The Escapement e-3

by K. J. Parker

  Miel smiled. "You may have noticed, we aren't shooting either. Doesn't that make it a draw?"

  "Yes, but we're in possession of the field."

  The field, he thought; well yes, that's what soldiers fight for. Not for a cause, truth, freedom, to save the lives of innocents, for countries or principles, trade routes, the resolution of disputes between nations. They fight for the field, thirty-odd acres of farmland ruined in the process, whose value lies only in the fact that the enemy have been forcibly excluded from it. Back on the home estate, there'd been a forty-acre pasture called Battle Moor; and from time to time, when it was ploughed and reseeded, they turned up bones, bits of rusty junk so badly corroded it was anybody's guess what they'd once been. Nobody knew who'd fought there, of course, or why.

  The field. The Mezentines weren't farmers, and the plain in front of the City hadn't been cultivated for as long as they'd been there. Once a year, at midsummer, they hired foreigners to come and burn off the dried grass and the rubbish, to keep it from turning into a jungle. Apparently it was quite a sight to see, though the City people moaned about the smoke, and the flecks of soot on their clean washing for days afterwards. Other than that, they showed no interest in it whatsoever; until now, of course, when it had suddenly become the field, every last inch to be fought for to the last drop of blood. The deep strata of ash made it pleasantly light and easy to dig, according to the sappers, though once you got down underneath you hit flints, and a singularly bloody-minded type of clay.

  Today, the field was different. The stones stood out like huge puffballs, the sort you can't resist kicking, because of how they disintegrate. There were also the dead bodies. Those killed on the second day were starting to swell, and there were flies everywhere. They soared up in a cloud as you walked past, and the soft hum was strangely soothing, like the sound of a river a quarter of a mile away. Miel Ducas knew all about battlefields, of course. The only thing that made this one different was the absence of the usual scavengers (he knew all about them now, of course; the useful function they performed in cleaning up and making good; like earthworms in a garden, or a graveyard).

  "Organise a burial detail," he said to nobody in particular (because when the commander-in-chief speaks, there's always someone listening, with a notebook). "We've got enough problems without plague as well." Then it occurred to him to wonder: did the Aram Chantat bury their dead or burn them? It was the sort of thing that caused horrendous trouble if you got it wrong. "You'd better find out what the savages want done with theirs," he added quickly.

  Not far away, ten yards or so, a man was trying to lift his arm. Most of his body was under a stone, and by the look of it his forearm was smashed as well; it flopped as he tried to wave. The kindest thing would be a dozen men with pollaxes, walking up and down and putting the hopeless cases out of their misery (he'd seen enough bullocks and pigs and sheep slaughtered; one peck between the eyes with the horn of the pollaxe. When you've done thirty in a morning, it's just a chore). Instead, he told whoever it was whose turn it was to be listening to get that man out of there, and organise some orderlies with stretchers, and let the surgeons know.

  Men started bustling about; he assumed they were doing what he'd told them to do. He turned, slowly because of his cricked neck, and took a long, interested look at the bank, which so many men had died to build. It was just a mound of earth, with a row of those filled-basket things on top. Here and there it had been battered down, and men were working briskly to put it back straight again. It was, of course, a remarkable achievement, considered as the end product of human labour and effort. He tried to imagine how it'd look in two hundred years' time-a little bit lower and smoother, grassed over, with paths scratched deep in it here and there by the passage of sheep. Not the ruins of a city, not a road, or a levee, not even an aquifer or a drain; just an expedient scooped up in a hurry to keep the worst of the hailstones off, something that had briefly served a temporary purpose, but which would probably last for ever, long after the reason for its existence had been forgotten.

  (Motives fade, he thought; actions endure. A thousand men died to win the field, and the lasting result is a grassy bank in the middle of a flat plain. But they didn't die to build a bank-that was just a trivial side-effect; they died-some immediately, some after three motionless days in the stink, trying to wave a broken arm-for the field, as all soldiers do.)

