by Gordon Ryan
Niels glanced up at the castle. Still no movement from the two guards visible at the gatehouse. The closer one seemed fixed on the trebuchet. At the same time as the movement around the ram, Niels’s men shouted over some contrived difference about the size of the counterweight.
“Move,” he urged the men. “Every minute counts. You and you, drag that log out of here. Hey,” he said to someone else, “get in front of that ram, the head.”
To mount a full assault on the gates, he needed support beam and chain for the ram. The soldiers would pull the ram back on the chain and let it swing with full strength, instead of hefting it back and forth with brute muscles. That it was too early for a full assault was also the beauty of his plan.
But what about the traitor? Niels studied the men and women preparing for the assault, looking for suspicious behavior, or for signals to the men at the gatehouse.
Three months earlier, while still in Hamburg, a mysterious email had arrived in Niels’s inbox.
From: Black Horse ([email protected])
To: [email protected]
Subject: re: medieval warfare
Herr Grunberg, do you want to change the course of the war?
”Four cups of wheat for bread will sell for a day’s wages.”
Niels had tracked the quotation to the Book of Revelations, in a specific English translation of the Bible, which described the third horseman of the apocalypse. The black horse: Famine. But what to make of the query itself?
He sent back a tentative reply: “Tell me more.”
A second email came.
From: Black Horse ([email protected])
To: [email protected]
Subject: re: re: re: medieval warfare
The wheel of history is turning. Do you believe this? Or is it just talk?
You can turn the wheel. Break the current order. Are you interested?
Niels had a web site that told a little about his books, his work at the university, and his lectures and speaking fees. The ‘wheel of history’ was a phrase he had used in an essay posted to his web site. He thought it was also in his latest book, but that wouldn’t be published for six more months.
Most people seemed to look at the last two hundred years and see a seamless slope of progress. The steam engine, the train, the airplane, nuclear power. Wars had ended between the great powers. Democracy and capitalism marched across the world. He had discussed this very thing with Peter Gagné on more than one occasion.
A wheel was just a lever bent into a circle. You push on the wheel and you can move a huge object. In this case, the object was human civilization. That wheel would inevitably turn and civilization would move to a new state.
He emailed three or four times with Black Horse, evading a proposed meeting until he knew more. This Black Horse had an agenda, something beyond what Peter envisioned in his war. He wanted Niels to push on the wheel. But why?
And then the emails stopped. He tried a couple of times before they simply bounced. He thought about going to Peter, but it occurred to him that this might be the man’s way of deducing his loyalty. More likely, however, it meant that Black Horse had found another ally already.
Niels called a friend of his in the computer science department at the Universität Hamburg. He wanted to figure out who had been reading his web page, was that possible? Of course, the friend said. Get me your log files and I can track it down for you.
His friend tracked IP addresses, hits to specific parts of Niels’s web site, and correlated them with the Black Horse emails. Niels came up with a name. Henri Fournier, a Belgian and a one-time associate of the Gagné family from oil drilling in Libya. The first hits to the page in question had come from Bruges, then another in Hamburg the same weekend that Niels met with the man to discuss the war on Peter’s behalf. Another hit from Moscow and a few phone calls told Niels that Henri was in Russia to meet with Alexander Borisenko.
Niels called Peter and did everything but ask him flat out if he’d told Henri to send him mysterious emails. Neither “black horse” nor “wheel of history” sparked any reaction.
And now Henri was on the inside of the castle. Niels could only conclude that Black Horse had someone in Borisenko’s army as well. He’d already considered Borisenko himself, then discarded that. Peter and Borisenko were close friends; he could influence the man directly without need for subterfuge.
Niels’s men had the shed over the ram and heaved the entire contraption toward the castle gates. With every man inside, it resembled a giant turtle, and moved about as fast, too. They were still a good two hundred meters from the gates, just out of crossbow range.
And still the thing moved without drawing attention from the men at the gatehouse. He could hardly believe his luck. The turtle was only a hundred meters away now and Niels’s men stopped for their first breather. Probably in better shape than a medieval army, at least aerobically. Most everyone Niels knew had been training as if for a marathon.
They picked up again and at this moment both men on the gates shouted at once. What the hell was Tess doing back there?
“Crossbows!” Niels shouted.
Across the encampment, the rest of the men dropped their tools. Others boiled from tents. About half of the men grabbed shields and ran toward the castle walls, shouting.
Borisenko came out of his tent, joined by his wife. Niels watched them both for reaction, but especially Yekatarina.
“God, that’s moving slowly,” Borisenko said. The men on foot had almost caught up to the turtle, with no need yet to lift their shields against missiles from the castle.
“What? No, this is good. Very good.”
Just now, one of the men at the gatehouse let fly the first bolt. It sailed far into the gap between the advancing attack and Borisenko’s encampment. Nevertheless, it forced the second group of men to slow, bunch together, and lift their shields into a wall. Another man popped up next to the first, then two more.
“Is it going to work, then?” Borisenko asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t think so, at first, it’s going to take too long to swing that ram. Thought they’d burn the shed to the ground before we punched through. But look how slowly the other side is reacting. Where the hell is Tess?”
