David Drake - Conqueror

Junpawl waited, knife poised, ready to slash and dive out of the tent. The man next to the corpse turned over, muttered in his sleep and began to snore again. The nomad mercenary sliced off one of the dead man's ears and tucked it in the pouch at his waist; one silver piece per left ear, that was what the Big Devil Whitehall would pay. Ah, that one was a frai hum, a Real Man in his spirit! You could buy a lot of burn-head-water with a silver piece, many fat women, lots of chocolate or ammunition.

He stepped over the sleeping man and squatted down near the second pair, carefully wiping his hands on a corner of the blanket so the next victim wouldn't feel blood dripping on his face.

He'd kill only two of the four in the tent. Cadaw d'nwit, a night-gift for the Long Hairs to wake up to. His giggle was utterly soundless.

The joke was worth missing the other two silver pieces. Besides, he'd stop in one more tent tonight on his way out of camp.

Delicate as a maiden's kiss, the Skinner's hand sank toward the sleeping Brigadero's face.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"I suspect we're going to get very sick of this view before spring," Raj said. It's only a couple of weeks since the Brigaderos arrived and I'm sick of it already. The strategic arguments for standing on the defensive were strong. He still didn't like it.

He bent to the eyepiece of the brass-and-iron tripod-mounted binoculars. The gun-redoubt the enemy were building — slowly, since they'd gotten reluctant to move outside their walls at night — was mostly complete. Walls of wicker baskets full of earth, loopholed for the heavy siege guns. The guns themselves were rolling out of the nearest of the fortified camps, soda-bottle shaped things on four-wheeled carriages, drawn by multiple yokes of oxen.

The chanting of the morning prayer had barely died; the breaths of the command group on the tower were puffs of white, although there had been no hard frost. Bells rang from the hundreds of cathedrons and churches throughout the city. Silvery fog lay on the surface of the river behind the roof-crowned hills of Old Residence. Steam rose from the kave mugs most of the officers held.

Kaltin Gruder took a bite out of a pastry. "If one has to fight in winter," he said, "this is actually not bad. Clean sheets, hot meals, running water, women. As long as the food holds out, of course."

Muzzaf Kerpatik nodded. "Two ships came in last night under tow," he said. "Eight hundred tons of provisions, and another two hundred thousand rounds of 11mm from Lion City."

Raj glanced up at the black-uniformed naval commander. The sailor cleared his throat:

"Their batteries on the south shore aren't much, at night," he said. "The channel's fairly deep on the north side, we just steam up and they try to hit the sound of our engines. Which is difficult enough if you're used to dealing with sound on water."

Tonhio Lopeyz, Raj reminded himself.

"Good work, Messer Commodore Lopeyz," he said, nodding.

Provisions aren't tight yet, he thought. Plenty of beans and bullets, but he needed men. What he could do with another five or six thousand veteran cavalry. .

"What sort of rate of fire do you think they can get with those siege pieces, Grammeck?" he asked.

Dinnalsyn looked up from his plotting table. "Oh, not more than one shot per half hour per gun, mi heneral, " he said. "Their crews look like amateurs, mostly — I think they keep those guns in storage between wars. Probably only a few real gunners per tube. Still, a day or so and six guns firing those forty-kilo round-shot would bring any hundred meters of wall down, even with the earthwork backing we've put in. Curtain walls like this—" he stamped a foot " — just can't take the racking stress." Which was why they'd been replaced with low earth-backed walls sunk behind moats, in the Civil Government and Colony. The western Midworld was considerably behind the times.

There was a rattling bang from the rear of the tower. The Y-beams creaked as the platform came level with the parapet, and the crew manhandled a 75mm field gun forward onto the flagstones. A gunner waved a flag from beside it, and the platform sank as oxen on the ground below heaved at their traces and compensated for the pull of the counterweights. The timber platform bumped rhythmically against the stones of the tower's inner wall as it went down. The gun-crew trundled the weapon into position on the wooden disk that waited for it. Behind the wheels were long curving ramps; ahead of them rope-buffered blocks. The gunners slid marlinspikes through iron brackets sunk into the circular wooden disk and heaved experimentally. There was a grating sound from the "lubricating" sand beneath the planks, and the weapon pivoted, the muzzle just clearing the crenellations of the parapet.

"Will the structure take it?" Raj asked.

"I think so," Dinnalsyn said cautiously. "We've got the floors below this braced with heavy timbers." He looked at the Brigaderos. "Amateurs. Hasn't it occurred to them to check trajectories? Height is distance."

No, Raj thought. But then, it wouldn't have occurred to me unless Center had pointed it out.

The second gun slid into position. Dinnalsyn looked to the towers left and right of his position; the guns there were ready too.

He touched off a smoke rocket. The little firework sizzled off northward, its plume drifting through the cold morning air. Center looked out through Raj's eyes at the smoke. Glowing lines traced vectors across his vision.

"Colonel," Raj said quietly. "Bring that gun around another two degrees, and you'll make better practice, I think."

Dinnalsyn relayed the order. "We lost a great cannon-cocker when you were born to the nobility, mi heneral, " he said cheerfully, bending his eyes to the binoculars. Then: " Fwego! "

The gunner jerked his lanyard. The gun slammed backwards, rising up the tracks behind its wheels, paused for a second as mass fought momentum, then slid downward with a rush to clang against the chocks. Bitter smoke drifted with the wind into the eyes of the officers at the side of the tower. They blinked, and a spot of red fire flashed for an instant in the center of a blot of black smoke over the Brigadero redoubt. A second later one of the enemy siege cannon fired, a longer duller booom and cloud of smoke. Almost at the same instant there was a splintering crash from far below, and the stone of the tower trembled beneath their feet.

A brass shell casing clanged dully on timber as the crew of the field gun levered open the breech of their weapon.

None of the men on the tower commented on the enemy hit. Dinnalsyn turned to the battery commander at the plotting table. "Triangulate," he said.

The captain moved his parallel setsteels across the paper, consulted a printed table and worked his sliderule. The solution was simple, time-to-target over set ranges to a fixed location. Center could have solved the problem to the limit of the accuracy of the Civil Government guns in a fraction of a second — but that would start looking excessively odd. Besides, he didn't want men who needed a crutch. Come to that, neither did Center.

The captain called out elevations and bearing for each gun in the ten tasked with this mission. A heliograph signaller clicked it out in both directions, sunlight on a mirror behind a slotted cover.

"Ranging fire, in succession," Dinnalsyn said.

From east to west along the wall guns spoke, each allowing just enough time to observe the fall of shot. Raj trained his own field glasses. Oxen were bellowing and running in the open center of the Brigadero redoubt, some of them with trails of pink intestine tangling their hooves. Men staggered to the rear, or were dragged by their comrades. More were still heaving at the massive siege guns, hauling in gangs of two dozen or more at the block-and-tackle rigs that moved them into and out of position.