When the meeting broke up, the Aram Chantat went back to their tents; all but one of them, who took a horse and set off on the road to Civitas Vadanis. In spite of the danger, he took the border road, the same route Duke Valens had been following when he was attacked; the urgency of his mission outweighed the danger, and besides, there had been no reports of Cure Doce activity in the area ever since the ambush. He had memorised one message and carried another, written on a scrap of thin rawhide cut off the handle-wrapping of a broken bow. It read: Gace Daurenja to Ziani Vaatzes, greetings.
You need to upgrade the Type Three; it hasn't got the range. Can you modify all the pieces you still have at the city and send them immediately. Also send more finished shot. When will the worms be ready? Send prototypes as soon as they're serviceable. The horesehair you've been using for the mangonel springs hasn't got the strength for the top setting. Use four plies instead of three; also send spares, since they've been breaking. Most important: get the weapon ready to ship. Box it up so nobody can guess what's in there, and send it with at least 2 squadrons Vadani cavalry escort. Things here are going well. GD.
The verbal message was duly delivered to the Aram Chantat privy council. It made them very angry for a while. Then they calmed down and composed a reply.
14
The artillery duel resumed next morning, but the situation had changed. During the night, while their engines kept up their blind pounding of the embankment, the allies had built a wall of gabions and fascines in front of their artillery line, to protect the working parties-every man who could be spared from other duties-who now set about digging a bank and ditch to shelter the engines from the Mezentines' incoming fire. They worked with a speed that astonished the observers on the City embankment, who immediately stopped trying to pick off the allied engines and began dropping their shot into the dense mass of diggers and earth-shifters. It was, as one artillery officer said later, practically impossible to miss. Each shot was sure of killing two or three workers, and the Mezentines quickly found out that if they managed to pitch a shot on the rapidly rising bank itself, there was a good chance it would skip and skim, cutting a bloody channel through the teams of men wheeling barrows of spoil or shovelling earth into gabions. As soon as Chairman Psellus heard about this, he ordered the artillery captains to stop it and go back to targeting the engines themselves. The captains were extremely reluctant to obey this order; the diggers were much easier to hit than the engines or their crews, and they felt they were achieving something. It was only when Psellus himself appeared on the embankment and gave the order in person that they eventually complied.
By mid-afternoon the bank was eight feet high, topped with a double line of gabions. It didn't provide a total defence, but it meant that the Mezentines now had to drop their stones directly on top of the engines in order to damage them, instead of being able to pitch short and either roll or skim their shot until it hit something. The allies, of course, had faced the same problem from the outset, but the fact that their shot tended to shatter on impact meant that although they rarely hit a machine, they were killing artillery crews at a rate which even the general expressed himself satisfied with. As he told the Aram Chantat liaison that evening, the Mezentines were manufacturers rather than soldiers; they could build new engines much faster than they could train men to use them, and so killing the trained men was a much more efficient course of action than merely smashing up equipment.
After his meeting with the liaison, Daurenja sent for Colonel Ducas of the Eremian contingent. The messenger found him, after a long search, leading a party of stretcher-bearers. They'd spent the afternoon collecting the wounded from the bank site, prising them out from under spent shot with beams ands crowbars. Miel himself had carried the axe and the saw, because a large number of them were pinned down by an arm or a leg; it wasn't a job he felt he could delegate. His knees were plastered with a putty of mud and blood, and he'd wrenched his back contorting himself as he tried to haul a paralysed man out from under a stone by his ankle and wrist. When the messenger found him, he said he was too busy to go; now that the bombardment had stopped, he said, they had to make full use of the time available to get as many wounded men out as possible. The messenger had to point out that it was a direct order from the commander-in-chief.
He found Daurenja sitting on an upturned bucket outside his tent. He was grinding something with a pestle and mortar.
"Colonel Leucas was killed in the bombardment," Daurenja said, looking earnestly into the mortar.
"Oh."
It wasn't what Miel would have chosen to say, but he was tired and frustrated at having to leave the work he knew he should be doing. Besides, Imbrota Leucas had been a pinhead, barely capable of blowing his nose.
"I expect you knew him," Daurenja said.
"Yes, of course. Actually, I never liked him much."
Daurenja shrugged. "Obviously, we need to replace him as commander of the Eremian contingent. You know your own people; they need a Leucas or a Phocas or a Ducas to lead them or they won't do as they're told."
Miel didn't grasp the implications of that straight away. Then he said, "I see."
Daurenja looked up. "I'd have thought you'd have been the natural choice instead of Leucas," he said, "only you weren't around when Valens made the original appointment; and besides, I seem to remember there's some kind of bad blood between the two of you. Anyhow, that's not important now. I suggest you use the existing staff, at least until you've had a chance to pick people you're more comfortable working with. I'm afraid I'll be asking a lot of you Eremians before this siege is over."
Miel looked at him, and thought: some kind of bad blood. "If I don't want the job, can I refuse?"
"Of course." Daurenja was staring into his mortar again. "But I don't imagine you will. You have a duty to your people, and that matters far more to you than any personal issues between you and me. I gather you've been rescuing the wounded."
"That's right."
Daurenja nodded. "Nobody told you to," he said. "In fact, you'd been assigned other duties, a nice safe job out of the line of fire. But you disobeyed orders and did what you felt had to be done. Well, that's fine. I know I can rely on you. Besides," he added with a yawn, "I owe you something for saving my life that time. I do try and pay my debts."
Miel frowned. "That's funny," he said. "The way I remember it, I tried to get Valens to have you hanged."
"That's right. But before that, you kept my ex-partner Framain from bashing my head in with a rock. If you hadn't done that, I'd be dead." He shrugged. "I tried to pay you back for that by assigning you to a job away from where the shot was falling, but I should've known better. The way to reward you is to give you a chance to do your duty. That's the sort of man you are. I understand you, you see. If you could stop hating me for a minute or so, you'd see we're not that different. Only, your duty's to your people and mine's to my work. Otherwise, we're basically the same. So," he added with a weary sigh, "you'll take the job, because you don't really have a choice. That's how I do things, you see. It's a basic premise of engineering. Components run in precisely cut keyways until they meet a stop. Everything does exactly what it's supposed to do, because it has no choice."