The Escapement Read online

  He wasn’t listening. A loaf (a small loaf, and distinctly stale); a knob of cheap yellow cheese; some rather slimy cold chicken, with splodges of cold brown gravy – scraped off her husband’s plate after he’d finished, presumably. I’m reduced to eating table scraps, like a dog or a pig. Marvellous. Two soft, waxy store apples; three raw carrots; half a dozen flat scones, blackened round the edges…

  “I burned them on purpose,” she pointed out, “so I could throw them away. He told me off for being careless and wasting flour and eggs. You can hardly get eggs any more. Some fool’s ordered all the chickens in the City slaughtered, because they reckon we can’t spare the grain.”

  He rolled his eyes. Small, stupid, petty things like that were a sure way to ruin morale. “Did you bring anything to drink?” he asked hopefully. “I’m sick to death of rainwater out of dirty barrels.”

  She handed him a small jug stopped with screwed-up cloth. He sniffed it and pulled a face.

  “I can’t drink that,” he said. “It’s gone stale.”

  “If it wasn’t stale, he wouldn’t have let me chuck it out,” she snapped back at him. “Malt’s half a dollar a pound, and that’s if you can get it. Pretty soon all we’ll have is water.”

  My heart bleeds, he thought. “It’ll have to do, then,” he replied sullenly. “Will you come again tomorrow? You can say the kid’s still off colour.”

  She was looking at him, and he didn’t need his lifetime of expertise in handling women to interpret that particular expression. She doesn’t love me any more, oh well, never mind. At least she’s got enough common sense to realise she’s stuck with me.

  “I’ll try,” she said. “It’s lucky he hardly notices me these days, so long as his food’s on the table and the laundry gets done.”

  The little girl was bored. She was playing with the buckles of her shoes, undoing them and doing them up again. It was annoying to watch, but he decided against saying anything. Idly, he wondered about her; whose daughter she was, not that it mattered very much. He couldn’t bring himself to feel anything about her at all; just another pointless complication. But she’d been married to Vaatzes all those years and there’d been no children, then all this had started, and suddenly there was one. Only natural to wonder, though he’d never had the slightest interest in breeding offspring.

  “Did you find out about the war, like I asked you?”

  She sighed. “He’s rushed off his feet building siege engines, that’s all I know,” she said. “He doesn’t like talking about work when he gets home. My friend whose husband works in the paymaster’s office said something about some new alliance, but she didn’t know any details.”

  He frowned. “Did she say anything about the Cure Doce?”

  “Who?”

  He shook his head. “Try and find out more if you can,” he said, doing his best not to let his impatience show. “It’s vitally important I keep up to date, if I’m ever going to get out of this mess. And then,” he added awkwardly, “we can finally be together.”

  She nodded. It was a curious gesture in the circumstances, like a servant accepting orders without forming any judgement of whether they were good or bad.

  “I need another coat,” he said. “This one’s useless.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  He took a moment to look at her, something he hadn’t done properly in a while. The changes were only very slight, almost too slight to notice or describe: a little thinner around the face, tighter around the mouth and eyes. She looked dried, like stored fruit; the sap drained out in the interests of endurance. But she’d put on a little weight, just enough to spoil the curves and radii of her figure. Her waist had thickened up, her arms were starting to turn podgy where once they’d been rounded and soft. He realised, with the sense of someone noticing he’d forgotten something that used to be important, that they hadn’t had sex for – how long was it now, six months? Since Psellus went to Civitas Vadanis – now how could those two facts be at all connected, though clearly they were, somehow. He thought about that. They’d had the opportunity, all these clandestine meetings in dark, secret places, and he had no doubt that she’d have agreed to it if he’d suggested it, because she’d never refused him anything. Did he want to? Not, he decided, in the slightest. Even if he’d still wanted her, found her even remotely attractive, it would be frivolous, a ridiculous indulgence for someone in his position, like a starving man spending his last three quarters on candy floss.

