by K. J. Parker
Luso, he thought. Luso, getting dinner.
As he walked quickly down to the river, he mulled over the loss of the snapping-hen pistol. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. They had six (well, five now) and even if the lost pistol had fallen into the hands of a hostile agency, it wouldn’t irrevocably shift the balance of power. In terms of honour, prestige and dread it was a bad thing, needless to say. Also, it couldn’t help but have a serious effect on the political situation in the family and the farm as a whole. That might not be so bad; maybe Father would be a bit less inclined to indulge Luso, which would mean Stheno would gain ground, if only for a while. On balance, most of the time, Gignomai was broadly on Stheno’s side (not that his allegiance mattered a damn to anybody); not that he was against Luso, or Father, or anybody. Actually, if anybody was going to come out of this well, it’d probably be Pin, simply because she wouldn’t be involved, and could therefore earn points as a peacemaker, should she choose to do so. As for the pistol itself, being realistic, it wouldn’t be much good to an enemy. None of their enemies had any significant resources of powder—enough for two shots, maybe—and no balls of the right bore, and no skill to make a ball mould or more powder. It’d probably hang on a wall as a trophy for a year or two, and then Father would discreetly buy it back.
He walked—strolled, in fact, with his hands in his pockets; a gesture nobody could see, but it was important—to the riverbank, and stopped at the very edge. He was out, free and clear. In theory, he could go anywhere and do anything.
In some book, a romance of some kind which he’d read when he was too young to know that such books were to be despised, there had been a moment when the hero had stood by a river, just as he was doing now, and probably that was why he was doing it. In the book, the hero had thought about rivers, about how the water that was passing by his feet would be miles away by that evening, and tomorrow might well be tumbling into the vast and unknowable sea, mingling with that plural and singular entity that touched other shores he would never visit, places whose existence he’d never be aware of. If only a man could become water, the hero had mused, what understanding, what unimaginable clarity there must be in the common intelligence of an ocean. How bizarrely unnatural it was to be a single, isolated drop that could never join with the main.
Well, people in books thought like that, and even said that sort of stuff out loud. Father had a word for it: melodrama. He used it for everything he reckoned was false and just for show (that wasn’t quite what it meant—Gignomai had looked it up in the dictionary) and the bit in the book was just melodrama, because people weren’t drops of water, and it’d be a pretty odd world if they were. Even so. Let the river (he cast it in mathematical form, a habit of his; he was quite good at mathematics) equal the human race minus the ancient and illustrious family of met’Oc. There was no mathematical symbol for crossing, as far he knew, so he couldn’t calculate what would happen if he (x) crossed the river. Would your answer be different if you built a raft and sailed down the river? Calculate the effects necessary for proving rain falling on a fountain. He took off his boots, rolled up his trousers, and waded into the water.
On the far side, he stopped and looked back. There was nothing to see. The trees masked the Fence at this distance, and the crack between the two rocks of the Doorstep was too faint to make out. People had learned long ago not to graze cattle on the rich, fat grass of the water meadow—rather a pity; it was some of the best grazing in the colony—and the deer wouldn’t come out here in daylight, for more or less the same reason. Conclusion: there is a world beyond the Fence, but nobody much lives there, which tends to decrease its attraction. It was only at this point in his mental journey that he remembered that he’d had a purpose in mind when he started out: to walk into town and see Furio.
He frowned as he began the walk. He’d spent rather longer than he’d anticipated getting past the Fence and the guards, which meant he’d really only have enough time to get to town, say hello, turn round and come back again if he wanted to stand any sort of chance of returning before his absence was noticed. Quickly, to salvage the operation, he modified the objective. He’d walk into town, buy a coil of wire (he checked his pocket; he’d brought the coin) and maybe spend an hour with Furio on the way back if there was time.
