The Folding Knife

by Parker, K. J.

  The barber's shop on the east side was one of the more surprising successes. Although Mavortines of every caste professed nothing but scorn for the civilised nations of the south, they were increasingly prepared to make an exception when it came to their hair. Fashions, chosen apparently at random from the three major foreign cultures, came and went with bewildering speed. The Sclerian bob, often disconcertingly combined with the Vesani smooth chin and the luxuriant Auxentine moustache, swiftly gave way to the Auxentine plait (but with full Mavortine beard), which in turn was ousted by the Sclerian tonsure (with the Vesani smooth upper lip and the Auxentine forked beard), until supplanted in its turn by Vesani layering, the Mavortine moustache and the waxed-spike chin-only beard copied from Auxentine coins of the previous century. The barber, a Mavortine with nomad Hus on his mother's side, employed six men (including a genuine Vesani, who'd left the Republic in a hurry for legal reasons) and two women, and his shop was generally regarded as the social hub of Inguiomera.

  A week after the raid on the Vesani Treasury, a man nobody had seen before walked rather diffidently into the barber's shop and looked round, clearly uncertain of the procedure. He was shown to the only vacant chair and asked what he wanted. He replied that he wasn't sure, it was his first time in a place like this, but he wanted the best and was prepared to pay for it. The barber assured him he'd put his best man on the job, and beckoned to the renegade Vesani.

  The style, or combination of styles, employed on this occasion was a fairly monumental piece of work, taking a substantial amount of time, because the bill came to seven stury, best part of a day's wages for a skilled man. The customer didn't seem to mind; he paid with a gold coin, told the barber to keep the change, and left.

  The Vesani hairdresser was a quick thinker, though not a particularly deep one, which was why he now found himself in the Mavortine Confederacy. He slipped the gold coin into his mouth, put seven stury of his own money into the takings pot, and saw to the next customer. Some time later, on the pretext of relieving himself, he went outside, took the coin out of his mouth and tucked it inside his shoe, where it remained for the rest of the day.

  His initial intention had been to take it to the money changer on the south side and convert it into stury. On his way there, however, he paused to examine it under a lamp, and changed his mind. Instead, he went to the Vesani lodge and demanded to see the resident.

  At that time, the office of Vesani resident in Inguiomera was largely informal, shared between those of the senior merchants who could be bothered to do it. On that particular day, it happened to be the turn of Brenno Reliano, a minor cousin of the wrong side of the Aureliani banking family, aged nineteen years and on his first trip abroad. He'd been in the Confederacy for three days.

  As soon as Brenno saw the coin, he realised that he was looking at his passage home. He asked the hairdresser where he'd got it, and was told the full story. No, the hairdresser hadn't seen where the man had gone and he hadn't mentioned his name or anything like that, but he shouldn't be hard to find. Just look for a Mavortine with a Sclerian skinhead, bushy whiskers and a beard like a six-inch nail.

  Brenno thanked the hairdresser and, on the pretext of getting him a drink, escorted him to a small storage bay and locked him in. Then he rounded up all the Vesani in the lodge, explained what he'd found, and asked what they should do next.

  Going to the authorities (Brenno's own suggestion) was dismissed out of hand. For one thing, there were no authorities in a Mavortine town; for another, it was extremely unlikely that any Mavortine would choose to help a foreigner against one of his own kind. If anything was to be done, they'd have to do it themselves. Four men refused to have anything to do with any form of violent action; that left twelve men, to search the entire settlement before the suspect could get away. A vote was taken, and it was reluctantly agreed that they should look for allies among the other foreigners.

  The Auxentines refused to help, on principle; the Sclerians, however, agreed to join the search, in return for a third share in any cash reward, plus trading privileges to be agreed later. There were seventeen of them, and they also provided the Vesani with short swords and stab-proof shirts from their trading stock, at practically cost.

  In the event, they didn't have to look far. There were nine inns and seven beer halls inside the rings, in the fifth of which they found their man. There was a brief scuffle, but nothing to excite interest; they hauled the man outside, cut his purse off his belt, and found it was stuffed with newly minted Vesani nomismata, all bearing the head of Bassianus Severus. They marched the man back to the Vesani lodge for questioning.

