Wearing an ordinary trooper's mail shirt and a much-battered helmet, the elder Maniakes came up beside his son. He peered down into the ditch for a moment, then nodded in somber satisfaction. «I don't think they'll try that again any time soon,» he said. «Bit of a slaughter down there.»
«This is the high ground,» Maniakes agreed. «If they let us keep it, they'll pay the price.» He frowned. «If they let us keep it high, they'll pay the price.» He pointed to show what he meant.
Maybe Etzilios, in spite of the better advice the Makuraners undoubtedly must have given him, had thought Videssos the city would fall to direct assault, and never mind all the fancy engines he'd spent so much time and effort building. Maybe he'd believed that the imperials huddled inside their walls from fear alone and lacked the spirit to resist his ferocious warriors. If that was so, he'd received an expensive lesson to the contrary.
And now he was going about things as he should have done from me beginning. The ladders lay in the ditch; after a while, the Videssians set them afire, to be rid of them.
Meanwhile, though, Etzilios' warriors and teams of horses dragged his own stone-throwers, the ones the Makuraners had taught him to make, up to where they would bear on the walls. More men—Maniakes thought them Videssian prisoners, not Kubratoi– carried stones up and piled them beside the engines.
«Knock mem down!» he shouted to his own catapult crews. But at long range, that was not so easy. The Kubratoi had only to hit the wall, a target they could hardly miss. Hitting specific stone-throwers, as the Videssians needed to do, was a different proposition.
Every once in a while, by the curious combination of good shooting and luck so necessary for success in war, a Videssian catapult crew would manage to land a stone square on an enemy engine, wilh results as disastrous for that engine as for a man unfortunately in the path of such a missile. The stricken stone-thrower would go from engine to kindling in the course of a heartbeat, and the Videssian catapult crew would caper and pound one another on the hacks and brag to anyone who listened or, more often, to anyone nearby, listening or not.
And the Kubratoi would make their prisoners haul away the wreckage of the ruined stone-thrower, the said wreckage some-times extending to the men who served the engine and were injured when a piece flying off it smote them. And they would drag up another stone-thrower and go back to pounding away at the walls of Videssos the city.
Up on the walkway of the outer wall, Maniakes felt caught in an unending medium-sized earthquake. Stones crashed against the stonework of the wall, which brought every impact straight to the soles of his boots. The roar of stone striking stone put him in mind of an earthquake's fearsome rumble, too.
But earthquakes, no matter how fearsome they were, stopped in a minute or two. This went on and on, the continuous motion underfoot almost making him seasick. Many of the stones the engines cast bounded away from the walls without effect; the masons who had built those works centuries before knew their business.
Every so often, though, the Kubratoi let fly with a particularly hard stone, or with one hurled particularly hard, or with one that hit in a better spot or at a better angle. Then stone on the face of the wall shattered, too.
«How much pounding can we stand?» Maniakes asked his father. «Haven't the foggiest notion,» the elder Maniakes replied. «Never had to worry about it quite this way before. Tell you what, though– knowing where to find the answers is nearly as good as knowing what they are. Anything Ypsilantes can't tell you about the walls isn't worth knowing.»
«That's true, by the good god,» Maniakes agreed, and summoned his chief engineer.
«We should be able to hold out against pounding like this a good long while, your Majesty,» Ypsilantes said. «Only a few stretches of the wall have a rubble core; most of it is either solid stone all the way through or else double-thick stone over storerooms and kitchens and such.»
«That's what I'd hoped,» the Avtokrator said. «Nice to have hopes come true every now and again.»
«I am pleased to have pleased you, your Majesty,» Ypsilantes said. «And now, if you will please excuse me—» He hurried away on missions more vital than reassuring his sovereign.
After Ypsilantes had left, the elder Maniakes tapped his son on the arm. «Come back to the palaces,» he said. «Get some rest. The city isn't going to fall to pieces while you go to bed, and you're liable to fall to pieces if you don't.»
Maniakes shook his head. «As long as I'm here, the men on the wall will know I'm with them. They'll fight harder.»
