Colours in the Steel f-1

by K. J. Parker

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘here’s the deal. You tell me why it’s so all-fire important to you to be an advocate, and then maybe I might be persuaded.’

  Silence. For the first time, the trainer could sense a slight trace of reluctance; a questionable motive, perhaps, something on which he could quite reasonably base a refusal. He decided to press the advantage.

  ‘The point being,’ he said, ‘that there’s only one valid reason for wanting to join this profession. Anything else, and you’re disqualified instantly. And I’ve got an idea it’s not the reason that’s motivating you.’

  The girl said nothing, but her cheeks were beginning to glow red. Professional that he was, the trainer could sense a fault in her guard that would repay pressure. He moved onto the offensive.

  ‘The only reason for fighting people for a living,’ he said, ‘is money. Not love of justice, or honour, or adventure, or prowess, or the desire to be the best. Certainly not the pleasure of killing; most definitely not because secretly you want to find a way you can die before your time without it being your fault. It has to be the money, or nothing. And if you’re about to tell me that it’s all right, you don’t actually intend to practise once you finish the course, you’re just here for the education, then I suggest you get out of my establishment before I have you thrown out into the street. Of all the dirty, disgusting words I know, the very worst of all is amateur. And that’s what you are, isn’t it?’

  He was winning; because when the girl replied her voice was unsettled, worried. ‘How would you know?’ she said sullenly.

  ‘Because,’ he said, ‘you turn up with payment in full in advance, all ready, not even a pretence of haggling or offering to pay in instalments or asking me to wait till you’ve started earning. That’s what professionals do. Obviously, therefore, you’re not a professional.’

  Victory. The girl’s hand closed around the purse and dropped to her side. ‘The hell with you, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll just have to go elsewhere.’

  ‘Best of luck,’ the trainer replied, relieved that the fight was over. Even so, now that he’d won, he couldn’t help feeling a burning curiosity. After all, she hadn’t answered his question. He asked it again.

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘If you tell me,’ he said, ‘I might be able to point you in the right direction.’

  The girl shrugged; the matter was no longer important. The mere gesture seemed to devalue his victory. ‘Revenge,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Ah,’ the trainer replied, ‘I might have guessed. If there’s one thing I despise almost as much as amateurs, it’s melodrama.’

  The girl gave him an unpleasant stare. ‘My uncle was killed by an advocate called Bardas Loredan. The only way I can legally punish him is to become an advocate myself. So that’s what I’m going to do.’

  In spite of himself, the trainer couldn’t help being intrigued. ‘What’s so significant about being legal?’ he asked. ‘If it’s so terribly important to you, why not just hire a couple of bright lads to cut his throat in an alley somewhere? I could definitely give you a few recommendations there; quite a few of our ex-students diversify into that area of the profession after a couple of years.’

  The girl shook her head. ‘That would be murder,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in murder, it’s wrong. This has to be done right.’

  Several replies occurred to the trainer, but he voiced none of them. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Start a lawsuit against one of his regular clients, and hire a better fencer. He’ll be killed and it’ll be completely legal.’

  ‘That would still be murder,’ the girl replied. ‘It’s not as if Loredan’s done anything wrong, after all. He was just doing his job, so he hasn’t committed any crime that would put him outside the law. But he killed my uncle and so he’s got to be punished.’

  Before the trainer could say anything, she had turned and walked away; out of the hall and out of his life. Most of him was only too glad to be rid of her; but there was one small dangerous part of him that regretted losing so unusual a subject for observation. The trainer had seen all kinds of strange people – the sad, the sick, the disturbed, the crazy and the plain old-fashioned stupid – but never one like this. Probably, he reminded himself, just as well. Bad trouble on two legs is always best avoided.

  It wasn’t until quite late in the afternoon that Loredan woke up. He was hung over, depressed and angry with himself for not coping better. He decided to go out for a drink.

  If a man wants to get thoroughly drunk in the lower city of Perimadeia, there are any number of places he can go, between them covering all the nuances of the mood, from boisterous jollity to utter self-loathing and all the fine gradations in between. From the fashionable inns where respectable people talked business over good wine to the unlicenced drinking-clubs behind a curtain in the back room of someone’s house, there was an abundance of choice that was sometimes offputting. There were taverns that advertised their presence with enormous mosaic signs, and others which did their best to be invisible. There were taverns that were government offices, taverns that were theatres, taverns that were academies of music or pure mathematics; there were temples to forbidden gods, corn exchanges and futures markets, dancing floors and mechanics’ institutes, places that allowed women and places that provided them, places to go if you wanted to watch a fight, places to go if you wanted to start one. There were even taverns where you went to argue over which tavern you were going to go to. And there were places you could go and sit on your own until you were too drunk to move. In fact, there were a lot of those.

  The one Loredan chose didn’t have a name or even many customers; it was basically the back room of a wheelright’s shop, with four plain tables, eight oil lamps and a hatch you banged on when you wanted more to drink. Nobody spoke much, though occasionally someone sang for half a minute or so. There was a channel under the back wall to piss in if you were feeling refined. If you happened to die where you sat, nobody would hold it against you. The wine was no worse for you than a dose of malaria.

