The Proof House (68 page)

‘Him?’

‘Gorgas.’ He lowered the sword and laid it on the anvil, next to the bow. ‘Let’s go through it step by step. If Gorgas hadn’t killed my father, would I have left home when I did, joined up with Uncle Maxen and caused the fall of Perimadeia? (We’ll leave all the other cities out of it for now - Scona, Ap’ Escatoy, the Island, that pretty little model Perimadeia Temrai’s built himself; they all follow on). If Gorgas hadn’t done what he did, would we both still be back on the farm, mending gates and ploughing the six-acre? Or would I have left anyway? Surely that’s what it all comes down to. That’s probably the most important question in all history.’

She nodded. ‘If Gorgas caused it, then it’s his fault—’

‘Not fault,’ he interrupted. ‘I used to think fault, but since I’ve been in with these people,’ (he nodded towards the Sons of Heaven in their reserved seats in the front row), ‘I only think cause. If Gorgas started it, then he’s the cause. If I started it, then I am. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ Vetriz admitted. ‘Sorry.’

‘Personally, I think it was him,’ he said. ‘Stands to reason; he’s the doer in our family, the one with the drive and the energy. On the other hand, I’m the one who brings about the consequences of his actions. Now if there really was such a thing as the Principle, that’d make sense.’

She looked at him. ‘What’s going to happen?’ she asked.

‘You don’t need me to tell you that,’ he said, and vanished into her pillow.

She sat up sharply and opened her eyes. She felt very uncomfortable. It was like the time she’d allowed Gorgas Loredan into her room; there was the same sense of it not being hers any more. If there was any sense to be made of it, perhaps that was where she should look; except that she couldn’t see how her
mistake
with Gorgas Loredan had caused anything or made anything happen. She thought about Niessa Loredan, who’d reckoned that she could control the Principle with the help of a natural or two, and had scooped her up and tucked her away in Scona for a while. Nothing much ever seemed to have come of that. She had the feeling that he’d been right, and the Principle was nothing but a folk-tale explanation, like the far-fetched reasons you hear in stories for why the sun rises in the east, or why the moon wanes. If there really was such a thing, it was like a big machine, something like the huge rolling-mill she’d been to see in the City the first time they’d gone there, a huge, slowly turning roller that dragged in the blooms of iron, flattened them into plate and fed them out the other side; and if you weren’t careful, if you leaned over the rollers, your sleeve could catch and you’d be pulled in too.

And that wasn’t right, either, far too simplistic.

She got up, realising as she did so that her left foot had gone to sleep, and stumbled to the dressing table. Her face in the mirror was soft and golden, like a fond and unreliable memory.

 

Late in the afternoon, Bardas Loredan had a visitor. Once the stranger had convinced Bardas that he was who he claimed to be, they sat and talked in Bardas’ tent for over an hour.

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ the visitor said, after they’d talked business.

‘I’m not,’ Bardas replied. ‘Which is odd, because I should be. But no, this seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable development.’

‘Really? Well, that’s your business, not mine. Anyway, you’re happy with the timetable?’

Bardas nodded. ‘Entirely. If I were to ask you why you’re doing this, would you tell me?’

‘No.’>

The visitor left, and Bardas made his preparations. He called a staff meeting, explained the situation, ignored the protests and issued his orders. Then he went back to his tent.

Leaning against the bed, still in its oiled buckskin case, was the Guelan broadsword, the one Gorgas had left for him as a present, just before Perimadeia fell. Now Perimadeia fell because Gorgas opened the gates; but that didn’t alter the fact that the Guelan was still a good sword (shorter in the blade than most two-handers, with a heavy pommel and the best balance he’d ever come across). He untied the strings and pulled it out of the case.

If anything, it felt lighter in his hands than ever; possibly because three years of digging in the mines had strengthened his arms and wrists, and he’d got used to the top-heavy Imperial glaives, halberds and bardiches for two-handed work. He tested the edge with his thumb, and closed his eyes.

Some time later, he put on his armour (he no longer noticed the weight), pushed the Guelan down into the belt-frog and secured it with the buckle. Then he sat for an hour in the darkness, expecting to hear voices that for once were silent; but from somewhere in the camp came the smell of garlic and coriander, flavourings often used by cooks to mask the taste of tainted meat.

