by K. J. Parker
His mother had once told him he had a fine singing voice (but then, she’d told Luso that he was handsome and Pin that she was pretty). He wasn’t quite sure what “fine” was supposed to mean in this context. If it meant loud, Mother’s words were a statement of undeniable fact, not a compliment. He thought he sang rather well, but he was realistic about his own judgement. In any event, the pigs seemed to like it.
To begin with, he restricted himself to a few short simple halloos and volleys, the sort of thing Luso used to communicate with the hounds ever since he’d lost the hunting-horn in the river. They worked perfectly well. By the fifth note out of eight, all the pigs came running, even if the sack was still in the tree (though he knew he had to keep faith and fulfil the contract by feeding them or the whole procedure would fail). Nevertheless, he felt the need for improvement or, at least, further elaboration. He extended the halloos into verses from the usual ballads, and the pigs didn’t seem to mind. But he didn’t like ballads much, they were plain and crude, and the words seemed a bit ridiculous taken out of their narrative context. So he began to invent words and music of his own, using forms from his mother’s music book. He made up serenades to call them, estampidas for while they were feeding (the only form boisterous enough to be heard over the sound of happy pigs) and aubades for the minute or so of forlorn sniffing and searching before the pigs managed to accept that all the barley was really gone. Gradually, as he elaborated and improved his compositions, the singing became an end in itself rather than a function of practical swineherding, and the terrifying chore blossomed into a pleasure.
For the afternoon feed of the day in question he’d worked up what he considered was his finest effort yet. He’d started with the basic structure of the aubade, by its very nature a self-limiting form—but he’d extended it with a six-bar lyrical coda that recapitulated the opening theme transposed into the major key with a far livelier time signature. He’d run though the coda many times during the day, sitting with his back to the fattest, oldest beech in the glade. A wolf tree, the men from the farm called it. It had been there before the rest of the wood grew up, and instead of pointing its branches directly at the sky, it spread them wide, like his mother making a despairing gesture, blocking the light from the surrounding area so that nothing could grow there, and thus forming the clearing which generations of pigs had extended by devastation into a glade. When the angle of the beams of light piercing the canopy told him it was time for the feed, he got up slowly, brushed himself free of leaf mould and twigs, and hauled the yellow bucket out from its secure storage in a holly clump. Three pigs looked up, their ears glowing translucent against the slanting light. He grinned at them, and lugged the bucket into the middle of the clearing. Then he walked slowly to the hollow tree and felt inside the crack for the barley sack. Two more pigs lifted their heads, still diligently chewing. He cleared his throat with a brisk cough and began to sing.
La doca votz ai auzida…
(Lyrics weren’t his strong point. They had to be in the formal language of Home, or he might just as well sing ballads and, in theory, he was fluent in it as befitted a boy of noble birth albeit in exile. In practice, he could pick his way through a few of the simpler poems and homilies in the books, and say things like “My name is Gignomai, where is this place, what time in dinner?” As far as writing formal verse went, however, he hadn’t got a hope, so he tended to borrow lines from real poems and bend them till they sort of fitted.)
De rosinholets savatges—
He stopped suddenly, the next phrase congealed in his throat. A string of horsemen had appeared through the curtain of leaves and were riding up the track towards him. In the lead was his brother Luso, followed by half a dozen of the farm men and one riderless horse.
His first impression was that they’d been out hawking, because he could see a bundle of brown-feathered birds, tied at the neck, slung across the pommel of Luso’s saddle. But there was no hawk on Luso’s wrist. Had Luso lost the hawk? If so, there’d be open war at dinner. The hawk had come on a ship from Home; it had cost a fortune. There had been the most appalling row when Luso turned up with it one day, but Father had forgiven Luso because a hawk was, after all, a highly suitable possession for a gentleman. If Luso had contrived to mislay the wretched thing…
Luso looked at him without smiling. “What was that awful noise?” he said.
There was no way he could explain. “Sorry,” he said.
