Academic Exercises (15 page)

“You work in a tannery,” he said.

“If you’re reading my mind you’re not very good at it,” the man replied. “Six months since I left there. Five months and twenty-seven days since it burned down,” he added. “Anyway, what’s that got to do with anything?”

“Fight me,” Framea said. “If you dare.”

“If I think I’m hard enough, you mean?” The man laughed. “That’s what they used to say at that place. Regretted it, later. But there’s no point. We can’t hurt each other. You know that.”

Framea took a deep breath. “The defence you’re referring to is called Lorica,” he said.

“Fascinating.”

“Take it down,” Framea said. “I’ll do the same. Then we can fight and really mean it. It’s the way we do it.”

He didn’t dare breathe until the man replied, “Is that right?”

“Yes. Think about it. How do you suppose anything ever gets sorted out?”

Another pause. Then the man said, “How’ll I know you’ve taken yours down?”

Framea muttered Ignis ex favellis, making his skin glow blue. “I’ve lit mine up, same as yours. When the lights go out, we’ll both know the other one’s taken down Lorica. Then we can put an end to this, once and for all.” He waited a heartbeat, then added, “I’m taking mine down now. Don’t disappoint me. I’m paying you a compliment.”

He ended Ignis. Another heartbeat, and the white glow at the far end of the loft went out. With his mind’s arm, he reached down into the girl’s heart and took everything, at the same time as he ripped every last scrap out of himself, and launched it all in Ruans in defectum.

The form went through. The smallest fraction of time that he could perceive passed, and no counterstroke came. No backlash. With the last shreds of his strength, he moved into the second House.

As usual, it was light and cool there. Today it was a meadow, with a river in the distance, sheep in the pasture on the far bank. He looked round and saw the man, lying on his face, burned practically to charcoal. He ran across, lifted his head by his charred, crumbling hair and whispered in his ear, “Can you hear me?”

The reply was inside his own head.
Yes.

“This is the second House,” he said. “This is another place, not the place where you used to live. In that place, your body has been disintegrated. I used Ruans. There’s nothing left for anyone to bury. You’re dead.”

I understand
.

“I’m holding you here by Ensis spiritus. The second House is outside time, but it takes a huge amount of effort just to be here. In a moment I’ll have to let you go, and then you’ll just disappear, drain away. It won’t hurt. Do you understand?”

Yes
.

“Show me Lorica.”

But you know—

“No. I don’t know Lorica. Nobody does.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Nobody living. Show it to me. You’re the only one who ever found it. Show it to me now.”

The body was charred embers, it was ash, it was falling apart. Any moment now, the thing inside it would leak out into the air and be gone for good. Framea used Virtus et clementia, which was illegal, but who the hell would ever know?

He saw Lorica.

He wanted to laugh. It was absurdly simple, though it would take considerable strength of mind and talent; still, easier and more straightforward than some forms he’d learnt before his voice broke. It was nothing more than a wide dispersal through at least twenty different Houses, combined with a third-level dislocation. The weapon (or the form, or the collapsing wall or the falling tree) killed you in one House, or twelve, or nineteen; but there you were, safe and sound, also in the twentieth House, and a fraction of a second later, back you came, as though nothing had happened. All there was to it. Less skill and technique required than conjuring up a bunch of flowers.

The voice sighed in his head. A gentle breeze blew away the last of the ash. Framea felt the bitter cold that meant he’d stayed out too long and needed to get back. He slipped out of the second House just in time, and as soon as he got back he passed out.

Someone was shaking him. He opened his eyes and grunted,

“Are you all right?” The girl was leaning over him, looking worried. “You wouldn’t wake up. I was afraid something had happened.”

You could say that, he thought. Something did happen. “I’m fine,” he said. “I had a bit too much to drink earlier, that’s all. I’m going now,” he added. “Thanks for everything.”

He stood up. His ankle still hurt, and for some reason he couldn’t be bothered to fix it with Salus or any of the other simple curative forms.

“Are you a wizard?” she asked.

He turned to face her. She looked all right, as far as he could tell, but in many cases there was a delay before the first symptoms manifested. “Me? God, no. Whatever gave you that idea?”

He walked away before she could say anything else.

“And was it,” the Precentor said delicately, “the problem we discussed?”

