Lord Leon’s great hall was a hive of shouts and pandemonium. The blacksmiths and craftsmen inveighed against the assembly-line system Professor Temerin had set up with Eric’s help, claiming it beneath them as masters to be reduced to such rote work, while the guard forces kept demanding more carpenters for trebuchet construction. Just about the only thing going well were drills under Lord Leon’s and Lord Granat’s field marshals. If nothing else, the Druza Freeholders were good at fighting. “Now, the downsides of decentralization become apparent,” Temerin had mused.
This all was interrupted by the banging of oaken double-doors as a black-haired man in fancy robes stormed inside, fury on his face. Eric recognized him as Osral, minor lord of the valley north of Highwater Mountain. The first place which Dulane would invade.
“You are ABANDONING my lands?” he thundered, halting before Lord Leon’s great table.
“We have no choice.” Leon stood. “We must make our stand at Forefathers’ Walls, only then is there is hope of containing Dulane’s forces.”
“Your fortress.” Osral spat. “I thought we had a pact of peace.”
“And we do. Which is why you must take everything of value you possibly can from the Cleft Valley and get behind my walls!”
“I will do no such thing!” The other conversations had stopped, all eyes fixed on the two lords. “You must send us supplies; stone bricks and your new starman weapons, so we may mount a defense at our pass!”
“Which has two separate routes, at different elevations. There is no time to set a defense, my fortification has been ready for decades!”
“My people will not flee our homes! We must fight!”
“You’ll die! We need every man here, gathered as one!”
“Isn’t there some sort of arrangement we can come to?” Temerin asked. “Where Lords Leon and Granat will give you money to rebuild in exchange for joining their defense? Or new lands in their Holds?”
“We are not filthy merchants, starman! Our ancestors, mine and those of my pledged landsmen, tamed that valley by their sweat and blood. We will not be driven from it to the lands of indifferent southerners! Consider this: if indeed we fought at your fortress, my lands burning before me, and failed, Dulane would have nothing to stop him from proceeding forth to ravage and conquer the Freeholds as he wished!”
“A strategic risk, yes, but we have no other choice,” answered Selva. “If we stand together, he must beat us all at once or none at all. But apart...he will crush you, and without your assistance we may fall.”
“No. We will beat him, and you—” he jabbed a finger at Lord Leon, “—will cry into that shiny cup of yours when you remember it was not Highwater walls, or starman weapons, that broke the evils of Arztilla, but the valor of Cleftsmen.”
“Then I wish you great valor,” Leon said. “You’ll be needing it.”
With mere days to go, the defenses were only beginning to be placed at Forefathers’ Walls. Gryphon scouts from the aviaries of Lord Leon and the Beastspeaking Temple had kept a close eye on the Arztillan army’s movements, but it still felt too rushed. Impossible for it not to, Eric thought. With just one extra month, he could’ve had gunpowder enough for a few primitive firearms, but as things stood he’d only been able to improve the crossbows somewhat. The latest models—produced in tandem with the Model One until shown satisfactory—now used a windlass for reloading. If they survived this, he wondered what effects their meddling might have. A crossbow offered ranged lethality without the expert training of a longbowman; maybe the Freeholds would democratize further as peasants gained the ability to resist exploitative landsmen. Or perhaps he was being too optimistic, and it would become a tool for large armies in service of warlords. Technology-proliferation restrictions, heartless though they seemed, did have a basis in fact.
But that was the next problem. First, they had to beat this one.
Forefathers’ Walls was located at the end of a mountain pass which ran back to the city, sitting where it opened up to the verdant fields of Cleft Valley. Below a square citadel, its main walls formed an arc of weathered grey stone, in the center of which an arch held a sturdy gate and its portcullis, another starman invention hastily retrofitted. Through it streamed crowd after crowd of refugees, peasants with sacks and babies on their backs, carts of grain and bony donkeys, all driven south by Arztilla’s relentless advance. Any man among them who showed skill with weapons, or a craft useful to Highwater Mountain’s defense, was offered enlistment in exchange for food and lodgings.
Finally, the dreadful day approached. After nightfall, Eric paced atop the walls between the trebuchets with their arms pointed starward, and casks of water placed between battlements in case of fires. On the grounds inside were platforms for companies of crossbowmen.
“Trouble sleeping?” The creak of a wooden staircase behind him announced Professor Temerin’s arrival.
“I didn’t even try,” Eric said. The night wasn’t chilly; he shivered anyways. Down at the far end of the valley were more lantern-lights, Lord Osral preparing his defense as well. The women, children, and aged of the Cleft, along with its more sensible men, continued a slow trickle through the fortress gate.
“Nor did I.” Objects clinked in Temerin’s hands, he held up a small glass and bottle of vodka. “Been saving this, figured we’d wind up in something of this sort.”
Eric rarely drank, he accepted a full glass anyways. Temerin took a swig from the bottle. “I just...wish there was another way. Some peaceful option, where no one has to fight.”
“I doubt you’d like it if there was. Back in these kinds of times on Terra, there were no laws of war, no concept of civilian versus soldier. There’s a theory in history, that as a society progresses it can afford better morality—ancient Greece and Rome could hardly have survived without slavery, so they accepted the institution and came up with all sorts of rationalizations for it. As did Ancient America, before its first civil war. Then, just like industrialization gave a solution to slavery, later came vatmeat, and animal farming also fell out of favor, branded unconscionable torment of living beings.”
“Do you believe that?” Eric asked.
“Maybe.” Temerin burped. “True, in many ways our moral sense of today is better than that of ancient Greece, or post-industrial Terra before wormholes, but we are also possessed of ever more destructive means—nukes, radiation beams, relativistic kill vehicles—and we continually misuse them. Would you rather have lived in Hispania a year before Rome fell, or in the Second Interstellar Period a year before the planetary bombardments? Perhaps it is a wash.”
“Hey, you guys drinking without me?” Cobb called up from the ground.
Eric poured another glass. “Join the party!”
