The Two of Swords, Part 16 Read online

  The Two of Swords: Part Sixteen

  K. J. Parker

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  orbitshortfiction.com

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by K. J. Parker

  Cover design by Kirk Benshoff

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: September 2017

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  ISBN 978-0-316-27195-0

  E3-20170818-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Extras Meet the Author

  About Orbit Short Fiction

  By K. J. Parker

  Orbit Newsletter

  ONE

  To Saevus Andrapodiza, all human life had value. This revelation came to him in a moment of transcendent clarity as he looked out from the summit of Mount Doson over the fertile arable plains of Cors Shenei in central Permia. Every man, woman and child, regardless of age, ability, nationality, religion, sexual orientation or social class was valuable and must be treated as such. His task, he realised, was finding someone to buy them all.

  As a native of East Permia, he was free from the restrictive laws of the two empires, where slavery had been illegal for a hundred and fifty years, ever since excessive reliance on servile labour had threatened to wipe out the yeoman class, from whom the Imperial army was almost exclusively drawn. In Permia, with the lowest level of population per square mile in the inhabited world, there were no such considerations. When Saevus embarked on his mission, the price of a field hand in Permia was nine oxen, thirty ewes or forty pigs, making good help unaffordable to the hard-working farmers who were the backbone of the nation. He set out to change all that.

  He considered the proposition from the supply end. Because Permia had been at peace with its neighbours for generations, the supply mostly came from breeders, who naturally had to recoup the costs of fifteen years of careful nurture, together with the ongoing expense of the brood stock. But there were wars practically everywhere else; stockades crammed with surrendered prisoners, the women and children of captured cities slaughtered simply because they weren’t worth anything to anybody. Prices at the pithead, so to speak, were ridiculously cheap; the real expense lay in transporting the goods to Permia, across some of the worst roads in the world.

  Perhaps Saevus’ greatest gift was his vision, his ability to see clearly, his sense of perspective. Before he entered the business, slave caravans limped through the high mountain passes between Rhus and Permia in gaggles of ten or twenty, moving at the pace of the slowest lame man or sickly child; and why? Because the traders were small operators, undercapitalised, inefficient. Saevus had a ship built, at that time the biggest merchant vessel ever constructed. With a full load of seven hundred, it could cover the distance between Aelia Major and Permia in ten days, as opposed to the six weeks needed by an overland caravan to cover the same distance. The cost of the ship was staggering, but, from the moment its keel bit the surf, Saevus was saving money. Marching rations of a pound and a half of barley bread per day for six weeks amounted to sixty-one pounds of bread, at a cost of an angel sixteen. Shipboard rations, a generous pound per day for ten days – ten pounds, nineteen stuivers, a saving of eighty-five per cent. Furthermore, the mortality rate overland was between forty and sixty per cent, so half the outlay was liable to be wasted, expensive bones bleaching by the roadside, dead loss. Aboard Saevus’ ship, the death rate was a trivial fifteen per cent.

  War is always with us; even so, it wasn’t long before Saevus Andrapodiza had dried up the pool of young, able-bodied men available for purchase, or at least generated a demand that far outstripped supply. By keeping his prices to the end user as low as he possibly could, he’d stimulated the Permian economy, doubling grain yields in under a decade, with the result that more and more Permians were able to afford a slave, or two, or five. Land which since time immemorial had been dismissed as useless was now coming under the plough, as thousands of reasonably priced hands swung picks and mattocks, shifting millions of tons of stones and hacking out terraces on windswept hillsides. More and better farms called for more and better tools, which someone had to make, from materials that someone had to fell or mine; and more money in circulation meant more people could afford the better things in life, and the craftsmen who supplied them couldn’t cope without help. Permia was crying out for manpower, but all the wars in the world couldn’t keep pace. For a while, Saevus looked set to be the victim of his own success.

  It’s a true measure of the man that he made this setback into an opportunity. Obviously, perfect physical specimens were the ideal; but life, he argued, isn’t like that. Take any small family-run farm or workshop; look at who actually does the work. It’s not just the man and his grown-up son. Everyone is involved – women, children, the old folks, the feeble, the sick. Saevus often talked about a farm he’d visited as a boy, where the farmer’s aunt, seventy years old and missing an arm, still made a precious contribution keeping an eye on the sheep, collecting the eggs, leading the plough-horses, sorting through the store apples. Everyone is valuable – not necessarily of equal value, it goes without saying, but that’s just a matter of appropriate pricing, and there were smallholders and small-scale artisans who’d be glad of any help they could get, assuming the price was one they could afford to pay. What was more, these hitherto neglected categories of livestock came with hidden benefits. Children grew into adults. Old men had skills and valuable experience. Many women had significant recreational as well as practical value. A one-legged crone might look like she’s not worth her feed, but she’s bound, over the course of a long life, to have learned how to do something useful, and you don’t need two legs to card wool or ret flax or plait straw or sort and bag up nails: all the tedious, repetitive, time-devouring little jobs that somehow have to get done if the householder’s hard work in the field or at the workbench is to be turned into money.

