Chapter 22

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

Okay, we figured that it was time to get rid of King Arses. Big Boy #1 was lined up on the big black Pegasus icon in the center of the C&C tent. It was mid-morning, and none of our lookouts had seen the king leave the tent. We knew that he was there because the icon was there, so we used the icon as the aiming point.

King Arses was not completely stupid, so he had the C&C tent set up about 150 yards behind where the previous king had placed his. Fortunately, unknown to Arses, that was still within the range of Big Boy #1. Extra care was taken in the aiming of the ballista, and a 10-incher was fired at the target. I watched the path of the firebomb as it flew toward the tent, and the Big Boy #1 crew was madly preparing for another round to be fired if appropriate.

The firebomb flew toward the tent just as had been planned, and I could see a sudden depression form in the roof of the tent very near the center of the icon’s portrait. A deep depression formed and then started to bounce back, but, on the way up, a mass of flame broke out. This flame was enough to set fire to the entire roof of the tent, and burning streamers began to fall into the tent proper.

Very soon thereafter, a number of men began to run from the tent, and most of them had burning clothes. Just to be on the safe side, I ordered that a second 10-incher be fired without changing the aiming point. This firebomb landed very close to where the first one had hit, and there was a new outbreak of flame.

Finally, I ordered another 10-incher to be fired into the open space immediately behind the C&C tent just in case somebody had slit an escape hole through the back wall of the king’s sleeping area. None of us had seen the king leave the burning tent, but there was always the possibly that he had been missed by the first two firebombs.

There was so much flame and smoke from the first two firebombs that we could not see into that area very clearly, but we had no trouble in seeing the flame leap up when the third 10-incher landed. At this point, all we could do was hope that King Arses had been killed.

This seemed like too good an opportunity to miss, so we began to lob five-incher firebombs into the camp, aiming at the squad-tents neatly arranged between us and the C&C tent. All four of the Little Boys at the front of the fort roof began firing along with the operation of the Big Boy. Because of its substantially longer range, the Big Boy was lobbing five-inchers at tents behind the former C&C tent where the officers had their quarters.

The mercenaries’ tents were beyond those at the extreme edge of the camp and were beyond accurate range of even Big Boy, so we did not bother shooting at them. We later conceded that was probably a mistake, based on what the mercenaries later did. Oh, well, you cannot shoot beyond where your weapon cannot reach.

The rest of the day was spent by the enemy in fighting the fires that we had set. When all of the excitement was over, we had fired 104 of the five-inchers and three of the 10-inchers. The Corinthian portion of the enemy camp was in a real mess, but the mercenaries’ portion of the camp was in much better shape.

The next day, the Corinthians pulled out, apparently headed home. From that, we assumed that we had killed King Arses. Surely, after all of the damage we did, we figured that he would have ordered a full-scale attack on our wall and eventually our fort. To hell with the number of soldiers he lost, it was the principle of the thing!

However, the mercenaries stayed where they were. Hippolyte figured that the mercenaries were going to try to recover their lost wages and loot our stores, especially our treasury. We had taken too much money from them to give up without a fight.

Well, it appeared that our estimate had been correct. Damon and his brigade came storming up to our gate with seven heavily loaded wagons, and they were being chased by men on horseback. It was difficult to say if those men on horseback were regular cavalry or just men on horseback, but it was obvious that they meant to stop Damon’s brigade from entering the fort.

We were able to keep the soldiers left in camp from attacking Damon’s brigade by means of the firebombs, but that was all we could do with the ballistas. However, the scorpions along our defensive fence were fully manned with trained shooters, so they were able to shoot at the attackers on horseback, even though they were moving too much and too fast for the ballistas to follow them.

Damon’s brigade and the seven wagons made it through the gate in the wall, but it was a close shave. The plastic armor was doing a good job of fending off arrows and crossbow bolts, but several wounded men demonstrated that the armor was not perfect. Out of 42 men who rode out of the fort with Damon, 36 returned, but every one of those 36 had flesh wounds to show that they had been in a fight. We were sad to lose those men, but we were happy for the ones who had survived.

When these silver coins were counted, we found that we had come up with a total of 20,310 silvers, and that was a veritable fortune, no matter how one looked at it.

Uh-oh, now that the amateurs had gone home, the pros were left to take us on. Surely, they were not only after recovering the money that they believed belonged to them, but they wanted loot and revenge. All of us were going to die very painfully if we could not fight off what had to be close to 6,000 very determined mercenaries.

Fortunately, we had enough food and ammunition to fight off an attack that might last two months. The Corinthians had taken what was left of the food with them when they returned home, so the mercenaries were going to have to forage for food. Most of them used swords and spears as weapons, so they did not have much need for ammunition. Only around 5% or so had bows or crossbows, so they could not do much to us with ranged weapons.

The mercenaries were forced to break into out fort if they were to beat us, and we had a very good chance to stop them. We retrieved the bridge over the trench in the road, so they were going to have a lot of trouble attacking us with a battering ram. Hippolyte was sure that any battering ram that the mercenaries could build would have to be used against the door and could not be used to batter down a section of our fort. Therefore, the battering ram would have to be brought up along the road, and our dry moat should prevent that.

Our worst danger was from stones thrown against our fort’s walls by a trebuchet or catapult. A catapult similar to the Roman onager was the most likely weapon, and that we could fight with our firebombs as we had at the beginning of the siege. Actually, I could not see the mercenaries doing much damage with anything less than a large trebuchet that could hurl large boulders. Even if they did go the trebuchet route, I figured that it would take at least a month for them to construct one from scratch, and that should give us plenty of time to come up with countermeasures.

Frankly, I most feared fire. I told Hippolyte that my concern was that the enemy would gain a foothold someplace along our fort’s wall and try to burn a hole through the wall. [By the gods, Jane, I had not considered that possibility. Do you have a defense in mind?]

[I do not know what I would recommend at this point. I do wish that we had made a deeper and wider dry moat, but it is too late to cry over that. I will try to come up with something, but I will have to think hard on a solution.]

We dropped the conversation at that point because something came up that required Hippolyte’s attention, but I kept trying to think of something. Dammit, there had to be an answer, but I could not think of it. All I could think of involved explosives, but I had no idea how to solve that problem while we were under attack. One thing for sure, after this battle was over, I was going to work out a way to make gunpowder. I had learned that from a boyfriend in highschool, all I needed were charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. I could get saltpeter from urine, but sulfur could be a problem. Anybody could make the charcoal.