The Belly of the Bow

CHAPTER TWENTY

At first light, Bardas Loredan embarked on the next stage of the project.

All through the night before, he’d drawn down the sun-dried tendons and pounded them on an oak board with a hide mallet until the sinew began to disintegrate into its component fibres; these he’d slowly and painstakingly drawn off with a purpose-made ivory comb, sorting the coarse, translucent yellow fibres into bundles of roughly matching length and laying them out on the bench in order of size so that they’d be handy when he came to use them. Now all that remained by way of preparation was to clean the ribs and make up the glue.

The bone was slippery with its own grease, so he scoured each section with lye and boiling water, paying particular attention to the insides of the splices, and set them aside to cool down while he made the different sorts of glue that would be needed for what was to follow.

He made the sizing glue by mixing congealed blood with sawdust, and the main fixing glue by boiling scrapings of rawhide and the waste sinew in water vigorously for an hour, skimming off the chaff as it rose to the surface and stirring from time to time. He separated off the first pouring, which would make the strongest join, and put the residue back to simmer for the rest of the day. The smell was disgusting, but he scarcely noticed it.

With the blood glue he carefully sized both the bone and the wood to seal them, and put them to one side, delicately balanced on wooden blocks where the sunlight poured in through the window. While the size hardened, he pounded more sinew into fibre and made a wooden jig for winding gut into a bowstring. Finally he stretched pieces of soaked rawhide to make the outside wrapping.

(‘Of course I’d like to help,’ young Luha had said, ‘if it’s for the war. What do you want me to do?’

‘Oh, fairly basic things, nothing difficult. I wouldn’t bother you, only I’ve got so used to having an apprentice, and I don’t know anybody else who’d be able to help.’

Luha had smiled. ‘I’ve always wanted to learn a trade,’ he’d said. ‘Something with my hands, that is, not just bookwork or fighting. Making things. I’ve always wanted to make things.’

‘It must run in the family,’ he’d replied encouragingly. ‘Well, you and I, we’ll make the best bow ever seen outside the Mesoge, you can bet your life on it.’

Luha’s smiled had widened; like so many apparently sullen and withdrawn children, he had a nice smile. ‘Father will be so pleased,’ he’d said.

‘Let’s hope so,’ he’d replied.)

At roughly the same time as the battle of Lox Wood reached its climax, he finished the preparation of materials and was ready to start building the bow itself.

‘Subtlety,’ said Sten Mogre, ‘is for losers. On the other hand, we really don’t want to mess up this battle, so let’s take it nice and steady.’

It was a blindingly hot, bright morning, with no trace of a breeze. The sun blazed and sparkled off the sea to the east so fiercely that it was painful to look at, and flashed on the copper-washed roof of the Bank as if it was already on fire. Between Lox Wood, to his rear, and Scona Town itself there was nothing but the open downs, gently sweeping towards the cliffs that flanked the bay. Perfect country for an infantry charge; enough of a gradient to add worthwhile impetus, but not steep enough to make the going treacherous. Below him, he could see Gorgas’ little army lying across the line of the road, like a thin billet of steel on an anvil ready to be beaten into shape. ‘Thirty gold quarters for Gorgas’ head,’ Mogre called out, ‘twenty more if he’s still attached to it and capable of breathing. Apart from him, we don’t need any of them for anything, so feel free to indulge yourselves. Keep in line and don’t dawdle, and it ought to be easy as treading on beetles.’

He’d put three hundred men in two ranks in the centre, and thrown out the rest in equal numbers on the wings; six hundred and fifty men to each wing, in two long lines. The plan was to advance the wings wide, giving Gorgas the impression that they were sweeping round him to avoid him altogether and attack the Town. If he took the bait, he’d either divide his forces in an attempt to stop them and be encircled before he knew it, or else he’d lose his nerve and try and fall back on the Town, in which case the centre would charge and catch him in rear while the flanks joined ahead of him and formed a noose to cut him off. In any event, so long as he kept his men spread out and moving, he’d rob the archers of any chance of snatching a fluke victory; there simply wouldn’t be enough halberdiers in any one place at any time to give them anything worthwhile to shoot at. Fond though he’d become of Gorgas since the war started – hard not to become attached to someone you’ve studied so intensely – he couldn’t for the life of him see any way that two hundred and fifty archers stood a chance against sixteen hundred halberdiers in this terrain. Briefly he toyed with the idea of offering terms, but decided against it without much internal debate. Technically this was putting down a rebellion, not a legitimate war; accordingly, rebellion protocols applied.

