The Proof House (63 page)

‘And you’ve taken steps to make sure he gets the opportunity.’

‘It was the least I could do,’ Gorgas replied. ‘I wouldn’t have felt right if I hadn’t done it. And really, it was so easy in the end. Now then,’ he went on, ‘that’s enough of that, I’ve got letters to write. Have either of you seen Zonaras? I want him to nip out to Tornoys for me.’

Iseutz shrugged. ‘Which one is Zonaras?’ she asked. ‘I still can’t tell them apart.’

Gorgas frowned at her. ‘Very amusing,’ he said. ‘I take it that means you haven’t. Well, if you do see him, I’ll be in the office.’

What Gorgas called the office was a small room at the back of the house; originally it had been a smokehouse, where the hams were hung up over a smouldering cairn of oak-chips, but Clefas and Zonaras hadn’t bothered much with curing meat, and they’d used it as a dump for sundry clutter. Gorgas had had it re-thatched and repointed, and had knocked a doorway through and put in a window. He had plans for a new, much larger smokehouse on the other side of the yard, once he’d finished repairing the fence and restoring the woodshed and the trap-house; but that was going to have to wait.

He had a desk, rather a fine one with a slanting face at chest height (Gorgas was old-fashioned and preferred standing up to write), a lamp-bracket that swung sideways on a pivoted arm, another arm with a hole in it for the ink-horn and a tray on top for his penknives, sealing wax, sharpening stone, inkstone, sand-shaker and all the other marginally useful paraphernalia that tend to accrue to people who spend a significant proportion of their time writing. Under the face was a board that pulled out and was supported by two folding struts, just the right size for a counting board, with a rack for your reckoning counters let into the side. Needless to say it had been made in Perimadeia, about a hundred years ago; the wood was dark and warm with beeswax, and across the top was carved the motto DILIGENCE-PATIENCE-PERSISTENCE, suggesting that it had been made for a customer in the Shastel Order. Gorgas remembered it well from his childhood - where his father had got it from he hadn’t the faintest idea, but he’d used it as a cutting-board for making and trimming arrow-fletchings, as witness the hundreds of thin lines scored across the face. When he’d rescued it from the dead furniture store in the half-derelict hayloft, Gorgas had intended to reface it with leather or fine-sawn Colleon oak veneer, but in the end he’d kept it as it was, not wanting to deface any of the visible signs his father had left behind.

He’d trimmed a fresh pen only the day before, out of a barred grey goosefeather; it didn’t need sharpening but he sharpened it anyway, using the short knife with the blade worn paper-thin by decades of sharpening that had always been in the house for as long as he could remember (but his mother had used it in the kitchen, for skinning and jointing). Then he folded back the lid of the ink-horn (it was one he’d made himself; but Bardas had made the lid and the little brass hinge, beaten them out of scraps of brass scrounged from a scabbard-chape they’d found, green and brittle, in the bed of a stream), dipped the pen and started to write. It was a very short letter written on a tiny scrap of thrice-scraped parchment, and when he’d sanded it he rolled it up tight and pushed it into a brass foil tube slightly thinner than an arrowshaft. Then he reached under the desk and fished out an arrow.

It was a standard Imperial bodkinhead, with a small diamond-section blade and a long-necked socket. He pulled the head off without any real effort and pushed the brass tube up inside the socket as far as he could get it to go. Then he took a little leather bag from the top of the desk, opened it and tapped a few brown crystals out into the palm of his hand. There was also a small brass dish on the tray, one of the pans from a long-lost pair of scales. Having transferred the crystals into the pan he took the penknife and made a small nick in his forearm, angling his arm so that the blood dripped on to the crystals. When they were amply covered, he wrapped a piece of cloth over the cut and carefully spat into the pan until the proportions of blood and spit were roughly the same. Finally he added a fat pinch of sawdust from a twist of parchment he’d had tucked under his cuff.

Pulling the lamp-arm toward him, he held the pan over the flame and stirred the mixture with the penknife handle, dissolving the crystals (glue, extracted from steeped rawhide). When he was satisfied with the consistency he took a dollop of the glue on the tip of his little finger and smeared the end of the arrowshaft where the socket was to go. After putting the socket carefully back on and making sure it was straight, he served the joint with a length of fine nettle-stem twine, using the last of the glue to stick down the ends.

