The duke’s soldiers, retreating before the enemy army which vastly outnumbered them, had but to say the word and the non-city dwellers did their duty. Duke Alex, as he advanced into the rich farmlands north and east of his objective, quickly realized to his dismay and rage that his plan of feeding his army off the country of his foe was doomed to failure. Storehouses and granaries gaped as empty as every house and barn, and the few unreaped fields now sprouted only charred stubble. Aside from the occasional stray goat or half-wild pig rooting in the midden of a deserted village, nothing that might possibly be of use to him and his host remained. Cursing sulphurously, he sent yet one more messenger riding back the way they had come, with orders for supplies to be ready for barging across the Great River as soon as he had secured the surrender of the ridiculous little pile of stone that went under the misnomer of “citadel.” It would be ten days or two weeks, he estimated, probably only half that time.
Just outside the low walls of the city, Alex set up camp and, while he met with his sister-in-law, her retainers and courtiers and the chief men of the city, his troops were marshaled and groomed to give the best appearance. Then on the morning of the third day, to the cheering of the city folk lining the street—High Street, which led straight from the North Gate to the Palace Square in the exact center of the city— beneath the bunting-draped shops and homes, he and his army paraded in, with drums beating and banners unfurled. And Duke Alex felt every inch the liberator he had convinced himself he was. This heady mood lasted all the way to the Palace Square. As soon as the square was jam-packed with his soldiery and Alex was staring in horrified awe at the bulk of a completed citadel in the lower reaches of the city, a number of black specks were seen arcing from the top of the inland walls, growing steadily larger as they neared.
The boulders slammed sanguineously into the massed troops, shattering against the pave in deadly, flying shards or bouncing high—once, twice, sometimes thrice—to mash out the lives of still more men. And the carnival atmosphere was become, in a matter of short seconds, purest pandemonium and screaming panic. Nor did the second volley of bushels of smaller stones or the third of blazing pitchballs help to calm the terror-stricken throngs. It was later reckoned that as many or more were trampled to death trying to flee the Palace Square as actually died from the engine missiles.
Duke Alex thought it, in toto, a most inauspicious beginning for the siege. And the following weeks went no better. Early on, it was discovered that the usual trenching manuevers would be impossible anywhere in the Lower Town, for no sooner was a trench deep enough to give a minimum of protection than it commenced to fill with groundwater from the high riverside water table. Therefore, on the advice of his staff, Duke Alex had many nearby homes and other buildings demolished and the rubble carted to fill in the canals the trenches were fast becoming. Then the rest of the rubble was used to give some measure of cover to the crews of his engines.
But no sooner were his stone and spear throwers in place and taking their first, ranging shots at the walls of the citadel than their crews and Duke Alex were made painfully aware of the error in the staffs reckoning. Not only brick, stone and mortar had gone into the filling of the trenches and the erection of the protective wall, but much splintery wood, lengths of dry, dusty timbers that flared like brushwood at the impact of the first pitchballs. The fire spread with unbelievable rapidity, its heat driving the crews away, crackling flames leaping in every direction, soon adding the wooden portions of the engines to the conflagration. Slowly eating into the wetted wood in the trenches below, the fire smoked and smoldered on for days.
The oldest portion of Tworivercity or Twocityport (which bore a third and still older name, Tworivertown) was the riverside section, in the center of which the citadel now squatted, ringed about by its moat. A hundred and more years agone, when the ancestors of both Duke Alex and Duchess Ann were nothing more than river pirates, who sent their swift galleys beating out to levy tolls on or board and plunder passing river traffic, the lower section had been all the urban area there was and the only edifice on the stretch of bluff behind the town had been a watchtower to warn of the approach of prey from up- or downriver.
It was only after the town became richer and conquered much of the inland farmlands and small towns and the then rulers began to style themselves high nobility and hire on soldiers to protect their holdings and add more by conquest that the first part of the bluff-top palace was built, and the present city had grown up around the palace. In the beginning, only mansions of the nobility and gentry and the quarters of the soldiers had occupied the newer section of the city.
In more recent decades, however, pursuant to the many and sweeping changes wrought by Duke Tcharlz—and much to the screaming outrage of the old nobility, whose wealth and power had declined precipitously in the wake of the new duke’s reforms—non-nobles, newly rich ship owners and merchants had bought or built in the once exclusive Upper City.
Prior to the erection of the new fortress-citadel, the Old Town had been entirely given over to huge warehouses, mean bordellos and low dives frequented almost exclusively by river sailors and low-ranking mercenaries, fringed at north and south by a ramshackle aggregation of the huts and hovels of the poor, the aged, the outcast and the indigent.
Wisely, Duke Tcharlz had raised the landward walls of his new fortress several yards higher than called for in the original plans, that they not be overshadowed by higher elevation of the bluff-top city. However, as days became weeks, Duke Alex, frustrated at every turn in his attempts to open a normal siege on the citadel in the old town, determined as his sole real advantage the fact that the bluff area, which be did fully control, was almost on a level with the walls of the objective and that it was the only feasible place, both within range and affording some measure of protection, on which to mount his batteries of engines.
Although only a little better than half of the promised troops to garrison the citadel had ever arrived, Captain Count Martuhn still felt well served and secure in his firm belief that he could hold the fortress as long as might prove necessary. True, he was devilishly short of archers, having only those from his own mixed company and the unit of crossbowmen from Pirates’ Folly. But in the absence of any attempt at a frontal assault against the fortress, he had as yet had no need of them.
A more serious problem might have been the nonarrival of the company of engineers and artificers, save for the multi-talented Lieutenant Nahseer and two happy turns of fortune.
Quite a few of the yeomen-farmers who had stripped and deserted their land in the face of the invaders had come through the Upper Town to the Lower and sought admission to the citadel. Most had brought their whole families, their livestock and wagonloads of personal effects, furniture and victuals. After cogitating the ticklish matter and discussing it with Wolf and Nahseer, Martuhn had admitted a few, but only those who had relatives among the garrison or those who were retired soldiers. And that was how he acquired not one but two veteran engineers’ artificers, one a company sergeant, one a sergeant-major, with a total experience of nearly fifty years between them.
With a few simple adjustments and a few days of drilling the amateur crews, the two sergeants had rendered the existing engines more flexible, longer-ranging and harder-hitting. The missing spearthrowers they had replaced with an ingenious device consisting of a wooden framework holding a wooden, V-shaped trough to support the spear and springy boards to propel it. When both of the retired noncoms flatly refused the offer of commissions, Martuhn transferred Nahseer from his personal staff to the command of the fledgling engineer unit, promoting him at the same time to senior lieutenant. Well aware from times past of the inherent dangers of idleness among soldiers, especially under the present conditions, Martuhn made certain that every member of the garrison had work of a sort to perform for almost every hour of daylight. The men, of course, grumbled at the unending rounds of drills, weapons practice and inspections, but it was the good-natured grumbling of professional soldiers and to be expected in any command.