by K. J. Parker
‘Don’t they? You mean there’s no stealing?’
‘Not really. What’d be the point, when everybody’s got more or less the same as everybody else? And besides, you can’t do anything without at least two people seeing you. Everybody knows everybody’s else’s business, and a stranger – well, a stranger wouldn’t be able to spit without everybody knowing about it for five farms in each direction.’
‘Right,’ the boy said. ‘So when we get there, what are we going to do?’
The Fencer made landfall at Tornoys, where Athli made a half-hearted attempt at justifying the expedition in commercial terms by buying four dozen bales of reasonable-quality local worsted for only slightly more than she would have paid for it on Scona or Colleon, and two dozen caged song-thrushes.
‘What do you want them for?’ Bardas asked, as the wicker hampers of frantically warbling birds were carried up the ramp.
‘There’s a craze for them on the Island,’ Athli replied. ‘Bored wives tweet and gurgle at them and feed them crumbs on the ends of silver tweezers. And I know where I can get all the cute little bronze cages I can use, cheap.’
‘Ah,’ Bardas replied, nodding. ‘In the Mesoge, we eat them.’
Athli bought a wagon and two adequate horses for less than the going rate, and they followed the coast road as far as Lihon, which was the nearest thing the Mesoge had to a city. From there they followed the main carters’ road, a semi-connected tracery of cart tracks and cattle-droves that meandered from farmstead to farmstead in no particular order. As luck would have it, they were trying to go up country in the week before Lihon Fair, which meant that they were continually fighting their way upstream against a fierce current of sheep, goats and pigs being driven south, which sometimes threatened to overwhelm them and sweep them back the way they’d just come. At the end of the second day, Bardas pointed out the wooded crest of a range of hills, which he said overlooked the small valley they were heading for. At the end of the third day, they were exactly the same distance from it, but now they were approaching it from the west rather than the south.
‘Not meaning to be rude,’ Athli said, ‘but how much longer is this going to take?’
Bardas shrugged. ‘I don’t honestly know,’ he replied. ‘I’ve only ever come this way once, and then I was going in the opposite direction, from home to the coast. Actually, I think I came a different way, or else the roads have moved. I seem to remember it took about five days last time.’
On the fourth day they finally left the plain and found themselves on a straight, horribly rutted track that led up the first range of hills in the direction they wanted to go. ‘This is the old Bailiffs’ Drove,’ Bardas explained. ‘When I was a boy, most of this part was owned by big City families and let to local tenants like my father. The City owners’ bailiffs had this road made so they could drive cattle direct from a couple of mustering-stations to the coast; they reckoned that if they took their land up here in hand and could arrange continuity of supply, they’d be able to flood the City with cheap beef and mutton from their own estates. It didn’t work, though; they couldn’t agree wayleave terms with the farmers on the coastal plain, so the big joint droves they’d planned got this far and then had to pick their way through the lanes just like we’ve been doing. In the end, they gave it up as too expensive and went back to letting the land, or sold it off to the tenants in possession. That’s when we bought out our place.’
Athli nodded. The further they got from the sea, the more Bardas was using words like ‘we’ and ‘us’ instead of ‘they’ and ‘them’, and although most of what he said about the country was a series of variations on themes of inefficiency, stagnation and an utterly provincial mindset, she couldn’t remember ever having seen him so animated. To a certain extent she was pleased; it was the nearest she’d ever seen him to being happy, or at the very least taking an interest. On the other hand, she didn’t like the Mesoge, for all the reasons Bardas himself had given. All around her she felt an oppressive indifference to anything except the job in hand, which was subsistence farming. She hadn’t seen a painted door since they’d left Lihon, and the men they passed in the fields all wore virtually identical smocks of pale undyed wool and sturdy but oafish-looking wooden-soled boots. Once she thought she saw a garden and pointed it out to Bardas, who explained that the cheerful-looking yellow and purple flowers were local varieties of flax, grown as cattle fodder. It was the first time he could remember, he said, that anybody had ever mentioned the colours of the flowers. Athli thought of the times when he’d made fun of her back in the City for caring about what colour things were – what earthly difference did it make if the shirt was grey or green, what was it about a blue-enamelled inkwell that made you write more legibly than you would with a plain brass one, and so on. Back then she’d taken it for a rather endearing deficiency of taste; here, she could see it was just Mesoge, buried two or three layers down under his skin. It wasn’t as if he seemed to like the place any more than she did, but his attitude suggested that he somehow thought it was right, the way things should be, and that any difficulty he had in accepting it was a fault in himself rather than a difference of opinion. Five years here and he’ll be a farmer again, she reflected, wondering as she did so why that thought depressed her so much. And not a particularly good one, either, she added, with a touch of malice.
