Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

by K. J. Parker

  I looked at her. “No.”

  She beamed at me. Not one of those women who’s always grinning all the damn time. She looked quite different, somehow.

  “I want a prototype,” I said. “And we’re going to test it, somewhere they can’t see us. Set it up on the docks and chuck stones in the sea. I want this to be a surprise for them.”

  The next three days were solid, torrential rain, the sort we get in the City every five years or so. It turned the streets into swamps, so we couldn’t move carts, there was flooding in Lower Town and about thirty tons of irreplaceable charcoal got soaked and ruined. And I was so happy I could hardly look out of the window without bursting into song. Why? First, because we had houses with roofs, they had tents. Second, because all that rainwater poured down off the slates and tiles into drainpipes and gutters, and eventually found its way into the storm drains, which I’d ordered to be diverted into cisterns.

  Excuse me for a moment, I’m going to boast about something. I designed the whole system, and it worked. I’m particularly proud of the banks of gravel through which the drainwater passed; filtered out all the crap and litter, leaving stuff fit to drink, provided you boiled it first. I can’t remember where I first heard about that trick, but it works.

  The fourth day, I was down at the docks. It’s a strange place when there’s no ships, like a hill covered in stumps when all the trees have been felled. Actually, that’s not a bad comparison, because it reminds me of a young plantation in winter, when all the leaves are off; rows of tall, bare poles sticking up at the sky. But there wasn’t a mast in sight that day, and the only pole was the beam of the Trebuchet, Experimental, Mark One. Got to hand it to that girl, she works quickly and well. I’d hate to work for her. You’d kill yourself trying to keep up, so as not to be humiliated by a woman.

  You can tell when someone hasn’t slept or eaten much lately, let alone washed. She had cuts all over her hands, just the normal nicks and gashes that can’t be helped when you’re handling chisels and rasps and planes. I think she’d reached the stage where she was past tired and out the other side, moving slow but steady, ignoring the inconvenient fact that everything hurts.

  “You’ve changed the beam taper,” I said.

  She nodded. “I found a piece of hickory just the right size,” she said. “So I’ve gone slimmer and gentler in the taper, for more spring.”

  “That’s not a very good idea,” I said. “We’ve got to build hundreds of these things. Where are we going to get hundreds of straight hickory beams?”

  “We’ll use ash and the original spec.” She yawned so much she nearly tore her face. “Ash is lighter, so it’s broad as it’s long.”

  I hated doing it, but I said, “Did you make an ash beam? To spec?”

  “Got one rough-hewed, but then we found the hickory.”

  “Fine. Finish it, take off the hickory, shift the fittings over to the ash and use that. A one-off proves nothing.”

  She gave me a pitiful look, then nodded. “You’re right,” she said, “I’m sorry. I just thought, well, hickory’s better.”

  “It would be. A buffalo horn thirty feet long and backed with dragon sinew would be better still. But we haven’t got any of those, either.”

  She stifled another yawn, then tottered away to tell the crew to take down the beam they’d just bust a gut winching into place. I heard raised voices; they weren’t happy, and who can blame them? They were my lads, so I went over and gave them a filthy look. No more trouble.

  It took the rest of the morning to finish the ash beam, drill it for the ironwork, fit it out, get it mounted. I hung around, itching to grab a plane and join in, but I couldn’t quite trust myself to do good enough work, in front of everyone. Stupid, really. It’s not something you forget, and I was a skilled man, once upon a time. So I hung around getting under people’s feet, occasionally dealing with some nonsense or other brought down by runners from Upper Town. I could’ve gone back and got on with my own job, but the temptation was too great, so I told myself I was still sick and needed the fresh air. I guess that’s what it’s like for retired athletes or arena men. They can’t do it any more, so they watch.

  Typical of me, I was looking the other way when the beam eventually dropped into place and they slid the axis pin home; job done. I was reading some idiotic supply report; I looked up and there it was, finished, towering over me like a monster crane fly with a broken wing. I looked at Sawdust; she was swaying slightly. She caught my eye, grinned and said, “Give us something to shoot at.”

