by K. J. Parker
In any case, Furio thought, he’s got a long way to go yet. Maybe he’ll fail. All he’d managed to achieve so far was a vague atmosphere of distrust, to some extent neutralised by Uncle Marzo’s remarkable and totally unexpected success as diplomat and community leader. He’d need a really bold, magnificent stroke to get the colonists mad enough to attack the Tabletop, or years of slow, patient effort, like a single mole undermining a whole city.
The latest shipment was mostly shovels, picks and ploughshares, three barrels of nails, a barrel of gate hinges. Also, ten coils of wire—poor quality, Gignomai confessed, of irregular thickness and somewhat brittle, but the next batch would be better—and a new line: billhooks with steel cutting edges welded into soft iron for toughness and economy, hardened and drawn to purple to stay sharp all day, seasoned ash shafts, five dozen at a thaler a dozen.
Marzo picked one out of the straw and examined it. Still black and greasy from the tempering oil, no finish to speak of but a good, straight, well-balanced tool. From Home, three thalers a dozen if he could get them. He’d ordered twelve dozen, but there hadn’t been any on the last three ships. On the other hand…
“Not much call for them,” he said. “I mean, everybody’s got one, and it’s not as though they wear out in a hurry.”
“Ah yes,” Gignomai said with a pale smile, “but now people can have one and a spare. At that price, you can get one for the boy to use, and then there’ll be two of you on the job and you’ll get it done in half the time.”
“Hedging’s winter work,” Marzo replied, arguing more from habit than conviction. “Time’s not exactly of the essence.” He wondered why he was bothering. Gignomai wouldn’t lower the price—he was practically giving them away as it was—and Marzo had decided he’d take them as soon as Gignomai had told him what was in the crate.
“Fine,” Gignomai said. “Tell you what I’ll do. Sale or return. I’ll leave them here and you don’t have to give me any money until you’ve sold them. If they’re still here in three weeks, I’ll take them back and work them into hayknives. All right?”
Marzo just managed to stop himself whimpering with surprise. Achieving a deal like that without even trying was—well, disappointing. He felt almost cheated, as if his hard-earned bargaining skills had been utterly devalued. “If you like,” he said, trying to sound casual. “And the same terms for the gate hinges?”
Gignomai gave him a beautiful smile. “The hell with that,” he said cheerfully. “Cash in hand or I take them back with me.”
Marzo nodded, relieved. Back to normal. “Two thalers five.”
“Three, and I want the barrel back.”
Marzo opened his book and made a show of examining the figures, though of course he knew the balances by heart. “Cash in hand for the hinges, then,” he said. “You want cash for the rest of the stuff, or shall I write it up?”
“Cash,” Gignomai said. “Which reminds me of the main reason I’m here. I’ve been thinking.” He perched on the edge of the long table and folded his arms, instinctively elegant like an animal. “Seems to me it’d make more sense for us to start buying our supplies direct from the farmers, instead of going through you for everything, now we’re earning money. What do you reckon?”
Marzo exaggerated the shrug a little. “That’s up to you,” he said. “You do what you like.”
Gignomai shook his head. “No, I want us to stay friends,” he said. “I worked out there can’t be much margin for you in supplying us, and it’s a lot of work for you, with storage and carting.”
“True,” Marzo said, and left it at that, in case Gignomai had something else to offer.
“In return,” (Ah, Marzo thought) “I suggest we draw a line under everything up to now. How would that be?”
“Sorry,” Marzo said. “I don’t follow.”
“Simple. I don’t owe you anything for what I’ve had from you so far, and you can have the sword, sell it, keep the money for yourself. Is that a deal?”
“But it’s worth—” Marzo managed to bite off the rest of the sentence, but he had an idea the look on his face would tell Gignomai all he needed to know.
“Yes,” Gignomai said, “ten, twenty times what I’ve had from you, sure. More like fifty. So what? Back up on the Tabletop it wasn’t worth anything. Down here, it means I’ve been able to get the job done. For you, it’s a passage out of here and a nice life back Home for you and your family, if that’s what you want. Amazing how one stupid bit of pointed metal can do so much good for so many people.” He yawned, and stroked his throat; maybe he had a cold coming. “If you’d rather do it some other way I’m open to suggestions.”
