My job now. I bend and lift the woman warrior into my arms. Walking hunched over, I see Skenandoah. He’s firing one arrow after another at the base of the palisade. His war shirt has a dozen ragged holes down his arms where his cape has been clipped by arrows. His square face is hard and red, his brown eyes glittering.
As I struggle to move by him, to reach the ladder, Deputy War Chief Leep cries out. Four paces away, he staggers backward and falls off the palisade with an arrow through his skull. Skenandoah looks for an instant too long. The arrow strikes him squarely in the lungs. As he grabs hold of the palisade, his bow drops from his fingers and clatters on the catwalk. A strange, almost amused expression touches his face. It’s a mortal wound. He must know it. He straightens to his full height, as though making a target of his broad chest, and shrilly roars a defiant war cry. Within moments three more arrows slam into his body, each knocking him back a step. He crumples like a dry blade of grass beneath tramping feet.
Every warrior on the catwalk stops. They’ve lost both their war chief and deputy war chief in less than twenty heartbeats. Most have seen fourteen or fifteen summers. There’s no one left to lead them. I can see it in their eyes. They think it’s over. There’s no hope.
One youth throws down his bow and flees. Two follow him. The rest are backing away from the palisade.
I hastily lay Londal’s body down and grab Skenandoah’s bow. Sick helpless rage fills me. As I tug the quiver from Londal’s shoulders and sling it over my own shoulder, I shout, “Get that look off your faces! There are Hills People to kill! Nock your bows!”
Young warriors suck in air. They stare at me.
“Do it now!” I shout.
As though they’ve been slapped from a nightmare, they scramble to obey me.
A strange madness filters through me. An old familiar madness. My practiced hands work automatically, pulling arrows from the quiver, nocking, letting fly. As I watch man after man fall to my arrows, the fever builds. I’m on fire, and the sparkling mist is so bright it hurts.
“Sky Messenger!” Yaweth cries. “They’re coming through!”
I swing around and see enemy warriors flooding through two holes in the innermost palisade, streaming across the plaza. The few Standing Stone warriors run to meet them. It is a disorganized rabble. As more of the enemy floods inside, the Standing Stone warriors break and run. The enemy pursues. The sodden thuds of war clubs striking flesh rises. The victory cries of the Hills warriors are like a Spirit Plant surging through my veins.
I throw my head back and shriek a war cry. Every warrior turns to me. Aims shift. Enemy arrows stream around me.
“Yaweth!” I shout. “You’re my new deputy. Pick twenty people and form teams to cover every place where they might come through the inner palisade.”
“Yes, Sky Messenger. What about you?”
My eyes must be blazing. An appreciative smile crosses her face. She knows this look. We are going to win. “I’m going down to lead the warriors in the plaza. Now move! They’re coming.”
I charge for the ladder.
Fifty-nine
Sky Messenger
I leap off the rungs and hit the ground running. Skenandoah’s bow sings in my hands. Standing Stone warriors flee around me, their faces stunned and gray, a slack-jawed mob. Most are very young, little more than terrified children. But I, above all, know what children can do when they must.
A bony girl in a torn dress has hold of an older man’s arm. She is perhaps thirteen, crying, trying to drag him backward into the fight. He’s seen around sixteen summers. “Please, my brother, they’ll kill Mother and Father!”
He screams, “No!” shakes off her hands, and runs.
I grab the youth as he darts by and swing him around to glare full in his face. “Pull that war club from your belt! You’re a Standing Stone warrior. Fight!” The man is shaking badly. “What is your name?”
“P-pato.”
I release him and step into the falling arrows to shout, “I am Sky Messenger. Follow me! Now is the time to save your families from slavery and death! Follow me!”
I shriek another war cry and pound into the plaza battle, loosing arrows on the run. I may not know these children’s names, but they know mine. I hear them coming on behind me, my army of children. Bravely following. May the ancestors protect them. I cast a glance over my shoulder. Perhaps forty. That is all the help I have to drive back the endless stream of warriors. It must be enough.
Yaweth’s people race along the catwalk, getting into position. Every time Hills warriors duck through a hole in the walls, her warriors cut them to pieces. That leaves perhaps one hundred of the enemy in the plaza. Men who know the only way they’ll get out is to kill every man, woman, and child in the village.