The Escapement Page 49

  Whoever it was hesitated just for a split second. “With respect, shouldn’t we take out their artillery first? Otherwise—”

  “Please,” Psellus said, very quietly. “Do as I say.”

  Orders were passed down; it amused him, the way one officer passed them on to another, who went and told someone else, who went and told someone else… The chain of command, presumably, and it was admirably military. But absurd, nevertheless. “All ready, Chairman,” the nonentity was saying. “At your command.”

  “Thank you,” he said firmly. “Please wait.”

  They all think I’m mad, he thought. They’re trying to make up their minds to push me out of the way and do what needs to be done; but they won’t do it. Which is just as well. Even so, we’re a pathetic excuse for a nation…

  Then a flash of light caught his eye, and he looked at the top of the ridge, where he’d been told to look when the moment came. “Tell me,” he said urgently. “My eyesight’s so poor these days. Is there a large body of horsemen on top of the ridge?”

  Slight pause. “Yes,” whoever it was said. “But…”

  Deep breath. “In that case,” Psellus said mildly, “kindly open fire.”

  Miel Ducas galloped down the slope, terrified in case his horse should stumble and throw him, and keep him from his duty. But the Ducas is, of course, a supremely accomplished horseman, and his mount is the finest money can buy.

  Ten yards short of the artillery line, he reined in and looked round for someone to talk to. An artillery captain (an Eremian, thank God) turned round and stared at him.

  “Hey, you,” Miel shouted at him. “Do you know who I am?”

  The captain nodded.

  “Good. New orders. You need to bring down your elevation fourteen minutes, all of you.”

  The captain was doing mental arithmetic. “That can’t be right,” he said. “If we do that, we’ll be shooting straight at—”

  “Fourteen minutes,” the Ducas repeated. “Now.”

  The parts of a machine fulfil their various functions because they have no choice. A lever pivots a sear, which slips out of the notch cut in the underside of a roller. Unsupported, the roller gives way, releasing the slider, which shoots forward under the pressure of two springs along a close-sided keyway, driving the arrow shaft along its channel and away through the air. The arrow has no choice but to fly until it hits the target. Or a lever pivots a sear, which slips out of its notch in the roller, which releases the swinging arm, which rushes through ninety degrees, pivoting around its axis pin, until it slams into the crossbar, launching a net full of bricks, broken masonry, flints and potsherds into the air. Then the hook goes on the slider or the arm and the winch begins to turn. The tongue dances over the teeth of the ratchet as each turn drags back the slider or the arm against the furious resistance of the springs, until the sear drops into the notch on the underside of the roller, and a new arrow or a new consignment of lethal junk lands in the slot, and the lever drops, and the sear falls out. Between the spanning of the spring and the release there is only the sear, the trigger, the escapement, and once it lets go, the force is committed beyond recall.

  Then the scorpion bolts lift, like a flock of rooks disturbed while feeding; they climb into the air on a lifting curve that reaches a high point, hesitates for a tiny moment, then (as though a sear has been tripped) falls in a decaying trajectory, accelerating as it slants down out of the sky. Or the hundredweight of jumbled, ballistically inefficient rubbish soars in a dissipating pattern, hangs, decays and drops, each lump spinning and twisting in the air like a falling man treading emptiness, powered by its own height and the furious pull of the ground, until it pitches…

  Miel Ducas had seen it all before, of course. Once upon a time, he’d watched the Mezentine artillery beat flat the Eremian army, the way the wind lays a field of corn. Once you’ve seen one wipeout, there’s a case for saying you’ve seen them all. So it didn’t bother him that he couldn’t see what happened after the cloud of bolts lifted up into the sky. He could picture it in his mind easily enough.

  Instead, he watched the Vadani cavalry pouring down over the ridge, parting into two wings as it reached the plain and surging up to surround the remaining four fifths of the Aram Chantat as they waited still and quiet for their shifts to begin. Of course, they couldn’t see what was happening on the other side of the bank that shielded the artillery from the city batteries. They wouldn’t have the faintest idea, until the scorpions swung round on their traverses to point straight at them.

