S. Stirling - The Scourge of God

There was a twenty-foot-tall outwork with towers every hundred yards, then a wet moat half bowshot broad and flowing like a slow river, and rearing above it on the inner side a wall twice the height of the first. Its towers were sixty feet high or more and staggered so that they covered the gaps between those on the outer wall. Many of them bore tall windmills, creaking and groaning as their metal vanes turned.

Probably pumping up reservoirs for hydraulic cocking systems, Rudi thought, as an observation balloon tethered to one tower was winched down. Whoever built this didn't miss a trick.

The construction itself was concrete and steel, though faced with salvaged stone; he suspected a welded web of construction girders inside poured mass-concrete. The ramparts had crenellations overhanging it so that murder-holes could be opened to drop things straight down, and they were topped by an outward-sloping metal roof that was definitely not thin sheet.

More I beams, welded into a solid mass. Like the gates of Larsdalen. And the wall around Mt. Angel is taller, and built into the side of a hill four hundred feet high. But the size of this!

The wall stretched out of sight, curving away to the northeast and southwest towards the river. As he watched gaslights flared up along it, a long ripple like a wave across a lake; that showed the thick steel shutters of the firing ports in wall and tower.

"That is… a large city," he said mildly.

Ingolf snorted. "Sixty square miles within the circuit of the walls, more or less. A hundred and twenty thousand people, not counting transients. I wandered around bumping into things like some Rover from the Hi-Line the first time I came here."

Edain cursed softly. That was nearly twice as many people as the whole of Clan Mackenzie-about as many as the Mackenzies and Bearkillers put together, and this was only Iowa's capital city.

"Tarnation," Virginia Kane said; she'd never seen a city at all, until she came to Iowa. Then, quietly: "Fuck!"

Fred Thurston chuckled. "You said it."

They all nodded; cities in the old days had been much larger, of course, but those were the distant times of wonder that none of them had seen. This was now, in the ordinary, prosaic world of the Change.

A sharp rank smell grew stronger as they approached; not anything organic, but a chemical tang Rudi had never experienced before. It made his eyes water a little, as well, like smoke from an invisible fire.

"Coal smoke," Ingolf said. "Coal and coke. They bring it in by rail, and by barge on the river from places like Carbondale."

They'd been talking in low tones; now they fell silent as the train clattered over the bridge that spanned the moat, a slow click.. clack… sounding beneath the steady pound of the hooves. The gate in the wall ahead was just large enough to pass the two tracks of the railway; within was deep shadow for the length of the passage through the wall, but looking up Rudi could just make out the teeth of multiple slabs of metal that could slide down to close it and lock into girders driven deep into the ground below.

"Now, that's a mite excessive," Rudi said mildly. "One alone would make the gate stronger than the wall."

Somebody in charge of this realm wanted a very strong redoubt. The cost, even for Iowa!

Rudi blinked as the train pulled through the thickness of the wall and into the open ground beyond. The streets were brightly lit by the incandescent mantles of the gaslamps spaced along the streets, and more inside the buildings. Northward he could see the high gilded dome again, but with a suggestion of more walls around it-the Bossman's palace, no doubt.

Palaces and forts he'd seen before. The buildings on either side of the railway line were something else again. Corvallis had a few water-powered factories, and so did Portland; even Sutterdown had mills for sawing lumber and breaking flax.

Here there were solid miles of them-tall brick chimneys trailing black smoke, a hot glare of molten metal and trails of sparks as a great cupola furnace was tapped into the molds, glimpses through huge but grimy glass windows into stretches of whirling overhead shafts and belting driving machines and figures attending them-here if people wore overalls the garments were filthy, soiled, covered much more of the body, and were entirely practical linen canvas, not expensive cotton symbols of gentility. The noise was shattering, snorts and grunts like gigantic pigs as mechanisms gulped air, blurring roars from furnaces and drafts, the tooth-hurting squeal of metal on metal, stamping and grinding.

Roads and railway sidings wove among the factories; oxen and horses and men pulled and pushed loads of ingots and coal and timber in, shaped metal out. Rudi recognized some of the products-cloth he supposed came from power looms…

He snapped his fingers. " That's what was bothering me. Back at Victrix Farm, you never heard any looms thumping! I suppose everyone in Iowa buys from here?"

"Everyone near Des Moines," Ingolf said. "If I were a Farmer or Sheriff here, it'd make me nervous having to buy in everyday stuff like that, but you have to get out near the frontiers to find much home-weaving, here."

Several of the others nodded thoughtfully. "I wonder why we don't do that," Ritva said. "We have spinning mills, or at least they do in Corvallis. Granted most people weave when they don't have anything else to do, but it's still pretty tedious."

"It only pays if you've got a lot of people close together and with cheap transport so they can buy the stuff, and a lot of water power," Fred Thurston said. "Dad tried to set up something like that, but it had to be subsidized with tax money all the time, so he shut it down-something for later, he said."

"It's a matter of market size, to be technical," Father Ignatius said.

Rudi kept an eye on the factories. More goods poured out, turned cylinders and pistons for hydraulic machinery, gears, crankshafts, chains, cast-iron pipe. Others were entirely mysterious…

"Tarnation," Virginia said again softly. "It's like something out of an old story. Like magic."

"How the Cutters would hate this!" Mathilda said, grinning. "They get upset when they see a clock, and there's a hell of a lot more than gear turning gear turning something here!"

"How I hate this!" Edain said, and coughed. "The stink's worse than it was outside the walls. Sure and it's like being trapped inside a chimney!"

"You're right about that," Rudi said; his sinuses and throat already felt a little raw, as if he were coming down with a cold. "It's sweating hot, as well. How a man could work next to a furnace in this, only the Gods know. Why don't they put it outside the walls, the way most places do a tannery or soap-boiling?"

"Because the Bossman and his cronies all have shares in these, and they don't want them risked outside the defenses… and it's easier to control things in here, too?" Odard said.

Ingolf gave him a wry look. "Right on both counts."

Odard is clever, Rudi thought. But sometimes he lets you see the way his mind works.

"There's power here, though," Fred Thurston said. "Dad tried to get as many factories going in Idaho as he could. Said the old Americans won a lot of wars because they could produce weapons cheap, fast and plenty."

As if to illustrate the point a load of armor was pushed out of one of the factories on carts with little wheels, breastplates and tassets stacked in bundles according to size and tied securely together. The train they rode slid onto a siding, behind one loaded with bundles of raw flax. The team pulling it stood with their heads down, utterly spent; grooms bustled over to lead them away. Rudi frowned a little. Horses weren't machinery, and Epona-the goddess his horse was named for-didn't like it if you treated them as such. He hoped they'd get a good rest and some mash, and have their hooves seen to; the roadbed of the railway would be hard on them.