Age of War

Chapter 54

It was the second night of the siege. That first battle, the desperate race through the fire to take the outer walls, was no siege at all – a better word would be catastrophe. Hadrin couldn’t shake her headache. She had too much weighing on her mind. Too many worries, and too many bodies. Thousands of men and women were still lying there for the crows. When would they bury the dead? Or would it just be a single great funeral pyre? She had a vision of that colossal bonfire then, burning for days on the plain outside the city, its smoke billowing into the sky, its reek suffusing everything for miles around. She grimaced. It wasn’t just that though. Her ankle was in agony. She should have been resting, but of course Albrihn wouldn’t grant her that luxury. The fighting – such as it was – had started that day. Arrow after arrow raining down from the top of the walls, driving their army into cover; hot oil poured out from such a height that it fell as scalding drizzle on an area strides across and left dark stains on the plain white stonework. Even simple rocks, hurled from up there, became deadly. Any attempt to return fire was utterly futile. It was impossible to draw a clear line of sight to the defenders sheltering behind the battlements, and her archers had to be deployed in the open on the streets, which of course made them prime targets. The only strategy she’d hit on was positioning her bows atop the towers in the city which reduced the besieged army’s height advantage. But there were only so many soldiers you could put in a turret or in the window of a minaret, and their return fire had minimal effect. More successful were the engines that were hauled up through the narrow streets with great difficulty. The largest trebuchets, towering wooden machines that required an entire company to load and fire, had to be disassembled into huge beams, ropes and cogs, brought up the hill by carts drawn by teams of draught horses. They were each rebuilt in one of the city’s squares, well out of range of the Atlasian bowshot, and had soon begun their bombardment. Saffrey’s orders were clear: they were not to target the interior of the Enclave, where Atlas’s population was sheltering. Instead, the great boulders and chunks of masonry were aimed at the battlements and the walls themselves. Each shot left an ugly scar in its wake, but the damage seemed purely cosmetic. The Enclave’s walls were too thick for any artillery in the known world to breach, as Hadrin well knew.

More had died, from arrows, oil, rocks, even their own bombardment as ammunition had bounced back into their own lines. One trebuchet had misfired badly too, probably as a result of too-hasty reconstruction. A snapped rope had sent the arm wheeling around madly, scattering stones all over the square, killing dozens of its own crew and demolishing entire buildings. The machine had torn itself to pieces in moments, leaving bloody ruin in its wake. Such was war. There were plans to reclaim the artillery on the docks too, and turn them against their owners. Hadrin was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary. She was hoping those within the Enclave were suffering worse than they were. If they were, there was no sign of it.

She lowered herself down onto a folding chair as her servant, a wispy-haired man named Colip, knelt to ease off her boot. There was a footrest she’d liberated from a well-appointed townhouse not far away – a small act of looting she didn’t intend to tell Saffrey about – and she put her ankle on it. She winced. Colip put aside her boot and began to roll back her stocking, frowning. “I know you’ll ignore me again,” he said, “but you really should keep off this foot…”

Truthfully, Hadrin was inclined to agree with him. She turned it this way and that, examining the bruised and swollen ankle critically. There was nothing to be done about it. It was just a sprain, and it would heal by itself in time. But she needed to rest it, or she’d do herself more harm. To think, after all the violence and death of the past few days, she would be undone by a bad fall from her horse. Colip stood up and crossed to the door flap of her tent. He returned with a round stone, which had been left outside in the freezing night air. He lifted her foot gently and placed it upon the stone. The cold surface made her breath catch, but it did feel soothing. She leant back and closed her eyes. She was determined to get a decent night’s sleep tonight. Somehow, they were losing this war and she wasn’t accustomed to defeat.