The Belly of the Bow

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The people he was talking to looked at him as if he’d just taken off his clothes. ‘I beg your pardon?’ one of them said.

‘Sten Mogre,’ Gannadius repeated. ‘He’s dead. His army’s been wiped out too. In fact, we’ve lost something in the order of four thousand men, and nothing to show for it. Avid Soef’s still alive, of course.’

Mihel Bovert’s wife came in with a tray of doves marinaded in bacon fat. ‘Eat them while they’re hot, everybody,’ she announced. ‘Oh dear, what long faces. Is everything all right?’

There was an embarrassed silence, broken by one Bimond Faim saying, ‘According to our mystical friend here, the army’s been cut to ribbons.’

‘Oh,’ said Mihel Bovert’s wife. ‘Which army? You mean the great big one that’s dealing with those horrid rebels?’

‘That’s right,’ grunted Mihel Bovert, ‘the one our son’s serving with. Doctor Gannadius, would you say you’re mad, divinely inspired or just very, very tactless?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Gannadius said. ‘I – Something came over me, I suppose.’

‘Quite,’ replied Bimond Faim, lifting a dove off the tray with his fingers. ‘The spirit moved you, or whatever. Apart from what your inner voice tells you, have you any proof of this rather disturbing claim?’

‘No,’ Gannadius said. ‘Please, I’m so sorry, forget I said anything. Really-’

One of the dinner guests, a big grey-bearded man, shook his head. ‘Easier said than done, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The plain fact is, you don’t import a genuine Perimadeian wizard and then ignore his occult sayings. Be straight with us, Doctor: should we pay attention to what you’re saying or not? Presumably this sort of thing’s happened to you before.’

Gannadius nodded. ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘Well, similar things.’

‘And on these previous occasions, has the little angel voice been right or wrong? Or is it hit and miss?’

‘It’s hard to say,’ Gannadius replied defensively. Mihel Bovert’s wife went out, and came back a moment later with a silver sauce-boat. ‘You see, I’m only telling you what someone else is telling me.’

‘Someone on Scona, though,’ said a small, stout woman at the opposite end of the table. ‘Your spirit guide, or whatever the technical term is.’

Gannadius didn’t correct her choice of terminology; his head was starting to hurt, making it hard for him to concentrate. ‘Someone on Scona, yes. Patriarch Alexius, as it happens. And he wouldn’t lie to me, so I do know for a fact that Alexius believes that Sten Mogre is dead and his army has been defeated. That’s all I can be certain about, though.’

A bald, heavily built middle-aged man opposite him frowned. ‘But you can’t be certain,’ he said. ‘Let’s be scientific, shall we? After all, we’re supposed to be men of science. On previous occasions, when you’ve had these-’ He hesitated.

‘Funny turns?’ suggested Bimond Faim.

‘These experiences,’ the bald man said. ‘On your word of honour as a philosopher, can you honestly tell me you’ve proved to your own satisfaction that these insights are genuine? That you’ve somehow communicated with someone far away?’

Gannadius nodded. ‘I’ve spoken to the other person involved – face to face, I mean, in the usual way – and they’ve confirmed that they had the same, or roughly the same, experience, and that they said the words I heard. Particularly Alexius; I’ve communicated with him quite a few times, it’s as if we have some sort of link. I’m not saying there aren’t alternative explanations,’ he added. ‘For a start, it’s perfectly possible that two people of very similar backgrounds who know each other well, thinking about the same problem, might come up with the same idea at roughly the same time, in a way that makes it look like they’re in contact with each other.’

‘Highly likely, I’d say,’ Bimond Faim said, through a mouthful of rye bread.

‘I think so too,’ Gannadius replied. ‘In fact, I have an idea that’s something to do with how this link works; literally, a meeting of like-thinking minds. But that’s just theory. I know Alexius thinks what I just told you is true.’

The silence that followed was distinctly uncomfortable.

‘All right,’ said Mihel Bovert, his thick brows furrowed. ‘As scientists and philosophers, we’ll take your word for it that you’ve verified your findings in an acceptable manner, at least for now. Obviously, the next question is what we do about it.’

Faim looked up from his plate. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake, Mihel. You aren’t seriously suggesting we should base policy on this magical nonsense?’

Bovert shook his head. ‘That’s not up to us,’ he said, ‘it’s up to Chapter. If you’re asking me whether we should pass this information on to Chapter, then I think I have to say yes, we should.’

‘Leave me out of it, please,’ someone else said hastily. ‘I really don’t like the mental image I’m getting of what our esteemed Separatist colleagues are going to say when we tell them we want to rethink the war because some – excuse me, Doctor – some foreign self-proclaimed wizard has been hearing distant voices in his head.’

