Colours in the Steel

CHAPTER TEN

Early one morning a man walked across the Drovers’ Bridge into the city, leading a string of donkeys heavily laden with dried figs. He was tired and fed up, having lost a shoe while taking a short cut through a bog to avoid a tollbridge. His feet hurt, his detour had added to his journey instead of making it shorter, and although he had indeed avoided the tollbridge, he’d had to spend the night in a squalid and extortionately expensive inn, with the result that he’d spent twice as much as he’d saved. More than anything in the world, he wanted a stiff drink and a nice hot bath.

For the latter, he’d come to the right place. There were no fewer than seven public baths in the city to choose between, all of them within easy limping distance of the bridge. Having left his donkeys with a friend, therefore, he headed straight for the nearest one, paid his copper half plus another half for a jug of cheap red wine, and spent the rest of the morning wallowing in magnificent luxury.

The bath left him feeling relaxed and rejuvenated, but also rather ashamed of the scraggy state of his hair and beard. Before going to the market to collect his donkeys and set up his stall, therefore, he stopped off at a small barber’s shop where there happened to be an empty chair just when he was passing the door. He flopped into the chair, put his feet up on the footstool and urged the barber to do the best he could.

What with the wine and the warm bath, he was feeling benign and at ease with everything around him, and it so happened that he was the sort of man who talks when he’s happy. This was another reason for having a shave and a haircut, because its universally known that barbers, by the sacred code of their ancient and venerable craft, are obliged to listen.

He started off with, ‘Nice day,’ expanded that into a brief account of his journey, enlarged on that so as to make it a detailed account of his journey, with special reference to the predatory nature of bogs and the iniquitous cost of tollgates and inns, digressed at length on the subject of his life, times and philosophy of business, spoke for four minutes with scarcely a pause for breath about his wife’s nephew (who she’d forced him to take on as an assistant, and who was no more use than a butter kettle), and was just commiserating with the city folk on the latest problems they were having with the plainspeople, when the barber stopped him.

‘Problems?’ said the barber. ‘I hadn’t heard about any problems.’

The fig merchant raised an eyebrow. ‘You know, the things they’re up to upriver. All those things they’re building.’

‘What things?’

‘You mean to say you hadn’t heard?’ At once the fig merchant embarked on a colourful description of what he’d seen as he passed along on the opposite bank of the river; huge stockpiles of timber, the river jammed almost solid with rafts, enormous saw-pits, all sorts of funny-looking machines with people running around shouting and ordering each other about. And, he added, all them catapults.

‘What catapults?’

The catapults, of course; the ones the plainspeople were making at this ford he’d gone past. Well, when he said making, what it looked like they were doing was making them, putting them together, testing them – bloody great big rocks they were chucking about, like a lot of kids with snowballs – and then taking them to bits again and packing the bits onto wagons. Surely, he insisted, the barber had heard about the catapults.

The barber asked him if he was sure. The fig merchant replied, sure he was sure. Seen it with his own eyes, hadn’t he? The barber asked to be told again. The fig merchant told him again.

‘Oh, shit,’ the barber said, and immediately sprinted away, still holding his razor and leaving the fig merchant sitting in his chair with half a beard and a towel round his neck.

The reason why the barber took the news so much to heart was that as a young man, before he was old enough to know better, he’d spent eighteen months on the plains as one of Maxen’s cavalry army before getting in the way of a clansman’s arrow and being left for dead. It had taken him two years to get home, and even all these years later it wasn’t often he slept without dreaming about it.

When he burst into the market waving a razor and yelling, ‘The savages are coming, the savages are coming!’ the city people drew the obvious conclusion, knocked him down, took away his razor and threw him in a coalshed to sleep it off; one kind soul even had the presence of mind to relieve him of his purse in case he cut himself on the sharp edges of the coins while thrashing about in his drunken rage. It was only two or three hours later, when the owner of the coalshed opened it up to get some coal, that the barber was able to escape and make his way, rather more sedately this time, to the nearest guard post.

