by K. J. Parker
One day, when he’d had enough of carrying fifteen-foot planks from one side of the site to the other (he didn’t know what they were for, or why they couldn’t have been offloaded in the right place to begin with) he looked round to make sure nobody was watching, then walked quickly away into the woods. If anyone had seen him, they’d assume he was going for a piss, but it was hardly likely anybody would spare him even that much thought.
He followed a deer track for a while until he came to a hollow, rising steeply on the far side. He could still hear the incessant chime of hammers and a few faint, irritated voices, but at least his ears weren’t ringing. He climbed to the top of the rise, sat down on a fallen tree trunk and simply enjoyed being there, for quite a long time.
The crack of a twig in the hollow below brought him back. He looked down and saw Gig, walking purposefully, carrying a rag bundle. He’d already opened his mouth when he decided not to say anything. He wouldn’t hide or anything stupid like that, but he wouldn’t announce his presence, either. Not, at least, until he’d seen what Gig had with him so carefully wrapped up.
He knew what it was as soon as it came out of the cloth, though he’d never actually seen one before, but he’d heard Gig talk about them and other people had described them. It was about eighteen inches long; a wooden curve with an iron pipe let into it, and an iron plate mounted on one side. On the plate—he wasn’t quite close enough to see clearly—some iron thing like a bird’s head and neck, rearing up over some other iron thing like a flattened thumb. A bird’s head—hence the name, the snapping-hen. Gig had said it was called that because when the hammer flew forward and struck the flint against the steel, it looked like a chicken suddenly stooping to peck. He’d imagined it all wrong, of course, but now he could actually see one he could appreciate the similarity.
Gig pulled something from his pocket. It was the pointy end of a cow’s horn, with a wooden stopper in the tip. This stopper pulled out, apparently, and as you withdrew it, you tilted the horn back, as though you were trying not to spill something inside it. In fact, the stopper was also a measure. He watched Gig pour a sort of black sand out of it into the open end of the iron pipe. Then he hesitated, not knowing what to do. Furio grinned. If Gig put the snapping-hen down so he could put the stopper back in the horn, the black sand would spill out of the pipe, likewise if he put down the horn. What he needed, obviously, was a third hand. He eventually solved the problem by gripping the stopper in his teeth and sticking it back in the horn that way. Then he dropped the horn on the ground and fished around in his other pocket until he found something else: a small round nut, or stone, except it was silver-shiny. Then he froze again, confronted by some new difficulty. Then he popped the silver ball in his mouth while he went back once more to his pockets and dug out an inch-square scrap of linen rag. This he stretched over the open end of the tube, like the cloth you put over a jar of jam. He leaned forward until his nose was practically touching the tube, and gently spat the silver ball on top of the cloth stretched over the open hole. Next he pressed the ball with his thumb until he’d sunk it into the tube mouth.
(I’ll bet Luso doesn’t do it this way, Furio thought, or if he does, we’ve clearly overestimated the threat he poses.)
Next Gig looked round for a bit of stick. It had to be the right size. After quite a while he eventually found one, and used it to shove the ball further down the tube. He seemed quite concerned about this stage of the operation. Furio guessed it had to go all the way down to the bottom, or something bad would happen. Then the cow horn came out again. Gig pulled back on the bird’s head until it clicked, then pushed the flattened-thumb away from him. It hinged forward. Under it was a hollow, like the bowl of a very small spoon. He unstoppered the horn, half filled the spoon with black sand and pulled the flattened thumb back to where it had originally been. There was a repeat performance of putting in the stopper; the horn back in the pocket; then…
Gig stood quite still, holding the snapping-hen, not apparently doing anything. It wasn’t fear exactly, though if he’d been in Gig’s shoes, Furio would’ve been petrified, because all manner of bad stuff happened, apparently, if you made a mistake getting the snapping-hen ready. Not fear; as far as he could tell, it was a kind of unwillingness—the dog that doesn’t come back when it’s called, the horse that won’t come to the halter, the child who won’t come in to dinner. Gig looked for all the world like someone who was about to do something he didn’t want to, but had to, but didn’t want to. It crossed Furio’s mind that a friend, if Gig had one, would probably go down there and talk to him to see if he could help. Of course, he stayed where he was.
