by K. J. Parker
“Excellent. In that case, the subject is closed.” He shivered a little, pleased to have got that out of the way. “Now,” he went on, “we shall discuss your progress towards the next stage of the siege.”
Twenty-five thousand men, with shovels.
The watchmen on the embankment saw them a long way off, and sent frantic messages to Secretary Psellus at the Guildhall. A vast army, they said, a cloud of dust that blotted out the sun. Anticipating the order, the colonel of the hastily formed first Mezentine cavalry commanded his terrified men to muster and saddle up. No order came.
Secretary Psellus came instead, puffing hoarsely as he climbed the steps up on to the top of the embankment (or glacis, as he called it; he used a lot of weird-sounding words, which people said he got out of old books). He didn’t seem particularly concerned. “It’s all right,” he told them, after ten minutes of silent peering into the dust. “They aren’t going to attack. There’s not enough of them, and they haven’t brought heavy equipment. Could somebody tell Colonel Sporades to let his men get off their horses, please? They’ll only become restive if they’re kept standing about like that.”
Psellus was right. The column halted about fifty yards outside the extreme range of the heaviest trebuchets. They appeared to be doing something, but nobody could make out what. After an hour of agonising suspense, the watch officer sent out three observers, mounted on the fastest horses in the City. They walked out and galloped back.
“They look like they’re digging a trench,” was all they had to say for themselves. “Thousands of them, with picks and shovels, and there’s a bunch of them unloading timbers off wagons.”
The watchers on the embankment relaxed a little. The enemy had come, but they weren’t going to attack; instead, they were digging a trench – a latrine, perhaps, or graves for their own dead, victims of a highly contageous outbreak of plague (wouldn’t that be nice), or maybe they were planning on planting some climbing beans. Like it mattered. They weren’t going to attack. Nothing to worry about.
But Psellus was worried, though he tried, hard and successfully, not to show it. He knew exactly what they were doing. The trench they were digging would run parallel with the embankment frontage for something like a hundred yards; it would be six feet deep by three feet wide. By the time they’d finished it, the watchers on the embankment would have lost interest, and so wouldn’t notice when the line of the trench began to change, creeping gradually slantwise, approaching the embankment, one yard forward for every twenty leading away. Then it would stop and angle sharply back – thirty degrees would be best practice, though it depended on how stiff and rocky the ground was – and begin its slow zigzag approach to the City: forty yards, an angled turn, another forty yards, and so on. Being mostly side-on, the trench would be sheltered from artillery fire (if it came on straight, at right angles, an expert artilleryman could shoot down into it), and the spoil would always be heaped on the side facing the City, to give additional cover. He’d seen it all, reduced to neatly ruled lines in diagrams, in the old book. Once the trench came within easy shot of the engines on the embankment, he’d start to see pavises (tall, broad wicker shields, mounted on wheeled carriages) put out to guard the sappers from arrows and catapult shot lobbed up high. Once the pavises appeared, of course, they’d begin their own artillery bombardment; its purpose not to kill men or damage machines or structures, but simply to keep heads down and rule out any risk of a sortie from the gates to force the trenches and kill the sappers. In all likelihood, if his enemy was proposing to do the job properly, when this trench was halfway another one would start off, aimed at a different point on the embankment; one of them would be a blind, to leave him no choice but to divide his forces. The other would be the real thing, and when it eventually sidled up to the base of the mound…
He didn’t want to think about that. From the forward point of the leading bastion he could see nothing but small, teeming shapes, the very occasional flash of light on a shovel blade fresh from the forge. According to the old book, an acceptable rate of progress would be a hundred yards every twenty-four hours; so, with a scale map, an abacus and a protractor, it’d be an easy enough job to calculate exactly how long it would be before the trench reached the flooded ditch at the foot of the embankment, on which, he knew, his people were placing so much fragile hope. They hadn’t read the book, of course. With cruel impartiality, the book told you how to build an uncrossable moat in chapter six, and how to cross it with minimal casualties in chapter nine. In chapter ten it gave instructions on how to disrupt the assault on the moat, to the utter discomfiture of the enemy – but not if they’d read chapter thirteen, countermeasures against disruption. So detailed, so clearly written, so authoritative; you could read the whole history of the siege there, from the first spade stuck in the ground to the collapse of the last undermined wall. You could figure out a precise schedule, with estimates of killed and wounded accurate to within five per cent plus or minus. Simply by reading to the end of the book, you’d know what was going to happen. Curious, that: a hundred years before Ziani Vaatzes was born, before Boioannes decided that the best way to advance his career was a war, before the minor clerk Psellus took the decision to invade Eremia and slaughter its people, the book had already foreseen and planned it all. The schematics, the working drawings, every detail of the design, the exact specifications of the death of the City of Mezentia had been there, pressed like dried flowers between the book’s covers, all along.
