The Folding Knife (32 page)

One thing of which there is no doubt is that they knew precisely where they wanted to go. From the pier, they marched directly towards the harbour master's office, where nine members of the harbour guard were on duty. In their citations, it is stated that they held their ground and fought until they were wiped out. At least one witness says they broke and ran, but were shot down before they'd covered five yards. The harbour master and his staff were inside at the time, and didn't come out until the armed men were long gone.

Inevitably, a crowd had started to gather. All the witnesses to this stage of the attack talked of a sense of complete bewilderment, a certainty that what they appeared to be watching couldn't possibly be happening; instead of running away, therefore, between fifty and eighty people actually approached the harbour master's office, in an attempt to figure out what was going on. The raiding party immediately started shooting arrows into the crowd at random, killing six men and two women and injuring an unascertained number. At this point, most of the crowd fled; others would appear to have been so stunned that they froze and didn't move. The raiders charged, but it would seem they were more concerned with punching a hole through the crowd and getting past than inflicting casualties; two men were killed, and there were a number of injuries, mostly sword-cuts and broken bones.

The raiders had acted with remarkable speed and purpose. One consequence of this was that they entered the City before any of the fugitives, all of whom had run back towards the seafront because of the angle of the raiders' charge. It is more or less certain that they came in through the Portgate, killing the two gatekeepers, and marched straight up Portway. Needless to say a great many people saw them, and the sight of a large body of men marching in column up a main thoroughfare was certainly unfamiliar; even so, it simply didn't occur to anybody that they could be a hostile force. People stared and got out of the way, but nobody thought to alert the authorities; they assumed that whatever was happening was authorised, and someone official knew all about it.

The first resistance the raiders encountered, therefore, was at the gate of City Yard itself. The raiders would appear to have been entirely successful in concealing their weapons in Portway, but a sharp-eyed guard on the Yard gate saw an axe in a man's hand as they turned right into the outer courtyard. He yelled to his colleagues on the gate towers to shut the gates immediately. There was a significant delay--the gatemen wanted to know why--but the gates were closed and the bars dropped just in time, and runners were sent through the side doors to tell General Aelius' office that something was going on at City Yard.

Several commentators have speculated that had the message Aelius received been rather more specific, events might have taken a different turn. That, however, is unlikely. In the event, Aelius interpreted 'something going on at City Yard' as either a riot or an outbreak of fighting between Blues and Greens supporters (it happened to be a race day); accordingly, he sent twenty-five men in police armour, armed with batons and minimal side arms. When they reached the Yard, they found that the raiders had already burst through the gate, using benches from the Yard chapel as improvised battering rams.

Captain Trachea, commanding the twenty-five guards, came in for the brunt of the criticism at the inquiry. This is understandable, if only because it's usually simpler and more conciliatory to established interests to blame a dead man with no family. With hindsight, it's hard to imagine what else Trachea could possibly have done. He commandeered every cart, barrel and bench he could find, and every able-bodied man he could catch, and built a barrier that proved, in the event, to be quite effective. As Basso said privately after the inquiry had reported, nobody in his right mind could have expected Trachea to lead his twenty-five men with sticks against six hundred with real weapons, and arrest them. As for the allegations of collusion, they rest entirely on the fact that Trachea was a Mavortine. Those who imply that, if there was no actual collusion, Trachea held back because he didn't want to attack his fellow countrymen ignore the fact that at that stage, nobody had any reason to know or even suspect that the attackers were Mavortines.

There is no hard evidence; but educated guesses and reconstructions suggest that the time elapsed between the first raider setting foot on shore and the forced entry into City Yard was no more than twenty minutes. Trachea's men, marching at the double, would have taken six minutes to reach the Yard, at least five more to assess the true significance of the situation, decide on their course of action and take the decision to assemble the barricade. Actual construction of the barricade was, by all accounts, impressively swift; no more than ten minutes. It follows, therefore, that by the time the barricade was in place, the raiders had already been inside the yard for twenty minutes. The only aspect of Trachea's conduct for which it remains difficult to account is his delay in sending a message to Aelius, to tell him what was happening and call for reinforcements; it would appear that the runner was sent only after the barricade was complete. We can only assume that it slipped Trachea's mind in the heat of the moment, or that there was some misunderstanding as to who was supposed to go.

