The Proof House (70 page)

Shock and exhaustion caught up with him halfway between the fortress and the camp, and he dropped down in the dirt, unable to move. The extreme elation he’d felt at getting out of the trap was wearing thin. All he could think about was the weight of his legs and the pain in his knees. He lay still for half an hour, his eyes shut (if anybody stumbled over him they’d assume he was dead). There was nothing to see behind his eyelids any more, and nothing existed outside his painful, overworked body.

Then it began to rain, and when he was soaked to the skin and hardly able to see for the water running down his forehead and into his eyes, it occurred to him that there were tents back at the camp, and rather more comfortable places to rest. Standing up proved to be a major operation, involving the co-ordination of a number of complex manoeuvres that his body no longer seemed capable of. Because the rain was particularly wet and cold, however, he found a way to pull things together, and limped back to the camp dragging his left foot, which had suddenly decided that it had got itself sprained at some unspecified stage.

The bed looked wonderfully comfortable but it was too far away, so he dropped into his chair and let his head roll forward on to his chest. Nobody seemed to have noticed that he was back, which was a relief; there would be an unendurable amount of work to be done (and no Theudas to help him) and he couldn’t face doing it now. He closed his eyes, glad of the dark, but the ache in his muscles and joints was far too dominant in his mind to allow him to fall asleep. Nonetheless he was just starting to slip away into an intermediate doze when he felt something pricking the back of his neck. It might have been a thorn, or a sliver of steel from his mangled armour, but he didn’t think so. ‘Hello?’ he said.

‘Hello yourself.’

The voice was familiar. ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

‘Me. Iseutz Hedin, Niessa’s daughter. Remember me?’

‘Of course,’ Bardas replied without moving. ‘How did you get here?’

‘The usual way, by ship,’ she replied. ‘We had the wind behind us all the way, which made for a quick but exciting trip. But I can see you’re not really interested, so I’ll kill you and be done with it.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ Bardas said, and the fear made him slur his words slightly, the way a man does when he’s not drunk but not sober either. ‘I can’t remember, did we ever talk about this? I’d like to know why you hate me so much.’

‘Easy. You ruined my life.’

‘All right,’ Bardas said, ‘but it was a fair fight, you’d have killed me if I hadn’t—’

‘I’m not talking about that,’ Iseutz interrupted. ‘Sure, cutting off my fingers didn’t exactly make me love you, but as you say, it was a fair fight; that’s not the reason, as well you know.’

Bardas could feel his hands aching, weak with both exertion and terror. ‘So you’re still angry with me because I killed your uncle—’ He couldn’t remember the man’s name. Something Hedin. Tactless to betray the fact he’d forgotten it. ‘Really? After all this time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh. But that was a fair fight too; come on, you were a law-fencer yourself for a while. Really, I don’t see the difference.’

He heard Iseutz breathe out through her nose (all terribly familiar, this; knives in the dark, not being able to see the enemy, having to rely on sounds and smells - and yes, she’d recently eaten something flavoured with coriander). ‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘I’m not surprised. You should try listening to people when they tell you things. I said I’m going to kill you because you ruined my life. And you did.’

One thing about fear he’d forgotten: the way it saturates everything else in your mind, like lamp-oil spilt on a pile of papers. ‘But really, that doesn’t follow,’ he said. ‘The City would still have fallen whether I’d killed him or not; your life would still have been messed up. Dammit, if you want to play logic games, try this: if I hadn’t killed your uncle, would you have been in that alleyway the night the City fell? Because if the answer’s no, you’d have been killed. I
saved
your bloody life, remember? Doesn’t that count for anything?’

‘You didn’t do me any favours.’

The fear was getting worse, not better. There are hysterical women with knives who say they’re going to kill you and then talk at you instead; they don’t inspire fear in the hearts of men who can carve a path through an enemy army while thinking about something else. But he was definitely scared of Iseutz, almost to the point of speechlessness and loss of bladder control. After all, she was his niece; if there was anything in heredity, he was in serious trouble.

‘You’ve lost me,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you explain, instead of making me guess?’

