The Proof House Part 17

Before Bardas could object, Anax had marched out of the room. He walked so fast that Bardas had trouble keeping up with him, especially in the maze of corridors and galleries under the main shop, which was where he was headed. Bollo lumbered along some way behind; he wasn't built for speed or agility, and he knew the way already.

'Good,' Anax said, peering in through a doorway, 'n.o.body's found it yet. One of these days I'll come down here and it'll be full of equipment and people working, and that'll be my private workshop gone. Where's Bollo with the lamp? We need to get a fire going so we can see what we're about.'

When there was light, Bardas was able to look round. In the middle of the floor stood an anvil, the full-sized three-hundredweight type, bolted to a ma.s.sive section of oak beam to dampen the shock of the blows. Next to it on the beam was a swage block, a large square of heavy duty iron into which were cut holes and grooves and cups of various sizes and profiles, half-round and square and three-square; into these recesses the sheet metal could be hammered, to mould a variety of shapes, such as flutes and raised edges. At the end of the beam a cup-shaped hole had been chiselled out, about half a thumb's length deep at its deepest point (it was shaped rather like a scallop sh.e.l.l, sloping gently at one end, steeply at the other). Bardas noticed that the fibres of the wood had been hammered smooth, hard and s.h.i.+ny.

'Dis.h.i.+ng stump,' Anax explained. 'For dis.h.i.+ng and hollowing. And that's the folder,' he went on, pointing to a contraption mounted on a stout workbench at the far end of the room, 'and next to that's the rollers and the shear. All there is to it, really. Now then, let's see what we've got behind here.' He knelt down and reached behind the work-bench. 'Unless somebody's been in here and found it, we should have - yes, here we are.' He hauled out a sheet of steel, dull brown under an even layer of rust. 'I put this aside - what, fifteen years ago it must be, just in case I ever wanted to make some good stuff. I watched it being drawn down out of a single bloom of proper Colleon iron - lovely clean material, not full of bits of grit and rubbish like the garbage we use for work. There's half a hundredweight here, plenty to be going on with if we cut neatly.' He bit his lip, then went on, 'You know, this probably sounds silly to you, but I knew when I saw it that I'd find a use for it some day.'

Bardas felt vaguely uneasy about this. 'Are you sure you can spare it?' he asked. 'I mean, if it's such good material-'

'That's all right,' Anax replied with a slightly c.o.c.keyed grin. 'So long as it's going to someone who'll make proper use of it.'

'I'm not sure I like the sound of that,' Bardas said.

From a shallow box in the corner Anax produced a set of patterns cut out of thin wood. 'Breastplate,' he said, handing up the largest of them. 'Backplate, gorget, vambraces, helmet panel, cheekpieces, neckguard - d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l, where's the neckguard? Ah, got it. All seems to be here; cuisses, greaves, cops, rerebraces - are we going to bother with sabatons? No, I don't think so, you'll hardly be able to move as it is. Taces?'

'What's a tace?' Bardas asked.

'All right, no taces. That'll do. Bollo, get the sheet up on the bench so I can start marking out.'

Carefully, while Bollo held the sheet still, Anax drew round the patterns with chalk. 'It's just as well for you that you're a decent height,' he said. 'I cut these patterns for us - the Sons of Heaven, I mean. Most of you outlanders are funny little short people.'

'Like you,' Bardas pointed out.

'Precisely,' Anax agreed. 'But then, I'm different. Luckily for you. All you'd ever get free from the rest of us'd be your three days' rations. Keep the d.a.m.n sheet still, Bollo, you're wobbling it about.'

It took a long time to mark the patterns out, and longer still to cut out the sections on the shear. Bollo cut the straight lines, pulling down the long lever effortlessly, his mind obviously elsewhere; Anax cut the curves, something which Bardas would have sworn was impossible to do, since the shear was nothing more than a giant version of a pair of snips, one jaw bolted to the bench, the other fitted with a three-foot handle. 'You're worried,' Anax said between grunts of effort, 'that I can cut this stuff like paper. You think it must be too thin to be any good. Well, all I can say to you is, have faith.'

