by K. J. Parker
So I went to the Hippodrome workshops, basically three enormously long sheds, where generations of skilled craftsmen have lovingly built and maintained the most carefully designed and crafted artefacts in human history: the racing chariots.
To give you an idea. It costs five thousand stamena to build a warship for the Imperial fleet. A racing chariot costs three times that. Every inch, every ounce, has been pondered over, fiddled with, improved, reimproved, rethought from scratch. There are two hundred and seven nails in a racer, and some of the brightest, most brilliant minds that ever lived have thought with terrible intensity about every aspect of each of those nails; could it be longer, shorter, thinner, thicker, slightly more tapered at the front end, made out of a slightly different alloy? Could we do away with just one of those nails and get away with two hundred and six? Could we do away with all of them and use hickory dowels instead? Crazy. If we could breed people the way they build racing chariots in those sheds, a man would be eight feet tall, weigh ninety pounds, run ten miles in twenty minutes, live to be two hundred and never catch a cold. When I walked through the shed door, fifty faces turned and scowled at me. Quite right, too. What I’d told them to do was far worse than murder.
14
“We don’t have to go through with this,” Nico said. His teeth were chattering, I assume because of the cold. Actually, it was quite warm. “We could go back.”
Nico is as brave as a lion. I’m the coward. “No,” I said.
He was standing on the gangplank. “It’s a good idea,” he said, “on paper. But we’re not soldiers. You’re always telling us that. And everything depends on the timing, and things we haven’t really tested properly.”
“Move,” I told him.
The plank bowed slightly under his weight. Actually, there was no need for him to go, and the sensible thing would’ve been to leave him behind, in case something bad happened to me. Come to that, there was no need for me to go. In fact, both of us were likely to be more of a hindrance than a help. But there. I shuffled along the plank and someone helped me aboard the barge, like I was somebody’s old aunt. It was dark as a bag. I could hear the barges creaking but all I could see was vague dark shapes.
Stilico was there to see us off. If we bought it, he was in charge. I couldn’t see his face. “Remember,” I told him, “red flag means start, green flag means—”
“Good luck,” he said. Then I heard the rope splash in the water, and the barge began to move.
“Ah well,” Nico said. I sat down. The bottom of a barge isn’t comfortable for sitting. “You’ve got the flags?”
I held them up, but of course it was too dark for him to see them. “Yes, of course,” I said. “Now shut your face and settle down.”
We’d timed it so that the ebb tide would take us out; no need for oars or flapping sails, anything at all that might be seen by the watchmen I knew the enemy had posted on the promontories either side of the Bay. We’d be out of their sight and earshot by the time we needed to set the sails or start rowing. Nothing to do but keep absolutely quiet for a couple of hours. Sheer torture.
No need whatsoever for me to go on this escapade. Artavasdus, who didn’t even like me, had begged me not to go. He said something embarrassing about how I was the heart of the defence; if anything happened to me, everything would fall apart and they might as well unlock the gates and let the bastards just walk in. I knew he was right—at least about the pointlessness of me going along—but you know how it is when you simply can’t bring yourself to do the right thing. So we compromised. Instead of leading the attack proper—where I’d be sure to get in the way, almost certainly get myself killed and everyone else with me—I was going to be the signalman, perched on the top of the old watchtower on Beacon Hill. Since there was a better than even chance there’d be enemy sentries up there, Nico was coming with me as half of my bodyguard, the other half being Lysimachus of the Greens, currently ranked Number One in the summer League, therefore by definition the most dangerous man in the world. With Lysimachus along, Nico was obviously superfluous, but I made him come with me anyway. To protect me from Lysimachus, I rather suspect. That man can’t help looking villainous, it’s his job, but I really didn’t want to be alone with him if I could help it.
