The Proof House

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

‘We could do this for the rest of our lives,’ said the engineer, ‘and we’d be no better off. I say we stop mucking about and follow up; otherwise we’re just wasting our time.’

It was the third day of the bombardment. The day before had been like the day before that; while the sun shone, the trebuchets had pounded the lower stockade, the engine emplacements and the path. When the sun set, Temrai’s men had patched up the lower stockade, replaced the smashed and splintered sections of the engines and filled in the gaps hammered out of the path, and in the early hours of the morning his light cavalry had made a sortie and hamstrung the trebuchets. On the second night, they’d had a different leader and met with sterner resistance; but they’d learned a few things too, and the net result had been the same. For the third night, Bardas had detailed two companies of halberdiers to guard the trebuchets and had given orders for a stockade of his own, only to be told that all the timber within easy reach had been felled to build the fortress, so he’d have to make do with a ditch and bank, which would of course take time…

‘No,’ he said, ‘we’ll keep going. Sooner or later there’ll be so much damage they won’t be able to patch it up any more – you can’t keep patching on to patches, believe me, I’ve tried it. We can lose this war very easily, with just one error of judgement. I’d rather waste time than lives, if it’s all the same to you.’

The engineer shrugged. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said. ‘And I’m telling you, I wouldn’t have your job for anything.’

There was no cavalry raid that night, and the halberdiers, who’d been standing to arms for nine hours, went off duty with a feeling of having won the moral victory, giving place to the artillery crews. It was during the changeover, about half an hour after sunrise, that Temrai sent out his horse-archers, arguably the most effective part of his army. Before Bardas’ sentries had a chance to identify them and signal in, they’d been shot down; then the three troops drew up in line and started a bombardment of their own, from two hundred yards; further than Bardas’ bowmen could shoot; within range of the crossbows, but they could only loose one shot every three minutes, and the second troop was concentrating its volleys on them. Bardas called for the siege pavises, large oxhide shields designed to cover crossbowmen during siege operations, but there was a problem. The wagon master had stationed supply wagons all round them, hemming them in (after all, nobody had told him they were likely to be needed, and he had to park the damned wagons somewhere). In order to get them out, he had to shift the wagons, which in turn meant bringing about a third of them through the camp… Within a quarter of an hour, the streets of the camp were jammed solid with wagons, impeding the shot wagons that were supposed to be fetching trebuchet shot from the dump. Not that it mattered; the first and third troops of horse-archers were shooting at the artillerymen, and those who’d managed to get under cover weren’t likely to be loosing off any shot until the enemy had withdrawn.

‘No,’ Bardas kept saying, when they urged him to do something. ‘Cardinal rule: don’t charge horse-archers with heavy cavalry. I learned that the hard way. And if you think I’m sending infantry out into that-’ (no need to ask what that was; the volleys of arrows were lifting, planing and dropping like spurts of boiling water from a geyser; the thought of being underneath one of those plumes was enough to make your mouth dry). ‘So,’ he went on, ‘we sit tight. You know how many arrows a plainsman carries? Fifty; twenty-five on his back, twenty-five on his saddle. When they’ve used up their arrows they’ll go away, and we can get on with our work.’

He was right, of course. Not long afterwards the horse-archers pulled out, leaving behind them the best part of a hundred thousand arrows that King Temrai was in no position to replace in a hurry. They were everywhere; sticking in the ground, in the timbers of the trebuchets and the wagons, hanging by their barbs from the sides of tents and wagon-covers, smashed underneath dead men, slanting upwards from the chests and arms of dead and living men; they covered the ground like a carpet of suddenly sprung flowers, the carts and engines like moss or lichen, their fletchings like the tufts of bog-cotton on the wet marshes, and the snapping of shafts underfoot as the artillerymen came out from cover sounded like a bonfire of twigs and dry grass. Like ants or mosquitos they’d got in everywhere; like bees dazed by the smoke from the bee-keeper’s bellows they lay exhausted, their flight and stinging all done.

‘Clear up this mess,’ some officer was shouting. ‘And get those engines working, we haven’t got all day. Where’s the chief engineer? We’re going to need twelve new crews for number six battery. Casualty lists – who’s got the damned lists? Have I got to do every bloody thing myself?’

Half the artillerymen out of action; more wounded than killed, but not by a wide margin. The injured lay or sat around the shot-wagons, the arrows still sticking out of them; the surgeons were rushed off their feet, sawing shafts and dragging out barbs the hard way, throwing the recovered arrowheads on to piles under the tables, and they didn’t have time to look back at the work they still had to do. From time to time a man would die, quietly or making a fuss, and at intervals they came round with a handcart for the bodies.

They came and asked Bardas what they should do now. ‘Carry on,’ he said. ‘Keep plugging away at the path and the stockade. You can put halberdiers on the engines, so long as there’s an artilleryman to each team to tell them what to do.’

