Colours in the Steel (30 page)

By leaning the two A-frames together and tying them top and bottom, they made a firm base for the crane. One of the poles was then hauled up and tied in to act as the lever, and there was no shortage of willing helpers when Temrai called for volunteers to work the thing. He himself stood on the engine frame and guided the tenon carefully into the mortice; it went nearly halfway in before it stuck.

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘All right, lift. That’ll do. Hold it steady, for pity’s sake.’ He knelt down, his head directly under the dangling upright, and brushed soot inside the mortice, so that when the tenon went in again the soot would mark the places where it was sticking. ‘All right, let’s try that again. Down - hold it. Right, out again, and hold it there.’ He turned and faced the leader of the crane gang. ‘Just keep it steady like that while we trim this tenon back a bit. We’ll be as quick as we can.’

At the fourth attempt the tenon went down all the way. Kossanai jumped forward with an augur and brace to bore the holes for the bolts, while the crane gang continued to hold the weight of the upright on their ropes. Temrai had chosen the right man for the job; Kossanai worked quickly but carefully, apparently not too bothered by all the fuss and excitement. It took him half an hour to drill the two holes, by which time the joyous enthusiasm of the crane gang had evaporated rather.

‘Let’s get the bolts in,’ Temrai said, grabbing the hammer and tapping them home himself. ‘Thank the gods for that, the damn things fit. Pasadai, get the cotter pins in those bolts so we can slacken off the crane.’

And so on; after the uprights, they fitted the two bracing struts that supported them, and then the thickly padded crossbar at the top which joined them together and took the impact of the catapult arm itself. By this stage the holiday atmosphere had ebbed away and been replaced by a tense, impatient excitement, as the machine slowly and incredibly began to look like the sketch Temrai had traced in the mud a week before. Now at last the clanspeople were beginning to understand; there in front of them was something that looked real, something that would actually work and which they’d built themselves. Temrai fancied he could hear the mood of the clan changing; it was like a child growing up, terribly fast. He wasn’t quite sure he liked it.

‘Good work,’ he said as the joiners stood back from the completed frame. ‘Now let’s get the metal fixings and the ropes in.’

This stage he supervised personally, since even now he was the only man in the clan who really understood how it all worked. He’d made the two ratchet assemblies himself; one for tensioning the rope, the other for locking the windlass roller so that it could be wound back in stages. There were no problems with the fit; he made them all go together more by sheer effort of will than anything else, but go together they did. While he was busy with the tensioning ratchet, Kossanai’s men brought up the catapult arm -
it still looks just like a bloody great big spoon
, Temrai admitted to himself - and held it in place until Temrai had threaded in the ropes. As soon as he gave the word, another team fitted levers into the slots in the tensioners and began the slow job of winding up the rope.

Those ropes are going to break, I know it
. But they didn’t; nor did the ratchet mechanism or the tensioner axles, or any of the parts Temrai had shaken his head dubiously over as he dunked them in the water to quench. At last, the tensioner crews gave up their attempt to coax the winders round one more click; the levers were taken out, and someone roped up the arm to the windlass.

It was finished. All that was left was to wind it back, put a stone in the bowl of the spoon and loose the slip.

Temrai stood up. He was exhausted, filthy with mud and sawdust, bleeding from several small cuts and two sets of skinned knuckles. More than anything, he wanted not to have to give the order to loose the slip. Everybody was looking at him.

If I do this, nothing’ll ever be the same again
.

‘All right,’ he called out. ‘Let her go.’

The slip operator, someone Temrai knew by sight but not by name, tugged sharply on the rope in his hand, drawing a loop off the end of the carefully shaped hook that connected the windlass rope to the arm. The enormous wooden spoon shot forward, smacking against the felt padding wrapped round the top crossbar with a noise like a giant mother slapping a giant child. The whole engine hopped six inches in the air and landed again like a cat.

And the stone flew.

Temrai watched it rise, slow down, stop and fall, gathering pace as it came down. It didn’t fall where he’d expected; it was well over to the right and a good ten yards further out, and when it landed, he could feel the impact through the soles of his feet. It pitched on a small rocky outcrop, made a cracking noise that echoed off the hills, bounced and landed in the river with a splash and a dramatic curtain of spray.

There was dead silence. After a moment or so, Kossanai’s people began swarming all over the machine, peering and checking, telling each other with joyous disbelief that this, that and the other was still in one piece, that this bolt hadn’t bent and that dowel hadn’t snapped; that it worked, gods damn it, the bloody thing actually worked!

They were the only ones moving or speaking; the rest of the gathering were staring in silence, estimating in their minds the weight of the stone and the distance it had travelled, imagining the force of the impact, what it could do. Temrai could hear what they were thinking:
you want to be careful with that thing, it could do someone an injury
.

Well, yes. That was the point, wasn’t it? Or hadn’t you realised?

With an effort, Temrai snapped himself out of the communal trance and went over to the machine. The clan watched him step by step; it was as if standing near it was a political act, a statement of a new and rather dreadful policy. All at once he wanted to say he was sorry and shout at them for being wet and woolly-minded; he wanted to order them to break the machine up as quickly as possible, but he’d have attacked anybody who laid a hostile finger on it. He didn’t know what to think. Above all, he was afraid.

Slowly, he looked round until he found Kossanai, who was tapping a wedge carefully into place with a beech mallet. ‘Any damage?’ he asked.

‘No,’ the older man replied. ‘Apart from a few wedges and pins that moved a bit, she’s as sound as a bell. We did it, Temrai. Isn’t that something?’

Temrai smiled, reached out a hand and patted the catapult arm as if it was a favourite horse. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said. ‘Now all we’ve got to do is make up another three hundred of these beauties and we might just be in business. Come on,’ he added, raising his voice so that everyone could hear, ‘don’t just stand there hugging yourselves, we’ve got work to do.’

