Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

by K. J. Parker

  Outside the tent, in the moonlight, I could see who his hostage was. He’d stuffed a gag in her mouth and tied her wrists, but the moon glinted on her golden hair. Terrific. “You’re insane,” I hissed at him. “They’ll crucify both of us.”

  “This way.”

  Later I found out it was just fool’s luck, or hero’s luck, same difference. The first tent he came to happened to be Sichelgaita’s private latrine. He didn’t know she was Ogus’s wife; just figured a pretty lady would make a dandy hostage. How can anyone doubt the existence of God when evidence of His sense of humour surrounds us on all sides?

  We got halfway across the parade ground before the sentries spotted us; and then Lysimachus was in his element. Naturally he’d got hold of a knife, a whacking great big one; he’s like a magnet, sharp instruments just seem to sidle up to him and beg him to take them with him. He made a big show of prodding her under the ear until she squealed. I’ve never been so embarrassed in all my life.

  Lysimachus being Lysimachus, it never occurred to him to be suspicious about the ease with which we got out of there. It was easy, he doubtless told himself, because he was such a superlatively excellent hero. In fact there were half a dozen times at least when a half-competent archer could’ve picked him off as easily as a popinjay in a low tree. But pretty soon we were outside the light of the watchfires and running like hell; let her go, I panted, she’s slowing us down. Which wasn’t actually true, because he was towing her along by the hair, on account of which she was making pretty good time, but just for once he did as he was told and let go. I heard a few arrows swishing past us, well over our heads, and voices baying behind us. How we were going to get back inside the City was another matter entirely. As I think I mentioned, opening the gates was no casual matter. That genius Lysimachus hadn’t thought about that, of course.

  So, not long afterwards, there we were under the North Gate. I knew for a fact there’d be nobody chasing us, but of course I couldn’t tell him that. “Watch my back,” I told him, then I craned my neck back and started hollering: it’s me, Orhan, throw down a rope for God’s sake.

  Praise be, it was Bronellus’s shift on the North Gate tower, and he recognised my voice. They hauled us up like grain sacks. One damn thing after another.

  “What the hell—?” Nico started, but I cut him off short. “First,” I said, “sort something out about Lysimachus. Grand procession down Longacre, then standing ovation in the Hippodrome, and finish off with presenting him with the Bronze Crown. He’ll like that, and it’ll give people something to cheer about.”

  He never makes notes, he just remembers it all, like a barmaid. “Right,” he said. “Good idea. What happened to you? We thought—”

  “Next,” I said, “I need to write a letter. Now.”

  Orhan to Ogus, greetings.

  One good turn deserves another. Your wife is going to kill you. I’m supposed to take your place. She’s got a mole on the inside of her left thigh about two inches down from her crack. If you stroke it, she hisses like a kettle. Take care of yourself.

  That ought to cover it, I thought. I wrote it in Alauset using the Jazygite alphabet. I wrote OGUS on the back in ordinary letters, put it in a silver-gilt reliquary and had them leave it on the ground a hundred yards from East Gate under flag of truce. Either the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong thing for the right reason. What are friends for?

  “Right,” I said, to Faustinus, because by now Nico was busy. “I need divers. At least fifty. Right away.”

  “Divers? Orhan, are you feeling all right?”

  “Divers,” I said. “Matter of life and death. Go.”

  Nobody bothers with history any more. How many people walk past the stone blockhouses at either end of the Long Quay and know what they were built for? Maybe one person in ten will tell you, weren’t they something to do with Jovian’s Necklace? And when you ask them what that was, they just shrug.

  Two hundred and forty years ago, give or take a decade, Jovian V lost a great sea battle against the Echmen. It wasn’t the end of the world; he’d lost two of his four fleets, but the enemy weren’t going to come sailing into the Bay quite yet. But Jovian—let’s skip the pretence—Jovian was a halfwit who only cared about breeding pedigree wolfhounds, but his City Prefect Martialis was a very smart man, though maybe a tad overcautious. What if the other two fleets were to go the same way? So Martialis and his colonel of engineers put their heads together, and the result was Jovian’s Necklace.

