K Parker - Devices and Desires

Something about it was wrong; at least, the enemy weren't acting in the way he'd been expecting. They'd sent forward another wave, but it was walking, scurrying right into the path of the bolts. He saw the invisible foot stamp it flat, and there wasn't another wave behind it. He realised what it meant: Vaatzes the Mezentine had improved the design of the windlasses, or something of the kind. These scorpions could be reloaded faster than the ones the Mezentines made, which meant their timings for their planned manoeuvres were all wrong; accordingly, instead of sending their people into a neat, safe interval between volleys, they'd placed them right under the stamping foot. Jarnac felt sick; it was a wicked, treacherous thing to do, to trick the enemy into destroying his own people on such an obscene scale. He turned his head away, and saw an engineer hanging by his hands from a windlass handle, every ounce of bodyweight and every pound of strength compressed into desperate activity.

He forced himself to look back at the view below, as though it was a punishment he knew he deserved. They'd been moving their scorpions up; now they were trying to stop them before they vanished under a net of bolts. The enemy was a bubbling stream now, swirling and breaking around tiny black pebbles, swept against their will into a weir of flying pins. Most of all, it was an utterly ludicrous spectacle; and beyond it he could see the familiar copses, spinneys, chases and valleys of his home, places he knew down to the last deer-track and split tree. It was an impossibility; what was that word the Mezentine had used, to describe something that shouldn't be possible, outside any definition of tolerance? It was an abomination.

After a while he got used to it, or at least he blunted the significance of what he was watching. It took four abortive and costly experiments before the Mezentines figured out the timing of the Eremian scorpion winches; the fifth time they were successful. It was a strange kind of success-seconds after their scorpions had been advanced into position, every man in the moving party was dead-but it constituted a victory, because the rest of their army started cheering, a sound so incongruous that it took Jarnac several seconds to figure out what it was. The sixth wave managed to span and align the engines before they died. The seventh-

But Jarnac had been practising for that. As soon as the sliders had slammed home, he raised both arms and yelled. Nobody could make out what he was saying, of course, but they'd been through the drill twenty times, anticipating this moment. As Jarnac dropped to his knees and shoved his shoulders tight against the rampart wall in front of him, he couldn't look round and see if the rest of his men were doing the same. He hoped they were; a heartbeat later he heard the swish, and that was when he closed his eyes. The clatter, as the enemy's scorpion bolts pitched all around him, was loud enough to force any kind of thought out of his head, and he forgot to give the next order. Fortunately, they didn't need to be told.

They got their next volley off just in time. Before his own bolt-cloud had pitched, a thin smear of enemy bolts sailed, peaked and dropped around him. He heard yells, a scream or two; he didn't look round, but couldn't help catching sight of a man with a bolt through his shoulder, in the hollow above the collar-bone; he overbalanced and fell backwards off the ledge. Jarnac leaned forward over the rampart-someone yelled at him but he took no notice-and saw confusion and an opportunity where the enemy scorpions were drawn up. It was an advantage; they'd have to bring up new crews now, and they'd run straight into the centre ring of the target and be killed. Before they died, they'd have spanned the windlasses and loaded the bolts, so that their successors could slip the sears and launch the volley. I'm killing men at an incredible rate, Jarnac told himself, but there's still too many of them. As he watched the new crews run forward, work frantically and die, he knew he was wasting his time. Might as well fight the grass, he thought; you can fill a dozen barns with hay, and all you're doing is encouraging it to grow.

It was the twelfth wave that did the damage. He timed it as well as he could, but maybe the twelfth-wavers were faster or better-trained, or maybe his men were getting tired; just as he was about to yell, 'Cover!' the bolts came down. It was like sea-spray breaking over a wall; and once he was up and on his feet again, he saw that half his crews were dead. The other half loosed their volley; he was leaning over the back edge of the walkway, yelling for fresh crewmen. They arrived in time to look up at a cloud of bolts. As the remaining engines returned fire he called again. The bolts overshot most of them as they scrambled into the cover of the wall, and they found engines spanned and ready to loose. That's a thought, Jarnac said to himself, and cursed his stupidity for not thinking of it before; loose alternately, in two shifts. He didn't need to give an order, they were doing it anyway. Another Mezentine volley pitched; he estimated that only a quarter of their engines were manned and operating. The trouble was, a quarter was plenty. Not only were they killing men, the bolts were stabbing into the timber frames of the engines, gouging out gobbets of splintered wood (the Mezentines, of course, made their frames out of steel). A return volley, and more men running up the stairs, jumping, vaulting over the piled-up dead, leaping at the windlass handles, ripping bolts out of nearby corpses to load the slider because it was quicker than stooping to load from the stack. Jarnac waited for the enemy reply. It didn't come.

He waited a little longer, then sprang to his feet and peered over the battlement. The main body of the enemy army was advancing, pouring round, past and over the line of engines, each with its grove of spitted dead men. Jarnac didn't understand; had they run out of artillerymen after all, or were they simply sick and tired of watching? It didn't matter; they were advancing into the killing zone-he heard the crash of the sliders, watched the enemy go down. He saw a whole line crumple and flatten, and the line behind them march on over them without stopping. The next volley pitched and slaughtered, but by then three other lines were out of the line of fire. Simple, when you thought about it. With his scorpions he could kill a quarter of the Mezentine army before they came within bowshot of the wall. But a quarter wouldn't be enough. He didn't need to open his copy of the Discourse and look it up on the table. He could do the sums in his head.

Someone, a junior staff officer of some kind, was standing a few yards away, gawping at the dead; half-witted, mouth open, arms dangling at his sides. Jarnac yelled to him but he didn't seem to hear, so he jumped up, grabbed his shoulder and shook him.

'Go to the palace,' he said. 'Fetch the Duke.' He had to repeat it twice, and then the man picked up his feet and ran, sliding in pooled blood, tripping on scorpion bolts and dead men's legs. That chore done and promise fulfilled, Jarnac turned back to the pointless task of killing ten thousand men.

At the foot of the wall, Melancton finally stopped and looked back over his shoulder. As he did so, he thought about the old fairy-tale that says you mustn't look behind you in the kingdom of the dead, or the dead will get you. The hero, of course, gets as far as the gateway unscathed; but, because he's a tragic hero, he gives in at the very last moment, and is lost for ever.

Best, therefore, not to think about the men who wouldn't be joining him for the next phase of the operation. He leaned his head back and looked up at the wall. Above him, he couldn't see the enemy scorpions, but he could hear the crack of the sliders slamming home. He was safe from them here; the city wall sheltered him, which in itself was a pleasing irony. With a tremendous effort he cleared his mind of the images that clogged it, and tried to remember the next step.