The Two of Swords, Volume 1

by K. J. Parker

  On the major’s desk was a little bronze statue: a blacksmith, bent over his anvil, hammer hand raised, tong hand steadying the work on the anvil, forging a human heart. On the base, in small but elegant lettering: Am I not a man and a brother?

  “You’re starting to get on my nerves,” Pieres said. “I had to spend half an hour this morning calming down Sergeant Egles. He’s agreed to let the whole thing drop—”

  “He hit me.”

  “You insulted him,” Pieres replied angrily. “You cast aspersions on his worthiness to be a craftsman. That makes it an honour claim, recognised as such by military law. He was perfectly within his rights to challenge you, and you wouldn’t have lasted two minutes. Fortunately, as I said, I managed to calm him down. Believe it or not, I do have other things to do with my time.”

  “He was fortune-telling,” Musen said, “with the pack. He was making it up, and he took money off that lieutenant. That’s wrong.”

  “Yes, well.” Pieres scowled at him. “I did actually point out to the sergeant that obtaining money by deception from a superior officer is a court-martial offence, and if he survived the duel I’d have no option, et cetera. But you know what? I couldn’t give a damn. Egles is a good soldier; he runs the stores damned efficiently, and you’re a complete waste of space. I wish he’d called you out on the spot and killed you, and then we’d be rid of you and I wouldn’t have had to do anything about it. So,” he went on, “I’m giving you fair warning. Don’t make trouble. You talk about abusing the craft. Seems to me that’s all you’ve done since you got here.”

  Am I not a man and a brother? Only, apparently, up to a point. “I’m sorry,” Musen said.

  Pieres swallowed a mouthful of water. Rather a nice cup: silver, embossed with vine leaves. On a major’s pay, Musen doubted he’d come by it honestly. He made a mental note of it. “First,” Pieres said, “you apologise to Sergeant Egles. Next, for God’s sake find yourself something to do. I can’t have paroled enemy prisoners wandering around the post all day like rich men’s sons, it’s ridiculous. So make yourself useful, understood?”

  No hard feelings, the sergeant said. By that point, the bottle was less than a quarter full. He’d traded the old man two mirrors, the sergeant’s hairbrush and a solid silver buckle for it.

  “No, I mean it,” Musen said. “And to make it up to you, I’d like to do something to help out. Round the stores, maybe.”

  The sergeant squinted at him. “Like what?”

  “Fetching, carrying, heavy lifting. Anything you tell me to.”

  The sergeant looked at the bottle, thought better of it. “What the hell,” he said. “Great big bastard like you, why not? I spend half my life lugging stupid great boxes around. And fuck it, you’re a craftsman.” He paused, and a cunning look covered his face. “Pieres gave you a hard time, did he?”

  “Just a little bit.”

  “Nah, he’s all right. All fart and no turd. You don’t want to take any notice. All right, then. Meet me up the stores after first change tomorrow.”

  Everything is a matter of perspective; from one point of view, the stores was an earthly paradise. A long, wide, low-roofed shed crammed with boxes, in the sort of chaotic mess that suggested it was under the authority of someone who didn’t have quite enough time to do everything that was asked of him. Inside the boxes, all manner of useful and desirable objects. Two huge ledgers on the table by the window: Stores In and Stores Out. At each weekly audit, they balanced exactly, but only because Egles habitually under-recorded the incomings; if Supply delivered thirty-six gross boots, black, cavalry, medium, he recorded thirty gross in Stores In, which allowed a civilised margin of six gross for pilfering, private enterprise and genuine misplacement. Musen thought about the old man’s misgivings about handling military goods, and dismissed it as an outsider’s ignorance. Who the hell could ever possibly find out, except Egles, and he was in no position to get self-righteous about anything. As for finding an outlet for all this stuff, there was a campful of eager customers on the doorstep. Egles never issued anything for free if he could help it. So, sod the old man and his incessant bloody haggling. Why bother with civilians when you can do business with the military?

