Fallen Eagle

Chapter 83: Huddled Beneath Indifferent Stars

“You want us to… sing, commander?” Christos asked, bleary-eyed, his face betraying the exhaustion of the previous night. A night he’d spent shoving wool into his ears, trying to snatch some minuscule measure of sleep between the discordant orchestra the Italians had played from dusk to dawn.The Italians were masters of the . As well as they could play it, that same talent apparently lent itself to knowing how to play it as awfully and as annoyingly as possible. They blew the damned things as erratically as they could, changing angle and position, never sounding from the same place twice in a row. Twice in the same night they had feigned major assaults, sending half the camp stumbling to its feet despite the officers’ shouted orders to stay down and conserve what little strength they had left.

No matter how bloodied the peasants had been, they were still green when it came to these more esoteric facets of war.

Theodorus nodded at Christos, the faint dark circles under his own eyes matching those of the men before him. Around them, a sea of soldiers stood at attention in tight formation, utterly perplexed. Theodorus could not blame them.

The order sounded ludicrous on the surface, and high command had thought much the same when he had first proposed it. Only the fact that his bold and strange ideas had, thus far, a spotless record had persuaded them to entertain it at all. Even then, they were eager to distance themselves from the almost silly order.

“I want you to chant all throughout the night, for sixteen hours every day,” Theodorus said firmly, his expression unwavering despite the skepticism he could feel pressing in from all sides.

“But why?”

The question came from a skinny young lad with a sour look. Kratos, if Theodorus remembered rightly. The boy punctuated his words with a vicious glare toward the palisade as another shrill note knifed in from beyond the inner wall they stood beside.

Theodorus let the complaint hang in the air for a heartbeat, taking the measure of the men. He needed to win them here, now, if he wanted them to follow through on the order. Men could be forced to carry out any number of intransigent commands - boiling water and sieving it through sand and ash, marching in proper formation through blistering heat - but they would do it better, and longer, if they believed there was sense in what they were doing.

“Let me ask you this,” he said, stepping up onto a nearby crate so that his voice carried clearly over the gathered ranks. He swept his gaze across them. “If your enemy brings a knife to an alley fight, do you fight with your bare hands, or do you look for a weapon?”

The men stayed mostly quiet, having been drilled into obedience and holding their tongues unless spoken to. Even so, Theodorus heard a few low murmurs, the whisper of their thoughts creeping through the mass of bodies as they glanced at one another and shifted their weight, waiting to see where he meant to lead them.

“You bring your own, of course.” He nodded. “And if you are in a church, pleading before the priest after being accused of blasphemy?”

Expressions turned puzzled at this, but Theodorus pressed on, trying to lead them along the line of his reasoning.

“You would not be well served using a knife in that situation,” he said. “But it is a battle all the same. You would rather have a Priest with you. To articulate and plead your case.”

He let the pause stretch, giving the image time to take root.

“Not all fights are the same,” he went on, “and the weapons best suited to face one foe are not the ones you would use on another. This,” he gestured toward the loud, grating blare that had haunted them incessantly since yesterday, “this is yet another kind of fight, a battle of sound. And we must meet it with a weapon of our own.”

He watched their faces, saw the slow dawning of comprehension. He could not begin to explain the finer points behind counter soundwave theory without sounding like a lunatic, but he could nudge them in the right direction.

“It is a very specific chant I will ask you to reproduce,” Theodorus said, his gaze sweeping across the ranks. “And it is one that all of you know.” He let the anticipation build for a heartbeat. “It will be the holy chant you sing every Sunday and every feast day in the Holy House.”

Surprise rippled through the men, a contagious thing that leapt from face to face.

“Father Stelios, if you please.”

Theodorus gestured to the unassuming priest. Stelios stepped forward, took the small space before the gathered men as though it were a church nave, and began to chant. The sound that emerged was a low, resonant, grave rumble that rose as if from deep within his chest rather than his throat.

Orthodox monastic chanting was built on such bass undertones, lines of sound that locked together and echoed against stone, filling the acoustics of their churches with a smooth, rolling harmony.

“This is a holy sound,” Theodorus said over the priest’s steady drone, “one that calls fortune and safety onto our side. It calls God to our cause and sets His hand between us and harm.”