'I wasn't worried, actually,' Bardas said, but Anax didn't seem to have heard, because he went on, 'The point is, steel is wonderful stuff. I can cut it and bend it and shape it like it was parchment or clay; and then when I've finished with it, Bollo and his biggest big hammer won't be able to make so much as a dent in it. And you know what the secret is? Stress,' he went on, before Bardas could answer. 'A bit of stress, a bit of tension, maybe just a little torture even, and suddenly you've got good armour, the genuine proof. Ouch,' he added, as he cut his finger on a sharp sliver of swarf. 'Serves me right, I wasn't thinking about what I'm doing.' A drop of blood plopped like a single raindrop on to the surface of the section he was cutting out and stood proud, like the head of a rivet.

'Stress,' Anax repeated, putting a steel plate into the folder. It was an odd-looking thing - two square frames, like window-sashes, one fixed, the other pivoting at right angles. Anax trapped the plate between the two frames and pushed down on the pivoting arm, neatly folding the plate down the middle like a sheet of card. Next he transferred it into the roller, which reminded Bardas of the big iron mangle they used in the laundry round the corner from his apartment in the island-block in Perimadeia. Anax adjusted a setscrew to allow a little play between the rollers, then turned the handle with a sharp, jerking motion and the sheet fed through, coming out the other side with a p.r.o.nounced curve; the right-angled edge that the folder had put in had become an arched rib, running up the centre-line of the sheet. 'Stress,' Anax said again. 'This bit here,' he went on, running a finger along the rib, 'is stressed outwards, like an arch; bash on it from the outside and you'll have a devil of a job to move it. So it becomes your first line of defence, see; it follows the line of your leg-bone up the piece, and no matter how hard you get clobbered, that force won't come through and smash your leg. You'll thank me for that when someone feints high and then sweeps low across your s.h.i.+ns.'

Bardas smiled politely. 'Thanks,' he said. 'That's a leg-guard, is it?'

'Greave,' Anax corrected him, 'don't show your ignorance. It covers you from the knee down to the ankle.' He was holding the piece up between his hands, squeezing the edges gently together, lifting it up so he could see along it, pulling it apart a little, repeating the process. 'Just adjusting it to fit,' he went on, 'not too tight and not too loose. It doesn't look it, but you're watching pure skill here.'

'I'm sure,' Bardas said.

When he was finally satisfied (Bardas couldn't tell the difference from when he'd started) Anax went over to the anvil and picked up a hide mallet. Propping the piece at an angle against the horn, he tapped and pecked at the edge, raising and curling it around the radius to form a lip. The hand holding the mallet rose and fell in a quick, impersonal rhythm; with the other hand he fed the piece along, making sure that the blows fell evenly s.p.a.ced. 'More stress,' he explained, a little breathlessly. 'Once the lip's curled, you can't just go bending it between your hands like I've just been doing; it's stiff and inflexible, like provincial office regulations. There,' he added, as he finished drawing the lip round, 'we'll call that done and do another one, while we still remember how. Planis.h.i.+ng can wait till we've finished.

'Hollowing, now.' Anax was making cops, the cup-shaped pieces that covered the knees and elbows. 'Hollowing's where you really put in the stress.' He was standing in front of the dis.h.i.+ng stump, holding the truncated-diamond-shaped section over the scooped-out hole at an angle so that the middle of the plate was directly above the deepest part. 'But you've got to understand stress really well to do this,' he went on, 'or you'll ruin everything.' With the edge of the mallet-head he started to peck at the plate, pinching it between the mallet and the wood. 'Bash it too hard in the middle and you'll make it thin, you'll squeeze the metal out of it, like wringing out a wet cloth. Bad stress, that; too much, too soon. So instead you come at it gently, starting on the edge of where you want the hollow to be, and you work in from the edge to the centre - that way, you're squeezing thickness out of the sides into the top of the dome, where you need it most.'

He stopped, wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and grinned. 'Sneaky, I call it,' he said. 'But n.o.body ever said this business was fair.' His right hand rose and fell quickly and precisely, so that the hammer dropped in its own weight and bounced itself back up off the metal - minimal effort, the effect being achieved by accuracy and persistence, the sheer number of precisely aimed blows. 'As well as stress,' he went on, 'there's compression, you're crus.h.i.+ng the inside up tighter than the outside, making more stress; and stress is strength, to all intents and purposes. It's what we call work-hardening, and it's a wonderful thing, except when you overdo it. You want to remember that, my friend; stress on the inside is strength on the outside, and hardness comes from getting bashed a lot. Understand that, and you're pretty much there.'

The orange light of the fire rolled in the steel-burnished brightness of the plate, like the last of the wine in the bottom of a silver cup. 'I think I see what you're getting at,' Bardas replied. 'But doesn't bas.h.i.+ng it sometimes make it weak?'

