The Belly of the Bow

CHAPTER FIVE

From the gate at the top of the track, there was a clear view across the narrow ribbon of clifftop grazing land to the cove. Bardas crossed the green strip and pushed his way through the tangle of briars that overlooked the neck of the cove. It was a good place to see without being seen.

The men on the shingle beach below didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry. They had hauled the long, heavy barges up out of the water and were unloading their gear – armour and halberds in waxed-cotton covers, kitbags and satchels, all sodden and glistening in the rain. They looked bone-weary – reasonably enough: it was no easy run from Shastel round the back of Scona Island in this sort of weather even in a proper boat, let alone the primitive, cack-handed punts that were the best the Shastel people could do in the way of seafaring transport. You wouldn’t get me out in one of those things, Bardas assured himself with a true landsman’s shudder. Only idiots choose to be surrounded on all sides by water.

He counted them; seventy-five heavy infantry, the celebrated Shastel halberdiers. He’d never seen any of them before, and, he had to admit, they looked just like any other soldiers: awkward, brutal and alien, out of place in any landscape. Maybe all soldiers look alike in the rain, he reflected. And it always rains, sooner or later. I’m just glad I’m not down there with them. Rotten job, and nobody really has to do it.

A sergeant started shouting orders and the men shuffled across the grinding shingle to form a column, while another man, the officer presumably, huddled over an increasingly waterlogged and useless parchment map. From the way he kept glancing down at it and then up at the surrounding wall of cliffs, it was either the wrong map, upside-down or not particularly accurate; in the end the officer stuffed it like an old rag into his satchel and stumped across the shingle, sliding a little over the loose stones – he looks just like a duck, Loredan observed, waddling down to the river with her chicks. He took one last look round, as if hoping for inspiration, then led the column towards the one track that wound up the side of the cliff towards Loredan’s house and the village beyond.

My house, Loredan thought gloomily. Well, it’s too wet for a fire to burn properly. Just for fun he considered the tactical position. There was only one track up from the beach, and five men could hold it all day against any army, provided you could find five lunatics with a death wish at such short notice. More realistically, a dozen or so trained City archers could pin this lot down almost indefinitely on the straight stretch of track that led up to the downs; and if he had two dozen spearmen to circle round behind this fuzz-patch and take the goat track that led down onto the beach from the other side – but he didn’t, and that was probably just as well. It was, after all, none of his business; they might trash his house, but then again they might not, if their mission was to burn the village. The point was that he didn’t belong here, and so he didn’t have to join in when this sort of thing happened. That was the whole point of not belonging.

He kept still and quiet, waiting for the soldiers to go away. Thinking about it logically, there was no reason for them to go anywhere near his place if they were heading for the village; it’d waste time, possibly enough time for word to get to the village or even the nearest guard post. (Bardas knew that the village had already been warned and there wasn’t a guard post nearer than Scona Town itself, but maybe they didn’t.) And even if they did go snooping round his place, what harm could they actually do? The thatch would be too wet to burn, they weren’t going to waste time pulling the buildings down with ropes and bars, and who in their right mind would want to plunder a woodworker’s shop? Planes, drawknives and spokeshaves aren’t high on an experienced looter’s list of priority items. No, as soon as they’d satisfied themselves that there was nobody about, they’d push off and get on with their work.

Even when he was fairly certain that they were long gone, he stayed put – if they’re gone now, they’ll be even more gone in fifteen minutes – and lay snuggled in his coat under the surprisingly effective shelter of a big, fat briar-bush. If anything, the rain was getting heavier; a bit of wind had got up, coming in off the sea. There was no reason, in fact, why he couldn’t stay here all day. It’d probably be the most sensible thing to do, in the circumstances. On the other hand, it was very boring. He stood up, picked trailing shoots of bramble off his arms and legs, and cautiously made his way out of the fuzz.

The first thing he saw was a satisfying absence of smoke rising from the direction of his property. The beer-barrel, he remembered; a nearly new barrel of quite reasonable beer in the middle house, they’d fined and tapped it two days ago. Soldiers can smell beer across vast distances, even when the wind’s in the other direction; in fact, it probably wasn’t smell but something far more abstruse, closer to the sort of metaphysical stuff his old friend Alexius was so deeply into. Chances were, he could kiss that goodbye. Still, if they’d been busy drinking his beer, they wouldn’t have had time to damage anything else.

A combination of rain, mud and issue boots results in a trail a blind man could follow. Bardas picked it up at the top of the cliff path and followed it to his gate, where (oh, joy) it carried on without deviating, down the slope towards the village. Perhaps the officer had made sense of his map after all, or maybe they hadn’t even realised there were any buildings here; come to think of it, they were pretty well hidden by the outcrop and the rank growth of nettles he’d been meaning to do something about for the last month. Just as well he hadn’t. Three cheers for bad husbandry.

I ought to go home now, he thought. True, they’ll presumably be back later, returning the way they came; but they aren’t likely to stop on the way back, they’ll have done the job and be in a hurry to get away. I should go home, maybe even get on with some work. Me, I’m no bother to anybody, so why should anybody bother me?

