The Two of Swords, Part 2

by K. J. Parker

  When he’d finished, Jaizo looked at the result for a while, then said, “So we’re here and Belot’s here.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s bloody close.”

  Musen nodded. “Yes,” he said. “But how come you didn’t know? Captain Guifres knew where Spire Cross is.”

  “Guifres’ lot were dragoons,” Jaizo replied, as though that explained everything. “So, naturally, they got issued the good maps. That really is terribly close. I’d better tell the major. He’s not going to like it.”

  Major Pieres had enough on his mind already. Orders had been issued to all the units in Rhus to fall back on Beloisa. That should have been enough to give them the advantage in numbers. So far, though, nobody had come. It wasn’t hard to draw a conclusion from that, though nobody said it aloud.

  “But if he’s that close,” Egles theorised, “and he hasn’t come for us yet, and none of our lot’s shown up yet—”

  “There’s other explanations,” Musen said.

  “Right? Such as?”

  He came up with a few – Belot was having supply problems; the missing units had defied orders, or the orders had been superseded; they’d joined together and fought Belot out on the moors and beaten him; both Belot and the missing units were wandering about on the moor in the fog somewhere, hopelessly lost – and Egles was convinced enough to cheer up dramatically, but Musen wasn’t fooling himself. And what was the point of arranging a place on a ship, at God knows what cost, if there weren’t going to be any ships? And, if there were no ships, why hadn’t she known that? Or maybe she had.

  Finally the ships came.

  Marvellous. Thank God. But they weren’t troopships. They were freighters, loaded down with supplies and provisions for the siege. Thousands of barrels of flour, bacon, salt beef, salt fish, butter; hundreds of tons of oatmeal, in sacks; thousands of gallons of lamp oil, vinegar, birch syrup, honey; onions, dried peas, lentils, chickpeas; one ton of turmeric, for crying out loud, and a quarter of a ton of nutmeg. “There’s enough here to last for years,” Jaizo said, raising his voice over the thunderous rumble of rolling barrels.

  “Yes,” Pieres replied miserably. “Think about it.”

  Jaizo wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he got it. He immediately posted guards on the quayside and more guards on the ships, to catch stowaways. The roll was called four times a day. Musen was told to report to the guardhouse at the start of each watch. “Don’t take it personally,” Egles told him, but Musen was furious. They couldn’t have it both ways, he argued. If they wanted to order him about and condemn him to death by making him stay and be killed, they should at least have the decency to let him join up. If they didn’t want him, they should let him go. Simple as that.

  “Fine,” Egles said. “So desert. Go back to your lot. Bet you they’d be really pleased to see you, with what you could tell them.”

  “I can’t do that,” Musen snapped. “I can’t betray craftsmen. You know that.”

  Egles stared at him. “Really. You don’t mind screwing your own people, but not craftsmen.”

  “You don’t understand anything,” Musen said.

  Egles just laughed. “Get the rest of the barrels shifted,” he said.

  And rumours, of course. Scouts had gone out and found the battlefields where Belot had slaughtered the Fifth, Sixteenth, Ninth Auxiliary, the entire Southern Army, recalled from the far distant frontier to relieve Beloisa and intercepted somewhere on the high moor. Furthermore, the relief fleet, carrying thirty thousand regular infantry and two field artillery divisions, had been caught in a storm, or sunk by the enemy fleet, or both. The good news was that plague had broken out in Belot’s army and killed two men in three; his supply chain had been cut and he was starving; hundreds of his men were deserting every day; the Queen of Blemya had finally joined the war on the Eastern side, and was sending fifty thousand armoured cavalry on stone-barges—

  “But none of it’s true,” Musen protested.

  “Probably not,” Egles conceded. “But it makes people feel good. Like Temple.”

  Don’t go there, Musen told himself. “Who’s the Queen of Blemya?” he said.

  Scouts – real ones – reported a large body of men approaching the city from the east. They hadn’t been able to identify them for sure – you had to get uncomfortably close to do that, since both Eastern and Western regulars used basically the same patterns of kit – so they couldn’t definitely say whether the army was Belot or the missing friendly units. Pieres sent heralds, who didn’t come back.

