by K. J. Parker
As soon as he was through the gate, he knew where he was. That tall square building was the bonded warehouse, where he delivered finished arrowheads for export. The superintendent was a friend of his, sometimes on slow days they drank tea and had a game of chess (but today wasn’t a slow day). He was in Twenty-Fourth Street, junction with Ninth Avenue.
Three blocks down Ninth Avenue was an alley, leading to the back gate of a factory. It was quiet and the walls on either side were high; you could stop there for a piss if you were in a hurry. He contrived to get the horse to turn down it, let it amble halfway down, pulled it up and slid awkwardly off its back. It stood there looking at him as he picked himself up. Nevertheless, he said. “Thanks,” as he walked away.
The factory gate was bolted on the inside, but he managed to jump up, get his stomach on the top of it and reach over to draw back the bolt. The gate swung open, with him on top of it. He slipped down — bad landing — and shut it behind him, trying to remember what they made here. At any rate, he was back on industrial premises, where the rules were rather closer to what he was used to.
He was in the back yard; and all the back yards of all the factories in the world are more or less identical. The pile of rusting iron scrap might be a foot or so to the left or right; the old tar-barrel full of stagnant rainwater might be in the northeast corner rather than the northwest; the chunky, derelict machine overgrown with brambles might be a brake, a punch, a roller or a shear. The important things, however, are always the same. The big shed with the double doors is always the main workshop. The long shed at right angles to it is always the materials store. The kennel wedged in the corner furthest from the gate is always the office. The tiny hutch in the opposite corner is always the latrine, and you can always be sure of finding it in the dark by the smell.
Ziani ducked behind the scrap pile and quickly took his bearings. Ninth Avenue ran due south, so the gate he’d just climbed over faced east. He glanced up at the sky; it was gray and overcast, but a faint glow seeping through the cloud betrayed the sun, told him it was mid-afternoon. In all factories everywhere, in mid-afternoon the materials store is always deserted. He looked round just in case; nobody to be seen. He scuttled across the yard as fast as he could go.
The geometry of stores is another absolute constant. On the racks that ran its length were the mandatory twenty-foot lengths of various sizes and profiles of iron and brass bar, rod, strip, tube, plate and sheet. Above them was the timber, planked and unplanked, rough and planed. Against the back wall stood the barrels and boxes, arranged in order of size; iron rivets (long, medium and short, fifteen different widths), copper rivets, long nails, medium nails, short nails, tacks, pins, split pins, washers; drill bits, taps, dies; mills and reamers, long and short series, in increments of one sixty-fourth of an inch; jigs and forms, dogs and faceplates, punches, calipers, rules, squares, scribers, vee-blocks and belts, tool-boats and gauges, broaches and seventeen different weights of ball-peen hammers. At the far end, against the back wall, stood the big shear, bolted to a massive oak bench; three swage-blocks, a grinding-wheel in its bath, two freestanding leg-vices, a pail of grimy water and a three-hundredweight double-bick anvil on a stump. Every surface was slick with oil and filmed with a coating of black dust.
It was the familiarity of it all that cut into him; he’d worked all his life in places like this, but he’d never looked at them; just as, after a while, a blind man can walk round his house without tripping, because he knows where everything is. All his life Ziani had worked hard, anxious to impress and be promoted, until he’d achieved what he most wanted — foreman of the machine room of the Mezentine state ordnance factory, the greatest honor a working engineer could ever attain this side of heaven. Outside Mezentia there was nothing like this; the Guilds had seen to that. The Eternal Republic had an absolute monopoly on precision engineering; which meant, in practice, that outside the city, in the vast, uncharted world that existed only to buy the products of Mezentine industry, there were no foundries or machine shops, no lathes or mills or shapers or planers or gang-drills or surface-grinders; the pinnacle of the metalworker’s art was a square stub of iron set in a baked earth floor for an anvil, a goatskin bellows and three hammers. That was how the Republic wanted it to be; and, to keep it that way, there was an absolute prohibition on skilled men leaving the city. Not that any Mezentine in his right mind would want to; but wicked kings of distant, barbarous kingdoms had been known to addle men’s minds with vast bribes, luring them away with their heads full of secrets. To deal with such contingencies, the Republic had the Travelers’ Company, whose job it was to track down renegades and kill them, as quickly and efficiently as possible. By their efforts, all those clever heads were returned to the city, usually within the week, with their secrets still in place but without their bodies, to be exhibited on pikes above Travelers’ Arch as a reassurance to all loyal citizens.