Well, Psellus thought, I’ve been condemned to death by a man writing a book a century before I was born, and according to the specification there’s nothing at all I can do about it. But (he smiled to himself) I’ve got something he never anticipated, which might yet render all this digging and building and piling up earth and burning completely irrelevant. I’ve got Ziani Vaatzes.
“Any idea what all this is in aid of?” Someone was talking to him. Oachem Phrazus, superintendent of mid-range artillery; an idiot, but too noisy not to be put in charge of something. The book-writer would’ve known all about him. Psellus pulled a grave face, and shrugged.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.
“Well, if it keeps them happy and out of mischief,” Phrazus replied indulgently. “They can dig their little molehills all they like. Soon as they come in range of my Type Seventeens, they’ll wish they’d never been born.”
(No; because by then they’ll be shovelling the earth from the trench into stout wicker baskets, called gabions, and stacking them five deep and three high on the lip of the trench. Your catapult stones will smash the baskets and spray dirt and gravel all over the place, but you’ll be wasting your time. I know this, because to all intents and purposes it’s already happened.)
“Let’s hope so,” Psellus said cheerfully. “Would you mind very much staying here for a while and keeping an eye on things? There’s a job I’ve got to do back at the Guildhall. If anything important happens, send someone to let me know.”
Phrazus nodded, looking over Psellus’ shoulder at the swarming black dots in the distance. “Of course,” he said. “But nothing’s going to happen, I can promise you that. My guess is, they’re building a bunker. Somewhere safe where their leaders can cower once we start bombarding the hell out of them.”
Psellus smiled and left him. A covered chair was waiting to carry him back to the Guildhall, but he waved it on, preferring to walk. One good thing: he’d had more exercise in the time since he’d succeeded Boioannes than in the whole of the rest of his adult life. By the time the savages killed him, he ought to be splendidly fit and healthy.
“Falier’s wife,” he said to the Guildhall guard captain. “Which cell is she in?”
The captain gave him a number; a specified cell in a particular row in a block on the third floor of the west wing. “I’ll have her brought up to your office, shall I?” he said.
Psellus shook his head. “I think I’d rather go to her,” he said. “Thank you for the offer, thou
gh.”
The captain looked surprised, but he couldn’t be expected to understand. The reproachful look on his face said, why would anybody want to go visiting in a dirty, smelly prison? But, of course, he had no choice.
It was the first time he’d been in a place like this, and naturally he had no idea what it was like. He’d anticipated darkness, filth, damp, stench, rotting straw, the white leach of saltpetre streaking the walls, the olive-pit shapes of rat droppings. Instead it was well-lit, savagely clean, not a speck of dust or a cobweb anywhere. Of course. In real terms, the jailers were prisoners too. They swept and dusted and scrubbed because there was nothing else to do in their warehouse crammed with toxic human waste. That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail (but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place? Like a siege).
The corridor his directions led him to had been whitewashed recently. It glared at him, and the sound of his heels on the brick floor was embarrassingly loud. The duty warder asked him if it was his first visit to the cells, as though he was here to cut a tape and open something. It took three keys to open the steel door.
