The Escapement

by K. J. Parker

  * From a manufacturer to a prospective customer, listing and commending products

  * From a manufacturer to an existing customer, excusing late delivery

  From a host to a recently departed guest, tactfully requesting return of household objects

  From a bailiff to his master, conveying respectful congratulations on the birth of (a) a son (b) a daughter

  From a friend, concerning a miscarriage

  * From a trader to a carrier, disputing the rebuttal of a claim for breakages

  From a lover; general

  From a prisoner to his judges, beseeching clemency

  From a condemned man, an open letter of (a) repentance (b) defiance

  * From a vendor of dried fruits to the market commissioners, concerning allegations of short measure

  Only the forms marked with a double star had the status of specifications; a single star meant strongly recommended. A triple star meant the form could only be used by a senior member of the Guild in good standing, but there weren’t very many of those. He turned the pages slowly, looking for a phrase or a happy collision of words that would at least get him started.

  (What were you supposed to do, when you were called upon to make something for which no specification existed? It was a question that was regularly set in the ethics papers of Guild professional exams, and it was an open secret that all the possible answers to it were equally wrong; the purpose of the question was to gauge the candidate’s tolerances of error when error was inevitable.)

  Lucao Psellus to Ziani Vaatzes, greetings.

  First, I expect you’d like to know that Ariessa and Moritsa are both well. I have this from your friend Falier, whom I spoke to this morning.

  (That was from Form 207, a parent to his son abroad on behalf of the family business. Not inappropriate, as far as it went.)

  With regard to the present crisis

  The nearest anybody ever came to a correct answer was that no citizen of the Republic would ever place an order for an artefact for which there was no specification (excluding, of course, military equipment reserved for the defence of the City). The order would, therefore, inevitably have come from a foreigner, and the appropriate response would be to persuade him that what he’d asked for didn’t and couldn’t exist, and to encourage him to order the nearest equivalent from the authorised catalogue; failing that, show him the door.

  With regard to the present crisis, I find it impossible to believe that it is your intention to destroy the City and murder your fellow citizens. I appreciate that you may believe you have a grievance against us

  He sighed, and drew a line through the paragraph. Another sheet of paper wasted. Fortunately, paper was made from old rags, boiled, crushed and rolled. The siege could last a hundred years and there’d still be enough rags in the City to make all the paper they needed.

  We do not have to agree on the causes or the right and wrong of the present crisis. I refuse to believe that you want to see the City destroyed and your fellow citizens slaughtered. I prefer to think that there must be something else that you want. Tell me what it is; if I can get or arrange it for you, I will. In return

  He frowned, bit his lip and leafed through the red-bound book until he found what he was looking for.

  In return, we would – scratch that – I would only ask that you use your best endeavours to rectify the present situation, bearing in mind the mutual benefit that must accrue from the cessation of the current

  It was a one-star precedent, which meant he could change it if it was demonstrably necessary. He drew another line.

  In return, stop helping the Vadani and the savages. Better still, do what you did at Civitas Eremiae. I am now in a position to give you assurances you can rely on. You know me. We’ve already worked together. I can guarantee your safety, arrange a full pardon. If you want money, I can arrange that too.

  Again he paused, lifted the pen to draw another line, hesitated and left it alone. He could always come back to it later.

  You may wish to consider other possibilities; for example, the reaction of your present allies should they ever find out who betrayed Civitas Eremiae to us, or who contrived the false evidence against Duke Orsea, which led Duke Valens to have him killed. I understand that Valens is now married to Orsea’s widow; an uncomfortable alliance, I can’t help thinking, and one which might not survive the revelations I’m in a position to make. From what I know of him, I believe Duke Valens is the sort of man who would spare no ingenuity in finding a suitable way to express his feelings towards someone who’d placed him in such an impossible position. There are many ways to die, some of them considerably more distressing than others. (I would also suggest that as soon as you have read this letter, you should burn it. Were it to fall into the hands of your new friends, the consequences are all too easy to imagine.)

