by K. J. Parker
At the foot of the wall, Melancton finally stopped and looked back over his shoulder. As he did so, he thought about the old fairy tale that says you mustn’t look behind you in the kingdom of the dead, or the dead will get you. The hero, of course, gets as far as the gateway unscathed; but, because he’s a tragic hero, he gives in at the very last moment, and is lost forever.
Best, therefore, not to think about the men who wouldn’t be joining him for the next phase of the operation. He leaned his head back and looked up at the wall. Above him, he couldn’t see the enemy scorpions, but he could hear the crack of the sliders slamming home. He was safe from them here; the city wall sheltered him, which in itself was a pleasing irony. With a tremendous effort he cleared his mind of the images that clogged it, and tried to remember the next step.
If the defenses of Civitas Eremiae had a weakness, it was the main gate itself. The doors were strong — according to the reports he’d seen, six inches of cross-ply oak, reinforced with internal crossbeams — but they offered considerably more hope of success than the walls, and of course he had Mezentine ingenuity and craftsmanship to help him, provided he could move it the enormous distance of five hundred yards.
He glanced behind him again. Here it came; they’d listed it in the inventory as a battering-ram, but there was more to it than that. True, the first stage in its operation was simple enough, merely a beautifully engineered derivative of the crude old log-dangling-from-chains. Once it had been swung, however, and its two hardened and tempered beaks had pecked into the gate panels, it displayed hidden talents. At the heart of it was a windlass driving a worm. You could turn the windlass with one hand, but the power of mechanical advantage would force the two beaks apart, tearing the gate panels like rotten cloth. A point would be reached where the wretched timbers wouldn’t be able to resist any longer. They’d be prised open, the frame of the gate would spring, and a sharp tug on the back of the ram would drag them out like a bad tooth. He had his employers’ word on that, which was a comfort.
The ram edged forward. It was being pushed by fifty-odd men, who were sheltered from the scorpion bolts by eight-inch steel pavises mounted on the sides of the frame. An overimaginative observer with a tendency to romanticize might be put in mind of a wild boar beset by hounds; to Melancton it was a piece of equipment, and he bitterly resented having to pin his hopes on it. For all that, it came slowly; there were dead men and other obstacles under the wheels, which had to be either dragged out of the way or ridden over. There was a slight gradient to overcome as well. He could picture the machine’s designers, shaking their heads and making excuses when they heard about how he’d failed. He could hear bones crunching and skin bursting under the wheels.
Of course, he hadn’t failed yet. Men were crowding round it, partly to get what cover they could from the bolts, partly to add their weight and help it up the slope, over the obstructions. He saw a man pinned to a frame-timber by a scorpion bolt; he was still alive, and every jolt and bump twisted the steel pin in his ruptured intestines. A man shouldn’t have to see things like that, he thought. Soldiers die in a battle, and each death is hideous and obscene, but a commander has to look past all that, so that he can see the pattern, the great shape of the mechanism. He scampered out of the way as the machine rumbled and crunched toward the gate. The noise was confusing, how could anyone think with that going on? There was a disgusting smell of sweat and urine, which he realized was his own.
He saw the beam sway backward, drawn by chains running on pulleys; trust the Mezentines to get a gear-train in somewhere. It hung in the air for a moment, and a slab of rock dropped from the battlement above, bounced off the wall as it fell, skipped out wildly and caught the side of a man’s head. Melancton saw his legs and back collapse as he lurched sideways and fell in a heap, like discarded dirty laundry. The beam swung forward. He heard the splitting of wood. The beam had stopped dead, not a quiver in the chains. They were spanning the windlass now, he could hear the scream of the oak ply being levered apart. Shouting all around him, on all sides and above, where an Eremian officer was screaming at his men to lower the elevation on a scorpion as far as it would go. Not far enough, Melancton knew, and the panic in his enemy’s voice delighted him. He lifted his head and saw a great wedge of daylight glowing through the wrecked panels of the door. The framing timbers were bent like the limbs of bows; it was shocking to see the torture of materials as the stress from the worm built up in them. It was impossible for solid oak bars to bend as far as that. They snapped, the ends a prickly mess of needle-pointed splinters running down the over-abused grain. He heard a voice give an order, though he couldn’t make out the words. The beam jerked back; the doors popped out of their frame like a cork from a bottle.
