by K. J. Parker
There is something almost arrogant about the lack of ostentation displayed by the Directors of Scona; a hectoring determination to prove that they have nothing to prove. Gorgas smiled as he savoured the words in his mind; the Dean of Shastel at his supercilious best, in a letter they’d intercepted a month or so back. On balance, he had to admit, he preferred the bewildering and vulgar complexity of Shastel architecture to the slab-sided four-walls-and-a-roof approach his sister had chosen, but he wasn’t sure that he liked himself for liking it. When his sister got going on the subject, as she often did, and started talking about every cornice and archetrave on Shastel being stained with the blood of forced labour, he tended to keep his head down and his mouth shut. As he passed the fountain he converted the smile into a wry grin and went left into Three Lions Street, where he lived.
He had only just turned the corner when a small, incredibly fast object hurtled down the paved street towards him yelling, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ and collided sharply with his midriff, knocking the wind out of him. He stepped back, put down his kitbag and lifted the object up, so that her eyes were level with his.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘I banged my head on your belt,’ his daughter said reproachfully, ‘and now it hurts.’
Gorgas solemnly examined the slight red mark on her temple. ‘We’ll have to post you as wounded in action,’ he said. ‘We’ll ask Mummy if you deserve a medal.’
The little girl smiled at him with a mercenary glint in her eyes. ‘Please can I have a medal?’ she said. ‘I’d really like one. You get medals for being brave.’
‘That’s right,’ Gorgas replied, putting her down and taking her hand. ‘And you’re going to be very brave and not cry just because you bumped your head.’
‘All right. Then will I get a medal?’
‘If you eat all your dinner.’
‘Oh.’ The little girl frowned thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think I really want a medal, actually,’ she said. ‘I’m not very hungry.’
‘Oh, really?’ Gorgas made a pantomime of ferocious scowling. ‘You mean you’ve been stuffing yourself with nuts and honeycomb all afternoon, so you haven’t got any room left for proper food. I know you too well, my girl. Now run indoors and tell Mummy I’m home.’
He watched her scuttle into the house, and not for the first time wished he hadn’t agreed to call her Niessa, after her aunt. It had been a bad omen, in his opinion; far better to have named her after her mother, or picked a name that had no connotations at all. I wouldn’t mind her having her aunt’s brains, he told himself, or her strength of will, or even that clarity of thinking that’s so easy to mistake for callousness and cruelty; but that’s about all I’d want for her out of that particular package. Let’s all hope she takes after her mother.
Though comparatively modest for one of his position and means, Gorgas’ house was large by the standards of Scona and reflected the tastes and experiences of its owner. The central courtyard with its surrounding covered cloister was in the approved local style, but whereas nearly all the houses on Scona were entirely inward-looking, offering nothing to the outside view except four dour walls with narrow slits for windows, Gorgas had built a verandah on the side that faced the sea, Island-fashion, where he could sit and look out across the channel to Shastel and the mountain ranges of the mainland. The builders who’d executed his design hadn’t known what to make of it; they’d insisted on calling it the look-out, on the assumption that it must have something to do with his position in the Bank. Presumably they imagined him sitting there with wax tablets and stylus, jotting down details of the ships arriving at the Dock, or brooding over maps and military textbooks as he planned the next phase of the war. Fortunately the verandah was hardly overlooked at all, and so only a few of his neighbours ever got to see the scandalous sight of the Chief Executive sitting idly in a huge cedarwood chair with his wife on a pile of cushions beside him and his offspring playing with wooden bricks at his feet.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the interiors all betrayed more than a hint of Perimadeian decadence; there were frescoes painted on the walls, bushy and inedible plants in pots dotted round the edge of the cloister and, in the middle of the courtyard, a fountain supplied by a natural hot spring in which the members of the household were rumoured to wash themselves at regular intervals. Infuriatingly for the neighbours, Gorgas’ servants were all foreigners and depressingly reticent about their master’s eccentricities, and (since they also formed his personal bodyguard) it was deemed unwise to press them too closely for information they weren’t prepared to give. One consequence of this tantalising shortage of hard data was the quite bewildering cloud of rumour and speculation that had settled around the man, which included such bizarre and improbable tales as the one that held that he’d fled from his native country after prostituting his sister and murdering his father and half his family. Needless to say, nobody actually believed that particular fantasy. But there were plenty of quite sensible people who felt there was no smoke without fire, and that there might well be secrets in Gorgas’ past that would be better left undisturbed for everybody’s sake.
