by K. J. Parker
The sergeant grunted. ‘You’d get on well with my youngest boy,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘Four years old and he never goes to bed before his mother. If you make him to go bed, he only waits till we’re all asleep and then gets up again. I caught him trying to light the lamp the other night - well after midnight, and he nearly burnt the house down. Four years old,’ he repeated, shaking his head. ‘By your reckoning, if he keeps at it he’ll be older than me by the time he’s thirty.’
Gorgas laughed. ‘You send him to me when he’s twelve and I’ll put him to work as my night clerk,’ he said. ‘No point in all that extra time going to waste.’
‘I’ll hold you to that,’ the sergeant replied.
The narrow quay of the factory island was already busier than usual. One of the first orders Gorgas had given when the news broke was for the stockpiles of arms and materials in the factories to be shifted up to the Town and every available ship and barge was being loaded up with bales and barrels, sacks, crates, jars and boxes. ‘Not a bad start,’ Gorgas commented, as they disembarked. ‘But we’re going to need to set up another shift, maybe two, and that’ll mean we’ll need more labour, not to mention materials. Then there’s transport, and storage too, of course. Fat lot of good it’ll do us having a cellarful of barrels of arrows here if we can’t find the barges to ship them a few hundred yards over the water to the city.’
‘Build more barges, then,’ the sergeant said. ‘Or you could requisition some of the cattle-boats.’
Gorgas shook his head. ‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘They’ll be too busy hauling timber and pig-iron from Colleon and the South. And as for building barges, I can’t spare the shipyard capacity. I’ve got ten commerce raiders to build and a couple of months to do it in, so the hell with building barges.’
The sergeant raised an eyebrow. ‘Commerce raiders?’
Gorgas nodded. ‘It’s about the only way I can think of to take the war to the enemy. That said, though, they may just find they’ve got themselves into something they can’t handle. Have you ever stopped to think what proportion of its population Shastel can feed from its own farmland? Twenty thousand people living on a rock are likely to get hungry if the grain-ships can’t get through.’
‘Good point,’ the sergeant said.
Gorgas stopped to let a cart laden with oxhides pass. ‘And their timing isn’t exactly wonderful, either,’ he went on, ‘declaring war when the early barley’s just coming up to being ready to cut. Catches fire easily at this time of year; believe me, I’m a farm boy, I know these things. We aren’t through yet, my friend, not by a long way. And those bastards up there in their castle might just learn a few things about what wars really mean that aren’t anywhere in their textbooks.’
The first visit on the itinerary was to the sawmill. It was fortuitous, to say the least, that Gorgas had insisted that Scona have its own top-class sawmill, and had cajoled his sister into parting with the money to build it. He’d based it on the sea-mills of Perimadeia, but the Scona version was bigger and rather more efficient. The tide surging up the narrow straits between the factory island and Scona trapped water in a system of weirs, which powered five enormous water wheels, in turn connected by a fabulously complicated array of gears and drives to the flywheels that dominated the sawmill itself. Ten huge circular blades, each one as tall as a man, ran day and night in the sawpits, while another feed powered the rollers that drew the logs into the blades. Three shifts of a hundred men, women and children loaded the rollers, took off and stacked the cut planks, cleaned out the mountains of sawdust and made sure the mill kept going. There were even two orderlies on duty at all times, to patch up cuts and pull out splinters for workers who weren’t careful or quick enough around the spinning blades.
‘I could stand here all day just watching,’ Gorgas shouted over the deafening noise. ‘When I think of how long it used to take us when I was a kid, fooling around with hammer and wedges, it makes me realise I’ve achieved something in my life.’
The mill foreman made a great show of being proud and honoured, which Gorgas completely ignored; instead, he immediately started talking about extra shifts, which stripped away the foreman’s jovial obsequiousness like raw vinegar stripping a pearl.
‘We simply haven’t got the capacity,’ he kept repeating. ‘All ten saws are fully occupied as it is, except when we stand down for an hour at night for sharpening and general maintenance. And we’ve got to do that, or they’d be scrap within a week.’