‘All right,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s go. Advance the wings, steady the centre. Let’s make this one neat and tidy.’

Gorgas watched the halberdiers coming towards him on either side, and realised that he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was going to do.

Stupid, stupid. For some reason he’d got it into his head that they’d form a strong, packed centre and charge from there – an absurd notion, since that was the only scenario in which he’d have a chance of winning. Now it looked like they were ignoring him altogether, stepping round him as if he was a drunk slumped in the street.

‘Well?’ someone asked. ‘What do we do now?’

Gorgas shrugged. ‘Engage the enemy, I suppose. I think that’s what we’re here for.’

‘Which ones?’

Gorgas thought for a moment. ‘Them,’ he said, pointing at the centre of the line, ‘the buggers standing still. They’ll be easier to hit. All right, form two ranks, loose and advance in turn.’

The first volley lifted and soared like a flock of rooks scared off newly cut stubble. The range was just over two hundred yards – clout-shooting distance, and wasn’t it just as well he’d had them all training at the clout for the past six months? Just over halfway towards the enemy, the arrows faltered, stopped climbing, hung in the air for a fraction of a second -

(one tiny fragment of time; the beam of the scale balanced on a razor-thin fulcrum.)

– and dropped, gathering speed and force as their trajectory decayed. They always fall short of where you think they’re going to fall; you think they’re almost directly overhead at the high point of their ascent, but the trajectory decays, they rise gradually and fall steeply, and their momentum is greater going down than going up. The volley pitched square on the first and second ranks of the centre; and by the time it pitched, the second volley was in the air, fired by Gorgas’ second rank after it had passed through the first, advanced five paces and shot. Now the first rank came on another five paces, drew and loosed; as the volley went up, the second rank advanced, drew, loosed. The first rank held their ground, since there was nothing left for them to shoot at.

(I never thought he’d do that, Sten Mogre said to himself as he died.)

Now the wings were coming in fast, wondering what in hell was going on. Gorgas took a deep breath and gave the order to form a tight square. If they’ve got the sense they were born with, they’ll make for the Town, he reflected, reaching for another arrow. If they come for us, it’ll all depend on whether the arrows hold out. In the end, it comes down to supplies, economics.

They were coming on, the lines on either side extending so as to join and complete the encirclement. That didn’t bother him in the slightest. He’d made his square as small as he could; if they wanted to fight him, they’d have to squeeze in close, turning their extended widely spaced line into a thick, jostling mob just right for shooting arrows into, like the mess he’d seen in the river bed. ‘Hold your fire,’ he called out in a loud, clear voice. ‘At eighty-five, no further. Front rank, draw.’

The first volley thinned them a little, but the gaps soon filled, so that was all right. The staggered ranks of the square worked just as he’d hoped; as one rank loosed, the other drew, so that there was never a moment when there wasn’t a cloud of arrows in the air. The enemy were stumbling now, as if they’d been tripped by a rope across their path. Forty yards out from the square they became so tangled that they couldn’t move forward fast enough to live long enough to get past the banked-up dead and wounded and go in closer. The bank grew; it was like watching the sand forming high drifts in the bottom of an hourglass, or the moment when the incoming wave dissipates on the sand just before it’s pulled back into the sea. At forty yards out, the crucial moment was tangible, although as a problem in applied philosophy it was hardly worthy of attention. It would be decided by nothing more obscure or profound than elementary arithmetic – which was going to run out first, Gorgas’ supply of arrows, or the enemy’s supply of men? It would be very close, close enough for a recount. It might yet come down to the last arrow or the last man, the accuracy of one archer’s aim, the care with which one halberdier put on his breastplate, the true tiller of one bow, the straightness of one arrow, the turning of a head to left or right at one particular moment, to decide whether the attack broke off and fell back or surged over the bank and pressed home.

