by K. J. Parker
“Stheno.”
Stheno raised a hand in vestigial apology. “Sorry, mustn’t say nasty things about my future sister-in-law. But she’s—well, a bit of a tomboy, that one. Also somewhat inclined to do what the hell she likes and ask if it’s all right afterwards.”
Luso shifted so that the back of his head was pointed at his brother. “One or two unresolved issues,” he said to Marzo, synthetically cheerful. “Nothing that need concern you, and I do apologize for any embarrassment we may have caused you. But yes, he’s got a point. My fiancée can be a little bit boisterous at times. I don’t really see her snooping about in the dark assassinating pigs, but it’s not impossible she might have fluttered her eyelashes at someone and got them to do it for her. And she does have quite a collection of interesting trinkets.”
Stheno laughed. Luso clicked his tongue at him. “Well,” Stheno said, “looks like I’ve cleared up your problem for you. And just think, Luso didn’t want me to come along.”
“It’s the only explanation,” Luso said. “Well, isn’t it? And that’s just fine, because when we get back, I’ll have a word with my cousins, both of them.” He turned and shot a quick scowl at his brother. “And, yes, I can guarantee there won’t be any more gunshots in the night. On that, you have my unconditional promise.”
“There,” Stheno said solemnly, clapping his hands together. The noise made Furio jump and bang his head on the door latch. “Luso’s word of honour. What more could anybody ask for?”
Luso swung round to say something to him. At that point, the chair collapsed.
* * *
Gignomai drove a cart into town two days later. He pulled up outside the store just as Furio was opening the door for the start of business. They looked at each other.
“Hello, stranger,” Gignomai said. “Marzo about?”
“I’ll get him,” Furio replied.
“That’s all right.” Gignomai jumped down and landed awkwardly, yelping as his ankle went over. “Mind giving me a hand with this lot? I did my back in a day or so ago, and heavy lifting isn’t going to improve it.”
Furio hesitated, but he was curious. “What’ve you got?” he said.
“The first batch,” Gignomai replied.
“You mean…?”
Gignomai grinned. “A dozen shovels, two dozen hay-forks, ten ploughshares, a dozen hay-knives, three dozen tin plates, ditto cups—”
“Already?”
“We don’t hang about,” Gignomai said, dropping the tailgate. “We’re using oak formers for the pressings. They won’t last long, but they’re easy enough to replace, and it means we’re in production. Later, when we’ve got five minutes, we can make up proper iron swages.”
Furio didn’t understand most of that, but he got the general idea. “We’d better get this lot inside, then,” he said. “You take the back end.”
They lugged half a dozen long crates into the shop and dumped them on the floor. Marzo must have heard the thumps. He came out of the back store room and tripped over a crate. Then he looked down.
“Is that…?” he said.
“Ploughshares,” Gignomai said, grinning broadly. “One hundred per cent domestic product.”
Marzo stared at the crate as if it was the most remarkable thing he’d ever seen, until Furio tapped him on the shoulder. “Crowbar,” Furio said.
“Careful with the crates, please,” Gignomai said. “I’ll be needing them back. Actually, those represent our entire stock of packing cases. We decided that for now we’d concentrate on making stuff, rather than stuff for putting stuff in.”
Marzo tried to prise the lid off the crate, but instead dropped the crowbar. “You do it,” he told Furio. “Over-excited,” he explained. Gignomai laughed, and Furio gently lifted the lid. They all stood over the crate and looked inside.
After a while, Furio said, “They just look like plain ordinary ploughshares to me.”
“Thank you,” Gignomai said.
“That’s the whole point,” Marzo said. “Plain, ordinary ploughshares. From here, you can’t tell them apart from the real thing.”
“They’re real ploughshares,” Gignomai growled. “Hence the marked bloody similarity. They fit the standard Company eighteen-inch plough. We tested them, they’re fine. Only difference is, they haven’t got the Company crests and batchmarks stamped on them.”
Marzo didn’t seem capable of standing for much longer. He grabbed a chair and sank into it. “What’re you doing for steel?” he asked.
