The Two of Swords, Volume 1

by K. J. Parker

  Axio smiled. “Not enough to share.”

  “Not if you’re walking,” Pleda said. “But if you were lucky enough to get a ride in a nice cart—”

  All sorts of issues there, needless to say. From Pleda’s perspective, the essential question was, could Musen drive a team of horses? Inevitably, Axio would be addressing the matter from a different angle. Not impossible, even so, that both parties could arrive at the same conclusion.

  “Indeed,” Axio said abruptly. “The hell with all this fighting, anyway. If I’d wanted to fight, I’d have stayed in the army. Isn’t that right, boys?”

  They might be fiercely and unthinkingly loyal to Axio; that didn’t mean they liked him. The looks on their faces suggested that, at that moment, they didn’t like him at all. That couldn’t have been lost on him, but he didn’t seem worried by it. Curious people, Pleda thought, can’t wait to be rid of them. But that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

  The arrangements were fairly straightforward. The four soldiers, Axio and Pleda rode in the back of the cart—they had to dump some of the gear, but no great loss; the soldiers and Axio at the far end, Pleda with his back to the driver’s bench and the sword across his knees. Musen and the soldiers’ weapons sat on the driver’s bench. Axio cheerfully handed over his knife, which Pleda took as definitive proof that he had another one. Still, wedged in between two of his friends in a cart that jolted horribly all the time, his capacity for sudden movement was somewhat diminished. Musen proved to be a competent driver, which was just as well.

  “You’re sure you know the way,” Axio asked, as they set off.

  “Oh yes,” Pleda replied cheerfully. “I know this country like the back of my hand.”

  Not long after midday, they saw the Greenstocks.

  They’d been going steadily uphill for a long time; the gradient was so gentle they’d hardly noticed it until, quite suddenly, the ground seemed to fall away at their feet, and they were looking down a steep slope, on the other side of which was a river and, beyond that, mountains.

  “We can’t get the cart down that,” said the archer.

  “Don’t have to,” Pleda replied. “We follow the top of this ridge for a bit, parallel with the river until we see a gap in the hills on our right. Then we turn left. There’s a road,” Pleda added hopefully. “Takes us straight there.”

  As a boy, Pleda had always loved the story about the boy who rescued an old woman from a lion, and the old woman turned out to be a witch, who gave him a magic something-or-other, whose special power was that everything he said thereafter turned out to be true. It was a ring, or a five-sided coin, or a walrus-ivory comb, or a pebble with a hole in it; something ordinary, anyway, something you might well pick up and forget about, and never realise you had. An hour before sunset, Pleda surreptitiously searched his pockets. He narrowed it down to the bit of old rag and the horn-handled penknife; could be either of those, or maybe, just possibly, it was luck or coincidence and not magic at all.

  “There’s the road, look,” he said, pointing. “Bang opposite the Powder Hill pass, just like I said it would be.”

  Axio tried to stand up to get a better view, but a jolt sat him down again; he landed hard on the knee of the man next to him, who winced. “That’s all right, then,” he said. “Tell you what. Let’s stop here for the night and then carry on in the morning. Don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

  They sat warily round a fire—Pleda wasn’t keen, because of the smoke, but Axio insisted; they smashed up the cart’s tool box for firewood—and ate the last of the biscuits and some rock-hard dried sausage from the archer’s pack. Nobody seemed to be in any hurry to go to sleep. It was going to be a long night.

  “Anybody fancy a game of cards?” Pleda said.

  He’d got their attention. “Why not?” Axio said, and reached in his pocket, from which he produced a beautiful ivory box with gilded hinges. “Should be enough light to see by for a little while.”

  Pleda hadn’t expected that. Still, it wasn’t unreasonable for a thief to have a luxury item like a pack of cards, especially if it came in a valuable box. “Let’s play Bust,” he said. “Eastern rules?”

  “Of course.” Axio smiled. “We’re all patriots here, aren’t we?” He opened the box and took out the pack. “Here we go,” he said. “Three cards, face upwards.”

