"Victory!" Enry Sharbonow said, coming by with a train of servants carrying wineskins. "Oh, excellent sir, honorable sir — here, have a drink."
Adrian took a flask, swallowing rough red wine, unwatered.
"A great victory," the Preblean said.
Esmond lowered his own skin, looking around at the cheering milita; his own men were cheerful enough, but much quieter as they leaned against the parapet and watched the Confeds flee.
"I'd call it more of a skirmish," he said. "Come and tell me about our victory in a month or two."
EIGHT
"Sun-stabbed by spears of brazen light," Speaker Emeritus Jeschonyk said. "Brazen, you see. Not bronze light."
One of his aides frowned. "That would be an irregular use of the pluperfect, though, wouldn't it?"
A babble of controversy erupted in the hot beige gloom of the command tent. Justiciar Demansk cleared his throat.
"Speaker," he said. Eyes turned towards him. "I think it's a dialect form, actually — Windrush Plain Emerald, archaic, of course." It would have to be; the poem they were discussing was eight hundred years old, an epic on the Thousand Ships War. Bits and pieces of it might go back to the Thousand Ships War, half a millennium before the poet. "In any case, Speaker, I think that at the moment we have more pressing, if banausic, concerns."
"By all means, Justiciar," the Speaker sighed, willing to listen to reason. He was a square-faced square-shouldered man, dressed in the purple-edged wrapped robe of his office, in his sixties, not a soldier recently himself, but still vigorous. "What do you recommend?"
When Demansk ducked outside the tent, one of his aides fell into step beside him. The man was a hundred-commander technically, but also First Spear of Demansk's First Regiment, the highest slot that a promoted ranker could reach. Within, it sounded as if they'd gone back to the irregular pluperfect. Sometimes I wish we'd never let the Emeralds civilize us, Demansk thought. Particularly, I wish they'd never taught us literary criticism. Rhetoric might be the foundation of civility — everyone agreed on that — but it did get in the way, sometimes.
"Get 'em to discuss business, sir?" he said, his voice still slightly rough with the accent of a peasant from the eastern valleys.
"More or less. We're putting in an attack as soon as we can get a causeway built. It's only half a mile, and shallow water. Meanwhile we'll get the fleet in Grand Harbor operational."
The promoted ranker shrugged mail-clad shoulders. "You get my men on solid ground next to the enemy and we'll thrash the wogs as soon as we get stuck into 'em, sir," he said. "But by the belly of Gellerix, we can't walk on water — or swim in armor, either. Not half a mile, not a hundred fucking yards, sir."
They reached the gate and took the salute of the watch platoon; Demansk trotted easily up the rough log stairs to the top of the openwork wooden tower, the left of the pair that flanked the gate. From there he could see out to Preble — the Speaker's camp was on the shore opposite the fortified island. One of the small ships the local commander had used in his abortive attempt to retake the city was still burning on a sandbank directly below the city walls. Not encouraging.
The camp itself was. Jeschonyk had brought four brigades, twenty thousand citizen troops, regulars, and nearly as many auxiliaries — slingers and archers and light infantry, of course; cavalry wasn't going to be much use here and he'd mobilized only enough for patrolling and foraging. The camp was a huge version of the usual marching fortress that a Confed force erected every night; a giant square cut into the soft loam of the coastal plain, with a ditch twelve feet deep and ten feet wide all around the perimeter. The earth from the ditch had been heaped up into a wall all around the interior, and on top of that were stakes pegged and fastened with woven willow. Each wall had a gate in the middle, flanked by log towers and guarded by a full company. Sentries patrolled the perimeter, and the rest of the men were hard at work. Four broad streets met in a central square for the command tent and unit standard shrines, and working parties were grading them, laying a pavement of cobbles and pounding it down, cutting drainage ditches along a gridwork throughout the camp. Orderly rows of leather tents were up, the standard eight-man issue for each squad; picket lines set out for the draught animals; deep latrines dug; even a bathhouse erected. Smiths and leatherworkers and armorers were already hard at work, repairing equipment and preparing for the siege works.
Demansk felt a surge of pride; this whole great city, this expression of human will and intelligence and capacity for order and civilization, was the casual daily accomplishment of a Confed army. If they were ordered to move, they'd take it all down before breakfast muster — no use presenting an enemy with a fortress — and do the same again the next evening after a full day's march. And if they were here for a couple of months, it would be a city in truth — paved streets, sewers, stone buildings.
Then he turned and looked at Preble. I hate sieges. Sieges were an elaborate form of frontal attack, which was a good way to waste men at the best of times. With a siege, all the Confed army's advantages of flexiblity and articulation were lost. Against an Emerald phalanx. . well, you didn't have to run up against the pikepoints. Draw them onto broken ground, have small parties work in along their flanks, disrupt them — then they were yours. Islanders were like quicksilver; if you could get them to stand still for a moment, a hammer blow spattered them, no staying power. But behind a stone wall, even a townsman with a spear could become a hero. You had to go straight at him, and climbing a ladder left you virtually defenseless.
