The Escapement

by K. J. Parker

  “We don’t know that. It’s much more likely that we’re reading too much into this. After all, we don’t really understand how their minds work, they were probably only discussing contingency plans, just in case you don’t get better. And the doctors say you’re healing up really fast now.”

  Very slowly and deliberately, like a team of engineers raising a tower, he hauled himself forward a few inches on his elbows and sat up. “It’s what I’d do,” he said. “Think about it. They’ve got to resign themselves to a foreign king, they’ve got no choice. They marry their princess to me, figuring it’ll provoke war with the Mezentines so they can clear out everything our side of the mountains and have a new homeland to settle in. Turns out that wasn’t necessary: when they get here, they find we’re already at war, so that’s all right. But then the princess gets killed. They’ve been reassuring themselves that it’s all right really, the next dynasty will be only half-foreign, her and my children; but then she dies, I marry you and they’re faced with being ruled by strangers for ever. What’s more, by marrying you, I’ve shown them I’m not really interested in what’s best for the Aram Chantat; otherwise I’d have waited till this twelve-year-old kid came of age and married her. Instead, I marry for love” – he paused on that word, frowned as much as the pain in his face would let him – “which probably doesn’t carry much weight with them, I really couldn’t say, I know so little about them. And to cap it all, they believe I’ve been lukewarm about the war. And now they’ve got an alternative, the brave, committed general, and he’s neither Eremian nor Vadani, so he won’t be likely to favour either race above the Aram Chantat if he becomes king. If you look at it rationally, they’d be failing in their duty if they didn’t at least consider it.”

  She thought: he’s talking to himself, not me. Which is fine; it’s part of my job to be someone the duke can think aloud to, it’s a very necessary function. “You make it sound like you sympathise with them,” she said.

  “I do,” he replied. “They’re in deep trouble. The other Cure Hardy nations have more or less driven them out of their own country. They’ve had to leave their home, cross the desert, come here and immediately start fighting a singularly vicious war; they know that even if they win, a lot of their people will die in it, and if they lose they’re facing a famine. Added to that, their new king’s going to be a foreigner who doesn’t look like he really gives a damn about them.” He shook his head. “And I happen to know that that’s true: the heir apparent doesn’t care about them, in fact he can’t stand being in the same room with them for too long – something he’s done his best to keep to himself, but he’s a rotten actor and they’re not stupid. And they’re right about him being lukewarm about the war, too.”

  She looked at him again, noticing how lined and furrowed his face had become lately, as though it was under siege, deeply scored with trenches; and she thought, that’s the face of a man who’s only recently realised that love doesn’t solve everything, that having each other isn’t really enough. Poor man; he’s lived his life thinking that the book closes at the first kiss, and being in love is like crossing a border, over which they can’t follow you. Perhaps he thought love could be starved out with a blockade, or stormed with overwhelming force, once the defences had been undermined. Those are the sort of terms he’d tend to think in (Valens the problem-solver, the man who gets the job done, the good duke); and now they’ve taken away the command and given it to the freak, because of me.

  But she said: “So what are you going to do about it?”; not because she wanted to know, but because he did, and if she couldn’t be his soul, she could at least be that part of his mind that chafed him into action.

  But he shrugged, as though they were talking about someone else, a friend of hers that he tolerated for her sake but had never really liked. “I’ll have to go there,” he said, “and take the war back from Daurenja.”

  It was the reply she’d been expecting, but it made her flinch. “You can’t,” she said. “You’re not well enough.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “But it’s not like I’ve got a choice.” He wriggled his shoulders against the pillow. “First, because I don’t want to be got rid of. Second, because Daurenja’s getting it all wrong. He’s doing exactly what they want him to, but he can’t see that because he’s convinced he’s winning.” He scowled, either at some thought that crossed his mind, or from the pain of moving. “Could you send someone to fetch Ziani Vaatzes?” he said. “I need to see him right away.”

