The Escapement e-3

by K. J. Parker

  Everything went well. All five units were able to approach without being seen, thanks to the cover of the farm buildings. Squads one, two and three surrounded the sheds, burst in and killed all the men in just over three minutes. Simultaneously, squad five barred the doors of the main house and set it on fire, while squad four secured the herd. Squads two and three broke into the barns and loaded as much grain and hay as they could fit on the farm carts, while squad one skirmished the rest of the buildings, picking out half a dozen Cure Doce who happened to be there. The buildings were set alight, a prize party was detailed to take the cattle, grain and fodder back to the main camp as quickly as possible, and the squadron re-formed to move on to the next target. The whole operation was completed in just under the hour.

  As he repeated the procedure at six more farms on the first day-he was so far ahead of schedule that he found he had time to fit in an extra raid-he rotated the duty assignments so that nobody had to take part in more than one attack. He himself was the only exception; in all seven raids, he insisted on leading the main strike force himself. By the time they camped for the night, carefully hidden away in a wood on the slopes of a deep combe an hour's ride from the last farmstead, the Ducas had personally killed seventeen men, nine women and seven children. That night, he dreamt that she was standing over him as he slept; he was standing off to one side, looking at her as she stared down at him, lying huddled on the ground, his head under the blanket.

  She said: Why?

  You wouldn't understand, he said. It's all to do with duty.

  Don't give me that, she said. All your life, you've protected the weak and the defenceless: your tenants, the people of Civitas Eremiae, the refugees after the city fell, when you led the resistance. Now you've turned into the enemy you spent your life fighting. Why?

  Duty, he said. I'm an officer of the Alliance. I have my orders. And I can't tell anybody else to do something horrible and evil if I'm not prepared to do it myself.

  She said: that's not the real reason.

  No, he admitted. It's a valid reason, or at any rate a valid defence to a charge of monstrous inhumanity. But it's not the real reason.

  She repeated the question: why?

  Because I want to, he said. Because each time I carve into a neck tendon or chop open a skull, it gives me pleasure, and it's permitted by the proper authorities, I'm allowed to do it. I've fought so long on the opposite side and I've always lost; it's a pleasure to be on the winning side for a change.

  She said: you can't lie to me, Miel, we've known each other too long. Is that the real reason?

  He thought before he answered: I don't know. I think it might be, but I'm not sure. It could be that I hate myself so much, and this is the most effective way of hurting myself I can find; to become the thing I hate the most.

  She said: that seems more likely. But is it the real reason?

  He thought some more, and said: it's the duty of the Ducas to help his friends and hurt his enemies. These people are my enemies, because my orders say so.

  She said: your orders came from that freak Daurenja. He sees nothing wrong in rape and murder. Your duty is to protect the weak and the defenceless.

  He saw himself stir in his sleep; a movement of the arm, as if trying to push something away. He said: my duty is to the Eremian people, who are part of the anti-Mezentine Alliance, whose leader was attacked and nearly killed by these people. It is essential that such a grave crime should be punished.

  She said: that's not the real reason.

  True, he conceded. All right, then: when I was with the scavengers, and then later, when I was killing and robbing soldiers just to feed myself and you…

  (She frowned, but didn't interrupt.)

  … when I was doing all that, it wasn't for duty or politics or in a just cause in a just war. I was a predator, killing to live. Now, you know what happens when a fox gets inside a henhouse. He can't help it, it's his nature.

  She said: you know you can't lie to me, not after all these years. Is that the real reason?

  He said: I'm not sure, but I think it might be.

  As he woke up, he saw a man standing over him, looking worried. He recognised him as the sergeant of the troop he'd led on the last raid. "Are you all right?" the sergeant asked.

  "Of course," Miel replied. "Why shouldn't I be?"

  "You were screaming," the sergeant replied.

  The next day they destroyed eight farms; the day after that, seven more. There would have been time for an eighth, but during the killing, a man managed to stab the Ducas in the thigh with a hayfork. The wound was deep but clean, missing the major blood vessels, and the Ducas tried to make light of it, but his senior staff insisted that he should rest and let the surgeon clean it up and dress it.