  He looked away, feeling disgusted and betrayed. For her sake, he’d risked and lost everything. In that sense, she was to blame; the astonishingly fierce desire he’d felt for her at first, which had made everything else seem trivial, couldn’t reasonably be called his fault, since he’d had no control over it, none whatsoever. Now it had gone, evaporated as the heat of the consequences burned through his life, and here they were, stuck with each other, like an old couple resentfully celebrating sixty years of an arranged marriage. It was hard to believe that either of them were the same people they’d been then, of course. But at least she still had enough to eat, and slept in a bed, under a roof that didn’t leak. And as for the scale of losses incurred, there was no possible comparison. What had she lost? Nothing at all. She’d traded one unsatisfactory husband for another, but the two men were practically interchangeable in any event, they even did the same job, so that couldn’t possibly count as a loss. He, on the other hand – well, that didn’t bear thinking about.

  “I’d better go,” she said awkwardly. “I’ll try and come tomorrow.”

  “You’ve got to find me somewhere better than this,” he said angrily. “I can’t live here. At least find me somewhere I can have a fire. I’ve been wet through to the skin for days now.”

  “I’ll try.”

  But that was always her answer: she’d try, she’d do her best. “I’m sure you will,” he replied, knowing that she wouldn’t hear the irony – because naturally she did try, she did do her best, but it wasn’t enough. “Maybe it’s time I got out of the City for a while,” he said.

  “No.” She almost barked the word at him, and he could see panic in her face. “No, you mustn’t do that. How am I supposed to bring you food and stuff if you’re… ?”

  “You wouldn’t have to,” he replied reasonably. “If you bring me some things I can sell – just ordinary household junk, they’ll buy anything City-made in the villages. It’d be better than sleeping in a godawful hole like this, and I wouldn’t be scared to death every time a watchman looked at me.”

  “But what about the savages?” she said, and he knew that what she really meant was what about me? At least she had the instinctive good sense to realise what a poor argument that was these days. “People are saying they’ll be here any day now.”

  “Are they? How soon?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know, it’s hard to know what to believe. Some people say ten days, some people say five, they’re just guessing.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?”

  The panic glowed brighter in her eyes; at last, some sign of life. She looked better for it. “But the savages really are coming, everybody knows that,” she said. “And suppose they shut the gates, and you can’t get back in? And what happens when you run out of money? You can’t go, it’d be dangerous.” She’d wanted to use another word. He wondered: is this love? Or just a habit, unwanted but now unbreakable; a dependency, which is what love always becomes. Like alcohol, or smoking hemp; the need increases as the pleasure fades into pain. Better to be abstemious, to indulge only occasionally, socially, among friends.

  “Fine,” he said, making a show of resentful concession. “I’ll stay here, then, if you’re that worried. But you’ve got to find me another place.”

  “All right.”

  All right, not I’ll try. “And a new coat.”

  She nodded. “There’s his old winter coat he never wears any more. There’s a hole, but I can darn it. If he misses i
t, I’ll say the moths got at it. He’ll be angry at me for not looking after it, but…” She realised he wasn’t listening, and added, “I love you, Maris.”

  “I love you too.” She turned to leave. The child was playing with the remains of a rotten sack, pulling threads out of a frayed hole; she grabbed it by the hand and it stood up. “Don’t forget the coat,” he added, because women never heard anything unless they were told at least three times.

  She left him and walked quickly up the narrow alley until she reached Chairmakers’ Street. Moritsa was tugging at her hand.

  “Are we going to see the doctor now?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh. I thought…”

  “It’s all right. You don’t have to see the doctor.”

  “Oh. Does that mean I’m better?”

  “Yes.”

  That seemed to make sense to her, and they walked in silence for a while. Then she asked, “Mummy, who was that man?”

  “Just a friend.” She frowned, and went on, “He’s been very unlucky and lost his home and all his money, so we’re looking after him until things get better for him.”

  “I see. He sounded very unhappy.”

  “Yes. But you mustn’t tell anybody about him, do you understand? It’s very important. There are bad people looking for him, and if they find him they’ll hurt him, and we don’t want that to happen, do we?”

