The Belly of the Bow

by K. J. Parker

  Avid Soef went to bed in a foul mood. True, he’d won the day and got his army, but once again that damned fat man had nipped out all the credit right from under his nose. There was also the slight possibility that taking an army across these marshes might not be the simple walk-through he’d assumed it was when he came up with the idea; and that Mogre was well aware of it when he so graciously conceded. On reflection, what he should have done was insist that Mogre lead the southern army - yes, but then Mogre would be the one to take Scona and catch Gorgas, while he was stuck fast in a mountain bottleneck fussing over water rationing and acceptable loss ratios.

  Confound it; why did war have to be so difficult?

  ‘Uncle Gorgas will be just fine,’ Iseutz said confidently. ‘His sort never come to harm. The bad luck just sort of glances off them and hits the person standing next to them.’

  Heris Loredan bit her tongue and made no reply. It was only to be expected that the child would be the next best thing to impossible given the life she’d led, and since Gorgas seemed to dote on her it would be imprudent to pick a fight. ‘I hope so,’ she mumbled. ‘I suppose he can look after himself.’ She put the stopper in her ink bottle, picked up the document she’d been copying and sprinkled it with sand to dry it off. ‘Aren’t you cold, sitting there without even a shawl?’ she asked.

  Iseutz shook her head. ‘I don’t feel the cold any more,’ she said, ‘or at least not the way you people do. You forget, it was really cold in the prison.

  Heris didn’t think she could take much more of her husband’s niece without doing something she’d later regret, so she took the original document and the copy and went back into the house. Irritating, to be chased out of her favourite seat in the cloister by this horrible, sad creature; but being married to Gorgas Loredan had taught her the value of strategic retreats and the avoidance of conflict. She retreated into the office and busied herself with the filing backlog.

  When she’d gone, Iseutz picked up her book and read for a while. It was a Perimadeian technical treatise on applied metallurgy, dealing with such topics as the extraction of mercury and the refining of precious metals; for some bizarre reason, the subject interested her. Behind her, Luha (solid, dull, insignificant, tree-like Luha) was dutifully doing his homework. Thankfully, little Niessa had gone off to be a pest somewhere else. Iseutz had finally managed to control Niessa by convincing her that she was a witch who ate cats and rats and turned little girls into insects; Niessa avoided her whenever possible now, and peered anxiously at her from behind furniture when it was required that they share a part of the house for any length of time. Heris she could banish from her presence just by being aggravating, and Luha was the easiest of them all; she only needed to wave her mutilated hand under his squeamish little nose and he was off and away like a flushed partridge. As for Uncle Gorgas - well, she didn’t mind him. But while he was away, it was imperative that she should be able to exercise some degree of control over her environment.

  ‘Excuse me, miss.’ Iseutz looked up; it was that damned obsequious porter. ‘Is the mistress in the house, do you know?’

  ‘Yes,’ Iseutz replied. ‘Why?’

  The porter looked at her. ‘Well, miss, there’s a man at the door. He says he’s the master’s brother, miss. Bardas Loredan.’

  Iseutz kept perfectly still. ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘Show him in here, I’ll deal with him.’

  As soon as the porter had gone she jumped up and looked round frantically, but there was nothing to be seen. Hardly surprising; civilised men like Gorgas Loredan don’t leave deadly weapons lying around in their houses. There was always a heavy blunt object, like a chair leg; or she could hide in the doorway and strangle him with her dressing-gown cord. Both ideas seemed faintly comic. She stayed where she was.

  ‘Hello, Uncle Bardas,’ she said.

  It was amusing to see his reaction. To do him credit, he didn’t shrink away or yelp, but he was visibly startled.

  ‘Hello,’ he replied.

  Iseutz smiled and waved him to a chair. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said. ‘Last place on earth I’d expect you to turn up of your own free will.’

  Bardas nodded and sat down, never taking his eyes off her. ‘Ordinarily yes,’ he said. ‘But since I know for a fact that Gorgas isn’t here—’

  ‘And you either didn’t know I was, or you’d forgotten. Bad staff work on either count, Colonel. Would you like some of this wine? It’s not bad, and I didn’t have a chance to poison it.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not thirsty,’ he said. ‘And these days I don’t drink much, anyway.’