  Interrogation, according to the old Guild maxim, is no job for amateurs. Needless to say, neither the Vesani nor the Sclerians had any knowledge of scientific procedure, so they had to rely on brute force, first principles and enthusiasm. As a result, when the prisoner finally agreed to talk, they had the greatest difficulty in understanding what he was trying to tell them. Eventually, they got what they wanted: the name of a village, a dozen miles or so to the south.

  At first light, a Vesani sloop left the estuary and sailed straight home. On board were the Mavortine and the Vesani hairdresser (who received a full pardon for his earlier indiscretions, and a pension of twenty nomismata a year for life, paid by the First Citizen personally). General Aelius' professional interrogators quickly confirmed that, in their opinion, the prisoner was telling the truth. After a brief meeting with Basso, Aelius and two Treasury officials boarded the sloop and set sail. Instead of going direct to Inguiomera, however, they made for Anno, the nearest town of any size on the Cazar Peninsular.

  It was the first time Aelius had been home for over thirty years, but he was in a hurry. He hired a horse in Anno and rode for twelve hours into the foothills of the Great Crest mountains, where his mother's family had come from. Forty-eight hours later he was back, with sixty distant cousins, discreetly but effectively armed and bound by the most dreadful oaths of loyalty and good faith recognised by Cazar tradition. The rest of the men, he told the Treasury officers, would be along in a day or so.

  The Treasury men had chartered a caravel for Aelius and his party. They themselves stayed in Anno and were lucky enough to find a Vesani stone barge, which had come to collect marble from the quarries. Using the letter of authority Basso had given them, they requisitioned it, bought supplies, and had it ready to rendezvous with Aelius' party and load up the stolen gold assuming (big assumption) that it had been recovered. They also managed to commandeer a grain freighter for the two hundred Cazar.

  Thanks to a freak turn of the wind, Aelius was already in Inguiomera. He disembarked alone, went straight to the Vesani lodge and was given the map he'd been promised. Two hours after sunset (it was pitch dark and raining) he led his sixty cousins south to the blind side of the ridge overlooking the village the prisoner had told him about. He waited until just before dawn.

  There was nothing complex about his strategy. He sent twenty men to go round the other side of the village, taking care to keep below the ridge for as long as possible. Half an hour later, he led the rest of his men down the hill at a brisk run. At the village gate, he detached two parties of ten men to go ahead and drive villagers from the outer houses towards the centre. With the remaining twenty, he worked from the centre out.

  It went well. Two villagers, a young man and a boy, slipped between the outer and inner flushing parties and had to be shot; after that, there was no trouble. When all the villagers had been herded together in front of the main lodge, Aelius explained the situation to them through an interpreter. Time, he said, was of the essence. Although he and his men had been as quiet and unobtrusive as possible, it wouldn't be long before the alarm was raised and the men who'd buried the gold in or near their village came rushing out to protect their treasure. Being a cautious man, he estimated he had something like four hours. (There was a problem with the word hour; the interpreter had to point at the sun and wave his arms.) Much to his regret, therefo
re, he could only allow himself the time it would take him to count to five hundred before he'd have to start killing villagers, five at a time. On this schedule, assuming nobody was prepared to tell him what he needed to know, he'd have time to execute fifty of them; then he'd have no choice but to drive the rest of them into the lodge, wedge the doors from the outside and set fire to the roof. He thanked them for their attention and began counting.

  At three hundred and forty, a man stood up and led him to one of the village's six wells. It was all down there, he said; the well was dry, and they'd sewed it all up in goatskins and dropped it in. Aelius sent a man down on a rope; he came back up with a goatskin sack gripped in both hands.

