The Escapement Page 41

  Psellus rubbed the corners of his mouth with forefinger and thumb. “You voted on it. Thank you, that certainly puts my mind at rest. Please tell the subcommittee that I’m greatly obliged to them for their efforts.”

  Dorazus went away, taking his papers and his diagrams with him, though he left the exquisitely detailed scale model behind. Psellus sat staring at it for several minutes after he’d gone; then, quite tentatively, he reached out his hand and scratched gently at the edge of the miniature embankment. A few flakes of green-painted plaster fell away, leaving a white scar.

  He sighed, and opened the book. He’d marked the page with a scrap of paper torn off the corner of some report.

  To cross a flooded ditch, he reminded himself, the usual method is to construct a siege mound directly overlooking the ditch at its narrowest point, or, where more expedient, at the point at which it is most advantageous to cross. Sappers then undermine the base of the mound, causing it to subside into the ditch, filling it. Where necessary, firm standing can be provided to cross the filled section by nailing planks to long ropes, which are then rolled up. A special machine (see Appendix Twenty-Six) is used to roll them out again.

  A siege mound. He did some calculations, using brass counters on a chequerboard. No, they wouldn’t have time for that; and besides, if that was what they had in mind, why hadn’t they started it already? Instead, as far as he could make out from the reports, they were deepening the wide, broad trenches, which suggested an attempt to drain the ditch and carry the water away into the slight dip at the base of the ridge. That, however, would be impossible; it would take the sappers far too long, they’d be vulnerable to mangonel and scorpion fire, and even if they succeeded, they’d be swept away and drowned when the water broke through; surely even the savages weren’t fanatical enough for that. So, Dorazus and his subcommittee were quite right. There was no way it could be done. If he’d been at the meeting, he’d have had no choice but to vote in support of the motion.

  He picked up his pen, dipped it in ink and wrote on a piece of scrap paper:

  Allow three days for breaching/crossing/ filling in the flooded ditch.

  Because he knew they’d do it, somehow; and then they’d face the embankment itself; which they’d sap and undermine. Allow days for sapping the embankment. He frowned at the space he’d left blank, then turned back through the pages of the book.

  There wouldn’t be time. Surely they understood that. Undoubtedly they had some plan for coping with the flooded ditch; their preparations told him that, even though he couldn’t figure out what they were planning to do. But once they were past the ditch, they had to get through, or over, or under the embankment before they could get at the walls, and there was no way they could achieve that in the time available to them…

  A thought occurred to him, and he made way for it politely. Reports said that the allies were plundering farms in the Cure Doce country, on the pretext of punishing them for the attack on Duke Valens. Wagons loaded with food and hay had been seen coming down the border road. Would these extra supplies extend the time available to them to any significant degree? His fingers paddled the brass counters across the chequerboard, and he frowned. Answer: no. The simple fact remained that the allied army presently camped on and behind the ridge consumed in a single week more than the three adjoining Cure Doce counties were capable of producing in a year.

  Assault, he said to himself; a straightforward, brutal attack, with scaling ladders, siege towers, similar primitive equipment. Suppose they sent a hundred thousand men (he couldn’t visualise that many people all in one place) to carry the embankment by storm. He found the place in the book where the author set out a clearly tabulated ready-reckoner. To carry a defended position by storm. (His finger traced along the line.) Light or heavy defences; well, say light, for the sake of argument. That gave him a multiplication factor of forty, reduced by thirty per cent (untrained or poorly trained defending army). He did the calculation. No, not possible. According to the tables, twenty thousand defenders entrenched on the embankment, poorly trained but equipped with short- and medium-range artillery, should be able to resist an assault by up to two hundred and thirty thousand attackers; projected casualties for an army of a hundred thousand, assuming the assault wasn’t abandoned until the losses reached the point of critical perceived failure (there was a complicated equation to find this, but as a basic rule of thumb, say fifteen per cent losses in eight hours or less), between twenty and twenty-six thousand for the attackers, no more than fifteen hundred for the defence…

