Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

by K. J. Parker

  He looked at me. “I can’t,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “We’ve got loads of clerks to read stuff out to you and take dictation, and I’ll have them make up a stencil so you can sign things.”

  He shook his head. “My place is at your side,” he said.

  Shit. Still, it was worth a try.)

  Five of my best smiths from the regiment on each end of the chain, welding shut the ends of the connecting chains, which is harder than you think with bronze. You need a localised heat, so they’d rigged up bellows with long, thin nozzles, like the blowpipes people use for getting a fire going. Soon as they’d finished, the winches took up the weight until the chains were taut; we were ready to go. Part of me really didn’t want to give the signal, because what if it didn’t work? What if the Necklace was corroded through, somewhere out at the bottom of the middle of the Bay, or maybe the connecting chains wouldn’t stand the strain, or the winches bent or snapped, or simply weren’t powerful enough? I could see all these contingencies as clearly as if they’d already happened, they were memories rather than fears, part of me was already saying, he should’ve known better, calls himself an engineer? Shut up, I told them, and gave the signal.

  Lots of clicking, as several hundred yards of shining golden chain wound itself round the winch spools. Then someone gave a great shout. Out in the distance, on the other side of the Bay, something broke water, like a dolphin or an enormous seal. A second later, the same on our side; then, it was as though God had drawn a straight line across the water with His fingertip, and there was this low, slow rumbling, a bit like the noise the incoming tide makes when it rolls the pebbles together. It looked like a wrong-way-up bridge, or—God help me, I thought of that clown Polynices and forgave him, and was properly ashamed of myself—an upside-down rainbow, the reflection of a green rainbow in dead calm water; and still the winches clicked softly, no grunting or straining because they were machines, and machines can be perfected, unlike their makers; and then they stopped, because there was no more slack, and the Necklace was raised. Three feet clear of the water at either end, just dipping under the surface in the middle; an amazing, extraordinary thing. I stared at it, and I realised, my mind was too small to take in what I was looking at. It was as though the Gods had dropped something—a comb, a hairpin, a needle—and it had fallen down to earth; unimaginably huge and incomprehensibly magnificent, made of celestial materials by a divine craftsman, too big and too beautiful to have any place in our world, utterly incongruous, a numbing statement of the difference between Them and us—

  Excuse me. It was an impressive sight. It was a very nice chain. And I was damned if I could see how any ship, from a cockle boat to a quinquireme, was going to get past it. Job done.

  Job almost done. The most vulnerable point—sorry, the only vulnerable point—was the winch housings. So we built hollow moulds out of planks and poured in the magic pumice mortar; two instant castles, walls eight feet thick, fitted with iron doors we’d borrowed from the strongrooms of the Imperial treasury (where they were redundant these days, since we’d spent all the money). Then, because we’d learned a thing or two, we buried both castles in soft sand and earth, to take the impact out of trebuchet stones.

  From start to finish, twelve days. Not bad.

  I was fast asleep. I’d had a long, hard day. In a siege, sleep is the only luxury you have left.

  “Wake up,” some idiot was shouting in my ear. I told him to go away, or words to that effect. He was shaking me by the shoulder.

  “You’ve got to come right now.” Not a he, a she. “Something’s happening.”

  “Sawdust.” She can’t stand being called that. “You lunatic. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Now,” she said.

  Sawdust isn’t one of those loud, assertive women, and she never shouts. Something was wrong. “What’s going on?”

  “We don’t know. You’ve got to come now. Please.”

  Dark night, no moon. Some fool had put out all the lights on the wall. “That was me,” she hissed.

  She’d been up there fine-tuning the catapults (in the middle of the night, because she hadn’t had time during the day; for Sawdust, sleep is something that happens to other people). But everyone (she blushed when she got to this part) needs to pee sometimes, and in the pitch dark, over the side of the wall’s as good a place as any and better than most. So she was squatting there, pissing into space with one hand on the crenellation to stop her falling over, and out of the corner of her eye, at the extreme edge of her peripheral vision, she saw something move.

