And then someone else cried out, 'More arrows! Send up more arrows!'
One of the city's tradesmen, climbing halfway up the wall's steps from the street below, heaved a sheaf of arrows up to me. I grabbed it by the binding cord, and ran up the tower steps to deliver them to Atara.
'Are you all right?' I said to her, looking her over for wounds.
'I'm fine, Val,' she said. Then she looked at my blood-spattered surcoat and mail and asked, 'Are you all right?'
'For now,' I said, cutting the cord around the sheaf of arrows.
As she fit one to her bowstring, Lord Grayam came over to me holding a long bow.
He asked, 'Can you work one of these as you wield your sword?'
'No,' I said, 'but I can shoot.'
'Good – then aim your arrows at those Blues on the wall!'
For a moment, I turned to look at the battalions of Count Ulanu's men far below us crashing against the city's walls like steel waves. They stood bravely beneath the hail of our missiles, their shields held high, waiting to take their turns ascending ladders and die upon our swords – or deal out death themselves. A great many of them were massed beneath the section of wall that the Blues had taken. They were pouring up the numerous ladders there, trying to turn the stream of men that had topped the wall into a flood.
From the tower's vantage, Atara began shooting her arrows into the Blues with a deadly accuracy. I did, too. Where I had once pulled aside my bow to keep from wounding a deer, I now found myself firing feathered shafts into men's naked bellies and throats. Astonishingly, many of the Blues fought on even with half a dozen arrows sticking out of them. If it hadn't been for the valor of the Librarians on the wall, braving the Blues' ferocious axes as they counter-attacked them along the battlements from the north and south, that section of the wall might have been lost to the enemy's assault.
'Push them off!' Lord Grayam called down to his knights. 'Push them off and they'll lose heart!'
A hail of arrows aimed at the tower – at Lord Grayam and us – struck against its battlements, sending up chips of stone. And then a great boulder, hurled by the mangonel, nearly found its mark. It crashed into the wall just where it joined the tower, and broke a hole there. When the dust had settled and the tower stopped shaking, I looked down to see that the boulder had destroyed the stone stairway leading from the tower down to the walls.
DOOM! two, three, four, DOOM! two, three, four, DOOM! two, three
…
And still the battering ram worked against the city's gates. I heard Maram gasp out a curse from thirty feet below me. Then I watched as he leaned out of a vacant crenel near Kane and held his crystal pointed toward the ram. A red fire that quickly built into swirling crimson flames leapt out from it. The flames fell upon the ram's housing like the breath of a dragon. In only moments, the wet hides nailed to the ram's frame steamed and began burning away as the wood beneath ignited in a great torment of fire. Screams split the air as the men inside it began burning, too.
'Ai! Ai! Ai!' they cried. 'Ai! Ai! Ai!'
More than one of Count Ulanu's men, upon witnessing this horror, turned to flee from the wall. Then ten more broke, and twenty, and soon whole companies from Aigul and Inyam were turning and running. Count Ulanu and his captains rode upon them, striking them with the flats of their swords and trying to turn back the tide of this uncalled retreat. But when men lose the courage to fight, there is little their leaders can do to make them.
'I'll give them fire!' Maram called out from the wall below the tower. 'I will!'
Just then his crystal flared a bright ruby red as a shaft of fire shot forth. It struck the siege tower, which had just been hooked onto the wall. Flames enveloped it, trapping fifty men inside its great height of crackling wood. I tried not to listen to their screams.
Suddenly the enemy's bugles along the burning pasture sounded a loud tattoo as Count Ulanu finally gave the order for a retreat. His men, who had mounted their ladders with so much bloodlust, now couldn't be kept from practically flying back down them. They left the companv of Blues stranded on top of the wall. Although these nearly nerveless men fought valiantly, Atara's and my arrows picked them off one by one, and Lord Grayam's knights quickly finished them, closing in from north and south along the wall as they retook this blood-slicked section of it.
For the moment, the enemy's attack failed and the world seemed to stand still. All I could hear was the cries and pleading of the wounded, and the long, dark, terrible shrieking inside me. Then I took note of a tremendous clamor coming from the south of the city. A knight on top of a wounded horse came galloping through the streets from that direction. He stopped just beneath our tower and called up to Lord Grayam.
'My Lord!' he gasped, 'the Sun Gate is broken! Captain Nicolam is holding the entrance, but we are too few! He begs you to send more men!'
It took only a moment for Lord Grayam to call down to his son, Captain Donalam, to lead half a company of knights to this new crisis along the south wall. Kane, who had a sense for where the battle was to be the fiercest, looked up toward me and smiled savagely as he favored me with a quick nod of his head. Then he gripped his bloody sword and joined Captain Donalam's knights. They climbed down the wall to the street and began running behind the knight on his wounded horse. I would have gone with them, but the tower's steps were broken, and I had no good way down to them.
Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom…
Out on the pasture before the west wall, the enemy's war drums were booming again.
Count Ulanu rode among his badly mauled battalions, screaming out orders and trying to reform his men. Surely, I thought, his heralds must have told him of the breaching of the Sun Gate. And so surely it wouldn't be long before he marched his thousands against the wall again.
'No, no,' Maram called out below me, seeming to read my thoughts, 'I'll burn him with starfire – I will!'
Flushed with the hubris of his recent triumphs, he stood leaning out between two of the battlements' arrow- scarred merlons. He pointed his gelstei toward Count Ulanu five hundred yards from us out on the pasture below. The slanting rays of the sun touched the fire-stone. It began to glow again, hellishly hot, it seemed to me. Ten thousand enemy warriors waited to see if its fire would fall upon them. Then Maram let out a painful cry as the sear of his stone burned his hand. He wailed as his fingers opened against his will, and he let go of it. It fell straight down in front of the wall like a shooting star.
'Oh, my Lord!' Maram cried. 'Oh, my Lord!'
'The firestone!' one of Lord Grayam's knights called out. 'He's dropped the firestone!'
Doom, doom, doom…
The bright crystal, now quickly cooling to a blood red, lay on the green grass of the pasture beneath the wall. A hundred of the Librarians had seen Maram drop it. And ten thousand of the enemy had.
'Maram Marshayk!' Lord Grayam called out next to me. He looked, down from the tower at Maram almost alone beneath us. 'The gelstei! You've got to retrieve the gelstei!'
Maram peered over the crenel at the firestone where it lay among the bodies of fallen warriors thirty feet below him. He sadly shook his head and muttered, 'No, no – not I.'
Far out on the pasture, Count Ulanu had called up his archers who brought their bows to bear on our section of the wall.
'Maram!' I shouted, looking down at him. My eyes picked apart the broken masonry of the tower's stairway to see if there was any way I could climb down to him. There wasn't. 'Maram, you must not let them gain the firestone! Go now!'
'No!' Maram shouted back at me, 'I can't!'
'You can! You must!'
'No, no,' he said angrily. 'How could you ask this of me?'
Behind Count Ulanu, ten of his knights gathered in their horses' reins and turned their shining helms toward us.
'Maram!'
'No! No!'
Several Librarians near Maram chose that moment to haul themselves up over the battlements and climb down the outside of the wall on the ladders that Count Ulanu's men had left there. Arrows killed them. They fell down on top of the heaps of the dying and the dead.
