The Proof House

CHAPTER EIGHT

Once the fire has been lit, the report said, it must be kept going to maintain the necessary level of heat. Approximately twenty-four loads of charcoal are needed to produce eight tons of pig-iron.

Athli closed her eyes, then opened them again. It was late, and she wanted to go to bed; but the report had been sitting on her desk for two days now, and she wouldn’t have time to read it tomorrow – meetings all day, and the accounts to audit after that. She found the place again and tried to concentrate.

In refining the pig-iron into a bloom of plate, one ton in eight will be lost. Five hundredweight of plate will make twenty cuirasses, Imperial standard proof, with pauldrons. Four hundredweight will make forty sets of cuirasses, without pauldrons. Sixteen hundredweight will make twenty full suits of cavalry armour, Imperial standard proof. Four plateworkers will make up thirty-seven hundredweight of plates in a week, therefore one plateworker will make up nine and a quarter hundredweight in a week, or one and a half hundredweight a day, using a coal-fired furnace; where the fuel is timber or charcoal, the daily output is unlikely to exceed one hundredweight.

Athli yawned. At first glance, it had seemed like a sound enough proposition; with wars breaking out here and there, the Empire on the move, its neighbours panicking, generals and masters of ordnance everywhere looking to upgrade equipment, what better investment than an armour factory, either here on the Island or away in Colleon, where labour was cheap and raw materials conveniently to hand? But she was cautious, getting more so every day, and so she’d asked the librarian at the Merchant Venturers’ Hall, who owed her a favour, to see if there was anything about the economics of running an armoury; and he’d found an old report by the warden of the city armoury of Perimadeia, compiled thirty years ago and more, which he’d had copied and sent to her wrapped in silk and tied with a broad blue ribbon. It was very kind of him, though it wasn’t going to get him anywhere, if that’s what he was thinking; but the very least she could do was read it, after he’d been to all that trouble.

She tried to focus, but her eyes slid across the page like a colt trying to cross a frozen river. Dry stuff; well, of course, what did she expect, a love interest? Concentrate, she urged herself, this is the good bit. If one man can make one and a half hundredweight of plate a day, and if five hundredweight makes twenty cuirasses (with pauldrons, whatever a pauldron was), but using coal, not charcoal; twenty-four loads of charcoal makes eight tons, of which one ton is lost; but how much charcoal do you get in a load? She scowled, and rearranged the counters on her counting-board.

Coincidence, she thought; apparently Bardas has been posted to the armoury at Ap’ Calick. Hey, why don’t I just go to Ap’ Calick and ask him about all this stuff, instead of killing myself trying to understand it from a book? What a good idea. No, thank you. Not even if he knows what a pauldron is, or whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing to have with a cuirass.

Who could she think of – who else could she think of who’d be likely to know what a pauldron was? On the Island, armour came in barrels stuffed with straw and sealed with the factory seal, and it stayed there until it was offloaded on the customer’s dock and paid for. What was inside the barrel, nobody knew or cared. The Islanders knew a lot of things – they had a library, after all – but technical military information wasn’t the sort of thing that interested them. Chances were, she could find ten people who could tell her how much a pauldron was worth, twenty who happened to know where there was a consignment of best-quality pauldrons, cancelled order, virtually at cost; forty who were crying out for pauldrons to meet an order, cash on the nail, good customer, but the stuff’s never about when you want it. Show them a pauldron and they’d probably try to poach an egg in it. She shuffled the counters up and down the lines and wrote the result on the wax tablet next to the board. Good, solid, meaningless data.

Armour, she thought. Was there really going to be a war? Everybody seemed to think so; they were counting on it, planning ahead for it, stockpiling and getting rid – Maupas is buying arrowheads and selling paintbrushes, because nobody’s going to want to buy brushes when there’s a war on; Ren is buying Maupas’ brushes, because the price is right and after the war is over, people will want brushes again; but in order to pay for the brushes, he’s got to sell the two hundred thousand copper rivets he got cheap in Aguill all those years ago – but that’s all right, because they use rivets to make armour, soon people will be crying out for rivets because of the war, so wouldn’t he be better off keeping the rivets and passing on the brushes? It was an odd way to look at a war, purely in terms of all the things needed to make it work – all the arrows that would be shot off, armour that would be bashed up and mangled, all the hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes and miles of strap leather, all the belt buckles and whetstones and cartwheel spokes and nails and pickaxe handles and parchment-roll covers and stockings and planks and feathers and axle pins and water bottles. You could take away all the people, and still a war is a massive thing, a vast collection of goods, an endless supply and demand of materiel, all being crammed into the mouth of the war; such a displacement of things. And why? Because war is inevitable. Fancy you needing to ask.

Perimadeia, displaced. The war had been inevitable. Likewise, presumably, the fall of Ap’ Escatoy, brought low by one Bardas Loredan. Such a displacement of people; but things were easier to deal with, things were her business now. If I knew what a pauldron was, would it all suddenly become clear, would I truly understand? Possibly. Possibly not.

Once the fire has been lit, it must be kept burning to maintain the necessary level of heat. She pulled a face; read that bit already. Why couldn’t these people want to make something she knew a bit about, like carpet?

The counting-house door opened; Sabel Votz, her chief clerk, in a hurry and a fluster.

‘Visitors,’ she said, as if announcing the end of the world. ‘From the provincial office. Downstairs, in the hall.’

If Athli had taken her cue from her clerk’s tone of voice, she’d have been in two minds whether to send for wine and cakes or barricade the doors. Fortunately she was used to Sabel by now. ‘Really,’ she said. ‘Well, it’s about time. Bring them up, wait two minutes, then fetch in a tray.’

