by John F. Carr
The second platform was in place now, ladders rising on it. The men on these ladders must be some of the southern swampmen Soton had brought north, or the Blethan Ruthani who had raided their baggage train at Ardros Field. They carried no armor, no clothing except leather leggings and breechcloths, and no weapons but hand axes and long wicked knives. If the men in the mortar pit could start hitting the wall in time, there was still a chance--
The Hostigi mortar emplacement spewed flame, smoke, slabs of stone, and flying timbers. An enemy shot or a stray spark had touched off the remaining fireseed in the magazine. Most of the men in or around the pit went down where they stood.
Flying debris scythed into the rear of the Hostigi infantry holding the barricade at the breach. Their line wavered. Some charged forward, grappling with Styphoni and rolling down the rubble to die in the moat with them. Others gave way, and a volley of musketry cleared a path through the ones who stood. Across the dying and the dead of both sides, the Sacred Squares poured over the barricade and down into the outer courtyard.
It seemed to Ptosphes that the Styphoni reached the gatehouse where he stood in the time between one breath and the next. Bullets whistled around him; the men atop the keep were now firing on the inner wall without caring much who was there. His reluctance to turn his back on the enemy gave way to an indignant refusal to be shot in the back by his own men. He ran to the edge of the gun platform, sheathed his sword, and made his way down the rope ladder with both hands, until he was sure his arms would pull out of their sockets. The rope ended about two rods above the flagstone paving of the inner courtyard.
It was a long drop for an armored man no longer young. Ptosphes went to his knees and was quite sure all his bones were jarred loose from one another. Thankfully, all of them seemed intact when he stood. Smoke was rising from the base of the stairs, to the keep. He sprinted for them without stopping to take a breath.
A bullet tore through his jack and glanced off his breastplate, while another clipped his beard and seared one hand. At first they came from both sides, then he heard a shout from above, “That’s Prince Ptosphes, you wolf’s bastard!” and the bullets from the keep stopped. A moment later a crash like the end of the world sounded from behind, followed by screams and curses that penetrated even the ringing in Ptosphes’ ears, and a choking wave of fireseed smoke. Some Styphoni with more zeal than sense must have used a petard on the inner gate, no doubt blowing it open but also demolishing a good many comrades as well!
Two of the swamp warriors reached the foot of the stairs before Ptosphes. He cut one down with his sword, knocked the ax out of the other’s hand, leaped on to the stairs, and dashed up them. By the time he reached the top, the blood pounding in Ptosphes’ ears drowned out every other sound. He leaned against the wall beyond the doorway, feeling the cool stone against his forehead and not hearing the outer door being shut and bolted behind him.
By the time he’d been led to a chair and had a cup of wine thrust into his hands, Ptosphes had enough of his wits back to think about what to do next. This was no normal siege, where the garrison of the keep was always given one last chance to surrender. This one would end with the Styphoni trying to bury the Hostigi under a pile of their own dead flesh if they couldn’t finish the battle any other way.
If Phidestros and Soton and their captains had the wits the gods gave to fleas, they would launch the last attack as soon as they could, before their men had time to lose their battle-rage. Otherwise those men might start thinking of the kind of fight waiting for them behind the walls of the keep.
When Ptosphes had drunk the wine and could stand, he walked over to Harmakros in the chair of state. He had to walk carefully, to avoid stepping on exhausted men catching their breaths, cleaning their weapons, or just lying staring at the ceiling. The lightly wounded were taking care of each other; the badly wounded hadn’t reached the keep.
“I lost sight of the column on the ridge. What of them?”
“They started to close when the column at the main gate ran. Then the breach fell, and the ridge fighters drew back. Not without leaving a good many men behind, to be sure.”
“What do we have left?”
Harmakros’ shrugged. “A hundred, maybe a few more. That’s all, unless we get some through the underground passage from the outer courtyard.”
“It’s being watched?”
“Of course!” Harmakros wasn’t going to take accusations of carelessness lightly, even now. “Three men, with a barrel of fireseed to blow it up if the bastards try to come through.”
