Chapter 10
The Lie That Tumbles Walls
People are the strangest of all animals. One moment, they panic and hang their heads in despair, ready to lie down and die, mourn their dead and claim never to be able to recover from what harsh events have thrown them off course. And yet, after a few encouraging words, a pat on the back and the depiction of the imaginary silver lining on the horizon, they swipe away their tears, shrug their shoulders and urge each other to action.
"Work don't do itself!" they say, and "Don't do tomorrow what you can do today!"
It was largely this mindset that has assured mankind its survival despite the Breaking of the World and all the disasters that had followed in the three millennia since. People would mourn their losses, remember them, but ultimately move on.
With Strongquarry, it had been no different.
The first day, search parties had dug for survivors beneath rock and rubble while others had gone through the ruins to scavenge whatever could be salvaged. Back in the camp at the Old Road, the wounded had been treated, wagons been repaired, meals been cooked and even laundry been washed.
The second day, the dead had been buried. Family members and the village council had spoken some prayers, but once the rain had started falling again, people had accepted that what corpses they had found were dumped into a long ditch and buried there. Almost every family had lost someone, and some families had forever been wiped out by the forces of nature itself.
On the third day, they started moving south. On horseback, it would have been a week's ride to the borders of Ghealdan, but their wagons and all the life stock they were carrying and pulling along made their trek a lot slower. Each day, they drove and rode from the early morning hours until an hour before nightfall when they made camp besides the Old Road. Yurion started taking other villagers with him when he went hunting and scouting, trying to teach them. The food they brought home was a welcome addition around the fireplaces where the people had to make due with what they had been able to salvage from the ruins of their houses.
Some days later, the women joined the men in their efforts to search food and started gathering herbs and roots and berries and wild fruits. The hides the men around Yurion Stormcrow brought back with them were cleaned and hung up to dry, the sounds of axes chopping firewood, saws and hammers hung over the fireplaces, and after the first few solemn days, music and laughter found their way back into the nightly camp sites. Still, the people they had to bury during their voyage reminded them of the past. Some had been to grievously wounded to make it, others had caught fevers from infections. Seven had died so far, but it seemed with them the worst was behind them. What remained where those with the less severe injuries.
They also lost people every time they came to a village. The settlements to Strongquarry's south were all a good deal smaller than the ruined village, and their inhabitants watched their trek with suspicion. Nonetheless, one or two or three people would always know someone there, a relative or old friend who would vouch for them, and they would stay there. Tarmion could see the longing in the other people's eyes when they once again left a village, but also the stubborn desire to make the best of their situation.
The village council met every evening, and Tarmion and Zath took part in their meetings. It had been his idea to lead the people to Ghealdan, but there was little advice he could give those men and women about how to run their camp. Like all of them, he rode and worked from dawn till nightfall and woke with the first rays of the sun with aching muscles and bones. The idea that had grown in his mind was not one to be proposed in front of the council, not like this, not yet. Still, each day he would stride through the camp, talk with the people at their fireplaces, chat with the craftsmen while he helped them and mention parts of his ideas among the others when he was chopping firewood with them.
Armies with colourful banners, a village on wheels, catapults and sieges, gold and battle, ideas like his needed time take root and grow, time and distance. He hoped that with every mile they put between Strongquarry and themselves they would become more open towards what he was talking about. In a strange way, Azral had presented him with an opportunity he found hard not to grasp.
Concerning the old farmer, he still felt miserable and hardly talked. When he did so, he did it only with his daughter. The only good thing the harsh daily routine did was provide him with an excuse not to be around the ginger – and hotheaded – woman. What little calm she had gathered had been blown away by the destruction wrought at Strongquarry, for which, of course, he was responsible, not her lightning-throwing father.
As for the other stranger, the sword master seemed to only have been mildly inconvenienced by the destruction of Strongquarry in his quest of self-destruction.
He got drunk whenever he could, suffered cruelly from the withdrawal when he could not, and more often than not slept in his own vomit. By now, his smell preceded him, and people avoided the ashen man. Why the man even stayed with them was a mystery to him. Probably had no other place to go to, which again made his problems appear a lot like theirs.
All in all, it took them twenty days and nights to reach village that separated the Kingdom of Ghealdan from the unclaimed wilderness to its west.
Crickhollowe was a hamlet that once must have been a lot larger than the thirty houses it now consisted of. The remains of a circular earthen wall twice the range between the houses that were the farthest apart still surrounded Crickhollowe, about a span in height and overgrown with grass and elderberry bushes. The village folk watched their wagon train with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. Mostly curiosity, though.
Crickhollowe's village elder and mayor - positions which seemed to be inseparable in this part of the land - was a gaunt and almost completely bald fellow named Elmer Moleshunt. Reluctant to welcome them until Zath had held a silver coin the size of his palm under his nose he allowed them to camp within the boundaries of Crickhollowe. The villagers quickly were at their sides when they had settled down for the moment, and two parties eager and willing to share news and gossip soon had found each other. Not long thereafter, the trading and bartering began. Bryce Kemnon, Strongquarry's former blacksmith, went to see his counterpart, who soon became the meeting place for those willing and able to do business. The people needed tools and iron, and steel heads for their spears and arrows.
After long days on the road, it felt good to meet other people again, and the atmosphere spread throughout the village. Even Marisa seemed to be happy, even though she did her best to scowl at him whenever he was near her. Azral had calmed down since they had started their voyage, but tried to remain for himself.
