by K. J. Parker
“True.” He turned away, breaking eye contact with the enemy, like you’re not supposed to do when you’re facing down a lion or an angry bull. “We’ve been ingenious, resourceful and inventive, and we haven’t let ourselves be hindered by outmoded or irrelevant ways of thinking. It’s a shame, really, because nobody will ever know how clever we were.”
So I made a decision. We were going to wreck their siege tower.
Amazingly, and worryingly, nobody yelled at me or told me I must be out of my tiny mind when I announced it at that evening’s staff meeting. Instead, there was a long silence, and then Artavasdus said, “Well, I guess we’ve got to do something,” and Nico made that grunting-pig noise that means he wishes you weren’t right but you are, and Arrasc of the Blues said, “Finally,” or something like that, and I think the only person round that table who reckoned it was a truly terrible idea was me.
“Fine,” I said. “So, how do we go about it?”
I rarely ask for suggestions, because, when I do, people tend to make them; in this case, all at once and very loudly. Nico was all for a head-on frontal assault; the element of surprise, do the thing they least expect you to. Arrasc agreed with him before he’d even stopped talking, so, naturally, Longinus of the Greens had to disagree; Arrasc called him a coward, Longinus said the Greens wouldn’t be taking part, and for a moment I thought I’d been let off the hook. Then Artavasdus lost his rag with both of them and—I really don’t understand people, give me inanimate objects any day—they both said yes, you’re right, we really do need to do it, and suddenly it was all on again. And then they turned and looked at me.
My head was completely empty. No ideas, not a clue. And then I heard myself say, “What we’re going to do is this.”
13
Allow me to introduce Aelia Zenonis, universally known as Sawdust.
She was born, thirty-two years before the Great Siege, somewhere in the Poor Town district, a Blues neighbourhood. Her mother was indentured in a button factory. Sawdust worked in the factory until she was nine, and would probably have stayed there if her mother’s foreman hadn’t lost her in a game of knucklebones. The winner was a freelance carpenter by the name of Zeno, a Green, who spent most of his time in and around the Hippodrome, earning money building and fixing bleachers, rails, fittings, you name it, and then losing it betting on the fights and the chariot races. The carpenter had no son and his daughter, a superior creature, stood an excellent chance of being taken on as a lady’s maid in a good house, so Sawdust became a carpenter’s monkey—carry the tools, hold this, pass me that; unusual for a female but not unheard of where a man’s too poor to afford an apprentice. The life must have suited her, because she shot up, filled out, picked up the trade like other people get mud on their boots; by age fifteen she could cut a dead square mortice, taper a barrel stave, dovetail a joint, as well as old Zeno or better. Most men would be embarrassed, but Zeno didn’t mind; she earned him good money, her mind was almost always on the job and she had a cheerful, uncomplaining disposition which made a very pleasant change from what he was used to at home. She genuinely enjoyed the work—she liked being good at something, she explained—and, most of all, she positively relished constructing the props and gadgets for the masques and stage shows that they put on to mark the opening of the big events: the Championship, the Gold Crown, the Wooden Sword and so forth. Now that sort of thing doesn’t just mean careful, precise work (and always on an impossibly tight schedule); it also calls for a degree of imagination and ingenuity, designing the clever little mechanisms for trapdoor latches, rising flats, revolves, all manner of tricky stuff that hasn’t been done before and for which no guild-approved pattern exists. Needless to say, it’s also horrendously competitive; the Greens want their Grand Entrance to be a hundred times better than what the Blues did last year, and vice versa. You have to be very, very good to be entrusted with the commission, but if you prove you can do it you’ve got the respect and admiration of your Theme sewn up in a little silk bag, regardless of who or what you are; even if you’re some indentured fatherless brat from Poor Town; even if you’re a milkface; even if you’re a girl.