Framea looked straight at him, as if taking aim. “No,” he said. “I got that completely wrong. It was just an unusually powerful Scutum.”

The Precentor’s face didn’t change. “That’s just as well,” he said. “I was concerned, when I received your letter.”

“Yes. I’m sorry about that.” Behind the Precentor’s head he could just make out the golden wings of the Invincible Sun, the centrepiece of the elaborate fresco on the far wall. Had the Precentor deliberately arranged the chairs in his study so that, viewed from the visitor’s seat, his head was framed by those glorious wings, imparting the subconscious impression of a halo? Wouldn’t put it past him, Framea decided. “I guess I panicked, the first time I fought him. I’m new at this sort of thing, after all.”

“You did exceedingly well,” the Precentor said. “We’re all very pleased with how you handled the matter. I myself am particularly gratified, since you were chosen on my personal recommendation.”

Not long ago, that particular fragment of information would have filled him with terror and joy. “It was quite easy,” he said, “once I’d figured it out. A simple translocation, change the angle, broke his guard.” He licked his lips, which had gone dry, and added, “Needless to say, I regret having had to use lethal force. But he was very strong. I didn’t want to take chances.”

The Precentor smiled. “You did what had to be done. Now, will you join me in a glass of wine? I believe this qualifies as a special occasion.”

Three weeks later, Framea was awarded the White Star, for exceptional diligence in the pursuit of duty, elevated to the Order of Distinguished Merit, and promoted to the vacant chaplaincy of the Clerestory, a valuable sinecure that would allow him plenty of time for his researches. He moved offices, from the third to the fifth floor, with a view over the moat, and was allocated new private chambers, in the Old Building, with his own sitting room and bath.

Nine months later, he wrote a private letter to the Brother of the village. He wrote back to say that the village whore (the Brother’s choice of words) had recently given birth. The child was horribly deformed; blind, with stubs for arms and legs, and a monstrously elongated head. It had proved impossible to tell whether it was a boy or a girl. Fortuitously, given its sad condition, it had only lived a matter of hours. After its death, the woman hanged herself, presumably for shame.

Father Framea (as he is now) teaches one class a week at the Studium; fifth year, advanced class. He occasionally presents papers and monographs, which are universally well received. His most recent paper, in which he proves conclusively that the so-called Lorica form does not and cannot exist, is under consideration for the prestigious Headless Lance award.

A friend of mine once developed a board game based on Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. It was an exciting game to play. You could be the good angels or the fallen angels, and usually the fallen angels won the early stages, because they were better fighters, better motivated. But in the final round, the good angels played the Messiah card, which automatically won them the game. Siege warfare worked more or less the same way. The outcome was not in question. What mattered was how the defenders played their game before they lost.

Sieges caused civilisation. Some time over five thousand years ago, somewhere in Mesopotamia, a community that was reluctant to face its enemies in open battle built walls to shelter behind. Outside the walls, the enemy constituted the first siege. The people inside were the citizens of the first city.

From Jericho to Stalingrad, human beings have expended a vast proportion of their species’ energy, ingenuity and resources on the lethal game of building walls and trashing them. The science developed slowly; the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople, built in the 5th century AD, were able to defend the city from countless sieges for a thousand years. By the seventeenth century, siegecraft had evolved rules as sophisticated and inflexible as chess. The French engineer Vauban wrote a book in which the conduct of a siege on both sides was set out with mathematical certainty; no city could withstand a siege conducted under Vauban’s principles, and the length of time between the various stages of the siege’s progress were as precisely calculated and tabulated as a railroad timetable. Nevertheless, Vauban also laid down designs for the state of the art in fortification, on the principle that, although success for the besieger was inevitable if he was able and prepared to commit the staggering resources of time, manpower and money necessary, he might well be deterred from making the attempt if the scale and strength of the defences were such as to render the exercise cost-ineffective. The designs themselves are masterpieces of Enlightenment geometry; if you look at them without knowing what they are, you’ll see them as some kind of advanced abstract art, visually arresting, a disturbing blend of symmetry and menace—malevolent starfish encrusted with spiky cancerous growths. There’s no mistaking that these extraordinary shapes are weapons of earth and stone. Just as sieges gave birth to the cities we live in, they gave them their location and their shape.