He saw several men nodding at that, some almost eagerly. The practice might seem bizarre, but invoking God to their side against the Latin heretics was no small thing. The faith of the Greeks was a strength, one of the few clear advantages their Principality still held over the unpious neighbors who circled them like wolves.

“Make no mistake, gentlemen,” Theodorus called, letting his voice cut cleanly across the camp. “This is a war for our very soul, and we must defend ourselves even in sleep.” He meant to galvanize them, to make them want the order rather than merely endure it.

“Henceforth, the camp will post more men as sentries and guards on the walls,” he continued. “Those assigned to this duty will sing continuously during their watch, repeating this chant for the length of their turn.”

Father Stelios’s deep undertones rolled on, serving as a strange, solemn backdrop to the seemingly mad instruction.

“At least three men in each squad must chant at the same time,” Theodorus said, “and you will rotate among yourselves every twenty minutes or so, to avoid ruining your throats. You do not have to shout yourselves hoarse, only make yourselves heard.”

The aim was to turn the night into a single, continuous, homogenous soundscape and allow enough time to split the camp into two, and both halves have 8 hours of sleep. Trumpets and sleep deprivation worked by being erratic, jabbing at the mind with sudden, jagged noises that never settled. The human brain had an amazing capability to push aside loud sounds if they were steady, predictable, and uniform. By drowning out the trumpets with deep, rumbled chants, they’d reduce the sheer sound variance the Italian sought to introduce with their trumpets.

It was a small quirk of fortune that Theodorus found himself in a deeply traditional Orthodox principality. Orthodox monastic chants were among the most soothing sounds even an untrained singer could reproduce, and among the least tiring for human voices to sustain for hours on end.

By increasing the number of lookouts, they would not only ensure that enough sound rose from the walls to challenge the Italian , but also have more eyes watching for Genoese feints. The same men who lent their throats to the chant would keep careful watch on the darkness beyond the palisades.

“Additionally, men on the wall will have new directives to follow,” Theodorus said. He explained that the Genoese were likely to stage false assaults, rushing the ditches with noisy parties to keep the garrison on edge. The men were not to sound the alarm at every shadow that moved. They were to hold their tongues until the Italians had climbed the first palisade in numbers, until real mass and weight pressed against their outer works.

In a way, that first palisade served them twice over. First, as a barrier against the enemy’s canon, and second, as a deterrent against the enemy’s strategy. To drag men up and over it, across the wide, deep ditch before it, the Genoese would have to commit real numbers, which meant expending Genoese lives in night assaults just to chip away at Theodoran fatigue, as retreat would be slow and costly under crossbow fire.

It was as unorthodox a strategy as any commander could conceive, and it would mean fewer hands for foraging and for the necessary, mundane camp tasks, but it would allow them to weather the Italian onslaught in far better condition over the long term. And that was all that truly mattered.

The battle was no longer about who could win a single clash on the field, but about which army could keep its strength longest while steadily chipping away at the enemy’s resolve.

Theodorus and Silvanus stood atop the finished inner battlements, looking out across the fading fields as the last orange light of the dying sun washed over the camp and the enemy works beyond it.

The low hum of the on-duty lookouts drifted in from around them in a soft, uneven tide of sound. The voices pitched and swayed through different melodies, wandering from the simple base chant he had first ordered. Over the last few days the men had made the song their own, bending the arrangement in novel ways to find the barest modicum of entertainment amidst the repetitiveness of the song. It helped them stay alert and focused, so the Doux allowed it, despite Poseidippus’s vehement opposition of the frivolities, warning the men might ‘start thinking themselves bards, and not soldiers’.

For all the strangeness of having hard-bitten men singing in quiet, melancholic tones, it worked. Men reported better sleep, and although it was still far from a quiet night’s rest, they could at least keep themselves functional despite the harassment they suffered through the last week. The songs wrapped the camp in something like a lullaby, blunting the frayed edges of exhausted nerves.

