[Weeks later. Through the spring of Year 30]
[Selas POV]
The orcs kept coming.
Not in the same way. Not the same careless little band of a hundred, wandering south as if they had nowhere to be. After the first camp, the shape of it changed.
Two weeks after the first fight, a second band was spotted moving in from the north-west. Larger.
Around a hundred and thirty this time, and they moved as if someone were moving them — in a rough column, with a rough vanguard, and something that might have been orders being passed by noises I could not interpret. They had traded clubs for spears on half of the bodies we counted. A few even had something that looked like leather bound with sinew across the chest.
We met them three leagues from the wall. Same encirclement. Same discipline. Heavier fight, this time — they broke our first rank and we had to reset, and we lost two of our own.
Lost. In the sense that mattered. A young Lindar bowman called Aeglin, who had come up through the drills as a child. A Tattyar archer called Durel. Twenty-one wounded. We burned the bodies on the field, as before.
I brought Aeglin and Durel home on a wagon.
I delivered Aeglin to his mother myself. She did not scream. She took his hand. She sat beside the wagon for an hour without speaking. When I tried to say the sort of things a commander says, she shook her head once, slowly, and I understood that I was to stop.
We buried them outside the wall under two piles of stones. It was the first time the Avari had had to do this. Nobody knew the words. I did not know the words. In the end we stood around the graves in silence, and someone — a young bard — began a wordless song, and we all joined it, and that was the funeral.
That was the first one.
Three weeks later: another band. Two hundred, maybe slightly more. This one we ambushed on the march. We lost one. They lost all of them.
Two and a half weeks after that: another. Three hundred and fifty. We lost six. They lost every one of themselves, and we chased stragglers for half a day.
Six Avari dead in a season.
Six graves added to the row outside the north gate.
Six names added to the book Dirmal had started keeping two months before. He had called it, in neat Avarin: Those Who Stood. I had read the first entries and been unable to look at it for three days.
[Year 1135. Mid-spring. A night of cloud]
[Angrod POV]
Angrod was afraid tonight.
The cloud had rolled in out of the north in the late afternoon, thick and low, and by the time the silver hour should have come there was no silver to be had.
The wall was black against a black sky, and the torches along the watch-walk were the only lights, and they flickered because the wind off the lake had turned cold and rough.
Angrod walked his section with his bow across his back and his spear in his hand, and he did not like the wind, and he did not like the silence below him.
Because there was a silence below him. He could feel it.
He stopped.
He listened.
Somewhere under the treeline, something had stopped moving when he stopped moving. He could feel the shape of that stopping even though he could not hear anything.
He raised his spear. He turned his head, slow, and caught the eye of Thandor two towers down, and Thandor saw his posture, and Thandor picked up the horn at his belt.
Thandor blew it.
One long note. The settlement below began to stir.
And then, as if the note had been the signal they were waiting for, the forest came alive.
Gods.
There were hundreds of them in the treeline. He had not seen them. The dark and the cloud had hidden them. They must have moved into position through the whole afternoon, in ones and twos, each slipping under the trees and waiting.
Five hundred. That was his first fast count. Five hundred, at least, at the first ring of torchlight.
He dropped the spear and reached for the horn on his own belt.
He blew the long three-note call. Attack. Full force.
Below him the bell began to ring.
And the orcs came at the wall.
[Selas POV]
I was out of bed before the bell had finished its first pull.
By the time I reached the wall I was armed, and half the watch had beaten me to their posts, and Angrod's horn was still sounding, and Thandor's from further along, and the Avari were streaming up onto the rampart in organized groups the way we had drilled for twenty years without believing we would ever actually have to.
Five hundred orcs.
Five hundred.
It was the largest attack by an order of magnitude. Larger than any prior engagement combined. And they were throwing themselves at the wall with ladders. Crude ones, half-rotted already, but ladders, which meant someone had taught them what a wall was for.
"Archers!" I called down the line. "Loose at will! Do not wait for a mark!"
The air filled with arrows. They were not as accurate as our archers could be in daylight, on the range, with still targets. They were accurate enough. The first ranks of orcs below the wall went down in a dozen places at once.
But the ranks behind them stepped over the ones in front, and kept coming.
