War Weary

Fabian Castel gripped his sword and stood side on to the advancing wall of shields. The formation stepped over corpses of soldiers Sir Castel had already defeated.

            “That Nephilim is an archer. Take cover, both of you.”

            “Where?” The boy and the woman who’d saved him asked together.

            The door to the tower behind them was completely blocked. On their right over the battlements was a sixty-foot drop. On their left it was probably only a fifty-foot drop to their deaths, far more convenient.

            Danielle notched an arrow in her bow. Only the shields showed where the soldiers were, and she’d already wasted arrows on the golden armour of a Nephilim knight. She needed something, anything to break their advance.

            A metal clanging sound drew her attention to Fabian.

            “How did you do that?” Carl asked, the shivering boy was fearful and hiding behind her, but the boisterous enthusiasm still glowed in his words.

            “Practice,” said the knight of Crann.

She saw chunks of kindling scattered across the wall top where they’d tipped the brazier before.

            “Carl, get a big chunk of that wood and throw it at the shields.”

            “Why?” asked the impudent child.

            “Because all I need is a gap to shoot them in the ankle or the eye. Go.”

            The boy huffed but did as he was told. Picking up a huge chunk of cut log he hurled it at the shields.

            They barely moved but it was enough. Danielle Longbow got an arrow between the shields and heard a groan. Carl was already picking up another lump of frozen wood. He dropped it as an arrow from the golden archer hit the kindling in the middle.

            Miss Longbow presumed the archer was skilled enough to have killed Carl with that shot. Either he had been showing off or he was happy to let the soldiers skewer them with spears.

            The shield wall reformed but one of the spears had dipped. Only two were any danger to Fabian. The spear tips were aiming for him, far too close. As they stabbed, he sidestepped and gripped one of the spears behind the head. He struck down hard, cutting the end off the spear and kicking it over the edge of the wall.

            The movement of the spears gave Danielle another opening. She made eye contact with a man holding the broken spear. The next moment one of those blue eyes had an arrow through it.

            The screaming man ran backwards into the golden archer. The Nephilim knight pushed the wailing wounded out of his way and off the wall. From the length of the cry until the sound of the man hitting the ground, she guessed the ground was higher inside the walls than outside. A mere fiftyish foot.

            Fabian leapt nimbly into the gap in the shields and stabbed one of the shield bearers. Two of the red garbed imperial foot soldiers were dead in a heartbeat.

            The Nephilim was having none of it.

            “MOVE!” Danielle had heard literal monsters roar and yet only the cries of the harpies had been louder. It was at that moment that her bladder decided it was overcrowded. That was the last thing she needed on a freezing night.

            The golden Nephilim pushed mere veterans out of his way and grabbed Sir Castel in a lightning-fast grab. Fingers the length of her hand wrapped around her friend’s throat.

            “Kill them,” barked the giant as he closed another hand around Fabian’s neck.

            Danielle put an arrow through the eye of another shield bearer before he could lift it again. Two men ran forwards with spears. One was just a pole thanks to the knight from Crann.

            Fabian was flailing around. The Nephilim sat on his chest as if they were alone and pinned the dying man’s arms with his knees.

            She put another arrow through the eye slot of the one with a pointy weapon.

            It was then that Carl proved his heroism/insanity again. Armed only with a huge chunk of kindling he ran past the pole aimed at Danielle. He smashed the blunted spearman in the head with the lump of wood and shoved the man hard enough to send him screaming off the edge of the wall.

            “I’ll deal with you in a moment,” said the justifiably confident imperial who was strangling Fabian. Her arrow bounced off the golden helmet. The giant laughed.

            “Leave him alone!” Carl pleaded.

            “He’ll be gone soon enough,” said the Nephilim knight.

            Danielle drew her sword. Each blow moved the golden man but not enough to save her friend. She grabbed the helmet, trying to take it off.

            What the fuck? How does he take this off?

            The muscular mountain of murderous intent laughed.

            Then Carl started pissing on him.

            Fabian was immediately free from the steely grip.

            The Nephilim knight got up off his knees. The boy tried to leap out of the way. The brute’s fist caught him in the forehead. Carl collapsed.

            When the monster threw his knockout punch, Danielle saw a slice of red in his armpit between the gold. Fabric. A weak point. In went the point of her sword. In went the blade. She threw all her weight behind it. The sword stopped at the hilt.

            Fabian was coughing. The hacking sound suggested a cat puking up a hairball, if the hairball was the size of a horse. His face was purple. His eyes were red from burst veins. As he tugged at his chainmail to try to help more oxygen into his lungs, she glimpsed red marks that would become bruises if he survived long enough.

            The Nephilim was down and gasping his last, bloody breaths. Danielle put a foot on his back and pulled out her sword.

