by K. J. Parker
“Really,” Alces said politely.
“Apparently. Of course,” Aidi went on, “by the same token, two strong men with sledgehammers could do the work of this machine, and then I wouldn’t have to drive myself nuts trying to put the fucker together.” He dropped the bone-shaped bar; the clang it made on the floor sounded to Alces uncommonly like laughter. “Just think,” he said. “Second year, I was top of the class in mechanical engineering.”
“Second,” Alces corrected him. “Nuctos was . . .”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Aidi shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “it went together once, so it’ll go together again. It’s just a matter of being very patient and trying not to mutilate myself beyond repair in the process. How’s you?”
“Worried,” Alces replied, sitting down on the floor. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?”
“What, this, you mean?” Aidi picked up the metal bar, held it sideways and looked down it, checking it for straightness. “Minor setback. If I could just figure out—”
“The whole stupid thing,” Alces interrupted. “I’ve just been listening to Teuche being lord of all he surveys. I think he’s in a different world to the rest of us.”
Aidi sighed. “The trouble with Teuche,” he said, “he doesn’t listen. You tell him things, he looks like he’s listening carefully and taking it in, but really his mind’s somewhere else, always four moves ahead. Mark of a fine commanding officer, of course, but it’s different in the service. You’re always accountable to someone, you’ve always got the next man up from you in the chain keeping a watchful eye. Out here, he reckons he’s God.” He lay back, wriggled under the machine and offered up the bar the other way round. “Oh I see,” he said, with a mixture of relief and exasperation. “That pin there goes in the little slot, and then it pivots.” Two clicks, and Aidi emerged, wiping his hands on his chest. “Doesn’t bother me particularly,” he said. “It’s not like I was doing anything interesting with my life, world’s greatest underachiever. And you’ve got to say this for him, he hardly ever makes a mistake, overlooks a detail. No, I’m quite prepared to stick with him and see it through till he’s got it out of his system. It’s just important to bear his little frailties in mind, that’s all. Pass me the jug, would you. Thanks.” He took three enormous gulps, and water gushed past his mouth down his chin and neck. “We’ve all known each other long enough not to be too fussed at each other’s faults,” he said. “We make allowances, so that’s fine. Not so sure about the girls, though. May be trouble there. Still, it’s not like we’re back at the war or anything. I mean, we’ve got food and clothes and nobody’s trying to kill us; what serious harm could we come to?”
Alces thought for a moment, then said, “Malaria.”
“Had it,” Aidi replied briskly. “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? Fifth year of the war, I was sick as a dog. We were stuck for days in that fallen-down old barn, me babbling my head off, Muri with an arrowhead stuck in his hand, Nuctos with dysentery . . .”
“God, I remember that,” Alces said.
“You weren’t much better,” Aidi reminded him. “You’d had a bash on the head, serious concussion; we had to take it in turns talking to you to keep you from falling asleep. Teuche was dead on his feet with exhaustion from getting us there. I think Kudei was the only one who wasn’t at death’s door, and he ran himself ragged looking after us all; by the time the foragers found us, he was in worse shape than the rest of us.” He grinned. “We got through that in the end.”
Alces frowned. “Death doesn’t apply to us, you mean? You know, I always found that stuff mildly offensive.”
“Never bothered me,” Aidi replied. “Anyway, after that, this ought to be a piece of cake.”
He stretched his arm for the wrench, but it was just too far for him to reach. Alces picked it up and put it in his hand. “We were younger then,” Alces said. “Besides, surviving isn’t quite the same sort of thing as actually succeeding at something. Failing to die’s really just not being able to take a strong hint. Actually getting something to work takes different skills, and I’m not sure we’ve got them. Ah well,” he said, with an exaggerated sigh. “Too late now.”
“Quite.” Aidi applied the wrench to a nut, gave it a ferocious tweak and swore viciously as the bolt snapped off. “Now look what you’ve made me do.”
Alces grinned and stood up. “Always someone else’s fault,” he said. “Try and be a bit more careful, can’t you?”
