Colours in the Steel (49 page)

He glanced up at the clouds, trying to read them. Rain would complicate things horribly; wet bowstrings, engines bogged down, torches refusing to light, leather armour absorbing water and swelling, water running down inside the armour and making every man in the line feel wretched, rain beating into the eyes of the archers as they lifted their heads to take aim. The clouds were low, fat and grey; as soon as they reached the hills, there was a fair chance they’d let go and drench everything.

He was still looking up when the first stone came swinging down. He watched it, noticing how its trajectory decayed and its descent steepened. Clean miss, twenty yards or so in front. Ranging shot.

Nearly there now; he could make out details of the men on the walls he hadn’t seen before. Theoretically they had an advantage in range because they’d be shooting down, but Temrai knew the city bows; self longbows cut from a single stave of wood, as opposed to the short, heavily recurved composite bows of the clan. In practice, their advantage of angle was more or less exactly cancelled out by his advantage of superior construction, just as the fact that the city people habitually used arrows that were too stiff to be accurate was offset by his disadvantage of having to make his shafts out of unseasoned wood, feathered with inadequate fletchings. It was as if someone was deliberately trying to even up the odds - we have more men, they have cover and better armour; we have the sun in our eyes, they have the wind against them; we’re in the right, they’re defending their homes and families. A very carefully designed, precisely manufactured war this was turning out to be.

It didn’t take the city artillery long to find the range. The first accurately sighted volley gouged out gaps all along the line, obvious as footprints in clean snow. Temrai called a halt and gave the orders; nock arrows, draw, take aim, loose, the cycle repeating smoothly and without pause. He shot in time with his own commands, hoping he’d judged the elevation correctly - at maximum range, raise the arrowhead an inch or so over the target and in line, not aiming off to the side as you have to do at shorter ranges.

The physical effort of the work was absorbing, enough to take his mind off what was actually happening. At the moment of the draw, push with the left hand against the bow handle, pull back the string with the right, until the shoulder blades feel as if they’re about to touch behind your back. Head still; wait for the touch of the string against your nose and lip, the feel of your hand under the point of your chin. On the command
loose
, take away the strength that curls the fingers of the right hand, so that the string can travel easily and without interference. After the shot, hold your position for a heartbeat before letting your right hand drop onto the quiver and feel for the nock of the next arrow. Above all, look at the target and not the bow, keep your eyes fixed on the faraway objective, the distant spot where your work and effort will have its effect.

Away there, on the wall, the arrows would be falling like rain, anonymous and impersonal, not like the intimate business of hacking flesh close in with an edged weapon. Back here at the two-hundred-yard line, there was still a deceptive sense of taking part in a great game, a staged event, with the wall as combined target and audience. Funeral games; what fun, to be able to watch one’s own.

One quiver empty already; Temrai looked round and saw the runners hurrying up, shuffling like hedgehogs under a great burden of prickly bristles. Another twenty thousand arrows or so; enough to keep the war going for a whole minute.

Participants and spectators; Temrai was reminded of the lawcourts in the city. He’d been to see a couple of cases, sitting so far back he couldn’t even make out the faces of the advocates, and it had seemed to him a remarkable way to do business in a city that otherwise seemed to have worked things out so well. On the other hand, there’s nothing to beat trial by combat for an unarguable result.

Beside him, a man dropped his bow and pitched forward onto his knees, an arrowshaft standing out of the right side of his chest. Lung-shot; he was fighting for breath, wondering why he was inhaling but still choking. He turned to Temrai, the subject to the lord, and opened his mouth, but nothing came out except blood. Before Temrai could say anything he flopped down on his face, the arrow making him lie slightly askew. Then someone handed Temrai a bunch of arrows, and he stuffed them awkwardly into his quiver, the heads of the new arrows catching in the fletchings of the old.

Gods alone know if we’re doing any good. One minute the wall looks empty, the next it’s bobbing with heads
. His right arm and back were beginning to ache, and every time he loosed the string it slapped his left forearm in exactly the same place, making him wince. Steady work; before he knew it his quiver was empty, and he left his place to go forward and pick up some of the other side’s arrows (longer and stiffer than ours, fletched with goose and peacock, tipped with narrow triangular heads that punched through armour with the maximum efficiency). While he was bending down, a stone landed on the exact spot he’d been occupying. He felt rain spotting the back of his hand.

 

‘That’s all we need,’ groaned Teofil Leutzes, captain of the archers of the east wall. ‘Strings soggy, fletchings wet, and these bows break for a pastime in the damp.’ He beckoned to a man on his left. ‘Send runners down the line, tell ’em to wax their strings quick, before it starts pissing down. Not that they will, of course,’ he added. ‘All they want to do is shoot off all my arrows as quick as they can and get their heads down.’

Soon the rain was falling in fat splodges, dripping off the back edges of helmets down the necks of the archers, making their leather gloves sticky and the bow handles slippery. Loredan pulled his hood up over his helmet and ducked inside the frame of an engine. Rain’s wet in war as well as peace, and only a fool stands out in it unless he’s got to.

It was going abysmally. Basically the same problem as before; the enemy were spread out, his men were packed together. The cover of the battlements was doing no good at all, since the arrows were coming in from above, slanting in like rain on a windy day. Some of the men had two or three shafts sticking out of their armour, where the clan’s broad-bladed arrowheads had cut through the chainmail but hadn’t made it through the padded jerkin underneath; they were still shooting, too preoccupied to spare the time to wrestle the arrows loose. The engines were letting fly at longer and longer intervals, as more and more engineers were hit and their places were taken by untrained men.