‘There’ll be bite-sized bits of our credibility scattered between here and Tornoys,’ growled Bimond Faim. ‘We’ll be lucky if any of us gets so much as a junior fellowship ever again.’

Bovert smiled. ‘There’s ways and ways,’ he said. ‘Jaufre,’ he continued, turning to the young man on his right, ‘you play chess with Anaut Mogre’s son, don’t you?’

‘Occasionally.’

‘Splendid. Go round there now, spin him some yarn about having fallen out dreadfully with your uncle or me, and by way of a terrible revenge on us, tell young Mogre we’ve got vital information about the war but we’re keeping it hushed up for faction reasons. You don’t know what the information is, of course, you just know it’s terribly important, and we’ve all been locked in a secret meeting for the last couple of hours. If you’re quick, we’ll get the summons to Chapter in about an hour and a half, just time to finish dinner and digest.’

Bovert’s prediction was reasonably accurate; two hours later he was getting to his feet in a packed, bad-tempered Chapter.

‘Essentially,’ he said, ‘what Anaut’s just said is true. I have received what could be important news about the war, and I haven’t told anybody. The reason is, I don’t believe a word of it.’

On the Separatist benches, Anaut Mogre didn’t seem to be aware of his closeness to the mouth of the trap. ‘Perhaps this assembly ought to be the judge of that,’ he said. ‘Be so kind as to share your news with us.’

Mihel Bovert was only too happy to oblige. ‘So you see,’ he concluded after making his report, ‘I really didn’t feel justified in troubling this assembly with a cock-and-bull story based on magic and mysticism, when even the magician himself isn’t sure the message is actually true.’ Redemptionist laughter; awkward silence on the Separatist side. They knew they were now going to have to believe officially in Doctor Gannadius’ inspiration – it was that or agree with the Redemptionists, and admit they’d wasted everybody’s time calling the Chapter – and demand that action be taken based on it. If the crisis turned out to be a false alarm, they’d be ridiculed for believing in magic. If the crisis proved to be real, the Redemptionists wouldn’t find it hard to snatch the credit for sending the reinforcements, since it was their man, at their dinner-party, who’d obtained the vital information. It was time for quick thinking.

‘I’m a scientist,’ said Anaut Mogre. ‘And one of the most important things in science is being able to admit you don’t know. I admit, I don’t know whether to believe in this magic story or not. For all I know, it could be meaningless babble, or a true vision, maybe something in between. Personally, I’ve always preferred to keep an open mind about this whole applied-philosophy issue, as anybody who heard my keynote address at Convocation last year will confirm. But what I’d like you all to consider is this. If there’s no crisis and we send another army, what’s the worst outcome? We look idiots – I look an idiot, as do my colleagues on this side of the chamber – the army comes home again, no harm done. Now, suppose we ignore this message and there really has been a disaster on Scona? Worst outcome: we lose the war. Colleagues, in this case I’d far rather be humiliated than justified, because I’d really like this all to be a hoax or a mistake, I really want to find out that my cousin Sten and his army are safely in one piece and getting on with the job in hand. But if there’s the slightest chance otherwise, I say send an army, and I don’t care who hears me.’

The general consensus in the courtyard after Chapter was that being sent to Scona with a further three thousand men was a fitting punishment for Anaut Mogre for not seeing that one coming a mile off; if he was truly the best the Separatists had, then pretty soon the balance of power was going to undergo a significant shift. But as far as the war went, regardless of Anaut Mogre’s ineptitude, sending another army was no bad thing; after all, another three thousand men couldn’t do any harm, and there was an outside chance that, purely by coincidence, they might do a power of good.

When Bovert and his party returned home, they were much more polite to Gannadius and kept pouring him drinks he didn’t want; on the strict understanding, they added, that his vision was really a gigantic hoax, and he’d been talking through his rear end. Prophets, they gave him to understand, were fine by them, just so long as their prophecies were guaranteed to be false.

In the heat of the battle, Gorgas couldn’t help smiling. When asked by his sergeants what was so very amusing about being attacked on three sides by a greatly superior force on unfavourable ground, he simply shook his head and said it was a personal thing.