  Psellus closed his eyes. He didn’t for one moment doubt the accuracy of the tables, but how on earth did the book’s author know these things? It could only be that, at some time in the past, so long ago that nobody remembered them any more, there had been sieges of great cities; so frequent and so commonplace that scholarly investigators had been able to collate the data – troop numbers, casualty figures – and work out these ratios, qualified by variables, verified by controls. The cities, the men who’d lived in them, had been forgotten for so long that nobody even suspected they’d ever existed. The only mark they’d left behind was the implication of their existence, to be inferred from the statistical analyses in a manual of best city-killing practice. Extraordinary thought. There were people who held that certain kinds of stone weren’t stone at all, but the compressed bones of innumerable billions of fish, crushed into solid blocks by the weight of the sea. He didn’t actually believe that; but suppose the book was the only residue left by the death of thousands of cities, each one of them as huge and arrogant in its day as the Perpetual Republic – the Eternal City of this, the Everlasting Kingdom of that, squashed down by time and oblivion into a set of mathematical constants for predicting the deaths of men in battle.

  So what, he thought; all that told him was that the real enemy wasn’t General Daurenja or the Aram Chantat, but war itself, a truth so profound as to be completely useless. Even so, something had snagged in his mind, like a bramble on a sleeve, and he wondered what it could be. Curious, he glanced over the tables once more, until suddenly he saw it, and was immediately paralysed by its implications.

  Light and medium artillery; and in the earlier chapters of the book there were detailed descriptions of each class of engine – the light field engines, such as scorpions, springalls and torsion rock-throwers; the medium engines, mangonels, onagers, the heavy springalls and lithobales; the heavy engines, such as the trebuchet. When he’d first read it, he’d been pleased and impressed – the engines in the book are just like the ones we use now, he’d told himself, so the data in the book is still useful and relevant. Now, it stunned him that he could have missed such a devastating point so completely; because the engines described in the book weren’t just similar to the Guilds’ approved types. Apart from a few inconsequential details, they were the same. But the book wasn’t Mezentine; it had been translated by a Mezentine, two hundred years ago, from a very old manuscript, written by some foreigner belonging to a city and a race that had completely disappeared. In which case, the designs, the specifications, were hundreds of years old, quite possibly thousands; in which case, the Guilds hadn’t created them, they’d simply copied them from somewhere else. True, there was a special dispensation for military equipment; but that wasn’t enough to prop up the gaping sap that suddenly threatened to undermine his entire world. The Guilds hadn’t created these specifications; they were the work of foreigners, savages, who’d achieved perfection at some point in the obscure past, long before the Mezentines had even left the Old Country. In which case…

  He was having trouble breathing. In which case, we aren’t the authors of Specification. We’re just thieves, like Ziani Vaatzes, who stole designs from our betters, which is the greatest sin. In which case…

  Before he realised what he was doing, he was on his feet and running: down the passageway, recklessly fast down the worn steps of the back stair, into the middle quadrangle, across the lawn where Necessary Evil used
to meet, up more stairs, along more passages, to the door of the records office; through that into the entrance lobby, where there was a wall with a niche in it about four feet up from the floor, and in the niche…

  “Chairman Psellus.” He recognised the voice (alarmed; shocked; well, understandable. Not every day the ruler of the City bursts into your office like a madman). “Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “Yes.” He was short of breath, and the word came out creased. “This thing here.”

  As he lifted it out of the niche in the wall, he couldn’t bring himself to call it by its name. A name, a common noun, carries deadly implications of identity. Call it what it is – a padlock – and it’s identified; a padlock is a specific identified object, which means it must conform to Specification. Or…

  “Ah, yes.” The chief archivist relaxed very slightly. “That.”

  Psellus forced himself to breathe. “It was dug up in the flowerbed outside, wasn’t it? When the drains were laid.”

  The archivist smiled, a little awkwardly. “That’s right,” he said. “Just before my time, actually, but my predecessor was there when it was found. It was knocking about in a drawer for ages, but I thought it’d be nice to put it up somewhere on display. There are so few old things from before the City was built, it’s a shame to—”

  “From before the City was built,” Psellus repeated, laying down each word like a blow. “You’re sure about that.”

