Rictus stifled a shiver.
“The lazy bastards must be half asleep,” Druze whispered. “One good flash of moonlight and we’re as plain as a turd on a tabletop.”
“Let’s go, Rictus,” Fornyx said behind him. “Druze is right – any second now they’ll wake up on us.”
“Wait for my word,” Rictus said. “Remember the plan.”
A splurge of shouting in the night, off to their left.
“That’s Corvus,” Ardashir said. “He’s starting.”
“Give them a moment,” Rictus hissed to the men around him. He could sense their eagerness, the impulse in all soldiers to get it started, to get the thing over with.
The tumult to the south and west broadened, rising to break apart the stillness of the winter night. They could see torches running along the walls now, and someone began beating on a bronze gong.
“That’s their alarm,” Fornyx said. “Rictus, you want me to piss myself? Let’s go.”
Rictus grinned inside his helm. He rose to his feet, hauling at the heavy wood of the ladder. “All right, girls, up you get. Move quick and quiet.”
The ladder-bearing files of men climbed off their knees and brought the siege-ladders up to their shoulders. Rictus led off at the head of his and the rest followed. They spread out as they approached the walls; a bristling crowd of men, centons intermingled. Dogsheads, Igranians and Companions, all creeping together in the dark under the walls.
They were perhaps a hundred paces from the base when they were spotted. Someone yelled and held a blazing torch over the battlements, looking down, waving his arm.
“Fuck,” Rictus said. “Pick it up, lads. The party’s begun.”
Ardashir darted aside from the line of ladder-carriers. He lifted his bow from his shoulder and reached calmly for an arrow from the quiver at his hip. The rest ran past him.
The man on the walls with the torch cried out, dropped it, and staggered back from the battlement. The torch fell to the ground below and Rictus fixed his eyes upon it, a reference point in the night, something to keep him focused.
They were at the base of the wall. Rictus dropped his end of the ladder. “Lift!” he shouted. “Move in as you push!”
The heavy iron-frapped timber of the siege ladder rose up as a score of men manhandled it upright. They moved in as it rose, until it thumped against the wall above them and they were all in a huddle at its foot.
“Spread out a little, for Phobos’s sake!” Fornyx rapped out.
Rictus took a breath, hearing it hoarse and loud inside the helm. He drew his sword – he was carrying a heavy drepana – and settled his shield on his back. The bronze-faced weight of it seemed almost impossible to manage as he set a foot on the first rung and began to climb. He was glad of the helm now, and instinctively hunched as he ascended, expecting at any second to feel the impact of a stone or arrow.
The ladder flexed and bounced under him as it took the weight of man after man below. The quiet of the night was entirely ruptured now, with men’s voices raised all along the walls in fear and fury. In battle, men would scream themselves hoarse and not even be aware they were making a sound. Rictus had done it himself. But not tonight. He was concentrating too hard on climbing one-handed in full panoply. For the men below him it would be even harder, as there would be muck on the rungs to make their feet slip.
Other ladders on the walls to left and right. They had sawn out fifty in the past two days, chopping down a grove of fine old plane trees for the timber, and hammering out the iron reinforcing brackets in the field-forges of the army using spare horseshoes.
Back over the rise that led down to the city walls, Corvus and Parmenios – his plump little secretary – had set up a cross between a factory and a lumberyard, and men worked there in shifts, night and day. They had felled taenons of woodland and gathered every piece of scrap iron the countryside had to offer, everything from knives to ploughshares. No-one was quite sure what they were at; a bigger thing than these ladders, that was for certain.
But the ladders were the most economical way of getting men upon the walls of the city. They had to attempt a quick assault before settling down to the siege, Corvus had said. Even if it did not succeed, it would rattle the defenders, and give the attackers experience.
Experience, Rictus thought, gasping and gripping the wooden shank of the ladder so hard his bones hurt. Experience is overrated. If you want men to do this kind of thing with a willing heart, they’re better off ignorant.
He raised his head and looked up, a gesture of courage in itself. There were heads framed in the battlements above him. He saw a pair of arms raised.
Phobos! He jerked to one side and the heavy stone clipped the edge of his shield, struck the man behind him full in the face. The fellow did not even manage a scream out of his shattered mouth before he soared backwards and disappeared. In his fall he had thumped against the man below him on the ladder and knocked his feet from the rungs. The second man hung on by one hand – Rictus saw the terror in his eyes, bright in the T-slot of his helm – and then he was gone also, plummeting into the press below.
Rictus felt heavy, drained and weak, cold fear diluting the very blood that pumped madly through his heart. As he began to climb again, he uttered a guttural snarl, and his teeth bared like those of an animal.
A javelin glanced off his helm, clicked against the great bowl of the shield on his back, and was gone. His sandals slapped upon the flattened wooden rungs of the ladder. He held the drepana above his head as though it were some kind of talisman.
And he was there, level with the battlements -looking into the faces of the men who were trying to kill him.
One was pushing at the ladder, trying to lever it off the wall. Rictus flicked out the wide point of the drepana and dropped him with a pierced throat. He climbed higher up the rungs, set a hand on the cold stone. It felt as reassuring as a rope flung to a drowning man. He swept the drepana in a wide arc, missing his blow, but forcing the men in front of him back.
He was off the ladder, perched on the top of a merlon like an immense crow. He lunged forward, keenly conscious of the great long drop at his back, the weight of the shield still liable to drag him towards it.
He tumbled, felt a strike on his shoulder which slid off his black cuirass. A spearhead punched him in his chest, a heavy blow which would have transfixed him were it not for the Curse of God. He straightened, still snarling, his feet planted securely on Machran’s stone, and sent the drepana licking out like a snake, not trying for damage, just unbalancing his attackers, gaining room. With his left arm he angled his elbow into the bowl of the shield and swung it forward, slid his forearm into the centre-grip, and at once felt safer. “Dogsheads!” he bellowed. “Dogsheads to me- on the walls, boys!”
Someone had dropped onto the battlement behind him. A shield was tucked beside his own. He felt a surge of new energy, the bowel-draining fear leaving him.
More of his men were up at the lips of the walls, their heads popping up all down the line. The defenders were being pushed back. Corvus’s diversion had worked; the enemy was very thin on the ground here.
Rictus smashed forward, butting his shield into the face of the man in front, stabbing the drepana low at his knees. He felt the blade shear through flesh and the gristle of a joint. The man cried out, his mouth a wet hole under his helm. Rictus shouldered him hard and he flew backwards, off the catwalk.
More men behind him now. The assault was succeeding – they had a foothold.
“Who’d have thought it?” Fornyx yelled. “Ladders!”
“Keep them coming,” Rictus shouted back. He saw Kesero there under the banner, and Valerian was further along the wall, standing in an embrasure and holding fast to a tottering ladder. Dogsheads were fighting side by side with Druze’s lightly armed Igranians.