Then Gig pulled the bird’s head back a little further, and there was another click. He looked round—something to shoot at, presumably—then raised the snapping-hen at arm’s length, as though he was trying to get it as far away from himself as it would go. When his arm was straight, he stood quite still.
There was a click, as the bird’s head pecked, and a hissing noise. A little round ball of white smoke lifted off the side, followed by a rushing boom, like thunder in a small room. Furio saw Gig’s hand lift, like a smith swinging a hammer. There was white smoke everywhere, a whole cloudful. And that, apparently, was that.
He saw Gig slowly lower his arm, look carefully at the snapping-hen, then stoop and lay it down on the ground. He walked over to the place he’d been pointing at, but Furio couldn’t see what he leant forward to examine. He watched him look for quite some time, but he didn’t seem to have found anything.
Many and various were the outcomes he’d contemplated, but this hadn’t been one of them—not a clean miss, at five yards. Clearly it was harder than it looked.
He knelt down and prodded the leaf mould with his finger. It’d have had to make a hole, a big, deep one, and if he could find the hole, at least he’d know by what margin he’d failed to connect. Even so—a stump the size of a man’s head, at five yards, and he’d missed it. Terrific.
Still, it worked, and that was the main thing. The fact that a bow and arrow would get the job done in a quarter of the time (and you might even hit something) and with infinitely less fuss was neither here nor there. He was conscious of having taken another step on a long road. It was a cold feeling, but there was a degree of intellectual satisfaction, such as a scientist might feel at the conclusion of a successful experiment. Not what he’d been expecting, but never mind.
He took a moment to listen. He could hear the hammers, the saws, voices. It wasn’t the same as being there, where he was part of it or it was part of him. It occurred to him that he could simply walk away, choose a direction and keep walking until he came to a place where he felt like stopping, and be rid of it all, now, before it closed in on him and swept him away. The urge to do just that was so strong that he could barely keep his feet, but then he thought, No, don’t be ridiculous, this is what you want. You started it. Besides, it’s all gone too far now.
There was something heavy in his hand. He looked, and saw the snapping-hen, which he’d completely forgotten about. All that, and he couldn’t even hit a tree stump. Hardly what you’d have a right to expect from the harbinger of the end of the world.
He picked up the oily rag and wrapped it up carefully, making sure that the hammer and frizzen were properly concealed now that there were men on the site who might well recognise a snapping-hen if they saw one. Really there was only one direction, back the way he’d just come to rejoin the main road. Or maybe not; there was one faint possibility…
“I’ll be gone for a few days,” he told the foreman (Dacio, the ship’s midshipman; a good, solid man who never thought unless he had to). “Keep them going on the hammer, that’s top priority, and if there’s time, get them started on the belts for the overhead shafts. And check all the incoming consignments against the materials book. I’m starting to have my doubts about Marzo Opello.”
Dacio didn’t actually salute, but the effect was the same. He’d been in the navy before he s
igned up with the met’Ousa, and although that had been several years ago, he was taking a long time to recover. “Leave it to me,” he said confidently. I might just do that, Gignomai thought, but you wouldn’t like it if I did.
He nearly managed to forget to take the snapping-hen, but at the last moment he noticed it, when he was rummaging in his trunk for his spare boots. He looked at it for a while, then stuffed it into his knapsack. It was too long to go in sideways, and he had to leave the barrel end sticking out of the top. He packed the powder flask as well, and the patches, and the spare flints, and the bag of balls; like going away on a visit with your wife, who insists on taking every damn thing with her.
