[SPEAKER_00]: In the last hour of the day, when the sun had gone down, behind the western shoulder of the mountains, and the light lay long and golden across the fields.
[SPEAKER_00]: The valley of Kasivan was as fair a place as any in that country.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Stairin Halva looked upon it from the high wall, as a man looks upon something he loves, and sorrowfully does not expect to see again.
[SPEAKER_00]: The valley was a long and narrow cliff in the Highlands, and its floor was given over, holy to grain.
[SPEAKER_00]: Terrace fell below Terrace in broad green steps, each bounded by low walls of Graystone, that had been laid down in the years of the grandfather's, of the grandfather's of the men who now tended them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So old that none could say who had first set them there, and each Terrace was heavy
[SPEAKER_00]: Among the fields stood the silos, tall and round, and as the light failed, they held the last of the gold a little longer than the ground below, so that for a while their metal roofs seemed like lamps lit against the coming of the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: And over all of it, drifting up even to the height where how vast would, their hung the good smell of the harvest, the dry sweetness of cut grain, the dust of the threshing, and beneath these the deep and ancient smell of the earth itself, which had given all that it had to give, and waited now only for the gathering.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a smell that Halva had known since he was a child, and he had never in his life grown weary of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: For it was the smell of home, and home was the only thing he had ever truly desired.
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind the valley and above it, north and south, rose the great cliffs that hemmed it in.
[SPEAKER_00]: They went up sheer and bare into the low clouds that seldom lifted from the high country.
[SPEAKER_00]: And down their grave faces, round-long streaks of red, where the iron in the stone had wept with the reins of untold years.
[SPEAKER_00]: No man could go around them.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the old days some had tried, and in days more desperate still.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the valley kept no memory of any who had come through, for the loose stone of the heights gave way beneath the feet, and the rock above was smooth and pitiless, and whoever fell from it fell far.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no road over the mountains, and no road around them.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only the one way, through the narrow throat, where the two great arms of stone drew close together and all but met, and across that throat, from cliff to cliff, they stood the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ferris gate, it was called.
[SPEAKER_00]: Though it had not been a true gate for a long time, no war had been waged here in many many years.
[SPEAKER_00]: It stood across the gap as though the mountain had raised it out of itself, rather than the hands of men.
[SPEAKER_00]: One vast rampart of dark stone and ferricrete flung from war to war of the valley,
[SPEAKER_00]: and rooted so deeply into the living rock at either end that no eye could find the place where the work of men left off and the mountain began.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wall and mountain became one thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: One long refusal laid across the only road into the last green country for a hundred leagues or so.
[SPEAKER_00]: 60 feet it rose to the parapet where Halvar kept his watch, and so broad was it, at the foot the three men might have walked a breast within its belly, and never brushed a shoulder against the stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everywhere upon it lay the marks of great age.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ferracrete had darkened to the colour of old iron, and from the bones of metal buried within it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rust showed down the face in long red stains, so that the whole grim length of the war seemed to bleed slowly, as it had bled for a thousand years and more.
[SPEAKER_00]: The slots cut for the gunners of forgotten days had been worn smooth at their lips by wind, and by the passing of hands, and here and there, and then everywhere, the old stone work had been patched, and the patches patched again, by the small and half-hearted labors of a hundred generations, who had mented the war, because their fathers had
[SPEAKER_00]: For the wall had been built to hold back an army.
[SPEAKER_00]: In some war so far back in the years that not even its name had come down to living memory.
[SPEAKER_00]: That army was long since gone to dust, whoever they had been, and since then the wall had held back nothing at all, save the wind that came down cold from the high passes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had become a thing men simply lived beneath, as they lived beneath the weather and the turning of the seasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: A gray line drawn along the edge of the world, always there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet on this night, after all its idle centuries, the old war was called upon once more to do the thing it had been made for.
[SPEAKER_00]: For an enemy had come against it at last,
[SPEAKER_00]: They were gathered out beyond the throat in the failing light, and they were for the most part, and to help our sorrow, the valleys own people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thousands of them, they were farmers from other parts who had gone hungry, through one hard winter too many.
[SPEAKER_00]: folk from production cities that had rejected their hardships, and wanderers of the outlands who had nothing left in the world to lose, and even men who had once stood upon this very wall and had since cast their loyalty away.
[SPEAKER_00]: For long months their bitterness had grown, fed by hunger, and by hard usage, and by the slow cold certainty that the great imperium for which they labored neither new nor cared that they lived at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: And into that bitterness, there had come certain holy men, preachers of a new and darker faith, who spoke gently of a better world, and less gently of the blood that must be
[SPEAKER_00]: And these had taken the people's despair and given it shape and a voice and a thing to reach for.
[SPEAKER_00]: Frit was a simple truth, and the preachers made it simpler still, that whoever held the wall held the valley, and whoever held the valley held the grain, and whoever held the grain held in his closed hand, the very lives of half a subsector, all the far factory worlds and the void stations, and the teeming cities that had never once wondered where their daily bread was grown.
[SPEAKER_00]: and would wonder, at nothing else, on the day it ceased to come, and so they had come for the food.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the end they had come for the very same reason that Halva now stood upon the wall to keep them from it, because folk must eat to live, and it was these fields that fed them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Down below, upon the safe side of the wall, the last of the valley was making its slow way home.
[SPEAKER_00]: The farm workers and their families went back along the valley road in a long dark line, with their carts and their beasts and their children.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the few small things that people snatch up when there is little time to choose, drawing away from the throat and deeper into the green cleft, where the shadow of the keep might shelter them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And where, if any mercy remained in the world, nothing worse would find them.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, watch them go, and he knew that weary walk well, for he had walked it himself at the ending of a thousand days of labor.
[SPEAKER_00]: The slow, trudger folk, who have given all the daylight to the ground, and have kept back only the darkness for themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Near the end of the line, a woman went by with a child upon her hip and a small lamp swinging in her free hand, and something in the way she carried herself, the set of her shoulders beneath her burden, courted his heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: For he thought he knew her, from Fenn's hollow perhaps, or from one of the little silo villages out past the third terrace.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some soul he had once hauled grain beside, or shared a mug of thin beer with, on a feast day, whose name he could no longer bring to mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not call out to her.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would not have known what words to send.
[SPEAKER_00]: He only watched until the road bent away, and the dusk took her from his sight, and then he turned again to the dark beyond the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: His hands lay quiet upon the cold stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were a grain hauler's hands, broad in the palm and thick of the knuckle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the shoulders behind them had been made strong by a whole life of lifting.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sacks and the crates, and the long dead weight of the laden paniers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Load upon load, year upon year, until the labour was written into the very frame of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good hands for the holding of a lion he's opposed.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it came to that, steady hands and slow to tremble.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not a brave man as he understood the word, nor a devout one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the small ambition he had once carried, he had set down and forgotten, long ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wished for one thing only, which was to live out this night and go home again, down
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not think that he would.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had made his peace with that already, quietly and without any words, as a man makes his peace with the coming of a long winter that he may not see the end of.
[SPEAKER_00]: All along the wall walk about him, stirred the small sounds of men making ready for battle, and hoping in their hearts that the battle would not come.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere down the line, a heavy gun was being fed its belt of ammunition, link by link, with a slow clicking like the ticking of a great clock, and the clack of the charge handle being racked to load the first round.
[SPEAKER_00]: Boots scraped upon the stone, a crate of power cells came dragging along the walk and was set down with a grunt and a soft curse that carried no real anger in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over everything lay the sharp blue smell of gun oil.
[SPEAKER_00]: and threaded through it, thin and gray, came the smoke of the incense where the voxman knelt at his prayers, so that all the length of that cold parapet smelled at once of both the engine and the altar, of the two things that men will turn to when they have run out of better comforts.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dusk air was cold at that height, colder than ever.
[SPEAKER_00]: It fell upon the valley floor, and it moved along the wall, in a slow when steady stream that carried the scent of stone, an iron, and the coming of the night.
[SPEAKER_00]: However drew a long breath of it, and held it a moment, and let it go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And far down in the dark below, the drums had not yet begun to beat.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not alone upon that stretch of the war, though a man keeping such a watch might well have felt himself the last soul in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were nine of them in all upon that length of the parapet, above the flank of the gate, a squad of the valley's own levy, the eighty-eighth of the Kasevan rifles, and they were nearly all of them farmers and silo hands and haulers, such as Hauva himself, taken up out of the fields not two years gone, and given guns, and a great coat of peace, and told that they were soldiers
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew one another, as men, know their neighbors.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew whose village lay in which fold of the hills, and whose father had quarrel with hooves over the boundary of a barley field a generation back.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was a part of what made the waiting so hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: For there is a particular grief in standing to arms beside men, you have known since boyhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the enemy at the wall wears the same faces as the friends behind it,
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the sergeant who held them together, as the keystone holds an arch, and his name was Octavian Brook.
