by K. J. Parker
She was looking at me. “Something bad,” she said.
I nodded. “Something bloody awful.”
She sighed. Her time is not without value, but when I need to talk, she makes time and listens. She nodded to the tapster, who pulled a sad face and went away to fill a kettle. “Politics?”
“Sort of politics.”
“I’m not interested in all that. I work for a living.”
“You’re smart,” I said.
She has this sort of wan smile. “This is one of your figure-it-out-from-first principles games, isn’t it? Where you make me say what you’re thinking.”
“Yes, but you’re good at it. Because you’re smart.”
Vanity is her one weakness. She knows she’s pretty, because men tell her, over and over again, and it brings her nothing but aggravation. But I’m the only one who tells her she’s clever. “Go on,” she said.
“You heard about Classis.”
She nodded. “Something about pirates stealing a load of stores.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Now, you’re the one with the brains, you tell me. Why would that bother me so much?”
When she thinks about something, she has this ritual. She lowers her head, as if in prayer. She stares down at her hands. Don’t bother talking to her while she’s doing all this, she won’t hear a word. You know when she’s on the scent because she scowls. When she reckons she’s got there, she sits up straight and looks right at you. “Well?” I said.
“What exactly did they take?”
Good girl, I thought. “I don’t know for sure,” I said. “All I know is what I overheard in the navy hospital, and I wasn’t there long. But by the sound of it, mostly basic military supplies.”
“Meaning?”
“Boots,” I said. “Blankets. Three hundred barrels of scales, for making armour. Two thousand yards of tent fabric. Cartloads of palisade stakes. Seven thousand helmet liners. That sort of thing.”
She nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. “I’m a businessman. I spend a lot of money on ships and crews, knowing that I’m going to catch it hot from the navy once they’ve found me, which they’re bound to do sooner or later. What do I get for my money? Let’s see. Palisade stakes are firewood, which—”
“Grows on trees?”
“Don’t interrupt. Tent fabric might do for clothes, but you’d get pennies on the tornece. Helmet liners—” She shrugged. “No use at all. Nobody’s going to want to buy all that stuff. Not at a price that’ll give you a profit.”
“Except?”
She nodded briskly. “An army, a government. But governments don’t steal their supplies from other governments, it’s too risky. Also it’s cheaper to make the stuff yourself, and you’ve got continuity of supply.”
She knows a lot of long words. Gets them from me, I flatter myself. “So?”
“Hang on, I’m still thinking. Pirates steal a load of unlikely stuff, really hard to shift and no real value, and the risk is really horrible. So—” She dipped her head, as if some invisible helper had just fed her the answer. “Stealing to order.”
“Stealing to order. But not a government, we already decided that.”
She rubbed her thumb against her palm. Her father did that when he was angry, or confused. “Not a government. Maybe someone who isn’t a government right now but—”
“Wants to be one.” I snapped my fingers and pointed at her. “Your father always said you were sharp.”
That got me a scowl. “Hang on, though,” she said. “Still doesn’t make sense. Just suppose there really is someone who wants to set up an army, from scratch. I don’t know, someone founding a colony up in the Armpit, or down south somewhere, or a free company. You can buy all that stuff at the surplus auctions. Cheap.”
I smiled at her. “Yes,” I said, “you can. Or you could buy a thousand skilled men and set up a factory. But they didn’t. So?”
She went back into thinking mode, and while she was in conference the tea arrived. I poured a bowl and put it aside to cool down.
“Money,” she said. “Actual cash money. Whoever he is, he hasn’t got any.”
“But the Sherden—the pirates,” I said, a bit too late. Her eyes flicker just a little when she learns something she doesn’t already know.
“It must be a long-term partnership,” she said slowly. “No money now, working on spec, and a really big payout some time later. Which doesn’t sound like the Sherden,” she added. “Too organised, if you see what I mean. The long term for a Sherden is tomorrow afternoon.”
“I thought so too. So?”
Frown. “So it must be a really good deal, for them to be interested. A really big payout, at some point.”
