by K. J. Parker
Gorgas looked at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You lost me.’
‘Think,’ his sister replied. ‘Shastel has a fleet of ships. Shastel has nothing to sell. So they carry our goods on their ships. Suddenly they need us, they start to rely on us for a lot of easy money.’ She smiled broadly. ‘We might just end up running Shastel, and without loosing a single arrow.’
Gorgas thought for a moment. ‘It’s a hell of a big step,’ he said.
‘So was coming here in the first place,’ Niessa said equably. ‘Compared with what we’ve already done, it’s nothing; it’s what you’ve been saying we should be looking towards doing anyway. And we don’t fight a war and we don’t get killed. That’s the main thing. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, like a war for destroying money. Even if we had a signed contract with Death saying we’d win hands down I’d do anything rather than get us into a proper war. A little war for you to enjoy as a hobby is something I can put up with, but if you expect me to indulge you in a great big war, you’re sadly mistaken.’
Gorgas sat still and quiet for a long time, thinking. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘And suppose they just won’t play? No deal, under any circumstances—’
‘Which is a very real possibility,’ Niessa interrupted, ‘given the sort of people we’re dealing with.’
‘Well, quite. So what do we do then?’
Niessa pulled a wry face. ‘Simple,’ she said. ‘We load as much of the capital as we can on a couple of decent ships, go to the Island and let them get on with it, let them have their stupid invasion. After all,’ she added with a sad smile, ‘we’ve both cut our losses and run away from home in our time, we can handle it. And we’ll be a damn sight better off than we were the last time.’
Gorgas stood up. ‘I’m going home to bed,’ he said. ‘You think it over and let me know what you’ve decided in the morning. One thing, though.’
‘What?’
‘Bardas. How does he fit into all of this?’
Niessa shrugged. ‘We take him with us, of course. Which reminds me, that job I gave you. I don’t suppose you’ve even started it.’
‘Niessa.’ Gorgas frowned. ‘I’ve been busy.’
‘I’d noticed,’ Niessa replied. ‘Well, damn well make sure you get on with it, or I’ll have to do it myself. And remember,’ she added, ‘I won’t mess about trying to be like you.’
Gannadius?
No answer. Nothing. It was almost like being a small boy again, and standing in front of a door being towered over by someone’s mother; No, Gannadius can’t come out to play today, he’s helping his father with the chickens. He sighed and opened his eyes. In theory, the headache should signify contact with the Principle. In reality, Alexius felt that it probably had more to do with sitting with his eyes screwed shut and his head at a funny angle. Natural? Call yourself a natural? And the rest.
It had been a long day, what with his first magic lesson with the Director and his complete and utter failure to get his newly acquired techniques to work. According to the Director, sitting cross-legged on the floor with your eyes shut and your head lolling on your shoulder like a dead man swinging from a gibbet was supposed to focus the mind, turn it into a sort of burning-glass to concentrate the stray wisps of Principle that (apparently) waft around the place like dandelion seeds. So far, however, he hadn’t seen one shred of ev—
—He was sitting on a barrel on the deck of a ship, in the middle of a calm, flat sea. Judging by the light and the position of the sun, it was very early in the morning; there were red streaks in the sky, and a pleasant fresh smell, but he felt extremely tired, as if he’d sat up all night to see the dawn. He appeared to be alone on the deck of this ship, which suggested that the crew were all still asleep.
He lifted his head and looked towards land. He recognised the island in front of him; it was the same view of Scona he’d had from the ship that brought him here. Seen from this angle, there was a passing resemblance to Perimadeia, except that there was no upper city and no dramatic backdrop; the mainland was a grey and green blur daubed across the skyline in a hurry, and not allowed to dry properly. Something was different, though. Not hard to work out what it was.
