The Proof House

by K. J. Parker

  ‘Oh, well,’ Temrai said. ‘Now then, how does this look?’

  ‘Unintentional,’ Leuscai replied. ‘That is, I wouldn’t insult you by thinking you meant it to look like that.’

  ‘That bad?’ Temrai sighed. ‘I’m getting cack-handed in my old age, that’s what it is. It’s not so long ago I was able to earn my living bashing metal around.’

  ‘In Perimadeia,’ Leuscai pointed out, ‘where presumably their standards weren’t so high. All right, put me out of my misery. What’s it supposed to be?’

  Temrai grinned. ‘There’s a technical term for it,’ he said, ‘which escapes me for the moment. But basically it’s a knee-guard. Or rather it isn’t.’

  ‘Not unless you’ve got really unusual knees,’ Leuscai agreed. ‘But it’s just as well you told me, or I’d never have guessed. To me it looks like a slice of harness leather pretending to be a pancake.’

  ‘Yes, all right.’ Temrai let the offending item fall from his hand. ‘It’s frustrating, really,’ he said. ‘While I was in the City, I read about how you’re supposed to do this, and they made it sound really easy. You just get thickish leather, you dip it in hot melted beeswax, you shape it, and there you are; cheap, strong, lightweight armour, made out of something we’ve got lots of. I don’t know,’ he went on, sitting on the log he’d been using to beat the thing into shape over. ‘Making things used to come so easily to me, and now I seem to have lost the knack. Anyway, tell me more about these stragglers of yours. Any idea who they are?’

  Leuscai smiled. ‘You mean, are they spies? Well, it’s possible. From what we’ve been able to gather so far, one of them was a wizard – well, assistant wizard – and they’re both something to do with the Island and the Shastel Order.’

  ‘Really?’ Temrai sounded impressed. ‘Wizards and diplomats. We’re honoured.’

  ‘That’s not the best bit though,’ Leuscai continued, the smile quickly fading from his face. ‘The kid spent several years on Scona. He was Bardas Loredan’s apprentice. ’

  Temrai sat perfectly still for a moment. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘Then I think we’ve met. Briefly, but memorably. How do you know all this?’

  Leuscai pulled up a log and sat down beside him. ‘Pure chance, really. You remember Dondai, the old bloke who used to make the pancakes?’

  Temrai nodded. ‘He died a short while back,’ he said.

  ‘Apparently. And his nephew, you’ve come across him? Dassascai, his name is. Doesn’t know a lot about pancakes, but he’s surprisingly well informed about commercial activity on the Island. Says he has contacts from when he was in business in Ap’ Escatoy, though if you ask me that doesn’t quite tie up. Anyway, for some reason, this Dassascai—’

  ‘He’s a spy.’

  ‘Oh, really? Well, that explains what he was doing snooping round our yard, where we’re raising the trebuchets. This Dassascai, he happened to see our two guests, recognised them (so he says) and went to the camp commander about it.’

  ‘Goscai.’

  ‘That’s right. Nice enough man, but he worries; and he got into an awful state over this, as you can imagine. First he was going to have them strung up on the spot; then he thought he’d better not, in case he started a war, so he was going to have them put in chains instead; then it occurred to him that they might be our spies (don’t know where he got that from) – finally, he got himself into such a tizzy he didn’t know what to do, so we said the best thing would be to ask you. He hadn’t thought of that; but as soon as we suggested it, he was delighted. So here I am.’

  Temrai rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Any idea how they got there?’ he asked. ‘Or did they just show up, saying, Hello, we’re spies, mind if we look around?’

  ‘Hardly.’ Leuscai laughed. ‘Though if they had, I for one would’ve said, Go ahead, help yourselves. The way I see it, some solid intelligence work by the provincial office might do us a power of good.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ Temrai replied, ‘but let’s not get into all that now.’ He breathed in deeply, then breathed out again. ‘How did they get there? Any ideas?’

