The Belly of the Bow

CHAPTER FOUR

I hope I won’t die today, Master Juifrez muttered to himself as he took his place in the landing barge. He looked at his shipmates, fifty halberdiers of the Foundation’s Fifth Company, and wondered how many of their minds were occupied with variations on that theme. At the bow, a thin, nervous young corporal was clutching the banner of the Fifth: Austerity and Diligence. Scarcely the kind of inspiring concepts that men willingly die for, which was probably all to the good. Master Juifrez didn’t want his men to die for anything.

To divert his thoughts from such depressing topics he undid the straps on his pack and peeled open the linen parcel that contained his three days’ rations. He couldn’t help smiling; Alescia had put in a thick wedge of his favourite cheese, some peppered sausage (rock-hard and bright red, the way he liked it), a block of mature rye bread, six onions, a leg of cold chicken – he looked up and saw that the men were watching him. He folded the parcel up again and strapped up the pack.

He wanted to say something – So what’ve you got in yours? – but of course he couldn’t. A Master of the Foundation, twelfth-generation Poor, with a doctorate in metaphysics and a master’s degree in philology, doesn’t ask his troops what their wives have put in their lunch-boxes. Obviously not. For some reason. He smiled vaguely, and the men looked away. Strange, he reflected. We’re off to fight together, possibly die in each others’ company, and yet we seem to have so little in common. On reflection, that wasn’t so strange. What do ordinary people talk about? Not about textual variants in the early manuscripts of Mazia’s Epiphany, or the fallacy of moral duality, or modern developments in the art of counter-sapping during long-term sieges, or aspects of the problems of extended lines of supply during protracted foreign campaigns, or Dio Kezma’s early instrumental music, or the likelihood of a fall in interest rates among the federated banks of the Island, or who was likely to succeed Master Biehan as Chief Executive of the Department of Public Health and Waterways. And if you discounted that sort of thing, what was there to talk about? The weather?

A heavy wave shoved against the barge like a rude man in a hurry, and Juifrez grabbed at his helmet just in time to stop it toppling off his head into the sea. Organised sport, he remembered, and shared experiences in the workplace, known as ‘shop’. But he knew nothing about organised sport, except that in theory it was forbidden, and he had an idea that enlisted men weren’t likely to want to talk shop with their commanding officer. As for the weather – There’s a light drizzle. Yes, isn’t there? He frowned and picked at a loose end of binding-cord on the handle of his halberd. It was a pity; because he was there, the men seemed to feel that they couldn’t talk among themselves – presumably because what they wanted to say was how crazy the mission was and what little confidence they had in the judgement of their commander. Absolutely no way of knowing. The nearest he’d ever been to their situation was when he’d been a very young freshman, and he and six or so of his classmates had found themselves sharing a ferryboat with their class tutor. Of course they’d all sat there in stony silence, all the way from Shastel Pier to Scona Point, but that was because they were all terrified of dour, humourless, miserable old Doctor Nihal… Juifrez frowned, not liking the implications. Me dour, humourless, miserable? Maybe Doctor Nihal wasn’t any of those things either, and we all assumed he was just because he was Them. Am I Them? When did that happen, I wonder?

Not long after that, the condition of the sea and the bad manners of the wind and waves helped clear his mind of all thoughts except, I hate going on boats, and just when the steady drizzle was leading him to the conclusion that four coats of wool grease on a military cape aren’t quite enough to make it waterproof, the pilot sang out, ‘Roha Point!’ and he snapped out of his personal thoughts and became an officer again.

First, he looked behind, but the drizzle and the sea-fret were so thick that he couldn’t see the other two barges. That didn’t mean anything. Visibility was down to twenty yards, if that. He narrowed his eyes, trying to blink away the raindrops, and peered ahead, but there was nothing to see. How in hell’s name does he know we’re at Roha Point? We could be anywhere. Master Juifrez reflected that one of the things he knew least about in the whole wide world was boat-handling. There were bound to be ways of knowing where you are in the middle of a thick fog, or else how did anyone ever get anywhere?

He heard the splash of the anchor and stood up, at first swaying helplessly until his hand connected with the rail. Tradition and honour demanded that he should be the first to jump off the boat into the cold water of unknown depth that separated him from the beach. He scrambled awkwardly over the bench, sat astride the rail, swung his other leg over, dropped off the side of the barge and ended up sitting in nine inches of water. Marvellous, he muttered to himself as he hoisted himself back to his feet using the shaft of his halberd, leadership by example. Behind him, the men were disembarking in a rather more orderly, scientific manner (because they’re trained to do this and I’m not; after all, I’m just the damn commanding officer). He raised his left arm and waved the men on, giving the sign to fall in. Behind his boatload, he could see two other similar bodies of men, blurred dark shapes forming a vague platoon-shaped mass. All present and correct, then; time to go.

Up the hill, the scouts had told him, back in the relative warmth and comfort of the Fifth Company’s barracks in Shastel; up the hill, follow the track until you come to a cluster of derelict buildings; that’s the abandoned tin mine, the Weal Erec. From there, you want to march for about an hour due north, that’s carrying on uphill, until you find yourself just under the hog’s back; then you turn east and follow the line of the crest until you come to a sudden deep combe, a fold in the ground. The village is down there, in the dip.

Simple enough directions, easy to remember. Master Juifrez led the way, his boots squelching abominably, the rain trickling down the gutter formed by the rolled-over seam between the fluted plates of his helmet and straight down the back of his neck. Did it always rain here? The ground was sodden, and great clumps of mud stuck to his feet, making them impossibly heavy to lift. The further uphill he went, the thicker the low cloud seemed to get, so that by the time he stumbled and tripped over a block of fallen masonry from the wheelhouse of the abandoned mine, he had convinced himself they’d come the wrong way and was on the point of giving the order to turn back.

We’re where we’re supposed to be; fancy that. He called a halt, and watched the men fall out and perch on the broken-down walls of the mine buildings, bedraggled and gloomy-looking as a flock of rooks roosting in the bare branches of winter trees on a rainy day. Some of them were emptying water out of their boots, others were wringing out hoods and capes, while the majority just sat with the absolute stillness unique to exhausted, demoralised men. He reflected for a moment on how heavy rain makes cloth, and wondered whether there was any realistic chance of getting these sad, sorry people to exhibit any degree of aggression whatsoever, as and when they finally came upon the enemy. If they’ve got any sense, they’ll invite us inside for a hot drink and a seat by the fire; they’d be safe as houses if they did that.

