Sharps

by K. J. Parker

  Bearing all that in mind, she took another look at the landscape. It still struck her as vacant space to be got through as quickly as possible, devoid of any possible interest or value. There were no houses, none at all, and she found that sort of emptiness disturbing. Even her distinguished ancestor would’ve gone mad out here, she decided, with nothing to look at but heather. There was nothing to suggest that people had ever been here, or that they existed anywhere in the world. She shivered, opened her book again, and soon fell asleep.

  She dreamt, as she often did, of the drowning of Flos Verjan. There was no reason for this, except perhaps that her father had told her about it once when she was quite young, and her imagination had seized on it and made it real. She imagined herself standing in the market square, which was really the Bakers’ Market in the City, and looking up at the surrounding mountains, and seeing a great white and blue sheet of water falling towards her – an extraordinary thing, based on nothing in her own experience, but unmistakably vivid, and she’d never doubted for a moment what it was; rather like an abstract concept suddenly transformed into matter. It wasn’t ice, because it moved as it fell, and it wasn’t a waterfall, because every waterfall has sides to it, after a fashion, and this was entirely unconfined. Besides, she’d never seen a waterfall, although there was a picture of one in one of her school books (so badly drawn it could be anything). She stood with her neck craned back, watching from underneath as it fell, and fell, and fell; it was impossible to judge its speed because it was so huge and so shapeless, so there was no immediate impression of it getting bigger as it came closer. She felt no urge to run, because she knew it’d be pointless. The water was so big, there’d be no chance of getting clear. She could see a rainbow through it; quite pretty, in a way. She knew instinctively that when it reached her, she’d drown, and wake up. She knew that drowning here was waking up on the other side, which raised a number of quite intriguing issues about the nature of life, death and resurrection that she’d have liked to follow up on once she was awake (but when she tried to think them through afterwards, her mind seemed foggy and sluggish; she could feel the connections and insights and sparks of intuition evading her, and it made her angry). She was vaguely aware that all the people she’d ever known were standing next to her, and if she turned her head she’d be able to see them, even the dead ones, but instead she kept her eyes fixed on the falling water. Also, very much at the back of her mind, she felt a furious rage against the Irrigator, who had somehow brought himself to do this utterly inhuman thing, just to win a war and cause a map to be slightly redrawn.

  This time, as the water fell, and fell, and fell, she knew that the man standing beside her, also looking up, was the Irrigator’s son – not Addo, but the one who, she vaguely knew, had died in the War. It was a silent dream this time, but she was sure he was muttering something about sending his only begotten son to die for all the people – which was absurd, because General Carnufex had four sons, everybody knew that, though of course one of them had been killed in action. As the water surged down to touch her, and she opened her eyes and saw Addo, head against the bulkhead, eyes closed, dribbling slightly, she realised that it had been a sort of play on words, the Irrigator’s son and the Invincible Sun, the son of the invincible Irrigator, the son of the Sun sent to die for the people every night and be resurrected every morning, to the greater glory of his Father in heaven. For some reason she found that intensely annoying, as though she’d been playing silly word games with herself, and had somehow contrived to lose.

  Addo had woken up and was looking at her, and she realised she must’ve made a noise. She did that, apparently; spoke or even screamed in her sleep, though not necessarily when she was having nightmares.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  “You made a sort of—”

  “Yes,” she snapped. “But I’m fine now.”

  He winced, and she suddenly felt rather stupid. Maybe, she thought, I’m blaming him for my dream, which would be silly. She remembered that he had a chess set, and that she’d finished her book and traded it for one she really didn’t want to read, although she could never admit that. They had a long journey ahead of them. It would, therefore, be in her best interests to be nice to the son of the Irrigator.

  She glanced at him and wanted to smile. He was having the most terrible trouble deciding where to aim his eyes. He couldn’t look at her, because she’d just snapped at him. But they were sitting opposite each other, and it was a small, enclosed space. His only real option was to look out of the window. “Do you mind if I have the blind down?” she asked, standing up and yanking it shut. “The sun’s in my eyes.”

  It wasn’t, of course. He mumbled a sort of consent. Now he couldn’t look out of the window. She gave him her best friendly smile.

  “How about a game of chess?” she said.

  *

  He tried to lose, but he wasn’t that good. He managed to spin it out, at any rate. She fought to the very last. He tried to engineer a stalemate, but made a careless move that proved to be checkmate. She glowered at him, but said, “Another?”

  “If you like.”

  Winning at chess was one of those things he couldn’t help, like being his father’s son. Winning came naturally; losing was something he’d had to work at, and he didn’t quite have the tactical flair necessary to lose convincingly at will. Against a poor or mediocre player he was generally all right, but someone with just enough ability to be awkward, like Iseutz, presented him with real difficulties. For the second game he tried to think long-term, building a complex and far-reaching strategy based on what he’d learned about her play in the first game. She liked to attack strong pieces, so he devised a beautiful trap for his own queen. She took the bait eventually, only to sacrifice her own queen in the process. That left him with a significant advantage in capital pieces (the idea was that once his queen was dead, she’d be able to mop them up at her leisure) and he won again, this time quite quickly.

