The Two of Swords, Part 16

by K. J. Parker

  “That ought to do it,” he said. He was red in the face and his hair was plastered across his forehead. “Don’t you think?”

  “You want to go down another six inches.”

  He didn’t argue; well, you wouldn’t, would you, digging someone’s mother’s grave. But she kept him at it until he looked genuinely tired, and he grinned and said he wasn’t cut out for a life of manual labour. “That’ll do fine,” she said, and reached out her hand to pull him up. Of course, he was two feet further down than she’d been, and he was heavier than she was; and he’d expected her to be able to haul him up out of there easy as anything. A compliment, of sorts.

  “Sorry,” she said, as he slid back down again and landed awkwardly on the sides of his feet. “Here, try again.”

  “It’s perfectly all right,” he said. Then he laid the shovel at an angle against the corner, stood on the handle and hopped out quite easily. “Right,” he said. “What do we do now?”

  “You don’t do anything. This is private.”

  “Of course.”

  Stupid, she thought, a little later. Her mother’s body was too heavy to lift (a strong woman, years of bending to the hoe, walking three miles to the well twice a day, a weight she’d never be able to shift as long as she lived), so she had to get behind it, arms under the armpits, hands linked across the cold chest, and drag. It wasn’t an issue; she’d seen battlefields, bodies longer dead, more swollen, more shrunken than this, she’d handled them, rifled them for money, trinkets, boots, it was just a thing; you can’t catch death by touch, so she dragged it, heels trailing, walking backwards, careful not to bump into the wall or foul its trundling heels on the doorpost. A coffin would’ve been ten stuivers extra. She lugged it to the edge of the grave, stood it upright and pitched it in. You stupid, clumsy girl, you can’t do anything. Well, she thought. Then she grabbed the shovel and threw dirt on her mother’s face – open mouth, blank and staring eyes, I came all this way and spent all my money and look what a mess I’m making of it. Ah well. I’ll try and do a better job next time.

  By the time she’d spooned in the last cupful of spoil, her hands were red raw and her back was aching, and that was good, because it was only right and proper that she should feel pain at this moment, and she wouldn’t have done otherwise. She stacked the tools neatly against the trunk of the thorn tree, then went inside the house.

  Oida was drinking with the farmer and his two sons. She must’ve walked through the door a split second after he told the punchline of a joke. The three farmers were laughing, and Oida had that grin on his face.

  “I’m done,” she said. “I’m going now.”

  Oida jumped up. “Just a moment. You’re not in a tearing hurry, are you?”

  She really didn’t want him to see her starting the long walk to Cordouli. “I don’t want to miss the stage.”

  “Stage isn’t due in till sundown,” the farmer pointed out. “Plenty of time yet.”

  She ignored him. But Oida was too quick. Before she knew it, he was between her and the door, thanking the farmer for the drink before she could push past him.

  “I can give you a lift,” he said. “Quicker than the stage. Also, my coach has springs.”

  She sighed. “Oida, what are you doing here?”

  “I heard. About your mother.”

  That was entirely possible. The Lodge knew everything, even now. “So you flew to my side. How sweet.”

  “Yes, actually. I don’t think anyone should have to face something like this on their own.”

  The Lodge would know all about local burial customs. And Oida would’ve looked them up in a book before setting off. “My bag’s on the stage.”

  “You can have it sent on from the depot.”

  Now she knew him pretty well. On a trip like this, he’d ride, not bother with a chaise or a coach, unless he was sure he’d have company on the way back. Did he know about her sad lack of money? The Lodge knows everything.

  “My book is in my bag. I hate not having something to read.”

  “I’ll lend you a bloody book.”

  “I don’t like your books. They’re boring.”

  Which was perfectly true. For this journey, he’d packed Pleusio’s History of the Archidamian War and Illectus’s Aspects of Comedy. He always took two books, in case he decided he wasn’t in the mood for one of them, and he never went on the road with a book he hadn’t already read. The coach was a luxury model, city-built, with curtains and padded seats.

