The Hammer

by K. J. Parker

  Next came the reading of the settlement, and Gignomai stood up a little straighter, paying close attention. As her dowry, Pasi brought with her substantial estates in the northern and eastern provinces, together with the rents of three market towns and the benefit of four advowsons, and a number of turnpike roads, a merchant ship and a share in a mercantile consortium, a street of shops and two inns in the City. In return, the met’Oc settled on her a whole county in the southern province, a bell foundry, the benefit of government contracts in perpetuity to supply lumber, rope and chain to the Navy, the met’Oc town house and, very much an afterthought, all honours and possessions currently enjoyed by the met’Oc overseas. The deed was signed by Father, Luso and Pasi (a tiny pink hand struggled out of the cloth to take the pen), and sealed by Father with the Great Seal, after three goes at getting the wax to melt.

  That’s it, Gignomai thought, that’s the fall of the hammer: going once, going twice, sold and delivered. He felt an unsettling flow of strength seep into his arms and legs, as though a lever had been thrown to connect him to the drive-shaft. He’d lost track of the time, but it didn’t really matter. If they had to wait, so what?

  His original plan had simply been to pretend to pass out, but he’d decided against it. Father was quite capable of leaving him lying there until the ceremony was over. So much simpler just to walk out, quickly, stepping in front of Boulo rather than Stheno, since his brother might make a grab and stop him. Even so, it proved extraordinarily difficult to make himself do it. You’ll be in so much trouble later, yelled every instinct he had. But there wouldn’t be a later. He took the first step, and the rest followed. He saw Father look round at him with murderous fury on his face; Boulo even took a step back to let him pass. Luso, the only one who might conceivably have guessed, was mercifully preoccupied.

  Out through the side door into the boot-and-hat room, through that and into fresh air. The first thing he did was glance up at the sun, but it was masked in cloud. He had no idea what the time was. He looked back to make sure nobody was following him, then walked quickly across the stable yard, pushed open the rickety gate and broke into a run.

  Even then he couldn’t help grinning, thinking of himself as a boy, slipping out to go and meet his common friend from town. Different friends would be waiting for him this time, but it hardly signified. He was glad there wasn’t enough time for him to linger and take a last look, which he knew he would have done, had it been possible.

  He’d drawn them a map, but he wasn’t expecting them actually to be there. He was, therefore, pleasantly surprised to see them—they were doing their best to keep out of sight, but they stood out like blood on snow—though the incongruity of their presence offended him before he’d had a chance to adjust his attitude. They had no right to be here; trespassers on private land. That’s all right, he told himself firmly, they’re with me. They’re my guests.

  “What the hell took you so—?”

  “Quiet,” he snapped, and whoever it was, someone he didn’t recognise, fell silent as abruptly as though he’d had his throat cut. “The wedding’s in full swing, they’re all inside except the garrison, and they’re standing to in the courtyard.”

  “That’s not what you said,” Rasso interrupted; he was terrified. “You said they’d all be in the house. We can’t—”

  Gignomai rolled his eyes. “Can’t you read a simple map? The courtyard’s inside the main wall. The hall’s right next to the wall. We can secure all three doors of the hall without anyone in the courtyard noticing, and we’ll block the yard gate so the garrison won’t be able to get through. They’ll just have to stand there and watch; they won’t be able to do a thing.” He turned his head and looked for Marzo, and found him. “You brought the stuff I told you?”

  Marzo nodded. “Hammers, nails, a couple of saws. That’s what you said,” he added. “Isn’t it?”

  “That’s fine.” Gignomai stopped to take a deep breath, like a diver who expects to be under for a dangerously long time. “Right,” he said, “follow me.”