  “No.” A pause, then: “Did he do something wrong?”

  “No. Just remember, not a word to anybody. All right?”

  At the top of Chairmakers’ Street, left into Spangate. A fine drizzle, just enough to be annoying. She’d been longer than she’d expected to be, but she could explain that by saying she’d had to wait for the doctor. With luck, he wouldn’t have noticed anyway. Most likely he’d be asleep in his chair, like an old man. She found the thought of him mildly disgusting, and considered whether she could get away with taking one of his shirts as well as the coat. She decided she probably could, if she let it get burnt while it was drying in front of the fire. Stealing from him pleased her; it was like winning, like achieving something positive.

  He wasn’t asleep when she got home; but he was sitting at the table with a pile of papers and his counting-board, and he didn’t look up as she closed the door behind her. She sent Moritsa straight off to bed, then stood over him until he looked up.

  “The doctor says she’s fine,” she told him. “Just a tummy bug, it’ll clear up in a day or two.”

  He frowned, then said, “That’s good.”

  She didn’t move. “You could at least make it sound like you cared.”

  She saw him wince. It meant he didn’t want to fight, couldn’t face the aggravation that would follow if he answered her back. “Of course I care,” he said. “But you said yourself it wasn’t anything serious. I just—”

  “It’s all right,” she snapped. “But I’ll need six quarters to pay the doctor.”

  He nodded, felt in his pocket for the coins. That’d buy a shirt; a cheap new one, or a good one second hand. He never begrudged her money so long as she said what it was for. Somehow, she tended to see that as a fault rather than a virtue.

  “Are you going to be long?”

  He nodded. “I’ve got to get these costings finished by tomorrow, and you know what I’m like with figures. I keep asking them to give me a clerk, but…” He stopped; that I-know-I’m-boring-you gesture of the head and shoulders. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. You’d better go on to bed.”

  “It’s all right,” she said wearily. “You know the light keeps me awake.”

  That pleased her, too; another tiny wound inflicted, another pinprick of guilt. Sometimes she imagined him as a piece of knitting, and she was unpicking him a stitch at a time. Very occasionally, it occurred to her to wonder why, but when she did, she never liked the answer very much. Besides, he’d brought it on himself. Any man who’d betray his friend just to get his wife deserved to end up with the sort of woman who’d cheat on her husband with his best friend. To pass the time, she took the old winter coat down from behind the door and started darning the hole.

  After she’d done five rows, she asked, “Have you heard anything new about how the war’s going?”

  She pitched it just right; as though she was making conversation as a way of showing she’d forgiven him. He paused, two brass counters held between his fingers. “The latest is, we’ve made an alliance with the Cure Doce.”

  “Who?”

  “Quite.” He put the counters carefully down on a square, shifted another from the bottom to the top. “They live out east, on the Vadani border. Little better than savages, really, but they’re sending troops, and we’re in no position to be fussy.”

  “That’s good, then.”

  He shrugged. “Can’t see there’s enough of them to make any difference,” he said. “All I know is, we’re sending them eighteen thousand suits of three-quarter-length mail and sixteen thousand helmets, which is rather more than we’ve got in stock. Which is why I’m having to sit up doing these bloody costings instead of getting some sleep.” He sighed. “It seems to me that any soldiers who haven’t got their own equipment already can’t be much good. I mean, you can’t just turn a man into a soldier by sticking an iron hat on his head, or else we wouldn’t need the Cure Doce. But if they want to go out and get killed on our behalf, let them. I suppose it’ll keep the savages off our backs for a little while longer.”

  She waited for a moment or so, then said: “Is that all we’re doing, then? Hiring these…”

  “Cure Doce. No.” He wrote something down. “I get the impression they’re planning something a bit more positive than that.”

  “Go on, then.”

