The Escapement (6 page)

He paused, then frowned. "Of course, you know who we've got to thank for that," he added. "Your old friend Lucao Psellus."

The name hurt her. "Him," she said.

"I know. But you can't deny it, he's doing a good job, in the circumstances."

"He's horrible. I should know. And think of all the difficulties he made for us over our wedding."

"Yes, sure. All I'm saying is, he's doing
something
about the war. God only knows what sort of a state we'd be in if we still had that arsehole Boioannes running things."

In that moment, she realised, she'd never hated him so much in all the time they'd been together. "Like your opinion matters," she said. "You don't know anything about it."

He turned and looked at her, and she thought: one of these days, I'll go just a little bit too far, and then I'll lose him. But not today. "Fine," he said, "let's not talk about it. I'll just get on and finish these figures."

She turned her back on him, picked up the coat and sewed for a while, although there wasn't really enough light; he'd taken the good lamp to read his papers by, and the other lamp needed a new wick. She didn't want to do sloppy work on a coat she was going to give to
him;
not that he'd notice, but she'd know, and feel ashamed. She'd have to get up early and take it over to the window, to catch the first light. "I'm going to bed now," she announced. "You'll have to get your own lunch tomorrow, I haven't had time to make anything."

"Mphm." He didn't look at her. "I can get something from a market stall on my way in."

For some reason, she was offended by that; he'd made it sound as if she was so unimportant that even a gross dereliction of duty on her part couldn't possibly matter. But of course, that wasn't what he'd meant, he was just trying to be considerate. On balance, though, she preferred to take offence. "Fine," she snapped, as she crossed the room to the bed and dragged the curtain across so savagely she nearly pulled it off the wall.

Falier waited until he heard her snore, then put down his pen and carefully swept the counters off the board into his cupped hand, making sure they didn't clink together. It had been a dreadful, hateful evening. He had no idea why, but it seemed like there didn't have to be a reason any more. Ever since… He stopped what he was doing and concentrated, trying to pin down the moment with all due precision. Ever since the Vadani duke had evacuated his capital city, not long before the savages got involved. He thought about it some more, trying to correlate the vast events of the war with the most significant turning-points in their marriage. The correlation gave him a coherent chronology and verified his conclusion, but offered no explanation. Perhaps, he thought, it's like astrology; the movements of stars and planets bearing on the tiny lives of men and women. Perhaps the war's got so huge and heavy now that it's pulling our lives along with it, the same way the moon draws the tides. There were other explanations, of course. Since the war got so busy—ever since Vaatzes betrayed the Eremians; he'd been directly involved in that—he'd had so much work on, been so wrapped up in production targets and productivity ratings, felt so tired in the evenings when he finally got home… Obviously he'd been neglecting her, and wouldn't any woman resent that? He felt properly guilty about it, of course, but unfortunately there was nothing he could do to set it right. He couldn't even resign, they wouldn't let him, and as for delegating, that'd only make things worse; they'd make a mess of everything, and he'd have to work even longer and harder trying to get it all straight again. To begin with he'd hoped she'd understand, because of the national emergency and the threat to the City, but apparently not. He couldn't blame her for that.
Just because the savages are coming, why should that mean you don't
love me any more
? She didn't need to say it out loud, and he could tell her it wasn't true until they were both sick of the sound of his voice. She'd never believe him. And for this, he thought, I betrayed my friend. It really shouldn't have turned out this way. If you're going to do some unspeakably evil thing to gain your heart's desire, you should at least have the basic good manners to take proper care of your heart's desire once you've got it, instead of leaving it lying around neglected, like a spoilt child's toys.

But that was far too easy to rationalise. The crime contains its own punishment; wasn't that a quotation, or a proverb or something? His betrayal had led directly to Ziani escaping and defecting to the Eremians; that in turn led to the war, which was ruining their marriage. In other words, he could never have won her without making losing her inevitable; not to mention bringing destruction down on the entire Republic, like someone carrying home the plague in a shipment of tainted grain. To bring the world to ruin, for love; put like that it sounded wonderfully romantic—be mine, and let the whole world burn; another quotation, most likely. But he couldn't twist his mind far enough round to see it in that light, somehow. Rather, he'd done it because he really had no choice in the matter. He had to have her, and it had been the only way to make it happen; the consequences were irrelevant, regardless of how many strangers died because of it. It wasn't his fault; love was nobody's fault, just like nobody was to blame for hurricanes, or lightning setting fire to the thatch. It's not the apple's fault that it falls from the tree, because it has no choice, if the branch can't hold it any longer. He'd had no choice, because there had been no other way. Even so… He looked at the calculations he'd just finished making, so much hardening steel, apportioned between shovel blades and arrowheads. Arrows to kill men with, shovels to bury them with; add together the inventory of arrowheads already in stock and the requisition for arrowheads ordered to be made, and then imagine them, ten million arrows, each one cutting through flesh, into bone. A mercenary captain he'd talked to in Eremia had told him that in an average battle, one arrow in twenty hits something. He didn't need his counters to do the calculation. Half a million hits; say a fifth of those manage to pierce armour and reach the flesh inside. Fifty thousand wounds (think of how much a splinter in your finger can hurt; think of an arrow as a huge barbed splinter). He shook his head, remembering the stacks of dead men he'd seen at Civitas Eremiae; stared at them in blank horror, and never even realised that what he was looking at was the true meaning of love. He was desperately tired, but he couldn't get into bed, not with her there. He leaned back in his chair, lifted the mantle off the lamp and crushed the flame to death between thumb and forefinger.