She looked up as he came in. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
“Me,” he confirmed. “Is it all right if I sit down?”
Whitewashed brick. Twelve feet by eight. A brick ledge stuck out of the wall, covered by a thin mattress. A water jug sat on the floor. That was it. All scrupulously clean, of course.
She sat down on the bed. “What on?” she said.
He conceded the first scratch. “The floor, I suppose,” he said, and made the effort of folding his legs and back, settling himself as best he could into the corner by the door. “Are you warm enough in here?” he asked without thinking.
She nodded. “It’s always the same,” she said, and he thought: well, it would be. Just cold enough to be mildly uncomfortable, if you’re wearing a plain white cotton bag with holes for your head and arms, and you have no blanket, but not cold enough to do you any harm. Everything always the same. Nothing, no defence, standing between you and infinite time.
“I expect you’re wondering why you’re here,” he said.
“No,” she replied.
He let that go. Just by being there, he knew, he was giving her the victory; every minute he spent with her was a massacre of her enemy. The almost impossible task he faced was turning that fact to his advantage.
“Moritsa’s fine,” he said. “I made sure. She’s been well looked after, at the orphanage.”
A tiny glow of anger in her eyes, quickly fading. “That’s good,” she said.
“I can get you out of here, you know,” he said gently. “One word from me, and you can go home.”
“I know.”
He’d forgotten just how formidable she could be; and he’d made a mistake, he realised, by bringing her here. A place like this would only make her stronger. “I just need you to tell me a few things, that’s all.”
“You can ask.”
He watched her closely. There was more to see in the whitewashed wall behind her head. “It’s about your husband – your former husband, I mean, Ziani.”
“I thought it might be.”
He nodded. “I’ve thought about him a great deal,” Psellus went on, “about the sort of man he was – good heavens, listen to me, I’m talking about him as though he’s dead; the sort of man he is. I feel I’ve got to know him quite well. I met him; did I tell you that? Anyway, I’ve studied him quite carefully, ever since this whole wretched business began, and every time I try and make sense of it all, I keep coming up against a solid wall. You see, I can’t for the life of me figure out why he did it.”
Not a flicker. “Did what?”
“Why he built the doll. No,” he corrected himself, “that’s not it. He built the doll because Moritsa wanted one. What I can’t understand is why he changed the design, improved it the way he did. That was so wildly out of character for such a sensible, law-abiding man. And there was no need for it, no need at all.”
She shrugged, and he thought of a lizard on a wall, so frugal with its movements. Of course, he realised, it’s no wonder she’s adapted so well to this environment. She’s been in one kind of prison or another all her life. “It’s all right,” he said pleasantly, “I quite understand. You don’t have to say a word if you don’t want to. I’ll just tell you what I think, the conclusions I’ve reached, and maybe you’ll feel like commenting. All right?”
Another shrug. “If you like.”
“Thank you.” He shifted a little; his left leg was going to sleep. When had he last sat on a floor? he asked himself. When he went to Civitas Vadanis to meet Ziani Vaatzes, of course. “Yes,” he went on, “it’s a mystery, isn’t it? It’s been haunting me, you might say, ever since I first looked into the case. Everything I’ve learned about Ziani – I mean Vaatzes – leads me to believe he’d be the last man on earth who’d ever do such a thing. He isn’t a free thinker, a born rebel, the sort who breaks rules just because they’re there. I think he genuinely believes in the Guild system, the inviolability – is that a word, I wonder? – of the specifications, all that rather high-flown theoretical stuff. I was so puzzled,” he went on, deliberately allowing his voice to drone, “that in the end I turned to the charge sheet, just to have a look at these terrible illegal modifications he risked everything to make.”
He paused. Of course she said nothing, gave no sign that he was there in the cell with her.