“No, that’s fine,” Marzo said, altogether too quickly. “Thank you. You’re being very generous.”
For some reason, that made Gignomai laugh. “Forget about it,” he said. “Now, can we get the rest of this stuff unloaded so I can be on my way?”
Marzo was about to call for Furio to come and help, then remembered he wasn’t there. “How’s that nephew of mine getting on?” he asked.
“Miserable,” Gignomai replied, as he crossed the porch. “He always gets a bit sad when called on to do demeaning manual labour. I left him sweeping out the wheel-house.”
“He’s good at sweeping,” Marzo said. “He’s had practice.”
“I bet.” Gignomai let down the tailgate of the cart. “No, he’s fine. I should have mentioned it before, but I had to talk to him first about it, naturally. I want him to take over the whole of the business side, and I’ll get on with making stuff. It makes sense, after all. He knows about that sort of thing, it’s in the blood, and I haven’t really got a clue. Where I come from, buying and selling’s one of those things where you wash your hands afterwards for fear of catching something.”
Marzo didn’t speak immediately. Something was snagged in the back of his mind. “He’s his father’s son when it comes to business,” he heard himself say. “And it makes good sense from my end, keeping it in the family. And after I’m gone, of course, it’ll all be his anyway.”
“Quite,” Gignomai said, “unless you see us both out, which isn’t impossible. Anyway, that’s why I asked him to come back to the factory full time. He needs to get a really good grasp of everything we’re doing. I don’t know anything about it, but it stands to reason, you can’t run a business unless you know everything about it. Right,” he added, scrambling up onto the bed of the cart, using the hub of the back wheel as a stepping-stone. “This crate’s the scythe blades. Careful, it’s quite heavy.”
No doubt about it, Gignomai had changed. For one thing, he’d grown deceptively strong, or else he’d taught himself the subtle art of lifting. Probably a bit of both, Marzo decided, as he took the strain at his end and felt something fail in the small of his back, a combination of increased capacity and the ability to make full use of what you’ve got. Basically, the polar opposite of the way the met’Oc did things.
“To me,” Gignomai commanded, as they swung the case round to get it through the door. “Right, where do you want it?”
More than anything (money, power, respect, repose and tranquillity), Marzo wanted a rest and a chance to straighten out his back before they went outside again for the next crate. But Gignomai didn’t hang around long enough to give him a chance to drop hints. He followed him into the street, and saw four men walking quickly towards him, from the East Ford side of town. He could have wept for relief and joy, even when he recognised them: the Stalio brothers from Long Cross, their son, and Nuca Emmo, their hired man. Four more tedious people you couldn’t hope to meet on a summer’s day, but still…
Gignomai had seen them too. He pulled a long face, muttered something about business at the livery, and vanished like snow on hot coals. Marzo put on his smile of office, and stood up straight to greet them.
“It’s the savages,” said Ila Stalio (fifty-seven, fat, full head of grey hair). “They attacked us.”
Marzo tried to speak, but nothing came out.<
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“With guns,” Emmo said. “They shot at us.”
“But the savages haven’t got guns. Nobody’s got—”
“They have now.” Ila’s brother, Namone, was the sort of person nobody ever listened to on principle. “Ila’s telling the truth, Mayor. I was there. They shot at me too.”
“But the savages haven’t got guns,” Marzo repeated. It was the truth, and they were refusing to acknowledge it. He had no idea what to do under such circumstances.
“Me and Dad and Uncle Namone were bringing in the heifers from our long meadow,” said the boy, Telo. He wasn’t so bad, except he treated his father as some sort of god. “And Nuca was with us as well. We saw them, other side of the river, about two hundred yards off. We stopped and looked at them—”
“You don’t see savages every day,” Namone put in. “Not in our neck of the woods.”
Marzo turned to the boy. “You’re sure they were…”
“They had those long coats, and those dumb hats,” Ila said. “They were just stood there, watching us. So we yelled at them to go away.”
“We just yelled,” Nuca put in. “We didn’t do nothing.”
“And then we heard this noise,” Telo went on, “like thunder. And a split second later, there were these little clouds of smoke, where they were stood to. We didn’t figure it at first.”
