The Escapement e-3 Read online

  "Today," the instructor said, "I'd like to explain the theory of time and distance."

  Psellus felt quietly relieved. He liked theory. He had no trouble understanding it, and it meant he could sit down, rather than floundering about along the chalk line.

  "In fencing"-he was looking past Psellus, over his shoulder, as though addressing an invisible class-"time and distance are so closely related that we can barely tell where one ends and the other begins. Time is distance, and distance is time. Distance matters, because you can't stab a man if he isn't there. So, if I have time to take a step back, so your sword can't reach me, I can always be safe."

  Psellus nodded eagerly.

  "Distance," the instructor went on, "in fencing parlance, is the space between two enemies. Full distance is where neither man can touch the other without moving his feet. If you're at full distance, he has to take a step forward before he can reach you; and of course, that gives you time to take a step back, which maintains the distance." He paused. "Are you still with me, or…?"

  "That's fine," Psellus said happily. "Go on."

  The instructor nodded gravely. "Close distance," he went on, "is where both men are close enough to strike each other. When you close the distance, he can hit you, but you can hit him too. In fencing, danger is mutual; you need to bear that in mind at all times."

  "Of course," Psellus said. He liked the sound of full distance much better, of course.

  "Now then." The instructor's voice became brisker. "Suppose you're at full distance, and you believe your enemy's about to move towards you. There are three options. You can move back-safe, but it means he's safe too-or you can stay where you are and try blocking his attack with a defence-what we call a ward-or you can move forward at the same time he does, hoping to block his attack and make an attack of your own simultaneously. That is, of course, a dangerous choice; it can end up with both of you killing the other, for instance, and you'd be surprised how often that happens. But if you can make it work, it's the best choice of all, because as you close the distance you also close the time. He's got no time to defend himself or get out of the way, and so you win. We call that an action in single time, as opposed to where he attacks and you retreat, then you attack and he retreats; that's double time. All right so far?"

  Psellus nodded, but he wasn't quite sure; the implications were too broad to be assimilated so quickly. He'd have to think about it later, if he could remember it all.

  "For an action in single time," the instructor went on, and his voice suggested that he was reciting a scripture long since learnt by heart, "we can either simultaneously block and strike, or simultaneously avoid and strike. This is where the two main schools of fencing diverge. In the Eremian school-"

  "I'm sorry," Psellus interrupted. "What did you call it?"

  "The Eremian school. They have-well, had, I suppose-a long and rich tradition of fencing. The Eremian school"-he's lost his place, Psellus thought guiltily-"is up and down a straight line, because after all, a line's the shortest distance between two points, and the shorter the distance, the less time you need. The Vadani school is based on a circle. Basically, you avoid the attack by moving sideways and make your own attack by going forward; so, if you imagine a circle drawn on the ground-"

  "I'm sorry," Psellus said. "A circle."

  The instructor looked sad. "Well, strictly speaking, more of a hexagon, or an octagon, even, but a circle's easier to picture. Imagine the centre of the circle is a point exactly between the tips of the swords of two men at full distance." He frowned, then added, "It's much easier if I draw a diagram. If you've got some paper…"

  The end of the lesson. Half a dozen sheets of paper, covered in lines, circles, hexagons (Psellus had insisted), some plain, some with arrows to show the direction of the defender's feet. An insincere promise to review it all before the next lesson and ask about anything he hadn't understood.

  It had all been perfectly fine until the circle. If you don't want to get hit, be somewhere else; he'd grasped that just fine (except how can you move an entire city out of the way? You can't, especially if there's no time, less than nine days before close distance). He could understand staying put and blocking, which was, after all, what walls were for-walls and bastions and ravelins, and all those bizarre shapes in the two-hundred-year-old book, that could be the wild sketches of a lunatic for all he knew. Staying put, blocking and hitting back all at the same time; he understood that, and they ought to have superiority in artillery, although with Vaatzes out there they couldn't be sure. But the circle (or, properly speaking, the octagon), the move sideways and forwards in single time… If only, he felt, he could understand that, all his troubles would be over. And the volte-well, he'd been told to forget about the volte, since it was intermediate going on advanced, and they wouldn't be getting on to it for some time, so it'd only confuse him, but it did illustrate the principles perfectly, so they might as well just touch on it briefly; the volte, where you swing sideways out of the line of attack and watch the enemy walk blithely on to your sword-point, so that his own movement impales him…

