The Escapement

by K. J. Parker

  The gates stayed shut.

  When it became apparent that Chairman Psellus had abandoned him, Colonel Zosoter ordered his men to lay down their weapons and surrender, on the entirely reasonable assumption that the enemy took prisoners. He was wrong about that, too.

  He had her escorted to the top of the Chandlers’ bell-tower, whose window overlooked the main gate. She didn’t want to look, insisting that it was none of her business, and she’d done nothing wrong.

  Psellus had always taken refuge in the fact that he wasn’t a violent man. He hadn’t even tried to hurt anybody physically since he was eight years old. He reached out as if to pat her comfortingly on the shoulder, wound his fingers in her hair and tugged till she gasped. Then he twisted her head to face the open window.

  “In that case,” he said, “there’s no reason why you shouldn’t look.”

  She swore at him, but struggling made it hurt more. “Let me go,” she said. “I’ve got my eyes shut.”

  “If you don’t open them,” Psellus said gently, “I’ll push you out of the window.”

  She called him some names he didn’t actually understand, though he got the general idea. He leant against her gently, and she screamed.

  “Look,” he said.

  (Afterwards, he felt very badly about it; partly because he thought he’d let himself down, partly because if she hadn’t opened her eyes, he was sure he would have pushed her out, and killing her would have meant the end of any hope of saving the City. He was also deeply disturbed by how thrilling he found the texture of her hair and the softness of her body as he pressed against it. Just as well, in fact, that she gave in when she did, and opened her eyes.)

  She said nothing; and after thirty seconds or so, he relaxed his grip on her hair and let her pull away. She glared at him, as though he’d trodden on her foot.

  “I agree,” he said. “You’ve done nothing wrong. You just wanted to be happy. But now you can see why you’ve got to help me. Otherwise, they will break in here, and they will kill you. Ziani won’t be able to stop them.”

  She frowned. “I never thought we’d lose,” she said. “I thought we’d win. We always win, don’t we? We’re better than everybody else.”

  He shook his head. “We’re better at everyone else at some things,” he replied. “The things that matter, naturally. But they’re stronger than us, just as I’m stronger than you. One thing this has taught me, you can’t win against brute force if you’re weaker.”

  Her frown deepened; it was as if he was insisting that two and two made five. “But they’re savages,” she said.

  “Yes. And savages are better at fighting than we are. We’ve always tended to see that as evidence that we’re superior to them. I’d like to believe that’s true, but I’m beginning to have my doubts. Now, will you do what I asked you?”

  She nodded. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  When it was all over, the Ducas reported to General Daurenja, who nodded and smiled at him. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve done well.”

  The Ducas made some formal gesture, which the general assumed was an Eremian military salute. “Just doing my duty,” he said.

  “Carry on,” the general replied.

  Miel left him and walked slowly back towards the ditch. The Mezentine dead were piled up like grain sacks waiting to be loaded, a great wealth of commodities. He paused, stooped and turned over a body at random. Then he searched it, taking a bronze cloak-pin, a finger-ring, a linen handkerchief and twelve dollars cash.

  An Eremian soldier was watching him. He straightened up, dropping the goods he’d taken into his pocket, and nodded affably. The soldier saluted.

  “We made them pay for what they did to us, didn’t we, sir?” the soldier said.

  Miel raised his eyebrows. “I suppose so, yes,” he replied.

  He walked down the steep slope formed by the collapse of the embankment, concentrating to keep his balance. Around him he was aware of men calling out (the wounded, too badly hurt to move; it reminded him of the bleating of sheep), and thought of the expression the scavengers used: live one here. Of course, they made a point of salvaging any wounded men who could be expected to recover, and putting the others out of their misery. He envied them their humanity, but reflected that it had done them no good in the long run. If they hadn’t spared him, they’d probably still be alive now.

