Dragongate I

The night waned and dawn was already a rumour. It had taken time to rouse the departing townsfolk and for them to be ready for their journey. Now a forlorn line of folk of all ages and conditions were assembled in the town square. Some had carts with ponies, others mules and some very few were mounted on horses. Most were on foot and took whatever each could carry. There were mothers and fathers with careworn looks and idlers joshing to look brave, there were children with faces bright with the prospect of adventure, and children who were crying. Most of the people looked grave, or wary. Smoke drifted through the darkness from the smouldering remains of fires set in the town by the Enemy. Yet the full scarring of the town was hidden by the night from those now forced to make their sorry retreat. Those who were of the Vale had departed Stowham at the first sign of the attack, taking all they could of value through the castle gate to the safety of the upper town. These now were the strangers with no place of safety. Around them there was much wreckage, glimmering fitfully in the torch light; ruined half-burnt houses and the detritus of peaceful and prosperous lives, suddenly abandoned. Sacrissa could see nothing of value left among the broken carts and empty overturned stalls and baskets, staved barrels and smashed pots. Her fine black destrier, a fryson mare, snorted disdainfully at the acrid tang in the air. Sigird viewed the charred spoilation grimly, absently leaning forward to pat the neck of her horse to comfort the beast. A fine large dales horse, she rode, such as had bourn the Heroes of the North in ages past. Its brown patches now appeared almost black in the dull grey gloom, its patches of white glowed faintly like the moon. The huntress and Elyssa were also ahorse. They had been in conference with the King and together the three of them now approached the escort, clopping with a soft dolefulness across the silent square.

“It is the hour before dawn and time you must depart,” the King addressed them, “I will tell you now how I have ordered things for your journey.”

He was proudly clad in his wargear, with bright helm upon the saddle pommel of his fine caparisoned grey. Today he wore the bold red of Dragongate, glowing softly in the firelight, its two dragons, one gold, the other black, facing each other, tails entwined.

“The escort is mounted and Dimlicdale can be crossed on horseback,” he continued, “This will enable you better to scout, provide flank and rear guards and to travel swiftly to the site of any trouble. The column must be kept moving yet will be as slow as those with the slowest feet. You must cross the dale before sunset. That is the only advice I shall give you.

“As to the ordering of the party, the huntress shall have charge of it, and by her side always are to be the Lady Amora, Trystan and Conan. I give you the service of Captain Trum and picked men of Dragongate. Three are scouts, garbed as the hills and well hardy and field crafty, their leader is Ebban the Stealthy. Twelve are bowmen, of whom Lady Elyssa has, at my bidding, agreed to take charge. Twelve more are Men-at-Arms. All are mounted and cloaked in grey against the eyes of the enemy. Ladies Sacrissa and Sigird have offered to ride with the party also, for which I am grateful, and the huntress will use them as she will.”

The King leaned forward and spoke softly, so that only the huntress would hear him, “Beware, there are many in your company not of the Vale. There will be traitors among your ranks.”

“And among yours, Lord King,” whispered the huntress in return.

The King nodded and sat back in his saddle, addressing the company at large.

“Go now, and may the Powers go with you.”

Bows were gravely exchanged (even Sigird could not curtsy on a horse), and, at the command of the Captain and his sergeant, the townsfolk were shepherded from the square and the party set out along the road called Stanebriggate toward the river.

The huntress rode up to her three companions of yestereve, “Ladies, we are companions on the road for at least this day, and, who knows, for some time longer, perhaps. I expect your help and trust.”

Sacrissa smiled, “We are chance companions, by the will of the Powers it seems, on a road far from straight or certain, yet may we not at least know the name of she who expects our aid and trust?”

The huntress stiffened momentarily. “When we met, I referred to myself as a huntress,” she began, slowly, “though perhaps I should say that some know me as the Huntress.”

Sacrissa interrupted with a long, loud intake of breath. “Well, well,” she murmured pensively, and then added, brightly “Well, after all, what girl isn’t reassured to have a stone-cold killer by her side on an adventure!”

The Huntress frowned, “My true name cannot be given lest it bind my freedom at this time.” She saw that this just left the others looking confused, so added, “But you can call me ‘Elle’.”

Elyssa nodded in acknowledgement.

“As my Lady pleases,” said Sigird.

Sacrissa raised an eyebrow and left it at that.

“Good, then,” said Elle the Huntress, “let us be on our way.”

