The Company

by K. J. Parker

  Kunessin scowled at him. “There isn’t time to fiddle about playing at carpentry,” he said. “We want to get the stuff ashore today.”

  “We’ve got sawn lumber on the ship,” Alces pointed out. “A couple of boatloads of those long inch planks . . .”

  “They’re stuck in behind the flour barrels,” Kudei said. “We’d have to shift them, and the pigs, before we could get to the planks.”

  Aidi was up on the jetty, sitting on his heels. “Muri’s right,” he said. “We can rip up this section here and lay the boards lengthways. If we get the flour and the pigs off the ship and on the jetty, we can get the planks, cover over this long gap here, and then we’ll be fine. It’s a pity we didn’t think to bring any withy hurdles. We could’ve laid them flat and used them as a temporary floor.”

  Kunessin was still studying the map. “There’s another place here, where this offshoot of the river comes out, sort of a small estuary,” he said. “That’s up the coast, so we should be able to get there without waiting for the wind.”

  “It’s all right,” Aidi called back. “I told you, we can use the jetty. And then we won’t have to lug all the stuff overland. Right, we’ll need the long crowbars and a couple of sledgehammers, and a keg of the four-inch nails’d come in handy.”

  Kudei pulled his collar a little tighter around his neck. “Even if we can get the ship round to that estuary,” he said, “there wouldn’t be enough time to get unloaded before sunset. So, we might as well take our time and get everything straight, instead of rushing.”

  “Teuche?” Alces said.

  Kunessin folded up the map. “You win,” he said. “But we don’t want to fool round getting out the planks. Get some axes and cut down that stand of birch poles there. We can lay them across the gaps and cover them in matting.”

  Alces and Kudei volunteered to take the boat back to the ship and get the tools. Muri was already busy pulling up planks with his bare hands. Aidi came down off the jetty and stood next to Kunessin, glancing round. “Let’s take a look at these buildings,” he said. “See if there’s any with their roofs still on.”

  Kunessin hesitated, then shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “It’ll be a while before they’re back with the boat.”

  They walked together up the dune. At the top, they stopped and looked down. They saw a dozen long, rectangular houses, all but one roofless, their rafters bare like the picked-over bones of a chicken carcass. The exception was messily thatched with loose bundles of green rushes, tied with—

  “Flag cord,” Aidi said.

  “Odd,” Kunessin said; but Aidi was right. After so many years in the service, Kunessin could recognise it a hundred yards away. He also noticed that it was still white. Why would anybody use inch-thick soft woven cotton rope for tying up bundles of improvised thatch? Because - the only possible explanation - there wasn’t anything else.

  Aidi started off down the slope, and Kunessin hurried to keep up with him. It was only when they were quite close to the thatched building that he saw the thin stream of smoke drifting from a hole in the roof.

  “Better go and see who it is,” Aidi said quietly. Kunessin watched him stoop and pick up a two-foot length of broken paling. He didn’t comment.

  The door was grey planks, warped with the damp; to judge from the scrape it had made in the dirt, it hadn’t shut properly for some time. Aidi opened it briskly, with his boot, and lunged inside.

  There were two men, sitting on chairs on either side of a brazier. They jumped up as Aidi burst in. They were wearing the sad remains of regulation greatcoats, and home-made scarves of sacking.

  “Hello?” one of them said. The other frowned, then said, “Are you the relief ship?”

  Aidi had taken guard: sideways on, left shoulder forward, the length of paling in his right hand. Old habits. “Who are you?” Kunessin said.

  The shorter of the two men stood a little straighter. “Lieutenant Aili Thraso,” he said, “and this is Lieutenant Noi De’Pasi. You’re from the ship.”

  Kunessin took a step forward, leaving Aidi where he was. “What are you two doing here?” he said.

  Thraso frowned at him. “You’re not from the supply ship,” he said.

  “No.” Kunessin’s scowl deepened. “Are you two some sort of . . .” He paused. “Garrison?”

