by K. J. Parker
Bardas shrugged. ‘You remember my brother sent some men to round us up and bring us in?’ he said.
The boy nodded. ‘You bashed them,’ he said.
‘That’s right. Well, figure it out for yourself. Whoever that is waiting for us down there, he doesn’t seem bothered about letting us know he’s here. I think that rules out thieves, or the odd stray halberdier. I don’t think it’s more of my brother’s soldiers, for the same reason. So, who else is left? A big party of halberdiers, possibly; and if so, I’ll see the sentries and come right back. But I don’t think so, If they’re wandering about openly and lighting fires, we’d have heard about them by now, with all the travelling round we’ve been doing. I think I know who that is.’
‘Your brother?’
Bardas nodded. ‘Or it could be someone completely harmless, I don’t know. Anyway, you wait here, and remember - Athli Zeuxis, on the Island. You got that?’
‘Yes,’ the boy replied. ‘Can’t I come with you?’
‘No. Stay here. Pay attention.’ He reached into the cart and took out the short heavily recurved ninety-pounder and the quiver of short reed arrows, looked at them and put them back. ‘The hell with it,’ he said, ‘I can’t shoot straight in broad daylight, let alone the pitch dark. Serves me right, I suppose.’
He walked quietly along the side of the barn as far as the woodshed. Fortunately, he knew everything there was to know about the woodshed door, including the precise way to lift it to stop the hinge squeaking. It was impossible to see anything in there, but he was able to find what he was looking for by feel: a hatchet-head fitted to a felling-axe handle, hanging from a strap from a hook in the centre beam. It was a weapon in the way rabbit was food; a significant improvement on nothing at all.
Why he felt so angry he didn’t know. If it was Gorgas in there, he was glad he’d had some warning. The way he was feeling right now, he’d have gone for him straight away, without even thinking about it, and since Gorgas was most probably better armed than he was, that would have been a bad mistake. The advance notice hadn’t changed how he felt; time to think about it had given him an opportunity to choose some semblance of a weapon, but it hadn’t cooled his temper. And that was odd. He’d spent so many years killing for money that he couldn’t imagine himself ever killing for free again. He hadn’t felt this way when he first came to Scona and was confronted with Gorgas and Niessa. He’d even managed to be civil to them both while making it clear that he wanted to be as far away from them as the cramped geography of the island would permit. He hadn’t enjoyed the interview and it had been hard work being in the same place with them, but he hadn’t felt this terrific urge to see their blood.
Since then, nothing in particular had happened. They’d left him alone, just as he’d asked. Once he’d turned away a few messengers with gifts of money and clothes and the like, Gorgas had taken the hint and stopped trying. Recently Bardas had been able to go days at a time without feeling their presence in this enclosed space they owned. He’d worked hard, very hard, at shutting them out of this mind; and although he knew it was all entirely artificial, this pretence that he was a simple artisan making a satisfactory living by honest toil, that his bows were of such exceptional quality that the procurement officers paid a premium for them and took whatever he could produce, nevertheless it was an illusion that he believed he could maintain for a while yet (as his mind slowly took a set, like a bow left strung and put away, until the wood forgets the tension in the back and the belly and follows the string in a permanent bend), perhaps even indefinitely. He wondered about the physics of it, and considered the old saying in his trade that a bow at full draw is nine-tenths broken. He concluded that all he wanted to do now was break, and the hell with everything; but why this should be he couldn’t quite grasp. Perhaps it was nothing more than this heavy-handed reminder of how shallow the illusion was, as simple as that; the act of walking into his home and lighting a fire. In Perimadeia, where houses quite often went without an owner (because someone had died childless and without family, or had gone abroad and not come back) it was the law that ownership was asserted by treating the property in some way as if one owned it - moving in furniture, whitewashing the walls, cleaning the curtains or even something as simple and ordinary as lighting a fire in the hearth. He’d have taken it without a word from a couple of stray Shastel halberdiers, even if they’d burnt the place down, because they’d have been passing through and wouldn’t have been asserting ownership. Gorgas lighting a fire in his grate was another matter entirely; that made it a legal issue, and he’d spent long enough in the lawcourts of the City to know what to do about that.
