Colours in the Steel

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The clan was still working hard, every man, woman and child, but more to stave off boredom than because there was much need of what they made. Bozachai, the chief smith, had undertaken to replace the traditional leather armour with coats of mail, and the metalworkers spent the day drawing thick steel wire, coiling it round mandrels and slitting the coils with a chisel to make the rings. Women and children were given the tedious job of linking the rings together; one twist of the pliers opened the split rings, which were then threaded together, each ring interlocking with two from the previous row, and twisted shut. At first Bozachai had insisted that each link be sealed by welding or brazing, but after a while it was generally agreed that it wasn’t worth the effort, and they stopped bothering.

Tilchai, the chief bowyer, tried to copy the city crossbows, taking as his models a handful captured during the original cavalry raid. Where the clan’s version of the weapon used a bow made of horn, wood and sinew laminated together, the city version used a steel bow, as thick as a man’s thumb in the middle and tapering to fingertip-width at the ends. The experiment proved to be futile; either the steel bows snapped, or else they turned out feeble and soft, taking a set after the first few shots and failing to carry more than forty or fifty yards. Temrai tried to remember how they’d tempered the bow-steel in the arsenal, but his recollections weren’t precise enough. The venture was futile anyway; the city bows were so stiff that a special wooden lever was needed to force the string back over the twin hooks of the lock, and in the time it took to do that, an archer with an ordinary bow could have loosed ten arrows and sent them straighter and further.

New problems were cropping up every day. Pasture for the herd was getting thin within safe grazing distance of the camp. A freak cold snap killed off three-quarters of the clan’s bees, which meant mead was suddenly scarce, smoked meat couldn’t be glazed, milk and yoghurt had to be drunk unsweetened. Saltpetre for curing meat and oak bark for tanning leather were both getting harder to find. The hunting parties had to go further afield to find deer and wildfowl, which meant more men away from the camp and more culling of the herd than was usual for the time of year. There were several minor but virulent epidemics, mostly stomach complaints; only a few died, but morale in the camp sank and didn’t really recover once the outbreaks were over. The ropemakers had shaved the clan’s horses until they were the next best thing to bald; but still the bowyers made bows and the carpenters made engines that were doomed to be useless for want of strings and ropes. The causeway opposite the bridgehouse had been rebuilt, in spite of naggingly accurate archery from the bridgehouse tower that had claimed the lives of over fifty men, but nobody had any idea of what to do with it.

Yet no one suggested giving up and going away; not even in whispers or ambiguous hints. The enterprise of the city had long since stopped being an exciting adventure, but the clan had settled down into a siege routine that could easily last for ever if that was how long it took. Already some families were building stone walls for their tents and pens. A few had even taken their first tentative steps towards breaking up the earth and growing food instead of chasing or herding it. And nobody objected that planting was a waste of time since they wouldn’t be there to harvest the result. It was automatically assumed that the camp would still be in the same place six months hence.

We might as well build ourselves a city here and have done with it, Temrai reflected, as he walked through the camp on his way to an undoubtedly pointless staff meeting. It would, after all, be the final irony if, in a few years’ time, there were two mirror cities on either side of the river, their inhabitants distinguishable only by their accents and the colour of their hair. Then it would be impossible, and futile as well, to ask who was besieging who, or who had got the better of the war.

There was no point in hurrying – the meeting was due to start at noon – so Temrai took a detour down by the river to see how the water-wheel project was coming along. That, too, was a symptom of insidious permanence, but Temrai couldn’t bring himself to dislike it on those grounds. He couldn’t help remembering the bonemeal grinder which had been one of the first things he’d noticed when he arrived in the city. The thought that his people were now capable of making such a remarkable thing for themselves pleased him. Torsion engines, trebuchets and the arrowmakers’ lathes were ambivalent at best, but a water wheel couldn’t be anything else but a good thing. In his mind’s eye he could already picture permanent mills built beside the clan’s traditional fords and bridges back on the plains, standing ready for use when the annual migration brought them there – assuming, of course, that they could get this prototype to work. But it wasn’t a difficult thing to build, compared to some of the items they’d managed to make, with nothing more than a few simple tools, plenty of timber and an unwillingness to believe that anything was impossible.

He arrived at the project site at a crucial moment: the point where the water wheel and the flywheel were mounted on either end of the main driveshaft. The design was his own; based, of course, on a standard city model, but adapted by himself to make use of the materials available. The frame was little more than four A-frames salvaged from smashed trebuchets; these supported the shaft, which had been cut from the trunk of a particularly tall and straight fir tree, planed and shaved in situ until it was as near to a perfect cylinder as made no appreciable odds. The timbers that they’d used for the spokes of the wheels were salvage, too; all that was left of the first generation of rafts, the few that had survived the fire. They were using better rafts now, rigidly held together by cross-members morticed and dowelled into place, copied from a standard city pattern. The paddles of the water wheel were heavily modified frame components from scrap torsion engines, and the nails that secured them to the wooden rim had been forged out of city-made bodkin-pattern arrowheads.