  Loredan was halfway through a small jug of the stuff when someone walked up and sat down opposite him.

  ‘Bardas,’ he said.

  Loredan raised his head. ‘Teoclito,’ he replied. ‘Aren’t you dead?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Teoclito put down his jug and filled both cups. ‘Mind you, I’m not trying as hard as you. How’s life in the legal profession?’

  ‘Depressing.’

  ‘Good money, so I hear.’

  Loredan shrugged. ‘Better than the army, and you get to wear your own clothes. What about you?’

  Teoclito looked about seventy; in fact, he was only five or so years older than Loredan. The last time the two of them had sat together over a jug of wine had been in a tent pitched among the ruins of a town they had reached three days too late. The next day, there had been a bit of a scrimmage with the clans; Teoclito was one of the wounded who was past helping. They’d gone back to put him out of harm’s way, but he hadn’t been where they’d left him. It followed that the clans had him. It helped not to think too hard about such things.

  ‘Been back three years now,’ Teoclito said. ‘I work in the dancing school, sweeping up after the young ladies. It’s a living.’

  Loredan refilled the other man’s cup. ‘And before that?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much fun. You don’t really want to know.’ Teoclito smiled; he had five teeth. ‘They have surprisingly good doctors, but a wicked sense of humour. Eventually they turned me loose.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘No room for passengers in the caravan, and they’re a superstitious bunch. Terrible bad luck to kill a cripple.’

  ‘And after that?’

  Teoclito sighed wearily. ‘Oh, I walked to the coast, got there, found I’d been going in the wrong direction. After that I didn’t feel much like walking any more, so I stayed put.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘Solamen.’ Loreda
n raised an eyebrow; Solamen was up on the north coast, two months’ walk from the place where they’d parted. Among other things, it was a flourishing slave market. ‘I got a job, of sorts. Unpaid. Sort of like voluntary work.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Finally I ended up helping row a big boat,’ Teoclito continued. ‘And when this boat got sunk off Canea, I swam ashore, and now here I am. I’d like to say how nice it is to be back, but I have a basic respect for the truth that prevents me.’

  ‘You’ve been busy, then.’

  Teoclito shrugged, awkwardly. ‘Like you said, it beats being in the army. Anyway, enough about that. You see any of the old crowd nowadays?’

  Loredan shook his head. ‘Not many of us made it back,’ he said, ‘and we don’t have reunions. You didn’t miss much, at the end.’ He yawned. ‘Saying that, I did run into Cherson the other day, down by the city wharf. He’s running a brass foundry, doing quite well. Employs a lot of people.’

  ‘Never could stand the man myself.’

  ‘Nor me. Funny, isn’t it, the way bastards live for ever.’

  Before his presumed death, Teoclito had been Loredan’s Company Commander. Every inch the hero, in a society that discouraged the type; first man into the engagement and last out. He seemed much shorter than Loredan remembered. He was almost completely bald, and there were scars across his crown. Loredan had taken over his command; to the best of his knowledge, they were the only two men alive out of that company.

  Teoclito was looking at him intensely. Mostly, Loredan recognised, it was contempt.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They do, don’t they?’

  They filled their cups again and sat quietly for a while. Loredan couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘Anyway,’ Teoclito said at last, finishing his drink and standing up. ‘Can’t be too late, got to work tomorrow. Be seeing you.’

  ‘Clito.’ Loredan wished he hadn’t spoken; he was afraid that what he was about to say would be the wrong thing.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You… Are you all right for money? I mean-’

  That look again. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I got a job. Go carefully, Bardas.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘Oh, one more thing.’ Teoclito leant against the table, favouring his right leg.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sure you had a good reason,’ he said, ‘for leaving me and not coming back. Just don’t ever try and tell me what it was.’

  ‘Take care, Clito.’

  ‘I always do.’ He walked away, his right foot dragging. His whole body had been twisted like a length of wire. It must have seemed a very long way from the high plains to Solamen, walking like that.

  The lengths some people’ll go to just to stay alive.

  Loredan left the rest of his wine and went back to his ‘island’. He was virtually sober, but that was all right. No more drinking, he told himself, as he lay down to sleep. Regular meals, exercise, practice in the Schools, perhaps even a new sword, and maybe he’d be in shape to beat Ziani Alvise. After all, it was just another fight, something he was supposed to be good at. It wasn’t as if he was being asked to do anything difficult, like walking home.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘What are you staring at?’ demanded the engineer.

  Temrai stepped backwards. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just looking.’

  The engineer scowled, and spat into the sawdust. ‘Haven’t you got any work to do?’

  ‘I finished it. I’m waiting for the next batch of blanks. So I thought I’d just look around.’

  The engineer muttered something and went back to what he was doing. He was working on the frame of a small trebuchet, the kind that threw a hundredweight stone. Using a chisel and a beech mallet, he was cutting dovetails in a thick twelve-foot-long plank; earlier, he and another man had sawn it out of a massive billet of seasoned ash, using a ten-foot saw.

