Colours in the Steel (19 page)

‘All right,’ Jurrai grunted. ‘But will they fight?’

Temrai nodded. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘No question of that. They are not an overtly warlike people, but their history is full of sieges and attempted assaults both by land and sea. They are brought up from childhood to expect attacks - the most recent attempt was thirty years ago, when an armada of significant size and quality was dispatched by a coalition of states from the western cities, which was effectively destroyed by the long-range siege engines installed on the sea walls before the ships were able to come within bowshot. They claim to have sunk over two hundred vessels in the course of one day, and the claim is credible if you’ve seen the engines.’

‘So,’ Jurrai said, ‘suppose you’ve managed to force the lower city. What then?’

Temrai nodded. ‘The wall dividing the lower city from the second city is not as tall or as thick as the land wall, but the gradient on which it stands and the crowded nature of the buildings at its foot make it, if anything, a more daunting proposition. The watchtowers are of a similar pattern, and are placed at intervals of a hundred yards; they hold only a token garrison, but are fully supplied with arrows and other stores. The main granaries are all in the second city, as are the principal cisterns from which the lower city draws its water. In an emergency, there would be enough room for the entire population to withdraw to the second city should it prove necessary to evacuate, and plans for this contingency have been in existence for many years and are well-known to the citizens, although there hasn’t been a full evacuation drill for some years. About the upper city I have no information, as only a few high-ranking officials are allowed to go there; there are rumoured to be large rainwater tanks and separate granaries up there, and a permanent garrison of elite troops who form the Emperor’s personal guard.’

‘I see,’ Jurrai said, poking the fire with a long stick. ‘And you reckon you’ve worked out a way of prising this strongbox open?’

‘Not me,’ Temrai replied with a grin. ‘They did it themselves, years ago. Then they forgot they’d done it.’ He sighed, and lay back on his saddle. ‘That’s the Perimadeians for you. Too clever for their own good.’

‘So? Are you going to let me in on the secret, or have I got to wait till the council?’

‘You’ll wait rather longer than that,’ Temrai replied with a yawn. ‘You’ll know soon enough, believe me. Actually, it’s all pretty simple.’

Jurrai grunted, and broke off a handful of bread. ‘Beats me how they can live on this stuff,’ he said. ‘It bloats you out and then you feel hungry again soon after.’

‘You get used to it,’ Temrai said drowsily. ‘Only the rich can afford meat more than once or twice a month, and even then it’s salted and spiced to buggery. You can have all the cheese you can eat for two coppers, but it doesn’t taste of anything. Oh, and they eat fish.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Jurrai replied, frowning. ‘I had fish once. Won’t forget that in a hurry. They’re welcome to it.’

‘Theirs comes from the sea,’ Temrai murmured, his eyes closed. ‘Mostly it’s dried and salted, or else they smoke it. You get used to that, too. It’s cheap.’

‘What about the drink? Wine and cider, isn’t it?’

‘You want to be careful of that stuff. It’s evil.’

‘And the women?’

Temrai snored.

 

‘Right,’ said Bardas Loredan, masking his true feelings, ‘let’s have a look at you.’

It wasn’t an inspiring sight. A long, straggly lad of about eighteen, with a jealously tended wisp of beard on what there was of his chin; another, similar, but without notional beard; an enormous sullen boy of maybe sixteen in an obviously new and slightly-too-small set of what the prosperous farmers of Lussa thought the city was wearing this season; a small, wiry kid with a baby face who might possibly have made the grade if he was six inches taller and forty pounds heavier; a girl who stared at him; a plump young man of good family, too old at twenty-four and plainly not really interested. Great.

He took a deep breath. ‘First things first,’ he said. ‘Names.’

