Perspecto urbis situ perterritisque hostibus, quod equitatu, qua maxime parte exercitus confidebant, erant pulsi, adhortatus ad laborem milites circumvallare instituit.

On reconnoitering the situation of the city, finding that the enemy were panic-stricken, because the cavalry in which they placed their chief reliance, were beaten, he encouraged his men to endure the toil, and began to draw a line of circumvallation round Alesia.

The Siege of Harfleur began with an assault against the walls in the dead of night with five thousand picked legionaries, a thousand crossbowmen, and the support of two wyverns. They attacked by escalade, throwing long siege ladders onto the walls while the crossbowmen covered their approach. Saderan wyvern riders dropped baskets of stones from overhead the walls. Legionaries, veterans of a dozen battles, went up the ladders in a mad rush to seize the town in one decisive blow. They attacked with surprise and with decades of experience in storming barbarian fortresses on the Imperial border.

But these were no ordinary barbarians. These barbarians had sentries on watch and a force of men awake, already armored, and ready to react to exactly this sort of surprise assault.

The legionaries seized a section of the wall before any real resistance materialized. Then arrows started falling on them from all around. One of the wyverns took an arrow to the wing, and its rider decided to back off. The other took two arrows before retreating. Saderan crossbowmen suddenly found themselves being shot at from the fortress' towers, and their reload speed and accuracy dropped dramatically. A force of barbarian knights organized a counterattack against the legionaries occupying the wall.

In twenty minutes of fighting, the Saderan veterans were driven off the walls by barbarians covered in steel, screaming, "Seinte George! Seinte George!"

As the legionaries fell back from the fortress, a rain of arrows came down on them courtesy of the barbarian archers. It was inaccurate in the dark, but dozens died regardless. The legionaries were forced to make slow withdrawal with their shields raised, tripping over ditches and corpses as they went. They returned to camp exhausted, demoralized, and fewer in number.

In the morning, the barbarians dumped two hundred Saderan corpses over the wall. Total Saderan casualties numbered about three hundred. No one had any idea what the barbarians had lost.

To Marius Co Pictor, it was the expected outcome. An assault like that was rarely successful, but it was necessary to conduct regardless. Sieges were long, exhausting, and costly. Even with miniscule chances of success, a surprise assault was necessary because if it had succeeded the savings in blood and gold would have been colossal. Thousands could've been spared from death. The amount of human suffering avoided would have been incalculable.

But it did not succeed. So now the true siege began.

Marius sent his engineers to site siege works that would surround the entire fortress. He divided his army into three and put it into three camps: one by the coast to block the river harbor and two on hills on opposite sides of the town. Then he sent foraging parties to secure adequate timber for the camps and teams of legionaries with shovels and picks to help the engineers even out the terrain.

He intended to source most of what he needed for the siege locally. Currently, Saderan supply lines were congested at best and completely unusable at worst. Anything Marius could get from locally was one less thing that needed to be carted hundreds of miles over muddy roads. It was also free and didn't require the Imperial Senate's approval.

Unfortunately, the enemy had already picked over the region.

Nearby villages were empty and completely bereft of supplies. Saderan cavalry had to ride a full day before they found a village to forage from. Somewhat annoyed, Marius drafted orders for food shipments from Italica to supplement what they foraged.

There were also some things which simply couldn't be sourced locally. The Imperial Army used standardized equipment made by licensed smiths, so swords, helmets, breastplates, spearheads, greaves, vambraces, horse tack, and everything else that needed replacement would have to be shipped from the Empire. Marius put in an order for equipment from Sadera to build stockpiles at the camps. Sieges chewed through equipment like goats through grass; he couldn't afford to wait for replacements to arrive in the future.

Likewise he ordered siege engines, these from Italica, or rather the metal parts for siege engines since he could get the timber locally. Marius wanted at least eight good stone-throwing catapults to take down the walls, and a handful of ballistae to back them up. He also asked for students from the Imperial Academy, men who were trained in mathematics, to man the engines when they arrived.

Finally, he put in a request for mages from Rondel to supplement his force. This request he doubted would go through. The Imperial Army had always been distrustful of mages, and the mages of Rondel had always been distrustful of the army. Many commanders viewed magic as a gimmick, useful once but ultimately impractical. Marius agreed to an extent, but in sieges gimmicks were worth substantially more than in field battles. He asked for three mages who had practical experience with magic, not the typical theory focused academics. Barring that, he requested more non-human auxiliaries to use as fodder.

