Colours in the Steel (48 page)

Engineer Garantzes was down on his knees, hacking at a tangled rope with a belt dagger far too flimsy for the job, while Loredan went from engine to engine, trying to make himself useful and getting in the way. He saw men nudging corpses off the walkway with their feet to make a little room, engineers shouting and cursing at the untrained men who had taken the place of the dead men who’d known what they were doing. He heard screams from down below, as a winch rope broke and a two hundredweight stone fell back on the hauling team, watched another man step out of his shoe and observe helplessly as it fell off the walkway, then put his bare foot down on the jagged stone of the splintered parapet, not looking down as it sliced his skin like a knife, all his attention on a twisted ratchet iron he was trying to replace while his team held back the impossible bulk of the counterweight; if they let go or the rope broke, his hand would be chopped fine by the spinning ratchet, or the spanner would fly up and go into his ribs like an arrow.

It’s because I can’t see the enemy
, he told himself. And it probably looks far worse than it really is.

This isn’t working. We’re going to lose if this goes on.

Do something
.

A stone had clipped away the first six steps of the stairway, and he had to sit and slide down on his backside to get to sound footing. There were wounded men on the stairs, men who’d managed to crawl this far and reckoned that that would have to do. He stepped over them, an awkwardly placed heel landing on an outstretched hand; no time to apologise or even look back. He made it to the bottom of the stairs and walked quickly - mustn’t be seen to run - up the street and into the town.

It was as if there was a line drawn across the road; the war stops here. On the other side of the line, people were shopping, sitting in their doorways making things (a shoemaker cutting leather, looking up, staring at the bloodstained, dusty, dirty man in armour walking past his door) as if there was no small hell a few hundred yards away; as if all you had to do was leave, turn your back, no longer be a part of it.

Quite.

He walked into the council chamber and headed straight for the Prefect, who was sitting under the window with a pile of documents spread out in front of him. He looked up - how spotlessly clean his white gown looks by comparison - and started to say something.

‘We need to send out a sortie,’ Loredan said. ‘We can use a ship, sail out of the harbour as far as the chain, put the men and horses ashore on the west bank. They’ll have rafts on the river; we can grab a couple of those upstream, get across and come up on them from behind the cover of the hills. So long as we get their engineers, the raiding party’s expendable.’

The Prefect shook his head. ‘Out of the question,’ he said. ‘No sorties, no hand-to-hand fighting. We’ve all agreed.’

Loredan took a deep breath. ‘We’re being smashed to pieces on the east bastion,’ he said. ‘And if we lose that, we lose the three-hundred-yard zone. I need that sortie.’

The Prefect shrugged. ‘I had my doubts about the bastions from the start,’ he said. ‘Now, obviously, they aren’t viable. We’ll have to write the experiment off as impractical and go back to the original plan of defence in depth on the walls.’

Loredan managed to control his temper. ‘If we lose the zone,’ he said, ‘they’ll be able to bring up their minor engines, and then they’ll drive us off the old wall as well. And we’ll be in bowshot, and they’ve got more archers and bows that shoot further. If we ride down their trebuchet crews we’ll slow their rate of fire, give ourselves a chance to sort out the mess up there on the bastion; we’ll be able to match them and the zone’ll be safe. Please, I need that time.’

The Prefect thought for a moment. ‘How many men would you need?’

‘A hundred, a hundred and fifty. It’d be speed and surprise rather than numbers; the whole bloody clan’s out there watching the show from the edge of the zone.’

‘And you think you can manage to get in position without being seen? Won’t they see your men landing and wonder what they’re up to? And surely they’ve got detachments stationed deep to guard the rafts.’

Loredan shrugged. ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘Personally, I rate the chances of rolling them up like a carpet and getting the boys back into the city by dinner time as very slender indeed. But unless you want to give Temrai control of the wall by nightfall, we’re going to have to try something. If you’ve got a better idea, I’d love to hear it.’

‘There’s the mercenary horse-archers,’ said a voice behind Loredan’s head; Liras Fanedrin, something or other high up in the Office of Establishments. Loredan still wasn’t quite sure what exactly it was that the Office of Establishments actually did. ‘They’re expendable, and it sounds like their sort of work.’

