‘You’re getting the idea. We might make an engineer of you yet.’ He patted the timber in front of him, which was secured by broad iron cramps to a substantial trestle. ‘I been thinking, and I reckon if I make the frame twelve by eight by twelve, I won’t be too far out; it’s not like I was trying to mount a sixty-foot beam with clearance for three an’ a half hundred. The more weight, see, the more clearance you need, so the taller the A-frame’s gotta be. But the more acute you make the angle, the likelier they are to bust under the strain, so you gotta beef them up, and then some prat from Ordnance comes along and tells you to lose twenty hundredweight off it or it’ll be too heavy for the tower they want it on.’ The engineer rolled his eyes dramatically. ‘See what I mean?’ he said.
‘I think so. What else do you make besides trebuchets?’
‘You name it,’ the engineer said proudly. ‘This year so far I’ve made catapults, oistoboles, onagers, scorpions, mangonels, all that sort of bloody stuff. Doing a nice simple treb’s a pleasant change, I can tell you.’
As he sat at his bench, carefully wiring hardened edges to a soft steel core, Temrai couldn’t help thinking of his uncle Tesarai; how once, many years ago, he’d managed to capture a Perimadeian artilleryman, and set about torturing him with tremendous ingenuity and enthusiasm in an attempt to wring from him the secrets of building war engines. The harder Tezarai tried the less he achieved, until the time came when the prisoner died with his secrets intact, leaving the clansmen with a deep sense of baffled respect. At this point Tezarai declared that it was plainly impossible for the city ever to be taken, since its people were prepared to face the ugliest forms of death rather than betray it. Whereupon Temrai, who was twelve at the time and only just old enough to be allowed to attend councils, tentatively suggested that they’d gone about it in the wrong way. Trying to extort information out of these people was obviously futile; wouldn’t it have been a good idea simply to have asked nicely? To which he’d added quickly (for fear of being sent straight to bed) that these people who were so puffed up with pride in their city that they preferred to die rather than let it down might very easily tell an enquirer everything he wanted to know, so long as he asked the questions in a way that allowed the Perimadeians an opportunity of showing off in front of ignorant savages.
And now, five years later, here he was; and it was proving even easier than he’d imagined. He now knew the dimensions and construction details of the siege tower, the long ladder, the scorpion, the gravity-operated ram and the trebuchet. He’d learnt the art of sapping and undermining walls simply by going to the library and reading a book. He’d been given a tour of the walls and watchtowers by a member of the guard he’d met in a tavern, and had sat drinking with him while he timed the intervals of the watch and counted the number of men on duty. His job in the arsenal meant that he knew more about the city’s stocks and production capacity of arrows than the guard commanders. There was even a book, which the librarian had promised to find for him, that described ten perfectly feasible ways of breaching the defences and storming the city; it had been a prescribed text at the military academy twenty years ago, and since then had been largely forgotten about. It was wonderful; like everything about the city, wonderful, unsettling and deeply sad.
He finished wiring up and put the assembly into the fire to heat up for brazing. He’d make a good job of it, never fear; the least he could do, in the circumstances, was make sure that they had a few decent swords to defend themselves with when the moment came.
Among the large crowd who paid their copper quarter and stood in line to see the Alvise-Loredan case were a tall, thin young man and an equally tall, rather more rounded girl. They were wearing matching cloaks of an unfashionable colour and cut-
(‘How was I supposed to know? The last time I was here was five years ago.’
‘And it didn’t occur to you that fashions might have changed?’
‘To be honest, no.’
‘Men!’) -and when they whispered together, their dialect, although more quaint than barbarous, was enough to make the people behind them in the queue nudge each other and wink. Islanders, they muttered to each other, and made a show of checking that their purses were still there.
‘I’m not sure I want to see this,’ the girl muttered as the ticket clerk took from her the little bone counter she’d been handed at the door. ‘Where on earth’s the fun in seeing two grown men killing each other?’
Her twin brother shook his head. ‘They probably won’t do that,’ he said. ‘Extremely difficult, for one thing. Much more likely that one’ll kill the other and that’ll be that.’
‘Don’t be obtuse,’ his sister replied. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. And I think it’s barbaric.’
Her brother shrugged. ‘I’m not defending it,’ he said, ‘it’s just something you ought to see if you ever hope to understand these pazze.’
‘Shh! They’ll hear you.’
‘Ah, but they don’t know what pazze means. Look, you want to join the firm and do business here, one thing you’ve got to get your head round is their paz ’ legal system. Which is,’ he added, ‘the finest in the world if anyone asks you, all right?’
The girl nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But I still don’t see-’
‘Shut up. Here’s the judge. Stand up when I do.’
‘Barbaric,’ the girl sniffed.
Three days in the Triple City had cut a huge swathe through the fine romantic notions that had filled her head when the white crown of Perimadeia had poked up above the sealine. The smell still bothered her, and she definitely didn’t hold with the streets. It was one of the crazy contradictions that made up this place; every market stall seemed to offer ever more astoundingly lovely clothes and fabrics, with colours and textures beyond the dreams of the Island, but if you wore them in the street they’d be ruined inside five minutes. The buildings, even in the lower city, were as tall and majestic as the Prince’s own lodgings back home, but the streets outside were squelchy with mud and muck, the roadways rutted and crowded with carts and wagons that splashed the passers-by with foul water and tried to run them down even if they stayed inside the gutter-lines. Everyone she saw in the streets looked prosperous and well-dressed, but she noticed that her brother wore his sword openly on his belt all the time and avoided doorways and dark alleys. It was a fine place to visit, she’d decided, but you wouldn’t want to live here.
‘There’s the advocates, look,’ her brother hissed, jabbing with the knuckle of one finger-
(And that was another thing; at home it was rude to point; but here, everyone did it. She’d spent the first day and a half with her face permanently red with embarrassment.)
‘That’s the plaintiff’s man, and that’s the defence,’ her brother continued. ‘I think the famous one’s the plaintiff.’
‘I shan’t look. You’ll have to tell me when it’s over.’
‘Please yourself.’ He leant back, trying to find a comfortable place on the stone bench, and looked around to see if he could spot anybody he recognised.
It hadn’t been his idea bringing Vetriz on this trip; but now she was here and had proved not too much of a liability, he had changed his mind. True, it made the evenings rather dull; but in consequence he was saving money hand over fist, in spite of having Vetriz’s expenses to pay, so that was all right. It was also undeniable that she was good for business. Back home a pretty face got you precisely nowhere, but for all their vaunted canniness the Perimadeians could be snared by a smile and a flash of ankle as easily as hungry pigeons with grain in winter. Not a tactic he’d ever consider using at home; there was a word for men who didn’t immediately cut the throats of strangers who ogled their sisters, and it wasn’t very polite. Different here, of course; and fairly harmless too, provided Vetriz didn’t find herself getting used to it…