Colours in the Steel (11 page)

‘Been back three years now,’ Teoclito said. ‘I work in the dancing school, sweeping up after the young ladies. It’s a living.’

Loredan refilled the other man’s cup. ‘And before that?’ he asked.

‘Not much fun. You don’t really want to know.’ Teoclito smiled; he had five teeth. ‘They have surprisingly good doctors, but a wicked sense of humour. Eventually they turned me loose.’

‘Just like that?’

‘No room for passengers in the caravan, and they’re a superstitious bunch. Terrible bad luck to kill a cripple.’

‘And after that?’

Teoclito sighed wearily. ‘Oh, I walked to the coast, got there, found I’d been going in the wrong direction. After that I didn’t feel much like walking any more, so I stayed put.’

‘Where was that?’

‘Solamen.’ Loredan raised an eyebrow; Solamen was up on the north coast, two months’ walk from the place where they’d parted. Among other things, it was a flourishing slave market. ‘I got a job, of sorts. Unpaid. Sort of like voluntary work.’

‘Ah.’

‘Finally I ended up helping row a big boat,’ Teoclito continued. ‘And when this boat got sunk off Canea, I swam ashore, and now here I am. I’d like to say how nice it is to be back, but I have a basic respect for the truth that prevents me.’

‘You’ve been busy, then.’

Teoclito shrugged, awkwardly. ‘Like you said, it beats being in the army. Anyway, enough about that. You see any of the old crowd nowadays?’

Loredan shook his head. ‘Not many of us made it back,’ he said, ‘and we don’t have reunions. You didn’t miss much, at the end.’ He yawned. ‘Saying that, I did run into Cherson the other day, down by the city wharf. He’s running a brass foundry, doing quite well. Employs a lot of people.’

‘Never could stand the man myself.’

‘Nor me. Funny, isn’t it, the way bastards live for ever.’

Before his presumed death, Teoclito had been Loredan’s Company Commander. Every inch the hero, in a society that discouraged the type; first man into the engagement and last out. He seemed much shorter than Loredan remembered. He was almost completely bald, and there were scars across his crown. Loredan had taken over his command; to the best of his knowledge, they were the only two men alive out of that company.

Teoclito was looking at him intensely. Mostly, Loredan recognised, it was contempt.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They do, don’t they?’

They filled their cups again and sat quietly for a while. Loredan couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Anyway,’ Teoclito said at last, finishing his drink and standing up. ‘Can’t be too late, got to work tomorrow. Be seeing you.’

‘Clito.’ Loredan wished he hadn’t spoken; he was afraid that what he was about to say would be the wrong thing.

‘Yes?’

‘You . . . Are you all right for money? I mean—’

That look again. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I got a job. Go carefully, Bardas.’

‘You too.’

‘Oh, one more thing.’ Teoclito leant against the table, favouring his right leg.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sure you had a good reason,’ he said, ‘for leaving me and not coming back. Just don’t ever try and tell me what it was.’

‘Take care, Clito.’

‘I always do.’ He walked away, his right foot dragging. His whole body had been twisted like a length of wire. It must have seemed a very long way from the high plains to Solamen, walking like that.

The lengths some people’ll go to just to stay alive.

Loredan left the rest of his wine and went back to his ‘island’. He was virtually sober, but that was all right. No more drinking, he told himself, as he lay down to sleep. Regular meals, exercise, practice in the Schools, perhaps even a new sword, and maybe he’d be in shape to beat Ziani Alvise. After all, it was just another fight, something he was supposed to be good at. It wasn’t as if he was being asked to do anything difficult, like walking home.

 

 

‘What are you staring at?’ demanded the engineer.

Temrai stepped backwards. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just looking.’

The engineer scowled, and spat into the sawdust. ‘Haven’t you got any work to do?’

‘I finished it. I’m waiting for the next batch of blanks. So I thought I’d just look around.’

The engineer muttered something and went back to what he was doing. He was working on the frame of a small trebuchet, the kind that threw a hundredweight stone. Using a chisel and a beech mallet, he was cutting dovetails in a thick twelve-foot-long plank; earlier, he and another man had sawn it out of a massive billet of seasoned ash, using a ten-foot saw.

