The Escapement (2 page)

Catorzes hesitated again, then nodded grimly. "Of course," he said; then, almost reluctantly, "Thank you. I'll, um, do my best."

"I'm sure you will."

There, he thought, as he sat down again at his desk, I've done something. Quite possibly something useful, although that remains to be seen. Have we actually got any books about fighting wars? Yes, we must have, because the Copyists' Guild copies and binds all the books in the known world for export, though we never actually read them ourselves, and I'm sure we must keep copies, if only out of habit. Of course, there's no guarantee that any of the books is any good; probably they're just collections of bits copied out of other books copied out of other books by men who've never been in a battle in their lives. But real princes buy them from us, so they must have something in them, if only…

He looked down at his hands; ten soft brown worms attached to two flat cakes of putty. I
must
cope, he told himself. I must find a way of coping, because there's nobody else but me. I know I'm not fit to be in charge of a war, I know I'm hopelessly ignorant and not particularly clever. But unless I find a way of coping, a million savages will come and break open the city like a crabshell and pick us all out like shreds of meat; and war can't be all that difficult if a lot of bone-headed princes can do it, surely.

He glanced up at the opposite wall, where the clock stood. It was a Pattern Fifty-Seven, the best specification of all, guaranteed accurate to within an hour a year if properly sited and maintained. If the City fell, of course, there would be no more clocks, because nobody else in the whole wide world knew how to make them. How long, he wondered, would it take for the clock to be reinvented, and how long after that before anybody was skilled enough to build a clock up to the standards of a Pattern Fifty-Seven? A thousand years, possibly; or never. If we die, everything dies with us…

No, he reflected, not quite. If Valens and the savages come and the walls are breached and we're slaughtered like ants in a crack between flagstones, there'll still be one of us left. Ziani Vaatzes could build a clock, if he wanted to and he set his mind to it. Ziani Vaatzes, the abominator, our greatest enemy and civilisation's only hope.

He thought about Vaatzes; studying him so intensely for so long, finally meeting him in the empty streets of Civitas Vadanis. To the best of his knowledge, Psellus had never been in love; but if he had to imagine what love must be like, his nearest reference would be how he felt about Ziani Vaatzes, the supreme enemy. Which was strange, and more than a little disturbing, since Vaatzes was to blame for everything. He'd brought the war here, like a man carrying the plague—infected, a victim and also a predator, a weapon, an enemy. Under other circumstances, Psellus liked to believe, they'd have been friends, good friends (which was, of course, absurd, since a ranking Guild official would never condescend to mix with manual workers, outside of circumstances that in themselves precluded any possibility of friendship). Perhaps it's because I'm so isolated from ordinary people that the only one I ever bothered to try and understand fascinates me so. In which case, I'm even more pathetic than I ever imagined.

Be that as it may; the clock told him it was a few minutes to noon, at which time he was due to meet with the Strategy and Tactics Committee to discuss the progress of the war…

"I can't help thinking," he told them, and they just looked at him, as they always did, "that we might as well be logs meeting in the grate to discuss the fire." He paused. They were waiting for him to say something—
anything
—they could possibly construe as coherent. "Siano, you're in charge of intelligence. Where are they now?"

Siano Bossas, Drapers' Guild; a closed box of a man, with the biggest feet Psellus had ever seen in his life. "According to our contacts in Jasca, they crossed the Redwater two days ago, which puts them somewhere between Lopa and Boc Polizan." He paused, well aware that Psellus didn't have a clue where the Redwater, Lopa or Boc Polizan were. Neither, Psellus suspected, did Siano Bossas. Psellus nodded gravely. "Gould somebody please go out to the front office and fetch in the map? I had one drawn," he explained. "There didn't seem to be one that showed all the places you've been telling me about, I suppose they hadn't been built yet when the specifications for the maps were drawn up, so they couldn't officially exist. Strictly speaking, I suppose that means I've committed an abomination, but never mind. We really ought to know where all these places are, don't you think?" It wasn't a very good map, by Guild standards. The calligraphy was poor, and it wasn't even coloured in. But it did show Lopa, Boc Polizan and the Redwater, and if it was drawn to anything like scale…

"Nine days," Psellus said, after he'd put down his dividers. "In theory," he added. "But I don't suppose they'll actually be here in nine days, because of lines of supply and things like that. It'd help," he added mildly, "if we knew where they were getting their food and forage from." He bent his head and looked at the map. "Does anybody know anything about this countryside here? I mean, is it farmland or moor or heath or what?" He waited for a moment or so, then added, "Someone must know, surely."

Apparently, nobody did. Psellus straightened his back and looked round at the empty faces surrounding him. "Fine," he said. "Now, I've ordered a study of military logistics, which I hope will tell us what we need to know about how armies are fed and supplied. What I'd like you to do for me is find out everything you can about the country between
there"
—he prodded at the map—" and the City. I want to know whether they can feed themselves with what they can find and steal as they go along, or whether they need to carry their supplies in carts from somewhere else. Also, it'd be helpful to know something about the roads, that sort of thing. Also, it's really no good at all relying on little bits and pieces of news we get from carters and carriers. We need proper scouts to observe their movements and report back. Can someone see to that, please?" No volunteers; he looked round and chose someone at random.

"Feria, that can be your job. Now then, what else?"

Slowly and painfully, like a snail climbing a wall, he led and dragged them through food reserves, materiel procurement, finance, the condition of the City walls, recruitment and basic training; things he'd heard about, mostly, without really knowing what they meant, so that he had to reconstruct them from first principles as he went along. It was like trying to read and understand a book whose pages had all been lost, so that all he had to go on was the list of contents.

