Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

by K. J. Parker

  He shuddered. “Yes,” he said. “Most of them are my family. They’re decent people.”

  “They wouldn’t like it here, then,” I said, and poured him another drink.

  “There could be all sorts of explanations,” Nico said. He has an exceptional flair for the unhelpful remark. “We daren’t make any assumptions.”

  Also, he’s got a loud voice, and that precise, clipped Imperial blue-blood diction that means you can hear everything he says perfectly clearly half a mile away in a thunderstorm. “Not so loud,” I told him. He looked puzzled, then guilty. It’s a problem his sort have—the mighty, born-to-rule Great Families, I mean. All their lives, wherever they are—in the street, at home, probably squatting for a shit or screwing their wives, for all I know—they’re constantly waited on and surrounded by a legion of servants. You couldn’t live like that unless you taught yourself to believe that the lower classes are stone deaf. They aren’t, of course; and yet Nico’s lot never cease to be amazed that they can’t keep a secret.

  I wanted him to keep it down because we were standing on a scaffolding platform up against the wall in Canonsgate, watching fifty Greens and forty Blues pouring a mixture of water, quicklime, sand and pumice (you want to know the exact proportions? In your dreams) into a hole in the ground. To explain: the hole we were filling was the one Ogus’s sappers had made, before I flooded them out. The weird mix is a recipe I came across in Tomae, right up in the frozen, godforsaken north; it’s a sort of mortar, except that you can cast it, like bronze, to make slabs and pillars and whole floors—you make a wooden box out of planks and boards and fill it with the gloop, and when it goes off it sets hard as stone, even—now here’s a miracle, if you like—underwater. I can only assume it’s never caught on because you need pumice, which most people haven’t got in any useful quantity. But we have; there’s a vein of the stuff running right down the middle of North Hill, under Hill Street and out into Old Castle. If ever I get out of the military, I’ll make my fortune with the stuff. You could build whole cities out of it, and never have to shape another stone block or lay another brick.

  Secrecy—sorry, I got sidetracked there—because the rumours about a ship suddenly appearing out of nowhere had spread across town like the plague, and people were getting excited. Ships meant a way out of the City before the savages broke in, and I still had a double guard posted outside the docks gate, which was still firmly closed and bolted. Ships were therefore not something I could be heard talking about in public, especially not with ninety-odd Themesmen straining to catch every word I said.

  “You must have some idea,” Nico went on, in what he thought was a whisper. “You talked to the man. What did he say?”

  “I told you,” I said. “His ship got blown off course, and where he expected to find the blockade, there was nothing. That’s all I know.”

  “Makes no sense,” Nico said. “Mind you, it begs the question. If they’ve got ships for a blockade, why haven’t they tried to attack us by sea?”

  You think you know people. He said it like it had only just occurred to him. I’d been losing sleep over it since about Day Two of the siege. I’d assumed he’d thought of it, too, and we hadn’t discussed it because it was too depressing. Still; good question.

  31

  “It’s obvious,” she said. She was feeling a lot better. They’d propped her up with about a million cushions in a gold-leaf chaise longue that used to belong to the Empress Theophano. I didn’t tell her that, of course; it’d have given her the horrors. “How many Sherden ships did you say you saw at Classis?”

  “Seventy odd.”

  “Well, then. That’s probably how many ships they’ve got. Plenty for a blockade of the Bay, if you stand out beyond the Five Fingers, and of course you wouldn’t dare come in any closer because of the evening currents—”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Sailor stuff, of which I know nothing. “Of course,” I said.

  “But hopeless for an invasion,” she went on regardless. “Seventy ships carrying twenty marines, that’s fourteen hundred men. To capture and hold the whole of the docks. That’ll be why.”

