A Sterkarm Kiss (23 page)

But Davy's suspicions were tickled, and his face twisted into a thoughtful grimace. The Sterkarms, innocent? Trotting so trustingly into an ambush. Something was not right …

“That be May,” said the man near him. “Per May!”

Other voices breathed the name, and Davy knew him too—by his height, his figure, and his walk more than anything, since he had on a helmet. But Per May, Big Toorkild's son, was a man the Grannams looked for, and noted. They would know him on a dark, moonless night. And if they were going to kill Sterkarms in revenge, then Per May's head was worth ten heads of lesser fry.

But why, Davy asked himself, would Per May walk—not ride, but walk—into a place where, being no fool, he might well expect an ambush. Something wrong, something wrong … Davy had half a mind to call off the ambush and let the Sterkarms through, because something was very wrong. He turned to the man nearest him and was raising his hand to signal to another a yard away—but his men weren't looking to him, and they waited for no orders. It was impossible to tell which had been the first to move, but someone had strung his bow at the first sight of the Sterkarms, and now stood and loosed an arrow. And there was another, standing, raising his bow, and another. Davy heard the soft throb of the string only from the nearest man, and the arrows were too slender and fast to be seen, but he knew that many were flying, silently, well aimed, toward the men below.

Per felt the blood pulsing along the center of his bones. He knew that if the Elves were slow, or the Grannams lucky, in the next breath an arrow could drive through his throat, or a pistol ball punch through his jaw. The fear of pain and the fear of death tightened his back as he took one step after another. He saw the men come to their feet among the rocks and knew they were archers. He didn't see the arrows loose, but he felt the air shift against his face as one went by. The archer had his range; the next would hit.

“Nether!” Patterson yelled. “Nether!”

Per threw himself down.

On the hillside above, Davy Grannam saw the Sterkarms throw themselves down on the ground—and hadn't begun to wonder why when a sound he'd never heard before took all thought away. It was loud—it deafened. He couldn't have said what made it, or even what direction it came from. He saw his men rise in the air and fly backward. They fell from the air, crashing down on the hard hillside. His body turned cold and heavy with fear.

Other men rose from their hiding places—maybe to attack, maybe to run. Some Sterkarms threw things. Head-cracking bangs, flashes, men screaming—bawling out in fear, shrieking in pain. Their jakkes, their helmets, weren't saving them.

Davy didn't see what landed near him; he hardly heard the cracking bang or saw the flash. But the pain filled him, intense, sudden pain. He fell.

The surviving Grannams broke cover and ran. They ran up the steep slopes. They ran down. The Elves followed; their pistols banged and crackled. The Grannams fell, with smashed legs or bodies ripped open.

The din stopped. There was no one else to run. The Elves waited warily, then relaxed slightly, though they still scanned the hillsides around them. Patterson said, “All yours, lads.”

The Sterkarms couldn't have understood what he said, but they knew what he meant. They rose from the ground and went to work. Gareth watched in helpless dismay. Scrambling up the hillsides and among the rocks and bushes, they found the wounded and dying Grannams and finished them. Removing their valuable helmets, they pounded in their heads with clubs. They cut their throats. They hacked off hands and they hacked off heads. They turned what had been living, thinking men into carrion, and they did it in minutes.

Gareth couldn't speak. He sat on a boulder and watched the men coming back together. The Elves were a little muddied; the Sterkarms were bloodied. All about the hillside lay bodies and parts of bodies and pieces of flesh and flesh jellied by close explosions. Just lying there. It would rot. It shouldn't be like that.

Per took little part in the killing. He came loping down the hillside, stopped near Gareth, and cleaned his dagger in the grass and moss. Then he sat down on the rock beside Gareth, who wanted to cringe away from him. Per said nothing and looked furious. Gareth would have been scared to speak to him even if he'd had anything to say.

Patterson, cradling the great Elf-Pistol in his arms, nodded at Gareth but spoke to Per. “How'd you like them apples?”

Gareth couldn't speak. Per, even if he could have understood Patterson's words, wouldn't have understood their sense, but he spoke anyway, angrily.

“What's he say?” Patterson asked.

