by Colin Kapp
‘There’s been so sign of interference from his men in the province.’
‘Then the fact that he hasn’t called on them must mean either that he considers you no threat or that he’s confident that his garrison here can deal with you adequately on their own. Your prospects don’t look too bright either way.’
Ren surveyed the sky. The sun was already beginning to draw down on the horizon.
‘Did you ever think, my Lord, that the Imaiz may not be infallible? When darkness falls I intend to take these ballistae closer so that we can throw even larger jars of flaming spirit inside those walls. No matter how good his defenses, they can’t function if they’re afire. When the garrison is fully occupied putting out blazes, we’ll launch our main attack on the gates. If we can manage to breach even one gate successfully we’ll run whole barrels of spirit inside the walls and fire these also. We have the catapults, we have the ramps and we have more than enough combustibles to fill Magda with a sea of flame. Are you thinking that Dion can withstand even that?’
‘It’s a good plan and a bold one,’ said Di Irons grudgingly. ‘On the face of it, you should succeed. But I’ll wager the Imaiz knows every detail of the scheme. If he has not yet moved against you, it’s because he knows your chances of success are quite remote.’
‘On that point we’ll agree to differ. Only the morning will tell which of us was right.’
‘I think you’ll find it a long night. And I wish you welcome to it, Tito. This is one night I’ve no wish to spend on Thirdhill. If I can’t persuade you to your senses, I’ll take my leave. I think tomorrow there’ll be many graves to supervise.’
When the prefect had gone, Ren spared no time in calling together his lieutenants and ensuring that they were all in accord with the details for the coming battle. The ballistae were handed over to teams which had been instructed carefully on both the method and the timing of their use. The general relocation of troops had already begun and every foreseen aspect of the campaign had been fully covered. After a final inspection of the stockpiles of inflammables and the supply lines on which so much of the plan depended, Ren gave the final order to proceed.
Though no one knew it but himself, he had approached his final moment of decision with mixed feelings. Di Irons was a hard-headed realist, whose knowledge of probabilities in Anharitte was not to be dismissed lightly. Di Irons had predicted that the attack would fail. While Ren did not concur, he had to allow that the prefect’s opinion was based on lifelong experience in Anharitte and carried a great deal of weight. Ren was not one to dismiss informed opinion lightly, and to underestimate Dion-daizan could be fatal.
Because he and Catuul were to join the selected armsmen who were to make the attack on the main gates, Ren and the scribe made a circuitous journey first west and then north to a point well below the township where part of the attacking party was mustering. Here were men fresh into the field, having just arrived up the Magda Road where they had been encamped as a reserve. They had completed their journey on time and Catuul was pleased to find that everything was in excellent order.
The close warmth of the early night was beginning to fade as the assembled troop moved off up the ragged road that followed the upward slope between the dark ridges of the hill. The prognosis for the attack was promising. Ren had hand-picked men fresh to the battle and backed them up with small carts carefully laden with more than sufficient inflammables to fire the castle. Even Catuul was beginning to feel that the operation must succeed.
The wheels of the carriers’ carts which regularly used this route had worn shallow grooves into the granite of the underlying rocks. In the moonless light from the Rim sky Ren found these furrows a useful guide, presenting a surface certainly more congenial to walk upon than the broken roughness of the rest of the road. About fifty men were ahead of him and as many following. In the true tradition of the societies the whole column moved silently, neither singing nor talking, their soft steps giving no indication that an army was on the march. Even the wheels of the little carts had been muffled, Ren found their quietness almost eerie. He was acutely conscious of the sound of his own boots on the hard underfooting.
The catastrophe was all the more terrifying because it lacked any warning. Many of those who died scarcely had time to raise a shocked scream to their lips before they were destroyed. From somewhere out of the darkness a giant boulder, roughly spherical, plunged from a high place and thundered with sickening momentum between the cheeks of the road. Such was its force and unexpectedness that the first part of the column was crushed before the men had time to realize the nature of the thing which had leaped upon them. Comprehension of the nature of the threat was accompanied by a wild scramble by those following to climb the banks to avoid being mashed.
Weighing many hundred tons, the boulder had been finely calculated to fit the contours of the road without becoming embedded in the banks. Its trajectory must have been set for maximum effect in this precise application. Certainly its release from a place of rest on an adjacent hillside was no accident, but even the authors of the misfortune could scarcely have hoped for such a truly devastating effect. The boulder went straight through the column of marching men, grinding flesh and bone alike into the dust. Even the frail carts at the rear were crushed completely, together with the patient animals and the men who held their reins. The only ones who were spared were those who were quick enough to break formation and climb the bank in time to save themselves.
Aghast, Ren rose from the side of the bank where he had thrown himself and tried to estimate the severity of the damage. At least thirty were dead and as many more injured. The enormity of the damage and its improbable swiftness robbed him of words. The impact of that one great stone somehow symbolized all he had been told of the wrath of the Imaiz. In abstract such anger had been something to face with equanimity—translated into crushed flesh and shattered bones, its aspect assumed a far more daunting hue. The rumble of the boulder still traveling down the distant slopes was audible above the cries of the injured. Ren was sick on the spot.