(At the same moment, on the other side of the stockade, Temrai held out his plate; and a man laid on it a thin white pancake filled with spiced meat, and smiled, and went back to slicing meat with a long, thin-bladed knife.)

They came for him when it was time. As he’d ordered, the pikemen and halberdiers had smeared mud on their weapons and armour, in case the steel glittered in the starlight. He hadn’t needed to obey his own order; the armour Anax the Son of Heaven had made for him was lightly browned with rust and didn’t catch the light any more. Once they marched outside the circle of their own firelight it was too dark to see, but by now they knew the way with their eyes closed.

(Temrai finished his meal, got up and wandered across to the warm glow of the welding-fires, where his armourers were repairing damaged mailshirts. First they heated the new rings to a dull red, then flattened the ends, punched little holes in them, knitted them into place, closed them up with the tongs, pushed in a rivet and hammered it round over a sett. It was the warmest place in the fortress now that the nights were getting cold. There wasn’t much skill in the job, not to someone who’d once earned his living making sword blades in the state arsenal of Perimadeia; the steel simply went from dull grey to blood-red. But he stood for a while watching them, not thinking of anything much - one thought that did occur to him was how convenient it would be if skin and flesh could be mended as easily as armour, by heating, softening and bashing, but it wasn’t an idea worth following through.)

The swing-bridge was tied back and guarded by sentries; but in the dark Bardas’ men swam across the river without making a sound (after a while it gets easy, finding your way in the dark) and cut their throats, working by feel and smell. Bardas hoped that they thanked them afterwards. Then they swung out the bridge, careful and quiet.

(Temrai went back to his tent, where Lempecai the bowyer was waiting for him; he’d glued another layer of sinew on the back of Temrai’s bow to stiffen it a little more, pull it back into tiller. The glue had taken its own sweet time drying, as it always did, but it had been worth the wait. Temrai drew the bow, observing that it seemed to take less effort to draw it even though it had been made stronger, and complimented Lempecai on his work.)

Bardas led the first company over the bridge himself. It wasn’t vainglory or pride that made him want to be the first man inside the fortress, more a sense of continuity, given that he and Theudas (who was beside him, in a borrowed helmet and jack-of-plates that were both a little on the small side) had been the last Perimadeians to leave the City. He’d prepared himself for the tension of waiting; but he’d scarcely set foot on the shore when a slit of light, thin and pointed as the blade of a jointing-knife, appeared down the side of the gate. He closed his eyes against the glare -

(
Bardas Loredan, Sacker of Cities
.)

- and when he opened them again, the gate was open too. He dipped his head as a sign to the men behind him, and walked into the fortress.

‘As promised,’ said the man standing beside the door.

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

It wasn’t long before the alarm was raised, but by then Bardas was leading three companies of halberdiers up the path, while the rest of the army poured in and filled up the lower level of the fortress. The plainsmen there were caught entirely by surprise - someone had taken care of the sentries on the gate - and didn’t know what to do. Some of them ran towards the weapons stacks, others ran in the opposite direction, but the line of soiled black spearheads herded them like sheep, and they had no armour.

Bardas’ men had made it to the top of the path unopposed by the time the shouts and screams from below attracted attention. They knew what to do and where to go; one company toward the main encampment, the other two round the sides, following the stockade, to push back the enemy as they ran. As they broke into the firelight the enemy lashed out at them, like a wave breaking on rocks and falling back.

As was only appropriate, Bardas Loredan was the first man to draw blood. His opponent was a long, thin man, wearing nothing but a helmet and waving a scimitar as if it was a charm against witchcraft. First, Bardas took off the hand holding the sword; then he rolled his wrists and brought the Guelan back for a rather showy cut across the side of the neck. The man staggered and fell over backwards, and Bardas thanked him. The next man he killed came at him with a spear and the lid of a kettle. Bardas feinted high and swept low, feeling the shock as his sword jarred on the man’s shin, then drew the sword through and thrust into the ribcage. A slight twist freed it, and he was ready for the next man, who bounced a scimitar off Bardas’ left pauldron before the Guelan sheared through his neck and collar-bone. The man dropped and Bardas stepped over him, muttering perfunctory thanks as he sized up the next one, a boy with a looted Imperial halberd. Bardas knew enough to respect the weapon no matter who was behind it; he watched the blade while taking a couple of short sideways steps, then lunged at the boy’s heart through the crook of his elbow. He thanked him as he slid off the blade on to the ground, then ducked his head a little to the right to avoid a swing from a big hammer in the hands of a heavily built bald man who looked like a blacksmith. He watched the swing go astray, exposing the man’s armpit (
the way to a man’s heart is through his armpit
) but instead of lowering the sword to let the body slide off, he jerked it sharply to the right, so that it impeded the man with the long-handled axe who was next in the pile waiting for proof. Startled, the man pulled his blow and so threw himself out of position. Leaning back, Bardas swung a short cut that slit open his stomach; while he was frozen with terror and pain, Bardas put him down with a head-shot that split his skull, and thanked him.