He headed for the door, but stopped as it swung open. A man he recognised but couldn’t put a name to, one of the indentured men, burst in and looked round wildly, confused by the gloom. “Anybody in here?” he called out.
“What’s the matter?” Alces said.
The man located him as soon as he heard the voice. “Big trouble,” he said. “The grain store’s on fire.”
Without any conscious decision to move, Alces shouldered him out of the way and lunged through the door into the yard. The sunlight stabbed his eyes and he stopped, until Aidi crashed into the back of him.
They could smell the smoke. “Buckets,” Aidi said.
“In the grain store,” Alces replied.
“Shit.”
Shoulder to shoulder, they sprinted across the yard. Fat red flames were licking the sills of the empty windows, like a tongue searching for the last smear of honey. Four indentured men, Enyo, Dorun and Menin were standing in a huddle ten yards from the door.
“Get away from there,” Aidi screamed, his voice shrill with fear. If they heard him, they didn’t move. Alces beat him to it by one stride; they grabbed shoulders and arms, hurling bodies across the yard like woodsmen throwing logs up a hill. They only just had time to get clear themselves before the first flour barrels blew.
It was sheer bad luck that Alces should have had his face turned towards the shed. The blast of hot air hit him like a slap from a giant; as he closed his eyes, he felt the sudden heat scorch his eyelids, and the skin on his cheeks melt. A perceptible fraction of time passed between the burn and the push that laid him flat on his back; when he told him about it later, Muri thought it was most interesting, the implication being that heat travels faster than air. He landed hard, and for a few moments he wondered if he was dead, because there was no air in his lungs and he couldn’t seem to make them work. When he did manage to fill them, the air was excruciatingly hot. Then his whole face started to hurt, pain far worse than he’d ever felt before. Hands fastened on his shoulders; he opened his eyes - they still worked, a moment of overwhelming joy - and saw Aidi’s face, a most comical expression. He was being dragged by his feet, and then Aidi lifted him and he was being carried. Once he was sure he hadn’t been blinded, he wasn’t in the least scared.
As soon as he’d got Alces safe, Aidi took charge of the mess. The shed was stuffed full of flour barrels, each of them capable of going off like a potted volcano. (At the College they’d taught him flour had to be soaked in oil to make it explosive; apparently not.) If it was just him, or the five of them, and if every single bucket they possessed hadn’t been in the shed, he might have considered trying to put the fire out, or at least damp it down, before the rest of the flour went up. But he had to consider the women and the servants, lesser mortals. Frantically he tried to estimate a danger area, but he had no data to go on. The first blast had nearly killed Fly at fifteen yards. Thirty barrels going up simultaneously; not just the blast itself, but a skyful of joists, beams and burning thatch. No guarantee they’d be able to get clear in the unspecified time available. Not distance, then; cover. “Get in the house,” he yelled, and it was infuriating that his voice should crack and come out as a loud squeal. “Inside, all of you. Come on!”
Why couldn’t people just do as they were told? At least the women had some sense, or else they’d been trained from birth to obey when men shouted at them. The servants just stood there looking at him, the dull, blank stares of cattle. He grabbed the nearest man by the collar, lifted him off his feet and sent him
tottering and sprawling towards the house door. Later, he told Fly he was sure they only went inside because they were afraid of him, not because they had a clue about the danger. Simultaneously he was thinking: me, Fly, Kudei’s up the woods, Teuche’s surveying, where the fuck is Muri? And then he caught sight of him, bustling men in through the back door of the house like a sheepdog. No idea if all accounted for; didn’t actually know offhand how many servants there were, let alone where. No time. He plunged through the door, slammed it after him and shot the top bolt.
Which wasn’t quite enough, as it turned out. The blast, three seconds later, was far louder than he’d anticipated. It made the ground shake and the house shudder; he could feel the timbers bend, like trees in the wind. Then the door flew open; the ripped-off bolt shot past him like an arrow, as half a burning barrel sailed into the middle of the house. On the first bounce it smashed the long table the servants ate off. Next bounce it hit someone, he couldn’t see who. Third bounce, it smashed a hole in the back wall and disintegrated in a shower of burning splinters.