  Hadn’t thought about that, had I? “See that marker buoy?” I pointed. “A hundred stamena if you hit it.”

  They didn’t, of course. It was five hundred yards away, and very small, just a floating log with a flag stuck in it. But they weren’t all that short and they weren’t all that wide, and most of all, the bloody machine didn’t break. There was a cheer the enemy must’ve heard, and then they were winching the counterweight back down. “Now do it again,” I said.

  Sawdust was giving orders; two minutes up, three minutes left. Missed again, but a fraction closer. “All right,” I said, “try something easier.”

  So we launched a shit barge and I had them row it out four hundred and fifty yards, then row back in the dinghy. Just as well Sawdust didn’t manage to hit it, though she came unpleasantly close. What really impressed me was that she overshot it a couple of times—four-fifty yards plus, so a good fifty yards further than even the mythical trebuchets of Echmen were supposed to be able to shoot. I decided I’d save up that extra fifty yards for a rainy day and make sure nobody mentioned it to anyone.

  20

  Thanks to Nico, we’d got away without a full-scale Green-and-Blue war, but things like that don’t just melt away like the snow in spring. There were a lot of people going around muttering things like we should’ve given those Greens/Blues a proper seeing-to while we had the chance, and I couldn’t help noticing that the two Themes weren’t getting along as well as they had been. Only natural, I suppose. They’d been working flat out side by side with their worst enemy for weeks on end, on the strict understanding that if they didn’t the world was going to end; but it hadn’t ended, and now we’d beaten the savages in the sortie and seen off their secret weapon, so obviously the so-called emergency had been blown up out of all proportion; in fact, more than likely the whole thing was a scam put up by the government to break up the Themes and kid people into working their guts out for rubbish money. And what were the Theme bosses doing about it?

  I think Arrasc had his people on a pretty tight rein, but that wasn’t Longinus’s style. He got into leading the Greens because he liked to be popular, and suddenly he wasn’t. His view, if he ever thought it through to such an extent, was that he’d been elected to look after his people and get them what they wanted. Obviously looking after them came first, and when we’d been defenceless with the enemy at the gates, he’d done his deal with the Devil and it had worked, no regrets on that score. But that was some time ago, and it was now clear enough that the savages weren’t actually up to much. The bouncing balls had sent them running for cover, their siege towers and trebuchets were now so much firewood, and all they did was sit there; we could take them if only we had a proper soldier leading us, and as soon as the Fleet came home the marines and the navy boys would make short work of them, and that would be that. So, all a lot of fuss over nothing. Meanwhile, what the Greens wanted was a showdown with the real enemy, and as Green leader it was his duty to give it to them.

  So now we recognise (as they say in the House) yet another unsung hero who saved the City single-handed, although that wasn’t what he intended to do, and I don’t suppose he knew he was doing it. Said hero is one Antigonus Vorraeus, no fixed abode, occupation a dealer in stolen property and illegal merchandise. Vorraeus was a Scaurene, been in the City about five years—he jumped ship off a freighter—and didn’t belong to a Theme. What he was really good at was being invisible, and neither the Blues nor
the Greens knew much about him. He was very hard to find unless he wanted to be found, and having no affiliations he was uniquely positioned to start up a one-man black market, if only he could lay his hands on some stuff to sell. He also had a broad, uninhibited imagination, and a small boat he’d neglected to hand over to the authorities.

  At great personal risk, therefore, he sneaked out of the harbour in the middle of the night and rowed all the way down to Chirra, against the tide, in the hopes of finding something to buy. He got lucky. He fetched up in Chirra about seventy-two hours later, half dead with exhaustion, and immediately ran into a Scaurene freighter, which had turned back with its cargo hold full of wine and strong cider because there were no buyers from the City in town. They hadn’t heard about the siege in Scauroe yet.

