Child of the River

Chapter Five The Siege

Yama lay awake long into the night, his mind racing with speculations about what Dr. Dismas might have discovered.

Something about his bloodline, he was sure of that at least, and he slowly convinced himself it was something with which Dr. Dismas could blackmail the Aedile. Perhaps his real parents were heretics or murderers or pirates . . . but who then would have a use for him—and what powers would take an interest? He was well aware that like all orphans he had filled the void of his parents’ absence with extreme caricatures.

They could be war heroes or colorful villains or dynasts wealthy beyond measure; what they could not be was ordinary, for that would mean that he too was ordinary, abandoned not because of some desperate adventure or deep scandal, but because of the usual small tragedies of the human condition. In his heart he knew these dreams for what they were, but although he had put them away, as he had put aside his childish toys, Dr. Dismas’s return had awakened them, and all the stories he had elaborated as a child tumbled through his mind in a vivid pageant that raveled away into confused dreams filled with unspecific longing.

As the sun crept above the ragged blue line of the Rim Mountains, Yama was woken by a commotion below his window. He threw open the shutters and saw that three pentads of the garrison, in black-resin armor ridged like the carapaces of sexton beetles and kilts of red leather strips, and with burnished metal caps on their heads, were climbing onto their horses. Squat, shaven-headed Sergeant Rhodean leaned on the pommel of his gelding’s saddle as he watched his men settle themselves and their restless mounts. Puffs of vapor rose from the horses’ nostrils; harness jingled and hooves clattered on concrete as they stepped about. Other soldiers were stacking ladders, grappling irons, siege rockets and coils of rope on the loadbed of the grimy black steam wagon. Two house servants maneuvered the Aedile’s palanquin, which floated a handspan above the ground, into the center of the courtyard and then the Aedile himself appeared, clad in his robe of office, black sable trimmed with a collar of white feathers that ruffled in the cold dawn breeze.

The servants helped the Aedile over the flare of the palanquin’s skirt and settled him in the backless chair beneath its red-and-gold canopy. Sergeant Rhodean raised a hand above his head and the procession, two files of mounted soldiers on either side of the palanquin, moved out of the courtyard.

Black smoke and sparks shot up from the steam wagon’s tall chimney; white vapor jetted from leaking piston sleeves. As the wagon ground forward, its iron-rimmed wheels striking sparks from concrete, Yama threw on his clothes; before it had passed through the arch of the gate in the old wall he was in the armory, quizzing the stable hands.

“Off to make an arrest,” one of them said. It was the foreman, Torin. A tall man, his shaven bullet-head couched in the hump of muscle at his back, his skin a rich dark-brown mapped with paler blotches. He had followed the Aedile into exile from Ys and, after Sergeant Rhodean, was the most senior of his servants. “Don’t be thinking we’ll saddle up your horse, young master,” he told Yama. “We’ve strict instructions that you’re to stay here.”

“I suppose you are not allowed to tell me who they are going to arrest. Well, it does not matter. I know it is Dr. Dismas.”

“The master was up all night,” Torin said, “talking with the soldiers. Roused the cook hours ago to make him early breakfast. There might be a bit of a battle.”

“Who told you that?”

Torin gave Yama an insolent smile. His teeth were of white bone. “Why it’s plain to see. There’s that ship still waiting offshore. It might try a rescue.”

The party of sailors. What had they been looking for?

Yama said, “Surely it is on our side.”

“There’s some that reckon it’s for Dr. Dismas,” Torin said. “That’s how he came back to town, after all. There’ll be blood shed before the end of it. Cook has his boys making bandages, and if you’re looking for something to do you should join them.”

Yama ran again, this time to the kitchens. He snatched a sugar roll from a batch fresh from the baking oven, then climbed the back stairs two steps at a time, taking big bites from the warm roll. He waited behind a pillar while the old man who had charge of the Aedile’s bedchamber locked the door and pottered off, crumpled towels over one arm, then used his knife to pick the lock, a modern mechanical thing as big as his head. It was easy to snap back the lock’s wards one by one and to silence the machines which set up a chorus of protest at his entrance, although it took a whole minute to convince an alembic that his presence would not upset its delicate settings.

