The Proof House

CHAPTER SIX

No, no, they’d told him – they’d sounded quite shocked – you mustn’t call it a civil war, it was a rebellion. It’d only have been a civil war if they’d won.

It wasn’t the sort of victory Temrai wanted to dwell on any more than he had to; but it was in order, diplomatically speaking, for his new neighbours in the provincial office to express their pleasure, now it was all safely over, that the best man had won. A simple letter would have done; or a messenger with his words written out for him in big letters on a bit of parchment; there wasn’t really any need to send a full proconsular delegation (although strictly speaking, as Deputy Proconsul Arshad carefully explained, since the mission was to a recognised non-aligned friendly sovereign state, from a provincial directorate as opposed to a provincial governor, it being a directly governed province and therefore in theory under the direct supervision of the chancellor of the Empire, by way of his duly appointed delegates, protocol did require a personal attendance by the senior ranking diplomat; anything less, Arshad implied, would have been an insult, or at the very least a display of bad manners and ignorance).

‘I see,’ Temrai replied untruthfully. ‘Well, it’s very kind of you to have come all this way; but as you can see, I’m still very much in one piece, as are the rest of my senior officers and ministers; really, in fact, no harm done.’ He stopped, unable to think of anything else to say. Of all the people he’d met in the course of his extremely eventful life, Deputy Proconsul Arshad was the most inhuman. Light seemed to fall away into his eyes like water draining into sand, and when he spoke, the words seemed to come from a great way off. Temrai felt compelled to carry on talking, in an effort to fill the gap in nature the man seemed to produce. ‘Of course,’ Temrai went on, ‘it was a dreadful business; we were fighting people who we thought of as our friends – well, more than friends, family. I’m still not sure what it was all about, to be honest with you. It just happened, I suppose. One minute we were all on the same side, wanting the same things, just not completely in agreement about how to go about achieving them. Next thing we knew, we weren’t talking any more, and they’d left the camp and gone off somewhere with their horses and sheep and goats. Well, that was all right, if they didn’t want to stay here, that was up to them. But then they started making trouble; nothing terrible, just awkward, rude I suppose you could call it. They wouldn’t let some of our people water their stock at a river they’d decided was theirs; stupid thing to argue over, especially since if our side had moved a couple of miles up river, they’d have been drinking exactly the same water (just a few minutes earlier) and everybody would have been happy.

‘But it didn’t turn out that way, worse luck; first there was a standoff, then there was a scuffle, you couldn’t call it more than that, but a man was killed, so I had to get involved; looking back, I keep asking myself if I could have handled it differently, found some way not to make an issue out of it. But I found myself insisting that the man who’d struck the actual blow had to be sent back here to answer for what he’d done; they refused, so I sent some people to fetch him. There was more fighting-’ He shook his head. ‘It shouldn’t have happened, gods know, but it did; and now here we are, looking back on our first civil war. I suppose it’s a sign of how far we’ve come, in a way. I mean, it’s things like this that sort of define a nation.’ Temrai bit his lip; he couldn’t believe some of the things he was hearing himself say. But Deputy Proconsul Arshad was just sitting there, drawing the words out of him like a child sucking an egg. Presumably that was what he’d come for. Even so, he couldn’t really see the point of the exercise. It was like deliberately opening a vein.

‘A most unhappy sequence of events,’ Arshad said eventually, moving his head very slightly forward, though the rest of his body remained motionless. He had an ugly scar running from the corner of his left eye right down to the lobe of his ear, and it was all Temrai could do not to stare at it helplessly. ‘Let us hope that by dealing with the problem so quickly and decisively, you’ve effectively forestalled any further opposition to what we consider to be a most welcome and positive program of social reforms. As you say, if your actions here have ensured that something like this is unlikely ever to happen again, you’re entitled to feel a considerable degree of satisfaction.’

‘Thank you,’ Temrai replied, though he wasn’t entirely sure what he was thanking this peculiar man for. What he really wanted, of course, was for the Son of Heaven and his grim-faced retinue to go away and never come back. Maybe there was a special way diplomats could say that sort of thing without giving offence or starting a war; but if there was, nobody had let him in on the secret. ‘Personally, I’ve had enough of wars and fighting to last me a lifetime. I mean to say, just because you’re really quite good at something, it doesn’t actually follow that you like doing it. Definitely that way with me and fighting wars – well, not just me, all of us, really. I’d say that, as a nation, we’ve been through all that proving-ourselves stuff and now it’s time to move on.’

Deputy Proconsul Arshad studied him for a moment in silence, as if making up his mind whether to knock him on the head now or throw him back and let him grow a little bigger. ‘I most sincerely hope those aspirations will prove to be attainable,’ he said. ‘For the present, may I remind you of something from my people’s most respected treatise on the art of war. To paraphrase – necessarily – it says that trying to make peace without total victory is like trying to make soup without onions; it can’t be done.’ He didn’t smile, but there was a space for where a smile would have been, had he been human. ‘You have work to do; I’ve trespassed on your time long enough. May I conclude by saying that the Empire is delighted that at long last we have you for a neighbour.’

When Arshad had gone – Temrai saw him leave, but he had a totally irrational feeling that he might still be there somewhere, lurking – he breathed a long sigh of relief and asked, ‘Anybody care to tell me what all that was about?’

