The Belly of the Bow

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

‘Sleep,’ said Gorgas Loredan, ‘is wrong. I don’t hold with it. If a tax-collector showed up on your doorstep and demanded a third of everything you own, you’d cut his throat and start a riot. But along comes sleep, demanding a third of your life, and you snuggle your face into the pillow and let him rob you. Well, maybe you do. Not me.’ He yawned, and covered his mouth with his fist. ‘When I was a kid, I made the decision not to let the bastard grind me down; I started cutting back, slowly and gradually, half an hour per year, and now I can get by easily on four hours a night, and go without sleep entirely for three or four days in a row if I have to. Net result is, by the time I’m your age I’ll have lived eight whole years longer than you have – that’s four more hours a day for forty-eight years, you can get out your counters and check the arithmetic if you don’t believe me. Think of it, eight more years of life. It’s like what market traders do with the coinage; you know, the way they clip a tiny bit of silver off the edge of each coin that passes through their hands, and after a while they’ve got a jar full of silver they can take down to the Mint and exchange for new coin.’

The sergeant smiled. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You Loredans cheat everybody else, so why not Death as well? Sounds only fair to me.’

Gorgas shook his head. ‘Not all us Loredans, just me. Niessa’s got the staying power of a cheap tallow candle. About the time I’m settling down to make a start on a useful night’s work, she’s dead on her feet and sleepwalking back to her bed. Bardas was a bit better than that, but still no night-owl.’ He sighed, and put his hand over the side of the boat, letting his fingers trail in the water. ‘I’m telling you,’ he said, ‘if I were to invent some medicine you could buy in a bottle that guaranteed you an extra eight years of life, guaranteed to work, money back if not, I’d be so rich I could buy Shastel instead of fighting it. But you try and convince people to do without a few hours’ sleep, they look at you as if you were murdering their children. Crazy.’

The sergeant grunted. ‘You’d get on well with my youngest boy,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘Four years old and he never goes to bed before his mother. If you make him to go bed, he only waits till we’re all asleep and then gets up again. I caught him trying to light the lamp the other night – well after midnight, and he nearly burnt the house down. Four years old,’ he repeated, shaking his head. ‘By your reckoning, if he keeps at it he’ll be older than me by the time he’s thirty.’

Gorgas laughed. ‘You send him to me when he’s twelve and I’ll put him to work as my night clerk,’ he said. ‘No point in all that extra time going to waste.’

‘I’ll hold you to that,’ the sergeant replied.

The narrow quay of the factory island was already busier than usual. One of the first orders Gorgas had given when the news broke was for the stockpiles of arms and materials in the factories to be shifted up to the Town and every available ship and barge was being loaded up with bales and barrels, sacks, crates, jars and boxes. ‘Not a bad start,’ Gorgas commented, as they disembarked. ‘But we’re going to need to set up another shift, maybe two, and that’ll mean we’ll need more labour, not to mention materials. Then there’s transport, and storage too, of course. Fat lot of good it’ll do us having a cellarful of barrels of arrows here if we can’t find the barges to ship them a few hundred yards over the water to the city.’

‘Build more barges, then,’ the sergeant said. ‘Or you could requisition some of the cattle-boats.’

Gorgas shook his head. ‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘They’ll be too busy hauling timber and pig-iron from Colleon and the South. And as for building barges, I can’t spare the shipyard capacity. I’ve got ten commerce raiders to build and a couple of months to do it in, so the hell with building barges.’

The sergeant raised an eyebrow. ‘Commerce raiders?’

Gorgas nodded. ‘It’s about the only way I can think of to take the war to the enemy. That said, though, they may just find they’ve got themselves into something they can’t handle. Have you ever stopped to think what proportion of its population Shastel can feed from its own farmland? Twenty thousand people living on a rock are likely to get hungry if the grain-ships can’t get through.’

‘Good point,’ the sergeant said.

Gorgas stopped to let a cart laden with oxhides pass. ‘And their timing isn’t exactly wonderful, either,’ he went on, ‘declaring war when the early barley’s just coming up to being ready to cut. Catches fire easily at this time of year; believe me, I’m a farm boy, I know these things. We aren’t through yet, my friend, not by a long way. And those bastards up there in their castle might just learn a few things about what wars really mean that aren’t anywhere in their textbooks.’

