Page 39 of The Summer Pass

“Halza rode back with news,” Auxshna reported. “There’s an army approaching.”

“Coming up the valley from the south-west,” said Halza. He looked windswept and alight with purpose in a way that made him surprisingly handsome.

He said something more to Auxshna, and she translated, “Ten regiments. That’s 10,000 men, Na Gurti. Headed to the Summer Pass.”

“We have to alert the villagers,” said Halza, looking past Gurti toward Manáshta.

“What will they do? Where can they go?” Auxshna asked.

“Up into the pass, to Tagra Degra,” said Gurti. “It’s a fortress—that’s where we shelter in case of attack.”

“I’m going to ride on to the village,” said Halza. He glanced at Auxshna.

“I’ll come with you,” she said. “I can help talk to the villagers.”

He nodded, and for a moment, the way they were looking at each other, full of shared determination, they looked like they could be lovers. Halza mounted his horse and helped Auxshna up behind him, and Gurti watched them ride off across the meadow to save her village from their own king’s soldiers.

Chapter 16

Not Bad with a Bow

Lill restrung his bow quickly and nocked another arrow. He aimed out the slit in the stone wall and shot at the soldier closest to the tower. Reached for another arrow and shot again, without watching the first man fall. The attackers were Zashians with tall wicker shields which were proof against arrows, but the gate to Tsuruva was narrow, and they had to turn to enter it, offering a moment when their shields didn’t protect them.

They weren’t making an assault on the towers; their aim was simply to loot the village. Lill and Firuduna were covering the main path up to the gate as well as they could, while other villagers were waiting on the rooftops with buckets to put out any fires. Everyone in the remaining towers was ready with bows and rocks and buckets of refuse to drop.

It was the second attack in two days. The first had come in the early morning before Lill had risen to set off for Tagra Degra. Their defence had been disorganized but effective; they’d driven off the raid, and Lill and Zaraz, not being in the towers when it started, had been able to put out the fire that the soldiers set at the forge. That was what had given the headman the idea to organize a fire brigade for the next raid. At least, that was as close as he would come to acknowledging that it had been Lill’s idea.

“You all right over there?” Firuduna asked from his post at the arrow slit to Lill’s right.

It was the second time he’d asked that, and Lill wasn’t sure what he meant by it. He wished he had Muni up here instead of Firuduna; from what he’d seen, she was a better archer.

“Running low on arrows,” he answered as he snatched up another.

“What, really? Here you go.”

Lill could hear Firuduna putting down his bow to pass over arrows from his own quiver, and he wanted to snap at the man to keep shooting. But it’s not a drill, he reminded himself. No one would beat Firuduna bloody for failing to hit the moving targets the required number of times.

Below the tower, a soldier stumbled and dropped his shield for a moment, and Lill’s arrow sliced through his beard and into his throat.

Firuduna’s handful of arrows clattered down beside Lill’s nearly empty quiver.

“Keep shooting,” Lill reminded him.

Every soldier that they failed to stop here—and they were failing to stop a lot of them—was another who could harm one of the women or children or old men of the village that Lill was here to protect. Why had he not been taught to worry about that instead of just whether or not he would be whipped after the drill was over?

In the end, the second raid was found to have done less damage than the first. Nothing had been burned; the fire brigade had put out a couple of small fires easily. Hardly anything was taken, none of the towers was breached, and the only villager injured was one of Artami’s neighbour’s sons, who broke his arm falling off the roof of a shed. Also, there were the bodies of twelve slain soldiers lying in the village streets and around the gate, four killed by things dropped on them from the towers, the rest by arrows. Another five, at least, had been injured but made it out of the village alive; Lill heard Muni modestly confessing to Artami that she had kept count of the soldiers she had shot.

“But I made sure not to kill them,” she added. “I always aim for the … ” She gestured.

Apparently she had shot five soldiers in the ass. Lill was impressed.

The remainder of the day was spent cleaning up after the raid. The bodies were the main concern. Their weapons and jewellery were all taken as a matter of course; Lill found villagers looting the corpses by the time he came down to retrieve his arrows. They didn’t want most of the Zashian clothing, although they took some of the men’s boots. Then the headman’s elder daughter had the idea that they should ask Lill what he recommended they do with the bodies to respect Zashian funeral customs, which they didn’t understand very well.

This set a couple of the old men off; one wanted to take the soldiers’ heads and hang them from the towers, or failing that, the eaves of his own house, while the other went on a long ramble about how they took scalps in the Steppes and offered to show everyone the collection of scalps left to him by his mother’s brother, who had spent a decade as a prisoner of the nomads. The headman eventually shut this down, at the urging of his elder daughter, and gave a speech about how Tsuruvans should be proud to think they treated even their enemies’ bodies with respect. They appealed to Lill again for his expertise and were a little disappointed but accepted his authority when he said he thought the most respectful thing to do would be to carry the bodies a good way outside the village gate and leave them for their fellows to claim and give funeral rites.

In the Order, the bodies of those who died were left out for animals to eat, but Lill knew the regular troops who did not live under the opprobrium of the Almighty had more elaborate ways of dealing with their dead. He didn’t know exactly what they were.

He was anxious to get back up to the house behind the forge to check on Zaraz and make plans to go to Tagra Degra, but Firuduna stopped him on his way there.