The captain of our shit barge had never been out in the Bay at night, needless to say. Nobody in the City had, or at least nobody admitted to it, for fear of being appointed Lord High Admiral and forced to take part in this damnfool caper. Since none of the barges had lights, we had no way of knowing where the other six were, and all seven of us had only a vague idea of where presumably deserted Bel Semplan was, and that was where we were headed. The idea was, we’d drift out until the tide stopped drawing us, then bear sort of right until first light, at which point we’d know where we were. Bloody stupid idea. Guess whose.
I’d talked airily of getting some sleep on the barges, but I was deluding myself. There we all were, twenty men and ten horses to a barge, all wide awake, scared stiff, bobbing about in the pitch black. Faustinus had suggested, very sensibly, that we leave in the middle of the night, or better still three hours before dawn; we’d be there in plenty of time and no pointless hanging about on the dark sea. I’d overruled him, blathering about catching the ebb tide—a slight advantage, to be fair, but hardly a game-changer, we had oars, for God’s sake, and it wasn’t far. No, I’d known that if I’d had to wait around in the City until third watch, my nerve would’ve gone and I’d have called the whole thing off. Hardly a good reason, but realistic.
“Artavasdus was right,” Nico said. We were well away from shore by now, so I had no excuse for shutting him up. I really didn’t want to talk, though. “He often is,” I said.
“About you being the heart of the defence.”
“Oh, that. No, that’s bullshit.”
“No it isn’t. Just think what you’ve achieved. When we got here, we were an hour or so away from the savages storming the gates. You—”
“Bullshit,” I repeated, slightly louder than I should’ve. “They haven’t attacked the City because they’re not ready. That’s all there is to it.”
“You keep saying that. I’m not sure I believe it.”
“Suit yourself.”
Poor sod, he was trying to be nice; and he’s one of those people who thinks that if you’ve got something on your mind, you ought to put it into words. All that expensive education, probably. Me, I talk about the job in hand, problems to be dealt with, possible solutions; technical issues, properties of materials, the defects and qualities of things. Of course I do, I’m an engineer.
What I can do, though, is put together a schedule, a sequence of events. Thus: first light, and we could just make out a dark blue blur on the skyline. We altered course and headed for the coast; just shy of where the captain guessed the shoals were, they lowered a horrible little boat and Nico, Lysimachus and I got into it. I had my arms full of flags; they rowed. By the time we hit the beach, we could see the Beacon quite clearly. I hadn’t appreciated just how steep that bloody hill is. Halfway up it, Lysimachus the bruiser gave us professional soldiers a look of utter contempt and suggested that we wait there and rest while he went ahead; if there were sentries up there, he pointed out, they’d hear us gasping and panting a quarter of a mile off.
He was gone for a long time and I was getting worried. Timing was crucially important. Either he’d been killed by the sentries, in which case the whole thing was off but we had no way of telling the main party, or by the time he got back from the top and then we’d dragged ourselves up there, we’d be ages behind the clock and everything would unravel into a tangle. But back he came, eventually, with a gash on his right shoulder and blood on his hands that I assume wasn’t his. “All done,” he said. That man scares me.
No dead bodies when we got up there, so he must’ve got rid of them somehow. The sun was now well and truly up—in fact, we were exactly on time, entirely by luck rather than judgement. I scrambled up the semi-derelic
t stone steps to the top of the tower, then rested my arms on the parapet and caught my breath.
Amazing view from up there. I could see the North Gate guardhouse, where Stilico would be waiting. I could see the scaffolding all round the enemy siege tower, which must be nearly finished. I could see the back lines of their camp, which we’d had to guess at when we were planning this nonsense. By the look of it, we’d slightly overestimated the extent of their rear defences. There were three rows of tents, housing the rearguard; I’d anticipated four. No big deal, either way. They simply weren’t expecting an attack from that direction, knowing full well there was nobody out there to attack them. And I could see the little round ash spinney that marked the furthest extent of the Citomer forest, another of His Majesty’s deer parks, which stretches up from the sea to within a half mile of the North Gate. What I didn’t know was whether a man sitting in the topmost branches of one of those tall ash trees would be able to see me. If he couldn’t, we were all screwed. I’d gambled on that, and there was no way of testing it beforehand. Stupid, stupid idea.