The shield-bearing group stopped twenty meters to the left and out from the gates. The front soldiers formed a solid wall of shields, while the men behind them swept back their cloaks and pulled out crossbows. They fired a volley that shattered against the battlements in a splatter of red paint. There was little chance of taking out the defenders, who moved behind the merlons and fired a return volley. But it took fire and attention from the turtle.
A lucky bolt split the shield wall. A man staggered out, grasping his shoulder. He turned toward the encampment with a grimace of real pain. Blood-red paint plastered his shoulder and chest. Another man took his shield and Niels’s crossbows returned fire.
Niels could risk a few losses. Any man lost on the battlefield had to sit forty-eight hours. But Niels wouldn’t have his serious attack ready for at least three days, still. He just needed to avoid losses so heavy that Tess and Peter were tempted to send a sortie to finish them off.
There were maybe a dozen defenders on the walls now. Two men heaved over a stone which clattered on the roof of the turtle. The turtle stopped momentarily and then continued forward. It stopped again, then continued. Niels hoped the men had enough left to deliver some blows to that portcullis.
And still, the defense looked disorganized to Niels’s eyes. There should be serious attention directed to the turtle. As of yet, Tess had not shown her hand. No way he had caught her unprepared. It was enough to make him worry.
Chapter Twenty:
“This can’t be right,” Dmitri said. “It just isn’t possible.”
Tess gaped at the size of the room. It was at least twenty feet high at the far end and half the length of a football field. It must span the keep, go right to the outer cur
tain. Hundreds of crates lined the left side. To the right, objects too large to box: An obelisk laying on its side, an Olmec head, a bearded lion, columns from a Greek or Roman temple, heroic statues of gods or mythical creatures. And paintings, stacked in rows, some wrapped, some open to the air.
“It’s just not possible,” Dmitri repeated. They walked across the cement floor, their footsteps loud in the stillness of the cavernous room.
“How did he get all this stuff out here?” Tess asked. “That’s one hell of a smuggling operation.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. Peter has money, he can get stuff done, but the value of this stuff…”
He tore into the brown paper that wrapped one object. It was a marble statue of what looked like a Roman emperor in armor, a laurel wreath across his brow. The eyeballs, carved in relief, stared out across the centuries.
Dmitri said, “Any one of these things would sell for a fortune at auction. There have to be thousands of objects in this room. How many billions would it take to acquire a collection like this? And how would you keep it secret?”
“You couldn’t. We’d sure as hell have heard of it.”
There was another statue, even larger and Tess couldn’t resist unwinding the shroud of fabric to take a look. It was a woman draped in robes, that rippled as under a strong breeze. No head or arms, but a pair of delicate wings that swept back from the body. Tess took a step back in surprise.
“Is that what I think it is?” Dmitri asked.
She nodded. “Winged victory of Samothrace.”
“But what? How? That’s one of the most famous statues in the world.”
“I saw it in the Louvre just last April.”
“So this must be a replica,” Dmitri said.
“You sure? You sure the replica is not the one I saw in Paris?”
“That’s impossible. There’s no way anyone—I don’t care how rich he is—could get his hands on this thing. And I bet all this other stuff is more of the same. It’s got to be a replica, all of it.”
Tess and Dmitri walked across the room to look at the paintings. They tore into the brown paper that covered several works of art stacked against one wall. There was a Monet and what she took to be a Rembrandt.
“I can tell you one thing,” Tess said. “There no way Peter is collecting a bunch of fakes, like he’s the interior decorator for Caesar’s Palace, or something.” She returned to Winged Victory, rubbed her finger along the cool marble. Her fingers felt the flaws, the chips, the smooth, aged spots.
“Then what the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know. You’re right, it doesn’t make any sense, they can’t be fakes and they can’t be real, either.”
Dmitri rubbed his chin. His eyes seemed to lose focus.
“What are you thinking right now?” she asked.
He blinked and met her eyes. For a moment he looked like he wanted to say something, then seemed to think better of it. She was about to press him, when he said, “I’m thinking there’s a service entrance on the far side of the room. We should look for it.”
She didn’t think that’s what had been going through his mind, but he was right, nevertheless. “This room must go right to the outer wall of the castle. Where does it open? That’s one hell of a flaw to our defenses.”
Dmitri turned suddenly and she heard someone running down the service tunnel. “Tess! Dmitri!”
It was Lars. He stepped into the room and did a visible double take. “Oh, my god.” He started over toward the two of them, then stopped. “Come on, we’ve got to go. They’re looking for Tess.”
“What? Why?” she asked.
“Borisenko and Grunberg are up to something. Don’t know what but everyone is running around, squawking.”
“Oh, god. Come on, Dmitri, get the lights.”
They hurried up the tunnel and through the doors into the walled off room. Lars was limping; he said he’d lowered himself into the dungeon, then dropped the last few feet, and rolled his ankle in the process. They climbed back down the ladder.
