CHAPTER FORTY

From where he was crouching on the top of the city ramparts near the Southern Gate, Nopin heard the alien, ugly sound of the Murak horns heralding the Sacrifice of Innocents. The Death Tower, which he had watched grow day by day, was surrounded by the Murak army, and when the killing began, whoops and shouts greeted each sacrifice.
Nopin was not sure at first what was going on - the tower was some distance away - but after watching for a while, his face screwed up into a scowl of incomprehension, he realised with a shock just what it was that the Muraks were up to. For a moment he was transfixed with horror, and then he scrambled down into the ruined city and ran, sobbing and heedless of danger, through its narrow, twisting lanes back to the refuge of his father's yard.
On one side of it were the remains of his home, burnt to the ground by the Muraks on the day that the city fell.
Almost as soon as Herrit and Kassi had left the children hiding in the barrels, Herrit calling after Kassi to come back, the house was swarming with Muraks. Finding it to be empty, they first ransacked it and then set it on fire, and moved on to the next one.
Inside his barrel, Nopin thought he was going to be roasted alive. It became so hot that, Muraks or no Muraks, he was forced to wriggle out, and the blast of heat which hit his face from the blazing house made him wince.
His barrel was the nearest to the house and was beginning to smoke. He rolled it to the farthest side of the yard, and then inspected the other barrels, shielding his face from the heat of the flames with his arm. "No one's here," he whispered into each. "We've got to move the barrels."
As his brothers Tesk and Addiran and his seven-year old sister Harra, cluthing baby Brojan in her arms, crawled out they backed away from the flames, and stood, gazing with tears in their eyes at the destruction of their home. When Addiran asked where their mother and father were Nopin could only shrug, and then Harra started to cry out loud. Nopin said "We must stay in the barrels. We're safe there."
Addiran repeated his question. "Where's mummy and daddy?"
Nopin said "They'll come back if they can."
"And if they can't?" asked Tesk, the second eldest.
"Yes, supposing they never come back," Addiran wailed, "what'll happen to us?"
"We'll get back into these barrels," Nopin said "and we'll wait. The Muraks will be everywhere by now - they may even come back here."
Occasionally one or other of the children emerged to ease aching limbs, but for the most part they stayed where they were. Baby Brojan cried incessantly to begin with, but then subsided into silence, her eyes wide and staring; it was as though crying had become too much effort for her.
For the rest of that day and through the night and the following day and night, between bouts of nightmare-filled sleep, the children lay inside their barrels, each sound that reached them adding to their confusion and renewing their terror. Sometimes it was the harsh shouts of men that set them trembling, or the sudden shriek of a woman. They listened, alert and tense, to the thud of footsteps hurrying past, and wished they could shut out from their ears the incessant yowling and yelping of frenzied dogs. More than any other, this was the sound which evoked the city's calamity, and it worked on their insides like a saw.

When there had been silence for a while, Nopin would venture out to re-fill a flagon of water from the butt in the yard and share it out among his brothers and sisters.
On the second morning he awoke to silence and after a while it seemed to him that the city must be deserted. Compelled by hunger, he left the yard to search for food.
Many of the houses in the street had collapsed; all were burnt out. The first corpse he saw was lying in a broken-down doorway, but its features were too badly mutilated for him to recognise who it had been; he stared at it, feelings of revulsion and fascination jostling each other in his mind.
In one house which was less badly burnt than the rest he found some scraps of food, and with them returned to his father's yard.
The sight that greeted him confused him at first. The barrels were higgledy-piggledy, not as he had left them, and the yard appeared to be deserted. He searched it and then sat down on a barrel. Tesk, Addiran, Harra, Brojan - they had all gone.
He stood up and began to shout Tesk's name, but in mid-syllable stopped. If they had gone it was because they had been taken, and if he shouted he too would be found. He sat down again and stared at the uneven wall of the yard, his brain quite numb.
The Muraks did not come back for him.
Later, peeping over the city ramparts, he saw their encampment, and a sight he at first did not understand. A line of slowly moving figures was strung out towards the distant forest and he thought for a moment that the Muraks were leaving.
Eventually he realised that it was not the Muraks who were going, but the citizens of Felewith, and among them, he supposed, his mother and father and brothers and sisters.
During the next days he lived like a rat, holed up in his barrel during daylight and scavenging for food at night, and it was only the sound of the Murak horns, drawing him to the southern edge of the city, that disrupted this routine.
On his return he lay in his barrel, shaking convulsively, but gradually subsided into a fitful sleep. He awoke at dusk, drank some water from the butt, ate the last of the sweet meats which he had found the night before in what remained of the temple of Tin Wina, picked up his sword - the one the city had provided him with - and stole from the city, making his escape from the North gate.
He followed the course of the River Put, through a countryside devastated by the Muraks. Farms, hamlets and villages were all destroyed and their inhabitants gone. Nopin had no clear idea of where he was going, indeed he had never been as much as a day's journey away from the capital in his life before; he just followed the river, drinking from streams and eating what little he could find.
It was too little.
His days alone in Felewith had accustomed him to the constant pain of an empty belly, but now he was hardly aware of it. Too weak to walk any farther, he lay down at the edge of the track, his mind dipping in and out of consciousness.
A scout from the Sairish army found him; thought he was dead, yet another victim of the barbarians. But a slight movement caught his eye, and stooping, he saw that life still flickered within the cold, emaciated body.
Given warmth, food and water, Nopin made a rapid recovery, and three days later was standing before his king.
He had seen Sigmar at a distance riding through the streets of Felewith with his courtiers, and had imagined him to be a big man. But Sigmar was hardly taller than himself. At 43, the Sairish king had a full head of reddish hair, and although small, he looked tough. He spoke to the boy directly, firing off questions at him as fast as he could find answers; he wanted to know about the siege and how long it had lasted and what the Muraks had done to his capital. Nopin told him that they had taken most of the citizens away, and were murdering the others by throwing them from the top of a tall tower. And he added, with tears rising in his eyes "They took my father and mother. They burnt my house. They took away my brothers and sisters . . ."
"Well now," said the king, "what are we to do with barbarians who do such things, eh?"
Nopin looked straight back at him. He was not crying now. "Kill them," he said.
Sigmar laughed and then reached out and gripped his chin. "Serve me well and I will make you into a fine soldier, and you will kill as many Muraks as you like."
It was a promise Nopin was to remember.