  Thanks to the impression he'd made on them, Aelius had no trouble persuading the villagers to deal with getting the gold out of the well. He detailed ten men to watch them, and stationed the remaining fifty around the village perimeter to watch for new arrivals. In the event, his estimate of four hours proved to be remarkably accurate. He immediately pulled his men back inside the village, barred the gate and went up onto the watchtower to open negotiations. But the raiders shot arrows at him, so he withdrew and stood to his defence.

  His position was not as bad as he'd originally assumed. The village was surrounded by a ditch and bank, topped by a palisade of eight-inch fir trunks. There was only one gate, commanded by one watchtower. The gate itself was reasonably solid, with stout hinges and bars. He put the ten of his men who had bows in the tower; they quickly demonstrated that they were much better shots than the enemy, who pulled back out of range to consider their options. The tower detail counted heads as best they could and put the size of the opposing force at less than two hundred. Aelius was greatly encouraged; that put the numbers well within the approved offensive/defensive ratio, and the enemy appeared to have little or no understanding of siege procedures. He, on the other hand, had food and hostages. His main disadvantage was the lack of a catwalk or fighting platform on his side of the palisade; apart from that and his limited stock of arrows, he was modestly confident that he could hold the status quo. Everything would depend, therefore, on which arrived first: his reinforcements, or the rest of the raiding party. To buy a little extra time, he had the interpreter shout out a warning that if the raiders didn't withdraw to double bowshot immediately, he would execute two hostages. The raiders made no move, so Aelius had ropes put round the necks of the two villagers who'd been shot earlier, and hung them off the tower. The raiders screamed at him and shot a few arrows (which fell short), then backed off a further two hundred yards. They stood around for a while, then sat down cross-legged on the turf.

  Aelius discussed the situation with his cousins, who agreed with him that the enemy would most likely attack an hour or so before dawn. Aelius therefore decided he would attack an hour after midnight. As soon as it was dark he set a party of villagers to digging a tunnel under the palisade into the ditch, on the opposite side of the village to the gateway and the tower. When the time he'd chosen came, he left ten of his men to guard the villagers and keep a lookout from the tower, then led the rest of his force through the tunnel. They took a long detour, eventually coming out on the blind side of the slope just above the place where the enemy were. They crept to the top of the crest and ran down towards the campfire the raiders had thoughtfully lit, around which most of them were now sleeping.

  In so far as they could think at all, woken from sleep by hostile yells and the screams of their wounded colleagues, the enemy naturally assumed that the men invading their camp and slaughtering them at will must be Vesani reinforcements. Quite sensibly and properly, they ran, most of them not bothering to pick up their weapons. Those who stayed, through drowsiness or valour, were quickly dealt with. Aelius told his men to leave their bodies where they lay and get back to the village, just in case the fugitives came back. However, he made a point of collecting all the abandoned weapons they could find by firelight, in particular bows and arrows. Then he retired to the village.

  It's safe to assume that the fugitives knew which direction their reinforcements were coming from, and ran to tell them what had happened. They arrived two hours after dawn, to find thirty of their colleagues lying dead on the grass and the village gate firmly shut. As far as they were aware, the sixty or so men who'd taken the village had been reinforced by an unknown but quite substantial number of allies, at least doubling the garrison. That put the odds at something in the order of five to one--marginal but acceptable according to the tables at the back of Aelius' copy of The Art of War; rather less inviting to the raiders, whose respect for their enemy had increased significantly. There was some sort of council of war, which Aelius watched with interest from the tower. Then a small number of raiders went off in a hurry, while the rest sat down, comfortably out of bowshot.

  It was easy enough for Aelius to reconstruct the arguments used during the council. One faction would have insisted on sending for reinforcements. The opposition would have pointed out that that would entail telling their neighbours at least the bare outline of events, which in practice would mean inviting the entire Mavortine Confederacy to come and share the loot with them. Further, there was no way of knowing how many more Vesani were on their way; the longer they delayed, the greater the risk not only of losing the treasure but of being killed or (probably worse) captured and taken back to the City. True, they were in no position to rush the gate and break it down in the face of determined and highly professional opposition. The one advantage they had was numbers; if they attacked the gate and simultaneously dug their way under the palisade, preferably in two places, they had a chance of dividing the garrison and overwhelming them. Otherwise, they might as well go home, pack their belongings and emigrate; it would be interesting to see how far they'd get before the Vesani tracked them down.