  “You’re really into this craft stuff, aren’t you?” Egles said to him, one day after they’d unloaded a consignment from Supply.

  Musen was tired and his back hurt. “I guess so, yes.”

  Slight hesitation; not something he’d usually associate with Egles. “Do you think you could read the pack for me? Find out if I’m going to get posted home soon?”

  I could explain, he thought. The pack is not for telling fortunes. “Sure,” he said.

  “Thanks. I’d like that. When can we do it?”

  Furthermore, if you mess with the pack, the pack will mess with you. The Master hadn’t put it quite like that, of course. “Tonight, after mess call.”

  “Thanks.”

  Later he broke the bad news to the old man, who didn’t seem unduly bothered. As a parting gesture, he tried to sell him eight pairs of gloves, brown, non-commissioned officers’. “Nah,” the old man said. “They’re army. You can tell by the stitching.”

  “You could say they’re off dead bodies. It’s legal if they’re battlefield.”

  “Don’t be stupid, son. Anyone can tell they’re unissued.”

  “Dirty them up a bit.”

  “You know what they do to you if you get caught receiving army stuff?”

  “Have them,” Musen sighed. “No charge. Present. Keep your hands warm.”

  That was different. “All right.”

  “My pleasure.” For what we are about to receive, may He make us duly thankful. “If I get any civilian stuff—”

  “What about the silks? You said you’d get some more.”

  He put the gloves down by the old man’s feet. He left them there. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I got a buyer. But you need to get a move on.”

  He never expected to see the old man again. But he did, a week later. He was with three other men, hanging from a big ash tree outside the Prefecture. He’d been there some time, but Musen knew him at once, if only by the smell of his feet.

  “There was a woman in here looking for you.”

  That made no sense. Musen hadn’t seen a woman, young or old, rich or poor, since the secret village on the moor. He’d sort of assumed they were extinct. “When?”

  “Just now. You only missed her by a minute.”

  Damn, Musen thought; and then it occurred to him that not all surprises are pleasant. “Did she say what she wanted?”

  Egles shook his head. “Left something for you.”

  On the bench where the soldiers sat while they were waiting. Just a sack, folded very small. “What is it?”

  “How would I know?”

  Egles was watching him out of the corner of his eye, a sort of oblique stare of great intensity. He picked up the sack and stuffed it in his coat pocket. “You want to do another reading tonight?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  Musen managed not to sigh. It had come as a surprise to him how many, how very many ways there were of arranging the cards of the pack to spell out the same message: promotion, followed by a posting back home. The weird thing was, Egles never tired of it. Each time, his face lit up, his eyes sparkled and he bought drinks afterwards without being asked. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Aren’t you going to see what it is?”

  “Liniment,” Musen said. “For my back. Don’t suppose it’ll work, mind. Nothing works on my back.”

  “Could I try some?” Egles asked. “My back’s been killing me lately. I think it’s the hot weather.”

  “Sure. But I’ll give it a go first, just in case it brings you up in boils or something.”

  He made a mental note: back wall, fifth shelf down, siege catapult winch ratchet lubricating grease, two-ounce pots; he’d have to scrape it out and put it in something else first.
“You’re too young to have a bad back,” Egles was saying. “Me, I’ve had backs for years. It’s the lifting.”

  “Maybe you should transfer,” Musen said. “Go back on the line or something.”

  “What, with your load of bastards out there trying to kill me? Catch me doing that, son.”

  He had to wait the rest of the day before he was able to get some peace: in the latrine, while everyone was in the mess hall. He unfolded the sack. It seemed to be empty. Then he felt something right at the bottom, cloth, and pulled it out. A silk handkerchief, with faint traces of blood.

  I got a buyer; practically the last words the old man had said to him. Now he came to think of it, the old man had mentioned it several times; the only line of goods he’d specifically asked for. But if the woman was the buyer, why had she sent this one back?

