by K. J. Parker
"Is that where we're going?" he called out, and wondered if the driver would reply. He hadn't said a word all day; but then, Miel hadn't either.
"Yes."
There was a ditch as well as a stockade. The driver stopped the cart, jumped down and whistled. A gate in the stockade opened; apparently it doubled as a drawbridge. The cart rumbled over it, jarring Miel's knee. The drawbridge went back up again as soon as they were across.
"Hold on, I'll help you down." The driver, now that he looked at him, was a short, stocky man with a fringe of sandy hair round a bald citadel of a head. Miel thanked him-the Ducas always acknowledges help-and leaned on his shoulder as they crossed the yard to one of the barns.
"Live one for you," the bald man called out as they crossed the threshold into the darkness inside. He put Miel down carefully and walked away.
He'd called out to someone, so presumably there was someone there; but it was too dark for Miel to see, so he stayed where he was, leaned up against a wall, like a hoe or a shovel. He was getting used to being property, he decided, and so far it hadn't been so bad. That could change, of course. He decided to resume some responsibility.
"Hello," he called out. "Anybody there?"
"Just a minute, I'll come down." A woman's voice, which made a change. Not a pleasant voice, though. The best you could say for it was that it sounded like it meant what it said. You knew where you were with a voice like that, even if it wasn't anywhere you'd ever want to be.
There was a hayloft, and a ladder. She came down slowly; a tall, red-haired woman in a plain, clean gown, tied at the waist with plaited straw rope. She was much younger than her voice, maybe his own age, a year or two older; nice-looking, too-no, revise that.
The Ducas is trained in good manners from infancy, like a soldier is trained to obey orders. He's almost incapable of inappropriate or boorish behavior. He instinctively knows how to put people at their ease, and he never, ever reacts to physical ugliness or deformity. He keeps a straight face, and he never stares.
Which was just as well. At some point in the last year or so, the woman had lost her left eye. The scar started an inch above the middle of her eyebrow and reached down to the corner of her mouth. If he'd had to give an opinion, Miel would have said it was probably a sword-cut. It hadn't been stitched at the time, and had grown out broad. Her eye socket was empty. In order to learn that aspect of his trade, Miel had been taken when he was twelve years old to see the lepers at Northwood. For the first time, he felt grateful for having had such a thorough education.
"What's the matter with you?" she said.
It took Miel a second to realize what she meant. "My knee," he said. "I got hit there in…" He hesitated. Presumably she was part of the business: doctor, nurse, jailer, all three? "In the fighting," he said. "I don't know if-"
"Hold still." She knelt down and prodded his knee sharply with her index finger. Miel yowled like a cat and nearly fell over. "That seems all right," she said. "The swelling and stiffness won't last long, a few days. You'll have to stay here till it's right again, we can't spare transport to take you back to your outfit. Have you got any money?"
"Excuse me?"
"Have you got any money?"
"Yes. I mean, not very much."
She frowned at him. "How much?"
"Eighteen turners, I think."
"Oh." She sighed. "It's six turners a day for food and shelter, so you'll just have to mend quickly. Not much chance of you working for your keep, is there? What do you do, anyway?"
Now there was a good question. "I'm a falconer," Miel said.
"Are you really?" She looked at him. "Which family?"
"The Ducas."
"Oh, them." She shrugged. "Well, try and keep out of my way." She frowned, creasing and stretching the scar. "What did that to you? One of your birds?"
For a moment he couldn't think what she was talking about. Then he remembered that he had a scar of his own; not as flamboyant as hers, because skillful men with needles had done something about it while there was still time. It had been so long since anybody had appeared to notice it that he'd forgotten it was there.
"A goshawk in a bate," he replied. "I unhooded it too early. My own fault."
She turned away, the set of her shoulders telling him he no longer mattered, and picked up a sack of boots. Then she stopped.
"My brother used to say you should keep them hooded for three days before you start manning them," she said, not turning round.
"Was he a falconer?"
"No." She paused, as though weighing up the issues for an important decision. "You can sew, then."