Gorgas reached down without looking and felt the fletchings of another arrow, one more than he thought he had left. The skin between the first and second joints of his draw fingers was rubbed away into a mush of raw flesh, and the muscles of his back screamed as he took up the weight of the draw, pushing against the handle of the bow with his left hand, drawing back the string with his right. As he drove his left arm forward, straightening the elbow, he heard a sharp crack and felt the top limb of his broken bow smash into his mouth, as hard as a punch from a skilful boxer, while the lower limb welted across the side of his knee. He stood for a moment with the ruins of his bow hanging comically around him – damn the thing, the useless, cheapskate heap of crap, lousy unbacked ash that couldn’t take the racking stretch across the back and crushing in the belly, it had left him defenceless in the very moment when everything was to be decided; suddenly there was nothing more he could do except drop two pieces of firewood, stand still and wait.

‘The hell with this,’ someone shouted (Huic Bovert, who’d tripped over a guy-rope on his way back from the council of war last night, the pain from his twisted ankle was draining his strength like a hole in a bucket). ‘Pull back; dress your ranks and for gods’ sakes pull back.’ Slowly at first, simply because there was so much mess on the ground to pick their way through, the halberdiers edged back; the arrows carried on hitting them, of course, and they continued to fall in roughly the same numbers as before. At seventy-five yards they checked and rallied, and saw for the first time how few of them there were. ‘The hell with this,’ Huic Bovert repeated, and they withdrew, walking reluctantly away, guiltily, like a man walking away from a woman he no longer loves. Limping slowly behind the main body, his broad back a distinct target, Huic Bovert was the last man to fall, although it was hours before he died.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Gorgas said.

‘Don’t knock it,’ someone beside him replied. ‘Close, yes, but it beats losing.’

Someone else had assumed command of the remnants of the army; they had fallen in and formed a column, they were marching away. ‘No more than seven hundred,’ someone said. ‘If that. Probably closer to six.’

Gorgas snapped himself out of it. ‘What about us?’ he said. ‘casualties?’

‘They never got that close,’ someone else replied. ‘Another three arrows fewer each and they’d have made soup with us, but we got away with it. All present and correct, it looks like.’

‘We’re getting good at this,’ Gorgas said.

Late in the afternoon, while Gorgas was organising men from the Town into parties to collect arrows, parties to strip the dead, parties to bury them, a messenger came in from Sergeant Baiss’ detachment; he was pleased to be able to report that Baiss had ambushed the retreating column as they climbed up into the mountains. Out of an estimated seven hundred halberdiers, he was confident that no more than ninety had escaped and were still at large. Was he to pursue the fugitives or return to Scona Town?

Gorgas felt sick. He told the messenger to bring Baiss back and leave the poor devils alone; then he set off up the hill to see his sister.

The Bank was nearly deserted; no clerks scuttling down corridors or peering up at him from their desks. Nobody waiting on the stone bench outside Niessa’s office. He pushed the door open and went in. Nobody home.

Eventually he caught up with a clerk in the exchequer; the man was scooping up the silver counters from the counting boards and putting them into a large, clinking sack.

‘You,’ he said, ‘where’s the Director?’

The clerk stared at him as if he had two heads. Gorgas glanced down at his bloodstained clothes and shredded hands. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘we won. Have you seen my sister?’

The clerk looked as if he didn’t know whether to giggle or run. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said. ‘She’s cleared out. Left Scona. Taken all the ready money and the best ship and gone.’

Avid Soef? thought Avid Soef. Yeah, I remember him, wasn’t he the clown who showed up in Scona Town three days after the other two armies, soaked to the skin and covered from head to foot in mud and pine needles? What a joke!