  The supply freighters sailed home again. Musen hadn’t bothered trying to stow away; he’d have been caught, and things were bad enough already. Everyone else in the camp was working flat out on the reinforced defences, hacking stone blocks out of temples and municipal buildings, hauling them on rollers, lifting them into position on rickety improvised cranes; when Musen volunteered to help he was turned away, with or without courteous thanks. It’s because you’re one of the enemy, Egles explained helpfully. That made him much angrier than he’d thought possible, but he did his very best not to show it. A few ships appeared in the harbour: small, fast diplomatic couriers, which anchored well out to sea and sent their passengers ashore on launches.

  Pieres ordered the city’s four gates to be walled up solid. (“You know why, don’t you? It’s not to keep Belot’s men out, it’s to keep us in.”) To get blocks big enough, they dismantled the façade of the White temple, the oldest and biggest in Beloisa. Whoever was in charge of the operation did his best to shore the temple up with scaffolding, but there was only a limited supply of seasoned poles and beams, and the gangs working at the gates had priority. Without warning, the spire, bell tower and north portico of the temple suddenly collapsed, killing thirty men and completely blocking North Foregate, thereby cutting the city into two isolated halves. The granaries and water tanks were in the western half, which meant that three quarters of the garrison, working on the gates, had to go without water and food for the forty-eight hours it took to clear a way through the rubble.

  The main water tank sprang a leak. Normally this wouldn’t have mattered, since a tributary of the Los flowed in through a watergate in the east wall; but Peires’ crews had dammed the river to form a moat and walled up the watergate. The breach in the tank flooded one of the three principal grain stores before it could be found and stopped up, by which time the tank was nearly half empty. The cause of the breach proved to be damage to the foundations of the tank, caused by the collapse of the White temple.

  A fire broke out in the Tannery quarter. The district was deserted and there were no strategic stores there, but the intense heat cracked the west wall and made it subside; on investigation, it turned out that the fire had spread to an extensive network of cellars under a vintner’s warehouse, where empty casks were stored. These had burned out, setting fire to the wooden props supporting the galleries, which caved in; the displacement of earth made the whole wall shift six inches. Pieres’ men tried to shore it up with beams, but they didn’t have any long enough so they built three buttresses out of rubble and half-fired bricks from one of the city kilns. They partly collapsed during the night, and had to be done all over again with finished stone from the Hospital outbuildings.

  The scouts confirmed that the approaching army was General Belot, with approximately fifteen thousand men. The garrison numbered precisely seven hundred and thirteen.

  “These things always go the same way,” Jaizo told him. “It’s a set procedure, a sort of unwritten protocol. There were classes on it when I was at the Institute.”

  For some reason, Jaizo had started talking to him. He guessed it was because he was outside the chain of command. Since Jaizo always brought a bottle with him, and left what he hadn’t drunk behind, Musen encouraged him.

  “Go on.”

  Jaizo filled his cup. “Sure you won’t join me?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Wise fellow. Bad habit.” He sw
allowed half a cupful. “It goes this way. They launch an assault. If they get through, it’s all over; most of us will probably get it during the fighting, they’ll be so pissed off with the rest of us that they’ll slaughter us like sheep. So, we fight back like mad and drive them off. That’s stage one.”

  “I see,” Musen said. “What’s stage two?”

  “Investment,” Jaizo said. “They dig in round the walls, set up siege artillery if they’ve got any, start building it if they haven’t. Their sappers set about undermining the perceived weak points of our defences. If we feel like it, we can launch a sortie or two, to steal or spoil their food supplies or set fire to their siege engines. We don’t have to, but it sort of shows willing. Anyway, that usually lasts about ten days. Then we move on to stage three.”

  “What’s stage three?”