The first visit on the itinerary was to the sawmill. It was fortuitous, to say the least, that Gorgas had insisted that Scona have its own top-class sawmill, and had cajoled his sister into parting with the money to build it. He’d based it on the sea-mills of Perimadeia, but the Scona version was bigger and rather more efficient. The tide surging up the narrow straits between the factory island and Scona trapped water in a system of weirs, which powered five enormous water wheels, in turn connected by a fabulously complicated array of gears and drives to the flywheels that dominated the sawmill itself. Ten huge circular blades, each one as tall as a man, ran day and night in the sawpits, while another feed powered the rollers that drew the logs into the blades. Three shifts of a hundred men, women and children loaded the rollers, took off and stacked the cut planks, cleaned out the mountains of sawdust and made sure the mill kept going. There were even two orderlies on duty at all times, to patch up cuts and pull out splinters for workers who weren’t careful or quick enough around the spinning blades.

‘I could stand here all day just watching,’ Gorgas shouted over the deafening noise. ‘When I think of how long it used to take us when I was a kid, fooling around with hammer and wedges, it makes me realise I’ve achieved something in my life.’

The mill foreman made a great show of being proud and honoured, which Gorgas completely ignored; instead, he immediately started talking about extra shifts, which stripped away the foreman’s jovial obsequiousness like raw vinegar stripping a pearl.

‘We simply haven’t got the capacity,’ he kept repeating. ‘All ten saws are fully occupied as it is, except when we stand down for an hour at night for sharpening and general maintenance. And we’ve got to do that, or they’d be scrap within a week.’

Gorgas shook his head. ‘That’s your department,’ he said. ‘I want output up by a tenth in three weeks. How you do it is up to you. Still,’ he went on, ‘if you want a suggestion, I couldn’t help noticing that you stop the blades for ten minutes or so after every cut length. Why’s that?’

‘To grease them,’ the foreman replied. ‘It stops them jamming and means we can go longer without having to sharpen them up.’

‘Fair enough,’ Gorgas conceded. ‘But can’t you keep them running while you’re at it? It only takes a few seconds to swab on the grease; the rest of the wasted time is stopping and starting the train.’

‘It’s a safety measure,’ the foreman replied. ‘I wouldn’t fancy smearing grease on those things while they’re running, would you?’

Gorgas nodded. ‘I can see you’d rather be here in the office, where it’s safe and quiet. And if you want to stay in here, I suggest you get me my extra ten per cent. Otherwise you’ll be out there with a pot of grease and a rag on a stick. Understood?’

Next they went to the burnishing shop, where a feed from the water wheel drove two massive circular mops, on which weapons and armour were given their final polish. Ten women and sixteen children were employed there, coating the items to be polished with grit in a base of runny wet clay and holding them on the wheels. The air was full of grit and dust, and Gorgas was glad to get out again after a perfunctory inspection, his eyes painful and watering. Nobody lasted very long in the burnishing shop.

‘We could close the whole thing down,’ the sergeant pointed out. ‘It’s only to make the stuff look pretty.’

Gorgas shook his head. ‘Shame on you,’ he said, ‘and you a sergeant. How can you bawl a man out for not being able to see his face in his helmet if the helmet’s not shiny to start with? You could undermine the whole basis of military discipline.’

After that they visited the tannery, another of Gorgas’ improvements on a Perimadeian original. The four main vats were as big as cottages, with scaffolding towers to support the cranes that lowered and raised the bales of hides. If anything, the atmosphere was worse than in the burnishing shop, and everybody who worked there had their faces muffled up in any piece of cloth they could lay their hands on. It was generally held that you could spot a tannery worker from the other side of the Square, because his arms were permanently black to the elbows; assuming, of course, the unlikely event of a tannery worker ever finding himself in Scona Square, among the cheerful stalls and strolling promenaders.

‘Our main problem is getting the materials,’ the foreman said. ‘You find me another ten tons of oak-bark a month and I’ll up production by a quarter. And using anything else is a false economy.’

Gorgas scratched his head. ‘That’s a lot of bald trees,’ he admitted. ‘Still, that’s my problem, not yours. What I need you to do for me is start producing stuff I can use for covering the hulls of boats; barges, mostly, and landing-craft for putting marines ashore on shallow beaches. You’ll need to talk to the shipyard masters about what’s needed. Pretty soon that’s going to be your top priority, so be ready.’

