“It’s a full hour,” he said wonderingly. “I’d thought fifteen minutes, thirty at the outside.”
“Time flies when you’re havin’ fun,” Simun said beside him, shaking and blowing on a hand scorched by a fuse that burned too fast. “We ought to get some men down the wall, sor—salvage them mail shirts ‘n helmets. Better than some of our lads have—better than almost anything the milita here got. Must be seven, eight hundred we could get at.”
“I suppose so,” Adrian said quietly, looking down. If you can accomplish the work, you should be able to look at the results, he told himself.
“Victory!” Enry Sharbonow said, coming by with a train of servants carrying wineskins. “Oh, excellent sir, honorable sir—here, have a drink.”
Adrian took a flask, swallowing rough red wine, unwatered.
“A great victory,” the Preblean said.
Esmond lowered his own skin, looking around at the cheering milita; his own men were cheerful enough, but much quieter as they leaned against the parapet and watched the Confeds flee.
“I’d call it more of a skirmish,” he said. “Come and tell me about our victory in a month or two.”
EIGHT
“Sun-stabbed by spears of brazen light,” Speaker Emeritus Jeschonyk said. “Brazen, you see. Not bronze light.”
One of his aides frowned. “That would be an irregular use of the pluperfect, though, wouldn’t it?”
A babble of controversy erupted in the hot beige gloom of the command tent. Justiciar Demansk cleared his throat.
“Speaker,” he said. Eyes turned towards him. “I think it’s a dialect form, actually—Windrush Plain Emerald, archaic, of course.” It would have to be; the poem they were discussing was eight hundred years old, an epic on the Thousand Ships War. Bits and pieces of it might go back to the Thousand Ships War, half a millennium before the poet. “In any case, Speaker, I think that at the moment we have more pressing, if banausic, concerns.”
“By all means, Justiciar,” the Speaker sighed, willing to listen to reason. He was a square-faced square-shouldered man, dressed in the purple-edged wrapped robe of his office, in his sixties, not a soldier recently himself, but still vigorous. “What do you recommend?”
When Demansk ducked outside the tent, one of his aides fell into step beside him. The man was a hundred-commander technically, but also First Spear of Demansk’s First Regiment, the highest slot that a promoted ranker could reach. Within, it sounded as if they’d gone back to the irregular pluperfect. Sometimes I wish we’d never let the Emeralds civilize us, Demansk thought. Particularly, I wish they’d never taught us literary criticism. Rhetoric might be the foundation of civility—everyone agreed on that—but it did get in the way, sometimes.
“Get ’em to discuss business, sir?” he said, his voice still slightly rough with the accent of a peasant from the eastern valleys.
“More or less. We’re putting in an attack as soon as we can get a causeway built. It’s only half a mile, and shallow water. Meanwhile we’ll get the fleet in Grand Harbor operational.”
The promoted ranker shrugged mail-clad shoulders. “You get my men on solid ground next to the enemy and we’ll thrash the wogs as soon as we get stuck into ’em, sir,” he said. “But by the belly of Gellerix, we can’t walk on water—or swim in armor, either. Not half a mile, not a hundred fucking yards, sir.”
They reached the gate and took the salute of the watch platoon; Demansk trotted easily up the rough log stairs to the top of the openwork wooden tower, the left of the pair that flanked the gate. From there he could see out to Preble—the Speaker’s camp was on the shore opposite the fortified island. One of the small ships the local commander had used in his abortive attempt to retake the city was still burning on a sandbank directly below the city walls. Not encouraging.
The camp itself was. Jeschonyk had brought four brigades, twenty thousand citizen troops, regulars, and nearly as many auxiliaries—slingers and archers and light infantry, of course; cavalry wasn’t going to be much use here and he’d mobilized only enough for patrolling and foraging. The camp was a huge version of the usual marching fortress that a Confed force erected every night; a giant square cut into the soft loam of the coastal plain, with a ditch twelve feet deep and ten feet wide all around the perimeter. The earth from the ditch had been heaped up into a wall all around the interior, and on top of that were stakes pegged and fastened with woven willow. Each wall had a gate in the middle, flanked by log towers and guarded by a full company. Sentries patrolled the perimeter, and the rest of the men were hard at work. Four broad streets met in a central square for the command tent and unit standard shrines, and working parties were grading them, laying a pavement of cobbles and pounding it down, cutting drainage ditches along a gridwork throughout the camp. Orderly rows of leather tents were up, the standard eight-man issue for each squad; picket lines set out for the draught animals; deep latrines dug; even a bathhouse erected. Smiths and leatherworkers and armorers were already hard at work, repairing equipment and preparing for the siege works.