Andris wondered briefly whether he could possibly get away with a flat lie, but decided that it was best not to weave too tangled a web of deceits, even though he knew that even a half-honest answer would probably bring forth more laughter.
"My primary training is in the Arts Geographical," he said uncomfortably. He had, indeed, been intensively educated in that subject, although his primary training- and almost all his actual experience- had been in the Arts Martial, which he thought it best not to admit in the present circumstances.
Unfortunately, the Arts Geographical were held in very low esteem in these parts, because the maps which had been drummed into his memory with such great care were held by every man who sailed the Slithery Sea or knew its shores to be utterly unreliable.
"You must understand, sir," he was quick to add, 'that insofar as they relate to the nations of the far north, the Arts Geographical are far more congruent with reality than they seem to be in these parts. "
"If that's the case," the magistrate said, reverting to his silkily menacing tone, 'it's surprising that you've strayed so far from the lands where your education is of use to you. I ask again- how did you intend to make your living here? And how do you propose to pay the debt that you now owe His Royal Highness King Belin of Xandria? "
"It's not so very surprising, sir," Andris said, fighting to keep calm even though he knew this was a losing battle. He tried desperately to think of a story which might be believable.
"When the maps which trading nations know are inadequate to their purposes, their noblemen become interested in making new and better maps- and who else but a mapmaker could they send forth to do such work? In Ferentina there's considerable curiosity about 26
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the Slithery Sea, the Thousand Islands and
legendary Xandria. I've known the name of Xandria since infancy, sir, and have known too that the lore I learned had misplaced it. I came here in the hope that my kinsman Theo Zabio might help me to amend my faulty lore, so that I could return to Ferentina with news which might be to the benefit of our merchants- and of yours. I beg you to let me do that work." The magistrate's face had become stony. He was not in the least interested in the follies of foreign map makers
"Have you any money, other than that which was found on your person?" he asked- displaying, Andris bitterly observed, the skill which men of justice the world over had for getting to the true heart of a matter. "None,"
he admitted, while his sinking heart attained the utmost depths of its private abyss.
"My coin amounts to three crowns, I believe- but I have my colours and brushes in my pack at the inn, and some other goods . . ."
"He had but two crowns and a quarter," the clerk interrupted dutifully.
Andris shook his head angrily, bur knew that it was useless to protest.
Corrosion allowances were generous around the shores of Slithery Sea, where even gold could not be expected to last more than a few years unless a man had a very cunning purse.
"The fine for incapacitating a guardsman," the magistrate said, 'is eight hundred crowns. The lesser charges bring the sum to nine hundred and ninety.
The interest for delayed payment is one per cent per ten day
"But I didn't do it," Andris said doggedly.
"Your guilt has already been determined," the magistrate told him unceremoniously.
"Given that your education is worthless, I think it best if you pay off the debt under the supervision of the king's stone masons
"I'm trained in the Arts Martial too!" Andris said swiftly- but the magistrate only favoured him with a grim smile, as if he had contradicted yet again his earlier claims to have been uninvolved in the brawl.
Anxious to find a more profitable course of action, Andris said: "Don't I have any right of appeal? Is there no way I can delay matters until you can hear the guardsman's testimony?" ^7
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The magistrate sighed.
"If you decide to go to prison^' he said, 'one crown will be added to your debt for every day you spend there."
"You mean it costs money to go to jail in Xandria?" said Andris, in genuine astonishment.
The magi state smile broadened, albeit in a somewhat lack lustre fashion.
"Xandria," he said unctuously, 'has been a civilised nation for a hundred thousand years. That is why its name is known even to the superstitious geographers of Ferentina. Its jails are comfortable, its prisoners well-fed-for which reason we must discourage our prisoners from staying there too long when they could be much more usefully employed in repairing the walls which secure Xandria's place as the greatest nation in the world. The rate of pay for indentured stone workers is three crowns a day, but the interest payable on your fine will initially take up a third of that, once you actually start.
Would you like me to summon a mathematician to work out the exact time of your service? "
Andris thought of himself as a fair arithmetician, by laymen's standards, and felt in no need of a number-wise magician to tell him that the magistrate was talking in terms of four hundred days and more.
"You call this civilised?" he said, allowing his anger to show because he could no longer hold it in check.
"No wonder no one from Ferentina ever came here before- or ever went back to tell their story, if they did. Do I have the right of appeal or do I not?"
"Your only right of appeal is the right to a petition for a royal pardon,"
the magistrate said, in an ominously self-satisfied fashion, 'and the administrative charge levied on a failed royal petition is a hundred crowns.
