The Far Side
Page 43
“Thunder rods?” the young lieutenant mumbled in the darkness. “How can we fight thunder rods?”
Collum sighed. “Andie and Kris held off ten times their number! Only half our men had crossbows!” He hoped no one would mention that Kris and Andie had their smaller thunder rods or that at the end, Andie was firing three crossbows, and Kris two, because the four men who’d carried them before were dead or wounded.
“We’ll rouse before the sun rises, and if they are indeed following you, we’ll give them a surprise, thunder rods or not,” he continued, sounding confident.
In fact, he remembered a place a few miles back that would be a perfect spot for an ambush!
Men had trouble sleeping as the word spread through the camp, and well before dawn men were awake and eating, getting ready for the day. They marched the few miles quickly, and Collum gathered together the men.
“Below us is a small lake, left over from the rains. We are on top of a small hill, shaped here like a child’s bow, drawn too far. We will put some wagons on top of this hill and about twenty men. At sunset, they will light a cooking fire and go about their business. With luck, the Tengri will come at first light, thinking their thunder rods will make short work of us!
“Most of us will be behind the two flanks of the hill. When they start shooting, we will let them fire a volley, then step up to the top of the hill, shoot quickly, and then go back to reload the crossbows. Bowmen, get a picture of what lies below and start firing volleys over the top of hill, to land among them.
“You men by the wagons, don’t be in a rush to get up! As soon as we see them coming, we’ll pass the word. Hide behind the wagons and fire some arrows in their direction and then get down and stay down.”
Collum smiled. “And, in case this is a bad mistake, I’ll see you all in a week in Arvala! If we have to run, run! Don’t wait on anything else! You know what mercy they show to those who fight them!”
Aye, they chopped off their heads with axes. Why bother to surrender to the Tengri? It wasn’t as though they were going to let you live.
Collum wasn’t terribly upset that the lieutenant refused to countenance Collum being one of those in the camp, placing him on the left instead. The Tengri, if defeated, would have to withdraw east first, before going around the long thin, lake. He would lead the men south and see if they could kill a few more of them.
These things never work out like you plan. Everything was going well, with Collum lying under a thick bush when the Tengri fired their thunder rods. He kicked himself for forgetting that part of what others had reported! The billows of smoke completely obscured the men who’d fired. He signed for everyone to stay down.
Kissom, sharper than most had his men up and ready to shoot, but most of them realized that there was nothing to shoot at, and then realized that Collum’s men were still in hiding. Two men fired bolts which was something he was sure Kissom would fix quickly. Kissom’s men also vanished behind the hill.
Seeing nothing but a mass of smoke, the men on the hilltop started firing arrows at random into the mess, knowing that they wouldn’t hit anything, but at the same time, making their enemies wary.
A minute later the wind cleared the smoke and Collum could see that few men stood with their thunder rods ready, most were busy with them. He called for his men to rise and shoot then.
The volley took the Tengri by surprise, and a few turned towards them and fired. Kissom had seen what he’d done and had his men shoot as well a few moments after Collum’s men did. There wasn’t nearly as much smoke, and even more of the Tengri went down. Worse for the Tengri, their officers had called attention to Collum’s force, and had their men face that threat, letting Kissom’s men hit them with an unanswered volley.
Shots came from the mass of smoke, one at a time, as men got ready. Archers train from the time they are boys, and the men with Collum were some of the finest archers from Arvala, and new weapons or not, they remembered their training. “Front rank! Advance and fire!”
Half the men stepped forward and fired, and after a long thirty count, he had the second half fire. There were only a few Tengri left, now under intermittent arrow shot from the hill, and repeated volleys from the flanks. They stayed longer than Collum thought they would, but from the way they milled around, Collum thought it was because there was no one left to give the order to withdraw. Finally the half dozen survivors turned and ran.
To Collum’s surprise, the men threw away their weapons and packs and jumped in the lake and swam to the other side.
“I want men down there now!” Collum said, waving at the battle field. “I want everything off those bodies! Then I want the heads hacked off and piled in a pyramid! After that, look over the area and find as many quarrels as you can, whether or not they’re broken! Bring them back!”
He had a runner pass an identical order to Kissom and he walked slowly downhill, letting the younger men be the first to find out if any of the Tengri were shamming. Some had, of course, there had been thirty of them and it was too much to hope for that they’d killed them all.
Still, they didn’t sham for long, and the lieutenant brought a wagon down which quickly proved its worth as they threw their gleanings into it.
By midday, they were headed back up the hill. The lieutenant saluted and pointed southwest. “I was about to call you back, Sachem. That isn’t good, is it?”
He looked and saw it. It would have been a nightmare, except for Andie! A ship glided along the water, mountains of white sails billowing in the wind.
The ship itself was dark against the sea, and it was still several miles away. A word popped into his head. Arbalest.
Ezra had hinted that his people had larger weapons than the ones they carried. Wouldn’t a ship need something larger than a thunder rod a man could carry?