In fact, he knew most of their names without asking. The huge peasant was called Ducas Valier; throw a handful of pebbles at a hiring fair in any of the market towns of Lussa, and be sure you’d hit at least three Valiers, one of them called Ducas. The lad with the beard was Menas Crestom - a city name, pottery or brickyards district, younger son of a second-generation affluent family with a depressingly misguided idea of what constituted giving a kid a good start in life. His beardless shadow was the same basic stock; Corrers were as thick on the ground in the foundries as piles of fluxed skimmings or splashes of waste metal, and a quarter of the kids his age in the city were Folas, after Folas Manhurin, champion boxer five years in a row a quarter of a century back. The wiry boy had the good eastern suburbs name of Stas Teudel and the rich kid was inevitably a Teo-something, though the variation was a new one to Loredan - Teoblept Iuven. When he heard the boy’s family name, Loredan cringed. A century back, the Iuvens had owned fifty of the best merchant ships in the bay; these days they still lived in one of the most prestigious houses in the second city, but their tailors insisted on something on account before they set shears to cloth. As for the girl, she was something nondescript that went in one ear and out the other; with any luck, she’d answer to ‘You’ and a nod in her direction.

‘Next,’ he said. ‘Money.’

Out came the purses, from under coats, off belts or out from where they hung round sweaty necks. Master Iuven offered a gold five-piece, apologising smugly for not having anything smaller. Loredan forgave him and kept the balance on account.

‘Good,’ Loredan said. ‘Now we can get down to business. Who’s got their own sword? Anybody?’

All except the girl, unfortunately; as offbeat a collection of ironmongery as you’d ever expect to meet outside a scrapyard. The peasant boy held up a two-hundred-year-old broadsword that would have been big medicine back in the days when men lumbered into battle under sixty pounds of steel scales and boiled leather. A collector would probably offer him good money for it, despite the heavy pitting and the missing point. The three city lads proudly offered for inspection the latest in cheap and shiny fashion accessories - young master Teudel looked deeply offended when Loredan took his pride and joy and bent it almost double over his knee without apparent effort. The sprig of the nobility had a genuine Fascanum, which Loredan immediately told him to put away and not look at again for six months, remembering a lean patch a while back when he’d lived for the best part of eight months on the sale proceeds of one of those. He could just picture the expression on Daddy’s face when the family heirloom came home after the first day’s parrying practice, with five notches in each edge and the exquisitely chiselled lion missing off one end of the quillon.

‘Fortunately,’ he said, ‘I took the precaution of bringing a few practice swords, which I’ll issue you with when you’re fit to be trusted with them. For the time being, we’ll use wooden foils; with which,’ he added sternly, ‘it’s perfectly possible, not to mention fatally easy, to put someone’s eye out if you’re careless.’ He handed out the foils; two and a half feet of arrowshaft set in a simple wooden hilt, with a big button on the business end just in case anybody did happen to land a blow on his sparring partner. Luckily he’d managed to get a case of the things cheap; sure as anything, at least one of these idiots would contrive to break one in the course of the first day. On cold mornings he could still feel the cuff round the ear he’d had from Master Gramin for just such an offence.

It turned out to be a long day; but, by the time the Schools closed Loredan had taught his unlikely pupils the elements of both kinds of guard, the advance step and the retreat step, the crouched shuffle forwards and backwards along a straight line of the City fence, the straight-backed circular movement of the Old fence, until in spite of their natural ineptitude and individual deficiencies they bore a passing resemblance to fencers. The high-class schools, he knew very well, didn’t even touch on the Old fence until the end of the first week, and even then most of their scholars tended to move like old women taken short in the middle of the night.

Of his six, he reflected, as he slumped into a chair in the nearest affordable tavern (the new rule was No Taverns, but just this once wouldn’t hurt), the two tall, skinny lads did more or less what they were told and seemed desperately eager to learn. He knew their type; he’d killed enough of them over the last ten years. The peasant wasn’t as clumsy or as stupid as he looked, and with his obvious strength might make a good Zweyhender fighter, but Loredan was fairly certain he’d drop out after a week or so. The wiry boy from the suburbs had turned out to be a lost cause; he’d learnt the drills well enough by rote, but showed no indication at all of being able to think. It would be cold-blooded murder ever to allow him to practise law in Perimadeia. Master Iuven had proved irritatingly competent once he’d at last consented to pay attention, but Loredan already knew he’d never make a fencer, call it cowardice or call it enough sense to avoid a fight. Which left whatsername. The girl.

