The Belly of the Bow

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘I hate the sea,’ confessed Bardas Loredan, clinging to the rail with both hands as the Fencer slid over a small wave. ‘Or at least I hate being on it. Comes of being a woodworker, I suppose.’

‘Really? And how do you make that out?’

‘I know a bit about wood,’ Bardas replied. ‘With particular reference to its tendency to rot, split, warp, fret, feather and just plain bust. And the thought that the only thing separating me from certain death is one inch of pine, probably the cheapest grade they could lay their hands on-’

‘Relax. The ship isn’t going to sink. It’s a good ship.’

Another small wave hit the good ship and wobbled it a little. Bardas lurched, nearly lost his footing and hauled himself back upright, his fingernails leaving little marks in the rail timber. ‘I think we should turn back,’ he said. ‘While we still can.’

‘Don’t be silly. If you’re going to be like this all the way there-’

‘It’s all right for you,’ Bardas grumbled, his eyes shut. ‘Though come to think of it, I can’t see why you’re acting so superior. I mean, what the hell do you know about boats anyway? You’re just a carpet and cushion merchant, and before that you were nothing but a clerk. I can picture you turning up your nose at the sea the first time you saw it because the colour didn’t go with the rocks.’

‘Right. And you’re a farmer turned soldier turned lawyer turned bowyer. All of them occupations that call for an intimate knowledge of seafaring. Bardas Loredan, the human dolphin.’ Athli yawned and stretched her arms wide. ‘Though it’s true, we did do our fair share of shipping disputes. But you weren’t the one who had to read through the pleadings, with all those loathsome, incomprehensible technical terms. Bowsprites and luggers and mizensails and I don’t know what else. Why they can’t say “the bit of flappy cloth that hangs off the middle stick thing” like everybody else beats me.’

Bardas nodded. ‘Talking of which,’ he said, ‘one thing I could never fathom, though I never mentioned it for fear of showing my ignorance, was why all that interminable paperwork was actually needed. After all, the whole thing was settled by three minutes’ violence, so what the hell was the point of all those carefully worded petitions and statements and rejoinders and surrejoinders you spent your time writing? It was all so meaningless, you know?’

Athli looked at him in surprise. ‘You’re joking,’ she said. ‘Do you really mean to say you didn’t know? All that time, and all those fights?’

‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking,’ Bardas replied, nettled. ‘So, are you going to tell me?’

Athli giggled. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just find that – well, anyway. The point is, before a case was permitted to go to trial, the parties had to show the court – that means the judge. You remember the judge? Man in a black dressing gown sat up on a bench at the back of the hall.’

‘I may have noticed him one or twice,’ Bardas conceded. ‘I thought he was some sort of referee, to make sure there was no cheating.’

‘He was that as well. But the other part of his job was going over the pleadings to see if there was really a case to answer. Otherwise, the system would have broken down into people using the courts as a place to fight duels to settle private grudges, rather than serious commercial and criminal issues.’

‘Right,’ Bardas said. ‘I see. And in all the years we worked together, did a judge ever throw out a lawsuit for, what was it you said, no case to answer?’

‘No,’ Athli admitted. ‘Which goes to show how well the system worked,’ she added gamely.

Bardas laughed. ‘And the rest,’ he said. ‘But honestly, I had no idea. Was it difficult?’

Athli nodded. ‘Very,’ she replied. ‘And complicated, and time-consuming and boring. What do you think I did all day, sat around combing my hair?’

‘I never realised,’ Bardas said. ‘All that work, and all you ever got was five per cent. It doesn’t seem right, somehow.’

Athli looked him in the eyes. ‘I didn’t have people trying to kill me,’ she said. ‘I never had an argument with the way we split money. But no, I can believe you didn’t realise. The truth is, if you’re not prepared to kill people and risk getting killed yourself, you have to work damned hard to earn a living in this cruel, hard world.’

‘Wouldn’t suit me,’ Bardas said, shaking his head. ‘But it’s true, I haven’t really done a proper day’s work since I left the farm; I mean, soldiering’s hard but you can’t really call it work, it’s a lethal mixture of boredom and adventure but it’s not work because it doesn’t actually produce anything, or do anything. And the fencing – well, that was just the soldiering without the boredom but with very unpleasant adventures. And as for the bow-making-’

‘Yes? Surely that was a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.’

Bardas shook his head. ‘No really,’ he replied. ‘My brother was making sure I was handsomely subsidised out of the procurement budget. I only had it explicitly confirmed the other day, but I suppose at the back of my mind I’d known it for some time. I was getting paid well over the odds, far more than the work was worth, which meant I was really only playing at it, like a hobby or something.’ He closed his eyes. ‘In other words, the whole thing was a waste of time. I might just as well have stayed in Scona Town and spent all day lounging around like an old blind dog, the way they wanted me to.’

Athli didn’t say anything, and they stood for a while looking at the distant speck on the seam between the sea and the sky where Scona had been. Then Athli muttered something about some chore she had to attend to, and walked away. Bardas stayed where he was.