Loredan shook his head. ‘Mercenaries don’t do suicide missions,’ he said. ‘It’ll have to be city troops.’

The Prefect looked annoyed. ‘Oh, very well,’ he sighed. ‘Liras, your department. What about the ship?’

‘Different department.’ Fanedrin shook his head. ‘Requisitioning ships is Office of Supply, not us,’ he replied. ‘Get Teo Oliefro onto it. I think I saw him around here a moment ago.’ He turned to Loredan, and said, ‘Any ideas about who’s going to command? You’ll want someone good, but not that good.’

Loredan was about to object; he’d assumed he’d be leading the force himself, since he was in charge. It hadn’t occurred to him to send somebody else.

‘Piras Muzin,’ he said. ‘He’ll do what he’s told, and he hasn’t got the imagination to realise he won’t be coming back.’

Expendable - yes, like advocates in the lawcourts. If it was Muzin or me, out there in the centre, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. And besides, if I went I’d probably lose my nerve and run away
.

‘Good choice,’ said Fanedrin. ‘You’d better brief him. We should be ready to go within the hour.’

Fanedrin and the Prefect went away, and Loredan collapsed into the window seat. Suddenly he felt very tired, and he didn’t want to have to go back up on the wall, where the stones came crashing down and everything seemed to be going wrong. It would be nice to stay here for a while; much easier to think things through clearly in peace and quiet, and there wasn’t anything useful for him to do up there. And as for Piras Muzin - well, people died every day, and he couldn’t be held accountable for that. A little time; patch up the bastion, clear away the mess, replace the smashed engines, make it so we can start again from the beginning.

His head was splitting; noise and dust and fear and exertion. A drink would be a good idea. A drink would
not
be a good idea. Dangerous enough up on that wall without a spinning head. He stood up while he still could and walked slowly to the bridgehouse, where he could watch the fun.

 

Piras Muzin, a man Loredan had spoken to six or seven times, handled things very well. He’d been in charge of a wing of the cavalry during the mess upriver; he’d shepherded his people through the gap in the line that Loredan had opened, gone on to help relieve the ambush at the upper ford, stayed with it through the retreat and the return to the city. He’d have made a reasonable regular officer, something near the bottom of the chain of command in Maxen’s army.

From the bridgehouse it looked rather more like a game, and Loredan kept himself amused while he was waiting by keeping score. The advantage was still with Temrai, but his rate of fire had slowed down; hard to tell at this distance, but his engineers looked as if they were having trouble with the engines shaking themselves to bits after so much continuous use. The city engines were keeping up a better, steadier rate, but only one in fifteen shots was having any effect. The other side scored about one hit in twenty, but a good third of their shots were hitting the bastion there or thereabouts, and even the clean misses were mostly clearing the wall. Odd, to be a spectator for a change; he could see how people got to like watching. He wondered if any of the other men on the tower with him would be interested in a small bet.

When the time came, the cavalry action was short and not particularly spectacular. Muzin did exactly as he’d been told; his men came out from behind the cover of the hills and rode through the engineers, cutting and slashing downwards from the saddle at men who hadn’t been expecting anything of the sort, working as quickly and efficiently as farm workers harvesting a crop. At least half of them stayed at it until Temrai’s horsemen reached them; the rest tried to get out, but there wasn’t time. Although it was largely irrelevant and not part of the mission, they put up a fine show against the plainsmen before they were overwhelmed. It was all in the very finest traditions of the service.

And, once the mess had been sorted out, the mule-trains came and pulled the trebuchets out of the zone. Of the thirty-five enemy engines that had been used, eighteen were still working or capable of being repaired. Looking across at the bastion, Loredan could see nine catapult arms silhouetted against the sky; nine out of sixteen, not so bad after all. Of course, tomorrow would be another day.

