by K. J. Parker
Not that it mattered. Did it? No, because it had always been there, the tendency, and Furio had always been aware of it, and it hadn’t mattered before. It only registered with him now because…
Why was Gig doing all this? Furio had assumed it was because he was bored. He’d been planning to leave the colony, go back Home under a false name, but there wouldn’t be a ship till spring, so he’d found something to do. Maybe—it was plausible. The scale of the thing didn’t signify. A met’Oc wouldn’t concern himself with the fact that he was turning the world upside down for his own amusement, and anything small and trivial wouldn’t be sufficiently entertaining. But there were problems with that hypothesis. The factory was a long-term project. If Gig still intended to get on the spring ship, he’d leave before the factory was in full swing and having its dramatic effect on the colony; he’d miss all the fun. Besides, he’d have wasted at least part of his share of the sword money (though there’d be so much money he’d hardly notice). But what other reason could there possibly be? All that stuff about revolution, independence, freedom without bloodshed. Well, big concepts and big dreams and changing the world for ever were all very met’Oc. In fact, he could just imagine them taking enormous delight in Home losing a profitable colony. Serve the government right for banishing a noble house to a distant, barbarous land. Not a primary motivation, perhaps, but distinctly plausible as a secondary one.
The light in the livery window went out, and Furio treated it as his own curfew. He went upstairs to bed and found he was too tired to sleep.
When he arrived at the factory site next morning, he was stunned to find that the road was finished. It had only been light for an hour or so.
“We started early,” Gignomai said cheerfully, leaning on his axe. Furio saw that both his hands were bound with cloth—blisters. “And we finally figured out how to drop a tree against the lean, so it doesn’t get hung up in the branches. All you do is…”
Furio didn’t pay attention to the explanation, which was complex and involved technical terms he didn’t recognise. When it was over, he said, “You seem pretty cheerful. All of you,” he added, looking round. “Yesterday I was convinced they’d all leg it during the night.”
“Ah.” Gignomai beamed at him. “I had an idea. Your fault, actually.”
“My—”
Gignomai nodded. “You scuttled away back to your nice clean sheets and left me with them,” he said. “No option under the circumstances but to make conversation. I ended up making them all partners.”
Furio tried to repeat the word, but it came out as a splutter.
“Junior partners, of course,” Gignomai reassured him. “Very junior. Each of them gets one per cent of the net profit. It’s all right,” he added, “it’s no big deal.”
“Really.”
“Really. If we do well, they get rich; if we don’t, they’re no worse off. They love the idea, naturally. They reckon that come Independence, they’re going to be the new merchant aristocracy. Well, you can see for yourself,” he added. Furio had to admit the point—a dozen big trees felled and cleared in a couple of hours suggested a degree of enthusiasm that hadn’t been evident the previous day. “And what’s eight per cent to you and me? Fleabites.”
Furio was counting in his head: eight per cent. But aloud he said, “Did they ask, or did you offer?”
“I offered,” Gignomai replied. “If they’d asked for it, I’d have told them to go to hell.”
“I see. And this was all my fault.”
As a road, it had its drawbacks. Quite soon, when the rain started to fall, it’d be too soft for carts; they’d get down the hill easily enough, but not back up again. (“But that’s fine,” Gignomai said. “Once we’ve got the lumber and the provisions down here we won’t need anything else before we’ve built a raft, and then we can fetch stuff in by river.”) Even so, it was something they’d set out to do and achieved, ahead of time and without quarrels or bloodshed. They spent the rest of the day levelling the ground for the main shed—hard, miserable work, but Gignomai personally set a ferocious pace, and the men felt obliged to keep up.
“It’s what Stheno does,” Gignomai explained. “Half the time you want to cut his throat just to make him slow down, but come the finish, when you realise how much you’ve got done in a day, you feel so good about it you don’t mind. And it’s how you feel at the end that matters.”
Furio wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, so he made an excuse and found something to do on the far side of the site. As he worked (thumping stones into the ground with a heavy wooden post; nature hadn’t equipped him for arduous manual labour) he ransacked his mind for the thing that was bothering him, something Gig had said earlier that hadn’t quite made sense.
Eight. Eight per cent.
Well, Lario, Senza and Turzo formerly employed at the sawmill; Ranio and the fat man whose name he hadn’t managed to learn yet, from Derio’s forge; Pollo and the boy (Areno or Arano) from the wheelwright’s shop. Seven. But Gignomai had distinctly said eight per cent.
He rested the log against his shoulder and looked at his hands. There were soft white bubbles, like the ghastly pale mushrooms that grow in marshy ground, at the base of three of his fingers. Nobody ever got blisters working at the store. He felt in his pocket for a handkerchief to wrap round them, but couldn’t find it. A few yards away, Pollo the wheelwright and the useless boy were on their knees in the deep wet leaf mould, carefully positioning a flat stone they’d fished out of the riverbed. I should feel guilty, he thought, I’m not pulling my weight, I can’t keep up, I shouldn’t be here. That made him think about the savages—dead, or not born yet, shouldn’t be there, either way, and therefore, by the exercise of logic, weren’t there. A reasonable explanation that made sense of the world, which just happened to be wrong.
