The Hammer Part 1

THE HAMMER.

K. J. PARKER.

"Other people," Stheno said quietly, "have to live in this house too.

Sometimes it's not easy, but generally I manage to cope. But it's hard enough as it is without you pulling stunts like that. Do you understand?"

He'd have said anything to get the hand off his shoulder before he choked to death. "Yes, I understand. I'm sorry."

Stheno held him just a little longer; just a little too long. Then he let go, and all Gignomai could think about was breathing. "I can see why you did it," Stheno said, not at all unkindly. "In your shoes, probably I'd have done the same. But you don't have that luxury. Right?"

"Right."

Stheno nodded. A curt nod that said, quarrel over, let's not bother with grudges. "Glad you're back," he said. "I was worried."

"Stheno?"

"Yes?"

"The sword," Gignomai said. "I lost it, in the woods. Really."

Stheno frowned. "I suggest you find it," he said, "else, Father'll kill you."

"That's what I was thinking."

For Ian and Angela Whitefield and Jim Alc.o.c.k, An everyday story of country folk

Seven Years Before

When Gignomai was seven years old, his brother Stheno gave him three chickens.

"They're not yours, of course," Stheno said, "you're just looking after them. Food and water twice a day, muck 'em out when the smell gets bad, make sure the fox doesn't get them. No big deal. Father thinks it's time you learned about taking responsibility."

"Oh," Gignomai said. "How about the eggs?"

"They go to the kitchen," Stheno said.

For a week, Gignomai did exactly as he'd been told. As soon as he woke up, he ran out into the yard, being careful not to slam the door in case it disturbed Father in his study, and went to the grain barrel, where he measured out a double handful of wheat into the battered old pewter cup he'd found in the barn. He scattered the grain all round the foot of the mounting-block, filled the tin pail with water, counted the chickens to make sure they were all there and made a tour of inspection of the yard palings. One paling was rotten at the base, and Gignomai was worried that a fox could shove against it, break it and get in. He reported his concerns to Stheno, who said he'd see to it when he had a moment. Nothing was done. Two days later, something broke in during the night and killed the chickens.

"Not a fox," his brother Luso said, examining the soft earth next to the broken palings. Luso was a great hunter, and knew everything there was to know about predators. "Look at the size of its feet. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was a wolf, only we haven't seen one of them for years. Most likely it's a stray dog from town."

That made sense. Town was a strange, barbarous place where common people lived, barely human. It followed that their dogs would run wild and murder chickens. Luso undertook to patrol the woods with his gun (any excuse). Stheno told Gignomai not to worry about it; these things happened, it wasn't his fault (said in a way that made it clear that it was, really), and if you kept livestock, sooner or later you'd get dead stock, and there was nothing more to be said. That would have been fine, except that he then issued Gignomai with three more chickens.

"Try to take better care of them," he said. "The supply isn't exactly infinite, you know."

For three days, Gignomai tended the chickens as before. For three nights, he sat in the bow window overlooking the grand double doors of the hall. He was too young to be allowed out after dark, and from the bow window you could just about see the far western corner of the yard. He managed to stay awake for the first two nights. On the third night he fell asleep, and the predator broke in and killed the chickens.

"Not your fault," Stheno said wearily. "For a start, you wouldn't have seen anything from there, and it was dark, so you wouldn't have seen anything anyway. And even if you'd seen something, it'd have taken too long. You'd have had to come and wake me up, and by the time I'd got out there, the damage would've been done."

It was the same large, unfamiliar paw print. Luso still maintained it was a dog.

"You didn't mend the broken paling," Gignomai said.

"I will," Stheno replied, "soon as I've got a minute."

Custody of the remaining dozen chickens was awarded to one of Luso's huntsmen. The paling didn't get fixed. Two nights later, the leftovers from two more hens and the c.o.c.k were scattered round the yard.

