K Parker - Devices and Desires

And that's me told, Orsea thought rebelliously, but of course Jarnac was right. Not only did he sound right, he looked right, head to toe, in his no-nonsense open-face bascinet, brigandine coat over a light mailshirt, munitions arm and leg harness. You could believe in him, six foot five of lean muscle. He could've stepped straight off the pages of The True Art of War, or A Discourse of Military Science. He made Orsea feel about twelve years old.

'Fine,' he said, 'but you call me as soon as they get to the foot of the wall. That's an order.'

'Understood,' Jarnac said crisply; turned away, turned back impulsively. 'There's one thing you can do,' he said, in a voice more urgent and apprehensive than Orsea had ever heard him use before. 'Something that'd really help.'

'What?'

Jarnac stepped right up close, something the lesser Ducas had probably never done before in the history of the family. 'You can release Miel and send him up here to take over from me,' he said, with an edge to his voice that made Orsea step away. 'He's the man you need, not me. He's good at this stuff.'

He doesn't know, Orsea realised. 'I can't,' he said. 'Look, I promise I'll explain; but it simply can't be done, you've got to believe me.'

'I see.' Jarnac's massive head drooped on his neck for a moment, and then he was himself again. 'In that case, with your permission, I really must get back to the tower. I will send for you,' he added, 'you've got my word on that.'

Once Orsea had gone, Jarnac bounded up the stairs to the top platform of the tower. His staff were waiting for him, anxious to point out things they'd noticed-a unit of archers previously misidentified as engineers, tenders full of scorpion ammunition, a banner that could be the enemy general staff. Jarnac pretended to listen and nodded appreciatively, but the buzzing swarm of detail didn't penetrate. He was staring at the enemy; a single swarming, crawling thing trudging unhappily up the steep road to his city, with the intention of killing him.

Jarnac Ducas had fought in seventeen military engagements; the first, when he was just turned sixteen, had been against the Vadani, a trivial cavalry skirmish on the borders that had sucked in infantry detachments that happened to be in the vicinity and had turned into a vicious, indecisive slog-ging-match; the most recent, Miel's raid against the Mezentines. He'd missed the scorpion-cloud and the massacre, and he'd felt bad about that ever since. He'd been reading approved military texts since he was ten, at which age he'd also started to train with weapons (the sword, the spear, the poll-axe, the bow, the halberd); ten hours a week of forms, four hours a week sparring. By his own estimation, he was eminently qualified to lead a full regiment of heavy cavalry, as befitted his place in the social order. Never in his worst dreams had he ever imagined himself in sole command of the defence of Civitas Eremiae. That was something that simply couldn't happen.

'Get the engines wound up,' he said, not looking round to see who received the order. Whoever was responsible for doing it would know what to do. 'They're good to three hundred and fifty yards, is that right?'

Someone assured him that it was, not that the information was necessary. Some weeks earlier, a party of workmen had hammered a row of white stakes into the ground in a straight line, precisely three hundred and forty-nine yards from the wall. As soon as the enemy crossed the staked line, the scorpion crews were going to loose their first volley. The engineers who installed the machines had carefully zeroed them to that range, so that the first cloud of bolts would land on the line, with a permitted tolerance of six inches either way. The enemy advance guard, marching purposefully up the hill in good order, were already as good as dead. It was the unit behind them Jarnac was thinking about.

The key would be the mobile scorpion batteries; he could see them, though the enemy had done their best to disguise them as ordinary wagons. If he could neutralise the Mezentine scorpions, he reckoned he could kill one man in three before they reached the base of the wall. Take away a third, and the enemy army wasn't strong enough to take the city; there were definitive tables of odds in the military manuals that told you the proportion by which the attackers needed to outnumber the defenders in order to secure victory. Jarnac had a copy of A Discourse of Military Science tucked inside the front of his brigandine, with a bookmark to help him find the place. The critical figure was one in three; simple arithmetic.

Now then, he thought. The skirmish line advances, I wipe them out; while our engines are rewinding, they push forward the mobile batteries so that they're in range. I loose a volley that gets rid of all their scorpion crews, but when we're all down again, they send up replacement crews to span and align their scorpions. If I'm quick, maybe I'll get those crews too, but there'll be a third wave, and a fourth. Sooner or later they'll get off their shot; I'll lose crewmen, which'll slow down my rate of fire as I replace them. Whoever runs out of scorpion crewmen first will lose the war. And that's all there is to it.

(He paused for a moment to consider the sheer scale of the enterprise he was committing himself to. Not tens of deaths but hundreds, not hundreds but thousands, not thousands but tens of thousands; each death caused by a wound, a tearing of flesh, smashing of bone, pouring out of blood, an experience of intense pain. He'd seen death several hundred times, the moment when the light went out in the eyes of an animal because of some action of his, at which point the shudders and twitches were simply mechanical, no longer controlled by a living thing. Each of those deaths he could justify in terms of meat harvested, crops preserved from damage, honour given and respectfully taken-there were times when he found it hard to believe any of those justifications,' but he knew somehow that what he was doing was clean and legitimate. Now he was going to see death on a scale he couldn't begin to imagine, and the justification-which should have been self-evident-seemed elusive. Why kill ten thousand Mezentines, he asked himself, when the outcome is inevitable and the city is doomed to fall? Why should any human being kill another, given that the flesh and the hide are not used, and no trophy is taken? All he could find to shield himself with against these thoughts was a banal they started it, and the illogical, incredible fact that unless he killed them, all of them, they were going to wreck his city and murder his people. Because there's no alternative; it was a reason, not a justification, on a par with a parent's because I say so, something he had to obey but could neither understand nor respect. It was no job for a gentleman, even though it was the proper occupation of the lesser Ducas-but not to command, not to be in charge and accept responsibility. He hadn't been born to that; Miel had, and that was what he was there for. Except that he wasn't; why was that? he wondered.)

They were closing; they were only yards from the white posts; they were the quarry walking into the snare. Jarnac took a deep breath, sucked it in, found it impossible to let it go, because when he did so, he'd be saying the word, loose, that would kill all those people. Could he really do that, exterminate thousands of creatures with just one word, like a god or a magician in a story?

'Loose,' he said, and the scorpions bucked all along the wall. The sounds they made were the slider crashing home against the stop, a thump of steel on wood, and the hiss of the bolt forcibly parting the air. All around him, men were exploding into action, arching their backs as they worked frantically at windlasses, swirling and flickering like dancers as they picked up and loaded bolts, jumped clear as the sear dropped and the slider flew forward again. He pressed against the battlement and looked down, in time to see the cloud of bolts lift, a shimmering, insubstantial thing that fell like a net. The enemy were flattened like trampled grass, as if an invisible foot was stamping on them. They weren't people, of course; they were blades of grass, or ants, or bees swarming; not a thousand creatures who resembled him closely but one composite, collective thing, belonging to the species enemy. The bolt-cloud lifted again and blurred his view.