The Belly of the Bow f-2

by K. J. Parker

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Athli said, and Gannadius saw that her face had gone white. ‘Is there any way – I mean, can I see this vision too? Or isn’t that possible for non-believers or whatever you’d call it?’

  Gannadius shook his head. ‘I know it was Bardas,’ he said. ‘He seemed perfectly sound and healthy, but I wouldn’t go further than that. He took the dead man’s shirt and boots in preference to his own, which suggests at the least that he’s down on his luck. There wasn’t anything in what I saw that confirmed the place was Scona, but that’s where Cousin Ramo is, or was. In my opinion, the visions must be either the recent past or the immediate future, for that reason. You see, I do know for a fact that Bardas is on Scona. In fact, he’s been there for some time.’

  Athli looked at him with cold fury in her eyes. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me.’

  ‘It’s not like that, I only saw him for the first time quite recently. I know he’d been there a while because he had a house and a workshop, what looked like a fairly well-established business, something to do with woodworking; and that suggests-’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ Athli interrupted. ‘I’m sorry. So you’re saying he’s on Scona and probably in some sort of trouble.’

  Gannadius nodded. ‘That’s what I make of it, anyway,’ he said. ‘And I thought – well, I’d better tell you. I know you were-’

  ‘Yes,’ Athli said. ‘Look, I must go. But thank you for telling me. I may not be able to stop by before I leave, so – well, keep in touch. How do I find the Secretary’s office, by the way?’

  The door closed behind her, and not long afterwards Gannadius saw her from his window, walking briskly across the courtyard towards the Provost’s lodgings. He noticed that she’d forgotten to take her sword, and wondered whether he ought to send someone after her with it. He drew it from the scabbard, and saw that it wasn’t a sword at all, just a hilt and six inches of broken-off blade.

  ‘You did what?’ Niessa demanded.

  ‘I let him go,’ Gorgas repeated wearily.

  ‘But why? I told you-’

  ‘Because it was the only thing I could do in the circumstances, ’ Gorgas interrupted with a flash of irritation. ‘Think, Niessa. He was standing over me with an axe in his hand; I’ll swear he was this close to taking a swing at me.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘You weren’t there.’ Gorgas shivered a little. ‘Come on, look at the alternatives. If I’d tried to make him come back with me, either he’d have killed me or I’d have killed him. Either way, it wouldn’t have achieved the required objective. It wouldn’t have made things better. Agreed?’

  Niessa frowned. ‘You had your escort with you, didn’t you? Four against one-’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ Gorgas sighed. ‘Three squaddies and me against the longest-surviving law-fencer in the history of Perimadeia, in a cramped room where numbers wouldn’t have helped anyway. It’s certain sure he’d have killed one or two of them. It wasn’t a military operation, Niessa, it was a private family matter. Soldiers would only have made things worse.’

  ‘It was Bank business,’ Niessa replied coldly. ‘The whole object of the exercise was to neutralise a threat to the Bank’s security. To that extent, yes, I’d rather you’d killed him. Then at least he wouldn’t be wandering about just asking to be grabbed and used against us as a hostage.’

  The strain of Gorgas keeping his temper was almost audible. ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ he said quietly. ‘I know you didn’t mean it. Look,’ he went on, relaxing a little, ‘the object was to get him out of harm’s way, right? Well, that’s what I’ve done. This time tomorrow he’ll be on a ship, heading off somewhere a long way away, probably somewhere they’ve never even heard of Scona. Problem solved, no violence and everybody’s happy; we may even have started him thinking that maybe we’re not so bad after all. You’d never have got that result if you’d had him dragged in here against his will.’ Gorgas leant forward. ‘And there’s one other advantage that I’ll bet you haven’t even thought of.’

  ‘Really? Do tell.’

  ‘It’s simple. My confounded niece. If Bardas has gone away, we can let her go. I mean, she can’t very well kill him if he isn’t here, can she?’

  Niessa’s expression confirmed that no, she hadn’t even considered that. It was an interesting moment.

