And now he was going about things as he should have done from me beginning. The ladders lay in the ditch; after a while, the Videssians set them afire, to be rid of them.

Meanwhile, though, Etzilios' warriors and teams of horses dragged his own stone-throwers, the ones the Makuraners had taught him to make, up to where they would bear on the walls. More men—Maniakes thought them Videssian prisoners, not Kubratoi– carried stones up and piled them beside the engines.

«Knock mem down!» he shouted to his own catapult crews. But at long range, that was not so easy. The Kubratoi had only to hit the wall, a target they could hardly miss. Hitting specific stone-throwers, as the Videssians needed to do, was a different proposition.

Every once in a while, by the curious combination of good shooting and luck so necessary for success in war, a Videssian catapult crew would manage to land a stone square on an enemy engine, wilh results as disastrous for that engine as for a man unfortunately in the path of such a missile. The stricken stone-thrower would go from engine to kindling in the course of a heartbeat, and the Videssian catapult crew would caper and pound one another on the hacks and brag to anyone who listened or, more often, to anyone nearby, listening or not.

And the Kubratoi would make their prisoners haul away the wreckage of the ruined stone-thrower, the said wreckage some-times extending to the men who served the engine and were injured when a piece flying off it smote them. And they would drag up another stone-thrower and go back to pounding away at the walls of Videssos the city.

Up on the walkway of the outer wall, Maniakes felt caught in an unending medium-sized earthquake. Stones crashed against the stonework of the wall, which brought every impact straight to the soles of his boots. The roar of stone striking stone put him in mind of an earthquake's fearsome rumble, too.

But earthquakes, no matter how fearsome they were, stopped in a minute or two. This went on and on, the continuous motion underfoot almost making him seasick. Many of the stones the engines cast bounded away from the walls without effect; the masons who had built those works centuries before knew their business.

Every so often, though, the Kubratoi let fly with a particularly hard stone, or with one hurled particularly hard, or with one that hit in a better spot or at a better angle. Then stone on the face of the wall shattered, too.

«How much pounding can we stand?» Maniakes asked his father. «Haven't the foggiest notion,» the elder Maniakes replied. «Never had to worry about it quite this way before. Tell you what, though– knowing where to find the answers is nearly as good as knowing what they are. Anything Ypsilantes can't tell you about the walls isn't worth knowing.»

«That's true, by the good god,» Maniakes agreed, and summoned his chief engineer.

«We should be able to hold out against pounding like this a good long while, your Majesty,» Ypsilantes said. «Only a few stretches of the wall have a rubble core; most of it is either solid stone all the way through or else double-thick stone over storerooms and kitchens and such.»

«That's what I'd hoped,» the Avtokrator said. «Nice to have hopes come true every now and again.»

«I am pleased to have pleased you, your Majesty,» Ypsilantes said. «And now, if you will please excuse me—» He hurried away on missions more vital than reassuring his sovereign.

After Ypsilantes had left, the elder Maniakes tapped his son on the arm. «Come back to the palaces,» he said. «Get some rest. The city isn't going to fall to pieces while you go to bed, and you're liable to fall to pieces if you don't.»

Maniakes shook his head. «As long as I'm here, the men on the wall will know I'm with them. They'll fight harder.»

«Maybe a little, but not that much,» his father replied. «And I tell you this: if you're the only prop holding the defenders up, then the city will fall. They're fighting for more reasons than just your being here. For one thing, they're good soldiers already, because you've made them into good soldiers over the past few years. And for another, believe me, they like staying alive as much as anyone else does. Now come on.»

He put some roughness into his voice, as he had when Maniakes disobeyed him as a boy. The Avtokrator laughed. «You sound like you'll take a belt to my backside if I don't do what you tell me.» The elder Maniakes looked down at the belt he was wearing. As befitted the Avtokrator's father, he had on a gold one with a fancy jeweled buckle. He undid the buckle, took off the belt, and hefted it speculatively. «I could give you a pretty fair set of welts with this one, son,» he remarked.

«So you could,» Maniakes said. «Well, if that's not lese majesty, to the ice with me if I know what is.» He and his father both laughed. When the elder Maniakes started down from the wall, the Avtokrator followed him. They rode back to the palaces together. All the way there, though, Maniakes heard heavy stones thudding against the wall. He didn't think he'd get much rest.

«A sally, that's what we need,» Rhegorios said. «A sally to scatter some of their archers and put paid to some of their engines. The stone-throwers would do, I suppose, but I'd really like to be rid of those siege towers. That would be something worth doing.»

Maniakes eyed his cousin with amusement. «How did you manage to slide from what we need to I suppose in a couple of sentences there? What you mean is, you feel like going out and fighting Kubratoi and you want me to tell you it's all right.»

Rhegorios gave him a glance respectful and resentful at the same toe. «Anyone would think we'd grown up together, or something like that,» he said. «How can I sneak anything past you? You know me too well. For that matter, how do you sneak anything past my sister? She knows you too well.»

«How do I try to sneak anything past Lysia?» Maniakes said. «Mostly I don't. It doesn't work well, for some reason. But that has nothing to do with whether we ought to sally against the Kubratoi.»

«I suppose not,» his cousin agreed. «But are we just going to sit here and let them pound on us?»

«That was exactly what I had in mind, as a matter of fact,» the Avtokrator said. «Whenever I've got in trouble, all through my reign, I've tried to do too much. I'm not going to do that this time. I'm going to do as little as I can, and let the Kubratoi and Makuraners wear themselves out, banging their heads on our walls. That's why the walls went up in the first place.»

«What kind of battle plan is that?» Rhegorios said indignantly.

«A sensible one?» Maniakes suggested.

«Where's the glory?» Rhegorios demanded. «Where are the heroes parading down Middle Street singing songs of victory?»

«As for the heroes,» Maniakes said, «more of them will be left alive if we play the game cautiously. As for the glory, the Kubratoi and the Makuraners are welcome to it, for all of me. Now wait.» He held up a hand to check his cousin's expostulation. «Whoever wants glory for glory's sake can have it, as far as I'm concerned. If I can win the war by sitting here like a snail pulled back into its shell, I'll do that, and gladly.»

«Cold-blooded way to look at things,» Rhegorios said. Then, after a moment, he admitted, «Your father would tell me the same, though; I will say that much. Which leaves me with only one question: what does a snail do when somebody tries to smash in his shell?»

«That's simple,» Maniakes said. «He twists around and bites him from the inside.» Rhegorios went off, dissatisfied.

Maniakes' attitude toward warfare might well have been more typically Videssian than that of his cousin. Only the Imperial Guards, for instance, had a name and reputation stretching over generations. When the Avtokrator went out to the wall a few days later, then, he was surprised to find a stretch of it defended by a unit of stone-throwers decorated with graffiti proclaiming, the biting snails! don't crack our shells!