[SPEAKER_00]: He came along the wall walk now in the last of the light, moving from man to man without haste, and there was a sense that he had done this thing many times before, and had long since ceased to be afraid of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was old enough to have been farther to most of them, for he had truly fought in the years before, ever this cult had gathered in the outlands, while the younger men about him had done little but drill.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stopped beside Halva at a moment and looked out through the slot into the gathering dark, and said nothing of any weight, only a low word about the cold and the long night coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then he moved on.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Halva felt the better for his passing, as men always did.
[SPEAKER_00]: About the sergeant shoulders, noted through the straps of his gear, their hunger faded strip of cloth that had once borne the colours of the regiment, and now bore little more than the memory of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: One thin and soft as an old prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was no true banner, and no hero would have owned it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a habit more than a standard, a thing brook had carried so long that the carrying of it had become a part of who he was.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not speak of it, and no man asked, where the sergeant went by, the corporal did not turn to watch him, for the corporal was at his prayers, him ran voss, knelt a little apart with his rifle, laid across his knees, and his fierce eyes half closed, and his lips moved without cease over the words of the old devotions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was that in his face, which the others did not have, and could not borrow.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was younger than Brooke by a good many years, and where the long waiting bowed the shoulders of lesser men, and pressed them down.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seemed rather to lift the corporal up, so that he stood the taller for it, straight backed in certain, kindled from within, by a faith that was hard, and bright, and wholly real.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether that faith would be worth anything before the night was out.
[SPEAKER_00]: No man could yet say, and however, who had no such fire in him, did not envy it exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he looked at Voss, the way a cold man looks at another man's coat, and wondered what it must be to be so sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Between the two of them, and forever in the way of both, went the boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: William Sahn was his name, and he was younger than the law allowed a soldier to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: whether he had lied about his years to the master offices, or whether some village desperate to fill its levee had lied for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one knew, and it no longer mattered.
[SPEAKER_00]: He went up and down the line with his rations clutched in his hand, and half forgotten.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two wound up to eat, offering his bread to this man, and that, as though the giving of it might settle him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his eyes were
[SPEAKER_00]: However, took a piece of the offered bread when it came to him, not because he wanted it, but because he saw that the boy needed the small comfort of being of use to someone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, a quiet word of thanks, and the boy flushed with a foolish gladness that was painful to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was frightened, was willing, frightened right down to the bone.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he was eager past all sense in the way that only the very young can be, both at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was out of his depth as a child is out of its depth in deep water, not yet understanding how far down the bottom lay.
[SPEAKER_00]: However found that he had come to watch for the boy, without ever having decided to.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way a man will keep half an eye on a lamp, he does not want to see Gutter out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Further along, where the wall bent, the voxman Joshua Cal was hunched over his set, with the headpiece pressed one ear, and out of him there came a low unbroken murmur that never quite stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: Part of it was the working of the vox.
[SPEAKER_00]: His careful corollings out into the crackle and hiss, his patient asking after the relief column that all of them knew to be days distant upon the roads.
[SPEAKER_00]: and part of it was prayer, so woven together with the rest that a man standing near could not always tell where the one left off and the other began.
[SPEAKER_00]: He asked the empty air for aid, and the empty air gave him back only its long silence, and still he asked, murmuring his litanies into the dark between one hopeless transmission and the next.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the squad's one threat of connection to a command that could do nothing for them that night, and there was something in the ceaselessness of his voice that was a comfort and a sorrow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Both like the sound of rain that will not stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: so the light drains slowly out of the sky, and the men of the 88th check their gear and shared out their bread and spoke to one another in the low voices that men use in the last quiet before a hard thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And how vast did a mongon and was glad in a small and worthless way of their nearness.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the sergeant, coming back along the walk, who spoke at last of the thing that lay heaviest upon them, and he spoke of it plainly, as was his way, without any dressing of the words to make them easier.
[SPEAKER_00]: A little way along the parapet, toward the northern cliff, there was a place where the war was not whole.
[SPEAKER_00]: The old facing there had crumbled worse than elsewhere, gone soft and treacherous with the weeping of the rust and the labour of the centuries.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at long last the engineers had come and begun to cut it back, to strip away the rotten stone, until they should reach the sound rock beneath, and could build the wall up true again.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the work had begun too late and gone too slowly.
[SPEAKER_00]: As such work does, and the enemy had come down upon the valley while the repair was yet unfinished.
[SPEAKER_00]: and so they stood in the one place where the war most needed to be strong, a stretch of scaffolding, and raw cutstone, and temporary timber bracing, half open to the night, the facing peeled away, and the good rock not yet risen to take its place.
[SPEAKER_00]: There, said Brooke, and he lifted his chin toward it, and did not raise his voice.
[SPEAKER_00]: that's the soft tooth in the jaw.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they've the wit to find it, that's where they'll come.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said it not as a man crying alarm, but as a man naming a fact that must be lived with.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way a farmer names the low corner of a field where the flood always gathers.
[SPEAKER_00]: so we'll not let them have the wit.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll keep their eyes on us, and their heads down, and their minds off the mending.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked round at them all in the last of the light, and there was no fear in his weathered face, only a great and steadying weiriness.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's held a thousand years and more, he said of the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can hold one more night,
[SPEAKER_00]: No one answered him, for there was nothing to answer, but however looked toward the broken place, the scaffold pale against the darkening stone, and marked it well in his mind, and something cold and quiet settled in his chest beside the piece he had already made there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And along the wall, the men fell silent one by one, and turned their faces outward to the dark, and waited.
[SPEAKER_00]: Full dark came down upon the throat of the valley, and with the dark came the fires, and by the light of the fires, however looked at last upon the thing that had come against them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not an army.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the first thought that rose in him, as he leaned into the cold slot, and gazed down upon the ground beyond the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was a thought that brought him no comfort, for there are things worse than armies.
[SPEAKER_00]: An army has a shape to it, and an order, and a will that runs down through it from its head to its feet, like the nerves in a body.
[SPEAKER_00]: An army may be beaten for it may be broken.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the thing below was no such audit thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a tide.
[SPEAKER_00]: It filled the whole floor of the throat from cliff to cliff, and spilled back beyond the reach of the firelight into the greater dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: A vast and restless multitude, without edge or end, that however could not have numbered had he counted all the night through.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were the discontented and the wronged and the desperate, the great mass of those who had labored all their lives and been given hunger for their wages, and who had come now in their thousands to take by force the bread that had been denied them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They carried torches, and the light of them was a terrible, and a beautiful thing to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: All across the floor of the throat, the flames burned and streamed in the night wind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thousands upon thousands of small fires held aloft, so that the whole dark tide seems strewn with embers, or scattered over with fallen stars.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by that leaping red light, Halva could see their faces turned up toward the wall, and
[SPEAKER_00]: And out of those thousands of throats, their rows are chanting, low at first and then swelling, a rough and rhythmic crying out of two words over and over into the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: they cried, and blood, bread, and blood, bread, and blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: As though the two had become one thing in their minds, as though they could no longer tell the hunger of the belly from the hunger of the wounded heart, and meant now to feed the both of them at once, and in the same red hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: Among them, and above them, moved the holy men, and it was they who shaped the crying into a weapon.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, could pick them out here and there upon carts and heap stones, and the shoulders of the crowd, dark figures with their arms flung wide.
[SPEAKER_00]: and though their words did not carry whole up to the height of the war, the working of them was plain enough to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where a holy man passed, the torches lifted higher, and the chanting swelled, and the tides surged forward against itself with a fierce a heat.
[SPEAKER_00]: They took the despair of that great multitude, which might else have gutted and gone cold in the long night, and they breathed upon it, and fed it, and fanned it up into a devotion to darker powers, a hard and burning faith that asked no reasons and would not be reasoned with, that had taken all the old griefs of these people, and forged them into a single edge, and turned that edge against the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a fearful thing, however thought, to see hunger given a religion.
[SPEAKER_00]: A hungry man may be pitted, and a hungry man may even be fed.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a man who has been taught that his hunger is wholly, will not be turned aside by pity, or by bread.
[SPEAKER_00]: But only by death, his own, or another.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were armed as such a host is armed, which is to say, with everything and with nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: here and there among the tide the firelight caught the dull gleam of a looted last gun, or the black iron of an auto gun, taken from some raided depot or some fallen soldier, and these were few, but they were deadly, and however marked where they were as well as he could.
[SPEAKER_00]: But most of that great multitude bore no soldiers weapons at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had brought instead the tools of their labour turned now to a darker use.
[SPEAKER_00]: The flares with which they had thrashed their grain, the long knives and cleavours of the slaughter yard, the hooks and blades and heavy practical edges of the farm and the field.
[SPEAKER_00]: And behind the throng, dim in the shifting light, their loom the great engines they had made.