When she’d left him, rather melodramatically, just before the fall of Perimadeia, she’d believed for some time that she was three parts in love with him, and when someone had tapped her on the shoulder on the quay at Scona, and the someone had turned out to be Bardas Loredan, she’d told herself that yes, now she knew for sure what it was she’d been feeling for him. Here and now, in the Mesoge, she wasn’t so sure. The differences in him were subtle and apparently contradictory. For one thing he looked younger; he held his head up straighter, talked more, volunteered information instead of waiting to be asked. There was something almost boyish about the way he was showing off his home to his friends from Away. But at the same time he seemed to have diminished. He still spoke in the same way, with his usual inflections and turns of phrase, but in everything he said about the Mesoge and its people there seemed to be an underlying note of involuntary, almost grudged respect, so that every time he criticised something he was acknowledging that he was wrong to do so, and that his opinions were therefore worthless. This is how it’s done here; it’s not how I’d do it; therefore I must be wrong. Athli found this both unsettling and distasteful, and naturally began to wonder whether in fact she knew him at all, or whether the man she’d assumed she was in love with had never in fact existed. Thinking about it objectively, she realised that when she thought of Bardas, she saw him in her mind’s eye as a striking figure standing on the floor of the courthouse in Perimadeia, sideways on and with his sword-arm extended in the guard of the Old fence, or as a lost and angry man slumped on a bench in a tavern, drinking hard after an easy victory. Of course, she’d never really seen him as a soldier, certainly not as a bowyer or a farm boy, only as a fencer, a man alone in the middle. It was quite possible that she’d made a mistake. Maybe they just didn’t have love here, like they didn’t have curtains or decorated pottery, and so loving a Mesoge man was actually impossible. After all, love wouldn’t help you squeeze an extra four measures of barley out of a stony terrace or get a good edge on a badly tempered scythe-blade, so why would they give it house-room?
‘Do they really eat thrushes?’ she asked.
Bardas nodded. ‘We smear the branches of trees and bushes with lime,’ he said. ‘They perch and their feet stick, and all you have to do is pull them off and put them in a covered basket. Roasted, they’re not bad. And,’ he added, with a sideways glance at the boy, ‘it makes a welcome change from rabbit.’
The boy groaned, and Bardas laughed; a father teasing his son, Athli decided, and she wondered if that was one of the things that had made him decide to come back here; that if he was to be responsible for the boy, then the boy ha
d to be brought up properly, in the Mesoge fashion. In all the years they’d known each other in Perimadeia, he’d mentioned home and his father three, maybe four times. Now she had enough information to draw a full mental picture of Clidas Loredan, who had apparently been everything a Mesoge father should be: wise, short-tempered, exacting, impatient with failure, able to turn his hand to anything, practical, realistic and (Athli added, with a malicious grin) doomed. It didn’t help that there were quite a few things about the Mesoge that she personally found highly amusing, though she knew for a fact that Bardas wouldn’t see the joke.
Well, if he insists on being doomed, he can jolly well be doomed on his ownsome. I think this is a horrid place, and I want to go home, where people wear nice clothes and don’t mind paying for them. I think I’d go mad if I had to live here. They can’t all be doomed, can they? I mean, if so, how come there are still so many of them left?
