by K. J. Parker
She hates being called that. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“Some bugger stole my lamp.”
“Ah.”
“What’s happening?”
“They’ve reached the wall. The catapults aren’t doing any good, so we’ve been stood down. I sent the men to get spears and swords, but—”
Quite. Sawdust and me, useless on the wall among all those rough men. I could see the logic. She, being a woman, and I, being a coward, would be no use there. Further, we’d be a danger to others, because we’d get in trouble and some poor fool would have to save us, probably get cut up or killed in the process. Have you noticed, by the way, that women don’t fight? Even on those rare occasions when they scrap with each other, it’s all slaps and scratches, they don’t try to maim or kill. And as for soldier-fighting, sharp weapons, blunt trauma, chops and cuts and slices, butcher’s work; they don’t do that. It’s not in their nature. This is frequently offered as proof that men are better than women. Me, I think it means the exact opposite.
“How are we doing?” I said.
“I don’t know. It’s still dark.” She paused, realised that she was making a report to the supreme commander. “Basically, the archers are shooting at shapes and noises. I think you’re right and those engines they’ve brought up are worms, because they’re all jammed up together headed for the gates. They may have siege towers, but they’d have to be pretty tall, and I didn’t see any big black shapes against the skyline. There were a lot of rumbling noises, like rocks being tipped off carts.”
“I sent sappers to clear the stones out from our end,” I said.
She nodded. “I think Artavasdus has got men standing by at the top of the saps, in case they try and come through that way.”
I hadn’t thought of that.
“We used up all the fire jars,” she went on, “but we only had a few. They worked quite well.”
“Get some more made,” I said. If we’re still alive in the morning, I didn’t say. “How did you stop them from breaking in the spoon?”
“Wire,” she said. “Pressed into the clay before it’s fired.”
Hadn’t thought of that either. It came as a shock to me, that I hadn’t thought of everything, that I didn’t have to. “Smart,” I said. She grinned, then went all serious again. Still reporting. “General Nicephorus stopped the trebuchets, because he couldn’t tell if we were hitting anything or not. He says he’ll start them up again as soon as it’s light. Colonel Artavasdus wanted to lead a sortie round the back of the attackers, but the general thought not, in case we needed the men inside.”
“Just as well I wasn’t there,” I said. “I’d probably have gone for the sortie, and it’d probably have been a mistake.”
She wasn’t sure what to make of that. “That’s about it, really,” she said. “Oh, and Prefect Faustinus has ordered a general curfew. Everyone not needed on duty stays home till further notice. That’s everyone not fighting or working in the masons’ or the armouries.”
I nodded. Very sensible. Good old Faustinus. A second later, I was on my feet, blundering for the door, tripping over Sawdust’s legs.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“All your bombardiers,” I said, “down at the harbour, now. Don’t just sit there, move.”
She jumped up, bumped into me, bounced off. My head was agony, as though my brain had swollen to three times its normal size, and there was this awful throbbing. “What?” she said.
I have a feeling I haven’t been lied to, I didn’t say.
Because he wouldn’t; not Ogus. Come to think of it, I can’t ever remember him telling a lie, except to protect someone else; well, me.
In which case, there was a fleet of trebuchet barges, and it was on its way, and it must be very close, or else why would Ogus throw away so many lives and so much fine equipment on a futile attack, unless as a diversion? And, right now, all my trained artillerymen were off shift and resting, when they should be at their stations at the docks. And the chain was down.
I’m woefully ignorant about sailing stuff, so we were halfway across town before I realised. Ogus’s fleet wouldn’t be sailing into the Bay until there was enough light for them to see by. Without leading lights to steer by, they wouldn’t know where to go, or where the rocks were.
I glanced up at the sky, which was starting to show blue, just a little.
Sawdust’s bombardiers were mostly Blues, because they’re traditionally strong in carpentry, masonry and allied trades, but she had at least seventy-five Greens—remarkable thought, if you’d spent all your life in the sure and certain knowledge that the only connection members of opposite Themes were ever likely to make would be along the length of a knife. They reached the docks ahead of me, goes without saying. I can’t help it. I have short legs.
