The Proof House (26 page)

‘Clefas,’ Gorgas said, ‘get the wedges. This stuff’s knotted and twisted like you wouldn’t believe.’

Clefas stood for a moment, then slowly walked away. Gorgas took a deep breath, then went back to what he’d been doing. He had a froe jammed in a lengthways split down the trunk of the tree, in too far to budge with the tommy bar, which he’d just contrived to break by jerking on it with his full weight.

‘You’ll never get that out,’ Zonaras said.

‘Watch me,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Here, pass me the side axe. I’ll cut the bloody thing out if I have to.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Zonaras said, handing him the axe, which was bevelled on one side only for cutting at an angle. ‘Watch the head on that, it’s loose.’

‘Really?’ Gorgas said.

His brother nodded. ‘Been loose for years,’ he said. ‘Needs the head taking off and a new wedge knocking in.’

Gorgas hacked away for a few minutes, trying to cut out a slot beside the jammed tool to free it. He hadn’t made any significant progress by the time Clefas wandered back with the wedges. They were heavy and indescribably ancient, and their heads had been smashed into razor-sharp flakes by generations of Loredans pounding on them with big hammers. ‘That’s better,’ Gorgas said. ‘Right, Zonaras, bash in a wedge either side; that’ll open it up.’

Zonaras picked up a wedge in each hand and nestled them in the crack fore and aft of the froe; then he bashed them home with the poll of the surviving felling-axe. The froe came out easily, but the wedges were stuck fast.

‘Marvellous,’ Gorgas said angrily. ‘Solve one problem, make two more.’

Zonaras sighed. ‘Grain’s too twisted for splitting,’ he said. ‘I could have told you that before you started.’

Gorgas straightened his back, pulling a face. ‘We’ll knock in the axe-heads as wedges,’ he said, ‘that’ll get these two out. We’ll get there, don’t you worry.’

Several hours later, when it was getting dark, they gave up for the day. They’d got the wedges out, and the froe (which they’d put back in, jammed solid and got back out again by bashing it to and fro with a hammer) but the axe-heads looked as if they’d never budge. ‘What we need,’ Gorgas said as they trooped back into the house, ‘is a saw-pit. Then we could saw our planks instead of trying to split them.’

Neither of his brothers said anything. They kicked off their boots and sat down on either side of the table, clearing a space to lean on with their elbows.
Curious
, Gorgas thought,
they’re Loredans too; but of course, they’ve never been away from the farm. They were the lucky ones.

‘We could build one down by the river,’ he went on, ‘near the ford, where the banks aren’t too steep. Then we could have a water wheel driving a mechanical saw. I’ve seen them, in Perimadeia. Wonderful things, but it should be easy enough to make one.’

Clefas looked up at him. ‘Down by the river,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Where Niessa used to do the washing. You know the place I mean.’
Of course they do.

‘I reckon so,’ Zonaras replied. ‘But we don’t need a saw-mill. What’d we want one of them for?’

Gorgas frowned. ‘I’d have thought that was obvious,’ he replied. ‘To saw planks, of course, instead of wasting three days bashing lumps of iron with hammers.’

‘But we don’t need planks,’ Zonaras pointed out. ‘Except a few now and then. And we buy them.’

‘Waste of money,’ Gorgas said impatiently, ‘when we’ve got perfectly good timber on the farm. Besides, if we set up a powered saw-mill, we’d be able to supply planks for all the neighbours, at only a fraction of what they’re paying now. It’s a good business proposition.’

Clefas shook his head. ‘And who’s going to work it?’ he asked. ‘Zonaras and me, we’ve got our hands full just managing the farm. Are you going to drop everything and come running every time someone wants a few bits of wood cut up? Don’t see it, myself.’

Gorgas waved the objection aside. ‘As well as planks,’ he went on, ‘we could make our own fenceposts, gateposts, rafters, weather-boards, the lot. We could even build a ship if we wanted to. Yes, I think a saw-mill’s a damned good idea. First thing in the morning, I’ll get some of the men on to it. It’ll give them something to do, at any rate.’

Clefas and Zonaras looked at each other. ‘Well,’ Clefas said, ‘if you’re going to do that, there’s no point us killing ourselves tomorrow trying to split that log. When your mill’s running, we’ll get it sawn up there.’

