CHAPTER EIGHT
“Sun-stabbed by spears of brazen light,” Speaker Emeritus Jeschonyk said. “Brazen, you see. Not bronze light.”
One of his aides frowned. “That would be an irregular use of the pluperfect, though, wouldn’t it?”
A babble of controversy erupted in the hot beige gloom of the command tent. Justiciar Demansk cleared his throat.
“Speaker,” he said. Eyes turned towards him. “I think it’s a dialect form, actually—Windrush Plain Emerald, archaic, of course.” It would have to be; the poem they were discussing was eight hundred years old, an epic on the Thousand Ships War. Bits and pieces of it might go back to the Thousand Ships War, half a millennium before the poet. “In any case, Speaker, I think that at the moment we have more pressing, if banausic, concerns.”
“By all means, Justiciar,” the Speaker sighed, willing to listen to reason. He was a square-faced square-shouldered man, dressed in the purple-edged wrapped robe of his office, in his sixties, not a soldier recently himself, but still vigorous. “What do you recommend?”
When Demansk ducked outside the tent, one of his aides fell into step beside him. The man was a hundred-commander technically, but also First Spear of Demansk’s First Regiment, the highest slot that a promoted ranker could reach. Within, it sounded as if they’d gone back to the irregular pluperfect. Sometimes I wish we’d never let the Emeralds civilize us, Demansk thought. Particularly, I wish they’d never taught us literary criticism. Rhetoric might be the foundation of civility—everyone agreed on that—but it did get in the way, sometimes.
“Get ’em to discuss business, sir?” he said, his voice still slightly rough with the accent of a peasant from the eastern valleys.
“More or less. We’re putting in an attack as soon as we can get a causeway built. It’s only half a mile, and shallow water. Meanwhile we’ll get the fleet in Grand Harbor operational.”
The promoted ranker shrugged mail-clad shoulders. “You get my men on solid ground next to the enemy and we’ll thrash the wogs as soon as we get stuck into ’em, sir,” he said. “But by the belly of Gellerix, we can’t walk on water—or swim in armor, either. Not half a mile, not a hundred fucking yards, sir.”
They reached the gate and took the salute of the watch platoon; Demansk trotted easily up the rough log stairs to the top of the openwork wooden tower, the left of the pair that flanked the gate. From there he could see out to Preble—the Speaker’s camp was on the shore opposite the fortified island. One of the small ships the local commander had used in his abortive attempt to retake the city was still burning on a sandbank directly below the city walls. Not encouraging.
The camp itself was. Jeschonyk had brought four brigades, twenty thousand citizen troops, regulars, and nearly as many auxiliaries—slingers and archers and light infantry, of course; cavalry wasn’t going to be much use here and he’d mobilized only enough for patrolling and foraging. The camp was a huge version of the usual marching fortress that a Confed force erected every night; a giant square cut into the soft loam of the coastal plain, with a ditch twelve feet deep and ten feet wide all around the perimeter. The earth from the ditch had been heaped up into a wall all around the interior, and on top of that were stakes pegged and fastened with woven willow. Each wall had a gate in the middle, flanked by log towers and guarded by a full company. Sentries patrolled the perimeter, and the rest of the men were hard at work. Four broad streets met in a central square for the command tent and unit standard shrines, and working parties were grading them, laying a pavement of cobbles and pounding it down, cutting drainage ditches along a gridwork throughout the camp. Orderly rows of leather tents were up, the standard eight-man issue for each squad; picket lines set out for the draught animals; deep latrines dug; even a bathhouse erected. Smiths and leatherworkers and armorers were already hard at work, repairing equipment and preparing for the siege works.
Demansk felt a surge of pride; this whole great city, this expression of human will and intelligence and capacity for order and civilization, was the casual daily accomplishment of a Confed army. If they were ordered to move, they’d take it all down before breakfast muster—no use presenting an enemy with a fortress—and do the same again the next evening after a full day’s march. And if they were here for a couple of months, it would be a city in truth—paved streets, sewers, stone buildings.
Then he turned and looked at Preble. I hate sieges. Sieges were an elaborate form of frontal attack, which was a good way to waste men at the best of times. With a siege, all the Confed army’s advantages of flexiblity and articulation were lost. Against an Emerald phalanx . . . well, you didn’t have to run up against the pikepoints. Draw them onto broken ground, have small parties work in along their flanks, disrupt them—then they were yours. Islanders were like quicksilver; if you could get them to stand still for a moment, a hammer blow spattered them, no staying power. But behind a stone wall, even a townsman with a spear could become a hero. You had to go straight at him, and climbing a ladder left you virtually defenseless.