“Ah.” Gignomai frowned. “Need to talk to you about that. We made these up out of the last of the scrap.”
Furio looked at him. “You mean you’ve run out of metal?”
“Temporarily.” Gignomai didn’t sound too happy. “But that’s all in hand. Open that crate there, it’s billhooks.”
The billhooks were plain, ordinary billhooks, though real enough for Marzo to nick his thumb when he tried a blade for sharpness. And the forks were ordinary forks, and the shovels were ordinary shovels. “That’s amazing,” Marzo said.
“That’s half a year’s stock,” Furio said.
“At current prices,” Gignomai replied. “But you’re going to sell them at a quarter of that.”
Marzo looked up sharply. “Am I?”
“Sure,” Gignomai said. “Which means everybody’ll be able to afford one. Which means you’ll sell ten times as many. Do the arithmetic.”
Marzo was silent for a moment, and Furio could feel a certain tension. “Depends what I’ve got to pay you for them,” he said.
“No money changes hands,” Gignomai said. “Not yet, at least. Same terms as before, until we’ve built up a solid market. You send us food, we send you finished goods.” Suddenly he smiled. Just like his brother, Furio thought. “I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”
“I guess not.” Marzo was examining a shovel blade.
“Very practical approach,” Furio muttered, but neither of them seemed to be listening. He left them to it and went outside to see to Gignomai’s horse. After a while, Teucer came out to join him.
“Well?” Furio said.
“Well what?”
“Seems like we were both wrong.”
She turned a bucket upside down and sat on it. “What makes you say that?”
“You’ve been in the store.”
She nodded. “They’ve got tools and things spread out all over the floor. You can’t get to the door without risking cutting your ankles.”
“There you are, then.”
“You aren’t making any sense.”
Furio sighed. “You told me—persuaded me that Gig was up to something. Apparently not. He said he was going to go away and make hardware, and that’s exactly what he’s done.”
“Maybe that’s not all he’s been doing.”
Furio laughed. “Teucer, he can’t have had time for anything else. He’s been working flat out all day and half the night, and he’s got to sleep sometimes.”
She shook her head. “He’s up to something. Someone like that doesn’t change his whole life just so the working man can buy an affordable shovel.” She picked up a few strands of straw and bent them till they broke. “Did you talk to him about his brother getting married?”
“Haven’t had a chance.”
“You should,” Teucer said. “Do you think he’ll go to the wedding?”
“I doubt it,” Furio said. “I got the impression that if he sets foot on the Tabletop he’s dead.”
“That’s an exaggeration,” Teucer said. “If he goes back, they might even patch things up.”
“Still fancy him, do you?”
She looked at him, as he leaned on the handle of the hayfork. “Yes,” she said, “on balance. But I don’t think I’d want to marry him.”
Furio barked out a laugh. “Don’t suppose there’s much danger of you being asked,” he said.
She shrugged. “Did he ever tell you what happened to his sister?”
Furio scratched his he
ad. “No,” he said. “I gather there was a sister once, when he was a kid. I assume she died.” He leaned the fork against the wall. “Why, did he ever say anything to you?”
“No. But I just wondered. Maybe he’s not interested in girls because they remind him of his sister.”
Furio thought about it for a very short time, which was as long as he felt the hypothesis merited. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think he’s not interested in any of the girls round here because none of them are grand enough for the son of the met’Oc. I think he might have had a go at that cousin of his, if she’d held still long enough.”
“I doubt it,” Teucer said. “No, I get the impression she and Lusomai will be very well suited. Still, it really doesn’t matter now, does it?”
Furio watched her go, then sat down on her bucket. As always when he’d said more than two words together with Teucer, he was left feeling slightly bewildered and vaguely uncomfortable. She reminded him of a character in a fairy tale, but he couldn’t decide which one.