I must warn you, too, that the likelihood of your petition being heard within the next few ten days is slight. The king is a very busy man. "
"Any man who keeps more than thirty wives would be!" Andris snapped unwisely he judged when he saw the reaction of the clerk. The magistrate, no longer smiling in any fashion at all, said: "I'm bound to point out that you have just committed a further offence, for which I ought to fine you another ten crowns. Given that you're a foreigner and clearly, a barbarian- I shall overlook the 28
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matter this time, but I urge you to show proper respect in future.
Now, do you wish to go to jail in order to wait until a petition can be heard, or will you start your term of indentured labour immediately? It would be much better for you, in the long run, were you to take the latter option. "
Andris had not the slightest desire to rush into a career as a stone worker labourer, and he was in no mood to make complicated calculations as to the extra time he would have to spend on the wall in exchange for a few ten days in prison.
"I'll go to jail," he said obstinately.
"I want to petition for that royal pardon- and I want the captain here to ask his man what he thinks about the question of who hit him."
"We already know the answer to that," the magistrate said icily.
"He couldn't see, because he was struck from behind, in a cowardly fashion.
There's no possibility whatsoever of my verdict being overturned- and I must point out that the king has the right to increase your fine as well as imposing further administrative charges. At this rate, you'll be working on the wall for life."
"I only want justice," said Andris sourly, knowing even as he said it that his chances of ever receiving it or anything like it- were vanishingly small.
I'm as good as dead, he thought. Dead and buried before turning thirteen-and for what? A moment's pity for a blind story-teller who hadn't anything more interesting to relate than fake sequels to the oldest and rottenest myths in the world. This is what seeing the world amounts to: a slow descent into misery and degradati
on, to end as a virtual slave two thousand kirns from home.
What a rotting city! What a rotting life!
"Take him away," said the magistrate.
The silent guardsman took him by the arm. Andris had no alternative but to shuffle off, dragging his absurdly corroded chains behind him.
As he paused by the door he looked back at the novice captain, who had the grace to blush slightly. Whether the blush was in sympathy for the injustice of the court's treatment of an innocent man or resentment of the angry stare with which the condemned man sought to wither him Andris didn't care to speculate.
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f70V don't suppose," Jacom Cerri said to Sergeant Purkin, I as they threaded their way through the crowded street beneath the fiery afternoon sun, 'that the amber might have been telling the truth?"
"Naw," said Purkin, in that infuriatingly worldly wise way he had.
"All dark landers are liars. Don't even know the meaning of the word truth.
Can't believe a word they say, sir take my word for it."
Jacom hated the way that the old soldier had of patron ising him, always contriving to imply that he was a country-born babe in arms who desperately needed to be educated in the ways of the city and of the world. It wouldn't have been so bad had Jacom been sufficiently confident that it wasn't so, but the few short ten days he had been in the city had made him keenly aware of the sheltered nature of his upbringing. (' When his father had bought him a commission in the king's guard he had fondly imagined that he would spend most of his time about the court, looking handsome' and being gallant.
Nobody had told him that the harbour patrol fell into the guard's jurisdiction rather than that of the constabulary or the militia, or that he would have to exert himself in such undesirable occupations as breaking up tavern brawls. The huge amber had been his very first arrest, and the mere fact of it made him feel uncomfortable and somehow dirty. The possibility that he had got it wrong and might be found out was too horrible to bear. He desperately wanted to prove himself to his father, to his commanding officer, to the king. . . but most of all, at least for the moment, to Sergeant Purkin and the men in his command.
"But he isn't a dark lander is he?" Jacom persisted.
"He really is from the far north, and he really wasn't with the dark landers who actually started the fight."
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Purkin spat in the gutter, narrowly missing a pair of urchins who were intent on some game involving a reel of cotton, a handful of matches and a giant shield bug They didn't bother to look up.
"Came in on a ship all right," he admitted.
"Darklanders aren't worth a bucket o' shit aboard ship, so he probably does come from tother side o' the Slithery Sea. So what? Still a barbarian, and a fool.
Should've shut up and gone to the wall right away. Might have been free again in a year or so. Damned now. Probably never get off. His own stupid fault. "
"But there were other men on that stairway, weren't there?" Jacom said.
"I saw them." He had, in fact, arrived just in time to see a pair of heels disappearing, but he felt that it was necessary to remind Purkin that he had been in the inn while the affray was still in full flow. He didn't want anyone thinking that he had hung back while his men did all the work, because he hadn't.
"Yeah," Purkin agreed.
"Locals knew what a good idea it'd be to be out o' the way before we started kicking arses. Checuti's men, I think. Thieves and tricksters. I know that big bastard the amber tried to fix the blame on- Burdam Thrid, his name is.
End up on the wall himself one day, that's for sure. Only hope it's some other poor sucker has to arrest him."
"Could it have been him who hit Hernman, I mean?"
"Aw, I don't know," the sergeant complained.
"Who cares?" It seemed to Jacom that, in the sergeant's eyes, the sin of caring was at least as bad as any others he might have committed. He wasn't sure that the sergeant was right to think so, but he didn't want to to be out of step with the whole citadel guard. It was important to fit in if he were going to build a proper career.