That made him think about the met’Oc, who had no place here, and Gig, who had no place with them any more, no place anywhere else, so—eminently practical, supremely met’Oc confident—he was building a brand new place just for himself, in the gap between the colony and the savages. And why not?
He tried clenching his hands like claws as he gripped the post. It didn’t help.
When it was too dark to see what they were doing, Gignomai called a halt for the day. Someone got a fire going. Someone else drifted down to the river to fill a pot with water. Furio waited until Gignomai had finished talking to, encouraging, cracking a joke with each of the partners in turn (the junior partners, but the term had stuck in his mind now). Then he sat down beside him next to the fire and asked, “Gig, where’s Aurelio?”
Gignomai was trying to ease the boot off his left foot, but it was too sodden with sweat and damp to move. “What?”
“Aurelio. That’s his name, isn’t it? The blacksmith from your place. Didn’t I hear he’d run away and joined you?”
Gignomai was giving his boot his full attention. “You wouldn’t catch Aurelio running anywhere,” he said, “not with his trick knee.”
“Gig?”
“Joining us later,” Gignomai said. He made a last, desperate, heroic effort and the boot came free. “Wouldn’t be much use to us at this stage of the operation,” he went on. “And if he did his back in lugging tree trunks about, he wouldn’t be fit for the work only he can do.”
But there were two other smiths: Ranio and the fat man. “Right,” Furio said. “I just wondered.”
“You were doing the maths,” Gig said, with a grin.
“Yes.”
“He’ll earn his share,” Gig said. “You know, I think I’ll leave the other boot where it is, rather than kill myself trying to shift it. After all, I’ll only have to put it back on again in the morning.”
When he got back to the store, Furio went straight to the back store room. As usual, there was an open bottle of white brandy; today, a quarter full. He sloshed brandy over his blistered hands and winced sharply.
His aunt had left him some dinner (mutton stew in a bowl covered with
a dishcloth). He devoured it so quickly that later he couldn’t remember having eaten, then limped out to the porch. Teucer was there.
“Good day at work?” she asked.
He wasn’t in a Teucer mood. “Fine,” he said. “We’re making excellent progress. Gignomai’s turned the operation into a partnership.”
“Equal shares?”
“Not quite.”
She shrugged. “It’s a really stupid idea,” she said. “As soon as Home finds out, they’ll send a platoon of soldiers and shut you down. You’ll be lucky if you’re not arrested.”
Furio turned his head. There was a light in the upper window of the livery. “Unlikely,” he said. “For a start, they won’t have a chance to find out till the spring ship comes, by which time we’ll be up and running, and people will have started getting stuff from us—cheaper, better stuff than they get off the ships. Uncle Marzo will be raking in money from his end of the deal, and the farmers who’ll be buying the stuff won’t be in any hurry to squeal to the government. And if they do find out, we’re not on colony land. They won’t risk a war with the savages.”
“You quoted all that from memory,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
He felt a little surge of anger, partly with her, partly with himself (though “risk a war with the savages” was the only direct quote from Gignomai). “You lay off him,” he said. “He’s my friend.”
She yawned. “I think he’s getting bored with you.”
“Thank you for sharing your opinion with me.” He shivered, like a horse trying to dislodge a horse-fly. It didn’t get rid of her. “I expect you’re frozen, sitting out in the cold night air. You’d be better off indoors in the warm.”
“I’ve got my shawl,” she said equably.
He remembered how he’d felt the first time he saw her. Hard to believe, now that he knew her better, and a valuable warning against judging by first impressions.
“He’s up to something,” she said abruptly. “And he’s going to drag you into it, and you’ll be sorry.”
He made himself laugh. “Is that based on hard evidence, or your unique insight into human nature?”
“You don’t have to listen to me if you don’t want to. But you know I’m right.”
“You’re just miserable,” Furio snapped. Then inspiration prompted him to add, “You’re down on him because he doesn’t fancy you. Well?”
She shrugged. It was her best gesture, and he guessed she knew it. “What I think about it isn’t the issue. You’re angry because you know I’m right.”
The proper course of action would have been to go inside and leave her there. Instead, he said, “Up to what?”
“I don’t know. You should, you’re his friend. Think about it. Why would he have a secret scheme and not tell you about it?”
“He doesn’t have a secret scheme. Unless you count liberating the Colony.”
“That’s not a secret,” she replied imperturbably. “That’s just something he hasn’t told everybody about yet. Well, they’ll have to know, won’t they? You can’t have a revolution and not tell people.”
“You have a wonderful imagination,” Furio said. “You ought to try and find something useful to do with it.”
She gave him a sad, sweet smile, stood up and went into the house. In the distance, a fox barked. The light had gone out in the window of the livery.
* * *
The hardest week of his life, no question about that. He’d appropriated a pair of gentlemen’s kid gloves from a box of fancy goods Uncle Marzo had bought sight unseen from a ship’s captain and regretted ever since. They quickly wore into large holes, but they protected his hands from the worst of it. The partners noticed him wearing them, of course, but he never managed to find out what they said about him when his back was turned. He tried his very best to be useful and occasionally succeeded. Gignomai didn’t talk to him much, he was far too busy, issuing orders, setting the pace. The partners didn’t say things about him when his back was turned. Of course, Furio reflected, that’s one of the marks of your true nobility: leadership, leading by example, never asking the men to do something you can’t or wouldn’t do yourself.
