by K. J. Parker
I was still shaking like a leaf, but I had to get those ships unloaded and on their way quickly, before my fellow citizens realised they’d been tricked and came back to tell me what they thought about that. Maybe presumptuously, I’d had half the public buildings in the City surreptitiously looted of their moveable artwork; we had it all stacked up in a big warehouse on Quay Six, and thank God there wasn’t a fire. I’d have liked to take my time showing those Selroqois round and screwing them to the wall for the best possible deal. As it was, we more or less shovelled artworks into their outstretched arms until they couldn’t carry any more, then sent them on their way. As it was they missed the evening tide, but I insisted they stand out to sea so that at least they were out of sight from anywhere in the City. And please come back, I added, as quickly as you can.
“Sure,” said one of them. “If you think you can handle the trouble that’ll cause. Were you actually prepared to launch stones at your own people?”
“No, of course not.”
“Mpm,” he nodded. “How about us? Would you have sunk us, like you said?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told him. “I need you.”
Not long afterwards, Artavasdus asked me the same two questions. I answered yes to both. I’m not good with the truth. I guess I just want people to like me.
The next ship that sailed into the Bay wasn’t Selroqois, and it wasn’t bringing wheat. It was Sherden, and they unloaded their cargo into a small boat, which they cast adrift so that the early morning tide could bring it ashore. I was sent for.
Inside the boat, packed in wicker hampers, was a considerable number of human heads. Some of them I recognised: they were the Selroq merchants I’d talked to the last time, and members of their crew; most likely their brothers and nephews and cousins, trade being a family business on Selroq. Others were new to me. I imagine they were other members of the mercantile community, eager to cash in on a very good thing while it lasted.
Pinned to one hamper was a note. Nobody could read it; hardly surprising, since it was in Alauzet, written in Jazygite script. We ought to talk. Ah, I thought.
Goes without saying, nobody had any paper, or ink, or a pen. Someone found me a thin bit of charcoal from a brazier. I scrawled on the back of the note, then called for a volunteer; five stamena for anyone who’ll row out to that ship and give them a letter.
I had my pick of three. Never ceases to amaze me, the insane things people will do for money.
It had been good while it lasted. The granary wasn’t exactly full, but at least we couldn’t see those distressing patches of bare floor any more. We’d also picked up a quarter of a million arrows, which really isn’t that many when you come to think of it.
You have to pay for everything in this life, however, and the food and the arrows cost me any popularity I may have had in the City, even with the Themes. Arrasc and Bronellus were still talking to me, though they insisted on having witnesses present, and the work was still getting done. But Lysimachus—he still liked me, and I was still terrified of him—lost no opportunity of warning me not to go here or there where I’d felt safe walking alone all my life, because I’d be bound to be recognised and torn to pieces by the mob. The Watch and the Parks and Gardens were livid with me because I’d nearly put them in the position of having to launch bouncing stone balls into a street packed solid with women and children. The Engineers were still on my side, though they reckoned I’d lost the plot recently. The sections of society who’d always hated me—the House, the civil service, the mercantile and commercial sectors—hated me more than ever. I tried not to let it bother me, with indifferent success.
So what? We still had the wall, and superior artillery (for the time being), and plenty of good water and a certain amount of food—enough to last the rest of our lives, if I was right about the captured Echmen siege machines, but we’ll come to that in a minute. My Engineers had been renamed the First Imperial Regiment of Archers; we’d kept the bows and arrows for ourselves, on the grounds that archers are further away from the enemy than other troops, and we wanted to put as much distance between ourselves and those murderous bastards as we possibly could. And, being engineers, they’d figured out how to use a bow, practised, tried a few modifications to bracing height and fletching configuration, added a few new skills to their repertoire. They weren’t good archers, but they were competent, and an overwhelming improvement on what we’d had before, which was nothing at all. Meanwhile, there were basins and buckets on every street corner. True, the general public used them for purposes other than those intended, but since that tended to increase rather than decrease the amount of fluid the containers contained, why the hell not?
