. Alas, not me

03 November 2014

Soldier Undaunted -- Chapter 7.2

It was nearly three miles across country and around the walls to the West Gate. Even if I had been willing to risk it, the road was now out of the question. So many people were now crowded onto it that they could scarcely move, and I doubted I could even cross it. So, remembering a bridge which carried the road over a small stream not far from the walls, I cut across the fields towards the City. All along the way, I kept my eye out for my father and the men riding with him, but there was no sign of them. I could see no one riding against the crowd.
At last I descended into the stream bed, and began to approach the bridge. In the spring the stream ran swift and strong, fed by the melting snows of the Green Hills just inland, but at this time of year the water was no more than a foot or two deep. Still I had to bend low over the mare’s neck to get through. It was dark and noisy under there. The bridge was groaning with the weight of so many, and the only light came from the shimmer of the sun on the waters. I saw two children and their mother hiding there. The smaller child, a dirty, tiny girl peered at me, and raised her finger to her lips in a gesture of silence. All I could think of when I looked at them were my father’s words to me on the road. I could do nothing for them. I rode on.
Back in the sunlight, I climbed the bank. Narinen rose before me in all its vain strength and beauty. All my life I had admired and loved the City, and on many a fine morning I had traveled there with my father, or brother, or my friends. Until today the sight of the sun upon her white walls and the banners dancing above them in the breeze had never failed to lift up my heart. Those walls were forty feet thick at the base and seventy feet high, topped with round towers and battlements. It had taken over a century to build them and for eighteen hundred years they stood unchallenged. In their ten mile circuit were four gates facing the cardinal points of the compass. The gates themselves were thirty feet tall and twenty wide, made of oak and bound with steel, but hung so perfectly on their hinges that only a few men were needed to shift their great weight, and open or close them. Or so I had been told. For in all my life I had never seen them shut.
From each gate issued a road. Through the North and South Gates they ran to the other towns and cities which lined the coast and drew their life and sustenance from the sea. At the West, or Mountain Gate, the Great Road began its journey across our wide land. After passing through a gap in the Green Hills thirty miles inland, it crossed the Plains of Rheith, then climbed over the Gray Mountains, to end at last at the port of Sufra by the western sea. The East Gate we called the Sea Gate, and from it the road ran for a mile down to our harbor, whence our ships set sail on every tide to explore, to trade, to protect our land. A quarter mile on either side of this road were long walls of stone that protected our link to the harbor, where a forest of masts and spars grew among the wharves and dockyards. Narinen was strong and beautiful to see, and long had it dreamed in peace.
But this morning as I came slanting down towards the Mountain Gate, all the legendary strength and beauty that was Narinen seemed more a myth than the truth I had always known it to be; it seemed nothing but a lie dipped in silver. The South Gate was shut. Steel glittered from the battlements. Four dragons swooped and circled round the City’s proudest towers. A few were already burning. Smoke also rose from the direction of the harbor. The first of the dragons’ ships must be there already, while every moment more rounded the sandy neck which screened the harbor from the south. My heart sank.
I galloped the mare towards the Mountain Gate, which was already half closed. Soldiers stood outside, eager to get in and pull the gates shut behind them, but people were still flowing through them like the tide though an inlet. From the battlements above men called to out me and waved. They gestured frantically towards the last gate.
“The West Gate!” they cried. “The Mountain Gate! Hurry!”
In their voices I could hear joy and desperation. Clearly they had not seen many riding for the City that morning. Their shouting moved along the walls with me as I rode, until finally one of the soldiers outside the gate turned and saw me. He beckoned me impatiently into the gateway just as the last of the mob came out. I passed through the tunnel and stopped.
Across the wide bailey inside the Mountain Gate a barricade of carts and wagons had been hastily improvised, with a single narrow opening at its center. Beyond it, with their backs to me, mounted troops were drawn up, not to keep the enemy out, but our own people in. In the middle of their line the Captain of the Gate sat on his horse, facing the crowd. He answered their clamor with a strong, calm voice, telling them they must stay, that they were safer within the walls. But they would not listen. They insisted on leaving; he insisted they remain. The gates must be shut against the attack which would soon begin. They should take up arms for their land and families and fight, or at least return to their homes.
One burly fellow, whose loud voice carried even above the tumult of the crowd, shouted that they had the right to save themselves, and would not be denied. He called the Captain a fool, and rushed at him with a large hammer. The Captain held his ground, and an arrow appeared in his attacker’s chest, loosed from the guard tower above. The voice of the crowd died with the man. The gates boomed shut and the bolts shot home. The iron portcullis dropped at the inner end of the tunnel with a clang. We were all locked in now.
“Return to your homes now, or go to the walls to fight,” the Captain said gently in the sudden quiet. “Whom shall we fight now in our fear? The dragons, or each other? Shall we do the enemy’s work for him?”
The Captain then backed his horse slowly out of the line of cavalry barring the crowd’s way, and turned away. He had no more to say. Behind him they slowly dispersed, first in reluctant twos or threes around the edges, then in larger numbers. Several dozen volunteered to fight. The Captain looked at me and beckoned.
“Who are you?” he said as I came through the gap in center of the barricade. “We almost shut the gates on you, you know.”
“I am Arden, son of Tyr. I have come to find my father. Do you know where he is?”
“Your father is Tyr, the council member? I see his likeness in you, but he did not come this way. He is probably near the Sea Gate, where the brunt of the battle will be, but there is no time for you to wander about the City looking for him. I need men here, and here you will remain.”
“But, sir.”
“But me no buts, boy. You are a brave lad to come when so many others have run, but today is the last day of Narinen. You can die here as well as anywhere else. Go see my lieutenant. He will assign you a place.”
The finality with which he spoke admitted no argument. I nodded acquiescence. His lieutenant, almost as brusque, sent me to the walls near the guard towers above the gate. A soldier led my mare away as I climbed the granite steps, and took my place in line at the battlements. The greater part of my new comrades were the ordinary folk of the City – mostly men, some quite old, some lads like me, and the first women I had ever seen in arms – but aside from the men of the West Company who kept this gate I saw few real soldiers.
For until recently our land had been at peace, and almost the whole of our eastern army was gone across the sea. Did anyone imagine we would wake up one morning to find the dragons at our gates? I had not. Even the night before I had believed that the Men of Narinen and the Elves of Talor would prevail; and then our brothers and friends and fathers would come home to us, with tales of glory and the wonders of Elashandra. And if the Council had summoned troops from the west to strengthen the City, my father never told me about it.
Now there was little to do but wait. I glanced at the others around me on the wall-walk. Some stood with their heads bowed low and arms clutched tightly across their chests; others were leaning against the parapet, gaping at the sky with eyes blank and mouths open. The soldiers bore themselves with assurance, but even they, I could see, were not unafraid. Only a few endured this comfortless time with grace. I realized how afraid I was. No help would come. We were alone.
The Captain of the Gate called today the last day of Narinen, just as my father had a little while ago. The size of the armada, the splendor of the dragons in flight, their mastery of the winds, and the cruel fire everywhere in the fields – all this made our destruction seem inevitable, as did the horrible certainty which lurked behind our present dread, that the dragons would not be here now, without any warning, had they not swiftly overwhelmed our armies beyond the sea.
So all I had wished farewell when our army set sail two months ago were dead. My brother, his friends, my friends and their loved ones, Gwinlan and his sons, Cal and Loran’s father, Hedále’s father and brother. Dead. And Hedále and the rest of his family were surely dead now, too. His was the first house I saw in flames. Of Cal and Loran I knew nothing, but the fires had burned brightly within the smoke around their home, which lay close to Gwinlan’s. And where was my father?
“Wake up, boy. Stop your daydreaming,” the lieutenant said, slapping me hard on the back as he passed. “We need your mind here with the rest of you.”
“Sorry, sir,” I said and straightened up.
Someone laughed. A very old man was standing next to me. In his hands was a tall, ashen spear, its iron head tipped in rust, which he leaned on like the staff he should have held. He grinned at me.
“It doesn’t bear thinking about, my lad,” he said.
“What doesn’t?”
“The ending of the world. That’s what this is. Aléthen, the old king, Stochas’ father, was a seer, you know. He saw that a day would come when this City would perish, and all our folk with it. He did, you know.”
“Yes. My father taught me that, but I never thought I’d live to see it.”
“Nor I, young man. And I did not think to wield this again,” he said, gazing at the spear as if it held all the strength and memories of his youth. “It’s been fifty years since we broke the gates of Irayan, and we’re both a bit rusty now, but we’ll have to do.”
He was about to say more when a shadow rushed over us from behind. Now the golden dragon dropped down before our eyes, and swept away from the walls and gate and off along the western road. Not far off, not far enough, the last of those who escaped from the City were straggling out of sight into the smoke. Before they knew it, or we could cry a vain warning, the dragon plunged in behind them. A searing line of fire lit the cloud from within, burning true to the road’s plumb straight course. It was all we could see, and all we needed to, but the screams of dying thousands robbed us of our voice. We stared into the unseen distance, mute, unseeing, unable even to look at each other. It was no different elsewhere. Flame traced all roads, west, north, and south. We could only listen. Until it ended.
Then the golden dragon burst from the wall of smoke, and flew with increasing speed back up the road towards the Mountain Gate. Many of us just kept staring, others dissolved in fear, their limbs shaking. None of us moved. Suddenly the dragon pulled up sharply.
“Down, down, everybody down,” I could hear the Captain and the lieutenant crying.
I threw myself face down on the hard stone and rolled up against the battlements, drawing my knees against my chest and covering my head. But not all were so quick. The blast from the dragon’s jaws struck the gates like a storm wave hitting a breakwater. The walls shuddered beneath me, as the flames rolled up and over the battlements, passing close above me. I covered my mouth and held my breath, trying not to inhale the scorched air. When the walls finally stopped trembling, I opened my eyes and rolled away from the wall. The dragon was now past us, sailing above the rooftops towards the center of the City, idly setting buildings on fire along the way. I could see the other three doing the same, converging on the heart of Narinen.
