Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

by K. J. Parker

  He looked up at me. He still couldn’t speak. I should have been ashamed of myself, hitting a man of his age.

  “The City,” I said, “is under martial law. I have the emperor’s commission and the Great Seal. You’re just going to have to trust me, that’s all.”

  I stood up, helped him to his feet, held his elbow as we walked to the door, which I opened for him politely. Then I shut it, bolted it and sat down. I was shaking like a leaf.

  “You can’t do things like that,” Faustinus told me. “You just can’t.”

  We were standing on the wall. The enemy were still there, five ranks of shields in front of a bustling community going about their business. I’d given up trying to count them, but somewhere in the order of forty thousand. And they were waiting for someone. I just knew it.

  “I can, though,” I said. “Well done with that scrap armour, by the way. Any more where that came from?”

  He shook his head. “I tried all the scrapyards in town,” he said. “They don’t usually keep bulk stock here, warehouse space is too expensive. Don’t change the subject. I know it’s tempting, but you can’t just trample all over the government and you can’t just ignore it and do things your own way. You’ve got to work with these people.”

  I hadn’t told him about losing the Seal. No need for him to know, not yet. “First thing in the morning,” I said, “we’ll need to pull the roof off the Guildhall. You’d better find somewhere else for all your clerks for a day or so.”

  “What? You can’t—”

  “I need the rafters,” I told him. “Really big, solid oak beams. Private houses, the beams just aren’t big enough. Besides, nobody lives in the Guildhall.”

  He gave me his words-fail-me look.

  “Artillery,” I said. “Fifty long-range spoon onagers, at least a hundred ballistas, and I’d like to put some scorpions in those corner towers there, for enfilading the approaches to the gates. For which we need a great deal of seasoned timber, something we don’t have enough of. Later we’ll need reinforcing beams for propping the gates and the walls, and after that I expect we’ll want about a hundred thousand pit props, for when they start sapping under the walls and we start countermining.”

  “The Guildhall is the administrative centre of the City,” he said. “You can’t—” Wisely, he stopped and started again. “There’s a hundred acres of lumber yards in Lower Town,” he said. “They must have all the timber you want, surely.”

  I shook my head. “Softwood, small-section. Oh, we’ll need all that, but for other things. I’ve asked Longinus and the Greens to see to stripping the Guildhall roof. I’ve told them they can have the lead.” I grinned, before he could say anything. “We’ll be needing that, too, but we can buy it back from them.”

  He drew in a deep breath. “Is it because they’ve always bullied you?” he said. “Payback time. Is that what this is all about?”

  He deserved an honest answer. “I thought about that,” I said. “And the answer is probably no. I say probably,” I added, “I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t pretend you didn’t enjoy it. Punching out the Leader of the House.”

  I shook my head. “I needed to get his attention,” I said. “I need to be taken seriously. We’re that far—” I pointed to the gap between the walls and the flashing shields “—from being slaughtered. If they were to come for us now, right this minute, we’d hold them up for maybe half an hour. That’s all.”

  His face changed. I guess he hadn’t really grasped it before. I felt sorry for him.

  “They’re waiting for something,” I said. “Or someone. Someone, I’m inclined to think, because they’ve got all the things they need, and all the manpower. No, I think their orders are, don’t start the party without me.” I turned my head so I couldn’t see the look on his face. There are times when you don’t intrude on other people’s despair; it’d be indecent. “With the rafters from the Guildhall roof made into artillery, I can possibly extend that half-hour into half a day. With all the pine planks from the Lower Town yards split and planed into arrows, assuming I can conjure up bows and someone to shoot them, thirty-six hours. You see what I’m getting at? Every stupid, bloody desperate little thing I can think of buys us a tiny scrap more time, once he gets here. It’s all ridiculous and pointless, of course, but I’ve got to try.” I looked at him. “Everyone keeps telling me what I can’t do, but they’re wrong. The only thing I can’t do is nothing.”