  He dealt a card and suddenly Pleda couldn’t breathe. He clenched his hands very tight and concentrated all his efforts on keeping his face straight and not staring. Axio dealt quickly and with the easy fluency of long practice. Even in broad daylight, it would’ve been next to impossible, for anybody else, to see how he cheated.

  “And three covered,” Axio went on, dealing the face-down cards. “All right, here we go. Stuiver in and a penny raise.”

  “Oh,” Musen said. “Are we playing for money?”

  “Bless the child,” Axio said.

  “I don’t have any.”

  Pleda dug in his pocket, found his purse, picked at the tie, pinched out the knot, emptied the purse on the ground, picked out a dozen quarters and flung them at him. Then, trying really hard not to let his hand shake, he took up his cards.

  Seven of Arrows. Two of Spears. Poverty. His mouth was dry as a bone. “I’m in,” muttered the soldier to his left, and Pleda heard a coin chink. His turn. “Just a second,” he said. Two crows in the tree, and a jug, broken in three pieces.

  “Come on,” Axio said. “Before it gets too dark to see.”

  “I’m thinking,” Pleda snapped. He forced himself to consider the cards tactically. With the open three, he had a pride in Arrows, Poverty and the Angel. “In and up twopence,” he said.

  “Your turn.” Axio was talking to Musen.

  “I’m in.” The boy was frowning. “And raise a penny.”

  The Angel’s crown had four fleurets. No question about it. The archer shook his head and folded. “In and up a penny,” Axio said. “Right, I dealt, so you start.”

  The soldier to Pleda’s left bought a card, threw away the Five of Arrows. Pleda snapped it up, dumped his two and raised twopence. Musen passed. Axio bought two and threw them away again. The soldier passed. “Buy one,” Pleda said. Axio handed him the Star-Crossed Lovers, which he dumped. Musen passed. “Right,” Axio said. “Here’s a quarter says it’s my lucky day. Let’s meld.”

  Pleda scrabbled on the ground, located a quarter by feel and flipped it into the middle. They all laid out. Axio won; a run in Spears and the Ship. He was grinning. “Go again?”

  Two of the soldiers were scowling at him. “Yes, why not?” Pleda said. Musen nodded. The archer shrugged and said, “Go on, then.” Axio gathered the cards. “I won, so I deal,” he said. “Let’s make it interesting. Stuiver in and raises are a quarter.”

  Pleda didn’t watch him shuffle. For his open cards, he got the Three, Four and Five of Shields, an open run. Covered, Seven of Shields, Hope and the Ten of Swords.

  There is no suit of Swords. Not in a normal pack.

  “Tens are wild,” Axio said. “Right, who’s in?”

  The soldiers and Musen looked at Pleda’s open cards and decided not to bother. Axio threw a stuiver into the middle, then another one. His open cards were rubbish. “Well?”

  “Tens are wild, did you say?” Musen picked up three stuivers from the pile in the grass beside him. A week’s money where he came from. “I’m in.”

  Axio beamed at him. “Right,” he said. “Since it’s just you and me, your two stuivers and double it.”

  Another week’s pay. “Meld,” he said. He turned over his cards. “Three to Seven of Shields, plus the trump.”

  Axio picked one card out of his hand and turned it face outwards. It was the Ace of Swords. “Sorry,” he said, and scooped up the money.

  Musen frowned. “Just a second, that’s not—”

  “Eastern rules,” Pleda said quickly. Musen stared at him, then shrugged.

  “Aces high in the East, remember?” Axio said. “Y
ou know what, I’m enjoying this. How about another? Or we could play Cats and Buckets.”

  Pleda stayed awake all night—he couldn’t have slept if he’d wanted to—but Axio made no attempt to talk to him privately; he rolled himself up in a thick blue blanket, with the archer’s pack for a pillow, and went straight to sleep. Pleda toyed with the idea of sending Musen to steal the ivory box from his pocket, but decided against it. He’d seen enough, anyway.

  Ace of Swords. The Ace, for crying out loud.

  Just before first light, he hauled himself up and shuffled a few yards the other side of the cart for a pee. When he got back, under his blanket, he found the ivory box. He covered it up and looked at Musen, who appeared to be fast asleep. He crawled under the blanket and opened the box by feel. It was empty.