‘That’s right,’ Zonaras added. ‘I mean, it’s not like there’s any rush. We don’t use the long barn any more, anyhow.’

That night, Gorgas dreamed he was standing outside the gates of a city. It was dark, and he wasn’t sure which city it was - could’ve been Perimadeia, or Ap’ Escatoy, Scona even; any one of a number of places. The gate was barred, immovable, so he was trying to break it up by splitting it, using wedges and an axe. The wedges, he somehow knew, were his brothers; he was the froe, and the axes too, both when they were driven into the split as wedges or swung as hammers. He could feel the hammer-blows on the polls of the wedges (the hammer falls, the steel is compressed, and where does all the force go, pinched between steel and steel?) as surely as he could feel the tommy-bar twist in the socket of the froe. He could feel the un-sustainable stresses in the wood, as the fibres of the grain were wrenched apart - wood’s not like steel: if you torture it, eventually it fails and bursts. But steel, the more you hammer it, the more you compress and work-harden it, the harder and stronger it gets. And that, logically enough, is why the Loredan boys aren’t like other people . . .

Well, it was dream-logic, the sort that melts away as soon as your eyes open.

Gorgas woke up, realised he didn’t stand a chance of getting back to sleep, and resolved to do some work instead. He’d insisted on having the one working oil-lamp in the place, and after a good deal of fumbling with flint and rather soggy tinder, he had light. He also had paper - a few sheets he’d brought with him, and the back of the letter he’d had about the refused treaty, quite serviceable once he’d smoothed it out over the table. He sat down and wrote three letters; one to his niece, one to an employee, giving him further orders, and one to Poliorcis the Son of Heaven, which he managed to make polite and friendly in spite of everything. After all, there was still time for them to change their minds, no point alienating them by being petulant just because it’d feel good to vent his anger. Keeping his personal feelings out of the way of his business decisions had brought Gorgas all the success he’d ever managed to achieve, after all. It was a rule he’d only ever broken where Bardas was concerned, and that one exception had cost him dearly enough, gods know. But Bardas was different; Bardas was his brother, Bardas was the only failure in a life full of remarkable achievements. And very few failures are definitely final, provided you’re level-headed enough to keep your feelings at bay.

When he’d finished writing the letters, it was still dark, too early for anybody else to be up and about, so Gorgas decided to fill in the time with one other minor chore, a task he’d neglected for the past couple of days. In the corner of the room stood a fine embossed-leather bow-case. He opened it and took out his bow, the rather special bow his brother had built for him three years before. People who knew the circumstances behind the making of the bow were amazed, even horrified, to find that he still had it. They’d assumed that he’d got rid of it - burned, buried, thrown into the sea - long before. They couldn’t understand how he could even bear to look at it, let alone touch it. But the fact remained, it was a very fine bow; and since it had cost him so much, the least he could do was use it and look after it - otherwise everything that had gone into making it would be wasted, all to no purpose.

First, he went over the back with a fine, stiff brush that lived in a pocket under the flap of the case, to remove all the loose dirt, mud and other rubbish. Then he sprinkled on to it a little of the special oil that he’d had specially mixed for this job, just enough to cover the fingernail on his left index finger; oil that kept the wet out and the sinew in. The oil had to be rubbed in until every last trace of it was gone, a job that called for thoroughness and patience. Finally, he waxed the string with a small block of solid beeswax. By then it was dawn; no sooner had he pushed the bow back into its case than the sun came up. Gorgas washed his hands carefully (the oil he’d used for the bow was poisonous), pulled on his boots and went to look for some more work to do.

 

An hour or two after Gorgas cleaned his bow, a ship limped into Tornoys harbour.

It had taken a pounding from a freak storm, the sort that added an unwelcome degree of uncertainty to navigation at this time of year. The ship had coped pretty well, all things considered; it had taken on rather more water than was good for it, and the wind had damaged the rigging and put a crack in the mainmast that would have caused real havoc if the storm had lasted much longer. But she was still afloat and nobody had been killed or badly hurt. It was as much as anybody had a right to expect, fooling about in those seas at that season.

Because it was still early, there was nobody much about. The fishing fleet had already left, of course, apart from a few lazy oyster-boats, and the bigger ships that were due to leave that day wouldn’t be ready to sail for another hour or so. They’d taken their cargoes on board the night before, so that the men could get a good night’s sleep before catching the tide. One or two of Gorgas’ men were hanging around the quay, but they weren’t on duty; it was still the last knockings of the night before, and they were hanging around waiting until the taverns started breakfast, hoping that the cool dawn breeze would help clear their heads.

