by K. J. Parker
Now that there was nothing left to see, the crowd dissolved, like earth becoming mud under heavy rain. Copis edged the cart carefully through the mass of bodies.
‘You were staring,’ she explained. ‘One thing you must never do in a place like this is stare. You’ll see a lot worse than that while you’re here, I promise you.’
‘Sorry,’ Poldarn said. ‘It just seemed so pointless, that’s all. I mean, at their age wouldn’t it be simpler to wait a few years and see which one of them outlives the other?’
Copis laughed. ‘I suspect you’re a country boy,’ she replied. ‘Nobody in the city waits for anything if they can help it. Which is strange,’ she added, ‘since living in a city means you’re bound to spend a large slice of your life standing around in queues or waiting for the traffic to clear; you’d have thought patience would’ve become a survival trait by now. Right,’ she said, stopping the cart without warning, to the extreme disgust of the traffic behind her, ‘let’s try here.’
‘What are we going to do?’ Poldarn asked, as she jumped down and made the reins fast to a tethering-post. The carter who’d been following them squeezed his cart past between their wheels and the opposite pavement, his face bright red with rage as he yelled abuse at them. Copis didn’t seem to notice.
‘See if we can sell all this stuff, of course,’ she replied. ‘Pull down a couple of jars while I talk to the stallholder. Well, come on. We’re blocking the road.’
The stallholder turned out to be a small man, almost spherical, with a smooth, shiny bald head and a pointed nose, like a carrot. He was sorry, but he didn’t buy small quantities, no matter how cheap they might be. His regular order with the plantation agents was finely calculated to give him exactly the amount of stock in hand that he could be sure of getting rid of before it went green and started to sprout; anything extra he bought would be money thrown away. Copis pointed out that at the prices they were asking he could almost give it away, thereby attracting new customers to his stall and increasing his sales without hurting his margins. That suggestion made the stallholder very sad, because, as he pointed out, every bushel of cut-price flour he sold meant another bushel of full-price flour, which he’d already paid for, that he wouldn’t be able to get shot of; in effect, he’d be waging a price war against himself. Besides, he explained, he had a Guild charter and a quota; if he bought or sold more or less than what was written down on his licence and the Guild found out about it, that’d be twenty years of hard work out of the window. Not worth it for a dubious chance of making a few extra quarters. Sorry.
‘He meant it,’ Copis said, frowning, as she climbed back into the cart and pulled out, nearly causing a nasty accident. ‘I hadn’t realised the Guild had got this far. Bloody nuisance. Never mind,’ she added, ‘at least we won’t go short of things to eat for a while.’
‘What’s the Guild?’ Poldarn asked.
‘Long story,’ Copis replied, ducking to avoid a low-hanging sign. ‘Tell you later. Well, that solves the problem of which inn to stay at. The cheapest.’
Poldarn nodded. ‘We’ll have to ask someone,’ he said.
‘No need,’ Copis replied, pulling a face. ‘It’s the one thing everybody knows about Sansory.’
It was a pleasant relief to discover that he could read; the sign over the wide archway was black with soot and mould but he could still make out the words Charity and Diligence in big red letters against a faded gold-leaf background. ‘Used to be a religious order,’ Copis explained as they passed under the arch. ‘All the inns and brothels in these parts were religious houses once, only really changed when the monks started charging for board and lodging. I guess that’s the coach-house over there.’
Poldarn saw a huge shed in front of them, nearly twice the size of the ruined temple they’d slept in at Cric. Next to it was an even bigger shed; next to that, a massive square stone building, with fluted white columns and a flight of twelve broad, shallow marble steps leading up to a pair of bronze doors, still awe-inspiring despite a thick layer of verdigris. The steps themselves were nearly invisible for the huge number of people sitting on them, bunched up together like calves in a pen. They ranged from scruffy to bundles of rags, and mostly they sat still and quiet, staring at the ground or straight in front of them. In the doorway itself stood two very large men with folded arms and grim expressions on their faces. When one of the scruffy people got up and tried to push past them through the doorway, they grabbed him by his arms, lifted him off his feet and threw him down the steps like a bale of straw. He landed badly, his fall partly broken by a couple of the silent sitters who hadn’t got out of the way in time. There was a little bit of shrill cursing, which didn’t seem to bother the men in the doorway at all, and then things settled down again.
