The Belly of the Bow

by K. J. Parker

  Loredan shook his head. ‘I’ve got two other brothers still living, or at least as far as I know they are, back in the Mesoge where I was born. Haven’t seen them in - oh, I can’t remember how long. Anyway, to the best of my knowledge there they still are, still scratching a living out of the same patch of dirt we all scrabbled about in when I was a kid.’

  ‘You don’t like them either, then?’

  ‘I don’t dislike them,’ Loredan replied. ‘In a way, I suppose I care about them. But they’re all right, they’ve got the farm. I guess you could say they’re having the life I should have had.’

  ‘Is it the life you’d have wanted?’

  Loredan frowned. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Let’s put it this way. If I’d carried on and never left the farm, never left the Mesoge, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine any other kind of life; so I suppose I’d have been happy, or satisfied, whatever. The thought of anything different probably wouldn’t ever have occurred to me. That’s the thing about farming, you’re completely taken up with the job in hand, you never have time to think beyond the next stage in the working year. Some people would say it means your mind gets cramped up and atrophied, but I’m not so sure about that. For a farmer, the only thing that matters is working the farm; nothing else really interests him, because it isn’t really anything to do with him. People make fun of us because all we ever talk about is how bad the weather is, too much rain or too much sun, it’s too wet to turn the cows out and too dry for the sheep to find enough to eat - well, fair enough, I suppose. But the pay-off is, if you do your work and then a bit more, and the weather’s not too horrible and the rooks don’t go down on the flat patches in the wheat, then basically it’ll all be all right and you can look forward to going through it all again next year, and the year after that. It’s the feeling that if you keep your side of the bargain, then, cosmic bastardry permitting, you’ll get a fair return and the system will work, you can rely on it working.’ Loredan shook his head. ‘Dear gods, if I could have had a life like that, I don’t think I’d have very much to complain about.’

  The boy, who hadn’t really followed much of all that, rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. ‘So why don’t you go back to it?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you buy some land and be a farmer, if you think it’s so wonderful?’

  Loredan smiled. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe it’s because I know it isn’t really like that, so I’d never be able to rely on the system working. I know too much about it all, you see; I know that one day you can be leaning on your scythe, touching up the edge with a stone, and a dozen horsemen will suddenly appear, riding towards you through the corn with spears levelled. I know that five bad years will send you begging at someone’s door, and they’ll say yes, take all the seedcorn you need, but first put your mark on this paper. I know that one day the recruiting sergeant will come and take your sons, and the bailiff will come and take your surplus for arrears of tithes, and the tax-collector will come and take what’s left for the Great King’s wars, and then the ploughshare snaps and the smith wants paying, and your daughter gets ill and the doctor has to be called, and one thing and another; and you walk past the cooper’s shop and see him sitting in the shade tapping away with a small hammer and you think, half your luck, you smug bastard, I wish to gods I’d been a tradesman’s son, just exactly the same way he wishes he’d been born to the land, and the Crown Prince in his tower dreams of running away to sea and becoming a pirate.’ Loredan grinned. ‘The whole thing’s garbage, if you ask me. Fetch me the forty-pound recurve and let’s go and shoot something decent to eat.’

  As they let themselves out of the back door, they realised that it had stopped raining. The air smelt sweet, and the evening sun was already pulling a faint haze of mist out of the wet earth. ‘When you said something decent to eat, you meant rabbits,’ said the boy accusingly. Loredan shrugged.

  ‘I know how to shoot rabbits,’ he said.

  ‘But I’m sick of rabbit,’ the boy protested. ‘And even when you stew it up with tons of spices and stuff, it still tastes of bones.’

  ‘True. But nothing else that’s edible is stupid enough to let me get up close. Actually, roasted and with just a touch of rosemary—’

  ‘We haven’t got any rosemary.’

  ‘That’s not all we haven’t got. Rabbit or go hungry, right?’

