Ice, Iron and Gold

by S. M. Stirling

  The isles between the pillars were crowded; there were bundles of carpets, and a rip in the burlap sacking showed they were colorful frazzate, done in geometric shapes. There were bundles of rawhides too, but under the odor of the uncured leather were hints of a dozen other things from boxes and bales and sacks stacked high in the gloom and from pyramids of barrels; pickled tuna and artichoke hearts and olives, sweet Marsala wine, brandy, raisins, dried figs and apricots, Deglet Noor dates, flowers of sulfur . . .

  "Don't tell me; Signor Vadalà is from the Kingdom of Sicily," Rutherston murmured.

  "Nose like a fox, Inspector Rutherston has," Bramble said.

  "Trapani," Arnson said. At their blank looks: "Port on the west coast of Sicily; that's where he comes from. His firm does a lot of business here in the Empire."

  They moved over to the open space in the middle of the building; there was a square hole fifteen feet on a side in the ceiling above, with a cargo-hook and pulley system hanging down through it and a geared windlass bolted to the floor. The body lay face-down in the center of the clear space, in the unlovely sprawl they all recognized. Rutherston leaned forward. The dead man was certainly wearing a kilt, the genuine pleated article though the tartan wasn't one the detective knew, a russet jacket with pewter buttons, a saffron-colored shirt of some rough fabric, and buckled shoes and knee-socks.

  There was a young red-haired man bent over the corpse. An older, shorter, portly, black-haired one with a tuft of chin-beard and mustachios waxed to points stood at a discreet distance—too far away to eavesdrop—looking anxious and fingering a hideously lurid purple silk cravat. Standing next to him was a younger woman with long dark hair and carrying an attaché case, wearing a smart outfit of dark skirt and jacket and a hat with a slightly damp ostrich feather; at a guess, a secretary or accountant, possibly a mistress as well. Rutherston dismissed them for a moment, focusing on the corpse.

  "Now," Bramble said, "did ee jump, or was ee pushed?"

  "Neither," the red-haired man said, looking up; he was in his twenties, with a pale, freckled face . . . and, right now, rubber gloves on his hands. "Stabbed in the back, and then fell."

  He straightened. "Artie McTavish, at your service, Detective-Inspector. I'd shake hands, but . . ."

  "But everyone calls you Jock, Jock," one of the uniformed police said.

  The young man sighed. "One of my grandparents moved south, along with nine-tenths of the folk in the Hebrides. I'm a dead-average Englishman! Why does it have to be me who gets called Jock?"

  "Because you don't hit them often enough?" Bramble said, grinning and holding up a great knobby fist.

  "We call you Jock because you moan about it," Arnson said. "And because you're a cheap bastard and have those carrot-shavings on your head. Now, tell us a story, Jock."

  Rutherston and Bramble crouched by the body. The dead man had brown hair, worn rather long, shoulder-length, and a mustache that was also long enough to fall past his mouth on either side. There was a pool of slowly congealing blood beneath the corpse, but not as much as might have been expected. Rutherston looked at the face; bleeding from the nose and mouth too, of course, and with a day's stubble or better, and the blotches of postmortem lividity. The staring eyes were a rather pale blue.

  "About thirty?" he said, guessing at the dead man's age.

  "About that, or a bit younger. He was an outdoor worker," the doctor said.

  Which aged the skin. Rutherston went on: "Time of death?"

  "He died sometime between nine o'clock and noon today," McTavish said. "Rigor mortis is just setting in—his face is stiff, but the joints are only now losing mobility. The low temperatures would delay onset, of course, but it would also depend on how physically active he was just before death."

  "Signor Vadalà's secretary opened up at noon to load cargo for transfer to the railway," Arnson amplified. "She sent for him—we have confirmation on that from the laborers who were with her—he ran to us, and we signaled Winchester over the semaphore when we couldn't identify the dead man. It's not a local killing, or just some ruff-scruff off a tramp freighter."

  The origins of the body had been why they'd called in New New Scotland Yard. The thin scattering who'd stayed up in the Hebrides and Shetland and Orkney when the rest of the survivors moved south had done well enough in the generations since, in an oatmeal-potatoes-and-whiskey way. Certainly they'd multiplied energetically. But though formally part of Greater Britain and the Empire of the West they were very out of the way, and largely self-governing.