They were loosing arrows now, close enough to test Imperial plate. But Bardas had anticipated that; on top of the plateau, hedged around by the stockade, cluttered with tents and dead men, there wasn’t the room for hit-and-run tactics. He signalled the charge and his halberdiers pressed home; some of them fell, but not enough to throw out the accounts. The first archer Bardas killed held up his bow to block the thrust; the Guelan bounced off the sinewed back but Bardas turned the blade and guided it down across the man’s knees, leaving his head at a convenient height. An arrow punched through his right vambrace but stopped before it reached his skin. He paused to jerk it out, then held out his sword for a man to run on to, the way he used to hold the dustpan ready for the brush when sweeping the shavings off his workbench. The next man had drawn his scimitar and was holding it in a semblance of a guard, but Bardas was too many years past fencing to bother with that sort of thing and swung down directly on the top of his head, crushing the helmet and driving him to his knees; then he kicked him in the face and finished him off with the point.
Victory to Bollo and the big hammer
, he thought as his lips shaped the words of thanks, and then he was ready for the next man, and the next, and the one after that.

Then he saw Temrai, huddled in a small crowd of half-dressed men; he’d jammed on a helmet and a pair of knee-cops, but the cop-straps weren’t tight enough and they were sliding down his legs. Bardas smiled and walked towards them, but before he could start work someone ran past him, a tall man in a helmet and jack-of-plates, swinging a halberd and yelling at the top of his voice.

‘Theudas,’ he called out, but the boy wasn’t listening; he ran straight at Temrai like an arrow, and when one of the men lunged at him with a spear, he didn’t notice he’d been hit until he stopped moving, wedged up against the spear’s cross-bar. He tried to turn and slash at the spearman, but the spear-shaft was too long and he couldn’t quite reach, though he tried twice before he fell down. One of the other men jabbed him through the ear - the helmet had fallen off, being too small for him - and he stopped moving.

That’s not right
, Bardas thought, and he tried to open his eyes, but they were already open.

Temrai’s party was backing away, trying to get deeper into the encampment, where there were more bodies to put between their King and the Guelan. Bardas followed them for a few yards, until something that had been chafing at the back of his mind became clear. There were, he realised, fewer people here than he’d have expected to find. Wasn’t this supposed to be the entire plains nation, every last one of them? True, it was dark; but he hadn’t seen more than a few hundred men -

He understood.
Very clever
, he thought.
But I should have seen it coming.

By then it was too late. Someone down below gave some kind of signal, and the plains army broke out of cover, from tents and wagons, from supply pits and trenches; they had spears and halberds (copied from the Imperial pattern, the sincerest form of flattery) and they kept together in dense formation, pushing the Imperials away from the path and any prospect of escape. As the last of the decoys scampered out of the way (had they known that it was a trap and they were the bait? Bardas wondered; if it had been my plan, I wouldn’t have told them), the lines wheeled and extended - Imperial drill-sergeants couldn’t have done much better - to complete the encirclement. Meanwhile, reinforcements were coming up the path, led by Iordecai, the man who’d so helpfully opened the gates . . . That didn’t bode well; it implied that the pikemen who’d poured into the lower level had been driven off or killed.
Me and my sense of historical symmetry
, Bardas thought ruefully,
looks like I’m going to get what I wished for.
His wrists and forearms ached from the strain of handling the sword, all the jarring shock travelling down the blade from bone to bone (in a sense, the armour serves to prove the hammer) and the sweat, dripping down his forehead under the bevor of his helmet, was getting in his eyes. He closed them -
Now what do I do? -
but there was nobody home. From an abandoned cooking-fire nearby came the smell of coriander.