The Escapement

by K. J. Parker

  As they left the room he asked them to tell the back-office clerk to bring him a glass of milk.

  It took an infantry division to move up the siege engines; Aram Chantat, because they were expendable. Some of them pushed, the rest hauled on ropes, while an advance squad with picks, shovels and long steel crowbars prised up and cleared away all the rocks, bushes and other obstructions. Moving the engines was like pulling teeth.

  The Mezentines waited till they were on the move before opening up with all batteries. The result, seen from a distance, was spectacular and encouraging. Before the bombardment started, the artillery crews had tightened the mangonels’ cord tensioner ratchets and topped up the trebuchets’ counterweights to full capacity. Up till then, the machines had been downtuned, to shoot at less than their true maximum range, thereby misleading the enemy into believing that they were safely out of shot. The densely packed columns of men pulling on ropes provided fat, rewarding targets. From the embankment palisade, each shot as it landed looked like a flat stone skimmed across still water; on its first pitch, it splashed down, sending up spray. The it bounced, two, three, four times, each time splashing casualties into the air. The idea was that the fifth bounce should drop the shot on to the engine itself, wrecking it. The artillery crew commanders weren’t expecting it to happen like that; the most they’d been hoping for was two, perhaps occasionally three splashes before the shot deflected and fell harmless. It was remarkable how often their expectations were exceeded.

  At the other end of the trajectory, the stone at first appeared in the sky like a small, dark moon. To begin with it seemed to be hanging quite still in the air. Only as it dropped and the regularity of the curve of its descent began to decay did the men watching it suddenly realise how fast it was moving, and how impossible it was to predict accurately where it was going to fall. It was quite perverse how often a column of men decided, unanimous and unprompted, to move five yards to the right or left, only to realise (too late) that they’d put themselves directly under the falling stone. When it pitched, it scooped up a mess of torn and bruised turf, dirt, crushed and smashed bodies. A remarkable number of men were killed by splinters of rocks pulverised by the impact of the pitching shot; others had arms and legs broken when dead men fell on them. As the great stone balls bounced, they picked up extra spin from their contact with the ground. Some survivors spoke about the shot kicking up, darting inexplicably right or left, jumping up on the first bounce, then shooting low on the second. When a ball hit a siege engine, the result tended to be a shower of shattered beams, joists, iron fittings, along with blade-sharp chips of stone from the ball itself. The smaller flying debris struck with the force of a hard punch; at first the shock of the impact numbed you; it could be twenty or thirty seconds before you looked down and saw the blood, or tried to move a limb that wasn’t there any more. Nearly all the survivors stressed the effect of the noise of the ball landing, saying that they’d never heard anything as loud before. Louder than thunder was a frequent comparison, followed by the qualification: so much louder, it wasn’t really like thunder at all. It was a noise you felt rather than heard.

  On the embankment, as soon as the sears were dropped, the crews stood still and watched the fall of shot. When they saw the first volley go home so beautifully true, they assumed it was all over; instead of bustling to span the windlasses for another shot, they were cheering, shouting congratulations to each other. It took a while for anybody to notice that, instead of scattering and running for their lives, the enemy (the surviving enemy) were still there, still grimly hauling on their ropes or heaving against their frames, as though nothing had happened. There were two or three seconds of complete silence; then the captains began yelling, and the crews jumped at windlass handles, frantically winding up for a shot they’d assumed they wouldn’t have to take. That was perfectly understandable. From the embankment, they couldn’t see individual men. The hauling parties merged into dense black shapes, so that you could imagine you were shooting at something like a huge beached jellyfish; and once you’d hit it fair and square, it was perfectly reasonable to assume you’d killed it, and that was that.