Gorgas toured the brass foundry, the armoury and fletching shops, the bowyers’ shop (where he joked with the foreman about having a brother who could use a place, if there was one going) and the ropewalk, and then it was time to head back to the city for a meeting with the treasury clerks. They were just as sullen and difficult as he’d anticipated; they had their orders from Niessa to make sure he didn’t spend a copper quarter more than was necessary, and they’d learnt by his own example that attack was the best form of defence. Before he could even begin setting out his requirements for building the commerce raiders they were querying his last set of accounts and telling him there wouldn’t be any money for new projects until he’d sorted out the waste in his present budget. He dealt with this obstacle by punching the chief clerk in the face, knocking him to the ground and breaking his nose; then he helped him up, gave him a bit of rag to staunch the bleeding and carried on the discussion where he’d left it. The clerks’ attitude improved substantially after that.

‘It’s not the things that are the problem, you see,’ Gorgas explained, as he and the sergeant crossed the city on their way to the barracks. ‘It’s the people. Sort out the people, and the people will sort out the things. And that’s all there is to it.’

As he’d expected, the mood in the barracks was ambivalent, the usual mixture of enthusiasm and terror that mobilisation brings to a standing army. There was scarcely any room at the butts; five or six men were shooting on each target instead of the usual two, and the red and gold rings were so clogged that there wasn’t room to squeeze another arrow in. Gorgas stopped to watch, and the chief instructor gave orders for a target to be cleared for him.

‘I’ll have to borrow a bow,’ he admitted. ‘I’m ashamed to say I haven’t got a decent one of my own any more, not since my old favourite broke.’

After that, of course, he was spoilt for choice; but he made a point of choosing the plainest standard-issue ash bow he could find, and a dozen issue bodkinheads straight from the barrel. The crowd gathered around him was so thick that he was amazed any of them could breathe.

‘Three up for sighters and then straight in,’ he announced, as he flexed the bow against his calf to string it. ‘That sound fair to you lads?’

A chorus of shouts assured him that it was. He picked up the first arrow, drew smoothly to the corner of his mouth, sighted low and to the right and loosed; the arrow struck a palm’s width high and on line, not bad for a first shot with a strange bow. He cleared his mind and concentrated, well aware that he had a fearsome reputation as an archer to defend, checking his stance and the length of his draw and calculating the allowance. The next arrow only just brushed the bottom left edge of the target-boss, however, and he changed his ideas; after all, he’d shot on impulse all his life, letting his eyes and hands think for him ever since he was a boy in the Mesoge. For his third sighter he simply drew, looked at the target and loosed without thinking, and the arrow landed plumb in the top left of the gold. He put nine more beside it as quickly as he could draw and nock, then unstrung the bow and handed it back to the instructor without a word, while the soldiers cheered themselves hoarse.

‘There you go,’ he said, ‘nothing to it. Now, if there’s anybody here who wants to tell me the issue bow’s a cross-eyed bastard, step right up. No takers? Just as well.’ He grinned, as if at some private joke. ‘I’m here to tell you, we make good bows on Scona.’

‘The first issue we have to address,’ said Avid Soef, ‘is ships. Agreed?’

At the far end of the enormous table, someone yawned. Over on the right, a very bald man whose name generally got left out of the minutes was eating a chicken leg, noisily.

‘No,’ replied Sten Mogre. ‘Absolutely not. Our first priority is an overall strategy, a game plan. Once we’ve got that, then we can start worrying about details such as ships.’

Soef glowered at him. ‘Ships are just a detail,’ he said. ‘I see. I suppose you’re planning to walk to Scona?’

Mogre smiled indulgently and folded his hands over his smooth, round belly. ‘Save it for Chapter,’ he sighed. ‘This is neither the time nor the place for the celebrated Soef wit. Thanks to you, we’re both in this mess up to our necks; if you want to have any chance of getting out of it in one piece, I suggest you lay off the cheap point-scoring and try to be positive. Obviously ships are an important detail; so are lines of supply, and communications, and battlefield tactics. In a war, everything’s important. What I’m saying is, begin at the beginning. Let’s start again, shall we?’

Avid Soef hesitated for a moment, then nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘My suggestion’s fairly self-evident, I reckon. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say.’

‘Thank you.’ Mogre leant across the table and drew the big chart towards him. ‘All right,’ he went on, ‘here’s the map of Scona.’ He jabbed at a corner with a sausagelike finger. ‘Here’s Scona Town. Point to bear in mind: it’s the only sheltered anchorage capable of receiving more than a handful of ships, so from that angle it’d be a good place to land. Against that, of course, it’ll be the most heavily defended place on the island. Looked at another way, if we’re going to win this war then sooner or later we’ve got to take Scona Town, either by assault or siege, and siege is out of the question unless we can maintain an effective blockade.’

