The Reformer

oarsmen's backs, to encourage them to keep rowing. Others beached their craft and jumped ashore, whirling grappling irons. A ladder thumped home against the crenellations of the wall, and then another. Men toppled off the rungs, and others replaced them; archers and slingers were replying from the invasion craft, concentrating their weaker fire on the crucial space around the heads of the ladders.

Four militamen came hurrying past Adrian, their rag-wrapped hands on the carrying handles of a huge bronze pot that had been bubbling quietly over a charcoal brazier. Adrian swallowed at the familiar scent of hot olive oil.

They reached the parapet and heaved the cauldron up, poured. The screams from below were unearthly loud and shrill, as the boiling oil ran over men's faces and through the links of their mail shirts. He could see Confed troopers throwing themselves into the ocean and drowning as they tried to extinguish the clinging agony.

'All right, Lightning Band,' he called in a high carrying voice. 'Let's see them off.'

Adrian stepped up to the parapet, taking a grenade out of his satchel and lighting the fuse. One of the galleys was not far away below, more Confed troopers clambering over the pile of dead men in the bows to reach the grapnel-throwing catapult. Adrian waited a second for the fuse to catch fairly and then lobbed it overhand, an easy throw. The sputtering red spark of the fuse arched through the night; the clump of men suddenly turned white as faces went up to see what was coming at them.

With malignant, unplanned precision the grenade burst just above head-height, sending fragments slicing into the faces. Men scattered, screaming. Other red sparks were arching out from the wall, lobbed by hand or thrown with the sling at craft still trying to come up to the wall. Adrian threw two more; one rolled under the quarterdeck of the galley, and when it burst, pine planks shattered and began to burn. Several others of the invasion flotilla were burning as well, lighting the surface of water dotted with the heads of swimmers and men clinging to bits of wreckage-those must be oarsmen and sailors; anyone who went over the side in sixty pounds of armor wasn't coming ashore unless he walked along the bottom.

'Go back, you fool! Get your men out of here!' Esmond was shouting as he threw another javelin. 'Order a retreat, gods condemn you!'

Adrian listened to the voices at the rear of his mind. 'Their commander is probably dead,' he said grimly. 'There's nobody to order a retreat, and his underofficers are operating on their last instructions-press the attack.'

'Wodep!' Esmond said. His eyes on the carnage below were full of a horrified pleasure. Adrian could read the thoughts on the shadowed face: They're Confeds. But they're brave men, too.

Even Confed discipline could take only so much. One by one the barges and fishing boats backed away, set sail or began to thrash the surface of the narrow channel with frantic oars. On a few of the craft fighting broke out, men who wanted to live in frantic close-quarter struggles with those determined to follow their orders regardless. Neither of the galleys was going anywhere; they were both outlines of yellow flame on the dark water, with men going up like torches or jumping overside. Some climbed the masts, scrambling frantically higher as the flames licked at their heels, screaming as the rigging burned through and the pine poles toppled over towards the water. Some of the water was burning too, pools of olive oil flickering with sullen orange-red.

'Gray-Eyed Lady,' Adrian whispered.

The screams from below were drowned by the cheers of the militia, dancing and shrieking their relief and incredulous joy at beating back the Confed attack. They capered along the parapet, shaking fists and weapons, some lifting their robes and waggling and slapping their buttocks at the retreating enemy. The narrow strip of beach and rock below the walls was black with a carpet of men, a carpet that still crawled and moaned slightly. Adrian looked up at the stars for relief from the sight, and started.

'It's a full hour,' he said wonderingly. 'I'd thought fifteen minutes, thirty at the outside.'

'Time flies when you're havin' fun,' Simun said beside him, shaking and blowing on a hand scorched by a fuse that burned too fast. 'We ought to get some men down the wall, sor-salvage them mail shirts 'n helmets. Better than some of our lads have-better than almost anything the milita here got. Must be seven, eight hundred we could get at.'

'I suppose so,' Adrian said quietly, looking down. If you can accomplish the work, you should be able to look at the results, he told himself.

'Victory!' Enry Sharbonow said, coming by with a train of servants carrying wineskins. 'Oh, excellent sir, honorable sir-here, have a drink.'

Adrian took a flask, swallowing rough red wine, unwatered.

'A great victory,' the Preblean said.

Esmond lowered his own skin, looking around at the cheering milita; his own men were cheerful enough, but much quieter as they leaned against the parapet and watched the Confeds flee.

'I'd call it more of a skirmish,' he said. 'Come and tell me about our victory in a month or two.'

EIGHT

'Sun-stabbed by spears of brazen light,' Speaker Emeritus Jeschonyk said. 'Brazen, you see. Not bronze light.'

One of his aides frowned. 'That would be an irregular use of the pluperfect, though, wouldn't it?'

A babble of controversy erupted in the hot beige gloom of the command tent. Justiciar Demansk cleared his throat.

'Speaker,' he said. Eyes turned towards him. 'I think it's a dialect form, actually-Windrush Plain Emerald, archaic, of course.' It would have to be; the poem they were discussing was eight hundred years old, an epic on the Thousand Ships War. Bits and pieces of it might go back to the Thousand Ships War, half a millennium before the poet. 'In any case, Speaker, I think that at the moment we have more pressing, if banausic, concerns.'

'By all means, Justiciar,' the Speaker sighed, willing to listen to reason. He was a square-faced square- shouldered man, dressed in the purple-edged wrapped robe of his office, in his sixties, not a soldier recently himself, but still vigorous. 'What do you recommend?'

When Demansk ducked outside the tent, one of his aides fell into step beside him. The man was a hundred- commander technically, but also First Spear of Demansk's First Regiment, the highest slot that a promoted ranker could reach. Within, it sounded as if they'd gone back to the irregular pluperfect. Sometimes I wish we'd never let the Emeralds civilize us, Demansk thought. Particularly, I wish they'd never taught us literary criticism. Rhetoric might be the foundation of civility-everyone agreed on that-but it did get in the way, sometimes.

'Get 'em to discuss business, sir?' he said, his voice still slightly rough with the accent of a peasant from the eastern valleys.

'More or less. We're putting in an attack as soon as we can get a causeway built. It's only half a mile, and shallow water. Meanwhile we'll get the fleet in Grand Harbor operational.'

The promoted ranker shrugged mail-clad shoulders. 'You get my men on solid ground next to the enemy and we'll thrash the wogs as soon as we get stuck into 'em, sir,' he said. 'But by the belly of Gellerix, we can't walk on water-or swim in armor, either. Not half a mile, not a hundred fucking yards, sir.'

They reached the gate and took the salute of the watch platoon; Demansk trotted easily up the rough log stairs to the top of the openwork wooden tower, the left of the pair that flanked the gate. From there he could see out to Preble-the Speaker's camp was on the shore opposite the fortified island. One of the small ships the local commander had used in his abortive attempt to retake the city was still burning on a sandbank directly below the city walls. Not encouraging.

The camp itself was. Jeschonyk had brought four brigades, twenty thousand citizen troops, regulars, and nearly as many auxiliaries-slingers and archers and light infantry, of course; cavalry wasn't going to be much use here and he'd mobilized only enough for patrolling and foraging. The camp was a huge version of the usual marching fortress that a Confed force erected every night; a giant square cut into the soft loam of the coastal plain, with a ditch twelve feet deep and ten feet wide all around the perimeter. The earth from the ditch had been heaped up into a wall all around the interior, and on top of that were stakes pegged and fastened with woven