The Belly of the Bow f-2

by K. J. Parker

  ‘Now there’s the bit I wish I could slow down,’ Niessa remarked. ‘Unfortunately, it all happens so quickly, I can’t really make anything out for sure. Does his hand wobble on the loose, or is he deliberately shooting low? Believe it or not, it didn’t really hurt all that much.’

  ‘Have we got to watch the rest of this?’ Alexius interrupted.

  ‘All right,’ Niessa said, with a hint of disappointment in her voice. ‘Actually, there’s not much more to see. He goes chasing off after the Hedin boy – he had nice eyes, Cleras Hedin, but really bad teeth; the joke is that he and I had been quietly amusing ourselves for days before all this happened – money changed hands, obviously, but it was all quite amiable – so there was really no need for him to be involved, it was young Ferian I drew the line at. But Gorgas doesn’t know that.’ They were back in the Director’s office now, and the wine in Vetriz’s hand was still pleasantly warm. ‘Anyway, he’ll catch young Hedin and bash his brains out, and when he gets back he’ll find Clefas and Zonaras scampering up the track, and Bardas and me not dead, and he’ll give it up as a bad job and run away. The rest of it’s just shouting and screaming and not knowing what to do, and Zonaras being sick at the sight of blood; it’s just as well Clefas stayed calm or we’d both be dead. But he’s solid brick from the shoulders up, nothing ever seems to get a reaction out of him. Typical farmer.’

  There was a moment of complete silence. Then Alexius cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I still don’t see the point. Why did you want us to see that?’

  Niessa smiled charmingly. ‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘You just helped me answer my question. Now I know where Bardas is – he’s gone home. In fact,’ she added, refilling Alexius’ cup, ‘I think I know precisely where he is, right now.’

  ‘This river,’ Bardas was saying, ‘used to mark the boundary; our land on that side, from here over to where you can see that little clump of firs. The ford is just round the bend here.’

  He stopped and reined in the horses. Two men were approaching on the other side of the river, just emerging from the shade of a tall cypress tree. They were wearing the usual broad-rimmed leather hats and carrying mattocks over their shoulders.

  ‘There now,’ Bardas said, and jumped down off the cart. ‘If that isn’t good timing.’ He raised his hands over his head and waved to the two men, who turned and looked at him. ‘Now I’m home,’ he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘Bardas,’ said the short one.

  ‘Hello, Clefas,’ Bardas replied. ‘Hello, Zonaras. It’s good to see you again.’ The two men regarded him steadily, exhibiting no emotion of any kind. Some sort of Mesoge recognition ritual. Athli speculated, wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Doing her best not to be obvious about it, she took a long look at Bardas’ two long-lost brothers. There was a family resemblance, to be sure, particularly round the jaw and chin, and Zonaras, the taller of the two, had Bardas’ eyes. Even so, it was almost shocking to see Bardas’ features mirrored in these two nondescript middle-aged farmers; it was like walking through a bazaar in somewhere like Inagoa or Sizma, some primitive backwater of a place where they used seashells for money, and coming across an obvious piece of loot plundered by pirates from an Island ship, an enamelled silver jug or an ivory-framed mirror among the asymmetrical coil-made pots and scraped-out wooden bowls. Clefas, the short one, was pot-bellied with fat cheeks and an enormously thick neck; he looked about ten years older than Bardas, though she knew for a fact he was the youngest of the brothers. The other one, Zonaras, seemed shorter than he actually was because of a bandy-legged stoop, and the hair on the top of his head was beginning to go. His ears stuck out, and he had a straggly beard that was thin at the point of his chin and absurdly bushy at the sides. Both of them had huge red hands with bitten fingernails.

  ‘This is Athli Zeuxis,’ Bardas went on, ‘a friend of mine from the Island. She’s a trader.’