I’d found an interesting book in the military science section of the abbot’s library at the Blue Spire monastery. It was very old and very depressing; Notes on Siegecraft, it was called, and chapter thirty-six was about how you capture an otherwise impregnable city by undermining the walls.
Hardly catapult science; but you need an awful lot of men, materials and time. You start to dig well beyond the maximum range of the defenders’ best artillery. For most of the distance between your lines and the wall, you needn’t go down terribly far; an open trench about ten feet deep will do just fine, but you don’t drive it straight at your objective, because a skilled artilleryman could drop a shot into the trench, squash your sappers and probably collapse a section of the works. No, you follow a zigzag line, and you pile up the spoil you’ve just dug out on the side facing the wall. Your soft, crumbly earth stops projectiles rather better than stonework or brick, which are stiff and fragile and prone to shatter into clouds of flying splinters. A stone hitting a bank of earth is cushioned, it sinks into the soft bank, maybe scatters it a little, but causes relatively little incidental damage by way of shrapnel. If you can be bothered (and Ogus undoubtedly could) you line the outside your bank with big wicker baskets filled with sand, to keep the heaped-up dirt from sliding down and leaking out if it takes a hit, or if it rains. To speed the digging there are a number of handy mechanical aids, most of them Echmen in origin. There’s a giant screw mounted on a frame like a battering ram, for boring through heavy clay. There’s cranes for shifting the spoil and carts that run on rails, hauled back down the trench by a relay of winches, to save you having to lug the stuff about in baskets. There’s a thing like a colossal bellows on wheels, for blasting a jet of hot flame—if you run into solid rock, you heat it up real hot with the bellows gadget, then douse it down with cold water or (for some reason, not explained) vinegar; the rock splits, and you can get in there with crowbars and big hammers and break it up small enough to shift. When you’re two hundred yards or so from the wall—that is, still comfortably outside arrowshot—you start to dig deep. Ideally you want to go down as far as the wall is high. When you reckon you’re directly under it, you dig a big chamber, which you stuff full of dry brushwood. This you soak with oil and set alight. The fire burns through the pit props supporting the tunnel; the tunnel collapses; the earth on top of the tunnel is displaced and falls down to fill the chamber, displacing the ground above it, on which rests the heavy, rigid wall. Result: the wall cracks up and subsides into the hole, leaving a sprawling heap of rubble, over which your shock troops can climb into the city. Simple as that.
Chapter thirty-seven is much shorter. It tells you what you can do to defend your city from sappers. You need to figure out or find by trial and error where the enemy tunnels are; then you dig tunnels of your own to undermine or intercept them. If you can bring the roof down before they reach your wall, splendid. If you can break into their tunnel, from the sides or above, you can send in your soldiers, or light fires of damp hay, so that the backdraught will suck the smoke down into the enemy’s working, or—and here, I think, the author was letting himself get carried away—you can turn loose wolves or bears or even lob in a couple of dozen beehives, then seal up the breach as fast as you can. But mostly what you can do, and are advised to do, is surrender. The
trick is to time your capitulation just right. Not too early, or he’ll know you’re scared and strike a viciously hard bargain. Not too late, or by that stage he’s nearly there, so why bother to negotiate. But time it perfectly, and he’ll give you good terms rather than waste time, lives and money. He may let you leave with what you can carry, or leave but empty-handed, or let the civilians out with a few possessions but the soldiers stay, or maybe he’ll kill the soldiers but sell the civilians; it all depends on the circumstances of the case, the skill of the negotiators, the level of malice so far generated and the timing of the offer. There’s even a handy chart, to help you do the calculations. One thing, however, always happens, regardless of the other terms of surrender. The defending king, general, governor or garrison commander is handed over and slowly executed. That’s a given, and non-negotiable.
Thanks ever so much for that, I thought, and put the book back where I’d found it.