  Jaizo drank some more. “Terms,” he said. “They offer terms, we reject them. They come back with a better offer. We put forward terms of our own. We haggle a bit, and then we surrender. Depending on the deal we’ve struck, we get to leave the city with or without our arms, armour and regimental insignia, provisions for the march, escort and safe passage, etcetera. We go home, our commanding offer is court-martialled and hanged for cowardice, we get reassigned without blame, life goes on. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that’s what happens.”

  “I see. What if it doesn’t?”

  Jaizo shrugged. “There’s stages four through six,” he said. “Basically, they bombard us with rocks, dig under our walls and make them fall down, launch assaults with scaling ladders, rams and siege towers, that style of thing. Each time they have a go and we beat them off, there’s an opportunity to go back to stage three. Stage seven is where they make it through the wall, burst into the city, kill everything that moves and burn the place to the ground. But that’s pretty rare.”

  Musen was silent for a moment. “So Pieres—”

  Jaizo shook his head. “He knows the score,” he said. “It’s a fact of life; you live with it if you accept a garrison command. After all, the only alternative is stage seven, so you’re dead either way, only then you take hundreds of your mates with you. And, of course, the senior staff wouldn’t stand for that. If we thought he was thinking along those lines, we’d cut his throat.”

  Musen thought a bit more. “So if everyone knows the city’s going to surrender sooner or later,” he said, “why bother with all this? Why not just—?”

  “Give up straight away? Forget it.” Jaizo wiped his mouth. “You never know, the government back home might send us reinforcements, or there could be an outbreak of plague in their camp, or heavy rains washing shit down into their water supply, or they could be recalled and sent somewhere else. That’s what motivates the garrison commander to stay at his post, the one in a hundred chance of staying alive. Not very likely,” he conceded, “but you never know. That’s why we fight. Just in case.”

  “But usually—”

  “Usually, yes.” Jaizo poured a thimbleful into his cup. “The vast majority of these things end with surrender. Like, if the government back home really gave a damn they wouldn’t have let it come down to a siege in the first place. Or they don’t do anything because they can’t, because they haven’t got the men or the money.” He shrugged. “Slightly different here, because we were fooled; we thought it was a trick and we were wrong. Our only hope of keeping the city is if our Belot wins a really big one on the other side of the sea, and they have to recall their Belot to deal with him before he’s winkled us out of here. Not that it matters,” he added with a shrug. “We don’t actually want this godforsaken place, we only came here to open a second front and take the pressure off down south. It’s all just strategy and tactics, isn’t it?”

  This godforsaken place. The trouble was, Musen realised, he thought of it in those terms, too. The moor, waste, empty, useless; their Belot and our Belot, but which was which? He really didn’t want to be cooped up inside the city if there was a siege, neither soldier nor civilian, sideless. And another thing—

  “Can I ask you something?”

  This time, Jaizo was definitely drunk. Every day he went a little bit further; the previous evening, he’d brought two bottles, though he hadn’t actually opened the second. Tonight, he was a quarter of the way into it. “Sure,” Jaizo replied. “So long as it’s not troop movements, because then I’d have to kill you.”

  “The war,” Musen asked. “What’s it about?”

  Jaizo laughed. “Good question,” he said, and fell asleep.

  General Belot was building siege engines. Since Beloisa stood at the edge of the treeless moor, his only source of lumber was the joists, beams, floorboards and lintels of the handful of farmhouses scattered around the elevation where grass gave way to heather. The only way he could get nails was to burn them out of planks too rotten or warped to be useful; as for rope, he had a thousand men stripping and twisting nettles, of which the abandoned market gardens to the south-east furnished an ample supply.

  At least water wasn’t a problem, even though the garrison had deliberately cut itself off from the river; it rained non-stop for a week and all the tanks were full. Unfortunately, so were the gutters and the drains, and then the streets, and then the basements and cellars, including several that housed provisions and supplies. Forty-six miles of best flax rope were ruined in one night, engulfed in thirty tons of cement, earmarked for making good the damage soon to be inflicted by General Belot’s artillery. As for Pieres’ beautiful new moat, in places it was lapping up against the top of the battlements, and the engineers were frantically trying to figure out a way of draining it without flooding the whole city.

