Reuben remained stock-still for just a moment. Then he turned towards Ayla with a charming smile she immediately and utterly distrusted.
"Ah, Ayla! How nice of you to join us." The red knight waved towards Burchard. "Your steward and I were just taking a stroll on the wall and discussing a few matters. Nothing you need to worry about right now, just inconsequential details and—"
Thump.
The low, dull noise from behind Reuben, beyond the castle wall, seemed to travel up into Ayla's head through the soles of her feet. She looked past Reuben, to the skeletal wooden structure that was rising above the enemy camp.
"Inconsequential details?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Well, maybe not completely inconsequential..."
Thump!
"Reuben!"
"... if you consider the complete destruction of your castle in about a day and a half consequential, that is."
Ayla felt a knot of fear tighten deep in her stomach.
"Yes." Her voice seemed to come from far away, as if it weren't even her own. "I'd call that consequential, I think."
"Well, let's go down and discuss it, shall we?" Reuben suggested. "There's no need to stay up here and..."
He might have said more after that, but Ayla didn't hear the rest of his sentence. She was looking past him to the enemy camp where, high above the tents, high above the spider-web-like construction even, a mighty column was rising into the skies. Accompanied be the distant, regular beat of drums and shouts of "Heave-ho!" a pillar of wood was slowly but surely being pulled up from the ground, trying to pierce the clouds, it seemed.
"I think we had better stay up here," Ayla whispered, unable to tear her eyes from the terrifying spectacle. What diabolical contraption had the enemy come up with now?
Seeing the expression on her face, Reuben turned back towards the east. "What is... No!" Catching sight of the pillar of wood, Reuben's eyes flashed with gray fire and he slammed his fist onto the breastwork. "I had expected something of the sort but this... Satan's stinking pisspot! They have an evil neighbor!"
Ayla turned to stare at him.
"What do you mean, they have an evil neighbor? The Margrave has been attacking and attacking and attacking me for months, and now they are preparing some new devilry to launch at us, and you say he has an evil neighbor? I haven't done anything wrong! If it is anyone who is evil, it is him, not me!"
"No, no." Reuben waved his hand, impatiently. "I didn't mean you. I meant that!" He pointed to the construction in the midst of the enemy camp. "That machine there. It's called an evil neighbor, or tribok, or trebuchet."
A faint memory stirred in Ayla's mind. She had heard that term before, but where? The memory came into clearer focus. Her father, talking about his adventures with Sir Isenbard, long ago, when he could still take walks in the garden with his little daughter... Forcing down tears that threatened to come into her eyes at the memory, tried to think. What exactly had he said a trebuchet was? "A catapult?" she asked. "It's a kind of catapult, right?"
Reuben snorted.
"If it were only that! Normal catapults are powered by hand—a group of men pulling on a rope, which is attached to a wooden pole, at the end of which sits a projectile. But this... this is something altogether different. Do you see that great wooden thing? Like a chest, or a crate, hanging from the end of the pole?"
Leaning forward, Ayla followed his outstretched arm with her eyes. She caught sight of the object in question immediately. It would have been hard to miss: the thing was about fourteen feet long, seven feet wide and just as high, and was hanging far above the tops of the tents.
"Yes, I see it. What about it?"
"That thing is the trebuchet's counterweight. From the size of it, it probably weighs about seven tons and pulls on the throwing arm with more force than a thousand men could provide. It throws a round stone projectile of about two feet in diameter roughly three-hundred yards through the air."
"And... that is bad?" Ayla asked, hesitantly.
"I've seen a trebuchet reduce a castle to rubble within half a day. Does that sound bad to you, Milady?"
"I-I think so, yes."
Thump. Thump.
Reuben threw a last, dark look at the construction above the enemy camp, which was still growing higher and higher. Then he turned his eyes on Ayla, and raised an eyebrow.
"I suppose I won't be able to slip out of here without first explaining to you why I have to go and what I am going to do?"
"You suppose correctly, Sir Knight."
Reuben's mouth twitched in a grim smile. "Then come!" He motioned towards the entrance of the tower. "If you want to talk, we will talk. It is time to hold a council of war."
*~*~**~*~*
Reuben's quarters were crammed full of people: Ayla, Burchard, Sir Waldar, Sir Rudolfus, Captain Linhart, and even, to Reuben's considerable annoyance, young Theoderich the squire, who had managed to squish himself into the room after it was, to all intents and purposes, already full to bursting.
Normally, such an important council would have been held in the great hall, but since that was currently being used by several hundred villagers as a combined kitchen, bedroom, pigsty and marketplace, Ayla had thought it best to call together the meeting in this relatively confined space. The room's only table being covered with piles of weapons and armor, they gathered around the stone windowsill, on which a map of the area was spread out.
"Here's how things stand," Reuben growled. In clear, precise words—most of them a little too graphic for Ayla's taste—he set out to explain to them the danger of the machine outside their walls. Ayla didn't understand half the words he used; they were all about angles, trajectories, projectile channels and release mechanisms. But she did understand the words "destruction", "death" and "pickle-brained, pestilent little pigs" all too well. The latter, she suspected, referred not to the machine but to the men who had built it.
"If that thrice-cursed thing is not smashed to smithereens by sundown, before they start firing, we might as well open our casks of wine and ale and drink ourselves to death," Reuben concluded. "It'll be a kinder fate than the one that awaits us when stones start raining from the sky."
