by K. J. Parker
“You said it yourself: they live like peasants up there. Anyway, I left home.”
“You didn’t have any choice.”
“No,” she replied. “That’s why I’m here.”
Gig’s leaving, Furio thought, and she’s here to stay. The wrong way round, like the chisels. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Looks like you’ll just have to put up with it.”
“Gignomai thinks I should learn to be a proper surgeon,” she said, “like my father was.”
“Does he?”
She nodded. “He says it’s different here, not like Home. He says there’s no reason a woman shouldn’t be a surgeon or a clerk or a trader even. People wouldn’t stand for it at Home because they’re set in their ways, but it’s not the same here. There’s so few people who can do anything useful, it wouldn’t matter if I was a woman if I could set bones and sew up wounds and stuff.”
“Maybe he’s right,” Furio said.
“Of course, I’d need to read the right books,” she went on. “I’ve got three of Father’s books. The rest had to be sold, but I took the most important ones out of the box when nobody was looking. And I know a lot of it already just from watching.”
Furio noticed a spot of rust on the seven-eighths bevel. He scratched it off with his fingernail. “But you’ve never actually done any of it.”
“Father let me sew up the wounds sometimes,” she said. “He said I did a neater job than he did.”
“You don’t mind the blood, then.”
“No.” She shook her head to reinforce the denial. “Really, it’s no worse than the stuff in a kitchen. It’s all meat, isn’t it?”
“I think you’d have a job convincing people you’re up to it,” Furio said.
“Oh, I don’t know. If your uncle hadn’t been there when they brought Gignomai in, I’d have coped. And I don’t think anyone would’ve stopped me when they saw I knew what I was doing. And once I’ve saved one man, word’ll get about. Anyway, who do people go to when they cut themselves on the farms? Their mothers, or their wives.”
“It’s different on the farms.”
“Not really.”
Furio couldn’t remember when he’d felt so strongly about wanting to be somewhere else. “Well, if that’s what you want to do, good luck to you,” he said. “Talk to my uncle; maybe he could send Home for the books you want. I’m sure he’d be on your side, if you share your fees with him.”
Teucer didn’t have to wait long for her chance to shine. Uncle Marzo had told Furio to unload a consignment of dry goods that had come on the ship. The carter had backed his wagon up to the side door, then mumbled something about seeing the smith to get his horses shod and disappeared, leaving Furio to wrestle with a wagonload of enormous barrels. They were far too heavy to lift. Furio opened the tailgate and leaned a couple of strong planks on the wagon bed, then proceeded to dance a slow, ungainly dance with each barrel, tipping, rocking and edging it to the back of the wagon, tripping it over on its side and letting it roll down the planks. Gignomai made a half-hearted offer of help while doing his best to look frail and ill. Teucer just stood and watched, confident in the immunity of being a girl.
“Most extraordinary thing I ever saw,” Gignomai was saying. “Big as a house, absolutely crammed full of stuff. I can’t see why it doesn’t just sink under all the weight. You’d have to be off your head to go out on one of those on all that water.”
Furio paused to snatch a little breath. “It’s a doddle of a run from here to Home,” he said. “One day of open sea then you’re hugging the coast, so most of the time you’re just a gentle swim from land.”
“I can’t swim,” Gignomai said.
“Can’t you?” No reason, of course, why he should. Nothing to swim in up there on the Tabletop.
“Can’t say it’s ever bothered me,” Gignomai went on. “But it’d be a different matter if I had to go on one of those things.”
“You’ll have to,” Furio replied, squaring up against a barrel and heaving. “If you want to go Home. It’s one instance where walking isn’t an option.”
“What you could do with,” Gignomai observed, “is a long bit of wood you could use as a lever. In Chrysodorus’ Mirror of Algebra there’s a whole chapter about levers. Theoretically, if you could find a long enough lever and a big enough rock to lean on, you could move this whole island.”
