“I’m . . . not altogether sure about that,” Helga said. “Sometimes . . . sometimes I’d catch him murmuring to somebody. Somebody who wasn’t there.”
Demansk grunted. “Perhaps he’s mad, then.”
“I don’t think so, Father. Madmen hear voices, but if Adrian’s listening, it’s to someone who tells him things that are true. Or at least very useful.”
That’s a point, a distinct point, Demansk thought.
He was lifting the cup to his lips when the alarm sounded out across the camp.
NINE
“This time they’re being cautious,” Esmond said, bracing his feet automatically against the pitch and roll of the ship.
“How so?” Adrian said curiously, peering towards the shore, where the causeway swarmed with workers and troops, like a human anthill.
“They’re putting in a wall with a parapet and fighting platform along the edge of the causeway as it goes out, see? And they’ve got their building yard completely surrounded with a ditch-and-stockade, and they’ve brought out those two fighting towers—they’ll push them out as the causeway proceeds. The catapults on them outrange anything a ship can mount, and they’ve got archers packed tight in there too. They can shoot from shelter.”
“Hmmm,” Adrian said. “Not good, brother.”
similar situations tend to produce similar solutions, Center said.
Meaning what?
Center tends to get a little oracular now and then, son, Raj thought with a chuckle.
Well, that’s appropriate.
What he—or it—means is that this isn’t the first time these tactical conditions have come up. Back on Bellevue, I got a reputation for originality partly because Center kept feeding me things that other generals had done, back on Earth before spaceflight. I’ve studied more since Center and I have been . . . together. There was a man named Alexander . . .
“Adrian? Adrian?”
Adrian shook himself, stopped squinting at the eye-hurting brightness of water on the purple-blue sea, and looked at his brother.
“Sorry.”
“I know Scholars of the Grove are supposed to be detached, but we have a problem here.” A scowl of frustration. “Or are you still mooning over that Confed girl?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think of practical matters,” Adrian said, slightly annoyed.
I’ve been getting that detached business since I was fourteen, he thought. One of the earlier Scholars had had the same problem from his family, and had cornered the olive-oil market for a year, just to prove a philosopher could also outthink ordinary men in ordinary affairs.
“Don’t think of it as a problem,” Adrian went on aloud, with a smile he knew was a little smug. “Think of it as an opportunity.”
He began to speak. Esmond’s eyes narrowed, then went wide. When he’d finished, the older Gellert spoke:
“Well, I will be damned to pushing a boulder up a hill for all eternity. That just might work—and it’s a little longer before we have to let them know about the rest of your surprises. Captain!”
Sharlz Thicelt hurried over. “Sir?” he said.
Esmond looked up, frowning a little—there were few men taller than he—and spoke:
“What are the prevailing winds like here, this time of year?”
“My General, they vary. Usually from the northwest, particularly in the afternoons—an onshore breeze, very tricky. It dies at night and backs in the morning, though. Of course, the Sun God alone can predict the weather on any given day; at times there are strong offshore winds, particularly if we get a summer thunderstorm, and—”
“Thank you very much, Captain Thicelt,” Esmond said hastily; the Islander loved the sound of his own voice—something of a national failing in the Islands as well as the Emerald cities. “That may be very useful. Very useful indeed.”
* * *
“Odd,” Justiciar Demansk said, shading his eyes with one hand. “Those look like merchantmen.”
The causeway had made two hundred yards progress, and the siege towers were half that distance from shore. Already the inner surface looked like a paved city street, flanked by fortress walls; attempts at hit-and-run sniping hadn’t been more than a nuisance. And we’ve sunk one of their galleys. That had been the stone throwers on the siege towers. Nine stories of height made a considerable difference in one’s range; when they got out to Preble, the tops would overlook the city wall by a good fifteen feet, and the archers and machines there could sweep the parapets bare for the infantry. Thousands of workers hauled handcarts and carried baskets of broken rock out to the water, and the sound of it dropping into the waves was like continuous surf. Masons worked behind them, setting up the defense parapet, and where it hadn’t reached yet the workers were protected by mantlets—heavy wooden shields on wheeled frames. All was order, and rapid progress. At this rate, they’d be out to Preble in less than a month. And the troops would be royally pissed at having to work this hard for this long—it was worse than road-building detail, itself always unpopular. Added to what had happened there during the uprising, and the fact that Jeschonyk didn’t even intend to try and keep the men in hand, and it was going to be a very nasty sack.