by K. J. Parker
“Or Clea,” Muri snapped back. “Her family’s all a bunch of thieves.”
“Shut up, Muri,” Kudei said quietly. “Look, it could have been any of them. Maybe all of them together for all we know. The fact is, we aren’t going to do anything about it. Well, are we? Are we going to hang one of our wives?”
Nobody answered him, and after a long silence Kunessin said: “We’ve got to drop this, or risk a civil war. I don’t know about you lot, but I’d rather get by on a bit less than have this discussion again. Agreed?”
The others nodded; all except Aidi. “It’s all very well saying cut the ration and forget about it. I’m not so sure we can do that. Someone’s just stolen food, when we’re desperate enough as it is. For one thing, what if the ship doesn’t turn up when we said it would? We’ve got no guarantee whatsoever. I tried to make a bit of an allowance when I figured out the ration, just in case, but now that’s all gone to hell. If that ship’s a week late, we’re screwed.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Muri said, still scowling. “We’ve got the sloop. All we’ve got to do is make another run to the mainland. All right,” he went on, “last time wasn’t a raging success. But this time we’ve got gold dust to pay with. That’s got to be better than starving, and accusing each other of stealing.”
“We agreed,” Kunessin said firmly. “We don’t send gold to the mainland. It’d be inviting an attack, letting them know what we’ve got here.”
“Things were rather different when we decided that,” Muri replied. “If it’s a choice between risking pirates and starving to death, I know what I’ll be voting for. Besides,” he added, “since when were we scared of a fight?”
“I agree with Muri,” Alces said. “Send the sloop out, and then it doesn’t really matter. The last thing we need is a civil war.”
Kudei said, “Aidi?”
Aidi screwed up his face; if someone had wanted a portrait of Thought to go on the back of a coin, he’d have been perfect. “I don’t know,” he said eventually. “We don’t want to attract attention, I can see that, and paying for groceries with gold dust would be asking for trouble. But if we’ve reached the stage where someone’s stealing food, something’s clearly gone badly wrong. We don’t want to have to make a big deal out of this, or we’ll be at each other’s throats. Make sure there’s enough food for everybody and we sidestep the problem.”
Silence; then Kunessin said: “That’s a neat summary, Aidi. Now tell us what you think.”
“I just said,” Aidi replied. “I don’t know.”
“Fine.” Kunessin stood up. “Then here’s what we’re going to do. We aren’t going to send the sloop out. We all agreed, and that’s all there is to it. Aidi, I want you to recalculate the rations. Muri, get a lock put on the store. Kudei, you’re quartermaster. Every morning, you unlock and give Dorun the day’s supply of flour, then you lock up again. All clear?”
Kudei nodded. Aidi said: “Is that it? What about the thief ?”
“We forget about it,” Kunessin said. “My guess is, it must’ve been one of the girls; in which case, we really don’t want to know which one it was. So long as it doesn’t happen again.”
The others went back to work. Kunessin walked up the hill to his lumber pile, looked round to make sure he wasn’t being watched, then took the lower path, dead ground, back to the settlement. The women would all be in the various outbuildings; he crossed the yard quickly and opened the door of the main house. Nobody about. He lit a candle from the embers of the fire and used its flame to loosen the wax on the seal of the gold jar. With the tip of his knife, he carefully prised it off without cracking it and put it in his pocket. He took off his coat, spread it out round the base of the jar, lifted the lid, then reached down into the jar until his fingertips located the neck of the flour-sack. Before he lifted it out (a half-hundredweight at arm’s length; the effort made him grunt) he shook it, to get as much of yesterday’s gold dust as possible out of the coarse weave of the sacking. Out the sack came, sparkling like a newly hooked fish; he dumped it on his spread-out coat and put the lid back, then gently warmed the back of the seal in the candle flame until the wax started to run. Firm pressure and a little more heat from the candle secured it. He let go and stood back. It got easier, of course, each time he did it.
