by K. J. Parker
“Harbourmaster,” he said. “He’s barricaded himself in his office. But he’s coming down now we’re here.”
Oh well, I thought, and gave the order to disembark. The other barges, which had been hanging back, drew in. The freighter was still standing off, like a fat girl at a dance. Just as well I’d put men aboard, or they’d have spooked and bolted.
Up came the harbourmaster. He had a mailshirt on, and a helmet, a hundred years old and two sizes too small. He looked straight past me until Nico did the introductions.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Gone.” The harbourmaster didn’t sound happy. “Soon as they heard what was going on, everybody was down here, trying to get on a ship. They were fighting like animals, you never saw anything like it.”
Gone. “There’s no ships?”
He laughed. “Cleared out, the lot of ’em. Nobody cared where they were going, so long as it was away from here. Them as couldn’t get on board went back up the hill to the temples, fat lot of good it’ll do them.” He peered at me, as if trying to see in through my eyes. “Wherever you’re headed, take me with you. I’ve got money.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” I said.
He rolled his eyes and words evidently failed him. He tottered back the way he’d just come, leaving the harbour to us. Fair enough.
I stood there, trying to think, until Nico said, “Well, it’s still standing. What do we do now?”
I dragged myself back from wherever I’d wandered off to. “Someone,” I said, “has got to be in charge. Who would that be?”
Nico knows these things. “In the absence of a ranking military officer,” he said, “that would be the City Prefect.”
My pal Faustinus. Oh God. Still, if you need to knock in a nail and you don’t have a hammer, use the heel of your broken-down old boot. “Fetch him,” I said.
“Shouldn’t we—?”
“We’re busy. No, you go, you’re polite.” He stood there, looking gormless. “Go on. Move.”
He shrugged, and ran. I turned round, so I wouldn’t have to look at the City, and started ordering people about. It calms me down, and there was a lot to do.
First things first. We got the barges up out of the water onto the quay and knocked holes in the bottoms; nothing we couldn’t fix later, enough to stop desperate citizens rushing us and taking them. We brought in the freighter, unloaded the cargo, then sent her out again, too far for anyone to swim, with five of my best sergeants on board. Then I split the men up into eight units, five hundred each. By the time I’d done that, Nico was back, with poor old Faustinus.
He was drunk. He has a problem that way at the best of times. It’s no big deal. He waved at me and gave me a big, crazy grin. I pulled him away so nobody could see him, into some shed where they kept tackle and stuff. I sat him down on a big coil of rope and said, “What happened?”
He just grinned at me, so I hit him. Then I helped him up off the floor and asked him again. “What happened?”
He was fingering his jaw. “You bastard,” he said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Tell me,” I said, “what happened.”
So he told me. It started with reports that a gang of about five thousand savages had appeared out of nowhere and were burning farms on the far side of the Spendone escarpment. There was a Council meeting. General Priscus decided that the only thing to do was come down on that sort of behaviour like a ton of bricks. He mobilised the Guards—all of them—and marched out. He wouldn’t be gone long, he said, it’d be a piece of cake.
A few days later, the watchmen on the towers saw what looked like the army coming back. Faustinus sent word to open the gates, get people out into the streets, put garlands up all round the Hippodrome, make sure there was plenty of food and drink for the victory street parties. Then, he told me, our luck must have turned, just a tiny bit. Some clerk from the War Office had some bit of urgent business he needed Priscus’s seal on. Rather than wait until the army got home (and then they’d all be busy making whoopee, and no chance of getting any work done or days) he grabbed a chaise from the messenger service and rode out to meet them. He was right up close when he realised something wasn’t right; the men in the soldiers’ uniforms were the wrong colour.
He turned the chaise round and dashed back to the gate hell for leather; a hundred or so cavalry set off after him, but those chaises are fast. Faustinus was at the gate when this clerk came racing through, screaming and yelling like a lunatic, shut the gates, shut the gates. Just as well Faustinus knew the man and knew he was the most unimaginative, boring creature who ever drew breath. They got the gates shut and the bars down a few heartbeats before the cavalry outriders reached it. By then, of course, the men on the wall could see milk-white faces under their helmets. Two Watch sergeants went sprinting off down the ramparts to the other gates. It was a horribly close shave, but all the gates were shut in time.
