Sharps

by K. J. Parker

  “You’d need a blacksmith,” Addo said – Giraut was startled for a moment; the voice seemed to have come out of thin air. “You’ve got to dismount the axle, forge-weld it back together, straighten it and then put it back. Or if it’s broken off too short, you may need to make up a new one. It happened to us once when we were driving out to our country place one summer,” he explained. “We were stuck in a little village somewhere for three days.”

  “Three days.” Iseutz looked as though she’d just been condemned to death. “I can’t possibly—”

  “The nearest blacksmith is probably back in the City,” Phrantzes said quietly. “Which means someone would have to walk back there, carrying the axle.”

  “And what the hell are we supposed to do?” Iseutz snapped at him. “Just sit here and starve?”

  “Walk to the way station, I suppose,” Phrantzes said. “At least you’ll be warm and dry there. I’ll have to send a message back to the City and tell them to tell the Permians we’ll be a week late. This is going to ruin everything. We won’t possibly be able to make the schedule.”

  “Excuse me,” Giraut said, and stood up. He couldn’t get the door handle to open, so he climbed out through the window. It wasn’t nearly as easy as Suidas had made it look.

  He found Suidas lying on his back, half under the carriage, looking up at a snapped-off length of steel bar. The political officer and the coachman had apparently vanished into thin air. “How bad is it?” Giraut asked.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Suidas replied. “I did a bit of time on caravan duty in the War, we were always getting held up with shit like this.”

  “Addo says we need a blacksmith.”

  Suidas grinned at him. “For a proper job, yes,” he said. “But it’s, what, two hours to the way station; something like that, anyway. Not too far.”

  “How do you know that?” Giraut had to ask.

  Suidas seemed surprised at the question. “I looked at a map before we left,” he said. “And I’ve been keeping tabs on landmarks as we’ve passed them, which gave me our average speed. If I’m right, we’re about twenty miles from C9 – which figures; if we hadn’t had this, we’d have got there just before nightfall, which makes sense. So, what I’m saying is, if we could fix it just enough, as opposed to properly, we could probably get to the station all right.”

  Giraut frowned. “How on earth can you fix something like that without the right tools?”

  “You’d be amazed what you can do if you absolutely have to,” Suidas replied, hauling himself out from under the carriage and sort of bouncing to his feet. He seemed almost absurdly cheerful, as if something good had happened. “Right, let’s see what we’ve got.”

  “Such as?”

  Suidas was looking round. “I once saw an old supply carter replace a busted axle with a chunk of oak gatepost and an axe,” he said. “Of course, we haven’t got either of those, but I expect the principle’s the same.” He put his foot on the hub of the back wheel and sprang up on to the carriage roof. “Of course it’ll be dark soon, which really doesn’t help. Any idea where the creep’s got to? Not to mention the coachman.”

  The creep was presumably the political officer. “Sorry, no idea,” Giraut said. He could hear voices inside the coach – well, Iseutz’s voice, raised and unhappy, interspersed with short silences, which presumably represented Phrantzes’ attempts to reply. It was colder outside, and it was just starting to spit with rain, but he felt no great desire to get back in.

  “Screw them, then. Are you going to help?”

  Giraut nodded, and for some reason he felt pleased too. Maybe it was just good to be doing something, after a long period of things being done to him. “What can I …?”

  “These bars.” Suidas was pointing to the luggage rack, the basis of which consisted of six steel rods, about as thick as a thumb. “Of course, the axle’s considerably thicker, so we’d have to shim the wheel with belt leather or something of the sort. The real problems are, one, getting one of those rods out, two, fixing it to the underside of the carriage. It’d be a piece of cake if we had a cold chisel, a big hammer and a dozen long nails.”

  Giraut looked at him. “What have we got?”

  Inside the coach, Iseutz chose that moment to say something trenchant about her view of the situation. “Motivation,” Suidas said. “Now then, there must be some sort of carrier’s box somewhere on this thing. Long wooden trunk, with a lid. It’s where the carter stores all his junk.”

