by K. J. Parker
Shortly after midnight, when the chain was finally in place and lashed securely to the yokes with requisitioned cart-reins, a small party of sappers slipped quietly into the trench, dragging behind them trolleys mounted with large spools for paying out rope. The Mezentines’ attention, what there was of it, was concentrated on the lights of the presumed festival, so they weren’t observed as they fed the rope ends through the pulleys attached to the stakes they’d planted and cemented in a few days earlier. They checked the pulleys were greased and running smoothly, then led the ropes back up the trench. One end they tied to the last link of the chain. The other went round the towing hitches bolted to the fronts of the worms.
There was a young Mezentine artilleryman, Lucazo Boerzes, a member in good standing of the Wiremakers’, and for some reason (his motivation has not been recorded) he decided to climb down the embankment and creep up behind the trench bank to get a closer look at the enemy festival. Anticipating trouble, or maybe simply because he was the sort of young man who made the most of any opportunity to carry a weapon, he took with him his bow, a quiver of arrows and a sword. It was later remembered that he’d been an enthusiastic member of the lunchtime archery club, and had twice scored a verified hit. Crawling most of the way, he eventually reached the head of the trench, where he’d seen a large concentration of moving lights. He was bewildered to see a long column of cattle, and his first thought was that these animals were being driven off to be slaughtered, either as part of some Aram Chantat religious ceremony or to feed the festival-goers. As he came closer, however, he couldn’t help noticing that the cows (he’d never left the City before in his life, and didn’t appreciate the difference between an ox and a cow) were wearing collars, which were somehow attached to what he recognised as a naval blockading chain, designed to be stretched across the mouth of a harbour to prevent ships from entering. It was, in fact, the chain he himself had worked on – his shift had drawn the bar stock from which the links had been formed – and he was entirely at a loss as to how to account for it being there, when it should have been spanning a harbour mouth somewhere in the Old Country. Fortunately, there was plenty of light, although he himself was safely outside it and therefore to all intents and purposes invisible; he carefully worked himself in closer, and saw that the chain was connected to a series of ropes lying in the trench. He couldn’t help noticing too a number of large and completely unfamiliar-looking machines, also with ropes attached to them.
It was at this point that Boerzes came to the conclusion that what he was looking at probably wasn’t a festival at all, but something rather more sinister. He therefore crawled in closer still (according to the report; some commentators have found it hard to credit much of what follows), and actually climbed up the blind side of the nearest machine and looked inside for some clue as to its function and purpose.
He saw (if the report is to be believed) a mechanism by which the weight of a heavy lead block suspended from a rope wound around a spindle turned a driveshaft connected to a gear train, which in turn drove a headstock to which were fixed four curved and twisted blades. From the shape and profile of these blades, he deduced in a sudden flash of insight that they were designed to cut and scoop earth. Furthermore, the sear that released the weight, allowing it to descend and thereby drive the mechanism, was connected to an elaborate system of wires and levers leading to a pressure point on the front of the machine, just above the tow-hitch; the implication being that when the machine crashed into a solid obstacle, such as a bank of earth, the weight would be tripped and the blades would start to turn, without the need of a human operator.
At this point (so the report states) Boerzes found himself torn between his perceived duty and his personal desire to engage the enemy and single-handedly thwart what he recognised as an entirely viable plan to breach the bank of the flooded ditch and thereby drain it. Again, his true motivation can only be guessed at; the report records that he settled himself on the top of the machine, nocked an arrow on his bowstring and started shooting.
If this is indeed what happened, it’s easy to imagine the bewilderment and panic it caused. It’s entirely plausible that the drovers and sappers believed they were being attacked by a sortie in force from the embankment. Allied accounts of the incident confirm the Mezentine report’s assertion that at least one of Boerzes’ arrows hit an ox, which shied, broke its traces and plunged into the crowd of sappers and lantern-bearers. Many of them understandably sought the nearest cover, some of them crowding behind the worms; Boerzes asserted that, having by this time run out of arrows, he killed two of them with his sword before making his escape back to the Mezentine lines. In any event, the allies halted their operations, and Boerzes, having made a frantic report to the watch captain, urged him to start an artillery bombardment at once, to smash down the posts cemented in at the foot of the trench.
