Chapter 14

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

“Mayor Kapaneus, I would like to discuss with you the possibility of permanently converting our warehouse into a fort and making it our base of operations.”

“By Zeus, Hippolyte, you cannot imagine how happy it makes me to hear you say that. That would give Coronis the kind of protection we need in this trying time. Please do whatever you feel is necessary to make your fort fit your requirements. Such protection would be enough to bring in more economic activity, and that is always good for a small city. Do you plan to put a wall around the whole town?”

“I am afraid that putting a wall around the whole of Coronis is beyond our physical and economic capabilities at the moment. However, we do plan for a wall around enough of our fort to protect everybody in a short siege, and I cannot see that a long siege is likely at this date.

“We plan to add some additional structure to the fort that would make it easier to defend. One thing that I want to do is to dig a dry moat that would keep siege towers from approaching us if the enemy managed to break through the wall. I have some ideas for long range defensive weapons that should keep them at bay. At the moment, my plans are not firm because they depended on your reaction to the idea of having a fort within Coronis. Now that we know that you are behind it, we can start making firm plans and begin construction. The amount of money we get from Uzoris is going to make some difference.”

At that point, the conversation shifted into generalities about organizing the work parties. By the time we left after an hour of conversation, we had a commitment from the mayor to support whatever we wanted to do. Hippolyte thought that was a miracle, but I was not surprised. Coronis is sitting across a major trade highway, and the mayor could see how rich the town could get if it were protected. We were that protection.

The trip back to the fort was devoted to an internal conversation on just what I wanted to do to improve the fort as a defensive center. I had seen a lot of programs on TV about European forts and which ones were successful up until the advent of gunpowder. At that point, everything went to hell in the castle business, but we were not at the stage of cannons, yet. Our wooden walls were nearly a foot thick, and I had thought of several ways to reinforce them.

[Hippolyte, we can take a two-fold stance on protecting our fort. One, we can reinforce the walls to make them highly resistant to any but the most powerful siege engines, and, two, we can install our own powerful artillery to keep those siege engines out of range.

[I would like to go with two dry moats. One would be out at the limit of our accurate artillery fire, and the other one would be right next to the fort’s walls so that infantry and siege towers would have a hard time getting near enough to the walls to be a serious problem. The moat near the fort’s walls would have to be about 12 feet deep, but the other moat could be only about 6 feet deep. Both moats should be about 15 feet wide at the top, but the walls would slope down. The slope angle would depend on what kind of ground we would be digging in.

[I want to reinforce some places on the roof for our artillery and build some projections at the corners of the building so that we could easily shoot at people who did manage to reach the walls. I will sketch you a picture of what I have in mind when we get home. By the way, we are going to need offices and other rooms inside the building. Maybe those should be the first items that we construct.]

Hippolyte was so enthusiastic over the project that she sent a messenger to the mayor asking for a list of carpenters whom she might interview about the interior modifications that we wanted. It turned out that there was a man in town who specialized in that sort of job, and his name led the list. It only took moments for Hippolyte to send the messenger to Ophelos asking him to come by as soon as he could to discuss some construction work she wanted done.

Ophelos returned with the messenger and talked to Hippolyte about the work she wanted done. He could see the economic advantage of being on Hippolyte’s good side, so he was anxious to see what she wanted. We had picked an area near the front of the building not next to a wall and asked if rooms could be partitioned off in that area. Ophelos looked around awhile and said that he could do the job and gave her a price.

The price seemed fair to Hippolyte, so she did not haggle. What she did haggle over was a starting date. Ophelos had only one other job going at this time, so he agreed to have a crew deliver materials tomorrow morning and start work. That was good enough for us, so we parted happy on both sides.

Next, we needed furniture, so she contacted the cabinet maker Ophelos had recommended. Pyrois was working at a job that he could not quit. He promised to come by tomorrow morning. Pyrois’ name came from his fiery temper, and we did not know how well we could get along with him, but he was reputed to be an excellent cabinet maker.

Both jobs progressed faster than I expected, and we had our offices and furniture ready in about a week. The only problem was with getting enough light into the small rooms, but we compromised with several lanterns in each room. A Greek lantern of the time was nothing to brag about with the small amount of light and the big stink of the burning oil, but I had no ideas on improvements at the moment, so I had to live with what I had.

I managed to get some vellum to use as a replacement for paper, and I used a quill pen with homemade ink. Again, it was not what I wanted to use, but it was all that was available. At least, the vellum was reusable by scraping off the dried ink with a sharp knife. I sketched a picture of the way I wanted the dry moat around the fort to look, and I included some changes to the walls.

The most urgent problem of the moment was how steep to make the walls of the moat. I wanted something steep enough so that a man encumbered with armor and weapons could not climb out if the moat if he fell in. I also planned to put sharpened stakes at the bottom of the moat so that anyone who fell in would be impaled. That would be our “last ditch” defense against infantry.

I had a trial trench dug near the wall to experiment with. We cut some trial slopes and had men try to climb out of the ditch at various angles of slope. It turned out that an angle of about 50° from the horizontal would work well enough and be stable even in a heavy rain. We tested that by pouring buckets of water on the wall to see if it would stand up. It did, so I figured that we were in good shape with 50°.

Now, the next part of the defense would be dirt piled against the outside wall and packed as hard as we could get it. This slope was was only about 35° because we were limited in how hard we could pack the dirt. What I planned on doing was using the dirt that we removed from the moat as the dirt we piled against the building.

The walls of the building were very close to 31 feet high, so the outer edge of the sloping dirt would be about 43 feet from the base of the wall. That was where we would put the upper edge of the trench.

Uh-oh, my idea was not going to work. My dream was much too grandiose! If we made the dry moat only 8 feet deep, we would still wind up moving something on the order of 300,000 cubic feet of dirt. I guessed that would take as much as five years to accomplish, even if we could find enough men to do the job.

Furthermore, we would need almost 2 million cubic feet of dirt to put the sloping dirt wall against our current wooden walls. We just didn’t have five years of time or the money to hire that many laborers, so I would have to come up with something else to protect our fort.

Okay, I would just have to come up with the weapons to do the same job of protecting us. Fortunately, I thought that was possible if we invested in the right kind of crossbows. Specifically, what I had in mind was a crossbow that the Romans would call the scorpion and a larger crossbow that they called the ballista. Both had an accurate killing range in the order of 400-500 yards and could be built relatively quickly and cheaply. Both crossbows would be mounted in fixed positions and be our major artillery. The small crossbows that the women currently used would serve as our anti-personnel weapons.