Sabel looked at her disapprovingly. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘And no interruptions?’

‘Exactly.’ Sabel went away again, and Athli looked round instinctively to make sure the place was tidy. A silly instinct, that; she wasn’t a housewife suddenly descended upon by her husband’s mother, she was the Island agent for the Shastel Order, and as such a person of consequence. At the last moment she caught sight of a pair of shoes, lying under the table where she’d kicked them off the night before. She just had time to scoop them up and hide them behind a cushion before the door opened, and Sabel ushered in two Sons of Heaven and a long, thin, pale clerk, who looked as if he’d been put out in the sun to dry and forgotten about.

Exceedingly polite, these Sons of Heaven (they were called Iqueval and Fesal, and both of them were lieutenant commanders in the Imperial Navy; this came as something of a surprise to Athli, who wasn’t aware the Empire had a navy). Even sitting down, they seemed to loom over her, the way the towers of Commercial Hall looked down on all the houses in her street. Both had white hair and short tufts of beard on the points of their chins; but she could tell them apart because Iqueval’s collar buttons were black lacquered horn, and Fesal’s were silver plate.

‘Yes,’ she said, when they’d explained the purpose of their visit, ‘I have two ships, and I’d be perfectly happy to-’

Fesal cleared his throat. ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘that’s no longer the case. You now have only one ship. I’m sorry to have to tell you the Fencer ran aground on a reef while apparently trying to slip past an Imperial blockade. She broke up before salvage was possible, and sank. I do hope for your sake she was properly insured.’ The Son of Heaven smiled consolingly, then added, ‘If it helps at all, I can provide you with a certificate of shipwreck to prove the loss, in case your insurer makes difficulties over the claim. After all,’ he added with a smile, ‘knowledge is one thing, proof is another.’

‘Thank you,’ Athli said. ‘Do you happen to know if there were any survivors?’

‘Regrettably, we have no information one way or another,’ Iqueval replied, ‘beyond a report from one of our patrols in the vicinity who encountered unauthorised foreigners in a restricted area shortly afterwards. One of our men was killed in the encounter, I believe. The intruders escaped north, towards Perimadeia.’

Athli nodded. ‘Thank you for letting me know,’ she said. She felt slightly numb and rather dizzy, as if she had a bad cold; just disorientating enough to make communication tiresome. ‘Well then, I’ve got one ship. I imagine you know all about that one, too.’

‘Indeed,’ Iqueval confirmed. ‘The Arrow; sixty foot, two hundred tons burden, twin mast square-rigger, under the command of Captain Dondas Mosten, a Perimadeian; presently at anchor here, due to sail the day after tomorrow for Shastel with a cargo of mixed luxury goods, books and furniture. We would very much like to charter your ship, at a quarter per ton per week plus wages, provisions and damages.’

Athli thought for a moment. ‘Starting when?’ she said.

‘That hasn’t been decided yet,’ said Fesal. ‘Our intention is to start the charter, at full hire except for wages and provisions, some time before we actually start our work; this will be necessary to ensure that all the ships we’re chartering will be available when we need them.’

‘I see,’ Athli said. ‘And what would this work of yours be?’

Fesal smiled tightly. ‘That’s restricted, I’m afraid,’ he said.

‘Oh.’ Athli looked him in the eye, but saw nothing there. ‘I’m only concerned in case there’s an element of risk. To be perfectly straight with you, I don’t want to get involved in anything that would leave my ship at the bottom of the sea, particularly,’ she added, ‘now that it’s the only one I’ve got. I do have certain commercial interests quite separate from the Bank, you see, and I need my ship-’

‘In the event of damage,’ said Fesal firmly, ‘or indeed outright loss, we will pay you compensation in full, in accordance with the market value of the ship as at the date of the charter, such value to be fixed by an independent local valuer. This will be a term of the charter. So really, you needn’t be concerned.’

Athli frowned. ‘What about lost earnings?’ she said. ‘Between you losing my ship and me getting another one, I mean. Is that included?’

Fesal was obviously impressed. ‘I believe we can come to some agreement on that score,’ he said. ‘For example, we might take out insurance to cover such losses, in your name, of course. But we feel sure that loss and serious damage are unlikely to occur.’

‘That’s something, I suppose,’ Athli answered. ‘I don’t suppose you’d care to comment about these rumours flying around, that you’re hiring a fleet to carry your army to war against the plainspeople?’

‘Is there a rumour?’ Iqueval said.

Athli smiled. ‘Oh, there’s always a rumour,’ she replied. ‘But some rumours are more believable than others. Still, it’s good money – well, you know that, I’m sure you’re completely up to date on charter tariffs. You aren’t about to tell me how long this job of yours is expected to take, are you?’

‘You’re quite right,’ said Fesal, ‘we aren’t. That information is, obviously, restricted.’ He made a placatory gesture with his long, fine hands. ‘It goes without saying that entering into an open-ended arrangement of this sort is both unusual and, potentially, inconvenient. We believe that the level of payment we’re offering is more than adequate compensation. Ultimately, the choice is yours.’

‘Oh, quite,’ Athli said. ‘Well, I suppose I’d have to be an idiot to turn down an offer like this. About payment, though – will that be in advance or arrears? I’m sorry if that sounds fussy, but…’

‘There’s no need to apologise for a firm grasp of the essentials of your profession,’ Fesal replied. ‘In advance for the first month, in arrears after that. We believe that’s a reasonable compromise. Is that acceptable?’