They’d had the misfortune to come upon Avid Soef just as he was emerging from the Baudel marshes; his men were exhausted and in bad order, scattered and confused and caked with mud that made their boots almost too heavy to lift, and in consequence he stood still and resolutely refused to attack. As far as Gorgas was concerned, this was a serious problem. Even with Sergeant Baiss’s company added to his own, he still had no more than four hundred men, as against Soef’s two thousand, so he was in no position to launch an attack. On the other hand, he really didn’t want to wait around in open country, with the Baudel marshes in front of him and the Baudel river behind him, not knowing whether yet another army of two thousand-odd halberdiers might suddenly appear behind him and cut off his retreat. All he could think of was to try the harrassment tactics that had worked so well in the mountains, and see if he could lure Soef after him into the equally treacherous wetlands to the west or the north. The trouble was that if he did that, he’d have to go there too, and in the mud and ooze of the bogs he’d lose the mobility that gave him his killing advantage. At least here on the level Baudel plain his men could outrun the halberdiers as far as the river. He set about trying to provoke an attack.

Soef, however, didn’t want to know. As the first sparse line of archers strolled up the field towards him, he ordered general retreat and fell back on Sheepridge, a rocky hog’s back that provided a natural rampart behind which his men could take cover. If Gorgas wanted to get a shot, he’d have to come within twenty yards; too close for comfort even for light-footed archers against dog-tired halberdiers.

Baffled, Gorgas withdrew to his previous position and ordered his men to dig trenches, cut and hammer in stakes. It was, he reckoned, a matter of nerve and patience. The bottom line was that Soef was the invader, the one whose mission it was to seek out and destroy the enemy; eventually he was going to have to mount an attack whether he liked it or not. For one thing, sooner or later the halberdiers would run out of food; it would turn into a siege without walls. As for his fear of another Shastel army, he had no reason to suppose there was such a thing loose on the island. The fact that he hadn’t known about Soef didn’t necessarily mean that the enemy had an infinite supply of soldiers wandering around the place. He would sit tight and wait; and, since by retreating to the ridge Soef had obligingly added another hundred and ten yards to the distance his men would eventually have to cross in the face of Gorgas’ archers, he didn’t mind.

Whether he’d overestimated or underestimated his enemy, he could never be sure. Whether the force that suddenly materialised forty yards from his right flank in the middle of the night was a daring sneak attack or a foraging party that had got hopelessly lost and blundered into his pickets thinking they were halberdiers didn’t really matter; the important thing was that they burst into Gorgas’ camp with only a few shouts and screams for warning, and it was too dark to shoot. Gorgas woke up from a dream he couldn’t remember, with a crick in his neck and a headache, already aware that something was wrong. He stuffed his feet into his boots (either his feet had grown or his boots had shrunk, but he’d never before had so much difficulty doing such a simple thing), grabbed his coat, his quiver and the new, the wonderful bow, and thrashed his way through his tent-flap.

He bumped head-on into a halberdier. Luckily, he was pressed right up close against Gorgas so that his halberd was jammed across his chest. With a great effort the halberdier shoved him away, which gave Gorgas a chance to jerk an arrow out of his quiver and hold it out in front of him, just handy for the halberdier to impale himself on as he rushed forward. The amazed look in the man’s eyes as he flopped to the ground said I didn’t expect that more eloquently than words ever could.

The camp fires were little islands of light; beyond them there was nothing but noise and invisible movement. Gorgas nocked another arrow on his string and stepped nervously out of the light, trying to think what the hell to do. All around him were confused single combats, men shoving and kicking and slashing at sounds, shapes, partial evidence of movement. Someone ran past him, about five yards away; before he knew it, he’d swung the bow up, reached forward with his left hand and let the string pull off his loosing fingers. He had no idea if the shot had gone home, or who he’d been shooting at; reflex, his old, reliable, get-out-of-trouble-quick reflex, faster than thought, which had shaped his entire life. Before he could nock another arrow, someone else collided with him from behind, treading on the back of his knees and sending him sprawling. He managed to avoid landing on the bow but lost his grip on it; he rolled sideways and jumped to his feet. The man, whoever he was, didn’t recover so quickly. Gorgas reckoned he could make out the shape of a man on his hands and knees, and kicked hard at where the head should be. His toes jarred on heavy plate, painful in spite of the thick toecaps, and whoever it was grabbed his ankle and threw him. He landed on his left shoulder, and his floundering left leg cracked into something half soft, which could have been a man’s face. The grip on his ankle relaxed; he slid his hands along the ground to help push himself up, and felt something under his left hand, either a bow-handle or a halberd shaft. The shape was rearing up, so he flipped onto his back and kicked up at it with both heels. That seemed to have some effect and the shape collapsed backwards, giving him time to scramble up with the halberd (which means he’s the enemy, what a relief) and lunge with it towards the other man’s last known position. Nothing there but empty air.

