by K. J. Parker
Bardas found that he couldn’t hear any more; it was as if his ears were blocked up with wax. He could see Alexius still talking, but he couldn’t make out the words. When he stood up to shout out, Speak up, we can’t hear you at the back, he felt his head crack against the low roof of the spur, just as the walls began to buckle and come in on him, like a tin cup being crumpled under the wheels of a cart.
‘Sergeant Loredan?’
His head snapped up. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was miles away.’
‘As I was saying,’ the adjutant went on, giving him an austere look, ‘the situation in that part of the world is deteriorating steadily. Imperial interests are being directly threatened. We can no longer guarantee the safety of our citizens. Accordingly, central command is drawing up contingency plans in case military intervention becomes unavoidable.’
‘I see,’ Bardas said, not having a clue what the adjutant was talking about. ‘That’s – disturbing.’
‘Quite so.’ The adjutant folded his hands on the desktop, leaned forward a little. ‘Now, as you will appreciate, first-hand experience of these people will be of great value in planning our response, both long-term and tactical. Since you have fought in several wars against them—’
Gods. They’re going to attack Temrai. ‘I see,’ he repeated.
The adjutant nodded. ‘At the moment,’ he went on, ‘you’ve been ordered to stand by, pending a detailed debriefing by senior staff; I have little doubt, however, that as the situation develops, you will be reassigned to a more active role in the war. There may,’ he added alluringly, ‘be a further promotion, depending on the nature of the duties you are called on to undertake.’
A promotion. Gosh. ‘In the meantime?’ Bardas asked. ‘As I said, at present you are to await orders and hold yourself in readiness. It would be in order, however, for you to conclude any unfinished business you may have here, and make arrangements for handing over to your replacement in due course.’
Bardas stood up. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on to it right away.’
Beats me why they don’t sling me out of this army, he reflected as he walked back down the endless corridors. Disrespectful, insubordinate, generally sloppy; ah, but I took Ap’ Escatoy for them. And now I’m going to take Perimadeia.
He stopped.
‘So you’re going to take Perimadeia, are you?’ the man said. Bardas couldn’t see him very well; it was a dark point in the corridor, halfway between two sconces, and he couldn’t make out his face; but he could smell coriander. He realised he’d stopped breathing, for some reason. Instinct, maybe.
‘They want me to,’ he replied. ‘I do what I’m told. If I do a good job, they’ll make me a citizen.’
‘They’ll make you a citizen,’ the man repeated. ‘Wouldn’t that be just fine? Imagine that; you, a citizen. Bardas Loredan, there isn’t a civilised society anywhere in the world that’d have you as a citizen.’
Bardas frowned. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but do I know you?’
‘We’ve met. In fact, we’ve been here before – here or hereabouts. Don’t change the subject. You’re going to take Perimadeia. Why am I not surprised? Enjoy your work, do you?’
Bardas thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Well, it depends. I’ve done a lot of different things in my time. Some were worse than others.’
‘Such as?’
‘The mines,’ Bardas said. ‘I didn’t enjoy them at all. And serving with Maxen, that was pretty grim, most of the time.’
‘Fair enough,’ said the man. He hadn’t moved, and neither had Bardas. ‘What about being in charge of the defence of Perimadeia? Was that nice or nasty?’
‘I didn’t enjoy it,’ Bardas replied. ‘I knew I was the wrong man for the job. I did the best I could, but someone else might have saved the city. And the experience itself was pretty wretched.’
‘I see. And what about your career as a fencer? Was it exciting, thrilling? Did you relish the challenge? Did you feel good each time you won?’
‘Relieved,’ Bardas said. ‘Glad I was still alive. But I did it because it was something I was good enough at to make a living. I needed the sort of money I could earn by fencing, you see, to send home to my brothers.’
‘They frittered it all away, of course,’ the man said, ‘so it was all a waste of time. Well, that only leaves farming, teaching fencing, bowmaking and whatever it is you’re doing now. How do you feel about them? Happier, I suppose.’
