The Hammer

by K. J. Parker

  “I know.” She stood up. “He’s hung it on the wall, in the back store room. He keeps looking up at it when he’s working, like it’s trying to read over his shoulder. I’d better go in now,” she said. “Your aunt wants me to cut up cabbages for pickling. Shall I tell her you’re back?”

  “Might as well,” Furio said. “I think I might stay out here for a while.”

  She smiled. “If you go in, she’ll have you shifting barrels.”

  “I’m definitely staying here, then.”

  He sat there for a long time, until it was starting to get dark, and Uncle Marzo came walking up the street. Furio explained that he’d come home. Uncle Marzo looked pleased, and didn’t ask why. “You might be interested to know,” he said, kicking his boots off in the porch, “those two strangers rode past me as I was coming home. I’d guess they’re on their way to the factory.”

  Furio shrugged. “They’ll be company for Gig,” he said. “His own kind. He’ll like that.”

  “Your brother Lusomai,” Cousin Boulomai said, “is impossible. He refuses to do anything. To begin with, he fobbed me off with excuses about bad timing. Then he promised he’d negotiate with the town mayor.”

  Gignomai grinned. “Marzo Opello isn’t a mayor. He isn’t anything. He runs a shop.”

  “Well, there you are. Lusomai tried to make me believe he had some sort of actual authority. And then, after keeping us both hanging about all this time, he comes straight out with it and says he’s done a deal and the matter is closed. Well, I’m not going to stand for it. I have the men to consider.”

  Gignomai looked over his shoulder. They were boarding in the sides of the hammer shed. “I have to say,” he said, “your men don’t seem unduly bothered about it. I asked them. These things happen, was the general consensus. And the man who did it hung himself, so it’s over and done with.”

  “Not as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I can understand why you feel so strongly about it,” Gignomai said, lifting the bottle. Boulomai shook his head, and Gignomai put it down again. “It’s a pretty fundamental question of honour, and if this was Home, I can see, you’d have to take steps. But this isn’t Home, it’s a charter colony precisely one notch up from subsistence agriculture in the middle of nowhere. We simply can’t afford to have blood feuds and private wars. If we did, there wouldn’t be enough manpower left to do the work and feed everybody. Luso’s just being practical.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Boulomai replied. Gignomai made a mental note, he was one of those people who gets quieter the angrier he gets. Sign of a serious man, in most cases. “He doesn’t mind disturbing the peace when he fancies a bit of excitement, but when something significant happens, he’s as quiet as a mouse.”

  Gignomai smiled. “You got the keeping the peace speech, then.”

  “Several versions of it,” Boulomai said, “all amounting to the same thing, and I have to say, I wasn’t terribly impressed. I happen to think there are times when the peace isn’t worth keeping, not when there’s something like this at stake. Four of my men have been murdered. I want justice.”

  Gignomai was looking over his cousin’s shoulder, trying not to be too obvious about it. He would have liked to have been there when the final board was nailed in place, but instead he was here, trying to handle this other matter. “What did you have in mind?” he said.

  Cousin Boulomai scowled. “It’s awkward, I know, because of the confounded man hanging himself. Otherwise it’d be straightforward. Back Home—”

  “At the risk of repeating myself, we aren’t Home. What did you have in mind? Money? I’m afraid there isn’t enough of it in the colony to pay compensation at Home rates.”

  Boulomai shrugged. “In that case, it’ll have to be something rather more basic. And it’s not just the murder,” he went on. “There’s the way they were treated. Those people just stopped feeding them. If they hadn’t taken matters into their own hands, they’d have starved. You can’t expect to treat people like that and get away with it.”

  “Fair point,” Gignomai said. “And the people who did that are still alive, of course. But you have to admit, no actual harm came of it.”

  “That’s entirely beside the point,” Boulomai said, and Gignomai got the impression he was rapidly running out of patience; not a commodity he was well provided with at the best of times. “The point is, your brother’s basically told me to shut up and get lost. So I’ve come to you.”

  “Me?” Gignomai shook his head. “I’d love to be able to help, but I’m afraid I have no influence whatsoever with Luso or any of them. Quite the reverse.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Boulomai said. “I’m turning to you as a man of power and influence in this community. Your family up on the hill won’t help me. I believe you should.”