'Ah.' Anax nodded his head. 'That's something different. That's fatigue. That's when you've stressed it so many times that it can't take any more. Bad stress. Or there's brittle; brittle is when you make it so hard it's got no give. You make something too hard and when you drop it, the d.a.m.n thing shatters like gla.s.s. Very bad stress. You don't want to worry about that; we take stuff like that out in proof. That's what proof's for.'

When he'd finished, the piece of sheet had gone from flat to perfectly domed, without any flat spots or wrinkles. 'Got to be smooth,' he said. 'Unless you get it smooth, you'll have weak spots. That's why you've got to bash every last bit the same.' He held the cop up, to see if any flaws caught the light. 'Bas.h.i.+ng gives shape,' he said. 'Shape is strength, too. Look; that's the shape it wants to be. The G.o.d of our forefathers could jump up and down on that all day in heavy boots and he'd never so much as mark it.'

Bollo was feeding the biggest section through the rollers, applying so much force that the handle flexed. 'Memory,' Anax went on, 'that's how you achieve stress. Give the metal a memory, a shape it'll return to when something tries to distort it; then, when it flexes, it'll try to get back to that shape, which is what gives it the strength to resist. Memory is stress, stress is strength. It really is remarkably straightforward once you understand the basics.'

'The Sons of Heaven,' Bardas asked, as Anax carefully bent a curve into the breastplate blank, holding it by the edges and pressing down the middle on to the horn of the anvil. Bollo had already folded in a ridge up the middle line and rolled it into its basic shape; Anax was adjusting it, a series of careful, controlled distortions. 'I'll be straight with you, I've never really managed to figure them out. You don't mind me asking, do you?'

Anax looked up at him and flashed him a rather terrifying smile; a controlled baring of the teeth. 'You're asking me,' he said. 'I suppose that's a compliment, by your standards. You said to yourself, the Sons of Heaven are b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, but he's not like them, he's almost normal.' Anax applied pressure and the metal obeyed him. 'Which only goes to show, you don't know spit about the Sons of Heaven. n.o.body knows anything about us,' he said, pressing a little more, 'except us; and we're not telling.'

'I see,' Bardas replied. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be offensive.'

'Nothing offensive about ignorance,' Anax replied pleasantly. 'Not to an enlightened mind, that is; and we're enlightened, you see, that's what gives us our edge. But I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll give you a few hints. Armour for the soul, that's what inside information is.'

'Thank you,' said Bardas gravely.

'The Sons of Heaven -' Anax was hammering a lip around the edges of the breastplate; he raised his voice a little and Bardas could hear him clearly, in spite of the shrill, crisp noise of the mallet '- well, the Sons of Heaven are this.' He stopped the mallet halfway down in its descent and held it still for a moment. 'And you're this,' he added, nodding at the plate. 'Or you're the Sons of Heaven, and this breastplate is you. Has it ever occurred to you that everything in the world might possibly have a meaning? Well, I'm not saying that's so, that'd be a really stupid generalisation. But if it's true, in whole or in part, then the Sons of Heaven are the meaning, or at least they're what everything is about. We're the axle,' he went on, turning the metal a little, 'and everything else is the wheel. Basically, the whole world's here for our benefit, to make it easier for us to do our job.'

'I see,' Bardas said. 'And what would that be?'

Anax smiled. 'Perfection,' he said. 'We perfect. We make everything we touch perfect. Well,' he admitted, s.h.i.+fting his grip slightly on the mallet handle, 'that's the theory. In practice, we also smash up a lot of things and do a great deal of damage. Do you see what I'm getting at, or do you want me to explain a bit more?'

'I think I get the idea,' Bardas said. 'You're proof.'

Anax stopped what he was doing and grinned broadly. 'Bless the man, he has been listening all this time. That's right, we're proof. We perfect by testing to the point of destruction. What pa.s.ses proof, we add to our collection; what fails, we junk. Like absolutely everything, it's totally simple once you start thinking about it the right way.'

After the armour had been shaped and planished, Anax punched holes for the rivets, cut the straps and fitted the buckles, put all the parts together. 'There you are,' he said eventually. 'You can try it on now, if you like.'

It was, of course, a perfect fit. It covered Bardas like a second skin; the strength on the outside, the stress inside. 'What about proof?' Bardas asked with a smile.