Rehamon Faim, a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early forties, nodded vigorously. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later we’ve got to take them on at their strongest point, so why not sooner? The key phrase for this whole war, it seems to me, has got to be overwhelming force. There’s a point in any battle where, if you outnumber the enemy by a sufficient proportion, you can hit so hard and so overwhelmingly that there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it – smother the bastards, in other words – and that way you keep your losses to a minimum. Well,’ he added, ‘that’s how I see it, anyway.’

Avid Soef shook his head. ‘I’ve read the same books as you, Rehamon,’ he said, ‘and you haven’t quite got that right. In a land battle, on the flat and in the open, then yes, I’d have to agree with you. But an opposed landing on a defended position like Strangers’ Quay – that’s asking for trouble. Now, if you’d ever finished the book, you’d have read the bit where it’s explained how, in a bottleneck or defended-causeway scenario, too many is actually worse than too few; and I say that’s basically what a seaborne attack on Scona would be.’

Sten Mogre, who’d been pouring himself a drink, rapped the table for attention. ‘You’re both of you getting too far ahead,’ he said. ‘Scona Town’s obviously the key to this war, but it’s not the only potential beach-head, not by a long way. If you’d care to look at the map, you’ll see the other choices ringed in red.’

With a general scraping of chairs and hunching of shoulders, the committee studied the map. ‘You’re being a bit optimistic, aren’t’ you?’ said Mihel Bovert, the acting treasurer. ‘Some of these you’ve marked are just little coves, places you’d be hard put to it to land more than a fishing boat.’

‘I’m coming to that,’ Mogre repled patiently. ‘Here’s my point. Now, before I start, this isn’t a suggestion or a proposal, so there’s no call to go jumping down my throat. It’s a straightforward question. Which is going to be better, a single landing in force, or a number of simultaneous landings all round the island?’

Soef shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’ve obviously been mugging up on this, Sten,’ he said. ‘You tell us what you think.’

‘All right.’ Mogre resumed his comfortable sprawl. ‘Let’s just think for a moment about how the rebels fight. Quick word-association game: someone says Shastel, you say “halberdiers”. Someone says Scona, immediately you think “archers”. Right? So, we agree on that, now what we’ve got to do, the way I see it, is to organise this war so that halberdiers will be at an advantage over archers. And where are archers at their best? I’ll tell you what the books say – not me, the books, the people who know about these things. And they’ll tell you, archers are most effective when deployed defensively from a position of strength against a massed advance of the enemy across open ground.’

‘We know all this,’ interrupted Mihel Bovert. ‘Make your point.’

‘All right.’ Sten Mogre nodded pleasantly. ‘A massed advance of the enemy across open ground, gentlemen: that’s what we’ve got to avoid. And here’s where Avid’s point about numbers sometimes being a handicap is important. When you’re marching down the throat of a line of archers, the more of you there are, the better their chance of hitting something; simple as that. Better to have smaller, more mobile assault units converging on the enemy from different directions; you make them divide their forces – and with archers, as everybody knows, there’s a magic ratio, somewhere between thirteen and ten to one, depending on distance between the armies and quality of troops. Once you go below the magic number, archers simply can’t stop a determined advance of heavy infantry. So, our aim’s got to be, split them up enough to take the individual units below that threshold. And we do that by dividing our own forces and making them do the same.’ He paused and looked round. ‘How are we doing so far? All agreed?’

Avid Soef did his best to look bored. ‘Like you keep saying, Sten,’ he said, ‘we’ve all read the books. All you’re really saying is, let’s use a basic encircling strategy. Common sense.’

Mogre smiled at him. ‘It looks that way, doesn’t it, until you look at the map. Look at the map, Avid. You see these brown bits, all round the edges? They’re mountains. Scona is basically one big mountain, with pockets of straight and level stuff scattered here and there. And when I was doing the first year of the course, they made me write out a hundred times, where there’s mountains, there’s problems. You know the sort of thing – ambushes, supply, communications, the right hand now knowing where in hell the left hand’s got to, basic stuff really. If we turn six thousand men loose in parties of a few hundred in the Scona hills, sprinkled all over the shop like handfuls of seedcorn, we’ll deserve what we’ll undoubtedly get. Are you following all this, or shall I go back?’

Avid Soef scowled impatiently. ‘Now what are you trying to say?’ he sighed. ‘First it’s Let’s divide our forces, now its We’ve got to stick together. Would you please make up your mind?’