Instead, he took the narrow rough track over the rocks that made an uncomfortable and hazardous short-cut to the village. It was a while since he’d been along here, and there was a season’s obstructive growth to tread down or wriggle under. Damn you, Nature, why can’t you leave things alone? he thought savagely, clambering through a notional gap in the branches of a rowan tree that had fallen across the path. (Rowan? No good for bows. Waste of everybody’s time it being there in the first place.) At least he could be sure nobody had been this way today, and since the path ran along the top line of the crest, he was out of sight of the main track. Not as sensible as staying home, perhaps, but sensible enough for a sensible man.

As he came round the sharp bend at the bottom of the Chapel Rock, the big outcrop that overlooked the seaward end of the village, he found a dead body. It was one of the halberdiers, lying face down in a patch of mud with an arrow sticking out of one ear – one of mine, he noticed, that batch I made with those sub-standard white goose quills and sold off cheap in the village. The man’s halberd was gone; he’d been stabbed several times in the back as well, but there was no blood – someone making sure, or just taking it out on dead meat, which would imply something to be angry about. No helmet either, but that figured. If he’d been wearing his helmet, he wouldn’t have got shot.

So someone was making a fight of it down in the village. Bardas frowned. They’d never struck him as warlike types, the sort who dream of tackling burglars and rustlers or marching down to the beach to ambush marauding pirates. Very few people were, in his experience; back along, when he’d been the one raiding and burning the encampments of the plainspeople to uphold the security of the City, he’d learnt pretty well all he’d ever want to know about how people react to this sort of thing. Generally, they ran; sometimes away, quite often round and round in circles, like ducks in a pen when the fox breaks in. Those that didn’t run, hid, and sometimes that was the right thing to do and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes they just stood there and watched, sometimes they shouted and screamed, sometimes they tried to talk to you and persuade you to go away. But one thing they very rarely did was fight; probably because human beings are not, at a fundamental level, that stupid. And when they did, some basic survival instinct made them give up short of actually killing one of the enemy, because if there’s one thing guaranteed to make a party of raiders mad at you, it’s killing one of their friends.

I don’t know, Loredan said to himself, as he stepped over the body, maybe these people just don’t know about these things. The sensible thing to do now, at any rate, would be to go home, put some food and some dry clothes in a bag, and head off into the mountains, maybe hide up for a day or so in one of the derelict farmhouses he’d seen there. That’d be the sensible thing.

Instead, he walked round the corner and down the track towards the village. It was a mess. There were a few bodies, but mostly it was just ordinary damage, the sort of thing a flood or a freak storm does so much better than human beings ever could. Perhaps understandably, given their recent experiences, the raiders seemed to have vented most of their rage on the village boats, the small ash-framed hide-covered curraghs that could cope with the worst tantrums the sea threw. As luck would have it, most of them had been drawn up in the square to have their hides regreased with the thick, foul-smelling dubbin that the Scona people made from newly shorn fleeces. The grease had been curing all summer and was now ready, and at this time of year the smell of lanolin and tanning fluid hung over the island like a cloud of midges. Now there wasn’t a single boat left intact, and bits of spar and scraps of hide were scattered everywhere, trodden into the mud like fallen leaves.

Maybe half a dozen fishermen lay among the smashed boats, draped and flopped in positions no living body ever lay in, and here and there Loredan found arrows – someone had lost his temper, perhaps, run indoors, grabbed his bow and started shooting out of the window. Here was a middle-aged woman with half a sack of flour under her and an arrow in her back, and an old man with his head cracked open like a walnut. Here was a fat young woman with a halberd still sticking in her, and a man’s arm, crudely severed at the elbow, a few feet away; it had taken two, maybe three cuts, and Loredan could picture him warding off the blows with an expendable part of his body, until presumably the attacker had decided he’d done enough and let him run. Here was a dead chicken, chopped nearly in half, and a dog with its belly ripped open, and here was a goat with a long rip in its side running across the line of its ribs from front shoulder to back; it lifted its head as Loredan came up to it, and went on chewing. Here was a dead halberdier – extremely dead – by the look of it two or three men had got hold of him and attacked him with knives and cleavers; and here was one of those attackers, presumably, lying on his back in a big mucky puddle with a small hatchet in one hand and a red palm-sized patch caked on the front of his shirt. More like a brawl than a battle, Loredan reflected disapprovingly; the officer’s fault for letting things get out of hand. We managed these things better in my day; though of course the plainsmen were used to being raided, they knew the drill as well as we did.

Here they’d tried to get a fire going, several times by the look of it, and failure hadn’t improved their temper. Neither had one of their men getting shot, because they’d made a fair mess of the house they hadn’t manage to set light to, and the two men who’d been in it as well. A little further down the street he found a live one, though only just; he recognised the sergeant who’d been giving the orders on the beach by the rather splendid gilded ridge round the crown of his helmet. He had managed to prop himself up against the side of a house and get the arrow out of his chest, but someone had had a go at cutting his throat, made a bad job of it and gone away. He tried to say something while Loredan looked at him and decided there wasn’t anything much that could be done; he shook his head and walked away, as if passing by an unconvincing beggar on a street corner. That brought him to the end of the main thoroughfare. It was very quiet, except for the pattering and dripping of the rain. His shoes were waterlogged, and he wriggled his wet toes with distaste. The sensible thing now would be to go home and change into dry clothes, before he caught his death of pneumonia.

