The Proof House (61 page)

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.

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.

But Temrai played his part as if they’d been rehearsing together for weeks; the pavises held up to the barrage (they were an improved design of his own, stretched hides backed with thick coils of the plaited straw matting the Empire issued for making archery targets with; designed by experts to stop an infinite number of arrows) and when the hail of arrows faltered and became sporadic, he opened the screens and sent the pikemen through.

It was a hedge of spears, dense as the undergrowth in an unmanaged wood. The archers carried on loosing into it, but their arrows didn’t get very far, it was worse than trying to shoot through a matted tangle of thorns. The distance to be covered was only twenty yards or so; and then the pikes were close enough to touch, and the plainsmen tried to run away; but they were backed up on their own ranks, who were backed up on the supply carts bringing up more arrows, which were backed up on the reinforcements coming down the path. There was a certain limited scope for compression, as the front ranks cringed away from the spearblade hedge, like children on a beach skipping out of the way of the incoming tide. But when they’d flattened themselves against the men behind them, packed together like arrows in a barrel, there was nowhere left for them to go; all they could do was watch the pike-heads come on to them and into them.

Some of the front rank were killed outright. Others hung from the pikes still living, like the chunks of meat on skewers that the Sons of Heaven ate with rice and peppers. The force of the advance was enough to lift them off their feet, still struggling like speared fish (because the halberdiers were backed up too, the rear ranks pressing forward were still advancing, cramming into the ranks in front so that they couldn’t have lowered their pikes even if they’d wanted to; so the long shafts of ash and apple bent like bows under the weight of the skewered meat, but being tested and approved to the highest specifications of the empire, they didn’t break and neither did the men packed in round them). The second rank of the enemy joined the first on the spike, like a second layer of cloth joined to the first by the needle; a few pikeshafts snapped, but not enough to matter. After the first two ranks had been gathered up on the pikes, the forward progress stopped; dead or impaled, they served the third rank like a gambeson or some other form of padded or quilted armour, resisting the thrust with softness rather than strength or deflection (the padding of the gambeson smothers and dissipates the force of the thrust, clogging the advance of the blade). The forward momentum of the pikemen faltered, as the shower of arrows had done; the manoeuvre had run its course, and it was time for the next stage.