Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

by K. J. Parker

  Anyway; Aichma looks like a diluted version of her mother. There are savages out east who mix their tea with milk; a bit like that. Adulterated is the word I’m groping for. But her mother was a sweet, gentle soul, kind to everybody, never a harsh word, with a sort of serenity about her. Aichma takes after her father.

  “Tell me,” I said. “If you were in my shoes.”

  Her eyes gleamed. “Are you kidding?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Take the deal, obviously. You just told me what he said. If you don’t, you’re dead and so are all of us. I don’t want to die out of solidarity to the empire. It’d serve no useful purpose, and, besides, they’re arseholes.”

  “You’re Robur.”

  “Not quite Robur enough, so I’ve been given to understand. Also, I’m rubbish. It’s not my empire, I just live in it. More to the point, we can’t win. Therefore I’m going to die, unless you do the deal. Don’t tell me you had to stop and think about it.”

  “I thought about it very hard.”

  “Why? What the hell was there to mull over, for crying out loud?” She had that oh-for-God’s-sake look on her face. “It’s like—all right, supposing there’s a fire. What do you do? You grab everyone and everything you can and you get the hell out of there. You don’t agonise about letting the fire win. Staying alive doesn’t make you the fire’s accomplice. Orhan, you’ve had the most amazing stroke of luck. Just for once in your life, being who you are’s worked out in your favour, not against you. And if you’re still not convinced, think about your friends. Trust me, this isn’t a grey area. This one’s pretty bloody straightforward.”

  “You think so.”

  “Idiot,” she said. “Stupid fool. You just told me, Fronto and the senators were going to murder you. Five hundred Greens were going to help them do it. If you want to know what a representative cross-section of Robur society think of you, there’s your answer. Fuck them. Fuck the lot of them. Take the deal.”

  It annoys her like nothing else when she gets all forceful and I stand there stone-faced. “What do you think your father would have said?”

  “Him? Take the deal. Save my little girl’s life. You promised, remember?”

  “That’s true,” I said. “I did promise.”

  She frowned. “You have made your mind up already, haven’t you? You never ask my advice unless you’ve already decided.”

  “I’m not sure,” I told her.

  “Not sure? What kind of an idiotic answer is that? Pull yourself together, Orhan, this is important.” She made a visible effort, lowered and softened her voice. She can do it if she has to. “Listen, you did your best. You did amazingly well. When you got here, we were an hour or so from being slaughtered like sheep. You held them off, you gave them a bloody nose, and while you were at it you shook up this stupid city like nobody’s ever done before, you tried to make it into something that might conceivably be worth saving. But it couldn’t be done. The Themes are still at each other’s throats, even with Death banging on the front door, and the boss Robur want to knife you in the back. How many times have you got to hear it before it finally sinks in? Don’t bother trying to save the City, it can’t be done. Save us instead. We’re your friends. Everybody else hates you.”

  I let her see that I was still thinking. Then I nodded. “So on balance,” I said, “you think I should take the deal.”

  “On balance,” she said, “yes.”

  27

  Opening the gates of a besieged city to the enemy isn’t as easy as you might think. It takes a lot of thought and planning, involves a great many people and calls for careful timing and excruciating attention to detail.

  You don’t think so. You think, all you have to do is wait till the middle of the night, sneak down to Foregate, pull back a few bolts, job done. In which case, I’d like to live in your city. With citizens like you, it has nothing to fear from treachery.

