As soon as he was close enough to the bottom of the path to be able to see what was going on, he gave the order for the work-crews to pull out. The first time he shouted they didn’t hear him, or didn’t recognise his voice; they were standing on the raised embankment on their side of the stockade, trying to keep the enemy from bursting through a gap about two yards wide where a shot had landed right on top of the fence. The boulder, of course, was still there; it was the main obstacle blocking the halberdiers’ way. As they tried to scramble up on to it, the workmen bashed at them with their mattocks and big hammers, bouncing two-handed blows off helmets and pauldrons. Instead of ringing like a hammer on an anvil, the blows sounded dull and chunky.
He gave the order a second time, and the men did as they’d been told, sidling backwards away from the breach. On the other side, the halberdiers were pushing and jostling each other, competing to get through while the way was inexplicably clear. As they oozed and bubbled through the gap, Temrai stepped back into the line and gave the order to draw bows. By nock your arrows there were thirty or so of them through the breach; more by the time Temrai called hold low and then loose, and the front rank let fly at no more than fifteen yards’ range.
It was just as well he’d reminded them to shoot low; at such short range the arrow is still climbing, and even with his warning, a quarter of the shots went high. But three quarters of a volley was enough for the halberdiers at the breach; they crumpled up like paper thrown on to the fire, laying a carpet of obstacles directly in the path of the men following them. The next volley congested the opening even further; the pile of dead, twitching and wriggling bodies was over knee-high now, too tangled to step through, not stable enough to scramble over. Still they carried on coming though, each batch put to proof and found deficient. The handful that did manage to get through then underwent the next degree of the test as they threw themselves up the slope towards the line of archers, and what had passed the arrows went down under the pounding of the big hammers, swirling and falling like shot from a trebuchet.
Temrai had nothing to do in all this except stand still and watch; and as he watched, he thought about the fall of Perimadeia, the gate (not much wider than the breach here) that had opened and let in his men. There hadn’t been a rank of archers waiting for him then, only the darkness and empty streets, nothing to prove his mettle. Now, trapped between hammer and anvil (the shot still hissed and whistled overhead, thudded into the side of the hill, ripping up dust) he felt a little easier in his mind.
When the enemy captain gave the order to break off, the gap in the stockade had been filled; not with timbers looted from the other side of the hill but with proof steel in a jumbled, compacted heap. Saves us a job, Temrai thought; they’ve done it better than we could have – and he paused to ask himself whether his men would have gone on squeezing and scrambling into the killing zone, the way the Imperials had done. But we never had the chance; it’s not a fair test. He shook his head, then signalled to the work-crew to move in and start shoring up, making good.
‘You see,’ he told Heurrai (who’d been one of the sullen faces at the council of war), ‘give them an opportunity, they may just be stupid enough to take it.’
Heurrai didn’t reply; what he’d seen was bothering him. Temrai could sympathise; at another time, in another place, it would have bothered him too. But he’d improved himself since then, made good the gaps in his defences; and now he was wondering if Bardas Loredan had felt this way when he’d beaten off the assault on Perimadeia with incendiaries, so that fire had danced on the unburnable water. It was an opportunity for a valuable insight, a sharing of experience leading to a sharing of minds – he felt like an apprentice standing at his master’s elbow.
‘They’ll be back,’ someone said; and a trebuchet shot pitched a few yards away, crushing one man and ripping a leg off another. The next shot only tore up more dust, as Temrai led the way up the path, where another crew was already starting to make good.
‘Sure,’ he replied, when he’d caught his breath. ‘And when they try again, we’ll share another opportunity. Don’t worry about it. I know what’s going to happen.’
Bardas hadn’t expected the first sally to go home. It had been more in the nature of an experiment, a trial, a putting to proof. They’d passed the second degree. He’d have expected nothing less. Meanwhile he’d field-tested the portable bridges and was satisfied that they were up to the job. He was pleased by that.
He directed the second and third batteries to pick another point on the stockade, the rest of the artillery to concentrate on the existing breach. Then he ordered the halberdiers and pikemen to form a column, with the cavalry out of harm’s way on the flanks. The crossbowmen had taken too many casualties to be much use as a field unit, so he relegated them to the rearguard, and brought up the archers to replace them. Imperial archers weren’t up to much, in his opinion, or at least these ones weren’t; they had seventy-pound self flatbows, thoroughly inferior to the heavy composites of the plainsmen, and their place in this army was on the side of the plate, as salad. He was annoyed by that. If it had wanted to, the provincial office could have given him some of the best archers in the world, armed with longbows, composites, northern self recurves, southern cablebacks, on foot or mounted, light or heavy armoured, fighting as skirmishers or volley-shooters, in the open or from behind pavises. Instead he had crossbowmen and rabbit-hunters, neither of which were likely to be much use to him. But it didn’t matter. He could manage perfectly well with what he’d got.
He allowed the batteries an hour to make the breaches, but they did the job in twenty minutes; so he reassigned them to laying down a blanket barrage on the enemy artillery. The dust was an unexpected bonus; he could have managed perfectly well without that, too, but it made what he had in mind that bit easier. As the trebuchets changed angles and locked down on their new targets, he gave the order to sound the advance. As they moved forward, the halberdiers started to sing, and it no longer bothered him that he didn’t understand the words.
This time, he tried a different tactic. Instead of simply flooding the breaches with heavy infantry, he sent in a few companies of skirmishers to set up pavises. As he’d anticipated, Temrai’s archers were there to oppose the assault; but instead of men to shoot at, he gave them oxhides, with his own archers returning fire through loopholes and from behind the edges of the screens. They didn’t accomplish anything much, but he didn’t really want them to; the purpose of the exercise was to give King Temrai an opportunity to shoot as many arrows as possible harmlessly into the pavises. He knew that each plainsman carried twenty-five arrows on his back, enough for three minutes’ sustained fire – after that, they’d have to rely on supplies brought down the hill from the supply pits, along the pitted and gouged-out path, through the dust. Once the three minutes were up, the enemy archers wouldn’t be a serious threat; assuming, of course, that Temrai was short-sighted enough not to realise what he was doing.