Colours in the Steel

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The next morning, Temrai gave the order to hitch up the mules and bring forward the first battery of trebuchets.

Half an hour after they’d entered the three-hundred-yard zone, all five engines were so much firewood and the ground was littered with smashed timber, stones, dead mules and dead men. In reply they’d managed to loose off precisely one shot, which had landed in the river. Very pale in the face and trying his best not to let his people see that he was shaking, Temrai ordered the next two batteries forward simultaneously. The assault had begun.

Seven engines survived the next volley from the eastern bastion; and trebuchets take time to wind and load. Say twenty minutes between volleys, enough time if they looked sharp about it. He sent in another ten engines, and nobody on the wall had anything left to shoot at them with. When it eventually came, the next volley from the city smashed another two engines, but this time Temrai’s engineers had fifteen trebuchets ready to return fire. He shouted to them to take their time and remember the sighting drill. They waved back at him; don’t bother us, we’re busy. The first engine let slip, and its stone hit the wall somewhere near the base. There was a great cheer from the clan, but Temrai yelled for quiet. The engineers adjusted the trajectory by tightening the winch a precisely calculated number of turns. Another machine let slip, and its stone sailed over the wall, clearing it by a matter of five or six feet. The other engineers slacked off their winches a little. The third engine let slip, and this time the clan really did have something to cheer about.

‘Close,’ Temrai called back, ‘but close isn’t good enough. Keep that mark, and sooner or later we’ll get those engines.’

They managed to hit one before the next volley from the bastion, which smashed another of Temrai’s engines and dropped a stone onto the crew of another. That wasn’t a pleasant sight, by any means; there was a man still miraculously alive under the stone, and he was screaming for help. Temrai waved a party of men forwards; eventually they rolled the stone away, but by then the man was dead. Meanwhile the artillery duel went on; and every stone that missed an engine on the bastion hit something else, while the unlucky shots from the bastion simply dug holes in the ground.

This is how it’s going to be, Temrai said to himself, and we’ve got hours of it still to go before we know whether it’s going to work. Oh, well. At least we aren’t making complete fools of ourselves.

The dreary business went on for a long time. In a way it was absurd; the engineers were working at fever pitch, hauling on ropes and manhandling boulders, trying to keep the mules that drew the lines that raised the counterweights from breaking their traces in panic when a stone landed, trying to get them to move at all the rest of the time. And the remainder of the army watched, like spectators at a Perimadeian lawsuit, while the men in the middle worked and died. Once he’d managed to conquer the urge to drag his men out of the danger zone, Temrai found it was rather like a very boring event at someone’s funeral games; presumably his own. It had the same strange contrast; frantic and desperate effort in the arena, silence and stillness in the crowd, the occasional shuffling of feet cramped from standing too long in one place, even here and there the crunch of an apple, an overheard snatch of conversation about something quite other.

Fairly early on in the exchange, Temrai realised where there was an advantage to be had, and ordered the engineers to move the engines rather further apart. He’d noticed that although his men had only scored two direct hits in ten volleys, the city engines were shooting far more slowly and less accurately than they had been. He thought about that, and realised that although his shots weren’t smashing engines, they were mostly landing on or around the bastion itself, and the bastion rampart was so crowded with machines and engineers that it’d be hard to drop a stone on it without hitting something. What his engines were doing was killing or injuring the city engineers; the trained men who knew how to work the machines properly. In their place came men who knew less about managing trebuchets than Temrai’s people did, hence the poor quality of their work. Accordingly it made sense to space his engines out. It worked; such shots as did land on target and break bone or wood were merely lucky, the practical application of the laws of averages. His men, however, were getting better at it as they went along.

Over and over again the mule-train stopped, the engine-master engaged the slip that connected the arm to the windlass, the captain of engineers checked the aim and adjusted the tension so that the witness-marks scratched on the windlass drum lined up exactly with the equivalent scratches on the frame opposite before giving the order to the master to let slip; whereupon the master tugged on the cord that pulled the steel hook out of the loop fitted to the underside of the arm; the counterweight, a huge plank crate full of rocks, swung back to rest and flipped the arm up into the air, making the massive beam bend like a sapling in a high wind; the sling on the end of the arm snapped out and forwards, whipping the two hundredweight stone out as if it was a pebble flung at a bird, and the stone lifted and became smaller and smaller as it flew, until it dwindled down to a dot, small and distant as a shooting star, visible only by the line its motion drew across the sky, and eventually dropped out of sight onto the faraway prospect of the wall.