  The ditch was easy to cross now; they’d brought up planks and laid them on top of the rubble and dead bodies, making a road wide enough to drive a cart over. He noticed the silence, and realised that the Mezentines had given up shooting from the wall batteries. It made sense, of course, to conserve their ammunition. He thought about the hail of scorpion bolts that had wiped out Orsea’s wretched attempt at an invasion. Now it was the other way around, like a reflection in a mirror; a different angle, but the same thing.

  He remembered saving Daurenja’s life, when Framain and his daughter had wanted to kill him. It had been the act of a humane man. He couldn’t imagine those circumstances arising now. He wouldn’t have got involved in the first place.

  He crossed the ditch and walked slowly up the trench, labouring through the mud, working out in his mind how to approach the task of clearing up the mess. Burial details: first, of course, the dead would have to be stripped, the recovered goods sorted into piles: military equipment in one heap, personal items in another. Carts to haul away the armour, weapons, bales of clothing, footwear; sacks for the rest. As he understood it, the correct procedure was to appoint a factor to take charge of the salvage, notify the principal dealers and organise a series of auctions. The proceeds of sale of the military equipment went back into consolidated funds, while the private property of the dead went into a separate fund, to be divided up between the soldiers who’d taken part in the relevant action. The important thing was to make sure that everything was visibly fair and equitable. The factor, if he remembered correctly, took five per cent of the gross. He was sure the general would give him the job, if he asked politely.

  He stepped aside to let a wagon go by. The carter leaned down and called to him. “What’s it like up ahead?”

  “Not so bad,” he replied. “The trench is a bit sticky still, but the slope’s pretty gentle. You’ll get across the ditch all right, but you won’t get much further. Too steep.”

  The carter nodded. “You know where I can find whoever’s in charge?” he said. “Sounds like I’ll need men to haul this lot up to the wall.”

  “You’ve found him,” Miel replied pleasantly. “I’ll send a couple of platoons, if you think that’ll be enough.”

  The carter thanked him. “Special delivery for the general,” he explained. “Top priority, is what I was told.”

  “Ah, well then,” Miel said. “I won’t hold you up any longer.”

  True to his word, he sent on the two platoons before he started rostering the burial and recovery details – he was, after all, still first and foremost a soldier, and his duty must take precedence. The men he’d dispatched squelched up the trench at the double, anxious not to keep the general waiting. So far they’d had nothing to do, and it looked as though the preliminary assault was now as good as over. If they were lucky, they’d be on the spot for the attack on the City itself, and first in meant the best pickings. Everybody knew the general had a special trick up his sleeve for busting down the gates, so that wouldn’t be any problem.

  They overtook the cart just as it was about to cross the ditch. The sergeant went ahead, to make sure the planks were firmly seated, and shouted back that it was all as firm as a rock. Later he told anybody who’d listen that it was the carter’s fault, for not driving straight. Also, the boards were slippery with mud, and he hadn’t realised the load was so heavy. The offside back wheel slid off the boards and went over, cracking the axle, and the shifting of the cart’s weight skewed it sideways. The boom twisted and snapped, and the cart turned over, rolling its cargo off the impro
vised road and into the deep, wet mud.

  The general was furious. He came scrambling down from the gate as soon as he heard what had happened, screaming at the carter and the soldiers, threatening them with court martial, torment and eventual death, and plunged into the mud up to his knees, wading like some rare marshland bird towards the tarpaulin-wrapped bundle half sunk into the mud. He yelled for ropes and long poles, attached the ropes himself, got behind the lump with a lever to work it loose from the grip of the suction. The heavy cylinder came out without too much trouble, considering its weight, and likewise the oak barrel; but two of the stone shot sank without trace in the mud and had to be abandoned.

  “It’s all right,” he panted at Ziani, “we can get by with three. In fact, we can get by with one. Don’t worry,” he added with a brilliant smile, “it’s going to be fine. It’ll take more than a bit of mud to stop me now.”

  “I believe you,” Ziani said.