He could feel the urge to snuggle down inside his cape and go to sleep becoming steadily more insistent; time to start moving again, or he’d never get them to budge. He stood up, waved them on, and they formed up in line of march like so many sleepwalkers, without so much as a grumble. Looking at them, the expression ‘raiding-party’ seemed so incongruous as to be absurd. Raiders pounce and swoop; they don’t squelch, or trudge along with their heads down like a work detail on their way to the peat diggings. Maybe he ought to address the men, say a few inspiring words that’d stir up their military ardour. He remembered reading something to that effect, but decided against it. In all the years of their history the armies of the Foundation had never once mutinied, but there’s always a first time.

From the Weal Erec, march due north for an hour until you find yourself just underneath the hog’s back. Master Juifrez looked round for a landmark. Stupid: he couldn’t remember which direction they’d come from. He did know that due north was uphill, but there was an awful lot of uphill in front of him; which way were they supposed to go now? Absolutely no chance of fixing due north by the position of the sun (what sun?). Utterly ridiculous, the idea that a hundred and fifty grown men, supposedly professional soldiers, could lose their way on an open hillside, just because it was raining and there was a touch of low cloud. He concentrated, trying to visualise the ruined site as he’d first seen it.

Well now, if we keep going uphill, sooner or later we’ll find the hog’s back, and then we just turn right. As simple as that. You couldn’t get lost if you really tried. He signalled the advance, and felt his stiff legs protesting as he trudged and slithered through the unspeakable mud. Not for the first time, it struck him as ludicrous that anybody should be willing to die for the right to own this loathsome place. So far he’d seen no cultivation, no cattle or sheep, nothing to indicate that this sloppy, squelchy mess was of any interest to anybody – quite understandably. You couldn’t plough this mud or plant anything, it’d simply rot in the ground. Livestock wouldn’t last a season before footrot and starvation decimated them. Nothing but waste and an abandoned, flogged-out mine. You’d have to be mad.

They came up onto the hog’s back almost without knowing it. One moment they were dragging themselves up a steadily increasing gradient, having to use halberd-shafts to pole themselves up the hill; the next, the ground seemed to fall away under their feet, and Juifrez found himself staggering, waving his arms to try and keep his balance. He signalled a halt, wiped the rain out of his eyes yet again, and tried to make sense of the landscape.

They were on the top of the ridge all right, but directly to the west he could see the hillside tumbling down in just such a combe as the scouts had described – which was bewildering, since the combe where the village lay should be to the east, and about three miles further along. Either this was a different combe entirely, or else they’d taken a diagonal course up the hill, overshot the combe and come up on the other side. The combe itself, of course, was full of cloud, which billowed up onto the sides of the crest like the head on a mug of beer. Ridiculous; but here he was, and he had to do something. He could send scouts to see if the village really was down there, but somehow he didn’t feel that was wise. The thought of any of his bedraggled, unhappy-looking force being able to descend that steep slope quietly enough to avoid detection was, he felt, fairly remote. Nothing for it but to order the advance, lead his men down the hill and hope he’d got the right combe. Ridiculous. Ah, hell…

He raised his halberd and pointed down into the mist. The question wasn’t so much whether they’d be able to get down the slope quickly enough to be onto the enemy before they had a chance to get ready. It was more a matter of whether, in all this filthy, slippery mud, they’d be able to stop at all. A vision of a hundred and fifty heavy infantrymen tobogganing into battle on their backsides, frantically trying to steer with the butt-ends of their halberds, flitted through his mind and made him cringe. Austerity and Diligence, he muttered to himself, victory or death. Does it count as a victory if the enemy can’t fight back because they’re laughing so much?

With severe misgivings and a general sense of being in the wrong place, he led the way. Their best, or only, chance lay in zigzagging their way back and forth across the slope, slowly working their way down until he felt the risk of detection was too great; then he’d have no alternative but to charge down the rest of the slope and trust to luck that there really was a village in the bottom of the valley. Wouldn’t the scouts have mentioned it if there were two basically identical combes right next to each other? Maybe they had, and he hadn’t been listening. And assuming, just for fun, that there really is a village down there, what are we supposed to do about it, exactly? Burn it to the ground? In this rain?

Maybe they’re already waiting for us; bows strung, arrows nocked, just waiting for the command, ‘Loose!’ Maybe we’re all about to die, any minute, here in the rain and the mud. No way of knowing, of course. I hope I don’t die today.

It took a very long time to work their way down the side of the combe, maybe more in subjective than objective time, but it’s the time you feel that matters. No signs of any life whatsoever, which was reasonable enough. Either this was the wrong combe and there wasn’t a village down here at all, or else it was the right combe and everyone was safe and warm indoors, where any sensible person would be on a day like this. Only idiots and raiding parties go slobbering about in the rain and the mud. Idiots, raiding parties and people who are hopelessly lost…

Juifrez stopped dead, digging his heels in to keep himself upright. Below, through a curling wisp of cloud, he could see a thatched roof, no more than hundred yards away. Damn it, he thought, holding up his arm for the halt. He stood for a moment, trying to see or hear something, anything at all apart from the patter of rain on his helmet, like the drumming of a bored child’s fingers on a desktop. Around him he could see the fuzzy outlines of his men, blurred by rain and mist, standing the way he’d seen herds of wild ponies, still and aimless in the rain, just standing and dripping. Here goes nothing, he muttered under his breath, and gave the signal for rapid advance.

The next moment he had more than enough to occupy his mind. Rapid advance was one way of describing it. The general philosophy behind it all seemed to be that if you ran fast enough you had a chance of keeping from falling over, as if instability was a pursuer hot on your heels. The three platoons of the Fifth Company (Austerity and Diligence) scampered down the hill like reckless, over-excited children, skipping and bouncing, sliding and careering, and all amid a dead, eerie silence that was quite unnerving. The danger they were in was very real indeed; if a man stopped suddenly (assuming such a thing was possible) it was virtually certain that someone’d go charging into the back of him and spit him clean through with the spike of his halberd. Being aware of this, everyone was trying to run faster still, so that the whole unit was accelerating, racing ahead like falling rocks bouncing down a mountainside, a hundred and fifty men all terrified of each other, running away from their own men directly towards the enemy. By the time the ground under their feet started to level out and the first houses loomed up at them out of the mist they were covering the ground at speeds most athletes would never aspire to, skimming over the mud like flat stones spun over still water. Ludicrous, Juifrez told himself, ludicrous…

Then a shape reared up at him like a hostile animal – a log-built house, almost a shack, and he was heading straight for it. He did the best he could to avoid it and ended up colliding with the corner, feeling the impact bumping all the air out of his body. His feet shot out from under him and he slammed down onto his back, trying to cry out as his head hit the ground but entirely lacking the breath to cry out with. Somewhere in the mist in front of him he heard a woman screaming, and he could see his men streaming past, halberds levelled, completely out of control. More screams followed, and crashes like someone dropping an armful of scrap metal, and then the first scream that was pain, not terror. An accident, probably; a halberdier blundering into somebody with his weapon at the level, a collision like two carts crunching into each other at a street corner on a foggy day. As he fought for breath he could make out the voice of one of his sergeants, bellowing orders – he couldn’t hear the words but he recognised the inflections – form ranks, dress ranks, present arms. Another scream, quite close. Contact with the enemy established.

