The big table in the center held maps and papers; there was a buffet along one side laden with lunch, and some of the commanders were holding chicken legs or cheeseburgers or roast-beef sandwiches as they looked at the maps, or at their target.
"And here we are," Renfrew went on after a sip of the coffee and a sigh of pleasure. "Anyone got any brilliant ideas?"
Sutterdown was the closest thing the Mackenzies had to a city. Even by CY9 standards it wasn't much, less than two thousand people in normal times; there were a dozen towns in the Association's territory as big or bigger already. The walls were impressive, though, better than thirty feet high and, by report, nearly twenty thick, and the circuit was big enough to hold a lot more people in an emergency. They were studded at hundred-yard intervals with round towers half again as tall topped by conical roofs sheathed in green copper and shaped much like-appropriately-a witch's hat. A four-tower minifort guarded the gates at the quarters; the one on the south gave directly onto a bridge over the Sutter River, and the town as a whole was nearly contained within a U-shaped bend, giving the south and east and west a natural moat. A ditch across the north side completed the protection.
The crenellations along the top of the walls had been covered over the last few days by prefabricated metal-faced hoardings of thick timber, like a continuous wooden shed with the roof sloping out; that protected the fighting platform atop the wall from missiles, and gave an overhang so that the defenders could drop things straight down on anyone climbing a scaling-ladder. Association forts had the same provision; he'd practiced assembling the hoardings during emergency drills at his own Castle Odell, the Renfrew stronghold in the Hood Valley. Evidently the architects here had been reading the same books the Portland engineers studied-Castle by Macaulay for starters.
It looked more formidable to the naked eyeball than he'd thought it would be from the reports and sketches, and he was surprised the near anarchy of the Clan Mackenzie had managed to put so much labor into something with a long-term payoff. The bright white stucco on the town wall was different from anything he'd seen before, and so were the odd, curving designs of flowers and leaves painted on them. If you looked at them long enough you started to see faces peering out:
It's not altogether like one of our castles, or one of our towns, though: there's no inner keep, he thought, freeing his eyes with a wrench. Though those two hills on the west side of town might serve the purpose:
They were about a hundred feet above the general level of the town, or of the Sutter River that flowed along its southern edge. One of them was topped by some sort of temple or church or whatever the kilties called it, according to the intelligence briefings. He could see a bit of it, a round open structure with Douglas fir trunks smoothed and carved as pillars all around. A drift of smoke came from the center of the conical roof.
Unfortunately the dark-robed Bishop Mateo could see it too, and it had set him off again. Nobody dared interrupt him. "There is the altar of Satan!" he said, pointing; the cleric was a slender brown-skinned man with burning black eyes. "It is a stink in the nostrils of God! You must destroy it!"
There were nods all around the table. "Well, that's exactly what I'm going to try and do, Your Grace," Renfrew said politely.
Does he talk like that all the time? he wondered. Then: I'm not afraid of Leo's men, he thought, slightly defensive. Then again, I'm not anxious to butt heads with them, either.
He'd been an agnostic before the Change. Now he was an ostentatiously dutiful son of Mother Church, like anyone in the Protectorate's territories who wasn't a complete idiot, since the Lord Protector was too.
Does Norman really mean it? some fraction of his mind wondered. Or is it just part of the pageantry to him? Or was his mother scared hy a copy of King Arthur and the Round Table while she was pregnant? Well, I'm not going to kick. I couldn't have put this show together myself.
A fragment of poetry went through his mind, pseudo-Shakespeare:
Lay on, MacDuff
Lay on with the soup, and the Haggis and stuff;
For though 'tis said you are our foe
What side my bread's buttered on you bet I know!
Sometimes he wondered how many were trimmers like himself, and how many had come to genuinely believe. More of the latter than the former, he suspected, and his own un-belief got sort of shaky sometimes these days. When people heard the same story all the time and had to act as if they accepted it, most just did accept it; maintaining private reservations was too much like hard mental work. And it did help the Protectorate run smoothly, and would be even more helpful in another generation, when his children were growing up to inherit what he'd built.
But, oh, how I wish the damned priests would stick to their churches!
The bishop fingered the steel crucifix that hung around his neck; His Holiness Leo disapproved of ostentation, save where ritual demanded it. Fortunately Mateo's gaze stayed locked on the Mackenzie settlement. As they watched, something flashed out from one of the towers, trailing smoke. It landed a quarter mile closer to them, near a knot of patrolling horsemen, and splashed flame near enough to make the cavalry scatter. When they rallied, it was further out.
"Sir Richard?" Conrad asked calmly.
Dick Furness had been a combat engineer in the National Guard before the Change and was in charge of the Association's siege train now; he was forty-two, the only other man in the tent besides Renfrew to have seen his fourth decade, with a sharp-nosed face and brown hair and glasses. He shrugged, making his mail hauberk rustle and clink, and pointed. Another globe of napalm followed the first just as he began to speak, and then two four-foot bolts like giant arrows. They went over the cavalry's heads, and made them canter off again, which was sensible. Those things could go through three horses in a row: lengthwise.
"Well, as you can see, my lord Count, they've got lots of artillery, and it's well protected. Good reloading speed, too-must have hydraulic reservoirs in the towers. I'd say they probably bought the whole system from Corvallis, or the Bearkillers. Probably the Bearkillers, I recognize Ken Larsson's style: anyway, the wall's that Gallic construction, a frame of heavy timbers with rubble and concrete infill, and a layer of mortared stone on the outside and inside to cover the ends. Not as good as our ferroconcrete, but nearly."
"Couldn't you burn it?" someone said. "I was reading in one of the Osprey books"-that illustrated series on the history of warfare was important in the Association's military education system-"that the Romans used to burn 'em when they were fighting the Celts."
Good question, the Grand Constable thought. That's Sir Malcolm, Baron Timmins' son. Have to keep an eye on him. For promotion, he's too young to be angling for my job. Yet.
The engineer answered: "Sure thing, my lord, if you can figure out a way to make wood burn without oxygen."
Furness spoke more politely than he probably wanted to-he was a mere knight among tenants-in-chief and their sons, and most of the troops under his command were townsmen, although he hoped for ennoblement and a barony himself if this campaign succeeded. There was still a trace of irony in his voice. "I said rubble and concrete fill. And they used rebar. You'd have to knock the aggregate open before you could burn the frame. It's pretty good protection against battering, too. The timber lattice makes it more resilient than simple masonry; plus there's an earth berm on the inside. We can't undermine, either; the foundations are below the water table. Good luck on draining that with hand pumps."