The Proof House Part 31

'Good point,' Bardas said. 'But let's keep it up a while longer. I want them to feel the pressure.'

So this is what it was like, Temrai said to himself, waiting for the next shot to fall. Well, now I know.

The shot landed, a heartbeat late, making the ground shake. Because of the dust-cloud, he couldn't see where it had pitched or whether it had done any damage; it was as bad as being in the dark. But he could hear shouting, implying an emergency - someone was giving orders, someone else was contradicting him; there was an edge of raw urgency to their voices that didn't inspire confidence. Should have antic.i.p.ated this, he thought. Didn't. My fault, ultimately.

He counted down from twelve, and the next shot pitched. He could feel where that one went (when you're in the dark, the other senses adapt quickly) - presumably an overshot, strictly speaking a miss, but it felt like it had landed on one of the stores. I'd rather it was the biscuits than the arrows; we can eat broken biscuits if we have to. He started counting again.

'Temrai?'

d.a.m.nation, lost count. 'Over here,' he called out. 'Who's that?'

'Me. Sildocai. Where are you? I can't see a thing.'

'Follow my voice, and keep your head down; one's due any second now.'

Another overshot; no prizes for guessing where it had gone either, as it sprayed sharp-edged chips of rock across the catwalk. 'Their settings must be shaking loose,' he observed. 'They can't see the pitches, so they don't know they're going high.'

'I preferred it when they were on target.'

'So did I.'

Sildocai materialised in front of him, as if he'd been moulded out of the dust. 'I've been down there,' he said. 'Since they started shooting high, I reckoned it was the safest place to be. They've smashed up four trebuchets and half a dozen of the scorpions, two more of each out of action for now but fixable. The worst part is, there's a d.a.m.n great hole in the path which we're going to have to fill somehow. Otherwise we're completely cut off from the lower defences.'

Temrai closed his eyes. 'Well, there ought to be enough loose rock and spoil,' he said. 'You'll need to lay timbers to hold the loose stuff in, anchor them with pegs like you're building a terrace.'

'All right,' Sildocai said, coughing. 'When we've done that, what about hauling some of the engines up out of the way? They're doing no good down there, just waiting to be smashed up.'

Temrai shook his head. 'No, we won't do that,' he said. 'They'll just bring theirs up closer. We need to shut those trebuchets down for a while, and if we can't reach them with artillery, we'll have to go over there and do it by hand.'

Sildocai frowned. 'I'd rather not do that,' he said, 'even with the light cavalry. It's a bit too flat for charging down the enemy's throat.'

'We haven't got any choice,' Temrai replied, as another shot pitched, scooping up loose dirt and sprinkling it over their heads, the way the chief mourner does at a funeral (although it's customary to die first). 'We're outranged. If we sit here and do nothing, they'll flatten the whole thing.'

'All right,' Sildocai replied doubtfully. 'But let's at least wait until it gets dark and they stop shooting.'

'What makes you think they'll stop when it gets dark? I wouldn't. If they fix their settings, they don't need to see us in order to smash us up. They're doing a pretty good job as it is, and this dust is as good as a dark night.'

'Yes, but it's only dusty over here. I'd rather not ride up on their archers in broad daylight, thank you very much. You may not remember, but there's bright sunlight outside all this muck.'

Temrai thought for a moment. 'Fair enough,' he said. 'I'm not thrilled at the thought of having to sit through three more hours of this, but you're right, we don't want to do their job for them by making silly mistakes. Get a raiding party organised, and then put someone on making good that path. n.o.body's going anywhere till that's fixed.'

Sildocai scrambled away, trying to keep his head down below the level of the earth bank into which the stakes of the stockade had been driven. It meant scuttling like a crab, or a man in a low-roofed tunnel. Another shot pitched, but too far away to be a danger to him. Very erratic now, Temrai decided, but I don't suppose they care; this is just to make us feel miserable. The damage is probably trivial, but this dust is starting to get on my nerves.