  That was roughly what I’d come up with on Day Three, hence my ability to get at least some sleep. “I’d figured there must be a blockade,” I said, “because of no ships coming in, and I guessed we couldn’t see them because it’s too dangerous to hang about in the Bay itself. I don’t know why, but I gather it just is.“

  “It’s all to do with the rip tide and the undertow off Start Point, which means that when the tide turns mid-morning coming in from the west—”

  “Yes,” I said. “Quite probably. And I thought, sooner or later they’ll have repaired that bloody lighthouse, and the Fleet will be able to get back here, and—well, I didn’t bother thinking past that, because as soon as the Fleet gets here, I hand over command to whoever’s in charge of it, I’m off the hook and none of it’s my problem any more. But time’s gone on, and no Fleet.”

  She frowned. “If I was them,” she said. “Sorry, if I was your pal Ogus, the first thing I’d do is get hold of that lighthouse and make bloody sure it’s out of action and beyond repair.”

  I nodded. “I think we can assume he did that. And likewise, it’s a certainty the Fleet’s been trying to take it back. I’ve never been there so I don’t know the geography, but I’m guessing the Imperials built it there precisely because it was safe from an attack from the sea.” I looked at her. “Which doesn’t shed any light on anything really, does it?”

  She doesn’t give up that easily. “Possibility,” she said. “The Fleet’s broken through, and the Sherden have been called off the blockade to stop them.”

  “No chance,” I told her. “The Sherden against the Fleet? They wouldn’t do it. And if they did, they wouldn’t last five minutes, the Fleet would be here by now. Stand-up fighting against a superior enemy isn’t the Sherden way. Or an inferior enemy, come to that.”

  “All right,” she said. “Possibility. The blockaders got messed up by the same storm that blew those traders off course.”

  I nodded. “That’s a good one,” I said. “And, as we all know, I don’t know sailor stuff from a hole in the ground. Even so. If a nasty big wind blew the Selroqois off their line into the Bay, wouldn’t it also have blown the blockaders in here, too? Or can a storm have two nasty big winds blowing in two opposite directions at once? I honestly don’t know, it’s too technical for me.”

  She glared at me. “Good point,” she said. “All right, possibility. The Sherden are the only ships Ogus has, and he needed them for something somewhere else.”

  “Distinct possibility,” I said. “Such as?”

  “It could be anything.” She scowled at me. “If you’d had half a brain, you’d have asked him when you had the chance.”

  32

  As a matter of fact—

  I hadn’t told her about that part of the conversation. I’ve been making arrangements for a big push, he said, on the off-chance you wouldn’t listen to reason. But I won’t have to bother with all that now.

  Big push?

  He nodded. We just cleared the blueskins out of Leuctra Opuntis, so that’s another thirty thousand men available. Also, we had a stroke of luck there.

  That was all he said. But I’m in the trade; I know that Leuctra Opuntis is where they store most of the siege equipment captured from the Echmen in the last war, or the war before that. You’ll have grasped the significance. All government-issued equipment has to go through Classis. But stuff looted from the enemy isn’t our-government issue. A canny provincial general would therefore make damn sure he got hold of it and kept it safe, to be sure of having it to hand if he ever had need of it, rather than going through channels. And the Echmen; they’re rotten soldiers or we wouldn’t keep beating them, but they’re a long way ahead of us—don’t tell anyone I said this—when it comes to making things. Trebuchets, a case in point. It stood to reason, therefore, that Ogus’s stroke of luck was
a cache of state-of-the-art siege equipment, which some fool had neglected to soak in lamp oil and set light to when the savages started coming over the wall. From what I’d heard about the stores squirreled away in Leuctra, seventy Sherden ships would need to make several journeys to shift it all. Something to look forward to.

  That, in my experience, is the way life works. Things tend to come in linked pairs of opposites. Thus, a heaven-sent chance to stock up on supplies, hand in hand with the prospect of heavy plant and equipment which would kill us all.

  Faced with something like that, the sensible man thinks at right angles. Ships, or at any rate, a ship comes to the City laden with wheat. It unloads, and is empty. Of rather more interest, in the wider scheme of things, is not what the ship can bring into the City but what it could take out of it. Me, for instance. Or, if I’m hell-bent on being noble, the people I care for.