According to the locals, the bog-carpeted forest that covered the southern tip of Scona was far drier than usual; the recent heavy rains had all run away into the sea, and the scouring heat of the past few days was drying out patches of marsh and bog that had been submerged for as long as anybody could remember. Mires that usually swallowed you up to the waist now only engulfed you as far as the knee.

Wretched, dismal, every step laboured and difficult; tracks that might just have been passable for five men and a mule becoming lime-traps with two thousand men squelching through them; mud-encrusted boots, almost too heavy to lift, so saturated that their wearers would almost have been drier walking barefoot; tussocks of couch grass, tripping men up and turning over ankles; all under a dark, nasty-smelling canopy of spindly firs and wind-twisted beeches, through waist-high clumps of briar and bramble, in and out of the branches and roots of fallen trees that blocked the way. How utterly superfluous, in all this natural torment, was any trace of the enemy.

The enemy wouldn’t come in here. More sense.

Nevertheless, Soef knew, if he didn’t send out scouts and advance parties, then undoubtedly there would be ambushes, roadblocks, landslides, pickets, snipers. The whole army could be cut down in their tracks, all because of carelessness, a general thinking he knew better than Regulations. At any moment he expected to bump into the remnants of the rebel army in flight from the sack of the Town – presumably it had fallen by now, it was hard to imagine anything that could stop an army of four thousand men. When he met them, would they keep running or turn and fight? A battle in this mud and filth among these dark and gloomy trees would be unspeakably awful, for both sides. Surely they’d have more sense. (Ah, but if they had any sense they’d have stayed out of the marshes.)

‘They reckon there’s a clearing up ahead,’ said the colour-sergeant.

‘Let’s hope they’re right this time,’ Soef answered. ‘For a while back there I thought they were deliberately misleading us – reasonable enough, since we’re the enemy. But I don’t think so now. I think they’re as lost as we are. After all, why in hell should anybody ever come here?’

The colour-sergeant nodded. ‘Apparently some of them do,’ he said. ‘Hunters – there’s supposed to be deer and wild pigs in here somewhere, I guess we must be making too much noise. And a few old men bring their yard-pigs to look for truffles.’

‘Never could understand what people see in those things. With honey, I suppose, or diced in a-Good gods, they were right. There is a clearing.’

‘That’s not all. Look.’

In the clearing there were men putting up tents, men trying vainly to make fires with wet timber and sodden kindling, men stacking bows in stands, hanging clothes from branches to dry. In the five or so seconds it took for Soef to realise what he was looking at, a few of them made an effort to get to their weapons. Most of them simply stood and stared, as if they were sitting at home and mythical beasts had just battered their way in through the wall.

‘Front three ranks,’ Soef shouted, but he was too late; the army was already surging forward all around him, not waiting for orders in their eagerness to take out their feelings after a week in the forest on someone else. The action didn’t last long. Half of the two hundred and fifty rebels made it into the forest, unarmed, some barefoot and in their undershirts. The rest were chopped down as if they were the brambles, briars, bracken, saplings and undergrowth of the forest that had caused the army so much suffering and aggravation. It was a swift, efficient, slashing clearance, a lopping of exposed limbs, all blade-work, very little stabbing. Soef didn’t try to intervene; he might as well have asked his men to consider the feelings of the couch grass and the bog-cotton and besides, he didn’t want to. A week in the forest had got to him too.

By the time the army lost interest, there were about fifty of them left. Most of them had at least a cut or a slice, some were missing fingers or a hand or an ear; it had been like watching spiteful children aimlessly bashing at the trunks of trees, smashing off branches, crushing and scarring the bark till the sap flows. Scarcely any of them had tried to fight.

‘That’ll do,’ Soef called out. ‘We’re just wasting energy now. Secure the prisoners, we’ll move on in an hour. Somebody see if there’s any clean water nearby, and find out if there’s anything fit to eat in the rebel tents. No point letting good stuff go to waste, when we don’t know when we’ll next have a chance to stock up.’