Pretty desperate, even so. Faustinus had at his disposal the two hundred Watch who were on shift—dispersed, it goes without saying, right across the City. That was all. Quite by chance, he had forty or so within the range of his voice. He got them up on the wall, but he knew he was in dire trouble.
The bare statistics aren’t widely known, but they’re in books where anyone can read them. The Land Walls are thirty-eight feet high, eighteen feet thick at the base. All the gates are ten plies of oak laid crosswise, so they can’t be split down the grain, and each of the eight hinges weighs a quarter of a ton; if nobody disturbs you, you could hack and bash your way through them in half an hour (given unlimited manpower and the proper kit) or pile up brushwood and burn them through in a day. Get through them and you’re into the Olive Press, a strip twenty-five yards wide between the Land Walls and the Inner Curtain, twenty-six feet high, fifteen feet thick; the idea being that anyone who makes it that far will be shot to pieces in seconds by the siege engines and massed archers on the Curtain ramparts, with no cover and nowhere to run to. It’s an unbeatable defensive setup so long as you’ve got even a handful of men, which of course Faustinus hadn’t.
In theory, the Prefect has at his disposal all the ten thousand or so able-bodied citizens who get their pay from the government; the Watch, the Board of Works, the Fire Brigade, the Inspectorate of Weights and Measures, all that. But they weren’t where they were supposed to be. They were down at the harbour, fighting for deck room on a ship. The only outfit who were prepared to do as he told them were the hundred or so operatives from Parks and Gardens, and then only when he offered to pay them triple time.
(That I could understand. When I’m out of uniform in the City, I’m often mistaken for a gardener. A senator explained it, a few years ago. Milkfaces are shorter than Robur, therefore closer to the ground, therefore naturally suited to stoop labour, like planting and weeding.)
So up onto the ramparts they went, holding hoes and brooms like they were spears. You don’t have to do anything, Faustinus told them, just stand there, give the impression there’s somebody home. Amazingly, it worked. The enemy stopped and drew up three hundred yards from the wall, sent out scouts to ride up and down and take a good look. Which they were still doing.
According to the books (there’s an extensive literature on the subject) there are fifteen ways to defend a walled city. You can try one of them, and if that doesn’t work—
Indeed. But the books were written for generals, kings, emperors; better luck next time, and we have plenty more cities where that one came from. And, to be fair, each of the fifteen ways is practical and sensible, provided you’ve got an adequate garrison, and sufficient supplies and materiel, and a competent staff of trained officers making up a properly constituted chain of command.
What the books don’t tell you is, there’s a sixteenth way. You can use it when you’ve got nothing; no stuff, no men and nobody to lead them. Apart from that, it’s got nothing to recommend it whatsoever.
Fine, I thought. Let’s give it a go.
; “All right,” I said. “Here’s what you need to do.”
Of all the crazy ideas I’ve ever had, that had to be the craziest. But, Faustinus had said three hundred yards, which could only mean one thing. A Type 16 torsion engine (that’s a catapult to you) has an extreme range of two hundred and seventy-five yards. Of course there were no Type 16s, no engines of any sort. They’d all been in storage at Classis, dismantled and crated up, ready for deployment in the unlikely event that they’d be needed somewhere. Plainly, the enemy didn’t know that.
Luckily, I knew exactly where to find what I needed. I sent two of my eight companies down the quay to the West Dock, where they unload the grain ships. They requisitioned all the big cranes, dragged them all the way up that steep hill to the wall, broke them down into their four main pieces and hauled them up onto the towers, where they put them back together again and draped them with tarpaulins. From a distance, if you don’t really know what you’re looking at, a freight crane covered in a tarp looks a little bit like a catapult. At any rate, it looks like a big, powerful machine, or it did to the enemy scouts, which is why I’m still alive and you’re reading this. Like I said, crazy.