  Even so, he thought, it’d probably be a good idea to get out of the way. He walked his horse through the gap between the head-high stacks of scorpion bolts, dismounted, handed the reins to someone or other and scrambled up on to the wall, at a place where a Mezentine shot had punched a hole. What he saw was quite familiar.

  “One more shot,” he called out, “then a new setting.”

  This time, nobody questioned the order.

  The war council was still sitting, of course. There had been issues they wanted to discuss without General Vaatzes there. But the general came in anyway, and he had a platoon of Eremian soldiers with him.

  “Your attention, please,” he said.

  No choice at all, as he explained to them. A fifth of their men were already dead, shot or squashed by the combined fire of the Eremians and the Mezentines. The remainder were unarmed, packed close together, surrounded on three sides by the Vadani cavalry and faced on the fourth side by the allied scorpion batteries. As Ziani pointed out, if they chose to fight, there was a chance they might prevail by sheer force of numbers, eventually, but their losses would be something of the order of seventy per cent; and then they’d still have the Mezentines to contend with.

  “I arranged it with Duke Valens and Chairman Psellus,” he went on. He was almost too tired to speak, but the impetus of the final stage swept him along. “We all agreed that, compared with the threat you represent, our differences are relatively trivial; the sort of things we can always sort out later on, we decided, once we’ve got rid of you.”

  They were staring at him, but he really couldn’t care less about that. His mind was a long way away, preoccupied with far more important issues.

  “At any rate,” he went on, “we’ve solved the supply problem – which,” he added with a grin, “I created when I told Daurenja how to blow up the embankment. It was my gesture of good faith to Chairman Psellus; by using up a third of our flour reserve, I guaranteed to him that the City couldn’t be taken by conventional siege and assault, because there simply wouldn’t be time before our supplies ran out. He had to take my word for it that General Daurenja’s secret weapon wouldn’t work, but that was a foregone conclusion. I was there when it was made, and I knew it would fail. Now, of course, the supply problem’s been solved, simply by virtue of the fact that there’s eighty thousand less of you and twenty thousand fewer Mezentines. It was a brutal solution, but rather less so than the alternative, which was to slaughter all the Mezentines. And if you discounted that, there really wasn’t any choice.”

  He paused for breath. He’d been talking quickly, to get it over with so he could move on. He slowed down a little as he continued:

  “My deal with Psellus is as follows. We – I mean the Vadani and the Eremians – will disarm you and escort you over the mountains to the edge of the desert. Once you’ve crossed back to where you came from, Mezentine engineers will destroy the string of oases, so no one will ever be able to bring an army across there again.” He shrugged. “I have no idea how you go about wrecking a large pool of water, but my people have the expertise, not to mention the incentive. Then, apart from the inevitable small raiding parties every so often, we’ll never see or hear from you again, which is how it should be. The Mezentines will break down the City walls and undertake never to raise a standing army; and there’ll be a trade agreement, we haven’t worked out any details yet, but it’ll mean the Mezentines will sell their goods for a fair price, and pay a
substantial war indemnity; there’ll also be a lot of changes in the way the Republic’s run, but that’s an internal matter, nothing to do with you. In return, the Vadani and the Eremians will be responsible for the City’s defence.” He frowned. “It’s not a very good deal for any of us, and I expect it’ll break down sooner or later and we’ll all be back at each other’s throats again before very long, but at least we’ll be rid of you. It took this war to make us all realise that you’re the one problem none of us can accommodate. You’re a different kind of threat; you change everything.”

  One of the Aram Chantat said: “You realised it, though. Before the wedding, even. That’s why you made it happen.”

  Ziani gave him a blank stare. “I’m not important,” he said. “What possible relevance could one man’s concerns have to the fate of nations? What I’ve done is end the war with the minimum of bloodshed and damage, and given the people of three countries some kind of chance of living in peace. Surely that’s a leader’s duty, and if it isn’t, it should be.”