Quite. We might just as well eat what we kill.

The prisoners’ story cheered him up. They’d got lost as well, trying to find the halberdiers and ambush them. After three days of crashing through bush and sliding in mud, they’d resolved to give it up, pull back to the edge of the forest and either pick the Shastel men off as they came out or harass them all the way back to Scona, the way Gorgas had done with the first army -

‘What do you mean?’ Soef interrupted.

The prisoner looked worried. ‘You don’t know?’ he said. ‘We heard just before we left: General Loredan defeated your first army. He’s got hundreds of prisoners.’

Soef frowned. ‘General Mogre’s army?’ he queried. ‘Or General Affem’s?’

‘No idea,’ the prisoner said. ‘Gorgas hadn’t reached Scona, all we heard was dispatches and the order to guard the forest. We only heard about you when we ran into the foresters.’

‘You’re seriously telling me Gorgas defeated one of the other two armies?’ Soef said. The prisoner dipped his head nervously. ‘And then he was going to fall back on Scona Town, presumably.’

‘I suppose so.’ The prisoner wiped blood from a slash across his scalp out of his eyes; blood was running down his hair, dripping off his sheepdog fringe, like rainwater running off leaves. ‘The message we got didn’t say; all we were told was we’d won a big victory, and we’d been ordered to keep this end tidy.’

‘And you’re sure you don’t know which army it was? If you’re lying I’ll have you strung up.’

‘I’m sure,’ the prisoner said wearily. ‘I don’t even know where the battle was, or where Gorgas was when he sent the message, come to that. I suppose the sergeant might know, if he’s still alive.’

Avid Soef looked up at the colour-sergeant, who shook his head. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Sergeant, fall the prisoners in, we’ll have to take them with us. There’s a thought; they can show us the way they came. They don’t look like they’ve been wading up to their chins in mud.’

The prisoner shook his head. ‘It’s really very dry the other side of the clearing, where the side of this combe slopes upward. But I can’t show you exactly which way we came; we were lost, remember. I’m sure we spent about half a day just drifting round in circles.’

The thought that it might be Sten Mogre’s army that had been beaten and captured or put to flight troubled Avid Soef more than he’d imagined such news ever could. He thoroughly disliked the man and knew Mogre felt the same about him, with contempt added in on top. But ever since they’d landed Mogre had been running the show, and Soef hadn’t really given much thought himself to any overall strategy, only various small ways to embarrass Mogre and his constituents back in Shastel Chapter. If Mogre had truly suffered a serious defeat, it could be days, even a whole week, before he’d be able to rally his men and play any further useful part in the war. That meant Soef would effectively be in charge of the whole expedition. Whatever happened next could be his fault.

Bloody war, he thought bitterly. Even when things go right, it’s a hiding to nothing.

‘What do you mean, gone?’ Gorgas said.

‘Gone,’ the clerk repeated helplessly. ‘And she’s resigned as Director. She took all the silver plate and most of the valuable furniture and stuff. But she’s left all the books and the accounts.’

Gorgas took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Did her daughter go with her?’

The clerk looked puzzled. ‘Sorry?’ he said.

‘Her daughter. The Lady Iseutz.’

‘Oh. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think she took anyone with her, just some bodyguards and the crew of the ship.’

Gorgas leant against the wall and rubbed his cheeks with his fingertips. ‘All right,’ he said again. ‘There just isn’t time for this now. Who are the headquarters staff reporting to?’

The clerk shrugged. ‘I don’t think anybody’s bothering with any of that,’ he said. ‘I think most of the clerks are, well, getting ready to leave too.’

Gorgas scowled and snatched the sack of counters out of the clerk’s hand, spilling them all over the floor. ‘I bet,’ he said. ‘Well, that’d better stop. Anybody caught trying to leave his post will have to explain himself to me; you make sure that reaches all your colleagues, or I’ll hold you responsible. What did you say your name was?’