Before 2000 BC, the Egyptians already knew about the three main approaches to storming a city; climbing the walls, smashing gates, undermining the walls to make them collapse. They used scaling ladders, battering rams and siege towers. The Assyrians developed these techniques, bringing them to such a level of perfection that little would change until the Middle Ages. They added pavises (shields to protect sappers from defending archers) and embankments (heaps of earth piled against the wall to enable machinery to get up close). The Greeks invented artillery—the various forms of torsion engine (stone-throwers powered by twisted-rope springs). By Alexander’s time, siegecraft was already a complex science. We have a military textbook written at that time; among other recommendations, the author suggests that the best way to deal with sappers digging tunnels under your walls is to make a hole in their tunnel, throw in as many beehives as you can lay your hands on and fill in the hole. Pouring hot or noxious liquids on the attackers’ heads goes way back, and the Greeks had invented the flame-thrower by the fifth century BC; the Byzantines perfected it a thousand years later with the invention of Greek fire, a sort of early napalm that couldn’t be put out; it even kept burning when sprayed on, or under, water, and it was sprayed through a siphon powered by bellows. The final innovation was gunpowder, first used to propel cannonballs against masonry around the middle of the 14th century. It was cannon that breached the Theodosian walls, though it took a specially large gun to do it; invented by a Christian renegade who’d previously offered the design to the last emperor of Constantinople, who couldn’t afford to pay the asking price.

Before gunpowder, it wasn’t quite so cut and dried. Western literature starts with a siege. In the
Iliad
, the Trojans have been so secure behind their walls that even after nine years, King Priam has to be told who everybody is on the Greek side, because they’ve never managed to get close enough for him to see them. The Trojans come out to fight, hand to hand on the plain, but only because honour requires it. The real Troy, as excavated by Schliemann, may not have been quite so invulnerable. About the size of a medium shopping mall, it was destroyed by fire at least once, during the so-called Catastrophe of the late Bronze age, when nearly all the great cities of the Aegean were burnt down and abandoned by raiders from the sea, whose identity and motivation we can only guess at.

Pitched battles and sieges make up a large part of the history of war. In ancient Greece, war was endemic; it was also (for the most part) under control. Sparta aside, the Greek city states didn’t have standing armies. The army was just another permutation of the citizen assembly. Adult Greek middle-class men came together to vote, to worship, to watch plays and to fight. All these activities, war included, had to fit in with the really important priorities of the agricultural year—ploughing, sowing, harvest. Wars had to be fought quickly and decisively; so, in a country of mountain and maquis, Greek armies met together on the plains. In a country murderously hot in summer, they met together covered from head to ankle in bronze armour. The Greeks despised archers, weren’t bothered about cavalry or light infantry (which tended to wander off before or during the battle); what mattered was the
othismos
, the shoving-match between rival phalanxes; American football to the death. The stronger team pushed back the weaker; the losing side broke up, fled, and were butchered as they ran, for a short while. The object of the exercise was to win the field and set up a trophy (
tropaion
, a heap of captured weapons). As soon as a result was achieved, the survivors could go home and get on with some useful work. If you were on the winning side, casualty rates were very low. It was formal, sensible war, keeping damage and waste to an acceptable minimum, and the Greeks practised it among themselves, almost unchanged, for three hundred years. The great sieges of Greek military history came in the biggest, nastiest war, at the end of the Classical period, between Athens and Sparta; no land dispute, but a fear-and-loathing confrontation between radically different ideologies, where all the rules gradually broke down.

It’s easy to speculate that the Greeks avoided sieges for as long as they could because they had the sense to realise how nasty things could get. The ancient and medieval world was under no illusions about the misery of sieges. The Mongols made that common knowledge into a military tool. When they wanted a city, they offered it three chances to surrender; three refusals, and the city would be razed to the ground and the inhabitants massacred.