'No mucking about,' Sildocai said, a stern, parental expression on his face. 'The only thing we're interested in is the trebuchets; cut the counterweight cables, then when the beam comes down cut the sling cables, and that's it. Just this once, getting back in one piece is more important than killing flatheads, so no wandering off, no hot pursuit and categorically no looting. Understood?'

n.o.body spoke. By the look of it, his dire warnings had been largely unnecessary. Chances were they'd only volunteered in the hope of getting away from the dust for an hour.

It was a typical plains moon, bright enough to cast shadows. That was good. From here he could see the camp-fires across the river, where they were going. Men sitting in the firelight don't have good night vision, whereas his men would have had time to get accustomed to the dark; they'd be able to see the enemy, and the enemy wouldn't see them. He gave the sign, and the winch crew started to wind the swing-bridge into place.

Sildocai went first. It was tradition in his family, which had produced more than its share of commanders; so many, in fact, that it was remarkable that it had lasted this long. His own father had been killed fighting this same Bardas Loredan, shortly after Maxen died. His grandfather had also fallen in battle against the Perimadeians. His great-grandfather had gone the same way, though n.o.body could remember who he'd been fighting against. Four generations of brave leaders who always led from the front. Some people never learn.

Getting there was no problem; just head for the nearest cl.u.s.ter of camp-fires until he could make out the trebuchets, silhouetted against the blue-grey sky. There was just enough wind to carry away the sound of the horses' hooves on the dry gra.s.s. All in all, ideal conditions for a night attack; it was almost enough to tempt him into ignoring his own excellent advice and go looking for a fight, except that he didn't want one. There'd be plenty of time for that sort of thing later; besides, his men were tired after a bad day divided between cowering under the dust-cloud and hauling dirt in buckets to fill in the hole in the path uphill.

They did better than he'd expected; they were fifty yards from the nearest fire by the time someone saw them and shouted. Sildocai drew his scimitar, called out, 'Now!' and kicked his horse into a gentle canter.

It started well. Understandably, the enemy ran away from the suddenly materialising hors.e.m.e.n, heading for the weapons stacks, away from the trebuchets, and n.o.body bothered the raiding party until they'd done some useful work among the trebuchets. That would have been a good time to quit.

Sildocai was the first to cut a rope; it took him three attempts. It was almost comical. Somehow he'd pictured himself cleaving the rope with a single blow, slicing through the taut fibres almost without effort. Instead, he caught it at an awkward angle, jerked his wrist and nearly dropped the sword. He'd have been better off with a bill-hook or a bean-hook, a heavier, more rigid blade. His adventure nearly ended there; in his grim determination to hack through the rope he forgot that cutting it would result in a long, heavy piece of wood pivoting sharply downwards - the beam missed his shoulder by no more than a couple of inches, and startled the life out of him. Then, as he pulled his horse round, he found he couldn't quite reach the sling on the other end; he had to jump off his horse, kneel down, saw through it with the forte of his sword blade, and then hop back up again (except that his horse was spooky and didn't want to hold still, and he spent an alarming moment or two dancing beside a moving horse, one foot in the stirrup, the other dragging on the ground while he clung to the pommel of the saddle with one hand and tried not to drop his scimitar with the other).

But he was a grown-up, he could cope; and he made a rather less messy job of the next two trebuchets. In fact, he was feeling confident enough to be toying with the idea of trying to get the things to burn when the enemy finally showed up. That was the point at which he should have let it alone and gone home to bed.

The enemy didn't want to be there, it was obvious from the way they advanced; crab-fas.h.i.+on, their halberds and glaives thrust out well in front, sheer terror on their faces. Urging them on were a couple of officers, beside themselves with fury, like apple-growers whose trees are being robbed by the village children, but not quite furious enough to lead from the front. The job was about half-done; Sildocai called the first and second troops to follow him, and kicked up his favourite slow canter - quick enough to have momentum but slow enough to maintain control. There wasn't a line - the enemy were slouching towards him in a huddled bunch, the men on the ends trying to snuggle towards the centre - so he waved the second troop out wide left, and took the first troop wide right. The plan was to hit them hard in flank, turn them back on the camp in a confused mob so they'd get under the feet of any further, better-organised relief party. There was just about enough light from the camp-fires to see what he was about. It should have worked fine. It did - - Except that, as he bent down over his horse's neck to deliver a straightforward diagonal cut along the line of some footslogger's collar-bone, his saddle-girth snapped, sending him sliding helplessly down the vector of the stroke. He landed with his shoulder in the dead man's face, with his saddle still gripped between his thighs.

