The Hammer

by K. J. Parker

  “He got sick,” Gignomai said. “So he’s out at the Lascio farm in the long valley. They’re some kind of off-relations.”

  Furio nodded and went back to work. In consideration of his skill and ability with a hammer and a nail, he’d been given the essential and uniquely responsible job of piling up shingles in stacks of twenty. That wasn’t right, he thought. Hadn’t Aurelio left the colony in a hurry as a young man, on account of some bother over a girl that left one man dead and another a cripple, and weren’t the victims supposed to be members of his own family? In which case, his relatives would doubtless be delighted to see him, but not the other way round. It was possible that time had healed the wound, but not likely. Good-quality grudges were treated like heirlooms in the colony, where the desire to draw blood was never far from the surface, but rarely found a solid enough pretext. When the news of Aurelio’s defection had broken, come to think of it, there had been a certain amount of excitement and speculation about his whereabouts. Rasso at the livery was, however, a good friend of Uncle Marzo and deeply in his debt.

  He’s up to something, she’d said, and he’s going to drag you into it.

  He dropped an armful of shingles and scowled at them. He asked himself if the warning had come from anybody else, would he be less reluctant to consider it? The answer had to be yes, which tormented him like an unreachable itch. On the other hand, Gignomai was his friend, had been ever since they were kids; he’d repeatedly broken out of the Tabletop just to visit him, which was no small matter. Besides, what secret could Gig possibly have that he wouldn’t want to share with his oldest, his only friend? Surely Gig knew that there was absolutely no chance he’d betray Aurelio to his family, not even by an inadvertent slip of the tongue. And in any case, why would Aurelio be hiding dangerously in town, rather than here at the site, where his relatives and other enemies wouldn’t dare come after him?

  I ought to ask him, he told himself. It was more of a rebuke than a decision. If he needed to ask, he couldn’t be sure of getting a straight answer, and more than anything else he dreaded creating a situation where Gig lied to him and he knew it was a lie. It would be one of those places you can’t get back from, and he didn’t want to think about the inevitable consequences.

  Velio Fasandro had been helmsman on a beef freighter until a falling spar crushed his back and rendered him more or less useless, at which point he was promoted to harbour master of the colony. Most days he sat on a barrel on the quay, watching seagulls. In the falling down wooden shack that constituted the harbour office and de facto seat of colonial government he had a slate, on which he scratched the names and due dates of incoming shipping with a nail, which lived in a hole bored in the door frame specifically for that purpose. He had no calendar or almanac, so the dates were somewhat detached from relevance, but so long as the sky was clear he could guess the time of the month more or less adequately by the phases of the moon. Besides, Marzo at the store always told him well in advance when a ship was due. Not that it mattered terribly much. He was always at his post, on his barrel, and when a ship came in, all he had to do was take official notice of it, scratch its name off his slate, and stay out of the way while it was unloading.

  On the day in question, therefore, when he saw what looked disturbingly like a mast on the horizon he assumed it was a product of his failing eyesight and looked the other way for an hour or so. When he looked back again, however, it was palpably a mast, with a ship under it, heading straight for the line of buoys that marked the only safe road into the harbour.

  He sat perfectly still, wondering what it could mean. In twenty-three years, he’d never known a ship to be blown off course or forced into the colony by bad weather. Only ships for the colony came close enough to be forced in there; there were no other destinations. Also, it didn’t look right. Colony ships were brigs or galliots, fat as pigs and painfully slow, or fly-boats, the great long cattle barges that looked like floating islands. This one—he broke the crust on his memory and fished out the word ketch—twin-masted, square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft on the main, stepped well aft, light, fast and nimble, a hundred tons burden, if that; as much chance of seeing something like that in colony waters as finding a duchess in a laundry. Unless, of course, it was a government boat. Velio Fasandro believed in the government in the same way some country people still believed in the Little Folk, and expected about as much good from them. Still, who else could it possibly be?