«Maybe a little, but not that much,» his father replied. «And I tell you this: if you're the only prop holding the defenders up, then the city will fall. They're fighting for more reasons than just your being here. For one thing, they're good soldiers already, because you've made them into good soldiers over the past few years. And for another, believe me, they like staying alive as much as anyone else does. Now come on.»
He put some roughness into his voice, as he had when Maniakes disobeyed him as a boy. The Avtokrator laughed. «You sound like you'll take a belt to my backside if I don't do what you tell me.» The elder Maniakes looked down at the belt he was wearing. As befitted the Avtokrator's father, he had on a gold one with a fancy jeweled buckle. He undid the buckle, took off the belt, and hefted it speculatively. «I could give you a pretty fair set of welts with this one, son,» he remarked.
«So you could,» Maniakes said. «Well, if that's not lese majesty, to the ice with me if I know what is.» He and his father both laughed. When the elder Maniakes started down from the wall, the Avtokrator followed him. They rode back to the palaces together. All the way there, though, Maniakes heard heavy stones thudding against the wall. He didn't think he'd get much rest.
«A sally, that's what we need,» Rhegorios said. «A sally to scatter some of their archers and put paid to some of their engines. The stone-throwers would do, I suppose, but I'd really like to be rid of those siege towers. That would be something worth doing.»
Maniakes eyed his cousin with amusement. «How did you manage to slide from what we need to I suppose in a couple of sentences there? What you mean is, you feel like going out and fighting Kubratoi and you want me to tell you it's all right.»
Rhegorios gave him a glance respectful and resentful at the same toe. «Anyone would think we'd grown up together, or something like that,» he said. «How can I sneak anything past you? You know me too well. For that matter, how do you sneak anything past my sister? She knows you too well.»
«How do I try to sneak anything past Lysia?» Maniakes said. «Mostly I don't. It doesn't work well, for some reason. But that has nothing to do with whether we ought to sally against the Kubratoi.»
«I suppose not,» his cousin agreed. «But are we just going to sit here and let them pound on us?»
«That was exactly what I had in mind, as a matter of fact,» the Avtokrator said. «Whenever I've got in trouble, all through my reign, I've tried to do too much. I'm not going to do that this time. I'm going to do as little as I can, and let the Kubratoi and Makuraners wear themselves out, banging their heads on our walls. That's why the walls went up in the first place.»
«What kind of battle plan is that?» Rhegorios said indignantly.
«A sensible one?» Maniakes suggested.
«Where's the glory?» Rhegorios demanded. «Where are the heroes parading down Middle Street singing songs of victory?»
«As for the heroes,» Maniakes said, «more of them will be left alive if we play the game cautiously. As for the glory, the Kubratoi and the Makuraners are welcome to it, for all of me. Now wait.» He held up a hand to check his cousin's expostulation. «Whoever wants glory for glory's sake can have it, as far as I'm concerned. If I can win the war by sitting here like a snail pulled back into its shell, I'll do that, and gladly.»
«Cold-blooded way to look at things,» Rhegorios said. Then, after a moment, he admitted, «Your father would tell me the same, though; I will say that much. Which leaves me with on
ly one question: what does a snail do when somebody tries to smash in his shell?»
«That's simple,» Maniakes said. «He twists around and bites him from the inside.» Rhegorios went off, dissatisfied.
Maniakes' attitude toward warfare might well have been more typically Videssian than that of his cousin. Only the Imperial Guards, for instance, had a name and reputation stretching over generations. When the Avtokrator went out to the wall a few days later, then, he was surprised to find a stretch of it defended by a unit of stone-throwers decorated with graffiti proclaiming, the biting snails! don't crack our shells!
«Did my cousin put you up to this?» he demanded with mock severity.
«His highness the Sevastos might have mentioned it, your Majesty, but he didn't put us up to it, like,» their commanding officer said. «The lads and I, we liked the name, so we decided to wear it.»
«May your teeth be sharp, then,» Maniakes said, and the soldiers cheered.
