by Steven Gould
If that’s not some sort of staff headquarters, I’ll eat my socks.
He handed the telescope back to the coronet and looked down through the hole in the platform. “Why is climbing down always so much harder than climbing up?”
Leland could tell that Halvidar Gahnfeld both liked and hated the idea. “Out of the question. We haven’t even been to the staff meeting yet!”
“That’s just it,” Leland said. “It would be nice to take something, some hard intelligence, to the staff meeting. We’ve got two days and, while the Rootless seem as thick as molasses between that camp and the fords, their pickets seem quite light between the cliffs across from us and that camp.”
“Well, yes, but you can detach three squads from the Seventh. Byron can lead them since he’s done so good at your camouflage game. He’s familiar with the Rootless, too. He’s been in four campaigns.”
“I’ll need someone who knows their hierarchy. But I’m going, also.”
“But—”
Leland held up his hand. “I’ll not bend on that point, Myron. Just help pick the right men to come along.”
Gahnfeld clamped his mouth shut and stared back at Leland for half a minute, then said, “Very well. I’ll pick the men to accompany us.”
“Us?”
“I might as well come along. If you get killed or captured I’ll never be able to show my face in Laal again.”
Leland thought about the improprieties of the commander and second-in-command both going behind enemy lines.
“Well, I won’t tell if you won’t.”
The Pottsdam Engineers, from New New York, were working on several fords upriver, doing their best to make impassable barriers through the use of dams, trenches, and breastworks. Rootless riders, riding in and out of range, were delivering a sporadic shower of arrows. Each soldier working was accompanied by another carrying a large wood-and-felt shield. There were very few shields that didn’t have at least one arrow in them, and more than a few looked bristled, like a stand of wheat.
Leland found Captain Kuart supervising the placement of rows of sharpened logs in the gently sloping hillside above the river. He looked different without a hakama on. There were arrows sticking in the ground a few meters below where he was standing.
“Ah, de Laal. How goes it? Need some engineering at your site?”
“Sort of. I need a field ballista. Would you have one I could borrow?”
“A field ballista? What on earth for? Not exactly a cup of sugar. You need to knock down a wall or two?”
Leland told him. He’d just finished when an arrow, slanted steeply down, struck the ground beside Kuart’s foot. The captain frowned down at the projectile then turned aside and shouted, “Halvidar Smith, has the wind shifted?”
A man standing on the top of the bank with a spyglass said, “No, sir. Some of them are riding closer.”
“Instruct them in the error of their ways.”
“Sir!” The man turned around, raised his signal fan, and gestured to someone on the other side of the rise. Leland couldn’t read the signal—it wasn’t the codes used by Laal. Smith held his fan straight up then and turned back to the river.
Leland looked across the river and saw another group of mounted Rootless ride toward it, arrows at the ready. He glanced back at Smith in time to see the halvidar drop his arm sharply.
There were three deep thung sounds in close succession and something flew overhead, thrumming like a hundred giant bees.
He turned his head in time to see dust fly up on the far bank and horses scream and rear. The charge turned into a rout and several horses fled ahead with empty saddles. Some horses were down, too, but their riders stayed with them, crouched low.
“Why don’t they run?” he asked.
Gahnfeld answered him. “They have to tend their horses. If they can’t get them up and moving, they’ll cut their throats, but the Rootless won’t leave a wounded horse on the field,”
“What’d you hit them with?”
Kuart scratched his head. “About three hundred kilos of gravel. Well, not exactly gravel—the stones are graded between one half to one kilogram. Those mangonel can throw single rocks at a hundred kilos each, but the Rootless aren’t much for fortifications. They prefer to fight in the open with fluid lines of battle.”
Leland nodded. “About that ballista?”
“My word,” Kuart said. “I don’t know if I can justify lending you one of our pieces…”
Leland blinked, disappointed.
“…unless I can come along, too. To make sure it’s used properly and all that. Unit property, don’t you know.”
