by K. J. Parker
‘It’s all right, really,’ Gannadius replied, thoroughly alarmed at the thought that Gorgas Loredan had been thinking about him in any context. ‘And yes, to a certain extent I agree with you. I found it very hard not to like them when I was over there.’
Gorgas smiled. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘it’s an ill wind, and so forth. As far as I’m concerned, the good thing is the opportunity it gives my brother Bardas to advance his career with the Empire. I know it must sound silly, but I worry about him; well, he’s my brother, I’m entitled. You see, ever since he left the army – the City army, I mean, after Maxen died – well, he’s just been marking time, drifting aimlessly along without any real purpose in his life, and it’s such a waste. I really thought I might have been able to get him involved with what we were doing on Scona – give him my job, basically, after all, he’d have done it much better than I ever could; and all I’ve ever wanted is to go home to the Mesoge and mess about playing at farming. And now,’ he continued with a sigh, ‘I’ve got what I want, and where’s Bardas? Serving time as a sergeant, for gods’ sakes, when he isn’t risking his neck down some hole in the ground, or slaving away in some miserable factory, when he should be making something of his life, achieving something he could be proud of. No, if Bardas beats the plainspeople and kills Temrai, coming on top of what he did at Ap’ Escatoy, he’s got to be in line for a proper job somewhere, possibly even on the fast track to a prefecture somewhere, even though he’s an outsider. ’ He smiled again, and leaned back. ‘So, and I know this must sound a bit callous, I’m sorry for Temrai and his lot, but I really want this war, for Bardas’ sake. It could be the answer to a lot of things for him.’
Gannadius took a sip of his cider. It still tasted just as foul, but his mouth was painfully dry. ‘As you say,’ he murmured, ‘it’s an ill wind. Well, I hope things work out for you with the duck project.’ It occurred to him that if the plainspeople were massacred, there wouldn’t be any duck project; in which case why was Gorgas bothering with it? But he decided not to raise the issue. Instead, he stood up, smiled, and walked away, rather more quickly than was polite.
And that, he reflected as he crossed the Market Square, ought to be the end of my grand adventure; home again (well, it counts as home for all practical purposes), safe and sound and none the worse for wear. But it didn’t feel like the end of anything; rather, it was as if he was hanging around waiting, like an athlete at a country fair who’s been knocked out of one event and has several hours to kill before he’s on again.
So, instead of heading for Athli’s house, where Theudas would be waiting and Athli would be inexplicably delighted to see him safe and well, he crossed over to the south side of the Square and headed inland, without knowing why, in the general direction of the brickyard and the wire mill.
Why a nation that adamantly refused to make anything it could buy or sell abroad had decided to make an exception in the case of bricks and wire, nobody knew. There weren’t even any theories (and Islanders had theories about everything); it was just a freak accident of commerce, to which no particular significance should or could be attached.
Unusually, the big double doors of the wire mill were open, and Gannadius stopped for a gawp.
At first, he couldn’t make out what they were doing. They’d set up a series of posts, in pairs, about four feet high and two feet apart; through each pair of posts ran a thin steel rod about half the thickness of the tip of his little finger. Each rod was as long as he was tall, and had an L-shaped handle at one end and a slot in the other. The factory hands had threaded wire through the slots and were turning the handles, wrapping wire tightly round the rods like the serving on the handle of a bow. When there was no more space on the rod for any more turns of wire, they lifted it up and off by way of a slot cut in the side of each post and carried it over to an anvil, where two men with cold chisels worked down the length of the rods, cutting off the loops of wire so that they fell to the ground as split-ended steel rings, which a couple of young boys scooped up in large baskets and carried into the back of the shop.