Even at this range, the sound of its impact could be plainly heard; a solid, painful thump, a chunky noise that promised damage, like the sound of a rider’s bare head hitting the ground after he’s fallen from a moving horse. It was easy to imagine the force of its blow, because when the city’s stones landed they made the ground shake; watching them coming down was horribly fascinating, seeing them grow in the air, trying to guess which way they’d fall, trying to figure out their looped and irregular trajectories, sometimes guessing right, sometimes not. Temrai watched one man watching a falling stone; he ran from where he’d been standing, stopped, ran back, ran forwards, his head right back and his eyes fixed on the swelling dot; stopped, waited, ran back, waited, at the last moment jinked sideways; managed to get it completely wrong, so that the stone landed directly on top of him, obliterating him so thoroughly that it was hard to believe he’d ever been there.

The arm snapped on one of the trebuchets, its crack a sharp and deafening noise; cheated of its momentum the sling flopped down, sweeping horribly through the engineers who were working the machine. Nobody killed, but arms and legs and ribs broken like the branches of a dead tree, the sort that give way suddenly when you put your weight on them. Then there were people running forward, hauling and scrabbling at the stone; screams from the men pinned down by it – no, stop! You’re rolling it the wrong way! You’re crushing me, get it off me – and then more men running in, getting in the way of the first rescue party.

A stone lands ten feet or so away from them; it hits a previous shot and splinters, flinging sharp edges of stone that slash skin and jar bone. And as more people run up to help, an engineer with red-raw hands and hair soaking wet waves his arms, yells, ‘Get these people away from here!’: The rescuers stand confused, not knowing what to do. Someone yells, Look out, coming in! and before they have time to move a stone whistles down, pitches fifteen feet away from them, neatly nipping off the foot of the man who’d shouted the warning. He stares down, too surprised to speak; tries to move, falls over. And all the time Temrai watches, doesn’t move, says nothing.

On the wall, it was a nightmare of shouting, blood and stone dust. There were large gaps in the walkway, a mangled trebuchet dangled by its counterweight, draped over the battlements while the frame hung and swayed in the air. Men stepped over bodies and hopped over gaps, scrambled to untangle ropes and knock back wedges shaken loose by the vibrations of discharge, lost their grip on levers and spanners that fell over the parapet. Engine-masters fought with tongs and hammers to straighten bent loosing-hooks, captains blocked out the noise and movement as they concentrated on the witness-marks, or yelled at their men to realign an engine that had shifted from its place.

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.

He glanced up at the clouds, trying to read them. Rain would complicate things horribly; wet bowstrings, engines bogged down, torches refusing to light, leather armour absorbing water and swelling, water running down inside the armour and making every man in the line feel wretched, rain beating into the eyes of the archers as they lifted their heads to take aim. The clouds were low, fat and grey; as soon as they reached the hills, there was a fair chance they’d let go and drench everything.

He was still looking up when the first stone came swinging down. He watched it, noticing how its trajectory decayed and its descent steepened. Clean miss, twenty yards or so in front. Ranging shot.

Nearly there now; he could make out details of the men on the walls he hadn’t seen before. Theoretically they had an advantage in range because they’d be shooting down, but Temrai knew the city bows; self longbows cut from a single stave of wood, as opposed to the short, heavily recurved composite bows of the clan. In practice, their advantage of angle was more or less exactly cancelled out by his advantage of superior construction, just as the fact that the city people habitually used arrows that were too stiff to be accurate was offset by his disadvantage of having to make his shafts out of unseasoned wood, feathered with inadequate fletchings. It was as if someone was deliberately trying to even up the odds – we have more men, they have cover and better armour; we have the sun in our eyes, they have the wind against them; we’re in the right, they’re defending their homes and families. A very carefully designed, precisely manufactured war this was turning out to be.

