Colours in the Steel (62 page)

They’d put the wrong wheel on first. As soon as the paddles of the wheel touched the water, the wheel began to turn, and the shaft with it. That, of course, made life even more difficult for the crews standing by to raise and guide the flywheel. Piloting a giant wheel into place wasn’t exactly easy when the shaft was motionless. Trying to fit it to a beam which rotated ninety-odd times every minute was asking a bit much. There was a basic clutch system to disengage the flywheel, but nothing comparable at the other end. Mentakai swore under his breath.

‘Just my luck,’ he said. ‘Now you watch; they’ll have a couple more goes to confirm their verdict, just in order to show willing, and then they’ll dismantle the machine. They haven’t even
tried
to follow it through.’

Temrai frowned. ‘What if taking it to bits really is the best way?’ Temrai asked aloud. ‘No way of knowing, I suppose, without having tried it first.’

‘Not you as well,’ Mentakai muttered. ‘It’s just a simple mistake, caused by rushing into things and not thinking them through first. Doesn’t prove a thing about whether my way’s the right one.’

There were ideas in all this that could be applied to other human activities, Temrai realised, sacking cities included. ‘I suppose we’d better do it right,’ he said. ‘Tell them to take the water wheel off again and fit the flywheel, and
then
we can put the water wheel back.’

Getting the water wheel off proved far harder than getting it on; for one thing, it was going round and round in a strenuous and dangerous manner. Eventually they managed - well past noon by now, Temrai realised, but so what? They can have the meeting without me, it’s not as if we have anything to say to each other - and the flywheel went on comparatively easily, thanks to all the practice they were getting. The second fitting of the water wheel was a mess; several ropes broke and one of the frames in the crane sprang a joint, the crews were all thoroughly soaked from splashing about up to their waists in the river, tempers were beginning to fray and the onlookers were making amusing comments from the sidelines. In the end there was a feeling of exhausted relief rather than jubilation when the water wheel began to turn and the flywheel reciprocated its movement. Still, it had been a success - more than that, an achievement, which surely made it all worthwhile—

Someone shouted, ‘Look out!’ but by the time the crews had realised what was happening it was too late. Three hundredweight stones, launched from the trebuchets on the bridgehouse tower, whistled through the air and landed; one in the river, throwing up a curtain of spray that seemed to touch the sky; one directly on top of the water wheel, crushing and cracking it, smashing the A-frames, snapping the driveshaft in two and smearing Mentakai’s body over what was left of his project; and one on the edge of the crowd of spectators, killing a man and a woman and shearing both legs off a young boy.

The initial shock seemed to last for ever. Then someone screamed, men ran forward and put their shoulders to the stone under which the boy was pinned, the rest of the crowd wavered, not knowing whether to help the rescuers or run for cover in case there were any more stones on the way. Temrai shoved his way through the engineering crew, who were rooted to the spot staring at the mess where the water wheel had been, and started shouting orders, sending for healers, a stretcher, engineers to bring up five trebuchets for a return volley; the activity helped soak up the shambles in his mind, where images of the burning camp and the rafts burning on the water were blurring into a picture of the bonemeal mill, just the other side of the wall from here if he remembered it right, similarly shattered and destroyed, and in its hoppers the bones of hundreds and thousands of men and women, city and clan, being fed mechanically through onto the still-turning millstones.

They managed to lift the rock enough to drag out the boy; he was still alive and opening his mouth to scream, although nothing was coming out. Someone mentioned that the man and the woman who were still under there had been the boy’s parents; Temrai took note of that and put it safely away in his mind for future reference. The first of the five trebuchets was dragged into position and the mules were detached from the hitching points on the frame and linked up to the counterweight; and then they decided to be obstinate and not budge, so there was cursing and the cracking of whips to add to the overall effect; and then someone realised they hadn’t brought up a stone to shoot from it, and someone suggested using one of the two that were here already, and someone else thought that suggestion was in pretty poor taste; and Temrai looked up at the bridgehouse tower and told the engineers to belay his order to return fire, since there were no signs that the enemy engines were reloading and they had enough on their hands as it was without picking a fight.

 

‘For me?’ Colonel Loredan asked, puzzled.

The guardsman nodded. ‘Bloke left it about an hour ago,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t give his name. There’s a letter with it.’

‘Oh. Oh, well. Thank you, dismissed.’ The guardsman saluted and left, closing the door behind him.

Back in his miserable cell in the second-city gatehouse; same bleak stone walls, same stone shelf for a bed. Loredan looked at the bundle of cloth in his hand, shrugged and tossed it onto the bed-shelf. Something metal rattled against the stone. He’d open it later, after he’d got out of these hateful boots.

Why should anybody leave me a present?
he wondered, as he dragged the left boot off his hot, sweaty foot. Although he was already late for a meeting he allowed himself the luxury of sitting and wiggling his newly liberated toes before putting on his sandals.
And why couldn’t it be something useful, like a nice pair of felt slippers?

Next he pulled off his coat, sopping wet from the afternoon’s sudden downpour, and reached for his second best; an old friend, shabby and frayed but nicely moulded to his body by years of close association. Not the most appropriate attire for an audience with the Prefect, but he didn’t exactly care too much if he got fired. His shirt and trousers were wet too, but he couldn’t be bothered to change them. The heat of the fire in the reception room of the Prefect’s palace would dry them off soon enough.

A quick drag of a comb through his hair; that would have to do. Now then; he’d open his present, and then he’d have to go.

