“Yes, and incendiaries. I hope we have enough firefighters.”
“Fire is the last thing we have to worry about. Here they come again.”
A fresh surge at the foot of the walls. Crossbow bolts came clinking and cracking against the battlements in a dark hail. Men fell screaming from the catwalks.
Another assault, the ladders lifted up and thrown down once more. The ground at the bottom of the fortifications was piled with corpses and wreckage.
“I don’t like it,” Corfe said. “This is too easy.”
“Too easy!”
“Yes. There is no thought behind these assaults. I think they are a cover for something else. Even Shahr Baraz does not throw his men’s lives away for no gain.”
There was an earth-shuddering concussion that seemed to come from beneath their very feet. Almost the entire gatehouse was enveloped in thick smoke through which flame speared and flapped.
“They’ve blown the gate!” Andruw cried.
“I’ll see to it. Stay here. They’ll make another assault to cover the breaching party.”
Corfe ran down the wide stairs to the courtyards and squares below. Torunnan soldiers and refugee civilians were running about carrying powder, shot, wounded men, match and water. He seized on a group of a dozen who possessed arquebuses and led them into the shadow of the gatehouse.
There in the arch a fierce fire was burning, and the massive gates were askew on their hinges, white scars marking the shattered wood. Already the Merduk engineers were swarming through the gaps and a hundred more were clustered behind them. It was like watching dark maggots writhing in a wound.
“Present pieces!” Corfe yelled to his motley command, and the arquebuses were levelled.
“Give fire!”
The volley flung back a score of Merduks who were clambering through the wrecked gates.
“Out swords. Follow me!” Corfe cried, and led the Torunnans at a run.
They stepped over wriggling, maimed men and began slashing and hewing in the burning gloom of the arch like things possessed. In a few moments there were no Merduks left alive inside the gatehouse, and those trying to force their way through the battered portals had limbs and heads lopped off by the defenders.
The fire spread. Corfe was dimly aware of men with water buckets. He hacked the fingers off a hand that was pulling at the broken gate. Then someone was tugging him away.
“The murder-holes! They’re going to use them. Out of the gateway!”
He allowed himself to be hauled away, half blind with sweat and smoke. The Torunnans fell back.
Immediately the Merduks were squirming through the gates again. In seconds a score of them were on the inside and more of their fellows were joining them by the moment.
“Now!” a voice yelled somewhere.
A golden torrent poured down on the hapless Merduks from holes in the ceiling of the gatehouse. It was not liquid, but as soon as it struck the men below they screamed horribly, tearing at their armour and dropping their swords. They flailed around in agony for long minutes whilst their comrades halted outside, watching in helpless fury.
“What is it?” Corfe asked. “It looks like—”
“Sand,” he was told by a grinning soldier. “Heated sand. It gets inside the armour and fries them to a cinder. More economical than lead, wouldn’t you say?”
“Make way, there!” A gunnery officer and a horde of blackened figures were man-hauling two broad-muzzled falcons into position before the gate. As the torrent of sand faltered the Merduks outside began clambering inside again with what seemed to Corfe to be arrant stupidity or maniac courage.
The falcons went off. Loaded with scrap metal, they did the remains of the gates little damage, but the Merduks in the archway were blown to shreds. Blood and fragments of flesh, bone and viscera plastered the interior of the archway.
“They’re falling back!” someone yelled.
It was true. The attack on the gate was being abandoned for the moment. The Merduks were drawing away.
“Keep these pieces posted here, and get engineers to work on these gates,” Corfe commanded the gunnery officer, not caring what his rank might be. “I’ll send men down from the wall to reinforce you as soon as I can.”
Without waiting for a reply, he ran for the catwalk stairs to rejoin the men on the battlements.
Another assault—the cover for the breaching party—had just been thrown back. Men were reloading the cannons frantically, charging their arquebuses, doctoring minor wounds. The dead were tossed off the parapet like sacks; time for the solemnities later.