Mentakai, the carpenter in charge of the project, had rigged up simple pole cranes made out of further salvaged A-frames to lift the hub-sockets of the wheels level with the shaft. He’d had two options; to mount the hubs only and then assemble the rest of the wheels onto them, or to prefabricate the complete wheels and fit them fully assembled. He’d chosen the latter option despite considerable opposition from his fellow workers on the project, and a small crowd had gathered to see the outcome. There was even a group of apparently interested observers on the city wall, and Temrai wondered if there was anything they could learn from what he firmly believed was an improved design. When he realised the implications of that train of thought, he suppressed it at once; it’d be nice for generations of city people to call water wheels of his design Temrai-wheels in perpetuity, but it’d still be admitting failure. As far as the city was concerned, there would be no perpetuity. He thought about that, and found it strangely depressing.

‘Of course it’s possible,’ Mentakai said to him in a low voice, as the water wheel was manhandled into position under the crane. ‘My problem is that because of all this childish rivalry in the team, I’m only likely to get one shot at doing it my way. If it doesn’t work, they’ll say it’s impossible and start pulling the wheel to bits, even if it’s just a matter of a frayed rope breaking or a damaged frame giving way.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Why people have to be so damned competitive all the time, I just don’t know.’

‘Human nature,’ Temrai replied absently, his attention on the work in progress before them. ‘People like things to be a contest, they can understand better if there’s winners and losers. It’s just the way they are.’

The mule-train was harnessed up and set in motion, and for once the mules did as they were told. After an alarming creak and twitch on the ropes, the wheel lifted off the ground and slowly rose into the air, until an engineer standing up to his knees in the riverbank mud shouted to the mule-drovers and the train stopped. First snag: the hub socket was nine inches too high, which meant the team had to be backed up a tiny amount. That sort of precision is, however, hard to obtain with mules walking backwards; after a great deal of effort, cajoling and bad language the drovers managed to get the recalcitrant brutes to go back, but instead of dropping the hub nine inches, they lowered it by two feet. That was obviously no good; so the mules were driven forwards again, resulting this time in an overshoot of eighteen inches.

‘You see?’ Mentakai complained dramatically. ‘Much more of this and they’ll be saying it can’t be done. It’s not an easy job, for gods’ sakes, you can’t expect it to go right first time. You’ve got to stick at it until it comes out right, or else forget about the whole idea and go back to two men turning a handle all day long.’

Temrai made a noise like someone being sympathetic and carried on watching the show. The drovers backed up again (someone had figured out that the best way to get the mules to back up slowly was to cover their heads with a cloth; this meant finding cloths of the right size and shape and, harder still, persuading their owner to part with them.

Eventually, though, the man stuck in the mud yelled out, ‘That’s it!’ with the same degree of exhilaration and relief that you’d expect from a man who’s just watched his son being born. Immediately, teams of men standing between the A-frames pulled hard on ropes tied to the spokes of the wheel and guided the socket onto the shaft as if it was the easiest thing in the world. All that needed to be done after that was for the smiths to drive in the cotter pin that would keep the wheel fixed in place; no problems there – hardly surprising, since pinning was a standard part of making torsion engines, and they all knew a lot about that by now. They were just about to drive the mules round to be harnessed up to the flywheel crane when a problem they hadn’t allowed for became disturbingly obvious.

They’d put the wrong wheel on first. As soon as the paddles of the wheel touched the water, the wheel began to turn, and the shaft with it. That, of course, made life even more difficult for the crews standing by to raise and guide the flywheel. Piloting a giant wheel into place wasn’t exactly easy when the shaft was motionless. Trying to fit it to a beam which rotated ninety-odd times every minute was asking a bit much. There was a basic clutch system to disengage the flywheel, but nothing comparable at the other end. Mentakai swore under his breath.

‘Just my luck,’ he said. ‘Now you watch; they’ll have a couple more goes to confirm their verdict, just in order to show willing, and then they’ll dismantle the machine. They haven’t even tried to follow it through.’

Temrai frowned. ‘What if taking it to bits really is the best way?’ Temrai asked aloud. ‘No way of knowing, I suppose, without having tried it first.’

‘Not you as well,’ Mentakai muttered. ‘It’s just a simple mistake, caused by rushing into things and not thinking them through first. Doesn’t prove a thing about whether my way’s the right one.’

There were ideas in all this that could be applied to other human activities, Temrai realised, sacking cities included. ‘I suppose we’d better do it right,’ he said. ‘Tell them to take the water wheel off again and fit the flywheel, and then we can put the water wheel back.’