Furio scowled at him. Leaning up against one of the sheds were four ten-foot lengths of rafter, but he’d been too idle to go and fetch them, and had been regretting it ever since. “More trouble than it’s worth,” he replied briskly. “I just need to get my weight behind it.”
He shoved a little harder than he’d intended. The barrel toppled prematurely onto its side and rolled awkwardly, sweeping away the planks. It dropped off the cart and smashed open, spilling out straw, sawdust and about a hundred shiny new spoons.
“You’re probably right,” Gignomai said, straight-faced. “Well, you obviously know what you’re doing. I’ll shut up and let you get on with it.”
Furio hopped down from the wagon, grappled the smashed barrel upright, and started gathering spoons. When he’d rounded up all the fugitives, he tried to jump back onto the wagon. Somehow, he didn’t quite make it. For a moment he hung in the air, as if he’d contrived to learn the secret of levitation. Then he fell backwards, landing in a tangle of limbs.
Gignomai had drawn a lungful of air to laugh with, but there was something wrong. A bright red stain was soaking through the cloth of Furio’s left sleeve.
“Furio,” Gignomai said, “I think you’ve cut your arm.”
“What?” Furio looked over his shoulder and swore. He’d caught his forearm on the jagged edge of a broken barrel-stave. Blood was spreading fast, like light in the sky at midsummer dawn. He stared at it, trying to figure out what it meant.
“Let me see that.” Teucer had suddenly come to life. She practically sprang at him, like a cat, dragged the sodden cloth away and studied the wound with every sign of total satisfaction.
“That’s a very deep cut,” she said. “Let’s get you inside.”
Furio looked at Gignomai, who shrugged, then allowed himself to be bustled into the store. “Gignomai,” Teucer ordered, “get a bowl of water and a clean cloth.”
Gignomai had no idea where a cloth might be, but he wasn’t about to admit ignorance. He grabbed a large enamel soup plate from a display in the front of the store and darted into the back room, where he was fairly sure he’d find a pitcher of water. He found the pitcher, but it was empty, so he scurried out through the back door and filled the pitcher from the pump in the stable yard. That just left a cloth. He went into the back room and looked round, but the closest thing he could see was a roll of linen shirt fabric. The hell with it, he thought, and butchered a generous square out of the roll with his pocketknife.
“Where have you been?” Teucer had got Furio lying on the long table in the main store, where they’d put Gignomai when they’d brought him in. Furio shot him a sort of scared-resigned look. His sleeve was rolled up, displaying a long, ragged gash.
“I’ll need alcohol,” Teucer said. “Brandy, something like that.”
It took Gignomai a moment to realise that was an order. Luckily, Furio called out, “Back room, third shelf, small wooden box with the key to the cellar in it.”
The way down to the cellar was through a trapdoor in the back-room floor. It was, of course, dark down there, so he had to go back, find a lantern, find a tinderbox, reload it with dry moss, light the lantern. He could feel time passing, and for all he knew Furio was bleeding to death.
There turned out to be a whole row of brandy bottles, some clean, some very dusty. He assumed the dusty ones were for Uncle Marzo’s own use, and grabbed a clean one.
He was quite relieved to find Furio was still alive. Teucer glanced at the bottle and said, “Well, open it, then.”
Should’ve thought of that himself. It was closed with a cork and wax. He broke the wax of
f with his thumbnail. “Corkscrew,” he pleaded.
“Box of them under the front window,” Furio said.
“And I’ll need a small dish,” Teucer called out.
He found one, and fetched it and the bottle over to Teucer, who gave him a soul-shrivelling sort of look, and poured brandy into the dish. “Alcohol cleans metal,” she explained, though more, he was sure, to show off her own knowledge than to save him from perplexity. There was a tinkling noise as something small dropped into the dish.
“Now then.” Teucer turned to Furio. “This is going to hurt a lot, but I need you to keep perfectly still, or you’ll make me mess it up.”
No pressure, Gignomai thought. “What are you going—?”
“Shh.” Teucer picked something out of the dish and held it at arm’s length, in the direction of the window, where the light was coming from. “I’m no good at this. Gignomai, you’ll have to thread it for me.”