  "It should heal just fine," the surgeon told him. "Unless you insist on exerting yourself and opening it up again; in which case, you'll lose blood, and that'll make you weak, and you won't be able to do your job. What you need," he added firmly, "is rest and sleep."

  That made the Ducas laugh. "Actually," he said, "I've been having trouble sleeping."

  "I can give you something for that," the surgeon said.

  Whatever it was (he didn't like to ask), it worked; and when she came and stood over him that night, he could see her but wasn't able to make out what she was saying, and after a while she went away. That was good, except it meant he was left alone with Orsea.

  How long have you been here? Miel asked.

  I've been here all the time, Orsea replied. I go with her wherever she goes. Actually, it's embarrassing, now she's married Duke Valens.

  It must be distressing for you, he said, watching them together.

  Yes, Orsea said. But he has a better right than me. She loves him, you know. She never loved either of us.

  Orsea turned to walk away, then hesitated. He asked: why?

  Because I want to, Miel said. Because Jarnac hunted wolves and foxes and all the scavengers and predators in the forest, but now he's dead, so there's nobody to stop me. And they always gave me duties I was never able to perform, because I was too weak or too stupid, but this is something I can do really well.

  You're screaming again, Orsea said. You'd better wake up, before you disturb the whole camp.

  So he woke up and looked round, and Orsea was nowhere to be seen; but for several minutes he felt sure that he was there somewhere, behind the armour stand or under the bed, like the adulterer in a farce. Then he told himself: get a grip, Orsea's dead, Valens had him killed, and that wasn't your fault, either. Even so, when he breathed on the polished steel of his breastplate, which he used as a shaving mirror, he had the strangest feeling that the face he could see was not his own but Orsea's, toad-belly white where the blood had drained from the severed neck veins; and he thought, yes, but why Orsea? Why not one of the hundred or so innocent civilians I've murdered over the past few days, or one of the soldiers I killed for his boots, or even some Mezentine I dispatched in the war?

  They let him ride, because they couldn't stop him, but they wouldn't allow him to go with the raiding parties. He had to stay behind with the main cordon, watching for the first plume of black smoke; it made him feel like he was a small boy, being punished for something.

  He gave up taking the sleeping medicine, and that stopped Orsea from following him around. He still had dreams, but instead of talking to him, she just looked at him and shook her head sadly, as if to say, I knew you'd end up like this. It had become the fashion for the artillerymen's wives to bring them their lunch up on the embankment, and to sit with them watching the enemy sappers digging the approach trenches. They were getting closer, and occasionally a man who wanted to show off would string his bow and shoot an arrow or two at the lead sapper as he poked his head and chest up out of the trench to move the shield trolley and place the front gabions. Some of the artillerymen were getting quite good-there was plenty of time to practise, now that they'd given up on the bombardment, and precious little el
se to do-and once or even twice a day, an arrow would hit the target; the head would slump forward, until the dying man's wriggles dislodged him and he slid back down into the trench. The lucky archer got free drinks all evening. The enemy never shot back. But when the trench came close enough for the artillerymen to catch the occasional word of what the enemy were saying, the lead sappers took to wearing monstrous full-face close helmets and breastplates, which the arrows couldn't penetrate. The scorpion crews were under strict orders not to shoot at them (nobody knew why), so the lunchtime sniping stopped and they started playing backgammon instead. Even then, the wives used to say that the enemy were getting worryingly close, and shouldn't Chairman Psellus be doing something about it? To which their husbands replied, explaining patiently, as men do to women, that it really didn't matter, since there was no way on earth they'd be able to get past the flooded ditch, and that was all there was to it. Scouts told General Daurenja that the worms were coming two days before they actually arrived. He'd sent observers out to keep watch for them; as soon as anybody spotted the dust from their wheels, they were to flash a mirror to the rear observation post on top of the ridge, who'd light a beacon. When the tiny orange glow eventually appeared, Daurenja went in person to inspect the progress of the machine trench. He wasn't satisfied, and issued an ultimatum; he also added another shift to the rotation. By the time the worms came into view from the ridge top, the trench was no more than seventy yards from the edge of the flooded ditch, which the general said was close enough. He then tripled all the work parties assigned to it, and set them to deepen and widen it, and to dig a number of spur trenches down on to the flat. To cover them, he ordered the general bombardment to resume. When the Mezentines returned fire, he noted with satisfaction that they were now shooting baskets filled with broken bricks, instead of finished shot. When they told him that the bricks made extremely effective missiles and casualties in the digging parties were high, he didn't seem particularly interested. Nor did he seem concerned when they told him that Duke Valens had come with the worms, though it was held to be significant that he sent for all the senior Aram Chantat officers, and met them in his tent for over an hour. There was no point in worrying about it, they kept telling him. They'd considered the matter very carefully. They'd consulted all the available literature on the subject, and questioned representatives of the Architects', Cabinetmakers' and Stonemasons' Guilds. Having examined the evidence, they'd taken a vote on it and found by an overwhelming majority that the flooded ditch couldn't be crossed in the time available to the enemy.