  He wasn’t in a good mood. They’d demolished his hay barn, where he slept – something about firebreaks in the heavily built-up zone next to the north wall, in case Belot bombarded them with incendiaries – and his blanket, pillow and spare clothes were now under three feet of compacted rubble. Also buried beyond recovery, though at different sites, was his stock in trade, but he couldn’t see how he could register a formal complaint about that.

  Having nowhere else to go, he decided to sleep in a temple. There weren’t quite so many to choose from as there had been; the Old, the New, the White and the Refining Fire had all been pulled down or collapsed, the Perpetual Grace was flooded and the Eastgate had been turned into a hospital for men injured during the building works. That just left the Reformed and the Mercy, and the Reformed, next door to a major granary, was alive with rats. Musen went to the Mercy.

  The door was locked, of course, but he didn’t even need to force the vestry window; someone had done it for him, and very neatly, too. He wandered into the nave, and saw with a degree of surprise that the Flame was still burning, its glare reflected in the gilded walls and polished marble floor, so that the nave was flooded with light to roughly the same extent as the street outside was flooded with water. That made him feel oddly comfortable and also rather guilty. It meant that, in theory at least, the fire god was still here, at His post, on duty; a good soldier, though Musen suspected that He was no longer in practical control of the situation. Nevertheless, he made a perfunctory grace, bobbing his head and patting the left side of his chest, the way kids do. At the same time he was thinking: there must be a big reservoir of lamp oil under there somewhere, enough for several days. Lamp oil was at a premium right now. Query: if he doused the flame and stole the oil, would he drive the god out of His own temple? Could he actually do that, evict the god, as though He was behind on the rent? Define rent, he thought.

  He went back into the vestry and found the chest where the priests stored their vestments. Good stuff, actual silk; you’d have thought they’d have spent out on a decent padlock. He gathered a heaped armful, went back into the nave and made himself a silk nest, like a caterpillar, in front of the fire, although the actual warmth it gave off was negligible. Our Father, he prayed, keep me safe, tonight and always.

  Two chasubles made a fairly effective pillow, and h
e was just slipping into a dream when he heard someone cough. The voluntary sort. He sat up. “Hello?”

  “That’s so sweet,” she said.

  “You.”

  She was wearing deep red, an extraordinary choice in a city under siege, where people instinctively tried not to be noticed. Maybe she’d looted the dress from somewhere; maybe she’d been caught in the rain and got soaked to the skin, and the red number was all she could find. Red, of course, is the proper colour for the fire priestess. A terrible thought struck him. “Are you—?”

  She grinned. “Actually, yes. At least, I’m ordained, but I’m not in offices. I sort of collect qualifications. They’re useful.” She changed the grin to a frown. “You’re pretty hard to find.”

  Her shoes, he couldn’t help noticing, were dry. “Am I?”

  Over her shoulder, he could see the main door. It was slightly open. Did that mean she had the key? “Yes, you are. I’ve wasted a good hour looking for you. Mind you, I should’ve thought of a temple to start with. You really do believe, don’t you?”

  An odd time to discuss religious conviction. “Yes,” he said, “of course.”

  She nodded, as though he’d given the right answer. “And when your friend Sergeant Egles insulted the pack, you hit him.”

  “Actually he hit me.”

  Shrug. “Same difference. You’re a good craftsman, and a true believer. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Country people have stronger faith, I’ve noticed that.” She’d produced his pack of cards, from somewhere. He tried very hard not to look at them. “It says in Scripture, you must not steal.”

  “I know.”

  “But you do.”

  “I’m not perfect.”

  “Do you try to be?”

  He thought about that; it was a good question. “Yes,” he said. “I fail, obviously.”

  “Lesson one,” she said. “Nobody’s perfect. To seek to attain perfection is to presume that you are capable of being equal in grace and substance with Him. That’s very bad. Don’t do it. Instead, you should confess your imperfections, to show that you regret them, and seek to make them good.”