Or it could just be a couple of burglars. Gods, I hope so.
He knew which shutter-bolt was loose, fastened into rotten timber; the axe-handle between shutter and window-frame as a lever, and a gentle but insistent application of pressure, to rip the bolts through the crumbling wood without making a noise. I’d have made a good burglar myself; here I am, breaking in. Already I’m treating it as another man’s house. Once he’d got the shutter loose he paused and counted to twenty before slowly swinging it open, then another twenty before he carefully stepped though and into the pitch-dark back pantry. For all his care and attention to detail, he’d forgotten something; he remembered it just in time, when something dry and textured like skin batted him gently in the face. Two of those damned ubiquitous rabbits, skinned and hung to drain out the blood into a pudding-bowl placed under them on the flagstones; he let his breath out slowly, calmed himself down, and took a moment to remember exactly where the door-latch was, and where he’d put the bowls. Treading rabbit-blood footprints through his own house (yes, my house, damn it) would only serve to add another level of aggravation.
Another count of twenty after he opened the door an inch or so. The pale orange light was coming from the main hearth, no question about that. He was starting to feel horribly uncomfortable, as if the house had betrayed him somehow; as if it had been Gorgas’ paid spy ever since he first came here, and he’d only just realised it. He felt as if he was sneaking up on his wife and her lover, listening to them as he edged down the dark passageway. No pretence of trying to make himself calm down, not now that he could practically smell his brother here, like unfamiliar hair-oil on a pillow. All he could feel was the urgent physical need to swing the little axe, to split bone like splitting a newly felled tree (every tree will split if only you know where to hit, where to find the fault-line); it was something he couldn’t put away in his mind, insistent and distasteful like a full bladder or an upset stomach, something he’d rather not do but absolutely had to. And then we’ll be all square, he reflected, I’ll finally be on the same level as him, though perhaps without his minor plea of expediency. Or he’ll get me and be that much nearer the full set. Whatever. The outcome really doesn’t bother me; it’s getting it over with that matters.
Indeed. He relaxed, stood up straight, took a deep breath. No earthly reason why he should skulk about in his own house. He put his left hand against the dividing door and pushed.
Gorgas was sitting on a stool in front of the fire, with his back to him; a pair of broad shoulders hunched a little and the back of a bald head. He turned round and stood up in the same movement - there had always been a sort of grace about the way Gorgas moved; he’d never been clumsy or awkward, even as a boy - and stepped a little to one side, so that the light of the fire shone in his face.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘Gorgas,’ Bardas said.
‘I was passing,’ Gorgas went on. ‘I lit the fire, I hope you don’t mind.’
Up till then, the axe in his hand had felt like an extension of his arm; now it was as if he’d been lying on it and it had gone to sleep. He could sense it was there, but he couldn’t feel it. He looked at his brother and said nothing.
‘I hope I didn’t startle you,’ Gorgas went on. ‘I guess it’s not a good time to be lurking about in someone else’s
house, though I’m pretty sure we got all of them. Even if there were one or two we didn’t get, I wouldn’t give much for their chances of getting this far.’
Bardas narrowed his eyes, puzzled, and then realised his brother was talking about survivors of the raiding party. He heard himself say that he’d run into a stray halberdier on the road; but that was some time ago.
‘Oh,’ Gorgas said. ‘Well, that’s one less to worry about, I suppose.’
There was something in the way he said it, suggesting that if Bardas Loredan met a man on the road, he’d kill him, because that’s what he does, of course. Carpenters shape wood, peat-cutters cut peat, charcoal-burners make charcoal, Bardas Loredan kills people. Did any of them get away? Not to worry. It’ll give Bardas something to do, now that the evenings are drawing out.
‘Isn’t that apprentice of yours with you? Damn it, I can’t remember his name. He’s all right, is he?’
‘He’s fine,’ Bardas replied.
