The Escapement

by K. J. Parker

  He stopped, drank a sip of water, took a moment to rest his voice. He’d never imagined talking could be so tiring.

  “What this means,” he continued, “is that our enemy isn’t coming here quite yet. I believe that the cavalry squadrons posted nine days away are there simply to scare us; to make us think we have barely any time to prepare ourselves. I’m proposing to test this theory, now that we have the Cure Doce field army at our disposal, but that’s a subject for another day. I believe that Vaatzes is taking his time, because he knows that without artillery, the savages can’t take the City, even though there’s close on a million of them and we have no trained soldiers, because the existing fortifications are such that they can’t mount an effective assault in the time available to them; time which is very closely restricted by their own problems of supply. Put simply: they can’t get enough food here to feed an army big enough to storm the City without artillery. By the same token, they can’t lay a siege, because they’d starve long before we do.

  “With artillery, however, our enemy’s success isn’t just possible, it’s practically certain. We designed the weapons Vaatzes can bring to bear on us. We designed them to trash the sort of walls we’re relying on, in weeks, maybe even days. Not to make too much of a song and dance about it: our walls are two skins of stone holding in an infill of earth and rubble. Smash up the bottom of the outer skin sufficiently, and the weight of the wall, particularly the loose infill, does the rest. Once the walls are breached, of course, we’re done for. We have no trained soldiers to defend a breach. It’d be like punching a hole in a bucket of water.”

  He stopped talking and looked at them all, and for the first time, he didn’t feel in the least intimidated. That in itself was faintly disheartening. All these wise men, but none of them with any more brains than he had.

  “But we have time,” he went on, “time and distance. If I’m right, it’s a race. We have to learn how to fortify against artillery and get the work done before Vaatzes can teach the savages how to build siege engines. It’s a race I think we can win. I believe so, because we already have all the information we need” – he picked up the book and held it so they could see; of course, it could have been any old book, for all they knew – “and the tools, and the manpower. Basically, it’s just digging, carting earth from one place to another and dumping it. It’s not difficult to learn. In fact, I believe that, given time, training and the right incentives, even the members of this committee could manage it.”

  Silence. He made a mental note: no more jokes.

  “Vaatzes, on the other hand, faces a rather greater challenge. We can all dig, and we can all read the book. In what he’s got to do, a huge part of it can only be done by Vaatzes himself. He’s got to teach miners and village-level blacksmiths and carpenters how to be engineers; he’s got to design the machines he needs, probably build the prototypes mostly by himself; he’s got to organise and supervise a workforce of a million men, see to every detail, hold it all in his mind all the time. Also, he’s got supplies to worry about, more so than we do. He has to get food from somewhere, food for his men and hay and fodder for the savages’ herds of livestock. I believe he’ll need to get the silver mine at Vassa working again, on top of everything else he’s doing there, just to pay for what he needs to buy. But even then, he can’t feed his people on silver. He must be planning on trading with the coast, through Lonazep, like us; essentially, shopping in the same market as us, which of course makes him vulnerable. Whatever he’s paying, we’ll have to pay more. That, at least, is one kind of war we understand.

  “So, like I said, we probably have a little time. Now, if you’d care to look closely at the model here, I’ll show you what I have in mind.”

  The men with the buckets, who’d nearly gone to sleep, sprang forward. They dumped their earth in piles, and the two representatives of the Architects’, who’d been sitting quietly at the back, set to with little rakes and trowels, moving the earth around like children playing sandcastles. For a while it was just a silly mess; but then shapes began to form.

  (What we need, Psellus thought as he watched, isn’t engineers so much as gardeners.)