It reminded Gannadius of something. He thought for a while and then remembered the wire factories of Perimadeia, where they’d used something similar but much larger to form the links of chains. Once he’d found that mental image, he knew what they were doing: they were making armourers’ rings, for chain-mail. For some reason, Gannadius found the idea disturbing. No question but that the stuff was for export; he didn’t know a single Islander who owned a mailshirt (he knew several who owned thousands of mailshirts, carefully packed in oil-soaked straw and ready for shipping; but such ownership was intended to be as temporary as possible) or a sword that wasn’t a fashion accessory, or a bow or a spear or a halberd. As a nation the Islanders acknowledged the existence of war only as something that happened far away between two rival groups of potential customers. A unique mind-set, simultaneously endearing and reprehensible, like so much about these people . . . He shook his head, as if making himself wake up. There was no real likelihood of the Islanders taking up arms and going off to war, even if the rest of the world seemed determined to do so. Far more than mere water separated the Island from everywhere else, and for that Gannadius was extremely grateful. Nevertheless, he didn’t feel like wandering about any more. It was high time he went home, even if (like every other place he’d thought of as home for as long as he could remember) it was somebody else’s.
The armies of the Sons of Heaven sang as they marched; and generally speaking, they did it well. In addition to the signallers who blew their bugles for the charge and the retreat, there were any number of soldiers who carried flutes, rebecs, mandolins, fiddles and small drums along with their blanket rolls and three days’ rations; when the mood took them, they would hand their pikes to their neighbours in the column and accompany the singing, so that from a distance the approach of the army sounded more like a wedding than the onslaught of the Empire.
Bardas Loredan, who had no ear for music, had been rather taken with this apparently uncharacteristic frivolity; and besides, even he liked the tunes, which were either fast and lively or fast and sad, but never droopy like the refined fugues and motets they were so fond of in Perimadeia, or tuneless and interminable like Mesoge folk-songs. He couldn’t sing and could barely whistle, but he hadn’t been with the column long before he found himself humming, bumble-bee fashion, when the soldiers struck up one of his favourites.
But he couldn’t understand the words. They were in a language that was entirely unlike anything he’d ever come across; not the highly inflected sing-song Perimadeian that was the standard in most places, from the Mesoge to the plains; or the attractively rounded-and-crisp language of the trading nations, Colleon and the Island (and, by default, Shastel and Scona), which nobody had ever set out to learn deliberately but which everybody acquired, like a sun-tan, after any sort of regular contact with the people who spoke it; or the hammered-flat Perimadeian dialect that was the second language of all the western provinces of the Empire. When he finally got around to asking someone, he was told that the soldiers’ songs were in the language of the Sons of Heaven, and that nobody had a clue what any of them meant.
To Bardas’ mind, this spoiled the effect of the marching minstrel show, to the point where it started to get on his nerves. The idea that twenty thousand men could march along singing a song they didn’t understand struck him as rather distasteful; for all they knew, they could be singing graphic accounts of the defeat and subjugation of their own native cities, with detailed descriptions of what the victorious Sons of Heaven had already done to the men and were intending to do to the women and children. He asked the man he’d been talking to if it bothered him, and the man replied, no; the songs and singing them were an ancient tradition of the service, and traditions are what hold a professional army together. A man should be proud to be allowed to learn the words and join in singing them; they were a secret, a mystery that came with being accepted, becoming part of something great a
nd invincible. The ordinary soldier didn’t need to understand the words of the song, the plan of campaign or the reason for the war; he was there to put into effect what the Sons of Heaven, in their absolute wisdom, decided should be so. And that was all there was to it.
In spite of the disillusionment, Bardas couldn’t help humming one tune that had burrowed deep into his mind. It was one of the fast, lively ones, generally accompanied with drums and flutes – the words, of course, were just a blur of noise but it had to be a marching song, if only because it was so difficult not to hum it when marching . . . Its shape was an endless loop, so that unless you made a conscious decision to abandon it there was no reason why you’d ever stop.
