The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [122]
“We’ve got the ladders up,” one young lad said. “They were trying to push them off, but we keep pulling their cursed poles away from them, and they must have run out, because they’ve stopped that.”
“Good,” Nevyn said. “Now hold still. This is going to sting.”
When Nevyn poured watered mead over the gash in his face, the lad screamed and fainted. It was easier to stitch up the wound that way, but Nevyn had to wait till the next wounded man who could talk for more details of the fighting for the walls. The Boar’s men on the catwalks, Maryn’s men on scaling ladders: the battle hung on who would fight the longest, on whether Maryn had the men to pour over the wall like a wave and wash the Boarsmen off. Toward the middle of the afternoon the first squad gained the catwalks, only to be mobbed and killed, but in the flurry of fighting a second lot got over, and these held.
“Once we’ve got the place to stand, like,” a man with a broken arm said, “then we’ll have them. Ah ye gods, that hurts! It’s when I try to move it, like.”
“Then don’t!” Nevyn snapped. “Hold still while I wrap this. You’ll have to wait before I can try to set it.”
“There’s many worse off than me, truly.” Sweat broke out on his whitening face. “When I left, a lot of our lads were atop the wall.”
Whether they stayed there or not, the man didn’t know. A few at a time, more reports filtered down to the waiting chirurgeons and through them to the camp itself. Maryn’s men held a stretch of wall; Maryn’s men held the wall directly over the gates. They were calling for the ram; the ram had arrived. And finally, late in the afternoon, the gates went down. That event they could hear as a massive shout on the wind, a horrendous scream from the defenders and one of triumph from the attackers at the walls. The stream of wounded turned into a flood, and Nevyn had no more time to worry about the battle until the sun hung low in the western sky and a messenger arrived, announcing that the prince wanted to talk with him.
“The walls are ours, my lord, but the royal broch—well, that’s another matter.”
Nevyn cleaned up by the simple expedient of dumping a couple buckets of water over himself, clothes and all, and hurried off, still wet but cool for the first time all day. In sweaty and blood-streaked mail and helm Prince Maryn, with a tidy Oggyn in attendance, stood on the walls near the shattered gates. Nevyn climbed up a rickety siege ladder and joined them. The prince acknowledged him with a nod.
“They hold the main broch complex and some of the side ones.” Maryn drew his sword, streaked with old blood, and pointed. “The ward is ours, but it’s nearly night. I’m not risking what we’ve gained by trying to finish this now.”
“Sounds wise, my liege,” Nevyn said. “So this is the last battleground, is it?”
In the middle of the final ring of walls stood the central broch complex. Eight hundred years earlier it had started with a single squat tower, broader at the base than at the top. Other kings had built other brochs, some freestanding, others half-rounds joined to the first. Covered arcades and flat sheds had grown like mushrooms between and among the towers; here and there a slender tower in the new style rose from the roof of a stone building. The whole edifice covered some hundreds of yards. Off to either side, some thirty yards away, stood two smaller clusters of brochs. All three complexes flew the banner of the Green Wyvern, a last defiance in the gathering night.
“In the morning I’ll try to parley,” Maryn said. “I’m hoping they’ll just surrender. There can’t be a lot of them left.”
“True spoken, Your Highness. Well, we can hope for a surrender, though I’ve got my doubts that they’ll take it.”
“If not, we’ll have to turn into terriers