Sharps

by K. J. Parker

  “Now what?” Suidas shouted, without lifting his head. No reply, so he jumped up, vaulted out of the coach and squelched flat-footed in search of an explanation.

  He didn’t have to go far. The Imperials were sitting bolt upright and perfectly still, staring at the plain in front of them. It was covered in dead bodies.

  They lay as though they’d been dropped from a great height, arms thrown wide or folded under torsos, legs splayed, necks twisted at unendurable angles. The rain had soaked them, turning their clothes to black mush, washing channels through caked blood, so that for a moment Suidas thought they must have been drowned, in a great flood that had since drained away. But the actual cause of death was perfectly obvious: arrows, mostly, but towards the centre of the mass, great butcher’s cuts that had sliced flesh and smashed bone. Soaked with rain, they didn’t look like anything at all. It was only the dead horses that identified them as Aram Chantat.

  “What in God’s name happened?” Suidas heard himself say. Nobody answered. He lifted his head. The heaps seemed to go on for ever, covering the ground like the stumps of a clear-felled forest. What a mess, he thought, what a hell of a job it’ll be clearing all this lot away. Weeks rather than days, to dig pits sufficiently deep to bury them far enough down that the first rain wouldn’t wash them out again. To get an idea of how many of them there were, he tried to imagine them standing up, an army of living men rather than dead; he knew roughly how much ground a thousand standing men covered. But he couldn’t do it. Five figures, at any rate. Aram Chantat, all dead.

  He noticed that Addo and Tzimisces were standing beside him, staring, doing exactly the same as he was, but he found their presence intolerable and walked a few steps forward. The Imperial captain dismounted and went to talk to Tzimisces. He heard Tzimisces say, “No idea, sorry. Not my lot, I’m almost certain of that. I mean, they were going home. Why would we bother?”

  It would be so easy to drown in a sight like that; but you could keep your head above water by clinging to curiosity. He recognised the arrows, and he was pretty sure the Imperial captain had done the same; Tzimisces too, quite definitely. The Imperials painted their arrow shafts, colour-coding them according to spine: green for the light self-recurves carried by the skirmishers and light infantry, red for the longbows of the infantry archers, blue for the heavy composites of the horse archers. The shafts sticking up out of the bodies and the ground were mostly red, but there were thickets of blue here and there (like bluebells in May). Nobody else in the world painted their arrows. But the wounds of the men who’d been cut to death: oh, those were so familiar, and only one weapon he’d ever come across did that to a human body. Here they fight, had fought, with messers, God help them.

  He heard Tzimisces ask the captain, in a voice of detached enquiry, if the Imperials sold or gave consumable stores to the Permian militia; arrows, for example. The captain said no, they didn’t. There were strict rules about military supplies. Imperial issue was for the use of Imperial personnel only. Tzimisces thanked him mildly. There was a pause, and the captain said, “Well, we’d better be getting along.”

  Nobody spoke for the rest of the day. But that night, which they spent in another empty blockhouse identical in every respect to the first one they’d stayed in, Giraut intercepted Suidas on his way back from staring at the rain. He was wide-eyed and pale; well, of course. Never seen anything like that before.

  “I don’t know,” Suidas said. “But they were killed by Blueskins and Permians, that’s for sure.” He frowned. “I think they must’ve been Rosinholet and no Vei; the entire contingent. Roughly five thousand each. The Auzida and the smaller clans wouldn’t ride with the Rosinholet, too many feuds. And five thousand sounds about right for the number of men the Permians were hiring.”

  Giraut’s expression didn’t change. “Why?” he said.

  “Don’t know,” Suidas repeated. “I can only assume they didn’t like them very much.”

  “That’s no reason …”

  “There doesn’t always have to be a reason,” Suidas said quietly. “Well, you could say the Permians wanted to get even after the way the Aram Chantat laid into the civilians during the riots, and the Blueskins may have had orders not to let so many unemployed braves go home, in case they turned up on the borders of the Empire in a few months’ time. It could be something like that. It’s not hard to come up with pretexts and justifications.”

