Colours in the Steel (50 page)

The unwilling messenger must have done his job well, because four flat barges, oystermen by the look of them, appeared from behind the western bastion and were suddenly up against the jostling mass of rafts, spilling out men like a jar of grain dropped on a hard floor. Temrai saw them and swore, immediately aware of his error - somehow he’d assumed that once he’d set up the chain, the threat from the harbour would cease to count for anything. In his mind’s eye there would be a smooth transition, from a chain stretched across the fork to a chain stretched from the foot of the bridgehouse to the ruins of the causeway. He hadn’t imagined they could get boats ready and out so fast.

There was one raft that was bigger than all the others, thirty feet long and solidly built out of timbers he’d been at great pains to find. Mounted on it was a tall cradle of A-frames, from which hung the huge battering ram on which so much was going to depend. A lot of work had gone into that raft; calculating the height the ram would have to be so that it’d be level with the gates rather than the stonework of the drawbridge causeway, making and fitting the hide-covered shields that protected the ram-workers top and sides from arrows and stones, making the thing solid enough to work the ram from, yet not so unwieldy that it couldn’t be moved.

Now all he could do was watch while enemy soldiers swarmed all over it, like ants on uncovered food. They had killed the ram-workers already; now they were breaking up the raft, cutting the cables that held it together, cutting the ropes that held the ram, poling the poor, helpless thing away from the rest of the rafts into open water, so Temrai’s men couldn’t try and stop them. Very soon it began to come apart. Two of the barges collected the soldiers from the wreckage and the water, while the other two landed their men by the ruins of the land-side causeway. Nothing anybody could do to stop them; by the time his men got there, the landing party had cut the cables that held the chain, and that beautiful, brilliant artefact slid down into the water and was lost for ever.

There were more boats on the way, rounding the western bastion, their decks lined with men. Temrai sent another runner; get the reserves from the camp, I want those boats cleared, don’t care what it costs. Everything was suddenly going wrong, all because of one mistake, like a woodpile collapsing when one log is pulled out from the base.

 

As the raft sank, Teoblept Iuven looked round and saw he had nowhere to go. He’d stayed to make sure, insisting on cutting the last bond himself; since he’d assumed, somehow, that they’d never pull it off and they were all going to die, it had seemed like a waste of time and energy to work out an escape route. He stood balanced on one bobbing log like an acrobat, feeling rather foolish, the victim of his own success.

He’d broken his sword cutting the last few twists of cable; the ancient and incredibly valuable Fascanum that’d been in his family since the human species began had never been intended for chopping wood and slitting string (we have people who do that sort of thing for us) and he’d had to saw through the last half-inch with the splintered end. He swore, drew back his arm to throw it in the river, changed his mind.

There were men on the riverbank now, enemy archers. They’d been running, slipping and sliding and falling over in the mud. As they stopped to draw their bows and take aim, he could see them fumbling, clumsy and cack-handed in the wet. It was, he decided, high time he wasn’t here. Although there was precious little chance of his being able to swim more than a yard or so in all this ironmongery he was wearing, it was better to drown than stay put and get shot. Presumably.

He positioned himself for a graceful dive off the log and in doing so lost his footing and fell face first into the river. Instinctively he still held onto the broken sword, until the weight of his armour began pulling him down faster than he could compensate for by kicking and thrashing with his feet. The river came up over his face before he had a chance to close his mouth.

So ended his first command, which he was sure he’d only been given because he was a Iuven and because he’d been a pupil at the fencing school run by the man who was now the Commander-in-Chief, Bardas Loredan; no experience, no natural ability, no innate qualities of leadership to justify putting him in charge of such an important mission. He’d done the job, though, so perhaps they’d chosen the right man after all.

As his head ducked under the water for the second time, it occurred to him that he might improve his situation if he took the bloody armour off. This he managed to do, just about; the standard city mailshirt had its buckles at the side, where a man could reach them, but a nobleman has a squire to help him on with his armour, so his buckles were up the back. When his head bobbed up for the fourth time, an arrow splashed into the water no more than twelve inches from his nose; he took the hint and a deep breath and went under again, kicked and pawed at the water until he was facing west (he hoped) and struck out for the shore.

