The Proof House (31 page)

The orange light of the fire rolled in the steel-burnished brightness of the plate, like the last of the wine in the bottom of a silver cup. ‘I think I see what you’re getting at,’ Bardas replied. ‘But doesn’t bashing it sometimes make it weak?’

‘Ah.’ Anax nodded his head. ‘That’s something different. That’s fatigue. That’s when you’ve stressed it so many times that it can’t take any more. Bad stress. Or there’s brittle; brittle is when you make it so hard it’s got no give. You make something too hard and when you drop it, the damn thing shatters like glass. Very bad stress. You don’t want to worry about that; we take stuff like that out in proof. That’s what proof’s for.’

When he’d finished, the piece of sheet had gone from flat to perfectly domed, without any flat spots or wrinkles. ‘Got to be smooth,’ he said. ‘Unless you get it smooth, you’ll have weak spots. That’s why you’ve got to bash every last bit the same.’ He held the cop up, to see if any flaws caught the light. ‘Bashing gives shape,’ he said. ‘Shape is strength, too. Look; that’s the shape it wants to be. The God of our forefathers could jump up and down on that all day in heavy boots and he’d never so much as mark it.’

Bollo was feeding the biggest section through the rollers, applying so much force that the handle flexed. ‘Memory,’ Anax went on, ‘that’s how you achieve stress. Give the metal a memory, a shape it’ll return to when something tries to distort it; then, when it flexes, it’ll try to get back to that shape, which is what gives it the strength to resist. Memory is stress, stress is strength. It really is remarkably straightforward once you understand the basics.’

‘The Sons of Heaven,’ Bardas asked, as Anax carefully bent a curve into the breastplate blank, holding it by the edges and pressing down the middle on to the horn of the anvil. Bollo had already folded in a ridge up the middle line and rolled it into its basic shape; Anax was adjusting it, a series of careful, controlled distortions. ‘I’ll be straight with you, I’ve never really managed to figure them out. You don’t mind me asking, do you?’

Anax looked up at him and flashed him a rather terrifying smile; a controlled baring of the teeth. ‘You’re asking me,’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s a compliment, by your standards. You said to yourself, the Sons of Heaven are bastards, but he’s not like them, he’s almost normal.’ Anax applied pressure and the metal obeyed him. ‘Which only goes to show, you don’t know spit about the Sons of Heaven. Nobody knows anything about us,’ he said, pressing a little more, ‘except us; and we’re not telling.’

‘I see,’ Bardas replied. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be offensive.’

‘Nothing offensive about ignorance,’ Anax replied pleasantly. ‘Not to an enlightened mind, that is; and we’re enlightened, you see, that’s what gives us our edge. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll give you a few hints. Armour for the soul, that’s what inside information is.’

‘Thank you,’ said Bardas gravely.

‘The Sons of Heaven -’ Anax was hammering a lip around the edges of the breastplate; he raised his voice a little and Bardas could hear him clearly, in spite of the shrill, crisp noise of the mallet ‘- well, the Sons of Heaven are this.’ He stopped the mallet halfway down in its descent and held it still for a moment. ‘And you’re this,’ he added, nodding at the plate. ‘Or you’re the Sons of Heaven, and this breastplate is you. Has it ever occurred to you that everything in the world might possibly have a meaning? Well, I’m not saying that’s so, that’d be a really stupid generalisation. But if it’s true, in whole or in part, then the Sons of Heaven are the meaning, or at least they’re what everything is about. We’re the axle,’ he went on, turning the metal a little, ‘and everything else is the wheel. Basically, the whole world’s here for our benefit, to make it easier for us to do our job.’

‘I see,’ Bardas said. ‘And what would that be?’

Anax smiled. ‘Perfection,’ he said. ‘We perfect. We make everything we touch perfect. Well,’ he admitted, shifting his grip slightly on the mallet handle, ‘that’s the theory. In practice, we also smash up a lot of things and do a great deal of damage. Do you see what I’m getting at, or do you want me to explain a bit more?’

‘I think I get the idea,’ Bardas said. ‘You’re proof.’