They praised God for lending them strength against the foreign invaders, choosing to see the endurance of the garrison as proof that He was with them and not with the enemy. High command did nothing to disabuse them of the notion, and Father Stelios proved invaluable in nourishing it from his rounds amongst the army. Morale was the single most important resource available to a besieged force, and dredging up faith at a time like this was worth more than any wagon of grain.

“What do you think they are building?” Silvanus asked, offering Theodorus a cup of watered wine.

This had become their habit in recent days. When the long sessions in the command tent finally came to an end in the evening, they stopped here to breathe cooler air, drink poor wine, and stare in silence at the enemy’s latest construction.

A giant earthen mound, angled towards them but hundreds of paces away.

It rose ahead of the Genoese wooden fortifications, raw and ugly against the land, too deliberate to be dismissed as spoil from a ditch and too prominent to be anything accidental. Men had hauled it together under watch and guard, basket by basket and shovel by shovel, until it sat there like a crude altar raised to some purpose only the enemy fully understood.

“A ramp of some kind,” Theodorus said. “Though leading where or why I cannot say.”

The enemy’s stratagem puzzled him. He had studied enough campaigns and enough sieges throughout history to recognize the most common strategems employed, but building a ramp in the middle of a cleared field, hundreds of meters away from the enemy you meant to attack did not feature on any text he knew of.

“Do you think it will make a difference?” Silvanus asked.

There was worry in his tone, and Theodorus could not blame him for it. He felt an inkling of a strange logic behind the move, something that was meant to break the current stalemate. A stalemate they’d engineered to persevere over the italians.

Contrary to popular belief, most casualties in the military feuds of the Middle Ages did not come in glorious charges or desperate last stands, but from sickness, bad water, festering wounds, foul camp habits, and the long slow grind of poor hygiene and cramped camps.

If any military officer of this age were to analyse the current military situation, they would surely conclude that the Theodoran position was the more fragile of the two. Their army was made up in large part of peasants and townsmen, their means were limited, and the enemy had both artillery superiority, easier supply lines, and had fouled the enemy’s water.

They would be dead wrong. Through the modern hygene practices, the counter sound strategy and the boiling and filtration of their water sources, Theodorus believed they could outlast the Italians in this attrition contest, slowly whittling away at the difference between their numbers, despite the losses suffered while foraging in the southern forest.

That wasn’t to say that they wouldn’t have losses. They had already felt the price of crude medicine and the lack of antibiotics. Plenty of men had already died, reducing their total number to closer to 750 rather than a full 800, counting the men who’d been lightly injured in the battle of Kalamita Hills and then reinforced them.

More would surely follow. But the Italian army, for all its professionalism, did not understand the true value of cleanliness. They mitigated it, but it wasn’t the focal center of their attention like it was for the Crown’s army.

They didn’t boil drinking water. They didn’t separate the sick adequately. They didn’t cordon off the army’s pack animals and livestock, isolating them thoroughly from the rest of the camp. These small measures, laughably basic by the standards of a 21st-century outlook, could significantly curb the onset of plagues and diseases breaking out in a host.

“It might,” Theodorus said quietly.

Inwardly, he hoped with all his strength that it would not. Their hygiene measures wouldn’t yield a readily apparent advantage for months to come, as the Genoese could keep reinforcing their numbers through their secure supply lines, but it would add up over time, and the psychological impact of the seeming invincibility of the small Theodoran army was not to be underestimated.

However, all of their strategies and plans depended on the situation remaining broadly the same.

They drank the last of their wine in silence. The evening wind moved softly along the battlements. Below them the camp had begun its nightly settling, a thousand small routines of men preparing for another difficult night. Across the field, the enemy mound sat in the failing light like a question.

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Silvanus narrowed his eyes toward it.

“What is that?” he asked suddenly.

Theodorus followed his gaze and strained his sight. At first he saw only darkness gathering over the packed earth, the outline muddied by distance and dusk. Then shapes resolved themselves. Long shapes. Angular ones. Movement around them.

A shout broke from one of the lookouts farther down the line.

“Cannons!” the man cried. “There are cannons atop the hill!”

Theodorus felt his heart drop as if some unseen hand had torn it from his chest.

Of course.

The mound was not merely a platform. It was a gun-ramp.

“We must get the men out of the inner palisade and the outer works immediately,” he said, already turning. The words came sharp and fast, each one landing before the last had fully faded. “And everything near the riverbank. Tents, stores, equipment, all of it. Move it back at once.”

Silvanus caught him by the arm for a moment, grip strong enough to stop him.

“What is happening, Theodorus?”

“They mean to fire from elevation,” Theodorus said, gesturing hard toward the enemy works. “From the top of that man-made hill they can shoot over the first palisade and into the second. And from that angle…” He looked toward the stretch of camp nearest the river.

Silvanus’s eyes widened at once. “They can aim for our camp sections by the riverbank.” he whispered

They descended from the battlements at a near run, shouting for messengers as they went.

Orders began to leap outward from them in all directions. Sergeants were told to wake squads, captains to clear the forward positions, labourers to start shifting what they could while there was still light enough to see by. Men who had expected only another anxious evening suddenly found themselves throwing camp into motion.

By the time Theodorus and Silvanus reached the heart of the encampment, the Papadopoulos brothers were already coming toward them, drawn by the spreading commotion.

“What is happening?” the Doux demanded.

Theodorus did not waste a breath.

“They are dragging cannons to the top of that earthen hill,” he said. “They mean to fire over the first palisade and straight into the second. They may also have the angle to strike the edge of the camp by the river. By tomorrow morning, we will likely be under bombardment. They moved now to force us to scramble in the dark, they likely mean to fire by early dawn.”

The Doux’s expression hardened immediately. Poseidippus’s face darkened in much the same way. Neither man indulged in disbelief. They understood the danger at once, and the stillness lasted only a heartbeat before both burst into action.

Whole sections of the camp were redirected while the sun’s last light still clung to the sky. Men cursed, ran, hauled, dragged, and shoved belongings in a hurry. Tent lines were cut. Supply bundles were heaved onto shoulders and carts. Units nearest the river were pulled back and packed inward. The neat geometry that had once given the camp its disciplined shape had to be sacrificed, but was done so without hesitation. Better crowded quarters than risking losing men and equipment.

Theodorus moved through it all like a man chased by the future, forcing speed into every exchange. He saw confusion, irritation, fatigue, but not resistance. The urgency in his voice had stripped all that away. Men worked because they understood, even if only dimly, that whatever was coming at dawn would be worse than a night spent cramped and miserable.

By full dark, everything that could be moved had been moved.

What remained of the camp no longer resembled the clean arrangement it had worn before. Its order had been butchered and redrawn, lines crossing where they should not, tents jammed too close, stores stacked in hurried, inelegant clusters toward the safer interior. It looked wounded already, even before the first shot had fallen.

And by morning, the thunder struck their walls.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Loukas had never dreaded the morning sun as much as he did now. His night had been spent fitfully, restlessly, sleep coming only in thin, frayed scraps that slipped away the moment he reached for them. The screech of out-of-tune trumpets seemed to pierce through the low chants more cruelly than on any previous night.

Not because the Italians were somehow louder now, not because the sentries’ voices were quieter, but because his worst fear had come to pass.

The cannons had climbed to the heavens.

They now sat atop an impossibly raised hill, iron mouths yawning open and pointed straight at the fortifications he had spent over a week reinforcing to the mad specifications of those above him, with heavy logs tied together, propped up with heavy bracing and every trick he knew.

Loukas poured his heart and soul into every job he accepted. Whether it was fashioning a simple three-legged stool or raising a great wooden manor, he applied himself without distinction. That was who he was: a man who refused to accept anything less than perfection as his standard.

But no matter how well he designed a wooden palisade, it could not stand against the might of metal.

He had heard the stories of the foreign thunder that was seizing Europe. Of the iron behemoths that had shattered the city they had once called their capital. The great Theodosian walls had fallen to these weapons, what hope did his hastily erected wooden fort have of standing against them?

They would carve open gaping wounds in his work, splintering logs like kindling, tearing paths for metal-armoured Italians to come pouring through. Then their weak rabble of peasants would be slaughtered like sheep in a pen, trampled and cut down before they could even form a proper line. Loukas saw himself among them, cut down without a second glance.

All his dreams, his ambitions, the greatness he knew lay in his hands would vanish with him.