  I knew how the gates were guarded, because I’d set up the system myself. With the people split into two warring factions, an aristocracy that hated me and what I’d done, not to mention a substantial criminal element perfectly capable of betraying the City for money, I wanted to make the system as traitor-proof as possible. So; each gate was guarded by not one but two contingents, one Theme and one official. Thus, one night it’d be Greens and Engineers, the next Blues and Parks and Gardens, then Greens and Watch, Blues and Engineers: you get the idea. Each guard unit was fifty men, ten of whom would be standing directly in front of the gate, in full kit. Each pair of gates was fitted with five bolts, thick as your leg. To reach the fifth one, you needed a long ladder and someone to hold it for you; if you tried to shoot the top bolt without someone at the bottom, you’d fall and break your neck. Also, each bolt was fitted with a padlock, and for these padlocks there were only two sets of keys: one for the gatehouse, one in a safe in my room at the Palace. Just to make life interesting, custody of the keys was split between the two details—if it was Greens and Engineers that shift, the Greens would have the keys to bolts one, three and five, the Engineers would have two and four. That wouldn’t be a problem for me, of course, since I had the master set.

  So what? I’m in charge of the City, everybody has to do what I tell them. No problem for me to walk down at a time I’ve agreed with the enemy outside and issue a direct order: open the gates. No, I’d thought of that. The idea was, what if I’m killed or otherwise indisposed? Command passes to Nico, or Faustinus, or the Theme bosses, whoever happens to still be alive. The men on the gates probably won’t know what’s going on; they have to take someone’s word for it that I’m dead and so-and-so is legitimately in command, and you can see the potential for deception there. Also, the City is simply crawling with actors—the Hippodrome, the Opera, the Comedy and Tragedy, probably the finest theatrical tradition in the world—and one of our favourite genres is impressions. Never saw much to it myself, but you’d be amazed how many people will pay good money to watch a man dressed up to look like someone else. Bear in mind that a good number of the men on duty on the gates at any given time will only have seen me once or twice, in passing, at a distance. Since I’d become a public figure, I’d earned the dubious honour of being impersonated, and I have to say, some of them were very good indeed at being me, rather better than I am myself. Therefore, insufferable smartarse that I am, I’d taken precautions. Nobody, not even me, could give the command to open the gates on his own. There had to be two authorised officers, out of a small and select pool—me, Nico, Artavasdus, Faustinus, Arrasc and Bronellus (both together, not one on his own)—together with the duty officer for that particular gate on that particular shift, who had to have seen a written order bearing the Great Seal.

  I’d explained all this to Ogus, who rolled his eyes and said something about too clever by half, with which I found it hard to disagree. But that’s all right, he went on, you set up this cockamamy system, you can replace it with another one. Not really, I told him, it’d look a bit suspicious, and, as you just demonstrated, I’m not exactly popular with a lot of the key players right now. But not to worry, I assured him. There are other ways into the City besides the gates.

  “So you’re the little bird,” I said.

  He stared at me. Someone more unlike a little bird it’d be hard to imagine. His name was Nausolus and he was an Honour Sergeant in the Blues. That’s a responsible job. An Honour Sergeant—there’s a dozen in each Theme—sees to it that Themesmen who commit honour violations (passing on information to the authorities or the other Theme, disobeying the orders of the Theme bosses, murder, rape or aggravated theft against a fellow Themesman, that sort of thing) come to a bad and well-publicised end. Honour Sergeants are handy with small knives, poisonous chemicals and dangerous objects and processes. They know everybody and have very few friends. They’re paid well, direct from Theme funds. No Honour Sergeant has ever gone to the bad, because of what would happen to him if he did.

  When he wasn’t doing all that, Nausolus kept poultr
y, in five long, stinking sheds down by the North dock: chickens, ducks, geese, doves and pigeons. He was particularly good with the pigeons, and before the siege he’d trained about a dozen of them to carry messages, to his cousin Vossus in the Paralia. When the savages came, he sent a pigeon to his cousin with a suggestion: go and find the enemy leader, ask him how much it would be worth to him to have regular detailed news from inside the City, from a very well-placed source indeed. A deal was quickly made, and the pigeons had been busy ever since. Mailing the Great Seal by pigeon post had been a particular triumph; he’d hung it round the bird’s neck on a short strap, and tied it down with string under the armpits, for want of a better word, to keep it from coming loose and bobbing about. Can’t be done, the wiseacres on Ogus’s staff had declared, but Nausolus and his champion bird had proved them wrong.