Behind Reuben's back, Theoderich the squire listened with wide eyes. He seemed to believe Reuben's every word like the gospel ever since the battle down where the bridge had once been. The others, though, were not so easily convinced.
"Are you sure you don't overestimate the danger of that thing, Sir Reuben?" Captain Linhart asked. "Our walls are made out of solid stone, I'll have you know."
Theoderich threw the captain a scathing look, and Ayla had to suppress a smile at his protectiveness for his new knight master. Reuben definitely didn't need protecting—only a second later, he directed a glare at Linhart that was ten times as fierce as his squire's, and made Ayla thoroughly glad she wasn't in the Captain's shoes right now.
With a jerk of his arm, Reuben swept the map off the stone windowsill. For a moment none of them, not even Ayla, realized what he intended to do. Then he raised his armored fist, and Ayla understood.
Crack!
Reuben's fist came down in an ark and split the windowsill, two inches thick and made from the same stone as the castle walls, right down the middle. It splintered like rotten wood. Dust rose and pieces of stone clattered to the floor. The entire room stared at the red robber knight, half-enchanted, half terrified.
No, Ayla told herself, that wasn't true—at least not for herself. She probably stared at him entirely enchanted, even if it was a dark enchantment. The demonic energy that emanated from Reuben and set him apart from other men was stronger than ever.
"All right..." Linhart swallowed. "Maybe the stone isn't quite as solid as I've imagined."
"The trebuchet won't hit your walls with the fist of a mortal man," Reuben told them darkly. "It'll hit with ten thousand giant fists of stone, flying faster than the eye can see. I leave it to your imagination to conjure the result."
Staring down at the destruction he had wrought, he picked up a few fragments of shattered stone and let them fall to the ground again, in a final gesture. "We must never allow things to get that far. We must destroy that machine before it has a chance to destroy us!"
He looked up from the shattered stone to face the war council of Luntberg. Yet Ayla noticed he avoided looking directly at her. Something, she realized only now, he had avoided doing ever since they had come into the room. What was the matter?
"We must destroy it," he repeated, fixing Burchard with his fiery gray eyes.
She felt a sense of foreboding creep up her spine. Why wasn't he looking at her? Normally, he looked at her all the time. Actually, "looking" wasn't a strong enough expression. "Undressing her with his eyes" would be more like it. And now he suddenly preferred to look at Burchard? Ayla felt the sudden urge to find a mirror and check if she had grown a large, bushy, and ugly mustache overnight.
Unobtrusively, so the others wouldn't notice, she felt her upper lip. No, not the least sprouting of hair was detectable. Deep down, she knew anyway that it had to be something far more serious than her looks to make Reuben avoid looking at her like that. He wasn't just avoiding looking at her: he was avoiding looking into her eyes.
Her worse suspicions were confirmed a moment later, when Sir Rudolphus suggested: "What about flaming arrows? I am no military expert, however, I understand that they were utilized with some success against the margrave's troops in an earlier offensive measure, taken by our esteemed liege lady." He nodded to Ayla. "Could they not be deployed against the trebuchet in the same manner?"
"No." Reuben's reply came quick and decisive. Too quick and decisive. He had already anticipated that question and prepared an answer, Ayla was sure. "The range of a trebuchet is far greater than that of archers, and it can shoot higher. It will be easily able to shoot over palisades around the enemy camp. Our archers will not. And even if they would be able to—the trebuchet's parts are so massive, they will burn only after hours of concentrated shooting. That's a risk we can't allow our archers to take. The Margrave would simply have to send his own archers to eradicate them. We cannot engage in open battle, and start fighting a fight we cannot win. No, we must choose a different path."
The unpleasant tingle up Ayla's spine returned with increased intensity. She didn't like the way he said "different path." It sounded too much like "dangerous path." And he still wouldn't meet her eyes.
"Different path?" Sir Waldar grunted. "And what the hell—begging your pardon, Milady—do you suggest we do? We can't attack them with archers, and we most certainly cannot storm the camp. What else can we do, Sir Beetroot?"
Reuben glanced down at his shining, blood-red armor. Then he directed a look at Sir Waldar that made the portly knight swallow.
"If you ever call me that again," Reuben growled, "I'll rip out your tongue and have it for dinner. Now, as for our options... There's only one thing we can do."
Slowly, he turned his head and met Ayla's eyes. She knew what he was thinking—and he wanted her to say it. He wanted her to admit that it was the only course of action left open to them.
But she wouldn't! She couldn't! Not knowing what it might cost her. From deep inside, she felt a torrent of panic rise.
Reuben waited a moment longer. Then he took a deep breath and said, his voice as hard as steel: "One of us has to break into the enemy camp tonight and destroy that thing."
Ayla felt her heart clench. She knew only too well who Reuben meant by "one of us."
"One?" Waldar snorted. "What lone man could accomplish that which is beyond an entire lance of archers?"
Reuben's eyes didn't leave Ayla. Although he spoke to Waldar, she knew his words were meant as much for her, sealing the inevitable.
"I, of course."
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Greetings, Milords and Ladies,
Time for Reuben in action, again! I hope you are looking forward to some serious enemy-slaughtering? ;-)
Farewell for now
(a very bloodthirsty) Sir Rob