"Let it ground, sir?" he asked, puzzled.
"We can't stop it." Still less push it around the front of the causeway, to drift harmlessly downwind. Somebody out there — those damned Gellerts — had probably timed this very carefully. "Have the battalion retreat — get everyone else out behind us. Walking retreat, shield-wall formation, but be damned quick about it. Move!"
He turned himself and began to walk to the rear. He'd been campaigning most of his fifty years; there was nothing in him of the need to prove his courage that had driven a young tribune to lunacy, so long ago. And the First Spear was partly right; nobody else was going to do this job better, if he couldn't.
* * *
"They're bugging out," Esmond said, disappointment in his voice. "Someone got a rush of thought to the head."
Adrian nodded tightly; he wasn't grieved that fewer men would be burned alive. The first of the fireships was almost in contact with the sandbank the causeway was being built on. . almost. .
"There!" he said.
The comandeered merchantman touched, lurched forward and then stopped dead. With a long slow crackling audible even over the growing roar of the fire, the mast toppled forward, to lie with its burning sail over the rock of the causeway. It fell towards the tower, but did not quite touch it — men were leaning out of the upper works of the siege tower, reckless of arquebus bullets, and pouring water down the layers of thick green hides that made up its outer skin. Any moment now. .
BUDDUFFF.
The force of the explosion was muffled by the hull of the ship, and the weight of combustibles lying above it. That confinement increased the force, as well. The burning deck of the fireship vanished in a spectactular volcano of flame, burning planks, beams, and dozens of barrels of flammables; many of them had ruptured in the hull as well, and added their sticky, fast-burning contents to the cone of flame that leapt upwards. It wasn't aimed at anything in particular, but the breeze bent it south and eastwards. . and most of it fell across the wall of the siege tower. Buckets of water became utter irrelevancies, and so did the layers of hide — they dried out and began to burn almost immediately. When the explosion cleared, the whole flank of the tower was already burning, and smoke was pouring out of the arrow slits and catapult ports all along the other side of it. Men jumped too, men with their hair and clothes aflame. A few were running from the other side, but not many could have made it down the ladders. The tower was a chimney now, sucking in air from the bottom and blasting it out the top and every opening along the sides, the thick timbers and internal bracing adding to the holocaust.
The next three fireships drifted into the red heart of the flames and exploded almost immediately. Adrian felt a huge soft pillow of hot air strike his face, making him fling up a hand as his eyeballs dried. When he blinked them clear the first tower was falling onto the flaming pillar of the second, nine stories of burning timber avalanching down unstoppably. The second tower cracked, shedding men and planks and hides; part of it hit the shallow water beyond, but the thick stump of it remained to burn with the whole of the first. Pieces of flaming wood flew through the air for hundreds of yards, well into the walled camp where the Confeds had crammed their carpentry supplies and naval stores. Fires started there, too; he could hear trumpets and drums as officers tried to organize fire-fighting parties. It would be difficult, though — the way to the nearest water supply was thoroughly blocked by the conflagration on the causeway.
There, stone would be beginning to crack as it glowed white-hot. Esmond was laughing, and the crews of the galleys were joining in — even the rowers were grinning through their oar ports on the outriggers, and the soldiers and sailors on deck were dancing, snapping their fingers and making obscene gestures towards the shore.
"A thousand men lost, there," Esmond said, slapping his hand exultantly on his swordhilt. "A thousand men, and a month's work, and all those materials. Lovely."
Even against the wind, Adrian thought he could catch a whiff of the smell. He gagged slightly and nodded.
"That will set them back a little," he said. "But I think we're going to be real, real unpopular over there now."
"Well, then," Esmond said, clapping him on the back. "We'll just have to continue closing the door in their face, won't we?"
* * *
"It's called a 'trebuchet,' " Adrian said to the carpenters and blacksmiths and shipwrights. "And it's a form of catapult."
He was standing on a platform of rammed rubble behind the city wall, the section nearest to the Confed's causeway. Everyone had been up there, and seen the redoubled efforts — this time the blocking wall along the sides was like a small city's, and the towers pressed forward to the edge of construction were squat monsters sheathed in plates of beaten iron and brass, glittering like malignant serpents in the bright sunlight.
The craftsmen crowded around to look at the man-tall model he'd built. It had two heavy tripods, linked by an iron axle. Pivoting on that was a beam, anchored about one-third of the way along its height. The short end of the beam held a box full of rocks, itself pivoting on an iron bar driven through the outermost part of the beam; the long end had a leather sling on its end, holding a fist-sized ball of rock.
"How does it work?" one carpenter asked after a minute, baffled. "There's no twisted sinew, no bow neither — how does it throw things?" He made a sign with one hand. "More of your hellpowder sorcery?"
Adrian smiled soothingly. "No, this is pretty straightforward," he said. "I'll show you. Simun."
The underofficer motioned two arquebusiers forward. The other hundred were on the wall, happily potting men through the wooden shields that the Confeds moved forward to protect the working parties. They'd doubled and redoubled the thickness of planks on those, until they could barely move them over the uneven ground of the forward working surface, but the odd ball still penetrated. More still hit men behind the row of shields, or on exposed limbs, or struck the working parties that tried to move the mantlets forward. Other gunmen waited patiently for one of the trapdoors on the siege towers to open and spit a catapult dart at the city. They were just within extreme range. . extreme catapult range, that was. The arquebuses were comfortably within their range, and a dozen fired every time the Confeds made the attempt. Men died within the tower, but that was secondary — a four-ounce ball travelling at nine hundred feet per second did unpleasant things to a torsion catapult's frame and fixings whenever it struck.
