The Hammer

by K. J. Parker

  Furio grinned weakly. “Serves you right for standing for high public office.”

  “What we should really do is have proper elections,” Teucer said. “Have a proper mayor, with clearly defined powers and responsibilities. It’s times like these when you realise how important these things can be.”

  “What bites me,” Marzo said, after they’d both ignored her for an appropriate length of time, “is how Luso went banging on about being practical and keeping the peace. And the next thing is, he’s running around the place making trouble. Really, I thought he meant all that stuff he said. I mean, I’m not saying I liked the man—he’s arrogant and vicious and he makes you feel like a chess piece. But I thought that when he said what matters is keeping a lid on things and not letting them get out of hand, he actually meant it. I thought we could figure out a way of living next to these people without anybody getting seriously hurt.”

  “It doesn’t sound like Luso to me,” Furio said. “If he was going to make trouble, it’d be big. Killing a pig is the sort of thing we’d do.”

  * * *

  The next morning was cold and crisp, the first frost of the year. Furio hadn’t slept well, and he was glad to have an excuse to get out of bed before daybreak: it was his turn to see to the horses. He was in the yard breaking the ice on the water barrel when he heard hooves clattering on the flagstones outside. He walked to the gate and put his head round the corner to see who it was.

  He saw two huge men, the biggest he’d ever seen in his life. Their faces were muffled in scarves, but their sheer bulk told him who they were. He ducked back round the corner and sprinted for the back door.

  Much to his surprise, he found Marzo awake and pottering in the kitchen, trying to light the fire. “Luso met’Oc’s outside,” he said, in a hoarse whisper.

  Marzo was slightly deaf in one ear. “You what?”

  “Luso met’Oc,” Furio repeated, dropping the whisper. “Outside. And I think…”

  Marzo didn’t wait for the rest of the sentence. He dropped the tinderbox he’d been fumbling with (Marzo never had any luck with fires), swung round with an agonised look on his face, located his slippers and stuffed his bare feet into them. “Where’s my fucking coat?” he wailed.

  “Behind the door.”

  “What? Oh, right.” He clawed at his head in an attempt to drag a stray tuft of hair over his bald spot, plunged into the coat like a diver and shot out of the kitchen. A moment later, Furio heard the bolts on the front door grinding back. A voice said something he couldn’t quite make out. For a moment he was sure it was Gig talking. He heard Uncle Marzo reply, “No, that’s fine, please come in.”

  “You’ll excuse us for calling so horribly early,” the voice went on. “Only, given the situation, we thought it’d be better not to be out and about in broad daylight.”

  Furio grabbed the tinderbox, quickly struck a spark and emptied the smouldering moss onto Uncle Marzo’s vilely constructed pyramid of kindling. A blast from the bellows got it going. Somehow it wouldn’t be right to have visitors in the house and no fire lit. Then he retreated into the kitchen, leaving the door slightly open so he could hear.

  “I’m sorry to have to bother you with this,” Luso said, walking over to the fire. He scowled at it, grabbed the charcoal bucket and shook a triple handful into the grate. “But I guess you’re the proper person to talk to. Oh, I’m sorry, let me introduce my brother Sthenomai. Stheno, this is Mayor Opello.”

  Stheno grinned. “You’ll be Furio’s father, then.”

  “Uncle,” Marzo said. “Please, sit down.” There was more than a hint of urgency in the request. If they’d only sit down, they’d stop towering over him, and he wouldn’t feel quite so much like a dog in a yard full of horses. “Can I offer you a—?” He stopped dead, realising he hadn’t got anything for them to eat or drink apart from the dregs of last night’s brandy. Fortunately, Luso shook his head.