  ‘That’s a change,’ Iseutz said. ‘When you were teaching me to fence there was always booze on your breath.’

  ‘I’m a reformed character,’ Bardas replied.

  ‘I’m sure. So what are you doing here?’

  Bardas grinned feebly. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m here to meet my nephew. Is that him, there in the corner?’

  ‘That’s him,’ Iseutz replied. ‘Luha, come and meet your Uncle Bardas. Your Uncle Bardas is a great man, Luha; he’s a soldier and a fencer and a craftsman and the gods only know what else besides.’

  The boy looked at Bardas warily; a wise reaction, Bardas thought, on meeting a new Loredan. Wiser still would have been to run away.

  ‘Hello, Luha,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Geometry,’ Luha replied. ‘I’m not very good at it.’

  Bardas smiled. ‘You and me both. I had to learn it in the army, calculating angles for aiming catapults. I could never get the hang of it, though.’

  Luha looked at him blankly and said nothing. ‘Don’t worry,’ Iseutz said cheerfully, ‘it’s nothing personal, he’s always like this, aren’t you, Luha? The quiet sort.’

  ‘Yes,’ Luha said. ‘Can I get on with my homework now?’

  Bardas nodded. ‘Would you like me to try and help you?’ he said.

  Luha frowned. ‘I thought you said you weren’t any good at it.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Bardas replied. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not better at it than you.’

  Luha thought for a moment; he was one of those boys you can watch thinking. ‘If you like,’ he said, ‘but I’m not bothered. I always do my homework on my own. Father says I should.’

  ‘You carry on, then,’ Bardas said. ‘I’ll sit here and talk to my niece.’

  Luha nodded and went back to his corner. Bardas sat back in his chair and let his hands trail on the grass.

  ‘This is cozy,’ Iseutz said. ‘If you like, I’ll send him to fetch Heris and little Niessa.’

  ‘Don’t trouble him on my account,’ Bardas replied. ‘But thank you for being so civil,’ he added. ‘I must admit, I expected a scene when we next met.’

  Iseutz shrugged. ‘You’ll keep,’ she said. ‘But I still can’t get over seeing you here. You must be really demoralised.’

  Bardas nodded. ‘That’s a fair assessment,’ he said. ‘Mostly, though, it’s only morbid curiosity. Try as I might, I just couldn’t imagine Gorgas with a home and a family. It’d be like going round to Death’s house for dinner. But apparently I was wrong.’

  Iseutz smiled. ‘Don’t be fooled,’ she said. ‘It’s like those toy houses they sell for little girls’ dolls; it’s all perfect, absolutely true to life, all the doors and windows actually open, and it was all ordered sight unseen from a catalogue. Except me, of course, and I’m in the process of being slowly digested. In a few years’ time I’ll probably be quite housebroken. Hey, if I’m really good maybe my fingers’ll grow back.’

  ‘I think you came with the set,’ Bardas replied. ‘I think you’re the token skeleton in the cupboard, utterly lifelike but made of wax and only three inches tall. Now you’re upset,’ he added, grinning. ‘Didn’t I teach you always to keep your guard up?’

  She nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You know what I’m going to do now? I was just going to bide my time, be patient and kill you when I had
the chance. But that’s be too good for you. So I’m going to hurt you.’

  Bardas raised eyebrow. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘And how do you propose doing that?’

  Iseutz smiled. Under other circumstances, she might have had a nice smile. ‘I’ll tell you something I know and you don’t, something Uncle Gorgas told me. I’m guessing it’ll burn you up.’ She shrugged her bony shoulders. ‘And if it doesn’t, I’ll just have to find something that does. But this ought to do the trick.’

  Bardas made a show of yawning. ‘I’m listening,’ he said. ‘What’s this tremendous secret that you know and I don’t?’

  Iseutz turned her head away, flipped her fringe out of her eyes, and then looked back, like a young girl flirting. ‘It’s about who opened the gates of Perimadeia,’ she said.

