Prince of Outcasts (46 page)

From Baru Denpasar's point of view that
had
to be stopped, and soon. He sympathized and understood their fear and rage. Rice needed a great deal of water, and anything that interfered with the round of the farming year was a mortal threat, one that hit you on a visceral level every time you looked at your family eating or felt hunger in your own belly. More to the point, he couldn't really expect the Raja and his folk to make a major effort to get the Montivallans and Townsvillians free of Carcosa's threat unless they helped him end this menace. A ruler's duty was to his own folk before strangers.

Anak used his parang to point. “Scouts say forest empty. We outnumber garrison. Fuf . . .”

He looked down at his hand and moved his fingers to recall the English numeral. “
Five
to one.”

Then he made a side-to-side motion with the blade. “No rice here, comes long-long way on bad road for enemy, much up, much down.”

Hilly,
John thought; the local noble's English was very basic, but it got meaning across. And he understood logistics.

“No big rice, no big army men,” Tuan Anak said as if to confirm the thought.

The Baru Denpasaran commander scowled, a thoughtful expression exaggerated by the scars and lopped nose.

“But we no stay long, same for us, too must cut rice soon. Must take quick but lose too many men, if we try to take walls while engines shoot us from this side, that side.”

“They're there, and we're here,” John said, pointing to the fort. “It will cost, taking those works, but not ruinously if we can suppress their catapults and then rake the ramparts with our prang-prangs when the assault goes in.”

And every one of the non-ruinous losses lying gaping at the sky with sightless eyes is someone's beloved child. Holy Mary, Mother of God, Lady pierced with sorrows, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths!

“You have such fort, many,” Anak said; it was a statement rather than a question, but a request for reassurance too.

“Yes, many,” John said, and didn't continue aloud:

And most of them make that look like a pimple, unless you count Mackenzie duns.

For one thing, it was very fortunate indeed that the enemy fort was rather small and improvised. He couldn't tell Tuan Anak how to take a major Protectorate castle or a walled city anywhere in the High Kingdom, because to the best of his knowledge nobody in Montival ever had, save by treachery or starving it out. Smaller works, yes, though at terrible cost . . .

He put calm confidence into his voice, copying his instructors:

“Now we have to work forward, establishing sheltered positions, until we can dominate their fort and suppress its fire.”

He sketched a standard siege operation, with trenches zigzagging forward, parallels dug, redoubts established, and then the whole procedure repeated. His instructors had called it a
Vauban Approach
, after some great French warrior of the ancient world. The problem was that even the best modern catapults weren't as powerful as the black-powder cannon Vauban had used, and the ones they had were light warship machines turned field pieces, not a battering-train meant for siege work. Even the
Tarshish Queen
's eighteen-pounder bow and stern chasers were only just in that class, and the prang-prangs were for use against troops only.

“Then it can be stormed,” the Montivallan prince finished confidently. “Getting up the walls of an earthwork like that isn't the problem; it's getting the troops to the foot of it.”

Not that I've ever done anything of the sort.

He'd never really enjoyed learning fighting much, but it was good to be fit and he
did
like doing well in tournaments—it was a quick route to popularity with girls well-born and otherwise—and he'd realized long ago that it might well keep him alive at some point. That had happened about the time that he grew old enough to imagine what the scars so common in his parents' generation actually meant.

But while jousting and sparring could be at least not terminally tedious, lessons in siegecraft had bored him like a hydraulic drill. It made his breath catch to think all these people depended on his remembering it right.

Then he glanced across to Thora. She gave him a single slight nod to signify
fine so far
and he managed not to slump in relief—if you slouched in armor it clattered, and looked ridiculous. She'd talked of sieges she'd seen here and there, without much detail on her own role; but he was absolutely confident that she knew how to do it far better than he did. Fortunately he had her with him and so didn't have to do it alone. And Captain Ishikawa was standing tactfully behind her, looking
preternaturally calm, which was also reassuring. From what he'd said, he'd both defended and attacked forts as well.

The Baru Denpasaran lord wouldn't take
orders
from any outsider whatsoever, which was reasonable enough. And he wouldn't listen well to advice on warcraft from a Japanese stranger or a woman of any variety, even if he grudgingly respected both as individual fighters. He would take suggestions from a Prince, provided the Prince was from very far away in the land of the fabled American ancients, and provided the Prince had brought equipment he couldn't do without and most of all provided his ruler had ordered him to do so, point-blank and in public. Especially now that he was desperate for victory to make up for a stinging loss.

He's no fool, but custom is king over all lands,
John thought, trying to be charitable and tolerant though he thought the basic attitude idiotic.
Still, I'd like to see even the stiffest Associate noble treat Grandmother Sandra like that, or Baroness d'Ath!

He almost smiled at that, then sobered. From what he'd heard—heard whispered, it wasn't spoken aloud—a number of them had
tried
to do just that after his grandfather died and Nonna Sandra became Lady Regent of the Protectorate. Somehow they'd all come to bad ends in ways that left their heirs no way to strike back, or sometimes left them with no heirs at all. The survivors had learned wisdom, or at least how to act as if they had wisdom, motivated by a miasma of fear, until the pretense had become reality. His grandmother had said to him once, smiling slightly, that if you compelled people to behave as if they believed something eventually all but the strongest-willed really
did
start to believe it, because it was easier on their pride than admitting every moment in the privacy of their soul that they were pretending.

Tuan Anak sighed. “Men born, men fight, men die, men reborn.”

Well, that's a little surprising. But what was it Father liked to say? Wasn't it:
A man's mind is like a forest at night, always full of the unexpected.