They said that the Vadani duke had married the widow of the Eremian duke, who he'd had killed on some flimsy pretext. You didn't need to be a politician or a diplomat to figure that one out. It's love that makes the world go round, they said; also, that the Vadani duke had only brought his duchy into the war for her sake. And then he'd married a princess of the savages, and when she'd been killed by the Republic's cavalry in some skirmish, that meant the savages were in the war too, and now the City needed a million shovels double quick, to dig a hole to hide in. (I did all that, he thought. For love.)

He closed his eyes. He'd be asleep in no time; and then he'd wake up with a crick in his neck from sleeping all night in a chair, because he couldn't bring himself to share a bed with the woman he loved.

They said Ziani Vaatzes must be mad, to have done all those dreadful things and brought disaster down on the City. Well; they were quite right, for once. And it never rains but it pours, and it's always darkest before dawn, and every cloud has a silver lining, and sooner or later everybody falls in love with the foreman's daughter. All perfectly true.

So he closed his eyes, but it was a while before he fell asleep; his mind was still crowded with numbers and sums, bits of random information, facts he preferred not to face, things he wished he didn't know. Just before the confusion in his head exhausted itself and faded into sleep, a question formed; one that he hadn't ever considered before, and yet unless it was answered, nothing in the whole wide world could ever possibly make sense again. It flared up like the last ember of a sleepy fire, burned itself out and faded, and then he slept…

Why did Ziani make the thing in the first place?

She wasn't there when he woke up. Bright grey light filtered through the window. His neck hurt.

There was the end of a greyish loaf, some white butter, and a thumb's-length of water in the jug. He changed his shirt, put on his coat and left for work. You could tell the time in the City by the smell. They'd already lit the furnace fires, but the smell was woodsmoke, not the foul, clinging taste of coal, so the kindling hadn't burnt through yet. That meant he was a little bit late, but not enough to feel guilty about. The pavement was sprinkled with black snow, yesterday's soot settled overnight and not yet trodden in. He stopped at the one-eyed man's stall and bought a barley cake and half a dry sausage. The streets were still quiet; the day-shift workers weren't expected to show up until the fires had had a chance to heat up, caking over the forges and bringing the water in the boilers to the simmer. The factory porter opened the wicket gate for him, and he stepped out of a narrow street into the cloister that led to the main shop.

It wasn't possible, of course; but Falier had always fancied that the roof of the main shop was higher than the sky outside. The City sky always seemed low and cramped, even in the summer heat; now, when the grey clouds crowded in, like stoppers on the bottles whose necks were the City's drop towers and chimneys, you could make yourself believe that if you stood on tiptoe you could reach up and touch it, though you'd want to wipe your hands on something afterwards. Inside, though, it was different. To see the factory roof you had to lean your head right back, your eye drawn upwards along the line of the great wrought-iron pillars, close, straight and tall as pine trees in a forest. Outside, light seeped down through the cloud and the constant blanket of smoke like blood through a bandage. Inside it came in sideways, through the regularly spaced series of tall, narrow windows, so that during the day there were practically no shadows anywhere, and at night the whole place filled up with an orange glow so thick it was practically a liquid. There was always an hour's break between shifts; enough time for the previous shift's fire to burn off the last of its fuel and die down without letting the brickwork and the tue-irons cool to the point where they'd start to crack. During that hour, the only activity was dragging out the clinker, sweeping up the drifts of scale flakes, oiling and greasing the bearings of the trip-hammers; quiet, careful work, acts of recovery, almost of tenderness. Men hauled buckets of water to fill up the slakes, refilled the coal bins, greased the bellows leathers, generally made good before the destructive effort of the new shift. It was the time of day when the factory was pleasantly warm instead of uncomfortably hot; warm as the bed you leave when you get up to go to work, assuming you didn't spend the night in a chair. The floor smelt of coal, oily water, wet rust and the unmistakable aroma shared by blood and freshly cut steel. On the toolroom side of the shop they were scrambling about on ladders, greasing the overhead shafts and dusting the long loops of drive belt with chalk, for grip. Two old men who'd been old as long as Falier could remember were walking slowly up and down the ranks of machines, filling the oilers from tall copper jugs. At the end of one row a sudden shower of orange sparks blossomed as someone trued up a grinding wheel, adding the scents of carborundum and burnt steel to the mixture. Falier had seen gardens, he'd even been in the grand formal garden in the inner courtyard of the Guildhall, but he'd never found them convincing. Somehow they'd always struck him as pointless attempts to copy the main shop, using trees and shrubs to represent wrought and cast iron.

The superintendent's office was on the eighth level of the galleries that encircled the main shop like the banks of seats in a theatre. Falier climbed the iron spiral staircase, pausing at each level to look down. With a practised eye you could take in the health of the factory at a glance from here, in mid-shift, when the men scurrying about below dwindled out of individuality into flowing shapes of movement. Between shifts, the factory looked like its own schematic, a reduction intended to convey the workings of the machine. Ziani Vaatzes had told him that once he'd been in here when it was completely empty, apart from himself; there had been some reason for it, a total closedown while everything cooled, maybe the only time in its history when it had been entirely still. As he paused on the seventh level, Falier tried to imagine what that must've been like; to be the only living soul in the factory, nothing moving, no sound at all.