by K. J. Parker
City Prefect Hunfort then set out the sub-committee’s proposals for the victory games, which would be the core event of the celebrations.
On the first day, to highlight the glorious achievements of the Imperial military, there would be a grand procession of the Imperial guard, starting at Northgate, down Three Acre to Florian’s Column. The Guard would then perform a mock battle in the Perfect Square, with incidental music provided by the orchestra of the Lesser Studium. Soldiers from the Home regiments would then compete in a full day of athletics, to include running, jumping, wrestling in full armour, timed and freestyle javelin, armed combat in the pit, man-against-horse racing and mounted relay through obstacles. The day would conclude with a display of patriotic dances and the execution of war criminals and dissidents. The second day would be given over to a festival of theatre and music, staged in the courtyard of the Blue Star temple; dramatic companies and choirs from all parts of the empire would compete for a 1,000 solidi prize, to be awarded by a panel of judges made up of the faculty of the Lesser Studium and the regency council. In the evening, there would be a grand outdoor service of intercession for the health of the emperor, concluding with the beheading of the Great King of the Sashan (admission by ticket only). The main event would be reserved for the third day; a re-enactment of the great naval victory of Grain River, to be held on an artificial lake in the middle of the City, with at least a dozen full-size replicas of Second Kingdom warships crewed by condemned prisoners. The festivities would conclude with a banquet and reception at the palace for selected dignitaries, and a Five Thousand Feast—five thousand pigs and five thousand hogsheads of beer—in the Perfect Square for the populace at large, culminating in a scattering of largesse, say 5,000 solidi in gold quarters, by various elected officials.
“It’s a lovely idea,” someone said. “But where in God’s name can we dig a lake in the centre of Town?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” replied Chancellor Maerving. “We temporarily divert the river at Eagle Bridge. The water will follow the course of the old canal and flood about two-thirds of Westponds. We clear the rest for stands and seating areas, stalls, what have you. A couple of days work and you’ll have your lake, at minimal cost.”
Silence. Then Aimeric said, “Excuse me, but that district’s all residential, isn’t it?”
Maerving smiled. “You could call it that, I suppose. I prefer the term ‘slums’. That’s the other good thing about this plan. Once the water drains off, we can go in there and start redeveloping from scratch. I mean to say, that whole end of Town’s a disgrace. Should’ve been cleared out years ago. The only people who live down there now are the immigrant workers—” He looked up at Aimeric and grinned. “Your lot,” he said, “the savages. Well, you won’t be needing them any more, now you’ve gone up-market. It’s not like they’ve got roots here. In fact, it’s a nice, strong hint to them to go back where they came from. Now we’ve got all those poor devils from Mondhem and the north coast, we’ve got all the unskilled labour we need. We can build cheap housing for them in Westponds. It’ll be a lasting legacy of the victory games—damn sight more use to the City than a racetrack or an auditorium.”
“Legacy Park,” said the archdeacon. “Nice ring to it.”
“Yes, or Victory Estates,” Maerving replied. “Anyway, I can’t see there’s anywhere else we could put a lake, what with commercial property as it is at the moment. You go and ask the Merchant Venturers if they’d mind us flooding Cornmarket and see what sort of an answer you’d get.”
“Who owns all that land?” Carloman asked.
“It’s nearly all ecclesiastical property,” Hunfort replied, with a glance at the Archdeacon. “Golden Spire, the Studium, the College of Arms, North Inn. I don’t see any objection coming from that quarter.”
“You’d be doing us a favour,” the Archdeacon said.
“The City would, of course, be happy to discuss the terms of a joint venture for redevelopment,” Hunfort said smoothly. “Good investment for both of us. Rented accommodation for hard-working skilled manual workers. Safe as houses, literally.” He looked back at Aimeric. “Sorry, were you about to say something?”
Aimeric hesitated, then shook his head, then added, “Have you got a timescale in mind? Presumably the tenants down there will have to be given notice to quit.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Hunfort said. “I imagine they can clear out fast enough. I mean, it’s not like any of them own anything they can’t carry with them when they leave.”
“More to the point,” put in Commissioner Astigern, “where are we going to get a dozen Second Kingdom warships from? And if anyone says build them from scratch—”
“Not a problem,” Carloman said. “Calojan saw to that, bless him. Guess what he came across when he captured the loot the Sashan took out of Coal Harbour? One dozen full-scale replica Second Kingdom quinquiremes, in kit form, stolen from one of the fancy upmarket shipyards. Apparently they’d made them for some nut in the Vesani Republic who wanted to play at sea battles on the lake in the grounds of his country estate. They’re official war loot now, of course, so we don’t have to pay for them. All we need do is cart them back here and put them together. That’s what gave me the idea in the first place.”
Just when he was starting to think he was in real trouble, Raffen managed to get two days work on the Games, uncrating and assembling the ships. Later it turned out that Prusimand, who’d been one of the foremen at Peguilhans and was now shift leader with one of the Games crews, had told the boss there what a good worker he was and how he could turn his hand to anything. Accordingly, he was summoned to the site office, where a tall, thin, very young clerk asked him if he knew anything about shipbuilding.
