by K. J. Parker
Pleda told him they were going home, to visit family and friends. That seemed to be an acceptable answer, though Pleda was quite sure the captain didn’t believe it. Of course, as Pleda knew perfectly well, the government was subsiding the shipowners to keep the north–south crossings going, so the captain wasn’t quite as hard done by as he was pleased to suggest.
“Ten years since I was last in Beloisa,” Pleda observed as the ship dawdled through choppy water on the second day.
Musen didn’t feel much like chatting. He appeared to be working on the assumption (unfounded, as Pleda knew only too well) that if you keep perfectly still, eventually it gets better. “It’s all changed now, I expect.”
“Bound to be, since some bastard burned it to the ground. It wasn’t a bad old place when I knew it. A bit something-and-nothing, but I’ve seen worse.” He turned his back on the sea and rested his elbows on the rail. He’d forgotten, but actually he quite liked sailing. “I’m from Arad Sefny originally. Know it?”
Musen shook his head. A mistake. He closed his eyes and swallowed a couple of times.
“About a day and a half’s walk up from Burnt Chapel. Between Bray Downs and the Greenwater valley.”
“Sorry,” Musen said. “No idea where that is.”
Pleda shrugged. “We had a nice little farm, forty acres on the flat, grazed three dozen sheep on the downs. My mother bred geese, we used to drive them down into Burnt Chapel for the autumn fair. Three brothers, I was the youngest, and a sister; she married a man from Corroway. I used to go over there sometimes to help him with the peat-digging.”
Musen turned his head. “You said your father was a fuller.”
Pleda nodded. “Happy days,” he said. “Haven’t been home for, what, thirty years. Don’t suppose they’d recognise me if I walked through the door.”
“In a town.”
“Burnt Chapel. Smallish place. Used to be a chapel there, but it burned down.”
Musen was grinning. “One contradiction.”
“Good boy. I made it easy for you, mind.”
Musen turned back so that his mouth was directly above the sea. “Where are you really from?” he asked.
“Here and there. The lodge has always been my home. You go where you’re told. I like that.”
The boy thought for a while before he spoke again. “I can see where it saves you a lot of fretting,” he said. “Lots of choices you don’t have to make.”
Pleda frowned. “Oh, there’s choices,” he said. “All the bloody time, and the higher up you get, the more of them you’ve got to make. Don’t get any easier, either, and nobody thanks you for anything, nobody ever says well done, bloody good job.” He spread his elbows wider along the rail; it helped his back, a little. “I think that’s probably why the lodge works so well,” he said. “It’s not like anything else I know; not like governments or armies or Temple or any of that lot. Everywhere else, you always get people who want to get on, people with ambition. When the choices come along, they choose because they want to get to the top, because of the money and the power and all that rubbish. In the lodge, now, the higher up you get, the worse it is. No, don’t pull faces at me; it’s true. You don’t get paid, you live where you’re put, and if they send you to a tannery or a slaughterhouse, cleaning out the stalls, that’s where you go and that’s where you damn well stay. You don’t get fame and glory because there’s only a handful of people know who you are, and they’re lodge, not easily impressed. Just when you’ve got yourself settled in somewhere and your life feels like it’s starting to make sense, the bastards promote you, and it’s off somewhere else and start all over again, whether you like it or not. You can be Grand Vizier to the Sultan of Dog’s Armpit, and if you get promoted and the job means digging ore fifteen hours a day down an iron mine, that’s that, off you go, you don’t argue. Take me, for instance. Before I was put on this food-tasting thing, I was a chief clerk in a treasury office in the home provinces. Big house, nice bit of garden, servants, a bunch of little clerks to do all my work for me. And before that I was an assistant harbour master, and you can take it from me, there’s no better dodge going if you want to make a bit on the side. I could’ve raked it in, if I’d been that way inclined. Now I’m here doing this, glorified footman, with a good chance of getting myself killed any day of the week. That’s promotion in the lodge, my boy, and don’t you forget it. Nothing but trouble and sorrow. Like I said, I guess that’s why it works so well.”
