Devices and Desires (80 page)

The Eremians loosed another volley from their scorpions.

By now, all the dead were too tightly wedged up to fall; they were a shield, a ram, something to push against. Melancton’s
mind evacuated all his remaining thoughts as pain rendered everything else irrelevant. He could hear his own voice screaming.
Whatever was happening to him, it seemed to be going on forever. He could see the logic; he’d looked round on the threshold
of death’s kingdom, and now he would be here forever.

The Phocas were skeptical after the event. They maintained that in a crush like that, nobody could make a difference, no matter
how strong they were, or how brave. But they kept their doubts to themselves, for fear of appearing ungracious. None of the
other eye-witnesses agreed with them, in any event. The Bardanes and the Nicephorus both maintained that at the critical point
of the battle in the gateway, Jarnac Ducas and his personal guard, recruited from his huntsmen and harborers, cut a path through
the enemy with poll-axes and glaives, took their stand outside the gate and held their ground until all the Mezentines who’d
spilled into the city had been killed, and the engineers had blocked the gateway with steel pavises propped up by scaffolding
beams. Only Jarnac himself and one huntsman made it back, scrambling up over a pavise as it was being lifted into place and
dropping down the other side. It was, the majority of those present agreed, the most extraordinary thing they’d ever seen.

The huntsman died ten minutes later — they counted twenty-one wounds on his body — but Jarnac was able to walk twenty yards
to a mounting-block and sit down of his own accord before he passed out. The consensus was that he owed his life to the brigandine
coat.

When he came round, half an hour later, he opened his eyes and asked what was going on. They told him that the attack had
been driven back, with heavy losses. He didn’t believe them, and passed out again.

It was Ziani Vaatzes who suggested dropping grappling-hooks from the gatehouse tower and simply lifting the battering-ram
off the ground, using the portcullis winch. They did as he told them because he was a Mezentine, and therefore knew about
such things. When the crisis was over and they wanted to lift him shoulder-high and salute him as the saviour of the city,
he turned out not to be there. Meanwhile the ram dangled in the air like a dead spider, until someone thought of winching
it up as far as it’d go and then slipping the winch. It fell thirty feet and smashed, and that was the end of it.

Duke Orsea arrived too late, of course. He’d run from the council room as soon as the messenger arrived, but the press of
bodies was too thick and he couldn’t get through. By the time he’d scrambled his way to the front of the scrum it was all
over, and they were carrying the lesser Ducas home on a door. Everyone was convinced he was dead, until he appeared at his
front gate, leaning on someone’s shoulder. The cheering was as loud as the battle at the gate.

They spent the rest of the day and all the following night shoring up the barricades in the gateway and fixing or cannibalizing
the damaged scorpions. Vaatzes reappeared to take charge of that side of it. Probably it was just stress and fatigue, but
nobody was able to get a civil word out of him. He shouted at the workers, which wasn’t how he usually behaved toward his
men, and nobody seemed able to do anything right.

Some time after midnight, they finished counting the dead bodies and collating the casualty lists. Five hundred and seventeen
killed, over nine hundred wounded; meanwhile, a work detail was struggling to get the dead Mezentines out of the gateway,
so the masons could get in and block up the breach with bricks and rubble. Nobody could be bothered to count them, though
there were inevitably a few jokes about saving some of the better heads for the lesser Jarnac’s trophy collection. As and
when there was time, the plan was to load them into ammunition derricks, winch them up to the top of the wall and throw them
over. There wasn’t enough space in the city to bury them, and burning such a monstrous quantity of material would have posed
a fire hazard.

They waited until the surgeon had finished with him before they gave Melancton the casualty reports. It had taken an hour
to dig the two arrowheads out of him — one in his stomach, the other in his shoulder — and he’d lost a lot of blood. His aides
said the report could surely wait till morning (the dead would still be dead tomorrow, and possibly the day after, too), but
the officer in charge pleaded an express order.