Poscai, the newly appointed treasurer (his predecessor had been on the other side in the civil war, and hadn’t survived it), smiled ruefully. ‘Welcome to politics,’ he said. ‘They say it gets easier as you go along, but I have my doubts. I think it gets worse and worse, until finally both sides give up and go to war, the way human beings were meant to.’

Temrai shook his head. ‘Why on earth should they want to start a war with us? We haven’t done them any harm. And I can’t believe we’ve got anything they could possibly want. Do you really think they’re going to attack us, Poscai? Maybe I wasn’t listening properly, but I don’t think I heard anything you could actually describe as a threat. Nothing so straightforward,’ he added.

General Hebbekai pulled the cushion off the chair Arshad had been sitting on, put it down next to Temrai’s feet and sat on it. ‘Oh, there were threats all right. If the provincial office tells you it likes the shoes you’re wearing, that’s a threat: they’re going to kill you and take your shoes. If they say it’s a nice day for the time of year, that’s a threat too. If they don’t say anything at all, just sit there and smile at you, that’s a really bad threat. You don’t think a man like that’d come all this way just to borrow a pair of shears.’

Temrai shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘And neither would you, come to that. Face it, Hebbekai, we don’t know anything about these people, or at least not yet.’

Poscai shook his head. ‘Speak for yourself,’ he said. ‘Here’s a cold fact for you. At any one time, Arshad and his friends in the provincial office – that’s just one province, remember, and by no means the biggest province in the Empire – they’ve got a standing army of at least a hundred and twenty thousand men, all highly trained and beautifully equipped, not to mention lavishly paid. Armies aren’t for decoration; if they’ve got an army like that it’s because they’re going to use it. Can’t do otherwise.’

‘I don’t follow,’ Temrai said.

‘Don’t you?’ Poscai frowned. ‘All right then, picture this. You have a hundred and twenty thousand of the best fighting men in the world, and you tell them you don’t need them any more. That’s it, they’ve done the job, they’re free to go. So what do they do? Remember, these are professional soldiers. After six months, you’d need another quarter of a million men just to get rid of them, kill them or chase them off your land. No, once you’ve got an army like that, you don’t really have a choice. You’ve got to keep on going. And now,’ he concluded sadly, ‘they’ve reached us.’

‘Poscai’s right,’ said Hebbekai. ‘Basically, we now have two options: fight them, or pack up and get out of their way.’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he went on, ‘I thought you’d worked all this out for yourself. That’s what we just had a civil war about.’

Temrai looked up, startled. ‘Are you serious?’

‘I thought it was obvious. They wanted to pack up and leave, after what happened to Ap’ Escatoy, follow the old ways – and what that really meant was, go back to the plains, as far away from these people as we can get. You decided against it. Your call. So we had a civil war. Isn’t that right? Poscai? Jasacai? You tell him, I can see he doesn’t believe me.’

Temrai held up his hand. ‘You’re trying to tell me I’ve just fought a civil war and nobody thought to tell me what it was about?’

‘We assumed you knew,’ said the chancellor, Jasacai. ‘After all, it’s so obvious.’

Temrai slid back in his chair and let his chin drop on his chest. ‘Not to me,’ he replied. ‘All right,’ he went on, ‘I want you to promise me something. Next time we go to war, will somebody please tell me why?’

Another Imperial diplomat, not quite so grand but nevertheless a thoroughly competent man with nearly twenty years’ experience, landed from a civilian merchant ship at Tornoys, the free port through which passed most of the traffic to and from the suddenly relevant backwater of the Mesoge. His name was Poliorcis, and although he wasn’t a Son of Heaven (originally he was from Maraspia province, right on the other side of the Empire) his appearance alone was enough to make him stand out among the usual crowd on Tornoys pier. Mesoge people, and the traders who did business with them, tended to be short, square and functional, as if someone had made a conscious effort to get as many of them as possible out of a limited quantity of raw material. By contrast, Maraspians came fairly close to extravagance verging on deliberate waste.

While the porters were unloading the cargo, near the bottom of which were the various barrels and bundles of trade-goods and junk that constituted his persona of itinerant textiles dealer, Poliorcis took the time to watch a mildly interesting and informative little scene being played out in the doorway of a ships’ chandlery at the town end of the pier.

Blink twice, and you’d have missed it; more likely, you’d have seen it out of the corner of your eye and dismissed it as too commonplace to be worth eavesdropping on. Hence, among other reasons, the provincial office’s habit of sending complete strangers when it wanted discreet observations made.

The old man was drunk; no question about that. Whether or not he was disorderly would depend on what passed for good order in any given place, and in Poliorcis’ opinion this was the sort of place where singing and waving one’s arms about in an exuberant but not overtly intimidating fashion would be, at worst, a nuisance and at best, ambience. Since the old man was quite decrepit, definitely not a threat to anybody but himself, and not that bad a singer if only he’d take the trouble to learn more than the first five words of any of the songs in his limited repertoire, Poliorcis was inclined to mark him down, in context, as ambience. At home, of course, it would have been quite different – ambience was about as popular as garbage from a fifth-storey window where he came from, and just as severely regarded by the authorities. But in a setting like this, you’d have expected no reaction beyond a tendency for passers-by to cross the road. Instead, a soldier coming out of a tavern stopped, reached out, grabbed the old man by the front of his disreputable shirt and cracked his head sharply against the doorframe, then let go and watched him slump to the ground, leaving a smear of blood on the timbers. At least four people must have seen the incident apart from Poliorcis, but none of them turned his head or gave any other indication of having noticed anything, whether from familiarity or policy the stranger wasn’t sure. The old man lay still; the soldier went on his way. It had been neatly done, as if it was something they practised in the drill-yard, over and over again until they got it right.