Fortunately the guard sergeant knew him and was prepared to listen to what he had to say; which was how the first news of Temrai’s preparations reached the city of Perimadeia, fourteen weeks after he had left the city and embarked on his life’s work.

The sergeant, like most of the guard, was a part-timer, a soldier one day in ten and an innkeeper the rest of the time. When he’d finished making his report – a long business; he had to keep repeating his report to an apparently endless succession of officers of one sort or another, all of whom then insisted on hearing exactly the same thing from the poor terrified barber – it was well past the end of his duty shift, and high time he was back in his tavern, where his wife and daughter would be busy with the evening rush. Pausing only to dump his gear in the guard house he scurried home, quickly tied on his apron and started drawing off jugs of cider.

Once the rush had subsided a little, however, and he’d had time to catch his breath and help himself to a couple of hard-earned drinks, he lost no further time in making known the extremely rich gobbet of news he’d been fortunate enough to come across. This time, with the news coming from a highly respected member of the community instead of a drunken barber, people listened. Then, having listened, they panicked.

There seems to be a perverse law of nature that the larger the city, the quicker a rumour spreads among its population. The sergeant’s customers, running home to make sure their houses were still there and weren’t being looted by fur-clad savages, shouted the news to any acquaintances they happened to meet. Since it was about the time of day when the citizens were accustomed to take an after-dinner stroll round their own particular square with their wives and families, it wasn’t long before the streets and courtyards were full of people running wildly in all directions, each one in turn shouting the news to anybody who might not have heard it yet. Meanwhile, the original disseminators of the news, having reassured themselves that their homes were unburnt and their possessions and loved ones still more or less intact, started streaming back in the opposite direction on their way uptown to find a government building to stand in front of and demand that Something Be Done.

Quite soon, the streets were an exciting place to be, what with crowds forming, people running and bumping into each other, the rumour mutating and conjuring up illusory parties of savages at the gates/already inside the walls/ coming up through the main sewer/laying waste the tanners’ quarter with fire and the sword. As always, scuffles and fights started springing up like mushrooms, someone managed to set fire to the carpet-weavers’ quarter, and a number of the more level-headed opportunists took advantage of the general chaos to do a little cash-free shopping.

The city Prefect called out the guard to restore order; but since it was at the end of the day shift, the daytime guards had all gone home and the night shift were either trying to struggle through the packed streets or joining in the fun with their friends and neighbours. The city Prefect then called on the Lord Lieutenant to send in the regular army. The Lord Lieutenant reminded the city Prefect that apart from the Prefect’s own full-timers there wasn’t a regular army. After a moment’s thought the city Prefect, the Lord Lieutenant and their respective general staffs quietly made their way to their private gate into the second city and locked it behind them.

Next morning the lower city was a sorry sight, and those citizens who had fallen by the wayside during the festivities and spent the night where they fell might have been forgiven for thinking that the city had indeed been sacked by the enemy while they’d been asleep. The fire had spread from the carpet-weavers’ quarter and made quite a mess of four adjoining districts before reaching the river and burning itself out. A remarkable number of shops and stalls had been visited by the merry bands of opportunists, taverns and vintners having taken the worst of it. There were groaning bodies all over the place, and quite a few that neither groaned nor moved. By the time the city guard had managed to get together a quorum and found the courage to venture outside their posts there was nobody left to arrest apart from a few sleeping drunks, so they sent a message to their betters in the second city to let them know it was safe to come out, and made a start on clearing up the mess.

One of the few people who’d stayed at home all night and hadn’t realised that anything unusual had been happening was Bardas Loredan. The day before, his class had taken its final guild examinations and every one of them had passed. This small miracle had called for a modest celebration, which started around midday and lasted until Loredan himself, the last survivor of the revels, had woken up in a tavern in the soap-boilers’ quarter at about the time the barber had been let out of the coalshed, and had made his painful way home to bed. The first he knew of the night’s festivities was when he struggled down the stairs to the baker’s on the corner, only to find that it wasn’t there any more.

He stood for a moment rubbing his eyes; then a man he knew by sight happened to pass by, and Loredan grabbed him by the arm.