Gorgas shook his head. ‘That’s your department,’ he said. ‘I want output up by a tenth in three weeks. How you do it is up to you. Still,’ he went on, ‘if you want a suggestion, I couldn’t help noticing that you stop the blades for ten minutes or so after every cut length. Why’s that?’
‘To grease them,’ the foreman replied. ‘It stops them jamming and means we can go longer without having to sharpen them up.’
‘Fair enough,’ Gorgas conceded. ‘But can’t you keep them running while you’re at it? It only takes a few seconds to swab on the grease; the rest of the wasted time is stopping and starting the train.’
‘It’s a safety measure,’ the foreman replied. ‘I wouldn’t fancy smearing grease on those things while they’re running, would you?’
Gorgas nodded. ‘I can see you’d rather be here in the office, where it’s safe and quiet. And if you want to stay in here, I suggest you get me my extra ten per cent. Otherwise you’ll be out there with a pot of grease and a rag on a stick. Understood?’
Next they went to the burnishing shop, where a feed from the water wheel drove two massive circular mops, on which weapons and armour were given their final polish. Ten women and sixteen children were employed there, coating the items to be polished with grit in a base of runny wet clay and holding them on the wheels. The air was full of grit and dust, and Gorgas was glad to get out again after a perfunctory inspection, his eyes painful and watering. Nobody lasted very long in the burnishing shop.
‘We could close the whole thing down,’ the sergeant pointed out. ‘It’s only to make the stuff look pretty.’
Gorgas shook his head. ‘Shame on you,’ he said, ‘and you a sergeant. How can you bawl a man out for not being able to see his face in his helmet if the helmet’s not shiny to start with? You could undermine the whole basis of military discipline.’
After that they visited the tannery, another of Gorgas’ improvements on a Perimadeian original. The four main vats were as big as cottages, with scaffolding towers to support the cranes that lowered and raised the bales of hides. If anything, the atmosphere was worse than in the burnishing shop, and everybody who worked there had their faces muffled up in any piece of cloth they could lay their hands on. It was generally held that you could spot a tannery worker from the other side of the Square, because his arms were permanently black to the elbows; assuming, of course, the unlikely event of a tannery worker ever finding himself in Scona Square, among the cheerful stalls and strolling promenaders.
‘Our main problem is getting the materials,’ the foreman said. ‘You find me another ten tons of oak-bark a month and I’ll up production by a quarter. And using anything else is a false economy.’
Gorgas scratched his head. ‘That’s a lot of bald trees,’ he admitted. ‘Still, that’s my problem, not yours. What I need you to do for me is start producing stuff I can use for covering the hulls of boats; barges, mostly, and landing-craft for putting marines ashore on shallow beaches. You’ll need to talk to the shipyard masters about what’s needed. Pretty soon that’s going to be your top priority, so be ready.’
Gorgas toured the brass foundry, the armoury and fletching shops, the bowyers’ shop (where he joked with the foreman about having a brother who could use a place, if there was one going) and the ropewalk, and then it was time to head back to the city for a meeting with the treasury clerks. They were just as sullen and difficult as he’d anticipated; they had their orders from Niessa to make sure he didn’t spend a copper quarter more t
han was necessary, and they’d learnt by his own example that attack was the best form of defence. Before he could even begin setting out his requirements for building the commerce raiders they were querying his last set of accounts and telling him there wouldn’t be any money for new projects until he’d sorted out the waste in his present budget. He dealt with this obstacle by punching the chief clerk in the face, knocking him to the ground and breaking his nose; then he helped him up, gave him a bit of rag to staunch the bleeding and carried on the discussion where he’d left it. The clerks’ attitude improved substantially after that.
‘It’s not the things that are the problem, you see,’ Gorgas explained, as he and the sergeant crossed the city on their way to the barracks. ‘It’s the people. Sort out the people, and the people will sort out the things. And that’s all there is to it.’