The clerk sighed. ‘Riert Varil,’ he said. ‘Chief deputy, copying pool.’

‘Right. Pass the message round, then get back to your desk. No, forget that. Find out if there’s been any messages, and where in hell the southern guard units have got to. I need to know if there’s any more of the enemy left.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t have thought so,’ the clerk replied. ‘I thought you said you’d just wiped them out.’

‘Find me as soon as you know. I’ll be in the Director’s office.’

It was true, Gorgas said to himself, lifting his feet and planting them in the middle of her desk, she must have gone, or where’s that little applewood cup of hers, the one Bardas made for her out of the stump of the kitchen tree? It isn’t here, so she must have gone. And so, he observed, has everything else, except for the few bits and pieces that weren’t worth anything or were too firmly fastened to the walls to be easily removed. He’d known she was gone when he’d put his feet up on her desk without being worried in case she suddenly came in through the door. He couldn’t feel her in any part of the building. She’d gone because she couldn’t trust him to defend her against her enemies. Again.

The clerk reappeared, looking distinctly nervous. ‘No messages, Director,’ he said. ‘And I’ve spoken to the heads of department-’

‘Director,’ Gorgas repeated. ‘All right, carry on.’

‘I’ve spoken to the heads of department, and the staff are being put back to work. Sergeant Graiz and the southern guard left for the marshes as you ordered, but nothing’s been heard of any enemy units.’ The clerk hesitated. ‘The war would appear to be over for now,’ he said. ‘Will there be anything else?’

Gorgas looked at him for a moment. ‘Does anybody know why she left?’ he asked. ‘Did she say anything?’

The clerk nodded. ‘I gather she decided the war had become too expensive to pursue any further,’ he said.

‘Too expensive.’

‘So I gather. She formed the view that it was time to cut her losses by closing down her operation here and concentrate on her other business interests.’

Gorgas stared. ‘What other business interests?’ he demanded.

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Oh, for gods’ sakes,’ said Gorgas angrily. ‘No, I don’t. What other business interests?’

So the clerk told him: the half-share in a Colleon merchant venturers’ company, the tannery on Gasail; the lumber mill at Visuntha; the vineyards at Byshest; the stake in the Dakas copper-mining syndicate; the ropewalk on the Island-

‘Go away,’ Gorgas said.

Bardas picked up the bow.

Ideally, he would have liked to have left the glue to cure for at least a week, preferably longer than that; but time was a luxury and besides, the glue he’d made from this batch of exotic, expensive rawhide dried remarkably quickly in the fierce sunlight. He picked up the string and dropped one loop over the bottom nock, then hesitated. There was every chance that, when he flexed the bow for the first time to string it, the thing would snap in two and all his work and hard-to-come-by materials would be wasted.

The first stage had been shaping and fitting the butt-spliced sections of bone to the belly of the wooden core; a slow, frustrating business for a man aware that he was working to a tight deadline. But it had to be right; unless the sections fitted together exactly, the belly would be weak, the terrifying forces of compression would find the vulnerable points where the sections met and tear the work to pieces. So he had filed and scraped and polished, smearing soot onto one face of each join with the tip of his finger, assembling them, taking them apart, until the soot marked both faces evenly and they came together so tightly that he couldn’t pull a hair into the fissure of the joint. Having located, sized and numbered each section, he smeared on the glue, pressed each one into place against the core and wrapped it round tightly with stout cord, one turn every eighth of an inch. To make sure, he added clamps packed with slivers shaved from the spare bone to distribute the force of the clamps evenly. To help pass the time while the glue set, he carded and sorted the sinew for the backing once again, and wove and served the string.

As soon as the glue was hard and he’d slipped off the clamps and unwound the cord, he’d mixed up another batch and begun the tedious, messy work of putting on the sinew backing. First, he’d sized the back of the core once again, this time with the residue of the last batch of hide glue. Next, he set it up on blocks at the front of the workbench, on which lay forty neatly sorted bundles of sinew fibres at convenient intervals. The glue was right – still warm and the consistency of new thin honey. He picked up the sliver of bone he’d chosen to use as a smoother and put it in a small clay cup full of water.