He could hear women screaming; but the body on the floor was a man (small mercies), amazingly still alive, though both legs and the right side of his body had been crushed like a snail shell. The assessment was instinctive: won’t make it, leave him. He took in the rest of the house in one looped glance. No other casualties, but there were shrouds and flowers of smoke drooping down through the thatch. Marvellous.
And no fucking buckets. But he wasn’t prepared to lose the house as well. Cursing Teuche for not being there, he squeezed his mind till it hurt: no buckets, so what had they got?
“Muri,” he shouted (still more a squeak than a shout), “we need ladders and rakes, hoes, billhooks, axes. Got to drag the thatch off before the rafters catch.”
The slightest of nods and Muri was off running, drawing men with him like a magnet draws filings. He could trust Muri; who else? “Dorun,” he called out (surprised himself with the choice), “Chaere, get them out of here. Animal pen. It’s far enough away, and open. Menin, Teuche’s up the hill, run and find him, quick as you like.” He didn’t look to see if they were doing as they were told; he was kneeling to pick Fly up in his arms, like a baby, like Teuche had carried Kudei through the marsh. A wadge of burning thatch fell on the back of his neck as he scrambled out through the back door. He had a nasty feeling he should have coped better.
Outside, there was burning rubbish everywhere, but a breeze was clearing the smoke, thank God. He looked round, saw a cart blown over on its side, carefully laid Fly down beside it so its bed would shield him just in case any more flour barrels went off. He could smell burning hair; scared to death until he realised it was his own, still smouldering. He slapped wildly at it, like a blind man hunting a wasp, then hobbled (couldn’t run; must’ve done something to his foot) round the side of the house, just as Muri and the servants brought up a ladder.
After all those years, of course Muri knew that Aidi was afraid of heights. Like all his fears, he suppressed it ruthlessly, but it was still there, a torment and a weakness, so it was only logical that Muri should be the one to go up the ladder, while Aidi took command at ground level. Unfortunately, Aidi didn’t see it that way, and there was a ridiculous tussle, only lasting a second, at the foot of the ladder, before Muri gently but irresistibly shoved Aidi out of the way and started to climb. Only then did Aidi look down, mere curiosity, and notice a chunk of board stuck to the sole of his boot, attached to it by the long nail driven up into his foot. He stared at it, as though he’d just noticed an extra toe, then bent down and tugged it out. A spike of pain ran up through his leg to his heart, and he yowled like a cat; then he dropped the wood and hopped over to a couple of indentured men, who were bringing up the second ladder. Without a word he yanked it out of their hands, wobbled on one foot and fell over.
They were kind enough to help him up, and someone else gave him a shoulder to lean on as far as the doorway of the woodshed, where he collapsed in a heap, trying very hard not to whimper. He could see Muri up on the ladder, rake in hand, hauling sheaves of blazing thatch off the rafters; the fire fell all round him but he wasn’t taking any notice. The rake handle caught fire; he dropped it and yelled for another one. Someone else had climbed the second ladder. He couldn’t see who, or what he was doing. He felt useless, bitterly ashamed and angry; the fire was the least of his concerns.
Someone had gone to the feed store and fetched the pigs’ buckets; only five of them, but soon a chain was in place, passing the buckets from hand to hand. He saw Chaere in the line, her hair tangled (she must hate that), and Menin, and Kudei’s wife, Clea - a big, strong girl, he noted; she was passing the buckets up to the man on the lower rungs of the ladder, and a three-gallon bucket of water weighs thirty pounds. Someone else had had the bright idea of fetching fence-rails to push the thatch off with, much quicker and more efficient than nibbling away with a rake. For some reason he resented that.
He shifted, tried to get up, very quickly thought better of it. And then Teuche was looming over him, grabbing his shoulder, yelling, “What the hell’s going on?”