I lent Nico the book. He read it and gave it back to me. “Well?” I said.
“Well,” he replied, “obviously we haven’t got any wolves or bears. Under normal circumstances we could get some from Garia or somewhere like that, like we do for the Spring Games, but if the blockade’s back, that’s out of the question. But what we could do is round up a load of stray dogs and not feed them for a week, and then turn them loose. What do you reckon?”
Ye gods. Sometimes I think he lives in a world of his own.
34
I was racking my brains trying to figure out how Ogus would get a message to me, replying to mine saying, yes, let’s meet. His spy’s carrier pigeons had long since gone in the pot (not bad, actually; a bit stringy, perhaps) and he hadn’t mentioned any other resources of his inside the walls. I needn’t have worried. My trouble is, I think sly and furtive, which comes of having a fundamentally dishonest nature. Ogus thinks on a grand scale, as befits a conqueror.
He sent an ambassador: a pleasant enough old boy, dressed in monks’ habit, complete with hood and cowl. His arrival puzzled me, because I knew for a fact there was nothing to talk about; and so it proved. We had him in and sat him down in the throne room of the Palace; me, Faustinus, Nico, the Theme bosses. I was waiting for him to slip me a message on a scrap of paper, and hoping to God he wouldn’t be too obvious about it. Given my disastrous slump in esteem, the last thing I wanted was for anyone to suspect that I was in secret communication with the enemy; difficult, since I wanted to be just that. But no, nothing of that sort. We sat on one side of a big rosewood and ivory table, he sat on the other. He demanded our unconditional surrender. We said no. He rephrased it. We said no, again. This went on for a bit—that man had a remarkable gift for saying the same thing in different ways—and then it was obvious we weren’t getting anywhere, and he got up to leave. As he did so, his hood, which he’d kept up all the time we’d been talking, slipped sideways, while he was facing me but not the others. Then he put the hood back up again, thanked us politely for our time, and left.
That’s what I mean about doing things in the grand manner. On the old boy’s tonsured head were tattooed—not just written on, but actually pricked and inked into the skin—a few well-chosen words, written in Alauzet using the Jazygite script. Anyone seeing them—almost anyone seeing them—would’ve taken them for some of the weird stuff monks get decorated with if they’ve been particularly good or clever; mystic runes and cabalistic sigils and whatever.
That’s the difference, I guess, between my old pal and me. I would never be able to bring myself to believe that any scheme of mine was important enough to justify some poor innocent going around for the rest of his life with the words Lead a sortie against the ram and get captured, your safe return guaranteed indelibly carved into his scalp. For Ogus, I feel sure, it was just a chance to get his message across and show off at the same time.
What ram? Oh, that ram.
It was a beauty. The moment I saw it, I wanted one. The next moment, my blood ran cold. It was a magnificent piece of engineering and construction, but it was headed directly for my gate, and if it got there we wouldn’t stand a chance. Then I remembered, it wasn’t supposed to.
Indulge me, though, and let me tell you about it. When the Echmen—nobody else could have designed or made something like that—built it, they’d addressed all the problems I’d thought of and reckoned to be insuperable and brushed them away like flies. Direct hit from a catapult? Surround it with a stout frame covered with stitched-together hides and padded like a cushion. Same principle as the dirt banks; don’t resist the impact, dissipate it. Brilliant. The sixty-strong team of oxen needed to move the thing vulnerable to arrows? Padded jackets for them, too—covered from nose to tail, I kid you not, in quilted armour of a quality the Imperial guard never aspired to. All right, what about a direct hit on the oxen with a catapult stone, squashing them flat and shattering the yoke boom? Simple; have ten more teams of oxen standing by, plus a quick-release connection so you can uncouple the smashed yoke and couple up the new one faster than you could say it—the spare teams protected, of course, by huge wooden pavises the size of warship sails, mounted on wheeled limbers. The pavises alone would be enough to give you nightmares; they’d stop arrows and almost certainly slow down my horrible bouncing stone balls. The ram itself was a straight oak trunk about fifteen yards long, with a bulbous tip that was almost certainly bronze filled with lead. There was a marvellous-looking winch arrangement on the back, so that a relatively small crew protected by shielding could wind the thing up and let it go without being exposed to arrows from the ramparts. I couldn’t begin to tell you how much the whole thing must have cost; more than my entire Engineers’ budget for a decade, and then some. If ever I get the chance, I’m definitely going to go and work for the Echmen. Those people must really appreciate fine engineering.