  “Oh yes.” The archivist nodded enthusiastically. “We can tell, because it was found under the thick seam of ash about three feet down; and we know the ash was left over from the destruction of the earlier city that was built on this site; we aren’t certain how long—”

  “Thank you,” Psellus said. “Please go away.”

  When he was alone, he sat down on the edge of a table, the thing resting on the palm of his hand. The touch of it disgusted him; not because the thing itself was repulsive, but because of the guilt that came with it, like an infection. It was a padlock; corroded, rusted shut, the rivets and plates welded into a solid lump (pressure of time, like the weight of the sea). He knew it was a padlock, because there was the loop, and there was the casing that housed the mechanism; but the shape and the size were different from any type approved by the Guilds. In which case…

  (He shuddered, and it seemed to hop off his hand like a frog on to the floor.)

  In which case. This was the original specification, and the padlocks the Cutlers’ Guild made nowadays were different, and the difference was abomination; the deadliest sin. We came here (the thought ploughed up his mind) and we found a city of men, where they made things, and we burnt the city and we changed the specifications, just like Ziani Vaatzes, and so everything we’ve done and said ever since must, logically, have been evil…

  He didn’t know how long he sat there, staring at the thing on the floor; it had him pinned down, he daren’t move because of it. He thought: perhaps there’s a pattern, a type, a specification for the death of cities. Perhaps all cities are a mechanism, of which Ziani Vaatzes and his equivalents throughout time are the escapement, transmitting the energy of the motive components to the delivery system – engines, sappers, fire – to complete the task for which the mechanism was designed, namely its own destruction. Perhaps that’s what cities and societies are for, to destroy themselves; just as a tree sheds leaves that rot into mould to nourish the roots. In which case, the fall of Mezentia is the necessary evil. Perhaps (he didn’t like the conclusion, but he really had no choice) all evil is necessary.

  But evil ought to be opposed, which is why we have laws and specifications and Compliance and war engines and armies. So perhaps it’s necessary that we should oppose evil, and equally necessary that we should always lose.

  Perhaps the only way to win the war is to lose it.

  Ziani Vaatzes.

  He stood up, laughed aloud and kicked the padlock across the floor. It skittered, hit a chair leg and vanished under a cabinet. The idea taking shape in his mind was so monstrous that he could scarcely believe he was allowing himself to consider it. But it made sense, when nothing else did, and it was all there in two words, so familiar he’d long since stopped asking himself what they actually meant: necessary evil.

  For the first time in many years, he felt inspired, bursting with energy. Naturally, having found the answer, he wanted to dash out and start putting it into practice, straight away, before he lost his nerve. But he forced himself to stay calm. Just because it was the right thing to do, it didn’t necessarily follow that it’d be easy. He could still fail, and that would be disastrous. He felt the passion inside him sublimate, into a kind of serene determination. It could be done. He could do it. But it had to be done right. First rule of all the craft and artisan Guilds: the easiest way to do anything is properly.

  So he walked slowly back to his office, the long way round, pausing to admire the Founders’ Monument in the centre quadrangle. It too was so familiar that he’d stopped seeing it years ago; he remembered that when he first set eyes on it, as a young trainee clerk just starting in Clerical Support, he’d thought it was crude and ugly, and the head of the allegorical figure of Perfection in the centre of the group was too big for her body – but, needless to say, he’d never dared say it to anybody. Now he looked at it again, and yes, he’d been quite right. The head was much too big. The Artists’ had established the true ratio two hundred years ago. The head should be precisely one-eighth of the length of the body. Perfection, on the other hand, had a head like an oversized watermelon, and the expression on her face was little short of idiotic. It was so perfect, he could almost believe it was deliberate.

  But it wasn’t, of course, so he went back to his office, closed the door, took a clean, new sheet of Type Sixteen paper, and wrote on it:

  Lucao Psellus to Ziani Vaatzes, greetings.

