Surface Detail (3 page)

Too late now, she thought, … Meant nothing …

The darkness was moving in remorselessly from the edges of her field of vision. She stared up into it, unable even to blink. She waited for some profound insight or thought, but none came.

High above her, the simulated sceneries and architectures stacked within the giant carousel swung slowly back and forth, all slowly going dim. In front of the hanging roofscape above her she could see a flat, tattered-looking mountain scene; all soaring, snowy peaks and ruggedly romantic crags beneath a cloud-dotted sky of blue, the effect somewhat spoiled by rips and tears in the fabric and a broken lower frame.

So that was what she’d been pressed up against. Mountains. Sky.

Perspective, she thought woozily, slowly, as she died; what a wonderful thing.

Conscript Vatueil, late of Their Highnesses’ First Cavalry, now reduced to the Third Expeditionary Sappers, wiped his sweating brow with a grimy, calloused hand. He worked his knees forward a few centimetres across the stony floor of the tunnel, sending fresh darts of pain up his legs, and plunged the short-handle spade into the shadowy face of the pebble-dotted wall of dirt immediately ahead of him. The exertion set off further stabs of pain, which ran up his back and across his straining shoulders. The worn spade bit into the compacted earth and stones, its tip connecting with a larger rock hidden within.

The collision jarred his hands, arms and shoulders, setting his teeth on edge and ringing his aching back as though it was a bell. He almost cried out, but instead just sucked in a breath of stale, warm, humid air, pungently scented with his own bodily odours and those of the other sweating, straining miners around him. He worked the embedded spade to one side within the dirt and tried to sense the edge of the buried rock, pulling the spade out and heaving it back in again a little to the side in an attempt to find the edge of the obstruction and lever it out. The spade bit into solidity on both sides, making his arms and back ache again each time. He let the breath out, putting the spade down by his right thigh and feeling behind him for his pickaxe. He had moved too far forward since he’d last used it and had to look round, back muscles protesting, to find it.

He turned carefully, anxious not to get in the way of the man to his right, who was already swinging hard with his own pickaxe, cursing under his breath all the time. The new kid on his other side, whose name he’d already forgotten, was still stabbing weakly at the face with his spade, producing little. He was a big, powerful-looking lad, but still face-weak. He’d need to be relieved soon if they were to keep up to target, though he’d pay for such deemed lack of application.

Behind Vatueil, in the flickering, lamp-lit gloom, the tunnel stretched back into darkness; half-naked men, on their knees or walking bent over at the waist, shuffled about the confined space, loaded with spades and shovels, picks and pry bars. Somewhere behind them, over their coughs and wheezed, bitten-off exchanges, he heard the irregular hollow rumble of an empty rubble wagon approaching. He saw it thud into the buffers at the end of the line.

“Feeling delicate again, Vatueil?” the junior captain said, walking over to him, back bent. The junior captain was the only man at the face still wearing the top half of his uniform. He was sneering, and had tried to put some sarcasm into his voice, though he was so young Vatueil still thought of him as a child and found it hard to take him seriously. The delicacy the junior captain was referring to had occurred an hour earlier just after the start of Vatueil’s shift when he’d felt and then been sick, sending an extra unwanted shovelful of waste back to the surface in a rubble wagon.

He’d felt ill since just after breakfast back at the surface and on the walk to the face. The last part especially, doubled over, had been a nightmarish slog of increasing nausea. That was always a bad bit for him anyway; he was tall and his back hit more of the roof support beams than the other men’s. He was developing what the long-serving sappers called back buttons; raised welts of hardened skin above each bone in his spine like giant warts. Ever since he’d thrown up, his stomach had been rumbling and he’d had a raging thirst that the single meagre hourly water ration had done little to alleviate.