He dumped his kitbag in the lodge and went straight through into the courtyard, which was the likeliest place to find his wife at this time of day. She had set up her desk in the shade of the cloister, just clear of the ring of sparkling fallout from the fountain, and he kept back in the shadows for a minute or so watching her as she painstakingly copied a long legal document. At the end of each line she carefully read through what she’d written, comparing it a word at a time with the original. A strand of her long black hair had worked loose from the tight bun on the back of her head, and was dangling perilously close to the ink pot.
‘Watch out, Heris,’ he said softly. ‘You’ll get ink on the page.’
She twitched, almost knocking over the ink. ‘Idiot,’ she replied, with a smile. ‘Don’t make me jump like that. So you’re not dead, then.’
‘Not so as you’d notice,’ he replied, strolling across the courtyard and kissing her gently on the cheek. ‘All well?’
She nodded. ‘A couple of men came looking for you, middle-aged merchant types, yesterday, and an old boy this morning. They both said it wasn’t important and they’d come back. Vido sent the North Coast papers down, and I’m copying them now. Luha got sent home from school for fighting,’ she continued with a frown. ‘Again. Oh, and She wants us to go round for dinner tomorrow.’
Between the two of them, there was no need to specify who She was. By and large, Heris managed to cope remarkably well with the all-pervading presence of her sister-in-law. She’d known before she married Gorgas that there was no way in which she could compete with Niessa Loredan in any department of her life. When Niessa spoke, Gorgas listened, and when she gave an order, he obeyed. Dimly Heris was aware that it had something to do with various disagreeable things in the past, and she had the common sense to keep out of it. Common sense was, in fact, the cornerstone of her existence. If she had been the princess in the fairytale who was forbidden to go into the one locked and secret room in the castle, then into that locked and secret room she would never ever have gone, and the happy ending would have happened for her years earlier than scheduled. So, instead of making difficulties and trying to intervene between Gorgas and Niessa, she made sure that the things that mattered to her were areas in which Niessa had no interest or involvement.
The compromise was simple and effective, and only failed to be completely viable when Gorgas had to go away on business, most specifically the sort of business that made it necessary for him to wear his mailshirt under his coat and pack three days’ rations in his kitbag. There had been a time when she’d been able to keep her mind off those, too; but ever since his last trip to Perimadeia, when he’d barely managed to get out of there alive when the plainsmen sacked the place, she found she had difficulty in being properly detached about it all. That aside, she represented the part of his life that took place here inside the enclosed area
of the house, where nothing too disagreeable was ever allowed to enter. Anything he did outside, be it his work, his relationship with his sister or even his occasional infidelities (and they were very occasional; or at least she had no reason to think otherwise) might have been the acts of some other man who by coincidence shared the same name. They were neither interesting nor relevant to her, just as the management of the house and the buying of vegetables for the evening meal were of no interest to him.
‘Tomorrow,’ Gorgas repeated, sliding into the chair beside her and peering over her shoulder at the mortgage deed she was copying. ‘That’s a nuisance. I was going to spend tomorrow evening catching up on the work that’ll have piled up while I was away. You know, I wish she’d think about things like that sometimes.’
Heris kept her eyes on the page and didn’t answer. Years ago she’d worked out that while Gorgas frequently said all sorts of unpleasant things about his sister, that prerogative was reserved for him alone. For what it was worth, she got the impression that Niessa liked her, or at least approved of her, in the same way a chess-player approves of one of his pieces when it stays where it’s been put and doesn’t go wandering off all over the board.