"We'll have to get a c.o.c.k from one of the farms," Luso said. The met'Oc didn't condescend to trade with their neighbours, but from time to time Luso and his huntsmen went out at night and took things. It wasn't stealing, Mother said, but she didn't explain why not. Stheno tied the paling to the rail with a bit of twine from his pocket. Gignomai knew why he hadn't mended it: he had the farm to run, and he did most of the work himself because the farm workers were weak and lazy and not to be trusted. Stheno was twenty-one and looked like Father's younger brother rather than his son.

The next night, Gignomai climbed out through the kitchen window. He'd noticed some time before that the catch didn't fasten; he'd made a note of this fact, which could well be strategically useful, but had decided not to squander the opportunity on a pointless excursion. He took with him a horn lantern he'd found in the trap-house, a knife from the kitchen and some string.

The predator came just before dawn. It wasn't a dog. It was huge and graceful and quiet, and it nosed aside the broken paling as though it wasn't there. It jumped the half-door of the chicken-house in a single fluid movement, and came out a short time later with a dead chicken in his jaws. Gignomai watched it carefully, and didn't move until it had gone.

He thought about it. The predator was a wolf. He'd seen pictures in the Bestiary Bestiary in Father's library, and read the descriptions in Luso's in Father's library, and read the descriptions in Luso's Art of the Chase Art of the Chase. Quite likely it was the last surviving wolf on the Tabletop, or maybe in the whole colony. The met'Oc had waged war on the wolves when they first came here. Luso had always wanted to kill a wolf, but he'd only ever seen one, a long way away. This wolf was probably old, which would explain why it had taken to burglary; they did that when they were too old and tired to pull down deer, and when they were alone with no pack to support them. There was no way a seven-year-old could fight a wolf, or even scare one away if it didn't want to go. He could tell Stheno or Luso, but they almost certainly wouldn't believe him.

Well, he decided. The job had to be done or it'd kill all the chickens, and n.o.body else was going to do it because they wouldn't believe he'd seen a wolf.

He thought hard all the next day. Then, just as it was beginning to get dark and the curfew came into force, he went as un.o.btrusively as he could to the chicken-house, chose the oldest and weakest hen and pulled her neck. With the knife he'd borrowed from the kitchen and neglected to return, he opened the guts and carefully laid a trail of drops of blood across the yard to the woodshed, where he put the corpse on top of the stacked brushwood. He scrounged some loose straw from the stables and laid it in the shed doorway, and found a stout, straight stick about three feet long, which he leaned up against the wall. It was the best way of doing it that he could think of. There'd be trouble, but he couldn't help that.

The wolf came earlier that night. Gignomai had been waiting long enough for his eyes to get accustomed to the dark, and besides, there was a helpful three-quarter moon and no cloud. He watched the wolf's nose shove past the paling and pick up the scent of blood. He kept perfectly still as it followed the trail, pausing many times to look up. It was suspicious, he knew, but it couldn't figure out what was wrong. Old and a bit stupid, but still a wolf. He made sure of his grip on the lantern, and waited.

Eventually, the wolf followed the blood all the way into the woodshed. Gignomai kept still until the very tip of its tail had disappeared inside; then he jumped up, took a deep breath, and crept on the sides of his feet, the way Luso had taught him, across the yard. He could smell the wolf as he groped for the stick he'd put ready earlier. As quickly as he could, he opened the front of the lantern and hurled it into the shed, hoping it'd land on the nice dry straw. He slammed the door and wedged the stick under the latch.

Nothing happened for a disturbingly long time. Then he heard a yelp-a spark or a cinder, he guessed, falling on the wolf's back-followed by a crash as it threw itself against the door. He'd antic.i.p.ated that, and wished he'd been able to steal a strong plank and some nails, to secure the door properly. But the stick jammed against the latch worked just fine. He could see an orange glow under the door. The wolf howled.

He hadn't antic.i.p.ated that. It was guaranteed to wake the house and bring Luso running out with his gun. Luso would open the door and either he'd be jumped by a maddened, terrified wolf, or the burning lintel would come down and crush him, and there'd be nothing Gignomai could do. He considered wedging the house door with another stick, but there wasn't time and he didn't know where to find the necessary materials. Then the thatch s.h.i.+fted-it seemed to slump, the way lead does just before it melts-and tongues of flame burst out of it, like crocuses in spring.

