They advanced cautiously across the front yard with weapons drawn; Lady Roselyn and Pavel, still too weak to fight because of fever, brought up the rear.
To the left were burned-out stables, and to the right a provision store where shattered oil jugs and empty grain sacks were visible amidst a confusion of boards. Before them stood the main building of the convent, a two-story structure clad in white marble where the priestesses had once taken their meals and which housed the library and the offices of the abbess and her staff. The walls were still standing, but the black soot stains above each shattered window indicated the destruction that reigned inside. Vile symbols had been painted on the walls that Reiner was glad he didn't understand. The courtyard was strewn with rotting corpses dressed in priestess robes that lay like rotting fruit fallen from a macabre tree. Oskar shuddered at the sight.
They stealthily ascended white curved steps that led up to the level of the convent's collective dormitory, where the priestesses and novices had slept. In front of the building was a small square. Neither was in good repair. The dormitory, a large three-story building half of which was constructed of wood, had lost its left wing to the flames and the right wing was leaning dangerously. It appeared that the square had been used as a latrine and dumping ground by the invaders, and was littered with rotting food, broken and burned furniture, rusted weapons and excrement. It smelled like a sunken ossuary in a sewer.
Giano made them stop and crouch on the last step before the plaza. He pointed to the next level: a ruined garden reached by another flight of curved steps and surrounded by a balustrade overlooking the square. Above a row of burnt hedgerows they saw pikes pointing skyward with long-haired skulls nailed to the end like totem poles.
"They have their camp there." He said. "Behind the hedgerows. They patrol by walking around the edges." Barrister nodded his head.
"Good. Giano..., no, Oskar and Franz, I want you up there in the bedroom. There will be windows on the third floor that look out onto the garden. Otherwise, go up on the roof. You'll cover the boys at the bonfire. Giano, you'll join them when we've finished with the patrol.
"I'm sure it won't take seven of us to kill two men." Erich commented.
"They are tough men." Barrister explained. "And I'm hoping that seven of us will be enough to kill them one at a time. Now, here's what I want you to do."
As Barrister laid out the strategy, they watched the first of the barbarians pass by. He was an intimidating sight: a hairy giant clad in furs and leather, a head taller than Ulf and disproportionately loaded with muscle. He wore fetishes and amulets hanging from the braids in his beard, and the sheathed sword hanging from his belt seemed to exceed Franz's height, and probably outweighed him as well.
After waiting for the second barbarian to pass, they hurried to take up their positions: Oskar and Franz ran, crouching, toward the bedroom door, and the rest made their way toward the steps leading to the garden. Pavel, armed with one of Reiner's pistols, remained behind with Lady Roselyn.
There was a shattered statue of the Mother just below the balustrade flanking the garden. A blow from above had split it from one shoulder to the opposite hip so that what remained was a sharp shard pointing skyward, while the serene countenance of the Mother looked up from the rubble at the base of the pedestal. Giano put a hand to his heart at the sight.
"Pagans." He muttered. "Desecrating the goddess. Blasphemy."
Reiner smiled.
"A mercenary who worships the goddess of peace?"
"I always fight for peace." Giano replied, proudly.
"Ah."
While the others stuck to the walls on either side of the steps so they wouldn't be seen, Reiner and Giano tiptoed up to the garden level. On the east side it overlooked the ravine, and there the balustrade was flanked by tall columns. They had once been topped by statues of the Mother's martyrs facing the far north, but the invaders had knocked them down and the columns looked bare.
Reiner contemplated them with trepidation. Barrister had asked him and Giano to be the first to climb, and he didn't like the idea. Not because they were difficult to climb: they were wrapped in tough but thorny climbing rose bushes, which provided good foot holds and hand holds. The problem was that they were at the edge of the ravine, and while Reiner wasn't overly afraid of heights, clinging to a column with fingers and toes over a hundred-foot-high chasm with the bottom covered in sharp rocks would scare the bejesus out of anyone. He may have imagined it, but the wind began to get stronger the moment he started to climb.
At last, well after Giano had settled on his, Reiner stood at the top of the column. He swallowed. The top had seemed quite wide to him when he was on the ground, but now it seemed to have shrunk to the diameter of a plate. He squatted down, his knees shaking. Fortunately, the rose bushes were thick around the capital, so that unless they were looking for them, they were hidden from the eyes of someone on the ground. What was going to make them more visible was the blanket.
After glancing around to make sure the guards were out of sight, Reiner pulled out his blanket, unrolled it and, after clinging tightly to a branch, tossed one end to Giano. The mercenary did not seem to feel any fear of heights.
He stretched an arm across the space between them and caught the blanket without hesitation. He gave Reiner a smile and put his thumb and forefinger together to indicate that all was well.
Reiner's pulse was pounding. If the invaders detected anything, it would be the blanket falling between the two columns like a festive flag. At least the sun was at such an angle that the light cast no shadow on the path.