  He led them back the way he’d just come, and it felt all wrong. They were all scared half to death, as though he was leading them out of the fire and the slaughter, not in to start it. Luso’d wet himself laughing if he could see them, he thought. Some army. But there was nobody about, not in the home meadow, not in the stableyard. They filled the yard; there was barely enough room for them all. He thought what Luso would be able to achieve with his hanger, among so many frightened men, so tightly packed together. He didn’t really care, but the thought disturbed him.

  “All right,” he said. “This is the side door, ten of you here, there’s planks and battens in the woodshed just over there. Ten of you round that side, you’ll find the kitchen door. You four, shoot the bolts on the yard gates, then get back here. The rest of you with me, round the front.”

  They emptied the woodshed of suitable lumber and divided up into their three contingents. Gignomai didn’t look back. He’d put Heddo in charge of the kitchen door and Rasso (yes, but what harm could he do?) would deal with the side. He led his party, forty strong, with Marzo right behind him trying to keep up, round the corner to the main gate.

  “Double doors,” he said, “so we’ll need at least a ten-foot plank.” He chose one from the selection they offered him, and took a hammer and a fistful of long nails, his own make, from the factory. “Soon as we start hammering they’re going to realise something’s going on, so we need to wedge the door first. It opens outwards, so there’s no problem. Then we just get the nails in as quick as we can, and that’s the job done.”

  He looked at them, and although they were white with fear, he could see they believed him. None of them had taken the trouble to look up and see the great first-floor bow window, the only weak point in his plan. He herded his party closer together. If anyone dropped anything out of the window it’d hit someone, but they wouldn’t be able to jump out and expect to survive. That was the best he could do.

  He chose a good solid fence post and wedged it under the head-sized iron knocker on the left door. On the right side he had to make do with jamming a section of rafter under the bottom edge of the hinge. Shouldn’t matter. It’d take Luso a second or two to figure out what the hammering meant, and six, seven more seconds to run to the door. Plenty of time to knock in a couple of nails.

  He put one nail in his mouth, the other stayed between the fingers of his left hand. With his right, he lifted the hammer. He nodded, and two men lifted the inch-thick oak plank and presented it level across the door, just above the knocker. He touched the point of the nail lightly to the wood and swung the hammer.

  The sound of the blow was like Luso’s gun going off in the early morning, lifting the crows out of the trees, hitting the edge of the wood and bouncing back. He hit hard, counting the seconds under his breath. One nail home. He spat the other one into his hand, fumbled it, positioned it and hammered. He paused for a moment, just long enough to hear hammer blows from the other side of the house. Then he drove in four more nails, two each side, as easily as if he’d been doing this sort of thing all his life.

  “Finish up,” he snapped, pushing the hammer at the man standing next to him. “Three more planks.” As he turned away, he heard the thump of a fist on the other side of the door. They’d be shoulder-charging it in a moment or so, but the plank was in and should hold. He strolled across the yard, pausing to pick up a bit of stick from the woodshed, to the small hay barn. Plenty of loose straw on the floor. He picked up a fat handful and wrapped it carefully, tightly round the stick.

  Father had always been mortified that the met’Oc should live in a thatched house. His father had tried to make tiles, or have tiles made, but the river clay wasn’t the right sort. It cracked when you fired it. Father had had his eye on the slate beds down by the coast for many years, but obtaining enough slate would have meant trading with the colonists. The house stayed thatched.

  Gignomai had stolen a tinderbox from the kitch
ens rather than use his own, which had come from Marzo’s store and didn’t work very well. He watched the spark drop into the moss and blew on it gently, like a boy blowing in a girl’s ear. Such a little thing, a spark, like an idea. He watched it bud and flower, then touched the straw to it and wandered back to the gate.

  “What are you doing?” someone asked. He didn’t answer. He felt and savoured the moment as it sank in, as they figured it out for themselves, were properly horrified, and did nothing.