  Gignomai was silent for a very long time. Then he said, “Power and influence. No, I don’t think so. Sorry, but that’s just not the way it is.”

  “You’re being modest,” Boulomai said. “You’re a met’Oc, every bit as much as your brother. And you command rather more men. In my book, that’s power and influence.”

  Gignomai poured himself a drink but didn’t drink it. “I was under the impression they were your men,” he said. “Most of them, anyway. The rest of them aren’t fighters. You can take my word for that. Talking of which, if it comes down to manpower, you’re the one with the most boots on the ground. If you’re dead set on making something of this, you really don’t need me.”

  Cousin Boulomai keeping his temper was an impressive sight: rather like a volcano, Gignomai speculated, the day before an eruption. “This isn’t my country,” he said. “If I started throwing my weight around, I’d have the colonists and your brother on to me, sure as eggs. In fact, I’d venture to suggest it’d be about the only thing guaranteed to bring them together with a common purpose. You, on the other hand…”

  “I’m sorry.” Gignomai stood up. “I sympathise, really, but I live here, I can’t go starting wars, not if I want to sell these people cheap farm tools. I’m not pretending to justify my behaviour, I’m simply explaining why I can’t help you. I’m sorry. Get Luso to do something, do it yourself or let the matter drop. Leave me out of it.”

  Boulomai rose gracefully to his feet. He looked as though he’d practised in front of a mirror. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said. “I thought we had certain values in common. I apologise if my misapprehension’s caused you any embarrassment.”

  They stood a shoulder’s width apart. Gignomai said, “Does this mean you want your men back?”

  “I don’t know,” Boulomai replied. “I don’t think things can go on as they are. But I’ll have to think it over. I’ll let you know what I decide.”

  He walked away, back to the tree under which his sister was sitting, demurely reading a book. They exchanged a few words, then mounted their horses and rode away. Boulomai hadn’t said where they were going next.

  Two days later, a boy galloped up to the store on a black pony. He scrambled through the door. Furio was behind the counter, laying out bolts of cloth. He recognised the boy as the youngest Heddo.

  “Got a message for Marzo Opello,” the boy said.

  “He’s in the back,” Furio replied. “Stay there. I’ll ask if he can spare you a moment. Is it important?”

  “Tell him he’s got to come out to our place, right now,” the boy said.

  Much to Furio’s surprise, Uncle Marzo didn’t argue. He asked the boy what it was all about, but got no answer. He’d been told not to say anything, just bring the mayor.

  “That must be you,” Furio said.

  Marzo nodded unhappily. “I guess so,” he said.

  They got out the light cart, which Furio’s father had acquired in a moment of folly under the impression it was a chaise. They had to drive rather faster than they’d have liked to keep up with the boy and his pony. “Any idea what this is all about?” Furio asked, shouting to make himself heard.
/>   “No,” Uncle Marzo replied. “But if it’s the Heddos, you can bet it’s trouble.”

  The boy took them straight to the door—the front door, which nobody ever used. There was a hole in it, about five feet off the ground, roughly the width of a man’s thumb. Both of them noticed it, but neither of them said anything.

  “Bullet hole,” Desio Heddo said. “That’s what it is. Look.” He opened his enormous hand and showed them a grey disc, about an inch across, tapered, like a lens. “Dug it out of the wall opposite the door. Here’s the mark, see.”

  The hole looked like the mark you’d make if you’d dug a pickaxe into the plaster. Marzo took the grey disc and scratched it with his thumbnail. Soft. Lead.

  “Middle of the night,” Heddo said. “Me and the wife upstairs, fast asleep. Just as well. If we’d been in the parlour here, we could’ve been killed. See? Right above the settle, where I always sit. He knew that. Tried to kill me.”

  Marzo frowned. “You’re saying whoever did this knew you always sit on the settle there.”

  “Looks like it,” Heddo said angrily.

  “So he must know you quite well, then.”

  “Must do.”