‘Method of payment?’

‘By letter of credit,’ Iqueval said, ‘drawn on the provincial office, redeemable wherever you choose to specify. In your case, I assume, in Shastel; you can then write it directly to yourself here.’ He smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few of your compatriots elect to have their payments written to Shastel, which ought to be good for business. You may care to put arrangements in hand, though of course it’s not for me to tell you how to run your franchise. Still, with the Loredan Bank gone, there aren’t that many banks outside the Empire for people to choose from.’

And only one inside the Empire, Athli didn’t reply. Instead, she said, ‘That’ll be fine. And yes, I’ll be happy to arrange exchange facilities for anybody else who wants to use us, though with the sort of money you’re talking about floating around, it’ll be quite an undertaking. I’ll probably end up having to lay off some of the credit with other people here on the Island.’

Fesal stood up. ‘You’re going to be busy,’ he said. ‘Well, thank you for your time. We’ll be in touch when we’re ready to make a start. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.’

‘Likewise.’

When they’d gone, Athli spent a fascinating few minutes with her counting-board and tablets, first making the calculations and then checking them three times to make sure she wasn’t making some elementary mistake that made the sum she’d be due to receive seem much larger than it should be. But it worked out the same each time; good money, indeed.

So they’re going to attack Temrai, are they? She should be pleased; delighted, in fact, that the monster who destroyed her home and butchered her people was only a few months away from defeat and death. The good man loves his friends and hates his enemies; wasn’t that what she’d been taught as a child? My enemy’s misfortune is my good fortune – confound it, if they’d come to her and asked for the loan of her ship, free of charge, for a holy war against the plainspeople, that’d have been straightforward enough; Yes, she’d have said, with my blessing. But this way, revenge and a substantial profit – somehow she wasn’t sure the world worked like that.

Not that a substantial profit would go amiss; not if her poor Fencer was at the bottom of the sea, and Gannadius and his nephew with her. Even if they were still alive, lost somewhere between the Empire and Temrai, chances were she’d never see them again. She found it hard, almost impossible, to feel anything about that; not because she didn’t want to, but simply because she couldn’t. When Perimadeia had fallen and she’d come here, she’d started making herself armour, good armour proof against such things – a helmet of business, a breastplate of friends, pauldrons (whatever they were) of possessions, success, prosperity. When she’d taken Bardas Loredan aboard the Fencer to visit his brothers in the Mesoge, and had come back with his sword and his apprentice but without him, she’d closed up the rivets and planished the exterior, making this armour of hers good enough to pass any proof; the death of an old friend and the boy Loredan had given her to look after were blows she acknowledged but couldn’t actually feel. That’s the merit of good armour; the blows either glance off the angled contours or waste their energy against the internal tensions of the metal, which are so much more powerful than any force likely to be applied from the outside. To be good armour, to be proof, it must have its own inner stresses, those of constricted metal trying in vain to push outwards, so that pressure inwards is met, force against force, and repelled. She had those internal tensions, those inner stresses; now here was an act of proof, and look, her armour had turned the blows easily. The prospect of some money, some business, an opportunity to find more clients and increase her prosperity had quite taken away the force of the attack.

So that’s all right, then. As for her ship, her poor little ship, the Son of Heaven was quite right: it was insured, so heavily that it was a wonder it had ever managed to float under all that weight of money. Once the insurers stopped squirming (only a matter of time, plus a certain amount of effort) she’d do rather well out of the loss of the Fencer.

Well, of course. That’s what insurance is for, to turn the blow. And if she hadn’t been expecting, deep in the darker galleries of her mind, to lose it some day, she probably wouldn’t have called it the Fencer in the first place.

Being an orderly, methodical person (by practice if not by nature) she made a note of her meeting with the Sons of Heaven, filed it in the proper place and went back to reading the report, which was, of course, all about armour. She managed to get to the end of the seventh section before her eyes filled with tears, making it impractical to try to read further.

‘Really?’ Temrai stopped what he was doing and looked up. ‘Perimadeians? I didn’t think there were any left.’

‘A few, here and there,’ the messenger replied. His name was Leuscai, and Temrai had known him for years, on and off. How someone like Leuscai came to be running errands for the engineers building siege-engines down on the southern border he had no idea; chances were that he simply hadn’t wanted to get involved. It was a problem with a lot of his contemporaries; though they’d never have considered supporting the rebellion, let alone joining it, they weren’t happy with the direction Temrai seemed to be leading the clans in, and they manifested this unease by taking part as little as possible. It was profoundly irritating, to say the least. But Temrai couldn’t be bothered to raise the issue with an old friend like Leuscai; it’d probably result in falling out, bad temper and the end of a friendship, and he had few enough of those left as it was.

‘Oh, well,’ Temrai said. ‘Now then, how does this look?’

‘Unintentional,’ Leuscai replied. ‘That is, I wouldn’t insult you by thinking you meant it to look like that.’

‘That bad?’ Temrai sighed. ‘I’m getting cack-handed in my old age, that’s what it is. It’s not so long ago I was able to earn my living bashing metal around.’

‘In Perimadeia,’ Leuscai pointed out, ‘where presumably their standards weren’t so high. All right, put me out of my misery. What’s it supposed to be?’

Temrai grinned. ‘There’s a technical term for it,’ he said, ‘which escapes me for the moment. But basically it’s a knee-guard. Or rather it isn’t.’

‘Not unless you’ve got really unusual knees,’ Leuscai agreed. ‘But it’s just as well you told me, or I’d never have guessed. To me it looks like a slice of harness leather pretending to be a pancake.’