  He tried to remember where he’d got it from. That was the trouble: so many things passed through his hands these days, some of them from the soldiers, some from locked-up houses, a few bits and pieces he’d genuinely found in the street. He racked his brains, tried to picture himself acquiring it. Then he remembered. Teucer: it had been sticking out of Teucer’s pocket, the day after they left the hidden village. And he hadn’t had it before—Musen had been quite familiar with all Teucer’s possessions, at all times—so he must have got it there, somehow. A strange thing to find in a cut-off village in a fold of the moors, so remote that they didn’t even know about the craft. Sure as hell hadn’t been made there, so it had to have come from outside. He cursed Teucer for getting him in trouble, and then not being there when he was needed.

  Then he examined the handkerchief, looking for anything distinctive. Nothing he could see; no embroidered monogram or anything like that. It was a sort of vague buttermilk colour, and the stains were very slight, a repeating pattern, in one corner, almost as though something had been wrapped up in it.

  He thought of the old man hanging on the tree and shuddered. But that had been for receiving military stores, and this was nothing to do with the army. Only missed her by a minute, Egles had said. He wasn’t sure if he was sad or happy about that. Also, it wasn’t like Egles just to say “a woman.” He was well aware of the sergeant’s views on women, their uses and drawbacks, and “woman” was a surprisingly neutral term, coming from him. That suggested there had been something about her that had put Egles on his guard, at the very least. He fished out the sock he kept his money in, feeling the coins through the cloth, though he knew the total without needing to check—six gold angels and thirty silver rials, a worthwhile sum (and all through his own diligence and industry, in such a short space of time—and his aunts reckoned he’d never amount to anything) but not nearly enough to represent a stake or a fresh start somewhere, even if there was anywhere in this uncannily emptying world worth going to. Besides, making a run for it just because an unidentified woman had sent him a hanky was probably over-reacting. Probably.

  He lay awake trying to make sense of it, eventually fell asleep, overslept and woke up late for work, with an eyeful of sun streaming in through the hayloft door. He pulled on his coat—quick check to make sure his money was still there, yes, good—and stumbled down the ladder.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t sleep, and then—” He broke off. Egles wasn’t alone.

  “That’s him,” he heard Egles say. She turned round and smiled at him.

  It was probably, he later decided, because he’d grown up in a small village out in the country. Nobody left, no strangers ever arrived; you knew everybody from birth. So, with regard to women, you’d seen them grow up, from kids to girls, from girls to mature women; people you know change gradually, and you don’t tend to notice, at least not consciously. Eventually the day comes when you discover you’ve known for some time that so-and-so isn’t a skinny little nuisance with sticking-out teeth any more, she’s now something quite other and extremely interesting, but nobody comes as a surprise.

  “You’re Musen,” she said.

  “That’s right. Who—?”

  She turned back to Egles. “Mind if I borrow him for a minute? I’ll bring him back, I promise.”

  Egles was trying so hard not to grin. “You go ahead, miss. Stay here if you like. I’m just going out back.”

  Later, he realised she wasn’t really beautiful. Her face was a long oval, her eyes were very big and dark, there was something odd about her nose, which was long, thin and flat. Her mouth was rather low down, and her cheekbones were exaggeratedly high. Tall as a Rhus woman, but thin, narrow-shouldered, almost bony. Between thirty and thirty-five? Merebarton women didn’t look like that past twenty-four, but she was definitely older than that. Analysed objectively, though, not beautiful at all.

  He was having trouble breathing. “Sorry,” he heard himself say, in a nervous, squeaky voice. “I don’t think I know you.”

  “Of course you don’t.” Same accent as the major’s, but it suited her. A high voice, remarkably clear. “But I carry charcoal down to the fourth hearth.”

  “You’re a—” He stopped, not sure what to say. “I didn’t think—”

  “Women in the craft? All right. Ask me something.”

  His mind, of course, went completely blank. The only question he could think of was about six minutes into the lesser office of the tongs, and he wasn’t sure he could remember what the correct answer was. Still. “What came after the seventh fold?”