By the time Marius had finished drafting requisition requests, his men had begun work on the new camps, and his cavalry were out bringing in food from the nearest settlements. The coastal camp was coming up nicely with neat rows of tents protected by wooden palisades, earthworks, and ditches. The latrines were in good order, and supply posts had been set up.

And then, a few hours after the work had begun, the barbarians made their first sortie.

They came from the harbor gate, five hundred mounted knights covered in armor, and went immediately for the engineers building the coastal camp. In only minutes, the barbarians closed distance with the camp and descended on a group of engineers who'd begun to site the siegeworks. Dozens were butchered; the rest fled into the partially built camp while the barbarians picked off stragglers. Men gathered to fend them off with shovels, picks, and axes.

Faced with entrenched resistance, the barbarians pivoted and went hunting for work parties outside the camp. First they snapped up fifty legionaries dragging fresh cut trees for the palisade. Then they burned a dozen carts loaded with sharpened stakes. Another thirty legionaries were killed as they were carrying fresh water from the river.

Around this time, Marius was alerted to the situation by the coastal camp. He wanted to organize a response, but of course the barbarians had waited to launch their sortie until after the bulk of Marius's cavalry had ridden off to forage. He hadn't thought to keep a cavalry reserve for a siege.

So Marius cobbled together every man with a horse he could find, mostly staff officers and couriers, then led them to the coastal camp while a column of legionaries and crossbowmen followed close behind to reinforce.

In the time it took to do that, the barbarians had moved to cut down all the men who'd been sent to collect timber from a nearby forest. They finished killing the last man just as Marius's force arrived.

The barbarian knights saw them coming and rallied for a charge.

Marius, not one to back down, formed his officers for a counter charge.

The result was a swirling cavalry melee outside the walls of Harfleur. Marius's riders were not professional cavalrymen, and they clearly received the worst of the encounter But soon the infantry were deploying to support Marius. A block of legionaries maneuvered towards the flank while crossbowmen began loosing bolts.

Whoever led the barbarians wasn't eager to stick around. Their knights beat an orderly withdrawal to Harfleur's gate before the tides could turn against them. Archers on the town walls covered them as they fell back.

Marius, exhausted and uneasy at the enemy's firm resistance, breathed a sigh of relief and dismissed his officer cavalrymen to their duties.

He garrisoned the infantry at the coastal camp to shore up its defense. Then he dispatched men to collect the dead and wounded.

Half an hour later, the barbarians dispatched a sortie. A second sortie. Absurdity. Everyone knew that defenders only sortied once every few days. The defenders would send all their best men at once in an attempt to sting the besiegers then return to their fortress and rest up for a few days before doing it all again. Everyone would get a bit of reprieve in between.

The barbarians went out a second time with a different set of men on fresh horses. They'd waited for the first sortie to finish, gave it some time for the Saderans to disperse, and charged out the same gate.

Marius was two miles away at one of the newly sited hill camps. He was with his shield bearer, Gaius, and an engineer named Falco. The engineer was a treat. He'd never received any formal education, but he'd learned his trade from practical experience in the army and had a knack for it. What he lacked in refinement, he made up for in common sense.

Falco had just been explaining why they needed to redig the latrines further from the tent lines when Gaius pointed and shouted. From the hill camp, they could see the barbarians riding out of Harfleur with swords raised. They were riding straight for the men Marius had sent to collect bodies, strung out and hopelessly far from safety. No one, Marius especially, had thought they'd need an escort.

The barbarians were quick, and in moments there were a hundred more bodies in the soil. A group of water carriers were cut down next.

"Emroy's balls," Marius swore. He'd just dismissed his mounted officers. Recalling them would take a long time, and they were still tired from the fight.

Falco laughed. "These fucks know how to dance, eh?"

Marius gave him a look.

"Eh, I'm just an engineer." He grinned, showing a gap in his front teeth. "You're the one who needs to be doing your job."

Marius didn't manage to organize a response in time. The barbarian knights carved a swathe through the Saderan work parties then fell back once infantry from the coastal camp lumbered out to confront them. Almost a thousand Saderans had died in the two sorties, and most of them had been unarmed legionaries assigned to work details. Marius's men became reluctant to leave camp.

