The Siege of Inca
Just as the cleanup at the fortress was in full swing, an emergency fell over the place.
"What on earth…?"
"Why?"
"Ugh…."
They couldn't figure out why fifty girls were all in foul moods.
Ask, and they wouldn't answer. No—they couldn't answer. Wasn't the reason just too embarrassing? Even the girls had consciences; admitting they were sulking because the soldiers had walked right past them without a single hug on the battlefield was simply beyond them.
"How do we make up?"
"Anyone got an idea?"
"Hmm…."
The girls agonized in much the same way.
"How could he just walk right past like that?"
"Do you know how happy we were to see them?!"
"Right, right!"
"I could've stripped down right there to welcome them!"
"Whoa, isn't that going a bit too far?"
The girls were simply too hurt. No matter how urgent things were, shouldn't he at least have tossed out a warm word or two—'You okay?' or 'Anyone hurt?'—before rushing off?
And so a cold war broke out within the fortress.
Eventually, Lee Yung was summoned before Kim Usam.
"So what's gotten into you lot?"
A dark bruise still bloomed across Usam's face from the beating he'd taken last time.
Yung didn't dare bring that up—it was his own doing, after all—and instead poured out his frustration in answer to the question.
"It's just… I can't figure out why they're angry!"
"Tsk, tsk, tsk."
Usam clicked his tongue. Unmarried men, every time.
"Do you have any idea how much you've soured the mood in this whole fortress?!"
"I'm sorry, sir!"
Usam would have liked to needle Yung a little longer, but they were in a pre-war state right now. The Inca army was still camped out there beyond the walls.
Thud.
"Take this."
"What is it, sir?"
"Take it to the women, say you're sorry, and somehow get it into their mouths."
"Hm?"
What Usam pulled out was a box of chocolate.
The natives here knew about cacao fruit, but they didn't go to the trouble of making proper chocolate from it the way Daehan did.
To melt a woman's heart, first you had to put something sweet in her mouth.
"Will something like this really work?"
"Hm… It's solved most cases so far."
It usually worked—as long as the women didn't come back with 'So what exactly are you sorry for?'
And if that line ever came out, it meant a mistake grave enough to forgive murder. These men hadn't done anything that bad.
"Thank you, sir!"
"See it through properly, now."
"Yes, sir! I'll talk it over with my comrades!"
"Good. Get to it."
Stepping out of the command post, Lee Yung frowned, puzzled. That faintly sweet smell—surely that hadn't been a snack?
Back with his comrades, they opened the box to find it brimming with chocolate.
"So it's chocolate?"
"And he said this will do it?"
"He's a married man—shouldn't he know better than us?"
"Worth a shot."
Knock, knock.
"Who is it?"
The fortress had plenty of soldiers' quarters—built to house four hundred men at a hundred-man standard, in fact.
Even after housing the refugees who'd fled to the fortress, plenty of rooms remained, and some of the soldiers had one all to themselves.
And Lee Yung had come calling at the door of one such room—the one Rari had to herself.
"It's me, Yung."
"What do you want?"
A cold reply, as expected.
"I'm sorry."
"…."
"I truly am. I brought you a present—I'll leave it out here, so open the door and take it. Then get some rest."
Rari's heart had melted long ago, but she couldn't quite bring herself to open the door and step out.
While she stood there, unable to understand her own feelings, Yung set the gift down and was gone.
"Whew…."
She opened the door and carried the gift inside.
"What's this?"
It's called chocolate. They say it makes you happy when you're feeling down. —Yung
"Tch…."
Even as she stroked his short little note, there was still affection in her fingertips.
Crinkle.
"Hm? What's this?"
To a girl who knew cacao fruit but had never heard of chocolate, a dark chunk packed with sugar was suddenly pressed into her hand.
Crunch.
"Mmm~"
The coast here was unexpectedly cool—a cold current ran along the shore, which was exactly why the chocolate hadn't melted.