  “I’ll get straight to the point,” he said, as the chair he was sitting in creaked dangerously. It was the big, straight-backed chair with the carved arms, which nobody ever sat in because they knew the left-hand upright was cracked. Marzo wasn’t prepared to guess how much Luso weighed, but it had to be considerably more than anybody who’d ever been in the house before. Unfortunately, it was too late to say anything now. “Last night, someone tried to get past our sentries. Whoever it was made a bit of a racket and when a guard went to see what was going on, he was attacked, stabbed from behind. He’s all right, but only because he happened to be wearing a jack—that’s a padded jacket—under his coat. Anyway, he tried to grab the attacker, but then someone else hit him over the head. We think that was the end of it, because there’s nothing to suggest anybody got past the sentry-block. We’re assuming the scrap with the guard made them lose their nerve and they legged it. We found the tracks of three horses, leading straight here. Of course, we couldn’t follow them once we reached the town—there’s so many horse tracks, you can’t pick out just one trail. But whoever did it came straight back here afterwards.” Luso paused, reached out an impossibly long arm, took the poker and gave the fire a sharp poke. “Now I’m sure this is all news to you, and you don’t know who was involved. I’m also confident that you’ll agree with me that this sort of thing needs to be stopped before it gets out of hand. I’m afraid my father takes a rather dim view of trespassing. I’ve told him it’s probably just a couple of stupid young lads out after the deer. I’d like to think that’s true. What do you think?”

  Please, Marzo prayed under his breath, don’t let the chair break, this really wouldn’t be a good time. “You’re right,” he said, “it’s the first I’ve heard of it. From what you’ve told me it does sound more like poachers than anything else.”

  Stheno made a sort of grunting noise. Luso said, “We’d both like it to be that, of course. But the fact is, we haven’t had trouble with poachers for, what?” He looked at his brother, who muttered a number. “Thanks, Stheno, forty years, which is before Stheno and I were born. I seem to remember Father telling us he came down on the people responsible pretty hard.”

  Marzo winced. The men in question had been carpenters, but now they did odd jobs for charitably minded neighbours. Hard to do carpentry with only one hand.

  “Things are different now, of course,” Luso went on. “Father had his way of doing things, I have mine. I accept this isn’t Home, and the traditional approach, if I can call it that, may not always be appropriate. I prefer to get along with people, if I can.”

  His voice was so pleasant, so sensible and reassuring—you could trust that voice, you could be sure that anything it said was obviously the right thing—that Marzo almost forgot the point he wanted to raise. Saying it seemed impossible, just as it was impossible to believe that the speaker could ever have maliciously shot someone’s pig. He imagined what it must be like to be an arm or a leg, controlled by the brain, obeying without question because, after all, we’re all part of the same body. So he surprised himself when he heard himself say, “Me too. I like to keep the peace. But maybe you should accept that you’re partly to blame.”

  Luso sat up straight, as if he’d just been slapped by a girl. “Well, I suppose there’s some truth in that, we haven’t exactly been the best of neighbours. But you’ll remember, when we spoke last, I gave you my word there’d be no cattle raiding or any nonsense like that, and I think you’ll find I’ve kept my end of the bargain.”

  Marzo opened his mouth and closed it again. He knew there had to be words to say what he needed to say, but he couldn’t imagine what they could be. He resolved to do his best, and hope. “With respect,” he said, “I think you may be overlooking a couple of things.”

  Luso’s eyes opened wide. “Really?”

  “Please,” Marzo said. “Please, just wait there.”

  He almost ran out of the room. Once he was in his back store room, with the door closed, he had to sit down and wait for his breath to catch up with him. More than anything else h
e wanted to wedge the door shut with a chair, or climb out of the window, anything rather than go back in there and call Lusomai met’Oc a liar to his face. But when he came out again a little while later, he was breathing normally again, and he had both hands tightly closed.

  “We found this,” he said, “in the wall of Desio Heddo’s house. I was wondering if you could tell me what it is.”

  He knew all right. There was a blank look, then a quiver of the eyebrows. “That’s a bullet,” Luso said. “Where did you say…?”

  “Lodged in a wall,” Marzo replied, in a brittle voice. “Whoever it was shot through the door. And then there’s this one.” He opened his other hand, and let the thing fall onto the table, next to the flat disc. This one looked like a grey pebble, irregular, squashed at one end, rounded at the other. “We dug this out of the skull of a valuable pedigree boar belonging to a man called Silo Adresco. If you’d like me to fetch my scales, I can show you that both bullets weigh practically the same, which suggests they were fired from the same gun.”