I should be glad, he chided himself. Glad and cheerful. After all, look at it sensibly. It was a valid point; he’d got what he wanted, or should have wanted, a chance to sweep the pieces from the board and set them up again any way he liked, a chance to break away entirely from his family and everything he’d ever been, nothing left over from the past except the boy and Athli, both of them listed in the short column of credits on the right-hand side of the ledger…

He let his head droop forward. He’d found an old and valued friend he’d been sure he’d lost for ever – after the awkwardness of seeing her again, his surprise, the shock of how well she’d done for herself, the disagreeable fact that she’d started making something of her life the moment she’d got away from him; after all that, it was as if they’d never been apart, that same taken-for-granted easiness between them that had been one of the few good things about the years he’d lived in the City. She was, after all, the only friend he had now, but a good enough friend that he didn’t really need any others (like the man who was recommended to read Stazio’s Commentaries and replied that it was all right, he’d already got a book). She’d proved what sort of friend she was many times; just recently, when the boy had turned up on her doorstep with some wild tale about Bardas Loredan having sent him to her for safekeeping (like a bank deposit; how apt), she’d taken him in without question, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Somehow, when he’d been with her, he hadn’t minded being himself so much. That part of it hadn’t come back, not so soon after that meeting with Gorgas. But perhaps it might, at that. Presumably that was what had moved him to go and look for her, his first step as a free man, a refugee, an ex-Loredan…

Then why are you doing this stupid thing? demanded the voice in the back of his head. The whole world to choose from, a ship effectively at your disposal, money in your pocket, and look where you decide to go. And of course there was no answer to that.

‘Can I ask you something?’

He hadn’t heard the boy approaching over the noise of the sea and the general racket of a ship being worked. He looked round and saw that the boy was worried about something; not difficult to spot, he always scratched his neck when something was bothering him. ‘Go ahead,’ Bardas replied.

‘This place we’re going to,’ the boy continued, ‘Are we staying there? For good, I mean.’

Permanently, yes. Whether good’ll have any part in it I’m not sure yet. ‘That’s my intention, yes,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for us on Scona, and it wasn’t exactly as if we chose to go there in the first place. A ship fished us out of the water and took us there, if you remember.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ the boy said. ‘I’m not bothered about it, I was just asking, that’s all.’ He leant on the rail; he could just reach. ‘What’s it like in the Mesoge? Does it really rain all the time?’

Bardas shook his head. ‘Gods, no. Tell the truth, it doesn’t rain nearly enough if you’re trying to grow things. And when it does, it all comes down at once and turns the roads into sludge.’

The boy nodded, and moved on to the next item on his list. ‘So it’s hot there, is it?’

Bardas considered before answering. ‘Muggy rather than hot,’ he replied. ‘The City was hot, but it was more of a dry heat. In the Mesoge, the temperature’s lower but the heat feels hotter, if you see what I mean, in summer at any rate. In the winter we have snow.’

‘I’ve never seen snow,’ the boy replied. ‘Is it hilly or flat?’

‘Flat near the coast, hilly inland. But they’re hills rather than mountains, not as tall as the back hills beyond Perimadeia, and more rounded than Scona.’ He smiled. ‘Scona always struck me as a tatty sort of a place, because you could see where the rock had worn through the grass, like the elbows of an old man’s coat. You don’t get those spectacular rocky outcrops in the Mesoge. In fact, you don’t get spectacular anything. To look at, it’s fairly dull compared with what you’ve been used to. Good cattle country, good for sheep, and horses down on the flat by the sea. In the low hills, where we’re going, it’s indifferent poor land for grain, plenty of woodland – it was never worth anybody’s while to clear it – better climate than the coast or the top hills. It’s not so parcelled up into fields as the coast, but it’s not moorland, like the top. Up there’s only fit for running sheep and cutting peat.’

‘I see,’ the boy said. ‘Are there a lot of people?’

‘Depends on where you are,’ Bardas said, looking out to sea again. ‘Obviously it’s more crowded on the plains and sparser up on the moors. The middle part’s a bit more heavily populated than Scona was, but not all that much. It seems more crowded because people live out on their farms, rather than living in villages and going out to work every day. You’re rarely out of sight of someone’s house, but there’s never more than one or two houses together.’

‘That sounds strange,’ the boy said. ‘Sort of cramped and lonely all at the same time.’

Bardas nodded. ‘You do tend to see a lot of your immediate neighbours and not much of anybody else,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t actually matter very much, because all the Mesoge people are pretty much the same. I mean, they all do the same work, there’s precious few foreigners, they even look the same.’

‘Like you?’ the boy asked.

‘I suppose so, yes,’ Bardas answered, after a moment’s thought. ‘On average we’re taller than they are on Scona or in the City, most of us have dark hair. You won’t have much trouble understanding what people are saying, though the accent’ll sound fairly dull and flat to you. We, on the other hand, find the sing-song City accent rather irritating. But not nearly as bad as the Scona bleat. It’s sort of nothingish, like most things about the Mesoge.’

The boy collated the information. ‘It doesn’t sound so bad,’ he pronounced.

‘Oh, it isn’t,’ Bardas said. ‘Not bad, not good, just ordinary. It’s a sort of leftover soup of a place – bits of everything, but nothing in particular. It’s like that with the people, too. Because we don’t live in villages we generally have to do everything for ourselves – no specialist tradesmen, you see. So we can all do a bit of smithying, a bit of weaving and building and carpentry and pottery; all the boys your age can make a passable bow, good enough to shoot rabbits with-’

‘There’s rabbits in the Mesoge?’

‘Any amount of them, unfortunately.’

‘Oh.’

‘Like I was saying,’ Bardas continued, ‘we can all do a bit of everything, as much as we need to get by and no more. Nobody’s good at anything, because that’d be a waste of effort and resources. Far more efficient to be competent at everything, because you don’t need a good bow, or a good plough or a good bucket, just one that works, and usually the one thing you haven’t got is time. You get the job done and move on to the next job, and when you’ve finished that there’s always something else. So, a bit of rope’ll do to hold a gate shut instead of a latch, and if a bent nail will do the trick as well as a mortice and tenon joint, you use a bent nail.’ He caught sight of the boy’s expression, and laughed. ‘It’s not as bad as all that, really. I mean, it has its advantages too. For one thing, there hasn’t been a war fought in the Mesoge for over two hundred years. And people don’t bolt their doors at night, either.’

