They halted about four hundred yards away. There was a pause of about ten minutes and then the commando split into two – one part to the east along the river, the other to the west. A small number of men with the covered wagons moved back behind the table mountain and Cale was unable to track them though he was anxious to do so. There was something odd about the wagons – they were covered but a peculiar shape. The Redeemers in the Drift would have to wait for the attack. Nearly an hour passed then Gil again pulled his sleeve. ‘Look, sir, on the shoulder of that butte.’ He was pointing at a flattish section down from the top of the table mountain. Taking the line, Cale examined the wagons now several hundred feet above the Drift and saw the three of them being stripped, though fuzzily, the glasses being not so good at such a distance. What he could make out consisted of frames and ropes but these were not structures he recognized beyond their being some sort of catapult. He passed the glasses to Gil who said he thought they looked like ballistas, a contraption much used for a while by the Antagonists on the Eastern Front.
‘Never heard of it,’ said Cale.
‘It’s just a glorified crossbow, but much bigger. They used it for a while about nine months ago but it was only any use against hill defences and there aren’t many of them on the Eastern Front. I can’t see the point of them here.’
They didn’t have to wait long for the first surprise. After five minutes of manic activity the ballistas had been set up – but instead of pointing the ten-foot-long bows at the trenches in the Drift, the three were clearly fixed pointing almost straight up into the air. When they fired, the powerful bows lashed the enormous bolts upwards but at a slight angle. An unpleasant nerve-jangling scream went up.
‘They fix a wheezer around the shaft – makes them wail. Gets on your tits.’
The whining bolts shot upwards and then curved in a sharp arc and smacked heavily into the yellow stub grass around the trenches as if straight down from the clouds directly above. For the next twenty minutes the ballistas were fired repeatedly to get their range until almost two in three of the bolts were landing in the trenches. A few screams made it clear that some of the huge bolts had found a target – but though this was nastily unfamiliar, Cale couldn’t see it was going to be decisive.
There was another hiatus and then the iron ‘TWANG!’ of the ballistas starting up again with the oddness of the difference in sight and sound – the giant bolts were almost in mid-flight before the metallic noise of the release rippled over Cale and Gil on the distant rise. But this time there was something even odder about the sound – it was deeper – and the arc of the bolt as it hit the top of its natural curve and began to fall to earth. The shaft, even without using the ’scope, was clearly much thicker and Cale scrabbled with the bioscope to catch sight of the bolt as it moved. Just as he fastened on to it, the thick shaft started to fall apart in mid-air and a dozen much thinner bolts gently separated from the main shaft and slowly formed a loose group before hitting the trenches as a loose pack – there was a beat and then the screaming of half a dozen men. Then another thick bolt was released and another. From time to time one of them failed to unravel but mostly the nine bolts fired every minute landed on the Redeemers in the trenches as one hundred and eight bolts every sixty seconds. The hideous screaming of the dead and dying was continuous now. Gil’s face set with a stoic pallor. Through the glasses he could see the surviving Redeemers desperately digging to get themselves deeper but it was as much use as digging to get out of the rain. Realizing this, the survivors started scrambling out of the trenches and running away. They were allowed to go about fifty yards before a sea of bolts and arrows from either side of the great U took them like a boy taking a stick to weeds. Some twenty Redeemers surrendered. From all around the U, the soldiers of the Folk emerged from behind bushes and the great termite hills. There must have been a hundred and sixty men within a hundred yards. As a handful of the Folk came to take the surrender and Cale was wondering whether the Redeemers were going to get more mercy than they would have given, a half-dozen arrows whisked down from the hill at the rear of the U and three of the Folk advancing fell screaming. There were ten Redeemers in a position there refusing to give in. But Cale could see that there was a blind spot to the right of the hill that allowed a platoon of the Folk to advance up to within fifty yards of the recalcitrant Redeemers. They were able to pin down the Redeemers and the Folk were easily joined by reinforcements. Being so close and with much greater numbers they swamped the Redeemers on the hill with their first charge. Whatever chance of mercy the Redeemers from the great trench had before, they had lost it now. Within ten minutes every one of the defenders was dead and with no more casualties than they’d received during the botched surrender the Folk had yet again humiliated one of the greatest fighting forces on earth.
Three days later the Redeemers were back defending the Drift with the eighteen hundred men Cale had earlier sent to the nearest major fort. During the interim the Folk had overseen the passage of more than two hundred wagons of supplies and almost a thousand troops. At the approach of the Redeemers they had simply vanished into the veldt, confident that Duffer’s Drift or one of the other roads into the interior could be taken when needed with a similar lack of difficulty.
Cale gathered seventeen centenars around him and for an hour took them through the tactics of the late Redeemers, whose remains had been shovelled into a shallow pit about five hundred yards away. He then explained why they’d been so easily defeated. He asked for questions. There were a few. He asked for answers. There were a few of those too. None of them, it was clear to Cale, would have resulted in a different outcome, though a couple would certainly have held back the Folk for longer.
‘You’ve got two hours to agree a plan. Then two hundred of you’ll stay here and see if you can hold out for the three days it’ll take to reinforce.’
‘How will you choose, sir?’
‘Prayer,’ said Cale. On his way back to his tent Cale had time to consider the cheapness of his remark. Redeemers or not, two hundred men were going to die.
Which is exactly what they did. Cale listened to the new tactic for defence, decided to order a few changes because he wanted to see their manoeuvres in practical operation and then chose the men to carry it out by lot rather than any blasphemous play with devotion. He added one name himself, that of a centenar he had recognized during the initial conflab as a Redeemer who had once beaten him on the arse with a rope as thick as a man’s wrist for talking during a training session. Possibly the Redeemer might have lived had it not been for the fact that it had not even been Cale doing the talking but Dominic Savio, who had been whispering to Vague Henri that he might, indeed probably would, die that very night and be shat out by a devil for all eternity.
For a second time Cale withdrew along with Gil to the scrubby rise about half a mile away from Duffer’s Drift. Again the wait, two days this time, which Cale passed occasionally tormenting Gil in any trivial way he could think of – hinting at lascivious experiences in Kitty Town, which, being in the early stages of love, he had not visited along with Kleist and the guilty but fascinated Vague Henri. ‘You could get a beezle,’ said Cale to Redeemer Gil, ‘for a dollar or less. And,’ he added, ‘a bumscraper for two.’
He had made up the names of these perversions and therefore thought they did not exist. He was wrong about this. In Kitty Town even a depravity no one had ever thought of could be found if you had the money.