The storm came. The water drummed across the steppe grass like soldiers on the march. They drummed the advance upon the dry earth, then drummed the quick march once they reached the walls. The rattling battering of heavy raindrops on the tile roofs was charming, then deafening. Twilight turned to pitch darkness. Lanterns were lit, sheltered by awnings and roofs, barely illuminating the ground beneath them. The streets were dim, almost conceptual spaces, existing between little puddles of yellow-orange light spilling through shutters.
Tian let his awareness roam over the city. The soldiers didn’t like the rain. The officers dispatched more soldiers than usual to the guard houses inside the walls, and doubled the watch. The soldiers were rotated frequently, standing watch for an hour, then down into the dry watchroom while their replacement took over. Round and round, doing their best to peer into the impenetrable darkness, and listen through the deafening rain.
Even their helmets deafened them, the domed steel reverberating and muffling sound, as they were blinded by rain.
“Don’t shoot!”
“For the love of heaven, don’t shoot!”
“Mercy! Mercy! Save us!”
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!”
Ladders thudded against the city wall, stacking one on top of the other, climbing up forty feet to the parapet. The solders screamed “Attack! Attack! Alarm!” Gongs rang out brassy and frantic, followed by the tolling bells, all fighting to be heard over the deafening rain. Messengers raced across rain-slick cobblestones, rushing the message to the City Protector and the Red Plume General. The attack had begun.
The soldiers on the wall had their orders. Long sticks with iron prongs shoved the tops of the ladders away from the walls. They ignored the screams from below, or that the voices they were hearing all spoke with kingdom accents in the kingdom’s tongue. Ladders kept thudding up against the stone parapet. Not all were spotted in the dim light of the shielded brazers. A flash of lightning showed people crawling over the parapet, screaming. “Don’t shoot! Don’t kill us! I’m a soldier! I’m a peasant of Chen Village! Save us! Save Me!”
A ten man commander rushed forward, leading his squad. The leading people coming off the ladder stumbled towards him, raising their hands. Horror struck the soldiers, seizing their nerves. The man kneeling in front of them was wearing the remains of a uniform. The hands he was raising had no thumbs. More and more people were coming up the ladder. Hundreds, no, thousands of them would be coming up the ladders. They were already filling the parapet, clogging it, stopping the soldiers from moving around, forming up, organizing their defense.
The ten man commander had his orders. Under the rain, he didn’t know who he hated more- the Red Plumed General, the Yuu, or himself. He pulled out his straight saber. “Our orders are to clear the wall. Anyone coming over the wall is the enemy. Kill!”
Some of the city soldiers died, clearing the wall. Most by accident, slipping on the wet stones and falling. Some caught a saber blow to the back of the head, or an unlucky stab from a comrade’s spear. All those rushing up the ladders died. So did the ten man commander’s heart, by the time he shoved the nearest ladder over. His body was moving, but his eyes were darker than the stormy night.
Bales of oil-soaked bamboo were tossed over the wall, illuminating the scene on the ground. The dry moat was full, packed with frantic people. Most with bloody rags tied around their hands, and bloody rags around their feet. Behind them were Yuu on horseback, driving them forward with whips and sabers, cutting down anyone who even looked backwards, forcing them up towards the wall.
They had no armor, no weapons, rags for clothes, not even shoes for their feet. But they were very well supplied with ladders. The hundred men commanders clenched their teeth and hammered their fists on the parapet, but they had their duty. They knew this was to be a long battle.
“Shove the ladders off the walls! Steal them or break them if you can, but don’t let anyone up! I don’t care if it’s your mother up there, you stab her in the fucking eye and shove the ladder off the wall!” Ten man commanders rushed up and down, slapping the backs of heads and leading by example.
“Venerable Martyr watch over me tonight, I’m fighting demons.” The ordinary soldiers muttered prayers when they could bring themselves to think at all. It was almost impossible to think, the constant battering rain on their helmets, the screaming people trying to climb up the ladders or howling below. The screams of their officers, the way their spears were slick and clumsy in their hands, everything dark, the rain blinding, it was hard to breathe. It was hard to breathe and the battle had only begun. Minutes. Just minutes. How many had died, in just a few minutes?
“Stones!” The walls were forty feet tall. You didn’t need to aim. You didn’t even need huge rocks. Some solders pushed ladders, others flung down rocks, breaking heads and, hopefully, ladders. The commanders weren’t going to waste oil. Not now. Not when their enemy was hoping they would do exactly that.
“Reinforcements! We need more support!”
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“The East wall is under attack!”
“The South Wall is under attack!”
The wind picked up, blowing north, hot from the Redstone Wastes. The rain that had been hammering the city rolled backwards, leaving seeming silence in its wake. The silence didn’t last long. There was far more screaming happening than people realized. The clouds still covered the moon, bare patches of slightly lighter sky peeking through. The soldiers on the wall rushed around, clearing off the captives who had been driven up the ladders. Some fortunate few were knocked by the soldiers into the city. If they survived the fall, perhaps they would be looked after. That was their fortune. The rest were shoved off the wall by the cold faced soldiers, looking wan and sickly under their dome helmets in the orange light of the braziers.