Musen was looking at him with a mildly startled expression. “I don’t want to be anything special,” he said. “I just want to serve the lodge, that’s all. It’s the only thing I ever wanted.”
“Sure. That, and a load of stuff that doesn’t belong to you. Just as well the lodge can use you, then, isn’t it? Mind, that’s the other reason the lodge is so successful. We can use everybody.” And then the grin. “Even you.”
Maybe the grin wasn’t working today. He could tell Musen didn’t like what he’d said – not the stuff about promotion and all, the other thing. “Fact is,” he said, “we’re all the same. We wouldn’t do it otherwise. We serve the lodge because we believe in it. And if you’re a believer – well, the rest all sort of goes without saying. I don’t think it’s something you choose. It’s inside you, right from the start.” Like stealing, he didn’t say. “Some people are like that, they were born to be just the one thing. That’s us. That’s why we don’t need money and flash clothes and big houses.” He paused for a moment, then added: “You’re one of us, sunshine, I can tell. Don’t expect praise. After all, it’s none of your doing.”
He’d said the right thing, at last. “That’s it,” Musen said. “That’s exactly how I’ve always thought about it. It’s why – well, when I was growing up, in Merebarton. That’s my village. I was the only craftsman there.”
Pleda frowned. “Now that’s hard,” he said. “When you’re the only one. Different for me; there were always at least half a dozen of us, we always had someone to talk to. We felt special, you know, strong. Just you on your own, that must’ve been tough.”
Musen’s eyes were wide and bright. “It was,” he said eagerly. “You know, I think that’s why I started taking things. I always felt, you know, different, shut out. Actually, it was more than that. I felt like they were all blind and I was the only one that could see. But somehow that wasn’t an advantage, if you get what I mean.”
Sooner or later, Pleda thought, sooner or later. There’s always a certain combination of words that gets through, and then you’ve got them; like those amazing locks they have in Sond Amorcy, the ones with no keys, and you turn three little dials to line up the tumblers. Work people a click at a time, you’ll get there eventually. He let the boy talk. There was a whole lifetime waiting to come out, like a blocked drain.
Beloisa was just depressing. There was a structure calling itself an inn, on the quay, where the customs house used to be. It was mostly made of doors, charred on the outside, but military-spec crossply is too dense to burn right through; someone had been all round the site and gathered up about a hundred charred and scorched doors, nailed them to scaffold poles and lengths of rafter; oiled sailcloth for a roof, which sagged where rainwater had pooled – any day now, the cloth would give way and some poor devil would wake up drenched. Meanwhile, the weight of the rainwater had bowed the walls inwards. They’d tried to draw them straight again with guy ropes, but the pegs had already started to pull out. Sorry, the innkeeper said, we’re full up; try again next week, or the week after that.
The plan had been to buy a cart. No problem there; country people desperate to get across the sea had plenty of carts for sale, but horses to pull them were a different matter. The military paid cash – about three stuivers in the mark, but cash – for anything with four legs and a faint spark of life. So the country people had mostly turned their carts on their sides and added a lean-to of sooty planks, and there they sat, nothing to do but wait, observing the new arrivals off the boats, l
ike sheep at market watching the butchers.
“Looks like we’re going to have to walk,” Pleda said. “I hate bloody walking.”
But Musen had other ideas. “I’ve got a letter,” he said.
“What sort of a letter?”
Musen reached inside his shirt and produced a thin tube. It looked like brass, but there are other yellow metals. “Put it away, for God’s sake,” Pleda hissed. “You want to get our throats cut?”
Musen hadn’t thought of that. “It’s signed by the emperor,” he said, pulling his shirt down so the tube wouldn’t show. “It says we can have anything we want. I don’t know if that actually means anything.”
Dear God, a plenipotentiary warrant. A real one, not a fake. “It means something,” Pleda muttered. “Means we don’t have to walk, for one thing. Right, we need the prefect’s office.”