They went round with big wicker baskets, picking up the arrows – reasonable quality materiel that’d come in handy some time, if not in this war then in some other war, where the Empire saw fit to deploy massed archers – and when the baskets were full, they packed them in empty barrels and loaded them on to supply carts. The broken arrows were sorted into two piles; heads for scrap, shafts for the fire or the carpenters (an arrowshaft makes good dowel rod for small structures, like pavises and screens and the floors of siege-towers and the rungs of scaling-ladders). A platoon of pikemen with nothing else to do sat cross-legged in a circle, cutting off the fletchings and dropping them into big earthenware pots, ready for the quilters to use for stuffing gambesons.

‘It was a gesture,’ Bardas explained, ‘nothing more. And the best thing to do with gestures is to ignore them, like your mother did when you were a kid and wouldn’t eat up your porridge.’ But all the while he was thinking about the second grade of proof, the proof against arrows; to meet the specification, an armour should turn a bodkinhead arrow shot from a ninety-five-pound bow at seventy-five yards, or a seventy-pound bow at thirty yards. Most armours fail that test and go in the scrap, along with the spent arrowheads.

They got the trebuchets going again, and the beams slapped upright like hammers on the anvil, pounding dust out of the side of the hill.

‘Mostly,’ someone was saying, ‘we’re using their shot to repair the road; those big boulders are a nice size, though they take some shifting. We could do with a few more cranes, though; they’ve smashed up most of the ones I scrounged from the top batteries.’

Temrai tried to concentrate, but it wasn’t easy. He felt as though he’d been living with the thump of landing shot for years, and he’d gone past the point where he could ignore it. Earlier that day someone had come and told him that Tilden was dead; a splinter from an overshot that had smashed to pieces against an outcrop and sprayed debris over the back lot of tents on the far side. He heard the news but couldn’t feel it; it was impossible to concentrate on anything important with this constant hammering going on, in his ears and coming up out of the ground through the soles of his feet. He knew it was all a ploy, an attempt to pull him down out of his fortress on to the flat for a pitched battle, and he wasn’t going to fall for it. He’d been there before.

‘What about the stockade?’ he asked. ‘How’s the timber supply holding out?’

‘It’s not good,’ they told him. ‘We’re giving priority to shoring up the path, like you said, and that’s using up a lot of stock. We’ve started pulling stakes out of the back of the top stockade; after all, they aren’t much good to us there, and so far we’ve been able to plug the gaps with broken stuff. Can’t keep it up for ever, though; if we take out much more we’ll leave weak spots, and that’s asking for trouble.’

Temrai scowled; trying to keep his mind on the subject in hand was like trying to hold on tight to a rope: the more you gripped, the more it burned. ‘I don’t mind a few obvious weak spots,’ he said. ‘A weak spot in the wall is a temptation to the enemy, and sometimes it’s good to offer them an opportunity, so long as you’re ready and waiting when they accept it. Sometimes the best chance of winning a battle comes when you’ve almost lost it.’

That remark didn’t win him any friends. It’s true, though, he wanted to tell them, you study old wars, you’ll see what I mean. Nobody seemed in the mood for a history seminar, however, so he ignored the scowls and frowns. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘carry on robbing the back wall for now. This bombardment won’t last much longer. Trust me on that.’

(And why not? They’d trusted him once, right up to the walls of Perimadeia; and back then he was only a kid, with nothing about him to suggest he knew what he was doing apart from a certain ability to communicate enthusiasm. Now he was King Temrai, Sacker of Cities, so surely they ought to trust him even more.

Didn’t work like that.

Nevertheless, these were his people; they’d do as they were told. The ones who wouldn’t have were all dead now, killed in the civil war.)

They talked through a few minor points of supply and administration, then he dismissed the meeting and walked out of the tent into the dust. The death of his wife was somewhere quite close under the surface of his mind, like a fish feeding, but he wasn’t consciously aware of any significant levels of grief or guilt. She had been just the sort of woman he could have loved to distraction in another time or another place. But now that he had to look at the world through the eyeslits of the visor of King Temrai, he found it almost impossible to let the sharp blade through; there was no gap or seam, no weak point where he could create an opportunity.

The dead-cart trundled past him as he walked across the plateau towards the path. He watched it go, realised that he recognised a face peeping out between another man’s crushed legs. For now they were piling the dead in a half-finished grain-pit; the stores that should have gone in there had been spoiled by an overshot, and it seemed a pity to waste the effort that had gone into digging it. He’d been to see it, had stood for a moment looking at the confused heap, arms and legs and heads and feet and bodies and hands jumbled in together, like an untidy store, but it hadn’t meant anything more to him than the sum of its parts.

A man ran past him, heading down the hill; then two more, shapes that loomed up out of the dust and went back into it. More followed; he caught one of them by the arm and asked what was going on.

‘Attack,’ the man panted at him. ‘Gods only know where they appeared from. They’ve got some kind of portable bridge for crossing the river.’