  Saevus built a fleet of new ships, each one capable of transporting twelve hundred head, with a ninety per cent survival rate. The unit cost of getting a potential worker from battlefield or burned-out city to Permia fell by a breathtaking thirty-seven per cent. As his overheads fell, so did his prices. Now, practically everybody could afford to own a functional, useful human being.

  Sadly, Saevus didn’t live to see the outbreak of the East–West war, but his son Sae
vus II, universally known as Saevolus, was ideally placed to take full advantage when the Eastern emperor Glauca repealed the anti-slavery laws throughout his dominions, shortly followed by his nephew in the West. And only just in time. War losses and economic devastation had led to attrition of manpower on such a scale that it was virtually impossible to make up the losses of the endless sequence of major battles, or keep anything like a serious army in the field. Slave labour, however, would enable the empires to take thousands of men from the plough and the forge, freeing up whole regiments for service, while ensuring uninterrupted supply of equipment and materiel for the war effort from slave-staffed State arsenals.

  The simple inscription on the base of Saevus’ statue reads: He saw the worth of every man. We shall not look upon his like again.

  When Procopius (the great composer) was fourteen years old his uncle sent him to the Imperial Academy of Music at Tet Escra to study harmonic theory under the celebrated Jifrez. Aware that the journey would involve crossing the notorious Four Fingers Pass, Procopius’ uncle provided him with an escort of six men-at-arms, two archers, a personal attendant and a cook; he also sent with them the full cost of his nephew’s tuition and maintenance, five thousand angels in gold. A cautious man, he had made proper enquiries about the eight soldiers, and the servant had been with the family for many years. The cook was a last-minute addition to the party. He seemed like a respectable man, and he came recommended by a noble family in the south.

  The party crossed the Four Fingers without incident and began the long climb down Castle Street to the river valley. On the fourth day, just before sunrise, Procopius woke up to find the cook standing over him with a filleting knife in his hand.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. The cook bent down and stabbed at him with the knife.

  It was probably his phobia about blades that saved him. He rolled sideways as the blow fell, so that the knife struck him on the shoulder rather than in the hollow between the collarbones, as the cook had intended. The cook yelled at him and tried to stamp on his face; he caught his attacker’s foot with both hands and twisted it, toppling him; then he jumped up and ran, passing the dead bodies of the soldiers and his servant, all with their throats cut. The cook threw the knife at him, but it hit him handle first, between the shoulders. He kept running, until he was sure the cook had given up chasing him.

  Although he’d escaped the immediate danger, his situation was about as bad as it could be. The cut in his shoulder was bleeding freely. He was still five days from the nearest known settlement, with nothing except his shirt. His feet were bare. The surrounding countryside was shale rock, with a few clumps of gorse. He had no idea if there were any streams running down off the mountain; he couldn’t see any, and was reluctant to leave the road to go exploring. It was a reasonably safe assumption that the cook would be following the road – where else would he go? – and he would be on horseback, most likely armed with a selection of the dead soldiers’ weapons. Procopius had never fought anyone in his life. He seriously considered staying where he was and waiting for the cook to find him and kill him; he was going to die anyway, and a knife would be quicker and easier than hunger, exposure or gangrene. It was only the thought that, if he let himself be killed, the cook would prevail and thereby in some vague sense prove himself the better man; the sheer unfairness of it that convinced him to keep going and do his best to survive.

  Fortuitously, the road at this point was steep and made up of loose, dry stones; a horseman would have little advantage over a man on foot. He kept up the best pace he could manage, stopping only to listen for the sound of his pursuer, until nightfall. Then he left the road and hid as best he could in the gorse, waiting for sunrise. He was so tired he fell asleep for a few hours, but was wide awake long before the sun rose.

  As soon as it was light enough to see by, he carefully made his way back uphill, parallel to the road, about fifty yards off on the eastern side, until he reached the place where the cook had camped for the night. He covered his advance by using the cook’s horse as cover. He took an arrow from the quiver hanging from the saddle, crept in slowly and quietly and stabbed the cook through the ear without waking him.