‘Yes,’ Bardas said. ‘Farming was a hard life, but it’s what I was born to do. Teaching fencing was better than fencing, and the money was adequate; I could have carried on with that quite happily. The same with making bows – living that sort of life, I didn’t really need much money, and I like working with my hands. Same goes for this, I suppose, if only I could find something I could actually do here. Still, nobody’s trying to kill me, so I’m that much ahead of the game.’
The man laughed. ‘What an uncomplicated fellow you are, deep down,’ he said. ‘All you really want out of life is a hard day’s work and a fair day’s pay; and instead, you grind down tribes, defend and destroy cities, kill men by the hundred. Tell me; in all the fights to the death you’ve been in, all the him-or-me confrontations, why is it, do you think, that they all died and you’re still alive? Is it just your superior skill and hand-speed? I’d be interested to hear what you make of it.’
‘I prefer not to think about it,’ Bardas replied. ‘No offence, but what business is it of yours?’
‘None,’ the man replied. ‘Except that I’m curious, as most people are. I just wanted to know what you were really like. It’s so easy when you’re reading or hearing about a great historical figure to get into the habit of assuming that they were completely different from the rest of us, that they lived by entirely different rules. Talking to you like this, just the two of us, I realise it isn’t like that at all. It’s obvious to me now; most of the time, you simply hadn’t got a clue what you were doing; nothing more to it than that. But I’d never have seen that if I’d stuck to what it says in the books, or what Grandfather told us when we were kids. Well, I think that’s all. Goodbye.’
‘Wait,’ Bardas said; but he was talking to half a shadow.
‘Oh, and one last thing,’ said a voice from the darkness where the man and the smell of coriander had been. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Bardas replied; then his knees folded up and he hit the ground.
When he opened his eyes again the light was horribly bright, and there was a ring of heads peering down at him.
‘The heat, possibly,’ a Son of Heaven was saying. ‘They take time to get used to it. He comes from a cold, wet country.’
‘Or the residual effects of being buried alive,’ said someone else at the bottom edge of his vision. ‘In cases of severe concussion, it can be weeks before the symptoms manifest themselves. That would account for the hallucinations.’
‘So would heatstroke,’ replied the Son of Heaven. ‘In fact, hearing imaginary voices and talking to people who aren’t there is rather more indicative of heatstroke than cranial trauma, although I grant you, it’s common to both conditions.’
‘I think he’s awake,’ said another voice. ‘Sergeant Loredan, can you hear us?’
Bardas opened his mouth; his tongue and throat were stiff and dry, like leather that’s got wet and been allowed to dry without being oiled. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Are you real?’
The Son of Heaven seemed offended by the question; but the man who’d spoken to him smiled and said, ‘Yes, we’re real; real enough for your purposes, anyway. Can you remember what happened to you?’
‘I fell over,’ Bardas replied.
‘Cranial trauma,’ muttered the man with the buried-alive theory. ‘Notice the slight aphasia, the obvious memory loss. Typical.’
‘We know that,’ said the man who was talking to him, slowly and gently, as if to a dying man or an idiot. ‘You fell, and you bumped your head; no
thing serious. But before that.’
Bardas thought for a moment. ‘I was talking to someone, ’ he said.
That seemed to please the man who was talking to him, because he smiled a little. ‘Aha,’ he said. ‘And can you remember who you were talking to?’
‘My superior officer,’ Bardas croaked. ‘He was telling me I might get a promotion.’
Wrong answer, apparently. ‘I meant after that,’ the man said. ‘After your interview with the adjutant, but before you fell over. Were you talking to anybody? ’
Bardas tried to shake his head but it didn’t want to move, so he spoke instead. ‘No,’ he replied.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes. At least,’ he added, ‘as far as I can remember.’
‘He’s hiding something,’ muttered the Son of Heaven. ‘Evasiveness, slight paranoia. Obviously heatstroke.’
The man who’d been talking to him tried again. ‘We’re doctors,’ he said, ‘we’re here to help you. Are you sure you weren’t talking to anybody else?’