  Moved, therefore, that they send a small number of men to the nearest large farm, to buy, borrow or steal digging equipment, carts and horses. Voted on and approved by something in the order of a two-thirds majority.

  The commandeering party came back with four hay carts and a lumber wagon. They used the carts as mobile cover for the sapping parties (in effect, reinventing the pavise from first principles; Aelius was impressed) and the garrison quickly stopped wasting arrows on them. There were, after all, other expedients, approved by the Book and standard procedure. When the Mavortine sappers were about halfway through, they were startled and horrified to find a hole caving in the side of their trench, out of which crawled armed men: Aelius' cousins had dug a tunnel of their own. They chased the survivors of the sapping parties out of the ditch as far as the carts, then stopped, dragged the carts into the open away from the palisade, smashed four spokes out of each cartwheel, and retired to their tunnel, which they filled in after them with previously prepared sacks of rubble.

  Aelius, meanwhile, had been lucky. While ransacking a house for sacks to fill with rocks, he found something he definitely hadn't expected to find, but which filled his heart with joy: a jar of good-quality refined shipwrights' pitch, bearing an Auxentine revenue seal. With this crucial ingredient in hand, he had no trouble finding lamp oil; sulphur was another unexpected bonus. There was only one suitable pipe in the village, running down the side of the lodge, but the smithy provided him with a fine double-action bellows, and the shoemaker had an adequate stock of thick tanned hide. After that, all he had to do was choose between half a dozen entirely suitable large iron kettles.

  Shaken by the disastrous failure of the undermining attempts, the raiders decided to put everything into a full-scale assault on the gate. They had one cart left; they filled it with rocks, for weight, and tied in it lengthways the trunk of the only decent-sized oak tree within ten square miles, which happened to grow on the ridge overlooking the gate. As they manhandled their improvised ram towards the gate they suffered cruelly from the accurate and surprisingly far-reaching archery of the defenders in the tower; however, for each man shot, another rushed to take his place, and as they came to the
last ten yards of their distance, they began to feel a faint but distinct degree of hope.

  Then the gate suddenly swung open, just enough to reveal one end of an ordinary baked-clay water pipe. One of the raiders had the experience or the intuition to yell a warning and jump clear, but if his colleagues realised why he was so terrified, they had no time to react.

  The first recorded use of Vesani fire by the Republic's navy was in AUC 576, over four centuries previously; and ever since the recipe for the infamous incendiary compound, which burned even on water and which Vesani ships shot at their enemies with a giant syphon through a tube, was one of the Republic's most closely guarded secrets. Even Aelius didn't know it; but he knew that the closest anyone else had ever come to duplicating it was by mixing pitch, lamp oil, sulphur and distilled birch resin. The workings of the projector were common knowledge, since examples had been recovered from wrecked Vesani ships; you simply passed a jet of air through a vessel full of the compound down a tube, in the mouth of which you'd previously stuffed a handful of smouldering rag or moss.

  All the Mavortines knew about Vesani fire was that it was certain death--if it hit you, there was no way of putting it out, not even if you jumped into the sea. In the event, Aelius' improvised projector only worked indifferently well; it sent an impressive jet of flame just over the heads of the men pushing the ram, missed the ram itself and set fire to one side of the cart, which burnt in a gradual and unspectacular manner for the rest of the day. That didn't seem to matter, as far as the raiders were concerned. All they knew was that the garrison was armed with the Vesani Republic's deadliest and most secret weapon, and they had no interest whatsoever in getting any closer to it than they could help.

  The debate that followed was passionate and bitter and lasted well into the night. Aelius was tempted to try another sortie, but resisted the temptation; his position was now comfortably strong, and a failed sortie was one of the few ways he could bring about his own defeat. He contented himself with shooting a few fire-arrows; they fell well short, but each time one streaked through the sky, the raiders stopped talking and stayed silent for some time.