  “This,” he said as he pointed, “is really just a great big bank of earth, all round the City. You’ll have to imagine the equally big hole out here somewhere, which is where we’ll take the earth from. In point of fact, that’ll be our first line of defence, since we’ll divert the Brownwater and the Vane into it and flood it to make a nice wide moat, which ought to make Vaatzes’ life rather more interesting. Now, these wedge-shaped bits sticking out of the bank are called bastions; the idea is to put our own artillery on them, and you’ll see that, because of how they stick out, the engines will be able to shoot in all directions; there won’t be any blind spots or safe areas where sappers can hide while they’re digging under the walls. The great thing about making the bastions out of plain old ordinary earth is that they’ll be soft. Vaatzes’ engines can pound them with rocks and they’ll just sink in, rather than smashing them up, which is what would happen if they were made of stone, like the walls. Obviously, sooner or later a continuous bombardment will shatter the brick and timber frameworks that keep the earth in, or else shake the earth loose; but that’ll take time, which is the rarest and most precious commodity in this whole business. Time is the key, you see. We don’t have to keep them out for ever; only for long enough. We all know the saying, time is money. It’s a lot more than that. Time is distance; time is flour and animal feed and firewood, it’s the patience of Vaatzes’ barbarian allies – they’re nomads, they aren’t used to staying in one place. Time is overflowing latrines and a sudden flood of rain, leading to dysentery and plague; it’s the grain surplus of the faraway places we don’t even know about, where they grow the wheat that’s shipped to Lonazep, and which isn’t infinite.” He paused, smiled a little. “It’s a paradox,” he went on. “Here in the City we make weapons out of steel, the best anywhere, which we don’t know how to use; but what we’ve never realised before is that everything in our lives is really a weapon – the food we eat, the earth we stand on, lumber, bricks, shovels, buckets, carts, horses; and of course time.” And one other thing, he thought but didn’t say; the one thing that’ll win this war for us, if anything can, the deadliest weapon of all. “Now we know we’re not soldiers,” he went on, “because we don’t know a lot about spears and bows and arrows, or drill, or cavalry tactics. So, we can’t expect to fight a war with soldiers and their kind of weapons. So instead we’ll fight with the weapons we do know how to use, or those we can learn about quickly and easily: food, earth, water, money and time. The whole point of the Republic is knowing what to do and doing it well, doing what we know best. That’s why we have the Guilds, and Specification. That’s all we’ve got; we don’t have armies or generals, just as we don’t have dukes and princes and kings. Well; we don’t have them, we don’t need them, we don’t even want them. We can win this war, beat the savages and save the City, just so long as we do what we’re best at: ingenuity, resourcefulness, and plenty of hard, gruelling work. Or,” he added, with a little nod of his head, “we can all give up, wait for the savages to come at us with Vaatzes’ engines, and die. I think it’s a fairly straightforward choice, but what do I know, I’m just a clerk who never wanted this job. I suppose it’s up to you to decide, but you’d better do it quickly, and once you’ve made your decision, you’d better stick to it. Otherwise… well.” He shook his head. “Unless someone else has any ideas. I’d be delighted to hear them.”

  Nobody said anything, of course, and Psellus thought: well, so much for politics. We’ve always had so much of it, we’ve been so busy about it all these years, and it turns out we were wasting our time. Now it’s suddenly turned serious, and they’ll follow any bloody fool, so long as someone else’ll do all the dangerous thinking for them. At any rate, if we do lose, it takes the sting out of it, a bit. After all, if we’re this pathetic when it really matters, maybe we wouldn’t be
such a great loss, after all.

  They were waiting for him to say something.