He left just before first light, not that that meant anything any more. The night shift still had some time to go. They were fitting the bearings for the overhead shaft, which meant a lot of men standing still holding lanterns while the fitters checked tolerances with the gauges that had been so much trouble to make. It was a good time to leave, while they were busy. He felt painfully guilty, like an absconding husband.
By the time the sun was up he was clear of the woods, following the course of the river. It seemed a logical thing to do, because a large body of people with grazing animals wouldn’t go far from water, would they, and as far as he knew there weren’t any lakes or big ponds. Sloppy logic, of course. He didn’t actually have the faintest idea where they’d gone, in which direction, at what speed. He was walking out into the wide empty world with a heavy pack and food for three days, on the offchance of bumping into them.
He followed the river for two days, then stopped. He’d started out with romantic notions of living off the land—shooting a deer with the snapping-hen, maybe—and cramming his mouth with the legendary nuts and berries with which the wilderness is supposed to abound. So far he’d seen one bush laden with unidentified glossy black berries which were almost certainly poisonous, and one hare, about a quarter of a mile away, which ran off when he moved. He had enough food to get him back to the site, or he could keep going and trust to luck. Also, his feet hurt.
He turned back, walked for half a day and found them. Either he hadn’t noticed them on his way out, which was hardly likely, or they’d come in across country, making for the river, after he’d gone on. That was also fairly unlikely. The sheer size of the spread they made—two thousand sheep, a thousand goats, ambling along as they grazed—meant they were very hard to overlook, and the outlying edges of the spread were several hours ahead of the main body. It would be like an entire country sneaking past you in the dark.
Of course, he thought as he walked towards the camp, they may not be the same lot. Could be a completely different tribe or sect or whatever, and I can’t speak the language.
But he kept walking, and when he was about half a mile from the camp, scattering the more adventurous goats, two men suddenly stood up out of the grass in front of him. They wore the same strange long coats as the ones he’d met before, and stared at him in roughly the same way. He smiled at them and kept going.
The language problem meant he couldn’t just find someone and ask, “Excuse me, which way to the lunatic’s tent?” which robbed him of any semblance of the initiative, so he was mightily relieved when a man and a woman approached him, stopped, looked at him, turned round and walked back the way they’d just come. He followed them right into the middle of the camp. They didn’t look round once.
There were plenty of women, not many men. They were uniformly tall and thin, with high cheekbones, long faces, long necks, broad bony shoulders standing out through the thick rough cloth of their practically identical coats. They looked at him, didn’t move, studied him as though he was a puzzle, for the solving of which no valuable prize was offered. His guides walked past them without a word and weren’t acknowledged, as if non-existence was contagious and they’d caught it from him. His nerve was just about to give way when a face appeared in the fold of a tent curtain—a huge grin with a pair of wide eyes balanced on top.
“My dear fellow!” the old man yelled. “Yes, over here. Quickly!”
Gignomai wasn’t sure he liked the “quickly.” He darted across, and a huge hand on a thin wrist shot out, grabbed him round the knuckles and dragged him into the tent. The hand was warm and soft, like a woman’s, and compellingly strong.
“Sit down, please,” the old man said, as he yanked the curtain back in place. “You shouldn’t…” he hesitated, then went on, “I am most awfully pleased to see you again, but really, you oughtn’t be here, you know.” He was still standing. He peeled the curtain delicately aside, glimpsed through, and turned it back. “Sit down, sit down,” he said. “Please, do make yourself at home.”
There was only one stool. Gignomai sat on the floor, which was covered by a thick, dusty carpet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If it’s going to make trouble for you.”
The old man shook his head so fiercely that Gignomai was afraid he’d hurt his neck. “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that,” he said. (Gignomai thought. About something, but not that?) “As a lunatic, I’m privileged and therefore immune to censure. You…”
“Am I in danger?” Gignomai asked.