  Psellus picked up the diagrams, stacked them neatly, put them on his desk and covered them with a twenty-page report, so he wouldn't have to see them. The volte, he thought. The volte is the essence of single time. The volte is where you and your enemy co-operate…

  Ziani Vaatzes. He wants to walk into my sword, provided he can get to where he wants to be. Not wants; needs. (It was a moment of revelation, purely intuitive, though he didn't realise that until later.) Ziani Vaatzes is a man with no choices; a man in single time, at all times. His line is straight, and that means that somehow I have to get my poor muddled head around this business of the circle. Or, properly speaking, octagon.

  The quickest way to a man's death is through his heart, but if you want to get into his brain… The work, they'd confidently told him, would take a year. That had depressed him, before he learned the truth about time and distance.

  He'd sent for the master instructor of the Potters', and ordered him to build a model of the City out of clay. The master had replied that there was no specification for anything like that, but he'd convinced him that it came under the heading of military engineering, so that was all right.

  And here it was; built to Guild standards, which meant it was beautifully detailed and immaculately glazed (they'd wanted to paint it, too; he'd had to be quite firm. Foliate scroll and acanthus motifs picked out in gold leaf weren't going to help him beat the savages), it stood on a Pattern Sixteen square beech table in Necessary Evil's cloister in the Guildhall grounds. Two worried-looking men stood by with buckets of earth dug out of the flowerbeds as the rest of the committee assembled for the briefing.

  Psellus cleared his throat. They'd come to recognise the significance of that mild, sheeplike noise. Bizarrely, they'd come to trust it, too.

  "Well," he said (how tired he sounded, they said afterwards; too tired to be nervous or scared), "here's the City." He paused, briefly reflecting on the absurdity of that statement. "While I think of it, formal vote of thanks to the Potters' for this fine model." A quick, low mumble of agreement, and the secretary scribbled something in his book.

  "Now then." Psellus sighed. The temptation was to gabble, get it all over and done with. He wasn't used to speaking slowly. All his working life, he'd had to talk fast, to get his information across before someone more important interrupted. "As we all know, our ancestors of blessed memory fortified the City to the highest possible specification. We have the four concentric circles of main walls; the outer wall, which is thirty feet high and five feet thick; the outer curtain, twenty feet and four feet, the inner curtain, likewise, and the citadel, forty feet high and eight feet thick. At the time…" He paused, to let the words soak in. "At the time, the specification was more than adequate to cope with any possible threat the City could ever face from its potential enemies: the Eremians, the Vadani, the Cure Doce, even the savages beyond the desert. Our engineers designed o
ur defences to withstand the methods of direct assault available to such unsophisticated attackers; attempts to batter down the gates, to scale the walls using ladders or primitive towers, and to undermine the walls by tunnelling under them. For obvious reasons"-he paused again-"they didn't bother to consider an assault by artillery, since only the Republic had the knowledge and capacity to build siege engines, and it was unthinkable that either of those could ever be acquired by an enemy."

  He looked round. He had their attention.

  "All that," he said, "has changed. The abominator Ziani Vaatzes has proved, at Civitas Eremiae, that he can train primitives to build functional artillery; that he can do so, furthermore, in an appallingly short time. I have reason to believe," he went on, looking over their heads, "that at this moment, the bulk of the savages' army is at a place called Vassa-you won't have heard of it; there's a map in my office if you want to look it up, but it's about half a day from Civitas Vadanis, it's the site of the second largest Vadani silver mine, and it's beside a big river, with a very large forest on the other side. You may find this news comforting, because it means the enemy are far away and in no hurry to come here. I'm afraid I don't agree."