‘Have you got much more of that to do?’ Gorgas said. ‘I’d like to take a walk around the Square before dinner.’
Heris shook her head. ‘At least,’ she added, ‘I wasn’t planning on finishing it today. There’s miles of it. The parcels clause alone is two sides.’ She hesitated and wrinkled her nose. ‘This is a big place,’ she said. ‘Since when did we have clients among the landed gentry?’
Gorgas laughed. ‘You should see it,’ he said. ‘Three square miles of rock and scrub, no useful timber and about the only thing you’d ever grow there is old before your time. The two brothers – they’re both in their late sixties – gave up trying to make a living farming it years ago; they just net the weirs for salmon and pootle about in that little toy quarry they’ve got on the western edge. We’ll be lucky if we see a bent quarter out of that one while they’re still alive. But two old boys living on their own – call it a long-term investment.’
‘I see,’ Heris replied. ‘I expect you know what you’re doing. There,’ she added, drawing a line under a finished clause with her ebony ruler and putting the stopper back in the ink bottle. ‘That’s enough of that for one day. I’ll get Luha and Niessa ready while you put the desk away for me.’
It was almost dark by the time they arrived in the Square, and the evening promenade was nearly over. Around the steps of the fountain the stallholders were gradually packing up for the night; fortunately, they all knew Gorgas Loredan by sight and quickly unfolded their trestles, spread their cloths and started laying out their goods again. Heris bought a honey-cake each for Niessa and Luha, cheese and sausages for the evening meal and a quarter of cinnamon to flavour the wine, while Gorgas amused himself by haggling with an old friend and sparring partner for a new penknife and set of writing tablets he didn’t really want, and ended up striking such a good bargain that he was obliged to buy them.
‘Heris,’ he called out across the Square, ‘I’ve come out without any money. Have you got seven quarters?’
The stallholder grinned and assured him that his credit was good, but Gorgas looked suitably shamefaced and promised faithfully to send his boy out first thing in the morning with the money. The stallholder insisted on making a show of wrapping the things carefully in a square of waxed silk tied up with red cord, packed up his stall with a flourish and departed with his trestle and pack over his shoulder, whistling cheerfully.
‘Not another penknife,’ Heris sighed. ‘You’ve got a whole box of them you never even look at, and you insist on using that old thing you made out of a pan handle that you’ve had ever since I’ve known you.’
Gorgas shrugged. ‘I’m afraid that if I take the good ones out of the house I’ll lose them somewhere. You know what I’m like. But if I leave the old home-made one somewhere or it falls out of my pocket, then it’s no great loss. Besides,’ he added, ‘it gets the job done. You can sharpen pens with it. What more do you want from a penknife?’
‘Rubbish,’ his wife replied. ‘You just prefer using things that are old and tatty.’
‘Old, tatty and functional,’ Gorgas said gravely. Heris laughed, but with just the trace of an edge; and that’s why you’re still with me, and not one of those girls you pick up when you’re away… She called to the children. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time we were getting back.’
Niessa protested, needless to say, and made a specious but basically ill-founded case for being allowed to go paddling in the fountain, which her parents wisely ignored. Luha swallowed the last of his honey-cake and licked honey and the last flake of almond off his thumb. They were just about to go back when Gorgas stopped dead in his tracks.
‘Just a moment,’ he said. ‘You go on, I’ll catch you up. There’s someone I haven’t seen in a long while.
Heris nodded and led the children away. Gorgas stood motionless for a while under the shadow of the fountain, hard to see in the dim light, studying an old man who was buying the last loaf of bread from the last remaining stall. It was two years since Gorgas had seen him last, in the city of Perimadeia, on the night before it was stormed by the plainsmen. He’d heard since that the old man had escaped and was still alive, but the rumours had placed him on the Island, where he was said to be living off the thinly disguised charity of a young merchant and his sister. Gorgas frowned. He knew without understanding why that the former Patriarch Alexius was a very important man, important enough to have come to the attention of his sister. If he was here in Scona, it followed that she had had him brought here; and if that was the case, what was he doing pottering about in the Square buying stale bread at a discount?