Gorgas nodded. ‘I gather he was the boy who gave the alarm at Briora. He did well.’
One step across the floor, slightly to the left to avoid tripping over the footstool; a two-handed feint to the right to draw his guard, in case he has time to draw his sword, then let go with the left hand and swing hard with the right for a point of impact just above the ear. He’d taught that as a basic gambit when he was running his fencing school; simple and fairly obvious, but in all the thousands of years that men have spent killing each other, nobody’s yet come up with a sure way to defend against it. Against an unarmed man, of course, it’s virtually satisfaction guaranteed, like the easy shot at a sitting rabbit from fifteen yards, where all the difficulty and skill is in the stalk, the actual loosing of the arrow being pretty much a foregone conclusion. Against an unarmed man who happens to be your brother and who’s trying to make conversation, no possibility of failure whatsoever.
‘What do you want, Gorgas?’ Bardas asked.
His brother grinned sheepishly. ‘This is going to sound bad,’ he said, ‘and I won’t insult you by trying to make it sound otherwise. Niessa told me to bring you back to Scona Town.’
‘I see.’
‘Actually,’ Gorgas went on, ‘she’s got a point. The war’s escalating, getting out of hand. You’re our brother, you live out here alone on the coast, a ship could easily slip in, they could grab you and be away before we could do anything. I’d never forgive myself—’
Bardas opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it.
‘I know you don’t want to come to Scona,’ Gorgas went on. ‘Gods know, I can understand why. Niessa wants you safe, where she knows where you are. It wouldn’t be for ever; just till things calm down and this mess with Shastel sorts itself out. After all, this is our mess, it’s up to us to solve it without you getting hurt. We think we can see a way to deal with it without it turning into a full-scale war - nobody wants that, it’d be stupid, crazy. Then you could come back here, carry on as you are now—’
‘I’m not going to Scona,’ Bardas said.
Gorgas took a deep breath and sat down. ‘I knew you’d say that,’ he said. ‘Damn it, you’re my brother, I’m not going to bring you in on a rope like a stray calf. All right, here’s what we’ll do. There’s a ship from the Island in port; get on it, go where you like, I don’t care where. Just so long as you go somewhere where the Foundation won’t find you easily. And your apprentice, of course; and don’t worry about money or anything like that, we can sort something out—’
‘You’re joking,’ Bardas said. He felt as if the sky had fallen all around him, and there was nothing between him and the stars. ‘She’ll kill you,’ he said, in a voice that came from somewhere around twenty years ago.
Gorgas shrugged. ‘I can handle Niessa when I have to,’ he replied. ‘The trick lies in not doing it too often. The hell with her, little brother. Is it what you want, or isn’t it?’
‘You know I never wanted to come here,’ Bardas said, the words spilling out like a leak in a wineskin.
Gorgas nodded. ‘That was us being selfish,’ he said. ‘I suppose we both thought that somehow we could make things up to you, put everything right again.’ He made a wide gesture with his hands. ‘As if. Whatever we do always seems to screw things up even more, so maybe the only thing that might help is to stop trying. I don’t know. At least we should stop thinking about what we want.’
Bardas couldn’t think of anything to say. He sat down on the edge of the table and looked at Gorgas; with his back to the fire, in control, as if he was in his own house. He let the axe slip out of his hand.
The halberdier yawned. After everything he’d been through - the march up from the sea, the fighting in the villages, being holed up in that awful place with the leaky roof, and then the unexpected attack and the fire and the narrowness of his escape - more than anything else he wanted to go to sleep, if sleep was actually possible in this horrible country.
Just Ramo and himself, the only survivors. There could be no possible reason why they’d made it and nobody else had, it could only be something random, meaningless. Now, as if to make fun of them, everything seemed to be going their way. They’d stumbled on this house, nicely off the beaten track, with nobody home; a few scraps of cold roast rabbit and some flat beer on the table in the main room; a comfortable hayloft to sleep in, where he’d be relatively safe until such time as he and Ramo felt strong enough and brave enough to go and look for someone to surrender to. He thought of his fellow survivor, pacing up and down outside on sentry-duty (Ramo had insisted on setting a watch, just like the real army. Fair enough; if he wanted to play sentry instead of getting some sleep, good luck to him).