  Then I stop and think a bit more. Aichma; who else? Nico and Faustinus and Artavasdus; for a start, they probably wouldn’t go. Question: my friends? Define friend. And any meaningful definition of friend, applied in my case, probably wouldn’t include them, but would definitely apply to Ogus; my old friend, my mate, my pal. And if I’d wanted to save my friends, or, to be more accurate, my friend’s daughter and my colleagues, I had a splendid opportunity, which I pissed on. The difference being, in order to save my pals by taking up Ogus’s offer, I’d have had to betray the City. Putting them on a ship to Selroq wouldn’t have the same unpalatable consequences.

  I was still agonising over that when the ship came back: alone, just the one ship, but riding dangerously low in the water because of its weight of cargo.

  “Of course,” I said, as they unloaded, “you’ll want paying for all this.”

  Teldo, a much-enduring man I’d treated very badly, gave me a sour look. “You don’t have to,” he said. “You could just take our stuff and not pay for it, just like you kidnapped me.”

  “I’m sorry you see it that way,” I said. “and of course you’ll get paid.” I glanced down at the manifest. It was short and to the point. One hundred and fifty tons of wheat, in sacks. If his brothers and cousins had paid more than six hundred stamena for it, they didn’t deserve to survive in business. “Five thousand stamena, “ I said. “Fair?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Amazing how simple arithmetic can change your world view. “All right,” he said.

  “Of course,” I went on, “we can’t give you actual coins.”

  “What?”

  “Sadly, no. But instead I’ll give you a letter of credit guaranteed by the Imperial treasury and bearing the Great Seal. Every bit as good as gold, if not better.”

  He looked as though I’d just pulled out his front teeth. “Fine,” he said. “That’ll have to do, then.”

  “Alternatively—”

  It’s how I do things. First, despair. Then hope.

  I took him for a tour round the Palace—the ground-floor rooms and the library—followed by the Council Chamber, the Golden Chapel of the Blue Feather monastery, the Scriveners’ Guildhall, a few other places like that. City people see these places every day. If they even notice the icons, the triptychs, the altarpieces, the tapestries, the incunabula, the iconostases, all they see is a vague, familiar blur of gold and bright colours; they don’t stop and think, just how much is all that lot worth?, because of course it’s not for sale. Nobody bothers stealing it, because who in his right mind would buy it? We have tons, literally tons, of the stuff; painted wood, mostly, you can’t melt it down or hammer it into sheets. But in Echmen, where the Selroqois do so much of their business, or further east still, where the silk and the jade come from, giving evidence of great and prosperous realms governed by men of exquisite taste—and entirely legal, with a bill of sale and a provenance, and each piece guaranteed unique…

  Worth risking a blockade for, even.

  He looked at me, wild-eyed. “You’re sure,” he said, “this stuff is yours to sell.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I hold the Great Seal. I can do what I damn well like.”

  So much better than gold, which is heavy; the most a little Selroqois cog could carry would be a hundred and twenty, hundred-thirty tons. But the Ascension of the Golden House—egg tempera on lime boards, thirty-one inches by twenty-seven, weight one pound nine ounces; plenty more where that came from…

  “And all you want is wheat,” he said.

  “Wheat and arrows. A few thousand bowstaves would

  be nice.”

  He looked at me the way the male spider gazes at his beloved. He knows he’s going to get eaten afterwards, but it’ll be worth it. “Deal,” he said.

  “You can’t,” Faustinus said. He was almost in tears. “You can’t do it. It’s unthinkable.”

  “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t think,” I said.

  “You can’t do it, Orhan. No, listen.” He was beside himself with fury. “Those paintings are the soul of this city. Let them go and you may as well burn the place to the ground.”

  “I beg to differ,” I said. “I think the soul of the City is the people who live here. But they won’t live much longer with nothing to eat. No, you listen. Have you been to the stores lately? It may be all right now, just about, but fairly soon it’ll be pretty desperate. And people aren’t fools. They know as well as you and I do, what we had stored before the enemy came won’t last forever. Do you really want corn riots, on top of everything else?”