Leland smiled. “I don’t think it will be a picnic, Captain. It could be quite dangerous.”
Kuart leaned over and pulled the arrow by his foot from the ground and smiled.
“And we engineers don’t know anything about danger.”
“But if you insist on coming along, I can’t stop you.”
“Well,” said Kuart, “you probably could, Sensei, but I wish you wouldn’t.”
They rehearsed the operation in daylight, well away from the river, using trees an appropriate distance apart. Kuart brought a crew to operate the ballista, a horse-drawn giant crossbow with a seven-foot composite bow that was drawn by a three-man windlass. It fired steel projectiles seven centimeters thick and two meters long.
They ran through the operation four times, the last two without any problems or mistakes. Leland pronounced himself satisfied and sent the men to rest.
After midnight he couldn’t help but think, We should have practiced blindfolded. They waited, in a tree on the Noram side of the river. The cliff was two meters away, and they were four meters off the ground. Below the ballista crew waited, as well.
Leland, his face itching from the charcoal smeared across it, heard a cricket chirp four times in succession—the signal, relayed along the cliff by the sentries. He strained his ears but couldn’t hear anything but the roar of the river rapids below. Ringlight, filtered by trees, cast dim patches of light and shadow across the other side. Then he saw them, the standard night patrol, about eight mounted men riding down the far path at a trot.
Over the last five days, Leland’s sentries had recorded the passage of the patrols.
Those at night moved by about once an hour, but that could vary by half an hour either way. Gahnfeld and Leland had agreed that they had at least twenty minutes to cross, though the sentries up- and downstream were primed to alert them if there was any unexpected activity.
Leland hoped there weren’t any stationary sentries hidden on the far side, like their own.
They waited five minutes. When there were no unexpected signals from the sentries, Leland cleared his throat and said quietly, “Proceed.”
The ballista sent its grappling hook-tipped projectile out into the darkness with a harsh thwack. Leland could barely hear the sound of the rope singing endwise off its painstakingly wound spool. He couldn’t hear it land among the trees on the far side, but he heard the ballista squad running back into the trees, drawing the rope with them.
Kuart, on the branch below him, called down, “Well? Did it catch?”
“Yes, sir,” came the hissed answer. “We can’t budge it with six men.”
There was motion below and the rope was passed up, from man to man waiting in the tree. Leland took the line and passed it above, to the four men above him. At the top, Gahnfeld fed it through the open-cheeked block of a pulley, then said, “Take up the slack.”
Below the crew took the free end of the rope and pulled it back again, hauling until Gahnfeld called, “Good. Belay it!”
“Belayed!”
“Here goes nothing.”
Despite the ringlight and cloudless sky, Leland couldn’t see the blackened line stretching across the gorge, but he saw the dim shape of Gahnfeld as he slid down the rope, hanging on his well-oiled pulley. The men moved up a branch each and the soldier at the top put his pulley on the rope and waited.<
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Gahnfeld was supposed to clear the end point, making sure there weren’t any dangerous branches to run into, then strike the rope three times to signal the next man. Unless, of course, he’d been impaled on such himself. But the soldier above called down, “There’s the signal.” Then he launched himself.
The men moved up. By the time each man had properly positioned his pulley, the signal from the previous man thrummed in the rope. When it was Leland’s turn, he closed his eyes and pushed out from the tree.
The rope slanted down about fifteen degrees, ten meters off the ground on this side and just about ground level on the far side, he hoped. Above the gorge, the white-noise roar of the rapids seemed to double in volume. Leland vividly pictured the wet rocks far below. Ahead, the dark mass of trees rushed at him and his imagination solidified them, making them a solid wall he’d slam into. Then he felt small branches whipping past and his feet skidded on earth.