It didn’t take the city artillery long to find the range. The first accurately sighted volley gouged out gaps all along the line, obvious as footprints in clean snow. Temrai called a halt and gave the orders; nock arrows, draw, take aim, loose, the cycle repeating smoothly and without pause. He shot in time with his own commands, hoping he’d judged the elevation correctly – at maximum range, raise the arrowhead an inch or so over the target and in line, not aiming off to the side as you have to do at shorter ranges.

The physical effort of the work was absorbing, enough to take his mind off what was actually happening. At the moment of the draw, push with the left hand against the bow handle, pull back the string with the right, until the shoulder blades feel as if they’re about to touch behind your back. Head still; wait for the touch of the string against your nose and lip, the feel of your hand under the point of your chin. On the command loose, take away the strength that curls the fingers of the right hand, so that the string can travel easily and without interference. After the shot, hold your position for a heartbeat before letting your right hand drop onto the quiver and feel for the nock of the next arrow. Above all, look at the target and not the bow, keep your eyes fixed on the faraway objective, the distant spot where your work and effort will have its effect.

Away there, on the wall, the arrows would be falling like rain, anonymous and impersonal, not like the intimate business of hacking flesh close in with an edged weapon. Back here at the two-hundred-yard line, there was still a deceptive sense of taking part in a great game, a staged event, with the wall as combined target and audience. Funeral games; what fun, to be able to watch one’s own.

One quiver empty already; Temrai looked round and saw the runners hurrying up, shuffling like hedgehogs under a great burden of prickly bristles. Another twenty thousand arrows or so; enough to keep the war going for a whole minute.

Participants and spectators; Temrai was reminded of the lawcourts in the city. He’d been to see a couple of cases, sitting so far back he couldn’t even make out the faces of the advocates, and it had seemed to him a remarkable way to do business in a city that otherwise seemed to have worked things out so well. On the other hand, there’s nothing to beat trial by combat for an unarguable result.

Beside him, a man dropped his bow and pitched forward onto his knees, an arrowshaft standing out of the right side of his chest. Lung-shot; he was fighting for breath, wondering why he was inhaling but still choking. He turned to Temrai, the subject to the lord, and opened his mouth, but nothing came out except blood. Before Temrai could say anything he flopped down on his face, the arrow making him lie slightly askew. Then someone handed Temrai a bunch of arrows, and he stuffed them awkwardly into his quiver, the heads of the new arrows catching in the fletchings of the old.

Gods alone know if we’re doing any good. One minute the wall looks empty, the next it’s bobbing with heads. His right arm and back were beginning to ache, and every time he loosed the string it slapped his left forearm in exactly the same place, making him wince. Steady work; before he knew it his quiver was empty, and he left his place to go forward and pick up some of the other side’s arrows (longer and stiffer than ours, fletched with goose and peacock, tipped with narrow triangular heads that punched through armour with the maximum efficiency). While he was bending down, a stone landed on the exact spot he’d been occupying. He felt rain spotting the back of his hand.

‘That’s all we need,’ groaned Teofil Leutzes, captain of the archers of the east wall. ‘Strings soggy, fletchings wet, and these bows break for a pastime in the damp.’ He beckoned to a man on his left. ‘Send runners down the line, tell ’em to wax their strings quick, before it starts pissing down. Not that they will, of course,’ he added. ‘All they want to do is shoot off all my arrows as quick as they can and get their heads down.’

Soon the rain was falling in fat splodges, dripping off the back edges of helmets down the necks of the archers, making their leather gloves sticky and the bow handles slippery. Loredan pulled his hood up over his helmet and ducked inside the frame of an engine. Rain’s wet in war as well as peace, and only a fool stands out in it unless he’s got to.

It was going abysmally. Basically the same problem as before; the enemy were spread out, his men were packed together. The cover of the battlements was doing no good at all, since the arrows were coming in from above, slanting in like rain on a windy day. Some of the men had two or three shafts sticking out of their armour, where the clan’s broad-bladed arrowheads had cut through the chainmail but hadn’t made it through the padded jerkin underneath; they were still shooting, too preoccupied to spare the time to wrestle the arrows loose. The engines were letting fly at longer and longer intervals, as more and more engineers were hit and their places were taken by untrained men.