As easily as he’d taken to humming the tune, Bardas got into the habit of commanding the army. As much as anything, it was a matter of convenience and habit. He’d learned a long time ago that the easiest way to do anything is properly; it was less effort to tell the officers and sergeants the right way than have to sort out the mess they made if they tried to work it out for themselves. Every morning, just before daybreak and reveille, he held a staff meeting, told the heads of department what he expected them to do and questioned them about the things they’d done wrong or hadn’t got around to doing the previous day. He interrogated the quartermaster and the colonel of foragers about supplies and materiel, the colonel of scouts about the terrain they’d be crossing in that day’s march, the captains of each division about the state of their commands, the captain of engineers about how he proposed to deal with any natural obstacles or obstructions; if they gave the wrong answers he told them the right ones, the first time patiently. It was so much less effort than discussion, canvassing opinions, arguing merits; and since he’d been here before and done very much the same things, there wasn’t really any point in pretending to listen to the views of men who knew less about the subject than he did. Anything else would be like discussing the letters of the alphabet with a bunch of children who couldn’t read yet, rather than simply chalking them on a slate and saying, Learn this.
And he had been here before; it was strange how easily it came back to him, across over twenty years of deliberate forgetting. They passed the place where Maxen had won an incredible victory, five hundred heavy cavalry against four thousand plainsmen; he’d almost expected to see the bodies still lying where they’d left them, but there was nothing to mark the spot apart from a cairn of stones he’d ordered built himself to cover their own trivial losses. They crossed the Blue Sky River by the ford where Maxen had finally caught up with Prince Yeoscai, King Temrai’s uncle – the river had been in spate and when they found him, Yeoscai was sitting on his horse staring at it, as if he couldn’t believe in such gratuitous spite from something that wasn’t even human. They camped one night in the little valley where Maxen died; his cairn was still there, but Bardas was content to look at it from a distance. And from that point on, it was simply a matter of remembering; no more thought needed.
Two days on from Maxen’s cairn (if I’d been Temrai I’d have pulled it open and flung his bones to the wild dogs years ago) they were held up by another river; the Friendly Water, which had dammed up in the hills and flooded the Longstone Combe. The easiest solution was to build a bridge at the head of the combe, but the nearest timber was a day’s cart-ride behind them. He emptied the supply wagons and sent them back with the pioneers and the foragers, armed with detailed specifications of the amount and dimensions of timber they’d need, and settled down to wait. There was no reason why the army should be idle while it was waiting; there was kit to overhaul and inspect, armour to repair, boots to patch up and renail; archery practice and weapons drill and parade drill, an opportunity to train the soldiers in specific techniques they’d need against the plains cavalry and archers, tactical seminars for the captains and lieutenants, a few disciplinary tribunals that had been too complex to decide in an evening session on the march, a chance to update and correct the provincial office’s rather vague maps. By the time he returned to his tent, well into the second night of the delay, he was rather more weary than he’d have felt if they’d been on the road. He took off his armour – it was a second skin to him now, and he felt strange and uncertain on his feet without the weight of it on his shoulders; first, unbuckle the chausses, followed by the gorget, then the pauldrons, followed by the cops and vambraces, followed by the cuirass, finally the mailshirt and habergeon, and he was a little white worm again, a snail out of its shell – then kicked off his boots and lay down on the late Colonel Estar’s foldaway rosewood camp bed.
As soon as he closed his eyes he found himself in a place he knew well, almost as well as the plains. It was dark there, and he couldn’t see the walls or the roof; it was a tunnel under a city, garlic and coriander together, a cellar under a factory, the proof house. He turned round – that involved kneeling down, feeling for the plank walls of the gallery – and saw that Alexius had got a fire going; he saw the smoke rising straight up into the vent-hole in the roof, with its blackened edges.
‘You’re early,’ Alexius said.
‘We’ve been making good time,’ he replied. ‘Is there a lot to get through?’
Alexius shook his head. Oddly enough, he wasn’t wearing Alexius’ body this time, or rather he’d put on another man’s face over his own (like a visor) so that he’d become Anax, the Son of Heaven who had failed. ‘Shouldn’t take long,’ he said. ‘Fetch the hammer and we’ll make a start.’