  “Will there be a war?” Giraut asked.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Suidas replied wearily. “If I’m right and that’s the Rosinholet and the no Vei out there, then there simply aren’t enough of them left back home to make any trouble, and the other Aram nations wouldn’t put themselves out to avenge their ancestral enemies. Too busy wiping out the survivors, in all likelihood. That’s the beauty of it. Nobody will be particularly upset to see them dead. In fact, if I was the Eastern emperor, I’d make whoever did this a duke and marry him off to my daughter.” He grinned like a dog. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this wasn’t planned a long time ago. It makes such good business sense, especially doing it in another country. I expect someone’ll be along shortly to clean up the mess, and then there’ll be no evidence. No evidence, no war. Ten thousand pains in the arse wiped off the face of the earth.”

  Giraut shivered. “You make it sound like you approve.”

  “Well.” Suidas looked straight in front. “I never liked the Aram Chantat, no. But that’s all water under the bridge now. This is nothing to do with me. I just want to go home.”

  Giraut shrugged and went back into the blockhouse. Suidas stayed where he was, watching rain drip through a crack in the guttering and collect in a pool at his feet. If he only waited long enough, the pool would become a flood, and wash everything away.

  He saw two Imperials hurrying across the yard, hunching their shoulders to make themselves smaller targets for the rain. “Hey, Sergeant,” he heard one of them say, “what do you call ten thousand dead Aram Chantat in a field?”

  “I don’t know. What?”

  “A start.”

  They ended up reading the books; even Iseutz, though she only gave in after they lost half the pieces out of Addo’s chess set. She read with a puzzled frown, and kept turning back the pages, using her thumbnail as a bookmark. When they’d all read all the volumes, they traded them with the Imperial captain for A Description of the Principal Cities of Permia, a ninety-year-old-guidebook he’d been given by his grandmother when he first heard where his next posting was going to be. It described Luzir Soleth as a small, unspoilt market town, and stated that the people were peaceful and friendly.

  One day, quite suddenly, the coach stopped in the middle of nowhere. Iseutz, Phrantzes, Suidas and Addo were all asleep. Tzimisces was writing a letter. Giraut sat still and patient for a while, then craned his neck to look out. There was nothing to see. They were somewhere on the flat, high moor, with no landmarks anywhere.

  Tzimisces stopped writing and frowned. Then he carefully put the stopper back in his ink bottle, stood up and slid gracefully out of the coach, still holding the letter and the pen. Giraut sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. The coach was always stopping, for one reason or another.

  He opened them when Tzimisces prodded his shoulder. “This is the border,” he said. “Thought you might like to know.”

  For a moment, Giraut couldn’t understand. “What, you mean Scheria?”

  “Not quite.” Tzimisces smiled. “The Demilitarised Zone. We’re changing escorts here. The government’s sent a half-squadron of cavalry to take us across the Zone.”

  “Scherians?”

  “Well of course Scherians.”

  Incredible. Over the past few weeks, he’d almost come to believe that he and his fellow fencers were the last Scherians left on earth. “Where are they? Are they here yet?”

  “Should be along any minute.”

  They were Scherians all right: provincial reserve militia, shepherds on bag-of-bones ponies, with
three-quarters of a full set of Imperial kit and four spears between the ten of them. They stared at the Imperials and gawped at the coach. When Addo stuck his head out of the window, two of them started muttering to each other, while a third picked at the coach’s black varnish with his fingernail. The Imperials gazed steadily at them, observing every movement they made without actually taking official notice of their presence, while the captain solemnly handed over a folded-flat packet of parchment to one of them, who stuck it in his pocket without looking at it. The Imperials formed up and bowed in the general direction of the coach, then turned and rode away at a perfectly synchronised rising trot. The Scherian who’d taken the packet gave Tzimisces a sad look, then plodded to the head of his short, shapeless column. These were men, Giraut decided, who most definitely didn’t want to be here. Better things to do, in a better place. He really couldn’t blame them for that.