And now the rain; too wet to keep a torch burning. The walkway was slippery, slowing up the runners who were supposed to be handing out fresh supplies of arrows. The winches that raised the barrels of arrows up to the tower were running slow as well; too easy for a rope to slip through wet fingers and let a heavy barrel drop on the winding crew. Worst of all, there was nothing he could think of that might improve matters; it was a slow, remote kind of warfare that couldn’t be hustled or bounced into victory by acts of flamboyant valour. Just hard, gruelling work in the rain. For this, Loredan reflected, he might just as well have stayed home on the farm.

‘They’re bringing something else up now,’ sang a voice above his head; some young enthusiast who’d scrabbled his way up onto the crossbar of a disabled engine to get a better view. He’d been there a while. The arrows seemed to avoid him, like fastidious cats who won’t sit on the knees of strangers. ‘I can’t see what it is, but it’s big and bulky; they’ve got about thirty mules hitched to it.’

‘You want to get down from there,’ Loredan replied. ‘You’re asking for trouble. We’ll see whatever it is soon enough without you risking your neck.’

‘All right, I’ll be down in a minute. I think it may be some sort of tower, on its side. Or a bridge, possibly. A bridge’d make more sense than a tower.’

Ah, yes, the last problem; how were they planning to get across the river?

The rain had set in for the day. It was that hard deliberate rain that sends men running down the street with their coats pulled up over their heads, or strands them in doorways or under trees. Already the ground underfoot was the clinging consistency of wet dough, making each step an effort.

On the lower slopes of the hill that overlooked the bridgehouse, Temrai huddled under a quickly improvised hide canopy. He was holding the piece of parchment on which he’d sketched out a plan of what was going to happen next, but the rain had long since washed the charcoal away, leaving him with a sodden piece of thin leather that was no use for anything. No matter; he knew what he was doing.

Behind him, the river above the fork was full of rafts; a hundred and twenty-six of them, each one twelve feet long by ten feet wide. He raised his arm, and the raftmen started to pole forward, heading for the chain stretched across the mouth of the river fork.

It’d be nice if this could be made to work. Well, we’ll soon see.

From where he was sitting he had what should have been a good view of the engagement below the walls, but there was so much rain in the air that he could only see shapes and vague colours instead of precise details of machines and men. Still, by all accounts it seemed to be going well. He now had just over ten thousand archers drawn up under the wall, and the return fire from the city was feeble and sporadic. Nearly all of the city engines had stopped shooting, while his own catapults and trebuchets were scientifically pounding away at a hundred-yard section of the wall that overlooked the narrowest point of the river. Unlike the bastion they’d been engaged with yesterday (which was recent work, badly designed and shoddily built), the main wall was too solid and massive to breach with artillery; but his engineers were concentrating on battering the ramparts and battlements, breaking up the towers and chipping off the castellations that his men would otherwise have had to scramble over when the moment came.

‘All right,’ he said, and beckoned one of the runners who were sitting wretchedly half-under the small canopy. The poor lad was soaked to the skin and water was running in clear streams down his face, like tears. ‘Get over there and tell them to lower the chain, quick as you can. Then get back up here.’

The young man nodded and set off, skidding and sliding as he tried to run down the muddy slope. Gods, he’ll slip and break his neck, and we’ll be held up even more. He shouted after the lad, ‘Slow down, look where you’re going,’ but he was already too far away to hear.

‘They’re lowering the chain!’ yelled the spectator above Loredan’s head, still miraculously unkilled and as enthusiastic as ever. For a moment or so, Loredan couldn’t think what he was talking about – chain? What chain? Oh, that chain.

Dear gods, they were lowering the chain, and that’s how they’re going to get across the river.

They must be out of their minds.

Please…

He looked round for someone to carry a message, but they were all busy; shooting arrows, squeezing themselves under narrow ledges of wood and stone to get out of the arrow-rain, falling and dying. Loredan was just about to go himself when he thought, yes.

‘You,’ he said, ‘get down from there. I need you to take a message.’

