The Escapement

14

The artillery duel resumed next morning, but the situation had changed. During the night, while their engines kept up their blind pounding of the embankment, the allies had built a wall of gabions and fascines in front of their artillery line, to protect the working parties-every man who could be spared from other duties-who now set about digging a bank and ditch to shelter the engines from the Mezentines' incoming fire. They worked with a speed that astonished the observers on the City embankment, who immediately stopped trying to pick off the allied engines and began dropping their shot into the dense mass of diggers and earth-shifters. It was, as one artillery officer said later, practically impossible to miss. Each shot was sure of killing two or three workers, and the Mezentines quickly found out that if they managed to pitch a shot on the rapidly rising bank itself, there was a good chance it would skip and skim, cutting a bloody channel through the teams of men wheeling barrows of spoil or shovelling earth into gabions. As soon as Chairman Psellus heard about this, he ordered the artillery captains to stop it and go back to targeting the engines themselves. The captains were extremely reluctant to obey this order; the diggers were much easier to hit than the engines or their crews, and they felt they were achieving something. It was only when Psellus himself appeared on the embankment and gave the order in person that they eventually complied.

By mid-afternoon the bank was eight feet high, topped with a double line of gabions. It didn't provide a total defence, but it meant that the Mezentines now had to drop their stones directly on top of the engines in order to damage them, instead of being able to pitch short and either roll or skim their shot until it hit something. The allies, of course, had faced the same problem from the outset, but the fact that their shot tended to shatter on impact meant that although they rarely hit a machine, they were killing artillery crews at a rate which even the general expressed himself satisfied with. As he told the Aram Chantat liaison that evening, the Mezentines were manufacturers rather than soldiers; they could build new engines much faster than they could train men to use them, and so killing the trained men was a much more efficient course of action than merely smashing up equipment.

After his meeting with the liaison, Daurenja sent for Colonel Ducas of the Eremian contingent. The messenger found him, after a long search, leading a party of stretcher-bearers. They'd spent the afternoon collecting the wounded from the bank site, prising them out from under spent shot with beams ands crowbars. Miel himself had carried the axe and the saw, because a large number of them were pinned down by an arm or a leg; it wasn't a job he felt he could delegate. His knees were plastered with a putty of mud and blood, and he'd wrenched his back contorting himself as he tried to haul a paralysed man out from under a stone by his ankle and wrist. When the messenger found him, he said he was too busy to go; now that the bombardment had stopped, he said, they had to make full use of the time available to get as many wounded men out as possible. The messenger had to point out that it was a direct order from the commander-in-chief.

He found Daurenja sitting on an upturned bucket outside his tent. He was grinding something with a pestle and mortar.

"Colonel Leucas was killed in the bombardment," Daurenja said, looking earnestly into the mortar.

"Oh."

It wasn't what Miel would have chosen to say, but he was tired and frustrated at having to leave the work he knew he should be doing. Besides, Imbrota Leucas had been a pinhead, barely capable of blowing his nose.

"I expect you knew him," Daurenja said.

"Yes, of course. Actually, I never liked him much."

Daurenja shrugged. "Obviously, we need to replace him as commander of the Eremian contingent. You know your own people; they need a Leucas or a Phocas or a Ducas to lead them or they won't do as they're told."

Miel didn't grasp the implications of that straight away. Then he said, "I see."

Daurenja looked up. "I'd have thought you'd have been the natural choice instead of Leucas," he said, "only you weren't around when Valens made the original appointment; and besides, I seem to remember there's some kind of bad blood between the two of you. Anyhow, that's not important now. I suggest you use the existing staff, at least until you've had a chance to pick people you're more comfortable working with. I'm afraid I'll be asking a lot of you Eremians before this siege is over."

Miel looked at him, and thought: some kind of bad blood. "If I don't want the job, can I refuse?"

"Of course." Daurenja was staring into his mortar again. "But I don't imagine you will. You have a duty to your people, and that matters far more to you than any personal issues between you and me. I gather you've been rescuing the wounded."

"That's right."

Daurenja nodded. "Nobody told you to," he said. "In fact, you'd been assigned other duties, a nice safe job out of the line of fire. But you disobeyed orders and did what you felt had to be done. Well, that's fine. I know I can rely on you. Besides," he added with a yawn, "I owe you something for saving my life that time. I do try and pay my debts."

Miel frowned. "That's funny," he said. "The way I remember it, I tried to get Valens to have you hanged."

"That's right. But before that, you kept my ex-partner Framain from bashing my head in with a rock. If you hadn't done that, I'd be dead." He shrugged. "I tried to pay you back for that by assigning you to a job away from where the shot was falling, but I should've known better. The way to reward you is to give you a chance to do your duty. That's the sort of man you are. I understand you, you see. If you could stop hating me for a minute or so, you'd see we're not that different. Only, your duty's to your people and mine's to my work. Otherwise, we're basically the same. So," he added with a weary sigh, "you'll take the job, because you don't really have a choice. That's how I do things, you see. It's a basic premise of engineering. Components run in precisely cut keyways until they meet a stop. Everything does exactly what it's supposed to do, because it has no choice."