  The brothers looked at her as if she was something on a stick at a puppet show. Neither of them said anything, but there wasn’t any need. Their expressions fairly shouted, So her name’s Athli Zeuxis; what d’you expect us to do about it? She’d certainly never felt less comfortable in her life. A minute or so dragged away, and still neither of them had said a word, except for Clefas’ perfunctory greeting. She glanced at Bardas out of the corner of her eye and saw with relief and amusement that he seemed to be feeling just as embarrassed and out of his depth as she was. It occurred to her that Bardas hadn’t even tried to introduce the boy, but that at least seemed to be in keeping with what passed for normal behaviour here. Children, it seemed, were like dogs; everybody had one or two huddled round their feet or trotting round in the background looking for a fight while the big people talked to each other (or at least while they stood stock still and practised their glowering) and nobody ever seemed to notice they were even there.

  Just when Athli was about to scream, or fall asleep on her feet, Clefas gave a little sigh and said, ‘You staying long?’

  Bardas blinked once. ‘I’m not sure yet,’ he said. ‘I haven’t really got any plans in any direction at the moment.’

  ‘You’d better come up to the house,’ murmured Zonaras, in the tone of voice of someone who’s just found a badly injured stranger in the road, right at the most inconvenient moment possible. The total lack of expression had subtly changed into a hostile, suspicious stare, the face of a man who fears the worst. That’s odd, Athli said to herself. I’m the one who’s a complete and utter stranger among these lunatics.

  It wasn’t far to the house, which proved to be a long thatched affair with a steeply angled roof and tiny, almost token windows. There was a huge front door, solid oak studded with the heads of big square nails, and a doorway at the side with no door whatsoever, just a board put across to keep the pullets from escaping. The yard was littered with junk; smashed and mossy barrels with ferns growing up through the gaps between the slats, what looked like a perfectly good and serviceable chain harrow almost completely overgrown with bindweed, any number of holed and rusty iron buckets, the green and decaying skeleton of a cart that had been gradually robbed of its boards and fittings, like a beached whale after the local people have cut off the best meat for salting; a water-butt with a bubbling leak in the side, and green moss marking the course of the escaping water; a pile of bones stacked up like logs against an outhouse wall; the skin and bones of a huge rat nailed to the planked-in sides of the woodshed half a century ago, now tanned and cured by the wind and sun to a brittle crispness; a sheep’s skull on a pole, set up as a slingshot target gods only knew how long ago, chipped and cracked and still incredibly in one piece; a leaf-thin rusty scythe blade lodged between loose stones on top of a crumbling wall. A fat, blind old ewe nibbled lichen off the stones of the mounting block. Oh, for gods’ sakes, Athli muttered to herself as she passed through, surely it wouldn’t kill them to tidy the place up say once every seventy-five years?

  ‘Cosy,’ she whispered in Bardas’ ear, as Zonaras laboriously shooed away the pullets from the doorway and lifted away the board.

  ‘Personally, I preferred it when it was just left scruffy,’ Bardas replied. ‘Mind you wipe your feet before you go indoors.’

  Because it was so dark inside the house, Athli’s first impression was of the smell, a bizarre mixture of cheese, smoke and apples. It was strong, rich and delicious, and not at all what she’d been expecting. It was also pleasantly cool, thanks to the thick stone walls and flagged floor. When her eyes became accustomed to the light, she saw a long, bare room with a huge fireplace at one end, almost hidden behind a massive iron spit with an elaborate mechanism for turning it, and beside it a cavernous bread oven; there were sunken alcoves with steps leading down on both sides of the room, and a massive table in the middle that was almost as long as the room, with a low bench on either side. From the crossbeams hung ropes of onions, low enough that Bardas and Zonaras had to duck, and a bewildering collection of tools
and implements, some of which looked as if they hadn’t been disturbed for a hundred and fifty years.

  ‘Where’s Father’s chair?’ Bardas asked.

  ‘Broke,’ Clefas replied. ‘We put it up in the hayloft.’

  ‘Pity,’ Bardas said. ‘I’ll see if I can’t mend it.’ He sat down on the bench and planted his elbows on the table. ‘And the pot-hook too,’ he added. ‘I see nobody’s got around to fixing that since I’ve been away.’