Scona Town was in ruins. Smoke was rising from the mess where the buildings had been. The harbour was empty, and the warehouses that lined the quay weren’t there any more. Something prompted him to stand up and peer over the side of the ship, and in the water a few yards away he saw a dead body, floating on its face. There were quite a few of them, in fact; too sodden and deep in the water for him to be able to tell what nationality they were, or even if they were men or women. Just bodies; blood, bone and meat, with everything else taken away. It’s not often that we get to see our fellow humans as things rather than people, as nothing more than the sum of their organic parts. Even when they’re dead, humans are generally recognisable as having once been individuals, but hide the face and the indications of gender and the clothing and belongings that serve to classify and distinguish, and all that’s left is so much blood, bone and meat, so much raw material.
There’s been a battle, then, Alexius rationalised. Bodies in the water ought to mean a sea-battle, or a bad storm. The burnt town suggests a battle, and the lack of ships in the harbour suggests they were launched to fight an enemy fleet or evacuate the town. Either there was a catastrophic fire followed by a terrible storm - and surely the storm would have put out the fire - or else there was a sea-battle followed by a successful attack on the Town. If that’s the case, though, you’d think the attackers must have been Shastel, but Shastel doesn’t have any ships.
‘Alexius,’ said a voice behind him. ‘What’s going on?’
Gannadius. I’ve been trying to find you.
‘Have you? I wasn’t aware . . .’
Oh, thank you very much. So what’s all this about you knowing more about the Principle than any man alive?
‘You mean what Machaera said? She’s just young, that’s all. A bad case of hero-worship.’
I should say. And what’s all this? And what are you doing here?
Gannadius sat down on the barrel and grinned feebly. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I come here quite a lot. I find it soothing.’
Soothing? A burnt city and dead bodies? Are you out of your mind?
‘Certainly not,’ Gannadius replied, nettled. ‘And compared with what I’ve been getting lately, it’s wonderfully soothing. The end of the war, and all that. When you’ve been forced to live through graphic scenes of hand-to-hand combat and the massacre of unarmed civilians, a bit of calm sea and sunshine makes a pleasant change.’
You’ve seen the rest of the war?
Gannadius smiled sadly. ‘Seen it? I’ve been writing it. Or whatever you do when you make up a different future out of your head. And before you ask why in blazes I should want to do such a thing, it isn’t really me. Oh, I’ve orchestrated and choreographed it, but that’s just me being professional. No, it’s that confounded student of mine who dreamt all this up, in the rough, so to speak.’
That girl? She’s managed to curse an entire island?
‘It looks depressingly like it,’ Gannadius replied. ‘Quite unprompted, and certainly without any help from me. In fact, without being too obvious about it I’ve been trying to sabotage it, or at least tone down the nastiest bits. I don’t think she’s noticed, or at least not yet.’ He scowled. ‘You wouldn’t want to see what it was like before; just scrambling and chopping and blood spurting everywhere. I suppose that’s how someone that age who’s read books and heard songs and never seen real fighting must visualise a battle; swords cleaving and men run through and heads rolling in the gutters or bounding down the streets like those stuffed leather balls we used to make when we were children. Quite ghastly, the whole thing.’
And you want this to happen, do you?
Gannadius shook his head vigorously. ‘But what can I do about it?’ he said. ‘On my own, not a great deal. That’s why I’ve been trying to find you.’
<
br /> Sorry, but you’ll have to leave me out of it. Taking a curse off just one man nearly killed me, if you remember. Taking a curse off a whole island would finish me off for sure. Gods, though, this Machaera must be a bloodthirsty little thing, something like that awful girl we had to deal with back home.
‘Not a bit of it,’ Gannadius sighed. ‘Timid, meek, polite, mousy creature, the sort that gets panic attacks trying to summon up the courage to ask a question after a lecture. If anything, that makes it even scarier, don’t you think?’
Alexius nodded slowly. So tell me what happens, he said. Then we can start at the beginning and work out if there’s any practicable way of stopping it.
‘Quite straightforward,’ Gannadius said. ‘The Shastel fleet sails round the blind side of Scona island—’
Just a moment, slow down. What Shastel fleet?