Nearly every one of the abominably numerous courtroom romances, churned out in such profusion by the hack professional poets and any number of talentless amateurs, had as the heroine the lovely swordmaiden, slender as a wand but quick and deadly, capable of skewering the mighty advocate or cutting a bloody path through any number of bandits, pirates or barbarian warriors. Once upon a time, Loredan had bothered to explain to lay acquaintances exactly why this poetic fancy was impossible; that without weight and reach and a strong enough wrist to turn the other man’s blade, all the speed and athleticism in the world wouldn’t save you from an early death. He’d told them how quickly the arms and knees tire, how a full-blooded slash from a fifteen-stone man would knock a sweet young thing off her feet even if her parry was textbook perfect; how, in short, the courtroom floor was no place for a woman, or any decent human being, come to that. He still believed it; nevertheless, the girl had talent.

Of course, she was no willow wand. She carried no superfluous weight, but she was strong and sure on her feet - clearly used to working, though not farm work, to judge by her hands. The only child of a craftsman, Loredan guessed; a daughter who did a son’s work because it had to be done and there was no one else to do it. (In which case, what the hell was she doing here?)

Mostly, though, she was determined. It wasn’t the boyish eagerness of the tall, thin twins; no sense of a childhood ambition being realised, no
fun
. It was almost as if this was something she had to do successfully, whether she liked it or not, as if her life depended on it. Thinking about her, Loredan shook his head and took a long pull at his cider. The ticklish feeling she gave him was more than his dislike of female fencers. It was—

—Personal.

He yawned, suddenly aware of how tired he was. Next day he’d have to teach these tiresome children the grip, more elementary footwork and the basic elements of the defence. The next day he’d have to drill them in the lunge and go back over everything they’d done so far and make them learn it all over again. That was assuming his voice held up and he didn’t get accidentally spitted or lose his temper and murder one of them. If he was really lucky, he’d educate this lot, get rid of them and start all over from scratch with another bunch of inadequates.

Really fallen on my feet this time
.

Yes. Well, at least nobody was deliberately trying to kill him.

He really wanted another jug of cider. Instead he stood, gathered up his various props and kitbags and trudged home, across the city and up the stairs. There was someone waiting in the doorway.

He saw whoever it was before he/she saw him, and flattened himself against the wall just outside the meagre circle of light thrown by the sconce. Once he’d calmed himself down, it occurred to him that if the muffled and cloaked figure was an assassin he was a pretty incompetent one; besides, who could possibly be bothered to have him killed? A robber wouldn’t waste good darkness lurking outside a door in a fairly poor area on the off chance that the householder might come home and be worth robbing; in the unlikely event of there being anything worth stealing, he’d have pushed open the unlocked door, helped himself and gone away.

Nevertheless. Carefully and by feel, Loredan teased out the knot at the top of his sword case and let the canvas slip fall away. Then, as quietly as he could manage after climbing all those stairs, he edged up the last few steps and grabbed the torch.

‘Athli!’ he groaned. ‘You scared the living daylights out of me.’

‘Sorry,’ Athli said. Damn! It hadn’t even occurred to her. ‘I was just passing, and...’

‘Really?’ He knew that wasn’t true. ‘Well, you’d better come in. The door’s not locked.’

She was looking at the sword in his hand. He felt foolish. ‘You startled me,’ he said, replacing the torch in the sconce. ‘Been here long?’

‘No,’ she said.

He closed the door after them and fiddled with his tinderbox to get the lamp lit. The tinder was damp; like everything in this rat-trap.

‘Why do you live in a place like this?’ she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. ‘You make good money.’

‘Used to,’ he replied, lifting the wine jug and finding it empty, as usual. ‘I’ve retired, remember. Now I’m nothing but a humble trainer, with precisely six pupils.’

‘At a silver quarter a day each, makes six quarters,’ she replied. ‘Most of the people in this place are lucky if they see that much in a month. What is it with you? You can’t have drunk it all - you’d be dead.’

Loredan grinned. He wouldn’t say anything about the gold five in his pocket; for which, incidentally, he’d had change. ‘My business,’ he replied. ‘Maybe I like it here. I mean, it’s such a picturesque district that people go out of their way just to stand in doorways.’