Stheno came running out. Gignomai heard him yelling, "s.h.i.+t, the woodshed's on fire!" and then he was ordering people Gignomai couldn't see to fetch buckets. One of the farm men rushed past where he was crouching, unaware he was there, nearly treading on him. Quickly Gignomai revised the recent past. As soon as it was safe to do so, he got up quietly and headed for the house door. Luso intercepted him and grabbed his shoulder.

"Get back to bed. Now!" he snapped.

Gignomai did exactly as he was told, and stayed there until the noise in the yard had died down. Then he made his way down to the hall. Stheno and Luso were there, and Father, looking extremely irritable. Stheno was telling Father that the woodshed had caught fire; they'd tried to put it out but the fire had taken too good a hold by the time they got there and there had been nothing they could do. Luckily, the fire hadn't spread, but it was still a disaster: half the winter's supply of seasoned timber had gone up in flames, along with twelve dozen good fence posts. Father gave him a look that told him that domestic trivia of this nature wasn't a good enough reason for disturbing the sleep of the head of the family, and went back to bed.

Next day, Stheno went through the ashes and found the twisted frame of a lantern. Some fool, he announced, had left a light burning in the woodshed, and a rat or something had knocked it over, and now they'd all be cold that winter. It would go hard, he implied, with the culprit if he ever found out who it was. But his enquiries among the farm hands produced a complete set of perfect alibis, and Stheno had too many other things to do to carry out a proper investigation.

The attacks on the chickens stopped, of course, but n.o.body noticed, having other things on their minds.

Gignomai wasn't proud of what he'd done. Clearly, he hadn't thought it through. On the other hand, he'd done what he had to, and the wolf, quite likely the last wolf on the Tabletop, was dead and wouldn't kill any more chickens. That was important. The violation of the family property wouldn't happen again, so there'd be no need for him to repeat his own mistake. Accordingly, he didn't feel particularly guilty about it, either. It was a job that had needed doing, and he'd done it.

A little while later, when he thought it was all over, his sister came to him and said, "You know the night of the fire."

"What about it?" Gignomai replied.

"I was in the kitchen," she said. "I went down to get a drink of water, and when you came in, I hid and watched you climb out of the window."

"Oh," Gignomai said. "Have you told anyone?"

She shook her head. "Why did you burn down the woodshed?" she asked.

He explained. She looked at him. "That was really stupid," she said.

He shrugged. "I killed a wolf," he said. "How many kids my age can say that?"

She didn't bother to reply. "I ought to tell Father," she said.

"Go on, then."

"But I won't," she said, after an agonising moment. "He'd just get mad, and then there'd be shouting and bad temper and everybody in a mood. I hate all that, specially when it goes on and on for days."

"Fine," Gignomai said. "Up to you, of course."

"You might say thank you."

"Thank you."

"It was still a really stupid thing to do," she said, and left the room.

After she'd gone he thought about it for a long time and, yes, she was right. But he'd done it, and it couldn't be helped, and it had to be done. The only criticism he could find to make of himself was idleness and lack of foresight. What he should have done was stack brushwood in the old cider-house, which was practically falling down anyhow (Stheno was going to fix it up sometime, when he had a moment) and would've been no great loss to anybody.

Next time, he decided, I'll make sure I think things through.

The Year When

His first real command were pigs. There were fourteen of them, quarter-grown light brown weaners, and it was his job to guard them while they foraged in the beech wood and keep them from straying. He dreaded it more than anything else. The men from the farm-proper stockmen who knew what they were doing-drove them up there from the house in the morning and led them back at night, but for the whole of the day they were his responsibility, and he was painfully aware that he had no control over them whatsoever.

