The Wine of Dreams (37 page)

Once he was inside the storehouse, he found Sigurd easily enough and gave him
the wine. Sigurd was surprised to see him; Matthias Vaedecker had obviously not
taken the trouble to share the news that Reinmar had been conscripted to his
command. “You should not be here, Master Wieland,” the giant said. “You are too
young to be thrust into the first line of defence. Far too young.”

“I’d rather be with the best soldiers than the worst,” Reinmar told him.
“There’ll be no safety anywhere until the battle is won.”

“True enough,” Sigurd conceded. “Stay close to me, sir. If we fall, we’ll
fall together—but there’s no monster born that can bring us to that. If it
were you and I against the world, we’d come through unscathed.”

“It certainly won’t come to that,” Reinmar assured him. “Von Spurzheim’s come
this far—he won’t be beaten now. He’ll crush the enemy, and then he’ll march
on the valley and the underworld beneath the monastery. He’s irresistible.” He
deliberately made no mention of magic, although he had taken leave to wonder
privately whether von Spurzheim’s close retinue included priests who might try
to neutralise any spells that might be cast by the likes of the lady Valeria.

“That’s the spirit, lad,” another voice broke in, eager to join the
conversation. It was one of Vaedecker’s infantrymen, who did not know either of
them but obviously thought it worth the trouble to cultivate their acquaintance.
“From what I’ve seen, the things we have to fight are the dregs of the enemy’s
reserves—nasty but unskilled. They’ll be tough, but by no means unbeatable. At
the end of the day, even the best of them are little better than animals. We’re
men.”

Reinmar could not help but remember his grandfather’s similarly insistent
assurances of his own humanity. “Do you think they’ll come tonight?” he asked.
“Von Spurzheim said this morning that they probably would not come until tomorrow
night.”

“Oh yes,” said the infantryman, sounding like a man who had learned much from
experience. “They’ll come tonight, even though it’s too soon to allow them
proper preparation. They’ve already begun the work of slaughter, and once that
kind begin, they can’t be made to pause. They’re animals: cunning, but not
clever; vicious, but not artful. They’re coming now—and as soon as they
arrive, we’ll be in the thick of it. But we’ll win. As you say, we’re
irresistible.”

It was all too obvious that the soldier was trying hard to convince himself—and Reinmar recognised the wisdom of making that kind of effort, for his own and
everyone else’s benefit. He got up and went to find Matthias Vaedecker, who was
still trying to drum some semblance of discipline into the dullest of the
townsmen.

“They’re ready, sergeant,” Reinmar said, quietly. Then he raised his voice in
order to add: “This is their home, after all. They’ll defend it with every last
vestige of their strength. Eilhart is the best town on the Schilder. Nobody who
lives here will do anything less than his best to save it from the vermin that
are determined to foul it.”

Matthias Vaedecker looked at him, and grinned. “Master Wieland!” he said,
raising his own voice rather more than was necessary. “Another brave slayer of
beastmen! I’ll take your word for it—you know these people better than I.” But
when he had dismissed the men, and told them to rest a while, he became much
graver.

“It’s going to be bad, Reinmar,” he said confidentially. “You and I have seen
what they’ve been summoned to defend. It’s no mere patch of ground. News of its
existence is already speeding northwards, so another army will certainly come if
von Spurzheim fails, and another after that, but we’ve been on the road for a
long time. No one else has von Spurzheim’s knowledge, or his conviction. Whoever
comes in his stead, if anyone has to, won’t be half as determined to find the
valley, let alone to prevent the supply-line from renewing itself. For a prize
like this one, the enemy will likely send forth daemons as well as brutes, and
this is the point they’ll be most anxious to breach in order to strike at von
Spurzheim himself. I don’t know how insanely suicidal they’re prepared to be,
but I know that it’s going to be bad.”

“But in the end, we’re irresistible,” Reinmar said, wryly. “We’re men, after
all, and they’re monsters.”

“It’s precisely because we’re men that we’re no more irresistible than they
are,” the sergeant replied—but the reply was a whisper, spoken softly so that
no one else would overhear it. Reinmar felt oddly privileged to be the chosen
recipient of such a dangerous truth, but he soon went back to his station to sit
down with Sigurd.