‘Is that for the main frame?’ Temrai asked. The engineer looked up, surprised.

‘Left-hand A-frame,’ he replied. ‘Already done the right one. How come you know so much about engines?’

‘I’m interested,’ Temrai said. ‘I’ve been watching.’

The engineer, a man of about sixty-five with shaggy white hair on his chest and arms like a bear, nodded. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re the offcomer kid, the plainsman.’ His mouth twitched into a small grin. ‘Bet you ain’t seen anything like this up on the plains.’

‘Oh, no,’ Temrai said. ‘I think it’s fascinating, seeing all the different machines.’

This time the engineer actually laughed. ‘There ain’t much to these buggers,’ he said. ‘Trebuchet’s a very basic design; you just got a bloody great big heavy weight on one end and a sling to put the stone in on the other, and it pivots around a pin supported on two A-frames. So you hoist up the weight with a winch, load your stone and let go. The weight goes crashing down again, and the stone gets slung out. Piece of cake. Compared to some of the machines we make here, there’s nothing to it.’

‘Oh,’ Temrai said. ‘I thought they were quite good.’

The engineer shrugged. ‘Oh, they work all right. We got trebuchets’ll throw a four hundredweight stone three hundred an’ fifty yards, straight as a die. This here’s just a baby; got the same range but only takes a quarter of the load.’

Temrai nodded appreciatively, and the engineer was secretly pleased to see the light of enthusiasm in his eyes. All true engineers are enthusiasts; they value admiration and respect every bit as much as painters and sculptors do, and they know they deserve it even more. All a sculpture need do is look a certain way. A machine has to work.

‘How do you know how big to make it?’ Temrai asked.

The engineer laughed again, not unkindly. ‘That, my son, is a bloody good question. Some of it you can work out by figuring; there’s what we call formulas. The rest just comes by trial and error. You make one, you see if it works; if it doesn’t you make it again a different way, and you keep on over and over till you got one that does work. That’s what we call prototypes.’

‘Ah,’ Temrai said.

‘F’rinstance,’ the engineer went on, carefully marking out the rectangle he was about to cut with light taps of the chisel, ‘the Secretary of Ordnance comes to me and he says he wants ten light trebs to cover the angle of the sea wall just along from the Chain, where they’ve just put in them five new bastions. So he tells me what he wants these trebs to do and I go away and I have a think. Now, I know that we built a treb once that had a beam thirty-three foot long, with a counterweight of a hundred hundredweight, and we found it could chuck half a hundredweight a couple of hundred yards. Now that ain’t much for a treb, more like a kiddie’s toy, but it gives me somewhere to start. So I reckon, if I can sling fifty pounds two hundred yards with a hundred hundredweight off thirty-three, maybe if I want to sling a hundred pounds three hundred and fifty yards, I could start with maybe a forty-foot beam and fifteen hundred hundredweight. And then I think, hang on, a fifty-foot beam and two and a half hundred hundredweight’ll chuck three hundredweight two hundred an’ seventy-five yards, ’cos I made one that did. So I try a hundred hundredweight off forty foot of beam, and if that busts the beam, I know forty’s too long with a hundred, so next time I try thirty-six. But I’ve made the beam shorter now, so I gotta up the weight on the other end; so we up the counterweight to a hundred an’ seventy. Now if it breaks, I gotta make the beam stronger, and that throws out all the other measurements.’ He paused for breath. ‘Not a quick job,’ he said,‘making engines.’

‘It sounds really complicated,’ Temrai said. He sounded so downcast that the engineer smiled at him.

‘It
is
complicated,’ he said, ‘making things that work. Any bloody fool can make things that don’t work. No offence, son, but that’s what you foreigners do. You see a machine and you think, that’s a good idea, we’ll make one of them; but you never stop to think about how long it ought to be or what it ought to be made out of, and then it don’t work and you say the hell with that, alas, the gods are angry, and you pack it in. That’s the difference, see,’ he added, tapping his forehead. ‘Up here.’

‘I can see that,’ Temrai replied. ‘That’s what makes you all so very wise.’ He surveyed the various finished and half-finished parts of the engine standing against the wall in order or cradled on specially built jigs, and his lips moved as if he was counting under his breath. ‘And I suppose it’s not just the arm and the weight,’ he went on. ‘I suppose it’s important to get the frame the right size, too.’