They hadn’t been hawking. They were wearing their padded shirts, with horn scales sewn into the lining. Two of the men had wide, shiny dark red stains soaking through their shirts, Luso had a deep cut just under his left eye, and they all looked exhausted. The birds on Luso’s saddle were chickens.
“Keep the noise down, will you?” Luso said. He was too tired to be sarcastic. For Luso to pass up an opportunity like this, something had to be wrong. The men rode by without saying anything. Their horses had fallen into a loose, weary trudge, too languid to spook the pigs. He didn’t bother trying to hide the barley sack behind his legs; Luso didn’t seem interested. Under the chicken feathers, he could see the holsters for the snapping-hen pistols. The ball pommel of one pistol was just visible. The other holster was empty.
When they’d gone, he performed the feeding ritual quickly and in silence. It worked just as well without music. When the swineherds showed up to drive the pigs back to the farm, they were quiet and looked rather scared. He didn’t ask what the matter was.
Father was angry about the man getting killed, but he was absolutely furious about the loss of the pistol, so furious that he didn’t mention it at all, which was a very bad sign. Gignomai heard the shouting before they were called in to dinner—that was all about the man’s death, how it’d leave them short-handed at the worst possible time, how Luso had a sacred duty by virtue of his station in life not to expose his inferiors to unnecessary and frivolous dangers—not a word about the pistol, but it was plain as day from what was said and what wasn’t that the real issue wasn’t something that could be absolved through sheer volume of abuse. Dinner was, by contrast, an eerily silent affair, with everybody staring at their hands or their plates. When the main course was served, however, Father looked up and said, in a terrible voice, “What the hell is this supposed to be?”
A long silence; then Luso said, “It’s chicken.”
“Get it out of my sight,” Father said, and the plates were whisked away. No great loss, Gignomai couldn’t help thinking; it had been sparse and stringy and tough as strips of leather binding, and he was pretty sure he’d last seen it draped over the pistol-holsters, in which case the chickens had been laying hens, not table birds, and not fit for eating. There was rather more to it than that, of course. They’d eaten layers before, when they’d had to, and had pretended they were perfectly fine.
Next morning, early, his brother Stheno told him he wouldn’t have to look after the pigs for the next week or so. He gave no reason, but Gignomai could tell it had something to do with yesterday and the chickens. He supposed he should have been pleased, particularly since Stheno didn’t give him anything else to do. Instead, he felt aimless and somehow disappointed, as though he’d closed his eyes for a kiss that never came.
He wanted to sneak up to the hayloft with a book, but as usual Father had entrenched himself in the library (the place he was usually to be found). Going to the loft without a book would just be a waste of lifespan. He looked for Mother’s music book, but she was propped up in bed reading it, feeding scraps of cold chicken to her cats. How slender, he thought, is the division between happiness and misery. All he needed for a day of perfect pleasure was a book (any book, so long as he hadn’t read it so often he could say the words with his eyes shut), but there wasn’t a book to be had, and so the day promised to be wretched.
Unless, of course, he did something desperate and illegal. Those aspects of his proposed plan of action held no charm for him in themselves. He preferred to avoid danger and keep to the rules whenev
er it was possible to do so. But the prospect of drifting aimlessly round the farm all day suddenly seemed unbearably dreary, and he felt as though he didn’t really have a choice. He decided to break out of the Tabletop, walk down to the town and see his friend.
Breaking out was no small thing. The Tabletop, the plateau on which they lived, rose steeply out of the plain, a rectangle a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, three sides of which were bare perpendicular rock. At the foot of the southern face, where the beech wood sloped sharply down to the river, they’d built what everybody called the Fence, though it wasn’t a fence at all, but a high earth rampart, topped with a stone wall, with a deep ditch at its foot on the river side. There was one gate, the Doorstep, in the middle of the Fence, a massive thing guarded by two towers which Gignomai had never seen opened. Hired men, seasonal workers and the very occasional visitor were winched up the north face in a terrifying beam and plank cage, in which Gignomai had sworn a private oath he’d never set foot. There was, however, a third way out, the one Luso used. Gignomai wasn’t supposed to know about it, but he couldn’t help having a lively mind. Once he’d followed the bridlepath through the wood down to the Fence, and found that it stopped abruptly at the point where it met one of the many run-off streams that turned the lower part of the wood into a quagmire for two-thirds of the year. The stream-bed looked impossibly steep for a human being to walk down, let alone men leading horses, but he guessed it must be possible, since that was apparently what Luso and his raiding parties did.