  Psellus raised his eyebrows. "You voted on it," he repeated.

  Dorazus of the military engineering subcommittee nodded gravely. "Seventeen to two," he said, "with one abstention. So you see…"

  Psellus rubbed the corners of his mouth with forefinger and thumb. "You voted on it. Thank you, that certainly puts my mind at rest. Please tell the subcommittee that I'm greatly obliged to them for their efforts."

  Dorazus went away, taking his papers and his diagrams with him, though he left the exquisitely detailed scale model behind. Psellus sat staring at it for several minutes after he'd gone; then, quite tentatively, he reached out his hand and scratched gently at the edge of the miniature embankment. A few flakes of green-painted plaster fell away, leaving a white scar.

  He sighed, and opened the book. He'd marked the page with a scrap of paper torn off the corner of some report.

  To cross a flooded ditch, he reminded himself, the usual method is to construct a siege mound directly overlooking the ditch at its narrowest point, or, where more expedient, at the point at which it is most advantageous to cross. Sappers then undermine the base of the mound, causing it to subside into the ditch, filling it. Where necessary, firm standing can be provided to cross the filled section by nailing planks to long ropes, which are then rolled up. A special machine (see Appendix Twenty-Six) is used to roll them out again.

  A siege mound. He did some calculations, using brass counters on a chequerboard. No, they wouldn't have time for that; and besides, if that was what they had in mind, why hadn't they started it already? Instead, as far as he could make out from the reports, they were deepening the wide, broad trenches, which suggested an attempt to drain the ditch and carry the water away into the slight dip at the base of the ridge. That, however, would be impossible; it would take the sappers far too long, they'd be vulnerable to mangonel and scorpion fire, and even if they succeeded, they'd be swept away and drowned when the water broke through; surely even the savages weren't fanatical enough for that. So, Dorazus and his subcommittee were quite right. There was no way it could be done. If he'd been at the meeting, he'd have had no choice but to vote in support of the motion.

  He picked up his pen, dipped it in ink and wrote on a piece of scrap paper:

  Allow three days for breaching/crossing/filling in the flooded ditch.

  Because he knew they'd do it, somehow; and then they'd face the embankment itself; which they'd sap and undermine. Allow days for sapping the embankment. He frowned at the space he'd left blank, then turned back through the pages of the book.

  There wouldn't be time. Surely they understood that. Undoubtedly they had some plan for coping with the flooded ditch; their preparations told him that, even though he couldn't figure out what they were planning to do. But once they were past the ditch, they had to get through, or over, or under the embankment before they could get at the walls, and there was no way they could achieve that in the time available to them…

  A thought occurred to him, and he made way for it politely. Reports said that the allies were plundering farms in the Cure Doce country, on the pretext of punishing them for the attack on Duke Valens. Wagons loaded with food and hay had been seen coming down the border road. Would these extra supplies extend the time available to them to any significant degree? His fingers paddled the brass counters across the chequerboard, and he frowned. Answer: no. The simple fact remained that the allied army presently camped on and behind the ridge consumed in a single week more than the three adjoining Cure Doce counties were capable of producing in a year.

