Colours in the Steel (61 page)

‘You said you wanted me to give Bardas a message,’ he said, as neutrally as he could manage. ‘What do you want me to tell him?’

‘I’m not sure, really,’ Gorgas confessed, scratching the side of his head. ‘I suppose he ought to be told about Iseutz; who she really is, and all that. It’d have been better perhaps if he’d been told
before
he cut off all the fingers on her right hand; or maybe not, I don’t know. Maybe if he’d known, it’d have cost him his life.’ He leant forward and went on very earnestly, ‘I love my brother, Patriarch. I always did. We were close; not as close as I was to my sister, but we grew up together, played together as kids. You can’t help loving someone under those circumstances even if you end up hating them at the same time. If you’ve got a brother or a sister, maybe you understand. And I recognise that making it up to Bardas is going to be very difficult, since this whole mess is nearly all my fault; I made no bones about that from the very start, remember. I’ve got no illusions about myself. But I’m not an evil man, Alexius, just a man who once did some evil things. Maybe I still do, from time to time. But if there’s anything I can do for my brother, I want to do it. Ideally, I’d like him to leave this city while there’s still time; come back with me if he likes, or go wherever he wants. I’d gladly make sure he never wanted for money or things. I’d even try and make peace between him and my sister, though I doubt that’d ever be possible. Whatever; you’ve got to believe me, I certainly don’t mean him any harm.’

Abruptly, he stood up. Alexius wanted to stop him leaving, but made no effort to do so. ‘So what do you want me to tell him?’ he repeated. ‘Always supposing I can get in touch with him, which I can’t guarantee.’

Gorgas licked his lips before answering. ‘Tell him about the girl,’ he said at last. ‘He may not believe it, of course. If he does, he’ll probably think I’m telling him now just to make him suffer, but there’s nothing I can do about that.’ He hesitated, then continued, ‘Tell him I’d like there to be peace between us, if for no other reason than because he’s my brother and I miss him. Tell him I love him, Patriarch Alexius. I think that more or less covers everything.’

Gorgas moved swiftly to the door, opened it and closed it behind him. When he’d gone, there was a large empty space in the room, a displacement that put Alexius in mind of the operation of the Principle and the uses it could on occasion be put to, for good or ill. He sat for a long time thinking over what he’d been told, trying to tease out of it something that would help him make sense of many things that had happened, to him and to others, over the last few months; coincidentally, since more or less the time when Temrai was known to have come to the city. He thought about Bardas Loredan lying half-dead among the bodies of his family, and remembered a dream he’d had during the emergency, in which he’d seemed to see Loredan riding through a burning camp with a torch in his hand, apparently looking for someone among the bodies of women and children; and a boy he’d somehow recognised as the young Temrai, hiding under a wagon and watching him. Behind it all there was one simple thing; he could visualise it in general terms, he could almost taste it, but it continued to elude him. He even got up and looked on a map to see where Scona was, but that didn’t help particularly.

At times like this, he realised, he missed Gannadius, and he spared a thought for his absent friend, even now on the Island—

On the Island, thanks to the intercession of a virtual stranger, who had seen to it that he was taken out of harm’s way, along with Loredan’s clerk, who had been a sort of friend and companion to him. He wondered about that, too.

All these problems, all these questions; they should have given him a headache, but they didn’t.
Tell him I love him, Patriarch Alexius . . .
What an extraordinary thing for him to say, a man who’d killed his father and brother-in-law, tried to kill his brother and sister, in furtherance of procuring his sister’s rape. He believed what Gorgas had said; no reason to assume that such a man was incapable of love, or incapable of anything. In fact, he had a shrewd idea that Gorgas was capable of pretty well anything he chose to do, one way or another. An interesting man, and no mistake.

Eventually he thought himself to sleep and had no bad dreams.

