IronStar (21 page)

Uh-oh!
she
thought, five minutes later as they joined Lord Tsano and Armsmaster Opeth atop
the wall beside the still-open Ash Gate. Spread out in an arc a good kilometer
distant, stretching from west to north all the way around to the east, was a
solid ring of horsemen. There must be… wait, they’re grouped under those small
banners, Irshe said they were usually thirty to a, a platoon… A few moments’
counting, and some simple extrapolating, yielded the result that the
two-kilometer arc of horsemen centered on this gate consisted of some two
thousand mounted enemy - in the
front
row.
How deep were those ranks?
Surely not three riders deep, not
six thousand
Wrth, all at once, here,
now…

“Irshe
’jasa
, this evening I
will want to discuss the accuracy of your scouting reports. You said ‘perhaps
two thousand’, I remember clearly.”

“Kirrah
’jasa
, I also said
‘perhaps more’,” he replied with a wry smile.
Everyone’s playing lawyer
today,
she thought.
Why is he looking so calm?
Lord Tsano turned
towards them:

“Warmaster, is this too many for
your
stone-surprise
?” he asked.

“I think not, Lord. Even better
now, to break some of them so cheaply, if they will just …cooperate. Why do you
suppose they wait?”

“They seek to frighten us. And they
fear our walls. The other gates are all closed, as you …suggested.”

“May I also suggest, then, that you
send men to check the house-doors behind us. And please get all the townspeople
out of these six
vai’athoz
,” Kirrah said, indicating the three city
blocks on either side of the street immediately south of Ash Gate.

“Irshe, signal the archers.”
Another loud whistle, followed by hand gestures, and thirty archers clambered
up onto the walltop east of the gate, and another thirty to the west wall where
Kirrah stood. Each man carried one of the old bows and one of the new, and two
sets of arrows. Behind them, city patrol armsmen made their way south from the
gate down the main street, hammering on private doors and testing each one. Any
unlocked doors were quickly bolted from the inside. The citizens for three city
blocks south of Ash Gate began gathering in groups in the streets to east and
west, away from the main street.

At a signal from Armsmaster Opeth,
a troop of twenty Border Patrol rode out through the still-open gates and a
short distance up the north road, among the deserted shops and buildings
huddled outside the walls. There was a stirring in the ranks of Wrth.
C’mon,
take the bait…
nothing. After ten minutes of posturing and waiting, Kirrah
turned to Opeth and asked:

“What does it take, to get these
raiders’ attention?”

“They are wary of our walls and
towers. Even our old bows can sting, if they come under the walls. They will
not waste themselves for nothing.”

“Then why are they here?”

“They want us to believe that we no
longer own the land outside our walls. They will attack any farmers or
travelers. They will probably leave us in our city as long as we stay here, or
until they actually have the siege-engines you warned us of.” Kirrah thought
about this for another few minutes, then asked Opeth, Lord Tsano and Irshe for
a conference.

“On my world,” she said, “if the
prey will not take the bait, the hunter changes to another bait. Could we
arrange for some volunteer armsmen to dress as farmers, and send them into the
fields near the gate?”

“This might provoke them,” Lord
Tsano said.

“We could send a wagon, I think the
wagon we used for training archers is just inside the courtyard of the second
block on the east, there.” Irshe pointed.

Twenty minutes later, a cluster of
a dozen ‘farmers’ began working the fields adjacent to Ash Gate, and ten
minutes after that a wagon rumbled out, loaded with sacks of seed for planting.
There was no further response from the Wrth.

By mid-morning, there were two
dozen fake farmers sweating in the cool, humid air, and Kirrah was becoming
very frustrated.

“What kind of raiders are these,”
she grumbled. “They don’t raid. They just
sit
there.”