As he walked along the walls, he realized all the defenders, not just the Biting Snails, were going to need sharp teeth. The Kubratoi were dragging their siege towers, one after another, into position for an assault on the city. They stood just beyond the range of the engines the Videssians had mounted on the outer wall.
Immodios was studying the towers, too, and not looking very happy while he did it. Maniakes consoled himself by remembering how seldom Immodios looked happy about anything. The officer said, «Your Majesty, I fear we're going to have a hard time stopping them or even slowing them down much before they reach the wall.»
«I think you're wrong,» Maniakes answered. «I think the darts and the stones and the fire we'll hurl at them from the wall will make sure they never reach it. I think most of them will burn up or be smashed before they get within bowshot of the wall.»
«If the Kubratoi had figured out siege towers on their own, your Majesty, I'd say you were likely to be right,» Immodios said. «They wouldn't build them strong enough. But the Makuraners know what they're doing, same as we do.»
«They just did the showing,» Maniakes said. «The Kubratoi did the building. They've never tried anything like this before. My bet is, they haven't built strong enough.»
«The lord with the great and good mind grant that you have the right of it,» Immodios said. He didn't sound as if he believed it.
He had reason to worry, too, as the Avtokrator soon discovered. Maniakes had even dared hope that the Kubratoi would try to use beasts of burden to haul the siege towers up close to the wall. The Biting Snails, the other dart– and stone-thrower crews, and the arches would have enjoyed targets to dream of, even if massacring beasts of burden was a stomach-turning business in and of itself. But Etzilios, perhaps having ignored one set of instructions from his Makuraner tutors, did not ignore two. No horses or mules ever came within range of the engines on the outer wall. The nomads led the animals away and disconnected the ropes with which they'd been harnessed. Then they herded ragged men—Videssian prisoners again—into the towers, treating them not much differently from the way they used any other beasts of burden. Kubrati warriors went into the towers, too, a few to make the prisoners propel mem forward, most for the assault on Videssos the city.
Very slowly, the towers began to advance. «Now we find out,» Maniakes said. To his dismay, the closer the towers got, the sturdier they looked.
When he said as much, Immodios nodded. «That's so, your Majesty,» he agreed. It wasn't quite I told you so, but it would do.
«Well, well,» Maniakes murmured. «How stupid was I?» He held up a hand before Immodios could speak. «Never mind. You don't have to answer that. In fact, I'd be happier if you didn't answer that.»
Whatever Immodios' opinions were, he dutifully kept them to himself. Foot by foot, the siege towers moved forward. When they came into range of the engines on the walls, the Videssians let fly with everything they had. Some of their darts did pierce the hide covering and shields on the front of the siege towers. Some, no doubt, pierced warriors and haulers in the towers. Such pinprick injuries, though, did little to make the Kubratoi give over their assault.
Stone-throwers hurled their missiles at the towers, too. They hit with loud crashes, but they bounced off without doing any visible damage. Maybe the Kubratoi had listened to the Makuraner engineers, after all. Instead of looking just somber, Immodios looked somber and vindicated. Maniakes did his best not to notice.
But the stone-throwers could throw more than stones. Their crews loaded them with jars full of a nasty mix of tallow and rock oil and naphtha and sulfur, then lighted the mix with torches before flinging it at the foe. Fire dripped down the fronts of the towers. The harsh smoke stank. When it got into Maniakes' eyes, it made them water and burn. Inhaling some, he coughed. «What vile stuff!» he said, coughing some more.
Fire the Kubratoi could not ignore, as they had the darts and stones. Some of them came up onto the tops of the towers and poured water down onto the flames. That did less good than they might have hoped. Instead of putting out the fires, the water only made them run faster down the fronts of the towers.
That sufficed, though, for the flames had trouble igniting the hides that faced the siege towers. Maybe the Kubratoi had soaked them to leave them wet and slimy and hard to burn. Whatever the reason, they did not catch fire. Inch by slow inch, the towers advanced.
