Colours in the Steel f-1

by K. J. Parker

  ‘Yes, but-’

  ‘And now,’ Alexius went on, ‘there seems to be evidence that there’s a natural in the city who can control it. Probably,’ he added bitterly, ‘quite instinctively and possibly without even realising what he’s doing. In addition, just to add a little human interest, there’s a curse of my making charging around the city out of control and apparently hell-bent on attaching itself to me.’ He bit his knuckles savagely. ‘Do you know, if only we’d confined our studies to mathematics and ethical speculation, which is after all what we’re supposed to be doing-’

  ‘Yes, but we didn’t. Or at least, you didn’t.’

  ‘You were only too pleased to get involved.’

  ‘All right.’ Gannadius rubbed his face with his hands. ‘This isn’t helping. If we can’t control this problem, do we know anybody who can?’

  Alexius sighed. ‘As you yourself pointed out just now, I’m the Patriarch of Perimadeia. And you’re the Archimandrite of the City Academy. Asking for help’s a luxury we gave up when we accepted the promotion.’

  ‘The natural,’ Gannadius said suddenly. ‘Maybe he could put it right.’

  ‘But didn’t we just agree he probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it? Even if we could convince him that he’s got the power, there’s no reason to believe he can do it on demand.’

  ‘We don’t appear to have any other options.’

  ‘True.’ Alexius slumped, his chin on his chest. ‘But how do we find this natural of yours? We can’t very well wander through the city until we find a miracle.’

  Gannadius thought for a long time. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I don’t see what else we can do.’

  ‘But that could take years. And I haven’t got…’

  ‘I know,’ Gannadius said. ‘And there’s more, if you think about it. You’re assuming the natural’s a citizen; what if he isn’t? What if he’s a foreigner, here on business and due to leave in a day or so? Or perhaps he’s already left.’

  ‘There’s no reason to think that.’

  ‘Isn’t there? Ask yourself: if he’s a citizen, someone who lives here permanently, why haven’t we come across his work before? The odds must be against this being the first manifestation of his power.’

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘Yes, but the odds are against that. A power so strong that it gives effect to a hardly conscious wish-’

  ‘That was only theorising.’

  ‘And my observation too, remember. I was there, in the court.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Alexius groaned. ‘Go on, then, you suggest something.’

  Gannadius shrugged his shoulders. ‘Apart from combing the streets, I can’t think of anything. And of course there’s no guarantee whatsoever-’

  ‘A trap,’ Alexius said suddenly. ‘No, not a trap as such. A lure. Something likely to provoke him into using the power, or make the power happen without him doing anything consciously. Flush it out into the open.’

  ‘Splendid idea. How do you propose going about it?’

  Alexius sniffed, then blew his nose. ‘I don’t know,’ he confessed.

  Gannadius leant forwards, his chin cupped in his hands. ‘There must be someone we can ask,’ he said.

  ‘How many times have I got to tell you-?’

  ‘It’s a speciality,’ Gannadius replied. ‘We need a specialist. How many students of the Principle are there in this city? Thousands. There must be one of them who’s made a study of this little corner of the subject. Everyone has to study something.’

  ‘So we hold a conclave, tell all our people we’re in desperate trouble, and ask if anyone happens to know the answer. Please, Gannadius.’

  ‘Obviously we’d have to be circumspect about it. We could issue a paper full of mistakes and wait to see who takes issue with it.’

  ‘Fine. Have you any idea how long that’d take? And suppose the natural’s a foreigner, as you suggested, and all set to leave the city. We simply don’t have time to do this properly.’

  ‘Guess, you mean?’

  ‘Educated guess. A trap to catch a natural.’ Alexius gazed over his steepled hands at the chandelier moorings in the middle of the floor. ‘Anything’s better than sitting here bickering with each other.’ He smiled painfully. ‘Remarkable, isn’t it? We’re supposed to be good at this.’