She bit down, and the sweetness melted away on her tongue almost instantly.
"Gah?"
Before she knew it, a chunk the size of her fist had vanished.
"When did I eat it all?"
Had anyone been watching, they'd have asked if she'd lost her mind devouring it like that. Thankfully, no one was beside her.
"Haah! Haah! It's so good! So this is Yung's heart?"
The logic was dubious at best, but—
"That's right! What did he even do so wrong? He was busy, it happens! Maybe it was my fault! Sob!"
The girls had seemed composed, but the stress of combat had crept up on them unawares and left them all raw and irritable.
With something sweet in her stomach and a bit of warm attention besides, the fear and tension of the battlefield finally began to melt away for Rari.
For reasons she couldn't quite name, she found herself running to Yung's quarters. She'd been there more than once or twice—even if the fortress were ten times bigger, she couldn't have gotten lost.
Thump, thump.
"Haah… haah…."
Rari, breathless from the run, pounded on his door.
"Who is it?"
"Yung! It's me!"
BANG!
The door nearly flew off its hinges at the sound of her voice.
"Rari!"
"Yung!"
The two threw their arms around each other and tumbled inside.
Thud.
The door shut behind them, and whispers of love filled the room.
And it wasn't just them—roughly the same scene was playing out across some fifty barracks in the fortress.
The fortress enjoyed a gloriously bountiful day of debauchery.
While the fortress buzzed with activity, disaster struck the Inca as well.
For a people armed with stone axes and, at best, a smattering of bronze, their first battle against Daehan had been shattering.
Hear the accounts of the dozen-odd survivors out of five hundred, and the enemy was practically an army of gods.
"Is that city truly a city of the gods?"
At some point, people had taken to calling the fortress a city.
"Is that an altar to the gods?"
"It… does look rather like one, my lord."
With its sloping, angled profile, it could pass for an altar at a glance—so they had completely misread it.
"Have we trespassed on the gods' land?"
"Hmm…."
"What do you think?"
"But the gods' punishment never fell upon us, did it?"
Come to think of it, that was true. If it truly were divine wrath, everyone gathered here would have fallen sick or died.
"Then it's a weapon we don't know of?"
"That would seem the likeliest explanation."
"How are we to take that place?"
More than anything else, this was the bitter problem: they had marched south to conquer, and barely a few days into the descent, they'd slammed into a wall.
"Send word back and begin the encirclement!"
When one thinks of a siege, it's easy to picture only the dramatic parts: catapults hurling stones, rams smashing gates, soldiers swarming over the walls.
But the most common tactic, surprisingly, was simply to wait.
Wait until the isolated enemy ran out of food and water and surrendered.
Unless a relief force arrived to break the encirclement, time was on the attacker's side.
"Let's see how long they can hold out."
The messenger he dispatched would deliver news of the situation here and return with more supplies and men.
But there was one thing the Inca didn't know: the water pipes leading into the fortress were buried underground.
The land was so parched and the sun so fierce that exposed pipes would have given everyone a hot shower, so they'd all been buried in the earth.
Quite a bit of time had passed, leaving no trace—unless you were a local, you'd never spot them. The fortress had no shortage of water. If anything, it overflowed.
"Huh? What is that?"
And a few days later, the Inca witnessed an astonishing sight.
"That is supposed to be a ship?"
To an Incan, a "ship" meant a small vessel plying a lake or river—and now they were gaping at one of Daehan's Horned Whales.
"What in the—? Still, there are many mouths in there. They can't hold out long."
He buried his unease and forced himself to be comforted. Wait long enough, and surely the enemy would crawl out and surrender.
"Hm? What are they doing?"
"They seem to be encircling us…."
Truthfully, it was the people inside the fortress who were getting antsy.
They'd come here to fight, and the enemy was just dithering around out there.
"Let's just call it a vacation…."
"Hmm…."
The Inca showed no interest in talking things over, and though their encirclement suggested they planned to do something, their utter silence was unsettling.