“Two hundred yards away,” Marzo said. One of them he could have handled, just about. Four was too many.
“On the other side of the river,” Namone said. “Their side, properly speaking. But they were shooting at us.”
“How do you know?”
Ila shrugged. “Wasn’t anything else to shoot at,” he said. “They were dead set on killing us, Mister Mayor, and what we want to know is, what’re you going to do about it?”
Marzo couldn’t feel his feet. It was a strange feeling, as if he’d been sitting still too long. “But the savages haven’t got guns,” he said for the third time. “Nobody’s got guns except the met’Oc. Everybody knows that.”
“Why would the met’Oc be shooting at us?” Ila said. “Besides, they were savages. No question about it. You can always tell. It’s the way they stand, dead still.”
Marzo drew in a long breath, as if he knew it’d have to last him for a while. “You’d better come inside,” he said, and led the way into the store. There he found Gignomai, unloading gate hinges from the barrel.
“What’s the matter?” Gignomai said. “You look like the world’s about to end.”
“Maybe it is,” said Ila mournfully, “if the savages have declared war on us.”
“What?” Gignomai looked as though he was about to laugh.
“Tell him,” Marzo said, and when the four of them had repeated their story, practically word for word but arranged for different voices, Gignomai sat down on a crate and covered his mouth with his hand.
“It’s not possible,” Marzo said. “It can’t be. Where the hell would they get guns from?”
“From my family,” Gignomai said.
Marzo was standing beside him, looking sideways down at him. At that moment a connection formed in his mind, and he asked himself: if Gignomai is planning on Furio taking over the business, why would he give me the sword, knowing perfectly well that it means I’d be able to take us all, Furio included, back Home? It was, he admitted to himself, a strange time to be thinking about that sort of thing, and it was wrong of him to give it mind room when the worst crisis in the colony’s history might be about to break, but somehow, he couldn’t shift it from his thoughts, so he missed what Ila said to Gignomai. But he heard the reply.
“On the contrary,” Gignomai said, “it’s just the sort of thing Luso would do. In fact, he’s talked about it to my father, at least twice, to my certain knowledge. I was there at the time.”
“Why?” Nuca said. “It doesn’t—”
“Think about it,” Gignomai said. “An alliance between the met’Oc and the savages, to drive the colonists out, or wipe them out—whichever’s easiest, I suppose, though extermination would be the more logical course. Vacant possession of the entire colony, and a labour force to work the land once the primary objective’s been achieved. Really, just like back Home, where families like ours used to have whole armies of tenants, or serfs, or whatever you choose to call them. I know it’s been at the back of my father’s mind for a long time, but he doesn’t have the energy. When Luso suggested it, he said no because he reckoned Luso was too young and inexperienced to pull it off. Now that he’s getting married, though, he needs property of his own, a dowry.” He shrugged. “It’s a stupid idea, of course. There aren’t enough of the met’Oc to wipe out the savages once they’ve done their side of it; it’s much more likely to be the other way about. I can only guess that Boulo figures he can bring in reinforcements from Home. It’s just the sort of thing they’d come up with: a little pocket empire of their own with slaves to work the fields. And what else could we have to offer that’d tempt the met’Ousa into a marriage alliance?”
Marzo had been trying to grasp some relevant fact that had been floating out of reach in the confusion of his mind. He caught it at last, and said, “But Gignomai, your people only have about five guns between them. They haven’t got enough to go giving them away to—”
Gignomai laughed. “That was true when I left,” he said. “But it’s obvious, isn’t it? They’ve been making the things. It’s not all that difficult, I believe. Luso told me once, if you can make a door lock and you can make a piece of pipe, you can make a snapping-hen. Luso’s got two or three men up there who’d be able to do it. And how many would you need? Two dozen? Three? Suppose it takes a day to make one. In a couple of months, you’d have enough for a small army.”
Marzo felt as though his head had just been plunged under water. “They could do that?”
“I’m sure of it,” Gignomai said. “All it’d take would be the need to do it. And if you think about it, that’d explain a lot of what’s been going on around here lately.”
“The attacks,” Ila said. “Fasenna, and the Heddos.”