  Luso looked up at him. “Somebody shot a pig?”

  “You tell me,” Marzo replied. “You’re the expert. I don’t know anything about it. I’m assuming that’s a gun bullet, because it’s lead and it was driven so hard it smashed a hole in a boar’s skull, which is about as thick a bit of bone as you’ll get anywhere. I think both of those are bullets from a snapping-hen pistol, but maybe you could confirm that for me.”

  Luso picked them up and stared at them on the palm of his hand. “They look like pistol balls to me,” he said. “I take it you think I fired the shots.”

  Marzo shrugged; he overdid it a little. “As far as I know, there’s three of the things in the colony. You’ve got one, your cousin Boulomai’s got one.”

  “Two, actually,” Luso said. “But they’re half-inch bore. These are five-eighths.”

  “I was going to ask you about that,” Marzo said. “And there’s the third one, which happens to belong to me.”

  Stheno lifted his head suddenly. “That’s open to debate,” he said.

  “It’s all right, Stheno,” Luso said. “My brother doesn’t accept the notion of legitimate spoils of war,” he said. “But I do, so we won’t go into all that now. I didn’t know you’d got it, though. I tried to buy it back, but the man wouldn’t sell.”

  Marzo swallowed, to get his throat working again. “You’ll have to take my word for it, I’m afraid, but I can guarantee that neither of those came from my gun. It’s kept in a safe place, and I know for a fact it hasn’t been moved.”

  “You can check quite easily,” Luso said. “If it’s been fired, it stinks to high heaven of burnt powder. Or if it’s been cleaned, either it’ll be starting to rust or it’ll be oiled up to stop it rusting. I take it…”

  “In that case, I can confirm it wasn’t my gun,” Marzo said. “I don’t suppose you happen to have yours with you.”

  Luso grinned. “Well, no,” he said. “Didn’t think it’d be polite, for one thing. Also, as it happens I did fire the gun yesterday. I practise with it once a week.”

  Marzo remembered what Furio had told him: Gignomai couldn’t hit a log, at five paces. “If it wasn’t mine,” he said, “and it wasn’t your cousin’s…”

  “Beats me,” Luso said. “And yes, I can see why you think it must’ve been me. All I can say is, it wasn’t. When did all this happen, by the way?”

  Marzo told him. He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “but it doesn’t look like I can help you there. Our place is pretty big, you know. People can come and go, and I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”

  “Could someone have taken your gun without you knowing?”

  Stheno laughed. “Hardly,” Luso said, “if they knew what’s good for them, they wouldn’t even try.” He frowned, and Marzo desperately wished he knew what he was thinking. “Well,” he said, “I’ll ask questions when I get back home, but I can’t promise anything. Meanwhile, we really do have to sort out this other business. I can see what you’re thinking and believe me, I can understand why you’re upset, but it’s got to be done. I haven’t come all this way to go back empty-handed.”

  Silo Adresco, Marzo thought. Silo, who was sitting right there a day or so ago, talking nonsense about storming the Tabletop with a few good men, and then his stupid pig gets shot. And then a few men, by the sound of it not particularly good, try and knife a guard in the dark. It was hideously plausible. He tried to think of something to say, but when the words came out, he instantly regretted them.

  “We’ve got to be practical,” was what he said.

  Stheno met’Oc seemed to find that enormously funny. Luso shot him a mock scowl, and said, “Exactly what I was thinking. You and I need to find a way to close all this nonsense right down before somebody gets hurt.” He paused, then added, “I’m open to suggestions.”

  Marzo tried to think, but nothing came. “You’re sure these couldn’t have been shot out of one of your other guns?”

  Luso smiled. “Not possible,” he said. “They’re all hunting pieces, three-quarter inch bore. And they don’t take bullets, they fire small shot. I suppose you could wrap the ball in several layers of cloth, but then you’d have found bits of burnt fabric at the scene. Also, I’d have known if someone borrowed one. Nice idea, but it couldn’t have been.”

