“Chezzy! Grab thirty men and the wagon and go start on 10th Street! Be careful; be smart, but get it down. Take two of the mantlets!”

He turned back to the Main Street bridge, wishing he had Thierry’s training as a field engineer. Crossbows began to twang and thump from the wall; most of the bolts fell short, but he ordered spearmen forward to hold their shields up to protect the working parties. Just as they finished the work and were forming up, a scorpion was wrestled up onto the wall. Men looked up and yelled in alarm; they were well within range of the four-foot bolts and you couldn’t count on a siege mantlet stopping them.

Guelf laughed; it was even mostly genuine.

“They haven’t fastened that thing down, men!”

Recoil would buck it right off the wall if they tried to fire it without a solid anchor. Pendleton was short of artillery; the Boise army had probably brought in a lot, but there wouldn’t be pre-fitted bolts ready to secure them on the walls. There were men working around it, probably trying to improvise braces.

“Give them a salute, boys!”

He turned his back on the wall, pulled the knot on his trews’ waistband and mooned the useless scorpion; a knight’s plate armor left the seat bare to grip the saddle.

Dangerous, he thought. But it puts fresh heart in the men.

The Gervais contingent roared and laughed and followed suit, waggling and slapping their buttocks at the wall and shouting remarks that started with shoot this, you sheep-fuckers and went downhill from there. The thermite charges lit with a hissing dragon’s roar, and off-white smoke poured heavenward. Metal bubbled and ran, and concrete broke with a snapping crackle. Guelf yanked his trews up, pulled a new slip knot and pointed his sword west . . .

“Back! Let’s help Chezzy stick it to them again!”

He led the way down the old footpath, mantlets clanking and rattling beside them. Over the rattling sound of his men double-timing in pounding unison and the banging of the mantlet’s steel wheels came a sudden wheep, like an arrow hugely magnified.

“Hurry!” he roared.

The muffled impact came with a scream, high and pain-laden. Guelf pounded up onto 10th Street, into chaos. The men he’d sent were milling about, on the ground . . . he clenched his jaw against the welling of despair—Chezzy and Chezzy’s squire, Terry Reddings, a huge bolt transfixing his body. Terry was his wife’s younger brother and as like to Layella as a twin.

God! Thank you! He’s facedown. I couldn’t bear to see his dead face . . . her face—dead . . . She’s not dead, she’s not!

He laid about with the flat of his sword, banging on mail and shocking men back into sense.

“Get that mantlet set up, get us some cover!”

He turned to see Father Stanyon working on Chezzy.

“He’s alive? What’s happened to him?”

“Crossbow bolt in the scapular.” The doctor-priest jerked a thumb to the right. “They got a man over the wall and he sneaked up close enough to take a shot. Young Reddings is dead, and Sir Czarnecki isn’t. But the bolt hit a vein; luckily not an artery. I can’t budge it and we need it out to cauterize it. I have to get him back to the cars. Probably need to get him to Hermiston before we can do anything.”