Colours in the Steel (15 page)

The number of trainers working in the Schools tended to vary, depending on a large number of factors ranging from the health of the economy to the time of year. There were six long-established and savagely expensive schools which had appropriated sections of the building and installed their own fixtures and fittings; a constantly changing pool of old men and nerve-cases who hung about the colonnades offering to make you invincible in a day, money back if you get killed within a year; and ten or twelve establishments between the two extremes providing some sort of training in arms for a vaguely realistic fee. The latter group, mostly comprising the proprietor, perhaps one assistant and a combination clerk, registrar and bursar, used the main hall and the communal fixtures, and paid a modest rent to the governors for the privilege. To start up a new school, you paid a month’s rent in advance and put up a wooden board on the wall with your name under it, beneath which students could assemble at the start of each day.

On his way to the governors’ office, Loredan saw someone he recognised. There wasn’t time to turn round or duck behind a column.

‘Congratulations.’

‘Thank you,’ he replied.

The man’s name was Garidas. He had been an advocate for six years before losing an eye in a banking dispute; now he worked as an assistant with the second-best of the grand schools, as well as helping out with the book-keeping. His father had been in the cavalry, and Loredan had watched him die of an arrow wound one cold morning in a ruined sentry post on the plains. His last words had been a desperate plea to look after his boy, and Loredan had happened to be the nearest. He was fairly certain the dying man had thought he was talking to someone else.

‘I’m not sure where that puts you in the ratings,’ Garidas said. ‘Alvise was somewhere around sixth, so you must be up in the top twelve.’

‘Not any longer. I’ve retired.’

‘Oh.’ Garidas seemed taken aback. ‘Since yesterday?’

‘Since and because of. I may be stupid, but I can take a hint.’

Garidas nodded. ‘It was certainly that, from what I’ve heard. Oddly enough, we were all set to take a party along to watch, but somehow we didn’t.’

‘Wouldn’t have been a good example to the students,’ Loredan replied. ‘Classic case of the best man not winning; very offputting.’

‘On the contrary. Salutary warning of the dangers of carelessness and underestimating your opponent. So what’ve you got planned? A life of ease and luxury?’

‘As if,’ Loredan said, frowning. ‘No, I’m going to have a go at your racket. On my way to see the governors now, in fact.’

‘Really?’ Garidas grinned. ‘I could put a word in for you at our place if you like.’

‘No thanks. Never did fancy the idea of working for anybody else. Having to have clients was bad enough, but at least I was my own master in theory. I’ll put up a board like everyone else and see what happens.’

‘Best of luck.’ Garidas smiled. ‘I always said we never saw enough of you down here. I’ll bear you in mind for any we turn down.’

Loredan nodded. Garidas probably would, at that; he’d always been very friendly, although there was no way he could have known that his fees at the expensive school he’d attended (the one he now taught at) and his living costs while he was there had all come out of Loredan’s army pay and prize money. Add to that several lucrative clients Loredan had turned down to avoid having to fight him in the court, and one way or another Garidas had cost him a lot of money over the years. It would be agreeable if he could start paying some of it back after all this time by recommending a few students.

Later that morning he set off to the signwriters’ district to have a board painted. Traditionally the board carried a portrait of the trainer, seated wearing his court clothes and armed with the classes of weapon he professed to teach, with his name and a tariff of charges at the bottom; lately, however, there had been a tendency to depict ex-fencers in the act of winning their most famous case, with the man himself shown rather larger than his cringing and mortally wounded opponent. Some trainers even commissioned laudatory verses, to be inscribed in gold letters all round the edge. Loredan decided he’d have to be firm about that sort of thing.

‘Bardas Loredan,’ he said accordingly, ‘three eighths a day, standard and two-handed sword and dagger, no fancy dress.’

‘Just the portrait and the fight scene?’

‘No fight scene.’

‘You sure?’ The painter was disappointed. ‘No extra for the fight scene.’

‘No fight scene.’

‘I do good fight scenes. They’re good advertising.’

‘No.’