  “Not mine,” he said. “Hired it in Moil. I think it belongs to the mayor.”

  She shook her head. “You didn’t hire it. The mayor turned out to be a fan. Please, take my coach, I’d be honoured. Everything’s so easy for you.”

  He laughed. “I earned it,” he said. “I had to sit still while his loathsome twelve-year-old son murdered Undefeated on the clarinet.”

  And the mayor’s son would remember that for the rest of his life, and tell his grandchildren. “People give you things,” she said. “And you do nothing to deserve it.”

  “True,” he said. “But I dig a mean hole.”

  She looked out of the window; familiar places, but this time she was going in the right direction. “I used to pick blueberries on this moor.”

  “Sounds like a pleasant occupation on a sunny day.”

  “Not really. They use them for dye, for army uniforms. We had to pick twelve pounds a day each, or we didn’t get any food.”

  He gave her a weak smile; it had been an obvious trap, and he’d willingly walked into it. She thought about him, digging. He’d done it like an actor, playing a man digging a hole. He’d studied the technique, thought himself into the mindset, and actors are generally fit and active, so he’d kept it up quite convincingly for half an hour. “I ought to be in floods of tears, but I’m not,” she said. “Do you disapprove? Do you think I’m shallow and heartless?”

  “Are you familiar with the concept of work-hardening?”

  Good answer. Of course she was; a piece of steel that gets flexed time and again eventually gets hard, just before it turns brittle and snaps. Or a piece of steel sheet that gets hammered over and over gets compressed, hard and strong, just right for a helmet or a breastplate. “I do feel things, you know.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Right. What am I feeling now?”

  He considered the problem as though it was algebra. “Relieved.”

  She looked at him. “How do you make that out?”

  “Am I right?”

  “Show your working.”

  He smiled. “All right,” he said. “You hate this place, and you hate the fact that you come from here. Now your last tie with it’s gone, and it’s a great weight off your shoulders.”

  She nodded. “It’s not just that,” she said. “I feel like my whole life I’ve been carrying the guilt of a dreadful crime, only I haven’t been caught yet. And now the last witness against me is dead, and there’s no proof any more. I’m free.”

  “The last witness but one.”

  She shook her head. “If only I know something happened, then if I say so, it never happened.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Were you close to your sister?”

  “Closer than my mother. No, I wasn’t, not really. I hardly knew her.”

  “You left her everything in your will.”

  He wasn’t supposed to know that, but of course he did. “I haven’t got anything to leave.”

  “You might suddenly come into money.”

  “Well, she’s dead now, so I guess I’ll have to think of someone else. The Blue Star temple, probably. Or the Pandion library.”

  He gave her a solemn frown. “I’m a trustee of the Blue Star,” he said: “don’t even consider it. Why buy lunch for a bunch of people you never even met? The Pandion’s a good thing, though. They’ve got the complete works of Illectus.”

  She frowned. “Nobody’s got the complete works. A third of them are lost.”

>   He shook his head. “They don’t want it widely known, but, yes, the complete works. Not to mention two books of Orderic’s Analects that were supposed to have gone up in flames during the sack of Haut Bohec.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’re kidding.”

  “Seen them myself, with these two eyes. I wasn’t allowed to read them, mind you, they won’t let you do that unless you’ve got signed testimonials from the heads of three accredited faculties. Five aspects of the nature of Evil are, however, self-evident. That’s all I saw, and then Father Prior closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Annoying. I’d have loved to find out what happened in the end.”

  “They all got married and lived happily ever after, probably.” He smiled. “No witnesses,” he said. “Witnesses to what?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I’m a human being; everything human is my business.”

  “Fremda, The Girl from Beloisa.”

  “Act four, but which scene?”

  “Two.”

  “Three. Close, but no apple.”

