Chapter Seven.
Kallista stirred and groaned. She tried to marshal her eyelids to open, but they didn't obey. Instead she explored her surroundings with her other senses. The earth below her was hard and baked hot by the sun, which beat down on her from above. It smelt like a clay oven, a scent which reminded Kallista painfully of her childhood.
She could hear to her right sounds of activity: footsteps thudding against the ground, low voices, a crackle that sounded familiar, but that she couldn't quite recognise. A gentle breeze fanned her face, bringing with it a disgusting, sickly sweet stench. Kallista wrinkled her nose, then groaned as the motion sent a sharp bolt of pain thudding through her head.
"Hey, this one's still alive!"
The call came from quite close by and frightened Kallista with its suddenness. More footsteps thudding, this time in her direction, then rough hands grabbed her uniform and turned her over.
"Gyurel scum! What did you -".
" 'Ey! 'Old up there 'Arry! 'S a woman."
"Oh. Well, blow me down, it is, too. Give us a hand then, Lyle."
More hand groping at the black fabric of her tunic. A feeling of weightlessness came to her as they hoisted her limp body aloft and began moving somewhere. The sunlight pierced her eyelids, making her wince.
"Good one, 'Arry. Yer hurtin' the poor darlin' ".
"Shut up."
" 'Ey! Wha's a woman doin' in 'ere anyways?"
"Remember the runaway cart from yesterday? Before those damn Gyurelians attacked us?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I'm bettin' she was the one in it."
"Yer kiddin'!"
"Nope."
"Cross yer 'eart?"
"Lyle, I swear it on my mother's grave."
There was a brief silence and Kallista knew they were both looking at her. She thought about moving, but before she could make up her mind the sun suddenly left her face and the mens' boots clomped onto wood.
"Got a live one fer ya', doc'."
"Put him over there."
"It's a 'her', Gil."
"A her?!"
More footsteps. Kallista was really getting tired of all the surprise she was causing. Time to wake up.
With great effort she forced her eyes open, an involuntary groan escaping her lips as pain thudded behind her eyes. Her watery gaze was met with the concerned stares of three men, all three looking tremendously taken aback.
"All ... alright. Bring her over here," the doctor, a short, thickset man with black hair, said.
They carried her into another room, an empty one with just one bed. Someone's chain-mail and sword-belt, with the weapon still in the scabbard, lay discarded in a corner. The men laid Kallista gently on the covers, the straw mattress feeling like a feather bed after the hard earth. She sighed with delight.
The two soldiers left the room, only the doctor remaining. He leant over Kallista, frowning in a concerned sort of way, and she saw blood-stains splattered across his white tunic. Sudden fear struck her, where was Merric? Then she caught herself and scowled for being so concerned about a soldier she'd only just met. In fact, if it hadn't of been for him she might have escaped and would be leagues away from here, not lying on this bed with a head that felt like a warhorse had kicked it.
"Where does it hurt?" the doctor asked, breaking her train of thought.
Kallista rolled her eyes. "Everywhere?" she replied.
A smile cracked his weary face, a chuckle bubbling up from his throat. "I mean, where does it hurt the most?"
She took a quick inventory of her body. Her limbs didn't hurt much; they just felt numb from lying awkwardly on the ground all night. It was her head, especially her jaw, which was causing her the most grief. She told the man so.
"Hmm ..." he replied, sticking his tongue out slightly as he felt her forehead. A quick search seemed to assure him she hadn't cracked her skull, so he switched to inspecting her face.
"Well what do we have here?" he muttered to himself when he moved on to her jaw. Kallista couldn't see, but she assumed it was beginning to bruise.
"I got punched," she replied.
"Yes, I see that."
"No need to get sarcastic, doc."
He laughed, and it was so infectious that Kallista tried to grin. Her jaw throbbed when she did, causing her to groan.
"You'll live," the doctor said. "It'll hurt like H -," he caught himself, "like the dickens for a week or so, but you'll live."
"Don't bother censoring yourself, I've heard worse," Kallista assured him.
