The claws holding the beam snapped back. Cable un-spooled with a rumbling whirr. The great basket of rock seemed to drop slowly at first, then faster and faster, and the steel beam of the throwing arm whirred upward so swiftly that inertia bent it like a bow.
Sss-crack!
At the very top of its arc the chain-and-mesh sling swung upward as well. Another hook was cunningly shaped to let the upper chain of the sling go free at precisely the right moment, and the big boulder flew westward-tumbling as it went, slowing as it reached the height of its arc and then dropping down towards the fort like an anvil from orbit. Dust puffed up around the trebuchet, from under its wheels and the four screw jacks that stabilized it for firing.
"Hit!" shouted a Bearkiller trooper, looking through a pair of heavy tripod-mounted binoculars they'd reclaimed from a tourist lookout point. "Hit!"
Larsson had his own monocular out and put to his good eye-the castle was about half a mile away, and he wanted to know just how his baby functioned. He could see where the quarter-ton rock had struck; in the middle of the earth wall of the fort, halfway between ditch and the palisade. A cloud of dirt drifted away, and he saw the boulder three-quarters buried in the heaped soil.
Well, so far we're just helping build the castle wall, Lars-son thought. No damage except to the barbed wire. But next time:
"Incoming!" the woman at the binoculars shouted. Then: "Short!"
Larsson looked, tensed to dive for the slit trench. A rock rose over the gate of the castle, arching up-in a reverse of his own shot, it seemed to get faster and faster as it approached.
Thud.
It landed in the roadway, cracking and cratering the asphalt, then rolling along until it came to a halt about a hundred yards in front of his own trebuchet. More than enough to hammer anything trying to sneak by the castle on either side, but less range than his, with a lighter load. Probably mounted on some sort of turntable.
"You shouldn't have thought you'd be the only one to come up with this idea, Professor," Larsson said with an evil chuckle. To the crew: "All right, winch her down!"
The crew sprang to work, pumping at the cranks on either side of the frame's rear. There was a quick ratcheting clatter as they took up the slack on the two woven-wire cables that ran up to the peak of the throwing arm and out through block-and-tackle at the middle of the rear brace. That slowed as the weight came on the cables and they had to work at it, but the gearing made the effort steady rather than hard. At last the arm was down, and Larsson threw the lever that brought the jaws of the clamp home on it and slipped home the safety pin-a steel rod the thickness of his thumb and as long as his forearm.
"We need something a little lighter, if we want to hit the palisade or the interior," he said, looking down the row of boulders. Each had its weight chalked on the surface, along with a serial number.
"Number thirty-two!"
The loading crew had two-man pincers for carrying stones, with turned-in sections at the tips, and stout horizontal wooden handles like spades. Four men went after boulder thirty-two, each pair clamping their pincers on it and walking it over to the sling. Larsson carefully raised the chain and loop and dropped them over the hook, removed the pin:
"Incoming!"
This time the yell was much louder, and the sound from the castle was different, a long vibrating tunnngg! from the motte tower.
"Cover!" Larsson said, and jumped into a slit trench; Havel had smiled that crooked smile when he told them those should go in first.
I'm not doing bad for an old man, he thought, puffing and keeping his head down. So I may not be good at waving swords:
Something went over his head with a loud whhht. A fractional second later there was a sharp crack from behind him. He turned and raised his head. There was a row of mantlets about ten yards behind the rock-thrower-heavy shields on bicycle wheels, for archers and crossbowmen to push towards hostile walls. One had been hit.
Not just hit, he thought, whistling softly to himself.
The missile was a four-foot, spear-sized arrow with plastic vanes and a pile-shaped head. It had punched right through the metal facing and double thickness of plywood, and buried itself in the rib cage of a rancher's man who'd been leading a horse behind. The man went down, screaming like a rabbit in a trap and flailing with his arms, but the legs stayed immobile. More people scattered eastward, running from the sudden danger; a few ran three or four steps, then turned and dashed back to drag the injured man to safety. He screamed even louder at that, and was undoubtedly going to die anyway-a pre-Change trauma unit probably couldn't have saved him, but:
That was well done, Larsson thought, wincing slightly. Stilclass="underline" ouch.
He'd gotten case-hardened since the Change-his mind suppressed memories of the night of blood and screams in the ranger cabin with an effort so habitual that he didn't even have to think about it.
But this isn't just a game of engineers, the way business was a game with money for counters. Or if it is, it's a game with human beings as pieces.
On the heels of the thought came more distant sounds from the castle: six together this time, tunng-tunng-tunng-tunng-tunng-tunng.
"The first one was a ranging shot!" Larsson shouted. "Heads down, everyone!"
More black dots came floating out from the castle, from the tower and along the wall. Deceptively slow-looking at first, then gathering speed. Larsson dropped to the bottom of his hole and looked upward. Something went overhead in a blur, and there was a hard whack! sound of metal on metal, duller chunks as steel spearheads buried themselves in wet dirt. There were shouts, but no screams.
Larsson shouted himself: "Everyone stay in their holes until I say you can come out!"
There was no quaver in his voice; he was proud of that. He knew the javelins probably couldn't hurt him: but his gut and scrotum didn't seem to know that, and they were sending very unpleasant messages up to his hindbrain. When he thought about what he was going to do next, his sphincter got into the action.
And I can come out myself whenever I want. I don't want to, but I'm going to do it anyway.
He launched himself out of the trench. The loop at the end of the firing lanyard was about a dozen yards away; the point of his hook sank into the dirt in the middle of it, and he let his backward slither pull it taut.
Chang- whack!
The boulder arched out towards the Protector's castle; before it was halfway the multiple, musical tunnng of the dart-throwers sounded.
"Now I understand why they had so many sieges in the Middle Ages, and why everyone hated them," he muttered to himself as he tumbled back into the protective embrace of his foxhole.
"Hit!" someone shouted, after the javelins struck. "Broke off a section of the palisade this time!"
He could hear the crew cheering from their trenches and felt like shouting himself: until he realized that he'd just probably pulped several men into hamburger with a three-hundred-pound boulder, and equally probably mutilated and crippled several more.
"But I'm not going to get bent out of shape about it, as Mike says," he murmured to himself, his lips thinning. "So many dead, and you cretins are adding to the total, when you could be helping. If your Protector had organized to get people out of Portland-"
He yelped involuntarily as one of the man-length darts plowed into the dirt near him; it sank a third of its length into the hard-packed rocky soil and quivered with a harsh whining sound that played along his nerves like a saw-edged bow on a violin. Three more banged off the steel framework of his rock-thrower.
And we are not going to stand around cranking Mr. Tre-buchet down again, he thought, swallowing an uneasy mix of terror and exhilaration. Hmmm: next time, really big, thick movable shields to protect the crew?
"All right!" he called out aloud. "Next flight of javelins, one of us runs back-you, Jackson, the minute they hit you get out of your hole. We've given the Protector's men the kick in the ass we promised 'em!"