Miel thought about that for a moment. "Fine," he said. "Will it be all right if I get cleaned up first?"

Daurenja nodded. "And I'd grab some sleep while you can, if I were you. In the morning, I've got a job for your people. Nothing unpleasant," he added, with a faint smile, "but quite important." Then he turned his head and shifted his back a little, so that Miel no longer existed and he was free to concentrate absolutely on the contents of the pot on his knees.

The job turned out to be strenuous but simple: to collect, remove and pile up neatly all the finished round shot the enemy had fired at the allied line during the artillery duel. It was, the staff major explained, a marvellous windfall: thousands of rounds of precision-finished, Mezentine-made trebuchet and mangonel ammunition; hard, unlike the soft shit from the local quarries, and therefore exactly what they'd need for bashing down the City walls when the time came. The joy of it was (the major said) that the enemy couldn't reuse spent allied shot in the same way, since it smashed all to pieces when it pitched; every round, both outgoing and incoming, was a dead loss to them, whereas every shot that landed on or over the new bank was effectively profit. The duel continued all through the next day, but the rate of fire on both sides gradually subsided. Because so many of their artillerymen had been killed or wounded, the Mezentines were having trouble finding fresh crews for the machines at the end of each shift. Increasing shift length from three to five hours kept the machines in action, but the men were exhausted, and the rate dropped from six to two shots per machine per hour, until Psellus ordered that the batteries should be rested in rotation, since fewer machines firing faster and more accurately put more shots on target than all the available machines shooting slowly and missing. He was also deeply worried about the rate at which the ammunition was being used up. The stone-cutting plant, working flat out, could just about keep up with the demands of the artillery so long as their supply of rough-cut stone blanks held out. Once they were all used up, however, the only way to get raw material was to pull down buildings, break up the stone blocks and cart them to the shot factory; Psellus told the supply commissioners to press as many men and carts as they needed, but the sheer volume of carts in the narrow streets around the factory led to horrendous jams, which in turn held up the supplies of finished shot being sent to the embankment.

The allies had similar problems. Daurenja was being careful with his finished shot, which was reserved for precision shooting at the enemy machines, since only perfectly round balls flew straight; the majority of his engines were throwing unshaped rocks and boulders, trying to batter down and collapse the parts of the embankment where the batteries were. This approach was proving successful, but he'd underestimated how much shot it took to dislodge enough earth to do any good. All the loose boulders and outcrop in the vicinity had been used up during the first night, and the quarrymen and carts that should have been making and shipping finished shot were busy with rough-hewn stuff; and even so, demand was outstripping supply. As a result, at sunset the bombardment stopped, giving the engineers a desperately needed opportunity to patch up the machines, which were starting to tear themselves apart under the stress of seventy-two hours' continuous use.

Not that Daurenja was unduly worried. As he told the Aram Chantat, the artillery battle was a sideshow compared with the serious business of repairing and extending the approach trenches. Work on these had continued at an entirely satisfactory rate of progress throughout the artillery battle, while the enemy's attention had successfully been drawn elsewhere. Most important of all, the machine trench had not only been repaired but was now half a day ahead of schedule, and with any luck should be finished and ready for use by the time the worms arrived from Civitas Vadanis. Miel Ducas was woken up at dawn by the silence. He'd got used to the noise, and the way the ground shook every time a two-hundredweight stone ball landed, and the smell of disturbed earth, which reminded him of flying falcons on newly ploughed fields, at the very end of the partridge season. He'd been dreaming about that, in fact, remembering a day when he was-what, sixteen?-when he'd been invited out for Closing Day with the Count Sirupat and his guests; and she'd been there, looking very nervous on a tall, slim chestnut mare that spooked every time the falcon on her wrist fretted and flapped its wings. His dream was mostly just memory, except that every time he looked in her direction, her face was turned away, and he could only see the edge of her cheek.

He woke up to find himself sitting upright, the blanket tangled; and he noticed that the little spindly-legged table they'd issued him with for writing his reports on was still standing upright. Yesterday and the day before, it had been knocked down by the vibrations.

He yawned, then winced, as he remembered that he'd hurt his back the previous day. Carefully he tried to turn his head: not good. That bothered him. Trivial aches and pains, that sort a civilian grins and bears; but anything that slows down a soldier or impedes his ability to move instinctively can easily prove more fatal than cholera.

But we aren't going to be fighting anybody today, he told himself. Instead, we're picking up stones and piling them neatly; our contribution to the war effort. Oh yes, and I've been appointed supreme commander of the Eremian army.

He looked at his armour, heaped up in the corner of the tent, and thought, the hell with it. There won't be any Mezentines roaming about on this side of the bank, and if I get hit by a mangonel ball, armour's not going to make any difference. For the sake of appearances he put on his padded aketon, but he left the ironmongery where it lay.