The painter thought for a moment. ‘I can do you in a radiate crown representing the protective influence of the Principle,’ he said.

‘Not if you expect to get paid.’

‘Sit in the chair,’ the painter said huffily. ‘Be with you in a minute.’

He turned around and started fiddling with bottles and jars at the back of the booth. Loredan sat back and tried to relax. It was an unseasonably hot day, and the shade offered by the booth’s canvas awning was pleasant. From where he was sitting he had a good view of the square that formed the main trading area of the signwriters’ district. Like so many of the small specialists’ enclaves of Perimadeia, it consisted of a square with a fountain in the middle, loomed over by an old and neglected statue. Round the fountain was a clutter of tents and booths, obscuring the grander frontages of the ground-floor shops. At regular intervals there were stairs up to the galleries onto which the first-floor shops opened, and thence up to the houses and workshops on the second floor. At the four corners of the square arched gateways led off to the neighbouring districts; needless to say there were shops built over the arches, so that the sides of the square presented a solid wall of commerce. In every shop on the sunlit side, a signwriter sat in the doorway, making the most of the light; because the buildings were so high, the occupants of each side could only work by daylight for a quarter of the day.

A constant procession of carts, wagons and trolleys rumbled through what clear space there was between the booths and the central fountain; except when the traffic came to a standstill and backed up, with an accompanying chorus of bad temper and traditional carters’ oaths. Unlike most of the city, the signwriters’ district had no one distinctive smell peculiar to its own particular trade; only the residual background smell that nobody noticed. So many people, Loredan mused, so many trades, so many different ways of making a good living or scraping a poor one, and for every useful and profitable trade a separate and suitable district, where everything necessary for production of the particular commodity could conveniently be obtained. So much order and settled existence, with every man in his proper place fulfilling his part in the whole.

In the next square lay the shops and stalls of the colourmen, who soaked seashells and walnuts, ground rust, lapis and lead to get the colours that, mixed with egg white or limewater, made the paint used in the next square over. The most skilful and aristocratic of the colourmen made the universally famous Perimadeian gold paint, grinding up oxides, mercury and tin on a marble slab, adding triple-strength vinegar and dusted lead, crushing the mess together and drawing off the result into tiny stone bottles.

In a corner of the colourmen’s square were the brush-makers, a speciality within a speciality, who spent their day guillotining bristles to size and serving them to the handles, boiling up pots of glue and hammering down the ferrules. They had to walk twelve squares to get to the gluemakers’ district, a part of the city people walked through as quickly as possible, their collars up around their noses against the stench of rawhide macerating in limewater. The gluemakers, on the other hand, had only to walk round the corner and over a bridge to reach the lime kilns in one direction and the tanners’ and knackers’ yards in the other. On their way they passed through the sawyers’ quarter, where they would probably pass signwriters collecting newly sawn and planed boards from the sawmills that huddled beside what had once been a waterfall before the city people harnessed it to turn a hundred clever wheels.

All these people, all these things; and everything a part of the whole, all useless and unable to function without a score of other trades and tradesmen, all of them similarly dependent on the union and fusion of many parts. As he sat and watched, Loredan had an uncomfortable feeling of being the only thing in this city that wasn’t a component, a dedicated part of something else. Yesterday, of course, it had been different; then, he had been very much a part of the business of Perimadeia, albeit the most specialised of specialists perched at the extreme edge of the process, where agreements sometimes slipped their gears and the smooth running of the machine occasionally needed to be lubricated with a little blood. Foolish speculation, he knew; because as soon as he had his board and his piece of parchment from the governors allocating him a pitch, he’d have a place once again, a part to play, a function to perform in the process. It would make more sense to relish this brief interval rather than agonise over it; few men in Perimadeia ever had the chance to stand aside and spend an hour or so not participating.

‘All done,’ said the painter. ‘You want to look before I put the varnish on?’

Loredan nodded and stood up. It turned out to be a perfectly adequate piece of commercial art, with no fight scene and no radiate crown whatsoever. He was relieved.

