Chapter eighty

Ortia under siege

 

Aurelian got all of his elves back behind the walls and waited.  As the rays spiralled downwards the defenders finally got a close-up view of them. They were at least thirty feet long and had a strange deep blue interior with a greyish translucent skin. Their bodies changed very little but their wings were constantly shifting, sometimes short and stubby and sometimes long and pointed. Everything that they touched crumbled away, but they appeared to suffer no damage at all.

Once they had reached the level of the wall the rays began to batter them. Each swoop produced a collision that caused a green flash which erupted on the stonework of the wall. Any elves that were close to the coruscation died instantly, burned up in a vivid green-blue spark. There was a smell like fireworks, which was horribly disconcerting. The impacts were also clearly weakening the walls, even though they were protected by Quiena’s Magic.  The kinaam crowded round, waiting for a hole large enough to crawl through. There were so many of them that they could replace each body that they lost with three more. The defending elves were increasingly tired and desperate.

Marthian was up on the thickest part of the wall with Aurelian. They no longer paid any heed to Perclivius, who wandered the streets giving garbled orders to soldiers who ignored him. The proconsul and the general huddled together, shivering with fear in the bright sunlight under the cloudless blue sky. Every now and then Aurelian would stagger up and give orders. His voice had become hoarse and cracked, but he kept going, trying to rally his forces against their apparently invulnerable foes. He distributed his dwindling regular forces to the parts of the wall which seemed most likely to fall first.

‘What’s happening to the Lady?’ he asked.

‘I’m not sure – I’m getting very unclear reports, but they’re not good. It seems that the lake may be shrinking away. We may be losing her’

‘How can we have a city without the Lady?’

‘We can’t’ she said, emotion welling up in her voice, ‘however that might all soon be irrelevant, anyway’.

‘I have no idea what to do about those flying abominations’ he muttered, expecting no reply.

Marthian sighed and shook her head. She could hear the relentless bangs of the wall being gradually worn down.  The seeds of panic had already been sown among the elves and she was fearful that soon many of them would give up the will to carry on. Her mind raced with possible actions, but all of them seemed pointless. Pointless or not, however, she knew that she had to do something.

 

With no clear idea of what else to do, Marthian went to the worst affected part of the wall. There four rays were battering repeatedly against a single section. She forced himself to watch for an hour, hoping to spot some weakness in the fabric of the creatures, but she could see none.  She began to feel increasingly desperate. They didn’t seem affected by boiling oil, fire, stone or metal. Every time that they came close an intense volley of arrows would strike them, but they seemed to have no effect. Perhaps one in a hundred of the arrows would pierce the skin of a ray. When that happened the wooden part of the arrow would wither inside it, and a small puff, like a tiny blue cloud, would be expelled out of the monster, while the metal tip simply dissolved away. However, it seemed to slow the ray down only very slightly, if at all.  Marthian watched a complete cycle of the four rays attacking and concluded that, like everything else, the arrows were almost a complete waste of time. 

She retreated from the battlements and went down into the city to find something more useful to do. She had only once in her life felt worse, and that was very recently, but this time she was determined to carry on; to do something useful, until the very end. As she made her way down she had, on the edge of her conscious mind, the repeated image of an arrow withering in the blue of a ray.

 

Aurelian had conducted a chaotic, and entirely dispiriting, tour of the city’s defences. Now he was crouched down inside the outer ring of buildings closest to the wall. There were fires everywhere and the smell of soot and charred flesh filled the city. All around him people were running; either desperately trying to mend things or put fires out, or scarpering to find places to hide in the centre of the city.  Aurelian racked his brains. What else did he have to throw at the rays? Perhaps Marthian had some magical weapons that he didn’t know about.  He went to look for her.

He found her organising a bucket line to put out some of the fires that the wall collisions were causing, and where the pumping stations had been obliterated. She had got together a motely group of children and pensioners in a ragged column slowly passing large buckets from hand to hand.   Her robes were wet and muddy and her face was streaked with soot. She greeted him eagerly but without embracing him.

‘That’s my job’ he said, smiling, despite himself.

‘I’d rather you did your new job properly’ said Marthian sharply, ‘then I could do something a little more proconsular’

Aurelian’s smile died on his lips. He felt totally unable to help her and still ashamed of his earlier cowardice.

‘Sorry, darling’ said Marthian, stroking his arm discreetly, ‘this is dreadful for everyone. Do you have some news?’

His face darkened further as he recounted a series of failures against the rays. The only way to distract them temporarily was to send a raiding party out to attack the kinaam– this would defelct a ray or two for a few minutes as they came and dealt with the threat. However, this achieved nothing except more deaths and more food for the kinaam. 

Marthian screwed up her face.

 ‘Have you noticed that occasionally an arrow gets stuck in inside a ray?’ she asked

Aurelian shook his head.

‘No – does it matter?’

‘Probably not – but that’s all we have…’ she said, ‘…a few arrows get inside the rays, everything else has no effect. It looks like we’ll have to try something stupid.’

Aurelian looked at her, uncomprehending. 

Marthian left the bucket line and walked up to a small cherry tree growing nearby. She gestured to Aurelian to join her.

‘Lop a big branch off that tree, General’ she commanded.

Aurelian was perplexed.

‘Why?’

‘So far only wood seems to affect them – let’s throw a branch at one’

Aurelian stood for a second staring at the tree.

‘This is stupid, Marth…’

She growled at him.

‘Nonetheless, please do it, General’

Aurelian drew his heavy sword and hacked of the side branch of the cherry tree. It was much larger than she had originally intended and they both struggled to carry it towards the wall. After a few steps Marthian let go of her end and Aurelian fell over with the branch on top of him. He was about to complain when he saw Marthian’s expression – she was scowling.

‘Get some strong men over here with good throwing arms’ she demanded, ‘tell them we need them to do an experiment’

 

Marthian returned to the bucket line briefly, until Aurelian had found three burly elves to pick up the branch. One of them would have done as it turned out.  They were big elves.

Marthian ordered them to climb up on to the battlements close to where the four monsters were still flying. Then they waited, briefly, until one came into view.

‘I want you to fling it into the ray as hard as you can’ Marthian said, ‘and then duck down. I want to see what will happen’

Two of the elves held the branch at either end and prepared to throw it. The ray approached rapidly on its collision course with the wall. When it was about ten feet away the throwers swung the branch back and then pitched it into the centre of the beast. The branch struck close to one of its wings and seemed to stick on. The ray, distracted, fell rather harmlessly against the wall and then flew off slowly, twisting and turning, clearly trying to rid itself of the branch. It seemed that a few of twigs and leaves had penetrated the inside of the ray and that they were irritating it. A few puffs of blue smoke came out of its side but then it managed to shake off the branch, fly off and resume its previous flight pattern.

All around them they could hear the cracking and popping of the walls, as Quiena’s defences shuddered and crumbled. It was only a matter of time before the kinaam would flood the city and devour everyone and everything.  Aurelian’s head bowed and he began, for the first time, to think seriously of his death and the death of everyone and everything that he loved.

He wondered why they had done that with the branch, given that it hadn’t achieved anything; maybe it was just to be able to say that they were still trying, even at the end. He looked over at Marthian, certain that she’d be just as devastated as he. He was astonished to see that instead she seemed unaccountably excited, her eyes unbelievably bright.

‘General’ she commanded, ‘get some military carpenters to cut down enough trees to make pointed stakes as large as they can manage.’

‘Why?’ asked Aurelian, flabbergasted.  

 ‘Because I think I know how to destroy them’

She waited for a second, listening to the noises building up everywhere around her and smelling the city burning. 

‘That’s if we’re quick enough’