K Parker - Devices and Desires

The huntsman died ten minutes later-they counted twenty-one wounds on his body-but Jarnac was able to walk twenty yards to a mounting-block and sit down of his own accord before he passed out. The consensus was that he owed his life to the brigandine coat.

When he came round, half an hour later, he opened his eyes and asked what was going on. They told him that the attack had been driven back, with heavy losses. He didn't believe them, and passed out again.

It was Ziani Vaatzes who suggested dropping grappling-hooks from the gatehouse tower and simply lifting the battering-ram off the ground, using the portcullis winch. They did as he told them because he was a Mezentine, and therefore knew about such things. When the crisis was over and they wanted to lift him shoulder-high and salute him as the saviour of the city, he turned out not to be there. Meanwhile the ram dangled in the air like a dead spider, until someone thought of winching it up as far as it'd go and then slipping the winch. It fell thirty feet and smashed, and that was the end of it.

Duke Orsea arrived too late, of course. He'd run from the council room as soon as the messenger arrived, but the press of bodies was too thick and he couldn't get through. By the time he'd scrambled his way to the front of the scrum it was all over, and they were carrying the lesser Ducas home on a door. Everyone was convinced he was dead, until he appeared at his front gate, leaning on someone's shoulder. The cheering was as loud as the battle at the gate.

They spent the rest of the day and all the following night shoring up the barricades in the gateway and fixing or cannibalising the damaged scorpions. Vaatzes reappeared to take charge of that side of it. Probably it was just stress and fatigue, but nobody was able to get a civil word out of him. He shouted at the workers, which wasn't how he usually behaved toward his men, and nobody seemed able to do anything right.

Some time after midnight, they finished counting the dead bodies and collating the casualty lists. Five hundred and seventeen killed, over nine hundred wounded; meanwhile, a work detail was struggling to get the dead Mezentines out of the gateway, so the masons could get in and block up the breach with bricks and rubble. Nobody could be bothered to count them, though there were inevitably a few jokes about saving some of the better heads for the lesser Jarnac's trophy collection. As and when there was time, the plan was to load them into ammunition derricks, winch them up to the top of the wall and throw them over. There wasn't enough space in the city to bury them, and burning such a monstrous quantity of material would have posed a fire hazard.

They waited until the surgeon had finished with him before they gave Melancton the casualty reports. It had taken an hour to dig the two arrowheads out of him-one in his stomach, the other in his shoulder-and he'd lost a lot of blood. His aides said the report could surely wait till morning (the dead would still be dead tomorrow, and possibly the day after, too), but the officer in charge pleaded an express order.

Seventeen thousand, four hundred and sixty-three dead. Lying in his tent, he looked at it as if it was a random squiggle on the scrap of parchment. Nobody could really understand a figure like seventeen thousand. A quick calculation-he'd always been good at mental arithmetic-told him that he'd lost slightly over half his men, and therefore, according to all the recognised authorities on the art of war, he now had insufficient forces at his disposal to carry the city. He'd failed.

Somehow, that hardly mattered. He was a mercenary, a skilled tradesman paid to do a job; they weren't going to behead him or lock him up, as they might well have done if he'd cost them that many citizens instead of mere migrant workers. He'd go home, unpaid, his career ruined, and that'd be that. Years ago he'd bought a reasonable-sized estate just outside the city where he'd been born, somewhere to retire to when his soldiering days were over. He'd been looking forward to it, in a vague sort of way.

Seventeen thousand. He remembered a story he'd heard years ago, about a man who owned a piece of land on which a great battle had been fought. He came back home a week after the battle to find the dead still lying. He was a fairly well-to-do farmer, with twenty men working for him; it had taken them weeks just to cart away the bodies and dump them in a disused quarry a couple of hundred yards from the battlefield. The land itself was ruined. Some of his neighbours put it down to malign influences, others reckoned the sheer quantity of blood that had drained into the soil had poisoned the ground. Ploughing was next to impossible, because every few yards the share would jam on a helmet or a breastplate or some other piece of discarded junk. He tried a heavy mulch of manure for a couple of years, but nothing would grow except bindweed and nettles.

Seventeen thousand. As he stared at the tent roof, trying not to move (the doctor had given him all sorts of dire warnings about that), he made a few attempts at visualising the number, but once he got past five thousand it all broke down.

The Mezentine liaisons came to see him around midday. For once, they didn't have much to say for themselves; he got the impression that they were preoccupied with what was likely to happen to them when they got home. One of them made a few half-hearted suggestions about a surprise attack by night; the other two ignored him.

'Can we at least say we've got enough men left to mount an effective siege?' another one asked him. 'According to one set of reports, they probably outnumber us by now'

Melancton shrugged. 'If they tried to make a sortie and chase us off, they'd be walking into our scorpions,' he pointed out. 'I'd love it if they tried, but I don't suppose they will. No, I think they'll sit tight and watch us use up our stocks of food. They're better supplied than we are. We weren't anticipating a siege.'

One of the liaisons shifted uncomfortably. 'How long can we stay here, then?' he asked.

Melancton grinned. 'Well, we've got a lot fewer mouths to feed than we had this time yesterday, so we can probably stick it out for three weeks, assuming we want to. I can't see any point in that, though. They must have supplies for at least six months, probably more.'

'Three weeks,' the liaison repeated. 'Well, it's possible that the reinforcements could get here by then. In the meantime, we'll send to the City for a supply train-'

'Reinforcements?' Melancton frowned, as though he didn't know what the word meant. 'I don't understand.'

'Fresh troops, from your country,' the liaison explained. 'Obviously we're going to have to raise another army before we try again. That's going to take time, naturally, so meanwhile our job will be to mount an effective siege-'

'Try again.' Melancton couldn't think of any words for what he wanted to say. 'You're going to try again?'

'Of course. The Republic never loses a war. As I was saying, time is going to be the key. Based on what we've just seen, we're going to have to make very substantial modifications to the long-range engines, and that'll probably mean shipping them back to the City for a complete refit. How long that'll take I simply don't know, but…'

Melancton paid no real attention to the rest of what they said. It wasn't any of his business any more. Curiously, they'd spoken as though they assumed he'd still be in command when the reinforcements arrived; he thought about that. It was possible, of course, that the Mezentines wouldn't want to replace him, because that would be an acknowledgement of the disaster. Maybe they're just going to pretend it never happened, he thought; and of course, they could do that, it'd be possible. Getting another army from home forty-five or fifty thousand this time-was also eminently feasible, given the time of year and the political situation. There'd be no shortage of recruits, assuming they had the common sense not to say anything about what had happened to the last expedition.