Page 71 of The Summer Pass

They’d been told off to report for duty on the walls the moment they’d shown their faces at the main guard station. It was just luck—and a bit of quick thinking on Barda’s part—that had allowed them to hang onto their bottles of wine, which obviously they weren’t supposed to have on duty. Now they had bows and quivers to carry as well as the bottles.

“Yeah, all right, true—but we’re on a stealth mission all the same.”

They reached the top of the wall, and Barda proceeded to lounge with his back to the enemy. Firuduna tried to actually do his job by looking over the parapet at the forces arrayed below.

“I got to say,” Barda drawled, “I envy you, getting to be nursed by Lill.”

“He, er, he was a good nurse. I was well cared for.”

At that, Barda got in Firuduna’s face, as best he could from his height, with a put-on look of furious envy, and growled. Firuduna’s cock jumped in a way that had nothing—well, very little—to do with Lill.

Barda Gukhártu was not, by any stretch, pretty the way Lill was. He wasn’t even really handsome, though he wasn’t ugly either. He had a pale face with sharp features, and he wore his dark brown hair in a jaunty style, long in the front and short in the back, with small gold rings winking in his ears. He was wiry and undersized, a head shorter than Firuduna, and his trousers were tight in the seat, as if he wanted to show off his ass. It wasn’t unworthy of being shown off. Though probably the trousers were just too small for him, made for him before he’d reached his full size, such as it was.

“He was a good nurse,” Firuduna repeated, “and you don’t seem surprised to hear it, so you were joking when you said he was an assassin!”

Barda got a solemn look on his face now, but it wasn’t convincing. “Heart to the Blue Heaven, I wasn’t joking. He was an assassin from some Order of the Sworn Thingigummies, sent to kill Lord Vanu in his bed, and he fell in love with him instead.”

That stirred Firuduna’s innards in a different way. Imagine having someone feel that kind of thing about you. And he found it wasn’t unbelievable. It made sense of some of the things about Lill that hadn’t made sense before.

He cleared his throat. “So what is he doing here, then? What was he doing in Tsuruva?”

“No clue,” Barda admitted. “But I know why he wasn’t in Umtúshta—I mean, kind of. He couldn’t carry out his mission to kill Vanu, so he had to leave.”

“But if he was in love … ”

“Yeah, that’s why I said I kind of know. It doesn’t entirely make sense to me. All I know is it did make sense to Lord Vanu, and he was fucking pissed at the rest of us for being mad about Lill showing his true colours or whatever. I mean, we weren’t all mad. My brother and I thought it was a piece of purest bee-fuckery, which we respect. I mean respect. And Padunu—he’s our shaman—he never said a word against Lill either, but he’s the toadiest fucking toady that ever toadied, so who knows what he really thought. Ma and her boyfriend were livid, Lord Vanu’s girls were miserable, and Da was—well, he’d only just made up his mind not to want Lill dead because Lill’d saved Khatu and Padunu’s lives, so Da was mostly just confused.” Barda sighed. “And then I was the one who went and got Lill half-killed by telling the fucking Piglet of Hawakhurta he’s an assassin. Sometimes I hate myself.” After a moment he added, a sly look creeping back onto his face, “Most of the time I don’t. Most of the time I think I’m great. Just so you know.”

“Right,” said Firuduna warily.

He had the strangest urge to reply, “Sometimes I hate myself too—like this one time, I took two lowland musicians hostage and dragged them all the way to Tsuruva because I was so ashamed of trying to have sex with a man for money that I didn’t stop to figure out they weren’t really trying to rob me.” That ought to have been on a level with whatever Barda had done to get Lill in trouble. But it would be crazy to admit something like that. Why was he even tempted?

“Earth’s tits!” said Barda, pointing over the wall. “Look down there—what’s that thing?”

“That’s a battering ram.”

“That basket-looking thing?”

“Yes. That’s a cover over the ram. So we can’t shoot the men operating it. They’ll wheel it up to the main gate and start hammering away.”

The ram was under a wheeled wicker cover that did look rather like a huge basket. It was still out of bowshot, like the rest of the Zashian army, but even as Firuduna watched, he could see that they were positioning it to approach the gate. The first assault was coming.

“Can’t we set it on fire?” Barda asked.

“It’s probably wet, to prevent us doing that. But yeah. It’s something to try.”

“What if we poured something on it that catches fire and then set that on fire?”

“Like bitumen or something?”

“I dunno what that is.”

“It’s a thing that catches fire—you use it for waterproofing boats. In the lowlands, where they have boats.”

Barda gave him the look that deserved. “That’s not gonna be helpful here, then. Is it?”

Chapter 25

A Legend