Seventeen thousand, four hundred and sixty-three dead. Lying in his tent, he looked at it as if it was a random squiggle on
the scrap of parchment. Nobody could really understand a figure like seventeen thousand. A quick calculation — he’d always
been good at mental arithmetic — told him that he’d lost slightly over half his men, and therefore, according to all the recognized
authorities on the art of war, he now had insufficient forces at his disposal to carry the city. He’d failed.

Somehow, that hardly mattered. He was a mercenary, a skilled tradesman paid to do a job; they weren’t going to behead him
or lock him up, as they might well have done if he’d cost them that many citizens instead of mere migrant workers. He’d go
home, unpaid, his career ruined, and that’d be that. Years ago he’d bought a reasonable-sized estate just outside the city
where he’d been born, somewhere to retire to when his soldiering days were over. He’d been looking forward to it, in a vague
sort of way.

Seventeen thousand. He remembered a story he’d heard years ago, about a man who owned a piece of land on which a great battle
had been fought. He came back home a week after the battle to find the dead still lying. He was a fairly well-to-do farmer,
with twenty men working for him; it had taken them weeks just to cart away the bodies and dump them in a disused quarry a
couple of hundred yards from the battlefield. The land itself was ruined. Some of his neighbors put it down to malign influences,
others reckoned the sheer quantity of blood that had drained into the soil had poisoned the ground. Plowing was next to impossible,
because every few yards the share would jam on a helmet or a breastplate or some other piece of discarded junk. He tried a
heavy mulch of manure for a couple of years, but nothing would grow except bindweed and nettles.

Seventeen thousand. As he stared at the tent roof, trying not to move (the doctor had given him all sorts of dire warnings
about that), he made a few attempts at visualizing the number, but once he got past five thousand it all broke down.

The Mezentine liaisons came to see him around midday. For once, they didn’t have much to say for themselves; he got the impression
that they were preoccupied with what was likely to happen to them when they got home. One of them made a few half-hearted
suggestions about a surprise attack by night; the other two ignored him.

“Can we at least say we’ve got enough men left to mount an effective siege?” another one asked him. “According to one set
of reports, they probably outnumber us by now.”

Melancton shrugged. “If they tried to make a sortie and chase us off, they’d be walking into our scorpions,” he pointed out.
“I’d love it if they tried, but I don’t suppose they will. No, I think they’ll sit tight and watch us use up our stocks of
food. They’re better supplied than we are. We weren’t anticipating a siege.”

One of the liaisons shifted uncomfortably. “How long can we stay here, then?” he asked.

Melancton grinned. “Well, we’ve got a lot fewer mouths to feed than we had this time yesterday, so we can probably stick it
out for three weeks, assuming we want to. I can’t see any point in that, though. They must have supplies for at least six
months, probably more.”

“Three weeks,” the liaison repeated. “Well, it’s possible that the reinforcements could get here by then. In the meantime,
we’ll send to the City for a supply train —”

“Reinforcements?” Melancton frowned, as though he didn’t know what the word meant. “I don’t understand.”

“Fresh troops, from your country,” the liaison explained. “Obviously we’re going to have to raise another army before we try
again. That’s going to take time, naturally, so meanwhile our job will be to mount an effective siege —”

“Try again.” Melancton couldn’t think of any words for what he wanted to say. “You’re going to try again?”

“Of course. The Republic never loses a war. As I was saying, time is going to be the key. Based on what we’ve just seen, we’re
going to have to make very substantial modifications to the long-range engines, and that’ll probably mean shipping them back
to the City for a complete refit. How long that’ll take I simply don’t know, but…”

Melancton paid no real attention to the rest of what they said. It wasn’t any of his business anymore. Curiously, they’d spoken
as though they assumed he’d still be in command when the reinforcements arrived; he thought about that. It was possible, of
course, that the Mezentines wouldn’t want to replace him, because that would be an acknowledgment of the disaster. Maybe they’re
just going to pretend it never happened, he thought; and of course, they could do that, it’d be possible. Getting another
army from home — forty-five or fifty thousand this time — was also eminently feasible, given the time of year and the political
situation. There’d be no shortage of recruits, assuming they had the common sense not to say anything about what had happened
to the last expedition.