Of course, he hadn’t given much thought to what would happen after that. He’d sort of assumed that once the gate was open, that would be that; as though the gate was the enemy’s neck, snap it and they die. Instead, a cloud flitted out of the open gateway, and in the fraction of a second it took to pass him by, he heard the hiss and recognized the flight of arrows.
The engine sheltered some of them, but not all. For a moment, long enough to count up to six, it was all perfectly still in the space in front of the gate, because nobody was left alive to move. The Eremians, he knew, were fumbling for arrows, nocking them, drawing. They’d be in time to meet the confused, furious charge with another volley. Melancton turned his head away until he heard the hiss. When he turned back, he saw his men charging.
The archers in the gateway changed their minds at the last moment, realizing they didn’t have time for another volley. Just too late, they turned to run, and the infantry charge rammed them. Mostly they were simply knocked down and trampled on; there wasn’t any room for using weapons, and no time. Melancton jumped up to join the charge. He was ready to go when he heard the slam of sliders.
They’d briefed him in great detail about the effective use of scorpions, with examples drawn from many campaigns against many different enemies. But they hadn’t said anything about what would happen if a densely packed force of infantry received a scorpion volley at point-blank range. Given the proud thoroughness of Mezentine military intelligence, he could only presume that such a thing had never happened.
It had happened now. The men in the front of the scrum were blown back as if by a blast of wind or an incoming breaker. Swept off their feet, they slammed into the men behind them, as the bolts plunged through them and out behind. Three men pinned together, unable to fall for a long moment, until they toppled sideways; the sheer crushing effect of so much force contained in such a crowded, fragile space. Melancton saw it all, and the images soaked into his mind. They would be there forever, like frescos painted on the inside of his eyelids. He noticed that he was stumbling toward the gateway, shoving his way in a jumble of calves, elbows, shoulders, backs. What am I doing? he wanted to know. Why am I going there, it’s dangerous. He had no choice in the matter, apparently. He heard the hiss of arrows, and a soldier fell across him, treading on his kneecap as he sprawled to the ground. Three more paces brought him to a dead stop. Somehow it had turned into a pushing contest. His arms were jammed against his sides, so he shoved his shoulder into the back of the man trapped in front of him, and pushed with his back and legs. Someone else was doing the same to him. All the breath was forced out of his lungs, and he found he couldn’t replace it. The panic of not being able to breathe suppressed every other thought for a moment, until the man behind him shifted a little and the pressure on his lungs eased up. He gobbled a deep pull of air, and was flattened against the man in front.
The Eremians loosed another volley from their scorpions.
By now, all the dead were too tightly wedged up to fall; they were a shield, a ram, something to push against. Melancton’s mind evacuated all his remaining thoughts as pain rendered everything else irrelevant. He could hear his own voice screaming. Whatever was happening to him, it seemed to be going on forever. He could see the logi
c; he’d looked round on the threshold of death’s kingdom, and now he would be here forever.
The Phocas were skeptical after the event. They maintained that in a crush like that, nobody could make a difference, no matter how strong they were, or how brave. But they kept their doubts to themselves, for fear of appearing ungracious. None of the other eye-witnesses agreed with them, in any event. The Bardanes and the Nicephorus both maintained that at the critical point of the battle in the gateway, Jarnac Ducas and his personal guard, recruited from his huntsmen and harborers, cut a path through the enemy with poll-axes and glaives, took their stand outside the gate and held their ground until all the Mezentines who’d spilled into the city had been killed, and the engineers had blocked the gateway with steel pavises propped up by scaffolding beams. Only Jarnac himself and one huntsman made it back, scrambling up over a pavise as it was being lifted into place and dropping down the other side. It was, the majority of those present agreed, the most extraordinary thing they’d ever seen.