There was a chorus of shouting starting further back in the tunnel and another rumbling sound. For a moment he thought it was the start of a cave-in, and felt a sickening pulse of fear run through him, even as another part of his mind thought, At least it might be quick, and that would be an end to it. Then another rubble wagon came hurtling out of the darkness and slammed into the rear of the first one, sending dust bursting out from both wagons and knocking the leading wheels of the front wagon off the track just in front of the buffers. There was much more shouting and swearing as the track layers were blamed for unsettling the track behind, the surface wagon emptiers were cursed for not fully emptying the wagon in the first place and everybody else further up was shouted at for not giving them more warning. The junior captain ordered everybody away from the face to help get the wagon back on the rails, then added, “Not you, Vatueil; keep working.”

“Sir,” he said, lifting the pickaxe. At least with nobody around him he could get a proper swing at the obstruction. He turned back and heaved the pick at a spot to the side of where the spade had baulked, briefly imagining that he was swinging it at the back of the young captain’s head. He hauled the pick out, twisted it to present the flat blade rather than the spike towards the face, found a slightly different position and swung hard again.

You developed a feel for what was going on at the end of a shovel or a pick, you started to gain an insight into the just-hidden depths in front of you, after a while. There was another jarring strike to add to all the others that had run up through his hands into his arms and back over the year he’d been down here, but he sensed the slightly flattened blade make a sort of double strike inside the face, sliding between two rocks, or into a cleft in a single more massive rock. That felt hollow, he thought, but dismissed the idea.

He had leverage now, a degree of purchase. He strained at the worn-smooth handle of the pick. Something grated inside the face and the weak light from his helmet lamp showed a stretch of dirt face as long as his forearm and tall as his head hinging out towards him. Dirt and pebbles slumped about his knees. What fell out of the hole was a piece of dressed stonework, and beyond was a rectangular hole and a damp darkness, a dirt-free inky absence from which a thin cold wind issued, smelling of old, cold stone.

The great castle, the besieged fortress, stood over the broad plain on a carpet of ground-hugging mist, like something unreal.

Vatueil remembered his dreams. In his dreams the castle truly was not real, or not there, or genuinely did float above the plain, by magic or some technology unknown to him, and so they burrowed on for ever, never finding its base, tunnelling on without cease through the killing muggy warmth and sweat-mist of their own exhalations in an eternal agony of purposeless striving. He had never mentioned these dreams to anybody, unsure who amongst his comrades he could really trust and judging that if word of these nightmares got back to his superiors they might be deemed treacherous, implying that their labours were pointless, doomed to failure.

The castle sat on a spur of rock, an island of stone jutting above the flood plain of the great meandering river. The castle itself was formidable enough; the cliffs that surrounded it made it close to impregnable. Still, it had to be taken, they’d been told. After nearly a year of trying to starve the garrison into surrender, it had been judged, two years or more ago, that the only way to take the stronghold was to get a great siege engine close in to the rocky outcrop. Enormous machines had been constructed of wood and metal and manoeuvred towards the castle on a specially built road. The machines could hurl rocks or fizzing metal bombs the weight of ten men many hundreds of strides across the plain, but there was a problem: to get them close enough to the castle meant coming within range of the fortress’s own great war machine, a giant trebuchet mounted on the single massive circular tower dominating the citadel.

With its own range increased by virtue of its elevation, the castle’s engine dominated the plain for nearly two thousand strides about the base of the rock; all attempts to move siege engines to within range had been met with a hail of rocks from the fortress’s trebuchet, resulting in smashed machines and dead men. The engineers had been forced to concede that constructing a machine of their own powerful enough to remain out of range of the castle’s war engine while still being able to hit the fortress was probably impossible.

So they would tunnel to near the castle rock, open a pit and construct a small but powerful siege engine there under the noses of the castle’s garrison, and, supposedly, under the angle at which the castle’s trebuchet could fire. There were rumours that this absurd machine would be a sort of self-firing bomb device, some sort of explosive contraption that would throw itself into the air, up past the cliff and against the castle walls, detonating there. Nobody really believed these rumours, though the slightly more plausible idea of constructing a sufficiently powerful wooden catapult or trebuchet in a pit excavated at the end of a tunnel seemed just as fanciful and idiotic.