  If Axio missed his treasure the next morning, he gave no sign of it. They resumed their places in the cart and set off down the miraculous road. Thirty miles, maybe less, to Merebarton.

  “Another good game,” Axio was saying, “is Blind Chopper. Do you know that one? We used to play it a lot in the army. It goes like this. Dealer deals five cards face down, you’re not allowed to look at them—”

  Pleda was having second thoughts about Axio’s men. At first he’d assumed they were deserters, with Axio as their officer; it was common enough, a platoon or half-platoon deciding it had had enough of the war, or finding itself in trouble on account of some breach of military law, or simply unable to resist the commercial opportunities of the total breakdown of civilisation. That might in some part explain the unswerving obedience, and the way Axio took them so completely for granted. Pleda was still fairly sure that the four silent men were soldiers—the way they walked, talked and moved, they couldn’t be anything else—but unless there were provinces of the Eastern empire he knew nothing about, which was rather unlikely, they most definitely weren’t Easterners. Possibly they were the other lot, which would make sense of Axio’s remark about all being patriots, and there was a degree of logic in a group of Western deserters moving east, where the ferociously keen military proctors couldn’t follow them. It was the loyalty thing that bothered him most; more than loyalty, it was rather a sort of involuntary devotion. It reminded Pleda of a shepherd he’d known; horrible man, who used to take his bad temper out on his dog, but the more he kicked the dog for no reason, the more it worshipped him. That and the business with the cards—Well. Axio had cheated on the deal, he’d seen it quite plainly. To win, of course, to make money. But the hands he’d dealt; oh, he was a clever man, sure enough. And the pack (yes, but it had been Pleda who’d suggested a game of cards), and the Ace of bloody Swords. He made a quick interpretation of the two hands; inconclusive. Pleda didn’t really believe in fortune-telling, because with a bit of skill and sophistry you could make a deal of cards mean anything you wanted it to. The cards Axio had chosen for him could have meant he’d reached the end of his journey and now it was time to hand his burden on to a better, stronger man; even that would be a bit too vague and convenient to base a decision on. Of course, he had no way of knowing that the handsome man really was Axio, though if you were going to assume someone’s identity, there were a lot of better ones you could choose. One thing he was sure of. No way in hell could Axio be the Ace of Swords—

  Could he?

  He glanced at him, then looked away quickly. The good looks, of course, the easy manner, commanding personality; you could add the honest and sincere conviction that he was the centre and sole purpose of the universe. And smart, too, almost as smart as he thought he was. And it would explain a number of otherwise inexplicable mysteries—why the war was dragging on, why both empires were going to hell, why nobody seemed to be doing anything. But no. Pleda didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it, just as he could never bring himself to believe it if someone told him the fire god created the heavens and the earth for a bet, and that plagues, wars, earthquake and famines were his idea of livening up a tedious afternoon. That’s the whole essence of faith. You wouldn’t believe something like that, even if it was true.

  All that day, oddly enough, Pleda had trouble staying awake. He yawned all the time, and only the ferocious bumps and jolts kept him from nodding off. That, he knew, would be a bad idea. Now that they’d found the road, his usefulness was at an end, whereas the cart was still every bit as valuable as it had been. Just because you’ve played cards with someone doesn’t mean they wouldn’t cut your throat in an instant, with something as precious and rare as a cart at stake.

  The soldiers had scabbed up nicely, no immediate prospect of infection, which suggested that the man he’d taken the sword from had kept it scrupulously cleaned and polished; not like an old soldier, who knows that rust and blood poisoning can make a valuable contribution to the war effort. From time to time he caught them looking at him; a hungry sort of look, like a dog watching a joint of meat just out of reach on the kitchen table. He hoped they were good dogs.

  He wanted to ask Musen if the countryside was starting to look familiar, but anything he said would be plainly heard by Axio and his men, so he couldn’t. All he could see of Musen was his back. When Axio made noises about stopping to stretch their legs and eat something, he put him off with a vague nearly there; the sun gave the lie to that as it lifted overhead and headed west, and still nothing to see except heather and gorse. Hell of a place to make a living, Pleda thought; don’t suppose the war’s helped much, either. At the very least there should be sheep at this time of year—summer grazing—and the shepherds living out at the shielings. But the only living things he’d seen had been larks and crows.

