Academic Exercises (36 page)

A redoubtable modern experimental archaeologist, one Mike Loades, recently set out to disprove the Maciejowski Bible once and for all. He acquired a very fine reproduction sword and had a very fine reproduction helmet made, looking just like the ones in the Bible, and proceeded to bash on the helmet with the sword for all he was worth. He managed to dent it, but that was all.

Proof positive; except that—

1. The very fine helmet, like the very fine sword, was made of modern steel. Mr Loades didn’t go into details, but the industry standard for modern repro helmets is something like 2mm cold rolled steel sheet. Medieval armour was made of iron, not steel, and the sheets were hammered by eye with sledgehammers, not rolled in a computer-controlled mill. King Louis would’ve traded you the Loire valley and half of Touraine for a helmet, or a sword, as good as the ones Mr Loades used for his test.

2. Most of the armour-chopping in the Maciejowski Bible is done by men on horseback. Add the momentum of a moving horse to the strength of the human arm, and you vastly increase the force of the blow; rather like the difference between getting punched by a pedestrian and hit by a moving car.

3. Mr Loades is one of the most skilled swordsmen currently alive, but he’s a 21st century weakling. They were stronger back then. They could shoot bows that we can’t draw. They could till an acre a day with an ox-drawn plough—we know they could, because that’s the original definition of an acre, but you try it and see how far you get. They could fight all day in heavy armour, which exhausts us in a matter of minutes. Medieval noblemen trained intensively with weapons from childhood. The fact that we can’t do it is no proof that it can’t be done.

(2) Our best evidence about how men died in battle in the Middle Ages comes from the mass graves discovered on the site of the Battle of Wisby, fought in Sweden in 1361. The remains of over a thousand bodies were unearthed there between 1905 and 1928. The dead were almost exclusively local Swedish infantry conscripts rather than knights; they wore mail coifs rather than helmets and little or no leg armour. Considerable numbers of them show cutting wounds to the legs and head, which suggests a fairly basic feint-high-cut-low or feint-low-cut-high style of battlefield swordsmanship, a hypothesis supported by descriptions of fighting in the roughly contemporary Icelandic sagas and elsewhere. Of the skeletons where cause of death could be established, cuts outnumbered piercing wounds by almost 5 to 1. In several cases, both legs had been severed by one blow, though of course we can’t establish whether the weapon used was a sword or an axe.

(3) The shield survived into the rapier era, in the form of the buckler, a steel disc about the size of a dinner plate. The buckler was a handy piece of equipment. You could punch with it as well as defend, and it was just about small enough to hang from your belt as you swaggered about town, though the incessant clanking would have driven you crazy. It fell into disuse when contemporary fashionistas decreed that wearing the buckler (swash-buckling) was just so last year.

(4) Robert Drews, a leading authority on the Bronze Age in Europe, accounts for the extraordinary catastrophe that left most of the great walled cities of the Aegean in ashes near the end of the Bronze Age to the introduction of a new type of sword, the Naue Type II or Griffzungenschwert, wielded by a loose confederation of Sicilian and Sardinian pirates. Drews’ hypothesis is significantly more convincing than the alternative explanations previously offered by scholars, and it’s undeniable that the Naue II was a massive success, appearing simultaneously all over Europe and the Near East and replacing previous types. However, his theory tends towards the Hells Angels school of historical speculation—a bunch of mindless hooligans blow into town, trash the joint and vanish without a trace, as though they’d never been—which I’ve always had problems with. Furthermore, the Naue II is better than most bronze swords but it’s still a bronze sword; smack something hard with it and it bends like a banana. Professor Drews could do worse than invest in one of Neil Burridge’s outstandingly authentic replicas of the Naue II and try it for himself.

Codex Escatoensis XIV.67/3c; 127-339

The truth, the sad, banal truth, is that they’re nothing but a network of three-hundred-year-old Imperial relay stations, built in a hurry in the last decades of the Occupation to pass warning messages about pirate raids. Of course they built them on hilltops, so they’d be visible at a distance, and of course they had to be towers, for the same reason. They used stone because they used stone for everything; white stone because the Porthead marble quarries hadn’t been completely worked out back then. It’s true they didn’t use mortar, and you can’t slide the tip of a knife between the stones. That’s how they built everything—temples, barns, outdoor privies. They didn’t know any other way.

We know this, because we can read the inscriptions they left over the doorways. They look mysterious and grand. Translated, they’re nothing at all. They tell you the station number, the commissioning date, the name and rank of the engineer in charge of construction, and some basic standing orders. We go out of our way to tell people that the ancient writings aren’t runes of power or deadly curses. Nobody believes us, of course. They never do. We rarely want them to.