The time dragged on with such painful slowness that Reinmar almost began to
wish that the enemy would appear and put an end to his suspense. Given that an
attack was now inevitable, he thought, it might be best to get it over with. He
was obviously not the only one who felt that way, but all that came down the
river between six and midnight were two sharpened tree-trunks, neither of which
broke through the nets that the defenders had strung across the flow.

“They can send as many of those as they wish,” Vaedecker called to his men.
“They’re the ones who’ll be fighting from the water, not us.”

When the market bell struck midnight a tangible ripple of tension passed
through the crowd, but it was no alarm signal; the hour came and passed like its
predecessors. Half an hour afterwards, though, a different missile came floating
down the river: an oarless rowboat whose interior had been stuffed with
oil-soaked chaff and kindling. The chaff had been set alight, and by the time
the nets caught the boat it was ablaze like a giant candle. The nets, being
beneath the surface, were not in the slightest danger of catching fire, but the
light of the fire reflected from the faces of the waiting bowmen and the
projecting heads of the pikes that had been laid down on the lowest floor.

“The light won’t tell them anything they don’t already know,” Vaedecker
called out, as promptly as before. “It’s just a gesture, intended to unsettle
us. When the time comes to fight, fire on the water will be our ally, not
theirs.”

The fire in the boat died down to mere embers, and finally sputtered out. It
was then that the enemy came, perhaps hoping to gain some tiny advantage from
the afterglow that the flames had left in the defenders’ eyes. The boats came
swiftly, skimming the surface while their occupants lay flat, with blades ready
to attack the nets.

The signal must have passed like lightning into the centre of the town, for
the market bell immediately began to jangle wildly, sounding the call to arms.

“Bowmen ready!” Vaedecker shouted. “Pikemen stand by!” It was the last order
he was able to give so clearly, for heavier boats were making their way down the
river behind the first few, and these were loaded with fighting-men. Some, no
doubt, were beastmen with the voices of beasts, but even those which had human
throats and tongues gave voice in a markedly bestial fashion as soon as the
arrows began to fly.

Reinmar leaned forward to see what was happening, but Sigurd pulled him back
from the lip of the opening at which he crouched, anxious that he might present
a target to an enemy bowman. For this reason, he heard rather than saw the bolts
fired by Vaedecker’s crossbowmen as they rained down upon the boats, slapping
into the wooden hulls and clicking into the water. He saw arrows hurtling into the warehouse, and immediately wished that
the openings in its flanks could have been smaller, but the pikemen were
crouching very low, waiting for their turn without exposing themselves.
Vaedecker was still shouting, punctuating his commands with curses whenever they
did not have the desired effect. The war-cries of the beast-men and their
subhuman allies were mingled with screams, but as the noise grew it became
increasingly difficult to tell the difference between howls of aggression and
howls of pain.

The noise seemed to take hold of Reinmar’s heart, almost as if it were a kind
of magic, forcing the pace of its beating to increase It seemed, too, that the
beat became lurchingly unsteady. Reinmar hoped that that, at least, was only an
illusion.

Reinmar never heard Vaedecker give the order, but the pike-men closest to the
north side of the building and those at the middle aperture—including Sigurd—began to pick up their weapons. A full-length pike was so long, and its head so
heavy, that no one but a giant could thrust repeatedly, especially at an awkward
angle, so the weapons were not yet of much use, but the fact that they had been
taken in hand at all testified to the fact that the heavier boats must have
drawn in close to the warehouse walls, waiting only for the clearance of the
nets and the boom that were preventing their further progress.

“What’s happening?” Reinmar shouted at Sigurd.

The only authentically human voice he could hear for a few moments afterwards
was Vaedecker’s, as he urged his cross-bowmen to fire and fire again and to make
every bolt count, but Sigurd did eventually turn. “Not long!” was what he
shouted—which Reinmar took to mean that the nets had been cut to shreds, and
that only the metal hawser forming the boom was offering significant resistance
to the passage of the boats.