The Mongols ran their wars the way good businessmen run successful corporations. The war had to be cost-effective and show a profit. Taking a city represents an enormous investment, so it made sense to avoid it if possible. A Greek general once said that no city is invulnerable if a mule laden with gold can get inside it, and a substantial proportion of the great sieges of history ended in treachery; someone inside bribed or terrified into sneaking out at night and opening the gates. Finding a traitor, an opportunistic individual or disaffected political faction, would have been the besieging general’s first and favourite option—“I love treachery,” said the Roman emperor Augustus, “it’s traitors I don’t like.” He would, of course, also try more conventional means of negotiation. The defenders knew the score; that, unless they could hold out until their own side sent an army to drive the besiegers away, it was only a matter of time and resources before the city fell. Terms would be offered; safe conduct for the garrison to come out and go home, keeping their weapons, standards and military insignia; a promise not to loot the city and kill or enslave the people. The defender would have done the arithmetic. The equations were well known and straightforward; numbers on both sides, stocks of food, the risk of disease—with so many people cramped up in a confined space, outbreaks of plague on either side of the wall were a regular occurrence—morale, how long a relieving army would take to arrive, the political will to send such an army; if the city had access to the sea, would an enemy blockade be effective.

Both sides would, of course, make the same calculations, most likely arrive at the same answer. Long before Vauban wrote down the ratios in his impeccably scientific book, the basic formulae were well known to everybody in the trade. Of course, there were always mavericks who didn’t care, like the Zealots who defended Masada against the Romans, and killed themselves rather than surrender. A defending commander serving a psychotic autocrat (no shortage of them throughout history) might choose to continue an untenable defence if he knew that a sensible, businesslike surrender would cost him his head. Naturally, the headman’s axe cut both ways. Many unwinnable sieges dragged on because the besieging general knew exactly what would happen to him if he gave up and went home.

Treachery and sweet reason both having failed, the besieger had three options. He could withdraw; he could sit outside the walls and try and starve the enemy out; or he could mount an assault in hope of carrying the city by storm.

Torsion artillery—stone and arrow throwing engines powered by twisted-rope springs—started with the Greeks and overlapped with gunpowder. The Roman name for the rope-powered single-armed engine was
onager
, the wild ass, because the way the throwing arm slammed into the wooden frame reminded them of a donkey’s kick, or because the squeaking sound it made as the rope was being wound sounded a bit like ‘hee-haw’. It took eight men to work it. At Masada, the Jewish garrison got the hang of watching the trajectory of the white balls against the sky and getting out of the way just before they pitched; the Romans painted the balls black and started killing Jews in great numbers. The double-armed engine, resembling a giant crossbow but also powered by twisted rope rather than just the bending of the arms, was called the
ballista
, from the Greek word for ‘to throw’. It could shoot arrows or throw stones. In the Islamic world it was called a
ziyar
, and was used well into the 15th century. The Europeans refined the
ziyar
to develop the
espringal
, wound by a long screw and a windlass.

Torsion engines killed men on both sides and caused a certain amount of damage to masonry, but they weren’t city-smashers. Trained artillerymen could shoot them surprisingly accurately. Their main function was to keep heads down (or knock them off). To get inside the city, the attackers had three options; to climb over the walls, bash down a gate, or breach the walls by digging under them and making them collapse.

Climbing the wall, using long scaling ladders, was the least effective option if the wall was adequately defended. A man climbing a ladder is sadly vulnerable. You can drop things on his head, push the ladder away from the wall with a forked stick, or kill him as soon as he reaches the upper rungs. Siege towers evened the odds a little; mobile wooden fortresses as tall as the tops of the walls, with platforms for archers who could lay down a barrage of arrows. But the towers themselves were dangerous places to be. They were usually armoured with thick planks, sometimes with water-soaked hides to protect them from fire; they worked well for the Assyrians in the 9th century BC, and the Greeks called them
helepoleis
, ‘city-takers’, which suggests they got the job done, for a while at least. More sophisticated versions were fitted with a drawbridge arrangement, allowing men to cross from the tower directly onto the wall. The Turks were still using siege towers in 1453, against Constantinople, and in 1565, at the siege of Malta. But they were cumbersome, needing to be wheeled into position by teams of men or oxen; a good hit from an onager would cause havoc inside, and if they caught fire they were death-traps. If the approach to the city was rough, uneven or wet, getting a tower up to the wall must have been a nightmare. Defenders sometimes dug deep trenches around the walls, filled them with storage jars and covered them with turf; when the towers were brought up, their weight crushed the jars and the towers collapsed into the trench. The Greek architect Diognetus foiled the towers of Demetrius Poliorcetes (his name means “sacker of cities”) by commandeering the contents of every midden and chamber-pot in the city and pumping it out through holes in the wall; the towers duly bogged down and got stuck.