Temrai let go of him. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Who’s in charge down there?’

The man shrugged. ‘Nobody, far as I know. There’s the gang-boss on the stockade detail, I suppose.’

‘Find him,’ Temrai said, ‘tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

The man nodded and slipped away into the dust, like someone vanishing into quicksand. Temrai thought for a minute or so, then turned back up the hill and headed for his tent. There was nobody about to help him with his armour, but he’d got the hang of it now, and it was getting easier each time he wore it, as the metal shaped itself to the contours of his bones and muscles. He felt much better once it was on – in truth, he’d spent so much time wearing it lately that when he took it off, his arms and legs felt strangely light and feeble.

He was adjusting the padding inside his helmet when they came to tell him that the enemy halberdiers had breached the stockade. He acknowledged the news with a slight nod of his head. ‘Who have we got down there?’ he asked.

‘The work crews, mostly,’ someone answered. ‘They’ve been fighting with hammers and mattocks. There’s a few skirmishers and pickets in there as well, and Heuscai’s on his way down with the flying column.’

‘Catch him up,’ Temrai said, ‘and tell him to wait for me.’

When he found him, Heuscai looked impatient and bewildered, almost angry. ‘We’ve got to hurry,’ he said, ‘the work crews can’t hold them for long.’

‘It’s all right,’ Temrai said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’

He led the column down the path. It was slow going; the bombardment had raised elevation a few degrees to clear the lower stockade, with the result that the upper reaches of the path were being hammered away now, while the lower reaches were a mess. ‘Take your time,’ he called back as he picked his way through – it was bad luck and bad timing that a shot landed in the thick of the column just as he said it; the men were too closely packed together to have any chance of getting out of the way, and when the shot landed, it crushed three men with a dull crunch, like the noise you get when you squash a large spider. The dust was worse than ever, but at least there were the sounds of fighting below them to give them something to head for. Temrai found walking down the steep slope in heavy armour extremely awkward; the back plates of his greaves dug into his heels, pinching skin between the greaverims and the upper edges of his sabatons.

As soon as he was close enough to the bottom of the path to be able to see what was going on, he gave the order for the work-crews to pull out. The first time he shouted they didn’t hear him, or didn’t recognise his voice; they were standing on the raised embankment on their side of the stockade, trying to keep the enemy from bursting through a gap about two yards wide where a shot had landed right on top of the fence. The boulder, of course, was still there; it was the main obstacle blocking the halberdiers’ way. As they tried to scramble up on to it, the workmen bashed at them with their mattocks and big hammers, bouncing two-handed blows off helmets and pauldrons. Instead of ringing like a hammer on an anvil, the blows sounded dull and chunky.

He gave the order a second time, and the men did as they’d been told, sidling backwards away from the breach. On the other side, the halberdiers were pushing and jostling each other, competing to get through while the way was inexplicably clear. As they oozed and bubbled through the gap, Temrai stepped back into the line and gave the order to draw bows. By nock your arrows there were thirty or so of them through the breach; more by the time Temrai called hold low and then loose, and the front rank let fly at no more than fifteen yards’ range.

It was just as well he’d reminded them to shoot low; at such short range the arrow is still climbing, and even with his warning, a quarter of the shots went high. But three quarters of a volley was enough for the halberdiers at the breach; they crumpled up like paper thrown on to the fire, laying a carpet of obstacles directly in the path of the men following them. The next volley congested the opening even further; the pile of dead, twitching and wriggling bodies was over knee-high now, too tangled to step through, not stable enough to scramble over. Still they carried on coming though, each batch put to proof and found deficient. The handful that did manage to get through then underwent the next degree of the test as they threw themselves up the slope towards the line of archers, and what had passed the arrows went down under the pounding of the big hammers, swirling and falling like shot from a trebuchet.

Temrai had nothing to do in all this except stand still and watch; and as he watched, he thought about the fall of Perimadeia, the gate (not much wider than the breach here) that had opened and let in his men. There hadn’t been a rank of archers waiting for him then, only the darkness and empty streets, nothing to prove his mettle. Now, trapped between hammer and anvil (the shot still hissed and whistled overhead, thudded into the side of the hill, ripping up dust) he felt a little easier in his mind.

When the enemy captain gave the order to break off, the gap in the stockade had been filled; not with timbers looted from the other side of the hill but with proof steel in a jumbled, compacted heap. Saves us a job, Temrai thought; they’ve done it better than we could have – and he paused to ask himself whether his men would have gone on squeezing and scrambling into the killing zone, the way the Imperials had done. But we never had the chance; it’s not a fair test. He shook his head, then signalled to the work-crew to move in and start shoring up, making good.

‘You see,’ he told Heurrai (who’d been one of the sullen faces at the council of war), ‘give them an opportunity, they may just be stupid enough to take it.’