  Before the boy could reply, a big, fat cock pheasant scuttled out of the long grass under their feet and exploded into flight, clucking frantically. Loredan had an arrow on the string; he fixed his eyes on the bird, drew to the corner of his mouth and loosed, all in one fluid movement. The arrow sailed off to the left and vanished in a clump of tall nettles.

  ‘Another thing I like about rabbits,’ Loredan said after a moment, as he drew the nock of another arrow smoothly onto the string, ‘is that they can’t fly. Forget the arrow, it’ll be all smashed up.’

  ‘Shall I have a go?’ the boy asked hopefully.

  ‘Get lost,’ Loredan replied. ‘Now then, let’s take a look at that warren by the oak stump.’

  They walked quietly down into a shallow dip where there were several patches of brambles and fuzz. ‘There’s one,’ the boy whispered. ‘You can get him from here.’

  ‘Quiet,’ Loredan replied. ‘I’m not wasting any more arrows. Now stay put.’

  He moved forward carefully, taking small steps, keeping the rest of his body still and straight. When he was forty yards away, the rabbit stopped grazing and sat up; Loredan stopped where he was and waited until the rabbit’s head went down again before continuing at the same slow, breathless pace. At thirty yards the rabbit looked up again; he halted, balanced uncomfortably on one leg, but the rabbit scampered five yards towards the mouth of its hole, then stopped, as they always do. Loredan waited. The rabbit dropped down on all fours but didn’t graze, just sat looking at safety as if wondering whether it was a good idea. Loredan walked on another five yards, making sure he put his foot down flat each time, gradually easing his weight onto it just in case there was a twig or a thistle-stalk he hadn’t seen.

  At twenty-five yards he raised the bow and started to draw, looking along the arrow with the bow canted at forty-five degrees; as the base of his thumb brushed the corner of his mouth he dropped the arrowhead a yard below and a yard to the right, then continued the draw until he felt the tip of his finger against his lip, at which point he relaxed his hand and watched the arrow all the way to the target. As he’d expected, the rabbit saw the arrow and started towards home, but he’d allowed for that; the slender bodkinhead passed through the rabbit’s back, pinning it to the ground. It was struggling against the shaft, kicking frantically with all four legs, as Loredan ran in, letting the bow fall. By the time he reached it, the rabbit was dead, its eyes wide open, and the last few twitches were just reflexes. Loredan, who had killed more men than rabbits in his time, waited until it was completely still before he pulled out the arrow, wiped the head and dropped it back in the quiver at his belt. Then he picked up the rabbit by its back legs and hocked it, passing the blade of his knife between the tendon of the right leg and the bone, cutting the tendon of the left leg and passing the left foot through the slit. He looked round for a bit of stick and hung the rabbit on it, then walked back and retrieved his bow.

  ‘Enough for two meals on that,’ he said.

  The boy nodded unenthusiastically. ‘And I expect you’ll make broth with the carcass, too,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘Well, you don’t go wasting good food,’ Loredan replied. ‘Or nasty food, for that matter.’ He undid the hock, lying the rabbit along the palm of his left hand, with the head lolling back over his wrist, gently squeezed the piss out of its bladder with his thumb, then pricked the point of the knife carefully into the skin of the belly until he’d penetrated it; then he turned the knife round so that the blade pointed upwards, and slit an opening in the belly up as far as the ribcage. The boy looked away. Loredan put a finger round the rabbit’s neck, another round the back l
egs and turned it upside down, shaking it till the guts dropped out through the slit, then jerked with his wrists to flick them away. With his index finger he hooked out the heart and what was left of the intestines, but left the liver and the kidneys, then picked up his knife again and cut the skin of the back leg from the belly slit to the leg joint. He put the knife down and pushed his finger carefully between the skin and the flesh, easing it away without tearing it until he had enough purchase to pull it away from the rabbit’s back, then worked the other leg free and let the skin hang forward close to the ground. He put his foot on it and pulled up on the rabbit’s hind legs until the whole body was pulled out of the skin up to the chest, then prised out the front legs and cut through the neck. Having folded the skin carefully with the fur on the outside, he twisted all four legs against the joint until they snapped, cut through the muscle and sinew just below the feet and tossed them away. The rabbit dangled from his fingers, naked and bloody as a new-born baby.