[SPEAKER_00]: The catapults cobbled together out of the torsion gear of harvest a rigs, made to fling not cheves now, but stone and fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: the ram's slung on chains beneath frames of silo timber, the crude and cunning devices of folk who knew machines and had turned all their knowing toward the breaking of the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the arming of a people, rather than the arming of a host, and there was something in that which struck Hauva harder than any ranked and ordered soldiery could have done.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then the drums began.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came out of the dark somewhere deep in the body of the tide, and they were slow, and they were deep, and Halva felt the first stroke of them in the stone beneath his hands, before ever the sound of it reached his ear.
[SPEAKER_00]: along silence, boom, another.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no haste in them and no hurry, and that was the dreadful thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not quicken, and they did not clamour.
[SPEAKER_00]: They only beat on, and on, with the awful rhythm of a thing that knows it has all the night, and all the numbers, and all the time in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Boom.
[UNKNOWN]: Boom.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the sound of something vast drawing breath.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the slow heartbeat of the tide made audible, and with every stroke of it, the chanting rose to meet the beat and fell away again into the trough between bread and blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: bread and blood, until the two sounds together, seem less like the noise of men than like some great and terrible engine of the earth itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Breathing and beating in the dark below the wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then, for a long while, nothing more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every man upon the war came to know it before the night was done, not the fires, and not the chanting, and not even the slow, dreadful drums, but the waiting that stretched out behind them, hour upon hour, taught as a wire drawn near to breaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tide did not come, it gathered, and it burned.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it beat its drums, and it made no move against the war, and so the men of the 88th stood at their slots with their guns grown heavy in their hands, and their hearts wound tighter with every hollow drumbeat, and had nothing to do with all their fear but hold it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dredd is a thing that a man can meet when it comes, but Dredd that will not come, Dredd that only draws nearer and nearer and never arrives.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where's at the soul as water wears at stone?
[SPEAKER_00]: How vast did among the rest, and bore it as they bore it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And somewhere in that time he asked himself the question that he had never yet been able to answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: He
[SPEAKER_00]: and the valley road beyond it, and the dark was wide enough to swallow one grey coated man who slipped away toward home.
[SPEAKER_00]: And no one he thought would ever truly blame him.
[SPEAKER_00]: For better men than he would run before this night was through.
[SPEAKER_00]: and yet he knew, with a certainty that went deeper than any reason he could give for it, that he would not.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could not have said why.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not for the Emperor who he had never seen and could not imagine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was not for any glory, in which he did not believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was something smaller and closer than these, and harder to put a name to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only that he could not ask another man to stand, and hold the wall if he himself were not willing to stand beside him, and that these were the fields that had fed his people, and might feed them yet again, and that home lay it his back, and this, whatever it was, was the price of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not understand it, he only knew it, the way he knew the smell of the grain,
[SPEAKER_00]: The drums changed at last in the deepest hour of the night, and the change was the blowing of a horn.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came up out of the dark heart of the tide, a single long, deep note that was nothing like the drums.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lower than the drums and longer, a great mournful bellowing that seemed to roll along the floor of the throat, and break against the foot of the wall and climate.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he did not need to be told what it meant.
[SPEAKER_00]: No man on the parapet did.
[SPEAKER_00]: The note had scarcely begun to fade before the whole vast multitude below took it up in a roar, and the slow patient beating of the drums broke all at once into a furious hammering, and the tide that had gathered and burned and waited through all those dreadful hours came forward at the wall like the sea coming in.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came without order and without cunning.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they came in such numbers that neither order nor cunning was needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the terror of it, and the pity of it both.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not so much attack the war as throw themselves against it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wave upon wave, casting their own bodies at the ancient stone, as though they meant to bury it under the weight of their dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: The foremost of them reached the foot of the wall and could go no further, and still those behind pressed on, and those behind them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until the whole base of the rampart was choked with a heaving press of folk, crushed together in the dark, trampling their own fallen underfoot, crying out their two words to the unanswering stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: bread and blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had made a weapon of their own great number, the only weapon that so ragged a host could truly wield, and they spent it now, without stint and without mercy.
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all upon themselves, all the while the men of the war fire down into the mass, it was not elegant work, but it was necessary, and many of the enemy fell
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere back in the dark, the harvester catapults loosed all along the throat, and the night above the tide was filled all of a sudden with things that flew.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some were stone, great broken lumps of rubble torn up from whom you were.
[SPEAKER_00]: That came down upon the parapet, and the wallwalk with a crash that a man felt in his teeth, and where they struck, they left the stone, starred and cracked, and sometimes a man broken beneath them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But some were on fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cultists had made fire bombs of whatever they had, of Promethium and Lampoyle and rag and clay, and these the catapults flung up in long, burning arcs against the last gray-light
[SPEAKER_00]: so that they seemed for a moment, like slow comets crossing the sky, where they fell they burst, and in the bursting, each one threw out a brief and blinding flower of light, a flash of white and gold, and streaming embers that lit the wall and the faces on its stark as noon day, for the space of a single heartbeat, and then was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: leaving the dark darker than before, and a pool of clinging flame burning where it had struck.
[SPEAKER_00]: All up and down the wall, these flowers of fire bloom and died, bloom and died.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by their coming and going, the whole length of the parapet flickered between blind night and sudden day.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that Halva seemed to see the battle in broken pieces.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each lit fragment torn from the darkness on either side of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Below, at the great outer gate, the rams began their work.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, could not see them from where he stood, but he could hear them, and feel them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The slow, ponderous swing of the great Timber slung engines, the cultists had built.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then the deep booming shock as they drove home against the ancient gate, a sound so vast and so low that it came up through the wall itself and into the souls of his boots and the bones of his legs, boom, and a pause while the beam was hold back, boom,
[SPEAKER_00]: It was almost the rhythm of the drums again.
[SPEAKER_00]: That slow dreadful patience, but heavier now, and nearer, and aimed.
[SPEAKER_00]: With every stroke the old gate grown in its seized runners, and the men above the gate looked at one another and said nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then out of the tide, the ladders rose, they came up all along the wall, crude things lashed together out of timber and card frames, and whatever wood the valley could yield.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they swade and toppled, and were raised again, and where they touched the parapet, the cultists came swarming up them like ants upon a fallen bow.
[SPEAKER_00]: grapples flew up out of the dark, hooks of bent iron on ropes and chains, and caught upon the stone lip of the wall, and down at the ends of them the climbers began to hold themselves up, hand over hand, a foot at a time, out of the firelight, and into the dark beneath the parapet, and worst of all, groaning and lurching through the press to what the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came, a tower, they had built it, God alone knew how in the outlands, in the long months of their gathering.
[SPEAKER_00]: Upon the running chassies of a great silo elevator, one of the tall machines that hauled the grain up to the mouths of the siloes.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they had raised upon it, a rickety fighting platform of timber and plate, and now they drove it forward on its screaming tracks through the mud, and the bodies toward the flank of the gate, swaying so far with each lurch that it seemed at every moment about to topple, and never quite toppling.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, said Sergeant Brooke, in a voice that did not rise and did not shake, and needed to do neither, for every man had been waiting on the word.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now lads, give it them, and the wall answered, all along the parapet, the defenders rose up in their places, and leveled their guns down into the seething dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the night was split from end to end, with the crack and flare of mass-dlands fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: A great ragged volley that lit the underside of the smoke a sudden red.
[SPEAKER_00]: However fired with the rest, he had marked his stretch of the wall long before, the latter heads in the grapple lines within his reach.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he laid his shots into the climbers there as they came, and saw them fall, saw the foremost man on a ladder, throw up his arms and go backward into the press below, and the next after him, and the next, until the ladder for a moment carried none, but the dead sliding slowly down it.
[SPEAKER_00]: up and down the wall it was the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: The volleys tore into the tide where it was thickest, where the ladders clustered, and the grapples bit, and the cultists died in their scores and their hundreds, tumbling from the ropes, falling from the ladder heads, dropping where they stood at the foot of the wall, to be trampled under the feet of those who came behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was slaughter, plain and simple, and for a while it seemed to however that no host of flesh could bear it, that surely they must break and fall away from the wall, as the wave falls back from the rock, but they did not break, that was the thing he had not truly understood until that night, and would never forget after it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had no thought of breaking, where ten fell upon the ladders, twenty took their places, where a grapple line was cut, and its climbers cast down, three new hooks flew up to take its place, and the great mass of the foot of the war, neither wavered nor thinned, but grew, fed endlessly from the dark behind, an ocean that could lose a
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, despite the valleys, despite the dreadful reaping the guns made of them, the tide came up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here and there along the parapet, and then in more places, and then in many, the first of the cultists reach the top of the wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: Heave themselves over the ancient stone lip, with a torch in one hand, and a cleaver, or a flail, or a stolen blade in the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: wild-eyed and screaming their two words and fell upon the defenders where they stood.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there was no more firing in valleys, no more shooting down into an enemy below, but only the close and desperate work of the wallwalk, man against man in the dark and the leaping firelight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halvar met it as it came to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had no memory afterward of deciding to do the things he did.