Still, here we were, and it was time. I went to raise the flag—
“Not the green one,” Nico hissed at me. “The red.”
Just as well he’d come along, wasn’t it? I raised the red flag and gave it a waggle. Then I waited, to see if my big idea was actually going to work.
All started many years ago, when I was a sergeant. We’d just finished a job and the boys were relaxing, taking their boots off, pulling corks. Come and play Bollocks, someone said. What’s Bollocks, I asked.
Answer: the typically elegant and tasteful name the Imperial army gives to the universal game of throwing a stone and then seeing who can roll a wooden ball closest to it. Everyone everywhere in the world plays this game or a variant thereof. Turned out I was quite good at it; good enough to be popular with the men, not good enough to win and show myself up for a smartarse. But it set me thinking, all those years ago; and this is what I thought.
You start with a stone, any old stone. You pitch it up high in the air; it comes down thump, lands, stays put. Then you take your smooth, perfectly round wooden ball and you gently pitch it, on a low trajectory. It lands, bounces once or twice, then rolls implacably toward the mark. All in fun, of course, and it’s a good game, especially when you’ve been drinking.
Now think about artillery. Your Pattern 68 hurls a two hundredweight slab of rough-hewn asymmetrical rock up in the air at an angle of forty-five degrees, which science and experience have concluded is the optimum angle for distance. It goes up, it peaks, stalls and goes down, it hits the deck and half buries itself. Extreme range, from a perfectly tuned catapult with new horsehair ropes, all the joints tight to reduce vibration, etcetera: two hundred yards. Which was why the enemy had drawn up their triple line two hundred and seventy-five yards from the wall.
Let the catapult shot be the mark; now think of the game. The round wooden ball cruises easily up to it, often as not goes past it. Now picture me, walking up Hill Street one evening, pausing to admire the perfect stone balls, about twice the size of my head, stuck up by some rich man to decorate his gateposts.
It’s the way my mind works, and I’m not proud of it. I went down to a masons’ yard I know, made out I wanted to buy a pair of stone balls, like the ones I’d seen. No problem. Out of interest, I say, how do you make them so perfectly round? Is that some poor sod chipping away with a chisel? I get a smile for my naivety. We’ve got a machine for that; and he shows me, a stone lathe, bloody great big thing powered by six donkeys turning a mill, though the bigger yards downtown use water power. Turns out a perfect seventy-pound stone ball every hour, each one identical; yours for the ridiculously cheap sum of—
Told him I’d think about it; that was no lie. Thought about it a lot. But, having thought it over for about fifteen years, came to the conclusion that I wasn’t put on this earth to make trouble for people. I build bridges. True, from time to time people cross those bridges on their way to slaughter the enemies of the empire, or to take food and supplies to the slaughterers, or carry messages backwards and forwards to and from them—you spin it out, like flax, and after a while it gets thin and vague, and you’re not really doing anyone any harm, you’re just making it easier to get from one side of a river to another, nothing bad about that. So, I thought about it, decided I’d think some more, got on with something else. Until now.
Until I waved the red flag.
For a count of maybe three, nothing happened, and I thought, that halfwit Stilico, he’s screwed everything up. Then something caught my eye, something a long way away, a curved line in the air more than an object, a flat arc. I didn’t hear the distant slam of the catapult arm against the frame until some time later, because for some reason sound is much slower than seeing.
The soldiers drawn up in triple line, two hundred and seventy-five yards down the gentle slope, saw it, too. They laughed when the shot pitched woefully short. They laughed when it bounced the first time, and the second. The third time they didn’t laugh at all, as a hundred and fifteen seventy-pound balls bounced a third time and smashed into them at head height, snapping necks, pulping bones in the first, second, third ranks; bounced a fourth time in the open space between the back rank and the tents; then carried on rolling along the ground, actually picking up pace thanks to the damned slope; seventy pounds rolling just faster than a man can run is a lot of momentum, takes a hell of a lot of stopping. Bone can’t stop it, neither can tent poles, wagons, tethered horses, flesh, blood. Nothing can stop it until the ground levels off and starts to slope upward, and by then—
By then, of course, Stilico’s men had loosed another volley.
