The Proof House

by K. J. Parker

  Inevitably, it seemed, they got lost; the lake had moved, because it wasn’t where the scouts said it was. They spent most of the day hunting for it, dragging through the wet, dangerous swamp, losing boots and getting filthy, having to pull each other out when they suddenly went in up to their thighs. When at last they stumbled on the lake, Leuscai was pretty sure it wasn’t the one they’d been looking for – the scouts had mentioned a hill at the southern end that rose above the tree line, and there was no sign of anything like that. But it was a lake, and it was unquestionably covered with ducks. Thousands of them, floating in enormous black and brown rafts, like the garbage flotsam washed down into a lake by the first storm rains of summer. They showed absolutely no inclination to go away when Leuscai and his men poked through the trees on to the shore; they quacked and steered away a little, obviously not aware that Death himself was watching them. Foolish, objectionable ducks.

  Leuscai convened a brief ways-and-means conference. They had no nets, no slings, no throwing sticks, no dogs and no boat, which ruled out most of the conventional ways of slaughtering waterfowl. They had their bows, but not enough arrows that they could afford to waste any, sinking into the still water spitted through a dead duck. ‘We’ll just have to throw stones,’ someone suggested; and since there were no better suggestions, the motion was carried.

  Leuscai, of course, was a master of the art of stoning ducks. They found a handy supply of stones in the bed of one of the streams that ran into the lake, and agreed their strategy. There was a small spit of dry land sticking out into the lake, and a particularly dense mob of ducks bobbing up and down in the horseshoeshaped bay it created. They’d be able to bombard the ducks from three sides; they’d have about twenty seconds of extreme activity before the whole flock got up off the water in an explosion of wings and spray, leaving their dead and wounded behind. If they didn’t manage to get enough the first time, they’d undoubtedly get another chance next morning, and next evening too, if need be. It would be rather like the bombardment of Perimadeia, with Leuscai and his men being the trebuchets (ironic, given what they’d originally come for).

  Since Leuscai had absolutely no wish to repeat the performance, he took special pains in deploying his artillery; spook one duck, and there was a faint but disturbing chance that the whole lot would get up before a single stone could be dispatched. So the hunting party set off from well inland and crept up slowly and painfully to the shore, taking great care not to make a noise or a sudden movement. The plan was tactically sound and would surely have succeeded if one of the party hadn’t slipped and gone down in a boggy patch, grabbing at his neighbour as he went and pulling him down as well. As luck would have it, there was a single adventurous duck nosing about in the bushes at the edge of the lake a few yards away fom where the men went in, and their sudden, pitiful yells of distress sent the duck rocketing into the air, like a stone from a torsion engine. At once the whole flock rose with it, blotting out the sun like a huge volley of arrows lobbed over a city wall at extreme range. Leuscai howled with rage and frustration and hurled the stone he’d been gripping in his hand; he was well out of range, of course, and the stone splashed noisily into the water. The ducks swung and lifted over the trees, then swung again and headed out towards the middle of the lake, putting up other flocks until the whole surface of the lake seemed to be standing up, like a man getting out of bed.

  The Imperial patrol, which had taken the afternoon off to go wildfowling on the other side of the lake, were furious. They’d been looking forward to their evening’s sport all week; they’d smuggled nets and slings and gunny-sacks out under their armour, trudged all the way across the swamp to get here, and just as they were about to set up and take their positions, something had spooked the birds and ruined everything. The sergeant’s first guess was a fox; but it was just too early for foxes to be about, and what else would panic the best part of five thousand ducks? The only other creature fearsome enough was a man, and that couldn’t be right, since this was a restricted area. A thought occurred to him, and he snapped at his men to shut up and keep still.

  Sure enough, his fears were justified. On the far shore he saw men moving about. He couldn’t make out much in the way of detail, but he didn’t really need to; there were too many of them for their purpose in being there to be legitimate. For a while he simply couldn’t decide what to do for the best. He was outnumbered (nearly two to one, if his estimate of their numbers was at all accurate), but he had the element of surprise, and of course his men were Imperial heavy infantry, which put rather a different complexion on the matter. Received wisdom had it that a force of Imperial regulars facing only twice as many opponents could quite reasonably be held to be outnumbering them . . . That was all very well, and it did wonders for morale if you could actually get the men to believe it; as their sergeant, it was his job to preach one doctrine and believe another. The only alternative was to go back to the camp, a day and a half away through the marshes, and hand the matter over to Captain Suria – three, maybe four days’ delay, by which time finding the enemy again certainly wouldn’t be a foregone conclusion. In the end, the deciding factor was the thought of explaining to Captain Suria how they’d come to be at the lake at all, since it was quite some way from their designated beat; it’d be much easier to handle the interview if he’d just driven off an enemy invasion of Imperial territory and become a hero. True, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing (the Empire approved of heroism but generally despised heroes); but so far, in its thousand-odd years of history, the Empire had never court-martialled a hero for netting a few ducks.