  He made an effort to cover the body with stones but soon gave up; the clouds were gathering, and he understood the merit of getting as far along the road as he could before the rain started to fall. As well as the money, the cook had brought two full waterskins and a sack of food, mostly cheese, dried sausage and apples; also two blankets and an oilskin cape. There were also various weapons, but Procopius left them behind, as he had no idea how to use them. He took a small knife and the cook’s boots, which were much too big for him.

  The next two days were fairly straightforward, although he led the horse rather than rode it, even though his feet were horribly sore. On the third day, however, he came to the place where the Blacklode crossed the road. Heavy rain on the Four Fingers had swollen the normally shallow river into a flood. Procopius had no experience with such matters, but he recognised at once that he had no hope of crossing the river in that state. With no map, he had no way of knowing if there were any alternative fords or crossings. He’d been careful with the food, but at best he had just enough for another four days. He couldn’t get his head far enough round to see properly, but he had an idea that the wound in his shoulder had gone bad; it was warm and tender to the touch and hurt more now than it had earlier, and he felt weak and decidedly feverish. He decided that honour had been satisfied by his defeat of the cook, and there was nothing inherently shameful in this situation about death by exposure. He sat down beside the river, cleared his mind and fell asleep.

  He woke up to find a man leaning over him, in more or less the same attitude as the cook. This time, though, he didn’t instinctively flinch, mostly because he was too weak and sick to move. He noticed that the stranger wasn’t holding a knife.

  “You all right?” the stranger said.

  “No.”

  The stranger frowned. “How’d you get yourself all cut up like that?”

  Procopius took a deep breath and explained, as lucidly as he could; he’d been sent on a journey with a large sum of money, one of the servants had tried to kill him for the money but he’d managed to get away, and now here he was, lost and alone and very sick. The stranger nodded, to show he’d understood.

  “Will you help me?” Procopius asked. “Please?”

  The man smiled. “Wish I could,” he said. “But don’t worry, it’ll be all right. What happened to your face? It’s a real mess.”

  Procopius explained that, when he was eighteen months old, his father had murdered his mother and then tried to kill him too. “Is that right?” the stranger said. “You’ve had a pretty rough old time, one way and another. Still, it’ll all come right in the end. Believe it or not, you’ll look back on all this someday and understand it was all for the best.”

  “Look,” Procopius said, “please, can you help me? At least give me a leg up so I can get on the horse. I haven’t got the strength.”

  The stranger smiled. “In that case, that horse isn’t much use to you, is it? So, really, I might as well have it, save me footslogging it all the way to the nearest town to fetch help. I hate walking. I get blisters.”

  “You can’t have it.”

  “Sorry.” The stranger’s smile grew wider, if anything. “You can’t use it, and you can’t stop me taking it, so tough. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll buy it off you.”

  “I don’t want to sell it. I need it.”

  “No you don’t,” the stranger said gently. “But I’m going to give you a good price for it. I’m no thief.”

  He gathered the reins, put his foot in the stirrup and hoisted himself into the saddle. All the provisions and the other stuff were in the saddlebags. “It’ll be all right,” he said, “I promise you. You’re going to be fine, just you wait and see.”

  Procopius watched him until he was out of sight; a long time, because, from where he was
, he could see the road for ten miles, so at least an hour, during which time the horse and rider gradually grew smaller and further away before dwindling down into a dot, and then nothing. During that long time, he resolved not to die, because he needed to follow the thief, catch up with him and deal with him the way he’d dealt with the cook, for roughly the same reason. But this time it looked as though that wasn’t going to be possible. He was getting weaker, it was harder and harder to stay awake; when he wasn’t burning hot he was freezing cold, and, really, what was the point? His weakness had proved him to be inferior. If he didn’t deserve to live, he didn’t deserve to live. Simple as that.

  He woke up lying in the bed of a cart. The driver and his wife were taking a load of cheese to market; you poor thing, they said, whatever happened to you? And they were very kind and looked after him, they took him to the inn at Loscobiel and stayed with him until he was better, and then took him on to Tet Escra, where he was able to get a letter of credit from his uncle’s bank that made good his losses and enabled him to give the cheesemonger and his wife a proper reward, appropriate to his dignity and station in life, so that was all right.

  On his first day at the Academy, he presented the Principal with a manuscript: a flute sonata in three movements. He didn’t mention the background to the piece, how the shape of it had come to him as he lay among the rocks hoping to die, after the thief stole his horse, because that wasn’t relevant, and he didn’t suppose the Principal would be interested. The Principal put the manuscript on his desk and said he’d be sure to look at it some time, when he had a moment.

  Two days later, he was sent for.

  “Did you write this?” the Principal asked him. He looked fierce, almost angry.

  “Yes,” Procopius said.

  “Think carefully, and I’ll ask you again. Did you write this?”

  “Yes.”

  “All on your own?”