He dragged himself into a sitting position and forced himself to breathe; the instinct to do so seemed to have been buffeted out of him, he had to issue commands to his body to fill and empty his lungs. His halberd must be somewhere; there it was, slippery with mud and unpleasant to hold, like something dead fished out of a river. He trawled it towards him and levered himself up with it; knees weak, body still winded, no pain yet but only because of the shock. As he took a deliberate breath of air, a shape materialised near him out of the fog, a tall man, not a soldier, not a member of the Fifth Company. Instinct, which had abdicated responsibility for getting him to breathe, made him level the halberd and lunge. The man just stood there. The spike went clean through, until the blade obstructed it.

He looks surprised. Why does he look surprised? Doesn’t he know there’s a war on?

The man put both hands round the halberd shaft, opened his mouth to speak, died and fell down, sliding neatly off the halberd spike. He didn’t appear to have a weapon of any kind. It was then that the thought occurred to Juifrez: maybe this is the wrong village. Maybe this isn’t the village where, according to our spies, a platoon of Scona archers has been stationed for an attack on Bryzis. Oh, wouldn’t that be…?

A woman was running past, she hadn’t seen him. He reached out and grabbed her by the arm, so that she swung round and thumped against his shoulder. She looked utterly bewildered.

‘This village,’ he said. ‘What’s it called?’

She looked at him as if he was some kind of weird mythical beast. ‘Primen,’ she said. ‘This is Primen.’

Juifrez winced. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. I live here.’

‘Damn,’ Juifrez replied, and let her go; no rabbit ever ran faster.

Fuck, he muttered under his breath. Wrong village. These are our people, loyal subjects of the Foundation. This is absurd. He took a moment to pull himself together, make sure he was breathing properly, stable on his feet; then he took a deep breath to shout out orders, call off the attack. That was when a man darted out of the mist and hit him over the head with a stool.

When he came round, he could hear voices; screaming and shouting and swearing, but different. These were battle-noises. That can’t be right, we hit the wrong village, he told himself; then he recognised a voice with the low, rolling accent of Scona, someone trying to make orders heard over the noise. Right village? he asked himself. No, can’t be. It took him several seconds to work out what had happened; that somehow someone had got through to the next village down the line and called out the Scona archers to come and save them. Wonderful, Master Juifrez lamented, shaking his head in disbelief. Not only have I massacred the wrong village. I’ve managed to turn them over to the enemy. How the hell am I going to explain this when I get home?

There were men coming. Boosting himself sideways like a scuttling crab, Master Juifrez managed to scramble under the dead body of the man he’d killed, just as a dozen or so men walked out of the mist. He couldn’t see them clearly, peeping out from under the arm of a dead man, but they were wearing mailshirts and helmets and carrying bows; all he really needed to know, under the circumstances. He lay as still as he could and prayed he wouldn’t sneeze.

‘… Hiding to nothing,’ one of the men said, in a voice that was all Scona. ‘We’re outnumbered four to one and we can’t see to shoot. We aren’t even supposed to be here, for crying out loud. We want to get out of here while we still can.’

‘Can’t see a bloody thing,’ replied another. ‘Definitely wasting our time. Where’d you get that four-to-one stuff from, anyway?’

‘Someone said,’ the first voice replied. ‘They said it was four platoons of heavy infantry, just sort of appeared out of nowhere. I don’t mind an even fight, but four platoons-’

‘Not up to us,’ a third voice interrupted. ‘The obvious thing’d be to space out, surround the village, pick ’em off as they come out.’

‘And let ’em burn down the village?’

‘Do they look like they’re burning down the village? Get real.’

The voices receded. When he was certain they’d gone, Juifrez pushed the body aside and staggered to his feet; he had cramp, and pins and needles in both legs, so there was no way he was going anywhere quickly. Absurd, he thought, if I get killed because I can’t run because I’ve got pins and needles.

It was time to get a grip, he reflected, as he stood on one leg, leaning against the doorframe of the hut. After all, he was meant to be the officer commanding this situation, the man in control, or at least wrestling for control with his opposite number, the enemy captain. As it was, all he’d done since they’d charged down into the valley was collide with a wall, kill a loyal civilian, get bashed silly and hide from the enemy. He found that he wasn’t too worried about that; but he did have a responsibility to a hundred and fifty men under his command, and it was time he did something about that.

Assuming he could find them, of course. If anything, the fog was thicker than ever. He tried to call his mind to order, but his mental parliament was a confused racket of shouting and screaming. All he could think of to do was to wander into the fog and try and find some of his men. It sounded like a fairly foolproof way to get killed, but he was aware of no other options. An extended scrabble on his hands and knees eventually revealed his halberd. He punted himself upright, muttered something under his breath and headed into the fog.

It was a case of fortune favouring the brave, or fool’s luck, or at the very least serendipity of an extravagantly high order; but the first men he met were a dozen halberdiers. They’d formed a loose and unwieldy hedgehog formation, a slightly bent oval with everybody facing outwards, so that the men at the rear were walking backwards. Because nobody was navigating and the fog was so thick, they lurched from side to side like a party of drunks, or a boatload of inexperienced oarsmen trying to paddle a longboat against a stiff current. One lurch carried them up against the side of a barn, and the three men on the end were squeezed into the wall and nearly crushed before the formation changed course and staggered the other way. It didn’t help, of course, that the men had their helmets down with the cheekplates fastened, which made it virtually impossible for them to hear a thing.