‘Positive,’ Bardas said; then, as the man’s face creased into a disappointed scowl, he added, ‘Of course, I imagined I was talking to someone, but I know it wasn’t real. Just a hallucination or something.’
The man looked more annoyed than ever. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘And how can you be so certain of that?’
‘Easy.’ Bardas’ head began to hurt a lot. ‘First he tried to make me believe he was someone I killed in the mines; then he wanted to make out he was a student of history from hundreds of years into the future. Also he knew too much about me; I must have imagined it.’
‘I see,’ said the cranial-trauma man. ‘And do you talk to imaginary people often?’
‘Yes,’ Bardas replied; and the doctors vanished. When he opened his eyes again, he was still in the same place, but alone; and now it was dark, and he could smell onions and rosemary and blood and sweet marjoram and urine. For a while everything was quiet as the grave; then he heard a man groaning a few yards away. Hospital, he thought.
His head was still splitting, though the pain was rather different now. He savoured it for a while, trying to place it by its texture and intensity (if cranial trauma was medical for a bash on the head, he was ready to plump for cranial trauma; he’d been bashed on the head many times, and this was pretty much what it felt like).
Bardas?
‘Shhh,’ he whispered. ‘You’ll wake people up.’
Sorry.
‘That’s all right. How are you, anyway?’
Can’t complain, Alexius replied. Bardas closed his eyes; he could see Alexius very clearly in the dark behind his eyelids. So what have you been doing to yourself?
‘I don’t know,’ Bardas admitted. ‘One moment I was walking down a corridor in the armoury building, now I’m here. It could be heatstroke, or cranial trauma.’
Cranial trauma?
‘Bash on the head. Not that I’ve been bashed on the head recently, but apparently it can take a while to show up. Anyway, here I am; that’s about all I know.’
What rotten luck, Alexius said sympathetically. I hope you feel better soon.
‘Thank you.’ The pain suddenly got worse, then better again. ‘Was there something you wanted, or did you just drop by for a chat? Only, I don’t want to sound unfriendly, but—’
Of course. I just wondered where you were, that’s all. When I heard about Ap’ Escatoy, I was worried; being buried alive and so forth, it sounds absolutely awful.
Bardas smiled. ‘I can’t remember much about it,’ he replied. ‘I went out like a light, and then they dug me out and I came to in a field hospital. How about you? What are you up to these days?’
Would you believe, I’m teaching again. It’s almost like the old days. But so long as I take things a bit steady, it doesn’t seem to be doing me any harm. And it’s good to be doing something useful, instead of just sitting about.
‘I’m pleased for you,’ Bardas replied. ‘So where are you doing this teaching?’
‘Delirious,’ said a man’s voice, unseen, quite loud. ‘A common enough effect in cranial-trauma cases. What would you suggest?’
Bardas opened his eyes. There was light, the soft flush just after sunrise, when the ground’s still cool. A tall man, a Son of Heaven, was standing over him. A little further away was a group of young men, listening attentively. ‘Rest,’ said one of them. ‘It’s about all you can do, isn’t it?’
‘Good answer,’ replied the Son of Heaven, ‘but I think we can do a little better than that. Anyone?’
One of the young men cleared his throat. ‘A sedative,’ he said diffidently. ‘Poppy juice, to keep the patient calm and let him sleep while he’s healing. And a willow-bark infusion for the pain.’
‘But not both together,’ the Son of Heaven chided. ‘Or else he might go so fast asleep that he’ll never wake up. Besides, if he’s asleep, he won’t need anything for the pain. Very good. Right, let’s move along.’
‘Doctor.’ One of the students had noticed that Bardas was awake, and nodded in his direction. The doctor looked back.
‘He’s awake,’ he said, ‘splendid. But we must keep this short for fear of overtiring him. Well now, how are we feeling today?’
‘Awful,’ Bardas croaked. ‘Where am I?’
But the doctor was leaning over him, pressing his skull with the balls of his thumbs. ‘Does that hurt?’ he asked. ‘And what about that?’
‘Ow,’ Bardas replied with feeling.