The last step was to mark the arrow; he dipped the pen back into the ink and painstakingly wrote
this one
between the cock feather and the bottom fletching, in tiny, angular clerk’s letters. Then he laid it flat on the window-sill to dry.

He had other letters to write, and he was busy with them when Zonaras came in (as usual, without knocking).

‘Well?’ he said.

Gorgas looked up. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour and ride over to Tornoys—’

‘What, today?’

‘Yes, today. Go to the Charity and Chastity - I don’t need to tell you where that is - and ask for Captain Mallo, who’s going to Ap’ Escatoy. Give him these letters and this arrow—’

‘What’s he want with just one arrow?’

‘Just you make sure he gets it,’ Gorgas said, in a tone of voice that made Zonaras open his eyes wide. ‘He knows what to do. Once you’ve done that,’ he added, reaching into his pocket, ‘and not before under any circumstances, have a drink on me.’ He handed over a couple of silver quarters, which Zonaras took quickly without saying anything. ‘All right?’

Zonaras nodded. ‘The mare’s cast a shoe,’ he said.

‘What? When was that?’

Zonaras shrugged. ‘Day before yesterday,’ he said.

Gorgas sighed. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Take my horse, just try not to ride her down any rabbit holes. We’ll shoe the mare when you get back.’

Zonaras frowned. ‘I’ve got a lot on right now,’ he said.

‘All right,
I’ll
shoe the mare. Now get on; remember, Captain Mallo, going to Ap’ Escatoy, at the Charity and Chastity. You think you can remember that?’

‘Course.’

After he’d gone, Gorgas leaned against the desk and scowled. If anybody was capable of messing up a simple job, it was Zonaras. On the other hand, Zonaras riding to the Charity and Chastity in Tornoys and drinking himself stupid was the most natural thing in the world, a regular event these last twenty years, a sight so familiar as to be practically invisible.

Before he left the study, Gorgas paused in the doorway and looked up, as he always did, at the mighty and beautiful bow hung on two pegs over the top of the frame. It was the bow Bardas had made for him, just as he’d once made the ink-horn cover and the little copper sand-shaker and the folding three-piece box-wood ruler, which had been with Gorgas wherever he’d gone (it got broken in Perimadeia while he was there; he’d kept the pieces and, years later, had the best instrument-maker in the City put them back together again, with the finest fish-bladder glue and tiny silver tacks so small you could hardly see them; he’d had a rigid gold and silver case made for it at the same time, to make sure it didn’t get broken again).

Hoping to force Temrai into giving him an opportunity, Bardas kept up the bombardment for three days without changing the settings; he described it to his staff officers as ‘planishing the enemy’. They didn’t really understand what he was talking about, but they could see the reasoning behind it. The major obstacle was still the disparity in numbers; if they could force Temrai into an ill-advised sortie, they had a chance of killing enough men to bring the odds to within acceptable parameters. It was sound Imperial thinking, and they approved.

Nevertheless, the Imperial army was feeling the strain. A third of the halberdiers and pikemen had to be kept standing to at all times, in case Temrai launched a night attack; another third were fully occupied quarrying and hauling stone shot from the nearby outcrops (and the supply of useful rock was dwindling rather quicker than Bardas had allowed for); he’d had to detail two troops of cavalry to help the artillerymen. The troopers were disgusted at this reduction in status, while the bombardiers complained bitterly about cack-handed horse-soldiers doing more harm than good; the trebuchets themselves were starting to shake apart after so much continuous use, and Bardas found he was alarmingly low on both timber and rope, neither of which were available locally. He’d already given the order to break up the newly built siege towers for timbers and materials (but it didn’t look like they’d be needed now, and the hide coverings could be scavenged to make up more pavises, when he could spare a few carpenters from trebuchet maintenance).

