John Carr - Siege of Tarr-Hostigos

Now that control of the war council had been decisively wrested from Roxthar and his supporters, Lysandros went on to inform the council of the Ban of Galzar; it was as if one of Kalvan's 'shells' had dropped through the roof. Phidestros relaxed to watch a master politician at work; Roxthar didn't stand a chance, not with this crowd!

Three tiny clouds of white smoke rose from the Styphoni siege battery. Ptosphes started counting. At 'five' the three shots crashed into Tarr-Hostigos. One struck the face of the outer wall; the others hit the left side of the breach. Rock dust as white as the powder smoke whirled up, carried down toward Ptosphes on the morning breeze. He tasted the grit on his tongue and teeth; it was a familiar taste by now, with the siege into its tenth day.

The Hostigi men working on the barricade rising inside the breach barely looked up from their work. The barricade was made of heavy timbers from the buildings of the outer courtyard, flagstones from the courtyard itself and dirt from the floor. The men at work were lacing the timbers together with ropes and strips of leather, while others stood by, ready to haul a cannon onto the top of the barricade.

"The Harphaxi are beginning to master King Kalvan's way of doing things," Master Gunner Thalmoth said, who was standing beside Ptosphes. He pointed to the Styphoni siege battery. "Some of those Harphaxi guns have trunnions and many of the guns look like ours."

"Some are," Ptosphes answered gruffly, "as are those slaves they're using to haul them up."

Thalmoth was old enough to remember standing in the crowd with his father to see the newborn Ptosphes presented to the people of Hostigos as their future Prince. Too old to take the field, he'd taught at the University as well as lending a lifetime of artillery experience to testing the new Hostigi guns.

Ptosphes wondered if Thalmoth had volunteered to remain behind entirely because of his age. (He'd been seen to lift powder barrels and wield handspikes on balky guns.) Did he perhaps hold himself responsible for the proof-testing explosion that killed four men and took off Captain-General Harmakros' leg?

Thalmoth owed an answer to that question only to Dralm or Galzar, not to an overcurious Prince.

"It's their first big siege," Ptosphes said tolerantly. "No doubt they'll do better next time."

This morning he felt almost benign even toward the besieging Styphoni. It was a beautiful day, and not too hot. He'd eaten a good breakfast. The garrison's wounded were doing as well as could be expected. Best of all, the men of Tarr-Hostigos now knew they'd won the victory they had to win.

Last night a party of picked men had slipped into the besiegers' forward positions. Their score was twenty-eight taken prisoner, more than fifty killed, a magazine blown up, and three bombards wrecked, all for the price of one man dead and four wounded.

All the prisoners said that Kalvan hadn't been overtaken. Some added that the men chasing him had been ordered back to join the siege. One said he'd heard a whole band was wiped out in an ambush by Kalvan's rearguard. (Ptosphes suspected that the last man was trying to please his captors, who had nothing to lose by blowing him from a gun.) The last stand at Tarr-Hostigos was not going to be a waste of lives. If that wasn't worth celebrating, then nothing was.

Of course, the odds against the besieged would rise still higher now that the Grand Host was bringing back their vanguard. Since those odds were already over a hundred to one, who cared? Ptosphes rather liked Harmakros' way of putting it:

"Aren't we lucky? We'll never run out of targets now!"

That might have been Harmakros' fever speaking. In spite of his stump having been cleaned to drive out the fester-demons, Harmakros had been working far too hard for a man so badly hurt. However, most of the rest of the garrison seemed to feel the same way.

Ptosphes continued his walk around the castle walls, Thalmoth following ten paces behind. The riflemen in the towers encouraged enemy musketeers to stay beyond accurate range, and the besiegers didn't waste cannon shot on single men. Ptosphes suspected that they were short of fireseed and saving what they had for the storming. No trouble of that kind for his people, even without the reserve of twelve tons of Styphon's Best in the cellar of the keep.

He inspected the Styphoni gunners at the battery at the top of the draw leading up to the gate. The battery had been laid out by someone who knew his business, which was also why it had no guns in it as yet. They would be needed for the storming, to keep the Hostigi on the gates from having target practice on the men coming up the draw. Until then, they would simply be on the wrong end of plunging fire from the gate towers.

Another hundred paces along the walls, and some of Ptosphes' good mood evaporated. On this side Archpriest Roxthar had his prison-really more of a stock pen for the people he was Investigating. Like most of the besiegers' works, it was walled in timber and stone carted by slave gangs from Hostigos Town, but lacked their roof of old tents. At the rate the besiegers' works were swallowing the town, it soon wouldn't matter if it burned or not.

A long line of gallows rose by the gate of the prison pen, most of them dangling bodies, and continued on down the road all the way to Hostigos Town. Ptosphes could smell the bodies that'd been dangling more than a couple of days, even over the stable-and-powder-smoke reek of the siege.

The gallows seemed to be more burdened now than even a few days ago. No doubt the Styphoni had finished with many of their Hostigi slaves after they'd sweated and bled to haul the captured sixteen-pounders up the slope to the siege battery. That whole affair had been as bloody in itself as some of the battles of the days before Kalvan.

The Styphoni had even killed a fair number of their own men, hammering footholds and passageways in places where his grandfather had carved the slopes into vertical faces. Then Ptosphes' men had also had to kill some of their own folk, weeping and cursing, as they raked at the gun teams with case shot and rifles.

The end of it was what had to be, when one side could spend men like water. The guns were in place and hammering at the walls of Tarr-Hostigos in a way even those ancient stones could not endure forever. Many of the guns were ancient bombards, most likely dragged all the way from Tarr-Harphax and other Harphaxi forts; one huge bombard was even mounted on its own carriage! Hostigi guns, too, Alkides' prize sixteen-pounders. No surprise that, considering that all of the big guns except Galzar's Teeth had been lost at Ardros Field.

No surprise, and therefore something Ptosphes should have been able to do more about. He'd forgotten Kalvan's advice, given late one night when they'd all been emptying a jug of Ermut's brandy.

"Always plan against the worst thing your enemy can do. That way you'll be safe, no matter what he does. If he doesn't do his worst you'll win more easily."

Wise words. Truly the army of the Great King Truman taught its captains well.

Ptosphes shook his head and lit his pipe. There was no call to feel sorry for himself. He had done too much of that. Besides, while he might not be fit for service in the hosts of Great King Truman, he was no bad captain for Tarr-Hostigos when every day it held was another victory over the Styphoni.

The screeching ravens overhead darkened the sky and drowned the cries of the babies and wounded trailing the retreating army, as the Hostigi made their way along this Trail of Tears. Kalvan's mount whickered as they passed another horse. He gouged its flanks with his boot heels to keep his horse's head forward. He was riding, with a small escort of Lifeguards, back along the Hostigi train to get a better idea of just how many refugees and supplies accompanied the retreating army. Actually, they were no longer an army but a folk migration-like the Zarthani immigrants of half a millennium ago, only traveling west instead of east.