  He fancied he could hear Luso’s voice, but it was hard to tell over the noise of the hammers and the thump of bodies slamming against the other side of the door. It was shaking with every impact, but the met’Oc had built their doors of ply, to resist axes, sledgehammers and battering-rams. It was the posts wedged against the doors rather than the planks nailed across them that were taking, and resisting, the strain. Gignomai was surprised at that, but it all came to the same thing. He walked backwards a few steps until he could see the top ridge of the roof. Then he swung the torch back and threw it as hard as he could.

  It was better this way, he thought. He had no particular interest in watching them die, no furious need to taunt or harangue them, to let them know how he felt. He was quite content to communicate with them purely through fire with the minimum possible contact. When it was all over, there’d be nothing left to speak of, just anonymous bones that could just as easily be some farm worker as his brothers or parents. It’d be like coming home from a long journey to find your family had all died while you were away—upsetting, but all over. Gignomai had no time for people who enjoyed revelling in their emotions.

  The torch pitched just short of the top ridge, rolled a little way and came to rest. It flickered, for a moment Gignomai thought it was going to go out, but the thatch all around it began to smoke, and then to burn. He’d chosen his spot with care, directly over the north wall of the library. As soon as it burned through, fire would fall on Father’s desk, where there were always loose papers, and on the old, dry books of genealogy, history, house law. The heat would shatter the windows, letting in the brisk southerly breeze. The polished oak floor, fanned by the crossdraught, would burn through and drop floorboards and rafters into the hall below, while the fire would carry down through the cricks and beams of the house and collapse the walls. By then, of course, the smoke would have—

  “Just a moment,” someone was saying. “The women and the farm hands. How’re they going to get out?”

  He looked past the face that had just spoken. They were all looking at him. “They can’t,” he said.

  “But that’s—” The speaker, someone he knew by sight from over East Reach, had a stunned look on his face. “You can’t do that. It’s murder.”

  Gignomai did Luso’s shrug, all lazy shoulders and straight back. “Fine,” he said. “If that bothers you, you can pry off those planks and pull out the props. Go on, there’s still time.” He waited. Nobody moved. “Of course,” he went on, “you’ll have to apologise to my brother for spoiling his wedding, and he might not be in a mood to listen. But if it bothers you that much, go ahead.”

  Nobody moved. Gignomai remembered nobody moving the first time, when Father had his daughter tied to a chair. They’d known something bad was about to happen, the moment had come and passed and moved on, but nobody could quite bring themselves to be the first to speak, and the moment moved on a little more as Father beckoned to the nurse and she stepped forward with the needle and thread, and nobody moved then either, or spoke. Now, this time, he looked round for somebody to move, or say something. They all looked at him, but nobody said anything or did anything, and the only sound was the crackle of burning straw and the thumping of a fist on the inside. He tried to remember if Father had said anything. He rather thought not, and so decided to say nothing himself. The moments came and went and moved on, and Gignomai couldn’t help thinking, Like Father, like son. Same act, different reason, same outcome. At least I said something this time, he comforted himself. It’s them standing still and quiet while the thatch burns. Very clearly he could see inside their minds: any moment now, someone else would do something or say something, any moment now they’ll rip down the planks and let those people out of there, and the met’Oc would come tumbling out, coughing and blind, weak as baby rats in a nest, and we’ll take away their weapons and tell them not to do it again, and they’ll have learned their lesson and everything will be fine. There’s still time (there had still been time, right up to the time she died, and then there was no time at all) for someone to do something, but not me. Not me standing up to the man in charge, the last of the met’Oc, and getting my throat cut for it.

  He heard the crack of timber. Soon the first burning beam would fall on the paper.

  To take his mind off the passage of time, he considered the doors. Six planks had been nailed across, a fistful of nails each side. But Luso was in there, a clever, strong, resourceful man. “Get another half-dozen planks and nail them longwise,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

  Four men jumped to it. They looked happy to be doing something, rather than just standing around. The man who’d spoken earlier came close. He was short, and Gignomai had to lean forward to hear him, because for some reason he was whispering, “I thought we’d light the thatch and just guard the doors,” the short man said, “and as they came running out—well, we’d let the women and the farm hands go.”