Two hours from the river to town. It was a conventional figure which people tended to accept and believe, even though it was plainly wrong. Maybe it was true if you ran part of the way, or had extremely long legs. He guessed that once upon a time the road had gone through the bog, or where the bog was now, instead of round it. Come to think of it, the bog was a man-made thing, the result of subtle changes in the course of the Whitewater caused by years of uncoordinated irrigation. The road had moved, slowly, as the bog had gradually encroached on it, but in everyone’s minds the time from the river to town was still two hours. If you couldn’t make it in that time, it had to be your fault for dawdling.
He always felt nervous at the first sight of the Watchtower. It meant he was rapidly approaching enemy territory—melodrama. In reality, he was approaching a place where he wasn’t really supposed to be, but he’d been there dozens of times, everybody knew who he was and nothing bad had happened yet, although he’d never been stupid enough to wander into town the day after one of Luso’s pranks before. He assumed he was tolerated because he was just a kid (that’d change soon, of course), but also, well, because he wouldn’t be there unless he wanted to be, and that was the fundamental difference between him and the rest of the house of met’Oc. He had an idea that the people in town recognised this, somehow, and turned a blind eye. Also, they must know by now that he was friends with Furio, and Furio’s dad was Somebody in town. (He was also aware of the fundamental difference between luck and a wheelbarrow; only one of them was designed to be pushed.)
Just as the road into town was really only a suggestion in the grass, town itself was two dozen buildings, which gave the impression that they’d been left lying about after someone had finished playing with them. One of the buildings was the Watchtower. Next to it was the livery, then Furio’s father’s store: the Merchant Venturers’ Association. Beyond that were ten long low sheds, warehouses in which people happened to live. Beyond them, in a circle, were the pens, which covered a hundred and six acres. There wouldn’t be a ship for three months, so naturally the pens were empty; nobody brought cattle into town, where they had to be fed hay at ruinous expense, until a ship had been definitely sighted. When the big salt-beef freighters came in, the pens would be full, so you could walk quite easily from one side to another across the backs of cattle too closely packed together to move. Furio claimed a boy he knew had done this. Slaughtering day, when all the animals in the pens were killed and butchered, was reckoned to be a sight to see, though Gignomai had never done so. But he’d heard the noise, right up behind the Fence.
As he passed the gate of Number One pen, he stopped. It was a tall gate, seven feet high and fully boarded in, and to it a man’s body had been nailed. His face and chest were pressed against the board, his arms and legs were spread out as wide as they would go, and the nails had been driven through his wrists and ankles, with one long nail through his neck. It was how you nailed a rat or stoat on a barn door, so presumably someone was making a statement about something. The man was unmistakably dead, but there was no smell, and the flesh was still firm under the smooth skin, so he hadn’t been there long. There was no blood to speak of, so he’d been dead when they put him up there. Over his head, someone had daubed CATLE THIEF in blue raddle. That made Gignomai frown. For some reason, poor spelling had always offended him. He didn’t recognise the face, but he hadn’t necessarily expected to. Many of Luso’s men kept themselves to themselves, and they came and went.
That explained the mystery of the empty saddle, at any rate. He hesitated. If they’d taken to nailing up Luso’s casualties as vermin, it suggested an unprecedented level of anger, and maybe town wasn’t safe any more. On the other hand, he�
��d come a long way, and turning round and walking tamely home again would be an admission of defeat (though who he was fighting he couldn’t say). Besides, there was a world of difference between one of Luso’s men and a son of the met’Oc. The town people were realists. They didn’t tend to pick fights.
He walked up to the store. The door was open (he’d never known it closed) and he wandered in.
The store was one of his favourite places. To some extent, it was the sheer number and variety of objects it contained that never failed to please him. At the farm, he knew all the things. There weren’t very many and most of them had been there as long as he could remember, and a significant proportion were broken, worn out, imperfectly mended or otherwise unsatisfactory. He was pretty sure he’d be able to recognise every nail the family possessed. He knew their histories—what they’d been used for, when and why they’d been reclaimed, straightened, re-used, reclaimed again. In the store, by contrast, there was a barrel full of virgin nails with the oil still on them, also buckets with all their slats intact and their original handles, cloth in great rolls that nobody had ever worn, shovels and hammers made in the old country, by strangers, things he’d never met, things he might possibly (one day, if everything changed out of all recognition) buy, and have, and keep for his very own exclusive use. Walking into the store was like meeting a thousand strangers—better, of course, because things had no reason to dislike him because of who his father was, or what his brother had done.
