K Parker: The Escapement

The ambassador took a moment to clear his throat. "Agreed," he said.

"Splendid." Psellus beamed at him. "There, we've made an alliance, and it was so much easier than I thought it'd be. When Boioannes was in charge, it used to take weeks to hammer out a treaty, and he knew a lot about diplomacy, unlike me. Now, how soon can your soldiers get here? Or…" Psellus frowned. "Here's where it gets difficult again. I don't know whether we need them here at the City, or whether they'd be more useful hindering the savages and making it hard for them to reach us. You're the expert. What do you think?"

Nothing in the ambassador's long and varied experience had prepared him for a question like that. "It's a complicated decision," he said. "On the one hand…"

"The way I see it," Psellus went on, "an army of a million people is obviously a great advantage in a battle, no doubt about it, but until you actually get to the battlefield, it's also a tremendous problem. Must be. Food and so forth, hay for the horses, clean water. Now, we've done a little research-dreadful, really, it's taken something like this to make us realise just how woefully ignorant we are about everything other than making things and selling them-and we can't see how the enemy can keep themselves fed and watered just from what they can find in the fields and villages, which means they must be having to bring in their food and so on from somewhere else. God only knows where," Psellus added with a grin. "I mean to say, you increase the population of the mountain duchies by a million, the Eremians and the Vadani could only just about feed themselves at the best of times, so it's not like there can be any huge granaries bursting at the seams with stockpiled sacks of flour. Probably some of your merchants have been trading with them-it's perfectly all right, I quite understand-but from the little I know about your people, I don't suppose that can have made much difference. No, the only source of supply I can think of is the savages' own herds of cattle-they're nomads, as I'm sure you know, that's how they live, and they must have managed to bring their cattle with them across the desert when they came. Which is fine, of course, from their point of view, except that there can't be all that much pasture in the mountains for all those hundreds of thousands of animals; and when the grass has all been eaten, and any hay that our men overlooked while they were there, they'll have to slaughter most of them before they starve; and yes, they can salt down the carcasses, but even that won't last for ever. Time, you see. They're almost as short of it as we are." Psellus stopped talking for a moment, as if thinking about something, then added, "Of course, all this stuff is just what's occurred to me while I've been thinking about it, and like I've told you already, I'm hopelessly ignorant about military matters, so I may have got it all completely wrong. But if I'm right-and if I'm not, do please say so-it seems to me that the best use we can make of your army is messing about with their lines of supply. Would you agree?"

The ambassador hesitated, as though trying to translate what he'd heard into a language he could understand. "Of course," he said. "It's the only logical-"

"Though obviously," Psellus went on, "there's a bit more to it than that. The last thing we want to do is make them come here before we've done what we can to get ready for them. If your soldiers were to drive off all their cattle, it could force them to attack us straight away, simply because the only reserve of food large enough to feed them and close enough to be any use is what we've got here-though I think you ought to know, we're not exactly well provided for in that department ourselves. Of course, I've made arrangements for every ship we can buy or hire to bring in as much food as possible from across the sea-the old country won't send us soldiers any more, but they're still happy to sell us wheat, thank goodness-but it's all got to come in through Lonazep, and I understand it's absolute chaos there at the moment. Still, they probably don't know that, and if they do, it's not as though they'd have a choice, if we somehow contrived to run off all their livestock. So, we don't want to leave them starving. We just want to slow them right down, so we've got time to build up our walls and get in as much food as we can for a long siege. That's our best chance, I reckon. If it's a matter of who starves first, I think we can win. If it comes to fighting, we might as well not bother." Psellus breathed out (he still wasn't used to talking uninterrupted for so long), then added, "Do you think I'm on the right lines here, or have I got it all wrong? Really, I'd value your opinion. It's been such a worry, trying to learn all this very difficult stuff in such a tearing hurry. It'd be a relief if an expert like yourself can reassure me I haven't made a dreadful mess of it all."

The ambassador looked at him warily for a while, then said, "Can I ask you what you did before all this?"

"I was a clerk."

Psellus nodded. "I was a records clerk for nine years, after I'd finished my apprenticeship. Then I got my transfer from the executive to the administrative grade; I was a junior secretary in the Compliance directorate for six years, and then general secretary for five years after that. And then," he added sadly, "Ziani Vaatzes came along, and now look at me. Lord of all I survey. I met him once, did you know that? Vaatzes. He's the key to it all, of course." Psellus shook his head. "I'm terribly sorry, I'm rambling, and you're a busy man. Now then, about this army of yours."

Later, in the ten minutes or so between appointments (he had his beautiful clock to thank for such an indecent degree of precision; he still loved it for its beauty, but it nagged him like a wife), he wrote down the minutes of his meeting with the ambassador and compared them with the plan he'd prepared beforehand. Well, he thought, now at least we have a few soldiers, thanks to the incredible stupidity of the Cure Doce. He still couldn't quite believe it. But then they'd been brought up to believe the Republic was invincible; invincible and gullible. Two mistakes, and they'd probably cost the Cure Doce their existence. Not that it mattered, if they could buy him time to turn the City into one of those extraordinary star shapes he'd seen in the book.

He put the sheet of minutes on the pile of papers to be filed, and spent his last few moments of solitary peace going over his plan for the meeting with the architects. He would never be able to understand the book, but they might.

Suddenly, he smiled. Wouldn't it be a superb piece of irony, he thought, if we actually contrived to get away with it? A million enemies, and we beat them because there's too many of them to take the City. The sheer perversity of it appealed to him enormously. They lose, because they sent a million men to do the job of fifty thousand; I beat a million men by fighting just one.

Which reminded him. He pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the pile, inked his pen and wrote, wastefully, in the middle of the page:

His wife.

He was cold, hungry, and still damp, though it had stopped raining through the hole in the roof. He could feel drops of water trickling down his forehead from his sodden cap, and smell the stench of drying wool.

I might be late, he remembered her saying. It's hard for me to get away in the evenings. Well, of course it was. She had a husband to look after, and right now he'd be the busiest man in the City; rushed off his feet, frustrated by his inferiors, yelled at by his masters for not working miracles, painfully aware that nothing was under his control, but everything was his fault. So, naturally, when he finally got home from work, he'd expect a hot meal on the table and everything just so. That didn't alter the fact that she had other responsibilities, and no excuse for not performing them efficiently.