Scrambling down it the first time had terrified the life out of him. Once he’d been up and down it a dozen or so times, he realised it could be done, safely if not comfortably, if you knew exactly where to go and where to put your feet. It came out beside the river between two giant rocks, lying so close that they looked like one enormous monumental facade, commissioned by some great emperor. The crack (you went in at an angle, where the two rocks sort of overlapped) was so slight you’d miss it if you didn’t know it was there. On closer examination, it turned out to be wide enough for a horse to squeeze through, but from only a few yards away it looked like just another facet of the sandstone wall. It was, when Gignomai came to think about it, pretty well perfect. Luso, returning from one of his frolics, could ride up the river, leaving no trail, and melt away into an invisible chink in the wall. If anybody were to stumble upon it and look upwards, they’d immediately assume that the stream-bed was unscalable, and continue their vain search for the real entrance.
As he walked through the wood, contemplating the reason for his surprise holiday, he had to assume that it was to do with Luso’s raid, which he knew had gone badly. The beech wood was, he supposed, the Tabletop’s most vulnerable aspect, though (needless to say) it had never been compromised in the past. Therefore, as a precaution, it had been emptied of man and pig until the fuss had died down. That made sense, but it hadn’t been deemed necessary before. It occurred to him that this time, Luso might have made rather more trouble than usual. In any event, he expected to find at least one sentry on duty at the head of the stream—standard procedure for two days after a raid—and he wasn’t proved wrong. There were, in fact, four.
That was awkward. He spotted them easily enough from his usual vantage point at the top of the worked-out limepit he called the Woodland Cathedral. They were some of Luso’s best men (best in this context bore a rather specialised meaning: they didn’t do farm work, and a lot was said about them behind their backs) and their presence tended to support the hypothesis that something bad had happened the previous day. It occurred to him that he could have used his day off rather more usefully eavesdropping on Father in the library; except that was a highly dangerous operation and, if anything, even more illegal than breaking out. Besides, it would’ve involved a great deal of sitting, or crouching, perfectly still, and he really wasn’t in the mood.
Luso had a book called The Art of War. He kept it beside his bed and had let it be known that dreadful things would happen to anybody who so much as noticed it existed. Gignomai had therefore taken it as his fraternal duty to read it from cover to cover, several times, an exercise far more excruciating than any punishment Luso’s rather limited imagination could ever have devised. It was a boring book, badly written and self-evidently useless (by his own admission, the author’s only qualification for writing about military strategy had been twenty years as headmaster of a small provincial school), but Luso clearly set great store by it, since he’d posted his sentries almost exactly as shown in diagram C on page 344. As a result, there was a blind spot where the double trunk of a fat old split oak blocked the western sentry’s view of the riverbed; not a major flaw, since they were presumably guarding against enemies coming up the stream, who’d be visible at other points, not delinquents going down it. As for those other points, he guessed he’d be able to get past them by virtue of being small and skinny. He could duck down and be covered by the overhang of the moss and ivy clusters that hung from the stream’s lower bank.
