The Belly of the Bow

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Scona charge d’affaires was called to the offices of the Foundation and asked politely what the Bank thought it was playing at. The charge d’affaires replied that as far as he knew (and all he’d heard was the official Shastel version), his people were simply defending themselves against an act of unprovoked aggression, just as the Bank’s team of advisers had done here on Shastel when the Foundation’s armed forces had attacked them for no readily apparent reason when doing whatever it was they were doing in that village. In fact, he went on, he was prepared to say that the Bank took a grave view of recent developments. The Shastel spokesmen replied that the Foundation also took a very grave view of the whole situation and deplored the recent violence and loss of life. The charge d’affaires replied that the Bank always deplored violence and loss of life, whatever the circumstances.

Having reached agreement on the fundamentals, the two sides became more specific. The Bank, said the charge d’affaires, was a purely commercial organisation and had no military or political agenda whatsoever; all it wanted was to be able to go about its business, which was primarily the lending of money on the security of agricultural property, without fear of violence being offered to its staff or customers. The spokesmen for the Foundation replied that they too represented an organisation that, although not wholly commercial in its outlook, had substantial financial interests to protect and mortgagors who looked to it to safeguard them against such unsupportable burdens as raiders, brigands, pirates and other lawless elements; that was why the Foundation felt it necessary to maintain security forces on a permanent basis. That, surely, was something that the Bank ought to be able to understand better than anybody.

The charge d’affaires thought for a moment and said that although, clearly, there were some issues on which they would find it hard to reach consensus in the short term, surely they were both agreed that armed conflict was in the interests of neither party, and the first priority ought to be an immediate halt to hostile activity on both sides, followed by a period of restructuring and general negotiation which might in time lead to a more fundamental settlement between the two sides.

‘In other words,’ the spokesman reported back to his superior, ‘they’re planning to make us pay through the nose for the hostages and they’re going to take their own sweet time about it. It’s a disaster.’

‘The hell with that,’ the superior agreed. He was one of the five deputy wardens of the Poor, a member of the Soef family and the holder of two doctorates, in Linguistics and Applied Mathematics, and the thought of being held to ransom by a Perimadeian whoremonger wasn’t something he was very comfortable with. But he was also an intelligent man, and one of the hostages was a Bovert. ‘We’ve got to get the hostages back,’ he said, ‘and we’ve also got to get out of this without sending a message to the hectemores that we’ve lost our grip and given up. I’m going to have to take this to Chapter and see what they want to do, while we’ve still got a few options.’

Just before this meeting, he’d been talking to Doctor Gannadius, another of these Perimadeians who seemed to be getting into everything these days, but for once the Doctor had had something interesting to say. Of course, he’d be a complete fool to base policy decisions on the word of a foreign mystic; on the other hand, he was enough of a scientist and a philosopher himself to be able to keep an open mind when it came to things he didn’t understand. The obvious priority here was to keep a sense of balance and neither rush into anything nor dismiss anything out of hand. As for the hostages, well, he hoped they were somewhere warm and dry in this foul weather, because whichever option was eventually chosen, it was likely to take some time.

‘It’d depress me to think I was going to be stuck here for the rest of my life,’ muttered the young soldier, peering up at the drops of water falling from the leak in the roof, ‘if it wasn’t for the moderate certainty that the rest of my life won’t take very long.’ He shuddered and threw another piece of wood on the fire. ‘Looked at from that angle, a man could get to like it here.’

Master Renvaut nodded. ‘Well, by my calculations I’m dead already,’ he said. ‘Or at least, I ought to be. But the medicine that butcher of an orderly gave me was so foul, I think it made me too ill to die.’

The young soldier nodded. ‘Blue bread mould in garlic juice,’ he said. ‘It certainly adds a new dimension of horror to serious illness. I mean, nobody’s saying death is a barrel of fun, but it’s got to taste nicer than that.’ He grinned. ‘I take it you’re feeling better,’ he said.

Renvaut nodded. ‘I think I sweated out the fever in my sleep. I still feel a bit shaky and not the least bit hungry; which is fortunate, from what I can gather.’

‘That’s true,’ the young soldier agreed gloomily. ‘We’ve got enough for a week, maybe two if we really torture ourselves, and that’s about it. At least drinking water isn’t a problem,’ he added, as a raindrop fell in his eye.

‘Marvellous,’ Renvaut sighed. He rolled over on his back and stared at the black patches in the thatch where the water was seeping through. ‘Your first mission, is it?’

The young soldier laughed. ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘I’m in the third year of my degree course, and like a fool I chose to do my six months in the ranks early, so as to get the feel of what soldiering’s really all about.’

‘You got lucky,’ Renvaut grunted. ‘This is pure concentrated essence of soldiering, as far as I’m concerned. Now, when I was your age, I pulled every string I possibly could and got assigned to the secretariat.’

The young soldier grinned. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I reckon it’s a good rule. After all, if you’re going to command men in combat, it helps to know what makes them tick.’

‘Absolutely,’ Renvaut said. ‘And what is it you’re studying?’