  ‘Some of our people found them in the swamp,’ Leuscai replied, ‘when they were out looking for ducks. In a pretty bad way, apparently. The wizard’s no spring chicken. If they are spies, they went to a hell of a lot of trouble to look like dying men. Their story was that they were on their way to Shastel from the Island, got run aground by the Imperial coastguard and were on the run from the foot patrols. Plausible enough, I suppose.’

  ‘All right,’ Temrai said, picking up a bossing mallet and putting it down again. ‘You send them here; I’ll look them over, frighten them politely for a day or so and send them on their way. If they really are spies, I’ll give them the guided tour; that’ll confuse them so badly they won’t know what to think.’ He looked round at the mess left over from his experiment in armour-making. ‘You don’t happen to know of anybody who can do this?’ he asked. ‘It’s got me beaten, but it can’t really be all that difficult. It really annoys me when I know I’m on to something but I can’t make it work.’

  Leuscai shrugged. ‘Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. Of course, you could always write a letter to Bardas Loredan, care of the Imperial state armoury service. I’m sure he’d be delighted to help.’

  Temrai scowled, then laughed. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘he bumped into me in the street once, in Perimadeia. He was drunk, obviously he hadn’t got a clue who I was. Everywhere I go, there he seems to be; and I can’t figure that out for the life of me. I mean, why should there be this horrible connection between us? He’s a farmer’s son from the Mesoge; by rights he should be hoeing turnips in the mud right now, not lurking in the shadows everywhere I go, waiting to jump out at me. I wonder, what the hell could it have been that tangled our lives up together like that?’

  ‘You make it sound like you’re in love,’ Leuscai said. ‘Star-crossed lovers, like in some old story.’

  ‘You think so? In that case, I reckon it’s high time we got a divorce.’

  When the messenger eventually found him, Gorgas Loredan was at the farm, helping his brothers patch up the floor of the long barn.

  ‘Bloody menace,’ Zonaras had said in passing, when Gorgas asked him why he wasn’t using it any more. ‘Planks rotten right through. You could break your leg.’

  ‘I see,’ Gorgas had replied. ‘So you’re just going to abandon it, are you? Let it fall down?’

  ‘Haven’t got time to fix it,’ Clefas had put in. ‘It’s a big job, and there’s only the two of us.’

  Gorgas had grinned at that. ‘Not any more,’ he’d said.

  And so there he was, muddy and bad-tempered, standing astride a newly felled sweet-chestnut tree with a hammer in his hand, blood trickling down from his knuckles where he’d scraped them carelessly while manhandling the timber.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Sergeant Mossay sent me,’ the messenger replied defensively. ‘Letter for you, from the provincial office.’ He held the little brass cylinder out at arm’s length. ‘The courier arrived last night at Tornoys.’

  ‘Is he waiting for the answer?’ Gorgas asked, wiping his hands on his shirt.

  ‘No,’ the messenger replied. ‘No answer expected, he said.’

  Gorgas frowned and took the cylinder, flipping off the carefully fitted lid with his thumbs.

  They’d started by felling the tree; the last of the stand of chestnut trees that their grandfather had planted shortly after their father was born. It hadn’t been an easy tree to fell. The wind had twisted it, so when they tried to saw through, the timber clented on the saw-blade until finally it broke (it was old and rusty, like all the other tools about the place). So they’d got out the felling axes; and after they’d blistered their hands, and Clefas had taken his eye off the cut and knocked the head off his axe as a result, they thought better of it and dug out the other saw, which was even older and rustier. But Gorgas made them rope the tree
back, and they used a block and tackle to put some tension on it, opening the cut to allow the blade to move freely. When they were three-quarters of the way through, they realised that if they carried on the line they were following, the tree would drop on the roof of the old pig-house and flatten it. Of course, the old pig-house hadn’t been used for years except as a miscellaneous junk store; but Gorgas made them drive in another post and rope the tree back another way so that they could chop a wedge out and alter the direction of the fall. Eventually they cut through and the tree fell; not the way Gorgas had intended, but it nearly cleared the pig-house, only sweeping off a few cracked slates with an outlying branch. It had taken them the rest of the first day to trim the trunk and cart off the loppings to the wood-shed (which was too damp to store wood in now that half the thatch had blown away); now, finally, they were splitting the trunk to make the planks they’d need for the barn floor.

