Savages

by K. J. Parker

  The work itself was hard but not too disagreeable. When he’d reported to the deputy chief supervisor on his first morning, he’d been asked what he could do. Fortuitously, while he’d been waiting to be seen, he’d witnessed a furious argument between a man and one of the other supervisors, which ended with the supervisor calling for someone to escort the quarrelsome man off the site. He’d gathered that the quarrelsome man was a striker’s mate on the trip, whatever that meant.

  “Well,” he had said, therefore, “a bit of everything, really. But last place I was at, I was a striker’s mate on the trip.”

  He’d said the right thing; the deputy chief stared at him, then laughed. “That’s all right,” he said. “Where did you say you were at?”

  “United Forge,” Raffen replied, hoping there wasn’t such a firm. “It was just a small outfit, in Mondhem.”

  “Never heard of it,” the deputy chief said. “Still, I was never in Mondhem. Can’t have been that small if it had a trip.”

  “We did specialist work,” Raffen replied. “Government stuff.”

  Better still. It turned out that a trip was a trip hammer, a huge rectangular block of solid iron mounted on a swinging arm operated by a cam off a flywheel driven by an overshot water wheel. The striker’s mate’s job was to position a piece of cherry-red-hot steel on the anvil while the block pounded it into the required shape. You held the steel in long tongs, and there were various tools that slotted into a square hole on the back of the anvil—swedges, fullers, dies—that formed the metal into specific shapes, such as round or square rods, rectangular bars and so on. Mostly, though, the trip was used to beat rough bars of newly smelted iron into thin flat sheets, for making plate armour. He’d stood and watched for a few minutes, on the pretext of seeing how they did things differently from what he’d been used to at United Forge, until he got the general idea. Actually, it wasn’t so bad. You had to concentrate on what you were doing, but otherwise it was pretty straightforward—

  “You’re a good worker,” the deputy chief said, when he came off his first shift. “I’m surprised.”

  “Oh,” Raffen said. His throat was bone dry. The rest of him was soaking wet with sweat. “Why’s that?”

  “Well,” said the deputy chief, “You don’t look like a forge hand. I’d have said you’d never been in a hot-work shop in your life before.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  The deputy chief smiled. “Your arms,” he said, “backs of your hands. No burn marks.” He rolled up his own sleeve; his hand and arm were pitted with dozens of small pink spots and weals. “I said to myself, he’s never been in no forge. Still, the big boss man sent you here, so I had to give you a shout.”

  “Ah.” Raffen smiled. “Where I come from, we wear big leather gloves, cuffs right down to here. Keeps the clinker off.”

  “In Mondhem?”

  “Back home,” Raffen replied, “up north. I brought my gloves down south with me, but I lost them when we left Mondhem. Feels strange working without them, but I expect I’ll get used to it.”

  He’d done so well in his first week on the sheet-iron trip that they’d moved him to doing profiles—fiddly, delicate work, making thin rods and bars with splayed or scrolled ends. He found he was very good at it, which was just as well, since he was still very unpopular with the other men. Then one day there was an accident. The striker, who controlled the operation of the machine, got his arm caught in the linkages. He’d been careless for a split second, turning his head to listen to someone shouting something at him; a moment later there was a messy red pulp where his right arm had been, and an hour after that he was dead. The trouble was, there were no other strikers experienced enough to run the profiling trip; it meant promotion and more money, but nobody wanted to do it, because of the danger. A profiles striker, the deputy chief explained when Raffen asked, had to have a really light touch; he ought to be able to crack the shell of a boiled egg without squashing it. Raffen could see his point. The striker’s mate on profiling had to get in very close to the work sometimes. He’d always trusted the old striker implicitly, because he had to, but to begin with he’d been painfully aware that a false move on the striker’s part would cost him a hand or an arm.

  “I was a striker back in Mondhem for a while,” he said. “Of course, it was a smaller trip we had back there, only three tons. But we did a lot of small work.”

