The Belly of the Bow (52 page)

 

The ink was full of dust again, and the pen was worn out and spluttering; the scraps of parchment had been scraped down so many times there were holes in them, and the ink just soaked away in places, making the letters look like trees grown shaggy and shapeless with moss and ivy; and the lamp needed a new wick. But Machaera kept on writing, because calligraphy was seventy marks (seventy marks just for the writing, regardless of what she wrote) and a good score would go a long way towards offsetting the inevitable disaster of Applied Geometry, and she
had
to do well in Moderations if she wanted to get into the top stream of Third Year . . .

There was a nick in the shaft of the pen, and it had worn a raw patch on her middle finger between the top knuckle and the side of her fingernail, and it
hurt
. . . There had to be some way to harden her skin up before the exam, something she could put on it to stop it rubbing away. Hadn’t she read somewhere that raw grain spirit did the trick? Not that that would be a lot of help, since she didn’t happen to have any raw grain spirit; although she had an idea they used the stuff in the Natural Philosophy workshops, and wasn’t that moon-faced boy who kept oh-so-accidentally bumping into her in the Buttery (Name? Can’t remember) a Nat. Phil. second-year?

She narrowed her eyes and squinted at the page she was copying from. The main text was clear enough; it was the bold, cursive script of about a hundred and twenty years ago, written in Perimadeia in a commercial copying shop by someone who understood how to lay out a legible page of text. Her problem was with the commentary, scrawled between the lines and crammed into the margins, running right to left as often as left to right, contorted with scholarly space-saving abbreviations and written with a pen shaved down to the thickness of a hair.
Mcrb thnks th Passg prob corrupt, cf Euseb On Philos chp 23 ll.34 to 60 but cf opp Comm on Silen Gen Summary chp 9 ll.17ff wh var readings pref
; all squashed into the gap above one line, with the last few words bulging out into the margin and marching upside down along the underside of the end of the line, like a column of ants on the stem of a flower. It could, of course, have been worse; there could be three or four generations of commentary squeezed in there, rendering the main text as illegible as the subsidiaries and making reading the thing as slow and painful as a child picking its way through its first horn-book.

Macrobius thinks this passage is corrupt
, she wrote carefully,
compare Eusebius,
On Philosophy
, chapter 23 lines 34 to 60; but note the opposite view in the commentary on Silentius,
General Summary
, chapter 9 lines 17 and following, where variant readings are preferred.
Quite, she thought. And does it really matter, given that the text all this attention has been lavished on is nothing more than the trivial bickering of two scholars, both of them dead for over four hundred years, over a fine point of dogma in a theory long since discarded as quaintly primitive? Apparently it did, or else why was she crouched here copying it out on slivers of vellum scrounged from the bellows-mender’s shop in the vague hope that writing it out would somehow help fix it in her memory? It mattered because the men who set the exam thought it mattered, probably because they’d had to sit in this same library staring at this same copy of this book when they were her age, and that was the only criterion that counted for anything. Still, it would be interesting to know when this book was last read by someone who
wasn’t
studying for the second-year Mods; two hundred years ago? Three?

She looked at the page in front of her and considered the next line in the main text.
But that same foolish and opinionated clerk, in averring that the same essence could be at one and the same time corporeal and non-corporeal, commits a grave error; indeed, his ignorance and folly are such that no scholar would pay any heed to them. In consequence—

Machaera yawned and lifted her head until she could see out of the window. Outside it was a clear, crisp day, and the menacing silhouette of Scona Island was painfully sharp against the hard blue sky. Over there, apparently, lurked the Enemy, the latest incarnation of the dark and malevolent force that waited eternally for the weak, the helpless, and bad girls who didn’t eat up their dinners. She found it extremely unsettling to think that the Enemy was so close, only the width of a narrow channel away; if she wasn’t careful, she could easily spend hours staring at the water, imagining shadowy coracles flitting over the dark water, spear-points and helmet-ridges gleaming in the thin light of a watchful star - and then she’d never get any work done, and she’d fail Mods completely and have to go home. Oh,
damn
Scona, for being at war and distracting her from her revision!

