The Belly of the Bow (11 page)

‘My Uncle Bardas used to go around killing them.’

For the first time, there was something in Gorgas’ expression that suggested he might be getting angry. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and he also saved your life. He spared your life when you were trying to kill him, and then he got you out of the City when he should have been thinking about himself. And you still say no, he’s got to die. All right, so if you’d killed him, what’d that have made you?’

She thought for a moment. ‘A chip off the old block, presumably.’ She held up her truncated hand. ‘Look at me, for pity’s sake. I’m as bad as the rest of you,
and
I’m incompetent. I’m a murderer who can’t even get the job done. You’ve no idea how proud it makes me feel, knowing I’m useless as well as rotten.’

Gorgas reached out and banged twice on the door with his fist. ‘Melodrama,’ he repeated. ‘High tragedy. Family curses, poisoned blood and the downfall of the gods. Give me a shout when you’ve had enough and maybe I’ll show you round the real world some time. In the meantime you can stay here and write your lines. I’ll just make sure that nobody else gets to hear them.’

The key turned in the lock and he barged the door open, pushing the sergeant out of the way. The door rolled shut and the key turned again.

‘All right,’ Gorgas said, ‘get me out of here. And for pity’s sake get that cell cleaned up. I wouldn’t keep a pig in that state. I don’t care how it got that way, but there’s no excuse for not clearing up a mess.’

He felt better as soon as he was above ground again, and by the time he was clear of the guard house and out into the fresh air of the courtyard, the feelings of frustration and anger were back to manageable levels, which was just as well. Gorgas Loredan had built his life around the principle that positive thinking gets things done; he found monolithic negatives impossible to understand and therefore hard to deal with, and so he’d always managed to find a way to go round the immovable object. One of his favourite stories was about two generals in command of an army who found themselves faced with the prospect of laying siege to an impregnable city. As they sat in their tent, staring wretchedly at the massive walls before them, the old general sighed and declared, ‘We’ll never find a way of taking that city.’ The younger general smiled at him and said, ‘In that case, we’d better find a way of not having to take that city.’ Whereupon he explained how it might be possible to lead the army round another way, bypassing the city entirely, and fall upon the enemy’s unprotected homeland, thereby winning the war and rendering the insurmountable obstacle irrelevant. For the moment, he couldn’t yet see how to apply this lesson to dealing with his intransigent niece, or his equally intransigent brother; but he knew there must be a way, simply because there always is.

Another gift that had helped him greatly over the years was the ability to put a difficult problem out of his mind entirely, leaving him free to tackle something he could manage. Solving the soluble problem, he’d generally found, often gave him the confidence and the sheer momentum to overwhelm the apparently insoluble one. Fortunately, the next job on his list was eminently soluble, and he found that he was looking forward to it.

He walked briskly down the hill to the Quay and took the boat to the small island at the mouth of the harbour where the refugees from Shastel were housed in a large sprawl of wood and canvas structures, a sort of hybrid of huts and tents, while they were waiting to be permanently resettled. To someone without Gorgas’ attitude to problem-solving, the Camp would have been a depressing place, full of uncomfortable reminders of failure. Here, after all, was the place where people ended up when the Bank had failed to make good its promise to protect them from the vindictiveness of the Foundation. The families crowded in here had all seen their houses burnt down, their cattle driven off, their crops trampled; by definition, they were here because they had nowhere else to go, and the people who’d said it was all going to be all right had let them down and were now faced with the burden of looking after them and finding them somewhere else to live and work.

To Gorgas Loredan, however, they were the answer to a prayer. At first he’d looked here for recruits for his army, because at first that was what he needed most; but there were women and children and old men here too, and they constituted a resource that it would be wasteful to neglect; almost as bad as leaving a good field fallow for want of a bucket of seedcorn and the effort of ploughing. He’d taken charge of the running of the Camp, made an inventory of what was available, and worked out the best way to make use of what he’d got.