Instead, he followed the trail the raiders had left, down the hill towards the next village.

Not a good day for making the short but troublesome crossing from Shastel to Scona. Gorgas Loredan, usually a good sailor, had to admit to being a trifle wobbly and green as he walked down the plank from the sloop Butterfly and gratefully set foot on the Traders’ Dock.

Gorgas Loredan was always glad to be home, but on this occasion he could feel the relief rushing through him, the way blood starts to flow again through a numb leg when you wake up and find you’ve been lying on it. He’d spent a more than usually unpleasant couple of days in the hectemore country, fought an unanticipated battle and brought back with him a couple of problems that he suspected would turn out to be awkward.

One of these problems had tried his best to die on him during the night. Master Juifrez’ relatively straightforward wound had turned bad, and the wretched man was in the grip of a thoroughly melodramatic fever. Field surgery with a hot knife, raw spirit and a bread-mould poultice had kept him alive, but he still looked awful, and he appeared to have about as much interest in staying alive as Gorgas had in Colleon religious poetry. He could understand that, in a way – a man who’d managed to make such a comprehensive mess of his life and his nation’s affairs might be forgiven for deciding to call it a day. But no businessman likes having the stock die on him; so as soon as the Butterfly tied up, a runner was sent off to fetch a doctor. Death was a luxury not permitted to the prisoners of the Bank of Scona.

As the patient was carried off on a door by the doctor’s orderlies, Gorgas shouldered his kitbag and started to walk up the Promenade. He hadn’t got far when a runner skittered to a halt beside him and tugged on his sleeve.

‘Urgent message,’ the boy panted, without waiting to catch his breath. ‘There’s an enemy raiding party loose in the hills around Horn Point. They burnt down a village and killed all the people. The Director wants you to get out there as quick-’

‘Horn Point,’ Gorgas repeated. ‘You’re sure about that?’

The boy nodded. ‘My cousins live up there,’ he said, as if this was somehow definitive proof. ‘Sounds like the village they burnt was Briora; that’s just on the Point, straight down the hill from Horn Rock. I’d say they must have landed in the cove.’

Gorgas frowned. ‘Never been there,’ he said. ‘Who did you get this from?’

‘A kid ran in from there, he’d seen it happening. I talked to him before I came here. They were about to send someone else when your ship was spotted.’

‘That’s just as well, then. Did the boy say how many men?’

The runner shook his head. ‘Just that there were a lot of them, probably more than a hundred.’ He stopped to wipe away the rain that was running from his plastered-down fringe into his eyes. ‘Proper soldiers, he said, in armour. Some of the village men tried to fight them, and then they got really nasty and started smashing up everything in sight.’

Gorgas took a deep breath. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘here’s what you’re going to do. Run up to the Bank, get a message sent to the Director that I’m on my way and I’m taking the five platoons of the Tenth that’re on standby down here at the Dock. Say that I want the whole of the Seventh called in and sent after me as soon as possible. Then meet me back at the Dock barracks gate – you know where that is?’ The boy nodded. ‘I’ll need a guide, and you sound like you know the way. Are you on for that?’

‘You bet.’ The boy was grinning.

‘That’s good, then. You get on, and make sure you get the message straight.’

Fortunately, Gorgas’ staff who’d come back with him on the Butterfly were mostly still hanging round the Dock. He caught hold of one of his runners and sent him to round them up, and dispatched another runner to the barracks with the mobilisation orders and the message that he’d be following straight away.

Briora village, near Horn Point; as he forced his pace along the Dock towards the barracks, he tried not to think about it. I knew I shouldn’t have let him go swanning off like that; if anything’s happened to him… The rational part of his mind suggested that this was sheer folly. There had never been any reason to assume that the back country around Horn Point was a dangerous place to be; and besides, if Bardas Loredan could survive the sack of Perimadeia, there was a fair chance he’d be able to cope with a Shastel raiding party. There had never been any question of keeping Bardas cooped up in Scona Town; he wasn’t a prisoner, he’d only have fretted and made trouble. He’d done everything he could for the man. It was pointless blaming himself. Yes. But. When it’s family, you can’t help blaming yourself.

The guard captain met him at the gate. ‘We can be ready in an hour,’ he said, fumbling with the hooks of his mailshirt. His hair was uncombed, and under his armour he was wearing an old shirt with frayed cuffs – probably caught him in the middle of his dinner, Gorgas thought with a smile. Food; gods, yes, I remember food. It’s something that happens to other people. ‘But I haven’t got a ship. What about the one you came in on?’

‘The Butterfly,’ Gorgas said. ‘Good idea. Send a runner to find the captain, get him to round up the crew and be ready to leave in an hour. We can get three platoons on board at a push; choose who you want to take the other two and tell him to find himself some transport.’ He looked up at the sky; foul weather for sailing round the island. He didn’t know Horn Cove, but he guessed it’d be tricky work bringing a sloop in anywhere on that side. Still, the captain of the Butterfly had seemed like a reliable man. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Get me a map of the area while you’re at it, and see if any of your men know the place. We don’t know how many of them there are and we don’t want to have to waste time pussyfooting about, so some local knowledge’ll be very handy.’