'Proof?' Anax pulled a face. 'Huh. What do you think you're for?'

CHAPTER TEN.

The war between the plainspeople and the Empire started late one afternoon, on the edge of a lake in the marshy region between Ap' Escatoy and the Green River estuary. It was started, somehow appropriately, by a duck.

The party of trebuchet builders to which Temrai's old friend Leuscai was a.s.signed had run out of timber; accordingly, Leuscai was put in charge of a small scouting expedition and sent off to find tall trees suitable for shaping into the main arms of trebuchets. Straight, fast-growing pines were the best bet, though occasionally it was possible to find an unusually straight fir or spruce in the forests to the south. When Leuscai reached the region he'd been told to try first he found plenty of evidence of pine, fir and spruce: a considerable number of stumps, carefully sawn off close to the ground by generations of Perimadeian s.h.i.+pwrights, rough-hewn on the spot and s.h.i.+pped back to the City to be made into masts. Time was pressing; there weren't enough suitable timbers in the store to furnish arms for the current production run, let alone the fifty extra trebuchets Temrai had just commissioned.

On the other side of the Green River, Leuscai knew, there were a fair number of suitable trees; he could see them as he sat on an ivy-covered pine-stump and gazed at the bank opposite. Technically, however, the southern bank of the river was Imperial territory - at least, it had been until recently part of a long, narrow tongue of land claimed by Ap' Escatoy, although the claim had been unenforcible for at least forty years owing to the general decline in the city's fortunes. Leuscai considered the risk; invading the Empire hadn't been part of his mission briefing and he didn't really want to do it, but he badly needed the timber, and he a.s.sessed the chances of being noticed, let alone challenged, by Imperial personnel as too slight to worry about, compared with the reception he'd undoubtedly face if he went back home, or even returned to the camp, without any timber. He took a deep breath and started thinking about how he was going to cross the river, which was wide, deep and fast.

After a long, irritable day of brainstorming, he rejected all the ideas so far canva.s.sed and led the way downstream in the hope of finding a natural ford of some description. As luck would have it, he didn't have to look far; he'd come out only a few miles up from a treacherous but pa.s.sable shallow point just above some rather spectacular rapids. The crossing itself was tense and not particularly pleasant, but they made it without loss of life or any essential equipment. What they did lose were half a dozen supply mules which were carrying the food.

This stroke of bad luck changed their immediate priorities. Leuscai, who'd been brought up on the principle that starving in a forest or beside a river takes a deliberate act of will, split his group up into a number of hunting parties, told them when and where to meet up, and set off into the forest.

He was quickly disappointed. The forest turned out to be a swamp with trees growing in it, and what little game there was saw or heard him coming. He came back empty-handed to find that n.o.body else had done much better; but one party reported that they'd stumbled on a lake about a mile due south that looked promising for duck.

Leuscai wasn't enthusiastic. He'd had enough of duck a few years back, when he'd been one of the men Temrai had sent to hunt the wretched creatures for food and feathers during a hiatus in supplies just before the attack on Perimadeia. He'd been a victim of his own success; they'd found what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of ducks and proceeded to exhaust it, grimly and piecemeal, with nets, slings, throwing sticks, arrows - in some cases, where they'd found a strain of particularly trusting, stupid ducks, their bare hands. For weeks on end he'd done nothing but wring necks and pull out feathers, with nothing but duck to eat (fishy and stringy) and the creatures' obnoxious smell always in his nose. He'd come to loathe the sensation of killing them, gripping the neck tight just below the head and swinging the body round and round in circles until the bird suffocated - but you kept getting ones that were the next best thing to immortal, that carried on living even after you'd broken their necks and crushed their heads into the ground with your heel; nothing on earth is harder to kill than a horribly injured duck, not even a bull buffalo or a man in full armour. And here he was again, about to kill and eat yet more ducks if he wanted to stay alive. Maybe, he speculated, he was really the Angel of Death for ducks, and killing them was what he'd been put into the world to do (he thought of Colonel Loredan and the plainspeople); if so, there wasn't any point trying to avoid the inevitable. Yes, he said, by all means; let's go and scrag some ducks. So they went.