Catuul Gras had taken command while Ren attempted to draw himself out of his shock. Already messengers had been sent to fetch help and sick-wagons for the injured. The fit men been drawn aside and counted and lost weapons were replaced by arms taken from the dead. In battle the Pointed remained practical to the last.
‘Friend Tito, we’re ready to proceed.’
The scribe was sympathetic toward Ren’s condition, but the whole battle was lost if the commander faltered. Ren, feeling the true pains of responsibility for the massacre of so many of those he had hired, would have preferred, to have retired from the fight at that point. It had once more been driven home to him that he was a merchant, not a soldier, and that fighting was only a part of a commander’s burden—the other part was the acceptance of death, his own and those of his men. This was one aspect of making war that had never been made apparent to him in books.
At the back of his mind the clear voice of conscience reminded him that those who had died had given their lives for the maintenance of the free trade principle—but the benefits of the principle’s survival would go almost entirely to the nameless outworld moguls who controlled the strings of interstellar trade. Catuul’s men had died in the service of someone else’s greed.
TWENTY-TWO
Ren pulled himself together suddenly. The realities of the situation became brutally clear. Whatever the morality, he was already committed. There could be no turning back.
‘I’m with you, Catuul. Have you sent for reinforcements?”
‘No. But we’ll be joining the rest of the party at the town ship. That’ll have to be enough. They’ll have extra combustibles also.’
The remaining element of the troop continued with the march. Heeding the lesson so desperately learned, they broke file and walked’ high on the banks above the road in case a second boulder should follow the first. To their right the hill rose steeply into the blackness of a coniferous wood per
ched precariously high against the towering skyline and it was a reasonable certainty that those responsible for launching the boulder were still up there among the trees.
Catuul called for scouts and sent them ahead up the bank to ascertain what dangers might still be lurking. Ten minutes later a minor landslide heralded something rolling down the slopes. Cautious investigation revealed the bodies of the scouts with their throats cut. They had been rolled back down to rejoin their comrades. At no time had there been any sight of or sound from the hidden enemy, and Catuul viewed the road ahead with considerable apprehension.
Ren decided on a detour. His reasoning was that their progress along this particular road had been anticipated and the route would probably contain several further traps. If they struck a new path across country, they might encounter nothing more than random patrols. Catuul agreed and the party made a wide detour that much later fetched it to the road at the entrance to the township.
Here the rest of the attackers were waiting—and listening to an agitated messenger who had been unable to locate Catuul in the darkness. The messenger held a long and involved conversation with Catuul and repeatedly pointed beyond Magda to where Ren was beginning to discern a broad area of light in the sky. Finally Catuul approached him to report.
‘Some of the ballistae are in trouble. Dion used cannon to knock a couple of them out. He had also managed to project some sort of incendiary into two of our stockpiles. The fires you see are our own emplacements burning.’
‘Have we still enough ballistae to set Magda afire?’
‘Easily enough. We’ve seven left and even three would be adequate.’
‘Then let them commence firing. The quicker we can move now, the more surely we can win. Are we ready to assault the castle gates?’
‘The men are ready. We’re waiting for some more tar and oil to get through to replace some we lost, but it can follow us later. First we have to get into attack position.’
‘Then let’s get on with it,’ said Ren. ‘We’ve still a fair way to go to reach the castle and Dion’s obviously expecting us.’
Soon the sounds of renewed hostilities became loud in the air. The night sky began to echo to the firing of muskets and the occasional roar of cannon. Although nothing was yet to be seen, Ren knew that his ballistae must have already started launching the great spirit jars over Magda’s walls. Soon he hoped to see evidence of fires within the castle perched directly above where he now stood. It was necessary that his assault troops moved swiftly into position ready to seize the most advantageous time to breach the gates. Ren began to feel better. His previous horror was soon lost in the preoccupation of renewed activity.
The township of Magda was built of streets steeply sloped , toward the castle at its head. The inhabitants had wisely stayed inside their houses and behind locked doors—the streets were deserted save for where Ren’s army thronged the lower square. The way ahead up the narrow cobbled street was lit by occasional watch flares which dimly illuminated the way almost to the foot of the castle.
Despite the apparent overtness of the action Catuul insisted that a small troop of men go ahead to ensure that no ambush had been laid from the dark alleys that laced the township. Ren felt that his role should have placed him at their head, but he acquiesced to Catuul’s more informed objection. Catuul needed men he had trained. The scouting party would be visible right to the top of the hill and could easily exchange with the men below.
Ren’s decision to remain was nearly the cause of his immediate death. The square was flanked by buildings formed from the traditional granite of the hills. Without warning—and by obvious design—one of these collapsed, its walls falling outward to scatter granite blocks far across the square and on the heads of the unfortunate troops mustered beneath. The nature of the mechanics by which this trick was wrought was not apparent, but its effect was catastrophic. As the walls had begun to bulge Catuul had thrown Ren clear and the agent had received merely a startled impression of an apparently solid wall of masonry seeming to become plastic as it bent and twisted outward to engulf a great many of his men.