Damn you, brother, he said to himself as he sat down in the porch to catch his breath and clear his head for a few precious minutes, why must trouble keep following you like the cat and the farmer’s wife? But in some deep and rather unseemly way, he had to admit, what he was mostly feeling was excitement, almost pleasure at the thought of rushing to his brother’s rescue. At very bad times, when he caught himself wondering what sort of a man he must be to have done some of the things he’d done, had to do, over the years, he always pulled himself out of it by reminding himself that someone who really cared about family, as he did, couldn’t really be a bad man. After all, what else was there, when you came right down to it? Pulling Bardas out of the fire back in Perimadeia had been a good thing to do; and now here he was doing the same sort of thing all over again. Well, it had to count for something. Saving a brother was sort of like balancing the books.

Bardas can look after himself, insisted his rational voice. He was a professional soldier, remember, one of Uncle Maxen’s men, not to mention all those years of swordfighting for a living. You’d better hope he’s left you a few of the enemy. That’d be right, he reflected; and then he thought of what the boy had said, about some of the villagers trying to make a fight of it, and that was when the trouble had started. Mess, he thought bitterly, and melodrama. Oh, why can’t people stay where they’re put and do as they’re damn well told?

Short, sharp and nasty, the Dean of Lay Works had said; a fast response, hitting them right between the shoulder blades where they least expect it, then out again and home before they know what’s happening. It had sounded fair enough when the Dean was explaining it, but between there and here something would appear to have gone wrong.

Master Renvaut, officer commanding the Scona task force, sat down on a fallen tree and scraped some of the thick crust of mud off the sole of his boot with the blade of his halberd. Maybe it was the weather, or the fact that they’d scrambled into action the moment the news of the disaster at Primen reached Chapter, without time for proper preparations and planning. Maybe it was all his fault. Didn’t matter, particularly. The only thing that mattered now was getting out of this mess, before he managed to make Juifrez Bovert look like a strategic genius in comparison.

‘Nine dead,’ the colour-sergeant reported, his voice completely neutral, ‘four wounded, one of ’em’s cut up pretty badly but the other three’ll be all right.’

Renvaut nodded; it was better than he’d expected. He still had sixty-five men on their feet and presumed fit for duty. ‘Fall them in,’ he said, and he grunted with pain as he stood up. ‘I’ve had enough of this. We’re going back.’

It had stopped raining, and there were even a few scraps of blue scattered across the sky, like flotsam on a beach after a storm. A bit of warmth, to dry out their sodden clothes, maybe even dry up the mud so that every step they took wasn’t quite such an effort; a bit of warmth and sunlight might make everything seem better. There was still a chance they’d get out of this mess in one piece, and be home in Shastel by this time tomorrow.

Assuming, of course, that the boats were still there, and that they didn’t sink to the bottom of the sea on the way back. Ah, but all human life rests uncomfortably on a fragile bed of assumptions, interposed between hope and fear like the thin skin of a boat; or so they’d told him in Cloister. Out here it sounded both annoyingly glib and depressingly true. So much for the benefits of a first-class education.

Back the way they’d come? He didn’t fancy the idea. He was all too aware that he was painfully behind on his schedule; the rain and the unexpected resistance had seen to that. The Scona armed forces were supposed to be mostly made up of light infantry and archers, quickly mobilised and able to move at speed. In theory, that oughtn’t to be a problem, since two platoons of trained, disciplined heavy infantry should be capable of ramming its way through the sort of opposition they’d be likely to encounter. But somehow this didn’t seem like a good day for fighting. Being an educated man and a member of a moderately good Poor family, he didn’t believe in luck, but he’d been taught the basics of the operation of the Principle, which as far as he’d been able to make out was nothing more than luck in a fancy hat. So; the Principle wasn’t running his way today, so perhaps it’d be a sensible idea to go back the other way, the one marked in red on his map and annotated as Alternative Route. Besides, the thought of trudging back through those dreary and now rather horrible villages was infinitely depressing. He fished in his rain-soaked satchel for the map, and found a clammy, sticky ball of rawhide, already starting to swell. As the men shuffled into their ranks he spread the map out on the tree-trunk and tried to make some sense of it.

As luck (or the Principle) would have it, the red ink was slightly more watertight than the black, and he was able to trace the line of Alternative Route with his fingertip. If he was where he thought he was (another assumption to add to the fragile bed), then the path lay above the main road they’d come along, under the brow of the mountain ridge, curling up and round through yet another poxy little village until it came back to the beachhead at the little cove. He nodded, dislodging drops of rainwater from the channel formed by the curled-over seam of his visor; they fell on the map and added a couple more red smudges. Just as well he didn’t believe in omens, either.

His feet hurt, and his wet stockings were rubbing his heels into nagging blisters. The stitching of his left boot was just beginning to fray, and the impact of an arrow on the left cheek-piece of his helmet had creased the metal so that it grated just behind the ear, catching him every time he turned his head. The rain had raised the grain in the shaft of his halberd, and a splinter had lodged under one of his fingernails. Nothing about him felt comfortable or right. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be. He gave the order to move on. For twenty minutes or so an old, crazy dog followed them, barking wildly, running up and down the line and prancing away with its ears back, as if cringing away from some anticipated attack; but nobody had the energy or the enthusiasm to aim a kick at it. Eventually it lost interest and lay down in a pool of muddy water, its tongue lolling out and its tail wagging furiously, giving the impression that it could see something tremendously amusing.