That evening, Tarmion finally had enough men together to start his endeavour.
They set out for the nearby forest before dawn, a band of thirty men and boys as young as fifteen and as old as sixty, laden with tools and provisions. They did not exactly creep away, but they made an effort not to wake the others until they had passed the limits of the village and were marching across the open field, at which point some of the men began to sing, and after a while he found himself singing with them.
They did not take long to reach the edge of the forest, a grey and green mass of tall beech trees and oaks behind which a labyrinth unfolded for miles and miles to come. Tree stumps all around them were a clear sign that the people of Crickhollowe also used the place for firewood and lumber.
With a queasy feeling Tarmion noticed that everybody had gathered around him and was watching him with expectant eyes. He could feel the cold sweat on his back and on his hands. If there was one thing he had usually never been good at, it had been speaking to larger crowds, especially crowds who were very closely watching him. Well, there had been that one time in Katar, a reassuring voice in his head reminded him, but even that made him tense up, fearing it could have been Caraan Tureed.
Stuttering, he gave himself a start. There was much work to do.
He had no hand for the actual work that needed to be done - cutting wood in the right angles, leaving the correct notches for the different parts to be stuck against each other, trimming the beams so that they were all symmetrical - but he helped where ever he could lend a hand. Still, more than his muscles his advice was demanded more often than not. The men had accepted him as their leader - it had been his idea, and he had drawn them in with his enthusiasm. That was why they trusted him, trusted his judgement, and Tarmion was ready to do whatever he could to justify their trust.
It was as if a fever was burning in him. He jumped from the men that built the frame to those who were working on iron angles, talked to those that were grappling with the construction of the counter-weight, encouraged the group that was lacking behind with the pivot arm. He had none but the most theoretic knowledge in most cases, but he watched the men, listened to their problems and ideas, and when he left their midst again, everybody returned to work with new ideas, new enthusiasm and new courage.
Zath sometimes nodded quietly to him when nobody else was watching.
By the time the early afternoon hours had passed they had built the frame according to his vague instructions, added the swing and a fixed counterweight and put it all into position with long ropes.
"Time to get them going again," Zath nudged him. The masked half-man had been his closest companion since he had awoken in the ruins, and a kind of quiet understanding between the two men had grown where they could almost feel what the was thinking. That Zath was more experienced than Tarmion by a wide margin had lead to the fact that he had grown into the role of not only a friend, but also an advisor.
"Right," Tarmion nodded quietly, then raised his voice. "Very well, lads, good work! Now let's see what this thing can do."
Cheers erupted from the men around him, and four of them together hefted a heavy log onto the arm of the machine they had built while most of the others were pulling the ropes into position. Realizing they expected him to give the command, he raised his hand.
"On my mark!" he shouted, and their eyes fixed on him. "Fire!"
Almost simultaneously everybody let go of the ropes, and the arm shot forward with a deep moan. The whole frame rocked, but everyone was fixed on the heavy log that until just that moment had rested safely on the swing - and now was flying through the air in a wide arch. They had set up markers, coloured ribbons in the branches of bushes, to measure the range. The log passed the fifty paces mark, crossed a hundred, then a hundred and fifty paces, then thundered into the dry ground only inches short of the two hundred paces marker.
A flock of large, black crows sat quietly in the crowns of the nearby trees. Tarmion felt a slight shiver run down his spine as he looked at them, watched them watch them.
Zath inclined his head towards him.
"We've gathered an audience," he remarked with dry humour.
"Is he watching?" Tarmion almost whispered the question, but the masked man just shrugged his shoulders and turned his head away from the trees.
"Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. Maybe someone is. Or maybe they've just sat down there because they know they'll get the leftovers from our camp fires. Ravens are mean, but very clever birds, my friend. Some myrddraal even have them as pets."
Tarmion shot him an incredulous glance, and Zath started to laugh. It was a deep, pleasant sound.
"Cruelty, mischief and slyness attract each other. And there's no doubt that both are sly. Burn me, some of those birds can even talk!" he rumbled, shaking his head. He noticed Tarmion's look and shrugged. "Don't worry. No need to see phantoms were there are none. And," he pointed back at the machine, "we have other things to bother our heads about," he sighed and pointed towards the machine.
The siege engine rocked back and forth, and more violently so with every shot they took, almost toppling over the fourth time a stone left the sling.
"You bloody morons are doing it wrong," a voice that sounded as tired as it sounded bored cut through the clamour. Everybody turned around, looking for its origin. The Taraboner stood at the edge of their little construction site, leaning against a tree while chewing on a strip of dried meat.
"Damn peasants," he muttered lowly, but still loud enough for all to hear it. "What you do is like prodding a bull with a sharp stick, all the while expecting it to hold still."
In his soiled clothes and dirty beard he looked as if he had slept beneath a heap of garbage. And maybe he had. His sour stench preceded him as he slowly walked into their midst, men wrinkling their noses, making no efforts to hide their disgust.
"Aryman, is it?"
The man answered him with a wry grin, bemused about the people around him who recoiled from his presence.
"Then tell me, Aryman, what should we do?" Tarmion asked with as much politeness as he could muster.
"Burn you, boy, let it run, of course!" he explained with an expression that made clear he had just told them something that should be as obvious as the act of breathing itself. "Put some wheels under it!"