She’s like her father in many ways. Brave, loyal, kind-hearted, sharp as a knife and slippery as an eel. But he had charm. “Out of interest,” I said, “the first thing they did, before they set to thieving, was set fire to the ropes and the barrel staves.”
“Chandler’s stores. For which there’d be a ready market.”
“Or they could have used them themselves. But no, up in smoke; and before they started looting, it’s as though they’d been told, first things first.”
“To make sure the Fleet couldn’t follow them.”
“Only temporarily.”
“Someone told them to do that,” she said firmly. “First, stop the Fleet, then take the stuff.” She looked at me. “Now that’s interesting.”
“Keeps me interested all night, when I’d rather be sleeping. Only temporary, but maybe temporary’s long enough. If whoever it is plans to make his move very soon.”
“And he’s got all our stuff, and we haven’t got anything.”
I nodded. “Because of centralised supply. Two birds, one stone. In the short term we’re paralysed, army and navy. He’s ready, we’re not. But that begs the question. Who’s he?”
“Not the Echmen, or the Auxenes, they’d never hire pirates. And besides, why would they want a war with us? They’ve got their hands full with their own savages.” She shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “No idea.”
“You’re just stupid, you are.”
She gave me that look; you’re a clown, but I forgive you. I sipped my tea. They make it just right at the Dogs—remarkable, since they don’t use the stuff themselves and I’m the only customer for it. Weak and refreshing at the top of the pot, strong and soothing at the bottom. Great stuff. The only good thing ever to come out of Echman; therefore (it’s only just occurred to me) yet another blessing conferred upon me by the enemy.
“What’s all this in aid of, anyway?” she asked me. “You’re scared.”
“You bet,” I replied.
She gave me a scornful look. “Not your business,” she said. “You’re just a glorified carpenter.”
“Hardly glorified.” She was watching one of the tapsters. She can spot someone palming a coin at twenty paces. “And, yes, it’s none of my concern.”
“Good.”
I grinned. “I’m concerned,” I said, “because the people whose concern it is don’t seem concerned. If that makes any—”
She sighed. “I like talking to you,” she said, “but basically you’re a pest. My dad said, don’t let him get started, he’ll make your head spin.”
“Bless him.”
She was giving me her full attention now. “Why do you do it?” she said. “Why do you come in here and make me think about a whole load of stuff that’s got nothing to do with me? I don’t like it.”
“You do. It’s like playing chess to you.”
“Why do you do it? You knew all that, but you made me figure it out.”
“Because your father isn’t here any more,” I said, “and he was the cleverest man I ever met. But he’s gone, so I have to make do with you.”
She smiled at me, not unkindly. “You know what,” she said, “when he was sick one time, he made me promise him something. Look after Orhan, he said, make sure he doesn’t come to any har
m. Weird thing to say. I was only twelve.”
“Did you promise?”
Nod. “Had my fingers crossed behind my back. So.” She parked her elbows on the table. “What are you going to do?”
“Me? Nothing. Not my place. We agreed on that.”
“Never stopped you in the past.”
“Nothing,” I repeated. “Not unless they want a bridge built. In which case, I’ll be on it like a snake.”
