Corvus (31 page)

HEART OF WAR

LAST
OF THE MERCENARIES

Rictus knelt on
one knee in the
freezing mud. The timber under his hand creaked as he leaned his weight upon
it. His breath frosted out in the moonlight.

“Wait,” he said in
a low voice. “The cloud’s coming again.”

The wind high up
above his head tumbled a broken fretwork of black cloud about the sky. Through
rents in the cloud, pale Phobos leered down, and Haukos glowed red and low on
the horizon, almost set.

He gripped the
rough-hewn wood of the ladder on his left and turned his head this way and
that, nodding as he caught the bright feral glow of Ardashir’s eyes beside him.
The tall Kufr smiled, a gleam of teeth in the flickering moonlight. Rictus’s
vision was heavily circumscribed by the bronze shell of his helm. He longed to
take it off, but knew he would need it for the work ahead.

To his right,
Druze crouched with a line of men along another ladder. For hundreds of paces,
a host of men were kneeling in the frozen mud, formed along the siege ladders
like legs on a centipede. Half a pasang to their front, the walls of Machran
loomed up huge and black in the night, as solid as a cliff-face.

Rictus stifled a
shiver.

“The lazy bastards
must be half asleep,” Druze whispered. “One good flash of moonlight and we’re
as plain as a turd on a tabletop.”

“Let’s go, Rictus,”
Fornyx said behind him. “Druze is right - any second now they’ll wake up on us.”

“Wait for my word,”
Rictus said. “Remember the plan.”

A splurge of
shouting in the night, off to their left.

“That’s Corvus,”
Ardashir said. “He’s starting.”

“Give them a
moment,” Rictus hissed to the men around him. He could sense their eagerness,
the impulse in all soldiers to get it started, to get the thing over with.

The tumult to the
south and west broadened, rising to break apart the stillness of the winter night.
They could see torches running along the walls now, and someone began beating
on a bronze gong.

“That’s their
alarm,” Fornyx said. “Rictus, you want me to piss myself? Let’s go.”

Rictus grinned
inside his helm. He rose to his feet, hauling at the heavy wood of the ladder. “All
right, girls, up you get. Move quick and quiet.”

The ladder-bearing
files of men climbed off their knees and brought the siege-ladders up to their
shoulders. Rictus led off at the head of his and the rest followed. They spread
out as they approached the walls; a bristling crowd of men, centons
intermingled. Dogsheads, Igranians and Companions, all creeping together in the
dark under the walls.

They were perhaps
a hundred paces from the base when they were spotted. Someone yelled and held a
blazing torch over the battlements, looking down, waving his arm.

“Fuck,” Rictus
said. “Pick it up, lads. The party’s begun.”

Ardashir darted
aside from the line of ladder-carriers. He lifted his bow from his shoulder and
reached calmly for an arrow from the quiver at his hip. The rest ran past him.

The man on the
walls with the torch cried out, dropped it, and staggered back from the
battlement. The torch fell to the ground below and Rictus fixed his eyes upon
it, a reference point in the night, something to keep him focused.

They were at the
base of the wall. Rictus dropped his end of the ladder. “Lift!” he shouted. “Move
in as you push!”

The heavy
iron-frapped timber of the siege ladder rose up as a score of men manhandled it
upright. They moved in as it rose, until it thumped against the wall above them
and they were all in a huddle at its foot.

“Spread out a
little, for Phobos’s sake!” Fornyx rapped out.

Rictus took a
breath, hearing it hoarse and loud inside the helm. He drew his sword - he was
carrying a heavy drepana - and settled his shield on his back. The bronze-faced
weight of it seemed almost impossible to manage as he set a foot on the first
rung and began to climb. He was glad of the helm now, and instinctively hunched
as he ascended, expecting at any second to feel the impact of a stone or arrow.

The ladder flexed
and bounced under him as it took the weight of man after man below. The quiet
of the night was entirely ruptured now, with men’s voices raised all along the
walls in fear and fury. In battle, men would scream themselves hoarse and not
even be aware they were making a sound. Rictus had done it himself. But not
tonight. He was concentrating too hard on climbing one-handed in full panoply.
For the men below him it would be even harder, as there would be muck on the
rungs to make their feet slip.