"Wow. Aren't those guys suffering something awful, though?"
"How many people do they send for water?"
Several times a day, men filed toward the village spring, jars balanced on their heads, trudging back and forth all day long.
"If we'd just shut the dam's channel, they'd have pulled out ages ago. Kind of a shame."
"Well, it was pretty rushed."
And so a month passed. Then two. Time simply began to trickle by.
Meanwhile, Amaru—who had been consolidating the surrounding territory—was on his way back from the south.
He'd learned from the supply porters that the fortress was under siege.
Two months into the siege, it was the Inca who were reaching their limit.
There was a water channel near the village, and they drew from it—but the distance was so great that supply never kept pace with consumption.
Even the commander himself felt eyes on him whenever he went to wash.
"Why in the world won't they surrender?"
The Inca commander was going out of his mind. Even if there was groundwater down there, he'd reasoned, it couldn't possibly feed everyone inside that sprawling place.
True, they had discovered an enormous lake up in the ring of surrounding mountains—but as far as they could tell, no channel connected it to the fortress, and it was far too distant.
It never even occurred to the Inca that the fortress might be drawing water from underground, fed by that very lake.
"Is it truly a city of the gods, then, that water springs even from this parched land?"
He wracked his brains. Nothing about returning home empty-handed looked like it would end well.
"Are we left with no choice but to attack, no matter the cost…?"
After agonizing over it, he launched the assault the next day.
The first move was to dig the earth at a diagonal and shore it with timber, advancing inch by inch—a covered approach to shield his men from the enemy's projectiles.
"What's that now?"
"Clever, aren't they?"
Looking down from the fortress walls, they could see it: the enemy carving out something that looked for all the world like trenches, creeping steadily closer.
The Inca were building twelve approach corridors on three sides—all but the seaward one. But the pace was painfully slow.
"So they're finally attacking?"
"But when are they planning to actually get here?"
"Get the cannons ready."
"Roger."
A cannon's maximum range was considerable. The effective range only shrank because accurate aiming had its limits—loosely lobbed shells could still find their mark.
And the enemy was digging their trenches at a distance from which rough ranging shots could easily land.
Daehan's soldiers hurried to prepare the cannons for firing.
"Everyone's been given free fire. Just don't go spraying wildly!"
"Yes, sir!"
Clunk.
Beside the men loading the shells stood soldiers who looked a cut sharper than the rest, scribbling calculations on paper.
They were estimating the range and computing firing angles to squeeze out extra accuracy.
"Calculations complete, sir!"
Once the numbers were done, they adjusted the cannons' elevation.
BOOM!
Smoke swallowed the barrels whole—the shells vanished somewhere unseen. Even after the smoke cleared, no one could tell where they'd landed.
"Seriously? Did we even need to calculate? Might as well just fire and hope."
"That's what I was thinking, sir."
"Fine—just stand off a bit and watch where one lands."
Orders were orders, so they fired—but unless you had smokeless powder, watching for impacts wasn't much help.
Apparently, command wasn't always right. For the time being, spotting impacts with the naked eye from clear ground would serve better.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The cannonade rolled on, closer to target practice than battle—and on the far side, the Inca were in hell.
Whiiiiiine—
"Incoming!"
"Aaagh! Get down!"
The terrifying shriek of incoming shells tore through the air above the men digging at the earth.
KRA-BOOM!
"AAARGH!"
This one landed squarely atop an approach corridor, the ground caving in and swallowing several of the men inside whole.
The passage they had bled and sweated to dig crumpled like a sheet of paper and blew apart.
Even so, they were the lucky ones.
KRRR-BOOM.
Here, the luck had run out completely. The shell had dropped into the corridor itself and plowed straight through it.
"Gkkhh…."
"Khhg…."
Dozens of men—bodies mangled, limbs twisted out of true—clung raggedly to what breath remained.
The Inca siege trenches were steadily transforming into a mass grave.