The young captain (he'd been told the man's name twice, forgotten it, was too embarrassed to ask a third time) met him in the trench, as he made his way out to the artillery positions.

"They've stopped the bombardment," Whatsisname said. "We won."

Miel smiled. "You may have noticed, we aren't shooting either. Doesn't that make it a draw?"

"Yes, but we're in possession of the field."

The field, he thought; well yes, that's what soldiers fight for. Not for a cause, truth, freedom, to save the lives of innocents, for countries or principles, trade routes, the resolution of disputes between nations. They fight for the field, thirty-odd acres of farmland ruined in the process, whose value lies only in the fact that the enemy have been forcibly excluded from it. Back on the home estate, there'd been a forty-acre pasture called Battle Moor; and from time to time, when it was ploughed and reseeded, they turned up bones, bits of rusty junk so badly corroded it was anybody's guess what they'd once been. Nobody knew who'd fought there, of course, or why.

The field. The Mezentines weren't farmers, and the plain in front of the City hadn't been cultivated for as long as they'd been there. Once a year, at midsummer, they hired foreigners to come and burn off the dried grass and the rubbish, to keep it from turning into a jungle. Apparently it was quite a sight to see, though the City people moaned about the smoke, and the flecks of soot on their clean washing for days afterwards. Other than that, they showed no interest in it whatsoever; until now, of course, when it had suddenly become the field, every last inch to be fought for to the last drop of blood. The deep strata of ash made it pleasantly light and easy to dig, according to the sappers, though once you got down underneath you hit flints, and a singularly bloody-minded type of clay.

Today, the field was different. The stones stood out like huge puffballs, the sort you can't resist kicking, because of how they disintegrate. There were also the dead bodies. Those killed on the second day were starting to swell, and there were flies everywhere. They soared up in a cloud as you walked past, and the soft hum was strangely soothing, like the sound of a river a quarter of a mile away. Miel Ducas knew all about battlefields, of course. The only thing that made this one different was the absence of the usual scavengers (he knew all about them now, of course; the useful function they performed in cleaning up and making good; like earthworms in a garden, or a graveyard).

"Organise a burial detail," he said to nobody in particular (because when the commander-in-chief speaks, there's always someone listening, with a notebook). "We've got enough problems without plague as well." Then it occurred to him to wonder: did the Aram Chantat bury their dead or burn them? It was the sort of thing that caused horrendous trouble if you got it wrong. "You'd better find out what the savages want done with theirs," he added quickly.

Not far away, ten yards or so, a man was trying to lift his arm. Most of his body was under a stone, and by the look of it his forearm was smashed as well; it flopped as he tried to wave. The kindest thing would be a dozen men with pollaxes, walking up and down and putting the hopeless cases out of their misery (he'd seen enough bullocks and pigs and sheep slaughtered; one peck between the eyes with the horn of the pollaxe. When you've done thirty in a morning, it's just a chore). Instead, he told whoever it was whose turn it was to be listening to get that man out of there, and organise some orderlies with stretchers, and let the surgeons know.

Men started bustling about; he assumed they were doing what he'd told them to do. He turned, slowly because of his cricked neck, and took a long, interested look at the bank, which so many men had died to build. It was just a mound of earth, with a row of those filled-basket things on top. Here and there it had been battered down, and men were working briskly to put it back straight again. It was, of course, a remarkable achievement, considered as the end product of human labour and effort. He tried to imagine how it'd look in two hundred years' time-a little bit lower and smoother, grassed over, with paths scratched deep in it here and there by the passage of sheep. Not the ruins of a city, not a road, or a levee, not even an aquifer or a drain; just an expedient scooped up in a hurry to keep the worst of the hailstones off, something that had briefly served a temporary purpose, but which would probably last for ever, long after the reason for its existence had been forgotten.

(Motives fade, he thought; actions endure. A thousand men died to win the field, and the lasting result is a grassy bank in the middle of a flat plain. But they didn't die to build a bank-that was just a trivial side-effect; they died-some immediately, some after three motionless days in the stink, trying to wave a broken arm-for the field, as all soldiers do.)

Collecting the spent shot was straightforward hard work. They let down the tailgate of the cart and laid the ends of two poles on the floorboards. Then two men rolled the stone ball up this improvised ramp, and a third man standing in the bed of the cart hauled it in so it wouldn't roll out again. So simple, Miel thought, even Eremians can do it. Presumably he was there to supervise, to make the men work as fast as possible. No need; they were going at it like lunatics, presumably because they expected the bombardment to start again at any moment. In which case, he wondered, what did they need him for? He could only suppose he was required as a witness, in case it should ever be necessary to prove that the artillery battle had actually taken place, and wasn't just an embellishment added to the story by an ambitious historian. Well, he was, after all, the nearest thing they had to a resident expert on the aftermath of battles, the sole representative of the corpse-robbers' profession. As such, he knew more about the field than any duke or general. Quite probably, he was the only one who really understood: that every battle is for the field, which is a place where dead men lie until the scavengers come to pick up, clean up and cart away the residues, both the useful and the useless. The war is a complex mechanism, whose escapement is the battle, whose function is to produce nothing but waste; as if you peeled apples to get the peel and the core, and threw the fruit away.