He stopped himself, still standing. Hands reached out to steady him, but he said, “I’m all right.” The soldier detailed to collect the pulleys held out his hand and Leland handed it to him, then he struck the rope three times with the flat of his hand. The rope thrummed under his hand as the next soldier started across. Leland stepped back away from the line and crouched against a tree.
It took less than two minutes for the remaining seven soldiers to cross. With Leland, Kuart, and Gahnfeld, plus two four-man squads from the Seventh, they were eleven in all. As soon as the last of them were off the rope, they cut the rope where it connected to the ballista projectile. The grappling hook and shaft they threw into the gorge. Leland felt cut off—isolated—but they’d agreed that the rope was likely to attract attention before they got back. Especially if a patrol rode directly into it where it crossed the path at the chest height of a mounted man.
“Ponchos,” Gahnfeld said quietly. “Lucien and Laurel—take the point. Remember, we’ve got over an hour allocated to get there so take it very slow. If you guys miss a sentry we’re all dead.”
Everybody put on the camouflaged ponchos and pulled the hoods up. They’d been supplemented with netting, grass, pine needles, and Spanish moss and, especially in the patchy light of the rings, looked like nothing more than lumps of shrubbery.
They moved through the woods from tree to tree, crouching frequently to listen to the night. As they got away from the gorge and the sound of the rapids faded, the sounds of the night became more distinct: an owl, crickets, toads, and the distant wicker of horses.
The trees thinned but were replaced by patchy bushes and evergreen shrubs interspersed with knee-high grass. They could see the camp now, a collection of eight large tents surrounding a large fire. There were horse pickets to one side and latrines to the other. On the other side of the camp, perhaps another half kilometer away, they could see a much larger camp and more fires than they could conveniently count.
The first sentries were fifty meters out, stationed in pairs every fifteen meters or so and regularly checked by a mounted officer. Other mounted patrols, apparently based at the large camp beyond, occasionally passed the camp. This was probably the source of the men who patrolled the cliff top.
Closer to camp, standing just beyond the tents, was another set of sentries, facing out. These guards were only a few meters apart and challenged all who entered the camp.
Talking in whispers, Gahnfeld, Kuart, and Leland discussed the layout.
“Look,” said Gahnfeld. “The sentries are thick as flies, and if they alert the larger camp over there, that’s over a thousand men who’ll be on us before we get a third of the way back to the Ganges.”
Kuart nodded. “It’s a point. I can’t help but notice, though…”
“Notice what?” asked Gahnfeld.
“The bushes are thicker over there, behind the privies. Because of this, there’s a spot where the sentries aren’t as close together. Also, notice that the guards of the inner circle don’t come out as far as the latrines.”
Gahnfeld snorted. “Great. We can sneak up to the latrines. If I wanted to pee, I could do it just as well right here, thank you.”
Leland smiled. “But the high and low all have to go sometime, Gahnfeld. We might hang around the privy and see what comes to us.”
Gahnfeld wrinkled his nose. “As flies to shit? The big fish probably have chamber pots.”
“Their aides probably don’t,” Kuart said. “And couriers with dispatches who want to lighten the load before hitting the road. It’s worth a try.”
Leland nodded. “It is indeed.”
They took thirty minutes to creep around to the side of camp behind the latrines.
They sat in clumps, against or in bushes, their legs tucked under their ponchos. Leland, sitting with Kuart and Gahnfeld, couldn’t tell where the bushes ended and his soldiers started, even though he’d been watching as they moved. The wind freshened slightly and the stink of urine and feces drifted to them.
“Whew!” breathed Leland. “I see why the sentries aren’t standing at just this point.”
Gahnfeld replied, speaking, if anything, even quieter. “Yes. You were right about this area of the perimeter. I don’t think we should take more than three in.”
Leland nodded. “Us three?”
“No! I’ll take two men in. If we’re discovered, get out—don’t try to mount a rescue—that’ll get all of us caught.” He pulled his hand from under the edge of his poncho and showed Leland and Kuart a sand-filled blackjack.