Of course he couldn't; but a falconer could. "Yes," he said.
"Fine. Something useful you can do. Stay there."
She went out, and came back a little later with a sack full of clothes. Miel had rested his head on it during the cart-ride. From the pocket of her gown she took a thread-bobbin; there was a bone needle stuck into the thread. "Darn the holes as best you can," she said. "Anything that's past repair you can tear up for patches. Don't break the needle."
Bloody hell, Miel thought; then, Well, how hard can it be? "All right," he said.
Apparently, unloading the cart was her job. She came and went with the sacks and the bundled-up weapons, sorting them and stacking them against the walls; no sign of the carter. He tried not to watch her. Instead, he tried desperately to figure out how you were supposed to get the thread to go through the hole in the needle.
As far as he could judge, it was physically impossible. The end, where it had been cut off, was frayed and tufty, not to mention fiendishly hard to see in the poor light, and the hole in the needle was ridiculously small. It was like trying to pull a turnip through a buttonhole. He tried to think; he'd seen women sewing before, you couldn't turn round at home without seeing some woman or other sitting placidly in a corner, her arm moving gracefully up and down. He concentrated, trying to refine a memory. Every so often they'd stop sewing and do something; but they did it quickly and easily-the bobbin would just appear in their hands, they'd run off about a forearm's length of thread, they'd hold the needle steady, and then they'd do something, if only he could remember what it was.
(Come on, he thought; if they could do it, it couldn't be all that hard.)
He tried to squeeze the picture up into his mind. The head would go forward, he remembered that. Something to do with the hand and the mouth. But of course the Ducas is trained not to stare at people, which is another way of saying, trained not to notice things that don't concern him; things and people.
They licked it. That was it; they licked the end of the thread. Presumably, if you got the tufty bit wet, you could sort of mat it down and stop it being all fluffy and hard to manipulate. He tried it, and found he could twist the strands tightly together into a point that would just about go through the needle-hole (there was a word for it, wasn't there? The eye of a needle). He tried that. At first he thought it was going to work. The tip of the point went through easily, and he tried to pinch hold of it with his fingernails as it came out the other side. But clearly it wasn't as simple as that. He'd got most of the strands through, but not all of them, so that when he pulled, the thread started to unravel and jammed. He felt his arms and neck clench with frustration, but he daren't let her see. He tried again, carefully rolling the tip of the thread between his lips; it didn't do to hurry when you were trying something new and complicated. Still no joy; one or two strands stubbornly evaded the eye, like sheep who are too scared to go back into the pen. He was confident that he'd got the technique, but evidently it took both skill and practice to execute. For crying out loud, he thought; human beings are supposed to be resourceful, why can't somebody invent a tool to do this quickly and easily? Or make needles with bigger holes in them, come to that.
The fourth time; he didn't quite know what he'd done differently. It just seemed to go, as if it had given up the struggle. Victory; now what? He went back to his memories. They threaded i
t, right, and then they cut or broke off a foot or two of thread. He scowled. It stood to reason that if you stuck the needle in and pulled it through, the thread would simply pass through the cloth and come out the other side, and you'd be sitting there with the cloth in one hand and a threaded needle in the other. There had to be some way of anchoring the end of the thread in the cloth; did you tie it to something, or stick it down with glue, or what? All his life, all those hundreds of sewing women, all he'd have had to do was stop and ask and one of them would've been happy to explain it to him. As it was…
They tied a knot in the end of the thread. He remembered now, he could picture it. The knot was thicker than the hole the needle made in the cloth, so it stuck. Excellent. He laid the needle carefully down on his knee-the last thing he needed was for the thread to slip out of the eye after all that performance getting it in there-and found the other end. Was there a special kind of knot you had to use, like sailors or carters? The women in his memory hadn't used any special procedure that he could recall, however, so he'd just have to take his chances on that. He dropped the knot and retrieved the needle. Now, he imagined, came the difficult part.
Think about it, he ordered himself. Sewing is basically just tying two sheets of material together with string. Surreptitiously, he turned over his wrist and unbuttoned his cuff.
