by K. J. Parker
He waited to make sure she’d finished for the time being, then said, “We can’t stay here. When the soldiers come back, we’ll have to go. There’s no two ways about it.”
Her brief silence he attributed to speechless rage. “But General Kunessin’s got a legal paper,” she said. “It means the island belongs to him. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“No,” Kudei said.
“He doesn’t think so.”
Kudei sighed. “His idea is, let them have the gold workings and we keep the rest of the island. Basically, the original plan but with a permanent military garrison on our doorstep. Not what I signed up for. I’d rather go home. The others will just have to get along without me. Don’t suppose it’ll be the end of the world.”
She laughed at him. It was the first time she’d done that. “Don’t be bloody stupid,” she said. “If they stay, they won’t let you go.”
“Surely that’s what you want,” Kudei said mildly. “To stay here.”
He yawned, stretched, and rubbed his eyes, and as he moved, she saw, peeping out from under the collar of his shirt, the upper end of the terrible scar that ran from his collar-bone to his navel: broad, shiny, soft, purple against his unusually pale skin, like a river crossing a plain. On their first night together she’d asked him about it; got it in the war, he’d replied, as though she’d asked him about a hat or a pair of shoes. She felt the anger drain away, soaked up by the disgust, and the fear.
“No I don’t,” she said, almost meekly. “I want to go somewhere - somewhere nice.” She winced at her choice of word, but he nodded, and the movement tugged on the end of the scar, stretching the purple skin. “A nice house somewhere, I don’t care if it’s a farm or in a town. Somewhere quiet. Away from them.”
He frowned, as though thinking over a complex proposition. “You said you didn’t want to go back to the farm,” he said.
“Not with your brothers,” she said. “That’d be as bad as being here, with your friends. For crying out loud, Kudei, don’t you want to get away? You do really, I know you do.”
His face didn’t move for a long time; then he grinned. “Not as simple as that, though, is it? Teuche and Aidi and Muri and Fly . . .” He pulled a face, comic and sad, then shook his head, like a cow shaking off flies. “It’s difficult,” he said. “I have obligations. Running away’s just something I daydream about, so I won’t actually have to do it.”
He stood up. She turned her back, not watching as he left her and walked away. There was something he did, a tiny mannerism, a slight tilt of the head as he stooped under the lintel, that reminded her of the soldiers who came to ask her father about the axe. It had puzzled her ever since she first noticed him doing it, until eventually she’d overheard Muri and Alces talking about something or other while they sat under a tree, sheltering from a sudden squall of rain. Muri had a heavy cloth bag slung over his shoulder - his carpentry tools, something like that - and as he eased the strap away from the base of his throat, he’d made some remark about old times, and suddenly she knew: the tilt of the head, just the way someone who carried a heavy bag on a strap every day instinctively stretches his neck to shift the strap into a comfortable position. Something a soldier would do, something all soldiers did, such a stupid thing to hate someone for, but she couldn’t put it out of her mind; and every time he did it, it pulled up the purple tip of the scar. She’d asked Menin, who’d asked Muri, and he’d said Kudei had got it cutting into a hedge of pikes (the place-name meant nothing to her); the gash went so deep you could see the bone, but it was only after the battle, when the enemy had been routed, herded into a steep-sided combe and slaughtered to the last man, that he’d even noticed it, and condescended to allow the surgeon to pack it with moss and spider’s web and stitch it up. Muri seemed to think that was rather fine and splendid, but to her the scar was a line on a map of the place where Kudei and A Company still lived, the place they’d never leave. She thought about that and shivered, and a shadow fell across her face. She looked up, and saw one of the indentured men, Xipho Sideroi.
“You made me jump,” she said.
He grinned. “You looked like you were miles away. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“That’s all right. I didn’t expect to see anybody round the house, this time of day.”
Sideroi pulled a sad face. “Had to come back for my other boots,” he said. “The pair I was wearing split - there, look, right up the seam.” He held a muddy, stinking boot under her nose, and the burst seam, with its ripped stitches and frayed holes, looked like an open wound. “Past mending, I reckon. What do you think?”