‘You’re getting the idea. We might make an engineer of you yet.’ He patted the timber in front of him, which was secured by broad iron cramps to a substantial trestle. ‘I been thinking, and I reckon if I make the frame twelve by eight by twelve, I won’t be too far out; it’s not like I was trying to mount a sixty-foot beam with clearance for three an’ a half hundred. The more weight, see, the more clearance you need, so the taller the A-frame’s gotta be. But the more acute you make the angle, the likelier they are to bust under the strain, so you gotta beef them up, and then some prat from Ordnance comes along and tells you to lose twenty hundredweight off it or it’ll be too heavy for the tower they want it on.’ The engineer rolled his eyes dramatically. ‘See what I mean?’ he said.

‘I think so. What else do you make besides trebuchets?’

‘You name it,’ the engineer said proudly. ‘This year so far I’ve made catapults, oistoboles, onagers, scorpions, mangonels, all that sort of bloody stuff. Doing a nice simple treb’s a pleasant change, I can tell you.’

As he sat at his bench, carefully wiring hardened edges to a soft steel core, Temrai couldn’t help thinking of his uncle Tesarai; how once, many years ago, he’d managed to capture a Perimadeian artilleryman, and set about torturing him with tremendous ingenuity and enthusiasm in an attempt to wring from him the secrets of building war engines. The harder Tezarai tried the less he achieved, until the time came when the prisoner died with his secrets intact, leaving the clansmen with a deep sense of baffled respect. At this point Tezarai declared that it was plainly impossible for the city ever to be taken, since its people were prepared to face the ugliest forms of death rather than betray it. Whereupon Temrai, who was twelve at the time and only just old enough to be allowed to attend councils, tentatively suggested that they’d gone about it in the wrong way. Trying to extort information out of these people was obviously futile; wouldn’t it have been a good idea simply to have asked nicely? To which he’d added quickly (for fear of being sent straight to bed) that these people who were so puffed up with pride in their city that they preferred to die rather than let it down might very easily tell an enquirer everything he wanted to know, so long as he asked the questions in a way that allowed the Perimadeians an opportunity of showing off in front of ignorant savages.

And now, five years later, here he was; and it was proving even easier than he’d imagined. He now knew the dimensions and construction details of the siege tower, the long ladder, the scorpion, the gravity-operated ram and the trebuchet. He’d learnt the art of sapping and undermining walls simply by going to the library and reading a book. He’d been given a tour of the walls and watchtowers by a member of the guard he’d met in a tavern, and had sat drinking with him while he timed the intervals of the watch and counted the number of men on duty. His job in the arsenal meant that he knew more about the city’s stocks and production capacity of arrows than the guard commanders. There was even a book, which the librarian had promised to find for him, that described ten perfectly feasible ways of breaching the defences and storming the city; it had been a prescribed text at the military academy twenty years ago, and since then had been largely forgotten about. It was wonderful; like everything about the city, wonderful, unsettling and deeply sad.

He finished wiring up and put the assembly into the fire to heat up for brazing. He’d make a good job of it, never fear; the least he could do, in the circumstances, was make sure that they had a few decent swords to defend themselves with when the moment came.

 

Among the large crowd who paid their copper quarter and stood in line to see the Alvise-Loredan case were a tall, thin young man and an equally tall, rather more rounded girl. They were wearing matching cloaks of an unfashionable colour and cut—

(‘How was I supposed to know? The last time I was here was five years ago.’

‘And it didn’t occur to you that fashions might have changed?’

‘To be honest, no.’

‘Men!’) —and when they whispered together, their dialect, although more quaint than barbarous, was enough to make the people behind them in the queue nudge each other and wink. Islanders, they muttered to each other, and made a show of checking that their purses were still there.

‘I’m not sure I want to see this,’ the girl muttered as the ticket clerk took from her the little bone counter she’d been handed at the door. ‘Where on earth’s the fun in seeing two grown men killing each other?’

Her twin brother shook his head. ‘They probably won’t do that,’ he said. ‘Extremely difficult, for one thing. Much more likely that one’ll kill the other and that’ll be that.’