Chapter 146: What catapults are for

A catapult was not a good weapon against Roamers.

Every officer on the Wall knew this, and the reason was simple.

In general, a catapult threw a heavy stone in a high arc. Mostly used in sieges when trying to break through the defense of sturdy castle walls.

But that was not the case here.

The ones at the defense was the Wall, they didn’t need to breach any fortress. So if a catapult was used here, the stone would be thrown from the top of the Wall where the machine was mounted.

The stone would come down and kill whatever happened to be underneath it. On open ground, that meant two or three creatures. On crowded ground, it might mean five.

Then it rolled.

A rolling stone knocked over one or two more, lost its speed, and stopped. After that it became an obstacle, and Roamers simply went around it.

In other words, twenty catapults firing twenty stones would kill roughly eighty Roamers.

There were thousands of Roamers on the northern killing ground.

That was why Garrick Dane had spent the last quarter of an hour staring at the catapult platform on the Fourth Mile as though it had personally insulted him.

"Commander. The Fifth is signalling."

"What does it say?"

"Fire."

Dane exhaled through his nose.

"Then fire."

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-Kwadeung!

Twenty arms came up and slammed against their stops at the same moment. Twenty stones left the cups and climbed.

Dane watched them go and waited to be disappointed.

Then the bundles came out behind them.

At first they were nothing worth looking at. Tight-packed grey lumps trailing on a length of chain, tumbling end over end, completely unremarkable.

Then the chain went taut.

Then they opened.

"What...?"

Forty paces by thirty.

That was the size of each sheet, and the men on the Fourth Mile had no way of knowing where it had come from. They had not been told about the four hundred people sewing in the inner yards the night before. They had not been told that every bedsheet, tarpaulin, tent, awning and grain sack on two hundred kilometres of Wall had been requisitioned in a single afternoon, nor that the whole lot had been soaked in oil until the fabric would not fold clean.

All they saw was the sky filling up.

Twenty sheets. Each one larger than a house. The stone at the front of each dragging it open as it flew.

For three seconds the northern sky above the killing ground was grey canvas.

Then they came down.

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The Gorehorn wedge at the Fourth Mile was eighty paces across when the first sheet landed on it.

It killed nothing.

Of course it killed nothing. It was cloth. It was heavier than ordinary cloth because of the oil, and the animals under it slowed for a moment, and that was the entire effect.

The Gorehorns did what Gorehorns do.

They pushed forward.

A Gorehorn’s skull plate is not armour. Armour is a defensive structure and the plate is not defensive. It is a tool. In the Great Green Forest, a Gorehorn spends its entire life walking through dense undergrowth, and rather than going around obstacles it lowers its head and drives through them. The plate exists for that purpose. The horns exist to lever things apart.

An animal built that way does not stop when something lands on it.

It tears through.

The front rank lowered their heads and drove into the canvas, and the canvas caught and tore and dragged, and inside thirty seconds the sheet was in six or seven pieces.

Not one of those pieces fell off.

That was the part Dane noticed, although he did not yet understand why it mattered.

Torn cloth caught on horns. It caught in the ridges of the skull plates. It wound round forelegs and hung across shoulders, and the harder the animals fought it, the deeper it worked itself into the coarse matted hair along their flanks.

Fifty or sixty Gorehorns were now walking toward the Wall wearing oiled canvas.

They did not appear to mind.

They kept coming.

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Along the parapet, the men of the First Watch had stopped fighting to watch.

That was a disciplinary matter under normal circumstances. Nobody enforced it.

"What are they doing?"

"Throwing blankets at them."

"That’s not blankets. Look at the size of it."

"Then what is it?"

Nobody on that section had an answer, and the two men nearest the edge went back to their spears because a Reever had got a forelimb onto the stone and there was no more time to discuss it.

Dane put both hands on the parapet.

’Six months.’

For six months he had sat at that Council table and listened to the Strategist of the Wall explain why one arrow was worth more than another arrow, why a stake pointing the wrong way was worth nine hours of labour, and why a culvert nine miles south of the Mouth needed four days of work and eleven silver.

The man did not waste things. That was his entire reputation.

And now twenty catapult stones and every scrap of fabric on this Wall had been spent putting laundry on two hundred Gorehorns.

Dane turned to his aide.

"Send a word to the Watcher. I want to know what in the name of-"

"Commander."

"What?"

His aide was not listening to him. He was looking east along the Wall.

Dane followed his eyes. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

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The Fifth Bastion.

Encrid Gannon was standing at the parapet with his hands behind his back, and he had not moved since the catapults fired.

Beside him stood a young man in dark leathers.

He wore no part of the Wall’s uniform. He held no rank. He was not on the Wall’s strength, could not be given an order by any officer present, and had come up onto that bastion two hours earlier because the Strategist had asked him to.

He was holding a bow.

He had been holding it for two hours without doing anything at all.

Very few of the officers on the Wall knew who he was. The men of the Gleaning however knew him very well. The men who worked the outer contracts knew. Everybody else had heard a name once or twice and had assumed it belonged to some mercenary with a reputation in the Shambles.

Encrid turned his head.

"Rael. Whenever you’re ready."

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