  “In that case, he’d know when you go to bed.” Marzo leaned forward and poked his little finger into the hole in the wall. “That’s a hell of a punch those things must have,” he said. “Clean through a solid oak door and enough wallop left to dig a half-inch hole.”

  “Makes me go cold all over just thinking about it,” said Heddo, who didn’t look cold at all. Quite the reverse. “I reckon he must’ve come spying through the window, seen where we sit. Then he comes back at night and tries to kill me. At night, see, so nobody’ll spot him.”

  “If you’re right,” Furio said thoughtfully, “the man who did this would have to be quite a good shot. Wouldn’t he?”

  Heddo shrugged. “Guess so, I don’t know anything about that stuff. But everybody knows Luso met’Oc’s handy with a gun.”

  Marzo winced. “You think it was him.”

  “Well, who the hell else would it be? Who else has got one, for a start?”

  “Me, actually,” Marzo said.

  Heddo stared at him, then seemed to dismiss the revelation from his mind. “What I want to know is,” he said, “what’re you going to do about it.”

  Furio and his uncle drove home in silence. When they reached the edge of town, Marzo said, “I’m going to have to put a stop to this mayor thing. It’s getting on my nerves.”

  “It’s a sign of respect,” Furio said.

  “Like hell.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Me? Nothing.”

  “But you said…”

  Marzo pulled up outside the store, climbed down and unhitched the horses. “Put ’em away for me, would you?” he said. “I need a drink.”

  He went indoors, into the back store room, and opened a drawer of his desk. From it he took the cloth bag full of lead balls that Gignomai had given him. He laid one ball on the desk, with the lead disc from Desio Heddo’s wall next to it. Then from another drawer he took a rosewood box, a treasured thing, which had belonged to Furio’s father. From the box he took a pair of fine brass scales. He laid them flat, put the ball from the bag in one pan and the disc in the other, and lifted them by their fine brass chain. They swung wildly, as scales do; then they settled down. There was a needle at the fulcrum, pointing to a scale calibrated in grains. There was a five-grain difference, that was all. He laid them down again and held the grey disc close to his eye. Punched through an oak door into a wall, five grains’ worth of lead could easily have been shaved off. The edges of the disc were thin, like foil, and ragged. He took another ball from the bag and weighed it against the first one. Difference—two grains. So five grains, in context, was nothing.

  He frowned, then crossed the room and looked carefully at the snapping-hen, hanging on wires from two nails. There was dust on the barrel and the stock. He lowered his head a little and sniffed the muzzle, but he couldn’t smell anything. Someone had told him once that burning gunpowder had a sort of rotten-egg smell. Not this one, then.

  He sat down and poured himself that drink. The met’Oc used to own a pair of snapping-hen pistols. Lusomai met’Oc lost one of them, which came into the hands of Calo Brotti, who sold it to Gignomai met’Oc, who gave it to Marzo Opello, who stuck it up on the wall. That left another one, presumably still in the hands of Lusomai met’Oc.

  Marzo’s hand shook a little as he drank. What he didn’t know about snapping-hen pistols would fill a large book. For one thing, did all snapping-hens have the same diameter barrel, allowing the use of the same size ball? It’s in the nature of lead spheres that if two of them weigh the same, they must be the same diameter, meaning they’d fit down the same-size barrel. He remembered the book of fancy antiques and their values. He dived to the shelf, pulled it down and flicked through the pages.

  A gentleman’s matchlock fowling piece, thirty-six inch barrel, burr walnut stock with silver inlay, lock by Raiddo, bore twelve to the pound.

  He had no idea what that meant, so he looked it up in the glossary at the back: twelve lead balls of the right size to fit the barrel would weigh a pound. That in itself implied that not all barrels were the same diameter. Of course, the gun in the book was for shooting birds. There weren’t any snapping-hens listed.

  He closed it and put it back. How many of these things in the colony? One, this one. One belonging to Luso. One, at least, belonging to the stranger Boulomai. Unless all snapping-hens had a standard bore size, which on balance he was inclined to doubt, the bullet Heddo had prised out of his wall must have been fired from Luso’s gun.