  They made an enormous bronze chain, each link as thick as a man’s waist, long enough to stretch all the way from one side of the Bay to the other. Most of the time, it lay underwater, deep enough so that all classes of ship could sail over the top of it. But the moment the enemy were sighted, the chain could be raised, blocking the entrance completely. It was, I can categorically state, the biggest and most effective project ever undertaken by the Engineers. It was delivered on time, on budget, and it worked; at least, it would have worked if an enemy fleet had ever tried to sail into the Bay. But that never happened. Jovian was assassinated, not before time, and his successor Pacatian started off his reign with a string of dazzling victories over the Echmen that gave the Robur control of the sea for two generations. The Necklace wasn’t needed any more. It became something of a joke—read Galba’s Satires, he’s very witty about it—and they stopped holding chain-raising drills and greasing the winch; the chain itself was bronze but the winch-chains were iron, and they rusted. One night, they quietly and unobtrusively gave way, and the Necklace sank to the bottom of the Bay. Eusebius II sold it to a consortium of scrap metal dealers, who tried very hard to raise it until their money ran out. That was ninety years ago. Received wisdom is that there’s no point trying to do anything about it now, since its precise location has been lost and forgotten. Besides, bronze is much cheaper now than it was, thanks to the new mines in Thouria. Even if you could find the damn thing, it would cost more to salvage it than the metal is worth.

  Regimental archives—we never throw anything away if we can possibly help it—gave me the designs for the winch, which of course we’d have to build from scratch. I nearly burst into tears when I saw them. Still, as we say in the Corps, if it was made once, it can be made again. I put Genseric on it; matter of life and death, I told him, and for crying out loud be nice to the Greens and Blues, the regiment hasn’t got the manpower to do it all ourselves.

  Finding the bloody thing; Polynices Simocatta, the dreariest poet ever to set pen to paper, wrote a triumphal ode to celebrate the completion of the project, for which Jovian paid him good money, God knows why. It’s hard going, believe me (I’ve read it, so you don’t have to), but there’s a bit where he compares the chain to a rainbow, stretching “from Sidera’s porch to Actis’ shimmering fane”. Generations of scholars have dismissed this as Polynices being his usual tiresome self. For one thing, they point out, a rainbow is a great big arch, while a stretched chain is flat and level. Sidera’s porch and Actis’ fane they take to mean sunset and sunrise; Sidera, the evening star, Actis, the morning star, fair comment. No help there, then. But take the trouble to read round it a bit and you’ll find that in Jovian’s time there were temples to Sidera and Actis in the City; really read deep and you’ll discover that they were at either end of the Quay. In which case, Polynices was doing one of his trademark hideously laboured double conceits. The rainbow stretches from one end of the earth to the other—evening and morning, understood in poetic convention to stand for the west and the east—while the actual chain is anchored in two places: the temple of Sidera, at one end of the Quay, and the temple of Actis, at the other.

  If you think I’m being brilliant and displaying my encyclopaedic knowledge of the minor Robur poets, think again. I got all that out of a report compiled by some unknown freelance for the scrap metal boys—not the ones who went bust, another outfit a century later, who thought about salvaging the necklace, did some research and then decided against it. I have this doc
ument because some fool gave it to me in the hopes of interesting me in yet another salvage venture; I pointed out the change in bronze prices, he gave up and went away. The whole thing only lodged in my mind because I happened to know where the temple of Sidera used to be; because the Engineers did some work at that end of the quay and stumbled on stone slabs inscribed with religious texts, and we had the devil of a fuss with the ecclesiastical authorities before we were finally allowed to crack on and finish our job. But, no doubt whatsoever in my mind. Sidera’s temple used to stand where the new slipways for the Class Four warships stand now. And, if the unknown scholar and that moron Polynices could be relied on, somewhere very close by, but under a lot of water and probably a lot of mud, was one end of the mighty bronze chain that might just save all our lives. And, guess what, it’s a chain. You really only need to find one end. The chain itself will find the other end for you.