As they approached the town gate, they saw cloaked men about the gate, muffled against the chill autumn air. They stirred at the approach of the column of townsfolk and their mounted escorts. Elle rode forward on her black and feathered destrier. Like the rest of the mounted party, the hooves were muffled against noise on the cobbles. Strict silence was enforced in the ranks of the shuffling townsfolk. After a brief hushed exchange, the gates swung silently inward on newly oiled hinges. All was dark beyond the wall. Was the enemy already there, lying silently in wait on the invisible plain? The Huntress worried. No, she assured herself, there had been no sound of strife. Eric and the King’s men would still be there, she hoped, silent and dark in their new positions. Looking right from where the road forked toward the river, she thought she could faintly make out the white towers of the leading gate on the fortified bridge. It looked a long way away, and she had never had to travel the distance at the pace of one on foot. Trum and Ebban were now at her side. After a whispered exchange with them, Ebban made a slow sign with his arm, at which his two scouts trotted forward to be lost in the blackness. Trum and Ebban returned to their chosen posts. Elle turned in the saddle to Amora, who came to her side. The Huntress smiled reassuringly at her friend, though as she did, she realised that she was smiling to reassure herself.

Progress along the road was painful. The townsfolk seemed to do their best, but their best speed was frustratingly slow. The Huntress had no doubt that the enemy had contrived to watch the town gates, the roads and the bridge. The darkness should shield them, provided the clouds still hid the moon.

Sigird did not care for the situation either. She knew there was no choice. She knew that they were safe on the road, even if seen. The outer wall was unbreached and Lord Eric, she did not doubt, stood between them and the enemy with a great force in a prepared position. It was what lay beyond the bridge that troubled her. No enemy had been reported across the bank, but no friendly troops were stationed there. If she had the ordering of the enemy, she would have used the darkness to occupy the woods with many light troops.

Elyssa noted the return of the two scouts. The column continued forward. All was evidently well. Elyssa took stock of her bowmen. Tall and grim they were, though they treated her with a courteous deference, devoid of the fear and distrust she was used to from Men, or, come to that, from her mother’s people, when what she was had become known. These men seemed to take her as they found her. These were men of Dragongate, the twin dragons blazoned on red tabards beneath their grey cloaks. Elves did not abash them. Dark Elves, shadow-folk, lived among them. She and Nan Un had sought sanctuary with Dark Elves in the western coombes, where she found other Blood Elves. She had fled from Elvenholme once her blood-nature had become known. It was strange to think that these men had mixed with such kin and it troubled them not. The men went about their duties, adjusting gear, setting watch and arcs for their bows along their route with a calm economy of movement, gesture and low conversation. She was sure they knew their business well.

Just then, a bright light erupted in the centre of the column. Unbelievingly, Elyssa realised that someone had lit a brand! They were now waving it in a frantic motion, and now, shouting. The glare hid the fool from view, but all around him townsfolk were to be seen trying to edge out of the circle of light cast by the bobbing and swaying torch. Elyssa had her bow strung and instinctively nocked an arrow. Now Men at Arms were galloping towards the torch-bearer from both ends of the column. One momentarily blocked her view. Then, she raised her bow and aimed just below the centre of the torch’s swaying movement. She focussed her mind, blocking all the noise and commotion, and controlled her breathing. She breathed in slowly, then held it for a heartbeat and loosed her arrow. She heard a scream and saw the flaming point of light pause in mid-arc, then drop suddenly to the ground. The light was gone. The whole party seemed to hold its breath. All was still and silent. Then, far across the plain, horn calls were heard.

“A fine shot in the dark, my Lady,” observed her senior man, Hirdman Stralbore, in a matter of fact, but approving tone.

“Yes,” replied Elyssa, “but now they know someone is on the river road.”

Just then a great sound, as of a sudden wind, disturbed the air. After a moment’s silence a loud thud was heard to the side of the road, some distance away, and the ground beneath them shook. A wave of dust rolled through the air towards us.

“The greatest of their engines cannot reach this far,” concluded Stralbore.

“Yet, if they have men across the river, they will be expecting us now,” she replied.

***

Sacrissa had been talking to Amora when the torch flared.

“What in the Seven Hells…?” Amora had begun.

“I know not,” Sacrissa had replied, “but I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

Sacrissa’s Second Sight had caused the taste of bile to flood her mouth in response to the alarm. She savoured its rankness, discerning and dividing its parts. ‘Treachery, of course,’ she had noted, ‘and fear, hate, and … yes, defiance. Yet there is something more. Something that lies behind. Something I have not tasted before. Something dark and not of this earth.’

Suddenly, without understanding why, she had felt a thrill of fear, ice-cold down her spine, and her stomach had churned.

She was still shouldering her black Fryson steed through the confused crowd on the road toward the dancing light when the light fell. She had reached the stricken traitor as the wump of a great rock’s impact was heard a bow shot ahead of her. It had spooked the Fryson and shaken the ground, disorientating her for a moment. She had quickly recalled her situation and settled the beast with Words of Command. She was dismounting as the choking dust swirled round them.