Furio’s dad was at the back of the store, going through a barrel of store carrots, discarding the sprouters. He looked up and saw Gignomai, and there was a moment during which he could be seen doing the arithmetic, reasons for and against being friendly. Then he smiled.
“You want Furio?”
Gignomai smiled back politely. “If he’s not busy,” he replied. “But I’d like to buy some wire, please.”
“Wire,” Furio’s dad replied, as though he’d just been asked for the philosophers’ stone. “What sort of wire?”
“For making snares.”
“Ah.” A nod of the head that implied many things: understanding, willingness to trade, and a sort of community of interests and ideas, as if to say that anybody who wanted that sort of wire was fine by him. “How much?”
Gignomai took the coin out of his pocket without looking at it. “This much?”
Furio’s dad dipped his head. “Two yards. Just a moment.”
(Gignomai had found the coin in the bed of the river the time before last. One of the farm men had identified it as a silver two-quarters. It was the first coin Gignomai had ever seen, and he had no idea what it was worth. Now he knew. It was worth two yards of snare wire—a fortune.)
Furio’s dad pulled a huge spool, as big as his head, off a shelf. It was hard to believe there was that much wire in the whole world. He pulled wire off the spool and laid it alongside a series of marks on the side of the bench, then he took a pair of shears, snipped it off and started winding it round his hand.
“Do much snaring?” he asked.
“A bit,” Gignomai replied.
Furio’s dad looked away, almost furtively. “What do you do with the skins?”
Gignomai shrugged. “We use them round the farm,” he replied. “You know. Gloves, collars, fine rawhide twine.”
Another nod of the head. Well, of course you do. “Worth money,” Furio’s dad said, in a faraway sort of voice, as if Gignomai wasn’t actually there. “If you had any spare, I mean. Any left over.”
“How much money?”
“Quarter a dozen.” The words came out so fast they almost blended into each other. “For squirrel,” he added. “Quarter for ten for rabbits. Don’t suppose you get any ermine up there, do you?”
Gignomai didn’t know what an ermine was. But a quarter a dozen, for stupid squirrels. The coin, briefly but no longer his, had been a two-quarter. He did the arithmetic. Two dozen squirrel skins could, by some strange alchemy, turn into two yards of wire. Amazing idea. “No,” he said, because he’d have died rather than show his ignorance. “But we’ve got loads of squirrels and rabbits. And hares,” he added.
“Hares.” A sort of awed wonder, as if they were talking about dragons. “Quarter for six,” said Furio’s dad, and Gignomai knew that that was a lousy price, and that Furio’s dad was ashamed of himself for seeking to swindle a minor. “Sure,” he said. “I can get you all the hare skins you want. We’ve got them like rats.”
(Which was a lie, and he wondered why he’d said it. Later, he realised it was because he wanted Furio’s dad to feel better about the lousy price.)
“Deal,” Furio’s dad said, and smiled a broad, false smile, because of the guilt. “How about hawk feathers? I could give you a quarter an ounce.”
“Luso won’t let me kill hawks,” Gignomai said, and realised he shouldn’t have spoken that name, not here. Furio’s dad didn’t say anything, but the smile evaporated and it was clear that business negotiations were at an end. Gignomai handed over the coin and received his wire, which he stowed in his pocket, resisting the temptation to look at it and feel it, now that it was his.
“I’ll see if Furio’s out back. Stay there, won’t be a minute.”