Around me men and women were screaming, some burning, some with their skin charred black. The old man lay dead. Figures constantly appeared and disappeared through the black smoke. A few of us tried to help the wounded, struggling to put out the flames. Some crawled on their hands and knees, retching from the stench and the terror. Others were running away, down the steps and into the City. One man leaped to his death over the battlements. Many just shrank back and cowered. We all wept. I still remember the sharp taste of salt in my mouth.
The Captain of the Gate, however, came sweeping down the parapet, a pair of sergeants behind him. The lieutenant was not to be seen. The Captain had words of encouragement for all he passed: raising men up from the still warm stones on which they sat or crouched; commending us for withstanding the first assault; checking the wounded and assigning men to carry them – and the dead – away; giving orders to others to fetch bandages and water; bidding us to resume our posts. Our eyes met. He clapped me on the shoulder, gave me a good word and a smile. But despite his brave and resolute manner, his face was grim and his eyes empty of hope. I thought of the words of the king, of which the old man had only just reminded me: our day had come.
And still it was not noon. The dragons returned again and again, but none could predict their coming. Five minutes or a reluctant hour might pass between attacks, and it was never the same dragon twice in a row. Though the gates and walls withstood the flames, their defenders did not. It was hardest on the ordinary folk, many of whom died in the first attacks. Unlike the soldiers, they were too slow to obey the Captain’s orders. Some volunteered to help carry away the dead and wounded, and never returned. By the middle of the afternoon very few of us remained on the walls, and a sergeant now escorted anyone who left them.
Then the dragons turned their minds from us to our City, and a rain of fire began. We became spectators again, impotent witnesses to a new horror. Within an hour all of Narinen was one mighty conflagration. Above the heavens were clothed in a low, dark pall, supported by columns of smoke tinged red by the savage light. Below ash drifted like snow, choking us and soiling everything it touched. Worst of all was the roar of the flames, so loud that it silenced our world. The wounded and dying still screamed, the broken sobbed in terror, the Captain shouted orders, but all without voice. Even when by some caprice of the wind the air cleared enough for us to glimpse the center of the City, and we saw a building we knew totter and fall, no sound of its collapse reached us. When the smoke swirled in again like a curtain closing on a scene, we wondered if any of it was real. The soft, summer rain that started falling an hour before sunset availed little against the flames; and the rain itself, black and greasy from the soot in the air, only drenched us in filth and weighed down our guttering spirits.
Someone grasped me by the arm and shook me. It was the Captain. He pointed out across the fields, and leaning close, shouted in my ear. Even so I could barely hear him saying that the enemy’s forces were in motion. As I turned to look, I could see others along the wall behind him gazing outward in the direction he pointed. The Captain had been working his way down the parapet, telling each of us in turn. Outside in the distance I could just discern in the firelight a large body of men, several thousand strong close to the Mountain Gate, but still out of bowshot. Then I gazed south and glimpsed the widespread glitter of flames on steel, no doubt another similar detachment beyond the South Gate. They had no battering rams or siege engines that I could see, and that morning I would have said that even with our depleted numbers we could have kept them out. For the fire had scorched but not destroyed the gates. They were still strong. But today I had seen sights I could not have imagined the day before. Nothing seemed beyond the power of the dragons.
The attack would come soon, the Captain cried in my ear. We must hold this gate to protect the rear and flanks of the other three. The main attack would surely fall upon the Sea Gate. That was where the bulk of the enemy was mustering. We must hold them back, make them pay, take our vengeance. He asked me if I understood, and I nodded. We all understood. We tightened our grip on our weapons and prepared ourselves. He clapped me on the shoulder, and moved on to the next man. I wondered where my father was. Did he still live? Was he even now giving the same orders as my Captains was to other young men as frightened as I was.
Then the enemy began moving, marching slowly in a long column towards the gate. Soon they were nearly within bowshot and what few archers we had on the walls took their bows from beneath their cloaks, where they had tried to shield their bowstrings from the rain. As the enemy came on, the archers kept bending their bows to wring any water from the strings. Finally they notched their arrows, raised their bows, and began shooting. Arrows also flew from the guard towers, far more than I would have guessed. The front ranks of the enemy thinned as men fell, but others moved up to fill their places, stepping over their fallen comrades. More fell the closer they came, but still they kept coming.
Without warning the black dragon plummeted from the darkness to land on top of the nearer tower. His lashing tail and claws quickly cleared the platform of living men. Then he leaped the fifty feet to the farther tower and began killing once more. A second dragon appeared, the red one I had seen that morning. As before he flew in low over the road and straight at the gates, but now with much greater speed. He passed directly over the heads of his advancing soldiers, and once he did they broke into a run. I thought he would fly headlong into the gates, but at the last instant he rose up slightly, spread his wings to break his momentum, and drawing his hind legs up before him, he crashed feet first into the gates of oak and steel. They splintered at the impact. The iron hinges were wrenched from the stone pillars which held them. Masonry collapsed around the entrance. The dragon beat his wings forwards, rose up and was gone. The way into Narinen was almost open.
The column of men surged ahead. They charged through the shattered gates and into the tunnel. Yet the portcullis at its far end barred their way. Led by the Captain we hurried down the stairs into the bailey. There we took up positions behind the barricade, which only that morning our soldiers had made to keep people in. From here we could shoot at the enemy and choke the near end of the tunnel with their dead, while they struggled to raise or break through the portcullis.
But again we had reckoned without the dragons. For the black one still crouched motionless atop the further tower, his wings furled, his long tail wrapped around his forefeet, like some gigantic cat serenely waiting to pounce on his sport. Serene but intent, he watched us from above. The flames of Narinen were mirrored in his scales. One by one we felt his black eyes upon us, and we trembled at his attention, knowing that our death smoldered in the furnace within him. Then he threw back his head, and loosed a cry that pierced even the din of an entire city in flames. Beginning as a low growl, it soared upward to end in a shriek of cruelty and triumph.
But in his malice he did not destroy us as he might have done. He sprang from his perch down into the bailey. With one talon he grasped the portcullis, wrenched it from its moorings, and tossed it lightly away. For a moment he let his gaze linger on us before turning to consider his own men. He seemed pleased as he hurled himself aloft into the night. I understood then that the dragon’s malice and his pleasure were one: though he could have slain us in an instant and cleared the way for his own soldiers, he preferred that we battle each other on a field of blood.
The instant the dragon was gone, his men burst like a torrent from the end of the tunnel; some of our people, even the soldiers, broke and ran. The sergeants behind our line wielded their pikes, forcing as many as they could back into line at the barricade, but more were fleeing than they could stop. Then the enemy was upon us. At first we held them back, thrusting over and through the barricade with pikes and spears, slashing and stabbing with our swords at those who tried to climb over it. But no matter how many of them died, more came flooding through the tunnel every second; and within a few minutes their numbers and their mass pressing upon the barrier began to tell. The barricade itself began to be slowly shoved backwards and we could only give ground with it. But, oh, we made them pay for every inch they gained. We slew so many that their bodies formed a ramp for their comrades to use.
Until now the advantage had been ours to strike at them as we willed, while they had to expose themselves in order to attack us. Far more of them had fallen so far. Yet soon they began to break through our makeshift walls off to my left and to drive our men backwards. The balance had shifted. We would soon be overwhelmed if we stood our ground. I hurried to the center of our line and grabbed my Captain by the shoulder. He looked at me. I pointed down the line to the breach. He took it all in at once, then in a voice louder than any I have ever heard, a voice that carried over the violence of fire and battle, he cried out for us to fall back. Men looked to him, surprised. Several times he repeated the call and those who could obeyed, running for the opening of the street behind us at the inner wall of the bailey. Three of our sergeants were already there, pikes in hand, and they pushed and shoved the men into formation. Those who could not break away from the struggle at the barrier bought the rest of us time to form up. Many of our staunchest soldiers died there, swiftly outnumbered by the enemy who swarmed up and over our abandoned defenses. Without them we would have all perished there and then.
As we fell back, enemy soldiers broke through one by one and came rushing after us. Our Captain turned to meet them. Several of us tried to go to his aid, but the sergeants wouldn’t allow it. They seized us from behind and dragged us back, shoving us into our place in the ranks. The Captain had no need of our help. Alone before our line, like some hero, he cut down each of his opponents in turn. Then he stood there, just waiting for the rest of the enemy.
A moment later they all came. Their mouths were open and their eyes blazing as they shouted their battle cry. I could not hear it, but seeing them, I felt how raw my own throat was. I was screaming, too. When their front rank collided with ours, the immense weight of their numbers thrust us back on our heels, and compelled us to withdraw step by step.
For the moment we had one thing in our favor. Only one street led from the outer bailey into the City, and it was but twenty five feet wide. Thus, though our numbers could not match the enemy’s, we could fill this narrow place entirely. They could not get around us or outflank us as they could in the bailey. But with every step we retreated, we came closer to the first cross street sixty yards behind us, a broad avenue more than twice as wide as the street we were on. Even if we held out that long, at the crossroads they would overwhelm us at once. We had too few men and no hope of more.
We all knew all this fact, I’m sure, though I don’t remember thinking so at the time. Yet our ferocity with the enemy at our throats and our deaths imminent bore witness to our sense of it. We fought until our swords broke and our spears splintered. We fought with daggers and fists and teeth after that. We pulled the swords of our foes from our comrades’ bodies and turned them on their owners. And always before us stood the Captain. No single foe who assailed him long survived. Three or more would leap at him, and he drew his dagger and fought them two handed. You could see they feared him, and only the weight of the men pressing them from behind forward kept them from hanging back.
