Chapter 21

Author’s note: [ and ] delineate mind-to-mind dialog.

Four more bases like the one at Kion were hit by Damon’s cavalry brigade, all with the same results. King Arses was much put out by these events, but there was nothing that he could do about them besides rant and rave. He might have gotten some temporary relief from those outbursts, but that was the limit of the good things that happened. Several of his trusted advisers suddenly found good reasons to be in other cities, so he began to feel the lack of the emotional support that he needed.

At this point, King Arses was nagged with claims that the only way for him to get relief was to attack Coronis. There were many reasons for this nagging, some of them logical and some of them pure fantasy. King Arses’ biggest problem along this line was that he began to believe the fantastic arguments, and he became convinced that he could not lose.

After all, his predecessor was a weak fool who let incompetents run the war for him. The best way for him to get what he wanted surely must be for him to take a personal leadership role. After all, he had led the coup that made him king, so why should he not make himself the ultimate conqueror?

The ultimate conqueror needs the ultimate steed, so King Arses chose Pegasus as his logo, emblem, icon, who knows? Anyway, he chose a black silhouette of a prancing horse with wings to represent his spirit. Everywhere Arses went, he was preceded by a pennant decorated with his logo. Not only that, anyplace Arses spent more than a few minutes had itself decorated with that same logo.

Hooray! Now we had an easy way to follow him around. The stupid SOB started riding a black horse decorated with fake wings. Naturally, the poor horse tired quickly with the added weight of the wings, so Arses had in his retinue, a collection of the most handsome black horses that could be found. This affectation probably caused us to underestimate King Arses, but not by much, as it turned out.

One day we received word that King Arses and his army were headed for Coronis. The residents of Coronis were called to assemble at the fort, and to bring what they wanted to keep looters from grabbing. They were also told to bring all of their food and bedding. We handled this the way we had handled the previous invasion from Corinth.

This time, the Corinthian Army consisted of about 18,000 men, of whom, 250 were cavalry. It was a tight squeeze this time, but they managed to establish a camp in the same field that had previously been used by the Corinthians. That did make it a lot easier for us because we already knew how to set our ballistas to reach each important target.

Probably under King Arses’ orders, they put their main food dump at the northern edge of their camp, very near a very good side road. Surely, the location of the dump was chosen because of the convenient road. However, that turned out to be very helpful to us, too. Damon and his cavalry led a number of our wagons to the food dump and proceeded to steal a goodly portion of it.

He got away with it because King Arses often changed his mind and issued counter orders to something he had recently been adamant about. Therefore, Damon dressed his men in Corinthian cavalry uniforms and simply marched in and told the supervisor of the food dump that King Arses had ordered him to split the food into two dumps. Okay, that was believable, so the dump slaves were ordered to help load the wagons.

At the time, the Corinthians were doing a lousy job of keeping a watch over the gate through our wall, so Damon had no real trouble killing the few Corinthian guards at the gate and marching all of those wagons loaded with food right up to our fort. The food was unloaded and stored in some tents close to the fort just outside the shallow dry moat. We now had enough food for everybody in the fort for at least four months of a siege.

Dammit, the next morning six crucifixes were installed and manned by six very sorry looking individuals whom, we assumed, had been responsible for the loss of the Corinthian supplies. As before, the poor wretches were killed with bolts from a Little Boy. The difference this time from the last was that the crucifixes were left standing. Oh, well, that just added to Arses’ reputation as an SOB.

This time, the Corinthians had come a little better prepared. They were equipped with eight of the Greek equivalent of the Roman onager, but the machines were rather small. The onager was normally used to throw stones at a structure to break it down. The problem for the Corinthians was that these onagers were too small to cast stones large enough to do any real damage to the walls of our fort.

To add insult to injury, the range of an onager this size was lucky to be 200 yards. That meant that the onagers had to be installed well within the range of our Little Boy ballistas, but too close to be attacked by the Big Boy. The onagers were assembled in place from precut wooden components, possibly hauled all the way from Corinth.

The Corinthians were not well trained in the assembly of the onager and spent three days working on them. We did nothing to interfere with the work on the onagers, since they were essentially useless against us unless we stood in formation between our fort and the outer wall while they shot at us. Well, you know that we were not that foolish.

However, as soon as the work was finished on assembly of the onagers and the stocking of the firing positions with suitable stones, we set up to shoot firebombs at them. Our intention had been to let the Corinthians do a lot of useless work in the hot sun before we destroyed the onagers. We wanted to hurt their morale.

When the proper time came, I filled 24 of the five-incher firebombs with the devil’s mixture and distributed them among the four Little Boys that were in position to hit the onagers. I could not imagine that there would be a need for so many of the firebombs, but I wanted to be prepared for the worst that could happen.

Immediately, there was a contest among the four Little Boy crews as to which one could do the most damage with their first shot. Each crew had taken special efforts to line up their ballista properly. I had already specified which crews were to destroy which onagers. Everything was ready when I gave the order to fire, and four firebombs were launched at so close to the same time that it would have been impossible to say the order in which the shots were fired.

Well, that was totally unimportant. The important thing was that four onagers were destroyed. As quickly as they could, each crew cocked their ballista and aimed at a new target. This time they fired as soon as they had registered on their targets, and the second volley of firebombs were away. Scratch four more onagers. Each crew was excited over their success, and they all turned to me to pick the crew who had done the best job.

Dammit, they had all done a superlative job, and I did not see any way to pick one crew over the others. Okay, I admit it, I chickened out. I turned our body over to Hippolyte to handle this situation. She mentally grinned at me because she knew what I was doing. Hippolyte announced in her most commanding style that there was no way to pick one crew as the best of the bunch. As far as she was concerned, they had all acted exactly the way she expected them to, and they were all honorary Amazons as far as she was concerned.

All disappointment was canceled by that last statement, and I had to admit that I would never have thought to say that. That was why I was always ready to let Hippolyte handle all of the important command decisions!

For some strange reason, there was a lot of fiddling and fooling around over the next three days, but we finally figured out what had been going on. There was a wagon train of four wagons that had left from Corinth on the same day that we had destroyed the onagers.

A bit of careful asking of questions by some spies back in Corinth revealed that the mercenaries working for King Arses were aware of the screwy nature of King Arses, so the mercenaries demanded to be paid in cash every week. They were not going to let the king screw them out of their rightfully earned money, and this was payday. Everything ground to a halt while the mercenaries collected their money.