It was a start, nevertheless and Juifrez hurried towards them, waving his arms. At once the formation came to a rapid, disorganised halt, shuddering like a flimsy cart hitting a tree. Someone shouted at him. ‘Go away!’ or something like that. ‘It’s me,’ he yelled back, ‘Master Juifrez. Halt and hold your line. Stop!’

Somehow he got the impression they weren’t terribly pleased to see him. They stood where they were, halberds still resolutely extended as if he were a squadron of heavy cavalry bearing down on them from all directions. ‘Who goes there?’ somebody called out nervously. ‘Advance and be recognised.’

‘Oh, for…’ said Juifrez. ‘It’s me. Master Juifrez. Don’t you recognise me?’

‘Sir! ’ The man who’d challenged him snapped to attention and – yes – actually saluted.

‘Cut that out and let me through,’ Juifrez growled, and he shouldered his way into the front edge of the formation. ‘Right,’ he called out, ‘with me. Let’s move. And for pity’s sake, keep up.’

In the event, of course, he proved to be much more of a hindrance than a help. Now that there was an officer present, the men immediately stopped trying to navigate the formation themselves and kept going along the most recent straight line they’d been following until they heard the officer give a command. That as, of course, the way it should be, according to drills and regulations; but Juifrez couldn’t see any more than anyone else, and the idea of him giving clear, precise, simultaneous orders to a dozen men, half of whom were facing the other way, was clearly absurd. It occurred to him, Do we actually need to huddle up like this? Nobody’s attacked us. Why don’t we just form a column and march out of here?

Another body of men walked out of the mist, almost colliding with them before either party knew what was going on. The meeting was so sudden that no one even had time to raise their halberds; just as well, since both parties were armed with halberds… They’re Us, Juifrez realised with a start. ‘It’s all right,’ he shouted, before anybody got hurt, ‘it’s us. Shastel. It’s all right.’

From somewhere in the thick of the other party, Juifrez heard a voice he recognised yelling orders, one of the sergeants. ‘Conort,’ he shouted, ‘it’s me, Juifrez.’

‘Sir!’ the sergeant barked back.

Juifrez closed his eyes for a moment; he was shocked to realise that the emotion washing over him was relief at the end of a period of great fear, which he hadn’t been allowing himself to recognise. I was terrified; and now I’ve found some more men and an experienced NCO, apparently it’s all going to be all right. ‘Sergeant, form the men into column. How many have you got with you?’

It turned out that Conort had reassembled the most part of the second platoon; together, they were now about fifty strong, a force large enough to be able to deal with anything they were likely to bump into. ‘All right,’ Juifrez said, ‘what we’ve got to do now is find the rest of us and get out of here. Their lot don’t want to fight here, and neither do we. Sergeant, form the men into a double line. We’re going to take this village through like a partridge drive.’

For the first time, Sergeant Conort understood what the officer was talking about; he was a farmer’s son and had been out after partridges with the long net many times. He grinned as he acknowledged the order, and with a few brisk commands organised the men into the double-ply formation (Why can’t I do that? Juifrez asked himself) necessary for the manoeuvre, which would consist of beating through the village in an ever-diminishing spiral. As they went they’d collect their own men and drive the enemy and the villagers before them, until they had them penned up in the notional net in the middle of the village. If they had any sense at all, they’d surrender without a fight, and then they could all go home.

Actually, that’s rather brilliant, Juifrez realised, as the line advanced. Maybe I’m not so bad at this, after all. It seemed to be working just fine as they pushed forward, keeping it slow and steady, with the sergeant shouting out at regular intervals and the point men shouting back, to make sure the line stayed straight and together; it was just like a partridge drive, or maybe more like a boar flush, because of the danger. Yes, better comparison. There was the sense of controlled tension you got when you were driving wild boar through thick woodland, the knowledge that if you did it right you wouldn’t get hurt making you concentrate rather than panic (because of course you knew what you were doing; nobody’s allowed to join the flushing line unless they know what to do; any bloody fool can play at soldiers, but boar flushing’s a serious business).

Every time someone appeared before the line, the sergeant shouted out the challenge: ‘Who goes there? Advance and be recognised.’ Their own men called back, name, rank and number; the enemy had plenty of time to run away, which was how they wanted it to be; plenty of time to deal with them later, when they’d all been flushed into the net. In fairly short order, they’d regained two-thirds of their strength. So long as they took it nice and steady, kept the line, stayed calm, then it as bound to work. It was all going to be all right.

And then a line of men appeared out of the mist in front of them, and someone shouted something. Juifrez frowned – he didn’t know what this meant – and an arrow hit the man next to him, stopping him in his tracks. Another arrow hit Juifrez on the right side of his chest, just between his armpit and his collar-bone; he felt the impact, like a hard shove, but couldn’t feel any pain, except that all his strength seemed to drain out of him, like water out of a hole in a bucket. Sergeant Conort was yelling words of command – front rank present arms, make ready – and then suddenly stopped, at which point Juifrez realised that they were no more than thirty yards from two platoons of archers who were making a fight of it. Oh, hell, what had to be done now? Take cover? No cover, can’t stay here, only one place to go. ‘Front rank present arms, at the double forward march’ – someone was yelling that; me. He saw the men on either side of him surge forward, felt someone pressing against his back, pushing him forward. I suppose I’d better go too, though I ought to be excused this, after all, I’m wounded. Yes, that’s a point. I wonder how bad this is? Doesn’t hurt much, but I just want to fall over. Better not to, though; not now. He shuffled towards the vague line in front of him, aware that they were edging back and that arrows were still pitching all round. Still, only a few yards and we’ll be on them, they won’t stand, they’ll break and run. He took another step and saw the ground rushing up to meet him, felt somebody’s boot crash into his ribs, sharp pain as the arrow twisted in the wound as he landed. Then something heavy fell across him, knocking all the air out of his lungs. It twitched and struggled (dying man, probably) but he couldn’t move to shrug it off him. He didn’t have a clue what was happening. Probably not relevant now. So this is it, then. Oh, well.

As far as he knew he didn’t lose consciousness at any point. Rather, he lay still, eyes closed, not listening to the noises, letting his mind drift. That was just pragmatism on his part; if he didn’t try to focus but just let it all slide and blur, then the wound didn’t hurt. It was still there, of course; he pictured it as a mattress of nails, and if he lay perfectly still and relaxed, the nails didn’t hurt. At first he made the effort to breathe, self-consciously filling and emptying his lungs, but that was starting to be more trouble than it was worth. Death, he reflected woozily, is a perfectly natural thing. Nothing to be afraid of. It’ll probably do you good if only you’d let it.