  ‘We are,’ Gannadius replied gloomily. ‘That’s what worries me.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Loredan woke up with blood on his shirt. He examined the cut, bound it up with fresh wool and damp moss, and put on another shirt.

  No bread in the apartment; so he struggled painfully into his coat (his side was stiff, and putting his arm in the sleeve wasn’t pleasant), trudged down the stairs and through the maze of narrow streets to the south of the ‘island’ and a bakery he knew well. They were used to him there, and were no longer offended when he came in asking for mouldy bread.

  ‘Saved some for you,’ the baker’s son replied. ‘It’s the blue kind you like, isn’t it?’

  He’d given up trying to explain long ago, and smiled instead as he handed over a copper quarter. The boy waved the money away. ‘On the house,’ he said magnificently. ‘We don’t get many famous people in here.’

  ‘In that case I’ll have a fresh loaf as well. What d’you mean, famous?’

  The boy chuckled. ‘The great Bardas Loredan, they’re calling you. Made a lot of friends round here yesterday.’

  ‘Did I? How did I manage that?’

  ‘Bet on you, didn’t we?’

  Loredan raised an eyebrow. ‘Neighbourly loyalty?’

  ‘Bloody good odds, more like. Hell, if I’d known you were going to win, I’d have laid more’n a copper half. Still, at two hundred to one-’

  Loredan picked up his bread. ‘Sounds like you made more out of the case than I did,’ he said irritably. ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me they were offering two hundred to one? I could have done with some of that.’

  Back home, up the interminable stairs. Other fencers kept in shape by running or fooling about in the gymnasium at the Schools; all he had to do was get from the street to his front door. The loaf the baker had kept for him was admirably suited for his purpose; covered in horrible-looking blue and white spots all over one side. Carefully he scraped the best of the blue bits into the palm of his left hand with the point of his dagger, and poured them onto a fresh sheet of parchment. Then he unwound the bandage, patted the mould gingerly onto the raw cut, and tied the harness back up again. He had no idea whether this particular ritual did any good or not; he hadn’t had a badly infected wound since he’d started doing it, but law-swords were usually kept clean and rust-free anyway, so perhaps it was simply coincidence. He cut a slice of the new loaf and tipped out the last half-cupful of yesterday’s wine.

  The business with the bread mould was something he’d learnt on the plains, a long time ago. When he’d first heard about it, he’d assumed it was just another leg-pull for the benefit of a raw recruit, a joke in the same category as mules’ eggs and the legendary left-handed arrows every kid soldier gets sent to fetch from the quartermaster. In time he realised it wasn’t a joke, though he shrank from using the treatment himself. The old story was that a group of wounded men who had nothing to stop their wounds with except the stale bread in a saddlebag had all healed up in record time. A likely story, Loredan felt. His own theory was that it had something to do with the similar-looking mould the plainsmen deliberately put into their evil-tasting goats’ milk cheese. After all, they did have a way with unlikely sounding cures and medicines. There was one highly suspect recipe involving willow bark boiled in water that really did work against headaches, to his certain knowledge.

  The plainsmen; it was the second time he’d thought about them since the fight. It was the snapping of yet another good sword that brought them to mind, and the explanation he’d given the tiresome girl at the tavern. Because they brazed the edges of their swords to the cores with some sort of solder that melted at a much
lower heat, they were far less likely to muck up the temper of their blades and in consequence their swords tended not to snap. True, the plains sword was a curved single-edged affair, totally unsuitable for legal work; but the technique was presumably valid for any design. He wondered if anyone in the city knew how to use the plains method, and if so how he could find out who it was without letting anyone else know what he had in mind.

  Then he remembered. Through with all that now; quitting the profession, going to do something else. He scowled, and cut another slice of bread.

  He’d considered it many times before; after practically every fight these last six years. Thinking about it and actually doing it were different matters entirely. Always his excuse had been that there was nothing else he could do, no other way of making a living, too late to learn a new skill and so forth. Until yesterday, he’d managed to force himself to believe it, although he’d known for a long time it wasn’t true.

