by K. J. Parker
The end of a row. She marked it with a piece of stick, and paced out the next line. If they were going, of course, she was wasting her time. For now, though, she was happy to go though the motions, pretend that what she was doing had some value. An hour’s work now would mean food in a few months’ time. It wasn’t up to her whether or not there’d be anybody here to eat it.
“What are you doing?” She winced. Clea.
“Gardening,” she replied, not looking up. “Are you going to help me?”
“Waste of time,” Clea said, as though it was self-evident. “You don’t want to bother with all that.”
“It relaxes me,” Enyo said mildly. “You should try it.”
“Not likely.”
“Suit yourself,” Enyo said.
“Thought you were going to do the cornmeal.”
“Later.”
Clea came across and stood over her, watching. “What’s that you’re planting?”
“Beans.”
“Hate beans. Give you wind.”
“Don’t eat them, then.”
“Nobody’s going to eat your stupid beans,” Clea said. “We’ll all be gone by the time they’re ready.”
“You think so?”
“What the hell would we want to stay here for? It’s just a stupid rock in the middle of the sea.”
Enyo stood up, took the hoe and started to mark out a drill. “We came here to farm,” she said.
“Not to do the work ourselves,” Clea replied. “That’s what the servants were for, and now they’ve gone. Who’s going to do all the work? Not them.”
“You think he means to leave, then.”
“He must do. Nobody in his right mind’d want to stay here.”
Enyo finished the drill. “Seen Menin today?”
Clea shook her head. “Off again,” she replied. “Up in the woods, I suppose.”
She carried on standing there, like an inconvenient tree. “What happened to the gold?” she asked.
Enyo kept her eyes on what she was doing. “I was asking myself that,” she said.
“I think they took it,” Clea said. “I think that’s what they went to the mainland for, with Chaere. I never trusted her,” she added viciously. “I think they’ve gone off with the gold and dumped us here, like so much rubbish.”
Enyo paused, her knees ground down into the soft dirt, a small heap of bean seeds in her cupped hand. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“I do.”
“Yes, thank you, I’d gathered that. But I don’t believe it. Why would they?”
Clea made a soft, angry noise. “Don’t want us any more, do they? When they were going to be farmers, they wanted farmers’ wives, so they got a job lot, like weaners at market. Now they’ve got the gold and they’re off and away. Think about it.”
That was the last thing Enyo wanted to do. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said calmly. “The general went to a lot of trouble to do a deal with the government man, so he’d keep the land, and the government—”
“That was just to fool them,” Clea said scornfully, as though pointing out the painfully obvious. “It was the gold he was after all along. And look what happened. Everybody goes away - the soldiers, the servants - and suddenly the gold’s disappeared. Use your head.”
Cautiously, as though probing a painful tooth, Enyo thought about it. If I was Kudei Gaeon, she thought, would I sneak off and abandon this shrill, stupid, suspicious woman, with whom I could-n’t possibly have anything in common? Or Muri Achaiois, whose wife was almost certainly strange in the head. Or Thouri . . .
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“And there’s another thing.” Clea looked round for something to sit on, but there wasn’t anything. “What do you think happened with the servants? I don’t think they stole the gold. When could they have done it? Load of nonsense.”
“I’ve got my doubts about that,” Enyo confessed. “But you made the point yourself. Without them, who’s going to do all the heavy work? Surely the general would want them here, if he means to stay.”
(But that didn’t figure, she knew. If the soldiers hadn’t turned up, the indentured men would have taken their share of the gold and gone. If the soldiers had taken the gold, would they have stayed, just gone meekly back to the original deal? She doubted it. No, as things had turned out they’d been a hindrance, and now they were gone. Fortuitous.)
“Enyo.”
“Hm?”
“I’m scared.” Her voice had changed. “Really, do you think they’d go off and leave us?”
