A Triple Thriller Fest (127 page)

He stormed back to the camp. “The gates were open! Why the hell did you—?”

“Calm down,” she said. “We couldn’t risk it.”

He switched to Russian. “I looked like an idiot, you realize that?”

“Better an idiot than dead.”

“Only now nobody trusts me in battle. They’re going to wait for you to give them commands, see if you agree.”

Yekatarina put a hand on his arm. “Never mind. It was a trick, I promise you, and it doesn’t matter. Tonight, we’ll be sleeping inside, and then we’ll set everything in motion.”

Maybe she was right, maybe she was wrong. He was no longer sure. The problem was that fight with Tess Burgess. He’d matched her skill and overpowered her with his physical strength. All he needed was one more blow and he’d have cut her head from her shoulders. And instead, she had slipped away, slipped away, until he’d exhausted his attack, and discovered, to his horror, that she still had something in reserve.

The portcullis dropped back into place. Trap or opportunity, it was gone now.

Chapter Forty:

Tess’s feint at the gates had failed, but she still gained from the distraction. She and Niels had carried their ballista to the castle walls without detection.

Tess moved Dmitri to an even more secure room higher in the keep under different guards. The door was not to be opened, not to give Dmitri food or water, or to change his chamber pot, without the presence of four armed men. She set Lars to work in the blacksmith shop. The Dane was despondent over his failure.

What had Dmitri planned? An escape? An assassination? Had the enemy learned that he would try to escape? Niels and Miko Talo had staged a fight over the gatehouse, then they’d dumped a body over the edge. A closer inspection might have revealed that the body was not fresh.

Jans DeLong had died of a punctured lung during the night, a lucky shot from one of Kirkov’s crossbows. A good emergency room might have saved his life. DeLong was the third man to die since they’d retreated to the castle after Kirkov and Yekatarina’s treachery.

Meanwhile, twenty men waited in the gatehouse, poised over murder holes with spears, crossbows, and molten lead. Every other available man and woman waited in the bailey or crouched behind the battlements, similarly armed. Unfortunately, the enemy did not take the bait.

But with all attention on the front gates, Peter, Lars, and Tess wrestled the ballista onto the walls behind the keep. It came up in two pieces: the stock and the smaller crossbar. Once the commotion died down, they slid it behind the battlements.

The ballista looked like a giant crossbow, but used twisted loops instead of a bent bow to fire. It was mechanically complicated and inferior to the crossbow except for its size. They needed something that could fire a larger projectile over a long distance if they were going to take down that trebuchet. Niels had spent the better part of two days designing, building, and then testing the ballista in the bailey late at night.

Once they had the pieces in position in the hoardings that jutted from the wall near the gatehouse, Niels and Tess dropped everything else and set about reassembling the machine. The trebuchet pounded at the wall throughout the morning.

“That really helps the concentration,” Niels said after a direct, shuddering hit.

She stepped out from the hoarding and looked down at the enemy. The camp was breaking apart. They moved a pair of sheds, covered in what looked like deer hides and wet canvas from the tents, into position to charge down the hillside.

“They think they’re going to break through today,” she said. “Or maybe tonight. But they’re not planning to sleep outside tonight.”

“That wall is breaking, but I still think it’s got another day or two, even under full bombardment,” Niels said.

“Not if they hit the wall with a screw, or a ram.”

Niels hooked a rope loop over a peg. “But if they’re attacking the weak spot from below, they’ll have to stop firing the trebuchet or they’ll kill their own men.”

Tess took the other end of the rope and stretched it taught to hook onto the other side of the crossbar. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t want to wait and find out.”

They finished the ballista and moved around it, checked and greased the ropes and made sure all the parts felt stable. It would break apart upon firing if they hadn’t fit it together properly.

“Ready to kill your baby?” she asked.

“My baby is out there trying to kill me.”

“That won’t make it any less painful.”

Niels used a stick to measure the distance of the stock from the wall then consulted a sheet of trigonometry functions he’d torn from a book in Peter’s stash in the basement. There was a support prop that fit into measured notches, kind of like a Roman scorpio, and they adjusted the notch angle according to his measurements.