  Clefas and Zonaras looked at each other, then sat down opposite him; it reminded Athli of some tense moment in a long, drawn-out business deal, the point when the parties stop pussyfooting around and get down to cases. She perched on the edge of the table at the far end, while the boy pulled up a low three-legged stool and crouched on that.

  Clefas drew in a deep breath. ‘If it’s the money you’re after,’ he said, ‘you’re out of luck.’

  Bardas frowned. ‘I wasn’t, actually,’ he said. ‘I sent it to you for you to use, though I can’t say there’s much sign of it.’

  ‘It’s all gone,’ Zonaras said.

  That seemed to throw Bardas completely. ‘What do you mean, gone?’ he said. ‘Come on, talk sense.’

  Zonaras shrugged. ‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got it any more. Simple as that.’

  Athli knew what that look meant – Bardas, keeping his temper. ‘Don’t talk soft,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I sent you enough money to buy this whole damned valley. Which is what I assume you did with it, right?

  Clefas and Zonaras looked at each other. ‘We bought the farm,’ Clefas said. ‘This place.’

  ‘And?’ Bardas leant forward across the table. ‘Come on, I sent you enough for that in the first year. What did you do with the rest of it?’

  So that’s it, Athli said to herself. That’s what he did with it all. He sent it home. All the time she’d known him in the City, when he’d been earning enormous sums of money as a fencer-at-law and never seeming to spend a copper quarter of it, when he’d been living in a bleak, miserable apartment in an ‘island’ block and eating dry bread and coarse, cheap cheese; he’d sent the rest of it back to his brothers here in the Mesoge. She felt her mouth drop open; she knew more or less exactly how much money was involved, since she’d been his clerk, living very comfortably off her five per cent share. More than enough to buy this dismal valley; the Loredan brothers should have been living in a castle in the middle of an ornamental lake, with long avenues of sycamores lining the road and a model village set back at a discreet distance for the estate workers to live in. Every fight, every burdening of the already obscene odds against him, every drop of blood he’d shed, every morning he’d woken up and looked out through his tiny window at a sun that might not be there that evening; where in the gods’ names could all that have gone, and leave the brothers still living in this squalor?

  ‘We bought the mill,’ said Zonaras after a while. ‘But it burnt down.’

  ‘We built it again,’ Clefas added, ‘but then Leucas Meuzin built another one over at Ladywood and he charged less than we did, so we gave it up.’

  ‘All right,’ Bardas said, ‘so you make one mistake. That would have been a drop in the ocean. What about the rest of it?’

  And then the long, dreary catalogue began; a ludicrous recital that made Athli want to howl with laughter – if only she could remember it when she got back to the Island, what a party piece it would make, with the funny accents and the two of them interrupting each other like a pair of professional storytellers. There was the cattle-ship, which was going to make the run to Perimadeia once a month and bring in a king’s ransom in easy profit, except that it hit rock on its first run out and sank. There was the weir across the Blackwater, to catch the salmon; but there were problems, and instead of a month to build, it had taken a year and huge quantities of stone shipped in specially from Basleen in a specially modified ship; and it worked so well the first year that now salmon were extinct in the Blackwater, and the weir had clogged up and flooded and they’d had to pay all the neighbours the cost of draining their flooded land. There was the seam of pure tin someone had discovered up on top of the moor, an absolute fortune just waiting to be carted away; the salt pans and oyster beds on the coast; the deposit of fine white sand in the dunes beyond Turnoys that was going to be the foundation for a glassmaking industry to rival anything in the world; the wagon in Lihon; the diamond mine and the carpet-weaving syndicate and the cedar plantation, and of course the Bank of the Mesoge-

  ‘But why?’ Bardas interrupted. ‘For pity’s sake, Clefas, why didn’t you just buy land like I told you to?’

  Clefas scowled at him. ‘But we don’t want to be farmers any more,’ he said. ‘We want to be like – we wanted to make money and be rich.’

  ‘You wanted to be like Niessa,’ Bardas said softly. ‘If she could do it, so could you.’

