by K. J. Parker
‘I think it’s all gone wrong,’ he said. The man opened his lips to reply, but he didn’t catch any of it; his eyelids flopped back down and the pain washed back in like the sea. Hey, he heard himself thinking, if it hurts I must still be alive. That’s good. Then the waves of tortured feeling broke over his head, and there wasn’t anything else.
‘Well, what do you expect,’ said Gorgas Loredan, grinning as he knelt down to retrieve a perfectly good arrow from a body, ‘from an army where you get to be an officer by passing an exam?’
‘What’s an exam?’ asked his colleague.
‘It’s where you sit down in a big open hall with a couple of long tables,’ Gorgas replied, ‘and they give you a piece of paper with questions written on it, and you write answers to the questions on another piece of paper. And whoever writes the best answer, wins.’
Gorgas’ colleague frowned. ‘They must have a lot of paper,’ he said.
‘They make it out of reed-pulp,’ Gorgas said. ‘They ship in the reeds from the Salinarus delta. It’s a big thing in Shastel, something we ought to be looking at one of these days.’
‘There isn’t the demand, surely,’ the colleague said. ‘I mean, apart from them, who uses it?’
Gorgas folded a corner of the dead man’s sleeve round the arrowhead and wiped off the blood, then dropped the arrow into his quiver. ‘Like I said,’ he replied, ‘it needs looking into.’ He stood up, groaning a little at the stiffness in his knees. ‘I think we probably got most of them,’ he said. ‘I still don’t know what all that was about, but it didn’t turn out too badly in the end.’
‘They helped,’ said the colleague with a wry grin. ‘They helped a lot.’
‘Couldn’t have done it without them,’ Gorgas agreed. ‘You know, whenever I start having my doubts about this war, wondering if we’ve taken on more than we can handle, I just think about the stupidity of the enemy in all its many and wonderful forms, and then I know it’s all going to be all right. I mean,’ he went on, as they continued their stroll through the dead and dying, ‘one of these days I’d really like to win a battle, rather than just stand quiet while they lose it at me. You know, just to be able say I’d done it. But I’m not complaining. I mean, it works.’
They completed their tour of inspection and made their way back to the longhouse in the middle of the village, where the orderlies were patching up the wounded. Mostly civilians, Gorgas noted; and once again he found himself asking what on earth had possessed these idiots to attack a loyal village, killing sixteen of their own people and injuring twice as many again, in a thick fog, just when his expeditionary force was arriving to open negotiations with the villagers? It was wonderful - this whole district would come over now, no question about that - but the sheer stupidity of it offended him. It was messy, and he hated mess.
‘Look what we found.’ Sergeant Harzio was waving at him, calling him over. He grunted. He ought to be in the longhouse, talking comfortably to the village worthies and discussing the articles of transfer, but he didn’t feel like doing that. ‘Coming,’ he said. He turned to his colleague. ‘Would you mind doing the pep talk?’ he asked. ‘I’m not in the mood. You know the drill.’
His colleague nodded. ‘I don’t mind being fawned on,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’
Gorgas walked over to where Harzio was standing. At his feet were three men, sitting up against the side of a barn, their hands and feet tied. One of them was well out of it, his head slumped forward on his chest. ‘What’ve you got, Sergeant?’ he asked.
‘Their CO,’ Harzio replied, grinning. ‘Goes by the name of Master Juifrez Bovert. Ring any bells?’
Gorgas raised both eyebrows. The Bovert were a leading family among the Poor of Shastel. ‘You’ve got a collector’s item there, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Which one?’
The sergeant pointed. ‘He’ll make it all right,’ he said. ‘Diagonal hit through the muscle, lost some blood but nothing serious. We found them staggering about up yonder; they’d wandered into a closed sheepfold and couldn’t find their way out again.’ Sergeant Harzio grinned. ‘What d’you reckon he’s worth, then?’
Gorgas shrugged. ‘Couldn’t say offhand,’ he replied. ‘Not the sort of thing that comes on the market every day. Must be into four figures, though. Easily.’
Harzio whistled. ‘That’s not bad,’ he said. ‘The boys’ll be pleased. It was worth coming on this trip, then.’
