Tuan Anak sighed. “Men born, men fight, men die, men reborn.”
Well, that’s a little surprising. But what was it Father liked to say? Wasn’t it: A man’s mind is like a forest at night, always full of the unexpected.
The Baru Denpasaran forces had put folding umbrellas up over the command post; that seemed to be a matter of status, but John was very glad of it. It had been midmorning by the time the little army had debouched into the flat sloping glacis before the enemy fort, and the sun was fierce. This was the only practicable approach; its flanks were within shot-range of the woods on both sides, and the eastern side was close to the river too, which was too swift-moving and deep to ford.
It’s a murderously simple approach, John thought. But at least it’s so simple I can’t make any major mistakes if I have to decide something on my own when there’s no time to consult. Hopefully. God, I never asked to have the fate of men in my hands!
A voice seemed to whisper: Take up your cross, and follow Me. He shivered and put the thought out of his mind.
“We do,” Tuan Anak said decisively. “Camp first. Make safe base.”
That was much like the marching encampment they’d run up yesterday, except that the trench was deeper and the wall higher and topped with a substantial stockade and fighting platform, and the field of sharpened stakes and bamboo knives in covered pits stretched out farther. The Montivallans and Townsvillers watched from beneath the commander’s umbrellas, the common sailors squatting or sitting nearby. When Tuan Anak moved his command post to a completed section of wall northward, facing the Carcosan fortress, they followed. John looked down over the vast construction site that was the camp and whistled softly.
“Very impressive,” he said.
Pip and Toa and First Mate Radavindraban were watching with interest, but when John spoke Ishikawa and Thora and Sergeant Fayard all grunted in agreement in their different ways. The Nihonjin officer’s concurrence was reluctant, but genuine.
It wasn’t so much that the Baru Denpasarans were disciplined the way Boiseans or Reiko’s samurai were. They were disciplined enough, in a rough-and-ready way, but their regulars had little of that polished snap and the peasant militia none. He thought for a moment, and decided that the remarkable thing was that they were so self-organizing. Their leaders had told them what to do, and which group was to do what, and then the men simply went at it without needing to be watched or driven by anyone except themselves. They were like Mackenzies that way, but even less formal.
He thought they were competing with each other too, in a comradely fashion, village against village and one Sumbak association against the next. The result wasn’t particularly neat, but it was massive and it went up fast. So did the essentials—a hospital section roofed with woven bamboo, watering points for men and livestock and kitchens, and latrines safely deep and distant from the rest. Then they started in on thatched temporary huts, or at least shelters to keep the rain off; there was even an improvised temple.
Anak nodded. “Now, make fort little small to see,” he said, turning to look at the Carcosan position again. “And diggings, small.”
That led to some confusion, and consultation with Deor. It turned out the Baru Denpasaran commander meant making a model of the whole operation in miniature on a sand table, so that John could mark out the way the siege works should go for Anak’s monoglot officers. That was deeply reassuring, since it was the standard way he’d been taught and gave them a common language beyond words, but . . .
That will be about as much fun as watching mud dry, John thought, and carefully didn’t sigh.
* * *
I wish I was back to doing this with models, John thought four days later at the bright height of noon.
“Down!” someone shouted.
John ducked his head below the rampart of earth-filled bamboo baskets on the edge of the pit, knocked his visor down and raised his shield up from his side in the same motion until it was like a roof overhead. As he did so he realized that he didn’t even know which language the call had been in—and didn’t care.
At least it’s not a catapult bolt, he thought; that would have been here already.
A flight of arrows lifted shrilling from the ramparts of the Carcosan fort, and this forward bastion was only about two hundred paces from it, well within range. They were close enough now that the enemy bowmen could fire from behind the parapet, down in the relative safety of the fortress courtyard.
He looked up sharply, though only for an instant, and there was a perverse beauty to the flickering threadwork against the blue sky as the shafts rose to their apogee and the steel heads glinted like starlight on water as they tipped over and began to fall. Another flight followed them, and another.
Starlight on water. That’s a good image! I think there’s something about that in the Bible . . . no, it’s Byron.
Once he had the reference the words came into his mind complete:
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
His Aunt Fiorbhinn had told him once that mediocre poets had influences; great poets stole. And if you were going to steal, steal from the best. And Byron had been an adventurer too, leaving comfort and wealth to fight for the Greeks in their uprising against Turkish oppression. It was something to be a man of deeds as well as words.
As he thought he ducked his head down again, back to a view of pounded mud and mats making trails through it and the smell of wet earth and wastes and fear-sweat and, faintly, death. Getting an arrow in the eye while looking up put you into a special category of human being: too stupid to live summed it up.
“For what we are about to receive—” he began, reflecting that he’d be sweating like a pig even if it wasn’t like a sauna and even if he weren’t in his suit of plate complete.
Which it is, and which I am.
“—may the Lord make us truly thankful, Sire,” Evrouin finished.