Ziani walked over to the anvil and sat down. The more he thought about it, of course, the worse it got. He couldn’t stay in the city — this time tomorrow, they’d be singing out his description in every square, factory and exchange in town — but he couldn’t leave and go somewhere else, because it simply wasn’t possible to leave unless you went out through one of the seven gates. Even supposing he managed it, by growing wings or perfecting an invisibility charm, there was nowhere he could go. Of course, he’d never get across the plains and the marshes alive; if he did, and made it as far as the mountains, and got through one of the heavily guarded passes without being eaten by bears or shot by sentries, a brown-skinned, black-haired Mezentine couldn’t fail to be noticed among the tribes of pale-skinned, yellow-haired savages who lived there. The tribal chiefs knew what happened to anyone foolish enough to harbor renegades. Silly of him; he’d jumped out of check into checkmate, all the while thinking he was getting away.
On the bench beside him he saw a scrap of paper. It was a rough sketch of a mechanism — power source, transmission, crankshaft, flywheel; a few lines and squiggles with a charcoal stub, someone thinking on paper. One glance was enough for him to be able to understand it, as easily as if the squiggles and lines had been letters forming words. Outside the city walls, of course, it’d be meaningless, just hieroglyphics. A mechanism, a machine someone was planning to build in order to achieve an objective. He thought about that. A waterwheel or a treadmill or a windlass turns; that motion is translated into other kinds of motion, circular into linear, horizontal into vertical, by means of artfully shaped components, and when the process is complete one action is turned into something completely different, as if by alchemy. The barbarians, believers in witchcraft and sorcery, never conceived of anything as magical as that.
He thought for a while, lining up components and processes in his mind. Then he slid off the bench, washed his hands and face in the slack-tub and headed across the yard to the office.
As he walked in, a clerk perched on a high stool turned to peer at him.
“Any work going?” Ziani asked.
The clerk looked at him. “Depends on what you can do,” he said.
“Not much. Well, I can fetch and carry, sweep floors and stuff.”
“Guild member?”
Ziani shook his head. “Left school when I was twelve,” he said.
The clerk grinned. “Good answer,” he said. “We’re all right for skilled men, but we can always use another porter.” He shook his head. “Crazy, isn’t it? There’s Guildsmen sat at home idle for want of a place, and the likes of you can walk in off the street and start immediately.”
“Good,” Ziani said. “What’s the pay?”
The clerk frowned. “Don’t push your luck,” he said.
Nice clear directions brought Ziani to the shipping bay. The factory made farm machinery — plows, chain and disk harrows, seed drills — for export to the breadbasket countries in the far south. How they got there, very few people knew or cared; the Mezentines sold them to dealers, who took delivery at Lonazep, on the m
outh of the estuary. Ziani had never been to Lonazep, but he knew it was outside the walls. After five hours lifting things onto carts, he was asked if he fancied volunteering for carriage duty.
The answer to this question, in every factory in the world, is always no. Carriage duty means sitting on the box of a cart bumping along rutted tracks in the savage wilderness outside the city. It pays time and a half, which isn’t nearly enough for the trauma of being Outside; you sleep in a ditch or under the cart, and there are rumored to be spiders whose bite makes your leg swell up like a pumpkin.
“Sure,” Ziani said.
(Because the sentries at the gates would be looking for a Guildsman on his own, not a driver’s mate on a cart in the long, backed-up queue crawling out of town on the north road. When a particularly dangerous and resourceful fugitive — an abominator, say, or a guard-killer — was on the run, they’d been known to pull the covers off every cart and scrabble about in the packing straw in case there was anyone hiding in there, but they never bothered to look at the unskilled men on the box. Guild thinking.)