She loves it really. I know her too well. She likes to use her brain, just occasionally. Women aren’t allowed to be officers in the Themes, but a lot of clever men in the Greens spent a lot of time in the Dogs, chatting up the landlady, and, by a strange coincidence, the Greens were on top for the first time in a century—
It’s just occurred to me that maybe you don’t know very much about the Themes. It’s possible, if you’re from out of town. Maybe all you know is that there are two rival groups of supporters in the Hippodrome, one lot with blue favours, one lot with green, and they cheer for their side in the swordfighting and the chariot races. Which is true. It started that way, certainly. Then, about two hundred and fifty years ago, the Blues took up a collection for the fighters’ widows and orphans. Naturally, the Greens did the same. A bit later, they extended the fund to look after the dependants of Theme members; you pay a few trachy every week into the pot, and if you fall on hard times you get a bit of help till you’re on your feet again. Well, an idea that good was bound to catch on; just as bound to go wrong. Before long, the Theme treasuries controlled huge assets, invested in shipping and manufacturing since commoners can’t own land. Money brought power, which wasn’t always used wisely or honestly. Then the Greens started organising the labour at the docks, the Blues did the same in haulage and the civil service, lower grades. Wasn’t long before the government got scared and tried to interfere, which got us the Victory riots—twenty thousand dead in the Hippodrome, when the City Prefect sent in Hus auxiliaries. Since then, the Themes have kept a low profile. What they do, the funds and all the activities that go with them, is strictly illegal, but since when did that stop anybody from doing anything? Besides, if you get sick or break a leg in this man’s town, it’s the Themes you turn to, or starve to death. Her father was a trustee of the Greens fund, and quite a big man in the movement; did a lot of bad things and a lot of good ones, until he neglected to sidestep in the Hippodrome and got skewered. I’d assumed he’d creamed off enough to set his daughter up for life, but it turned out he gambled it away as fast as he embezzled it. As far as she knows, there was enough left to buy her the Dogs. Actually, there wasn’t, and regimental funds had to come to the rescue. Well, it was that or three thousand regulation shovels, and we have plenty of shovels. I was always a Blue, incidentally, until I met her father. So, you see, people can change their minds, on even the most fundamental issues of conscience.
4
The false coin people caught up with me the next day, and we did good business. There’s an advantage in changing your gold with the Old Flower Market crowd rather than the Mint; they do deals. The government says it’s a hundred and sixty tornece to the stamenon, but in the real world their opinion doesn’t carry a lot of weight, and government gold is ninety-seven pure, which gives me a lot of leverage in negotiations. My friends were a bit on edge that day, probably because the Classis thing was worrying the shipping people, and gold does a lot to calm the nerves. I closed with them at two hundred and sixteen of their excellent, in many ways better than the real thing silver-ish tornese to one of my official gold cartwheels, thereby clearing a substantial profit for my regimental rainy-day fund, which nobody knows about except me. That’s how come I can outbid other units for supplies, pay my boys when the treasury screws up, splash out on proper boots with seams that don’t split whenever Supply’s on an economy binge. That’s how you get ahead in this man’s army when you’re not someone’s nephew and you have a chronic skin condition, and, since it’s a game I’m rather good at, I’m all for it.
Admiral Zonaras would rather have bitten off one of his own ears than admit he’d listened to me, so it must have been coincidence that the First Fleet was pulled off guarding the straits and bundled off to the Schelm estuary. When they got there, nobody was home. All the little fishing villages were deserted, boats and nets gone, livestock pens empty, not a dog barking. They set fire to a few wattle-and-daub sheds, which I suppose is as good a way as any of persuading the unenlightened savages of the superiority of our culture and way of life, then came home. It was sheer bad luck that they ran into a filthy storm off the Pillars, which sank three ships and scattered the rest. It took a week for the Fleet to regroup, another week to patch up the damage, and then they hauled up the home straight into the Bay. I spoke to a midshipman on one of the ships in the lead squadron, and he told me they saw the smoke rising as soon as they rounded Cape Suidas.
Note smoke rising; indicating still air, no wind. It was really bad luck that they got well and truly becalmed just inside the Cape; it happens, from time to time, and nobody knows why. There was nothing they could do. The First Fleet is mostly galleots and dromons, massive great things with acres of sail, fast and beautifully nimble, but only when the wind is blowing. The Sherden, by contrast, use skinny little galleys, twenty oars a side, with one big square-rigged sail, so when there’s no wind they can row. Which is what they did, right past the Fleet, which was powerless to stop or chase them. The man I spoke to said he counted eighty-seven ships, all riding low in the water, on their way back from looting and burning Salpynx.