Heurrai didn’t reply; what he’d seen was bothering him. Temrai could sympathise; at another time, in another place, it would have bothered him too. But he’d improved himself since then, made good the gaps in his defences; and now he was wondering if Bardas Loredan had felt this way when he’d beaten off the assault on Perimadeia with incendiaries, so that fire had danced on the unburnable water. It was an opportunity for a valuable insight, a sharing of experience leading to a sharing of minds – he felt like an apprentice standing at his master’s elbow.

‘They’ll be back,’ someone said; and a trebuchet shot pitched a few yards away, crushing one man and ripping a leg off another. The next shot only tore up more dust, as Temrai led the way up the path, where another crew was already starting to make good.

‘Sure,’ he replied, when he’d caught his breath. ‘And when they try again, we’ll share another opportunity. Don’t worry about it. I know what’s going to happen.’

Bardas hadn’t expected the first sally to go home. It had been more in the nature of an experiment, a trial, a putting to proof. They’d passed the second degree. He’d have expected nothing less. Meanwhile he’d field-tested the portable bridges and was satisfied that they were up to the job. He was pleased by that.

He directed the second and third batteries to pick another point on the stockade, the rest of the artillery to concentrate on the existing breach. Then he ordered the halberdiers and pikemen to form a column, with the cavalry out of harm’s way on the flanks. The crossbowmen had taken too many casualties to be much use as a field unit, so he relegated them to the rearguard, and brought up the archers to replace them. Imperial archers weren’t up to much, in his opinion, or at least these ones weren’t; they had seventy-pound self flatbows, thoroughly inferior to the heavy composites of the plainsmen, and their place in this army was on the side of the plate, as salad. He was annoyed by that. If it had wanted to, the provincial office could have given him some of the best archers in the world, armed with longbows, composites, northern self recurves, southern cablebacks, on foot or mounted, light or heavy armoured, fighting as skirmishers or volley-shooters, in the open or from behind pavises. Instead he had crossbowmen and rabbit-hunters, neither of which were likely to be much use to him. But it didn’t matter. He could manage perfectly well with what he’d got.

He allowed the batteries an hour to make the breaches, but they did the job in twenty minutes; so he reassigned them to laying down a blanket barrage on the enemy artillery. The dust was an unexpected bonus; he could have managed perfectly well without that, too, but it made what he had in mind that bit easier. As the trebuchets changed angles and locked down on their new targets, he gave the order to sound the advance. As they moved forward, the halberdiers started to sing, and it no longer bothered him that he didn’t understand the words.

This time, he tried a different tactic. Instead of simply flooding the breaches with heavy infantry, he sent in a few companies of skirmishers to set up pavises. As he’d anticipated, Temrai’s archers were there to oppose the assault; but instead of men to shoot at, he gave them oxhides, with his own archers returning fire through loopholes and from behind the edges of the screens. They didn’t accomplish anything much, but he didn’t really want them to; the purpose of the exercise was to give King Temrai an opportunity to shoot as many arrows as possible harmlessly into the pavises. He knew that each plainsman carried twenty-five arrows on his back, enough for three minutes’ sustained fire – after that, they’d have to rely on supplies brought down the hill from the supply pits, along the pitted and gouged-out path, through the dust. Once the three minutes were up, the enemy archers wouldn’t be a serious threat; assuming, of course, that Temrai was short-sighted enough not to realise what he was doing.

But Temrai played his part as if they’d been rehearsing together for weeks; the pavises held up to the barrage (they were an improved design of his own, stretched hides backed with thick coils of the plaited straw matting the Empire issued for making archery targets with; designed by experts to stop an infinite number of arrows) and when the hail of arrows faltered and became sporadic, he opened the screens and sent the pikemen through.

It was a hedge of spears, dense as the undergrowth in an unmanaged wood. The archers carried on loosing into it, but their arrows didn’t get very far, it was worse than trying to shoot through a matted tangle of thorns. The distance to be covered was only twenty yards or so; and then the pikes were close enough to touch, and the plainsmen tried to run away; but they were backed up on their own ranks, who were backed up on the supply carts bringing up more arrows, which were backed up on the reinforcements coming down the path. There was a certain limited scope for compression, as the front ranks cringed away from the spearblade hedge, like children on a beach skipping out of the way of the incoming tide. But when they’d flattened themselves against the men behind them, packed together like arrows in a barrel, there was nowhere left for them to go; all they could do was watch the pike-heads come on to them and into them.