  “Look,” Thraso said, and his voice was high, almost squeaky, “I don’t know who you two are, but this is a military post, strictly off limits to civilians, so I’m going to have to ask you to leave. If you need water—”

  “My name is General Teuche Kunessin.” He tried to make it sound impressive, but he felt faintly ridiculous. They’d heard the word “general” clearly enough, though. “I’m here to take charge of this facility. I’m sorry,” he added, softening his voice a little, “I wasn’t aware we had anybody stationed here.”

  “We’ve been here eight months,” the other one - De’Pasi, Teuche remembered - said quickly. “Waiting for the relief ship to take us off. We were starting to think they’d forgotten about us.”

  “You aren’t supposed to be here,” Kunessin said. “According to the file, this base has been abandoned for five years.”

  The two men looked at each other. “We’ve been here two years,” Thraso said. “We had two companies to start with; then the rest got orders and left, and we were told to stay behind till the relief came. It was only supposed to be six weeks, and that was eight months ago. Fortunately there’s plenty of supplies - food, anyhow,” he added. “But we were starting to wonder.”

  “That’s the army for you.” Aidi came forward, dumped the broken paling in the brazier, and smiled. “Sorry to break it to you this way, Lieutenant, but it looks like they forgot about you. Just as well we showed up, or . . .” He shrugged. “Never mind,” he said brightly. “Think of all that back pay you’ve got coming.”

  “Forgot about us?” Thraso looked as though his mother had just spat in his face. “No, that’s not possible. We had our orders . . ”

  “I’ve seen the file,” Kunessin said gently. “There’s nothing in it about any garrison. This island isn’t even under military jurisdiction any more.”

  Thraso opened his mouth; then the realisation that he was addressing a senior officer hit him like a falling tree, and he shut it again. But De’Pasi said, “With respect, sir, can we see something in writing? Only . . .”

  Kunessin smiled. “You’ve got to follow the chain of command. Well done.” He reached into his inside pocket and took out a piece of lengthways-folded parchment. “Military conveyance,” he said, passing it over. De’Pasi took it as though God had just pulled a star out of the sky and handed it to him. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with military property law,” Kunessin went on. “The language is a bit abstruse.”

  “My father’s a lawyer, sir,” De’Pasi replied. “May I?”

  Kunessin nodded, as De’Pasi unfolded the paper. “Basically, the government’s transferred legal ownership of Sphoe to myself and my four fellow trustees, for the purpose of setting up a colony. It’s part of an initiative to strengthen the outlying stations by establishing self-supporting settlements. That big red blob at the end is the seal of the adjutant general’s office.”

  De’Pasi blinked and handed it back, as if afraid he might drop and break it. “So what are our orders?” he asked.

  Kunessin smiled. “Our ship’s going back to Faralia once we’ve unloaded our gear,” he said. “If I were you, I’d hitch a ride, make your way overland to Seautou and report to brigade headquarters there. Do be sure to chase up your back pay, as Major Proiapsen said just now. While you’re waiting, you might see if you can make yourselves useful with getting the cargo ashore.”

  De’Pasi nodded, and Thraso actually saluted; it took Kunessin a moment to remember how to salute back. “Before you go,” he added, “you’d better show us where the rest of your stores are. You’ll need me to sign them off.”

  When they’d gone, Aidi took a long stride, putt
ing him a few inches from Kunessin’s face. “What the hell was all that about?” he said quietly.

  Kunessin shrugged but didn’t move. “All perfectly true.”

  “That document.” Aidi held out his hand for it. “You didn’t just happen to have it in your pocket. You thought there might be someone here.”

  “It was a remote possibility, yes.” Kunessin looked past him at the wall. “I ordered the recall of the garrison, but it’s standard procedure to leave a couple of junior officers to hand over to the relief. I countermanded it, but there was always a chance the countermand wouldn’t filter through the system.”

  “Teuche.” Aidi lowered his voice even further. “You stole an island.”

  “No I did not.” Kunessin took a step away from him. “It’s a perfectly genuine document recording a perfectly legitimate transfer. There really is a civilian colonies initiative. I set it up myself. I had the transfer approved by the proper committee, who authorised the use of the seal. All honest and above board. All right?”