Work slowed.

The next day, Marius had a thousand cavalrymen under the command of Lars Zeno withdrawn from forage duty to form up in front of the harbor gate. They were excellent riders. Lars Zeno was a professional cavalryman and an aristocrat to the bone. He exercised his men every day without fail. What he was doing in the regular army, Marius had no idea. He should've been in one of the Imperial knightly orders.

Lars drilled his men just outside the range of the barbarian archers. His men did complicated maneuvers and fancy riding tricks while men called out taunts to the barbarians.

At the same time, Marius sent teams to collect the bodies from yesterday.

There wasn't any action that day. Both sides knew there were too many of Lars's men for the barbarians to beat in a sortie. But the bodies were recovered and given proper funeral rites by a priest of Emroy and a priestess of Hardy. Little things like that were important. No soldier wanted to risk his life thinking he'd be damned to eternity if he died.

A week into the siege, and Marius was ready to start in earnest. All three camps were completed so now Harfleur was surrounded on all sides. The next step would be to connect the camps with earthworks and palisades so that the town was completely cut off from the outside world.

Falco already had plans drawn out, so Marius put him in charge of the entire effort. He wanted to encircle Harfleur with fortifications then build artillery platforms for siege engines and rain hell on the walls. There'd be no way for the barbarians to escape or receive reinforcements. Once the walls were down, they'd assault the breaches with infantry until the town fell or surrendered.

Like Falco himself, the plan was straightforward, practical, and guaranteed success. Marius approved it without modification.

On day eight of the siege, Falco's engineers began directing legionaries to dig earthen ramparts along the town's perimeter. Lars Zeno was given two thousand cavalrymen to cover the workers from attack. The barbarians didn't dare attempt a sortie.

Instead, the barbarians flooded the valley north of the city.

It was a nasty little trick. A river ran through Harfleur, and the barbarians had a sluice gate that controlled the water's flow. By closing the sluice gate, they flooded the riverbank and ruined a day's worth of digging in that area. But the worst part was that doing so left a swamp of stagnant water which polluted the Saderan water supply and brought swarms of insects to the area. Only a few days after the flooding, Marius's officers started to report a sickness going around the legionaries.

There was little that could be done. Marius ordered water to be carried from further away and for better latrines to be dug.

Day twelve came with news from Marius's fellow legate Caeso and Prince Zorzal. Apparently Caeso had won a stunning victory over the barbarians and annihilated their army, though the credit naturally went to Prince Zorzal.

Caeso had pursued the survivors and now had them under siege at a city called Calais. He had so many prisoners that he had to send them through the Gate to Italica for fear of mutiny. The commoners were to be sold as slaves while the nobles were held for ransom. Interrogations were ongoing to discover as much about this world as possible.

In addition to the official message, there was also a private letter from Caeso himself. He intended to take Calais to establish a base of operations in this world before moving south. However, he feared that Prince Zorzal would become impatient if the siege took too long, and so he requested that Marius take Harfleur as a backup in case Prince Zorzal ordered him away from Calais. He ended by asking Marius to burn the letter and promising he would do the same for any letter sent his way.

Typical Saderan politics.

Two days later, Marius's requisitions started to come in.

Carts of grain arrived from the Imperial countryside along with replacement equipment for his men. Most of the armor was rusted because someone in the supply train had been lazy, but that was easily rectified. Marius had a whole century assigned to scrubbing off rust and coating the armor in linseed oil.

Most importantly, the parts for siege engines came in along with three dozen recent academy graduates who'd been ordered by their headmaster to report for service.

Falco took them in eagerly. The fifteenth day was spent assembling the siege engines, ten catapults and six ballistae, at one of the hill camps. Then they were moved to a siege mound which gave them the elevation necessary to hit the town's walls. Falco assigned a great deal of men to chisel out stones for the machines to throw that would be of equal size and weight. He also set up a quarry, because apparently the engines needed a specific type of stone, which took even more manpower.

By day eighteen, the catapults were ready to lob their first stones.

Everyone gathered to watch Falco direct the engines. A great volley was launched all at once which soared at the walls. Every Saderan cheered. Most stones missed, but two slammed into the walls with audible cracks that could be heard in every camp.

And then the barbarians responded with fire.