Getting the water wheel off proved far harder than getting it on; for one thing, it was going round and round in a strenuous and dangerous manner. Eventually they managed – well past noon by now, Temrai realised, but so what? They can have the meeting without me, it’s not as if we have anything to say to each other – and the flywheel went on comparatively easily, thanks to all the practice they were getting. The second fitting of the water wheel was a mess; several ropes broke and one of the frames in the crane sprang a joint, the crews were all thoroughly soaked from splashing about up to their waists in the river, tempers were beginning to fray and the onlookers were making amusing comments from the sidelines. In the end there was a feeling of exhausted relief rather than jubilation when the water wheel began to turn and the flywheel reciprocated its movement. Still, it had been a success – more than that, an achievement, which surely made it all worthwhile-

Someone shouted, ‘Look out!’ but by the time the crews had realised what was happening it was too late. Three hundredweight stones, launched from the trebuchets on the bridgehouse tower, whistled through the air and landed; one in the river, throwing up a curtain of spray that seemed to touch the sky; one directly on top of the water wheel, crushing and cracking it, smashing the A-frames, snapping the driveshaft in two and smearing Mentakai’s body over what was left of his project; and one on the edge of the crowd of spectators, killing a man and a woman and shearing both legs off a young boy.

The initial shock seemed to last for ever. Then someone screamed, men ran forward and put their shoulders to the stone under which the boy was pinned, the rest of the crowd wavered, not knowing whether to help the rescuers or run for cover in case there were any more stones on the way. Temrai shoved his way through the engineering crew, who were rooted to the spot staring at the mess where the water wheel had been, and started shouting orders, sending for healers, a stretcher, engineers to bring up five trebuchets for a return volley; the activity helped soak up the shambles in his mind, where images of the burning camp and the rafts burning on the water were blurring into a picture of the bonemeal mill, just the other side of the wall from here if he remembered it right, similarly shattered and destroyed, and in its hoppers the bones of hundreds and thousands of men and women, city and clan, being fed mechanically through onto the still-turning millstones.

They managed to lift the rock enough to drag out the boy; he was still alive and opening his mouth to scream, although nothing was coming out. Someone mentioned that the man and the woman who were still under there had been the boy’s parents; Temrai took note of that and put it safely away in his mind for future reference. The first of the five trebuchets was dragged into position and the mules were detached from the hitching points on the frame and linked up to the counterweight; and then they decided to be obstinate and not budge, so there was cursing and the cracking of whips to add to the overall effect; and then someone realised they hadn’t brought up a stone to shoot from it, and someone suggested using one of the two that were here already, and someone else thought that suggestion was in pretty poor taste; and Temrai looked up at the bridgehouse tower and told the engineers to belay his order to return fire, since there were no signs that the enemy engines were reloading and they had enough on their hands as it was without picking a fight.

‘For me?’ Colonel Loredan asked, puzzled.

The guardsman nodded. ‘Bloke left it about an hour ago,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t give his name. There’s a letter with it.’

‘Oh. Oh, well. Thank you, dismissed.’ The guardsman saluted and left, closing the door behind him.

Back in his miserable cell in the second-city gatehouse; same bleak stone walls, same stone shelf for a bed. Loredan looked at the bundle of cloth in his hand, shrugged and tossed it onto the bed-shelf. Something metal rattled against the stone. He’d open it later, after he’d got out of these hateful boots.

Why should anybody leave me a present? he wondered, as he dragged the left boot off his hot, sweaty foot. Although he was already late for a meeting he allowed himself the luxury of sitting and wiggling his newly liberated toes before putting on his sandals. And why couldn’t it be something useful, like a nice pair of felt slippers?

Next he pulled off his coat, sopping wet from the afternoon’s sudden downpour, and reached for his second best; an old friend, shabby and frayed but nicely moulded to his body by years of close association. Not the most appropriate attire for an audience with the Prefect, but he didn’t exactly care too much if he got fired. His shirt and trousers were wet too, but he couldn’t be bothered to change them. The heat of the fire in the reception room of the Prefect’s palace would dry them off soon enough.

A quick drag of a comb through his hair; that would have to do. Now then; he’d open his present, and then he’d have to go.

It didn’t take a genius to work out what was inside the cloth wrappings; a narrow, heavy bundle roughly two and a half feet long containing something metal. Someone had sent him a sword. He could do with one, sure enough. It was embarrassing for the Deputy Lord Lieutenant, the officer commanding the defences of Perimadeia, to be the only man on the wall with an empty scabbard swinging from his belt. He slit the string with his knife and peeled away the cloth; then sat quite still for a moment, staring.