[SPEAKER_00]: His hands did them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The broad, slow, steady hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he only followed where they led.
[SPEAKER_00]: He fired until the Lars gun clicked empty in his grip, and then his fingers found the spent power cell, and stripped it out and had a fresh one home, before his mind had told them to.
[SPEAKER_00]: The drill of a thousand grey mornings, doing now what fear alone could never have taught him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He fired again.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was aware in some far corner of himself of how the gun had changed in his hands since the fighting began.
[SPEAKER_00]: How a weapon that had weighed nothing at all in the first mad minutes now dragged at his arms with every lift, growing heavier by imperceptible
[SPEAKER_00]: Until the raising of it to his shoulder had become a small labour in itself, lode after lode, like the hauling of the grain.
[SPEAKER_00]: The barrel shroud grew hot beneath his left hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: The smell of the fighting closed over him, and became the whole world, the sharp wreak of the power cells, and the scorched air smell of the last bolts, the greasy black stink of burning promethium, where the fire bombs still gotered along the wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: The smoke that stunned the eyes and clawed the throat, and beneath it all, sweetish and dreadful.
[SPEAKER_00]: the smell of the blood and the burning of the fallen.
[SPEAKER_00]: He breathed it and coughed and fired and reloaded and stood his ground upon the stone and around him the men of the 88th did the same and the war held and the long night was only begun.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a kind of fighting that the songs do not tell of, because there is nothing in it that a song can use.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has no shape and no turning point and no single deed that a man might set apart from the rest and remember.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is only the same dreadful act done over and over, without pause and without meaning, until the doing of it uses a man up.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the fighting upon the wallwalk, in the long middle hours of the night, after the volleys had ended and the tide had come over the parapet, and Halva was in the midst of it, and lost himself in it, and could not afterward have told how long it went on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Time came apart into its pieces.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only the next man over the wall, and the next, and the next, each one rising up out of the dark, and the firelight with a blade or a brand or a stolen gun, and the clothes and ugly work of putting each one down before he could do the same to Halva, or to the men beside him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw a man come at him with a threshing flayer, who might have been his own neighbor from three farms down the terrace road.
[SPEAKER_00]: a slow-moving man with a farmer's hands, and however shot him, because the flail was already swinging, and watched him for, and there was no triumph in it, and no anger only a sick and hollow grief that had no time to be felt before the next was upon him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He killed a woman who could have been a girl he had danced with at a harvest feast a dozen years gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: He killed a great bearded man who wept as he came on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Weeping and screaming the two worlds together, bread and blood, with the tears shining on his face in the firelight.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not soldiers.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had no more business on that war than Halva had had 18 months before.
[SPEAKER_00]: When he too had been only a hauler with grain dust under his nails.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the knowing of that did not stay his hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a swung cleaver will open a man whether the arm behind it is a soldiers or a farmers.
[SPEAKER_00]: but it lay upon his heart like a stone and it grew heavier with every life he took.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way the gun grew heavier in his arms.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the strange and terrible intimacy of that night.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, and many of his enemies were the same people, sundered only by which side of the war they had been standing on, when the hunger came.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they killed one another in the dark with the tools of the harvest over the grain that should have fed them on.
[SPEAKER_00]: These people had been manipulated by the dark holy men, who had seen an opportunity to satisfy their chaos gods.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sadly, these lives were being used as a tool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Down the line, the voxman cow was still at his set.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had never left it through all of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was cow's place, and cow's duty, to keep the squads one thread to the world beyond the wall, and he kept it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hunched over the vox in the lee of the headpiece pressed to his ear, calling out into the crackling dark and getting back only the crackling dark, and praying in the spaces between.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, could hear him, even over the din, or thought he could, the low and broken murmur of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The calling's out and the litanies were so woven together now that they had become one long petition.
[SPEAKER_00]: asking the empty air and the absent command, and the far emperor, all at once for the same thing, for aid, for relief, for someone to come.
[SPEAKER_00]: He asked it without despair, as he had asked it all night, as though the asking itself were a thing worth doing whether or not it was ever answered.
[SPEAKER_00]: And perhaps it was, however did not know, he only knew that the sound of kills voice going on beneath the battle was a small, strange comfort, like the murmur of rain that will not stop, and that some part of him had come to lean upon it without ever meaning to.
[SPEAKER_00]: A cultist had come up over the wall behind them, in the dark stretch where a fire bomb had got it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this one had, among all that host of farm tools, a stolen or to gun.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did not know how to use it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the whole of it, in the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the small and stupid and unbearable truth of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not aim for he did not know how to aim.
[SPEAKER_00]: He only held the thing at his hip, and hauled upon its trigger, and let it hammer, and buck, and empty itself in one long, tearing burst.
[SPEAKER_00]: sweeping wild across the wallwalk at anything, and everything, and nothing, at the dark in the firelight and the shapes of men, screaming as he did it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the path of that blind spray, hunched over his vocks with his head bound, and the headpiece at his ear, and a prayer half finished upon his lips, was Joshua Kelp,
[SPEAKER_00]: However saw him fall, he saw the murmur stop, there was no cry, no last word, nothing that a song could have used, the low voice that had gone on all through the night simply ceased, in the middle of its asking, as a candle-flame ceases when the draft takes it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kells lumped down over the set that had been his charge and his burden.
[SPEAKER_00]: and lay still, and in the very same instant, the vox itself gave a sharp electric crackle, and dropped away into a long flat hiss of static.
[SPEAKER_00]: Struck through by the same wild burst, or fallen silent for the loss of the hand that attended it.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, never knew, but he heard it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Through all the roar of the fighting, he somehow heard that thin gray hiss rise up with a voice had been, and he understood it.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a single stroke, the squad had lost both its voice and its prayer, both the man who had called for help, and the machine through which help might have come.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the static that took their place said, more plainly than any words, the thing that all of them had known in their hearts since dusk, and none had spoken aloud.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one was coming, no one was on the road.
[SPEAKER_00]: No relief would crest the dark valley to save them in this hour, whatever answer might come at last too late.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only the wall, and the men upon it, and the tide.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were alone, they had always been alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: The vox had only been the last thread of the pretending, and now the thread was cut, and its hissing was the sound of the truth coming in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halva had no time to grieve, and turned back to the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was one among them whom the truth did not touch, or did not break, and that was the corporal.
[SPEAKER_00]: M. Ran Voss fought a little apart down the line, and where the rest of them were being ground slowly down into weariness and horror, Voss seemed rather to burn brighter for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not cease his praying even now, but his prayers were not Kells patient-askings into the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were something fiercer, cried aloud between his shots, and hurled against the enemy like a second kind of fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would scream his prayers at his enemies and grunt them when striking with the butt of his rifle.
[SPEAKER_00]: His faith was a hard, bright thing, and it held him up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where other men flagged and stumbled and felt the strength run out of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The corporal stood all the taller, his fierce eyes lit, his voice ringing out the old words over the noise.
[SPEAKER_00]: As though the words themselves were a weapon he wielded alongside the gun.
[SPEAKER_00]: and there were moments in that long grinding dark when the sight of him was the only thing that kept the men nearest him on their feet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halva watched him and did not understand him and could not have shared his certainty for anything in the world and was glad of him or the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether the faith was true, whether it was worth anything in the reckoning of that night or any other,
[SPEAKER_00]: However, could not have said and did not try to say.
[SPEAKER_00]: He only saw that it was real, and that it held, and that a man who believes he does not stand alone was sometimes stand when a man who knows the truth would fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: and one by one, in the long hours they were falling.
[SPEAKER_00]: The squad grew smaller in the dark, and however knew it less by counting than by feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way you know a fire is dying without looking at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the failing of its warmth, a gap would open in the line where a man had been, and not close, or close only when another shifted weirdly to fill it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A familiar voice that had been cursing or calling somewhere down the walk would not be there any longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: and however, would not have marked the moment of its going, only its absence after.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were being worn away, not broken, not routed, nothing so quick or so clean as that, only ground down, grain by grain, as the tide came on and came on, and asked of them more than flesh could go on giving.
[SPEAKER_00]: The war still held.
[SPEAKER_00]: The men of the 88th still stood their stretch of it, fewer now, and slower, and heavier of arm.