Loredan yawned and stretched; no rest for him tonight, not until the bastion had been patched up, as far as that was possible, and new engines hauled up to replace the losses. He’d already decided where to get the replacement engines from; four from the western bastion, one from the gatehouse, and two straight from the arsenal with the pitch still wet. He would have to organise teams to recover as many of the enemy’s stones as were still fit for use; chances were that the day had produced a net profit as far as ammunition was concerned. The main problem would be trained engineers; he was going to have to strip the rest of the defences, certainly most of the western side, if he wanted to be sure of having enough men on hand to replace tomorrow’s losses without slowing up the rate of fire. On the other hand, Temrai would be facing the same problem.

By and large, then, an evenly balanced day; nothing significant gained by either side, the whole job to do over again.

Ah, well. At least we didn’t make complete fools of ourselves
.

He’d have liked to have stayed longer, high up and out of it all, but a messenger from Garantzes summoned him back to the bastion - problems with structural damage requiring a policy decision. He walked slowly and found climbing the stairs a great effort. When he was two-thirds of the way up, he noticed a long slit across the left knee of his trousers, surrounded by a wide bloodstain. He paused to examine the wound, which he hadn’t noticed until now. It was a long, deep cut, quite clean and made by something extremely sharp, probably a splinter of stone. It must have happened several hours previously because the blood was dry on his skin, just starting to flake off. He made a mental note to deal with it later, if he got the chance.

‘Not good,’ Garantzes reported. ‘This whole section of the wall’s taken one hell of a pounding, gods alone know what’s holding it up. We can shore it with beams and try and get some mortar in, but it really wants pulling down and doing again.’

‘Fine,’ Loredan said wearily. ‘And maybe you could ask the enemy to hold the ladder for you while you’re doing it.’

Garantzes didn’t think that was particularly funny. ‘All I can think of,’ he said, ‘would be to tear down some other bit of wall and use the blocks to build an inner wall to line this one with, give it something to lean against. It’d take time, of course, but it’d be a damn sight quicker than getting new blocks cut, even if we’ve got that much raw stone in the city. If we put it in dry-stone it’d save time, and we can use the trebuchet cranes to do the hauling. If we stuck with it day and night and had enough manpower, I could do a reasonable job in a couple of weeks.’

Loredan shook his head. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘My guess is they’ll try and move their engines back into the zone during the night so they can start the barrage again at first light. That’s how long you’ve got.’

‘Impossible. In that case, my advice to you is to get all these engines shifted off here tonight; that way, when the bastion goes down tomorrow it won’t take the best of our artillery with it.’

So it had all been for nothing; the heroic cavalry charge, Piras Muzin laying down his life for his city, all the effort involved in building the bastions in the first place. Now he was going to give the order to take down the engines they’d just hoisted up and put them back on the old wall, abandoning the advantage of the three-hundred-yard zone and inviting the enemy to come in close enough to let their archers sweep the defenders from the walls. As simply done as that. ‘All right,’ he said.

‘Pity,’ Garantzes said thoughtfully. ‘Now, if we’d had a series of these bastions all along the wall it’d have been a damn good idea. Just one, and all we did was give them a single target to aim at.’

Removing the engines without bringing the wall down took most of the night. One of Garantzes’ men had his leg crushed - he’d shouted, ‘Hold it!’ to the people feeding out the rope, but they hadn’t heard him - and another put his foot on a bit of wall that wasn’t there any longer and broke an arm and several ribs. When the sun rose, it revealed a line of trebuchets just inside the three-hundred-yard zone, their arms back and their slings loaded.

 

Temrai gave the word, and the line advanced.

Thanks to his census, Temrai knew how many men walked with him towards the city; three thousand, the best archers in the clan, each man carrying two quivers of twenty arrows each. A hundred and twenty thousand arrows (green wood, fletched with duck) which his men ought to be able to loose off in under ten minutes. Temrai had once heard a friend of his mother’s complaining about preparing a special meal to celebrate someone’s birthday; a day and a half she was going to have to spend getting everything ready and it’d all be eaten in an hour or so, all that time and trouble for something that’d be all gone so quickly and then forgotten.

Overhead, the latest volley from his trebuchets flew like a flock of geese, trailing fleeting shadows behind them that raced along the ground, showing them where they had to go. A little to the rear of the screen of archers were the mule-trains, hauling the torsion engines. Very soon, the batteries on the wall would open up, and this time he wouldn’t be watching from a safe distance.