Gignomai nodded. “Softening you up,” he said, “getting you all nice and scared, reminding you of who’s got the real power around here. While my dear brother’s been pretending to play nice with the mayor here, they’ve been getting ready to make their move. I imagine that what happened today was a bunch of savages who couldn’t wait till the agreed date before trying out their new toys.” He looked at each of them in turn, then shook his head. “And you wonder why I left home,” he said. “Trust me, my family are capable of anything.”
Even then, a part of Marzo’s mind was fussing over the inconsistency of Furio and the sword. “There’s no proof, though, is there?” he said. “I mean, it’s all just your guesses.”
“Fine.” Gignomai glared at him. “You give me another explanation that fits all the facts.” He sighed, and went on, “I’ve been worried for some time that they might be up to something like this. Before I left, Luso was away for three days. Said he was going hunting on the west side, but there weren’t any deer out there, I’d been there myself, and he didn’t take the dogs, so what he was hunting I don’t know. When he came back, he and Father shut themselves away in the study and had a long, long conversation about something, but I never did find out about what. And Aurelio—who used to be our smith—thrown out on his ear to make way for a new man. Want to hazard a guess what the new man was good at? And before they got rid of him, they had him working for a whole week just making files. Files, for heaven’s sake! We use up one every ten years. But if you’re going to be making a lot of small, intricate metal parts, you could well want a boxful of sharp new files.” He shrugged. “Little things like that. But put them all together…”
Marzo felt like he was standing on a rotten floor, but he couldn’t think straight. “All right,” he said. “Ila, Namone, I want you to go round all the houses and tell everybody to come here. Get them to send the boys to all the nearest farms.
We need all the people we can get. I’m damned if I’m going to make a decision on something like this without as many people agreeing with me as possible.”
Three hours later, the store was packed with forty or fifty men pressed shoulder to shoulder, and Marzo and Gignomai sitting in the middle of the room on a rostrum improvised out of the newly delivered packing cases. The Stalio brothers had told their story once again, and Gignomai had offered his interpretation, with further circumstantial evidence of the met’Oc’s long-standing preparations. He’d taken off his coat because of the closeness of the room; under it he wore a fine linen shirt, torn and stained with oil, rust and millstone slurry. Marzo was disconcerted to see how thin he was: skin and bone with ropes of muscle.
“That’s about it,” Gignomai said, and the room was extraordinarily quiet. “But I’d like to add one thing. It’s not strictly relevant, but I think it’s something you ought to know.” He paused, as if allowing time for objections, then went on, “I expect some of you have been asking yourselves why I left home in the first place. Well, I’ll tell you. When I was fourteen years old, my father murdered my sister. He’d found out she was seeing a boy, one of my brother Luso’s gang. He didn’t approve. Luso killed the boy—I’m sorry, I never knew his name, it wasn’t the sort of detail my family regards as important—and my father had my sister tied to a chair and sewed her lips together. She stayed in the chair, in the dining room, till she starved to death, and nobody lifted a finger to help her. That’s my family, gentlemen, that’s the sort of people they are, so if you were thinking that no one could bring themselves to do the sort of thing I’ve been talking about, think again. Also, you might care to consider this. Maybe I’m wrong, about my family arming the savages and sending them against you. Maybe there’s some other explanation, and I’m doing them a grave injustice. Well, so what? They did my sister a grave injustice seven years ago. I didn’t study law, like my father wanted me to, but I have an idea that the lawful penalty for murder is death, and they’ve had it coming for a long, long time. I’m a met’Oc, I was born one, I’ve still got most of their shit in my head: honour, pride, perfect disdain for the lower orders. I try and fight it but it’ll probably always be there. When Luso ran off your cattle and stole from you and burnt your barns, I thought, well, they’re just farmers, it doesn’t matter. I admit it, I’m sorry for it, but I just let it happen and didn’t lift a finger. When they killed my sister, I didn’t lift a finger. But I think the time’s come for a better way of doing justice round here. I think it ought to start right now. I’ve been absolutely straight with you, I’ve told you something I never thought I’d tell anyone, because I believe you have a right to know. You can say I’m all eaten up with wanting revenge on my father and my brothers and you’d be right—that’s me. But if you’re in two minds about doing something about the met’Oc, because you’re not sure they’re guilty as charged, all I’m saying is—don’t be. That’s it.”