Some of the front rank were killed outright. Others hung from the pikes still living, like the chunks of meat on skewers that the Sons of Heaven ate with rice and peppers. The force of the advance was enough to lift them off their feet, still struggling like speared fish (because the halberdiers were backed up too, the rear ranks pressing forward were still advancing, cramming into the ranks in front so that they couldn’t have lowered their pikes even if they’d wanted to; so the long shafts of ash and apple bent like bows under the weight of the skewered meat, but being tested and approved to the highest specifications of the empire, they didn’t break and neither did the men packed in round them). The second rank of the enemy joined the first on the spike, like a second layer of cloth joined to the first by the needle; a few pikeshafts snapped, but not enough to matter. After the first two ranks had been gathered up on the pikes, the forward progress stopped; dead or impaled, they served the third rank like a gambeson or some other form of padded or quilted armour, resisting the thrust with softness rather than strength or deflection (the padding of the gambeson smothers and dissipates the force of the thrust, clogging the advance of the blade). The forward momentum of the pikemen faltered, as the shower of arrows had done; the manoeuvre had run its course, and it was time for the next stage.

Temrai, meanwhile, had seen another opportunity. He was on the path, looking down at the compressed mass of the slaughter, when the advance stalled and the two sides stood staring at each other through the dust across the ashwood thicket, like two neighbours on either side of a hedge. He turned to the man next to him, a section leader called Lennecai, and tugged at his sleeve.

‘They’re stuck,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘They’re stuck,’ Temrai repeated. ‘They can’t move, same as us. Get this path clear and bring down six companies of archers.’

They cleared the path by dumping the carts, pushing them off the crumbling track. Most of them tumbled harmlessly down, smashing into junk timber as they bounced off the rocky face of the slope; a few landed like trebuchet shot in the compacted mass of bodies, some on one side of the hedge, some on the other. Lennecai lined his archers out in a double column and ordered them to face about; enough of them had a clear shot down into the pikemen to make the manoeuvre worthwhile. Bardas’ men instinctively looked up as the arrows hissed and whistled into the air, and were able to watch the arrows bank and pitch, slanting in at them like rain on a windy day. Of course there was no hope of getting out of the way; they had no choice but to stand and watch the arrows, as closely packed as rows of standing wheat. It wasn’t just the front rank, or the front three ranks. The archers were raking the whole formation from front to back.

As men died or were spitted, so they stopped pushing; the momentum went out of the push of pikes like tension from a rope bridge when one of the main hawsers is cut through. The mass started to crumple, just as a crushed plate folds up under the hammer, until the pressure from the men on the other end of the spears forced them to give ground. As they slipped back so the formation no longer supported the weight of the pikes, with their tremendous weight of meat hanging from the sharp end. The pikes went down, like trees felled in an overgrown forest, fouling and tangling in the undergrowth. Now would be a good time for a counterattack, Temrai observed, and a few moments later he saw it happen, as the survivors of the third and fourth ranks of his men pushed and shoved their way past the bodies of their fellows and tried to press home an attack with their scimitars. It was only a partial success; there still wasn’t enough room to swing a sword, to bring down an overhead blow, and in any case the pikemen’s helmets and pauldrons were easily proof against light cuts delivered with the force of the arm and wrist alone. The best they could do was trim off a few fingers, ears and noses (like foresters trimming a newly felled trunk).

‘He’s about to make a mistake,’ Bardas said aloud.

The pikemen were slumping, falling back; and Temrai’s men were pushing forward, following up an opportunity they’d never anticipated. Bardas sent a couple of runners to the sergeants of halberdiers, and another to the artillery crews.

Temrai saw it too, but not quite in time; by that stage it was out of his control, as his men surged out through the breaches in pursuit of the pikemen, and were immediately enfiladed by Bardas’ archers, positioned on either side. The shock of volley fire at close range stopped them in their tracks, as men went down like cut corn; before they could turn round and go back, the halberdiers moved in to cut them off. Temrai’s runners arrived in time to stop anybody else going beyond the stockade, but for those already outside nothing could be done. The work crews had started piling trash in the breaches to block them up even before the last of the pursuit party were killed. Bardas’ second opportunity didn’t amount to much; the trebuchets only managed two clear shots each on the archers lined up on the path before Temrai pulled them out.

They packed up the portable bridges and withdrew in good order, without interference from Temrai’s battered and out-of-commission artillery. Once the assault party was safely home, the bombardiers restored the trebuchets to their previous settings, locked down the handwheels and carried on with the bombardment of the path and the engine emplacements.

‘On balance,’ Bardas explained, ‘we came out ahead. We killed more of them, we made them waste a lot of arrows, and of course there’s the morale effect of having the advantage at the end. More to the point, we learned another lesson about close fighting in the fortress, and we learned it in a practice run rather than the actual main assault. All they can say is that they’re still there, and that hardly counts as progress.’ He sighed; and if he could see the wounded men sprawled on the wagons outside the surgeons’ enclosure, he didn’t say anything about them. ‘We’ve got a long way to go yet,’ he said, ‘but we’re getting there. After all, Perimadeia wasn’t built in a day.’

‘What, me?’ Gorgas looked shocked. ‘Certainly not. Why should I do such a stupid thing?’