The Ducas, of course, has nothing but the best, and this rule applies especially to clothes. He had no idea who'd made his shirts-they tended to appear overnight, like mushrooms-but whoever they were, it went without saying that they were the best in the business. Obviously, therefore, they didn't leave exposed seams, not even on the inside, where it didn't show, and their stitches were small enough to be practically invisible. He cursed himself for being stupid; looking in the wrong place. He put his hand into the sack and pulled out a shirt; a proper, honest-to-goodness, contractor-made army shirt, Mezentine, made down to a price and with nice exposed seams on the inside that even the Ducas could copy. He studied them. Apparently the drill was, you stacked the edges of the two bits of cloth one on top of the other; you left about three-sixteenths of an inch as a sort of headland (why couldn't it have been farm work instead of sewing? he asked himself; at least I know something about farm work), and then you ran a seam along to join them together. But even the army-issue stitches were too small to be self-explanatory; he stared at them, but he couldn't begin to figure out how on earth they'd ever got that way. It was a mystery, like the corn or the phases of the moon.
Fine. If I can't work out how a load of stupid women do it, I'll just have to invent a method of my own. Think; think about the ways in which one bit of something can be joined to another. There's nails, or rivets; or how about a bolt on a door? You push a bolt through a sort of cut-about tube into a hole that keeps it-Or a net. Now he was onto something he actually knew a bit about. Think how the drawstring runs through the mouth of a purse-net, weaving in and out through the mesh; then, when you pull on it, it draws the net together. If you do something similar with the thread, weave it in and out through both layers of cloth, that'll hold them together. Brilliant. I've invented sewing. I'd be a genius if only someone hadn't thought of it before me.
He took another look at the shirt-seam. It hadn't been done like that. But if he went up it once, then turned it round and went down again, he could fill in the gaps and it'd look just like the real thing. Was that the proper technique? he wondered. Like I care, he thought.
Now for something to sew. He was looking for damage; a hole, cut or tear. He examined the shirt in his hands, but there didn't seem to be anything wrong with it, so he put it on the floor and took another one from the sack. This time he was in luck. There was a big, obvious tear in the sleeve, just the sort of thing for an enthusiastic novice to cut his teeth on. He looked for the needle, couldn't find it, panicked, found it, picked it up carefully, carried it across to the sleeve and drove it home like a boar-spear. It passed through the cloth as though it wasn't there and came out the other side, but with an empty eye and without the thread.
He looked up. She was standing over him, looking down. "So," she said, "which one are you?"
His mind emptied, like grain through a hole in ajar. "What?"
"Which one are you," she said, "Miel or Jarnac?"
Oh. "I'm sorry," he said, "I don't know what you're-"
"Jarnac's the falconry nut," she went on matter-of-factly, "but he's supposed to be big and good-looking. I met Miel once, but it was years ago and we were both children, so I wouldn't recognize him again. I could probably guess, but it's easier if you tell me, isn't it? Well?"
He sagged. "I'm Miel," he said.
She nodded. "Actually, I'm impressed," she said. "I've been watching you. It's clever, how you figured it all out. But you need to fold back a couple of inches when you thread the needle," she added. "Otherwise it just pulls out."
"Is that right?" Miel said. "Well, now I know." He sighed, and let the shirt drop from his hands. "So what are you going to do?" he said.
She shrugged. "Obviously," she said, "either I teach you how to sew properly, or I'll have to do all those clothes myself. Why did you pretend to be someone else?"
"I was afraid that if you knew who I was, you'd sell me to the Mezentines," he said. "Isn't that what you do?"
She didn't move or say anything for a moment. "No," she said. "They're the enemy. If it wasn't for them, we'd still be at home on our farms." She frowned. "We don't do this out of choice."
"I'm sorry." He wasn't sure he believed her, but he still felt ashamed. "Do you know what happened in the battle?" he asked (but now it was just a way of changing the subject).
"No. I expect we'll hear sooner or later. Why, don't you?"