Simun chuckled, looking over his shoulder, then signed to the two men. They hauled on ropes running through a block and tackle, and the long arm of the miniature trebuchet came down until he could slip an iron hook into a ring driven into the wood just above the sling. The load in that now rested, just touching the ground.
"Here, sor," he said, handing a lanyard to Adrian.
"So, we pull this—"
Thwack.
The heavy basket of rocks pulled the short arm of the trebuchet down. The long arm moved more quickly, leverage driving it. The sling added to the momentum, and the rock blurred across the fifty yards to the wall in a streak of vicious speed. It cracked into the granite facing hard enough to spall off a foot-square flake. The craftsmen and sapper officers gave long, admiring whistles.
"The thing is," Adrian went on, resting a hand on the model, "that we can build this as big as we can get timbers for — and Prince Tenny and the Syndics have authorized us to demolish buildings, even temples. We're a shipbuilding city, here, so we've got plenty of men used to working to these scales, and with heavy cables and pulleys. We'll need winches to pull down the throwing arm, but when it's ready we can throw really big weights; we can throw them on a high arc, to lob over the wall, and we can throw them all the way to shore, or nearly — dropping them right on the Confeds' heads."
A circle of beatific grins broke out as the image slowly sank into the consciousness of the onlookers.
"Shark-Toothed Sea Lord," one said, awed. "Like it was raining boulders, eh, lord? But how do we aim it?"
"We can move the whole frame around for direction," he said. "That won't be easy, but we can do it if we're careful how we build the underlying platform and if we apply plenty of manpower. For distance, we just fire ranging shots, adding or subtracting rocks from the basket on the short arm — that's where the impetus comes from, you see. We store up. ." He halted; the Islander he was using had no word that precisely corresponded to "force." "We store up the ability to throw by hauling up the basket, you see. Then when it comes down, all that, ah, strength, is transferred to whatever we're throwing all at once. By altering the weight, we alter the strength — as a man does when he's throwing a rock by hand."
A few seemed to grasp what he was driving at. There were blank looks from the others, and he removed his hat and sighed. Sweat ran down his forehead and stung in his eyes; it was hot, and the stone buildings everywhere around reflected the heat.
"We can do it," he said. Center had filled his mind's eye with images of what the trebuchet could accomplish, and precise step-by-step instructions in making it. "And when we do, it'll ruin the Confeds' whole day."
Men on the wall looked down, grinning reflexively at the laughter around Adrian. It spread spontaneously along the parapet, until the wall was ringing with cheers. Morale in Preble was very good.
"Enjoy it while you can," Adrian muttered below his breath.
Out there, the resources of the Confederacy would be moving, moving — slow at first, like an avalanche did. But very heavy in the end.
Experience had shown that the base of the causeway was safe from the weapons on Preble's wall. . and if you stayed low, from the ones on the galleys harassing the quarter-mile length. Justiciar Demansk stood, scowling and watching the stone stream forward, the dead and wounded trickle back. A solid line of guards was detailed to check that nobody came back without a real wound; they leaned on their shields, stolid and bored and glad they weren't out at the sharp end right now. The smell of sweat was heavy on the air, the smell of velipad and greatbeast dung, the dusty odor of cracked rock and the salt-silt of the shore.
At least we're getting plenty of time to drill the new recruits, he thought. That was the one good thing about siege operations, even this gods-cursed one. He ground his teeth as he watched the sails of a convoy of merchantmen appear on the horizon. Preble would be eating well; intelligence said they had six months' supplies, and they could import grain — from the Southern continent, through the freeport at Marange. As long as they had money, and they had plenty of that, too. Melting down the Temple treasuries, from what he'd heard; when that was done, there was always the King of the Isles.
"We're certainly not going to starve them out as long as they hold the seas," he said. "So, how do the men feel, First Spear?"
"Pissed off and scared, sir," he replied promptly. "They want to get stuck into those damned rebels out there, but they're starting to think that every time it looks as if we're getting anywhere, the fuckers come up with another trick. Sir."
Demansk nodded sourly. I can't think of anything else they could do, he mused.
They'd planted iron-tipped stakes in the shallow water a hundred yards out from both sides of the causeway, using conscripted local sponge divers. No more fireships, thank the gods.
The arquebuses—spies and prisoners had brought the name back from Preble — could punch through shields, but not walls or reinforced mantlets, or the iron plates on thick timber of the new siege towers. The trickle of casualties from the towers was getting worse as they got closer to Preble, and so was the continuous sniping from galleys ranging along the causeway, but the Confederation had a big army. Soon enough they'd be within effective catapult range, and a little after that of archery. The Confed army had a lot of mercenary archers, too. The new towers were an absolute bitch to move, they were so heavy they'd had to use iron-plated wheels under them, but as a side benefit they ought to be fairly immune to battering rocks from catapults, as well.
"What am I missing?" he muttered.
"Sir! Heads up!"
Demansk felt his eyes go wide with surprise as he saw the tumbling dot rising from behind the walls that fringed the peachpit shape of the island city. I'm getting to absolutely hate feeling that expression on my face, he thought angrily. It was a rock, obviously. And equally obviously it was huge, a quarter of a ton, far heavier than anything a catapult could throw — could have thrown, before the gods condemned him to this nightmare operation. Once more he felt the ground shifting below his feet, as the certainties of a lifetime — of uncounted lifetimes, back to the times of the heroes — crumbled.
The boulder dropped into the water with an enormous splash, a hundred yards short of the left-hand, southern tower side of the causeway. The water was shallow enough there that the tip of it remained sticking up above the water. Men began pelting back, their mouths open Os of fright — conscripted local workers, he noted with somber pride, not Confed soldiers.
"First Spear, evacuate the causeway," he said heavily. "Everything but enough men in the towers to stand off a fast attempt at a landing."