He stood still for a moment, and realised that he was waiting to see what happened – bad idea, bad idea. It also dawned on him that the nebulous, undecided duel he’d just fought had left him more frightened than he’d ever been in his life before. No good, he thought, unless he did something quickly it was going to turn into a disaster, a massacre.

Do something. Quickly. Do what?

There were lights coming; in the distance – was that Sheepridge over there? He’d completely lost his sense of direction – in rows, like an army marching with torches or lanterns. The likeliest explanation was Avid Soef and the rest of the two thousand, coming to finish the job, in which case the only sensible thing he could do was run away and hope nobody killed him, deliberately or by mistake, while he was at it. One thing for sure; those lights couldn’t mean anything good. Better to run away on general principles, while he still had arms and legs and eyes, the full working capital he’d managed to bring with him from the Mesoge. As usual, Niessa had been right; he had nothing to stay here for.

Trumpets were blowing. Do we use trumpets for signalling? I can’t remember. No, we don’t. Avid Soef is giving an order.

There was movement all round him, but there was a pattern to it; men were leaving the camp, steaming away towards the lights and the noise. Avid Soef is recalling his men. ‘Hold your ground!’ he heard himself yell – to his own side, presumably, not the enemy; hell, they wouldn’t obey him anyway. Why would Avid Soef be pulling out when he was winning the battle, the war? Maybe he doesn’t know he’s winning. Maybe he thinks his men are getting slaughtered, and this advance with lights and trumpet-calls is a desperate attempt to rescue them. The thought was so amusing that he laughed out loud.

‘Make for the centre of camp,’ he shouted. ‘Form ranks, and don’t move!’ It was worth a try, he supposed. He had no way of knowing how much of an army he had left, four hundred men or twenty – gods damn it, but what a difference the absence of light makes, it changes everything, turns us from demigods into buffoons, makes it possible for two opposing nations each to lose a war in the course of half an hour.

Mercifully, someone got a fire going in the middle of the camp, enough light to see a few yards by. He had the sergeants call the roll; thirty men unaccounted for, presumed dead, and another sixteen cut up to a greater or lesser extent. The lights in the distance weren’t going back the way they’d come. Avid Soef was doing something, moving men about. He could hear trumpets and shouts, orders (but he couldn’t make out what they were). Patterns of light shuffled about all round the camp, while Gorgas sat on the ground holding his captured halberd and saying nothing, almost unable to think.

It was a long night to sit through. In the first dimpsy half light, he sent men out to collect bows, arrows, weapons, helmets, whatever. The sergeants did most of the organising; for once, he didn’t want to be in charge. He had a theory – no more than that – about what Soef had been doing in the pitch dark; he’d been setting up an encirclement, moving his troops into position, setting up a trap that was almost as deadly and likely to result in victory as the unholy mess he’d pulled them out of the night before. Gorgas gave the order to form a square. Then someone brought him his bow.

He recognised it while the man was still quite a few yards away; its white limbs seemed to shine in the thick coagulated light. The relief he felt as soon as he had it in his hands again was foolish, utterly illogical; it was like having a brother or a father or a son come and stand beside him, a cheerful grin and a hand on the shoulder, saying, It’s all right, I’m here now. He realised with alarm that the poor thing had been lying strung all night, and in the dew as well. He checked it over with the utmost care; no harm done, as far as he could see. So that was all right.

Avid Soef attacked about half an hour after sunrise. His men walked up briskly, men going to work in the morning after sleep and breakfast. Gorgas’ army weren’t like that; they were still in the nightmare they’d dreamt last night, bewildered and scared, tense as a half-drawn bow.

Tactically speaking, the position wasn’t good. Somehow or other, Soef had left the eastern side of the camp uncovered, but his men were advancing evenly on the other three sides, which meant that each division of his two thousand, less the ten or so who’d been killed in the night, were facing just under a hundred archers, forming two ranks of fifty, with the eastern side of the square standing idle. Quickly, Gorgas did the mental arithmetic; to wipe out two thousand men, each archer would have to make seven successful shots before the enemy reached them. To halt the advance and turn it back, maybe four successful shots, more likely five. At between a hundred yards and fifteen yards, against an advancing target, the acceptable ratio for archery training in the butts was three hits out of five. Gorgas scowled, trying to do the maths – call it eight, nine volleys. In theory, there was time. Assuming, of course, that the enemy were content to lumber placidly forward into the arrow-storm.

Can’t be bothered to think. Draw the bow. You wouldn’t have the bow if you weren’t going to win.