A noise like thunder sounded from Harfleur's walls accompanied with flashes of sparks and fire followed by clouds of smoke. In an instant, the siege engines were ripped apart by projectiles moving too fast to track. The wooden frames splintered, killing four of the academy graduates and three of Falco's engineers. Not a single catapult remained standing.

Men rushed to help the wounded. Others went to rescue the remaining ballistae.

Five minutes later, the barbarian devices fired again, and three dozen men were killed in less than a second. Everyone else fled for the safety of earthworks.

A minute later, the barbarians launched a sortie with four hundred mounted knights. They burned the remaining siege engines and returned to the town without any sign of opposition.

The barbarians kept up a slow but consistent barrage for the rest of the day. Their devices pounded Falco's entrenchments with more force than any Saderan engine could hope to produce. Men who thought they were safely out of range were blasted apart by the monstrous things. An entire section of the siege line had to be abandoned because it was too easily targeted by the barbarian devices.

That night, Falco came to Marius and whistled. "Those are some nasty engines they have, eh?" he spat.

"Mhmm," Marius murmured. He was tired. Tired of the barbarians' tricks.

Falco continued, "I got a look at one on the wall, and it's just a tube of iron mounted on a wood frame. No idea how it works. Magic or alchemy probably. One of the locals we picked up calls them gonnes, but he didn't know many details. Apparently they propel an iron ball really fast, kind of like our engines but better."

Marius gave the engineer a blank look. Finally, he asked, "So how do we respond?"

"Four ways I can think of," Falco replied. He ticked them off on his fingers, "Build more engines than they can shoot, start mining the walls, use magic, or sit out here until they starve." With a grim smile, he added, "We don't have enough parts for the first, and we don't have enough experienced miners for the second."

"Right," Marius sighed, "but I haven't got a clue when or if we'll get the mages I requested, and I just received word from Legate Caeso that it's imperative I take this town."

Falco gave a shrug. "You could always have go at the walls with ladders. It'll be a feast for Emroy, but at the end of the day we outnumber the barbarians at least five to one."

Marius rubbed his face and glanced at the distant outline of Harfleur. "How many engines do you need to breach the walls in spite of the gonnes, and how many miners do you need to undermine them?"

Falco looked at the walls thoughtfully, his tongue slightly stuck out. After a moment, he turned back and said, "There's a part of the western wall that's weaker than the rest. I reckon this town was besieged recently and that part of the wall was breached. They've done a hasty job of patching it up; if we concentrate our engines on that part, we'd only need… fifteen catapults. Maybe twenty. Just enough to launch a few stones before they smash our engines apart. We can recover the metal bits after to rebuild and repeat the process. Eventually we'll get a breach."

"And the miners?"

"A few hundred should do it. Better to use slaves since the mortality rate is going to be high."

Marius nodded. "Start whatever preparations you can. I'll get you your engines and your miners."

In the morning, Marius wrote another requisition request ordering the parts for fifteen catapults from Italica and five hundred slaves from the iron mines in the Romalia Mountains. He also requested five thousand fresh legionaries to replace his losses. Meanwhile, Falco spent the morning recovering his destroyed siege engines. All the wood was smashed to bits, but the metal was usable and only a few pieces needed to be bent back into place. They started reassembling them out of range of the barbarian gonnes. That meant more work parties went out to collect timber. Which meant Lars Zeno's cavalry had to cover them from a potential sortie. Which in turn meant there were less foragers out collecting food and supplies. And of course that meant more food needed to be requested from the Italica. Food that required money to buy from Saderan farmers becoming wealthy at the Empire's expense. Money that had to be approved by the Imperial Senate. The Senate which was becoming tired of funding an otherworldly adventure when the Empire's borders were already stretched thin in Falmart.

Put simply, it was costing a lot, politically and militarily, to besiege Harfleur. Every trick or clever maneuver the barbarians used increased that cost exponentially. The Empire could pay the cost, no doubt, but some would naturally wonder if those resources would be better spent elsewhere.

Sieges. A logistician's dream. A politician's nightmare.

By day twenty-one, the lines of contravallation had been completed. Harfleur was now surrounded by a ring of palisades, earthen ramparts, and ditches which connected all three camps and were constantly manned by sentries. It meant that the barbarians could no longer make cavalry sorties to harass Saderan work parties. In turn, Lars Zeno and his cavalry were no longer required to guard the camps and could return to foraging with the rest of the cavalry.