If we can get the causeway close, we can batter the wall down with catapults. The problem with that was that the defenders could shore it up, or build a secondary wall within while you were battering—ready to mousetrap you as you charged in over the rubble. Or we could undermine, use sappers . . . The butcher’s bill is still going to be fearsome. And if it takes too long, we’ll get disease, sure as the gods made the grapes ripen, we’ll have disease. That really frightened him. He’d seen dysentery go through armies like the Sword of Wodep too many times.
“Sir!”
An aide came trotting up. “Sir, Justiciar Demansk—we’ve got a . . . a person, sir, who claims to have urgent news.”
Demansk’s eyebrows went up towards the receding line of his close-cropped grizzled hair. “A person?” he said.
“Claims to be a relative of yours, sir.” The aide’s aristocratic features curled slightly in disdain. “On the off chance that they might have some information I didn’t have them whipped out of the camp, sir.”
The Justiciar lowered the hand he’d been shading his eyes with as he peered towards Preble. “By all means, let’s see this . . . person . . .” he said.
Anything that could distract me from this would be welcome. Even a dancing ape.
A small slight man came trotting up the log stairs of the tower, with an Islander woman at his heels. No, wait a minute, he thought. He looked at bare legs and arms, at the way the stranger walked. That’s not a man, it’s a woman in armor. What looked like Emerald light-infantry kit, bowl helmet with cheekguards, linen corselet with brass shoulderpieces and probably iron scales between the layers of cloth. A trooper was carrying a sword and shield and pair of light javelins behind them, puffing along. . . .
This was out of the ordinary. Then the stranger took off her helmet, and long tawny-auburn hair fell free, nearly to her waist.
Demansk’s eyes went wide. “Helga!” he said . . . almost sputterings.
“Father!”
“What are they doing?” Enry Sharbonow said, squinting.
“They’re getting ready to build a causeway,” Esmond said. He pointed. “See, they’ve got a good hard-surfaced road right down to the water’s edge. They’ve almost certainly got local pilots and fishermen who can tell them exactly what the shoals are like. Now they’re starting. See those lines of log pilings, a hundred yards apart? Those mark the edges. Between them, they’ve got working parties, their troops and whatever civilians they can round up, unloading those oxcarts full of rock—boulders, up to sixty pounds. See how they’re passing them hand to hand? They’ll pile those up until they get above the surface, compact them, then cover with a layer of smaller rock. By the time it’s safely above high-tide level, they’ll have a section of first-class paved road.”
Enry swallowed. A little beyond him Prince Tenny lounged with elaborate unconcern, nibbling on a honeyed fig and fingering a set of healing scratches along one side of his bearded face.
“And those wooden things they’re building, a little further back?”
“Well, that’s a little far to see, but I’d say they’re probably siege engines. Catapults, of course, heavy ones. Siege towers—wooden fort towers on wheels, covered in hides or possibly metal plates, so they can roll them up to our walls and climb protected. Solophonic ladders—big counterweighted things like a covered bridge on a pivot, sort of the same thing. Fire raisers. Metal-shod battering rams under heavy roofs, also on wheels, for forcing a breach. When they get the causeway close enough, they’ll use the catapults and archers to keep our heads down while they complete it—batter a hole in the wall, if they can. If they can’t, they’ll roll the Solophons and siege towers up to the wall and storm it, while the battering rams knock sections of it down and make ramps for their assault troops.”
Enry’s natural olive skin had gone very pale, a sort of doughy white color. “What are we going to do?” he said.
Esmond took a fig from the silver tray being held up for Tenny, popped it into his mouth and chewed with relish. “Oh, there are a few tricks we can try,” he said cheerfully, and cocked an eye at the sky. “No moons tonight.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Esmond hissed into the darkness.
“Neither should you,” Adrian said.
“Sirs, with respect, shut the fuck up,” Donnuld Grayn said, pausing as he tightened the strap on a greave. “We’re getting close.”
We shouldn’t, Esmond thought. Typical Confed arrogance. When they sat down to besiege a place, they expected the defenders to sit tight and cower, waiting for inevitable doom, so what point was there in taking elaborate precautions?
At least, that was what the Preblean scouts had said, swimming in after sculling across the strait on inflated sheepskins. None of them had been caught, so either the Confeds were extremely confident or fiendishly clever at misdirection.
Esmond showed teeth, white in the darkness against skin covered with burnt cork. Now, fiendishly clever is something that might be applied to an Emerald, or even an Islander. But to a Confed? No, no . . . systematic, yes. Methodical, yes. But fiendishly clever? Rarely.