Only to discover Peter waiting in the dungeon. He’d lowered a second ladder to get down, and stared at them in turns with a flash of anger. It burned especially bright at Tess. “What the hell are you doing?”
“What the hell do you think I’m doing?” She adopted the same aggressive tone. “Why didn’t you tell me? How in god’s name am I supposed to defend this place if you’ve got a back door that you didn’t bother to tell me about?” She narrowed her eyes, anxious to put him on the defensive. “And where do you get off talking to me like that? You put me in charge, remember?”
“If you were in charge,” Peter said, “or if you took your duties seriously, you’d be defending the gate, instead of snooping around like some kind of—”
“What do you mean, defending the gate?”
“We’ve been shouting for you for the last twenty minutes. Niels is attacking the gates with a ram. He’s about to break through.”
#
“Fire!” Tess cried. “Give me fire!”
She took the stairs two at a time. They were slick, but she didn’t care. Below her, the ram boomed against the portcullis. It groaned and she could feel the shudder through the stone at her feet. The portcullis was her strong point. The gates themselves would take a few blows and shatter to kindling.
The men on the wall above misunderstood her and rose to launch a volley of crossbow bolts. One, having stood unwisely to get a better shot, came under fire from a hail of bolts. One struck him across the helmet. He fell with a shocking spurt of red. Droplets flicked across Tess’s face. It was just paint.
He rose to his hands and knees as she reached the wall. “Am I dead?” he asked in a slurred voice as he put a hand to his head.
“You’re dead,” she said. “Now get out of the way.” To the others, she said, “Don’t get killed. You and you, I need that bucket of stones. You, I need fire. And pitch. Do you understand?”
Tess put a hand on the dead man’s arm, who had finally regained his footing and used a hand to steady himself as he made for the stairs. “Strip your armor. Now. Give me your shirt, too.”
She squatted behind a merlon and put on the man’s breastplate, took his crossbow and bolts, then used his shirt to wipe paint from the helmet. It might look to the men below that she was a dead man cheating up here. Better that than become a dead woman in fact. Those bolts still hit hard enough to knock you on your ass.
“Now sit there until your head clears. You go down those stairs now, you’re going to fall and break your neck.”
Tess rose to her knees and peered cautiously through an arrow slit. Niels had formed a crude shed to protect a battering ram. It wasn’t strong and it wasn’t covered with wet hides to fireproof it, but it was perfect for catching her with her pants down. Another few days and that gate would be secure. She’d build hordings across the merlons to better allow her to drop missiles. She’d have those murder holes ready to wipe out an army charging between the gate towers.
A small clump of men set up to the north of the ram and the gatehouse, armed with crossbows.
Another shudder passed through her feet. “Fire!” she cried down to the bailey.
Men rushed about, but without much purpose. She spotted Peter. Unbelievably, he had Nick with him. Maybe the boy had wandered out. He must have. Surely, Peter wouldn’t have brought him out to watch the battle.
“Peter, goddamn it. Look at me!”
He caught her eye. “Get Nick out of here. He’s going to get killed. No, not you. I need you to get me fire and pitch. Now! Where the hell is Lars?”
She spotted Lars. He was to one side, shouting at men, lining them up. Gathering every man already armored and armed. Good. Get them under the gatehouse. Now, if only Dmitri had listened to her. She need buckets of red paint in the gatehouse itself, to pour over the men coming underneath the murder holes. The paint would stand as proxy for boiling oil. Maybe they’d catch the first few unawares before
the rest lifted their shields for protection—which would open them to crossbow fire from the front.
She ordered the remaining men to concentrate their fire at Niels’s crossbowmen, not at the shed. That was pointless. After a return volley, she poked her head for a second time over the edge. Where was her enemy? There.
Niels stood some two hundred yards distant, forming a shield wall of some five, six dozen men who prepared to storm the castle when the ram broke through. They looked disciplined, confident.
Two men ran up the stairs with torches. She’d have preferred braziers, but the torches would do. Two others came with buckets of pitch. “Stay down,” she said. “Go through the gate tower.”
There were half a dozen men inside the north gate tower. They fired uselessly through the arrow slits. They had nothing to use on the murder holes if the portcullis broke. Henri, Peter’s Belgian friend, was one of the men. She led them onto the stretch of wall between the two gate towers. It sat directly above the ram and turtle attacking the gates below.
“Henri. The fire, you know what to do?”
They’d built a hoarding on the stretch of wall between the two gate towers. This was a wooden platform that attached to the finials—three stone spikes that extended from each merlon—to extend beyond the walls. Two men crouched in the hoarding, where they dropped stones through a pair of trapdoors onto the turtle below. The stones simply bounced off its roof.
Another strike against the portcullis. It shook through the stone, but weaker this time. The men at the ram seemed to be tiring. Tess risked a look over the edge, around the hoarding. The portcullis bent inward. One of the interior hinges was about to give way.
Henri dipped a knotted rag into the hot pitch, then lit it on fire. He handed it to one of the men on the hoarding, then took another rag ball and lit it, too. The man in the hoarding dropped the flaming ball on the turtle. It rolled off to the ground without catching.