The barbarians made a sortie against the siege lines that night. Two hundred men on foot crossed over to the earthworks in the dark and killed all the sentries on one of the eastern sections before burning the palisades and withdrawing. Fifty legionaries died while not a single barbarian corpse was found.

Marius ordered the sentries doubled. The next night, the barbarians tried the same thing, this time against a section of the northern line. They were spotted and held on the earthworks until reinforcements from one of the hill camps arrived and forced them to retreat. Ten barbarians were killed. Only four legionaries died.

A small victory. But Marius's army was learning, and the noose was getting tighter around the barbarians.

Day twenty-eight brought both mining slaves and new engines from Falmart. The engines had originally been intended for Calais, but Caeso had diverted them to Harfleur when he'd gotten wind of Marius's requests. Marius sent a letter of thanks and assured him that Harfleur would fall before winter.

The slaves were immediately put to work. Falco found where the Saderan siege lines were closest to Harfleur's walls and had them start on a tunnel headed toward the town. It was grueling work, but they were used to it. Two of Falco's engineers oversaw the work, and a century of legionaries kept the slaves from getting any bright ideas.

While the slaves sweated away with shovels and picks, Falco had the rest of his engineers and academy graduates assembling the new engines.

There were nine new engines. Less than the fifteen Marius had requested, but with the eight originals they'd rebuilt, there were seventeen catapults total. That was enough for Falco to give the go ahead on trying to breach the walls.

On the thirty-first day, Falco organized them in three batteries and arrayed them against the west wall. For the past thirteen days, he'd had men dig a protected corridor of earthworks that would allow the catapults to be dragged up close enough to hit the walls without being hit by the enemy gonnes. Once there, they'd be protected by big earthen walls while they lobbed their stones at Harfleur's stone walls.

It wasn't perfect. The catapults would be vulnerable to the gonnes while shooting and the earthen walls had to be constantly rebuilt by men with shovels while under fire from the gonnes. But it was far better than the alternative, so Marius approved it.

Falco's engineers lined up the first shots from their earthen fortress. Their first barrage scored only two hits, but that got a cheer from the men.

Then the barbarians returned fire with their gonnes. The damned devices were more accurate than the catapults, and iron balls started to rain down on the artillery crews. They scored a hit on one of the catapults within the first ten minutes and killed twenty men despite the earthworks. But Falco kept working.

He had men carry the broken engine away to be rebuilt then had fresh crews moved up to replace the dead men. For the rest of the day, his catapults launched stones at the west wall while receiving iron balls from the gonnes. A dozen more engines were smashed by the barbarians so that by the end of the day, Falco was working with only four catapults. Both sides stopped once night fell, because it was too dark to hit anything.

Engineers worked through the night to rebuild the smashed catapults. A fresh supply of timber, ropes, nails, glue, and candles was provided by teams of legionaries. Marius ordered thousands of men to be armed and ready in case of a sortie. Sleep became a luxury.

In the morning, Falco had ten catapults to keep up the barrage. He moved up the ballistae, weaker engines which launched massive bolts rather than stones, with some notion of trying to target the enemy gonnes. If the bolts hit anything, Marius never saw. But once the barbarian engineers knew they were being shot at, their accuracy decreased notably.

The catapults worked continuously through the day. Falco had men working the engines and rebuilding them at the same time. For every two catapults the barbarian gonnes smashed, Falco would have a fresh one ready to move up. It was a gradual war of attrition, and by the end of the day Falco was down to three catapults.

But that was fine, because the next morning he was back up to nine, and Harfleur's west wall was only getting more battered.

Falco kept up the work all day on the thirty-third day and all day on the thirty-fourth. The expenditure in material was incredible. An entire forest was being pruned away to feed his workshops. His quarry was continually expanding, and Lars Zeno had stolen every bit of rope his cavalrymen could find within forty miles. Legionaries began to joke that soon Falco would demand their chest hair be requisitioned as well. Marius, who met with Falco every morning and every night, was sure the engineer had considered it.

The barbarians tried a sortie in the night. Marius's legionaries were ready, and the barbarians were sent packing with a hundred casualties.

The thirty-fifth day was much the same as the last two. Falco sent forward his engines, and the barbarians blew them apart. But every time he did it, he launched a decent number of stones. The wall was starting to come apart.