As he’d expected, the mood in the barracks was ambivalent, the usual mixture of enthusiasm and terror that mobilisation brings to a standing army. There was scarcely any room at the butts; five or six men were shooting on each target instead of the usual two, and the red and gold rings were so clogged that there wasn’t room to squeeze another arrow in. Gorgas stopped to watch, and the chief instructor gave orders for a target to be cleared for him.
‘I’ll have to borrow a bow,’ he admitted. ‘I’m ashamed to say I haven’t got a decent one of my own any more, not since my old favourite broke.’
After that, of course, he was spoilt for choice; but he made a point of choosing the plainest standard-issue ash bow he could find, and a dozen issue bodkinheads straight from the barrel. The crowd gathered around him was so thick that he was amazed any of them could breathe.
‘Three up for sighters and then straight in,’ he announced, as he flexed the bow against his calf to string it. ‘That sound fair to you lads?’
A chorus of shouts assured him that it was. He picked up the first arrow, drew smoothly to the corner of his mouth, sighted low and to the right and loosed; the arrow struck a palm’s width high and on line, not bad for a first shot with a strange bow. He cleared his mind and concentrated, well aware that he had a fearsome reputation as an archer to defend, checking his stance and the length of his draw and calculating the allowance. The next arrow only just brushed the bottom left edge of the target-boss, however, and he changed his ideas; after all, he’d shot on impulse all his life, letting his eyes and hands think for him ever since he was a boy in the Mesoge. For his third sighter he simply drew, looked at the target and loosed without thinking, and the arrow landed plumb in the top left of the gold. He put nine more beside it as quickly as he could draw and nock, then unstrung the bow and handed it back to the instructor without a word, while the soldiers cheered themselves hoarse.
‘There you go,’ he said, ‘nothing to it. Now, if there’s anybody here who wants to tell me the issue bow’s a cross-eyed bastard, step right up. No takers? Just as well.’ He grinned, as if at some private joke. ‘I’m here to tell you, we make good bows on Scona.’
‘The first issue we have to address,’ said Avid Soef, ‘is ships. Agreed?’
At the far end of the enormous table, someone yawned. Over on the right, a very bald man whose name generally got left out of the minutes was eating a chicken leg, noisily.
‘No,’ replied Sten Mogre. ‘Absolutely not. Our first priority is an overall strategy, a game plan. Once we’ve got that, then we can start worrying about details such as ships.’
Soef glowered at him. ‘Ships are just a detail,’ he said. ‘I see. I suppose you’re planning to walk to Scona?’
Mogre smiled indulgently and folded his hands over his smooth, round belly. ‘Save it for Chapter,’ he sighed. ‘This is neither the time nor the place for the celebrated Soef wit. Thanks to you, we’re both in this mess up to our necks; if you want to have any chance of getting out of it in one piece, I suggest you lay off the cheap point-scoring and try to be positive. Obviously ships are an important detail; so are lines of supply, and communications, and battlefield tactics. In a war, everything’s important. What I’m saying is, begin at the beginning. Let’s start again, shall we?’
Avid Soef hesitated for a moment, then nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘My suggestion’s fairly self-evident, I reckon. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say.’
‘Thank you.’ Mogre leant across the table and drew the big chart towards him. ‘All right,’ he went on, ‘here’s the map of Scona.’ He jabbed at a corner with a sausagelike finger. ‘Here’s Scona Town. Point to bear in mind: it’s the only sheltered anchorage capable of receiving more than a handful of ships, so from that angle it’d be a good place to land. Against that, of course, it’ll be the most heavily defended place on the island. Looked at another way, if we’re going to win this war then sooner or later we’ve got to take Scona Town, either by assault or siege, and siege is out of the question unless we can maintain an effective blockade.’
Rehamon Faim, a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early forties, nodded vigorously. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later we’ve got to take them on at their strongest point, so why not sooner? The key phrase for this whole war, it seems to me, has got to be overwhelming force. There’s a point in any battle where, if you outnumber the enemy by a sufficient proportion, you can hit so hard and so overwhelmingly that there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it - smother the bastards, in other words - and that way you keep your losses to a minimum. Well,’ he added, ‘that’s how I see it, anyway.’