Now, she lent over the expiring figure where he lay, kicked by the soldiers to the edge of the road. She revived him with a drop of liquid from a vial, aware that his respite would be temporary and that she must work quickly. He had the appearance of some entirely unremarkable and unmemorable peasant. A freeman, they all were here, apparently, but unkempt and with his better days behind him. He gazed at her with a look of truculent disdain through the fading light of glassy eyes. The arrow had struck close to the man’s heart, and he was near his end.

‘Bloody Elf,’ thought Sacrissa, ‘not one in a hundred could have hit him, a shot into the dark against a blinding light, and she all but drilled him straight through the heart. Note to self; probably not an Elf you want to upset. Now, to work …’

***

Conan possessed the happy coincidence of an insistently cheerful demeanour, which made it hard to take offence, even when he was ordering you about, and an imposing physical presence, which suggested that taking offence was, in any case, probably pointless, and certainly unwise. Although he was ever friendly and scrupulously polite, it was found that people seldom needed reminding twice to return books to his library. Now his talents were employed to good effect, calming the townsfolk, preventing panic spreading in their ranks, and chivvying them ever forward. When he next had leisure to look up from the worrying, scurrying horde, he saw the gate towers of the bridge looming pale above him.

At their approach, the oiled and muffled gates swung silently open and the long line of silent townsfolk filed through. A cobbled road led over the span and head-high walls, with fighting steps, flanked them. The escort dismounted and led their horses across. Nothing heard they, save the hoot of an owl and the solemn and relentless rush of the cold river beneath them, and, far off, behind that sound, the dull roar of the waterfall that fed the mere.

The Huntress, with Trum by her side and Amora and Trystan in attendance, walked ahead of the column out of the bridge gate onto the further bank, the soft clop of their horses’ muffled hooves barely audible. Ahead of them, out of sight, Ebban and his men were scouting on foot, with a fore-guard of Men at Arms in close support. Further back were mounted Men at Arms, and Elyssa and Stralbore were disposing their archers to cover the advancing footmen, though it might be thought they would be of doubtful aid in the enveloping dark.

Away to their left stretched a pale ribbon of riverbank wall, blocking the river itself from view and disappearing into the trees that rose, tier on tier, up the flanks of the Circling Hills as they parted at the river-gap. The wall was not manned. Like the river itself, the wall was an impediment to any mass movement of enemy forces, though no proof against a stealthy escalade by night. There was no way of knowing how many Enemy might have penetrated this side of the Vale, but they had to assume the Enemy was here.

The road lay uphill through fields. Hedges and walls might conceal many foes to either side, as might the farmstead through which the road ahead would soon take them. Beyond the field to their right, the bend in the river secured their flank, but to the left the fields ended where thick forest marked the course of the Circling Hills. The hills and the forest curved in a vast arc on the slopes above them, ultimately to lay across their path as the road ahead climbed toward the forest. The road to Dimlicdale lay through those trees, up that steep, wooded, slope, and through a high pass at the summit of the Circling Hills. Anyone could see that, once they had disappeared into those trees, at any point, the Enemy could take them. It struck Elle that what had seemed a reasonable chance, a calculated risk, on the map in the guardroom, now looked like suicide.

They decided that, for speed, the town-folk must stick to the road. At the farmstead straddling the road, the forest jutted out closest to the left side of the road, before receding to form a great bay of open land that would end only as the forest reached round to close over the road. The farm was deserted, and they passed on, the column hedged on its flanks and to its front by an anxious soldiery, scanning the black borders of the forest, straining to see into its shadows and penetrate its secrets.

Then the moon passed beyond the clouds, and they saw the forest curving away from the farmstead to their left and that now they were about to cross the wide bay of open ground, the whole of which was now illuminated by the moon’s pale white light. The road and everything on it was exposed to view from any unfriendly eyes lurking in the forest.

“From here,” remarked Trum to the Huntress, “the trees that reach to the farm behind us block any view of these fields from the Enemy across the river. If the Enemy is already here, however ….”

“We must pray to the Powers that they are not,” answered Elle, flatly, and they rode on in watchful silence. There was not one among the party who did not feel agonisingly vulnerable as they crossed the open fields beside the forest, naked under the glare of the moon.

Eventually the treeline was reached. The road passed under a canopy of pines. The darkness closed over the party and ghost-like figures rose out of the gloom; members of the escort, marking their flanks and probing ahead. They all felt relief at first as they reached the sheltering gloom, yet the dark wood that now closed around them was the greater danger. It would have been better to have faced any Enemy in the open, under the moon, thought Elle.