‘Yes, all right.’ Temrai let the offending item fall from his hand. ‘It’s frustrating, really,’ he said. ‘While I was in the City, I read about how you’re supposed to do this, and they made it sound really easy. You just get thickish leather, you dip it in hot melted beeswax, you shape it, and there you are; cheap, strong, lightweight armour, made out of something we’ve got lots of. I don’t know,’ he went on, sitting on the log he’d been using to beat the thing into shape over. ‘Making things used to come so easily to me, and now I seem to have lost the knack. Anyway, tell me more about these stragglers of yours. Any idea who they are?’

Leuscai smiled. ‘You mean, are they spies? Well, it’s possible. From what we’ve been able to gather so far, one of them was a wizard – well, assistant wizard – and they’re both something to do with the Island and the Shastel Order.’

‘Really?’ Temrai sounded impressed. ‘Wizards and diplomats. We’re honoured.’

‘That’s not the best bit though,’ Leuscai continued, the smile quickly fading from his face. ‘The kid spent several years on Scona. He was Bardas Loredan’s apprentice. ’

Temrai sat perfectly still for a moment. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘Then I think we’ve met. Briefly, but memorably. How do you know all this?’

Leuscai pulled up a log and sat down beside him. ‘Pure chance, really. You remember Dondai, the old bloke who used to make the pancakes?’

Temrai nodded. ‘He died a short while back,’ he said.

‘Apparently. And his nephew, you’ve come across him? Dassascai, his name is. Doesn’t know a lot about pancakes, but he’s surprisingly well informed about commercial activity on the Island. Says he has contacts from when he was in business in Ap’ Escatoy, though if you ask me that doesn’t quite tie up. Anyway, for some reason, this Dassascai-’

‘He’s a spy.’

‘Oh, really? Well, that explains what he was doing snooping round our yard, where we’re raising the trebuchets. This Dassascai, he happened to see our two guests, recognised them (so he says) and went to the camp commander about it.’

‘Goscai.’

‘That’s right. Nice enough man, but he worries; and he got into an awful state over this, as you can imagine. First he was going to have them strung up on the spot; then he thought he’d better not, in case he started a war, so he was going to have them put in chains instead; then it occurred to him that they might be our spies (don’t know where he got that from) – finally, he got himself into such a tizzy he didn’t know what to do, so we said the best thing would be to ask you. He hadn’t thought of that; but as soon as we suggested it, he was delighted. So here I am.’

Temrai rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Any idea how they got there?’ he asked. ‘Or did they just show up, saying, Hello, we’re spies, mind if we look around?’

‘Hardly.’ Leuscai laughed. ‘Though if they had, I for one would’ve said, Go ahead, help yourselves. The way I see it, some solid intelligence work by the provincial office might do us a power of good.’

‘Quite possibly,’ Temrai replied, ‘but let’s not get into all that now.’ He breathed in deeply, then breathed out again. ‘How did they get there? Any ideas?’

‘Some of our people found them in the swamp,’ Leuscai replied, ‘when they were out looking for ducks. In a pretty bad way, apparently. The wizard’s no spring chicken. If they are spies, they went to a hell of a lot of trouble to look like dying men. Their story was that they were on their way to Shastel from the Island, got run aground by the Imperial coastguard and were on the run from the foot patrols. Plausible enough, I suppose.’

‘All right,’ Temrai said, picking up a bossing mallet and putting it down again. ‘You send them here; I’ll look them over, frighten them politely for a day or so and send them on their way. If they really are spies, I’ll give them the guided tour; that’ll confuse them so badly they won’t know what to think.’ He looked round at the mess left over from his experiment in armour-making. ‘You don’t happen to know of anybody who can do this?’ he asked. ‘It’s got me beaten, but it can’t really be all that difficult. It really annoys me when I know I’m on to something but I can’t make it work.’

Leuscai shrugged. ‘Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. Of course, you could always write a letter to Bardas Loredan, care of the Imperial state armoury service. I’m sure he’d be delighted to help.’

Temrai scowled, then laughed. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘he bumped into me in the street once, in Perimadeia. He was drunk, obviously he hadn’t got a clue who I was. Everywhere I go, there he seems to be; and I can’t figure that out for the life of me. I mean, why should there be this horrible connection between us? He’s a farmer’s son from the Mesoge; by rights he should be hoeing turnips in the mud right now, not lurking in the shadows everywhere I go, waiting to jump out at me. I wonder, what the hell could it have been that tangled our lives up together like that?’

‘You make it sound like you’re in love,’ Leuscai said. ‘Star-crossed lovers, like in some old story.’

‘You think so? In that case, I reckon it’s high time we got a divorce.’

When the messenger eventually found him, Gorgas Loredan was at the farm, helping his brothers patch up the floor of the long barn.

‘Bloody menace,’ Zonaras had said in passing, when Gorgas asked him why he wasn’t using it any more. ‘Planks rotten right through. You could break your leg.’

‘I see,’ Gorgas had replied. ‘So you’re just going to abandon it, are you? Let it fall down?’

‘Haven’t got time to fix it,’ Clefas had put in. ‘It’s a big job, and there’s only the two of us.’

Gorgas had grinned at that. ‘Not any more,’ he’d said.

And so there he was, muddy and bad-tempered, standing astride a newly felled sweet-chestnut tree with a hammer in his hand, blood trickling down from his knuckles where he’d scraped them carelessly while manhandling the timber.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Sergeant Mossay sent me,’ the messenger replied defensively. ‘Letter for you, from the provincial office.’ He held the little brass cylinder out at arm’s length. ‘The courier arrived last night at Tornoys.’

