"Those contraptions take much longer to build than you'd think. And the wind and rain have slowed him up."
"Good for Helios-Apollon! I knew—"
A hand smote me on the back with such force that it nearly felled me. "Chares!" said a lusty voice.
"Phaon!" I embraced my new battery commander.
"Have you seen your new battery?" he asked.
"Yes. Aren't they beauties? I don't yet understand why I got them."
"Well, confidentially, old boy, all the rest of us in the artillery are afraid of those monsters. Moreover, it seemed only right to give the biggest catapults to the smallest officer in the corps: to balance things out, you know."
"How about ammunition?" I asked.
"That is what I wanted to speak to you about ..."
Bias left us, and I spent the rest of the day organizing my crews and arranging for the manufacture and supply of balls. I had eighty-odd stone balls from the previous fighting, but these would not last a day once the battle was joined again.
For more ammunition I had to settle for balls of brick with cores of stone, as Makar could not spare his masons long enough to chip down balls of solid stone. Besides, he needed all the large stones he could get for his walls. It did not much matter; brick is about as effective as stone except against stone walls. Brick also has the advantage that the ball usually breaks on impact and hence cannot be picked up and shot back.
I named my catapults Skylla and Charybdis, after the Poet's mythical monsters. They were commanded, respectively, by Onas and by Mys.
Towards sunset the pangs of hunger reminded me that I had forgotten to eat my lunch. I went home and was made much of by my mother.
"I'm only sorry we cannot give you a decent meal, dearest Chares," she said. "I'll warrant you haven't eaten properly during all your journey. You were always the worst eater of any child I ever heard of."
"Don't worry, Mother," I said. "So long as I keep my health and strength, my diet must be adequate. The people to worry about are those like Glôs and Genetor, who lug all that extra weight around. Why, Father, what's this?"
My father came in, carrying a cuirass, a helmet, and a pair of light greaves. "A little surprise for you," he said. "I made them with my own hands. We cannot have a battery commander running around in the cap and jack of a private soldier."
"Splendid!" I cried, wriggling into the armor. It fitted perfectly, even though made in my absence. The helmet was one of those with a plume holder that rises straight up for nearly a cubit before curling over forward at the top.
"I thought it would make you look a little taller," said my father proudly. "You will also notice that the cuirass is not all tricked up with reliefs of Herakles rescuing his wife from the centaur and similar subjects. This is a fighting corselet, and such irregularities merely afford places for the foe's point to catch and lodge ... Why, Chares, what are you crying for? Don't you like the suit?"
"It's that you are t-too good to me," I said. "In spite of my being headstrong and selfish and cross-grained—"
"You're coming along," he said. "When do we eat, Elissa?"
My hunger was partly appeased by a miserable meal of barley porridge, with a few greens and one small fish as a treat. I told of my adventures in Egypt—or as much of them as I thought my parents should know—and asked for news.
"The big event," said my father, "was Demetrios' attempt to invade the city through tunnels. He began these tunnels inside his stockade, so that we could not see their entrances. It meant much delving, but he has plenty of. men. He ran several tunnels across the cleared space, dipping deeply to pass under the ditch.
"Hermes only knows what would have befallen us had not a deserter warned the Council. Our people found the tunnels by setting bronzen bowls along the base of the wall— bowls made in my foundry; I'm proud to say—and watching the water in them ripple from the vibration of the sappers' picks. Then they dug a trench inside our wall, so deep that when the first tunnel emerged from under the wall, the sappers broke out into the trench. Our men jumped down and pushed into the tunnel, and a stubborn fight raged back and forth in these burrows. Your cousin Herodes was killed in this brawl.
"In the end the Antigonians were unable to force their way into the city, but neither could we force them very far back into the tunnels, because they had cross drifts by which they could feed men from one tunnel into another and cut us off. So each side piled a barrier of stones, we at the entrance of the tunnels into the trench and they farther back, and kept a sharp watch on the ends of the tunnels.
"Now, the commanding officer of the mercenaries sent by the Ptolemaios is Athenagoras of Miletos. One night, when Athenagoras had the guard, the Antigonians, by hissing and whispering, persuaded him to come into one of the tunnels for a parley. An officer was there with an offer of a magnificent bribe if Athenagoras would betray the city.
"It transpired that there was one tunnel the Rhodians did not yet know of, because its crew of sappers was slow and had not yet come near the "trench at the time of the breakthrough. The Antigonians wanted Athenagoras to shoo his men away from that tunnel on the appointed night, so that the sappers could break through and pour soldiers into the city.
"The Athenagoras pretended to fall in with this scheme. But, he warned them, the Antigonians must scout the city first. Otherwise they would mill around in the dark, get lost in the strange streets, and be destroyed piecemeal. The Antigonian officer, a Macedonian named Alexandros, agreed to come up on a certain night and be shown over the ground.
"Then honest Athenagoras went to the Council with the story. Alexandros was captured as he came up out of the tunnel, and the Council voted Athenagoras a bonus of five talents of silver.
"Knowing that they had been foxed, the Antigonians tried to enlarge their tunnels, setting props in them, so that they could burn the props and cause the wall to fall with the collapse of the tunnels. Our men drove them out with smoke and red-hot clay and hornets' nests, though not before they had done our wall some damage. That's why Makar has been working so frantically to build a secondary wall, because we don't trust the present wall to stand for long against Demetrios' engines."
I got my battery organized none too soon. Less than a ten-day after the Halia's return, Demetrios' trumpets sounded the advance.
With a tremendous groaning and creaking, as of ten thousand oxcarts with ungreased axles, nine of the eleven great engines lurched into motion; the ram tortoises stood still for the time being. A quarter of Demetrios' entire army was engaged in pushing these machines, within and at the sides and rear. Thirty-four hundred of his strongest soldiers pushed the great belfry alone.
"Herakles!" said Phaon, beside me on the wall. "Isn't that a sight?"
"It's like a whole army in armored war machines," I said.
Trumpets from the harbor told us that Demetrios was also attacking from the sea. Now thousands of soldiers marched across the plain, filing between the slow-moving engines. First came men carrying wicker mantlets, two men to each mantlet. Next came archers and slingers and scorpion men in small straggling groups.
Then came men bearing ladders over twenty cubits long. After them the infantry, brave in polished cuirasses, marched in time to the flutes, with golden eagle standards bobbing in front of each company. The sight of this vast mass of men and machines brought my heart to my throat. Nothing, it seemed, could withstand such an overwhelming assault.
A little group of mounted men cantered out between the engines: several officers, a trumpeter, a standard-bearer, and couriers. As they came nearer, one forged to the front: a big man with a purple cloak floating behind him. Although I could not make out his features at the distance, somebody cried: