A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1669 - 1669: A Captured Capital - Part 4

Blackwell watched, his expression neutral. That, naturally, was a countermeasure that they had expected to face. He could only hope that the fire retardant that they had coated all the wood in would do a proper job. But more than that, they had to hope that the bridge reached the moat before the flames could catch.

His men moved slower than he would have liked them to. It gave the enemy far too much time to target them, and see them harassed. Blackwell sent another two bridge teams charging when noticed that, in an attempt to take a little more attention away from the first.

But even if that first team were to speed up, it didn't exactly help them all that much when they came to the main obstacle of their task, which was securing the bridge over the river itself.

From that point, those men were left completely and utterly defenceless. There were shields, in places, throughout that bridge, that the men grasped for, but too many would have made the bridge far too heavy, and a dangerous number were left completely unarmed in full range of the enemy archers – and they still had their job to do.

Such was another use for those shield-bearing reinforcements. With the bridge laid flat on the banks right next to the moat, those bridge men without shields were given permission to flee, and their shield-bearing comrades rushed in after them, to see the bridge pushed over in their place.

It was difficult to outrun an arrow, however, and even if they were set to running, that didn't stop a good many of them from being punched through with arrows as they went.

The shield bearing men pushed, and dragged the bridge the last bit of the way. They'd used a soft wood, less dense than any other, in the hopes of getting it to sit atop the water, and float, rather than sink under its weight, as other woods might have. They relied on the buoyant nature of the wood a great deal to push it that final distance, when they could only have a few men near it at a time.

With a final heave from the men, it made ground, just in time for the first of the fire arrows to hit it, and send all the oil that had been scattered onto it in a great wall of flame.

By now, however, more of Blackwell's bridges were making landfall. The archers were force to split their attention between a good many teams, trying to scatter oil and set them alight as they were – and if there was one thing Blackwell had tried to make sure they did not have a shortage of, it was those bridges.

He saw five secured in place, and sent more teams charging forth with more. Though three were already blossoming with flame, they didn't seem to be disintegrating quite so readily as they would have without a thick fire retardant coat on them. He held to the hope that they might last long enough to be used, but he didn't bet on it.

Along the length of the wall, he set more and more bridges, losing a good few hundred men for his efforts, but that hardly put a scratch in his confidence. To sacrifice men for position was the very fundamental nature of siege warfare. There was no avoiding it.

When there were more than ten bridges down, he started to send teams with ladders forward, keeping an eye on Broadstone's side of the battlefield as he did so.

From the occasional thunderous pounding that he heard, he would have been reassured even without looking that General Broadstone had kept enough of his catapults alive to bully the enemy with. A glance from Blackwell saw that another one had fallen, leaving him with only two – but those were a hard working pair, and they were leaving the Broadstone's wall riddled with bruises and cracks, freeing up Broadstone's own bridge teams from the enemy assault of archers.

The enemy had an equal number of men to them, but there were only so many archers that they could fit on that front wall. Three thousand was what Blackwell estimated their numbers to be. When an army of twenty thousand was set to swarming, they would find it mightily difficult to keep up.

Preparing his ladder teams, Blackwell was forced to acknowledge just how tall those walls were. To assault them directly, and pay the cost of men necessary to do so, with the climbing of ladders amid a storm of oil and arrows – that was always something Blackwell was reluctant to do.

He always looked to try and find another way. He preferred to mount pressure, rather than simply to stick to the tactic that he held in his hand, and bet everything that he had on it. He could feel that pressure boiling now, rising up like the steam of a kettle. He could almost see the moat water bubbling from the heat.

But it was far from enough still. Far from enough. The Pendragon Capital was a veritable fortress. To overcome one wall would not grant them victory. It was not a game of simply spending as many men as he could just to get a foothold atop them. He had two more walls after it to bargain with, and then a keep to break his way inside of. He couldn't afford to mount too serious an injury to the integrity of his arm too early on.

So it was, he called upon his battering rams, and he began an assault on their main gain.

The enemy archers were far too busy by now to give the battering rams the attention that they deserved. They scattered the entrance with oil, just away from the gates, limiting their paths, and they attempted to cover the battering rams themselves in oil, though they had limited success in that too.

The two battering rams ran forward, one after the other, alternating their turns on the gate. Thudding into it with a heave, and a ho, as if they were ringing a giant gong. And for all the damage it did to the gate, it may as well have been a giant gong. The most reward they were given was in the form of the sound. There hardly seemed to be anything else been given to them in the process.