  Marzo nodded. Irrelevant, in any case. And if Boulomai’s gun used a smaller bullet… He shook his head. That line of thought really wasn’t helping. “You suggest something,” he said.

  “Are you sure? A moment ago you were telling me I caused all this.”

  “I really don’t care,” Marzo said. “I just want it all to go away. You’re supposed to be good at this. Do you think you can arrange it?”

  Luso leaned back a little; the chair groaned painfully, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. “It depends,” he said, “on whether you can control your people. I can handle mine, but I’ve got to give them something. My father especially. The trouble is, he wants to believe that you don’t exist. It’d suit his view of the world so much better if he could be sure you’re figments of his imagination. Stuff like this only reminds him, and he really doesn’t like that. I can’t just go to him and say, ‘Forget about it, I’ve dealt with it.’ He needs…” Luso paused, searching for the right word. “He needs a trophy, something he could stick on the wall alongside the stags’ horns and the boars’ masks. Something tangible, if you follow me.”

  Marzo nodded slowly. “Stick on the wall” was his cue. Well, he didn’t really want it anyway. “You can have the snapping-hen back,” he said.

  Luso nodded approvingly. “I think that’d do it,” he said. “But I’m going to impose a condition of my own. You’ve got to tell me how you came by it.”

  “I bought it from Calo Brotti,” Marzo said.

  “Who wouldn’t sell to me.”

  “He owed me,” Marzo said, “for a new plough and share. He needed the stuff but couldn’t pay cash. We did a deal. He wasn’t happy.”

  “Thank you,” Luso said. “All right, that’s my end dealt with. What do you need?”

  Marzo closed his eyes. “The way I see it,” he said, “if I give you mine, it’ll mean all the snapping-hens in the colony will be up there on the Tabletop, safely under your control. Is that right?”

  “That’s a good question,” Luso said. “I’m not sure I’m in a position to give you a guarantee. You see, I didn’t shoot either of those two balls you’ve got there. I give you my word on that.”

  Marzo looked at him despairingly, like a man drowning in a river who sees a passer-by stop, then walk away. “Tell you what,” he said. “If I make myself believe what you’ve just said is true, and I give you the stupid gun, will you promise me there’ll be no more shootings? Because there can’t be, can there? Not if all the guns are in your hands, and I’ve got your word.”

  Luso closed his eyes. “I can’t make that promise,” he said. “Because, if I didn’t do it, someone else must ha
ve. There’s got to be a third gun somewhere.”

  “Not possible,” Marzo snapped, and Stheno frowned—don’t you shout at my kid brother. Under other circumstances, it’d have been funny. “How could there be? I’ve lived here all my damn life, my brother used to have the import concession, and now I’ve got it. If a snapping-hen got brought in on a ship, I’d have known about it. If there was such a thing floating about loose somewhere, I’d know.”

  “Maybe Boulomai brought it,” Stheno said.

  There was dead silence. Luso turned his head and stared at his brother, as if a voice had just boomed out from a thundercloud. “Well,” Stheno went on, “it’s a possibility. Strikes me it’s the only possibility. We know he’s got a pair of the things he wears like jewellery.”

  “The half-inchers,” Luso said.

  “Whatever,” Stheno replied. “You’re the one who knows that stuff. But for all we know, he could have another one, in the bigger size. Or another pair, even. Those two brought a whole load of luggage with them, and I don’t suppose anybody’s taken a look to see what kind of toys they’ve got in there. First article of faith in the met’Oc family code of conduct: don’t search your house guests’ stuff for concealed weapons. In which case,” he went on, after a pause, “you’ve solved your mystery, haven’t you? Oh, have you heard, by the way? Luso here’s going to marry cousin Pasi. That’s the girl,” he explained. “Not always easy to tell them apart, of course, unless they’re standing sideways.”

  Luso glowered at his brother, who took no notice. “I guess Stheno’s right,” he said. “It’s entirely possible. Boulo could well have two pairs; a fancy pair for dressing up and a plain pair for actual mischief.”

  “Needn’t necessarily be him,” Stheno said to the wall. “She’s quite capable—”