When Sawdust was nineteen—the name, of course, referred to her skin, the colour of freshly sawn pine, and her hair, ditto oak; brush the sawdust off, the other kids would jeer, knowing that she couldn’t—Zeno celebrated a lucky win at the track with a boisterous night at the Two Dogs, and next morning stood on a scaffolding plank that wasn’t there, ninety feet above the Prefect’s Box. By now his wife was dead, his daughter had married and he had no other dependants; his property, therefore, passed by custom and tradition to the Green treasury—including, needless to say, Sawdust’s indentures. Custom and tradition likewise ordained that all such legacies be put up for public auction. Whose bright idea it was for the Blues to buy Sawdust, at a ridiculously high price after a furious bidding war, we’ll probably never know, but it was a masterstroke of tactical malice, leading to street fights and bloodletting, all to no avail. Come the next Prefect’s Trophy, the Blue fighters made their entrance into the arena on a three-quarter-size replica of an Imperial warship. I was there, and I saw it; most amazing thing. There were no ropes or levers, not that anyone could see. The sails filled out and billowed, and the ship suddenly moved forward—out of the tunnel under the stands, mark you, so not a breath of actual wind, the billowing effect must all have been done with wires sewn into the sailcloth, and how they got the ship to move, let alone glide along smoothly just exactly as if on the water, I’m not ashamed to confess I still don’t know to this day. It was the biggest coup the Blues had pulled off for about a decade, and they made no bones about who deserved all the credit. Sawdust, the little chippie girl, sold by the idiot Greens, bought, freed and elevated to her rightful rank of Master Carpenter by the intelligent and perceptive Blues.
Anyway, that was Sawdust. So, when I wanted someone who’d be able not just to copy the Pattern 68 stationary catapult but tweak it up to add an extra fifty yards’ range, I knew exactly who I needed.
Most carpenters are Green, most stonemasons are Blue. I sent for the big man in the masons’ guild and told him what I wanted. Can’t be done, he said. I told him where he could find the specialist equipment he’d need, in yards staffed and controlled by his guild members. That’s not nearly enough, he said. I told him who to see about getting the machines copied, and how many he’d need to build, and how long it’d take. He told me I was being wildly optimistic. So I showed him the warrant for the arrest of him, his entire family and forty-six leading members of his guild. I had my hand over where the Seal should have been. He gave me a terrified look and said he’d do his best. No, I said, do what you’re told. He went away, hating me to bits. Can’t say I blamed him.
Then I sent for my general staff—Nico, Stilico, Artavasdus, Menas, Arrasc and Longinus. While I waited for them to show up, I amused myself throwing stones and little wooden balls at a flower pot, which cheered me up no end. I wish it hadn’t, because—you’ll have to take my word on this—I really don’t enjoy the thought of bloodshed, or damage to human bodies. You spend your life trying to fix it so that the people doing dangerous jobs under your command don’t get all smashed up, and then you find yourself figuring out ways to hurt people on purpose. It just doesn’t feel right, somehow. Probably why archery instructors make such poor soldiers.
The next day was busy, busy, busy—for everyone else, not for me. I had my men patching up the holes they’d knocked in the shit barges. I had Theme hands working back-to-back shifts, the masons and Sawdust’s carpenters. I had Parks and Gardens men drilling with swords on the parade grounds, Hippodrome wranglers sawing and banging away in the coachworks sheds out back of the Blue Portico, and that was just the hands I’d assigned to special duties. Everywhere else, everyone else (except me) was skittering about executing the orders I’d given yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. Hrabanus’s clerks and the Theme ward bosses were counting the stores, which were now all safely lod
ged in secure warehouses, with savage-looking gladiators guarding the door; inside, you couldn’t move for sacks of wheat and barrels of bacon and jars and jars of that horrible pickled cabbage. Three and a half thousand Green women were glueing strips of linen. Four thousand Blues were pulling down public buildings—the Mansion House, the Arch of Valerian, the Chamber of Deputies—and hauling away the salvage; stone to the masons’ yards, timber to the lumber mills, even the nails, shipped off in barrels to the smiths for forge-welding into spearblades and arrowheads. Without realising it, or intending to, I’d changed the City out of all recognition. The market squares were empty. No stalls, no shoppers, no beggars or clusters of surplus manpower lounging in the shade of the porticos spoiling for a fight. No surplus manpower anywhere. Thanks to the Great Seal (or the illusion thereof) and my friends from the Old Flower Market, there was money for everyone