“At first glance,” he said, “to a non-specialist like me, they simply didn’t make any sense. An awful lot of work, the risk, needless to say, but they didn’t actually achieve anything. What I mean is, they didn’t improve the doll at all, make it work any better. I was starting to think I’d never understand when at last it came to me, the proverbial flash of lightning. When Compliance raided your house, the doll wasn’t finished. The modifications didn’t seem to do anything because they weren’t complete. There,” he added with a smile. “What do you make of that?”
She frowned. “Like I keep telling you,” she said, “I don’t know anything about it.”
“Ah well.” He nodded a couple of times. “In that case, I’ll have to explain my theory. It’s only a theory, of course; I can’t prove any of it.”
He took a deep breath, organised his mind; then he said: “Once I’d got that assumption, I started reading up in the Guildhall library, about design theory. Desperately complicated stuff, needless to say, and very difficult for an elderly clerk like me to understand. But I kept at it, whenever I had a spare half-hour or so, and eventually I knew enough about how mechanisms work to hazard a guess at what Ziani was up to. I think he was modifying the doll so it’d move its arms and head up and down, possibly its legs as well. Maybe it’d even dance, I don’t know. Anyway, once I’d got that far – well, you don’t need me to tell you what that suggested to me, do you?”
He got a cold stare for that. It was almost as good as a round of applause.
“All right,” he said, “maybe you do. I think Ziani is a man deeply, deeply in love: with you, with his daughter. The two of you mean literally everything to him; a glib enough phrase, but when you look at it and try and think what it actually means …” He sighed. “Now, you aren’t going to comment on that one way or the other, so it’s just an assumption. So let’s assume. Ziani’s love for you is his entire world; but he’s not a naturally romantic or outgoing man. In spite of the strength of his feelings, he doesn’t know how to express them. That’s why he spent hours and hours writing love poems about you, but never actually showed them to you. It’s like an invisible barrier he can’t cross. He can’t tell you how much he loves you; so he goes away somewhere on his own and makes something instead, because making things is all he knows how to do. He made those poems. He even made a book to write them down in. And he wanted so ve
ry much to make something for his daughter. Really, it gives a whole new meaning to the expression ‘making love’. Rather literal-minded, of course, but that’s a sort of occupational hazard for an engineer.”
She yawned; but not very well.
“He wanted to make something for Moritsa,” he went on. “Probably he’d mentioned it a few times, asked you what you thought she’d like. And one day, you told him: she’d like a mechanical doll, like the one we saw at such-and-such a fair. He’d have thought, that’s fine, I can do that, and the basic type’s not a restricted design. And then you said it again, I expect; in passing, probably not looking him in the face: like the one we saw at the fair, just like that one. But the doll you were referring to wasn’t the basic type. It was the advanced model – I ought to know the type number, but it’s slipped my mind. But I do know that the advanced model moves its arms and legs and head, and it dances.”
She was looking at him.
“Well,” he continued, managing to drone although his heart was racing, “that must’ve been a blow to him, because the advanced model’s a restricted design. He couldn’t just go to the specification tables and copy it down. He probably said as much to you; and I expect you pulled a very small sad face and said, oh what a shame, she’ll be so disappointed. You won’t have made any big deal about it. You’ll have touched his mind ever so gently, because you knew that’d be the best way to make him do what you wanted. Quite probably he doesn’t even remember you saying it; he’ll believe it came from him, not you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, in a voice as brittle as glass. “You’ve lost me, I’m afraid.”
He ignored her. “I imagine he let it prey on his mind for a week or so,” he said, “like an arrow in a wound slowly going rusty, until it poisons the blood. Then he’ll have made up his mind. He can’t get access to the approved design, but he won’t let that stop him. He’s an engineer, isn’t he? He’s even submitted modifications to military designs – all done properly, of course, through channels – and a couple of them have actually been accepted. He knows he can adapt the basic model to make it do all the things he believes Moritsa wants. And why shouldn’t he? Nobody will ever know, after all. He probably blotted the risk out of his mind; in fact, as I see it, he must have felt he had no choice, risk or no risk. His little girl wanted him to do it, and it was the only way he knew to show her how much he loved her. No choice at all, really.”