by K. J. Parker
Falier didn’t reply, and it occurred to Ziani that maybe he’d gone, leaving him to make his fine speech to empty air. Not that it mattered. If you tell the truth, does the fact that nobody’s listening make it a lie?
He should be getting back, he thought. He had a long, miserable ride back to Civitas Vadanis ahead of him, and there’d be no time to rest once he got there. Too much to do. He was grateful for the darkness, which kept him from seeing Psellus’ new defences. The more a dying thing wriggles, the less willing you are to finish it off. But he’d heard everything he needed to hear: solid data, measurements, specifications, numbers. Now he had that information, he knew he’d done enough. The ditch wouldn’t be a problem, and neither would the bastions, and as for the wall, that was already taken care of. He looked towards the City, a vague blob of firelight, and thought, it’ll be that much brighter when the whole City’s burning. A man sitting where I am now should be able to read a book by that light. He smiled. No evil, except necessary evil; and what’s more necessary than love?
He closed his eyes for a moment. A blind man could find his way back to the camp from here just by following the smell of woodsmoke. To pass the time as he walked, he compiled a mental nomenclature of parts. Daurenja. Secretary Psellus, Duke Valens, that Aram Chantat liaison whose name he couldn’t pronounce. Maris Boioannes. In order to get this far, he’d had to rely to a certain extent on luck. He’d had to leave a few blank spaces in the design, vaguely labelled: transmission, gearing, escapement. It was a practice he despised. Instead of having the whole thing drawn out before you start cutting metal, leave the tricky bits till later and hope you’ll think of something. Of course, he’d had no choice. Now that the design was complete, he reckoned he hadn’t done so badly, considering the prototype had also to be the finished product.
He was close enough now to see men silhouetted against the firelight. He thought of her; at least, he tried to call her into his mind, but all he could see was someone standing in a doorway with the light behind her.
He stopped walking. I’ve failed, he thought. The design was good, I made the parts well and fitted them together all right, but the job turns out not to be possible after all.
No, there was no point thinking like that. Everything was possible. He considered the example of Duke Valens, who killed Duke Orsea so he could marry his wife. Now, she loved Orsea, but when he died, she loved Valens just as much, or more. Everything was possible, provided you arranged the course of events.
A sentry yelled at him. He called back his name, and walked slowly into the firelight with his hands on his head. Luckily, the sentry knew him by sight.
“I’ve been to look at the defences,” he explained, when the sentry asked what he’d been doing. “Too risky in daylight.”
The sentry nodded and let him pass. He walked slowly up the main roadway that ran through the middle of the camp, until he found Daurenja’s tent. The flap was down; yellow light glared under it, seeping out like a spillage. There was a guard outside it, of course.
“I’m sorry,” said the guard. “Orders. He’s not to be disturbed.”
“He’ll see me,” Ziani replied.
Daurenja was sitting behind a table; actually, a wide board resting on two sawhorses. On it was one large sheet of paper, covered with dozens of tiny drawings, columns of figures, notes, tables of parts.
“That’s uncanny.” Daurenja grinned at him. “The man I most wanted to see in the whole world. Come in, sit down. Tell me what you think of this.”
It was a design, but at first Ziani couldn’t make out what it was supposed to be. A main drive unit, clockwork, powered by four coiled clocksprings in parallel. The takeoff connected to a complex gear train, supplying power to five spindles at three different ratios of conversion. A gearbox – why was it stuck right up there, requiring those long, fragile linkages? Cams and camshafts, with lifters and interrupters. By the spacing of the eccentrics and the complicated but ingenious travelling arm running down a series of zigzag keyways…
He realised what he was looking at. Not a machine after all. It was a plan of the defences, with the offensive trenches, saps and mines superimposed on it. A machine for defending and attacking a city. As he looked down at it, he realised why he’d made the mistake. Both functions, defence and attack, were part of the same mechanism. This machine was designed to do both.
Except that it wasn’t a machine, of course. But it worked just like one.