Inevitably, it seemed, they got lost; the lake had moved, because it wasn't where the scouts said it was. They spent most of the day hunting for it, dragging through the wet, dangerous swamp, losing boots and getting filthy, having to pull each other out when they suddenly went in up to their thighs. When at last they stumbled on the lake, Leuscai was pretty sure it wasn't the one they'd been looking for - the scouts had mentioned a hill at the southern end that rose above the tree line, and there was no sign of anything like that. But it was a lake, and it was unquestionably covered with ducks. Thousands of them, floating in enormous black and brown rafts, like the garbage flotsam washed down into a lake by the first storm rains of summer. They showed absolutely no inclination to go away when Leuscai and his men poked through the trees on to the sh.o.r.e; they quacked and steered away a little, obviously not aware that Death himself was watching them. Foolish, objectionable ducks.

Leuscai convened a brief ways-and-means conference. They had no nets, no slings, no throwing sticks, no dogs and no boat, which ruled out most of the conventional ways of slaughtering waterfowl. They had their bows, but not enough arrows that they could afford to waste any, sinking into the still water spitted through a dead duck. 'We'll just have to throw stones,' someone suggested; and since there were no better suggestions, the motion was carried.

Leuscai, of course, was a master of the art of stoning ducks. They found a handy supply of stones in the bed of one of the streams that ran into the lake, and agreed their strategy. There was a small spit of dry land sticking out into the lake, and a particularly dense mob of ducks bobbing up and down in the horseshoeshaped bay it created. They'd be able to bombard the ducks from three sides; they'd have about twenty seconds of extreme activity before the whole flock got up off the water in an explosion of wings and spray, leaving their dead and wounded behind. If they didn't manage to get enough the first time, they'd undoubtedly get another chance next morning, and next evening too, if need be. It would be rather like the bombardment of Perimadeia, with Leuscai and his men being the trebuchets (ironic, given what they'd originally come for).

Since Leuscai had absolutely no wish to repeat the performance, he took special pains in deploying his artillery; spook one duck, and there was a faint but disturbing chance that the whole lot would get up before a single stone could be dispatched. So the hunting party set off from well inland and crept up slowly and painfully to the sh.o.r.e, taking great care not to make a noise or a sudden movement. The plan was tactically sound and would surely have succeeded if one of the party hadn't slipped and gone down in a boggy patch, grabbing at his neighbour as he went and pulling him down as well. As luck would have it, there was a single adventurous duck nosing about in the bushes at the edge of the lake a few yards away fom where the men went in, and their sudden, pitiful yells of distress sent the duck rocketing into the air, like a stone from a torsion engine. At once the whole flock rose with it, blotting out the sun like a huge volley of arrows lobbed over a city wall at extreme range. Leuscai howled with rage and frustration and hurled the stone he'd been gripping in his hand; he was well out of range, of course, and the stone splashed noisily into the water. The ducks swung and lifted over the trees, then swung again and headed out towards the middle of the lake, putting up other flocks until the whole surface of the lake seemed to be standing up, like a man getting out of bed.

The Imperial patrol, which had taken the afternoon off to go wildfowling on the other side of the lake, were furious. They'd been looking forward to their evening's sport all week; they'd smuggled nets and slings and gunny-sacks out under their armour, trudged all the way across the swamp to get here, and just as they were about to set up and take their positions, something had spooked the birds and ruined everything. The sergeant's first guess was a fox; but it was just too early for foxes to be about, and what else would panic the best part of five thousand ducks? The only other creature fearsome enough was a man, and that couldn't be right, since this was a restricted area. A thought occurred to him, and he snapped at his men to shut up and keep still.

Sure enough, his fears were justified. On the far sh.o.r.e he saw men moving about. He couldn't make out much in the way of detail, but he didn't really need to; there were too many of them for their purpose in being there to be legitimate. For a while he simply couldn't decide what to do for the best. He was outnumbered (nearly two to one, if his estimate of their numbers was at all accurate), but he had the element of surprise, and of course his men were Imperial heavy infantry, which put rather a different complexion on the matter. Received wisdom had it that a force of Imperial regulars facing only twice as many opponents could quite reasonably be held to be outnumbering them . . . That was all very well, and it did wonders for morale if you could actually get the men to believe it; as their sergeant, it was his job to preach one doctrine and believe another. The only alternative was to go back to the camp, a day and a half away through the marshes, and hand the matter over to Captain Suria - three, maybe four days' delay, by which time finding the enemy again certainly wouldn't be a foregone conclusion. In the end, the deciding factor was the thought of explaining to Captain Suria how they'd come to be at the lake at all, since it was quite some way from their designated beat; it'd be much easier to handle the interview if he'd just driven off an enemy invasion of Imperial territory and become a hero. True, that wasn't necessarily a good thing (the Empire approved of heroism but generally despised heroes); but so far, in its thousand-odd years of history, the Empire had never court-martialled a hero for netting a few ducks.