  Vorraeus and his countrymen did a deal. In return for a sum of money—a small fortune to the Scaurenes—they gave him their ship’s longboat, loaded with barrels until it was barely afloat. The longboat had a sail, and fortunately there was a handy following wind all the way back to the City. Vorraeus hung about on the other side of the Cape till nightfall, then drifted in nice and easy on the midnight tide. He had a hell of a job unloading all that booze single-handed, but he managed it somehow, got it off the boat, into a handcart, then about two dozen trips to the broken-down shed he used as a warehouse. He had just enough strength left to stow the boat away in a corner of a friend’s boathouse, and crawled away a little before daybreak for a well-earned rest. Next afternoon, when he’d recovered enough to move, he went down to the Two Dogs, where he knew the management was offering stupid money for off-ticket booze.

  And that’s how Vorraeus saved the City. Thanks to him, the Dogs had wine and cider again, so the bar was open, so the Green war council had somewhere to meet and be overheard when they planned the big rumble.

  It was the middle of the night. Actually it was later, about the time when bakers light their ovens and the fullers do their rounds, and everyone else is fast asleep. Everyone but me; I had financial reconciliations to finish, though my head weighed a ton and kept drooping on my neck like a dead flower. Didn’t help that we had absolutely no money at all left, and I had to think of some way to disguise that fact before morning, when I was meeting the Paymaster. I was adding up a column of figures for, I think, the fifth time, and some fool came banging on my door.

  “Go away,” I said.

  Silence. Good. I started again at the top of the column. About a third of the way down, more banging.

  I may have said something uncouth. But the tiny part of my brain devoted to the exercise of common sense was insisting that nobody who knew me would come bothering me at that hour if it wasn’t lethally important. “Come in,” I said.

  Enter Pamphilus. He’s all right, actually, even though he’s one of Faustinus’s clerks. I’d had dealings with him before the emergency, back when I was nobody, and he’d been helpful and not too fastidious about interacting with dross like me. Accordingly he was now my assistant personal secretary. And, yes, he knew better than to hassle me in the wee small hours for anything less than the Second Coming.

  “Someone to see you,” he said.

  I yawned. “You’re serious, aren’t you? For crying out loud, Pamphilus—”

  He had that worried look. “You gave orders,” he said. “She’s to be admitted any hour of the day or night.”

  Which could only refer to one person. Only she was supposed to be half a mile away, under the zealous care of tyrannical nurses. “She’s here?”

  “Downstairs. She can’t manage stairs, she said.”

  I jumped up, spilling the ink over my night’s work. I winced, cursed. “See if you can clear that up, will you?” I said, ever the optimist. I was pulling on my slippers. “Is she alone, or—?”

  “There’s two women with her, and a man. I think he’s a doctor.”

  I left him dabbing at a sea of ink with the corner of his sleeve. Down the stupid marble stairs, three insufferable flights of them. She was in the lobby. For idiotic aesthetic reasons, there’s no chairs in the lobby, so she was standing, her arms round the necks of two nurses. A Theme doctor whose name I couldn’t remember was hovering, looking anxious. “What the hell are you doing here?” I yelled at her. “You should be in bed.”

  That’s what we told her, said the nurses’ faces. They had my sympathy. “In there,” I said, pointing at the nearest door. It was one of sixteen ante-rooms, all the size of a good hay meadow, but there were chairs in there, and couches. “Get her comfortable.”

  In the Palace they have bells in every room, which you ring by yanking on a silk rope. Damn thing came away in my hand. Then I remembered I’d fired—I mean reassigned—ninety-five per cent of the Palace staff.

  “Stop fussing, I’m fine,” she said, then squealed like a pig.

  “What is it?” I snapped at the doctor. “Is it the stitches?”

  He was rolling up her dress to have a look. She smacked his face so hard, it echoed off the ceiling. He carried on as if nothing had happened. “They’re fine,” he said.

  “I’m holding you responsible,” I said. “What the hell were you thinking of, letting her come here in her state?”

  He didn’t say anything, just looked at me. Quite right, too.

  “You three, get out.”

  That was her, not me. Remember me telling you, on the subject of my old pal Ogus, about the concept of the natural-born leader? That makes two I’ve known in my lifetime. The doctor looked at me and I nodded. The poor man had suffered enough. He left, and the nurses followed.

