Colours in the Steel f-1

by K. J. Parker

  ‘Are you sure you won’t join us, Venart?’ Gannadius asked.

  ‘No thanks, really. Spiced wine always gives me a headache.’

  Gannadius poured wine into two cups and passed one over to Vetriz. ‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ he said. ‘When Alexius and I tried that experiment, the first time we met you, Alexius told you it had effectively been a failure. He wasn’t telling the truth. There was-’ He hesitated, stared into his cup. ‘Something there,’ he continued. ‘Something we’d neither of us come across before, which is probably why we kept quiet about it. More embarrassment than anything else, I suppose; after all, we’re supposed to be good at this sort of thing. And perhaps we both thought we’d imagined it, I don’t know,’ he added with a straight face. ‘On reflection, however, I’m sure there was something; so, with your agreement, I’d like to try again.’ He stopped fiddling with his cup and put it down before he spilt it. ‘I don’t think Alexius would approve, I have to say; but to be honest with you, now that we have this emergency on our hands, I feel that every avenue that might conceivably be productive has to be explored; and if it comes to nothing, well then.’

  Vetriz’s eyes were big and round and shining like sunlight reflected on a distant glass. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘do let’s. You’re not going to be stuffy about this, are you, Ven? Because if there really is something we can do, I think we owe it to them, since they’ve been so helpful about everything.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Venart said resignedly. ‘I take it you mean my sister,’ he added to Gannadius. ‘I seem to remember that I fell asleep.’

  Gannadius stroked his chin. ‘The indications at the time did suggest that it was your sister who was, um, having an effect on things. But that may not mean anything. You see, I’m sure that whichever of you it is doesn’t consciously know what she or he is doing. On that basis, it could quite easily be you.’

  Venart shrugged. ‘I’m game, then, if you think it’ll help.’

  ‘Splendid.’ Gannadius sipped his wine. Still no headache. ‘Perhaps it’d help if I very briefly explained how the Principle works in this regard – or at least, how we think it works. As I said a moment ago, this is effectively new ground for us as well.’

  He started to explain, and although he did his best to keep it simple and reasonably lively, his monologue was inevitably rather abstruse and full of long unfamiliar words; and the room was comfortably warm and the wine was heavy and sweet, and before he knew where he was-

  – He was standing on one of Loredan’s new bastions, apparently in the middle of a battle; there were men rushing about all round him, carrying ropes and levers and sheaves of fresh arrows with bits of straw still stuck in the feathers of the fletchings, and they were stepping over the bodies of dead men, and others who weren’t dead but groaning or weeping, and some of the casualties were city people and others were plainsmen. Every now and then he could feel the walkway shake beneath his feet; he guessed that heavy stones were hitting the wall below the level of the rampart. There was a big engine, a trebuchet, over to his left and there were men fussing over it, some of them scrambling up the side of the frame or sitting on the crossbars, others handing them up tools and lengths of rope.

  There were arrows sticking in the wood, their shafts facing outwards towards the plain, and other arrows sailed across the wall from time to time, some clattering against the stone and others carrying over into the streets below. There were archers on the wall, standing up straight to bend their long, stiff bows; they didn’t seem to be worrying about the incoming arrows, but Gannadius saw one man fall to the ground with an arrow sticking out of his ear, and another suddenly drop his bow and clutch at an arrowshaft sticking in his upper arm. Two other men hurried up and helped him to the stairs, while a third picked up his bow and started to shoot.

  Gannadius looked round, trying to see Vetriz or Venart, or anybody else he recognised, but he couldn’t. An arrow flew past him, so close that he imagined he felt the feathers brush lightly across his chin. It was terrifying, but it had happened so fast and so quietly that at first he’d taken it for a breath of wind or an insect.

  Damn, he thought, so now what do I do? I must have come through on my own.