* * *
The news that Mayor Opello was practically giving stuff away swept through the colony like an epidemic. Since no ship had called, apart from the strangers’, it was naturally assumed that Marzo was in some kind of trouble, which was forcing him to raise money by selling his stock at a loss. Deeper thinkers made a link between Marzo’s presumed financial collapse and the weird project he was funding out in the savages’ country, about which the colonists still knew tantalisingly little. Not that they cared particularly. What mattered was a new shovel for a turner, ploughshares for six bits, and a new pattern of tin plate nobody had seen before for half a double.
By the time the deep-country people reached the store it was all over, though that didn’t stop them buying stuff, at full price, believing that what they were paying was the sacrificial discount. When Marzo eventually closed the doors on the second day, he calculated that his iron-bound cashbox now held at least a third of the coined money in the colony. He sat down in his chair behind the counter, feeling exhausted, exhilarated and more than a little scared.
Far from solving anything, the success of the first batch of home-produced goods had multiplied his problems to a terrifying extent. He now had money, more of it than he’d ever seen before (the image of Gignomai’s sword came into his mind and he expelled it quickly), but he was running perilously short of flour, malt, dried foods and all the other stores he was pledged to supply the factory with. He could now pay for replacement stock with money rather than other goods (he was running low on that sort of thing; he was running low on everything) but that didn’t help much. He’d more or less exhausted the surplus stocks of the colony, which was hardly surprising, given that they now had an extra twenty-odd mouths to feed: the sailors from the met’Ousa ship, now working at the factory. The colony’s subsistence economy was so finely poised that twenty extra eaters endangered everybody.
Let them eat beef, he told himself, because there was still plenty of that. Trouble was, it was spoken for, it belonged to the Company, it wasn’t his to buy or the farmers’ to sell. So what? If he tendered a hundred fewer steers than he was contracted to deliver, all that’d happen would be that he’d get paid a smaller quantity of trade goods, which wouldn’t matter a damn since Gignomai would be making all that stuff for him. True. But he’d have had to pay the farmers in cash and credit, and in return he’d be getting goods that would now be too expensive to compete with Gignomai’s products, so he’d be stuck with them or have to sell them at a loss (pretty irony). Furthermore, most of the things Gignomai was going to make, most of the stuff people in the colony wanted, were made of iron. He’d bought up practically every piece of rusty scrap in the colony, and Gignomai had used it to make his machines and the first batch of samples. There wasn’t any more. Gignomai had said that wouldn’t be a problem, but he hadn’t been prepared to expand on that, so Marzo felt entirely within his rights to worry.
Also, there was the inevitable fact that the colonists could only use so many shovels, spades, axes, tin plates, nails, wedges, saw-blades, knives and buckets. It wouldn’t be long before everybody had all the things he needed, and then what would become of the glorious bloodless revolution? Not to mention the reaction of the Company and (in Marzo’s mind, at least) its evil twin the government, when they figured out what was going on.
And that wasn’t all. Practically every eager buyer who’d been through his door over the last two days had stopped to talk, the way country people do when they come to town, and there’d been one predominant subject of conversation: what did the mayor propose doing about the met’Oc, following the spate of unprovoked murderous attacks? The stories had waxed fat in the telling, and the further out people lived, the more lurid the tales they’d heard. On the second day, when the people from the eastern hills showed up, he was reliably informed that Desio Heddo had been shot dead, or at least he was dying, and the Adrescos’ entire cattle herd had been slaughtered and left lying in grotesque heaps out on the pasture. You could smell the rotting meat for miles around, they said, though since most of them would have had to pass within half a mile of the Adresco house and none of them had smelt anything, Marzo wondered where that particular gem had come from, and how it had managed to survive the sharp frost of common sense. Most remarkable of all was the way that everybody, no matter how far out they lived or how rarely they saw another human face, had learned to call him Mayor Opello. Some of them were quite friendly about it, but there were clearly some who wondered who the hell he thought he was, awarding himself grand titles and putting on airs. They sort of spat the honorific at him, and scowled at him to show they weren’t impressed, not one bit.