If it had happened to somebody else he'd probably have wet himself laughing as he rode to the rescue; but comedy is relative, and when he looked up, the first thing he saw was a man standing over him. He was wearing a s.h.i.+rt, a kettle-hat and nothing else, and he was just about to stick a halberd into Sildocai's chest.

There wasn't a lot he could do about it; the d.a.m.ned saddle stopped him moving his legs, so all he was able to do was throw up his left arm in the way of the halberd. He had a boiled leather vambrace on his forearm; the cutting edge of the blade slid across it like a skater on ice and came off at an angle, making contact with his face at the point of his cheekbone and slicing off the top of his ear. That left his hand in good position for grabbing hold of the halberd shaft; but what with the shock and all he m.u.f.fed it a bit, and the blade slit the web between his thumb and forefinger before he was able to tighten his grip and pull.

The manoeuvre was a qualified success; he got the halberd away from the man, but he pulled it down across his own face, cutting another line more or less parallel to the first, from the corner of his eye across the lower part of his scalp. He couldn't keep hold of the halberd, and dropped it. The man stared at him, then kicked him in the face - not a good idea for either party, since the man wasn't wearing anything on his feet. Sildocai was sure he felt one of the man's toes break at the same time he felt the bone go in his nose.

He had his right arm free by now, and he used it to grab the man's ankle and try to pull him down; but he m.u.f.fed that too and was left gripping a flailing leg, hardly able to see because of all the blood in his eyes. There didn't seem much point in holding on, so he let go, at which point the man suddenly threw his arms wide and fell on top of him.

He'd been hit hard, but not hard enough to kill him; at a guess, a scimitar-cut slantwise across the base of his neck under the rim of the kettle-hat. Now the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was lying right on top of him, their mouths almost touching, like lovers; the man's eyes were open wide and he was making some sort of stupid glugging noise; he was trying to say something, but Sildocai wasn't interested. 'Get off me!' he screeched, and jerked and pulled at his trapped left arm until he had it free. The fingers were stiff and tight (Permanent disability, Sildocai noted, worry about it later) but he had enough use of it to get a grip on the man's shoulder and push. He didn't want to go, but it turned out he didn't have much choice; he rolled on to his back without moving, except for more eye-rolling and gurgling. With a lot of effort Sildocai found a way to scrabble himself up on to his knees, but things weren't getting any better; a man running past him rammed him in the back, knocked him on his face and went sprawling down beside him. d.a.m.n, Sildocai thought, this is hopeless. The man was picking himself up; there was a sword lying beside him where he'd dropped it. But he left it there and skittered away, running very fast, which at the time seemed like a piece of luck.

Bad luck, as it turned out. The reason he'd bolted without even picking up his sword became horribly obvious as Sildocai lifted his head in time to see a horse's hooves rearing up over his head. He dropped down again, but that didn't help; he felt an unbearable pain in his back, felt something give way as the horse trod on him. He tried to shout, but his mouth was full of dirt and besides, all the air had been squeezed out of him. It took a lot of painful effort to put some back in its place.

Broken ribs, he diagnosed, with the part of his mind that somehow wasn't involved, this isn't getting any better. For two pins he'd have stayed where he was; but he could still recall a time when he'd been in charge of this situation, and one of the things he could remember about it was that as soon as the job was done, they were getting out of there and going home. Sildocai didn't want to be left behind, so it was very important to stand up, find his horse (or any d.a.m.ned horse) and get back to the fortress.

The man next to him was still making that ridiculous glugging noise, like a fractious baby. Sildocai rolled over on to his right shoulder, kicked with his legs and jack-knifed himself on to his feet; he staggered, nearly went over again, caught his balance just in time. The operation was unbelievably painful - I shouldn't have to be doing this, a man in my condition - and breathing had become a test of character. He took a step forward, but apparently someone had stolen the joints out of his knees while he'd been sprawling in the dirt. He managed to stay upright, but that was about the best he could do.

