Enry swallowed. A little beyond him Prince Tenny lounged with elaborate unconcern, nibbling on a honeyed fig and fingering a set of healing scratches along one side of his bearded face.
“And those wooden things they’re building, a little further back?”
“Well, that’s a little far to see, but I’d say they’re probably siege engines. Catapults, of course, heavy ones. Siege towers—wooden fort towers on wheels, covered in hides or possibly metal plates, so they can roll them up to our walls and climb protected. Solophonic ladders—big counterweighted things like a covered bridge on a pivot, sort of the same thing. Fire raisers. Metal-shod battering rams under heavy roofs, also on wheels, for forcing a breach. When they get the causeway close enough, they’ll use the catapults and archers to keep our heads down while they complete it—batter a hole in the wall, if they can. If they can’t, they’ll roll the Solophons and siege towers up to the wall and storm it, while the battering rams knock sections of it down and make ramps for their assault troops.”
Enry’s natural olive skin had gone very pale, a sort of doughy white color. “What are we going to do?” he said.
Esmond took a fig from the silver tray being held up for Tenny, popped it into his mouth and chewed with relish. “Oh, there are a few tricks we can try,” he said cheerfully, and cocked an eye at the sky. “No moons tonight.”
* * *
“You shouldn’t be here,” Esmond hissed into the darkness.
“Neither should you,” Adrian said.
“Sirs, with respect, shut the fuck up,” Donnuld Grayn said, pausing as he tightened the strap on a greave. “We’re getting close.”
We shouldn’t, Esmond thought. Typical Confed arrogance. When they sat down to besiege a place, they expected the defenders to sit tight and cower, waiting for inevitable doom, so what point was there in taking elaborate precautions?
At least, that was what the Preblean scouts had said, swimming in after sculling across the strait on inflated sheepskins. None of them had been caught, so either the Confeds were extremely confident or fiendishly clever at misdirection.
Esmond showed teeth, white in the darkness against skin covered with burnt cork. Now, fiendishly clever is something that might be applied to an Emerald, or even an Islander. But to a Confed? No, no . . . systematic, yes. Methodical, yes. But fiendishly clever? Rarely.
“I’ll show them fiendish,” he whispered, chuckling, and looked back along the boat.
It was about thirty feet long, the Preblean sailors at the muffled oars, the men his own Strikers with some of Adrian’s specialists for luck. That dampened his mood, slightly. He might have known that Adrian wouldn’t send his men along and not go himself; he wasn’t a professional, but he thought like one, sometimes—as if soldiers’ ghosts were whispering in his ear.
That checked him for a moment. I suppose I am a professional now, he thought. Not an athlete or a weapons trainer, but a general. But not a mercenary. I have a cause.
“Row off,” the Preblean at the tiller oar said softly. “Row soft, all . . . raise oars and let her glide. Not raise it upright, Rawl, you stupid bastard; ten lashes for that.”
The high timber wall of the causeway’s edge loomed ahead of them. The Confeds had driven the logs into the sand and mud of the channel bed at an angle, slanting outwards. That made it easier to climb as the boat came alongside; he leapt, got a grip, swarmed upwards. Rope nooses flew up from his and the other boats, but Esmond ignored them as he poised crouching at the top. According to the scouts’ reports, the sentry ought to be . . .
There. Pacing stolidly along, and no more than fifteen paces away, now. Have to get him to turn around.
“Hey, you Confed donkey fucker,” Esmond said, in a conversational tone. “Did you know that your mother used to suck my dad’s dick, and for free?”
The Confed soldier whirled at the sound, gaping. Esmond’s arm whipped forward; it was an awkward position to throw from, but a clout shot at this distance—there were fires in iron baskets further in towards the shore. Iron crunched through the mail shirt the trooper wore, and he pitched over backwards. Esmond dropped four feet to the surface of the causeway; this section was half-complete, and loose rock shifted and crunched under the hobnails of his sandals.