who cared to show up and do a job of work. We’d reopened the old clay seam in Poor Town, closed down seventy years ago because it was cheaper to ship in clay from Proxima, and nine hundred Greens were making bricks again—we’d be needing bricks by the million once siege engines started pounding the walls. On the waterfront, the last two shipyards to close down were back in business. Glory be, they’d never managed to find buyers for the real estate, so when we smashed down the gates (the padlocks were too rusty to open) we found everything more or less as it had been when the last shift moved out: saw benches, cradles, cranes, tools still in their racks, still with an edge on them. Four hundred Blues who’d worked there before the closure were turning Guildhall rafters and Mansion House floorboards into warships, using the grey-with-age patterns they’d found hanging on the walls, where they’d left them ten years earlier. Five thousand women were splitting cedar planks and planing them down into arrowshafts in Watchbell Yard; another two thousand were glueing on feathers. And two hundred and seventy Greens who’d drifted unasked into the City when the copper mines at Dauris shut down had formed the new Miners’ Guild, with the Haymarket Watch House for their guildhall. We chose it because a lot of people can queue up outside it without obstructing the traffic. The Miners’ Guild was recruiting: half a tornece a day for trainees, a full tornece once you’d got your ticket. We’d be needing every sapper we could get once the enemy started undermining the walls. All told, it was as close as you’d ever dream of getting to the Great Society. A well-paid job for everyone, working together in harmony for the greater good; no fights, no muggings, because anyone caught doing that stuff would be thrown out of his Theme, and no Theme, no food, simple as that. Besides, why bother when you could earn silly money doing a proper job? Indeed.
And of course it was built, like all Great Societies, on lies. Lie One: there was no Great Seal. Lie Two: the silver tornece flowing like water out of the Paymaster’s were three parts copper, lovingly made for the government by professional forgers. Lie Three: everyone had plenty of money in their pockets but nothing to spend it on, with food and booze centrally issued and strictly rationed, all the markets and shops shut, even the brothels and gambling halls closed down by order of the Themes (and since the Themes ran them all, we had a unique example of prohibition that actually worked). Oh, and Lie Four: the happy dream that if we all pulled together and did our bit, we’d still be alive in a month, or three months, or a year; that we’d live to lay the bricks and man the ships and shoot the arrows; that we weren’t all just waiting for him to arrive, take command and issue the order to storm the City and stamp it into the ground.
Lies; so what? Many years ago we were building a bridge in Monouchis. We had to dig down deep to find hard rock to rest on, and we turned up the ruins of a city. Whoever they were, they’d built to last, and they dressed their massive ashlar blocks immaculately, every corner a dead square, every line unimpeachably straight, every block lettered and numbered, in letters and numbers none of us recognised—I don’t give a damn, but one of my junior officers was a scholar’s son, and he copied down examples to show his father, who said he’d never seen them before. So there was a city, for all I know every bit as big and brave and strong as ours, and no doubt they had their emperors and their first families and their guilds and Blues and Greens; all gone now, as though they’d never existed, and if we hadn’t been building a bridge we’d never have guessed that the green-topped hummocks had once been a glorious living city, teeming with vitality and action, and determination to survive, and hope. Their lies didn’t save them in the end, did they?
Still; so what? At least we had work to do, and work fills in the time, and time is the enemy. Personally I’ve never had a problem with lies, so long as they serve a useful purpose. Lies have consistently and reliably done me far more good than the truth. The way I see it, the truth is just barren moorland, all useless bog and heather. It’s only when you break it up and turn it over with the ploughshare of the Good Lie that you can screw a livelihood out of it. Isn’t that what humans do? They take a dead landscape and reshape it into what they need, and want, and can use. I’ve never hesitated to adapt the world to suit me, when I can get away with it.
Forgive me, I’m drivelling on. The next day; busy, for everyone but me. The day after that, some clown dragged me out of sleep while the sky was still dark blue with a message from Sawdust; come and see, we’ve finished.
So down I went to the artillery yard, only to find it deserted. Eventually, I found an old man cooking porridge; for when they get back, he told me. They’re all up on the wall, didn’t you know? So I dragged myself up onto the wall, where Sawdust’s Greens had just finished installing forty-six newly built Pattern 68-As.