“They’ll come soon, wherever they do it.” Ptosphes leaned against a stone archway and propped himself up with his sword. By the Twelve True Gods, he was getting old!
“I have men watching on the roof, and more men on the stairs relaying messages, my Prince. They won’t catch us napping.”
“Unless they kill the men on the roof.”
“With Soton’s cannons? Not without shells, and maybe not even with them. Anyway, I’ll wager a cask of Ermut’s Best they don’t have any shells.”
“Done,” Ptosphes said. “But just in case they do . . .”
“I’ve had the men on the roof build themselves a shelter with chests and rolled-up tapestries.”
Some of those tapestries, Ptosphes realized, were probably part of his wife’s dowry. Not that anybody except Rylla would be left to care before long, of course, and this was a better end for the tapestries than being looted or burned, eaten by vermin or left to rot in the crumbling shell of the keep.
Ptosphes forced his mind away from such thoughts and climbed the stairs to the roof.
THIRTY-NINE
Seeing the Styphoni swarming over the shambles that had been his seat and home didn’t improve Ptosphes’ mood. It helped to see the men on the rifled three-pounder actually smiling as they carved notches in the smoke-stained oak of the gun carriage.
“The big one’s for smashing the wheel of one siege gun. Didn’t hit any of our people either,” the gunner added. “The four little ones are banners we knocked down. The circle is one of the guns. We might have got ourselves a second, but the Styphoni were too cowardly to man it again and by then we’d run out of shot and were firing broken pottery and chunks of masonry.”
One of the swabbers laughed. “Styphon’s bully boys didn’t like eating our stones!”
Never mind that the gunners probably hadn’t done half the damage they thought they had. If they spent the last candle of their lives grinning and the last moments killing more Styphoni, what did anything else matter to them now?
Ptosphes had just descended to the keep hall when a messenger followed him down the stairs. “They’re moving a heavy field gun into the inner courtyard. One of theirs, though, from the number of men they’ve put to hauling it.”
“Everyone to your places, men,” Ptosphes said. He hesitated; added, “It’s been an honor to be your Prince and captain.”
A ragged cheer rose, then outside the musketry began again heavy, rapid fire. The expected message came down from the roof--the bullets were mostly coming up, to keep the gun there out of action. Even a three-pound ball could wreck a gun carriage.
He saw a black faced and bloodied Vurth crouching with a musketoon. “I thought you were dead!”
Vurth smiled, his crooked yellow teeth grinning like a death’s head. “It’ll take more than a Styphoni musket ball to take my life--Down Styphon!”
Ptosphes grinned as a score of harsh voices echoed with “Down Styphon!”
“Wait until they attack,” Ptosphes ordered. “Then they’ll have to cease fire or have spent bullets falling back on their friends.” He doubted that the mercenaries or even the Knights would care to risk much of that. It had been a bad day for self-inflicted casualties on both sides; for the Styphoni it was about to get worse.
Galzar’s muster-clerks are going to be working long hours today, Ptosphes thought.
Chrunngggg!
Something struck the outside of t
he wall--a solid shot, the report of its firing lost in the roar of musketry. “Not bad,” Ptosphes said. “Sounds as if they hit just to the left of the door.”
It took three more shots before the smashing of wood and the ringing of iron signaled a direct hit on the outer door. Two more shots completed the work. A rifleman crept up the stairs and into the doorway, peering through the wreckage.
“They’re reloading, but they’ve lined up a storming party too. They can’t be going to fire right over--here it comes--ayyyyhhhh!”
The pieces of the door flew into the keep chamber hall. So did the pieces of the rifleman. A cannonball rolled in after them, making the Hostigi do spritely dances to avoid it.
Harmakros unhooked his pistols from the arm of the chair of state, cocked them, and laid them in his lap, then raised an empty wine cup in salute to Ptosphes. “I’ll claim that brandy, Prince. If they had shells, they’d have used one then.”
“So it would seem.”