‘Is he waiting for the answer?’ Gorgas asked, wiping his hands on his shirt.

‘No,’ the messenger replied. ‘No answer expected, he said.’

Gorgas frowned and took the cylinder, flipping off the carefully fitted lid with his thumbs.

They’d started by felling the tree; the last of the stand of chestnut trees that their grandfather had planted shortly after their father was born. It hadn’t been an easy tree to fell. The wind had twisted it, so when they tried to saw through, the timber clented on the saw-blade until finally it broke (it was old and rusty, like all the other tools about the place). So they’d got out the felling axes; and after they’d blistered their hands, and Clefas had taken his eye off the cut and knocked the head off his axe as a result, they thought better of it and dug out the other saw, which was even older and rustier. But Gorgas made them rope the tree back, and they used a block and tackle to put some tension on it, opening the cut to allow the blade to move freely. When they were three-quarters of the way through, they realised that if they carried on the line they were following, the tree would drop on the roof of the old pig-house and flatten it. Of course, the old pig-house hadn’t been used for years except as a miscellaneous junk store; but Gorgas made them drive in another post and rope the tree back another way so that they could chop a wedge out and alter the direction of the fall. Eventually they cut through and the tree fell; not the way Gorgas had intended, but it nearly cleared the pig-house, only sweeping off a few cracked slates with an outlying branch. It had taken them the rest of the first day to trim the trunk and cart off the loppings to the wood-shed (which was too damp to store wood in now that half the thatch had blown away); now, finally, they were splitting the trunk to make the planks they’d need for the barn floor.

‘Bastard,’ Gorgas said, scowling and crushing the letter in his fist. ‘You know what? That bastard Poliorcis, he’s made them reject the alliance.’

The messenger took a step backwards, trying to look as if he wasn’t there. Clefas and Zonaras stood still, apparently unconcerned.

‘No material advantage to the Empire,’ Gorgas went on. ‘Well, the hell with them. Come on, let’s finish this. You,’ he added as an afterthought, as the messenger stood unhappily by, waiting to be dismissed, ‘you go back, find that courier and bring him here. I’ve got a reply all right.’

The messenger nodded doubtfully. ‘What if he’s already left?’ he said.

‘You’d better hope he hasn’t,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Because if he has, I might be inclined to ask why it took a day for this to reach me, if the courier got in last night as you just told me.’

The messenger hurried away, his feet squelching on the waterlogged grass of the yard.

‘Clefas,’ Gorgas said, ‘get the wedges. This stuff’s knotted and twisted like you wouldn’t believe.’

Clefas stood for a moment, then slowly walked away. Gorgas took a deep breath, then went back to what he’d been doing. He had a froe jammed in a lengthways split down the trunk of the tree, in too far to budge with the tommy bar, which he’d just contrived to break by jerking on it with his full weight.

‘You’ll never get that out,’ Zonaras said.

‘Watch me,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Here, pass me the side axe. I’ll cut the bloody thing out if I have to.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Zonaras said, handing him the axe, which was bevelled on one side only for cutting at an angle. ‘Watch the head on that, it’s loose.’

‘Really?’ Gorgas said.

His brother nodded. ‘Been loose for years,’ he said. ‘Needs the head taking off and a new wedge knocking in.’

Gorgas hacked away for a few minutes, trying to cut out a slot beside the jammed tool to free it. He hadn’t made any significant progress by the time Clefas wandered back with the wedges. They were heavy and indescribably ancient, and their heads had been smashed into razor-sharp flakes by generations of Loredans pounding on them with big hammers. ‘That’s better,’ Gorgas said. ‘Right, Zonaras, bash in a wedge either side; that’ll open it up.’

Zonaras picked up a wedge in each hand and nestled them in the crack fore and aft of the froe; then he bashed them home with the poll of the surviving felling-axe. The froe came out easily, but the wedges were stuck fast.

‘Marvellous,’ Gorgas said angrily. ‘Solve one problem, make two more.’

Zonaras sighed. ‘Grain’s too twisted for splitting,’ he said. ‘I could have told you that before you started.’

Gorgas straightened his back, pulling a face. ‘We’ll knock in the axe-heads as wedges,’ he said, ‘that’ll get these two out. We’ll get there, don’t you worry.’

Several hours later, when it was getting dark, they gave up for the day. They’d got the wedges out, and the froe (which they’d put back in, jammed solid and got back out again by bashing it to and fro with a hammer) but the axe-heads looked as if they’d never budge. ‘What we need,’ Gorgas said as they trooped back into the house, ‘is a saw-pit. Then we could saw our planks instead of trying to split them.’

Neither of his brothers said anything. They kicked off their boots and sat down on either side of the table, clearing a space to lean on with their elbows. Curious, Gorgas thought, they’re Loredans too; but of course, they’ve never been away from the farm. They were the lucky ones.

‘We could build one down by the river,’ he went on, ‘near the ford, where the banks aren’t too steep. Then we could have a water wheel driving a mechanical saw. I’ve seen them, in Perimadeia. Wonderful things, but it should be easy enough to make one.’

Clefas looked up at him. ‘Down by the river,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Where Niessa used to do the washing. You know the place I mean.’ Of course they do.

‘I reckon so,’ Zonaras replied. ‘But we don’t need a saw-mill. What’d we want one of them for?’

Gorgas frowned. ‘I’d have thought that was obvious,’ he replied. ‘To saw planks, of course, instead of wasting three days bashing lumps of iron with hammers.’

