The Escapement e-3

by K. J. Parker

  The Mezentines were spanning for a fourth volley when the enemy started shooting back. They shouldn't have been able to do that. According to all the best estimates, the enemy line was still over a hundred yards out of range. They were, after all, supposed to be using copies of the obsolete and superseded Type Twenty-One heavy trebuchet, Type Seventeen light trebuchet and Type Twenty-Seven mangonel. It was only when the sky suddenly filled with small hanging moons that it occurred to anybody that Ziani Vaatzes may have made some improvements of his own.

  Afterwards, the blame was placed squarely on the commissioners of the topographical and geological survey. They should have pointed out, it was held, that the enemy might be expected to have quarried stone for their shot from the limestone deposits at Veraiso, so conveniently adjacent to their predictable line of march. Given this important information, the ordnance and fortifications subcommittees would have known in advance that Vaatzes' engines would be likely to use smaller shot (because limestone was denser than the sandstone from the City quarries), which would fly faster, hit harder and-most important-shatter and disintegrate on impact into clouds of wide-dispersal shrapnel, liable to inflict serious casualties among closely packed groups of men. If only they'd known, the fortifications subcommittee could have specified more effective cover on the embankment-pavises, sidewalls of gabions and fascines, a half-roofed covered way. Casualties would still have been unavoidable, but the appalling carnage inflicted by the first and second allied volleys could certainly have been mitigated, possibly by up to forty per cent. Night fell, and the artillery captains could no longer see to aim. Finished round shot was too precious to be wasted on random bombardment. By torchlight, the Mezentines counted forty-six of their engines wrecked beyond repair, including nine of the fifty heavy trebuchets. A further twenty-eight were taken apart and carried back to the factory to be rebuilt. It was hard to establish the number of the dead, let alone identify them; a preliminary estimate, based on responses to an emergency roll call, came to a hundred and sixty dead, as many again too badly injured to resume their duties. Around midnight, the bombardment started up again. The allies were launching unshaped rocks at random, to disrupt the salvage and repair operations, damage the embankment and stop the defenders getting even a few hours' sleep. Repeated impacts on the same spot had the effect of scooping out large holes in the embankment; when dawn came, it looked for all the world as though it was infested with giant rabbits. Nothing could be done to repair the breaches, or prevent further deterioration as the disturbed earth settled.

  Chairman Psellus was awake when the messenger came. He received the news calmly, thanked the messenger and sent him away. As the door closed, the messenger saw him bend his head over a book, a little book which he shielded in his cupped hands, like a man cradling an injured bird. As soon as the messenger had made his report, General Daurenja called a meeting of the full general staff, including the Aram Chantat liaison and his entourage. Losses, he announced, had been heavy: thirty-seven engines destroyed, nine others likely to be out of action for a day or more. He'd budgeted, he told them, for fifty or more engines lost, so the damage was less than he'd anticipated. On the other hand, he'd hoped to have won the artillery battle by now, and it was quite evident that he hadn't. The continuing bombardment was very much a fallback option, since it meant that each crew would have to work a full extra shift; as well as the machines themselves, they'd lost ninety-two trained artillerymen killed or put of out action, which meant he'd had to commit all the standby crews. That would inevitably lead to a loss of precision and efficiency when the battle resumed tomorrow, but he felt he had no choice but to take that risk. The advantages of keeping the enemy under pressure outweighed the drawbacks, and he firmly believed that the stress and loss of sleep the night bombardment would cause would more than make up for his own crews' likely inability to function at peak efficiency. The Aram Chantat liaison was quick to voice his support for the general's immediate tactical judgement and broader strategic vision. He would see to it that Aram Chantat volunteers were available at dawn to take over the unskilled tasks-shifting and loading missiles, spanning windlasses and so forth-thus reducing the load on the trained Eremians and Vadani. He also took the opportunity to commend the general for the vigour, energy and resourcefulness with which he was prosecuting the assault.

  When the meeting broke up, the Aram Chantat went back to their tents; all but one of them, who took a horse and set off on the road to Civitas Vadanis. In spite of the danger, he took the border road, the same route Duke Valens had been following when he was attacked; the urgency of his mission outweighed the danger, and besides, there had been no reports of Cure Doce activity in the area ever since the ambush. He had memorised one message and carried another, written on a scrap of thin rawhide cut off the handle-wrapping of a broken bow. It read: Gace Daurenja to Ziani Vaatzes, greetings.

  You need to upgrade the Type Three; it hasn't got the range. Can you modify all the pieces you still have at the city and send them immediately. Also send more finished shot. When will the worms be ready? Send prototypes as soon as they're serviceable. The horesehair you've been using for the mangonel springs hasn't got the strength for the top setting. Use four plies instead of three; also send spares, since they've been breaking. Most important: get the weapon ready to ship. Box it up so nobody can guess what's in there, and send it with at least 2 squadrons Vadani cavalry escort. Things here are going well. GD.

  The verbal message was duly delivered to the Aram Chantat privy council. It made them very angry for a while. Then they calmed down and composed a reply.