‘The baker’s,’ he muttered. ‘What in hell’s name happened to it?’

The account he received was a fifth- or sixth-generation variant on the original story, to the effect that some lunatic had started an entirely false rumour that the savages were at the gates, and everybody had gone briefly and flamboyantly insane. That ought to have been good enough for a man with a morning head, but once Loredan had ascertained that the notional savages referred to were the plainsfolk, he decided to go in search of harder news. This commodity proved somewhat elusive, and he’d heard four or five different versions, all wildly contradictory and none of them remotely convincing, when he turned a corner and found himself facing a four-man squad of guardsmen in full armour and with arrows nocked on their bowstrings.

‘Bardas Loredan?’

‘Yes, that’s me,’ Loredan admitted, bewildered. ‘What…?’

‘We’ve been looking for you,’ the corporal said grimly. ‘You’ve got to come with us.’

‘But I didn’t – I was asleep the whole time.’ He took a step backwards. ‘Look, what is this?’

‘Orders,’ the Corporal said. ‘Come on, look lively.’

Although he felt strongly that looking lively was probably way beyond his limited capabilities this morning, Loredan did as he was told, and shortly afterwards found himself standing outside the gates of the Patriarch’s lodgings. He was about to protest when the door opened and a splendidly dressed officer in gilded armour who came up to round about his shoulder brusquely ordered him to step this way. He followed, up several flights of stairs and along about a mile of corridors, until he was brought to a halt outside a small door in a covered cloister surrounding a rather charming green with a fountain in the middle. The splendid officer knocked on the door, and pushed Loredan into the room.

It was pleasantly cool and dark inside. He’d never been inside the building before, but from what he’d heard he guessed this was one of the chapter houses. Once his eyes became accustomed to the dim light, he saw that there were fifteen or so people there, some of them sitting on the stone benches that ran all the way round the circular room, while others were standing in the middle, talking in low voices. He recognised the City Prefect, a short elderly man with fuzzy white hair, and a couple of officers from the Lord Lieutenant’s staff; and there, at the back, on a white marble throne, was Patriarch Alexius, talking to a long, thin man sitting on his right. Alexius looked up, noticed him and waved to him to join them. Before he could do so, however, another even more splendid officer swept him up and marched him over to see the Prefect.

‘You Loredan?’ the Prefect demanded.

Loredan nodded.

‘Thank heaven for that,’ the Prefect replied. ‘All right, I’ll get straight to the point. The rumours about an attack from the plains are true.’

‘Ah,’ Loredan said.

‘More to the point,’ the Prefect went on, frowning slightly as if to suggest that Loredan somehow failed to meet the required specifications, ‘it seems they’ve got hold of a lot of heavy equipment from somewhere. Siege engines, catapults, we don’t know exactly what, or who’s supplying them with the stuff. The point is, we’re taking this threat seriously, and we’ve decided to launch a pre-emptive strike.’

‘Excuse me,’ Loredan interrupted. ‘Who’s we, exactly?’

The Prefect paused, as if he’d just been asked a question he didn’t know the answer to. ‘The civil authorities,’ he replied. ‘Myself, the Lord Lieutenant, the various heads of offices, the Patriarch, naturally.’ He scowled, and then went on. ‘Our problem is that, as you well know, we don’t have a suitable force of heavy cavalry immediately available to make the strike with. Now, you were the last man to command the heavy cavalry, so it seems logical to involve you at the outset. I’ve already assigned you a basic staff-’

‘Excuse me-’

‘And you can work from one of the rooms we’ve taken here until you’re assigned a permanent office. My people will be doing the bulk of the actual recruiting, but you’ll be able to have a certain amount of direct input at the selection stage, and we’ll be looking to you to be quite heavily involved in training and materiel procurement, although of course control of the procurement budget will rest with the appropriate civil-’

Loredan held up his hand. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Slow down, please. Are you seriously suggesting that I join in this expedition of yours?’