‘Coming,’ the boy replied. ‘I’ll just…’ And then a body flopped down a couple of inches from Loredan’s feet, an arrowshaft broken off in its chest. Damn, he thought.

Someone scuttled across to see to the fallen man. Loredan grabbed at him as he went past.

‘That one’s dead,’ he said. ‘Carry a message to the harbour. I need marines in small boats – small, mind, they’ve got to be able to get along the west river past the bastion – to take out rafts coming downstream. Top priority. Anybody makes trouble, smash their teeth in. Got that?’

The man stared at him, shook his head. ‘I can’t go,’ he said. ‘I’m an engineer, not a runner.’

‘Get moving or I’ll sling you over the wall.’

The man hesitated a moment longer, then ducked away and slithered/ran to the stairs. He had to climb over broken timber and a pile of fallen masonry to get there; the tower overlooking the stairs had taken several hits too many and was falling apart, littering blocks and lumps of shattered mortar all over the walkway.

They must be out of their minds. But so far, everything they’d tried had worked, and everything he’d tried had been a disaster, so who was he to criticise?

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-

(Only an hour or so? I feel like I’ve been here all my life. Did I have a life before all this started? I assume I must have done, or I’d be too young to be a general.)

– 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.

Throwing the stuff from catapults had turned out to be impractical. The jars had an alarming tendency to shatter at the moment of release, setting fire to the engine and showering its crew with blazing potsherds. With this in mind, he hadn’t even tested the small stones wrapped in impregnated cloth. Instead, he’d ordered the Quartermaster to buy up all the raw materials his department could lay its hands on, and commissioned the potters to produce tall thin-walled jars with high, narrow necks that could be stuffed with rag and set on fire; one of which he was now frantically trying to keep hold of while an engineer touched a lighted torch to its neck.

‘Ready,’ the engineer said, as the rag flared up and started to burn ferociously a few inches away from his face. Cursing, Loredan hoisted the jar up onto the battlement, held it out into space and let go.

‘Next,’ he said.

Suddenly, the crew of one of the rafts seemed to be wearing fire.

From head to foot they were alight, like torches. Screaming, they barged into each other, slipped up, fell over, scrambled to their feet, still burning. Everything they touched caught fire, or was already alight. Some were consumed almost at once, dropping as black man-shaped cinders into the flames that danced on the deck of the raft. Others launched themselves into the water, went under and came up still burning. A few were still alive as they scrabbled onto the adjacent rafts, whose crews jabbed at them with spears and fended them off with raft poles, only to find that the fire had spread and was now flaring up around their feet. Meanwhile, more pots were being dropped from the walls; as they smashed they spread more fire, splashing the stuff everywhere so that the surface of the water was covered in hissing flames.

The ladders caught fire and toppled back onto the men below; the crews of the rafts that weren’t alight yet were furiously hacking at the cables, trying to cut the bonds that held the manmade island together and pole away before the fire reached them. Flames licked up the walls, almost reaching as high as the battlements. Swirling clouds of black smoke rose and hovered over the scene, so that from his place on the high ground Temrai could only catch intermittent glimpses of fire and movement to help him interpret the sounds that were coming from the river, the screams and shouts and crashes.

It was like some visible plague spreading uncontrollably, and the men on the bank kept the raft crews from coming ashore, afraid that the contagion would spread. Men were diving off the rafts, swimming a few yards underwater and coming up to find their heads emerging through a horizontal curtain of fire that kindled their wet hair and dripped down their faces, scorching out their eyes and being sucked into their lungs as they panted for air. Some of the archers had started shooting at the rafts, either to put the burning men out of their misery or to stop them coming ashore. More pots were falling, although the rafts they fell on were already on fire; when these shattered, all their contents lit up at once, creating great gusts of swelling, billowing flame that rose high in the air. Steam rose and met the clouds of smoke, until a translucent curtain closed the spectacle off like the flap of a tent.

Many things crossed Temrai’s mind as he watched; among them the thought that someone in the city had read the same book he had, and the slight consolation that the reserve secret weapon he hadn’t yet had time to develop properly could, quite evidently, be made to work.