He poked the headphones with a finger and sighed; they were an example. They had some pre-Event shortwave sets, all transistors and synthetics, none of which could be allowed anywhere as dangerous as Troy. What the Republic's engineers and artisans could make instead was this 1930's-style monstrosity-five times as big and with five times the power consumption and half the effectiveness of pre-Event electronics. But they could replace the handblown vacuum tubes, which they couldn't do with the modern equipment. Meanwhile, the electricity came from a windmill, or squads on bicycle generators during calms.
The sound of cannon came again, louder than before, a huge heavy dull sound, like an enormous door shutting in the far distance. He rose and hurried through the corridors of the palace. They'd been opulent not long ago, before the siege; smooth gypsum floors, walls painted in a fanciful half-naturalistic style, costly embroidered hangings. The building itself was made of timber and mud brick on stone foundations, flat-roofed, two-and three-story blocks built around courtyards, all rather like a Southwestern pueblo. Now it was crowded, like the whole of the small city inside Troy's walls; here it was mainly gentry from the countryside and their immediate retainers. Most were relatives of the King, bunking in rooms normally used for storage or weaving or kept empty for guests. They looked at him with an awe that hurt, the foreign magician who would save them from the Wolf Lord of the west; a granny hunched over a piece of sewing, girl-children playing a game remarkably like hopscotch and giggling as they skipped, a proud black-haired woman with a huge-eyed child on her lap, a tall cloaked man, white-bearded, who bowed gravely. The smell wasn't too bad overall; the Republic's military medics were enforcing sanitation with fanatical determination backed up by their reputation as wizards, but there was a sour undertone to it. Those sanitary regulations were the only thing that kept this whole city from going up in a pyre of epidemics; out in the lower town below the citadel the peasant refugees were crammed in like sardines, even many of the streets turned over to makeshift shacks.
There weren't many men of fighting age in the palace. They were on the walls, or working. Ian kept his face solemn, as local manners required, and returned the greetings. Inwardly he winced a bit. They would fight to the end, now. They didn't have much choice. The original terms for surrender Walker had offered had been relatively generous, and he'd probably have kept them.
But I convinced them to fight. That was certainly to the advantage of the Republic and its Hittite and Babylonian allies. It's only to Troy's advantage if the relief force gets here in time. If it didn't, this whole people would be blotted off the face of the earth.
A few minutes brought him to the place he sought, the main courtyard, which had been taken over by Major Chong of the Marine Corps for his weapons, a battery of heavy mortars. Their snouts showed above the lips of the berms below, each dug into a cell of earth; for a brief moment he felt an illogical sorrow for the gardens that had given air and sweetness to this section of the great building. Now that air was heavy with the stink of burned sulfur from the black-powder propellant. The loading teams sprawled, resting. Most of them were Trojans, in tunics and kilts much like their Achaean cousins. Over the weeks of the siege there had been time to train them for most of the work, each team under a Marine or two, while the rest of the crews acted as officers elsewhere.
Ian waved to them, and turned through what had once been the queen's audience chamber. The palace and the citadel around it were on the highest ground available, and Trojan architecture ran to exterior galleries on the higher stories. Chong was there, and King Alaksandrus of Wilusia-Ilios, Troy-in full fig of bronze armor, boar's-tooth helmet, horsehair plume, the rifle across his back looked a little incongruous. Ian exchanged solemn greetings.
It's a matter of morale, he thought, feeling a melancholy amusement at the Trojan's finery. Like a Victorian Englishman changing into formal wear for dinner in the middle of some godforsaken jungle or a residency besieged by mutinous sepoys. Stiff upper lip and all that.
"How's it going, Major?" he asked the Marine officer.
Chong's family had been Realtors on Nantucket, ethnic-Chinese refugees from Vietnam originally. There was a slight tinge of Yankee drawl to the man's vowels, and his handsome amber-hued face was drawn with fatigue as he shrugged.
"Exactly the way I anticipated," he said-in English, but Alaksandrus had grown resigned to his allies using their incomprehensible tongue when they wanted to leave him out of the conversation.
"That bad?"
"Take a look, Councilor."
He bent to the heavy tripod-mounted binocular telescope. The scene that jumped out at him was wearily familiar. The enemy vessels were further up the coast, just barely visible to the north, unloading new devilments; the bay that reached nearly to the wall was too close to Chong's mortars. Around Troy stretched a semicircle of siegeworks, trenches, and bunkers cut into the soft soil of the coastal flats and then over the rocky heights behind them. Beyond them stretched camps, orderly rows of tents for the Wolf Lord's men, a sprawling chaos of brushwood shelters and rammed-earth huts and leather lean-tos for his barbarian allies.
"The Ringapi don't look too happy," he said. Misery hung over those encampments as palpably as dust haze and smoke.
"Should they be?" Chong said.
"No," Ian said.
Prisoners had brought in tales of disease and hunger. He could fill in the rest for himself; the chieftains were probably wishing they'd never left the middle Danube. So far they'd gotten scant loot, and having plundered the countryside bare they were utterly dependent on Walker for their daily bread. Apparently he was doling it out in lots only slightly more generous than his allotments of second-rate firearms. You needed a long spoon to sup with that particular devil.
"Still, he's getting the work done," Chong said. "Herewith expert help, Ian could make out the zigzag covered ways thrust out from the encircling walls. Here and there, men toiled with pick and shovel and woven baskets full of earth to extend them, and others hauled timber and dirt forward to provide overhead cover. From two such bastions the slow bombardment came, heavy shells thudding home into the hastily heaped earth berm that the Islanders had shown the Trojans how to pile against their vulnerable stone curtain-wall.
"Dahlgren-type guns," Chong said. Ian licked dry lips and fought for a similar detachment. "Rifled pieces would be giving us more problems."
A subordinate called the Marine officer over to a map table; he looked at the results of the triangulation, nodded, spoke into a microphone. Less than thirty seconds later a massive whunk! sound came from the courtyard behind them, and a plume of smoke just visible over the rooftop. A falling shriek went northwestward, and a tall plume of dirt and debris gouted out of the plain of Troy like a momentary poplar tree. The thudump of the explosion came a measurable time later.
"Have to be dead lucky to get a direct hit on one of the guns," Chong explained. "Especially since we have to conserve ammunition…"
"We've only got the one dirigible," Ian pointed out. "And it can only carry a couple of tons at a time. If we lost it…"
Chong nodded. The Achaeans had light cannon in yoke mounts that could swing them quickly upward, big kites with burning rags attached, and a number of other antiairship weapons. None of them had worked so far, but they kept trying.
"I don't like the looks of those approach trenches they're digging either," Chong said. "I have a suspicion they're going to use them for another mass attack on the walls. We've got nearly a thousand rifles here now, but only a hundred and twenty rounds of ammunition for each."