Furio was seven months younger than Gignomai and a head shorter. His aunt reckoned he’d been born thirty years old and he really needed to mix more with boys his own age. His mother agreed, but drew the line at the common boys in the town. They compromised by not letting him read books, which were known to be bad for a growing boy’s eyesight.
“What did you bring?” was always Furio’s first question.
Gignomai hadn’t given it much thought. It had been an impulse to break out, so he’d snatched the first book to come to hand off his shelf. “Eustatius on the identification of waterfowl,” he replied, trying to make it sound like he’d thought long and hard about it. “There’s some really good pictures.”
Furio’s face lit up like a lantern. “Fantastic,” he said. “Give it here, then.”
Gignomai handed over the book, which Furio just about managed not to snatch. Instead, he looked longingly at the spine, then shoved it deep in his coat pocket and folded the flap over it.
They were sitting in the store room out the back, where the bulk goods were kept. There was just enough room to squeeze through between the stacks of barrels, crates and boxes. “I didn’t know you were keen on birds,” Gignomai said.
Furio shrugged. Birds—whatever; it was a book. “You’re taking a bit of a chance, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“Coming here,” Furio said, “after what happened.”
Gignomai nodded. “I saw,” he said. “What did happen?”
Furio gave him his you-mean-you-don’t-know look. He’d seen it many times. “Your lot raided the Venuti place,” he said.
“Where?”
Furio waved his hand vaguely—somewhere north, south or east. “They’re new arrivals,” he said. “From Home. Guess they don’t know about your lot.”
That would explain it, Gignomai thought. “So?”
“They fought back,” Furio said, reaching into a bucket and producing two elderly apples, one of which Gignomai accepted out of politeness. “Your lot killed their indentured man; they killed one of yours.” He paused, lowered his voice. “People are saying they captured a gun. Is that…?”
Gignomai nodded. It was an unforgivable breach of honour to disclose such a thing to an outsider. He wasn’t bothered. “Dad’s livid,” he said.
Furio’s eyes widened and practically glowed. “My dad reckons he’s going to try and buy it off the Venuti.”
“Why?”
Furio shrugged. “He wants one, I guess. Or he thinks he can sell it on.” Furio hesitated, and those wide, bright eyes clouded for a moment. “Were you talking to him earlier?”
Gignomai nodded. “He asked if I wanted to sell him some squirrel pelts.”
A faint sigh, as though Furio was contemplating some foul habit of his fa
ther’s that he’d accepted but could never quite forgive. “How much?”
“Quarter a dozen.”
“He’s ripping you off,” Furio said, with a degree of compressed savagery that Gignomai rarely heard him use. “He’ll get a thaler six for them when the boat comes.”
“So what?” Gignomai grinned at him. “Mostly we just chuck them away—too much bother curing them. Everything’s too much bother at our place.”
“Yes, but—” Furio left off; he knew when not to start an unwinnable argument. “You should make him pay you a quarter each,” he said.
Gignomai laughed. “No way,” he said. “If I do that, he’ll get them from somebody else, and I won’t get my quarter. You do realise that a quarter’s an absolute fortune to me.”
Furio bit a third off his apple, pulled a face and spat it out. “He hasn’t got any other sources of supply,” he said. “Not regular, anyhow. On account of the only big woods in the colony belong to your lot. And nobody goes poaching up there, because of your nutcase brother.”
It was an established licence between them: Furio could insult Luso and nothing need be said or done. Even so, Gignomai winced. “He wants rabbits too. And hares.”
“You’ve got it made, then, haven’t you?”
“But surely there’s rabbits and hares down on the flat,” Gignomai said. “They’re pests, you can’t get rid of them.”
“Actually you can,” Furio said seriously, “if you can get quarter and a half for a pelt, and you’ve got no other way of raising cash money.” The surely you know look again. “The colony pays its taxes partly in furs,” he explained. “We’ve got a quota. We have got to fill it or the government back Home gets stroppy.” He frowned. “They make them into hats, apparently,” he said. “They make the fur into felt, and then—”
