"I'm going up to look at the catapults on the walls, to see if we can use them without killing our own people in the process. Derek says they work well, but they've been there without skilled maintenance—as far as I'm aware— for almost thirty years, and I'll be happier once I've verified their condition for myself. I'll be very surprised not to have to change all the ropes, and I'll be even more surprised if I can find enough people capable of doing it in the time we have."
Shelagh returned to our temporary quarters to oversee the disposition of the goods arriving from the wharf, and I walked back to the wharf gates with Donuil, leaving him there and making my way up to the parapet walk.
I found Derek on one of the defensive towers that projected out towards the harbour, examining one of the great, fixed ballistae left behind by the legions when they abandoned the place. The long timber throwing arm stretched vertically, high above him as he crouched at its base, and I approached slowly, my eyes more concerned with the weapon than with the king. The great ropes that bound and propelled the device's moving parts looked sound, their surfaces hard and tight-looking, betraying no signs of the dry, weather-worn fuzziness I had feared to see. Derek heard me coming and looked up.
"Ah, there you are. I was looking for you earlier."
I explained what I had been doing, all the while examining the great torsion-driven throwing device on its solid base. "This thing looks excellent," I said, when I had finished. "It looks as though it could really work." As I said the words, another man straightened up from behind the other side of the machine's base, looking at me as though wondering which pit of Hades I had sprung from and what I could possibly know of artillery.
"Hah!" Derek's laugh was a bark of delight. "You hear that, Longinus? Merlyn of Camulod thinks your ballista might really work."
Longinus had drawn himself to his full height, and now he moved around the base of the machine to where I stood, pulling a tiny splinter from the side of one callused finger as he came. When it was out, he held it up to his eyes and then flicked it away before acknowledging me. He looked me up and down, his eyes moving very slowly, then nodded. "Gaius Longinus," he said. "You know siege machines?"
I shrugged. "I know enough to know this one's been well tended."
He nodded. "They all have."
I looked about me. I could see other installations on the walls, but this seemed to be the only one that was complete. "You have others?" I asked.
"Aye, dismantled. They'll be back in place today."
"How many have you?"
"Five." Longinus was evidently a man of few words.
"All on this wall?" I had seen signs of five installations.
He nodded. "Two overheads like this, three catapults."
"All in working order?" He nodded again. "Windlasses, too?"
Now his eyebrows flicked in annoyance. "You ever see a catapult that would work with a broken windlass?"
"Of course not. Forgive me, I'm simply excited. I didn't expect to find someone here with experience in the use and care of war machines. Where did you learn?"
"Right here."
"How, exactly? Or perhaps I should ask who taught you? The legions have been gone for thirty years and more."
"My father taught me, when I was a boy."
"And how did he know about it?"
"From the army artificers. Then, after the garrison left, he took over the defences for the king. Trained me. I've been doing it since he died, twenty years ago."
"Your father was with the legions?"
"Twentieth Valeria. Thirty years."
"In artillery?"
'The last twenty on artillery."
"My grandfather commanded the Valeria."
"Did he, by God? What name?"
"Britannicus, but that was more than forty years ago, probably before your father's time:"
"No, he was serving them But I don't know the name. Before my time."
I glanced at Derek. He was grinning like a split turnip. I ignored him and spoke again to Longinus, resigned now to this business of specific questions provoking taciturn answers. "You have assistants trained?"
"Two crews for each, one in training."
This was like catching fish by hand without bait. "You mean one crew? Or five crews in training?"
"Five. Six men to a crew."
"I see, so how many men altogether?"
He blinked, computing quickly. "Four and a half score. Ninety."
"Good God! Who trains them?"
"I do."
"All of them? You have no one to help you?"
"Five. Head man on each first crew." He looked away, down into the fort beneath the wall, and I heard someone shouting up to him. Then, without another word, he strode away towards the steps and disappeared down them.
I turned back to Derek. "He's not too talkative, is he?"
"No, but I'd choose him over any other man I know, either for company or competence. Wait till you see his people in action tomorrow. You'll be impressed, I promise you. So will the Ersemen, both on shore and afloat. They've all forgotten the Romans and their heavy catapults. When they see how much damage one well-used machine like this can do, and from how far away it can destroy a ship, they'll spin about like tops and they won't stop rowing till they run their keels up onto their own beaches ... " He paused. "The dead men. You still want them hung from the walls?"
"Absolutely, every one of them. I promise you, the sight of them in their armour—with Liam and his chieftains in the middle—will be even more effective than your catapults."
"Aye, it might, but it seems gruesome. There's more than a hundred of them."
"Close to a hundred and fifty. I agree with you, but Connor knows what he is doing. To these Ersemen, that much death, so flagrantly displayed, will scream of punishment and consequences not to be ignored. If we beat them off, in addition, they'll think long and hard before they come back this way again."
Derek deliberated in silence for no more than a few moments before nodding his head in agreement.
"So be it. I'll start Blundyl on the arrangements now. He'll need at least a hundred men, I'd guess. Those chains are heavy. They can start bringing them in immediately and fastening the lengths together. They'll string them as soon as Longinus and his people are finished setting up their machines. The bodies can be hung tonight, after the sun goes down." He hesitated, looking along the parapet from right to left. "I'm glad I won't have to do any of the hanging, it's going to be an unpleasant whoreson of a task."
"The hanging" was, as Derek had predicted, a whoreson of a task, but every able-bodied man in the settlement took part in it and it was completed before midnight, by the light of multiple bonfires kindled on the tops of the walls, in the enclosure beneath and on the earthen wharf outside the gates. Stringing the lengths of chain from the battlements had been the most time-consuming part of the exercise. The chains were heavy and cumbersome and had to be joined, then strung in long, pendant scallops anchored by shorter pieces—each about the length of a tall man— secured to the top of the wall above, so that the chain formed a kind of frieze running the entire length of the western wall facing the sea.
By the time that had been done, arrangements were in hand to display the corpses effectively—a grisly enterprise made even less pleasant by the fact that the bodies had now been dead for more than a day and had begun to decompose. They hung in pairs, each pair slung by a loop of rope secured beneath the shoulders of the two corpses and then draped across the chain by men who also worked in pairs, suspended in seafarers' rope cradles from the walls above. The sole exception to the paired arrangement was the body of Liam Condranson himself, which hung in the centre of the wall by a single rope depending from the walkway above. He hung below the chain, as did his dead companions, but he was not attached to it in any way.