I tried to remember how many men she had, all told, but my head was jammed full of numbers, so I couldn’t. Enough to man the capstans, turn the winches and raise the chain? No idea. Behind me, somewhere in the darkness, thousands and thousands of men were fighting and dying in a battle—arrow-wounds, bones crushed, flesh torn, bleeding external and internal—and I was hurrying in the other direction, because what they were doing wasn’t actually very important. All that mattered now was a fine point of engineering, the sort of thing better expressed in numbers than words; how many men of physical capacity x does it take to operate a winch of specification y to create a force capable of lifting a mass m? It should have been all right—I’m an engineer, for crying out loud—but my head hurt and I was scared and useless, and at some point during the last hour I’d lost the ability to think. But that was all right, because I had a shy little milkface girl to do my thinking for me. If my brain hadn’t been trying to squeeze out through my ears, I’d have laughed like a drain.
There was a crowd outside the docks: men, women, kids. I thought, volunteers rushing down to help with raising the chain, that’s good. Then I remembered: I hadn’t sent out for volunteers.
I got closer, and saw Sawdust, with a load of her bombardiers bunched up round her, yelling bloody murder right in the face of some man I recognised but couldn’t quite place. I’d never seen her so angry, didn’t think she was capable of it. But she was howling at the top of her voice; how can you be so stupid, how can you be so unreasonable? And the man said, piss off, milkface. We don’t want your sort round here.
I’m a coward, and I hate physical confrontations. A moment later I’d somehow got through the densely packed crowd, and someone was holding my arms behind my back, to stop me killing the man Sawdust had been talking to. And she was saying, it’s all right, it doesn’t matter, which is what I usually say in these situations. What’s going on, I asked her. Who are these people?
Actually, as I was asking the question I’d figured out part of the answer. The man I’d wanted to kill, I now remembered, was a ward manager for the Greens, and all the people with him were Greens too. And they weren’t here to help; I didn’t need to be told that.
“This man,” Sawdust said, making man the deadliest insult in the history of semantics, “thinks there’s a Selroqois fleet on the way to evacuate you and your friends. I’ve told him, he couldn’t be more wrong, but he won’t listen.”
I wriggled my arms loose—there’s a knack to it, which you eventually pick up when you’ve had your arms pinned as often as I have. “You moron,” I said to him. “Yes, there’s a fleet coming. No, it’s not Selroqois, it’s Sherden. That’s what we raised the Necklace for. Or maybe you haven’t been following the news.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “That’s all just bullshit, to distract us. You knew the attack was coming, and you fixed it with your Selroq pals to come and pick you up, soon as it starts getting hot. Well, fuck you. We’re getting on those boats. You can stay here with your Blue buddies and fry.”
I stared at him. I kid myself that I understand people, that I can predict what stupid, pathetic thing they’re going to do next. I think God sees
me doing it, and decides to teach me a lesson in humility. “That’s not true,” I said. “For crying out loud, you halfwit, if I wanted ships to get into the Bay, why the hell did we just bust our guts raising the fucking chain?”
“Smokescreen,” he said, and I swear he believed it. And faced with belief, what can you do? And we had so little time.
I took a long step back. “I hold you directly responsible,” I said, in a loud voice. “This is all going to be your fault.”
Because while we’d been talking, a lantern shadow had fallen across my face, and there’s only one man in this city tall enough to cast a shadow at that angle. “Lysimachus,” I said.
“Here, boss.”
“Get these idiots out of my way.”
He has his faults, but he does what he’s told. He slid past me like an eel, reached out with those long arms of his, one hand on the top of the fool’s head, one round his chin; then a movement so quick I didn’t really catch it, and a click, no louder than that, and the Green ward manager fell to the ground like a coat dropped on the floor. Then I saw metal flash—the shadow had passed over me—and then there was just Lysimachus, doing what he loves to do. That, for about five seconds; he can get a lot done in five seconds. Then Sawdust’s Blue bombardiers raised a horrible yell, realising that it was suddenly all right to murder Greens. They were wildly outnumbered, but they had weapons, and for months they’d had to pretend that these people were their friends. We had no trouble getting to the gates after that.