He stared with painful, gritty eyes into a patchy red sunrise. Before he’d been accepted into the armed forces of the Foundation he’d been the son of a hectemore, making some sort of a living off sixty or so acres of hillside and bog in the far west of the Shastel peninsular. The hayloft had always been a good place to hide, on a hot day when there was work to be done, or when his father was in a foul mood. It’s a basic rule of life that all haylofts are virtually identical, and this one had the same smells and sounds as the one he’d taken refuge in not so many years ago. So, although he was weary and aggrieved and painfully hungry, for the first time in a long while at least he felt reasonably safe.
Which was a mistake on his part; because, as he leant his halberd against the piled stooks and sat back with his hands behind his head, the noise he’d taken for a mouse scuttling about somewhere above his head suddenly got louder. He almost had time to grab his halberd, but not quite. A big man dropped down from the top of the stacked hay, landed beside him, grabbed his halberd just as his fingertips brushed the shaft, and stuck the spike into his windpipe.
Bardas Loredan twisted the blade to free it and pulled it out. Then he dropped down to a crouch and listened. But there was nothing to hear, and he allowed himself the luxury of a moment’s rest. He rolled the body along the stack, out of sight of the doorway, pulled off the dead man’s coat and draped it round his shoulders, then sat down where he’d been sitting, in case anybody happened to look that way. His knees ached, as well they might after two hours of crouching in the back of his own hayloft, listening to the sentry’s tuneless humming and waiting for first light.
One thing he’d had plenty of was time to think, and he’d decided on what he considered the most sensible course of action. He looked down at the halberd, wondering whether he’d have to fight anybody else before he got clear. He had no idea how many of them there were; presumably they were the survivors of the raiding party, but even that was just supposition on his part. If they’d done the job properly they’d have put a man up by the gate, maybe a patrol round the boundary wall. It’d be extremely bad luck if they’d managed to find the hole in the back hedge, so he could slip out through that and almost immediately be on the road down to Briora. But that would mean crossing the yard and walking straight past the workshop window, which woul
d be asking for trouble. If he simply dropped down from here and followed the line of the barn up as far as the gate, he stood a better than average chance of not being seen until he was right on top of the gate sentry, who ought not to know what hit him. He felt the weight of the halberd, and stacked it against the hay; he’d be better off barehanded than trying to do any good with an overgrown staffhook.
He swung his legs out through the hayloft door, braced his hands on the floorboards and slid himself forward, landing quite comfortably on the soft grass. As he’d hoped, there was nobody about, and he walked fairly slowly and calmly up to the gate. Sure enough there was a sentry, and sure enough the sentry was leaning on the gate looking down the lane, where it was reasonable to expect any trouble to come from. He’d even taken his helmet off, just to make Loredan’s life a little easier. Just before he reached him, Loredan stooped and picked up the stone he used for propping the gate open. It was the perfect size and shape for the job; there was a crunch, like the sound you make when you put your foot through thick ice, and the sentry slumped forward over the gate, then slid backwards and sprawled on the ground. Loredan used his head to give himself a leg-up over the gate.
Well, that was easy; much easier than getting out of the City. Maybe it just seems easier after all the practice I’ve had. He walked briskly down the lane without looking back and kept going until he reached the main road, where there was an old mortgage-stone sticking out of the hedge. He sat down on that and took a deep breath. He wasn’t shaking or shivering. He felt fine.
Quick check; alive and walking, not cut about at all, no broken ribs or head injuries. Can’t complain about that, now can you? There’s a couple of dead men back there who’d give their right arms to be in your position. He stood up and started to walk down the road, for all the world as if he was off to the village to buy fish. And everything I am is coming with me, he thought. Like the last time, I suppose, except I’ve been spared a swim in cold water, and last time I ended up coming here. Won’t make that mistake again.