‘Don’t be stupid, man. You’re an officer in the Perimadeian army. It’s your duty-’

It was a mistake for Loredan to shake his head, given the state it was in. ‘No. Sorry, but absolutely not. You can’t make me do that. I retired, remember?’

The Prefect looked as if he was about to explode. ‘Colonel Loredan,’ he said, and he would have sounded tremendously soldierly and authoritative if his voice hadn’t been quite so high-pitched, ‘you don’t seem to understand. I’m ordering you-’

‘Go to hell,’ Loredan snapped. Startled, the Prefect stepped backwards, treading on the toes of someone immediately behind him. ‘And don’t call me Colonel. I’m going home, before I lose my temper.’

‘Now you listen to me,’ the Prefect squeaked. People were turning round and staring. Loredan started to walk towards the door, but there was one of those splendid officers in the way. Loredan decided he really wasn’t up to a fist-fight, and subsided.

‘Really,’ he said, ‘you don’t want me. It’s been twelve years, and look at me, I’m a mess. There must be hundreds of your men-’

As he spoke, he caught the splendid one’s eye, and the truth dawned on him. There aren’t, though; just these peacocks and the part-timers. Oh, hell…

‘Hang on, though,’ he said. ‘What about the Emperor’s guard? Come to that, what about the Emperor? Shouldn’t he be doing something about-?’

Everyone around him had gone suddenly quiet, as if he’d just said something incredibly foolish. They’re doing their best not to laugh, he realised. What did I say?

‘Colonel Loredan,’ said the Prefect with a sigh, ‘there is no Emperor. Didn’t you know?’

Infuriating…

But it had to be done, and nobody else could be trusted to do it properly. With a deep sigh, Gannadius kicked off his too-tight slippers, trimmed the wick of the lamp and sat down to do the accounts.

Confounded jack-in-office auditors… Briefly he was tempted to do a little cursing on his own account. A broken leg or a fit of temporary blindness, just enough to keep them at bay without actually causing loss of life or permanent mutilation – no, maybe not. If he’d learnt anything from this sorry business, it was that the Principle wasn’t a cost-effective weapon.

He opened the cedarwood box that held his reckoning counters, pulled out the velvet bag and poured the shining counters out in a pile. It was an old and valuable set which had belonged to his grandfather, who had been a substantial wool-merchant; the counters were fine silver, rather worn now but still legible, little white pools of moonlight on the dark wood of the table. On the obverse of each counter was an allegorical female figure representing Commerce, seated on a throne with a pair of scales in one hand and a horn of plenty in the other; a stout lady in a revealing dress, her face worn away by three generations of painstaking arithmetic. The reverse was the traditional ship and castle crest of the city, with PRUDENT DEALINGS AUGMENT PROSPERITY in grandiose lettering around the edge. Gannadius picked one out and studied it for a while; there was something reassuringly solid and respectable about grandfather’s counters that somehow took the sting out of an otherwise loathsome chore.

With a lump of chalk he drew the lines on the table top; five horizontal lines like the rungs of a ladder right across the board. Although he wouldn’t have liked it to be widely known, Gannadius was only really comfortable with the basic lines-and-spaces method of accounting, as used by traders, innkeepers, farmers and the like. Scribes, scholars and clerks used a far more elegant and complex system, involving not only lines and spaces but different coloured squares on a permanent board (usually a work of art in itself), stationary counters with abstruse technical names, and a truly fiendish concept called the Tree of Numeration which he had never been able to make the slightest sense of. As far as he was concerned, arithmetic was bad enough without garnishing it with gratuitous mysticism.

In comparison, the common accounting was child’s play. Each rung of the ladder represented a multiple of ten; the bottom line was units, the second line tens, the third line hundreds and so on. The spaces between the lines were multiples of five; five, fifty, five hundred, five thousand. You laid out the first number to be added along the rungs, and then chalked a verticle line down the right hand side and laid out the next number; then you did the calculation, drew another line and laid out the next number. It took rather longer than the professional method, but it was reasonably foolproof, and the longer you stuck at it, the easier it seemed to get.

Having prepared his board, he opened the account book at the page headed Receipts and started to set out the counters-