‘Don’t they? You mean there’s no stealing?’

‘Not really. What’d be the point, when everybody’s got more or less the same as everybody else? And besides, you can’t do anything without at least two people seeing you. Everybody knows everybody’s else’s business, and a stranger – well, a stranger wouldn’t be able to spit without everybody knowing about it for five farms in each direction.’

‘Right,’ the boy said. ‘So when we get there, what are we going to do?’

The Fencer made landfall at Tornoys, where Athli made a half-hearted attempt at justifying the expedition in commercial terms by buying four dozen bales of reasonable-quality local worsted for only slightly more than she would have paid for it on Scona or Colleon, and two dozen caged song-thrushes.

‘What do you want them for?’ Bardas asked, as the wicker hampers of frantically warbling birds were carried up the ramp.

‘There’s a craze for them on the Island,’ Athli replied. ‘Bored wives tweet and gurgle at them and feed them crumbs on the ends of silver tweezers. And I know where I can get all the cute little bronze cages I can use, cheap.’

‘Ah,’ Bardas replied, nodding. ‘In the Mesoge, we eat them.’

Athli bought a wagon and two adequate horses for less than the going rate, and they followed the coast road as far as Lihon, which was the nearest thing the Mesoge had to a city. From there they followed the main carters’ road, a semi-connected tracery of cart tracks and cattle-droves that meandered from farmstead to farmstead in no particular order. As luck would have it, they were trying to go up country in the week before Lihon Fair, which meant that they were continually fighting their way upstream against a fierce current of sheep, goats and pigs being driven south, which sometimes threatened to overwhelm them and sweep them back the way they’d just come. At the end of the second day, Bardas pointed out the wooded crest of a range of hills, which he said overlooked the small valley they were heading for. At the end of the third day, they were exactly the same distance from it, but now they were approaching it from the west rather than the south.

‘Not meaning to be rude,’ Athli said, ‘but how much longer is this going to take?’

Bardas shrugged. ‘I don’t honestly know,’ he replied. ‘I’ve only ever come this way once, and then I was going in the opposite direction, from home to the coast. Actually, I think I came a different way, or else the roads have moved. I seem to remember it took about five days last time.’

On the fourth day they finally left the plain and found themselves on a straight, horribly rutted track that led up the first range of hills in the direction they wanted to go. ‘This is the old Bailiffs’ Drove,’ Bardas explained. ‘When I was a boy, most of this part was owned by big City families and let to local tenants like my father. The City owners’ bailiffs had this road made so they could drive cattle direct from a couple of mustering-stations to the coast; they reckoned that if they took their land up here in hand and could arrange continuity of supply, they’d be able to flood the City with cheap beef and mutton from their own estates. It didn’t work, though; they couldn’t agree wayleave terms with the farmers on the coastal plain, so the big joint droves they’d planned got this far and then had to pick their way through the lanes just like we’ve been doing. In the end, they gave it up as too expensive and went back to letting the land, or sold it off to the tenants in possession. That’s when we bought out our place.’

Athli nodded. The further they got from the sea, the more Bardas was using words like ‘we’ and ‘us’ instead of ‘they’ and ‘them’, and although most of what he said about the country was a series of variations on themes of inefficiency, stagnation and an utterly provincial mindset, she couldn’t remember ever having seen him so animated. To a certain extent she was pleased; it was the nearest she’d ever seen him to being happy, or at the very least taking an interest. On the other hand, she didn’t like the Mesoge, for all the reasons Bardas himself had given. All around her she felt an oppressive indifference to anything except the job in hand, which was subsistence farming. She hadn’t seen a painted door since they’d left Lihon, and the men they passed in the fields all wore virtually identical smocks of pale undyed wool and sturdy but oafish-looking wooden-soled boots. Once she thought she saw a garden and pointed it out to Bardas, who explained that the cheerful-looking yellow and purple flowers were local varieties of flax, grown as cattle fodder. It was the first time he could remember, he said, that anybody had ever mentioned the colours of the flowers. Athli thought of the times when he’d made fun of her back in the City for caring about what colour things were – what earthly difference did it make if the shirt was grey or green, what was it about a blue-enamelled inkwell that made you write more legibly than you would with a plain brass one, and so on. Back then she’d taken it for a rather endearing deficiency of taste; here, she could see it was just Mesoge, buried two or three layers down under his skin. It wasn’t as if he seemed to like the place any more than she did, but his attitude suggested that he somehow thought it was right, the way things should be, and that any difficulty he had in accepting it was a fault in himself rather than a difference of opinion. Five years here and he’ll be a farmer again, she reflected, wondering as she did so why that thought depressed her so much. And not a particularly good one, either, she added, with a touch of malice.

When she’d left him, rather melodramatically, just before the fall of Perimadeia, she’d believed for some time that she was three parts in love with him, and when someone had tapped her on the shoulder on the quay at Scona, and the someone had turned out to be Bardas Loredan, she’d told herself that yes, now she knew for sure what it was she’d been feeling for him. Here and now, in the Mesoge, she wasn’t so sure. The differences in him were subtle and apparently contradictory. For one thing he looked younger; he held his head up straighter, talked more, volunteered information instead of waiting to be asked. There was something almost boyish about the way he was showing off his home to his friends from Away. But at the same time he seemed to have diminished. He still spoke in the same way, with his usual inflections and turns of phrase, but in everything he said about the Mesoge and its people there seemed to be an underlying note of involuntary, almost grudged respect, so that every time he criticised something he was acknowledging that he was wrong to do so, and that his opinions were therefore worthless. This is how it’s done here; it’s not how I’d do it; therefore I must be wrong. Athli found this both unsettling and distasteful, and naturally began to wonder whether in fact she knew him at all, or whether the man she’d assumed she was in love with had never in fact existed. Thinking about it objectively, she realised that when she thought of Bardas, she saw him in her mind’s eye as a striking figure standing on the floor of the courthouse in Perimadeia, sideways on and with his sword-arm extended in the guard of the Old fence, or as a lost and angry man slumped on a bench in a tavern, drinking hard after an easy victory. Of course, she’d never really seen him as a soldier, certainly not as a bowyer or a farm boy, only as a fencer, a man alone in the middle. It was quite possible that she’d made a mistake. Maybe they just didn’t have love here, like they didn’t have curtains or decorated pottery, and so loving a Mesoge man was actually impossible. After all, love wouldn’t help you squeeze an extra four measures of barley out of a stony terrace or get a good edge on a badly tempered scythe-blade, so why would they give it house-room?