When I was a kid, I wanted one, for my very own, more than anything in the world. Feel free, therefore, to have no sympathy for me.

She stood up in her stirrups, her eyes positively shining. “It’s a wizard’s tower,” she said.

“There’s no such thing as wizards,” I replied. “You should know. You’re training to be one.”

She ignored me, as usual. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “How old is it?”

“Late Occupation,” I replied. “As you deduced from the style of the masonry and the materials used. Or perhaps you read the date, there, above the door.”

She squinted; the late afternoon sun was dazzling on the white stone. “Procuratorship of Callias and Sthenodorus. When was that?”

“You can look it up when we get home. Come on, will you? You’ve got the key.”

“Are you sure? I thought you had it.”

Laus tibi soli
is a third-level excession, primarily designed for bringing the latent silver in alluvial lead deposits to the surface. It also opens most locks. To be fair, she did it quite well. I shouldn’t have had to remind her of the words, though.

A brief digression about women. I have no problem with them. Bearing in mind the disadvantages they suffer from—late onset, early diminution, traumatic dispossession, all that—many of them do remarkably well. And I fully support the recent initiatives to bring more Talented women into the Order, and to help them make the most of their talent while they still have it. In the appropriate disciplines (medicine, primarily; they can also make pretty fair weather forecasters and water diviners) there’s absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t be treated just the same as us, though of course advancement beyond junior deacon is out of the question, they simply don’t have time. I also accept that there’s no substitute for a field placement between sixth and seventh year; all this business about accelerated apprenticeships and pushing them along with
fors maius
is clearly counterproductive, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how you grow and develop as an adept. So, obviously, someone’s got to draw the short straw occasionally. I just wish it didn’t always have to be me.

The first thing I noticed, of course, was the smell. It’s unmistakable.

Actually, it wasn’t just
the
smell; it was the rather extraordinary combination of
the
smell and all the usual neglected-building smells—mould, damp plaster, mildewed fabrics, the lives, digestive cycles and deaths of birds and rats. Blend all those with the stink of non-Saloninan physics and you get an entirely unique fragrance guaranteed to tantalise the mind and turn the stomach.

I said something about it. She looked at me. “What smell?” she said.

I looked around. It was more or less what I’d expected. Any normal, sensible person looking to build a tower would opt for a plain stone tube; not these jokers. They used a weird system of tiers of arches braced by internal buttresses; we’ve been studying the wretched things for a century and we still don’t know for sure how they work. Basic architectural theory tells us the lot of them should’ve fallen down years ago, which is why the College of Works refuses to certify them as safe for military use, which is why we’ve got them instead of the Brigade of Signals. When you first walk into one and look up, you’re terrified of sneezing in case you end up wearing the roof as a hat. But there they stand, smugly infuriating, proof against landslips, floods, earth tremors, subsidence and all known artillery. They’ve even survived ten generations of east-country crofters scavenging for building materials, unlike the great castles, temples and monasteries built under the Occupation.

Looking up, and then around, I felt as though I was inside a ribcage—all those arches, columns, vestigial ornamental pillars and columns cut in low relief into the walls, taper-curving up over my head. All a bit unnerving, though that’s probably just cultural conditioning. You spend your childhood being told scary stories about wizards’ towers, nothing’s ever going to scrub those images out of your brain, even when you know the banal facts. Even so; all those curved uprights looked uncommonly like bones to me, which put us squarely in the tower’s digestive tract. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like it when a building eats me.

The furniture was presumably the fault of the previous tenant. The only good thing was that there wasn’t very much of it; three chairs, one table. But the chairs (a matching set) were carved in the shape of a giant cupped hand—the fingers were the back, and you sat in the palm—and the table had arms instead of legs. They were thin, bony arms with the muscles standing out, like you see on country people, undernourished but still very strong, and the hands clawed at the floor with splayed fingers.

“Late Conceptualist school,” she observed. “Very nice. And worth a lot of money.”

I stared at her. “You don’t honestly expect me to believe you actually
like
that stuff.”

“They’re classics of post-Restoration design.”

“They’re grotesque.”

She had that no-point-talking-to-you shrug. “How much?” I asked her.

“Three chairs and a table.” She thought for a moment. “Nine hundred angels. Why?”

The thought hadn’t crossed my mind, really. “It amazes me,” I said, “that anyone would pay good money for something so horrible. Put blankets over those chairs, would you? I really don’t want to have to look at them.”

She hesitated, then pulled three blankets out of the saddle-bag. “This isn’t like you,” she said. “Something’s bothering you, isn’t it?”

She’d only known me for two days. “Yes,” I said. “The horrible furniture. You could give yourself nightmares, looking at that sort of thing.”