Yet for all our ardor and all we slew, there were always more of the dragons’ men. The more ground they took, the hotter the battle became. For we felt the open spaces of the crossroads like an abyss at our backs, into which we would soon fall forever. My eyes stung with sweat and the fine, salt spray of blood that saturated the air. The smoke was thick and heavy in my throat. At some lost hour the sun had set, leaving only the fires surrounding us to shed any light. Our ranks thinned. Men fell on every side. How did I not stumble over their bodies when I stepped on them, or lose my footing on the slick cobblestones? How was I never wounded?
At last out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a sign hanging above a doorway just to my right. On it was painted a lamp with a warm, welcoming glow. We were outside the oil merchant’s shop, which stood two doors in from the corner. I’d known it all my life, but I didn’t have time to think about the fire and smoke I saw rolling out of its upper windows, or the smaller fires visible inside through the windows on the street. I had no time at all. This was it. We were here. Maybe three dozen of us were still alive. We kept fighting, but it was all about to end. I resolved that if I was going to die, I would do so by my Captain’s side, and I tried to fight my way closer to him.
But before I could reach him, the barrels of oil within the shop grew so hot they exploded. Driven by the force of that blast, glass from the windows sped through the air, followed by a rolling wall of flame. Friend and foe alike were cut down. Like the dragons, the fire made no distinction between us. It was my fortune that a half dozen men were then between me and the explosion. This saved my life. For their bodies shielded me from the glass and took the brunt of the force, which hurled them into me and us all across the street, smashing me into the door of the shop opposite the oil merchant’s. I was stunned by the impact and buried in the bodies and debris which fell over us all.
I lay there for several minutes, surprised to be alive, able to hear nothing but the roar of the flames, to feel nothing but the weight upon me and the roasting warmth of the oil fed fires. I struggled to free myself from beneath the pile, and in time I wriggled free and sat up. I was sitting inside the doorway of the shop on top of its door. It had given way when we hit it. This again was my fortune. For as I looked through the doorway into the street outside, I discovered that with the explosion of the oil the entire shop, and much of the building next to it, had collapsed, filling the street with rubble and flames.
I remember smiling to myself to think that the fire blocked the path of the dragon’s men into the City. But I rued that thought as soon as I saw that no one but me had survived. The few bodies I could see burned or smoldered. Here and there an arm or leg or hand was thrust up or out of the rubble. Nothing but the fire moved. It was the only living thing before me. Every man and woman I had stood and fought beside, every enemy that stood against us and sought our lives, lay dead in that street in the ruins of that building. My Captain, too, lay there, I thought. His courage had sustained us throughout the day and into the night, and if I lived still, my life was owed to him. Without him, no one would have been at the gates to hold the enemy back until the building fell and gave us one small victory that day.
I did not and do not know his name, but the sword I bear is his. I found it right outside the shop door. The sword I had been wielding, seized from the dead hand of an enemy, was lost in the blast. When I ventured out to look for it, I found instead my Captain’s sword, standing hilt upright in a pile of smoking rubble. The blade and hilt were clotted with blood, but in the pommel at the hilt’s end, was set a green jewel, whose polished facets caught every spark and flicker of the blaze. I remembered seeing his hand rest upon that hilt as he had faced down the unruly crowd that morning, an age and more ago. With no weapon of my own, I took his sword and begged his pardon. I had need of it and he had none.
In the street I saw that the fire and fallen building had also cut me off from the rest of the City. More of the building crashed down while I stood there, forcing me to retreat into the shop behind me. Knowing that every shop has a back or side door, a place for carts to be loaded and unloaded, I began searching. In a kitchen at the back I came upon some jugs of water and at once realized how parched my throat and lips were. I drank again and again; and when I was done poured that blessed water over my head, rinsing off some of the sweat and blood and soot, washing off the gore that covered my hands. Then I slipped out the back door into an alley parallel to the street we had been defending.
At the alley’s end was the cross street we had fought so hard to keep the dragons’ men from reaching. It was broad and empty. There was no sign of fighting. The thought came to me as I looked down that street that I had no idea what to do next. Doubtless fighting raged across the City. The other gates had surely been breached by the dragons just as ours had been. At the Sea Gate, directly across the City from the Mountain Gate, our men had been facing the main force of the enemy, so my captain had said, and they would have been lucky not to be attacked from behind if the North and South Gates had fallen. Though my father was on the Council, he had of course never told me of any plans there might have been for defending our City. Its walls had never before been breached, and we had been at peace for more than two generations. All I wanted to do now was to find my father. So I had to cross the City to the Sea Gate and head for the thick of the battle.
The quickest route was to travel along the street we had been defending, which ran between the Mountain and Sea Gates. At the corner I looked back westward at the fallen building. No danger could come from that direction for some time. But the path before me was walled with fire and the smoke obscured my vision. It would be all too easy to stumble upon an enemy that had overwhelmed the defenders of the other gates and penetrated the City. The further I went, the more likely I was to meet an enemy. But it was all I could do. I gripped the Captain’s sword more tightly and began running east. At every street I stopped to peer around every corner, trying to see the enemy before he could see me. I kept close to the buildings where I could, guessing that anyone else in the streets would likely do the opposite, to avoid the flames. The closer I drew to the center of the City, the worse the fire and smoke became. Before long I found I could no longer run. Breathing the smoke made my head light and my lungs ache. And the passion of the battle at the gate had left me. I began to realize how hungry and weary I was. Breakfast with my father that morning took place in a different world. And I was no longer the boy with all the books, who did not know where to find his sword.
The dead were everywhere: vile, charred bodies, still smoking; crushed bodies, half buried in the collapse of buildings; bodies maimed by steel or broken in leaps of despair; bodies of children robbed of time. It is their empty faces that crowd my thoughts now, but the streets were not as deserted of living souls as memory makes them seem.
Outside a tavern I saw a small group of soldiers and townsmen, drunk, staggering about together and singing with grand gestures, or slumped quite unconscious against the building. The tavern door had been forced open. Two doors down a group of looters, not even soldiers of the enemy, eyed me suspiciously as I passed by. Halfway to the center of the City, I paused to watch two men, both my father’s age, dueling in the courtyard of a burning house, determined to settle a long cherished grudge before the dragons cheated them of their last opportunity.
Figures stepped unexpectedly out of the swirling darkness right in front of me, hurrying, always hurrying somewhere, and eager to be gone. We’d hesitate, then dart past each other without ever looking back. Once I nearly killed a woman who appeared from a dark doorway right in front of me. Startled, I raised my sword. She shrank back, clutched her child to her breast, and vanished back into the gloom within. I was hurrying, too.
In the last, long block before the great square at the heart of our City I took two of the dragons’ men by surprise. They were on their knees stripping the corpses of soldiers of ours whom they and their comrades had killed. Scores of dead men from both sides lay from one end of the street to the other, some still grappling with each other or gripping broken swords. These two were the only survivors. I cut them down before either of them saw me coming.
Fearing that more soldiers of the enemy were nearby, I concealed myself among the corpses, pretending for a time to be dead myself, while I peered across at the square. It was a half mile across, and the most important buildings our people lined the street that ran around it. On the north rose the ancient Hall of Kings with its two elegant towers of stone; on the south was the Hall of Counsel where my father spent many of his days in debate with the other elders and officials of the City and Land of Narinen; to the east, beside the Hall of Equity, stood the Houses of the Republic, which men still called the King’s Museum and the King’s Library; to the west, on either side of me, were the College of Healers and the King’s School where many of the men and women who guided our Republic had studied.
In those days the streets that ran from the gates entered the square through huge arches, fifty feet tall, placed in the middle of each side. Beyond them the streets became gravel walks bordered by cool, green lawns beneath the trees, which were planted throughout the square, from the arches to the fountains at the corner entrances, and inward along the paths to the circle, itself a quarter of a mile across, which occupied the center of the square. An open colonnade of white marble was built along the perimeter of the circle. Benches sat between its columns, and tall plane trees stretched their boughs over its roof, furnishing a shady place to rest on a hot summer day. Gray octagonal blocks paved the open area between the colonnade and the fountain at its center.
But tonight, as I rose to cross street, flames were pouring upward from the windows of almost every building, blackening their white facades with soot and smoke. All along the side of the square closest to me, the trees were down and smoldering. Along the north side one of the towers of the Hall of Kings was broken. And perched calmly atop that tower was the red dragon wreathed in flame. I ducked into the shadows beneath the arch when I saw him, but his attention was elsewhere. He was watching something directly across the square from me, something which the blowing smoke and the stoa and fountain in the square’s center kept from my view.
By now I had seen him many times today, but he was even more fearsome at this hour than he had been when I met him face to face in the morning light. For fire, darkness, and destruction were his element, and I was alone. Though still and silent on the distant tower, he seemed more alive and menacing. Yet the way to the Sea Gate and my father lay across the square. I swallowed my fear and left the dubious shelter of the arch. I forced myself to run for the fountain, my lungs aching from the smoke that felt thicker with every stride I took. I managed to make my way – unobserved or disregarded – to the central fountain. It still ran despite the destruction surrounding it, but the water was black and oily. Concealed behind the rim of the fountain’s basin, I crawled slowly around the south side, trying to keep out of sight. Halfway around I discovered what held the red dragon’s eye.