‘All right, I’ll explain.’ She was leaning on the knife a little harder. ‘It’s quite simple, really. You made me into
this
.’ (Listen to the disgust she managed to load into that one little word.) ‘You made me what I am today, Uncle Bardas. I’ll say this for you, you’re a hell of a craftsman. You made my cousin Luha into a bow, and you’ve made me into another sort of weapon, you made me into a Loredan. Thank you
very
much.’

Bardas’ mouth was full of something that tasted foul. He swallowed it. ‘Be fair,’ he said. ‘Your mother did that, not me.’

‘Oh, she started it, which is why she’s definitely not a good insurance risk. But I got away from her, I was going to be a Hedin instead, until you interfered. That’s why I’m going to kill you.’

‘I see,’ Bardas said. ‘And won’t killing me just make you more of what you don’t want to be?’

‘No,’ Iseutz said. ‘Loredans don’t kill family. Uncle Gorgas, now; you murdered his son and he forgave you. You had a chance to kill me, but you didn’t. Mother could’ve had me put down any time she chose, but she didn’t. It’s not our way.’ She laughed. ‘The more I think about it, the more I get the impression I’ll be doing you a kindness. Come on, Uncle Bardas, what possible reason could you have for wanting to stay alive? If I’d done half the things you’ve done, I’d die of exhaustion through never being able to sleep. Your life must be really horrible; I mean, mine’s bad enough and I’ve hardly even started.’

‘What a thing to say,’ Bardas replied. ‘Consequences aside, I can’t think of a single thing I’ve done that I didn’t do for the best.’

‘That wasn’t a very sensible thing to say, in the circumstances. ’

‘Really?’ Bardas was just about able to keep himself from shaking like a dog that’s just climbed out of a pond, but it was hard work. ‘I don’t think so. You aren’t really going to kill me. If you were I’d be dead by now.’

‘You reckon?’ Iseutz said, and jammed the knife home.

Later, Bardas decided that it made up for all the mistakes he’d made that day, that one deftly planned tactical success. By provoking her so skilfully, he’d at least known exactly when the thrust was going to happen. This made it possible for him to jerk his head forward and sideways - he still got a horrendous gash across the base of his scalp, but it wasn’t enough to die of - while simultaneously shoving hard with both feet to slam the back of the chair into where he hoped her solar plexus was likely to be. With the same impetus he threw himself to the ground, rolled and grabbed at the place where (provided nobody had moved it) Theudas’ penknife ought to be, in his writing-tray on the floor. After three years in the mines it was second nature, easier to do in the dark by feel and memory than if he were in the light and able to see. The knife-hilt found his hand and the act of throwing it was a continuation of the retrieve - economy of movement, an essential in the mines. He heard the impact and the gasp of pain - bad, because if she could cry out, he’d missed - but he was already reaching for the scimitar he’d left lying on the map-table.

She said, ‘Uncle Bardas, no . . .’ Then he heard the wet crunch of steel cutting flesh and sinew, the sharp edge compressing the fibres and shearing them. ‘Thank you,’ he said instinctively, and waited (always count to ten before moving; another valuable lesson he’d learned in the mines) before lowering the scimitar, getting up and groping for the tinder-box and the lamp.

She was dead by the time he had a light; cutting the neck vein is messy but quick. There was fear in her eyes too, probably that last-second realisation that she had wanted to live after all (he’d seen it so often). Her mouth was open and she’d thrown the knife away; but in the dark, of course, he couldn’t have been expected to see that. Theudas’ penknife had slit her cheek open, a gaudy but trivial flesh-wound like the one she’d given him. He stood and looked at her for a while. One less Loredan. Well.

So it goes on
, he thought,
so it goes on. And now I’ve got a dead girl in my tent.
She’d fallen, needless to say, across the bed, which was now fairly comprehensively saturated with blood. So he slept in the chair instead.

 

Away from the fighting, in peace and quiet; he felt like he couldn’t remember a time when there hadn’t been dust and the constant pounding of the trebuchets.

He remembered this place from years before. He’d been about ten years old, the whole family had gone off for the day after a distant, unconfirmed rumour of geese on the flooded levels; there weren’t any geese, of course, but they did find wild strawberries and some mushrooms that Uncle maintained were edible. As was usually the way on these occasions, they brought more food with them than they took back, but that wasn’t really the point. Though nobody would have put it in quite those terms, it was about getting away from the rest of the clan for a while, a token act of separation. They were the only family he knew who did such things; it was regarded as a rather quaint eccentricity, and nobody ever asked if they could come too.