  Giraut looked up. “You’re sitting on it,” he pointed out.

  “Well done, that man.” Suidas jumped up. “Right, let’s see.” He stood up, raised his foot and stamped on the lid of the box, smashing it. For some reason, Giraut found this mildly disturbing. “Oh come on,” Suidas said mournfully, pulling out an armful of spare reins, some rope and a coil of thick iron wire. “If I have to walk to the way station with that bloody woman whining all the time, there’ll be bloodshed, I can promise you that. On army wagons there was always a big hammer, an axe, six-inch nails, useful stuff. This is just …”

  Giraut crawled under the coach and had a look for himself. The steel axle, what was left of it, passed through two loops welded to the high point of the arched springs. Suddenly, as if in a moment of divine revelation, he saw what Suidas had in mind: one of the iron bars from the luggage rack, clamped to the floorboards of the coach with about two dozen long, bent nails. He could see how it would’ve worked with an ordinary cart, built from massive timbers you could drive a nail deep into. But the coach was light and flimsy; nails would pull out of those delicate boards, or pull through and shatter the wood. He was about to point this out, but realised that Suidas wasn’t in the mood to hear something like that. Then another thought struck him. He measured the diameter of the broken axle against his forefinger.

  “Those rods,” he said.

  “Well?”

  “Roughly an inch thick?”

  “More or less. But like I said, we could pack out the axis hole in the wheel with something.”

  Giraut grinned. The luggage rack stretched the full width of the coach; slightly more, in fact. The broken axle was two and a bit inches across. And if he pulled it off, he’d suddenly be a hero and everybody would like him. As it happened, the Invincible Sun was sulking behind a cloud at that precise moment, but Giraut nodded gratefully in His direction nonetheless.

  “Come down here a minute, will you?”

  “Why?”

  “Because we don’t need one bar,” Giraut said. “We need four.”

  They called Addo out to give them a hand. The look of gratitude he gave them suggested he’d be their friend for life.

  Fortunately, Addo was a good deal stronger than he looked. Together, he and Suidas were able to lift the coach while Giraut pulled the broken axle out from the other side. Then he hauled a couple of similar-sized rocks under it to prop it up, while they lashed into a bundle the four luggage-rack bars they’d eventually managed to prise loose, wrapping the spare reins round them as tight as they possibly could. This bundle they inserted into the steel loops welded to the springs.

  “One axle,” Suidas said delightedly. “Of course we won’t be able to go more than walking pace, and it’ll be bumpy as hell, but never mind.”

  In order to get the wheels back on, they had to lift the coach up higher. Iseutz and Phrantzes were pressed into service as auxiliary lifting power, while Giraut crammed in flat slabs of stone from a nearby derelict wall. By now it was nearly dark, so they snapped off the pretty gilt brass coach lamps and lit them; it was just enough light to work by. It wasn’t straightforward. The other wheel didn’t want to come off the old axle, and neither wheel wanted to go on the new one. The drizzle turned to rain, which made hands slippery and dissolved the ground under their feet into greasy, thin mud. Iseutz insisted on offering advice, most of it perfectly reasonable, which Suidas seemed to regard it as a point of honour to ignore. Eventually, however …

  “Knock the stones a
way,” Suidas shouted, “and let’s see what happens.”

  To keep the wheels from sliding off the axles, they’d bound the ends tightly with spare rein, knotted and intertwined into balls the size of a closed fist. That had been Addo’s suggestion, and Suidas didn’t think much of it. But it held. Addo led the horses on; the wheels rolled, creaked, wobbled in two planes, but stayed on. It was, Giraut couldn’t help thinking, something of a miracle.

  “What about the luggage?” Addo asked.

  They’d had to take it off the rack and dump it on the ground, of course, to break out the improvised axle rods. There wasn’t enough left of the rack to tie it to, and there most definitely wasn’t room for all of it inside.

  “We’ll take the fencing gear,” Suidas said, after a long silence. “They’ll have to send someone from the way station to pick up the rest of the stuff. Probably they can catch us up on the road later.”