Andruw’s sabre was bloody and his eyes startlingly white in a filthy face. “What about the gate?”
“It’s holding, for the moment. They’re persistent bastards. I’ll give them that. We sent half a hundred of them to join their prophet before they drew back.”
Andruw laughed heartily. “By sweet Ramusio’s blessed blood, they’ll not walk over us without a stumble or two. Was it as tight as this at Aekir, Corfe?”
Corfe turned away, face flat and ugly.
“It was different,” he said.
M ARTELLUS watched the failure of the assault from his station on the heights of the citadel. His officers were clustered about him, grave but somehow jubilant. The Merduk host was drawing back like a snarling dog that has been struck on the muzzle. All over the eastern barbican on the far side of the river a vast turmoil of rising smoke shifted and eddied, shot through with flame. Even here, over a mile away, it was possible to hear the hoarse roar of a multitude in extremity, a formless, surf-like sound that served as background to the rolling thunder of the guns.
“He’s lost thousands,” one of the senior officers was saying. “What is he thinking of, to throw troops bare-handed against prepared fortifications like that?”
A messenger arrived from the eastern bank, his face grimed and his chest heaving. Martellus read the dispatch with thin lips, then dismissed him.
“The gate is damaged. We would have lost it, were it not for the efforts of my new aide. Andruw puts his own casualties at less than three hundred.”
Some of the other officers grinned and stamped. Others looked merely thoughtful. They eyed the retreat of the attacking Merduk regiments—orderly despite the barrage that the Torunnan guns were laying down—then their gazes moved up the hillsides, to where the main host was encamped in its teeming thousands and the Merduk batteries squatted silent and ominous.
“He’s playing with us,” someone said. “He could have continued that attack all day, and not blinked an eye at the casualties.”
“Yes,” Martellus said. The early light filled his eyes with tawny fire and made a glitter out of the white lines in his hair. “This was an armed reconnaissance, no more, as I said it would be. He now knows the location of our guns and the dispositions of the eastern garrison. Tomorrow he will attack again, but this time it will not be a sudden rush, unsupported and ill-disciplined. Tomorrow we will see Shahr Baraz assault in earnest.”
H UNDREDS of miles away to the west. Follow the Terrin river northwards to where the gap between the Cimbric Mountains and the Thurians opens out. Pass over the glittering Sea of Tor with its dark fleets of fishing boats and its straggling coastal towns. There, in the foothills of the western Cimbrics, see the majestic profile of Charibon, where the bells of the cathedral are tolling for Vespers and the evening air is thickening into an early night in the shadow of the towering peaks.
In the apartments that had been made over to the new High Pontiff Himerius, the great man himself and Betanza, Vicar-General of the Inceptine Order sat alone, the attending clerics dismissed. The muddy, travel-worn man who had been with them minutes before had been led away to a well-earned bath and bed.
“Well?” Betanza asked.
Himerius’ eyes were hooded, his face a maze of crannied bone dominated by the eagle nose. As High Pontiff he wore robes of rich purple, the only man in the world entitled to do so unless the Fimbrian emperors were to come again.
“Absurd nonsense, all of it.”
“Are you so sure, Holiness?”
“Of course! Macrobius died in Aekir. Do you think the Merduks would have missed such a prize? This eyeless fellow is an impostor. The general at the dyke, this Martellus, he has obviously circulated this story in order to raise the morale of his troops. I cannot say I blame the man entirely—he must be under enormous pressure—but this really is inexcusable. If he survives the attack on the dyke I will see to it that he is brought before a religious court on charges of heresy.”
Betanza sat back in his thickly upholstered chair. They were both by the massive fireplace, and broad logs were burning merrily on the hearth, the only light in the tall-ceilinged room.
“According to this messenger,” Betanza said carefully, “Torunn was informed also. Eighteen days he says it took to get here, and four dead horses. Torunn will have had the news for nigh on a fortnight.”
“So? We will send our own messengers denying the validity of the man’s claim. It is too absurd, Betanza.”