'Steady now, chum, it's all right.' Whoever he was, Sildocai hadn't seen or heard him coming; he was just there, a man to his left grabbing and holding on to his arm. 'It's all right,' he repeated. 'Let's get you out of this before you fall over.' It was a horrible sing-song voice - the Perimadeian accent had always grated on Sildocai. 'Come on, this way.'

The b.a.s.t.a.r.d was trying to make him go back, towards the camp; that wasn't the right direction, so why was he doing it? Then it made sense. This was the enemy, mistaking him for a friend (like the man lying blubbering in the dirt, who'd expected him to help) - well, that was just fine, but it was the wrong direction. Fortunately, the man was an idiot; there was a knife hanging from his belt, just handy. Sildocai pulled it out and stuck it between his shoulders. For once, something went in the way it was meant to, but he'd missed the spot he'd been aiming for. The man gasped with pain and shock, but stayed on his feet. 'Oh G.o.ds,' the poor fool said and grabbed at Sildocai for support - he hadn't realised that Sildocai had stabbed him, must be thinking he'd been hit by an arrow or something. He took the man's weight on his shoulder as best he could, though it was nearly enough to bring him to his knees; then he pulled out the knife and stuck it in under the man's ear.

This time he did go down, but of course he was clinging on to Sildocai's shoulder, and so they hit the ground together. This one was easier to shove off - he was dead, which helped - but getting up again was probably going to be too hard for him to manage. Well, he'd tried; and, as his father used to say, if you've done your best, they can't ask any more of you.

Breathing was becoming harder, if anything. It was as if he had a big carpenter's clamp screwed across him, pressing his chest and back together while the carpenter waited for the glue to dry. But some people never learn (four generations of leaders). He dragged his elbows towards his knees, pushed his knees forward, tried to straighten his back - no future in that. Thanks for nothing, he thought bitterly, aiming his displeasure at the man he'd just killed. I'd have been just fine if you hadn't interfered. Then he straightened his legs and arms, probably the most gruelling physical effort he'd ever made in his life. It got him on his feet again. It was worth it.

Now then; all I've got to do now is find a horse, get on it . . . There didn't seem to be much in the way of battle-noises, he noticed with dismay. He had no idea how long it had been since he'd come off his horse. It felt like his whole life, of course, but that was subjective time. Quite possible, likely even, that his men had done as they were told and pushed off as soon as the job was done. In which case he needn't have nearly killed himself getting up.

He took three steps forward - a technique of controlled falling, whereby he aimed himself at the ground and stuck out a leg at the last moment. His left hand was hurting almost as much as his back - a different sort of pain, throbbing instead of sharp. Dragging in breath was getting to be more trouble than it was worth.

And then he saw the horse. Amazing creatures; in the middle of a battle, with all that death and pain around it, a riderless horse will still stop, put its head down and nibble at the gra.s.s. Sildocai looked at it for ten seconds, a long time in that context. He was trying to work out, from first principles, how to walk over to where the horse was standing, get on its back and make it go where he wanted it to. He knew the project was possible - we can win this, as Temrai would say - but at that particular moment he couldn't quite see how to go about it.

Sheer hard work and application, in the end. Luckily, the horse had the grace to hold still until he reached it, and then at least he had something to lean against while he bent down and lifted his foot up to the stirrup with his now mostly useless left hand. Getting into the saddle was always going to be the hardest part. No grip in his left hand, so pulling on the saddle was out. The best he could do was try to force his left leg straight and hope momentum and body weight would do the rest. It nearly worked; but while he was standing with one foot in one stirrup the horse decided to move, and it took him a long time to find the strength to get his leg over the horse's back and down the other side. When he'd accomplished that, he found that he had nothing left; he slumped forward against the horse's neck, his nose buried in its mane, and tried for one last breath. The horse kept walking; and since it was just a horse, and the enemy were too busy to bother with stray livestock, it carried on walking in the direction it remembered home used to be, until it came to a river. There it stopped to drink; and after that, it wandered a short way, snuffling for gra.s.s, until dawn; at which point someone on the other side of the river noticed it and started making a fuss. They swung out the bridge and sent some men to catch it; the horse didn't mind that, and they led it over the bridge and took the load off its back.

