Colours in the Steel f-1

by K. J. Parker

‘… Through the houses,’ the man was saying. ‘Break through the walls of the houses; they’re only wood and brick.’

  At first it sounded like gibberish, until Temrai realised what the man was trying to say. More or less opposite where they were standing, on the left-hand side of the avenue, there was a row of dilapidated cottages. He remembered them, recalled hearing that they’d been allowed to go to ruin by the owner, who’d bought them as an investment in anticipation of some development or other along this part of the avenue. On the other side of the cottages, if he’d got it right, there was a long alley that curved round the avenue like a strung bow curling back to its string. More than enough men to push in the walls of the cottages and then they’d be through, and the battle would effectively be rotated through ninety degrees. There might even be scope for an outflanking manoeuvre of his own.

  ‘Do it,’ he shouted over the noise. ‘Take as many men as you can get. And hurry, for gods’ sakes.’

  Without tools or equipment, or any real idea of what they were meant to be doing, they threw themselves at the walls of the cottages, kicking in doors and shutters and scrambling through, burying axe-heads in the soft plaster. When the wall began to give the mass pressed forwards like a stampede of horses frightened by thunder on the plains. A few, maybe a dozen, were buried under chunks of masonry; the rest squashed and crushed their way through, like grass forcing its way up through a pavement. As soon as men started spilling out on the other side, Temrai could feel the tension relax, now that the men trapped inside the box had somewhere to go. He had no choice but to follow the flow towards the breach, wondering as he went how many of his people would be left behind, to be massacred as they tried in vain to get past and into the hole in the wall. Too many, he decided, and left it at that. It was a simple form of arithmetic, because no matter what the figures said, the result would always be too many.

  Patriarch Alexius woke up to the sound of yells and people running. At first he assumed the building was on fire – it wouldn’t have been the first time – but somehow the noise was different. He strained to make out some words among the shouting.

  Whatever it was that was happening, it sounded important. Common sense suggested that it would be a good time to get out of bed and put some clothes on, but for some reason Alexius stayed where he was. The confused shouting still wasn’t making any sense, and he’d woken up with a migraine. He closed his eyes, just for a moment-

  – And saw a bench in a long, roomy workshop. He appeared to be at the dark end of the shop, but there was plenty of light near the open door, where two men were hanging what looked like a half-finished bow on a peg fixed to the wall. The younger man, who was little more than a boy, held the bow firmly on the peg with both hands while the older man (who was Bardas Loredan) slipped a hook over the bowstring and attached a cord to it. He fed the cord through a pulley, then looped it over one of the crossbeams of the roof; then he fished about under the bench and came up with a lead weight, marked on the side with tallies representing numbers. It was a heavy weight, because Loredan strained as he lifted it off the floor and held it under the end of the cord, cradled on his forearms, while he tied the cord to it.

  ‘Hold it steady,’ he said, and gently took his arms away, leaving the weight hanging from the cord. The bow on the peg bent as the weight drew down through the pulley, and Alexius noticed a number of marks scribed on the wall under the peg; the apex of the cone formed by the bent bowstring was touching one of them.

  ‘Sixty pounds at twenty-four,’ the boy said, having examined the mark. Loredan nodded, untied the weight and laid it gently down.

  ‘More to come off the belly,’ he said. ‘Take it down and put it up in the vice, and get me the small drawknife.’

  The boy did as he was told, asking, ‘Why the belly? The wood’s thicker on the back, shouldn’t we thin it there instead?’

  Loredan shook his head as the boy handed him an eight-inch blade with a handle at right angles on each end. ‘You’re forgetting your basic theory,’ he said, ‘about the back and the belly. You’d better tell me again, and remind yourself.’

  The boy sighed; then, as Loredan spat on a flat brown stone and started whetting the blade slowly along it, the boy began to recite, ‘The back of the bow stretches,’ he said, ‘and the belly is compressed. It’s the stretching and the compression, balanced and in proper proportion, that gives a bow its strength. I know that,’ he added in a wounded voice. ‘I was just saying, there’s an awful lot of wood in the back, so shouldn’t you even it up?’