It was a brutal affair. Every time a catapult was smashed, at least two men died with it. Wooden frames became deadly shrapnel when they splintered upon impact, and some men were unfortunate enough to get hit by the iron balls directly. Falco was bleeding men, valuable men. It wasn't legionaries who bore the danger. It was engineers and mathematicians, educated men with academy training. Things were so bad that Falco had pulled some of his engineers back to train legionaries how to operate the engines and was starting to rotate them in.

His men tossed stones all day on the thirty-sixth day, and they tossed more stones on the thirty-seventh, and on the morning of the thirty-eighth he got his first breach, and by nightfall he had four more breaches.

Marius tripled the watch that night and put a fourth of the army on alert, because if there was ever a time for a sortie it was then. They'd breached the walls in five places, and the barbarians had to do something.

They did nothing.

At dawn, Marius formed up the army to assault the breaches. It wasn't the whole army; a great deal of the legionaries were sick with the bloody flux and others were needed to guard the camps while the assault happened. Still, Marius had ten thousand legionaries ready for the assault. At their head were the picked men of the army and Marius himself.

After all, sharing danger with his men was the best way to gain their loyalty.

Falco didn't agree. He was staying with the engines while the 'poor stupid bastards' attacked the breaches. He refused to allow his engineers to partake in the assault.

Gaius got Marius's armor on while the other officers shouted at their men to get into formation. He was wearing a breastplate, bracers, greaves, and a helmet with a purple feather plume. All iron, all heavy as hell. That was in addition to the oval shield in his left hand and the spatha in his right. Never before had Marius's armor seem so superfluous. Usually weight wasn't a problem, because Marius was always on a horse.

Not today.

The assault was supposed to happen an hour after sunrise, but it didn't. Two officers were late to form up their contingents, and that delayed the assault by twenty minutes. Then one of them discovered another formation was in their assault position, and it took thirty minutes to sort that out. Now there was a commotion as legionaries on the left had to be reordered.

Sometimes it was like that, and there was nothing to be done. Fortunately Marius wasn't counting on surprise being a major factor.

He sighed and watched the walls. They seemed to tower over him.

Interestingly, the breaches seemed empty which seemed like an uncharacteristic oversight for the barbarians. Maybe they were counting on men not being able to climb the breach. There was a ramp of pulverized rock forming the way up, and Marius for one was not looking forward to climbing that through a rain of arrows.

Finally, someone got their head out of their ass, and the rest of the army made it into position. A runner came to inform Marius of that fact.

"All units are ready, sir," the runner announced with a salute.

Marius turned to the runner and snapped, "Tell Prefect Herma that he is the most slovenly commander I have ever seen, and that he'd better do something glorious in the next hour, or his career under my command will be in serious jeopardy."

The runner straightened his back. "Y-Yes, sir. I'll tell him now, sir," he stammered before fleeing.

Marius shook his head. He took one last look at the formation then raised his spatha to the air.

"Let's get this done!" he shouted.

Men cheered. Then they went forward.

It was a race to be the first one in Harfleur. Every man wanted that honor. So every man charged forward, right up the breach, all the way to the top. One rush, no halts and no rest, in forty to fifty pounds of armor.

Almost as soon as they went forward, the barbarians opened up with their gonnes. Each iron ball carved a red streak through the mass of charging men. But that was it. Once fired, the gonnes were too slow to be reloaded in time.

Instead, arrows started to come down on them. The barbarian archers were remarkable, and their bows were more powerful than anything Marius had seen, but it wasn't enough to stop them.

For all that it was terrifying to see an arrow punch six inches through Marius's shield, he was still alive by the end of it. The archers had a difficult time killing men with a lot of armor and big shields. A number of men fell, but most kept going.

Marius wasn't the first one into the breach, but he certainly was there before most men. There was no resistance at the breach. He crested the top and started down into the town. In front of him there were a row of houses with no gaps in between, so he turned right and followed the alley. Everyone else saw Marius's plumed helmet and decided to follow him.

Men were pouring into the town. The archers on the wall could do nothing to stop the surge, and for some reason the breach wasn't guarded by their armored knights.

Marius continued down the alley which seemed to go forever. Despite the frantic rush he always felt in battle, Marius could not help but wonder at what kind of town this was. Why didn't the alley go into a road? Why did none of the houses have a backdoor?

Finally, Marius reached the end of the alley where it culminated in a wall of freshly laid brick about three men high.

