Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [100]
Jahdo did, racing down the long hall, letting himself out the heavy door. As soon as he opened it, the noise broke over him. Shouting, screaming, cows lowing, dogs howling, weeping, war cries—all of it punctuated by the boom, boom, boom of something huge hitting from the east. Jahdo ran and dodged and twisted his way through the streets. The refugees milled round; soldiers poured from dun or militia hall and rushed for the walls. Silver horns blared; men yelled and shrieked and yelled some more. The streets swarmed as those civilians caught down by the walls began to stream uphill and toward the center of the town, while the militia and men from the dun struggled downhill toward their posts. Jahdo ducked between two houses, crawled under a wagon, shoved his way past a group of weeping farmwives, jumped up onto a barrel, and waited while a squad of warriors raced past, wearing mail but settling their pot helms as they ran. He glanced round and realized that his barrel stood at the overhang of a rough slate roof.
A jump and some concentrated scrabbling got him onto the roof, where he could inch himself up to the peak and finally see. The house he clung to stood halfway up a slope facing east, and it was at the east gate of the city that the attack seemed concentrated. Cengarn men lined the ramparts and shouted war cries and insults as they hurled stones down at the attackers or leaned over to stab and shove at enemies that Jahdo couldn’t see. Behind them, other men handed stones up ladders or milled round, waiting a turn up. Every now and then a Cengarn man screamed and fell; his fellows on the wall would shove him down and help a replacement up.
The noise spread; from the north as well as the east, came the thwack, thwack of battering rams pounding on gates, the screaming and yelling of the soldiers, the wordless chanting of the Horsekin outside. Below Jahdo’s perch, the town folk and the refugees huddled together. The center of town fell silent as the people grew terrified, barely speaking, barely moving, though here and there a woman wept, and somewhere a baby was sobbing, over and over. Suddenly, from the east, almost directly over the east gate, in fact, flew a shower of fire—whether flaming arrows or balls of pitch, Jahdo couldn’t tell from his distance. He wanted to scream as the fire fell among thatched roofs—and went out. He could only stare in utter amazement as every scrap of burning turned cold and died the moment it fell. Down below, the town folk who’d seen began to cheer and howl, laughing like demons.
“Dweomer,” Jahdo whispered to himself. “Our sorcerers be working it, I do believe.”
Another sound went up, this one distant from beyond the walls, another kind of howling—rage and frustration. Silver horns blared in Cengarn; the defenders began to shout and cheer only to cut the cheering short as another charge came. Remembering Meer, Jahdo clambered down from the roof, managed to get his feet on the barrel again, then fell when it tipped. Cursing under his breath, he picked his aching self up from the cobbles. The palms of his hands were scraped and bleeding. He could remember falling this way back home, but at a time when nothing terrible was happening, and his father had picked him up to comfort him. Jahdo turned and wept, leaning on folded arms onto the wall. It seemed that if he only wished hard enough, only wept hard enough, he would suddenly find himself home, but the screams and the war cries pounded on and on, like waves on some distant beach. When he opened his eyes, he was still in Cengarn. He choked back one last sob.
“I’ve got to get to Meer.”
His eyes refused to dry as he headed uphill, rubbing his face on his shirtsleeve. He passed clots of refugees, huddled in doorways, huddled in alleys, weeping and trembling, their children and their animals huddled round them. No one so much as asked him for news,