  “But you can’t have,” I said. “It’s dark as a bag out there.”

  She explained that working late on the wall had done marvels for her night vision. She’d seen something move, out there in the space between the wall and Ogus’s watchfires. So she’d come running and woken me up.

  “You stupid bloody woman,” I said. “If you saw anything, which I doubt, it was a fox or a stray dog or something. But you didn’t see anything, because it’s too dark.”

  She’d seen something, she said. And when a quiet, shy woman tells you something three times, even though she’s been shouted at and called a stupid bloody woman, you start asking yourself: did she see something? And then you worry.

  “Besides,” I said, “even if you’re right, what am I supposed to do about it? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Actually,” she said.

  She hadn’t told me, she explained, because she didn’t want to mention it until she was sure it would work; but it had occurred to her that if you filled a narrow-necked pot with palm oil, stuck a bit of rag in the neck and lit it, and then shot it out of a catapult on a high trajectory, when it landed it’d burst into flames and give you quite a bit of light. It’s been tried, I said, loads of times, it can’t be done. Yes, she said, but I’ve been thinking—

  Just so happened she had a stack of suitable jars handy, modified to her specifications, and a barrel of oil. I helped her load a jar into the spoon of a catapult, and we jacked up the ratchet to forty-five degrees. This won’t work, I told her, and it’s dangerous. Probably it’ll shatter on the spoon and we’ll get spattered all over with burning oil.

  It made the most amazing whistling noise as it sailed through the air, and when it pitched it split open in a fountain of blazing slops. There was a split second when the flames roared up into the sky, and then they died right down. And in that split second, we saw—

  “The bastard!” I yelled. I’d forgotten she was there. “Fucking shitty bastard, he lied to me.”

  We saw pavises, huge hide-covered pavises as tall as a house moving forward in a line across the empty plain. Which meant she’d lied to me, he’d lied to me through her. The attack wasn’t coming from the sea, there weren’t any trebuchet barges, he’d blindsided me, used that bitch to make a fool of me, tricked me, his friend; I wanted to circle his throat with my hands and squeeze. How could he do something like that?

  “It’s all right,” she was saying—stupid woman, of course it wasn’t all right, my best friend—“We need all the catapults, now.”

  What? Oh, that. I tried to remember who was duty officer, but the name escaped me. “Duty officer!” I yelled, so loud I scared myself. “All crews to stations, now.”

  It was the Blues’ night on shift. I reckon it was no more than four minutes before they were in their places, hauling the levers to span the catapults. Four minutes; how far had the pavises moved in four everlasting minutes? “Let’s have another of your firebaskets,” I said.

  We hadn’t moved the windage or elevation. The jar went splat against a pavise. Something to aim at. “Line ready,” someone yelled. “Loose,” I yelled back. The thudding of catapult arms against frames made the parapet shake.

  “And get those bloody trebuchets going,” I shouted. “Wake up, you idiots. Have I got to think of every damn thing?”

  The trebuchet crews had been on station
at the same time as the catapult boys, but their machines take three times as long to span. They went off while the catapults were still winding up. A trebuchet shot hisses as it flies—swish, swish, swish, very fast. Even if you can’t see a damn thing, you get a pretty good idea of what it’s hit by the noise. A stone pitching idly in the dirt is a dull, soft thump. A hit on any form of structure is a crash, like an accident, a pile of bricks falling over. No fluke; in a matter of seconds, they’d taken a mark on the brief yellow flare and shot a spread at fifty-minute intervals on either side. Amazing work; the Echmen royal artillery couldn’t have done better.

  I suddenly thought: whose job is it to call out the garrison? Mine, probably. “Keep going,” I snapped at Sawdust, one of those entirely redundant orders I seem to specialise in, and groped my way along the wall to the tower.

