by K. J. Parker
The clerk looked puzzled. ‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘Her daughter. The Lady Iseutz.’
‘Oh. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think she took anyone with her, just some bodyguards and the crew of the ship.’
Gorgas leant against the wall and rubbed his cheeks with his fingertips. ‘All right,’ he said again. ‘There just isn’t time for this now. Who are the headquarters staff reporting to?’
The clerk shrugged. ‘I don’t think anybody’s bothering with any of that,’ he said. ‘I think most of the clerks are, well, getting ready to leave too.’
Gorgas scowled and snatched the sack of counters out of the clerk’s hand, spilling them all over the floor. ‘I bet,’ he said. ‘Well, that’d better stop. Anybody caught trying to leave his post will have to explain himself to me; you make sure that reaches all your colleagues, or I’ll hold you responsible. What did you say your name was?’
The clerk sighed. ‘Riert Varil,’ he said. ‘Chief deputy, copying pool.’
‘Right. Pass the message round, then get back to your desk. No, forget that. Find out if there’s been any messages, and where in hell the southern guard units have got to. I need to know if there’s any more of the enemy left.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t have thought so,’ the clerk replied. ‘I thought you said you’d just wiped them out.’
‘Find me as soon as you know. I’ll be in the Director’s office.’
It was true, Gorgas said to himself, lifting his feet and planting them in the middle of her desk, she must have gone, or where’s that little applewood cup of hers, the one Bardas made for her out of the stump of the kitchen tree? It isn’t here, so she must have gone. And so, he observed, has everything else, except for the few bits and pieces that weren’t worth anything or were too firmly fastened to the walls to be easily removed. He’d known she was gone when he’d put his feet up on her desk without being worried in case she suddenly came in through the door. He couldn’t feel her in any part of the building. She’d gone because she couldn’t trust him to defend her against her enemies. Again.
The clerk reappeared, looking distinctly nervous. ‘No messages, Director,’ he said. ‘And I’ve spoken to the heads of department—’
‘Director,’ Gorgas repeated. ‘All right, carry on.’
‘I’ve spoken to the heads of department, and the staff are being put back to work. Sergeant Graiz and the southern guard left for the marshes as you ordered, but nothing’s been heard of any enemy units.’ The clerk hesitated. ‘The war would appear to be over for now,’ he said. ‘Will there be anything else?’
Gorgas looked at him for a moment. ‘Does anybody know why she left?’ he asked. ‘Did she say anything?’
The clerk nodded. ‘I gather she decided the war had become too expensive to pursue any further,’ he said.
‘Too expensive.’
‘So I gather. She formed the view that it was time to cut her losses by closing down her operation here and concentrate on her other business interests.’
Gorgas stared. ‘What other business interests?’ he demanded.
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘Oh, for gods’ sakes,’ said Gorgas angrily. ‘No, I don’t. What other business interests?’
So the clerk told him: the half-share in a Colleon merchant venturers’ company, the tannery on Gasail; the lumber mill at Visuntha; the vineyards at Byshest; the stake in the Dakas copper-mining syndicate; the ropewalk on the Island—
‘Go away,’ Gorgas said.
Bardas picked up the bow.
Ideally, he would have liked to have left the glue to cure for at least a week, preferably longer than that; but time was a luxury and besides, the glue he’d made from this batch of exotic, expensive rawhide dried remarkably quickly in the fierce sunlight. He picked up the string and dropped one loop over the bottom nock, then hesitated. There was every chance that, when he flexed the bow for the first time to string it, the thing would snap in two and all his work and hard-to-come-by materials would be wasted.
The first stage had been shaping and fitting the butt-spliced sections of bone to the belly of the wooden core; a slow, frustrating business for a man aware that he was working to a tight deadline. But it had to be right; unless the sections fitted together exactly, the belly would be weak, the terrifying forces of compression would find the vulnerable points where the sections met and tear the work to pieces. So he had filed and scraped and polished, smearing soot onto one face of each join with the tip of his finger, assembling them, taking them apart, until the soot marked both faces evenly and they came together so tightly that he couldn’t pull a hair into the fissure of the joint. Having located, sized and numbered each section, he smeared on the glue, pressed each one into place against the core and wrapped it round tightly with stout cord, one turn every eighth of an inch. To make sure, he added clamps packed with slivers shaved from the spare bone to distribute the force of the clamps evenly. To help pass the time while the glue set, he carded and sorted the sinew for the backing once again, and wove and served the string.
