The Vicar swung his attention from the engineer to the knight. ‘You went and examined the approach in person?’ he asked.
Of course. Ippeas wanted to say it, wanted to let his scorn show.
But war was politics, just as faith was politics. Ippeas let his anger boil away. He pushed it aside with a brief meditation on the moment of Sophia’s birth among men. He played the scene in his mind until anger was gone and only calm remained. The meditation, his most valued, took only the fraction of a breath to practice.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
The vicar swung indecisively to his engineer. ‘Great Sword Ippeas is not a novice on his first caravan, Engineer. Perhaps the two of you can visit the sap in person and determine a new course of action.’
The engineer shook her head. ‘Perhaps the great sword can plan the rest of the siege, as well,’ she snapped. ‘That bastion must fall today, Eminence. I have ten, or at most, twelve days until the rains come. Twelve days, or our summer and all our dead are for naught.’ She shrugged. ‘I have said all this before.’ She looked tired and, suddenly, the Sword wondered if he’d misjudged the woman.
The engineer looked at the Vicar. ‘You know what’s at stake,’ she said quietly.
A month ago, you let the Vicar waste our time building siege lines that would stop all the legions of the Pure, Ippeas thought. His caution and your vanity have doomed this campaign. Now you seek to spend the lives of my brothers to retrieve your schedule. But even as his mind formed the heated thoughts, Ippeas admitted their injustice.
The Vicar looked back and forth between them, his tired eyes and slack face clear signs of his mental exhaustion. Like most of his soldiers, he felt he should never have been given so high a command. He hated conflicts among his officers, but his very weakness made room for them.
Ippeas tried to feel compassion. This war was sapping everything; his faith, his vision of the people around him.
‘How do you answer the great sword’s observations, Engineer?’ asked the Vicar.
The engineer drew a poniard from her belt and began to use it on her nails, which were black. ‘I was in those trenches last night,’ she said. ‘The garrison kept up a constant fire, and we lost pioneers. The rest became…skittish.’
She glanced at Ippeas, searching for something, and then she shrugged and went back to her nails. ‘The approach trench is not the best. But it can be done. Your armour will protect you from the harassing fire. And, to be frank, Sword, your brothers can take the casualties to reach the breach, and then storm the bastion. You and I both know it can be done. You are our best.’
The engineer winced, waiting for his response.
The Vicar raised his hand. ‘Clear my tent,’ he said to his senior Centark, and the man made a hand motion. Officers scattered.
Ippeas stood and waited.
The Vicar motioned for a servant to open his camp stool, and then he sat with a groan.
‘All clear,’ his Centark said. ‘And a cordon of lobsters to keep `em out, my lord.’
Lobsters being the elite cavalry of the imperial army.
The Vicar nodded, spat, drank some water, and spat again. ‘It has to be done today. The engineer is correct. But it could be done at dusk. Engineer, you could place mortars in the second line and use them to suppress the culverin.’
Ippeas was surprised.
And yet, the old man had been a fine soldier before he was promoted beyond his ability. The idea was sound. It didn’t change the crumbling, shallow approach trench, but it would almost certainly prevent a charge of scattershot at the moment of crisis.
‘Yes. It can be done.’ The engineer opened a lap desk and began to write notes with a pencil.
Ippeas reminded himself that the explosion of one of their own culverins on the second night of the siege had killed the first engineer and all his staff. That the engineer before him had been a junior second, newly minted by the Arsenal. Nerves probably caused the woman’s abrasiveness.
‘Tell him,’ she said to the Vicar. ‘He deserves to know.’
The Vicar looked at an icon of the Eagle, one of the old gods he kept to look at in the privacy of his tent. He made the old Eagle sign. Then he turned to the sword. ‘Do you know why we’re here?’ he asked.
Ippeas stood straight, despite the sweat and the fatigue and the flies. ‘I was ordered here,’ he said.
The Vicar made a face. ‘Do you know why we are attacking this town?’
Ippeas might have shrugged. ‘It is an important town to the Pure,’ he said.
