The Escapement

by K. J. Parker

  Siano Bossas, Drapers’ Guild; a closed box of a man, with the biggest feet Psellus had ever seen in his life. “According to our contacts in Jasca, they crossed the Redwater two days ago, which puts them somewhere between Lopa and Boc Polizan.” He paused, well aware that Psellus didn’t have a clue where the Redwater, Lopa or Boc Polizan were. Neither, Psellus suspected, did Siano Bossas.

  Psellus nodded gravely. “Could somebody please go out to the front office and fetch in the map? I had one drawn,” he explained. “There didn’t seem to be one that showed all the places you’ve been telling me about, I suppose they hadn’t been built yet when the specifications for the maps were drawn up, so they couldn’t officially exist. Strictly speaking, I suppose that means I’ve committed an abomination, but never mind. We really ought to know where all these places are, don’t you think?”

  It wasn’t a very good map, by Guild standards. The calligraphy was poor, and it wasn’t even coloured in. But it did show Lopa, Boc Polizan and the Redwater, and if it was drawn to anything like scale…

  “Nine days,” Psellus said, after he’d put down his dividers. “In theory,” he added. “But I don’t suppose they’ll actually be here in nine days, because of lines of supply and things like that. It’d help,” he added mildly, “if we knew where they were getting their food and forage from.” He bent his head and looked at the map. “Does anybody know anything about this countryside here? I mean, is it farmland or moor or heath or what?” He waited for a moment or so, then added, “Someone must know, surely.”

  Apparently, nobody did. Psellus straightened his back and looked round at the empty faces surrounding him. “Fine,” he said. “Now, I’ve ordered a study of military logistics, which I hope will tell us what we need to know about how armies are fed and supplied. What I’d like you to do for me is find out everything you can about the country between there” – he prodded at the map –” and the City. I want to know whether they can feed themselves with what they can find and steal as they go along, or whether they need to carry their supplies in carts from somewhere else. Also, it’d be helpful to know something about the roads, that sort of thing. Also, it’s really no good at all relying on little bits and pieces of news we get from carters and carriers. We need proper scouts to observe their movements and report back. Can someone see to that, please?” No volunteers; he looked round and chose someone at random. “Feria, that can be your job. Now then, what else?”

  Slowly and painfully, like a snail climbing a wall, he led and dragged them through food reserves, materiel procurement, finance, the condition of the City walls, recruitment and basic training; things he’d heard about, mostly, without really knowing what they meant, so that he had to reconstruct them from first principles as he went along. It was like trying to read and understand a book whose pages had all been lost, so that all he had to go on was the list of contents.

  “Arms and munitions production,” he said at last, and he could sense the relief, since finally they’d reached a subject they all understood. “I’d like one of you to be my permanent liaison with the ordnance factory; Galeazo, you know the setup there as well as anybody. Do you think you could get me copies of the production schedules, so we can be sure they’re making the right quantities of the right things. Wall-mounted artillery’s an obvious priority, but we’re also going to have to kit out a large number of infantry in a hurry, as soon as Lanuo here has recruited them for us. You’ll need to talk to the Tailors and Clothiers as well, boots and helmet linings and padded jackets – what’s the word, gambesons; those things you wear under your armour to cushion the blows. I know we used to make them for export, it’s just a matter of getting everything up together so every helmet we issue’s got a lining to go with it. Just common sense, really.”

  As he spoke, he thought: this is hopeless. We don’t know what we’re doing, and they’re all desperate to leave it up to me; only because they’re afraid, but that doesn’t really make it any better. The fact is, we can’t, I can’t fight a war against eight hundred thousand men, any more than I can build a Fifty-Seven clock or a water-mill. We don’t have a specification for a war, and there isn’t enough time to write one.

