The Two of Swords, Part 16

by K. J. Parker

  Procopius suppressed a smile. Very much all on his own. “Yes. Sir,” he added, remembering his manners. Then he couldn’t resist asking, “Did you like it?”

  The Principal didn’t answer that. Instead, he gave a ferocious lecture on the evils of plagiarism. It had been known, he said, for students from wealthy families to hire penniless young composers to write works which the students then passed off as their own; behaviour the Principal confessed he couldn’t begin to understand, because surely anybody who did such a thing would be eaten away with shame, and what possible pleasure could anyone get from being praised and rewarded for something he hadn’t done? In such cases, the penalty was instant expulsion from the Academy. He wanted Procopius to understand that; and now he’d ask the question a third time, and if the answer was yes, there’d be no penalty, not this time. Did you write this piece of music?

  “No,” Procopius said. “Sir. I mean, like you said, why would I want to pretend if I hadn’t? I’ve come here to learn, not to show off.”

  “I see,” the Principal said. “In which case, that’ll be all. You can go.”

  The Principal never liked him after that, because he’d made a serious accusation against him and it turned out to be wrong. But all the teachers loved him and said he was the most remarkable talent they’d ever come across, and it was a privilege to be part of the making of someone who would undoubtedly turn out to be the finest musician of his generation. Procopius wasn’t sure about all that. The teachers had shown him all sorts of clever ways to turn the shapes in his mind into music; he’d been shocked and appalled by his own ignorance and the fact that he hadn’t been able to figure out such things for himself but had had to be shown. That felt like cheating, though apparently it was quite legitimate. For the rest of it, the shapes just came to him, without any real work or effort on his part, certainly no skill or engagement with excellence. He was given them, unearned, just as he’d always been given everything, his whole life, undeserved, simply because he was the son and sole heir of a rich man who died relatively young, and the nephew of a rich, doting uncle.

  So, for a while, he made sense of it the best he could. He thought about the man who’d taken his horse. You’ll be all right, the man had said, just you wait and see. And he’d said he wasn’t a thief, and he’d pay a good price for the horse; and that was when young Procopius began to see the shapes, and calling that a coincidence was stretching belief much further than it could possibly go. He could make no sense of it, of course – because what would a god or similar supernatural agency want with a horse, or feel the need to pay for a perfectly unremarkable thirty-thaler gelding with such a precious and valuable commodity? – but the fact that he couldn’t make sense of it certainly didn’t mean that it didn’t make sense, only that he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. Later, he realised that he’d simply exchanged one insoluble problem for another, with a garnish of the supernatural to excuse him from having to analyse it rationally, and simply accepted; he was one of those people from whom things are taken and to whom things are given, not necessarily proportionately; a conduit for the remarkable and the excessive, himself unremarkable and lacking in any real substance, either for good or evil.

  You don’t bury your mother every day, so Telamon had treated herself: a new dress and shoes, two angels twenty from the best ladies’ outfitters in Moil, which was also the only ladies’ outfitters in Moil and the whole of the Eastern Mesoge. The dress was dark grey wool, covered her ankles and made her look like a granite outcrop. The shoes chafed at the heel, but only came in one size. Wool is far too hot to wear next to the skin in the Mesoge in midsummer, so she was going to be uncomfortable the whole time. Appropriate. Her mother would have liked that.

  She’d budgeted an angel forty for the stage from Moil to Heneca; it had been an angel forty for the last thirty years to her certain knowledge, and things just don’t change east of Moil, it’s impossible, like water flowing uphill. So she handed the money to the driver, who looked at her.

  “Where did you say you were going?”

  “Heneca Cross.”

  “That’s another ten stuivers.”

  She looked at him. “No it bloody isn’t,” she said. “Are you trying to be funny?”

  Unlikely; he didn’t come across as a humorous sort of man. “Angel fifty to Heneca Cross,” he said. “Angel forty’ll get you as far as Cordouli. You can walk from there if you like.”