  The wooden crate took up the space they’d been using to put their feet. Faced with the prospect of spending the rest of the ride with his knees tucked under his chin, Giraut volunteered to ride up top with Suidas, even though the rain showed no sign of letting up. He was so wet already, it couldn’t possibly matter. But that’s all right, he told himself. The huge log fire at C9 will have us all dry in minutes. In spite of everything, the wet, the pain in his back and shoulders and where he’d skinned his knuckles against the hub, he felt serenely happy, in a way he couldn’t remember having felt before.

  “I really would like to know where that so-called political officer’s got to,” Suidas said, wiping rain out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “I mean, we’re in the middle of nowhere, and he just disappears. It doesn’t make sense.”

  But just as the coach was about to move off, he appeared, trotting towards them out of the darkness, with the coachman following on behind him. They were wet through, which was some consolation.

  “Where the hell were you?” Suidas yelled at him, but he was through the door and into the coach before either of them could stop him. The coachman climbed up on to the box, only to find there wasn’t room for him.

  “You can damn well lead the horses,” Suidas snapped. “First, though, you can tell me where you and that arsehole went off to.”

  But the coachman shook his head and climbed down. Suidas yelled at him some more, but it was too dark to see if he was taking any notice. The coach lurched forward; it was actually limping, as if it had feet rather than wheels, and each quarter-turn of the ludicrously improbable axle made the boards under Giraut’s feet shake.

  It would, of course, have been quicker to walk. There was no way of telling how long it took, because there was nothing to gauge the passage of time by. Suidas claimed to be making some kind of scientific observation based on his extrapolation of the circumference of the wheels; but when they blundered into a deep pothole and he was nearly thrown off the box, he admitted he’d lost count, so his findings were necessarily flawed. After a very long time, however, he started making worried noises.

  “We should be able to see the lights by now,” he said. “I mean, the damn place is right next to the road, and there’s only one road, so we can’t have taken a wrong turning, so it’s got to be there, and we’ve got to reach it soon. But we ought to be able to see the lights. They keep a big storm lantern burning all night, for the government couriers.”

  “You’ve been here before.” Giraut found it hard to get the words out. He was wet and cold, so his teeth were chattering, and every bump of the four-lobed axle jarred his jaw.

  “During the War. Of course, they didn’t show a light then, so you had to find it by dead reckoning.”

  “That’s what you were doing.”

  “Trying to,” Suidas said. “But it wasn’t my job back then, so I’ve never done it for real. I just know the general principle. It’s like how they did the military survey of the DMZ: a dozen men in raggedy old clothes, counting their paces under their breath. Amazingly accurate, as it turned out.”

  More time passed, and Suidas said they’d better light the one remaining coach lamp (the other had got smashed while they were playing with the axle). “If we miss it and have to go back, she’ll go on about it for the rest of the trip, you can bet your life.”

  Entirely believable; so they lit the lamp. It meant they could see the rain, each slanting line golden in the yellow light, like strands of hair, but not much else. It didn’t help them find C9.

  “What the hell’s that?” Giraut heard Suidas call out; he was hauling on the reins with one hand and the brake with the other. The coach stopped. Giraut couldn’t see anything.

  “There’s something blocking the road,” Suidas said. “If we’d run over it, it’d have snapped the springs, sure as eggs. What the hell does that clown of a carter think he’s playing at?”

  He jumped down, and after a moment’s thought Giraut followed him. The obstacle proved to be a thick, square-section wooden beam, lying across the road. Suidas swore and lifted the lamp over his head, then started yelling, “Everybody out! Now!” It took Giraut rather longer than he’d have liked to admit to figure out that if you wanted to wreck a coach or a cart in the dark, presumably with a view to robbing it, you could do worse than lay a beam across the road.