For a time it seemed as if they’d reach the wooded crest and the valley below it before nightfall on the fourth day. But, at the last moment, the Bailiff’s Drove suddenly ceased to exist and melted away into an overgrown lane too narrow to get the wagon down. Bardas swore and backed up the horses – there wasn’t room to turn round – as far as the last turning off they’d passed, which led them off to the east round the brow of another small hill. When the sun set and they put the canopy over the wagon for the night, the wooded crest appeared to be just as far away as it had been at noon, albeit that they were seeing it from a slightly different angle.
‘We’ll be there tomorrow,’ Bardas said cheerfully as he lit the fire. It was colder than it had been the previous evening, and Athli wished she’d brought more than one blanket. ‘I know this place, some cousins of ours used to be the tenants here, though they had to give up and move on. Just over the hill, on the slope, is where the landlord made them plant a vineyard. It didn’t come to anything, of course, but the landlord insisted and they wasted a hell of a lot of time over it. Apparently he’d read a book about viticulture and was convinced he could cover the slopes of these hills with vines and make a fortune. Unfortunately, he never actually finished the book, so he missed the bit about dry, well-drained soil. In the end he let us pull them up. The vinewood made pretty good toolhandles, as I recall.’
Athli looked up. ‘Is that how these people look at everything,’ she asked, ‘in terms of what it can be made into?’
Bardas looked at her curiously. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ he replied. ‘The last couple of years I’ve been walking round Scona and every time I pass a tree I say Yes or No, depending on whether I can make bows out of it or not. It’s instinctive, I guess; is this thing likely to be any use to me or not? Can I make something out of it? You do the same; you look at the rolls of cloth in the market and think, how much would they go for on the Island and what can I get them for? It’s human nature.’
Athli shook her head. ‘In a market, yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what markets are for. But I don’t go around weighing up everything I see as a potential source of profit, or pricing everything as I go, like an auctioneer’s clerk.’
Bardas shrugged. ‘I suppose it depends on what you’ve trained yourself to notice,’ he replied. ‘But I think that that’s what people do, its the essence of being human. You take pieces of junk – a bit of tree, or some lumps of iron ore – and you make them into something useful and good.’
‘Even if they were perfectly good as they were?’ Athli queried. ‘Like the thrushes?’
Bardas laughed. ‘Maybe, but they aren’t doing me any good just flying around in the air and going tweet-tweet. Surely all of life’s about change; how we change things and how things change us. Otherwise we’d eat grass and sleep standing up. That was always the City mentality,’ he went on, turning his head away and looking at the hillside. ‘Everybody in Perimadeia was involved in making things, one way or another. They sat on a rock surrounded by sea and turned everything they could lay their hands on into something useful or valuable. Useful to them, of course – they tended to regard anything they couldn’t use as trash and a nuisance, which is how they came to get on the wrong side of Temrai and his people. Here in the Mesoge we’re similar, but we tend not to muck about with people, just things. Hence, no wars.’
Athli decided that she didn’t want to continue with the discussion. ‘One thing they can’t make here,’ she said, ‘and that’s a decent road. But then, if you don’t ever go anywhere, what do you need roads for? Pass me the bread-bag, please, I’m starting to feel hungry.’
‘And no rabbit,’ added the boy. ‘Please.’
‘Or thrushes,’ Athli said. ‘Or squirrels or weasels or frogs or any other free delicacies from Mother Nature’s larder. Just bread and cheese and some of that apple chutney will do me.’
‘Are you sure?’ Bardas said, with a concerned look on his face. ‘I bet you that if I looked around for a minute or so I could find you something to go with it – a few beetles, maybe, or a handful of woodlice. Though personally I prefer my woodlice marinaded in honey, with just a faint garnish of chives-’
‘Oh, shut up,’ Athli said.
‘You again.’
‘That’s right,’ Gorgas said cheerfully, ‘me again. No,’ he added, as the warder started to close the door, ‘leave it. She’s free to go.’
