S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

They all chuckled. Ignatius was a few years older than them, though a Changeling for all practical purposes, and he had a natural dignity that wasn’t all incompatible with his dryly ironic sense of humor. Beneath her amusement Rudi could feel the underlying anguish in Mathilda at deciding to leave their daughter in the care of others. Even an other as beloved and competent as Juniper Mackenzie. It was the spiritual equivalent of a constant low-level toothache, stoically endured.

There were times when the Sword was a burden; sometimes even the link to each other and the land that had come with the Kingmaking was. He didn’t know how much of that went with being a ruler in other times and places, but it was most assuredly true if you were High King of Montival-or High Queen. For that matter, he could sense a muted hint of Ignatius’ longing to be back at the hilltop monastery of Mt. Angel, to lose himself in the ancient round of prayer and toil and meditation. He hadn’t become a cleric to seek secular power.

The monk’s sense of duty was like a blade of forged steel, though; he didn’t have to give speeches to be an inspiration. Rudi sighed.

Time to be Artos, he thought, as he drew up his chair . Or as the good Father would say, take up your cross.

“Here, look at this,” Mathilda said, pushing over the telescope. “We both need distracting. Come get a good military reason to be depressed.”

He did, turning the focusing knob. Rudi had first seen Boise’s fortifications a few years ago, on the Quest to Nantucket, and more recently from the observation balloons that now ringed it. Like many, the modern city had contracted to its original core, which here meant a rectangular block to the east on the far side of the river and a little back from it. Three bridges crossed the water, heavily fortified at both ends, virtual castles on the western shore surrounded by clear land worked as vegetable plots and running into massive complexes of towers on the wall.

Unlike most still-inhabited cities the sprawl of buildings around Boise’s edges had been thoroughly torn down in old General Thurston’s day. Many places left their suburbs to the attentions of time, vegetation, scavengers and fire, but around Boise even the foundation pads had mostly been broken up for reuse in the fortifications and cellars filled in for truck gardens-Lawrence Thurston had been a man with a very strong sense of order, among other things.

The walls he’d built reflected the other, bleakly pragmatic part of his nature. They were mass concrete reinforced with girders but they included some of the pre-Change high-rise buildings, themselves in-filled with cemented rubble, and it gave the fortification an odd mottled, angular look. They weren’t as elegantly historic as Todenangst or the walls of Portland, or as brilliantly sited as Mt. Angel, and they didn’t have the snarling cyclopean menace of Larsdalen’s Bear Gate, but. .

“We’re not going to batter those down, or storm them,” he said.

There was a click from the sentries as he spoke, the High King’s Archers touching their bowstaves to the brow of their helmets in salute, and Frederick Thurston came in. He was in the hoop-armor of a Boise regular, with a red-white-and-blue crest running fanwise from ear to the ear of his helm. It gave his tall form an extra element of menace-which was one point of the gear, of course. He took it off and laid it down on the table, throwing his metal-backed gloves beside it and unbuckling his cavalry saber.

“Thor’s mighty goats, no,” Fred said, answering Rudi’s last comment. “Can you imagine trying to land on that nice inviting strip of land between the east bank of the river and the walls, for example?”

Rudi could; he winced at the thought of the sudden rain of bolts and round shot and balls of flaming napalm among troops crowded into the narrow band-it was a deathtrap masquerading as an opportunity, even more than the moat-encircled remainder of the ramparts. It said something of Fred’s father as a soldier that he’d done that, and not put the wall at the water’s edge.

“No, you’d have to try it from the other side,” he said. “Which we won’t, but it’s essential they think we’ll try.”

Fred nodded, family pride in his face for a moment. “That’s why Dad put the wall as far back as West River Street.”

Rudi turned the instrument from the city to his own siege lines, a ragged but substantial line of trenches and earthworks, some of them smoking faintly where stick-flame had landed. It was amazing how much dirt you could move in a week with fifty thousand sets of reasonably willing hands, spades, wheelbarrows, Fresno Scrapers, horses, mules, oxen and some well-trained field engineers. A crew in a pit a little behind the front were sweating at a trebuchet, grunting as they levered a four-hundred-pound block of stone into the throwing cup; the boulder had been shot at them by a similar machine on the walls and landed in the soft earth of the berm protecting them and was about to be sent home postpaid.

An officer barked a command, they all stood back, and the lanyard was pulled. A trebuchet was the simplest of siege engines in principle, if the strongest, just a great lever pivoting on an elevated axle about a fifth of the way from one end. You put weight-tons of weights-on the short end and a metal-mesh and cable sling arrangement on the long one, and you were in business apart from a few incidentals like the supporting frame to hold the axle high in the air and the winches to haul the long arm down and the general massiveness needed to withstand the stress. This one was about the height of a three-story house, the product of a foundry and machine shop in Corvallis, and in knocked-down form it took twelve eight-horse wagons to transport it.

The triangular block of weights in a steel frame box on the upper, shorter end of the arm began to fall as the catch released the restraints. The long throwing-arm between the two giant steel upright A-frames started to move, slowly for the first few instants then more quickly as it whipped up, dragging the sling along the alignment trough on the ground.

The loop of the sling swung skyward above the giant beam and lifted free in a blur of speed; the free end came loose from the carefully shaped hook at the top of the arc, and the machine lofted the boulder at the city with the casual ease of a boy shying an apple core at a crow in the fields at sowing-time. It rocked back and forth with the cup and sling dangled down as the crew hooted and jeered at the defenders-probably variations on eat this! — and a few ran up to the top of the berm before turning to bend over and rhythmically slap their arses in derision.

Corvallans tended to be vain of their city-state’s scientific accomplishments and manufacturing prowess; the university there ran the place, more or less, and had since the Change. Its far-travelling merchants and skilled artisans and ingenious factory-owners were numerous, energetic and shrewd too, shrewd enough to use that accumulated knowledge well. A third of his artillerists and half his engineers were Corvallans. Their bankers were equally famous but far less liked, though Rudi had reluctantly found them as indispensible as the troops.

The roughly shaped boulder tumbled away into the distance, turning to a dot. Then there was a puff of dust from the great ramparts above the blank steel surface of a gate, and the hard tock sound of impact echoed back. At this distance imagination had to fill in the way the wall would shake underfoot, and the deadly whine of fragments of shattered rock and concrete like flying gutting-knives. A rock that size packed a lot of energy into its travelling mass, and when you stopped it all at once. .