The second village had looked much like the first, except that there hadn’t been any boats. Instead, the litter in the main thoroughfare had been smashed-up wicker hurdles, the wreckage of an old and decrepit dog-cart, a few sacks of seedcorn ripped open, some storage jars smashed, a few more bodies. They’d tried to break up a plough, but it had proved too solid; there were a few blade-cuts in the shafts and handles, and that was all. A wagonload of sea-coal had been overturned, and the body of another soldier lay a few yards away from it, helmetless and with the mark of something like an axe or a mattock on the crown of his skull.

At least it wasn’t raining any more. Bardas Loredan folded his hood back onto his shoulders and rolled his wet sleeves up to the elbow. It made no sense to carry on following the trail. He sat down on the boom of the overturned wagon, reached in his pocket and found an apple he’d picked up along the way.

No sign of the boy so far, at least, he hadn’t been one of the flotsam of corpses. Loredan frowned. He’d sent the boy to raise the alarm so that people could get clear, but people obviously hadn’t. Well, if he wasn’t among the dead it was reasonable to assume he was still alive. He took a few bites out of the apple, which was small and sour, and then lobbed the rest over a wall.

There was something or someone moving about close by. He stayed put and listened for a while, then hopped off the boom, walked away a few paces, circled back round behind the wagon, stooped quickly and grabbed.

‘I was wondering where you’d got to,’ he said. The boy recognised him and stopped wriggling. ‘Obviously it’s my role in life to fish you out from under carts at the scenes of massacres.’

‘I thought you were them,’ the boy said, standing up. He was caked in mud. ‘I tried to tell them but nobody’d listen.’

Bardas Loredan shook his head. ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘Well, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of them, but I don’t think there’s much to be gained by hanging around here. We can go home, or we can press on up into the hills, just to be on the safe side. What do you reckon?’

‘Me?’ The shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘You’re a great help. All right, we’ll head on home. Probably best to follow the road back to Briora and then take the short-cut from there, in case they double back in a hurry. Are you all right, by the way?’

‘Fine,’ the boy replied. ‘I gave them the bows and arrows like you said-’

Loredan frowned. ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. ‘Bad idea. I expect the trouble only began when they started shooting.’

‘More or less. I mean, they were smashing things up and hitting people, but once the villagers shot at them they went mad. They started killing people, and then some of the village men ran away and others tried to jump in and stop the soldiers; and they grabbed this little girl and threw her down the well in Briora, and then this woman tried to grab hold of the men who were doing it, and they cut her hands off, just like trimming a sapling. She just stood there then, and they went away and left her. It was as if they were more frightened of her than the other way about.’

‘Get a move on,’ Loredan said. ‘Like I said, I don’t want to stay on the road longer than we can help.’

‘I expect the army will come soon,’ the boy said, after they’d splashed half a mile down the road. ‘And then there’ll be a proper battle.’

Loredan shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘More likely, if the army does get here in time, they’ll try and surround them and make them surrender. And if they come by sea, they’ll hole the barges so they can’t get away.’ He smiled. ‘They made pretty sure of that themselves when they smashed up the boats in Briora.’

‘If they surrender, what’ll the army do to them? Will they hang them? That’s what I’d do.’

Loredan shook his head. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘If you kill your prisoners, the enemy stop surrendering, and then you’ve got to fight it out to the last man every time, which is stupid. War isn’t about killing people, it’s about winning.’

The boy nodded. ‘Did you kill many people when you were a soldier?’ he asked.

‘No, not many.’

‘And did you win?’

‘Not so as you’d notice.’

The boy thought about that. ‘You won when you fought those men that night when the City fell,’ he objected. ‘I saw you.’

‘True, but I was supposed to be defending the City, remember. You can’t lose more conclusively than that.’

The boy thought some more. ‘If you’d had more men and someone hadn’t opened the gates, you’d have won,’ he declared. ‘So really it wasn’t a fair contest.’

‘Thank you,’ Loredan said. ‘That’s taken a great weight off my mind.’

The rain started again as they rounded the bend into Briora. The boy didn’t have a hood, so they stopped and found one that more or less fitted. ‘That’s stealing,’ the boy pointed out, as he tied the string under his chin. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘Looting, possibly,’ Loredan replied. ‘Though looting’s more your gold and precious stones. When it’s just useful things we used to call it requisitioning.’

‘Oh. And that’s all right, is it?’

‘It is if nobody’s watching. Look, if it bothers you, dump the wretched thing.’

‘But then I’d get wet,’ the boy objected.

They skirted round the village and picked up the track. The dead halberdier was still there; the rain had washed silt down off the mountainside, lightly covering his hair with grime, as if the mountain was in a hurry to bury him. The boy stepped over the body without saying anything.

It was harder going in this direction, of course, since the gradient was against them most of the time, and the extra few hours’ rain had made the track slippery. After a mile they stopped and had a rest.

‘Did they find the house?’ the boy asked.

‘Went straight past it,’ Loredan replied. ‘We were lucky.’