(He considered Daurenja, and wondered if the substantial enterprise of advancing the artillery and building the bank to protect it was simply a way of getting the Mezentines to supply him with ammunition. It was just the sort of thing he'd be capable of doing, if he needed finished round shot badly enough.)

They moved a stone, and under it was a man; an Eremian, who recognised him. The man was dying. The stone had crushed his ribs, and the sharp end of one of them had punctured his lung.

"I remember you," Miel said. "Only I can't quite…"

The man said he'd been a huntsman before the war, in the service of Jarnac Ducas. Then he remembered. This was the man who whipped the hounds off the deer as soon as it was dead, so they wouldn't tear it apart. He tried to think of something to say, but he couldn't find any words. Instead, the man asked him: was it true that Jarnac was dead? There were rumours, but…

Miel nodded. "Quite true, I'm afraid," he said. "He was with Duke Valens in the retreat, when they were making for the desert. He died very bravely."

The man nodded. "He used to worry, you know," he said. "About all the animals he killed. He said it was all right really, because we ate the meat, so actually it was no worse than farming. He used to give the meat away, most of it, to the people in the villages. But he hated it if an animal was badly pricked, like in bow and stable, and it got away and wasn't found. He said it must be the worst thing, dying slowly in pain."

Miel felt he should say something like: rest now, don't say any more, you need to lie still. But he knew the man was dying, beyond help, and he only wanted him to stop because he didn't want to hear any more. "I didn't know that," he said. "He never said anything like that to me."

The man tried to grin. "Well he wouldn't, not to his own kind. But he worried a lot about it, and I'd have liked him to know: actually, it's not so bad. You'd think you'd be scared, but you aren't. You just think, well, that's that, then, and then you just wait quietly." He let his neck and back relax, like a man settling into a soft bed with clean sheets. "It'd have been nice to have set his mind at rest, but I don't suppose it matters now."

Miel nodded; but he said: "I thought I was going to die, not long ago, and I was terrified."

The man smiled. "Ah well," he said. "You thought, you didn't know. When you know, it's really not so bad." And then he died, and as Miel watched he turned from a human being into an object, a dead weight for the burial detail; and with him faded all the other evidence he could have given. Miel looked down at his face for a while, but there was nothing there.

When it got too dark to see, he sent back to the camp for lanterns, picked on the first officer he could find, and delegated the conduct of the night shift to him. The poor young fool acted as though he'd been awarded a great honour.

On his way back to the camp, he thought about Jarnac, and Orsea. As a matter of courtesy, Daurenja sent a note to Duke Valens to inform him that he'd appointed the Ducas to lead the Eremian contingent. He added that he had a high opinion of the Ducas' loyalty and sense of duty, and trusted that the appointment met with the duke's approval.

Nobody bothered to tell the messenger that the letter he was carrying was just a formality, so he rode through the night, taking the border road, changing horses twice at the military inns. Determined to make the best time he possibly could, he took a short cut through Stachia woods in the dark, rode into a low branch at the gallop and ripped the side of his face open. He had a scarf, which he wrapped round his head to stop the bleeding; it was sodden by the time he reached the Tolerance and Compassion, where he was lucky enough to find a fellow messenger heading for the city who undertook to take the general's letter the rest of the way.

The other letter he carried was to the Aram Chantat high council. It was read to them by a Vadani secretary, since the more traditional Aram Chantat still tended to regard literacy as a weakness, liable to undermine the imagination and the memory. In it, the liaison reported on the conduct of the siege, commending General Daurenja for his diligence and resourcefulness. A motion was passed confirming the general as commander-in-chief for the duration of the siege. It was held that, although Duke Valens was a capable leader, he had not shown the same level of vision and commitment that the general had displayed; indeed, Valens' injury, though deplorable, could be seen as fortuitous. Naturally, once the war was over, the position would be reviewed. However, it was never too early to consider the future. The Aram Chantat nation faced the prospect of being ruled for the first time by a foreigner, since there was no male heir. As the widower of the heiress apparent, Valens was indisputably the legal heir. However, should he die before the king-unlikely, of course, unless he suffered complications to his wound; an infection, for example, all too real a possibility-the succession would pass through the king's great-niece, currently only twelve years old and therefore too young to marry, unless a special exemption from the law was made by, for instance, a regency committee appointed by the high council. In that event, it would be inviting internal dissent and possible civil war to permit her to marry an Aram Chantat, in which case a suitable foreigner would have to be selected; a man with proven leadership capability, strong-minded, dynamic, preferably someone held in high regard by the people on account of (say) his war service. All such speculation was, of course, entirely hypothetical, and simple loyalty required the council to hope that Duke Valens would make a quick and complete recovery. Nevertheless, the fact that the duke had married again, so soon after the death of the princess, and that his new wife had already conceived a child, meant that if Valens survived his present serious illness, the Aram Chantat could look forward to being ruled by an entirely foreign dynasty for the foreseeable future. It had not escaped the council's notice that this state of affairs had not escaped the notice of the people in general, and was not entirely to their liking. Voices of complaint (which the council naturally deplored, but could not afford to ignore) had been raised even before Valens was injured. The serious threat to his life posed by the wound and the drastic medical procedures that had been deemed necessary to attempt to heal it had inevitably led the people to reconsider the whole succession issue. Furthermore, there were unconfirmed reports that the king's own medical advisers were seriously concerned about the state of his health…