  The truth was that for the last ten years or so he’d been walking around with a terrible sense of being left over from the war, needing to be used up like scraps of meat or offcuts of leather. It was a stupid attitude, not to mention a dangerous one, and he despised himself for it. But he had never quite managed to face up to it, with the result that he’d carried on, a fight at a time, collecting scars on his body and cutting a thick swathe through a whole generation of advocates.

  It was time to admit that it didn’t work. If it was going to work, it should have done so yesterday.

  Even so. Starting a school or running a tavern. All the wonders of the world are at your fingertips; all you have to do is stay alive long enough.

  He put his coat back on (even more painful this time) and toiled up the hill to the Schools. It was the last place he felt like going the day after a big case. There would be other advocates, clerks, the unsavoury hangers-on, the profession in all its glory, and he’d rather not have to make conversation and put up with a succession of left-handed congratulations. He pulled his collar up round his neck and crept in through the side door.

  The number of trainers working in the Schools tended to vary, depending on a large number of factors ranging from the health of the economy to the time of year. There were six long-established and savagely expensive schools which had appropriated sections of the building and installed their own fixtures and fittings; a constantly changing pool of old men and nerve-cases who hung about the colonnades offering to make you invincible in a day, money back if you get killed within a year; and ten or twelve establishments between the two extremes providing some sort of training in arms for a vaguely realistic fee. The latter group, mostly comprising the proprietor, perhaps one assistant and a combination clerk, registrar and bursar, used the main hall and the communal fixtures, and paid a modest rent to the governors for the privilege. To start up a new school, you paid a month’s rent in advance and put up a wooden board on the wall with your name under it, beneath which students could assemble at the start of each day.

  On his way to the governors’ office, Loredan saw someone he recognised. There wasn’t time to turn round or duck behind a column.

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied.

  The man’s name was Garidas. He had been an advocate for six years before losing an eye in a banking dispute; now he worked as an assistant with the second-best of the grand schools, as well as helping out with the book-keeping. His father had been in the cavalry, and Loredan had watched him die of an arrow wound one cold morning in a ruined sentry post on the plains. His last words had been a desperate plea to look after his boy, and Loredan had happened to be the nearest. He was fairly certain the dying man had thought he was talking to someone else.

  ‘I’m not sure where that puts you in the ratings,’ Garidas said. ‘Alvise was somewhere around sixth, so you must be up in the top twelve.’

  ‘Not any longer. I’ve retired.’

  ‘Oh.’ Garidas seemed taken aback. ‘Since yesterday?’

  ‘Since and because of. I may be stupid, but I can take a hint.’

  Garidas nodded. ‘It was certainly that, from what I’ve heard. Oddly enough, we were all set to take a party along to watch, but somehow we didn’t.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have been a good example to the students,’ Loredan replied. ‘Classic case of the best man not winning; very offputting.’

  ‘On the contrary. Salutary warning of the dangers of carelessness and underestimating your opponent. So what’ve you got planned? A life of ease and luxury?’

  ‘As if,’ Loredan said, frowning. ‘No, I’m going to have a go at your racket. On my way to see the governors now, in fact.’

  ‘Really?’ Garidas grinned. ‘I could put a word in for you at our place if you like.’

  ‘No thanks. Never did fancy the idea of working for anybody else. Having to have clients was bad enough, but at least I was my own master in theory. I’ll put up a board like everyone else and see what happens.’

  ‘Best of luck.’ Garidas smiled. ‘I always said we never saw enough of you down here. I’ll bear you in mind for any we turn down.’

  Loredan nodded. Garidas probably would, at that; he’d always been very friendly, although there was no way he could have known that his fees at the expensive school he’d attended (the one he now taught at) and his living costs while he was there had all come out of Loredan’s army pay and prize money. Add to that several lucrative clients Loredan had turned down to avoid having to fight him in the court, and one way or another Garidas had cost him a lot of money over the years. It would be agreeable if he could start paying some of it back after all this time by recommending a few students.

