«That means we'll just have to give them a nice, warm reception,» Maniakes said, more than half to himself. But the stream of orders he sent forth after that was meant for the men on the wall.
Soldiers around the Silver Gate got those orders straight from his lips. Couriers dashed off to give his ideas to men on other stretches where the towers were advancing.
When one of the couriers returned, he said, «Begging your pardon, your Majesty, but the officers I talked to said they'd already thought of that for themselves.»
«No need to beg my pardon,» Maniakes answered. «I'm not angry if the soldiers who serve me think for themselves. The reverse, in fact.»
Archers and stone– and dart-throwers from the inner wall rained missiles down on the siege towers as those drew near the lower outer wall. A few of the missiles they rained down fell short, wounding defenders instead of attackers.
An arrow from behind Maniakes shattered against a battlement only a couple of feet to his left. An assassin could slay him so easily, and then say it was an accident. He made himself shrug. He couldn't do anything about that.
Closer and closer to the Silver Gate crawled the two towers still unburnt. The bombardment they took from the Videssian catapults on the walls was harsher than any Maniakes had seen. The Avtokrator wished the Makuraner engineers who had taught the Kubratoi the art of making such towers into Skotos' coldest icepit.
Videssians in mail shirts crowded the walkway by the spots where the towers would send forth their gangplanks. The Kubratoi on the ground did everything they could to keep the imperials from concentrating against the towers, redoubling their own barrage of arrows and catapult-flung stones. Hale men hauled their wounded comrades to the siege towers on either side of the Silver Gate. More soldiers took the places of those hurt or slain.
«We have to beat them back,» Maniakes called to his men. «No foreign foe has ever set foot inside Videssos the city. And besides,» he added practically, «if we don't kill them, they'll kill us, and enjoy themselves doing it, too.» A few of the soldiers laughed. More, though, simply nodded.
He'd phrased his words as a joke, but that didn't mean they weren't true.
Now the first tower almost touched the wall. Maniakes could see that a couple of the shields mounted on it had burned when his men hurled fire at it, but the hides below those shields had kept the fire from turning to conflagration. His nostrils twitched. Those hides weren't fresh. He hoped the Kubratoi inside the tower were good and sick. It would make them easier to beat.
The doorway in the upper story of the siege tower opened. Like the rest of the tower, it was armored with shields and hides. The Kubratoi waiting inside let out a cheer at seeing the light of day once more and shoved the gangway out toward the wall.
«Now!» Maniakes shouted, as loud as he could to make himself heard over the din of battle.
He wasn't sure afterward, but he didn't think the catapult crew waited for his command before letting fly. As soon as the doorway came open, they launched a great jar full of the Videssian incendiary mix straight at it. The jar smashed against the foremost couple of Kubratoi, knocking them over and drenching them and the inside of the tower with clinging flames.
The inside of the tower, of course, was made of wood. In moments, it began to burn. Smoke billowed out of the door. The gangway remained perhaps a third extended, several feet shy of the wall.
«They're not going to come at us that way, by the good god!» Maniakes said. The soldiers around him yelled themselves hoarse and him deaf. He didn't care. The Kubratoi had only one limited way of getting at the Videssians on the wall. Turn that way into a seething mass of fire, and the whole immense siege tower, on which they'd labored so long and hard, all at once became useless.
Not so many Kubratoi were trapped here as had been in the other tower that burned. With the fire at the top, the warriors packing this tower had the chance to flee out the bottom. The Videssians killed and wounded many of them with stones and darts and arrows, but many also fled back out of range of those missiles without taking any hurt.
Maniakes dismissed them from his mind even as they ran: if they were running away from Videssos the city, they were for the time being no threat. He also dismissed the burning siege tower, except insofar as the smoke now pouring from it made him cough and his eyes stream tears. The tower that had not yet opened its door posed the greater threat.
«Be ready!» he shouted to the crews of the catapults facing that second tower. «We'll treat this one the same way we did the other, and then we'll go and help our friends farther up along the wall.»