“Perhaps
that
is what
they’ve been waiting for,” said Lieutenant Rash’koi, who had joined them on the
wall-top.
That
was a cluster of horses and
mu’atha
, the smaller
domesticated version of the huge grazing animals, moving slowly across the open
plains from the west. The convoy drew up to the north road, about a kilometer
from the wall where the arc of raiders intersected the road. It appeared to
consist of several loads hauled on large wagons. After a good deal of pushing
and pulling, the wagons were turned and began to rumble slowly south down the
road, toward the still-open Ash Gate. The center section of the semicircle of
mounted Wrth followed, the remainder of the arc closing in from a thousand
meter radius to about seven hundred meters.

As the wagons approached, it became
apparent that they were not ordinary trade carriages. They were seven or eight
meters long, two and a half or three meters wide, and covered with heavy wooden
plank roofing. Each carriage was on four massive wheels almost as tall as a
man’s shoulder, and under the roof Kirrah could see what looked like a huge
log, suspended by ropes or chains. She turned to the others and exclaimed:

“This carriage is a
ram
. It
is intended to break these gates. It may be strong enough to do it. We must
interfere with it. Do you have any oil that will burn?” Opeth confirmed that
flammable oil was available, and sent a messenger to requisition some. He
added:

“It will be a close race. Their
rams
move slowly, but the oil must come from the warehouse district, about twenty
blocks away.”

“I am sorry,” said Kirrah, thinking
frantically. “I should have thought of using oil, earlier.”
It’s my first time doing this, honest!
“I
think we must call the Royal Cavalry to help. I hoped to keep them in reserve.”
Opeth signaled to a man at the top of the tower, and the alarm bells began to
ring a low, high, low triplet of tones.

“Forgive my presumption, is this perhaps
a job for your
not-sword
?” Opeth
gestured one hand toward the oncoming machines.

“It would stop one, perhaps both,”
Kirrah replied. “But those are made of very heavy wood, so it would leave me
little reserve if our ‘stone surprise’ fails to work exactly right. I prefer we
defeat the rams by other means, if we can. If the oil arrives in time.”

“Perhaps I can buy us some time,”
said Irshe, who whistled sharply and gestured to the faux-farmers to head for the
gate.

“What…” Kirrah started, as he
turned and dodged into the tower’s door and down its inside ladder. She
watched, dreading some kind of heroic one-man sacrifice.
Not
that
one
man!
wailed some inner voice,
as he dashed out the gate in time to meet the others returning from the fields at
a run, hoes and shovels still in hand. With a quick few words, he organized
them into a crew that began attacking the road’s stone surface, about five
meters outside the gates. Soon one after another of the half meter square
paving stones were coming up, and rolled or carried inside the gates. As soon
as the column of Wrth riders escorting the rams saw what was happening, they surged
forward in a gallop.

“They’re coming!” she and several
others yelled. Irshe and the men looked up and redoubled their efforts. The
stones across two thirds of the road’s width were out, and the men with shovels
were throwing the newly exposed gravel in all directions. Turning to the
lieutenant beside her on the wall, Kirrah said:

“Rash’koi-
sana'tachk
! Tell
the wall-archers, use the longbows first! The surprise is not as valuable as
the time we can buy for Irshe!” The man whistled and made hand-signals, and
sixty bowmen changed to the new weapons. On his mark, they nocked arrows and
stood ready. The Wrth group escorting the approaching wheeled rams, about
sixteen hundred riders, had split in two, about four hundred remaining with the
wagons and the rest now pouring down the road, straight at the open gate. They
made a weird, ululating wailing cry as they charged. Twenty sweating men
continued to tear at the road. The leading Wrth closed at a gallop, three
hundred fifty meters, three hundred… at two hundred fifty, Rash’koi shouted
“Fly!” and sixty of the deadly new arrows leapt from the walltop. Sixty-one,
Rash’koi had found a bow of his own.
Too soon
, Kirrah thought,
they’re
still too far out…

“Fly!” he called again, and another
sixty shafts leapt into the air.
Not too soon, you just have to allow for
the lead
, Kirrah realized, as the charging column was abruptly severed
about five units back from its leaders. Horses and riders spilled in all
directions, those behind piling up on the carnage and adding to it. The head of
the column, some twenty or thirty riders, continued their charge, unknowing. The
second flight of arrows landed long, taking down the rearmost few men. The
third flight struck the leaders squarely, turning the road into a bloody
screaming mass a bare hundred yards north of the gate.