  ‘Is that for the main frame?’ Temrai asked. The engineer looked up, surprised.

  ‘Left-hand A-frame,’ he replied. ‘Already done the right one. How come you know so much about engines?’

  ‘I’m interested,’ Temrai said. ‘I’ve been watching.’

  The engineer, a man of about sixty-five with shaggy white hair on his chest and arms like a bear, nodded. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re the offcomer kid, the plainsman.’ His mouth twitched into a small grin. ‘Bet you ain’t seen anything like this up on the plains.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Temrai said. ‘I think it’s fascinating, seeing all the different machines.’

  This time the engineer actually laughed. ‘There ain’t much to these buggers,’ he said. ‘Trebuchet’s a very basic design; you just got a bloody great big heavy weight on one end and a sling to put the stone in on the other, and it pivots around a pin supported on two A-frames. So you hoist up the weight with a winch, load your stone and let go. The weight goes crashing down again, and the stone gets slung out. Piece of cake. Compared to some of the machines we make here, there’s nothing to it.’

  ‘Oh,’ Temrai said. ‘I thought they were quite good.’

  The engineer shrugged. ‘Oh, they work all right. We got trebuchets’ll throw a four hundredweight stone three hundred an’ fifty yards, straight as a die. This here’s just a baby; got the same range but only takes a quarter of the load.’

  Temrai nodded appreciatively, and the engineer was secretly pleased to see the light of enthusiasm in his eyes. All true engineers are enthusiasts; they value admiration and respect every bit as much as painters and sculptors do, and they know they deserve it even more. All a sculpture need do is look a certain way. A machine has to work.

  ‘How do you know how big to make it?’ Temrai asked.

  The engineer laughed again, not unkindly. ‘That, my son, is a bloody good question. Some of it you can work out by figuring; there’s what we call formulas. The rest just comes by trial and error. You make one, you see if it works; if it doesn’t you make it again a different way, and you keep on over and over till you got one that does work. That’s what we call prototypes.’

  ‘Ah,’ Temrai said.

  ‘F’rinstance,’ the engineer went on, carefully marking out the rectangle he was about to cut with light taps of the chisel, ‘the Secretary of Ordnance comes to me and he says he wants ten light trebs to cover the angle of the sea wall just along from the Chain, where they’ve just put in them five new bastions. So he tells me what he wants these trebs to do and I go away and I have a think. Now, I know that we built a treb once that had a beam thirty-three foot long, with a counterweight of a hundred hundredweight, and we found it could chuck half a hundredweight a couple of hundred yards. Now that ain’t much for a treb, more like a kiddie’s toy, but it gives me somewhere to start. So I reckon, if I can sling fifty pounds two hundred yards with a hundred hundredweight off thirty-three, maybe if I want to sling a hundred pounds three hundred and fifty yards, I could start with maybe a forty-foot beam and fifteen hundred hundredweight. And then I think, hang on, a fifty-foot beam and two and a half hundred hundredweight’ll chuck three hundredweight two hundred an’ seventy-five yards, ’cos I made one that did. So I try a hundred hundredweight off forty foot of beam, and if that busts the beam, I know forty’s too long with a hundred, so next time I try thirty-six. But I’ve made the beam shorter now, so I gotta up the weight on the other end; so we up the counterweight to a hundred an’ seventy. Now if it breaks, I gotta make the beam stronger, and that throws out all the other measurements.’ He paused for breath. ‘Not a quick job,’ he said,‘making engines.’

  ‘It sounds really complicated,’ Temrai said. He sounded so downcast that the engineer smiled at him.

  ‘It is complicated,’ he said, ‘making things that work. Any bloody fool can make things that don’t work. No offence, son, but that’s what you foreigners do. You see a machine and you think, that’s a good idea, we’ll make one of them; but you never stop to think about how long it ought to be or what it ought to
be made out of, and then it don’t work and you say the hell with that, alas, the gods are angry, and you pack it in. That’s the difference, see,’ he added, tapping his forehead. ‘Up here.’

  ‘I can see that,’ Temrai replied. ‘That’s what makes you all so very wise.’ He surveyed the various finished and half-finished parts of the engine standing against the wall in order or cradled on specially built jigs, and his lips moved as if he was counting under his breath. ‘And I suppose it’s not just the arm and the weight,’ he went on. ‘I suppose it’s important to get the frame the right size, too.’

  ‘You’re getting the idea. We might make an engineer of you yet.’ He patted the timber in front of him, which was secured by broad iron cramps to a substantial trestle. ‘I been thinking, and I reckon if I make the frame twelve by eight by twelve, I won’t be too far out; it’s not like I was trying to mount a sixty-foot beam with clearance for three an’ a half hundred. The more weight, see, the more clearance you need, so the taller the A-frame’s gotta be. But the more acute you make the angle, the likelier they are to bust under the strain, so you gotta beef them up, and then some prat from Ordnance comes along and tells you to lose twenty hundredweight off it or it’ll be too heavy for the tower they want it on.’ The engineer rolled his eyes dramatically. ‘See what I mean?’ he said.