«That's right, your Majesty!» the Biting Snails yelled. «We'll lick 'em, same as we'll lick anybody you turn us loose against.»
«Good men!» he said, and a couple of the warriors turned their heads to grin at him. Even after returning to Videssos the city, they didn't care whom he'd married. That he'd led them to victory counted for more. He wished the same held true for people he hadn't led into battle.
The second siege tower assaulting the Silver Gate crawled forward slowly, ponderously. Maniakes thought it was taking a very long time to reach the wall. Maybe it had slowed when some of the men inside saw what had happened to its companion. Maybe, too, time simply seemed to have slowed down for him, as it often did in battle.
Whatever the truth there, at last it came close enough for the Kubratoi inside to open the door. «Now!» Maniakes shouted, as be had before.
And, as the other catapult had done, this one flung a jar full of the Videssians' incendiary liquid straight into the doorway. But the Kubratoi must have thought on what went wrong when the first tower tried extending its gangway toward the wall. All the often crowding forward thrust big shields up against the impact of the jar.
They were so tightly jammed into that little space up there, the impact did not, could not, tumble them backward, as it otherwise would have done. The jar shattered against the upthrust shields, and probably broke arms and ribs in so doing, but most of the burning stuff dripped down over the shields and hides and did not start a great, inextinguishable blaze inside the top of the tower.
Out came the gangway, snaking toward the wall. A Videssian with an axe he must have taken from a Haloga guardsman chopped at it, once, twice, before an arrow caught him in the face. He dropped the axe and reeled back with a groan.
Even before the gangway reached the stones of the outer wall, several Kubratoi charged out onto it. Snap! The crew at a dart-thrower smote the engine's trigger. Those darts could slay a man at a quarter of a mile. At such short range, this one drove through two Kubratoi and skewered a third behind them. All three tumbled to the ground, which they struck a second later with heavy, meaty thuds.
No one who had faced the Kubratoi, weapons in hand, had ever claimed they were anything less than brave. After having fire hurled at them, after a dart had hurled to their doom the first three bold enough to try the gangway, the warriors who came after could hardly have been blamed had they hesitated. They did nothing of the sort. Shouting fierce war cries, they shoved one another aside in their eagerness to rush at the Videssians.
Arrows thudded into the shields they held up to protect their vitals. An arrow caught one of them in the thigh. He stumbled and fell, screaming, to the ground below. Another one went down on the gangway, whereupon the Kubrati behind him tripped and also fell.
But the rest came on. The Videssians at the end of the gangway met them not with swords or even spears, but with long, stout poles. They swept a couple of Kubratoi off the narrow way and into that long, deadly drop. The nomads chopped at the poles with their swords. One of the poles split. A Kubrati grabbed another by the end and, instead of trying to fend it off, pulled with all his might. Caught by surprise, the Videssian wielding it did not let go before overbalancing. «Phoooos!» he shrieked all the way down. His cry cut off abruptly when he hit.
With a shout of triumph, the first Kubrati leapt off the gangway and onto the stone of the wall. That shout turned
to a scream of agony moments later; beset by three imperials, he went down under spear and sword. So did the next Kubrati, and the next.
After that, even the nomads' fierce courage faltered. A Videssian, caught up in the same unthinking battle fury as his foes, jumped up onto the gangway and ran at the Kubratoi, slashing as he went.
«No!» Maniakes shouted. «Come back! Don't throw yourself away!»
The soldier paid no heed. He cut down the first nomad he faced, but was pierced by an arrow a moment later. Leaping over the Kubrati he'd just slain, he seized the fellow behind that one by the waist and then leapt off the narrow plank, taking his foe down with him.
Maniakes sketched the sun-circle above his heart. The Videssian hadn't thrown himself away; the Avtokrator silently admitted as much to himself. He'd made the Kubratoi pay two to get one– and, in the way he'd done it, he'd made them think, too.
