Woven Steel

CHAPTER 10: City Of Orphans, Part 1

The day had begun beautifully, with a fresh clean breeze off the sea and a mid-spring sky untroubled by clouds. Untroubled, that was, until the incendiaries began to scream in from over the walls. It was noon now, and quarter of Metsamor was alight. 

Hallmayn gripped his pike and stood up straight, trying to look soldierly. He was with many other 'soldiers' crowded in the open  square near the west gate. He doubted he was achieving the desired effect. The kettle helm he had scrounged up was too big for him. Even with the leather chinstrap tightened all the way it still tended to tilt over to one side, as it was doing now. He hoped it looked jaunty, rakish, maybe even piratical. But Hallyman was a realist, as well as a student of philosophy. He knew it was much more likely he looked boyish and absurd.

As a realist , he also knew that he was unlikely to live out the week. The way Broduer was talking, he might be lucky to live out the day. As a student of philosophy, he knew it was a bit absurd to be concerned with aesthetics at a time like this.  But one had to do die, sooner if not later. Did one have to die as a joke? And what was true for him was true for the entire Metsamor Worker's and Student's Commune.  The end would be coming soon. The important thing was to make it mean something.

Hallmayn wondered how widely his sentiments were shared. Crowded around him were a hundred of his comrades, maybe more. The troop was near even mix of students and artisans- former students and former artisans, really, since none of them attended any classes or done any real work for more than a month.  Few of them looked particularly more martial than Hallmayn.  They were armed and armored in much they same manner as him- that is, haphazardly. The looting of the city armory at the begging of the uprising had provided each man with a bit of armor or a weapon, usually not both. 

The exception of course, was Broduer.  He was wearing a gleaming silver breastplate over a white silk shirt. His chain mail hood was pulled down and puddled around his neck, revealing his perfect obsidian-black hair. His hand rested comfortably on the pommel of the sword at his hip.

Behind them bucket brigades composed of women, children and the few pyromancers they had on hand were fighting the fires desperately. Hallmayn had heard a rumor that a gang of former librarians had abandoned their post on the wall to stand guard their old domain from immolation. He did not blame them. It was the biggest collection of texts outside of Latimer Down in the basement there were original copies of scrolls dating from before the Moonbreak, written in the runes of the old wizard-kings.  Priceless, literally priceless. Their destruction was unthinkable.

                             Somewhere behind him there was a massive  thump, followed by a cracking sound. Hallmayn, snapped out his reverie, spun around along with many of those around him. They saw a giant chunk of the tall sandstone wall that surrounded the city, only three blocks away, come crashing inward. Debris vomited onto the houses below, and dust billowed from the gap like smoke. 

They were battering the walls now too.

              "Listen to me, Comrades, Brothers!" Broduer said, from his pedestal atop an overturned cart. "Pay it no mind. They can batter away at the walls all they want. It will do them no good. It will take them months to knock them down, and even then they would need a fleet of boats they don't have. There are only three ways into the city, and we have them guarded."

There were several holes in that, it seemed to Hallmayn. They could build boats, just as they had built the siege barges. Hell, they could use the barges. And weeks to batter the walls down? How could he believe that, after seeing what just one shot could do? Broduer was many things. Stupid was not one of them. Hallmayn had known him since their second term, nearly two years ago.  And since the commune began- well, that was another five years all smashed into a month.  A whole life. Breathless kisses on Dahlgren Square, in the middle of a dense, dancing crowd of newly free citizens. Strutting through the streets side by side, soldiers of the revolutionary militia, the poppy-flower cockade pinned to their proud chests. Falling in to bed together as, out the window, the first lemon-yellow incendiaries streaked in over the walls.