His mind drifted back, unbidden, to the first time a calloused hand had pressed a rough wooden block into his palm and dared him to make something useful of it. The same hand that had later gripped his own so weakly, fingers shaking, as it lay in its own filth on a straw pallet, waiting for the end.

Loukas rolled off the hay pile and rose.

“Loukas? What are you-?” a bleary-eyed Antonis mumbled from the other side of the shared tent, lifting his head from his bundle of blankets. He had slept, apparently, in blissful ignorance, his ears stuffed full of wool.

Loukas did not slow or bother to answer. He could not stay in the stale, cramped heat of the tent a moment longer.

Outside, the monotone chant of the sentries permeated the air. A thin, trembling barrier set between them and the outer darkness. The voices seemed more strained today than on any day before. Loukas noticed that most, if not all, of the men on the walls were singing despite the orders that less than half of them should. They had come to lean on the prayer they were sending up to the God above, begging for salvation and mercy for whatever was about to come crashing down upon them.

The sight and sound together stole his breath: the soft, delicate pleas of a hundred men rising toward the stars. For a moment, Loukas had the odd, sharp sense of standing in the center of something vast. The stars above were as bright as on the night his uncle had died, pricking through the darkness with the same indifferent fire.

It was then that he had an epiphany.

The sky, for all the trials and terrors of common men, remained untouched, unfazed, uncaring. The moon hung above the camp, framing the scene in a cold, ethereal light.

Loukas felt something stir inside him - a kind of calling, or perhaps simply the need not to be alone in his fear. Moved by an instinct he could not name, he drew breath, and a low hum began to slip from his lips, unbidden, folding itself into the chant that already wrapped the fortress.

There was no sense to what he was doing. He was standing smack in the middle of the camp, waking men who desperately needed what little sleep they could steal, accomplishing nothing that would better their chances come morning.

And yet, in that moment, something about it felt right.

His voice rose almost of its own accord as he took up the cadence of the monastic hum, letting it roll in his chest. He reached for a higher note the chant did not strictly call for, but one that slipped into its gaps and nudged itself through the bass like wood through a small joint, complementing rather than breaking it.

He was alone with God then, a single fragile voice pitched against the crushing void of the night.

Suddenly, another voice climbed up to meet his.

He turned and found Antonis beside him, joining their own private chorus. The man’s eyes were bloodshot, his face drawn and haggard in a way Loukas had not noticed in the dim tent. Loukas realized that Antonis had been lying awake as well, just as unable to sleep through the trumpets as anyone else. Just as scared of what tomorrow would bring as he was.

Their voices echoed against one another, catching and reinforcing, until the sound felt larger than the two of them. Soon, more men wandered out into the open, drawn towards the unlikely concert at the heart of the camp. Their faces were as tired and sleepless as those of the two madmen already singing in the middle of the night.

Without a word exchanged, without even a nod, they too took up the chant. The melody thickened, gained weight and texture, as more harmonies folded into it. For a little while, men forgot their desperation, forgot their fear.

Right then and there, huddled together beneath the indifferent stars, they felt sheltered by something higher than themselves. And even if they were just fools shouting their hopes at an empty sky, for them, in that moment, it was enough.

…

The first rays of sun crept over the high Crimean mountains, thin lines of pale gold that slowly framed the heavy Genoese cannons in all their terrible glory. Standing atop the massive man-made hill, the guns looked like a king’s own instruments of judgment, ready to unleash ruin upon their unruly peasant subjects.

The peasants were not afraid.

By rights, the night watch should have been stumbling back to their tents, taking a well-earned rest after standing through the dark hours. The rest should have been turning to the morning tasks that kept the camp alive - lighting cookfires, hauling water, mending gear. Sergeants should already have been barking at laggards and shoving men towards their duties.

But no one ordered them away from the walls. It was as if every officer present understood, wordlessly, how important it was for the men who had sung all through the night to witness this first shot with their own eyes. To see whether their prayers would be answered or mocked.

They stood packed along the rough wooden frameworks that had been laid atop the earthen mounds heaved up behind the inner palisade, the angled earth serving as a crude ramp towards the top. It was dangerous, foolhardy even, to stand there sighting the cannons so openly. They were placing themselves on a potential line of fire, no matter how slim the chances.