Avid Soef shook his head. ‘I’ve read the same books as you, Rehamon,’ he said, ‘and you haven’t quite got that right. In a land battle, on the flat and in the open, then yes, I’d have to agree with you. But an opposed landing on a defended position like Strangers’ Quay - that’s asking for trouble. Now, if you’d ever finished the book, you’d have read the bit where it’s explained how, in a bottleneck or defended-causeway scenario, too many is actually worse than too few; and I say that’s basically what a seaborne attack on Scona would be.’
Sten Mogre, who’d been pouring himself a drink, rapped the table for attention. ‘You’re both of you getting too far ahead,’ he said. ‘Scona Town’s obviously the key to this war, but it’s not the only potential beach-head, not by a long way. If you’d care to look at the map, you’ll see the other choices ringed in red.’
With a general scraping of chairs and hunching of shoulders, the committee studied the map. ‘You’re being a bit optimistic, aren’t’ you?’ said Mihel Bovert, the acting treasurer. ‘Some of these you’ve marked are just little coves, places you’d be hard put to it to land more than a fishing boat.’
‘I’m coming to that,’ Mogre repled patiently. ‘Here’s my point. Now, before I start, this isn’t a suggestion or a proposal, so there’s no call to go jumping down my throat. It’s a straightforward question. Which is going to be better, a single landing in force, or a number of simultaneous landings all round the island?’
Soef shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’ve obviously been mugging up on this, Sten,’ he said. ‘You tell us what you think.’
‘All right.’ Mogre resumed his comfortable sprawl. ‘Let’s just think for a moment about how the rebels fight. Quick word-association game: someone says Shastel, you say “halberdiers”. Someone says Scona, immediately you think “archers”. Right? So, we agree on that, now what we’ve got to do, the way I see it, is to organise this war so that halberdiers will be at an advantage over archers. And where are archers at their best? I’ll tell you what the books say - not me, the books, the people who know about these things. And they’ll tell you, archers are most effective when deployed defensively from a position of strength against a massed advance of the enemy across open ground.’
‘We know all this,’ interrupted Mihel Bovert. ‘Make your point.’
‘All right.’ Sten Mogre nodded pleasantly. ‘A massed advance of the enemy across open ground, gentlemen: that’s what we’ve got to avoid. And here’s where Avid’s point about numbers sometime
s being a handicap is important. When you’re marching down the throat of a line of archers, the more of you there are, the better their chance of hitting something; simple as that. Better to have smaller, more mobile assault units converging on the enemy from different directions; you make them divide their forces - and with archers, as everybody knows, there’s a magic ratio, somewhere between thirteen and ten to one, depending on distance between the armies and quality of troops. Once you go below the magic number, archers simply can’t stop a determined advance of heavy infantry. So, our aim’s got to be, split them up enough to take the individual units below that threshold. And we do that by dividing our own forces and making them do the same.’ He paused and looked round. ‘How are we doing so far? All agreed?’
Avid Soef did his best to look bored. ‘Like you keep saying, Sten,’ he said, ‘we’ve all read the books. All you’re really saying is, let’s use a basic encircling strategy. Common sense.’
Mogre smiled at him. ‘It looks that way, doesn’t it, until you look at the map. Look at the map, Avid. You see these brown bits, all round the edges? They’re mountains. Scona is basically one big mountain, with pockets of straight and level stuff scattered here and there. And when I was doing the first year of the course, they made me write out a hundred times, where there’s mountains, there’s problems. You know the sort of thing - ambushes, supply, communications, the right hand now knowing where in hell the left hand’s got to, basic stuff really. If we turn six thousand men loose in parties of a few hundred in the Scona hills, sprinkled all over the shop like handfuls of seedcorn, we’ll deserve what we’ll undoubtedly get. Are you following all this, or shall I go back?’
Avid Soef scowled impatiently. ‘Now what are you trying to say?’ he sighed. ‘First it’s Let’s divide our forces, now its We’ve got to stick together. Would you please make up your mind?’