Once he'd made his mind up, he gave the order to advance. With every squelching, bogged-down step closer to the enemy, the sergeant questioned his decision; there were even more of them than he'd thought there were, and they were quite definitely plainsmen, and they were armed with bows (and what else would plainsmen be armed with?) - he'd stumbled across a major raiding party, possibly the skirmisher line of a whole invading army, and he was proposing to give them battle with one platoon of heavies. The only way to avoid being shot down like - well, ducks, say - was to get very close very quietly, and rush them before they even had a chance to get their bows out of their cases.

Fortunately (the sergeant couldn't fathom why) the enemy seemed determined to make his job as easy as possible. There were no pickets, no sentries; they appeared to be arguing violently among themselves, with their backs to the likeliest vector of attack. For the first time since he'd embarked on this idiotic venture, the sergeant began to feel just a little hopeful. One statement of official doctrine about the plainsmen that wasn't just good-for-morale was that they were warriors rather than soldiers, basically undisciplined and disorderly.

Most of the way he was fairly sure of staying out of sight as long as he kept his men just inside the tree-line. He'd chosen to follow the western sh.o.r.e of the lake, and the choice turned out to be a good one; the trees grew close enough together on the western side that it was possible to hop from tree-root to tree-root, avoiding the boggy leaf-mould pits. By the time they reached the southern side, where the trees were older and more openly s.p.a.ced, they were no more than a couple of hundred yards from the enemy. Still, it might as well have been a mile for all the good it did him, because the going became horrendously wet and sticky and n.o.body, not even Captain Suria and the Sons of Heaven, can wade up to their knees in thick black liquid mud and be un.o.btrusive about it. He called a general halt and tried to hustle his brains into coming up with a better strategy - unfair and uncalled-for, since he was only a sergeant and neither trained nor expected to be a battlefield tactician.

When he gave the order to go back, he could tell the men weren't happy about it, but it was an order, and that was all there was to it. They hopped back about fifty yards; then he led them at right angles deeper into the woods, striking in about a hundred and fifty yards. His reasoning was simple: if he was going to have to make a noise, it'd be sensible to make it as far away from the enemy as possible for as long as he could. He'd swing round behind them and then make the best job he could of charging, or at least squelching quickly, into the enemy's rear. He had no idea whether it'd work or not, but he was wet, muddy, extremely weary and very frightened, and he couldn't think of anything else.

In retrospect, it would probably have been a very good strategy in the circ.u.mstances, if only they hadn't got lost in the wood. But both distance and direction are notoriously hard to keep track of in a wood unless you happen to be an experienced forester; when the sergeant launched his charge, he found out the hard way that he'd come too far, as his breathless and dishevelled command burst through the undergrowth at the edge of the lake to find that instead of being behind the enemy, they were alongside them, about forty yards to the east.

A mistake; but in the event not a wholly decisive one. When Leuscai first became aware of an Imperial patrol materialising beside him, his first instinct was to hide weapons rather than ready them. The way he saw it, he'd been caught trespa.s.sing and poaching; his mind was busy trying to find a plausible lie to explain why he and his men were there (we got lost in the forest; excuse me, but are we right for the Green River?) and it didn't occur to him that he was going to have to fight anybody until two of his men, who'd been trying to hide their bows behind their backs, were speared like fish by a couple of legionaries.

Without any conscious effort on the part of either commander, they'd managed to hit on the optimum conditions for bloodshed. There was just enough time for the majority of Leuscai's men to get their bows out, nock and draw, and just enough time for the Imperials to close with the plainsmen nearest to them. It was a short battle and extremely uncharacteristic; neither side could very well avoid killing the enemy, or being killed themselves. Leuscai's archers were loosing at point-blank range, easily punching their bodkinhead arrows through plate and into muscle and bone. The patrol were thrusting and slas.h.i.+ng at effectively unarmed men, without armour, s.h.i.+eld or sword to ward off the blows. Interestingly enough from a theorist's point of view, the casualty ratio more or less validated provincial-office doctrine (one Imperial footsoldier to three plainsmen) to the extent that if the fighting had carried on to the point of annihilation, there should have been four Imperials left standing, and no plainsmen. Unfortunately for military science, the experiment was abandoned early, with the survivors of both parties giving up as if by mutual agreement and pulling back; so the data, although persuasive, cannot be taken to const.i.tute proof.

