Devices and Desires (79 page)

He forced himself to look back at the view below, as though it was a punishment he knew he deserved. They’d been moving their
scorpions up; now they were trying to stop them before they vanished under a net of bolts. The enemy was a bubbling stream
now, swirling and breaking around tiny black pebbles, swept against their will into a weir of flying pins. Most of all, it
was an utterly ludicrous spectacle; and beyond it he could see the familiar copses, spinneys, chases and valleys of his home,
places he knew down to the last deer-track and split tree. It was an impossibility; what was that word the Mezentine had used,
to describe something that shouldn’t be possible, outside any definition of tolerance? It was an abomination.

After a while he got used to it, or at least he blunted the significance of what he was watching. It took four abortive and
costly experiments before the Mezentines figured out the timing of the Eremian scorpion winches; the fifth time they were
successful. It was a strange kind of success — seconds after their scorpions had been advanced into position, every man in
the moving party was dead — but it constituted a victory, because the rest of their army started cheering, a sound so incongruous
that it took Jarnac several seconds to figure out what it was. The sixth wave managed to span and align the engines before
they died. The seventh —

But Jarnac had been practicing for that. As soon as the sliders had slammed home, he raised both arms and yelled. Nobody could
make out what he was saying, of course, but they’d been through the drill twenty times, anticipating this moment. As Jarnac
dropped to his knees and shoved his shoulders tight against the rampart wall in front of him, he couldn’t look round and see
if the rest of his men were doing the same. He hoped they were; a heartbeat later he heard the swish, and that was when he
closed his eyes. The clatter, as the enemy’s scorpion bolts pitched all around him, was loud enough to force any kind of thought
out of his head, and he forgot to give the next order. Fortunately, they didn’t need to be told.

They got their next volley off just in time. Before his own bolt-cloud had pitched, a thin smear of enemy bolts sailed, peaked
and dropped around him. He heard yells, a scream or two; he didn’t look round, but couldn’t help catching sight of a man with
a bolt through his shoulder, in the hollow above the collarbone; he overbalanced and fell backward off the ledge. Jarnac leaned
forward over the rampart — someone yelled at him but he took no notice — and saw confusion and an opportunity where the enemy
scorpions were drawn up. It was an advantage; they’d have to bring up new crews now, and they’d run straight into the center
ring of the target and be killed. Before they died, they’d have spanned the windlasses and loaded the bolts, so that their
successors could slip the sears and launch the volley.
I’m killing men at an incredible rate,
Jarnac told himself,
but there’s still too many of them.
As he watched the new crews run forward, work frantically and die, he knew he was wasting his time. Might as well fight the
grass, he thought; you can fill a dozen barns with hay, and all you’re doing is encouraging it to grow.

It was the twelfth wave that did the damage. He timed it as well as he could, but maybe the twelfth-wavers were faster or
better-trained, or maybe his men were getting tired; just as he was about to yell, “Cover!” the bolts came down. It was like
sea-spray breaking over a wall; and once he was up and on his feet again, he saw that half his crews were dead. The other
half loosed their volley; he was leaning over the back edge of the walkway, yelling for fresh crewmen. They arrived in time
to look up at a cloud of bolts. As the remaining engines returned fire he called again. The bolts overshot most of them as
they scrambled into the cover of the wall, and they found engines spanned and ready to loose.
That’s a thought,
Jarnac said to himself, and cursed his stupidity for not thinking of it before; loose alternately, in two shifts. He didn’t
need to give an order, they were doing it anyway. Another Mezentine volley pitched; he estimated that only a quarter of their
engines were manned and operating. The trouble was, a quarter was plenty. Not only were they killing men, the bolts were stabbing
into the timber frames of the engines, gouging out gobbets of splintered wood (the Mezentines, of course, made their frames
out of steel). A return volley, and more men running up the stairs, jumping, vaulting over the piled-up dead, leaping at the
windlass handles, ripping bolts out of nearby corpses to load the slider because it was quicker than stooping to load from
the stack. Jarnac waited for the enemy reply. It didn’t come.

