Insurgency (Tales of the Empire Book 4)

by S. J. A. Turney

  ‘Whatever it is,’ Kiva replied calmly, ‘it can only be good for us. Better to watch them sit and wait than watch them throw rocks at us. Every day we remain untouched is another day for Titus and Jala to bring reinforcements.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Quintillian muttered quietly. ‘I like to know what’s going on. Something big is about to happen, and if we don’t know what it is, how do we act against it?’

  The emperor put a comforting hand on his brother’s shoulder. ‘We will persevere. I know that, and so do you.’

  The prince merely grunted in reply and the two stood in silence for some time, listening to the subdued sounds of city life going on, somewhat muted by apprehension, and the various shouts and noises of the defenders along the walls. The two massed armies just outside artillery range sat gleaming under the morning light, patches of shade scudding across them as the high clouds periodically obscured the sun.

  ‘There,’ Quintillian said suddenly after such a long period of silence that Kiva had almost drifted off to sleep leaning on the parapet.

  ‘What?’ he said, starting back to attentiveness and peering off at both camps, trying to see what had changed.

  ‘There,’ the marshal said again, pointing this time. Kiva followed the gesture and could see a flurry of movement in the centre of the nomad camp. The two figures, clearly the Khan and his son, had emerged from their tent and were engaged in some sort of discussion on the hillside. At this distance they were little more than ants in a sea of other ants, and Kiva couldn’t guess at whether they were planning, arguing or even telling jokes. Then he saw what had clearly attracted his brother’s attention. Four groups of nomads on horseback were forming into lines, each one more than 20 beasts long. And nearby, other lines of nomads were taking shape, these ones dismounted.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s some kind of assault, and it’s coming now.’ Quintillian turned to the captain nearby. ‘Be prepared for anything. I want all the artillery facing the nomads loaded with short-range ammunition – scattering shot to use against large numbers of infantry. Have all the archers ready and pull in any you can spare from the other walls to that section. Be prepared for a major assault.’

  The captain saluted and went about his tasks, leaving the emperor and his brother watching tensely, alone on the tower top.

  Gradually, the enemy lines organized themselves. It must have been peculiar for the nomads to work in such a manner – truly against all their experience of war. The Khan had excelled himself in achieving such a thing with the fractious, disorganized clans. And whatever was about to happen this time had the backing of the Khan himself and not his impetuous son, leading Quintillian to believe it would be something that posed a proper threat to the defenders. Kiva shuddered.

  The clans began to clear the way for the lines of men. These were no mere two or three hundred riders with a ram. This time their numbers were beyond counting, but at a simple estimation, Kiva reckoned they were facing two or three thousand men, all moving in oddly neat lines as they began to descend from their camp towards the city.

  The four groups of nomads were dragging something. Each group had split into two lines in the same manner they’d carried the ram yesterday, but as they emerged from the press at the heart of the camp, Kiva frowned to see what they were dragging. Four long, flat timber structures. They each looked a little like a palisade that had been laid on its side, or… or one of those wooden walkways they installed in forts for ease of footing where the ramparts were too muddy.

  In a flash, Kiva realized what they were.

  ‘Bridges?’

  Quintillian nodded. ‘Four timber crossings for the moat. I did wonder how they were intending to come against the walls. It’s still a precarious idea, but better than that idiocy yesterday. And look: the other lines are all carrying long siege ladders.’

  Kiva swallowed as he saw dozens of lines of footmen coming along in the wake of the bridges, each carrying a heavy wooden ladder

  ‘Now we’ll see how good the intelligence the Khan received is. Are the ladders the right height for the walls? If he’s underestimated them, this could be short and very costly for him.’ Quintillian turned and looked for the captain, but he was gone, busy carrying out the earlier orders. The prince looked down from the tower top until he spotted an officer’s uniform on the walls.

  ‘You! Prefect!’ The man looked up and saluted. ‘Take every archer the walls can spare to the nomad front. Every last one. And any of the townsfolk who’ve reported for auxiliary duty… get them up there too. I want forked poles every ten feet along that wall. We’re facing siege ladders. Oh, and have the baskets of rocks sent over too. Once their bridges are in position, I want hot sand, burning oil and a hundred rocks dropped on each one. The faster we can ruin, burn and sink those timber structures the quicker this will be over.’

  The officer saluted.

  ‘Shall we go over there?’ Kiva prompted.

  ‘No, I think not. The officers there know what they’re doing, and having to keep bowing every time they walk past you would detract from their efficiency. I still can’t believe Aldegund is sitting there and letting the Khan suffer the brunt of it all. And I can’t believe the Khan’s accepting that. The rebel probably thinks preserving his men will leave him as a power in the land when the Khan’s army is diminished and the city’s fallen. But without his help, I doubt the city will fall.’

  As the walls swarmed with men preparing to take on the nomad assault, the brothers watched the enemy moving down the slope. Somewhere off to the right, an officer called for all the archers to nock their arrows. The auxiliary bowmen, mostly drawn from southern and eastern provinces, each set an arrow to their bow and drew back, holding tight and sighting, marking an approaching rider. They would have a range of perhaps 20 feet beyond the moat and no more if they wished any level of accuracy. The four groups of riders with the bridges were getting close now. Kiva could only estimate the length of those timber walkways at forty feet, and the moat was thirty feet wide in most places.

