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Chapter 17: Thirty Seconds of Timber

Chapter 17: Thirty Seconds of Timber

The third impact arrived before Leon finished counting.

Timber bowed inward. Three bound posts took the first part of the force and gave it back. The fourth came out of the saturated ground and hit the walkway behind it hard enough to split a plank. A defender threw himself sideways. Thorn panel burst loose in a spray of wet fibre.

Through the opening, Leon saw horn.

Not the forward-curving brow horns he would have expected. A thick nasal horn above a deep beak, and long spikes projecting backward from the frill behind the skull. Mud had darkened the hide almost black. Blood streaked one side of the frill where the thorns had opened it.

Somewhere behind him Tala said a word. Dorkesh.

Leon’s own mind supplied a different one and he did not say it out loud, because it was a guess from a museum placard and this was not a museum.

It pulled its head back and stamped beyond the wall, and the ground carried the weight of it up through Leon’s boots.

Kharun shouted.

Four defenders dropped their spears toward the damaged bay. Two more dragged a fresh thorn screen across the inner path. Nobody froze, nobody hesitated, and nobody looked at Kharun for instructions they had already been given years ago.

Leon grabbed the nearest loose support pole, planted one end at the base of the leaning post and angled the other toward an intact platform beam.

A brace. He pointed at a second pole, then at the post, then made a pushing motion.

Kharun looked once and understood.

Three people moved on his order, forced the second pole into place, and bound both braces to the surviving posts with wet rope. Leon wrapped his first turns too low. An older defender slapped his hands away, shifted the binding upward toward the load point, and locked it with a wooden toggle in about four seconds.

Local expert. Leon accepted the correction before the fourth impact and made a note to remember it afterwards, if there was one.

Both braces flexed. One cracked audibly.

The wall held.

Something bellowed on the other side. Lower than he expected, a sound that came through the timber more as vibration than as noise.

Kharun pointed at Leon, then back toward the northern platform. Stay back.

Leon shook his head and pointed at the post bases.

Because the animal was not the only problem, and it was not even the worst one.

Water had been collecting behind the retaining wall uphill all night. Every impact was shaking more soil loose. A dark line had opened between the wall and the ground behind it, and mud pulsed out of that joint with each vibration, a little more each time.

Leon ran to the collapsed drainage channel and kicked a layer of reeds aside. The original outlet was still there under the mud. The stone lining had slumped across it.

Reduce the water pressure or the wall stops being a wall.

He pointed at the blockage, then swept both hands downhill.

Kharun followed the line of it, and his face changed.

He barked another order.

Half the defenders stayed at the palisade. Four villagers took digging sticks and broad stone hoes to the blocked drain. Two more started moving baskets off the storage platforms.

He had split the problem without giving up command of either half.

Leon approved, and then remembered that his approval was still not a component of anything.

It hit the palisade again.

A frill spike punched through between two posts. One spear glanced off the beak. Another defender drove for the eye and Kharun knocked the shaft upward before it landed.

Killing the animal at the wall would not fix the wall. It would put four tonnes of dying Dorkesh across the only repair they had.

Tala went up the watch platform in three movements, looked out past the stakes, and whistled once — sharp, not the alarm pattern. Information.

She pointed down and to the left of the attacking adult.

Something smaller screamed outside.

Leon climbed one rung of the ladder, just enough to see over the damaged section.

A juvenile had pushed into the woven thorn barrier where the palisade curved toward the river. One foreleg was caught in the collapsed fibre. It was pulling backward, which was tightening the thorns around itself, which was making it pull harder.

And the adult was standing between the juvenile and the defenders, striking the wall every time a human moved toward it.

This was not an attack on the village.

It was a rescue attempt being carried out by an animal that weighed several tonnes and had no way of asking for help.

Leon dropped off the ladder and drew fast in the mud.

Wall. Adult. Juvenile. Then an opening further along the curve, and a clear line away from the settlement.

Kharun stared at it.

Leon pointed at the damaged bay, mimed repeated impacts, then pointed at the proposed opening and swept his hand out.

Let them leave.

Kharun answered with one hard word Leon did not know and did not need.

No.

The eastern palisade covered the only dry-land approach to the settlement. Cutting a hole in it deliberately undid the entire purpose of the thing, and every person on this terrace knew somebody who had helped build it.

Another impact drove the cracked brace back by a hand’s width.

Leon pointed at the trapped juvenile. Then at the adult. Then at the wall.