The spilt gold dust from the sack went in a pottery mug, to be added later to his private store. He hid the mug in the usual place, behind the loose brick in the fireplace. The flour sack was more of a problem. His assumption had been that, once everywhere had been thoroughly searched, he’d have no trouble finding a cache for it; but he had an unpleasant feeling that Aidi meant to keep searching, and he was smart enough to figure that the thief might well move the sack once the official search had been abandoned. The logical course of action, therefore, would be to get rid of it: pour it in the river, tip it out in the boggy patch in the wood and tread it in. Logical, but he really didn’t want to do that. Fifty pounds of flour was ten days’ supply for the five of them, as and when the food ran out. The other alternative was to put it back in the store, but he couldn’t be certain that he’d got all the gold dust out of the sacking; that’d be a nasty clue to give Aidi, who’d be bound to notice. Really, the sack had to be burnt. If he wanted to get rid of the sack but keep the flour, he’d need one of the big jars, and the loss of one of them would be noticed, leading to another grand search and more aggravation and risk. Oh well, he thought. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Maybe he was preoccupied, and that made him careless. He opened the door, and found Dorun facing him across the threshold. It was no use trying to hide the sack.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” she said.
He nodded. “You’ll never guess where it was hidden.”
“No,” she said.
“In the gold jar.” As he said it, he could see the mistake he’d just made. “The only place none of us thought to look.”
She was frowning at him. “But the seal,” she said. “Does that mean Aidi . . . ?”
She was looking over his shoulder. From the doorway, she had a clear view. The seal, intact, in place. “That’s a neat trick,” she said.
For once in his life, he wasn’t quite sure what to say. “I lifted the seal,” he said. “I didn’t want to let him know I’d found out.”
“Can you do that? I thought—”
“A candle and a sharp knife,” he said. “But don’t tell anybody. The last thing we need is anyone getting ideas.”
She stood away from him a step or two. “So it was Aidi,” she said.
“Let’s not talk about it,” he replied. “I should imagine Chaere had something to do with it. Rationing isn’t her style.”
He could see she was thinking about it. “It doesn’t make sense, though,” she said. “I mean, we’ve been talking about it, and it can’t have been him. He was away at the river, with everybody else.”
Everybody else but you, she didn’t add. “When we were in the service,” he said, “if there was ever any quiet work to be done - taking care of a sentry, something like that - it was always Aidi’s job. Never known anybody who could move so quietly. He must’ve done it while we were all asleep.”
“That’s . . .” She shook her head. “What’re you going to do?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m going to put this back where it came from, Muri’s going to put a lock on the store, and Kudei’s going to be in charge of the key. I can guarantee there won’t be a repeat performance.”
She nodded slowly. “What are you going to tell everybody?” “I’m not,” he said. “We’ll cut the ration a little. No bad thing, actually; this means there’ll be a bit of a reserve. Telling everybody’s just going to make matters worse.”
“I suppose so.” She wasn’t looking at him. “Aidi, though, of all people. He’s so particular about things.”
“Think about it,” Kunessin said. “Fifty pounds of flour.” She frowned, then said, “Oh, I see. I suppose t
hat makes sense. But—”
“That’s enough.” He took hold of her arm. “You can come with me, as a witness, just in case this ever comes out. You can tell them you saw the flour go back.”
“What puzzles me,” Aidi said, “is the quantity.”
Alces straightened his back and loaded a shovelful of silt into Aidi’s pan. “What’s that mean?” he said.
“The quantity,” Aidi repeated. “Fifty pounds. Think about it.”
“What’s there to think about?” Alces said, as Aidi began to twist the pan around. “Well, I guess a half-hundredweight’s about as much as a woman can carry without doing her back in.”
Aidi shook his head. “Yes, fine,” he said. “But if you steal fifty pounds of flour, what’re you going to do with it? Look,” he went on, draining away the first rinse of black water, “the food runs out, all right? Everybody’s starving; except one person, who stays fat and healthy. That’s going to be rather obvious, don’t you think?”
Alces sighed. “Maybe,” he replied, nudging the toe of the blade into the gravel and shifting his weight behind it. “Assuming whoever it was thought it through that carefully.”