The Baru Denpasaran forces had put folding umbrellas up over the command post; that seemed to be a matter of status, but John was very glad of it. It had been midmorning by the time the little army had debouched
into the flat sloping glacis before the enemy fort, and the sun was fierce. This was the only practicable approach; its flanks were within shot-range of the woods on both sides, and the eastern side was close to the river too, which was too swift-moving and deep to ford.

It's a murderously simple approach,
John thought.
But at least it's so simple I can't make any major mistakes if I have to decide something on my own when there's no time to consult. Hopefully. God, I never asked to have the fate of men in my hands!

A voice seemed to whisper:
Take up your cross, and follow Me.
He shivered and put the thought out of his mind.

“We do,” Tuan Anak said decisively. “Camp first. Make safe base.”

That was much like the marching encampment they'd run up yesterday, except that the trench was deeper and the wall higher and topped with a substantial stockade and fighting platform, and the field of sharpened stakes and bamboo knives in covered pits stretched out farther. The Montivallans and Townsvillers watched from beneath the commander's umbrellas, the common sailors squatting or sitting nearby. When Tuan Anak moved his command post to a completed section of wall northward, facing the Carcosan fortress, they followed. John looked down over the vast construction site that was the camp and whistled softly.

“Very impressive,” he said.

Pip and Toa and First Mate Radavindraban were watching with interest, but when John spoke Ishikawa and Thora and Sergeant Fayard all grunted in agreement in their different ways. The Nihonjin officer's concurrence was reluctant, but genuine.

It wasn't so much that the Baru Denpasarans were disciplined the way Boiseans or Reiko's samurai were. They were disciplined
enough
, in a rough-and-ready way, but their regulars had little of that polished snap and the peasant militia none. He thought for a moment, and decided that the remarkable thing was that they were so self-organizing. Their leaders had told them what to do, and which group was to do what, and then the men simply went at it without needing to be watched or driven by anyone except themselves. They were like Mackenzies that way, but even less formal.

He thought they were competing with each other too, in a comradely fashion, village against village and one Sumbak association against the next. The result wasn't particularly neat, but it was massive and it went up
fast
. So did the essentials—a hospital section roofed with woven bamboo, watering points for men and livestock and kitchens, and latrines safely deep and distant from the rest. Then they started in on thatched temporary huts, or at least shelters to keep the rain off; there was even an improvised temple.

Anak nodded. “Now, make fort little small to see,” he said, turning to look at the Carcosan position again. “And diggings, small.”

That led to some confusion, and consultation with Deor. It turned out the Baru Denpasaran commander meant making a model of the whole operation in miniature on a sand table, so that John could mark out the way the siege works should go for Anak's monoglot officers. That was deeply reassuring, since it was the standard way
he'd
been taught and gave them a common language beyond words, but . . .

That will be about as much fun as watching mud dry,
John thought, and carefully didn't sigh.

*   *   *

I wish I was back to doing this with models,
John thought four days later at the bright height of noon.

“Down!” someone shouted.

John ducked his head below the rampart of earth-filled bamboo baskets on the edge of the pit, knocked his visor down and raised his shield up from his side in the same motion until it was like a roof overhead. As he did so he realized that he didn't even know which
language
the call had been in—and didn't care.

At least it's not a catapult bolt,
he thought;
that would have been here already.

A flight of arrows lifted shrilling from the ramparts of the Carcosan fort, and this forward bastion was only about two hundred paces from it, well within range. They were close enough now that the enemy bowmen could fire from behind the parapet, down in the relative safety of the fortress courtyard.

He looked up sharply, though only for an instant, and there was a perverse beauty to the flickering threadwork against the blue sky as the shafts rose to their apogee and the steel heads glinted like starlight on water as they tipped over and began to fall. Another flight followed them, and another.

Starlight on water. That's a good image! I think there's something about that in the Bible . . . no, it's Byron.

Once he had the reference the words came into his mind complete:

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

His Aunt Fiorbhinn had told him once that mediocre poets had influences; great poets
stole
. And if you were going to steal, steal from the best. And Byron had been an adventurer too, leaving comfort and wealth to fight for the Greeks in their uprising against Turkish oppression. It was something to be a man of deeds as well as words.

As he thought he ducked his head down again, back to a view of pounded mud and mats making trails through it and the smell of wet earth and wastes and fear-sweat and, faintly, death. Getting an arrow in the eye while looking up put you into a special category of human being:
too stupid to live
summed it up.

“For what we are about to receive—” he began, reflecting that he'd be sweating like a pig even if it wasn't like a sauna and even if he weren't in his suit of plate complete.

Which it is, and which I am.

“—may the Lord make us truly thankful, Sire,” Evrouin finished.

Fayard and his men from the Guard were grimly silent; John thought the underofficer would be really happy only if his charge spent his time in a deep bunker. There was a rising whistle, and he winced. There might be something more wearing on the nerves than being shot at and not
being able to do anything except passively wait it out, but if there was he hadn't run into it yet. Evrouin and the rest of those in the bastion stepped back under the overhead protection that covered the rear half, layers of three-inch saplings crisscrossed on a framework of bamboo lashed together with strips of the same material and covered in a foot of earth.

Crack.

An arrow punched into the sheet-steel covering of his shield, dimpling the metal but not piercing it, and bounced off. Then hundreds fell, in a hissing, thudding, snapping rain. He suppressed the impulse to squeeze his eyes shut, and instead simply endured. Ten arrows struck his shield, and several penetrated to the plywood core and stood vibrating. Another glanced off the curve of his sallet helm, a hard blow like a quick punch from a fist on the top of his head. More sprouted suddenly from the packed earth around him, or plunged into the roofing above the crew of the catapult and the guard detail or cracked and rattled off the big killing-machine itself.