‘Do they really eat thrushes?’ she asked.

Bardas nodded. ‘We smear the branches of trees and bushes with lime,’ he said. ‘They perch and their feet stick, and all you have to do is pull them off and put them in a covered basket. Roasted, they’re not bad. And,’ he added, with a sideways glance at the boy, ‘it makes a welcome change from rabbit.’

The boy groaned, and Bardas laughed; a father teasing his son, Athli decided, and she wondered if that was one of the things that had made him decide to come back here; that if he was to be responsible for the boy, then the boy had to be brought up properly, in the Mesoge fashion. In all the years they’d known each other in Perimadeia, he’d mentioned home and his father three, maybe four times. Now she had enough information to draw a full mental picture of Clidas Loredan, who had apparently been everything a Mesoge father should be: wise, short-tempered, exacting, impatient with failure, able to turn his hand to anything, practical, realistic and (Athli added, with a malicious grin) doomed. It didn’t help that there were quite a few things about the Mesoge that she personally found highly amusing, though she knew for a fact that Bardas wouldn’t see the joke.

Well, if he insists on being doomed, he can jolly well be doomed on his ownsome. I think this is a horrid place, and I want to go home, where people wear nice clothes and don’t mind paying for them. I think I’d go mad if I had to live here. They can’t all be doomed, can they? I mean, if so, how come there are still so many of them left?

For a time it seemed as if they’d reach the wooded crest and the valley below it before nightfall on the fourth day. But, at the last moment, the Bailiff’s Drove suddenly ceased to exist and melted away into an overgrown lane too narrow to get the wagon down. Bardas swore and backed up the horses – there wasn’t room to turn round – as far as the last turning off they’d passed, which led them off to the east round the brow of another small hill. When the sun set and they put the canopy over the wagon for the night, the wooded crest appeared to be just as far away as it had been at noon, albeit that they were seeing it from a slightly different angle.

‘We’ll be there tomorrow,’ Bardas said cheerfully as he lit the fire. It was colder than it had been the previous evening, and Athli wished she’d brought more than one blanket. ‘I know this place, some cousins of ours used to be the tenants here, though they had to give up and move on. Just over the hill, on the slope, is where the landlord made them plant a vineyard. It didn’t come to anything, of course, but the landlord insisted and they wasted a hell of a lot of time over it. Apparently he’d read a book about viticulture and was convinced he could cover the slopes of these hills with vines and make a fortune. Unfortunately, he never actually finished the book, so he missed the bit about dry, well-drained soil. In the end he let us pull them up. The vinewood made pretty good toolhandles, as I recall.’

Athli looked up. ‘Is that how these people look at everything,’ she asked, ‘in terms of what it can be made into?’

Bardas looked at her curiously. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ he replied. ‘The last couple of years I’ve been walking round Scona and every time I pass a tree I say Yes or No, depending on whether I can make bows out of it or not. It’s instinctive, I guess; is this thing likely to be any use to me or not? Can I make something out of it? You do the same; you look at the rolls of cloth in the market and think, how much would they go for on the Island and what can I get them for? It’s human nature.’

Athli shook her head. ‘In a market, yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what markets are for. But I don’t go around weighing up everything I see as a potential source of profit, or pricing everything as I go, like an auctioneer’s clerk.’

Bardas shrugged. ‘I suppose it depends on what you’ve trained yourself to notice,’ he replied. ‘But I think that that’s what people do, its the essence of being human. You take pieces of junk – a bit of tree, or some lumps of iron ore – and you make them into something useful and good.’

‘Even if they were perfectly good as they were?’ Athli queried. ‘Like the thrushes?’

Bardas laughed. ‘Maybe, but they aren’t doing me any good just flying around in the air and going tweet-tweet. Surely all of life’s about change; how we change things and how things change us. Otherwise we’d eat grass and sleep standing up. That was always the City mentality,’ he went on, turning his head away and looking at the hillside. ‘Everybody in Perimadeia was involved in making things, one way or another. They sat on a rock surrounded by sea and turned everything they could lay their hands on into something useful or valuable. Useful to them, of course – they tended to regard anything they couldn’t use as trash and a nuisance, which is how they came to get on the wrong side of Temrai and his people. Here in the Mesoge we’re similar, but we tend not to muck about with people, just things. Hence, no wars.’

Athli decided that she didn’t want to continue with the discussion. ‘One thing they can’t make here,’ she said, ‘and that’s a decent road. But then, if you don’t ever go anywhere, what do you need roads for? Pass me the bread-bag, please, I’m starting to feel hungry.’

‘And no rabbit,’ added the boy. ‘Please.’

‘Or thrushes,’ Athli said. ‘Or squirrels or weasels or frogs or any other free delicacies from Mother Nature’s larder. Just bread and cheese and some of that apple chutney will do me.’

‘Are you sure?’ Bardas said, with a concerned look on his face. ‘I bet you that if I looked around for a minute or so I could find you something to go with it – a few beetles, maybe, or a handful of woodlice. Though personally I prefer my woodlice marinaded in honey, with just a faint garnish of chives-’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Athli said.