  14

  The artillery duel resumed next morning, but the situation had changed. During the night, while their engines kept up their blind pounding of the embankment, the allies had built a wall of gabions and fascines in front of their artillery line, to protect the working parties-every man who could be spared from other duties-who now set about digging a bank and ditch to shelter the engines from the Mezentines' incoming fire. They worked with a speed that astonished the observers on the City embankment, who immediately stopped trying to pick off the allied engines and began dropping their shot into the dense mass of diggers and earth-shifters. It was, as one artillery officer said later, practically impossible to miss. Each shot was sure of killing two or three workers, and the Mezentines quickly found out that if they managed to pitch a shot on the rapidly rising bank itself, there was a good chance it would skip and skim, cutting a bloody channel through the teams of men wheeling barrows of spoil or shovelling earth into gabions. As soon as Chairman Psellus heard about this, he ordered the artillery captains to stop it and go back to targeting the engines themselves. The captains were extremely reluctant to obey this order; the diggers were much easier to hit than the engines or their crews, and they felt they were achieving something. It was only when Psellus himself appeared on the embankment and gave the order in person that they eventually complied.

  By mid-afternoon the bank was eight feet high, topped with a double line of gabions. It didn't provide a total defence, but it meant that the Mezentines now had to drop their stones directly on top of the engines in order to damage them, instead of being able to pitch short and either roll or skim their shot until it hit something. The allies, of course, had faced the same problem from the outset, but the fact that their shot tended to shatter on impact meant that although they rarely hit a machine, they were killing artillery crews at a rate which even the general expressed himself satisfied with. As he told the Aram Chantat liaison that evening, the Mezentines were manufacturers rather than soldiers; they could build new engines much faster than they could train men to use them, and so killing the trained men was a much more efficient course of action than merely smashing up equipment.

  After his meeting with the liaison, Daurenja sent for Colonel Ducas of the Eremian contingent. The messenger found him, after a long search, leading a party of stretcher-bearers. They'd spent the afternoon collecting the wounded from the bank site
, prising them out from under spent shot with beams ands crowbars. Miel himself had carried the axe and the saw, because a large number of them were pinned down by an arm or a leg; it wasn't a job he felt he could delegate. His knees were plastered with a putty of mud and blood, and he'd wrenched his back contorting himself as he tried to haul a paralysed man out from under a stone by his ankle and wrist. When the messenger found him, he said he was too busy to go; now that the bombardment had stopped, he said, they had to make full use of the time available to get as many wounded men out as possible. The messenger had to point out that it was a direct order from the commander-in-chief.

  He found Daurenja sitting on an upturned bucket outside his tent. He was grinding something with a pestle and mortar.

  "Colonel Leucas was killed in the bombardment," Daurenja said, looking earnestly into the mortar.

  "Oh."

  It wasn't what Miel would have chosen to say, but he was tired and frustrated at having to leave the work he knew he should be doing. Besides, Imbrota Leucas had been a pinhead, barely capable of blowing his nose.

  "I expect you knew him," Daurenja said.

  "Yes, of course. Actually, I never liked him much."

  Daurenja shrugged. "Obviously, we need to replace him as commander of the Eremian contingent. You know your own people; they need a Leucas or a Phocas or a Ducas to lead them or they won't do as they're told."

  Miel didn't grasp the implications of that straight away. Then he said, "I see."

  Daurenja looked up. "I'd have thought you'd have been the natural choice instead of Leucas," he said, "only you weren't around when Valens made the original appointment; and besides, I seem to remember there's some kind of bad blood between the two of you. Anyhow, that's not important now. I suggest you use the existing staff, at least until you've had a chance to pick people you're more comfortable working with. I'm afraid I'll be asking a lot of you Eremians before this siege is over."

  Miel looked at him, and thought: some kind of bad blood. "If I don't want the job, can I refuse?"

  "Of course." Daurenja was staring into his mortar again. "But I don't imagine you will. You have a duty to your people, and that matters far more to you than any personal issues between you and me. I gather you've been rescuing the wounded."

  "That's right."

  Daurenja nodded. "Nobody told you to," he said. "In fact, you'd been assigned other duties, a nice safe job out of the line of fire. But you disobeyed orders and did what you felt had to be done. Well, that's fine. I know I can rely on you. Besides," he added with a yawn, "I owe you something for saving my life that time. I do try and pay my debts."

  Miel frowned. "That's funny," he said. "The way I remember it, I tried to get Valens to have you hanged."

  "That's right. But before that, you kept my ex-partner Framain from bashing my head in with a rock. If you hadn't done that, I'd be dead." He shrugged. "I tried to pay you back for that by assigning you to a job away from where the shot was falling, but I should've known better. The way to reward you is to give you a chance to do your duty. That's the sort of man you are. I understand you, you see. If you could stop hating me for a minute or so, you'd see we're not that different. Only, your duty's to your people and mine's to my work. Otherwise, we're basically the same. So," he added with a weary sigh, "you'll take the job, because you don't really have a choice. That's how I do things, you see. It's a basic premise of engineering. Components run in precisely cut keyways until they meet a stop. Everything does exactly what it's supposed to do, because it has no choice."

