Light, he thought. And shelter. A chance to see what was happening. To seize the initiative, control the battle instead of reacting to it. He yearned for time more than for food or rest or water. He needed it as an outmatched wrestler needs a foothold.
As he reached the wall, saw the remains of his command spread out along the inner, undefended battlements, he turned and looked out, stepped on to the parapet to feel the dawn wind on his sweat-soaked tunic.
Two hundred yards away Erkenbert said with vindictive relish to his catapult captain, “Launch.” The short arm dropped, the long arm shot up, the sling dragged along the ground and then whipped round in its vicious swing. Its load shot into the sky, not neatly but in a confusion of twisted limbs.
Shef, on the parapet, saw nothing except a momentary glimpse of movement coming towards him. He threw up an arm, felt a body-shaking thud, found himself sprawled on the ground, a weight on top of him. He tried to thrust it off, found his hands caught in something tough and sticky, clawed at it in desperation. It was off him and men were lifting him to his feet. He realized his hands were caught in human entrails, from a burst-open body at his feet. It was Trimma the cross-bowman, his dead face set in a rictus of torment.
“They're shooting our own dead at us,” explained Brand. “They must have known where we were headed and brought the big catapults round to meet us. These are men who were killed in the night.”
Ahead of us again, thought Shef. Ahead of us again. I do not know what to do next.
“They're all round us,” Brand added. “I doubt there's more than half of us left.”
“The worship of Loki has brought us little good, then,” said Thorvin. His tone was bitter, his white clothing torn and blood-stained. He had fought with his hammer in the night. He had not been able to save Skaldfinn, cut down by the aqueduct. Solomon the Jew had vanished, no-one knew how. Of Shef's immediate council only six remained: he and Thorvin, Brand and Hagbarth. Hund was there, his face cast down. Svandis too. He should have given her a thought at least during the night, Shef reflected, but he had not. The blood of Ragnar could usually look after itself. But she had within her now the blood of himself and of Rig. Why had he not stayed by her? He had had other duties.
And he had them now. Every now and then the battlements beneath them shook as another boulder landed from the counterweight machines Erkenbert was using: he had improved them, Shef had seen through the one remaining unbroken far-seer. He had hardly needed to, for there was nothing to oppose them with. Shef's council appeared sunk in apathy or despair. Even Brand had his heart set, it seemed, on making a noble end, no more.
Wrong, something said inside Shef's heart. They knew what they were suffering. They did not know what the other side was suffering. They must have lost heavily in the night as well, from fire and shot, in the innumerable scrimmages in the dark. It was an axiom that heavy horsemen should not be used at close quarters and at night, where valuable and highly-trained men could be brought down by mere kitchen-boys. Yet that was what the Emperor had been doing. The Wayman army had lost its machines, that was all. It had once known how to fight without them. Nor had they lost everything.
Shef's eye fell on the long bundles someone had stacked against the parapet. He had not known anyone had carried them, would have forbidden it if he had seen them. But now they were here… Yes, there was Tolman, lurking in the lee of a buttress, ducking his head incongruously every time the stonework shook to a new blow.
Shef got to his feet, setting his face into a mask of good cheer and encouragement. He walked over towards the frightened boy.
“Fancy a flight?” he remarked. “Safer up there than down here. Get aloft and let's see what the other side is planning. Cwicca! Unpack the gear and assemble a kite. What happened to your tooth, did you bite someone tough?”
The freedmen eyed each other as they began to assemble canes and cloth. Their experience of slavery was longer than their years of freedom, the habits came back to them readily. “He's forgotten he hit you already,” muttered one out of the corner of his mouth to Cwicca. “And the bairn's terrified.”
“Shut up and fix that line,” Cwicca replied. Were all masters the same in the end, he wondered. He looked down at his wing-pendant, now the mark of the flier-caste. Master or no master, he had done things that no other man ever had.
Within minutes Tolman was in his familiar harness, held by six men just inside the wall. The wind was strengthening and they were a good forty feet up on the battered ramparts of Rome. It would take him out over the semi-circle of machines and men hemming them in from the outside, but Shef wanted him to use his eyes on what he could not see, the forces surely gathering for an assault within the walls.
“We'll reel you out quickly, pull you in as soon as you wave,” he repeated. “Be as quick as you can.”
The scared face nodded, the launchers held him aloft to take the wind, waited an instant, threw him up and out all together. For a moment he seemed to drop, and Shef noted that the wind eddied round the walls. Then he was reeling away backwards, on the stout mooring line and the cluster of thinner control lines—control lines the boy hardly needed now, so expert had he grown at working the vanes. Shef admired his skill as he swept upwards and outwards. His own best flight had lasted bare minutes. One day, when the world was at peace, he would do better.
“They're still up to their tricks,” said the Emperor Bruno to his new-appointed Pope, Peter-that-was-once- Erkenbert. The two stood in the cover of a sacristy outside the walls, wrecked years before by the Moors. The Holy Lance was still by Bruno's left hand, in its holder beside the shield-grip. Behind him the four knights of the Grail stood round their relic and its banner. All had been held back from the fighting, not from personal fear but from the Emperor's fear that the precious relics might fall into enemy hands. He could not hold back much longer, the Emperor thought. Rage at the enemy's defiance was beginning to overcome him. They were defying not only him but their Savior, His Church and His relics on earth. The heathen had penetrated to Rome itself, were in catapult distance, almost, of the Leonine Wall and Saint Peter's Basilica, heart of the Faith. It must be finished today.
“If they try it again, I will have a trick too,” replied Erkenbert. “But they are reeling him in. Lucky for him.”
“What did you see?” asked Shef.
The boy spoke from his harness, not bothering to climb out. “Inside the walls, there are men on foot, in armor, on that side there,” he pointed. “About two or three hundred. There were none in sight the other way.”
No more than that, Shef thought. There will be more out of sight, of course. But they have lost heavily.
“No horsemen anywhere?”
“No. I saw the Emperor. Behind me, near that ruined building with a bit of white dome left. I think it was him. There was a man in black standing next to him, and a banner by his side.”
“What emblem was on the banner?”
“It was yours, lord.” Tolman jerked his chin at the ladder-pendant dangling now outside Shef's torn tunic.
If only we could shoot from the skies, Shef told himself. Or rain down fire from Steffi's mixtures. Then the Emperor would be dead and the war over. All wars would be over.
The trouble with machine wars, something within him replied, is that both sides end up with machines. The same machines. That is the true meaning of the
“Go up again,” he said. “See if there is a door in these walls anywhere near the Emperor, a door we might reach. We could try a sally out.”
The small scared face nodded, the launchers moved back to their places. Two hundred yards away Erkenbert exclaimed with satisfaction as he saw the kite appear again on the parapet. From the shade of the ruined sacristy men came out, hammered a stout five-foot post into the ground, set on it a device like an upturned iron stirrup, and on that a crossbow. A giant crossbow, six feet from tip to tip.
“It is yew-wood,” said Erkenbert. “Vegetius does not explain the secret of the steel the heathen make their bows from. But nor does he explain this. I had it made when we saw the kites fly from the Jewish city. But this shall be its first trial, in defense of Saint Peter and Saint Peter's city.”
Tolman had seen arrows curve up at him before, shot hopefully by the besiegers of Septimania. He knew that