  “The mine of information,” I clarified. “The bringer of glad tidings.”

  Nausolus was quick, I’ll say that for him. He was on his feet, past the guards and halfway through the door before Lysimachus brought him down with a beautifully thrown chair, to which we tied him thoroughly before resuming the interview.

  “Now I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to,” I told him. “If you don’t want to co-operate with me, that’s fine, I quite understand. I’ll just hand you over to Arrasc and tell him what you’ve been doing.”

  He didn’t seem to like that idea very much.

  “Glad to have you on board,” I told him. “Now, I’m quite happy for you to carry on sending messages to the enemy, provided I see them first. The sort of stuff you’ve been giving him so far will do fine. If your stuff suddenly turns useless, he’ll get suspicious, and then you’ll be no good to me at all. Very occasionally, I’ll get you to send something I’ve written. Now, that’s not a problem, is it?”

  He assured me it wasn’t.

  “Fine,” I said. “Nice to have met you.”

  I don’t hold with codes, ciphers, all that rubbish. Clever men can figure them out. If you’ve got the code and someone sends you a message, you find yourself spending hours compiling charts and diagrams and writing things out in rows and columns until your fingers ache, just so you can read: nothing much happening at this end, we had fish with parsley sauce again, how about you? Life’s too short.

  Much easier to use normal, regular words, provided they’re in a language nobody but you and your pal can understand. Alauzet, for example, my and Ogus’s native tongue. There may have been three dozen other Alauzet speakers in the City, maybe a couple of hundred in Ogus’s massive army; we don’t get around much, unless we have no choice. The only slight drawback is that Alauzet has never been a written language, since none of us can read or write. Still, there’s a first time for everything. I found I could write Alauzet more or less acceptably using the Jazygite alphabet—no y, and you have to use uu for w; otherwise, no big deal. I happen to know Jazygite—long story, not important—and there was bound to be someone in Ogus’s polyglot multitudes who knew it, too, but Jazygites are even thinner on the ground that Alauz in these parts. Now that’s what I call cryptography.

  “What’s all this?” Nausolus asked, when I gave him the message to send. “It looks like gibberish.”

  “It is gibberish,” I told him. “Completely meaningless. Think how much time and energy they’ll waste before they figure that out.”

  The other way into the City, I’d told my oldest and best friend, calls for a bit of work on your part, but you won’t mind that. Then I asked for paper and something to draw with. I sketched out the course of the main drain, which naturally empties out into the Bay, on the southern side, so the current washes all the crap out to sea. What my scruffy hand-drawn map showed, and all the up-to-date official ones don’t, is the old spur drain, which was closed down and sealed off after the sinkhole incident in Poor Town. This spur originally led out to a soakaway outside the walls, I told him, in what was then marshland; it was drained about seventy years ago, and now it’s lush green grass. Now then, I said, if someone were to dig a sap, precisely fifty-seven feet down below the surface, starting from the derelict tannery and driving directly towards the belltower of the Golden Hope monastery, pretty soon he’d find himself cutting into the side of the abandoned spur drain, which would lead him to the bricked-up junction with the main drain, and once he was there he could take his pick of a dozen or so wide, well-maintained access tunnels leading to the surface. Nobody would hear him digging, not that far down, and if he chose to emerge in, say, Cutlers Fields in the middle of the night with a thousand or so of his very best men, he could overwhelm the guards on the East Gate before they had a chance to raise the alarm and have the gates open before anybody could do anything about it.