  Collecting the spent shot was straightforward hard work. They let down the tailgate of the cart and laid the ends of two poles on the floorboards. Then two men rolled the stone ball up this improvised ramp, and a third man standing in the bed of the cart hauled it in so it wouldn't roll out again. So simple, Miel thought, even Eremians can do it. Presumably he was there to supervise, to make the men work as fast as possible. No need; they were going at it like lunatics, presumably because they expected the bombardment to start again at any moment. In which case, he wondered, what did they need him for? He could only suppose he was required as a witness, in case it should ever be necessary to prove that the artillery battle had actually taken place, and wasn't just an embellishment added to the story by an ambitious historian. Well, he was, after all, the nearest thing they had to a resident expert on the aftermath of battles, the sole representative of the corpse-robbers' profession. As such, he knew more about the field than any duke or general. Quite probably, he was the only one who really understood: that every battle is for the field, which is a place where dead men lie until the scavengers come to pick up, clean up and cart away the residues, both the useful and the useless. The war is a complex mechanism, whose escapement is the battle, whose function is to produce nothing but waste; as if you peeled apples to get the peel and the core, and threw the fruit away.

  (He considered Daurenja, and wondered if the substantial enterprise of advancing the artillery and building the bank to protect it was simply a way of getting the Mezentines to supply him with ammunition. It was just the sort of thing he'd be capable of doing, if he needed finished round shot badly enough.)

  They moved a stone, and under it was a man; an Eremian, who recognised him. The man was dying. The stone had crushed his ribs, and the sharp end of one of them had punctured his lung.

  "I remember you," Miel said. "Only I can't quite…"

  The man said he'd been a huntsman before the war, in the service of Jarnac Ducas. Then he remembered. This was the man who whipped the hounds off the deer as soon as it was dead, so they wouldn't tear it apart. He tried to think of something to say, but he couldn't find any words. Instead, the man asked him: was it true that Jarnac was dead? There were rumours, but…

  Miel nodded. "Quite true, I'm afraid," he said. "He was with Duke Valens in the retreat, when they were making for the desert. He died very bravely."

  The man nodded. "He used to worry, you know," he said. "About all the animals he killed. He said it was all right really, because we ate the meat, so actually it was no worse than farming. He used to give the meat away, most of it, to the people in the villages. But he hated it if an animal was badly pricked, like in bow and stable, and it got away and wasn't found. He said it must be the worst thing, dying slowly in pain."

  Miel felt he should say something like: rest now, don't say any more, you need to lie still. But he knew the man was dying, beyond help, and he only wanted him to stop because he didn't want to hear any more. "I didn't know that," he said. "He never said anything like that to me."

  The man tried to grin. "Well he wouldn't, not to his own kind. But he worried a lot about it, and I'd have liked him to know: actually, it's not so bad. You'd think you'd be scared, but you aren't. You just think, well, that's that, then, and then you just wait quietly." He let his neck and back relax, like a man settling into a soft bed with clean sheets. "It'd have been nice to have set his mind at rest, but I don't suppose it matters now."

  Miel nodded; but he said: "I thought I was going to die, not long ago, and I was terrified."

  The man smiled. "Ah well," he said. "You
thought, you didn't know. When you know, it's really not so bad." And then he died, and as Miel watched he turned from a human being into an object, a dead weight for the burial detail; and with him faded all the other evidence he could have given. Miel looked down at his face for a while, but there was nothing there.

  When it got too dark to see, he sent back to the camp for lanterns, picked on the first officer he could find, and delegated the conduct of the night shift to him. The poor young fool acted as though he'd been awarded a great honour.

  On his way back to the camp, he thought about Jarnac, and Orsea. As a matter of courtesy, Daurenja sent a note to Duke Valens to inform him that he'd appointed the Ducas to lead the Eremian contingent. He added that he had a high opinion of the Ducas' loyalty and sense of duty, and trusted that the appointment met with the duke's approval.