  “No,” she said, “shut up and listen. In just over an hour, when the bell rings for Matins at the Silver Star, the Greens are going to burn down the Blue clubhouse.”

  I have my faults. But when I hear bad news that’s palpably true, I don’t argue or ask for proof. I took one look at her face and knew she was serious. Then I was in the lobby yelling out names at the top of my voice: Nico, Artavasdus, Menas—no, wait, he’s dead. Genseric. Dead silence; then I heard their boots on the marble.

  During that dead silence I knew what we were going to do, as though someone had told me and I was just passing on the message. Genseric to the Blues, warn them, full permission to take all steps necessary for their defence. Artavasdus to the Watch—fat lot of good they’d be—and the Parks and Gardens. Nico to send for Faustinus, then downtown to fetch our boys. I stopped him just long enough to scrawl the order of battle and basic moves in the dust on a small mahogany table. He grasped it instantly, nodded once—meaning he understood and approved, and, boy, did that make me feel better—and then he swept the dust away with his elbow and was off like a chariot in the Hippodrome, and I was alone again.

  I went back into the ante-room. She was sitting up on the couch. “Am I really barred?”

  “What?”

  “From the Dogs. You said, don’t come round here any more.”

  “What? No, of course not, I didn’t mean it.” She looked straight through me and out the other side. So what? I’m nobody special. “What are you going to do?”

  “Stop it, of course,” I said. “Look, will you be all right? I’d better go.”

  “Take care.”

  Useless advice for a man heading for a combat zone, but nice to hear. “You, too,” I said.

  I put on my armour. Complete waste of time. Yes, it protects you when you’re on your feet, up to a point, but not if you’re down on the ground. Also, it really slows you up when you’re running away. But it’s expected of you if you’re in command, so I tied myself in knots squeezing into the scale cuirass on my own—it’s a two-man job, you just can’t reach the straps, let alone tease them into the stupid buckles—snapped the greaves round my legs and whimpered as the bottom front edge dug into the top of my instep; the helmet came down over my eyes, so I fiddled with the liner laces, and then it just about balanced on the top of my head, and fell off as soon as I moved. Fine, I decided, I can carry it under my arm. Then down two flights o
f stairs, realised I’d forgotten my sword, trudged up the stairs again (it’s misery walking upstairs in armour that doesn’t fit; the neck of the cuirass crushes your windpipe and the greaves shred the skin all round your ankles), couldn’t find it, found it, back down the stairs—exhausted, like I’d done a day’s work, and I hadn’t even left the house yet.

  Lurking by the door was an ominous dark shape. Lysimachus. You’ll recall he’s a Green.

  “Clear off,” I told him. “Won’t be needing you tonight.”

  He gave me a grave look. “Reckon you will.”

  “You do know—”

  “Yes. You can trust me.”

  God, I thought. Just when you think it can’t get worse. For some reason, though, I believed him. “Fine,” I said. “Though I’m not going anywhere near the fighting.”

  He grinned. “Suits me.”

  There was a two-porter chair waiting for me in the courtyard. The porters would be Themesmen, of course. Everyone is, in this town. But it was that or walk in those crippling greaves. We set off at the run, with Lysimachus loping alongside like a horrible dog, the sort that won’t go away even if you throw stones at it. I tried to think serious tactical thoughts, but my mind was a complete blank.

  Everything depended on the element of surprise, which I was convinced—treachery, or just blundering about like fools in the dark—we wouldn’t have. But the chair stopped three blocks short of Goosefair, and Lysimachus and I walked smartly up as far as South Parade, where I hoped to God Artavasdus would be waiting, his men all neatly hidden in the shadows. No sign of anyone, until I was nearly skewered by a Parks and Gardens man who jumped out of nowhere with a bloody great pike. Lysimachus took it away from him before he could hurt anybody, and then he recognised me, so that was all right. He led me into a building, in the back and out the front. In the porch, Artavasdus was crouched down, gazing at the front door of the Blue House, directly opposite.

  “Nothing yet,” he whispered.