What a bloody fool I am. It’s no consolation that Admiral Zonaras didn’t see it coming either. Salpynx is—sorry, was—a single-purpose facility. It’s where the big charcoal barges from the Armpit put in to land their cargoes, thousands of tons of the stuff every month to supply the forges and foundries of the Arsenal. No wonder the smoke was easy to see a long way off. Apparently the Sherden took their time, loaded their little ships until there was barely room to move, then set light to what was left and ran for it. Luck was on their side. If it hadn’t been for the storm and the calm, they’d have run into the Fleet off the Pillars and that would’ve been that. I assume that whoever planned the operation reckoned on Zonaras’s boys putting a bit more effort into finding someone to kill up in the estuary. Still, fortune favours the brave.
By this point I’d had enough of the City to last me a good long time. I hired three big carts to lug my dodgy silver back to regimental headquarters at Cacodemon—normally I’d have sent it by fast ship, but somehow that didn’t seem sensible. I was in a hurry to get out of town before Priscus called another Council, so I hitched a ride with Eynar the scrap metal king as far as Louso and hired a horse at the Unicorn. I hate riding—it’s not the day after, it’s the day after that—but something told me I needed to get back to my own people and find something to do for a while, preferably a long way away, where communications would take some time.
I save up rainy-day jobs for just such occasions. About nine months earlier, some Academy brat had sent for us to build him a bridge up in the Teeth mountains, halfway to the Armpit. I have better things to do than trudge up mountain tracks, carrying my establishment with me like a snail, so I wrote back saying I’d try and get around to it when I had five minutes. Those five minutes had now become available. The lads weren’t exactly overjoyed to be leaving the refined delights of Cacodemon for an extended trip to the middle of nowhere, but I had one of my sporadic bouts of deafness, and off we went.
I won’t bore you with an account of our adventures building a pontoon bridge across a river in spate between two sides of a steep ravine in the mist and the driving rain, just so that our Academy boy didn’t have to take a ten-mile detour when he wanted to go skirt-chasing in the nearest town. Actually, it was a lovely piece of engineering, though I say it myself, and we did it with salvaged or scrounged materials, so it didn’t cost Division a bent trachy, and the casualty list was two broken arms and a few bumps and bruises—th
at, with a seventy-foot drop into frothing white water for the view that greeted us when we started work each morning, isn’t bad going, trust me. But it was a waste of time and energy, and I reckon the lads began to suspect that something funny was going on. There were a lot of conversations that went quiet when I walked up to the campfire, and I had to fend off a lot of artful questions, which isn’t something I’m used to doing. Just as well the boys trusted me, or it could’ve been awkward.
News doesn’t get that far up the map; the only form of it they have up there is coins, which tell the few of them who can read when there’s a new emperor. The soldiers we were building the bridge for hadn’t heard from Division for three years; hadn’t been paid, either, so they spent most of their time herding sheep and hoeing cabbages. The young officer had scars on his left wrist, where he’d tried to open his veins out of sheer boredom. Therefore, I didn’t get any hard data about the goings-on at Salpynx until we finished the bridge and withdrew, in a leisurely fashion, to Maudura, where we stopped off to mend a leaky aqueduct. There I ran into a man I knew slightly. He told me the lighthouse keeper saw the pirate ships sneak out from under the blanket of fog, trace their way through the truly horrendous shoals and come down on Salpynx from the north-west. They rounded up the longshoremen, had them load the ships till they couldn’t carry any more, then herded everyone into the main storage shed, nailed the doors shut and set fire to the roof. Amazingly, a couple of men made it out alive, and lived long enough to make sworn depositions to the magistrates. No question that the raiders were Sherden. All this was more or less what I’d already heard, but news to me was that they’d stopped off on their way out, loaded to the gunwales as they were, to smash up the other lighthouse, the one on Stair Point. Curious thing to do, unless you wanted to make sure that the Second Fleet, due back any day now from a routine cruise to the Friendly Sea ports, wouldn’t be able to clear the shoals until the light got fixed and would therefore be trapped for weeks, possibly months, on the wrong side of the straits.