Gareth shook his head.

Patterson gave his leg a nudge with his boot. “Wake up! What's he say?”

Gareth made an effort. It was like mouthing clay and ashes. “He says. It's like the autumn killing.”

“Eh?”

“They kill most of the animals in the autumn so there's fewer to keep through the winter.” It was quite easy to talk about history. “He says it's a job for a butcher.”

Patterson stared at Per for a moment, then shrugged. “He wanted 'em dead, they're dead.”

Per jumped up and walked a few paces away, turned, walked back, turned again, too furious to keep still. He had thought that killing so many Grannams would bring some relief; but his rage was still there, like a smothered fire: red, sullen, choked. The Elves had done the killing, and left the Sterkarms the butcher's job. How was that revenge?

“Now then,” Patterson said. “What next? Do we find the other ambush party, or do we go for the tower? My vote's for the ambushers, because if we leave them, they'll get behind us, and we don't want any bother, do we?” He looked at Gareth and wagged his head toward Per. “Gareth? Do the honors?”

Gareth found himself hearing Patterson's words belatedly, and fear made him hurry to translate them. He didn't want angry Grannams coming up behind him. Especially when they had such reason to be angry.

Per listened to the translation and then said,
“Vi gaw til tur.”
We go to the tower.

Patterson didn't need a translation. “Tell him! About 'em getting behind us. Finish the job first, then go to the tower.”

Gareth started to translate, but Per cut him short.
“Vi gaw til tur.”
The more difficult it was, the more revenge was earned.

Mistress Crosar drearily swept up old rushes. The noise of the stiff broom twigs hushed, hushed against the stone flags, and the rushes whispered. She told Joan to keep her eyes and her thoughts on her stitching. Joan sat in a chair, stitching, and the blood poured from her pricked fingers all over the chemise she worked on. Mistress Crosar swept on and the insistent sound of the brush on the stone became the hard clang, clang of a bell—

She started up. Sweeping rushes, she thought. How ridiculous. How long is it since I swept rushes? I would set a maid to do it.

The bell. Her heart tightened, and she rose from her bed where she'd been dozing, fully dressed. Her maid shoved open the door. “Riders, mistress!”

“Theirs or ours?”

The maid grabbed the cloak from the bed and swung it around Mistress Crosar's shoulders. “We can no tell. But riders—riders!”

Mistress Crosar needed no candle on the dark, close stairs, she knew them so well. She stepped from the door at the top into the chill, strong, damp wind and made her way around the roof to the lookout turret, where the man on watch still clanged the bell. He made room for her to join him and, for a moment, stopped his ringing. “There, mistress.” He pointed. “D'you see? There?”

Clots of darkness, moving in darkness. When she squinted at them, they formed themselves into something like horses moving, with blobs on their backs that might have been men.

“Who be they?”

“Sterkarms, mistress.”

The answer shocked her, even though she'd been expecting it. “How dost ken?”

“They'd be whooping and cheering if they was ourn.”

Mistress Crosar stared at the moving blobs, thinking that they might still be Grannam men who didn't feel like whooping and cheering. There might be no reason to fear. She said, “Fire beacon.”

She went back down to the roof and stood aside in a corner, to let the man take the lid from the beacon and fire it with the fire canister he had by him. It took a while to catch but then flared up, casting showers of red sparks and tongues of red and yellow light over the roof. The shadows deepened. Mistress Crosar felt the skin of her face tighten in its heat. She looked out over the dark countryside, imagining the beacon carrying its message. Every Grannam tower and bastle house that saw it would fire its own beacon and pass the message on. Help would come.

Per felt a fierce, gleeful eagerness to see the Elves fire on the Brackenhill Tower. Even now, even as they peered from the walls, the Grannams believed that as long as they stayed locked inside, with the beacon blazing on the roof and the bell clanging, no great harm could come to them. But the laugh was on them, now that the Elves had seen sense. Make peace with the Grannams? The only way to make peace with the Grannams was to kill them all. The Elves had been slow to learn that, but they had learned it at last.