  “Your boots,” he said.

  Axio had been gazing vacantly up at the sky. He sat up a little. “Sorry, are you talking to me?”

  “Yes. Your boots.”

  “What about them?”

  Pleda made him wait for a moment or so. “There you were, the five of you, miles from anywhere with no horses. So, wherever you came from, you must’ve walked.”

  “Correct.”

  “Not in those boots you didn’t. Soles are barely marked.”

  “Oh, I see.” Axio beamed at him. “You’re quite right.” He lowered his voice, mock-furtive. “Entirely between you and me, strictly speaking, these aren’t my boots. Well, they are now, of course. Their previous owner had no further use for them.”

  Pleda studied him, as if learning him for an audition. A plausible enough explanation for a bandit to give. But, the night before they’d encountered Axio and his gang, he’d looked all round to see if there was anyone, anyone at all, out on the moors with them, and he was absolutely sure he’d seen nothing and nobody. Impossible that anyone could have walked, particularly in the dark, from the horizon to where they’d stopped the cart in the space of one night. But when he’d woken up and found them sitting there on those idiotic chairs, there were definitely no horses. And boot soles that clean and unscuffed had barely touched heather at all.

  “Right,” he said. “That explains that, then.”

  “Glad to have set your mind at rest. I won’t go into details, if you don’t mind.”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  The cart stopped with a jolt. “What’s the matter now?” Axio said. “We’re not stuck in the mud again, are we?”

  It meant taking his eyes off Axio and his men, but Pleda twisted himself round. “What’ve you stopped for?” he said. Musen didn’t answer. The horses were still, their ears back, their heads up. Something’s wrong, Pleda thought; there’s something the horses don’t like, and they’ve stopped.

  “Drive on,” he said.

  Musen didn’t turn round. “Look,” he said.

  The cart shifted as Axio stood up. “Where did they come from?” he said.

  “Who?” Pleda demanded; then Axio dropped to his knees, not caring who or what he landed on. There was a yelp of pain from the man next to him. “Get down, you bloody fool,” he shouted. Who to? Then Pleda heard a sound he recognised, a sort of swish, followed by a
solid noise. Missed, said a voice inside him, because nothing appeared to have happened. Then Musen fell sideways off the bench.

  He landed on his bad arm, but he didn’t make a sound. That wasn’t good.

  “Sod this,” Axio said suddenly. He jumped up, snatched the sword from Pleda’s hand and vaulted out of the cart. His men followed as though tied to him by a rope. Another swish, this time so close that Pleda felt the slipstream as the arrow—he’d caught just a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye, a shapeless blur going so fast he couldn’t really track it—passed by the left side of his head. He threw himself face down into the bed of the cart.

  The boy, he thought. He tried to get up, but fear was like a hand pressing him down, so instead he crawled down the cart and fiddled with the tailgate bolts; they were stiff and he couldn’t get them free. He used the heel of his hand as a hammer, and got cut. He tried again with his other hand, the bolts shifted and the tailgate dropped down with a bang. He slithered out over the back edge and landed on the heather with a thump that winded him.

  Musen was lying on his side, quite still. Beyond him, Pleda could see Axio and his men, fighting—wrong word, it was too one-sided for a fight. They were outnumbered three to one at least, but the harvester faces far greater odds, one scythe against a hundred thousand stalks; it was like watching a skilled man cutting wheat, the same momentum, small, efficient movements, controlled deployment of strength, footwork, concentration and, above all, experience. Pleda thought, they weren’t anything like that when they were fighting me. He left them to it and crawled over to where Musen lay.

  He turned him over; he was breathing, which was good, but the arrow was through him and out the other side, the shoulder side of the collarbone. There was also a big smear of blood and an ugly graze on the side of his head—he must have bashed it falling off the cart, and that was what had put him out. Pleda realised he had no idea what he was supposed to do. Damaging people he’d learned about, but fixing them once damaged hadn’t been covered on the course he went on.