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Chapter 7.3

Soldier Undaunted -- Chapter 7.1

Seven

My father called me early that day. It was the first of autumn, and I was to leave for the scholars’ town of Prisca to begin my studies. Winter or summer he always rose when it was still dark to prepare for the day. So by dawn all of my bags and boxes of books had already been loaded onto a cart for my departure. As I looked out my bedroom window, in the morning light I saw the servants leading the horses out to harness them. The leaves that skipped across our courtyard told me that the east wind which had risen last night after sunset was blowing still. When I came down to join him at breakfast, I asked if he was in a hurry to be rid of me.
“No, son, not at all,” he laughed, “but it is best to begin our journeys early. For we never know what we may meet.”
“Father,” I said, “I have been to Prisca many times and have never yet met an adventure.”
“Ah, but today may be different. In fact today will be different, Arden. You will begin your studies and live away from home for the first time. You will make new friends.”
“I don’t want to make new friends. I like the ones I have.”
“And what’s wrong with new ones? The friends you have today will not always be there. Your grandfather used to tell me that when I was your age. I didn’t believe him either, but he was right, you know. The older I got, the wiser he became. It was uncanny.”
“So you’ve told me.”
“And I’ll tell you again,” he said with a wry smile, then he stopped and looked at me.
“What is it?”
“Your mother would have been proud of you.”
“But I haven’t done anything yet.”
He grinned at me again, with mischief in his eye. Though he meant every word he’d said, he was making game of me. He knew I hated it when he spoke in his fatherly manner. But this morning he was all ‘Old Father Tyr,’ as my brother used to call him whenever he conjured the shades of our mother and grandfather to tell us things he rarely said in his own voice. It was his way.
“If you’re finished,” he said, gesturing at my empty plate, “go check your room. Make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.”
“I have checked,” I said, getting up.
“Humor me,” he replied as he took the last bite of his own breakfast.
“Very well,” I answered.
He was not looking at me now. With his wonted care he was folding his napkin. He laid if back in its place beside his plate, and smoothed it flat, just as he always did before he rose from the table, just as he would tomorrow when I was gone.
Until that moment I had not considered what my leaving meant to him. Young as I was, I had thought only of myself and my friends. Now my heart was full of him. He had married late, lost my mother soon after I was born, and raised me and my brother on his own. Now Alairan was across the sea, and I was leaving for Prisca. After today he would be alone. For the first time I knew I would not have him forever.
“Go check your room, Arden,” he said as he stood up. Our eyes met only briefly. “Life goes on. We must go with it.”
He understood my every thought. He always did. I could never fool him. The few times I tried to lie to him he would just look at me with an expression that let me know he didn’t believe a word I was saying, but he was going to let me say it if that was what I wanted. I went upstairs to look around my room.
I thought I had left nothing behind, but talking with my father had altered my mood. My chair, my desk, my books, even my bed, all seemed different. I had lived in this room all my life, but it had changed and grown as I had. First there had been toys, now put away somewhere, except for two that proudly held the high ground on the shelf above the books that had taken their place. The clothing I had outgrown had been given away to other children my family knew. My first bed was gone, too, replaced five years ago by one more suited to my sprouting years. I felt I would never be here again. I sat down, daydreaming.
“Arden! Arden, come now!”
My father’s shouting roused me slowly. In his voice was a sound I had never heard from him before. It was the voice of a man who suddenly saw that something was very wrong. There was also a terrible urgency. I wondered if the house was on fire.
“Arden!”
He was clearly outside. So I jumped up and ran to the open window. My father was standing on the bluff overlooking the sea behind our home. He was calling servants and issuing orders. They came to him as they went again an instant later, running. Some never even got close to him. As soon as he saw them, he began shouting instructions that sent them on their way. I heard him bidding the stable boys to saddle the horses, now. Amazed, I leaned out the window and was about to call out to him, when the east wind gusted so hard in my face that I had to shut my eyes and turn away.
When I opened them again, he was looking straight at me and pointing out to sea. His eyes never left me as my gaze followed his outstretched arm. Then I saw the ships, men of war, far out to sea but coming swiftly down the wind, their square sails spread wide like dark wings, sharp against the sun and blazing waters. Hundreds of ships of war. For a moment my heart leaped. For a moment I thought our fleet was returning victorious from across the sea, that my brother Alairan was aboard one of those ships.
Then I saw them. Huge, winged shapes, swooping and circling against the morning sky, effortlessly, it seemed, but always coming closer, growing larger with each beat of my heart, racing in on the wind. Their outstretched wings must have spanned a hundred feet, and their bodies, from the tip of their snouts to the end of their slender tails, were nearly as long. At first I could not grasp what my eyes so clearly saw, until one stooped on a small sailboat, which was desperately trying to outrun the warships in a mad rush towards a leeward shore. One of the beasts fell from the sky, swift as a stone, but true as an arrow in its path. Just above the boat it snapped out its wings and pulled up sharply. Its head darted forward like a striking snake’s and flames streamed from its jaws, engulfing the boat entirely. The beast did not wait even a moment before soaring upward again. The ruined boat came up into the wind at once, burning down to the waterline. Even the waves that battered its hulk could not douse the fire.
“Arden, now,” my father shouted again, more urgently than before.
I tore myself from the window, ran down the stairs and out of the house. Servants dashed about the courtyard, dispatched in haste by my father. Stable boys and grooms struggled to saddle the frightened horses, who tossed their heads, eyes wide and nostrils flaring, and tried to rear. I saw my father’s horse lift one boy high off the ground, the boy’s legs kicking and stretching to reach the ground as he clung tightly to the chestnut’s bridle. I remember thinking how brave that little boy was. Our dogs raced from one person to the next, barking at the confusion, demanding answers. In the midst of it all the cart with my possessions stood disregarded. I raced through the open gate in the eastern wall and crossed the porch where on spring or summer evenings we used to watch fishing boats and small sloops, men of war and merchantmen, returning to friendly harbors. How different it looked that day.
As I approached my father, I stole another glance at the sea. Since I had left my window, the armada had come visibly closer, driven by that foul east wind; and behind them more sails were crowding the horizon.
“Arden, listen to me,” he said. “The enemy will soon be here. Take the servants, gather up as many of our neighbors’ wives and children as you can and lead them up into the hills –”
“No, I will not leave you. We –”
“Arden, you do not understand. I must go to the city. If we can hold the enemy off for even a little while, some of our people will be able to escape.”
“But –”
“Be quiet. I said you do not understand and I meant it. Today the City will fall and all its defenders with it. If the elves and our men together could not stop the dragons, we certainly cannot. We do not have the power, in men or magic, to hold them off; even if we could, the City is not ready for a siege. We cannot win. We can only buy time for others.”
“I will fight with you.”
“You are not a soldier.”
“Neither are you, father. And I have been trained to use a sword and bow.”
“But you have never killed a man before, Arden, and there will be much killing today. Our servants and friends need you to lead them to safety.”
“Send someone else.”
“There is no one else. Your brother – ”
“ – is not here. And he would want to go to the City with you, too.”
“Yes, but he would also obey me,” he stopped and sighed. “And he is dead. I don’t want to lose you both in one day.”
I had no answer to this. We could only look at each other. A confusion of love, fear, anger, and grief played across my father’s face. He knew that what he had to do would not end well, but it had to be attempted. He suddenly appeared far older than his fifty nine years.
“I’m sorry, father,” I said quietly, “but I will not obey you in this. I choose to be with you no matter what.”
“But by your choice you will die, and leave others to die as well.”
“So be it. I will go with you. We can send the stable hands to round up the others. They will be fine with them, you’ll see.”
His eyes were dark with displeasure and doubt. He was not used to such disobedience from me, and time was pressing him. The ships of the enemy drew closer.
“Will you not obey me?”
“No, sir. I will not.”
“Then I pray to god you are right. Go, get your sword. I hope it’s sharp. You are going to need it.”
As I started to go, one of the servants began shouting, “Look, look!”
Still over a mile out to sea, but high aloft, the dragons were flying in a circle above the leading ships, a circle that grew ever tighter and higher as they went around. At last they were so close to each other that they seemed to be pivoting around a central point; the tips of their wings almost touched. Then one after another they pulled up from the circle and soared upwards in a spiral which expanded as they climbed.
We stood transfixed, watching them and marveling at the beauty of their flight, their wings beating more quickly than any of us could have imagined in beasts so large, their bodies one graceful curve from head to tail. They climbed so high the sun no longer silhouetted, but illuminated them; and their different colors gleamed brightly for all the distance between us. They were red, golden, silver, and black. It took my breath away. I wondered how evil could be so beautiful. Finally, when they had risen so high that they were visible only as a splendor of color and movement, each one broke from the spiral and fell from the heights like shooting stars that never burned out. Now, however, they were no longer moving towards us, but northwards towards Narinen; and as they changed direction, so did the wind and every ship of war beneath them, coming about to starboard in one long fluid movement.
“They shifted the wind,” my father gasped, amazed.
And it was true. For the wind had veered and now blew out of the south, but more moderately than before, a perfect wind for taking them safely along the shore to Narinen.
“A wind of enchantment, conjured for our destruction,” my father said quietly. “I should have guessed as much. The sea was not troubled enough for that east wind to be real. Arden, get your sword. Now we must hurry.”
I ran back across the porch and into the courtyard, which was still a tumult of activity. I had almost reached the door to the house when I remembered that my sword was packed in the cart, so I could continue my fencing lessons at Prisca. But who knew where? I rummaged through the cart, recklessly casting aside the books and clothing and other articles which were treasures an hour ago. With each moment I became more desperate to find the sword and rejoin my father. Time was pressing. Time and fear. This was a different morning than I had expected.
“Son,” my father called to me as he entered the courtyard, “you must treat your belongings with more respect, especially your books. You will find your sword in the right front corner. I hope you’ve more respect for it.”
I looked up at him astonished. In the midst of all our haste he had grown calm. The anger and confusion of a few minutes ago were gone. It was as if with the shifting of the wind he became reconciled to all that would happen that day, and resolute in his conviction that he must face it as best he could; that nothing more could be expected. He spoke now with the steady voice of the father I had always known, calm, confident, and assured. This return to himself calmed me as well.
“Now get your sword. It’s time to go,” he said.
With that he turned away and mounted his horse, instructing several of our servants to ride across the fields, gather up our friends and neighbors, and help them to safety. But they stared at my father in terror. Some of the houses he was sending them to were only a mile from the City. One of the stable hands protested that it was too dangerous, and would not yield until my father asked him where his sister and her children lived. The man fell silent. For they lived at one of those houses.
