Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

The Siege of Syrn: Part IXX

Dirk lay panting for a moment. Then he rolled over. Arem gave him a hand up. The Thargonite catapults continued to bombard the city, while the Aidarian catapults fired back, usually unsuccessful at hitting anything. Dirk looked around.

The siege towers were still moving forward. Dirk had messengers run to each of the catapults telling them to concentrate on the towers. Then, for the time being, there was nothing to do except sit and wait.

Dirk watched as over the next hour, the catapults demolished two of the siege towers. The other six kept moving forward.

Until now, Dirk had been so concentrated on the towers, he had forgotten to pay attention to the rest of the Thargonite army. Cursing himself for his carelessness, he now saw that the entire army was beginning to move forward.

He looked down again, and now saw that the siege towers were being pulled each by four armored oxen, and were being pushed by several men as they approached the city walls.

They stopped just outside the range of a bow shot. The army then began breaking up into groups. About a quarter of the troops climbed up the siege towers, some stayed down to help push, and some troops stayed back in reserve. After this was set, the full towers began moving forward again.

Dirk gave orders for his archers to try and bring down the oxen and any men that they could. Then he had about three quarters of his troops split up into six divisions, each stayed in line with the siege towers, ready to engage the moment the bridge fell.

As they neared the wall, archers from the top of the siege towers began to fire at the men on the walls.

All this time, the catapults never let up their bombardment.

More writing by this author

Blogs on This Site