The engineer nodded. ‘It’s not just an important town,’ she said. ‘This is where the corrupt crystals come from. The source of the bone plague. The scourge of our magik. We must take it. Now.’ She looked at the Vicar, who nodded.
‘Lives are at stake. Not just our own, but perhaps the whole population of Hatti and Byzas. The refugees, the whole of idea of reform. Everything we stand for.’ He shrugged, and stood, and looked less like a tired, incompetent old man. ‘If you like, Sword, I’ll lead the sortie myself.’
Ippeas managed to stand straighter. ‘That is not necessary,’ he said, suddenly appalled by the weight of responsibility. ‘By the Goddess, I had thought this a routine…’ he almost couldn’t breathe. ‘I accept. I thank you, Vicar, and you, Engineer. I sought only to protect my brothers from unnecessary peril.’
The engineer glanced at him once, this time, like a conspirator, or an actor in a shared play, and then went back to drafting notes on her lap desk.
The sun reached its height, and the sands reflected the heat, so that a naked man might die in a few hours and eyes might become blind by too much staring.
Ippeas was still in his armour. His feet were almost cold from the sweat pooled in his shoes. He had climbed the rampart of the first line to examine the ground in front of the bastion from the highest point in his lines. He looked at the ground for half an hour, trying to find another solution. Across five hundred paces of open ground, crumbling walls, and blasted sand, heat-shimmers made investigation almost impossible. So did sniper fire.
Below his feet, sweating pioneers in nothing but loin cloths and sweatbands hauled four big mortars down the ramp from the first line to the second. Ordinarily, neither army worked or fought much in the full heat of the day, and this activity would tell the garrison a great deal.
Nonetheless, the mortars would help.
He leaned out of an embrasure, staring too long at the white glare, so that his eyes began to water.
‘Try this, Sword,’ said an aristocratic voice by him.
Ponderously, he forced himself upright and turned. The engineer was offering a farseer, a long tube with crystal lenses. Ippeas had used them in training, but had never been able to afford one. He gave the engineer a glance, looking for mockery, saw none, and took the instrument.
‘It was with the first engineer’s equipment,’ the engineer said in a conversational voice. ‘Made by the Academy. Turn this knob.’ Then she leaned out over the walls and roared, ‘Hey! Broxo! Watch that number two gun! That sled is not balanced. I don’t give a shit how often you checked it. Load it again. Do it right!’ She pulled the canteen from the strap over his shoulder and took a slug, spat, held it out to Ippeas.
Refusing water in this army was an insult, sharing it a gesture of camaraderie. Ippeas’s hand barely hesitated. He spat and then drank.
The engineer curled up into the patch of shade left by the jutting fascines of the embrasure. She was not a big woman, and she fit easily in cover where Ippeas would have stood out, armour and all. ‘Looking for another approach?’ she asked.
Ippeas grunted. He was trying to steady the farseer and adjust it. His arms felt like lead. He needed to get his armour off, to rest before the assault. There was sand between his arming clothes and his skin. The sand abraded the skin, and he bled. The blood attracted flies.
‘I wanted to try having a word with you in private, Sword. I want you to understand.’ The engineer’s voice said
she wanted Ippeas to understand things she couldn’t put into words. Political things.
Ippeas got the tube focused. He looked at the head of the sap, the dusty sand there, then the scree of rock—shale, it looked like—just beyond. No wonder the pioneers had given up.
He swept the farseer back and forth over the ground in front of the breech. Just to the left of the hole in the wall and collapsed rubble pile that led like a ramp up and into the bastion, there was a wide patch of desert grass, raknard, the hard, spiky leaves sticking up like arrows. The grass came up waist high. He followed the edge of the grass back towards his own lines until if petered out in the shale. The grass got within twenty paces of the breach.
A ball thudded home in the fascine by his head. Then he heard the shot.
‘You’ve found something.’ The engineer got up out of the shade next to him. ‘Let’s move.’