‘But we don’t need planks,’ Zonaras pointed out. ‘Except a few now and then. And we buy them.’

‘Waste of money,’ Gorgas said impatiently, ‘when we’ve got perfectly good timber on the farm. Besides, if we set up a powered saw-mill, we’d be able to supply planks for all the neighbours, at only a fraction of what they’re paying now. It’s a good business proposition.’

Clefas shook his head. ‘And who’s going to work it?’ he asked. ‘Zonaras and me, we’ve got our hands full just managing the farm. Are you going to drop everything and come running every time someone wants a few bits of wood cut up? Don’t see it, myself.’

Gorgas waved the objection aside. ‘As well as planks,’ he went on, ‘we could make our own fenceposts, gateposts, rafters, weather-boards, the lot. We could even build a ship if we wanted to. Yes, I think a saw-mill’s a damned good idea. First thing in the morning, I’ll get some of the men on to it. It’ll give them something to do, at any rate.’

Clefas and Zonaras looked at each other. ‘Well,’ Clefas said, ‘if you’re going to do that, there’s no point us killing ourselves tomorrow trying to split that log. When your mill’s running, we’ll get it sawn up there.’

‘That’s right,’ Zonaras added. ‘I mean, it’s not like there’s any rush. We don’t use the long barn any more, anyhow.’

That night, Gorgas dreamed he was standing outside the gates of a city. It was dark, and he wasn’t sure which city it was – could’ve been Perimadeia, or Ap’ Escatoy, Scona even; any one of a number of places. The gate was barred, immovable, so he was trying to break it up by splitting it, using wedges and an axe. The wedges, he somehow knew, were his brothers; he was the froe, and the axes too, both when they were driven into the split as wedges or swung as hammers. He could feel the hammer-blows on the polls of the wedges (the hammer falls, the steel is compressed, and where does all the force go, pinched between steel and steel?) as surely as he could feel the tommy-bar twist in the socket of the froe. He could feel the un-sustainable stresses in the wood, as the fibres of the grain were wrenched apart – wood’s not like steel: if you torture it, eventually it fails and bursts. But steel, the more you hammer it, the more you compress and work-harden it, the harder and stronger it gets. And that, logically enough, is why the Loredan boys aren’t like other people…

Well, it was dream-logic, the sort that melts away as soon as your eyes open.

Gorgas woke up, realised he didn’t stand a chance of getting back to sleep, and resolved to do some work instead. He’d insisted on having the one working oil-lamp in the place, and after a good deal of fumbling with flint and rather soggy tinder, he had light. He also had paper – a few sheets he’d brought with him, and the back of the letter he’d had about the refused treaty, quite serviceable once he’d smoothed it out over the table. He sat down and wrote three letters; one to his niece, one to an employee, giving him further orders, and one to Poliorcis the Son of Heaven, which he managed to make polite and friendly in spite of everything. After all, there was still time for them to change their minds, no point alienating them by being petulant just because it’d feel good to vent his anger. Keeping his personal feelings out of the way of his business decisions had brought Gorgas all the success he’d ever managed to achieve, after all. It was a rule he’d only ever broken where Bardas was concerned, and that one exception had cost him dearly enough, gods know. But Bardas was different; Bardas was his brother, Bardas was the only failure in a life full of remarkable achievements. And very few failures are definitely final, provided you’re level-headed enough to keep your feelings at bay.

When he’d finished writing the letters, it was still dark, too early for anybody else to be up and about, so Gorgas decided to fill in the time with one other minor chore, a task he’d neglected for the past couple of days. In the corner of the room stood a fine embossed-leather bow-case. He opened it and took out his bow, the rather special bow his brother had built for him three years before. People who knew the circumstances behind the making of the bow were amazed, even horrified, to find that he still had it. They’d assumed that he’d got rid of it – burned, buried, thrown into the sea – long before. They couldn’t understand how he could even bear to look at it, let alone touch it. But the fact remained, it was a very fine bow; and since it had cost him so much, the least he could do was use it and look after it – otherwise everything that had gone into making it would be wasted, all to no purpose.

First, he went over the back with a fine, stiff brush that lived in a pocket under the flap of the case, to remove all the loose dirt, mud and other rubbish. Then he sprinkled on to it a little of the special oil that he’d had specially mixed for this job, just enough to cover the fingernail on his left index finger; oil that kept the wet out and the sinew in. The oil had to be rubbed in until every last trace of it was gone, a job that called for thoroughness and patience. Finally, he waxed the string with a small block of solid beeswax. By then it was dawn; no sooner had he pushed the bow back into its case than the sun came up. Gorgas washed his hands carefully (the oil he’d used for the bow was poisonous), pulled on his boots and went to look for some more work to do.

An hour or two after Gorgas cleaned his bow, a ship limped into Tornoys harbour.

It had taken a pounding from a freak storm, the sort that added an unwelcome degree of uncertainty to navigation at this time of year. The ship had coped pretty well, all things considered; it had taken on rather more water than was good for it, and the wind had damaged the rigging and put a crack in the mainmast that would have caused real havoc if the storm had lasted much longer. But she was still afloat and nobody had been killed or badly hurt. It was as much as anybody had a right to expect, fooling about in those seas at that season.

Because it was still early, there was nobody much about. The fishing fleet had already left, of course, apart from a few lazy oyster-boats, and the bigger ships that were due to leave that day wouldn’t be ready to sail for another hour or so. They’d taken their cargoes on board the night before, so that the men could get a good night’s sleep before catching the tide. One or two of Gorgas’ men were hanging around the quay, but they weren’t on duty; it was still the last knockings of the night before, and they were hanging around waiting until the taverns started breakfast, hoping that the cool dawn breeze would help clear their heads.