She waited for him to obey, then turned to look at him. He was standing perfectly still. His mouth was open, and his eyes were very wide. “Gignomai?”
He tried to speak, but something wasn’t working properly. Teucer made a brisk, disapproving noise. “Oh come on,” she said, “don’t go all squeamish on me. A grown man like you, getting all stupid over a silly little needle.”
Gignomai shook his head.
“Gig?” Furio said. He’d seen something in his friend’s face, though he didn’t understand it. “Are you all right?”
Teucer gave breath to a long, carefully fashioned sigh. “Men,” she said. “All right, I’ll have to do it.” She dipped the end of the thread in the brandy, tweaked it into a point and triumphantly threaded the needle at her first attempt.
“Gig?” Furio said.
“Quiet,” Teucer ordered. “Now, perfectly still.” She leaned forward, the needle pinched between right thumb and forefinger, her left hand gently pressing together the lips of the wound. With a slow, even pressure, she pressed the needle point against Furio’s skin.
Gignomai sprang forward, grabbed her right hand, lifted it up high, cupped her face in his open right palm and shoved her hard away from the table. She staggered, tripped and fell. Gignomai stared at her for a moment as Furio tried to grab his shoulder with his uninjured arm. Gignomai dodged, looked Furio in the face, then ran out of the store into the street.
He came back two hours later. Furio was waiting for him on the porch, his arm neatly bandaged.
“Don’t ask,” Gignomai said.
“Don’t you tell me—”
“Don’t ask,” Gignomai repeated. He tried to walk past, but Furio shot out a leg to block him. “I’m leaving now. Thanks for everything. Tell Teucer I’m sorry.”
“Gig, what the hell?”
Gignomai stepped over the outstretched leg and went indoors. He came out a little later holding his coat.
“You’re leaving,” Furio said.
“Yes.”
“Gig…”
“Goodbye.”
Furio watched him walk away. He didn’t understand. He knew he’d just witnessed something important, but he had no idea what it could possibly be. Gignomai turned left at the corner and vanished behind the livery building. Gone, just like that.
Of course, he could run after him.
Teucer was standing in the doorway. “He’s gone, then.”
Furio nodded. “What the hell was all that about?”
“I don’t know. Is he coming back?”
“He didn’t say.” Furio thought about it. “I’d be inclined to doubt it.”
“Where’s he going? Back to his family?”
Furio shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought so. But then, I wouldn’t have thought he’d go storming off like that.” He turned to look at her. “What did we do?”
“No idea.”
He was caught. He’d seen something in her face, even though it was closed, drawn in, formal. Oh, he thought. Another surprise. “I didn’t think you liked him,” he said.
“I don’t, much,” she replied. “He’s arrogant and self-centred. I don’t think he likes me very much.”
“But,” Furio said.
“Yes.” She sighed, as if it was something tiresome, like the milk boiling over. “I’m not sure that whether you like someone’s got very much to do with it.” She sat down quickly, as if the chair was about to be snatched away. “I think it was what he said, about how I could be a surgeon if I wanted to. As if that was an obvious thing. It hadn’t crossed my mind before he said it. I’d always assumed it wouldn’t be possible.”
Furio turned his head and stared at the corner of the livery building, as though there was a door there through which you could go and be in the past or the future. “I guess Gignomai feels the need to believe that you don’t have to carry on being what you are or what people want you to be.”
She nodded. “Do you think he’ll go home?”
“Probably. He’s got no money, so he can’t get a ride on a ship. That leaves him two choices, really: here or there. He’s left here.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Teucer protested with sudden fury. “You cut yourself, I stitched it up. He said I should be surgeon. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“He’ll be back,” Furio said. “He can’t go home, and I really don’t see him sleeping in haylofts.” He looked at her again. She turned away. “Should I go after him?”
“That’d just make things worse,” she replied. “He’ll be back.”