The huntsman died ten minutes later — they counted twenty-one wounds on his body — but Jarnac was able to walk twenty yards to a mounting-block and sit down of his own accord before he passed out. The consensus was that he owed his life to the brigandine coat.
When he came round, half an hour later, he opened his eyes and asked what was going on. They told him that the attack had been driven back, with heavy losses. He didn’t believe them, and passed out again.
It was Ziani Vaatzes who suggested dropping grappling-hooks from the gatehouse tower and simply lifting the battering-ram off the ground, using the portcullis winch. They did as he told them because he was a Mezentine, and therefore knew about such things. When the crisis was over and they wanted to lift him shoulder-high and salute him as the saviour of the city, he turned out not to be there. Meanwhile the ram dangled in the air like a dead spider, until someone thought of winching it up as far as it’d go and then slipping the winch. It fell thirty feet and smashed, and that was the end of it.
Duke Orsea arrived too late, of course. He’d run from the council room as soon as the messenger arrived, but the press of bodies was too thick and he couldn’t get through. By the time he’d scrambled his way to the front of the scrum it was all over, and they were carrying the lesser Ducas home on a door. Everyone was convinced he was dead, until he appeared at his front gate, leaning on someone’s shoulder. The cheering was as loud as the battle at the gate.
They spent the rest of the day and all the following night shoring up the barricades in the gateway and fixing or cannibalizing the damaged scorpions. Vaatzes reappeared to take charge of that side of it. Probably it was just stress and fatigue, but nobody was able to get a civil word out of him. He shouted at the workers, which wasn’t how he usually behaved toward his men, and nobody seemed able to do anything right.
Some time after midnight, they finished counting the dead bodies and collating the casualty lists. Five hundred and seventeen killed, over nine hundred wounded; meanwhile, a work detail was struggling to get the dead Mezentines out of the gateway, so the masons could get in and block up the breach with bricks and rubble. Nobody could be bothered to count them, though there were inevitably a few jokes about saving some of the better heads for the lesser Jarnac’s trophy collection. As and when there was time, the plan was to load them into ammunition derricks, winch them up to the top of the wall and throw them over. There wasn’t enough space in the city to bury them, and burning such a monstrous quantity of material would have posed a fire hazard.
23
They waited until the surgeon had finished with him before they gave Melancton the casualty reports. It had taken an hour to dig the two arrowheads out of him — one in his stomach, the other in his shoulder — and he’d lost a lot of blood. His aides said the report could surely wait till morning (the dead would still be dead tomorrow, and possibly the day after, too), but the officer in charge pleaded an express order.
Seventeen thousand, four hundred and sixty-three dead. Lying in his tent, he looked at it as if it was a random squiggle on the scrap of parchment. Nobody could really understand a figure like seventeen thousand. A quick calculation — he’d always been good at mental arithmetic — told him that he’d lost slightly over half his men, and therefore, according to all the recognized authorities on the art of war, he now had insufficient forces at his disposal to carry the city. He’d failed.
Somehow, that hardly mattered. He was a mercenary, a skilled tradesman paid to do a job; they weren’t going to behead him or lock him up, as they might well have done if he’d cost them that many citizens instead of mere migrant workers. He’d go home, unpaid, his career ruined, and that’d be that. Years ago he’d bought a reasonable-sized estate just outside the city where he’d been born, somewhere to retire to when his soldiering days were over. He’d been looking forward to it, in a vague sort of way.