Leuscai died in the brief third phase of the engagement, when the Imperials closed for a second time after taking the plainsmen's one devastating volley. He'd been rus.h.i.+ng to get a second arrow on to the string; he fumbled the nock, dropped the arrow in the mud and was reaching over his shoulder for another one when a man he hadn't even seen wedged a spearhead between his ribs. The blade was too broad to penetrate any further and too firmly stuck to be withdrawn, so its owner wisely abandoned it and tried to finish the job with his sword. But he was rus.h.i.+ng things, too; instead of a clean, coaching-manual, skull-splitting blow, all he managed was a cack-handed slash that scived half the scalp off the left side of Leuscai's head and toppled him into the oozing leaf-mould. As the mud covered his raw flesh like a poultice, he was aware of the man for the first time, putting one heavy boot on his chest as he tugged at the shaft of his spear, vainly trying to get it unstuck. After three goes he gave up and went away, leaving Leuscai to bleed peacefully to death. It turned out to be not nearly as traumatic as he'd imagined it would be. Ironically, the last sound he was aware of hearing was the distant quacking of ducks, cautiously drifting back to the middle of the lake.

'Wonderful,' said Eseutz Mesatges. 'Now we can have the war, get it over with, get our money and have our s.h.i.+ps back.'

She'd met Athli Zeuxis in the street outside a dress-maker's shop, one of the best and most expensive on the Island - one of the few things left to spend money on was clothes, and for some unaccountable reason there had just been a wave of seismic activity in women's fas.h.i.+ons; the warrior-princess look was out, stale and dead as last night's sc.r.a.ps, its place triumphantly usurped by the nomad-caravan look, all cloudy silks and bare midriffs. This suited Eseutz perfectly - warrior princess had placed what she felt was an unhealthy emphasis on cleavage, and the leather made her sweat.

'We won't have the details for a day or so,' Athli said. 'That'll have to wait until I get the official despatch from head office in Shastel. But their reports are always pretty reliable.'

Eseutz thought for a moment. 'Short term, it's going to create havoc,' she said. 'It'll be the same as it's been since this started, only worse, too much money chasing too few opportunities, everybody desperate to buy before prices soar, but nothing to spend the money on.'

'Except futures,' Athli replied. 'Which is an area I've always tried to keep out of, since I don't happen to be a qualified fortune-teller. If I were you, I'd hang on to my money until things start getting back to normal; pretty soon, everybody who's overbought in the first rush of excitement is going to want to sell, and that'll be the time to buy. Sadly,' she went on, 'I haven't got the luxury of following my own advice; everybody's going to be wanting their money so they can start spending, which means that unless I can arrange cover from head office, I'm going to be in an awkward position for a week or so.'

Eseutz held a spangled slipper up to the light. 'Give 'em paper,' she said. 'They'll grumble, but they'll take it. After all, everybody knows Shastel scrip is good; mind you,' she added, with a grin, 'that's what they used to say about Niessa Loredan.'

'Quite,' Athli said, looking down at a tray of silver ankle-bracelets. 'And if I start flooding the Island with paper, it won't be long before it's "that's what they used to say about Athli Zeuxis". No, thank you. I'll just have to write some of it off with Hiro and Venart. It shaves my margins, but at least I'll still be here this time next year.'

One of the dressmaker's girls appeared from the back room and started fluttering round Eseutz with a measuring tape. Eseutz didn't seem to have noticed she was there. 'I wouldn't object to a bit of that, if there's any to spare,' she said innocuously. 'Bear me in mind, will you?'

Athli smiled. 'No,' she said.

'Ah well, no harm in trying,' Eseutz replied. 'Actually - no kidding - just at this precise moment in time I'd be good for the money.' She frowned. 'That's what's bothering me; I'm not used to being in credit. Being in credit is nature's way of telling you you're missing out on an opportunity somewhere.'

'Maybe,' Athli said. 'But your opportunities have an unfortunate habit of sinking.'

'That's an exaggeration. It was just the one time . . .'

'Or getting impounded by the excise,' Athli went on, 'or stolen by pirates, or infested with weevils, or repossessed by the original owner . . .'

'It's true, I do like to go after investments with a certain element of risk. They don't all turn yellow on me, you know.'