She didn’t look up, because she knew that the man standing beside her wasn’t real, and that she was in another of those involuntary and unfortunately extra-curricular visions (if only they counted towards the year-end continuous assessment grades - but they didn’t, and a headache right now would be
so inconvenient
. . .)

‘Machaera,’ Alexius said. ‘I’m sorry, am I disturbing you?’

‘A bit,’ she replied, trying not to let her resentment show; after all, Patriarch Alexius was one of the greatest scholars ever, she should be proud—

‘You work too hard, you know,’ he said. ‘You aren’t getting enough sleep. Fine thing it’d be if you’re so exhausted you fall asleep in the exam. Don’t laugh; it happened to a friend of mine. He’d spent a whole year cramming for that one subject, got as far as writing his name, and the next thing he knew was the invigilator shaking him by the shoulder and taking his paper. He gave up philosophy after that and went into the wine trade, where he made a great deal of money and would have done very well for himself if he hadn’t been killed when the City fell. At least, I assume that’s what happened to him; it’s a fairly safe assumption. What’s that you’re reading?’

‘Veutses,
On Obscurity
,’ Machaera replied. ‘Doctor Gannadius says it’s the key to understanding the whole of neo-Tractarianism. ’

‘He’s right,’ Alexius said, ‘surprisingly enough, since I happen to know for a fact he’s never read it. Oh, he’s read the
Epitome
and the
Digest
, which contain everything you need to know; but as for sitting down and actually ploughing through the wretched thing, he told me himself, life’s too short. I did read it, once - a long time ago now, of course - and frankly I couldn’t make head or tail of it. So I went back and read the
Digest
entry and for the life of me I couldn’t remember any of the important points listed in the
Digest
article being in the original text. So I went back and read Veutses again, from beginning to end, and blow me down if I wasn’t right. All the important ground-breaking stuff was made up by whichever poor little clerk it was who did the
Digest
entry, not Veutses at all.’

‘Oh,’ said Machaera, visibly shaken. ‘But it says in the
Commentary
—’

‘Ah.’ Alexius smiled. ‘The purpose of the
Commentary
, which was written two hundred years later, was to take the conclusions reached in the
Digest
and then go back into the original text and find obscure and badly written bits which could be interpreted to seem as if they were the bits the writer of the
Digest
got his ideas from. It’s a wonderfully imaginative and inventive piece of academic writing, and just shows what you can achieve if you really set your mind to something.’

‘Oh.’

‘But for pity’s sake don’t go pointing that out in the exam,’ Alexius went on, ‘or they’ll fail you on the spot.’

‘Oh . . .’

‘As is quite right and proper,’ Alexius continued. ‘Because what you’ve been taught is that Veutses discovered Veutses’ Law of Obscurity, and the exam’s to test what you’ve learnt, not some theory or other you may have dreamt up for yourself. After all,’ he went on, ‘the conclusions drawn by the
Digest
writer are still just as valid and important, so why does it matter who wrote them?’

‘I suppose not,’ Machaera replied, frowning. ‘But it still doesn’t seem fair, really.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ Alexius shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t think it was ever supposed to be. If I were you, though, I’d skip the rest of the book and just read the
Digest
. After all, you can’t go far wrong if you emulate someone as distinguished as Doctor Gannadius.’

Machaera looked at him, then nodded obediently. ‘If you say so,’ she said. ‘But I still think—’

‘Give it thirty years and it’ll wear off,’ Alexius interrupted. ‘Thinking, I mean. It’s something you grow out of, like greasy skin and spots. And, all due respect, I didn’t come here to discuss Veutses and intellectual dishonesty. Do you mind if I sit down, by the way? I know this isn’t my real body, but even notional cramp in imaginary legs can be quite painful.’

‘Oh. I mean, sorry. Yes, please sit down.’

Alexius perched on the edge of the desk. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Now then, let’s get to the point. You and I are deadly enemies.’