He tsked slightly, felt her jaw one more time then straightened. From beyond the door Kallista could hear more boots.
"Doc!" came a call.
The doctor turned. "Be right there!" he replied.
Kallista struggled to sit up, head whirling. He put out a hand to steady her but she waved it away impatiently. "Go. I'm fine. Help the others," she said.
"But --," he began.
"Go," she replied firmly, fixing him with the sternest gaze she could muster. "You're an army doctor, help the soldiers."
He hesitated for a fraction of an instant, then nodded and rushed from the room. Kallista collapsed back against the hard pillow, allowing herself a long moment of rest to calm her spinning head. Gods, she hadn't felt this sick in forever.
She had to move. She had to take the opportunity and get out of here, escape, before the soldiers got their act together and slapped her back in the prison barrack. The room tilted like the deck of a ship as she staggered to her feet and lurched toward the door.
The room beyond was a larger ward than the tiny, single-bed one she had been in. White beds lined the wall with neatly spaced military precision. A good proportion of them were occupied by quivering masses of bloody flesh. Kallista saw the doctor hunched over one, already up to his elbows in gore.
It was easy to slip unnoticed back out into the courtyard, where the first thing she saw was a massive fire in the centre of the open space. Men coated black with soot danced about it like savage tribesmen in some strange ritual. Closer inspection showed that they were throwing something into the hungry flames.
A rare breeze wafted the sickly sweet stench she had smelled before straight into Kallista's face, making her cough and gag. The foul odour coated her nostrils and refused to be dislodged. It was disgusting. She sneezed and held her forearm across the lower part of her face, which made it harder to breathe but at least kept the smoke from her airways.
Kallista stepped down from the infirmary steps and saw pairs of men scurrying to and fro from the fire, carrying things between them that she couldn't quite recognise. It took a few moments for her to realise that the limp bundles were not broken wood or tattered cloth, but bodies.
Cold shock coursed through her, chilling her to the very bone. The bonfire was not a bonfire at all.
It was a funeral pyre.
Bile rose in her throat and she was forced to look away. As she did so Kallista saw a familiar figure emerging from the prison barrack. Merric straightened in the sun, squinting at the fire. He wore an expression of despair.
Before she could catch herself, Kallista called his name.
He turned and fixed his light blue eyes on her. A grin came to his lips.
"Kallista! You're okay!" he said, leaping down the barrack steps and hurrying over.
She met him half-way, removing her arm from her face. The stench wasn't as bad here, the air breathable but still tainted with the horrible aroma. Merric didn't seem to be affected by it as much as she was, his silly grin only widened.
Kallista halted when they came within range of one another, but Merric didn't. To her utter surprise he scooped her up in his strong arms and gave her an affectionate squeeze. Before she could stop herself, Kallista's own arms came up and slid around him. She could feel his chorded muscles, hard as steel, bunching in his back.
All too suddenly he released her and she stumbled back, trying to arrange her wits. Her face burned. Merric just smiled at her, completely unperturbed by what had just happened.
"When I woke up and you weren't there," he said. "I thought maybe ..."
He gestured to the stack of bodies Kallista could now see, which had been hidden by the tall flames when she stood outside the infirmary. The rest of Merric's sentence died.
"You thought I'd died," she finished for him.
He just nodded, those piercing blue eyes holding her own. They were the sort of eyes a person could get lost in, mesmerised by. It took great effort for her to look away.
"Why would you care if I died?" she wanted to know.
From the corner of her vision she saw him shrug. "A lot of my men have, I didn't want to be responsible for a civilian's death as well."
"You think you're responsible for all this?" She looked back at him.
He lowered his eyes to the ground, this time it was he avoiding her gaze. "I'm in charge. I should have trained them better."
Kallista laid a hand on his arm. "You couldn't have prevented this," she told him softly.
He just nodded. Kallista sighed and looked around, taking stock of the carnage. She had already seen the stack of bodies and the pyre, as well as the hole in the prison barrack wall, but now she could plainly see broken wagons, over-turned barrels and the littered corpses of horses and men not yet collected for cremation. A building behind her was a blackened shell of charred wood. Food scraps were strewn on the ground around it and Kallista realised, with a sudden jolt in her stomach, that it was the kitchen. She vaguely wondered if Berta was okay, and then was surprised she cared.