  With the ropes and levers, they dragged the cylinder up the bank, ploughing furrows in the loose dirt with their feet. Glancing up, Ziani saw movement behind the gatehouse rampart; he shouted for pavises, a shield trolley, archers to cover them and keep the enemy’s heads down. But nothing happened, and he saw that Daurenja was gently shaking his head. “Don’t worry,” he was saying, “it’ll be just fine, we don’t need them. We’ll be under the lee of the wall soon, where they can’t reach us.” He doesn’t want witnesses, Ziani realised; he wants to keep the secret to himself, right up to the very last moment; and he knew intuitively that the soldiers hauling so energetically on the ropes wouldn’t be living much longer. They’d be right at the front in the next action, or there’d be some horrible accident. Not for him, though. Daurenja would never do anything to harm him, because he trusted him implicitly.

  (The good leader, he thought; he’s got all the qualities of the good duke, everything Orsea tried so hard to copy and failed. Certainly, he couldn’t think of anybody else who’d be able to hold the alliance together, or who’d have got this far…)

  A few arrows pitched around him, but they were harmless, out of shot, and he ignored them. The only effect they had was to encourage the men to pull harder. They were a good three yards under the overhang of the wall by now. A man would have to lean right out over the parapet to see them, and then he’d be too cramped up to draw a bow. But they were still far enough away from the foot of the wall to be safe from bricks and rubble dropped on them. In which case…

  “Here,” Daurenja said, his voice low and choking. “This’ll do. Right, let’s get the wraps off and set it up.”

  Four men were struggling with the barrel; another four were laboriously rolling a round of shot up the slope, bracing their backs and thighs against it to stop it from slipping and rolling back down. Daurenja was fumbling with the knots of the cords that bound the tarpaulin round the cylinder. He scrabbled, tore a fingernail, swore, frowned and pulled a jack knife from his pocket. It took him quite some time to open out the blade. Ziani had never seen him be clumsy before. In a way, it was almost touching.

  In the end, he cut the cords and slit the tarpaulin, like a hunter paunching the game. Inside the cut cloth lay the black tube, a horrible fruit inside its split shell. Daurenja reached in and touched it for a moment, laying his palm flat on it, the way Ziani had seen ostlers calm fractious horses. Then he turned his head and shouted to the men to go back to the cart; they’d find wooden blocks and timber sections, some wedges, a hammer and something that looked like a glue-boiler’s iron pot.

  “It’s in two sections,” Daurenja was telling him. “There’s the tube proper, and a sort of reservoir that slides into the back end, to hold the charge of blasting dust. The two together sit in a wooden cradle, and the reservoir’s held tight in the tube by a wedge bearing against the back member of the frame. It’s not wonderful, but I didn’t want to risk trying to close the tube at one end, welding in a bung or anything like that. The reservoir’s just a pot, turned out of solid, so it’ll be plenty strong enough. Of course, it’s got to be practically an interference fit, where the reservoir joins the tube…”

  Crude, Ziani thought. You’d do better with a screw thread or a couple of locking lugs. He’s perfectly capable of thinking of that, but he’s in too much of a hurry. Not that it mattered. The wedge arrangement would be good enough for one firing, and that was all it’d take.

  While the men were fitting the timbers together (Daurenja had cut mortices in them beforehand, a beautiful job; all the men had to do was slot them into each other and tap in a few dowels), Ziani straightened his back and looked thoughtfully at the gate. The proper nomenclature was a Type One; a six-inch thickness of quarter-inch plies, the lie of the grain pointing alternately up and down, side to side. No battering ram yet made would be capable of splintering that. And of course it’d be wedged shut from the other side, and there’d be bars across it, and reinforcing struts jammed into the ground, and behind that a portcullis, which they’d already have lowered. They’d tested a Type One in the factory once by shooting at it with scorpions and onagers at point-blank range, but the plies had flexed and bounced back the shot. No weapon known to the Republic had been able to smash up a Type One. It was Daurenja’s tube, then, or nothing.