"Spears to the breach!" I called — the first ladder had reached the top of the eastern stretch, and one orc was already coming up. "Do not let them over! The moment one crosses, three more come with him!"
A young Tattyar whose name was — damn it, his name was Voron — put his spear through the orc coming up the first ladder and kicked the ladder back into the crowd below. The ladder fell. The orc at the top fell with it, and the ladder hit two of its kind on the way down.
Further along, two ladders had gone up at once, and for a moment I thought the section would break.
Then Celestia's voice came across the noise, sharp and clear, and four of her drill-circle were at the ladders together, and the ladders went over. The men on them went over with them, and I breathed out for the first time since the bell had rung.
Behind the spears, the archers were still loosing. Behind the archers, another layer of archers — women, mostly and two of Celestia's most reliable shots — stood on the second-line catwalk and picked off anything that had a foot on the wall. Not a single orc made it up into the settlement.
But they kept coming.
I do not know how long it lasted. An hour. Two.
At some point there was a lull. The orcs pulled back into the dark. The archers did not stop. We kept loosing into the treeline until Angrod on the next tower shouted for us to hold.
"Hold! I can't see them!"
The wind had shifted. The cloud was thinning. The next wave came — but weaker. Something had changed in them. Something in the press of their movement had slackened.
We broke the second wave at the foot of the wall.
The third wave never fully formed. They were still coming at us, but in knots now — groups. Not the solid front of the first hour.
Then — slowly, grudgingly, as the sky in the east began to pale to a thin grey — they broke.
We kept loosing until they were out of range.
Then we stopped.
And the silence came down.
The dead orcs at the foot of the wall and on the ground beyond were — I did not have to count. Angrod came up to the walk beside me, blood on one sleeve and a long cut along his jaw, and said, "About four hundred of them on the ground. Maybe more in the brush."
"How many did they start with?"
"Five hundred. I counted twice during the second wave. Maybe a few more. Not fewer."
"And us?"
He looked down. Briefly. Then back up.
"Five dead."
The number hit before the meaning did. Then the meaning arrived, and something in my chest dropped like a stone into dark water.
"Thirty wounded. Ten of those badly. Mireth is already working. The healing-house is full."
"Names."
He told me the names. I wrote none of them down. I would not forget them. I did not know yet whose parents were which, and which were young, and which were married. I would learn all of it in the next day, from the people who came to me to tell me.
I put my hand on the rampart to steady myself for a moment, and then I straightened, because five Avari were dead and I did not have the right to fold in front of the living ones.
"Scouts," I said. "At first real light. Follow them. Do not engage. I want to know where they have gone and what is behind them."
"Chief."
"Go."
He went.
[Three days later. The Council hall]
The report was what I had been expecting and the thing I had been hoping was not true.
Angrod and two other scouts had tracked the retreating orcs north through the forest and then, from the lip of a ridge, had lain on their bellies in the grass and looked out over the valley on the far side of the lake.
What they had seen had driven Angrod back to me at a run that had taken him two days and had aged him in the face.
He stood in front of the Council in the hall, and he spoke without any of the flourishes he usually allowed himself.
"Across the northern shore of Cuiviénen, there is an army."
Silence.
"How large?"
"I do not know precisely. More than I could count. More than I could estimate. More than a thousand. Several times more than a thousand. Perhaps three thousand. Perhaps many more than that. They are spread across a front I could not see the end of, and they have —" he hesitated. "They have camps. They are not passing through. They are gathered. They are being held in place."
"Are they moving south?" Thoron asked.
"Not yet. But they are forming up. I would guess — two moons. Three at the outside. Whatever stopped them from coming against us all at once is holding them together on the other side of the lake, but it will not hold forever. When the order comes, it comes."
Cálros sat down.
The Council did not speak for a long time.
I let it not speak. I let them understand, each in their own way, the shape of what we had just heard.
When I did speak, I spoke quietly, because quiet words in a quiet room did more than loud ones in that moment.
"We cannot hold this place against three thousand orcs. Or five thousand. Or ten. The wall will not hold them if they come all at once. The attack four nights ago was not an attack. It was a probe."
I let the word sit.
"I am calling, now, before this Council, for the evacuation of Cuiviénen."