  The Demilitarised Zone, however, had changed. There were people on the road: shepherds, mostly, driving small flocks of thin sheep, but a few Permians in thick coats with fascinating-looking heavy brass instruments on their shoulders, or in the process of being set up on massive stands. If a group of Scherians passed them, each party ignored the other completely, even when the sheep knocked over the tripods and trod on the instruments. Once or twice a Permian looked up at the coach as it went by, frowned and suddenly froze, a stunned look on his face, as the shadow of the unbelievably famous Scherian fencing team rolled over him. They’ll tell their grandchildren, Giraut realised; the thought made him feel distinctly uncomfortable, as if a sorcerer had stolen his soul in the mistaken belief that it was worth something.

  They crested a hill, and saw the road straight and apparently endless in front of them, an arbitrary line drawn across treeless moor by a giant with nothing better to do. But as they descended the slight incline, they could distinguish some sort of man-made structure, and activity, and people.

  The Scherians were building a frontier station. It was hard to see why. As a security measure it was completely worthless: go a mile to the south and you could cross the border entirely undetected. As a link in a chain of defence-in-depth outposts, it was equally useless, since it was little more than a shed and an outhouse, capable of accommodating three sociable men and two horses. It didn’t have a roof yet, but they’d put up an eighteen-foot wooden gate right across the road. The coach driver stopped and waited, but the men walking about among the bare rafters paid no attention; they were builders, not soldiers or customs officers. The driver climbed down to open the gate, but it was closed with a padlock and chain. Tzimisces got out and went inside the hut; there was nobody there. He found a desk with a book on it, but no pen or ink. He came out again and told the driver to back up and go around the gate, which he did. Welcome to Scheria.

  A mile or so on from the frontier post, the road forked. The coach went left, their cavalry escort went right. “What are they doing?” Iseutz asked. “They can’t just abandon us like that.”

  “We’re in Scheria,” Tzimisces replied. “We don’t need an escort.”

  Addo frowned; then he said, “No, I suppose not. Still, it feels odd. We’ve been escorted and guarded so long, it feels weird without them. Like walking around with no clothes on.”

  Suidas was watching the horsemen ride away. When they’d vanished out of sight, he smiled and said, “Stop the coach.”

  “What?”

  “I said stop the coach.”

  Tzimisces shrugged and banged with the flat of his hand on the partition. The coach slowed to a halt, and Suidas stood up.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s been interesting. You all take care now.” He climbed carefully over Phrantzes’ legs and got out.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Tzimisces asked.

  “I think I’ll make my own way home from here, thanks,” Suidas said. “Been cooped up a bit too long, I guess. Also – well, no offence, but …” He didn’t complete the sentence.

  Iseutz looked at him. “You’re going to walk home from here?”

  “Stretch my legs,” Suidas replied cheerfully. “And I know the way, and I’m in no hurry.”

  “That’s not a good enough reason.”

  “And I do rather want to get home,” Suidas said. “Be seeing you.” And he walked quickly away.

  Iseutz rounded on Tzimisces. “You’re not just going to let him go like that, are you?”

  “It’s a free country,” Tzimisces replied mildly. “Well,” he added, “relatively, anyway.”

  Giraut frowned. “Maybe he thinks the bandits …”

  “Or something like that,” Addo said quietly. “Or maybe he’s just sick to death of us.”

  “But that’s stupid,” Iseutz protested. “He’s got no food, no water, no money …”

  Tzimisces leaned forward and bashed the partition. “He’ll be fine,” he said, and the coach rolled forward. “Probably get home before we do, if he finds a horse to steal.”

  “Addo,” Iseutz said, but Addo just shrugged. “Phrantzes,” she said, though with rather less enthusiasm. “Tell him. We can’t just abandon him in the middle of nowhere.”

  Phrantzes shook his head. “If you want to try and stop Suidas Deutzel doing what he wants to, be my guest. Just don’t ask me to do it.”

  “He left these.” Addo was holding up the rosewood case of messers.

  “I expect he’s got another one,” Tzimisces said. “At least one.”