As soon as the glue was hard and he’d slipped off the clamps and unwound the cord, he’d mixed up another batch and begun the tedious, messy work of putting on the sinew backing. First, he’d sized the back of the core once again, this time with the residue of the last batch of hide glue. Next, he set it up on blocks at the front of the workbench, on which lay forty neatly sorted bundles of sinew fibres at convenient intervals. The glue was right - still warm and the consistency of new thin honey. He picked up the sliver of bone he’d chosen to use as a smoother and put it in a small clay cup full of water.
He selected the first bundle of sinew, the longest he had, and dipped it in the glue until it was saturated and limp. He squeezed out the excess, starting at the top and working the runout down to the bottom, flattening the bundle in the process, then carefully laid it down the middle of the core’s back above the handle, spreading it from the centre outwards with the piece of dampened bone until it was just over half an inch wide. The next bundle he butt-ended onto the first, pushing firmly with the smoother to stretch the fibres slightly, and repeated the process until he’d covered a strip up the centre of the back from nock to nock. When that was done he paused briefly to wash some of the surplus glue off his hands.
As he laid in the next row, to the left of the first, he made sure that the butt-seams didn’t line up to create a weak spot, two seams side by side; instead he staggered them like rows of bricks in a wall, then worked each bundle over with the smoother until it was indistinguishable from the material above, below and beside it. He continued until the whole of the back and sides of the core were covered in a homogenous mat of glue-sodden sinew, a long, flat artificial muscle that, once dry, would be next best thing to impossible to break no matter how hard it was stretched. As soon as he’d done one layer he laid on the second, working fast while the glue was still tacky and malleable so that each bundle of fibres would be fused with its neighbour and no weak spots could form. Finally he used up the last of the sinew in wrapping the joints in the bone on the belly, and smoothed all the leftover glue over the back; every last fibre of sinew and smear of glue used up, without waste or spoilage.
Because time was so short, he’d made up a drying oven out of slabs of firebrick; he heated the bricks in the fire until they were just too hot to hold and stacked them round the blocks on which the bow was mounted, where the sunlight through the window would catch them and keep the bricks warm once the heat of the fire had dissipated. He’d never used this technique before, and was afraid that the intensity of the heat would warp or spoil the bow, or that the glue would dry brittle, or that the sinew would dry too fast and pull away from the back as it shrank (and those were only the disasters he could easily anticipate; the unforeseen problems would doubtless be even worse).
Now all that was done, and he held the bow in his hands, to be strung and tillered, trimmed, smoothed and polished, the final layer o
f parchment-thin rawhide to be wrapped round.
In his hands now, it was as ugly and messy as a new-born baby; a man-made limb, put together out of bone, tendon, blood and skin, with all the body parts refined, corrected, pulled out and put back together again in a better, more efficient way. On the back, the tendons to be stretched, in the belly the bone to be crushed and compressed, the two held apart by an intrusive wafer of timber, held together by blood, skin and bone-dust; an arm stronger than any man’s arm when stretched and crushed to the very point of destruction, made by violence for violence out of body parts, heat, desiccation and skill. Wonderful beyond words, if the dead muscle still remembered its function, if the dead bone withstood the unbearable force of compression, if dead limbs could take lives, if nothing but a smear of blood and the scrapings of skin could bind the bits of dead body together as they strove with all their stored-up might to tear apart from each other—
(Like the Loredan family, Bardas thought with a smile; some of us bend and stretch, some of us crush and are crushed, but a little blood and sawdust and a shared skin keep us glued helplessly together, and when we bend and stretch and crush together, at the moment before breaking, we have infinite capacity for doing damage. I have been at the back of this family for many years, and now I’m in the belly of the bow, in the place where compression turns to expansion, where the stored force is converted into violence. And I have made this bow for my brother Gorgas.)