The watch captain pointed out that most of the artillery crews had been sent home, and the only men available were partially trained general infantry, incapable of working the engines, let alone aiming with sufficient precision to take out the posts. Instead, having sent a message to Chairman Psellus, he took the decision to launch a sortie with the forces at his command.
Psellus’ reply, forbidding him to leave his position under any circumstances, came too late, and the sortie, no more than sixty men strong, scrambled down the embankment into the flooded ditch. Since none of them had been trained to swim in armour, it was inevitable that a number of them soon got into difficulties and were drowned; others were saved by their fellows or managed somehow to get across, but the commotion they made soon drew the attention of the allied sappers, who by now had realised that they were no longer under attack and were hurrying to get the operation back on schedule.
The surviving members of the sortie, meanwhile, had reached the trench; but they were leaderless, the captain having drowned in the flooded ditch, and most of them had only a very vague idea of what the purpose of the sortie was supposed to be. Instead of breaking down the posts or cutting the ropes, they advanced slowly and warily up the trench, apparently expecting to meet a raiding party of allied infantry.
Instead, they met the worms. General Daurenja, directing this stage of the operation in person, had given the order for the oxen to be led forward, pulling on the ropes fed through the pulleys at the far end of the trench and thereby drawing the worms on their wheeled carriages down the trench towards the already weakened wall of the flooded ditch. The sortie took them for some kind of siege tower and, displaying a remarkable degree of courage in the circumstances, charged them and clambered aboard. Instead of finding them full of armed men, however, they quickly realised they were unmanned, and moving at a slow but steady rate towards the ditch. The sortie’s nerve finally broke; they jumped down behind the worms, still not having the wit to cut the ropes, and tried to climb out of the trench over the gabion wall. In the dark, however, they had no idea how tall it was; they appeared to have concluded that it was too high to scale without ladders, and dropped back into the trench; for some reason, it didn’t seem to have occurred to them to try the other side, where there was no wall and they could have scrambled out relatively easily. As a result, they were still in the trench when the worms hit the bank and set off their blade-spinning mechanisms.
Ziani Vaatzes had of course tested a prototype before shipping the worms to the camp; it helped, as well, that the weight of the ditchwater was pressing in from the other side. Even so, the speed and efficiency with which they bored through the bank surprised everybody, including the general. The bank collapsed and the water flooded out into the trench, sweeping before it a tumbled mess of gabions, shield trolleys, fascines and other equipment. Most probably it was the debris, rather than the floodwater, that accounted for the Mezentines in the trench; only six of them escaped to report back to Psellus on the embankment. The worms, on the other hand, remained firmly tethered to the posts, cemented into the trench floor, and when the water had drained away and th
e first allied troops arrived at the foot of the trench, they found them substantially intact, ready for use in the next stage of the operation.
Psellus’ head was still full of sleep as they bundled him, in his frayed nightgown and slippers, into the Guildhall yard, where a covered sedan chair was waiting. He protested: he hated being carried around in those things, he’d far rather walk. They ignored him as though he hadn’t spoken, which put him in his place.
He particularly hated it when one of the four chairmen was a few inches taller than the others. It meant that one corner of the chair was always higher, while the man diagonally opposite was taking more than his fair share of the weight, which meant he stumbled on cobbles.
As a result, Psellus found it impossible to concentrate on what he’d been told, as the chair lurched and wobbled through the back alleys, heading for the Ridgeway gate. That was unfortunate; he needed time to clear his mind, before people started talking at him in loud voices. All he’d managed to grasp while they were waking him up and putting his slippers on his feet was that the enemy had somehow managed to burst the banks of the flooded ditch; there was also some ridiculous talk about a sortie – he’d sent a runner ahead to forestall that – and other stuff about monstrous unmanned digging machines. He’d let it flow over him; he’d have to deal with it when he got there, and the world stopped swaying.