He waited a little longer, then sprang to his feet and peered over the battlement. The main body of the enemy army was advancing,
pouring round, past and over the line of engines, each with its grove of spitted dead men. Jarnac didn’t understand; had they
run out of artillerymen after all, or were they simply sick and tired of watching? It didn’t matter; they were advancing into
the killing zone — he heard the crash of the sliders, watched the enemy go down. He saw a whole line crumple and flatten,
and the line behind them march on over them without stopping. The next volley pitched and slaughtered, but by then three other
lines were out of the line of fire. Simple, when you thought about it. With his scorpions he could kill a quarter of the Mezentine
army before they came within bowshot of the wall. But a quarter wouldn’t be enough. He didn’t need to open his copy of the
Discourse
and look it up on the table. He could do the sums in his head.

Someone, a junior staff officer of some kind, was standing a few yards away, gawping at the dead; half-witted, mouth open,
arms dangling at his sides. Jarnac yelled to him but he didn’t seem to hear, so he jumped up, grabbed his shoulder and shook
him.

“Go to the palace,” he said. “Fetch the Duke.”

He had to repeat it twice, and then the man picked up his feet and ran, sliding in pooled blood, tripping on scorpion bolts
and dead men’s legs. That chore done and promise fulfilled, Jarnac turned back to the pointless task of killing ten thousand
men.

At the foot of the wall, Melancton finally stopped and looked back over his shoulder. As he did so, he thought about the old
fairy tale that says you mustn’t look behind you in the kingdom of the dead, or the dead will get you. The hero, of course,
gets as far as the gateway unscathed; but, because he’s a tragic hero, he gives in at the very last moment, and is lost forever.

Best, therefore, not to think about the men who wouldn’t be joining him for the next phase of the operation. He leaned his
head back and looked up at the wall. Above him, he couldn’t see the enemy scorpions, but he could hear the crack of the sliders
slamming home. He was safe from them here; the city wall sheltered him, which in itself was a pleasing irony. With a tremendous
effort he cleared his mind of the images that clogged it, and tried to remember the next step.

If the defenses of Civitas Eremiae had a weakness, it was the main gate itself. The doors were strong — according to the reports
he’d seen, six inches of cross-ply oak, reinforced with internal crossbeams — but they offered considerably more hope of success
than the walls, and of course he had Mezentine ingenuity and craftsmanship to help him, provided he could move it the enormous
distance of five hundred yards.

He glanced behind him again. Here it came; they’d listed it in the inventory as a battering-ram, but there was more to it
than that. True, the first stage in its operation was simple enough, merely a beautifully engineered derivative of the crude
old log-dangling-from-chains. Once it had been swung, however, and its two hardened and tempered beaks had pecked into the
gate panels, it displayed hidden talents. At the heart of it was a windlass driving a worm. You could turn the windlass with
one hand, but the power of mechanical advantage would force the two beaks apart, tearing the gate panels like rotten cloth.
A point would be reached where the wretched timbers wouldn’t be able to resist any longer. They’d be prised open, the frame
of the gate would spring, and a sharp tug on the back of the ram would drag them out like a bad tooth. He had his employers’
word on that, which was a comfort.

The ram edged forward. It was being pushed by fifty-odd men, who were sheltered from the scorpion bolts by eight-inch steel
pavises mounted on the sides of the frame. An overimaginative observer with a tendency to romanticize might be put in mind
of a wild boar beset by hounds; to Melancton it was a piece of equipment, and he bitterly resented having to pin his hopes
on it. For all that, it came slowly; there were dead men and other obstacles under the wheels, which had to be either dragged
out of the way or ridden over. There was a slight gradient to overcome as well. He could picture the machine’s designers,
shaking their heads and making excuses when they heard about how he’d failed. He could hear bones crunching and skin bursting
under the wheels.

Of course, he hadn’t failed yet. Men were crowding round it, partly to get what cover they could from the bolts, partly to
add their weight and help it up the slope, over the obstructions. He saw a man pinned to a frame-timber by a scorpion bolt;
he was still alive, and every jolt and bump twisted the steel pin in his ruptured intestines. A man shouldn’t have to see
things like that, he thought. Soldiers die in a battle, and each death is hideous and obscene, but a commander has to look
past all that, so that he can see the pattern, the great shape of the mechanism. He scampered out of the way as the machine
rumbled and crunched toward the gate. The noise was confusing, how could anyone think with that going on? There was a disgusting
smell of sweat and urine, which he realized was his own.