"I got knocked out halfway through," he explained.
"Ah." She smiled, crushing the scar up like crumpled paper. "I can see that'd be frustrating for you. Not that it matters. You're bound to lose eventually. You never stood a chance, and at your best you were nothing but a nuisance."
"I suppose so," Miel said quietly.
"Aren't you going to argue with me?" She was grinning at him. "You're supposed to be the leader of the resistance."
"Yes." He knew he was telling the truth, but it felt like lying. "So I'm in a good position to know, I suppose."
"Well." She frowned. "All right, you can't sew. Is there anything you can do? Anything useful, I mean."
He smiled. "No."
"And you're hardly ornamental. Do you think the Mezentines really would give us money for you?"
She walked away and came back with a cloth bag that clinked and jingled. As he took it from her, it felt heavy in his hand. "Tools," she said. "Two pairs of pliers, wirecutters, rings, rivets, two small hammers. Do you know what they're for?"
He thought for a moment, then nodded. "I think so," he said.
"I thought it'd be more likely to be in your line than sewing, and it's easier. It must be, men can do it. Figure it out as you go along, like you did with the sewing. When you're ready to start…" she nodded into the corner of the barn, "I'll help you over there."
"Might as well be now," he said.
She bent down and he put his arm round her neck. Not the first time he'd done that, of course; not the first time with a redhead. The most he could claim was, she was the first one-eyed woman he'd ever been cheek to cheek with. Her hair brushed his face and he moved his head away.
"You're standing on my foot," she said.
He apologized, perhaps a little more vehemently than necessary. Her hair smelled of stale cooking oil, and her skin was very pale. When they reached the corner, he let go and slithered to the floor, catching his knee on the way down. That took his mind off other things quite effectively.
"It's all right," he gasped (she hadn't actually asked). "I just…"
"Be more careful," she said. "Right, I'll leave you to it. I've got work to do."
When she'd gone, he pulled open the nearest sack and peered inside. It looked like a sack full of
small steel rings, as though they were a crop you grew, harvested, threshed and put in store to see you through the winter. He dipped his hands in, took hold and lifted. At once, the tendons of his elbows protested. A full-length, heavy-duty mail shirt weighs forty pounds, and it's unwise to try and lift it from a sitting position.
He hauled it out nevertheless, spread it out on the floor and examined it. Mezentine, not a top-of-the-range pattern. The links were flat-sectioned, about three-eighths of an inch in diameter, each one closed with a single rivet. A good-quality shirt, like the ones he was used to wearing, would have smaller, lighter links, weigh less and protect better. This one had a hole in the back, just below where the shoulder blade would be, and the area round it was shiny and sticky with jellying blood. The puncture had burst the rivets on five of the links; must've been a cavalryman's lance, with the full impetus of a charging horse behind it, to have done that. He looked a little closer, contemplating the twisted ends of the damaged links. So much force, applied in such a small space. He'd seen wounds before, felt them himself; but there was more violence in the silent witness of the twisted metal than his own actual experiences. That's no way to behave, he thought.
She'd been right; it was much easier to understand than sewing, though it was harder work. He needed both hands on the ends of the wirecutter handles to snip through the damaged links, and after he'd bent a few replacement links to fit (one twist to open them, one to close them up again), the plier handles had started blisters at the base of both his thumbs. The only really awkward part was closing up the rivet. For an anvil he used the face of one of his two hammers. The only way he could think of to hold it was to sit cross-legged and grip it between his feet, face up, his calf jamming the handle into the floor. He tried it, but the pain from his injured knee quickly persuaded him to try a different approach; he ended up sitting on the hammer handle and leaning sideways to work, which probably wasn't the way they did it in the ordnance factory at Mezentia. Hauling the shirt into position over the hammer was bad enough; lining up the tiny holes in the ends of the links and getting the rivet in without dropping it was torture. He remembered someone telling him once that there were fifty thousand links in a really high-class mail shirt. He also remembered what he'd paid for such an item. It didn't seem quite so expensive, somehow.