Colours in the Steel

BARDAS LOREDAN

There were, Loredan knew perfectly well, no gods; and if there were any, they lived far away in less enlightened lands, well out of earshot. Nevertheless, he prayed; If I get out of this, I’ll pack it in for good, retire, set up a school or something. And if there were gods, he knew they wouldn’t believe him, because they’d heard it all before. And here he still was, an advocate of ten years’ call, a man who showed promise while still young but failed to live up to it, and then simply failed to live.

Perhaps the charcoal people would settle, after all. Men like Alvise only fight one in ten of the cases they’re retained for, because no litigant likes to go into court when there’s money at stake knowing for certain he’s going to lose. But the charcoal cartel weren’t the settling kind; he’d met them, recognised them at once. They were the sort of men who get themselves tangled up in the most desperate messes through their own pig-headed greed, and then react with astonishment and fury when the inevitable disaster follows. He could picture them, striding out of the court with their heavy gowns flapping round their ankles, muttering bitterly about the incompetence of their late advocate and the unfairness of the legal system, and swearing great oaths that they’d rather be skinned alive than pay one penny of the bill for such a badly handled case.

I could always back out, he thought. There is always that possibility. It would make perfectly good sense; I’d be finished in the profession, but so what? I’d still be alive. I could do something else.

He grinned, and rolled over onto his side. Of course, he could never withdraw from a case just because he was afraid, or even because he knew he was going to die. It was one of those things that just don’t happen; if it did, the whole system would collapse and then where would everyone be? It was, after all, the solidity of its commercial law that had made Perimadeia the greatest trading city in the world. And besides, you didn’t become an advocate in order to live for ever.

He had decided, many years ago, that the last thing he wanted to do was live for ever. Twelve years later, here he was; and if he hadn’t done much, he’d done enough. Traditionally, a fencer’s coffin is borne by six of his colleagues in the profession, wearing their collegiate robes and with empty scabbards on their belts, while on the coffin lid rides the deceased’s second-best sword – his best sword, of course, having reverted to the winner – and a single white rose, symbolic of Justice. In practice it was rather different, of course; the coffin rode on the shoulders of six men who’d had the sense to leave the profession early and take up pallbearing instead, the sword was hired from the undertaker and, somehow, it always seemed to rain. He’d stood beside a lot of muddy graves when he was younger. These days he didn’t bother to go.

Just my luck that the Guelan should break right when I need it most.

A thought occurred to him and he leant over, groaning, and groped under the bed until his fingers made contact with a coarse woolen bundle. He pulled it out. It was garlanded with cobwebs and grey with dust, but the knot fell away easily, leaving him holding a battered black scabbard with a plain brown steel hilt projecting out of it. Now here’s a thing, he said to himself; I haven’t given it a thought in ten years. But why not? It can’t make any difference, after all.

Twelve years ago, a young man already old after three years in the foreign wars had joined the fencing school by the Protector’s Gate, paying his fees in ready money from a fat purse and bringing with him a cheap, plain sword with no maker’s name on the ricasso. Once he’d finished the course, there was enough coin left in the purse to buy a genuine Guelan, and the cheap, plain sword had been consigned to second best, third best, emergency use only and finally a blanket under a bed on the seventh floor of Island Thirty-nine. It wasn’t, properly speaking, a lawyer’s sword at all; just a military blade from the arsenal ground down to reduce the weight, roughly re-tempered and fitted with a plain turned grip. It had killed a lot of men before it lost weight, but since then it had been used for school work and practice, never once being called upon to carry the weight of a man’s life. It was worth a quarter and a half, if that. He’d never liked it much. It didn’t owe him anything. It would do.

He closed his eyes and went to sleep. His dreams were not pleasant.

Temrai looked down into his cup and saw that it was still almost half-full of the stuff. He wished it wasn’t. He was tempted to pour it away while nobody was looking; but his new friends had bought it for him and to pour away a gift would be an insult as well as waste. Even so; it tasted horrible and it was making him feel ill.

‘And is it true,’ one of them was asking, ‘that when you get old they take you out into the desert and leave you there to die? Only I heard somewhere…’

They had stopped by his bench earlier that evening; four broad-shouldered middle-aged men who worked on the furnaces, cheerful, loud-voiced and sociable. When he’d seen them bearing down on him, Temrai had felt a little apprehensive. It’d only be natural if they resented a foreigner (and a plainsman, at that) walking into the arsenal and taking a job that would normally have gone to one of their own. From what he’d overheard, many of the more skilled workers in the arsenal belonged to some sort of secret clan reserved for masters in the craft; perhaps these men belonged to it and had come to chase him away. It was something of a relief to find out that all they wanted was to invite him to drink with them.