  “That was two hundred and thirty years ago,” Nico said, trying to keep his temper. “It’ll be nothing but rust and slime by now.”

  “It was bronze,” I told him. “Bronze doesn’t rust, it just goes green. It’s still down there, I know it. Nobody’s salvaged it, it’s too big and heavy for anyone to have stolen it, it won’t have squiggled away on its own like a great big snake. All we’ve got to do is find it.”

  One of the things I like about the City is the unbelievable range of skills lurking inside its walls, just waiting to be needed. Water diviners? Put out a sign saying water diviners wanted, they’ll be lined up round the block. Snake charmers? Offer the right money and get yourself a big stick to fight them off with. Pearl-divers? No problem. The Blues and Greens found me a hundred and sixty-two experienced pearl-divers in a matter of hours.

  It works like this. Out in the far reaches of the empire, there are places where people have learned and practised esoteric specialist skills for generations. Then the empire comes along. Realising there’s money to be made from water divining, snake charming, pearl diving, whatever, the new Robur governor and his staff turn that particular field of endeavour into a government monopoly, grant the right to carry on doing what they’ve done for generations to a favoured few (in return for a modest fifty per cent of the take) and drive out the competition to fend for themselves as field labourers or beggars. They—doubtless because, having had a taste of the advantages that contact with a superior culture brings, they yearn to immerse themselves in the fountainhead, so to speak—gravitate to the City, where there’s bound to be a shanty town full to bursting with their compatriots, and a skilled pearl-diver can earn good money (compared with what he was used to getting in the old country) gutting fish or loading the shit barges. Naturally, the first thing they do on arrival is join a Theme (in return for a modest twenty per cent). So; one hundred and sixty-two pearl-divers, just like that. God bless the empire, I say.

  I thought that for men and women used to fishing out tiny oysters from the bottom of the sea, finding a stupid great big chain in the Bay would be a piece of cake. I was wrong about that. It took them three days, during which time I kept scanning the horizon for the characteristic brown-and white-striped sails the Sherden use, and by the time they found it, there were one hundred and forty-seven trained pearl-divers in the City rather than a hundred and sixty-two. I remember thinking, that’s a nuisance, we’ll need divers to get the damn thing linked up; a nuisance, just listen to yourself. Imperial thinking, omelettes and eggs. Clearly, therefore, Ogus is right and the empire has got to go. But Ogus spends lives like a rich man who’s just bought a house in the country spends money. I wish things would make sense, but they don’t.

  Meanwhile, the winch—you don’t want to hear about the winch. I could get very boring very easily telling you about the winch, which had triple-locking ratchets and a gear train so beautiful it nearly made me cry. To work the original, they harnessed teams of a hundred oxen to the capstan. We didn’t have a hundred oxen, so we had to make do with people, which meant a fundamental rethink, something I’d have loved to do myself but had to delegate to Artavasdus because I was too busy. He moaned like hell because he had so much work on his plate he barely had time to breathe. I think I may have lost my temper with him when he told me that. In the end, I think a young lance corporal did the actual design, which was simple and brilliant and much better than anything I could’ve come up with, after too little sleep and too much trying to make myself heard at meetings. I used to be an engineer, but that was a lifetime ago.

  After all that, they told me it couldn’t be done, because I’d specified bronze chains to connect the necklace to the winches, and there wasn’t that much bronze left in the City. I was ready for that. We were in the Small Audience Room at the Palace at the time, so I was able to lead—I forget who—to the window and point at the colossal equestrian statue of Quietus II down in the courtyard below. Look, I said, bronze; use that. Then, a minute or so later when they’d yelled themselves hoarse, I said; fine, we’ll call in all the bronze coins in the City and melt them down instead, starting with your regiment and your Theme.

  It’s a big statue, was a big statue. We had eighty-five pounds of good bronze left over, which I sent to the Mint.