‘That’s assuming we ransom him,’ Gorgas went on, and the sergeant’s face fell sharply. ‘Oh, don’t worry, if we decide to keep him I’ll make sure we see you right, the lads won’t lose out. Better for you, in fact; I’ll see to that.’
The sergeant’s grin broadened into a beautiful smile. ‘Always a pleasure doing business with you, Chief,’ he said. ‘What do you want us to do with him? We stopped the bleeding and he looks like he’ll be all right, but - well, now we know he’s worth money . . .’
Gorgas nodded. ‘I’ll send him out first thing in the morning.’ He knelt down beside the slumped body and had a look for himself. ‘He’s asleep,’ he said, ‘which is a good sign. He’ll do. Throw a blanket over him and get him under cover before it rains again. And set a guard, just in case.’
He stood up and yawned. It’d be wonderful to be able to go to bed now, but no such luck; too much to do. As he turned to head back to the longhouse, someone behind him tugged his sleeve.
‘Casualty figures,’ the solder said, ‘as near as we can make them. We got a hundred and seventeen dead, thirty-one prisoners. We lost four killed, two seriously wounded.’ Gorgas asked for the names; nobody he knew, but still, it was a pity. It had been an unnecessary battle, for all that it had turned out well. The fact that they’d killed a hundred and seventeen men gave him no satisfaction at all, quite the reverse. A sharp and total defeat of this order of magnitude would represent a substantial loss of face for the Foundation, which meant there would have to be reprisals, quite possibly directed against Scona itself. No fun for anybody. He sighed, and wished, not for the first time, that people wouldn’t keep interfering in his business. True, the whole district was now pretty sure to come over to Scona, but there was every chance they’d have done so anyway, in the normal course of events, simply because Scona’s interest rates were lower and their attitude less overtly tyrannical. The whole idea of coming here with a relatively small expeditionary force was to avoid starting fights. Now he was going to have to bring in more men, probably as a long-term garrison, just to stop the Foundation from killing every living thing in the district by way of making an example. Not, he reflected as he pushed open the longhouse door, the way he liked to run his business; and he had the unpleasant feeling that his sister would see it the same way.
‘Magic,’ Alexius said.
Niessa Loredan nodded briskly. ‘Not philosophy,’ she replied, without looking up. ‘Not metaphysically enhanced non-verbal communication. Not drug-induced hallucinatory trances in which the participant’s subconscious mind assembles and analyses already-known data with exceptional but nevertheless entirely natural insight and then disguises the result as a mystic experience. Magic.’ She yawned, and reached for a tiny pair of bronze scissors. ‘Magic is just science we don’t understand yet. Probably there was once a time when people thought the bow and arrow was magic, because it did something new and unexpected and not many people knew how. But the bow and arrow works because it works. The arrow flies through the air and hits the target. And magic works, too.’
Alexius waited for her to look up, but she didn’t. Whatever it was that she was making, it seemed to occupy her full attention. It looked like a patchwork quilt.
‘I’m not saying it doesn’t,’ he said. ‘All I’m saying is that I’ve studied these things for sixty years and never once seen any direct proof—’
‘Ah.’ This time she did look up, to give him a patronising smile. ‘These things, you say. But what you’ve been studying all these years is science and philosophy and mathe
matics and all that kind of stuff. You haven’t been studying magic. The very most you could have done was just nudge into the edge of it while you were off studying something else. It’s like a plumber has to know a bit about carpentry, but he doesn’t need to know how to make mortice and tenon joints. You’re saying you don’t think mortice and tenon joints could ever possibly work, since you’ve been studying plumbing since you were a boy and never came across them.’
Alexius thought for a moment, while the Director bit off a length of thread and fed it through the eye of her plain bone needle; then he said, ‘Tell me, do you always negotiate with the truth? When you come up against a fact, a plain and simple and straightforward fact, do you always try and beat it down, wheedle it into making concessions?’
Niessa lifted her head and smiled. ‘Always,’ she said. ‘In the City, when I first went there, they had a saying: truth is what you know is true when you can afford fresh fish every day of the week. Now then,’ she went on, looking down at her work, ‘these days I can afford anything I want, and all sorts of things I could never even imagine myself wanting. Truth is what I know is true, and everything else is a matter of bargaining.’
Alexius laughed. ‘I haven’t heard that one in a long time,’ he said. ‘Only we used to say, truth is what you know is true when you sit in the front three rows.’