‘No,’ he replied, shaking his head (and for some reason that was enough to make him feel dizzy). ‘That’s not right at all. We have great respect for old people, who are so wise and know so much. They make all our decisions and tell us how things ought to be done. My father…’

He caught himself just in time, and covered the mistake by pretending to choke on his drink. The men thought that was highly entertaining and pounded him on the back with their enormous hands. Strange, that; he had a vague impression that they were sharing some hidden joke, almost as if someone had tied a rat to another man’s pigtail without him noticing.

‘What you’re probably thinking of,’ he went on, ‘is when a man grows very sick, so that he knows he’s going to die. When that happens, quite often he’ll go off into the plains on his own, so as to spare his clan the distress of watching him die. And it saves on rations too, of course. Among my people, waste is a terrible thing.’

He noticed that he was slurring his words a little, like a man with bad toothache whose jaw becomes inflamed. That and the dizziness made him want to go back to his sleeping place and lie down. He would have assumed it was something to do with the drink, except that the men had drunk far more than him, and if anything they were even livelier than usual.

‘Drink up,’ said one of them, whose name was Milas. ‘Don’t they have wine where you come from, then?’

Temrai replied that in his country they drank milk. The men nodded sagely and their eyes sparkled. ‘Wine’s better than milk,’ said another one, Divren. ‘Good for you. Full of sweetness, makes you strong.’

Milas tilted the jug and Temrai found his cup was full again. He took a long pull at it, to get it over with. They were really very kind, hospitable people, but the stuff was disgusting.

‘We heard,’ said the oldest of the men, Zulas, ‘that in your country the men all have a hundred wives each. Is that true?’

‘Oh, no,’ Temrai assured him. ‘Never more than six, and that’s only great lords, like my-Most people just have one or two. It’s because there’s more women than men.’

‘Are there? Why’s that?’

‘Because a lot of the men get killed,’ Temrai replied. He burped, but nobody seemed offended. ‘Fighting, or lost on the plains, or else they just go away for a few years. And then their wives marry someone else. Although,’ he added, frowning, ‘I don’t think marriage means the same here as it does at home.’

Zulas winked at the others. ‘Doesn’t it?’ he asked. ‘What’s the difference, then?’

Temrai thought hard. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘where I come from the men are out on the plains most of the time seeing to the horses and the sheep, while the women stay back at the wagons, so they don’t tend to spend a lot of time together. But here, they live with each other all the time. I think it’s amazing. Men and women weren’t meant to be together like that. They’re different. They get on each other’s nerves.’

‘True,’ said Milas, nodding gravely. ‘Here, have some more.’

‘Puts hairs on your chest,’ Divren agreed.

‘But then,’ Temrai went on, ‘there’s so many things that are different here. Like buying and selling, for instance. In this place, everything’s bought and sold; what you eat, what you drink, clothes, where you live. So you have a whole lot of people who do nothing but make shirts, and another lot who do nothing but buy food from one load of people and sell it to another load.’ He waved indiscriminately at his surroundings. ‘And there’s people who earn their living owning a house that other people live in. That’s strange. Or take you, I mean, us; it’s all different back home. All you do, or rather we do, is make swords all day. At home the smiths do smithing one day in ten, and the rest of the time they’re running their stock or fixing up their wagons or curing hides or whatever, just like everyone else. Even my – even the great lords ride out to the flocks when they haven’t got clan business to deal with. So we hardly buy and sell anything. It’s odd,’ Temrai went on, ‘because our way seems to work pretty well, and so does yours. They’re just as good as each other, but different.’

‘Wise words,’ said the fourth man, Skudas. ‘Wisdom in wine, isn’t that what they say? Have another.’

‘Thanks,’ Temrai said, holding out his cup. It got better the more you had. ‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘Here you’ve got people whose only job is fighting, and when they’re not fighting they’re practising fighting. All my people fight when there’s fighting to be done, but the rest of the time we don’t fight at all. Well, hardly at all. Mind you, we do fight quite a lot of the time, clan against clan and nation against nation. But it’s always over in a day, while you people go on fighting the same war for years on end. Where’s the point in that? Surely the whole point of fighting’s to see who’s the strongest, not who’s got the cleverest lords who can spin the war out even though the enemy’s got heaps more men. Doesn’t make sense to me.’

Zulas waved his hand for another jug, then said, ‘So you don’t like it here, then?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Temrai replied, shaking his head vigorously. ‘Didn’t say that at all. I think it’s absolutely wonderful here, all these incredible things you’ve got, and the way you all live heaped on top of each other and hardly ever lose your tempers. If my people had to live here cooped up like horses in a corral, they’d be at each other’s throats in a day or so. But it’s hard to have feuds and quarrels when you’re all doing things together, like getting the caravan across a river or bringing the horses in to be broken.’ He stopped to drink more wine, and then continued, ‘I think the clan’s much more like a family than your city is. Everybody’s a man on his own here, and you all live in your own houses and shut the doors at night and lots of you don’t even know the people who live half an hour’s walk away. That’s strange.’

