Chapter 9: Awaiting the Tide of Darkness

The sailors and fishermen weren’t the type of men to man a wall, but they should be fine as artillerymen. They were familiar with ropes and mechanisms, and they certainly knew the machines they had built. As each machine was completed we assigned a regular crew to it and they started practicing.

The first catapult had some issues. We could fix some of them, but we were going to have to live with the rest of them. We didn’t know how long we had to prepare, so having one engine that worked sorta okay NOW was better than two perfect ones that weren’t ready when we were attacked.

It got dragged up the street to where it could fire down the coastal road, the one that led to Cowford, the next town along the coast. Once the crew had it lined up where we wanted it, we staked it in place and started experimenting. We tried a variety of different loads, and finally settled on a standard weight. I figured it was about 50 pounds, maybe a bit more. After all that time with the two backpacks I knew 50 pounds pretty well.

Or maybe it was 25 kilos. The people here didn’t have any sort of standardized measures so I could call it ‘three quatloos’ if I wanted. It didn’t matter what the actual weight was. All that mattered was that we pick a stone and say “That’s it.” and collect other stones the same weight. The catapult would cycle with a heavier load, but it didn’t move fast enough to get any range so we decided that that was the upper practical limit.

They could fire one large rock and get it to go a couple hundred meters, but it wasn’t that accurate. The arm wasn’t mounted that securely on the pivot bar and it would always shift a little, keeping it from always hitting the same place. Still, it would always hit close, so that would be fine for a large target like a mass of charging pirates.

Or, they could fire a dozen smaller rocks. They wouldn’t go as far, and they’d spread out some, but again that would be great against a group of men.

Last, the crew could just fill the bowl with gravel. We tried that a few times and learned quickly to stay away from the catapult as it slung gravel EVERYWHERE. Still, if they adjusted the stop to allow the arm to go forward until it was vertical, it made an awesome shotgun. Again, not much range, no more than a hundred feet or so, but if we fired our shotgun down the road we thought it would pretty much clear it.

Once the crew knew what it could do and how to do it, they split their time between making small improvements and gathering ammunition. Some of them went back to helping build the arrow-engines, another catapult, and the second trebuchet.

The arrow-engines weren’t working out. The carpenters built all three of them, they could work pretty fast when their lives were at stake, but their work came apart every time they were fired. They were simply too big for their materials. Or, rather, the bow was too strong. It would load, cock, and fire, but their prods, the things that held the bow to the stock, weren’t strong enough. The ends of the bow would bend backwards when it was cocked. When it was fired, the ends moved forward as the bow straightened out, taking the bowstring and the arrows with it.

So far, so good, right? Once the bow had straightened it wanted to continue moving forward. If the frame wasn’t staked down, the whole thing jerked forward a foot or so which wasn’t a problem, but the prod was always damaged and couldn’t hold the bow still. If the frame WAS staked down, the bow simply ripped free.

They needed a metal clamp to hold the bow in place. Steel would be best, followed by bronze or iron. Nothing they could build out of wood was strong enough. The town had a couple of ironmongers or blacksmiths, but they were busy converting every metal item they could get their hands on into arrow heads, spear points, and armor.

We ended up with three arrow-engines that could realistically only be fired once and then needed repairs. Two of them fired a dozen super-sized arrows. We could use them to strike at people hiding behind regular shields or wooden breastworks. The third one launched a cruise missile. That was just a small tree-trunk, with a fire-hardened point and some turkey feathers on the back to keep it from tumbling. Not much range compared to the trebuchets and the catapults, but we could aim it pretty well and we figured that any ship it hit would have ... issues. We put our missile launcher down near the docks close to the western end of the wall, not far from the trebuchets. It would probably only be fired once during a battle, but if it disabled a ship full of pirates once would be all we needed.

We set the two arrow-engines up behind the gates on both roads, right in front of the two catapults. If the catapults were throwing gravel, the arrow-engine crews might want to stand to one side for a few seconds.

And we bitched at the blacksmiths for not being able to do five things at once.

The townspeople were in awe of our trebuchet. The catapults and arrow-engines were neat, and they could see how helpful they would be in a siege, but the trebuchet could reach out and touch someone several hundred yards away, and do it with a rock that weighed a hundred pounds. None of the sailors and fishermen had ever seen a ship that could survive being hit by such a rock.

On the other hand, it was really slow to reload. If we had pirate ships coming in, we would only get a couple of shots before they landed. And it wasn’t that accurate in the first place. Of course, we wouldn’t get any shots at all, if they came at night, but they would have no reason to do that if they didn’t know about our new artillery.

