Chapter 3

BOABDIL, SOUTH MAIN CONTINENT

The raiders set the small storehouse on fire just before dawn. Corinn organized the women to pass the buckets as the men fought the blaze. She felt a vague sense of wastefulness. She knew there was a different way to do this, a better way. Buckets were inefficient, but buckets were all they had.

The buckets came one after another, an endless line of heavy buckets slopping cold water on skirts, sleeves, and hands. Numb fingers grabbed tarred rope handles and passed the buckets forward. Somewhere at the head of the line, a man grabbed each bucket and flung its contents on the buildings next to the inferno that had been wooden walls, wooden rafters, and all the smoked meat remaining from their careful culling of the herds. The storehouse was doomed, but maybe they would stop the flames from spreading to the other buildings.

The aroma of cooking hams and bacon had been sweet torture at first. No more; the smoke was thick with the stench of burned flesh. Dark red tongues of fire wreathed in black smoke reached for the sky, casting irregular shadows, making the line of women seem to dance and sway. Scar dropped one bucket, the water splashing across dusty soil like a dark stain. She stared at the spreading blot for a long moment, her thin, twisted face ashen with sudden memories raised by that awful smell.

Corinn picked up the dropped vessel. She handed it to the woman in the line that returned empty buckets to the well for refilling. Nobody said anything. There was nothing that could be said. They all remembered the Burnings. They all feared what would happen when the raiders finally took this place. They were all tired. Scar shook her head and seized the next full bucket. She passed it to Corinn, who passed it to Samata. At least the idiots outside had stopped dropping bullets and arrows into the Holding.

That was a mistake. Corinn shook her head too, wondering where that thought had come from. She hoped it wouldn’t occur to any of the raiders.

Only four days ago, the raiders had chased them all back into the Holding and started lofting bullets over the walls. They fired their guns at high angles from the cover of trees and brush far beyond the Holding’s dry ditch. Some fired arrows, but guns seemed to be their favorite attack by daylight. The bullets raised little clouds of dust as they thudded into the dirt in the middle of the compound. Somehow, they seemed like life here, sudden, random deaths that had no reason, just a cruel happenstance that could fell anyone.

At first, there had seemed to be no sense to the bullets. There was certainly no aiming. It was a nuisance, that was all, just random destruction. Then a woman was struck by a flying splinter of wood. Corinn remembered her standing in the middle of the street staring at her own blood pooling in the dirt, her mouth open in silent shock.

Hardly an hour later, Corinn, having just finished bandaging and comforting the woman, stepped out of the makeshift infirmary and saw a boy running to the barracks with a message from the main gate watchtower. He suddenly dropped, tumbling limply to lie unmoving in the middle of the common. A falling bullet struck one of the women who tried to pick him up. That one was still in the kitchen workroom, moaning from a shattered forearm.

Corinn had spent half the night trying her best to clean that wound. She had carefully washed and boiled every tool she used, but there was no escaping the awful certainty she felt twisting in her stomach. Only incredible luck would save that woman’s arm from the bone saw. The boy had been dead, of course. He had probably died instantly.

Sometime during the gray, early hours of morning, Corinn remembered another word for nuisance attacks: terrorism.

It was a nuisance, nothing more, to the men. They fought from well-covered killing places in the holding’s brick walls, or rushed out to engage the bolder raiders directly. Reduced to no more than a double handful of able warriors by the usual succession of raid and counter-raid, the defenders had returned arrow for arrow until it was obvious to all that that was a waste. Each arrow and each quarrel loosed into the surrounding brush was returned, either immediately or later that night, and always with a flaming strip of cloth attached to it. That was an exchange only the raiders could win. The women inside the holding must dodge falling fire arrows at night and risk unseen falling bullets during the days, and still do their work.

Terrorism.

Corinn could not remember much more than the word and a hint of meaning, but it seemed to fit well what she witnessed for four days and nights. The bullets only fell during daylight. At night, the raiders sent fire arrows instead. That was worse. Everyone could see the fire arrows rising like sparks from the darkness. They would hang in the night sky like dim, threatening stars, then plunge down to rip into flesh, walls, dirt, and, most unfortunately, into the tinder-dry moss used to plug gaps between the roof slates of the small storehouse. People had to spend the night guarding against fire, and the day tossing and turning, trying to find rest in the heat of late summer. It was death and destruction just for the sake of death and destruction, totally senseless, but she could see how it wore on everyone.