Seventeen thousand. He remembered a story he’d heard years ago, about a man who owned a piece of land on which a great battle had been fought. He came back home a week after the battle to find the dead still lying. He was a fairly well-to-do farmer, with twenty men working for him; it had taken them weeks just to cart away the bodies and dump them in a disused quarry a couple of hundred yards from the battlefield. The land itself was ruined. Some of his neighbors put it down to malign influences, others reckoned the sheer quantity of blood that had drained into the soil had poisoned the ground. Plowing was next to impossible, because every few yards the share would jam on a helmet or a breastplate or some other piece of discarded junk. He tried a heavy mulch of manure for a couple of years, but nothing would grow except bindweed and nettles.
Seventeen thousand. As he stared at the tent roof, trying not to move (the doctor had given him all sorts of dire warnings about that), he made a few attempts at visualizing the number, but once he got past five thousand it all broke down.
The Mezentine liaisons came to see him around midday. For once, they didn’t have much to say for themselves; he got the impression that they were preoccupied with what was likely to happen to them when they got home. One of them made a few half-hearted suggestions about a surprise attack by night; the other two ignored him.
“Can we at least say we’ve got enough men left to mount an effective siege?” another one asked him. “According to one set of reports, they probably outnumber us by now.”
Melancton shrugged. “If they tried to make a sortie and chase us off, they’d be walking into our scorpions,” he pointed out. “I’d love it if they tried, but I don’t suppose they will. No, I think they’ll sit tight and watch us use up our stocks of food. They’re better supplied than we are. We weren’t anticipating a siege.”
One of the liaisons shifted uncomfortably. “How long can we stay here, then?” he asked.
Melancton grinned. “Well, we’ve got a lot fewer mouths to feed than we had this time yesterday, so we can probably stick it out for three weeks, assuming we want to. I can’t see any point in that, though. They must have supplies for at least six months, probably more.”
“Three weeks,” the liaison repeated. “Well, it’s possible that the reinforcements could get here by then. In the meantime, we’ll send to the City for a supply train —”
“Reinforcements?” Melancton frowned, as though he didn’t know what the word meant. “I don’t understand.”
“Fresh troops, from your country,” the liaison explained. “Obviously we’re going to have to raise another army before we try again. That’s going to take time, naturally, so meanwhile our job will be to mount an effective siege —”
“Try again.” Melancton couldn’t think of any words for what he wanted to say. “You’re going to try again?”
“Of course. The Republic never loses a war. As I was saying, time is going to be the key. Based on what we’ve just seen, we’re going to have to make very substantial modifications to the long-range engines, and that’ll probably mean shipping them back to the City for a complete refit.
How long that’ll take I simply don’t know, but…”
Melancton paid no real attention to the rest of what they said. It wasn’t any of his business anymore. Curiously, they’d spoken as though they assumed he’d still be in command when the reinforcements arrived; he thought about that. It was possible, of course, that the Mezentines wouldn’t want to replace him, because that would be an acknowledgment of the disaster. Maybe they’re just going to pretend it never happened, he thought; and of course, they could do that, it’d be possible. Getting another army from home — forty-five or fifty thousand this time — was also eminently feasible, given the time of year and the political situation. There’d be no shortage of recruits, assuming they had the common sense not to say anything about what had happened to the last expedition.
“Soon as you’re up and about again,” the liaison continued, making it sound as though he was getting over a nasty dose of flu, “we’ll get you to come back with us to the City so you can brief Council on the sort of modifications needed to bring the engines up to the mark. The important thing,” he added, “is to keep a sense of perspective.”
They went away again shortly after that, and Melancton slid into a shallow doze. When he woke up, there was a man standing over him who looked vaguely familiar. Beside him was the day officer, looking unhappy.
“Insists on seeing you,” he said. “I told him you were asleep.”
Falier; the name rose to the surface of his mind. Falier, the engineer from the ordnance factory. Presumably he was here to start mulling over those design modifications. “Tell him to go away,” Melancton said.
“It’s important.” Falier was shouting, which surprised him. On the couple of occasions when they’d met, he’d formed an impression of a weak, scared little man whose main ambition was to be somewhere else. “I’ve got vital information, about the war.”