The Vadani secretary had been dismissed after he'd read the letter and taken down the brief formal acknowledgement to be sent in reply. But as reading aloud made him thirsty, he'd begged a drink from the chamberlains and sat quietly drinking it in the anteroom next to the chapterhouse where the meeting was being held; he had better than average hearing, and someone had neglected to close the connecting door properly. "I shouldn't have told you," she said.

Valens frowned. "Yes you should," he said. "If they're really thinking about killing me…"

"We don't know that. It's much more likely that we're reading too much into this. After all, we don't really understand how their minds work, they were probably only discussing contingency plans, just in case you don't get better. And the doctors say you're healing up really fast now."

Very slowly and deliberately, like a team of engineers raising a tower, he hauled himself forward a few inches on his elbows and sat up. "It's what I'd do," he said. "Think about it. They've got to resign themselves to a foreign king, they've got no choice. They marry their princess to me, figuring it'll provoke war with the Mezentines so they can clear out everything our side of the mountains and have a new homeland to settle in. Turns out that wasn't necessary: when they get here, they find we're already at war, so that's all right. But then the princess gets killed. They've been reassuring themselves that it's all right really, the next dynasty will be only half-foreign, her and my children; but then she dies, I marry you and they're faced with being ruled by strangers for ever. What's more, by marrying you, I've shown them I'm not really interested in what's best for the Aram Chantat; otherwise I'd have waited till this twelve-year-old kid came of age and married her. Instead, I marry for love"-he paused on that word, frowned as much as the pain in his face would let him-"which probably doesn't carry much weight with them, I really couldn't say, I know so little about them. And to cap it all, they believe I've been lukewarm about the war. And now they've got an alternative, the brave, committed general, and he's neither Eremian nor Vadani, so he won't be likely to favour either race above the Aram Chantat if he becomes king. If you look at it rationally, they'd be failing in their duty if they didn't at least consider it."

She thought: he's talking to himself, not me. Which is fine; it's part of my job to be someone the duke can think aloud to, it's a very necessary function. "You make it sound like you sympathise with them," she said.

"I do," he replied. "They're in deep trouble. The other Cure Hardy nations have more or less driven them out of their own country. They've had to leave their home, cross the desert, come here and immediately start fighting a singularly vicious war; they know that even if they win, a lot of their people will die in it, and if they lose they're facing a famine. Added to that, their new king's going to be a foreigner who doesn't look like he really gives a damn about them." He shook his head. "And I happen to know that that's true: the heir apparent doesn't care about them, in fact he can't stand being in the same room with them for too long-something he's done his best to keep to himself, but he's a rotten actor and they're not stupid. And they're right about him being lukewarm about the war, too."

She looked at him again, noticing how lined and furrowed his face had become lately, as though it was under siege, deeply scored with trenches; and she thought, that's the face of a man who's only recently realised that love doesn't solve everything, that having each other isn't really enough. Poor man; he's lived his life thinking that the book closes at the first kiss, and being in love is like crossing a border, over which they can't follow you. Perhaps he thought love could be starved out with a blockade, or stormed with overwhelming force, once the defences had been undermined. Those are the sort of terms he'd tend to think in (Valens the problem-solver, the man who gets the job done, the good duke); and now they've taken away the command and given it to the freak, because of me.

But she said: "So what are you going to do about it?"; not because she wanted to know, but because he did, and if she couldn't be his soul, she could at least be that part of his mind that chafed him into action.

But he shrugged, as though they were talking about someone else, a friend of hers that he tolerated for her sake but had never really liked. "I'll have to go there," he said, "and take the war back from Daurenja."

It was the reply she'd been expecting, but it made her flinch. "You can't," she said. "You're not well enough."

"That's right," he said. "But it's not like I've got a choice." He wriggled his shoulders against the pillow. "First, because I don't want to be got rid of. Second, because Daurenja's getting it all wrong. He's doing exactly what they want him to, but he can't see that because he's convinced he's winning." He scowled, either at some thought that crossed his mind, or from the pain of moving. "Could you send someone to fetch Ziani Vaatzes?" he said. "I need to see him right away."

She didn't say don't leave me, because if she said it he'd have to obey. But she did say, "You're far too weak still to cope with running the war. If you go, you'll be playing into their hands. You'll make a mistake, and that'll give them all the excuse they need."