  Nobody bothered to tell the messenger that the letter he was carrying was just a formality, so he rode through the night, taking the border road, changing horses twice at the military inns. Determined to make the best time he possibly could, he took a short cut through Stachia woods in the dark, rode into a low branch at the gallop and ripped the side of his face open. He had a scarf, which he wrapped round his head to stop the bleeding; it was sodden by the time he reached the Tolerance and Compassion, where he was lucky enough to find a fellow messenger heading for the city who undertook to take the general's letter the rest of the way.

  The other letter he carried was to the Aram Chantat high council. It was read to them by a Vadani secretary, since the more traditional Aram Chantat still tended to regard literacy as a weakness, liable to undermine the imagination and the memory. In it, the liaison reported on the conduct of the siege, commending General Daurenja for his diligence and resourcefulness. A motion was passed confirming the general as commander-in-chief for the duration of the siege. It was held that, although Duke Valens was a capable leader, he had not shown the same level of vision and commitment that the general had displayed; indeed, Valens' injury, though deplorable, could be seen as fortuitous. Naturally, once the war was over, the position would be reviewed. However, it was never too early to consider the future. The Aram Chantat nation faced the prospect of being ruled for the first time by a foreigner, since there was no male heir. As the widower of the heiress apparent, Valens was indisputably the legal heir. However, should he die before the king-unlikely, of course, unless he suffered complications to his wound; an infection, for example, all too real a possibility-the succession would pass through the king's great-niece, currently only twelve years old and therefore too young to marry, unless a special exemption from the law was made by, for instance, a regency committee appointed by the high council. In that event, it would be inviting internal dissent and possible civil war to permit her to marry an Aram Chantat, in which case a suitable foreigner would have to be selected; a man with proven leadership capability, strong-minded, dynamic, preferably someone held in high regard by the people on account of (say) his war service. All such speculation was, of course, entirely hypothetical, and simple loyalty required the council to hope that Duke Valens would make a quick and complete recovery. Nevertheless, the fact that the duke had married again, so soon after the death of the princess, and that his new wife had already conceived a child, meant that if Valens survived his present serious illness, the Aram Chantat could look forward to being ruled by an entirely foreign dynasty for the foreseeable future. It had not escaped the council's notice that this state of affairs had not escaped the notice of the people in general, and was not entirely to their liking. Voices of complaint (which the council naturally deplored, but could not afford to ignore) had been raised even before Valens was injured. The serious threat to his life posed by the wound and the drastic medical procedures that had been deemed necessary to attempt to heal it had inevitably led the people to reconsider the whole succession issue. Furthermore, there were unconfirmed reports that the king's own medical advisers were seriously concerned about the state of his health…

  The Vadani secretary had been dismissed after he'd read the letter and taken down the brief formal acknowledgement to be sent in reply. But as reading aloud made him thirsty, he'd begged a drink from the chamberlains and sat quietly drinking it in the anteroom next to the chapterhouse where the meeting was being held; he had better than average hearing, and someone had neglected to close the connecting door properly. "I shouldn't have told you," she said.

  Valens frowned. "Yes you should," he said. "If they're really thinking about killing me…"

  "We don't know that. It's much more likely that we're reading too much into this. After all, we don't really understand how their minds work, they were probably only discussing contingency plans, just in case you don't get better. And the doctors say you're healing up really fast now."

  Very slowly and deliberately, like a team of engineers raising a tower, he hauled himself forward a few inches on his elbows and sat up. "It's what I'd do," he said. "Think about it. They've got to resign themselves to a foreign king, they've got no choice. They marry their princess to me, figuring it'll provoke war with the Mezentines so they can clear out everything our side of the mountains and have a new homeland to settle in. Turns out that wasn't necessary: when they get here, they find we're already at war, so that's all right. But then the princess gets killed. They've been reassuring themselves that it's all right really, the next dynasty will be only half-foreign, her and my children; but then she dies, I marry you and they're faced with being ruled by strangers for ever. What's more, by marrying you, I've shown them I'm not really interested in what's best for the Aram Chantat; otherwise I'd have waited till this twelve-year-old kid came of age and married her. Instead, I marry for love"-he paused on that word, frowned as much as the pain in his face would let him-"which probably doesn't carry much weight with them, I really couldn't say, I know so little about them. And to cap it all, they believe I've been lukewarm about the war. And now they've got an alternative, the brave, committed general, and he's neither Eremian nor Vadani, so he won't be likely to favour either race above the Aram Chantat if he becomes king. If you look at it rationally, they'd be failing in their duty if they didn't at least consider it."