‘Oh, mostly the usual, Ethical and Economic Theory, with a bit of Literature and Metaphysics thrown in. After that I’m going to specialise, but I haven’t quite made up my mind yet. I’ll probably go for Ethics because that’s what I’m good at, but secretly I’d rather have a go at the Philosophy of Commerce course. After all, that must be the key to understanding what the Foundation’s all about.’

‘Well, yes,’ Renvaut said, straight-faced. ‘Mind you, it’s a big subject.’

‘Well, of course,’ the young soldier replied. ‘But since all the leading texts are written in the Shastel dialect, it’ll save me three months learning Old Perimadeian and Southern and Bathue; I was always useless at languages. About the only subjects you can take where there isn’t a whole lot of language work are Phil. Comm. and Military Theory, and,’ he added with a wry smile, ‘I reckon if I get out of this alive, I’ll have had all the Military Theory I can take.’

‘Mil. Theory graduates usually go straight into teaching,’ Renvaut said with a yawn. ‘Which explains a lot, don’t you think?’

The young soldier shook his head ‘Our society is run on unique and original lines,’ he said. ‘Arguably, it should tend to produce the ideal: the altruist, the scholar, the soldier and the practical man of business all rolled into one. I’d feel rather more sanguine about the concept if we weren’t in this shed surrounded by the enemy.’

Renvaut shrugged. ‘You only really start to get problems when you can’t control all the human elements in the equation. It’s pointless trying to apply scientific method to something as completely random and perverse as human nature, particularly human nature en masse.’

‘People are a nuisance, you mean?’ the young soldier suggested.

‘That puts it rather well,’ Renvaut agreed. He yawned, stretched until he felt something twang painfully in his back, and stood up. He’d lost the best part of a day because of the fever, and there was a great deal to do and nobody else really competent to do it. A professional soldier, he reflected, is someone who’s not quite good enough at a range of administrative and managerial skills to earn a living at them (or else that’d be what he was doing for a living) and ends up exercising those skills for lives rather than money.

‘Any sign?’ he asked the sergeant in charge of the sentries, who shook his head. ‘They’ve been prowling around on the top of the ridge,’ the sergeant went on, ‘but just scouts, nothing serious. My guess is, they’re waiting for something.’

‘Reinforcements.’

‘Or siege gear,’ the sergeant replied. ‘Catapults and rams and stuff like that. Only they’d have a job getting anything too heavy up into these mountains; they’d have to take ‘em to bits and put ’em back together again when they got here. Too much like work.’

Renvaut pulled a face. ‘Reinforcements are more likely,’ he said. ‘It all depends on what they’re planning. Myself, I don’t see them trying an assault. After all, why bother? If they bring up enough men to invest this place properly, they can starve us out in a week or so and never risk a man. Plus,’ he added with a wry grin, ‘we’re worth more to them alive – as hostages, or plain and simple commodities for sale.’

The sergeant shrugged his shoulders. ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said.

‘Me too.’ Renvaut peered through the crack between the window frame and the hastily improvised and purportedly arrow-proof shutter at the steady and relentless rain outside. ‘Unfortunately, one thing they don’t teach you in any of the classes I took is how long you’ve got to hold a besieged position before it’s polite to surrender and you don’t have to worry about being court-martialled and killed by your own side. I think it’s safe to assume that once the food runs out, it’s all right. I mean, that’d be logical, wouldn’t it?’

The sergeant wasn’t prepared to venture an opinion on that, and Renvaut left him to his duties and got on with his own list of things to do. Civilised commercial warfare, he reflected; buying and selling, trading and negotiating; it’s just a pity we have to be stuck in this dump for a fortnight while they sort it all out. But it should be all right, he insisted, provided everybody keeps calm and nobody does anything stupid, like send another expedition to rescue us. And even we’re not idiotic enough for that.

There was nothing to eat apart from slightly stale rye bread and the last of the red cheese, which neither of them liked particularly much. The boy stared to say, ‘Looks like I’ll have to go down to the village tomorrow and buy-’ He fell silent, and Loredan said nothing, went on chewing the disgusting food.

‘Do you think there’ll be any trouble?’ the boy asked after a long time. ‘About hitting those two soldiers, I mean?’

‘Doubt it,’ Loredan replied with his mouth full. ‘If you think about it, I don’t suppose my brother’d go to all the trouble of sending men to rescue me on the one hand, and then have me slung in jail for assault on the other.’ He paused, and frowned. ‘Although that doesn’t actually follow,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘In fact, that’s just the sort of thing he would do. Then, after he’d left me to stew in the prison for six months, he’d petition the judge for a free pardon and make a great show of pulling strings and using his influence to get me out again. And then he’d expect me to be grateful. He’s a strange man, my brother. I don’t like him much.’

The boy took a moment to consider. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Or is that a rude question?’

‘Because,’ Loredan replied. ‘And yes. If you don’t want that last bit of cheese, give it here.’

‘You’re welcome. I had a brother, back in the City. Did I ever tell you that?’

‘No, you didn’t.’