“Where did you learn to saw a straight line?” he asked Gignomai, on one of the rare occasions when they talked.
“Here,” Gignomai replied. “Had to, no choice in the matter. I got Senza to show me once and made sure I took it all in. Actually it’s not hard, once you’ve got the hang of it.”
Furio couldn’t make a saw do what he wanted it to no matter how hard he tried. “I thought you had to be brought up in the trade from childhood,” he said. “That’s what people’ve told me.”
Gignomai grinned. “Well, they would,” he said. “They want you to pay them for doing a job you can do yourself.”
At some point Uncle Marzo lost his wonderful eyeglasses, the ones Gignomai had given him, the ones he’d stolen from his father. Uncle had the whole house and store turned upside down, but there was no sign of them. A homeless man who sometimes did odd jobs at the livery was suspected, since he’d come in the store at some point, but when he was looked for he couldn’t be found.
By the end of the week, the front and rear frames were in place. Furio hitched lifts to and from the site on lumber carts, which at least saved him the misery of the long walk. One of the carters was furiously angry with the three partners who’d deserted the sawmill. He yelled at them each time he set eyes on them and had a hammer thrown at his head for his trouble. Another carter wanted to run away and join the project, but Gignomai told him gently that they weren’t hiring right now. Empty flour and bean barrels went back on the carts at night. There seemed to be an awful lot of them, and Furio thought about Uncle Marzo’s dilemma. He’d heard people talking in the store about how much stuff was going out to the met’Oc boy’s wild venture, and how there was bound to be a shortfall—higher prices to start with, and most likely shortages to follow. Two or three men from the colony found their way out to the site and asked for work. Furio reckoned Gig was right to send them away; either they were known to be no good or hiring them would cause trouble with their families. Besides, as Gig pointed out, the work was coming along just fine. They didn’t need anybody else.
One night he waited for the livery window to light up, then walked silently down the street to the corner. He’d climbed into the livery many times when he was a boy, using the stunted sycamore tree as a handy leg-up and hauling himself up onto the roof by the guttering. Time had passed, of course. He weighed more and was rather less flexible. There were a couple of nasty moments, as branches groaned and slates came away in his hand. He made it, though, and decided he had two weeks of grinding manual labour to thank. He was certainly fitter and stronger than he used to be. It was just a shame that everything hurt all the time.
Once he was on the roof it was easy. The back eaves overhung the hayloft door; it was no trouble dropping down onto the loading platform, where men stood to fork up the hay, and of course the hayloft door wasn’t barred. He opened it as carefully as he could, but the faint creak of the hinges sounded like a scream in the quiet dark. He left the door slightly ajar, and crawled over the hay until he could look down onto the main area of the top floor.
The light came from a big brass lamp on a strong-looking table. Behind it stood a man. Furio could only see the top of his head, which was bald and garlanded with wisps of thin grey hair. The man was bending over a solid, heavy-duty bench vice, a rare and expensive item that Furio had last seen in Uncle’s back store, lying on a bed of straw and still in its grease from the foundry. Clamped in the jaws of the vice was a small metal thing, too small to make out but shining with the harsh white gleam of newly cut steel. The man was working on it with a round file, slowly, carefully, a few strokes then stop, examine, measure with calipers. There were at least a dozen files lying on the table, also a couple of small hammers, cold chisels, two frame-saws with thin blades like wire. There was something else, which Furio didn’t recognise
, about eighteen inches long, steel and wood, wrapped in cloth. From time to time the man took the metal thing out of the vice and compared it with something else, another small metal thing that lay beside the vice when he wasn’t using it. At one point he clamped that thing and the thing he’d been filing in the vice together, back to back, presumably so he could use one as a pattern for the other. The smell of cut steel was strong enough to make itself noticed over the hay.
The man took the thing he was working on out of the vice and held it up to the light. As he did so, something on his face sparkled, and Furio knew where Uncle’s eyeglasses had got to.
The next day he took Gignomai aside and asked him, “Why is Aurelio camping out in the livery?”
Gignomai looked at him. “What?”
“Your man Aurelio,” he said. “The blacksmith. What’s he up to in the livery?”
Gignomai was holding a hammer in one hand and a pine shingle in the other; he had a nail between his lips. He slid the hammer into his belt and spat the nail out into his hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Ah,” Furio replied. “Only someone’s been staying at the livery. He’s been there a few weeks now. And he’s got a workbench in there and a bunch of tools, and he’s doing some kind of fancy metalwork.”
“Is that right.” Gignomai frowned slightly. “Well, he’s nothing to do with me.” He located the shingle against the uprights and positioned the nail, jamming the shingle in place with his elbow. “What makes you think it’s Aurelio?”
“I just assumed,” Furio replied. “I wouldn’t know, I’ve never seen the man. Where is he, anyway?”