While they walked the last hundred mets to the hospital he directed his attention to other matters, scanning the street for signs of evil doing He was off duty, but his commanding officer had gone to great pains to explain to him that while he was in the king's uniform he was the king's representative, bound to look after the king's interests.
The street was filled with hawkers selling a bewildering variety of fruits, vegetables and loaves of bread from carts and baskets.
Competition seemed to be fierce it appeared to be a buyers' market, in which it was impossible for anyone to make a sale without an exhaustive session of haggling.
Jacom had never been able to see the point of the kind of long drawn-out haggling which wasted ten or fifteen minutes in making the most trivial purchases, but it seemed to be an immensely important point of pride among Xandrians never to pay a quarter-crown too much for a day's bread. He supposed that this must be what his father had been talking about in all those long lectures about efficient trade being the true basis of imperial grandeur. Personally, he had always thought of imperial grandeur in terms of armies or, to be strictly honest, in terms of flags, military uniforms, arms and armour- but his own brand-new uniform and badges of rank seemed to carry little enough weight when it came to pushing through a crowd of serious file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (35 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:19 AM]
shoppers. He was glad when they finally arrived at their destination.
The hospital was oppressively clean. The walls were whitewashed every week and the floors were scrubbed every day. The constant battle that was waged about Xandria's mighty walls, in the interest of keeping them strong and impenetrable, seemed to be a cursory affair compared with the constant battle that was waged within the city's hospitals.
To Jacom Cerri, who was new to the rituals of military discipline and the ways in whicH they were employed to mech anise men's reflexes, the manner in which the orderlies worked seemed remarkable in its efficiency-anjd also in its pointlessness. He was a sceptical man, utterly uninterested in and unimpressed by all talk of the occult and the invisible. He had not an atom of faith in the 'bacteria' which were said to infest all walls arid all floors not to mention the very air itself- and which must be kept at bay at all costs in places where wounded; men were laid to rest. He thought of hygiene as a matter of politeness, and felt that it was quite unnecessary to pretend that mere cleanliness was a matter of life and death.
The true purpose of all this scrubbing down with unpleasantly sharp-smelling substances, he thought, as he glanced into the wards past which he and Purkin tramped, must he symbolic. The real idea must surely be to provide a kind of allegorical example to the patients, urging them to marshal all their inner resources to the fight against debilitation. The real medicine is in the mind, isn't that what they say?
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enough on
Herriman, who was looking surprisingly cheerful considering that the last time Jacom had seen him he had been unable to stay conscious for more than a few minutes at a time, and had spent most of those lost in delirium. The guardsman seemed genuinely pleased to see his sergeant and his commanding officer, and he saluted them both with some verve, although the plaster cast on his leg inhibited the initial movement of his hand and the eventual impact of his rigid fingers on his bandaged head brought a pained expression to his face.
Purkin's response was automatic but deliberately slovenly. Jacom's was much neater. An officer had to be able to salute
properly, or what would people think?
"I'll be back on my feet in two ten days they say," Herriman told them, in response to Jacom's polite enquiry.
"I just wish the plaster cast didn't itch so much. They'll have to change it tomorrow- I just can't help trying to bend my knee, and the plaster's crumbling. They keep sluicing it with that disinfectant stuff, but it doesn't help. I keep telling them, everything crumbles, it's just the nature of things but they don't listen. Medics, hey?"
"Medics," Jacom echoed obligingly.
"The inquiry's concluded, by the way. We got nine of them. They all got away with trivial fines except for the big amber. He was identified as the one who hit you he's in jail for the moment, looking for a pardon, but he'll be on the wall for a long time."
Herriman looked puzzled for a moment or two.
"It wasn't the dark lander who hit me, sir," he said hesitantly.
Jacom's heart skipped a beat. He didn't dare look at Purkin for fear that the man might take the glance as a tacit 'f told you so', although the only thought in his mind was: I've made a mess of this, haven't I? Aloud, he said: "No, it wasn't a dark lander It was the big amber by the stairway looked almost as if he might have giant's blood in him, if that were possible. He was the one who did it. They all said so."
TMo sir," said Herriman stubbornly.
"It definitely wasn't him."
"You had your back to him," said Purkin, speaking with exaggerated carefulness in order to signal to his man that this was treacherous ground.
"You couldn't see who hit you, could you? Anyway, I saw you grappling with him myself. You probably can't remember, because you got hit on the head."
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"He wasn't in thejight at all," Herriman said, blithely refusing to take the hint.
"I grabbed hold of him to stop myself falling over. He helped me. He was just having a drink with some beggar. Some big bastard in a hurry to get up the stairs knocked his table over- the amber was only trying to stay out of trouble."
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