‘You again.’

‘That’s right,’ Gorgas said cheerfully, ‘me again. No,’ he added, as the warder started to close the door, ‘leave it. She’s free to go.’

The warder didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. His face reminded Gorgas of the bas reliefs of allegorical subjects that City architects loved to decorate the top of arches with: all melodrama and action, with every face registering extremes of graphic emotion. Any archtop in Perimadeia would have been pleased to have the warder up there, radiating the very essence of Relief and Deliverance From Tribulation. Gorgas denied himself the smile.

‘You’re kidding,’ said Iseutz. ‘She’s letting me go?’

‘That’s right. Normally I’d say get your things together, but I really can’t imagine anybody wanting to take anything out of here except to burn it.’ Now he smiled. ‘Present company excepted, of course.’

‘Witty, Uncle Gorgas, witty. It’s nice to think that when you’re a beggar scratching a living on the street corners of Shastel, you’ll have a valuable talent like that to fall back on.’

Gorgas nodded gravely. ‘Clearly it runs in the family,’ he said. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? You can go. Now. Soon as you like.’

She shook her head. ‘Not till I know what’s involved,’ she said. ‘You don’t expect me to believe that you and my mother have had a sudden change of heart and realised the error of your ways, do you? It’s some sort of game, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, for gods’ sakes. Get out of here, will you, before I change my mind.’

Iseutz grinned at him, leant against the wall, slid down it and squatted on her heels. ‘The more you want me to do something, Uncle Gorgas, the harder I’ll fight not to do it. There now, do you think I’ll be the first person in history ever to be thrown out of jail?’

Gorgas sighed and settled himself comfortably on the bed, lying on his back with his hands behind his head. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘there is a certain appeal to this place. I can see how you could get used to it; it’d be so easy to wallow in that feeling of the worst having already happened. When you’ve reached that point, of course, there’s absolutely nothing left to be afraid of. It must be wonderful not to be afraid of anything any more.’ He yawned. ‘Shut the door on your way out, there’s a good girl.’

Iseutz scrambled up and stood over him, her arms folded. ‘Oh, there’s plenty to be afraid of in a place like this,’ she said. ‘Like the thought that you’re never going to get out of here. The thought that they might even bury you in here – or I suppose they’ve got a pit or a wellshaft they sling the bodies down. Sometimes I think about that, and I run over to the door and bash on it till my wrists bleed, yelling for them to let me out. I don’t like it in here, Uncle, I don’t like it one little bit. But I’m not leaving till you tell me why.’

‘Please yourself,’ Gorgas muttered drowsily. ‘It’s no big secret. I’ve been on at Niessa to let you out ever since she put you in here, and now, bless her heart, she’s agreed. Simple as that. I expect she got sick and tired of the sound of my voice, the way I’m sick and tired of yours.’

She didn’t move, just went on looking down at him. ‘So I can go, can I? Go wherever I like?’

‘Mhm.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘And what if I tell you I’m going straight to Briora – that’s the name of the village, isn’t it? – to find Uncle Bardas and kill him?’

‘You’re welcome to try.’

‘Really?’ She frowned. ‘And you won’t try and stop me?’

‘You can give it your very best shot if you like. It won’t get you very far, but that’s your business. You go right ahead.’

She knelt down beside him, and he noticed how graceful the movement had been. ‘Come on, Uncle Gorgas, be a sport, tell me what you’re up to. Please,’ She folded her arms, rested her cheek on them and smiled.

‘For gods’ sakes,’ Gorgas snapped, ‘leave it alone, will you?’ It wasn’t right to see her acting girlish, acting her age. She looked like a monster, with her matted hair, thin, bony arms, hands unnaturally large; there were white scars along the blades of her hands, from the base of the little finger to the projecting bones at her wrists. ‘Get away from me, will you? You’re disgusting.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied gravely. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

‘For the last time, nothing’s going on.’

‘Then why are you letting me go, when the first thing I’ll do is…’

‘No, you won’t,’ Gorgas said angrily, ‘because he’s not here. He’s gone. Left Scona. And before you ask, I don’t have a clue where, and that’s the truth.’

‘I see.’ She looked steadily at him, her eyes very large and round and brown; then she spat in his face. Gorgas shuddered and slapped her across the cheek, striking her on her hard, fleshless cheekbone so hard that she lost her balance and fell over backwards.

I’m sorry,’ Gorgas said immediately, ‘I didn’t mean to do that, you just…’

‘You were provoked,’ she said, as he got up from the floor. ‘My fault. Really, Uncle Gorgas, I don’t have any quarrel with you. But why did you let him go?’

Gorgas shrugged. ‘He wanted to go, and I couldn’t stop him. Simple as that.’

‘And now me. All the baby chicks flying the coop, Uncle Gorgas. I expect Mother’s livid.’

‘She’s not best pleased.’ He stood up. ‘Look, are you all right? I didn’t mean to hit so hard, it’s just – well, things are getting to me and I took it out on you. I shouldn’t have done that.’

‘It’s all right, really.’ Iseutz smiled, and Gorgas noticed that her eye was already beginning to swell. ‘You know, part of you is a decent human being. That’s the strange thing about you. In spite of the really incredible things you did, you’re not really a monster either. You know, I used to lie here thinking about that – what sort of person could do something like that, murder his own father without a moment’s hesitation? Well, obviously a monster, I thought, something more and less than human. But I don’t see that somehow.’