  “I think that’s all, really,” he said. “I take it nobody’s got anything else to contribute; in which case, we might as well make a start. I’ve taken the liberty of writing up a schedule – we’ll need to alter it as we go along, naturally, at this stage it’s more guesswork than anything, so please don’t feel afraid to say what you think about it. I’ve also given each of you your own specific assignments. I’ll be talking to you about those over the next day or so, after we’ve all had a chance to reflect on what I’ve just told you. First priority, I think, is to organise the workforce, get everybody’s names on a register and assign them to where they’ll be needed. Aniaces, that’ll be your job, you’ll want to talk to the Guilds, they know everybody’s names and where they live. It shouldn’t be too hard really, all the infrastructure’s in place already. Maybe you could see me around ten this evening, once you’ve had a chance to gather your thoughts, and we’ll go through it together. Pazzas, I want you to take charge of the food supply, getting in as much as we can, storage, distribution systems. Oniazes, I’d like you to handle material procurement – speak to Alexicaccus at the Foundrymen’s, Falier at the ordnance factory, Zeuxis at the Carpenters’, you know who to talk to as well as I do. I suggest we meet again the day after tomorrow, when we should all have a clearer idea of what we’re about, and we’ll take it from there.”

  Later, when he was back in his office and alone again, he started to shake. It took a while for it to pass, and then he felt terribly cold, especially in his knees and hands. He thought for a while about Ziani Vaatzes, who’d escaped from the Guildhall by jumping out of a window.

  It’s tempting, he thought, but I’m too old to jump.

  He wasn’t quite sure what happened to the next fortnight. It didn’t seem to have passed, because the enemy were still at Vassa, still only nine days away. Only nine days to go, then, before the end of the world, in single time. The trick, according to the fencing master, was to step a day back for every day forward taken by the enemy. So far, it seemed to be working, but it was making him feel dizzy.

  At some point during those fourteen days, the members of Necessary Evil (his colleagues; dear God, his subordinates) had been busy. Each Guild had produced a register of all its members who were able-bodied and available for work, arranged and subdivided by factory, chapel, ward and lodge; each subdivision had its work assignment; all the assignments had been co-ordinated into a Grand Over-Arching Schedule (either a work of genius or the biggest joke ever perpetrated, but only time would tell); the necessary tools and materials for each job at each stage of the Schedule had been sourced, located and batched for delivery. From the gatehouse towers, you could see a forest of sticks standing up out of the plain in front of the City like some bizarre failed crop, each stick flying a little coloured pennant, each colour having its own secret significance to the surveyors’ branch of the Architects’, and between the taller, thicker sticks were strung taut lines of red and blue twine, marking sites of trenches, foundations, bastions, supporting walls, so that the observer from the tower might easily believe he was looking at a technical drawing, a lifesize blueprint. So far, of course, nobody had actually sunk a spade or filled a bucket. But there was still time.

  His colleagues, subordinates, subjects had done all that; Psellus, by contrast, had spent those illusory fourteen days doing very little, at least by his own reckoning. He’d met people – the Cure Doce ambassador, scouts, the heads of departments – all of whom had told him in great detail what was being done, by other people. He’d listened and soaked in the information, until he felt quite bloated with details; but he hadn’t actually done anything.

  Instead, he’d sat and wrestled with the book. The text was bad enough; he’d finally figured out what palisades, cuvettes, cordons, scarp and counterscarp revetments, embrasures and escalades were, but he still couldn’t get his poor head around counterforts or ecluses. It was the pictures, though, that haunted him. The shapes were just shapes; abstracts, symmetrical patterns of lines, essays in the geometry of violence, manmade and unnatural – except that they kept reminding him of things, and that was what was so disturbing. The bastion with complex ravelins assailed by saps and defended by countermines, for example, put him in mind of the head of an insect, with multiple eyes and projecting feelers, while other formations and patterns were stars or snowflakes, perfect but encumbered with strange and malevolent growths swelling out of them, grotesque and disgusting in a way that no picture of people or animals could ever be. At times, he caught himself feeling afraid of the book; savages and primitives believed in books that could suck your soul out through your eyes as you read them, books that could wrap their pages round your head and swallow you, words that crawled into your brain like tapeworms. Of course, he wasn’t a primitive or a savage.

  Saps; they, he was beginning to understand, were the real danger. If everything in the Grand Over-Arching Schedule actually happened, the City would be safe from Vaatzes’ stone-throwers (not for ever, but for long enough; query, however, whether time fences in a straight line or a circle); and all the enemy had to do in order to be safe from the City’s engines was to fall back a hundred yards or so. Artillery, then, was a negatable threat, and once both sides had figured that out (he had a depressing feeling they wouldn’t take his word for it and save themselves the effort), the war would go underground and start burrowing, like maggots.