‘Calm down, Avid,’ Mogre replied, ‘nobody’s getting at you. All I’m doing is trying to point out what I think is a pretty obvious fact about this war, which is that there’s no simple answer; we can’t just copy out a few relevant passages from the set books and follow them to the letter, we’ve got to use our heads. We’ve thought about the enemy, sorted out their strengths and given a little preliminary thought about how to avoid them; now let’s do the same for the terrain.’

Pier Epaiz, the youngest member of the committee, raised his hand. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘I’ve been doing a bit of work on this very point. I teach a class in property law, and I had my second years go through the Cartulary records and pull out all the old copy mortgages and leases from way back, anything to do with land transactions on Scona. We’re correlating them now, and once we’ve married up our findings with the old tithe maps and census returns, we should be able to put together a far more detailed geographical survey than anything we’ve got in the main archive. Which means,’ he went on, grinning nervously, ‘that if we do a proper job, we ought to be able to produce reliable maps that actually show our people where things are.’

‘Now that’s the most intelligent thing-’ Avid Soef started to say; but Mogre interrupted him.

‘Point of interest,’ he said. ‘Any idea how long this exercise is likely to take?’

Pier Epaiz thought for a moment. ‘Six months at the very most,’ he said, ‘and there’s every chance we can do it in four, if I can get some more people assigned from other classes. In fact-’

‘Four months,’ Mogre repeated. ‘You’re suggesting we hold up the war for four months while your students read their way through old property deeds.’ He shook his head. ‘Tell me you can let me have something that’s an improvement on what we’ve already got in four weeks, and yes, that’ll be a useful contribution. Otherwise I guess we’re just going to have to make do with the tithe maps, from which,’ he added, ‘if I remember my law classes, all the plans and diagrams you get in title deeds were originally copied anyway.’

‘Yes, but there’s usually further details in the text-’ Epaiz tried to say, but the rest of the tables was looking at him, so he sat down again and pushed his chair back. ‘All right,’ Mogre went on, ‘there is actually a valid point here. Geography – know the terrain. Maps – where we’ve got two or more units working towards a common objective, make sure they’re all using copies of the same map, drawn to the same scale. Don’t laugh,’ he added, ‘it’s been known. One commander runs a pair of calipers over the map, calculates it’s two days to the city. His colleague on the other side of the city’s got a different scale map so he gets a different time estimate – result, one of them gets there before the other one does, ends up facing the enemy on his own and gets a hammering. What I’d like you to do,’ he went on, looking across at Pier Epaiz, ‘is get this mapping school of yours turning out precisely identical campaign charts copied from the tithe map, beginning with twenty copies just for starters and then keep ’em coming till I say When. All right?’

Epaiz nodded silently.

‘This is wonderful,’ said Sten Mogre, ‘we’re actually starting to make some progress. Let’s see if we can make some more. Now then, we’ve got Pier on map-making, what else needs to be done before we can make a proper start? Ernan, would you like to put together some figures for me on, first, what we’re likely to need in the way of supplies and materials – right across the board, from halberds to boot-buckles to bacon – and then second, what we’ve actually got, and finally third, what we need to get, where’s our best chance of getting it, how long and how much. Are you happy with that?’ Ernan Mines, small and painfully nervous sub-dean of the faculty of Mathematics, nodded several times. ‘That’s fine, then,’ Mogre went on, turning to the tall grey-haired man sitting to his immediate left, ‘Hiors, why don’t you get your History students cracking on the best profile we can put together of the rebel forces – number, training, equipment, everything you can get? Grab hold of as many traders, fishermen, spies, whatever as you can lay hands on, anybody who’s likely to know anything useful – recent shipments of military supplies, best guess at manpower reserves, all the demographic stuff, accounts of previous engagements in the dispatches archives; see if you can scrape together a few samples of rebel kit so we can see what we’ll be up against.’

He paused to draw breath, then leant forward a little and looked straight at Avid Soef. ‘And what I’d like from you, Avid,’ he continued, taking no notice at all of the expression on his colleague’s face, ‘since you raised the issue, is a rundown on what kind of ships we’ll need, how many of them, where we can hire them from and how much it’s likely to cost. Keep in touch with Hiors, he’ll be able to tell you what the rebels have got in the way of fighting ships so you’ll be able to make provision for keeping them off our backs while we’re trying to land troops. Now then, anybody, have I forgotten anything?’ He waited for two seconds, then went on, ‘Nobody? Well, if anything occurs to anybody after the meeting, let me know. Meanwhile, I’d like to suggest that we meet up in two days’ time and see where we’ve reached. Agreed? Splendid.’ He stood up. ‘I think we’ve actually managed to get some valuable work done here today, so thank you, all of you. If we keep on at this rate, who knows, we might just all still be alive this time next year.’