  “Easy.” She grinned. “He folded it seven times and laid it in the fire till it was white. Then he forged it five times with five hammers. Want me to tell you what they were?”

  Perfectly right. As she said it, he remembered the Master, trying to teach him. “No, that’s fine. I’m sorry. Only, where I come from—”

  “Now, please be quiet,” she said. “I haven’t got all day. You know a man called Teucer.”

  “Yes.”

  “You stole the handkerchief from him.”

  “No, I—”

  “Please,” she said. “Now, was there anything inside it? Wrapped up.”

  He was going to say no, but instead he stopped and tried to remember. Teucer had been asleep. The corner of the handkerchief had been sticking out of his pocket, just the corner; it had snagged his eye, the way a bramble catches lightly on your sleeve and hooks in. He’d made sure Teucer was in deep—watched his eyes, listened to his breathing, the usual; then he’d pinched the visible corner between the thumbnail and forefinger-tip of his left hand and tugged, slowly and very gently, no more than half an inch at a time. It had taken a while. You learn to be patient, it’s like tickling fish. Every two inches he stopped, let go and counted to twenty, his eyes fixed on Teucer’s face—you never look at the thing itself, because if the sleeper wakes up, and there you are with your eyes glued to something half in and half out of his pocket, it’s hard to be plausibly innocent. He remembered that there were a couple of times when he’d come up against an obstruction, when the fabric jammed and he had to use extra strength. You have to be so careful; pull evenly, building in a straight, rising line, just like drawing a bow, and as soon as you feel the resistance overcome, stop pulling and have a rest. And those obstructions could have been—

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t know.”

  “There could have been,” he said. “Maybe there was something in there, and it came out in his pocket while I was—”

  “Right.” Something about how she said that suggested to him that he didn’t have to explain, not the technical stuff. She knew about taking things from people’s pockets, quite possibly rather more than he did. Another craft that women could belong to, apparently. “So it’d still be there, that’s what you’re saying.”

  “I don’t know,” he repeated, feeling ashamed. “Depends what it was.”

  She was considering him as a problem to be overcome and there were several different ways of tackling it. “The village was called Old Street,” she said. “And there was a craftsman there, but it wasn’t the blacksmith.
I know, it usually is, but not there. They’re a bit unfriendly in Old Street; they’re scared of the war, they don’t have anything to do with the outside world any more. So, nobody comes or goes. But the craftsman needed to send something out, it was quite urgent, and then you two turned up. So she wrapped it up in the handkerchief and stuffed it in your friend’s pocket while he was asleep. The idea was, when he was caught by the cavalry—”

  “Hold on,” Musen said. “This—”

  “Craftsman.”

  “She knew Guifres’ troop was looking for us.”

  “For Teucer, yes. It was ideal. Teucer would be picked up but not harmed, and a fellow craftsman could get the handkerchief back from him and pass it on where it had to go. Only,” she added, “you stole it. And nobody figured that out until now. Apparently it never occurred to them that friends would steal from each other in a situation like that.”

  “I—”

  She ignored him. “As soon as Diudat showed me the handkerchief—” She stopped. “The old fence. Didn’t you know that was his name?”

  “I didn’t, no.”

  “Soon as I saw it, I knew what had happened. Too late by then, of course. Teucer was on a ship. He’s arrived safely, by the way, in case you’re interested.”

  “What’ll happen to him?”

  “He’s fine,” she said. “But he hasn’t got it, what we’re looking for. You haven’t, either.” He wondered how she knew that. No, he knew how she knew that. When? Whoever it was that had searched him must’ve been very good. “I’m levelling with you,” she went on, “because you’re a craftsman, because you’re serious about it or you wouldn’t have made these.” She took them out of her sleeve—impossible, there wasn’t room for them in there—and fanned them in her hand with a casual skill he couldn’t help admiring. “Believe me when I tell you, this is all about the craft, and what we’re looking for is very important to us. If you love the craft, you’ll help me and not lie any more. Well?”