Academic Exercises (17 page)

Defenders could launch sorties and kill sappers, block up trenches, collapse galleries with explosives, but if the enemy had the time and the resources, they were only delaying the inevitable. Once one of Vauban’s zig-zags appeared in front of the city, there wasn’t really anything anyone could do. As before, the only real constraint was the besieger’s ability to supply his army. Vauban’s employer, Louis XIV of France, was the richest king in Europe, and he bled France white paying for sieges. Being besieged wasn’t quite so ruinously expensive, but it didn’t come cheap. Of course, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Europe was awash with new money—gold from the New World, the proceeds of expanded trade and early colonialism; just as well, given that Europe’s rulers had acquired such a taste for probably the most expensive hobby in history, at least before the start of the space race.

It was in the New World, during the American Civil War, that siegecraft finally overextended itself and fell into decline. It was a war decided by a different sort of engineer; cutters of metal, not shapers of stone. For example; at Petersburg, the Union forces executed a textbook undermining of the Confederate fortifications. Vauban would have approved. But, when the camouflet went up, a gaping breach appeared in the line and the infantry poured in to secure it—a formality, according to the rules—they were shot to pieces by the Confederates. Samuel Colt’s Hartford production line had revolutionised small arms manufacture, with the result that every infantryman now held a rifle capable of accurate aimed fire. At New Orleans, the Union used the waterways to float city-smashing mortars close enough to the city to prompt surrender. Paddle steamers and railways made possible a new kind of war, fought in the open over great distances, with mobility the key. Why bother cracking open the layered defences of Atlanta when you could simply go round them?

The machine-gun briefly gave the battlefield back to the trench-diggers in the First World War, just as cannon had done in Vauban’s time. But the tank—a siege tower, if you like, but self-propelled and massively armed and armoured—put an end to trench warfare. The tank was, of course, nothing new. It was the logical development of the 16th century armoured wagons of Jan Huss. Leonardo had tried to invent it. With the advent of fast, powerful tanks, the siege as generations had known it was obsolete. Motorised warfare dealt with the Maginot line by going round it. A different kind of siege took place at Stalingrad. The pounding of masonry into rubble by long range artillery simply gave the defending infantry endless cover, and Vauban’s formality became the main event. Aerial bombardment brought the horrors of war back to city-dwellers in yet another permutation of the siege, but the Second World War was won in the open field, by mobility, firepower and (most of all) industrial capacity.

The only reason to study war is the reason doctors study a disease; to find a cure. Smallpox is now officially extinct, and the same is probably true of the classical assault-and-blockade siege. There are, of course, plenty more diseases. The siege shaped our society at every level. It brought us together to live behind walls, in cities. Its fundamental influence on the nature of warfare directed political life and development for three thousand years. It was, of course, the mother of many of our essential technologies, from mining to metalworking. It would have been nice, of course, if we could have arrived at the same place without such a monstrous waste of lives, resources and effort. It’s impossible to calculate how many millions of tons of earth were shifted in its name, mostly in wooden shovels tipped with iron, steel being too rare and expensive.

Well; our ancestors may have been disreputable and violent, but we are their descendants, and we can’t simply wash our hands of our inheritance. Nor, as we cheerfully prepare to destroy the planet itself, can we afford to be too superior in our attitude to our predecessors, who were content simply to wreck cities. The deadly elegance of Vauban’s geometry and the miserable reality of sick, starving men digging trenches ought to teach us some kind of lesson, but that’s probably too much to hope for. Instead, we pack sandwiches and tour the broken walls and slighted castles, marvelling at mankind’s ability to smash up practically anything, given time, money and other people to do the dirty work.

They all say that, don’t they? They say; I met someone once who spent five years there, disguised as a holy man. Or; the village headman told me his people go there all the time, to trade timber and flour for spices. Or; the priest showed me things that had come from there—a statuette, a small, curiously-fashioned box, a pair of shoes, a book I couldn’t read. Or; from the top of the mountain we looked out across the valley and there it was, on the other side of the river, you could just make out the sun glinting off the spires of the temples. Or; I was taken there, I saw the Great Gate and the Forbidden Palace, I sat and drank goat-butter tea with the Grand Master, who was seven feet tall and had his eyes, nose and mouth set in the middle of his chest.

