Evil for Evil (6 page)

The fourth time; he didn't quite know what he'd done differently. It just seemed to go, as if it had given up the struggle. Victory; now what? He went back to his memories. They threaded it, right, and then they cut or broke off a foot or two of thread. He scowled. It stood to reason that if you stuck the needle in and pulled it through, the thread would simply pass through the cloth and come out the other side, and you'd be sitting there with the cloth in one hand and a threaded needle in the other. There had to be some way of anchoring the end of the thread in the cloth; did you tie it to something, or stick it down with glue, or what? All his life, all those hundreds of sewing women, all he'd have had to do was stop and ask and one of them would've been happy to explain it to him. As it was…

They tied a knot in the end of the thread. He remembered now, he could picture it. The knot was thicker than the hole the needle made in the cloth, so it stuck. Excellent. He laid the needle carefully down on his knee—the last thing he needed was for the thread to slip out of the eye after all that performance getting it in there—and found the other end. Was there a special kind of knot you had to use, like sailors or carters? The women in his memory hadn't used any special procedure that he could recall, however, so he'd just have to take his chances on that. He dropped the knot and retrieved the needle. Now, he imagined, came the difficult part. Think about it, he ordered himself. Sewing is basically just tying two sheets of material together with string. Surreptitiously, he turned over his wrist and unbuttoned his cuff.

The Ducas, of course, has nothing but the best, and this rule applies especially to clothes. He had no idea who'd made his shirts—they tended to appear overnight, like mushrooms—but whoever they were, it went without saying that they were the best in the business. Obviously, therefore, they didn't leave exposed seams, not even on the inside, where it didn't show, and their stitches were small enough to be practically invisible. He cursed himself for being stupid; looking in the wrong place. He put his hand into the sack and pulled out a shirt; a proper, honest-to-goodness, contractor-made army shirt, Mezentine, made down to a price and with nice exposed seams on the inside that even the Ducas could copy. He studied them. Apparently the drill was, you stacked the edges of the two bits of cloth one on top of the other; you left about three-sixteenths of an inch as a sort of headland (why couldn't it have been farm work instead of sewing? he asked himself; at least I know something about farm work), and then you ran a seam along to join them together. But even the army-issue stitches were too small to be self-explanatory; he stared at them, but he couldn't begin to figure out how on earth they'd ever got that way. It was a mystery, like the corn or the phases of the moon.

Fine. If I can't work out how a load of stupid women do it, I'll just have to invent a method of my own. Think; think about the ways in which one bit of something can be joined to another. There's nails, or rivets; or how about a bolt on a door? You push a bolt through a sort of cut-about tube into a hole that keeps it—Or a net. Now he was onto something he actually knew a bit about. Think how the drawstring runs through the mouth of a purse-net, weaving in and out through the mesh; then, when you pull on it, it draws the net together. If you do something similar with the thread, weave it in and out through both layers of cloth, that'll hold them together. Brilliant. I've invented sewing. I'd be a genius if only someone hadn't thought of it before me. He took another look at the shirt-seam. It hadn't been done like that. But if he went up it once, then turned it round and went down again, he could fill in the gaps and it'd look just like the real thing. Was that the proper technique? he wondered. Like I care, he thought.

Now for something to sew. He was looking for damage; a hole, cut or tear. He examined the shirt in his hands, but there didn't seem to be anything wrong with it, so he put it on the floor and took another one from the sack. This time he was in luck. There was a big, obvious tear in the sleeve, just the sort of thing for an enthusiastic novice to cut his teeth on. He looked for the needle, couldn't find it, panicked, found it, picked it up carefully, carried it across to the sleeve and drove it home like a boar-spear. It passed through the cloth as though it wasn't there and came out the other side, but with an empty eye and without the thread. He looked up. She was standing over him, looking down. "So," she said, "which one are you?"

His mind emptied, like grain through a hole in ajar. "What?"

"Which one are you," she said, "Miel or Jarnac?" Oh. "I'm sorry," he said, "I don't know what you're—"

"Jarnac's the falconry nut," she went on matter-of-factly, "but he's supposed to be big and good-looking. I met Miel once, but it was years ago and we were both children, so I wouldn't recognize him again. I could probably guess, but it's easier if you tell me, isn't it? Well?"

He sagged. "I'm Miel," he said.

She nodded. "Actually, I'm impressed," she said. "I've been watching you. It's clever, how you figured it all out. But you need to fold back a couple of inches when you thread the needle," she added. "Otherwise it just pulls out."

"Is that right?" Miel said. "Well, now I know." He sighed, and let the shirt drop from his hands. "So what are you going to do?" he said.

She shrugged. "Obviously," she said, "either I teach you how to sew properly, or I'll have to do all those clothes myself. Why did you pretend to be someone else?"

"I was afraid that if you knew who I was, you'd sell me to the Mezentines," he said. "Isn't that what you do?"

She didn't move or say anything for a moment. "No," she said. "They're the enemy. If it wasn't for them, we'd still be at home on our farms." She frowned. "We don't do this out of choice."

"I'm sorry." He wasn't sure he believed her, but he still felt ashamed. "Do you know what happened in the battle?" he asked (but now it was just a way of changing the subject).

"No. I expect we'll hear sooner or later. Why, don't you?"

"I got knocked out halfway through," he explained.

"Ah." She smiled, crushing the scar up like crumpled paper. "I can see that'd be frustrating for you. Not that it matters. You're bound to lose eventually. You never stood a chance, and at your best you were nothing but a nuisance."

"I suppose so," Miel said quietly.

"Aren't you going to argue with me?" She was grinning at him. "You're supposed to be the leader of the resistance."

"Yes." He knew he was telling the truth, but it felt like lying. "So I'm in a good position to know, I suppose."