  Meaning, Winchester ignores them and vice versa, Rutherston thought. Except when one of them gets knocked over the head down here. Wouldn't do to offend some powerful clan.

  "Cause of death was a bit puzzling at first glance, Inspector," McTavish said. "But it's this puncture wound, sure enough."

  He drew a scalpel from his black bag and widened a slit in a section of blood-soaked cloth on the dead man's back. "See, here—" he used the blade as a pointer. "Just a tiny little pinprick, but I'll wager anything you care to name, it went up under the ribs and across to the heart. I'll know for sure when I've done the autopsy, of course. The entry wound is very neat, completely circular. Certainly not a knife with an edged blade. Stiletto, I'd say."

  "Or a piece of sharpened wire spoke in a bit of doweling," Bramble said. "I've seen that. Either way, someone knew how to do it."

  The medic grunted, Arnson nodded, and Rutherston made a just-so gesture of agreement. Killing a man instantly with a single thrust like that was not easy. Even a sword through the body usually took longer and involved some thrashing about.

  "Then he toppled forward—see the abrasions on the shins—and fell fourteen feet to the floor here. Fractured skull; broke his neck, shoulder and ribs too. All that was postmortem, or nearly, though."

  Bramble got up and began quartering the area, then grabbed the rope and swarmed up to the second story arm-over-arm. Rutherston stayed crouched on his hams, sketching the body and its position in his notebook; then he drew rubber gloves of his own, put them on and bent forward.

  The dead man was about his own height or Bramble's, six feet. A little over the average for someone of North European descent, which he probably was. Lanky but muscular in a lean fashion, like a man who'd eaten well but worked hard all his life, which was normal enough for someone from a civilized country. Naturally fair-skinned, but not so much so that he couldn't tan—and he was tanned, hardly winter-pale at all, and no paler under the shirt, but the upper thigh where the kilt was disarranged was much lighter.

  Outdoor worker and in the habit of doing his job stripped to the waist, and quite recently in a place with strong sun.

  He felt the palms. Both were covered from fingertips to the heel of his hands with heavy callus, of the sort you got from handling ropes a good deal. A seaman's hands; the pattern was quite distinctive.

  "It's nei more summer up in Scotland than it is here—rather less so, in fact—but this man was exposed to a good deal of sun lately," Rutherston said. "We can't be certain that he's Scottish, but he definitely was a sailor and fresh from the tropics."

  "Mmm, but he's certainly dressed like a Scot," Arnson pointed out.

  Besides the kilt, he was wearing a plaid, a blanketlike swath of tartan fabric across the torso and pinned at one shoulder with a silver brooch; a small knife was tucked into the top of one knee-stocking—a sgian dhu, with a hilt of black bone carved in knotwork—and a double-edged dirk with a ten-inch blade at his belt. There was similar curling interleaved work tooled into the leather of the belt and worked on the bronze buckle. The oddest feature was a narrow ring of twisted gold around the man's neck, ending in two knobs over the throat, graved with an interlaced design of elongated gripping beasts.

  Two of the uniformed policemen brought a stretcher forward and rolled the body onto it, pressing until he lay straight, then set the ends of the poles on barrels to leave the corpse at just above waist-height.

  "He's not really dressed ve
ry like a Scotsman," Rutherston said thoughtfully. "Or rather, too much so. Orkneymen and Shetlanders wear trousers, of course, but I've met visiting lairds from the Hebrides and the new mainland settlements dressed very much like this for visits at Court."

  "Are they as dour a lot as rumor has it, Inspector?" McTavish asked curiously.

  "Ah . . . let's put it this way; it's not hard to tell the difference between a man from North Uist and a ray of sunshine. But more to the point, while they do wear kilts up there as ordinary wear . . . at least in the Western Isles . . . they're not always dressed up in the rest of it, not most of the time. When they do, it's for swank and in the best they have. This is a plain man's working clothes—the fabric was never anything fancy, and it's worn; see the fraying here, and how the elbows are shiny."

  "And that thing around the neck?" Arnson asked.

  "I've never seen anything like that except in books and the New British Museum. It's a torc; the ancient Celts wore them. Contemporary Scots most certainly do not."