On my horse I clattered out of the courtyard behind my father. At the main road we turned north towards the city three miles away, and immediately met a tide of people flowing swiftly in the opposite direction. The riders we passed were not all servants or soldiers on urgent missions, nor were all those in the wagons and carriages women and children. Among them we saw men we recognized – neighbors, friends, men full grown and capable of bearing a sword, men we thought we knew better – fleeing often at a breakneck speed that left their families behind. In fear or shame they looked away when they saw us. Several wagons had overturned; one carriage had lost a wheel. The tide fled on past them. I glanced at my father, who shook his head in disgust as if nothing could be done.
Other, braver, men joined us as we rode. They came through the fields of tall grass, jumping their horses over the hedges and fieldstone fences that divided one holding from another, or down the long tree-arched lanes from their homes to fall in with us. Before we had gone a mile, a dozen gathered around us. Like my father, their attention was on weaving through the mob as swiftly as they could, and if they raised their eyes at all, it was to the walls of the City in the distance. But the dread in our servants’ faces, and the cutthroat haste we encountered on the road, kept dragging my gaze off the road to my right, to search for any sign of the men we had sent to help our neighbors.
At first I thought it would be easy to glimpse them, moving parallel to us on the lush, open green that rolled down to the bluffs above the sea. Many times before when riding along this road I had seen people far off on foot or on horseback. All I desired was one moment’s assurance that our men had not run away, too, but today I saw no one. The fields seemed empty. I told myself we were riding too fast, that the road was too crowded for me to look long enough. With every glance I stole more time in the hope of seeing what I wanted to see.
“Mind your horse, boy,” a harsh voice warned, as my horse bumped the one next to me, and the rider’s crop stung my thigh.
I swerved away, and for a moment rode alone beside the road. I could not help looking again. There, just entering the grove of trees around the home of my friend, Hedále, was a single rider, gone before I could even ask myself who he was. I gasped in relief, and realized I had been holding my breath. My eyes still fixed on the wood, I started back for the road.
Suddenly the red dragon came soaring up over the bluffs beyond Hedále’s. He rose several hundred feet, then turned and plummeted downwards, leveling off just above the grove. Lonely figures of men and women burst from the trees, running alone or in groups of two or three. They scattered in every direction. Above the house the dragon pivoted sharply and paused in mid-flight more nimbly than any bat. His head lunged forward, and the grove exploded into flames. With a snap of his wings he soared upward again, to hunt in the fields of fire. He left none living behind him.
“Arden, ride on,” my father shouted back to me.
So we rode on, as the countryside ran with flame. That south wind fanned it. Smoke swirled everywhere, choking us and burning our eyes. But as yet the dragon had not attacked the road. When I asked myself why, the answer came crawling from the pit of my stomach. The dragon was herding us like cattle. The road was to be our slaughter pen. Then off ahead of us on the right, a mile or more away in the lonely distance, I saw the house of Gwinlan. It was just visible through the smoke, the last house still untouched. I reined in my horse so hard that he neighed in protest. My father glanced over his shoulder at me and stopped.
“Why are you stopping?” he demanded as he rode up.
“The dragon is driving everyone onto the road,” I cried, but it was the house I could not take my eyes off.
“I know. We cannot help them,” he replied grimly. Then he saw the direction of my gaze, and added, “or our friends.”
“Look,” I said, “the dragons have not yet attacked Gwinlan’s house. Let me go warn them, tell them to hide.”
“Hide? There’s no place to hide.”
“Let me go.”
“No, Arden, no. You will be trapped out here if you do.”
“Please, father, I’ll cross the fields to Gwinlan’s, and cross them again to the West Gate of the City. That will be the last to close. I can make it. I know I can.”
“No, it is too dangerous.”
“More dangerous than the City? Gwinlan and his sons are dead across the sea, father. His wife and daughter have no one but me. She – ”
“Enough. Go.”
With a last look he was gone. I spurred my horse into the smoke. We leaped ditches and fences, and splashed through streams. My horse ran all the harder because almost everything behind us was burning now, and fear of the fire at his back made him keen to escape it. From where I left the road it was nearly a mile to the house of Gwinlan. I had known him and his sons from my earliest memory. His wife had been like a mother to me, always kind and ready to laugh, and his daughter, well, I loved her as only a boy of those years could love a girl.
At last we ran clear into sunlight, but a shadow fell. Above me stretched the monstrous wings of the red dragon. When they beat it was like a clap of thunder shocking the air about me. I shouted encouragement to my horse, but my voice sounded thin and faint, the voice of one someone shouting far off in a storm. My horse began to shy. I fought to keep him headed for the woods around Gwinlan’s house, but the next beat proved too much for him. He stopped short and bucked me over his head. I hit the ground hard. I jumped up, gasping for air, and looked around for my horse, but he was gone. I was confused. He could not have run out of sight so quickly. Where was he?
Much closer now the wings beat. Their wind staggered me, as the carcass of my horse struck the earth not ten feet away. They beat once more, and the next gust threw me down again. When I raised my head from the dirt, the red dragon was there before me, folding his wings along his sides. He crouched like a giant cat, and I was his mouse. His shining head swayed slowly from side to side, turning this way and that. He observed me, contemplated me, despised me. His tail flipped behind him, curling high above, then uncurling as it whipped down again. But it made no sound, so softly did it touch the earth.
I knew from the songs that I should not meet his gaze, lest he bewitch me. At first I tried to avert my eyes, but I couldn’t help myself. And my death was at hand, as I thought, so why not? What use would it be to him to ensnare a boy like me trembling with anger and fear? I looked him full in the face.
His snout was long and slender, covered in small red overlapping scales – like those of a fish or a well made hauberk, but burnished so that they would glow even on the darkest night. His lips were thin. His oval nostrils tapered backwards, flaring with each breath and change of expression. His head widened as it approached his eyes, on either side of which his pointed ears pricked up or swiveled to catch every sound. Like his nostrils they seemed to reflect his every thought. But the eyes, the eyes were crimson, shimmering with life, luminous as blood, yet the black slits of their pupils were dark and bottomless. Even as I lay there on my belly before him, it made me dizzy to look into them, like I was sliding down an undulating slope into emptiness. I fought against it. I shook my head to clear my mind. I struggled to recall my name.
Then his ears came forward and his eyes widened. I could swear he smiled at me, a faint, false grin. He exhaled in a short, thoughtful grunt. My effort amused him. The fire and death around us amused him. The thousands dead, and the thousands soon to die, amused him. This pause with me was just another moment of play. Hatred and wrath flared within me, and I struggled to one knee, my eyes never leaving his. Reaching over my shoulder, I grasped the hilt of my sword. His eyes opened wider in delight, his grin broadened to reveal his teeth.
“Brave boy,” his voice dripped contempt. Then he let loose a single, derisive laugh.
“Ha!”
And with that he sprang into the air, wings unfurling, and was gone.
But my eyes would not leave him. I stood there, expecting him to circle back and blast me from the earth. Instead he flew off towards the road. The people there battled to escape him. They knocked each other down; they trampled on the fallen; carriages, carts, wagons swerved, collided, turned over; men screamed. At the last instant the dragon shot upward into the gray veil above the road. I did not breathe. The fugitives on the road paused. Every eye sought to penetrate the cloud. In the still, silent ordeal of waiting, even the wind made no sound. It brushed my cheek, bent the tall grass near me, and rolled the smoke down the fields. But the dragon did not return.
Suddenly a shout came from the road, and set the whole mob moving again. I turned and ran for Gwinlan’s house. Despite the smoke the trees and the garden beyond were still green and calm, just as I’d seen them on many another morning, but the house itself seemed deserted. I hunted through the empty rooms for Gwinlan’s wife and daughter, calling their names. No one answered. It was like finding yourself in a dream in which you are searching for someone you cannot find, though you know she is there somewhere, just around the next corner. Nothing seems wrong, but everything is.
As I stepped out onto the porch on the east side of the house, my gaze swept across the garden, from the stables on the south, along the low brow of a wooded hill, to the gardener’s shed at the northern end, and back again. It was the wide open stable doors that drew my eye. Then a calm voice spoke close at hand.
“Arden. What are you doing here?”
Down the long porch to my left, in a corner enclosed and deeply shaded by roses entwined on trellises were Gwinlan’s wife and daughter sitting on a bench. It was Lady Gwinlan who addressed me. She perched on the edge of her seat as if it were yesterday. Her head held high, her back straight, her legs tucked beneath the bench and crossed at the ankles. She wore her silver hair pulled back from her round face and gathered at the back of her neck, not the finest wisp astray. As always she cradled an open book in one hand on her lap. With her other hand she marked her place on the page. Beside her sat her daughter, equally straight, but excitement and fear shone from her eyes as we looked at each other. She smiled.
“Arden, are you going to answer my question?” Lady Gwinlan said. Her lips were pursed and her eyebrows raised. She was expecting an answer.
“Sorry, ma’am.” I replied as I walked towards them. “I’ve come to warn you. The dragons are herding everyone out there onto the road. They’re burning everything on either side of it. I fear they mean to –”
“Yes, I take your meaning,” she said, stopping me from saying too much. “Well, what would you suggest? Plainly we cannot sit here forever with a war going on.”
“Yes, ma’am. I believe you have deep, stone cellars beneath your house, ma’am? That is the safest place I can think of. You can lock yourselves in until...”
She raised her eyebrows again in polite inquiry.
“…until my father and I return from the City for you.”
For the only time in my life I saw Lady Gwinlan close to losing her composure. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Then her daughter burst out.
“Arden, you can’t go to the City,” she cried, jumping to her feet and taking a step forward.
“Please, sit down, my dear,” said Lady Gwinlan, recovering herself. “Arden, we shall do as you suggest and await your return.”
“Mother, no,” her daughter said. “We can’t let him go.”
“My dear,” she said again, more firmly, “do sit down. Arden must go if he is to reach the City before the gates close.”
Her daughter remained standing.
“I suppose you have a horse, Arden?” Lady Gwinlan asked.
“Actually, ma’am, I lost him on the way here. The fires spooked him and he threw me.”
“Then take one from the stables and be on your way. No one here will need them.”
“Your people ran away, ma’am?”
“Yes, one of those hideous creatures flew over the house and they all ran. Now go, Arden. You are wasting time.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I turned to go, but her daughter rushed forward and took me by the hand. We looked at each other. We waited for words. Another moment and I could not have gone.
“I must go,” was all I could say.
“Come back,” she said.
“I will. God will see me through. But others need me now.”
I squeezed her hand. As I turned my back and hurried away, she whispered “come back” behind me. In the stable I found a horse already saddled, abandoned in the panic caused by the dragon passing overhead. Like almost everything else at the house of Gwinlan that day, the mare seemed deceptively calm. I mounted and urged her to a gallop, cutting across the garden. Lady Gwinlan was right. There wasn’t a moment to be lost. The gates would be closing soon.
As I rode past the porch, I raised my hand in farewell and tried to look cheerful, but neither of them saw me. Lady Gwinlan held her daughter’s bowed head to her shoulder and stroked her hair. All her attention was devoted to her. I bit my lip and went on. The garden ended, the woods passed by, and the horse carried me back out of the dream and into the fields of fire.

