I thought that the bey would be most sorely disappointed by the response from the city. Instead, his smile grew a hair’s width broader with each word of my recounting throughout. He was positively beaming by the end.
“Well done, Dragon’s son,” Bey Ishak said, tapping his spyglass in his hand. “I’m glad you thought to repeat my message—with two of them listening and the message given twice, I am sure the whole of the council will understand the precise nature of my threat by tomorrow.”
From this, I inferred that the bey had not expected an imminent surrender, and I nodded as if I both knew the details of the bey’s plan and had confidence in its ultimate success. A distant boom sounded from the city, and I flinched as I heard a cannonball’s rising whistle of approach. When I opened my eyes and looked around, I saw that it had pierced the earth near the foot of the hill.
“Perhaps, sir, we might seek a safer position?” I asked.
“We should have a few minutes while they reload—I do not care to give up a good vantage lightly—and I have already chosen to invest in this hill, so I shall be sorely disappointed if they prove to have the reach.” Bey Ishak had his spyglass raised once more and was scanning back and forth, looking for the source of the shot. “It looks like they already had it elevated at a ratio of one over two—I think it will not be easy for them to build up any higher of a slope on top of the walls while also bracing it against a heavier charge of powder. They may get a little more range, but we hold the higher ground over the walls, and that advantage in elevation is worth perhaps another hundred yards of horizontal distance. I think they are more likely to burst the barrel than to reach the peak.”
It was the work of a moment to understand what the bey meant by choosing to invest in the hill. On the side of the hill farther from the city, men and beasts had already begun the difficult process of pulling one of the galley-grade bombards up the back side of the hill. This was considerably less easy than pulling bombard-laden carts along a well-established road, which had already proven the slowest part of the whole process of moving the army.
Accordingly, three of the oxen teams had been brought together to the task, and the men were using slabs of wood beneath the wheels to compensate for the combination of soft grassy dirt and the hill’s slope. Although the ground looked dry, even ground that looks dry on the surface will prove to be muddy once it has been churned by dozens of hooves and pressured by the wheels of a heavily laden reinforced cart, and a muddy slope is difficult to traverse with a heavy weight.
I was immediately glad not to be among the men prying wooden slabs loose from mud lower on the hill and shifting them to a position higher on the hill to be pressed once again into the mud by the weight of a bombard atop a reinforced cart. Worse, they had to hurry, for any full stop of the teams made things worse, and there was a limited span between the hooves of the rearmost ox and the wheels of the cart. Then the bey, as if reading my mind, detailed me to take over supervising said task—the process having been set in motion by the best field engineer the bey had at his disposal, it could be kept in motion by a less experienced officer, allowing the field engineer to move on to the next problem.
The construction of siege lines with firing positions and field fortifications was an untidy process, made worse by the bey’s haste and by the fact that they were not true siege lines. Two thousand men, mechs, and beasts may seem like a great total, but to completely encircle the city’s walls from outside of the range of the city’s cannons would require miles of fortified lines. What was possible was the creation of a more substantial set of field fortifications straddling and blocking the main road west out of the city.
The point of the fortifications was more the protection of the main portion of our own army—incidentally blocking the main road in and out of the city—and the divided small auxiliary flanking forces to either side positioned to harry and delay any forces attempting to enter or exit the city from the north or south while the main force rallied.
I supervised the slow movement of the cannon up to the crest of the hill. The oxen were periodically rested, and the men, mostly oarsmen with well-calloused hands but less familiarity with mud, were changed out about three times each. Unlike the periodic breaks called for the sake of the oxen, the men’s shift changes were not a formally timed or organized affair. Instead, since the raising of the bombard up the hill was one of the visibly least pleasant tasks at hand in setting up the camp, I was sent a steady stream of reinforcements as disciplinary cases, malingers from the rest of the army. This let me send away the men who had spent enough time immersed in mud and stabbed with rough splinters of wood or who met with an unfortunate accident.
As an officer and a prince, I was not expected to get my own hands dirty, although I found it necessary to do so on several occasions while imposing discipline. Galley slaves are reluctant enough participants in the sultan’s war efforts when forced to perform a regular and familiar task. I was glad to hand matters back to the supervision of the field engineer, who had to figure out how to unload the bombard and brace it into a position where it could be fired without the recoil sending it sliding down the smooth muddy path that had been torn straight down the backside of the hill behind it.
Pantikapaion’s fishing fleet was already diminished by the fact that some of it had turned around and sought other harbors in the morning. What was left had headed north in the early pre-dawn hours—reasonable, given how narrow the strait was in the vicinity of the spit and the position of the steamship grounded on the spit.
Around dawn, everyone had woken with the sound of a loud blast. Those who were awake had pointed to the strait as the origin of the noise. The spit that Pasha Mustafa and the steamship had been grounded on looked a dozen yards shorter. Its tip seemed wider, with a crescent-shaped end. The steamship had resumed an interdicting position at the focus of Pantikapaion’s harbor, out of easy cannon range. Peering through a spyglass from the vantage of the top of the hill, I thought I could see a slight wobble, the ship listing unevenly to the right. The sailors aboard were bustling and busy, small dots scurrying around and about the decks of the ship.
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Standing there and looking attentively through my spyglass left others assuming that I was at some needed task assigned by the bey, and I was left alone by other officers for a considerable length of time. There was no absence of things to see; fishing boats returned by ones and twos from their northerly fishing expeditions. Most of them, soon after coming into sight, turned northwest to make for Hermonassa. Most of the remainder turned around north along the Taurican coast. One small boat slunk back into the city’s harbor along the coastline, braving the specter of the steamship, which loomed ominously but did not move to intercept; when a second and larger fishing boat started to follow, a bombard aboard the steamship fired, the stone creating a visible splash in the water halfway to the shoreline. Though the shot had been well short of the mark, the captain of the second fishing boat then lost his nerve, the ship swinging northwest to Hermonassa.