Having digested the scene and committed it to memory, Poliorcis carried on down the street towards the timber exchange, where he hoped to absorb some more significant ambience. He hadn’t gone more than a yard or so, however, when someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he stopped and turned round.

‘You look lost,’ said the man who’d stopped him. He was large, commonplace-looking, bald, with friendly looking grey eyes; the height aside, he looked typically Mesoge. ‘Are you looking for someone?’

Poliorcis thought for a moment. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I am.’

‘You’ve found him.’ The man was wearing a light-brown quilted wool shirt, faded from grey and frayed across the shoulders; only someone as widely travelled and professionally observant as Poliorcis would have recognised it as Scona military issue, designed to be worn under the heavy mailshirt the Scona army had adopted in the days of their affluence, when they could afford the best; not cumbersome and hot, like the leather arming-jack or habergeon the provincial office specified to go with their lighter, short-sleeved hauberk, or fancy and impractical, like the padded linen gambesons produced by the Perimadeian state factories; whoever designed the Scona shirt had given it a degree of thought, and had done his job well. ‘I’m Gorgas Loredan,’ the man went on. ‘If you’re who I think you are, you’ve come a long way to see me.’

Poliorcis dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘Travel is one of the great pleasures of my trade,’ he replied. ‘It’s not often these days that I can say I’ve come to a place I’ve never been before. You could say I collect places.’

Gorgas Loredan smiled. ‘National pastime with you people,’ he said. ‘Let’s go in the tavern there and have a drink.’

The tavern was large and busy; one main room with a high roof, filled with groups of three or four men standing and chatting amiably – farmers come to market, most of them, and a few merchants, corn-brokers, a handful of soldiers (allowed a certain amount of room by the other customers). At the back was a staircase leading to a gallery that ran round three sides of the building; there were chairs and tables up there, but only one or two of them were taken. Gorgas sat down with his back to the rail and pushed out the other chair with his foot for Poliorcis to sit on.

‘Excuse the melodrama,’ Gorgas said. ‘I don’t imagine for one moment that there’s anybody following either one of us, or anything silly like that. But you never know.’

Poliorcis nodded. ‘Actually, I think you’re very sensible. I don’t know what sort of intelligence service they’ve got-’

Gorgas pursed his lips. ‘Better than you’d think, actually,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they’re great ones for sending out secret agents or anything like that, but they do seem to have the knack of asking the right questions when they’re chatting to foreign visitors – traders, sailors, people on their way somewhere. I’m sorry,’ he went on, ‘I don’t think I quite caught your name.’

‘Euben Poliorcis.’ He reached into his satchel and produced a small, crumpled roll of parchment that could easily have been a letter of credit or a bill of lading. ‘I take it you’re familiar with Imperial seals,’ he said.

‘Not as familiar as I’d like to be,’ Gorgas replied with a grin. ‘For a start, I’d love to learn the knack you people have of lifting a seal off a letter without breaking it and then putting it back again when you’re done. Just an ordinary bit of thin wire, so I understand, heated red in a clean flame and drawn through the wax.’ With the nail of his left little finger Gorgas picked off the seal like a scab and flicked it away. ‘Now then, let’s see what we’ve got here. Yes, that all seems to be in order. Marvellous handwriting you people have. Talking of which, next time you come, bring me a dozen or so sheets of that linen paper they make in Ap’ Oezen. Can’t get it for love nor money in these parts.’

Poliorcis smiled thinly. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ll make a note of it. Now, as I recall, it was you who wanted to talk to us.’

Gorgas shrugged. ‘Someone had to make the first move,’ he said. ‘But it’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it? Our interests and yours coincide; let’s do business.’

Three men appeared at the head of the stairs, saw Gorgas and retreated quickly. ‘Interesting you see it that way,’ Poliorcis said. ‘Personally, I can’t quite see your interest in this matter. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but what harm has King Temrai ever done you?’

Gorgas shrugged. ‘Oh, I’ve got nothing against the man; I met him once, he seemed pleasant enough. But that’s hardly the point. I’m more concerned with what you people are planning, long term. As I see it, there’s a gap waiting to be filled. I want my share of it. You could do with my help. Simple commercial relationship. Let’s be straight with each other, and we’ll get along fine.’

Poliorcis leaned back in his chair, making distance between Gorgas and himself. ‘Indulge me,’ he said. ‘Looked at from one point of view, you’re trying to persuade the Empire to make an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state. I’d like to know why.’