39
Of the people, by the people, for the people. I can’t remember offhand where that quote comes from; it was something to do with some bunch of wild-eyed idealists overthrowing the tyrant so they could become tyrants themselves. No good will have come of it, you can be sure. The people; God help us.
You look—at least, I do, or I did—at the emperor and the nobility, lording it over the people while they starve and suffer, and you say to yourself, something’s got to be done about all this. This can’t be right. The lions of the earth must not destroy the worms any more. And then you do something about it, and what do you discover? The people turn out to be—well, people; a collective noun for all those individual men and women, none of them perfect, some of them downright vicious, most of them monumentally stupid. As stupid as the emperor, the great hereditary lords, the priestly hierarchs, the General Staff and the Lords of the Admiralty, the merchant princes and the organised crime barons. When push comes to shove, thick as bricks, the lot of them. You wouldn’t trust any of them with the helm of a ship, or the regimental welfare fund, or your dog if you were going away for a few days, or anything sharp.
I speak as a member of the people. I’ve done some colossally stupid things in my time. I never asked to be placed in a position of authority. Most of the time I’ve done my best, and it’s never been good enough. Just dumb, I guess.
In my time I’ve met three, maybe four genuinely smart men and women. One of them was Ogus, my old pal, who for some reason always had a high opinion of me. I think that says it all, really.
40
Soon as Sawdust and I were inside, I called out, “Lysimachus, get those Blues in here, right now.” I didn’t expect him to obey, it’d be like whistling to a dog once it’s on the scent of a deer, but obey he did, herding the bombardiers inside the gate, none too gently, with the flat of his sword. We got the gates closed and then the Green mob outside nearly sprung them, by sheer weight of numbers. But Lysimachus got the bars up, and the bars held. That problem solved, for now.
I sent a man up to the top of the lookout tower. What am I supposed to look out for, he said, it’s dark, I can’t see squat.
I’d made sure there were plenty of lanterns in the winch-houses. The levers were already in the slots in the capstan barrels, secured by wedges. I’d already split up the available manpower into two teams, me in one winch-house, Sawdust in the other. This is going to work, I told myself. I gave the order, and threw my weight against the lever. We couldn’t budge it. Not an inch.
“We need more men,” some genius told me. “There’s just not enough of us.”
Outside the gate, doing their best to stove it in with benches from the nearest inn, were more men—the people, on whose behalf I was fighting this desperately difficult war. A few dozen of them, with their strong arms and broad shoulders, would have those capstans turning in no time flat. Beyond that impenetrable cordon, a whole city full of the people, whose survival depended on the turning of those capstans, but we couldn’t reach them or get a message to them. I’d done my bit. I’d made and salvaged the hardware, dealt with the things, devised and executed the cunning tricks; what I hadn’t done, apparently, was take the people along with me; neglected to win their hearts and tiny, tiny minds. And so the capstans weren’t turning, the chain wasn’t going to lift, it had all been a complete waste of time, and I’d betrayed my friend, the last of my people, all for fucking nothing. There’s an old saying, isn’t there, about leading a horse to water. Well. You can lead the people to water, but you can’t make them think. Nobody, it seems, can do that.
Someone was yelling at me: sails, sails. For a moment, I didn’t understand what he was talking about. What did sails have to do with getting the capstans to turn? Then I figured it out. Oh, I thought. Oh shit.
I left them to it, heroically straining every sinew against the levers of capstans that wouldn’t bloody turn, and wandered out into the soft red light of dawn. The newly risen sun blazed on the water, exquisitely beautiful. I couldn’t see anything. No, belay that. I could see the sails of ships, hundreds of them, beating up the Bay with the morning tide.
Well, I thought, we nearly did it. We nearly saved the City, we nearly kept all these tiresome people from being slaughtered, we nearly prevailed against insuperable odds. We built the winches, we hooked up the chain, we actually got it lifted and in position; just not at the right time. Great hardware, but the people let us down. Pity about that.
