With that, the Kleesahk opened his mind that Bili might see through his hominid eyes. Some fifty or sixty feet below the watcher, on the last level stretch of the plain before the precipitous cliff, scores of Skohshun artisans were hard at work at siege carpentry. Obviously, one or more buildings out somewhere upon the plain had been wholly or partially demolished and the long, thick, strong, well-seasoned beam timbers from that destruction were being worked and joined end to end—slotted, dovetailed, augered and tree-nailed. At regular intervals, shorter timbers were being used to connect each of the three pair of uprights, with wooden latticework meshes lashed across the spans and wetted green hides stretched atop all. One of the giant devices lay almost complete, and the two others were nearing completion.
Seated at table in the hall of the palace, Bili felt his nape hairs all a-prickle. Those Skohshun leaders were clearly no fools, tyros or incompetents. Faced with a fortress-city so cunningly designed and situated, so massively constructed and stubbornly defended as to render frontal attacks so hideously expensive in terms of casualties as to not bear repetition, a city so well supplied and watered as to be capable of outwaiting even the most determined armies, a city that could not even be undermined, they had rightly concluded that new and extreme tactics were required.
Every officer in the city was aware that the Skohshun army vastly outnumbered their own trained fighters, but secure in their stonewalled, well-supplied and elevated fortress, they still could have probably held the foe at bay with half their present numbers. Since the very inception of the siege, no single Skohshun foot had ever rested for even a moment upon any portion of the walls, and damned few had ever achieved so far as within spear cast of them.
But this advantage rested upon the sole fact that the city could be approached and, therefore, attacked by any numbers only from the front. Of the two sides, one was at the edge of a high, sheer cliff made even more treacherous by being almost constantly wet and slimy due to the fact that all the city drains exited at the base of that stretch of wall; the opposite side overlooked some hundred and fifty yards’ expanse of a steep, shaly slope, broken by another, lower cliff, then extending on for several hundred more yards of loose, treacherous footing beyond. The rear of the fortress-city was unwalled—there was no need for any other defense than the mountain into which it had been built. So the front wall and its gates, alone, were vulnerable to the attack of enemies unable to fly.
“Those damned Skohshuns have a running mile of guts,” Bili thought, “I have to give them that!”
Early on, the besiegers had essayed not just one but two full-scale frontal assaults, with their thousands running up the inclined roadways and scrambling up the exposed slopes and taking dreadful losses from the accurate loosings of engines, bows, crossbows and, as the few survivors got closer, staff slings and darts. Only the luckiest or the hardiest had gotten close enough to die under the walls of the barbican, and Bili and his officers had seriously doubted that the aliens would try such suicidal bravery again.
But they had! Only a week later, the Skohshuns had marched out of their camp, bearing short polearms and long scaling hooks and clumsy, two-men-abreast ladders. The parties carrying the heavy ladders had headed up the roadway and the rest had poured up the flanking slopes to face the large and small stones, the pitchballs and pots of flaming oil, the arrows and bolts and engine spears which were capable of piercing through three or four men in a row, steel breastplates and all.
Also, on that ill-fated day for Skohshuns, a stray splash of burning oil from one of the pots flung by the wall engines had ignited the pitch-soaked, oakum-stuffed wooden corduroy of the roadway. It had not been intentional, for the garrison was holding the attackers off, executing terrible amounts of death and maimings within their ranks, without it. But when the highly flammable stretches once were fired, there had been no stopping the ensuing fires, and all of the environs had stunk unto the very skies of charred, overdone meat for long days, and then of the sickly-sweet stench of rotting flesh until at last the carrion birds and beasts and insects had accomplished their grisly but necessary purposes.
The Skohshuns had seemed to have learned their lesson, a hard, very bloody lesson. After that second attack they had limped, hobbled, crawled or been carried or dragged back within their stockaded camp; there had been no more attempts on the front wall and barbican. The third attack had come boiling up the slippery, uneven and terribly exposed shale slopes to the east of the city-fortress. But such had been the losses on the lower slope that the assault had been wisely aborted before a single man had reached the upper slope.
In recent weeks, the Skohshuns had given every outward appearance of having settled in for a long, passive, interdictive siege. But Bili knew them for the stark fighters that they were and had been dead certain that they were but resting, licking their wounds and planning new and different means of striking again at the walls and the city within them.
Stealthy nighttime patrols by Whitetip and various of the Kleesahks had verified that the Skohshuns were hard at work in constructing stone- and spear-throwing engines of several varieties and sizes. But as both the prairiecat and the huge hirsute hominids had had, perforce, to take a roundabout way to and from the camp, they had never spotted the construction site at the very foot of the front slope or what was being built there ... until today. That was why the Skohshuns had sent up the Ganiks with their Witchman weapons: fear that the watchers upon the front walls and towers might espy the work going on below.
Now the certain tactics of the coming assault—the third, against the front wall, it would be—were crystal-clear to Bili’s quick, perceptive mind.
The Skohshuns would drag their engines into place on a dark night, setting them, their crews and the projectiles for them somewhere just out of easy bowshot, probably in preselected and prepared positions. A chosen group of shock troops would be massed just below the front bulge of the mountain—that up which the roadway snaked its way—and there they would wait, protected from any but high-arching, indirect loosings by that same, rocky bulge. Possibly they would also send all three of the Ganiks armed with the Witchman weapons, these “ryfuhls,” up the slopes during the hours of the dark to, with the first light, aid the engines in making the walls and the tower-engine positions most unsalubrious places for humans or Kleesahks.
Then, when it seemed that the time was ripe, those long, long, immensely long lengths of timber would be somehow set up on end. Then, probably guided by ropes, their other ends would be lowered to span the roadway cuts and the difficult slopes to finally come to rest—if they were long enough, and the parapet of the front wall was actually less than a hundred feet above the level of the plain when measured in a straight line—on the very walls of the city.
The Skohshun engines would be able to continue their workup to and until only bare moments before the first Skohshun was close enough to come onto the wall of New Kuhmbuhluhnburk. With a few score or more Skohshuns upon the front wall, the engines would probably either increase their range and begin dropping boulders and flammables within the city itself, or change direction to support the other attack, most likely one against the east wall. And, all things considered, the scenario Bili’s mind conjured up might very well succeed where earlier, less well-planned ones had failed.
That was not a chance that Bili, feeling keenly the crushing weight of his undesired responsibilities, was willing to take. Several optional plans for the destruction of these oversize scaling ladders crowded the young thoheeks’ mind. Whether or not the guards and craftsmen were slain, the devices and raw materials must be fired, burned to ashes. But how best to accomplish this aim?