Gignomai didn’t slow down until he’d passed the Watchtower, and only came to a stop when he reached the small brook that ran down from town to join the Blackwater. Once he’d stopped, he found it impossible to move.
For a long time, there was too much noise inside his head. He waited for it to die down, as he knew it would. Ah well, he thought.
It would have been nice to go Home, to get away from everything he’d grown up with, to live in a place where everybody was a stranger. He’d amused himself with the fantasy of choosing a new name for himself, as though a name was something you could put on and take off like a coat. It would’ve been possible with his share of the sword money.
The trouble with running away is that, no matter where you go, you have to take yourself with you. He couldn’t remember who’d said that. It was either a quotation or something Luso had said, in an unrelated context, meant as a joke. He hadn’t meant to scare Furio and Teucer like that. Not their fault. They weren’t to know.
He looked up at the sun. Mid-afternoon, just for the record. At this time on this day in this place, I realised that I have to face up to my responsibilities. That reminded him of how he’d killed the wolf, and he frowned.
Forget all about Home, he told himself. He’d do what he had to. But this time, he’d think it through first.
It felt very strange, walking up to the Gate openly without any attempt at concealment. He could feel the arrows pointing at him long before he saw anyone.
“Hello?” he called out.
After a while, one of Luso’s men came out from behind a tree. He was staring.
“Yes,” said Gignomai, “it’s me. Would you mind pointing that thing somewhere else?”
The guard lowered his crossbow and lifted the bolt out of the clip. Two more guards appeared on either side of him. Turning back was no longer an option.
“Come on, then,” Gignomai said. “One of you’s enough. Besides, standing orders say a minimum of two on guard.”
But all three came with him, keeping a two-yard distance, as though he was contagious or something. They marched him to the front door of the house and told him to wait there. It was strange, being made to wait outside his own door like a tradesman.
Luso came out in a sudden explosion of movement like a boar breaking cover. For a moment Gignomai was sure Luso was going to hit him, and made the decision to stand and take it rather than try and dodge out of the way. But Luso came to a full stop an arm’s length away, and all the momentum seemed to drain out of him.
That was an impressive thing to see.
“You’re back, then,” Luso said.
Gignomai shrugged. “Looks like it.”
Luso wasn’t scowling or frowning or trying to look scary. He was examining him with the keen attention Gignomai had seen Aurelio the smith give to the white-hot steel, listening for it to be ready to weld. “I think I’ll let Father deal with you,” he said. “Come on.”
Luso let him pass, then followed him up the stairs. “It’s all right,” Gignomai said. “I know the way.” No reply. After twenty years of trying to bait Luso, he should’ve known better than to try.
He stopped outside the double doors of the library. “Luso.”
“What?”
“There was a boar,” Gignomai said. “I spooked it and it went for me. You know it’s true, because it killed your dog. Right?”
Luso had a way of putting his head slightly on one side when he was interested. “So?”
“The boar was on to me. I ran. Next thing I knew, I’d blundered over the edge.”
“You fell all the way?”
“Yes.” Gignomai nodded vehemently. “Broken nose, cracked rib, a lot of scrapes and bruises, but that was all. I got away with it. Amazing, don’t you think?”
Luso nodded slowly. “Go on.”
“Some people from the town found me. They took me to Furio’s uncle’s place.” He hesitated. “They knew we used to be friends. Anyhow, they patched me up. I’d have come back earlier, but they said I wasn’t well enough.”
Luso studied him, as though he was a tangle of rope and he was looking for an end. “In you go,” he said, and reached past Gignomai to open the doors.
Father was at his desk, reading. He was wearing his eyeglasses. They were extraordinary things: two glass discs held together by a frame of gold wire. If you looked through them the letters on the page grew enormous. They were a great rarity even back Home. These days, Father had some trouble reading, but he only wore the eyeglasses when he absolutely had to. He looked up, over the rims of the glass discs.
Gignomai felt a firm pressure between his shoulders, and just managed not to trip over his feet as he was moved forward. He heard the doors close behind him.