  Between Cordouli and Heneca Cross stands the massive cloud-wreathed rampart of the Framea escarpment. In the old days before the war, painters and refined young ladies who did watercolours rode out to Heneca Top to paint the breathtaking vista of the Western plain sprawling away into the distance. On the other hand, what with the dress and the shoes she now had precisely three angels seven, out of which she had to find the cost of the funeral and her fare home. She did some mental arithmetic and found that if she didn’t eat for the next three days she could just afford the fare. She fished two five-stuivers out of the hem of her glove and handed them over.

  She wasn’t the only passenger in the stage. There was also an old man in a long gown, who smelled, and a stout, round-faced woman with short grey hair, who read aloud from a prayer book the whole way. When it got too dark to read, she recited from memory. She got bits wrong, but Telamon didn’t correct her.

  She was facing forward, so she didn’t get to see the amazing vista at Heneca Top. Instead, she got a fine view of the moors: a million acres of blackened heather-stubs, because they burn off the heather at midsummer, to keep the gorse in check. Beyond that was Eyren Common, a million acres of tree stumps slowly submerging into a tangle of ferns and briars, where they’d felled Eyren forest for charcoal, for the war. So, you see, some things do change in the Eastern Mesoge, though not necessarily for the better. Trees get cut down, and people die, and gradually the reasons for dragging back to this godforsaken place get fewer and less overwhelming, so that it begins to be possible to conceive of a day when one might not have to come back ever again—

  (“So you’re from the Mesoge,” a young man had said to her once. “Very flat there, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she’d replied, “except for the hills and the mountains.”)

  One thing that never changes; it’s three hours by stage from the Top to Heneca Cross, and the road goes straight through all the places she’d known when she was a little girl. A straight line, with her life on either side of it, like the things you don’t like to eat left on the side of your plate. It’s very much the sort of place where people don’t have what they need, so they use something else. There’s no slate and no clay, so they roof their houses with turf; the sheep clamber up onto the low eaves and clump about overhead all night, keeping you awake, and your big brother thinks it’s amusing to tell you that the clumping noise is dead men dancing on the roof, and you lie awake quivering. There’s no trees, so the fields are divided up with barriers of dry bramble and bracken wedged between rows of blackthorn stakes, for which the technical term is dead-hedging, and the only fuel is dried peat. There are no roads, no meadows, no woods, no inns, no villages, no chapels, no big houses of the rich and powerful. Instead, the people live in turf cabins in turf-walled enclosures, supposedly to protect their sheep from rustlers, though that hasn’t worked worth a damn in two thousand years. They make plain but exceptionally fine weapons in the Eastern Mesoge, and they catch passenger hawks, which sell for big money. Apart from that, it’s the last place God made.

  There’s no chapel at Heneca Cross, but the Father comes out from Segita once a month and holds services under the old thorn tree, so that’s where they bury people, in the only clay seam north of the Aiser. It’s convenient, because the stage stops there, and all the very many people who’ve left the area can come home when somebody dies, just briefly, just long enough to splash a bit of money about, and then go home. There’s a stone-built barn to store the bodies in, more or less out of the damp and nicely chilled by the knife-edged wind, two s
tuivers a day, until the grieving kinsfolk can get there, and the farmer’s wife lays on a sit-down meal for two stuivers a head or bread and cheese standing for three-farthings. It’s the closest thing in those parts to a business.

  “I came as soon as I could,” she told the farmer, who she hadn’t seen for twenty years. He hadn’t forgotten her. Like a bad penny, said the look on his face. She owed him twenty stuivers, plus an angel for the plot. You could buy a small valley of indifferent grazing for an angel, but it wouldn’t be under the thorn tree, so it wouldn’t be right. Right and wrong are absolute and definite in the Eastern Mesoge. No grey areas whatsoever.

  He showed her the plot he’d set aside. She frowned. “That’s not right,” she said.

  “That’s all there is. Take it or leave it.”

  “I don’t want that one. I want the one next to my sister.”

  The farmer looked at her. One patch of scrubby heather is pretty much like another, you’d have thought, but apparently not. “That’s reserved,” he said.