The boy looked down at the wooden bowl in front of him, lifted up one side, put it down again. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I have this fantasy that he’ll just turn up one day; you know, walk in through the door without saying anything, just to surprise me. Oh, I’m sure he’s almost certainly dead, but I don’t actually know that. Like, I know my mother and father are dead, because I saw them getting killed, but my brother got left behind when we were running down the street, so it’s just possible-’ The boy picked up the crust of his bread and dropped it in the bowl. ‘I mean, it’s something to dream about; you know, suddenly finding him again, years later, when I’d been sure all that time he was dead.’ He stood up and collected the bowls and the breadboard. ‘Is he your only brother?’ he went on.

Loredan shook his head. ‘I’ve got two other brothers still living, or at least as far as I know they are, back in the Mesoge where I was born. Haven’t seen them in – oh, I can’t remember how long. Anyway, to the best of my knowledge there they still are, still scratching a living out of the same patch of dirt we all scrabbled about in when I was a kid.’

‘You don’t like them either, then?’

‘I don’t dislike them,’ Loredan replied. ‘In a way, I suppose I care about them. But they’re all right, they’ve got the farm. I guess you could say they’re having the life I should have had.’

‘Is it the life you’d have wanted?’

Loredan frowned. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Let’s put it this way. If I’d carried on and never left the farm, never left the Mesoge, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine any other kind of life; so I suppose I’d have been happy, or satisfied, whatever. The thought of anything different probably wouldn’t ever have occurred to me. That’s the thing about farming, you’re completely taken up with the job in hand, you never have time to think beyond the next stage in the working year. Some people would say it means your mind gets cramped up and atrophied, but I’m not so sure about that. For a farmer, the only thing that matters is working the farm; nothing else really interests him, because it isn’t really anything to do with him. People make fun of us because all we ever talk about is how bad the weather is, too much rain or too much sun, it’s too wet to turn the cows out and too dry for the sheep to find enough to eat – well, fair enough, I suppose. But the pay-off is, if you do your work and then a bit more, and the weather’s not too horrible and the rooks don’t go down on the flat patches in the wheat, then basically it’ll all be all right and you can look forward to going through it all again next year, and the year after that. It’s the feeling that if you keep your side of the bargain, then, cosmic bastardry permitting, you’ll get a fair return and the system will work, you can rely on it working.’ Loredan shook his head. ‘Dear gods, if I could have had a life like that, I don’t think I’d have very much to complain about.’

The boy, who hadn’t really followed much of all that, rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. ‘So why don’t you go back to it?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you buy some land and be a farmer, if you think it’s so wonderful?’

Loredan smiled. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe it’s because I know it isn’t really like that, so I’d never be able to rely on the system working. I know too much about it all, you see; I know that one day you can be leaning on your scythe, touching up the edge with a stone, and a dozen horsemen will suddenly appear, riding towards you through the corn with spears levelled. I know that five bad years will send you begging at someone’s door, and they’ll say yes, take all the seedcorn you need, but first put your mark on this paper. I know that one day the recruiting sergeant will come and take your sons, and the bailiff will come and take your surplus for arrears of tithes, and the tax-collector will come and take what’s left for the Great King’s wars, and then the ploughshare snaps and the smith wants paying, and your daughter gets ill and the doctor has to be called, and one thing and another; and you walk past the cooper’s shop and see him sitting in the shade tapping away with a small hammer and you think, half your luck, you smug bastard, I wish to gods I’d been a tradesman’s son, just exactly the same way he wishes he’d been born to the land, and the Crown Prince in his tower dreams of running away to sea and becoming a pirate.’ Loredan grinned. ‘The whole thing’s garbage, if you ask me. Fetch me the forty-pound recurve and let’s go and shoot something decent to eat.’

As they let themselves out of the back door, they realised that it had stopped raining. The air smelt sweet, and the evening sun was already pulling a faint haze of mist out of the wet earth. ‘When you said something decent to eat, you meant rabbits,’ said the boy accusingly. Loredan shrugged.

‘I know how to shoot rabbits,’ he said.

‘But I’m sick of rabbit,’ the boy protested. ‘And even when you stew it up with tons of spices and stuff, it still tastes of bones.’

‘True. But nothing else that’s edible is stupid enough to let me get up close. Actually, roasted and with just a touch of rosemary-’

‘We haven’t got any rosemary.’

‘That’s not all we haven’t got. Rabbit or go hungry, right?’

Before the boy could reply, a big, fat cock pheasant scuttled out of the long grass under their feet and exploded into flight, clucking frantically. Loredan had an arrow on the string; he fixed his eyes on the bird, drew to the corner of his mouth and loosed, all in one fluid movement. The arrow sailed off to the left and vanished in a clump of tall nettles.

‘Another thing I like about rabbits,’ Loredan said after a moment, as he drew the nock of another arrow smoothly onto the string, ‘is that they can’t fly. Forget the arrow, it’ll be all smashed up.’

‘Shall I have a go?’ the boy asked hopefully.

‘Get lost,’ Loredan replied. ‘Now then, let’s take a look at that warren by the oak stump.’

They walked quietly down into a shallow dip where there were several patches of brambles and fuzz. ‘There’s one,’ the boy whispered. ‘You can get him from here.’

