They came and asked Bardas what they should do now. ‘Carry on,’ he said. ‘Keep plugging away at the path and the stockade. You can put halberdiers on the engines, so long as there’s an artilleryman to each team to tell them what to do.’
They went round with big wicker baskets, picking up the arrows – reasonable quality materiel that’d come in handy some time, if not in this war then in some other war, where the Empire saw fit to deploy massed archers – and when the baskets were full, they packed them in empty barrels and loaded them on to supply carts. The broken arrows were sorted into two piles; heads for scrap, shafts for the fire or the carpenters (an arrowshaft makes good dowel rod for small structures, like pavises and screens and the floors of siege-towers and the rungs of scaling-ladders). A platoon of pikemen with nothing else to do sat cross-legged in a circle, cutting off the fletchings and dropping them into big earthenware pots, ready for the quilters to use for stuffing gambesons.
‘It was a gesture,’ Bardas explained, ‘nothing more. And the best thing to do with gestures is to ignore them, like your mother did when you were a kid and wouldn’t eat up your porridge.’ But all the while he was thinking about the second grade of proof, the proof against arrows; to meet the specification, an armour should turn a bodkinhead arrow shot from a ninety-five-pound bow at seventy-five yards, or a seventy-pound bow at thirty yards. Most armours fail that test and go in the scrap, along with the spent arrowheads.
They got the trebuchets going again, and the beams slapped upright like hammers on the anvil, pounding dust out of the side of the hill.
‘Mostly,’ someone was saying, ‘we’re using their shot to repair the road; those big boulders are a nice size, though they take some shifting. We could do with a few more cranes, though; they’ve smashed up most of the ones I scrounged from the top batteries.’
Temrai tried to concentrate, but it wasn’t easy. He felt as though he’d been living with the thump of landing shot for years, and he’d gone past the point where he could ignore it. Earlier that day someone had come and told him that Tilden was dead; a splinter from an overshot that had smashed to pieces against an outcrop and sprayed debris over the back lot of tents on the far side. He heard the news but couldn’t feel it; it was impossible to concentrate on anything important with this constant hammering going on, in his ears and coming up out of the ground through the soles of his feet. He knew it was all a ploy, an attempt to pull him down out of his fortress on to the flat for a pitched battle, and he wasn’t going to fall for it. He’d been there before.
‘What about the stockade?’ he asked. ‘How’s the timber supply holding out?’
‘It’s not good,’ they told him. ‘We’re giving priority to shoring up the path, like you said, and that’s using up a lot of stock. We’ve started pulling stakes out of the back of the top stockade; after all, they aren’t much good to us there, and so far we’ve been able to plug the gaps with broken stuff. Can’t keep it up for ever, though; if we take out much more we’ll leave weak spots, and that’s asking for trouble.’
Temrai scowled; trying to keep his mind on the subject in hand was like trying to hold on tight to a rope: the more you gripped, the more it burned. ‘I don’t mind a few obvious weak spots,’ he said. ‘A weak spot in the wall is a temptation to the enemy, and sometimes it’s good to offer them an opportunity, so long as you’re ready and waiting when they accept it. Sometimes the best chance of winning a battle comes when you’ve almost lost it.’
That remark didn’t win him any friends. It’s true, though, he wanted to tell them, you study old wars, you’ll see what I mean. Nobody seemed in the mood for a history seminar, however, so he ignored the scowls and frowns. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘carry on robbing the back wall for now. This bombardment won’t last much longer. Trust me on that.’
(And why not? They’d trusted him once, right up to the walls of Perimadeia; and back then he was only a kid, with nothing about him to suggest he knew what he was doing apart from a certain ability to communicate enthusiasm. Now he was King Temrai, Sacker of Cities, so surely they ought to trust him even more.
Didn’t work like that.
Nevertheless, these were his people; they’d do as they were told. The ones who wouldn’t have were all dead now, killed in the civil war.)
They talked through a few minor points of supply and administration, then he dismissed the meeting and walked out of the tent into the dust. The death of his wife was somewhere quite close under the surface of his mind, like a fish feeding, but he wasn’t consciously aware of any significant levels of grief or guilt. She had been just the sort of woman he could have loved to distraction in another time or another place. But now that he had to look at the world through the eyeslits of the visor of King Temrai, he found it almost impossible to let the sharp blade through; there was no gap or seam, no weak point where he could create an opportunity.
The dead-cart trundled past him as he walked across the plateau towards the path. He watched it go, realised that he recognised a face peeping out between another man’s crushed legs. For now they were piling the dead in a half-finished grain-pit; the stores that should have gone in there had been spoiled by an overshot, and it seemed a pity to waste the effort that had gone into digging it. He’d been to see it, had stood for a moment looking at the confused heap, arms and legs and heads and feet and bodies and hands jumbled in together, like an untidy store, but it hadn’t meant anything more to him than the sum of its parts.
A man ran past him, heading down the hill; then two more, shapes that loomed up out of the dust and went back into it. More followed; he caught one of them by the arm and asked what was going on.
‘Attack,’ the man panted at him. ‘Gods only know where they appeared from. They’ve got some kind of portable bridge for crossing the river.’
Temrai let go of him. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Who’s in charge down there?’
The man shrugged. ‘Nobody, far as I know. There’s the gang-boss on the stockade detail, I suppose.’
‘Find him,’ Temrai said, ‘tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
The man nodded and slipped away into the dust, like someone vanishing into quicksand. Temrai thought for a minute or so, then turned back up the hill and headed for his tent. There was nobody about to help him with his armour, but he’d got the hang of it now, and it was getting easier each time he wore it, as the metal shaped itself to the contours of his bones and muscles. He felt much better once it was on – in truth, he’d spent so much time wearing it lately that when he took it off, his arms and legs felt strangely light and feeble.
He was adjusting the padding inside his helmet when they came to tell him that the enemy halberdiers had breached the stockade. He acknowledged the news with a slight nod of his head. ‘Who have we got down there?’ he asked.
‘The work crews, mostly,’ someone answered. ‘They’ve been fighting with hammers and mattocks. There’s a few skirmishers and pickets in there as well, and Heuscai’s on his way down with the flying column.’
‘Catch him up,’ Temrai said, ‘and tell him to wait for me.’
When he found him, Heuscai looked impatient and bewildered, almost angry. ‘We’ve got to hurry,’ he said, ‘the work crews can’t hold them for long.’
‘It’s all right,’ Temrai said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’
He led the column down the path. It was slow going; the bombardment had raised elevation a few degrees to clear the lower stockade, with the result that the upper reaches of the path were being hammered away now, while the lower reaches were a mess. ‘Take your time,’ he called back as he picked his way through – it was bad luck and bad timing that a shot landed in the thick of the column just as he said it; the men were too closely packed together to have any chance of getting out of the way, and when the shot landed, it crushed three men with a dull crunch, like the noise you get when you squash a large spider. The dust was worse than ever, but at least there were the sounds of fighting below them to give them something to head for. Temrai found walking down the steep slope in heavy armour extremely awkward; the back plates of his greaves dug into his heels, pinching skin between the greaverims and the upper edges of his sabatons.