Later that day, when they had finished their work, Tarmion watched him closely as he sat by the fire. The men were joking and making jests and bragging about their day's work, but Aryman just sat there, holding the cup with the sour wine in both hands, and stared into the flames, his face gradually becoming harder beneath all the grime and sweat and dust, turning into a scowl beneath furrowed brows. Still, Tarmion was drawn into a conversation, which he joined only too gladly, renewing his feeling of triumph as it did. When he turned his head to look for the Taraboner again, the man was gone, but Tarmion noticed he had left the cup behind besides the fire, the wine untouched.
That night, Tarmion lay awake under the star spangled sky long after the people around him had fallen asleep. So far, his strain of strange luck had continued. He only hoped that would not change now that it was no longer just all in good fun. From now on, the lives of people would be on the line.
The first occasion to test Tarmion's outlandish ideas they stumbled over purely by chance. It had been almost classical, a turn of events as it usually used to be portrayed in epic stories, a crossroads that lead the hero down a path to glory. In their case, it was a crossroads that lead to Roonheart.
The signs of war were clearly visible after a while on the road, and they were pretty much the same ones Tarmion had always imagined they would be. Zath had noticed them much earlier than he had, of course, and told him so casually to avoid the stares of the others.
It had started with empty farm houses off the road, the doors wide open, hanging from only one angle or being shattered, fields that had not been tended to in a while, meadows devoid of life stock.
Down the road, there came a handful of farmsteads that had been burned to the ground. There was no sign of the people that once had lived their, but the sickly sweet stench of the rotting carcass of a cow almost covered in thick, black flies filled the air while crows were picking at its eyes.
A few miles further, men with spears and bows glowered at them from behind newly raised palisades while women and children hid quietly in the low houses with high-peaked, red-tiled roofs.
The land lay strangely silent. Even those in their convoy who had no idea what was going on around them instinctively felt the tension, summoning their children back onto their wagons and holding axe or spear close to them. The men on horseback drew closer to the wagon train, and the banter and laughter that had accompanied them all so far slowly ebbed away, until all that was left was a quiet procession that suspiciously monitored the lands around them for an unseen danger they felt was there.
Twice they came upon people in shabby clothes rummaging through the remains of burned-out houses, but those fled once they saw them coming, vanishing into hedges and nearby woods. The few farmsteads that seemingly were still inhabited sported barreers of spiked wooden beams and wary farmers and their sons and elders standing guard. Once they were shot at, but the arrow fell short and the farmer berated his son for wasting a good arrow, as did Mellen when one of the cockier young ones from their wagon train tried to answer the shot. They quietly rode past their land and its glowering dwellers.
Mellen was distraught about what he saw around him, and said so several times. Tarmion could see the same sentiment in many of the other faces, but he urged him to keep going, and was surprised to find Yurion and some of the older others agreeing with him. Most of the younger ones that had built their weapon together seemed rather eager to him and not worried. Half of them had moved to the column's top, to him, where there horses formed a wedge with Tarmion, Zath, Mellen and Yurion at its point.
Roonheart came as a surprise to all of them.
The town rested on a hill in the center of a hollow with soft slopes, and in sharp contrast to the silence that had accompanied them for the past hours the ridge they stopped on made way for the sound of battle that was waged around the town's defences. While the women of the Strongquarry folk rushed their children into the seclusion of the group's wagons, the men edged forward, lining up along the edge of the ridge.
None of them had ever seen a town that large, and none had ever seen a battle.
Roonheart covered the top of the small central hill, it's grey walls rising twenty feet high, crowned by red brick battlements and interspersed with stocky, round towers. The ground around the walls had been dug off to make them rise even higher. Men exchanged volleys of arrows and thrown rocks and spears. Ladders were brought forward against the walls while other men hid behind high wicker shields, but the shields were set aflame by burning arrows and the ladders were pushed over by the men manning the battlements.
A bitter fight was raging at the ramp that lead to the city gates and the drawbridge.
Two shield walls had formed, two crescents, the outer one assaulting the inner one, while the men on the walls and the two half-round gate towers exchanged flights of arrows with those behind the greater crescent and the wicker shields.
Tall banners were waving in the wind: four golden bees on a red field, tall and proud from poles atop the battlements; a silver stag on purple, fierce and angry from a dozen pikes among the besieging men. There were also other colours mixed between them on smaller banners, too small to discern them from their position.
The sounds of steel on steel, of men crashing into each other, of the frenzy of battle and of the cries of the wounded and dying filled the hollow. The defenders had the better, higher ground, but the assailants were more numerous and had already drawn a ring around Roonheart. It acquiesced Tarmion that the sight of the slaughter ahead had culled some of the enthusiasm the younger ones had shown at first. This was no game, and now that he had more or less taken over responsibility over them he owed it everybody, himself included, to try his best for them.
High-peaked, colourful tents rose amidst a multitude of small tarpaulins on the southern slope of the hollow. Grey smoke from dozens of cook fires hung over the encampment that was surrounded by wooden watch towers – watch towers which had spotted them. A detachment of soldiers on horseback came racing towards them, drawing a dusty cloud behind them. The silver stag angrily flapped in the wind from the second rider's lance.
"Stay calm, everybody!" he called out, hoping nobody had heard his voice tremble while there suddenly was movement among the ranks besides him.
The riders came closer, their horses' hooves thundering. When they were only twenty paces away from them, the leader pulled his mount's reins hard. The animal reared up and neighed, and everybody instinctively backed off a step. Only Zath snorted disdainfully but remained silent otherwise, sitting straight in his saddle with his arms crossed before his chest.