‘Typical Sansory,’ Copis said as they waited for someone to come and open the coach-house door. ‘They couldn’t pay their tab, so they’re slung out and the house keeps their tools and stuff. Without their tools, they can’t earn any money to pay off their tab and redeem their tools. So they sit and wait for something to happen. Like I told you, this is pretty much a place where you stop because you can’t go any further.’
The doors opened eventually, and two very silent, very efficient grooms unyoked the horses and led them away, while two others manhandled the cart into a stall in a long line that stretched the length of the shed. Another man, who’d kept perfectly still while the others were working, then handed them a little bone counter with a number on it – Copis explained that so many carts and wagons passed through the Charity every day that the stablemaster couldn’t be expected to remember them all, hence the little ticket with the stall number on it. There was a hole drilled at the top, through which Copis passed a piece of hemp cord she’d picked up off the floor (it was covered in the stuff). She tied the ends together, hung it round her neck and tucked it away out of sight. ‘Lose the ticket, lose the cart,’ she said. ‘It’s that kind of place. Now you can see why I’d have preferred something a bit less basic.’
‘What about our things?’ Poldarn asked, thinking of the big lump of gold hidden by the tailgate. ‘The fireworks and all the rest of our stuff. Do you think they’ll be safe there?’
Copis grinned. ‘Guaranteed,’ she replied. ‘Tradition of the house: no fighting, no stealing, except by order of the management. I don’t know if you noticed the two porters on the main door; it’s a fair bet there’s at least a dozen more like them inside, and as many again in the staff barracks waiting for their shift. Free company men, probably; it’s one of the usual careers for when you’ve had enough of the road.’
Getting up the steps past the silent sitters looked like it would be next to impossible; but Copis exhibited a thoroughly efficient technique that basically consisted of treading hard on the hands and ankles of anybody who didn’t shift out of the way, and Poldarn followed nervously in her wake. The owners of the squashed fingers and joints swore at them, but didn’t bother to look up; instead, they mumbled their curses into the air, like sleepy monks saying their responses.
The porters at the main door looked at them closely but let them pass (the man behind them wasn’t so lucky, and ended up on his back on the stairs) and they found themselves in an enormous hallway. The ceiling was so high that Poldarn had to lean his head back as far as it would go in order to see the paintings, still startlingly beautiful despite the effects of decades of smoke and grime on their colours and gold leaf. The mosaics on the walls were even finer, though only a few patches were still discernible. He found that he couldn’t afford to stand gawping for long, however. There were too many people in the hallway, moving too fast. For her part, Copis barged her way through to a trestle table set up in the far left corner; she came back some time later with two more bone tickets, one of which she handed to him.
‘These aren’t quite so precious,’ she said. ‘We have to show them to get food or a place to sleep in the dormitory. Still, if you lose yours you’ll end up outside with the rest o
f the poor sad people, because that’s the last of our money. We’d better give some thought to how we’re going to get some more.’
Again he thought about the lump of gold, and probably would have mentioned it if she’d stayed put long enough to let him. Instead she started pushing and slithering her way to the door. ‘To be honest with you,’ she explained, when they were back in the fresh air again, ‘I don’t like it much in there. A bit too crowded, and I’m not desperately keen on the smell. Let’s go and find the junk market, see if we can get something for your predecessor’s boots.’
The fifth boot stall they tried in the junk market was buying, and they came away with three and a half quarters, a quarter more than Copis had been expecting. ‘Which means he figures he can get five,’ she pointed out, as they turned sideways to squeeze through a narrow gap between two barrows. ‘Wonder why rubbish like that’s going so dear. Panic, probably; because of what happened to Josequin. People get scared, prices go up. Fact of life.’