He heard it creak as he drew the first arrow; but that wasn’t unusual with a new composite bow, just the sinew and the belly material getting used to taking up the strain. His arrows were all too long for it, given the way it stacked immovably at twenty-five inches, and the spine wasn’t right, because the first arrow fishtailed away to the left as well as overshooting; it was chance and the overcrowding in Avid Soef’s line of march that made the arrow pick out a man in the very back row of the column. Gorgas couldn’t see where he’d hit him, he only saw a break in the pattern, something slumping, a gap just discernible in the hedge of shouldered halberds. With a desperate effort, ignoring the pain in his fingers, he managed to draw the next arrow an extra inch, and allowed for paradox; at eighty yards he hit exactly what he’d been aiming at, a man on the end of a line. He could see the man drop to his knees, the man behind hopelessly trying to jump over him from a standing start, tripping on his shoulder and sprawling down, just avoided by the man behind him. He drew again, making the full twenty-five inches, dropping half an inch, aiming into the brown of the middle of the column. Before he was ready, the string scraped across his raw fingers and slipped away, sending the arrow up into the air and down like an osprey dipping for fish into some place in the army. Men were falling down in that part of the column, but he couldn’t be sure that any one of them was his, particularly. Only after the fourth shot did he steal a moment to look at the shape of the advance. They were still coming, but very slowly, picking their way through the dead and fallen like men in a bramble patch who have to keep stopping to unhook the thorns from their clothes and skin, rather than pressing onwards and feeling cloth and skin rip. By now they should have been running; but it’d have been like running in thick mud, to wade through the killed and the twitching. They were near enough to charge, to charge home and win the war, but their dead were like great dollops of mud clinging to their boots, slowing them up and draining their strength.

Some bow. Seven shots, six confirmed hits, one possible.

At that moment, Gorgas noticed Avid Soef.

That man. he thought. That man looks like Gorgas Loredan.

There was an old story in the Soef family, about one Mihan Soef who’d won a famous victory for the Foundation by charging the enemy at a crucial turning point, a fulcrum or pivot of the war, and killing the enemy general with his own hands. Up till then, so said Soef family history, it had been a hiding to nothing – the Foundation army was being led by some nullity from an opposing faction, so it was inevitable that they should be losing. According to the story, Mihan Soef saved the day and went on to become Dean of Military Geometry, the first of the family to head a sub-faculty. That part of the story was a lie – look at the great inscribed stone in Shastel Hall, see the dozen or so Soefs listed there above Mihan, up among the dust-clogged cobwebs – but nobody cared, because it was the Soef family version of history, relevant only to themselves, and they had every right to do what they liked in it.

Ridiculous notion, of course; and anybody who tried anything of the sort under his command would answer for it at a court martial, whether it won the battle or not.

I wish I knew how we were doing, Avid Soef said to himself as he stepped over a dead man. It’s only a few yards more, but we’re hardly moving. It feels like everything’s stopped, as if we’re waiting to see what’s going to happen.

The arrow hit him on the right side of his body, two inches or so below the nipple. He knew it would be all right, because his breastplate would have turned the arrow, or at least stopped it penetrating. He took one hand off the shaft of his halberd and tried to tug the thing loose, but it wouldn’t come; also, there was suddenly a great deal of pain, which made him stop concentrating on where he was going. His foot caught in something and suddenly he was watching grass coming straight at him; his forehead hit the ground hard, painfully, and the arrow jarred agonisingly inside him. Someone trod on his back, squeezing all the air out of his chest. He heard it whistle out, and knew then that the arrow had punctured his lung. Quite soon, but not all that soon, the lung would flood with blood (Military Medicine, foundation course, year two of Tripos) and that would be the end of him. Another boot clouted against the side of his head and a great weight landed on his back; there were feet in front of his eyes, but his eyes were growing dark, like the sun setting very quickly. Just a moment, he thought.

Shot, Gorgas thought, and chose another target.

He had six arrows left; he’d be lucky to have time to loose two of them. He felt like a boy in an exam who’s left the easy question till last and suddenly finds he won’t have time to answer it. Four wasted arrows, four opportunities gone by; the twisted-gut string rasped the bloody flesh of his fingers, burning and tearing them as the bone kicked back the desperate load of compression, as the sinew jerked in contraction like an arm punching. He didn’t watch the arrow on its way (at thirty yards, no point; foregone conclusion., This close, he could see their faces, their eyes – they were hardly moving now, they were standing waiting to see what would happen) and instead concentrated on a clean nock for the next arrow, a good fast draw, bustling the bow open to exert that terrible force on bone and sinew – his wrenched muscles and jarred bones, still drawing the monstrous, overpowered hundred-pound composite recurve that was wrecking his body, flaying his fingers.