The boy nodded. ‘If they’d tried to smash the house up, would you have fought them?’ he said.

‘No chance,’ Bardas Loredan answered. ‘Seventy-five of them and one of me.’

‘Oh. Was that why you didn’t go and try and help the village? You could have told them what to do.’

Loredan frowned. ‘That’d have been a stupid thing to do,’ he said. ‘What they should have done is clear out until the soldiers had gone away. And besides, we aren’t anything to do with these people, or this war. Only idiots get involved in other people’s quarrels.’

The boy looked at him. ‘You used to,’ he said. ‘When you were a lawyer back in the City. You used to fight people in the lawcourts.’

‘That was different,’ Loredan said. ‘That was my job. And it wasn’t seventy-five to one, either.’

‘I see,’ said the boy, doubtfully. ‘So it’s all right to get involved if you get paid and you’re going to win.’

‘I’d drop this subject if I were you,’ Loredan said. ‘In fact, if I were you I’d keep my face shut till we get home. That’d be the sensible thing to do.’

‘All right,’ the boy said. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’

‘Let’s get on,’ Loredan said. ‘No point sitting here in the wet when we could be back home.’

They struggled on up to the top of the rise, where the downs started to fall away from the rocky sides of Horn Point. Then Loredan told the boy to stay put while he went ahead and had a look around. He made his way carefully up to the edge of the briar-patch and pushed his way through, until he was looking down onto the beach.

There was a ship just inside the mouth of the cove. It looked like one of the military sloops, and it had crept in as far as it dared. There were two longboats on the water, both filled with men heading for the beach. The army had arrived.

Loredan stayed where he was and watched. The men in the boats were definitely Scona military; they had bow-cases and quivers, or shields and short, heavy pikes, not halberds, and their helmets were a different shape. One man, who was standing in the bow of the nearer of the two longboats, wasn’t wearing a helmet, and the rain glistened on his bald head. Loredan’s brows furrowed, and he crawled out of the briars and walked quickly back to where he’d left the boy.

‘The army’s here,’ he said. ‘They’re landing men right now, and presumably they’re going to follow on up the road and try and engage the enemy. Best thing we can do is head up the mountain and sit it out there till it’s all over.’

‘But shouldn’t we go down and tell them what we’ve seen?’ the boy queried. ‘I mean, we know pretty well where they’ve been, it might help.’

‘None of our business,’ Loredan said firmly. ‘We stay out of it and let them get on with it.’

‘Because it’s their job,’ the boy said.

‘Right. I say we carry on up the hill till we come to one of those old abandoned farms we passed when we were up there with the cart. Give it tonight and tomorrow morning; it should all be over by then.’

‘All right,’ the boy said. ‘I’d have liked to have seen the battle, though.’

‘That’s because you’re a sick little bugger,’ Loredan said. ‘Mind you, kids are like that at your age. Anyway, this time you’re out of luck. Let’s get moving before anything happens.’

The cart track up into the mountains broke away from the coast path about two miles beyond Horn Point and traced a series of zigzags up the face of the main escarpment, occasionally dodging behind one of the lesser formations. At first it was a steep climb, made even more disagreeable by the mud, but once they were on the slopes, the ground was harder and less muddy and the gradient was easier. There were several clumps of trees (no osage or yew, just stumps), and quite a few streams cut across the trail, all of them louder and more boisterous with the rainwater draining off the mountains. Low cloud was draped over the higher ground up above, but they weren’t going up that far. They stopped at the foot of a farm tower that faced out to sea; unusually it still had most of its conical slate roof, although the rest of the farm buildings had been picked over for building stone a long time ago.

‘This’ll do,’ Bardas announced. ‘We can see right down the slope from up here, and we can cut some of this gorse to block the doorway with. From the track it’ll just look overgrown.’

After an hour sitting in the middle of the floor with nothing to look at but the walls and the crumbling remains of the stairs, the boy was thoroughly bored. ‘I’m cold,’ he said. ‘Can’t we start a fire?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Loredan replied.

‘And I’m hungry,’ the boy added. ‘We could go out and lay wires for rabbits.’

Loredan frowned at him. ‘We haven’t got any wire,’ he pointed out.

‘What about the string off your bow? We could make wires out of that.’

Loredan wasn’t amused. ‘This bowstring,’ he said icily, ‘is made of twenty-four strands of the best-quality linen thread money can buy, woven into three plies, laid into a three-forked loop at both ends and served with three plies of silk. It took me four hours to make, not counting spinning the thread. Get lost, will you?’

‘All right,’ the boy said, ‘why don’t we take the bow and go and shoot something to eat?’

‘Because we’re supposed to be hiding,’ Loredan replied irritably. ‘Look, you’re just going to have to stay hungry. It won’t be for long.’

‘I’m bored.’

‘Of course you’re bored. We’re in a war. Four-fifths of any war is very, very boring. The other fifth makes you realise what a wonderful thing boredom is. And keep your voice down, will you? Just because we’re in here doesn’t make us inaudible.’

The boy thought for a while. ‘Are you good at making string, then?’

‘A bowyer’s got to be. And we made all our own rope and twine on the farm when I was your age. You can make good string and cord out of almost anything that’s got fibres in it.’