Fortuitously, they were naturally gregarious animals and stuck together, generally too preoccupied with snuffling in the leaf mould to wander off and cause him problems. But he had an excellent imagination. What if something startled them? He knew how easily they spooked and once that happened and they started das.h.i.+ng about (they were deceptively fast and horribly agile) he knew he wouldn't stand a chance. The whole litter would scatter and be lost among the trees, and that'd mean turning out the whole household to ring and comb the wood in a complex military operation that would waste a whole day, and it would be all his fault. The list of possible pig-startlers was endless: a careless roebuck wandering into the clearing and shying; a buzzard swooping down through the canopy; the crack of a dead tree falling without warning; Luso down in the long meadow, shooting his stupid gun. Or what if a wild boar decided to burst out of a briar tangle and challenge him for leaders.h.i.+p of the herd?

The first half-dozen times he performed his wretched duty ("It's time your brother started pulling his weight on the farm," his father had p.r.o.nounced. Why couldn't they have told him to muck out the goose-house instead?) he'd spent the whole day at a breathless, st.i.tch-cramped trot, trying to head off any pig that drifted more than a yard from the edge of the clearing, an exercise in counterproductive futility. It didn't help that the beech wood was on a steep slope. Since he clearly couldn't carry on like that for any length of time, he resolved to think the thing through and find an answer. There had to be one.

In the long barn, he knew where to find a large oak bucket, which everybody else had apparently forgotten about (the farm was crammed with such things, perfectly good and useful but long since mislaid and replaced). He also knew where they kept the yellow raddle. He got up very early one morning, mixed a pint of raddle in a derelict saucepan and used it to paint the bucket, which he carried up to the clearing in the wood. Next morning, he stole half a sack (as much as he could carry-actually, slightly more) of rolled barley and took that up as well, hiding it safe and dry in the crack of a hollow tree.

The idea was simple and based on sound principles of animal husbandry he'd learned from watching the stockmen. Three times a day, he fed the pigs from the yellow bucket. He knew the pigs loved rolled barley above all things-the sight of fourteen of them scrambling over each other and scrabbling across each other's heads to get into the bucket was really quite disturbing-and he made sure that each feed was preceded by a distinct and visible ritual, because pigs understand that sort of thing. When he walked to the foot of the hollow tree, they all stopped rooting and snuffling and watched him, still and tense as pointing dogs. When the sack appeared, they started barking and squealing. As soon as he moved, holding the sack, there'd be a furious torrent of pigs round his ankles, and he'd have to kick them out of the way to get to the bucket to fill it.

A great success, whose only drawback was that it was strictly illegal-he'd requisitioned equipment and drawn restricted supplies without authority, a serious crime, the consequences of which didn't bear thinking about, but the risk of detection, given the way the farm was run, was acceptably low. He took great pains to hide the yellow bucket when not in use, and was almost excessively careful in planning his raids on the rolled-barley bin. It was, however, a significant part of his nature that he didn't believe in perfection. The system worked just fine, but that didn't mean it couldn't be improved.

The most beneficial improvement would be doing without the barley, but he knew that wouldn't work, or not for long. He could rely on the squealing of the main body of pigs to draw in any outlying stragglers in an instant, but wouldn't it be better if he could train them, by a.s.sociation, to come to a feeding call of his own? The stockmen did it with the cows. All they had to do was call out, and the herd came quick-shambling to them right across the forty-acre meadow. He tried various calls, but the pigs just looked at him as if he was mad. In desperation, he tried singing. It worked.

His mother had once told him he had a fine singing voice (but then, she'd told Luso that he was handsome and Pin that she was pretty). He wasn't quite sure what "fine" was supposed to mean in this context. If it meant loud, Mother's words were a statement of undeniable fact, not a compliment. He thought he sang rather well, but he was realistic about his own judgement. In any event, the pigs seemed to like it.