  She thought: he's talking to himself, not me. Which is fine; it's part of my job to be someone the duke can think aloud to, it's a very necessary function. "You make it sound like you sympathise with them," she said.

  "I do," he replied. "They're in deep trouble. The other Cure Hardy nations have more or less driven them out of their own country. They've had to leave their home, cross the desert, come here and immediately start fighting a singularly vicious war; they know that even if they win, a lot of their people will die in it, and if they lose they're facing a famine. Added to that, their new king's going to be a foreigner who doesn't look like he really gives a damn about them." He shook his head. "And I happen to know that that's true: the heir apparent doesn't care about them, in fact he can't stand being in the same room with them for too long-something he's done his best to keep to himself, but he's a rotten actor and they're not stupid. And they're right about him being lukewarm about the war, too."

  She looked at him again, noticing how lined and furrowed his face had become lately, as though it was under siege, deeply scored with trenches; and she thought, that's the face of a man who's only recently realised that love doesn't solve everything, that having each other isn't really enough. Poor man; he's lived his life thinking that the book closes at the first kiss, and being in love is like crossing a border, over which they can't follow you. Perhaps he thought love could be starved out with a blockade, or stormed with overwhelming force, once the defences had been undermined. Those are the sort of terms he'd tend to think in (Valens the problem-solver, the man who gets the job done, the good duke); and now they've taken away the command and given it to the freak, because of me.

  But she said: "So what are you going to do about it?"; not because she wanted to know, but because he did, and if she couldn't be his
soul, she could at least be that part of his mind that chafed him into action.

  But he shrugged, as though they were talking about someone else, a friend of hers that he tolerated for her sake but had never really liked. "I'll have to go there," he said, "and take the war back from Daurenja."

  It was the reply she'd been expecting, but it made her flinch. "You can't," she said. "You're not well enough."

  "That's right," he said. "But it's not like I've got a choice." He wriggled his shoulders against the pillow. "First, because I don't want to be got rid of. Second, because Daurenja's getting it all wrong. He's doing exactly what they want him to, but he can't see that because he's convinced he's winning." He scowled, either at some thought that crossed his mind, or from the pain of moving. "Could you send someone to fetch Ziani Vaatzes?" he said. "I need to see him right away."

  She didn't say don't leave me, because if she said it he'd have to obey. But she did say, "You're far too weak still to cope with running the war. If you go, you'll be playing into their hands. You'll make a mistake, and that'll give them all the excuse they need."

  "That's possible," he said; and he was arguing against her now. She'd become yet another difficulty in his way. "But you never know, I might not. And if I stay here, I'm finished, and so are the Vadani. So…" He shrugged again. "There you have it," he said. "Look, do you think you could find someone to fetch Vaatzes? He'll be heading off to the camp any day now, and I'd like to hitch a ride."

  "Will you take me with you?"

  It wasn't the question she wanted to ask, but quite obviously it meant the same thing. It would, of course, have been better to have said nothing at all.

  He paused, only for a short time, then said, "Yes, of course." They always addressed him as "Engineer Vaatzes", and he wasn't quite sure how he felt about that. He assumed they meant it as a mark of respect, or they intended him to feel flattered by it; and it was, of course, an appropriate title. Somehow, though, it made him feel uncomfortable, maybe because it came from them. He didn't know for sure, since it wasn't the sort of thing he ever discussed with them, but he had an idea they disapproved of what he did on a very basic level, like vegetarians disapproving of eating meat.