He crossed the Square quickly and quietly, keeping in the shadows more from force of habit than for any conscious reason; but the old man saw him and recognised him before he spoke.
‘Gorgas Loredan,’ he said.
‘Patriarch,’ Gorgas replied, with a polite nod. ‘You’re looking well.’
Alexius smiled. ‘I can say the same of you,’ he said, ‘and with the added advantage of telling the truth.’ He hesitated, having nothing else to say; he remembered their last conversation, in his lodgings at the Academy.
‘Would you like to join us for dinner?’ Gorgas said. ‘We’re having lentil soup and a leg of lamb, and my wife’s just bought some rather fine-looking sausages. It’s not far, just around the corner.’
Alexius looked at him, and Gorgas was reminded of the expression in the stationer’s eyes as they argued over the price of the penknife. A bargain was being struck here, compromise traded for compromise. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ Alexius said, and he glanced down at the lump of hard barley bread he was holding in his hands. ‘But your wife won’t thank me for rolling up for dinner at a moment’s notice, I’m sure.’
‘Not at all,’ Gorgas replied. ‘We enjoy having people for dinner, and there’s plenty to go round. Our cook always makes at least one helping more than we need, and then eats it himself. He could do with losing weight, before he ends up getting hopelessly wedged in the scullery doorway.’
‘In that case,’ Alexius replied, ‘I’d be delighted.’
In the short time he’d been on Scona, Alexius had seen rather more than he’d wanted to of a couple of large, apparently official buildings and slightly less of the very cheap inn where he’d deposited his second-best coat and shoes. So far, he hadn’t seen inside a real house, and he had to admit to himself that he was curious. Why this should be, he didn’t know. Since he left home and joined the Foundation, he’d spent most of his life in dormitories, cells and lodgings, and the only ordinary dwellings he’d ever got to know properly were his family home and the house of Venart and his sister Vetriz, the merchants from the Island who’d rescued him from the sack of Perimadeia. The two establishments had been so unlike each other that any scientific attempt to extrapol
ate a model of an Ordinary House was clearly futile. Nevertheless, he wanted to see inside Gorgas Loredan’s house, and that was all there was to it.
If he’d been hoping to find anything in common between the Loredan house and either of his two previous samples, he was disappointed. It was as if his old home had been cut open and turned inside out, like a rabbit’s skin; instead of the house being surrounded by the garden, what passed for a garden was in the middle of the house. A more inconvenient arrangement, he couldn’t help thinking, would be hard to devise. If you wanted to go from one room to another that happened to be on the opposite side of the square, you’d either have to traipse all through the intervening rooms or else walk across the grass – aggravating if it was dark or raining. Also, because the little patch of open space was surrounded by high walls, it was overshadowed at all times of day, which meant there was no chance of growing vegetables or fruit, and surely that defeated the whole object. He could only guess that this style of building was forced on these people by the needs of defence and security, so that each house was enclosed by high walls like a little city. A strange way to live, he reflected, and not to his taste.
On the other hand, it was better than the inn, although since the same could be said of virtually any building with a roof, that wasn’t a supreme compliment. Loredan’s wife, a pleasant-faced woman in her late thirties, seemed genuinely pleased to have company, and the little girl immediately understood, with that special sense that small children have, that here was an old man not particularly used to children who could be charmed to death. All in all, it seemed like a fine specimen of a family, the sort of household you might show students round as a field exercise for the part of the course dealing with human relationships. It was almost as if it had been designed that way, and the accessory family members carefully selected for the purpose; or was that just his knowledge of Gorgas’ past life colouring his judgement? Quite possibly. After all, he had about as much hard data on families as he had on dwelling-houses, and for all he really knew, the Loredan household might easily be as typical as it seemed.