He acted instantly. “Wagons over the hill, to the east, stay out of sight! Men! You too! We don’t want to find out if that ship has thunder rods larger than these men carried!”
Men moved with a laugh, knowing that they had foiled men with thunder rods that they themselves had been in awe of -- yesterday. If you were brave, if you were clever, you could kill men armed with thunder rods just as easily as any other man -- and if you were foolish and stupid, like the Tengri had been, it didn’t matter what your enemies were armed with.
Sure enough, he had a few men stay on the hilltop, but who could quickly scramble to cover. They waved bows at the ship, and the side of the ship vanished in huge billows of smoke.
Everyone fell flat, and moments later came sounds that were terrifying. Something hit a wagon and the wagon flew into a thousand pieces, and a round object rolled past Collum and started downhill. Someone made to stop it, but Collum waved him away, watching the weapon warily.
One man had a piece of the wood from the wagon in his arm, but it wasn’t a serious wound, and Collum had the rest of the wagons and men moved before the ship had emerged from the cloud of smoke and turned back on its course.
Once again he owed Andie a debt of gratitude. He’d heard her talk about ships like this and how fast they could turn around. He laughed. If Andie was Tengri, she was a far more of a traitor to them than to Arvala!
This time there was no billow of smoke, but that was because there wasn’t anything to shoot at. Collum watched from cover carefully, but the ship continued back south without stopping.
He looked at the object that had come to a stop near the bottom of the hill rolling a simply amazing distance. It was still warm to the touch, and it was extremely heavy. Cast iron, he thought. He had a man carry it to one of the wagons and wedge it into place.
There was no safe way to continue south. Sure, he’d surprised and beat a patrol, but he was sure that they would shrug that off if Kissom was right about how many of them there had been back at their camp. He turned the column around and headed north.
After that, at least once a day, the ship would glide past, but he kept the column well away from the water.
If they’d just sailed north as fast as they could, they would have arrived at Arvala long before a warning could have arrived, and that would have been a catastrophe. The ship’s thunder rods would have made porridge out of their ships and severely damaged the town and would have killed who knew how many people.
As it was, the ship was as impotent as their men with their thunder rods had been.
* * *
Melek heard the messengers’ warning and afterward tried not to feel despair, even if Collum had destroyed the Tengri he’d faced. Sure, he’d destroyed them, but had turned around and was headed home as fast as he could go. Melek thanked the messengers, called for some of his own and relayed the messages further west, urging the King to come with all dispatch, but to beware of unknown ships on the sea.
Kris, Andie, and Ezra had stood by while he’d heard the report and now he turned to them. “What should I do?”
Ezra told him of the motto of a band of soldiers from his world -- Who Dares, Wins.
“Yes, the weapons that ship bears will do frightful damage. You are going to lose the docks and all the buildings close to them. There is nothing you can do about that. But those guns won’t be able to reach far into the town -- there are too many stone buildings. While if they shoot for long enough, they can bring those down, but they would need a lot of powder and shot. No, once they destroy the docks, they’ll stop, unless they see concentrations of soldiers.
“It is possible that they will try a landing. You need to rush the crossbow construction again.”
Melek nodded at that. The men had other things to do with their time, and while they were still making a few dozen crossbows a day, they’d only made a hundred over the last week. The bright spot there was that the smiths had listened to Andie describe how to make a great many quarrels quickly, and they’d made nearly a hundred thousand in the two weeks since Collum had gone south. They had about five hundred crossbows and if he put people once again to making as many as he could, they could have a thousand or more, perhaps.
“But Ezra, crossbows against thunder rods! They will kill my people!”
Ezra nodded. “Yes. But you can do some things to reduce that number, Melek. Many things. Your men can hide in buildings and behind buildings, they can dig holes and crouch in them. Then they shoot any Tengri that tries to enter the city. When you pop up in a window and fire a crossbow from a hundred yards, you are essentially even with a man with a thunder rod. If you shoot before he sees you, you have a good chance.
“The men they send to attack the city will be the men who work the thunder rods of the ship, and who work the sails. They can’t afford to lose many of them or it will hamper the operation of the ship. They aren’t going to be able to press home the attack. The city has too many stone buildings to burn, but there are wooden buildings by the docks -- so expect them to be burned, but usually they’d try to destroy the city with fire.”
“The ships...” Melek moaned. The Golden Bough was in constant use, showing other ship masters and crews what it could do. Two more smaller ships were being modified. They would all be lost!
Andie was reassuring. “Sail them west, away from the city. Someplace to the west, the forest comes down to the water, does it not?”
“Yes, of course. A hundred miles or so, there are places. Further west... the trees actually grow in the sea.”
“Good! What you do is sail the ships west and bring them as close to the shore as you can get them. Cut branches and things from trees and tie them to the ship to break up the ship’s outline. A ship as big as the Tengri have can’t sail close to shore -- they have to stay a mile or more away from the coast. It makes it very hard to find single ships hiding against the land.”