  Once he’d made his mind up, he gave the order to advance. With every squelching, bogged-down step closer to the enemy, the sergeant questioned his decision; there were even more of them than he’d thought there were, and they were quite definitely plainsmen, and they were armed with bows (and what else would plainsmen be armed with?) – he’d stumbled across a major raiding party, possibly the skirmisher line of a whole invading army, and he was proposing to give them battle with one platoon of heavies. The only way to avoid being shot down like – well, ducks, say – was to get very close very quietly, and rush them before they even had a chance to get their bows out of their cases.

  Fortunately (the sergeant couldn’t fathom why) the enemy seemed determined to make his job as easy as possible. There were no pickets, no sentries; they appeared to be arguing violently among themselves, with their backs to the likeliest vector of attack. For the first time since he’d embarked on this idiotic venture, the sergeant began to feel just a little hopeful. One statement of official doctrine about the plainsmen that wasn’t just good-for-morale was that they were warriors rather than soldiers, basically undisciplined and disorderly.

  Most of the way he was fairly sure of staying out of sight as long as he kept his men just inside the tree-line. He’d chosen to follow the western shore of the lake, and the choice turned out to be a good one; the trees grew close enough together on the western side that it was possible to hop from tree-root to tree-root, avoiding the boggy leaf-mould pits. By the time they reached the southern side, where the trees were older and more openly spaced, they were no more than a couple of hundred yards from the enemy. Still, it might as well have been a mile for all the good it did him, because the going became horrendously wet and sticky and nobody, not even Captain Suria and the Sons of Heaven, can wade up to their knees in thick black liquid mud and be unobtrusive about it. He called a general halt and tried to hustle his brains into coming up with a better strategy – unfair and uncalled-for, since he was only a sergeant and neither trained nor expected to be a battlefield tactician.

  When he gave the order to go back, he could tell the men weren’t happy about it, but it was an order, and that was all there was to it. They hopped back about fifty yards; then he led them at right angles deeper into the woods, striking in about a hundred and fifty yards. His reasoning was simple: if he was going to have to make a noise, it’d be sensible to mak
e it as far away from the enemy as possible for as long as he could. He’d swing round behind them and then make the best job he could of charging, or at least squelching quickly, into the enemy’s rear. He had no idea whether it’d work or not, but he was wet, muddy, extremely weary and very frightened, and he couldn’t think of anything else.

  In retrospect, it would probably have been a very good strategy in the circumstances, if only they hadn’t got lost in the wood. But both distance and direction are notoriously hard to keep track of in a wood unless you happen to be an experienced forester; when the sergeant launched his charge, he found out the hard way that he’d come too far, as his breathless and dishevelled command burst through the undergrowth at the edge of the lake to find that instead of being behind the enemy, they were alongside them, about forty yards to the east.

  A mistake; but in the event not a wholly decisive one. When Leuscai first became aware of an Imperial patrol materialising beside him, his first instinct was to hide weapons rather than ready them. The way he saw it, he’d been caught trespassing and poaching; his mind was busy trying to find a plausible lie to explain why he and his men were there (we got lost in the forest; excuse me, but are we right for the Green River?) and it didn’t occur to him that he was going to have to fight anybody until two of his men, who’d been trying to hide their bows behind their backs, were speared like fish by a couple of legionaries.

  Without any conscious effort on the part of either commander, they’d managed to hit on the optimum conditions for bloodshed. There was just enough time for the majority of Leuscai’s men to get their bows out, nock and draw, and just enough time for the Imperials to close with the plainsmen nearest to them. It was a short battle and extremely uncharacteristic; neither side could very well avoid killing the enemy, or being killed themselves. Leuscai’s archers were loosing at point-blank range, easily punching their bodkinhead arrows through plate and into muscle and bone. The patrol were thrusting and slashing at effectively unarmed men, without armour, shield or sword to ward off the blows. Interestingly enough from a theorist’s point of view, the casualty ratio more or less validated provincial-office doctrine (one Imperial footsoldier to three plainsmen) to the extent that if the fighting had carried on to the point of annihilation, there should have been four Imperials left standing, and no plainsmen. Unfortunately for military science, the experiment was abandoned early, with the survivors of both parties giving up as if by mutual agreement and pulling back; so the data, although persuasive, cannot be taken to constitute proof.

  Leuscai died in the brief third phase of the engagement, when the Imperials closed for a second time after taking the plainsmen’s one devastating volley. He’d been rushing to get a second arrow on to the string; he fumbled the nock, dropped the arrow in the mud and was reaching over his shoulder for another one when a man he hadn’t even seen wedged a spearhead between his ribs. The blade was too broad to penetrate any further and too firmly stuck to be withdrawn, so its owner wisely abandoned it and tried to finish the job with his sword. But he was rushing things, too; instead of a clean, coaching-manual, skull-splitting blow, all he managed was a cack-handed slash that scived half the scalp off the left side of Leuscai’s head and toppled him into the oozing leaf-mould. As the mud covered his raw flesh like a poultice, he was aware of the man for the first time, putting one heavy boot on his chest as he tugged at the shaft of his spear, vainly trying to get it unstuck. After three goes he gave up and went away, leaving Leuscai to bleed peacefully to death. It turned out to be not nearly as traumatic as he’d imagined it would be. Ironically, the last sound he was aware of hearing was the distant quacking of ducks, cautiously drifting back to the middle of the lake.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Eseutz Mesatges. ‘Now we can have the war, get it over with, get our money and have our ships back.’