He’d done his best, of course. He’d told anybody who looked as though they might be listening (a depressingly low percentage) that he’d met with Lusomai met’Oc (they already knew that) and that they’d had a full and frank discussion about the recent disturbances, and he had the met’Oc’s word that there wouldn’t be any further trouble. His pronouncements were met with a mixture of awe and disbelief. Awe, because here was a man who actually talked to the semi-mythical creatures who lived on the mountain top. Disbelief, because who could trust a man who kept company with that sort of people?
After all that, the other snippet of news had come as light relief. It was weird, but he couldn’t see how there was any harm in it, which made it the exception. Apparently, several families who lived near the southern border had seen parties of savages, in most cases for the first time in their lives. No big deal, they said. The savages, usually in groups of a dozen or so, men and women, had taken to standing on hilltops and other vantage points and staring at people as they went about their daily chores. Nothing hostile, no reports of any visible weapons or aggressive posturing, and if you called out to them, they took no notice—maybe they were all deaf; after all, we know so little about them—and nobody was missing any cattle or chickens, no fences had been broken down, no unexplained footmarks on this side of the border. They just stood and watched, was all.
Two days later, Furio volunteered to be driver’s mate on a cartload of flour barrels headed for the factory.
“Please yourself,” Marzo replied. “It’s not like we’re rushed off our feet right now.”
Which was true. Ever since the orgy of buying, business had been painfully quiet. Just as well, Marzo made a point of saying, since we’ve hardly got anything left to sell. That was a gross exaggeration, but Furio couldn’t be bothered to raise the issue. He left Marzo leaning on the counter doing sums on a scrap of the coarse brown paper that came wrapped round scythe blades.
It was the first time Furio had been back to the factory since his grand departure, so he wasn’t expecting the noise. When he first noticed it, miles away, it was a faint, almost dainty tinkling, like a cow-bell. Once they were inside the wood, it made hearing the cart driver impossible. When they reached the factory, Furio could feel the blood pumping in his ears in counterpoint. No doubt about it, the drop
-hammer was working just fine. It was, he discovered by taking his own pulse, a very slightly longer interval than a heartbeat. Maybe that was why it jarred so badly. Each time the hammer fell, it crashed on the anvil, a dampened ring, the sound of sheer weight and frustrated motion. After a minute, he found he was having difficulty with his breathing.
The carter didn’t want to hang around. He pulled up the cart, jumped down, dropped the tailgate and started hauling barrels in a way that was bound to damage his back. Furio didn’t offer to help. Instead, he leaned in close and shouted, “I’ll stay here for a bit. You go on, I’ll walk back.”
“What?”
“I’ll walk back,” Furio yelled, but it was obviously no use. He shook his head and walked away. The carter carried on wrestling barrels.
Furio stopped by a fallen tree and tore a couple of handfuls of moss off the trunk, but he couldn’t get it to stay in his ears. He looked round to see if he could find Gignomai, but there didn’t seem to be anybody about. It occurred to him to wonder what the hammer was pounding, if there wasn’t any metal left.
A man hurried past him, someone he didn’t recognise. He shouted, but the man didn’t hear, so he followed him, and was led to a building that hadn’t been there when he left. He went inside.
He saw what looked like an enormous mound of clay, swelling out of the ground like a huge fungus. Its top disappeared through a hole in the roof. There was a small door, just big enough for a child to crawl through, about a foot above ground level. A two-foot-diameter clay pipe branched off the other side and disappeared through the wall. For a brief, bewildering moment he wondered if Gignomai, in an intense burst of homesickness, had built a scale model of the Tabletop, but he wouldn’t do that, would he?
“It’s a furnace,” a voice yelled in his ear. It was too loud to recognise; he turned, and there was Gignomai, covered in dirt and soot, grinning at him. “Come on, I can’t hear myself think.”
He followed Gignomai out, and they walked beside the river for quite a while, then up the hill to the hollow where Furio had watched Gignomai fire the snapping-hen. At the bottom of the hollow, the thump of the drop-hammer was muffled, and Gignomai could be heard without yelling.