‘Quiet,’ Loredan replied. ‘I’m not wasting any more arrows. Now stay put.’

He moved forward carefully, taking small steps, keeping the rest of his body still and straight. When he was forty yards away, the rabbit stopped grazing and sat up; Loredan stopped where he was and waited until the rabbit’s head went down again before continuing at the same slow, breathless pace. At thirty yards the rabbit looked up again; he halted, balanced uncomfortably on one leg, but the rabbit scampered five yards towards the mouth of its hole, then stopped, as they always do. Loredan waited. The rabbit dropped down on all fours but didn’t graze, just sat looking at safety as if wondering whether it was a good idea. Loredan walked on another five yards, making sure he put his foot down flat each time, gradually easing his weight onto it just in case there was a twig or a thistle-stalk he hadn’t seen.

At twenty-five yards he raised the bow and started to draw, looking along the arrow with the bow canted at forty-five degrees; as the base of his thumb brushed the corner of his mouth he dropped the arrowhead a yard below and a yard to the right, then continued the draw until he felt the tip of his finger against his lip, at which point he relaxed his hand and watched the arrow all the way to the target. As he’d expected, the rabbit saw the arrow and started towards home, but he’d allowed for that; the slender bodkinhead passed through the rabbit’s back, pinning it to the ground. It was struggling against the shaft, kicking frantically with all four legs, as Loredan ran in, letting the bow fall. By the time he reached it, the rabbit was dead, its eyes wide open, and the last few twitches were just reflexes. Loredan, who had killed more men than rabbits in his time, waited until it was completely still before he pulled out the arrow, wiped the head and dropped it back in the quiver at his belt. Then he picked up the rabbit by its back legs and hocked it, passing the blade of his knife between the tendon of the right leg and the bone, cutting the tendon of the left leg and passing the left foot through the slit. He looked round for a bit of stick and hung the rabbit on it, then walked back and retrieved his bow.

‘Enough for two meals on that,’ he said.

The boy nodded unenthusiastically. ‘And I expect you’ll make broth with the carcass, too,’ he said gloomily.

‘Well, you don’t go wasting good food,’ Loredan replied. ‘Or nasty food, for that matter.’ He undid the hock, lying the rabbit along the palm of his left hand, with the head lolling back over his wrist, gently squeezed the piss out of its bladder with his thumb, then pricked the point of the knife carefully into the skin of the belly until he’d penetrated it; then he turned the knife round so that the blade pointed upwards, and slit an opening in the belly up as far as the ribcage. The boy looked away. Loredan put a finger round the rabbit’s neck, another round the back legs and turned it upside down, shaking it till the guts dropped out through the slit, then jerked with his wrists to flick them away. With his index finger he hooked out the heart and what was left of the intestines, but left the liver and the kidneys, then picked up his knife again and cut the skin of the back leg from the belly slit to the leg joint. He put the knife down and pushed his finger carefully between the skin and the flesh, easing it away without tearing it until he had enough purchase to pull it away from the rabbit’s back, then worked the other leg free and let the skin hang forward close to the ground. He put his foot on it and pulled up on the rabbit’s hind legs until the whole body was pulled out of the skin up to the chest, then prised out the front legs and cut through the neck. Having folded the skin carefully with the fur on the outside, he twisted all four legs against the joint until they snapped, cut through the muscle and sinew just below the feet and tossed them away. The rabbit dangled from his fingers, naked and bloody as a new-born baby.

‘What are you keeping the skin for?’ the boy asked.

‘Glue,’ Loredan replied. ‘You boil it up and it makes gesso; it’s good enough for putting a rawhide backing on a lightweight bow. Actually, you can make glue out of almost anything living, but some things are better than others.’ He picked up the little parcel of skin and fur, while the boy gathered up the bow and wiped the damp off it. ‘Like I said,’ Loredan went on, ‘nothing’s wasted.’

The boy grinned uncomfortably. ‘We spend our lives making things out of bits of animal,’ he said. ‘Sinew and rawhide and horn and glue, and gut for strings, and all the fiddly bits we use bone for.’

‘And blood,’ Loredan added. ‘Mix blood with sawdust and it makes a good sizing glue. I use it sometimes for sealing the grain.’

‘Right,’ said the boy, uncertainly. ‘But don’t you think it’s a bit – well, gruesome, really?’

Loredan nodded. ‘But very efficient, wouldn’t you say? It’d be a shame to kill something and then just throw it away. It’s only other people we do that to.’

Gannadius looked round uncomfortably, wishing (not for the first time in his life) that he’d kept his mouth shut. Just because you have something intelligent and useful to say doesn’t always mean you should go ahead and say it. More often than not, in fact, the opposite is true, depending on circumstances, and the circumstances in which a fifty-nine-year-old professional philosopher is in a position to point out the painfully obvious to the ruling council of a military oligarchy are among those where keeping the mouth tightly shut and not getting involved are most highly recommended.