He measured again. “That should be thirty-seven degrees.”

“Assuming we’ve got the range right. Hand me the bolt.”

Tess wrapped the bolt in a pitch-soaked rag and loaded it into the ballista. Niels cranked on the alternating handles to draw the skein tight.

She peered over the battlement. Three men turned the wheel to lift the counterweight of the trebuchet. “Almost. Not yet.”

When it was almost cocked, she snapped her fingers. “The fire. Quick.”

He shoved a stick into the brazier full of coals to his left and emerged with a burning brand, which he touched to the rag at the tip of the bolt. It caught fire and burned. Tess pulled the trigger on the ballista.

The bolt squirted from the end in a streak of flame. It soared high over the battlefield and a shout went up from her men on the castle walls and at the gatehouse. Niels had calculated the angle perfectly, and his measurements of their test shots in the bailey and his estimate of the distance to the trebuchet were perfect.

The bolt landed on the trebuchet with a spray of fire and splinters. It bounced off the arm and into the wheel, where it continued to burn.

“Damn, you’re good,” she said.

“Thanks. Someone once called me the world’s second leading expert.”

She laughed. “Get me another bolt. Quickly.”

The enemy soldiers scrambled back from the wheel. Someone thought to discharge the partially armed trebuchet and the arm thrust forward. Its stone landed short of the castle wall. Two men came with buckets. Men boiled through the camp that looked suddenly like a hive of wasps poked with sticks by naughty children.

Tess took her turn at the cocking arms. They pulled back and forth. The ropes creaked as they pulled taught. It took a lot of muscle to twist the skeins tight. At last, she notched it and stepped back. Her breath came heavy.

Niels lit the rag on the end of the bolt, then stepped to the front and fired. It landed just short.

“Damnit.”

“It was notched at the right strength,” he said. “I probably didn’t wind the rag tight enough, and it caught the breeze. My turn.”

She loaded the rag while he worked the handles. He’d shed his cloak between shots and the muscles bulged on his arms and shoulders. Below, the enemy had put out the fire on the wheel and dragged away the stops that held the wheels in place. Other men came running with ropes.

“Hurry, they’re trying to drag it clear.”

The third shot hit the wheel again and the fourth landed on the base and burned. The enemy had a bucket brigade going, but most of their effort was on lashing the ropes to the trebuchet and chaining enough muscle power to drag the thing out of range. Let the bastards try. They weren’t yet at maximum range of the ballista.

Tess and Niels had the rhythm now and every other shot found the mark. She worked the cranks until her muscles quivered and refused to move anymore. Lars came up from the bailey to take her place. The big Dane worked the handles with fury. He shook his head when Niels went to take his turn. Sweat soon poured down his forehead.

The trubuchet creaked into motion. Inch by inch, the men pulled it through the mud, but then someone brought the draft horses and roped them to the counterweight and it began to move. Tess kicked out the angle prop and slid the support into the next higher notch. The fiery bolts followed the trebuchet up the hill.

By the time it was out of range, the arm had come loose from the counterweight, which still smoldered. The track was a mess of burned and broken ropes, pulleys, and broken wooden bolts.

Lars stood to one side and gasped for air. He bent and put his hands on his knees.

Tess clapped him on the shoulder. Her hand came away wet from the sweat that soaked his jerkin. “Nice job, really excellent.”

“Whatever, it’s not enough.” He turned before she could say anything more and found the stairs down to the bailey.

“Let him go,” Niels said. “That’ll take time to work its way out.”

“I wasn’t going to follow him. Lars doesn’t need coddling, he needs a good kick in the ass, but now isn’t the time.”

She turned back to the crippled trebuchet and allowed herself a smile.

“Now they have no choice,” she said. “They have to attack the gates, and pass underneath our murder holes, and that’s where we destroy them.”

#

It wasn’t the last use of the ballista. They aimed at the smaller trebuchet, the one that had tormented them earlier with fiery shots of its own. But the smaller trebuchet was easier to move and the enemy dragged it out of range before they could do serious damage.