The City Yard was at that time considerably less well defended than it is now. The encircling wall was only twelve feet high, and the three major buildings--the Mint, Treasury Storage and the Arsenal--were neither fortified nor guarded. Once past the Yard Gate, the raiders would simply have marched up to Treasury Storage, kicked down the door (assuming it wasn't already open, as was often the case), surged inside and started helping themselves to coined money from the stores.

"I was trying to do long division," Bassano said, "which has never been a strong point of mine, and there was this dreadful row going on down in the Yard. I couldn't concentrate, so I went to the window to shout at whoever was causing it."

He closed his eyes. Basso noticed that he hadn't touched the large brandy he'd poured for him.

"I couldn't make it out," Bassano went on. "I could see four men lying on the ground, like they were asleep; like drunks passed out after a party. I think I knew instinctively that they were dead, but that made no sense at all, because surely people would be trying to help if there'd been an accident--I wondered if they'd been up on scaffolding working on the gutters--but there was nobody at all in the yard, which really was odd. Also, if the yard was empty, where had all the noise come from?"

He stopped talking, and Basso could see he was staring at the wall, at one particular place on the blank wall, where there was nothing worth looking at. "Are you all right?" he asked, but Bassano didn't seem to have heard him. "Maybe you should get some rest," he said awkwardly, not knowing how you were supposed to treat this condition: herb tea, inhalation of sage and saffron steeped in boiling water, mustard poultice on the forehead to draw out the poisonous memory. His mother would have known; or at least, she'd have ordered some remedy, which wouldn't have worked.

"I'm fine, really," Bassano said. "Where was I?"

"You'd just looked out of the window."

"Oh, right." Bassano grinned weakly. "I do apologise, I sort of lost the thread there for a moment. Anyway, you know me, no common sense whatsoever. I thought that since I was nominally in charge of the place, I'd better go down and take a look. So I went down the back stair--you know, that awful spiral job where if you meet someone coming the other way, you've got to walk backwards up to the next landing? We really should tear it out and put in something decent, before there's an accident."

"Noted," Basso said.

"Thanks. Well," Bassano added, with a laugh that had little to do with humour, "I don't suppose it's going to be too far up your list of priorities, in the circumstances. But you might just bear it in mind." He picked up the brandy, then put it down. "So I went down the stairs, out into the yard, and there still wasn't anybody about; I'd been expecting people to come rushing out, like I'd just done. But I stood there, all on my own in the yard, and--I don't know, it didn't seem real, it was like some big event was going on, a procession or a ceremony or something, and everybody else had been told about it except me. Stupid way to think, of course, but my mind just went blank. I couldn't seem to get any further than 'all this is very strange'. And I thought, I'd better find someone and ask what's going on. So I turned back to go into the main shop, but the door was shut. I tried the handle, it turned but the door wouldn't open. Crazy, I thought. I looked round; the Arsenal door was shut too, but the door of Treasury Storage was wide open. So I sort of picked up my feet and wandered across."

Basso winced, which made Bassano laugh. "Like I said," he went on, "no more sense than next door's cat. I walked in through the door, and there they were, hundreds of them. Thank God they were busy and didn't see me. I just stood there; I couldn't believe it. They were prising open the barrels--the newly minted stuff, they weren't bothered about the foreign money, which is significant when you think about it. They must've known exactly where to find what they wanted. Anyhow, they were popping the lids off the barrels with the horns of their axes, then baling coins out into sacks with--I believe it was old tin dishes; I guess they must've brought them with them, because I don't remember anything like that lying around in Storage. One man would be holding the sack, another would be leaning over the barrel, scooping. I remember, one of the scoopers lifted his head and he saw me. Eyeball to eyeball, as they say. He looked at me for--well, I don't know how long, seemed to last for ever, couldn't have been more than a pulse beat or two; then he went back to what he was doing, and I realised, I didn't matter, I wasn't a threat, not worth losing time over. Of course, I couldn't see very far into the building, so I had no way of knowing how many of them there were in there. Could've been twenty or a thousand of them for all I knew. But I thought, if I'm not a threat, they can't be worried about being found out and someone calling the guards; and it was only then I started putting things together, the dead men in the yard, and it started dawning on me what was happening."