  Usually you can shut him up with stuff like that. He’s terrified of the common people, afraid he’ll wake up one morning and find them standing over his bed, ready to eat him. But not this time. “I don’t give a damn,” he said. “Your precious Blues and Greens aren’t the empire, they just live here. In a hundred years’ time nobody will remember their names. But the Golden House Ascension is probably the supreme achievement of the human race, and it belongs here. And if you think—”

  I looked at him, and he trailed off. “Actually,” I said, “I agree with you. Which is why, if the Selroqois didn’t want to trade wheat for it, I’d beg them to take it for nothing.”

  “You what? Are you mad?”

  “No, you are. You’d leave it, and all the other really precious stuff, for the savages to smash up and burn. They won’t care about art, Faustinus. As far as they’re concerned, it’s Robur, so they’ll kill it. Which is why it’s got to go somewhere safe.”

  That shut him up.

  “And, if we survive this,” I went on, “we’ll save up our pennies for a hundred years and we’ll buy it all back. But it’ll still be there, even if we aren’t. It won’t have gone up in smoke. What do you take me for, Faustinus, a barbarian?”

  Simple as that.

  33

  Three days later, there were seventeen Selroqois cogs in the Bay.

  No point trying to keep it a secret. I had all the Watch and the Parks and Gardens guarding the docks gate, but they weren’t much use. For one thing, I had a lot of difficulty trusting them not to leave their posts, charge the quay, steal the ships and sail away in them. But the crowd of desperate would-be refugees outside the docks was huge and dangerous. People were getting trampled to death. It wouldn’t be long before they figured out that the Watch wouldn’t use their weapons if they made a concerted attack on the gate with a battering ram. You’ve got to do something, Faustinus said, useful and resourceful as ever.

  I knew what I had to do. But I was damned if I was prepared to do it.

  But they didn’t know that. So I gave orders for five of the catapults on the dockyard watchtowers to be turned round to face the crowd.

  It takes a while to turn a catapult. You run a pair of long levers into iron hoops driven into the sides of the carriage. Then, of course, you’ve got to chock up the back end to get the reverse elevation. Enough people had relatives and friends who did shifts on the wall to recognise what was going on. It didn’t take long for the noise to die away. Instead, there was the most appalling silence. But they
weren’t moving.

  It was going to be an absolute disaster as and when they did move, of course. Ever seen a really big crowd break up in a panic? It’s not like they’re trying to hurt each other, they simply don’t have a choice. Someone pushes, someone else overbalances, falls against someone else; now there’s people on the ground, people tripping over them, boots landing on faces, bodies piling up, weight beyond the tensile strength of arms and ribs and skulls. Query whether the catapults could do significantly more damage, or even as much. I realised I’d just made a catastrophic mistake. Just as well there was time to undo it.

  “Turn the bloody things back again,” I yelled.

  I think the crews were only too happy to oblige. And then it occurred to me that I might just have done a clever thing by accident. Sheer fluke; but I’d managed to shut them up, which meant I’d be able to make myself heard.

  I don’t have a loud voice and I don’t like shouting. This, though, wasn’t something I could delegate.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I yelled, and remembered to pause, give the words time to get there. “God knows you’ve tried my patience, but I’ve decided not to shoot you after all. But what I will do, if you don’t disperse quietly and sensibly, is give the order to those catapults to sink the ships in the Bay. We haven’t unloaded all the food yet, so most of it’ll be wasted, but please understand this. If we can’t all go, nobody goes. And if anybody so much as leans on this gate, so help me I’ll scuttle those ships so fast it’ll make your head swim. Thank you for listening.”

  I’ve done some bloody stupid things in my time, but I reckon that has to be the prize exhibit in the collection. If one voice had shouted or one hand had thrown a stone, I don’t believe the entire Imperial army, at full strength in its glorious heyday, could’ve kept them from sweeping away the gates and crushing my soldiers underfoot like snails. What can I say? I got away with it, and it worked. When the crowd had thinned out by about four-fifths, I sent out stretcher parties to pick up the poor devils who’d got trodden on. There wasn’t a lot we could do for most of them. Just think of what could have happened, and judge me accordingly.