The soldiers all wore the silver stag on their surcoats, but that was were the similarities ended. Their armour ranged from none at all to steel breast plates and helmets with purple feathertops. Dust was settling down on them. Their leader bore an angry red scar across his face. With a kick he drove his own mount forward and mustered them with hostile eyes.
"Who are you? Speak! Whom do you claim allegiance to?" the one with the feathertop helmet and the scar demanded harshly while the men under his command almost casually lead their horses so that they ended up forming a loose line covering all off the men around Tarmion and his friends.
"My name is Aryman Sadras," a gruff voice announced from behind the travellers' group. A murmur went through the ranks as the Taraboner – was that really him? - slowly drove his red fox forward. His face was gaunt and pale but clean-shaven, his grey hair was cut short. Over a dark red, almost crimson tunic and trousers of the same colour he wore a harness of boiled, black leather. Similar pieces protected his arms, knotted together with leather strings. The blade with the heron mark hung tightly on the flanks of his mount, hilt pointing forward.
"I was 1st Lieutenant of the Companions and banner bearer in the war against the Aiel. Now I ride with Tarmion Genda and these people."
He gave the scarred man a level look with his steel-blue eyes and a sardonic grin.
"And our allegiance lies with the highest bidder," he shot Tarmion a glance that signalized 'Ball's in your field now, boy.'
Tarmion drove his own horse a pace forward so that it was no he and the warrior facing each other.
"I am Tarmion Genda," he slightly bowed his head.
The mounted warrior eyed him dismissively and scowled. Still, some courtesy was left in this angry face, and with a start he gave him the faintest nod of his head.
"My name is Captain Hullen Juram. I command Lord Erman Halvaed's personal guard. You people be swords for hire?" he sceptically raised an eyebrow and seemed to judge each of them individually. The expression on his face made it clear they fell woefully short of his expectations.
"Don't look like much, Sir," the banner bearer commented dryly.
"Shut your mouth, Bellam," Juram growled without looking at the man, even though his face expressed the same sentiment.
"We have our gifts and specialities, Captain Juram," Tarmion forced a smile on his face.
Juram's scowl told him exactly how much he believed that, but to his surprise the man just shrugged hi shoulders.
"Well, they better be worth it. My liege does not like to waste his time with loudmouths."
Tarmion vigorously upheld his smile.
"I can assure you, Captain, that we are very good at-."
"I don't care, man," the soldier turned his horse around. "Convince Lord Halvaed, not me. And you better convince him good, because," he smiled cruelly, "if you fail I'll drive you and your people off."
Aryman and Tarmion rode back to the encampment with the Ghealdanian soldiers, the Taraboner giving off an air of confidence Tarmion could only dream of emulating. The other riders kept a careful distance to the man with the heron-marked sword, and even sulky Captain Juram seemed to feel uneasy around the gaunt fellow, his eyes staring straight forward, never touching the man he rode with.
It was a short ride, but Tarmion disliked the silence and barely hidden hostility. To break the silence as much as to gloss over his own insecurity, he asked Jumar why they were fighting here.
"For mercenaries you are an extraordinarily uninformed," the Captain commented dryly.
"Well, we did not take the road to Roonheart with the intention to lend our service to your master. We stumbled into this conflict by mere chance."
"By chance?" he asked incredulously.
Aryman shrugged.
"The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills."
Juram sighed.
"Well, no matter. The men behind those walls have insulted my lord's honour on numerous occasions. Their peasants poach in my lord's woods, draw water for their fields from his streams and plant and sow on lands that are not theirs. They have not listened to reason, well, now they will listen to steel."
"I am no man known to these things like my friend from Tarabon," he nodded towards Aryman, "but isn't there a king in Ghealdan? Not that I'm not glad about the opportunity to make good coin...," he tried to overcome the knot in his bowels by joking, and failed miserably at it.
However, Juram did not seem to spot it, at least for the moment. He just scowled at the remark.
"The king? The king is nothing but-," he cut his sentence off and shook his head. "It's not my place to judge these things. Lord Halvaed might speak about them, if it pleases him." He stopped in front of the largest tent of the camp. "Here we are."
"The king?" Halvaed roared furiously. "Blood and ashes, what good is that oaf for! Dim-witted son of a Amadician whore, that's all he is, sitting behind Jehannah's walls, fucking his mistresses and wearing fancy hats!" he threw the map off the table.
Juram quietly picked it up and rolled it together while the Ghealdanian lord continued to vent his anger.
"You know what he said to me? You know what he said when I came to explain my grievances?" 'Reconcile with each other, noble lords'," he imitated a nasal voice. "Reconcile!" he growled. "I didn't want to hug Kivars fat hides. I wanted justice! Fuckin' jester dressed as a king... ."
Erman Halvaed has was stocky man in the middle of his fifties, with thin grey hair growing atop a square face that rested upon a broad neck. He was in full plate armour, except for his helmet which rested on top of a wooden stand. It was purple, open-faced and crowned by a polished antler. The man had been brooding over a set of maps on the table in the middle of the tent when Captain Juram had lead Tarmion and Aryman inside. He sighed and suddenly seemed very tired, focussing on the newcomers to his tent.