“Fifty pounds,” Aidi went on, “isn’t going to go far if there’s a lot of you, so the servants probably wouldn’t bother. It’d be a hell of a risk for what, a couple of days’ extra rations? And if it was just one man, why steal a whole half-hundredweight and get the whole camp up in arms, when you could just keep stealing an extra cup or two every day, and probably not be noticed at all.”
Alces pulled a face, to show he was bored with the conversation. But Aidi wasn’t looking at him. “All right,” he said, “how about this? Fifty pounds is ten days’ rations for five people. There are five women in the camp. The likeliest suspect, I think we’ve all agreed, is one of the girls; they’re the only ones who had the opportunity.”
Aidi nodded. “That’s the conclusion I jumped to, to begin with,” he said. “And it sort of makes sense, though I don’t see any of them having the nerve to do it. But in that case, where’s the stuff now? If it was one of them, it’d have to be hidden in the settlement somewhere, because the girls don’t leave camp.”
“There’s Menin.”
“Could’ve hidden it in the woods, you mean.” Aidi shook his head. “She can’t lift fifty pounds, let alone carry it all that way. I watched her with a three-gallon bucket once. That’s thirty pounds, and she was really struggling.”
Alces lifted the shovel out of the mud and slewed off the surface water. “I think Teuche’s right,” he said. “Forget about it. There’s no way finding out who did it’s going to make things better.”
Aidi sighed. “He’s right, of course. It’s just . . . I don’t know.” He tipped a slug’s trail of dust into the pot and replaced the lid. “It’s something that shouldn’t have happened. If it was up to me, I’d pack it in here and go home.”
“What, because of this? One sack of flour?”
“It was Teuche’s idea,” Aidi said, “his wonderful ideal community; hence the wives, and the servants. Should’ve just been the five of us. With outsiders along, something like this was bound to happen. And it’s all very well saying forget about it, but it’s not that easy. The servants won’t, I can guarantee that.”
“Soon as the ship gets here, they won’t give a damn,” Alces said. “Besides, soon enough they’ll have their money and they’ll be gone.”
“I’d like to think that,” Aidi said.
The reduced rations weren’t popular. It was the women who complained most (Dorun excepted); the indentured men didn’t say much, but they didn’t need to. Some of them started asking why the sloop hadn’t been sent out. Kunessin reminded them about the agreement, with the result that they stopped talking about the sloop whenever they saw him coming.
That wasn’t the end of it, however. Anculo Metis, a carpenter, and Pollas D’Iphthimous, one of the stockmen, hatched up a plan to steal the sloop and a day’s worth of gold, sail to the mainland, stock up with food and use the bargaining power it’d give them to renegotiate the agreement and, with any luck, get rid of the five proprietors. They recruited four rather half-hearted conspirators, one of whom (a tinsmith by the name of Dactylo) lost his nerve and told the whole story to Aechmaloten, who lost no time in passing it on to Kunessin.
The theft of the ship was scheduled for daybreak the next morning. Metis, D’Iphthimous and two of their four recruits crept out of the main house and walked quickly to the jetty, taking with them a sock half filled with gold dust (they’d switched it for another sock containing sand, which had been put in the gold pot the previous evening). Waiting for them at the jetty they found General Kunessin and Captain Gaeon. Neither of them was armed.
“You’re up early,” Kunessin said. “Going fishing?”
D’Iphthimous had stolen a Type Fifteen sword from the shed where the weapons were kept, and Metis had brought his carpenter’s side-axe under his coat. D’Iphthimous took a step forward, said, “Get out of the way, General,” and drew his sword, which he then promptly dropped. As he stooped to pick it up, Kunessin kicked him on the chin. He toppled over the side of the jetty, landed in the water, and sank. When Metis went to jump in after him, Kudei stopped him, twisting his arm behind his back and lifting the axe out of his belt. He didn’t say anything, just shook his head.
D’Iphthimous’ body was washed ashore two days later. It was fished out of the sea and hung up next to those of his fellow conspirators, on the big, splay-branched ash tree on the western edge of the compound. The whole community had been there to see them hanged, in spite of a quick, fierce shower of rain that soaked everybody to the skin. The only man to speak throughout the whole performance was Dactylo the tinsmith, reprieved for informing on the others; he yelled abuse at the condemned men as they were led out, blaming them for putting him in an impossible position and turning everybody against him. Alces eventually shut him up with a kidney punch. Three days later, Dactylo’s body was found head down in the latrine, and no action was taken over his death.