  She shrugged. “I read on coaches, and I travel a lot.”

  “Me too,” he said, and opened his book.

  So she opened hers: Illectus on Comedy. She hadn’t read it before. It was ghastly; impenetrable, boring and wrong. But he’d chosen it for light reading; brought two books, as he always did, so she couldn’t tell herself he’d brought one for her, in anticipation of her riding back with him, and deliberately chosen something dead boring. She looked up and saw him watching her. “What?”

  “Swap?”

  She closed the book and put it on the seat beside her. “What were you doing in Heneca? You didn’t fly to be with me in my hour of trouble, because even you couldn’t possibly have known. The Father wrote to me that she’d died and an hour after I read the letter I was on the stage. And the letter hadn’t been opened. I know everything there is to know about fixing seals.”

  He shook his head. “No, you don’t,” he said gently. “And the Father was under orders to report anything about your family before contacting you.”

  She scowled at him. “Whose orders?”

  “Not mine. Really. I don’t have that sort of authority, believe me.”

  “But you’re told my mother’s died before I am.”

  “You’re a Lodge soldier.” His voice was suddenly hard. “Lodge security overrides delicate sensibilities. They need to know all about you.”

  “What were you doing at Heneca Top?”

  He sighed. “You want the truth.”

  “Yes. I’m kinky that way.”

  “Fine.” He broke eye contact and looked away. “You’re needed, in Rasch. Someone had to go and fetch you. I volunteered.”

  “That’s more like it.” She felt a sudden surge of anger – because he hadn’t dropped everything and rushed to be with her; he was just doing a job, obeying orders. It occurred to her that he was rather an important man, whose time was not without value, and he’d taken a job that any low-grade foot soldier could’ve done, spent days rattling through the horrible Eastern Mesoge, put up with her vile temper, dug a grave – For some reason, that didn’t reduce the anger. Quite the reverse. “Why can’t you give me a straight answer the first time, instead of all this garbage?”

  He shrugged, said nothing. A wise man said: the purest form of victory is not to fight. Sometimes, this was one of them, what she wanted most in the whole world was to smash his face in. “Thank you,” she said. “For the lift. I’d run out of money, you see. I was going to have to walk down to Cordouli.”

  “In those shoes?”

  How many men actually notice shoes? Was it something he’d trained himself to do, over the years? She raised her head slightly, so that she could look at him properly. Here was a man who sang commonplace songs exceptionally well but who loved and understood Procopius and Genseric, far better than she ever would; who noticed shoes and hairstyles and the ebb and flow of hemlines; who chased women like a cat chases string, but read Illectus on Comedy for pleasure and relaxation; who lied fluently and well, but who could dig a straight-sided hole in stiff clay; who bet ridiculous sums of money on cockfights and invariably won; who basked in praise and flattery like a lizard on a rock but who believed in the Craft with unshakable faith, and would die for the Lodge without a second thought; who spent more on socks each year than her mother had earned in her whole life, but who’d pulled strings and called in favours to be sent on a degradingly routine mission in the Eastern Mesoge on the off chance that he might be some help at a bad time; who spoke eight languages and was an off-relation of the two emperors; who never told her the truth unless she gouged it out of him; who, with all the world to choose from, kept following her about and finding excuses and pretexts for being in the same place as her, a plain, scar-faced woman from the Mesoge whose mother had sold her to the blueberry-pickers. Face it, she told herself; you know how this is going to end, and nobody else on earth knows you half so well, or gives a damn. But not yet. The apple falls from the tree when the time is right, and not before.

  Sometimes she played a game with him, although he probably didn’t realise that was what she was doing; she’d pick some thoroughly abstruse topic, which she’d carefully boned up on in advance, and start asking him questions about it, just to see if he knew what she was talking about and was able to reply intelligently. Amazingly, he hadn’t failed her yet.