  Gignomai nodded gravely. “And cut down the met’Oc with our billhooks.”

  The short man didn’t answer. His face was twisted with fear and something else—shame, Gignomai guessed. “I didn’t think we were going to kill all of them.”

  “All right,” Gignomai said. “We can do it that way if you want, there’s still time. You want to prise off the planks, be my guest. You may need to talk it over with the others, but I won’t stop you.”

  The short man stared at him as though he’d spoken to someone he thought he knew, who had turned out to be the Angel of Death in a big, floppy hood. “Sure?” Gignomai said. “I mean it. You go right ahead and take down the planks and let Luso out, and I promise I won’t interfere.”

  The short man took a long step backwards, and Gignomai lost sight of his face in the crowd. One man, he thought, and too scared when it came to it, but better than us. Not better enough, though. The four men came back with more planks, and a bucket of rusty nails they’d found on the windowledge. Those who had hammers kept themselves busy for quite some time.

  Smoke, Gignomai thought. In a house fire it’s the smoke that kills everyone. It’s a well-known fact. Must be filling up by now. Maybe they were all dead already. He smiled, thinking of the first time Stheno had tried to make charcoal. He had been too impatient, and kept pulling the rick apart to see what was happening inside, with the result that the air got in and burned most of the wood to ash. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake. In fact, there wasn’t any reason why they should hang around waiting. It made much more sense if they all went home and came back in the morning.

  He heard a woman scream. He had to think for a moment before he could place the voice: Dorper, she worked in the kitchen; a big mound of a woman who talked in grunts; she’d run away from the colony twelve years ago because her husband beat her up. He speculated whether, if he could talk to Luso, maybe they could arrange something, a truce, safe passage for the women, at least. Just the sort of thing Luso might agree to, given how marinaded in honour and proper conduct he’d been all his life. But it was his parents and brother in there, in that furnace with him, and his wife. Honour might just slip his mind at the sight of a door opening. Besides, Dorper worked in the kitchen. She could’ve smuggled out a few crusts of bread in her sleeves or her apron pocket, or used a small paring-knife to cut through his sister’s stitches. He apologised to her under his breath, but that was as far as he was prepared to go.

  He heard the glass in the bow window above his head shatter. As he lifted his head to look, he saw a blur, something falling, a ma
n. He should have broken his neck, but he landed with his heels on young Fasenna’s shoulders. Fasenna crumpled, going down like a nail driven into wood by a hammer. The jumper stood up, and some fool lifted a billhook at him. With a movement so smooth you’d have sworn they’d rehearsed it together for hours, the jumper twisted the billhook out of the man’s hands, took a neat step back and swung at the fool’s knee. There was a sound like someone driving in a fence post, then a crack as the jumper twisted on the hook handle to free the blade, which had sunk two inches into the fool’s kneecap. The fool dropped, his mouth moving, both hands round his knee. He twisted on the ground like a landed fish. Nobody else moved, of course.

  “Luso?” Gignomai said.

  The jumper took a pace sideways and backwards, fencer’s footwork. His head was bald and bright red, and his face was more or less melted away, but he wore burnt rags that had once been Luso’s wedding costume. His boots were still smoking. Gignomai knew him by his size, the remains of the clothes and his footwork. He shortened his grip on the billhook shaft and, like a shape-shifter in a fairy tale, became the low guard for polearms, straight out of the coaching manual.

  Gignomai glanced past him, afraid that someone might be stupid enough to try and stab Luso in the back. Such an attempt, he knew, would not end well for the attacker. But the half circle of colonists standing well out of Luso’s reach were quite still, all desperately hoping that the eyes in the back of Lusomai met’Oc’s head wouldn’t notice them so long as they didn’t move. Luso shifted his guard from low to middle. His left eye was opaque and half closed.