  He wasn’t at all happy with that. Too crude; an open threat, practically a challenge to Vaatzes’ proven resourcefulness. Also, there was the very real possibility that the letter might be intercepted. He drew a thin line through the paragraph, to remind him to tinker with it later.

  You may ask yourself why, if it’s in my power to destroy you, I have not already done so. You may believe the answer I’m about to give, or not, as you see fit.

  There are two reasons. First:

  (He liked that way of structuring a proposition. Businesslike, unambiguous, easily grasped. The book recommended highlighting each subsection with an illuminated capital letter, but he knew his own limitations when it came to freehand drawing.)

  First: if I betray you, you will die and my enemies will lose a most useful adviser, but I do not believe they will abandon the siege, or the war. If you can be induced to betray them,

  Back to the book. He liked this phrase so much he’d turned down the corner of the page.

  (You will, I trust, pardon my bluntness; this matter is too important to both of us for me to afford myself the luxury of polite circumlocution.)

  Yes, but would Ziani know what circumlocution meant? He sighed, and crossed it out again.

  If you can be induced to betray them, we stand some kind of chance of beating them, winning the war and saving the City. I say “we”; at some level, I regard you as a potential ally as much as an enemy, which brings me on to my next point.

  He shook his head, and put a line through everything after “City”.

  Second: whether or not you choose to believe it, I would prefer so to arrange matters that you survive this crisis and find some sort of resolution satisfactory to yourself. Being realistic, you must understand that you can never come back to the City; anything else, however, that you may reasonably aspire to is eminently possible, provided you have the goodwill of a powerful friend. I would invite you to consider me in that light. What you have already done in the service of our enemies reveals you to be a man of exceptional abilities. To waste those abilities

  He read what he’d just written; then, slowly, he tore the page across and dropped it on the floor. Then he stooped, picked it up again and screwed it into a ball.

  Time for his fencing lesson. He hadn’t had time to practise the exercises. Most likely the instructor hadn’t expected him to.

  “Today,” the instructor said, “I’d like to explain the theory of time and distance.”

  Psellus felt quietly relieved. He liked theory. He had no trouble understanding it, and it meant he could sit down, rather than floundering about along the chalk line.

  “In fencing” – he was looking past Psellus, over his shoulder, as though addressing an invisible class – “time and distance are so closely related that we can barely tell where one ends and the other begins. Time is distance, and distance is time. Distance matters, because you can’t stab a man if he isn’t there. So, if I have time to take a step back, so your sword can’t reach me, I can always be safe.”

  Psellus nodded eagerly.

  “Distance,” the instructor went on, “in fencing parlance, is the space between two
enemies. Full distance is where neither man can touch the other without moving his feet. If you’re at full distance, he has to take a step forward before he can reach you; and of course, that gives you time to take a step back, which maintains the distance.” He paused. “Are you still with me, or… ?”

  “That’s fine,” Psellus said happily. “Go on.”

  The instructor nodded gravely. “Close distance,” he went on, “is where both men are close enough to strike each other. When you close the distance, he can hit you, but you can hit him too. In fencing, danger is mutual; you need to bear that in mind at all times.”

  “Of course,” Psellus said. He liked the sound of full distance much better, of course.

  “Now then.” The instructor’s voice became brisker. “Suppose you’re at full distance, and you believe your enemy’s about to move towards you. There are three options. You can move back – safe, but it means he’s safe too – or you can stay where you are and try blocking his attack with a defence – what we call a ward – or you can move forward at the same time he does, hoping to block his attack and make an attack of your own simultaneously. That is, of course, a dangerous choice; it can end up with both of you killing the other, for instance, and you’d be surprised how often that happens. But if you can make it work, it’s the best choice of all, because as you close the distance you also close the time. He’s got no time to defend himself or get out of the way, and so you win. We call that an action in single time, as opposed to where he attacks and you retreat, then you attack and he retreats; that’s double time. All right so far?”

