Giraldi nodded. “Archers!” he growled. “Fire at will!”
All up and down the line, archers set arrows to their bows, their tips pointing up at the sky, standing close to their shield man. Amara watched the nearest young man half draw his bow, then bump his partner with his hip. The legionare knelt, lowering the shield, and the archer drew as he lowered the bow, took quick aim, and loosed at the oncomingMarat. His partner stood up again swiftly, bringing his shield back into position.
All along the wall, the archers began shooting. Each man loosed an arrow every five or six breaths, or even faster. Amara stood beside Giraldi in the one crenellation not occupied by a shieldman and watched the arrows slither through the air and into the oncoming Marat ranks. The deadly aim of the Aleran holders dropped Marat and beast alike with equal ferocity, littering the ground with fresh corpses, making the eager crows swoop and dive in a swarm over the charging horde.
But still the horde came on.
The archers had begun shooting at close to six hundred yards—an incredible distance, Amara knew. They had to have been woodcrafters of nearly a Knight’s skill to manage such a feat. For perhaps a minute, there was no sound but the grunt of archers drawing bows, legionares kneeling and standing again, the droning blare of Marat horns, and the rumbling of thousands of feet.
But when the Marat closed to charging range of the walls, the entire horde erupted in a sudden shout that hit Amara like a wall of cold water—chilling, terrifying in its sheer intensity. At the same moment, the war birds let out a shrill, piercing shriek, terrifying from one such beast, but from the thousands below, the sound almost seemed a living thing all its own. At the same moment, the sun broke the horizon across the distant plains, a sudden harsh light that swept over the top of the battlements first, and made archers flinch and squint as they attempted their next shot.
“Steady!” Giraldi bellowed, voice barely carrying over the din. “Spears!”
The shield-bearing centurions gripped their spears, faces set in a fighting grimace.
Below, the Marat charge hit the first razor-edged defensive spikes the holders had crafted out of the earth itself. Amara watched closely, her heart in her throat. The leaders in the Marat charge began to leap and skip among the spikes, looking for all the world like children playing at hopping games. Behind them leapt their animals. Amara saw some of the Marat, with heavy, knotted cudgels, begin to strike the spikes from the sides, shattering them.
“The ones with clubs,” Amara said. “Tell the archers to aim for them. The longer we can keep the spikes in place, the harder it will be for them to pressure the gate.”
Giraldi grunted and relayed her order up and down the walls, and the archers, instead of firing into the enemy at random, began to pick their targets.
Scaling poles and ropes with hooks fashioned of some kind of antlers or bone began to lift toward the wall. Legionares thrust at the poles with the crossguards of their spears, pushing them away, and some drew their swords to hack at ropes as they came up, while the archers continued to fire on the enemy. Arrows began to flicker up from the horde below, short, heavy arrows launched from oddly shaped bows. One of the archers beside Amara lingered in aiming his shot for too long, and an arrow struck him through both cheeks in a sudden welter of blood. The holder choked, dropping.
“Surgeon!” Amara yelled, and a pair of men on the wall moved quickly to the fallen man, dragging him down before going to work on removing the arrow.
Amara stepped back to the battlements. She swept her gaze over the enemy below, but she couldn’t see anything beyond a horde of Marat and their beasts, so many thousands of them that it was difficult to tell where one left off and the other began.
Giraldi abruptly seized her shoulder and dragged her back from the edge. “Not without a helmet,” he growled.
“I can’t tell what’s happening,” Amara panted. She had to shout to make herself heard. “There are too many of them.”
Giraldi squinted out at the enemy, then drew his head prudently back. “About half of their force is here. They’re holding the rest back, ready to bring them in when they get an opening.”
“Are we holding them?”
“The walls are doing all right,” Giraldi called back, “but the gate is our weak point. They attack the walls only to keep most of our men busy up here. There are too few men at the gate. They’ll force the barricade sooner or later.”
“Why didn’t they craft the gate closed?”
“Can’t,” Giraldi reported. “Engineer told me. No foundation under it for extra wall, and the interior surface is lined with metal.”
From below them there came a crunching sound and a sudden chorus of mixed Aleran war cries of, “Riva for Alera!” and “Calderon for Alera!”
Giraldi glanced out over the field again. “They must have gotten part of the barricade down. The hordemaster has ordered the rest of his troops in, and they’re on the move. They’ll try to put pressure on the gate until the defense breaks.” Giraldi grimaced. “If they don’t repel this first thrust, we’re done for.”
Amara nodded to him. “All right. Almost time, then. I’ll be back up as soon as I can.” She leaned out to look down into the courtyard below. She could just make out the forms of a couple of legionares standing their ground almost within the gate itself, spears thrusting. There were shrieks and cries from below, and Amara’s eyes caught a flash of motion, a dark blade seen for only a second as its wielder spun it out behind him. Pirellus was holding the gate once more.
Amara hurried to the nearest stairs and pelted down them to the courtyard, looking around wildly. Hay from the bales she had crashed through earlier that morning lay scattered everywhere over the courtyard. All but a few of the wounded had been pulled back to the west courtyard, and the last of them were being loaded onto stretchers. She started across the courtyard toward the stables. As she did, she saw Pluvus Pentius emerge from one of the barracks, white-faced and nervous, one hand wrapped around the hand of a little boy, whose hand stretched back behind to another child, and so on, until the truthfinder was leading half a dozen children across the courtyard.
Amara hurried to him. “Pluvus! What are these children still doing here?”
“H-hiding,” Pluvus stuttered. “I found them hiding under their fathers’ bunks in the barracks.”
“Crows,” Amara spat. “Get them to the west courtyard with the wounded. They’re supposed to be fortifying one of the barracks to hold them. And hurry.”
“Yes, right,” Pluvus said, his skinny shoulders tightening. “Come on, children. Hold hands, and stay together.”
Amara dashed to the stables and found Bernard sitting with his back to the wall just inside one of the doors, his eyes half-closed. “Bernard,” she called. “The gate is under attack. They’ll be coming.”