  He studied it carefully for a while. If it really was the government, someone should be told. Who, though? He thought about it, and came to the unpleasant conclusion: himself. He was, after all, the only public servant in the colony, paid (whenever anyone remembered) out of harbour dues, in theory entrusted with the full delegated powers of the central authority. In which case…

  Quickly, he put that thought out of his mind. If the government had come here, it wanted to talk to somebody important, which could only mean Marzo at the store, Rasso at the livery or Gimao the chandler. Marzo was closest. Velio stood up, took one more look at the ship (it was getting bigger every time he looked at it, like a monster in a nightmare) and hobbled up the quay as fast as he could go.

  “Can’t be the government,” Gimao the chandler protested, lengthening his stride to keep up. “They’ve forgotten about us. They don’t even know we’re still here.”

  Marzo didn’t bother to answer. The government didn’t feature anywhere in his personal bestiary of possible threats from the sea. The Company, on the other hand, was a horrible possibility at all times. He managed to sleep at night because he’d always told himself that the discrepancies and anomalies in the accounts he sent them as their duly appointed agent were too slight and trivial to justify the bother and expense of sending a ship, and the captains of the regular ships were his friends and all, in one way or another, in his power. But the possibility that the Company’s never blinking eye might some day rest on him and decide to make an example lived always with him, like an arrowhead buried in an old soldier’s chest, gradually creeping towards his heart. He glanced sideways at Rasso the liveryman, who winced and looked away.

  Velio had caught them up by the time the ship crossed the harbour mouth. They silently rearranged themselves so that Velio was at the front, and watched as a boat pulled away from the ship’s side. Six men in some kind of uniform were at the oars; there was a canopy at the back, so they couldn’t see who else was on board.

  We could kill them, Marzo thought, and row them out with rocks tied to their legs, and say they died of fever. But their friends on the ship would want to know more, it’d all go wrong and then we’d really be in trouble. Besides, what was to stop the Company sending another ship, and another one after that? He couldn’t really face the prospect of filling up the bay with murdered men. Quarantine? A sudden outbreak of plague, which meant they couldn’t possibly land? He reckoned he could pull it off, but the other three… He dismissed the idea and tried to stand up straight, as the boat pulled up to the steps. One of the oarsmen stood up and threw a rope, which nobody moved to catch. Then Rasso nudged Velio in the back, and Velio shuffled over to the rope and made it fast to an iron ring, half rusted through. The canopy curtains opened, and…

  Dead silence, as the two strangers made their way up the steps. They moved slowly and awkwardly, because of their ludicrously unsuitable footwear. The woman was wearing knee-length black boots with thumb-long heels. So, for that matter, was the man.

  “Hello,” the man said. “Could you possibly tell me who’s in charge here?”

  He was an extraordinary creature. For one thing, he was tall. The only human being any of them had seen whose head was that far off the ground was Luso met’Oc, and the resemblance didn’t end there. The only word, Marzo said later, was beautiful, though you couldn’t really say that about a man, could you? But he had long hair, like a girl (or Luso met’Oc) and long, delicate hands, which somehow didn’t seem out of place with his broad shoulders and heroic chest. He was dr
essed from head to foot in brown buckskin, cut in the most jaw-droppingly exotic style, with apparently meaningless brass studs all over in a pattern, and slashes in the sleeves so that the white shirt underneath poked through—that had to be deliberate, but why would you do it?—and more pockets than the average family had between them. The woman was dressed exactly the same—in trousers—and her hair was the same length and colour, and she really was beautiful by any relevant criteria. They were about the same age (Furio’s age, Marzo thought, but they might as well have been a different species); they could almost have been twins, except the woman came up to the man’s armpit.

  Marzo suddenly realised that nobody had answered the man’s question. “I’m Marzo Opello,” Marzo said (it sounded like a dreadful thing to have to own up to), “I run the—” No, wrong. He reconsidered quickly. “I’m the Company agent.”

  “Ah.” The man frowned slightly. You could see him weighing the matter up in his mind, and deciding to be magnanimous and to forgive. “Permission to come ashore.”

  A stupid little voice in the back of Marzo’s head insisted that he really ought to ask their names before he gave them permission, though of course it wasn’t his to give. He ignored it. At the same moment, it dawned on him that whoever these gorgeous creatures were, they weren’t the government or the Company. A tiny part of him couldn’t help wishing they were. Better the devil you know than the gods you don’t.