Another strange thing, Temrai noticed, was the way the room was going round. He’d only ever felt this way before when they’d banked up the fire for a dance for the gods and the old women had burnt herbs and holy leaves. It was all right to feel dizzy and strange then, because the gods came down and joined in the dances, and the presence of gods has a peculiar effect on mortals. Could it be that there were gods in the inn tonight? He’d heard stories of gods going round in disguise to keep an eye on mortals, and if the gods were travelling, it was only logical they’d put up at an inn for the night rather than sleep out in the open. Surreptitiously he glanced round, trying to spot anybody who might be a god. He couldn’t see any obvious candidates, but that didn’t mean anything. But wasn’t it the case that there weren’t supposed to be any gods in the City of the Sword? Well, maybe there were, and perhaps that’s why they’re in disguise. In which case, best to pretend he hadn’t noticed anything.

‘And another thing,’ he said.

He carried on talking for a while; but now he couldn’t clearly make out what he was saying. It was like trying to listen to a conversation in the next tent. He could hear a voice, but the words were all bent and worn away, like on a coin picked out of a river. If he’d been right about gods, then the chances were there were quite a few of them in the inn tonight. Also, he didn’t feel terribly well.

The next thing he was aware of was the landlord shaking him by the arm and speaking to him in a weary, disagreeable voice. Temrai tried to explain about the gods, and that appeared to annoy the landlord, because soon after that he found himself out in the street, lying in a puddle of something that didn’t seem to be water and feeling very sick. He looked around for Zulas and Milas and the others but they’d gone. He was terribly afraid he’d offended them by acting strangely; he was, after all, a foreigner, and a plainsman into the bargain. It had been very kind of them to buy him all that wine. He’d have to make a point of thanking them the next day, and saying he was sorry.

Eventually a soldier with a lantern came along and kicked him until he got up. After that he wandered around for a while trying to find where he lived, gave up and went to sleep under a wagon. His last thought before his mind slipped away was that the city was a very strange place indeed, but some of the people were very kind and good-hearted; good old Zulas and Minas and Skudas and Divren. He would have to remember to make a point of asking his father to spare their lives, once the city had been taken.

Twelve years ago, a party of horsemen rode in through the Dawn Gate. They looked ragged and tired; their clothes were patched and threadbare, their mailshirts mostly held together with wire. Many of them were as hideous as the ogres in children’s stories; badly set fractures left limbs out of shape, scar tissue had formed over wounds that had been inadequately dressed or septic. Men and horses alike were almost comically thin, their hands and feet seeming out of all proportion to their bodies.

They were, or course, heroes, though nobody came out to meet them, and a few people threw things at them because they’d lost. They were all that was left of the army.

Maxen’s Pitchfork had been, for as long as anyone could remember, the city’s one and only defence against the vague and constant threat posed by the nomadic clans of the western plains. Because they did their job so well, the citizens took them for granted, giving them honour, respect and twenty-five quarters a month all found; accordingly they never thought to ask themselves how a thousand heavy cavalry could possibly be expected to hold back the virtually limitless manpower of the clans. After all, it worked, and they did manage it; and whenever a citizen woke up in the middle of the night out of a nightmare of shrieking savages and clouds of arrows, he would remember General Maxen, Lord Count of the Exterior, turn over and go back to sleep.

But Maxen, who had spent thirty-eight of his sixty years in the field fighting the clans, suddenly did the inconceivable thing and died – of gangrene, following a fall from his horse during a routine punitive expedition. As soon as news of his death spread among the clans, there came the inevitable explosion. For the clansmen, Maxen had been quite simply the most terrifying thing in the world, a demonic force that appeared in the middle of the night, surrounded by blazing torches and slashing swords, killing every living thing in a whole caravan and then melting away into some crack in the earth, invisible in the vast emptiness of the plains. Maxen’s death was like the death of fear itself; so, when his second-in-command, Alsen, met the assembled clans beside the Crow River, they threw themselves against the Pitchfork as if charging straw dummies in a training exercise. Alsen, who had been on the plains twenty-five years since joining the regiment as an ordinary trooper, was a brilliant soldier, the kind whose campaigns might under other circumstances have been studied in military academies. As it was, he faced odds of twenty-five to one and inflicted such devastating losses on the enemy that an assault on the city was rendered impossible for many years to come. But he fell, and eight hundred and eighty of his men died with him. The husk of his army hurried back to Perimadeia under the command of Maxen’s nephew, a lad of twenty-three who had only been on the plains for seven years; one Bardas Loredan.