A Meeting At Corvallis

But, oh, how I wish the damned priests would stick to their churches!

The bishop fingered the steel crucifix that hung around his neck; His Holiness Leo disapproved of ostentation, save where ritual demanded it. Fortunately Mateo's gaze stayed locked on the Mackenzie settlement. As they watched, something flashed out from one of the towers, trailing smoke. It landed a quarter mile closer to them, near a knot of patrolling horsemen, and splashed flame near enough to make the cavalry scatter. When they rallied, it was further out.

"Sir Richard?" Conrad asked calmly.

Dick Furness had been a combat engineer in the National Guard before the Change and was in charge of the Association's siege train now; he was forty-two, the only other man in the tent besides Renfrew to have seen his fourth decade, with a sharp-nosed face and brown hair and glasses. He shrugged, making his mail hauberk rustle and clink, and pointed. Another globe of napalm followed the first just as he began to speak, and then two four-foot bolts like giant arrows. They went over the cavalry's heads, and made them canter off again, which was sensible. Those things could go through three horses in a row: lengthwise.

"Well, as you can see, my lord Count, they've got lots of artillery, and it's well protected. Good reloading speed, too-must have hydraulic reservoirs in the towers. I'd say they probably bought the whole system from Corvallis, or the Bearkillers. Probably the Bearkillers, I recognize Ken Larsson's style: anyway, the wall's that Gallic construction, a frame of heavy timbers with rubble and concrete infill, and a layer of mortared stone on the outside and inside to cover the ends. Not as good as our ferroconcrete, but nearly."

"Couldn't you burn it?" someone said. "I was reading in one of the Osprey books"-that illustrated series on the history of warfare was important in the Association's military education system-"that the Romans used to burn 'em when they were fighting the Celts."

Good question, the Grand Constable thought. That's Sir Malcolm, Baron Timmins' son. Have to keep an eye on him. For promotion, he's too young to be angling for my job. Yet.

The engineer answered: "Sure thing, my lord, if you can figure out a way to make wood burn without oxygen."

Furness spoke more politely than he probably wanted to-he was a mere knight among tenants-in-chief and their sons, and most of the troops under his command were townsmen, although he hoped for e

Renfrew tapped his fingers on the map, where higher land rose just to the eastward of the town. "Emplacements here?"

Furness shook his head again. "That's extreme range for our engines-even trebuchets, even with the height advantage, my lord Count," he said. "And we'd have to build roads and clear timber to get the heavy stuff up there. Not worth the trouble. When we get the battering pieces here, we'll have to work them in by stages-build bastions for our siege engines, then zigzag approach trenches, then more bastions closer in. Hammer at the walls until we dismount enough of their machines, and then more pounding until we bring down a section and get a breech, and then assault parties with scaling ladders going in from the trenches under cover of the catapults and massed crossbowmen behind earth-works."

"That isn't how the books say they handled siegework the first time 'round," |Sir Malcolm observed. "Sounds more like the way they did it with ca

Interesting, Renfrew thought. He didn't stop reading at the end of the pre-gunpowder period the way most people do.

Furness spread his hands. "Steel-frame engines with truck springs for power and hydraulic cocking systems can throw things hard, nearly as hard as black-powder ca

There was a slight bristling, mostly from families who'd been Society before the Change, or ones who'd caught the bug since. Medieval was a word to conjure with, these days.

Oblivious, Furness went on: "So's modern design better, if you've got a good engineer; we know more about using mechanical advantage. Ken Larsson is good."

"Siege towers?" young Timmins said. "If we can get men on top of the wall, it's all over but the rape and pillage."

"Nope. Their engines'd smash a wheeled siege tower into scrap before it gets to the wall, or burn it; anything that could stand up to the stuff they've got would be too heavy to move. We'd have to knock the wall down anyway to silence them. I'd say use the northern approach; that moat will be a problem, but less so than the whole damned river. The town'll be pretty roughed up by then, I'm afraid."

The commanders looked at each other. The Protectorate hadn't fought anyone before who had defenses this formidable, or skill with war-engines to match their own. It had mostly been improvised earthworks they faced, if it was anything beyond barricades of dead cars and shopping-carts full of rocks. "That'll cost, working trenches up to the walls and then going right into a breech like that," someone said. "That'll cost bad."

Everyone looked as if they'd sucked on a lemon: Or on vinegar, to stick to things still available. A nobleman's status depended on how many men he could put into the field. They couldn't just send the infantry in, either-honor meant a lot of the leaders had to lead, and from the front; otherwise the men wouldn't press an attack in the face of heavy casualties. Training replacements for lost knights and men-at-arms would be slow and expensive, particularly since the knights' families had a claim on their manors even when the heirs were too young to fight. Not to mention making vassals' allegiance shaky.

Renfrew grunted and looked at Sheriff Bauer, who'd been promoted to second-in-command of the scouting forces; as the Constable had expected, the Protectorate's forces were critically short of light cavalry, and the man seemed to know his work. The easterner shrugged as well.

"Them walled villages of theirs, duns they call 'em, the ones close to here are all empty and scraped bare-assed. A round dozen we checked are empty as an Injun's head."

They all looked at Sutterdown; that probably meant that the inhabitants and their supplies were within the town walls. Or possibly just the ones who could fight, with the others up in the eastern hills. Or possibly a mixture. That meant there could be as many as fifteen hundred of their damned archers in there, as well as the artillery, ready to deluge a storming party with arrows that went through chain mail as if it wasn't there.

Which is why they kept taking risks to delay us on the way south, Renfrew knew. They had plans for this and they needed time to implement them. Probably those SAS bastards are the ones who set it up. I don't think it's a folk musician's approach to the Art of War, somehow. Damn her and her fucking luck, anyway.

Then again, all the leaders who'd risen to power since the Change had a reputation for being lucky. If they hadn't been lucky, they wouldn't have been leaders, or alive at all. Everyone still around on the eve of CY10 was lucky: lucky so far, at least.

"Some of the ones further south are still being held," Baron Timmins' son said. "They're just villages with an earth bank and log palisade. We could take them one by one without much trouble, burn them out if nothing else. That would hurt them badly. And we could interfere with the spring planting, to demoralize them without hurting the long-term productivity."