Iain Banks: Surface Detail

The collision jarred his hands, arms and shoulders, setting his teeth on edge and ringing his aching back as though it was a bell. He almost cried out, but instead just sucked in a breath of stale, warm, humid air, pungently scented with his own bodily odours and those of the other sweating, straining miners around him. He worked the embedded spade to one side within the dirt and tried to sense the edge of the buried rock, pulling the spade out and heaving it back in again a little to the side in an attempt to find the edge of the obstruction and lever it out. The spade bit into solidity on both sides, making his arms and back ache again each time. He let the breath out, putting the spade down by his right thigh and feeling behind him for his pickaxe. He had moved too far forward since he’d last used it and had to look round, back muscles protesting, to find it.

He turned carefully, anxious not to get in the way of the man to his right, who was already swinging hard with his own pickaxe, cursing under his breath all the time. The new kid on his other side, whose name he’d already forgotten, was still stabbing weakly at the face with his spade, producing little. He was a big, powerful-looking lad, but still face-weak. He’d need to be relieved soon if they were to keep up to target, though he’d pay for such deemed lack of application.

Behind Vatueil, in the flickering, lamp-lit gloom, the tunnel stretched back into darkness; half-naked men, on their knees or walking bent over at the waist, shuffled about the confined space, loaded with spades and shovels, picks and pry bars. Somewhere behind them, over their coughs and wheezed, bitten-off exchanges, he heard the irregular hollow rumble of an empty rubble wagon approaching. He saw it thud into the buffers at the end of the line.

“Feeling delicate again, Vatueil?” the junior captain said, walking over to him, back bent. The junior captain was the only man at the face still wearing the top half of his uniform. He was sneering, and had tried to put some sarcasm into his voice, though he was so young Vatueil still thought of him as a child and found it hard to take him seriously. The delicacy the junior captain was referring to had occurred an hour earlier just after the start of Vatueil’s shift when he’d felt and then been sick, sending an extra unwanted shovelful of waste back to the surface in a rubble wagon.

He’d felt ill since just after breakfast back at the surface and on the walk to the face. The last part especially, doubled over, had been a nightmarish slog of increasing nausea. That was always a bad bit for him anyway; he was tall and his back hit more of the roof support beams than the other men’s. He was developing what the long-serving sappers called back buttons; raised welts of hardened skin above each bone in his spine like giant warts. Ever since he’d thrown up, his stomach had been rumbling and he’d had a raging thirst that the single meagre hourly water ration had done little to alleviate.

There was a chorus of shouting starting further back in the tunnel and another rumbling sound. For a moment he thought it was the start of a cave-in, and felt a sickening pulse of fear run through him, even as another part of his mind thought, At least it might be quick, and that would be an end to it . Then another rubble wagon came hurtling out of the darkness and slammed into the rear of the first one, sending dust bursting out from both wagons and knocking the leading wheels of the front wagon off the track just in front of the buffers. There was much more shouting and swearing as the track layers were blamed for unsettling the track behind, the surface wagon emptiers were cursed for not fully emptying the wagon in the first place and everybody else further up was shouted at for not giving them more warning. The junior captain ordered everybody away from the face to help get the wagon back on the rails, then added, “Not you, Vatueil; keep working.”

“Sir,” he said, lifting the pickaxe. At least with nobody around him he could get a proper swing at the obstruction. He turned back and heaved the pick at a spot to the side of where the spade had baulked, briefly imagining that he was swinging it at the back of the young captain’s head. He hauled the pick out, twisted it to present the flat blade rather than the spike towards the face, found a slightly different position and swung hard again.

You developed a feel for what was going on at the end of a shovel or a pick, you started to gain an insight into the just-hidden depths in front of you, after a while. There was another jarring strike to add to all the others that had run up through his hands into his arms and back over the year he’d been down here, but he sensed the slightly flattened blade make a sort of double strike inside the face, sliding between two rocks, or into a cleft in a single more massive rock. That felt hollow, he thought, but dismissed the idea.

He had leverage now, a degree of purchase. He strained at the worn-smooth handle of the pick. Something grated inside the face and the weak light from his helmet lamp showed a stretch of dirt face as long as his forearm and tall as his head hinging out towards him. Dirt and pebbles slumped about his knees. What fell out of the hole was a piece of dressed stonework, and beyond was a rectangular hole and a damp darkness, a dirt-free inky absence from which a thin cold wind issued, smelling of old, cold stone.

The great castle, the besieged fortress, stood over the broad plain on a carpet of ground-hugging mist, like something unreal.

Vatueil remembered his dreams. In his dreams the castle truly was not real, or not there, or genuinely did float above the plain, by magic or some technology unknown to him, and so they burrowed on for ever, never finding its base, tunnelling on without cease through the killing muggy warmth and sweat-mist of their own exhalations in an eternal agony of purposeless striving. He had never mentioned these dreams to anybody, unsure who amongst his comrades he could really trust and judging that if word of these nightmares got back to his superiors they might be deemed treacherous, implying that their labours were pointless, doomed to failure.

The castle sat on a spur of rock, an island of stone jutting above the flood plain of the great meandering river. The castle itself was formidable enough; the cliffs that surrounded it made it close to impregnable. Still, it had to be taken, they’d been told. After nearly a year of trying to starve the garrison into surrender, it had been judged, two years or more ago, that the only way to take the stronghold was to get a great siege engine close in to the rocky outcrop. Enormous machines had been constructed of wood and metal and manoeuvred towards the castle on a specially built road. The machines could hurl rocks or fizzing metal bombs the weight of ten men many hundreds of strides across the plain, but there was a problem: to get them close enough to the castle meant coming within range of the fortress’s own great war machine, a giant trebuchet mounted on the single massive circular tower dominating the citadel.

With its own range increased by virtue of its elevation, the castle’s engine dominated the plain for nearly two thousand strides about the base of the rock; all attempts to move siege engines to within range had been met with a hail of rocks from the fortress’s trebuchet, resulting in smashed machines and dead men. The engineers had been forced to concede that constructing a machine of their own powerful enough to remain out of range of the castle’s war engine while still being able to hit the fortress was probably impossible.

So they would tunnel to near the castle rock, open a pit and construct a small but powerful siege engine there under the noses of the castle’s garrison, and, supposedly, under the angle at which the castle’s trebuchet could fire. There were rumours that this absurd machine would be a sort of self-firing bomb device, some sort of explosive contraption that would throw itself into the air, up past the cliff and against the castle walls, detonating there. Nobody really believed these rumours, though the slightly more plausible idea of constructing a sufficiently powerful wooden catapult or trebuchet in a pit excavated at the end of a tunnel seemed just as fanciful and idiotic.