  The book had plenty to say about sapping; about mines, countermines, camouflets, petards, galleries, stanchions and globes of compression. The basic idea was very simple: dig a tunnel under a wall. To keep it from caving in while you’re building it, you need to hold up the roof with wooden props; when you’ve finished, you pack the end of the tunnel, directly under the foundations of the wall, with straw, brushwood and scrap lumber, all thoroughly soaked in lamp oil. Strike a spark and run; the fire burns through the props, down comes the roof, and the ensuing subsidence topples the wall.

  Try that with a solid bank of earth, of course, and you achieved very little – a few dimples, maybe a crater, but nothing you could send an army into and hope ever to see it again. The book was ruthlessly straightforward when it came to proposing a countermeasure: first, storm the bastion. That was the point at which Psellus closed the book. He wasn’t quite sure why, or at least he couldn’t reduce it to words, but it was something to do with the thought of the unspeakable degree of effort involved – first storm the bastion, then start digging tunnels, where necessary chipping through any solid rock that might be encountered in the process. The thought of it – the work, the slaughter, the sheer weight of dirt to be shovelled into baskets in the dark and carried – made him feel sick. He looked at the pictures and saw the heads of insects; he read about sapping, and thought about ants. It was all too inhuman.

  (Also, pointless; but it would have to be done, even though it wouldn’t win the war. Only a letter could do that.)

  Well, there was still time. He could force himself to read the rest of the book later, when it became unavoidable. In the meantime, he submerged himself with an enthusiasm little short of joy in banal, tedious administration, like a fish thrown back into the water by an angler. His clerks glared at him behind his back, of course. They felt that his insistence on doing routine paperwork that should have been their job was intended as a criticism. He felt bad about that; but he needed the columns of figures to soak up the diagrams that lingered in his head, like sawdust on spilled blood.

  From time to time he wasted a sheet of paper trying to write the letter. The clerks learned to stay out of his way on such occasions.

  Iosao Phryzatses, chief scout. As the door opened, he was expecting to see a spare, weatherbeaten man in worn buckskin and knee-length boots. Instead…

  “Thank you for finding the time to see me,” he heard himself say. “I’m sure you’re very busy at the moment.”

  The little round man frowned, very s
lightly. “No, not particularly,” he said, and stood perfectly still next to the empty chair, until Psellus remembered his manners and asked him to sit. He sat down – expertly, there was no other word for it. The slightest of movements, and he’d gone from a man standing to a man sitting. Psellus was tempted to make him stand up, just so he could watch him do it again.

  “Now then,” he said, trying to sound brisk. “Your latest report.”

  Phryzatses nodded, another tiny movement, then went back to being perfectly still. He was dressed in ordinary City clothes, plain but brand new and of the best quality of cloth allowed for that particular cut under Specification. His shoes glowed.

  “The situation at Vassa,” Psellus said. “I don’t suppose you remembered to bring—”

  Before he had a chance to finish the sentence, Phryzatses’ rather chubby hand vanished inside his jacket and came out with a slim brass tube, which he tapped smartly on the edge of the desk. Out of one end popped the edge of a roll of paper. He teased it out with his precisely trimmed fingernails, unrolled it and smoothed it out with the side of his hand. “The map,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Psellus reached for it, glanced at it. He had trouble with maps.

  “That’s north.” Phryzatses touched one edge of the paper with his fingertip.

  “Ah, yes.”

  The whole idea of maps was somehow disconcerting; because how could you possibly draw one? You’d have to breed giant eagles whose backs you could ride on, to get up high enough to see. Otherwise, he couldn’t figure out how it was possible. It’d be like drawing with your eyes shut (though he believed that was possible, too).