  ‘What are you keeping the skin for?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Glue,’ Loredan replied. ‘You boil it up and it makes gesso; it’s good enough for putting a rawhide backing on a lightweight bow. Actually, you can make glue out of almost anything living, but some things are better than others.’ He picked up the little parcel of skin and fur, while the boy gathered up the bow and wiped the damp off it. ‘Like I said,’ Loredan went on, ‘nothing’s wasted.’

  The boy grinned uncomfortably. ‘We spend our lives making things out of bits of animal,’ he said. ‘Sinew and rawhide and horn and glue, and gut for strings, and all the fiddly bits we use bone for.’

  ‘And blood,’ Loredan added. ‘Mix blood with sawdust and it makes a good sizing glue. I use it sometimes for sealing the grain.’

  ‘Right,’ said the boy, uncertainly. ‘But don’t you think it’s a bit - well, gruesome, really?’

  Loredan nodded. ‘But very efficient, wouldn’t you say? It’d be a shame to kill something and then just throw it away. It’s only other people we do that to.’

  Gannadius looked round uncomfortably, wishing (not for the first time in his life) that he’d kept his mouth shut. Just because you have something intelligent and useful to say doesn’t always mean you should go ahead and say it. More often than not, in fact, the opposite is true, depending on circumstances, and the circumstances in which a fifty-nine-year-old professional philosopher is in a position to point out the painfully obvious to the ruling council of a military oligarchy are among those where keeping the mouth tightly shut and not getting involved are most highly recommended.

  The chapter house was enormous, four or five times the size of Chapter back home and probably larger than the council chamber of Perimadeia, though he’d only seen that a few times and had no real recollection of it. As with most of the Foundation’s public architecture, it was light and airy, with a high domed roof and five huge windows, all of them glazed with thousands of small panes of clear, slightly blue glass, whose colour showed that they’d come from Perimadeia, probably at some point in the last twenty years. That made them irreplaceable now, of course. Other people could make glass, sure enough, but nobody else knew the secret of the City formula, which the guild had fanatically guarded for centuries. As a boy, Gannadius had thrilled with delicious terror at the dark tales of the guild’s assassins, who ruthlessly tracked down and exterminated any City glazier who tried to slip away and sell the secret to foreigners. Later he’d found out that the ‘secret’ was no such thing; Perimadeian glass was slightly blue because of something or other in the sand that they used to make it from that was unique to the City coastline. Still, it made a good story.

  An usher touched him on the shoulder and pointed to an empty seat at the very back, directly opposite the rostrum and lectern where the council of faculty heads would be sitting. He thanked the man and set off on his long march across the marble floor, marvelling yet again at the extraordinary acoustics of the place. From the middle of the floor he could hear quite distinctly what two men were saying right in the distance, where he was going. He smiled, reflecting that a council chamber where the faintest of whispered conversations could be overheard from any part of the building must make for either very boring or very exciting politics.

  He didn’t know the man to his left, but on his right was one Haime Mogre, who lectured in Applied Metaphysics and Military Administration. They’d exchanged a few words at some faculty meeting or other; as far as he could tell, the Mogre were a powerful family among the Poor, their family name meaning ‘thin’ or ‘starved’ (not a hereditary characteristic), and Haime was the youngest son in his generation, which meant that he’d ended up with the lowliest post that his birth and position permitted him to accept - a profound nuisance, since he’d have been far better suited to one of the lowlier faculties, such as Accountancy or Poetry, both of which were too low-class for him to be allowed to work in. Haime was, by his own admission, a poor metaphysician and a dreadful administrator, but (as he pointed out on every possible occasion) not nearly as bad at either as his brother Huy, who was a year his senior and his immediate superior in both departments.