“What do you reckon?” Daurenja asked anxiously. The fool, Ziani thought, he really does value my opinion. Of course, he was another example of the same principle: a device for being the hero and the villain simultaneously.
“You need to cap the approach trenches at the turns,” he said. “Gabions’d do it, but you might want a few heavy steel pavises as well. Otherwise, a battery of scorpions here” – he pressed the paper with his fingernail, hard enough to leave a mark – “could shoot down into all your main trenches here, here and here, look.”
“You’re right,” Daurenja said, scrabbling for his pen. “Thanks for pointing that out.” He dipped the nib in ink and wrote PAVISES in big letters at the point of each angle of the zigzags. “Anything else?”
“Give me a moment,” Ziani replied mildly. “There’s a lot to take in.”
Now there was a thought. Defence and attack working together to achieve the foreseen result; the machine wouldn’t work without both of them, acting and reacting on each other. You could say the same about good and evil. He traced the sequence of events through the various stages and processes – the flooded trench, the bastions, the embankment, the walls. Then he stopped, and grinned. “It’s not finished,” he said. “No escapement.”
“Sorry? I don’t follow.”
Ziani leaned back in his chair, which creaked. “You’ve got past the new defences, under the wall, but now you’re stuck. You need to bring the wall down, and bring up foot soldiers right away to force the breach. But there’s nothing about that here. Did you forget, or haven’t you got around to figuring that step out yet?”
This time, Daurenja smiled. “Actually,” he said, “you haven’t read it quite right. All that bit there” (he pointed) “is really just a feint, to draw off their forces. But we’re getting into the City through this gate here.”
The Westgate; the strongest and the best defended of the five main gates. But it opened on to Guildhall Street, the widest, straightest thoroughfare in the City, leading directly to the Guildhall itself. Carry the Westgate with sufficiently overwhelming numbers, and a half-mile sprint up an unblockable, indefensible road would get you to the seat of government before anybody, even the best professional soldiers, could stop you.
“You’re way ahead of me, I can see that,” Daurenja said happily. “Once we’ve taken the Guildhall, we hold it until the sappers have brought down the walls here, here and here. While all the defenders are rushing towards the centre of town, three support parties are coming up behind them to take them in flank and rear. Then it’ll just be a matter of clearing the walls themselves and mopping up. Well?” he added anxiously. “What do you think?”
It was a superb piece of engineering. A ram, a scoop and a pivot, then just tighten the collet and grip, equalising the inside and outside pressure. But he had to say something, so: “You’re very laid back about breaking down the Westgate,” he said. “I take it you’re thinking of using a battering ram, presumably in a covered frame, but I suggest you may have overlooked the gradient of the embankment. You’d need, what, thirty couple of draught horses…”
“Nothing like that.” He’d never seen Daurenja happier. “I mean, yes, you’re right. You’d never get a ram up that incline under fire, and even if you could, it’d take too long. By the time you’d got through, they’d have had a chance to barricade the main drag, and then you’re fighting every step of the way instead of making a quick, decisive dash to victory. And before you say it, I know the gatehouse is built on heavy clay, so undermining it’d be a n
ightmare. No, the hell with that. What I’ve got in mind…”
Ziani knew what he was going to say. The stone-throwing pot, Daurenja’s great invention. It was, of course, the answer, assuming it could be relied on. He watched Daurenja’s face as he talked about it, like a young boy talking about his first girl, eyes bright, unable to keep the love from seeping past the seal of his mouth. He thought: this is a remarkable man, by any standards. Engineer, soldier, murderer, rapist, scholar, traitor, thief, hero, a man of ingenuity, resource, courage, determination, intellect; a passionate man, driven in everything he does by a ferocious pressure of love, like the poison under an abscessed tooth. He understood him now, clearly for the first time, his characteristics and properties. Daurenja was the two different kinds of love, the good and the evil. His life had been spent in search of a worthy object for his unlimited ocean of love, and he’d found it at last, in the weapon he’d conceived and brought to life. Well, Ziani thought, that’s all right, I can handle lovers. Lovers are easy to use.