‘Do you need persuading?’ Gorgas grinned. ‘I don’t think so. With Ap’ Escatoy out of the way, it’s pretty obvious you’ll keep on going till you reach the northern sea. Take Temrai out of the equation, and how does the picture look? There you are, right up against the coast, breathing down the neck of Shastel; the Island’s neither here nor there, they aren’t going to bother you, though I guess you could use their fleet. After that, sooner or later you’re going to come west, and pretty soon after that we’ll be neighbours. I’d far rather we had a good relationship when that time comes. So,’ he went on, leaning forward across the table, ‘here I am, coming to meet you. Makes sense, doesn’t it?’

Poliorcis smiled pleasantly. ‘I’d say you have a rather individual view of what our aspirations are. But,’ he went on, ‘let’s assume for now that your interpretation’s correct. Suppose we do have territorial ambitions in the peninsula; why do we need you? Haven’t we got enough resources of our own, men and materiel, to do the job without indebting ourselves to you?’

Gorgas laughed. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘No question about it. But that’s not your way. Never do a job yourselves if you can get someone else to do it for you. Sound business principles again, nothing wrong with that. With my army involved, it means you don’t have to take so many units away from garrison duty in other parts of the Empire. Sure, you’ve got vast resources; doesn’t mean to say you’re not spread pretty thin, even so. And we both know our history; weaken the garrison in any of the eastern provinces, you’re asking for trouble. Look what happened in Goappa, just recently, when you moved the seventh legion. Rather a close call, wasn’t it?’

‘Quite.’ Poliorcis’ smile didn’t waver. ‘How very well informed you are; I suppose it comes of running a bank. But I fancy we’d be able to scratch around and put together a large enough expedition without making a mistake like that again. We read the reports too, you know.’

‘Of course.’ Gorgas made a small gesture with his hands. ‘But why go to all that trouble? The strength of the plainspeople has always been their archers. To fight them you need to match their archers with your own. Most of your archers are stationed in the east. No earthly use sending a hundred thousand heavy infantry against Temrai; you’d be asking for a bloody good hiding. No, what you need is experienced, reliable longbowmen; and that’s what I’ve got to offer.’

Poliorcis didn’t reply immediately; he sat still with his hands folded in his lap. ‘All right,’ he said at last, ‘just suppose you’re right. Just suppose we do intend to attack Temrai, and we ask you for help. If it’s a sound business proposition, as you assure me it is, what do you get out of it? Just money? Or did you have something else in mind?’

A fly landed on the table, flicking with its legs at a sticky patch of spilt beer. Gorgas flicked it with his fingers before it could take off, killed it. ‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Money comes into it, certainly.’

‘Implying you want something else as well. Such as? Territory? You want a slice of Temrai’s land?’

Gorgas shook his head. ‘Good gods, no. What use would that be to me? For a start, I haven’t got the manpower, let alone the ships to keep darting backwards and forwards to protect my interests. Besides, that’d make us neighbours rather sooner than I’d like, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘All right.’ Poliorcis nodded. ‘You don’t want territory; what does that leave? As I see it, there are only three things worth fighting for: money, land and people. Is that what you want? Slave labour to help you expand your economy here in the Mesoge?’

Gorgas scowled. ‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘Quite apart from anything else, it’d be far more trouble than it’s worth. No, I don’t want anything like that.’

‘Then I give up,’ Poliorcis said. ‘Tell me what it is you do want.’

‘Like I said,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Friendship. The beginning of a long, smooth and mutually beneficial relationship between the western provincial office and the republic of the Mesoge. What’s so strange about that?’

‘I see,’ Poliorcis said. ‘You’re prepared to help us defeat the plainspeople so that we’ll then owe you a favour. Am I right?’

‘That puts it quite well, yes.’

Poliorcis rubbed his chin. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I can see how that would be a tremendous advantage for you. I’m not sure it’d be worth our while, though. You see, we have an annoying habit of sticking to our treaties. If we were really as hell-bent on conquest as you seem to think we are, wouldn’t we be making a rod for our own backs here? Hypothetically speaking, of course.’

‘Up to you,’ Gorgas said quietly. ‘We have a saying here: don’t kid a kidder. I’m making this offer in good faith, we both know perfectly well why. Now you can tell me what I can do with my offer and I’ll just have to live with it. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Whatever else I may or may not be, I’m a realist.’ He smiled. ‘That’s what makes me such a pleasure to do business with.’

‘So I gather,’ Poliorcis replied. ‘Well, I think that’s about as far as we can get at this stage; I’ve got to go back to my superiors in the provincial office, give them my report, let them make up their minds.’ He stood up. ‘As you’ll appreciate, I’m basically just here to find out a bit more about you and your people here, give the decision-makers back home a little bit more to go on. And I think I’ve got enough from our meeting here; with your permission, I’d like to have a look around before I go. Please, feel free to point me in any direction you feel I ought to be taking. For instance, I’d be interested to see these archers of yours. We have a saying of our own: always try the goods before you buy. Before I can make a valid report, I do need something a bit more solid to go on than what I’ve heard from you and what I’ve seen so far here in Tornoys. I’m sure you see my point.’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Gorgas said. ‘No, please, go right ahead. In fact, if you’ve got the time I’ll happily be your guide for a day or so; the main garrison camp, that sort of thing. Or if you’d rather not – I mean to say, if you think having me round your neck all the time you’re wanting to go see for yourself-’

Poliorcis smiled gracefully. ‘A guided tour of the republic with yourself as my guide,’ he said. ‘What better way to find out about things could there possibly be?’