  She’d met Athli Zeuxis in the street outside a dress-maker’s shop, one of the best and most expensive on the Island – one of the few things left to spend money on was clothes, and for some unaccountable reason there had just been a wave of seismic activity in women’s fashions; the warrior-princess look was out, stale and dead as last night’s scraps, its place triumphantly usurped by the nomad-caravan look, all cloudy silks and bare midriffs. This suited Eseutz perfectly – warrior princess had placed what she felt was an unhealthy emphasis on cleavage, and the leather made her sweat.

  ‘We won’t have the details for a day or so,’ Athli said. ‘That’ll have to wait until I get the official despatch from head office in Shastel. But their reports are always pretty reliable.’

  Eseutz thought for a moment. ‘Short term, it’s going to create havoc,’ she said. ‘It’ll be the same as it’s been since this started, only worse, too much money chasing too few opportunities, everybody desperate to buy before prices soar, but nothing to spend the money on.’

  ‘Except futures,’ Athli replied. ‘Which is an area I’ve always tried to keep out of, since I don’t happen to be a qualified fortune-teller. If I were you, I’d hang on to my money until things start getting back to normal; pretty soon, everybody who’s overbought in the first rush of excitement is going to want to sell, and that’ll be the time to buy. Sadly,’ she went on, ‘I haven’t got the luxury of following my own advice; everybody’s going to be wanting their money so they can start spending, which means that unless I can arrange cover from head office, I’m going to be in an awkward position for a week or so.’

  Eseutz held a spangled slipper up to the light. ‘Give ’em paper,’ she said. ‘They’ll grumble, but they’ll take it. After all, everybody knows Shastel scrip is good; mind you,’ she added, with a grin, ‘that’s what they used to say about Niessa Loredan.’

  ‘Quite,’ Athli said, looking down at a tray of silver ankle-bracelets. ‘And if I start flooding the Island with paper, it won’t be long before it’s “that’s what they used to say about Athli Zeuxis”. No, thank you. I’ll just have to write some of it off with Hiro and Venart. It shaves my margins, but at least I’ll still be here this time next year.’

  One of the dressmaker’s girls appeared from the back room and started fluttering round Eseutz with a measuring tape. Eseutz didn’t seem to have noticed she was there. ‘I wouldn’t object to a bit of that, if there’s any to spare,’ she said innocuously. ‘Bear me in mind, will you?’

  Athli smiled. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Ah well, no harm in trying,’ Eseutz replied. ‘Actually – no kidding – just at this precise moment in time I’d be good for the money.’ She frowned. ‘That’s what’s bothering me; I’m not used to being in credit. Being in credit is nature’s way of telling you you’re missing out on an opportunity somewhere.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Athli said. ‘But your opportunities have an unfortunate habit of sinking.’

  ‘That’s an exaggeration. It was just the one time . . .’

  ‘Or getting impounded by the excise,’ Athli went on, ‘or stolen by pirates, or infested with weevils, or repossessed by the original owner . . .’

  ‘It’s true, I do like to go after investments with a certain element of risk. They don’t all turn yellow on me, you know.’

  ‘All the ones I ever backed did.’

  ‘Oh, come on. What about those seventeen barrels of turmeric?’

  Athli wrinkled her brow. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I’d forgotten that. I’ll admit, that turned out all right in the end, after I bought out that other partner of yours you hadn’t got around to telling me about, and paid off the import duty you’d forgotten to mention. The profit I made on that deal kept me in lamp-oil for a week.’ She winced slightly, as the girl with the tape started on her. ‘No offence, but I’ll take my chances with Hiro and Venart, thank you very much. Hey, what do you reckon?’ she added, holding up an amethyst-and-silver pendant. ‘Will it go with the mauve silk, do you think?’

  Eseutz shook her head. ‘Overstated,’ she said. ‘You want something small and intense with that, like diamonds. So, how long do you think t
he war will last? You ought to know about these plainspeople, if anyone does.’

  ‘Depends.’ Athli carefully gathered up the pendant chain and put it back. ‘An all-out assault, and it ought to be over quickly. If they let themselves get bogged down, it could drag on for months.’

  ‘This man Loredan,’ Eseutz went on. ‘What’s he like? You knew him for years, didn’t you?’

  Athli nodded. ‘I worked for him,’ she said, ‘as a clerk. Gods, that seems like another life. Somewhere at home I’ve got a sword that used to belong to him. I wonder if I should send it on.’