But, again, he had to say something; so he asked, “Have you tested it yet?”
Just a brief flicker; pain, fear. “Not yet, no. I want to keep it a secret, you see. The whole point is, it’s got to come as a complete surprise. You and me, and the duke, of course, we’re the only ones who know what it does or how it works. If I test it, the enemy’ll find out about it, you can bet your life on it. Besides,” he added, with a slight waver in his voice, “it doesn’t need testing. It’ll be just right, you’ll see.”
He’d heard that flicker in men’s voices before, when they said things like, Besides, I trust her, I don’t need to know where she is all the time or what she’s doing, there’ll be a perfectly reasonable explanation, you’ll see. And that made him think of the cold spot. Love welds together, but a cold spot is where the seams and joins begin to tear apart. Poor Daurenja, he thought; he couldn’t see it, just as I couldn’t see the cold flaw in my own weld. Perhaps love blinds you to it, and only a stranger can see it.
“I hope so,” he said gently. “Everything’ll be depending on it. If it goes wrong…”
“It won’t.” Admirable, the way Daurenja dragged back the anger and replaced it almost instantly with gratitude for friendly concern. “Trust me,” he added, smiling, “I’ve been really thorough. I did years of experiments, remember, I’ve thought about nothing else for – well, as long as I can remember, really. It’s funny, when something like this comes into your life, it gradually takes over, and everything else gets pushed to the edges. It’s all right,” he added, “I won’t let you down. I know you persuaded them to give me this chance because you believe in it too. I knew you’d come round, you see, once you realised what an amazing thing this is. You can feel it too, can’t you? The sense that something incredible’s about to happen.”
Ziani nodded. He understood. The old contradiction: you want everybody, all your family and friends, to realise how wonderful she is, but nobody else is allowed to love her, only you. “So,” he said briskly, “that’ll take care of the gate, then. And everything else should go smoothly after that.” He nodded, his seal of approval. “Yes, I think it’ll work. You’ve done well.”
A big smile spread over Daurenja’s face. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” he said. “I mean that, I’d never have got this far on my own. And I’m sorry; I mean, I know I’ve not…” He pulled a face. “I’ve not exactly behaved well towards you, at times. I’ve pushed and nagged, and I’ve bullied you, done things I really regret.”
“That’s all right,” Ziani said quietly. “You had no choice.”
“Yes, exactly,” Daurenja said excitedly, “I knew you’d understand. There were things that had to be done, so I did them. But all the same, I do feel bad about it. I mean, using people to get what you want, like they’re tools or bits of a mechanism, it’s deceitful. I can’t help feeling bad about it, the way I’ve manipulated so many people, and you especially.”
“No big deal,” Ziani replied. “It’s actions and outcomes that matter, not intentions. And when something’s got to be done, it’s no good killing yourself with guilt about it.”
Daurenja laughed. He was happy. “I must say,” he said, “I wish all my victims took such a pragmatic view of things.”
13
On the twelfth day of the assault, the allies’ approach trench came within range of the forward batteries on the point of the northernmost bastion. An engineer by the name of Tuno Belias of the Foundrymens’s Guild, deputy night-shift foreman at the pipe and stove factory, loosed the first shot from a Type Nine scorpion. Later, he admitted that he’d neglected to allow for the moderate easterly side-wind; but that was all right, because he’d laid three degrees too far left in any case, and the wind drew the bolt straight and pitched it precisely in the heart of the sapper standing next to the man Belias had been aiming at. This early success was celebrated noisily all across the City, and Belias’ colleagues at the stoveworks immediately launched a subscription to raise money to buy a suitable trophy or memento to mark the occasion. By the end of the shift, the fund stood at fifteen dollars, and a Type Seventeen commemorative silver salver was commissioned from the Silversmiths’, to be engraved with Belias’ name and a brief account of his notable deed. The rest of the shots loosed from the battery missed, and within the hour the sappers had raised a wall of gabions that protected the trench-head completely.