  At that point he had to move out of the way. The men from the boat were bringing up luggage—a trunk so huge that two of them could barely manage it, followed by another, followed by a third. The men disappeared, with the dogged, energetic air of men who have lots more heavy lifting still to do. Marzo dragged his eyes away from the trunk and said, “Of course, yes,” and stopped. If he carried on talking, he’d have to ask them who they were and what they wanted, and although he desperately wanted to know, he couldn’t bring himself to ask.

  The man was smiling at him. He had the sort of smile you vainly wish you could be worthy of. “Do you think you could point us in the direction of the inn?” he said.

  “There isn’t—” Gimao started to say, but Rasso trod on his foot. “You’re welcome to stay with us,” Rasso said. “As our guests.”

  Idiot, Marzo thought, but it was too late to say anything. Fortunately, the man smiled and said, “Oh, it’s not for us. We’ve got a tent.” He made it sound unbelievably exotic, like a tame gryphon. “But my men here will need billets.”

  “There isn’t an inn,” Marzo said, looking down at his feet. “But there are farmers who’ll put up men from the ships, if that’s all right.” He took a deep breath and said it; it felt like diving into a frozen pond. “What are you here for, exactly?”

  The man and the woman looked at each other. Then the woman said, “We’ve come to visit our cousins. Maybe you know them,” she added, “the met’Oc.”

  Her voice was like drowning in honey. “Oh yes,” Rasso said. “We know them. They live…” He hesitated; presumably he’d just looked down and noticed he’d walked off a cliff. “Up country a way.”

  “Ah.” The man smiled again. “Is it far?”

  Yes and no, Marzo wanted to say. “Not very far,” Gimao said. “About three hours’ walk.”

  The man frowned. The woman looked both distressed and disgusted. Intemperate use of the W word, Marzo guessed. “Rasso here can let you have horses,” he said quickly.

  Yet more luggage: hat-boxes, musical instrument cases, writing-slopes, a huge sack with poles sticking out of it (the famous tent, presumably), a double sword-case, boot-boxes. Very occasionally, Marzo saw tradesmen’s lists from home; one of the beef captains knew he liked realistic props in his dreams. The most recent one he’d seen had been five years old. He rapidly priced the growing barricade; nearly a hundred and fifty thalers just for the containers. The thought of what was inside them made his throat dry up. “Will you be staying long?” he asked, but neither of them seemed to have heard him.

  A small crowd was gathering: children, mostly, a few women, two or three old men with nothing to do. In an hour or so, Marzo thought, the whole town will know. He wasn’t sure why that worried him. He heard the man say, “Horses would be an excellent idea, definitely,” and realised that Rasso hadn’t moved. He trod on the back of his heel, which woke him up. He nodded twice, bowed awkwardly, walked three paces backwards, turned and fled.

  Now there was an awkward silence, the sort that sucks unguarded remarks out of you. Marzo heard himself say, “Actually, the youngest met’Oc boy is a guest in my house,” just as his rational mind resolved not to admit to any connection whatsoever. Too late. The woman looked interested and the man turned his head, smiled again and said, “Excellent. Perhaps we could meet him, and he could show us the way.”

  “Unfortunately he’s not at home right now,” Marzo said. “He’s…” Words failed him completely. The hole he’d dug himself was so deep, so sheer-sided that he could see no way of getting out of it other than feigning an epileptic seizure. Gimao (presumably trying to help) said, “He’s working out in the savages’ country,” before Marzo’s furious glare cut him short.

  The man and woman looked at each other. “How fascinating,” the man said. “Is that far?”

  “Oh yes.” Marzo snapped the words out like a man drawing a knife. “Several hours, and in the opposite direction.”