The chapter house was enormous, four or five times the size of Chapter back home and probably larger than the council chamber of Perimadeia, though he’d only seen that a few times and had no real recollection of it. As with most of the Foundation’s public architecture, it was light and airy, with a high domed roof and five huge windows, all of them glazed with thousands of small panes of clear, slightly blue glass, whose colour showed that they’d come from Perimadeia, probably at some point in the last twenty years. That made them irreplaceable now, of course. Other people could make glass, sure enough, but nobody else knew the secret of the City formula, which the guild had fanatically guarded for centuries. As a boy, Gannadius had thrilled with delicious terror at the dark tales of the guild’s assassins, who ruthlessly tracked down and exterminated any City glazier who tried to slip away and sell the secret to foreigners. Later he’d found out that the ‘secret’ was no such thing; Perimadeian glass was slightly blue because of something or other in the sand that they used to make it from that was unique to the City coastline. Still, it made a good story.

An usher touched him on the shoulder and pointed to an empty seat at the very back, directly opposite the rostrum and lectern where the council of faculty heads would be sitting. He thanked the man and set off on his long march across the marble floor, marvelling yet again at the extraordinary acoustics of the place. From the middle of the floor he could hear quite distinctly what two men were saying right in the distance, where he was going. He smiled, reflecting that a council chamber where the faintest of whispered conversations could be overheard from any part of the building must make for either very boring or very exciting politics.

He didn’t know the man to his left, but on his right was one Haime Mogre, who lectured in Applied Metaphysics and Military Administration. They’d exchanged a few words at some faculty meeting or other; as far as he could tell, the Mogre were a powerful family among the Poor, their family name meaning ‘thin’ or ‘starved’ (not a hereditary characteristic), and Haime was the youngest son in his generation, which meant that he’d ended up with the lowliest post that his birth and position permitted him to accept – a profound nuisance, since he’d have been far better suited to one of the lowlier faculties, such as Accountancy or Poetry, both of which were too low-class for him to be allowed to work in. Haime was, by his own admission, a poor metaphysician and a dreadful administrator, but (as he pointed out on every possible occasion) not nearly as bad at either as his brother Huy, who was a year his senior and his immediate superior in both departments.

‘This is terrible,’ Haime muttered to him, leaning over and whispering in his ear so softly that Gannadius could hardly catch the words; those confounded acoustics, presumably. ‘An absolute disaster.’

Gannadius nodded sympathetically. ‘I suppose so,’ he whispered back, though why it was necessary to be so secretive he didn’t know. ‘Two defeats in a row-’

Haime Mogre looked at him as if he was simple. ‘I’m not talking about the military situation,’ he replied. ‘Damn it, the day we can’t take the loss of a couple of hundred men in our stride is the day we start packing and looking for somewhere else to live. No, I mean the effect this is going to have on the balance of power. I really can’t see how we’re going to get out of it this time.’

‘Ah,’ Gannadius replied. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not terribly well up on Foundation politics.’

‘Well,’ Mogre replied, drawing in a deep breath; and he started to explain. Gannadius was hampered by the extreme quietness of his voice, the quite incredible complexity of the situation, and the fact that in the key family of the Deporf, whose members were evenly divided between three out of the four warring factions, all the male children were traditionally given the forename Hain. Nevertheless, he managed to piece together enough snippets and scraps to know that Juifrez Bovert, the commander of the first lost unit and now a prisoner of the Bank, had belonged to the Redemptionist faction (which had once favoured allowing the hectemores to redeem the mortgages but now bitterly opposed the idea), which was why the Separatists (supporters of a separate committee on finance and general purposes) had insisted that Renvaut Soef lead the retaliatory strike, because the Separatists were at daggers-drawn with the Redemptionists over proposed revisions to the Military History syllabus, with the unfortunate consequence that the Dissenters (who had objected to the annexation of Doure seventy years ago) now had plenty of ammunition to use against the Separatists in their dispute over the vacant seat on the Minor Arts faculty council, in which dispute they were siding with the Traditionalists (advocates of the traditional, as opposed to the First, Second and Third Revised, wording of the Articles of Foundation) in exchange for their support on the vexed issue of the recognition of Medicine as a separate faculty, rather than a part of Minor Sciences. The situation was complicated by the irresponsible behaviour of Hain Doce Deporf, who had suddenly taken it into his head to change sides on the Annexation issue -

(‘Are they still arguing about that?’ Gannadius interrupted. ‘After seventy years?’

‘Of course,’ Mogre replied. ‘In fact, the debate is just starting to get interesting.’)

– thereby tilting the balance on the Acquisitions committee dangerously in favour of the Traditionalists, who didn’t gave a damn about the Annexation, but who now had a majority over the Redemptionists on the subcommittee that was considering the issue.

‘And now this has to happen,’ Mogre continued. (Gannadius still didn’t have a clue which faction he supported.) ‘You can see what’s going to happen, can’t you? The Separatists are going to do their best to bury the hostages and forget about the whole thing, since all this is basically their fault, which means the Dissenters will demand a rescue attempt to embarrass them and the Redemptionists, so the Traditionalists’ll be able to force the Separatists to back down on condemning the Amended Declaration if they want the Traditionalists to vote against the Dissenters on the hostage crisis. All this,’ he concluded, ‘just when we thought we were getting somewhere on the Standards issue. It’s enough to make you weep.’