Then something landed on his chest, and the fragile truce with pain was abruptly broken. Now it all hurt like hell, and he didn’t like it. Some bastard just trod on me, he realised, and for the first time he felt angry. He opened his eyes and saw two men standing over him, staring down at him with terror of almost comic intensity in their eyes; then they reached down and grabbed him, hauling him up – ah shit, that hurts, let me go! – and mauling him about like a big sack of wool. He tried to protest but none of the right bits worked, so he closed his eyes, let it happen and tried to concentrate on dealing with pain. He could feel his feet dragging on the ground, every jolt and bump sending blue lightning up his legs. It all lasted a very long time, until it became no time at all.

At one point they appeared to have stopped moving. He opened his eyes, let the weight of his head swing sideways until his face was a few inches away from that of the man on his right. He didn’t know who he was.

‘I think it’s all gone wrong,’ he said. The man opened his lips to reply, but he didn’t catch any of it; his eyelids flopped back down and the pain washed back in like the sea. Hey, he heard himself thinking, if it hurts I must still be alive. That’s good. Then the waves of tortured feeling broke over his head, and there wasn’t anything else.

‘Well, what do you expect,’ said Gorgas Loredan, grinning as he knelt down to retrieve a perfectly good arrow from a body, ‘from an army where you get to be an officer by passing an exam?’

‘What’s an exam?’ asked his colleague.

‘It’s where you sit down in a big open hall with a couple of long tables,’ Gorgas replied, ‘and they give you a piece of paper with questions written on it, and you write answers to the questions on another piece of paper. And whoever writes the best answer, wins.’

Gorgas’ colleague frowned. ‘They must have a lot of paper,’ he said.

‘They make it out of reed-pulp,’ Gorgas said. ‘They ship in the reeds from the Salinarus delta. It’s a big thing in Shastel, something we ought to be looking at one of these days.’

‘There isn’t the demand, surely,’ the colleague said. ‘I mean, apart from them, who uses it?’

Gorgas folded a corner of the dead man’s sleeve round the arrowhead and wiped off the blood, then dropped the arrow into his quiver. ‘Like I said,’ he replied, ‘it needs looking into.’ He stood up, groaning a little at the stiffness in his knees. ‘I think we probably got most of them,’ he said. ‘I still don’t know what all that was about, but it didn’t turn out too badly in the end.’

‘They helped,’ said the colleague with a wry grin. ‘They helped a lot.’

‘Couldn’t have done it without them,’ Gorgas agreed. ‘You know, whenever I start having my doubts about this war, wondering if we’ve taken on more than we can handle, I just think about the stupidity of the enemy in all its many and wonderful forms, and then I know it’s all going to be all right. I mean,’ he went on, as they continued their stroll through the dead and dying, ‘one of these days I’d really like to win a battle, rather than just stand quiet while they lose it at me. You know, just to be able say I’d done it. But I’m not complaining. I mean, it works.’

They completed their tour of inspection and made their way back to the longhouse in the middle of the village, where the orderlies were patching up the wounded. Mostly civilians, Gorgas noted; and once again he found himself asking what on earth had possessed these idiots to attack a loyal village, killing sixteen of their own people and injuring twice as many again, in a thick fog, just when his expeditionary force was arriving to open negotiations with the villagers? It was wonderful – this whole district would come over now, no question about that – but the sheer stupidity of it offended him. It was messy, and he hated mess.

‘Look what we found.’ Sergeant Harzio was waving at him, calling him over. He grunted. He ought to be in the longhouse, talking comfortably to the village worthies and discussing the articles of transfer, but he didn’t feel like doing that. ‘Coming,’ he said. He turned to his colleague. ‘Would you mind doing the pep talk?’ he asked. ‘I’m not in the mood. You know the drill.’

His colleague nodded. ‘I don’t mind being fawned on,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’

Gorgas walked over to where Harzio was standing. At his feet were three men, sitting up against the side of a barn, their hands and feet tied. One of them was well out of it, his head slumped forward on his chest. ‘What’ve you got, Sergeant?’ he asked.

‘Their CO,’ Harzio replied, grinning. ‘Goes by the name of Master Juifrez Bovert. Ring any bells?’

Gorgas raised both eyebrows. The Bovert were a leading family among the Poor of Shastel. ‘You’ve got a collector’s item there, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Which one?’

The sergeant pointed. ‘He’ll make it all right,’ he said. ‘Diagonal hit through the muscle, lost some blood but nothing serious. We found them staggering about up yonder; they’d wandered into a closed sheepfold and couldn’t find their way out again.’ Sergeant Harzio grinned. ‘What d’you reckon he’s worth, then?’

Gorgas shrugged. ‘Couldn’t say offhand,’ he replied. ‘Not the sort of thing that comes on the market every day. Must be into four figures, though. Easily.’

Harzio whistled. ‘That’s not bad,’ he said. ‘The boys’ll be pleased. It was worth coming on this trip, then.’

‘That’s assuming we ransom him,’ Gorgas went on, and the sergeant’s face fell sharply. ‘Oh, don’t worry, if we decide to keep him I’ll make sure we see you right, the lads won’t lose out. Better for you, in fact; I’ll see to that.’

The sergeant’s grin broadened into a beautiful smile. ‘Always a pleasure doing business with you, Chief,’ he said. ‘What do you want us to do with him? We stopped the bleeding and he looks like he’ll be all right, but – well, now we know he’s worth money…’

Gorgas nodded. ‘I’ll send him out first thing in the morning.’ He knelt down beside the slumped body and had a look for himself. ‘He’s asleep,’ he said, ‘which is a good sign. He’ll do. Throw a blanket over him and get him under cover before it rains again. And set a guard, just in case.’

He stood up and yawned. It’d be wonderful to be able to go to bed now, but no such luck; too much to do. As he turned to head back to the longhouse, someone behind him tugged his sleeve.