  Psellus nodded, but he wasn’t quite sure; the implications were too broad to be assimilated so quickly. He’d have to think about it later, if he could remember it all.

  “For an action in single time,” the instructor went on, and his voice suggested that he was reciting a scripture long since learnt by heart, “we can either simultaneously block and strike, or simultaneously avoid and strike. This is where the two main schools of fencing diverge. In the Eremian school—”

  “I’m sorry,” Psellus interrupted. “What did you call it?”

  “The Eremian school. They have – well, had, I suppose – a long and rich tradition of fencing. The Eremian school” – he’s lost his place, Psellus thought guiltily – “is up and down a straight line, because after all, a line’s the shortest distance between two points, and the shorter the distance, the less time you need. The Vadani school is based on a circle. Basically, you avoid the attack by moving sideways and make your own attack by going forward; so, if you imagine a circle drawn on the ground—”

  “I’m sorry,” Psellus said. “A circle.”

  The instructor looked sad. “Well, strictly speaking, more of a hexagon, or an octagon, even, but a circle’s easier to picture. Imagine the centre of the circle is a point exactly between the tips of the swords of two men at full distance.” He frowned, then added, “It’s much easier if I draw a diagram. If you’ve got some paper…”

  The end of the lesson. Half a dozen sheets of paper, covered in lines, circles, hexagons (Psellus had insisted), some plain, some with arrows to show the direction of the defender’s feet. An insincere promise to review it all before the next lesson and ask about anything he hadn’t understood.

  It had all been perfectly fine until the circle. If you don’t want to get hit, be somewhere else; he’d grasped that just fine (except how can you move an entire city out of the way? You can’t, especially if there’s no time, less than nine days before close distance). He could understand staying put and blocking, which was, after all, what walls were for – walls and bastions and ravelins, and all those bizarre shapes in the two-hundred-year-old book, that could be the wild sketches of a lunatic for all he knew. Staying put, blocking and hitting back all at the same time; he understood that, and they ought to have superiority in artillery, although with Vaatzes out there they couldn’t be sure. But the circle (or, properly speaking, the octagon), the move sideways and forwards in single time… If only, he felt, he could understand that, all his troubles would be over. And the volte – well, he’d been told to forget about the volte, since it was intermediate going on advanced, and they wouldn’t be getting on to it for some time, so it’d only confuse him, but it did illustrate the principles perfectly, so they might as well just touch on it briefly; the volte, where you swing sideways out of the line of attack and watch the enemy walk blithely on to your sword-point, so that his own movement impales him…

  Psellus picked up the diagrams, stacked them neatly, put them on his desk and covered them with a twenty-page report, so he wouldn’t have to see them. The volte, he thought. The volte is the essence of single time. The volte is where you and your enemy co-operate…

  Ziani Vaatzes. He wants to walk into my sword, provided he can get to where he wants to be. Not wants; needs. (It was a moment of revelation, purely intuitive, though he didn’t realise that until later.) Ziani Vaatzes is a man with no choices; a man in single time, at all times. His line is straight, and that means that somehow I have to get my poor muddled head around this business of the circle. Or, properly speaking, octagon.

  The quickest way to a man’s death is through his heart, but if you want to get into his brain…

  The work, they’d confidently told him, would take a year. That had depressed him, before he learned the truth about time and distance.

  He’d sent for the master instructor of the Potters’, and ordered him to build a model of the City out of clay. The master had replied that there was no specification for anything like that, but he’d convinced him that it came under the heading of military engineering, so that was all right.

  And here it was; built to Guild standards, which meant it was beautifully detailed and immaculately glazed (they’d wanted to paint it, too; he’d had to be quite firm. Foliate scroll and acanthus motifs picked out in gold leaf weren’t going to help him beat the savages), it stood on a Pattern Sixteen square beech table in Necessary Evil’s cloister in the Guildhall grounds. Two worried-looking men stood by with buckets of earth dug out of the flowerbeds as the rest of the committee assembled for the briefing.