Other ladders on
the walls to left and right. They had sawn out fifty in the past two days,
chopping down a grove of fine old plane trees for the timber, and hammering out
the iron reinforcing brackets in the field-forges of the army using spare
horseshoes.

Back over the rise
that led down to the city walls, Corvus and Parmenios - his plump little
secretary - had set up a cross between a factory and a lumberyard, and men
worked there in shifts, night and day. They had felled taenons of woodland and
gathered every piece of scrap iron the countryside had to offer, everything
from knives to ploughshares. No-one was quite sure what they were at; a bigger
thing than these ladders, that was for certain.

But the ladders
were the most economical way of getting men upon the walls of the city. They
had to attempt a quick assault before settling down to the siege, Corvus had
said. Even if it did not succeed, it would rattle the defenders, and give the attackers
experience.

Experience, Rictus
thought, gasping and gripping the wooden shank of the ladder so hard his bones
hurt. Experience is overrated. If you want men to do this kind of thing with a
willing heart, they’re better off ignorant.

He raised his head
and looked up, a gesture of courage in itself. There were heads framed in the
battlements above him. He saw a pair of arms raised.

Phobos! He jerked
to one side and the heavy stone clipped the edge of his shield, struck the man
behind him full in the face. The fellow did not even manage a scream out of his
shattered mouth before he soared backwards and disappeared. In his fall he had
thumped against the man below him on the ladder and knocked his feet from the
rungs. The second man hung on by one hand - Rictus saw the terror in his eyes,
bright in the T-slot of his helm - and then he was gone also, plummeting into
the press below.

Rictus felt heavy,
drained and weak, cold fear diluting the very blood that pumped madly through
his heart. As he began to climb again, he uttered a guttural snarl, and his
teeth bared like those of an animal.

A javelin glanced
off his helm, clicked against the great bowl of the shield on his back, and was
gone. His sandals slapped upon the flattened wooden rungs of the ladder. He
held the drepana above his head as though it were some kind of talisman.

And he was there,
level with the battlements -looking into the faces of the men who were trying
to kill him.

One was pushing at
the ladder, trying to lever it off the wall. Rictus flicked out the wide point
of the drepana and dropped him with a pierced throat. He climbed higher up the
rungs, set a hand on the cold stone. It felt as reassuring as a rope flung to a
drowning man. He swept the drepana in a wide arc, missing his blow, but forcing
the men in front of him back.

He was off the
ladder, perched on the top of a merlon like an immense crow. He lunged forward,
keenly conscious of the great long drop at his back, the weight of the shield
still liable to drag him towards it.

He tumbled, felt a
strike on his shoulder which slid off his black cuirass. A spearhead punched
him in his chest, a heavy blow which would have transfixed him were it not for
the Curse of God. He straightened, still snarling, his feet planted securely on
Machran’s stone, and sent the drepana licking out like a snake, not trying for
damage, just unbalancing his attackers, gaining room. With his left arm he
angled his elbow into the bowl of the shield and swung it forward, slid his
forearm into the centre-grip, and at once felt safer. “Dogsheads!” he bellowed.
“Dogsheads to me- on the walls, boys!”

Someone had
dropped onto the battlement behind him. A shield was tucked beside his own. He
felt a surge of new energy, the bowel-draining fear leaving him.

More of his men
were up at the lips of the walls, their heads popping up all down the line. The
defenders were being pushed back. Corvus’s diversion had worked; the enemy was
very thin on the ground here.

Rictus smashed
forward, butting his shield into the face of the man in front, stabbing the
drepana low at his knees. He felt the blade shear through flesh and the gristle
of a joint. The man cried out, his mouth a wet hole under his helm. Rictus
shouldered him hard and he flew backwards, off the catwalk.

More men behind
him now. The assault was succeeding - they had a foothold.

“Who’d have
thought it?” Fornyx yelled. “Ladders!”