He lifted his left leg and stepped over the handle, trapping the lower limb over the instep of this right foot and drawing the belly-side of the handle up into the hollow of his left knee, then pulled as hard as he could with his left hand on the upper limb, bending it back until he could slip the top loop of the string over the nock. It was amazingly stiff to bend; he could feel the bone trying its utmost to break - but there was nowhere for it to break to, it was trapped against an equally unbearable tension in the sinew of the back, each tension preventing the other from giving way; trapped like the members of a family at war with each other, held by bonds they can never escape but which create the very tension that stresses them to their limit. Just when he thought he would never be able to string the bow, he managed to edge the loop of twisted gut over the sinew-wrapped nock. The bowstring took the strain, the loops and serving held, and Bardas let the bow lie across the palm of his hand, finding its balance around its centre of gravity. Against all his expectations, the tiller was perfect: two beautifully balanced convexes on either side of the concave handle, utterly symmetrical, the recurves bent back on themselves to create yet another tension. He held his breath and lifted the bow - how light it was - set his fingers to the served middle of the string, pushed with his left hand and pulled with his right (again the power of forces in opposition, working against each other to produce force, violence), straining the tendons and bones of his arm, back and shoulders; carefully testing, an inch further with each flex, until the base of his thumb touched his chin, and then it would go no further.
He rested for a moment, flexing his tortured muscles, thinking, So, the wretched thing draws short and stacks like crazy; that’s a hundred-pound bow with a twenty-five-inch draw. It’ll never be much for accuracy, but the power’s there. Well, it wouldn’t suit me. But Gorgas was always the strong one in our family, he can draw a hundred without breaking into a sweat, and a short draw suits fast, instinctive shooting. And Gorgas has always shot on instinct, ever since he was a boy. He picked an arrow out of the quiver that leant against the doorframe, fitted its nock to the string, aimed at a flat oak board three inches thick on the the side of the room, drew and loosed, letting the force of the draw pull the string off his fingers. The arrow struck high and its shaft disintegrated, leaving the bodkinhead driven clean through the board. The power was terrifying, and Bardas stood and stared for a while before unstringing the bow and laying it carefully down on the bench.
Later he tidied it up with scarpers and abrasive reeds and grits, wrapped the handle with more fine rawhide, waxed it thoroughly to keep out the damp and finished it with two thick coats of pure, horrendously expensive Colleon lacquer, which dries fast and is completely waterproof. It looked a bit smarter now, all milk-white except for the dark line of the wooden core, and shining.
He took the last scrap of the fine hide, which was every bit as good for writing on as the best parchment, and wrote To Gorgas, from Bardas, with love. Then he opened the door and yelled. Quite soon a clerk came hurrying up.
‘Is Gorgas Loredan still in the Bank?’ Bardas asked.
‘I think so,’ the clerk replied. ‘But he won’t be here much longer. Word’s come in that Avid Soef and the third army have just turned up, away to the south. He’s getting ready to leave.’
Bardas smiled. ‘Wonderful timing,’ he said. ‘Take him this bow, quick as you like, it’s very important.’
The clerk nodded. ‘Straight away,’ he said.
‘Good man. It’s just what he always wanted, so he ought to be pleased.’
When the clerk has gone, Bardas shut the door, sat down on the floor, put his head in his hands and tried not to think about what he’d just done.
Gorgas took the handle in his left hand and rested the raw, scabbed pads of his draw fingers on the centre of the string. The bow was perfect, as if it was part of him, his own arm, but made infinitely more strong. He felt as if he’d owned it for years, knew it and was familiar with it, the easy familiarity of flesh and blood.
‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘And Bardas made it for me.’
The sergeant was tapping his foot. ‘That’s really nice,’ he said. ‘But we do have a war to fight, so when you’re quite finished playing with it-’
Gorgas didn’t look up. ‘I’ve got to go and say thank you,’ he said. ‘You don’t realise. I’ve lost my sister, but I’ve found my brother. We’re a family again.’