Everyone’s voices were spent and ragged, throats scraped raw by hours of chanting. And still, as they watched the Genoese gunners stoop and fuss around their pieces, the men’s voices rose once more, hoarse and stubborn. The chant rumbled out of them, thinner now but no less heartfelt.

God would hear them. They would not perish here.

The sound that erupted from the enemy lines was enough to nearly deafen them all. An enormous blast tore through the air. An eruption that seemed to rise from the earth itself. Its very noise felt like an attack, a blow that hammered chest and bone before the eye could even track the shot.

The sight of the monstrous stone ball heaving itself into the sky, arcing slowly toward them, shook Loukas to his core. For a heartbeat, he forgot the chant, forgot the men around him. Doubt clawed up his throat, cold and sour.

Their flimsy defenses couldn’t hope to withstand that. No arrangement of earth and timber, no matter how cleverly braced, could stand long against the terrifying, remorseless power of artillery.

The shot hit the wall he was crouched behind dead on. The outer shell of hard timber shattered at the first impact, splinters bursting outward as the cannonball punched through into the packed earth between the two rows of stakes and then… stopped dead in its tracks.

For a heartbeat there was nothing.

No trumpet, no chant, no shouted order. Only the soft hiss of dust and loosened soil pattering back down. The men stood frozen, struggling to grasp what their eyes were telling them. The shot had chewed up the outer facing, gouged a raw wound into the palisade, but the wall itself had not collapsed. It had only… dented.

Then the silence broke.

A cheer of pure, incredulous jubilation tore itself from the gathered soldiers. Cries of victory and praise for God rolled along the line, a wave of triumphant relief that surged through them all. Men clapped one another on the back, some laughing, some weeping openly. For a moment it felt as though they had just won a great battle, rather than merely survived a single shot.

In the midst of the celebration, Loukas stared wide-eyed at the hole in the wall. Just as he had predicted, the timber facing had given way at once, but the structure itself had held, drinking in the cannonball and burying it in the earth between the stakes.

He stood paralysed amid the cheering throng as the realization settled over him.

“The earth,” he whispered.

Antonis, who had been jumping up and down like a madman, broke away from his comrades and came to clap Loukas on the shoulder.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, brow furrowing when he saw that Loukas was not joining the celebration.

Loukas seized Antonis’s forearms, his grip tight, eyes fever-bright. “The earth that dampens the footsteps,” he said, sounding half-delirious.

“What?” Antonis blinked at him, perplexed.

“The earth absorbed the cannonball’s impact far better than stone or timber ever could,” Loukas said, the words tumbling out in a rush. “Our camp is defended not by wood, but by earth.”

The last word left his mouth and he seemed to realize, all at once, what he had just said, and to whom he’d said it to.

Antonis erupted into a booming laugh. “So, wasn’t ‘woodworking a much more important and difficult craft than digging up earth’?” he crowed.

Loukas felt heat creep up his neck, staining his cheeks, but only the faintest blush, as he had absolutely no need to be embarrassed. “Hah! You should see your face, you look like a beetroot!” Antonis went on mercilessly, but Loukas resolutely ignored him.

What mattered was that they were still alive. And while most of the men around them would gladly credit God alone for this small miracle, Loukas knew that the true mastermind was whoever had devised this ingenious way of turning timber and dirt into the surest shield he’d seen against the deadliest weapon of the age.

“The Theodoran palisade has withstood the day’s bombardment, and no significant breach has been achieved as of yet.”

“Preposterous,” Democrito heard one of the Magnifici mutter, the word grating against his already frayed temper. “How could their flimsy shield stand up against our bombards?” He echoed the question that lay on everyone’s mind after the day’s impossible showing. Democrito also did not know how it was possible, but they could not deny the facts in front of them.

“We spent a total of eighteen shots in each of our three heavy bombards over the course of the day, each aiming for their own section of the wall,” Eraldo continued, consulting his notes with tight-lipped care. “That makes fifty-four rounds in all, an average of four and a half shots an hour across the twelve hours of daylight available to us. Of these, fifteen fell short of the intended sections, six struck adjacent stretches of the palisade, and nine overshot entirely to splash into the river beyond.”

