by K. J. Parker
Bardas thought about that for a long time, and then smiled. Odd, that of all of them he should be the one who ended up making a living out of his manual dexterity; he, not Gorgas, had been one of the most successful fencers-at-law in the history of Perimadeia, fighting and killing with the sword, a tool notoriously awkward to manipulate. Odd that he, not Gorgas, had ended up making a living out of killing people. It only goes to show, we’re given talents but don’t always use them.
He put the thought of his brother Gorgas carefully to one side, stowed the useless bone bow under the bench and looked around for something to do. No shortage of that; the billets of that ash they’d cut in the mountains needed to be drawn down into staves, preferably before the boy turned them all into firewood for the benefit of his education. He climbed up onto the bench and pulled one out of the stack stowed between the rafters, then got down again, picked up his drawknife and tested the edge with his thumb. Blunt, of course; his diligent young apprentice had been using it, and as usual had left it as sharp as a tomato. Bardas growled softly and looked round for the stone.
‘I think I left the stone out by the back gate,’ Bardas said, ‘when we were cutting back the brambles. Go and see if it’s there, would you?’
‘It’s raining,’ the boy pointed out.
‘So? You weren’t made of salt last time I looked.’
The boy muttered something under his breath about justice and the fair division of labour, and slouched very slowly towards the door. ‘You sure it’s not under the bench?’ he asked, as he reached for the latch.
‘Sure,’ Bardas replied. ‘I looked there just now.’
‘There’s all sorts of places it could be.’
‘Very true. Now get down to the gate and fetch it.’
While he was gone, Bardas tidied away some of the tools he’d been using that morning. Under the heap he found the stone. Damn, he said to himself, and set about putting an edge on the drawknife. He’d just about got it right when the boy came hurrying in, his hair plastered round his head like seaweed on a wet rock.
‘Sorry about that,’ Bardas said, ‘it was here all the-’
‘There’s two boats down below in the cove,’ the boy interrupted, the words spilling out of his mouth.
Bardas frowned. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. ‘Who’s dumb enough to be out fishing in this weather?’
‘They aren’t fishing boats,’ the boy went on in a sort of terrified glee. ‘They’re barges. They were just coming in past the Horn Rock.’
‘Barges,’ Bardas Loredan repeated, as if the word was meaningless.
‘Two of them, full of men. I think they’re soldiers, from Shastel.’
Barges. Soldiers from Shastel. That doesn’t make any kind of sense. ‘Are you sure about that?’ he said. ‘Damn it, why am I asking?’ He straightened up, stopped and hesitated. ‘You’re sure?’ he repeated.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ the boy replied angrily. ‘Really, it was two barges, I stopped and looked. They didn’t see me, because as soon as I saw them I ducked down behind a rock, but I saw them and they were both full of men. I couldn’t see them properly because they were all wearing hoods because of the rain, but what else would two barges full of men be?’
Fair point. ‘All right,’ Bardas said. ‘Here’s what you do. Run down to the village as fast as you can, go to the smithy and tell Leijo you’ve seen what looks like a raiding party; he’ll tell you what to do.’
‘All right,’ the boy said. ‘What about you? Are you coming?’
Bardas shook his head. ‘I’ll probably join you later, but I suppose I ought to go and have a look first. Here,’ he added, ‘take the four flatbows we finished yesterday and the big sheaf of bodkinheads. Can you manage them by yourself?’
‘Of course,’ the boy replied. ‘Are we going to fight them, then?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Bardas said. ‘Anyway, not if we can possibly help it. That’s what the army’s for. Go on, get a move on. You’d better go through the lower copse, just in case. And be careful.’
He helped load up the boy’s arms with the bows and arrows and watched him run off. Then he shut the workshop door and walked quickly over to the house. He had to go down on his hands and knees to get it; a long greasy bundle of cloth he’d stowed under his bed some time ago, put away out of sight and largely out of mind. Damn, he thought again, as he shook off the wrapping and lifted out the two-handed Guelan broadsword his brother Gorgas had given him, just before the City fell. There was a touch of mildew on the shoulder-strap, a slight fog of rust on the pommel, like the mist left behind when you breathe on glass. He put the strap over his shoulder, then took his bow and quiver off the hooks on the wall. Absolutely not, he told himself as he shut the house door behind him; it’s just that it’d be stupid to leave the sword lying about, it’s worth a fortune. And I wouldn’t want to lose the bow, either. He looked back at the house and then across at his workshop, as if he was leaving on a long journey, then set off up the hill at a brisk walk.
CHAPTER FIVE
From the gate at the top of the track, there was a clear view across the narrow ribbon of clifftop grazing land to the cove. Bardas crossed the green strip and pushed his way through the tangle of briars that overlooked the neck of the cove. It was a good place to see without being seen.
The men on the shingle beach below didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry. They had hauled the long, heavy barges up out of the water and were unloading their gear – armour and halberds in waxed-cotton covers, kitbags and satchels, all sodden and glistening in the rain. They looked bone-weary – reasonably enough: it was no easy run from Shastel round the back of Scona Island in this sort of weather even in a proper boat, let alone the primitive, cack-handed punts that were the best the Shastel people could do in the way of seafaring transport. You wouldn’t get me out in one of those things, Bardas assured himself with a true landsman’s shudder. Only idiots choose to be surrounded on all sides by water.
