"Bear a hand with those ropes!" called Demetrios' powerful voice. "You men, take hold and pull! More men on the buckets!"
Away went the belfry, shuddering, rocking, and creaking. It left a hundred little spots of Are flickering on the ground behind it, where burning incendiary mixture had dripped. The tower itself burnt for half an hour, before the fire fighters doused the last coal.
Meanwhile a party of men sallied forth and laid fire to the tortoises. The Antigonians came back, and there was confused fighting in the dark. One smaller tortoise went up in a blaze, but the Antigonians drove our men back inside the wall, pulled the other engines back, and put out the fires.
Dawn showed scores of bodies and hundreds of missiles littering the field, and all Demetrios' siege engines back out of range.
Another ten-day passed; Persephone's flowers bloomed once more on the flanks of the akropolis. Bias, some other officers, and I stood on the newly finished lune, watching our artillerymen dig deep ditches on either side of the mound of debris where the main wall had fallen. Behind us, Makar's men, with volunteers from all corps and classes, worked on a second lune, longer than the first and reinforcing all parts of the main wall weakened by Demetrios' attacks.
Across the field the sound of tools came to us as Demetrios' workmen repaired his fire-damaged engines.
"He's a hard man to discourage," said Bias. "He'll be back again tomorrow, with more power than ever."
I said: "You once told me that old Diognetos could think our way out of this. Has anybody worked on him lately?"
"I guess not. We've had our hands full here." The carpenter wrinkled up his face. "You know, you may have said something. I'm going to speak to the President. See you later."
Two hours later Bias was back. "Phaon," he said, "you and Chares come with me. I hope you're not too proud to kneel" in front of the old bastard when your city's safety demands it."
We followed the carpenter down from the wall and into the city. In the Town Hall, we found President Damoteles, the Council, and a couple of the generals; Nereus, the high priest of Helios-Apollon, and his subordinate priests; and a group of young people of both sexes. These last had apparently been picked for birth and good looks. I exchanged shy smiles with my affianced bride Io. She looked much prettier than I remembered her, even with her hair cut short. Damoteles said:
"We are going to the house of Diognetos to make a last plea to him to save us. Nereus shall make the actual appeal while the rest of us kneel humbly before him. If anybody mislike this plan, let him withdraw now."
Nobody did, and the procession wound up the hillside to the house of Diognetos. The porter fled into the house at the sight of us, and presently the old man appeared.
"By Earth and the gods!" he exclaimed. "Have you come to murder me, or what?"
Nereus, who was almost as old as Diognetos, stepped forward. "O Diognetos," he began, "we have come to you, not as murderers, but as humble petitioners ..."
I do not remember Nereus' speech well enough to write it down. Nevertheless it was a cursed fine sermon, full of the loftiest Rhodian eloquence. Before he finished, the priest had everyone weeping. Everyone, that is, save old Diognetos, who stood leaning on his stick with his mouth shut in a hard line. When Nereus had finished, Diognetos looked out over our bowed heads.
"Fie!" he said. "A fine performance: free Hellenes, even your President, kneeling and sniffling! Get up, all of you. Although you do not deserve it, I will do what I can for you, on one condition."
"What is that, sir?" said President Damoteles, rising.
"Just this: that, if I capture Demetrios' oversized belfry, I shall have it as my share of the booty. Agreed?"
"Certainly, it is agreed," said the President.
"Very well, then, lead me to the scene."
When he had walked the walls, Diognetos turned to the knot of notables that trailed him. "The solution is obvious," he said. "You could have saved yourselves much trouble and many lives, had you kept faith with me in the first place, instead of spurning me for that Phoenician cutpurse."
"We have long since regretted that rash act," said Damoteles. "But what, sir, shall we do now?"
"Do you see that ditch down there, along the outer side of the pile of tailings?"
"Yes. We have dug it in the past few days, to hinder the Antigonians from climbing through the breach."
"Well, I want every vessel in Rhodes to be mobilized; every jar, jug, bucket, chamber pot, or what have you. And tonight I want everybody who can walk to carry anything wet he can find up to the breach and down to that ditch. And I want that liquid dumped into that ditch. Anything you have: water, mud, sewage, or anything at all. Be sure also to collect the jars that the dyers set out at street corners for urinals. Then we shall see what we shall see."
At dawn the trumpets blared. Once again Demetrios' engines, fully repaired, rumbled across the field. This time, I thought, we were in for it. Our defenses were steadily weakening, while Demetrios, like Antaios in his wrestle with Herakles, seemed to derive additional strength from each fall. Again I prayed.
As the engines approached to within range, our catapults were cocked and loaded. Onas said: "I fear your Diognetos, too, is but a mountebank. See, they come on as ever. What you need is a good wizard—"
"Speed up your cockers," I gritted. "There's more magic in a well-aimed three-talent ball than in all the wizards of Egypt."
On came the armored engines. Then somebody cried: "What ails the belfry?"
Little by little the great tower slowed. The shouts of the officers, urging their thirty-four hundred men to greater efforts, rang across the field. Slower and slower went the tower.
Hundreds of infantrymen added their strength. When there was no more room around the base of the tower itself, the Antigonians belayed ropes to the engine and put more men on these.
In spite of all their efforts, the tower stopped dead.
While other Rhodians were still crying: "Why is this? A miracle!" I saw what had happened. The liquids which, at Diognetos' behest, we had spent the long night pouring into the trench, had spread out into the field, converting it into a bog. Under the weight of thousands of talents, the eight wheels of the belfry had sunk deeper and deeper into the ground, until the engine stuck fast.
Moreover, as the front wheels had reached the soft ground first, the front end of the machine sank more deeply than the rear, so that the tower was tilted forward, thus reducing the range of its catapults and rendering them useless.
On the walls we danced and yelled and embraced one another. But Demetrios was not yet finished. When his tortoises, also, began to sink into the wet earth, he had them pulled back, jacked around, and sent forward against a more easterly section of the wall. His mechanics began removing the smaller catapults from the belfry. This, however, was a very slow process, as the engines had to be taken apart and reassembled outside.
I spent the day levering my two heavy stone throwers around to bear upon the new scene of action. We sweated and strained while the roar and dust of battle rose and fell. All afternoon and into the night the rams boomed. Towards morning, despite all our countermeasures, two more sections of wall collapsed.
With the coming of light I kicked my crews awake and drove them to their stone throwers. With a few ranging shots we got the range of the ram tortoises and stove them in. By now, however, Demetrios' armored foot was already swarming into the breaches.