“I’ll show them fiendish,” he whispered, chuckling, and looked back along the boat.
It was about thirty feet long, the Preblean sailors at the muffled oars, the men his own Strikers with some of Adrian’s specialists for luck. That dampened his mood, slightly. He might have known that Adrian wouldn’t send his men along and not go himself; he wasn’t a professional, but he thought like one, sometimes—as if soldiers’ ghosts were whispering in his ear.
That checked him for a moment. I suppose I am a professional now, he thought. Not an athlete or a weapons trainer, but a general. But not a mercenary. I have a cause.
“Row off,” the Preblean at the tiller oar said softly. “Row soft, all . . . raise oars and let her glide. Not raise it upright, Rawl, you stupid bastard; ten lashes for that.”
The high timber wall of the causeway’s edge loomed ahead of them. The Confeds had driven the logs into the sand and mud of the channel bed at an angle, slanting outwards. That made it easier to climb as the boat came alongside; he leapt, got a grip, swarmed upwards. Rope nooses flew up from his and the other boats, but Esmond ignored them as he poised crouching at the top. According to the scouts’ reports, the sentry ought to be . . .
There. Pacing stolidly along, and no more than fifteen paces away, now. Have to get him to turn around.
“Hey, you Confed donkey fucker,” Esmond said, in a conversational tone. “Did you know that your mother used to suck my dad’s dick, and for free?”
The Confed soldier whirled at the sound, gaping. Esmond’s arm whipped forward; it was an awkward position to throw from, but a clout shot at this distance—there were fires in iron baskets further in towards the shore. Iron crunched through the mail shirt the trooper wore, and he pitched over backwards. Esmond dropped four feet to the surface of the causeway; this section was half-complete, and loose rock shifted and crunched under the hobnails of his sandals.
The sentries died, quickly and with relative quiet. Men were forming up around him; others were coating the logs that ran along both sides of the causeway with oil and tallow brought along in leather sacks. More were handing up small wooden barrels from the boats.
“Ready, General,” Donnuld panted.
“Follow me.”
The Strikers followed. Behind them were Preblean archers; he’d picked them himself, from men with good sea-beast hornbows and plenty of experience. Forward . . . Yes. They really didn’t fortify their construction yard.
Siege engines reared about him in the dark, like monstrous beasts in a child’s nightmare. More sentries died, but a few survived long enough to sound an alarm. They’d have to work quickly.
Adrian and his men ran to the larger engines, the siege towers and heavy catapults. The kegs of gunpowder went underneath them, hastily buried. Esmond let his nose guide him to stacks of timber, mostly fresh-cut pine oozing sap.
“Right here, boys,” he called.
Covered firepots were brought out, torches lit and whipped into flame. Esmond thrust one under a stack of four-by-six timbers and shouted glee as the wood began to catch. Others of his men were kicking over barrels and pots of pitch and tar, throwing long coils of rope onto growing blazes; the archers were sending fire-arrows buzzing about, into piles of cordage and wood further in, into tents and heaps of sailcloth and fodder. Esmond was whirling another torch around his head when a lead-weighted dart whipped by his ear close enough for him to feel the draft, going thunk into a timber and whining with a malignant buzz like an enormous, very pissed-off bee.
“Fall in!” he called. Beside him the signaler sounded his horn, and the bannerman waved the flag. “Fall in! Everyone else back to the boats!”
The Strikers formed up at the head of the causeway—most of them, at least, and anyone too hopped up or too stupid to remember the signals he’d gone over at great length deserved what was going to happen to them. Happy arsonists ran by, climbing the wooden edges of the causeway and sliding down to the boats or into the water, whooping. The Confeds were reacting at last, though; he could see blocks of them working their way through the burning equipment, and the fires were making this area as bright as day.
“Discourage them,” he said to the Preblean in charge of the archers. The man nodded and turned to his own command: “Loose!”
The archers drew to the ear, thumbrings around the strings of their powerful composite bows. A cloud of yardlong shafts whickered out, vanishing from sight into the darkness and smoke above, then whipping back down into the gathering Confed ranks. A dozen men went down, silent or jerking or screaming and ripping at the barbed shafts in their flesh. More shrugged aside slight wounds, or started when armor or shields deflected the steel raining down out of the night.
“Keep it up,” Esmond said, teeth showing. “Pour it on!”
The Confed noncoms were hustling their sleepy men into battle order, shoving, bellowing orders. The formation began to shake itself out into the dreaded double line of the Confederation, shields up, darts rocking back ready on thick muscular peasant arms. Here and there a man fell as an arrow or slingstone went home, and the formation rippled as it closed up to maintain the precise one-yard gap between each soldier. In a minute, that living wall would begin to walk . . .
Except that in less than a minute . . .
BWAMMMP.
“Yes!” Esmond shouted.
Dirt, flame and splintered wood vomited up from beneath one of the siege towers. Shattered along one side it began to sway, leaned drunkenly, and then fell—four stories of heavy timber, crashing down across the back of the Confed formation.
About three hundred of them, Esmond thought. But—
BWAMMMP.
The other siege tower writhed as half a dozen ten-pound kegs of powder went off beneath it; this one disintegrated where it stood, showering the wavering Confed troops with heavy bone-cracking lumps and baulks of timber.
“Charge!” Esmond shouted.
The trumpeter sounded it, but the Strikers were already running forward, howling. A cloud of javelins surged out before them, and the archers fired over their heads. When they struck the Confeds, they struck in a solid line abreast, struck men whose formation had already been shaken. A rippling series of explosions shook their nerve even more, as catapults leapt into the air in fragments and rained down out of the dark.
“Wodep’s thunderbolts!” a Confed trooper bawled, and threw down his shield.
The noncom behind him killed the man before he’d taken his second panic-stricken step, but then the Emeralds were upon them. Esmond threw at point-blank range, and the javelin crunched through the Confed’s face to knock his helmet off as the point met the inside rear with an audible clank. He punched his buckler into another face, stabbed a throat, brought the buckler around to break the wrist that held an assegai and then stab downward into a thigh. The Confeds shattered the way a clay winejug might when dropped on solid stone . . . and spattered red in the same way, too.
“Rally!” Esmond shouted, and the trumpeter blew it again and again. Some of the men were reluctant; one or two were so victory-drunk that they careened off into the darkness. “Rally!”
“Fall back to the boats,” he went on.
“Feels good to see their backs, by Wodep,” Donnuld said, as they jogged back.
Behind them the Confed siege works and timber stores were fully involved, a cone of bright orange flame rising into the spark-shot night and underlighting its own black cloud of smoke. Glorious, glorious destruction, Esmond thought, feeling the savage heat of it on his face.
They reached the edge of the causeway, slid down into the boats. Esmond took a torch and tossed it at the oil-soaked wood as they left; flames ran across the timbers in a sheet of orange-red, adding to the hellish symphony of flames.
“It won’t be as easy the next time,” he said, chuckling. “But I think we’ll come up with some way to annoy them.”
He started as Adrian nodded beside him. “We haven’t shown them most of our surprises yet,” he said. “Technological surprise.”
“What’s technology?” Esmond asked, curious.
“That’s what the Confeds are about to find out, brother.”
“What am I going to do with you?” Demansk asked his daughter.
She lounged back in the camp chair and sipped from her clay cup. “Velipad piss . . . well, you’re not going to marry me off, not after all this.”
Demansk flushed and hit the table with a fist, making the jug bounce. “You don’t speak to your father like that, missy!” he growled, his voice filling the tent like a direbeast’s warning. “And a tent is not a place to discuss family matters at this volume.”
They were both speaking Emerald, but so could any Confed citizen with any pretensions to education. The ranker guards outside probably couldn’t, and there probably wasn’t anyone else within earshot . . . probably.
“Sorry, Father,” Helga said, dropping her eyes. “I’m just trying to put the best possible face on it.”
Demansk sighed and rubbed a hand over the gray-and-brown stubble on his chin. Small insects were coming through the laced opening of his tent and immolating themselves in the oil lamps with small spppt sounds and a disagreeable smell; the scent triggered old memories of camps, running back to his earliest manhood. Helga had been conceived in a tent like this, to his second wife; she’d accompanied him on several campaigns down around the southern border, when he’d been one of the senior officers overseeing the building of the wall against the barbarians.
“Your mother was a lot like you,” he said heavily. “Perhaps if she’d lived . . . maybe that’s why I’ve indulged you so. Too much, probably.”
He sighed again; with commendable self-command, Helga held her piece. “Oh, we could patch up some sort of match. . . .”
“You’d have to pay heavily, and I wouldn’t be getting any prize, Father. I’d rather be a spinster. It isn’t as if you don’t have grandchildren already, and besides . . .”
“Besides, there’s this pirate,” Demansk said dryly.
“He’s not a pirate!”
“Mercenary, then,” Demansk said, with a slight wry smile. “Emerald rebel, surely.”