If we can get the causeway close, we can batter the wall down with catapults. The problem with that was that the defenders could shore it up, or build a secondary wall within while you were battering — ready to mousetrap you as you charged in over the rubble. Or we could undermine, use sappers. . The butcher's bill is still going to be fearsome. And if it takes too long, we'll get disease, sure as the gods made the grapes ripen, we'll have disease. That really frightened him. He'd seen dysentery go through armies like the Sword of Wodep too many times.
"Sir!"
An aide came trotting up. "Sir, Justiciar Demansk — we've got a. . a person, sir, who claims to have urgent news."
Demansk's eyebrows went up towards the receding line of his close-cropped grizzled hair. "A person?" he said.
"Claims to be a relative of yours, sir." The aide's aristocratic features curled slightly in disdain. "On the off chance that they might have some information I didn't have them whipped out of the camp, sir."
The Justiciar lowered the hand he'd been shading his eyes with as he peered towards Preble. "By all means, let's see this. . person. ." he said.
Anything that could distract me from this would be welcome. Even a dancing ape.
A small slight man came trotting up the log stairs of the tower, with an Islander woman at his heels. No, wait a minute, he thought. He looked at bare legs and arms, at the way the stranger walked. That's not a man, it's a woman in armor. What looked like Emerald light-infantry kit, bowl helmet with cheekguards, linen corselet with brass shoulderpieces and probably iron scales between the layers of cloth. A trooper was carrying a sword and shield and pair of light javelins behind them, puffing along. .
This was out of the ordinary. Then the stranger took off her helmet, and long tawny-auburn hair fell free, nearly to her waist.
Demansk's eyes went wide. "Helga!" he said. . almost sputterings.
"Father!"
* * *
"What are they doing?" Enry Sharbonow said, squinting.
"They're getting ready to build a causeway," Esmond said. He pointed. "See, they've got a good hard-surfaced road right down to the water's edge. They've almost certainly got local pilots and fishermen who can tell them exactly what the shoals are like. Now they're starting. See those lines of log pilings, a hundred yards apart? Those mark the edges. Between them, they've got working parties, their troops and whatever civilians they can round up, unloading those oxcarts full of rock — boulders, up to sixty pounds. See how they're passing them hand to hand? They'll pile those up until they get above the surface, compact them, then cover with a layer of smaller rock. By the time it's safely above high-tide level, they'll have a section of first-class paved road."
Enry swallowed. A little beyond him Prince Tenny lounged with elaborate unconcern, nibbling on a honeyed fig and fingering a set of healing scratches along one side of his bearded face.
"And those wooden things they're building, a little further back?"
"Well, that's a little far to see, but I'd say they're probably siege engines. Catapults, of course, heavy ones. Siege towers — wooden fort towers on wheels, covered in hides or possibly metal plates, so they can roll them up to our walls and climb protected. Solophonic ladders — big counterweighted things like a covered bridge on a pivot, sort of the same thing. Fire raisers. Metal-shod battering rams under heavy roofs, also on wheels, for forcing a breach. When they get the causeway close enough, they'll use the catapults and archers to keep our heads down while they complete it — batter a hole in the wall, if they can. If they can't, they'll roll the Solophons and siege towers up to the wall and storm it, while the battering rams knock sections of it down and make ramps for their assault troops."
Enry's natural olive skin had gone very pale, a sort of doughy white color. "What are we going to do?" he said.
Esmond took a fig from the silver tray being held up for Tenny, popped it into his mouth and chewed with relish. "Oh, there are a few tricks we can try," he said cheerfully, and cocked an eye at the sky. "No moons tonight."
* * *
"You shouldn't be here," Esmond hissed into the darkness.
"Neither should you," Adrian said.
"Sirs, with respect, shut the fuck up," Donnuld Grayn said, pausing as he tightened the strap on a greave. "We're getting close."
We shouldn't, Esmond thought. Typical Confed arrogance. When they sat down to besiege a place, they expected the defenders to sit tight and cower, waiting for inevitable doom, so what point was there in taking elaborate precautions?
At least, that was what the Preblean scouts had said, swimming in after sculling across the strait on inflated sheepskins. None of them had been caught, so either the Confeds were extremely confident or fiendishly clever at misdirection.
Esmond showed teeth, white in the darkness against skin covered with burnt cork. Now, fiendishly clever is something that might be applied to an Emerald, or even an Islander. But to a Confed? No, no. . systematic, yes. Methodical, yes. But fiendishly clever? Rarely.
"I'll show them fiendish," he whispered, chuckling, and looked back along the boat.
It was about thirty feet long, the Preblean sailors at the muffled oars, the men his own Strikers with some of Adrian's specialists for luck. That dampened his mood, slightly. He might have known that Adrian wouldn't send his men along and not go himself; he wasn't a professional, but he thought like one, sometimes — as if soldiers' ghosts were whispering in his ear.
That checked him for a moment. I suppose I am a professional now, he thought. Not an athlete or a weapons trainer, but a general. But not a mercenary. I have a cause.
"Row off," the Preblean at the tiller oar said softly. "Row soft, all. . raise oars and let her glide. Not raise it upright, Rawl, you stupid bastard; ten lashes for that."