‘My sentiments entirely. But apparently there’s going to be one, and while it’s ferrying the army across the straits, out come the Scona ships and the fun starts. They sink fifteen Shastel ships, all of them crammed with soldiers, all drowned, and they set fire to another six. That’s before they’re all sunk.’
Sunk. I see. Carry on.
‘It’s sheer weight of numbers, you see. It doesn’t matter how vastly superior the Scona ships are, because at the end of the day there’s just twenty-two of them, and any number of ours. Anyway, then the Shastel fleet forces a landing on the Strangers’ Quay - horrible business, that, we lose a lot of men there, but again we push through because we outnumber them so much. The rest of it’s just a great deal of killing. You can see the result over there.’
Gannadius, this is horrible. We’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Gannadius gazed at him wearily. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘And how do we do that, exactly? You just spell it out in easy-to-follow stages and I’ll help as much as I possibly can. Well?’
All right then, stop the girl. Make her see it’s wrong. Tell her to stop doing it. You’re her tutor, aren’t you? You ought to be able to control one young, timid student.
‘Oh, quite,’ Gannadius replied angrily. ‘Nothing simpler. And then she goes to the Dean and says, Doctor Gannadius saw I’d made up a victory for us in the war and told me to take it down again. They’d string me up from a lemon-tree and use me for javelin practice. No,’ he went on, ‘all I can think of that might work - and this is just guessing, mind - is killing her, and I can’t do that. Sorry.’
Scona destroyed. Thousands dead on both sides. The Town burnt. Is there something in the life-cycle of towns and cities that makes a fiery death inevitable? Or is it more narrow than that? Say, just towns and cities I have anything to do with?
‘Besides,’ Gannadius went on, ‘I don’t think killing her would solve anything. No, if we want to head this off, it’s not her we should be talking to, it’s someone quite other.’
Such as?
‘Such as the man behind the invasion, the man who leads the army and directs the fleet. And that’s where you come in, I think.’
Me? Why?
A wild grin spread over Gannadius’ face. ‘You,’ he said, ‘because the general’s name is Bardas Loredan.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Machaera woke up from the dream she could never remember, the one with the smoke and the killing and the man calling her name . . . Gone again. She didn’t mind in the least not being able to remember that one. It wasn’t the sort of thing any sane person would want to carry about in her head.
She yawned and sat up. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep; she still had a third of Heraud’s Responsibility and Volition to prepare for Moderations, which were getting depressingly close. True, she was ahead of the rest of her year in Applied Science and Lesser Arts, but she’d spent so much time lately on projections and the like that she was weeks behind on her required reading, and Best Authors was the first test in Moderations. Even with all the practical work, she would have been able to cope if it wasn’t for all the wretched headaches. According to the lodge Orderly, they might well be something to do with reading in a bad light, in which case she’d only be rid of them if she did her reading during the day. Maybe it would be best if she gave up the practical work for a while, at least until after Moderations. After all, Applied Science was only fifteen per cent of the marks.
She tilted the water jug towards her and saw it was empty. With a sigh she picked it up and trotted down the spiral staircase to the rainwater tank in the courtyard to fill it. She was just straightening up with a full jug in her arms when she heard a voice behind her.
‘Hello,’ it said. ‘There you are. So where have you been hiding the last few weeks?’
She sighed. ‘Hello, Cortoys,’ she replied. ‘I’ve been working. But you wouldn’t know about that.’
‘Very funny,’ Cortoys Soef said. ‘As it happens, I’ve been working very hard.’
‘Really? Two-syllable words and everything?’
The young man’s face became uncharacteristically serious. ‘You bet,’ he said. ‘I’ve had this irresistible urge to study lately. Ever since,’ he went on, ‘I had my name pulled off the list for the Scona raiding party by Doc Gannadius because I was overdue on my Lesser Arts dissertation. It’s that sort of thing that reminds me just what a bookish type I really am, deep down. As far as I’m concerned, you can lock me in a good library and chuck away the key.’