  On the stairs, which shuddered like a fly-bitten horse under the shock of the pounding artillery, I tried to draw myself the bigger picture. We had artillery and they didn’t; we had lots of very good artillery, enough to carpet the plain with smashed bones and crushed bodies. They had pavises. A pavise is a shield the size of a ship’s sail, on a wooden trolley. Hit it high up and it falls over; hit it low down and you smash the frame. Directly behind it you’ll generally find between ten and fifty men, pushing. They’re meant to protect against arrows, not monstrous balls and blocks of very fast stone. Hit the pavise, it’s inconceivable that you won’t hit, kill, crush double figures of men pushing it or crouching behind it. The bloody fool, I thought; bloody bastard cheat, bloody fool.

  I reached the bottom of the stair, where the answer lit up in my mind like a lamp in the darkness. Pavises are a liability for men crossing open ground against artillery, but essential when you bring heavy machinery within arrowshot of a wall. Therefore, it wasn’t men, or just men, behind those things, it was engines. Ogus was making his big push. He’d done it at night, hoping to get across the plain without being cut to bits but not really all that fussed if it cost him a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand dead. He was bringing up his brightest, best, most beautiful weapons, his pearls of great price from the treasures stolen from the Echmen; that would be the worms, which screw into wooden gates and crumple them up like a bit of paper or a dry leaf.

  Across the empty space, where the Bailiffs’ Market used to be (but I’d cleared all that; streets and blocks of wooden buildings just begging to go up in flames, and we needed the timber). I thought, he knows I’ll have undermined the approaches to the gates, so that anything heavier than a haywain will break the frail underprops and go crashing down twenty feet. So he’ll have wagons of big rocks, our catapult and trebuchet shot, most like, to fill in our mines and make hard standing for the worms. Does he seriously imagine enough of his pavises will make it across the plain to shield his engineers while they’re doing all that? Answer? Not bothered, one way or the other. Omelettes and eggs. I know Ogus fairly well, and one thing he’s not is penny wise and pound foolish.

  Thank God Nico was where he was meant to be, asleep in his own bed in the prefecture. All I had to say was, they’re here, they’re coming, and he knew what I meant. I told him what I was expecting while he scrambled into his armour—aketon and cuirass next to the skin, he didn’t bother with clothes, no time—then I scuttled away, yelling for someone to take a message to the Miners’ Guild.

  Ogus, I figured as I ran back towards the wall through streets that were rapidly clogging up with suddenly mobilised, sleepy, terrified people—Ogus didn’t know me quite as well as I knew him. He figured I’d take artillery off the wall to defend the harbour against his mythical fleet. I hadn’t done that. I’d built new engines; because the machines on the wall had been modified to throw the bouncing balls, and we’d have had to modify them back to use against ships, quicker and easier to build new ones from scratch. No, fair play to him, only an engineer would’ve realised that. Therefore he was anticipating maybe a third less firepower on the wall; losses horrifying but not catastrophic, therefore a reasonable price to pay, acceptable, omelettes and eggs. I could imagine him being annoyed to find he’d missed a trick. Serve the bastard right.

  The Miners’ rep was at the tower gate waiting for me. I knew him slightly, a Green, quiet sort of a man, seemed dependable. I explained: you know those saps you dug under the gates? Well, they’re bringing up heavy gear, and when they get here they’ll collapse them and start filling them up with stones. What I want you to do is open the saps up from our end, go down there, start fishing out the stones as fast as they drop them in. Can you do that? He gave me a look that told me I’d asked a stupid question. Ten minutes, he told me. Thanks, I said.

  Artavasdus was in charge of assault drills and procedures: where the hell was he? Actually he was up there already—I asked myself, when did we get so good at all this, when did we turn into professionals?—and I could hear him, shouting orders in that rather too high, slightly annoying voice that shows he’s in control but only just. Moving his men into position, and if I could hear him, so could the enemy. Not that it mattered, but I clicked my tongue. Maybe not so professional after all.