He counted them; seventy-five heavy infantry, the celebrated Shastel halberdiers. He’d never seen any of them before, and, he had to admit, they looked just like any other soldiers: awkward, brutal and alien, out of place in any landscape. Maybe all soldiers look alike in the rain, he reflected. And it always rains, sooner or later. I’m just glad I’m not down there with them. Rotten job, and nobody really has to do it.
A sergeant started shouting orders and the men shuffled across the grinding shingle to form a column, while another man, the officer presumably, huddled over an increasingly waterlogged and useless parchment map. From the way he kept glancing down at it and then up at the surrounding wall of cliffs, it was either the wrong map, upside-down or not particularly accurate; in the end the officer stuffed it like an old rag into his satchel and stumped across the shingle, sliding a little over the loose stones – he looks just like a duck, Loredan observed, waddling down to the river with her chicks. He took one last look round, as if hoping for inspiration, then led the column towards the one track that wound up the side of the cliff towards Loredan’s house and the village beyond.
My house, Loredan thought gloomily. Well, it’s too wet for a fire to burn properly. Just for fun he considered the tactical position. There was only one track up from the beach, and five men could hold it all day against any army, provided you could find five lunatics with a death wish at such short notice. More realistically, a dozen or so trained City archers could pin this lot down almost indefinitely on the straight stretch of track that led up to the downs; and if he had two dozen spearmen to circle round behind this fuzz-patch and take the goat track that led down onto the beach from the other side – but he didn’t, and that was probably just as well. It was, after all, none of his business; they might trash his house, but then again they might not, if their mission was to burn the village. The point was that he didn’t belong here, and so he didn’t have to join in when this sort of thing happened. That was the whole point of not belonging.
He kept stil
l and quiet, waiting for the soldiers to go away. Thinking about it logically, there was no reason for them to go anywhere near his place if they were heading for the village; it’d waste time, possibly enough time for word to get to the village or even the nearest guard post. (Bardas knew that the village had already been warned and there wasn’t a guard post nearer than Scona Town itself, but maybe they didn’t.) And even if they did go snooping round his place, what harm could they actually do? The thatch would be too wet to burn, they weren’t going to waste time pulling the buildings down with ropes and bars, and who in their right mind would want to plunder a woodworker’s shop? Planes, drawknives and spokeshaves aren’t high on an experienced looter’s list of priority items. No, as soon as they’d satisfied themselves that there was nobody about, they’d push off and get on with their work.
Even when he was fairly certain that they were long gone, he stayed put – if they’re gone now, they’ll be even more gone in fifteen minutes – and lay snuggled in his coat under the surprisingly effective shelter of a big, fat briar-bush. If anything, the rain was getting heavier; a bit of wind had got up, coming in off the sea. There was no reason, in fact, why he couldn’t stay here all day. It’d probably be the most sensible thing to do, in the circumstances. On the other hand, it was very boring. He stood up, picked trailing shoots of bramble off his arms and legs, and cautiously made his way out of the fuzz.
The first thing he saw was a satisfying absence of smoke rising from the direction of his property. The beer-barrel, he remembered; a nearly new barrel of quite reasonable beer in the middle house, they’d fined and tapped it two days ago. Soldiers can smell beer across vast distances, even when the wind’s in the other direction; in fact, it probably wasn’t smell but something far more abstruse, closer to the sort of metaphysical stuff his old friend Alexius was so deeply into. Chances were, he could kiss that goodbye. Still, if they’d been busy drinking his beer, they wouldn’t have had time to damage anything else.
A combination of rain, mud and issue boots results in a trail a blind man could follow. Bardas picked it up at the top of the cliff path and followed it to his gate, where (oh, joy) it carried on without deviating, down the slope towards the village. Perhaps the officer had made sense of his map after all, or maybe they hadn’t even realised there were any buildings here; come to think of it, they were pretty well hidden by the outcrop and the rank growth of nettles he’d been meaning to do something about for the last month. Just as well he hadn’t. Three cheers for bad husbandry.
I ought to go home now, he thought. True, they’ll presumably be back later, returning the way they came; but they aren’t likely to stop on the way back, they’ll have done the job and be in a hurry to get away. I should go home, maybe even get on with some work. Me, I’m no bother to anybody, so why should anybody bother me?
Instead, he took the narrow rough track over the rocks that made an uncomfortable and hazardous short-cut to the village. It was a while since he’d been along here, and there was a season’s obstructive growth to tread down or wriggle under. Damn you, Nature, why can’t you leave things alone? he thought savagely, clambering through a notional gap in the branches of a rowan tree that had fallen across the path. (Rowan? No good for bows. Waste of everybody’s time it being there in the first place.) At least he could be sure nobody had been this way today, and since the path ran along the top line of the crest, he was out of sight of the main track. Not as sensible as staying home, perhaps, but sensible enough for a sensible man.