  Without looking up, Loredan shook his head. ‘You’re forgetting what I told you about the heartwood and the sapwood,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ the boy replied, fidgeting with a beechwood mallet. ‘Sapwood for the back, because it’s young and can be stretched, heartwood for the belly because it’s old and remembers its shape, even when it’s been crushed up tight.’

  ‘And the sapwood should be thin and the heartwood thick,’ Loredan added, ‘because what is compressed has more power when it expands again than that which has been stretched when it contracts. And that’s the important bit,’ he concluded, testing the edge of the blade against his thumb. ‘The bit you always seem to forget.’

  ‘Only because it’s full of long words,’ the boy replied. ‘I’m not very good with long words. I’d remember it much easier if I actually knew what it meant.’

  Loredan smiled. ‘It does help,’ he conceded. ‘All right, then, think of it this way. Lord Temrai-’

  Alexius saw the boy’s face change, ever so slightly.

  ‘-is the sapwood, because he was young and he stretched the clan to make them do something they weren’t supposed to be able to do. By stretching them he gave them power.’

  ‘I don’t like this explaining,’ the boy said.

  ‘If you don’t like it, it must be doing you good. Now then, the Patriarch Alexius is the heartwood, because he was old and he was crushed up and bent back when the city fell, and all the strength of the Order was squeezed into him; and that’s how he got his power, which is much greater than the clan’s.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the boy. ‘Now I think I understand.’

  ‘There’s more,’ Loredan warned. ‘There’s the reason why you don’t make a bow out of just sapwood or just heartwood; because the same power that stretches the sapwood also compresses the heartwood, and the stretching of the one compresses the other.’

  ‘Now I’m not understanding again.’

  ‘Never mind. Learn now and understand later. Without the heartwood to support it, the sapwood stretches too much and breaks. Without the sapwood to contain it, the heartwood compresses too much and breaks. That’s why the sapwood’s on the outside, facing away from you as you draw the bow, and the heartwood’s inside.’

  ‘I see,’ said the boy. ‘Or I think I do. We’re in the belly of the bow, and they’re outside, in the back.’

  Loredan nodded. ‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘Right, that’ll have to do for an edge. Now, let’s let the dog see the rabbit.’

  – and opened them again, because someone had opened the door and was shouting something at him.

  ‘What?’ he mumbled. ‘Speak up, I can’t-’

  ‘The enemy,’ the boy in the doorway repeated, ‘are inside the city. Somebody’s opened the gates. The savages are taking the city.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alexius replied. ‘That would explain it, then.’ He frowned, wondering why he’d said that. ‘Do we know what we’re supposed to do?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘The precentors and the librarians want to see you as soon as possible,’ he said, ‘about trying to hide the library or bury it or something.’ He shuffled his feet nervously. ‘Do you need me any more, Patriarch, or can I go?’

  Alexius shook his head. ‘No, you run along,’ he said. ‘I’d get home, if I were you, before your mother worries herself to death.’

  The boy nodded gratefully and shut the door behind him, leaving Alexius in the dark once more. He sat u
p and felt for his slippers with his toes. Next, he should get dressed and go and see the precentors and the librarians; but was there any point, now that the city was about to fall? There was no earthly hope of saving the library, over a hundred thousand books ranged over a couple of miles of shelves. As for saving himself, that would be a sublimely futile effort; the strain of hurrying down to the harbour and trying to jostle his way onto a ship would kill him just as effectively as an arrow or a lungful of smoke. If he thought he’d be able to help organise an efficient evacuation, he’d go to it with a will. But the truth was that he’d only get in the way. If only there was some light, he could spend his last hours, or minutes maybe, admiring the justly famous mosaics on the ceiling and using them as a focus for some final act of meditation. But there wasn’t; and he couldn’t be bothered to grope around in the dark for his tinderbox. Ah, the hell with it; he’d never particularly liked the things to begin with.