Before Gannadius could ask about the Amended Declaration, let alone Standards, the chief usher banged the floor of the rostrum with his ebony staff for silence, and everybody stood up as the faculty heads filed in. They were all old, old men, two of them so decrepit that they had to be bustled along by a couple of ushers, like drunks being helped home by their friends. But they all wore flowing scarlet robes under sleeveless gilded mailshirts that reached below the knee and must have weighed forty pounds, and each one gripped a ceremonial sword and a huge copy of the Articles in a long silver tube the size of a standard Perimadeian drainpipe section, which the ushers took from them before they sat down and piled neatly in a stack behind the rostrum. Clowns, Gannadius muttered to himself. Even we were never as bad as this, and look what happened to us.

The debate started with a bang and carried on getting hotter and hotter. There was a three-way shouting match (‘Who’s that?’ Gannadius asked, pointing at a tall man who was shaking his fist at the rostrum and yelling at the top of his voice. ‘Hain Deporf,’ Mogre replied) which went on for several minutes before one of the very old men on the rostrum staggered to his feet and joined in in one of the loudest voices Gannadius had ever heard. That shut up the three previous speakers, but then another very old man on the rostrum joined in, talking in a whispery croak that the remarkable acoustics made audible right back where Gannadius was sitting. Since he was making a savage personal attack on another council member (not the man he’d interrupted), being able to hear every word didn’t help Gannadius terribly much; it struck him as ironic that, thanks to the truly exceptional design of this magnificent building, he should be able to hear so much and understand so little.

Just as he was on the point of drifting off into sleep, he heard his name mentioned and discovered that everybody in the place seemed to be looking at him. It was a terrifying moment, and at first he wasn’t able to get his legs working and stand up.

‘All I wanted to say,’ he announced, and his voice curled and echoed round the huge chamber like thunder reverberating in a canyon, ‘is that Alexius, former Patriarch of Perimadeia, is on Scona.’

He blinked and looked round again. Everybody was still staring, and he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He forced himself, and went on.

‘The reason why I think this may be important,’ he said, ‘is this. I’ve known Alexius for many years, and I can’t imagine anything that’d make him go to Scona of his own free will. So my guess is that he was somehow induced to go there by someone in their government. Now then,’ he went on, gradually getting into his stride, ‘you’re wondering what the Bank of Scona wants with a seventy-five-year-old philosopher. That puzzled me too, until I remembered something I’d heard about the Loredan family.’

He paused for effect; sure enough, the name Loredan had caught their attention. He took a deep breath and went on. ‘As you may know, the brother of Niessa and Gorgas Loredan lived in Perimadeia; in fact, it was Bardas Loredan who conducted the defence of the City against the plainspeople. I should mention in passing that, contrary to what you may have heard, he made a splendid job of it in the face of quite dreadful odds, not only the overwhelming numbers and determination of the enemy but the run-down state of the City defences and a criminal lack of co-operation from the City authorities. Before that, he learnt his trade as a soldier under the City’s most illustrious general, his uncle Maxen. Make no mistake: Bardas Loredan is a thoroughly accomplished and talented soldier, and I’d hate to be on the opposing side to him in a war.’

Gannadius paused again, then continued, ‘Unfortunately, that might be about to happen. It’s common knowledge, on Scona and here, that Bardas Loredan fell out with his brother and sister many years ago and wants nothing more to do with them, even though he’s been living on Scona ever since the fall of the City. What you may not know is that one of Bardas’ few close friends in the old days was the Patriarch Alexius; and if anybody could reconcile Bardas Loredan to his sister, it’d be Alexius. I’m talking, of course, about ordinary persuasion, because I know that not all of you really believe in the rather abstruse metaphysical side effects of the workings of the Principle by which it’s supposedly possible to change the future and influence people’s actions. For what it’s worth, however, if you do believe in all that, then you’ll be interested to know that Alexius – and I, come to that – were involved in a strange and rather baffling sequence of events which we believe concerned Bardas Loredan and some sort of manipulation of the Principle, and Alexius was, let’s say, the main conduit of the Principle in all this. In any event, I put it to you that the prospect of Scona acquiring the services of a soldier of Bardas Loredan’s calibre ought to make you think long and hard before getting into any kind of military confrontation with them. I’m no student of warfare, the gods know, but even I can see that even without him, war with Scona could do us a lot of harm if we lose and not gain us anything much if we win. Bardas Loredan could make a bad situation much worse; so, as we used to say in the City, think on.’

The silence that followed this speech was somewhat unnerving, enough to make Gannadius wish he’d expressed himself a little less flippantly (but they’d annoyed him; they’d been annoying him ever since he’d arrived, and he’d wanted to annoy them back). For a moment, Gannadius believed he’d made an utter fool of himself and that nobody was going to pay the slightest attention to what he’d said. But then someone stood up in the middle of the third row, and said that surely that settled it, on no condition should they send more men to Scona now that they had this new commander – obviously he was working for them, it explained how they’d managed to score two consecutive victories over the superior forces of the Foundation. Before he’d finished, someone else jumped up and said, on the contrary, that was precisely why Shastel should act now and with overwhelming force, to nip the threat in the bud before this new Loredan had time to retrain their whole army and make it invincible. Fairly soon, the magnificent acoustics of the chapter house were pounding Gannadius with monstrous waves of raised and querulous voices, each one crystal clear and marvellously audible. He closed his eyes, slouched back in his hard seat, and groaned.