  Later that morning he set off to the signwriters’ district to have a board painted. Traditionally the board carried a portrait of the trainer, seated wearing his court clothes and armed with the classes of weapon he professed to teach, with his name and a tariff of charges at the bottom; lately, however, there had been a tendency to depict ex-fencers in the act of winning their most famous case, with the man himself shown rather larger than his cringing and mortally wounded opponent. Some trainers even commissioned laudatory verses, to be inscribed in gold letters all round the edge. Loredan decided he’d have to be firm about that sort of thing.

  ‘Bardas Loredan,’ he said accordingly, ‘three eighths a day, standard and two-handed sword and dagger, no fancy dress.’

  ‘Just the portrait and the fight scene?’

  ‘No fight scene.’

  ‘You sure?’ The painter was disappointed. ‘No extra for the fight scene.’

  ‘No fight scene.’

  ‘I do good fight scenes. They’re good advertising.’

  ‘No.’

  The painter thought for a moment. ‘I can do you in a radiate crown representing the protective influence of the Principle,’ he said.

  ‘Not if you expect to get paid.’

  ‘Sit in the chair,’ the painter said huffily. ‘Be with you in a minute.’

  He turned around and started fiddling with bottles and jars at the back of the booth. Loredan sat back and tried to relax. It was an unseasonably hot day, and the shade offered by the booth’s canvas awning was pleasant. From where he was sitting he had a good view of the square that formed the main trading area of the signwriters’ district. Like so many of the small specialists’ enclaves of Perimadeia, it consisted of a square with a fountain in the middle, loomed over by an old and neglected statue. Round the fountain was a clutter of tents and booths, obscuring the grander frontages of the ground-floor shops. At regular intervals there were stairs up to the galleries onto which the first-floor shops opened, and thence up to the houses and workshops on the second floor. At the four corners of the square arched gateways led off to the neighbouring districts; needless to say there were shops built over the arches, so that the sides of the square presented a solid wall of commerce. In every shop on the sunlit side, a signwriter sat in the doorway, making the most of the light; because the buildin
gs were so high, the occupants of each side could only work by daylight for a quarter of the day.

  A constant procession of carts, wagons and trolleys rumbled through what clear space there was between the booths and the central fountain; except when the traffic came to a standstill and backed up, with an accompanying chorus of bad temper and traditional carters’ oaths. Unlike most of the city, the signwriters’ district had no one distinctive smell peculiar to its own particular trade; only the residual background smell that nobody noticed. So many people, Loredan mused, so many trades, so many different ways of making a good living or scraping a poor one, and for every useful and profitable trade a separate and suitable district, where everything necessary for production of the particular commodity could conveniently be obtained. So much order and settled existence, with every man in his proper place fulfilling his part in the whole.

  In the next square lay the shops and stalls of the colourmen, who soaked seashells and walnuts, ground rust, lapis and lead to get the colours that, mixed with egg white or limewater, made the paint used in the next square over. The most skilful and aristocratic of the colourmen made the universally famous Perimadeian gold paint, grinding up oxides, mercury and tin on a marble slab, adding triple-strength vinegar and dusted lead, crushing the mess together and drawing off the result into tiny stone bottles.

  In a corner of the colourmen’s square were the brush-makers, a speciality within a speciality, who spent their day guillotining bristles to size and serving them to the handles, boiling up pots of glue and hammering down the ferrules. They had to walk twelve squares to get to the gluemakers’ district, a part of the city people walked through as quickly as possible, their collars up around their noses against the stench of rawhide macerating in limewater. The gluemakers, on the other hand, had only to walk round the corner and over a bridge to reach the lime kilns in one direction and the tanners’ and knackers’ yards in the other. On their way they passed through the sawyers’ quarter, where they would probably pass signwriters collecting newly sawn and planed boards from the sawmills that huddled beside what had once been a waterfall before the city people harnessed it to turn a hundred clever wheels.