Pollas Arteval, the Tornoys harbourmaster - he was the nearest thing to an official that Tornoys had, and even then he was really nothing more than a chandler who kept a register and collected contributions from the waterfront traders’ association - leaned on the gate outside his office and tried to figure out where the ship was from. It was old but soundly made, clinker-built, unlike the majority of the Colleon and Shastel sloops and clippers; certainly not from the Empire, with those sails. From the Island, possibly - they’d use anything that could float and a few that couldn’t - but the rigging wasn’t Island fashion somehow. He stared for a little longer, and realised what was bothering him. It was nothing really, a trivial detail of how the tiller bars of the rudders were socketed into the upper part of the loom, but he had an idea he’d seen something like it before, a long time ago. Still, he’d seen a lot of ships from a lot of places, with every possible contrivance for steering as for every other function. He made a note in his mind and started thinking about warm, fresh bread dunked in bacon fat instead.

The ship nuzzled up to the quay (if it’d had a face it’d have grinned with relief; Pollas fancied he could hear it sighing) and someone jumped down with a line and made her fast while others put out a gangplank. The men were like the ship, unfamiliar but faintly evocative of something he’d seen - what, twenty-five, maybe thirty years ago. Quite possibly, they were from some far-flung place that used to send ships here and then stopped doing so for some reason - war or politics, or just because there wasn’t enough in it to justify such a long haul. Reasonably enough, the men looked tired and fraught - so would anybody after a long night in the squalls off Tornoys - but they didn’t look like men who were expecting a well-earned rest. Rather, they had the resigned look of people who had most of their work still to do.

A crowd of them were ashore now, some fifty-five or sixty of them (a big crew for a ship that size, or maybe they were passengers). Then, in the time it took for Pollas to turn his head to smell the bread in the oven and then look back again, they’d drawn swords and axes and bows, put on helmets, uncovered shields. Suddenly Pollas knew where he’d seen a ship like that before. They were Ap’ Olethry pirates, runaway slaves and deserters from the Imperial army who infested the southern coastline of the Empire, and the chances were that they hadn’t come here for a hearty breakfast.

Pollas Arteval stood with his mouth open, horribly conscious that he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do. The pirates were splitting up into three groups, about twenty in each party; all he could think about was his own house, his wife opening the door of the bread oven, his daughter slicing the bacon. He couldn’t protect them, he didn’t own any weapons and he didn’t know how to fight. It wasn’t a required skill in Tornoys, where there wasn’t anything to fight about. He watched the small knot of soldiers to see what they were prepared to do about it, but they didn’t seem to have realised what was going on. Maybe, he thought, it isn’t really happening; maybe they’re just
wearing
their swords and shields and helmets, rather than getting ready to use them.

Not wanting to turn away, he stepped backwards into his porch, still watching. Be logical, he told himself: they’re here to steal, they won’t hurt anybody unless anybody tries to fight them, and nobody would be that stupid—

It would have been some misinterpreted nuance of body-language, a movement just too quick, a gesture that reminded someone of something he’d seen before. In all likelihood, it was glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, acted on with instinct rather than thought. It can’t have been an intentional act, for one of Gorgas’ soldiers to draw his bow and shoot an arrow into a pirate, for the simple reason that contingents of six men don’t pick fights with forces ten times their number, not even if they’re heroes. If the arrow had missed, even if it had glanced harmlessly off the angled side of a properly contoured helmet or breastplate, things might have been different. But it didn’t. The pirate was on his knees, screaming in terror, and instead of trying to help him, his friends were closing with the soldiers in a short, predictable mêlée. If they’d managed to kill all six of the soldiers it might not have been so bad, but they hadn’t. One man got away, ran up the hill much faster than anyone would have expected just from looking at him in the direction of the billets where Gorgas had stationed a half-company of men to make his presence felt in Tornoys. Pollas could see how the pirates felt about it all by the way they moved into action. They were unhappy but resigned, as you’d expect from men who’ve just seen a simple job turn into an awkward one.
More fighting
, they were saying.
Oh, well, never mind.
They formed their shield-wall like weary hands in a factory who’ve been told they’re having to work late.