“Keep them coming,”
Rictus shouted back. He saw Kesero there under the banner, and Valerian was
further along the wall, standing in an embrasure and holding fast to a
tottering ladder. Dogsheads were fighting side by side with Druze’s lightly
armed Igranians.

Rictus looked
west, the world spanning out below his gaze.

To his right there
rose the vast dark bulk of Kerusiad Hill. Below him were the narrow contoured
streets of the Goshen Quarter. All Machran lay before him, speckled with
lights, a vast beast rolling out to the horizon in the fitful moonlight. Corvus’s
attack was marked by a long cluster of blazing torches down in the Avennan
Quarter some two pasangs away.

Phobos - I hope he
keeps the bastards off our back a little longer.

The Dogsheads and
Igranians fought along the walls, the heavily armoured mercenaries locking
shields and battling forward foot by foot, the Igranians darting in and out
with stabbing javelins and drepanas. Rictus saw one of his own men trip over a
corpse and go flying into the air - he tumbled off the wall and struck the roof
of a house below with an explosion of clay tiles, then slid down the incline,
scrabbling for a hold, before pitching to the street below, the shattering
impact of the cobbles breaking the body within the armour.

Rictus’s eye was
drawn to the streets on his left. Some kind of torchlit procession was pouring
along it, like a flame-crested serpent of immense size.

“They’re bringing
up reserves!” He shouted. “Make some space, lads - we need more men up here!”

A ladder was
shoved back from the walls, a Machran soldier pushing it off with his feet. It
swung sideways with a dozen men still clinging to it, and went down with a
sickening crash, crushing a whole file of men below.

The troops at the
foot of the walls were frantic to ascend the ladders and help their comrades
above. A crowd of them clambered up one while more held it steady at the top of
the wall, urging them on, pulling them over the battlements as they reached the
top.

Then there was a
tearing crack, and the ladder broke in the middle. It went down in pieces, men
still clinging to it.

One of the men in
an embrasure caught a friend by the arm as he fell, held him for a moment, and
then was pulled down with him, the two soaring into the crowded carnage below
with their fists still locked together.

“Steady, boys!”
Rictus shouted, dismayed, “Ten to a ladder, no more!”

The press on the
walls was tightening again. One of the great towers of Machran loomed over them
to the west; they were fighting towards it under a hail of stones and javelins.
The defenders were even throwing shields and helms down upon them. Rictus felt
his feet slithering in blood. He raised his shield instinctively as something
came at him, a half-guessed shadow of a lunge. A blade clanged off the bronze
face and he sent the drepana under his attacker’s guard. It went in below the
man’s cuirass.

As Rictus pulled
the weapon free he felt the stitches in his arm open up and a hot flow of blood
ran down his fist, gluing the sword to his fingers.

There was a whoosh
of air over his head - he felt it tug at the transverse crest of his helm - and
something flew through the night above him. A clang, and a knot of men behind
him went down as though flattened by a giant fist.

He stared
uncomprehending for a long moment, disbelief sawing the breath in and out of
his throat. A massive spear or bolt, thick as a man’s wrist, had skewered three
of his men, bursting through their armour as though the bronze were gilded
paper.

“Ballistas!”
Fornyx shouted across at him. “I thought those bastards didn’t work anymore!”

Another tore
overhead, like some raptor stooping for the kill. On the crowded battlements it
could not miss. Rictus saw two Igranians pinned to a Machran spearman, the
three joined by the long barbed shaft of the missile.

Men were pouring
out of the tower, and more were fighting their way up the stairs to the
catwalks, a flood of them with torchlight and moonlight splintering across
their armour, playing across it in gleams and flashes. There was open space
around Rictus. His own men were falling back to the remaining ladders. The tide
of battle had shifted. The ballista bolts hammered into the ranks and knocked
men down like skittles.

Fornyx was at his
side, supporting Druze. The dark Igranian had a death mask for a face. His
bound arm gleamed black with blood.

“Let’s ask them if
they want to surrender,” Fornyx said, his teeth white in his beard.

“Get back to the
ladders, Fornyx - this isn’t working.”

“Not those fucking
ladders again,” Druze groaned.