Machaera looked shocked. ‘But we can’t be,’ she said. ‘Really, I would never—’

Alexius raised a hand, palm towards her. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘But it isn’t up to us. It’s because of the war, you see. And it seems that you and I are like - oh, I don’t know - we’re two siege engines mounted high on towers, facing each other across the straits, ready to bombard each other and turn each other’s cities into rubble. Believe me, it’s true. I was brought here - to Scona, I mean - and you’ve been carefully encouraged when under normal circumstances you’d either have been scared into never using your latent abilities or strangled or something, just so we can be part of the war.’

Machaera looked at him gravely. ‘I’m not sure I want that,’ she said. ‘But you can’t be right about me,’ she went on. ‘Why me, when we’ve got people like Doctor Gannadius?’

Alexius chuckled. ‘Gannadius is a nice enough man, and quite bright too, in his own way, but he’s got about as much ability to use the Principle as I have wings to fly through the air. Anything he can do in the Principle he has to do through a natural. It’s the same with Niessa Loredan, and she’s the one using me.’

‘Oh.’

‘So I thought,’ Alexius went on, ‘why don’t you and I come to an agreement? Call it a private peace treaty all of our own. Because one of these days, quite soon, you’ll find yourself in one of these visions, and you’ll be at some critical point in the future of the war, and you’ll be standing there looking at a single moment in time where either of two things can happen. I haven’t the faintest idea what it’ll be; it could be a soldier standing in a doorway, or an engineer aiming a trebuchet, or a general putting his head up above a slit-trench to see what’s happening, whatever. That’s when you’ll find yourself making a decision about what should happen next - let’s say you decide that the soldier in the doorway sees the enemy approaching and runs away, instead of holding his ground and keeping them back until reinforcements arrive, or the engineer decides to add an extra two degrees to allow for windage, or the general thinks better of it and isn’t shot down by a sniper. When that happens, I’d like you to make a conscious effort not to make a decision. Switch off your mind, say out loud, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” And if we both do that—’

‘Excuse me,’ Machaera said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Excuse me,’ she repeated, ‘and please don’t take this the wrong way; but if we’re really on opposite sides, and I don’t make the decision, how will I know that you won’t make the decision either? I know this sounds awful,’ she went on wretchedly, ‘but if I do as you’re saying, won’t I be hurting my side and helping yours? And besides, I
do
want Shastel to win the war. It can’t be wrong to want that, can it? I mean, shouldn’t people do everything they can to help their side win, if there’s a war?’

Alexius narrowed his eyes. ‘But they’re using you,’ he said. ‘Just like Niessa’s using me. Surely you can see that’s not right.’

‘It’s all right if I don’t mind,’ Machaera replied. ‘And yes, the war’s a dreadful thing, and I wish ever so much there didn’t have to be one, because lots of my friends will have to go and fight and some of them may get killed or badly hurt, which is probably worse in a way, because then they’ll have to live their lives without an arm or an eye or something. But if I don’t do something to help, that won’t mean there won’t be a war, it just means we’re less likely to win; and what if I keep my side and you don’t? Then I’d really be hurting my side—’

Alexius scowled at her for a moment, and stood up; he raised his hand, drew it back and slapped her hard across the side of her head, at which point he wasn’t Alexius any more but a short, stout middle-aged woman she’d never seen before but somehow knew as Niessa Loredan. Machaera tried to scramble out of the way, but Niessa was coming after her; now she had a knife in her hand, and behind her shoulder Machaera could see Patriarch Alexius, looking horrified but not moving. She got as far as the doorway when Niessa managed to reach out and grab her by the hair. Machaera screamed, and as Niessa slashed at her with the knife she tried to fend the blade off with her hands. She could feel the knife cutting her fingers and palms, slicing through the knuckles of her right hand just below the first joint; but the sensation wasn’t pain, it was more like a kind of fear she could feel with her body as well as her mind. She screamed again, and then Niessa got past her flailing hands and stuck the knife into her, just below her ribs, in the place her father used to stick in the knife when he was skinning rabbits he’d snared up in the mountains orchard. She could feel the knife inside her, an intrusion, something that shouldn’t be there—

And she was sitting looking out of the window at a distant prospect of Scona, with her hands clasped in front of her, as if she was trying to keep her intestines from falling out. She’d scattered her bits of parchment and knocked over the inkwell.