The Folding Knife

by Parker, K. J.

  "Dare say he did. The Hus believe the sky is the belly of a huge pregnant woman touching her toes. Doesn't mean it's true."

  Bassano didn't elaborate his point. He could see Basso understood. The others didn't matter.

  "Sorry, First Citizen," said one of the oversight committee men, "but it looks like we've wasted our money. They didn't tell us anything we didn't already know."

  Basso's face was straight, but his eyes were sparkling. "Don't worry about the money," he said. "I issued the invitation, I'll pay them their fee, and the expenses."

  The committee men looked rather sad; they'd been hoping to make a little recreational trouble. "Extremely generous gesture," one of them said, and the other guests made polite rumbling noises to express their agreement. "And I suppose it was worth trying. You weren't to know the men were charlatans."

  "Oh, they weren't that," Basso said. "No shame in ignorance, provided you rectify it as and when you can."

  The Sclerians didn't go home straight away. Basso asked them to stay over for a day or so, and found time for several long discussions. When Aelius asked him why he was bothering, he shrugged the question away. When Bassano asked him--

  "Actually," Basso said, "they're a mine of useful information. It's like when they dig for silver. For every ton of silver you find, you get five tons of lead. Some seams, the poorer ones, the ratio's more like one to eight. Now, just suppose it was the lead you were actually after."

  Bassano frowned, then laughed. "You were finding out if they're really as dumb as they look, or whether it was an act they were putting on, to mislead us into thinking..."

  Basso nodded. "Not an act," he said. "That really was the cutting edge of Sclerian martial science. Which means, since the Sclerians fought a really serious war with the Empire about thirty years ago and came out very slightly ahead, and the Empire is known to be slightly in advance of the Auxentines..."

  "We know more about it than anybody else," Bassano said. "Yes, I see what you mean. You'd never get reliable information like that out of spies." His eyebrows drew together; it made him look almost comically serious when he did that. "I was thinking, though. Just because a bunch of academics are a hundred years behind the times, does it follow that the actual soldiers are too? Could be that the university course is just a finishing school for gentlemen's sons, and the real professional soldiers..."

  Basso smiled. "I'm way ahead of you," he said. "And no, apparently not. A degree from Gopessus is a requirement before you can be commissioned in the Sclerian army. Those no-hopers upstairs are responsible for educating the men we'll be fighting in eight years' time. Which," he added, "is the most cheerful news I've heard in a long while."

  Aelius had studied the map. He'd had a dozen full copies made, together with three dozen half-scale versions and sector charts for use in the field, to be copied by the clerks of each unit. Something about it, though, was bothering him, and Basso was having trouble finding out what it was. "Like dealing with a woman," he told Bassano sourly. "Something's the matter, but when you ask what it is, all you get is oh, nothing, and then they sulk, because you're supposed to be able to guess. I hate that," he added.

  "That's not like Aelius," Bassano said. "Straight questions and straight answers are more his style."

  "That's why I'm worried," Basso said.

  The training of the recruits was going very well, Aelius said. They were, of course, born soldiers, and nobody could teach them anything about handling weapons or fieldcraft. Vesani military discipline and procedures, on the other hand, were completely alien to them, and they had to be trained from scratch as though they were city conscripts. Fortunately, they were both willing and able to learn. It helped tremendously that the Commander-in-Chief was a Cazar--a Cazar and a Vesani citizen, something that impressed them greatly; better still, a Cazar from a clan with whom very few of the clans who'd provided the bulk of the recruits had any subsisting blood feuds. The one point on which they had reservations was the fact that they'd be expected to cooperate with Hus cavalry. Not without a small kernel of good reason, the Cazars regarded the Hus as vicious barbarians who burnt villages for fun and killed women and children on sight. The Hus, in so far as anybody knew what they thought about anything, regarded any non-Hus as not really human, and therefore outside their bewilderingly complex concepts of chivalry and honour. They were, however, very keen to earn as many Vesani nomismata as possible; they took them home, drilled holes in them, and strung them into oppressively heavy headdresses for their mothers, wives and sweethearts.