  Assault, he said to himself; a straightforward, brutal attack, with scaling ladders, siege towers, similar primitive equipment. Suppose they sent a hundred thousand men (he couldn't visualise that many people all in one place) to carry the embankment by storm. He found the place in the book where the author set out a clearly tabulated ready-reckoner. To carry a defended position by storm. (His finger traced along the line.) Light or heavy defences; well, say light, for the sake of argument. That gave him a multiplication factor of forty, reduced by thirty per cent (untrained or poorly trained defending army). He did the calculation. No, not possible. According to the tables, twenty thousand defenders entrenched on the embankment, poorly trained but equipped with short-and medium-range artillery, should be able to resist an assault by up to two hundred and thirty thousand attackers; projected casualties for an army of a hundred thousand, assuming the assault wasn't abandoned until the losses reached the point of critical perceived failure (there was a complicated equation to find this, but as a basic rule of thumb, say fifteen per cent losses in eight hours or less), between twenty and twenty-six thousand for the attackers, no more than fifteen hundred for the defence…

  Psellus closed his eyes. He didn't for one moment doubt the accuracy of the tables, but how on earth did the book's author know these things? It could only be that, at some time in the past, so long ago that nobody remembered them any more, there had been sieges of great cities; so frequent and so commonplace that scholarly investigators had been able to collate the data-troop numbers, casualty figures-and work out these ratios, qualified by variables, verified by controls. The cities, the men who'd lived in them, had been forgotten for so long that nobody even suspected they'd ever existed. The only mark they'd left behind was the implication of their existence, to be inferred from the statistical analyses in a manual of best city-killing practice. Extraordinary thought. There were peopl
e who held that certain kinds of stone weren't stone at all, but the compressed bones of innumerable billions of fish, crushed into solid blocks by the weight of the sea. He didn't actually believe that; but suppose the book was the only residue left by the death of thousands of cities, each one of them as huge and arrogant in its day as the Perpetual Republic-the Eternal City of this, the Everlasting Kingdom of that, squashed down by time and oblivion into a set of mathematical constants for predicting the deaths of men in battle.

  So what, he thought; all that told him was that the real enemy wasn't General Daurenja or the Aram Chantat, but war itself, a truth so profound as to be completely useless. Even so, something had snagged in his mind, like a bramble on a sleeve, and he wondered what it could be. Curious, he glanced over the tables once more, until suddenly he saw it, and was immediately paralysed by its implications.

  Light and medium artillery; and in the earlier chapters of the book there were detailed descriptions of each class of engine-the light field engines, such as scorpions, springalls and torsion rock-throwers; the medium engines, mangonels, onagers, the heavy springalls and lithobales; the heavy engines, such as the trebuchet. When he'd first read it, he'd been pleased and impressed-the engines in the book are just like the ones we use now, he'd told himself, so the data in the book is still useful and relevant. Now, it stunned him that he could have missed such a devastating point so completely; because the engines described in the book weren't just similar to the Guilds' approved types. Apart from a few inconsequential details, they were the same. But the book wasn't Mezentine; it had been translated by a Mezentine, two hundred years ago, from a very old manuscript, written by some foreigner belonging to a city and a race that had completely disappeared. In which case, the designs, the specifications, were hundreds of years old, quite possibly thousands; in which case, the Guilds hadn't created them, they'd simply copied them from somewhere else. True, there was a special dispensation for military equipment; but that wasn't enough to prop up the gaping sap that suddenly threatened to undermine his entire world. The Guilds hadn't created these specifications; they were the work of foreigners, savages, who'd achieved perfection at some point in the obscure past, long before the Mezentines had even left the Old Country. In which case…