To begin with, he restricted himself to a few short simple halloos and volleys, the sort of thing Luso used to communicate with the hounds ever since he'd lost the hunting-horn in the river. They worked perfectly well. By the fifth note out of eight, all the pigs came running, even if the sack was still in the tree (though he knew he had to keep faith and fulfil the contract by feeding them or the whole procedure would fail). Nevertheless, he felt the need for improvement or, at least, further elaboration. He extended the halloos into verses from the usual ballads, and the pigs didn't seem to mind. But he didn't like ballads much, they were plain and crude, and the words seemed a bit ridiculous taken out of their narrative context. So he began to invent words and music of his own, using forms from his mother's music book. He made up serenades to call them, estampidas for while they were feeding (the only form boisterous enough to be heard over the sound of happy pigs) and aubades for the minute or so of forlorn sniffing and searching before the pigs managed to accept that all the barley was really gone. Gradually, as he elaborated and improved his compositions, the singing became an end in itself rather than a function of practical swineherding, and the terrifying ch.o.r.e blossomed into a pleasure.

For the afternoon feed of the day in question he'd worked up what he considered was his finest effort yet. He'd started with the basic structure of the aubade, by its very nature a self-limiting form-but he'd extended it with a six-bar lyrical coda that recapitulated the opening theme transposed into the major key with a far livelier time signature. He'd run though the coda many times during the day, sitting with his back to the fattest, oldest beech in the glade. A wolf tree, the men from the farm called it. It had been there before the rest of the wood grew up, and instead of pointing its branches directly at the sky, it spread them wide, like his mother making a despairing gesture, blocking the light from the surrounding area so that nothing could grow there, and thus forming the clearing which generations of pigs had extended by devastation into a glade. When the angle of the beams of light piercing the canopy told him it was time for the feed, he got up slowly, brushed himself free of leaf mould and twigs, and hauled the yellow bucket out from its secure storage in a holly clump. Three pigs looked up, their ears glowing translucent against the slanting light. He grinned at them, and lugged the bucket into the middle of the clearing. Then he walked slowly to the hollow tree and felt inside the crack for the barley sack. Two more pigs lifted their heads, still diligently chewing. He cleared his throat with a brisk cough and began to sing.

La doca votz ai auzida...

(Lyrics weren't his strong point. They had to be in the formal language of Home, or he might just as well sing ballads and, in theory, he was fluent in it as befitted a boy of n.o.ble birth albeit in exile. In practice, he could pick his way through a few of the simpler poems and homilies in the books, and say things like "My name is Gignomai, where is this place, what time in dinner?" As far as writing formal verse went, however, he hadn't got a hope, so he tended to borrow lines from real poems and bend them till they sort of fitted.) De rosinholets savatges- He stopped suddenly, the next phrase congealed in his throat. A string of hors.e.m.e.n had appeared through the curtain of leaves and were riding up the track towards him. In the lead was his brother Luso, followed by half a dozen of the farm men and one riderless horse.

His first impression was that they'd been out hawking, because he could see a bundle of brown-feathered birds, tied at the neck, slung across the pommel of Luso's saddle. But there was no hawk on Luso's wrist. Had Luso lost the hawk? If so, there'd be open war at dinner. The hawk had come on a s.h.i.+p from Home; it had cost a fortune. There had been the most appalling row when Luso turned up with it one day, but Father had forgiven Luso because a hawk was, after all, a highly suitable possession for a gentleman. If Luso had contrived to mislay the wretched thing...

Luso looked at him without smiling. "What was that awful noise?" he said.

There was no way he could explain. "Sorry," he said.

They hadn't been hawking. They were wearing their padded s.h.i.+rts, with horn scales sewn into the lining. Two of the men had wide, s.h.i.+ny dark red stains soaking through their s.h.i.+rts, Luso had a deep cut just under his left eye, and they all looked exhausted. The birds on Luso's saddle were chickens.

"Keep the noise down, will you?" Luso said. He was too tired to be sarcastic. For Luso to pa.s.s up an opportunity like this, something had to be wrong. The men rode by without saying anything. Their horses had fallen into a loose, weary trudge, too languid to spook the pigs. He didn't bother trying to hide the barley sack behind his legs; Luso didn't seem interested. Under the chicken feathers, he could see the holsters for the snapping-hen pistols. The ball pommel of one pistol was just visible. The other holster was empty.