Then, from all the firing slits, the sentries shouted that the storming party was on the way. The gun on the roof let fly, although no one bothered to tell Ptosphes if it hit anything. It fired a second time ... a third.
As the fourth shot went off, the Styphoni burst into the chamber hall.
A ragged volley of pistols and muskets half-deafened Ptosphes. He saw the leading rank of the enemy stagger and go down, but realized the men behind them now had shields of once-living flesh. He drew his own pistol and fired it over the heads of the six men who’d appointed themselves his last bodyguard. Then the Styphoni were everywhere.
Ptosphes decided that if demons ever really came into the world, they might look like Styphon’s soldiers. The attackers wore every sort of armor and clothing except for those who wore little of either. They were black-faced, red-eyed, stinking, shrieking cries in no language intended for human ears, and waving strange weapons in more arms than the gods gave men.
The massed Styphoni gave Vurth a fine target for his musketoon. He shot one man, smashed in a second’s face, then got a third in a wrestler’s headlock and broke his neck before someone else ran him through. Vurth’s diversion let Ptosphes break away from his bodyguards toward the fireplace and the concealed ladder leading down to the cellar. He had to be down there to do his last duty as Prince of Hostigos--not the last Prince; the gods grant it!--and knew he might have already waited too long.
Four of the bodyguards stayed alive to reload their weapons and see that their Prince no longer needed them. They fired into the Styphoni, and then closed with steel.
The first man to make a way past them Harmakros shot in the head. The second man ran Harmakros through the stomach; the Duke returned the compliment with his second pistol. A third man hesitated, uncertain whether to help his comrades or see if Harmakros was dead. Harmakros snatched the pistol from the man’s belt, rammed the muzzle up under its owner’s jaw, and pulled the trigger. The chair of state fell over, spilling out Harmakros’ body as Ptosphes swung himself into the chimney.
The room was filling with Styphoni, many of them Temple Guardsmen with dented plate and fouled capes. Ptosphes forced himself to go down the iron rungs of the ladder one at a time. It would help nobody except Styphon’s House if he failed in his last duty by falling down the chimney and dashing out what the siege had left of his brains.
By the time he reached the bottom, he knew that if he had to climb back up again his heart would burst before he finished the climb. He’d been right; he would not have lived to see his grandchildren grow up even without this Dralm-damned war! However, this way he was at least spared years of listening to old Tharses and Rylla fussing at him, making him eat and sleep and rest as they thought proper, and generally trying to turn him into a corpse while he was still alive.
The blessed coolness of the cellar revived him a little. He found that he’d brought his pipe, tobacco and tinderbox with him, started to light up, stopped as he remembered the ironclad rules about smoking near fireseed, then laughed. It made precious little difference what anybody did down here now.
Ptosphes found the fireseed intact, all twelve tons of it minus a barrel or two. He also found the last of the magazine-keepers sitting at the foot of the stairs, along with his clubfooted grandson. The keeper was an old soldier past campaigning, with the grandson to support and no other kin. Ptosphes had given him the magazine by way of a pension.
“What can we do for you, my Prince?”
“If you have pistols--?”
The keeper showed an old cavalryman’s matchlock. The boy produced a heavy-barreled boar-hunter’s pistol.
“Good. Keep watch on the stairs.”
With his pipe in his mouth, Prince Ptosphes walked over to a row of small barrels, chose one from the top, cracked it open, and then laid a trail of fireseed a thumb wide and a finger deep to the center of the larger barrels. Just to be safe, he borrowed one of the keeper’s handspikes and knocked in the head of one of the larger barrels. Fireseed cascaded out until a helmetful lay waiting at the end of the train, with the twelve tons waiting beyond.
By the time Ptosphes was finished, fists were hammering on the outside of the cellar door. Then he heard the more solid sounds of a chest or bench being swung against it. Wood cracked and metal pulling out of stone screeched as a hinge gave way. The door half-swung, half-fell inward.
All three Hostigi fired together at the first silhouettes to appear. The answering volley sent bullets spanging around the cellar. One hit the boy in the stomach. The Styphoni drew back except for the one who fell forward and rolled down the stairs to land at Ptosphes feet.