[SPEAKER_00]: Firing and reloading and killing the folk they had grown up among, in the smoke and the guttering firelight, with the dead vox hissing its long grey nothing into the night behind them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would have likely been one faster if it not for the heavy weapons teams and their emplacements cutting down the bulk of the invaders, but even they can only do so much, and they can only fire into spaces where allies were not at risk of being hit
[SPEAKER_00]: and still the drums beat on below, patient has ever, and still the horn sounded now and again out of the dark, and still the ladders rose, and Halva stood among the dwindling remnant of his friends, and did the dreadful labour over again, and waited, without much hope now, for the dawn.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the boy's cry that Halva heard through everything,
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no reason that he should have heard it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The war walk was one great roar of noise from end to end, the crack of the guns, and the crash of the stones, and the screaming of the tide.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a man could scarcely hear his own voice in the midst of it, let alone another's a dozen paces off.
[SPEAKER_00]: But some part of Halva had been listening for the boy all the night, without ever choosing to.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way a mother sleeps through storm and thunder and wakes at the smallest whimper of her child.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, when Willam's son cried out, somewhere down the line to Halva's left, Halva heard it under all the rest, and his head came round before his mind had understood why.
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw it in one of the broken flashes of catapulted firelight, torn out of the dark and hanging there an instant like a thing painted.
[SPEAKER_00]: The boy had let a cultus get too close.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was young, and he was frightened past all sense, and in the crash and terror of the wallwalk, he had done what a frightened boy would do, which was to fire and fire and fire, at the shapes coming out of the dark until, all unknowing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now there was a man upon him, a great war bone outlander, with a butcher's cleaver raised, and the boy was fumbling at his dead gun.
[SPEAKER_00]: With hands that would not work, staring up at the falling blade with his mouth open and no sound coming out of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Too far gone in his fear, even to raise the weapon toward the blow.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was going to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the space of that single lit instant, Halva saw the whole of it, the cleaver at the top of its arc, and the boy beneath it with his ruin hands, and knew that the boy was going to die, and that there was not time enough in the world to reach him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halva did not decide to move.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not weigh the thing, or choose it, or reckon the cost of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: or ask himself whether the boy was worth the crossing of that open stretch of war with the tide coming over it.
[SPEAKER_00]: His body simply went.
[SPEAKER_00]: It went the way his hands had gone all the night, on some older knowledge than thought, and he was moving before the cleaver had begun to fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three long strides down the walk, with no memory of taking them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his own gun was up, and he fired past the boy's head so near that Willam must have felt the heat of the bolt.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the great outlander with the cleaver was flung back and away, and gone over the wall into the dark below.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blade fell from his dead hand, and rang upon the stone beside the boy, and did him no harm at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then Halva was there, hauling the boy up off his knees by a fistful of his coat, shoving a fresh power cell into his shaking hands, and the moment was over, and neither of them had time to speak of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the walls still had to be held, but something had happened in it that would not be undone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halva had crossed the fire for the boy, without counting the cost, and the boy had felt himself lifted out of the very jaws of death by a hand he had not looked for.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a thing was made between them in that instant that had no name, and needed none.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not spoken, it never would be spoken.
[SPEAKER_00]: But from that moment, Halva's watching of the boy was no longer the idle half-attention, a man gives a guttering lamp.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had become something fiercer and more particular, a thing he would have had to call if he had ever put words to it, his to keep.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then strangely there came a law.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not peace.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no peace in such a night.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the tide drew back a little from that stretch of the wall, as tides do, gathering itself for the next surge.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ladders in Halva's part of the wall had all been cast down and not yet raised again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the nearest cultists had been killed, and for a handful of minutes there was upon that piece of the parapet, something almost like quiet.
[SPEAKER_00]: The strange hollow quiet at the very heart of the storm, where the wind falls still and the world holds its breath.
[SPEAKER_00]: and a man knows even as he stands in it that it cannot last.
[SPEAKER_00]: The guns went on down the line, but farther off now.
[SPEAKER_00]: The firelight got at low, however leaned against the cold stone, and found that his legs were shaking, and let them shake, and drew the wreaking air into his lungs, and beside him, the boy did the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: for a little while neither of them spoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then Willam said, in a small voice, not looking at him.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought I was for it, back there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after a moment, still not looking.
[SPEAKER_00]: You came across the whole wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, however,
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: However, considered that, in the way he considered most things, slowly and without hurry, turning it over.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not rightly know the answer, or he knew it too deep down to bring it up whole.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reload and before your empty, he said it last, which was not an answer at all, and was the only one he had.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't wait till it's dry.
[SPEAKER_00]: Count your shots in your head so you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll not have me across the wall the next time.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said it graphely, because he did not know how to say gentle things, but the boy heard what was under it well enough, and something in his frightened face he used, and he nodded and set himself to counting.
[SPEAKER_00]: They stood a moment longer in the failing quiet.
[SPEAKER_00]: The loathom very far below, the drums still beat their slow deep stroke, and the hornbone somewhere out in the dark, and the great tide muttered, and seized, and gathered itself unseen.
[SPEAKER_00]: However I looked at the boy beside him, really looked for the first time since the fighting began.
[SPEAKER_00]: at how young he was, how thin his wrists were, where they came out of the two big coat, how the fear sat on him, like a weight too heavy for so slight a frame, and something in Halva's chest turned over, and he thought without wanting to, of the road home, and the green valley, and all the small living things that this boy might yet grow up to do and be, if only the wall held one more hour, and then one more.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not say any of
[SPEAKER_00]: He only reached over and cuffed the boy's shoulder once, roughly the way men do, and turned back to his slot.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even as he turned, he felt the change come.
[SPEAKER_00]: The muttering of the tide down in the dark had shifted.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had gathered a new note, deeper, and more purposeful than the blind hunger of before.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it seemed to have art to be moving, flowing along the foot of the war toward the north.
[SPEAKER_00]: toward the cliff.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could not see it yet, but he could feel it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way he had felt the whole night in the stone beneath his hands, a great purpose for current of it, drawing away from where he stood and pooling somewhere after his left, and a cold woken him beneath the sweat and the weariness.
[SPEAKER_00]: A cold he had felt once before, that night, at dusk, when Brooke had lifted his chin toward
[SPEAKER_00]: The soft tooth in the jaw, halva-toned his head and looked north along the wall, toward the pale ghost of the scaffolding standing against the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Toward the half-open stretch of rock-out stone, weather wall was not whole, and he saw the firelight of the tide moving toward it, gathering to it, and he understood, all at once and too late, what it was that the enemy had found.
[SPEAKER_00]: sergeant, he said, and then louder so that it carried down the wall over the din, in a voice he did not know he had.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sergeant, the repair, they're going for the repair, and below in the dark, at the foot of the broken place, something began to glow.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had known where to strike.
[SPEAKER_00]: Alva and some of his men had made their way to the weak point of the war to fire down on the enemy attempting to expose it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He understood it in the moment he saw the globe again in the tide of bodies, 60 feet below.
[SPEAKER_00]: That somewhere in all that ragged host, there had been eyes clever enough to read the wall as Brooke had read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: To look up at the great grim length of stone and find the one place in it that was soft and patience enough to gather at that place in the dark while the defenders spent themselves elsewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not luck, the tide had found it, and it had come for it in earnest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Down at the foot of the broken place, and not of cotists was waiting in toward the wall, and the way they came was a horror in itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ground there, churned by the long nights fighting, had become a black mire of mud and rain and worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was heaped and strewn with the fallen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their own fallen.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dead of the tide piled where the volleys had reaped them thickest.
[SPEAKER_00]: And through this, the cultists came, waiting knee-deep in the ruin of their own kin, treading upon the bodies of the dead to reach the war, and never faltering.
[SPEAKER_00]: They bore something among them, carried high and handled with a care that all the rest of that reckless host had shown for nothing else all night, and Halva could not see it clearly, only the dull gleam of it, and the reverence with which they brought it on.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he did not need to see it clearly.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew what care like that meant.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a weapon out of the depots, a soldier's weapon.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of thing that folk with threshing flails did not carry and did not know.
[SPEAKER_00]: A melted charge, a breaching charge.
[SPEAKER_00]: A thing made for the unmaking of stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were carrying it to the one place in all the miles of the wall, where stone was already half unmade.
[SPEAKER_00]: When one of them was shot, another would take their place to carry the charge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Others were holding up plates of metal to try and shield themselves in the charge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Slowly they made their way to the wall despite heavy losses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Down, rod broke from somewhere, in a voice of the tour.
[SPEAKER_00]: Down, off the wall, get off the wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halva had a hand on the boy's coat.
[SPEAKER_00]: He remembered that after.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had turned already toward Willon, with his hand reaching out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some blind instinct in him, wanting the boy near, wanting the boy off the broken stretch and back toward the soundstone.
[SPEAKER_00]: He got his fist into the coat.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was already pulling.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the world came apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no sound to it at first, or none that Halva's ears would keep.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a light, a single, terrible flowering of white heat down at the foot of the wall, so fierce and so sudden that it printed the whole scaffolded stretch black upon his eyes in the instant before he could shut them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The timbers and the rock hut stone and the climbing figures all seared into after image.