They kept coming, but the moment's hesitation the soldier's self-sacrifice bought let more Videssians rush up toward the gangway. The Kubratoi did manage to put men on the wall every so often, but none of the men they put there lived more than moments. Maniakes' greatest fear was that they would be able to force the Videssians back and create a perimeter behind which more and more of their men would gain the wall.
It did not happen, not by the Silver Gate. «Phos be praised,» Maniakes murmured, and anxiously looked up and down the wall to see if the Kubratoi had gained lodgments with any of their other towers. Seeing no signs of that, he said «Phos be praised» again and gave his attention back to the fighting close by him. The stone-thrower crew had finally managed to load another jar of incendiary liquid into their engine. They could not shoot it at the Kubratoi, though, or at their tower, because too many Videssian soldiers crowded round the machine, which stood near the forefront of the fighting. At last, seeing their moment, they loosed the jar.
It smashed a Kubrati on the gangway near the tower. He fell spinning to the ground below, some of the burning sticky stuff clinging to him. More splashed onto Kubratoi directly behind him. Screaming, they tried to run back into the siege tower, but could make no progress against the stream of warriors trying to come forward. Indeed, those warriors fended them off weapons in hand, not wanting to burn along with the couple of unfortunates.
And some of the mixture of oil and fat and sulfur and naphtha dripped down on the gangway and set the wood afire. The burning Kubratoi kept the others from dousing it, not that it would have been easy to douse with water. The men closer to the wall than the two on fire were so intent on pressing ahead against the Videssians, they did not notice the flames till far too late to stamp them out.
The gangway burned, then, till it broke in two. Both halves, and all the men on them, tumbled down, down, down. Maniakes let out a cry of triumph when that happened. «Come ahead!» he shouted, shaking his fist at the Kubratoi staring out of the siege tower. «Come ahead and get what we just gave your friends!»
He'd hoped they had but a single gangway and would be stuck in the siege tower after losing it. But they, or more likely the Makuraner engineer from whom they'd learned how to build the tower, had planned better than that. Out snaked another plank toward the wall of Videssos the city.
«Here!» Maniakes bawled to his men. «To me!» He snapped orders. Videssian soldiers carried yet another jar of inflammable liquid up to the very edge of the wall. At his command, they poured some of the stuff onto the stone where the gangway would reach the wall, then thrust a torch into it.
Yellow flames sprang up. Thick clouds of black, choking smoke made the Videssians pull back from the fire they'd started. That might have worked to the advantage of the Kubratoi, had they been able to put men on the wall then. But the nomads in charge of the gangway halted with it half-extended, not daring to push it forward into the flames.
«Come on!» Maniakes shouted again. «Don't you want to see the rest of the welcome we have waiting?»
He didn't know whether they heard him or not. If they did hear, he didn't know whether they understood. What he did know was that the gangway advanced no farther. Through the blowing smoke, he saw the Kubratoi pull it back into the tower. And then, so slowly that at first he did not believe what his eyes told him, the tower drew back from the Silver Gate. The other surviving towers were also moving away from the wall.
Now, for the first time that whole mad, terrifying day, Maniakes spoke softly, in tones of wonder: «By the lord with the great and good mind, we've won.»
And one of his veterans, a fellow with a scar on his forehead and a kink to his nose, shook his head and said, «No, your Majesty. They've just had enough for today, that's all.»
«You're right, of course,» the Avtokrator said, recognizing truth when he heard it. Also for the first time that day, he laughed. «And do you know what else? That will do nicely, thank you very much.»
No one disagreed with him. He did not think the soldiers deferred to his views because he was their ruler. He thought they kept silent because they, like he, were glad to be alive and not driven from the outer wall.
«What will they do next?» That was the elder Maniakes, taking the question his son addressed to the council of war and doing his best to answer it: «Whatever it is, I hope it won't be as bad as what they threw at us today.»
«I expect it will be worse,» Maniakes answered, «In today's fight, they were seeing what they could do. Now, curse them to the ice, they have a pretty good notion.»