  Psellus cleared his throat. They’d come to recognise the significance of that mild, sheeplike noise. Bizarrely, they’d come to trust it, too.

  “Well,” he said (how tired he sounded, they said afterwards; too tired to be nervous or scared), “here’s the City.” He paused, briefly reflecting on the absurdity of that statement. “While I think of it, formal vote of thanks to the Potters’ for this fine model.” A quick, low mumble of agreement, and the secretary scribbled something in his book.

  “Now then.” Psellus sighed. The temptation was to gabble, get it all over and done with. He wasn’t used to speaking slowly. All his working life, he’d had to talk fast, to get his information across before someone more important interrupted. “As we all know, our ancestors of blessed memory fortified the City to the highest possible specification. We have the four concentric circles of main walls; the outer wall, which is thirty feet high and five feet thick; the outer curtain, twenty feet and four feet, the inner curtain, likewise, and the citadel, forty feet high and eight feet thick. At the time…” He paused, to let the words soak in. “At the time, the specification was more than adequate to cope with any possible threat the City could ever face from its potential enemies: the Eremians, the Vadani, the Cure Doce, even the savages beyond the desert. Our engineers designed our defences to withstand the methods of direct assault available to such unsophisticated attackers; attempts to batter down the gates, to scale the walls using ladders or primitive towers, and to undermine the walls by tunnelling under them. For obvious reasons” – he paused again – “they didn’t bother to consider an assault by artillery, since only the Republic had the knowledge and capacity to build siege engines, and it was unthinkable that either of those could ever be acquired by an enemy.”

  He looked round. He had their attention.

  “All that,”
he said, “has changed. The abominator Ziani Vaatzes has proved, at Civitas Eremiae, that he can train primitives to build functional artillery; that he can do so, furthermore, in an appallingly short time. I have reason to believe,” he went on, looking over their heads, “that at this moment, the bulk of the savages’ army is at a place called Vassa – you won’t have heard of it; there’s a map in my office if you want to look it up, but it’s about half a day from Civitas Vadanis, it’s the site of the second largest Vadani silver mine, and it’s beside a big river, with a very large forest on the other side. You may find this news comforting, because it means the enemy are far away and in no hurry to come here. I’m afraid I don’t agree.”

  A few of the older committee members were starting to fidget. The traditions of Necessary Evil didn’t include long speeches.

  “Here’s why,” Psellus went on. “Vassa is a silver mine, as I just said. That means it has the best the Vadani have to offer in the way of industrial facilities: furnaces, some established workshops, above all men who have a degree of experience in rudimentary engineering. There are already a number of quite large mills on the river, built to crush ore for smelting, but easily converted by a man of Vaatzes’ abilities to run saws, trip-hammers, anything he wants and can make. The forest is an unlimited source of lumber. Also, according to what we know about the region – very little, of course, a few references in some very old books – silver isn’t the only metal in the ground in those parts. There’s also a very old abandoned iron mine, the Weal Calla. Two hundred years ago, it provided us with a quarter of our second-quality raw iron, until we found a cheaper supply in the old country and stopped buying. The mine was closed down, but it’s still there.”

  They’d stopped fidgeting now.

  “So,” he went on, “at Vassa, Vaatzes has almost everything he needs. He has water power, some plant and machinery, iron, lumber and charcoal, a core of semi-skilled workers and unlimited unskilled labour. With these, he can start building siege engines. In fact,” he said, raising his voice just a little, “we have every reason to believe he’s already doing so. Our scouts – we have scouts now, by the way, thanks to our new best friends, the Cure Doce – tell me that smoke is visible from long distances – our scouts aren’t keen on getting too close – and that road-building parties have been out in all directions, working with rather alarming speed and efficiency, presumably to make it possible for Vaatzes to cart in the food and supplies he needs for the very large number of people he’s gathered there.”