I heard Nico swearing fluently beside me. Lysimachus was staring as though he’d just seen the Ascension, the most wonderful thing he could possibly imagine in his most profound yearnings, bloodthirsty savage. Me, I felt—You couldn’t possibly understand. But I’m an engineer, I work with massive weights in motion and suspension. When I was a captain they made me safety officer, it was my job, my responsibility, to make sure that those massive weights didn’t get loose to smash bone and crush flesh. And most of the time they didn’t, but sometimes they did—my fault, I freely confess, my bloody stupid fault. I’ve seen men squashed like fruit until their guts burst, I’ve seen sharp ends of bone sticking out through pulped skin and muscle, I’ve seen men decapitated by flying ropes, legs and arms ripped off by runaway rollers and timbers, men with their spines crunched up like the veins of a dry leaf and still just about alive—I was safety officer, my responsibility, you can’t blame the wood or the stone or the rope. There was nothing you could’ve done, they told me, and even when I believed them it didn’t make any difference. It’s not something you let happen. It’s definitely not something you do deliberately—
“The flag,” Nico was yelling. “The green flag, for crying out loud.”
I’d forgotten all about it. He snatched it from my hand and waggled it about above his head. Stupid green flag. All I could think about was what I’d done. More stone balls in the air; the whole plain in front of me was moving, men running like lunatics, a lot of men, a lot of men not moving at all. And I couldn’t remember the flag for ceasefire (because there wasn’t one, of course; we wanted this to happen) so I couldn’t make the ghastly accident stop, only it wasn’t an accident. And Nico was waving a flag, which made no sense until I remembered. Phase Two.
Out of the little round ash spinney the chariots came racing. Aboard each chariot, designed with infinite skill and care for one man, were two men, one driving. The other had charge of fifteen road pins, a pottery jar of lamp oil with a bit of cloth stuffed in the mouth instead of a stopper, and a storm lantern.
Road pins—bit of iron rod about four feet long, half-inch diameter, with a point on one end and a wiggle like a shepherd’s crook on the other. Bet you you’ve seen them, just never knew what they were called. We mostly use them for surveying, but they come in handy for all manner of t
hings; including the traditional Engineers’ game of Throwing the Road Pin; closest to the mark wins a beer. You can’t chuck them much more than fifteen yards because they’re so heavy, but you can get quite accurate with them, and they’ll go through sixteen-gauge steel plate. Or armour.
I knew there’d be trouble, because the chariots were so light and flimsy. I saw three turn over before they got anywhere near the line of tents. But the rest made it, and just as they got there, men started spilling out from under the tent flaps, and got road pins in them just for being in the way. Past the tents—another two chariots went out of control and crashed—and they were where I’d wanted them to be, right up close to the siege tower, magnificent under its covering of hides. I saw little flares of yellow light, the pots of oil with lit wicks sailing through the air to shatter against the frame of the tower. The surviving chariots turned and went back the way they’d come. For a while I was sure the flames on the siege tower had gone out or hadn’t caught; then a fat orange bloom, then thick black smoke. Was that it? Had we won?
“Come on,” Nico said. “Time we weren’t here.”
I let him lead me down the hill. I felt stupid, like the time a beam got loose on a rope, swung round and hit me right between the eyes. Had it worked or hadn’t it? I didn’t know. No idea what victory’s supposed to look like.
Halfway down, Nico said to me, “You do realise what you’ve done, don’t you?”
Last thing I needed to hear. “Enlighten me.”
“You’ve only revolutionised battlefield infantry tactics for a generation,” that idiot said. “From now on, field artillery’s going to rule the battlefield. Close-order heavy infantry and phalanx formation have just been made obsolete at a stroke. Sheer genius. It’s probably the greatest single leap forward in tactical—”