Raffen smiled. “I ought to,” he said. “I worked for my uncle for fifteen years, and he was the best shipwright north of the mountains.”
“Oh.” The clerk looked confused. “I thought it was all landlocked up there.”
“We do have rivers,” Raffen explained patiently. “Great big ones. Furs, hides, grain, all that, it’s got to go downriver on barges.” He tried to remember; he’d seen a freight barge once, when he was a boy. “I was on laying keels, mostly. Got to get that exactly right, or the whole job’s screwed.”
The clerk nodded. “In that case you may be overqualified, if anything,” he said. “We’ve got all the shipyard workers from Mondhem and Coal Harbour in Town queuing up for work. All I’m looking for is people who can knock a peg in straight.”
“I can do that,” Raffen said confidently.
He went back to Westponds and told her he’d got a job. She smiled at him, for the first time in days. “Doing what?” she asked.
“Carpentry,” he replied. “On the Games.”
“Oh. Not a permanent job, then.”
He shrugged. “It’ll do for now,” he said. “I can look around for something better.” He rested his hand on her shoulder. “That’s what I like about this place,” he said. “There’s always work for a man with the right skills.”
She didn’t look convinced. “Pity you’re not a foundryman,” she said. “They’re hiring at the bell foundry.”
He made a mental note of that. A foundry is where they melt metal and pour it into moulds. Should be able to do that.
“They came round for the rent today,” she went on. “It’s gone up.”
He frowned. “You had enough?”
She nodded. “Just about. It’s up sixty trachy.”
“We should find somewhere else,” he said. She gave him a startled look and didn’t reply.
Working on the ships was no trouble. They had skilled men who knew what to do; all he did was carry lengths of timber, hold them steady, occasionally knock in a wedge or a peg. He watched carefully, figuring out how a ship was constructed, what went where, the technical terms they used. The job got behind and he was needed for a third day. The next morning (he hadn’t told her the job was finished) he walked down t
o the shipyards. He strolled for an hour, looking around, taking note. Then he went up to a man he’d identified as some sort of boss. “Excuse me.”
The man (short, square, neck as wide as head) frowned at him. “What?”
“They say you’re looking for skilled men.”
The man shook his head. “Not here, son.”
“Oh. This is the White Boar yard.” He’d asked someone the name out in the street.
“That’s right.”
“Fine. Sorry, I must’ve got the wrong end of the stick.” He turned his head slightly and made a show of watching three men nailing on strakes. Something wasn’t quite right. Lucky. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but your spacing’s a bit wide, isn’t it?”
“You what?”
“Those blokes down there,” Raffen said. “They’re spacing the nails, what, two foot apart. Where I come from, we nail every eighteen inches.”
“So do we.”
“They aren’t.”
The man shifted and followed his gaze. He waited patiently for five seconds or so, then added, “Place I used to work, the lads had a scam. Nail every two foot, keep back the leftover nails and sell them down the lumber yards. They made a bob or two, over time. Not a good idea, though. More chance of the strakes springing under heavy flex.”
“Bastards,” the man said. “I’ll have them for that.” He hesitated. “Where did you say you’re from?”
“Oh, all over,” Raffen replied. “North-west, originally. But I was in Coal Harbour, Mondhem before that, bunch of other places. I’ve just finished working on a job for the victory games. They brought me in to help with assembling those old warships.”
Something was moving inside the man’s head. “Someone told you there was a job here?”
Raffen nodded. “Stetigern,” he said. “Supervisor. I expect you know him.”
(A safe bet. There was indeed a Stetigern who’d overseen the assembly work; a very grand man in clean clothes who paced up and down pointing out mistakes to the foremen.)
“Oh, I know him,” the man said, slightly uncomfortably. “Big pal of the boss. Come to think of it,” he said abruptly, “they do need another pair of hands frame-laying.”
“That’s handy,” Raffen said. “That’s what I did at Coal Harbour.”
It was touch and go for a while; much harder than anything else he’d done, and some of his early mistakes made the foremen angry. By the end of the day, though, he’d more or less got the hang of it, and the pay was twenty trachy more than he’d been getting at Peguilhans. Even so, he decided he’d better look around for something else.
He stayed late to finish off what he’d been doing—they liked that, he’d found, and it wasn’t as though he had anything else to do. As he was putting the tools back on the racks, the foreman walked up.
“Been watching you,” he said. “You do things a bloody funny way sometimes.”
“Do I?”
“Say this for you, though, you stick at it.” He lowered his voice, though there was nobody else in the huge, echoing shed. “You said you were on building the ships for the victory games.”
“That’s right.”
“Live down Westponds, do you?”
“Yes. How did you—?”