‘At Chapter,’ Niessa interrupted, ‘meaning you’ve reached the fourth grade or above. I hated that.’ Her eyes met his, and he saw in them a fire he hadn’t noticed before. ‘I hated the Foundation, you know. Because they thought they were better than the rest of us because of what they knew. And they didn’t know anything. Oh, the City was full of people who knew things, useful things: how to make machines, how to extract nitre from urine, how to cure toothache without pulling out the tooth, how to case-harden steel, how to make clear, coloured glass, how to do long division without counters - you name it, somewhere in Perimadeia there was someone who knew how to do it, and who was looked up to and respected for their knowledge and wisdom. The Foundation - couldn’t get a stopper out of a stone bottle without a book of instructions, three commentaries and a scale diagram. Let me tell you something, Patriarch Alexius. I know more about magic than you’ll ever know if you live to be twice as old as you are now; practice and theory. But I didn’t learn it in Perimadeia, and I didn’t learn it here, and you aren’t going to learn it unless you do what I ask, however hard you try and trick me into showing off just to disprove your scepticism.’ She sniffed, and rubbed her nose on the back of her left hand. ‘It was a good try, though,’ she said. ‘You’re the only scholar I ever met who might just have made a living in the markets.’
Alexius nodded, accepting the compliment, and as he did so he wondered, How much of any of this is real, and how much is just negotiation? This woman could be anything, anything at all, for the purposes of striking a more favourable bargain. Look at her now, painstakingly stitching together scraps of cloth to make a piece of patchwork; she’s being the plain, shrewd no-nonsense countrywoman, so as to undermine me, the soft-fingered City scholar. Tomorrow she’ll be the Director of the Bank when she’s telling a delegation of peasants why the mortgage rate’s gone up, and the day after that she’ll be something else again; and they’re all her, and she’s all of them, and none of them are real. Nevertheless; we’ve been cooped up in here for an hour and a half and still I haven’t even started doing what she’s told me to, and she was the one with the crowded schedule. Not bad, for an otherworldly old bookworm. ‘And you’re the only banker I’ve ever met who can quote three of Acadius’ hypotheses in one sentence,’ he replied. ‘Though “metaphysically enhanced non-verbal communication” is rather over-simplifying the second book of Axioms, don’t you think?’
Niessa shrugged, eyes on her work. ‘The whole second book is based on a false premise anyway,’ she replied, ‘as you well know. Mometas proved that a hundred years ago. And,’ she added casually, holding the seam up to the light, ‘his refutation is basically a circular argument, so the whole thing’s a waste of time.’
Alexius wasn’t expecting that. In spite of himself, he couldn’t help asking for details.
‘Oh, it’s quite simple,’ Niessa replied. ‘He takes the analogy of light refracted in a rainbow, and then knocks down the hypothesis he’s just built up by saying it’s just an analogy. It’s very well argued, of course, but it’s still as obvious as a bull in a chicken-run. He’d have starved to death if he’d been in the linen trade.’
She’s right, Alexius thought angrily. Either she’s read something none of the rest of us ever saw, or she figured it out for herself. She’s right. Dear gods, if I were thirty years younger I’d give up philosophy and get myself indentured to a sack-maker. ‘It’s an interesting theory,’ he heard himself say, ‘but what about Berennius and the irregular flux theory? I think you’ll find that for the last fifty years, Mometas’ theorem has only ever been regarded as a starting point, not an end in itself.’
‘Whatever.’ Niessa Loredan dismissed the whole topic with one small wave of her needle. She’d won that round, they both knew it, she had nothing to gain by continuing the battle on that front. ‘Obviously you know far more about the subject than I do. Frankly, I’d be appalled if you didn’t. Now then.’ She carefully folded her work and laid it in her lap. ‘Let’s get down to business. It’s time we did some magic.’
‘Well?’ asked the boy anxiously.
Bardas Loredan pursed his lips. This was awkward.
On the one hand, his father had never been tactful with him. When he’d been learning this particular skill, the old man’s way of indicating that he’d got it wrong was pulling it out of the vice and snapping it across his knee, while adding a few short, pithy remarks about wasting good timber. (As far as Bardas could remember, he’d never actually said that good wood doesn’t grow on trees, but he’d been close to it on several occasions.) On the other hand, Bardas Loredan wasn’t his father.