‘There’s desert grass growing at the base of the bastion,’ Ippeas said. He handed the farseer to the engineer. They crawled to another lookout. Then, while the engineer looked, Ippeas continued, ‘I can have my men put sand cloaks over their armour. We crawl up from the base of the east trench. You drop a mortar round short—right in the basin, there—to make smoke. A handful of my brothers demonstrate in the approach trench—that’s where they expect us, so that’s where they should see us.’
The engineer shook her head. ‘They’ll see you. You didn’t like fifty stades of open ground, now you’re crawling a hundred stades just to get to the grass.’
Ippeas pulled off a gauntlet and used his cuff, brown with dirt, to wipe sweat off his face. ‘All too possible. In the hands of Sophia. But scared men keep their heads down below their walls. Or they fixate on the first enemy they see.’
The engineer was stretched full length on the parapet, heedless of snipers, farseer to her eye. Two balls struck the gabion next to her, and she didn’t flinch. ‘I can get my best pioneers up in the angle. They’ll make you a gravel ramp and a covered entry to your line of— Well, to the way you’ll crawl. I see it. Good eye.’
Ippeas couldn’t resist. ‘Engineering is taught in the Academy,’ he said.
The engineer rolled on her back and slithered off the parapet. ‘Fencing with great swords is taught at the Arsenal, but I don’t claim to be an expert,’ she said.
Stung, Ippeas withdrew a step. ‘I meant— No, my tongue ran away with me. I apologize.’
The engineer raised an eyebrow. ‘Father, I have an abusive tongue, as any of the brothers in my many schools can testify. I came up here to try and avoid open enmity with you. You seem competent. We’re right on the edge, Father. Win or lose, it’ll be the next few hours. If you take me this bastion, I’ll take the damned city. You can have the credit.’
Ippeas wasn’t used to being called Father. He was a priest, but none of his order would ever call him by other than his rank or his real title—Great Sword. The engineer called him Father as if he was a country prelate.
Was the aristocrat mocking him? ‘I prefer you call me Ippeas,’ he said. ‘Ser Ippeas, if you wish to be formal.’
The engineer shot him a grin. ‘I’m a Kallinikas,’ she said. ‘Collateral line. Distant cousins. All that crap.’
‘You have the look.’ Kallinikoi were one of the imperial houses. They were blond and dark-skinned, robust, given to heavy mouths and big noses. This scion lacked the size, but she had the dark skin and blonde hair. Her breasts showed in sweat through her shirt; her filthy shirt, which had a fortune in blackwork embroidery at the throat and frayed cuffs. She had a pair of pistols, in her sash like a pirate, and a heavy arming sword.
‘Did you get my point about the siege?’ Kallinikas asked.
Ippeas looked out over the besieged city, at the bastion standing in the bright sun with the gash of the breach spilling its walls like the intestines of a wounded animal. ‘Myr Kallinikas, I will take this bastion with my brothers, or die in the attempt. At last light.’
Kallinikas shook his head. ‘You Magdalenes are scary. Don’t die. Just take the fucking bastion.’ She paused. ‘Call me Fresa. Myr Kallinikas sounds too much like we’re in a fucking ballroom.’
She leaned over the parapet and motioned at a sapper. ‘No,’ she yelled. ‘Follow the fucking rope line!’ She spat. ‘More water, Father?’
Ippeas stood at the head of his company. He had forty-three brothers fit for duty. They stood in their armour, their hands crossed on their sword hilts. They wore plate armour from head to toe. Every brother had a baldric holding a pouch of grenadoes, a pair of heavy pistols clipped to the strap by their hooks, and a heavy silver match-case up at the shoulder. The match-case held the slow-match to light the grenadoes. The pistols would make noise going up the breech. The heavy swords would do the work.
Every man had a sand cloak wrapped tight and secured by cords to his baldric. There was no point to throwing the thin khatan cloaks over their armour until they were ready to crawl. Cloaks and armour weren’t friends.
Ippeas told off five brothers for the feint. He hardened his heart and chose almost at random. Almost. He didn’t choose any of his best.
‘Go to the base of the approach trench and wait. Then move up and down the trench. Expose yourselves as much as you can with sense, common sense, my brothers. The Goddess will not expect a display of bravura. She will expect an attention to deception. Am I clear?’