  ‘Bastard,’ Gorgas said, scowling and crushing the letter in his fist. ‘You know what? That bastard Poliorcis, he’s made them reject the alliance.’

  The messenger took a step backwards, trying to look as if he wasn’t there. Clefas and Zonaras stood still, apparently unconcerned.

  ‘No material advantage to the Empire,’ Gorgas went on. ‘Well, the hell with them. Come on, let’s finish this. You,’ he added as an afterthought, as the messenger stood unhappily by, waiting to be dismissed, ‘you go back, find that courier and bring him here. I’ve got a reply all right.’

  The messenger nodded doubtfully. ‘What if he’s already left?’ he said.

  ‘You’d better hope he hasn’t,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Because if he has, I might be inclined to ask why it took a day for this to reach me, if the courier got in last night as you just told me.’

  The messenger hurried away, his feet squelching on the waterlogged grass of the yard.

  ‘Clefas,’ Gorgas said, ‘get the wedges. This stuff’s knotted and twisted like you wouldn’t believe.’

  Clefas stood for a moment, then slowly walked away. Gorgas took a deep breath, then went back to what he’d been doing. He had a froe jammed in a lengthways split down the trunk of the tree, in too far to budge with the tommy bar, which he’d just contrived to break by jerking on it with his full weight.

  ‘You’ll never get that out,’ Zonaras said.

  ‘Watch me,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Here, pass me the side axe. I’ll cut the bloody thing out if I have to.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Zonaras said, handing him the axe, which was bevelled on one side only for cutting at an angle. ‘Watch the head on that, it’s loose.’

  ‘Really?’ Gorgas said.

  His brother nodded. ‘Been loose for years,’ he said. ‘Needs the head taking off and a new wedge knocking in.’

  Gorgas hacked away for a few minutes, trying to cut out a slot beside the jammed tool to free it. He hadn’t made any significant progress by the time Clefas wandered back with the wedges. They were heavy and indescribably ancient, and their heads had been smashed into razor-sharp flakes by generations of Loredans pounding on them with big hammers. ‘That’s better,’ Gorgas said. ‘Right, Zonaras, bash in a wedge either side; that’ll open it up.’

  Zonaras picked up a wedge in each hand and nestled them in the crack fore and aft of the froe; then he bashed them home with the poll of the surviving felling-axe. The froe came out easily, but the wedges were stuck fast.

  ‘Marvellous,’ Gorgas said angrily. ‘Solve one problem, make two more.’

  Zonaras sighed. ‘Grain’s too twisted for splitting,’ he said. ‘I could have told you that before you started.’

  Gorgas straightened his back, pulling a face. ‘We’ll knock in the axe-heads as wedges,’ he said, ‘that’ll get these two out. We’ll get there, don’t you worry.’

  Several hours later, when it was getting dark, they gave up for the day. They’d got the wedges out, and the froe (which they’d put back in, jammed solid and got back out again by bashing it to and fro with a hammer) but the axe-heads looked as if they’d never budge. ‘What we need,’ Gorgas said as they trooped back into the house, ‘is a saw-pit. Then we could saw our planks instead of trying to split them.’

  Neither of his brothers said anything. They kicked off their boots and sat down on either side of the table, clearing a space to lean on with their elbows. Curious, Gorgas thought, they’re Loredans too; but of course, they’ve never been away from the farm. They were the lucky ones.

  ‘We could build one down by the river,’ he went on, ‘near the ford, where the banks aren’t too steep. Then we could have a water wheel driving a mechanical saw. I’ve seen them, in Perimadeia. Wonderful things, but it should be easy enough to make one.’

  Clefas looked up at him. ‘Down by the river,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Where Niessa used to do the washing. You know the place I mean.’ Of course they do.

  ‘I reckon so,’ Zonaras replied. ‘But we don’t need a saw-mill. What’d we want one of them for?’

  Gorgas frowned. ‘I’d have thought that was obvious,’ he replied. ‘To saw planks, of course, instead of wasting three days bashing lumps of iron with hammers.’