Looking north and south, Maniakes spied seven or eight of them. Three moved on the Silver Gate, near which he stood. The others crawled singly toward the wall. Kubrati stone-throwers flung boulders at the outer wall and at the walkway atop it, making it hard and dangerous for the Videssians to concentrate their defenders where the attacks would come.
Maniakes bit his lip. Somewhere back at one of the Kubrati encampments, those Makuraner engineers had to be hugging themselves with glee. The towers were doing everything they wanted, which meant they were doing everything Maniakes didn't want them to do.
Off to the north, cheers rang out from the wall. The Avtokrator stared to see why his men were cheering in the middle of what looked like disaster. He needed a while, peering in that direction, before he understood: one of the towers wasn't moving forward any more. Maybe it had tried to go over damp ground and bogged down. Maybe a wheel or axle had broken under the strain of the weight the tower carried. Maybe the ground sloped ever so slightly, so it had to try to go uphill. Whatever the reason, it wasn't going anywhere now.
Maniakes felt like cheering himself. He didn't, though, not with only one threat gone and so many remaining. And then, right before his eyes, one of the siege towers bearing down on the Silver Gate began to burn at last. The flames and smoke rising from it were no longer solely from the incendiary liquid with which the Videssians had been bombarding it. The timbers of its frame had also caught fire.
So did the Kubratoi inside the tower. Enemies though they were, Maniakes pitied them then. Above the snap of catapults discharging above the thud of stones and darts striking home against the wall and against the siege tower, rose the screams of the warriors in that inferno.
What was it like in there? Maniakes tried to imagine himself a nomad on the stairs between, say, the fourth and fifth floors. It would be packed and dark and frightening even without fire; every stone that slammed into the tower had to feel like the end of the world, The odor of smoke would have been in the air for some time already, what with jars of blazing grease striking the tower along with the stones.
But what happened when the odor changed, when the Kubratoi smelled unmistakable woodsmoke and saw flames above them? Worse, what happened when they smelled unmistakable woodsmoke and saw flames below them?
Warriors streamed out of the base of the siege tower and fled away from the walls of Videssos the city back toward their encampment. Stones and darts and ordinary arrows took a heavy toll among them. At that, though, they were the lucky ones: that was a quicker, cleaner way to die than they would have found had they remained in the tower.
At the very peak of the siege tower, a d
oorway opened and a gangway was thrust forth, as if a boy had stuck out his tongue.
With the tower more than half a bowshot from the wall, it was a gangplank to nowhere. But that did not mean no one used it.
Kubratoi desperate to escape the flames and smoke inside the siege tower dashed out onto the gangway. Maniakes got the feeling that a lot of them would have been content simply to stand there, to rest for a moment after getting away from the fire. But that was not to be, could not be. For one thing, smoke poured out of the doorway from which the long plank had emerged. And for another, more and more Kubratoi, men who could not use the stairs and ladders down to the ground, tried to get out on the gangway.
What happened after that was grimly inevitable. Some nomads, crowded off the plank by their comrades, fell to the ground nearly forty feet below. Others jumped, no doubt thinking it better to propel themselves off into space than to be forced off at a time and attitude not of their choosing.
A few of the nomads were lucky, getting up apparently uninjured from their falls. A few, as unlucky as they could be, lay unmoving. More dragged themselves away, hurt but alive. A couple of those, at least partly lucky at first, were unlucky later, when other Kubratoi, either forced off or springing from the gangway, landed on top of them or when a stone from a Videssian engine finished them where the fall had not.
And then fire reached the end of the gangway still inside the siege tower. Maniakes could hear the wood crack, and the board, burning, crashed to the ground along with the nomads left on it.
The siege tower collapsed in on itself a minute or two later, flames flaring brighter and higher in the breeze of the collapse for a little while and then beginning to subside once more.
«There's one we don't have to worry about any more,» Maniakes said.
That, unfortunately, left all the siege towers about which the Videssians did still have to worry. Several of them were going to reach the wall: that seemed revoltingly obvious, despite the Avtokrator's earlier optimism. The places where they would reach the wall seemed obvious, too—they could hardly change their paths, twisting and dodging like rabbits chased by hounds.
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