Never mind, I reassured myself. Ogus, my pal, had given explicit orders that I wasn’t to be harmed, on pain of death. All I’d have to do was walk up to the first enemy officer who set foot on the quay and tell him who I was, and a fast dinghy would carry me safely out of harm’s way. I’d known that, ever since that first meeting, and don’t for one moment imagine that it hadn’t factored heavily in my decision-making. There’s some freak cult somewhere that believes that the king of the gods sent his eldest son down to earth to die for the sins of the people; they arrested him and strung him up and stretched his neck for him, and he died; and on the third day he rose again from the dead, and that was supposed to prove something, though I’m not sure what. The hell with that. The eldest son knew perfectly well that he’d rise again, unlike his temporarily fellow mortals, so it really didn’t matter, just a brief inconvenience. I assume that’s why the cult never caught on, because any fool can see the gaping hole in the logic. Anyhow; that was me. Everyone else is mortal, but I can’t be touched. Screw it. Eventually, no matter how hard you wriggle and squirm, there comes a time when you’ve got to admit that you’re beat and the game is over.
“Lysimachus,” I said.
“Boss?”
“Stay here,” I said. “I expressly forbid you to set foot on the quay as long as I’m alive. Stay back here and organise the defence.”
He looked at me. He was in agony. For some utterly incomprehensible reason, that vicious bastard loved me, or what in his poor addled mind I stood for.
“Please,” I said.
There were tears in his eyes. “Sure,” he said. I turned my back on him and walked away.
There was nobody on the Quay. Everybody was in the winch-houses, straining at the capstans. I had the place to myself. Ideal. There’d be nobody to see me walk up to the enemy soldiers, raise my hands above my head and call out, “Don’t hurt me, I’m Orhan, Ogus’s friend.” Everybody would assume that I’d died fighting, in a final act of heroic stupidity. How little they know me. I may be dumb,
but not that dumb.
Ashamed? A little, though the failure wasn’t really my fault. I’d done my best. It was nearly good enough. Mostly, though, I just felt very, very tired.
I watched the ships grow, from little white flecks of sail into recognisable shapes. They were Imperial warships; clearly, Ogus had managed to capture one of the fleets, along with all those armies and all that gear. I counted the ships and did some mental arithmetic, number of marines per ship. At least ten thousand men. Even if every man in the City capable of bearing arms hadn’t been tied up defending the wall against Ogus’s horribly bloody diversion, we’d never have stood a chance—not against ten thousand soldiers arriving suddenly at the docks, with the whole City wide open in front of them. I imagine we’d have held the docks gate for an hour or so; Lysimachus would’ve loved that, his moment of apotheosis. Nico would almost certainly have fought and died at his side, for the honour of his noble family; he’d have felt justified, redeemed. I really wish I could’ve made that possible, it would’ve meant so much to him. Screw them both. If there’s one truth in this life, it’s that you simply can’t win. The most you can achieve is to make a nuisance of yourself, for a very short time.
I stood on the quay and watched the ships come in, going through in my mind the list of people I was going to do my best to save. Aichma, and Sawdust, and Artavasdus if he’d allow me, and Arrasc and Bronellus, though at that precise moment I wasn’t too kindly inclined toward the Themes; mustn’t forget poor Faustinus, who’d always done his best to be my friend, though his best, like mine, really wasn’t worth dogshit. I thought some more, but those were all the names I could come up with. Probably I’d forgotten someone, like I always do, and I’d kick myself later, when they were dead. What I should’ve done, of course, was write a list. Too late for that now. Ah well.
The front rank of ships, twelve of them, had passed the line where the chain would have been, if we’d managed to raise the bloody thing. Even if there was some miracle and the stupid thing suddenly came soaring up out of the water like an angry dragon, there were enough marines on those twelve ships to clear out the winch-houses and slaughter everyone inside them. It was over. God forgive me, I felt relieved.