  38

  But it was all taking too much time. Two weeks, according to Sichelgaita, quite possibly less, and the barges would be here; and a construction project, as anyone in my line of work will tell you, proceeds at the pace of the slowest contractor. In this case—and, dear God, could you blame them?—the divers. It was their job to join the new winch-chains to the two ends of the Necklace, tie the other end of each rope to the new chains, then pass the rope through the end links of the old one. I make it sound simple. Not really. The Necklace was down there all right, down at the very limit a human being can reach before having to return to the surface. Add to that the fiddly job of manipulating the end of a heavy, waterlogged rope, and you’re four, maybe five seconds outside the capacity of mere flesh and bone. So, what happens? Silly question. You have two options. You try and you give up, or you stay down there, try a bit harder, and drown. Mostly, my divers took the first option, then went back and tried again. Some of them reckoned there was a third option, and that was the last anyone saw of them. I’d have cried my eyes out except for the little voice in my head saying, these people, can’t they do anything right?

  Finally, when we were all at our wits’ end, who should save the day but that insufferable pest Lysimachus, now fully healed of his wound and bouncing around the place looking for further and better deeds of exceptional valour. No, he’d never been a pearl-diver, but he could swim, and hold his breath; how hard could it be? I’m ashamed to say I agreed, in the pious hope that he’d drown and I’d be shot of him.

  By now he had a regular fan club numbering in the thousands, all of whom turned out to watch him, naked as a baby and smeared all over with olive oil, diving magnificently off the West Quay with a rope’s end clenched in his shining white teeth. He sliced into the water like a smug dolphin, and then everything went quiet. We waited, counting under our breath. No way can any mortal man hold his breath for more than six minutes; six sixties is three hundred and sixty. Round about two-ninety we were starting to worry. At three-thirty, you could’ve heard a mouse squeak. At three-seventy I could distinctly hear sobbing. Damn, I thought. The fool’s gone and drowned himself, and it’ll all be my fault. Some people have no consideration.

  I’d given up counting by then, but I’m reliably informed he broke the surface after four hundred and nine seconds, with the rope still in his teeth, punching the air with both hands as the crowd bayed for pure joy. Someone rowed out in a little boat to pick him up but he was fine, no ill effects whatsoever. So I ordered him another public triumph and the Order of the Bronze Chain, first class; silly fool had won all the existing honours so I had to invent him a new one. I never could abide a show-off. Still, it got the job done.

  “A hero is no bad thing,” Faustinus assured me, while I sulked all the way back to the Palace. ”People need
a figurehead, someone to put their faith in. This Lysicrates—”

  “Lysimachus.”

  “He’s just the man for the job. Typifies all the Robur virtues. He’s strong, brave, loyal, altruistic, dedicated to the service of his superiors—”

  “The right colour.”

  He gave me a nasty look. “That, too. People need heroes, just like they need legends. Probably in a thousand years it’ll be Lysimachus who defended the City and saved us all, and you and I will just be a footnote.”

  “You think this lot’ll still be here in a thousand years?” I said to him. “Get real.”

  After that, it went like a dream. I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget the first time I heard the winch. There was this deep ringing sound, like a bell, which tells you that the iron is strong and true, with no cracks or flaws, no cold shuts or inclusions in the welds, and then the most amazing soft, sharp clicking as the ratchet hand engaged with the detents and dropped exactly into place—click, click, click, and it was telling you, everything’s fine, the strain’s being taken, you’re in safe hands now. I swear, there’s nothing in this world as satisfying as the sound of a beautifully made machine working perfectly. And I thought: I caused that to be, I’m responsible for its being called into existence, that beautiful piece of work. And I thought: I didn’t make it, someone else did, while I was having meetings and doing the paperwork. Ah well.

  We were having trouble finding enough bodies to work the capstans. Then Nico, who very occasionally shows signs of starting to think like me, suggested that Lysimachus might like to go down to the Market Square and call for volunteers. I gather several people were quite badly hurt in the crush, but we got our winch crews, one shift on and another standing by.

  (“Lysimachus,” I said, “how would you like to be the new City Prefect? Faustinus won’t mind, I’ll promote him to Lord Chancellor or something. People really like you. It’d be a great help to me.”