"That's possible," he said; and he was arguing against her now. She'd become yet another difficulty in his way. "But you never know, I might not. And if I stay here, I'm finished, and so are the Vadani. So…" He shrugged again. "There you have it," he said. "Look, do you think you could find someone to fetch Vaatzes? He'll be heading off to the camp any day now, and I'd like to hitch a ride."

"Will you take me with you?"

It wasn't the question she wanted to ask, but quite obviously it meant the same thing. It would, of course, have been better to have said nothing at all.

He paused, only for a short time, then said, "Yes, of course." They always addressed him as "Engineer Vaatzes", and he wasn't quite sure how he felt about that. He assumed they meant it as a mark of respect, or they intended him to feel flattered by it; and it was, of course, an appropriate title. Somehow, though, it made him feel uncomfortable, maybe because it came from them. He didn't know for sure, since it wasn't the sort of thing he ever discussed with them, but he had an idea they disapproved of what he did on a very basic level, like vegetarians disapproving of eating meat.

Two of them he'd met before, though he couldn't remember their names or what they did; he knew they were fairly important but not very important, and so he had to be polite to them. The third one he'd never seen, and the other two didn't introduce him, which meant he was either some clerk or assistant who didn't matter at all, or someone very important indeed.

"We appreciate the exceptional effort you've been making," one of the familiar ones said, "and the quite remarkable achievement your results represent. Without your machines, the entire project would collapse; more than that, it could never have begun in the first place." He paused for a moment and touched the headstock casing of the Mezentine turret lathe, which was nominally what they'd come here to admire. He prodded it tentatively, as if expecting it to be dangerously hot. "However," he went on, "I have to tell you, the siege is rapidly approaching a critical stage. The general has instructed me that the design of the heavy trebuchet" (he didn't pronounce the word quite right) "needs to be modified, to give further range. He appreciates that this will cause delays, and you are therefore to ship all the completed pieces you presently have in hand without making the necessary modifications; the general will attend to that himself."

Oh really, Ziani thought, and smiled. "Sorry," he said. "It can't be done."

The Aram Chantat stared at him, as though Ziani had just spat in his face.

"It's quite simple," Ziani said cheerfully. "To increase the range, you need either a heavier counterweight or a longer throwing arm, or both. But we can't make the weight heavier or it'll crack the frame, and we can't make the arm longer, or it'll just snap as soon as you loose off a shot. I can beef up the frame and the arm, of course, but that'll add to the weight, which reduces the efficiency, and you won't actually get the shot to go further or faster; all it'll mean is the machine'll be harder to move about. Now, if I could use box-section steel instead of oak beams for the cradle assembly, like the Mezentines do, that'd be a different matter, but producing box-section would mean I'd have to build a special furnace and rolling-mill, which would take at least three months, even if I had enough skilled workers, which I don't." He paused, wondering why it was so satisfying to say no to these people. "Of course, if the general's found a way to get round the problem, I'll be only too happy to use it."

All three of them were looking at him; he could trace the workings of their minds, as if he was studying a mechanism. They believed him; in which case, they were thinking, the general's demand was unrealistic and unreasonable, and clearly he doesn't know as much about making these weapons as he thinks he does, which in turn is a fault in him which we weren't previously aware of. And yet, they were thinking, Engineer Vaatzes recommended him for the job…

"What I can do," he went on, "is forget about the trebuchets and concentrate on getting the worms ready to ship. After all," he added carefully, "they're what's going to win us the war, as you know as well as I do."

As quite obviously they didn't. "We were going to ask you about them," the third man said-he spoke, so that meant he had to be very important indeed. Ziani turned his head a little, towards the third man and away from the other two.

"Come and see for yourself," he said. "I can tell you how they work, if you like."

It annoyed him that they weren't interested in what he showed them and didn't even try to understand what he told them. Of course he appreciated that it was entirely alien to them, as remote as horse-breeding and cattle-herding were to him, but after all, it was their war and they should have made the effort.

Afterwards, he took them to see the small-arms line. They liked that. They were impressed by the drop-hammers churning out sword-blade blanks, and the four-foot-diameter wheels that ground in the bevels, though they made a point of telling him several times that they did it differently in their country, and their way was much better. The swages that formed complete arrowheads in one pass wiped the smirks off their faces.

"You made this machine?" the third man said.

Ziani nodded. "It's a copy of the plant in the City ordnance factory," he said, "except that I modified it. The original machine does it in two steps; it makes the socket, then it goes back in the fire to heat up again, and then it forms the blade. My version's almost twice as fast."

He could feel them wanting him. In fact, not having him would eat them slowly away. He considered pointing out that the swage blocks and the trip-hammer together weighed just over seven tons, so it'd be useless to them; even if they managed to build a wagon strong enough to carry it, the time and effort involved in loading and unloading it whenever they needed to make arrowheads made it completely impractical. But no, he thought, let them want me, by all means. "If you think that's impressive, just wait till you see how we turn and fletch the shafts," he said.

"And they have machines like this in the City?" the third man asked, when they'd done the full tour.