They waited until it was dark to take the dead sapper’s body back to the camp. The stretcher party was met by General Daurenja in person; he took the front handles and helped carry the body to the fosse, where a grave had already been dug. He made a short but powerful speech to the crowd of soldiers and sappers who’d gathered there; the dead man, he told them, was only the first of many, and the priorities of siege and battle would mean that not every body would be retrieved or decently buried. Therefore, he said, it was important to mark their first loss calmly, solemnly, making no attempt to belittle the ugly realities of war and death. Every man lost was one too many, he told them, and every death would stay with him for the rest of his life, since he was their commander, responsible for everything that happened. Nevertheless, he went on, the war had to be fought, the power of the enemy had to be broken and made safe, if the horrors of Eremia were not to be repeated. As they buried their dead, so they must bury fear, misgivings, doubt and even compassion. They should mourn now, he concluded, for themselves and their enemies, and have done with it. From tomorrow, there would be no place in the army for sorrow or regret, only for courage, resolution and grim determination.
When the body had been buried and the crowd had broken up, Daurenja went back to his tent. He drank three glasses of wine and ate a little rye bread and cheese; then he got up and went quietly, without guards or staff, and climbed down into the assault trench. He moved so quietly that the sappers of the night shift weren’t aware of him until he tapped the rearguard on the shoulder.
“It’s all right,” he said, as the man raised his lantern and recognised him. “I just came by to see for myself. How’s it going?”
They stopped work and explained. There were five of them, they said (he could see that for himself, but he said nothing): four sappers, and a guard. The front sapper dug a trench eighteen inches wide and twenty inches deep. To protect himself from the enemy’s shot, he pushed ahead of him a shield of half-inch steel plate, mounted on a wheeled carriage. As he dug, he threw the spoil to his left into a stout cylindrical wicker basket four feet high and two feet in diameter, known as a gabion; filled with earth, it was dense enough to stop a scorpion bolt. The line of filled gabions formed the core of the trench’s defensive bank. The second sapper followed on behind, doubling the depth and width of the trench and helping to fill the gabion with his spoil. The third and fourth sappers deepened and widened the trench still further, until it was three feet deep and four feet wide, but they threw their spoil over the line of gabions to form an earth bank beyond it, to reinforce and stabilise it. The guard fe
tched empty gabions from the supply cart and topped off the bank with tightly bound faggots of coppice-wood, called fascines. The resulting combination of ditch and bank meant that a column of men two abreast could march upright along the completed trench, almost entirely safe from the enemy’s tactical artillery. Each team of four worked for an hour, and was then replaced. So far, they’d been averaging a hundred yards in twenty-four hours, but they felt sure that a hundred and sixty yards was possible, maybe even more. At the angles, when the zigzag line bent back on itself, they were exposed and in danger, as had been demonstrated earlier that day. To deal with that threat, they proposed to double-sap, building a gabion wall on both sides of the trench; assuming, of course, that that met with the general’s approval. He then asked them where they were from, and they said they were Vadani, formerly miners from the silver mines. Most of the sappers were from the mines, though there were also some northern Eremians, experienced in building terraced fields on the sides of their thin-soiled hills, and a few peat-diggers from the marshlands of the Vadani–Eremian border. They had all the equipment they needed, though it was hard for just one man to keep them supplied with gabions and fascines; sometimes they had to stop and wait, and so it’d be a good idea to assign an extra guard. Daurenja nodded and said he’d see to it; then he slipped off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and took the front position for the rest of the hour, sending the lead sapper back to help with the gabions, as they’d recommended. As he left, he made them promise not to tell anybody that he’d been there.
Back at his tent, in front of a warm stove, he dragged and peeled off his muddy clothes and changed into a blue velvet gown edged with gold lace at the neck and wrists. It came from the Aram Chantat. Properly speaking, that style, cloth and level of ornamentation was restricted to counsellors, generals and members of the royal family. It had been meant as a gift for Duke Valens, but he hated that sort of thing and had packed it away at the bottom of a chest, where Daurenja had found it and taken an instant liking to it. He only wore it at night, so nobody would see him in it and tell the savages, who’d be sure to be offended.