Symvatios said, «The khagan will have a rare old time trying to get them to bring the towers forward again, after what we did to them this time. A warrior who's just watched a good many of his friends go up like so many joints of beef isn't going to be dead keen on heading up to the wall to cook himself afterwards.»
«Something to that,» Maniakes said. «A lot to it, I hope.»
Rhegorios said, «What worries me most of all is that these were the Kubratoi. No sign that many Makuraners were in the fighting today.» He pointed westward. «Best we know, they're still over on the other side of the Cattle Crossing. If they once reach this shore—»
«We have more troubles,» the Avtokrator broke in. «That wouldn't be the worst move for Etzilios to make, either. It would make his own men happier, because their allies are helping them, and it would make the attack stronger, too, because—»
The elder Maniakes took a father's privilege of interrupting his sovereign: «Because the Makuraners really know what they're doing.» That hadn't been what Maniakes intended to say, but it fit well enough. His father went on, «If we could, we really ought to find out what the Kubratoi and Makuraners are planning, not what we'd be doing in their sandals. It's not battle magic, not precisely…»
«They'll be warded,» Maniakes said glumly. «I'd bet a gold-piece against a copper that their mages are trying to listen in on us right now. If they learn anything, some heads that are in the Sorcerers' Collegium ought to go up on the Milestone instead.»
«If we don't try, it's sure we won't do it,» the elder Maniakes said.
«That's so,» Maniakes agreed. «Let it be as you say, Father. I'll summon Bagdasares.»
Alvinos Bagdasares said something startled in the throaty Vaspurakaner tongue. Maniakes, though of the same Vaspurakaner blood as the mage, understood that language only haltingly. He did not think, though, that Bagdasares had thanked him for the sorcerous assignment.
«Your Majesty, this will be a difficult conjuration at best, and may well prove impossible,» Bagdasares warned, returning to Videssian.
«If it were easy, I could pick a wizard off a street corner to do it for me,» Maniakes returned. «I know you may not get the answers I want, but I want you to do everything you can to find out what Abivard and Etzilios are plotting against us now.»
Bagdasares bowed. «It shall be as you command, of course, your Majesty.» He tugged at his bushy black beard, muttering in both Videssian and Vaspurakaner. When Maniakes caught a word—affinities—he nodded to himself. Yes, the mage would do his best.
To symbolize Abivard, Bagdasares came up with a shiny silver arket. «I have nothing similar for the Kubrati khagan,» he said unhappily.
«Why not just use one of our goldpieces, then?» Maniakes answered, sounding anything but gleeful himself. «We were going to pay Etzilios enough of them—but not enough to suit him.»
«The analogy needs to be more exact.» Bagdasares didn't notice that Maniakes was indulging in a wry joke—or else whipping himself for past failures. The mage finally chose a Kubrati saber. Its blade shone, too, though with a different sort of gleam from that of the Makuraner coin. Bagdasares looked almost pleased with the world after that. «Now I need but one thing more: you.»
«Me?» Maniakes heard himself squeak, as if he were a youth whose voice broke every other word.
«Certainly, your Majesty.» the wizard said. «You shall be the element transmuting the general to the specific. This is not Etzilios' sword, only a Kubrati weapon. The odds are long against this coin's ever having been in Abivard's beltpouch. But you have met both men. By the working of the law of contagion, you remain in touch with both of them. And that contact strengthens the action of the law of similarity here, linking these artifacts not only with their respective nations but also with the individuals whose plans we are trying to learn.»
Maniakes had hoped to get back to the wall in case Etzilios, instead of conferring with Abivard, simply decided to attack again. If that happened, though, a messenger would no doubt bring him word of it. He could leave when that happened. The urgent needs of battle would give him a good excuse for interrupting Bagdasares' magic. Meanwhile, he resigned himself to wait.
«Take the arket in one hand, your Majesty, and the sword in the other,» Bagdasares said. «Think on the two men whom the objects represent. Think on them talking with each other, and on what they might say in the situation in which they find themselves.»
«I've been doing nothing but thinking on what they might say,» Maniakes answered. «I want to find out what they did say or will say.»
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