  “But it stands to reason that if the head pressure at the top cistern is greater than the return flow” (she’d chosen hydraulic engineering, with specific reference to the rebuilding of the aqueduct at Fail Loisir), “then an abnormally low tide in the estuary is going to back up the feeder channels and the whole system will clog up with silt.”

  He thought for a moment. “Not necessarily,” he said. “I think they’ve got special bleeder pipes for that, somewhere up on the moors above Ciotal. Mind you, it’s a while since I’ve been there.”

  Amazing. “Well, that’s not going to help much if there’s heavy spring rain and the runoff comes surging down the rines. In fact, it would make it worse.”

  “In that case, they’d open the sluices at Mavais Shanz, surely. I’m only guessing,” he added (if so, lucky guess). “If you like, I can find out for you. I know a man who knows about these things.”

  Over the years she’d learned an awful lot about an awful lot of unlikely things, researching for the Game. But she’d never caught him out once. “No, that’s all right, don’t bother. Just idle curiosity, really.”

  “Fascinating subject,” he said, reaching for his book. “Would you mind shifting your feet? I’m getting cramp.”

  She’d accepted his kind offer and traded Illectus on Comedy for Pleusio’s History of the Archidamian War; seemed like a good idea at the time. “Still following the cockfighting?”

  He peered at her over the cover of Illectus. “You don’t hold with cockfighting.”

  “No, but I could do with a hot tip, if you’ve got one.”

  He nodded. “Bloodspur Pride of Blemya to win the Aelian summer league,” he said. “You’ll get a good price because nobody fancies the breed in the middleweights, but I’ve seen him fight and he’s got the body weight and the staying power. Have you run out of money again?”

  “Yes.”

  Puzzled frown. “Why? You always used to be as poor as a dog because you sent all your money home. But now you’ve got nobody to send it to, so you should be rolling in it.”

  She’d never told him that was what she did. “Well, maybe I will be, from now on. At the moment, though, I could do with a small injection of capital.”

  Credit where it was due; he’d never offered her money, or arranged for money to come her way. A couple of times, when she’d had an angel or two, he’d deliberately won it off her playing cards. Now, perhaps, would be a good time to rub his nose in it. “Could you lend me twenty angels?”

  He looked at her, the way he did when they were playing chess and she did that queen�
�s-side swoop he never saw coming. “Sure.” His hand was fumbling in his pocket.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay you back.”

  “Right. On seconds thoughts, forget about Bloodspur in the Aelian. There’s a nice little Rhaesian Grey called Fireclaw in the Domestic Stakes; the odds aren’t so good but it’s an absolute certainty.”

  She smiled. “I wouldn’t bet your twenty angels on a cockfight.”

  He held out his hand, on which rested four gold coins. “Why not? It’d be like finding money in the street.”

  “I don’t hold with cockfighting. It’s cruel.”

  “This from the woman who once killed a political officer for a berth on a ship.”

  She smiled and took the coins. “It’s like the old joke,” she said: “what’s the difference between lawyers and rats?”

  “Go on.”

  “Given time, and under certain circumstances, you can get attached to a rat.”

  He grinned, the special grin he only used for good jokes. The book was open on his knee, cover facing upwards. When he grinned like that, you could kid yourself into thinking he was a harmless idiot. She thought: Oida and me, we’ve fought each other like the Belot brothers, the length and breadth of two empires, and neither of us has ever lost or ever won, and I think it’s possible that we fight for the same reason they do. So, if I’m Senza, what do I do now?

  They only played cards once; never again. She was sure he cheated, but she had no idea how, and it was a subject she knew a great deal about. Fortunately, they weren’t playing for money.

  “There must be at least six aces in that pack,” she said.

  He shook his head. “The regulation four. No pack’s got six in it. The first pack ever made had five, if that’s any help.”

  “Five aces?”

  He nodded. “Five suits, therefore five aces. But for some reason, when they made the second pack, they cut the number down to four.”