Renfrew tapped his fingers on the map, where higher land rose just to the eastward of the town. "Emplacements here?"
Furness shook his head again. "That's extreme range for our engines-even trebuchets, even with the height advantage, my lord Count," he said. "And we'd have to build roads and clear timber to get the heavy stuff up there. Not worth the trouble. When we get the battering pieces here, we'll have to work them in by stages-build bastions for our siege engines, then zigzag approach trenches, then more bastions closer in. Hammer at the walls until we dismount enough of their machines, and then more pounding until we bring down a section and get a breech, and then assault parties with scaling ladders going in from the trenches under cover of the catapults and massed crossbowmen behind earth-works."
"That isn't how the books say they handled siegework the first time 'round," |Sir Malcolm observed. "Sounds more like the way they did it with cannon."
Interesting, Renfrew thought. He didn't stop reading at the end of the pre-gunpowder period the way most people do.
Furness spread his hands. "Steel-frame engines with truck springs for power and hydraulic cocking systems can throw things hard, nearly as hard as black-powder cannon did, they're a lot better than that wood-and-sinew crap those dimwits used back in the Middle Ages, and they scale up easier too."
There was a slight bristling, mostly from families who'd been Society before the Change, or ones who'd caught the bug since. Medieval was a word to conjure with, these days.
Oblivious, Furness went on: "So's modern design better, if you've got a good engineer; we know more about using mechanical advantage. Ken Larsson is good."
"Siege towers?" young Timmins said. "If we can get men on top of the wall, it's all over but the rape and pillage."
"Nope. Their engines'd smash a wheeled siege tower into scrap before it gets to the wall, or burn it; anything that could stand up to the stuff they've got would be too heavy to move. We'd have to knock the wall down anyway to silence them. I'd say use the northern approach; that moat will be a problem, but less so than the whole damned river. The town'll be pretty roughed up by then, I'm afraid."
The commanders looked at each other. The Protectorate hadn't fought anyone before who had defenses this formidable, or skill with war-engines to match their own. It had mostly been improvised earthworks they faced, if it was anything beyond barricades of dead cars and shopping-carts full of rocks. "That'll cost, working trenches up to the walls and then going right into a breech like that," someone said. "That'll cost bad."
Everyone looked as if they'd sucked on a lemon: Or on vinegar, to stick to things still available. A nobleman's status depended on how many men he could put into the field. They couldn't just send the infantry in, either-honor meant a lot of the leaders had to lead, and from the front; otherwise the men wouldn't press an attack in the face of heavy casualties. Training replacements for lost knights and men-at-arms would be slow and expensive, particularly since the knights' families had a claim on their manors even when the heirs were too young to fight. Not to mention making vassals' allegiance shaky.
Renfrew grunted and looked at Sheriff Bauer, who'd been promoted to second-in-command of the scouting forces; as the Constable had expected, the Protectorate's forces were critically short of light cavalry, and the man seemed to know his work. The easterner shrugged as well.
"Them walled villages of theirs, duns they call 'em, the ones close to here are all empty and scraped bare-assed. A round dozen we checked are empty as an Injun's head."
They all looked at Sutterdown; that probably meant that the inhabitants and their supplies were within the town walls. Or possibly just the ones who could fight, with the others up in the eastern hills. Or possibly a mixture. That meant there could be as many as fifteen hundred of their damned archers in there, as well as the artillery, ready to deluge a storming party with arrows that went through chain mail as if it wasn't there.
Which is why they kept taking risks to delay us on the way south, Renfrew knew. They had plans for this and they needed time to implement them. Probably those SAS bastards are the ones who set it up. I don't think it's a folk musician's approach to the Art of War, somehow. Damn her and her fucking luck, anyway.
Then again, all the leaders who'd risen to power since the Change had a reputation for being lucky. If they hadn't been lucky, they wouldn't have been leaders, or alive at all. Everyone still around on the eve of CY10 was lucky: lucky so far, at least.
"Some of the ones further south are still being held," Baron Timmins' son said. "They're just villages with an earth bank and log palisade. We could take them one by one without much trouble, burn them out if nothing else. That would hurt them badly. And we could interfere with the spring planting, to demoralize them without hurting the long-term productivity."
Renfrew grunted acknowledgment of the suggestion; it was a good thing for young men to be aggressive, within limits.
"But to do that, Sir Malcolm, we'd have to divide our forces again," he said. "And there are still at least eight hundred of the kilties at large, maybe a thousand by now-the ones who, ah, put up such stout resistance to Lord Stavarov before he drove them off."
Everyone nodded gravely, and all of them knew he meant the ones who beat Piotr's ass like it was a drum. Publicly slapping Alexis son around might have been bad politics: but it felt so good! Still, he'd better be polite now.
"And there are as many again in there," he went on, pointing at the town while he sketched the air over the map with his other hand. "If we left a small screening force here, the enemy bands still at large could attack and catch the screening force between themselves and the garrison of the town. We don't have enough men to circumvallate."
That meant build a double wall around the besieged town; he checked that everyone caught the reference. There was a list of suggested reading, but some of the Association's baronage were what the charitable might call print-impaired.
"If we left a large screening force here, then they could follow any small force we sent against the duns and overrun them as soon as they were out of supporting range of us here. The duns aren't much as forts but they can't just be taken on the fly. Remember what happened to the dog with the bone who saw his reflection in the water. We can't afford to invite defeat in detail. Two thousand men is the minimum we need to be sure of beating off an attack by the Mackenzie forces not yet accounted for."
"Will the Lord Protector send us more troops?" young Timmins asked. "My lord Count, from what you say we need more men to deal with the enemy here."
"There aren't many to spare, Sir Malcolm," Renfrew said-carefully. "Twenty-five hundred are besieging Mount Angel and the town there.''
Everyone nodded soberly. The town of Mount Angel was a lot like Sutterdown. The fortified monastery of the same name on its hill above made either look like a boy's toy castle made of pasteboard. Nobody had even suggested doing anything but starving it out; a siege train built in Heaven and twenty thousand men with the Archangel Michael for commander couldn't take it by storm.
"Another thousand are securing our communications all the way back to Molalla"-which the damned Rangers and stray kilties were doing their best to chop into salami-"and two thousand are facing the Bearkillers-and possibly the Corvallans-around West Salem. Another five hundred are screening the area between the Amity Hills and the Coast Range against Bearkiller raiding parties. That leaves very few back home. With essential garrisons-"
Everyone nodded again; stripping the fiefs and castles bare of armed men would invite peasant rebellion, not to mention attack from other enemies like New Deseret or the United States of Boise or the Free Cities of the Yakima League. Nobody much liked the Portland Protective Association, and that emphatically included a lot of its own subjects.