You hear them, read them. The first, second, third time, you believe. The fourth time, you want to believe. The fifth time, you notice a disturbing pattern beginning to emerge—how they were always so close they could hear the voices of the children and smell the woodsmoke, but for this reason or that reason they couldn’t go the last two hundred yards and had to turn back (but it was there, it is there, it’s real, it really exists). The sixth time breaks your heart. By the seventh time, you’re a scholar, investigating a myth.

I am a scholar. I have spent my entire life investigating what I now firmly believe to be a myth. But there is such a place. And I have been there.

“The duke,” she said, “is watching you.”

Bearing in mind where we were, who she was and what we’d been doing, I sincerely hoped she was talking figuratively. “You don’t say.”

“Oh yes.” She tugged at the sheet. Women feel the cold. “He’s very interested in you.”

Another thing women do is say things that aren’t entirely true. Men do this, of course; but usually for a reason, usually a reason you can perceive; a shape hidden under the lies, like a body under a blanket. You see a blanket, but you can trace where the arms, legs, chest are. Women, by contrast, say untrue things just to see where the path will lead. “I doubt it,” I said. “He won’t have heard of me.”

“Of course he’s heard of you.”

I yawned. I didn’t feel like conversation. “My father, possibly,” I said. “Maybe, just conceivably, my brother, because of the lawsuits. Me, no. Nobody’s heard of me.”

She cleared her throat.

“Outside of the Studium,” I amended. “And the scholarly fraternity at large. I confess, I’m reasonably well known among my brother scholars. That fool who believes, they call me. Outside of that, though—”

She nuzzled against me, purely for warmth. “The greatest living authority on Essecuivo,” she said.

“Exactly. That fool who believes. What on earth could that possibly have to do with the duke?”

“He’s bought the Company.”

I felt a shiver that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature of the room. “Then he’s an idiot,” I said. “Even if he only paid a penny for it.”

“He doesn’t think so.”

“Well, he wouldn’t.”

“And it was rather more than a penny,” she went on, talking to the ceiling. “He’s mortgaged Sansify and Gard Hardy and sold his half share in the tin mines to raise the money. He’s serious about it.”

I frowned; it was dark, so she couldn’t see me. “I feel sorry for his sons,” I replied. “It’s miserable, being the poor son of a rich father. You never quite manage to get away from it. Mind you, there’s a substantial difference in scale. My father was
well-off
, but nothing at all like—”

“He thinks it’s a good investment.”

I really wasn’t in the mood for talking about the duke; especially since the conversation also appeared to involve Essecuivo, a subject I talk about incessantly among scholars and never to outsiders. In fact, I didn’t want to talk at all. I just wanted to go home; but you can’t, can you? Not straight away. “Well,” I said, “I hope his faith turns out to be justified, naturally. If so, I’ll be as pleased as I’ll be amazed.”

I felt her turn towards me. “It does exist, doesn’t it?” she said. “There is such a place.”

I sighed. “Yes,” I said. “I believe it exists. Aeneas Peregrinus went there, and he was real enough. But we don’t know where it is.”

“You don’t know?”

“And I’m the greatest living authority.” I sighed. “One of the greatest living authorities. Professor Strella, in Aerope, would dispute that last statement, but he’s a fraud. Carchedonius of Luseil—”

“You must have some idea.”

I stretched. Time to get up and go. “It exists,” I said. “Somewhere. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. I’d better go.”

“No.”

“I’d better. He might come back early, you never know.”

“It’s the second reading of the Finance Bill,” she said irritably, “he won’t be back till the morning. You never want to stay.”

“I really should go.”

“Fine. That’s fine.” You see what I mean. They’re always saying things they don’t mean. “Tomorrow?”

“Not sure about tomorrow,” I said, “I may have to dine in Hall. And then I’ve got a lecture to prepare. The day after tomorrow would be better.”

“Suit yourself.”

I slid out of bed, felt for my trousers in the dark. I always find that sort of thing exquisitely distasteful. “Is the House sitting next week?”

“I don’t know.”

Of course she knew. But I could look it up in the gazette. I pulled on my shirt, then hesitated. “Is the duke really interested in me?”

“Yes.”