Meanwhile, Three Company was ransacking the factory quarter for anything they could find; drop hammers, wine presses, looms, the mechanism out of the Blue Temple clock, anything that would look scary under a dust sheet. By then, word had got about that the Prefect was handing out silly money to anyone prepared to haul on a rope; we scraped together about four hundred of the market-square crowd who reckoned that if they were going to die they might as well die rich. Bless them, they put in a bloody good hour’s work, and we got two-thirds of the artillery niches filled. The scouts stopped cruising up and down, and the enemy settled down and started putting up tents. And that, my children, is how Colonel Orhan saved the City.
For now, anyway. The trouble with now is, it’s over in a heartbeat, and then you’ve got to think of something else.
9
I’d been putting it off, but it had to be done. But I was damned if I was going to walk. I was shattered, and it’s a steep hill. I sent Stilico to find me a horse and he was confoundedly efficient about it. I hate horse riding.
Never seen the City like it; deserted. Nobody on the streets, windows shuttered, doors closed, dead quiet. Even in the dead of night, during curfew, there’s always a drunk singing or a woman yelling or the Watch beating up a tramp. In fact, night is a busy time, because that’s when all the heavy carts come rumbling in from the country—too many people got squashed when they used to let them in by daylight; you put your foot down one of the knee-deep ruts and you’re a dead man, you’d be mad to try and cross the street between sundown and third watch. Then, fourth watch, the carters come out from cutting the dust in the market-quarter bars, which is always lively and entertaining to see from a distance; fifth watch there’s generally a murder or a gang fight somewhere, Blues and Greens finding a healthy outlet for pent-up aggression. Sixth watch, you get the country people coming in and setting up stalls, the shit patrol, bakers lighting their fires, respectable men sneaking home after a night in the cathouse. Empty, quiet streets are, therefore, a truly terrifying thing to see, especially in the mid- to late afternoon.
I passed a gang of my lads hauling something—my best guess was the drive-shaft assembly from a waterwheel—on a handcart; I gave them a wave, they waved back. Apart from them, didn’t see a soul until I reached the wall, where a drunken Watchman tried to arrest me. I took my foot out of the stirrup and kicked him in the mouth. Always wanted to do that.
To get up onto the rampart, you go up one of those horrible screwthread spiral staircases inside a watchtower. There’s supposed to be a rope on the outer side to hold on to, but there wasn’t, and the steps were worn smooth as glass. I was shaking when I came out into the fierce white daylight, where some clown shoved the blade of a hoe under my nose and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Take it easy,” I said to him in Alauzet—I knew he was from the Old Country by the colour of his hair. “I’m Orhan, colonel of the Engineers. And you could put an eye out with that thing.”
He grinned and put it down. He’d heard of me; the only Alauz to have made good in the big city, I’m famous. Sold out is the term they generally use, but I’m sure they mean it kindly. “Pass,” he said.
I slid by him and put my hands on the parapet. Never been keen on heights, which is a problem in my line of work. I looked out over the plain, and saw the enemy.
At first, my brain didn’t register anything wrong. I was looking at an Imperial army, all shiny and neat in cornrows, a reassuring sight on any battlefield if you happen to be on their side. Then I remembered and I got this lump in my throat and my knees went weak. There were ever such a lot of them, and they looked the way they’re meant to look: terrifying.
Except they weren’t doing very much. Five ranks were standing to arms, shields rested on the ground, spears pointing skywards. Too hot to do much except stand still if you’re wearing all that ironmongery. Behind them, a lot of men in jacks but no metalwork were moving about—setting up tents, carrying things from here to there, digging latrines, grinding corn, sitting round fires. I could hear the tick-tick of distant hammers—farriers shoeing horses, smiths peening rivets. Quite evidently they were in no hurry. I took another look round, watching out for signs of my counterparts working on big baulks of lumber; because if I was down there, you can bet I’d have been building scaling ladders or siege towers or a battering ram. Nothing like that as far as I could see. Or I’d be binding up thick sheaves of brushwood—fascines, we call them—or handing out picks and shovels to the sappers, who’d be getting ready to move the million tons of earth it takes to drive a sap underground to undermine a wall. And there’d be flat-bed wagons laden with pit props, handcarts to shift the spoil, men leading pit ponies. Not something you can easily hide. Nothing like that, either.