Thanks to his imagination and hard work, the Camp was now an inspiring place to visit. As he walked through the gates (permanently open, now that there was no need to keep starving malcontents penned up out of harm’s way) he passed the training ground on the left, where his hand-picked corps of instructors were turning the adult males into an efficient and disciplined force of archers, and carried on down the narrow lane that ran between the long sheds where the women and children were employed making the things the Bank so badly needed. Each shed housed a different manufacture. First he passed the door of the clothing shop, where they produced uniforms and boots for the army, all to the best specifications. Next to that was the mailshirt factory, where several hundred women sat on benches at long tables twisting together the thousands of steel rings that went to make up each issue-pattern mailshirt; each worker was equipped with two pairs of pliers to grip and twist the rings, which were brought to them by the ten thousand in closely woven wicker baskets by porters who spent all day going backwards and forwards between this shed and the wire foundry, where a hundred anvils were grouped in a circle around one enormous central furnace; at each anvil, one worker hammered and drew the red-hot billets of steel into wire, while another wound the wire around a mandrel before slitting the coil down its length to produce another bucketful of rings.

Next to the foundry was the fletching shed, where he had four hundred women and children occupied sorting feathers by sizes, splitting them down the middle with sharp knives and peeling them apart, trimming them and serving them to the finished arrowshafts with sinew dipped in glue. The shafts themselves were produced in the next shed down the row, where the workers sat in front of table with three-foot-long grooves scored into them; in these grooves they laid the dogwood and river-cane shoots the arrows were made from, planing each surface flat and then turning them a few degrees until eventually they were left with a perfectly round, straight shaft, each one of uniform length and diameter. All told, there were sixty sheds in the Camp, each one producing the Bank’s entire requirement of some essential military commodity, and all at a fraction of what it would have cost to buy them on the open market. As for the workers, they were fed, clothed and occupied instead of aimless and starving. It was, Gorgas couldn’t help feeling, a remarkable achievement; and all the result of looking at a problem and seeing an opportunity.

His business today was with the superintendent of the nock factory. Each arrow was fitted with a bone nock, which was carved to shape, drilled at one end to accept the shaft and sawn at the other to fit the string. The problem he was here to deal with concerned the supply of bone. The raw materials came from the slaughterhouse on the other side of the island; the slaughtermen stripped the bones out of the carcasses, bleached them and loaded them on carts (six carts a day, every day, were needed to satisfy the demand from the factory); when they arrived here, they were sorted by type and size and passed on to the sawbenches where they were cut to size, and the stench of sawn bone could be smelt right across the Camp. The last few consignments had apparently not been satisfactorily cleaned. The superintendent of the factory had registered an official complaint with the slaughtermaster, who had taken offence and filed a counter-complaint about erratic collections by the factory carters and a number of other issues about the work of the factory which were really none of his concern. Neither official was now on speaking terms with the other, deliveries to the factory were down to a mere trickle, and production was almost at a standstill, which in turn affected production in four other sheds. As Gorgas saw it, it was another example of attitude and melodrama making a mess of things; the difference was that this mess was going to be cleared up, or he’d know the reason why.

As it turned out, the mere announcement that Gorgas Loredan was on his way to sort things out had had a remarkable effect on the officials concerned; they’d had a very productive meeting and dealt with all the outstanding issues, and three enormous cartloads of immaculately bleached bones were even now trundling their way down the narrow backstreets from the slaughterhouse to the Camp, while both parties were unreservedly withdrawing their complaints and thanking each other, with an almost frantic display of mutual goodwill, for their co-operation. Gorgas was extremely pleased, congratulated everyone for doing a splendid job, and took the opportunity to make an unscheduled tour of inspection; very much an unexpected honour, as the superintendent hastily admitted.

‘There’s still going to be a shortfall, though,’ Gorgas said, as he walked between the rows of benches. On either side of him sat twenty or so children, each one diligently filing slots in half-finished nocks. ‘Can’t we do something about the lighting in here, by the way? It’s a bit dark for fine work.’

The superintendent snapped at his secretary to make a note -
Investigate ways to improve lighting in shed
. The secretary scribbled hastily, the waxed tablet braced against the spread palm of his left hand - you could tell a scribe by the calluses on his fingertips and the way he sat flexing his fingers when he wasn’t writing.