Anax stopped what he was doing and grinned broadly. ‘Bless the man, he
has
been listening all this time. That’s right, we’re proof. We perfect by testing to the point of destruction. What passes proof, we add to our collection; what fails, we junk. Like absolutely everything, it’s totally simple once you start thinking about it the right way.’

After the armour had been shaped and planished, Anax punched holes for the rivets, cut the straps and fitted the buckles, put all the parts together. ‘There you are,’ he said eventually. ‘You can try it on now, if you like.’

It was, of course, a perfect fit. It covered Bardas like a second skin; the strength on the outside, the stress inside. ‘What about proof?’ Bardas asked with a smile.

‘Proof?’ Anax pulled a face. ‘Huh. What do you think
you’re
for?’

The war between the plainspeople and the Empire started late one afternoon, on the edge of a lake in the marshy region between Ap’ Escatoy and the Green River estuary. It was started, somehow appropriately, by a duck.

The party of trebuchet builders to which Temrai’s old friend Leuscai was assigned had run out of timber; accordingly, Leuscai was put in charge of a small scouting expedition and sent off to find tall trees suitable for shaping into the main arms of trebuchets. Straight, fast-growing pines were the best bet, though occasionally it was possible to find an unusually straight fir or spruce in the forests to the south. When Leuscai reached the region he’d been told to try first he found plenty of evidence of pine, fir and spruce: a considerable number of stumps, carefully sawn off close to the ground by generations of Perimadeian shipwrights, rough-hewn on the spot and shipped back to the City to be made into masts. Time was pressing; there weren’t enough suitable timbers in the store to furnish arms for the current production run, let alone the fifty extra trebuchets Temrai had just commissioned.

On the other side of the Green River, Leuscai knew, there were a fair number of suitable trees; he could see them as he sat on an ivy-covered pine-stump and gazed at the bank opposite. Technically, however, the southern bank of the river was Imperial territory - at least, it had been until recently part of a long, narrow tongue of land claimed by Ap’ Escatoy, although the claim had been unenforcible for at least forty years owing to the general decline in the city’s fortunes. Leuscai considered the risk; invading the Empire hadn’t been part of his mission briefing and he didn’t really want to do it, but he badly needed the timber, and he assessed the chances of being noticed, let alone challenged, by Imperial personnel as too slight to worry about, compared with the reception he’d undoubtedly face if he went back home, or even returned to the camp, without any timber. He took a deep breath and started thinking about how he was going to cross the river, which was wide, deep and fast.

After a long, irritable day of brainstorming, he rejected all the ideas so far canvassed and led the way downstream in the hope of finding a natural ford of some description. As luck would have it, he didn’t have to look far; he’d come out only a few miles up from a treacherous but passable shallow point just above some rather spectacular rapids. The crossing itself was tense and not particularly pleasant, but they made it without loss of life or any essential equipment. What they did lose were half a dozen supply mules which were carrying the food.

This stroke of bad luck changed their immediate priorities. Leuscai, who’d been brought up on the principle that starving in a forest or beside a river takes a deliberate act of will, split his group up into a number of hunting parties, told them when and where to meet up, and set off into the forest.

He was quickly disappointed. The forest turned out to be a swamp with trees growing in it, and what little game there was saw or heard him coming. He came back empty-handed to find that nobody else had done much better; but one party reported that they’d stumbled on a lake about a mile due south that looked promising for duck.

Leuscai wasn’t enthusiastic. He’d had enough of duck a few years back, when he’d been one of the men Temrai had sent to hunt the wretched creatures for food and feathers during a hiatus in supplies just before the attack on Perimadeia. He’d been a victim of his own success; they’d found what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of ducks and proceeded to exhaust it, grimly and piecemeal, with nets, slings, throwing sticks, arrows - in some cases, where they’d found a strain of particularly trusting, stupid ducks, their bare hands. For weeks on end he’d done nothing but wring necks and pull out feathers, with nothing but duck to eat (fishy and stringy) and the creatures’ obnoxious smell always in his nose. He’d come to loathe the sensation of killing them, gripping the neck tight just below the head and swinging the body round and round in circles until the bird suffocated - but you kept getting ones that were the next best thing to immortal, that carried on living even after you’d broken their necks and crushed their heads into the ground with your heel; nothing on earth is harder to kill than a horribly injured duck, not even a bull buffalo or a man in full armour. And here he was again, about to kill and eat yet more ducks if he wanted to stay alive. Maybe, he speculated, he was really the Angel of Death for ducks, and killing them was what he’d been put into the world to do (he thought of Colonel Loredan and the plainspeople); if so, there wasn’t any point trying to avoid the inevitable. Yes, he said, by all means; let’s go and scrag some ducks. So they went.