Gorgas slumped against the wall and rubbed his cheeks with the palms of his hands. ‘It was a mistake,’ he said. ‘I made a mistake. People do, you know. And the stupid part of it is, the whole thing only took – what, three minutes, four at the most. True, there was all that stuff with Niessa and the City boys before, but so what? Pimping for your sister’s part of growing up in the Mesoge, it’s one of the things you do for a little extra money when you’re young, like scaring crows or picking blueberries on the moors. No, when you analyse it rationally, it was a few minutes, less time than it takes to boil a kettle. Everything else bad I’ve done in my life has been in the normal course of business, the sort of thing you’re never really ashamed of, deep down; there was just one thing I did, and that’s all, but it’s the only thing about me anybody ever sees. I’m Gorgas the patricide, the man who killed his own father. They talk about me as if it was what I did for a living, like I do it every day; like I kiss my wife and children goodbye every morning and go off to spend the day murdering members of my family. And that’s not me. That’s putting me on a level with some lunatic who kills people for no reason and keeps on doing it till someone stops him, or an assassin who murders people for money.’ He stopped short, and shook his head. ‘The gods only know why I’m telling you this,’ he said. ‘Ask anybody who knows me, I don’t lie about what happened but I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, either.’

‘That’s all right,’ Iseutz said soothingly. ‘You can talk to me about things you can’t tell other people because we’re so much alike. Well, aren’t we?’

Gorgas looked at her. ‘No offence, but I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Beyond the fact that I killed my father and you want to kill your uncle, I’d say we’re very different.’

She shook her head. ‘You’re forgetting,’ she said. ‘One thing we’ve definitely got in common. My mother.’

‘I beg to differ,’ Gorgas yawned. ‘You forget, I’ve known her all my life, and you hardly know her at all. I imagine you’ve invented this other monster while you’ve been in here, but I’d be really surprised if you knew the first thing about what Niessa’s really like.’

She frowned. ‘But you hate her, don’t you? Because of the way she uses you, makes you do things you don’t want to, the way she’s ruined your life-’

‘Don’t say things like that,’ Gorgas interrupted. ‘I love my sister. The gods only know what’d have become of me without her. For all these years, she’s been the only person I’ve got in the world. You just look at what she’s achieved-’

Iseutz laughed. ‘You really mean it, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You really do believe all that stuff. That’s bizarre, Uncle Gorgas, truly it is.’

Gorgas leant forward and straightened his back. ‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Surely what I believe about my own feelings has got to be the truth, hasn’t it? I think this time you’re being just a bit too clever.’

‘Perhaps.’ She put her hands behind her back and stood on her toes, like a young girl about to be taken on an outing or a treat. ‘So what happens now?’ she asked. ‘Where am I supposed to go now?’

‘Wherever you like, we’ve been into all this-’

‘Being practical, I mean. Like, I’ve got no money, nowhere to go, no way of earning a living. Do I go and live with Mother, or am I going to be shipped off the island and sent somewhere, or what? I was assuming you’d got all that sorted out.’

Gorgas shook his head. ‘House arrest, you mean. Are you expected to go and play the good, dutiful daughter in your mother’s house, doing chores and being shown off to visitors? I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’ She grinned crookedly. ‘It’s what normal daughters do.’

Gorgas thought for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘here’s the deal. If you want, you can come and stay with me. A week or as long as you want to, but I’d want you to think of it as your home. The gods know, having a home to go to’s probably the most important thing in the whole world. How about it?’

She stared at him, trying to laugh. ‘Gods,’ she said, ‘you really do believe in all that stuff. Happy family life, the pleasures of having one’s nearest and dearest about one. You live in a strange world, Uncle Gorgas. It must be a bit like those brass bowls we used to have in the City, the ones that come from Colleon and got passed off as City-made. Remember how, when you first looked at them, you thought you could see the usual writing on the side, who made it and where and some motto or other? And then, when you looked closely, you saw it wasn’t writing at all, just shapes made to look like writing, because the people who make them in Colleon can’t read or write. I think that’s your life, Uncle Gorgas, made by someone who’s never had one but thinks he knows what they’re supposed to look like.’

Gorgas sighed. ‘Is that a yes or a no?’ he asked. ‘Come on, this is all highly entertaining but I’ve got other things I should be doing, like running a war.’

‘Why not?’ she replied with a shrug. ‘It’s not as if I’m spoilt for choice, and yes, it’s thoughtful of you to make the offer, whatever your reasons may be. Of course,’ she added, ‘it’s not such a big deal for you, since I don’t suppose you’re actually at home very often, it’s your wife and kids who’re going to have to put up with the mad woman. Still, I don’t suppose that thought even crossed your mind.’

‘It didn’t,’ Gorgas confessed. ‘But they’ll be all right about it. After all, you’re family.’

‘I’m a member of the Loredan family,’ Iseutz replied with a smile. ‘That alone’s grounds for any sane person to lock the door on me and set the house on fire. We’re an evil bunch, aren’t we, Uncle Gorgas?’

‘Yes, I suppose we are,’ Gorgas answered. ‘But we’re our evil bunch.’

‘Not prisoners,’ Alexius said gravely. ‘Guests. Valued and respected guests.’ He shifted uncomfortably on the stone bench. ‘If I was sixty years younger,’ he added, ‘I’d scratch my initials on this bench, like I did on the bench outside the Preceptor’s chambers, where I used to sit and wait when I’d got myself in trouble and had been sent for to be judged and found wanting. I spent a great deal of time sitting on that bench, in a room not entirely unlike this one, and the feeling of unspecified but acute dread is also remarkably similar. I’d hoped that at my age I wouldn’t have to go through all that again, but it seems I was wrong.’