He selected the first bundle of sinew, the longest he had, and dipped it in the glue until it was saturated and limp. He squeezed out the excess, starting at the top and working the runout down to the bottom, flattening the bundle in the process, then carefully laid it down the middle of the core’s back above the handle, spreading it from the centre outwards with the piece of dampened bone until it was just over half an inch wide. The next bundle he butt-ended onto the first, pushing firmly with the smoother to stretch the fibres slightly, and repeated the process until he’d covered a strip up the centre of the back from nock to nock. When that was done he paused briefly to wash some of the surplus glue off his hands.

As he laid in the next row, to the left of the first, he made sure that the butt-seams didn’t line up to create a weak spot, two seams side by side; instead he staggered them like rows of bricks in a wall, then worked each bundle over with the smoother until it was indistinguishable from the material above, below and beside it. He continued until the whole of the back and sides of the core were covered in a homogenous mat of glue-sodden sinew, a long, flat artificial muscle that, once dry, would be next best thing to impossible to break no matter how hard it was stretched. As soon as he’d done one layer he laid on the second, working fast while the glue was still tacky and malleable so that each bundle of fibres would be fused with its neighbour and no weak spots could form. Finally he used up the last of the sinew in wrapping the joints in the bone on the belly, and smoothed all the leftover glue over the back; every last fibre of sinew and smear of glue used up, without waste or spoilage.

Because time was so short, he’d made up a drying oven out of slabs of firebrick; he heated the bricks in the fire until they were just too hot to hold and stacked them round the blocks on which the bow was mounted, where the sunlight through the window would catch them and keep the bricks warm once the heat of the fire had dissipated. He’d never used this technique before, and was afraid that the intensity of the heat would warp or spoil the bow, or that the glue would dry brittle, or that the sinew would dry too fast and pull away from the back as it shrank (and those were only the disasters he could easily anticipate; the unforeseen problems would doubtless be even worse).

Now all that was done, and he held the bow in his hands, to be strung and tillered, trimmed, smoothed and polished, the final layer of parchment-thin rawhide to be wrapped round.

In his hands now, it was as ugly and messy as a new-born baby; a man-made limb, put together out of bone, tendon, blood and skin, with all the body parts refined, corrected, pulled out and put back together again in a better, more efficient way. On the back, the tendons to be stretched, in the belly the bone to be crushed and compressed, the two held apart by an intrusive wafer of timber, held together by blood, skin and bone-dust; an arm stronger than any man’s arm when stretched and crushed to the very point of destruction, made by violence for violence out of body parts, heat, desiccation and skill. Wonderful beyond words, if the dead muscle still remembered its function, if the dead bone withstood the unbearable force of compression, if dead limbs could take lives, if nothing but a smear of blood and the scrapings of skin could bind the bits of dead body together as they strove with all their stored-up might to tear apart from each other-

(Like the Loredan family, Bardas thought with a smile; some of us bend and stretch, some of us crush and are crushed, but a little blood and sawdust and a shared skin keep us glued helplessly together, and when we bend and stretch and crush together, at the moment before breaking, we have infinite capacity for doing damage. I have been at the back of this family for many years, and now I’m in the belly of the bow, in the place where compression turns to expansion, where the stored force is converted into violence. And I have made this bow for my brother Gorgas.)