The committee filed out, except for Avid Soef and Mihel Bovert.

‘I know,’ Bovert said, before Soef could speak, ‘it’s a disaster.’

‘You reckon?’ Soef smiled cheerfully. ‘I don’t think so. In fact, I think it’s all going wonderfully well.’

Bovert stared at him. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘That Redemptionist pig hijacks the meeting, hijacks the whole damn war, makes us look like idiot children-’

‘Relax.’ Avid Soef perched on the edge of the table and pulled a discarded map towards him. ‘Use your brains. So Sten’s taken charge; if you remember, we aren’t exactly here by choice. Now, if it all goes wrong, we can turn round and say, Nothing to do with us, you want to talk to Sten Mogre.’

Bovert conceded the point with a brisk nod. ‘And if all goes well?’

‘In that case, we share the credit and nobody’s any worse off. And besides, there’s still a long way to go. But my guess is, since Sten would insist on taking everything on himself, he’s going to be so busy running the damn war that he won’t have time to remember why we’re fighting the wretched thing in the first place.’

‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ Zonaras said over breakfast, ‘but just how long are you planning on staying?’

Breakfast consisted of the remains of the previous day’s loaf, a slab of cheese aged to translucence and a jug of cider in urgent need of using up. Nobody seemed particularly hungry.

‘I don’t know,’ Bardas replied. ‘To be honest, I hadn’t given it any thought. Why? Do you want to get rid of me?’

Zonaras and Clefas looked at each other. ‘This is your home too, you know that,’ Clefas said. ‘But we’ve got to be realistic.’

Bardas raised an eyebrow. ‘Realistic,’ he repeated.

‘That’s right,’ Zonaras said. ‘Face facts, Bardas. We produce enough to keep the two of us, just about. Three would make it tight.’

Bardas stirred in his seat. ‘That depends,’ he said. ‘Three useless losers like you, perhaps. Shut up, Clefas, when I want to hear from you I’ll let you know. This is a good farm, or it was in Father’s day. All right, we were never rich; but it provided for all of us and paid the rent as well, and nobody ever went hungry or barefoot that I can remember.’

Zonaras was bright red in the face. ‘We work damned hard, Bardas,’ he said. ‘We were up and seeing to the herd while you were still asleep in your pit. Don’t you come here telling us how to do our job.’

‘Someone’s got to,’ Bardas replied calmly. ‘Oh, I’m not saying you’re idle,’ he went on. ‘Nobody could accuse you of that. You’re just useless. Stupid. Everything you touch goes hopelessly wrong. If there’s ninety-nine right ways of doing a thing and one wrong way, you’ll choose the wrong way every time. And you know why?’

Clefas got to his feet, hesitated, then sat down again. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell us,’ he said.

‘You bet. It’s because you’re losers, simple as that. It’s not your fault,’ he went on. ‘You’re younger sons, you weren’t brought up to think. In the ordinary way of things, you’d have spent all your lives having someone to tell you what to do, how and when to do it; Father, then Gorgas or me, then Gorgas’ sons or my sons. You’d have been looked after, working hard would have been enough, all that anyone’d ever have expected of you. As it is, you’ve had to shift for yourselves, and you just aren’t up to it. Well? You aren’t going to try and tell me I’m wrong, are you?’

There was a long, heavy silence.

‘All right,’ Zonaras said. ‘But whose fault is that? Who went prancing off because he just couldn’t stick it round here any more? Now, if you’d stuck around, if you’d had the guts to stay here where you belonged instead of running off and leaving us-’

‘For gods’ sakes, I did my best for you,’ Bardas replied angrily. ‘All those years I spent risking my life, living in places you wouldn’t stall a pig, just so you’d be looked after-’

Clefas jumped up again. ‘Oh, yes, that was fine,’ he shouted. ‘All you had to do was send us money and that was supposed to make everything all right, like we were cripples or wrong in the head or something. All we wanted was one lucky break, so we could turn round and tell you where to stuff your damned money. Well, if you think you can come poncing back after all these years and start in being head of the family like nothing’s happened, you’re stupider than you look.’