The Sterkarms and Elves had reached the tower as quickly as they could, but even so, the farms they'd passed had been deserted. News had flown over the hills. The people knew that the Grannams and Sterkarms were killing each other again, and they were on watch. At the merest suspicion that the riders in the distance were armed with lances, the people had left everything and run. It was Sweet Milk who left their farms standing. Per would have burned them. Sweet Milk said that would waste time.

They left men in the hills to watch for the approach of any party coming to the tower's rescue and then rode to within a good bowshot of the red-gray walls of the tower. There they dismounted and settled to watch the Elves assembling their cannon, which, though small enough for a man to raise to his shoulder, was yet more destructive and powerful than anything men had. Other Elves stood ready to meet any Grannams with their many-shooting pistol, and their grenates that ripped folk to ribbons.

Elf-Patterson and Elf-Burnett put the cannon together and then knelt, took aim at the tower's gate, and fired. The first two shots fell short, with ear-tearing bangs and blinding flashes, but then they had the range. The third exploded against the stonework, sending chips flying. The fourth squarely hit the wooden gate and, crashing, booming, reduced it to flinders. The Sterkarms cheered, though their yells seemed faint among the wide hills.

The explosion, muffled as it was by the thickness of the stone walls, was the loudest anyone in the tower had ever heard. The tower shook with its impact, carrying the tremor through its stones far from the gate and the people felt the blow reverberate through their bones. Mistress Crosar, on the roof, was shaken by it. “What was that?”

The watchman leaned from his turret but shook his head.

Something fell in the courtyard of the tower. There was a flash and a deep
k-rump!
of sound, cuffing their heads. After the noise came a moment of dead silence: then the cries broke through—cries of terror, alarm, and pain.

“Fire!” came a woman's shout from below, and that jolted Mistress Crosar back on her heels. The tower's yard was full of thatched buildings, and most of the upper stories were built of wood. If fire took hold, they would be trapped in a furnace. She made for the stairs.

The Elves sent their rockets again and again against the tower door, splitting and crumbling the stone, reducing the iron yett to a glowing twist. They sent firebombs arcing into the castle. Per had given up cheering with every explosion, but he watched, grinning, jumping with glee. Soon, he saw, it would be time for someone to lead the way through the tower gate. He looked around and then went to one of his footmen.

“Andy—give me thine axe.”

Andy frowned, reluctant.

Per put his hand on the axe's shaft. “Give it to me. I'll pay thee. I want to lead us in.”

Andy handed over the long-shafted axe then, feeling proud that the May was going to use
his
axe and lead them, the footmen. Whatever chaos was in the tower, however weakened were the Grannams by the Elf-Shot, everyone knew that the first man through the tower's low gate into its yard was likely to be the first Sterkarm killed. “And it was my axe,” Andy would be able to say, in the future. “It was my axe in May's hand when he led us into Brackenhill Tower.”

“Milk—bring milk!” Mistress Crosar shouted. Her hair was down, her cloak lost. Sparks and ash were flew around her and smoldered in her skirts. Smoke from the burning thatch was thick and harsh and filled the narrow alleys, and so was heat. Mistress Crosar could feel sweat on her hot face, beneath her arms and breasts.

Women, silent, determined, ducked into the dairy to fetch pans of milk to throw on the fires. Mistress Crosar watched one large pan of milk thrown at a patch of burning thatch. Most of it missed. The liquid that landed spat and sizzled in the flames, sending up more smoke and a stink of burning milk. It quenched one patch of fire, but sparks and tongues of flame jumped free and caught at other thatch and at the wood of the shutters and walls. Seeing it, Mistress Crosar knew that it was hopeless—but she turned and took a bucket of water another woman had lugged from the well. One hand on the handle, the other beneath the pail, she heaved the heavy bucket up with a wrench of her back and threw the water onto a thatch.

Other women were pulling down burning thatch and stamping on it. “Good, good!” Mistress Crosar cried, and took a pitchfork from a woman and herself heaved down a great lump of burning thatch that filled the narrow alleyway. The heat grew fiercer and she was enveloped in smoke. There was a sizzling, and the smoke thickened as another woman emptied a bucket on the thatch before it could set light to the walls.