  The only problem he’d encounter (I went on) was about thirty feet of solid rock, which he’d bump into about a hundred yards from the junction with the main drain. Originally, I explained, the spur drain had bypassed this obstacle, going round it in a long, wide loop. But the loop section had caved in, taking several streets of houses with it, and was now comprehensively blocked. It would therefore be quicker and easier to cut through the original obstacle than muck about trying to clear the caved-in bypass, assuming you could even find it. Yes, I pre-empted him, cutting through thirty feet of rock is no small undertaking; but in an army of a hundred and twenty thousand men, surely he had skilled and experienced sappers who’d breeze through something like that as though it wasn’t there. Yes, he admitted, he had, at that. There you are, then, I told him. And if you start your sap at the old tannery, under cover of the walls, and make sure you’re discreet about it, anyone watching from the walls won’t be able to see that you’ve got mining operations under way, and I won’t be obliged to make life hell for you with catapults and trebuchets.

  I wasn’t there, having work to do, so I didn’t see what happened. My guess is, something like this.

  Soldiers, or Watchmen, banging on people’s doors in the middle of the day. This is never good. Eventually, someone, probably the woman of the house (men are by nature very brave, except when it comes to opening doors to strangers) answers and says, What do you want? The soldiers tell her.

  What the hell do you want that for, she says, not unreasonably.

  The soldiers, with whom the reason has not been shared, shrug and say, Don’t know, don’t care, orders is orders. You got any or not? The woman says No. The soldiers say, You sure about that? Only, anyone says no, we got orders to search their place from top to bottom.

  Come to think of it, the woman says. Wait there.

  And she comes back a minute or so later with a pudding basin, a preserving pan, a jerry. The soldiers take them and put them carefully on their handcart. Will I get them back? the woman asks. The soldiers say thank you and move on to the next house.

  An hour or so of foraging, and now we have about a thousand bowls, buckets, pans, basins, chamber pots. These are unloaded off the handcarts and placed carefully on the ground, a foot or so apart, all the way up Masons Alley, Portway, Key Street, Monksgate, Shambles, Potters Ground and halfway up Shepherds Walk. A bunch of Blues follow on with a two-wheeled bowser and buckets, filling each one two-thirds full with water. When they’ve finished they move on; their places are taken by Engineers, one man to a hundred buckets. For the next six hours, they walk up and down the line, staring at the buckets as though their lives depended on it.

  It’s a bit of a performance, but it works. Mining operations deep underground can’t be seen or even heard, but they can be felt; the vibrations make the ground shake, ever so slightly. You may not be able to feel it, even kneeling down with the palms of your hands pressed flat on the deck, but water can. A very slight ripple on the surface of a wide enough pan will tell you where the tunnel is, and how fast the sappers are progressing. It’s an old dodge—I got it out of a thousand-year-old book, tried it out just for curiosity’s sake many years ago, tucked it away under the lining of my mind in case it ever came in useful. For some
reason, people don’t bother with the old books these days. More fool them.

  About midday I went down to Poor Town to find out for myself. I’d put Genseric in charge of co-ordinating and correlating. He started me at Porters Yard, where the water was trembling like anything, then led me down New Alley, across the Old Flower Market and up Key Street, where I saw the faintest trace of ripples just starting to form.

  Genseric was with me when I did my experiment, back when I was still a captain and he was a freshly minted second lieutenant. He could read the signs as well as I could. “It’s massive,” he said. “There must be hundreds of them down there.”

  “About a thousand, I’m guessing,” I said.

  “What the hell are they up to?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” I said.

  I got the impression he couldn’t understand why I was taking it all so calmly. “We’d better do something,” he said.

  I nodded. “Like what?”

  Good question. “Countermine?”

  I shook my head. “First you tell me where to start digging, and how far down you want me to go. No, we’ll never find them.”

  “We can’t just wait for them to come up somewhere.”

  “Actually,” I said, “that’s what I had in mind.”

  He gave me a bewildered look, then pulled a brass tube out of his sleeve. “Look at this,” he said. “It’s an old map, I found it in with some other junk in the Surveyor-General’s office.”

  “That’s a very old map.”

  “Here.” He jabbed with his forefinger. “It’s colour-coded, see. The red’s all heavy clay, the blue’s porous limestone and shale, the green is that crumbly yellow muck and the grey is your actual hard sandstone.”