Bardas gave him a cold stare. ‘Sit down, you idiot,’ he said. ‘And stop bobbing up and down, the both of you, you’re giving me a headache. The fact remains, I can take over the running of this farm and within a year we’ll all be comfortable and have more than enough for the three of us. You carry on the way you’re doing and you’ll still be breaking your backs to scrape a living when you’re old men. And for why? Stupid pride. You’re like sulking kids, the two of you.’

‘Really?’ Zonaras said. ‘All right, big brother, you go ahead and tell us how you’re going to make such a hell of a difference.’

Bardas shrugged. ‘Where do I start?’ he said. ‘All right, here’s ten things you’re doing wrong, taken completely at random. One to five inclusive: you take a look out of the window there, you’ll see ten rows of vines, all leaf and no bloody grapes. You want to know why? Because you’ve overpruned, overwatered, overfed, overtrellised and overthinned. Next to that you’ve got ten rows of beans you’ve burnt alive by smothering them in manure. Moving on from the withered beans, we come to the dead plum trees, which you managed to kill by girdling ’em right down to the quick, and just beyond that, your pride and joy, the new olive stands. Must have taken weeks of backbreaking work to lay them out like that, all neat and tidy; but they’re all going to die, because slap bang in the middle there’s two great big oak trees, and any fool knows that oak roots poison olives. Now then, your onions-’

‘All right,’ Zonaras growled, ‘you made your point. Everybody makes mistakes.’

‘Yes,’ Bardas sighed, ‘but not in every single bloody thing they do. It takes real talent to spoil everything. And you know the really sad thing about it?’ He closed his eyes, rubbed them, and opened them again. ‘Most of these disasters are because you’re trying too hard. Really, if you’d just done the bare minimum and spent the rest of the day sitting on your backsides under a tree chewing blades of grass, you’d have ended up far better off. And that’s ridiculous.’

‘All right.’ Zonaras was beside himself with anger now; Bardas could recognise the symptoms of the man who’s going to come out swinging at any moment, and braced himself. ‘So we’re no good at it,’ Zonaras continued. ‘So what? Nobody ever told us. Father never told us how to do things – oh, he told you and Gorgas all right, made sure you knew all there was to know about every bloody thing. If we stopped and asked, we got a clip round the ear and told to get on with our work. It was always, you don’t need to know that, Bardas knows. You do as you’re told and leave the thinking to your elders and betters. So all right, we did as we were told, and where did it get us? All we ever learnt was hard work, not what the hell you’re supposed to use it for. And all that time, where in the gods’ names were you? You were up in that bloody City, killing people.’

Bardas could feel his breath shortening; anger, bad temper, not problems he usually had to cope with. A man who fights and kills for money almost never has occasion to get angry. ‘I’d leave off that line of argument if I were you,’ he said. His brothers stared at him contemptuously.

‘That’s a threat, isn’t it?’ Clefas said. ‘I knew that’s how it’d be, sooner or later. Bardas the big fighting man, Bardas the mighty fencer, do as I say or I’ll bash your face in. Well then, is that what you’re going to do? Going to bash my face in if I say what you don’t like?’ He relaxed, and grinned viciously. ‘I tell you, Bardas, I always reckoned you and Gorgas were out of the same pod.’

‘That’s-’ Bardas said, and got no further. Instead, he made himself calm down. ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say, Clefas. All right, I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, but comparing me to him-’

Clefas looked at him curiously. ‘Everyone else round here does,’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t we?’

Bardas stared at him. ‘What do you mean, everyone else?’

‘We’re ashamed of you, brother,’ Zonaras interrupted. ‘Both of you. Like when you used to send the money; decent people wouldn’t have anything to do with it, not even when we were offering to pay over the odds. We all know where that’s come from, they’d say. All three of ’em, they’re as bad as each other – that’s what they said, but what they meant was, the whole damn family, as if we were like you two and her. And what did we ever do except stay home and try and make a living?’ He laughed. ‘Well, we tried that and we weren’t any good at that either, and now we’re just here and we aren’t rightly bothered any more. So understand this, will you, Bardas? We don’t want you coming back here, not if you were to double and triple all the yields and gods know what else, because we’re through with you, all three of you. Why don’t you just push off and leave us alone?’

‘Zonaras?’ Bardas looked up at his other brother.

‘Like Clefas just said,’ he replied, ‘we don’t want you here. This isn’t your home any more. Go back wherever the hell it is you belong and don’t come bothering us any more.’

Bardas nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I certainly can’t see any point in staying here. So where do you suggest I go?’

Neither of his brothers said anything. He waited, then went on, ‘I can’t go back to the City because some bastard burnt it down. I’m too old to go fooling about soldiering any more, even if anybody’d have me. Come on, you tell me, where am I supposed to go?’