This, he realized too late, was not how towns were supposed to be designed. This alley had been walled in very recently. And this had to be a trap.

"Back!" Marius screamed. "It's an ambush!"

Men were just starting to turn around when the first volley of arrows came. These were loosed point blank, only a few yards away, and they went straight through both shields and armor.

Dozens went down. At that range, the barbarian archers could not miss and every arrow had enough force to reach flesh. Marius took an arrow through his back plate which went a finger deep in his shoulder and made him cry out. Each volley slaughtered them. The legionaries were so packed together in their rush to seize the town that as men fell, corpses began to pile onto each other.

Marius was pressed in with his men. The pain in his shoulder was immense. He wanted to vomit, and the sight of his men dying around him made him feel impotent.

But the Imperial Army was the greatest army in the world, both in this one and their own, for good reason. Even as he wanted to curl up and sob, Marius ordered, "Form tortoise!" Men from different units were all mixed together, but the sound of their commander compelled obedience regardless. Legionaries closed into tight ranks even as they were slaughtered in the arrow storm. Shields went up to the front and sides. They rose to cover men from overhead. At such close range, the arrows pierced through them, but the arrows were also slowed by the shields, and men survived as a result.

Marius's men created a moving fortress of shields. The discipline required was something only achievable by Imperial legionaries. Every man proved his worth in that moment.

"Back step!" Marius roared. "Everyone together!"

Step by step, they moved back. Marius was somewhere in the middle. He couldn't raise his shield because of the arrow in his shoulder, but he was covered by other men. Men in the front ranks were getting hit. Arrows went through their shields and into them. Some were stopped by armor, some by flesh. Men gritted their teeth and kept moving. Others died and were replaced by the men behind them.

Marius kept calling the steps like a centurion on parade. Step by step. Across the rubble with barbarian arrows pouring into their shields. The barbarian arrows were made for piercing armor, not cutting flesh, so men survived even with arrows sticking into them.

The pace was painfully slow. He could feel the rubble under his boots and the blood trickling down his back. His sweat had soaked through his undergarments, and he felt a chill as the morning air cooled it. Arrows continued to fall on them. They came from all sides. There were archers on rooftops and the wall. They'd even carved arrow slits into houses. An arrow came through the top of someone else's shield to strike Marius's head, and it was only his helmet that prevented death.

Step by step. The sound of screaming men threatened to drown him out, but he called the orders as well as he could. Marius's voice carried them, one step at a time, out of the city.

When they finally reached the bottom of the rubble ramp, the formation broke apart and men took off running for the safety of the siege lines. Marius made it to the earthworks. Then he collapsed, and two legionaries had to carry him to see a priestess of Ral.

The priestess was very apologetic to him, and Marius couldn't understand why, until she strapped him to a table, pulled the arrow from his shoulder, and used an iron to cauterize his wound as Marius screamed bloody murder. She also knew a little magic, so she put a sterilizing spell on it which somehow hurt just as much.

He was on his feet within the hour. The assault had failed, obviously. Gaius was waiting for him with a cup of wine and a fresh set of clothes which, at the moment, felt like the greatest pleasures in the world.

When Marius finished his wine, he turned to Gaius and asked, "Do you think a white dove means the same thing here as it does in our world?"

"Sir?" Gaius questioned.

"I want to meet with the barbarian commander," Marius explained. "And I'd like a way to signal that we want a peaceful meeting without having a volley sent at our envoy."

"I suppose a dove can't hurt," Gaius offered, shrugging.

"Good." Marius nodded. "Then find me a white dove. I need to know just who it is I'm facing."

Ah, sieges. Underrepresented in media and yet so ripe with potential. I find that they're incredibly fascinating logistical and tactical problems which really deserve more attention.

On another note, I hope readers are enjoying the additional perspective here. One of the most common criticisms I got of Terror Belli, Decus Pacis was that there wasn't really a Saderan perspective. In my defense, I was attempting to keep the perspectives narrowed down to Jacques and Ney with the auxiliaries being included periodically. However, for this story I've decided I want a perspective from every side of the conflict, so there's Perrin for the French, Marius for the Empire, and then King Henry and Nat for the English (who in turn provide different perspectives of class at the time).

Anyways, I hope everyone is enjoying the story thus far. Please keep reviewing if you can; I read all of them and they help immensely.