On his third day as deputy inspector of the proof house, Bardas actually managed to find it.

It was at the end of the longest gallery, down another of the speciality breakneck staircases, along a dark, narrow corridor, down another staircase, along another corridor, down another staircase; by which time Bardas could sense he was back underground where he belonged -

(It’s customary to die first, but in your case we’ve made an exception.)

– Along another corridor, seventh on the left, third on the right, down another staircase, there you are, can’t miss it. He stood outside the massive oak door feeling like a very junior clerk on his first day at a great merchant’s counting house (which was silly, because he was in charge of the place. Or so they’d told him back among the ruins of Ap’ Escatoy, above ground where the rules are subtly different).

He pushed the door with his hand, then pushed harder, then put his shoulder to it; it gave an inch or so, which encouraged him to keep shoving.

‘It sticks,’ said a voice as he tumbled into a cold, echoing room. ‘But we keep it shut anyway, because of the noise. Who are you?’

At least there was a certain amount of light, coming from a row of oil-lamps up on a ledge over the door. The draught made their tenuous flames dance, swirling the light.

‘My name’s Loredan,’ Bardas replied, trying to see who he was talking to. ‘I’ve been posted here.’

‘The hero,’ said the voice. ‘Come in. Shut the door.’

Bardas put his back to the door and managed to walk it shut; then he looked around. The room was lined with large, raw stone blocks, and the walls formed a high arch. In the middle was a pile of armour – breastplates, helmets, vambraces, gorgets, pauldrons, cops, cuisses, sabatons, gauntlets, all mangled and ruined, twisted and dented and crushed, pierced and skewed. The voice seemed to be coming from behind the pile; and when Bardas looked there, he found a little old man – a Son of Heaven – and an enormous boy of about eighteen. Both of them were stripped to the waist; the old man was all sticks and sharp edges pressing against the skin, while the boy was muscle and fat. Between them was an anvil on which sat a helmet. The old man was holding it down on the anvil with a pair of very long tongs. The boy was holding a huge hammer.

‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘you found us all right. Pull up a helmet, sit down.’

The air in the room was cold, but both men were sweating. The boy’s long, sandy hair was plastered round his forehead, as if he’d been dipped in tallow like a candle. The old man didn’t have any hair at all, and the sweat sparkled on his egg-shaped skull. Bardas looked round, saw a pile of helmets, pulled one out and sat on it.

‘I’m Anax,’ said the old man. ‘This is Bollo.’ He smiled, revealing a dazzlingly wide array of teeth. ‘Welcome to the proof house.’

‘Thank you,’ Bardas said.

Anax nodded politely (Bollo didn’t seem to have noticed Bardas yet). ‘You don’t mind if we carry on, do you?’ he said – his voice was refined, cultured, very Son-of-Heaven. ‘We’ve got a lot to get through today, as you can see.’

‘Please, carry on,’ Bardas said; and at once Bollo hefted the hammer, swung it over his head and brought it down hard on the apex of the helmet. The clang made Bardas jump. Then the helmet rolled off the anvil and clattered on to the stone floor.

‘No good,’ said Anax sadly. ‘You heard the harmonics? Garbage.’ He stooped painfully, picked the helmet up and put it back on the anvil. There was a slight dent on the left side of the crown. ‘You can tell everything from the sound,’ Anax went on. ‘Listen. This is what it should sound like.’ He stooped again – bending down seemed to trouble him inordinately – and came up with another helmet, as far as Bardas could see identical to the first. Anax gripped it in the tongs, and Bollo thumped it.

‘You hear that?’ Anax said. ‘Completely different. Good helmet. Well, good seam. The rivets are garbage.’

Bardas looked at the good helmet; it too had a slight dent in the crown. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but I don’t see-’

‘Really?’ Anax nodded, and Bollo swung again. The sound hurt Bardas’ ears. ‘A fifth higher; sort of a purer, whiter sound. It’s a bit flat, of course, because of the garbage rivets. Here, it’s easier to tell on a cuirass.’ He groaned this time as he bent down; he came up with a dull grey breastplate which he laid over the top of the anvil, having first swept the two dented helmets on to the floor with the back of his hand. ‘Listen for the high note,’ he said. ‘You should hear it quite clearly.’

Bollo shifted his grip slightly on the hammer handle, then dealt the breastplate five enormous blows, two on each side and one on the ridge that ran up the centre. To Bardas, it sounded like an awful clanging noise.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Yes, quite different.’

The old man laughed. ‘Fooled you,’ he said. ‘That one’s garbage too. Not that it seems to matter any; I test ’em and reject the batch, they issue them anyway, but with a little stamp on the inside: FP. It stands for Failed Proof. Wonderful, isn’t it?’

Bardas coughed. ‘I’m holding you up,’ he said. ‘You carry on, I’ll just watch for a bit.’

Anax laughed again. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Took me fifteen years before I started hearing it. Till then, I just bashed ’em till they fell apart, and never knew what I was doing. Now, of course, I can tell instantly. But we still go on bashing, because that’s what we do.’