God bless the city ordinance that kept annoying heavy traffic off the streets during the day. By its blessed virtue, it was dark when the long line of carts rolled out of the factory gate and merged with the foul-tempered glacier inching its way toward the north gate. Heavy rain was the perfect finishing touch. It turned the streets into glue, but as far as Ziani was concerned it was beautiful, because a sentry who has to stand at his post all night quite reasonably prefers to avoid getting soaked to the skin, and accordingly stays in the guardhouse and peers out through the window. As it turned out, they showed willing and made some sort of effort; a cart six places ahead in the line was pulled over, while the sentries climbed about on it and crawled under it with lanterns. They didn’t find anything, of course; and, their point proved, they went back inside in the dry. Ziani guessed the quota was one in ten. Sure enough, looking back over his shoulder once they were through the arch and out the other side, he saw the third cart behind them slow to a halt, and lanterns swinging through the rain.
“You’re new, then,” said the driver next to him. He hadn’t spoken since they left the factory.
“That’s right,” Ziani said. “Actually, this is my first time out of town.”
The driver nodded. “It sucks,” he said. “The people smell and the food’s shit.”
“So I heard,” Ziani said.
“So why’d you volunteer?”
“I don’t know, really,” Ziani replied. “Suppose I always wondered if it’s really as bad as they say.”
“It is.”
“Well, now I know.”
The driver grinned. “Maybe next time you’ll listen when people tell you things.”
A mile out from the north gate the road forked. Half the traffic would stay on the main road, the other half would take the turning that followed the river past the old quarries down to Lonazep. Ziani’s original plan had been to try and get himself on a ship going south, maybe even all the way down to the Gulf, as far from the Eternal Republic as you could go without falling off the edge of the world. Seeing the scrap of paper on the bench in the storeroom had changed all that. If he went south, it’d mean he was never coming back. Instead, he waited till they stopped for the night at Seventh Milestone. The driver crawled under the tarpaulin, pointing out that there was only room for one.
“No problem,” Ziani said. “I’ll be all right under the cart.”
As soon as he was satisfied the driver was asleep, Ziani emerged and started to walk. Geography wasn’t his strong suit, but as soon as the sun came up he’d be able to see the mountains across the plain, due west. Going west meant he’d be away for a while, maybe a very long time, but sooner or later he’d be back.
3
As soon as Duke Orsea realized he’d lost the battle, the war and his country’s only hope of survival, he ordered a general retreat. It was the only sensible thing he’d done all day.
One hour had made all the difference. An hour ago, when he’d led the attack, the world had been a very different place. He’d had an army of twenty-five thousand men, one tenth of the population of the Duchy of Eremia. He had a commanding position, a fully loaded supplies and equipment train, a carefully prepared battle plan, the element of surprise, the love and trust of his people, and hope. Now, as the horns blared and the ragged lines crumpled and dissolved into swarms of running dots, he had the miserable job of getting as many as he could of the fourteen thousand stunned, bewildered and resentful survivors away from the enemy cavalry and back to the relative safety of the mountains. One hour to change the world; not many men could have done such a thorough job. It took a particular genius to destroy one’s life so comprehensively in so short a time.
A captain of archers, unrecognizable from a face-wound, ran past him, shouting something he didn’t catch. More bad news, or just confirmation of what he already knew; or maybe simple abuse; it didn’t greatly matter, because now that he’d given the order, there was precious little he could do about anything. If the soldiers got as far as the thorn-scrub on the edge of the marshes, and if they stopped there and re-formed instead of running blindly into the bog, and if they were still gullible enough to obey his orders after everything he’d let them in for, he might still be relevant. Right now, he was nothing more than a target, and a conspicuous one at that, perched on a stupid white horse and wearing stupid fancy armor.
It hurt him, worse than the blade of the broken-off arrow wedged in his thigh, to turn his back on the dead bodies of his men, scattered on the flat moor like a spoiled child’s toys. Once he reined in his horse, turned and rode away, he acknowledged, he’d be breaking a link between himself and his people that he’d never be able to repair. But that was self-indulgence, he knew. He’d forgone the luxury of guilt when he bent his neck to the bait and tripped the snare. The uttermost mortification; his state of mind, his agonized feelings, didn’t matter anymore. It was his duty to save himself, and thereby reduce the casualty list by one. He nudged the horse with his heels.