  The second volley was a mess, as the captains themselves admitted afterwards. Mostly it was because they neglected to take up the elevation, to allow for the short but crucial distance each target had moved since the first volley. Most of them overshot; not by much, ten or fifteen yards. The few that hit something mostly scored direct hits on the engines themselves; extremely satisfying, to see an enemy trebuchet dissolve into a cloud of splinters, but a skidder splattering dead savages would’ve been better still. The third volley was better, although there were still more partial hits and outright misses than there’d been first time around. A good start, then, but spoilt somewhat by a failure to follow up.

  The Mezentines were spanning for a fourth volley when the enemy started shooting back. They shouldn’t have been able to do that. According to all the best estimates, the enemy line was still over a hundred yards out of range. They were, after all, supposed to be using copies of the obsolete and superseded Type Twenty-One heavy trebuchet, Type Seventeen light trebuchet and Type Twenty-Seven mangonel. It was only when the sky suddenly filled with small hanging moons that it occurred to anybody that Ziani Vaatzes may have made some improvements of his own.

  Afterwards, the blame was placed squarely on the commissioners of the topographical and geological survey. They should have pointed out, it was held, that the enemy might be expected to have quarried stone for their shot from the limestone deposits at Veraiso, so conveniently adjacent to their predictable line of march. Given this important information, the ordnance and fortifications subcommittees would have known in advance that Vaatzes’ engines would be likely to use smaller shot (because limestone was denser than the sandstone from the City quarries), which would fly faster, hit harder and – most important – shatter and disintegrate on impact into clouds of wide-dispersal shrapnel, liable to inflict serious casualties among closely packed groups of men. If only they’d known, the fortifications subcommittee could have specified more effective cover on the embankment – pavises, sidewalls of gabions and fascines, a half-roofed covered way. Casualties would still have been unavoidable, but the appalling carnage inflicted by the first and second allied volleys could certainly have been mitigated, possibly by up to forty per cent.

  Night fell, and the artillery captains could no longer see to aim. Finished round shot was too precious to be wasted on random bombardment. By torchlight, the Mezentines counted forty-six of their engines wrecked beyond repair, including nine of the fifty heavy trebuchets. A further twenty-eight were taken apart and carried back to the factory to be rebuilt. It was hard to establish the number of the dead, let alone identify them; a preliminary estimate, based on responses to an emergency roll call, came to a hundred and sixty dead, as many again too badly injured to resume their duties. Around midnight, the bombardment started up again. The allies were launching unshaped rocks at random, to disrupt the salvage and repair operations, damage the embankment and stop the defenders getting even a few hours’ sleep. Repeated impacts on the same spot had the effect of scooping out large holes in the embankment; when dawn came, it looked for all the world as though it was infested with giant rabbits. Nothing could be done to repair the breaches, or prevent further deterioration as the disturbed earth settled.

  Chairman Psellus was awake when the messenger came. He received the news calmly, thanked the messenger and sent him away. As the door closed, the messenger saw him bend his head over a book, a little book which he shielded in his cupped hands, like a man cradling an injured bird.

  As soon as the messenger had made his report, General Daurenja called a meeting of the full general staff, including the Aram Chantat liaison and his entourage. Losses, he announced, had been heavy: thirty-seven engines destroyed, nine others likely to be out of action for a day or more. He’d budgeted, he told them, for fifty or more engines lost, so the damage was less than
he’d anticipated. On the other hand, he’d hoped to have won the artillery battle by now, and it was quite evident that he hadn’t. The continuing bombardment was very much a fallback option, since it meant that each crew would have to work a full extra shift; as well as the machines themselves, they’d lost ninety-two trained artillerymen killed or put of out action, which meant he’d had to commit all the standby crews. That would inevitably lead to a loss of precision and efficiency when the battle resumed tomorrow, but he felt he had no choice but to take that risk. The advantages of keeping the enemy under pressure outweighed the drawbacks, and he firmly believed that the stress and loss of sleep the night bombardment would cause would more than make up for his own crews’ likely inability to function at peak efficiency. The Aram Chantat liaison was quick to voice his support for the general’s immediate tactical judgement and broader strategic vision. He would see to it that Aram Chantat volunteers were available at dawn to take over the unskilled tasks – shifting and loading missiles, spanning windlasses and so forth – thus reducing the load on the trained Eremians and Vadani. He also took the opportunity to commend the general for the vigour, energy and resourcefulness with which he was prosecuting the assault.