  She didn’t say don’t leave me, because if she said it he’d have to obey. But she did say, “You’re far too weak still to cope with running the war. If you go, you’ll be playing into their hands. You’ll make a mistake, and that’ll give them all the excuse they need.”

  “That’s possible,” he said; and he was arguing against her now. She’d become yet another difficulty in his way. “But you never know, I might not. And if I stay here, I’m finished, and so are the Vadani. So…” He shrugged again. “There you have it,” he said. “Look, do you think you could find someone to fetch Vaatzes? He’ll be heading off to the camp any day now, and I’d like to hitch a ride.”

  “Will you take me with you?”

  It wasn’t the question she wanted to ask, but quite obviously it meant the same thing. It would, of course, have been better to have said nothing at all.

  He paused, only for a short time, then said, “Yes, of course.”

  They always addressed him as “Engineer Vaatzes”, and he wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that. He assumed they meant it as a mark of respect, or they intended him to feel flattered by it; and it was, of course, an appropriate title. Somehow, though, it made him feel uncomfortable, maybe because it came from them. He didn’t know for sure, since it wasn’t the sort of thing he ever discussed with them, but he had an idea they disapproved of what he did on a very basic level, like vegetarians disapproving of eating meat.

  Two of them he’d met before, though he couldn’t remember their names or what they did; he knew they were fairly important but not very important, and so he had to be polite to them. The third one he’d never seen, and the other two didn’t introduce him, which meant he was either some clerk or assistant who didn’t matter at all, or someone very important indeed.

  “We appreciate the exceptional effort you’ve been making,” one of the familiar ones said, “and the quite remarkable achievement your results represent. Without your machines, the entire project would collapse; more than that, it could never have begun in the first place.” He paused for a moment and touched the headstock casing of the Mezentine turret lathe, which was nominally what they’d come here to admire. He prodded it tentatively, as if expecting it to be dangerously hot. “However,” he went on, “I have to tell you, the siege is rapidly approaching a critical stage. The general has instructed me that the design of the heavy trebuchet’ (he didn’t pronounce the word quite right) “needs to be modified, to give further range. He appreciates that this will cause delays, and you are therefore to ship all the completed pieces you presently have in hand without making the necessary modifications; the general will attend to that himself.”

  Oh really, Ziani thought, and smiled. “Sorry,” he said. “It can’t be done.”

  The Aram Chantat stared at him, as though Ziani had just spat in his face.

  “It’s quite simple,” Ziani said cheerfully. “To increase the range, you need either a heavier counterweight or a longer throwing arm, or both. But we can’t make the weight heavier or it’ll crack the frame, and we can’t make the arm longer, or it’ll just snap as soon as you loose off a shot. I can beef up the frame and the arm, of course, but that’ll add to the weight, which reduces the efficiency, and you won’t actually get the shot to go further or faster; all it’ll mean is the machine’ll be harder to move about. Now, if I could use box-section steel instead of oak beams for the cradle assembly, like the Mezentines do, that’d be a different matter, but producing box-section
would mean I’d have to build a special furnace and rolling-mill, which would take at least three months, even if I had enough skilled workers, which I don’t.” He paused, wondering why it was so satisfying to say no to these people. “Of course, if the general’s found a way to get round the problem, I’ll be only too happy to use it.”

  All three of them were looking at him; he could trace the workings of their minds, as if he was studying a mechanism. They believed him; in which case, they were thinking, the general’s demand was unrealistic and unreasonable, and clearly he doesn’t know as much about making these weapons as he thinks he does, which in turn is a fault in him which we weren’t previously aware of. And yet, they were thinking, Engineer Vaatzes recommended him for the job…

  “What I can do,” he went on, “ is forget about the trebuchets and concentrate on getting the worms ready to ship. After all,” he added carefully, “they’re what’s going to win us the war, as you know as well as I do.”

  As quite obviously they didn’t. “We were going to ask you about them,” the third man said – he spoke, so that meant he had to be very important indeed. Ziani turned his head a little, towards the third man and away from the other two.