She shrugged. “Chuck it out, then,” she said. “I expect there’s some that’ll fit you in the general’s stores.”
He laughed. “Don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t know who he bought them off, but they saw him coming. Sixty pairs he bought for the stores, and they’re all the same bloody size.”
It took a moment for her to understand; then she snorted with laughter. “You’re kidding,” she said.
“Perfectly true. All the same, and too small to fit any of us.” Sideroi grinned. “You know what I reckon? He bought them off one of the military contractors, cheap; and I think they’re from the war, when we were fighting those foreigners from down south, the little chaps. Small feet, see?”
Four days of deep, rich silt, and the lid of the gold jar no longer sat quite straight, even when Aidi pressed it down hard. On the fifth day, around mid-morning, Dorun came running up the river to the workings, to say that there was a ship in the bay. Not a sloop or a cutter; a big ship, as big as the one they came in.
For a long time, roughly as long as it takes to bridle a horse, nobody moved or spoke. Then Aidi dropped his shovel, straightened up with an effort (he’d been digging for four hours) and started giving orders to the indentured men. Muri and Kudei sprinted off towards the settlement. Alces went in a different direction.
Back at the main house, Kunessin put the wooden box he kept his papers in down on the long table, though he didn’t unlock it. Then he went to the shed where the weapons and armour were kept. Behind him in the main house, the women were putting up the shutters and filling buckets from the stream.
Kunessin waited for as long as he could bear, then walked out to the jetty. He was unarmed, but under his coat he wore his brigandine: twelve hundred and fifty small plates of proof steel, riveted into buckskin and faced with green velvet, so perfectly articulated that after a while he’d forget it was there. He’d got it from an enemy whom he’d stabbed seven times without any effect before guessing the truth and cutting his throat.
He stood at the end of the jetty and watched the ship grow and take shape. The dot stretched sideways, sprouted tiny points that resolved into masts, which flowered into sails. He stared at it, frowned, then suddenly grinned, clapped his hands together so fiercely that they stung, executed a jumping turn and ran very fast back to the house, just in time to meet Muri and Kudei. He flung one arm around Kudei’s neck and the other across Muri’s shoulders.
“It’s not the government,” he roared in Kudei’s face. “It’s our ship.”
It took Kudei a surprisingly long time, maybe as much as two seconds. Then he broke free and jumped in the air, while Muri let out a shrill whoop. “Look for yourself if you don’t believe me,” Kunessin was saying. “Food and clothes and fuck knows what else.”
Kudei feinted a sparring punch at his chin; he parried it open-handed with his left and prodded Kudei’s solar plexus with his right forefinger. “You’d better run over and tell Aidi,” he said. “Muri, go and get Fly, he’s up at the boathouse. We’ll meet back here and start unloading.”
As luck would have it, a stiff breeze got up and bustled the ship into the harbour. The entire company was there to meet it, wives and indentured men as well as the five proprietors. As the plank came down and the captain stepped on to the jetty, Kunessin’s ferocious “Where the hell have you been?” was drowned out by a raucou
s cheer. He gave up, grabbed the captain, lifted him off his feet and hugged him, nearly crushing him to death against the plates of the brigandine.
It took a whole day to unload the ship. Three quarters of the hold was taken up by barrels of flour; in the remaining quarter, bacon, dried fruit, beer, crates of live chickens, store apples, carrots and turnips packed in sand, salt fish, onions, boots (all different sizes), shirts, coats, tools, nails, roofing slates, sheet iron, billets of hardening steel, wire, staples, hinges, latches, mirrors, crockery and tinware. The company (joint owners of a four-foot-high jar of gold dust whose lid would no longer shut properly) were stunned into silence by the sight of six gallon jars of pickled walnuts and nine gross of five-eighth-inch tallow candles.