About the only way to get any real use out of it was to set it to fire a known-weight projectile at a known point. After the crew got it working right, they came up with a standard-weight rock and used it to trim others to the same weight. Then, they could practice and see how repeatable it was. I didn’t want to get into Circular Probability of Error and all that stuff, but they established that they could reliably get within ten or fifteen feet of their aim-point.

They turned out to not need the larger hamster-cage winch if they could take their time, but it sure helped speed things up so we kept it. Re-cocking it and loading it still took a while, though. Unless a ship stopped in the river, we’d never get more than one shot at it. On the other hand, if they came in several ships we might get to shoot at each one if they weren’t too bunched up.

Once our gunners knew what they were doing, we turned the trebuchet to fire out into the river and sent a boat out with some floats to mark the channel at about the aim-point. The crew had a great time learning how to adjust the range on their new toy. Their target float was never in any danger, but the crew could count seconds and tell how long it took between pulling the release cord and seeing the splash. With that, they could tell how far to lead a ship coming up the channel.

Once they had it aimed right, they pounded stakes into the ground so that it would not shift and started experimenting with different size rocks to see if they could change the range out or in without messing with the counterweight.

We also replaced the aim-point float in the middle of the channel with a raft we’d cobbled together. The new raft had a clay pot in the middle that we’d converted to be a big multi-wick oil lamp. We had a small group of the town guard man an observation post down at the seashore, and they were to light a signal fire if they saw a group of ships standing in together. If we saw that signal fire, we’d have one of our fishermen go light our range beacon.

We tried it one night as a test. The lamp didn’t put out much light at all, but it would help us see a ship trying to sneak up on us in the dark. If we saw the ship in time, we’d use the trebuchet on it. If not, we would have to wait until it was closer and use our cruise missile launcher.

And, it might not work at all. We couldn’t do anything to protect the lamp from the wind, and as soon as the land-breeze started up, soon after dark, all the flames went out. Maybe some sort of wicker lattice that would let light out but disrupt the wind? We added that, and the lamps stayed lit for several hours on our next test.

Meanwhile, the crews started working on two more trebuchets so that we could cover both sides of the channel. Where we had our first one aimed, someone who knew what they were doing could skirt around the bulls-eye raft on either side. There wasn’t a lot of room, but at high tide we could expect ships to try it and it would be nice to be able to cover the sides of the channel too.

It would depend upon when they came in. At dawn, they could see the mudflats and avoid them. In mid-day, they would be just under the surface where they couldn’t be seen but would still be there. How well did their pilots know the river?

One of the new engines was just a little larger than our original, and included quite a few ‘lessons learned’ from the first one we built. Hopefully, all the changes would make it more accurate and faster to reload. We’d have to see how it did, to decide if we wanted to use it at longer range for our first shot, or at closer range to clean up after our original one.

The third trebuchet was a lot smaller. We intended that one to be aim-able. The base was sturdier than the others, and the very back of the base had several logs under it to serve as rollers. We weren’t planning on moving it anywhere, but it would be nice if we could shift the back end some from side to side, to change the direction it fired.

I kept having a video run through my head, from the beginning of an old computer game. It was one that came on a CD before the Internet took over. Warcraft? It showed the people at an island fortress, preparing for an invasion by the bad guys. Wasn’t the first section of the game called “Awaiting The Tide of Darkness”? Widemouth City would be on an island, once the moat was finished.

Eric rode back into town about two weeks after he’d left, a beautiful young woman on a horse beside him and a good dozen packhorses loaded up behind them. I was certainly not the commander of Widemouth’s defenses, but I had earned a good amount of respect and I’d asked the people at the gates to be on watch for him. As soon as he was recognized coming down the river road they’d sent a messenger for me, and I beat him to the gates.

Millie and Jim came with me, although Henry stayed at the shop to work on things and deal with any customers. Okay, he still had a grudge against Eric for making him choose between apprenticing himself to a woman or getting hung from the neck until he was dead, dead, dead.

Henry didn’t seem to harbor any ill will towards Millie herself, and he agreed that the arrangement made sense. He was the most-skilled armorer in town, and she owned the only place he could work. He would have the same skills no matter where he was, but he didn’t own any of the tools, materials, or finished products in the shop and he wasn’t ready to go out on his own. It was just the principle of the thing! Men should not be apprenticed to women!