‘It’s terrible,’ he said. ‘Do it again.’
The boy looked at him as if he’d just killed his pet sparrow by crushing it in his fist. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
Bardas sighed. ‘You really need to be told?’ he said. ‘I knew you weren’t listening. All right, here we go. First, the belly should be flat, and it isn’t. Second, when you’re shaping the back you should follow one growth ring, otherwise you’re wasting your time, and you haven’t. Look,’ he went on, pointing to where the boy had shaved through three years’ worth of growth, ‘it’s a mess. Third, you’ve got to leave knots and pins standing proud, or else they’ll form weak spots and the bow’ll snap. You’ve just planed right through them. Fourth—’
‘All right,’ said the boy. ‘I’m sorry.’
Bardas breathed out sharply. ‘It’s not a matter of being sorry,’ he said wearily. ‘It’s not as if you’ve done something wicked. You’ve just not done it right, that’s all. True, you’ve wrecked a perfectly good piece of wood, but we all do that. Just . . .’ He sighed again, not really knowing what to say. ‘Just go away and do it again, and this time do it right. You think you can manage that? Or would you rather watch me do one, and this time—’
‘I’ll try again,’ the boy interrupted swiftly. ‘This time I’ll do it right, I promise.’
‘Sure,’ Bardas replied. ‘Well, do your best, anyway. And when you’ve done that, get this mess swept up, we’re knee-deep in shavings again.’
The boy made himself scarce, and Bardas sat down on the bench, his chin cupped in his left hand. In the vice in front of him was another mess; a banjax, a really lousy, crummy piece of work, an abortion, garbage, trash, junk. It also represented several weeks’ work and about twenty quarters’ worth of bought-in material. He’d already tried swearing at it, but it hadn’t helped.
‘My own bloody stupid fault for listening,’ he grumbled, opening the vice and lifting out the wreck. It had all started with a chance remark made by a man who called in occasionally
to sell him timber, the rare and exotic stuff that came from the South Coast, types of wood he didn’t know the names of from trees he’d never seen. The man had said that once he’d seen a bow made out of buffalo ribs—
‘You mean horn,’ he’d interrupted. ‘Buffalo horn. You slice it thin and glue it—’
‘Ribs,’ the man had repeated firmly. ‘Lovely thing, it was; no more than a yard long, a thumb wide at the handle, fingertip wide at the ends. Bloke who showed it to me said it drew fifty pounds and shot an arrow two hundred and twenty yards.’
‘He can’t have said ribs,’ Bardas maintained. ‘He meant horn.’
‘Ribs,’ the man repeated. ‘Buffalo ribs.’
And there the matter would have rested if it hadn’t been for his own stupid pride and a chance encounter with a dealer in hides who’d said yes, well, there was no call for them, not ribs, but as a special favour . . . And a month later they’d arrived, greasy, smelly and expensive; and once he’d paid out all that good money, he was obliged to continue.
‘Stupid,’ he muttered under his breath as he turned the horrid thing over in his hands. ‘Should know better at my age.’
There followed hours of work with the drawknife and the spokeshave, whittling the bones down into flat, even strips, checking with the calipers after every dozen or so strokes to make sure the strips matched exactly at four-inch intervals, identical in width, depth and profile. When the strips were precisely three sixteenths of an inch thick, he’d set them aside and made a wooden core out of a choice billet of imported red cedar, which he’d painstakingly heated over a steaming cauldron, draping a thick hide over the top to keep the steam in, until the wood could be bent into broad, flowing recurves at the tips so that it looked like a crawling snake, or the upper lip of a smiling girl. Then he’d set to work to make up a specially strong pot of glue, flaking small crumbs of hide into the pot, adding the boiling water and simmering the mess until it was the consistency of year-old honey. Clamping the bone to the core had been a special nightmare; he’d used every clamp in the shop, and improvised a dozen more out of wood and rawhide, and the glue oozing out of the joint had slopped everywhere, making the thing almost impossible to hold. Then it had taken forever to dry - just his luck to be doing the job during a rainy spell, when the damp got into the glue and stopped it hardening - and he’d needed the clamps for other work but didn’t dare take them of because the glue-drips were still sticky and he was terrified of the heavily stressed bone pulling off the core.