  “That was smart,” she said, her voice sheer ice. “Sacrificing your queen like that. I really fell for it, didn’t I?”

  “Actually, it was just carelessness.” He knew straight away that he’d said the wrong thing. Outwitting her with a magnificent ploy was bad enough; making a stupid mistake and then going on to win an overwhelming victory was ten times worse. He had no idea how to recover from that. But she offered him another game, and he made up his mind that this time she was going to win, no matter what.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. He’d set her up a knight fork that should’ve been mate in three, but ten moves later she gave him a look that felt as though it had flayed half the skin off his face, and resigned. “Another?” he said.

  “All right.”

  Maybe, he thought wildly, as the inevitable slaughter proceeded, she’s letting me win, just to make me suffer. Maybe she’s an absolute genius at the game – not so implausible as it might seem; you’d have to be damned good to lose against the chances he’d been offering – and what she enjoys is the embarrassment and guilt of her opponent. The first imperative of war, his father always insisted, was to define victory; to work out exactly what you wanted to achieve. Depending on what her agenda was, she stood to gain considerably more from losing than winning. His father was, of course, notoriously bad at chess. He always lost when playing against promising junior officers or enemy generals. But of course, in losing, he gained valuable information about their strengths, whereas if he won, all he’d have demonstrated was that he was more clever than them, which he knew already.

  After she’d lost, she pulled up the blind and looked out of the window. The sun, he confirmed, was on the other side of the chaise, as he’d suspected.

  But Dad, he heard himself saying, I’m really not interested in tactics and strategy and the art of war. Don’t be stupid, Addo. The voice, gentle, contemptuous and kind. Strategy and tactics are everything. They’re the whole of life. War is just a tiny p
art of it. And then, by more or less direct association, his own voice, almost a year ago now, telling her, I never argue with my father, it’s like arguing with the sea. You remember the story about the man who argued with the sea, Lyssa? You remember what happened to him? And she’d frowned and said no, and he’d smiled and said, He got very, very wet. The last but one time he’d seen her, and she’d called him spineless, and yelled at him because he didn’t disagree.

  Everything. Well, he was his father’s son, in that respect at least. He worked out an exit strategy before standing up and closing a door, or offering round a plate of biscuits.

  (And always, always in the back of his mind his mother’s voice: Nobody ever suggested you’re stupid, Addo. It’s just … And then, for once, her exceptional command of language failed her, and she waved her hands vaguely instead. We should’ve put you into the priesthood, but your grandfather wouldn’t hear of it. He reflected on that, not for the first time that day or any day. His father was his father’s son, and so it went on. And back to Lyssa’s voice, saying, Poor Addo. You inherit so much more than land in the landed bloody aristocracy.)

  At least there was no longer anything stopping him from looking out of the window. He saw moorland, empty, bleak and bizarrely purple (the colour of emperors; in the Eastern Empire, it was treason if a commoner wore purple. A distant ancestor on his mother’s side had died for a faint purple stripe in the weave of an imported scarf. The family was very proud of her, for some reason). Somewhere around here, if he remembered his ancient history, was the tomb of Ataulf the Great. Of course there was no point at all in looking out for it, because it was lost for ever, like so much else, but someone with a proper feel for history ought to feel a slight frisson, passing through the country where the mightiest of all conquerors lay buried. He inspected his soul: no frisson. Oh well.

  His mind kept trying to get back to the question he’d asked after the fight with the bandits, which nobody had answered and nobody except him appeared to find interesting: why had the swords in the packing case been sharps instead of foils? Various answers came to mind, and he knew he could make any of them plausible enough to be credible, if he wanted to. He’d been taught how to do that sort of thing, at great expense, by the finest logicians and rhetoricians money could buy in Scheria. They would argue that if something was so believable that you sincerely believed it, and enough people sincerely believed it too, then it must be true. He’d never been able to win that argument (only partly because he was too well brought up to contradict his betters), but he’d never really accepted it. Someone had put sharp weapons in that crate instead of foils, either through negligence or by design, and until he knew the answer to the question, it would be a crime against scientific method to assume, believe or accept anything at all about his current situation. But the others didn’t seem particularly bothered. They seemed happy to jump over it, like the knight on the chessboard.

  (If I was a chess piece, he wondered, which piece would I be? Not a king or a queen, naturally. Not a knight, because however hard I try, I can’t jump over anything, or come at problems from right angles. Not fierce and strong enough to be a castle, and no son of the Carnufex could ever be a pawn, so presumably I’m a bishop. Should’ve been, only my grandfather wouldn’t hear of it.)

  He realised he was looking straight at Iseutz. Luckily she didn’t seem to have noticed; she was staring out of the window, rapt in contemplation of the heather. A plain girl, his mother would say. Probably prettier than she looks, would be Stellecho’s verdict, immediately followed by, Don’t even think about it, little brother. There wouldn’t be enough left of you to bury. Not that he’d even considered thinking about it. Suidas didn’t like her, or at least they were always bickering, and Suidas said things about her behind her back. Lyssa would’ve noticed him looking at her and smiled, in that way she had that made him wish he’d never been born. Father probably wouldn’t be able to see her, because her father was something in the Bank. The Irrigator had severe difficulty noticing people who weren’t of good family, unless they were soldiers.