He was standing over her looking down, a puzzled expression on his face, as if he was trying to remember who she was. A slight twitch of the eyebrows; he’d remembered, and now he was trying to work out what she was doing here. Wherever here was.

‘It’s me,’ she tried to say, ‘Vetriz. You remember, we met in the City; first after that time you fought someone in the lawcourts and you weren’t expected to win, and we were sitting behind you in a tavern discussing the fight and saying all sorts of tactless things; and then we sort of kept bumping into each other, and when you were in charge of defending the City you and Venart had that deal with the rope…’ She could hear herself saying all that, and she knew perfectly well that the words weren’t getting out, for some reason.

Because she was dead.

I don’t like this dream. I think it’s horrid.

‘What makes you think it’s a dream?’ Without moving – she didn’t seem able to move – she looked the other way and saw the other Loredan brother, Gorgas; another familiar face, but not one that was welcome in her dreams. There had been the time when, quite uncharacteristically, she’d allowed herself to be picked up by this attractive but repulsive man, while her brother was away… And now here he was telling her she was dead. Go away.

‘I can’t,’ he replied with a grin. ‘I’m not here. And, strictly speaking, neither are you. This is just your dead body. You drowned.’

Did I?

Gorgas Loredan nodded. ‘Shipwreck,’ he said; and she realised that his brother Bardas didn’t seem to be aware of his presence. ‘You were sailing home after you completed your business here, and your brother misjudged the currents and got hit by a strong north-easterly squall. You were blown onto Ustel Point. You never had a chance, among those rocks at night. Hell of a way to go,’ he added sadly.

But Venart’s a good navigator. Whatever else he may not be quite so good at, he can handle the ship. He’d never make a mistake like that.

‘Not left to himself, perhaps.’ Gorgas Loredan smiled sweetly. ‘But you’re not the only one who has strange dreams. And people are very vulnerable to suggestions when they’re asleep. Well-known fact, that.’

Angrily, Vetriz tried to move. What she really wanted to do was give Gorgas Loredan a smack across the face he wouldn’t forget in a hurry, but she’d have settled for any kind of violent reproach. Unfortunately, nothing seemed to work; it was like being on the wrong side of a locked door.

‘It’s all right,’ Gorgas said, with a rather hateful grin, ‘I couldn’t do that sort of thing even if I wanted to. And I really have no idea why your brother’s usually flawless navigation had such dire consequences on this occasion. I’ve only the vaguest idea how this stuff works.’

Inside whatever part of her mind that was still functional, Vetriz felt something slide into place, like the tongue of a rusty lock. You’re a – what was that word Alexius used? – a natural. You can do that stuff that isn’t really magic but looks just like it.

Gorgas nodded gravely. ‘In very general terms,’ he replied. ‘Truth to tell, I’m not convinced it’s really me at all; no, that’s putting it very badly. Let’s say the part of me that can do this is very much a minority, and a rather unpleasant and disruptive one at that. Whenever there’s a big issue and the whole of Me in convocation gathers together to decide on something, it’s the part that always gets voted down. If I were inclined to melodrama, which quite emphatically I’m not, I’d call it the devil in me, though that would also be hopelessly misleading – makes it sound like some external influence that somehow possesses me, and it’s nothing like that at all. But yes, there is a part of me that’s unnaturally attuned to the Principle to such an extent that it has this bizarre ability to exist for just a few seconds in the future as well as the present and the past. The only way I can explain it is that it’s some sort of compensation for all the time I have to spend in my own past, which isn’t a very nice place to be. Does that make any kind of sense to you?’

I don’t know enough about it, to be honest.

Gorgas sighed. ‘Nobody does, not even the experts. Not even your friend Alexius, who knows more about the Principle than anyone else living – I asked him. And, more to the point, I asked him again when he wasn’t looking.’

You mean you invaded-

‘Invaded his thoughts?’ Gorgas shrugged his shoulders; meanwhile Bardas had walked away; he was a few yards further down the beach, examining what looked like another body, but she couldn’t see it very clearly – Gorgas’ leg was in the way. ‘You make me sound like some kind of metaphysical burglar. His view is that the Principle – hell, I couldn’t make head nor tail of what he was telling me, it was all far too technical, but he did say that the most useful comparison he knew was a cup of water standing on a table when a heavy ox-cart or a procession of soldiers goes by outside. You can’t see what’s making the table move ever so slightly, but the surface of the water in the cup ripples over and you can’t see your face in it any more. Alexius reckons that the Principle is the cart or the soldiers, and the cup is our minds, vaguely able to sense the existence of the Principle but unable to perceive it. I’d beg to differ; I think that the visions or whatever you call them that I get from time to time are moments when the traffic stops. I’d go further and say that the traffic only stops when it’s waiting for something – I get to see what I see when the Principle reaches moments where a thing could go one way or the other, but at that precise moment the course that the future will take hasn’t been decided, it’s a balance see-sawing backwards and forwards, and if I seize my chance and put my foot on one of the scales… But this is all pseudo-metaphysical trash. All I know is that one time, I saw Alexius seeing my brother fight in the lawcourts, and he tried to tip the scale against him, so I had to jump in and tip it the other way; and I have the feeling that, because I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing, I tipped the scale for a whole lot of other things as well, things I didn’t know about then, some of them I still don’t know about. Now am I making any sense?’