  Later that evening, Bardas Loredan went back to the Bank. He was allowed to come and go freely now, so long as he told his sister where he was going. A little clerk from the back office followed him everywhere and told Niessa where he’d really gone and what he’d really been doing. He knew this. It didn’t matter.

  He had two rooms, one to sleep in and the other for amusing himself. The second room was large and airy, with one big window about seven feet off the ground, looking out over a back alley, and a midden. It was empty except for a chair, a stool, and a long table robust enough to be used as a workbench. There were also two caskets full of the tools he’d asked for, though so far he hadn’t had the energy to unpack them.

  He unpacked them now, carefully arranging them in a logical order on or under the bench, wiping the preservative grease off the blades with handfuls of the hay they’d been packed in. Three saws; two drawknives, one straight, one curved; five assorted planes, ranging from the long, bulky boxwood try plane to the neat little brass-bodied block plane; four spokeshaves, straight and curved; any number of files, rasps, chisels and gouges; three short-bladed knives for whittling and scraping; abrasive reeds and pots of sand and grit and resin for bonding them to blocks, wood, brass and iron clamps, in a great variety of shapes and sizes; pots and jars of glues and gessos, and a pestle and mortar; beeswax and the makings of lacquers and polishes; a glue kettle; steel and brass hammers, bastard, ball-pein, planishing and tack; drifts and punches; copper, hide, lead and lignum vitae mallets; whetstones, oilstones, slipstones; a bow-drill, a breast-drill, a screw-drill, all with boxed sets of various collets and a rosewood tray of fine steel drill-bits; three ebony rules and two squares, one boxwood and one brass; charcoal and chalk; calipers and dividers and contour gauges; an awl and a fretsaw and a couple of handy-looking little objects even Bardas didn’t immediately recognise; all new and clean and of the finest quality, their edges fresh from their first grinding, their faces true and unbattered, enough tools to build the world.

  When he’d finished unpacking he took a stick of charcoal and started drawing sketches on the benchtop.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Gorgas had seriously underestimated the skill of his archers; there were just over three hundred and fifty bodies clogging up the river, bobbing gently up and down like a raft of logs on its way from the forest to the sawmill.

  The good news was that they’d pulled off one of the most remarkable feats of arms in recorded military history; the total defeat of a hugely superior force, with negligible losses to themselves, in a remarkably short period of time. The bad news was that they now had nearly five hundred prisoners, dying of starvation and exhaustion, in desperate need of food and a secure billet. The disused stone quarry was almost large enough and the sides were far too steep to climb, except for one easily guarded track, but they were open to the violence of the sun, and of course there was no water. At a bare minimum of a pint and a half of water and half an Ordnance loaf per man per day, that came to nearly a hundred gallon jugs to be filled at the river, carried four miles along difficult roads, lugged down the steep track and up again; sixty trays of Ordnance loaves to be got from somewhere (Where, for pity’s sake? Keeping his own men fed was a serious strain on his ingenuity); two shifts of forty guards, making up a third of his mobile army. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he had a major river blocked with dead bodies, and deputations from the four villages downstream whose drinking water was red and stinking. He was going to have to order his battle-weary soldiers to wade chest-high in that disgusting water to drag out all the swollen, sodden corpses, heap them up in stacks like bricks of newly cut peat, and dig three broad, deep pits in stony ground before they could even think of resting, patching up their worn and damaged kit, dressing their own minor wounds - assuming, of course, that they weren’t facing an overnight forced march to take on one of the other two armies he knew were still on the loose somewhere on the island. Only one thing worse than a defeat, somebody once said, and that’s a victory. Trite, Gorgas reflected, but true.

