Colours in the Steel f-1

by K. J. Parker

  Loredan took a deep breath. ‘We’re being smashed to pieces on the east bastion,’ he said. ‘And if we lose that, we lose the three-hundred-yard zone. I need that sortie.’

  The Prefect shrugged. ‘I had my doubts about the bastions from the start,’ he said. ‘Now, obviously, they aren’t viable. We’ll have to write the experiment off as impractical and go back to the original plan of defence in depth on the walls.’

  Loredan managed to control his temper. ‘If we lose the zone,’ he said, ‘they’ll be able to bring up their minor engines, and then they’ll drive us off the old wall as well. And we’ll be in bowshot, and they’ve got more archers and bows that shoot further. If we ride down their trebuchet crews we’ll slow their rate of fire, give ourselves a chance to sort out the mess up there on the bastion; we’ll be able to match them and the zone’ll be safe. Please, I need that time.’

  The Prefect thought for a moment. ‘How many men would you need?’

  ‘A hundred, a hundred and fifty. It’d be speed and surprise rather than numbers; the whole bloody clan’s out there watching the show from the edge of the zone.’

  ‘And you think you can manage to get in position without being seen? Won’t they see your men landing and wonder what they’re up to? And surely they’ve got detachments stationed deep to guard the rafts.’

  Loredan shrugged. ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘Personally, I rate the chances of rolling them up like a carpet and getting the boys back into the city by dinner time as very slender indeed. But unless you want to give Temrai control of the wall by nightfall, we’re going to have to try something. If you’ve got a better idea, I’d love to hear it.’

  ‘There’s the mercenary horse-archers,’ said a voice behind Loredan’s head; Liras Fanedrin, something or other high up in the Office of Establishments. Loredan still wasn’t quite sure what exactly it was that the Office of Establishments actually did. ‘They’re expendable, and it sounds like their sort of work.’

  Loredan shook his head. ‘Mercenaries don’t do suicide missions,’ he said. ‘It’ll have to be city troops.’

  The Prefect looked annoyed. ‘Oh, very well,’ he sighed. ‘Liras, your department. What about the ship?’

  ‘Different department.’ Fanedrin shook his head. ‘Requisitioning ships is Office of Supply, not us,’ he replied. ‘Get Teo Oliefro onto it. I think I saw him around here a moment ago.’ He turned to Loredan, and said, ‘Any ideas about who’s going to command? You’ll want someone good, but not that good.’

  Loredan was about to object; he’d assumed he’d be leading the force himself, since he was in charge. It hadn’t occurred to him to send somebody else.

  ‘Piras Muzin,’ he said. ‘He’ll do what he’s told, and he hasn’t got the imagination to realise he won’t be coming back.’

  Expendable – yes, like advocates in the lawcourts. If it was Muzin or me, out there in the centre, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. And besides, if I went I’d probably lose my nerve and run away.

  ‘Good choice,’ said Fanedrin. ‘You’d better brief him. We should be ready to go within the hour.’

  Fanedrin and the Prefect went away, and Loredan collapsed into the window seat. Suddenly he felt very tired, and he didn’t want to have to go back up on the wall, where the stones came crashing down and everything seemed to be going wrong. It would be nice to stay here for a while; much easier to think things through clearly in peace and quiet, and there wasn’t anything useful for him to do up there. And as for Piras Muzin – well, people died every day, and he couldn’t be held accountable for that. A little time; patch up the bastion, clear away the mess, replace the smashed engines, make it so we can start again from the beginning.

  His head was splitting; noise and dust and fear and exertion. A drink would be a good idea. A drink would not be a good idea. Dangerous enough up on that wall without a spinning head. He stood up while he still could and walked slowly to the bridgehouse, where he could watch the fun.

  Piras Muzin, a man Loredan had spoken to six or seven times, handled things very well. He’d been in charge of a wing of the cavalry during the mess upriver; he’d shepherded his people through the gap in the line that Loredan had opened, gone on to help relieve the ambush at the upper ford, stayed with it through the retreat and the return to the city. He’d have made a reasonable regular officer, something near the bottom of the chain of command in Maxen’s army.