  ‘It’s what I do best,’ Gorgas went on. ‘I take a problem and I turn it into an opportunity to solve a couple more problems. Of course, it means you do have to be able to see the bigger picture and think in the longer term. But if my life stands for anything, it proves that there’s no problem so bad it can’t be sorted out somehow, even if it’s later rather than sooner, provided you never ever give in. Like Uncle Maxen used to say: never surrender while you’ve got one man still on his feet, you never know what may turn up.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘I hate the sea,’ confessed Bardas Loredan, clinging to the rail with both hands as the Fencer slid over a small wave. ‘Or at least I hate being on it. Comes of being a woodworker, I suppose.’

  ‘Really? And how do you make that out?’

  ‘I know a bit about wood,’ Bardas replied. ‘With particular reference to its tendency to rot, split, warp, fret, feather and just plain bust. And the thought that the only thing separating me from certain death is one inch of pine, probably the cheapest grade they could lay their hands on-’

  ‘Relax. The ship isn’t going to sink. It’s a good ship.’

  Another small wave hit the good ship and wobbled it a little. Bardas lurched, nearly lost his footing and hauled himself back upright, his fingernails leaving little marks in the rail timber. ‘I think we should turn back,’ he said. ‘While we still can.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. If you’re going to be like this all the way there-’

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ Bardas grumbled, his eyes shut. ‘Though come to think of it, I can’t see why you’re acting so superior. I mean, what the hell do you know about boats anyway? You’re just a carpet and cushion merchant, and before that you were nothing but a clerk. I can picture you turning up your nose at the sea the first time you saw it because the colour didn’t go with the rocks.’

  ‘Right. And you’re a farmer turned soldier turned lawyer turned bowyer. All of them occupations that call for an intimate knowledge of seafaring. Bardas Loredan, the human dolphin.’ Athli yawned and stretched her arms wide. ‘Though it’s true, we did do our fair share of shipping disputes. But you weren’t the one who had to read through the pleadings, with all those loathsome, incomprehensible technical terms. Bowsprites and luggers and mizensails and I don’t know what else. Why they can’t say “the bit of flappy cloth that hangs off the middle stick thing” like everybody else beats me.’

  Bardas nodded. ‘Talking of which,’ he said, ‘one thing I could never fathom, though I never mentioned it for fear of showing my ignorance, was why all that interminable paperwork was actually needed. After all, the whole thing was settled by three minutes’ violence, so what the hell was the point of all those carefully worded petitions and statements and rejoinders and surrejoinders you spent your time writing? It was all so meaningless, you know?’

  Athli looked at him in surprise. ‘You’re joking,’ she said. ‘Do you really mean to say you didn’t know? All that time, and all those fights?’

  ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking,’ Bardas replied, nettled. ‘So, are you going to tell me?’

  Athli giggled. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just find that – well, anyway. The point is, before a case was permitted to go to trial, the parties had to show the court – that means the judge. You remember the judge? Man in a black dressing gown sat up on a bench at the back of the hall.’

  ‘I may have noticed him one or twice,’ Bardas conceded. ‘I thought he was some sort of referee, to make sure there was no cheating.’

  ‘He was that as well. But the other part of his job was going over the pleadings to see if there was rea
lly a case to answer. Otherwise, the system would have broken down into people using the courts as a place to fight duels to settle private grudges, rather than serious commercial and criminal issues.’

  ‘Right,’ Bardas said. ‘I see. And in all the years we worked together, did a judge ever throw out a lawsuit for, what was it you said, no case to answer?’

  ‘No,’ Athli admitted. ‘Which goes to show how well the system worked,’ she added gamely.

  Bardas laughed. ‘And the rest,’ he said. ‘But honestly, I had no idea. Was it difficult?’

  Athli nodded. ‘Very,’ she replied. ‘And complicated, and time-consuming and boring. What do you think I did all day, sat around combing my hair?’

  ‘I never realised,’ Bardas said. ‘All that work, and all you ever got was five per cent. It doesn’t seem right, somehow.’