The Beloisa prefecture was a genuine stone, brick and tile building, one of the five still standing. The prefect, a pale, thin man Pleda had never heard of, took the tube as though he’d just been handed a sleeping cobra. “What’s this?” he said.
“You might like to read it,” Pleda suggested.
The prefect had difficulty getting the parchment out of the tube. First he tried to pinch hold of the end with his fingernails, but they were too short. Then he tried prodding with his forefinger, but somehow he managed to get the base of the parchment crumpled so that it jammed. Then he got up, crossed the room to a big rosewood chest on a stand, opened the chest, rummaged around for a while until he found a foot-long piece of ebony dowel, the sort of thing people who need to draw lines on maps use as a ruler. He tried that, but it was too wide to fit in the tube.
“Let me,” Pleda said. He poked the uncrumpled end of the tube with his little finger, and the roll of parchment slid out on to the prefect’s desk. The prefect gave him a baffled look, unrolled the parchment and started to read. Then he lifted his head and stared. “Sorry,” he said. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”
Not nearly as much, it turned out, as they’d hoped. Horses, yes, not a problem. They could go to the stables and help themselves from a wide selection of military-spec thoroughbreds. Only trouble was, they were cavalry horses – first class for charging the enemy, no good at all for pulling carts. All the draught horses in the place had been requisitioned, day before yesterday, and loaded on transports and whisked away over the sea. Not best pleased, as you gentlemen can imagine, since there was now no way of moving supply carts, hauling firewood or emptying the latrines. Sorry about that.
Pleda replied that that wasn’t good enough. He had a warrant in the emperor’s own handwriting promising him whatever he needed. It would not go well with the prefect, he suggested, if he was responsible for making the emperor break his promise. The prefect gave him a smile of pure hate and fear and said he’d see what he could do.
An hour later, by some miracle, two carthorses were suddenly available. Sheer coincidence, the prefect told them, some farmer just wandered in off the moor and offered to sell them. They weren’t bad animals, as it happened: shaggy, short-legged, nearly as broad as they were tall. Pleda gave the prefect a list of the emperor’s other promises, and the prefect assured him everything would be loaded on the cart in an hour. Until then, perhaps they would care for a bite to eat in the officers’ mess.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me you’d got a warrant?” Pleda said, with his mouth full. Roast pork with chestnut stuffing.
“We didn’t need anything.”
Farm boy, he thought. No matter. “Well, it’s nice to know it’s there if we need it. Don’t suppose it’ll be much help once we’re out of here, not unless we run into soldiers. Still, you’d better let me keep it.”
Musen looked at him, then nodded. Pleda mopped up gravy with his bread. It would be interesting to find out, he told himself, just how good a thief the boy was. The first thing, of course, would be to remove the warrant from the tube; a fair bet that it was the tube he’d be after, since it was shiny and pretty. “You know the way, I take it.”
“Me? God, no.”
Oh joy, Pleda thought. “Fine,” he said. “They’re bound to have a map.”
“Their maps are all wrong.”
Naturally. “Well, in that case, what do you suggest?”
Musen thought about it for a while. “I may be able to remember enough,” he said. “But we didn’t come straight here, last time. We got lost and wandered about a lot.”
“We?”
“Me and someone else from my village. Don’t know what happened to him.”
Pleda sighed. “Not to worry,” he said. “I’ll ask the prefect nicely for the good map. There’s always one.”
No, there wasn’t. Instead, there was the military survey, seventeenth edition, which still showed Norsuby as the regional capital, or the prefect’s own heavily revised and annotated version, copied for them in rather too much of a rush by a sullen clerk with questionable eyesight and poor handwriting. They chose the survey. After all, Pleda said, where they were going there weren’t any villages or other man-made features, not any more, and the hills and rivers were probably in the same place as they were a hundred years ago; and, anyway, who needs a map when you’ve got the stars to guide you?