"Loads of them," Ziani replied. "But, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, the machines aren't any use without trained men to work them, and fix them when they break down. And it takes years to train someone."

"You could train them, couldn't you?"

He nodded briskly. "Yes," he said. "Me and General Daurenja. Apart from him and me, though, I don't think there's anybody outside the City."

The third man frowned, while the other two kept perfectly still and quiet. "And then there's the materials," he said. "I couldn't help noticing; all the iron and steel you use. The sheets perfectly flat, the same thickness all the way through; and the round and square bars we saw on the racks in your storeroom. Presumably you have other machines somewhere else…"

"That's right," Ziani said. "The furnace and the rolling-mill. Both of them are much bigger than this. There's well over a thousand people working there."

"All skilled men, presumably."

"That's right, yes. Far more difficult than this, in fact. But essential; before I built the furnace and the mill, we had to make do with hand-worked stuff, and you can't do precision work or mass production if your materials aren't exactly straight and true."

"But you trained all these men yourself," the third man said. "And in such a short space of time."

"Well, a great many of them are Eremians," Ziani replied, "skilled men, by local standards-blacksmiths, wheelwrights, coopers, joiners; they may not have been up to Guild standards when I started working with them, but at least they understood the value of a straight line. And the rest are Vadani from the mines, so they knew a bit about smelting ore. Mostly, though, it's a question of procedures: set up a properly designed production line, explain how each job is done-exactly, no margin for error-and there's not much that can go wrong, provided you have good supervisors." He allowed himself a faint grin. "What you're really asking is, could your people learn how to work like this? And the answer is, I don't see why not, if you're really determined. But I don't think you are. I got the Eremians and the Vadani to do as I told them because they realised they had no choice; without the stuff I was going to make for them, they didn't stand a chance. You're not in that position, so you haven't got the incentive. Simple as that, really."

The third man nodded slowly. "I believe you underestimate us," he said quietly, "but the point is entirely valid. If we need to change our whole way of life simply in order to make tools and weapons rather more efficiently, I don't think we'd be interested." Ziani noticed the intensity in his eyes, as he continued: "I believe that you are the sort of man who'd go to extraordinary lengths to do a relatively simple, ordinary thing, when other men would quite happily give up and go away. I believe that this tendency is evidence of exceptional strength, but it's debatable whether strength is always a virtue. A river in spate is strong; thunderstorms and earthquakes are strong, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody's ever found a use for them." He shrugged; he made the gesture elegant, somehow. "I don't think my people will want to stop being who they are just for the sake of things. I believe that that would be missing the point rather. I feel that if you change yourself in order to achieve something, you distort the objective. We have a story, a silly little story for children, about a dog who wanted to steal the meat from his master's table, but it was too high up for him to reach. If I were a bird, he thought, I could fly up there and get at it; and at that very moment, a sorcerer happened to pass by and heard his thoughts, and decided to teach him a lesson. He turned that dog into a bird, and the bird flew up on to the table, just as he'd wanted to do; but when he got there, he found his jaws had become a stupid little beak, and he couldn't open it wide enough to take the meat." He smiled. "I'm sorry," he said, "I shouldn't waste your time with such things. But as we were talking, it came into my mind."

Ziani frowned. "It's a charming story," he said, "but I don't see what it's got to do with what we've been talking about."

"Don't you?" The Aram Chantat raised his eyebrows. "Perhaps you think the bird was simply being feckless; he should have learned to use a knife, so he could cut the meat up into pieces small enough for him to eat."

"Not really," Ziani replied. "I can't imagine the dog wanting to be a bird. So it was the sorcerer's fault for interfering."

That made the Aram Chantat clap his hands and laugh. "Of course," he said. "Such a thing would never happen, and so the story is pointless. You would never wish to be anything other than what you are; I'd overlooked that point. In fact, you'd perch on the sorcerer's shoulder and peck his ears all day until he turned you back. I can see that, now I think about it." It was three days since he'd last seen the duke, and he arrived outside the bedchamber door expecting to find evidence of progress; otherwise, why would he be up and about and demanding to see people?

He found Valens dressed and sitting in a chair; but the hole in his face, stuffed with wood-pith, was still as extraordinary as ever. For a moment, he thought he was looking at a mechanical object, a man-sized and shaped automaton with the faceplate partly removed and one of the screw-holes showing. Then he got a grip on himself and made the usual respectful enquiries.

"Actually, I feel terrible," Valens replied. "It hurts like hell, and every time I move I can feel this fucking plug, and all I want to do is get hold of a pair of tongs and pull it out, except I wouldn't have the strength." He stopped abruptly, as though he'd been punched hard in the pit of the stomach, then went on, "But I've got to get up and go to the front, because of your revolting friend Daurenja. Talking of which, what in God's name possessed you to recommend him for commander-in-chief? I thought you couldn't stand the man."

Ziani looked down at the floor. "He didn't leave me much choice," he said. "You know the position. If he told the Aram Chantat what he knows about me…"

"Fine." Valens scowled, and clearly that hurt. "I should have realised. Anyway, the savages are thinking about making the replacement permanent, so I've got to go down there and take the war back, assuming the journey doesn't kill me. I gather you're going there soon, with the new engines."