Machaera’s eyes widened a little. ‘You were supposed to be on the raiding party?’ she said.
Cortoys nodded. ‘Uncle Renvaut pulled some strings, arranged for me to go along as his adjutant or his page or something. Pleased as punch, I was, till Doc Gannadius interfered.’ He looked away. ‘They’re saying the rebels have stuck Uncle Renvaut’s head up on a pole on the Strangers’ Quay. Apparently it’s the first thing you see when you walk up the promenade towards the customs house.’
Machaera shuddered. ‘It’s probably not true,’ she said gamely. ‘Most of these rumours are nonsense. Ramo says they’re deliberately put about by rebel spies, so as to worry us and make us think we’ll lose the war.’
Cortoys shrugged. ‘Well, if that’s what they’re trying to do, they’re doing a pretty good job where I’m concerned. All those people, Machaera. There were friends of ours on that expedition. Hain Goche. Mihel Faim. Very nearly me, too. And Mihel was younger than me; damn it, I’ve been teasing him about being six weeks younger than me ever since we were in letters school together. How can someone younger than me possibly be dead?’
Machaera thought for a moment. ‘Your cousin Hiro died when he was fifteen,’ she said, and immediately wondered why she should want to say anything so mindlessly tactless; after all, reminding him of the death of a much-loved cousin wasn’t going to make him feel better, was it?
‘True,’ Cortoys said dispassionately, ‘but he was ill for six months, at least we all knew he was going to die, we had a chance to get used to the idea. But Hain and Mihel weren’t ill. Damn it, Hain borrowed my Geometry notes only a few weeks ago to copy out the bits he’d missed. How the hell am I going to get them back in time for the test?’
Machaera was about to scold him for being so self-centred when he suddenly burst into tears. This was thoroughly disconcerting. Cortoys had never cried, not in all the years she’d known him; not even when he was just turned five and he’d fallen down the steps near the north cistern and taken all the skin off his knees. He’d wanted to cry; she’d stood there, watching him carefully as if observing an interesting astronomical phenomenon, waiting for him to cry, but he hadn’t, not then and not ever. It was one of the things about him that irritated her most.
‘Cortoys—’ she said.
‘Oh, damn all this to hell,’ he muttered through a big sob. ‘This is so stupid. And now you’ll go around telling everybody—’
‘Cortoys, I wouldn’t.’
He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter whether you do or not,’ he said, wiping his nose on his wrist. ‘You know what really worries me?’ he went on. ‘I kn
ow, really know, that if I’d been there, like I was supposed to have been, I’d have been so terrified I’d either have run or else been so scared I’d have just stood there. I don’t know, it’s just the idea of it, being in a battle, all that anger and danger. You know what I’ve only just realised? I’ve been a coward all my life and never knew it.
Machaera wanted very much to be somewhere else, but unfortunately she didn’t have that option. Part of her hated Cortoys more than ever for choosing her to break down in front of. Part of her wanted to hug him tight and tell him it didn’t matter; which was strange, because she really didn’t like him, not one bit. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, as briskly as she could (a bit like Master Henteil when he got impatient in Metaphysics tutorials). ‘You’re no such thing. Everybody gets these ideas from time to time, imagines they won’t be up to it when the moment comes. That doesn’t make them cowards.’
Cortoys shook his head. ‘From now on,’ he said, staring at the fashionably pointed toes of his shoes, ‘I’m going to make damned certain the situation never arises. And I don’t care what anybody says; the further away I stay from the fighting, the happier I’ll be.’
Machaera grinned in spite of herself. ‘You could start a new faction. The Don’t-Want-to-Fight faction. It’d be original, at any rate. I’m absolutely positive nobody’s thought of that one before.’
‘I’d be famous,’ Cortoys answered, looking up at her with a tearful smile. ‘The first all-new faction in Shastel for fifty years.’
‘Doing your bit for the Soef family name,’ Machaera added.
‘Oh, quite,’ Cortoys replied. ‘Uncle Renvaut would have been so proud.’