            Fabian was coughing. Nothing much could be done for him. Carl was unconscious with his red breaches pulled down. Not dignified. Not what you want when its well below freezing. She did her best to give the boy some dignity and avoid him getting frostbite on his bits, if he survived.

            Big if.

There was more shouting below. She was tired. Carl was unconscious. Fabian was gasping for air and seemed unable to see properly. There were two dead Nephilim on the wall. There were either fourteen or fifteen dead down below, she hoped.

            The escape back down over the wall had been blocked off. To get to it she would have to fight her way right through Worm’s Mount Castle. If stories about it were right the castle was almost as big as Leonor city.

            The boy lying unconscious knew about Nephilim knights. According to him there were a minimum of four left.

            “Too many.” She shook her head. Snow fell from her stolen imperial helmet.

            They couldn’t keep fighting. She was the last one standing.

            She could hear voices below. Swearing. The clink of weapons.

            “I’m fucking tired.” She thought of her girlfriend, Lupita. “I have to live to see you again.” They would be climbing up the ladder in the other tower. Coming for her. “Think. Think.”

            She had one curaduile arrow left. It would chew up a body and swell into an enormous monstrous tree in short order. But she only had one.

            She shivered as she pulled the red dyed arrow from her quiver. An idea began to form.

            Men with swords began running towards her from the same tower she’d been wasting time thinking about. The arrow went back in the quiver.

            Danielle grabbed one of the huge red tower shields and moved to face them. That she could do. If anything, it was oddly comforting to face imperial soldiers on a wall with a shield on her arm and a sword in her hand.

            There were eight of them. They slowed as they came close to her and formed a line. No shields. Luckily. She put her back to the battlements and moved towards them. Three men at the front in a row. Three men behind those and two at the back looking antsy.

            Imperial helmets were cheap. Just like the one she’d stolen, their eyes were only protected against horizontal swipes by the nose guard.

            She jabbed. In and out of the eye. It wouldn’t even be fatal, but the man was screaming as he dropped his sword. His chaotic flailing distracted the others. She stabbed again. Another man pierced the night with a howl and put a hand to the bleeding hole in his face.

            The third in the first row managed to stab over the shield but his point met her chainmail and failed. She blinded him. She’d perfected the technique in night long battles on the wall of Leonor city during the siege. Danielle wished she had her own shield and the knights of Crann at her back.

            Another weakness of imperial armour she’d learned about during the siege was that they had no armour over their shins. Lifting the huge shield on her arm higher she aimed her ironclad foot at the lower leg of the closest soldier. When he twitched, she bashed him as hard as she could with the shield. His nose guard bent under the force of her favourite attack.

            She was smiling. She couldn’t help it.

            Another stab hit her chainmail. It hurt but at worst it would be a bruise. Her sword sank into the skull of the middleman of the second row, far enough to enter his brain. The last of the second middle row was blinded like those before.

            Two left.

            She bashed the one on her left with the shield as they both stabbed, he fell over. The one on the right cut the air next to her head. He tried to compensate by swinging the sword into her head. No momentum. The clanging sound was awful though. She winced and closed her eyes.

            He kicked her off her feet.

            He kicked the shield aside.

            Her ears were ringing.

            He pointed his sword down and gripped it in both hands, ready to stab.

            Fabian tackled him out of nowhere.

            While the two wrestled on the ground she got up. She put two screaming men out of their misery and threw three more off the wall.

            Her saviour knight wasn’t doing well. The defender was on top with the length of his blade trying to slice at Sir Castel’s throat. She wrenched the imperial off and pressed the sword through his eye until it touched the back of his helmet.

            Danielle finished the rest of the wounded. No prisoners.

            She had an idea.

            Dropping the shield, she dragged two of the smaller corpses towards the tower that wasn’t blocked by a magical tree, yet. A brazier burnt by the window. The door to the wall that went northwest was open.

            She dropped an eyeless man beyond the open door.

            There were men climbing the ladder below.

            Out came the red arrow. The magical arrow.

            A tiny chunk of wood was glued into the shaft right behind the arrowhead. She had to cut it in half. Adrenaline surged again as the voices below came closer. She only had moments. Her sword wasn’t meant for slicing tiny slivers of magical tree. It crunched and snapped as much as it was cut. Two pieces.

            She took one piece of the curaduile wood and poked it into the bloody socket of a dead man. The wound started twitching straight away.

            She flung the hatch to the ladder open and came eye to eye with a defender. Her foot sent him screaming down to the ground far below. The other men on the ladder had held on. She gifted them with the rapidly morphing corpse. It hit them and knocked them all off in one go. Their screams were mercifully brief.

            The tree burst from the body far below and was already a small, deadly shrub. She slammed the hatch. In the excitement she’d misplaced the second chunk of curaduile wood. On her hands and knees, she searched for the deadly splinter.

            “There!” She tenderly picked it up. Into the next bloody wound beyond the door the splinter went. She closed the heavy door behind her.