'It's Sildocai,' someone said.

'Is he still alive?' Sildocai heard that. Good question, he thought.

'I think so. Get him down.'

In the event, Sildocai decided that he was still alive, because it doesn't hurt if you're dead. He slipped away from the pain after a while, and when he woke up someone whose name was something like Temrai came and stood over him and told him the raid had been successful. He wanted to ask, What raid? but he didn't have the energy. He went back to sleep for a few hours, until the crash-thump of trebuchet shot landing all round him (the raid had been a success; it took the enemy five hours to make good all the damage they'd done) woke him up again.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

'We could do this for the rest of our lives,' said the engineer, 'and we'd be no better off. I say we stop mucking about and follow up; otherwise we're just wasting our time.'

It was the third day of the bombardment. The day before had been like the day before that; while the sun shone, the trebuchets had pounded the lower stockade, the engine emplacements and the path. When the sun set, Temrai's men had patched up the lower stockade, replaced the smashed and splintered sections of the engines and filled in the gaps hammered out of the path, and in the early hours of the morning his light cavalry had made a sortie and hamstrung the trebuchets. On the second night, they'd had a different leader and met with sterner resistance; but they'd learned a few things too, and the net result had been the same. For the third night, Bardas had detailed two companies of halberdiers to guard the trebuchets and had given orders for a stockade of his own, only to be told that all the timber within easy reach had been felled to build the fortress, so he'd have to make do with a ditch and bank, which would of course take time . . .

'No,' he said, 'we'll keep going. Sooner or later there'll be so much damage they won't be able to patch it up any more - you can't keep patching on to patches, believe me, I've tried it. We can lose this war very easily, with just one error of judgement. I'd rather waste time than lives, if it's all the same to you.'

The engineer shrugged. 'You're the boss,' he said. 'And I'm telling you, I wouldn't have your job for anything.'

There was no cavalry raid that night, and the halberdiers, who'd been standing to arms for nine hours, went off duty with a feeling of having won the moral victory, giving place to the artillery crews. It was during the changeover, about half an hour after sunrise, that Temrai sent out his horse-archers, arguably the most effective part of his army. Before Bardas' sentries had a chance to identify them and signal in, they'd been shot down; then the three troops drew up in line and started a bombardment of their own, from two hundred yards; further than Bardas' bowmen could shoot; within range of the crossbows, but they could only loose one shot every three minutes, and the second troop was concentrating its volleys on them. Bardas called for the siege pavises, large oxhide s.h.i.+elds designed to cover crossbowmen during siege operations, but there was a problem. The wagon master had stationed supply wagons all round them, hemming them in (after all, n.o.body had told him they were likely to be needed, and he had to park the d.a.m.ned wagons somewhere). In order to get them out, he had to s.h.i.+ft the wagons, which in turn meant bringing about a third of them through the camp . . . Within a quarter of an hour, the streets of the camp were jammed solid with wagons, impeding the shot wagons that were supposed to be fetching trebuchet shot from the dump. Not that it mattered; the first and third troops of horse-archers were shooting at the artillerymen, and those who'd managed to get under cover weren't likely to be loosing off any shot until the enemy had withdrawn.

'No,' Bardas kept saying, when they urged him to do something. 'Cardinal rule: don't charge horse-archers with heavy cavalry. I learned that the hard way. And if you think I'm sending infantry out into that-' (no need to ask what that was; the volleys of arrows were lifting, planing and dropping like spurts of boiling water from a geyser; the thought of being underneath one of those plumes was enough to make your mouth dry). 'So,' he went on, 'we sit tight. You know how many arrows a plainsman carries? Fifty; twenty-five on his back, twenty-five on his saddle. When they've used up their arrows they'll go away, and we can get on with our work.'