The foreman gave him an odd look. “Lucky guess. Look,” he went on, his voice now almost a whisper, “you do know what they want those old ships for, don’t you?”
“That’s stupid,” she said. “We just paid the rent.”
He told her again. “We need to find somewhere else straight away,” he said, “before the others find out and start looking. You know what this city’s like. As soon as there’s demand, they’ll jack the rent up.”
“But there isn’t anywhere else.” She stopped and gazed at him. “You do know that, don’t you? We aren’t allowed to live anywhere else.”
Flooding the Westponds district proved to be, in the words of the Prefect’s chief engineer, a piece of cake. Two rows of forty five-foot-diameter piles were driven into the river-bed, using a triphammer mounted on a grain barge. Nets of bricks were hoisted up on barge-mounted derricks and dropped between the rows. It wasn’t enough to dam the river completely, but it sufficed to raise the water level enough to breach the judiciously weakened embankment walls at Cutlers Cross, sending a torrent of floodwater down the Old Cut. After forty minutes, the nets of bricks were lifted out again; the river subsided to its usual level, the embankment was repaired and reinforced. The piles were removed by the simple expedient of tethering fully-laden stone-floats to them and letting the current drag them out; the floats then carried on downstream to Florian’s Wharf, where the giant granite blocks were needed for the triumphal arch that the regency council had commissioned for the north end of the Perfect Square.
The engineers had judged it perfectly. The flood level stopped just above the junction of Milegate and the Tanneries, so that the rows of stakes the surveyors had driven in to mark the site of the lake were about a quarter submerged. Come the day, seepage would bring the level down a foot or so, which would be about right. Demolition crews moved in to tear down the tenements and slum housing between the Tanneries and Fletchers Row. Carpenters from the Imperial Engineers followed on to raise the stands and bleachers. Finally, at sunset on the third day of the operation, the twelve replica ships were hauled down Oldgate on rollers and launched on the newly-formed lake, as crowds threw flowers and the Court choir sang a cantata specially composed for the occasion.
The migrant workers evicted from Westponds were given the old gravel workings outside South Foregate as a temporary campsite, though it was anticipated that they wouldn’t be staying long. When District Representative Disimer raised the issue in the House, he was told that the City was paying the gravel consortium 750 solidi for the use of the gravel pits (which had been abandoned since the beginning of the War) but rents from the pitchholders were expected to exceed 125 solidi, so that was all right. Furthermore, the tenants would, in their own interests, clear out the gorse, briars, thorn saplings and other rubbish that had grown up there over the past seven years, so that when they moved on the site would be ready for development in accordance with the joint venture agreed between the gravel people and the City; a considerable saving in both time and money.
It would have ruined everything if it had rained; but the armies of black cloud that marched on the City early in the morning of the third day of the victory games were driven off by a courageous south-easterly wind. The Invincible Sun put in an appearance late mid-morning, as the crowds began making their way down Oldgate. By midday, every seat in the auditorium was full. The City Prefect and the ecclesiastical dignitaries arrived in gilded State coaches by way of the Ropewalk and Riot Lane, which had been closed to civilian traffic since dawn. Shortly afterwards, closed wagons arrived from the Bridewell, bringing the prisoners and undesirables who would be rowing the warships. The cordon of Imperial kettlehats drew in tight around the stadium, turning away late arrivals. The palace orchestra set up and began playing the overture. At noon exactly, when his brother the Invincible Sun was directly overhead, the emperor finally made his entrance, riding in Florian’s chariot, with a widow and a beggar standing behind him to remind him he was mortal. By proxy, of course; the emperor, though much improved, still wasn’t quite up to the exertion of a major ceremony, so his place was taken by Chancellor Maerving, wearing the chlamys and divitision but not the lorus. The chlamys was too big for him and the divitision was far too small; he was bright red in the face by the time he reached the royal box and was able to take them off without anybody seeing and clamber into his usual loose-fitting monastic robes.
As soon as the chancellor had saluted the people and taken his seat, the orchestra began to play the specially commissioned symphonic fantasy by Orderic now universally known as the Sea Battle Music. During the brief pause between the second and third movements, the six warships representing the Vesani fleet launched from their dock on the east side of the lake, follo
wed shortly afterwards by the Imperial fleet, emerging in column two abreast from their boathouse, formerly the Westmills public granary. As the third movement reached its stirring crescendo, the Imperial ships moved deftly from column to line to outflank the Vesani on the left—a slight liberty, since in the original battle it was the Vesani who outflanked the Empire; a more patriotic version of events had, however, been specified by the regency council. Lovers of fine music may find it hard to believe that on the occasion of its premiere, the glorious coda to the third movement would probably have been inaudible above the snapping of oars and the crunch of the rams, as the Imperials stove in the sides of the leftmost Vesani ships. Add the clash of steel as the Imperial marines boarded the stricken vessels, the shouts of the officers, the screams of the wounded and dying; it’s practically certain that the end of the third movement and the first forty bars of the fourth would have been entirely drowned out.