  He peered round, but it was hard to see anything for all the running men in the way. Presumably he’d come through at some crucial moment – that seemed to be the way it worked, you found yourself at the turning point, the moment where you could reach out and grab hold, and by so doing change the course of events. He wished he knew something about military affairs, tactics and the like. It all looked to him like a confused mess; if there was something vitally significant going on he didn’t have the first idea what it was supposed to look like. That didn’t help; for all he knew, he might miss it completely, or change it the wrong way out of sheer ignorance. Suppose this was the moment when the battle was going to swing decisively in the city’s favour, and he was about to change that simply because he didn’t know what he was doing?

  Someone was running up the stairs; Bardas Loredan, with blood soaking through his hair and a bow in his hands. Instinctively, Gannadius stepped back to let him past, although logically Loredan should have been able to walk straight through him.

  ‘The chain,’ he panted. ‘Which of you clowns forgot to raise the chain? Gods, we’ll have to do it in the middle of all this. Right, you and you, get ready to shin out along the pole and haul on the ropes. I’ll do this one here. All we’ve got to do is get it up onto the hooks and make it fast.’

  The men he’d spoken to stepped back with terror in their eyes, not saying anything. Loredan grabbed one by the arm, but he pulled away.

  ‘Someone’s got to do it, for pity’s sake,’ he shouted. ‘They’ll have those ladders up here any minute.’

  An arrow swished past Gannadius, hit Loredan’s mailshirt just above his hip and glanced off. The two men turned and ran. Somehow Gannadius couldn’t find it in his heart to blame them.

  Oh, gods, he’s going to try and do it on his own. Gannadius concentrated, wondering how exactly he was supposed to go about changing the course of events. Then he thought, Yes, and suppose Loredan succeeds, and that’s what saves the city? If I stop him, we’ll all be killed. Oh, why don’t I know what to do?

  Loredan was on the rampart, swinging one leg over, looking down to find the pole. Gannadius caught his breath. Do something! he told himself-

  ‘Hello?’ It was the Islander girl, Vetriz, and she was gently prodding at his shoulder. ‘You fell asleep,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Gannadius opened his eyes. ‘Good heavens, so I did. I’m so sorry. What was I saying?’

  He completed his explanation; and then they all tried very hard to fall asleep and couldn’t manage it. When it had started to be embarrassing, Gannadius thanked his visitors very much, promised again to pass their message on and shooed them out. Then he sat down on the edge of his bed, steadily drank his way through the rest of the wine (which was stone cold) and lay on his back, feeling ill.

  He was exhausted. He didn’t have even the slightest trace of a headache.

  He was a very worried man.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The next morning, Temrai gave the order to hitch up the mules and bring forward the first battery of trebuchets.

  Half an hour after they’d entered the three-hundred-yard zone, all five engines were so much firewood and the ground was littered with smashed timber, stones, dead mules and dead men. In reply they’d managed to loose off precisely one shot, which had landed in the river. Very pale in the face and trying his best not to let his people see that he was shaking, Temrai ordered the next two batteries forward simultaneously. The assault had begun.

  Seven engines survived the next volley from the eastern bastion; and trebuchets take time to wind and load. Say twenty minutes between volleys, enough time if they looked sharp about it. He sent in another ten engines, and nobody on the wall had anything left to shoot at them with. When it eventually came, the next voll
ey from the city smashed another two engines, but this time Temrai’s engineers had fifteen trebuchets ready to return fire. He shouted to them to take their time and remember the sighting drill. They waved back at him; don’t bother us, we’re busy. The first engine let slip, and its stone hit the wall somewhere near the base. There was a great cheer from the clan, but Temrai yelled for quiet. The engineers adjusted the trajectory by tightening the winch a precisely calculated number of turns. Another machine let slip, and its stone sailed over the wall, clearing it by a matter of five or six feet. The other engineers slacked off their winches a little. The third engine let slip, and this time the clan really did have something to cheer about.

  ‘Close,’ Temrai called back, ‘but close isn’t good enough. Keep that mark, and sooner or later we’ll get those engines.’