He reached down to his quiver. It was empty.

Slowly, Gorgas lowered the bow, relaxed sinew and bone, stood and waited to see what would happen.

They broke and ran at fifteen yards’ distance from the line of archers. Between seventeen and fifteen yards’ distance, two hundred and seventy-four of them were killed, in just over three seconds.

‘I think we won,’ muttered the sergeant. ‘Again.’

Gorgas opened his eyes. ‘Good,’ he said.

Nobody was moving. They were watching a little wisp of a line, a hundred or so men, walking gingerly backwards and away from them. ‘Bugger me,’ someone said, ‘there’s more of us than there are of them. We outnumber the bastards.’

‘Makes a pleasant change,’ someone else replied. ‘Can we go home now?’

Someone laughed. ‘You’ll be lucky. First Gorgas’ll make us bury the buggers.’

‘The hell with that. Let some other poor sod do it. I’m sick of burying bloody halberdiers.’

Apart from the conversation, it was very quiet. There wasn’t much noise coming from the thick wedge of bodies – a few moans, some sobbing, but less than they’d come to expect. ‘Shame there’s no use we can put them to,’ someone observed. ‘If anybody could think of something we could make out of dead soldiers, we’d all be rich.’

Someone else laughed nervously. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it still doesn’t feel like we’ve fought a battle. I mean, you can’t call this proper fighting, can you?’

Gorgas realised that he was on his knees and stood up. It wasn’t easy to do; his back was tensed up into a knot of wrenched, twisted muscle, and he could hardly breathe for the pain. Thirty shots rapid with a hundred-pound bow makes a mess of the human body.

The fact that he felt pain strongly suggested that he was still alive. Pain is as reliable a test for the presence of life as any.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Break camp, form burial details. Once we’ve tidied up, we’re going home.’

He thought about what he had done.

He had committed violent acts against members of his own family; wounding and killing. He had shed blood of his own blood to save his own life, to resolve a difficulty. There had been a time when he’d loved his family; he had come to evil through love. He had used his own kin, flesh and blood, for an evil purpose. He hadn’t wanted to do evil.

As a soldier he had killed – what, hundreds? As a commander of soldiers, he’d arranged the deaths of thousands. He had caused a war that brought an insatiable enemy down on his people, and he’d fought in that war, responsible for the deaths of thousands. He had committed an act of betrayal for his own personal ends, regardless of the consequences for a whole nation.

Mostly, he’d done what he thought was right.

Mostly, he thought of himself as a good man, a decent human being. Apart from the violence against his family (and he claimed mitigation even in that) he’d done violence doing his duty, meaning to help and protect his people.

He had devoted most of his life to trying to help the flesh of his flesh, and in the end all his effort had been wasted, thrown away. He had tried to be a good man, and somehow through good he always came to evil.

Always, at the crucial moment, the fulcrum, the turning point, the moment of loose, the result had been evil, or something that led to evil. It was, to use familiar imagery, like the bending of a bow. Force was applied; on the outside he stretched, seeking to accommodate, while on the inside he was crushed, compressed, compacted in on himself. The old proverb says that a full-drawn bow is nine-tenths broken; a bow is made so that it does best what it does best just before the point is reached at which it must destroy itself and collapse.

He had believed in his family. He had left his home and gone to another country, accepted responsibility for a whole nation. He had come to believe in that nation. Through belief, he had come to evil.

Hitherto, he hadn’t regretted what he’d done. Mostly, he’d done what he thought was right.

He was the belly of the bow.

It had been a long day, and he hurt all over. He wanted to go home, see his wife and children, see his long-lost niece; but first there was something that had to be done. He had to say thank you.

He hadn’t seen Bardas alone since that night at the cottage, and he felt nervous, like a young man hesitating before knocking at his beloved’s door. But Bardas had made him the bow, which implied, if not forgiveness, then at least a willingness to establish diplomatic relations. He would visit his brother, thank him for the bow, say a few words and then leave. He would tell Bardas that Niessa had gone, that Bardas was free to go if he wanted, that anything he could give him or do for him was his for the asking, that he wanted nothing in return. And then he would go home.

‘Come in,’ Bardas said.

The smell inside the room was nauseating. Bardas, noticing Gorgas’ involuntary reaction, grinned and said, ‘That’s the glue. Making bows can be a pretty disgusting business. But we get used to it.’

‘Right,’ Gorgas said. ‘Listen, I just came to thank you. I-’

‘That’s all right,’ Bardas replied. ‘It was the least I could do, considering what you’ve done for me.’