“We’re going to have to do something,” Aidi insisted, at the staff meeting that evening. He’d just finished helping Kudei to dispose of Dactylo’s body, in a bog pool out on the edge of the marshes, where Kunessin had hoped to find natural outcrops of iron ore. “Otherwise things are going to get very bad.”
Kunessin shook his head. “They’ve accepted it,” he said. “Mostly, I think, because of Aechmaloten. Because he turned the traitors over to us, rather than us going and taking them, the general view is that it was an internal matter which they sorted out themselves.”
Alces frowned. “They sure as hell sorted out the tinsmith,” he said.
Kunessin shrugged. “Can’t blame them for that,” he said. “It’s like they taught us at college: love treachery, hate traitors. I don’t plan on doing anything about it. Believe it or not, I didn’t come here to start a career as a policeman.”
“Teuche’s right,” Muri said. “This and the business with the flour; obviously we had to make a show of strength. But with any luck we’ve nipped it in the bud.”
Aidi rolled his eyes: at the sentiments, or the clichés, or both. Kudei got up and threw a log on the fire. “It’s going to be awkward making conversation with them for the next day or so,” he said. “You can’t lynch four men and expect to carry on the same as usual.”
“It’s the food crisis that’s doing it,” Aidi said. “Maybe we should send the sloop out, after all.”
Kunessin looked at him. “That’d be the worst possible thing,” he said.
“Beg to differ,” Aidi replied. “Starving to death when we’ve got a perfectly good boat’s the worst possible thing, closely followed by having our throats cut in our sleep over a few mouldy sacks of flour. Sending out the sloop comes a poor third.”
“We should hold on till the ship gets here from Faralia,” Muri said. “It can’t be much longer, for crying out loud. And once it gets here—”
&nb
sp; “If it gets here,” Aidi snapped. “If it gets here, it’s bloody obvious what we do. We unload the supplies, then we march the servants on board and send it straight back home. Then we take the gold and the sloop and clear out ourselves.”
There was a long silence. Then Kunessin said: “Why would we want to do that, Aidi?”
“Use your head, Teuche,” Aidi replied briskly. “Those four are bound to have family and friends back home. I don’t imagine they’re going to let the matter drop, especially once they find out there’s a large sum of money involved. They’ll lodge a complaint with the government, and you can bet the farm they’ll take a very close interest in this place, when they learn about the gold strike. Bearing in mind the fact that your title to this chunk of rock isn’t exactly watertight—”
Kunessin lifted a finger, and Aidi stopped talking. “You agreed to the hanging,” he said.
Aidi shrugged. “Didn’t see how we had much choice,” he replied. “If we’d let it go, they’d have taken the sloop, news would’ve got out anyway and we’d have no way off the island. As it is, provided we can hang on here till the ship comes, we’re in with a chance.” He sighed, and made a sad gesture that ran from his shoulders to his fingertips. “It’s a fucking mess whichever way you look at it. Damage control’s the best we can hope for now.”
“I have no great desire to get into a fight with the government,” Alces said. “By some miracle we kept out of the stockade while we were in the service. Pushing our luck at this point would be a mistake.”
“Agreed,” Aidi said. “Where it all started to go wrong was when whoever it was stole that bloody flour.”
Kunessin shook his head. “You’re all in a tearing hurry to give in and run,” he said. “I can’t see any call for that. Listen,” he went on, softening his voice, “we were entirely within our rights dealing with D’Iphthimous and his lads the way we did. D’Iphthimous tried to draw on me, so that was simple self-defence. Stealing the sloop would’ve put all our lives at risk, and as the proprietor named in the transfer deed, I’ve got personal jurisdiction. Suppose the government does want to take over the gold working. So what? Let the fuckers have it. We came here to farm. Let them have the gold; we keep the rest of the island, plus what we’ve already dug out of the river. If I can’t negotiate that, I’ll jump off the jetty with a rock tied round my neck.”