  “Come and see for yourself,” he said. “I can tell you how they work, if you like.”

  It annoyed him that they weren’t interested in what he showed them and didn’t even try to understand what he told them. Of course he appreciated that it was entirely alien to them, as remote as horse-breeding and cattle-herding were to him, but after all, it was their war and they should have made the effort.

  Afterwards, he took them to see the small-arms line. They liked that. They were impressed by the drop-hammers churning out sword-blade blanks, and the four-foot-diameter wheels that ground in the bevels, though they made a point of telling him several times that they did it differently in their country, and their way was much better. The swages that formed complete arrowheads in one pass wiped the smirks off their faces.

  “You made this machine?” the third man said.

  Ziani nodded. “It’s a copy of the plant in the City ordnance factory,” he said, “except that I modified it. The original machine does it in two steps; it makes the socket, then it goes back in the fire to heat up again, and then it forms the blade. My version’s almost twice as fast.”

  He could feel them wanting him. In fact, not having him would eat them slowly away. He considered pointing out that the swage blocks and the trip-hammer together weighed just over seven tons, so it’d be useless to them; even if they managed to build a wagon strong enough to carry it, the time and effort involved in loading and unloading it whenever they needed to make arrowheads made it completely impractical. But no, he thought, let them want me, by all means. “If you think that’s impressive, just wait till you see how we turn and fletch the shafts,” he said.

  “And they have machines like this in the City?” the third man asked, when they’d done the full tour.

  “Loads of them,” Ziani replied. “But, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, the machines aren’t any use without trained men to work them, and fix them when they break down. And it takes years to train someone.”

  “You could train them, couldn’t you?”

  He nodded briskly. “Yes,” he said. “Me and General Daurenja. Apart from him and me, though, I don’t think there’s anybody outside the City.”

  The third man frowned, while the other two kept perfectly still and quiet. “And then there’s the materials,” he said. “I couldn’t help noticing; all the iron and steel you use. The sheets perfectly flat, the same thickness all the way through; and the round and square bars we saw on the racks in your storeroom. Presumably you have other machines somewhere else…”

  “That’s right,” Ziani said. “The furnace and the rolling-mill. Both of them are much bigger than this. There’s well over a thousand people working there.”

  “All skilled men, presumably.”

  “That’s right, yes. Far more difficult than this, in fact. But essential; before I built the furnace and the mill, we had to make do with hand-worked stuff, and you can’t do precision work or mass production if your materials aren’t exactly straight and true.”

  “But you trained all these men yourself,” the third man said. “And in such a short space of time.”

  “Well, a great many of them are Eremians,” Ziani replied, “skilled men, by local standards – blacksmiths, wheelwrights, coopers, joiners; they may not have been up to Guild standards when I started working with them, but at least they understood the value of a straight line. And the rest are Vadani from the mines, so they knew a bit about smelting ore. Mostly, though, it’s a question of procedures: set up a properly designed production line, explain how each job is done – exactly, no margin for error – and there’s not much that can go wrong, provided you have good supervisors.” He allowed himself a faint grin. “What you’re really asking is, could your people learn how to work like this? And the answer is, I don’t see why not, if you’re really determined. But I don’t think you are. I got the Eremians and the Vadani to do as I told them because they realised they had no choice; without the stuff I was going to make for them, they didn’t stand a chance. You’re not in that position, so you haven’t got the incentive. Simple as that, really.”