‘Casualty figures,’ the solder said, ‘as near as we can make them. We got a hundred and seventeen dead, thirty-one prisoners. We lost four killed, two seriously wounded.’ Gorgas asked for the names; nobody he knew, but still, it was a pity. It had been an unnecessary battle, for all that it had turned out well. The fact that they’d killed a hundred and seventeen men gave him no satisfaction at all, quite the reverse. A sharp and total defeat of this order of magnitude would represent a substantial loss of face for the Foundation, which meant there would have to be reprisals, quite possibly directed against Scona itself. No fun for anybody. He sighed, and wished, not for the first time, that people wouldn’t keep interfering in his business. True, the whole district was now pretty sure to come over to Scona, but there was every chance they’d have done so anyway, in the normal course of events, simply because Scona’s interest rates were lower and their attitude less overtly tyrannical. The whole idea of coming here with a relatively small expeditionary force was to avoid starting fights. Now he was going to have to bring in more men, probably as a long-term garrison, just to stop the Foundation from killing every living thing in the district by way of making an example. Not, he reflected as he pushed open the longhouse door, the way he liked to run his business; and he had the unpleasant feeling that his sister would see it the same way.

‘Magic,’ Alexius said.

Niessa Loredan nodded briskly. ‘Not philosophy,’ she replied, without looking up. ‘Not metaphysically enhanced non-verbal communication. Not drug-induced hallucinatory trances in which the participant’s subconscious mind assembles and analyses already-known data with exceptional but nevertheless entirely natural insight and then disguises the result as a mystic experience. Magic.’ She yawned, and reached for a tiny pair of bronze scissors. ‘Magic is just science we don’t understand yet. Probably there was once a time when people thought the bow and arrow was magic, because it did something new and unexpected and not many people knew how. But the bow and arrow works because it works. The arrow flies through the air and hits the target. And magic works, too.’

Alexius waited for her to look up, but she didn’t. Whatever it was that she was making, it seemed to occupy her full attention. It looked like a patchwork quilt.

‘I’m not saying it doesn’t,’ he said. ‘All I’m saying is that I’ve studied these things for sixty years and never once seen any direct proof-’

‘Ah.’ This time she did look up, to give him a patronising smile. ‘These things, you say. But what you’ve been studying all these years is science and philosophy and mathematics and all that kind of stuff. You haven’t been studying magic. The very most you could have done was just nudge into the edge of it while you were off studying something else. It’s like a plumber has to know a bit about carpentry, but he doesn’t need to know how to make mortice and tenon joints. You’re saying you don’t think mortice and tenon joints could ever possibly work, since you’ve been studying plumbing since you were a boy and never came across them.’

Alexius thought for a moment, while the Director bit off a length of thread and fed it through the eye of her plain bone needle; then he said, ‘Tell me, do you always negotiate with the truth? When you come up against a fact, a plain and simple and straightforward fact, do you always try and beat it down, wheedle it into making concessions?’

Niessa lifted her head and smiled. ‘Always,’ she said. ‘In the City, when I first went there, they had a saying: truth is what you know is true when you can afford fresh fish every day of the week. Now then,’ she went on, looking down at her work, ‘these days I can afford anything I want, and all sorts of things I could never even imagine myself wanting. Truth is what I know is true, and everything else is a matter of bargaining.’

Alexius laughed. ‘I haven’t heard that one in a long time,’ he said. ‘Only we used to say, truth is what you know is true when you sit in the front three rows.’

‘At Chapter,’ Niessa interrupted, ‘meaning you’ve reached the fourth grade or above. I hated that.’ Her eyes met his, and he saw in them a fire he hadn’t noticed before. ‘I hated the Foundation, you know. Because they thought they were better than the rest of us because of what they knew. And they didn’t know anything. Oh, the City was full of people who knew things, useful things: how to make machines, how to extract nitre from urine, how to cure toothache without pulling out the tooth, how to case-harden steel, how to make clear, coloured glass, how to do long division without counters – you name it, somewhere in Perimadeia there was someone who knew how to do it, and who was looked up to and respected for their knowledge and wisdom. The Foundation – couldn’t get a stopper out of a stone bottle without a book of instructions, three commentaries and a scale diagram. Let me tell you something, Patriarch Alexius. I know more about magic than you’ll ever know if you live to be twice as old as you are now; practice and theory. But I didn’t learn it in Perimadeia, and I didn’t learn it here, and you aren’t going to learn it unless you do what I ask, however hard you try and trick me into showing off just to disprove your scepticism.’ She sniffed, and rubbed her nose on the back of her left hand. ‘It was a good try, though,’ she said. ‘You’re the only scholar I ever met who might just have made a living in the markets.’

Alexius nodded, accepting the compliment, and as he did so he wondered, How much of any of this is real, and how much is just negotiation? This woman could be anything, anything at all, for the purposes of striking a more favourable bargain. Look at her now, painstakingly stitching together scraps of cloth to make a piece of patchwork; she’s being the plain, shrewd no-nonsense countrywoman, so as to undermine me, the soft-fingered City scholar. Tomorrow she’ll be the Director of the Bank when she’s telling a delegation of peasants why the mortgage rate’s gone up, and the day after that she’ll be something else again; and they’re all her, and she’s all of them, and none of them are real. Nevertheless; we’ve been cooped up in here for an hour and a half and still I haven’t even started doing what she’s told me to, and she was the one with the crowded schedule. Not bad, for an otherworldly old bookworm. ‘And you’re the only banker I’ve ever met who can quote three of Acadius’ hypotheses in one sentence,’ he replied. ‘Though “metaphysically enhanced non-verbal communication” is rather over-simplifying the second book of Axioms, don’t you think?’

Niessa shrugged, eyes on her work. ‘The whole second book is based on a false premise anyway,’ she replied, ‘as you well know. Mometas proved that a hundred years ago. And,’ she added casually, holding the seam up to the light, ‘his refutation is basically a circular argument, so the whole thing’s a waste of time.’

Alexius wasn’t expecting that. In spite of himself, he couldn’t help asking for details.

‘Oh, it’s quite simple,’ Niessa replied. ‘He takes the analogy of light refracted in a rainbow, and then knocks down the hypothesis he’s just built up by saying it’s just an analogy. It’s very well argued, of course, but it’s still as obvious as a bull in a chicken-run. He’d have starved to death if he’d been in the linen trade.’

She’s right, Alexius thought angrily. Either she’s read something none of the rest of us ever saw, or she figured it out for herself. She’s right. Dear gods, if I were thirty years younger I’d give up philosophy and get myself indentured to a sack-maker. ‘It’s an interesting theory,’ he heard himself say, ‘but what about Berennius and the irregular flux theory? I think you’ll find that for the last fifty years, Mometas’ theorem has only ever been regarded as a starting point, not an end in itself.’

‘Whatever.’ Niessa Loredan dismissed the whole topic with one small wave of her needle. She’d won that round, they both knew it, she had nothing to gain by continuing the battle on that front. ‘Obviously you know far more about the subject than I do. Frankly, I’d be appalled if you didn’t. Now then.’ She carefully folded her work and laid it in her lap. ‘Let’s get down to business. It’s time we did some magic.’