“Soon as you’re up and about again,” the liaison continued, making it sound as though he was getting over a nasty dose of
flu, “we’ll get you to come back with us to the City so you can brief Council on the sort of modifications needed to bring
the engines up to the mark. The important thing,” he added, “is to keep a sense of perspective.”

They went away again shortly after that, and Melancton slid into a shallow doze. When he woke up, there was a man standing
over him who looked vaguely familiar. Beside him was the day officer, looking unhappy.

“Insists on seeing you,” he said. “I told him you were asleep.”

Falier; the name rose to the surface of his mind. Falier, the engineer from the ordnance factory. Presumably he was here to
start mulling over those design modifications. “Tell him to go away,” Melancton said.

“It’s important.” Falier was shouting, which surprised him. On the couple of occasions when they’d met, he’d formed an impression
of a weak, scared little man whose main ambition was to be somewhere else. “I’ve got vital information, about the war.”

Melancton raised an eyebrow. Melodrama. “Can’t it wait?” he muttered.

“I know how to break into the city without a full assault.”

That was almost worth sitting up for. “Is that right?” Melancton said.

“Yes. We can get in without them noticing, until it’s too late.”

It happened sometimes, after a serious disaster. You got people who suddenly declared they’d been visited by angels, or who’d
just realized they were the Son of God. Usually the voices told them how to achieve total victory without further bloodshed.
Occasionally, they decided they were some ancient warrior saint reincarnated, and they’d trot off on their own, sword drawn,
yelling, toward the enemy, and be shot down by outlying archers. “You’ve found this out just now, I suppose,” Melancton said
wearily. “In a dream, or something.”

“No.” The little man was getting angry. “Look, it’s all in here.” He was holding out a silly little scrap of parchment, much
folded. “It’s a letter from Vaatzes, the traitor.”

First, Melancton told the day-officer to get out, then, painfully, he raised himself just enough so he could reach the paper
gripped in Falier’s outstretched hand. “Give me that,” he said. “What are you doing, getting letters from him?”

He remembered the answer before Falier gave it; there had been a footnote in his personnel file. “I knew him,” Falier was
saying. “I worked with him. We were friends.”

The man’s handwriting was atrocious; small, cramped, full of dots and needles. That made it frustrating, because there were
several key words he couldn’t make out. In the end he had to hand it back. “Read it to me,” he said.

Falier cleared his throat, like a boy about to make a speech on Founder’s Day.

Ziani Vaatzes to Falier Zenonis.

I hope you’ll read this, Falier, rather than be all high-minded and burn it without breaking the seal — though if that’s what
you’ve done, I can’t really blame you. After all, I’m entirely responsible for the terrible things that have happened over
the last day or so.

Will you believe me, I wonder, when I say that I want to try and make amends? You’ll have to form your own opinion. I hope
you decide in my favor. It’ll go badly with what’s left of my conscience if you don’t.

What I want you to do is take this letter to the military authorities, as high up the chain of command as you can possibly
get. What follows are detailed instructions for capturing the city, easily, quickly and with minimal loss of life. I guess
you could say I’ve had a change of heart; or maybe what I saw from the ramparts yesterday was more than even I could bear.

The key to it all is the city’s water supply system. It’s actually quite a remarkable thing. The mountain is honeycombed —
I think that’s the right word — with caves, tunnels and natural lakes. The Eremians have spent the last couple of centuries
judiciously improving on nature. They can now store a year’s supply of clean water, using nothing but the runoff from the
eaves of their houses. Extraordinary piece of design; but it’s also a glaring weak spot in the defenses. You see, in order
to move around inside the mountain, so as to maintain and repair, they’ve enlarged or added to the cave network; there’s a
maze of tunnels and corridors under the mountain, wide enough to drive a cart along. And — this is where they were too smart
by half — there’s an entrance at the foot of the mountain, on the north side, one hundred and eighty degrees from the main
gate. In fact, it’s a drain plug. If there’s unusually heavy rainfall and the cisterns get full up and there’s a risk of backup
and overflow, they open this plug and drain off the surplus water. Naturally it’s a deadly secret, but these people aren’t
very good at secrecy.