  He shook his head and walked away.

  “I can’t,” she told me. “I’m sorry.”

  Late evening on the second day. I’d had about enough. Thrasso had brought me his attempt at the Great Seal. It was a beautiful piece of work. Someone told me once, a really great fake can’t just be as good as the original, it’s got to be better. Thrasso’s seal was better. I stamped it in hot wax and was stunned by the beauty of the thing. He looked at me and knew what I was going to say. I tried, he protested, God knows I tried, I got my calipers and measured every distance, to within a hair. I smoked the die over a candle and put it over a genuine imprint and there wasn’t a single smudge. It ought to be perfect, he said. I punched his face, hard. Do it again, I said. I can’t, he said, that’s as good as it gets. I put the thing of beauty he’d made under the heel of my boot and ground it into bits of gravel. Do it again, I told him.

  “What do you mean, can’t?” I said.

  She was close to tears. “I can’t do this job,” she said. “They won’t do what I tell them. I have to scream and shout to get anything done, and they’re so slow, and they make me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing.” She paused and looked straight at me. “And they’re right. I don’t.”

  There are times when you just don’t want to hear it. “Be firm with them,” I said. “You know how to do that.”

  “You’re not listening. They’re right. I don’t know how to do this stuff. I’m making it up as I go along, but that’s not good enough. You need a proper clerk, who knows about ward registers and where to look up property tax records and how to roster duty shifts. Maybe I could do it if I spent a year figuring out a system. All I’m doing is wasting time. You need people who know what to do.”

  “The Theme district mobilisers—”

  “No,” she said, “they’re no good. They know where people live, in Poor Town, and how much money they make, but it’s all in their heads, not down on paper. Finding things out from them takes too long. You need the written records. You need the clerks.” She was quiet for a moment. “You can’t bypass the system,” she said. “I know it’s the enemy, but you can’t do anything without it.”

  I could feel myself getting angry. The truth does that to me, when I’m in the wrong. “They’re just a bunch of—”

  She shook her head. “You need them,” she said. “I know what you’re trying to do. The empire failed, so you think it’s up to the rest of us to save the City. The other empire. The soldiers all got themselves killed, so we won’t use soldiers. The City magistrates all ran away, so we’ll use the Themes. Let’s have a milkface stomping around like he’s the emperor. Let’s have a woman running Supply. What’s the old proverb, the worms of the earth against the lions? Let’s try that. Orhan, I’m sorry but it’s not going to work. You need the clerks as well. And you need a clerk doing this job. I’m sorry. I’m on your side, but I can’t do it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Go back to the Dogs and wash some dishes.”

  She left without a word.

  Faustinus had a big pile of papers for me, all needing the Seal. I told him I was too busy. Fine, he said, lend me the Seal and I’ll get them done for you. It’s in the pocket of my other coat, I said. I’ll send for it directly, soon as I’ve got a minute.

  Nico came back from the ropewalk. There’s only one in Town these days, where there used to be a dozen, but the noble family who owned the freeholds closed them down and sold the land to builders. Not to worry; the Pausa brothers were still very much in business and they had plent
y of rope. Something going right for a change.

  “We’ll need about a mile of the good stuff, horsehair for choice, for the catapult springs,” I told him, “and get them to send three miles of best hemp over to the Blue lodge. Tell you about it later,” I explained. “Just see to it, will you?”

  He’s used to me. “Right away,” he said. “Look, can I ask you something?”

  “If you’re quick.”

  “What’s going to happen when they cut the aqueduct?”

  I know my faults. One of them is, every time I go away on a job or a visit, I forget something. Spare pair of boots, pen nibs, keys, the present I promised to bring someone from the City, always something. However hard I try, however many lists I make, there’s always one damn thing, and it always makes me feel unbearably stupid. Like that. “The aqueduct.”