Enyo paused. “No,” she said. “Thouri wouldn’t leave me.” She let that sink in. “Now, Aidi took Chaere on this trip to the mainland. If they weren’t planning to come back, Thouri would’ve taken me. Therefore,” she went on, speeding up a little, “they do plan to come back, which means they do plan to stay, which means they need us as, well, as breeding stock, for when they’re too old to work. That’s what we were for to start with.” That’s what you were for, she didn’t say. “I don’t know what’s going on with the gold or the indentured men, but I’m quite certain they’re coming back and they plan on staying here.” She took a deep breath, then added, “So if I were you, I’d start thinking up some way you can smuggle yourself on board the supply ship from Faralia when it gets here without them noticing you’re missing, at least till the ship’s sailed with you on it. And I’d say the same to Menin, if I knew where the hell she was.”
She could feel Clea looking at her. “Run away?”
“If I were you.” Carefully, she began placing the beans in the drill. “I think you’re right about one thing,” she said. “I think that if they had to, Muri Achaiois and your husband would dump you and Menin, without a second thought, if the general told them to. You’d be better off back in Faralia.”
“Oh, right.” Clea sounded furious. “But not you.”
“No.”
“Fine.”
Just to be on the safe side, Enyo counted to ten before she looked round, and satisfied herself that Clea really had gone. She sighed, then carried on planting beans.
The fire, she thought. No doubt about it, the general was a shrewd negotiator and a cunning man generally, but if Clea was right about the gold, the fire had been a real stroke of luck. No, of course it hadn’t. Dorun had been killed; General Kunessin wouldn’t have killed his own wife.
Accidents happen.
She decided not to think about it any more.
Menin came back from the woods. She was in a dreadful state, though she didn’t seem aware of it herself: muddy, green with lichen-stains, bits of stick and twig in her hair, her face and hands dirty. She had her basket, the one she always carried. It was full.
Enyo met her at the barn door. Before she could say anything, Menin asked her: “Where are they?”
“What, you mean . . . ?”
“My husband, and the others.”
Handle with care, Enyo thought. “They went to the mainland,” she said. “In the sloop. They’ve been gone for ten days.”
“Oh.” Menin frowned. “When will they be back?”
“I’m not sure. Quite soon.”
Menin looked at her basket. “That’s a nuisance,” she said. “They won’t keep more than a day or so, unless I dry them, and that’s not the same as having them fresh.”
Enyo smiled, a little bit too much. “That’s all right,” she said. “We’ll have them tonight, for supper, with the cornbread.”
“No.” Harsh voice. “It doesn’t matter. I can find more, I guess. Only it’s late in the season.”
“That’s right,” Enyo said helplessly. “Now, why don’t you go inside and . . . ?”
Wasting her breath. Menin walked away, back the way she’d just come. Marvellous, Enyo thought, exactly what we need, on top of everything else. “Menin,” she called after her, but she carried on walking, a slow, functional trudge, taking the basket with her.
Three days later, the sloop came back to
Sphoe.
They’d had a miserable crossing from the mainland: becalmed for two days, then caught in a series of violent squalls, then becalmed again.
“Actually,” Alces told his wife, “the getting blown about wasn’t so bad. It drowned out the noise of Aidi and Chaere yelling at each other. Three days of sitting dead still on a perfectly flat sea with those two . . .” He shrugged. “Thank God the war was never as bad as that. Don’t think I could’ve handled it.”
She smiled at him. “What were they . . . ?”
“The stupidest bloody thing,” Alces replied, peeling off his sodden, salt-caked clothes. “She says, maybe if we jettison the cargo, the ship’ll go faster. Aidi says, perfectly reasonably, if there’s no wind it won’t make a blind bit of difference. She says—”
“What cargo?”
Alces grinned. “Artichokes.”
“Arti—”
“Artichokes,” he repeated; then he frowned, and added, “You know: not the round spiky things like a giant thistle. The lumpy white roots. Stuff you feed to pigs.”
She paused before asking, “Why?”
