Nennius smiled. "Get Vaatzes on it," he said.
"I might just do that. Or at any rate his sidekick, the creepy bastard. He'll do anything for anybody, that one." Valens closed his eyes. It'd be wonderful to get some rest, at some point. "Thinking about it," he said, "I guess we ought to make something out of this. Tell you what: I want you to pass the word around-usual channels, you know what I mean; let them think we're putting a brave face on it, but actually this raid was successful. Mission accomplished. It wasn't just a flour store they torched, it was the main engine shed. All the really important production machinery wrecked beyond hope of repair. Six months' work gone up in smoke, right back to square one. I think I'd like the Mezentines to believe that."
"But you told the boy the truth."
"Which means the Mezentines will automatically believe the opposite, especially if we help them out a little. You might want to get a couple of carts loaded up with scrap iron, take them out somewhere they can see you and dump them in a bog or something. Give them a cavalry escort, to make sure they take notice. They'll think we're chucking out the ruined machines." He frowned. "That's assuming their scouts are bright enough to take the hint. But it can't do any harm. I'm sure Psellus would love to believe it's true. I'm serious about the chair, by the way. This useless article's ruining my back."
Nennius left. Valens stood up, whimpered at the stab of cramp, and lay down on his bed. He still had a great deal of work to do, but he absolved himself with the excuse that he was too tired to do it properly. Instead, he reached out and tugged the latest scouts' report from the bottom of the pile of documents heaped up on a stool beside the bedstead. He opened it and began to read, though he practically knew it by heart already.
The scouts were puzzled. He knew the men who'd made this report; conscientious but unimaginative. They reported that the Mezentines were apparently getting ready to dig holes in the plain in front of the City. They'd gone to enormous lengths to organise work details, mobilising every able-bodied citizen who wasn't actively engaged in essential war work. The ordnance factory had assigned one of its four volume production lines, and a large amount of hard-to-come-by blade-quality hardening steel, to making shovels. Lines had been surveyed and marked out (see sketch). Presumably all this effort was to do with additional fortifications, but the stonemasons were being issued shovels along with everybody else, and there hadn't been any recent orders sent out to the quarries.
Valens took another look at the sketch. When he was a boy, there had been these puzzles; sheets of thin copper foil pierced with tiny holes. You laid them on a sheet of paper and stuck a pin through each hole in turn. Then you took a charcoal stick, and you had to find a way of joining the pricked dots on the paper to make a picture: a castle, or a horseman, or a waterwheel. He'd never thought much of the puzzles. They were too easy.
The lines so meticulously sketched by the scouts could mean only one thing. He'd seen them before; in a book in his father's library, one of a job lot he'd bought-histories and ordinances of the famous wars, lives of the great commanders, soldiers' mirrors, didactic dialogues between A Master and Some Students concerning the various branches of the military sciences. Junk, most of them. He particularly treasured the explanation offered in one gloriously illustrated volume of why feathers on arrows and wooden fins on crossbow bolts make them fly straighter. The projections catch the air, making the missile spin. The spinning motion unseats the malignant spirits of inaccuracy who love to perch on arrows and make them fly wide of the mark. The tiny demons fall to the ground, allowing the arrow to fly unhindered towards the mark. There was even a picture, of weensy blue pointy-eared fiends scrabbling air as they fell, their lips curled in baffled fury. Obvious, really, when you thought about it.
Almost as ludicrous (he'd always thought) was the catapult book. It had been a particular favourite when he was ten years old, because it had lots of drawings of funny-looking machines. Some of them looked like carts with enormous spoons sprouting out of them, others reminded him of giant wheeled violins, complete with bows; there were things like cheese-presses with crossbows wedged between the weights, and a sort of bent-back sapling arrangement that flicked a giant arrow off a pole. Also, there were the weird shapes. Stars, crinkly wheels, zigzags, knobbly things like overgrown cogs. When curiosity drove him to read the accompanying text, he found that these were supposed to be ground plans of fortified cities. That was what made him classify the book along with the treatise on arrow-riding pixies, because nobody would go to the bother and ruinous expense of building a city like that. All those spikes and wedges and sticking-out bits, and hardly any room left in the middle where people could live. Some old fool with too much time on his hands, he'd decided. And now, here those shapes were again, unmistakable as footprints.
(The book was, of course, still on the shelf in the library of the ducal palace at Civitas Vadanis. He'd sent riders to find it and bring it back. In the meantime, he'd have to make do with what little he could remember.)
He considered his enemy, Lucao Psellus. Impossible that anybody, let alone the newly promoted clerk, could have reinvented those exact shapes from first principles. It followed, therefore, that Psellus had his own copy of the book, and enough sense (unlike the young Duke Valens) to appreciate the value of what he was looking at.
There was a bright side, though. As far as he could remember, the writer had devoted a whole chapter to demonstrating (with really impressive mathematical formulae that Valens hadn't even bothered to try and understand) that, in the absence of grossly disproportionate forces and various other material factors, an attacker who followed the book's precepts was likely to beat a defender following the same precepts six times out of ten. The list of possible vitiating factors was long and complicated, and Valens could only remember three of them (outbreak of plague among besiegers/defenders; failure of ammunition supply for one side's artillery; treachery). It'd be interesting to read the full list again, and see how many of them applied in this case.
Sandcastles, he thought; another game I used to play, in the big pit where the foundry workers dug out the fine white sand they used for filling mould-boxes.
Sending for the book was all very well, but he was realistic enough to know that it wouldn't be much use to him unless he also had someone who could understand it. For that reason, he'd also sent for Ziani Vaatzes. Both of them should arrive within the next two or three days, and then…
Valens growled, rolled off the bed and sat on the uncomfortable chair. And then, he'd have no excuse not to get started. The siege of Mezentia; it sounded like the title of a play. A tragedy in three acts, complete with hero, villain, love interest, hero's tragic flaw, betrayal, confusion and finally lots of death. He picked up a report, glanced at it; his father had enjoyed a good play, though he tended to talk to people during what he considered were the boring bits. He liked the fencing, he said, and the speeches before the battles, and the deaths, which were inventive, gripping and so much better than the real thing. Also, he'd been told once that a great duke should be a patron of the arts. It gave an impression of class, and the writers always found a way of getting your name in somewhere. When he'd died, Valens had paid off the Duke's Men, cancelled all outstanding commissions and made it known there weren't going to be any more.
He'd given no explanation for his decision, and apart from the actors themselves, nobody seemed to have minded or even noticed. There had been a very good reason at the time, which had since slipped his mind. Of course, nothing spoiled a good play as much as a bad performance of it.