The boy nodded. ‘If you can make string, you could pull some thread out of your coat and twist some string to make wires with.’

Loredan sighed. ‘For the last time, we aren’t going to set any wires. If the enemy see newly set wires all over the place, they’ll know there’s somebody about. We’re staying here, and that’s all there is to it. Got that?’

‘All right.’ The boy yawned. ‘Will you teach me how to make string?’

‘One of these days. Like I said, it’s something you’ll need to know how to do.’

‘Why can’t you teach me now?’

‘Because.’

The roof of the abandoned tower was almost watertight, but not quite. The dripping and gurgling of rainwater reminded Loredan of an apartment he’d had in a tenement block when he’d only just arrived in Perimadeia. Like most of the ‘islands’, as the huge, spec-built blocks were called, it had belonged to one of the craft guilds, who used the income to provide for the needs of elderly and infirm members and their families. It had always struck him as odd, that organisations set up for such praiseworthy objectives should be the most notorious slum landlords in the City. But then, the whole business of owning property in the rabbit-warrens of Perimadeia was so complicated and arcane that nobody really understood it, and since legal disputes were settled by the swords of the fencers-at-law, nobody ever needed to. There’d have been no trouble finding a tenant for this place, at twelve quarters a month, he said to himself, looking up at the sky through the holes in the roof. They’d have been queuing up.

‘Why did they build these towers?’ the boy asked. ‘I thought this place was an old farm.’

‘It was,’ Loredan replied. ‘But they were difficult times back then. Gangs of soldiers roaming about the place were an everyday occurrence. So people lived out in the open instead of in villages, and every farm had a high wall round it, and a tower. Who knows, if things carry on the way they seem to be going, maybe it’ll end up that way again.’

The boy considered the matter for a moment. ‘Should we build one, then? Just in case, I mean.’

Loredan shook his head. ‘If it starts getting bad, we’ll be off out of it. I’ve got no intention of hanging about here on the edges of somebody’s else’s war.’

‘Somebody else’s?’ The boy looked at him. ‘I don’t understand. ’

Loredan didn’t reply.

Thanks to the local knowledge of the messenger, Gorgas Loredan knew all about the top path. He decided to split his force into two. The larger part would press on up the main road, while he took forty men with him up the top path to try and overtake the raiding party and stop them getting any further. With luck he’d be able to hold them until the rest of his force came up behind them, and then they’d have them surrounded. That would make it much easier to contain them until the substantial reinforcements arrived overland from Scona Town.

He set the pace himself, clambering through the rocks and the mud at a rate he knew they wouldn’t be able to keep up for long. With luck, they wouldn’t have to; it all depended on how far the raiding party had got. According to the messenger, the top path was a substantial short-cut, forming the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle whose other sides were formed by the road running due west to Briora, then a few miles north to Penna, the next village on, before angling sharply back to follow the slope down towards Scona Town.

When he blundered headlong into the enemy, coming down the path in the opposite direction, he was taken as much by surprise as they were. It didn’t take him long to realise that he was in trouble, however; the enemy were right on top of them, far too close for comfort for a half-platoon of archers facing heavy infantry. It was also too late to fall back, and as the enemy lowered their halberds and charged, he didn’t really know what to do. It was probably fortunate that his thinking time was reduced to a few seconds.

The halberdier officer gave the order to charge, but in the context of a narrow slippery path ground out of the side of a steep slope, it was meaningless. Instead, the halberdiers edged forward and a pantomime fight broke out, something like the mock combats at fairs where two men stand on a greasy plank and hit each other with sacks of feathers. There wasn’t room for more than one man on the path at a time, and outflanking either above or below the path was out of the question because of the gradient. As the two parties pushed forward, Gorgas found himself squeezed up against his opponent, so that neither of them had any room to use their weapons; instead, the contest turned into a shoving-match, with the raiders’ superior weight of numbers becoming a hindrance rather than a help because of the treacherous footing. After a very uncomfortable fifteen seconds, the halberdier slipped and fell forward, grabbing Gorgas to break his fall and pinning his arms to his sides. Gorgas did everything he could to stop himself going over, since the greatest danger was clearly getting trampled underfoot, but it was no use. At the last minute, though, he did manage to fall backwards onto the man behind him, who caught hold of him by the scruff of the neck as if he was a delinquent child in an apple-orchard, and kept him from going down, until the forward momentum of the men behind put him back on his feet again. He still couldn’t get his arms free, however, and could do nothing except stare into the round, terrified eyes of the halberdier, only a few inches from his own. It was the closest he’d ever been to someone he was trying to harm in his life.

Then, quite suddenly, the shoving-match stopped, and Gorgas found himself falling forwards as the enemy stopped trying to force their way through and started to give ground. Unable to stop himself, he toppled over on top of the halberdier, who cracked his head against a rock as he went down and let go of Gorgas’ arms. Gorgas tried to stand up, but the man behind him shoved him forward, and this time he landed with his knee in the halberdier’s face; he heard a sharp crack as the man’s nose broke. He had the presence of mind to grope for the dagger on his belt, but he couldn’t reach it.