And now the rain; too wet to keep a torch burning. The walkway was slippery, slowing up the runners who were supposed to be handing out fresh supplies of arrows. The winches that raised the barrels of arrows up to the tower were running slow as well; too easy for a rope to slip through wet fingers and let a heavy barrel drop on the winding crew. Worst of all, there was nothing he could think of that might improve matters; it was a slow, remote kind of warfare that couldn’t be hustled or bounced into victory by acts of flamboyant valour. Just hard, gruelling work in the rain. For this, Loredan reflected, he might just as well have stayed home on the farm.

‘They’re bringing something else up now,’ sang a voice above his head; some young enthusiast who’d scrabbled his way up onto the crossbar of a disabled engine to get a better view. He’d been there a while. The arrows seemed to avoid him, like fastidious cats who won’t sit on the knees of strangers. ‘I can’t see what it is, but it’s big and bulky; they’ve got about thirty mules hitched to it.’

‘You want to get down from there,’ Loredan replied. ‘You’re asking for trouble. We’ll see whatever it is soon enough without you risking your neck.’

‘All right, I’ll be down in a minute. I think it may be some sort of tower, on its side. Or a bridge, possibly. A bridge’d make more sense than a tower.’

Ah, yes, the last problem; how were they planning to get across the river?

 

The rain had set in for the day. It was that hard deliberate rain that sends men running down the street with their coats pulled up over their heads, or strands them in doorways or under trees. Already the ground underfoot was the clinging consistency of wet dough, making each step an effort.

On the lower slopes of the hill that overlooked the bridgehouse, Temrai huddled under a quickly improvised hide canopy. He was holding the piece of parchment on which he’d sketched out a plan of what was going to happen next, but the rain had long since washed the charcoal away, leaving him with a sodden piece of thin leather that was no use for anything. No matter; he knew what he was doing.

Behind him, the river above the fork was full of rafts; a hundred and twenty-six of them, each one twelve feet long by ten feet wide. He raised his arm, and the raftmen started to pole forward, heading for the chain stretched across the mouth of the river fork.

It’d be nice if this could be made to work. Well, we’ll soon see
.

From where he was sitting he had what should have been a good view of the engagement below the walls, but there was so much rain in the air that he could only see shapes and vague colours instead of precise details of machines and men. Still, by all accounts it seemed to be going well. He now had just over ten thousand archers drawn up under the wall, and the return fire from the city was feeble and sporadic. Nearly all of the city engines had stopped shooting, while his own catapults and trebuchets were scientifically pounding away at a hundred-yard section of the wall that overlooked the narrowest point of the river. Unlike the bastion they’d been engaged with yesterday (which was recent work, badly designed and shoddily built), the main wall was too solid and massive to breach with artillery; but his engineers were concentrating on battering the ramparts and battlements, breaking up the towers and chipping off the castellations that his men would otherwise have had to scramble over when the moment came.

‘All right,’ he said, and beckoned one of the runners who were sitting wretchedly half-under the small canopy. The poor lad was soaked to the skin and water was running in clear streams down his face, like tears. ‘Get over there and tell them to lower the chain, quick as you can. Then get back up here.’

The young man nodded and set off, skidding and sliding as he tried to run down the muddy slope.
Gods, he’ll slip and break his neck, and we’ll be held up even more
. He shouted after the lad, ‘Slow down, look where you’re going,’ but he was already too far away to hear.

‘They’re lowering the chain!’ yelled the spectator above Loredan’s head, still miraculously unkilled and as enthusiastic as ever. For a moment or so, Loredan couldn’t think what he was talking about - chain? What chain? Oh,
that
chain.

Dear gods, they were lowering the chain, and that’s how they’re going to get across the river.

They must be out of their minds.

Please . . .

He looked round for someone to carry a message, but they were all busy; shooting arrows, squeezing themselves under narrow ledges of wood and stone to get out of the arrow-rain, falling and dying. Loredan was just about to go himself when he thought, yes.

‘You,’ he said, ‘get down from there. I need you to take a message.’

‘Coming,’ the boy replied. ‘I’ll just...’ And then a body flopped down a couple of inches from Loredan’s feet, an arrowshaft broken off in its chest.
Damn
, he thought.

Someone scuttled across to see to the fallen man. Loredan grabbed at him as he went past.

‘That one’s dead,’ he said. ‘Carry a message to the harbour. I need marines in small boats - small, mind, they’ve got to be able to get along the west river past the bastion - to take out rafts coming downstream. Top priority. Anybody makes trouble, smash their teeth in. Got that?’

The man stared at him, shook his head. ‘I can’t go,’ he said. ‘I’m an engineer, not a runner.’

‘Get moving or I’ll sling you over the wall.’

The man hesitated a moment longer, then ducked away and slithered/ran to the stairs. He had to climb over broken timber and a pile of fallen masonry to get there; the tower overlooking the stairs had taken several hits too many and was falling apart, littering blocks and lumps of shattered mortar all over the walkway.

They must be out of their minds. But so far, everything they’d tried had worked, and everything he’d tried had been a disaster, so who was he to criticise?