Pollas Arteval, the Tornoys harbourmaster – he was the nearest thing to an official that Tornoys had, and even then he was really nothing more than a chandler who kept a register and collected contributions from the waterfront traders’ association – leaned on the gate outside his office and tried to figure out where the ship was from. It was old but soundly made, clinker-built, unlike the majority of the Colleon and Shastel sloops and clippers; certainly not from the Empire, with those sails. From the Island, possibly – they’d use anything that could float and a few that couldn’t – but the rigging wasn’t Island fashion somehow. He stared for a little longer, and realised what was bothering him. It was nothing really, a trivial detail of how the tiller bars of the rudders were socketed into the upper part of the loom, but he had an idea he’d seen something like it before, a long time ago. Still, he’d seen a lot of ships from a lot of places, with every possible contrivance for steering as for every other function. He made a note in his mind and started thinking about warm, fresh bread dunked in bacon fat instead.

The ship nuzzled up to the quay (if it’d had a face it’d have grinned with relief; Pollas fancied he could hear it sighing) and someone jumped down with a line and made her fast while others put out a gangplank. The men were like the ship, unfamiliar but faintly evocative of something he’d seen – what, twenty-five, maybe thirty years ago. Quite possibly, they were from some far-flung place that used to send ships here and then stopped doing so for some reason – war or politics, or just because there wasn’t enough in it to justify such a long haul. Reasonably enough, the men looked tired and fraught – so would anybody after a long night in the squalls off Tornoys – but they didn’t look like men who were expecting a well-earned rest. Rather, they had the resigned look of people who had most of their work still to do.

A crowd of them were ashore now, some fifty-five or sixty of them (a big crew for a ship that size, or maybe they were passengers). Then, in the time it took for Pollas to turn his head to smell the bread in the oven and then look back again, they’d drawn swords and axes and bows, put on helmets, uncovered shields. Suddenly Pollas knew where he’d seen a ship like that before. They were Ap’ Olethry pirates, runaway slaves and deserters from the Imperial army who infested the southern coastline of the Empire, and the chances were that they hadn’t come here for a hearty breakfast.

Pollas Arteval stood with his mouth open, horribly conscious that he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do. The pirates were splitting up into three groups, about twenty in each party; all he could think about was his own house, his wife opening the door of the bread oven, his daughter slicing the bacon. He couldn’t protect them, he didn’t own any weapons and he didn’t know how to fight. It wasn’t a required skill in Tornoys, where there wasn’t anything to fight about. He watched the small knot of soldiers to see what they were prepared to do about it, but they didn’t seem to have realised what was going on. Maybe, he thought, it isn’t really happening; maybe they’re just wearing their swords and shields and helmets, rather than getting ready to use them.

Not wanting to turn away, he stepped backwards into his porch, still watching. Be logical, he told himself: they’re here to steal, they won’t hurt anybody unless anybody tries to fight them, and nobody would be that stupid-

It would have been some misinterpreted nuance of body-language, a movement just too quick, a gesture that reminded someone of something he’d seen before. In all likelihood, it was glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, acted on with instinct rather than thought. It can’t have been an intentional act, for one of Gorgas’ soldiers to draw his bow and shoot an arrow into a pirate, for the simple reason that contingents of six men don’t pick fights with forces ten times their number, not even if they’re heroes. If the arrow had missed, even if it had glanced harmlessly off the angled side of a properly contoured helmet or breastplate, things might have been different. But it didn’t. The pirate was on his knees, screaming in terror, and instead of trying to help him, his friends were closing with the soldiers in a short, predictable melee. If they’d managed to kill all six of the soldiers it might not have been so bad, but they hadn’t. One man got away, ran up the hill much faster than anyone would have expected just from looking at him in the direction of the billets where Gorgas had stationed a half-company of men to make his presence felt in Tornoys. Pollas could see how the pirates felt about it all by the way they moved into action. They were unhappy but resigned, as you’d expect from men who’ve just seen a simple job turn into an awkward one. More fighting, they were saying. Oh, well, never mind. They formed their shield-wall like weary hands in a factory who’ve been told they’re having to work late.

They’re coming, Pollas realised; but there still wasn’t anything he could do other than get himself and his family out of the way; and he knew without being able to account for why that he’d left it rather too late for that. It was too difficult to accept the reality of the situation. A few moments ago, less time than it took to boil a pot of water, everything had been normal. He could see people he recognised, shopkeepers and dock hands and quayside loafers, running away from the shield-wall or stumbling and falling; but he’d seen roughly the same sort of thing in dreams before now, when the nameless-familiar enemy or monster was chasing him along an alley or searching for him in the house – there had been this same illogical sense of detachment (it’s all right really, you’re asleep), this feeling of being an uninvolved spectator-

Someone was tugging at his arm. He looked round and saw his wife. She was pointing with one hand, pulling at him with the other, and he couldn’t make out what she was saying. He allowed himself to be pulled, and looked back as she hustled him away; they were using the bench from in front of the Happy Return to bash in the doors of the cheese warehouse. They were inside Dole Baven’s house, because there he was, with no clothes on, scrambling out of the back window, but he hadn’t looked to see what was underneath. He’d dropped down right in front of one of the other parties, and a pirate stuck him under the ribs with a halberd.

‘Come on,’ his wife was shrieking (basically the same intonation she used for chivvying him in from the barn when dinner was on the table, going cold), and he could see the sense in that; but they were killing his friends, the least he could do was watch. It would be terrible if nobody even knew how they’d died.