The envoy’s expression didn’t change – did they breed them that way, Gorgas wondered, or did they have the sinews in their cheeks and jaws cut when they were children, as part of a lifelong apprenticeship in the art of diplomacy? ‘I’m only repeating what we were told,’ he said. ‘Our sources say that the rebellion was started by your men, acting on your orders. The fact that you’re discussing the matter with me rather than twenty thousand halberdiers ought to give you some indication of how much faith we put in reports from that particular source.’

Gorgas laughed, as if the envoy had just told a funny story. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘unless you tell me where the report came from I can’t really comment. I suppose it’s possible that these troublemakers you’re talking about were my men, in the sense that they served with me at some time or other, but anything they may have done certainly wasn’t on my orders. Perish the thought. After all,’ he added, ‘I may not be a genius, but I’m not stupid enough to go picking a fight with the Empire for the sake of a bunch of merchants who’ve never done me any favours. That’d be suicide. Can I get you something to eat?’

The envoy looked at him startled, then shook his head. ‘No, thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have bothered you. Obviously, if you do find out anything about who might have been responsible-’

‘Of course. I’d be glad to have the chance to do something to show just how serious the Mesoge is about becoming a loyal and useful member of the Empire. I’m right in thinking, aren’t I, that we’re the first nation ever to join the Empire voluntarily?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ the envoy said, standing up and brushing moss and leaf-mould rather vigorously from his cloak. ‘One other thing before I go: have you by any chance heard anything from your sister or her daughter? We’ve had rather disturbing reports that suggest they may have been abducted.’

‘You don’t say,’ Gorgas replied. ‘It’s true, I haven’t heard from either of them lately. I was planning to write to Niessa soon anyway; I’ll see what I can find out.’

‘Thank you,’ said the envoy gravely, staring pointedly at the axe lying across Gorgas’ knees. ‘I’ll let you get back to what you were doing.’

‘Gateposts,’ Gorgas replied. ‘It’s a shame to fell this old oak – I remember climbing up it when I was a kid – but it’s stone dead; better to cut it down now than have it come down on the roof some windy night. And you can’t beat oak for gateposts.’

‘I’m sure,’ the envoy said. One of his escort held the stirrup for him and he lifted himself rather stiffly into the saddle. ‘Thank you for your time.’

‘Always a pleasure,’ Gorgas said.

By the time the envoy and his party were out of sight, Gorgas was nearly through, so he decided to finish off before going back to the house. He’d made cuts on three sides so as to be able to dictate which direction the tree would fall in; all he had to do now was cut out the remaining quadrant until he reached the point where the narrow core at the centre could no longer support the shearing force of the tree’s weight. Then he ought to be able to tip the tree down with just the pressure of his hand.

It fell well, more or less where he’d wanted it to go, and he allowed himself a moment of rest and satisfaction, leaning on his axe and listening to the soft patter of raindrops falling from the leaves of the tall elm behind him. It had rained all night, but the morning had been fine and fresh – if there was one smell that meant home, it was the sweet aftermath of rain.

It was a shame he couldn’t stay a little longer; but there was work to do indoors before he could get back to this job (and it had waited thirty years; it’d probably keep another hour without causing a disaster). He leaned the axe against the elm tree and walked slowly back to the house.

They were there, same as usual; staring at each other across the dark room like two dogs. Why his sister and his niece insisted on sulking like this he couldn’t make out, but he had a feeling that trying to bounce them into reconciliation would most likely do more harm than good.

‘Someone came asking after you two today,’ he said. Neither of them said anything. ‘From the provincial office, letting me know there was a chance you’d been – abducted, was the word he used. So you’d better stay indoors a bit longer, just in case they’ve got someone watching. I’m sorry,’ he went on, as both women protested angrily, ‘but I don’t need the aggravation of being caught with you two, not until I’ve had time to straighten things out.’ He sat down and pulled the cider-jug towards him; nothing like chopping down a tree to raise a healthy thirst. ‘I think we’ll go along with this abduction idea,’ he said. ‘What happened was, you were both kidnapped by pirates; they sent to me for a ransom, I pretended to play along, paid out the ransom, got you back, then went after the pirates and dealt with them. When someone gives you a perfectly serviceable lie, it’s only polite to follow it up.’

Not a word, from either of them. He sipped his drink and smiled; it had taken a while to get used to the taste of raw home-made cider again, but it was one of those flavours that grew on you, a sort of comfortingly familiar unpleasantness. ‘Mostly,’ he went on, ‘I don’t want to cause any upsets until Bardas has beaten Temrai; it can’t be much longer, so we’ll just have to sit tight. That damned Imperial was sniffing about that, too, but of course they can’t prove anything.’

Niessa turned and looked at him. ‘What was all that about, anyway?’ she said. ‘Someone told me you’d sent soldiers to the Island-’

‘Who told you that?’ Gorgas asked.

Niessa frowned. ‘One of the sergeants who came up here the other day, the tall ginger-haired one-’

Gorgas nodded. ‘I know who you mean,’ he said.