“It could have been worse,” Teuche said.
Thick twists of smoke were still rising from the ashes of the grain store; nothing left but a black ribcage of beams. “I guess,” Aidi said.
“Much worse.” Teuche pushed open the house door; it moved eighteen inches, then stuck. The impact of the flying barrel had twisted the hinges. He shoved through and stood looking up through the rafters at the blue sky. “We were going to have to do a proper job of thatching this anyway.”
The floor was thickly covered in sodden wet thatch; Kudei and his team had done a savagely thorough job of damping down. The place stank of smoke and soaked straw. “The rafters are mostly all right,” Teuche said, almost as though he believed it. “We’ll need to replace a few, but we can use some of the beams we cut for fence rails.”
It had rained briefly during the night; not enough to put out the dense heart of the embers, but more than sufficient to get everybody and everything thoroughly soaking wet. Aidi cleared his throat in an I’m-still-here kind of a way. “How’s Fly?” he asked.
“Not so bad,” Teuche replied. “Face is pretty raw, and the backs of his hands. Menin found some plant or other in the woods; she reckons it’s good for burns. He was lucky he wasn’t closer.”
Always look on the fucking bright side. “We shouldn’t have put all the flour in one shed like that,” Aidi said.
“No.” Teuche was still craning his neck, looking up at the rafters; probably trying to heal the cracks and burns by the power of positive thinking. “Won’t make that mistake again. Of course, we never had that much flour all together at one time, back home.”
He hasn’t got it, Aidi realised; it hasn’t sunk in yet, that the game’s over. Someone really ought to tell him. “I’ve been doing some calculations,” he said. “If we’re careful about rationing, we’ll be able to live off pork and beef till the ship gets back, assuming it’s not held up, but it might be an idea to see if we can’t spin it out a bit with other stuff. Kudei reckons there’s deer in the birch woods, and he’s seen duck on the lake. The main problem, as I see it, is going to be salt.”
“Salt,” Teuche repeated, as though he’d never heard of it before.
“Think about it,” Aidi said. “It’s not just our food that went up in smoke last night, it’s the animal feed as well. Which means we’ll have to slaughter most of the cattle and pigs quite soon, which means we need salt to preserve the meat.”
Teuche turned and looked at him. “Who says we’re going to slaughter the livestock?”
“We’ve got to,” Aidi said, “otherwise there won’t be anything to eat. Like I said, we should just about be all right till the ship gets here, but what we’re going to do for provisions on the journey home—”
“We aren’t going home,” Teuche said. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
Well, at least he’d got it out into the
open. Also, better to have a short, private blazing row about it now than let Teuche make a complete fool of himself in front of everybody. He took a deep breath, but Teuche turned his back on him and started to walk away. He opened his mouth, but somehow he couldn’t launch the first word; just as sometimes, in a battle where two ranks of archers line up against each other at lethally close range, nobody can bring himself to loose the first shot.
Chapter Nine
The battle of Ceparouros, according to most authorities, marked the turning point in the war. General Euteuchida’s advance forced an engagement in favourable terrain, and his pikemen, led by the legendary A Company, broke the enemy formation at the first attempt. Major-General Stethessi’s heavy cavalry executed a flawless encircling movement, and a massacre was averted only because the lancers, instead of sweeping round to close off the only line of escape, stopped to plunder the baggage train. In spite of that, and a spirited counterattack by the loyalist militia, the victory was complete and overwhelming, leaving nothing between Euteuchida’s triumphant army and the barely defended city except two regiments of regular cavalry and the sadly unreliable highland irregulars. No more propitious moment could be imagined for the arrival of General Arrabese with the long-awaited reinforcements: six regiments of pike, two of heavy cavalry and a field artillery train of sixty engines. Euteuchida immediately marched south to join up with Arrabese, pausing only briefly to crush the half-hearted resistance of the irregulars . . .
He opened his eyes, but he couldn’t see anything. Panic; then he realised that the soft touch on his face was cloth, a blindfold.