“Redvers was the rebel, and he was Adrian Gellert’s patron,” Helga said reasonably. “A client has to follow his patron, doesn’t he?”
“Well, that’s the tradition.” Demansk gestured at the wine jug, and Helga poured for them both again, adding dippers of water from the bigger clay vase by the door. “I think sometimes it would be better for the State if it wasn’t.”
Helga chuckled. “Father, you’re not rebelling against the Customs of the Ancestors yourself, now?”
“Our Ancestors were a bunch of pig farmers,” Demansk said bluntly. “My grandfather used to be out every day, weeding the fields beside his slaves. Times have changed; Audsley’s rebellion, Marcomann’s dictatorship, the proscriptions . . . things are falling apart.” His gaze sharpened. “And evidently my daughter has been driven mad by a scratch from one of the cats that draws Gellerix’s chariot, and has become besotted with a rebel.”
Helga shook her head. “Adrian’s not . . . not really a rebel. His brother, Esmond, yes—Esmond would bring the whole Confederacy down in ruins, and everyone in it, I think, if he could. Adrian’s more . . . reasonable.”
“Reasonable and learned,” Demansk said, keeping his voice casual. “He’s the one that came up with this damnable hellpowder stuff, isn’t he?”
Helga laughed ruefully. “You know, Father, the reason Adrian put me ashore was that he didn’t want me to be forced to betray the Confederacy. And here you are, trying to worm his secrets out of me! I’m between the mad velipad and the direbeast.”
“If you don’t want to talk about it . . . I suppose I do owe this man something for getting you out of Vase, and for putting you ashore.”
“There’s not much for me to say,” Helga said. “I don’t know how the hellpowder is made—Adrian didn’t tell me, and it’s a close-kept secret. So are the other weapons.”
“Other weapons?” Demansk said sharply.
“There were all sorts of rumors, and I saw what happened in Vase—the city wall pounded to rubble, and the gates of the citadel smashed like kindling.”
“Hmmm.” Demansk rubbed his chin again. “I suppose . . . larger barrels of hellpowder thrown by catapults? That could get nasty, very nasty, especially in siege operations, or at sea—and here we’re faced with both!” He slammed a fist into the arm of the folding camp chair, hard enough to make the tough wood and leather creak. “I spend my whole life learning the trade of war—not leaving it to the underofficers, but really learning it, the way Marcomann did, damn his soul to the Ash Fields—and this whippersnapper of an Emerald turns it upside down, all at once. A philosopher, a rhetorician!”
“Father . . . I don’t think Adrian really is a rhetorician, not anymore. He studied rhetoric, and he’s very good at it . . . but what he mostly seems to be interested in now is . . . is the . . . way the world’s put together.”
Demansk’s eyebrows shot up. “A natural philosopher? Hmmm. There haven’t been any of those since the League Wars! If this hellpowder is what comes of it, I’m glad there hasn’t been. Still, the wine’s out of the jug now, no use trying to put it back.” His shrewd green eyes fastened on his daughter’s face. “Just what do you think this Adrian fellow will do, facing us now.”
“Facing you now,” Helga snorted. “Jeschonyk couldn’t find . . . what’s the soldier’s expression?”
Couldn’t find his dick with both hands and a hooker to help, Demansk thought automatically. Still, however much of a tomboy she was, there were things you didn’t say to a daughter.
“Couldn’t find his arse with both hands on a dark night,” he chuckled aloud. “Not quite fair. He has enough sense to leave details to experts, and he listens . . . occasionally. But he’s set in his ways even for a man of his generation. And I asked you a question, missy.”
Helga’s chin went up. “Adrian will do what you least expect, and when you least expect it,” she said proudly. “His brother’s a good soldier and a demon with a sword but Adrian . . . thinks about things.”
Demansk shuddered, a little theatrically. “Allfather Greatest and Best, this business is bad enough without scholarship,” he said, and then cocked an eye. “Rumor has it that the gods talk to your Adrian.”
He hid his surprise when Helga looked distinctly uneasy; she was as skeptical as any young noble—the way the younger generation openly said things that were whispered in his younger days shocked him, now and then. In his grandfather’s day they’d been killing matters.
“I’m . . . not altogether sure about that,” Helga said. “Sometimes . . . sometimes I’d catch him murmuring to somebody. Somebody who wasn’t there.”
Demansk grunted. “Perhaps he’s mad, then.”
“I don’t think so, Father. Madmen hear voices, but if Adrian’s listening, it’s to someone who tells him things that are true. Or at least very useful.”
That’s a point, a distinct point, Demansk thought.
He was lifting the cup to his lips when the alarm sounded out across the camp.