"Arms and munitions production," he said at last, and he could sense the relief, since finally they'd reached a subject they all understood. "I'd like one of you to be my permanent liaison with the ordnance factory; Galeazo, you know the setup there as well as anybody. Do you think you could get me copies of the production schedules, so we can be sure they're making the right quantities of the right things. Wall-mounted artillery's an obvious priority, but we're also going to have to kit out a large number of infantry in a hurry, as soon as Lanuo here has recruited them for us. You'll need to talk to the Tailors and Clothiers as well, boots and helmet linings and padded jackets—what's the word, gambesons; those things you wear under your armour to cushion the blows. I know we used to make them for export, it's just a matter of getting everything up together so every helmet we issue's got a lining to go with it. Just common sense, really."

As he spoke, he thought: this is hopeless. We don't know what we're doing, and they're all desperate to leave it up to me; only because they're afraid, but that doesn't really make it any better. The fact is, we can't,
I
can't fight a war against eight hundred thousand men, any more than I can build a Fifty-Seven clock or a water-mill. We don't have a specification for a war, and there isn't enough time to write one.

The meeting ended and they left, as quickly as possible without being ostentatiously anxious to escape. When they'd gone, Psellus sat for a long time, staring out of the window. He had the best view in the Guildhall: the grounds, with the formal gardens in the middle, surrounded by the cloister gardens, each with its own fountain and arbor. It wasn't beautiful, in any meaningful sense, but there again, it wasn't supposed to be.

Very well, then, he decided. I don't know about war and I can't fight eight hundred thousand men. But I know Ziani Vaatzes and I can fight one man, and maybe that's all I need to do.

Simuo Catorzes handed in his summary on time. It covered both sides of twelve sheets of charter paper, was copiously annotated with references to the source material, and would probably have been exactly what Psellus wanted if the handwriting had been legible. .

"Excellent," he said. "Now, could you please take it away and get someone else to copy it out again?"

Psellus spent an hour reading a report he didn't understand about proposed reforms of fiscal policy, then left his office, walked down three flights of stairs and several hundred yards of corridor, and eventually found the library. He'd never been in there before, of course. No need. Ever since he'd passed the professional examinations and qualified for the clerical grade, he'd spent his life reading, but could still count on his fingers the number of actual books he'd had occasion to open in the course of his work. He stood in the doorway for a moment and stared, like a man on a cloudless night looking up at the stars. He'd checked the regulations. Every book acquired by the Copyists for the purposes of publication reverted to the Guildhall library after they'd finished with it. The room—if it was laid down to grass, it would easily graze two milking cows and their calves for a week—was lined with shelves that reached up from floor to ceiling, and every shelf was full. In accordance with Guild policy, every book was the same height, and identically bound, with the title written in tiny lettering at the base of the spine. The only thing like it that Psellus had ever seen was the review of troops, just before the army left for Eremia.

At the far end, under a long, thin window, was a desk, behind which a small man sat on a tall backless stool. The sunlight glowed on his bald head.

"Excuse me," Psellus asked him. "Are you the librarian?" The bald man looked at him. "Have you got an appointment?"

"My name is Lucao Psellus."

The librarian's eyes widened a little. "How can I help you?"

"I'm looking for…" A
book
, he nearly said. "I need to see everything you've got on the fortification of cities against artillery."

The librarian breathed out slowly through his nose. "I'll have to look in the general catalogue," he said. "If you'll bear with me for a moment." He hopped down off his stool like a sparrow and walked quickly to a table on which rested a single enormous book; each page as wide as an arm, as tall as a leg.

"There was a clerk in here a day or so ago," the librarian said. "He was looking for military books." Something in his tone of voice suggested that military books ranked about equal in his estimation with pornography. "With any luck—ah yes. Case 104, shelf twelve. If you'd care to follow me."

Psellus found the click his heels made on the wooden floor embarrassing, and he tried walking on the sides of his feet. It helped, a little. "Case 104," the librarian announced proudly, like an explorer on a mountaintop. "Shelf twelve." He looked up, counting under his breath, then put his foot on the bottom shelf, reached up and started to climb, each shelf a rung. The bookcase trembled under his weight.

"Fortification," he said, and hung for a moment by his left hand as he picked a book off a shelf, clamped it between his teeth and clam-bered down backwards. He wiped a drop of spittle off the cover with his sleeve before handing it over.

"Thank you," Psellus said. "Is that all?"

The librarian looked at him as though he didn't understand the question. "Was there something else you wanted?" he asked.

Psellus shook his head. "Is it all right if I take this with me?" he said. "I may need to hold on to it for quite some time."

The librarian took a moment or so to reply. "Of course," he said, in a rather tight voice. "I'll make a note."

For some reason, Psellus couldn't bring himself to open the book or even look at the spine until he was back in his office; even there, he had to resist an urge to wedge a chair against the door. He cleared space on his desk, then peered at the writing on the white pasted-on label:

Varus Paterculus

Psellus frowned. A Vadani name. The book creaked loudly as he opened it and turned to the title page, where he could find the date when it was acquired and copied. A little mental arithmetic. The book was two hundred and seven years old. Well, he thought. On the other hand, we have nothing else. He turned to the first page: a dedication, in Mannerist dactylic pentameters. He skipped all that.
Of the various kinds of artillery; in particular, the various types of engine used
by the Perpetual Republic of Mezentia.