A genuine Guelan. More than that; a genuine Guelan broadsword – there were only about five of them still in existence – rather than the more common but still murderously valuable law-swords that the great smith had made his reputation with. Yet a Guelan it undoubtedly was, he knew that before he drew the short, heavy blade from the scabbard and found the distinctive and uncopiable marks on the ricasso. No one had ever made military swords like the great Liras Guelan. Other makers’ imitations were dull abortions, fit only for chopping wood or opening barrels. Nobody before or since had hit on that precise harmony of weight and balance that made it the next best thing to perfect, for single- or double-handed use, cutting or thrusting.

There was a special skill to using them, so the legend went (and for the first time, as he held the sword in his hands, he realised it was no fairy tale); if you tried to use it like an ordinary sword, the weight of the blade and the proportions – long handle and short blade – would defeat you. The harder you tried, the more effort you put into it, the more sluggishly the weapon would handle. But if you used the weight rather than fighting to overcome it, then the sword would seem to guide itself, adding its own force to the blow in apparent defiance of all the laws of physics. A Guelan broadsword, they said, should be allowed to fight for you; it knew exactly what it was doing, and all the wielder had to or should do was hang onto the blunt end and watch the fun.

Bardas Loredan had his doubts about people who waxed lyrical over lethal weapons; even so, he felt he could make allowances in this one rather exceptional case. All his working life, it went without saying, he’d wanted one (though it wouldn’t have done for work, being outside the prescribed dimensions for legal use), and now here one was, its weight firm but not oppressive against the muscles of his upper arm, like a pedigree falcon deigning to sit for a time on his wrist.

This must have cost a fortune. He remembered the letter. Not wanting to put his marvellous new possession down, even for a moment, he fumbled awkwardly to break the seal and open the folded paper.

Bardas-

I assume you got my message and the letter that followed it, so obviously you don’t want to see me. I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ll understand if you don’t want to accept this from me (though you’d be a damn fool not to; you wouldn’t believe the trouble I had tracking one down, and when I found it the owner didn’t want to sell). Take it, though; it can’t be blamed for the sins of the giver, and you’ll find a use for it, I’m sure. I’ve told it to keep you safe; that’s why it had to be a Guelan – aren’t they supposed to have minds of their own? Try not to break this one.

With my love,

Gorgas Loredan.

Bardas Loredan looked at the letter, then at the sword, then back at the letter, then back at the sword. Weapons, he knew, are ambivalent, capable of doing good or evil, or both, or both together, incapable of knowing or caring about the use to which they’re put. The same, Loredan reflected, is true of the lawyer, the man who fights and kills for a cause not his own in the name of justice. The weapon in his hand and the skill that hand imparts to the weapon decide right and wrong, good and evil; but the stronger and quicker on the day prevail over the slower and weaker, and if a moment before the fight the defendant had taken over the plaintiff’s brief and vice versa, it’s hard to believe that the outcome would be different. Maybe that’s what I’ve become, Loredan thought, or maybe that’s what I’ve been all along; a weapon in someone else’s hand, created to kill and do damage, either for good or for evil depending on whose hand I happen to be in. And the Guelan – aren’t they supposed to have minds of their own? – perhaps it means something, arriving precisely now, when I’m the advocate instructed on behalf of the city of Perimadeia, entrusted with its defence and the righteousness of its cause.

It must have cost him a fortune… Yes, and over the years he’s cost me; maybe somehow he’s been using me, along with all the others, though I can’t imagine what for. It’s been his actions that have governed everything I’ve ever done, since that day beside the river when he left me for dead and took away the life I should have had. If he thinks he can buy me with this-

But a Guelan broadsword; it wasn’t answerable for the sins of the giver, just as the lawyer isn’t responsible for the acts of his client. Above all, they’d told him when he took his oath at the enrollment ceremony, an advocate fights for justice, and justice is his only client. And a sword cuts skin and flesh for the man who swings it; and a man is a sword in the hand of his own circumstances, the things that have happened in the past that have made him what he is and their consequences in the present that he must address and deal with. Taking this from his brother wasn’t all that different from taking the sword of the man he’d just killed on the floor of the courthouse. He’d earned it, in that sense; and once it was his, its past no longer mattered.

Gods, I’d make myself believe anything just to be able to keep this thing. It’s worth more than I ever earned in ten years in the racket. And what the devil does he mean ‘all my love’?

Loredan suddenly remembered the meeting he was late for. It was by a conscious act, no mere instinct of haste, that he unbuckled his belt, threaded it through the double loops of the scabbard-frog and drew it tight again; and in that instant he rejected the comfort that lay implicit in the excuse, I was only ever following instructions; they made me do it; it wasn’t me. Bardas Loredan, a Guelan broadsword; weapons of such quality and antecedents with minds of their own…

Well, well, he said to himself as he slammed out of the small, cold room and ran down the cloister towards the chapter house, if in the end I had to sell my soul, better keep it in the family than flog it off cheap to the charcoal people. But that thought didn’t resolve the matter; a final decision would have to be deferred until he had more time to consider it, and if possible more data.