Stone-throwers on the wall cast their fearful burdens at the attackers, too. A man hit by a stone weighing half as much as himself and traveling like an arrow ceased to be a man, becoming instead in the twinkling of an eye a red horror either lying still, smeared along the ground, or wailing like a broken baby bereft of breast, bereft of brother, bereft of hope.
And Maniakes, seeing what he would have mourned had it befallen one of his own subjects, even one who hated him as an incestuous tyrant, clapped his hands with glee and shouted to the crew that had launched the fatal stone: «Give 'em another one just like that, boys!»
And the crew did their best to obey, and cried out in fury and disappointment when their next missile fell harmlessly to earth. Maniakes moaned when that happened, too. Only later did he think on what a strange business war was.
He had no leisure for such thoughts in any case, for some of the Kubratoi, instead of pausing at the ditch in front of the outer wall, dropped down into it along with ladders tall enough to reach from that depression to the top of the wall. Not many of those ladders ever went up, though. A stone dropped straight down rather than flung from a catapult crushed a man as thoroughly, if not so spectacularly, as one actually discharged from a stone-thrower. The Videssian defenders also rained arrows and boiling water down on the heads of the Kubratoi directly below them.
Wearing an ordinary trooper's mail shirt and a much-battered helmet, the elder Maniakes came up beside his son. He peered down into the ditch for a moment, then nodded in somber satisfaction. «I don't think they'll try that again any time soon,» he said. «Bit of a slaughter down there.»
«This is the high ground,» Maniakes agreed. «If they let us keep it, they'll pay the price.» He frowned. «If they let us keep it high, they'll pay the price.» He pointed to show what he meant.
Maybe Etzilios, in spite of the better advice the Makuraners undoubtedly must have given him, had thought Videssos the city would fall to direct assault, and never mind all the fancy engines he'd spent so much time and effort building. Maybe he'd believed that the imperials huddled inside their walls from fear alone and lacked the spirit to resist his ferocious warriors. If that was so, he'd received an expensive lesson to the contrary.
And now he was going about things as he should have done from me beginning. The ladders lay in the ditch; after a while, the Videssians set them afire, to be rid of them.
Meanwhile, though, Etzilios' warriors and teams of horses dragged his own stone-throwers, the ones the Makuraners had taught him to make, up to where they would bear on the walls. More men—Maniakes thought them Videssian prisoners, not Kubratoi– carried stones up and piled them beside the engines.
«Knock mem down!» he shouted to his own catapult crews. But at long range, that was not so easy. The Kubratoi had only to hit the wall, a target they could hardly miss. Hitting specific stone-throwers, as the Videssians needed to do, was a different proposition.
Every once in a while, by the curious combination of good shooting and luck so necessary for success in war, a Videssian catapult crew would manage to land a stone square on an enemy engine, wilh results as disastrous for that engine as for a man unfortunately in the path of such a missile. The stricken stone-thrower would go from engine to kindling in the course of a heartbeat, and the Videssian catapult crew would caper and pound one another on the hacks and brag to anyone who listened or, more often, to anyone nearby, listening or not.
And the Kubratoi would make their prisoners haul away the wreckage of the ruined stone-thrower, the said wreckage some-times extending to the men who served the engine and were injured when a piece flying off it smote them. And they would drag up another stone-thrower and go back to pounding away at the walls of Videssos the city.
Up on the walkway of the outer wall, Maniakes felt caught in an unending medium-sized earthquake. Stones crashed against the stonework of the wall, which brought every impact straight to the soles of his boots. The roar of stone striking stone put him in mind of an earthquake's fearsome rumble, too.
But earthquakes, no matter how fearsome they were, stopped in a minute or two. This went on and on, the continuous motion underfoot almost making him seasick. Many of the stones the engines cast bounded away from the walls without effect; the masons who had built those works centuries before knew their business.
Every so often, though, the Kubratoi let fly with a particularly hard stone, or with one hurled particularly hard, or with one that hit in a better spot or at a better angle. Then stone on the face of the wall shattered, too.
«How much pounding can we stand?» Maniakes asked his father. «Haven't the foggiest notion,» the elder Maniakes replied. «Never had to worry about it quite this way before. Tell you what, though– knowing where to find the answers is nearly as good as knowing what they are. Anything Ypsilantes can't tell you about the walls isn't worth knowing.»
«That's true, by the good god,» Maniakes agreed, and summoned his chief engineer.
«We should be able to hold out against pounding like this a good long while, your Majesty,» Ypsilantes said. «Only a few stretches of the wall have a rubble core; most of it is either solid stone all the way through or else double-thick stone over storerooms and kitchens and such.»
«That's what I'd hoped,» the Avtokrator said. «Nice to have hopes come true every now and again.»
«I am pleased to have pleased you, your Majesty,» Ypsilantes said. «And now, if you will please excuse me—» He hurried away on missions more vital than reassuring his sovereign.
After Ypsilantes had left, the elder Maniakes tapped his son on the arm. «Come back to the palaces,» he said. «Get some rest. The city isn't going to fall to pieces while you go to bed, and you're liable to fall to pieces if you don't.»
Maniakes shook his head. «As long as I'm here, the men on the wall will know I'm with them. They'll fight harder.»
«Maybe a little, but not that much,» his father replied. «And I tell you this: if you're the only prop holding the defenders up, then the city will fall. They're fighting for more reasons than just your being here. For one thing, they're good soldiers already, because you've made them into good soldiers over the past few years. And for another, believe me, they like staying alive as much as anyone else does. Now come on.»
He put some roughness into his voice, as he had when Maniakes disobeyed him as a boy. The Avtokrator laughed. «You sound like you'll take a belt to my backside if I don't do what you tell me.» The elder Maniakes looked down at the belt he was wearing. As befitted the Avtokrator's father, he had on a gold one with a fancy jeweled buckle. He undid the buckle, took off the belt, and hefted it speculatively. «I could give you a pretty fair set of welts with this one, son,» he remarked.
«So you could,» Maniakes said. «Well, if that's not lese majesty, to the ice with me if I know what is.» He and his father both laughed. When the elder Maniakes started down from the wall, the Avtokrator followed him. They rode back to the palaces together. All the way there, though, Maniakes heard heavy stones thudding against the wall. He didn't think he'd get much rest.
«A sally, that's what we need,» Rhegorios said. «A sally to scatter some of their archers and put paid to some of their engines. The stone-throwers would do, I suppose, but I'd really like to be rid of those siege towers. That would be something worth doing.»
Maniakes eyed his cousin with amusement. «How did you manage to slide from what we need to I suppose in a couple of sentences there? What you mean is, you feel like going out and fighting Kubratoi and you want me to tell you it's all right.»