He was right, of course. Not long afterwards the horse-archers pulled out, leaving behind them the best part of a hundred thousand arrows that King Temrai was in no position to replace in a hurry. They were everywhere; sticking in the ground, in the timbers of the trebuchets and the wagons, hanging by their barbs from the sides of tents and wagon-covers, smashed underneath dead men, slanting upwards from the chests and arms of dead and living men; they covered the ground like a carpet of suddenly sprung flowers, the carts and engines like moss or lichen, their fletchings like the tufts of bog-cotton on the wet marshes, and the snapping of shafts underfoot as the artillerymen came out from cover sounded like a bonfire of twigs and dry gra.s.s. Like ants or mosquitos they'd got in everywhere; like bees dazed by the smoke from the bee-keeper's bellows they lay exhausted, their flight and stinging all done.

'Clear up this mess,' some officer was shouting. 'And get those engines working, we haven't got all day. Where's the chief engineer? We're going to need twelve new crews for number six battery. Casualty lists - who's got the d.a.m.ned lists? Have I got to do every b.l.o.o.d.y thing myself?'

Half the artillerymen out of action; more wounded than killed, but not by a wide margin. The injured lay or sat around the shot-wagons, the arrows still sticking out of them; the surgeons were rushed off their feet, sawing shafts and dragging out barbs the hard way, throwing the recovered arrowheads on to piles under the tables, and they didn't have time to look back at the work they still had to do. From time to time a man would die, quietly or making a fuss, and at intervals they came round with a handcart for the bodies.

They came and asked Bardas what they should do now. 'Carry on,' he said. 'Keep plugging away at the path and the stockade. You can put halberdiers on the engines, so long as there's an artilleryman to each team to tell them what to do.'

They went round with big wicker baskets, picking up the arrows - reasonable quality materiel that'd come in handy some time, if not in this war then in some other war, where the Empire saw fit to deploy ma.s.sed archers - and when the baskets were full, they packed them in empty barrels and loaded them on to supply carts. The broken arrows were sorted into two piles; heads for sc.r.a.p, shafts for the fire or the carpenters (an arrowshaft makes good dowel rod for small structures, like pavises and screens and the floors of siege-towers and the rungs of scaling-ladders). A platoon of pikemen with nothing else to do sat cross-legged in a circle, cutting off the fletchings and dropping them into big earthenware pots, ready for the quilters to use for stuffing gambesons.

'It was a gesture,' Bardas explained, 'nothing more. And the best thing to do with gestures is to ignore them, like your mother did when you were a kid and wouldn't eat up your porridge.' But all the while he was thinking about the second grade of proof, the proof against arrows; to meet the specification, an armour should turn a bodkinhead arrow shot from a ninety-five-pound bow at seventy-five yards, or a seventy-pound bow at thirty yards. Most armours fail that test and go in the sc.r.a.p, along with the spent arrowheads.

They got the trebuchets going again, and the beams slapped upright like hammers on the anvil, pounding dust out of the side of the hill.

'Mostly,' someone was saying, 'we're using their shot to repair the road; those big boulders are a nice size, though they take some s.h.i.+fting. We could do with a few more cranes, though; they've smashed up most of the ones I scrounged from the top batteries.'

Temrai tried to concentrate, but it wasn't easy. He felt as though he'd been living with the thump of landing shot for years, and he'd gone past the point where he could ignore it. Earlier that day someone had come and told him that Tilden was dead; a splinter from an overshot that had smashed to pieces against an outcrop and sprayed debris over the back lot of tents on the far side. He heard the news but couldn't feel it; it was impossible to concentrate on anything important with this constant hammering going on, in his ears and coming up out of the ground through the soles of his feet. He knew it was all a ploy, an attempt to pull him down out of his fortress on to the flat for a pitched battle, and he wasn't going to fall for it. He'd been there before.

'What about the stockade?' he asked. 'How's the timber supply holding out?'

'It's not good,' they told him. 'We're giving priority to shoring up the path, like you said, and that's using up a lot of stock. We've started pulling stakes out of the back of the top stockade; after all, they aren't much good to us there, and so far we've been able to plug the gaps with broken stuff. Can't keep it up for ever, though; if we take out much more we'll leave weak spots, and that's asking for trouble.'