  The meeting ended and they left, as quickly as possible without being ostentatiously anxious to escape. When they’d gone, Psellus sat for a long time, staring out of the window. He had the best view in the Guildhall: the grounds, with the formal gardens in the middle, surrounded by the cloister gardens, each with its own fountain and arbor. It wasn’t beautiful, in any meaningful sense, but there again, it wasn’t supposed to be.

  Very well, then, he decided. I don’t know about war and I can’t fight eight hundred thousand men. But I know Ziani Vaatzes and I can fight one man, and maybe that’s all I need to do.

  Simuo Catorzes handed in his summary on time. It covered both sides of twelve sheets of charter paper, was copiously annotated with references to the source material, and would probably have been exactly what Psellus wanted if the handwriting had been legible.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Now, could you please take it away and get someone else to copy it out again?”

  Psellus spent an hour reading a report he didn’t understand about proposed reforms of fiscal policy, then left his office, walked down three flights of stairs and several hundred yards of corridor, and eventually found the library.

  He’d never been in there before, of course. No need. Ever since he’d passed the professional examinations and qualified for the clerical grade, he’d spent his life reading, but could still count on his fingers the number of actual books he’d had occasion to open in the course of his work. He stood in the doorway for a moment and stared, like a man on a cloudless night looking up at the stars.

  He’d checked the regulations. Every book acquired by the Copyists for the purposes of publication reverted to the Guildhall library after they’d finished with it. The room – if it was laid down to grass, it would easily graze two milking cows and their calves for a week – was lined with shelves that reached up from floor to ceiling, and every shelf was full. In accordance with Guild policy, every book was the same height, and identically bound, with the title written in tiny lettering at the base of the spine. The only thing like it that Psellus had ever seen was the review of troops, just before the army left for Eremia.

  At the far end, under a long, thin window, was a desk, behind which a small man sat on a tall backless stool. The sunlight glowed on his bald head.

  “Excuse me,” Psellus asked him. “Are you the librarian?”

  The bald man looked at him. “Have you got an appointment?”

  “My name is Lucao Psellus.”

  The librarian’s eyes widened a little. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for…” A book, he nearly said. “I need to see everything you’ve got on the fortification of cities against artillery.”

  The librarian breathed out slowly through his nose. “I’ll have to look in the general catalogue,” he said. “If you’ll bear with me for a moment.”

  He hopped down off his stool like a sparrow and walked quickly to a table on which rested a single enormous book; each page as wide as an arm, as tall as a leg. “There was a clerk in here a day or so ago,” the librarian said. “He was looking for military books.” Something in his tone of voice suggested that military books ranked about equal in his estimation with pornography. “With any luck – ah yes. Case 104, shelf twelve. If you’d care to follow me.”

  Psellus found the click his heels made on the wooden floor embarrassing, and he tried walking on the sides of his feet. It helped, a little. “Case 104,” the librarian announced proudly, like an explorer on a mountaintop. “Shelf twelve.” He looked up, counting under his breath, then put his foot on the bottom shelf, reached up and started to climb, each shelf a rung. The bookcase trembled under his weight.

  “Fortification,” he said, and hung for a moment by his left hand as he picked a book off a shelf, clamped it between his te
eth and clambered down backwards. He wiped a drop of spittle off the cover with his sleeve before handing it over.

  “Thank you,” Psellus said. “Is that all?”

  The librarian looked at him as though he didn’t understand the question. “Was there something else you wanted?” he asked.

  Psellus shook his head. “Is it all right if I take this with me?” he said. “I may need to hold on to it for quite some time.”

  The librarian took a moment or so to reply. “Of course,” he said, in a rather tight voice. “I’ll make a note.”

  For some reason, Psellus couldn’t bring himself to open the book or even look at the spine until he was back in his office; even there, he had to resist an urge to wedge a chair against the door. He cleared space on his desk, then peered at the writing on the white pasted-on label:

  Varus Paterculus

  Psellus frowned. A Vadani name. The book creaked loudly as he opened it and turned to the title page, where he could find the date when it was acquired and copied. A little mental arithmetic. The book was two hundred and seven years old.