"They're ready," Ziani said. "There's a few bits and pieces still to do, but I can see to them once we get there."

Valens nodded. "In that case, we'll leave in the morning. Does that give you enough time?"

"I think so. I've got limbers and teams. But it'll take a while to get there, obviously."

"You won't be slowing me down," Valens replied. "Quite the opposite, in fact. The doctors say I've got to be carried in a litter at walking pace. Anything faster, and the wound might open up." He shuddered, a long, slight, convulsive movement that played up and down his body. When it stopped, he sighed. "I'm supposed to be brave," he said. "That's what they're telling everybody. Throughout, the duke has exhibited the utmost fortitude. Balls. The only reason I haven't screamed the place down is because it hurts too much to scream." He breathed in about halfway, then let the breath out slowly. "Really, I ought to thank you for making that horrible contraption the doctors used on me. They tell me it saved my life."

Ziani shrugged. "It was a job of work," he said. "I make machines. And it was a pleasant change to make something apart from weapons."

"That's beside the point," Valens said. "I got a really close look at it while they were using it. I'm no judge of these things, but it looked pretty impressive. Thank you." He pressed the tips of his fingers to his cheek, about an inch and a half below the swollen red mound surrounding the hole. "I guess I must be one of the very few people who's been on the receiving end of one of your inventions and survived."

"Like I said, it was just work," Ziani said; and he thought: one of the very few, and he's thanking me. "I'm sorry it had to be so painful."

Valens nodded. "Are you always sorry?" he asked. "No, you don't have to answer that. I believe you probably are, but you don't let it bother you too much. Anyway, I owe you my life. I take that sort of thing quite seriously."

"That's interesting," Ziani replied, looking past him at the wall. A heavy, slightly faded tapestry; the inevitable hunting scene, hounds pulling down a long, angular stag. No food without pain; no life without death. "You can see past the pain to the happy outcome."

"You have to, sometimes. I suppose it depends on what the outcome is. I mean, you can forgive someone who sticks a knife in you and cuts you open in cold blood if he happens to be a surgeon; he chops your leg off at the knee and you don't just forgive him, you pay him handsomely." He fell silent for a while, presumably gathering his strength. Then he said: "You say Daurenja forced you to nominate him; blackmail, this terrible secret you told me about."

Ziani said: "That's right."

"You said it was something I'd never be able to forgive."

"Yes."

Valens looked thoughtful for a moment. "This secret of yours has already caused me a lot of trouble," he said. "Let's do a trade. That instrument of torture you made saved my life. I'll trade you the debt in return for a complete free pardon, for whatever it is you did, provided you tell me about it. No going back on my word, no repercussions, no consequences. Well?"

"If you like," Ziani said. "Though I warn you…"

"Don't. Just tell me."

So Ziani told him: how he'd opened the gates of Civitas Eremiae to the Mezentines, allowing them to slaughter the people and burn the city. He kept it short and concise; Valens had bought the confession, but he hadn't paid enough for details. When he'd finished, he made himself turn his head a little and look at Valens' face; pale as milk, apart from the angry red around the wound.

"Why?" Valens asked.

"There were a number of reasons," Ziani replied. "The city was bound to fall sooner or later, so the people inside it were as good as dead already. I was sick to death of watching the scorpions I'd built shooting their soldiers down by the thousand. I thought that if they took the city, it'd end the war." He paused, then said, "And then I thought I could go home."

Valens nodded very slightly. "That was the deal, was it?"

"Yes. They cheated me, of course. There was supposed to be a safe conduct to get me out of there, we'd arranged it all beforehand. But when the time came, the men who were supposed to be meeting me didn't show up, and I knew they weren't going to keep their side of the bargain. So I made my own way out, and luckily-"

"You rescued Veatriz," Valens said quietly.

"That's right, yes. I figured that if I could get both of us out of the city and across the border into your country, you'd let me stay as a reward for saving her. Of course, you turned up and spared us both a long and unpleasant walk."

For a moment or so, he wondered if Valens had forgotten how to breathe. "You're right," he said eventually, "it's not something I could ever have forgiven. But I gave you my word, and so we'll forget all about it." He winced as he said that. "Partly because you made that thing for the doctors; but that wouldn't have been enough, on its own. Mostly it's because I've been profiting from your crime: if you hadn't done it, Veatriz would probably have been killed when they eventually took the city; as it was, I brought her here, and now she's my wife, and that's the only thing I ever wanted. It practically makes me your accomplice." He shook his head, like a horse refusing the bridle. "All right," he said, "those are the reasons why you did it. I still can't see how you could bring yourself to do it, though. It was…" He paused, scowling because the right word wouldn't come. "It was inhuman," he said. "So utterly callous…"

"Tell me," Ziani said. "If you'd been me, and opening the gates would've given you the woman you love, would you have done it?"

Valens nodded, once.