The ship brought other things. For Kunessin, two letters. One was from his agent in Faralia, informing him that his account at the bank was now exhausted. The other had been handed to the ship’s captain by a wild-eyed second lieutenant, whose sloop had intercepted the ship the previous day; if the captain could possibly deliver this letter, the lieutenant had said, it would save him two days’ sailing. The way he’d fought so hard not to grin when the captain agreed to take the letter . . .
Kunessin took a walk up the hill, and read the letter sitting on the top rail of the two-thirds-unfinished stock pen. It was a notice to quit, referring him to the emergency provisions in the third schedule to clause fourteen of the transfer deed. The emergency wasn’t specified; but, fair enough, there was no explicit requirement in clause fourteen that they should do so. All the government had to do was certify that a genuine state of emergency existed, and they had the right to revoke the grant and take back the island.
He frowned. Everybody knew that clause fourteen was only invoked if there was a war, and the land in question was needed for strategic purposes: a base of operations, a shipyard, a garrison. So maybe there was a war; he wouldn’t have heard about it, isolated on his little rock. He was, however, inclined to doubt it. His own letter couldn’t have reached Central Command yet; neither, by the same token, could the two young officers’ report. This notice, therefore, had nothing to do with the recent visit.
Properly speaking, it was the end of the world. A clause fourteen requisition couldn’t be opposed or appealed against, there was no defence whatsoever. It was like trying to fight the gods, or an earthquake. It was also incredibly rare. It had to be; if the government made a habit of using clause fourteen in anything but the direst emergencies, no rational man would ever buy land from them. It was a mandatory clause. Every government transfer had to include it, and if some fool of a clerk accidentally left it out, it would automatically be read into the deal by any court. Misuse of it was unthinkable, it simply didn’t happen . . .
Which was why, although the wording of the letter was unambiguously clear and the seal at the foot of the page was unimpeachably genuine, he couldn’t make himself believe that it really was the end of the world, the loss of everything. After all, he knew exactly what that felt like (a field full of dead bodies; losing the farm), and this wasn’t it. Therefore, it had to be a mistake, a clerical error, a misunderstanding. Like a government refusing to recognise a new regime in a foreign country, he resolved to ignore it, for the time being at least. He folded the letter carefully, and put it in his pocket.
Other letters, too. For Aidi, the death of an uncle he hadn’t seen for twenty years, bringing with it a legacy, fifteen thousand thalers, a house and six hundred acres with vacant possession. He grinned as he read it, then screwed it up into a ball and threw it at the fire. He assumed he’d hit the back of the grate, but for once his superb natural aim failed him, and Chaere picked it up after he’d left the house. For Alces, a final demand for the rent on the fencing school, payable within six days (the letter was three weeks old), failing which the house would be repossessed and its contents sold. For Kudei, a letter from his sister-in-law, to tell him that his brother Lusei had had a stroke, and was paralysed from the neck down. For Dorun, a long, chatty letter from her mother. For Chaere, a shorter letter from her father, inquiring after her health and asking, very delicately, for money.
While the last barrel was being rolled across the yard into the stores, Kunessin led the ship’s captain out of the compound, up the hill as far as the stock pen. There he told him about the gold strike; about how the settlement was now a merchant company rather than an agricultural estate, and how it would therefore be needing regular supplies of food and essential material.
“It goes without saying,” he said, in a bland, everyday sort of voice, “that if word of what we’re doing here gets out, it’ll ruin everything. We’ll have the government down on us like flies in summer, not to mention pirates and God knows what else. All it’d take would be one conversation in a bar and we’ll be screwed. Do you see that?”
The captain nodded warily.
“Excellent. Now,” Kunessin went on, “so far, nobody knows about this except us here, and you. We won’t be telling anybody, because we’re stuck here on an island, with nobody to tell.”
The captain was a big man, more than a head taller than Kunessin and broader across the shoulders. But he’d been born and brought up in Faralia; he knew who General Kunessin was. “I swear,” he said quickly. “On my life.”