Quickly, Yama searched for the papers Dr. Dismas had brought, but they were not amongst the litter on the Aedile’s desk, nor were they in the sandalwood traveling chest, with its deck of sliding drawers. Perhaps the papers were in the room in the watchtower—but that had an old lock, and Yama had never managed to persuade it to let him pass.

He closed the chest and sat back on his heels. This part of the house was quiet. Narrow beams of early sunlight slanted through the tall, narrow windows, illuminating a patch of the richly patterned carpet, a book splayed upside-down on the little table beside the Aedile’s reading chair. Zakiel would be waiting for him in the library, but there were more important things afoot. Yama went back out through the kitchen, cut across the herb garden and, after calming one of the watchdogs, ran down the steep slope of the breastwork and struck off through the ruins toward the city.

Dr. Dismas’s tower stood just outside the city wall. It was tall and slender, and had once been used to manufacture shot.

Molten blackstone had been poured through a screen at the top of the tower, and the droplets, rounding into perfect spheres as they fell, had plummeted into an annealing bath of water at the base. The builders of the tower had sought to advertise its function by adding slit windows and a parapet with a crenellated balustrade in imitation of the watchtower of a castellan, and after the foundry had been razed, the tower had indeed been briefly used as a lookout post. But then the new city wall had been built with the tower outside it, and the tower had fallen into disuse, its stones slowly pried apart by the tendrils of its ivy cloak, the platform where molten stone had been poured to make shot for the guns of soldiers and hunters becoming the haunt of owls and bats.

Dr. Dismas had moved into the tower shortly after taking up his apothecary’s post. Once it had been cleaned out and joiners had fitted new stairs and three circular floors within it and raised a tall slender spire above the crenellated balustrade, Dr. Dismas, had closed its door to the public, preferring to rent a room overlooking the waterfront as his office. There were rumors that he performed all kinds of black arts in the tower, from necromancy to the surgical creation of chimeras and other monsters. It was said that he owned a homunculus he himself had fathered by despoiling a young girl taken from the fisherfolk. The homunculus was kept in a tank of saline water, and could prophesy the future. Everyone in Aeolis would swear to the truth of this, although no one, of course, had actually seen it.

The soldiers had already begun the siege by the time Yama reached the tower, and a crowd had gathered at a respectful distance to watch the fun. Sergeant Rhodean stood at the door at the foot of the tower, his helmet tucked under one arm as he bawled out the warrant. The Aedile sat straight-backed under the canopy of the palanquin, which was grounded amongst the soldiers and a unit of the town’s militia, out of range of shot or quarrel. The militiamen were a motley crew in mismatched bits of armor, armed mostly with homemade blunderbusses and rifles but drawn up in two neat ranks as if determined to put on a good show. The soldiers’ horses tossed their heads, made nervous by the crowd and the steady hiss of the steam wagon’s boiler.

Yama clambered to the top of a stretch of ruined wall near the back of the crowd. It was almost entirely composed of men; wives were not allowed to leave the harems. They stood shoulder to shoulder, gray- and brown-skinned, corpulent and four square on short, muscular legs, bare-chested in breechclouts or kilts. They stank of sweat and fish and stale river water, and nudged each other and jostled for a better view. There was a jocular sense of occasion, as if this were some piece of theater staged by a traveling mountebank. It was about time the magician got what he deserved, they told each other, and agreed that the Aedile would have a hard time of it winkling him from his nest.

Hawkers were selling sherbet and sweetmeats, fried cakes of riverweed and watermelon slices. A knot of whores of a dozen different bloodlines, clad in abbreviated, brightly colored nylon chitons, their faces painted dead-white under fantastical conical wigs, watched from a little rise at the back of the crowd, passing a slim telescope to and fro. Their panderer, no doubt hoping for brisk business when the show was over, moved amongst the crowd, cracking jokes and handing out clove-flavored cigarettes. Yama looked for the whore he had lain with the night before Telmon had left for the war, but could not see her, and blushingly looked away when the panderer caught his eye and winked at him.

Sergeant Rhodean bawled out the warrant again, and when there was no reply set his helmet on his scarred, shaven head and limped back to where the Aedile and the other soldiers waited. He leaned on the skirt of the Aedile’s palanquin and there was a brief conference.