___________________________

Soldier Undaunted -- Chapter 6.2

Once she had watched Arden go, Agarwen turned to Niall.
“Well, Niall,” she said, “Arden’s desire to try the dragons again may come to something at last, if that is truly the dragonslayer.”
“Why do you doubt it, Agarwen?” Niall answered.
“I always thought elves had pointed ears,” she said sheepishly.
Niall burst out laughing.
“Who in the world told you that?” he said at last.
“Master Raynall.”
“The Master says many things to young Rangers,” he said, laughing again. “Not all are to be taken, shall we say, at face value. It is his way of testing their humor, and their innocence.”
“Well,” said Agarwen, abashed, “he has always said that in a world of tears we must laugh. Else our hearts will break.”
“Do not blush, Agarwen. Just enjoy the joke. You’re not the only one who believed him. I was there many years ago in his study when he told Arden and some others, myself included, the same thing.”
“Did you believe him?”
“For a moment, yes, but then I saw the light in his eyes and knew he was jesting.”
“And Arden?”
“He believed him, though he has clearly learned better since. In his youth his eyes were always cast down. He did not look Master Raynall – who was then still Master of Swords – in the eye, except on the fencing floor, and so he did not see. In those days he was still so wounded from the Fall that there was much he did not, or would not, see for fear of suffering more.”
“It’s strange that one so bitter was also so credulous. That is usually not their way.”
“At first,” Niall began, then stopped to consider his answer. “At first he was shattered, reckless in anger, helpless with grief. The bitterness grew as he refused to heal.”
“Refused?”
“Oh, it’s a hard thing to put into words,” Niall said, shaking his head, “and perhaps I have chosen the wrong ones to describe it. Some griefs cannot be overcome, Agarwen. Time stops, and a part of us, large or small, stops with it. The Fall of the City is the scar of Arden’s heart. Time stopped for him that day, but the darkness was already gathering.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You will learn that later tonight, I think, when the Masters have him tell the story of the Fall. Listen closely, and you will learn much of Arden.”
She studied his face uneasily, wondering what he meant.
“Why do you think the Masters will ask him to tell it?” she said.
“Because with the return of Evénn our time of waiting is at an end. It will be right to tell the tale. Arden has not done so in many years, not since you were a child.”
“I remember that night,” Agarwen said with a grin. “I crept into the hall to listen. I thought I had hidden myself well until Jalonn dragged me out by the ear, and sent me home.”
“Really, you sneaked in? I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. The Master was not pleased, but said he understood my curiosity. He also said as he twisted my ear that, if I wished to become a Ranger, I had better learn to conceal myself more cleverly.”
“What did you get to hear?”
“Not much, and all of it very sad. Arden told the tale well, but clearly he found no joy in it.”
“No one would.”
“I know, but it seemed quite particular with him, as if he still lived it and was seeing it all unfold before him as he spoke. I remember thinking that, but I didn’t know why at the time.”
“Then tonight you shall know.”
“I hope so,” she said. “And I hope the coming of Evénn will help him as much as the rest of us.”
“That I hope as well,” said Niall. “Now, I must attend to my duties and see my family before the evening meal. I’ll meet you at the hall, Agarwen.”
With that they parted, each pondering what they had heard and what might come of it. A rainy night fell as they left, the last of the Rangers to do so.