[SPEAKER_00]: a great flat concussion that struck the wall the way a hammer strikes a bell and rang it through from end to end.
[SPEAKER_00]: Howvar felt it come up through the stone into his feet and his legs and his belly and his teeth.
[SPEAKER_00]: He felt the ancient rampart, the thing that was won with the mountain, the thing that had stood for a thousand years.
[SPEAKER_00]: He felt it shudder and flex and give.
[SPEAKER_00]: Weather repair had been there, was suddenly no war at all, only a ragged, gaping wound of tumbling stone, a few could paces wide, and through it and above it, the whole flank of the rampart nearest the gate seemed to lean.
[SPEAKER_00]: To sag inward, like a thing gone, suddenly weary.
[SPEAKER_00]: The course is grinding and slipping upon one another, with a groan that was louder than the blast had been.
[SPEAKER_00]: The parapet beneath Halva's boots was no longer level.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was tilting.
[SPEAKER_00]: The stone was moving under him, canting slowly into it the keep, and the courtyard far below.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the stone he had leaned against a moment passed was toppling away outward into the dark, and there was nothing left to hold to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing solid, anywhere in all the reeling world.
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept his grip on the boy's coat.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not let go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever else he lost in that moment, and he lost nearly everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: His fist stayed shut in the cloth of William Sarn's coat, and he dragged the boy with him as he fell, trying to control their descent and make it safer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Below him in the courtyard was sacks of grain that had not been moved from the
[SPEAKER_00]: common enough for this time of year and a blessing.
[SPEAKER_00]: As he was about to fall, Halva threw himself down towards the grain, preferring to land on the sacks rather than the stone below.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wall had heaved him off it, as a horse throws a rider, up and out and over, and the world turned round him, fire and dark in the pale rushing stone, the flash of the courtyard
[SPEAKER_00]: and then there was no more telling of up from down at all, only the falling, and the boy's coat in his fist, and a single clear thought crossing his mind in the midst of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oddly calm, oddly quiet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is how it comes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the courtyard rose and the grain struck him, and the thinking stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not lose himself entirely, or if he did, it was not for long.
[SPEAKER_00]: The world came back to him in pieces, wrong side and really.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was on the ground, on the cold flags of the inner courtyard, behind the throat of the keep, where he had fallen after bouncing from the softer landing.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he could not at first make his body answer him, and there was a great ringing silence in his head where all the noise of the battle should have been, as though someone had packed his skull with wool.
[SPEAKER_00]: He tasted blood.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could not tell where it came from, or whether it was his.
[SPEAKER_00]: Across the keeps courtyard and through the gatehouse, he could see the broken lip of the
[SPEAKER_00]: ruined with figures, already pouring through the wound in it, and the site seemed to come to him slowly, and from very far away, as things seemed through deep water come.
[SPEAKER_00]: something stirred against his side.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Willam had come with him and seemed to have fared better in his landing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The boy was on his knees beside Halva now, white faced and bleeding from a gash above his brow, tugging at him, his mouth moving.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halva could not hear the words, but he understood the tugging.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he made his body answer it last, and got his arms beneath him, and rose, swaying half death.
[SPEAKER_00]: The courtyard tilting round him, almost as the wall had tilted, and stirred.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked for the others then.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some instinct in him, even in that ruin when searching along the broken wall, and the reeling dark for the men he knew, for Brooke, for the corporal, for the faces
[SPEAKER_00]: The wall where they had stood was gone or going, reathed in smoke and swarming with the enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of the squad that had held that stretch of parapet through all the long night, he could see now almost nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Brooke, he could not find.
[SPEAKER_00]: And vast, vast, he looked for hardest of all, for the corporal had been down the line toward the very place the charged blown.
[SPEAKER_00]: and Halva's eye went to that ruin and searched it, but there was only smoke there, and fire, and the pouring dark shapes of the tide.
[SPEAKER_00]: The corporal was not there.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not anywhere that Halva could see.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been on the wall, praying, standing taller than the rest, his fierce eyes lit, and his voice ringing out the old words over the noise, and then the charge had blown, and the smoke had come down, and Emran Voss was simply gone from Halva's sight.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a thing is gone, that the dark has taken
[SPEAKER_00]: Halva never saw him fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never saw him die.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never saw him again at all, nor learned in all the rest of that night, or after what had become of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether the blast had taken him, or whether he yet fought on somewhere in the ruin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether his faith had held him to the last.
[SPEAKER_00]: or failed him, or born him up and away.
[SPEAKER_00]: The corporal passed out of the tail there, in the smoke above the broken wall, and the tail did not follow him, and could not, and left him where he fell, unanswered.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no time to grieve that either, there was no time for anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the wall was breached, and through the breach the time was
[SPEAKER_00]: It came down into the keep the way water comes through a broken down, not in a rush all at once, but in a first thin dreadful trickle that halve our new wood swelling moments to a flood.
[SPEAKER_00]: The enemy poured through the wound in the wall and down the ruined stair and over the fallen stone into the courtyard and the passages of the keep.
[SPEAKER_00]: and everywhere that Halva looked in the smoke and the guttering firelight.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ordered defense of the war was coming apart into something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something worse, something without shape.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no line any longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no parapetal, no clear front where the enemy was there, and the friends were here.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only the broken inside of the keep, its courtyards and its stairs and its narrow ways and scattered through all of it, with a last defenders in little knots and clusters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cut off one from another, each fighting its own small hopeless battle in its own corner of the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: The keep had one entranceway through the gate, and the enemy had not yet fully taken it.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, could see them here and there through the murk, three men with their backs to a wall, a lone figure swinging a clubed rifle on a stair, and a handful gathered about to doorway.
[SPEAKER_00]: Islands of Grey in a rising tide, each one alone, each one dying where it stood over the same stone, for the same reason, without any longer being able to see or aid one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the thing the war had been built to prevent, and had prevented for a thousand years, and had failed to prevent this one night, that the enemy should be inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything changed with that failing.
[SPEAKER_00]: All the long labor on the parapet, the volleys and the reloading, and the holding of the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of it had been to keep this from happening, and now it had happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the rules of the night were remade in an instant.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no holding now, there was only surviving the next moment, and then the next.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only the knot of men you could reach, the patch of stone you could stand on, and the blade you could see coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: The great single thing that had been the defense of the wall was shattered into a hundred small dying things, and the smoke rolled down over all of them, and the tide came on.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, took the boy by the coat again, that same fist, that same cloth, the one fixed point left to him in all the reeling world, and put his back to the nearest sound wall, and raised his gun, and looked for other grey coats to reach.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a thing that men do, at the end, when the walls they trusted have failed them, and the line they held is broken, and there is nowhere left to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: They fall back to the last place, the narrowest place, the place of few may hold when many cannot, and they set their feet there, and they do not move again.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the oldest wisdom of desperate men, older than the war itself, older perhaps than wars, and though not one of the grain haulers and silo hands of the 88th had ever been taught it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came to it that night of their own accord, drawn to it out of the ruin of the keep, as water finds the low channel, gathering by ones and twos and threes back and back through the smoke, toward the one place that was made for holding.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the throat of the gatehouse.
[SPEAKER_00]: The men who had raised the keep in the forgotten years had built it, whatever else they built.
[SPEAKER_00]: With a hard clear purpose in that one place and the purpose was death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Between the great outer gate that faced the enemy and the inner gate that faced the valley, they ran a long entranceway into the body of the keep.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was a killing corridor by design, and by intent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Naro, so that no great press of men could come through it more than a few abreast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Overlooked along both its sides by raised stone galleries, from which those who held the keep might pour fire down its length upon any who forced the outer gate, and pinched at its inner end to a choke point so straight that a mere handful of resolute men, standing shoulder to shoulder across it,
[SPEAKER_00]: might bar the way to a host.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been built to be the last stand, the place where a failing garrison made its final effort, and it had waited a thousand years, unneeded for the night, when it would be asked to be what it was made to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: That night had come, and at the other end of the keeps courtyard, at the defenders' backs, stood the thing that gave the throat its whole meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: The inner gate.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was smaller than the great outer gate.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was sound, unbreached and whole, and it opened onto the valley road, and the valley road ran down, and away into the green cleft where the terraces lay heavy with grain, and the silos stood in the dark, and somewhere farther still, the farm workers and their families waited in whatever poor shelter they had found.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything was on the other side of that gate, everything that the wall had been raised to guard, everything that Halva and the rest had climbed the parapet to dusk to keep.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fields, the harvest, the people, the home-living valley, and the far-wounds beyond it that the valley fed.
