“You think them unreasonable people?” Morget asked.
“Hardly. They’re smarter than you lot. Of course, a bucket full of spotty turnips is, too. No. They’ll have heard what happened at Helstrow. Of the way dead King Ulfram tried to make parley with Morg, and got skewered up the shitpipe for it. No, they won’t come out and play nice.”
“Let us then, you and I, discuss better ways,” Morget said. “We took Redweir quick enough.”
“By sapping? Sure, we can try sapping,” Balint said with a shrug. She seemed to have accepted the collar around her neck, finally. She rarely ever complained about her thralldom anymore. “The walls here are better built than at Redweir, though. Thicker, better reinforced, and they go down deeper, in proper casements. Turns out a Burgrave can afford better engineers than a bunch of impotent monks.”
“So it can’t be done?”
“I didn’t say that,” Balint admonished. “But it’ll take longer, and we’ll need to dig multiple tunnels. It’ll take a week or so.”
“What could you do in the meantime? What other ideas have you?”
“We could build siege engines,” she said. “I don’t have the tools or the skilled laborers here for proper mangonels or siege towers but I could probably build some simple trebuchets. Won’t bring down the wall, but we can make the people inside wish they could crawl up their own arseholes.”
Morget nodded in interest. “Could they be rigged to throw balls of flaming pitch? We could burn those wooden hoardings off the walls.”
“Now there you’re thinking, old son. Why, I know some recipes for-”
At the flap of the tent, someone cleared his throat. Morget jumped up at once and grabbed his axe. It was the Great Chieftain, Morg himself, eavesdropping on them.
“All good ideas,” Morg said. “It might come to that. But for now, I want you two to stop this talk.”
“You don’t want us even thinking out loud?” Balint asked. “We weren’t planning anything for real yet.”
“For now I want to try a more gentle option,” Morg told the dwarf.
Morget’s eyes narrowed. “Great Chieftain. There are murmurings in the tents. They have been calling you Morg the Merciful again. It is my duty as your man to give you warning.”
“And so you have. I give little credence to men who whisper. Those are men afraid to act. When they talk openly of revolt, tell me again,” Morg said. “Now, come with me, Mountainslayer. Ness has finally agreed to talk.”
Father and son tramped through the mud of the barbarian camp. This had all been fields once, fertile fields full of waving grain. Now it was a great brown soup that sucked at their boots and threatened to swallow the camp entire.
There was little of the romantic in the investment of a siege. Everywhere barbarians were bending their hands to construction work-building enormous bread ovens, constructing crude mantlets, fencing in paddocks for livestock. The vast majority of the horde languished in their sodden tents, however, getting drunk. They knew they might be here all winter and wanted to get started on warming themselves now.
“Father,” Morget tried again as they wended their way through the randomly placed tents, “they say you’ve lost your fire. That you won’t fight-and if you won’t fight, they want someone else for Great Chieftain. Someone who will crush this place.”
“If it comes to that, I say good luck to them. You’ve besieged how many cities, Mountainslayer? One? And it fell within a week. I’m very proud of that, my boy. But until you’ve sat outside a curtain wall for six months, getting fat and lazy but always wondering if today is the day, the day you have to try your iron against that of some desperate man who just wants to defend his children… well. Don’t try to teach your grandmother how to skin a deer.”
They came to the end of the camp. A broad open space two hundred yards across separated the camp from the city wall-enough distance to make archers think twice before wasting arrows on potshots. Morgain and her riders were the only ones daring enough to enter that disputed zone. Now Morg led Morget into the yellowed grass and together they looked up at the wall.
“That right there,” Morg said, “is what separates us from the westerners. They can build things like this wall. That’s where their strength lies.”
“There’s none in their arms, we’ve proved that.” Morget laughed. “Great Chieftain, we have no need of walls! Tents are enough for your warriors.” Walls had always been the emblem of the great injustice that locked the clans away on the dry and harsh eastern steppes. The people of Skrae had pushed them first from their walled cities, then back beyond the Whitewall Mountains, where they’d been all but imprisoned until the day Cloudblade fell. In the stories the scolds told, walls were objects of hatred and derision. “Walls! I’d tear this one down with my own hands, if I had the time.”
Morg sighed. “Look at it. Really look at it. Right now it looks like cowardice and frustration. But imagine, if you can, what it would be like to own that. To be able to stand behind it and never worry about enemies raiding your camp again.”
It was impressive, Morget had to admit. Twenty-five feet of closely fitted stone, mortared together and then dressed to give protection to the mortar. No amount of strength-of-arms could penetrate that defense. They would have to find a way in through stealth, or engineering, or, as Morg seemed to want to try, promises. “They called down a few minutes ago,” he told his son. “They’re going to send someone to talk to us. Finally.”
“Talk. They wish to talk,” Morget muttered.
“Yes. If one wishes to offer terms of surrender, one must be able to speak,” Morg pointed out. “Oh, don’t get too excited. I doubt they’ll give in so easily. They’ll want concessions, and we’ll need to prove we bargain in good faith. But if we could take this city without losing a single berserker, I’d not balk at the price.”
“There’s more glory in breaking our way in by force,” Morget pointed out.
“Glory. Yes. Tell me, Mountainslayer-if we bring down that wall, what do we gain?” Morg asked.
Morget hated it when his father asked him leading questions. It meant there was a lesson to be imparted. His face burned even as it was flecked with cold winter rain. “We could storm inside, slaughter the inhabitants, and take the city for our own.”
“And hold it for how long? The Army of Free Men is sticking close. Right now they’re afraid to engage us, but what if we stole their city? Do you think they would hold back then?”
“I would relish the chance to destroy them!”
“Ah,” Morg said, “but would you get that chance? Once we were inside, we would become the besieged. We would be the defenders. And if the wall is damaged at the time the Burgrave arrives-if there is a massive hole in one side of our only protection-how will we defend ourselves? I want this place intact, Mountainslayer. I want it in the same condition I found it. Otherwise we gain nothing by taking it. I’ll remind you, it was your plan to come out here in the first place.”
Morget seethed but said nothing. The whispering in the tents was growing louder every day. When it became open muttering, he would move.
But not until then. Morget trusted his own arm. He trusted the steel of his axe. But he was wise enough to know that without the support of the clans, his own strength would not be enough to get him what he wanted.
“Halloo!” Hurlind shouted again. “You in there! Come show us some sign you haven’t forgotten us. You’ll break our hearts! Halloo! Show yourselves or we’ll write songs about how craven you were. Do you want your children to hear songs like that? Do you want history to remember you as cowards?”
Morg pointed upward. There was definitely movement atop the wall now. A man was coming forward. He wore a coat of plate that covered him head-to-toe in steel, and a great helm with a gilt cornucopia welded to its top. He seemed to have trouble walking, as if unaccustomed to wearing so much metal.