"Don't blame yourself for that," Basso said. "I don't suppose--"

"Yes, but I do," Bassano said. "I was supposed to be in charge, and a whole fucking
army
just walks in and empties the Treasury, and--"

"Listen." Basso raised his voice a little, and Bassano looked at him. "We're fairly sure there must've been at least five hundred of them. I spoke to Aelius just now. Do you know how many soldiers he's got stationed in the City right now? Not just on call at the guards but all over town, all the guards and watch patrols and everything? Just under two hundred. So even if they'd all rushed down there the moment they stepped off the boats, we'd have been outnumbered more than two to one. There wasn't anything anybody could've done. That's all there is to it."

"I didn't know that," Bassano said quietly. "And it doesn't really make any difference, does it? I should've been able to do something more constructive than stand there gawping like an idiot, then run like hell back to my office and wedge the door shut with a chair. That's just plain cowardice."

"Once it'd finally sunk in," Aelius said (his face was grey and his skin looked tight over his cheekbones; showing his age, Basso thought), "I realised how completely screwed we were. I still didn't know how many there were. Trachea's men said hundreds, but what's that supposed to mean? More to the point, they'd been in there for some time, they'd cheerfully killed anybody who got in their way and even I'd finally managed to guess what they were after. And I knew there was nothing I could do to stop them."

Basso nodded. "I accept that," he said.

"Thank you," Aelius replied. "Thinking about it, I don't suppose Trachea could've known just how few men we had in the City. It's not common knowledge--not a secret either, it's just one of those things you don't think about. We aren't at war, we don't have a law-and-order problem, nothing bad's ever going to happen to us, so why would we clutter up the City with a lot of armed men we don't need? Well." He shook his head. "I guess they could count on their fingers as well as the next man."

Basso said: "What happened to Trachea and his men?"

"My fault," Aelius said briskly. "I should've been quicker off the mark. Given the information available to him, Trachea did the right thing: bottle them up in the Yard so they can't get out, call for reinforcements. Of course, there weren't any reinforcements worth a damn, and all he'd done was make things worse. Soon as they'd finished looting Treasury Storage they came back out again, found that some fool had blocked their way with a load of carts, and forced their way through. Trachea, being a brave soldier, tried to stop them, and they went through him and his men like they weren't there."

"What did you do?"

"Me?" Aelius laughed. "As soon as I saw they were coming through, I told my fifty or so men to get the hell out of there, and I personally ran as fast as I've ever run in my life. By the time I stopped, I was in Cornmarket, and people were staring at me, wondering why this exhausted man in uniform had just collapsed on the steps of the Exchange."

Basso didn't say anything for a while. Then he said: "I assume you'd realised that they would return to their ships by the shortest route possible, and that if left alone they'd do no further harm; in which case--"

"No such thing," Aelius interrupted; he sounded angry. "It was sheer terror. Not the first time, either. The second battle I was in, I ran away. One moment we were all in line, spears levelled, sergeant calling out orders by the numbers; next thing I knew I was in some barn somewhere, hiding under a load of straw. I was desperately ashamed of myself for a while, until I talked to other soldiers about it, and guess what: they'd all done something like it, at one time or another. It's what happens. Armies don't stand their ground and butcher each other down to the last man. One side or other always runs away, and when you run, you
run
." He shook his head. "I can't expect you to understand," he said. "No civilian could. As far as you're concerned, it was unforgivable cowardice in the face of the enemy. Which it was," Aelius added. "And I'll say as much to the court martial."