  The timber bridges were leaving messy brown trails as they tore up the turf in their passage, and those muddy tracks were quickly lost beneath the feet of many hundreds of men. The nomads, unused to any sort of warfare that did not take place on horseback, kept losing formation, but it made little difference. Many of them carried long siege ladders, but others, previously unnoticed in the press, carried large wicker shields or huge timbers. Behind them came a huge mass of warriors brandishing weapons, eager to take the fight to the defenders of Velutio. As they surged across the grass and mud, those bearing the shields and timbers began to pull out ahead of the rest, closely following the bridges.

  ‘Artillery!’ came a call from along the wall. There was a pause and then the war machines began to sing their song of destruction. Thuds and crashes, twangs and whines brought forth the chorus of death. Sacks of stones had been shot from onagers, the bags shredding when fired, so that deadly rubble hurtled across the moat, ploughing into the approaching horsemen, pulverizing men and beasts alike, leaving shrieking and howling figures clutching what remained of their broken forms. Other catapults fired single rocks, which hit the ground, some ploughing long troughs in the turf, others hitting just right to bounce once, twice, thrice, and then roll to a halt. And the bolt-throwers launched their 3-foot iron missiles, seeking flesh to obliterate. Most missed their targets. An initial artillery volley was always a messy thing as even the best artillerists needed to find their range before they could hope to be truly effective. But here and there a shot had taken its toll. A scattering of stones had hit the rear of one of the bridge columns, killing three horses and their riders and causing mayhem among the footmen carrying the ladders behind them. Individual horsemen had been plucked from their saddles with iron bolts and hurled away to die in agony. One particularly large rounded rock had bounced just at the front of a bridge column, obliterating six riders and their mounts in a spray of pi
nk and tiny shattered body parts. The second bounce smashed a section of timber in the centre of the bridge, ripping through dozens of running warriors at the back before rolling to a halt amid screaming infantrymen, leaving a long trail of crimson-smeared ground in its wake.

  The defenders gave a rousing cheer at the sight, and Kiva almost joined in, but for the fact that his brother, still at the parapet, was pensive and worried. It had been an impressive sight, and spirit-lifting for the besieged city, but in truth the damage to the Khan’s army was tiny. Negligible, even. And Quintillian was still expecting something else, clearly.

  A second artillery volley was in the offing, men hurriedly loading the weapons and preparing them. Along the stretch of walls near the nomad assault, cauldrons of sizzling sand and bubbling pitch were being brought up to the parapet by four men apiece. Baskets of rocks were being positioned, along with forked poles, and the civilian levy, who had agreed to help defend their city, were moving into position among the soldiers, preparing to throw down rocks, skin-melting sand, and sticky fire. It was as thorough a defence as they could manage, and despite the Khan’s serious numerical advantage, Kiva felt certain that they could fight off this assault with little actual damage. Perhaps this was just another test? Perhaps the Khan was not as clever as Quintillian seemed to think?

  The riders reached the moat, having plotted their course in order to arrive at the lower areas of the bank. The Khan must have had men out during the hours of darkness, when the driving rain had made it hard for the defenders to spot movement. His scouts must have located the shallowest sections of moat and marked them somehow, for the riders plunged into the water with little difficulty, some directing their swimming horses, others fortunate enough to have found the lowest possible areas where their horses could even stand up in some places. And so they began to drag the bridges out across the water, their task easier the further into the moat they reached, the water taking more and more of the weight of the timber.

  The second round of artillery shot ploughed into the enemy, the ranges more certain. However, the bridge columns were now too close, and the brunt was taken by the footmen – those carrying ladders, wicker shields, logs, or just weapons, running into battle. No shield could protect a man from these strikes, though, and Kiva watched as one iron bolt passed through the wicker as though it was naught more than butter, shredding the man behind it and continuing on in its flight to smash the leg of the man behind. The emperor winced as the shield-bearer turned and fell, daylight was clearly visible through his torso.

  Another two heavy boulders struck, one carving a trench through men and turf alike, the other bouncing and leaving huge imprints of crushed and mangled bodies in its wake. A sack of stones failed to shred on loosing, and only scattered as it hit one poor bastard full on. He disappeared as though he had never existed, parts of his body joining the shrapnel of stones as the bag burst. The effect covered a smaller area than intended, but the damage in that place was just as intense.

  Finally, as the horsemen struggled towards the end of their ride and the footmen began to reach the edge of the moat, the defending officers gave the call for archers. Hundreds upon hundreds of feathered shafts flew out from the walls, not in high graceful arcs as was the common sight on the battlefield. These bowmen had had plenty of time to mark their targets and follow them in their run, as had been the commander’s intention. The many arrows whirred out from the defences in direct lines, plunging into figures both running and riding. Even as the artillery prepared for a third volley at the mass of warriors coming up behind, the archers were already loosing again at the men below them.