About as much as you were before. But go on. If I’m dead I’m not in any hurry.

‘No, you aren’t, are you? Another strange thing,’ Gorgas went on, ‘is that in these strange and obscure visions I keep bumping into you. Remember?’

Vividly.

‘Ah, well, it’s not deliberate, I assure you. So I tried to find out a bit more about you – with great success,’ he added with a smirk, ‘and the curious thing is, you’re such a commonplace, unremarkable little person, with absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about you at all.’

Thank you.

‘You’re welcome. Now, all the other people I’ve met on these peculiar excursions of mine are what you might term remarkable people. There’s Alexius, of course, and my wretched and loathsome niece, and my sister – it was a shock meeting her, I can tell you, and she wasn’t best pleased. Bardas as well, though he doesn’t really belong, he just seems to get dragged in there, probably because of Niessa and me. And there’s clever Doctor Gannadius, who’s got far more insight and raw ability than Alexius, but not nearly as much intelligence, and just lately there’s a new one, a girl student in the Shastel Foundation; she’s a remarkable person all right, I’ve had a look at what she gets up to in the future and no doubt about it, she’s really mustard. But you – well, I’m puzzled. And now here you are, dead, and never achieved a thing in all your short and shallow life. It beats me.’

I’m so sorry. Please may I wake up now?

‘Oh, why not?’ Gorgas said-

– and she sat up, the blanket a confused tangle around her shoulders, and shouted, ‘Ven!’

In the other bed across the room, her brother grunted and stirred. ‘Go ’sleep,’ he mumbled.

‘Ven, have you been dreaming?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Just now?’

Venart propped himself up on one elbow. ‘What you talking about?’ he asked woozily.

‘Did you just have a dream with a bald man in it? Come on, it’s important.’

‘Dunno.’ Venart scrubbed at his face with his balled fists. ‘Can’t remember, never remember my dreams. Look, pack it in, will you, Triz? It’s the middle of the night.’

Vetriz sighed. Her head was splitting. She got up and poured some water into a cup, drank it and got back into bed. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I had a nightmare or something.’

‘Too much blood sausage,’ Venart said wearily. ‘Doesn’t agree with you late at night, you should know that by now. Go back to sleep.’

Vetriz lay back but she didn’t want to close her eyes. It was like those horrible sleepless times when she was a little girl, convinced that there was something under the bed or crouched behind the curtains. She was also angry, a little bit ashamed, worried. And she could no more go back to sleep than deliberately not think of a monkey.

‘Ven,’ she said.

‘Go away.’

‘Ven, when we sail back home, you will be careful, won’t you?’

‘No, I’ll deliberately run us aground on the first rock I come to, just for the hell of it. Definitely no more blood sausage for you, ever.’

‘All right,’ Vetriz said. ‘But you will be careful? Promise?’

‘Promise. Anything, just so long as you shut up and let me go to sleep.’

She heard the straps of the mattress creak as he turned over, and soon he was making his distinctive soft-snoring noise. She closed her eyes and conjured up a mental image of doves pitching in a tall tree, which usually worked as a soporific. Dead, she thought. And I was there too, inside the dead body; what a repulsive notion. Except, I suppose, that’s what we all are, a living thing in a body. But commonplace and unremarkable – oh, why not? So much less trouble than being a remarkable person, surely. Much better to live a boringly contented life and then die.

She tried to watch the doves gliding down with their wings back, then spreading them like sails to slow down as they turned into the wind and stepped out of the air onto the tree-branch; but the vision seemed to ripple, like the surface of a pond when you’ve just dropped a stone in it. Maybe if they set sail a day earlier, or later; but the vision hadn’t specified a particular day, had it? It was all very well trying to be cunning and circumventing the future she’d seen, but that was a storyteller’s cliche; if they left a day later, then that’s when the storm would be, not on the day they’d originally intended. So what if they stayed on Scona indefinitely? For the sake of argument, suppose they stayed here for the rest of their lives? For all she knew, that’d only trigger some other, nastier chain of circumstances that led to a far more unpleasant fate than drowning. Such as? Well, spending her entire life on Scona, to name but one.

Maybe (she thought drowsily) the whole thing was a fake, an image he’d put into her mind so as to stop her leaving. Why should he want to do that? Obvious reason? Not very probable. Some peculiar magical thing he was cooking up? No such thing as magic. No reason why he’d want anything from a commonplace and unremarkable person like herself. She began to doze, and gradually the doves began to drift cautiously back to the tree, put their wings back and pitch; and if she had any other dreams that night, she didn’t remember anything about them in the morning.