He considered the tactical position. With the blind spot in his favour, the risk was acceptable, but only just—according to the handy reckoner in Luso’s book, something in the order of 25 per cent, with 33 being the cut-off point. In such circumstances, the book recommended raising a diversion. On that issue he begged to differ. A diversion—throwing a stone, breaking a branch to simulate the stealthy approach of an enemy, starting a small fire—would require activity and movement, with the attendant risk of detection. True, the penalties for being caught crashing about in the bushes were considerably less than those for being caught trying to break out, but it’d still mean he’d be marched back to the house, where he’d be given into the custody of his brother Stheno, who’d assign him uncongenial farm work as a remedy for excessive leisure. A one-in-four chance. He studied each of the sentries carefully in turn, weighing up what he knew about them. Luso’s book suggested that guards could be neutralised with gifts of alcohol, either drugged or in bulk. But Luso’s best men would know exactly what was going on if one of the sons of the farm strolled up to them with a huge jug of beer and, besides, they could drink anybody else in the house under the table, so it’d have to be a barrel at least.
He sighed. Stupid people shouldn’t be allowed to write books, in case even stupider people believed them.
Dismissing the book’s final fall-back suggestion (picking the sentries off at extreme range with a crossbow), he resolved to take the one-in-four chance. There was, however, no sense in rushing. He settled down to wait for the right moment.
It came when the eastern sentry, who stood the best chance of spotting Gignomai as he emerged briefly from the cover of the split oak, yawned and began unwrapping a bundle he’d taken from his pocket, which proved to be a fat slice of cheese. Perfect. First he’d have to unwrap it. Then he’d carefully pare away the plaster and the rind, using a sharp knife. Most likely, given the size of the slice and the time of day, he’d cut it in two and save one piece for later. A person could go a long way while a man was busy doing all that.
The ground underfoot was dry. There was no wind, which meant sound would carry, but the mild rattle of the stream would deaden a certain amount of noise. He stood up, feeling a mild tingle, like that of a two-hour-old nettle sting, and forced himself not to hurry. He looked down at his feet (swinging his head from side to side watching the guards was unnecessary movement, and movement is what gets you seen) and covered the first leg to the base of the split tree, in faultless style.
Once he was safe behind the tree, his nerve failed. He couldn’t have moved even if he’d wanted to; he was sweating and he had to make a determined effort to breathe. A detached part of his mind commented that this was just something that happened occasionally; it didn’t seem to need any particular reason, and it didn’t signal any unusual increase in the danger level. Sometimes people just froze in the middle. This commentary didn’t help much. He knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t do anything about it, which meant he was stuck. Al
l he could do was keep still and quiet and hope he’d pull himself together sooner or later.
It turned out to be later—half an hour, maybe, though he had no means of knowing for sure since he couldn’t see the sun or a helpful shadow without moving his head, which he didn’t dare try. He couldn’t see the sentries, but logic told him if they’d noticed anything they’d have come looking by now. Gradually the panic thawed, giving way to a curious sensation of grossly heightened perception. He could hear sounds he’d never have noticed otherwise, and the light seemed bright enough to tan skin. He really wished he was back in the hayloft not reading a book.
From experience he knew the best way to break the spell was to count up to some randomly chosen number. He opted for 250 but, in the event, he moved on 187 without quite knowing why. He crossed the open patch with no bother at all, and could feel the blood pounding in the veins in his head. He swooped like a hawk into the stream-bed, ducked low and walked with uncomfortably long strides until he was confident he was out of sight. Then he had to concentrate.
Halfway down the stream he stopped. Normally this wasn’t recommended. At that point, the gradient was so steep and the footholds so marginal you really had to get by the middle section on blind faith and happy thoughts; it wasn’t a place for sitting down and taking stock. But that was what he did, almost as though his mind was exhausted and couldn’t go a step further without a rest.
Not that he was thinking about anything in particular. He was processing the memory of the panic, the way you do, and half consciously running through the list of possible hazards he might encounter before he reached the bottom of the slope. Otherwise, his mind was clean and empty. He sat awkwardly on a low, sharp stone and watched the thin stream bouncing past his feet for a while. Then he stood up again, and finished the descent.
He arrived at the bottom, where the crack between the rocks opened out onto the narrow water meadow on their side of the river. Nothing to see in either direction. He lifted his shoulders, straightened his back and walked out into full daylight. As he did so, he heard in the distance the unique sound of a gunshot, a long way back in the wood.