  ‘But we don’t need planks,’ Zonaras pointed out. ‘Except a few now and then. And we buy them.’

  ‘Waste of money,’ Gorgas said impatiently, ‘when we’ve got perfectly good timber on the farm. Besides, if we set up a powered saw-mill, we’d be able to supply planks for all the neighbours, at only a fraction of what they’re paying now. It’s a good business proposition.’

  Clefas shook his head. ‘And who’s going to work it?’ he asked. ‘Zonaras and me, we’ve got our hands full just managing the farm. Are you going to drop everything and come running every time someone wants a few bits of wood cut up? Don’t see it, myself.’

  Gorgas waved the objection aside. ‘As well as planks,’ he went on, ‘we could make our own fenceposts, gateposts, rafters, weather-boards, the lot. We could even build a ship if we wanted to. Yes, I think a saw-mill’s a damned good idea. First thing in the morning, I’ll get some of the men on to it. It’ll give them something to do, at any rate.’

  Clefas and Zonaras looked at each other. ‘Well,’ Clefas said, ‘if you’re going to do that, there’s no point us killing ourselves tomorrow trying to split that log. When your mill’s running, we’ll get it sawn up there.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Zonaras added. ‘I mean, it’s not like there’s any rush. We don’t use the long barn any more, anyhow.’

  That night, Gorgas dreamed he was standing outside the gates of a city. It was dark, and he wasn’t sure which city it was – could’ve been Perimadeia, or Ap’ Escatoy, Scona even; any one of a number of places. The gate was barred, immovable, so he was trying to break it up by splitting it, using wedges and an axe. The wedges, he somehow knew, were his brothers; he was the froe, and the axes too, both when they were driven into the split as wedges or swung as hammers. He could feel the hammer-blows on the polls of the wedges (the hammer falls, the steel is compressed, and where does all the force go, pinched between steel and steel?) as surely as he could feel the tommy-bar twist in the socket of the froe. He could feel the un-sustainable stresses in the wood, as the fibres of the grain were wrenched apart – wood’s not like steel: if you torture it, eventually it fails and bursts. But steel, the more you hammer it, the more you compress and work-harden it, the harder and stronger it gets. And that, logically enough, is why the Loredan boys aren’t like other people . . .

  Well, it was dream-logic, the sort that melts away as soon as your eyes open.

  Gorgas woke up, realised he didn’t stand a chance of getting back to sleep, and resolved to do some work instead. He’d insisted on having the one working oil-lamp in the place, and after a good deal of fumbling with flint and rather soggy tinder, he had light. He also had paper – a few sheets he’d brought with him, and the back of the letter he’d had about the refused treaty, quite serviceable once he’d smoothed
it out over the table. He sat down and wrote three letters; one to his niece, one to an employee, giving him further orders, and one to Poliorcis the Son of Heaven, which he managed to make polite and friendly in spite of everything. After all, there was still time for them to change their minds, no point alienating them by being petulant just because it’d feel good to vent his anger. Keeping his personal feelings out of the way of his business decisions had brought Gorgas all the success he’d ever managed to achieve, after all. It was a rule he’d only ever broken where Bardas was concerned, and that one exception had cost him dearly enough, gods know. But Bardas was different; Bardas was his brother, Bardas was the only failure in a life full of remarkable achievements. And very few failures are definitely final, provided you’re level-headed enough to keep your feelings at bay.

  When he’d finished writing the letters, it was still dark, too early for anybody else to be up and about, so Gorgas decided to fill in the time with one other minor chore, a task he’d neglected for the past couple of days. In the corner of the room stood a fine embossed-leather bow-case. He opened it and took out his bow, the rather special bow his brother had built for him three years before. People who knew the circumstances behind the making of the bow were amazed, even horrified, to find that he still had it. They’d assumed that he’d got rid of it – burned, buried, thrown into the sea – long before. They couldn’t understand how he could even bear to look at it, let alone touch it. But the fact remained, it was a very fine bow; and since it had cost him so much, the least he could do was use it and look after it – otherwise everything that had gone into making it would be wasted, all to no purpose.