"So, mercenaries it is? Plainly spoken, man, I do not need more fodder for the crows. At least, not yet," he snorted, looking doubtfully at the scenes outside his tent. "So, can you make the ground heave and tremble so that Roonheart's walls will fall? Do you have a witch in your ranks that can call lightning down on Kivar's wretched lot?" he asked in a mocking tone. "If not, why should I pay you coin, or attention?"
"Because you want that town, and we can give it to you," Tarmion responded calmly.
"Hah! Well, you're none too modest, burn me. That much I grant you," he barked a laughter. "Boy, I always get what I want, and I'll get Roonheart and Kivar's ugly head on a platter. I'll either storm the bastard's walls or starve him out of them. I don't need no advice at that," he spat on the floor, dangerously close to Tarmion's boots.
For all their sake, Tarmion ignored it and gulped down his anger. Before he could speak, Aryman spoke up.
"Yes, but at what costs, my lord? All you have to storm a walled city are ladders and a ram. If my eyes don't deceive me, half of your army are levied smallfolk - the very people who pay your taxes. If you attack Roonheart like that, both sides will walk neck-deep in their own blood. The only alternative to that is a long siege, and there again your people don't pay their taxes, their fields remain barren, and in the end it'll give you a half-starved town. With us, this town will be yours within days, not months."
"Yeah, blood and ashes, as if. Now you're adding brag to bravado, and I'm not in the mood for dalliances of that kind. I'm a country noble, but don't take me for a fool. What makes you so special that you think your hundred people can storm the walls were an army like mine has failed? Stop dreaming, and stop wasting my time."
He turned around and addressed Juram.
"Captain, bring those men back to their wagons and see they are gone by the morrow."
"We don't intend to storm those walls for you," Tarmion informed the agitated noble with an ice cold voice that seemed to momentarily draw the heat of anger out of the tent and whose firmness surprised himself the most. "We intend to breach them for you."
Juram had grabbed him by the shoulders, but Halvaed motioned him to cease. Calculating green eyes drilled into him.
"This better be good, lad," he stated with a voice devoid of the anger and agitation which had been so apparent only moments before.
They fired the first shot the next morning. Lord Halvaed had come to their camp on the high ridge, followed by a column of guards on horseback lead by Captain Juram. He watched wide-eyed as an eighty pound boulder arched high into the air, only to crash into the ground almost two hundred and fifty paces away.
Unlike the day before, Tarmion now was beaming with pride and confidence as the men who had helped him build the trebuchet were relentlessly and to their best abilities manning the machine.
"So, how much do you want for your wondrous machine to smash my enemy's walls?"
"Four thousand golden marks," Tarmion stated flatly.
Halvaed's eyes almost bulged out of his head, and his face turned red in an instant.
"Four thousand? Are you mad?"
"We spare you the pain of a lengthy and costly siege and a massacre. In return you get a city full of healthy people who pay you taxes and who did not have to resort to eating rats to avoid starvation. We both know the city's worth a lot more than that, m'lord," he responded calmly. He had had the night to think about his arguments. "It's what a large river barge makes in two good years. We have five times the mouths to feed. We have material expenses to cover, too, and frankly: what I do is a hundred times as dangerous as river trade."
Halvaed frowned.
"Even if I agreed, I doubt there even is that much coin in that wretched city."
That was probably true. Golden coins were not often used in daily business. After some moments of consideration Tarmion nodded.
"All right, m'lord, here is how we shall do this. When this is done, we shall have our payment like this: a quarter in provisions, a half in loot, and the rest in coins. And a hundred up front, so that both sides remember their part of the deal."
The Ghealdanian nobleman looked back to the city walls and to the trebuchet, and after some moments he nodded reluctantly. The deal was made.
About three hundred paces from the gates and two hundred from the town walls away where the slope was the flattest. Arrows stuck in the ground in front of them, but even from their elevated positions the short bows of the defenders of Roonheart lacked the power to put them into danger.
The men from Strongquarry had gathered all the large boulders they could find in the vicinity of the town. Some of them were rough rocks, hardly weighing fifty pounds, while others were smooth and overgrown with moss and and six times as heavy.
Bowmen and three lines of men with shield and spear idly stood by while Tarmion shouted commands and Mellen and the others gave them a meaning and executed them. Their machinations also had drawn an audience on the battlements across from them that eyed them curiously.
Even though the sky was clouded and a cool breeze was blowing Tarmion and his men had sweat their clothes to the bones when they were finally ready to fire. Even though it had been placed on big wooden wheels, the trebuchet still easily weighed three tons, and positioning it was hard labour.
"Ready?" Tarmion cried out, and a flurry of "Ready!" 's answered him, signalizing that the men had done all that was to do and were out of the range of the dangerous, large swinging arm.
"Fire!"
"Fire!" Mellen repeated the order, and another man pulled the lever that held the cocked arm back.
Thick rope raced through winches and the long beam with the wide sling at it's end heaved upwards and forwards, yanking the sling with it and setting the massive boulder free.
The cries of wonder on the battlements turned into cries of terror as they realized just what the machine they had observed till then did.
The projectile arched over the walls and battlements and the defenders on them and thundered into the town behind it. Grey smoke rose into a dusty cloud.
"Too high," Zath commented matter of factly. "Needs a flatter angle."
The men at the trebuchet did not need a command to see that. They were already busy re-adjusting the huge machine, pulling down the swing and loading a new boulder into the sling. Mellen adjusted a steel notch, then gave a nod to Tarmion. The grey haired, half-bald former innkeeper had joined them only lately, and mostly to spite his restless wife, but his presence let the men feel at ease, and he had fast grown enthusiastic about what they did so far.