The warder didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. His face reminded Gorgas of the bas reliefs of allegorical subjects that City architects loved to decorate the top of arches with: all melodrama and action, with every face registering extremes of graphic emotion. Any archtop in Perimadeia would have been pleased to have the warder up there, radiating the very essence of Relief and Deliverance From Tribulation. Gorgas denied himself the smile.
‘You’re kidding,’ said Iseutz. ‘She’s letting me go?’
‘That’s right. Normally I’d say get your things together, but I really can’t imagine anybody wanting to take anything out of here except to burn it.’ Now he smiled. ‘Present company excepted, of course.’
‘Witty, Uncle Gorgas, witty. It’s nice to think that when you’re a beggar scratching a living on the street corners of Shastel, you’ll have a valuable talent like that to fall back on.’
Gorgas nodded gravely. ‘Clearly it runs in the family,’ he said. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? You can go. Now. Soon as you like.’
She shook her head. ‘Not till I know what’s involved,’ she said. ‘You don’t expect me to believe that you and my mother have had a sudden change of heart and realised the error of your ways, do you? It’s some sort of game, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, for gods’ sakes. Get out of here, will you, before I change my mind.’
Iseutz grinned at him, leant against the wall, slid down it and squatted on her heels. ‘The more you want me to do something, Uncle Gorgas, the harder I’ll fight not to do it. There now, do you think I’ll be the first person in history ever to be thrown out of jail?’
Gorgas sighed and settled himself comfortably on the bed, lying on his back with his hands behind his head. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘there is a certain appeal to this place. I can see how you could get used to it; it’d be so easy to wallow in that feeling of the worst having already happened. When you’ve reached that point, of course, there’s absolutely nothing left to be afraid of. It must be wonderful not to be afraid of anything any more.’ He yawned. ‘Shut the door on your way out, there’s a good girl.’
Iseutz scrambled up and stood over him, her arms folded. ‘Oh, there’s plenty to be afraid of in a place like this,’ she said. ‘Like the thought that you’re never going to get out of here. The thought that they might even bury you in here – or I suppose they’ve got a pit or a wellshaft they sling the bodies down. Sometimes I think about that, and I run over to the door and bash on it till my wrists bleed, yelling for them to let me out. I don’t like it in here, Uncle, I don’t like it one little bit. But I’m not leaving till you tell me why.’
‘Please yourself,’ Gorgas muttered drowsil
y. ‘It’s no big secret. I’ve been on at Niessa to let you out ever since she put you in here, and now, bless her heart, she’s agreed. Simple as that. I expect she got sick and tired of the sound of my voice, the way I’m sick and tired of yours.’
She didn’t move, just went on looking down at him. ‘So I can go, can I? Go wherever I like?’
‘Mhm.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘And what if I tell you I’m going straight to Briora – that’s the name of the village, isn’t it? – to find Uncle Bardas and kill him?’
‘You’re welcome to try.’
‘Really?’ She frowned. ‘And you won’t try and stop me?’
‘You can give it your very best shot if you like. It won’t get you very far, but that’s your business. You go right ahead.’
She knelt down beside him, and he noticed how graceful the movement had been. ‘Come on, Uncle Gorgas, be a sport, tell me what you’re up to. Please,’ She folded her arms, rested her cheek on them and smiled.
‘For gods’ sakes,’ Gorgas snapped, ‘leave it alone, will you?’ It wasn’t right to see her acting girlish, acting her age. She looked like a monster, with her matted hair, thin, bony arms, hands unnaturally large; there were white scars along the blades of her hands, from the base of the little finger to the projecting bones at her wrists. ‘Get away from me, will you? You’re disgusting.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied gravely. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’
‘For the last time, nothing’s going on.’
‘Then why are you letting me go, when the first thing I’ll do is…’
‘No, you won’t,’ Gorgas said angrily, ‘because he’s not here. He’s gone. Left Scona. And before you ask, I don’t have a clue where, and that’s the truth.’