  “Is that right? How much to unreserve it?”

  “Sixty stuivers.”

  More mental arithmetic. She could walk down the hill to Cordouli, but that would only save ten stuivers. The farmer and his son charged twenty-five stuivers for digging a grave.

  “I’ll give you another twenty,” she said, “and you can lend me a shovel.”

  She’d never dug a grave before, but how hard can it be? It’s just a hole in the ground. The farmer was a kind man at heart, so he lent her a pick as well. Clearly he knew his own land. Eight inches of crumbly black topsoil, all roots and small flints, and then you were into the clay. The shovel blade wouldn’t bite, it turned on the fist-sized stones, and she hurt her ankle when her foot slid off with all her weight on it. So she swung the pick – how do you swing it properly without stabbing yourself in the back? She got the hang of it eventually, and each bite of the pick loosened up a palmful of clay crumbs, unless she hit a stone, in which case there were sparks and a jolt up the abused tendons of her forearms, and a burning in her lungs from the effort. Of course, the deeper down she went, the less room there was to swing the pick and manipulate the five-foot handle of the shovel. Before long she was squatting on her heels, scooping clay in her cupped hands on to the shovel blade, levering out stones with her fingernails. Her fringe was sodden with sweat, which trickled down into her eyes, salt water like tears, which she had so far neglected to shed. She wiped sweat off her forehead and smeared it on her cheeks and neck, to cool them. Hell of a way to save twenty-five stuivers, she thought; and then it occurred to her that there were probably a dozen men within walking distance who’d cheerfully have done the job for ten, because life in the Eastern Mesoge is hard (hard and treacherous and difficult and more stones than dirt) and ten stuivers is a lot of money, in context; and she’d moved away, had it easy in the soft south, never did a hand’s turn, didn’t know she was born. Her mother’s words, and she could hear her mother’s voice in her head saying them, and wouldn’t she have been angry and ashamed to see her daughter digging a grave with her own hands, just to save a penny or two, because she could afford all the fine clothes and the fancy shoes, but when it came to burying her own mother—

  “Telamon,” said a voice somewhere in the air above her. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  She wanted to laugh – because of the surprise, the incongruity, the very thought of him being here of all places (unimaginable, like her mother in silk underwear); and for sheer joy, because she hadn’t seen him for so long. She didn’t look up, and she kept her voice absolutely neutral. “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.”

  “You seem to be digging some sort of a hole.”

  She turned, looked up and located him; a silly, handsome face; a clever man doing an incredibly realistic impression of an idiot. Beyond any doubt the most distinguished stranger ever to visit Cordouli Hundred, though quite possibly nobody here had ever heard of him. Not very musical, the people in these parts. “Yes,” she said, dropping the pick. “Oida, what are you doing here?”

  “I happened to be in the neighbourhood.”

  Possibly the most absurd thing he’d ever said in a lifetime of spectacular inanities. “Doing what?”

  “Never you mind. Then I heard some people saying there’s this beautiful, rich, sophisticated city lady visiting at Heneca Cross, so I came by on the off chance it was you.”

  “Go to hell.”

  He didn’t seem to have heard her. “Why are you digging a hole?”

  “It’s a grave.”

  He was silent, long enough to say half a catechism. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Another pause. Then: “You need to go a bit deeper than that. Six feet is generally recommended.”

  “It’s not finished yet.”

  “Would you like some help?”

  She laughed out loud; it came out sounding a bit forced. “What, you, digging? That I’d like to see.”

  “I can dig.”

  “Really.”

  “When I was in the army we dug trenches. Miles of them.”

  “You were never in the army.”

  “Actually, I was. Never saw any action, thank God, but we dug about a million miles of latrines.”

  She shook her head. “You’ve never handled a shovel in your entire life.”

  He lowered himself carefully and sat on the edge of the grave, with his feet dangling. Boots by the best maker in Rasch, but carefully waxed, well looked after. “I take it there’s some reason why you’re doing this yourself.”

  “Local custom. The next of kin digs the grave. It’s a mark of respect.”

