Fortress of Eagles

Well-done, Tristen thought, seeing his way clear. Encumbered though he was by shield and sword, he climbed up the pile among the Guard passing up the sacks, with the men calling out both first an encouragement and then realizing in dismay that they were being left behind.

He heard Uwen shout that he was coming, as with an elbow atop the narrow wall he had a view of the armory, the smithy, and the earl’s men rushing from the South Gate to the defense of the wall in sudden realization that the assault was on them sooner than expected and that the arrows that struck and shattered there were not enough. The lighter-equipped men who had been flinging down sacks jumped with no more than swords in hand as Tristen heaved himself up to the crest with a thump of the hindering shield. He rolled over the jagged masonry rim and plummeted down to the steep hill of the grain sacks below, leaned back and slid down them to the first brace of his foot and the oncoming assault of the earl’s men. More of his men were landing behind him, one sliding into his back as he braced himself halfway to his feet, trying to deploy his shield for cover to the men by him. Tristen thrust his shield right against the faces of men coming at him in desperate defense. One he flung back with a shove of the shield alone and the man beside him engaged that one; the other won the edge of his sword. For a moment he and two light-armed men were battling a knot of enemy alone, and then Uwen turned up beside him, shield up, sword advanced. Other men came thumping down among the sacks, arraying themselves to shield new arrivals in greater and greater numbers. They pressed forward from the grain sacks, pushed the enemy that had rushed toward them now into a ragged and increasingly disordered retreat. An officer across the yard tried to rally his forces to oppose what was still a small force, but the earl’s men had obstructed their archers, and the hindmost who had rushed up to the attack began immediately not only to give ground, but to run.

“Open the gate!” Tristen shouted at any man who could hear. “Open the gate behind us!”

He thought someone had gone. He led his men forward, across the cobbled South Courtyard into the sporadic fire of archers, at all the speed they could muster. Resistance to their advance collapsed as the last men they pursued ran past the thin ranks of the archers and left them undefended.

Then, officers’ shouts notwithstanding, and with a last, sporadic volley of arrows, the shadows of the yard gave up more and more bowmen who otherwise would have remained concealed, archers joining their sword-and-shield men in retreat until nigh on two hundred men were in sporadic, uncertain rout, giving ground across the yard, past the corner of the building and across its face, ru

Tristen forged ahead, giving the rebels no space to breathe. At the rebels’ backs was a second curtain wall, the east, its small single gate shut. But the fortress itself offered nearer refuge to men hard-pressed, and the rebel earl’s men pushed and shoved one another atop the South Stairs as they opened the doors to the interior, and men poured in, seeking shelter in the Zeide’s i

He had far rather the retreat had gone to the east, farthermost small gate of the South Court. He had left them that retreat in hope of their fleeing through the second of the two curtain-wall gates into the East Court. But the rebel officer was drawing his men into a warren of stairs and rooms, where traps might be prepared and where he might have something in mind.

But king’s men held the South Court and the West, undisputed.

“Open the all the gates! Open the South andthe East Gates!” Tristen pointed with his sword for the sake of the Guelenmen, some of whom did not know the East Gate from the one at their backs. “Let Captain Anwyll in by the South! And open up the East!”

“Get both the gates, lads! Go let in Cossell!” Uwen relayed the order in terms the men knew in a voice that echoed off the walls, as their band engaged the last escaping earl’s men on the lower tiers of the South Stairs, the scene of processionals and ceremonies.

“Forward!” Tristen shouted, and kept pressing up the steps as the rebels inside heaved at the great doors to shut them at the backs of their own hindmost men. Resistance collapsed, men went down, and the last few to reach the other side of the doors tried to push them shut in their faces, but Tristen hewed at the defenders with all his might through the narrowing gap, and Uwen pushed, and more of their men pressed forward and added their weight. The doors gave back and back until courage failed the rebels and the doors gave in a sudden lack of force behind them. They forced jammed doors the rest of the way open, shoving bodies before them and treading over dead and wounded as they reached the dark hall, seeking the enemy.

Then men poured in at their flank, out of the dark. “King’s men!” Tristen shouted, and “King’s men!” the shout went up on either side, Guelenmen narrowly evading each others’ mistaken attack as the viceroy’s force came in from the west wing to join theirs.

“They’ve gone east!” he heard Uwen shout. “M’lord, rebels is to the Temple court!”

“Dragons with me!” Tristen shouted, and turned his own men toward the deep dark, past the junction of stairs, chasing the distant noise of retreat in a thunderous advance of their own, all the way past what must be the great hall. The retreat echoed differently then, and his ears told him the rebels had reached the end of the hall and the downward stairs to the East Court. “Shields!” he shouted, as they came rushing up. “Stairs to the right!”

Men met them out of the blind dark, rear guard for the men on the stairs, and for a brief, sharp encounter everything was blind, men striking at men they could not see, pushing resisting men down steps and against the upward push of bodies. Tristen struck few blows himself, pushed with his shield, hit with the flat of his blade, his footing unsteady on unseen steps and fallen men entangling the feet of the living. The halls and stairwell rang with shouts and the clash of arms, and the battle anger was so close, so very close he dared not charge headlong. He pushed as much as fought, used his shield, forced the rebels down the narrow stairs to the door he knew was there. He heard Uwen’s voice. He heard the rebels shouting, “Lord Sihhë!” this time in panic, men pressing ahead at the last by sheer weight.

The earl’s men tried to stand. There was no room. Then a seam of night sky broke behind the heads of the defenders, and widened, as someone opened the east door. A few escaped outward, and now the battle choked into another panic as men jammed the doors to the outside in utter disorder.

Men with more presence of mind tried to rally once more through and shut that door against Tristen’s force, a door which Tristen was equally determined should stand open. He battered them with his shield, pressed back, trampled on the fallen, a moment of extreme peril, and the door, by reason of men fallen in the gap, could not shut again. He reached the open air of the steps, facing the shrines, and a knot of rebels who had run headlong against a fatal wall of Dragon Guard waiting for them, a grim line with shields locked.

Anwyll and Cossell had both come in.

The hammering din of battle and the shouts of armed men spreading out from the doors behind him fell away to a growing, knife-edged silence. A band of maybe sixscore rebels was left standing, half as many more wounded huddled at their feet. He had no doubt that some of the earl’s men had disappeared inside, to lose themselves in the halls. The columned shrines and tombs that towered up on either hand of this small courtyard might have sheltered the rebels: the Bryaltine, the Quinaltine, the Teranthine shrines, next the crypts of holy men and Aswyddim were a maze of narrow aisles. The roofs of the fortress itself might have been to fear, but no attack had come from that direction.