Shaken by his second near escape of the evening, Ren’s reaction this time was one of immense anger. He was sure the scheme could not have been devised and executed without the foreknowledge and cooperation of the inhabitants and he charged Catuul to make them pay for their indiscretion as soon as it was light. Meanwhile Ren’s own task was becoming increasingly urgent. The scouting party reported by light signals that the way was apparently safe and clear. Leaving fresh dead and wounded to be extricated from the ruins of the building, Ren started up the road, calling for men to follow him to the gates of Magda.
Had he given the matter more thought Ren might have been less brave. As he strode ahead he realized that even in the dim flarelight his merchant’s costume must have made him conspicuous among the armsmen and rendered him an easy target for a trained sniper. A sharpshooter with a modern electronoptic rifle hidden in one of Magda’s towers could have killed him at any moment. From his experience with the balloons Ren was reasonably certain that Dion did possess some of these weapons. He was forced to recognize that he was relying on the Imaiz voluntarily limiting his show of arms to those that would seem to be appropriate to the type of battle being offered.
Both he and Dion were playing a game—a war game carefully dressed to suit the character and background of Anharitte. But at what point would Dion’s hand be forced so that he would be playing a game no longer? At some point before he was broken, the Imaiz would be forced by the dictates of survival to drop the pretense and reply with whatever weapons he possessed, regardless of their origin or propriety. Or did Dion truly have his boulder and falling-wall technique so well organized that even now he had no fear of the army moving up the sloping street?
Halfway up the hill Ren heard a shout from the men above him. He called back, anxious to know what they had found. He was not long left doubting. With a hideous clatter a large wheeled cart, heavily laden with blocks of stone and held unnoticed in some recess, had begun to run down the slope toward him. The very narrowness of the street precluded the escape of all but the lucky as the juggernaut hurtled with ever increasing momentum toward the knot of anguished men.
On either side the sleeping houses left neither gaps nor alcoves nor open doors through which the men might escape. The width of the cart was nearly three quarters of the width of the road itself and, although it must leave some men unharmed, the trick would be to estimate precisely against which wall one should hug one’s self and hope. At one point the cart snagged against brickwork and the iron bands of its hubs shot visible sparks into the air and threatened to divert the cart to a stop against the wall. But the vehicle broke free, ran across the road, ricochetted off the other side and centered again on its murderous course.
Ren took the only action open to him. Trying to judge the most probable path the vehicle would take, he pressed himself against a wall and prayed. His prayer was not answered. By an apparently willful deviation of its direction the thundering cart moved again across the road and soon was upon him.
Even before the flying wheels made contact Ren knew his injury was going to be savage. The weight and speed of the unattended juggernaut left no doubt of the outcome. When it hit him he was going to be crushed. The heavy axle caught his thigh, and he went partly over the shaft and partly between it and the wall. The shock and pain of so grave an injury was mercifully foreshortened by unconsciousness—but he remembered thinking, as the fringes of darkness closed about him, that with those sort of injuries he would prefer not to live.
Some unknown time later he partially awoke—enough to be conscious of bright flares around him and of an unnatural numbness. He could see Eynes, the surgeon from the spaceport, bending over him, instruments in hand. Somewhere behind the surgeon and barely in focus the red-on-gold emblems of the sick-wagon of the Society of Pointed Tails danced in the flickering flames. He could hear Di Irons’ voice, but could not see him. R
en tried to concentrate on what was being said.
‘I’ll not let them take him… there’s not one society hospital in Anharitte has a chance of repairing that!’
Eynes cut in plaintively. ‘We’d need the operating theater facilities of a Stellar Cruiser to save him—and the nearest must be better than three weeks out.’
There was another gap in time, then a slight return to consciousness as the whisper of a cushion-craft cut through the enveloping clouds of internal darkness. He caught a glimpse of Eynes’ face by torchlight, a picture of worried indecision followed by a shrug and a gesture that meant capitulation. Firm hands gently rocked Ren—next he dimly recognized a pneumatic stretcher that lifted him without movement or dislocation. He experienced a disoriented passage through the air past the bright flames, a moment of unreal eternity he knew he would remember to his death. Then came darkness and a voice like Di Irons’ was raging loudly and furiously about his encirclement by fools and villains.
Then nothing—a long, long nothing. He struggled from time to time to break through into consciousness and almost succeeded, only to be defeated by something circulating in his bloodstream. The only thing Ren felt with certainty was that he had not died.
TWENTY-THREE
Gradually he awoke fully: He was in a bed under sheets of clinical whiteness. Though he feared to explore his condition, the form beneath the fabrics assured him he had not lost his legs. The room was a curved white cocoon, more aseptic and more expensively appointed than any hospital room of his experience. The bulk of smooth equipment at his bedside told of the continuous monitoring of his condition by medical computers.