“That’s what Chaere wanted to know,” Alces said, trying to ease the boots off his feet. “Which means Teuche has to butt in and say, we’ll be planting them for winter fodder for the stock; and she stares at him like he’s mad, and starts nagging at Aidi again. Teuche doesn’t like that, as you can imagine - doesn’t take kindly to being ignored - which makes Aidi get all pompous and up himself, and he says, I think you ought to apologise to Teuche, and then she really gets wound up. And so on, for days on end.”
She hesitated, as though she wasn’t quite sure she understood. “About artichokes.”
“Among other things,” Alces said, dragging off his left boot. “But all directed at Aidi, mind you, as though the rest of us weren’t actually there. Lots and lots of stuff about his personal shortcomings.” He sighed. “I’ll say this for him,” he said, “he’s a patient man. If it’d been me, I’d have pushed her off the ship.”
She turned her head away from him a little. “I guess,” she said in a neutral voice, “if he’s planning for spring fodder, that means we’re staying here.”
He looked at her. “Well of course we’re staying here. I mean, it’s what we came for, isn’t it?”
She nodded slowly. “And that’s what you went to the mainland to buy, was it? Artichokes?”
It gave her more pleasure than she’d expected to see him twitch slightly, caught out by one little slip. “And other stuff too.”
“Can’t have been much other stuff, if the boat was stuffed full of artichokes.”
He grinned. “Quite right,” he said.
She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t; so she said: “Did you sell it?”
“No, of course not.” He shook his head vigorously. “We’ve got it stashed away, in a safe place. Our rainy-day fund, I guess you could call it.”
She handed him a shirt. She’d washed and pressed it while he was away, carefully worked out the marks of mildew and rainwater with soaked wood ash and two round stones. He didn’t look at it, just hauled it on, like a tarpaulin. “And we’re definitely staying,” she said.
He nodded. “Confirmed,” he said. “We’re now officially farmers, Teuche says so. Tomorrow, first thing, we celebrate by planting the artichokes. Won’t that be something to look forward to.”
She thought about her twelve rows of beans. “Yes,” she said.
“It gets better.” He stood up, fetched his other pair of boots, knelt to lace them. “After that, we get to mend the stock pen rails and dig a root cellar. You know,” he added, standing up again, “practically like real life.”
Enyo looked at him cautiously. For once, she wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to hear her say. “The gold,” she said. “He’s glad to be rid of it, isn’t he?”
“Of course,” Alces replied, as if it was self-evident. “Just so long as nobody else gets it, which would constitute a defeat. As far as he’s concerned, it was never anything but a bloody nuisance.” Suddenly he grinned. “He’s been smart, you know,” he said. “Things haven’t gone the way he expected, but he’s dealt with it well. Got rid of the gold, and the indentured men, once he’d realised he couldn’t handle them any more, and he’s squared things up with the government. As far as he’s concerned, it couldn’t have turned out much better.”
Apart from Dorun, she didn’t say. Instead: “All that money, though.”
“Oh, that.” Alces grinned broadly. “You don’t know him like we do. Teuche’s not like that; not like Aidi, or me, for that matter. He never could give a toss about money.”
Chapter Sixteen
From now on, Kunessin let it be known, we do everything for keeps.
They planted the artichokes - three days’ hard labour with mattocks and rakes; they had six fine undercut ploughs packed in unopened crates, but no oxen to pull them with. They mended the fences, which weren’t in such a bad state anyway. They dug the root cellar, a long, miserable job that involved tearing up half the cobble, gravel and sand floor they’d been to such pains to lay in the barn, digging down six feet into the clay, shoring up with lumber and puddling the floor and the walls till they were hard as stone to keep the damp out. “I’d forgotten,” Kunessin said, when the job was almost done, and they were so tired they could barely stand, “how easy ordinary work is, compared to all the other shit we’ve been doing lately.” They found other chores to occupy themselves with, all labour-intensive, all of them needing five men working together as a team, all of them necessary, more or less; and as each task ended and turned into something accomplished, they seemed to pause, as if waiting for the other party to recognise their cue. But the soldiers hadn’t come back yet; and so Kunessin found them something else to do.