“Hold!” the lieutenant called.
Below the gates, all the stones were removed in a meter-wide ragged strip
across the north road, and the ditch was expanding steadily under the
enthusiastic attack of six or seven shovels and a dozen hoes. Up the road, a
few dazed Wrth scrambled to their feet, some clearly hurt. Beyond the carnage,
the main column was bunched between the buildings lining either side of the
road, and blocked by the carpet of dead and dying men and mounts at the site
where the original flight had fallen.
But not for long
, thought Kirrah.
Even as she watched, orders were shouted, fallen men and horses dragged to the
side like so much litter, and the column began to pick up speed.

“Irshe! Come inside
now!
”
she yelled over the resurgent Wrth war cry.

“Just a little deeper!” he called
back up, his face lit with the mischief he was causing.

“
Now
!” she screamed. “You
will ruin my
surprise
!” He whistled and all the men looked up to see the
leading element of the Wrth, over a thousand mounted raiders, bearing down on
them at a full gallop a hundred fifty meters up the road. Without further
encouragement, they raced inside the open portal. Irshe paused and made a show
of pulling on one of the pair of massive wood-and-iron doors of the gate.

“They are already convinced! No
more acting!
Inside!
” she called frantically. Behind the walls, the
twenty-odd men ran a few paces down the city street, into a small residential
door with a large white X painted on it, and slammed it shut behind them. With
the lead raiders fifty meters out and closing fast, Irshe abandoned the futile
attempt to move one of the huge gates, and dodged into the small man-door at
the base of the tower, just as the guards started pulling up the inside ladder.
He scrambled up the ladder while the head of the triumphantly screaming Wrth
horse column thundered across the shallow ditch, through the open gates and
into the city. The first three cross-streets being blocked on left and right by
Kirrah’s new stone walls, the column drove straight south along Falling Ash
Road, which stretched unimpeded before them to the palace walls.
I hope they
get this right,
Kirrah thought…

Exactly on cue, a triple rank of
pikemen and a row of archers stepped into the intersection three blocks south
and laid their lines across the only way forward for the Wrth. The alarm bell
sounded a dozen high chimes, and another hundred forty longbowmen rose from
behind new wooden palisades on the rooftops lining the central avenue, seventy
on each side of the three block stretch. As the head of the Wrth column impaled
itself on the first row of pikes, Kirrah shouted “Now!” and Corporal Prax’soua
and three other burly soldiers standing on the wall, heaved at levers under a
two tonne stone block balanced precariously on the wall’s inside edge, directly
above the gates.

With a grating sound and a shower
of dust, the block toppled over the edge and fell a meter, where it was brought
up short by a pair of attached chains. The chains received the jolt and began
to run out over two hefty pulleys attached under the center of the gate’s arch.
The other ends of the chains were bolted to the top outer corners of the
massive gates, which perforce began to swing ponderously inward. Pulled by the
two thousand kilogram mass of the descending block of stone, the doors swung
irresistibly in on the column of riders, four or five abreast, still streaming
through the opening. Over the shrieks of men and horses and the sickening
crunch of bones, the three-tonne gates ground together, effectively severing
the column of Wrth invaders at its midpoint.

Welcome to my surprise
, thought
Kirrah with a savage exultation, as the riders trapped in the three blocks
south of the gate began falling under volley after volley from the rooftop
archers. Outside the gates havoc ruled, as the bowmen on the walls let fly again
and again into the milling, broken column of Wrth. Something
smacked
the
upright stone beside her, and she woke with a start to the fact that she was in
the midst of a firefight. The archer to her left gasped sharply, his bow
clattered to the stone walkway, and he sank to his knees with a Wrth quarrel
high in his left side.