“A fortune in gunpowder spent…” another of the merchant nobles muttered under his breath.

Democrito did not let it pass. His mood was too dark, and the report too unsatisfying, for that kind of whining to go unremarked.

“If another person interrupts the report, they will be excused from this and any future war meetings,” Democrito said, cutting cleanly across the rising murmur of voices. “You will be quiet.”

The steely weight of his tone was enough to silence the lot.

“Our harassment of foragers in the southern forest continued,” the officer resumed, a little more stiffly. “We’ve inflicted another ten casualties on the Theodoran side after switching our cavalry’s location. Despite the Theodoran resilience, we believe they are growing tired under the strain of our sleep-deprivation strategy.”

The mood in the Genoese command tent eased, just a fraction, at the first piece of good news they had heard all day.

“But they also report,” the man went on, “that a wagon convoy of supplies from the southern port of Kalamita has arrived to relieve the Theodoran camp. Their stores had been steadily dwindling.”

The words fell into the already tense air like a dropped stone into still water.

Their grip on the southern forest was tenuous at best, and supply convoys could take any number of paths to reach the Theodoran position. With this success, the defenders could likely hold out another two weeks at least.

The news was crushing. Ghazaria was hemorrhaging money: paying for the upkeep of a large mercenary host, firing shot after shot at walls of wood and earth raised by monkeys.

The Bank of St. George had taken over broad swathes of Ghazarian administration precisely because of such financial weakness following the rise of the Turks, and if there was one thing the Bank did not tolerate, it was a ruinous expense for meagre gain. With each passing day, this campaign edged closer to that category.

“How many days until we can break open their fortifications?” Democrito asked, turning to his military officers, his tone brusque.

“Another week at the very least,” replied Baccio, his trusted condottiere general. “As high as three if our accuracy is poor, the enemy tenacious, or the situation changes.”

“So long?” one of the Magnifici blurted.

“Yes,” Baccio said, turning to face him fully. “If it were a simple palisade, we would have breached them today. With their double-layered design, we might have pierced it tomorrow or the day after, but there are additional factors to consider. Reloading the bombards can take up to an hour while the barrels cool, and the Theodorans do not sit idle while we wait. They patch their defenses in the meantime, reinforcing the sections we target. If there is anything the Theodorans excel at, it is earthworks and fortifications, and they certainly have no shortage of materials on hand, unlike they might for a stone fortress.”

Democrito heard snorts at the absurdity of the situation. Dirt and timber were plentiful in quantity of course.

“There is also the matter of the outer palisade, which we must waste half a dozen shots on to actually threaten a frontal assault. And the real concern is none of those things.” Baccio edged forward, his tone menacing and grim. “We need several such breaches to even threaten a possible victory with acceptable losses to my condottieri.” Democrito felt like gnashing his teeth at the cowardly mercenary captain. The mercenary captain had nothing to gain from rushing the assault; he would be paid regardless of how long they took, and was not keen on losing any men.

That was the disadvantage of hiring sellswords, but he knew the folly of trying to negotiate such a thing with the intransigent captain, so he did not even try.

That meant well into the hundreds of rounds from the bombards, maybe upwards of a thousand. That was an investment that would leave a serious dent in the Genoese coffers, an utterly unacceptable expenditure for a hastily erected fortification that was not even the monkeys’ capital. Democrito did not even want to contemplate the amount of powder that Mangup would eat up.

Their own supplies were already running low. They would have to requisition more shot and powder on top of the regular provisions needed to sustain an army of this size. The figures, once so promising, were turning against the merchants with alarming speed.

“There is another thing,” Eraldo added, almost hesitating.

Democrito fixed him with a hard look that told him to get on with it.

“The Theodorans have issued another call to parley.”

Of course they had. They were asking, without saying as much, whether the Genoese were ready to lower their demands now that the military pressure Democrito had intended to use as leverage had gone up in cannon smoke.

He drew a slow breath to steady himself. He was not some indecisive fop to be bounced between moods by every report.

“Answer the call,” he said at last. “We will talk.”