Perhaps they were expected to tunnel up inside the castle rock when they got to it, burrowing up through solid stone, or maybe they were meant to place a gigantic bomb against the base of the rock; these seemed no less absurd and pointless as tactics. Maybe the high command, immeasurably distant from this far (and, if rumour was to believed, increasingly irrelevant) front, had been misinformed regarding the nature of the castle’s foundations, and – thinking that the fortress’s walls rested on the plain itself – had ordered the mining as a matter of course, imagining that the walls could be sapped conventionally, and nobody nearer to the reality of the situation had thought, or dared, to tell them that this was impossible. But then who knew how the high commanders thought?

Vatueil put one fist to the small of his back as he stood looking out to the distant fortress. He was trying to stand up straight. It was getting harder to do so each day, which was unfortunate, as slouching was looked on unfavourably by officers, especially by the young junior captain who seemed to have taken such a dislike to him.

Vatueil looked about at the litter of grey-brown tents which made up the camp. Above, the clouds looked washed out, the sun hidden behind a grey, dully glowing patch over the more distant of the two ranges of hills that defined the broad plain.

“Stand up straight, Vatueil,” the junior captain told him, emerging from the major’s tent. The junior captain was dressed in his best uniform. He’d had Vatueil put on his best gear too, not that his best was very good. “Well, don’t malinger here all day; get in there and don’t take for ever about it. This doesn’t get you off anything, you know; don’t go thinking that. You’ve still got a shift to finish. Hurry up!” The junior captain clouted Vatueil about the ear, dislodging his forage cap. Vatueil bent to retrieve it and the young captain kicked his behind, propelling him through the flap and into the tent.

Inside, he collected himself, straightened, and was shown where to stand in front of the board of officers.

“Conscript Vatueil, number—” he began.

“We don’t need to know your number, conscript,” one of the two majors told him. There were three senior captains and a colonel present too; an important gathering. “Just tell us what happened.”

He briefly related prising the rock away from the face, sticking his head through the hole and smelling that strange, cave-like darkness, hearing and seeing the water running in the channel beneath, then wriggling back to tell the junior captain and the others. He kept his gaze fixed somewhere above the colonel’s head, looking down only once. The officers nodded, looked bored. A subaltern took notes on a writing pad. “Dismissed,” the more senior major told Vatueil.

He half turned to go, then turned back. “Permission to speak further, sir,” he said, glancing at the colonel and then the major who’d just spoken.

The major looked at him. “What?”

He straightened as best he could, stared above the colonel’s head again. “It occurred to me the conduit might contribute to the castle’s water supply, sir.”

“You’re not here to think, conscript,” the major said, though not unkindly.

“No,” the colonel said, speaking for the first time. “That occurred to me, too.”

“It’s still a long way, sir,” the junior major said.

“We’ve poisoned all the nearer sources,” the colonel told him. “To no obvious effect. And it is from the direction of the nearer hills.” Vatueil risked nodding at this, to show he had thought this too.

“With their many springs,” the senior major said to the colonel, apparently sharing some private joke.

The colonel looked at Vatueil through narrowed eyes. “You were with the Cavalry once, weren’t you, conscript?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Rank?”

“Captain of Mount, sir.”

There was a pause. The colonel filled it himself. “And?”

“Insubordination, sir.”

“Down to conscript tunneller? You must have been spectacularly insubordinate.”

“So it was adjudged, sir.”

There was a grunt that might have been laughter. At the colonel’s instigation the offisorial heads were brought together. There was some muttering, then the more senior major said, “There will shortly be a small exploratory force sent along the water tunnel, conscript. Perhaps you might care to be on it.”

“I’ll do as ordered, sir.”

“The men will be hand-picked, though volunteers.”

Vatueil drew himself up as straight as he could, his back complaining. “I volunteer, sir.”

“Good man. You might need a crossbow as well as a shovel.”

“I can handle both, sir.”

“Report to the senior duty officer. Dismissed.”

The calf-deep water was cold, swirling round his boots and seeping into them. He was fourth man back from the lead, lamp extinguished. Only the lead man had a lit lamp, and that was turned down as low as it would go. The water tunnel was oval shaped, just too broad to touch both sides at the same time with outstretched arms. It was nearly as tall as a man; you had to walk with head lowered but it was easy enough after so long being bent double.