The first face he saw as the chair stopped and he yanked back the curtains was Dilao Zosoter, colonel-in-chief of the artillery; a pompous, braying man who’d bounced his way up the hierarchy of the Pipemakers’; but when he saw him, Psellus couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He looked empty, as though someone had tapped his ear and siphoned out his personality.
“Dilao.” He felt gingerly with his foot for the folding step, and scrambled out of the chair on to blessed motionless earth. “What’s all this about draining the ditch? What’s going on?”
Zosoter told him. To do him credit, he was clear and concise, an indication of how badly shaken he must be. He ended his narration with the admission that he’d told the artillery crews to go home. “I’ve sent runners to fetch them back,” he added wretchedly, “but it’s got to take time. I can’t understand, actually, why the enemy haven’t started bombarding us. If they’re going to press home an attack tonight…”
Tempting providence. While Zosoter was speaking, Psellus felt the ground shake under his feet, and heard the dull, soft thump of a round shot landing. There was silence for one second, before everybody on the embankment started shouting at once. Typical Mezentines, Psellus thought; they’re telling everybody else to take cover while standing perfectly still themselves.
Which reminded him. He dropped to his knees – mercifully, the earth where his troublesome left knee landed was soft and free of stones – as another shot passed by, close enough for him to feel the slipstream and hear the unmistakable swish-swish-swish noise of the spinning stone ball. The thump shook him up like a coughing fit.
Zosoter had been knocked off balance by the shaking of the ground under his feet, but he scrambled up again straight away. He was screaming orders, but Psellus couldn’t make out a word of what he was saying over the background noise. Psellus looked past him, to the edge of the circle of light thrown by the palisade lanterns. He saw four men frantically spanning the windlass of a scorpion, as a round shot dipped out of the sky and landed no more than five yards away from them, lashing them with a hail of dirt and smashed brick. Another shot skimmed overhead and crashed into the wall behind him, and Psellus suddenly thought: that’s not possible, they can’t reach the wall, it’s outside their maximum range. So they must have advanced their batteries, quietly, while all the commotion was going on. In which case, we’d better drop our sights, or when we get going again we’ll all overshoot…
Another groundquake and thump, further away this time; and then a thought hit him, unexpected as shrapnel. They couldn’t have advanced their batteries, or else the hero who’d raised the alarm, Boerzes, would’ve noticed them as he came back to the Mezentine lines. In which case…
He scrabbled himself upright and grabbed Zosoter by the shoulder. “Listen,” he shouted (shouting always made him hoarse, very quickly), “whatever you do, when you return fire, don’t lower your sights. Got that? Keep the solutions exactly as they are now.”
Zosoter was shaking his head. “We’ve got to drop our aim,” he said. “Their shot’s hitting the wall, which is seventy yards further than they were able to reach last time. They must’ve moved up, which means—”
“They haven’t moved,” Psellus croaked back. “Trust me, I know exactly what they’ve done. Don’t change the solutions, do you understand?”
It was beautiful, in its way: simple, patient, the perfect moment so perfectly chosen. In all the previous artillery exchanges, the enemy had been dropping short deliberately, to give the Mezentines the impression that their engines were less powerful than they actually were. Maybe they’d lowered their elevation, they may even have slackened off the torsion springs, and lightened the counterweights of the trebuchets; however they’d done it, their motive was suddenly and blindingly clear: to fool the Mezentine batteries into thinking they’d moved up, at this crucial moment in the assault, and make them alter their solutions and so drop short.
Briefly, he considered trying to explain that to Zosoter, at the top of his voice, with huge rocks falling out of the sky. Instead, he grabbed the nearest part of him he could reach, his knee, and shook him, bawling, “Do you understand?” Zosoter gave him a look of terrified fury, and nodded. If we’re still alive in the morning, Psellus vowed to himself, I’ll explain it to him. But not now.
