In that sense, Vera-Sylvie stood out considerably. For one thing, she was the only person wearing a dress. It would’ve been harder not to notice her.
Apparently, the soldiers had taken a rather dim view of her accompanying us ever since they’d spotted her during the march. There had even been a rumor going around that the young emperor had brought his lover along. I mean, come on, guys, I’m still a kid!
The reason I’d used past tense there, though, was because her reputation had seen a significant improvement as of a short while ago. After all, it was kind of hard to look down on a person who had single-handedly levitated an entire cannon to the battlefield.
If we were talking about carvers—the most commonly used type of siege cannon—then it wasn’t all that hard to move them around. The nonstandard size of the flocks, however, necessitated at least two strong adults to push their carts, and even then their weight would cause the carts’ wheels to sink into and get caught in the ground. That was why there had been meticulous attention paid to packing the earth below the flocks’ gun platform at Chelán Hill as hard as possible.
Since leaving a cannon on a cart would cause it to go flying back from the recoil when fired, it needed to be off-loaded before usage. Generally speaking, this meant creating a dirt mound, which the cannon would lie against diagonally, stabilizing it—this was the origin of the term “gun platform.”
Recent developments in cannon technology had produced models with their own wheeled gun carriages that could be fired while still mounted, so “gun platform” also referred to any location where a cluster of cannons were positioned. But bracing smaller cannons on wheels was one thing; trying the same with flock cannons was another. The excessive recoil of the latter would blow away their braces wholesale, which was one of the reasons they were so unpopular among career soldiers.
Either way, it did nothing to tarnish my appreciation for the wheel; it truly was one of mankind’s greatest inventions. After all, it made the work of moving a flock cannon the work of a mere two people. Well, four, if you wanted to do anything more than nudge it along at a crawl. And, yeah, the wheels often broke under the weight. But still.
Vera-Sylvie, though, had simply floated it all this way without breaking a sweat, no transport cart needed. I’d seen for myself how the look in the soldiers’ eyes had turned from disdain to awe—or even, in some cases, fear.