  From the bridgehouse it looked rather more like a game, and Loredan kept himself amused while he was waiting by keeping score. The advantage was still with Temrai, but his rate of fire had slowed down; hard to tell at this distance, but his engineers looked as if they were having trouble with the engines shaking themselves to bits after so much continuous use. The city engines were keeping up a better, steadier rate, but only one in fifteen shots was having any effect. The other side scored about one hit in twenty, but a good third of their shots were hitting the bastion there or thereabouts, and even the clean misses were mostly clearing the wall. Odd, to be a spectator for a change; he could see how people got to like watching. He wondered if any of the other men on the tower with him would be interested in a small bet.

  When the time came, the cavalry action was short and not particularly spectacular. Muzin did exactly as he’d been told; his men came out from behind the cover of the hills and rode through the engineers, cutting and slashing downwards from the saddle at men who hadn’t been expecting anything of the sort, working as quickly and efficiently as farm workers harvesting a crop. At least half of them stayed at it until Temrai’s horsemen reached them; the rest tried to get out, but there wasn’t time. Although it was largely irrelevant and not part of the mission, they put up a fine show against the plainsmen before they were overwhelmed. It was all in the very finest traditions of the service.

  And, once the mess had been sorted out, the mule-trains came and pulled the trebuchets out of the zone. Of the thirty-five enemy engines that had been used, eighteen were still working or capable of being repaired. Looking across at the bastion, Loredan could see nine catapult arms silhouetted against the sky; nine out of sixteen, not so bad after all. Of course, tomorrow would be another day.

  Loredan yawned and stretched; no rest for him tonight, not until the bastion had been patched up, as far as that was possible, and new engines hauled up to replace the losses. He’d already decided where to get the replacement engines from; four from the western bastion, one from the gatehouse, and two straight from the arsenal with the pitch still wet. He would have to organise teams to recover as many of the enemy’s stones as were still fit for use; chances were that the day had produced a net profit as far as ammunition was concerned. The main problem would be trained engineers; he was going to have to strip the rest of the defences, certainly most of the western side, if he wanted to be sure of having enough men on hand to replace tomorrow’s losses without slowing up the rate of fire. On the other hand, Temrai would be facing the same problem.

  By and large, then, an evenly balanced day; nothing significant gained by either side, the whole job to do over again.

  Ah, well. At least we didn’t make complete fools of ourselves.

  He’d have liked to have stayed longer, high up and out of it all, but a messenger from Garantzes summoned him back to the bastion – problems with structural damage requiring a policy decision. He walked slowly and found climbing the stairs a great effort. When he was two-thirds of the way up, he noticed a long slit across the left knee of his trousers, surrounded by a wide bloodstain. He paused to examine the wound, which he hadn’t noticed until now. It was a long, deep cut, quite clean and made by something extremely sharp, probably a splinter of stone. It must have happened several hours previously because the blood was dry on his skin, just starting to flake off. He made a mental note to deal with it later, if he got the chance.

  ‘Not good,’ Garantzes reported. ‘This whole section of the wall’s taken one hell of a pounding, gods alone know what’s holding it up.
We can shore it with beams and try and get some mortar in, but it really wants pulling down and doing again.’

  ‘Fine,’ Loredan said wearily. ‘And maybe you could ask the enemy to hold the ladder for you while you’re doing it.’

  Garantzes didn’t think that was particularly funny. ‘All I can think of,’ he said, ‘would be to tear down some other bit of wall and use the blocks to build an inner wall to line this one with, give it something to lean against. It’d take time, of course, but it’d be a damn sight quicker than getting new blocks cut, even if we’ve got that much raw stone in the city. If we put it in dry-stone it’d save time, and we can use the trebuchet cranes to do the hauling. If we stuck with it day and night and had enough manpower, I could do a reasonable job in a couple of weeks.’

  Loredan shook his head. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘My guess is they’ll try and move their engines back into the zone during the night so they can start the barrage again at first light. That’s how long you’ve got.’