  “We misjudged you,” said another. “We assumed you wanted revenge.”

  “I’m not a savage,” Ziani replied calmly. “Only savages think like that.”

  He was about to dismiss them, but one of the Aram Chantat caught his eye and said, “Will you go back to your wife and daughter, and your work in the factory? Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  Ziani looked back at him, like someone looking into a mirror. “The meeting is closed,” he said.

  18

  There was a man called Cuno Abazes; a Mezentine, about thirty-two years old, a bachelor in a city where nearly everybody over the age of twenty was married. He didn’t belong to a Guild, having failed the trade test for the Carpenters’. Instead, he’d earned a sparse living as a porter, drover and general labourer, loading and unloading, holding horses and collecting nightsoil for the Fullers.” The war had been remarkably kind to him: he’d joined the army on the first day of recruitment, realising it was his one and only chance of making good, and had done so well that within a matter of weeks he’d been made an officer, a captain of general infantry. He’d been assigned to guard duty on the embankment on the day of the assault, but a splinter of rock from an allied round shot had hit him on the side of the head as he went to report for the start of his shift, and when the embankment was blown up he was lying in bed in the hospital. His injuries proved to be superficial, and next morning he was passed fit for active service and told to report to the Guildhall for sentry duty. There he heard the news that the war was over.

  “That’s terrible,” he blurted out. “What’s going to happen to the army?”

  “Being disbanded,” they told him. “Express term of the peace treaty. You’ll be able to go back to your old life, pick up where you left off. Isn’t that good news?”

  Cuno Abazes didn’t reply to that. Instead, he asked, “So who won?” and they said, “You know, that’s a very good question.”

  *

  Later that day, Captain Abazes was on duty in the main hall when Chairman Psellus himself passed through, on his way to the small conference suite. Since hearing the bad news about the end of the war, Abazes had had time to calm down and think it over, and he’d reached the conclusion that even if they were doing away with the army as such, they were still going to need guards, sentries, security officers, and this was exactly the time when they’d be choosing who to keep and who to let go. Accordingly, as Psellus went by, he snapped to attention like the swinging arm of an onager slamming against the stop. Abazes had always been good at drill, and he put everything he’d got into it, with the result that the crack of his heels coming together made Psellus shy like a horse and stare at him for a moment. That disconcerted him; he’d assumed the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the Republic would be a connoisseur of fine drill, but Psellus had reacted as if he’d stuck his tongue out at him and blown a raspberry.

  “Very good, Captain,” said the other man (shorter than the chairman, somewhere between thirty and forty-five, oddly dressed but otherwise completely unmemorable). “Carry on.”

  Instinctively, Abazes saluted, but neither the unmemorable man nor the chairman were watching. They were walking away from him, chatting in low, comfortable voices; old friends, he could tell. Well, he thought, obviously the other man had to be something to do with the military; at least, he sounded right, and he’d known what to say. Cuno Abazes muttered a silent prayer, and went back to doing his imitation of a statue, or one of those lifesize mechanical people that used to be in fashion, many years ago.

  “You’ve got them saluting already,” Ziani said. “I’m impressed.”

  Psellus shrugged. “Did he do it right? I don’t know about these things.”

  “He wouldn’t have gone down well with a Vadani drill sergeant,” Ziani replied. “Slouching, gut sticking out, hand wobbling around like he was trying to swat flies. You’d never have made soldiers out of them, not if the war had dragged on for twenty years. It’s not in our nature.”

  “I’m delighted to hear you say so,” Psellus said. “War is neither a craft nor a trade, and I’m pleased we have an excuse not to meddle with it any more. By all means let’s leave it to your precious Vadani. Let them get from it what pleasure they can.”

  Ziani laughed. “You still don’t understand them,” he said. “Not that there’s any reason why you should. There’s rather more to them than you think, but compared to us they’re still just savages.”