He was as filthy as all the others and no more than eighteen. He was crying for his mother as he clasped his hands over a belly wound that under other circumstances would have killed him slowly over the next few days. Well, he’d be spared that and he’d already lived longer than the keeper’s grandson would, or Harmakros’ son would--if the Grand Host overtook Kalvan.
Except that the Styphoni wouldn’t. Ptosphes knew this although he couldn’t have explained how he knew it. He was sure it was true knowledge, not a dead man’s dreaming to make his death easier.
My mind is wandering, he thought. He was having trouble breathing, too.
Since he was dead, why wait any longer, in case one of those Styphoni cursing so loudly at the top of the stairs wanted to come down and argue the point?
Ptosphes finished tamping the ball and wadding of his new load, checked the pan, and then rested the pistol on one knee as he knocked the live coal from his pipe into the trail of fireseed.
FORTY
Damn you, Sirna! What are you using in the wound? Galzar’s Mace?” Sirna ignored Phidestros’ blustering. She knew she must be causing him agony, probing his wounded thigh with her limited skills and instruments improvised by the Iron Band’s armorers from Menandra’s kitchen utensils. He’d refused a sandbag, though, and she had to go on and extract that last piece she felt in the wound. Otherwise he would certainly lose his leg and probably his life. Then what would happen to her? Sirna told herself that her concern was thoroughly practical and continued digging.
Finally the probe clicked on the fragment again, this time loosening it until she could grip it between two blood-slimed fingers. It was a piece of stoneware, sharp-edged but solid. It wouldn’t leave any more fragments in the wound (or so she told herself, because she knew that her hands would start shaking uncontrollably if she had to burrow back into that mangled flesh).
She held up the stoneware. Phidestros managed a grin. “So that’s why they didn’t run out of bullets. They saved up their last moon’s trash and shot it at us!” Phidestros made a face and groaned.
“That’s not all the trash I’m going to get shot at me when Soton learns I got this kiss from Galzar rallying his musketeers not a hundred paces from the breach! My ears will hurt worse than this leg.”
Petty-Captain Helios lifted Phidestros’ leg so that Sirna could bind it in the boiled remains of a shift. Helios’ wrenche
d knee made him slow, but as long as he could stand he felt that he had to be on duty. Certainly he’d had more experience dealing with battle wounds than any of Menandra’s girls, and he didn’t mind taking orders from a woman who knew her business and whipped into line any soldier who did.
At last, Phidestros was bandaged. Sirna came as close as she could to offering a prayer for his recovery. She could no longer tell herself that wish was entirely practical, either. Phidestros was too good a man to die, even if he was serving a particularly murderous brand of superstition.
“Sorry to give you such a bad time,” she said as four of the hastily recruited orderlies lifted Phidestros off the table. Half the Captain-General’s bodyguard had escorted him to the Gull’s Nest after he fell. She’d drafted most of them into helping with the wounded who’d been streaming in since dawn. And this was only one of the besiegers’ hospitals! Galzar’s Great Hall was going to be crammed to the rafters tonight.
“Menandra runs a fine whorehouse, but it’s not much of a hospital,” Sirna went on. “If I had some proper tools, or the help of a priest of Galzar--”
Phidestros sighed. “My lovely Sirna, if I knew where to find an Uncle Wolf who didn’t already need two heads and six hands, I’d have him dragged to you. You’re going to be all we have for today. When they carted me off, I heard we already had two thousand men down.”
“Two thousand!” Sirna shuddered at the implications. Phidestros had been hit early enough to reach the Gull’s Nest before the storming of the keep. Two thousand men down in the time it took the Styphoni to close the walls. How many more in the fighting since--?
Thunder battered at her ears and the floor quivered. The door and all the window shutters banged wildly and dust rose until the room looked as if someone had fired a cannon. Sirna looked frantically out the window, saw nothing but people gaping idiotically, knew she must be doing the same, and dashed out the door.