  "Don't even try to explain," Basso said. "I don't understand strategy."

  Aelius gave him an impatient look, which glanced harmlessly off. "You've read all those books."

  "True. I've also read Adventures in Wonderland, but that doesn't mean I know how to fly like a bird. You're the general, you do what you think's best. I'll stay here and sign things."

  So Aelius explained to the general staff instead. They made objections--some of them to show that they were awake and taking an intelligent interest, some because they were too stupid or narrow-minded to understand, a few because they could foresee real problems. Aelius reckoned he was extremely patient with them, and bitterly resented the reputation he quickly built up. But nobody was going to speak out in public against the man who'd beaten the Auxentines with cowshit and got the Treasury gold back without losing a man.

  Then he explained to Bassano, who'd asked politely. They were in the drawing office on the second floor of the War Building (which was what everybody called it; strictly speaking it was a temple, but there weren't any priests). It was a long room with high windows, to catch the first and last light. There were long benches, where map-copiers sat, carefully painting seas blue, mountains brown, and forests a darker shade of green. At the north end there was a raised dais with a table running crosswise. For some reason, the war was being run from there; it was buried so deep in papers, books, reports, dispatches, inventories and rosters that Bassano wondered if Aelius was trying to grow his own coal.

  "The problem," Aelius said, prodding the map in front of him with his broad, square-ended forefinger, "is this stuff here. All the brown and dark green. It cuts the country in two."

  Bassano nodded. He'd figured that out for himself. "So we need to land in the north and the south simultaneously and work from the ends towards the middle."

  Aelius laughed; private joke, presumably. "That'd be nice," he said. "But not practical. We've got enough ships and men, we can build carts, no trouble. What we're desperately short of is carthorses. No horses, no transport, no supplies; and you can forget about living off the land. The Mavortines can't manage it, and they live there. No, everything we eat and wear and use has got to come across the sea in ships, then cross-country on carts. We've got enough horses for one supply train, but not two."

  Bassano pursed his lips. "Can't we get more horses?"

  "Trying," Aelius said, massaging his eyebrows. "So far, no good. Cavalry horses, no problem; riding horses. But draught horses..." He sighed. "Far as I can gather, all the draught horses in the world come from the far north. They're a special breed, and the people who raise them don't sell stallions; they keep 'em all, so they've got the monopoly. Now apparently--this is what I've been told--they've had four really hard winters in a row up there, a lot of the young horses died, and there's snowdrifts blocking all the mountain passes, so the drovers can't get through. There haven't been any new horses on the market for three years. Prices have gone through the roof, and that's if you can find any to buy; most people who've got 'em are holding on to them because they need them for themselves. Requisitioning can only take us so far, because if we take all the draught horses, how are they going to bring grain and flour into the City, let alone take out all the stuff we export? Truth is, we've got barely enough horses to keep the City running as it is."

  "Mules," Bassano said.

  Aelius nodded. "Good suggestion," he said. "But no, it won't work. It'd take twelve to f
ifteen mules to carry what you can get on one big cart, but they eat nearly half what a horse does. We haven't got the fodder, and if we did, we'd have to transport it, which means even more mules, and--you get the idea."

  "Replace the City horses with mules and send the horses to Mavortis."

  "Same objection. And you'd have thousands of mules in the streets all day long, instead of wheeled traffic only moving at night; the city'd be jammed up. Also, we'd still need more horses. Also, there just aren't enough mules in the world."

  Bassano shrugged. "Forget that, then. What are you going to do?"

  "There's not a lot I can do," Aelius said; he's controlling his temper, Bassano thought, because he doesn't want to shout at me. "If there's no horses, there's no horses. So we can't do a simultaneous landing. We'll just have to make the best of it."

  Bassano said: "Have you mentioned this to my uncle?"

  "He just says he doesn't understand strategy and whatever I do is fine by him."

  "Flattering and completely unhelpful," Bassano said. "But have you asked him about horses specifically?"