  When the meeting broke up, the Aram Chantat went back to their tents; all but one of them, who took a horse and set off on the road to Civitas Vadanis. In spite of the danger, he took the border road, the same route Duke Valens had been following when he was attacked; the urgency of his mission outweighed the danger, and besides, there had been no reports of Cure Doce activity in the area ever since the ambush. He had memorised one message and carried another, written on a scrap of thin rawhide cut off the handle-wrapping of a broken bow. It read:

  Gace Daurenja to Ziani Vaatzes, greetings.

  You need to upgrade the Type Three; it hasn’t got the range. Can you modify all the pieces you still have at the city and send them immediately. Also send more finished shot. When will the worms be ready? Send prototypes as soon as they’re serviceable. The horesehair you’ve been using for the mangonel springs hasn’t got the strength for the top setting. Use four plies instead of three; also send spares, since they’ve been breaking. Most important: get the weapon ready to ship. Box it up so nobody can guess what’s in there, and send it with at least 2 squadrons Vadani cavalry escort. Things here are going well. GD.

  The verbal message was duly delivered to the Aram Chantat privy council. It made them very angry for a while. Then they calmed down and composed a reply.

  14

  The artillery duel resumed next morning, but the situation had changed. During the night, while their engines kept up their blind pounding of the embankment, the allies had built a wall of gabions and fascines in front of their artillery line, to protect the working parties – every man who could be spared from other duties – who now set about digging a bank and ditch to shelter the engines from the Mezentines’ incoming fire. They worked with a speed that astonished the observers on the City embankment, who immediately stopped trying to pick off the allied engines and began dropping their shot into the dense mass of diggers and earth-shifters. It was, as one artillery officer said later, practically impossible to miss. Each shot was sure of killing two or three workers, and the Mezentines quickly found out that if they managed to pitch a shot on the rapidly rising bank itself, there was a good chance it would skip and skim, cutting a bloody channel through the teams of men wheeling barrows of spoil or shovelling earth into gabions. As soon as Chairman Psellus heard about this, he ordered the artillery captains to stop it and go back to targeting the engines themselves. The captains were extremely reluctant to obey this order; the diggers were much easier to hit than the engines or their crews, and they felt they were achieving something. It was only when Psellus himself appeared on the embankment and gave the order in person that they eventually complied.

  By mid-afternoon the bank was eight feet high, topped with a double line of gabions. It didn’t provide a total defence, but it meant that the Mezentines now had to drop their stones directly on top of the engines in order to damage them, instead of being able to pitch short and either roll or skim their shot until it hit something. The allies, of course, had faced the same problem from the outset, but the fact that their shot tended to shatter on impact meant that although they rarely hit a machine, they were killing artillery crews at a rate which even the general expressed himself satisfied with. As he told the Aram Chantat liaison that evening, the Mezentines were manufacturers rather than soldiers; they could build new engines much faster than they could train men to use them, and so killing the trained men was a much more efficient course of action than merely smashing up equipment.

  After his meeting with the liaison, Daurenja sent for Colonel Ducas of the Eremian contingent. The messenger found him, after a long search, leading a party of stretcher-bearers. They’d spent the afternoon collecting the wounded from the bank site, prising them out from under spent shot with beams ands crowbars. Miel himself had carried the axe and the saw, because a large number of them were pinned down by an arm or a leg; it wasn’t a job he felt he could delegate. His knees were plastered with a putty of mud and blood, and he’d wrenched his back contorting himself as he tried to haul a paralysed man out from under a stone by his ankle and wrist. When the messenger found him, he said he was too busy to go; now that the bombardment had stopped, he said, they had to make full use of the time available to get as many wounded men out as possible. The messenger had to point out that it was a direct order from the commander-in-chief.