The logs had been sent down first in order to increase the load on the boom,
and the boats were increasing that stress with every minute that passed, but
Reinmar knew that the creatures within the boats must be paying a heavy price.
Arrows and crossbow bolts would thin them out—and when the boom finally broke,
the pikemen at his own station would seize their own opportunity.

Reinmar tried hard to force himself to be still, fearful that he might start
trembling long before he was actually drawn into the action. His self-discipline seemed effective, and he felt the thump of
his heartbeat ease a little. The boom was still holding, it seemed, and
everything was going to plan.

And then, within the space of half a second, the plan went wrong.

All of a sudden there were two fronts and not one. The watchmen at the doors
to the street set up a clamour of their own, and men wielding swords and
half-pikes began to pour through into the interior of the storehouse. The
lanterns set above the doorways reassured Reinmar that they were men, some
wearing Reiksguard colours and others having faces that he knew, but he realised
immediately that they were in retreat, and that the barricade they had been
manning must already have been breached.

Matthias Vaedecker was shouting at the top of his voice, and Reinmar knew—even though he could not make out more than one word in three—that he had to
come into the action now. He and the other swordsmen had to make sure that
anyone or anything that was not one of the town’s defenders would die as soon as
he or it passed through either of the two broad doorways that opened on to the
street. Alas, the feeble attempts that the watchmen made to close the doors once
they had admitted their retreating allies were immediately cancelled out, for
the pursuers already had battering-rams in play, having presumably used them to
smash through the barricade at the north end of the street. Both doors were
thrust back again and the battering rams kept on coming, their sharpened heads
aimed at the backs and legs of the defenders.

Those among the fleeing men who knew what they were about tried to turn as
soon as they were inside, but there were too many among them who did not know,
whose further attempts to dodge and find positions of safety interfered with the
rank of defenders that was forming to cover their retreat and carry the fight
back to the enemy.

The squat figures who were carrying the head of the ram on their shoulders
were ready targets, but they took a dozen cuts apiece before they went down, and
there were more behind them to maintain the ram’s momentum for a few precious
seconds more. That was all the time required to clear the doorways and make a
way in, and by the time Reinmar had joined something resembling a proper formation of spearmen and swordsmen the chance to seal the breach had gone.

As the rams bounced and rolled, knocking more defenders down, the enemy
produced enough swords and spears of their own to make the fight seem almost
even. It was, at any rate, even enough to be fierce.

There was light enough for Reinmar to see the faces of the creatures ranged
against him. He was slightly surprised to see that only a few were significantly
unhuman, but the rest made up for their lack of literal bestiality with as much
sheer ugliness as he had ever seen packed into human features. Their eyebrows
were huge, their chins jutting and their gritted teeth were yellow and
overlarge. They were exceptionally hairy, and a few had so many warts as to seem
toadlike, but they had hands and they had minds, and the manner in which they
wielded their clubs and blades spoke of practised skill and malign intelligence.
When they leapt forward they were undeniably reckless, but they were not by any
means easy targets.

As soon as Reinmar had thrust forwards for the first time, and felt his blade
connect with something hard, he knew that he was in terrible danger. The line of
which he was a part had been too hastily-formed, and the men in it too lightly
drilled. It was already ragged, and at dire risk of fragmentation—but it had
to hold, or the entire space within the vast storehouse would become a chaotic
battle-zone. If the men at the riverside were to continue doing their job they
needed to be covered; they had to be able to devote their entire attention to
the battle on the water, or it would be lost within an hour.

Fortunately, Reinmar was not the only man who knew that the line had to hold,
and Vaedecker’s men were not about to let the failings of farm-hands and
shopkeepers ruin their formation. Those with half-pikes were already drawing a
picket-line, with swordsmen between them—and their precision was so plainly
manifest that even the most thick-headed townsmen could see what they were about
and why. Reinmar inserted himself smoothly enough into a position between two
men who knew exactly how to lay about them with the heads of their half-pikes,
and as soon as they saw that he knew how to ply his sword they gave him room to
do it. Their weapons were heavier than anything the enemy forces had, and it
required considerable luck as well as skill for any enemy to get past the
sharpened blades.