I’d granted her the glory and privilege of that -A as a special reward, in recognition of her outstanding effort and achievement; the highest honour I ever paid anyone, as a matter of fact. The emperor can make you a duke or a prince, the priests can declare you a saint, you can make a million stamena buying and selling and the House can ennoble your swineherding family back fifteen generations, but these are trivial distinctions, meaningless, because nobody can possibly know if you’ve really earned them or not. But to be the one who establishes a new class in the Imperial military nomenclature; that’s something else. Take me. Fifteen years ago I designed a revolutionary new pontoon, one that actually works. There must be thousands of the things out there in service right now, all across the empire, from sunrise to sunset. But look in the inventories and the pontoons are still listed as Type 17, like they were before I was born. Not 17-A, or 17*, definitely not Pontoon (Orhan’s). Actually, I resent that like hell. But so what?
I looked at the things, and saw the pitch glistening on the newly sawn timbers, and smelled the tar on the ropes, and suddenly I was terribly afraid. A wise man once said, it’s not the despair that destroys you, it’s the hope. Forty-six state-of-the-art artillery pieces, pointing at the enemy. Sawdust’s foremen told me there’d be sixty-nine more in place by the end of the day. Suddenly we had artillery; suddenly, the big lie I’d managed to pull off that first day when we blew in on the shit fleet had turned into the truth.
Artillery, but nothing to shoot out of it. Which was, of course, my fault. Tell you about that later.
A perceptive soul like you will have noticed the strong hint of whining that’s crept into this story. Forgive me. I never intended to be a commander, a giver of orders, though I don’t exactly object. At heart, though, I still think of myself as a carpenter; and all around me there were wood shavings curling up off the plane, and not me making them. All I’d done was tell people to do things, which I can never bring myself to think of as work. Truth is, I felt left out, useless, lazy. So I went and found Sawdust. She was down on her hands and knees, trueing up the lie of a catapult cradle with a straight edge and a protractor. I stood over her and got in her light. “Go away,” she said, not looking up.
“Nice job,” I said.
She jumped up, banged her head on a thwart, made a sort of whimpering noise, wriggled round and scowled at me. “Are they all right?” she said.
&n
bsp; I shrugged. “I don’t know, do I? You tell me.”
She got up and flicked a tiny proportion of the dust off her smock. “Well,” she said, “I think we sorted out the problem with impact stress on the crossbar with an extra three turns of rope, and the creep in the joints is probably no big deal so long as we keep an eye on it, and the ratchets—”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said. “You’ve tested them, haven’t you?”
She gave me the filthy look such a stupid question deserved. “Yes, at a quarter power. You said we can’t wind them up to full.”
I nodded. My fault, like everything else. The enhanced performance of the new pattern was part of the element of surprise, which was really the only thing I had going for me. Therefore, we couldn’t test the bloody things, therefore we had no idea if they’d work or tear themselves to pieces, not until we started actually using them in anger against people dead set on killing us. Bloody stupid way of going about things, and entirely my decision.
I asked her some detail of the calibration system, to which she answered (as I knew she would) that without a chance to zero the engines at full power, any attempt at calibration was at best an educated guess. Completely irrelevant, in any case, but all I wanted to do was keep the conversation going.
“I’ll need them ready to go by sunset,” I said.
“Can’t be done,” she said. “We need the trestles, for raising the front ends. Otherwise I can’t give you that trajectory you asked for.”
I gave her a big smile. “No such word as can’t,” I told her, and walked away, giving her plenty of back to swear at.
Ready by sunset. As I said it, I felt my insides turn to ice. At sunset, we’d be doing a bloody stupid thing, on my orders, and if it went disastrously wrong it’d all be my fault.
So I went to the Blues’ masonry yard, where they’d somehow managed to do what I’d so unreasonably asked of them. The results were being loaded on huge wagons with the biggest crane in the City. No chance of testing that theory, either. It would work, or it wouldn’t; and if it didn’t, four hundred Blues and Greens and three hundred Parks and Gardens men would be slaughtered in about a minute and a half, all to no purpose. No pressure, then.