A sound went up that was not a shout. It was a hundred people drawing breath at the same time, very quickly, and it was one of the worst sounds I have ever heard.
"Selas —" That was Amnion. His voice was shaking. "This is our home."
"Yes."
"We were born here."
"Yes."
"You cannot —"
"I can." I looked at him. I was steady. "I can because I have to. Amnion, I will say this once. If we stay, we die. All of us. The children you love. The grandchildren you have not yet seen. Everyone."
"We can fight —"
"We are forty fighters in every hundred souls, and we have bronze and a wall, and they have numbers," I looked around the room. "I am not afraid to fight them. I have fought them. I will fight them again. But I will not stand on top of a wall watching my people be killed in front of me because I was too proud to tell them we had to go."
I turned to Maethor.
All these years I had been waiting to see what Maethor would do in this particular moment.
He was silent for a long time.
At last he stood up.
"I have spent tens years of the Trees arguing with this Chief," he said. "I have said, in this hall and elsewhere, that he ruled by fear of a darkness that might never come. That he was making of our children what we refused to become when we refused Oromë."
He did not look at me. He looked, instead, at the graves outside the hall, where the five we had buried three days ago lay under fresh stones.
"I was wrong."
The silence in the hall now was of a different kind.
"I do not say this easily, and I will not say it twice. I was wrong. The darkness came. It came on an evening of cloud, at our gate. Five Avari who should be alive are not alive. He was right. He has been right from the beginning, and I have been a man stubborn enough to keep my own dignity in place of seeing what was in front of my face."
He turned to me.
"You are right that we must go, Selas. I will not stand in the way. I will stand beside you. I will make my family ready."
I could not speak for a moment.
When I did, my voice was less steady than I wanted it to be.
"Thank you, Maethor."
He inclined his head, once, and sat down.
Thoron stood. "I support the evacuation."
One by one, the Council rose.
It was done.
[That night. The lake shore]
I walked down to the water alone.
The lake was quiet. The clouds had gone. The stars were back. Cuiviénen lay before me exactly as it had lain the night I had been born — which I could not remember — and the night of the Sundering, which I remembered very well, and every night between.
I had not told the Avari the whole truth in the hall. I had told them we were leaving because we had to. I had not told them that I had known we would have to leave for all these years .
I touched the pouch at my belt. The acorn was there. Still warm. Still quietly pulsing against my fingers.
Behind me, the settlement was alive with work. Forges already running through the night. Carpenters already mustering every able hand to the wagon yards. Mireth and Lómiel already compiling lists of portable medicines. Caldor already — I knew without having to check — drawing plans for how to dismantle the cement-works and take the method with us as a written set of steps.
We would leave in three moons. Four at the outside.
Two thousand Avari. One hundred wagons.
Into lands I had only half-read about in a life I did not speak of.
I will not fail them, I thought.
I stood there a long time. Then I turned and went back into the settlement, because the work would not do itself.
[End of Chapter 11]
GLOSSARY
Úrkai (sing. úrka) — The Avari word for the creatures Selas calls orcs. Coined in the early years of the Avari calendar as a deliberate loan — the word predates any actual sighting, a fact only Selas himself finds suspicious.
Utumno — The fortress in the far north from which, the Avari now understand, the orcs are bred. Not spoken of in council by its name.
Bog iron — The only iron available near Cuiviénen. Mined from swamp sediment; limited, slow to produce, and by Year 30 of the Avari almost exhausted. Eol has produced exactly one usable lump of refined iron in thirty Years of the Trees. He keeps it in the Chief's house where no one will ask him to use it.
Cement, stone (poured) — The mortar-and-block technique discovered by two Lindar potters in Year 7 of the Avari and now the standard material for new construction. Unknown to any other Quendi anywhere.
Those Who Stood — The book started by the scribe Dirmal in Year 30, recording the names of Avari who have fallen in battle. Seven names, as of the evacuation council.
The Great Council — Joint sitting of the Elder Council and the Advisory Council on a matter of the whole people. Convened rarely. Convened at the evacuation.
The Evacuation (forthcoming) — The decision of the Great Council in Year 30 to abandon Cuiviénen ahead of the orc army gathering on its northern shore. Preparations to take three to four moons. The people who depart will, at the moment of departure, number near two thousand.