  The deputy chief gave him an odd look. “I’ve been asking some of the other Mondhem lads,” he said. “None of them ever heard of United Forge. That was where you said you were, right?”

  “Like I said, we did government stuff,” Raffen replied. “Restricted, a lot of it. We sort of kept ourselves to ourselves.”

  So they powered up the profiling trip, and Raffen stood for a moment or so figuring out the controls. The big lever was a clutch, which connected or disconnected the hammer from the drive train. The foot plate governed the speed of the swinging arm, which in turn controlled the force of the blow; you stood on it hard for a full strike, or nudged it gently for a little tap. Nothing to it, really.

  They heated up a bar and laid it on the anvil, and he played around for a while, getting the feel of the machine. By the time the bar had cooled to dark red he reckoned he’d got the hang of it. So, apparently, did the deputy chief. “You’re quite right,” he said, “you’re a striker. All right, you carry on.” He gave Raffen another of those odd looks and added, “Just be a bit bloody careful, will you? That’s my men’s hands and arms under that bloody block.”

  So he concentrated; for four days he worked with a cricked neck and a constant headache, and then it wasn’t so bad. The striker’s mate who worked with him was an old man, from the City rather than Mondhem; he had a house of his own at the bottom of Sharrowgate, a wife and four children, all grown up and gone. He had thin wrists and huge hands, and he was very good indeed at his job. For the first five days or so they hardly spoke to each other; the old man was fairly deaf after a lifetime on the trip, though he always carefully stuffed his ears with fresh bog-cotton at the start of each shift, and it was hard enough to make yourself heard at the best of times. On the sixth day, when they were resting between morning and afternoon shifts (there was always a pause about noon, to give the firemen a chance to pull out the fused clinker from the fire, damp down and relay) the old man sat down next to him and said, “I’m Geuta. Who’re you?”

  “Raffen.” The old man shook his head, then turned so his left ear was facing. “Raffen,” he repeated, a little louder.

  “Offcomer.”

  Raffen nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Quick learner,” Geuta said, “I’ll say that for you. Why’d you make out you were a striker, when you never done it before?”

  Raffen was quiet for a moment or two. Geuta didn’t seem in a hurry for an answer. He thought about it for a while, then said, “I reckoned I could do the job, and it’s better money. How did you know?”

  “Been working with strikers forty year. You’re right handed, but you use your left foot. But when you started, you used your right foot.”

  “Ah.” Raffen nodded. “Yes, I found I’ve got more control that way. Don’t know why, but I do.”

  “It’s because you need your right foot, your master foot, to keep your balance. Balance is the most important thing, see. If you’re off balance, you haven’t got the fine touch.”

  “That figures,” Raffen said.

  “You got good balance. I used to have, but when I got deaf I lost it, so I had to quit to striking and do this job instead. You want to take care of your ears, boy, or you won’t be a striker very long.”

  “Thanks.”

  Geuta fished in his pocket and took out a big, flat biscuit, wrapped in clean cloth. He broke it neatly down the middle and gave Raffen one half. It was the first time anyone had shared anything with him. The biscuit was rock hard and tasted of compressed dust. “My old lady bakes ’em,” Geuta said. “Keeps you on your feet, afternoon s
hift.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So,” Geuta said, “what do you do really? Where you come from?”

  “Stockman,” Raffen said. “But that was a long time ago.”

  “Farm boy, huh?”

  “We worked for a man called Sighvat.” Now where had that name come from? “He had a big spread and a lot of livestock, so he had a dozen stockmen. But times got bad, so I had to go. So I came down here, to Mondhem.”

  “You were never in Mondhem,” Geuta said. “I asked the lads. No offcomers in Mondhem.”

  Raffen grinned. “I thought it’d sound better,” he said. “I guessed the deputy chief would know if I said I’d been working here, he’d have asked me where I was before, and I don’t know any of the places in the City.”