‘As I thought,’ the doctor said. ‘The skull’s too soft, and there are a number of dents and ridges that need to be taken out.’ He turned away and looked at one of the students. ‘The number-one planishing hammer,’ he said, ‘and the oval-head stake, if you please.’
Before Bardas could move or object, the doctor had forced his mouth open and shoved something into it; Bardas recognised it as one of the stakes that fitted in the slot on top of the armourer’s anvil, used to beat down on when shaping work from outside. Then the doctor took the hammer from the student – it had two flat faces, one square and one round – and started tapping the top of Bardas’ head with fast, even, pecking strokes.
‘The purpose of this action,’ he announced, ‘which we term planishing, is to smooth out the finished work. In addition to this, it has two other important functions: to compress the metal and to close its surface pores, thereby imparting to the outside a level of work-hardening comparable to that imparted to the inside by the act of doming or raising. It is important not to overdo the planishing process, lest the metal be beaten thin or made too hard, in other words brittle. Should brittleness be imparted by excessive zeal at this juncture, the piece would have to be annealed by fire and worked again, both outside and inside.’ Bardas wanted to shout, but his mouth was full of the oval-head stake; his head vibrated and echoed with the countless rapid blows, each one pinching his skull between the stake inside and the hammer outside. He tried to close his eyes; but the rivets around which the steel lames of his eyelids pivoted were slightly distorted, and the lids wouldn’t shut properly—
He opened his eyes.
He was sitting bolt upright on his bed in his little room in the top back gallery, his mouth open in mid-scream.
‘Steady on,’ said a voice at the foot of the bed. ‘Were you having a bad dream or something?’
Bardas closed his mouth – he felt that his jaw ought to pivot around two hardened steel pins, like the visor of a bascinet; but that was plainly absurd. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘That’s all right.’ The man at the foot of the bed turned out to be the old Son of Heaven, Anax, who worked in the proof house. Just behind his shoulder, inevitably, was the enormous shape of Bollo, his assistant. ‘Though I’ll admit you startled the life out of me, shouting like that. Anyway, how are you feeling?’
Bardas shuddered and lowered himself carefully back on to the mattress. His head hurt.
‘Excuse me if this sounds strange,’ he said, ‘but are you
real?’
Anax smiled. ‘You have trouble telling the difference, do you?’ he said. ‘I know the feeling. Yes, we’re real; or as real as it gets around here. It’s that sort of place, though, isn’t it?’
Bardas thought for a moment. ‘What’s been happening to me?’ he said. ‘Last thing I knew, I was walking down a corridor—’
‘And you flaked out, apparently,’ Anax said with a grin. ‘Dead to the world when they found you; couldn’t wake you up. They tried prodding you, slapping you round the face, even emptied a jug of water over you. Then they sent for us. I guess they decided you were our responsibility. Anyway, we brought you up here – or at least Bollo did.’
‘You’re heavy,’ Bollo said. ‘Especially going upstairs.’
‘I see,’ Bardas replied. ‘How long was I out for?’
Anax thought for a moment. ‘Let’s see,’ he said. ‘Half a day, last night and this morning; call it a round twenty-four hours, give or take half an hour. I don’t know,’ he went on, ‘fainting fits, at your age. That sort of stuff’s for old men and young girls who don’t eat properly.’
‘Maybe it was heatstroke,’ Bardas suggested. ‘Or cranial trauma.’
‘Cranial what?’
‘Trauma. A bash on the head.’
‘Oh. So who’s been bashing you on the head?’
Bardas shrugged. ‘Nobody, as far as I know. But it could be a delayed reaction to what happened to me in the mines.’
‘Nah.’ Anax shook his head. ‘That was weeks ago. Anyway, you seem to be all right now, which is the main thing. Tell you what; you stay in bed a day or so till you’re quite sure you’re all right; I’ll send Bollo or one of the lads from the foundry shop to look in on you from time to time – make sure you haven’t died or gone off your head. I’d stay myself, but we’ve got a lot of work on, and we haven’t made much headway with it sitting here watching you sleep.’