Melek’s heart stopped pounding. “You’re saying that we can survive?”
“Yes. You’ll take some damage,” Ezra told him, “but you can fix that quickly enough. The people of Arvala are what’s important here. You can put a lot of them in the stairwell up the cliff, and on top of the cliff. They’ll be safe there. They can come out of hiding as soon as the Tengri leave.”
Melek had to say what he felt. “Ezra, Kris, Andie -- I do not know what unkindness brought you here, but the fate that was unkind to you was beyond kind to us. If these blows had fallen on us when we were unprepared -- it would have been a catastrophe.”
Kris said something and Ezra translated it. “Kris says that it’s enough to make a believer out of her.”
“Believer?” Melek asked.
“I haven’t talked about beliefs much. Just honor and duty,” Ezra said.
Melek frowned. “What else is there?”
Ezra said something to Kris and Andie and it was Kris’ face that Melek searched. Of all of them, Kris seemed to be the one who most understood things.
“Kris says we have our beliefs and regrets that honor and duty aren’t as important as they once were among our people -- or yours. Nothing is as important as they once were. We will talk on this later... she says you will have enough to do just now, and that you won’t need any distractions.”
Melek could agree with that!
He called in the city council and the ship masters. They were all aghast at the news, demanding that the King do something -- even though the King was undoubtedly far to the west.
Melek was blunt. “We can’t wait for the King, we can’t wait for anything. That ship could appear tomorrow -- and we must make preparations. I need men to make crossbows, I need men to make quarrels. You ship masters, those of you who want to have ships when the Tengri have gone, will need to move your ships west and hide them.”
“Stolz is just three hundred miles west,” one man said. “We should be safe there.”
“Oh?” Melek asked. “And Stolz has thunder rods to defend the docks? Their soldiers have crossbows and men who know how to make and use them? They have many iron quarrels to kill the Tengri?”
There was no answer to that, of course. Melek wasn’t sure if some of the ships would go there anyway, but he’d warned them and that was all he could do.
The council ordered work and warned people of the town to hasten to the citadel if there was an attack.
When dawned gleamed the next day, Melek was on the walls at first light and was pleased to see the sea was empty as far as he could see. The watch was tripled and he left to supervise men training with Ezra how to fight in a city.
It didn’t take long for Melek to realize that their military training had been all wrong. It wasn’t just the Chain Breakers that had unrealistic training, all of them did, when it came to fighting an enemy like the Tengri. Oh, they were good against dralka and the various smaller predators and they stayed away from the larger ones. But for twelve hundred years the only enemy that had fought back was Rangar and history showed how well that battle had been waged!
Still, even at the end of one day it was possible to see that most of the garrison, no matter what fighting order the men belonged to, had vastly improved. The prospect of an imminent fight to protect their families and homes concentrated the city’s soldiers’ attention fiercely.
He had almost put the possibility of an attack out of his mind when a runner came pelting up. “Lieutenant Melek! There is a strange ship coming from the south! The watch says it is very large.”
Melek and Ezra ran all the way to the watch post on the wall. Melek cursed for the first time. “We should have built the wall along the shore of the ocean, too!”
Ezra shook his head. “It would have been a waste of time. We’re not going to want to be up here when that ship gets close, because it’s going to reduce this tower to a pile of rubble -- as it would reduce any wall you have built to rubble as well.”
“Like your thunder rod did to the wall i
n the council chamber?”
“Like that, except mine fires a great many very small objects very fast. The ship will fire relatively few shots, and they won’t be going very fast, but they will cause a lot of damage.
“Spread the word -- I forgot this the other day, and Collum mentioned it. No one is to try to stop one of those balls while it is still moving. They are very heavy, and if you try to stop one with a hand or foot, you’ll lose the hand or foot. Don’t mess with them -- just remember where it stops and we can collect them later.”
“Collect them?” Melek asked.
“Aye. I don’t know if Andie knows how to make this kind of thunder rod, but I do. You’d better start gathering as much iron as you can, because no matter how much you have, you don’t have enough.”
“There is perhaps three tons!” Melek said. “That isn’t enough?”
“That’s enough for maybe two small guns or fifty balls. You will also need lots of charcoal, yellow stuff from volcanoes, and white stuff from manure piles.”
“What?” Melek said, disbelieving.
“Yeah, hard to imagine, but you won’t believe what can be done with those three things. Not the least of which, great huge thunder rods that will throw several pounds of iron a few miles.”
Melek looked at him. “How much do your people know?”
Ezra clapped him on the back. “You’d be surprised how little we know! A long time ago, one man could learn everything important. That time has long since passed. Now, we are lucky if we can remember the simplest things.”
The sun sank behind the horizon, and there was still no sign of the Tengri ship.
The next morning the sky was gray and cloudy, first light was delayed a half hour. Even as visibility increased, Melek could see a ship many miles to the south. He called out the alarm, and the city woke up. Soldiers hugged their wives and children and rushed to their duty posts. The wives hurried their children along to the citadel and up the interminable steps.