Clefas shrugged. ‘None of our business,’ he said. ‘Why not back where you just came from? You’ve been there two years, it can’t have been that bad. Besides,’ he added, ‘if you want to be all cosy and homely, why don’t you make up with Gorgas and Niessa? You’re all made for each other, if you ask me.’

Bardas looked at him for a long time. ‘You say that like you mean it,’ he said quietly. ‘In which case, you’re right. I don’t belong here any more. And that’s a shame.’

Zonaras shook his head. ‘You may be a big fighting man, Bardas,’ he said, ‘but you don’t know spit about your own family. You face it, brother, we’re the Loredan boys, no good to anybody, no good for anything. Everybody round here says so.’

‘Do they?’ Bardas smiled. ‘Well, if everybody says it, I guess it must be so.’ He stood up and walked to the door. ‘If you had any idea how I used to dream about this place, back when I was in the cavalry, and then afterwards, when I was fencing. I used to think, all right, my life’s never going to be worth anything, but at least I’m making good for my family, looking after them, doing my bit as the eldest. For gods’ sakes, that’s all I’ve ever cared about. That’s why I stayed away, because I was never going to be any good for you here, only if I was away, making money to send home. It was all just for family.’

Clefas looked him in the eyes. ‘I reckon you were wasting your time, then,’ he said.

Bardas nodded, and walked out. It was warm in the yard, the sun just beginning to mull the air, and the previous night’s rain smelt sweet. On an impulse, Bardas stooped, picked up a small stone and let fly at the old sheep’s skull; the stone hit it squarely in the middle with a crack that echoed off the back wall of the house, but it didn’t budge. He shrugged his shoulders and lounged slowly towards the gate that led into the back orchard. He was untying the scrap of cord that made do in place of the long-since-rusted-up latch when he heard the sound of boots behind him and turned back.

Standing between him and the house were four men, four Scona archers; a sergeant and three troopers. ‘Bardas Loredan?’ the sergeant said.

Bardas nodded. ‘That’s me.’

The sergeant hesitated for just a split second, then took a single step forward. ‘You’ve got to come with us,’ he said. There was real fear in his eyes, and Bardas could see it was a stranger there.

‘All right,’ he said.

‘Now,’ the sergeant went on. ‘That’s my orders.’

‘All right,’ Bardas repeated. ‘I haven’t got anything to bring. We might as well go.’

The soldiers stepped back as he walked between them – they’re terrified of me, he realised, with a flicker of amusement, is that because they’re afraid I’ll hurt them or afraid they’ll have to hurt me? Come to think of it, they’d have had cause if they’d shown up an hour earlier. I’d have killed all four of them then, if I’d had to.

He wondered if he ought to mention it to them, just so that they’d know how well they stood with fortune, but decided against it. Instead he reached over and pulled the bow out of the hand of the man nearest to him, a quick snatch the man could do nothing about.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, before his wretched escort had time to react, ‘it’s just professional interest. Is this the sort of kit they’re issuing you lads with now, then?’

The archer nodded and reached out for his bow. Loredan held it out of his reach and studied it. Then he slid his thumbnail under a tiny split in the wood of the back, where a splinter was just starting to pull away. ‘Just as well you haven’t tried drawing this piece of shit recently,’ he said, ‘or first thing you know, you’d have got the top limb in your face and the bottom limb between your legs, and your mates’d have had to take you home on a door. Garbage,’ he added, sticking one end in the soft ground, putting his weight against the splintered limb and leaning till it snapped – a long, messy, diagonal fracture, full of splinters and needles. The soldier watched him in silent agony. Oh, gods, I suppose he’ll have it stopped out of his pay, I didn’t think. Oh, but wouldn’t that be Niessa all over? ‘So I’ve just done you a favour, son, haven’t I?’

The archer looked at him. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

‘And you don’t have to sir me, I’m just a civilian.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Whatever.’ He handed the two bits back to the archer; it felt like he was a general giving out medals. ‘I used to make them, you see,’ he went on. ‘Bows. For a living. Fortunately, that wasn’t one of mine.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Not that mine didn’t break sometimes,’ he went on, just so he could listen to his own voice, ‘but not like that. That’s where some clown shaved down through the growth rings; do that and the whole thing pulls to pieces, past all saving.’ He started to turn his head for a last look, but didn’t. ‘One little slip with something sharp, you see, and you’d be amazed the number of things you can comprehensively ruin without even trying.’