‘I suppose we’ll have to make up the difference from civilian contractors,’ Gorgas went on. ‘Place an order with the usual suppliers and have the invoices sent through to my office. I’ll deal with them myself.’ He didn’t need to look round to know what kind of expression was on the superintendent’s face; an outside order was one of the few opportunities he got to make a few quarters on the side, provided that the invoices could be processed in-house. The stipulation was intended as a reprimand, and the way it was made constituted a strong hint that the superintendent had got off lightly. ‘And if you get any more problems with supply, just let me know instead of going through channels. After all, we’re all on the same side.’

The superintendent thanked him politely for his help, and Gorgas urged him to think nothing of it. ‘Actually,’ he added, turning round and facing the man, ‘there was just one thing. When you do the requisitions, would you mind placing an order for - what, twelve dozen? Yes, call it that - with a man called Bardas Loredan. He lives up in the hills; one of my people can tell you where to find him. He’s my brother.’

The superintendent nodded twice, and relayed the order to his secretary, who’d already written it down. ‘Of course,’ He said. ‘No trouble at all. Shall I add him to the usual list of suppliers?’

Gorgas thought for a moment. ‘Better have a look at the quality of his work first,’ he replied. ‘It’s all very well helping out family now and again, but we aren’t doing this for the good of our souls. I expect they’ll be all right, though; he’s a good worker.’

If the superintendent was curious to know why a brother of the Chief Executive (and also, by implication, of the Director herself) made his living working with his hands up in the hill country, he certainly didn’t show it. It wasn’t all that long ago that the superintendent had arrived on Scona in a small leaky boat from Shastel with nothing more than a coat and a pair of shoes. As far as he was concerned, the Chief Executive stood fair and square at the centre of his universe; it was Gorgas Loredan who’d personally signed the deed that allowed him to pay off his debt to the Foundation, and when he’d stumbled off the boat onto the Dock, one of Gorgas’ clerks had been there to meet him and his family and take them out of the mob of refugees being herded into the Camp. Instead, they’d gone up the hill and been greeted by Gorgas himself in his own private office, where he’d been told there was a good job waiting for him if he wanted it. He had no idea why he’d been chosen, or what might one day be expected of him in return; all he could think of was that he’d been one of the Chief’s own personal clients, and that when he’d been burnt out, the Chief somehow felt responsible for not preventing it. But the reason didn’t matter; what mattered was that he spent his days in an office at a desk, while men every bit as good as him, or better, coughed up their lungs in the dust and stench of the sawbenches.

‘Right,’ Gorgas said. ‘I think we’re all sorted out here. If there’s any other problems, you know where I am.’ He paused for a moment, looking out over the rows of workbenches, listening to the scritching of blades and files on bone coming from every side. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘this is all looking very good. You’ve done a fine job.’

‘Thank you,’ the superintendent said.

 

‘Let us consider,’ Gannadius said, ‘the two Opposites that combine to make up this thing we call the Principle. Let’s call them’ - he paused for effect - ‘let’s call them The Same, and Different. About The Same, there is nothing to be said; it’s always the same, it has only one nature. It can’t be changed, or improved, or made worse. You may find it hard to imagine this Opposite; think of a granite cliff, and sooner or later you’ll imagine the sea grinding it down, or men quarrying it and hauling it away in carts. You could try to imagine death, I suppose, but death is only one stage in a cycle. If a thing is dead now, it must once have been alive. The Same is very hard to imagine; so you must take it on trust and think of it largely as what it is, an Opposite.’

He paused again and looked round the hall, pleased to see that he could still grab the attention of a hundred or so young people with something he knew was as trite as sunrise. ‘Now consider Different,’ he went on. ‘Different is easy. Different is so easy that it’s easy to let yourself believe that Different is somehow more important, more real than The Same. That would be very foolish, because The Same is the world, but Different is the Principle. Does that make any sort of sense? Or am I going too fast?’