  ‘Impossible. In that case, my advice to you is to get all these engines shifted off here tonight; that way, when the bastion goes down tomorrow it won’t take the best of our artillery with it.’

  So it had all been for nothing; the heroic cavalry charge, Piras Muzin laying down his life for his city, all the effort involved in building the bastions in the first place. Now he was going to give the order to take down the engines they’d just hoisted up and put them back on the old wall, abandoning the advantage of the three-hundred-yard zone and inviting the enemy to come in close enough to let their archers sweep the defenders from the walls. As simply done as that. ‘All right,’ he said.

  ‘Pity,’ Garantzes said thoughtfully. ‘Now, if we’d had a series of these bastions all along the wall it’d have been a damn good idea. Just one, and all we did was give them a single target to aim at.’

  Removing the engines without bringing the wall down took most of the night. One of Garantzes’ men had his leg crushed – he’d shouted, ‘Hold it!’ to the people feeding out the rope, but they hadn’t heard him – and another put his foot on a bit of wall that wasn’t there any longer and broke an arm and several ribs. When the sun rose, it revealed a line of trebuchets just inside the three-hundred-yard zone, their arms back and their slings loaded.

  Temrai gave the word, and the line advanced.

  Thanks to his census, Temrai knew how many men walked with him towards the city; three thousand, the best archers in the clan, each man carrying two quivers of twenty arrows each. A hundred and twenty thousand arrows (green wood, fletched with duck) which his men ought to be able to loose off in under ten minutes. Temrai had once heard a friend of his mother’s complaining about preparing a special meal to celebrate someone’s birthday; a day and a half she was going to have to spend getting everything ready and it’d all be eaten in an hour or so, all that time and trouble for something that’d be all gone so quickly and then forgotten.

  Overhead, the latest volley from his trebuchets flew like a flock of geese, trailing fleeting shadows behind them that raced along the ground, showing them where they had to go. A little to the rear of the screen of archers were the mule-trains, hauling the torsion engines. Very soon, the batteries on the wall would open up, and this time he wouldn’t be watching from a safe distance.

  He glanced up at the clouds, trying to read them. Rain would complicate things horribly; wet bowstrings, engines bogged down, torches refusing to light, leather armour absorbing water and swelling, water running down inside the armour and making every man in the line feel wretched, rain beating into the eyes of the archers as they lifted their heads to take aim. The clouds were low, fat and grey; as soon as they reached the hills, there was a fair chance they’d let go and drench everything.

  He was still looking up when the first stone came swinging down. He watched it, noticing how its trajectory decayed and its descent steepened. Clean miss, twenty yards or so in front. Ranging shot.

  Nearly there now; he could make out details of the men on the walls he hadn’t seen before. Theoretically they had an advantage in range because they’d be shooting down, but Temrai knew the city bows; self longbows cut from a single stave of wood, as opposed to the short, heavily recurved composite bows of the clan. In practice, their advantage of angle was more or less exactly cancelled out by his advantage of superior construction, just as the fact that the city people habitually used arrows that were too stiff to be accurate was offset by his disadvantage of having to make his shafts out of unseasoned wood, feathered with inadequate fletchings. It was as if someone was deliberately trying to even up the odds – we have more men, they have cover and better armour; we have the sun in our eyes, they have the wind against them; we’re in the right, they’re defending their homes and families. A very carefully designed, precisely manufactured war this was turning out to be.

  It didn’t take the city artillery long to find the range. The first accurately sighted volley gouged out gaps all along the line, obvious as footprints in clean snow. Temrai called a halt and gave the orders; nock arrows, draw, take aim, loose, the cycle repeating smoothly and without pause. He shot in time with his own commands, hoping he’d judged the elevation correctly – at maximum range, raise the arrowhead an inch or so over the target and in line, not aiming off to the side as you have to do at shorter ranges.