The quickest way to the thorn-hedge was across the place where the center of his line had been. His horse was a dainty stepper, neatly avoiding the tumbled bodies, the carelessly discarded weapons that could cut a delicate hoof to the quick. He saw wounded men, some screaming, some dragging themselves along by their hands, some struggling to draw a few more breaths, as though there was any point. He could get off the stupid white horse, load a wounded man into the saddle and take his chances on foot. Possibly, if there’d only been one, he’d have done it. But there wasn’t just one, there were thousands; and that made it impossible, for some reason.
Orsea had seen tragedy before, and death. He’d even seen mess, great open slashed wounds, clogged with mud and dust, where a boar had caught a sluggish huntsman, or a careless forester had misjudged the fall of a tree. He’d been there once when a granary had collapsed with fifteen men inside; he’d been one of the first to scrabble through the smashed beams and fallen stone blocks, and he’d pulled two men out of there with his own hands, saved their lives. He’d done it because he couldn’t do otherwise; he couldn’t turn his back on pain and injury, any more than he could stick his hand in a fire and keep it there. An hour ago, he’d been that kind of man.
A horseman came thundering up behind him. His first thought was that the enemy cavalry was on to him, but the rider slowed and called out his name; his name and his stupid title.
He recognized the voice. “Miel?” he yelled back.
Miel Ducas; he’d never have recognized him. Ten years ago he’d have traded everything he had for Miel Ducas’ face, which seemed to have such an irresistible effect on pretty young girls. Now, though, he couldn’t see Miel’s nose and mouth through a thick splatter of dirt and blood.
“There’s another wing,” Miel was saying; it took Orsea a heartbeat or so to realize he was talking about the battle. “Another wing of fucking cavalry; reserve, like they need it. They’re looping o
ut on the far left, I guess they’re planning on cutting us off from the road. I’ve still got six companies of lancers, but even if we get there in time we won’t hold them long, and they’ll chew us to buggery.”
Orsea sighed. He wanted to shrug his shoulders and ride on — he actually wanted to do that; his own callous indifference shocked him. “Leave it,” he heard himself say. “Those lancers are worth more to us than a regiment of infantry. Keep them out of harm’s way, and get them off the field as quick as you can.”
Miel didn’t answer, just pulled his horse’s head round and stumbled away. Orsea watched him till he was out of sight over the horizon. It’d be nice to think that over there somewhere, screened by the line of stunted thorns, was that other world of an hour ago, and that Miel would arrive there to find the army, pristine and unbutchered, in time to turn them back.
Orsea still wasn’t quite sure what had happened. Last night, camped in the middle of the flat plain, he’d sent out his observers. They started to come back around midnight. The enemy, they said, was more or less where they were supposed to be. At most there were sixteen thousand of them; four thousand cavalry, perched on the wings; between them, ten thousand infantry, and the artillery. The observers knew their trade, what to look for, how to assess numbers by counting camp fires, and as each one reported in, Orsea made a note on his map. Gradually he built up the picture. The units he was most worried about, the Ceftuines and the southern heavy infantry (the whole Mezentine army was made up of foreign mercenaries, apart from the artillery), were camped right in the middle, just as he’d hoped. His plan was to leave them till last; break up the negligible Maderi infantry and light cavalry on either side of the center, forcing the Mezentines to commit their heavy cavalry to a long, grueling charge across the flat, right down the throats of his eight thousand archers. That’d be the end of them, the Bareng heavy dragoons and the lancers. If a tenth of them made it through the arrow-storm, they’d be doing outstandingly well; and then Orsea’s own lancers would take them in the flank, drive them back on their own lines as the wholesale roll-up started. In would come the horse-archers from the extreme ends of the line, shepherding the Mezentines in on their own center, where the Ceftuines would’ve been standing helplessly, watching the world collapse all around them. By the time the fighting reached them, they’d be hemmed in on all sides by their own defeated, outflanked, surrounded comrades. The lancers would close the box, and the grand finale would be a long, one-sided massacre.