Later in the afternoon, Peter, Tess, and Niels took the ballista and hauled it to the north wall, just behind the keep. They watched the enemy all afternoon to make sure that there would be no attack on the north or east side of the castle, then waited until nightfall. The enemy camp was stirring, but Kirkov hadn’t yet made any major moves.

“Are you sure we have time?” Peter asked. “You said that whatever was happening, it would be tonight, because of the tents.”

“It will be,” Tess said, “and I’d rather stay up here to keep an eye on the enemy, but only Niels and I can put this thing together and fire it fast enough. You signal us if the attack comes and we’ll come running.”

Just after dark, Tess and Niels went over the edge of the outer curtain by rope ladder. Men lowered the two main parts of the ballista by rope immediately after. They waited in the dark for a long minute, just listening, then Tess tapped Niels and they carried the ballista stock away from the castle.

It took maybe twenty minutes to carry the stock to the lake edge. Another twenty minutes passed before they had the crossbar and squatted in the sand to put it together. They worked quickly with hands that grew numb in the sharp wind that blew in gusts from the north. They finished the main assembly and Neils worked at the alignment of the crank mechanism.

The trees shadowed them to their left. They stood on the edge of the same sandy beach where Tess, Lars, and Peter had waded ashore just a few days earlier. It was like another lifetime, another century.

“Tell me,” Niels said as his fingers picked sand and gravel from the rope skeins. “Do you still carry a torch for Peter?”

“A torch?” She laughed. “Sounds like something my grandpa would have asked me.”

“Sorry, that is not a current English expression?”

“I know what you mean, don’t worry about it.” She thought about the other night with Peter. What was that, the last flickers? Or something else?

“Torch sounds too…
warm,”
Tess said at last. “There’s a bit of a glow still, but it’s cool to the touch.”

“So, it’s not a torch so much as one of those compact fluorescent lights.”

“Exactly. Looks good from a distance, but then you get close and there’s an annoying flicker and this buzzing noise. Oh, and you half suspect that it’s giving you cancer.”

She turned to try to get a read of his face in the dark. “Is this your not-so-subtle way of asking if I’m available?”

“I can’t get the damn sand out of this rope,” he said.

“You are,” she said. “Niels, the thing is—”

“No, really, I’m serious. The rope is all gummed up with sand.”

“It’s good enough,” she said. “We don’t need a perfect shot.”

The wind dashed waves against the shore. It carried her hair in waving strands above her head.

They loaded the bolt into the ballista and Niels cranked at the handles. He stopped before he’d finished tightening the ropes. “You hear that?”

She didn’t against the wind, not at first. But shortly, it came into focus. The low rumble of a boat motor. She couldn’t see it, but it had to be only a hundred yards or so off shore.

“What’s a boat doing out at this hour, and in this weather?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but this could be our chance. Get the rag, hurry.”

He pulled back and twisted one corner of the rag wrapped around the bolt. Tess reached into her cloak. She’d carried a box with smoldering wood chips from the castle.

How many people lived on the shore of Lake Champlain? She could see the lights of Burlington or one of its suburbs to the southeast. Had to be tens of thousands in that direction. There would be someone looking out their window or walking along the waterfront. Someone to see flaming bolts soaring a couple of hundred yards over the water. That someone would call someone else and over the course of an hour of flaming bolts, the police or the Coast Guard would get a call.

Or that was the plan.

“Watch the wind,” Niels warned.

Tess opened the box while Niels shielded it with his hands. Tess touched the wood chips to the edge of the rag and blew between Niels’s cupped hands. The edge caught fire.

Without warning, Niels clapped his hands over the rag to smother the fire before it could take and pushed her hands away.

“Wha—?” she started to ask before Niels clamped a hand over her mouth and pointed.

Shadows moved across the beach and she heard the crunch of feet on gravel. Whispered voices. Tess and Niels shrank back against the trees. The ballista sat in the open, exposed. The wood chips flared and blew out in the box. She closed it, but too late.