No more missiles were thrown at the citadel that night or on the day following. The engineers and every other man, woman and child, slave or free, were far too busy trying to prevent the city from burning to the ground. Two months to the day after he had landed with his army on the beach north of Tworivercity, Alex, Duke of Traders-town, sat alone in a room of the south wing of the singed and charred palace chewing at his thumb in a high dudgeon. He and the army were in serious trouble, and well he knew it. His support within the city was fading away like morning dew under a hot sun, and even Duchess Ann was beginning to whine at him.
“No wonder,” he thought, “that Tcharlz keeps so far away from her. Were the fat slug my wife, had I wed her instead of her sister, I’d likely have slit her damned gullet by now, and shut her yapping mouth for good. Tcharlz must have far more patience than have I.”
Absently, Alex chose a strip of jerked meat from a plate before him and gnawed at the hard, stringy stuff. It was about all the victuals that he or anyone else in the city would have until supplies from Traderstown could be gotten to him. The supplies he had brought with him and those received shortly thereafter had mostly gone up in the same smoke that had taken almost all the stores of the city on the night the engines of that accursed citadel had fired so many buildings.
When his big yellow teeth had worried off a chewable piece of the jerky, he masticated for a while, then sipped from a goblet of honey wine to dilute the salt and mask the abominable flavor of the meat And his mood was as foul as his repast; servants and retainers tiptoed past the open doors to the room, for he had already injured one man with a thrown dagger. Duke Alex was by now convinced that all the world had turned against him. The damned little fort down yonder refused to surrender, refused to face the fact that Duke Alex held the city. Due to the high level of the groundwater in the Lower Town, the fortification could not be properly invested. None of his many and varied attempts to pound down the walls of this thorn in his side had been successful, and now he and his staff were loath to even try, again; should they, they feared that the satanic bastard who commanded might very well finish the burning down of the upper city.
Even his ally the King of Mehmfiz, that craven little fart Uyr, was turning against him, reneging on his sworn word. The plan had been for him to leave behind sufficient force to hold Tcharlz and his forces in the south, then to sail upriver with the bulk of his men and. attack from the dock area, while Alex attacked from the landward side. But the puling bastard had never sailed upriver, and each succeeding message from the forsworn scoundrel was more evasive than the last.
Nor had the coward even been able to hold Tcharlz in the south as he had promised to do. Tcharlz himself had been identified leading the strong force of dragoons, lancers and irregulars that had captured or destroyed three of the last five supply trains bound for the city, had eradicated smaller patrols of Duke Alex’s cavalry and had fought pitched battles with larger bodies. The weather had become frightful, freezing cold long before its time, with little cordwood and less charcoal and no way to secure more. So many officers and men of his army had been assaulted or murdered in the streets recently that they were now forbidden to venture abroad in lesser numbers than a full squad, by day or by night, nor had salutary executions of suspects or hostages picked at random seemed to do any good. It was become very difficult to feed the horses properly, and the beasts were, moreover, beginning to disappear. His own favorite stallion had been taken from a guarded stable; later the animal’s glossy hide and a few of the larger bones had been found on a midden pile. Watching the stable guards die slowly had done little to assuage his grief.
So sorely beset, Alex was no longer sleeping well. He was drinking more than had been his wont, which meant that when sleep he did, he invariably wakened red-eyed, with throbbing head and queasy stomach and nerves taut as the ropes of a catapult. The rough and paltry food available even to him had so addled his belly that he alternated between painful constipation and debilitating diarrhea. Why would not that damned little fort surrender? He had offered generous and handsome terms, all refused.
A few hours later, Duke Alex watched in impotent rage as Duke Tcharlz and his horsemen swept down upon the southbound supply train, butchered guards and drivers alike, then drove off the wagons and carts in triumph. And still later that dreadful day, he gazed dejectedly from a window of the palace to the square below, where citizens and his own soldiers fought like starveling dogs for the basketloads of offal and refuse hurled into the city by the engines of the citadel.
For the sake of his slipping hold on sanity, it was perhaps as well that Alex, Duke of Traderstown, was not aware that his real troubles had not yet begun.
12
The winter was as hard as any that Milo of Morai could recall. It came early, howling in from the far north, and it necessitated a measured scattering of the painfully gathered clans in order to provide graze and to preserve as much livestock as possible. He and Blind Hari of Kxooguh could but hope that the clans would reassemble at the appointed place if spring ever arrived. Nor was the winter any whit easier on Duke Alex, his army or the folk of the Upper Town. What remained of the invading force was now all foot soldiers with no transport, all oxen and horses and even the mules having either been slaughtered by the troops, with or without orders, or stolen by groups of ravenous civilians.
The besieged besiegers had scoured and rescoured the Upper Town, completely ridding it of pigs, goats, dogs, cats and even rats. Now rawhides and leather were being boiled up over fires fueled by chopped furniture, while mixed bands of soldiers and citizens willingly risked the deadly attentions of archers and crossbowmen on the walls of the citadel in order to secure one or two of the huge wharf rats on the streets and in the alleys of the old town. Duke Tcharlz, who was in actuality nowhere near as hard, uncompromising and unfeeling a man as he would have had the world believe, permitted an early exodus of nursing mothers and young children. At length he began to allow supply trains to reach the city, and finally when unusually heavy icing brought river traffic to a standstill, he and his men de-livered dozens of wagonloads of cordwood, charcoal and nonperishable foodstuffs to just beyond bow range of the city’s low walls.
By then his infantry had marched back up from the south, and he well knew that come spring, those scarecrow-defended walls would present little obstacle to his army. Nor would King Uyr of Mehmfiz present a problem any time soon, for, was the intelligence correct, that unhappy young man and what was left of his hired army was hotly engaged in putting down scattered rebellions on his northern marches.
Messengers passed with the greatest of ease between the duke’s field army and the “beleaguered” citadel in the Lower Town. Tcharlz was inordinately pleased with and proud of his selection of Captain Martuhn, nor did he hesitate to express his good nature toward him and his garrison in every way possible. “I think, Sir Wolf,” Martuhn chuckled, “that his grace would adopt me, name me his heir and gift me half his duchy, did I but drop the word that such would please me.”
“Then why don’t you, my lord count?” Wolf mindspoke. “I think I’d enjoy serving a duke’s heir.”
Martuhn just shook his head. “No you wouldn’t, old friend, you’d have to guard not only my back but taste all of my victuals, as well, and eventually you’d get a fatal bellyache of it. Too much politics of a poisonous nature goes on among the higher nobility to suit me. Count is as high as I will ever aspire, thank you.