 

 

The clan was still working hard, every man, woman and child, but more to stave off boredom than because there was much need of what they made. Bozachai, the chief smith, had undertaken to replace the traditional leather armour with coats of mail, and the metalworkers spent the day drawing thick steel wire, coiling it round mandrels and slitting the coils with a chisel to make the rings. Women and children were given the tedious job of linking the rings together; one twist of the pliers opened the split rings, which were then threaded together, each ring interlocking with two from the previous row, and twisted shut. At first Bozachai had insisted that each link be sealed by welding or brazing, but after a while it was generally agreed that it wasn’t worth the effort, and they stopped bothering.

Tilchai, the chief bowyer, tried to copy the city crossbows, taking as his models a handful captured during the original cavalry raid. Where the clan’s version of the weapon used a bow made of horn, wood and sinew laminated together, the city version used a steel bow, as thick as a man’s thumb in the middle and tapering to fingertip-width at the ends. The experiment proved to be futile; either the steel bows snapped, or else they turned out feeble and soft, taking a set after the first few shots and failing to carry more than forty or fifty yards. Temrai tried to remember how they’d tempered the bow-steel in the arsenal, but his recollections weren’t precise enough. The venture was futile anyway; the city bows were so stiff that a special wooden lever was needed to force the string back over the twin hooks of the lock, and in the time it took to do that, an archer with an ordinary bow could have loosed ten arrows and sent them straighter and further.

New problems were cropping up every day. Pasture for the herd was getting thin within safe grazing distance of the camp. A freak cold snap killed off three-quarters of the clan’s bees, which meant mead was suddenly scarce, smoked meat couldn’t be glazed, milk and yoghurt had to be drunk unsweetened. Saltpetre for curing meat and oak bark for tanning leather were both getting harder to find. The hunting parties had to go further afield to find deer and wildfowl, which meant more men away from the camp and more culling of the herd than was usual for the time of year. There were several minor but virulent epidemics, mostly stomach complaints; only a few died, but morale in the camp sank and didn’t really recover once the outbreaks were over. The ropemakers had shaved the clan’s horses until they were the next best thing to bald; but still the bowyers made bows and the carpenters made engines that were doomed to be useless for want of strings and ropes. The causeway opposite the bridgehouse had been rebuilt, in spite of naggingly accurate archery from the bridgehouse tower that had claimed the lives of over fifty men, but nobody had any idea of what to do with it.

Yet no one suggested giving up and going away; not even in whispers or ambiguous hints. The enterprise of the city had long since stopped being an exciting adventure, but the clan had settled down into a siege routine that could easily last for ever if that was how long it took. Already some families were building stone walls for their tents and pens. A few had even taken their first tentative steps towards breaking up the earth and growing food instead of chasing or herding it. And nobody objected that planting was a waste of time since they wouldn’t be there to harvest the result. It was automatically assumed that the camp would still be in the same place six months hence.

We might as well build ourselves a city here and have done with it
, Temrai reflected, as he walked through the camp on his way to an undoubtedly pointless staff meeting. It would, after all, be the final irony if, in a few years’ time, there were two mirror cities on either side of the river, their inhabitants distinguishable only by their accents and the colour of their hair. Then it would be impossible, and futile as well, to ask who was besieging who, or who had got the better of the war.

There was no point in hurrying - the meeting was due to start at noon - so Temrai took a detour down by the river to see how the water-wheel project was coming along. That, too, was a symptom of insidious permanence, but Temrai couldn’t bring himself to dislike it on those grounds. He couldn’t help remembering the bonemeal grinder which had been one of the first things he’d noticed when he arrived in the city. The thought that his people were now capable of making such a remarkable thing for themselves pleased him. Torsion engines, trebuchets and the arrowmakers’ lathes were ambivalent at best, but a water wheel couldn’t be anything else but a good thing. In his mind’s eye he could already picture permanent mills built beside the clan’s traditional fords and bridges back on the plains, standing ready for use when the annual migration brought them there - assuming, of course, that they could get this prototype to work. But it wasn’t a difficult thing to build, compared to some of the items they’d managed to make, with nothing more than a few simple tools, plenty of timber and an unwillingness to believe that anything was impossible.