“All right,” Zosoter was yelling. “So what do you want us to do? Can we return fire?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You’re sure?”
Psellus had often wondered about violence: why some men chose to initiate it when they didn’t have to. Now he could cheerfully have smashed Zosoter’s face in. “Yes. Get on with it. Please,” he added, on the off chance that politeness might succeed where a succession of direct orders had apparently failed. Zosoter gave him a last resentful look, and darted away to talk to the engine crews.
With only a fifth of the engines manned and operational, it wasn’t much of a return volley; but the enemy weren’t expecting it. The bombardment stopped for two minutes, almost but not quite long enough for the Mezentines to span and loose again. Instead, the allies’ next shot fell just as the crews were loading their projectiles into their slings and sliders, an operation that could only be done standing up. This time, the allies had loaded with junk instead of finished shot – bricks, rocks, chunks of smashed shot, bits of broken timber, gabions filled with flints and small stones which burst on landing and shredded anybody within ten square yards down to the bone. They learned that from us, Psellus thought, staring at a dead body a few feet away. Chips of flint had torn away one side completely, and a tangled mess of guts hung out, spoiled with patches of dust. He thought about the hundreds of cartloads of broken masonry his side’s engines had hurled at the allied lines over the past few weeks. He thought: war is a curious sort of reciprocal mirror. We never see the slaughter and injury our shot causes, only the results of the inevitable retaliation. Hardly any wonder, therefore, that we fall into the error of believing that it’s the enemy who are to blame, rather than ourselves…
“The ditch is empty,” someone was shouting in his ear. He vaguely recognised the voice, but couldn’t put a name or a job description to it. “All the water’s drained away down their big trench. What do you want us to do?”
What did he want them to do? What a very challenging, complex question. He wanted to say: stay here, defend the embankment against the attack in force which should be along at any moment, die (but keeping within the parameters of politically acceptable losses) and give me a few hours while I save the city by doing something so terrible, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you about it. That’s all. Instead, he replied
, “Keep up the bombardment and get as many armed men up here as you can.” Then, as he noticed blood on his ridiculous nightgown, and realised (he felt surprised, bemused even, because he hadn’t felt anything when it happened, and it wasn’t hurting at all) that his left leg had been sliced open just above the knee, he added, “And find my sedan chair and get it over here as quickly as possible. I’m going back to the Guildhall.”
The look in the man’s eyes hurt him. “If you’re leaving, who’s in command up here?”
Psellus smiled. “My dear fellow, you are. Now, please hurry up and find my chair.”
They were shooting round shot rather than scatter, which meant they were trying to take out the engines rather than simply kill artillerymen. The general wasn’t happy about that, coming as it did on top of the failure of the carefully planned undershooting ploy. He’d been banking on getting artillery superiority before sending the sappers up to start work on the embankment. By now, the scorpion batteries should have given up or been pounded into the dirt. Instead, they were maintaining a slow but steady fire – shooting blind in the dark, true enough, but they were still able to blanket a significant area. That left him with a choice between moving forward and thereby betraying his numerical strength, and staying where he was and taking thirty per cent more casualties than he’d budgeted for. He had no option but to choose the latter course, and he was quite obviously annoyed about it. Needless to say, it couldn’t possibly affect the outcome, but it was sure to spoil his projected casualty ratio; and all for nothing.
He joined the sappers, and went up the trench with them,. It was hard going. The floodwater from the ditch had turned the loose soil in the bottom of the trench into thick glue which tugged at their boots, like scavengers after a battle stripping the dead. There were no lanterns to spare, so they followed the gleam of faint moonlight reflected in puddles. Enemy shot whistled and twittered overhead, urging them to hurry, trip and sprawl. Occasionally they trod on dead men partially buried in mud and silt. As they approached the ditch, the lights on the embankment seemed almost welcoming – the friendly inn at the end of a long night ride – but they could hear the sharp clack of the scorpion sliders hammering against their stops: not friendly at all.