Even so, shouts from all around the inner ring warned that this wasn't the only place where the Menteshe were using those bound piles of brush to span the ditch. More cries rose from behind Grus. That could only mean the horsemen outside the ring were trying to break in, too. He wondered whether they'd also brought brushwood with them. I'll find out, he thought.
Meanwhile, more Menteshe made it over the inner palisade. Knots of cursing, shouting men battled one another. A nomad broke out of the nearest knot and rushed at Grus.
The nomad cut at his head. He blocked the blow. Sparks flew as iron belled off iron. The Menteshe slashed again. He had no style, but what seemed like endless youth and vigor. That might suffice, and Grus knew it.
Then another Avornan ran at the nomad. The Menteshe's face twisted in anger and fear. He didn't fancy facing two at once. He had no choice, though. Figuring – no doubt accurately – the young soldier was more dangerous than the frost-bearded king, he gave more of his attention to the new foe.
He likely would have beaten Grus without much trouble had they faced each other with no interference from other fighters. But he couldn't fend off the king with only a third or a quarter of his aim focused on him. Grus' sword went home below the nomad's right arm, a spot the fellow's boiled-leather corselet didn't protect. The Menteshe howled like a wolf. The pain of the wound distracted him, and the other Avornan's sword bit into his neck. He swayed, blood spurting from the wound, and then crumpled.
"We make a good team, Your Majesty," the Avornan soldier said.
"So we do," Grus replied. "Tell me your name." "I'm called Esacus, Your Majesty."
"Esacus," Grus repeated, fixing the name in his mind. "Well, Esacus, you'll have a reward when all this is done."
"Thank you very much, but I didn't do it for that," the soldier said.
"Which makes you more deserving, not less," Grus told him. Esacus scratched his head, plainly not understanding. That proved he'd never had anything to do with the royal court. People there were apt to act much more heroic if they thought the king's eye was on them than they might have otherwise.
"You stay back, Your Majesty," Esacus called as more Menteshe made it over the palisade. Shouting, "Avornis!" the soldier rushed into the fight.
Grus did stay back. He knew good advice when he heard it. The Menteshe couldn't get enough men within the Avornan ring at the same time to give the defenders too much trouble.
The nomads were also trying to break into the palisaded ring from the outside. Despite the barrage of arrows they rained on the defenders, they weren't having much luck. They must have hoped that barrage would break the Avornans, which would give them the chance they needed to force an entry. Unlike the Menteshe inside Trabzun, the relief force hadn't brought any hurdles or other ways to cross the ditch and come to grips with Grus' men at close quarters.
They were brave. Like anything else, bravery didn't matter so much without the talent that would have supported it. If anything, it made the nomads take heavier losses than they would have with less courage. They kept on attacking even when the attacks couldn't succeed – and they paid for it.
At last, they had taken as much as they could take. They gave up trying to force their way into the ring. A few at a time, they began to ride off. Some lingered to keep on shooting at the Avornans from beyond the range where Grus' archers could respond. Then a stone flung from an engine knocked a chieftain out of the saddle – and knocked over his horse, too. After that, the nomads seemed to decide they'd had enough. The men who'd lingered rode away after their comrades.
Grus ordered some of the Avornans from the outer works to go to the aid of the men who were fighting off the much more stubborn attack on the inner ones. When the Menteshe trying to break out of Trabzun saw that the Avornans battling them were being reinforced, they sullenly drew back into the city – those who could, at any rate.
Later, the king realized he should have tried to force an entry then. The Menteshe were in disarray, and the gates had to stay open for a while to let them back within the walls. But the nomads, though they hadn't won, had fought well – well enough to rock the Avornans back on their heels. Grus did not issue the order. Neither did Hirundo. No one pursued the Menteshe as they retreated.
What Grus did do as the fighting eased was let out a long sigh of relief and stab his sword into the soil to clean the blood off the blade. He sent runners out to find Hirundo and bring him back. The general nodded as he came up. "Well, Your Majesty, we got through that one," he said.
"I was thinking the same thing." Grus spotted Pterocles and waved to him. "Is the mine still masked from the Menteshe? I hope none of them stumbled down the hole when they broke in. And I hope the wizard you set there didn't run away from his post when that happened."
"I'll go find out," Pterocles said, which was exactly what Grus wanted to hear from him. The wizard hurried away.
"We can always start the undermining again somewhere else if things did get buggered up," Hirundo said.
"I know. But we would have wasted a lot of time and a lot of work," the king replied. "And if the Menteshe know we're trying to dig under the wall, they'll countermine to keep us away." He snapped his fingers. "Which reminds me – we have to bring in the hurdles the nomads used to cross the inner ditch."
"I should hope so. If we don't, they're liable to sneak out at night and see if they can slit our throats while we're sleeping," Hirundo said.
"Well, yes, that, too," Grus said. Hirundo gave him a puzzled look. He explained what he had in mind.
Hirundo heard him out and then bowed. "That's very nice, Your Majesty. Very fitting, you might say. I'll give the orders right away." As Pterocles had a few minutes earlier, he bustled off to tend to what needed doing.
The wizard returned at a trot, the smile on Pterocles' face telling Grus what he needed to know even before the wizard said, "All's very well, Your Majesty. No trouble came too close to Calidris, and he kept the spell going all through the fight. The Menteshe in Trabzun don't know what we're up to."
"Ah." Grus smiled, too. His was a more wolfish expression than the one the wizard wore. "Then that work will go on. How much longer till we're under Trabzun's walls? Do you happen to know?"
Pterocles shook his head. "I spoke to the sorcerer, not to the minemaster."
"Too bad," Grus said. "We'll go on till we finish, that's all." He looked south, toward Yozgat. "Yes, we'll go on till we finish."
King Lanius looked up toward the skylight set into the roof above the royal archives. Dusty sunbeams filtered down to where he sat. No one had ever been able to get those skylights clean. Lanius suspected much of the dirt was on the inside of the glass, and thereby inaccessible. The only way to be rid of it would be to take out the panes and replace them with clean ones.
A faint skittering noise came from somewhere in the bowels of the archives. Lanius sighed. He knew mice got in here. The only thing he didn't know was how many precious parchments they'd chewed up before he ever got the chance to see them.
Grus had written that he was besieging Trabzun, formerly Trapezus. Avornis hadn't owned the city for centuries. Even so, the archives held papers and parchments about the city and what it had been like in bygone days – tax records, reports on the state of the walls, appeals to lawsuits that had gone all the way to the city of Avornis. Lanius had run into them from time to time when he was looking for other things, sometimes when he was looking for nothing in particular.
He'd run into them, yes, but he hadn't thought anything about it. Why should he have? The Kingdom of Avornis had lost more than a few cities in the Menteshe invasions. Quite a few of them, these days, were only ruins. The one that really impinged on Avornan consciousness was Yozgat, and that more because it held the Scepter of Mercy than for any other reason.