  They managed to hit one before the next volley from the bastion, which smashed another of Temrai’s engines and dropped a stone onto the crew of another. That wasn’t a pleasant sight, by any means; there was a man still miraculously alive under the stone, and he was screaming for help. Temrai waved a party of men forwards; eventually they rolled the stone away, but by then the man was dead. Meanwhile the artillery duel went on; and every stone that missed an engine on the bastion hit something else, while the unlucky shots from the bastion simply dug holes in the ground.

  This is how it’s going to be, Temrai said to himself, and we’ve got hours of it still to go before we know whether it’s going to work. Oh, well. At least we aren’t making complete fools of ourselves.

  The dreary business went on for a long time. In a way it was absurd; the engineers were working at fever pitch, hauling on ropes and manhandling boulders, trying to keep the mules that drew the lines that raised the counterweights from breaking their traces in panic when a stone landed, trying to get them to move at all the rest of the time. And the remainder of the army watched, like spectators at a Perimadeian lawsuit, while the men in the middle worked and died. Once he’d managed to conquer the urge to drag his men out of the danger zone, Temrai found it was rather like a very boring event at someone’s funeral games; presumably his own. It had the same strange contrast; frantic and desperate effort in the arena, silence and stillness in the crowd, the occasional shuffling of feet cramped from standing too long in one place, even here and there the crunch of an apple, an overheard snatch of conversation about something quite other.

  Fairly early on in the exchange, Temrai realised where there was an advantage to be had, and ordered the engineers to move the engines rather further apart. He’d noticed that although his men had only scored two direct hits in ten volleys, the city engines were shooting far more slowly and less accurately than they had been. He thought about that, and realised that although his shots weren’t smashing engines, they were mostly landing on or around the bastion itself, and the bastion rampart was so crowded with machines and engineers that it’d be hard to drop a stone on it without hitting something. What his engines were doing was killing or injuring the city engineers; the trained men who knew how to work the machines properly. In their place came men who knew less about managing trebuchets than Temrai’s people did, hence the poor quality of their work. Accordingly it made sense to space his engines out. It worked; such shots as did land on target and break bone or wood were merely lucky, the practical application of the laws of averages. His men, however, were getting better at it as they went along.

  Over and over again the mule-train stopped, the engine-master engaged the slip that connected the arm to the windlass, the captain of engineers checked the aim and adjusted the tension so that the witness-marks scratched on the windlass drum lined up exactly with the equivalent scratches on the frame opposite before giving the order to the master to let slip; whereupon the master tugged on the cord that pulled the steel hook out of the loop fitted to the underside of the arm; the counterweight, a huge plank crate full of rocks, swung back to rest and flipped the arm up into the air, making the massive beam bend like a sapling in a high wind; the sling on the end of the arm snapped out and forwards, whipping the two hundredweight stone out as if it was a pebble flung at a bird, and the stone lifted and became smaller and smaller as it flew, until it dwindled down to a dot, small and distant as a shooting star, visible only by the line its motion drew across the sky, and eventually dropped out of sight onto the faraway prospect of the wall.

  Even at this range, the sound of its impact could be plainly heard; a solid, painful thump, a chunky noise that promised damage, like the sound of a rider’s bare head hitting the ground after he’s fallen from a moving horse. It was easy to imagine the force of its blow, because when the city’s stones landed they made the ground shake; watching them coming down was horribly fascinating, seeing them grow in the air, trying to guess which way they’d fall, trying to figure out their looped and irregular trajectories, sometimes guessing right, sometimes not. Temrai watched one man watching a falling stone; he ran from where he’d been standing, stopped, ran back, ran forwards, his head right back and his eyes fixed on the swelling dot; stopped, waited, ran back, waited, at the last moment jinked sideways; managed to get it completely wrong, so that the stone landed directly on top of him, obliterating him so thoroughly that it was hard to believe he’d ever been there.