  His eyelids were beginning to droop as he slipped back into a doze when the door flew open again, and light flooded in from the stairway behind. But it wasn’t the pageboy, or even a plains warrior with a dripping knife in each hand; it was someone he knew, if he could only fit a name to…

  ‘Patriarch Alexius? Patriarch? Excuse me, are you there?’

  His eyes snapped open. ‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Who’s that?’

  The glow of the lantern fell across the man’s face. ‘It’s me, Venart. You remember, we met a while ago when you were…’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Alexius peered at him, wondering if this was another of those dreams. ‘Please, come in,’ he added. ‘What can I do for you?’ An incongruous conversation to be having in the middle of the sack of one’s city, he reflected, but any interruption to his own death vigil was welcome enough.

  ‘My sister,’ Venart said. ‘She – well, she sent me to fetch you.’

  ‘Oh.’ It would have made much better sense if it had been a dream, but it patently wasn’t. He could smell the oil burning in the lantern, and Venart, pale-faced with embarrassment overlaid on terror, was quite obviously both here and now. ‘That was – very thoughtful.’

  ‘She insisted,’ Venart replied. ‘It’s really quite unnerving, as if she somehow knew.’ He stared at Alexius for a moment. ‘Patriarch,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry if this is a rude question or against your ethics or whatever, but I’m worried. Is she a witch? It’d never have occurred to me in a million years; but all those things you said the first time we came here, and now this-’

  She isn’t; but perhaps I know who is. ‘Please,’ Alexius replied, ‘don’t ask me. The one thing I’ve learned in my recent studies into the subject is that I still know next to nothing about it.’ He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and added, ‘Actually, if we’re going to escape from the city, shouldn’t we be making a start? I imagine it isn’t going to be easy.’

  ‘What? Oh, gods, yes, we must leave at once.’ Venart half-turned, then stopped. ‘You, um, don’t want to take much stuff with you, I suppose? Only I don’t think we ought to load ourselves down with heavy bags and parcels.’

  Alexius considered for a moment. ‘I don’t think there’s anything I actually need,’ he said. ‘If you’d be kind enough to hand me my coat; it’s just there, on the stool.’

  ‘No books or anything like that?’

  Books of spells, grimoires, magical instruments, a brass jar or pottery lamp containing my familiar demon. ‘No,’ Alexius confirmed. ‘There’s all sorts of things I’d like to take, but nothing I can’t do without. It’s rather wonderful to be able to say that at my age, don’t you think?’

  As they set out, Alexius confidently expected he wouldn’t survive as far as the second-city gate, let alone beyond it. But the streets were remarkably quiet; in the distance there were vaguely disquieting noises, but no recognisable shrieks of agony, no red glow over the lower city. He led the way from the gate, hoping his twenty-year-old recollections of back ways to the harbour were still reasonably accurate and valid.

  ‘How did you manage to get here? To my lodgings, I mean. Did you arrive before it all started, or…?’

  ‘Yes,’ Venart said (he was actually puffing, having to make an effort to keep up), ‘I was having a late meal at my inn when I heard the first rumours, so I came over straight away. Actually,’ he added, ‘I’m going to have to leave you at the docks – there’ll be a boat to carry you to the ship, assuming they haven’t both been stolen yet – because I’ve got to go back and pick up someone else. Or try to, at any rate.’ Venart was close to tears, Alexius noticed as they passed under a lamp. He wore the expression of a man who’s in desperate trouble not of his own making, trouble he knew was coming and could so easily have avoided, that it’s-not-fair kind of despairing rage that feels so much worse than ordinary fear or anger.

  ‘Loredan?’ Alexius prompted him.

  He nodded. ‘Though how I’m supposed to find the General in the middle of a battle, let alone persuade him to drop everything and come with me…’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll do your best,’ Alexius said with a trace of firmness, as if encouraging a child to do something he didn’t want to, but which would be good for him. ‘I expect you’ll manage,’ he added, truthfully.