‘Do my ears really stick out like that?’

‘Yes.’ The painter dipped his brush in solvent and wiped it on a scrap of rag. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘just so happens I’ve got this really nice set of laudatory verses, five stanzas of elegaics, cancelled order, dirt cheap. Just go nicely round the edges, look. Two quarters.’

‘No.’

‘Trouble with some people is, they fail to recognise the vital importance of positive marketing.’

‘Tragic.’

The painter sighed and cut the beeswax round the neck of a jar of varnish. ‘How about a set of five identical miniatures to hang up in places where the rich and fashionable love to congregate? Gesture of goodwill, call it three quarters?’

‘You can call it what you like so long as you don’t expect me to pay for it.’

‘The miniatures
and
the laudatory verses for seven eighths, and I’ll throw in half a yard of picture cord.’

(—From the ropewalks, three squares over to the west, where they stretch the skeins right across the square on sliding wooden pins; another trade, another hundred or so men whose lives extend just so far and no further.)

‘Thanks, but no. Finished yet?’

‘Give me a chance, will you?’ the painter groaned. ‘If you’re not careful it smears for a pastime.’

And of course, Loredan reflected as the painter daubed on the varnish, there’s far more to it than that. On each of these busy tradesmen depends another complex system; wives and families to feed and clothe, children needing to be taught their proper skills, have husbands or apprenticeships found for them; rent to be paid, guild fees and licences and taxes to be met, parents and parents-in-law to be supported in their declining years, burial clubs and friendly societies to be given their dues. By these subsystems each component is locked into the whole so fast that he dare not stir out of his place, so that every part of the machine needs to run smoothly for fear of destroying everything. Curious to think that in other parts of the world, people somehow managed to live without all of this. They were, of course, savages, little better than beasts, creatures who never in all their lives had their portrait painted or took a case to the courts of law; which was why they had to be kept back where they belonged, out of sight of the walls and gates of the Triple City, just in case a busy man on his way to work in the morning might chance to see them and wonder just why in hell he bothered.

‘Finished,’ the painter announced. ‘Still be wet for an hour or so, mind. You can take it now if you like, but you’ll get dust in the varnish, sure as eggs.’

‘I see,’ Loredan replied, nodding. ‘How’d it be if I left it here for a couple of hours and then came back?’

‘Fine,’ said the painter, wiping his hands on a hank of flax. ‘That’ll be five quarters, please.’

Two hours with nothing to do. Ordinarily, he’d find a tavern (when you have time to kill, it makes sense to take it to a purpose-built abattoir), but he remembered that he didn’t do that sort of thing any more. No money to waste on wine, no drinking in the middle of the day and sleeping it off in the afternoon. Well, then; he could walk back to the Schools, ask if his piece of parchment had been drawn up, be told to come back in an hour or so and still have time to get back to the signwriters’ district before the varnish was dry. Instead, he strolled lazily out in the direction of the Drovers’ Bridge, a part of the city he didn’t often visit. Hectically successful trainers don’t have time to go sightseeing during working hours, so he might as well make the most of it while he could.

‘’Scuse me.’

He looked round, then down. A small child, female, slightly grubby, was pulling his trouser leg. He sighed and felt in his belt pouch for a coin.

‘’Scuse me,’ the child said, ‘but you’re Bardas Loredan.’

Don’t blame yourself, kid, it isn’t your fault
. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘How do you know who I am?’

‘You’re an advocate, aren’t you?’ The child said the long word like a chicken laying a hexagonal egg: slowly, carefully and with a triumphant flourish at the end. ‘You’re the best in the world, my dad says.’

‘Was,’ Loredan replied, frowning. ‘What’s your dad do, then? Is he an advocate?’

The girl shook her head. ‘He makes barrels,’ she said. ‘But he likes watching law. He takes me to see law, sometimes.’

‘Does he? How . . . That’s nice.’

The girl nodded. ‘He took me to see you yesterday when you killed that man.’ She beamed. ‘I like going to see law, because my dad always buys me a cake to eat when I’m watching.’