  Aidi was silent for a moment or so; then he laughed. “This committee,” he said. “Any real people on it?”

  “All of them were real,” Kunessin replied. “There was someone from Establishments, two men from the adjutant’s department, a lawyer, a senile old fool from Supply, and me. Mind you,” he added mildly, “the transfer they approved isn’t quite the same as the one you’re holding, not actually word for word. But it matches the file copy exactly, so who the hell’s ever to know?”

  Aidi made a curious roaring noise that had something in common with laughter. “I thought so,” he said. “You stole an island.”

  “Nobody wanted it,” Kunessin said mildly. “They were glad to sign it off the books and save the cost of maintaining a garrison. It’s not as if it’s worth anything to anybody but us.”

  “I’ll say this for you, Teuche,” Aidi said. “You’re not cheap. Other people help themselves to penknives and inkwells; if they’re feeling really daring, they might liberate a keg of nails or a few lengths of timber. You steal bits of geography.”

  “I earned it,” he snapped, and Aidi took a step back. “We all did. So I got it, for us. It’s no big deal,” he added soothingly. “Command couldn’t care less. You know the way things work.”

  Aidi didn’t reply, and Kunessin couldn’t help thinking of a boisterous puppy growled at and cowed by a senior dog. He decided not to think about the implications of the comparison. “We’d better be getting back,” he said, “Kudei and Fly should have brought the tools by now.”

  Aidi nodded but didn’t say anything; he always tended to go quiet when he was upset about something. Too bad, Kunessin told himself. But Aidi had always been scrupulous about money. If they bought a tray of cakes or a keg of beer, Aidi would be the one who worked out what everybody owed, exact to the last farthing. It was a curious, infuriating nuance of his character. He’d cheerfully burn down a farmhouse just so the smoke would cover his movements from the enemy, but if he took a chicken, he’d leave the money to pay for it. Kunessin had always wondered why Aidi hadn’t volunteered to be the company’s prize agent. Just as well, of course, that he hadn’t.

  Just to be on the safe side, as they walked back to the jetty he said: “About all that stuff. Were you thinking of telling the others what I just told you?”

  Aidi looked blankly at him. “I hadn’t thought about it,” he said. “Why, don’t you want me to?”

  “It’s up to you,” Kunessin said. “I’m really not bothered either way. I wouldn’t ever lie to any of you, but . . .”

  “Fly’d think it was funny,” Aidi said. “Muri’s hardly likely to give you a hard time about it. Kudei . . .” He frowned. “You know, I’m not sure I know what Kudei would think.”

  “He’d go by how likely it is we’d be found out. Which isn’t going to happen; so I don’t imagine he’d have any problems with it. I was more thinking about the women. I mean, they’d be bound to hear about it, and they don’t understand about the military, the way we do. I wouldn’t want them to be worried. And then there’s the indentured men.”

  It was an excuse, and of course they both knew it: a compromise, a diplomatic solution, which Kunessin didn’t like at all. He should have foreseen that Aidi might get stroppy about it; but then, he hadn’t expected to find anybody here, and so the subject shouldn’t have come up. He checked himself there; he could feel himself rationalising it into being Aidi’s fault, whereas if anybody had done anything wrong (not that they had, of course) it was himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I ought to have told you. And the others, too.”

  He saw Aidi relax, a little. “Forget about it,” he said. “Is there really a - what did you call it? The initiative?”

  “Of course,” Kunessin said. “I set it up myself. It’s a perfectly good idea. We’ve got garrisons of twenty, thirty men scattered about all over the place, in outposts of minimal strategic importance; we don’t want to give them up completely, just in case they might come in handy some day, but they’re costing us far more than they’re worth, in money and manpower. Settling civilians on them keeps the presence but takes the strain off the military budget. The Treasury was very taken with the idea.” He grinned. “Obviously I had an ulterior motive, but that doesn’t make it any less beneficial to the commonwealth.”

  “Ah well,” Aidi said. “That’s all right, then.”