Next on the anvil was a pair of clamshell gauntlets, a dull grey colour with flecks of rust. Bollo wrecked them both with seven blows, bursting the rivets and crushing the lames flat, while the noise bounced from wall to wall. ‘Good,’ said Anax, making a mark on a tally-stick with a small, thin knife. ‘Pass them. Do the pauldrons next.’

Bardas didn’t know what a pauldron was; it turned out to be a shoulder-guard, domed at the top to fit the ball of the shoulder, articulated with five lames to allow the arm to move freely. Bollo’s hammer didn’t seem to have much effect on it, but Anax didn’t seem impressed. ‘Fail,’ he said. ‘Sounds dull. Flaws in the metal, that’s what does it; bits of coke and grit and copper, all sorts of rubbish. Comes of having to use what we can get. I know,’ he added, his eyes suddenly lighting up. ‘Bollo, fetch the Iron Man. Let’s show our guest something a bit clever.’

Bollo let the hammer fall to the ground with a thud, then slouched away behind another stack of wrecked armour. He came back dragging a heavy iron trolley on which stood a lifesize human figure made of iron. It was red with rust; Bardas could smell the rust from where he was sitting. ‘Properly speaking,’ Anax was saying, ‘we ought to use the Iron Man all the time; but after, what, a hundred and twenty years of being bashed around, he’s getting a bit brittle. Aren’t you, pal?’ He patted the figure’s thigh. ‘See? No left hand. Snapped off. Won’t weld. Too much bashing, see, it goes all hard – work-hardened, we call it, very important concept – and when it gets hard it gets brittle, and when it’s brittle – that’s it, finish. All right, Bollo, this time we’ll use a number-four felling axe, let’s show the gentleman how it’s done.’

Bollo grunted, wiped his forehead with his leg-thick forearm – there wasn’t a single hair left on it, Bardas noticed – and bent over, rummaging in a long metal box. Meanwhile Anax was strapping pieces of armour to the iron figure, carefully tightening buckles and adjusting the tension in the various straps. ‘Got to be straight and true before we start,’ Anax said, ‘or it won’t mean anything.’

The iron figure had vanished under the grey steel, not a square inch of rust to be seen; and in its place stood what Bardas would have sworn blind was a man in full armour. ‘All right,’ Anax called out, brushing powdered rust from his hands. ‘Stand well back,’ he told Bardas. ‘Sometimes you get bits falling off and flying round the room. Depends a lot, of course, on who’s bashing and who’s getting bashed. Slowly now, Bollo, it’s not a race. This is work, remember, not fun.’

How hard would he hit if it was fun? Bardas wondered, and braced himself just in time as Bollo swung the axe over his shoulder like a sack, then accelerated it as he bent his knees, throwing his entire bodyweight into the stroke. Bardas had been expecting an almighty clang, but the noise was different, more of a high-pitched clunk, as the force of the blow was transmitted through the thin skin of the steel knee-cop into the solid iron behind it; it was a musical, pulsating sound, short and clipped, the sound of extreme force being applied and turned back – Bardas heard the turning-back, and saw the axehead bounce off, all the force having nowhere to soak away into. The place on the armour where the axe-blade had hit was deeply scored but the steel skin was unbroken.

‘Now that’s bad,’ Anax said. ‘Hold that sound in your mind. All right, Bollo.’

The next blow landed on the point of the left elbow; and sure enough, the sound was a little different, just as the damage was evident and extensive, the steel being caved in and crushed. But Anax looked pleased. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Properly domed, the way it should be. Well, think about it, will you? You get hit very hard, where do you want the force of the hit to go, into the steel or into you? That’s what good armour does, it takes the blow. Bad armour passes it on. Simple as that.’

Good armour takes the blow, Bardas repeated to himself, bad armour passes it on. ‘So this is what you do here?’ he said.

Anax grinned from ear to ear. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s a bloody funny way to earn a living. I mean, take yourself, you’re clearly an intelligent man, you’ve been around, been in the wars, I dare say – well of course you have, you’re a hero, I was forgetting. You look at that -’ he pointed to one piece of scrap armour ‘- and then you look at that.’ He indicated another, just as badly mangled. ‘And you say to yourself, they’re both busted, I guess they both failed. Wrong. It’s a philosophy, you see,’ he went on, wiping his nose on the inside of his wrist. ‘It all fails, you see; there’s nothing, no piece of munitions-grade plate in the whole world, that can stand up to Bollo here and the big, big hammer. It’s how it fails that matters. And that’s what I can’t get them to understand, ’ he added, a tiny spurt of anger showing in his pale eyes. ‘Because unless you’re me, or someone else who’s been destroying and wrecking stuff day in, day out, all his life, long as he can remember, you can’t even understand there’s a good way to get smashed into scrap, and there’s a bad way. Your generals, now, and your brass in the provincial office, they say, we want a pattern that won’t fail, period. And I say, all right; I can tell them how to make it, specifications, gauges and angles and heat treatment and all the rest of it, but you couldn’t afford it and nobody could ever wear it. You want practical armour, you’ve got to come to an understanding with Bollo here and the number-four felling axe. And he’ll scrap it, every time.’