  They walked on together in silence as far as the foot of the grand staircase; and Psellus thought: I’ve come here every day for as long as I can remember, but I’ve never seen it before, there’s always been too many people in the way – my colleagues, my fellow clerks, hurtling up and down the stairs with files and ledgers. It’s almost as though they were there to distract attention from the building itself; because we didn’t build it, did we? The people who came before us did that, the people who made the padlock. And then he thought: I saved the Republic, but I don’t want it any more; even looking at it makes me feel sick. And then he said: “You’re really a patriot, aren’t you, Ziani?”

  Ziani nodded. “Always have been,” he said.

  “A true believer?”

  “Always.”

  Psellus accepted the statement with a slight movement of head and shoulders. “You never intended to destroy us,” he said.

  “Of course not.” Ziani wasn’t looking at him. He was gazing at the staircase, the vaulted ceiling, the carved balustrades, the allegorical frescoes on the walls (Perfection illuminating the assembled crafts and trades; Perfection being a tall, big-bosomed woman in flowing red robes, and each craft and trade represented by a grey-haired man carrying the archetypal tool or instrument of his calling; but why, he couldn’t help wondering, had they all been painted with white skins, like they were savages?). “Only a lunatic would burn down his own house; he’d have nothing to come home to.”

  “And that’s really all it was,” Psellus said, hesitating, as though he couldn’t set foot on the first tread of the stair until he’d had an answer. “You just wanted to come home.”

  “Of course.” Ziani traced the edge of a carved border with the tip of his finger; it was smooth, the sharp edge worn down by a million clerks brushing against it as they made way for each other on the stairs. “If I’d wanted to be rich and powerful, I’d have gone far away, the Old Country or somewhere like that; I’d have settled down and started a factory. Probably I’d have founded a new Mezentia, just like this one only better. That’s what big men do, heroic types, idealists, rebels.” He shook his head. “I just did what I had to, to put things right. No choice, really.”

  Psellus climbed the first step. “The death toll…”

  “I can’t help that,” Ziani said briskly. “I can’t be held responsible. Nor can you.” He turned his face, and Psellus couldn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know all the ins and outs of administrative procedure, but if you were chief clerk of Compliance, it
was you who gave the order that started the war. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not me,” Ziani said. “Sure, I planned the whole thing. I worked out every step, while I was dying of thirst out on the plain, before Duke Orsea’s people found me. By the time they picked me up, I’d planned as far as turning the scorpions on the Aram Chantat – I didn’t know they were called that, of course, I just knew there were millions of savages out there beyond the desert, and they were the only force on earth that could bring down the Republic; so of course they were part of the plan from the beginning; like a mainspring, if you like. Orsea and Valens were the gear train – I was lucky there, I admit it. I knew that if I could persuade the Eremian duke to let me build a factory, the Republic would have to declare war. I wanted to bring in the Vadani, to keep the war going, and I knew I’d have to find some mechanism to get the Vadani to bring in the savages beyond the desert. That was quite easy, once I found out the Vadani duke was unmarried, and the stupid courtly-love triangle with Orsea, Valens and the duchess gave me that whole assembly practically complete, I just had to make a few connections. The chain of oases across the desert was a stroke of luck, but I was pretty well sure there had to be something like that once I heard about the raiding parties. If I hadn’t had those strokes of luck, I’d have had to manufacture something myself to do the job; it’d have taken longer and needed a lot more effort, but I’d have got there in the end. The real luck was finding Daurenja.”

  “Oh.” Psellus raised his eyebrows. “You surprise me. I’d have thought he was more of an unforeseen difficulty.”

  “He was, at times.” Ziani smiled. “But I knew from quite early on that I’d make him the commander-in-chief of the Alliance. I assumed I’d have to find a way of disgracing him when the moment came, to get him out of the way when it was time for me to take command. But he blew himself up instead, which was far better.”