He remembered the feel of Bollo’s hammer in his hands – big, heavy, definitive, the measure of all things – but for the first time (and how many times had he been here? He’d lost count) he noticed that the hammer was in fact the Empire, because of course nothing can survive Bollo’s hammer, it’s just a matter of seeing how long it continues to offer resistance and the manner in which it eventually fails –
The first piece to be tested was an arm; a low-specification, munition-grade arm, made of ordinary flesh and bone, not expected to pass above the first degree of proof. Anax laid it on the anvil and Bardas reduced it to pulp with a few well-placed blows.
‘Fail that,’ Alexius said. ‘All right, next.’
He put a torso up; it was quite well made, with skilfully formed pectorals and well-defined ribs, and it was stamped with the plainsmen’s mark, usually a guarantee of quality. Bardas started with a couple of heavy bashes across the breastbone – ‘Thought so,’ Anax commented, ‘fancy decoration on top of poor material’ – then methodically broke the ribs, as easily as snapping off icicles. ‘Fail that,’ said Anax, and Bardas swept it off the anvil into the scrap.
‘Next,’ Alexius said, and Bardas put up a head. ‘Collector’s item,’ he said, because it was the head of a Son of Heaven, the late Colonel Estar. ‘Always wanted to see how well one of these would do,’ he said, and swung the hammer, putting a lot of left elbow and right shoulder behind the blow. The skull crumpled but stayed together – ‘That’s quality for you,’ said Anax – and it took him seven blows to wreck it completely. ‘It’s the bone structure that does it,’ Anax pointed out. ‘That high-domed forehead, see, and those cheek-bones. I’ll pass that in the second degree; still not good enough for the purpose it was made for.’
Another torso; female this time, with small round breasts and sloping, rounded shoulders. It had been made in the Perimadeian style but the patina on the surface suggested the sunlight of the Island. Breaking the ribs and collar-bone was easy enough; but the flesh was soft and springy, like the quilted silk armour of the far-eastern provinces, easy to bruise but next to impossible to crush, the force of the hammer blows just seemed to soak away into it, like water into sand. In the end, Bardas managed to ruin it by trapping it between the hammerhead and the edge of the anvil. ‘Third degree pass,’ said Anax. ‘Impressive.’
‘Cheating, if you ask me,’ Bardas replied.
Next was a hand; a girl’s hand with long, slender fingers. Instead of the hammer Bardas used the eight-pound axe, and the fingers came away quit
e cleanly. ‘Now the hammer,’ Alexius said, and Bardas smashed it across the back, expecting it to pulp. It didn’t. ‘Ah,’ said Alexius with a smile, ‘that’s a genuine Loredan, you see. Tough as old boots, they are.’ By the time he’d wrecked it to his satisfaction, Bardas had worked up quite a sweat.
‘Let’s have that head there,’ Alexius said. ‘Now,’ he went on, turning it round in his fingers, ‘here’s a challenge for you. Let’s see just how strong you are.’
Bardas grinned; the head was bald, with a strong jaw and a big, soft mouth. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said; but the first, second and third blows glanced harmlessly off the curved surface of the skull, and the head, opening its eyes and winking, forgave him.
‘I’ll pass it if you like,’ Alexius said sardonically. Bardas didn’t reply; he laid the head on its side and hammered on the jaw until the hinge cracked, then attacked the temples. He made some inroads but had to give up when he hit short, caught the shaft of the hammer on the side of the anvil and broke off the head.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I’ll use the axe.’
‘All right,’ said Anax, ‘but it’s not the right tool, so it won’t be a fair proof.’
‘So what?’ Bardas replied. The axe made a better job; but by the time he was satisfied there wasn’t much edge left on it, and the blade was notched where he’d hit directly on one open, winking eye. The head forgave him again as he shoved it off the anvil. ‘Fifth degree proof,’ Alexius said. ‘They don’t make ’em like that any more.’
Bardas was tired. He wiped away the sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist and asked, ‘Is that it?’
‘Almost,’ said Anax. ‘One more head, and then we’re done.’ And he reached under the bench and produced the head of Colonel Bardas Loredan. ‘All right then, Mister Clever,’ he said. ‘Crack that if you can, and I’ll buy you a jug of cold milk.’