Siege Perilous: The Foreworld Saga by E.D. deBirmingham

Author:E.D. deBirmingham [deBirmingham, E.D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2014-01-28T04:00:00+00:00

Every sunset, Ferenc and Ocyrhoe would bundle up in white-and-dun wool clothing, sneak out the gate, and move undetected across the north face of the wintry mountain to check on the enemy. The snow was glaringly white where it remained, but much of it had blown away.

Once the lumber, ropes, and hardware had been brought up, the frame of the French trebuchet had been reassembled within days. It was enormous, three times the height of a man. Makeshift workshops had also been built; villeins and soldiers started mining limestone around the summit through the snow, and within the workshops, others were shaping raw blocks into round projectiles; they were stored carefully in piles outside and ranged from what looked about the weight of a large dog up to what looked about the weight of a large man. Other blocks were being shaped and pressed together to be contained within a massive iron net: the counterweight. The mining of the counterweight seemed to be very slow going. In contrast, within the walls of Montségur, that had turned out to be the easiest aspect of the much smaller trebuchet: the men had simply begun to disassemble the interior walls separating the Goodmen’s village from the Goodwomen’s, and the stones were loaded into a large cage the smith had forged. The cage used up the last of his iron, and the forging used up the last of his charcoal. Bacalaira then demanded the smithy be taken apart, on the grounds that without iron or charcoal it was just an empty building—sited in the best possible place to put the trebuchet.

But even with an assembled trebuchet, they had no ammunition. Unless they were perfectly round and smooth, the balls would swing wide of their intended targets. They had no way to shape the projectiles.

Meanwhile, the French men were working around the clock, miserable in the cold. Other men protected them with metal canopies of overlapping shields. No matter how good a Montségur archer’s aim, there were no vulnerable targets.

One evening, when Ferenc and Ocyrhoe went on their sunset reconnaissance, the counterweight on the French trebuchet suddenly seemed much larger. Days of mining and trimming stone had created the misleading impression that everything was moving very slowly—but now suddenly, the fruit of the Frenchmen’s labor was before them.

“That’s terrifying,” said Ferenc, calmly. “The weight of that? Think how hard those stones will be coming at us.”

“But it’s from such a distance,” Ocyrhoe said nervously. “They’re shooting uphill across the length of a mountain ridge!”

“At first they will be,” Ferenc agreed. “But Raphael says they are going to move that monster a few yards every day.”

Ocyrhoe shook her head, incredulous. “Look at that thing, Ferenc. It will topple over the moment it hits a frozen tuft of grass.”

“Raphael—”

“He isn’t always right, Ferenc. Anyhow, the days are so short now, and they can’t shoot at night. They have no way to aim.”

“You don’t aim something like that,” said Ferenc of the machine. “If every rock is the

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