  The detective turned the battered face to the light with an impersonal gentleness. "Do you have a mirrored probe?"

  "Here it is, Inspector."

  It was the kind dentists used. Rutherston put pressure on the jaw with his left hand and slid it into the open mouth with the right.

  "Ah-ha! Take a look."

  "Good teeth," the doctor said. "Portsmouth people eat too bloody many sweets . . . wait a bit, that crown looks odd."

  "It's not gold; some sort of porcelain, I think. The Scots use the same sort of dentistry as we . . . only they've a good deal less of it."

  Rutherston laid down the probe, drew the little "black knife" from the dead man's sock and balanced it on his palm. "And this isn't a toy for ceremony. It's a working blade."

  "It is," Arnson said, taking it from him for a moment. "My family's in the metal trade. This is layer-forged—beautiful work. It would set you back a pound at least."

  That was most of a week's wage for a laboring man; two days for an inspector.

  "Hmmm. There's a crescent moon tattooed at the base of his throat," Rutherston said.

  "Or a strung bow, Inspector," the doctor pointed out.

  "Perhaps. But I've never seen this particular mark on a knife before," Rutherston continued. "And it's definitely the moon, in three phases."

  There was a symbol inlaid in silver on the hilt, a circle flanked by two outward-pointing crescents. There was another on the dirk, and . . .

  He turned over the left hand. The same mark was tattooed on the inside of the wrist.

  "Well, well, well," he said softly.

  "Why do you say it's definitely the moon?" Arnson said sharply. "It could be, but—"

  "It's Hecate's Moon," Rutherston said. "Waxing, full and waning. I've run into it before, during an investigation near the New Forest. There are some of them in the villages there. Quite a few, in fact."

  At their blank looks, he went on: "It's the witch-mark. The Old Religion."

  The blankness turned to wide-eyed surprise. Arnson crossed herself, and the others followed. By law Greater Britain had freedom of religion, but even in a polyglot seaport town like this the Anglican Rite Catholics were overwhelmingly dominant; the minority of Dissenters tended to be Lutheran or Anti-Reunionist Evangelical or Presbyterian. Outright non-Christians were very rare.

  "There really are witches there?" she said. "I thought that was a fairy-story."

  "Most certainly; a quiet and inoffensive lot for the most part. But they don't, to my knowledge, wear kilts!"

  Bramble slid down the rope; he had a length of wood in his hand roughly the size and shape of a quarterstaff.

  "Odd you should say that, sir," he said.

  Then he extended the baulk of wood. It was yew, heavy and hard, roughly triangular and split from a single tree-trunk; about seven and a half feet long and four inches through. Good yew, at that, straight and free from knots, and mostly the deep orange-brown of heartwood, with a thinner, paler band of sapwood on one side. And tapped into the wood with a punch near one end was the same triple-moon symbol.

  "Most of them had the stamp shaved off—looks like someone overlooked this one," Bramble said with satisfaction.

  "And our witches don't usually deal in yew, either," Rutherston said meditatively. "They're mostly farmers or craftsmen or charcoal-burners. Is there much up there, Constable?"

  "Four or five tons of it, sir. All about this quality."

  Bramble took the baulk and put it across his shoulders, bending it with the orange core in and the paler side out as it would be in a finished weapon and grunting a little with the effort. Yew was a natural laminate, the heartwood strong in compression and the sapwood when it was stretched, which made it the finest of all timber for bows.

  "Not 'alf bad," he said. "Well-seasoned. And not from Blighty, either."

  Rutherston nodded. Yew flourished in England and you could use it for bows—but the climate was really too mild and wet for the best quality bowyer's wood, and English yew tended to be crooked and knotty as well. Straight, dense slow-growth timber from cold mountains or drier country was much better; the lands around the Mediterranean were the traditional source for high-quality staves. The government of Greater Britain had big yew plantations in Iberia and the Maghreb, planted and guarded at considerable expense.

  The problem is that slow growth is . . . very slow, Rutherston thought. It takes at least a century for a good tree to be ready to harvest. Two or three centuries are better. And we only really started the plantations about the time I was born.