The ruins of the kitchen were right next to the infirmary. As it had blazed the flames had reached the outer infirmary wall and scorched it black, but thankfully it had not caught flame.
Kallista switched her gaze to the left, toward the Keep and saw that it was still standing, and relatively unharmed. A lot of bodies littered the ground before it, and she was saddened to see most wore the blue uniforms of Ohadian men. They had died to a man trying to deny the invaders entry. But why?
She frowned, puzzled. "Merric, what's in that keep over there?"
Merric looked up and followed her pointing finger. She watched his eyes rake up the building, then settle on the bodies as hers had done. He shrugged.
"A weapon ... I think," he replied. "It's why we're here. We have to guard it."
"It's not what those brutes wanted, is it?"
Merric's eyes widened, and his face slacked in shock. "Oh my gods."
"What," Kallista asked in alarm.
He wasn't able to answer. Next second a horn sounded from a sentry on the battlements, followed by the cry: "Rider approaching!" Merric shot Kallista a strange look, then raced towards the nearest set of undestroyed stairs. With scarcely a moment's hesitation, she leapt after him.
The battlements were somewhat still intact. A few places had large pieces of walkway missing, the stone scorched from flame. Kallista followed Merric as he dashed along, trying to keep up and at the same time balance. The reek of burning bodies wasn't as bad up here, where the smoke could disperse more efficiently. Kallista was glad for it.
By the time she caught up to him, Merric was already scanning the barren horizon with a spyglass. Not toward where the trade route was, but out into the wasteland, where no self-respecting person should be. Puzzled, Kallista raised a hand to shade her eyes and squinted.
The heat devils dancing in waves above the cracked and dry earth made it almost impossible to locate the rider at first. But then she saw something black, bobbing in the silver of what seemed to be a floating lake. At the same time as she spotted it, Merric removed the spyglass from his eye and handed it back to the sentry.
"It's not one of ours," he said grimly.
Fear coiled like a stirring serpent in Kallista's stomach. She turned to sweep her gaze nervously over the mountains, wondering if the rider was a distraction from a second attack. Her careful inspection revealed nothing out of the ordinary, except the dappled ground where dozens of horse hooves had pounded the night before. It snaked down the side of the nearest mountain like a dried up river-bed.
When she returned her gaze to the direction of the rider she saw that he was much closer than she'd first thought. Merric nodded to the sentry beside him and the man gave the captain his bow and an arrow from the quiver on his back. Calmly, Merric nocked the arrow and drew a bead on the rider. As the galloping horse came within a hundred yards of the fort walls, he sang out.
"Halt where you are!"
The rider sat up, drawing on the reins and sliding his perspiring mount to a stop.
Merric tightened his grip on the arrow. "State your purpose," he said calmly, shutting one eye so that he could aim better.
The rider held up a scroll, his horse dancing and straining against the hard hand against its bit. "I bring word from Lord Ogai."
"Lord Ogai?" Kallista asked Merric in a voice that wouldn't carry. Merric just shook his head.
"Word of what?" he called in reply.
The rider unfurled the scroll, cursing as his impatient steed whirled in a circle, refusing to stand still.
"I, Lord Ogai, of the great empire of Gyurel," the rider began to read in a loud voice. "Hereby demand you to evacuate this fortress and take word of your defeat to your king. Tell him I want his surrender delivered to me in written form by the time the full moon comes again."
"And if we don't?" Merric wanted to know, still training the arrow on the mounted man.
"Failure to comply with his orders will result in immediate death to all those in Ohadi," he replied.
"Immediate death to all? And how exactly does he plan to accomplish such a task? Ohadi is twice as large as Gyurel. From what I saw last night, his force is hardly more than ill-trained thugs."
"He doesn't need soldiers to kill you all," the rider cackled, his horse half-rearing. "Not when he has the Book of Elements."