Bardas nodded, trying to look as if he’d understood something. ‘And you say it’s the sound it makes?’ he said, but the old man just looked impatient.

‘That’s just one test,’ he said. ‘One criterion for one test. Believe me, we don’t just bash on the stuff with hammers and axes. Oh no. We shoot at it with longbows and crossbows, we squash it between rollers, there’s the puncture test, the shear test, the breaking-strain test, the crush test, the flex test – you don’t want to know all the different ways we can prove a piece, if anybody ever gave us a piece that got that far. And the point I’m trying to make is, it always fails – if it didn’t fail, it’d be a pretty useless test. We deal in extremes here, Mister Hero; otherwise there wouldn’t be any point.’

Anax suddenly stopped talking; he was staring at something. ‘What is it?’ Bardas asked.

‘Duff copper rivets,’ Anax replied, as if drawing Bardas’ attention to a widening crack in the sky. ‘Look at that, will you?’ He pointed with a long, brittle-looking finger. ‘See there, the rivets in that cop. Shorn off.’

Bardas made a show of looking. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What’s the significance of that?’

Anax sighed. ‘It’s the whole point of copper rivets,’ he said. ‘Your copper rivet, when you put it under a strain it can’t handle, it stretches – look, here, like this.’ He prodded a derelict gauntlet with his toe. ‘That’s what it’s meant to do. Now look at these here, on the cop. Torn the heads off. So that lot’s no good, not that anybody’s going to want to know that. It’d mean junking the whole batch, probably a hundred thousand rivets; if we do that, there’s some clerk in an office in Procurement who’ll have to answer for it. But he doesn’t want to do that, and nobody really believes me anyway, so they won’t take any notice. I tell you, if this wasn’t what I do, I wouldn’t do it any more.’

Bollo, who’d been standing by with the axe over his shoulder, seemed to have lost patience; quite unexpectedly, he whirled the axe round and brought it down on the point of the Iron Man’s shoulder.

‘Sharp clunk,’ Bardas said. ‘Not good?’

‘Terrible,’ replied Anax sadly. ‘But what they’ll do is, they’ll issue double padding to go inside the pauldron cup, and then it won’t seem so bad; at least anybody who wears the stuff won’t wind up with a smashed collar-bone. But it’ll be wrong. And I’ll know.’

‘I suppose so,’ Bardas said evenly.

‘Well of course,’ Anax said. ‘I always know.’

Theudas Morosin had found a ship; that is, he’d spoken to a man, a dealer in bulk almonds, who’d been talking to the captain of another ship a week or so before, who’d happened to mention that once he’d found a buyer for his cargo of ebony baluster-rail blanks from Colleon (he had no idea how he’d come to have a hold full of thirty-inch sections of ebony suitable for making baluster rails out of, assuming you had a lathe and a market for ebony baluster rails; price had been a part of the equation, but there’d been more to it than that) he was going to use the proceeds to buy a consignment of seven hundred sacks of duck-belly feathers he’d been promised by a man he knew in Ap’ Helidon; the deal being, he’d have to go to Perimadeia (what used to be Perimadeia) to collect them. ‘Although,’ (he’d said, apparently), ‘it may not be that much of a deal, at that, because who’s to say how big a sack is?’ The man Theudas had been talking to had then asked this other man, he didn’t say how big the sacks were? And the man had replied no, but it can’t be that important, because unless he was saying sack when really he meant bag, seven hundred sacks, at that price, is still a lot of feathers.

‘I see,’ Gannadius replied when his nephew had finished explaining all this. ‘And you’re hoping that when this man, the one who’s buying the feathers, comes to collect his cargo, he’ll take us with him.’

‘Yes,’ Theudas said. ‘And then we’ll be home again. Well, what do you think?’

Gannadius considered his reply. ‘It depends,’ he said. ‘If they’re small sacks, maybe he won’t bother. If they’re big sacks, there may well not be room for us on the boat. And didn’t you say all this depends on him finding a buyer for a shipload of ebony stair-rods?’

‘Baluster rails,’ Theudas amended. ‘Oh, come on. I’d have thought you’d be pleased.’

Gannadius scratched his nose. ‘I’m just trying to tell you not to get your hopes up, that’s all. And didn’t you say this man comes from Ap’ Helidon? I don’t remember you saying he was going to take the feathers to the Island when – if – he got them. I don’t really want to go to Ap’ Helidon, if it’s all the same to you. If it’s where I think it is, it’s part of the Empire. We’d be worse off than we are here.’

‘No, we wouldn’t.’ Theudas folded his arms and looked away. ‘Anywhere would be better than here. Here is nowhere.’

Outside the tent somewhere a man was singing, while a couple of other men accompanied him on a pipe and some kind of stringed instrument. The words didn’t seem to make much sense -

Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-pepper vine

Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-pepper vine

Grasshopper sitting on a sweet-pepper vine

And along comes a chicken and he says, ‘You’re mine’

– but the music was fast and cheerful, and the men sounded like they were enjoying making it; there were worse noises, both outside and inside Gannadius’ head. ‘There’ll be a ship,’ he said sleepily, ‘sooner or later. We’ve just got to be patient, that’s all. What we don’t want to do is go blundering about the western seaboard just for the sake of doing something. For one thing, I might die, and how are you going to explain that to Athli?’