 

 

Early one morning a man walked across the Drovers’ Bridge into the city, leading a string of donkeys heavily laden with dried figs. He was tired and fed up, having lost a shoe while taking a short cut through a bog to avoid a tollbridge. His feet hurt, his detour had added to his journey instead of making it shorter, and although he had indeed avoided the tollbridge, he’d had to spend the night in a squalid and extortionately expensive inn, with the result that he’d spent twice as much as he’d saved. More than anything in the world, he wanted a stiff drink and a nice hot bath.

For the latter, he’d come to the right place. There were no fewer than seven public baths in the city to choose between, all of them within easy limping distance of the bridge. Having left his donkeys with a friend, therefore, he headed straight for the nearest one, paid his copper half plus another half for a jug of cheap red wine, and spent the rest of the morning wallowing in magnificent luxury.

The bath left him feeling relaxed and rejuvenated, but also rather ashamed of the scraggy state of his hair and beard. Before going to the market to collect his donkeys and set up his stall, therefore, he stopped off at a small barber’s shop where there happened to be an empty chair just when he was passing the door. He flopped into the chair, put his feet up on the footstool and urged the barber to do the best he could.

What with the wine and the warm bath, he was feeling benign and at ease with everything around him, and it so happened that he was the sort of man who talks when he’s happy. This was another reason for having a shave and a haircut, because its universally known that barbers, by the sacred code of their ancient and venerable craft, are obliged to listen.

He started off with, ‘Nice day,’ expanded that into a brief account of his journey, enlarged on that so as to make it a detailed account of his journey, with special reference to the predatory nature of bogs and the iniquitous cost of tollgates and inns, digressed at length on the subject of his life, times and philosophy of business, spoke for four minutes with scarcely a pause for breath about his wife’s nephew (who she’d forced him to take on as an assistant, and who was no more use than a butter kettle), and was just commiserating with the city folk on the latest problems they were having with the plainspeople, when the barber stopped him.

‘Problems?’ said the barber. ‘I hadn’t heard about any problems.’

The fig merchant raised an eyebrow. ‘You know, the things they’re up to upriver. All those things they’re building.’

‘What things?’

‘You mean to say you hadn’t heard?’ At once the fig merchant embarked on a colourful description of what he’d seen as he passed along on the opposite bank of the river; huge stockpiles of timber, the river jammed almost solid with rafts, enormous saw-pits, all sorts of funny-looking machines with people running around shouting and ordering each other about. And, he added, all them catapults.

‘What catapults?’

The
catapults, of course; the ones the plainspeople were making at this ford he’d gone past. Well, when he said making, what it looked like they were doing was making them, putting them together, testing them - bloody great big rocks they were chucking about, like a lot of kids with snowballs - and then taking them to bits again and packing the bits onto wagons. Surely, he insisted, the barber had heard about the catapults.

The barber asked him if he was sure. The fig merchant replied, sure he was sure. Seen it with his own eyes, hadn’t he? The barber asked to be told again. The fig merchant told him again.

‘Oh, shit,’ the barber said, and immediately sprinted away, still holding his razor and leaving the fig merchant sitting in his chair with half a beard and a towel round his neck.

The reason why the barber took the news so much to heart was that as a young man, before he was old enough to know better, he’d spent eighteen months on the plains as one of Maxen’s cavalry army before getting in the way of a clansman’s arrow and being left for dead. It had taken him two years to get home, and even all these years later it wasn’t often he slept without dreaming about it.

When he burst into the market waving a razor and yelling, ‘The savages are coming, the savages are coming!’ the city people drew the obvious conclusion, knocked him down, took away his razor and threw him in a coalshed to sleep it off; one kind soul even had the presence of mind to relieve him of his purse in case he cut himself on the sharp edges of the coins while thrashing about in his drunken rage. It was only two or three hours later, when the owner of the coalshed opened it up to get some coal, that the barber was able to escape and make his way, rather more sedately this time, to the nearest guard post.

Fortunately the guard sergeant knew him and was prepared to listen to what he had to say; which was how the first news of Temrai’s preparations reached the city of Perimadeia, fourteen weeks after he had left the city and embarked on his life’s work.

The sergeant, like most of the guard, was a part-timer, a soldier one day in ten and an innkeeper the rest of the time. When he’d finished making his report - a long business; he had to keep repeating his report to an apparently endless succession of officers of one sort or another, all of whom then insisted on hearing exactly the same thing from the poor terrified barber - it was well past the end of his duty shift, and high time he was back in his tavern, where his wife and daughter would be busy with the evening rush. Pausing only to dump his gear in the guard house he scurried home, quickly tied on his apron and started drawing off jugs of cider.

Once the rush had subsided a little, however, and he’d had time to catch his breath and help himself to a couple of hard-earned drinks, he lost no further time in making known the extremely rich gobbet of news he’d been fortunate enough to come across. This time, with the news coming from a highly respected member of the community instead of a drunken barber, people listened. Then, having listened, they panicked.

There seems to be a perverse law of nature that the larger the city, the quicker a rumour spreads among its population. The sergeant’s customers, running home to make sure their houses were still there and weren’t being looted by fur-clad savages, shouted the news to any acquaintances they happened to meet. Since it was about the time of day when the citizens were accustomed to take an after-dinner stroll round their own particular square with their wives and families, it wasn’t long before the streets and courtyards were full of people running wildly in all directions, each one in turn shouting the news to anybody who might not have heard it yet. Meanwhile, the original disseminators of the news, having reassured themselves that their homes were unburnt and their possessions and loved ones still more or less intact, started streaming back in the opposite direction on their way uptown to find a government building to stand in front of and demand that Something Be Done.