They had fanned out, trudging among the trees to the left and right of the road. That way they could sweep the forest to some distance from it, flushing out any Enemy at a safe distance from the main column. Dismounted Men-at-Arms teased their way through the trees. Mounted supports lay behind and closer in toward the road. In the trees, the Enemy could be established on either, or, more likely, both sides of the road, but it was on the left that Sacrissa and Sigird found themselves, now on foot, lending their support to the sweep through the woods. The bright moonlight was dim here, filtered through fog and a thousand branches to a faint and unsettling glow that seemed to collect around the dense atmosphere at the base of the trees, showing them thickly planted in every direction. Ever on the trees marched before them. Ever upward they stretched, toward the bare rocky heights beyond. In any direction just five or six bare trunks could be seen through the half-light and the ground mist before the trees were swallowed by blackness beyond. The forest floor was clothed with fallen pine needles, which softened sound and dulled sense. It was as if they walked in a dream from which they could not awaken, the course of which was beyond their power to determine. Every trunk they passed gave way to another at the limit of their sight, never changing. It was as if they made no progress at all, ceaselessly repeating steps already taken. They were held in some other world, a twilight place outside time, quite helpless to resist its power to keep them there. Doomed, it seemed, to trudge this endless forest and, yet, to arrive nowhere. Yet they could feel the fallen cones beneath their feet. That connected them with something tangible, real and solid. They pressed down to feel them through the soles of their boots and felt alive and alert once more. Through the thickening ground mist, they trod softly on amid the still and silent trees.

“My Lady,” said Sigird after a while.

“‘Sacrissa’ Sigird, just ‘Sacrissa’ will do,” she replied.

“You tended the traitor, back there, before the bridge.”

“Aye,” said Sacrissa, “though I would not say ‘tended’.”

“Did he say anything?” asked Sigird.

“No,” said Sacrissa, “leastways not that he meant to.”

Sacrissa was content to let the conversation lapse at this point, but, after a pause, Sigird persisted.

“He told you something”, she said at length, “something that has made you thoughtful and…”, she hesitated to choose the word.

“Afraid,” re-joined Sacrissa, bluntly.

“Afraid? But …”

“Aye, afraid, or did you think I merely laugh in the face of danger? My dear, I devote considerable thought and effort to avoiding danger.”

“Yet,” Sigird again persisted, “you are a fighter? You showed us that at the castle.”

“Oh, I daresay I can be quite formidable at need, but there are more profitable and less risky adventures to be had than walking into a fair fight, or,” she added, “any fight, come to that.”

Despite the dark, the lightness of her tone told Sigird that the dark Lady was smiling as she spoke. Sigird frowned, feeling strangely disappointed.

“Look,” said Sacrissa, suddenly serious, “there is something in all this I do not understand. This is not some baron’s war or king’s squabble, this is …. I don’t know, but there is something behind all this. Something dark. Something unknown. The man the Elf killed … he was so full of hate but also so sure he was right, that his kind would triumph over us. We are all of us hunted, I deem, but who leads the hunt, and why…” She trailed off.

The trees were thinner here; something of a clearing to the left of the road seemed to be opening out. Room to fight, room to shoot, thought Sigird. She did not like Sacrissa’s dark hints. She did not count herself particularly superstitious, but …

“I thought I heard a noise, off to the left,” resumed Sacrissa.

Sigird had not heard anything. She was still intent upon Sacrissa’s vague forebodings.

“If you have found something out about this phantom army, you should tell the others …”

“Don’t call it that!” snapped Sacrissa, “for fear that it may be so. I cannot tell anything yet. I would not know how to describe it more, or what to say to….”

And then a twig snapped off to the left and an arrow whistled past them.

“Down!” shouted Sacrissa.

“To arms! To arms! Enemy to our left!” bawled Sigird, standing on her toes, waving pointlessly in the dark, and attracting far too much attention, Sacrissa thought, so she pulled the girl down to where she was already crouching.

A volley of arrows screeched over their heads. There were no cries as the feathered shafts disappeared behind them in the dark. None, it seemed, had found a mark. There were cries and horn calls from the column. Men at Arms ran forward, forming a shield wall in front of them, and then the Elf and the Huntress were bounding forward, leading three or four archers. They scanned for targets. With uncanny night sight and practised eyes they sought out their enemies and loosed arrows. Wherever they did so, there were screams. Brazen horns, as of brass, sounded deep in the forest and the cries of their enemies were heard, growing fainter until there was again silence under the boughs.

Elle bounded up to them, all bristling intent. Like a hound on a scent, thought Sacrissa.

“Well,” said Elle, “These Leopards were easily scattered! Yet I deem they will return soon enough now they have found us, no doubt in force. Be ready!” and she bounded off.

‘Bloody heroes,’ thought Sacrissa, and she let Sigird, already up and scanning their Enemy’s ground, pull her to her feet.