            Scratching sounds told her the tree outside was already sealing up that entrance.

            They couldn’t come through the door. They couldn’t come up the ladder.

            She was safe. For a while.

            Danielle helped Fabian to walk to the warmth of the brazier. She then collected Carl from his resting place in the snow on the wall. He looked dead. His breathing was shallow. They were alive.

            That was the best she could manage right then.

            Danielle stole the cloaks from dead imperial soldiers and wrapped the boy, herself, and the knight in one each. Hoping the fire would last, she gave in to exhaustion.

A kiss woke her. Was it all a nightmare? She blinked. A cold ache covered her body. The light of day broke through the arrow slits in the tower.

            “Lupita?” she asked. The beautiful woman standing over her smiled.

            “Who else? Better late than never, right?” said Danielle’s lover.

            Beside Lupita Smith stood a woman in a black bird mask with silver scratches.

            “Don’t expect a kiss from me, traitor. I’m only here to kill imperials.” Catherine Harper’s yellow eyes practically glowed beneath the mask. Her green Crann tabard was white with snow.

            Miss Smith helped Danielle to her feet. A third reinforcement stood with them in a blue tabard. The coat of arms for Afon sat in the frosty folds, a grey shield crossed lower left to upper right by a stripe of blue for the rivers. A red salmon lay diagonally across the shield the other way. He had a scrap of the Crann green sown around his arm.

            “Same goes for me. I want to kill imps; I wouldn’t mind starting with that one.” The foreign soldier nodded at Carl, whose forehead was a giant purple bruise. The boy gave the blue knight a cheeky wink.

            “I know you from the siege,” Danielle said. “What’s your name, sir?”

            “I am Sir Aled Cadogan.” He straightened his stance, pulling his shoulders back and puffing out his chest. “If we’re done with the introductions, how about some fighting?”

            “Sounds good to me Sir Cadogan. And, for the record, I killed more imperials than you did last night. So did the traitor.” The boy nodded to miss Longbow.

            The twinkle of a wink caught Aled’s eye with a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Let’s stab a few more then, shall we?”

            Danielle had the wind knocked from her lungs as Sir Cadogan thrust a full quiver of arrows at her. Then another. A dozen arrows each. One of regular arrows and the other red dyed curaduile arrows. She smiled.

            Ignoring them all, Catherine Harper climber the ladder to the tower ramparts. Everyone heard imperial yells coming to them through the arrow slit. Slinging the quivers over her shoulder, Danielle climbed up to the tower top as fast as she could.

            The day seemed as cold as the night had been, but the mist had cleared. At last, looking north, she saw the scale of the castle she’d stormed in the dark. Perhaps a mile from east to west, half that deep and hemmed in on two sides by the deadly mountains.

            The woman known as Cat-hawk had her bow drawn. Below them, past the mighty curaduile tree that blocked the door, stood six imperial soldiers. They made a two levelled shield wall. Three archers stood behind.

            “Those shields look heavy,” said the yellow eyed woman. “I wonder how long they can hold them like that.” The black mask was blank, but the voice was taunting.

            “Will we wait, and see?” Danielle asked.

            “I have nothing better to do right now,” Catherine relaxed and let her bow slack.

            “What am I missing?” Carl asked as he clambered onto the tower beside them.

            “A pulse if you come any closer to me,” said Cat.

            “Hey imps,” the boy shouted over the battlements. “I killed a Nephilim last night. Want to know how? I pissed on him, and my friend shoved a sword through his heart.” When there was no response, he shrugged. “I killed another one with a steak knife before that. Your greatest warriors, killed with piss and a steak knife. What hope do a bunch of weaklings like you have if a Nephilim couldn’t beat me.”

            Three arrows soared over their heads from behind the shield wall.

            “One of them did beat you,” Danielle reminded him, thinking of the punch.

            The boy looked at his saviour. “But he’s dead now. Therefore, I win.” He looked back at the men in the shield wall. “Who’s the idiot shaking at the front left? My left, your right. What a pathetic moron.”

            “FUCK YOU!” The roar from behind the shield was gravelly and soaked with hurt pride.

            “Why is the snow yellow beneath your feet? Pissing yourself right now just makes you look weaker.” You could almost hear the man grinding his teeth in response.

            Catching on to what the boy was doing, Cat began to draw her bow again. Danielle did the same.

            “Can you send a message to your woman for me? I want her to know that next time we have sex I want a glass of wine after. I get very thirsty.”

            The man at the front on the left ruined the formation to yell at Carl. Cat shot him. Danielle hit the man behind in the shin. As the shield wall collapsed, the two archers finished the men in that formation. Three archers tried to run. They got shot in their ankles for it.

            “You’re welcome.” Carl bowed.

            “Thanks,” said Cat, “I’ll kill you last.”

            “What more could I ask for?” The boy smiled.