Fayard and his men from the Guard were grimly silent; John thought the underofficer would be really happy only if his charge spent his time in a deep bunker. There was a rising whistle, and he winced. There might be something more wearing on the nerves than being shot at and not being able to do anything except passively wait it out, but if there was he hadn’t run into it yet. Evrouin and the rest of those in the bastion stepped back under the overhead protection that covered the rear half, layers of three-inch saplings crisscrossed on a framework of bamboo lashed together with strips of the same material and covered in a foot of earth.
Crack.
An arrow punched into the sheet-steel covering of his shield, dimpling the metal but not piercing it, and bounced off. Then hundreds fell, in a hissing, thudding, snapping rain. He suppressed the impulse to squeeze his eyes shut, and instead simply endured. Ten arrows struck his shield, and several penetrated to the plywood core and stood vibrating. Another glanced off the curve of his sallet helm, a hard blow like a quick punch from a fist on the top of his head. More sprouted suddenly from the packed earth around him, or plunged into the roofing above the crew of the catapult and the guard detail or cracked and rattled off the big killing-machine itself.
The last shaft had scarcely fallen before Ruan leapt out and sprang onto a stack of ammunition boxes. He had an arrow on the string of his longbow and two more between the grip and the forefinger of his left hand. He drew and shot all three in a quick ripple of effort, the great yellow limbs of Montivallan mountain yew flexing smoothly and the flat snap of the bowstring sounding hard and fast.
John risked a peek himself. The central wooden keep of the Carcosan fort was still burning fiercely; it had been made of green wood and covered in hides, but a flurry of napalm shells and firebolt had set it alight du
ring the last night-time bombardment. A huge plume of black smoke drifted northwestward away from them, carrying all but a bitter hint of the reek with it. The pounded dirt of the walls merely looked scorched and chewed, being immune to fire and nearly so to impacts, though the palisade on top of it had been knocked to flinders.
More to the point, that pillar of smoke meant that the Carcosans had no tall lookout post to direct the fire of their missile weapons. A man standing on the rampart doing duty for that dodged as the first of Ruan’s shafts hissed by his head, then toppled with a distance-thinned shriek as two more thumped into his upper chest.
“We are the darts that Hecate cast!” Ruan shouted, and then something in Gaelic that John thought involved the words your mother.
Mackenzies didn’t really speak the language of Grandmother Juniper’s ancestors, but they swore in it full often. . . .
“Good work!” Deor said, cautiously looking over the parapet himself and thumping his lover’s back as Ruan jumped down.
Fayard and his men cheered a fellow-shooter and the scop went on:
“Wuldor couldn’t do better.”
While he spoke the crew of the catapult sprang to readiness; it was already cocked and the hydraulic lines ran back to the covered section. Locals manned the pumps, and waited ready to move the trails behind the machine if it needed to slew around more than the traversing mechanisms could handle. Despite Ishikawa’s worries the frames had held up . . . so far, and with a little hammer-and-wrench work. A few others gathered in the arrow-shafts; the whole ones could be shot back by the Baru Denpasaran archers, and the broken ones would provide heads for their fletchers to use.
“I think we haven’t dismounted all the enemy machines in that bastion on the left,” John said. “Give them another brace of roundshot.”
They had plenty of those; the foundry in Baru Denpasar had run up hundreds, since it needed only the ability to cast a metal sphere and they were willing to sacrifice as much as needed even if it meant melting down tools. The surprisingly small nine-pounder ball was slapped into the groove—it was about four inches in diameter—and the gunner’s foot stamped down on the firing-pedal.
Tung-WHACK!
The locals finished picking up the arrows and threw themselves onto the arms of the pump as the throwing arms slapped forward into the stops and the mechanism recoiled. John flicked up his visor again, put his binoculars to his eyes and watched. The range was short and the ball didn’t have time to slow down much as it covered the distance in a blurred streak of speed. Then it plowed into the tumbled, smoldering ruins of the squared-timber bastion that had been built into the wall of the fort. Splinters and clods of dirt flew skyward.
“Again!” John snapped. “Keep it up, sustained fire.”
I hadn’t realized how you can be keyed up, exhausted and terminally bored at the same time, he thought as the next ball thumped home. This is like overseeing a construction project while being shot at.
A hail from the guards at the point where the zigzag communication trench entered the pit was answered in Thora’s unmistakable flat Bearkiller tones.
“Good to see you,” John said sincerely.
Thora pushed up the three-bar visor of her helm and grinned at him; her face was red and running with sweat like his, but unlike him she seemed totally indifferent to it.
“Tuan Anak is taking all your advice seriously, Johnnie,” she said with a grin and a wink. “Even when I carry the message.”
In fact she’d been solemnly passing on . . . her own opinions, with Deor helping out when the Baru Denpasaran commander’s uncertain English ran into a wall. He was quite certain the whole business would have had her sword out and blood shed if it had happened back home, but since they weren’t going to be here for long she regarded it all as a joke.