He saw the beam sway backward, drawn by chains running on pulleys; trust the Mezentines to get a gear-train in somewhere.
It hung in the air for a moment, and a slab of rock dropped from the battlement above, bounced off the wall as it fell, skipped
out wildly and caught the side of a man’s head. Melancton saw his legs and back collapse as he lurched sideways and fell in
a heap, like discarded dirty laundry. The beam swung forward. He heard the splitting of wood. The beam had stopped dead, not
a quiver in the chains. They were spanning the windlass now, he could hear the scream of the oak ply being levered apart.
Shouting all around him, on all sides and above, where an Eremian officer was screaming at his men to lower the elevation
on a scorpion as far as it would go. Not far enough, Melancton knew, and the panic in his enemy’s voice delighted him. He
lifted his head and saw a great wedge of daylight glowing through the wrecked panels of the door. The framing timbers were
bent like the limbs of bows; it was shocking to see the torture of materials as the stress from the worm built up in them.
It was impossible for solid oak bars to bend as far as that. They snapped, the ends a prickly mess of needle-pointed splinters
running down the over-abused grain. He heard a voice give an order, though he couldn’t make out the words. The beam jerked
back; the doors popped out of their frame like a cork from a bottle.

Of course, he hadn’t given much thought to what would happen after that. He’d sort of assumed that once the gate was open,
that would be that; as though the gate was the enemy’s neck, snap it and they die. Instead, a cloud flitted out of the open
gateway, and in the fraction of a second it took to pass him by, he heard the hiss and recognized the flight of arrows.

The engine sheltered some of them, but not all. For a moment, long enough to count up to six, it was all perfectly still in
the space in front of the gate, because nobody was left alive to move. The Eremians, he knew, were fumbling for arrows, nocking
them, drawing. They’d be in time to meet the confused, furious charge with another volley. Melancton turned his head away
until he heard the hiss. When he turned back, he saw his men charging.

The archers in the gateway changed their minds at the last moment, realizing they didn’t have time for another volley. Just
too late, they turned to run, and the infantry charge rammed them. Mostly they were simply knocked down and trampled on; there
wasn’t any room for using weapons, and no time. Melancton jumped up to join the charge. He was ready to go when he heard the
slam of sliders.

They’d briefed him in great detail about the effective use of scorpions, with examples drawn from many campaigns against many
different enemies. But they hadn’t said anything about what would happen if a densely packed force of infantry received a
scorpion volley at point-blank range. Given the proud thoroughness of Mezentine military intelligence, he could only presume
that such a thing had never happened.

It had happened now. The men in the front of the scrum were blown back as if by a blast of wind or an incoming breaker. Swept
off their feet, they slammed into the men behind them, as the bolts plunged through them and out behind. Three men pinned
together, unable to fall for a long moment, until they toppled sideways; the sheer crushing effect of so much force contained
in such a crowded, fragile space. Melancton saw it all, and the images soaked into his mind. They would be there forever,
like frescos painted on the inside of his eyelids. He noticed that he was stumbling toward the gateway, shoving his way in
a jumble of calves, elbows, shoulders, backs.
What am I doing?
he wanted to know.
Why am I going there, it’s dangerous.
He had no choice in the matter, apparently. He heard the hiss of arrows, and a soldier fell across him, treading on his kneecap
as he sprawled to the ground. Three more paces brought him to a dead stop. Somehow it had turned into a pushing contest. His
arms were jammed against his sides, so he shoved his shoulder into the back of the man trapped in front of him, and pushed
with his back and legs. Someone else was doing the same to him. All the breath was forced out of his lungs, and he found he
couldn’t replace it. The panic of not being able to breathe suppressed every other thought for a moment, until the man behind
him shifted a little and the pressure on his lungs eased up. He gobbled a deep pull of air, and was flattened against the
man in front.