  He sat back in his chair. He had his back to her, but she could see the weariness. “They’ve told me I’ve got to find seventy thousand twelve-inch billets of hardening steel, out of what we’ve got in stock,” he said. “And when I asked what for, they told me spades and shovels, pickaxes, sledgehammers, that sort of thing. Sounds like they’re getting ready to start building up the fortifications. And they must have something pretty big in mind, because I know for a fact we’ve got close on a million shovels sat in the warehouse; I was after some of them myself, for the steel, to make into arrowheads. So, if they’ve already got a million shovels and they want seventy thousand more, they must be planning on moving a lot of dirt, though who they’re going to get to use all these tools I have no idea. Still, at least it looks like someone’s trying to do something.”

  He paused, then frowned. “Of course, you know who we’ve got to thank for that,” he added. “Your old friend Lucao Psellus.”

  The name hurt her. “Him,” she said.

  “I know. But you can’t deny it, he’s doing a good job, in the circumstances.”

  “He’s horrible. I should know. And think of all the difficulties he made for us over our wedding.”

  “Yes, sure. All I’m saying is, he’s doing something about the war. God only knows what sort of a state we’d be in if we still had that arsehole Boioannes running things.”

  In that moment, she realised, she’d never hated him so much in all the time they’d been together. “Like your opinion matters,” she said. “You don’t know anything about it.”

  He turned and looked at her, and she thought: one of these days, I’ll go just a little bit too far, and then I’ll lose him. But not today. “Fine,” he said, “let’s not talk about it. I’ll just get on and finish these figures.”

  She turned her back on him, picked up the coat and sewed for a while, although there wasn’t really enough light; he’d taken the good lamp to read his papers by, and the other lamp needed a new wick. She didn’t want to do sloppy work on a coat she was going to give to him; not that he’d notice, but she’d know, and feel ashamed. She’d have to get up early and take it over to the window, to catch the first light. “I’m going to bed now,” she announced. “You’ll have to get your own lunch tomo
rrow, I haven’t had time to make anything.”

  “Mphm.” He didn’t look at her. “I can get something from a market stall on my way in.”

  For some reason, she was offended by that; he’d made it sound as if she was so unimportant that even a gross dereliction of duty on her part couldn’t possibly matter. But of course, that wasn’t what he’d meant, he was just trying to be considerate. On balance, though, she preferred to take offence. “Fine,” she snapped, as she crossed the room to the bed and dragged the curtain across so savagely she nearly pulled it off the wall.

  Falier waited until he heard her snore, then put down his pen and carefully swept the counters off the board into his cupped hand, making sure they didn’t clink together. It had been a dreadful, hateful evening. He had no idea why, but it seemed like there didn’t have to be a reason any more. Ever since… He stopped what he was doing and concentrated, trying to pin down the moment with all due precision. Ever since the Vadani duke had evacuated his capital city, not long before the savages got involved. He thought about it some more, trying to correlate the vast events of the war with the most significant turning-points in their marriage. The correlation gave him a coherent chronology and verified his conclusion, but offered no explanation. Perhaps, he thought, it’s like astrology; the movements of stars and planets bearing on the tiny lives of men and women. Perhaps the war’s got so huge and heavy now that it’s pulling our lives along with it, the same way the moon draws the tides. There were other explanations, of course. Since the war got so busy – ever since Vaatzes betrayed the Eremians; he’d been directly involved in that – he’d had so much work on, been so wrapped up in production targets and productivity ratings, felt so tired in the evenings when he finally got home… Obviously he’d been neglecting her, and wouldn’t any woman resent that? He felt properly guilty about it, of course, but unfortunately there was nothing he could do to set it right. He couldn’t even resign, they wouldn’t let him, and as for delegating, that’d only make things worse; they’d make a mess of everything, and he’d have to work even longer and harder trying to get it all straight again. To begin with he’d hoped she’d understand, because of the national emergency and the threat to the City, but apparently not. He couldn’t blame her for that. Just because the savages are coming, why should that mean you don’t love me any more? She didn’t need to say it out loud, and he could tell her it wasn’t true until they were both sick of the sound of his voice. She’d never believe him.