Outrider Shellenas stalked past, his eyes on his men at their posts on the wall. “Hold your arrows unless you have a target,” he repeated, just loud enough for them to hear. He glanced at Corinn. “Youngsters!” He spat, his voice filled with helpless fury. She knew none of these men had been young for many years, so he must be cursing the raiders outside.

“Any word from our Lord?” She swayed slightly, exhausted, shifting her weight from one tired foot to the other. It was her turn to rest a moment before going back to the lines of buckets. She kept one woman resting, away from the lines, ready to step in where others faltered, replacing one at a time and giving each of them a brief chance to recover. It was a sensible thing, not that that would mean much to some fools. She took deep, calming breaths and tried to stay alert.

Shellenas was no fool, not like some of the other men, but this was a bad night and he might react unpredictably seeing her stand seemingly idle. Best to focus his mind on other ideas, such as when they might expect help to arrive.

“I doubt the messenger got through,” Shellenas said. He ran his fingers through the stubble of his beard. “I would have expected a troop yesterday afternoon since he left before dawn. We would know by now if they had captured him. Maybe he did get through and nobody is free to come here. There could be trouble elsewhere.” His eyes continued to roam the walls. They both knew the defense was very thin now that some had been drawn away to fight the fire. One poorly coordinated night attack by the raiders had already been bloodily repulsed; Shellenas clearly expected another.

“Maybe we are the diversion,” Corinn muttered, more to herself than to him. “Attack two places, see which one gets help, and take the other. When the defenders march to retake the lost holding, take the first one as well and strike deeper, maybe catching the relief column between two forces.”

Shellenas turned and stared incredulously at her. “How ... how did you know that?” His eyes narrowed suspiciously. She spoke of a warrior’s ideas.

Corinn thought fast. How could she know that? What would he believe? She didn’t know where that foolish utterance came from. It had just popped out of the void of what had once been her memories. Wake up, idiot, she chided herself. Slips like that can get you burned.

“Herding chickhawkens,” she answered, spying one of the wretched birds scratching in the dirt as it searched for its breakfast. “You pick out the one you want, you make like you’re going for another, then you grab the one you really wanted all along. Often the first bird will relax and you can grab that one, too, and sometimes a third.”

Shellenas laughed shortly. “It is the first time I have heard war likened to catching chickhawkens,” he chuckled, “but what you say makes sense. I remember doing that as a youngster.”

Corinn spit to one side. “If these raiders be all young ones, and young ones be the only ones to waste on a place like this, then maybe they will get bored and go raid somebody else. If these be the older men, like yourself...” Her voice faded to nothing. She didn’t like that thought at all. Neither did Shellenas.

“If these are older warriors, then we are all lost,” he finished for her. “But we can’t see enough by day to find out for sure.”

“Even the young would be some danger,” she said. Again her foolish tongue threatened to get her in huge trouble. Fatigue seemed to have stripped away all of her normal caution. She considered that excuse, and wondered. Maybe it was more than fatigue. She had felt the fear gnawing away at her since those raiders had first shut them up in this place. She stared dully at Shellenas, thoughts chasing themselves through her numbed brain. Say nothing and risk death. Say something and risk death. What keeps my people alive best? She sighed and made a decision.

“One way or another, it is a good bet real warriors be behind the young ones.”

Shellenas surprised her. He did not scowl and turn away, ignoring her. Maybe she made too much sense. Maybe he also hated being locked in this tiny place. Maybe he wondered what she might say next. He nodded slowly. “Warriors or youngsters, if we try to escape, they will hunt us down.”

Corinn looked up at him, her gaze suddenly hard and bright in the half-light of the early dawn. “Better to fight in the open, where you can see your enemy, than be trapped like animals in these buildings as they burn them down one by one. If the place burns, we will have to come out to avoid the flames. It is better to come out at a time of our choosing, not theirs.”

“You sound like my men.”

She wanted to slap the frown off his face. She wanted to shout in his ignorant warrior face that it was better to keep a force active in the field than to lose it defending a worthless pile of crumbling bricks. A force in the field could always regain the pile of bricks. If you tied a force to a town, you risked their destruction in detail with no possibility of gain. She started to shake her head, and stopped. She wanted, more than anything, more than getting out of this deathtrap, almost more than life itself, she wanted to know how she knew that that simple observation was absolutely, inarguably true. She controlled herself, and shrugged, meeting his doubtful gaze with stony indifference.