  “Yes, the Aqueduct of Jovian. It supplies all the water to Lower Town and the mills.”

  I shook my head. “They’d need the proper tools.”

  “Yes, which we left behind in Spendone forest, remember? Chisels, wedges, screwjacks, lifting gear, everything they need. If you recall, I did say at the time—”

  Dear God. “Leave it with me,” I said, “I’ll think of something. Right now, I need that rope.”

  12

  The aqueduct. How could I have been so colossally stupid?

  You say things like that—out loud, inside your head—trusting on some level that someone will contradict you—you can’t think of everything, you’ve had so much else on your mind, there’s nothing anybody could have done. You exaggerate, taking on yourself more blame than you deserve. Truth was, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. We were still alive because they were waiting for someone, and when he eventually got here, it’d be a matter of time and how much of a nuisance we could make of ourselves before we all died. But every little step I took—real siege engines instead of olive presses under tarpaulins in the artillery niches on the wall, Theme button-men bulking out my tiny garrison, decommissioned substandard swords and armour instead of empty hands and bare bodies, each pointless flare-up of ingenuity, each minuscule triumph in the face of impossible odds pushed the final fall of the curtain just a bit further back; we might last days instead of hours, thanks to me, and apparently my reward for all that hard slog and brainwork would be getting shown up as the halfwit who hadn’t arranged for an alternative water supply when they cut the aqueduct. So, fine, I wasn’t really expecting a laurel crown and a chariot drawn by white horses to carry me under a triumphal arch with my name on it. But would it be too much to ask that one of those minuscule triumphs made things easier, instead of crushingly more and more difficult?

  I appointed a clerk by the name of Hrabanus Geticus as Minister of Supply. He was a short, hairless, shrivelled little man, looked eighty but according to the file he was sixty-two, started in the Cartulary at age fifteen, been there or thereabouts ever since. In six hours he designed a collection, storage and distribution network that was a miracle of elegantly simple efficiency, while his ten under-clerks, who were obviously petrified of him, divided the City up into search-and-enter zones for the collection squads. He wasn’t the least bit bothered at the idea of using Theme officers to do the actual collecting. Good idea, he said, not looking up from the schedule he was working on, they know the people and the districts, and who’s got false ceilings and hidden cellars, and who’s been buying more than they can possibly eat. I left him to get on with it, feeling guilty and defeated, even though I’d clearly just made a brilliant appointment.

  “Linen,” I said. “Lots and lots of linen, and glue. But glue’s easy, you can make it out of practically anything.” I looked down my nose at them. “You do know how to make glue, don’t you?”

  Yes, they knew just fine, so I condescended to explain. In Chorroe, six months’ journey to the east, where no Robur had ever gone, they make very fine armour out of linen and rope. They do this because there’s no iron ore in those parts; they have to import all the iron they use, at ruinous cost. So they take fifteen layers of linen and glue them together, and the result is light, cool in summer and warm in winter, easy to repair and maintain, and it’ll keep you safe when people are trying to hurt you just as well as a mailshirt or a coat of scales. Furthermore, in Chorroe the manufacture of armour is exclusively the province of women, of whom we had an ample supply.

  Silence—they found me embarrassing; then one of them (big fat man, ran the Blue Swallow mill) stood up and bowed politely. “With respect,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “What?”

  From his sleeve he took out what looked like a small tile. “My grandfather probably heard the same travellers’ tales as you did,” he said. “We looked into linen armour about forty years ago.” He rapped the tile with his knuckle; sounded like a man knocking on a door. “This is seventeen thicknesses of unbleached coarse linen. The glue’s just basic gesso—rabbit skins,” he explained (you do know how to make glue, don’t you?). “And, yes, it works very well, according to my grandfather’s notes. He bashed it with swords and axes and shot arrows at it, and the Quartermaster General was most impressed, he recommended it for an extended trial, which it passed. But the emperor said he wasn’t sending his men out to fight in bits of botched-up rag, he’d be a laughing stock, and that was the end of that.” He handed me the tile. “You’re quite right,” he said. “It would do admirably.”

