The Cellar Beneath the Cellar (Bell Mountain) by Lee Duigon

Author:Lee Duigon [Duigon, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chalcedon Foundation/Store House Press
Published: 2012-08-09T07:00:00+00:00

The next day was the worst day anyone in Ninneburky had ever seen.

When the first hint of dawn crept into the sky, masses of barbarians were already drawn up in a dense ring around the walls. Opposite the main gate, looking south, one man stepped out in front of the host and bellowed at the defenders in a language none of them had ever heard before. It was the mardar, but he was dressed as just another Zephite—helmet, horns, and a shaggy cloak. He raised a beribboned rod and shook it at the town, and those countless men behind him roared. And then they rushed forward, all of them at once.

“Hold your fire, boys—wait till you can make every arrow count!” The officers steadied their men as best they could, but many a hand trembled as its owner fitted arrow to the bow. The Zeph war cry sounded like an earthquake.

They had no ladders, no rams, no catapults. They must not have expected the moat. Some actually fell in, to be impaled on stakes. The rest tried to climb down and avoid the stakes, and then climb up again so they could get at the walls. But the air above them hummed with flying arrows, and there was such a crowd of them that an archer couldn’t miss.

It was very poor generalship on their part, Roshay thought. Nevertheless, for every Zephite that fell, two or three or four kept coming. They seemed to despise death. Heaps of killed and wounded lay in the ditch, but masses of men crawled out of it and attacked the walls with axes. Those who had no axes hurled short spears; and now men of Ninneburky began to drop off the wall.

The gate was the most vulnerable point. Had the Zeph taken time to shape a great log into a ram, they might have forced the gate in spite of the work done to strengthen it. Again and again they assaulted the gate, hacking at it, pushing against it fifty at a time with all their strength, while on the other side, crews of women pulled up heavy carts and pushed them onto their sides against the door.

And just when it seemed to everyone inside the walls that they’d done nothing all their lives but fight, and that they could fight no more, deep-voiced horns sounded somewhere and the Zephites abandoned the attack. They crawled over the bodies in the moat, back to their camp on the riverbank; and few were the arrows that pursued them. Only then did the defenders notice that the sun was setting.

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