He had little time to be distressed. Just as he and Giano finished settling in, the first of the invaders rounded the high hedge and started toward them. Reiner crouched among the brambles and clutched the blanket in both hands. He watched the advancing invader as he gazed idly over the ridge at the endless woods below; as he reached the stairway, he turned to walk along the balustrade overlooking the square, oblivious to the presence of the men above and below him.
The time had come. Reiner and Giano exchanged a glance and jumped off the columns at the same time, holding between them the neatly unfolded blanket. They landed perfectly; the blanket covered the invader's head as he was taking a step and they pulled back hard. The giant fell heavily on his back and gasped as he was knocked breathless by the blow, but before he had time to recover and cry out, the rest of Barrister's men ran up the ladder and jumped on him: Ulf sat on his chest and pinned his arms to the ground; Gustaf and Hals grabbed his legs, and Barrister grabbed his head through the blanket and thrust the butt of his pistol into the man's mouth, who struggled for breath.
Erich raised his sword but hesitated because, though immobilized, the barbarian was so strong that he was shaking back and forth the men holding him and was on the point of knocking them off him.
"Hold him still, damn you!" He hissed.
Reiner grabbed the pouch of pistol bullets from his belt and slammed it into the giant's head with all his might. The giant barbarian stopped struggling and Erich discharged his sword like an executioner's axe. The slash severed the head from the body, and Barrister wrapped it in the blanket and pressed it against the gushing bleeding neck.
"Now, get him out of here before I get it all bloody."
That was easier said than done. Ulf grabbed the warrior under the arms as Gustaf and Hals lifted his legs, but he was twice as heavy as he looked and they could only drag him out slowly. Although Giano tucked a second blanket under the invader's neck as they moved him, the flagstones on the path floor were splattered with bright red droplets.
"Clean that up." Barrister whispered, but it was too late. They heard the second guard approaching. Reiner and Giano ran to their columns and began to climb as Barrister wiped the bloodied stone slabs with his cloak. Ulf, Gustaf and Hals, grunting from the effort, tried to drag the decapitated corpse down the stairs, but Ulf lost his footing, fell backwards and rolled into the square where the corpse crashed down on top of him as the others hid.
Reiner heard the second barbarian shout something to a companion. As he rounded the hedge he had his sword drawn and was looking around with a suspicious air. He was as big as his companion, though bald and with such shaggy eyebrows that he had braided the ends into braids. He wore a nightshirt and a bearskin cloak. Reiner and Giano stopped in mid-ascent and moved around the columns like squirrels to get out of sight. The barbarian advanced slowly, cautiously.
Reiner held his breath.
The barbarian bellowed a question and then stopped as he noticed the bloodstains on the stone slabs. He stepped back as he shouted a warning to his comrades over his shoulder.
From behind the living hedge voices rose to answer him.
"Kill him!" shouted Barrister, and ran up the steps with Erich, Hals and Gustaf behind him.
The barbarian turned to face them, which left his back unprotected against Giano and Reiner, who leapt toward the guard with daggers drawn as he faced sword against sword with Barrister and Erich's charge. Reiner's dagger was deflected by the mail, but Giano's dagger stuck and the barbarian roared in pain. He backhanded them with his free hand while throwing slashes with his sword at the others.
Giano fell to the ground, but Reiner went crashing into the balustrade and nearly went over it and plunged into the void, which he could only avoid by clinging to a thorny vine despite the pain it caused him. As he hoisted himself back onto solid ground, Reiner heard the sound of running feet and, overhead, the whirring of a bowstring and the detonation of a pistol as Franz and Oskar fired from the collective bedroom windows at the targets that had suddenly become mobile.
Reiner helped Giano to his feet and they both ran to join in the fight. The bald barbarian was surrounded by Barrister and the others and roared like a cornered bull, exploding in Fury. Hals had thrust his spear into his belly and Barrister and Erich were riddling him with blows like swordsmen felling a tree, but the Norseman continued to fight. As he searched for a gap, Reiner saw Ulf, still dazed from his fall, laboriously climbing the stairs again and, behind him, Pavel was running across the square, pistol in hand, panting as if he had run ten kilometers instead of ten meters.
The barbarian delivered a glancing blow to Erich's shoulder and knocked him down, then split the shaft of Hals' spear, the tip of which he tore from his entrails. He used it to block Barrister's magic-fortified sword and struck back with a slash that sent the grizzled captain's helmet clattering down the stairs and knocked him to his hands and knees.
Reiner, Giano and Ulf rushed to take the fallen's places. Reiner parried the barbarian's sword with his saber. It was like trying to stop a battering ram with a fly swatter. His arm was numb from the force of the blow.
Giano, too, was knocked backwards, but not before plunging the sword into the giant's arm joint and severing something important. Blood soaked the leather guard protecting the Norseman's wrist, and the sword fell to the ground. Ulf grabbed his other arm.
"I've got him!" he shouted. "Kill him!"