  Athli looked him in the eyes. ‘I didn’t have people trying to kill me,’ she said. ‘I never had an argument with the way we split money. But no, I can believe you didn’t realise. The truth is, if you’re not prepared to kill people and risk getting killed yourself, you have to work damned hard to earn a living in this cruel, hard world.’

  ‘Wouldn’t suit me,’ Bardas said, shaking his head. ‘But it’s true, I haven’t really done a proper day’s work since I left the farm; I mean, soldiering’s hard but you can’t really call it work, it’s a lethal mixture of boredom and adventure but it’s not work because it doesn’t actually produce anything, or do anything. And the fencing – well, that was just the soldiering without the boredom but with very unpleasant adventures. And as for the bow-making-’

  ‘Yes? Surely that was a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.’

  Bardas shook his head. ‘No really,’ he replied. ‘My brother was making sure I was handsomely subsidised out of the procurement budget. I only had it explicitly confirmed the other day, but I suppose at the back of my mind I’d known it for some time. I was getting paid well over the odds, far more than the work was worth, which meant I was really only playing at it, like a hobby or something.’ He closed his eyes. ‘In other words, the whole thing was a waste of time. I might just as well have stayed in Scona Town and spent all day lounging around like an old blind dog, the way they wanted me to.’

  Athli didn’t say anything, and they stood for a while looking at the distant speck on the seam between the sea and the sky where Scona had been. Then Athli muttered something about some chore she had to attend to, and walked away. Bardas stayed where he was.

  I should be glad, he chided himself. Glad and cheerful. After all, look at it sensibly. It was a valid point; he’d got what he wanted, or should have wanted, a chance to sweep the pieces from the board and set them up again any way he liked, a chance to break away entirely from his family and everything he’d ever been, nothing left over from the past except the boy and Athli, both of them listed in the short column of credits on the right-hand side of the ledger…

  He let his head droop forward. He’d found an old and valued friend he’d been sure he’d lost for ever – after the awkwardness of seeing her again, his surprise, the shock of how well she’d done for herself, the disagreeable fact that she’d started making something of her life the moment she’d got away from him; after all that, it was as if they’d never been apart, that same taken-for-granted easiness between them that had been one of the few good things about the years he’d lived in the City. She was, after all, the only friend he had now, but a good enough friend that he didn’t really need any others (like the man who was recommended to read Stazio’s Commentaries and replied that it was all right, he’d already got a book). She’d proved what sort of friend she was many times; just recently, when the boy had turned up on her doorstep with some wild tale about Bardas Loredan having sent him to her for safekeeping (like a bank deposit; how apt), she’d taken him in without question, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Somehow, when he’d been with her, he hadn’t minded being himself so much. That part of it hadn’t come back, not so soon after that meeting with Gorgas. But perhaps it might, at that. Presumably that was what had moved him to go and look for her, his first step as a free man, a refugee, an ex-Loredan…

  Then why are you doing this stupid thing? demanded the voice in the back of his head. The whole world to choose from, a ship effectively at your disposal, money in your pocket, and look where you decide to go. And of course there was no answer to that.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  He hadn’t heard the boy approaching over the noise of the sea and the general racket of a ship being worked. He looked round and saw that the boy was worried about something; not difficult to spot, he always scratched his neck when something was bothering him. ‘Go ahead,’ Bardas replied.

  ‘This place we’re going to,’ the boy continued, ‘Are we staying there? For good, I mean.’

  Permanently, yes. Whether good’ll have any part in it I’m not sure yet. ‘That’s my intention, yes,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for us on Scona, and it wasn’t exactly as if we chose to go there in the first place. A ship fished us out of the water and took us there, if you remember.’

  ‘Oh, I know that,’ the boy said. ‘I’m not bothered about it, I was just asking, that’s all.’ He leant on the rail; he could just reach. ‘What’s it like in the Mesoge? Does it really rain all the time?’

  Bardas shook his head. ‘Gods, no. Tell the truth, it doesn’t rain nearly enough if you’re trying to grow things. And when it does, it all comes down at once and turns the roads into sludge.’