Vetriz smiled. ‘It was a bit like that when we were children,’ she said. ‘It was always, “Wait till your father gets home,” because of course he was away most of the time on business, and when he was actually there we were as good as gold. But when he’d been away for a couple of months and then we heard that his ship had been sighted and was due in later that day – well, it was always an uncomfortable time, because there’d always be this terrible catalogue of crimes and misdemeanours ready to greet him; the poor man only just had time to take his hat off, and Mother would march us forward, and he’d look at her with this Can’t-it-wait expression… Of course,’ she went on with a grin, ‘I always got away with it, because I was a girl and all I had to do was let my little face fall and start snuffling and Father would believe anything I said. So I always put the blame on poor Ven, and, bless him, he never did come to terms with that; he’d always protest his innocence and be really upset when he got punished for naughty things I’d done. He honestly believed that all he had to do was tell the truth and somehow Right would always prevail. You know, deep down in his soul, I think he really still believes that to this day.’

Alexius considered that for a moment. ‘That’s rather a fine thing, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘Not the most suitable mindset for a trader perhaps, but nevertheless admirable, in a way.’ He sighed, and shifted again. ‘Have you heard any more about how the war’s going?’ he asked. ‘The man who sold me my breakfast was convinced that Shastel is striking a deal with a great confederacy of pirates; they’ll ship the halberdiers over to Scona and in return they’ll get to sack Scona Town. On the other hand, he also believes that if they try, Gorgas Loredan will drive them back into the sea, and Niessa Loredan will command her tame wizards to summon up a great storm and sink all their ships, so perhaps his value as a source of information isn’t as high as one might think.’

Vetriz shrugged her slim shoulders. ‘I think this war’s like a fight I once saw,’ she said, ‘where there were these two young men at a wedding dance, and they’d had too much to drink, the way people do, and there was some sort of a quarrel over a girl or something. Anyway, everybody expected these two to start fighting and I suppose they didn’t want to disappoint everyone, so they started prancing round and swishing about with their fists; and, quite by accident, one of them made a wild swing and knocked over one of those big iron lamp-stands, you know the sort I mean, and the lamp toppled off and fell on the other man’s shoulder and gave him a nasty knock. And the other one – the one the lamp hit – sat down in the middle of the floor cursing and swearing and rubbing his shoulder and calling the first man a clumsy idiot, and the first man was apologising and getting into a terrible state because he was convinced he’d broken the other man’s collarbone; he was jumping up and down and bawling, “Send for a doctor, send for a doctor,” and then someone else tried to shut him up, so he took a swing at this other man and hit him on the nose; and that really finished him off, because the man’s nose started bleeding and he was staggering about with a napkin pressed to his face; and of course everybody else in the place was laughing like mad, and then the bride burst into tears because of all this fuss spoiling her wedding dance, so the groom got angry with the man who’d done all the damage and took a swing at him himself, and of course he missed and smacked his fist against the wall and broke a bone in his hand-’

Alexius nodded. ‘Most wars start because someone makes a mistake, and most battles are lost by the losing side rather than won by the victors. I’m not sure if that makes things better or worse. I suppose it depends which you disapprove of more, malice or stupidity.’ He massaged the calf of his left leg, which had gone to sleep. ‘It’s possible she’s forgotten all about us,’ he said. ‘I wonder, if we simply got up and walked away, would anybody actually try to stop us?’

‘We could try-’ Vetriz began to say; at which point the door of the Director’s office opened and the clerk scurried out, his arms full of hastily rolled maps. ‘She’s ready for you now,’ he said. ‘And I’d watch it if I were you. It’s a bad day.’

Alexius stood up, then staggered and grabbed hold of Vetriz’s arm to steady himself. ‘Pins and needles,’ he explained. ‘Oh, confound it. Now I’m going to have to stagger in there and look as if I’m drunk.’

There was a new piece of furniture in the Director’s office: a small, round three-legged table between the two visitors’ chairs, on which someone had put a jug of weak, sweet wine and two beautifully made horn cups, with silver rims and bases and dainty little silver stands to hold them upright. Vetriz recognised them as City manufacture and quite old, and it occurred to her that there were probably casks and chests of such things squirrelled away somewhere in the building – gifts from visiting embassies, foreign heads of state anxious to curry favour, wealthy individuals trying to secure private concessions, bribes, inducements and sweeteners, not to mention spoils of war. It looked hopelessly out of place in the deliberate dourness of the office; I wonder why she did it, she asked herself. Probably just to disconcert us. Third rule of negotiation: confuse and conquer. She sat down and made a deliberate show of not having noticed.

‘My brother Bardas,’ said Niessa Loredan, ‘has left Scona. I didn’t want him to go and I don’t know where he’s gone. Did you know that already?’

Vetriz looked at Alexius, who shook his head. ‘I had no idea,’ he said.

‘I believe you.’ Niessa stoop up, went to the little table and poured wine into the two cups. ‘Flavoured with honey and cinnamon,’ she said to Vetriz. ‘Your favourite, I believe.’

Vetriz smiled wanly. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said, taking the cup and holding it slightly away from her. ‘Please don’t take this the wrong way, but if he’s gone, do you really need us here? I mean, there doesn’t seem to be any point-’

‘On the contrary,’ Niessa replied. She was pouring water from a pottery jug into a plain wooden cup. ‘This is exactly the sort of contingency I needed you for. You aren’t going to be difficult, are you?’

‘What do you want us to do?’ Alexius asked.

Niessa sat down and folded her hands. ‘First,’ she said, ‘find out where he is and what he’s doing. Then I want you to bring him back. It’s all right, I’ll tell you how to go about it when the time comes. It’s quite simple, really; like this-’

– And all three of them were standing beside a river, looking at two young men and a girl. The girl was holding a big wicker basket full of clothes, and the men were trying to grab hold of her. She was trying to avoid them and pull away without dropping the basket, until one of the men pulled it away from her and let it fall into the water. The girl swore at him; he laughed and grabbed a handful of her dress where it covered her shoulder.

