They did, as more of the men getting ready to fend off the fireships went down. Confed troopers trotted up, raising their big oval shields to hold off whatever it was that was killing their comrades. Adrian could see the bronze thunderbolts on their facings glitter as they raised them; another row behind held them overhead, making a tortoise as they would for plunging arrow fire. Habit, but it was also habit that kept them so steady. Even when the first soldiers went down; the arquebus balls knocked men back, punctured shields, smashed through the links of mail.
This time Esmond winced; Adrian sensed he wasn't altogether happy at seeing personal courage and skill and strength made as nothing by a machine striking from twice bowshot.
" 'Strong-Arm! How the glory of man is extinguished!' " the elder Gellert murmured; a king of Rope had made that cry from the heart, the first time he saw a bolt from the newly-invented catapult.
"Progress," Adrian replied. Then: "Cease fire!"
The first of the fireships would ground not ten yards from its target. The Islander sailors had done their work well.
* * *
"Ungh."
A man not two paces from Justiciar Demansk went down, grunting like someone who'd been gut-punched. Unlike a gut-punched boxer he wasn't going to get up, not from the amount of blood that welled out around his clutching fingers. Better he bleeds to death now, Demansk thought with a veteran's ruthless compassion. I'd rather, than go slow from the green rot. A puncture down in the gut always mortified. He could smell shit among the blood-stink, even from here.
"That went right through his shield," he said aloud.
"Fuckin' right it did," his First Spear said. "Sir, you've got to get out of here! You get killed, who's going to command this ratfuck? I can't, and them bastards in the command tent, most of 'em can't."
Demansk shook his head. Jeschonyk actually had half a dozen reasonably experienced advisors-one good thing about the past twenty years of Confederation history was that the upper classes were full of men who'd seen red on the field. He turned in exasperation, keeping his voice low:
"I can't expect the men to hold steady under this if I don't-"
Ptannggg. Another trooper went down in front of him, a hole punched through his shield. Justiciar Demansk found himself on the rough stones of the causeway as well, blinking up at the First Spear's horrified face.
"Where's the velipad that kicked me?" he muttered.
His hand went to where the pain was, the left side of his torso, and then he jerked it away from metal burning hot. When he looked down there was a trough along his flank, ploughed into the thick cast bronze of his breast-and-back muscled cuirass. Lead was splashed across it.
"The Justiciar's dead! The commander's dead!" someone was wailing.
That pulled him out of his dazed wonder. He took a deep breath; there was a shooting pain in his ribs, but nothing desperate, no blood on his breath or grating of bone ends.
"I am not!" he said. "Get me up, gods condemn you!"
Hands pulled him up; he walked up and down behind the ranked troops, letting them see him.
Some way of making hellpowder throw things, he realized. Throw them farther than a torsion catapult can, and too fast to see. That's what those puffs of smoke on the galley are.
Another thought brought his eyes wide, appalled. "First Spear!" he snapped. "Get those men with the oars away from there."
"Let it ground, sir?" he asked, puzzled.
"We can't stop it." Still less push it around the front of the causeway, to drift harmlessly downwind. Somebody out there-those damned Gellerts-had probably timed this very carefully. "Have the battalion retreat-get everyone else out behind us. Walking retreat, shield-wall formation, but be damned quick about it. Move!"
He turned himself and began to walk to the rear. He'd been campaigning most of his fifty years; there was nothing in him of the need to prove his courage that had driven a young tribune to lunacy, so long ago. And the First Spear was partly right; nobody else was going to do this job better, if he couldn't.
* * *
"They're bugging out," Esmond said, disappointment in his voice. "Someone got a rush of thought to the head."
Adrian nodded tightly; he wasn't grieved that fewer men would be burned alive. The first of the fireships was almost in contact with the sandbank the causeway was being built on. . almost. .
"There!" he said.
The comandeered merchantman touched, lurched forward and then stopped dead. With a long slow crackling audible even over the growing roar of the fire, the mast toppled forward, to lie with its burning sail over the rock of the causeway. It fell towards the tower, but did not quite touch it-men were leaning out of the upper works of the siege tower, reckless of arquebus bullets, and pouring water down the layers of thick green hides that made up its outer skin. Any moment now. .
BUDDUFFF.
The force of the explosion was muffled by the hull of the ship, and the weight of combustibles lying above it. That confinement increased the force, as well. The burning deck of the fireship vanished in a spectactular volcano of flame, burning planks, beams, and dozens of barrels of flammables; many of them had ruptured in the hull as well, and added their sticky, fast-burning contents to the cone of flame that leapt upwards. It wasn't aimed at anything in particular, but the breeze bent it south and eastwards. . and most of it fell across the wall of the siege tower. Buckets of water became utter irrelevancies, and so did the layers of hide-they dried out and began to burn almost immediately. When the explosion cleared, the whole flank of the tower was already burning, and smoke was pouring out of the arrow slits and catapult ports all along the other side of it. Men jumped too, men with their hair and clothes aflame. A few were running from the other side, but not many could have made it down the ladders. The tower was a chimney now, sucking in air from the bottom and blasting it out the top and every opening along the sides, the thick timbers and internal bracing adding to the holocaust.
The next three fireships drifted into the red heart of the flames and exploded almost immediately. Adrian felt a huge soft pillow of hot air strike his face, making him fling up a hand as his eyeballs dried. When he blinked them clear the first tower was falling onto the flaming pillar of the second, nine stories of burning timber avalanching down unstoppably. The second tower cracked, shedding men and planks and hides; part of it hit the shallow water beyond, but the thick stump of it remained to burn with the whole of the first. Pieces of flaming wood flew through the air for hundreds of yards, well into the walled camp where the Confeds had crammed their carpentry supplies and naval stores. Fires started there, too; he could hear trumpets and drums as officers tried to organize fire-fighting parties. It would be difficult, though-the way to the nearest water supply was thoroughly blocked by the conflagration on the causeway.
There, stone would be beginning to crack as it glowed white-hot. Esmond was laughing, and the crews of the galleys were joining in-even the rowers were grinning through their oar ports on the outriggers, and the soldiers and sailors on deck were dancing, snapping their fingers and making obscene gestures towards the shore.
"A thousand men lost, there," Esmond said, slapping his hand exultantly on his swordhilt. "A thousand men, and a month's work, and all those materials. Lovely."
Even against the wind, Adrian thought he could catch a whiff of the smell. He gagged slightly and nodded.
"That will set them back a little," he said. "But I think we're going to be real, real unpopular over there now."