Somehow the halberdier managed to roll them both over, then scrambled to his feet, turned and ran. Gorgas tried to grab him, but all he managed to do was fall on his face in the mud, cutting his forehead on a stone. Somewhere behind him, he heard the sound of a bow being loosed, but the arrow went wide.

Someone caught hold of his arm and yanked him up; presumably whoever it was was trying to help, but he contrived to wrench a muscle in Gorgas’ right shoulder, and he shouted with pain.

‘Get off me, you clown,’ he yelped. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’

Since he knew the answer already he didn’t wait for a reply; instead, he gave a rather superfluous order to stop the line, and looked to see what the enemy were doing.

They’d vanished out of sight past the bend in the track they’d just come round. They’re up to something, Gorgas realised, I just wish to hell I knew what it was. He waved his men forward and they edged along the track until they came round the sharp corner and were able to see what the halberdiers were doing; they were following the bed of a stream up the hill, clambering as much as walking, heading for the top of the escarpment. It seemed a curious thing to do, and Gorgas didn’t waste any time on trying to puzzle out their motivation any further. He gave the order to nock arrows and loose.

But it wasn’t a good day for archery. The rain had saturated their bowstrings and soaked through into the wood of their bows, sapping the cast. The first volley fell short and, as the archers tried to compensate, the second volley mostly overshot. Two of the Shastel men went down, but both scrambled up again. There was the added complication of shooting up a steep slope, which threw out the archers’ largely instinctive estimation of range. By the time they had drawn for the third volley, the halberdiers were among the large boulders halfway up the slope, a good hundred and twenty yards away, and the arrows from forty bows were spread fairly thin at such a range. Scowling, Gorgas led his men up the slope after them, but the Shastel men were moving so quickly that it was all he could do to keep pace with them; there was no time to form the line and loose another volley. They aren’t going anywhere, Gorgas told himself, and slowed down the pursuit. The last thing he wanted to do was actually to catch up with them, and face sixty-five heavy infantry with forty bowmen hand to hand; that would be inviting the enemy to charge, with the gradient in their advantage. He sent back two men to try and find the relief parties and let them know what was going on. With luck, the main force from the city could be diverted round the other face of the escarpment, to come up on the enemy from the other side and complete the encirclement. It didn’t look as if the Shastel men had any stomach for a fight. Quite probably they’d guessed that there weren’t any boats waiting for them now. A reasonable show of force ought to be enough to prompt a surrender without any further significant bloodshed. Gorgas contented himself with keeping up with them, driving them steadily up the mountainside like a party of beaters flushing out game. Wherever they end up, they’ve got no place to go, he reminded himself. In fact, putting himself in the enemy commander’s position, he couldn’t think of anything that could be done, except to wait until there were enough of the enemy to justify an honourable surrender.

They’ll have trashed the boats. That’s the first thing they’ll have done. And we’re on an island.

At the head of his men (when running away, always lead by example), Renvaut dragged himself over the brow of the ridge only to find that it was no such thing; in front of him was a patch of dead ground, a dip leading up to a slightly more gradual slope that extended to the true brow, about a quarter of a mile further on. He signalled a halt; there was something in this dip that might solve his problems, at least in the short term.

Yet another poxy little village. This one, however, had much to recommend it. First, there was a seven-foot-high stone wall all round it, with two substantial-looking gates controlled by gatehouses. Second, there was no river or stream running through, which meant the water supply must come from a well-spring inside the village, something that couldn’t easily be cut off or diverted. Third, it had the look of having been abandoned, thoroughly and in a hurry.

‘Penna?’ asked the sergeant.

‘What?’

‘On the map,’ the sergeant said, ‘there was a village called Penna.’

‘Yes, but that was miles away. Over there somewhere.’ Renvaut waved vaguely in the direction they’d come from. ‘It could be Penna, I suppose. Or was that one of the ones we trashed? Anyway, doesn’t matter. Take an advance party and look around.’

But the name Penna tugged at his memory, and he remembered; the priory of Penna, founded early in the Foundation’s history, abandoned about seventy years ago and turned into a village; the hermit crab in the limpet shell. That would account for stone walls and gatehouses, and the handful of rather fine stone-built houses he could just see beyond the wall. Better and better. Defence had always been the first priority of the Foundation’s architects. Quite by chance, they’d stumbled on a purpose-built fortress just when they needed one. Luck, he mused, is having us and eating us.

‘Nobody home,’ the sergeant reported a little later. ‘And there’s water, flour, bacon, geese and chickens running about everywhere, even a couple of carp-ponds and a dovecote. So, what are we going to do?’

Good question. They could load up with supplies and try struggling on to the coast, or they could dig in and be besieged. The courageous, military thing to do would be to press on, make the most of their small lead and trust that the barges would still be there waiting for them. Holing up in a village on a hostile island might make them feel safer for a day or so, but in the long term it was suicide. Once inside, they’d never find a way of getting out again; their only hope would be a relief party from Shastel, and as a patriot and a staunch believer in the Foundation, Renvaut devoutly hoped they wouldn’t try anything so stupid.

‘So, what do we do?’ the sergeant repeated. ‘Whatever, we’d better hurry.’

Renvaut took a deep breath. One day, the whole of Shastel could end up looking like this, and the Foundation would be dead and gone.

‘We’re staying here and digging in,’ Renvaut said.