Temrai scowled; trying to keep his mind on the subject in hand was like trying to hold on tight to a rope: the more you gripped, the more it burned. 'I don't mind a few obvious weak spots,' he said. 'A weak spot in the wall is a temptation to the enemy, and sometimes it's good to offer them an opportunity, so long as you're ready and waiting when they accept it. Sometimes the best chance of winning a battle comes when you've almost lost it.'

That remark didn't win him any friends. It's true, though, he wanted to tell them, you study old wars, you'll see what I mean. n.o.body seemed in the mood for a history seminar, however, so he ignored the scowls and frowns. 'Anyhow,' he said, 'carry on robbing the back wall for now. This bombardment won't last much longer. Trust me on that.'

(And why not? They'd trusted him once, right up to the walls of Perimadeia; and back then he was only a kid, with nothing about him to suggest he knew what he was doing apart from a certain ability to communicate enthusiasm. Now he was King Temrai, Sacker of Cities, so surely they ought to trust him even more.

Didn't work like that.

Nevertheless, these were his people; they'd do as they were told. The ones who wouldn't have were all dead now, killed in the civil war.) They talked through a few minor points of supply and administration, then he dismissed the meeting and walked out of the tent into the dust. The death of his wife was somewhere quite close under the surface of his mind, like a fish feeding, but he wasn't consciously aware of any significant levels of grief or guilt. She had been just the sort of woman he could have loved to distraction in another time or another place. But now that he had to look at the world through the eyeslits of the visor of King Temrai, he found it almost impossible to let the sharp blade through; there was no gap or seam, no weak point where he could create an opportunity.

The dead-cart trundled past him as he walked across the plateau towards the path. He watched it go, realised that he recognised a face peeping out between another man's crushed legs. For now they were piling the dead in a half-finished grain-pit; the stores that should have gone in there had been spoiled by an overshot, and it seemed a pity to waste the effort that had gone into digging it. He'd been to see it, had stood for a moment looking at the confused heap, arms and legs and heads and feet and bodies and hands jumbled in together, like an untidy store, but it hadn't meant anything more to him than the sum of its parts.

A man ran past him, heading down the hill; then two more, shapes that loomed up out of the dust and went back into it. More followed; he caught one of them by the arm and asked what was going on.

'Attack,' the man panted at him. 'G.o.ds only know where they appeared from. They've got some kind of portable bridge for crossing the river.'

Temrai let go of him. 'I see,' he said. 'Who's in charge down there?'

The man shrugged. 'n.o.body, far as I know. There's the gang-boss on the stockade detail, I suppose.'

'Find him,' Temrai said, 'tell him I'll be there as soon as I can.'

The man nodded and slipped away into the dust, like someone vanis.h.i.+ng into quicksand. Temrai thought for a minute or so, then turned back up the hill and headed for his tent. There was n.o.body about to help him with his armour, but he'd got the hang of it now, and it was getting easier each time he wore it, as the metal shaped itself to the contours of his bones and muscles. He felt much better once it was on - in truth, he'd spent so much time wearing it lately that when he took it off, his arms and legs felt strangely light and feeble.

He was adjusting the padding inside his helmet when they came to tell him that the enemy halberdiers had breached the stockade. He acknowledged the news with a slight nod of his head. 'Who have we got down there?' he asked.

'The work crews, mostly,' someone answered. 'They've been fighting with hammers and mattocks. There's a few skirmishers and pickets in there as well, and Heuscai's on his way down with the flying column.'

'Catch him up,' Temrai said, 'and tell him to wait for me.'

When he found him, Heuscai looked impatient and bewildered, almost angry. 'We've got to hurry,' he said, 'the work crews can't hold them for long.'

'It's all right,' Temrai said, 'I know what I'm doing.'