‘Mavaut, come back!’ His wife’s voice again; she was watching their daughter sprinting away on her own, terrified, going the wrong way. Belis wanted to go after her, but he grabbed her wrist and wouldn’t let her (she didn’t like that). He watched as Mavaut bundled down the hill in a flurry of skirts, suddenly came up against the shield-wall, spun round and came scampering back.

They were coming up the hill now, this way. If they ran, they might still get out of the road. ‘All right, I’m coming,’ he said, and an arrow appeared in the air above him, hanging for a very brief moment before dipping and falling towards him. He could see it quite distinctly, down to the colour of the fletchings, and he watched it carefully all the way down and into his stomach, where it passed at an angle through him and out the other side, leaving six inches of shaft and the feathers still in him. Belis was screaming but after the slight shock of impact he couldn’t feel very much, except for the strange and disturbing sensation of having something artificial inside his body. ‘All right,’ he snapped, ‘don’t fuss, for gods’ sakes.’ Time to be sensible, he decided, and led his family up the hill, then at right-angles along Pacers’ Alley. As he’d anticipated, the pirates carried on up the hill. They had better things to do than break order to go hunting stray civilians.

He sat down on the front step of Arc Javis’ house and looked at the arrow. There was blood all over his shirt, soaking into the broad weave of the cloth. There would be no point trying to stand up again now; his knees had failed completely, even his elbows and wrists felt weak and he was confused now, distracted, unable to concentrate his mind. The best thing would be to lean his head against the door and close his eyes for a while, just until he felt a little stronger.

His wife and daughter were arguing again – well, they always argued, Mavaut was at that age – and they seemed to be arguing about whether they ought to pull the arrow out or leave it in there. Belis was saying that if they took it out now it’d make the bleeding worse and he would die; Mavaut had to know different, of course, and she was nearly hysterical. With what was left of his consciousness, Pollas hoped his wife wouldn’t give in, the way she usually did when Mavaut worked herself up into a state, because an overindulged child would be an awful thing to die of.

He must have been asleep for a while, though it hadn’t seemed like it; he’d just closed his eyes for a moment. But he could hear different sounds; shouting, men shouting information backwards and forwards, like dock hands loading an awkard cargo. Orders; he could hear a man’s voice telling someone to keep in line, another voice shouting, Dress your ranks, raise your halberds, or something along those lines. He raised his head – it had got very heavy – but there was nobody in the alley except Belis, Mavaut and himself; the battle, if that’s what it was, seemed to be happening fifty yards or so away, on the main street. He applied his mind, trying to work out what was going on just by listening, but without seeing he had no idea which lot of foreigners were the pirates and which were Gorgas Loredan’s men. Of course he knew nothing about the shape of battles, about how they worked; it was like trying to work out where the hands of the town clock were just by listening to it ticking. More orders, a lot of shouting; it hadn’t occurred to him how busy the sergeants must be in a battle, how many things they must have to think about at once; like the captain of a ship, or the master of a work crew. He couldn’t make sense of the orders, though; the technical stuff was outside his experience – port your arms, dress to the front, wheel, make ready at the left there. He could hear feet shuffling, the nailed soles of boots scraping on cobbles, a few grunts of effort, the occasional clatter of a dropped weapon; but not the ring of steel or the screams of the dying, the sort of thing he’d been led to expect. It was remarkably quiet, in fact, so presumably they hadn’t started fighting yet.

He remembered something, and glanced down. The arrow wasn’t there any more, and once he saw that he started to feel an intrusive ache, like the worst kind of bellyache. Damn, he thought, they pulled the arrow out after all. They were sitting quite still beside him, holding on to each other as if they were afraid the other one would blow away in the wind.

Then the noise started; and yes, a battle was pretty loud. It was the sound of a forge, of metal under the hammer, not ringing but dull pecks and clunks and bangs – he could almost feel the force of the blows in the sound they made, unmistakable metal-on-metal, force being applied and resisted, thumping and bashing. They were going at it hard all right, if the noise was anything to judge by. There was effort behind those sounds; it must take an awful lot of effort to cut and crush helmets and breastplates and armour. He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate, isolate sounds so as to interpret them better, something which is of course much easier to do in the dark. It was hard work, though; the shouting of the sergeants got in the way, drowning out the nuances of the metal-on-metal contact, blurring his vision in the darkness. Typical, he thought. First time I’m ever at a battle and I can’t see a bloody thing. Fine story this’ll make to tell my grandchildren.

Quite suddenly, the battle moved on. The likeliest thing Pollas could think of was that one side or the other had given ground or run away, because the noise was muffled and distant, but whether it was up the hill or down he couldn’t make out. Down the hill was what he wanted, presumably, Gorgas’ men driving the pirates back into the sea (unless they’d somehow changed places, so that Gorgas’ men were attacking up the hill – all he knew about tactics was that they were complicated, like chess, and he couldn’t even beat Mavaut at chess these days). Besides, he couldn’t concentrate properly any more, the bellyache got in the way of his hearing and pretty well everything else, and his head was spinning as badly as if he’d just drunk a gallon of cider on an empty stomach. All in all, he didn’t feel very well, so he was probably excused observing battles for now. Oddly enough, though, the pain didn’t get in the way of falling asleep; so he did that -

– And then he was in a bed, his own; the room was dark and there was nobody else there, so he couldn’t ask if he was dead or alive (and he had no way of knowing for himself). It followed, though, that his side had won; so that was all right.