  ‘This is terrible,’ Haime muttered to him, leaning over and whispering in his ear so softly that Gannadius could hardly catch the words; those confounded acoustics, presumably. ‘An absolute disaster.’

  Gannadius nodded sympathetically. ‘I suppose so,’ he whispered back, though why it was necessary to be so secretive he didn’t know. ‘Two defeats in a row—’

  Haime Mogre looked at him as if he was simple. ‘I’m not talking about the military situation,’ he replied. ‘Damn it, the day we can’t take the loss of a couple of hundred men in our stride is the day we start packing and looking for somewhere else to live. No, I mean the effect this is going to have on the balance of power. I really can’t see how we’re going to get out of it this time.’

  ‘Ah,’ Gannadius replied. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not terribly well up on Foundation politics.’

  ‘Well,’ Mogre replied, drawing in a deep breath; and he started to explain. Gannadius was hampered by the extreme quietness of his voice, the quite incredible complexity of the situation, and the fact that in the key family of the Deporf, whose members were evenly divided between three out of the four warring factions, all the male children were traditionally given the forename Hain. Nevertheless, he managed to piece together enough snippets and scraps to know that Juifrez Bovert, the commander of the first lost unit and now a prisoner of the Bank, had belonged to the Redemptionist faction (which had once favoured allowing the hectemores to redeem the mortgages but now bitterly opposed the idea), which was why the Separatists (supporters of a separate committee on finance and general purposes) had insisted that Renvaut Soef lead the retaliatory strike, because the Separatists were at daggers-drawn with the Redemptionists over proposed revisions to the Military History syllabus, with the unfortunate consequence that the Dissenters (who had objected to the annexation of Doure seventy years ago) now had plenty of ammunition to use against the Separatists in their dispute over the vacant seat on the Minor Arts faculty council, in which dispute they were siding with the Traditionalists (advocates of the traditional, as opposed to the First, Second and Third Revised, wording of the Articles of Foundation) in exchange for their support on the vexed issue of the recognition of Medicine as a separate faculty, rather than a part of Minor Sciences. The situation was complicated by the irresponsible behaviour of Hain Doce Deporf, who had suddenly taken it into his head to change sides on the Annexation issue -

  (‘Are they still arguing about that?’ Gannadius interrupted. ‘After seventy years?’

  ‘Of course,’ Mogre replied. ‘In fact, the debate is just starting to get interesting.’)

  - thereby tilting the balance on the Acquisitions committee dangerously in favour of the Traditionalists, who didn’t gave a damn about the Annexation, but who now had a majority over the Redemptionists on the subcommittee that was considering the issue.

  �
��And now this has to happen,’ Mogre continued. (Gannadius still didn’t have a clue which faction he supported.) ‘You can see what’s going to happen, can’t you? The Separatists are going to do their best to bury the hostages and forget about the whole thing, since all this is basically their fault, which means the Dissenters will demand a rescue attempt to embarrass them and the Redemptionists, so the Traditionalists’ll be able to force the Separatists to back down on condemning the Amended Declaration if they want the Traditionalists to vote against the Dissenters on the hostage crisis. All this,’ he concluded, ‘just when we thought we were getting somewhere on the Standards issue. It’s enough to make you weep.’

  Before Gannadius could ask about the Amended Declaration, let alone Standards, the chief usher banged the floor of the rostrum with his ebony staff for silence, and everybody stood up as the faculty heads filed in. They were all old, old men, two of them so decrepit that they had to be bustled along by a couple of ushers, like drunks being helped home by their friends. But they all wore flowing scarlet robes under sleeveless gilded mailshirts that reached below the knee and must have weighed forty pounds, and each one gripped a ceremonial sword and a huge copy of the Articles in a long silver tube the size of a standard Perimadeian drainpipe section, which the ushers took from them before they sat down and piled neatly in a stack behind the rostrum. Clowns, Gannadius muttered to himself. Even we were never as bad as this, and look what happened to us.