  The third man nodded slowly. “I believe you underestimate us,” he said quietly, “but the point is entirely valid. If we need to change our whole way of life simply in order to make tools and weapons rather more efficiently, I don’t think we’d be interested.” Ziani noticed the intensity in his eyes, as he continued: “I believe that you are the sort of man who’d go to extraordinary lengths to do a relatively simple, ordinary thing, when other men would quite happily give up and go away. I believe that this tendency is evidence of exceptional strength, but it’s debatable whether strength is always a virtue. A river in spate is strong; thunderstorms and earthquakes are strong, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody’s ever found a use for them.” He shrugged; he made the gesture elegant, somehow. “I don’t think my people will want to stop being who they are just for the sake of things. I believe that that would be missing the point rather. I feel that if you change yourself in order to achieve something, you distort the objective. We have a story, a silly little story for children, about a dog who wanted to steal the meat from his master’s table, but it was too high up for him to reach. If I were a bird, he thought, I could fly up there and get at it; and at that very moment, a sorcerer happened to pass by and heard his thoughts, and decided to teach him a lesson. He turned that dog into a bird, and the bird flew up on to the table, just as he’d wanted to do; but when he got there, he found his jaws had become a stupid little beak, and he couldn’t open it wide enough to take the meat.” He smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t waste your time with such things. But as we were talking, it came into my mind.”

  Ziani frowned. “It’s a charming story,” he said, “but I don’t see what it’s got to do with what we’ve been talking about.”

  “Don’t you?” The Aram Chantat raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps you think the bird was simply being feckless; he should have learned to use a knife, so he could cut the meat up into pieces small enough for him to eat.”

  “Not really,” Ziani replied. “I can’t imagine the dog wanting to be a bird. So it was the sorcerer’s fault for interfering.”

  That made the Aram Chantat clap his hands and laugh. “Of course,” he said. “Such a thing would never happen, and so the story is pointless. You would never wish to be anything other than what you are; I’d overlooked that point. In fact, you’d perch on the sorcerer’s shoulder and peck his ears all day until he turned you back. I can see that, now I think about it.”

  It was three days since he’d last seen the duke, and he arrived outside the bedchamber door expecting to find evidence of progress; otherwise, why would he be up and about and demanding to see people?

  He found Valens dressed and s
itting in a chair; but the hole in his face, stuffed with wood-pith, was still as extraordinary as ever. For a moment, he thought he was looking at a mechanical object, a man-sized and shaped automaton with the faceplate partly removed and one of the screw-holes showing. Then he got a grip on himself and made the usual respectful enquiries.

  “Actually, I feel terrible,” Valens replied. “It hurts like hell, and every time I move I can feel this fucking plug, and all I want to do is get hold of a pair of tongs and pull it out, except I wouldn’t have the strength.” He stopped abruptly, as though he’d been punched hard in the pit of the stomach, then went on, “But I’ve got to get up and go to the front, because of your revolting friend Daurenja. Talking of which, what in God’s name possessed you to recommend him for commander-in-chief? I thought you couldn’t stand the man.”

  Ziani looked down at the floor. “He didn’t leave me much choice,” he said. “You know the position. If he told the Aram Chantat what he knows about me…”

  “Fine.” Valens scowled, and clearly that hurt. “I should have realised. Anyway, the savages are thinking about making the replacement permanent, so I’ve got to go down there and take the war back, assuming the journey doesn’t kill me. I gather you’re going there soon, with the new engines.”

  “They’re ready,” Ziani said. “There’s a few bits and pieces still to do, but I can see to them once we get there.”

  Valens nodded. “In that case, we’ll leave in the morning. Does that give you enough time?”

  “I think so. I’ve got limbers and teams. But it’ll take a while to get there, obviously.”

  “You won’t be slowing me down,” Valens replied. “Quite the opposite, in fact. The doctors say I’ve got to be carried in a litter at walking pace. Anything faster, and the wound might open up.” He shuddered, a long, slight, convulsive movement that played up and down his body. When it stopped, he sighed. “I’m supposed to be brave,” he said. “That’s what they’re telling everybody. Throughout, the duke has exhibited the utmost fortitude. Balls. The only reason I haven’t screamed the place down is because it hurts too much to scream.” He breathed in about halfway, then let the breath out slowly. “Really, I ought to thank you for making that horrible contraption the doctors used on me. They tell me it saved my life.”