He led the column down the path. It was slow going; the bombardment had raised elevation a few degrees to clear the lower stockade, with the result that the upper reaches of the path were being hammered away now, while the lower reaches were a mess. 'Take your time,' he called back as he picked his way through - it was bad luck and bad timing that a shot landed in the thick of the column just as he said it; the men were too closely packed together to have any chance of getting out of the way, and when the shot landed, it crushed three men with a dull crunch, like the noise you get when you squash a large spider. The dust was worse than ever, but at least there were the sounds of fighting below them to give them something to head for. Temrai found walking down the steep slope in heavy armour extremely awkward; the back plates of his greaves dug into his heels, pinching skin between the greaverims and the upper edges of his sabatons.

As soon as he was close enough to the bottom of the path to be able to see what was going on, he gave the order for the work-crews to pull out. The first time he shouted they didn't hear him, or didn't recognise his voice; they were standing on the raised embankment on their side of the stockade, trying to keep the enemy from bursting through a gap about two yards wide where a shot had landed right on top of the fence. The boulder, of course, was still there; it was the main obstacle blocking the halberdiers' way. As they tried to scramble up on to it, the workmen bashed at them with their mattocks and big hammers, bouncing two-handed blows off helmets and pauldrons. Instead of ringing like a hammer on an anvil, the blows sounded dull and chunky.

He gave the order a second time, and the men did as they'd been told, sidling backwards away from the breach. On the other side, the halberdiers were pus.h.i.+ng and jostling each other, competing to get through while the way was inexplicably clear. As they oozed and bubbled through the gap, Temrai stepped back into the line and gave the order to draw bows. By nock your arrows there were thirty or so of them through the breach; more by the time Temrai called hold low and then loose, and the front rank let fly at no more than fifteen yards' range.

It was just as well he'd reminded them to shoot low; at such short range the arrow is still climbing, and even with his warning, a quarter of the shots went high. But three quarters of a volley was enough for the halberdiers at the breach; they crumpled up like paper thrown on to the fire, laying a carpet of obstacles directly in the path of the men following them. The next volley congested the opening even further; the pile of dead, twitching and wriggling bodies was over knee-high now, too tangled to step through, not stable enough to scramble over. Still they carried on coming though, each batch put to proof and found deficient. The handful that did manage to get through then underwent the next degree of the test as they threw themselves up the slope towards the line of archers, and what had pa.s.sed the arrows went down under the pounding of the big hammers, swirling and falling like shot from a trebuchet.

Temrai had nothing to do in all this except stand still and watch; and as he watched, he thought about the fall of Perimadeia, the gate (not much wider than the breach here) that had opened and let in his men. There hadn't been a rank of archers waiting for him then, only the darkness and empty streets, nothing to prove his mettle. Now, trapped between hammer and anvil (the shot still hissed and whistled overhead, thudded into the side of the hill, ripping up dust) he felt a little easier in his mind.

When the enemy captain gave the order to break off, the gap in the stockade had been filled; not with timbers looted from the other side of the hill but with proof steel in a jumbled, compacted heap. Saves us a job, Temrai thought; they've done it better than we could have - and he paused to ask himself whether his men would have gone on squeezing and scrambling into the killing zone, the way the Imperials had done. But we never had the chance; it's not a fair test. He shook his head, then signalled to the work-crew to move in and start shoring up, making good.

'You see,' he told Heurrai (who'd been one of the sullen faces at the council of war), 'give them an opportunity, they may just be stupid enough to take it.'

Heurrai didn't reply; what he'd seen was bothering him. Temrai could sympathise; at another time, in another place, it would have bothered him too. But he'd improved himself since then, made good the gaps in his defences; and now he was wondering if Bardas Loredan had felt this way when he'd beaten off the a.s.sault on Perimadeia with incendiaries, so that fire had danced on the unburnable water. It was an opportunity for a valuable insight, a sharing of experience leading to a sharing of minds - he felt like an apprentice standing at his master's elbow.

'They'll be back,' someone said; and a trebuchet shot pitched a few yards away, crus.h.i.+ng one man and ripping a leg off another. The next shot only tore up more dust, as Temrai led the way up the path, where another crew was already starting to make good.

'Sure,' he replied, when he'd caught his breath. 'And when they try again, we'll share another opportunity. Don't worry about it. I know what's going to happen.'