That just made Theudas more irritable. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. And what’s all this stuff about dying? You aren’t even ill, you’re just lazy.’

Gannadius smiled. ‘That nice lady doctor wouldn’t agree with you. She says I still need plenty of rest, after what I’ve been through.’

‘Oh really? And what was that, exactly? I don’t seem to remember anything all that dreadful. I mean, I was there too, and I’m not lying on my back groaning all the time.’

‘All right,’ Gannadius replied, laughing. ‘All right. If your duck-feather man really does show up, and if he’s going our way and if he agrees to take us and if there’s room on his ship, we’ll go. It’ll be a comfortable ride, sitting on all those feathers.’

Theudas stood up. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said, ‘before I lose my temper.’

It was bright outside the tent; so bright and hot that nobody was moving about. Instead, they were lying in whatever shade they could find. The three men who’d been making that awful noise had stopped now, thank gods; they were lounging in the shadow of a large timber frame they’d been working on, passing a big jug of some sort of drink from hand to hand, and eating nuts from a pot.

‘Your friend,’ one of them called out as Theudas walked past. ‘How’s he doing?’

Theudas stopped. ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ he replied awkwardly.

‘That’s good.’ The man was beckoning him over; it would be difficult not to refuse. Hate them quietly, Gannadius had said. Theudas went over and sat beside them. ‘Is it true what they’re saying?’ the man asked.

Theudas stiffened a little. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What are they saying?’

The man laughed and handed Theudas the jug. ‘That he’s a wizard,’ he said. ‘One of the Shastel wizards. Well, is it true?’

Theudas nodded. ‘Though really they aren’t wizards,’ he said. ‘Actually, there’s no such thing as wizards. They’re scholars.’

‘Whatever.’ The man seemed to regard the distinction as trivial. ‘Then it must be true, what I’ve heard,’ he went on. ‘The Shastel wizards are going to help us win the war.’

Theudas frowned. ‘What war?’

‘The war against the Empire,’ the man said. ‘King Temrai and the Shastel wizards are forming an alliance, so that when the Empire attacks one of us, the other joins in too. It’s about time,’ he went on. ‘I mean, fun’s fun, but it’s high time somebody took this thing seriously.’

Theudas’ frown grew deeper. ‘I didn’t know there was going to be a war,’ he said.

‘Of course there’s going to be war,’ said one of the other men, the one who’d been playing the pipe. ‘Because they’ve taken Ap’ Escatoy at last. Now they’re coming after us.’

‘Or Shastel,’ the third man interrupted.

‘Or Shastel,’ agreed the piper. ‘Which is why we need to make an alliance with the wizards. Nobody else is going to help us, after all. Nobody else is left.’

Theudas handed the jug to the piper, hoping nobody would notice he hadn’t drunk any of what was in it; cider, he suspected, and he’d always hated cider, ever since he was a boy. They’d drunk nothing else in Perimadeia, and now the plainsmen had taken to it as well. ‘What’s this you’re making?’ he asked, hoping to change the subject.

The men looked at each other. ‘Oh, come on,’ one of them said, ‘it doesn’t really make any odds. Besides, anybody with an eye to see can look at it and tell for themselves. It’s a trebuchet,’ he went on. ‘Like the ones we made when we took the City. Same design, in fact; well, they worked all right then, so let’s hope they’ll work just as well against the Empire.’

‘A trebuchet,’ Theudas repeated. He could remember the day the trebuchets had appeared; the day the plainsmen appeared under the walls, on the other side of the narrow channel, with their barges of pre-shaped timbers, and all the noise and bustle of assembling the engines. Nobody had known what to make of them, whether they were a joke or a threat or both. ‘And this is because of Ap’ Escatoy,’ he added.

The man who’d played the guitar-like thing nodded. ‘Because of that bastard Loredan,’ he said. ‘He thinks long, that bastard.’

‘Loredan? You mean Bardas Loredan?’

The guitar player nodded. ‘Planned the whole thing, everybody knows that. Went away after the Fall, joined the Empire, took Ap’ Escatoy for them so they’d come after us next. He’s the one we should be looking out for. Gods, he must hate us a lot.’

There was an awkward pause. Then the man who’d been singing said, ‘Well, fair enough. It was his city we burned down, of course he wants to get even.’

‘But we burned it down because of what he did to us,’ the piper answered. ‘Him and his uncle Maxen. That’s why Temrai had to do it. And now he’s come after us again, only this time he’s got the Empire with him. He won’t rest easy till he’s killed us all, you’ll see.’

Theudas looked down at the ground. Irrational; but he had the feeling that if they saw his face, they’d know. Also, he had a terrible, painful feeling of guilt – the things they were saying about Bardas, who wasn’t like that, they were making him sound like the angel of death or something and he wasn’t, he was a quiet, lonely man who just wanted to keep out of the way of trouble – but trouble would keep following him around, like a dog sniffing the trousers of a sausage-seller. But he knew that the last thing Bardas wanted was to get even, and that none of it was his fault.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, standing up. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the banjo-man. ‘And hey, calm down. He hasn’t got us yet. And he won’t, you can count on it.’

‘I know,’ Theudas said, and walked away.