  His rapid inspection tour of the holding camp in the quarry only depressed him further. He didn’t have enough medical orderlies for his own men, let alone any to spare for the enemy; but there were men dying of comparatively minor injuries, and that was a waste. He didn’t have to be a doctor or a scientist to know that unless the prisoners were moved on soon, a great many of them would die in the quarry from poisoned wounds, dysentery, malnutrition, any number of combinations of injuries and afflictions exacerbated by heat and squalor. Under any other circumstances he wouldn’t let such a dreadful thing happen, but as it was there was very little he could do. If any of them did survive and make it back to Shastel, the tales they’d have to tell of their treatment at his hands would be enough to harden the enemy’s resolve to fight to the last man if needs be, to make sure Scona was erased from the earth and rubbed out of human memory. It was what he’d want to see happen if he was in their place.

  One final, painful look at the prisoners, bodies and clothes caked in dried bloody mud, squashed up tight together like children hitching a ride on top of a hay-cart; but he had a war to run, the deplorable consequences of victory to cope with, and he’d already done all that was humanly possible. He wiped the picture from his mind and went away.

  Back at the burnt-out village he was using as his operational base - more shambles, more mess - he was just in time to hear the depressing news from his commissariat; yes, there were plenty of arrows, bows, shoes, food, everything he desperately needed, but there were only seven roadworthy wagons available to transport them, and the journey would take them a day and a half. Which did he want first? Arrows, without which his men couldn’t fight? Shoes, without which they couldn’t march, unless he ordered his victorious army to hobble and squelch their way across Scona in the footwear they’d been wading through mud and water in? Food? His choice. Oh, and by the way, Sten Mogre is marching on Scona Town; if you’re really quick, you might just catch up with him before he burns it to the ground.

  Having obtained the raw materials, Bardas started to build the bow.

  First, he put the fresh sinew up on the window ledge to dry in the sun. Then he mixed the sizing glue (fortunately he had plenty of sawdust to thicken it with) and pinned the rawhide up on boards to cure. Even in this heat, these three ingredients needed to be left alone for a few days before he could go any further. Fortunately, there was plenty more to be getting on with.

  He made the wooden core, to which the back and belly would be glued. Among the billets of suitable wood he’d been supplied with (sent straight from the Bank’s own bow-factory, hand-selected by the superintendent; nothing too good for a Loredan) was a fine, straight-grained mulberry blank, taken from an old, fat tree, which he worked down with the drawknife and the plane into an even half-inch-thick square section some fifty-five inches long. When he was happy with it, he made the bending-jig, a complicated assembly of planks, blocks and clamps to hold the bow in the shape he wanted while he steamed it to make the wood take the drastic permanent curves the design called for. The contour was the traditional kissing mouth, like a full-mouthed woman’s upper lip. After he’d bathed the wood evenly in steam for a f
ull hour, it lost its will to resist and sagged into the clamps like a fat man sitting down.

  While the wood was cooling down and taking its set, he cleaned the last few ribbons of meat off the bones that would make up the belly, flicking the scraps into the sizing glue pot to give the mixture a touch more texture.

  (‘What do you want with all this junk?’ Niessa had demanded suspiciously.

  ‘I want to make a bow for Gorgas,’ he’d replied.

  That had taken her by surprise. ‘I thought you couldn’t stand him,’ she’d said.

  ‘I’ve reformed,’ he’d replied. ‘Forgive and forget, that’s me from now on. After all, family’s family, and we’re all in this together whether we like it or not.’

  She hadn’t known what to say to that. ‘You’re going to booby-trap it, aren’t you?’ she’d said. ‘Or put poison on the handle, or saw through it so it breaks in the middle of a battle.’

  He’d scowled at her for that. ‘Give me some credit,’ he’d said. ‘I may not be much, but I take a pride in my craft. If I build Gorgas a bow, you can be sure it’ll be the best bow the world’s ever seen. Besides, when all is said and done, I owe him. He gave me a Guelan sword to defend myself with when Perimadeia fell. I want him to have a really fine bow,’ he went on, ‘for when the Foundation sacks Scona.’)

  Once he’d pared the rib-bones down to firm material, he cut the splices to join the sections together, using his finest fretsaw blade and a narrow scraper ground out of a razor. Cutting the double fishtail splice in each section was a long, difficult, nerve-racking job, one which had to be done right. It took him the best part of the day on which Gorgas fought the battle in the river bed.