Two hours later, as always at the beginning of the third hour past sunset, the Rangers gathered for their evening meal, to commemorate the hour at which Stochas, the last king, put off his crown and proclaimed the Republic. Also as always it was simple fare, dark loaves of bread and a thick brown stew, with water to drink and baskets piled high with apples for after supper. The routine of a thousand years was not easily disrupted. For, despite the great news that the dragonslayer had returned, the older Rangers were too sober, too schooled in patience under darkness to let their expectations be more than guarded; and if their example alone was not enough to check the more exuberant spirits of their younger brothers and sisters, sharp words reminded them that success would be achieved only through further loss, and at the risk of all they had left.
This was a lesson they all knew by heart. The dragonslayer’s songs and the other tales of the past on which they had been reared taught them as much, even if they also spoke of hope against evil. No victory in those tales came without cost, a truth often lost on the young who saw death for a cause as glory. The dour facts of their defeat and of a generation spent in the shadows, struggling merely to survive, brought this lesson home as no song ever could. So the low hum of conversation throughout the meal signaled not only their hopes and fears, but also their efforts to repress them and wait until they knew what the dragonslayer would say. Patience alone had kept them alive to see this day. High spirits could find voice later, when the bloodshed was done.
Evénn accepted Indushan’s invitation to sit at the head of the Master of the Valley’s table that evening with the other Masters, in the traditional place kept for all visitors, no matter how high or low their station. Kings had sat there, and leaders of the Republic after them; there, too, any messenger or other guest. At Indushan’s table, with Arden and Evénn seated on either side of her, no word was said of dragons or war, of hope or of despair. Yet every conversation held outside the Masters’ hearing touched on the coming of the dragonslayer; and every man and woman who did not take a long look his way at least stole a glance.
Many reserved their most careful attention for the Masters themselves, to see if by observing their manner towards Evénn they might guess their mind. As the older Rangers predicted, this scrutiny was unavailing. To be read like a book, they warned, even by the closest reader, was not the mark of a Master of Rangers. Nothing seemed different, yet everything was. But when one of the Guardians reported what Jalonn had said the morning before – that the time had come – the word spread through the hall like fire across a parched field. Then the Rangers old enough to remember their old defeats and the days before the Fall grew even quieter, and looked at each other with eyes that spoke what their lips would not.
As they ate and talked of such matters in low voices, they sat around a dozen long tables of black oak. Nearby against the walls stood large sideboards from which the youngest apprentices served their elders. Eight of these tables were reserved for the Rangers, male and female alike, while their husbands and wives dined at the rest. Once the number of spouses who lived in the Valley had been small. For only a few score Rangers dwelt there permanently, but in the first years after the Fall the Valley became as much a refuge as a citadel. The children of those days grew up, married, had children of their own. What for quiet centuries had been the stronghold of a warrior brotherhood was now a fortified town, swelling with the young and their passions. So many could not remain hidden, or be fed, forever.
In the center of the hall a large four sided hearth provided heat and light. Lamps of polished brass hung above each table. On either side of the tall double doors in the middle of each wall tapestries illustrated the deeds of the unforgotten dead. Yet they portrayed more than just the martial exploits of Rangers. The many discoveries of scholars and explorers were represented as well as the victories of bloodless persuasion that had strengthened a peace or forestalled a war. There was Narin, the ancient navigator who had discovered this wide land, and there Aléthen, the seer king, commanding his son to establish the library housed here. Above the tapestries on every wall, higher perhaps but less well lit, hung the battle honors won by the Rangers over the centuries.
At one end of the hall was a dais raised two steps above the floor, and on it a table sitting crosswise to all the others. Every night two apprentices set the table for a meal; they stood ready to serve, but were never called upon. No one sat there. In all the years of the Rangers no one ever had. It was kept to honor those who did not return. But if one of their shades found his way home, a single glass of wine, red as the blood he shed, waited there to welcome him and quench his long thirst. Legend had it that more than once the untouched glass had been found empty at the end of the night.
On the wall behind the dais hung two tapestries woven even more skillfully than the rest. The first depicted the last king’s abdication: his crown was placed on the table beside him; his right hand was over his heart, and his face was turned away. The second portrayed the same table: the crown still sat upon it, but surrounded by the books of the laws that now ruled the land; and on either side stood the first two men elected to govern the Republic. Until the day of the dragons the table depicted here had rested atop the Speaker’s Platform in the Hall of Counsel in the City of Narinen. While over the centuries many a council member had laid his hand on the books of law as he addressed the Council, none dared touch the crown. It lay where Stochas had put it.
By immemorial custom all those not on duty, even Rangers as solitary as Arden, ate together each night in the Hall of Feasts. After delivering his report, he had accompanied the Masters here to meet Evénn. Throughout the meal the Masters and other Rangers at Indushan’s table questioned them further about the encounter with the dragon’s men at Kinabra. They asked them about the troopers’ strength, tactics, and proficiency with weapons; they asked about the people of Kinabra, the conditions in which they lived, and their reactions to a Ranger among them. They attend closely to every answer. When some recounted similar experiences of their own, Arden and Evénn questioned them in turn. Marak, the Master of Hounds, was familiar with Kinabra, and remembered the captain and the blacksmith as children. Their father had also been a smith, and had an honest reputation.
When their meal was over, Master Raynall stood up and climbed the steps of the dais. The room became quiet.
“You all know of the guest among us,” he said. “After all it is hard to keep a secret from Rangers. I have heard many of you speaking of why he is here. We shall not discuss that tonight. Tomorrow the Council will meet to consider the news he and Arden bring. Afterwards, as is proper, we shall inform you all.
“Tonight, however, since Arden is one of the few still living who witnessed the Fall of our City, I shall ask him to tell us that tale. I know it is a memory of pain for him, yet if we are to begin anew” – at this many exchanged looks of surprise – “we must first recall what was lost. There are also young ones here who have never heard the tale. Let them know the sorrow of our times. Arden, will you speak?”
Arden rose from his seat, reluctantly. It was not that he wished to forget those events. He could not. He did not. They ran constantly through his mind, but speaking them aloud summoned all the grief and horror of that day. The past was no longer past, nor memory memory. To those who dwell there unhealed, the past is a shroud. In telling the tale, the shroud was rent.

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Soldier Undaunted -- Chapter 6.1