  A few of the older committee members were starting to fidget. The traditions of Necessary Evil didn't include long speeches.

  "Here's why," Psellus went on. "Vassa is a silver mine, as I just said. That means it has the best the Vadani have to offer in the way of industrial facilities: furnaces, some established workshops, above all men who have a degree of experience in rudimentary engineering. There are already a number of quite large mills on the river, built to crush ore for smelting, but easily converted by a man of Vaatzes' abilities to run saws, trip-hammers, anything he wants and can make. The forest is an unlimited source of lumber. Also, according to what we know about the region-very little, of course, a few references in some very old books-silver isn't the only metal in the ground in those parts. There's also a very old abandoned iron mine, the Weal Calla. Two hundred years ago, it provided us with a quarter of our second-quality raw iron, until we found a cheaper supply in the old country and stopped buying. The mine was closed down, but it's still there."

  They'd stopped fidgeting now.

  "So," he went on, "at Vassa, Vaatzes has almost everything he needs. He has water power, some plant and machinery, iron, lumber and charcoal, a core of semi-skilled workers and unlimited unskilled labour. With these, he can start building siege engines. In fact," he said, raising his voice just a little, "we have every reason to believe he's already doing so. Our scouts-we have scouts now, by the way, thanks to our new best friends, the Cure Doce-tell me that smoke is visible from long distances-our scouts aren't keen on getting too close-and that road-building parties have been out in all directions, working with rather alarming speed and efficiency, presumably to make it possible for Vaatzes to cart in the food and supplies he needs for the very large number of people he's gathered there."

  He stopped, drank a sip of water, took a moment to rest his voice. He'd never imagined talking could be so tiring.

  "What this means," he continued, "is that our enemy isn't coming here quite yet. I believe that the cavalry squadrons posted nine days away are there simply to scare us; to make us think we have barely any time to prepare ourselves. I'm proposing to test this theory, now that we have the Cure Doce field army at our disposal, but that's a subject for another day. I believe that Vaatzes is taking his time, because he knows that without artillery, the savages can't take the City, even though there's close on a million of them and we have no trained soldiers, because the existing fortifications are such that they can't mount an effective assault in the time available to them; time which is very closely restricted by their own problems of supply. Put simply: they can't get enough food here to feed an army big enough to storm the City without artillery. By the same token, they can't lay a siege, because they'd starve long before we do.

  "With artillery, however, our enemy's success isn't just possible, it's practically certain. We designed the weapons Vaatzes can bring to bear on us. We designed them to trash the sort of walls we're relying on, in weeks, maybe even days. Not to make too much of a song and dance about it: our walls are two skins of stone holding in an infill of earth and rubble. Smash up the bottom of the outer skin sufficiently, and the weight of the wall, particularly the loose infill, does the rest. Once the walls are breached, of course, we're done for. We have no trained soldiers to defend a breach. It'd be like punching a hole in a bucket of water."

  He stopped talking and looked at them all, and for the first time, he didn't feel in the least intimidated. That in itself was faintly disheartening. All these wise men, but none of them with any more brains than he had.

  "But we have time," he went on, "time and distance. If I'm right, it's a race. We have to learn how to fortify against artillery and get the work done before Vaatzes can teach the savages how to build siege engines. It's a race I think we can win. I believe so, because we already have all the information we need"-he picked up the book and held it so they could see; of course, it could have been any old book, for all they knew-"and the tools, and the manpower. Basically, it's just digging, carting earth from one place to another and dumping it. It's not difficult to learn. In fact, I believe that, given time, training and the right incentives, even the members of this committee could manage it."

  Silence. He made a mental note: no more jokes.