When they'd gone, he performed the feeding ritual quickly and in silence. It worked just as well without music. When the swineherds showed up to drive the pigs back to the farm, they were quiet and looked rather scared. He didn't ask what the matter was.

Father was angry about the man getting killed, but he was absolutely furious about the loss of the pistol, so furious that he didn't mention it at all, which was a very bad sign. Gignomai heard the shouting before they were called in to dinner-that was all about the man's death, how it'd leave them short-handed at the worst possible time, how Luso had a sacred duty by virtue of his station in life not to expose his inferiors to unnecessary and frivolous dangers-not a word about the pistol, but it was plain as day from what was said and what wasn't that the real issue wasn't something that could be absolved through sheer volume of abuse. Dinner was, by contrast, an eerily silent affair, with everybody staring at their hands or their plates. When the main course was served, however, Father looked up and said, in a terrible voice, "What the h.e.l.l is this supposed to be?"

A long silence; then Luso said, "It's chicken."

"Get it out of my sight," Father said, and the plates were whisked away. No great loss, Gignomai couldn't help thinking; it had been spa.r.s.e and stringy and tough as strips of leather binding, and he was pretty sure he'd last seen it draped over the pistol-holsters, in which case the chickens had been laying hens, not table birds, and not fit for eating. There was rather more to it than that, of course. They'd eaten layers before, when they'd had to, and had pretended they were perfectly fine.

Next morning, early, his brother Stheno told him he wouldn't have to look after the pigs for the next week or so. He gave no reason, but Gignomai could tell it had something to do with yesterday and the chickens. He supposed he should have been pleased, particularly since Stheno didn't give him anything else to do. Instead, he felt aimless and somehow disappointed, as though he'd closed his eyes for a kiss that never came.

He wanted to sneak up to the hayloft with a book, but as usual Father had entrenched himself in the library (the place he was usually to be found). Going to the loft without a book would just be a waste of lifespan. He looked for Mother's music book, but she was propped up in bed reading it, feeding sc.r.a.ps of cold chicken to her cats. How slender, he thought, is the division between happiness and misery. All he needed for a day of perfect pleasure was a book (any book, so long as he hadn't read it so often he could say the words with his eyes shut), but there wasn't a book to be had, and so the day promised to be wretched.

Unless, of course, he did something desperate and illegal. Those aspects of his proposed plan of action held no charm for him in themselves. He preferred to avoid danger and keep to the rules whenever it was possible to do so. But the prospect of drifting aimlessly round the farm all day suddenly seemed unbearably dreary, and he felt as though he didn't really have a choice. He decided to break out of the Tabletop, walk down to the town and see his friend.

Breaking out was no small thing. The Tabletop, the plateau on which they lived, rose steeply out of the plain, a rectangle a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, three sides of which were bare perpendicular rock. At the foot of the southern face, where the beech wood sloped sharply down to the river, they'd built what everybody called the Fence, though it wasn't a fence at all, but a high earth rampart, topped with a stone wall, with a deep ditch at its foot on the river side. There was one gate, the Doorstep, in the middle of the Fence, a ma.s.sive thing guarded by two towers which Gignomai had never seen opened. Hired men, seasonal workers and the very occasional visitor were winched up the north face in a terrifying beam and plank cage, in which Gignomai had sworn a private oath he'd never set foot. There was, however, a third way out, the one Luso used. Gignomai wasn't supposed to know about it, but he couldn't help having a lively mind. Once he'd followed the bridlepath through the wood down to the Fence, and found that it stopped abruptly at the point where it met one of the many run-off streams that turned the lower part of the wood into a quagmire for two-thirds of the year. The stream-bed looked impossibly steep for a human being to walk down, let alone men leading horses, but he guessed it must be possible, since that was apparently what Luso and his raiding parties did.