“Burn him out!” someone in the crowd shouted, and there was a general murmur of agreement.

The steam wagon jetted black smoke and lumbered forward; soldiers dismounted and walked along the edge of the crowd, selecting volunteers from its ranks. Sergeant Rhodean spoke to the bravos and handed out coins; under his supervision they lifted the ram from the loadbed of the steam wagon and, flanked by soldiers, carried it toward the tower. The soldiers held their round shields above their heads, but nothing stirred in the tower until the bravos applied the ram to its door.

The ram was the trunk of a young pine bound with a spiral of steel, slung in a cradle of leather straps with handholds for eight men and crowned with a steel cap shaped like a caprice, with sturdy, coiled horns. The crowd shouted encouragement as the bravos swung it in steadily increasing arcs.

“One!” they shouted. “Two!”

At the first stroke of the ram the door rang like a drum and a cloud of bats burst from the upper window of the tower. The bats stooped low, swirling above the heads of the crowd with a dry rustle of wings, and the men laughed and jumped up, trying to catch them. One of the whores ran down the road screaming, her hands beating at two bats which had tangled in her conical wig. Some in the crowd cheered coarsely. The whore stumbled and fell flat on her face and a militiaman ran forward and slashed at the bats with his knife.

One struggled free and took to the air; the man stamped on the other until it was a bloody smear on the dirt. As if blown by a wind, the rest of the bats rose high and scattered into the blue sky.

The ram struck again and again. The bravos had found their rhythm now. The crowd cheered the steady beat. Someone at Yama’s shoulder remarked, “They should burn him out.”

It was Ananda. As usual, he wore his orange robe, with his left breast bare. He carried a small leather satchel containing incense and chrism oil. He told Yama that his master was here to exorcise the tower and, in case things got out of hand, to shrive the dead. He was indecently pleased about Dr. Dismas’s impending arrest. Dr. Dismas was infamous for his belief that chance, not the Preservers, controlled the lives of men. He did not attend any high day services, although he was a frequent visitor to the temple, playing chess with Father Quine and spending hours debating the nature of the Preservers and the world. The priest viewed Dr. Dismas as a brilliant mind that might yet be saved; Ananda knew the doctor was too clever and too proud for that.

“He plays games with people,” Ananda told Yama. “He enjoys making people believe that he’s a warlock, although of course he has no such powers. No one has, unless they flow from the Preservers. It’s time he was punished. He’s been reveling in his notoriety too long.”

“He knows something about me,” Yama said. “He found it out in Ys. I think that he is trying to blackmail my father with it.”

Yama described what had happened the night before, and Ananda said kindly, “I shouldn’t think that Dismas has found out anything at all, but of course he couldn’t return and tell the Aedile that. He was bluffing, and now his bluff has been called. You’ll see. The Aedile will put him to question.”

“He should have killed Dr. Dismas on the spot,” Yama said. “Instead, he stayed his hand, and now he has this farce.”

“Your father is a cautious and judicious man.”

“Too cautious. A good general makes a plan and strikes before the enemy has a chance to find a place to make a stand.”

Ananda said, “He could not strike Dr. Dismas dead on the spot or even arrest him. It would not be seemly. He had to consult the Council for Night and Shrines—Dr. Dismas is their man, after all. This way, justice is seen to be done, and all are satisfied. That’s why he chose volunteers from the crowd to break down the door. Everyone is involved in this.”

“Perhaps,” Yama said, but he was not convinced. That this whole affair was somehow hinged about his origin was both exciting and shameful. He wanted it over with, and yet a part of him, the wild part that dreamed of pirates and adventurers, exulted in the display of force, and he was more certain than ever that he could never settle into a quiet tenure in some obscure office within the Department of Indigenous Affairs.

The ram struck, and struck again, but the door showed no sign of giving way.

“It is reinforced with iron,” Ananda said, “and it is not hinged, but slides into a recess. In any case we’ve a long wait even after they break down the door.”

Yama remarked that Ananda seemed to be an expert on the prosecution of sieges.