"Fire!" Tarmion yelled the command a second time, and once again the machine went into action with the moan of wood and metal. The projectile left the sling and shot towards Roonheart in a low arch. With the sound of a boot crushing a bug the hundred pound rock sheered off a three paces wide portion of the battlements, throwing any defender in the vicinity aside like a rag doll in cries of pain and death and terror.
A flurry of arrows rose in the air from the walls, plastering the green between the siege engine and the walls like a hedgehog. One of the spearmen made a rude remark and the whole company erupted with laughter while the men at the machine had already begun to prepare it again. They were like in a trance.
"Same angle, greater weight!" Mellen commanded on his own, and this time the rock that was catapulted into the air easily weighed thirty stone.
It struck the wall at the upper third of its height and ripped a whole the size of a grown man into the masonry. The impact sounded like a mill grinding old bones and sent shivers down the spine of every soul who heard it. The sections of the wall to its left and right trembled. Lord Halvaed's soldiers started banging their spears against their shields and shouted "Halvaed!" or hurled insults towards the men buzzing atop the walls of the town.
Of the next to shots one fell short, but the other collapsed the part of the wall between the hole and the battered battlements above. The Strongquarry men were preparing the next shot when Zath called out.
Columns of armed men were pouring out from the city gates. Their vanguard had already crossed half the distance between them, and the men dispatched to guard them nervously moved into position. Only moments later arrows were in the air, and with the battle cry "Roonheart!" the town's defenders began their charge. Steel clashed against steel.
Tarmion felt the icy fingers of panic grasping for his heart. He knew he needed to say something, do something, but his mouth defied him.
It was Zath who stepped into the void he had left and rallied the men to stay and fight. Aryman stood besides him, as did Mellen, and that sight was enough for the moment to put a bit of hope back into the Strongquarry men's hearts.
The Roonheart men were cutting themselves a gap through the stalwart shield wall. Their goal was clear: destroy the machine that was destroying the wall. Destroy it, and kill them all.
Panic was replaced by a spark of senseless anger, and he grabbed his large war hammer and jumped into the breach.
He swung the hammer with two hands and slammed it into one man's shield. The shield, and the arm holding it, broke, and the man vanished back into the bloody turmoil. Tarmion fought on, swinging his hammer effortlessly, howling and laughing like a mad man. The heat of battle had him. There was no exhaustion, no fear, no pain, only the rush.
Somewhere he lost his battle hammer in the slaughter into which the confrontation had devolved. Tarmion found himself on the ground, kneeling on a man's chest, smashing his face was a rock. The salty, copper-like scent of blood filled the air. Another man stormed towards him. Tarmion threw the rock. It hit him squarely in the chest, not hurting him, but startling him long enough for Tarmion to unsheath his sword and grab a mace from the corpse at his feet.
Black shadows raced across the sky, and he felt a sting in his right leg. The man charged. Metal thundered against metal. The attacker was smaller than Tarmion. In fact, most of the people around him were smaller.
He laughed manically and shoved the man back a pace, bringing the mace and blade to bear in a staccato of blasts. It had none of the elegance that Zath exuded when he gave him lessons on sword fighting. It was sheer raw force, bludgeoning the other man till he gave in. Again and again the heavy iron head of the mace hammered against the shield until the man had to pull it back to protect his arm. That moment his defence was open, and Tarmion's sword came down, cutting off his sword arm like a butcher with his cleaver. Crying, grasping for the stump of his arm, the man fell to his knees, and Tarmion threw himself deeper into the battle.
Mellen ran past him, wielding a cleaver in one hand and a woodcutter's axe in the other, a bloody cut across his chest, his eyes aflame with the fever of battle. The man that fled from him looked a lot worse than that. Yurion was charged by someone in full armour and shot the man at point blank range through his helmet's slits. The other's had fallen back behind the shield wall and were firing their arrows blindly into the enemy's ranks.
He felt the sting again. Warding off another attacker by cutting off his spear with his sword and then crushing the shoulder that had held it, he noticed the arrow that had gone through his leg. More irritated than afraid at the wound and the blood trickling from both sides of his leg he broke the shaft off with a grunt of diluted pain.
Bowing down to do so saved his life.
A man clad in a surcoat with the colours of Roonheart over a shirt of boiled leather swung a double-bladed heavy axe with two hands at him. Tarmion's head seemed to jump, and the fever seemed to spike. Reality seemed to narrow down only to him and the man in front of him, a tall, broad-shouldered attacker, a bearded face snarling at him from under a steel cap.
And suddenly, his wounded leg gave in beneath him, and he stumbled down to his knees. The axeman howled with glee, the heavy weapon in his hands racing up to gather momentum for one final, deadly blow. Folk wisdom had it that one saw his whole life replayed before one's eyes just before the embrace of death. Tarmion saw none of that. He could see every drop of sweat on the other man's body, every line in the wood of the axe's shaft, every grain of the steel and every bit of blood on it. He could see all the triumph in the man's eyes as his axe began its way back down – and for the short time that it lasted, all the surprise of the world as a horseman's lance hit him sideways in the chest and through him away like a rag doll.
Flanking the defenders of Roonheart, charging down the slope, Lord Halvaed and his personal guard had crashed into the undefended side of the men fighting under the banner of the golden bees and sent them running back to town.