It was just as well he had Theudas to help him; he had plenty of soldiers, but only a few competent clerks, and most of his work seemed to be drawing up rosters and schedules, allocating materials, updating stores manifests, the sort of thing he could do if he had to but which Theudas actually seemed to enjoy.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ the boy told him. ‘If I can help kill Temrai with a notebook and a counting-board, he’s as good as dead already.’ Then he launched into a highspeed résumé of the latest daggers-drawn dispute between the chief carpenters of number-six and number-eight batteries over who had a better claim to the one remaining full keg of number-six square-head nails—

‘Deal with it,’ Bardas interrupted with a shudder.

‘No problem,’ Theudas replied cheerfully.

Bardas smiled. ‘It’s good to see you’ve found something you can actually do,’ he said. ‘You were a pretty rotten apprentice bowyer.’

‘I was, wasn’t I?’ Theudas shrugged. ‘Still, everybody’s good at something.’

 

Two men met in a shed on the outskirts of the sprawling Imperial supply depot at Ap’ Escatoy. It was dark. They didn’t know each other.

After a short interval during which they studied each other like cats, one of them reached under his coat and pulled out a bundle wrapped in cloth. ‘Special delivery?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, that’s me.’ The other man reached for the bundle. ‘I hope you know where it’s supposed to be going, because I don’t.’

‘It says on the ticket.’ The first man pointed at a scrap of paper attached to the thin, coarse string that held the bundle together.

‘All right,’ the other man replied, frowning. ‘So what does it say?’

‘I don’t know, I can’t read.’

The other man sighed. ‘Give it here,’ he said. He felt the package curiously. ‘Feels like a stick. You got any idea what’s in here?’

‘No.’>

‘Your work fascinates you, doesn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

The next morning, someone stole a horse from the couriers’ stable, using a forged requisition. He was believed to have left in the direction of the war. Nobody could be spared to go after him, but a memorandum was added to the incident log, so that the matter could be dealt with later.

 

Temrai had got out of the habit of keeping his eyes open. There hadn’t been much point the last few days (how many days? No idea). There was nothing to see except dust, which clogged your eyes and blinded you anyway, to the point where it was easier to keep them shut and rely on your other senses for finding your way about. His hearing, on the other hand, had become an instrument of high precision, to the point where he could tell from the noise it made coming down almost exactly where the next shot was going to pitch. This method proved to be ninety-nine per cent reliable, the only serious exception being the shot that landed a few feet above him on the path, dislodging a great mass of rock and rubble and burying him.

That’s strange; I thought you had to die first
. He opened his eyes, but there was nothing to see. Hands, legs, head, nothing he could move; breathing was just about possible, but so difficult and time-consuming that it constituted a full-time occupation. It’d be all right, though; they’d come and dig him out in a minute or so.

Assuming, of course, that they knew where he was, or that he’d been buried at all. Now he came to think of it, there was no reason to believe that anybody had been watching when the hill fell on him; seeing your hand in front of your face was something of an achievement, thanks to the dust. How long would it take them, he wondered, to notice that he wasn’t there any more? Even if they missed him almost immediately, it wasn’t exactly an instinctive response to say,
Hey, we can’t find Temrai, he must be buried alive somewhere.
He thought of the number of times he’d gone looking for someone, failed to find them and given up in a temper, assuming they didn’t want to be found.

‘It’s all right,’ said a voice beside him. ‘They’ll find us. We’ve just got to be patient and try to stay calm.’

Temrai was surprised, but pleased. He couldn’t remember seeing anybody near him when the hill came down (but thanks to the dust, that was hardly conclusive). ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

The voice laughed. ‘Never better,’ it replied. ‘Nothing I enjoy more than being stuck in a hole in the ground under a few tons of dirt. I find it helps me unwind.’

The voice was familiar - very familiar, in fact - but he couldn’t quite place it. So familiar that asking,
Excuse me, but who are you
? would be embarrassing. ‘Can you move at all?’ he asked.

‘No. How about you?’

‘Not so as you’d notice.’ It was odd, Temrai reflected, that he could hear the other man so clearly, as if they were sitting opposite each other in a tent. Maybe the human voice carried well through dirt; he didn’t know enough about such things to be able to form an opinion. ‘Maybe we should shout or something,’ he said, ‘let them know we’re here.’