  “Ah.” He sounded uncomfortable, the way men do when the subject of grief comes up. “Next of kin.”

  “My mother.”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

  She looked down at the floor of the grave. Still two feet down to go, minimum. She realised she was too tired to stoop and get the pick, let alone swing it. “We weren’t close.”

  “Even so.”

  “She never liked me much.”

  “I find that hard to—”

  “She sold me.”

  “What?”

  After ten years of trying, she’d shocked him into empty-headedness. “When I was six years old. She sold me, to pay the rent.”

  As soon as she’d said it, she really, really wished she hadn’t. She’d never told anyone. It wasn’t the sort of thing you want known about yourself. But apparently she’d just said it, and to Oida, of all people. Curious. And she felt like she’d just drawn a knife over a kitchen-table game of shove-ha’penny.

  “But that’s illegal.”

  She laughed. “Oh, they call it indentured service,” she said briskly, “limited to five years and then you’re free again. Only the buyer charges you for your food and your clothes and the roof over your head, plus interest, of course, and by the time you’ve done your five years, what you owe’s going to take you another five years to work off, and so it keeps on going. No, she had the choice, sell me or my sister. She kept my sister.” She looked at him. He had that blank, thoughtful look. “This is not a nice place, in case you hadn’t realised. Do you know how much she sold me for?”

  “No, I really couldn’t say.”

  “Go on. Guess.”

  She’d offended him, or at the very least made him very uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure she wanted to, but now she’d drawn blood she couldn’t stop. “I can’t guess,” he said. “I don’t know about these things.”

  “Guess.”

  He shrugged, to signify that he was playing the game against his will. “Twenty angels.”

  “Fifty stuivers.”

  “Fifty—”

  Odd, she thought; it takes actual bare numbers to get right through to him, to make him truly understand. That’s so like a man; facts, not feelings. To get through to a man, you have to take the cover off and show him the gearwheels. “I kno
w,” she said. “The man who bought me was robbed. Anyway, that was my mother for you.”

  He was choosing his words carefully. “I can see, that’s not the sort of thing you can forgive easily.”

  “Oh, I forgave her,” she said quickly. “It’s all right, I told her, when they took me away, I understand. Actually, I loved her to bits. She—” She stopped. Her voice had been about to break, and that wouldn’t do at all. “Like I said, it’s the local custom. We’re very traditionally minded round here.”

  “You sure I can’t help?”

  It was like one of those games you play in your head on long coach journeys; consequences, improbable people doing improbable things. Imagine (let’s say) Oida, being a – think of something really wacky and offbeat – gravedigger. The imagination boggles. But it was very hot and she was very tired, and she had no money, and nobody else in the wide world was going to help her. And – now she came to think of it – the offer was extraordinary, incredible. “You’ll blister your hands. They’re too soft.”

  “And yours aren’t.”

  “Yours are softer than mine. Bet you.”

  “Show me.”

  She’d wrapped the sad scraps of her last linen handkerchief round the base of her left thumb; too little, too late. “Fine,” she said, with a weary sigh. “If you really want to come down here and dig a hole, be my guest.”

  He reached out his arm, and she realised he was offering to help her out. He caught her wrist and pulled, gently but effectively. He was stronger than he looked. Then he hopped down into the grave (like an acrobat; no, like a nimble clown) took the pick delicately, as though it was a flute or a clarinet, and swung it easily, using its own weight and balance. He worked quickly and efficiently, minimum effort and maximum effect. He’d done this before; someone had shown him how to do it well. Digging latrines in the army? For some reason she didn’t think so. She noted the way he edged himself into the corners, changing from swings to pecks in the confined space. Of course he was fresh and rested, and he was wearing stout, sensible boots and a light, tailored shirt that didn’t catch and snag and fight him every move he made. But he threw the earth up out on to the pile with a fluent, almost graceful sweep of the arms, and he didn’t seem to be getting tired. Damn the man, she thought. If he was a shoemaker, elves would break into his workshop in the small hours and do all his work for him.