Zath found him a long time after it all had settled down again. Tarmion had no idea or memory how he had climbed back up the ridge again. He was leaning against a tree when the masked man with the elegance of a snake appeared next to him. The wound in his leg was throbbing and had started to ache. The chestnut-haired man felt cold and exhausted as if he had worked for a week straight without any sleep. Cold sweat came in boosts, and except for that one leg his limbs felt as if they had been made off jelly. He had vomited, twice. The conscious memories of the battle still made his skin crawl and stomach churn, and with each image that crept into his mind came a new boost of fear.
"Your wounds need to be tended," Zath spoke softly and put an arm around him, allowing Tarmion to hobble back into the camp. He numbly did as he was told. He felt so weak, so exhausted.
And he feared going back to the camp, back to the icy glares of the women whose husbands had been wounded and put into mortal danger because of him, because of his ideas.
Instead found himself surrounded by the men that had manned the trebuchet and fought by his side, his men - and they were cheering for him! Nearly everybody was bruised, most wore bandages, some were limping and some lay unconsciously on stretchers and were being treated, but those who could walk shook his hands, hugged him, gave him slaps on the shoulders and jested with him.
"We gave 'em hell!" someone shouted and was answered by loud cheers.
Another one shouted "Strongquarry!", and the cry was taken up by a hundred throats and repeated.
"Yeah, a bloody quarry," another voice gruffly called, drawing angry murmurs from within the crowd, only to continue, "for them! Express delivery!" and have the laughs on its side.
Numbly he made it through the camp. Despite the bloodshed the elders and women felt it hard not to succumb to the cheerful euphoria of the men who had just gone through and won their first battle. Still, Tarmion felt their gaze on him.
Marisa and her father were waiting for them at their horse and cart. Tarmion braced himself for a tirade – this time even he himself would have agreed with everything she was to say – but when she saw the wound her angry expression was replaced by something else, if just for a second.
Zath let him slide to the ground besides her, and she calmly began to strip off his clothes and clean him with a wet cloth.
"Light, you look terrible."
Tarmion felt to weak and exhausted to even answer and just grunted.
"Most of the blood isn't his," Zath stated levelly and stepped aside.
She tore away the cloth around the wound in his leg and for the first time he yelped in pain, tears shooting into his eyes.
"You men and your foolish ideas of bravery," she muttered and lead a cup to his lips. "Drink!" she commanded. "It's wine, it'll help against the pain."
He gulped it down and demanded more. His throat felt so dry.
"Light, you stink, Tarmion Genda!" she exclaimed, wrinkling her freckled nose.
"I think I soiled myself," he admitted shyly.
"Greater and braver men have done so, too, Tarmion Genda," she said with a strange tone to her voice.
"I doubt Jain Farstrider ever pissed his pants," he coughed and winced when she cleaned another cut with the increasingly red piece of cloth.
"And I doubt he'd put such things into his tales," Aryman declared sardonically. "When was the last time you've read a story where the hero has to take a shit, lad?"
Marisa lay the wound free and poured something from a jar over it.
"Blood and bloody ashes!" he moaned as ripples of pain ran through his whole body. The clean liquid burned like fire. Tarmion tried to move, but Marisa held him firmly with surprisingly strong hands.
"Rye liquor," she explained softly. "My mother taught me that the strongest spirits are the best to clean wounds. Not even wool-heads like you, Tarmion Genda, deserve to get wound fever," she pressed him back down on the grass. "Father, Zath, hold him still, please, I have to remove the arrow and close the wound."
"You've done this before?" the half-man asked in a surprised voice, which produced a smile on the red-haired woman's face.
"Tending wounds? For my father, yes, and for myself," she took a needle and a ball of yarn from a pouch in her skirt and bit of the yarn. "Once I had to do it to an injured mule," she looked down towards Tarmion, "and well, one mule's like the other, right?"
The pain he had felt before was nothing against the piercing agony he felt when Marisa broke off the arrow and pulled it free. He cried - and shame be damned! Zath put a piece of leather in his mouth on which he bit so hard he believed his teeth would burst. When it became even worse, he blacked out.
When he opened his eyes again almost no time seemed to have passed. Marisa was still tending his leg, and everybody else was still there, but the arrow shaft was gone. It did not even hurt that much any more. Or maybe he was just too exhausted to feel the pain there any more.
Aryman smiled down on him.
"It was the right thing, to jump into the breach like that," he said jovially. "The right thing, but not necessarily the smart thing. You could have died," he added with a frown, "and then what? You would've abandoned them all.
"You ride at the point of this wagon train, you decide which way to take, you negotiate with nobles and soldiers. You are the leader here, lad."
"Mellen will be delighted to hear that," he sarcastically pressed through clenched teeth before pressing his lips shut to stifle another anguished cry.
Aryman chuckled and drew his sword and a wetstone from a pouch.
"Right now our dear mayor is most certainly getting an earful from his resolute wife. But that's not the point here, lad. None of you have accepted this yet, but you have become the one who has the command here. By deed you have assumed leadership, and unconsciously they have begun to look to you when problems arise."
"Problems are his speciality," Marisa snorted, but at the same time almost gently cleaned a cut on his arm.
"You have guts, I give you that, lad," Aryman sighed and shook his head. There was not a scratch on the Taraboner, but his sweat-stained clothes and the intensity with which he kept cleaning his blade signalized everybody who cared that the grey-haired, gaunt man had been in the centre of the slaughter.