  “Well, then.”

  He nodded. “In hot weather,” he said, “it takes a minimum of thirty days for the glue to dry.” Smile. “A bit like planting acorns, don’t you think, in the circumstances.”

  Indeed. Plant oak for the very finest timber, but you’ll never live to use it. “Thank you,” I said. “I’d be grateful if you’d share your research with the rest of these gentlemen. In light of what you’ve just told me I don’t think we’ll bother with prototypes and all that stuff. Crack on and make me as many suits as you can, and I’ll see you all in a month.”

  Awkward moment. “About the money side of things,” someone said.

  I did a vague hand wave. “You tell me how much you want,” I said. “Believe me, that’s the least of our problems.”

  Acorns and oaks. It’s the tradition, where I come from, that on the day you’re born your father plants an apple tree. It grows with you, and when you die they dig your grave in its shade. Nice idea; it’s all about stability and continuity and the pretty notion that things, left to themselves, will get stronger and bigger, and that when you go to bed at night there’s a better than even chance that the world will still be there in the morning.

  Maybe my tree’s still standing, I have no idea. I know from personal experience that things end suddenly, that the axe achieves more in ten minutes than the tree does in twenty years. First time I saw the City, I remember thinking, here’s a tree nobody can cut down. I liked the idea of the emperor, as represented on the back of the money. The emperor’s face never changes, only the name; the portrait is that of Mezentius III (though I bet you he didn’t look like that) who died four centuries ago, after a reign of nine months. So: names and bodies come and go, like leaves on a tree, but the emperor stays the same, always, imperishable, like the wall. Meanwhile, on my watch, it’s generally understood that thirty days is so wildly optimistic, it’s probably not worth bothering. Planting acorns.

  “What are they up to?” Stilico asked me.

  He’s a better man than me, but I have better eyesight. It was one of those needle-sharp mornings, when the sea-mist clears at dawn and you can see for miles. “They do say,” I said, “that in Chorroe they have these brass tubes with bits of glass in them—”

  He grinned. “You’ve been reading a book,” he said.

  “Fascinating place, by all accounts. Anyway, with one of these tubes you can see things a mile away as though they’re right in front of your nose.”

  “And they make armour out of bits of rag, I heard about that. It was a good idea.”

  The moment anybody sta
rts to bleed, there’s Stilico with a pinch of salt between his fingers. “Not much, is the answer to your question,” I said. “They’re building something over there, look, between that stand of ash trees and the old gravel pit, but there’s tents in the way and I can’t make out anything except scaffolding. You’d probably get a better view from the North Gatehouse.”

  “It’s a siege tower,” Stilico said. “A bloody great big one. I had my sergeant take a look.”

  Bad news, like the cough that won’t go away. “We know what to do about siege towers,” I said.

  Stilico nodded. “I’ve got the Greens requisitioning cooking oil,” he said. “It’d help if we knew which gate they were planning to use it on.”

  “Doesn’t have to be a gate,” I told him. “How’s the artillery coming on?”

  “Surprisingly well. Maybe the day after tomorrow, if we’re lucky.”

  I took a deep breath. The view from the wall was like looking up, at the stars, as though the world was besieged by the sky. “Stilico,” I said, “you’re a bright boy. Is there anything we could be doing that we haven’t already done?”

  He didn’t need to think long. “No,” he said. “Me personally, I’d have built boats, not catapults. By now we could’ve thrown together a bunch of rafts, enough to save maybe a thousand people. But that’s just my opinion.”

  I nodded. “Which thousand?”

  “Ah.” He smiled. “That’s why I’m glad I’m not in charge.”

  “I considered that. But then we’d never have got the Themes on our side. They’d have known they wouldn’t be on those rafts. And without them, we couldn’t have done anything.”