Десмонд Бэгли - High Citadel

Willis looked worried. ‘There’s a bit of a whip in the arm,’ he said. ‘It isn’t stiff enough. Then again, we haven’t a standard shot; there are variations in weight and that causes the overs and unders. It’s the whip that’s responsible for the variations from side to side.’

‘Can you do anything about the whip in the arm?’

Willis shook his head. ‘A steel girder would help,’ he said ironically.

‘There must be some way of getting a standard weight of shot.’

So the ingenious Willis made a rough balance which, he said, would match one rock against another to the nearest half-pound. And they started again. Four shots later, they made the best one of the afternoon.

The trebuchet crashed again and a cloud of dust rose from where the bucket smashed into the ground. The long arm came over, just like a fast bowler at cricket, thought O’Hara, and the rock soared into the sky, higher and higher. Over O’Hara’s head it reached its highest point and began to fall, seeming to go true to its target. ‘This is it,’ said O’Hara urgently. ‘This is going to be a smash hit.’

The rock dropped faster and faster under the tug of gravity and O’Hara held his breath. It dropped right between the catenary ropes of the bridge and, to O’Hara’s disgust, fell plumb through the gap in the middle, sending a plume of white spray leaping from the boiling river to splash on the underside of the planking.

‘God Almighty!’ he howled. ‘A perfect shot — and in the wrong bloody place.’

But he had a sudden hope that what he had said to Willis up at the camp would prove to be wrong; that he was not a dead man — that the enemy would not get over the bridge — that they all had a fighting chance. As hope surged in him a knot of tension tightened in his stomach. When he had no hope his nerves had been taut enough, but the offer of continued life made life itself seem more precious and not to be lost or thrown away — and so the tension was redoubled. A man who considers himself dead has no fear of dying, but with hope came a trace of fear.

He went back to the trebuchet. ‘You’re a bloody fine artilleryman,’ he said to Willis in mock-bitter tones.

Willis bristled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean what I say — you’re a bloody fine artilleryman. That last shot was perfect — but the bridge wasn’t there at that point. The rock went through the gap.’

Willis grinned self-consciously and seemed pleased. ‘It looks as though we’ve got the range.’

‘Let’s get at it,’ said O’Hara.

For the rest of the afternoon the trebuchet thumped and crashed at irregular intervals. They worked like slaves hauling on the ropes and bringing rocks to the balance. O’Hara put Miss Ponsky in charge of the balance and as the afternoon wore on they became expert at judging the weight — it was no fun to carry a forty-pound rock a matter of a couple of hundred yards, only to have it rejected by Miss Ponsky.

O’Hara kept an eye on his watch and recorded the number of shots, finding that the rate of fire had speeded up to above twelve an hour. In two and a half hours they fired twenty-six rocks and scored about seven hits; about one in four. O’Hara had seen only two of them land but what he saw convinced him that the bridge could not take that kind of pounding for long. It was a pity that the hits were scattered on the bridge — a concentration would have been better — but they had opened a new gap of two planks and several more were badly bent. It was not enough to worry a man crossing the bridge — not yet — but no one would take a chance with a vehicle.

He was delighted — as much by the fact that the enemy was helpless as by anything else. There was nothing they could do to stop the bridge being slowly pounded into fragments, short of bringing up a mortar to bombard the trebuchet. At first there had been the usual futile rifle-fire, but that soon ceased. Now there was merely a chorus of jeers from the opposite bank when a shot missed and a groan when a hit was scored.

It was half an hour from nightfall when Willis came to him and said, ‘We can’t keep this up. The beast is taking a hell of a battering — she’s shaking herself to pieces. Another two or three shots and she’ll collapse.’

O’Hara swore and looked at the grey man — Willis was covered in dust from head to foot. He said slowly, ‘I had hoped to carry on through the night — I wanted to ruin the bridge beyond repair.’

‘We can’t,’ said Willis flatly. ‘She’s loosened up a lot and there’s a split in the arm — it’ll break off if we don’t bind it up with something. If that happens the trebuchet is the pile of junk it started out as.’

O’Hara felt impotent fury welling up inside him. He turned away without speaking and walked several paces before he said over his shoulder, ‘Can you fix it?’

‘I can try,’ said Willis. ‘I think I can.’

‘Don’t try — don’t think. Fix it,’ said O’Hara harshly, as he walked away. He did not look back.

Night.

A sheath of thin mist filmed the moon, but O’Hara could still see as he picked his way among the rocks. He found a comfortable place in which to sit, his back resting against a vertical slab. In front of him was a rock shelf on which he carefully placed the bottle he carried. It reflected the misted moon deep in its white depths as though enclosing a nacreous pearl.

He looked at it for a long time.

He was tired; the strain of the last few days had told heavily on him and his sleep had been a matter of a few hours snatched here and there. But Miss Ponsky and Benedetta were now taking night watches and that eased the burden. Over by the bridge Willis and Armstrong were tinkering with the trebuchet, and O’Hara thought he should go and help them but he did not. To hell with it, he thought; let me have an hour to myself.

The enemy — the peculiarly faceless enemy — had once more brought up another jeep and the bridge was again well illuminated. They weren’t taking any chances of losing the bridge by a sudden fire-burning sortie. For two days they had not made a single offensive move apart from their futile barrages of rifle-fire. They’re cooking something up, he thought; and when it comes, it’s going to surprise us.

He looked at the bottle thoughtfully.

Forester and Rohde would be leaving the mine for the pass at dawn and he wondered if they would make it. He had been quite honest with Willis up at the camp — he honestly did not think they had a hope. It would be cold up there and they had no tent and, by the look of the sky, there was going to be a change in the weather. If they did not cross the pass — maybe even if they did — the enemy had won; the God of Battles was on their side because they had the bigger battalions.

With a deep sigh he picked up the bottle and unscrewed the cap, giving way to the lurking devils within him.

Miss Ponsky said, ‘You know, I’m enjoying this — really I am.’

Benedetta looked up, startled. ‘Enjoying it!’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Miss Ponsky comfortably, ‘I never thought I’d have such an adventure.’

Benedetta said carefully, ‘You know we might all be killed?’

‘Oh, yes, child; I know that. But I know now why men go to war. It’s the same reason that makes them gamble, but in war they play for the highest stake of all — their own lives. It adds a certain edge to living.’

She pulled her coat closer about her and smiled. ‘I’ve been a school teacher for thirty years,’ she said. ‘And you know how folk think of spinster schoolmarms — they’re supposed to be prissy and sexless and unromantic, but I was never like that. If anything I was too romantic, surely too much so for my own good. I saw life in terms of old legends and historical novels, and of course life isn’t like that at all. There was a man, you know, once...’