  When they reached the jetty, they found that the boat wasn’t back yet; but Muri had pulled up nearly half of the sound but redundant planks and stacked them neatly against the rail. It made them both tired just to look at him.

  There were problems, of course. One that none of them had anticipated was that the jetty’s foundations must have sunk, because it was a good eighteen inches lower than it should have been. As a result, the angle of the gangplank was steeper than they’d have liked. It was hard to keep their feet as they manhandled the heavy barrels, and the livestock didn’t like it at all. The bull slithered, panicked and tried to back up; some fool whacked it across the backside with a stick, which made it all the more determined to get back inside the ship; Kudei made them all stand back and let it calm down for ten minutes, then tried coaxing it down the ramp with fistfuls of hay, which would have worked just fine if a barrel hadn’t shifted at the top of the ramp, rocking the whole thing and launching the bull into an even wilder panic. Aidi insisted on putting a rope through the ring in its nose - that’s what it’s there for, he said - and afterwards had to have his hands bound up in sheep’s wool, because of the rope burns. Eventually, just as they were all starting to think it’d be better to get a heavy bow and shoot the stupid animal, it caught sight of one of the cows that they’d already landed, shuffled gracefully down the ramp and lumbered straight into the temporary pen.

  The pigs were even worse. When all attempts at luring them down the ramp had failed, Kudei went behind them with a sheet of tin and got them halfway down; at which point, one of the big brood sows changed its mind, turned round, nosed Kudei out of the way and headed back up again. But by now the ramp was slippery with cowshit; it lost its footing, scrabbled helplessly and slid over the side of the ramp into the sea. There was nothing anybody could do, so they had to stand and watch it drown, a process that took a surprisingly long time. After that, it was something of an anticlimax when Chaere’s trunk, with all her clothes and passionately cherished possessions from home, went over the side into the water. She wasn’t in the least impressed when Aidi and Alces dived in after it, because by then it had come open, and those items that were recovered were soaked and covered in mud, while the set of painted plates and the silver milk jug were lost and gone for ever.

  Nevertheless, they got all the livestock and most of the heavy stores ashore before nightfall, which was just as well. During the night, there was a torrential downpour, and they were too preoccupied with finding and stuffing sacks into the holes in the amateur rush-bundle thatch to spare a thought for the ninety bales of hay and twenty bales of str
aw that had been left on deck overnight. It was, of course, completely ruined, and went to join the sow and Chaere’s milk jug at the bottom of the harbour; being waterlogged, the bales sank like stones. Twelve bales were salvageable, but only because someone had covered them over with Chaere’s brocade bed-curtains - a far greater loss, according to her, than a load of old dry grass. It wasn’t a view that found favour with the rest of the company, Chaere’s husband included, which led her to say various things that might have caused serious offence if anybody had been listening.

  Unloading the rest of the cargo took much of the next day, mostly because a large section of jetty floor planking that had been pronounced sound turned out not to be. That accounted for a butter churn, two three-hundredweight anvils and one of Kunessin’s barrels of chainmail. When they cleared away the stub ends of the collapsed planks, they found that the main side-beam was cracked three-quarters of the way through. If it went completely, that would almost certainly mean the end of the jetty. Fixing it wouldn’t have been too much of a problem, if only they’d had somewhere to stand while they were doing it. As it was, they had to bring the boat in under the jetty, and Muri cut and fitted the splice working over his head, standing on a precarious stack of boxes piled up in the bottom of the boat.

  When it was too dark to work safely, they crowded into the thatched hut, lit a fire and sat round the walls, too tired to talk. After a while, Muri got up and fetched a sack of porridge oats from Thraso’s supplies. It was their fifth meal of porridge in two days; and just after midnight, it started raining again. At that point, Kunessin remembered that there were fifteen sacks of bean seed on the deck of the ship. He was very tired, wearing his last change of dry clothes, and the repairs to the jetty floor weren’t finished yet. He fumbled with his tinderbox, lit a lantern and got up.

  “Where are you going?” Dorun muttered, her eyes firmly closed.