  The boy nodded, and moved on to the next item on his list. ‘So it’s hot there, is it?’

  Bardas considered before answering. ‘Muggy rather than hot,’ he replied. ‘The City was hot, but it was more of a dry heat. In the Mesoge, the temperature’s lower but the heat feels hotter, if you see what I mean, in summer at any rate. In the winter we have snow.’

  ‘I’ve never seen snow,’ the boy replied. ‘Is it hilly or flat?’

  ‘Flat near the coast, hilly inland. But they’re hills rather than mountains, not as tall as the back hills beyond Perimadeia, and more rounded than Scona.’ He smiled. ‘Scona always struck me as a tatty sort of a place, because you could see where the rock had worn through the grass, like the elbows of an old man’s coat. You don’t get those spectacular rocky outcrops in the Mesoge. In fact, you don’t get spectacular anything. To look at, it’s fairly dull compared with what you’ve been used to. Good cattle country, good for sheep, and horses down on the flat by the sea. In the low hills, where we’re going, it’s indifferent poor land for grain, plenty of woodland – it was never worth anybody’s while to clear it – better climate than the coast or the top hills. It’s not so parcelled up into fields as the coast, but it’s not moorland, like the top. Up there’s only fit for running sheep and cutting peat.’

  ‘I see,’ the boy said. ‘Are there a lot of people?’

  ‘Depends on where you are,’ Bardas said, looking out to sea again. ‘Obviously it’s more crowded on the plains and sparser up on the moors. The middle part’s a bit more heavily populated than Scona was, but not all that much. It seems more crowded because people live out on their farms, rather than living in villages and going out to work every day. You’re rarely out of sight of someone’s house, but there’s never more than one or two houses together.’

  ‘That sounds strange,’ the boy said. ‘Sort of cramped and lonely all at the same time.’

  Bardas nodded. ‘You do tend to see a lot of your immediate neighbours and not much of anybody else,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t actually matter very much, because all the Mesoge people are pretty much the same. I mean, they all do the same work, there’s precious few foreigners, they even look the same.’

  ‘Like you?’ the boy asked.

  ‘I suppose so, yes,’ Bardas answered, after a moment’s thought. ‘On average we’re taller than they are on Scona or in the City, most of us have dark hair. You won’t have much trouble unde
rstanding what people are saying, though the accent’ll sound fairly dull and flat to you. We, on the other hand, find the sing-song City accent rather irritating. But not nearly as bad as the Scona bleat. It’s sort of nothingish, like most things about the Mesoge.’

  The boy collated the information. ‘It doesn’t sound so bad,’ he pronounced.

  ‘Oh, it isn’t,’ Bardas said. ‘Not bad, not good, just ordinary. It’s a sort of leftover soup of a place – bits of everything, but nothing in particular. It’s like that with the people, too. Because we don’t live in villages we generally have to do everything for ourselves – no specialist tradesmen, you see. So we can all do a bit of smithying, a bit of weaving and building and carpentry and pottery; all the boys your age can make a passable bow, good enough to shoot rabbits with-’

  ‘There’s rabbits in the Mesoge?’

  ‘Any amount of them, unfortunately.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Like I was saying,’ Bardas continued, ‘we can all do a bit of everything, as much as we need to get by and no more. Nobody’s good at anything, because that’d be a waste of effort and resources. Far more efficient to be competent at everything, because you don’t need a good bow, or a good plough or a good bucket, just one that works, and usually the one thing you haven’t got is time. You get the job done and move on to the next job, and when you’ve finished that there’s always something else. So, a bit of rope’ll do to hold a gate shut instead of a latch, and if a bent nail will do the trick as well as a mortice and tenon joint, you use a bent nail.’ He caught sight of the boy’s expression, and laughed. ‘It’s not as bad as all that, really. I mean, it has its advantages too. For one thing, there hasn’t been a war fought in the Mesoge for over two hundred years. And people don’t bolt their doors at night, either.’