The sudden, jaw-jarring thunderclap of a great bombard firing less than a dozen paces away startled me into dropping the spyglass. A cloud of black, choking smoke enveloped me a moment later, and I coughed, blinking and waving my hand in front of my face as I stumbled, trying to look around to see where in the grass the precious spyglass had landed. As I put down a foot, I felt something and froze, swaying precariously as I kept my weight balanced over one foot. I wobbled but did not fall, then slowly reached down, feeling the enameled cylinder underfoot.
The enchanted glass was, fortunately, intact. A good spyglass was worth a princely sum, and while a prince, I had neither a princely income nor the masterful skill with thaumaturgy needed to work with glasses and optics. Indeed, thanks to the cold iron wrapped around my wrists, I could not use such skill even if I possessed it—the magic of metals, as it was sometimes called, had already been crudely directed against my own use of any art.
As the cannon cooled and the smoke cleared, the terminal position of the round stone shot was of chief interest among the men who had gathered atop the hill while I had been observing Pasha Mustafa’s morning exercises of naval power from the explosive assault against the integrity of the sandy spit that choked the strait to the menacing of the city’s fishing fleet. Counting myself, the hilltop hosted at least half of the well-born officers in Bey Ishak’s command, with two mechs standing by. Either I had set a fashion by heading directly to the summit after breaking my fast with three tiny cups of sweet, strong, dark coffee, or the bey had wanted to gather up every officer who could be spared from the duties of directing masses of men.
“It is, what, ten yards from the gate?” Mevlana was shading his eyes against the morning sun as he peered down at the city.
Iskender shook his head. “That is where it came to rest, but do you see the line leading to it? It rolled into position. I make the landing twenty-five yards out.”
My attention drawn to the spot and the dirt and debris having been cleared from my spyglass, I examined the track of the ball closely. “Ah, but it bounced.” I hesitated, scanning back along the straight line drawn by the track of the roll and the divot from the bounce, finding another divot, a deeper one. “Twice. There, a little to the left of the road. Fifty or sixty yards short of the wall, I would say.”
“Well spotted, Dragon’s son. I agree with your mark,” said an older man named Karaca. He was the bey’s best field engineer and considered the captain of the artillery unit that had been assembled around the armament formerly carried by half a dozen galleys. “If you have completed your latest task for the bey, may I have the use of your spyglass for a spotter?”
“I am honored by your notice, Captain Karaca,” I said with a bow. “The bey has not given me any task yet this morning—I can spot the landing of your shots.”
“That is as good,” the field engineer said, his spine straightening as I accorded him a rank he had not yet been formally granted but surely felt he deserved given the magnitude of responsibility that had descended upon his shoulders. “Iskender—will you need assistance from the fire mages in setting the cage?”
“No,” the thaumaturge said, self-consciously adjusting his bandolier and giving a pained look at one of the two mechs. “Just the blacksmith and the men to hold—”
A rippling crack of thunder sounded as a trio of the city’s cannons responded, one ball thudding harmlessly into the side of the hill below us. Another skipped twice across the grass and into the advance line of the army across the road, catching an unfortunate arquebusier in the face. His headless body collapsed to the earth with a peculiar kneeling motion that planted the butt of the arquebus in the grass, the gun standing vertically on its own for half a heartbeat before joining its former bearer on the ground.
Iskender, rubbing his ears, continued his sentence from where he thought he had left off. “It is only when we adjust the bindings that we will need more than my strength. Are you sure the pasha will approve? This is a great expense for one shot, and we have not ranged in. Nor will it be the same weight as the stone shot—and it will tumble differently in the wind, being a cylinder.”
Captain Karaca shrugged. “There is no accounting for shape, unfortunately. The weight we could account for when you are done with the assembly, but we do not have a balance to weigh the shot against a round stone. I could try to fill and fire a barrel as a test—but no, I think it would burst, and we do not have the orichalcum to spare for you to make two of the bey’s special project. If the first shot fails, we will have the range calibrated if the bey should care to order a second shot made.”
The other noble officers were sent away, the fire mages and Iskender heading in two different directions to complete the tasks they had been assigned by the bey. Presumably they would later reunite to finish assembling the special cylinder that the bey wished fired upon the city.
Half an hour later, Iskender and the others were still away, but the bombard was cooled, swabbed, and packed with more powder than before. Captain Karaca ordered a second round stone loaded, the bracings checked and reinforced, and then directed me to stand lower on the front face of the hill towards the city. There I would be below the inevitable cloud of smoke and a bit to the side of the line of fire.
The bombard’s thunderous roar was painfully loud, and even though I had expected the noise this time, I nearly dropped the spyglass from the shock anyway. But I did not need the spyglass to range the shot correctly; it had impacted the city wall partway up, leaving behind a semi-circular gap that started a man’s height above the ground and looked like nothing so much as a giant ragged bite.
“I make the landing point in the wall,” I called out unnecessarily. “Then perhaps reaching the ground five or ten yards behind.”
Accidental War Mage audiobook. All three versions are now available for pre-order - I believe the audiobook / eBook are exclusively on , at least for now. The paperback is available . Yes, . Every book purchased makes your local author feel warm and fuzzy and excited to write more in this world. (And makes publishers more likely to throw more money at me to support and encourage my writing habit.)