  They were lifting it on a stretcher of spars and lowering it gingerly into the assembled frame – as simple as a box without a top or a bottom, with a semicircle cut out of the front for the tube to rest in. Daurenja was talking to it.

  Not, Ziani insisted to himself, that it mattered. It’d be over soon, and before long he’d be inside the City. He focused on that. Nothing else was important, after all.

  One of the men was prising the lid off the barrel. Daurenja left the tube and elbowed him gently out of the way. In one hand he held the iron bowl that fitted into the end of the tube, and in the other was a plain tin cup from a soldier’s mess kit. He dipped the cup into the barrel and brought it up again full of a shiny black compound that looked like charcoal dust. He ladled seven cupfuls into the bowl, then nodded to the man to put the lid back on the barrel.

  “Well,” he said, in a shaky voice, “here goes nothing.”

  He knelt to fit the bowl into the tube; then he held it in place with the fingertips of his left hand while he scrabbled for the hammer and the wedge with his right. Five smart taps, precise as a woodpecker, and then he laid the hammer down and stood up. Three men heaved a round of shot up to the mouth of the tube and rolled it in, snatching their hands away to keep their fingers from getting trapped. With a nod of his head, Daurenja gestured them out of the way. He was kneeling again, his head directly over the back end of the tube. He wasn’t sighting down it, the way the Mezentine engineers peered along the groove of a springal. Instead, he was looking at the gate as though he was the weapon, training and aiming himself at it. Appropriate, Ziani couldn’t help thinking. At some time or other, everybody turns himself into a weapon for some purpose or other.

  Someone was messing about with a tinderbox, frantically cranking the handle and puffing air through the hole in the side. Without looking round, Daurenja extended his arm, his hand palm up to receive the box. His eyes still fixed on the gate, he stuffed the end of a short piece of cord into the hole and blew gently. He’s completely forgotten about us, Ziani thought. This is the crucial moment of his life, and there simply isn’t room for anybody else.

  As he took the cord out of the box, Ziani could see the little orange tip. It glowed bright as Daurenja breathed on it, his breath as soft and urgent as a kiss. He saw Daurenja’s lips begin to move (it could have been prayers or endearments, or a mixture of the two) as he guided the bright orange spot towards the hole drilled in the top of the pot. Quickly, Ziani stepped back; something obstructed his heel, and he turned round and saw a gabion, lying on its side. He ducked down behind it, but couldn’t resist peering round it.

  “Get back, all of you,” Daurenja muttered (and it wasn’t concern for their safety; he just wanted to be alone with the weapon when the
moment came). “Any moment now, there’s going to be a very loud noise, but that’ll be just fine.” He sighed on the burning cord, and it glowed back at him: true love. “It’s going to be wonderful, just you wait and see.”

  Tender as a bridegroom, he touched the cord to the hole in the pot; and Ziani, his eyes open, could see only the cold spot in the heart of the welding fire, plain as a gate in a wall, a gate about to open. I warned him, he told himself, but he wouldn’t listen.

  For a fraction of a second, Ziani was sure he saw the tube swell, like a puffed-out cheek. Then it tore open, from the point where he remembered seeing the cold spot up to the muzzle. The noise and the heat slammed him back like a punch, and he felt something clip the side of his head. The sound rolled, echoed back off the city wall, washed over him and dissipated, leaving his head buzzing. He felt the warm lick of blood trickling down his cheek, and his burnt skin started to pulse.

  He scrambled to his knees. The gabion he’d been hiding behind had turned into a mess of smashed osiers; there was a chunk of twisted steel buried in the dirt where it had been. He thought: it must have worked, nothing could’ve been so close to that and survived. He stood up, then stumbled and sat down in the loose earth.

  Daurenja was lying on his back, about ten feet from where he’d been standing. His chest and half his stomach had been sliced away, and a tangle of wet tubes and pipes had been slopped out into the dirt. There was a steel splinter lodged in his cheekbone; the force of its entry had popped out his left eye. One arm had been torn off and was nowhere to be seen; the other was shredded. He was still breathing.