‘Well?’ asked the boy anxiously.

Bardas Loredan pursed his lips. This was awkward.

On the one hand, his father had never been tactful with him. When he’d been learning this particular skill, the old man’s way of indicating that he’d got it wrong was pulling it out of the vice and snapping it across his knee, while adding a few short, pithy remarks about wasting good timber. (As far as Bardas could remember, he’d never actually said that good wood doesn’t grow on trees, but he’d been close to it on several occasions.) On the other hand, Bardas Loredan wasn’t his father.

‘It’s terrible,’ he said. ‘Do it again.’

The boy looked at him as if he’d just killed his pet sparrow by crushing it in his fist. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

Bardas sighed. ‘You really need to be told?’ he said. ‘I knew you weren’t listening. All right, here we go. First, the belly should be flat, and it isn’t. Second, when you’re shaping the back you should follow one growth ring, otherwise you’re wasting your time, and you haven’t. Look,’ he went on, pointing to where the boy had shaved through three years’ worth of growth, ‘it’s a mess. Third, you’ve got to leave knots and pins standing proud, or else they’ll form weak spots and the bow’ll snap. You’ve just planed right through them. Fourth-’

‘All right,’ said the boy. ‘I’m sorry.’

Bardas breathed out sharply. ‘It’s not a matter of being sorry,’ he said wearily. ‘It’s not as if you’ve done something wicked. You’ve just not done it right, that’s all. True, you’ve wrecked a perfectly good piece of wood, but we all do that. Just…’ He sighed again, not really knowing what to say. ‘Just go away and do it again, and this time do it right. You think you can manage that? Or would you rather watch me do one, and this time-’

‘I’ll try again,’ the boy interrupted swiftly. ‘This time I’ll do it right, I promise.’

‘Sure,’ Bardas replied. ‘Well, do your best, anyway. And when you’ve done that, get this mess swept up, we’re knee-deep in shavings again.’

The boy made himself scarce, and Bardas sat down on the bench, his chin cupped in his left hand. In the vice in front of him was another mess; a banjax, a really lousy, crummy piece of work, an abortion, garbage, trash, junk. It also represented several weeks’ work and about twenty quarters’ worth of bought-in material. He’d already tried swearing at it, but it hadn’t helped.

‘My own bloody stupid fault for listening,’ he grumbled, opening the vice and lifting out the wreck. It had all started with a chance remark made by a man who called in occasionally to sell him timber, the rare and exotic stuff that came from the South Coast, types of wood he didn’t know the names of from trees he’d never seen. The man had said that once he’d seen a bow made out of buffalo ribs-

‘You mean horn,’ he’d interrupted. ‘Buffalo horn. You slice it thin and glue it-’

‘Ribs,’ the man had repeated firmly. ‘Lovely thing, it was; no more than a yard long, a thumb wide at the handle, fingertip wide at the ends. Bloke who showed it to me said it drew fifty pounds and shot an arrow two hundred and twenty yards.’

‘He can’t have said ribs,’ Bardas maintained. ‘He meant horn.’

‘Ribs,’ the man repeated. ‘Buffalo ribs.’

And there the matter would have rested if it hadn’t been for his own stupid pride and a chance encounter with a dealer in hides who’d said yes, well, there was no call for them, not ribs, but as a special favour… And a month later they’d arrived, greasy, smelly and expensive; and once he’d paid out all that good money, he was obliged to continue.

‘Stupid,’ he muttered under his breath as he turned the horrid thing over in his hands. ‘Should know better at my age.’

There followed hours of work with the drawknife and the spokeshave, whittling the bones down into flat, even strips, checking with the calipers after every dozen or so strokes to make sure the strips matched exactly at four-inch intervals, identical in width, depth and profile. When the strips were precisely three sixteenths of an inch thick, he’d set them aside and made a wooden core out of a choice billet of imported red cedar, which he’d painstakingly heated over a steaming cauldron, draping a thick hide over the top to keep the steam in, until the wood could be bent into broad, flowing recurves at the tips so that it looked like a crawling snake, or the upper lip of a smiling girl. Then he’d set to work to make up a specially strong pot of glue, flaking small crumbs of hide into the pot, adding the boiling water and simmering the mess until it was the consistency of year-old honey. Clamping the bone to the core had been a special nightmare; he’d used every clamp in the shop, and improvised a dozen more out of wood and rawhide, and the glue oozing out of the joint had slopped everywhere, making the thing almost impossible to hold. Then it had taken forever to dry – just his luck to be doing the job during a rainy spell, when the damp got into the glue and stopped it hardening – and he’d needed the clamps for other work but didn’t dare take them of because the glue-drips were still sticky and he was terrified of the heavily stressed bone pulling off the core.

Finally, when at last the glue was hard enough and he’d got the use of his clamps back and the thing was actually holding together and not peeling itself apart like the skin of a grape, he’d spent a day with a full glue-pot and an extravagant amount of his best deer-leg sinew, laying the glue on the bow’s back and smoothing the bundles of sinew into it with the handle of a wooden spoon, making sure that every bundle overlapped and the thickness of the backing was consistent. That too seemed to take a lifetime to dry; but at last the day came when the glue was as hard and brittle as glass, and he’d chipped away the excess, scraped the back smooth, rubbed the whole thing down with abrasive reed and bent it for the first time, just enough to get the string on it. That had been first thing this morning.

‘Useless bloody thing,’ he growled, his fingers following the flowing curve of the mid-limb section, feeling how perfectly smooth he’d made the back and belly. To look at it was an absolute delight, quite possibly the most graceful and elegant bow he’d ever seen, let alone made. The proportions were perfect, the recurves immaculately balanced; with the string on, it had the classic double-juxtaposed-S shape of the thoroughbred composite bow. The trouble was, it didn’t work.

When he’d first set it up on the tiller and drawn it a tentative inch, it had felt wonderful, the indescribable combination of yielding and resistance that only comes with the bonding together of sinew, wood and horn. But this wasn’t horn, it was bone, and (as he now knew extremely well) bone will bend so far and no further; in this case, seventeen inches, at which point it jammed solid and refused to budge any further. The wood and sinew stopped it breaking, but nothing he could do would induce it to flex another inch; which left him with a forty-two-pound bow with a seventeen-inch draw, not much use for shooting a thirty-inch arrow. Oh, it propelled the arrow, sure enough – if you were prepared to contort your arms and shoulders into a knot, like crawling through a hole not much wider than your head, but trying to aim with it was the next best thing to impossible. For all practical purposes it was completely useless, unless he ever came across a rich tiny man with very short arms who was looking for a lightweight bow for shooting squirrels with. Stone-deaf squirrels, at that; the thing made a horrible creaking noise every time he drew it that’d frighten away every living creature within a square mile.