  Miel thought about that for a moment. "Fine," he said. "Will it be all right if I get cleaned up first?"

  Daurenja nodded. "And I'd grab some sleep while you can, if I were you. In the morning, I've got a job for your people. Nothing unpleasant," he added, with a faint smile, "but quite important." Then he turned his head and shifted his back a little, so that Miel no longer existed and he was free to concentrate absolutely on the contents of the pot on his knees.

  The job turned out to be strenuous but simple: to collect, remove and pile up neatly all the finished round shot the enemy had fired at the allied line during the artillery duel. It was, the staff major explained, a marvellous windfall: thousands of rounds of precision-finished, Mezentine-made trebuchet and mangonel ammunition; hard, unlike the soft shit from the local quarries, and therefore exactly what they'd need for bashing down the City walls when the time came. The joy of it was (the major said) that the enemy couldn't reuse spent allied shot in the same way, since it smashed all to pieces when it pitched; every round, both outgoing and incoming, was a dead loss to them, whereas every shot that landed on or over the new bank was effectively profit. The duel continued all through the next day, but the rate of fire on both sides gradually subsided. Because so many of their artillerymen had been killed or wounded, the Mezentines were having trouble finding fresh crews for the machines at the end of each shift. Increasing shift length from three to five hours kept the machines in action, but the men were exhausted, and the rate dropped from six to two shots per machine per hour, until Psellus ordered that the batteries should be rested in rotation, since fewer machines firing faster and more accurately put more shots on target than all the available machines shooting slowly and missing. He was also deeply worried about the rate at which the ammunition was being used up. The stone-cutting plant, working flat out, could just about keep up with the demands of the artillery so long as their supply of rough-cut stone blanks held out. Once they were all used up, however, the only way to get raw material was to pull down buildings, break up the stone blocks and cart them to the shot factory; Psellus told the supply commissioners to press as many men and carts as they needed, but the sheer volume of carts in the narrow streets around the factory led to horrendous jams, which in turn held up the supplies of finished shot being sent to the embankment.

  The allies had similar problems. Daurenja was being careful with his finished shot, which was reserved for precision shooting at the enemy machines, since only perfectly round balls flew straight; the majority of his engines were throwing unshaped rocks and boulders, trying to batter down and collapse the parts of the embankment where the batteries were. This approach was proving successful, but he'd underestimated how much shot it took to dislodge enough earth to do any good. All the loose boulders and outcrop in the vicinity had been used up during the first night, and the quarrymen and carts that should have been making and shipping finished shot were busy with rough-hewn stuff; and even so, demand was outstripping supply. As a result, at sunset the bombardment stopped, giving the engineers a desperately needed opportunity to patch up the machines, which were starting to tear themselves apart under the stress of seventy-two hours' continuous use.

  Not that Daurenja was unduly worried. As he told the Aram Chantat, the artillery battle was a sideshow compared with the serious business of repairing and extending the approach trenches. Work on these had continued at an entirely satisfactory rate of progress throughout the artillery battle, while the enemy's attention had successfully been drawn elsewhere. Most important of all, the machine trench had not only been repaired but was now half a day ahead of schedule, and with any luck should be finished and ready for use by the time the worms arrived from Civitas Vadanis. Miel Ducas was woken up at dawn by the silence. He'd got used to the noise, and the way the ground shook every time a two-hundredweight stone ball landed, and the smell of disturbed earth, which reminded him of flying falcons on newly ploughed fields, at the very end of the partridge season. He'd been dreaming about that, in fact, remembering a day when he was-what, sixteen?-when he'd been invited out for Closing Day with the Count Sirupat and his guests; and she'd been there, looking very nervous on a tall, slim chestnut mare that spooked every time the falcon on her wrist fretted and flapped its wings. His dream was mostly just memory, except that every time he looked in her direction, her face was turned away, and he could only see the edge of her cheek.

  He woke up to find himself sitting
upright, the blanket tangled; and he noticed that the little spindly-legged table they'd issued him with for writing his reports on was still standing upright. Yesterday and the day before, it had been knocked down by the vibrations.

  He yawned, then winced, as he remembered that he'd hurt his back the previous day. Carefully he tried to turn his head: not good. That bothered him. Trivial aches and pains, that sort a civilian grins and bears; but anything that slows down a soldier or impedes his ability to move instinctively can easily prove more fatal than cholera.

  But we aren't going to be fighting anybody today, he told himself. Instead, we're picking up stones and piling them neatly; our contribution to the war effort. Oh yes, and I've been appointed supreme commander of the Eremian army.

  He looked at his armour, heaped up in the corner of the tent, and thought, the hell with it. There won't be any Mezentines roaming about on this side of the bank, and if I get hit by a mangonel ball, armour's not going to make any difference. For the sake of appearances he put on his padded aketon, but he left the ironmongery where it lay.

  The young captain (he'd been told the man's name twice, forgotten it, was too embarrassed to ask a third time) met him in the trench, as he made his way out to the artillery positions.

  "They've stopped the bombardment," Whatsisname said. "We won."