The sergeant breathed out through his nose. ‘Gorgas, we’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get down the mountain before dark, we won’t be able to see to get in position. We could lose the battle—’
‘You’re right,’ Gorgas said. ‘Bardas didn’t make me a bow so I could lose the war with it. I guess it’ll just have to wait till I get back.’ Reluctantly, he slid the bow into his bow-case, letting his fingers glide over the lacquered back. ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘The last bow he made me I did some pretty bad things with. I have the feeling that this time it’s all going to be different; like a whole new start.’
‘Really,’ the sergeant said. ‘You mean, with this one, you might miss?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘Sten Mogre is dead,’ Gannadius said.
The people he was talking to looked at him as if he’d just taken off his clothes. ‘I beg your pardon?’ one of them said.
‘Sten Mogre,’ Gannadius repeated. ‘He’s dead. His army’s been wiped out too. In fact, we’ve lost something in the order of four thousand men, and nothing to show for it. Avid Soef’s still alive, of course.’
Mihel Bovert’s wife came in with a tray of doves marinaded in bacon fat. ‘Eat them while they’re hot, everybody,’ she announced. ‘Oh dear, what long faces. Is everything all right?’
There was an embarrassed silence, broken by one Bimond Faim saying, ‘According to our mystical friend here, the army’s been cut to ribbons.’
‘Oh,’ said Mihel Bovert’s wife. ‘Which army? You mean the great big one that’s dealing with those horrid rebels?’
‘That’s right,’ grunted Mihel Bovert, ‘the one our son’s serving with. Doctor Gannadius, would you say you’re mad, divinely inspired or just very, very tactless?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Gannadius said. ‘I - Something came over me, I suppose.’
‘Quite,’ replied Bimond Faim, lifting a dove off the tray with his fingers. ‘The spirit moved you, or whatever. Apart from what your inner voice tells you, have you any proof of this rather disturbing claim?’
‘No,’ Gannadius said. ‘Please, I’m so sorry, fo
rget I said anything. Really—’
One of the dinner guests, a big grey-bearded man, shook his head. ‘Easier said than done, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The plain fact is, you don’t import a genuine Perimadeian wizard and then ignore his occult sayings. Be straight with us, Doctor: should we pay attention to what you’re saying or not? Presumably this sort of thing’s happened to you before.’
Gannadius nodded. ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘Well, similar things.’
‘And on these previous occasions, has the little angel voice been right or wrong? Or is it hit and miss?’
‘It’s hard to say,’ Gannadius replied defensively. Mihel Bovert’s wife went out, and came back a moment later with a silver sauce-boat. ‘You see, I’m only telling you what someone else is telling me.’
‘Someone on Scona, though,’ said a small, stout woman at the opposite end of the table. ‘Your spirit guide, or whatever the technical term is.’
Gannadius didn’t correct her choice of terminology; his head was starting to hurt, making it hard for him to concentrate. ‘Someone on Scona, yes. Patriarch Alexius, as it happens. And he wouldn’t lie to me, so I do know for a fact that Alexius believes that Sten Mogre is dead and his army has been defeated. That’s all I can be certain about, though.’
A bald, heavily built middle-aged man opposite him frowned. ‘But you can’t be certain,’ he said. ‘Let’s be scientific, shall we? After all, we’re supposed to be men of science. On previous occasions, when you’ve had these—’ He hesitated.
‘Funny turns?’ suggested Bimond Faim.
‘These experiences,’ the bald man said. ‘On your word of honour as a philosopher, can you honestly tell me you’ve proved to your own satisfaction that these insights are genuine? That you’ve somehow communicated with someone far away?’
Gannadius nodded. ‘I’ve spoken to the other person involved - face to face, I mean, in the usual way - and they’ve confirmed that they had the same, or roughly the same, experience, and that they said the words I heard. Particularly Alexius; I’ve communicated with him quite a few times, it’s as if we have some sort of link. I’m not saying there aren’t alternative explanations,’ he added. ‘For a start, it’s perfectly possible that two people of very similar backgrounds who know each other well, thinking about the same problem, might come up with the same idea at roughly the same time, in a way that makes it look like they’re in contact with each other.’