He lifted his left leg and stepped over the handle, trapping the lower limb over the instep of this right foot and drawing the belly-side of the handle up into the hollow of his left knee, then pulled as hard as he could with his left hand on the upper limb, bending it back until he could slip the top loop of the string over the nock. It was amazingly stiff to bend; he could feel the bone trying its utmost to break – but there was nowhere for it to break to, it was trapped against an equally unbearable tension in the sinew of the back, each tension preventing the other from giving way; trapped like the members of a family at war with each other, held by bonds they can never escape but which create the very tension that stresses them to their limit. Just when he thought he would never be able to string the bow, he managed to edge the loop of twisted gut over the sinew-wrapped nock. The bowstring took the strain, the loops and serving held, and Bardas let the bow lie across the palm of his hand, finding its balance around its centre of gravity. Against all his expectations, the tiller was perfect: two beautifully balanced convexes on either side of the concave handle, utterly symmetrical, the recurves bent back on themselves to create yet another tension. He held his breath and lifted the bow – how light it was – set his fingers to the served middle of the string, pushed with his left hand and pulled with his right (again the power of forces in opposition, working against each other to produce force, violence), straining the tendons and bones of his arm, back and shoulders; carefully testing, an inch further with each flex, until the base of his thumb touched his chin, and then it would go no further.

He rested for a moment, flexing his tortured muscles, thinking, So, the wretched thing draws short and stacks like crazy; that’s a hundred-pound bow with a twenty-five-inch draw. It’ll never be much for accuracy, but the power’s there. Well, it wouldn’t suit me. But Gorgas was always the strong one in our family, he can draw a hundred without breaking into a sweat, and a short draw suits fast, instinctive shooting. And Gorgas has always shot on instinct, ever since he was a boy. He picked an arrow out of the quiver that leant against the doorframe, fitted its nock to the string, aimed at a flat oak board three inches thick on the the side of the room, drew and loosed, letting the force of the draw pull the string off his fingers. The arrow struck high and its shaft disintegrated, leaving the bodkinhead driven clean through the board. The power was terrifying, and Bardas stood and stared for a while before unstringing the bow and laying it carefully down on the bench.

Later he tidied it up with scarpers and abrasive reeds and grits, wrapped the handle with more fine rawhide, waxed it thoroughly to keep out the damp and finished it with two thick coats of pure, horrendously expensive Colleon lacquer, which dries fast and is completely waterproof. It looked a bit smarter now, all milk-white except for the dark line of the wooden core, and shining.

He took the last scrap of the fine hide, which was every bit as good for writing on as the best parchment, and wrote To Gorgas, from Bardas, with love. Then he opened the door and yelled. Quite soon a clerk came hurrying up.

‘Is Gorgas Loredan still in the Bank?’ Bardas asked.

‘I think so,’ the clerk replied. ‘But he won’t be here much longer. Word’s come in that Avid Soef and the third army have just turned up, away to the south. He’s getting ready to leave.’

Bardas smiled. ‘Wonderful timing,’ he said. ‘Take him this bow, quick as you like, it’s very important.’

The clerk nodded. ‘Straight away,’ he said.

‘Good man. It’s just what he always wanted, so he ought to be pleased.’

When the clerk has gone, Bardas shut the door, sat down on the floor, put his head in his hands and tried not to think about what he’d just done.

Gorgas took the handle in his left hand and rested the raw, scabbed pads of his draw fingers on the centre of the string. The bow was perfect, as if it was part of him, his own arm, but made infinitely more strong. He felt as if he’d owned it for years, knew it and was familiar with it, the easy familiarity of flesh and blood.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘And Bardas made it for me.’

The sergeant was tapping his foot. ‘That’s really nice,’ he said. ‘But we do have a war to fight, so when you’re quite finished playing with it-’

Gorgas didn’t look up. ‘I’ve got to go and say thank you,’ he said. ‘You don’t realise. I’ve lost my sister, but I’ve found my brother. We’re a family again.’

The sergeant breathed out through his nose. ‘Gorgas, we’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get down the mountain before dark, we won’t be able to see to get in position. We could lose the battle-’

‘You’re right,’ Gorgas said. ‘Bardas didn’t make me a bow so I could lose the war with it. I guess it’ll just have to wait till I get back.’ Reluctantly, he slid the bow into his bow-case, letting his fingers glide over the lacquered back. ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘The last bow he made me I did some pretty bad things with. I have the feeling that this time it’s all going to be different; like a whole new start.’

‘Really,’ the sergeant said. ‘You mean, with this one, you might miss?’