There was a hissing noise, like the return of rain cut with the sound of rattling reeds or clattering branches. Goosefeather arrows fell on the parapet. Most deflected off of helmets or shattered on stout lamellar armor. Not all of them. Faces hollowed out by killing maimed civilians or their captured brothers from the army were filled with arrows plunging out of the darkness.
“Shields! Get shields up here! Now, now, now!”
The arrows came steadily, in a hissing downpour. The soldiers slammed their back to the parapet, getting firmly under cover and waiting for shields to arrive. But while they did, the ladders went up again. The screaming captives were once more forced up the ladders, once more fouling the defensive lines, and forcing the demoralized defenders to stand and shove them off the walls yet again. But this time, the rain that fell had narrow steel tips, stout shafts and fine goosefeather fletching.
Anyone who served out on the Steppes knew about the bows used by the Yuu. Their double curves meant that a short bow could hold explosive power, wieldy enough to shoot from horseback, yet outranging many larger ones drawn by infantry. They were a bit complicated to build, being an amalgam of wood, horn and hide, but they were unquestionably some of the finest bows mortals could make. Except for one terrible flaw, that ensured no one off the steppes saw any use in them.
They were an amalgam of wood, horn and hide, held together by glue. Glue that melted in the rain. And across the city, high ranking officers and officials simultaneously remembered that Yuu Shaman could make magic stones that controlled the weather. They didn’t do it often, and it wasn’t considered reliable, but tonight they had made it work. Worse, the Yuu were shooting from the darkness, invisible to the defenders, but the defenders were all clustered on the wall. Helpfully outlined by the brazers. Worse still, the Yuu firmly grasped the range to the wall. They didn’t have to aim. They just had to hit a certain distance, and trust the volume of fire to do the rest.
An attitude the Red Plume General could entirely understand. “Loose!”
From behind the thick walls, heavy siege engines snapped forward. Swinging weights moved in perfect curves of murderous mathematics, sending hundreds of pounds of fist-sized stones more than a hundred miles an hour across three hundred yards of grassland. They were shooting blind too, but it was a hell of a lot easier to make launchable rocks than arrows. And it wasn’t just rocks. The Yuu were in for an unpleasant siege.
Heavy tower shields were rushed to the battlements. Specially trained soldiers held them up like portable roofs, others plugged gaps in the parapets, stopping arrows and ladders alike. Painfully, section by section, the defenders firmed their hold on the walls. At no point had they fully lost control of a section of wall. Unless the Yuu were willing to commit to a full assault on one point, they weren’t likely to lose the wall either. The Yuu commanders clearly agreed. Deep horns sounded from the darkness. The captives were allowed to retreat from the base of the walls, the wounded and dying left on the battlefield.
No sense in launching a full assault when the defenders were at their strongest. There was always tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And in the meantime, the true power of the assault would slowly reveal itself.
In the courtyard, Tian slowly closed his eyes. He balled up his fists and pressed them to his knees, then bent over, crushed by the weight of what had happened, and what was about to happen.
“Compassion. What is compassion? Right now, in this place, at this time, what does it mean?” The words ground out of him, something between a snarl and a sob. Liren looked over at him, then slowly closed her own eyes, before standing and staring up at the shrouded moon.
“I don’t know, Zihao. Right now, I have no idea at all.”
At the base of the wall lay the wounded captives. Their bodies broken by the fall, their hands mutilated, their feet torn, bloody and infected by being driven over the steppes with only rags to protect their feet. Each was a burden, a mouth to feed, a body that could never add to the defenders’ strength. Even prolonging their life would use irreplaceable medicine.
Bad enough if they were Yuu, but they weren’t. They were countrymen and women, some comrades from the army. They weren’t silent about their suffering either. Their screams, their moans, could be heard clearly from the top of the wall, and even on the other side of it. Thousands of voices forming a chorus of desperation and pain.
So what was the compassionate thing to do? If compassion had no answer, where did duty lie? The City Lord, the City Protector, the Red Plumed General and the soldiers and the civil servants, the doctors and the mortal grandmaster martial artists, they all had their duties. Even the mercenary cultivators had their duties. Duties under the law. Duties imposed by tradition, and culture, and the politics of a city under siege.
A situation with no right answer, where any choice would have a price in pain, in loss of morale, in loss of will to fight. A situation where no choice, including choosing to do nothing, was right. Tian wanted to blame this on the heretics. He was sickly certain the Yuu didn’t need the advice. He could use some advice right now. He was doing exactly what he said he would do. Sitting in his courtyard, doing nothing. Should he rush out and tend to the wounded? Which wounded? Just the soldiers, or the captives too? Should he try to slip out of the city and start picking off shamans? He didn’t think he’d have the chance to, before being jumped by a half dozen grand shamans. They might be a bit leery of rushing the city, not sure of what traps they might have set up, but they wouldn’t be nearly so cautious out on the grassland.
In the face of all this horror, what was a daoist, a doctor, a man, supposed to do?