The CRES code

Chapter Eleven - The Orc

     He was awoken by Jane shaking his shoulder.

     Randall jerked awake and stared around, momentarily unsure where he was and what he was doing. His body was aching where he'd been lying on the hard, round turnips and one of his legs was numb from where it had been dangling over the side of the cart and the sharp corner of the wood had trapped a nerve. He rubbed some life back into it and groaned as the full horror of his situation came back to him. "I was hoping it had all been a dream," he muttered unhappily.

     "Never mind that," said Jane excitedly. "Look! We're here!"

     There was a city ahead of them, he saw, or at least what had been considered a city in medieval times. It lay inside a strong looking stone wall. Three times the height of a man, with a crenelated top behind which men in metal armour were staring out over the surrounding countryside. A row of arrowslits ten feet below the top testified to the existence of a corridor inside, presumably containing more defenders, and there were square towers at intervals of fifty metres or so. The nearest one, to the left as they approached, had a team of workmen repairing damage to the top, hoisting huge blocks of stone with thick ropes and pulleys and fitting them carefully into place. There was more damage elsewhere, Randall saw, although not as serious. The sort of damage that might be caused by catapults.

     "Gods gobblers!" said Ronald in surprise. "The orcs've been! They mest still be around, we might have passed right by 'em! God! I wouldn't have dared come if I'd known!" He stared at his son as if grief stricken by the danger he'd put him in.

     "It's okay, Pa," the boy replied. "We're safe, and we'll soon be inside the walls. Besides, looks like they've been at that for a couple days already. The battle was probably over before we left home."

     "The orcs could still be around, an Daisy an the other kids are still out there! They don't know!"

     "The farm's twenty miles away..."

     "Twenty miles to the north! The orcs must have passed right by 'em, an they might be taking the same route back as the way they came!"

     "We didn't pass any orcs on the way. Calm down, Pa. Either they went by another route or they're still around somewhere. Probably raiding Saltmarsh or Southby."

     The farmer continued to fret, though, and the hibernators could see him wanting to turn the cart around and head back home as fast as it would carry him. Gradually, though, the sense of his son's words filtered through to his agonised brain. Either the orcs had already reached their farm ahead of them, in which he would arrive too late to help, or the orcs had gone another way. Either way, racing home was pointless. Better to get inside the city walls as quickly as possible, to get his son to safety. Then worry about returning home tomorrow, after he'd delivered his goods.

     The fields beside them on the road were churned up, they saw, as if great crowds of people had been milling about for several days. Randall found himself reminded of the aftermath of a music festival. The tall ears of corn had been trampled flat, except for a few clumps that had miraculously escaped, and about thirty metres away was the smashed and burned remains of some kind of large, wooden structure. From his memories of old medieval action movies, Randall recognised it as a seige tower.

     There was a crowd of crows gathered a few metres away from it, hopping around and cawing angrily at each other. Occasionally one would leap into the air to fly a short distance away before landing and walking back again. "They're eating something," said Emily, leaning forward to see better. "I think it's a human corpse."

     "Nay," said Ronald, though. "More like an orc. If it were a man it would've been gathered up by  now for the funeral mound."

     "Funeral mound?" said Jane uneasily.