"Well." She frowned. "All right, you can't sew. Is there anything you
can
do?

Anything useful, I mean."

He smiled. "No."

"And you're hardly ornamental. Do you think the Mezentines really would give us money for you?"

She walked away and came back with a cloth bag that clinked and jingled. As he took it from her, it felt heavy in his hand. "Tools," she said. "Two pairs of pliers, wirecutters, rings, rivets, two small hammers. Do you know what they're for?" He thought for a moment, then nodded. "I think so," he said.

"I thought it'd be more likely to be in your line than sewing, and it's easier. It must be, men can do it. Figure it out as you go along, like you did with the sewing. When you're ready to start…" she nodded into the corner of the barn, "I'll help you over there."

"Might as well be now," he said.

She bent down and he put his arm round her neck. Not the first time he'd done that, of course; not the first time with a redhead. The most he could claim was, she was the first one-eyed woman he'd ever been cheek to cheek with. Her hair brushed his face and he moved his head away.

"You're standing on my foot," she said.

He apologized, perhaps a little more vehemently than necessary. Her hair smelled of stale cooking oil, and her skin was very pale. When they reached the corner, he let go and slithered to the floor, catching his knee on the way down. That took his mind off other things quite effectively.

"It's all right," he gasped (she hadn't actually asked). "I just…"

"Be more careful," she said. "Right, I'll leave you to it. I've got work to do." When she'd gone, he pulled open the nearest sack and peered inside. It looked like a sack full of small steel rings, as though they were a crop you grew, harvested, threshed and put in store to see you through the winter. He dipped his hands in, took hold and lifted. At once, the tendons of his elbows protested. A full-length, heavy-duty mail shirt weighs forty pounds, and it's unwise to try and lift it from a sitting position.

He hauled it out nevertheless, spread it out on the floor and examined it. Mezentine, not a top-of-the-range pattern. The links were flat-sectioned, about three-eighths of an inch in diameter, each one closed with a single rivet. A good-quality shirt, like the ones he was used to wearing, would have smaller, lighter links, weigh less and protect better. This one had a hole in the back, just below where the shoulder blade would be, and the area round it was shiny and sticky with jellying blood. The puncture had burst the rivets on five of the links; must've been a cavalryman's lance, with the full impetus of a charging horse behind it, to have done that. He looked a little closer, contemplating the twisted ends of the damaged links. So much force, applied in such a small space. He'd seen wounds before, felt them himself; but there was more violence in the silent witness of the twisted metal than his own actual experiences. That's no way to behave, he thought.

She'd been right; it was much easier to understand than sewing, though it was harder work. He needed both hands on the ends of the wirecutter handles to snip through the damaged links, and after he'd bent a few replacement links to fit (one twist to open them, one to close them up again), the plier handles had started blisters at the base of both his thumbs. The only really awkward part was closing up the rivet. For an anvil he used the face of one of his two hammers. The only way he could think of to hold it was to sit cross-legged and grip it between his feet, face up, his calf jamming the handle into the floor. He tried it, but the pain from his injured knee quickly persuaded him to try a different approach; he ended up sitting on the hammer handle and leaning sideways to work, which probably wasn't the way they did it in the ordnance factory at Mezentia. Hauling the shirt into position over the hammer was bad enough; lining up the tiny holes in the ends of the links and getting the rivet in without dropping it was torture. He remembered someone telling him once that there were fifty thousand links in a really high-class mail shirt. He also remembered what he'd paid for such an item. It didn't seem quite so expensive, somehow.

"Is that all you've done?"

He looked up at her. "Yes," he said.

"You're very slow."

"I'll get quicker," he replied. "I expect you get into a rhythm after a bit." He picked up a rivet and promptly dropped it. It vanished forever among the heaped-up links on his lap. "What happens to all this stuff, then?"

"We sell it," she said. "Juifrez'll pick it up on the cart and take it up the mountain to the Stringer pass. That's where he meets the buyers. Of course," she added,

"we've got you to thank."

"For what?"

"For our living," she said gravely. "For fighting your war. We've been tidying up after you ever since you started it. If it wasn't for you and your friends, I don't know what we'd have done."

"Oh," Miel said.

"It was Juifrez's idea," she went on. "Our village was one of the first to be burned out, it was soon after you attacked the supply train for the first time. Aigel; don't suppose you've ever heard of it. We ran away as soon as we saw the dust from the cavalry column, and when we came back…" She shrugged. "The idea was to walk down to Rax—that's the next village along the valley—and see if they'd take us in. But on the way we came across the place where you'd done the ambush. Nobody had been back there; well, I suppose a few scouts, to find out what had happened, but nobody'd buried the bodies or cleared away the mess. You'd burned all the food and the supplies, of course, but we found one cart we could patch up, and we reckoned that'd be better than walking. Then Juifrez said, 'Surely all this stuff's got to be worth some money to someone,' and that was that. Ever since then, we've been following you around, living off your leftovers. You're very popular with us, actually. Juifrez says you provide for us, like a good lord should. The founder of the feast, he calls you." She laughed. "I hope you've got someone to take your place while you're away," she said. "If the resistance packs up, we're really in trouble." While you're away; the implication being that sooner or later he'd go back. "He's your leader, then," he said, "this Juifrez?"

"I suppose so," she replied. "Actually, he's my husband. And while I think of it, it'd probably be just as well if you didn't let him find out who you are. Like I said, he thinks very highly of you, but all the same…" She clicked her tongue. "I suppose he'd argue that the lord's job is to provide for his people, and the best way he could do that is fetching a high price from the Mezentines. He's not an insensitive man, but he's very conscious of his duty to his people. The greatest good for the greatest number, and so forth."