  Back up the stairs, onto the wall; I realised, nobody knows where I am, this is very bad. People will need to be able to find me, I’m supposed to be in charge. Then Faustinus, in a yellow silk dressing gown and slippers… They told me you’d be here, he said. Then, this is terrible, what are we going to do?

  The tower I was in became command headquarters for the entire defence, simply because I was in it and I was so busy with people running in wanting decisions that I didn’t have time to move somewhere more sensible. Needless to say we couldn’t hear ourselves think, with that damned racket of catapults going on outside, and the walls and floor shaking; no table, no chairs, nothing to write on or with (but then a Green turned up with a fat sheaf of paper, a horn of ink and a whole box of pens; God knows who sent him, but he saved the City; people were actually thinking without me having to tell them to). Genseric stumbled in from time to time to let us know roughly how far the enemy had got. They were having a devil of a job; smashed pavises all over the place, unsmashed pavises blundering into them and getting stuck, then a direct hit on the blockage cleared the bottleneck, only for it to re-form a dozen yards further on. I kept asking, how are we doing for ammunition, are we going to run out? And when they said, no, we’re fine, we can keep this up for hours, I didn’t believe them. How could it be possible, the rate we were getting through it? And then someone would remind me, we saw to all that, we’ve had thousands of men and women working round the clock for weeks, we’ve got enough stone balls, honestly. Also, I kept asking what time it was, and they said about five minutes since you asked the last time. That made no sense. I was sure we’d been in that horrible shuddering room for days, maybe weeks, and here were people telling me it was just minutes, lying to me, men I thought were my friends.

  At some point, it dawned on me. I’d long since passed the point where I was having good ideas or making any sense, and it didn’t seem to matter. Other people were coping. All those hours and days we’d spent, thinking out drills, figuring out what we’d do about this and that, as and when the time came. I remember saying, we need to change shifts on the catapults, those boys must be fit to drop. And someone looked at me like I was senile and said, we’re changing shifts every quarter of an hour. Who told you to do that? You did, they said, about three weeks ago. We do actually listen, you know.

  And I kept hearing this loud, booming voice, somewhere up on the roof of the tower we were in, so that it echoed down the stairwell, and not even the thump of the trebuchet arms could drown it out. Lysimachus, of course, cheering the men on—what I should’ve been doing, except that’s not me, not one bit. For God’s sake make him shut up, I said, he’s giving me a headache. Genseric pointed out that he was doing a great job and the men were working like lunatics for him, but if I really wanted him to stop, I could send him a direct order. Then he changed the subject.

  I remember rea
lly, really needing to take a pee, but being too busy.

  And then the thumping and the shaking stopped. What the hell’s going on, I shouted, and they told me: the enemy had closed the range, too close now for artillery to be effective. They’re here.

  Then the tower really shook. I was sure we’d been hit, but apparently not; walls, ceiling and floor still in one piece, men getting up off the floor, still alive. Someone put his head round the door. That, he explained, was the saps under the gate thresholds giving way.

  Everyone left the room in a hurry, except me. They were needed on the wall, every pair of hands that could draw a bowstring or throw a brick or hold a shield. Not me, though. You stay here, they all said to me, where it’s safe.

  So there I was, alone in the dark, because the only light we’d had was one lantern, which someone had taken with him. Don’t know how long I was there on my own. My head was splitting, though I hadn’t been aware of it before. I stood up and pissed against the wall, floods, which helped a lot. I couldn’t think. I sat back down on the floor with my back to the wall, suddenly, horribly aware that I’d done everything I was capable of doing and was now completely useless. And did I trust those brave, clever, brilliant people, my friends, who’d just been proving how well they could do and how far they’d come, to carry on the defence without me? Like hell. I closed my eyes, not that it made much difference. The noise was very loud, and I’d lost the ability to analyse it or understand it, tell bowstrings from catapult sliders or orders from yells of pain.

  I’d never been useless before. I didn’t enjoy it.

  “Are you all right?”

  The last thing I’d expected to hear was a woman’s voice. Made no sense, until I remembered there was one woman up on the wall. “Sawdust?”