Leland didn’t like the thought of staying behind but something about the way Gahnfeld was holding his body convinced him that he wouldn’t win this fight. “All right,” he said.
Gahnfeld’s head twisted, waiting for the “but I’m coming, too,” but when it didn’t come forth, he nodded and Leland saw his teeth gleam in the ringlight. He slid slowly across the ground and tapped the shoulders of two of the other crouching soldiers.
Leland watched them creep forward and then vanish in the bushes, moving centimeters a minute, making no sound. He lifted his eyes and looked at the camp again. Fortunately, a large tent was between them and the fire, keeping the light from their night-adjusted eyes.
There were many awake. Small groups of men sat or stood, holding field cups. Others circulated with skins or flasks, replenishing wine and ale. An intermittent stream of men walked back and forth to the latrines, probably to give off a steady stream. The thought heightened Leland’s awareness of his own bladder.
There was a lull at the latrine, then two figures, leaning on each other, stumbled away from a large group by the fire. Leland saw several soldiers seated nearby start to rise, but one of the figures, side-lit by the fire, waved his hand and said something that caused the men to sit back down, laughing.
Interesting.
The pair, alternately laughing and swearing, made their way around the edge of the tent and then back toward the latrine. They were backlit by the glow-rimmed tent, but they were alone and no one seemed to follow.
Now, Gahnfeld, he thought. There probably wouldn’t be a better chance, and they could be the sort of fish they were after.
The bushes around the latrines were the thickest, probably chosen for privacy, so Leland couldn’t see what happened when they reached the trenches. When the two figures didn’t reappear in a few minutes, he figured Gahnfeld and the men had acted.
He licked his lips and watched the camp, hoping the two wouldn’t be missed. When Gahnfeld and the men showed up a few minutes later, they were still moving slowly, very low, to hide their profiles in the bushes. They were dragging another figure on a strip of netting. When they got close enough, Leland could see that the man was bound at ankles, knees, and waist, his hands tied behind him. He was gagged, as well, but his eyes were closed. The face was lined and bearded, dark hair shot with light streaks. Gold gleamed at his neck and belt.
“What about the other one?”
“We left him tied and gagged in the bushes.” He hefted the blackjack. “Neither of them
saw us, but if anybody misses them, the cry could go up, so let’s get moving.”
They spent thirty minutes moving slowly and quietly, to distance themselves from the camp, then, putting three men on each side of the prisoner, they picked him up by the edges of the net and advanced at a shuffle.
They’d just reached the edge of the trees when there was the harsh clanging of a iron triangle being struck repeatedly back at the camp.
“That’s torn it!” Gahnfeld said. “At the run, gentlemen.” They ran between the trees, the pine needle-covered floor silent under their feet. One of the soldiers carrying the net tripped on a root and three of them went down, spilling the prisoner, but he was snatched up again and they ran on the short distance left to the cliff.
As they listened, they heard the distant clanging spread as if every camp was sounding the alarm. They heard more and more hoofbeats as men took to horse, then they were near enough to the river that the sound of the rapids drowned out the clamor. They slowed to a walk and those not carrying the prisoner scuttled forward to check out the trail and look for the patrol.
For the moment, the immediate vicinity seemed safe. Leland reached into his shirt and took out a square of white cloth, oddly bright in the ringlight. He waved it back and forth three times, then up and down three times.
There was an answering signal from across the gorge and then he heard the thump of the ballista firing. He heard the projectile crashing through the trees overhead. He couldn’t see the rope or the projectile but heard branches rustle as the crew on the other side pulled the rope tight.
“Where is it, dammit!” he said.
Kuart pointed to their left and up. “Right here, I think.”
The crew on the other side stopped pulling, and Leland looked across for the signal cloth. He held his own out so it could be seen and the cloth on the other side signaled left. He moved slowly to his left, the cloth still held out so they could see his position, and then the cloth across the gorge signaled stop.