She looked at me. Mind-reading forms are strictly forbidden, of course; also, they don’t work. In her case, they were redundant.

There was also a bookshelf; mercifully not a classic of post-Restoration design, just a slab of board, grey with age, resting on two chunks of batten nailed to the wall. And on the shelf, six books. I guess you could say they were what we’d come for. I sort of casually strolled in that direction and happened to find myself standing where I could make out the writing on the spines.

“Well?” she said.

“Saloninus’
General Principles
,” I read out. Well, of course. “Perceptuus’
Divine Instrument
.” I grinned. “Everyone keeps their old school books, don’t they?”

“I sold mine.”

Ah well. “
Corbulo On Natural Philosophy
.” I pulled it down and checked the title page. It had the frontispiece but no watermark. Pity. “Second edition.” I put it back. “Maxentius’
Huntsman’s Garland
, and—” There was nothing written on the spine of the next one. I opened it and quickly put it back.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“
What?
”

“If you must know, it’s a deluxe edition of the
Garden of Entrancing Images
. With pictures,” I added. She blushed. “Oh,” she said.

“Quite.”

“Maybe,” she suggested hopefully, “it was already here when he—”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course. Anyway, that just leaves—” The last one just had the number 5, on the bottom of the spine, in black ink. I opened it.

Ah. Now, then.

“Is that—?”

I nodded.

His handwriting—of course, at that stage we had no idea who he was, no name or anything—was even worse than mine, and that’s saying something. Of course there are many different types of appallingly bad handwriting; this was the sort that appears completely unintelligible if you look closely at the individual letters, but if you lean your head back a bit and treat it as a pattern rather than conventional script, sooner or later you get the hang of it, apart from the occasional completely obscure squiggle which you have to reconstruct from context. Trouble is, my eyes aren’t what they were.
Actis heliou
helps—I muttered it under my breath, and the blotches and squiggles calmed down a little—but not enough. I’m told you can buy bits of round glass, like flattened raindrops; but they’re very expensive.

“Well?”

I sighed. “See what you can make of it,” I said.

She hesitated, bless her. “Are you sure?”

Fair enough. She only had a Class 3 clearance. But I was supervising her, and I’ve got a Class 8. “Go on,” I said. “It won’t bite.”

She took the book over to the horrible table and sat down in one of the horrible chairs. “I don’t recognise any of this,” she said.

“Well, you wouldn’t, if it’s original research.”

She screwed up her eyes. “What’s
orbs subito
?”

“No idea. What’s the context?”

“Sorry, I can’t make head or tail of this. It’s all in sort of note form.”

Naturally; he was writing for himself, not us. “Is there anything at all you recognise?”

“Sorry.” She lifted her head. “Shall I read it out to you?”

“Don’t do that,” I said quickly. Actually, I kept my temper really rather well. A moment later, the penny dropped. “Oh,” she said.

“Quite.”

(First rule of practice; don’t say any kind of Form out loud unless you’re absolutely sure what it is and what it does. As basic principles go, it’s on a par with not checking the level in the oil tank by the light of a naked candle. She really should’ve known that.)

“This is awkward,” she said. “You can’t read it and I can’t understand it, and I can’t read it to you. It looks like we’re a bit stuck.”

I smiled. “Not really,” I said. “This is what we do. You copy it out, in your nice, clear copperplate hand, and then I’ll be able to figure it out.” I paused. “You brought your inkwell.”

“Oh yes.”

“Fine.”

“Did you bring some paper?”

All due respect to women in general and absolutely no offence intended, but you have to tell them every damn thing.

“We’ll just have to take it back with us,” she said.

Sensible; but I wasn’t having that. Stupid of me, very stupid indeed. But this was my first field assignment for three years, and I really didn’t want it to be the last.
Didn’t you take any paper with you?
, I could hear them saying, and then I’d have to explain. In situations like that, I get creative. It’s a failing of mine.

“Just a moment,” I said, and I pulled down the deluxe edition of
Entrancing Images
. Written, of course, on best-quality white parchment vellum, which makes a much better medium for painting illustrations on than paper.

“What we need,” I said, “is a brick.”

When I was a novice, you did two years in the scriptorium before they let you anywhere near a reading list. At the time I found this both arbitrary and oppressive—I’d come here to learn magic, not how to copy out old books—and I’m still not entirely sure of the logic behind it. That said, one thing I learned was how to clean off a page of parchment using brick dust and the palm of my hand.

It’s a foul job. Think about it. Parchment is basically just skin, like your hand. The difference is, the parchment has been cured and polished, which makes it hard and durable. The brick dust grinds skin away. Reasonably enough, it takes the soft stuff off first. You can see why page preparation is a job usually assigned to the most junior members of the scriptorium staff.