It didn’t take a genius to work out what was inside the cloth wrappings; a narrow, heavy bundle roughly two and a half feet long containing something metal. Someone had sent him a sword. He could do with one, sure enough. It was embarrassing for the Deputy Lord Lieutenant, the officer commanding the defences of Perimadeia, to be the only man on the wall with an empty scabbard swinging from his belt. He slit the string with his knife and peeled away the cloth; then sat quite still for a moment, staring.

A genuine Guelan. More than that; a genuine Guelan
broadsword
- there were only about five of them still in existence - rather than the more common but still murderously valuable law-swords that the great smith had made his reputation with. Yet a Guelan it undoubtedly was, he knew that before he drew the short, heavy blade from the scabbard and found the distinctive and uncopiable marks on the ricasso. No one had ever made military swords like the great Liras Guelan. Other makers’ imitations were dull abortions, fit only for chopping wood or opening barrels. Nobody before or since had hit on that precise harmony of weight and balance that made it the next best thing to perfect, for single- or double-handed use, cutting or thrusting.

There was a special skill to using them, so the legend went (and for the first time, as he held the sword in his hands, he realised it was no fairy tale); if you tried to use it like an ordinary sword, the weight of the blade and the proportions - long handle and short blade - would defeat you. The harder you tried, the more effort you put into it, the more sluggishly the weapon would handle. But if you used the weight rather than fighting to overcome it, then the sword would seem to guide itself, adding its own force to the blow in apparent defiance of all the laws of physics. A Guelan broadsword, they said, should be allowed to fight for you; it knew exactly what it was doing, and all the wielder had to or should do was hang onto the blunt end and watch the fun.

Bardas Loredan had his doubts about people who waxed lyrical over lethal weapons; even so, he felt he could make allowances in this one rather exceptional case. All his working life, it went without saying, he’d wanted one (though it wouldn’t have done for work, being outside the prescribed dimensions for legal use), and now here one was, its weight firm but not oppressive against the muscles of his upper arm, like a pedigree falcon deigning to sit for a time on his wrist.

This must have cost a fortune
. He remembered the letter. Not wanting to put his marvellous new possession down, even for a moment, he fumbled awkwardly to break the seal and open the folded paper.

Bardas Loredan looked at the letter, then at the sword, then back at the letter, then back at the sword. Weapons, he knew, are ambivalent, capable of doing good or evil, or both, or both together, incapable of knowing or caring about the use to which they’re put. The same, Loredan reflected, is true of the lawyer, the man who fights and kills for a cause not his own in the name of justice. The weapon in his hand and the skill that hand imparts to the weapon decide right and wrong, good and evil; but the stronger and quicker on the day prevail over the slower and weaker, and if a moment before the fight the defendant had taken over the plaintiff’s brief and vice versa, it’s hard to believe that the outcome would be different. Maybe that’s what I’ve become, Loredan thought, or maybe that’s what I’ve been all along; a weapon in someone else’s hand, created to kill and do damage, either for good or for evil depending on whose hand I happen to be in. And the Guelan -
aren’t they supposed to have minds of their own?
- perhaps it means something, arriving precisely now, when I’m the advocate instructed on behalf of the city of Perimadeia, entrusted with its defence and the righteousness of its cause.

It must have cost him a fortune . . .
Yes, and over the years he’s cost me; maybe somehow he’s been using me, along with all the others, though I can’t imagine what for. It’s been his actions that have governed everything I’ve ever done, since that day beside the river when he left me for dead and took away the life I should have had. If he thinks he can buy me with this—

But a Guelan broadsword; it wasn’t answerable for the sins of the giver, just as the lawyer isn’t responsible for the acts of his client.
Above all
, they’d told him when he took his oath at the enrollment ceremony,
an advocate fights for justice, and justice is his only client
. And a sword cuts skin and flesh for the man who swings it; and a man is a sword in the hand of his own circumstances, the things that have happened in the past that have made him what he is and their consequences in the present that he must address and deal with. Taking this from his brother wasn’t all that different from taking the sword of the man he’d just killed on the floor of the courthouse. He’d earned it, in that sense; and once it was his, its past no longer mattered.

Loredan suddenly remembered the meeting he was late for. It was by a conscious act, no mere instinct of haste, that he unbuckled his belt, threaded it through the double loops of the scabbard-frog and drew it tight again; and in that instant he rejected the comfort that lay implicit in the excuse,
I was only ever following instructions; they made me do it; it wasn’t me
. Bardas Loredan, a Guelan broadsword; weapons of such quality and antecedents with minds of their own . . .

Well, well, he said to himself as he slammed out of the small, cold room and ran down the cloister towards the chapter house, if in the end I had to sell my soul, better keep it in the family than flog it off cheap to the charcoal people. But that thought didn’t resolve the matter; a final decision would have to be deferred until he had more time to consider it, and if possible more data.

 

 

‘I’d feel happier if I had the faintest idea what’s going on,’ Ceuscai muttered. The dim moonlight made the cloud of his chilled breath glow, as if his words had somehow frozen in the cold of the night. ‘The first one was bad enough. And I didn’t like this one at all.’

Beside him, crouched under the cover of a wagon, Temrai watched the torches burning on the bridgehouse tower, and shivered a little. ‘Probably some family thing,’ he replied, ‘about which we neither need to know nor particularly care. My only worry is that it’s some kind of trap.’

‘Bound to be,’ said the man on Temrai’s left. ‘Honestly, it smells like last year’s cheese. Enemy General’s brother comes and tells you he’s going to open the gates and lower the drawbridge at midnight - Gods, Temrai, what else do you believe in? The old woman with the basket of winds? The tooth fairy?’

Temrai scowled, though nobody could see him. ‘If it looks at all dodgy we won’t go,’ he said. ‘But if this trap of yours involves opening the gates and lowering the drawbridge, then it’s my kind of trap.’