“Your delicate little flower has the prang-prangs ready, too,” she went on.
There seemed to be genuine respect in that, even liking, as well as a tinge of sarcasm; John decided he wasn’t presumptuous enough to think that he understood how Thora’s mind worked. Instead he nodded to the bosun’s mate in charge of the catapult.
“Cease fire for now,” he said. “Be ready with the assault fire plan at the signal.”
The man nodded, blue eyes bright in the ruddy tan of his face. “Will do, Your Highness.”
John and Evrouin, Thora and Deor and Ruan turned into the zigzag communication trench, walking slightly bent over. The big ditches had been dug by the local folk to suit themselves, and by that standard even Evrouin’s five-foot-six was tall, and he was the shortest of the five of them. None of the Montivallans wanted to show their heads over the parapet. The Carcosan catapults were supposedly suppressed . . . but they might just be biding their time. He carried his sallet under one arm, as well. The white ostrich plumes would be just too tempting if they bobbed along over the edge.
And damned if I’m going to take them off! In fact, he’d bought a new set in town before they left.
“They’ve got the trebuchets set up,” Thora went on. “And Tuan Anak is very taken with your suggestion about those.”
That one had been Captain Ishikawa’s. John felt as if he ought to blush. Still, there was no way on God’s green earth the Balinese noble was going to take suggestions from a foreign woman, or from an Orang Japon. From a Prince of a great realm in the fabled land of the Americans . . . then, if they were politely phrased, yes.
Thora grinned. “What’s being a great monarch but a lifetime of getting the credit for what others do tacked on to your own deeds?” she asked.
Ouch, he thought.
Tuan Anak was waiting in the foremost parallel, the trench facing the enemy ramparts, just beyond bowshot from the Carcosan fort.
To get there John and his party passed the row of six trebuchets. The lever-principle machines were mostly made of wood—they had plenty of good timber within reach, albeit it was green—and the metal parts had come along from the city on the carts, along with artificers. Each was sitting in a circular pit dug more than ten feet deep with a berm piled around it. As far as he could tell—more to the point, as far as Captain Ishikawa could tell—they were well designed. The principle of a heavy weight hinged to one end and a much longer throwing arm with a sling on the other was simple enough. The devil of efficient energy transfer was in the details of proportion and angle, though, and while he remembered the basic formulas he was profoundly glad someone with practical experience was along.
The Baru Denpasarans used similar machines to command their western half of the harbor back at their capital. Without the Tarshish Queen’s longer-ranged weapons to suppress their Carcosan equivalents they couldn’t have built these massive things close enough to the fort’s wall, and even so it had cost lives. Now they were ready. Each sling was loaded with a ton-weight ball of rocks the size of a baby’s head, bound together with tight nets of coir rope made from coconut husk. Geared winches would pull the arms down surprisingly fast after each shot, and more bundles were ready to be rolled into the sling-cups.
There was a strong fruity odor as they passed; the nets that held the rocks had been soaked in vats of triple-distilled toddy before they were filled. No open flame was near them, but lidded clay pots of coals were standing ready. The connecting trenches leading up to the commander’s position were thick with troops, crouching on their hams with their bows or spears standing up between their knees and their shields propped against the mats that revetted the earth walls. Many of them nodded and grinned at the Montivallans as they passed; it was nice to be popular, although a little alarming when some of the smiles were dyed blood-red with paan, the combination of lime paste and betel nut and leaf many hereabouts chewed.
They spat when they chewed, too, though in town they used wooden buckets. Nobody was taking that much care here.
Thora chuckled grimly. “Hides the blood a bit, eh, Johnnie?”
/> “Just what I was thinking,” he said tightly.
Tuan Anak was talking to his officers when they debouched into the forward trench. John waited quietly; it wasn’t his country and he wasn’t in command here. As he did, he heard Fayard talking to his men, a few last instructions and then:
“We’re a long way from home. But our oaths are here, and our honor, Guardsmen, and so is the one we swore before God to protect with our lives.”
“God’s enemies are here too,” one of them said quietly; his name was Ernoul, John remembered.
Fayard nodded agreement, and finished: “And we all saw what the Prince did for a shipmate. Can we do less?”
The Prince blushed, then turned and settled the plumed helmet on his head.
“And I know you’re here, comrades, brothers of the sword,” he said, meeting the eyes of each. “We’ve come a long way together, and shed our sweat and blood side by side. I’m glad of it, and I won’t forget who was here with me either.”
The squad came to attention and smacked right fist to heart in the Association’s salute. John kept his face grave as he returned it, but he swallowed nonetheless. The men of the Guard would have fought for him regardless; that was their oath. But he thought he saw genuine respect for him, the individual and not just his rank and blood. The golden spurs on his heels seemed to settle in a little more comfortably.
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