“I saw one before,” Ananda said. “It was in the little town outside the walls of the monastery where I was taught, in the high mountains upriver of Ys. A gang of brigands had sealed themselves in a house. The town had only its militia, and Ys was two days’ march away—long before soldiers could arrive, the brigands would have escaped under cover of darkness. The militia decided to capture the brigands themselves, but several were killed trying to break into the place, and at last they burned the house to the ground, and the brigands with it. That’s what they should do here; otherwise the soldiers will have to break into every floor of the tower to catch Dismas. He could kill many of them before that and suppose he has something like the palanquin? He could fly away.”

“Then my father could chase him.” Yama laughed at the vision this conjured up: Dr. Dismas fleeing the tower like a black beetle on the wing and the Aedile swooping behind in his richly decorated palanquin like a hungry bird.

The crowd cheered. Yama and Ananda pushed to the front, using their elbows and knees, and saw that the door had split from top to bottom.

Sergeant Rhodean raised a hand and there was an expectant hush. “One more time, lads,” the sergeant shouted, “and put some back into it!”

The ram swung and the door shattered and fell away. The crowd surged forward, carrying Ananda and Yama with it, and soldiers pushed them back. One recognized Yama. “You should not be here, young master,” he said. “Go back now. Be sensible.”

Yama dodged away before the soldier could grab him and, followed by Ananda, retreated to his original vantage point on the broken bit of wall, where he could see over the heads of the crowd and the line of embattled soldiers. The team of bravos swung the ram with short brisk strokes, knocking away the wreckage of the door; then they stood aside as a pentad of soldiers (the leader of the militia trailing behind) came forward with rifles and arbalests at the ready.

Led by Sergeant Rhodean, this party disappeared into the dark doorway. There was an expectant hush. Yama looked to the Aedile, who sat upright under the canopy of his palanquin, his face set in a grim expression. The white feathers which trimmed the high collar of his sable robe fluttered in the morning breeze.

There was a muffled thump. Thick orange smoke suddenly poured from one of the narrow windows of the tower, round billows swiftly unpacking into the air. The crowd murmured, uncertain if this was part of the attack or a desperate defensive move. More thumps: now smoke poured from every window, and from the smashed doorway. The soldiers stumbled out under a wing of orange smoke. Sergeant Rhodean brought up the rear, hauling the leader of the militia with him.

Flames mingled with the smoke that poured from the windows, which was slowly changing from orange to deep red.

Some of the crowd were kneeling, their fists curled against their foreheads to make the sign of the Eye.

Ananda said to Yama, “This is demon work.”

“I thought you did not believe in magic.”

“No, but I believe in demons. After all, demons tried to overthrow the order of the Preservers an age ago. Perhaps Dismas is one, disguised as a man.”

“Demons are machines, not supernatural creatures,” Yama said, but Ananda had turned to look at the burning tower, and did not seem to have heard him.

The flames licked higher; there was a ring of flames around the false spire that crowned the top of the tower. Red smoke hazed the air. Fat flakes of white ash fell through it. There was a stink of sulfur and something sickly sweet. Then there was another muffled thump and a tongue of flame shot out of the doorway. The tower’s spire blew to flinders. Burning strips of plastic foil rained down on the heads of the crowd and men yelled and ran in every direction.

Yama and Ananda were separated by the sudden panic as the front ranks of the crowd tried to flee through the press of those behind and dozens of men clambered over the broken wall. A horse reared up, striking with its hooves at a man who had grabbed hold of its bridle. The steam wagon was alight from one end to the other. The driver jumped from its burning cab, rolled over and over to smother his smoldering clothes, and staggered to his feet just as the charges on its loadbed exploded and blew him to red ruin.

Siege rockets flew in crisscross trajectories, trailing burning lengths of rope. A cask of napalm burst in a ball of oily flame, sending a mushroom of smoke boiling into the air.

Flecks of fire spattered in a wide circle. Men dived toward whatever cover they could find. Yama dropped to the ground, his arms crossed over his head, as burning debris pattered around.

There was a moment of intense quiet. As Yama climbed to his feet, his ears ringing, a heavy hand fell on his shoulder and spun him around.

“We’ve unfinished business, small fry,” Lob said. Behind his brother, Lud grinned around his tusks.