  Well, he thought. On the other hand, we have nothing else. He turned to the first page: a dedication, in Mannerist dactylic pentameters. He skipped all that.

  Of the various kinds of artillery; in particular, the various types of engine used by the Perpetual Republic of Mezentia.

  Psellus smiled. Ah, he thought, Specification. Military technology was the one exception to the Republic’s most inflexible rule. Even so, the siege engines (drawn to scale in meticulous detail, with numbered parts) were essentially the same as the ones he’d seen on the walls a week ago, when he’d made a rather self-conscious tour of inspection. Whoever Varus Paterculus was, he had an excellent eye. After scanning a couple of pages, Psellus reluctantly skipped the rest of the chapter, and moved on to:

  Of the various devices whereby a city may be defended from the said engines.

  He tried to read on, but he couldn’t. The diagrams, he assumed, were supposed to represent fortified cities, seen from the air; but they made no sense. On each page was a shape; abstract, symmetrical, perfect. The simplest were like ornate, many-pointed stars. Others were like gears from some extraordinarily sophisticated machine, or blades for a circular saw designed to cut through some desperately resilient material, or frost patterns on a pane of glass. After staring at a dozen or so, Psellus leafed forward until he found text.

  The explanation helped, though not much. The basic theory was that a city under siege needed to be protected against siege engines and sappers. A plain, straight wall meant that the defenders’ engines and archers had a very limited arc in which they could shoot down at the enemy, who would be safe in any event once they reached the foot of the wall. To give the defenders a better field of fire, it was desirable to build projections at regular intervals. The simplest ones were triangular, like the teeth of a saw. These offered opportunities to shoot straight ahead, and also sideways, at attackers venturing into the V-shaped gaps between the projections. Faced with these, however, the attacker would inevitably react by digging trenches, zigzagging across the open ground in front of the city like a mountain path, so that his army could approach the walls in safety. This could be countered by making the shape of the projections more elaborate. Instead of a simple V offering only three directions to shoot in, the defender’s mantlets and ravelins (the terms weren’t explained) should be pentagonal or hexagonal, multifaceted as a jewel, so that wherever the enemy led his trench, one face of the defensive works should always be in line with it and able to shoot down into it. Furthermore, since a determined attacker with plentiful manpower would sooner or later over-run or undermine even the best defence, there should be two, three, or even four concentric rings of fortification, banked up on mantlets and toothed with ravelins so that the inner rings could harass any assault on the outer rings by shooting over the lower defenders’ heads. The best material for building such works was not stone, which shattered under the impact of heavy missiles, but sand and soft earth turfed over and retained inside simple shells of treble-skinned brick; such defences being capable of withstanding intense bombardment without shattering, and also frustrating the sapper, since an attempt at undermining would simply result in a fall of earth that would stop up and smother the sap…

  Psellus closed the book. Sooner or later – sooner, he was very much afraid – he’d have to open it again, and try and wrap his feeble mind around it. But not now. More than anybody else in Mezentia, he flattered himself, he knew his own limitations. If he tried to read any more, the tremendous weight of information would cave in on him and bury him, like the wretched sappers … Well, he said to himself, I asked a question. I can’t really complain about getting an answer, even if it’s so huge it’d take a hundred men a lifetime to understand it. He remembered a story he’d heard when he was a boy, about a tiny doorway in the side of a mountain that led into another world; vast plains and mountains under unlimited skies, all contained inside a little door. Closed, the book was just a flat brown thing; you could put a couple of reports on top of it and bury it completely, so you wouldn’t know it was there. Open, it led to something monstrous and huge; reading it, he thought, would be an undertaking on a par with invading a large and hostile country, and once you ventured inside, there was more than a chance you’d never get out again.

  He stood up, opened his door and called, “Hello.”

  Simuo Catorzes appeared from just out of sight. “What can I… ?”

  “Come in here,” Psellus said. “On the desk, look.”