All five brothers raised their visors in salute and nodded in agreement.
He saluted them. ‘Go in the name of Sophia and her Good Sister.’
‘Amen,’ said the whole company together, a hushed and potent sound.
They expected that he should speak. He was the sword. The priest. The word in the mouth of Sophia.
Except that he’d been in the desert for a year, had risen to command as better men died in sorties just like this one. His faith in Sophia was shaken, and his faith in his training and his army was fading. Speeches before action seemed childish.
Once he would have greeted this moment with joy.
He looked up at the company banner. It showed the Good Sister holding aloft the sword of the Sophia, with the words ‘Penitence is our Glory. Glory is our Penitence.’
Once, the words had brought a chill to his spine. Now, they seemed like the thoughts of someone who had never seen a battle.
‘Brothers,’ he said. He probably paused too long, thinking about his brothers and what a debacle would do to him, and them. A long line of corpses stretching back across the desert to the bay where the galleons had dropped anchor when they brought the war home to the enemy.
He raised his voice. ‘You know your places. You know your skill.’ He looked up and down the ranks, saw Clestes and knew from his face that he had gauged the mood correctly. ‘People depend on us. Let’s go take the bastion. For the Good Sister.’
A growl rose from the company.
He led them into the trenches.
Dusk was falling with all the rapidity of the desert. The sky was red, full of light, but already the base of the trench was indistinct, and men tended to stumble. Looking at the western horizon, a man could see the approach of night.
Ippeas thought he had fifteen minutes. He looked at the heavy silver timekeeper that he had hung on his baldric. His timing was exact, but all guesswork. And having guessed, he now suffered from all the nerves of command.
The first mortar fired, seventy paces to his right. The explosion was loud, and a few grains of sand fell down the nearest trench wall. The round had dropped short, just as Ippeas had asked. A pall of smoke hung over the open ground.
‘Here we go,’ Ippeas said, catching the eyes of his Justicars. Thirty-eight pairs of arms fastened their khatans at their throats and replaced their gauntlets. They reversed their pouches and baldrics so that the pistols and the match cases sat on their backs. Thirty-eight visors slammed shut together.
Clestes watched them and raised his hand for silence and to indicate that the brothers were ready.
Ippeas rai
sed his own hand in the gloom and dropped it. Clestes was right behind him as he scrambled up the new-built gravel ramp and flung himself onto the sand. And then he crawled.
Crawling in armour on sand was faster than crawling without armour. The breastplate served as a sled. Hands and feet pushed, skittering like the limbs of a scorpion. Ippeas pushed on as hard as he could, his thoughts so concentrated on the timing of his movements and the orderliness of his brothers that he forgot to fear the fusillade of firelock shots that might announce that his ruse had been discovered.
He made it to the edge of the sand grass. The bastion loomed like a great black claw over his right shoulder. His breastplate was full of sand and something was biting his neck.
Clestes came right up next to him in the grass, and they crawled side by side through sharp leaves, which bent under the weight of their armour but never broke. Other, stronger brothers pulled ahead of their mates, spreading into a rough line. Every man had his place, but the order didn’t require that a movement like this be disciplined.
A mortar fired behind them, and the culverin overhead answered with a roar. But the ball wasn’t meant for them. It vanished into the gloom at the head of the sap and threw up a cloud of dust and debris around the approach trench they had not used.
Ippeas rolled onto his back, drew off his gauntlet, and raised the dial of his timekeeper to his eyes. The gloom was already deep, and the drift of powder smoke deepened it. And something of its impenetrable quality told him that their own magickers were practicing an illusion. He pushed the dial almost inside the eye slit of his burgonet.
Exactly on time. His breathing was labored. He was sweating out all the water he had ever drunk. He rolled back onto his breastplate and faced Clestes. Then he reached with an unguantleted hand up into his pouch for his tinder kit and struck a spark on char cloth, held the glowing ember to the slow match dangling from his shoulder.
Art of War Page 36