[SPEAKER_00]: all of it lay behind that in a gate, down that road in the dark at their backs, and the time meant to reach it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the whole of the enemy's purpose, stripped of all the chanting and the fire and the fury, to come through the keep and out the inner gate and down into the valley and take the grain and hold it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gate was the line, it was the last line and the only one that mattered now and it could not be crossed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Helva understood this without any man telling him.
[SPEAKER_00]: As he came stumbling back through the smoke, with his fist in the boy's coat, and found himself among the gathering remnant in the mouth of the throat.
[SPEAKER_00]: He understood it the way he understood most true things in his body before his mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the simple animal knowledge that here was the place, and that beyond it there was nowhere, and that the road at his back went
[SPEAKER_00]: home.
[SPEAKER_00]: He turned himself about, and set his shoulder to the man beside him, and faced back up the corridor toward the enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did not look again at the inagate, for he knew that if he looked at it, he would think of the road, and the valley, and all that lay along it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was more than a man could carry, and still hold his place.
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept his face to the throat, and the gate stayed at his back, and would not let them pass.
[SPEAKER_00]: The guns were failing now, all along the little line.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halva's own had gone dry some while since, and he had no cell left to feed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He heard, up and down, the gathering hedge of men, the small, terrible sounds of the same one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The click of an empty chamber, the muttered curse, and the last cell counted out to the spent.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no more ammunition, it was gone, all of it poured out into the tide on the long wall through the long night, and there would be no more, for the magazine was deep in the keep behind the enemy now, and might as well have been on another world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, the men of the 88th did the last thing that men with empty guns can do, which is to make of the gun itself a spear.
[SPEAKER_00]: All down the line, however, heard the rasp and click of bayonets being fixed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Blade after blade snapped home onto the muzzles of guns that would never fire again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he found that his own hands were doing it too, fitting the long blade to the end of the useless weapon, without his having told them to.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he understood that this was to be the manor of the ending, not fire now, but still, and the reach of a man's arm, and the strength of his back.
[SPEAKER_00]: They set themselves across the choke point shoulder to shoulder, the last of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: A hedge of leveled blades barring the narrow way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Farmers and haulers standing close enough to feel one another shake.
[SPEAKER_00]: And beyond the bristling points of the bayonets, the corridor ran up into the smoke toward the enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nor was that all they had.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were a few among the survivors who had reached the raised galleries along the sides of the throat.
[SPEAKER_00]: And up there, in the very firing positions the old builders had cut for such an hour, they had dragged the last of their heavy weapons.
[SPEAKER_00]: A support gun, a heavy stubborn, whatever had been carried down or found in the ruin, and what little ammunition remained to feed them, hold it now for this.
[SPEAKER_00]: From those raised stone perches, the guns could fire straight down the length of the corridor, sweeping it end to end, so that anything coming through the throat toward the bayonet hedge would have to come through that fire first.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was exactly the thing the throat had been made for.
[SPEAKER_00]: the enemy funneled into the narrow killing length and the guns above raking down it, and the wall of blades at the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: A few men were placed in a place built for the holding.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was little enough, it was everything they had left, and it would have to be enough for a while, for the hoard was coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: However heard it before he saw it, the roar of the tide changing note as it found the mouth of the throat, and understood what lay beyond.
[SPEAKER_00]: The road, the gate, the valley, the prize, and gathered itself and poured in.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came up the corridor out of the smoke, filling it wall to wall, torch and blade and screaming face.
[SPEAKER_00]: The same ragged folk who had come over the parapet all night.
[SPEAKER_00]: So close, just there, just beyond the little hedge of grey men, and leveled steel.
[SPEAKER_00]: The heavy guns opened up from the galleries above, and their fire went tearing down the length of the throat, and the foremost ranks of the tide were swept away in it, like chaff before the wind, tumbling, and falling, and choking the narrow way with their undead.
[SPEAKER_00]: But behind them came more, always more, climbing over the fallen, as their kin had climbed the bodies at the foot of the war, pressing in and in against the fire, on toward the bristling blades and the men who held them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halva set his feet upon the stone and lowered the long blade, and put the road in the valley and the whole green world out of his mind, and did not look back at the gate behind him.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only the throat before him now, and the tide coming up it, and the narrow line of men he stood
[SPEAKER_00]: and the simple and arguable fact that here was the place where it would be decided, one way or the other, before the sun came up.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came home, and the last of the eighty-eighth metham at the choke point, blade to blade, in the throat of the keep, with the inner gate at their backs, and the valley beyond it, and held.
[SPEAKER_00]: How long they held the throat, however could not have told.
[SPEAKER_00]: Time had come apart again, as it had upon the wall, into a thing without hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only the endless coming on of the tide and the endless meeting of it, blade against blade in the narrow smoke choked dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bayonet hedge held, because it had to hold, and because it was made of men who had nowhere left to go and knew it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The heavy guns were raking down from the galleries, the choke point pinching the enemy to a few abreast, the leveled steel taking them as they came.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it held at a cost that could not long be born.
[SPEAKER_00]: The hedge was thinning, even as it stood.
[SPEAKER_00]: a man would go down under a swung cleaver, or a thrown blade, or the sheer crushing weight of bodies driven onto the points.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the men on either side would close the gap over him, shoulder to shoulder, narrower now and hold on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then another would fall, and the gap would close again, narrower still, until Halva could feel the line shrinking around him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Breath by breath, drawing in toward its own center, like a fist closing, and then brick was there.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sergeant had come through the ruin of the war somehow, when the corporal had not, and he stood down near the middle of the hedge where the pressure was worst, and he was the spine of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: as he had been the spine of everything all night.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, could hear him over the noise of battle, not shouting, never shouting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only that low, steady, carrying voice, naming men, studying them, telling this one to close up, and that one to watch the left, holding the little line together by main force of will, the way a keystone holds an arch by simply refusing to fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: As long as Brooke stood, the hedge stood, every man in it knew that, without knowing that he knew it, and drew from it a strength that was more than his own.
[SPEAKER_00]: And however, fighting an arms length off with the boy at his back took heart from the old man's nearness, as he had taken heart from it at dusk, when the worst thing in the world had only been the waiting.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a stone that took him, in the end, and there was no reason in it, and no justice.
[SPEAKER_00]: The catapults were still at their work beyond the broken wall, flinging their stones blindly over the ruin into the keep.
[SPEAKER_00]: And most of what they threw came down uselessly upon the courtyards, and the fallen stone doing as much hurt to the tide as to the defenders.
[SPEAKER_00]: But one stone, one broken lump of rebel, out of all the thousands, came arching over in the grey beginning of the light and struck high upon the inner face of the throat above the galleries, and did not stop there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It bounced, it came down off the stone at an angle no man could have foreseen or feared, a great ricocheting weight of rock plunging into the packed and narrow place where the defenders stood, and it fell among them, and it fell upon a tavian brook, and it bore him down.
[SPEAKER_00]: However heard the sound of it and turned and saw, the old man was on the stone, pinned and broken beneath the weight that had felt him, and there was no doubt, not at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: However had seen enough that night to know the difference between a wound, a man might rise from, and the other kind, and this was the other kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: He got to brook somehow.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not remember crossing to him, any more than he had remembered crossing the wall to the boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was simply there, on his knees on the blooded stone beside the sergeant, in the little space the others made around them, even as they closed the hedge tighter to fill the gap where brook had stood.
[SPEAKER_00]: The heavy guns still hammered overhead.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tides still screamed and pressed against the thinning line and arms length away.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in that small space, for that small moment, there was only the old man and howvar bending over him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Brooke was trying to say something.
[SPEAKER_00]: His mouth worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: and no words came at first, only blood, and then his hand came up.
[SPEAKER_00]: The great weathered hand that had knocked on Halva's shoulder at dusk, that had shared out bread and steadied frightened men, and carried the same faded scrap of cloth through God knew how many years, and how many nights like this one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The hand was fumbling at the strap across his ruined chest, at the banner rag noted there, and however understood and helped him, and worked the warm cloth free of the wreckage of the man.
[SPEAKER_00]: And broke took it in his failing fingers, that thin soft shred of colour that was no true banner and had never been.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was only a habit, and a memory, and the whole heart of a squad that were nearly all dead now, and he pressed it into Hover's hands, and closed Hover's fingers over it with his own, and looked up at him.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no glory in his face.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the thing Halva carried away from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing, he understood in that moment, and never after forgot.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sergeant was not passing him a standard to raise, nor a torch to bear, nor any bright thing out of the songs.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was passing him a job,
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the last job left, and it was a simple one, and someone had to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone had to hold the rag, and hold the line, and stand in the place until the standing was done, and Brooke could not do it any longer, and of all the men left in the shrinking hedge, however was the one nearest, and the one steadiest, and the one whose broad slow hands the old man trusted to keep hold of a thing, and not let go.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was all it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hold it, the old man's eyes said, more plainly than any words, for his words were gone now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone has to, it's yours, and then the light went slowly out of the weathered face, and the hand that had closed over Halva's loosen, and a tavian brick was gone, and Halva knelt there a moment longer, with the faded cloth crushed in his fist, and the battle
[SPEAKER_00]: It was nothing, only Willam's voice cracked and frightened, calling his name, calling him back to the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only the boys do it there, still alive, still on his feet at Halva's back, where he had been all through the long retreat, kept alive this far by nothing but the fact that the men before him had held, and held, and held.