Six

At a signal from Jalonn, Arden and Evénn mounted their horses. Three of the Rangers then approached the troopers’ horses, which kept shying away from the strangers until Evénn came over and spoke to them, taking each by the bridle and whispering softly into their ears. At this they were soothed and submitted to the Rangers, who looked upon Evénn with even greater admiration. Now the Ranger who had handled the hawk emerged from the trees again, riding his own horse and leading Jalonn’s, a tall bay called Touchstone, by the reins. As soon as Jalonn swung himself up into the saddle, the seven of them headed south into the forest. The last Ranger stood gazing after them until long after they were gone.
The woods, so crowded with Guardians of the Forest only a few minutes ago, now seemed empty. They rode abreast over a broad front, and their course wandered much. At times thickets barred their way, or brambles plucked at their clothes as they passed, but the floor of the forest was mostly open and it was possible to see a long way in the autumn light beneath the trees. Nor was there any trace of a path that could lead the enemy to the Valley. Evénn carefully scanned the ground they rode over, but even his sharp eyes could not pick one out. The Forest of Tasar looked much the same as it did the last time he had come this way, in the company of a young Ranger named Raynall. The trees were slightly older. That was all.
They crossed many streams, some deep, some shallow, all cold and dashing noisily downhill towards the Plains of Reith, first of all the Swift, which Arden had called the Seaborne when they met it on the high slopes yesterday. Here below it ran broad, loud, and swift as its name, beneath a broad-leafed canopy of oak and beech and walnut. The day grew sleepy and warm. For here, east of the mountains, the summer lingered on the wind and in green leaves just edged in red and gold.
Through the long afternoon Evénn and the Rangers rode dappled with sunlight and shadow, wading more often through pools of golden sun among the trees than across streams and brooks. Then clouds sodden with rain overtopped the mountains to the west, and a light but steady drizzle began to fall. By evening the rain had grown heavier. With their hoods pulled up and cloaks gathered about them, they settled down for the night beneath an old oak, and thought their fire could be larger.
In the gray dawn they set off again. The downpour muted their spirits and stopped what little conversation the Master would allow. After noon they came to a lively river, turbulent with the rainwater which lesser streams were feeding it. It would have barred their way had they needed to cross it, but this was the River of the Stars. It leaped down glittering from the mountain of the same name, then raced across the isolated valley which the Rangers called home. Jalonn turned west at the river bank and led them back towards the mountains. On either side of the river the land rose quickly and steeply, and soon became a dim gorge, its rocky cliffs looming two hundred feet above their heads. The air roared with the echo of rushing water, which grew louder as the gorge narrowed. Near the end there was scarcely enough room for man or horse to walk beside the river.
Then suddenly they exited the gorge and the Valley of the Rangers opened before them, nearly four miles across at its widest point, and hedged on all sides by granite walls that dwarfed the cliffs at the mouth of the gorge, the Valley’s one connection to the forest beyond. At the far end rose the loftiest of all the Gray Mountains, called the Mountain of the Stars because its summit seemed to pierce the very heavens. The first men to dwell here – it was so long ago now that few remembered them – were sages sent by the kings of the wide land of Narinen to study the stars. On the mountain’s upper slopes where no tree grew, amid snows never known to melt, they built a watchtower. There the hottest summer afternoon was like a cool evening of autumn, and a winter’s night more bitter than regret.
When the Rangers came to make this vale their home and their fortress during the first war against the spirit dragons thirteen centuries ago, the star-masters remained, counting and naming the stars, tracking their movements and striving to understand them, but as old age and death took them one by one, the king sent none to replace them. For the Valley of the Rangers was to be the most secret of all Narinen’s hidden places, a last haven of strength and in time of learning also. And so it was still. For thirty years the red dragon and his men had sought it in vain.
None but the Rangers knew where the fortress lay. Few outsiders ever visited, three or four perhaps in a hundred years, and they had been brought there on meandering, invisible paths through the broad forests. Fewer still could have found their way back alone, even if they had been able to escape the Guardians’ lethal vigilance. No one ever had. Today was the first day in centuries that anyone but a Ranger had entered here without first securing the permission of the Masters.
The fortress itself was carved into the living rock at the foot of the mountain. Even one standing in the open middle of the Valley would have missed its entrance if he did not know where to look for it, hidden beneath the two hundred foot tall pines which stood guard at the base of the granite cliff at the Valley’s western end. What few windows there were lay concealed behind those pines. Centuries of delving and building within the mountain had expanded the fortress within to hold many rooms and galleries and armories on several levels as well as the great library commanded by the seer king. There were stables, too, and forges and kitchens cunningly vented to disperse the smoke of their fires through many winding chimneys, so it seemed no more than the mists that cloaked the broad and lofty shoulders of the Mountain of the Stars.
Arden, Evénn, and the Rangers entered the valley as the second day of their journey verged on evening. The wolf, unsure of himself for once, kept close beside Evénn when Argos raced ahead to be met by his kin, the many other hounds that followed the Rangers into the perils of the lands outside. The rain still fell steadily as they neared the pines by the gates. There they came upon more than a hundred Rangers clad like Arden, Master Jalonn, and the others, some seated cross-legged on the turf, others down on one knee, but all with bowed heads. Facing them and kneeling on a platform which sat like a porch outside the gates of the citadel was an old man, his white hair long, his beard cropped close, his face wrinkled and tan, his eyes closed; and he was leading the Rangers in what they called the Time of Reflection. Jalonn and the other Rangers dismounted to join them, but not Arden. Evénn eyed him, half amused, half curious. Arden ignored him.
“Isn’t that Raynall?” Evénn leaned close to Arden and whispered.
Arden nodded.
For the present Raynall and the rest of the Rangers did not heed them, intent as they were on their meditation. All that could be heard was the rain falling and the dogs yelping and barking across the Valley. Most kept their distance, but a few came to join their masters, as Argos did after fifteen minutes or so. It was the solemn moment when sunset approached and the Rangers reflected on what and who they were, as Rangers, as mortals, as part of a long line of parents and children and lives and deaths. Finally Master Raynall spoke in a calm and thoughtful voice. Evénn smiled. The sound of that voice brought many memories of his time here back to him.
“Look upon the sun and the stars,” Raynall said.
“Know that god made them,” the gathering responded.
“Look upon the sky and the clouds.”
“Know that god made them.”
“Look upon the mountains and the seas.”
“Know that god made them.”
“Look upon the flowers and the trees.”
“Know that god made them.”
“Look upon the creatures of land and sea and sky.”
“Know that god made them.”
“Look upon yourself.”
“Know that god made you.”
“Be still.”
“Be still.”
“Know that you are a finite part of an infinite whole that heeds not your cares or your hurry,” Raynall said after a longer pause.
“But know that god does,” they replied with one voice.
“Be still. Be still. Be still.”
“And know that you are not god.”
For several minutes more they stayed as they were. Then a young boy at the front of the crowd stood up and approached Raynall. He held out his hand to help the old man to his feet, but it was clear to Evénn this evening, just as it had been decades earlier with a different Master, that this was more a ritual of respect for the Master and his years than it was a necessity. Raynall took the boy’s hand, but got up easily himself. He then bowed deeply to the Rangers. The Time of Reflection was at an end. The others, too, now got to their feet, and some turned to look at Arden and Evénn. Raynall gazed over their heads at Evénn as if he were gazing across time itself. He smiled in recognition and nodded to him, then to Arden. Both bowed in return, and Raynall beckoned to them.
They dismounted and began leading their horses forward through the crowd of Rangers, who stepped aside as they came, some talking quietly in small groups, others preferring to be alone as if in continued meditation. But the eyes of all were upon the two. As they passed, many nodded and welcomed them, bowing or extending a hand and a smile to Arden. Most were men, but there were several dozen women present, clad in gray or green and wearing a sword and dagger.
“You’ve been away too long, Arden,” said one of the men. Evénn guessed he was several years older than Arden.
“Perhaps I have, Niall. I often think so when I return,” Arden replied.
“Then you should return more often,” added a much younger woman standing at Niall’s shoulder. “Your friends have missed you these last three years.”
“And I have missed them, Agarwen," Arden smiled in answer, clasping their hands quickly and moving on. “We’ll speak more later. Evénn and I must greet the Master.”
Evénn nodded to Niall and Agarwen, and followed Arden towards the platform where Raynall stood. Jalonn was already at Raynall’s side, speaking very quietly. Nor were they alone. Five others stood around them in a circle, listening. As Jalonn spoke, Raynall’s eyes sought out Evénn’s and never left them. Evénn could just make out Jalonn’s words. He was quickly recounting all that happened yesterday morning and giving his assessment of it.
At that moment two young Rangers stepped up to Arden and Evénn. They bowed deeply, respectfully, and offered to tend to their horses for them, but as they did so they eyed the wolf at Evénn’s side with some care.
“Don’t concern yourself about him,” Evénn said to them. “Never yet has he harmed a friend. He is no kin to the wolves you know. He has never served or done evil.”
“We have no doubt of that, sir, since he comes here with you,” one of them said courteously, “but our long enmity with the wolves we know has taught us caution.”
“And so it should, but I have learned better in his company,” the elf said. “He has proven a faithful friend to me, and Argos here has the wisdom to know friend from foe. They have become fast friends in but a short time.”
“Then we shall not let it be said that we are less wise than our hounds,” the youth replied.
“Nor should you,” said Evénn.
With that Evénn withdrew the roll of cloth from Moonglow’s saddle, and let the two young men lead him and Arden’s horse away to be stabled, groomed, and fed. Then he looked down at Argos and the wolf. They were looking at him expectantly, then glancing at a group of wolfhounds some distance away. A plea was in their eyes.
“Arden,” he said, drawing his attention to them, “Argos wishes to introduce my wolf to his kin.”
“Go on, then, Argos,” Arden said to the hound, and, Evénn signaling his agreement to the wolf, both wolf and dog bolted off towards the waiting hounds, who met them as dogs will, with inquisitive noses. After the necessary introductions they all dashed off together.
Arden and Evénn now came up to the platform at the gates. Turf grew thick upon its roof, and vines hung down on all sides. Seen from above, it would have blended into the ground. When Evénn first arrived here on a sunlit morning some sixty years ago there had been neither vines nor turf, but those were other days. Men did not fear the heavens then. It seemed fitting to him, and grimly amusing, that he came this time amid the gloom of rain and dusk.
At the edge of the platform Raynall, Jalonn, and the others who had heard Jalonn’s report, stood silently waiting for them. Evénn had no doubt he was looking at all seven of the Masters. Their ages varied. The eldest, Raynall, hale into his ninth decade, could have been grandfather to Falimar, the new Master of the Bow, who was six years younger than Arden. The rest were Jalonn’s age or older. Beside him on Raynall’s left were Falimar and Marak, the Master of Hounds. On the other side stood Keral, the Master of Books, then Orom, the Master of Horses, and lastly Indushan, the Master of the Valley, to whose care were entrusted all matters touching upon the safety and provisioning of the Valley.
Reflected in their eyes Evénn saw both kindness and caution, but in different proportions according to their natures. The doubts of several were quite plain. He did not blame them. After all these years his own people might look at him in just this way – welcoming but uncertain, their hopes poised warily against their expectations – if he were to appear suddenly, bearing with him the suggestion of hope. Countless leagues of land and sea, and twenty five years of the sun, divided him from the last of his own people. They were hidden deep in their own final sanctuary, or so he prayed, and they, too, were waiting for a sign.
“Greetings, Evénn, and welcome,” said Master Raynall. “I did not think to see you again in this life.”
“Greetings to you, too, old friend,” Evénn answered with a fading smile. His voice took on a more sober, urgent tone. “I wish we had met sooner. Much has changed with the years, and many things have returned that we did not expect to see.”
“But your return at least is welcome.”
“Masters, the night has gone on too long. I bring a sign,” he said, and hesitated for the right words, “of the coming dawn.”
As he said these words he raised the silk wrapped bundle in his right hand ever so slightly, and subtly shifted his eyes to it, then back to the Masters again. Raynall’s expression scarcely changed, but the elf could see light of speculation, then wonder briefly kindle in his eyes. He stepped forward and extended his hand to his guest, who grasped it quickly and firmly.
“May your words prove true, Evénn,” Raynall said. “Welcome again. I regret that we serve but simple fare here. We can offer no feast to honor you and your ancient deeds as they deserve, but perhaps the past will light the way to the future. “
“It always has,” Evénn answered.
“Just so,” Raynall said. “For now, my friend, we must leave you, but Master Indushan will return presently to escort you to the room we have prepared for you. You will remember it, I think, from your last visit. Arden, son of Tyr, we will await your report in the Council Chamber. No doubt you have much to tell us.”
“That I do, Master,” Arden replied.
As the Masters entered the citadel, Arden noticed Jalonn and Keral exchange a brief look.
“So, Evénn, may I ask what that bundle is now?” Arden said. “The Masters looked at it closely, but their expressions were guarded.”
“Do not keep the Masters waiting, Arden,” Evénn said, chiding his impatience with a kindly smile.
“Very well,” Arden chuckled.
When the Master of the Valley reappeared a moment later, Evénn stepped up onto the platform to greet her and shake her hand before entering the citadel together. Arden lingered briefly, looking back across the rainy valley. Not one of the Rangers present upon their arrival had left yet. They had stayed to observe the meeting of Evénn and the Masters.
“Small wonder,” he thought, and set out for the Council Chamber.

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