  Aelius confessed that he hadn't. "Didn't seem much point," he said. "If he's not interested in the grand design, I don't suppose he'll want to be bothered with details."

  "I'm not so sure about that." Bassano was frowning. Aelius was beginning to understand that look. "A shortage of draught horses is something he can understand. It's just commodities. What he doesn't want to have to deal with is great big things like armies."

  Aelius considered that. "He's lying, isn't he? He's read all the books. He must understand strategy."

  "Of course he does," Bassano replied. "Also, he understands that he's read about it in books, which means that if he interferes, he could really screw things up. My uncle has very few limitations, but he respects them so much he practically worships them."

  Bassano volunteered to ask Basso about horses. A week later, at the end of an intelligence briefing, Basso asked Aelius if he had a minute, and led him out into the garden.

  "That's new," Aelius said, looking at a tall steel screen that blocked out the light from the street wall side.

  Basso pulled a sour face. "That bloody security man of yours made me put it there," he said, scowling viciously. "As if they'd try the same thing twice. Anyway, I've dealt with all that. There won't be another attempt. At least, not by the same people."

  Aelius pulled a face and eloquently said nothing. Basso ignored him. "Horses."

  "Bassano told you about it, then."

  "Yes." Basso poured Aelius a drink. "Just as well one of you's prepared to talk to me."

  "I didn't want to bother you with details."

  "This isn't a detail," Basso said severely. "It's a detail-sized segment of a really big problem. Anyway, I think I might have something for you."

  He explained. He said that the True Way mining corporation (a joint venture between four leading Sclerian noble houses, the Sclerian government and three local princes) had an extensive copper-mining operation on the island of Feralia, sixty miles up the coast from the northern border of Mavortis. They were all deep mines, cut into the side of a substantial range of hills. In order to get the ore to the surface, they used ponies--small but incredibly sturdy animals who spent most of their lives underground, pulling heavily laden carts loaded with rock. He didn't have accurate figures, but the people he'd talked to who'd been there and seen it estimated that they had to have at least a thousand ponies. He'd also talked to people who knew about horses (he made it sound as if they were experts in some abstruse dead language), who could see no reason why a thousand pit-ponies couldn't do the work of, say, four hundred thoroughbred draught horses. Also, the ponies had been bred to live on practically nothing; a thousand of them would eat more or less the same amount of fodder as four hundred horses, possibly less. It wouldn't take much to convert stone barges into horse transports, and they had plenty of barges. Well?

  Aelius frowned. "Sounds ideal," he said. "How are you going to persuade the miners to lend us their ponies?"

  "Simple," Basso replied. "I'll buy the mine. Then I'll close it down for the duration of the war. We could probably use the miners as engineers; very handy for siege operations, I believe, and I expect they could build walls and raise fortifications. It's all digging and shifting dirt, isn't it?"

  "Buy the mine," Aelius repeated, as though the words made no sense. "Can you do that?"

  "Actually, it's a nice little business," Basso said. "With the nomisma so strong against the Sclerian thaler, it wouldn't be a bad investment, long-term. When I say I'll buy the mine, of course, I mean a joint venture between the government and the Charity & Social Justice. What do you think?"

  Aelius looked at him for a while. Then he said, "I think that if someone tried to rob you in the street, you'd pick his pocket, sell him a better knife and probably offer him a job as a tax collector."

  Basso raised an eyebrow. "I choose to take that as a compliment," he said.

  Nine hundred and twelve ponies, to be precise. Two-thirds of the miners enlisted; the remainder stayed on to maintain the mine workings, dig new shafts and build a new ore-washing plant, for when production resumed. The ponies were corralled close to the docks, to await collection.

  Because he hadn't expected to be able to use them, Aelius hadn't done anything about getting or building carts for the ponies to pull. Basso turned over B Yard at the Severus shipyard to cart-building. The Severus cart was stronger, with a larger payload, and cheaper than anything the professional cartwrights could turn out. Basso gave orders for the yard managers to draw up plans for a cart factory, to be built as soon as possible.