'All the ones I ever backed did.'

'Oh, come on. What about those seventeen barrels of turmeric?'

Athli wrinkled her brow. 'Oh, yes,' she said, 'I'd forgotten that. I'll admit, that turned out all right in the end, after I bought out that other partner of yours you hadn't got around to telling me about, and paid off the import duty you'd forgotten to mention. The profit I made on that deal kept me in lamp-oil for a week.' She winced slightly, as the girl with the tape started on her. 'No offence, but I'll take my chances with Hiro and Venart, thank you very much. Hey, what do you reckon?' she added, holding up an amethyst-and-silver pendant. 'Will it go with the mauve silk, do you think?'

Eseutz shook her head. 'Overstated,' she said. 'You want something small and intense with that, like diamonds. So, how long do you think the war will last? You ought to know about these plainspeople, if anyone does.'

'Depends.' Athli carefully gathered up the pendant chain and put it back. 'An all-out a.s.sault, and it ought to be over quickly. If they let themselves get bogged down, it could drag on for months.'

'This man Loredan,' Eseutz went on. 'What's he like? You knew him for years, didn't you?'

Athli nodded. 'I worked for him,' she said, 'as a clerk. G.o.ds, that seems like another life. Somewhere at home I've got a sword that used to belong to him. I wonder if I should send it on.'

Eseutz examined her carefully for a moment, as if she were an investment with a certain element of risk. 'You've gone all woolly,' she said. 'Well, none of my business-'

'Actually, you're wrong. But yes, it's none of your business. I thought you were asking for my opinion of him as a military leader.'

'Mphm. Any good?'

Athli nodded. 'He did amazingly well, considering what he had to put up with from the City authorities. But I don't think he'd have been able to save the City, even if he'd had a free hand. He doesn't really have the single-mindedness you need to be a high-cla.s.s general.'

'But this thing he's supposed to have over the plains King,' Eseutz said. 'Is there any truth in that?'

Athli shrugged. 'There was something there, I'm pretty sure. But he never talked about that stuff, so I wouldn't know. Besides, from what I've gathered, he's only going to be a sort of figurehead; it's the provincial office commanders who'll actually be running the war, and I don't know the first thing about any of them. If they're provincial office staff, you can be sure they're competent, at the very least. The job will get done, one way or another.'

On her way home, Athli couldn't help thinking about the war, and her tiny part in it. Had there ever been a time, she wondered, when she hadn't been in the business of making money out of other people's deaths? That's what she'd done as Bardas' clerk, that's what she was about to do now. Yet she'd never seen herself in those terms, as some kind of carrion-eater circling high over plague-pits and battlefields. All she'd ever set out to do was earn a decent sum, on her own merits, living an independent life. And she'd succeeded, going from strength to strength; except that so many people had to die to keep her in the manner to which she'd become accustomed. It was the Loredan factor - in spite of all her efforts, everything she'd ever been was by and through him; as his clerk in Perimadeia, now this war - and she'd only got her start here on the Island through Venart and Vetriz Auzeil, who she'd met because of Bardas. What was it, she wondered, about these d.a.m.ned Loredans that meant that they started everything, finished everything, ran through everything like a bloodstain saturating cloth? She thought of Alexius, and the Principle; she missed Alexius.

As if to confirm her musings, she found Vetriz Auzeil waiting for her at home, wanting to know if she had any news about the war.

'You mean any news about Bardas,' she replied, because she was tired and fed up. 'No, sorry. If there's anything in the despatches from Shastel, I'll let you know.'

'Oh.' Vetriz smiled. 'That obvious, is it?'

'Pretty well,' Athli replied, wondering just what Eseutz had meant by 'woolly'. An odd term to use. 'If you're that bothered, why not just write him a letter? I'm pretty sure the Shastel courier would pa.s.s it on; there's a regular diplomatic bag now between Shastel and the provincial office, and once it's there, the Imperial post is excellent.'

'Thanks,' Vetriz said, 'but I don't really have anything to say. I was just curious, really; you know how it is, when someone you know is mixed up in something important. You take an interest.'

Hanging around in someone's porch waiting for them to come home just in case they had some news struck Athli as rather more than just taking an interest; but it wouldn't help matters to point that out. 'Coming in?' she asked.

'Why not?'

Athli opened the door. 'Actually,' she went on, 'I did hear something that might interest you, since you spent all that time as a guest of the other Loredans. Gorgas is making trouble again.'