“What? Oh, no, of course not. They wouldn’t dream of harming you; they don’t believe you exist. Now then, what can I offer you? Tea? My granddaughter has just brewed me a fresh pot. Or would you prefer milk?”
“Tea,” Gignomai said, and the old man, active as a locust, dodged past him and came back a moment later with two tiny, exquisite translucent white bowls. Gignomai mimed sipping, then put his bowl carefully on the ground beside him.
“Now then,” the old man said, perching on the stool like a big bird on a wire. “How may I be of service?”
Now that he was here, after the gentle melodrama of his arrival, the request sounded absurd. But it was the question he’d come to ask. “I’d like to ask a favour, if I may.”
“Of course. Anything within my power.”
“Do you think I could come and live with you, here, till the spring?”
The old man’s eyes opened very wide indeed. He opened his mouth and closed it again three times before he spoke. “Naturally I would like nothing better,” he said. “Merely to sit and talk, in a decent language, with a cultured man, about books and pictures and normal civilised things, is the most wonderful thing I could possibly imagine.”
“But,” Gignomai said.
The old man nodded sadly. “We understand each other so well,” he said. “But it’s impossible. My family, my neighbours…”
“Wouldn’t allow it.”
The old man looked solemnly at him. “There would be no violence, you understand,” he said. “For the reasons stated. No, I imagine what would happen would be that the rest of them would break camp very quietly in the night and go away, and keep going faster than we could follow. I can walk quite briskly even now, but not fast enough to keep pace with the carts. They would keep going until they were quite sure we were no longer following. This is a very big country, and one place is very much like another. I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I wish it were otherwise.”
Gignomai smiled at him. “My fault for asking,” he said. “Might I ask why? As far as I know, there’s no history of bad feeling between our people and yours.”
“Perfectly true,” the old man said. “Apart from my own abduction—which I most certainly don’t regret—there has been no bad feeling, because there has been no contact whatsoever. But please, answer me this. Why on earth would you wish to leave the company of civilised men and seek to live among savages?” He hesitated as the implications of the question struck him. An appalled look crossed his face, and he added, “Please, if the question is indiscreet…”
Gignomai laughed. “I haven’t murdered anybody, or done anything like that,” he said. “But things are happening here, and I’m not sure I want to be involved.”
“Even though you set them in motion?”
Gignomai blinked. “How do you know?”
/> The old man smiled gently. “My dear fellow,” he said. “More than anything else, I have time to think. I have thought about little else since you first came. You wanted to build a factory on our land; you asked permission. I know from my time in the old country that factories are forbidden in charter colonies because of the monopoly. A man seeking to build an illegal factory, taking care to do so outside the jurisdiction, whatever his motives may be, is bound to cause a great deal of trouble, sooner or later. My guess is that your project nears completion, the prospect of the concomitant trouble oppresses you, and naturally enough you are contemplating flight, escape from your own creation. The fact that you have actually come here, rather than merely imagining yourself doing so, suggests to me that whatever you have in mind is rather more momentous than a mere violation of commercial and civil law.” He shook his head, a wide sweeping gesture that brought his jaw to his shoulder. “I do wish I could help. But probably it’s for the best that I can’t. This great and noble work you have undertaken—”
“It’s not like that,” Gignomai said quietly. “It’s more sort of personal. An indulgence, really.”
The old man looked at him, head slightly on one side. “But for the good of the people, surely.”
“I want justice,” Gignomai said sharply. It wasn’t what he’d been planning to say. “Doesn’t always do anybody any good,” he said. “But it’s what I want.”
“Are you sure of that?” The old man was peering at him, as if trying to see through a keyhole. “Just now you wanted to run away. You wanted to come and live with the savages.”
Gignomai laughed abruptly. “That’d be justice for me,” he said. “I suppose I was being selfish. Tell me,” he went on, shaking himself, like a man coming in from the rain, “what exactly do your people believe about there being different worlds? It sounds good, but when I try and think about it, I can’t quite get a grip on it. How does it work?”