  “You’re new to forge work,” Geuta said. “But you learned bloody quick. You’re all right. Better than most I worked with. Careful.”

  “I try to be.”

  “That’s good. How long you been in the City?”

  Raffen shrugged. “A few months.”

  “And before that you were a farm hand?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You must be pretty smart, then, if you can learn so fast.”

  Raffen laughed. “Not really,” he said. “On the farm you have to pick things up quickly, or figure them out for yourself. There’s always too much to do and no time to do it in.”

  “They all like you back where you come from, then?”

  “Pretty much. I was nobody special.” He smiled. “I like it here. It’s a sight better than some places I’ve been.”

  Two days later there was a new striker’s mate. He was from Mondhem, perfectly competent. At midday, Raffen asked him, “Where’s Geuta?”

  “Who?”

  “The man who had your job.”

  “Oh, him.” The new man looked surprised. “Hadn’t you heard?”

  Geuta had been murdered. They found his body a hundred yards from his home. His skull had been crushed from behind and his pocket had been emptied. The murderers, everyone said, were almost certainly offcomers, the northerners who’d been turned out of Westponds and sent home. The few that had stayed in the City had all turned to crime; must have done, since there were no jobs for them now, so how were they feeding themselves? You want to watch out, the new man concluded; everyone knows you worked with him, so maybe you knew where he lived, or followed him home.

  Raffen shook his head. “I’m not a thief,” he said.

  “Didn’t say you were. But that’s what people are saying. Thought you ought to know.”

  When the afternoon shift ended, Raffen didn’t go back to the bunkhouse. Instead, he went out through the foundry gate, found a quiet alley, opened the cloth bag he kept his money in and tried to guess how much there was. You couldn’t count all those tiny saucer-shaped scraps of copper foil, so you made your best estimate based on weight. Well over two thousand trachy; probably nearer three.

  He had no idea where to go; but that hadn’t hindered him in the forest, so he made his best guess and headed east, towards the Perfect Square. When he got to the good neighbourhoods, where they lit the streets at night with oil-lamps on high posts, he went in to a tavern and asked directions. They looked doubtfully at him—what would someone like you be wanting a money-changer for?—but told him; out of here, first right, second left, go on fifty yards, sign of the Golden Locust, you can’t miss it.

  The man at the Golden Locust was young, well-dressed and smiling as he talked to an elderly customer. On the table he sat behind were twenty or so long, narrow wooden boxes, all full of gold coins. Three very strange-looking men stood motionless behind him; they wore beautiful silk clothes under gilded chain-mail, and held drawn swords. Raffen guessed they were either genuine Aram Cosseilhatz or locals dressed up to look like them.

  The smiling man was in no hurry; but neither was Raffen, who leaned against the doorpost and waited patiently. Eventually the elderly man picked up a cloth bag—heavy, by the way it dragged his hand down when he first lifted it—and left the shop; Raffen politely stood aside to let him pass. Apparently he was invisible, but he didn’t mind that.

  “Yes?” said the smiling man, who’d stopped smiling.

  “I want to change some money.”

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Trachy,” Raffen replied. “I’d like to change them for gold.”

  The man looked at him. “The exchange rate,” he said, “is twenty-six thousand seven hundred trachy to the solidus. How many have you got?”

  Raffen frowned. “About three thousand.”

  “Sorry, can’t help you,” the man said briskly. “Thanks for calling in.”

  Raffen stayed where he was. “Isn’t there anything smaller than a solidus?”

  “No.” The man’s lips twitched at the edges. “There’s your one-solidus, your five and your ten. That’s current Imperial, at seven eight five fine. Also there’s your one, two and five solidi obsolete Imperial heavy, at nine two five fine, obviously they’re worth more because there’s more gold in them. There’s foreign stuff, of course, like your Vesani tremissis, twenty to the solidus, your Mezentine scudi, six to the solidus, your Sashan mancus, they’re not legal tender now, goes without saying, but as bullion two of them’ll buy you three solidi, your Perimadeian angel, three to the solidus, your Scherian angel, five to the solidus, and those stonking great big Scherian cartwheel jobs, which we don’t handle. All out of your price-range, I’m afraid. Sorry.”