He looked it over one more time, then laid it on the bench and went back to rubbing the big sore yellow patch on his left wrist where the string had hit him. Useless, he reflected, and it bites, too. Well, we all make mistakes. I just hate it when it’s me.

It had started raining again, and he crossed the shop and pulled the shutter closed. If it got any darker he’d have to light a lamp, even though it was still only early afternoon. The pattering of water on the thatch soothed him a little, as it always did; it reminded him of days when it was too wet to do anything outdoors, and his father ushered them all into the long barn to learn a new skill at the workbench. Back then he’d assumed that his father knew how to do everything, that there was nothing he couldn’t make or mend if only he could be talked into it and the rain kept on long enough. It annoyed him, then and now, that there had never been quite enough time, what with the real work that always needed to be done outside, and the way his father had to slow down so that the others, who weren’t nearly so quick or so keen when it came to making things, could follow too. He’d always been the impatient one, who’d already worked the next stage out for himself while the old man was trying to get it across to Gorgas or Clefas; Clefas was the slowest, he remembered, Gorgas was perfectly capable of understanding but simply couldn’t be bothered, Niessa could grasp some things almost instinctively and then completely fail to understand the next step, and Zonaras – well, the old man had stopped wasting his time and patience on Zonaras by the time he was ten. No doubt about it: he’d always been the very best at making things, just as Gorgas had been the best at using the things that other people made. Nobody could lay a hedge like Gorgas, not even the old man; nobody could handle a net or lay a wire like he could, or spear fish at the weir or shoot a bow…

Bardas thought about that for a long time, and then smiled. Odd, that of all of them he should be the one who ended up making a living out of his manual dexterity; he, not Gorgas, had been one of the most successful fencers-at-law in the history of Perimadeia, fighting and killing with the sword, a tool notoriously awkward to manipulate. Odd that he, not Gorgas, had ended up making a living out of killing people. It only goes to show, we’re given talents but don’t always use them.

He put the thought of his brother Gorgas carefully to one side, stowed the useless bone bow under the bench and looked around for something to do. No shortage of that; the billets of that ash they’d cut in the mountains needed to be drawn down into staves, preferably before the boy turned them all into firewood for the benefit of his education. He climbed up onto the bench and pulled one out of the stack stowed between the rafters, then got down again, picked up his drawknife and tested the edge with his thumb. Blunt, of course; his diligent young apprentice had been using it, and as usual had left it as sharp as a tomato. Bardas growled softly and looked round for the stone.

‘I think I left the stone out by the back gate,’ Bardas said, ‘when we were cutting back the brambles. Go and see if it’s there, would you?’

‘It’s raining,’ the boy pointed out.

‘So? You weren’t made of salt last time I looked.’

The boy muttered something under his breath about justice and the fair division of labour, and slouched very slowly towards the door. ‘You sure it’s not under the bench?’ he asked, as he reached for the latch.

‘Sure,’ Bardas replied. ‘I looked there just now.’

‘There’s all sorts of places it could be.’

‘Very true. Now get down to the gate and fetch it.’

While he was gone, Bardas tidied away some of the tools he’d been using that morning. Under the heap he found the stone. Damn, he said to himself, and set about putting an edge on the drawknife. He’d just about got it right when the boy came hurrying in, his hair plastered round his head like seaweed on a wet rock.

‘Sorry about that,’ Bardas said, ‘it was here all the-’

‘There’s two boats down below in the cove,’ the boy interrupted, the words spilling out of his mouth.

Bardas frowned. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. ‘Who’s dumb enough to be out fishing in this weather?’

‘They aren’t fishing boats,’ the boy went on in a sort of terrified glee. ‘They’re barges. They were just coming in past the Horn Rock.’

‘Barges,’ Bardas Loredan repeated, as if the word was meaningless.

‘Two of them, full of men. I think they’re soldiers, from Shastel.’

Barges. Soldiers from Shastel. That doesn’t make any kind of sense. ‘Are you sure about that?’ he said. ‘Damn it, why am I asking?’ He straightened up, stopped and hesitated. ‘You’re sure?’ he repeated.

‘Of course I’m sure,’ the boy replied angrily. ‘Really, it was two barges, I stopped and looked. They didn’t see me, because as soon as I saw them I ducked down behind a rock, but I saw them and they were both full of men. I couldn’t see them properly because they were all wearing hoods because of the rain, but what else would two barges full of men be?’

Fair point. ‘All right,’ Bardas said. ‘Here’s what you do. Run down to the village as fast as you can, go to the smithy and tell Leijo you’ve seen what looks like a raiding party; he’ll tell you what to do.’

‘All right,’ the boy said. ‘What about you? Are you coming?’

Bardas shook his head. ‘I’ll probably join you later, but I suppose I ought to go and have a look first. Here,’ he added, ‘take the four flatbows we finished yesterday and the big sheaf of bodkinheads. Can you manage them by yourself?’

‘Of course,’ the boy replied. ‘Are we going to fight them, then?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Bardas said. ‘Anyway, not if we can possibly help it. That’s what the army’s for. Go on, get a move on. You’d better go through the lower copse, just in case. And be careful.’

He helped load up the boy’s arms with the bows and arrows and watched him run off. Then he shut the workshop door and walked quickly over to the house. He had to go down on his hands and knees to get it; a long greasy bundle of cloth he’d stowed under his bed some time ago, put away out of sight and largely out of mind. Damn, he thought again, as he shook off the wrapping and lifted out the two-handed Guelan broadsword his brother Gorgas had given him, just before the City fell. There was a touch of mildew on the shoulder-strap, a slight fog of rust on the pommel, like the mist left behind when you breathe on glass. He put the strap over his shoulder, then took his bow and quiver off the hooks on the wall. Absolutely not, he told himself as he shut the house door behind him; it’s just that it’d be stupid to leave the sword lying about, it’s worth a fortune. And I wouldn’t want to lose the bow, either. He looked back at the house and then across at his workshop, as if he was leaving on a long journey, then set off up the hill at a brisk walk.