Book 11: Chapter 20
“Your Majesty, these are the mortars you needed.”
The two mortars I waited for finally arrived. The anthropoids didn’t harass our transportation team or anything. The anthropoid citizens favoured us more, so we didn’t have to deal with any guerrilla attack teams. We had Leah to thank for that. The anthropoids did consider the Queen the highest ranked leader as Leah stated.
Eight horses pulled the two mortars. The horses all went down on the ground and panted once they delivered it. I dare say that they were the largest mortars I’d ever seen. Before metal work improved, the only option I had was to make it really big and the walls thick. Otherwise, it would blow itself up.
The two mortars looked very imposing. The barrel was large enough for me to easily be inserted into it. The two massive beasts sitting in my camp resembled two fearsome large beasts looking to gnaw into a man.
We made a total of two mortars. I didn’t need any more of these irregularly shaped weapons anyway. I only made six cannonballs. Six shots were enough. They didn’t need to carpet bomb an area. I planned to make the mortars exhibition items once the war was over. Consider it a war memorial item, I guess.
The artillerymen veterans with an abundance of experience surrounded the mortars to calibrate adjustments, calculate trajectory and time. All six shots were explosive shots. The explosives of the current era weren’t the type that exploded on impact. Instead, they utilised a fuse. Once the fuse was out, it’d explode. Therefore, the artillerymen had to calculate the timing correctly before using that sort of explosive.
It took several people just to load the cannonball in. There was a big crowd nearby the two huge mortars. I stood on a tall slope at the rear and watched the soldiers busy themselves around the two mortars.
The two huge mortars were placed in the centre of the camp. We could shoot all of the Imperial City, including the tall mountain located to the rear, from our location.
My order was to first test the power of the mortars on the massive windmill.