When he couldn’t hold his breath any longer, he pushed upwards and burst back into the light and air, unable to think about anything except the pains in his chest and the desperate need to breathe. Something slapped against his arm; he turned his head and saw an outstretched hand, the side of a boat. Amazing; he was being rescued.

A thick-set, middle-aged man with wisps of grey hair plastered to the side of his head by the rain grabbed his wrist and pulled, nearly jerking his arm out of its socket. With his other hand Iuven clawed at the side of the boat, but there wasn’t anything to hold onto. ‘It’s all right,’ the man shouted, ‘I’ve got you.’ And then something happened, and Teoblept Iuven found he was having difficulty breathing, which didn’t make sense now that he was out of the water. His arm encountered some obstruction; it reminded him of walking in a wood, with branches and briars getting in the way. There was an arrow sticking out of him. Oh, he thought. Then he closed his eyes and died.

 

A qualified success, Loredan said to himself, as he watched the six or so remaining boats turn back; we’ve sunk the battering ram and got rid of the chain - and killed a lot of people, of course, though there’s plenty more where they came from. We haven’t managed to do anything about the main flotilla of rafts, but there’s other things we can do about them. In theory, at least.

Best of all, though, the rain was slowing up. At this time of year it seldom rains for more than an hour or so—

—And as soon as it stopped raining, he could spring his surprise, the one thing he still had in reserve that could really make a difference.

Bad cramp in his legs from crouching for too long, and there were pools of bloodstained rainwater all around. He extracted himself from the shelter of the catapult frame, stepped over the body of his dead observer, and made his way to the head of the stairs.

Damn.

He looked round, and saw Garantzes. The engineer was sitting on the frame of an engine, his back to the uprights; not dead, as Loredan first assumed, but fast asleep.

‘Wake up.’

‘Huh?’ Garantzes’ eyes jerked open. ‘What’s . . .?’

‘The chain,’ Loredan said. ‘Get the chain up while there’s still time. If they’re going to use those rafts to stand scaling ladders on—’

Garantzes shook his head. ‘Waste of time,’ he said. ‘They’ve beaten the shit out of this part of the wall, I don’t suppose there’s more than a dozen posts still in there. There’s nothing to hang the chain from. Sorry.’

‘Oh, hell.’ Loredan scowled. ‘Well, can’t you improvise something? Get some timbers and run them out over the battlements? We’ve got the bloody chain, we might as well use it.’

The engineer took a deep breath as if to argue, then nodded. ‘See what I can do,’ he said. ‘Gods know, there’s enough bits of timber lying about the place we can use, with all these bust engines; it’s really just a question of how we can fix them to the walkway so they won’t come away. Leave it with me, we’ll sort something out.’

‘Good.’ Loredan left him and scrambled over the wreckage and rubble to the stairway. ‘And get these stairs clear,’ he called back, though he doubted very much whether Garantzes had heard him.

Cramp all gone now, but
very
bad headache. Never mind; I’ll feel dreadful later, when I’ve got time.

It had stopped raining.

 

The rafts nuzzled and bumped each other like sheep crowded together in a dipping pen. Fortunately, there was nobody much left on the wall to interfere with the raft crews from above; they had enough trouble as it was coping with the innate malignity of inanimate objects without any of their fellow humans deliberately trying to make things worse.

The idea was good and simple. Fix a series of strong cables to the masonry of the wall, and stretch them across to the riverbank opposite. Attach the rafts to these cables back and front, and to each other at the sides. The result would be an artificial floor bobbing on top of the water on which the scaling ladders could stand, the bottoms of their legs fitting into prefabricated sockets. Once the ladders were in the sockets and held fast at the base by steel pins, the ladders could be walked upright and placed against the wall.

It was a good idea. It might work. It wasn’t necessarily doomed to failure.