Even if I hadn’t seen the writing on the ambassador’s head, I’d have ordered a sortie; it was the only way of stopping the monster. Trust Ogus to make it all delightfully plausible for me. His note hadn’t said whether we’d be allowed to stop and destroy his wonderful gadget; the implication was that, yes, we had his permission, because if we didn’t it’d complete its mission and crunch the gate into kindling. Typical Ogus. He always was generous with his toys.
“What we need to do,” Nico said beside me, and his voice wasn’t as steady as it might be, “is dig a sap, quick, right in front of the gate. Then, when that thing rolls on top of it, its own weight will cave in the sap and it’ll fall through and break its back.”
I was impressed. Hadn’t thought of that. “Don’t be stupid,” I said, “there isn’t time.”
He gave me a sad look. “You’re quite right,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Put our lads on the wall with their bows,” I said, “and get me the hundred best Blues. We’re going to have to go out there and smash it.”
“A sortie? But that’s—”
“Yes,” I said. “But your idea’s stupid and I can’t think of anything. What does that leave?”
He nodded, the minimum movement to convey agreement. “I’ll go,” he said.
“Like hell you will. I need you here. I’ll go.”
“With respect—”
“Quiet.” I hadn’t meant to yell at him. “Stopping it and killing the crew won’t be enough, we’ve got to pull it down and break it. Engineering. You stay here and be a soldier, like you always wanted.”
I’d hurt his feelings. “Of course,” he said, and ran off to organise the sortie. But naturally I couldn’t let him go, he’d never come back, and neither would most of the poor bastard Blues. And if they did supremely well and proved themselves true heroes and killed the monster, it really wouldn’t signify worth a damn, since the whole performance was just an irrelevance, a show put on because Ogus couldn’t trust me to have myself lowered over the wall in a laundry basket at midnight without getting caught. I reckon the way you go about doing things says a lot about the sort of man you are. I’d never have thought up something like that in
a million years. Which explains why Ogus, not me, was leading the great crusade against the forces of darkness, and why I was trying to stop him.
35
It was a shambles. My fault. We came running out in a sort of shield-wall configuration—running isn’t my thing, as I think I may have mentioned—but they’d got about a hundred archers tucked away behind those bloody pavises, and we ended up kneeling in the dirt behind our shields, pinned down and not daring to move. Which would probably have worked out fine in the end—we could have surrendered, thereby achieving the object of the exercise while avoiding all the mess and bloodshed—except that bloody Lysimachus suddenly jumped up and led a charge, howling at the top of his voice. Lysimachus is a Green and the rest of them were Blues, so by rights they should have stayed put and let him get shot to bits; I don’t know. Maybe it was the shame of being outmachoed by a Green, there’s no accounting for idiotic heroics when you’re dealing with Theme fighters. Anyway, there was a terrific yell and off went all five hundred of the fools, leaving me kneeling there in the dust all on my own.
About seventy of them didn’t make it; the rest covered the distance to the ram in an amazingly short time, followed not that much later by me, gasping for breath and thinking I was about to die. Lysimachus was already halfway up the side of the ram, running up it like a rat up a curtain. Whoever those poor devils were on the ram, it was clear they hadn’t signed on to face dangerous lunatics like Lysimachus. They shot at him until he got close, then they scrambled down a convenient ladder and scampered away like rabbits. I think he managed to catch two, but the rest got away. Still, you can’t have everything in this life.