He arrived at the project site at a crucial moment: the point where the water wheel and the flywheel were mounted on either end of the main driveshaft. The design was his own; based, of course, on a standard city model, but adapted by himself to make use of the materials available. The frame was little more than four A-frames salvaged from smashed trebuchets; these supported the shaft, which had been cut from the trunk of a particularly tall and straight fir tree, planed and shaved
in situ
until it was as near to a perfect cylinder as made no appreciable odds. The timbers that they’d used for the spokes of the wheels were salvage, too; all that was left of the first generation of rafts, the few that had survived the fire. They were using better rafts now, rigidly held together by cross-members morticed and dowelled into place, copied from a standard city pattern. The paddles of the water wheel were heavily modified frame components from scrap torsion engines, and the nails that secured them to the wooden rim had been forged out of city-made bodkin-pattern arrowheads.

Mentakai, the carpenter in charge of the project, had rigged up simple pole cranes made out of further salvaged A-frames to lift the hub-sockets of the wheels level with the shaft. He’d had two options; to mount the hubs only and then assemble the rest of the wheels onto them, or to prefabricate the complete wheels and fit them fully assembled. He’d chosen the latter option despite considerable opposition from his fellow workers on the project, and a small crowd had gathered to see the outcome. There was even a group of apparently interested observers on the city wall, and Temrai wondered if there was anything they could learn from what he firmly believed was an improved design. When he realised the implications of that train of thought, he suppressed it at once; it’d be nice for generations of city people to call water wheels of his design Temrai-wheels in perpetuity, but it’d still be admitting failure. As far as the city was concerned, there would be no perpetuity. He thought about
that
, and found it strangely depressing.

‘Of course it’s possible,’ Mentakai said to him in a low voice, as the water wheel was manhandled into position under the crane. ‘My problem is that because of all this childish rivalry in the team, I’m only likely to get one shot at doing it my way. If it doesn’t work, they’ll say it’s impossible and start pulling the wheel to bits, even if it’s just a matter of a frayed rope breaking or a damaged frame giving way.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Why people have to be so damned competitive all the time, I just don’t know.’

‘Human nature,’ Temrai replied absently, his attention on the work in progress before them. ‘People like things to be a contest, they can understand better if there’s winners and losers. It’s just the way they are.’

The mule-train was harnessed up and set in motion, and for once the mules did as they were told. After an alarming creak and twitch on the ropes, the wheel lifted off the ground and slowly rose into the air, until an engineer standing up to his knees in the riverbank mud shouted to the mule-drovers and the train stopped. First snag: the hub socket was nine inches too high, which meant the team had to be backed up a tiny amount. That sort of precision is, however, hard to obtain with mules walking backwards; after a great deal of effort, cajoling and bad language the drovers managed to get the recalcitrant brutes to go back, but instead of dropping the hub nine inches, they lowered it by two feet. That was obviously no good; so the mules were driven forwards again, resulting this time in an overshoot of eighteen inches.

‘You see?’ Mentakai complained dramatically. ‘Much more of this and they’ll be saying it can’t be done. It’s not an easy job, for gods’ sakes, you can’t
expect
it to go right first time. You’ve got to stick at it until it comes out right, or else forget about the whole idea and go back to two men turning a handle all day long.’

Temrai made a noise like someone being sympathetic and carried on watching the show. The drovers backed up again (someone had figured out that the best way to get the mules to back up slowly was to cover their heads with a cloth; this meant finding cloths of the right size and shape and, harder still, persuading their owner to part with them.

Eventually, though, the man stuck in the mud yelled out, ‘That’s it!’ with the same degree of exhilaration and relief that you’d expect from a man who’s just watched his son being born. Immediately, teams of men standing between the A-frames pulled hard on ropes tied to the spokes of the wheel and guided the socket onto the shaft as if it was the easiest thing in the world. All that needed to be done after that was for the smiths to drive in the cotter pin that would keep the wheel fixed in place; no problems there - hardly surprising, since pinning was a standard part of making torsion engines, and they all knew a lot about that by now. They were just about to drive the mules round to be harnessed up to the flywheel crane when a problem they hadn’t allowed for became disturbingly obvious.