[SPEAKER_00]: And something turned over
[SPEAKER_00]: kneeling over the dead sergeant with the banner in his hand, and the thing he had never been able to name all the night.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing he could not answer at dusk when he asked himself why he did not run.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came to him at last, hole and simple and plain, the way the truest things come.
[SPEAKER_00]: He understood finally why he stood.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not for the emperor, he had known that all along.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had never once in all that night felt the touch of any God, and did not feel it now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was not for glory in which he did not believe, nor for the war, which was broken, nor for any bright cause that a man might put into words.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was for the boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was for Willam's son, thin-rusted and terrified, and still breathing at Halva's back in the gray of the dawn.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still alive in the world, with all his life still before him, and alive for one reason only, because the line had held, because men had stood in the throat and died in it, so that the tide should not come through, and the boy was on the safe side of that dying.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had stood so that the boy could stand behind him, and behind the boy was the gate, and behind the gate the road, and behind the road the valley.
[SPEAKER_00]: The terraces and the silos, and the good dark earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fields that had fed his people for a thousand years, and fed them still.
[SPEAKER_00]: That had fed the folk who came screaming up the throat to take them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And might, if only the line held one hour more, go on feeding folk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Long after every man in this passage was dust and forgotten.
[SPEAKER_00]: the fields fed people once.
[SPEAKER_00]: They could feed them again.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was worth a man standing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was worth this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not much of a creed, and it was not the kind they wrote in the Great Books, but it was his.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Halvar-Rose.
[SPEAKER_00]: He noted the faded rag through his own strap, where the sergeant had carried it, and he took up his bayonet in his two broad hands, and he stepped back into the gap in the line where brook had stood, and set his feet, and faced the tide.
[SPEAKER_00]: Close up, he heard himself say, in a voice that was not so unlike the old man's after all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Close up, lads, we hold
[SPEAKER_00]: The horns came at the grain of the world, in the last dark hour before the dawn, and at first however did not understand what he was hearing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had heard horns all through the night, the deep, mournful, bellowing of the tides own war horns out beyond the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: and his weary mind reached for that first, and found that it did not fit.
[SPEAKER_00]: These were other horns.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounded like they were coming from the direction of the enemy, but much further away.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were not the horns of the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were clear in clean where the tides horns had been horse, and ordered where the tides had been wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bringing up the valley in a clean, bright call that had in it nothing of hunger, and nothing of despair, and Halva stood in the gap in the line with the bayonet.
[SPEAKER_00]: heavy in his hands, and the dead sergeant at his feet, and heard them, and could not for a moment make himself believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: The relief had come, the column that had been days out upon the roads that Kel had called and called for, into the dead vox until the calling killed him, that no man on the wall had truly let himself out for.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had come in the end, driving through the last of the night, to reach the valley at the turning of the dark, and it came down the road at first light, with the dawn at its back.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, did not see the first of it, pinned in as he was in the throat with the enemy before him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He only heard the horns, and then, a moment after, he heard the guns.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not the guns he had grown used to that night.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was nothing ragged in them, nothing of the wild hammering autoguns, or the crudely flung stones.
[SPEAKER_00]: These were the ordered guns of a real column of war, and they spoke with a voice that shook the valley.
[SPEAKER_00]: away beyond the broken wall, out where the great tide still seaved at the foot of the rampart and poured its numbers up toward the breach, the shells began to fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: However felt them before he heard them, deep concussions rolling up through the stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then the long-range guns, and the artillery of the relief, found the mast and unmissable multitude, packed against the outer wall, and fell upon it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tide had made a weapon of its own great numbers all the night, had thrown its bodies at the wall in a mass that no defenders fire could thin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now that same mass, that same vast press of people crowded shoulder to shoulder against the stone with nowhere to scatter, became the most terrible witness a host can have under the falling of the shells.
[SPEAKER_00]: The guns reaped them as they had never reaped the defenders.
[SPEAKER_00]: The morning beyond the wall became a storm of fire and torn earth, and the great tide that it stood unbroken through the whole long night, broke at last, not against the courage of the men on the wall, which had never been enough to break it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But against the ordered fury of the machines and the guns coming down the valley road behind it, and what a host will not do for hunger, or for faith, it will do at last for fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tide that had climbed the wall over its own dead, that had waded through the bodies of its kin to set the charge, that had thrown itself again and again upon the bayonets in the throat.
[SPEAKER_00]: That same tide, when the shells began to fall among it in earnest, and the dying came faster than even its numberless numbers could bear, wavered, and then failed, and then ran.
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the holy men, and the corrupting powers of chaos, they ran.
[SPEAKER_00]: Out beyond the broken wall, the great multitude came apart into fleeing folk, scattering back from the rampart into the outlands and the dark, casting down their torches and their flails and their stolen guns as they went.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the pressure that had borne so long and so hard against the little line in the throat eased and slackened and fell away.
[SPEAKER_00]: The screaming faces before Halva's bayonet, thinned and turned, and were gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tide drew back, the tide broke.
[SPEAKER_00]: The war had broken in the night, but the defenders had not.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the thing that would be said of it after, in the valley and beyond.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the tale was told and grew in the telling, that the ancient rampart, the thing that was one with the mountain, the thing raised to hold back an army in a war whose name was lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: That war led failed at last and let the enemy through.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the men who held it, the grain haulers and the silo hands, and the boys too young for the master.
[SPEAKER_00]: the levy of the valley's own, with their last guns, and their bayonets, and their faded scrap of a banner.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had not failed, and had not fled, and had not let the tide come through the throat, and down the road to the fields beyond.
[SPEAKER_00]: The war broke.
[SPEAKER_00]: The guard did not.
[SPEAKER_00]: It made a fine saying, and it was true as far as it went.
[SPEAKER_00]: But however, standing in the throat as the dawn came up, could take no joy in it, and no triumph.
[SPEAKER_00]: For he knew the price of it, and the price was standing all around him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The relief had come, but it had come too late for Joshua Cal, who had called it down out of the dark with his last breath and died with the prayer unfinished on his lips, and the vox hissing empty beside him.
[SPEAKER_00]: to late for a tavian brook, who lay broken at Hauva's feet, with the dawn just touching his weathered face, and would never knock a man's shoulder again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nor name a village, nor study a frightened boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps to late for M. Ranvas, wherever he had gone in the smoke above the wall, whose faith had held him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps Hauva would see him soon, perhaps not.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was too late for most of the 88th, who had stood upon the wall at dusk, and did not stand now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who lay scattered through the ruin of the keep in their little knots where the tide had found them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the same stone, for the same road, for the same fields.
[SPEAKER_00]: The relief did not give them back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing would ever give them back.
[SPEAKER_00]: The horns had come at dawn, and the guns had broken the tide, and the valley was saved, and the grain would ship, and folk far off across the world who would never know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Any of these names would eat their bread, and never wonder what it had cost.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of that was true, and none of it was triumph, and none of it redeemed the dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not remember deciding to.
[SPEAKER_00]: He only found that his broad slow hands had opened, and the weapon had clattered down onto the bloodied stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was standing empty-handed in the throat of the keep, with the faded banner still knotted through his strap, half-deafened, so that the great sounds of the morning, the horns, the guns, the first ragged cheering somewhere out in the light, came to him muffled and far away, as through deep water.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he was bleeding he found, from more places than he could name or number, though he could not have said when any of it had happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind him a life on his feet, staring about at the dawn with a white and wondering face.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was the boy?
[SPEAKER_00]: Willon was alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: He turned his face up toward the light.
[SPEAKER_00]: A way to the east, beyond the broken lip of the war, beyond the cliffs and the drifting smoke and the fleeing dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sun was coming up over the valley of Kasevan, and it laid its first pale gold across the terraces and the silos, and the good dark earth belong.
[SPEAKER_00]: the fields lying quiet and unharmed in the morning, as they had lane quiet, a thousand mornings before, waiting only for the gathering.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, looked at them, he could feel no gladness and no grief and no triumph.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of that was somewhere still ahead of him, past the numbness and the ringing and the great great weiriness that had settled over everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only the light on the fields, and the boy breathing at his back, and the dead lying all about him in the dawn.
[SPEAKER_00]: And beneath it all, quiet and strange and animal, and undeniable.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one plain fact that he could not have put into any words and did not try to, that the sun had come up, and that he was alive to see it.