Gorgas didn’t know what to say. ‘Sit down, make yourself at home,’ Bardas was saying. ‘You don’t have to rush off straight away, do you?’

‘No,’ Gorgas said. ‘By the way, we won. The battle. Probably the war.’

‘That’s good,’ Bardas said. ‘I won a war once, against the plainspeople. In fact, I won it so thoroughly and well, they came back and burnt my city to the ground. With help, of course.’

Gorgas waited for him to add something, but he didn’t seem inclined to. ‘It’s a wonderful bow,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like it. What’s it made of?’

‘I’ll tell you in a moment,’ Bardas replied. ‘I’m glad you found it useful. I was worried for a while that it might be a bit stiff.’

Gorgas grinned ruefully. ‘Stiff’s putting it mildly,’ he replied. ‘As witness my back, hands and arms. At the time, though, it didn’t seem to worry me.’

Bardas nodded. ‘Plenty of power?’ he said. ‘Penetration?’

‘No question about that. Looked to me that it sent arrows through armour like it wasn’t there.’

‘That’s good,’ Bardas said. ‘Well, it was only a small contribution to the war effort – I made it, but you were the one who shot it. You always shot well with the bows I made you.’

‘Very true.’

Bardas shrugged. ‘And I always made ‘em better than I could shoot ‘em. Ironic, really. Take the bow you shot Dad with, for instance.’ Gorgas tensed up, the muscles in his belly tightening, but Bardas went on as before. ‘Originally I made that one for myself, but try as I might I could never hit a barn door with it; and the new one – well, I can only just draw the horrid thing.’

‘It’s a knack,’ Gorgas replied quietly.

‘Ironic, though; if I’d had that old bow that day, I’d never have hit all those long-range moving targets, if I’d been in your shoes.’

‘You weren’t.’

‘But I could have been. Damn it, we were both young, we hadn’t started being the people we are now. I can imagine a set of circumstances that’d have put me where you were, that day. I could have been the one who did what you did. Only,’ he added with a smile, ‘I’d have missed.’

Gorgas was silent for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you turned out to be better with the sword than I ever was with the bow.’

‘It’s kind of you to say so,’ Bardas replied gravely. ‘Coming from you, that’s an accolade. Can I ask you something?’

Gorgas didn’t like the sound of his voice, but he said, ‘Sure, ask away.’

Bardas nodded and relaxed a little more into his chair. ‘When you opened the gates of Perimadeia,’ he said, ‘what was the real reason? Iseutz said it was because Niessa told you to, but I have my doubts.’

‘I was there because Niessa sent me,’ he said. ‘And her reasons benefited me too, remember.’

Bardas acknowledged that with a gesture of his hand. ‘But I bet I know the real reason,’ he said. ‘Well, the two real reasons. First, you’d always hated Perimadeia, because that’s where young Hedin and the other boy came from; if they hadn’t come to visit, the landlords’ sons with their money and position, being better than us, you’d never have done it. In that respect, Perimadeia ruined your life, just like it ruined Temrai’s. That’s the first reason. What do you think?’

‘There’s truth in what you say, Bardas.’

‘Thought so. But the other reason,’ he went on, ‘that was something of your own. Now I’m not saying you’d ever have done it of your own hook just for this reason; Niessa gave you the order, and you thought of this and it was this that made you agree, so it’s not all your responsibility. But I think you engineered the fall of Perimadeia because I lived there, and you wanted me out into the big wide world again, where you could take care of me, see me right, make it all up for me for what you’d done. You brought me the Guelan sword, you as good as warned me about what was going to happen, you came looking for me in the fighting; you had a ship waiting to pick me up and bring me on. All that trouble you went to, just to make up with your brother. You know, in a way that’s really sweet.’

Gorgas looked at him, but there was nothing to see.

‘In a way,’ Bardas went on, ‘that was real brotherly love. I can’t think of anybody else who’d do something like that, someone so obsessively – loving. Really, making you the bow is hardly a fitting recompense.’

‘It was all I ever wanted from you,’ Gorgas replied.

‘Think nothing of it, please. But I thought I’d mention it; you see, if it was just what you’d done to Dad and the rest of us all those years ago, I’d never have made you the bow. But when I found out about the City, it set me thinking; I was thinking about it just now, a few minutes before you arrived. Gorgas, you know what? Your actions have always caused mine; in a sense, you made me, just like I made the bow. The only difference is, I made the bow out of dead tissue; you used me while I was still alive.’

Gorgas looked up. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

Bardas stood up and walked to the door that separated the main room from the small bedchamber. ‘You were asking me about what the bow was made of,’ he said.

