Up came the catapults. Brannan was a good officer. Doubting George kicked himself for not having ordered the engines forward with the cavalry. The northerners, surely, would not rush from cover to attack the catapults. They would be asking for massacre if they did. They might be brave-they undoubtedly were brave-but they weren’t stupid.
Firepots flew through the air toward the catapults as they deployed. So did large stones: altogether unsorcerous, but highly effective. A stone smashed one machine, and several of the men who served it. Another catapult sent a cloud of dirty black smoke into the sky. The rest of the crews stolidly went about their business. In mere minutes, they were flinging missiles back at the northerners.
Some of their stones smashed against the fences. Some of their firepots burst in front of or against the fences, too. That was spectacular, especially from George’s hilltop view, but accomplished nothing. But most of the missiles made it over the fences and fell among the enemy soldiers beyond. The northerners stirred and boiled, like ants when their hill was disturbed.
“That’s the way to shift them!” George shouted, and ordered a runner to go on down to the catapult crews and tell them so. “Those buggers won’t be able to stand against us for long if we keep dropping things on their heads.”
Other catapults turned the business of pelting the foe with crossbow quarrels into something that might have come straight from a manufactory rather than out of a general’s manual of stratagems. An operator at the right side of each dart-throwing engine worked a windlass connected to the engine’s cocking mechanism by means of flat-link chains each turning on a pair of five-sided gears. Another operator fed sheaf after sheaf of arrows into a hopper above the launching groove. When the devices worked well, each one was worth several squads of crossbowmen. When they didn’t-and they often didn’t-their crews spent inordinate amounts of time attacking them with wrenches and pliers.
Today, they were working as well as Doubting George had ever seen them. Their operators had them angled high so their darts plunged down over the fences and onto the enemy crossbowmen just beyond. George smiled and called for another runner. “Order the pikemen and crossbowmen to advance on the walls there,” he told the youngster. “They’ll be able to get up to them and over without too much trouble, or I miss my guess.”
But before the second runner could carry that command to the footsoldiers, lightning struck from a clear blue sky and smote one of the dart-throwers. The great ball of flame that burst from it made George’s hands involuntarily fly up to protect his eyes. As the roar from the blast thundered by half a heartbeat later, his unicorn snorted and sidestepped in fright. With automatic competence, he fought it back under his control.
Doing that made his wits start working again. “Hold!” he shouted to the second runner. That worthy wasn’t going anywhere anyhow. Like everybody else, he was staring in horrified astonishment at the ruination visited on the catapult. Even as he stared, another flash of lightning wrecked another engine. Doubting George was horrified and astonished, too. But he was also furious. He pointed to the runner. “No, by the gods! Get yourself gone to our so-called mages. You tell them that, for every catapult wrecked after you reach them, one of them will end up shorter by a head.”
The runner sprinted away. George doubted he had the authority to make his threat good. With luck, the mages wouldn’t realize that. If he had to terrify them into doing their job better, he would, and without thinking twice.
Another thunderbolt crashed down among the catapults. When George stopped blinking, he saw that this one had punished bare ground, not one of his engines or its crew. He nodded. Slower than they should have, his mages were casting counterspells. The next bolt didn’t reach the ground at all. Doubting George nodded again. The southron sorcerers could do the job, if only they remembered they were supposed to.
And then, when lightning struck behind the stone fences from which Geoffrey’s men fought, George did more than nod. He clapped his hands together. “Go it!” he shouted to the mages in gray. They were too far away to hear him, but he didn’t care. He shouted again: “Make the traitors think the seven hells aren’t half a mile off!”
His officers knew what wanted doing. They had a better, more certain idea than the mages. That was plain. As soon as the catapult crews could work their stone- and firepot- and dart-throwers again without fear of being crisped from the innocent air above, his company and regimental commanders sent their footsoldiers forward against the stone fences without waiting for orders from him.
A few of the soldiers fell; neither bombardment nor magecraft had forced all the northerners away from those fences. They were stubborn and brave, sure enough. The war would have ended long since were that not true. Their bravery didn’t help them here, though. Southrons gained the fences and started scrambling over them. Some northerners died where they stood. Some fled. Some came back captive, with upraised hands and glum faces.
“Lieutenant General George!” a rider called, galloping over from the center. “General Guildenstern’s compliments, and do you need help from the rest of the force?”
Doubting George shook his head. “Give him my thanks, but I need not a thing. Only a skirmish here, and we’ve won it.”
Captain Ormerod was not a happy man as he trudged west, back toward Rising Rock. The mages had promised they would do dreadful things to the ragtag and bobtail of gallowsbait from the southern cities and runaway serfs who filled out the ranks of false King Avram’s army. Mages’ promises, though, were all too often written on wind, written on water. What one mage could do, another-or several others-could undo. The southrons didn’t have great mages, but they had a lot of them. Ormerod didn’t think the little delaying action at the stone fences had done enough delaying. It certainly hadn’t done as much as his superiors had hoped.
And he had more reason for being unhappy than that. His left leg pained him, as it always did these days when he had to march hard. He’d taken a crossbow quarrel right through the meat of his calf in the frigid fight at Reillyburgh. The wound hadn’t mortified, so he supposed he was lucky. But he had two great puckered scars on the leg, and less meat than he’d had before he was hit. Hard marching hurt.
“Come on, boys,” he called to the footsoldiers in the company he commanded. “Keep it moving. Those southron bastards aren’t chasing us, by the gods. We showed ’em we’ve still got teeth.”
He put the best face he could on retreat. He’d had practice retreating, more practice than he’d wanted, more practiced than he’d ever thought he would get. Like so many northern nobles, he’d joined King Geoffrey’s levy as soon as war broke out: indeed, Palmetto Province had been the first to reject Avram and proclaim Geoffrey Detina’s rightful king.
Baron Ormerod wondered what kind of an indigo harvest his wife and the serfs would get from his estate when he wasn’t there to keep an eye on things. Bianca’s letters were all resolutely cheerful, but Bianca herself was resolutely cheerful, too. What all wasn’t she telling him? How many serfs had run off these past few months? How many of the blonds still on the land dogged it instead of working?
His first lieutenant came up to him, making him think of something besides his estate. “Sir?” the man asked.
“What is it, Gremio?” Ormerod asked. “By your sour look, something’s gone wrong somewhere.”
“With this whole campaign, sir,” Gremio burst out. “Truly the gods must hate us, if they watch us bungle so but do nothing to help… Why are you laughing, sir?” He sent Ormerod a resentful stare.
“Because if I did anything else, I’d start to wail, and I don’t care to wash my face with tears,” Ormerod said. “And speaking of faces, what would they say if they saw yours in the Karlsburg law courts looking the way you do?”