  While he was doing that, an Aram Chantat working party was unloading the wagons that had arrived from Civitas Vadanis.

  They had to use the crane to lift the worms off. The crane had been General Daurenja’s idea; he’d designed it and supervised its construction, and it worked extremely well. The frame, counterweight and bearings were salvaged from a wrecked trebuchet, to which he’d fitted a new, reinforced arm with a chain and hook in place of the throwing net. Once it had been hauled into position, and the arm was directly over the thing that needed to be lifted, the counterweight was wound up to its maximum height, bringing the arm down low enough for the hook to reach the transfer straps or carrying ring. Once it had been secured and the chain ratchet locked, the weight was released, lifting the arm and the cargo up into the air. All that remained after that was to drive the unloaded wagon out of the way and slowly feed out the chain until the cargo was resting on the ground.

  As well as the worms themselves, the wagons carried a number of stout oak posts, thick as a man’s waist, nine feet long, fitted at the top with pulleys, cogs and a ratchet. Once they’d been craned off the wagons, they were lowered on to flat wheeled trolleys, to which teams of a dozen mules were harnessed. They were pit mules taken from the silver mines, where they were used to haul the ore carts up the shafts to the bulk elevators. Even so, the sappers had a hard time trying to get them down into the machine trench. They dug their heels in and started up a long, exasperating chorus of brays, creaks and whines, until someone hit on the idea of walking in front of them with a bucket of crushed oats. After that, the only difficulty was the very real threat to the bucket-carrier, who didn’t dare stumble and fall as he walked backwards down the trench holding out the bucket, for fear he’d be trodden on and squashed to death under the trolley wheels. A team of sappers marched behind; they were wearing the heavy-duty helmets and breastplates that caused so much frustration to the lunchtime snipers on the embankment, and in addition to their usual gear, they were carrying crowbars, sledgehammers and sacks.

  The observers on the embankment had been wondering why the sappers had widened the trench about ten yar
ds from the end nearest to them. The answer was quite prosaic. It was nothing more than a lay-by, somewhere to turn the trolleys once the posts had been unloaded. The mules were sent back, and the sappers dragged the posts the rest of the way. Something about the manner in which they set about the job must have bothered the artillerymen; in spite of their earlier discouragements, they got out their bows and started shooting, though now they weren’t calling out bets and nominating their targets. They managed to hit one sapper in the hollow of the elbow joint and another in the thigh, but nobody claimed the shots or yelled out congratulations. Meanwhile, the sappers were digging out post-holes, five feet deep, through the topsoil and down into the dense red Mezentine clay. Behind them, other men were emptying the sacks, which turned out to contain sand and cement, and mixing up concrete.

  A captain of artillery (Lucuo Dozonas of the Clockmakers’ Guild, only recently promoted) ordered his crew to span and load their scorpion. Several people pointed out that this was directly against orders, but he didn’t even reply. Since he was still quite new to all this, he had to get out his book of elevation and windage tables before he could wind in the settings. Fortunately, since the head of the trench was so close to the edge of the flooded ditch, he knew roughly what the range was. He gave the order to loose, and watched the bolt lift into the air. At first he thought he’d overshot, but the trajectory decayed and the bolt dropped, the sun flashing briefly on its point, glanced off one of the gabions and hit a man bringing up a pail of water. He was wearing one of those breastplates, but the bolt went through as though it was just a shirt.

  Dozonas hesitated, well aware that everybody was looking at him. “Fine,” he snapped, in a rather shaky voice. “Span and reload.”

  Before his scorpion could loose again, four or five others had beaten him to it. Then the short-range mangonels opened up, throwing bricks and rubble. Before too long, they’d killed half a dozen sappers and wounded twice as many again, but the working parties hardly seemed to have noticed. They’d finished digging the holes; they were scooping in the concrete and manhandling the posts upright, with the machinery at the top. One scorpion bolt – pure luck – hit one of the posts dead centre, splitting it neatly up the middle. That seemed to bother the sappers far more than their dead and dying. They piled up more gabions and moved the shield trolley a few inches.