It had worked more or less when they’d rehearsed it in relative peace and quiet upstream. They’d found a place where the river passed between two sandstone cliffs, where they’d been able to practise hammering tethering pins into the rock, drawing the line taut, herding the rafts together and securing the fastenings. They’d reached the stage, they reckoned, when they could do it all blindfold.

Gazing at the confused scrum of rafts and their scampering crews, Temrai wondered if that was where they were going wrong; no blindfolds. Wherever he looked there were men tangling ropes, dropping tools in the water, breaking or letting go of poles, falling in the river and having to be fished out again.
Thank the gods we cleared the wall
, he muttered to himself.
If we had defenders dropping rocks on us, we’d have no hope at all
.

He’d pulled the cordon of archers in, right up to the riverbank, no more than a hundred yards or so from the wall; at this range and given enough arrows, they ought to be able to pick off individual targets, should the need arise. He’d stood down the engineers, however; there wasn’t anything the engines could do that the archers couldn’t, and the last thing he needed was for a couple of hundredweight stones to fall short and sink any rafts. The odd arrow bouncing off the stonework and falling among the raft crews was bad enough.

Just when he was considering pulling the rafts out and starting all over again the next day, the first ladder sat up, spindly and unsteady as a newly born foal, and slumped forward into place. Almost immediately it was pushed away; it hung in the air for what seemed like a very long, drawn-out half-second, then toppled magnificently backwards and crashed onto the riverbank, smashing itself to pieces as it landed. But almost before it had completed its fall, the next ladder was up and then the one beside it; then two more, standing perpendicular as the previous pair came to rest against the chain that ran round the top of the wall.

A nice idea, the chain, but poorly executed. The improvised posts it was slung from simply couldn’t take the strain; they snapped, bent sideways or folded down under the weight, merely slowing the ladders up and preventing them from hitting the parapet dangerously hard. The climbing parties were standing by, ready to swarm up the ladders and meet the enemy face-to-face inside their own city for the first time. It was—

It wasn’t over yet.

 

Loredan grunted, staggering a little under the weight of a smooth-sided earthenware jar. There wasn’t anything much to grab hold of, making it difficult to hold onto. Embarrassing if he were to drop it . . .

Many years ago he’d read in a book about a liquid compound of sulphur, asphalt and naphtha which was supposed to catch fire easily and stay alight, even (so the book claimed) on water. It could be set alight and poured from the walls of a city, loaded into pottery jars, lit and shot from catapults so that when the jar landed it shattered, spraying fire in all directions; it could even be forced out in a jet from the nozzle of a specially designed bellows, catching fire from a torch or a red-hot billet of iron fixed in a holder in front of the nozzle. Bolts of cloth could be dipped in the stuff and wrapped round hand-sized stones, which were then piled in the spoon of a catapult arm, lit and sent flying in a wide and lethal pattern, enough to set light to a whole enemy encampment. Once something was covered in the stuff, water wouldn’t put it out; stamping on it would simply set your feet on fire, smothering it with a cloth would set the cloth alight. Until all the liquid had burnt itself away, nothing could be done about it.

The book went on to offer suggestions for the safe handling of the compound; after being mixed, it should be stored in stone jars covered with freshly scraped rawhides, and the men who handled it should have their clothes and gloves impregnated with talc; to ignite it, use a torch on the end of a very long pole, and stand well back . . .

Also contained in the book were clear and concise instructions as to how to annihilate enemy armies by smashing clay models of them with a mallet; how to create panic by blotting out the sun by means of incantations; how to supplement your own depleted army by bringing the recently dead back to life using secret charms and arrowroot. It was not considered to be required reading for aspiring young officers, and was generally only taken down from its shelf by young novices who’d heard there were pictures of naked women in one of the later chapters.

Nevertheless, once he’d found out what naphtha was and where it could be bought, he’d set a team of engineers to experiment with mixing the stuff, trying different quantities and purities of ingredients. The results had been startling; so much so that he was tempted to try and find the book again and have a go at some of its other recommendations.