They’re waiting for something, I thought. Or somebody.
But I didn’t know that for sure; and I knew what had to be done next. Properly speaking, it wasn’t my job, but I had a nasty feeling I’d be doing it. Hope, however, springs eternal; maybe I could shuffle off responsibility onto somebody else. In which case—
In which case, God help me, my next move would have to be, go and see the emperor.
Clemens IV, brother of the Invincible Sun, regent of Heaven and Earth, Undefeated, Father of His Country, King of Kings, whatever. He’d been on the throne seventeen years, which is not bad going—the average is around twelve, but that includes the dozen or so who lasted a matter of months, and who ended up with their heads on pikes and a splendid view up Hill Street—and he was born in the purple, which means a lot to the Robur. It’s next best thing to impossible to know whether the man on the big chair during your lifetime is going to go down in history as The Great or The Wise or The Cruel or Old Coppernose or The Mad; the government boys would have you believe he never puts a foot wrong and we’re living in a golden age, your friends in the market or the Two Dogs tell you he’s a drunken, perverted halfwit and the empire’s going to hell in a handcart, and what you see with your own eyes (shining new temples, mighty armies parading at New Year and Ascension, overgrown fields, starving kids in the street) is almost certainly atypical or isolated incidents or the exception that proves the rule. If you’d asked me, I’d have said that Clemens was probably all right, if a bit misguided in his choice of advisers. I’d have wanted to believe that. Besides, what possible business was it of mine?
Certain facts were readily available to anybody who could read, or hear things read to them. Clemens was forty-six years old; he had two sons, Audax and Roburtinus, nineteen and fifteen respectively, so the succession was well and truly secure. His wife, Volumnia of Molossus—a cold woman, by all accounts, head in a prayer book most of the time—had been dead for ten years, and there was talk—when wasn’t there talk?—about a diplomatic marriage with one of the Echmen princesses, either for Clemens or Aud
ax—one princess was fifty-six and the other one was twelve, but they don’t worry about things like that in those circles. It must be funny being an emperor.
I needed to see him (I explained to Prefect Faustinus) in order to get the position straight. If, as I was horribly afraid, I was the senior military officer in the City, I needed confirmation or a warrant or something. If there was someone higher up than me, I desperately wanted to hear about him and ask him for orders. So, how do you go about it?
Faustinus looked petrified. “How the hell should I know?” He’d sobered up, just about, and wasn’t feeling his best. “I’ve never met him.”
“You haven’t.”
“Of course not, talk sense. I go through channels, naturally.”
I nodded. “Fine. What channels?”
“The Chamberlain.”
“Right. Take me to him.”
The crazy grin was back. “He skipped out on the first ship to leave. Also the Grand Logothete, the Chief Domestic, the Master of the Wardrobe, the Leader of the House and the Count of the Stables. There are no channels. They left.”
My head was starting to hurt. “That’s not possible,” I said. “There must be—”
“No.” He’d raised his voice. He doesn’t do that. “You know what it’s like in this town, there’s a hierarchy, a system, protocols. Only now there’s a hole in all that you could drive a horse and cart through. We’re cut off, stranded. He might as well be on a desert island. We’ve got no way of contacting him.”
Poor devil, he believed it. Years of conditioning. The only way to do things is through the chain of command, and if the chain breaks you’re stuck. I shoved my hand under his chin and tilted his head up. “Pull yourself together,” I suggested. “Now, who’s next after the Count of the Stables?”
He was staring at me as though I’d gone mad. “Me,” he said. “I guess.”
“Fine,” I said. “You’ll do. We can go together.”