  The arm snapped on one of the trebuchets, its crack a sharp and deafening noise; cheated of its momentum the sling flopped down, sweeping horribly through the engineers who were working the machine. Nobody killed, but arms and legs and ribs broken like the branches of a dead tree, the sort that give way suddenly when you put your weight on them. Then there were people running forward, hauling and scrabbling at the stone; screams from the men pinned down by it – no, stop! You’re rolling it the wrong way! You’re crushing me, get it off me – and then more men running in, getting in the way of the first rescue party.

  A stone lands ten feet or so away from them; it hits a previous shot and splinters, flinging sharp edges of stone that slash skin and jar bone. And as more people run up to help, an engineer with red-raw hands and hair soaking wet waves his arms, yells, ‘Get these people away from here!’: The rescuers stand confused, not knowing what to do. Someone yells, Look out, coming in! and before they have time to move a stone whistles down, pitches fifteen feet away from them, neatly nipping off the foot of the man who’d shouted the warning. He stares down, too surprised to speak; tries to move, falls over. And all the time Temrai watches, doesn’t move, says nothing.

  On the wall, it was a nightmare of shouting, blood and stone dust. There were large gaps in the walkway, a mangled trebuchet dangled by its counterweight, draped over the battlements while the frame hung and swayed in the air. Men stepped over bodies and hopped over gaps, scrambled to untangle ropes and knock back wedges shaken loose by the vibrations of discharge, lost their grip on levers and spanners that fell over the parapet. Engine-masters fought with tongs and hammers to straighten bent loosing-hooks, captains blocked out the noise and movement as they concentrated on the witness-marks, or yelled at their men to realign an engine that had shifted from its place.

  Engineer Garantzes was down on his knees, hacking at a tangled rope with a belt dagger far too flimsy for the job, while Loredan went from engine to engine, trying to make himself useful and getting in the way. He saw men nudging corpses off the walkway with their feet to make a little room, engineers shouting and cursing at the untrained men who had taken the place of the dead men who’d known what they were doing. He heard screams from down below, as a winch rope broke and a two hundredweight stone fell back on the hauling team, watched another man step out of his shoe and observe helplessly as it fell off the walkway, then put his bare foot down on the jagged stone of the splintered parapet, not looking down as it sliced his skin like a knife, all his attention on a twisted ratchet iron he was trying to replace while his team held back the impossible bulk of the counterweight; if they let go or the rope broke, his hand would be chopped fine by the spinning ratchet, or the spanner would fl
y up and go into his ribs like an arrow.

  It’s because I can’t see the enemy, he told himself. And it probably looks far worse than it really is.

  This isn’t working. We’re going to lose if this goes on.

  Do something.

  A stone had clipped away the first six steps of the stairway, and he had to sit and slide down on his backside to get to sound footing. There were wounded men on the stairs, men who’d managed to crawl this far and reckoned that that would have to do. He stepped over them, an awkwardly placed heel landing on an outstretched hand; no time to apologise or even look back. He made it to the bottom of the stairs and walked quickly – mustn’t be seen to run – up the street and into the town.

  It was as if there was a line drawn across the road; the war stops here. On the other side of the line, people were shopping, sitting in their doorways making things (a shoemaker cutting leather, looking up, staring at the bloodstained, dusty, dirty man in armour walking past his door) as if there was no small hell a few hundred yards away; as if all you had to do was leave, turn your back, no longer be a part of it.

  Quite.

  He walked into the council chamber and headed straight for the Prefect, who was sitting under the window with a pile of documents spread out in front of him. He looked up – how spotlessly clean his white gown looks by comparison – and started to say something.

  ‘We need to send out a sortie,’ Loredan said. ‘We can use a ship, sail out of the harbour as far as the chain, put the men and horses ashore on the west bank. They’ll have rafts on the river; we can grab a couple of those upstream, get across and come up on them from behind the cover of the hills. So long as we get their engineers, the raiding party’s expendable.’

  The Prefect shook his head. ‘Out of the question,’ he said. ‘No sorties, no hand-to-hand fighting. We’ve all agreed.’