‘That can wait,’ Gorgas interrupted. ‘Bardas, what do you mean, my actions caused yours?’

Bardas leant against the doorpost. ‘I met your son a short while ago,’ he said. ‘What was his name? Luha? A good boy, I thought. I liked him.’

‘He’s all right,’ Gorgas said.

‘I mentioned that I was going to make you a bow,’ Bardas went on, ‘and he said he’d like to help. In fact, he helped a whole lot. Have you been home lately?’

Gorgas got to his feet. ‘Bardas,’ he said, ‘what’s all this about?’

Bardas stood out of the doorway, gesturing Gorgas to come across. ‘You asked me what I made the bow out of,’ he said. ‘Come and see.’

In the bedchamber was a low wooden bed. On the bed were the remains of a body. About half the skin had been flayed off the flesh, which was in an advanced state of decay. The ribcage was exposed; all the front ribs had been neatly sawn out, and the intestines were missing. There were long, neat slits up the sides of the arms and legs, across the chest, up the sides of the neck, where every last fibre of sinew had been carefully removed. Half the scalp was shaved. There was no sign of any blood apart from a brown residue in the bottom of a brass dish on the floor.

‘It’s wonderful,’ Bardas said. ‘Everything you need to make the perfect bow’s in there somewhere, except for a little strip of wood. I’d heard about making bows from ribs years ago. I even tried it once but it never worked; I used buffalo ribs, and I guess they just can’t take it the way human bone can. Human sinew, too; it’s marvellous stuff, far better than deer or beef tendon. Then there’s the skin, for rawhide and glue; blood, for glue again; guts for the bowstring – some waste, obviously, but not too much. There’s even fat for waterproofing and fine hair to make into serving thread; I read somewhere that human hair makes good bowstrings, but I thought I’d stick with tried and tested gut.’ He put a hand on Gorgas’ shoulder. ‘And I bet there were times you thought Luha’d never amount to much. Instead, look, he’s helped you win the war.’

Gorgas was still and quiet for a long time, thinking. Bardas sat down at the foot of the bed, waiting for him to speak. ‘Good tactics, don’t you think?’ he went on, as Gorgas stayed quiet. ‘Your wife thinks her son’s here with me, staying with Uncle Bardas. Which he is, of course, though in a sense he also went with his father to the wars. That’s neat, really; he’s learnt soldiering with you and bow-making with me. Really, the best of both of us.’

‘It’s all right,’ Gorgas said.

Bardas looked at him. ‘What did you say?’ he asked.

‘It’s all right,’ Gorgas repeated slowly. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Bardas jumped up and grabbed him; he didn’t resist. ‘What the hell do you mean, it doesn’t matter, it’s all right? Gorgas, I just killed your son! I killed your son and I made him into a bow, and you’re telling me it’s all right. What is wrong with you?’

Gorgas had his eyes shut. ‘What’s done is done,’ he said firmly. ‘Luha is dead, we can’t bring him back. I’ve lost a son, but I can always have another one, I can make sons, I can’t make brothers. If I – if anything happened to you, you’d be gone for ever, and there’d be no point in that, it’d be a waste.’

Bardas let go of him and slumped against the wall. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘You’re forgiving me. Gorgas, I always knew you were evil, but I never thought you were as bad as this.’

Gorgas shook his head. ‘Not evil,’ he said. ‘Unlucky. There’s no such thing as evil, Bardas, it’s a myth, a sloppy, wasteful way of thinking. There’s just bad luck that makes us do things, even though we’re trying to do what’s best. You can’t fight bad luck, you’ve just got to accept it, the way I did when I-’

‘When you killed our father.’

Gorgas nodded. ‘It was bad luck, but I was practical, I knew I’d done a bad thing but I knew I could make amends for it, if I really tried hard. That’s why it doesn’t matter, Bardas, what either of us has done. I’m still your brother.’

Bardas walked away, back into the main room, and sat down. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if that doesn’t beat cock-fighting. What have I got to do to stop you loving me, Gorgas? There must be something, sort of killing you. I can’t kill you, Gorgas, that’d mean you’d have won, you’d have escaped, got away free.’

Gorgas came through and sat opposite him. ‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked.

‘Me? The gods know, I haven’t given it any thought. I’d assumed I’d be dead about two minutes after you saw that thing in there.’

‘You don’t know me, then, do you?’

‘Apparently not,’ Bardas replied. ‘I made the mistake of thinking you’d react like a human being rather than a Loredan.’

Gorgas grinned at him; his face was like the face in the other room. ‘We’re one hell of a family,’ he said. ‘On balance, it’s probably just as well there’s not more of us.’