I shrugged. “Maybe he’ll be good for a few marks toward the chancel fund,” I said. “It’s getting pretty desperate, the rain’s coming in under the eaves.”

I was born in the City. My father was a junior partner in the Eastern Sea Company, which at that time was a cross between a bank and a munitions factory. He was on the munitions side of things; he ran the ordnance yard where they cast the cannons and mortars that would be mounted on the ships that would make the journey to Essecuivo, to sell woollen cloth, tin plates, mirrors, shovels, whatever in return for cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, fine red pepper and the curious root that cures plague, syphilis and baldness. Because nobody had discovered Essecuivo yet, there wasn’t exactly a hurry; so, in order to keep the cash flow moving along, the Company sold the cannons and mortars my father made to the kings and dukes of neighbouring states, who always managed to find a use for them. Back then, money was still pouring in to the Company (because everybody knew it was only a matter of time before someone found Essecuivo), and the directors invested it sensibly in worthwhile projects, to build up the capital against the day when the crucial discovery was made and the Company could launch its first fleet. It was called the Eastern Sea Company because, on the balance of the evidence then available, it was generally held that Essecuivo was somewhere to the east. But if it had turned out to be in the west, they wouldn’t have minded. They were practical men, back then.

My father was a practical man. He wasn’t convinced that Essecuivo would simply fall into our laps like an overripe pear; it would need finding, so someone would have to find it. Ordinarily he’d have done it himself (he was a great believer in if-you-want-something-done-properly) but he was too busy with supervising the cannon-founders and doing deals with foreign princes to find the time, so it seemed logical to keep it in the family and give the job to his spare son (me). Accordingly, from the age of nine I was tutored in geography, history, languages and book-keeping (for when I’d found Essecuivo and established our first trading post there). When I was sixteen, I was sent to the Studium, which possesses a copy of every book ever written, to continue my studies. And there I stayed, becoming the youngest ever professor of Humanities at age thirty-two.

Every book, I discovered, except one.

I first encountered Aeneas Peregrinus when I was twelve. I read about him in Silvianus’
Discourses
. Aeneas Peregrinus had been to Essecuivo, three hundred years ago. He set off from the City with a cargo of lemons, heading for Mesembrotia, but was blown off course by a freak storm. The storm lasted for nine days, and when the wind dropped, nobody had any idea where they were; even the stars were different, Aeneas wrote. For four weeks they drifted, until another storm, even more ferocious than the first, picked them up and carried them at terrifying speed for eight days, then died away as suddenly as it had arisen. On the skyline, they could see land. They sat becalmed for a further three days, until a gentle breeze carried them to what turned out to be Essecuivo, where the soil and climate are the best in the world, the people are gentle, sophisticated, wealthy beyond measure and wildly generous, and where they’d never seen a lemon.

Aeneas sold his cargo for its weight in gold, then spent a month or so travelling round the country talking to noblemen, priests and scholars, finding out everything he could about the wonderful country he’d stumbled across. Most of all, naturally, he wanted to find out where it was. That, apparently, was no problem; the Essecuivans are exceptionally learned in astronomy, geography and all related sciences, and taught him the principles of latitude and the techniques of advanced navigation using the astrolabe, compass and sextant (all previously unknown outside Essecuivo) which every ship’s captain uses to this day. With this knowledge, it was a simple matter for Aeneas to fix the relative positions of Essecuivo and the City and plot a course home. The return journey took him three weeks, partly because he was held up by contrary winds a third of the way over. He arrived home with his cargo of gold ingots, and immediately sat down to write his two great books. The first of these,
A Discourse on Navigation
, he presented to the Council, who made him a Knight of Equity and set up a ten-foot high statue in his honour in what is now Aeneas Square. The second book, a complete description of Essecuivo, including precise directions for finding it again, he kept to himself, although he occasionally showed selected passages to his close friends. After all, he reasoned, he was determined to go back there and make a second massive fortune, and quite possibly a third, fourth, fifth and sixth, for as long as the Essecuivans were prepared to pay ridiculous prices for lemons. Only an idiot would disclose the secret of unlimited wealth, and risk a flooding of the market.

Aeneas Peregrinus died suddenly, at the age of forty-six, three hundred and seven years ago. At the time of his death, the whereabouts of the manuscript of his second book were not known. It hasn’t been seen since.