  The coach door opened. The political officer came scurrying out. He had a lantern of his own, a tiny little thing that gave out an extraordinary amount of light for its size. Behind him came Iseutz, then Addo, then Phrantzes last of all, stumbling like someone who’s just woken up out of a deep sleep. The political officer noticed the beam and lifted his lantern. “I think we should all move away from the coach,” he said, in a quiet voice that everybody heard quite clearly. “There’s a building over there,” he added, and they could just make it out against the slightly paler darkness of the sky. “I’ll go ahead and take a look. Wait here till I call.”

  He disappeared, taking the light with him; they couldn’t see him, only a glowing yellow cocoon moving away. “What the hell is going on?” Iseutz demanded.

  “Someone put a big chunk of wood across the road,” Suidas replied. “It’s what we used to do in the War, to block a convoy. It’s really lucky we were only crawling along. If we’d been going at anything like normal pace, the lead horses would’ve broken their legs. But they just stepped over it, and I saw it in time.”

  “Who would want to do that?” Addo asked.

  That was clearly a very good question, which was probably why nobody tried to answer it. “That political bastard is always disappearing,” Suidas said, to no one in particular. “Someone had better tell me what he’s supposed to be doing on this trip, or I’m going to get very unhappy.”

  “It was a condition of the tour,” Phrantzes said, and everybody else turned and looked at him. “Any official delegation going into Permia has to be accompanied by a political officer. That’s what they told me,” he added defensively. “I wasn’t told anything about him, just that he’d be joining us.”

  “He makes my skin crawl,” Iseutz said. “He just sits there reading his stupid book and smiling, and he doesn’t feel the cold. Can’t we leave him behind somewhere, or something?”

  The light went out, and Giraut felt a surge of panic. Why had the light gone out? Its absence made the world a much darker place than it had been when they’d been moving. “Now where’s he got to?” Iseutz said. “I vote we put him on a lead, like a dog.”

  There was a long silence. Giraut had to wipe rainwater out of his eyes so he could see, though it was too dark for him to make out anything except very subtle gradations of black and dark blue.

  “If you’d all care to follow me.” It was the political officer’s voice, though Giraut couldn’t place where it was coming from. “This way.”

  “Where are you?” Suidas said.

  “Head directly away from the coach. That’s right, keep going. Follow that line, and you’ll come to a stone wall. I suggest we camp there for the rest of the night, it’ll provide a degree of s
helter from the weather.”

  “And he can see in the dark,” Iseutz said bitterly. “That’s not natural.”

  They found the wall by bumping into it. The political officer was there before them. “I’d prefer not to light the lamp again,” he said. “I’d recommend keeping the noise down, if you wouldn’t mind. Nothing to worry about,” he added, cheerful and in no way convincing. “I think we might all try and get some sleep.”

  “Look, what the hell—”

  “Shh,” the political officer said gently; and it worked, because Iseutz didn’t speak again.

  Giraut wedged his back against the wall, pulled his completely sodden lapels round his running-wet face, and sat staring into the impenetrable darkness. He didn’t know who was on either side of him. He’d have given two hundred nomismata for a weapon, if he’d had two hundred nomismata.

  But, somehow or other, he must’ve fallen asleep at some point, because the next thing he did was open his eyes. He saw pale red light, the first stain of dawn. He could hear Iseutz talking.

  “… complete bloody shambles, and we haven’t even reached the border yet. What’s going to happen when we’re in Permia, assuming we manage to get that far, I dread to think. That man Phrantzes is obviously completely useless, the political man is most definitely not on our side, Deutzel’s decided he’s in charge but he’s an idiot. I was under the impression this jaunt was supposed to be important, but …”

  From context, therefore, she was talking to Addo, and the rest of them weren’t there. He looked round and saw the two of them, tucked under the wall like a handkerchief in a woman’s sleeve. He stood up, winced as the cramp announced itself, and looked round.

  He could see the coach, about thirty yards away. Beyond it there was a large grey square building, which had to be C9. So that was all right; except, if that was the way station, why were Iseutz and Addo still out in the open, still in their wet clothes, sitting on the ground?

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  Iseutz broke off in mid sentence. “Oh look, he’s back from the dead. Sleep well?”