  He poured himself another drink. The stuff didn’t seem to work quite as well as it used to. If Luso, the self-styled keeper of the peace, had shot a bullet into Heddo’s door…

  That needed thinking about. He poured a third drink but let it sit quietly on his desk. Boulomai and his sister had been up at the Tabletop, that was an established fact. Boulomai was the employer of the murdered oarsmen, but Luso had given Marzo his word that he’d sorted all that out. If the ball had come from Boulomai’s gun, then the likely explanation was that Luso had overestimated his diplomatic abilities and Boulomai had decided to take matters into his own hands. But that didn’t seem to fit. Marzo had only met them once, of course, but the two semi-divine beings he’d encountered at the dock had struck him as the sort of people who believe that a thing worth doing should be done properly—as witness the carefully tailored adventurers’ outfits, the fully manned ship, the huge pile of luggage. If Boulomai was good and angry enough to go to war over a matter of honour, would he restrict himself to making a hole in a door at a time when it was fairly certain that nobody would be hurt? Marzo considered the question as the third drink slid down, and thought, Probably not. More likely, he’d have had his men nail the door shut, then set fire to the thatch.

  If the ball had come from Luso’s gun, however, the sequence of events made rather more sense. A shot into a door in the middle of the night is a gesture. Luso, whose idea of keeping the peace was rounding up all the bad men in the colony and occasionally turning them loose to steal cattle, was rather more likely to deal in gestures, if that was what it took to get a whining cousin off his back. And a gesture with no harm done was a perfectly acceptable thing, if it kept the peace.

  Peace, Marzo reflected, as essential as air, food and water, because how could you possibly live any sort of a life without it? Presumably Boulomai met’Ousa thought the same way. He had to keep the peace among his ship’s crew, whose colleagues and friends had been murdered. Being a stranger, and a guest of the met’Oc, naturally he would apply to them for justice. Lusomai met’Oc had therefore struck a deal with the town, to keep the peace, but he’d misjudged the business. So, to keep the peace, he’d made an empty show of violence, using the snapping-hen, an instrument ideally suited to the purpose. Result: honour satisfied, justice done, and ever
ybody who’d been alive this time yesterday was still alive, and Heddo had a conversation piece in his door which he’d undoubtedly show off proudly to everybody in the district.

  Marzo looked guiltily at the bottle and left it where it was. What are you going to do about it? he asked himself. I’m going to be practical, Marzo replied, I’m a practical man. And the next one who calls me mayor goes home in a wheelbarrow.

  Desio Heddo told his neighbours that he’d reported the attempt on his life to mayor Opello, and had been promised justice. Any day now, he said, the mayor would be raising a posse, with a view to going up there and teaching those bastards a lesson. When one of the Adesco brothers, who’d never liked the Heddos anyway, pointed out that it was Desio’s son Scarpedino who’d done the murder that caused all the trouble, Desio hit him in the mouth with the handle of a hay-fork, knocking out two teeth. The next day, a large section of the Heddos’ northern fence was broken down, allowing fifteen of Desio’s eighteen-month bullocks to stray into the Sagrennas’ water meadow. The Sagrennas, citing damage and unauthorised grazing, refused to let Desio have them back unless he gave them four loads of hay by way of indemnity. Desio refused angrily, claiming that the Adescos had smashed down the fence to get their own back for the two teeth. All three families were inches away from bloodshed when someone had a bright idea. Let’s all go into town, he suggested, and let the mayor sort it out.

  In the morning, they ran the drop-hammer for the first time. It worked perfectly for about an hour, then broke a shaft. Gignomai declared that this was much better than he’d anticipated, and supervised the stripping of the gear train. It was a simple fracture, the result of a cold spot in a weld. It would take most of the afternoon to fix.

  In the afternoon, Cousin Pasi came to see him. She appeared through the trees on a white palfrey, led by a single groom. She wore a dark green hooded robe. It was like something out of a fairy tale, which was presumably the desired effect. The groom was Scarpedino Heddo.

  Gignomai was up to his elbows in black grease, aligning the bearings on the overhead shaft. “Leave it,” he said, “I won’t be long.” He wiped his hands on his shirt, and went down to meet her. She’d brought a tiny lightweight folding table, two cushions, a bottle of imported wine and two glasses.