  And in the meantime, the Empire needed bowstaves. By law, everyone not blind or crippled started archery training when they turned six and enrolled in school. Adults under sixty had to keep a bow and quiver at home as part of their muster-kit for the militia and practice with it every Sunday. Regular soldiers and the navy and Royal Marines used them far more often, of course. A bow in active service didn't last more than a few years at most. The load up in the loft would make at least five or six thousand of the great six-foot mankillers, allowing for wastage when they were trimmed to shape.

  "Signor Vadalà?" Rutherston called politely.

  The portly Italian merchant came over, fiddling a little with his cravat and followed by his secretary. She looked foreign too, even darker than the Sicilian and subtly different in general appearance, though very pretty in a slim, hawk-featured fashion, with flashing eyes so black the pupils vanished in the iris. The detective judged her age to be somewhere in the mid to late twenties; a small golden crucifix hung from a chain around her neck, vivid against the indigo linen of her high-necked blouse.

  "I presume this stack of yew is yours, Signor?" Rutherston said.

  "Yes, Detective-Inspector," the man said, in very good English—Portsmouth dialect, to be precise—but with a very un-English bow. "Antonio Vadalà, at your service."

  The detective shook hands, then turned to the woman.

  "Miss Llesenia Vargas, Inspector," she said, giving him a firm shake.

  She pronounced the first name as Yesenia, in the Hispanic style; he'd had some contact with the language in his Army days, and he mentally filled in the double-l.

  "Gibraltar, Miss Vargas?" he said; he didn't think she was South American.

  She smiled, showing very white teeth against a skin as dark as Bramble's, but with a strong olive tint.

  "Sí. From the Rock itself. So many of you Anglos moving south, I thought there would be plenty of room here if I would come north."

  Gibraltarian was what he'd have guessed, anyway. Her English was very fluent, but it had a rapid accent, soft for the most part yet occasionally guttural. Most of the original population of Gibraltar had spoken a Spanish dialect before the Change. In the city itself some still did, though those who'd joined in the resettlement of the empty land to the north and south had mostly been swallowed up in the northern influx.

  And she has the look, Rutherston thought. Might even be Rom, or partly, she's so
dark.

  "You discovered the body?" he said, poising his fountain-pen over his notebook.

  "Sí. At—" she touched a pocket of her jacket, which had the gold links of a watch-chain "—about eleven-thirty. I was here from the office—"

  "That is also my home," Vadalà said. "About ten minutes' walk from here."

  Rutherston nodded; living over the shop was common, and most merchants kept as close as they could to the docks without actually setting up among the sailors' dosshouses and slop-shops.

  "—to oversee the loading of the Marsala." Vargas nodded towards one of the pyramids of wine-barrels. "The body was there but I did not notice it until after I had done the inventory; it was you see, dark inside. When the laborers came with the cart, I saw the body and called to them. The blood was still flowing. I stayed here with the team, and sent one immediately for Signor Vadalà."

  "Thank you, Miss Vargas," he said.

  That agreed with the initial report . . . which was a little odd, since witness statements were usually chaotic and contradictory, particularly under stress, and finding a body was fairly stressful for a civilian. On the other hand, Miss Vargas was apparently a very cool customer and not given to the vapors. That she'd left home and ended up working here argued for wit, nerve and experience beyond the usual.

  "Signor?" he said.

  Her Italian employer went on: "Fifteen years I have been resident for my firm in Portsmouth, always paying my taxes in full and—"

  Rutherston cleared his throat and poised his notebook. "I'm sure you're a most valued resident," he said.

  What I'm mainly sure of is that you're smarter than you would like me to believe, he thought. The gesticulating-fat-man performance is supposed to make me or Englishmen in general take you less seriously, I think.

  "Importing yew is a major part of your business, Signor Vadalà?"

  The merchant looked a little surprised; his shrug was far more accented than his command of the spoken language.

  "No, but it's very useful, for the customs. You see, the tariffs on other items are reduced if yew staves are included in the shipment. The price of the yew, that does not produce much profit—even in the Kingdom of Sicily, or the Umbrian League, it is not cheap, you see? There is finding the trees, cutting, transport, taxes—all expensive. But the tariff reduction, it makes the difference. Also sometimes I buy a great many yew staves when I have the opportunity, and I trade them to other importers, from the Italies, and from Cyprus. Then they can get the reductions. The Crown gets the yew, everyone is happy."