  “And he took the book,” Giraut pointed out. “You know, Principal Cities.”

  “I’ve read it,” Addo said. “He’s welcome.”

  Later, when the others had fallen asleep, Iseutz prodded Addo’s shoulder and said, “I know why Suidas left.”

  Addo opened his eyes and yawned. “All right. Why?”

  “Well,” she said, “it was just after the escort went off like that. I think he thought we’re going to be attacked.”

  “Really,” Addo replied. “Who by?”

  “I don’t know, do I?” Iseutz snapped. “People are always attacking us, they don’t seem to need a reason. But I think Suidas reckoned the escort dumped us for a reason. So he got out while he could. I mean, just us in a coach in the middle of nowhere, we’re a nice big, slow-moving target. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  Addo frowned. “Iseutz,” he said, “we’re in Scheria.”

  “So? We were in Scheria the first time, when the so-called bandits attacked us.”

  “We were on our way out then,” Addo said kindly. “This time we’re on our way back. It’s over, the job’s done. There’d be no point.”

  “Fine,” Iseutz said irritably. “So why did Suidas …?”

  “I really don’t know,” Addo said. “But I don’t think it’s anything horribly sinister. Really,” he added, “I don’t. We’re home. We don’t matter to anyone any more.”

  Giraut woke up out of a bad dream and opened his eyes to find it was dark. “Why’ve we stopped?” he asked.

  “We’re here,” Addo said.

  “What?”

  “Here,” Addo repeated. “We’re home.”

  That didn’t make sense. “Where?”

  Suddenly he noticed that Iseutz, Phrantzes and Tzimisces weren’t there, and Addo was standing up. “Outside the Fencers’ Guild, I think,” Addo replied. “I assume so, anyway. It’s where we started from.”

  “What’s the time?”

  “Not sure. After midnight, I think.” He stepped back out of the coach, so that Giraut could barely see him. “You coming, or are you going to stay there?”

  Giraut scrambled up and nearly fell out of the coach. His legs were cramped and weak from sitting. Almost immediately, the coach started to move. Giraut had to make a conscious effort to stop himself from running after it. “Where are the others?” he asked.

  Addo was looking round. “Already gone,” he said. “Tzimisces had a carriage waiting, and he gave Iseutz a lift to her father’s house. Phrantzes just sort of vanished as soon as he set foo
t on the ground.” He saw something, and waved his arm. “That’s my father’s chaise,” he said. “They must’ve been looking out for us. Well, so long. Take care.”

  “Addo.” Addo stopped, and Giraut realised he had nothing he could say. What he wanted to say was, I don’t know where to go, I can’t go home, my father’s disowned me. I never gave it any thought, because I didn’t think I’d be coming back.

  “Yes?” Addo said.

  “Sorry,” Giraut mumbled. “I don’t know, I thought there’d be – well, someone to meet us, or something.”

  Addo grinned. “A reception, you mean? Dress clothes and pickled cabbage?”

  Giraut shook his head. “Sorry,” he repeated. “I just …”

  “I know,” Addo said. He hesitated, then went on, “I’d offer you a bed for the night at our place, but I don’t think my father’s going to be in the mood for guests. In fact, things may be a bit fraught at home, it’d be embarrassing for you.” He paused for a moment, then put down the coat he was holding and dug in his pocket. “Sorry,” he said, extending a palm with coins on it, “that’s all I’ve got on me. Should be enough for one night, if you can find anywhere that’s open.”

  Two gold nomismata. Four months’ rent, in the students’ quarter. I wonder if this is how Phrantzes’ wife used to feel, he thought, when they paid her, afterwards. He opened his hand and took the coins. “Thanks,” he said.

  “No problem. Look after yourself,” Addo said, and walked away across the square.

  *

  Eight weeks later, Iseutz was upstairs in the morning room when the maid told her she had a visitor. She put down her embroidery and went downstairs. Addo was sitting awkwardly in the hall, in a chair far too small for his legs. He stood up when he saw her.