  The Hus cavalry had made their way to Leir, the port at which they were to embark for Mavortis. They were two months early. Basso had made sure there was food waiting for them, but they soon got bored, complained that they and their horses were getting fat, and started looting the neighbouring villages. The governor of Leir, nominally a dependency of the Empire, wrote Basso a formal complaint: if the nuisance didn't stop immediately, he'd have no option but to send for help to the nearest Imperial garrison. As threats went, it was a fairly empty one. The nearest garrison was two hundred miles away, and although it had a paper strength of twelve hundred infantry, in practice it had eroded down to a hundred or so veterans, theoretically still on the reserve but in fact long since settled down on the scraps of land they'd been granted as their pensions. Rather more serious was the pretext such an appeal would give the Empire for future interference.

  "They can't stay there," Aelius said, "and we can't send them to Mavortis on their own. Seems to me you've got no choice but to pay them off and send them home."

  Basso gave him a sour look. "Even if I did that," he said, "which I'm not going to, there's no guarantee they'd go. If they like it there and the pickings are easy, they'll stay, until someone sends an army and pushes them out. No, we'll have to think of something else."

  As so often recently, he looked for inspiration in a map, and duly found it. There was an island, Voroe, some twenty miles down the coast from Leir. Basso had heard of it, vaguely; something or other came from there (he couldn't remember what offhand), but it could have been on the Moon for all he knew or cared. But Voroe turned out to be another leftover scrap of the Empire; at least, nobody had bothered to conquer it when the Imperial forces withdrew, and so it didn't belong to anybody else (the idea that it might belong to itself was not the sort of thing that occurred to diplomats and formulators of high strategy). According to the reference he found in the Complete Description of the World, the lamentably fallible standard text on faraway places, it had one city, also called Voroe, about the size of an Auxentine market town, and half a dozen vaguely defined villages. Its sole export (Basso remembered as soon as he read it) was oyster shells, of the rare and precious variety that, when ground into powder, could be used as purple dye.

  "But why?" Aelius objected.

  Basso counted off the reasons on his fingers. "To g
et them out of Leir, before they trash the place," he said. "To secure Voroe as a base of operations; we can stockpile supplies there, rather than hauling them direct from the City. To give the Hus people to rob who don't matter to anybody but themselves."

  "It's Imperial territory," Aelius objected.

  "I was coming to that," Basso said. "One finger left, see? To find out if the Empire's looking in this direction these days. As you know, I believe it may well be, but it'd be nice to have it confirmed one way or another."

  "Fine," Aelius said. "Leave them in Leir. We know that's Imperial."

  Basso shook his head. "If we leave them there causing trouble, after we've been politely asked to get them out, that'd be a hostile act, which could be held against us later on when the Empire's looking to pick a fight. If we send them to Voroe and the Empire objects, we can say we're terribly sorry, we didn't realise the island was still part of the Empire, and of course we'll remove our forces--by the time the messengers have shuttled back and forth we'll be ready to ship them to Mavortis in any case. If that happens, we'll ask the Empire for permission to have a base on Voroe; they'll say yes because we were good about withdrawing our forces. Or, if we don't get a protest from the Imperials, we'll know they're still too busy cutting each other's throats to give a damn about the West."

  Basso wrote a formal apology to the mayor of Leir, and the Hus went to Voroe, where they sacked the town, raided the villages and robbed a Sclerian merchant fleet who'd come to collect a shipment of oyster shell. Not a word from the Empire. Basso set up a trading company to collect, process and market purple dye; its product was good-quality and considerably cheaper than the imported Sclerian equivalent, and proved extremely popular. The Hus, once they'd slaughtered every living creature on Voroe (apart from Basso's men, who they knew were off-limits), started to complain about being bored. Since they were on an island and had no ships, Basso ignored them.

  Reluctantly, the city prefect gave orders for Basso to be informed. It was the middle of the night. Fortunately, he was still awake, as anybody who'd known him would have realised.