‘He assumed I knew all about it,’ Niessa went on. ‘I hope I haven’t got him in trouble.’

‘It’s understandable,’ Gorgas said. ‘After all, it’s not so long ago they were taking their orders from you, not me. It’s all right, I’ll deal with it.’

That didn’t sound very hopeful for the red-headed sergeant, who really had been most reluctant to tell her anything, but Niessa wasn’t going to let herself get sidetracked. ‘So what have you been up to?’ she asked. ‘You really shouldn’t play power-politics, you know. You aren’t very politic and you’re certainly not very powerful.’

Gorgas grinned. ‘It’s like cutting down a tree,’ he said, ‘it’s just a matter of making sure things fall the right way. I knew that if the provincial office had their way it’d be their general and the troops from the Island who ran down Temrai, and Bardas would only be there to round up the stragglers. Which would have been no use at all to anybody. So I made sure the fleet didn’t sail on time.’

‘You did?’ Iseutz asked, smiling. ‘Oh, sure. And how did you manage that?’

‘Easy,’ Gorgas said. ‘I went round some of the merchants I know on the Island, put the idea into their heads of trying to hold up the provincial office for more money. I expected it to be much harder work than it actually was; for a nation that call themselves businessmen, they’re as naive as they come. Of course,’ he went on, ‘I knew there was a risk the Imperials would do what they in fact did – annex the Island and get hold of the ships that way; but I wasn’t bothered by that, because I was figuring on Bardas catching up with Temrai in the open, rather than having to dig him out. So, when the Imperials made their move, I sent a few of my people to cause trouble on the Island; which they did, bless them, and now Bardas has the field pretty much to himself. It’s all turned out much better than I thought it would, actually.’

There was a moment’s silence. Niessa was shaking her head contemptuously. ‘One thing that occurs to me,’ said Iseutz. ‘Do you actually have any proof that Bardas wants to be the one to bring back Temrai’s head to the prefect, that it actually matters to him? For all you know, he was quite happy to potter about on the borders, well away from the fighting.’

‘Don’t be silly, Iseutz,’ Gorgas said. ‘I know Bardas, you don’t. When he sees an opportunity, he makes the most of it – he’s like me or your mother in that respect, I suppose it runs in the family. Look at how well he’s done already since he’s been in the army; he took Ap’ Escatoy for them, and now he’s in charge of an army with a field command and the chance to avenge a terrible defeat and restore the prestige of the Empire. They’ll have to give him a prefecture after this, it’ll be the making of him. And I don’t suppose he’ll be heart-broken at the prospect of settling the score with Temrai, either, though he’s not what I’d call a vindictive person. Unlike some,’ he added meaningfully, looking at Iseutz. ‘No, what Bardas has got that the rest of us haven’t is this strong moral sense; he’ll want to see Temrai punished, not out of spite or because it’ll give him pleasure, but because he knows it’s something that’s got to be done, and he won’t feel right until it’s been done and he’s done it.’

‘And you’ve taken steps to make sure he gets the opportunity.’

‘It was the least I could do,’ Gorgas replied. ‘I wouldn’t have felt right if I hadn’t done it. And really, it was so easy in the end. Now then,’ he went on, ‘that’s enough of that, I’ve got letters to write. Have either of you seen Zonaras? I want him to nip out to Tornoys for me.’

Iseutz shrugged. ‘Which one is Zonaras?’ she asked. ‘I still can’t tell them apart.’

Gorgas frowned at her. ‘Very amusing,’ he said. ‘I take it that means you haven’t. Well, if you do see him, I’ll be in the office.’

What Gorgas called the office was a small room at the back of the house; originally it had been a smokehouse, where the hams were hung up over a smouldering cairn of oak-chips, but Clefas and Zonaras hadn’t bothered much with curing meat, and they’d used it as a dump for sundry clutter. Gorgas had had it re-thatched and repointed, and had knocked a doorway through and put in a window. He had plans for a new, much larger smokehouse on the other side of the yard, once he’d finished repairing the fence and restoring the woodshed and the trap-house; but that was going to have to wait.

He had a desk, rather a fine one with a slanting face at chest height (Gorgas was old-fashioned and preferred standing up to write), a lamp-bracket that swung sideways on a pivoted arm, another arm with a hole in it for the ink-horn and a tray on top for his penknives, sealing wax, sharpening stone, inkstone, sand-shaker and all the other marginally useful paraphernalia that tend to accrue to people who spend a significant proportion of their time writing. Under the face was a board that pulled out and was supported by two folding struts, just the right size for a counting board, with a rack for your reckoning counters let into the side. Needless to say it had been made in Perimadeia, about a hundred years ago; the wood was dark and warm with beeswax, and across the top was carved the motto DILIGENCE-PATIENCE-PERSISTENCE, suggesting that it had been made for a customer in the Shastel Order. Gorgas remembered it well from his childhood – where his father had got it from he hadn’t the faintest idea, but he’d used it as a cutting-board for making and trimming arrow-fletchings, as witness the hundreds of thin lines scored across the face. When he’d rescued it from the dead furniture store in the half-derelict hayloft, Gorgas had intended to reface it with leather or fine-sawn Colleon oak veneer, but in the end he’d kept it as it was, not wanting to deface any of the visible signs his father had left behind.