Scrambling down it the first time had terrified the life out of him. Once he'd been up and down it a dozen or so times, he realised it could be done, safely if not comfortably, if you knew exactly where to go and where to put your feet. It came out beside the river between two giant rocks, lying so close that they looked like one enormous monumental facade, commissioned by some great emperor. The crack (you went in at an angle, where the two rocks sort of overlapped) was so slight you'd miss it if you didn't know it was there. On closer examination, it turned out to be wide enough for a horse to squeeze through, but from only a few yards away it looked like just another facet of the sandstone wall. It was, when Gignomai came to think about it, pretty well perfect. Luso, returning from one of his frolics, could ride up the river, leaving no trail, and melt away into an invisible c.h.i.n.k in the wall. If anybody were to stumble upon it and look upwards, they'd immediately a.s.sume that the stream-bed was unscalable, and continue their vain search for the real entrance.

As he walked through the wood, contemplating the reason for his surprise holiday, he had to a.s.sume that it was to do with Luso's raid, which he knew had gone badly. The beech wood was, he supposed, the Tabletop's most vulnerable aspect, though (needless to say) it had never been compromised in the past. Therefore, as a precaution, it had been emptied of man and pig until the fuss had died down. That made sense, but it hadn't been deemed necessary before. It occurred to him that this time, Luso might have made rather more trouble than usual. In any event, he expected to find at least one sentry on duty at the head of the stream-standard procedure for two days after a raid-and he wasn't proved wrong. There were, in fact, four.

That was awkward. He spotted them easily enough from his usual vantage point at the top of the worked-out limepit he called the Woodland Cathedral. They were some of Luso's best men (best in this context bore a rather specialised meaning: they didn't do farm work, and a lot was said about them behind their backs) and their presence tended to support the hypothesis that something bad had happened the previous day. It occurred to him that he could have used his day off rather more usefully eavesdropping on Father in the library; except that was a highly dangerous operation and, if anything, even more illegal than breaking out. Besides, it would've involved a great deal of sitting, or crouching, perfectly still, and he really wasn't in the mood.

Luso had a book called The Art of War The Art of War. He kept it beside his bed and had let it be known that dreadful things would happen to anybody who so much as noticed it existed. Gignomai had therefore taken it as his fraternal duty to read it from cover to cover, several times, an exercise far more excruciating than any punishment Luso's rather limited imagination could ever have devised. It was a boring book, badly written and self-evidently useless (by his own admission, the author's only qualification for writing about military strategy had been twenty years as headmaster of a small provincial school), but Luso clearly set great store by it, since he'd posted his sentries almost exactly as shown in diagram C on page 344. As a result, there was a blind spot where the double trunk of a fat old split oak blocked the western sentry's view of the riverbed; not a major flaw, since they were presumably guarding against enemies coming up the stream, who'd be visible at other points, not delinquents going down it. As for those other points, he guessed he'd be able to get past them by virtue of being small and skinny. He could duck down and be covered by the overhang of the moss and ivy cl.u.s.ters that hung from the stream's lower bank.

He considered the tactical position. With the blind spot in his favour, the risk was acceptable, but only just-according to the handy reckoner in Luso's book, something in the order of 25 per cent, with 33 being the cut-off point. In such circ.u.mstances, the book recommended raising a diversion. On that issue he begged to differ. A diversion-throwing a stone, breaking a branch to simulate the stealthy approach of an enemy, starting a small fire-would require activity and movement, with the attendant risk of detection. True, the penalties for being caught cras.h.i.+ng about in the bushes were considerably less than those for being caught trying to break out, but it'd still mean he'd be marched back to the house, where he'd be given into the custody of his brother Stheno, who'd a.s.sign him uncongenial farm work as a remedy for excessive leisure. A one-in-four chance. He studied each of the sentries carefully in turn, weighing up what he knew about them. Luso's book suggested that guards could be neutralised with gifts of alcohol, either drugged or in bulk. But Luso's best men would know exactly what was going on if one of the sons of the farm strolled up to them with a huge jug of beer and, besides, they could drink anybody else in the house under the table, so it'd have to be a barrel at least.

He sighed. Stupid people shouldn't be allowed to write books, in case even stupider people believed them.