As he came round the sharp bend at the bottom of the Chapel Rock, the big outcrop that overlooked the seaward end of the village, he found a dead body. It was one of the halberdiers, lying face down in a patch of mud with an arrow sticking out of one ear – one of mine, he noticed, that batch I made with those sub-standard white goose quills and sold off cheap in the village. The man’s halberd was gone; he’d been stabbed several times in the back as well, but there was no blood – someone making sure, or just taking it out on dead meat, which would imply something to be angry about. No helmet either, but that figured. If he’d been wearing his helmet, he wouldn’t have got shot.
So someone was making a fight of it down in the village. Bardas frowned. They’d never struck him as warlike types, the sort who dream of tackling burglars and rustlers or marching down to the beach to ambush marauding pirates. Very few people were, in his experience; back along, when he’d been the one raiding and burning the encampments of the plainspeople to uphold the security of the City, he’d learnt pretty well all he’d ever want to know about how people react to this sort of thing. Generally, they ran; sometimes away, quite often round and round in circles, like ducks in a pen when the fox breaks in. Those that didn’t run, hid, and sometimes that was the right thing to do and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes they just stood there and watched, sometimes they shouted and screamed, sometimes they tried to talk to you and persuade you to go away. But one thing they very rarely did was fight; probably because human beings are not, at a fundamental level, that stupid. And when they did, some basic survival instinct made them give up short of actually killing one of the enemy, because if there’s one thing guaranteed to make a party of raiders mad at you, it’s killing one of their friends.
I don’t know, Loredan said to himself, as he stepped over the body, maybe these people just don’t know about these things. The sensible thing to do now, at any rate, would be to go home, put some food and some dry clothes in a bag, and head off into the mountains, maybe hide up for a day or so in one of the derelict farmhouses he’d seen there. That’d be the sensible thing.
Instead, he walked round the corner and down the track towards the village. It was a mess. There were a few bodies, but mostly it was just ordinary damage, the sort of thing a flood or a freak storm does so much better than human beings ever could. Perhaps understandably, given their recent experiences, the raiders seemed to have vented most of their rage on the village boats, the small ash-framed hide-covered curraghs that could cope with the worst tantrums the sea threw. As luck would have it, most of them had been drawn up in the square to have their hides regreased with the thick, foul-smelling dubbin that the Scona people made from newly shorn fleeces. The grease had been curing all summer and was now ready, and at this time of year the smell of lanolin and tanning fluid hung over the island like a cloud of midges. Now there wasn’t a single boat left intact, and bits of spar and scraps of hide were scattered everywhere, trodden into the mud like fallen leaves.
Maybe half a dozen fishermen lay among the smashed boats, draped and flopped in positions no living body ever lay in, and here and there Loredan found arrows – someone had lost his temper, perhaps, run indoors, grabbed his bow and started shooting out of the window. Here was a middle-aged woman with half a sack of flour under her and an arrow in her back, and an old man with his head cracked open like a walnut. Here was a fat young woman with a halberd still sticking in her, and a man’s arm, crudely severed at the elbow, a few feet away; it had taken two, maybe three cuts, and Loredan could picture him warding off the blows with an expendable part of his body, until presumably the attacker had decided he’d done enough and let him run. Here was a dead chicken, chopped nearly in half, and a dog with its belly ripped open, and here was a goat with a long rip in its side running across the line of its ribs from front shoulder to back; it lifted its head as Loredan came up to it, and went on chewing. Here was a dead halberdier – extremely dead – by the look of it two or three men had got hold of him and attacked him with knives and cleavers; and here was one of those attackers, presumably, lying on his back in a big mucky puddle with a small hatchet in one hand and a red palm-sized patch caked on the front of his shirt. More like a brawl than a battle, Loredan reflected disapprovingly; the officer’s fault for letting things get out of hand. We managed these things better in my day; though of course the plainsmen were used to being raided, they knew the drill as well as we did.
Here they’d tried to get a fire going, sev
eral times by the look of it, and failure hadn’t improved their temper. Neither had one of their men getting shot, because they’d made a fair mess of the house they hadn’t manage to set light to, and the two men who’d been in it as well. A little further down the street he found a live one, though only just; he recognised the sergeant who’d been giving the orders on the beach by the rather splendid gilded ridge round the crown of his helmet. He had managed to prop himself up against the side of a house and get the arrow out of his chest, but someone had had a go at cutting his throat, made a bad job of it and gone away. He tried to say something while Loredan looked at him and decided there wasn’t anything much that could be done; he shook his head and walked away, as if passing by an unconvincing beggar on a street corner. That brought him to the end of the main thoroughfare. It was very quiet, except for the pattering and dripping of the rain. His shoes were waterlogged, and he wriggled his wet toes with distaste. The sensible thing now would be to go home and change into dry clothes, before he caught his death of pneumonia.
Instead, he followed the trail the raiders had left, down the hill towards the next village.
Not a good day for making the short but troublesome crossing from Shastel to Scona. Gorgas Loredan, usually a good sailor, had to admit to being a trifle wobbly and green as he walked down the plank from the sloop Butterfly and gratefully set foot on the Traders’ Dock.