He’d trimmed a fresh pen only the day before, out of a barred grey goosefeather; it didn’t need sharpening but he sharpened it anyway, using the short knife with the blade worn paper-thin by decades of sharpening that had always been in the house for as long as he could remember (but his mother had used it in the kitchen, for skinning and jointing). Then he folded back the lid of the ink-horn (it was one he’d made himself; but Bardas had made the lid and the little brass hinge, beaten them out of scraps of brass scrounged from a scabbard-chape they’d found, green and brittle, in the bed of a stream), dipped the pen and started to write. It was a very short letter written on a tiny scrap of thrice-scraped parchment, and when he’d sanded it he rolled it up tight and pushed it into a brass foil tube slightly thinner than an arrowshaft. Then he reached under the desk and fished out an arrow.

It was a standard Imperial bodkinhead, with a small diamond-section blade and a long-necked socket. He pulled the head off without any real effort and pushed the brass tube up inside the socket as far as he could get it to go. Then he took a little leather bag from the top of the desk, opened it and tapped a few brown crystals out into the palm of his hand. There was also a small brass dish on the tray, one of the pans from a long-lost pair of scales. Having transferred the crystals into the pan he took the penknife and made a small nick in his forearm, angling his arm so that the blood dripped on to the crystals. When they were amply covered, he wrapped a piece of cloth over the cut and carefully spat into the pan until the proportions of blood and spit were roughly the same. Finally he added a fat pinch of sawdust from a twist of parchment he’d had tucked under his cuff.

Pulling the lamp-arm toward him, he held the pan over the flame and stirred the mixture with the penknife handle, dissolving the crystals (glue, extracted from steeped rawhide). When he was satisfied with the consistency he took a dollop of the glue on the tip of his little finger and smeared the end of the arrowshaft where the socket was to go. After putting the socket carefully back on and making sure it was straight, he served the joint with a length of fine nettle-stem twine, using the last of the glue to stick down the ends.

The last step was to mark the arrow; he dipped the pen back into the ink and painstakingly wrote this one between the cock feather and the bottom fletching, in tiny, angular clerk’s letters. Then he laid it flat on the window-sill to dry.

He had other letters to write, and he was busy with them when Zonaras came in (as usual, without knocking).

‘Well?’ he said.

Gorgas looked up. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour and ride over to Tornoys-’

‘What, today?’

‘Yes, today. Go to the Charity and Chastity – I don’t need to tell you where that is – and ask for Captain Mallo, who’s going to Ap’ Escatoy. Give him these letters and this arrow-’

‘What’s he want with just one arrow?’

‘Just you make sure he gets it,’ Gorgas said, in a tone of voice that made Zonaras open his eyes wide. ‘He knows what to do. Once you’ve done that,’ he added, reaching into his pocket, ‘and not before under any circumstances, have a drink on me.’ He handed over a couple of silver quarters, which Zonaras took quickly without saying anything. ‘All right?’

Zonaras nodded. ‘The mare’s cast a shoe,’ he said.

‘What? When was that?’

Zonaras shrugged. ‘Day before yesterday,’ he said.

Gorgas sighed. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Take my horse, just try not to ride her down any rabbit holes. We’ll shoe the mare when you get back.’

Zonaras frowned. ‘I’ve got a lot on right now,’ he said.

‘All right, I’ll shoe the mare. Now get on; remember, Captain Mallo, going to Ap’ Escatoy, at the Charity and Chastity. You think you can remember that?’

‘Course.’

After he’d gone, Gorgas leaned against the desk and scowled. If anybody was capable of messing up a simple job, it was Zonaras. On the other hand, Zonaras riding to the Charity and Chastity in Tornoys and drinking himself stupid was the most natural thing in the world, a regular event these last twenty years, a sight so familiar as to be practically invisible.

Before he left the study, Gorgas paused in the doorway and looked up, as he always did, at the mighty and beautiful bow hung on two pegs over the top of the frame. It was the bow Bardas had made for him, just as he’d once made the ink-horn cover and the little copper sand-shaker and the folding three-piece box-wood ruler, which had been with Gorgas wherever he’d gone (it got broken in Perimadeia while he was there; he’d kept the pieces and, years later, had the best instrument-maker in the City put them back together again, with the finest fish-bladder glue and tiny silver tacks so small you could hardly see them; he’d had a rigid gold and silver case made for it at the same time, to make sure it didn’t get broken again).