There was something about the goods for sale in the junk market that Poldarn found familiar, though he couldn’t quite work out what it was. It was only when they had to stand and wait beside a clothing stall while a wide cart went by and he saw a big brown stain around a hole in a tunic that he realised where all the stuff came from.
‘That’s right,’ Copis confirmed, when he asked her. ‘It’s one of the biggest businesses in town. Someone told me once that three-quarters of all the stuff stripped off bodies on battlefields ends up in Sansory market sooner or later. It’s because so many of the free companies have their headquarters here, and all the others have at least a recruiting office or a dormitory. They’re all in the upper town, of course; they wouldn’t be seen dead down here in the Sump.’
‘Pity,’ Poldarn said. ‘If only I’d known, we could have made some money here.’
‘What do you mean?’
He remembered; he hadn’t told her about the two dozen dead men he’d woken up with. Hadn’t got round to it, and it was too late now. ‘Oh, I was just thinking about those horsemen we ran into,’ he said.
‘True. But at the time we weren’t planning on coming here. And used military equipment isn’t the safest thing in the world to carry around with you, especially if you’ve come by it the hard way, like we did.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Well,’ he added, stopping and looking about him, ‘at least nobody’s burned it down yet. Makes a pleasant change as far as I’m concerned.’
The stalls were colourful, if nothing else, and (as Copis was at pains to point out) you’d be unlikely to see anything like them anywhere else in the empire. There was a whole stall full of helmets, for instance, well over half of them crushed, cut or punctured in some way; the ones on the back shelves had been straightened, beaten out and patched, while the rest were presumably as the gleaners had found them. There were several stalls selling nothing but loose links for mailshirts, and behind them two or more old women were slowly dismantling shirts that were too badly damaged to be worth repairing. One old woman would cut the rivets with a big pair of shears, while another opened out the rings with two pairs of pinchers and dropped them in a copper basin by her feet. You could have had your choice of half-pairs of marching boots; three stalls sold only left boots, whereas four sold only right. There were belt stalls, buckle stalls, tunic, cloak and trouser stalls, button stalls, stalls selling plates, pots, pans and cauldrons, stalls with neat trays of horn buttons, bone and steel needles, sharpening stones and belt loops for carrying them in; stalls selling knapsacks, water bottles, blankets and tents. There were racks of tools for blacksmiths, armourers, farriers, carpenters and a host of other trades; also spades, shovels, picks and even a few wheelbarrows; folding chairs, tables and beds. It was hard to think of anything that wasn’t there, in some shape or form, right down to fur-lined slippers, books and musical instruments, though their comparative rarity suggested that they’d come from the bodies of senior officers rather than ordinary footsloggers.
‘Seen enough yet?’ Copis asked, trying to detach him from a display of thick woollen socks. ‘This lot gives me the creeps, if you must know.’
Poldarn shrugged. ‘I was just looking around,’ he said. ‘After all, if I see something I remember, like a uniform I may have worn once, or some distinctive-looking kit from the bodies of people I used to fight against, it might set the ball rolling and help me remember the rest.’
She clicked her tongue. ‘You’re not still on about that, are you?’ she said wearily. ‘Look, if I were you I’d let it go. After all,’ she added, lowering her voice, ‘there’s a chance that if it does all come flooding back, it’ll be stuff you really don’t want to know. Or me, for that matter. Leave it alone, is my advice.’
Before Poldarn had a chance to state his views on the matter, Copis looked up at the sky and announced that they’d better be getting back if they didn’t want to miss dinner. As if to reinforce her point, she added that it’d be quicker if they took a short cut through the scrap market. ‘This way,’ she said firmly and walked away quickly, so that he had to run a few steps in order to keep up.
