Uprooted(102)
Author: Naomi Novik

My lungs were bursting before he finished. Wind was whistling noisily in through the gaping wall, books scattered, torn pages riffling noisily. We pushed the table up against the open gap, to help keep us from falling out of the window. Sarkan picked up a piece of the hot cannon-ball with a cloth and held the sentinel next to it, like giving a scent to a hound. “Menya kaizha, stonnan olit,” he told the sentinel, and gave it a push out into the night sky. It drifted away, the grey of it fading into just a scrap of fog.

All that couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes—no longer than I could hold my breath. But more of Marek’s army had already crammed into the trench, and pushed the baron’s men back towards the first tunnel. Solya had flung another arrow-flight and opened more room for them, but more than that, Marek and his knights were riding just outside the wall behind them, spurring the men onward: I saw them using their horse-whips and spears against their own soldiers, driving them through the breach.

The ones in the front ranks were almost being pushed onto the defenders’ blades, horribly. Other soldiers were pressing up behind them, and little by little the baron’s soldiers were having to give way, a cork being forced out of a bottle. The trench was already littered with corpses—so many of them, piled on one another. Marek’s soldiers were even climbing up on top of the heaps to shoot arrows down at the baron’s men, as if they didn’t care that they were standing on the bodies of their own dead comrades.

From the second trench, the baron’s men began flinging Sarkan’s potion-spheres over the wall. They landed in blue bursts, clouds that spread through the soldiers; the men caught inside the mist sank to their knees or toppled over in heaps, faces dazed and sinking into slumber. But more soldiers came on after them, climbing over them, trampling them like ants.

I felt a wild horror, looking at it, unreal.

“We’ve misjudged the situation,” Sarkan said.

“How can he do this?” I said, my voice shaking. It seemed as if Marek was so determined to win he didn’t care how expensive we made the walls; he’d pay anything, anything at all, and the soldiers would follow him to their deaths, endlessly. “He must be corrupted—” I couldn’t imagine anything else that would let him spend his own men’s lives like this, like water.

“No,” Sarkan said. “Marek’s not fighting to win the tower. He’s fighting to win the throne. If he loses to us here, now, we’ll have made him look weak before the Magnati. He’s backed into a corner.”

I understood without wanting to. Marek really would spend everything he had. No price would be too high. All the men and magic he’d used already would only make it worse, like a man throwing good money after bad because he couldn’t stand to lose what he’d already spent. We couldn’t just hold him off. We’d have to fight him to the last man, and he had thousands of them left to pour into the battle.

The cannon roared once more, as if to punctuate the terrible realization, and then they fell suddenly and blessedly silent. Sarkan’s floating sentinel had dropped down upon them and burst against the hot iron. The dozen men working on the cannon had frozen into statues. One man stood before the left cannon with a rod thrust down the barrel; others were bent over gripping ropes, dragging the right cannon back to its place; still others held cannon-balls or sacks in their hands: a monument to a battle that wasn’t over.

Marek at once ordered other men to come and get the statues clear of the cannon. They began dragging and shoving the statues away, toppling them into the dirt. I flinched when I saw one smashing the fingers off the statues to pry out the ropes: I wanted to shout down that the stone-turned men were still alive. But I didn’t think Marek would care.

The statues were heavy and the work was slow, so we had a brief respite from the cannon-fire. I steadied myself and turned to Sarkan. “If we offered to surrender,” I said, “would he listen?”

“Certainly,” Sarkan said. “He’d put us both to death at once, and you might as well cut the children’s throats yourself as hand them over, but he’d be delighted to listen.” He took a turn thwarting the arrow spell: he pointed and spoke an incantation of misdirection, and another flight of silver-led arrows struck against the outer wall. He shook out his hand and wrist, looking down. “In the morning,” he said finally. “Even if Marek is willing to destroy his entire army, men can’t fight endlessly without a rest, and food and drink. If we can hold them until morning, he’ll have to call them off for a little while. Then he might be willing to parley. If we can hold them until morning.”

Morning seemed far away.

The pace of the battle ebbed for a little while. The baron’s men had retreated into the second trench entirely by now, filling the passageway in with corpses so Marek’s men couldn’t keep coming. Marek rode his horse back and forth outside the walls, simmering and angry and impatient, watching while his men struggled to get the cannon firing again. Near him, Solya settled into a steady rhythm of throwing arrow-flights into the second trench.

It was an easier spell for him to throw than for us to deflect. The arrow-heads were Alosha’s work. They wanted to find their way to flesh, and he was only showing them the way to go. Meanwhile we were trying to twist them from their purpose, fighting not just his spell but hers: the strength of her will, the hammer-strokes that had beaten magic and determination into the iron, and even the arrows’ natural flight. Pulling them aside was steady, grinding work, and meanwhile Solya threw his silver guiding lines into the air with wide easy sweeps of his arm, like a man sowing seeds. Sarkan and I had to take turns, each of us catching a flight at a time; each one an effort. We had no time or strength for any other working.

There was a natural rhythm to the work: dragging away a flight of arrows, like hauling on a heavy fishing-net, and then pausing to sip a little water and rest while Sarkan took his turn; then I would go to the window again. But Solya broke the rhythm, again and again. He kept the flights spaced apart exactly the worst amount of time: just close enough that we couldn’t sit down between them without having to spring up, and then every once in a while he let a longer time go by, or threw the arrows at us instead, or sent two flights out in quick succession.

“He can’t have an endless supply of them,” I said, leaning against the wall, drained and aching. There were boys with the archers who were hunting for spent arrows, pulling them out of corpses and from against the walls where they’d struck, and carrying them back to be shot again.