‘I’d forgotten that,’ Niessa said.

The fabric tore, and the girl stumbled backwards, putting down a hand to steady herself, The other man came up behind her and reached out, and she swung at his face; she had picked up a stone, and it cracked loudly against the bridge of his nose.

‘Look,’ Niessa said, pointing. ‘There’s Gorgas, over there.’

She was gesturing at a tall young man standing behind a single cypress tree, holding the reins of two horses. He wasn’t watching what was going on down in the river; he was looking over his shoulder, with an expression of panic on his face. Vetriz couldn’t see what he was staring at because there was a ridge in the way, but she saw him pull a short, heavily recurved bow from a scabbard on the nearest horse’s saddle. He pressed the hooked end of the bottom limb against the outside of his right ankle, then lifted his left foot over so as to trap the bow between his legs, bringing his left knee to bear on it just below the handle and applying enough pressure to bend it until he could slip the string over the top nock. It was a graceful manoeuvre, smooth and unhurried, like a dance step practised over and over again until it had become perfect and could be executed without any thought whatsoever.

‘I often come here,’ Niessa said casually. ‘But I still notice something new every time. Did you see? He did that without once looking down.’

He pulled a handful of arrows out of the quiver that hung down beside the horse’s neck, ducked under a low branch of the tree and wedged himself in a slot between two boulders. There was the faintest of clicks as he drew an arrow onto the bowstring.

‘He was really attached to that bow,’ Niessa was saying. ‘Bardas made it for him. I was surprised he lent it to the Ferian boy; I never knew him lend it to anybody else, he was that jealous of it. I think it was mostly because it was a present from Bardas.’

Now Vetriz could what he’d been looking at: three men with mattocks in their hands.

(At least, I assume those are mattocks. Alexius said to himself. We called what those men are holding rasters where I come from, but I’ve never heard that word anywhere else. I thought a mattock was more like a hoe. Gorgas said they were mattocks when he told me the story, so maybe I’m just filling in.)

The girl in the river was screaming now, and the two men were panicking, apologising, shouting at her, trying to shut her up; one was yelling he was sorry, he didn’t mean to, it was just in fun; the other slapped her across the face so hard that the running men could hear it. The youngest man stumbled, fell, landed heavily on his side, tried to get up, twitched, went still. The oldest man didn’t appear to have noticed, but the third man swung round, almost losing his footing on the stony ground, looked up in the direction the arrow had come from and shouted something. Then he fell over too, flopping backwards as if he’d been pushed. The older man stopped then, and a moment later he fell down too; the arrow hit him just above the heart and went through diagonally, the arrowhead poking out a finger’s breadth under his right shoulder-blade.

‘Forty yards, I’d say,’ Niessa commented, ‘and two out of three as clean a pair of kills as you could possibly wish for. In an archery contest, it’d have scored something like two bulls and an inner; thoroughly respectable, good enough for silver. In the field, though, a botched shot’s a botched shot.’

Then he stood up, pulled a few more arrows from the quiver and walked over to where the slope overhung the river. The two men had stopped bothering with the girl and were staring at the bodies; the girl was hitting one of them across the back of the shoulders with the sides of her fists and he wasn’t even taking any notice. They watched as the archer drew and took a quick aim, sighting down the arrow and making the adjustment for aiming off; then one of the men dropped like a stone into the water, and the archer reached to his belt for an arrow. The other man started to run without looking round; the girl started to say something, and then the arrow hit her. She went down-

‘Now there’s the bit I wish I could slow down,’ Niessa remarked. ‘Unfortunately, it all happens so quickly, I can’t really make anything out for sure. Does his hand wobble on the loose, or is he deliberately shooting low? Believe it or not, it didn’t really hurt all that much.’

‘Have we got to watch the rest of this?’ Alexius interrupted.

‘All right,’ Niessa said, with a hint of disappointment in her voice. ‘Actually, there’s not much more to see. He goes chasing off after the Hedin boy – he had nice eyes, Cleras Hedin, but really bad teeth; the joke is that he and I had been quietly amusing ourselves for days before all this happened – money changed hands, obviously, but it was all quite amiable – so there was really no need for him to be involved, it was young Ferian I drew the line at. But Gorgas doesn’t know that.’ They were back in the Director’s office now, and the wine in Vetriz’s hand was still pleasantly warm. ‘Anyway, he’ll catch young Hedin and bash his brains out, and when he gets back he’ll find Clefas and Zonaras scampering up the track, and Bardas and me not dead, and he’ll give it up as a bad job and run away. The rest of it’s just shouting and screaming and not knowing what to do, and Zonaras being sick at the sight of blood; it’s just as well Clefas stayed calm or we’d both be dead. But he’s solid brick from the shoulders up, nothing ever seems to get a reaction out of him. Typical farmer.’

There was a moment of complete silence. Then Alexius cleared his throat.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I still don’t see the point. Why did you want us to see that?’

Niessa smiled charmingly. ‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘You just helped me answer my question. Now I know where Bardas is – he’s gone home. In fact,’ she added, refilling Alexius’ cup, ‘I think I know precisely where he is, right now.’

‘This river,’ Bardas was saying, ‘used to mark the boundary; our land on that side, from here over to where you can see that little clump of firs. The ford is just round the bend here.’

He stopped and reined in the horses. Two men were approaching on the other side of the river, just emerging from the shade of a tall cypress tree. They were wearing the usual broad-rimmed leather hats and carrying mattocks over their shoulders.

‘There now,’ Bardas said, and jumped down off the cart. ‘If that isn’t good timing.’ He raised his hands over his head and waved to the two men, who turned and looked at him. ‘Now I’m home,’ he said.