  Catorzes looked sideways at the spine of the closed book, and said nothing.

  “Did you read that one?”

  No words, just a nod. Then: “I didn’t include it in the epitome.”

  “Oh.” Psellus frowned. “Why not?”

  A slight pause before Catorzes answered. “It’s very old,” he said. “Out of date.”

  “I don’t think so,” Psellus replied mildly. “I think it looks very useful.”

  There was resentment in Catorzes’ eyes, working itself up into hatred. “If you say so,” he said. “I’ll add it to the—”

  Psellus sighed. “No, don’t bother,” he said. “You’ve got enough to do, I’ll look at it myself. But I want you to search through the books of maps; I seem to remember seeing plans of towns and cities – quite old, some of them. I want to know if anybody’s ever actually built a city with all those sticking-out bits.”

  Catorzes smiled; just a hint of malice. “Ravelins,” he said.

  “Exactly, yes. What I’m getting at is, was all this stuff ever real, or is it just a lot of ideas and complicated drawings? That’s the trouble with books,” he added bitterly. “There’s no way of knowing whether what’s in them is valuable practical advice or just someone’s flight of fancy.” He stopped, as a strange thought struck him. “Two hundred years ago,” he said. “Do you know much history?”

  “Me?” Catorzes scowled, as though he’d just been accused of a particularly disgusting crime. “Well, yes, I suppose so. As much as anybody else does.”

  “Ah.” Psellus smiled. “Probably about as much as I do, then. And it’s just occurred to me that I know hardly anything about what things were like two hundred years ago. Maybe there were cities built like the ones in that book, only we don’t know about them because they aren’t there any more. I have an idea that the Republic fought a great many wars a few centuries ago, mopping up the little city states that used to exist hereabouts, until only Eremia and the Vadani and the Cure Doce were left. It may well be that they fortified their cities against our artillery – that’s why there’s pictures of our engines in the book, and details of how they work and what damage they can do.” He thought for a moment, then went on: “In which case it stands to reason that either they didn’t do what it says in the book, or they didn’t do it well enough, or the book’s just plain wrong. I guess you’d have to go out with a sextant and a ream of drawing paper and find the s
hapes in the grass where the old cities used to be. But we haven’t got time for that, obviously.” He looked up and saw that Catorzes was fidgeting. It’s embarrassing, listening to your superiors talking drivel. “See if you can find those maps,” he said. “And ask the Architects’ if they can send me someone who knows about building walls.”

  A look of panic flickered in Catorzes’ eyes, and Psellus felt a pang of sympathy. How would he have liked it, when he’d been a clerk, if his master had given him an order like that? “Excuse me,” Catorzes said slowly, “but they’ll want a bit more than that. I mean, building walls is what they all do, surely…”

  “Building walls quickly.”

  He could sense the relief, verging on joy, that the clerk felt as he finally escaped. He envied it. More than anything in the world, he wanted to change places with him. Perhaps he could trick him – lure him into the office, slam the door, lock it and run away, leaving poor Catorzes to rule the Republic. That wouldn’t work, of course.

  Nine days.

  The Cure Doce ambassador was a small, wiry man with short white hair, enormous hands and a nose like a wedge. As soon as Psellus walked into the room he jumped up, as though the door was a sear that tripped the catch that held him in his seat. He spoke in snips, like a man cutting foil.

  “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” he said. “Time, obviously…”

  Psellus nodded vaguely. “Quite,” he said. “They tell me – please, sit down – they tell me the savages are nine days’ ride from here. Time is therefore very much on my mind at the moment.” He sat down and wondered, as he always did when he had to conduct meetings with important people, what the hell he was supposed to do with his hands. He could fold them in front of him on the table, but that implied a level of briskness that he didn’t really feel capable of. And the only alternative was just to let them hang from his wrists, like coats in a cupboard. “If you have any suggestions to make, I’d be delighted to hear them.”