  “I see,” Raffen said. “So what can I do with—?”

  “Spend it,” the man said with a shrug. “Get yourself a good meal and a girl and lots and lots of beer, that’s what copper money’s for. Strictly for the poor folks. I only deal in hard currency here. Goodbye.”

  The brightly-coloured guards hadn’t moved, but they appeared to have noticed him. “Thank you,” Raffen said, and left.

  It was good advice, but he didn’t feel like taking it. Instead, he found a small covered portico, out of the way and deserted apart from a couple of old men, sound asleep and snoring under frayed grain sacks. He rolled up his coat for a pillow and closed his eyes. When he woke up in the morning, the old men had gone, and so had his money and his shoes.

  General Calojan at his side, the emperor did public penance for the flooding of Westponds. Starting at Florian’s Column, he walked to the Golden Spire, barefoot and dressed in a novice monk’s habit, stopping every ten yards to bow towards the spire and repeat the Shorter Contrition. He was met on the temple steps by the members of the regency council, dressed in white and linked together by a chain stapled to the slaves’ collars they wore round their necks. There, in front of an estimated fifty thousand people, Sechimer formally forgave them; the chains were struck off, the rivets cut and the collars removed. Archdeacon Vorsiger then conducted them inside the temple, where he celebrated the Conditional Office. When it was over, Sechimer returned to the palace in a plain military chaise, escorted by Calojan and forty mounted guardsmen. The council went out the back way, each making his own way quietly home.

  “Well?” she said.

  Aimeric sank down in a chair and threw a heavy metal band on the floor. “Bloody thing didn’t half chafe my neck,” he said. “You’d have thought they could’ve put in a little bit of discreet padding.”

  Orsella picked it up. “Silver,” she said. “About nine two five fine.”

  “Shinier,” Aimeric said, with a grin. “Got to be shiny so everyone in the crowd could see it.”

  “But you get to keep it.”

  Aimeric shrugged. “The point wasn’t specifically addressed,” he said. “Anyway, it’s over and done with and we’re officially forgiven. Now maybe we can get on with business.”

  She perched on the arm of the chair and kissed him. She took her time over it. If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.

  “And now I’d like to see this manuscript,” she said.

  He breathed in deeply.
“We can’t,” he said. “It’s in the Old Library at the Studium. You need a letter from a don or a priest.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said sweetly. “You’re a member of the council, one of the most important men in the empire. Well, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but—” He paused and frowned. “Good point,” he said. “Let’s go now.”

  In the event there was no trouble at all. The senior clerk recognised Aimeric from the victory celebrations and sent a novice running to fetch the key. “We won’t be long,” Aimeric told him. “If you could just show us where it’s kept, we won’t keep you.”

  It wasn’t as simple as that, not by a long way. From the porter’s lodge they walked across the Great Yard to the Inner Court, enclosed by crenelated walls that a dozen men could have held against an army. Once through the massive bronze gates of the Court, they made their way through the Deacon’s Garden, with its unique collection of flowering trees and shrubs from every corner of the empire, until they reached the Solar, popularly known as the Eye of God; a ten-storey circular tower surmounted by a copper dome. The Old Library occupied the whole of the top floor. You got up there by way of a tiny corkscrew stair—there were bells you rang, to warn people not to come down when you were coming up, because there was no way two human beings could pass on those stairs—which brought you to a tiny landing, basically just a narrow step a bird could perch on if it was careful, facing a massive iron door. There were two keys to this door; the senior clerk had one, the emperor had the other. It made a sound like a child screaming as it turned in the lock.