He remembered the cave; well, cave was an overstatement, the scrape under a rock where there’d been plenty of room for a ten-year-old to crawl in and imagine he was living in a
house
, one of those strange, non-mobile dwellings the Enemy lived in, when they weren’t being the enemy.

He remembered it because of the strange feeling of security it gave him; walls that were rock and clay, not felt. One day, he thought, I’d like to live in a
house
. And so he had, years later, until the Enemy (another Enemy, but the same one) came to Ap’ Escatoy and pulled his house down into their cave.

He remembered it also because while they were away from the clan, the Enemy had raided the camp; it was the day they killed Temrai’s mother and rode off most of the herd, causing the famine that killed off so many people that winter. He remembered what it had been like riding back into the camp, seeing the scraps of burned felt flapping from the charred poles, the bodies left lying because there were so many of them it would take a whole day to clear up - he frowned, superimposing that memory on what he’d just seen.

(He’d seen a lot over the years, and remembered more of it than he’d have chosen; but that’s what a spy does. He sees, and remembers; and then does what he’s told.)

The scrape was still there (no reason why it shouldn’t be); it was smaller than he remembered, but plenty big enough to shelter him for the rest of the night and give him somewhere to work. He tied his horse to the thorn-tree (still there too; but it was nearly dead now), unslung his saddlebag and crawled into the dark tunnel.

The tinder flared at the third attempt (outside it had started to rain). He lit his lamp, then the little oil-stove that had belonged to his uncle. It flickered rather alarmingly, but he had light and enough warmth to keep his hands steady. That was enough.

He took the meat out of the bag and looked at it; then fished in the saddlebag for the little wooden box that held his uncle’s most prized and mysterious treasure, the thin-bladed jointing and filleting knife.
Think twice, cut once
, he thought, then chose his spot for the first incision.

It was important to pace the work, easing the skin back with the forefinger of his left hand, working it off the bone with the flexible, razor-sharp blade in his right. He’d done similar work before, seen similar work done many times, and of course a certain degree of natural aptitude was in the blood. This was, however, an exceptional case, and it would be infinitely easier to avoid mistakes than to make them good later.

It was an awkward joint to skin, because of the curves and angles. Uncle had done harder jobs over the years - he was so good at this sort of thing that people brought him their special trophies of the hunt, their prize bucks and wolves and foxes, to be made into cloaks and rugs and blankets (though how anybody could want a blanket with the head still on he’d never been able to understand). He’d always found the sight fascinating, to see how the skin came off the bone, looking the same but completely different; and in his unformed mind he’d often speculated about that close relationship between the skin and what it covered, how the skin could be part of the whole and yet so easily separated. These reflections had led on to others - the nature of external and internal reality, the way that what lies underneath shapes the surface, the way the surface protects and contains and masks what’s inside. One paradox that had always amused him was the cuir-bouilli, thick, supple oxhide stripped off, boiled in wax and moulded to make armour that was nearly as effective as steel plate (because unlike the skin of steel, the cuir-bouilli had a memory; crush it and it flexed and returned to shape). He’d had a fantasy about a man boiled in wax until his skin became armour and no blade could bite him - impractical, of course, to make a defence for the outside that killed the inside. Nobody would ever try an experiment like that, and so the theory went unproven.

He carried on peeling and shaving until the last pinch of skin came away whole, and he was left with two separate objects; skin and bone. He looked up. The water was simmering in the pot, so he dropped the bone in, to boil out the meat and tissue (the final step would be to bleach the bone and burnish it), then he laid out the skin and reached in his saddlebag for the things he needed: salt, herbs and the pot of honey. The salt he smeared in a thick layer over the raw side of the skin; then he sprinkled on the herbs and rolled the skin up tightly, like a letter. Finally he cut the wax around the neck of the honey-jar, prised off the lid and submerged the roll in the honey. The lid went back, and he melted a little knob of wax with the lamp to seal it up again.