  It was simple carnage. Most of the arrows found a target, some of the more unfortunate attackers having been marked by two or even three archers and sprouting deadly shafts from several angles. The air was filled with the whirr of arrows in flight and the resulting screams of the wounded and dying. Kiva’s eyes read the tapestry of death along the turf before the moat. Stomachs were torn open, eyes exploded, necks pierced right through, legs and feet transfixed. Blood was everywhere and, though here in the high observation tower of the Eyrie they were too far away to experience it, Kiva knew all too well the stink of death and opened bowels that would now fill every breath of air over by those walls. He had to force himself to remember that these were the enemy and he must not feel sorry for them, though such empathy came naturally to him. Quintillian was less prone to it, and the look of satisfaction on his face even managed to surface through the layer of concern and uncertainty.

  But for all the vast damage the artillery and archers had, and still were, inflicting, the enemy were getting closer. Three of the four timber walkways had been manoeuvred into position, though the fourth had broken apart where it had taken the blow from the bouncing boulder. Men were running along the floating timbers. The walkways would not yet hold much weight and even under the seven or eight men running on each they were bobbing down below the surface, but now those runners were securing it. As men with wicker shields held them up to stop the worst of the arrow storm hurtling down at them, others sank those huge logs into the water and tied the bridges to them, steadying the walkways even as others secured them back on the turf.

  Again, one of the bridges failed here, the archers above managing to pick off both shield-bearers and log men, so that the walkway continued to float, held up only by the water and unable to support a great deal of weight. But two were intact and in position and now men were running along them, carrying ladders. Even as they closed on the walls, those ladders were raised. Others were splashing into the water and swimming with their burdens, and Kiva realized that some ladders had been made especially long in order to anchor them in the murk at the moat’s bed. The Khan was clever, after all. Still, despite all this, Kiva could not imagine them securing any section of wall. This was a costly exercise for the nomads and would have precious little lasting effect on Velutio.

  Already, ladders were dropping into place. More than half of them failed to reach the walls, courtesy of the artillery and the archers, but soon enough snarling, foamy-mouthed nomads were scaling the ladders, bearing down on the wall tops.

  Half a dozen of them were quickly pushed away by the civilian volunteers with their forked poles and waves of cheering, the ladders crashing back down onto the bridges or splashing into the water, where other men immediately began to raise them again. Those who had been climbing the ladders plunged with cries of shock down into the cold water or onto the timbers, breaking limbs and floundering, some with heavier armour sinking from sight with horrified gurgles.

  Kiva was elated by the success of his men and yet horrified at the sheer brutality taking place before the walls. He leaned forward on the parapet once more and turned to the serious frown of Quintillian, opening his mouth to speak.

  The stonework shuddered. Just for a moment. Kiva frowned, but Quintillian was already stepping back from the edge. ‘Oh, gods above and below,’ he cursed, his head snapping this way and that, searching the walls.

  ‘What is it?’ Kiva asked under a questioning brow.

  ‘The answer. The answer as to why Aldegund hasn’t moved.’

  ‘What?’

  Quintillian lurched towards the far side of the tower, in the direction of the northern rebel army’s camp. He squinted for a moment and then waved a pointing finger. ‘Look!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There. See the disturbed grass?’

  Kiva peered down. There was, now that he looked, a series of trails through the wet grass that spoke of the passage of a number of people.

  ‘The Khan had his scouts check out the moat during the night, when we could see nothing for the darkness and the rain, but Aldegund went one further. He sent men to our walls in the darkness and they’ve been there ever since, mining!’

  Kiva frowned, feeling another shudder through the stones beneath his feet. ‘Surely our men would have seen them?’

  His brother shook his head. ‘No. That’s the sigma. Plent
y of angles there where they’d be hard to spot.’

  Kiva’s eyes widened. The sigma was a stretch of the wall that had once been a gate, but had been rebuilt into wall at a later time. The result of the strange rebuild was a section of wall that bent through several odd angles, forming a ∑ shape. There would, as Quintillian noted, be several places where men could hide rather well unless they were being specifically looked for. He imagined dozens of men, half frozen in the cold water, hacking at the mortar between the stones with tools, the sound buried beneath the endless hiss of rain and the muttering of the men high atop the walls. They would have to have been quiet early this morning, but once the assault began, all eyes and ears had been on the horse clans, and no one would have noticed a muffled arrhythmic chipping down at the base of the walls beginning again.

  ‘But it would take them days to tunnel through the walls.’

  ‘All they have to do is remove enough stone to make the outer face unstable. They prop it with timbers and then set light as they run.’

  Sure enough, even as the stonework shuddered again, Kiva spotted a small group of men swimming back across the moat, closing on the grassland, where they climbed back up and ran for Aldegund’s camp. As his gaze strayed back to the walls he could see a thin line of greasy smoke rising into the clear air just outside the sigma.

  ‘Pig fat,’ snarled Quintillian. ‘We’re about to be neck deep in the shit.’ He turned, searching out that prefect below and attracted his attention even as shouts of alarm went up from the sparsely-manned walls over by the sigma.

  ‘Change of plan. Leave the sand, oil, rocks and forked sticks to deal with the Khan. He’s only a distraction. Get every archer and soldier to the sigma now!’