The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [176]
Still, the horses could only run so far, and the mob of riders began to spread out into a line, dangerously thin along the road. Here and there clusters of spearmen turned and gathered, back to back, to make a desperate stand. Silver horns shrieked, calling the Deverry and Westfolk men back to gather around their commanders. The remaining spearmen headed south again, running, walking, staggering towards the temporary safety of their stronghold. Gerran rode back to the army, spotted Calonderiel, and trotted his horse up to the banadar’s mount.
‘Can you see the fortress?’ Calonderiel pointed south with a blood-streaked sword. ‘Right down there.’
‘I don’t have Westfolk eyes,’ Gerran said.
‘Of course, my apologies.’ He paused to catch his breath. ‘The dragons are lurking down there somewhere. If the Horsekin cavalry rides out, they’ll send them back in again.’
‘Good. What do we do now?’
‘Move the camp down. It’s time to invest Zakh Gral.’
The archers changed their weapons to the curved hunting bows they could use from the saddle, then mounted up. Something occurred to Gerran as he watched them.
‘The cursed Horsekin have got to have some kind of bow,’ Gerran said. ‘Why aren’t they using them?’
‘Good question,’ Calonderiel said. ‘My guess would be that they don’t have a lot of arrows. You can always cut more shafts, but if you lose a fight, your points belong to the enemy. I’m willing to wager high that the Horsekin are hoarding theirs.’
Once the army had formed itself up into a decent marching order, it set out south along the river road. They passed the corpses of men who’d died in the retreat and saw wounded men who’d managed to crawl to one side to wait for death or capture.No one challenged them until they reached Zakh Gral. Even then, the challenges came from the top of the walls. The great iron-bound gates, wide enough for four horsemen to ride out abreast, stood shut against them.
Zakh Gral spread along the cliff edge, just as Salamander had described, but an outer stone wall, no more than five feet high, now circled the inner, wooden walls, made of whole tree trunks bound together and standing about twenty feet high. Next to the main gate stood another door, a mere sliver of a door compared to the massive construction next to it, though the builders had armoured it with metal strips to fend off an attacker’s axemen. In an attack the defenders would doubtless block it with stone. Above the walls, Gerran saw three towers looming, one of wood, two faced in stone.
‘We got here just in time,’ Calonderiel said. ‘Another eightnight, and those stone walls would have been finished.’
The wooden walls must have been fitted with inner catwalks, because Horsekin warriors stood along them at intervals. Gerran could just make out their heads and helmets over the barricade. Now and again he saw something that looked like the tip of a longbow as well. He pointed them out to Calonderiel.
‘That’s what they are, sure enough,’ the banadar said. ‘Well, we’re going to find out how good they are. And soon.’
Just before sunset the baggage train, the servants, the wounded, and the chirurgeons caught up with the army, but they set up the encampment a safe distance from the fortress walls. While mounted riders guarded against a Gel da’ Thae sally, in the last of the light exhausted men dug ditches and arranged wagons to protect the camp and the supplies. The sky hung so clear and warm above them that no one bothered to set up tents except for those that would shelter the worst wounded.
Salamander helped carry Tieryn Gwivyr into one of the elven round tents. Dallandra’s assistants had bound the tieryn, lying on his stomach, to a platform made of two planks tied together with rope, then turned his head to the side so he could breathe. Gwivyr lay as limply a set of empty clothes, and he stank of blood and urine both. The spear thrust had broken his spine just above his kidneys, Dallandra remarked.
‘He can’t control his water,’ she said, ‘or anything else, either. If he lives, he’ll never walk again.’
One of Gwivyr’s