  He found Daurenja sitting on an upturned bucket outside his tent. He was grinding something with a pestle and mortar.

  “Colonel Leucas was killed in the bombardment,” Daurenja said, looking earnestly into the mortar.

  “Oh.”

  It wasn’t what Miel would have chosen to say, but he was tired and frustrated at having to leave the work he knew he should be doing. Besides, Imbrota Leucas had been a pinhead, barely capable of blowing his nose.

  “I expect you knew him,” Daurenja said.

  “Yes, of course. Actually, I never liked him much.”

  Daurenja shrugged. “Obviously, we need to replace him as commander of the Eremian contingent. You know your own people; they need a Leucas or a Phocas or a Ducas to lead them or they won’t do as they’re told.”

  Miel didn’t grasp the implications of that straight away. Then he said, “I see.”

  Daurenja looked up. “I’d have thought you’d have been the natural choice instead of Leucas,” he said, “only you weren’t around when Valens made the original appointment; and besides, I seem to remember there’s some kind of bad blood between the two of you. Anyhow, that’s not important now. I suggest you use the existing staff, at least until you’ve had a chance to pick people you’re more comfortable working with. I’m afraid I’ll be asking a lot of you Eremians before this siege is over.”

  Miel looked at him, and thought: some kind of bad blood. “If I don’t want the job, can I refuse?”

  “Of course.” Daurenja was staring into his mortar again. “But I don’t imagine you will. You have a duty to your people, and that matters far more to you than any personal issues between you and me. I gather you’ve been rescuing the wounded.”

  “That’s right.”

  Daurenja nodded. “Nobody told you to,” he said. “In fact, you’d been assigned other duties, a nice safe job out of the line of fire. But you disobeyed orders and did what you felt had to be done. Well, that’s fine. I know I can rely on you. Besides,” he added with a yawn, “I owe you something for saving my life that time. I do try and pay my debts.”

  Miel frowned. “That’s funny,” he said. “The way I remember it, I tried to get Valens to have you hanged.”

  “That’s right. But before that, you kept my ex-partner Framain from bashing my head in with a rock. If you hadn’t done that, I’d be dead.” He shrugged. “I tried to pay you back for that by assigning you to a job away from where the shot w
as falling, but I should’ve known better. The way to reward you is to give you a chance to do your duty. That’s the sort of man you are. I understand you, you see. If you could stop hating me for a minute or so, you’d see we’re not that different. Only, your duty’s to your people and mine’s to my work. Otherwise, we’re basically the same. So,” he added with a weary sigh, “you’ll take the job, because you don’t really have a choice. That’s how I do things, you see. It’s a basic premise of engineering. Components run in precisely cut keyways until they meet a stop. Everything does exactly what it’s supposed to do, because it has no choice.”

  Miel thought about that for a moment. “Fine,” he said. “Will it be all right if I get cleaned up first?”

  Daurenja nodded. “And I’d grab some sleep while you can, if I were you. In the morning, I’ve got a job for your people. Nothing unpleasant,” he added, with a faint smile, “but quite important.” Then he turned his head and shifted his back a little, so that Miel no longer existed and he was free to concentrate absolutely on the contents of the pot on his knees.

  The job turned out to be strenuous but simple: to collect, remove and pile up neatly all the finished round shot the enemy had fired at the allied line during the artillery duel. It was, the staff major explained, a marvellous windfall: thousands of rounds of precision-finished, Mezentine-made trebuchet and mangonel ammunition; hard, unlike the soft shit from the local quarries, and therefore exactly what they’d need for bashing down the City walls when the time came. The joy of it was (the major said) that the enemy couldn’t reuse spent allied shot in the same way, since it smashed all to pieces when it pitched; every round, both outgoing and incoming, was a dead loss to them, whereas every shot that landed on or over the new bank was effectively profit.