  "Vaatzes, on the other hand, faces a rather greater challenge. We can all dig, and we can all read the book. In what he's got to do, a huge part of it can only be done by Vaatzes himself. He's got to teach miners and village-level blacksmiths and carpenters how to be engineers; he's got to design the machines he needs, probably build the prototypes mostly by himself; he's got to organise and supervise a workforce of a million men, see to every detail, hold it all in his mind all the time. Also, he's got supplies to worry about, more so than we do. He has to get food from somewhere, food for his men and hay and fodder for the savages' herds of livestock. I believe he'll need to get the silver mine at Vassa working again, on top of everything else he's doing there, just to pay for what he needs to buy. But even then, he can't feed his people on silver. He must be planning on trading with the coast, through Lonazep, like us; essentially, shopping in the same market as us, which of course makes him vulnerable. Whatever he's paying, we'll have to pay more. That, at least, is one kind of war we understand.

  "So, like I said, we probably have a little time. Now, if you'd care to look closely at the model here, I'll show you what I have in mind."

  The men with the buckets, who'd nearly gone to sleep, sprang forward. They dumped their earth in piles, and the two representatives of the Architects', who'd been sitting quietly at the back, set to with little rakes and trowels, moving the earth around like children playing sandcastles. For a while it was just a silly mess; but then shapes began to form.

  (What we need, Psellus thought as he watched, isn't engineers so much as gardeners.)

  "This," he said as he pointed, "is really just a great big bank of earth, all round the City. You'll have to imagine the equally big hole out here somewhere, which is where we'll take the earth from. In point of fact, that'll be our first line of defence, since we'll divert the Brownwater and the Vane into it and flood it to make a nice wide moat, which ought to make Vaatzes' life rather more interesting. Now, these wedge-shaped bits sticking out of the bank are called bastions; the idea is to put our own artillery on them, and you'll see that, because of how they stick out, the engines will be able to shoot in all directions; there won't be any blind spots or safe areas where sappers can hide while they're digging under the walls. The great thing about making the bastions out of plain old ordinary earth is that they'll be soft. Vaatzes' engines can pound them with rocks and they'll just sink in, rather than smashing them up, which is what would happen if they were made of stone, like the walls. Obviously, sooner or later a continuous bombardment will shatter the brick and
timber frameworks that keep the earth in, or else shake the earth loose; but that'll take time, which is the rarest and most precious commodity in this whole business. Time is the key, you see. We don't have to keep them out for ever; only for long enough. We all know the saying, time is money. It's a lot more than that. Time is distance; time is flour and animal feed and firewood, it's the patience of Vaatzes' barbarian allies-they're nomads, they aren't used to staying in one place. Time is overflowing latrines and a sudden flood of rain, leading to dysentery and plague; it's the grain surplus of the faraway places we don't even know about, where they grow the wheat that's shipped to Lonazep, and which isn't infinite." He paused, smiled a little. "It's a paradox," he went on. "Here in the City we make weapons out of steel, the best anywhere, which we don't know how to use; but what we've never realised before is that everything in our lives is really a weapon-the food we eat, the earth we stand on, lumber, bricks, shovels, buckets, carts, horses; and of course time." And one other thing, he thought but didn't say; the one thing that'll win this war for us, if anything can, the deadliest weapon of all. "Now we know we're not soldiers," he went on, "because we don't know a lot about spears and bows and arrows, or drill, or cavalry tactics. So, we can't expect to fight a war with soldiers and their kind of weapons. So instead we'll fight with the weapons we do know how to use, or those we can learn about quickly and easily: food, earth, water, money and time. The whole point of the Republic is knowing what to do and doing it well, doing what we know best. That's why we have the Guilds, and Specification. That's all we've got; we don't have armies or generals, just as we don't have dukes and princes and kings. Well; we don't have them, we don't need them, we don't even want them. We can win this war, beat the savages and save the City, just so long as we do what we're best at: ingenuity, resourcefulness, and plenty of hard, gruelling work. Or," he added, with a little nod of his head, "we can all give up, wait for the savages to come at us with Vaatzes' engines, and die. I think it's a fairly straightforward choice, but what do I know, I'm just a clerk who never wanted this job. I suppose it's up to you to decide, but you'd better do it quickly, and once you've made your decision, you'd better stick to it. Otherwise… well." He shook his head. "Unless someone else has any ideas. I'd be delighted to hear them."