There, stone would be beginning to crack as it glowed white-hot. Esmond was laughing, and the crews of the galleys were joining in—even the rowers were grinning through their oar ports on the outriggers, and the soldiers and sailors on deck were dancing, snapping their fingers and making obscene gestures towards the shore.
“A thousand men lost, there,” Esmond said, slapping his hand exultantly on his swordhilt. “A thousand men, and a month’s work, and all those materials. Lovely.”
Even against the wind, Adrian thought he could catch a whiff of the smell. He gagged slightly and nodded.
“That will set them back a little,” he said. “But I think we’re going to be real, real unpopular over there now.”
“Well, then,” Esmond said, clapping him on the back. “We’ll just have to continue closing the door in their face, won’t we?”
* * *
“It’s called a ‘trebuchet,’ ” Adrian said to the carpenters and blacksmiths and shipwrights. “And it’s a form of catapult.”
He was standing on a platform of rammed rubble behind the city wall, the section nearest to the Confed’s causeway. Everyone had been up there, and seen the redoubled efforts—this time the blocking wall along the sides was like a small city’s, and the towers pressed forward to the edge of construction were squat monsters sheathed in plates of beaten iron and brass, glittering like malignant serpents in the bright sunlight.
The craftsmen crowded around to look at the man-tall model he’d built. It had two heavy tripods, linked by an iron axle. Pivoting on that was a beam, anchored about one-third of the way along its height. The short end of the beam held a box full of rocks, itself pivoting on an iron bar driven through the outermost part of the beam; the long end had a leather sling on its end, holding a fist-sized ball of rock.
“How does it work?” one carpenter asked after a minute, baffled. “There’s no twisted sinew, no bow neither—how does it throw things?” He made a sign with one hand. “More of your hellpowder sorcery?”
Adrian smiled soothingly. “No, this is pretty straightforward,” he said. “I’ll show you. Simun.”
The underofficer motioned two arquebusiers forward. The other hundred were on the wall, happily potting men through the wooden shields that the Confeds moved forward to protect the working parties. They’d doubled and redoubled the thickness of planks on those, until they could barely move them over the uneven ground of the forward working surface, but the odd ball still penetrated. More still hit men behind the row of shields, or on exposed limbs, or struck the working parties that tried to move the mantlets forward. Other gunmen waited patiently for one of the trapdoors on the siege towers to open and spit a catapult dart at the city. They were just within extreme range . . . extreme catapult range, that was. The arquebuses were comfortably within their range, and a dozen fired every time the Confeds made the attempt. Men died within the tower, but that was secondary—a four-ounce ball travelling at nine hundred feet per second did unpleasant things to a torsion catapult’s frame and fixings whenever it struck.
Simun chuckled, looking over his shoulder, then signed to the two men. They hauled on ropes running through a block and tackle, and the long arm of the miniature trebuchet came down until he could slip an iron hook into a ring driven into the wood just above the sling. The load in that now rested, just touching the ground.
“Here, sor,” he said, handing a lanyard to Adrian.
“So, we pull this—”
Thwack.
The heavy basket of rocks pulled the short arm of the trebuchet down. The long arm moved more quickly, leverage driving it. The sling added to the momentum, and the rock blurred across the fifty yards to the wall in a streak of vicious speed. It cracked into the granite facing hard enough to spall off a foot-square flake. The craftsmen and sapper officers gave long, admiring whistles.
“The thing is,” Adrian went on, resting a hand on the model, “that we can build this as big as we can get timbers for—and Prince Tenny and the Syndics have authorized us to demolish buildings, even temples. We’re a shipbuilding city, here, so we’ve got plenty of men used to working to these scales, and with heavy cables and pulleys. We’ll need winches to pull down the throwing arm, but when it’s ready we can throw really big weights; we can throw them on a high arc, to lob over the wall, and we can throw them all the way to shore, or nearly—dropping them right on the Confeds’ heads.”