Inevitably, it seemed, they got lost; the lake had moved, because it wasn’t where the scouts said it was. They spent most of the day hunting for it, dragging through the wet, dangerous swamp, losing boots and getting filthy, having to pull each other out when they suddenly went in up to their thighs. When at last they stumbled on the lake, Leuscai was pretty sure it wasn’t the one they’d been looking for - the scouts had mentioned a hill at the southern end that rose above the tree line, and there was no sign of anything like that. But it was a lake, and it was unquestionably covered with ducks. Thousands of them, floating in enormous black and brown rafts, like the garbage flotsam washed down into a lake by the first storm rains of summer. They showed absolutely no inclination to go away when Leuscai and his men poked through the trees on to the shore; they quacked and steered away a little, obviously not aware that Death himself was watching them. Foolish, objectionable ducks.

Leuscai convened a brief ways-and-means conference. They had no nets, no slings, no throwing sticks, no dogs and no boat, which ruled out most of the conventional ways of slaughtering waterfowl. They had their bows, but not enough arrows that they could afford to waste any, sinking into the still water spitted through a dead duck. ‘We’ll just have to throw stones,’ someone suggested; and since there were no better suggestions, the motion was carried.

Leuscai, of course, was a master of the art of stoning ducks. They found a handy supply of stones in the bed of one of the streams that ran into the lake, and agreed their strategy. There was a small spit of dry land sticking out into the lake, and a particularly dense mob of ducks bobbing up and down in the horseshoeshaped bay it created. They’d be able to bombard the ducks from three sides; they’d have about twenty seconds of extreme activity before the whole flock got up off the water in an explosion of wings and spray, leaving their dead and wounded behind. If they didn’t manage to get enough the first time, they’d undoubtedly get another chance next morning, and next evening too, if need be. It would be rather like the bombardment of Perimadeia, with Leuscai and his men being the trebuchets (ironic, given what they’d originally come for).

Since Leuscai had absolutely no wish to repeat the performance, he took special pains in deploying his artillery; spook one duck, and there was a faint but disturbing chance that the whole lot would get up before a single stone could be dispatched. So the hunting party set off from well inland and crept up slowly and painfully to the shore, taking great care not to make a noise or a sudden movement. The plan was tactically sound and would surely have succeeded if one of the party hadn’t slipped and gone down in a boggy patch, grabbing at his neighbour as he went and pulling him down as well. As luck would have it, there was a single adventurous duck nosing about in the bushes at the edge of the lake a few yards away fom where the men went in, and their sudden, pitiful yells of distress sent the duck rocketing into the air, like a stone from a torsion engine. At once the whole flock rose with it, blotting out the sun like a huge volley of arrows lobbed over a city wall at extreme range. Leuscai howled with rage and frustration and hurled the stone he’d been gripping in his hand; he was well out of range, of course, and the stone splashed noisily into the water. The ducks swung and lifted over the trees, then swung again and headed out towards the middle of the lake, putting up other flocks until the whole surface of the lake seemed to be standing up, like a man getting out of bed.

The Imperial patrol, which had taken the afternoon off to go wildfowling on the other side of the lake, were furious. They’d been looking forward to their evening’s sport all week; they’d smuggled nets and slings and gunny-sacks out under their armour, trudged all the way across the swamp to get here, and just as they were about to set up and take their positions, something had spooked the birds and ruined everything. The sergeant’s first guess was a fox; but it was just too early for foxes to be about, and what else would panic the best part of five thousand ducks? The only other creature fearsome enough was a man, and that couldn’t be right, since this was a restricted area. A thought occurred to him, and he snapped at his men to shut up and keep still.