“Yes,” Kunessin replied. “Fine, I’m glad you see it that way. Now, you’d better keep your men on the ship. Tell them we’ve got mountain fever or something.”
“Leave it to me.”
“Of course.” Kunessin smiled, then frowned. “Oh, one other thing. I’ve run out of money, so you’ll need to raise a mortgage on the ship to pay for the next consignment. I’ll give you a letter of authorisation.”
The captain wasn’t sure about that. “Is that necessary?” he said. “Surely, if you’re digging gold out of this river . . .”
Kunessin shook his head, like a teacher correcting a simple but fundamental error. “We can’t pay for anything with gold. We can’t sell any of it. As soon as we do anything like that, the whole world’s going to guess what we’ve got here. It’s sort of ironic, really. We’re quite possibly the richest men alive, and we’re broke. Doesn’t matter,” he went on. “When we’re through here, we can pay off the mortgage out of the stuff that gets trapped in the weave of our sacks. And then you can have the ship for your very own, for all I care.”
The captain looked at him and said nothing (like the girl in the fairy tale who marries the prince of the elves, on condition that she never tries to talk to him). Kunessin sighed. He was gazing out over the coastal plain, at the water-meadows on either side of the river. “I hate it here,” he said. “When I was in the war, this was my dream; this or something like it. Now I wish I’d never set eyes on the place.”
The ship sailed early the next morning; empty, apart from its crew. Aidi tried to get Kunessin on his own, so he could shout at him, but Kunessin was keeping out of his way. So he trudged back to the main house, where his wife was waiting for him.
“I need four hundred thalers,” she said.
Aidi sighed. “For crying out loud, let me get my boots off first.”
She clicked her tongue, a mannerism which she knew irritated him. “Don’t you want to know what it’s for?”
He shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Well, of course it matters.”
“Fine,” he said, kicking off his left boot. “If it matters to you, then of course you can have the money.” Then the right boot. “I take it you need it in Faralia rather than here.”
“Well, of course.”
“Just asking. In that case, it’ll have to be a letter of credit on the bank. Pity you didn’t mention it before the ship sailed. It’ll be two months before it comes back.”
She glowered at him. “I was picking my moment.”
“When I’m in a good mood?” He grinned. “Like now, for instance?”
“If I had to wait till you’re in a good mood, I’d most likely die of old age first.” She scowled horr
ibly at him. “You’re not going to ask, are you?”
“Why should I? It’s your business, not mine.”
“It’s for my father,” she snarled at him. “He needs to cover a bad debt from a customer, and—”
“Fine.” Aidi stood up. “How many times do I have to say it? You can have the money.” He opened the door, then turned his head and looked at her. “It’s one of your more annoying traits, Chaere. You won’t take yes for an answer.”
He left her in the porch and went inside, but Kunessin wasn’t there. That made him angry. He crossed the room, waddling gingerly in his bare feet, and sat in a chair in front of the cold fireplace. He closed his eyes; then he heard footsteps behind him and sat up.
“Now what?” he asked.
“I want to know why you’re in such a foul mood,” Chaere said. “You should be happy. You’ve been worrying yourself sick about when the ship was going to get here.”
“True,” he said, closing his eyes again. “And now everything’s a whole lot worse. Can’t win, can you?”
She hesitated, then knelt down beside him. “What’s the matter?” she said.
“Teuche’s the matter,” he replied, eyes shut, head turned away. “He’d agreed to send the servants back with the ship. And now the ship’s gone, and they’re still here.”
Chaere frowned. “Is that so bad? We need them to get the gold.”
He didn’t appear to have heard her. “We’re only here because of him,” he said. “He’s only here because he wants a country estate - no, scrub that, he wants a farm, like the one his father lost. Well, fine. Big bloody deal. He can have mine.” He paused, then said, “I just learned, from a letter I got—’
“I was wondering when you’d mention it.”
“Oh.” He pulled a face. “Anyhow, it seems I now own a farm, which I really have no possible use for. Teuche wants one. Splendid. Why don’t I just give it to him, and everybody’s happy?”