Right now, Tarmion was not part of those who cared. He howled with every stitch Marisa made. So much for no pain, he thought sourly.
Aryman looked at the wineskin with longing in his eyes, then forced his gaze back to the shimmering blade on his knees.
"Let's all get some rest. Tomorrow will be a long day."
Noon had long passed, but the sounds of fighting still hung over the doomed town of Roonheart. Black smoke rose from several streets where houses had been set on fire.
Men in Halvaed colours stood guard at the breach. Fearing another counter-attack, the nobleman had tasked them with pulling down the town's fortification on the side opposite to the gates while he kept them blocked. Fighting had been intense, or so they said. Tarmion, resting on a makeshift wooden cane, could not vouch for that as he looked at the collapsed section of the wall that two days prior had seemed to invincible.
They had pummelled it with rocks, gradually weakening it over a period of more than two hours before the masonry gave in on a part of more than twenty paces wide, in part collapsing outward. The rock and debris had formed a natural ramped over which Captain Juram and the bulk of Lord Halvaed's forces had poured into Roonheart.
The battle at the breach had been brief and bloody. Tarmion's men had supported the attackers by directing their fire towards the battlements and towers the closest to the opening in the wall. Now there were no more defenders atop those walls.
Captain Juram came riding through the breach and stopped his stallion in front of them. His surcoat was slashed and dried blood stained his armour. Apparently none of it was his. His horse was bruised and sported a dozen superficial wounds. The stallion was breathing heavily when the leader of Lord Halvaed's household guard stopped it in front of them.
"How goes the fight?" Aryman asked politely while the others had stopped their work and gathered around the soldier.
"The day's won, the battle's all but over," Juram proclaimed triumphantly and looked over the men around him and back to Tarmion.
"Your men look as if they'd like a piece of the action, Master Genda."
Tarmion wearily looked back at the city and the sounds echoing back from within the walls.
"I think, Captain Juram," he answered cautiously, "that my men have seen enough action, and deserve some rest with their families."
There were some murmurs within the gathered crowd, but obviously Juram had heard enough.
"Oh, I won't stop you from crawling back under your women's skirts," he laughed disdainfully and turned his horse back around. "The spoils belong to the victor. I won't keep them for you!"
Juram pushed his heels into his stallion's sides, and the tall warhorse raced back through the breach into the streets of Roonheart.
"Arrogant son of a Domani whore," someone, probably Mellen, muttered when he was gone.
"Why can't we go to the city?" another voice asked, and received some support from within the crowd. The Strongquarry men had never been to a settlement as big as this, and there was a naive curiosity to their request.
Aryman put and hand on his shoulder and whispered: "Let me handle this," before he climbed into his saddle and let his view stride over them.
"Do you know what happens when a besieged city falls?" Aryman finally asked them in a friendly and patient voice, and began to explain. When he had finished his very graphic description, the men from Strongquarry had turned pale and very rueful. It was a very quiet evening in the camp.
Tarmion and "his" men did not see the inside of Roonheart until two days after the town had fallen. They rode through the open city gates, now guarded by men sworn to Lord Erman Halvaed through narrow roads flanked by stone houses with tiled roofs. It all seemed to have returned to normal as if nothing had ever happened, but the people on the streets lowered their glances whenever they or a soldier passed them by, and when they forgot to do so, the horror and shock of the events they had had to live through were plain to see in their faces. Their payment had been stored in the buildings of the former magistrate's seat.
The magistrate was still there, well, at least a part of him. Rumour had it Halvaed had beheaded his enemy himself, though what difference that made for the result nobody had been able to tell him. Tarmion gazed at the tarred head on a long pike in a mixture of morbid fascination and plain disgust. Others retched, again others very consciously looked away.
Lord Halvaed had already left the city to return to his home seat with Captain Juram and most of his host. Command over the town of Roonheart had been delegated to the hands of a young noble who had distinguished himself through bravery and fervent leadership in battle and restraint and modesty when the spoils of war were to be taken and the loot divided.
Lord Logain Ablar was a friendly, quiet man whose youth and demeanour masked the steel in his body and mind.
Unlike the choleric Halvaed and the sadistic Juram, Lord Ablar had made carefully listening and debating into a virtue, and Tarmion could say he genuinely had enjoyed the brief occasions where he had spoken with the man. A man of clear thoughts, ambition and responsibility.
Tarmion knew who he was, knew it long before they had been introduced to each other. How, he could not say. It was knowledge that was just there, like the one about the trebuchet, or all the tidbits about the world floating around in his head. Logain Ablar would be a False Dragon in 998 NE, throwing Ghealdan into war and chaos.
But right now he was the man who had made sure their part of the bargain was kept, and that was all that mattered.
Three weeks later, after they had recuperated and rested and prepared and made good use of all the loot they had been given, Lord Ablar gave a large feast on midsummer's eve as a sign of reconciliation.
When they left Roonheart two days and nights after the midsummer night's festivities, they had finally turned into what they had pretended to be.
Author's Notes
I have decided to try to keep track of the passing of time for everybody's convenience, mine included, so I will give an approximation of the date at the start of each chapter beneath the headline. Given that the Wheel of Time Farede Calendar is based on moon phases, the year has 13 months. Translated into our calendrical system that means that the beginning of the 10th month of the year (Choren) equals the second week of September.