“We just keep going north till we can see the Greenstock mountains, then we turn left along the Blackwater till we reach the Powder Hill pass, then due south and we’re there. Adds a couple of days to the journey, but we simply can’t go wrong.”
Musen looked at him. “If you say so.”
“Trust me,” Pleda said. “Geography’s a bit of a hobby of mine. Soon as I get my bearings, I won’t need any stupid maps.”
The main thing was, they still had plenty of food and water; not to mention beer, cider and tea, which Pleda took great pleasure in brewing up on the tiny portable charcoal stove the prefect had given them. “Charcoal,” he explained, as he fried pancakes in a dear little tinned-copper pan, “because there’s no smoke. No smoke, people can’t see you.”
“We’re lost, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know how you can say that,” Pleda replied, wounded. “We’re going north, like I said we should. Any day now we’ll see the Greenstocks.” He paused to flip the pancake. It landed with a delicate plop. “True, I can’t actually point to a place on a map and say, this is where we are. But lost—”
“Well,” Musen said, sitting down on the rock beside him. “I don’t know about you, but I’m lost. I have no idea where we are.”
“You can’t be lost,” Pleda said. “You’re with me.”
The important thing to bear in mind was, they still had plenty of water. The flour would last another two days, three if they were careful. By then, they were sure to reach the Greenstocks, at which point they would have the river dead ahead of them, and Pleda was an expert angler. “Used to spend hours on the riverbank when I was a boy,” he said, wiping grit out of his eyes. “Give me a bit of string and a bent pin, I can feed us indefinitely.”
“Have we got a bit of string and a bent pin?”
Secretly, however, Pleda was somewhat concerned. There should have been a road. He remembered it clearly from the last time he was here – a long time ago, admittedly, but roads don’t just vanish. Instead, they were creaking slowly over heather, stopping occasionally to lever, drag, lift, worry and prise the cart out of the boggy patches that you simply didn’t see till you were in them. They’d brought two changes of clothes each, but every garment they had was now caked with black, stinking bog mud, which never seemed to dry out and wouldn’t brush or wash off. It was ingrained so deep into their hands that they might as well be Imperials. Even the rain didn’t wash it off, even though it soaked right through to the skin and trickled down their bodies and legs, when the wind was behind it. Water, though; not a problem. Wring out a shirt, you had enough for a week.
“This moor’s so flat,” Musen was saying, “you must be able to see for, what, thirty miles?”
And th
e horizon was still flat. Quite. Pleda had been wondering about that. Was it possible that the mountains simply weren’t there any more – commandeered for the war effort, stolen by profiteers to make ballast for the fleet, demolished by the Belot brothers in a supreme moment of collateral damage? He doubted it. Even the war couldn’t level mountain ranges, or so he’d always been led to believe.
“It can’t be thirty miles,” he said firmly. “Here.” He reached down inside his shirt and pulled out the map. There wasn’t much left of it. Rain had washed off all the coloured ink, and a lot of the black had rubbed off against his chest; the parchment was soft and squishy, and smelt like newly boiled rawhide. “Look for yourself. There’s no open space three hundred and sixty square miles big. Too many hills and mountains. It must just be a trick of the contours.”
That was his latest phrase. He’d come to believe in it, the way a dying man believes in the gods. He wasn’t entirely sure it meant anything. Musen handed the map back without looking at it. “If you say so,” he said.
“Sod this,” Pleda said. “We might as well stop for the night, get under cover before that lot over there sets in.”
Musen glanced at the skyful of thick, black low cloud dead ahead of them. “It’s an hour away,” he said. “And there isn’t any cover.”
“Shut your face.”
They slept under the cart, their backs in pooled bog water. When he woke up, Pleda could see a brilliant blue sky, and three pairs of boots.
Oh, he thought.
One thing they hadn’t brought was weapons. Asking for trouble, he’d told the prefect. Anybody catches us with weapons in the middle of a war zone, they’ll think we’re spies or saboteurs. Ah well.