  She really doesn’t want to be here, he thought. Suidas is here because he needs the money, for Giraut it was this or the rope, and I’m here because I got a direct order from a superior officer. But as far as he knew, she wasn’t governed by that sort of imperative; he assumed she’d been bullied or nagged into it, or maybe she’d actually wanted to go at the time, to get away from home and her family. That was actually quite plausible. Addo wasn’t entirely sure what women actually did; in the Carnufex household, it seemed to be mostly needlework, while the Phocas daughters sketched and played suitable musical instruments (not woodwind, because a lady doesn’t puff out her cheeks like a bullfrog). He couldn’t imagine Iseutz doing anything like that.

  She’d noticed him. It was too late to break eye contact. She scowled at him, and said, “What?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You were looking at me. What is it?”

  Oh well, he thought, why not? “I was just wondering,” he said, “what made you come on this trip.”

  She gave him a look of horrified fascination, as though he’d just kissed her or pulled her hair. “What?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “None of my business, of course. I was just curious.”

  The gamble paid off. There was a short struggle inside her, and then she relaxed very slightly. “If you must know, I was given a choice, by my father. Well, it wasn’t a choice exactly, more like a threat. Well, a bluff. You see, they wanted to marry me off to some idiot in my father’s department at the Bank. Something political, I’m sure you know the sort of thing. I wasn’t having it. I was so angry. And then my mother chipped in with Well, dear, you do realise you’re not getting any younger, and most girls your age and all that, and I just lost my temper with both of them. And my father said, So what do you intend doing with your life, if you’re not going to get married? And all I could think of was fencing, because I was ladies’ junior champion when I was sixteen; and Mother just laughed, but Father got this look on his face and said about how they were sending a team to Permia, and some important people had been to see him to ask if I could go, but he’d said no, because I was just about to get married. So I said, Fine, then, I’ll go to stupid Permia. And after that, well, I couldn’t really back down. It’d have meant marrying this clown of Father’s, and that’d have been my life down the sink. And I thought, well, how bad can it be? Compared to marrying a moron, I mean. So here I am.”

  Addo nodded slowly. “Do you like fencing?”

  “Yes, actually. At least, I like it when I win. How about you?”

  He frowned. It wasn’t a question he’d ever been asked, or expected ever to have to answer. It was a bit like Do you enjoy breathing? “Yes,” he replied, surprising himself slightly. “I enjoy it the same way I like chess.”

  “You like winning.”

  He shook his head very slightly. “When you’re fencing, you’ve got to concentrate, you can’t let yourself think about anything else. You’ve got to be alone in your mind. I think that’s what I like about it.”

  She frowned, as though she hadn’t entirely understood him but was nevertheless intrigued by what he’d said. He felt strangely pleased by that. “Me too,” she said. “Also, I like being able to jab at people as hard as possible and not get into trouble for it later.”

  He nodded sagely. “You should try longsword,” he said. “You’d like that.”

  “Not allowed. Not ladylike.”

  “That’s a shame. You’d be good at it.”

  The moment that followed was of a sort he recognised: the disengage, after a well-fought point of attack, riposte, counter, bind, simultaneous withdrawal to long measure. It was a moment when, generally speaking, you felt respect and a kind of warmth for your opponent, a special luxury of fighting with foils. Usually it was followed by a long pause, as each participant tried to tempt the other into making the next attack, because it was when attackin
g that you were most vulnerable. His father said that people communicated most when they fought.

  (You know what, she’d said to him once. Your father doesn’t actually know everything about everything.

  True, he’d replied. He knows very little about embroidery.)

  “Your father’s General Carnufex.”

  Yes, I know that. “Yes.”

  She gave him a solemn look. “My brother Hamo was in your father’s regiment in the War,” she said. “He joined at fifteen, worked his way up to first lieutenant in the light cavalry. Then your father sent his squadron to capture a bridge. But he didn’t really want the bridge, it was just a diversion. Like you sacrificing your queen, in the chess game.”

  Addo knew what was coming. Another dead brother, for whose death he was responsible by birth and inheritance. The only decision left to him was whether to play his own dead brother, or to retreat behind his guard.

  “He was lucky,” she went on, and Addo caught his breath. “They took the stupid bridge and chased away the enemy, and then they just sat there waiting for the rest of the army to catch them up. But nobody came. He said he felt such a fool, like he’d been stood up by a girl, and his men were looking at him. He started thinking that maybe he’d captured the wrong bridge. Well, they waited till it was starting to get dark, and Hamo really didn’t want to be out there at night, away from the rest of the army, where the Aram Chantat could creep up on them, or anything. So he led his squadron back to camp, and everybody was really surprised to see them. They assumed they’d be dead. But it turned out your dad had screwed up, and the enemy didn’t take the bait. They didn’t send their mobile reserve or whatever it’s called to try and protect the bridge, so when your dad launched his main attack, he got a really nasty shock.”