Menin hadn’t said a word to any of them since they got back, so it came as something of a surprise when she announced that she was going to cook them a special dinner, to celebrate both their safe return and the decision to settle permanently on Sphoe. She had, she told them, been planning it for some time. Nearly all the ingredients would be things she’d gathered herself: doves’ eggs pickled in rosemary vinegar, honey-glazed upland hare stuffed with minced nuts and early berries, served with wild onions, sweet roots and forest dumplings . . .
A kind of puffball, she explained, that grows on fallen trees; but don’t be put off by that. Think of a cross between the best white flour dumplings and smoked beancurd. Back in Faralia, rich buyers from the mainland paid a thaler a pound for it, which was presumably why they hadn’t come across it before; it was quite rare back home, and far too valuable for country people to eat themselves. Here, though, you’d be hard put to it to walk ten yards through the woods at this time of year without treading on at least half a dozen good-sized heads. Which only went to show, she added, what a really special place Sphoe was; and this dinner would be (she blushed as she said it) sort of like the island’s way of welcoming its new owners.
“I can’t believe he’s letting her do it,” Chaere repeated. “He must be mad.”
Aidi gave up pretending he couldn’t hear her over the chink of his mattock blade on the stones. “What was he supposed to do?” he said wearily. “Say ‘No thanks, we think you’ve gone crazy and you’ll try and poison us all’? I don’t think so.”
Chaere sighed at him. “You heard what Enyo said. She’s been acting really strange while we were away. And let’s face it, she wasn’t exactly normal before that. Do you honestly want to sit down to a meal of God only knows what, concocted by a woman who spends her entire time roaming about in the woods like a tinker?”
“I don’t know,” Aidi said. “Depends on whether she’s a good cook, I suppose.” He straightened up, arched his back, then stooped again. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that it may just be a rather nice gesture on her part?”
“No.” Chaere scowled at him. “I think she’s strange.”
“Shy,” Aidi amended.
�
��And why now?” Chaere went on. “It’s not like we’ve just arrived, or it’s the first anniversary, or anything like that. No, she suddenly announces—”
“Like she said,” Aidi said patiently, “it’s because we’ve decided we’re staying. Nice thought on her part, I approve. Oh come on,” he added wearily. “We’ve been eating her toadstools and dandelion roots and stuff practically since we got here, and nobody’s died yet. In fact, after the stores got burnt, it was her and that servant who kept us going. You didn’t make a fuss then,” he added, “or at least you did, but only because of how it tasted. Why should she take it into her head to murder us all now, when she could’ve done it any time in the last—?”
“She’s changed,” Chaere hissed back. “Since we went to the mainland. Got worse. Clea thinks she had some sort of a thing going with one of the servants, the deer-hunter person. Don’t you see? This is to get back at us for sending him away.”
Aidi frowned. “Please don’t go saying things like that where Muri might hear you,” he said. “He’s a bit of an innocent in some ways; I don’t think he really understands about female gossip. He might be inclined to believe there could just possibly be a grain of truth to it. All right? Promise me.”
It took Aidi rather longer than usual to get Chaere to lose patience with him and go off in a huff. Once she’d gone, he turned over what she’d said slowly in his mind and decided that, on balance, she’d put up a case that needed to be referred upwards. So, when they stopped at midday, he talked to Kunessin about it.
“Well, we’ve agreed now,” Kunessin said. “We can’t very well say no. Muri’d wonder what we’re playing at.”
“Fine,” Aidi said. “I’d rather offend Muri than die in agony, thanks all the same. You’ve got to admit, it’s a bit odd, suddenly deciding she wants to treat us all to a grand banquet.”
Kunessin took his time before answering. “I’m not saying she’s the most rational woman in the world,” he said. “That doesn’t make her a mass poisoner. Anyhow, if she wanted to kill us, she could have done it any time. Could do it today, or tomorrow, come to that; slip something nasty into the cornmeal and then not turn up for dinner. We’d none of us know till it was too late. Why make a big song and dance about it, and risk putting us on our guard?”