  “Never mind,” the woman said. “We’ll just have to call on him another day.” She glanced at the man, then added, “You’ve all been most kind but we really mustn’t hold you up any longer. Thank you so much.” It took Marzo a moment or so to translate that into go away, but as soon as the message went home he felt a surge of relief. Gimao didn’t seem to have figured it out for himself, so he grabbed him by the elbow and kept a firm grip as he started to back away, towing him like a horse pulling a barge. As he turned his back on them and started to walk away, he heard the man call out, “Thank you!”, but decided he was deaf and hadn’t heard it. He realised he’d left Velio behind, but it was too late to go back for him now. Besides, Velio had nowhere else to go, and he didn’t matter anyway. As they passed Velio’s shed, they met Rasso hurrying along leading two horses: the not-quite-dead-yet mare and the gelding Teucer called the Anatomy Lesson, because you could see most of its bones. Welcome to the new world, he thought, and bolted for home.

  “And then they rode off towards the Tabletop,” the old woman said, “like they were the king and queen off hunting.” She shook her head, sad and wise. “Just what we need,” she added. “More of them.”

  Furio had kept his head down during the narrative, which (stripped of commentary) had given him little more than he’d already gathered from his uncle. He detached himself discreetly from the group and set off for the factory site.

  When he got there, they were raising the roof-tree, and nobody could spare the attention to notice that he’d got there, or was late, or had important news. After a while he was yelled at to come and pull on a rope, which he did to the best of his limited ability. Apart from that, he played no part in the operation. At midday the job was done, and Gignomai allowed a rest and a small barrel of cider to celebrate. Furio saw his chance and darted over to him when he moved away to study the diagrams in his book.

  “Yes, I know,” he said, when Furio gave him the broad outline. “The carters told me, when they brought up the last lot of shingles. You didn’t happen to hear a name, did you?”

  Furio confessed he hadn’t. “Nobody asked,” he said.

  “Oh.” Gignomai shrugged. “Well, I expect Father’ll be pleased. I reckon they’re in for a shock, though. I don’t imagine our place is quite what they’ll have been expecting.”

  Furio waited for something, anything else, but apparently that was that. Gignomai was engrossed in his book. The diagram, pale brown lines on yellow vellum, nearly translucent, bore no resemblance to the skeleton of the shed that he could see, but Gignomai seemed happy enough with it. If he hadn’t been, everybody wit
hin earshot would have known about it. He looked tired, Furio thought, but somehow larger; as though he’d walked out of one picture into another, but with no reduction of scale. Furio had never seen Luso, let alone Stheno, but he could imagine them quite clearly by looking at Gig and splitting him into two parts, the one who heaved great big beams about and the one who gave orders.

  When he got home that evening, there had been no further sightings. As far as anybody knew, the strangers had ridden towards the Tabletop and the world had swallowed them up. Their luggage—the pile of trunks and boxes that had come ashore with the boat—had gone on a cart to the Heddo farm, where the six oarsmen had been billeted. According to the best intelligence, they’d taken over an empty barn and closed the door, and all that could be heard from outside was low voices, too soft to make out words. The ship was still bobbing in the harbour, where the keenest-sighted boys from the town were working shifts. So far they’d seen about a dozen men and the thin smoke from the galley fire. One boy claimed to have seen light flashing off a bronze tube on the rail of the castle. He was known to be imaginative, but a bronze tube could be a telescope (Marzo vouched for the existence of such things; he’d actually handled one, courtesy of a friendly captain) or a rail-gun—nobody quite knew what that meant; it was some kind of warlike jewellery or accoutrement worn by warships—and Rasso’s uncle said his father had seen one once, when a frigate called at the colony in the early days. They couldn’t quite make out whether Rasso’s uncle was referring to the gun or the ship, and it was too much trouble to press the point. In any event, telescopes and rail-guns were both unbelievably exotic items, and the thought that the strangers might own one made them seem even more magnificent and unreal.

  A week went by, a roof appeared on the shed, the cradle for the waterwheel was well under way, the town boys had stopped watching the ship and the strangers were, as far as anybody knew, still up at the Tabletop. Rasso was deeply concerned about his horses, on account of which no actual money had yet changed hands. The six oarsmen still hadn’t left the barn: food went in and a chamber pot was emptied out back twice a day, but otherwise they might as well not have been there. The colony stopped holding its breath, and some people began to wonder if the strangers had been real, or just a dream shared by a small number of otherwise rational people.