  The physical effort of the work was absorbing, enough to take his mind off what was actually happening. At the moment of the draw, push with the left hand against the bow handle, pull back the string with the right, until the shoulder blades feel as if they’re about to touch behind your back. Head still; wait for the touch of the string against your nose and lip, the feel of your hand under the point of your chin. On the command loose, take away the strength that curls the fingers of the right hand, so that the string can travel easily and without interference. After the shot, hold your position for a heartbeat before letting your right hand drop onto the quiver and feel for the nock of the next arrow. Above all, look at the target and not the bow, keep your eyes fixed on the faraway objective, the distant spot where your work and effort will have its effect.

  Away there, on the wall, the arrows would be falling like rain, anonymous and impersonal, not like the intimate business of hacking flesh close in with an edged weapon. Back here at the two-hundred-yard line, there was still a deceptive sense of taking part in a great game, a staged event, with the wall as combined target and audience. Funeral games; what fun, to be able to watch one’s own.

  One quiver empty already; Temrai looked round and saw the runners hurrying up, shuffling like hedgehogs under a great burden of prickly bristles. Another twenty thousand arrows or so; enough to keep the war going for a whole minute.

  Participants and spectators; Temrai was reminded of the lawcourts in the city. He’d been to see a couple of cases, sitting so far back he couldn’t even make out the faces of the advocates, and it had seemed to him a remarkable way to do business in a city that otherwise seemed to have worked things out so well. On the other hand, there’s nothing to beat trial by combat for an unarguable result.

  Beside him, a man dropped his bow and pitched forward onto his knees, an arrowshaft standing out of the right side of his chest. Lung-shot; he was fighting for breath, wondering why he was inhaling but still choking. He turned to Temrai, the subject to the lord, and opened his mouth, but nothing came out except blood. Before Temrai could say anything he flopped down on his face, the arrow making him lie slightly askew. Then someone handed Temrai a bunch of arrows, and he stuffed them awkwardly into his quiver, the heads of the new arrows catching in the fletchings of the old.

  Gods alone know if we’re doing any good. One minute the wall looks empty, the next it’s bobbing with heads. His right arm and back were beginning to ache, and every time he loosed the string it slapped his left forearm in exactly the same place, making him wince. Steady work; before he knew it his quiver was empty, and he left his place to go forward and pick up some of the ot
her side’s arrows (longer and stiffer than ours, fletched with goose and peacock, tipped with narrow triangular heads that punched through armour with the maximum efficiency). While he was bending down, a stone landed on the exact spot he’d been occupying. He felt rain spotting the back of his hand.

  ‘That’s all we need,’ groaned Teofil Leutzes, captain of the archers of the east wall. ‘Strings soggy, fletchings wet, and these bows break for a pastime in the damp.’ He beckoned to a man on his left. ‘Send runners down the line, tell ’em to wax their strings quick, before it starts pissing down. Not that they will, of course,’ he added. ‘All they want to do is shoot off all my arrows as quick as they can and get their heads down.’

  Soon the rain was falling in fat splodges, dripping off the back edges of helmets down the necks of the archers, making their leather gloves sticky and the bow handles slippery. Loredan pulled his hood up over his helmet and ducked inside the frame of an engine. Rain’s wet in war as well as peace, and only a fool stands out in it unless he’s got to.

  It was going abysmally. Basically the same problem as before; the enemy were spread out, his men were packed together. The cover of the battlements was doing no good at all, since the arrows were coming in from above, slanting in like rain on a windy day. Some of the men had two or three shafts sticking out of their armour, where the clan’s broad-bladed arrowheads had cut through the chainmail but hadn’t made it through the padded jerkin underneath; they were still shooting, too preoccupied to spare the time to wrestle the arrows loose. The engines were letting fly at longer and longer intervals, as more and more engineers were hit and their places were taken by untrained men.

  And now the rain; too wet to keep a torch burning. The walkway was slippery, slowing up the runners who were supposed to be handing out fresh supplies of arrows. The winches that raised the barrels of arrows up to the tower were running slow as well; too easy for a rope to slip through wet fingers and let a heavy barrel drop on the winding crew. Worst of all, there was nothing he could think of that might improve matters; it was a slow, remote kind of warfare that couldn’t be hustled or bounced into victory by acts of flamboyant valour. Just hard, gruelling work in the rain. For this, Loredan reflected, he might just as well have stayed home on the farm.