  Zonaras slapped the table with his huge palm. ‘It didn’t seem fair,’ he said, ‘her running a bank and having money pouring in, when by rights she’d married Gallas and should have been an ordinary person. If she could have all that, we wanted it too. I guess we just weren’t as lucky as her. And now the City’s fallen,’ he added bitterly, ‘and there’s no more money, and here we bloody well are.’

  At that moment, what Athli wanted more than anything else she could think of was for Bardas to pull Zonaras across the table and bash his face in. But he didn’t move. After a long time, he pushed his hair back from his forehead and said, ‘What have you got left? Anything?’

  Clefas nodded. ‘There’s the farm, like I said. And we bought Palas Rafenin’s place when he died, that’s another thirty acres. And there’s the rap up on the moors where the tin mine was going to be, we let the keep on that to Teufas Tron for nine quarters a year. And there’s the rosewood plantation, of course, but that won’t be worth anything for fifty years-’

  ‘Nothing,’ Bardas said. ‘All gone. Wonderful. I’ve kept every swindler and chancer in the Mesoge for all these years and my own brothers are still chasing sheep and hoeing onions.’ He drew his fingertips down his cheeks as far as his chin. ‘You bloody fools, I was trying to look after you, all of us. I wanted it to be so that none of us would ever have to worry about anything ever again; and like you said, Zonaras, here we bloody well are, right back where we started.’

  ‘Heris,’ Gorgas Loredan called out, ‘I’m home.’

  ‘We’re in the cloister,’ his wife replied. He smiled, dumped the heavy bag he’d been carrying and strolled through the dark shade of the hall out into the courtyard.

  An appealing sight, if ever there was one; his wife sitting in her favourite cedarwood chair, sewing. At her feet, his daughter Niessa playing with her little wooden horse on wheels. Behind her, his son Luha lying on his stomach on the grass, propping himself up on his elbows and reading a book; and to his right, perched on a small ebony stool, the latest addition to the family, his niece, who was having her hair combed by the maid. Gratifying how well she’d scrubbed up – oh, for sure she’d never be a beauty or anything more than ordinary with a hint of strange-looking, all bones and eye-sockets. But at least she was clean and respectably dressed in one of Heris’ old linen smocks and a good plain pair of sandals. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘That’s what I like to see, a hive of industry. Any messages?’

  Heris looked down at a wax tablet balanced on the arm of her chair. ‘Vido brought over the excise figures, they’re on your desk. A man called Bemond Grus would like to talk to you about five hundred pairs of boots, FOB the Sea Falcon, whatever that means. She sent someone to see if your were back yet, but there wasn’t a message. Oh, and I’ve done those transfer deeds, all except the long one that needs a coloured plan.’

  ‘You have? That’s splendid,’ Gorgas replied, trying to remember which deeds she was talking about. It seemed a long time since he’d had nothing more urgent to think about than paperwork. How wonderful it must be, he thought, to be bored.

  He grabbed a cushion from the pil
e, dropped it on the grass and stretched out, like a good dog after a long day herding sheep. ‘So what’s been going on since I’ve been away?’ he asked. ‘Luha, how did you do in your verse-composition test?’

  ‘Nine out of ten, Father,’ the boy replied, without looking up from his book.

  ‘That’s not bad,’ Gorgas said. ‘Did anybody get ten?’

  ‘No. Well, yes. Ruan Acher did, but his dad’s a poet, so-’

  Gorgas frowned. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Nine out of ten’s good, don’t get me wrong, but ten would have been better. If Ruan Acher can do it, then so can you.’

  ‘Yes, but Father, verse composition,’ the boy said. ‘When am I ever going to want to do verse composition? It’s not like it’s any good for anything.’

  The frown condensed into a scrowl. ‘Don’t let me hear you talking like that,’ Gorgas said. ‘And don’t go spoiling good work with a bad attitude. After dinner I want to look at your work, and we’ll go over it and see if we can spot where you went wrong. Niessa,’ he continued, turning his head a precise few degrees towards her, ‘have you been practising your flute like you promised?’

  ‘Yes, Daddy,’ the little girl answered proudly. ‘And Doctor Nearchus says I’m nearly a grade ahead of everyone else in the class. Shall I get my flute and play you my piece, Daddy?’