It would not stop. It could not stop. It did not have that option.

Tala came down off the platform and spoke to Kharun faster than Leon could follow. He caught four words. Young. Pain. River. Many.

Many.

Leon looked past the adult.

Branches were moving in the mist. More heavy bodies were standing in there, waiting.

The animal at the wall had not come alone. The rest of the herd had stopped behind it, and they had stopped because it had.

If panic went through that herd, the village would not be dealing with one impact point. It would be dealing with a front.

Kharun saw the branches.

He made the decision, and Leon watched it cost him.

Defenders shifted from the damaged bay toward the curved section by the trapped juvenile. Two people untied a woven panel rather than cutting it, because a cut panel is scrap and an untied one can be put back. Others carried broad reed mats and hide shields out to build temporary visual barriers along the line Leon had drawn.

No fire. Dry grass, elevated oxygen, thatched roofs and frightened animals would have turned one torch into an extinction event with housing.

So they used shape and sound.

Villagers beat spear shafts against shields behind the closed sections of wall, driving the waiting animals away from the centre of the settlement. Along the exit lane, everyone went silent and low.

Tala crawled under the outer edge of the platform with a hooked cutting blade.

The adult saw the movement and charged.

Kharun stepped between the horn and the opening.

He took it on the shield, against the side of the beak rather than the point of the horn, which was the only version of that decision anyone survives. The impact threw him across the wet ground. He rolled once and stopped against a post.

Leon started toward him.

Kharun raised one hand without lifting his head.

Still conscious. Still in command.

Tala cut the first loop off the juvenile’s leg.

The adult pivoted toward her.

Leon got both hands on one of the loose thorn panels, with two villagers on the other end, and they hauled it across the animal’s line of sight.

The adult hit the moving screen. The force tore it out of their hands and put Leon down on one knee in the mud.

The shoulder absorbed it. The hands did not — thorns opened three narrow cuts across his left palm, and he did not notice for another forty seconds.

Tala cut the second loop.

Free. The juvenile ripped its leg out of the fibre.

And for one bad second it ran the wrong way, toward the houses.

Kharun shouted from the ground and slammed his spear shaft against the post to its right. The villagers on that side came in on the same rhythm.

The juvenile turned away from the noise, found the open lane, and went through it.

Its mother followed.

Its flank passed close enough for Leon to see old scars under the mud and the shift of muscle beneath thick skin, close enough to smell it — wet earth, and something sharper underneath. It did not stop to attack anybody. It went after the juvenile, down the silent corridor, and out toward the trees.

Beyond the wall the herd began to move. Frills and spikes came through the mist one after another and the ground shook for nearly a minute.

Then the forest took them and the sound went away.

Nobody cheered.

Eleven seconds later the retaining wall failed.

It did not explode outward. It rotated. The upper stones leaned another degree, then another, almost politely. Then water burst through the opened joint, and mud carried the lower course downhill, and everything above it lost its support at once.

Leon shouted and pointed. Kharun’s people were already moving.

Two villagers dragged the injured defender out of the path. Others let go of grain baskets they could not carry and ran. Leon reached the nearest storage post as the ground under it shifted, and he and Kharun put their shoulders against the raised frame while three people pulled sacks off the platform above them.

They saved four sacks.

The fifth tore open against a stone on the way down, and the grain went into the mud, and the mud took it.

The oldest storage structure tilted, hung for one heartbeat, and went under the sliding wall.

When the ground stopped moving, the northern side of the settlement looked as though a brown wave had come through it and then thought better of the whole thing.

The palisade was still standing — opened deliberately in one place and broken in another.

Every animal was gone.

One defender had a broken lower leg. Kharun’s shield arm hung stiff against his side and he refused to let Nayra near him until every other person in the village had been counted out loud.

Leon looked at the spilled grain going grey in the mud.

He had helped save the village from the immediate problem. The solution had cost food, timber, rope, and blood, and he had a fairly good idea which of those was going to matter most in eleven days.

An elderly woman came out of the raised council house.

Silver hair in long braids. Both hands resting on a dark staff carved along its whole length with hundreds of small marks.

She looked at the opened wall. At the collapsed store. At Kharun’s arm. At the blood running off Leon’s left hand.

Then she said one sentence.

Aru translated it from the safety platform, using the limited shared words Leon now had.

"Wall lives," he said. "Food dies."

Veya’s eyes stayed on Leon.

The village had survived his first thirty seconds inside it.

Now it wanted to know what the next thirty were going to cost.