“Sir,” he said, lifting the pickaxe. At least with nobody around him he could get a proper swing at the obstruction. He turned back and heaved the pick at a spot to the side of where the spade had baulked, briefly imagining that he was swinging it at the back of the young captain’s head. He hauled the pick out, twisted it to present the flat blade rather than the spike towards the face, found a slightly different position and swung hard again.
You developed a feel for what was going on at the end of a shovel or a pick, you started to gain an insight into the just-hidden depths in front of you, after a while. There was another jarring strike to add to all the others that had run up through his hands into his arms and back over the year he’d been down here, but he sensed the slightly flattened blade make a sort of double strike inside the face, sliding between two rocks, or into a cleft in a single more massive rock. That felt hollow, he thought, but dismissed the idea.
He had leverage now, a degree of purchase. He strained at the worn-smooth handle of the pick. Something grated inside the face and the weak light from his helmet lamp showed a stretch of dirt face as long as his forearm and tall as his head hinging out towards him. Dirt and pebbles slumped about his knees. What fell out of the hole was a piece of dressed stonework, and beyond was a rectangular hole and a damp darkness, a dirt-free inky absence from which a thin cold wind issued, smelling of old, cold stone.
The great castle, the besieged fortress, stood over the broad plain on a carpet of ground-hugging mist, like something unreal.
Vatueil remembered his dreams. In his dreams the castle truly was not real, or not there, or genuinely did float above the plain, by magic or some technology unknown to him, and so they burrowed on for ever, never finding its base, tunnelling on without cease through the killing muggy warmth and sweat-mist of their own exhalations in an eternal agony of purposeless striving. He had never mentioned these dreams to anybody, unsure who amongst his comrades he could really trust and judging that if word of these nightmares got back to his superiors they might be deemed treacherous, implying that their labours were pointless, doomed to failure.
The castle sat on a spur of rock, an island of stone jutting above the flood plain of the great meandering river. The castle itself was formidable enough; the cliffs that surrounded it made it close to impregnable. Still, it had to be taken, they’d been told. After nearly a year of trying to starve the garrison into surrender, it had been judged, two years or more ago, that the only way to take the stronghold was to get a great siege engine close in to the rocky outcrop. Enormous machines had been constructed of wood and metal and manoeuvred towards the castle on a specially built road. The machines could hurl rocks or fizzing metal bombs the weight of ten men many hundreds of strides across the plain, but there was a problem: to get them close enough to the castle meant coming within range of the fortress’s own great war machine, a giant trebuchet mounted on the single massive circular tower dominating the citadel.
With its own range increased by virtue of its elevation, the castle’s engine dominated the plain for nearly two thousand strides about the base of the rock; all attempts to move siege engines to within range had been met with a hail of rocks from the fortress’s trebuchet, resulting in smashed machines and dead men. The engineers had been forced to concede that constructing a machine of their own powerful enough to remain out of range of the castle’s war engine while still being able to hit the fortress was probably impossible.
So they would tunnel to near the castle rock, open a pit and construct a small but powerful siege engine there under the noses of the castle’s garrison, and, supposedly, under the angle at which the castle’s trebuchet could fire. There were rumours that this absurd machine would be a sort of self-firing bomb device, some sort of explosive contraption that would throw itself into the air, up past the cliff and against the castle walls, detonating there. Nobody really believed these rumours, though the slightly more plausible idea of constructing a sufficiently powerful wooden catapult or trebuchet in a pit excavated at the end of a tunnel seemed just as fanciful and idiotic.
Perhaps they were expected to tunnel up inside the castle rock when they got to it, burrowing up through solid stone, or maybe they were meant to place a gigantic bomb against the base of the rock; these seemed no less absurd and pointless as tactics. Maybe the high command, immeasurably distant from this far (and, if rumour was to believed, increasingly irrelevant) front, had been misinformed regarding the nature of the castle’s foundations, and – thinking that the fortress’s walls rested on the plain itself – had ordered the mining as a matter of course, imagining that the walls could be sapped conventionally, and nobody nearer to the reality of the situation had thought, or dared, to tell them that this was impossible. But then who knew how the high commanders thought?