  They were no more than a quarter of a mile from the harbour; but now they had no choice but to leave the back alleys and join the surge of people in a main thoroughfare. It wasn’t a pleasant walk, by any means; Alexius was reminded of excessively boisterous festivals, a student riot from his youth, the panic that had attended a fire, other similar precedents. But there were far more people here; women and children as well as men, all shoving and jostling, while on either side of the street the inevitable opportunists were indulging in some last-chance-to-steal looting of the better class of shops, and a few overturned carts and collapsed loads didn’t help the flow of traffic. Witchcraft, he muttered to himself as the crowd crushed and compressed all around them without ever actually impeding them, without anybody so much as treading on their feet. There wasn’t anything he could point to and legitimately call a supernatural effect; it was just that there were gaps and air pockets in the crush precisely where they wanted to go.

  ‘The boat’s not actually down by the docks,’ Venart said in a loud, hoarse whisper. ‘That’d be inviting people to come and grab it. So I told the boatmen to hide up under the arches of the long jetty, where I reckoned nobody’d see them. Mind you, I wasn’t expecting a wholesale panic like this.’

  Fortuitously the current of the stampede swept them directly towards the long jetty. Some fool had started a fire, accidentally or deliberately, in one of the warehouses, and its light reflected off the water was good enough to see by for some way. ‘There,’ Venart hissed. ‘Oh, gods, there’s people trying to get on it, just as I feared. Come on.’

  Alexius saw a small longboat, six oars each side, standing off about fifteen yards from the jetty. Around it in the water men and women were swimming; some of them were trying to scramble over the side of the boat, and the oarsmen were hitting them with boathooks, the butt-ends of oars, even the wooden clogs from their feet. Venart shouted and waved; by chance one of the oarsmen looked up and saw him, and shouted to his fellows. They dislodged the remaining swimmers with difficulty and quite a lot of force, and rowed towards the point where Venart and Alexius stood.

  ‘This’ll be the tricky part,’ Venart muttered. ‘I don’t suppose you’re up to swimming.’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Pity.’ Quite a few people were watching the boat coming in, others were scrambling to get to the front. It was the pushing and shoving behind them, in fact, that launched Venart and Alexius unexpectedly into the water, solving one problem but creating another.

  Alexius felt the water close above his head. Ah, well, he thought, it was worth trying, I suppose. But I knew it wasn’t going to do any good. Then he became aware of something pinching hard on his arm, and he was moving, being towed (still under the water) in the direction th
at he seemed to remember the boat being in. Since he was effectively dead already, of course, he could afford to be relaxed about the whole thing-

  – Until he felt the first mouthful of water enter his lungs, and the panic, which happened at almost precisely the moment when his head broke through the water back into the air, and many hands grabbed him and hauled him upwards; then a bump as he hit the planks of the boat, and someone pushing down on his chest – trying to kill him? No, this was something to do with getting water out of his lungs. It was all rather unpleasant, and he wasn’t entirely sorry when his eyes blacked over and he lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Prefect wiped the blood out of his eyes and looked down the wall, towards the bridgehouse, and then up, to where Loredan’s bastion used to be. On both sides, he could see large contingents of the enemy, each party outnumbering the force he’d managed to rally around watchtower sixteen.

  Under different circumstances, he could justifiably claim to have done enough. Four simultaneous assaults from both directions by superior forces had been repelled, at minimal loss to the defenders. Enemy casualties had been heavy, not that that signified particularly; what did it matter how many were killed when they still kept coming?

  Having assessed the situation and made what preparations he could, the Prefect took stock of his own condition, which wasn’t good. He’d taken a blow from an axe just above the rim of his helmet; the axe hadn’t penetrated, but the jagged edge of a crumpled piece of helmet trim had sliced deeply into his forehead, and the blood from the cut was making it hard for him to see. A short-range arrow had hit him in the ribs; again, the mailcoat had turned it, but the baffled impact had cracked at least one rib, possibly two, which made breathing a painful matter. He’d turned his ankle, which didn’t help, and pulled a muscle in his shoulder parrying a sword-cut from a much stronger man. As far as he was aware, none of the handful of offensive strokes he’d managed to make had done anybody any harm, but at least he was still alive.