The scrap market filled up a long, quite narrow alley between the back of the Faith and Hope (formerly the prebendary temple) and the outer wall of the garden of one of the big commercial houses. There were stalls on both sides, leaving only just enough room for two files of pedestrians, or one cart; it seemed a profoundly illogical place in which to buy and sell large quantities of bulk metal, but Poldarn was quickly learning that logic had very little to do with the design or growth of cities. Here, Copis explained as they shoved and weaved their way through, was where all the busted and mangled metalwork left lying about on battlefields ended up, the stuff that was only fit for cutting up or the melt.
The explanation wasn’t really necessary; the stock in trade crowded round him as he passed – piles of crushed and mangled breastplates, with rust clotting on the sharp edges of rips and punctures, crates and barrels of sword blades broken at the forte or sheared at the tang, spearheads snapped off at the top of the socket, arrowheads with their points curled in like seashells, plackets and beavers and gorgets twisted into bizarre shapes, coats of scales and coats of plates with the memory of the killing wound frozen in the distortion of the metal, where other metal had passed through and been drawn out. Each ruined artefact was as eloquent as a witness in a trial, recording its own failure – a bardische cracked along a flaw, exposing the white, gritty grain; a helmet torn apart along a welded seam; an overtempered spearhead bent double; links of a mailshirt whose rivets had pulled through the eyes under the force of an axe cut. It was like some kind of eternal damnation of metal, where each piece was condemned to stay for ever in the image of that last moment of inadequacy, the point at which it had betrayed its owner or simply given up trying to hold the shape its maker had given it. In every tear, puncture, fracture and distortion was a memory of its own death – was that how the souls of evil men are punished, Poldarn thought idly, by being frozen for all time in the moment of agonised transition? He hoped not, since he had no idea what he’d done and therefore couldn’t repent and seek salvation, and he didn’t want to end up on a stall in some crowded market of scrapped souls.
‘What the hell do people want with all this junk?’ he asked.
Copis grinned. ‘It may look like junk to you, but it’s prettier than a field of buttercups to some people. Just think of that town we passed through, where they’d cut down all the trees for charcoal. It costs a small fortune to make good iron, and as much again to turn it into steel, and here’s all the raw material you could ever want, all ready to be heated up and bashed into any shape you like, none of that tedious mucking about with smelting and rolling and hammering into blooms. It’s all good stuff, this,’ she went on, gesturing vaguely at the heaps and piles. ‘They don’t make armour and weapons out of any old rubbish. Where else could you get best oil-hardening steel at twenty quarters a hundredweight?’ She realised that Poldarn w
as looking at her oddly. ‘I had a regular who was in the scrap trade,’ she explained. ‘Really loved his work, I guess, he’d go on for hours about what he called the poetry of it all – you know, taking something that was all busted up and finished with and turning it into something new and useful. I’ve got to admit, the idea of that appealed to me in a funny sort of a way. I mean, if you’ve got to have wars, it’s nice that someone can get something useful out of it at the end.’
Poldarn nodded gravely. ‘It’s just a shame they can’t do the same sort of thing with all the dead bodies,’ he said.
‘Don’t you believe it.’ Copis shook her head. ‘There’s bone-meal, and compost; and they say the ash from funeral pyres makes wonderful lye, for soap and perfumes and stuff. I’ve never heard of anybody making a business out of it, but then, it’s not the sort of thing you’d admit to, not if you didn’t want to turn off all your potential customers. I mean, one block of soap looks pretty much like another; who knows or cares where it came from?’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Copis admitted. ‘Probably. It was the look on your face. I had no idea you were so squeamish.’
‘Am I?’
‘Apparently. My guess is that in your previous life you were some kind of clerk, spent your life perched on a stool copying out letters and yelling the place down if you nicked your finger when you sharpened your pen.’
He looked seriously at her. ‘Do you think that’s a possibility?’
‘Anything is possible, but that would be pretty low down the list.’
The evening meal at the Charity and Diligence consisted of boiled leeks and red cabbage in a thin grey gravy, with a slab of coarse barley bread the size of a roof slate and a wedge of hard white cheese. ‘Nourishing,’ Copis remarked with her mouth full, ‘wholesome, and tastes disgusting. Welcome to the city.’