‘You’ve been busy, then.’
Teoclito shrugged, awkwardly. ‘Like you said, it beats being in the army. Anyway, enough about that. You see any of the old crowd nowadays?’
Loredan shook his head. ‘Not many of us made it back,’ he said, ‘and we don’t have reunions. You didn’t miss much, at the end.’ He yawned. ‘Saying that, I did run into Cherson the other day, down by the city wharf. He’s running a brass foundry, doing quite well. Employs a lot of people.’
‘Never could stand the man myself.’
‘Nor me. Funny, isn’t it, the way bastards live for ever.’
Before his presumed death, Teoclito had been Loredan’s Company Commander. Every inch the hero, in a society that discouraged the type; first man into the engagement and last out. He seemed much shorter than Loredan remembered. He was almost completely bald, and there were scars across his crown. Loredan had taken over his command; to the best of his knowledge, they were the only two men alive out of that company.
Teoclito was looking at him intensely. Mostly, Loredan recognised, it was contempt.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They do, don’t they?’
They filled their cups again and sat quietly for a while. Loredan couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Anyway,’ Teoclito said at last, finishing his drink and standing up. ‘Can’t be too late, got to work tomorrow. Be seeing you.’
‘Clito.’ Loredan wished he hadn’t spoken; he was afraid that what he was about to say would be the wrong thing.
‘Yes?’
‘You… Are you all right for money? I mean-’
That look again. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I got a job. Go carefully, Bardas.’
‘You too.’
‘Oh, one more thing.’ Teoclito leant against the table, favouring his right leg.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m sure you had a good reason,’ he said, ‘for leaving me and not coming back. Just don’t ever try and tell me what it was.’
‘Take care, Clito.’
‘I always do.’ He walked away, his right foot dragging. His whole body had been twisted like a length of wire. It must have seemed a very long way from the high plains to Solamen, walking like that.
The lengths some people’ll go to just to stay alive.
Loredan left the rest of his wine and went back to his ‘island’. He was virtually sober, but that was all right. No more drinking, he told himself, as he lay down to sleep. Regular meals, exercise, practice in the Schools, perhaps even a new sword, and maybe he’d be in shape to beat Ziani Alvise. After all, it was just another fight, something he was supposed to be good at. It wasn’t as if he was being asked to do anything difficult, like walking home.
‘What are you staring at?’ demanded the engineer.
Temrai stepped backwards. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just looking.’
The engineer scowled, and spat into the sawdust. ‘Haven’t you got any work to do?’
‘I finished it. I’m waiting for the next batch of blanks. So I thought I’d just look around.’
The engineer muttered something and went back to what he was doing. He was working on the frame of a small trebuchet, the kind that threw a hundredweight stone. Using a chisel and a beech mallet, he was cutting dovetails in a thick twelve-foot-long plank; earlier, he and another man had sawn it out of a massive billet of seasoned ash, using a ten-foot saw.
‘Is that for the main frame?’ Temrai asked. The engineer looked up, surprised.
‘Left-hand A-frame,’ he replied. ‘Already done the right one. How come you know so much about engines?’
‘I’m interested,’ Temrai said. ‘I’ve been watching.’
The engineer, a man of about sixty-five with shaggy white hair on his chest and arms like a bear, nodded. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re the offcomer kid, the plainsman.’ His mouth twitched into a small grin. ‘Bet you ain’t seen anything like this up on the plains.’
‘Oh, no,’ Temrai said. ‘I think it’s fascinating, seeing all the different machines.’
This time the engineer actually laughed. ‘There ain’t much to these buggers,’ he said. ‘Trebuchet’s a very basic design; you just got a bloody great big heavy weight on one end and a sling to put the stone in on the other, and it pivots around a pin supported on two A-frames. So you hoist up the weight with a winch, load your stone and let go. The weight goes crashing down again, and the stone gets slung out. Piece of cake. Compared to some of the machines we make here, there’s nothing to it.’
‘Oh,’ Temrai said. ‘I thought they were quite good.’
The engineer shrugged. ‘Oh, they work all right. We got trebuchets’ll throw a four hundredweight stone three hundred an’ fifty yards, straight as a die. This here’s just a baby; got the same range but only takes a quarter of the load.’
Temrai nodded appreciatively, and the engineer was secretly pleased to see the light of enthusiasm in his eyes. All true engineers are enthusiasts; they value admiration and respect every bit as much as painters and sculptors do, and they know they deserve it even more. All a sculpture need do is look a certain way. A machine has to work.
‘How do you know how big to make it?’ Temrai asked.
The engineer laughed again, not unkindly. ‘That, my son, is a bloody good question. Some of it you can work out by figuring; there’s what we call formulas. The rest just comes by trial and error. You make one, you see if it works; if it doesn’t you make it again a different way, and you keep on over and over till you got one that does work. That’s what we call prototypes.’
‘Ah,’ Temrai said.
‘F’rinstance,’ the engineer went on, carefully marking out the rectangle he was about to cut with light taps of the chisel, ‘the Secretary of Ordnance comes to me and he says he wants ten light trebs to cover the angle of the sea wall just along from the Chain, where they’ve just put in them five new bastions. So he tells me what he wants these trebs to do and I go away and I have a think. Now, I know that we built a treb once that had a beam thirty-three foot long, with a counterweight of a hundred hundredweight, and we found it could chuck half a hundredweight a couple of hundred yards. Now that ain’t much for a treb, more like a kiddie’s toy, but it gives me somewhere to start. So I reckon, if I can sling fifty pounds two hundred yards with a hundred hundredweight off thirty-three, maybe if I want to sling a hundred pounds three hundred and fifty yards, I could start with maybe a forty-foot beam and fifteen hundred hundredweight. And then I think, hang on, a fifty-foot beam and two and a half hundred hundredweight’ll chuck three hundredweight two hundred an’ seventy-five yards, ’cos I made one that did. So I try a hundred hundredweight off forty foot of beam, and if that busts the beam, I know forty’s too long with a hundred, so next time I try thirty-six. But I’ve made the beam shorter now, so I gotta up the weight on the other end; so we up the counterweight to a hundred an’ seventy. Now if it breaks, I gotta make the beam stronger, and that throws out all the other measurements.’ He paused for breath. ‘Not a quick job,’ he said,‘making engines.’
‘It sounds really complicated,’ Temrai said. He sounded so downcast that the engineer smiled at him.
‘It is complicated,’ he said, ‘making things that work. Any bloody fool can make things that don’t work. No offence, son, but that’s what you foreigners do. You see a machine and you think, that’s a good idea, we’ll make one of them; but you never stop to think about how long it ought to be or what it ought to be made out of, and then it don’t work and you say the hell with that, alas, the gods are angry, and you pack it in. That’s the difference, see,’ he added, tapping his forehead. ‘Up here.’
‘I can see that,’ Temrai replied. ‘That’s what makes you all so very wise.’ He surveyed the various finished and half-finished parts of the engine standing against the wall in order or cradled on specially built jigs, and his lips moved as if he was counting under his breath. ‘And I suppose it’s not just the arm and the weight,’ he went on. ‘I suppose it’s important to get the frame the right size, too.’