The Siege of Macindaw

27

Horace craned over Will's shoulder to look at the rough sketch his friend had completed.

He frowned. From where he stood, the device Will had designed looked like a handcart, except that the main body, where the load would be carried, appeared to be upside down.

"What do you think?" Will asked.

"I think if you try to carry anything in that cart, it'll all fall out straightaway."

"I'm not putting anything in it. I'm putting us in it," Will said.

"In which case, we'll fall out," Horace replied.

Will gave him a withering look and tapped the salient points on the drawing with his charcoal pencil as he explained. "It's quite simple, really. There are two wheels, shafts and a framework underneath and a sloping, planked roof on top. The whole thing rolls along with us walking along underneath it."

"Well, that'll stop us from falling out," Horace said."But why are we under it in the first place?" Horace asked.

"Because if we weren't under it," Will said, with a hint of acid in his voice, "we'd be out in the open, where we could be hit by rocks and crossbow bolts and spears." He looked meaningfully at Horace to see if there was another question. But Horace's eyes were riveted on the drawing now, and a small furrow was forming between his eyebrows.

"The beauty of it is," Will continued, "we can disassemble it and reassemble it in a matter of minutes."

"Well, that's definitely an advantage," Horace replied. His tone of voice said that he thought it was anything but.

Will sat back in exasperation. "You enjoy being negative, is that it?" he asked.

Horace spread his hands wide in a helpless gesture.

"Will, I haven't the faintest idea what you've got in mind with this… thing. Bear in mind, I'm a simple warrior, the sort of person I've heard you and Halt refer to as a bash-and-whacker. Now you tell me you want us to walk around under a handcart that someone's built with the top where the bottom ought to be and expect me to get excited about it. And by the way, " he added, "I've seen better drawings of wheels. "

Will was looking critically at the drawing now, trying to see it through Horace's eyes. He thought that perhaps his friend was right. It did look rather strange. But he also thought Horace was being overcritical.

"The wheels aren't that bad," he said finally. Horace took the pencil from him and tapped the left-hand wheel on the drawing.

"This one is bigger than the other by at least a quarter," he said.

"That's perspective," Will replied stubbornly. "The left one is closer, so it looks bigger."

"If it's perspective, and it's that much bigger, your handcart would have to be about five meters wide," Horace told him. "Is that what you're planning?"

Again, Will studied the drawing critically.

"No. I thought maybe two meters. And three meters long." He quickly sketched in a smaller version of the left wheel, scrubbing over the first attempt as he did so. "Is that better?"

"Could be rounder," Horace said. "You'd never get a wheel that shape to roll. It's sort of pointy at one end."

Will's temper flared as he decided his friend was simply being obtuse for the sake of it. He slammed the charcoal down on the table.

"Well, you try drawing a perfect circle freehand!" he said angrily. "See how well you do! This is a concept drawing, that's all. It doesn't have to be perfect!"

Malcolm chose that moment to enter the room. He had been outside, checking on MacHaddish, making sure the general was still securely fastened to the massive log that held him prisoner. He glanced now at the sketch as he passed by the table.

"What's that?" he asked.

"It's a walking cart," Horace told him. "You get under it, so the spears won't hit you, and go for a walk."

Will glared at Horace and decided to ignore him. He turned his attention to Malcolm. "Do you think some of your people could build me something like this?" he asked.

The healer frowned thoughtfully. "Might be tricky," he said. "We've got a few cart wheels, but they're all the same size. Did you want this one so much bigger than the other?"

Now Will switched his glare to Malcolm. Horace put a hand up to his face to cover the grin that was breaking out there.

"It's perspective. Good artists draw using perspective," Will said, enunciating very clearly.

"Oh. Is it? Well, if you say so." Malcolm studied the sketch for a few more seconds. "And did you want them this squashed-up shape? Our wheels tend to be sort of round. I don't think these ones would roll too easily, if at all."

Truth be told, Malcolm had been listening outside the house for several minutes and knew what the two friends had been discussing. Horace gave vent to a huge, indelicate snort that set his nose running. His shoulders were shaking, and Malcolm couldn't maintain his own straight face any longer. He joined in, and the two of them laughed uncontrollably. Will eyed them coldly.

"Oh, yes. Extremely amusing," he said. "Highly entertaining. Why did I train to be a jongleur, I wonder, when we had two comedians like you available? Now I know," he added, with heavy emphasis, "why people call comedians fools."

Horace and Malcolm, with a supreme effort, managed to bring their snorting and laughing under control. Malcolm wiped his eyes.

"Aaah," he said to Horace, "it does you good to start the day with a laugh."

"It's late morning," Will pointed out.

"Better late than never," Malcolm replied.

Will seemed about to say something, but Horace thought it might be time to get to the business at hand.

"Will," he said, more seriously, "why don't you tell us what this thing is supposed to do?" Horace sensed that the idea would be sound, no matter how bad the drawing might be. He had never known his friend to have a bad idea.

"It's to get us closer to the west wall," Will said. "With our ladder."

Horace looked at the sketch again."You plan to push this right up to the wall?" he said. "And this roofed-over section is to protect us from the defenders above, right?" He shook his head. "It'll take too long, Will. They'll have plenty of warning, and as soon as we come out from under the roof here, they'll be ready and waiting for us."

"I know that," Will said. "But as you pointed out, if we try to run from the tree line to the wall carrying a ladder, it'll take far too long – and they'll have time to get back on the wall again to fight us off."

"So? Wheeling this… thing… will take us twice as long. Sure, we'll be protected while we're on the way. But I still don't see – "

Will cut him off. "I plan to get us halfway to the wall," he said. " Then we'll rig it so that one of the wheels collapses."

"What's the point of that?" Malcolm asked.

"Let me take it from the beginning," Will said."We assemble the cart at the tree line. We tie our ladder on top." Quickly, he sketched in a ladder on top of the roof. "Then, in the middle of the afternoon, Horace and I and, say, four of the Skandians get under it and start pushing it toward the wall."

"In the middle of the afternoon?" Horace said. "They're sure to see us! They'll be throwing spears and rocks at us – "

Will raised a hand for silence.

"We'll keep going till we're twenty meters from the wall, then we'll collapse the wheel here. The whole thing will sag over to the side. The defenders will think they hit something crucial or that the thing was badly built. In any event, they'll see we're stopped. Then the other four people run like hell back to the trees. We' ll rig some kind of armor for them to protect them."

Malcolm nodded. "That sounds fair," he said.

But Horace had noticed an omission in Will's plan." You said the other four run back. What about us?"

Will smiled at him. "We stay put, under the cart. They won't know we're there because they won't know how many people were hidden under it in the first place."

Understanding started to dawn in Horace's eyes now.

"So we'll be twenty meters from the wall… with a scaling ladder," he said softly.

Will nodded, his excitement evident. "All we have to do is sit quietly for a few hours. By that time, the wrecked cart and the ladder will have become part of the landscape. They'll be used to it, so they'll begin to ignore it. Then, when Malcolm starts his show to the south and everybody's attention is distracted, we break out and run for the wall with the ladder."

"We could make it before anyone notices," Horace said.

" That's the general idea," Will said, smiling.