Someone was very ingenious, he thought. But then, I'm told that they have an excellent library.
The walls were curved in a smooth oval, following the four-hundred-foot contour around the hillside, leaning back with a very slight camber. Building them must have been fairly simple; cut back into the hillside until the earth behind was a vertical bank as high as you wanted, and then build the wall up against it; the construction method looked like mass-concrete, big rocks set in a matrix of cement. The walls were not only thick in themselves; they were backed up by the whole intervening mass of the hill, millions of tons of solid earth and rock.
You couldn't knock them down, not without functioning pre-Change artillery or explosives. Even if there was no opposition, he doubted present-day technology could tear them down without thousands of laborers and years of effort. The towers that studded the circuit of the curtain were built out from the wall itself, starting about thirty feet up and swelling out from the surface; they were probably steel-framed. He could see the roofs of some of the buildings inside the curtain over the crenellations and hoardings, but that wouldn't matter much-with that height advantage, throwing engines inside could dominate everything for a mile around, smashing enemy catapults like matchboxes, and they'd be nearly impossible to knock out by anything trying to loft missiles back at them.
There was little or no cover on the slopes below, either; everything had been trimmed back to knee-height or less, the dirt from the excavations used to make the slopes smoothly uniform and nowhere less than forty degrees from the vertical, and some tough, low-growing vine planted to hold the surface. If things were arranged anything near to the way he'd do it, the defenders could toss heavy stone shot or pump flaming oil at any spot. The skin at the back of his neck crawled at the thought of trying to lead a storming party to the base of the walls.
And if you did get there, what on earth could you do? Raise scaling ladders eighty feet tall? Hit the wall with a sledgehammer? Jump up and down and wave your arms and shout, "I'm tired of it all, drop bally great rocks on my head?"
The light died as clouds hid the moon. A moment later it began to rain, a fine silvery drizzle, and the fortress-monastery vanished like a castle in a dream. The soldier-monk beside him looked at his watch, hiding the luminous dial with his other hand, and murmured: "Wait. Very soon now: "
Nigel waited with an endless fund of patience, despite the damp chill that worked inward, making him conscious of his joints and the places where his bones had been broken-not more times than he could count, but more than you could tally on the fingers of one hand, too. He and the others around him were dressed in dark woolens, and armed with sword and bow, but they wore no armor, and only knitted balaclava pullover masks on their heads. This was a mission where only stealth could hope to succeed; leaving a trail of dead enemy sentries would be failure even if they made it through, since they had to be able to get out as well.
Although he strained his ears he could hear nothing; the besiegers' camp was on the northwest side of the hill, two miles distant from the crest and better than three from here, just this side of Zollner Creek along the line of the old Southern Pacific railway. They were relying on mobile patrols to keep the rest of the circuit secure, but they had to send those well out to keep beyond catapult range.
"The diversion will start now," the monk said. Grimly: "Men are dying as we speak to distract the Protector's troops. Let's go."
The party went forward into the rainy night; the monk in the lead, as the native guide; then Alleyne Loring and his father; then Eilir Mackenzie and Astrid Larsson and John Hordle spread out in a fan as rear guard. They moved with cautious speed, across a meadow where no cattle grazed in this time of war, past a small farmstead equally empty and silent, and through a bare-branched orchard of peach trees just past bud-break. At the northern edge of it Nigel caught a flash of movement, more sensed than seen or heard; he patted the air with one hand, and they all sank down behind the weeds that flanked the fence and the laneway behind it.
Good, the Englishman thought. Not a sound.
He wasn't surprised at either Alleyne or Hordle; he'd helped train them himself, and knew their capacities. Astrid wasn't that much of a surprise either; Sam Aylward had taught her, and Michael Havel, and he knew the one and had a lively respect for the other. The movement had probably been nothing more than a fox or rabbit.
But Eilir is a bit of a startling phenomenon. I wouldn't have expected someone who couldn't bear to be able to be so quiet. She must have natural talent. I should have taken Hordle's word on it. He's not a man to let personal attachments cloud his judgment, not at all.
Lying by the fenceline, he put his ear to the muddy ground; even under the patter of the rain he could hear hooves approaching, many of them; at least a dozen riders, possibly twice that. Moments later a clot of horsemen followed the sound that heralded them, shambling along in no particular order, but with arrows on the strings of their short recurved saddle-bows or heavy machete-like sabers in their hands; one rose in the stirrups as he watched and slashed at an overhanging oak bough, bringing it down with casual ease though the wood was wrist-thick. He recognized the type; eastern mercenaries, plainsmen, the same folk he'd seen in action out near Pendleton last year, and which reports had placed in the Protector's service in this war. One had a light lance across his saddlebow and prodded at the roadside vegetation now and then.
Twenty of them, more or less, he thought; it was hard to be certain, with the light of the moon gone and the rain getting heavier.
They halted uncomfortably near, although there was a strip of meadow between the fence and the dirt road. One dismounted to piss into the roadway, holding the skirts of his long oiled-linen duster aside; a few of the others spoke, though most kept a keen eye out. Their ponchos and slickers made them look top-heavy and somehow inhuman through the murk and drizzle as they hunched in their saddles, and their heads swept back and forth.
I suppose they're nervous in close country like this, he thought; it was all small farms and fields here now, with new fences and hedges splitting up bigger pre-Change holdings. Not much like the great sagebrush plains and canyonlands of their homes, and doubly so in the wet darkness.
"What's got the Portland pussies all het up?" one asked. "They all tore over to the north there like it was a pretty girl spreading wide and yellin' first man here gets a piece!"
"Or like it was free beer on tap," someone else said.
"Oh, it's some raid or other, the monks kicking up their heels, I expect," a slightly older man replied; none of them sounded as old as his son Alleyne's twenty-eight. "Y'all know what the Portland pussies are like, hup-one-two-I-gotta-pike-up-my-ass. They spook easy, you ask me."
"Goddamn cold here," another said, wiping at the water on a face that was a blob of slightly lighter darkness. He looked up, which would only get him another face-full.
"Hey, who's the pussy now?" the older voice scoffed. "Been a lot colder, riding herd in winter."
"Yeah, but it's usually a dry cold. This country's too wet soon as you get west of the mountains. A man could get mushrooms growing on his balls around here."
"You could, Al, considering where you've been known to stick your dick. Rain's good for the grass, anyways," the leader's voice said. "Hey, Frank, you finished pissing or you got an irrigation system going there?"