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  The Company

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  Tags: 01 Fantasy

  The Company by KJ Parker Published by Orbit UK, October 2008 448 Pages So: the war’s over, the soldiers return home – what happens next? K J Parker’s latest standalone novel examines such a situation, not often looked at but one clearly relevant in a Fantasy world: what happens to soldiers after the fighting is over? The basic story here (though to be fair, KJ’s stories are rarely basic) deals with a company of men, skilled in their wartime efforts, who all (or nearly all) have gone back to their homes and their civilian lives. As you might expect, life outside the army is quite different. The impression given here is that after the war, despite the company’s heroism, non-combatants either know little or are unimpressed now that things are returning to normal seven years after. There is a return to the relative simplicity of civilian life and the mundane actions of small village communities. Bravery counts for little. One of those returning, admittedly later than some of the others in this tale, is recently-retired Colonel (or at times General) Teuche Kunessin, commander of A Company. He has plans. Having leased the island of Sphoe upon his decommissioning, he plans to use the abandoned facilities there and create his own colony with all of his ex-comrades-in-arms. He returns to the village of his birth to recruit his compatriots – cattle farmer Kudei Gaion, defence school teacher Thouridos (nicknamed ‘Fly’) Alces, shopkeeper Aidi Proaipsen and tanner Muri Achaiois - and make good on a promise they made when in the army. His compadres, realising the strength of the bonds of wartime friendship, rather conveniently drop everything, sell up, buy resources and get hitched in order to make their future life of self-sufficiency a reality. Unfortunately, despite Colonel Kunessin’s reputation for being methodical and meticulous, (and being a KJ Parker novel) things do not go as planned. This is KJ Parker’s first standalone. For those who found The Engineer Trilogy too long and slow, this might be a better option. It has many of those signature touches of Parker – the slow delivery, the detached narrative, the details of how to make and build things, which this one does. It wouldn’t be a KJ Parker story unless it told us of such activities as how to build a boat, rebuild burnt-down buildings, go panning in a river, build cranes, herd cattle and smelt metal. As ever, KJ’s tale is an education as well as an entertainment, which can, in equal measures, intrigue and annoy. It also has that slow, yet painstaking, unravelling of a dark tale which KJ has achieved so well in previous books. Again, here it starts slowly but builds cleverly to its conclusion. It is an unsettling story, one which deals with the basest of human actions rather than holds the moral high ground. To some extent the novel subverts the usual Fantasy clichés to suggest some enigmatic ideas that may make the unwary reader uncomfortable. Strangely, despite initial appearances, it is not a tale of heroism, though the protagonists are wartime ‘heroes’. Instead, being KJ Parker at the author’s most cynical, it deals more with the darker values of avarice, greed, snobbery, deception, murder, adultery and cowardice. Though it tells tales of bravery it is more about survival, both in wartime and peacetime. We also see here another recurrent theme in Parker’s books, that of the importance of gender in this quasi-agrarian situation. There are very different roles for the sexes here, with wives that are bought and relationships are forged in a variety of logical yet rationally unemotional ways. The two are not always compatible. Without giving plot revelations away, their interactions and positions in this micro-society are an important part of this novel and Parker emphasises here how and why those differences between the soldiers and the soldier’s wives are important. On the SFFWorld forums I’ve précis’ed the book as ‘imagine Lost meets The Italian Job’. At its simplest, it is a survivalist tale combined with a meticulously designed if not executed crime caper. Not all is what it appears to be and much of the fun is watching unexpected things unfold. Though not as extraordinary as some might suggest, it is a very good book, though Parker’s singular worldview may not be for all. As has been said at times of Parker’s previous work, it is a bitter, dark, cynical tale, yet also a masterfully planned and executed book, one that builds on ever-revealing characterisation and back-story, leading slowly yet inexorably to its final conclusion. Many readers may not like the ending, and although you may not feel happy about it, it is, like Parker’s previous efforts, knowingly and coldly logical.

  The Company

  K.J. PARKER

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  By K. J. Parker

  THE FENCER TRILOGY

  Colours in the Steel

  The Belly of the Bow

  The Proof House

  THE SCAVENGER TRILOGY

  Shadow

  Pattern

  Memory

  THE ENGINEER TRILOGY

  Devices and Desires

  Evil for Evil

  The Escapement

  The Company

  K.J. PARKER

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  ORBIT

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Orbit

  Copyright © K. J. Parker 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those

  clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without

  the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

  in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published

  and without a similar condition including this condition

  being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 7481 1388 0

  Typeset in Horley Old Style by M Rules

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

  Papers used by Orbit are natural, renewable and recyclable

  products made from wood grown in sustainable forests and certified

  in accordance with the rules of the Forest Stewardship Council.

  Orbit

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  www.hachettelivre.co.uk

  www.orbitbooks.net

  To Pete Thompson, transport officer, A Company,

  Brookwood irregulars, starer-down of lions, with thanks

  Acknowledgements

  I am most grateful to Jim Gibb, late of Imperial College, London, for the specifications of the gold-jar. If anyone doubts the accuracy of Mr Gibb’s calculations, I’d be happy to test them by practical experiment.

  Chapter One
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  The boatman who rowed him from the ship to the quay kept looking at him: first a stare, then a frown. Pretending he hadn’t noticed, he pulled the collar of his greatcoat up round his chin, a perfectly legitimate response to the spray and the cold wind.

  “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” the boatman asked.

  “Wouldn’t have thought so,” he replied.

  The boatman’s frown deepened. He pulled a dozen strokes, then lifted his oars out of the water, letting the back-current take the boat the rest of the way. “I do know you,” the boatman said. “Were you in the war?”

  He smiled. “Everybody was in the war.”

  The boatman was studying his collar and the frayed remains of his cuffs, where the rank and unit insignia had been before he unpicked them. “Cavalry?” the boatman persisted. “I was in the cavalry.”

  “Sappers,” he replied. It was the first lie he’d told for six weeks.

  He felt the boat nuzzle up to the quay, grabbed his bags and stood up. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Two quarters.”

  He paid three - two for the fare, one for the lie - and climbed the steps, not looking back. The smell was exactly as he remembered it: seaweed, rotting rope, cod drying on racks, sewage, tar. It would’ve been nice if just one thing had changed, but apparently not.

  As he walked up the steep cobbled hill, he saw a thick knot of people blocking his way. Never a good sign. It was just starting to rain.

  It was as he’d feared. The short, fat man in the immaculate uniform was almost certainly the harbourmaster; next to him, two thin men who had to be his clerks; the old, bald man had the constipated look of a mayor or a portreeve. Add two guards and a tall, scared-looking youth who was presumably someone’s nephew. At least they hadn’t had time to call out the town band.

  No chance of slipping past. He didn’t look at them directly. At ten yards, they stood at sort-of-attention. At five yards, the presumed harbourmaster cleared his throat. He was actually shaking with fear.

  “General Kunessin,” he said, in a squeaky little voice. “This is a tremendous honour. If only we’d had a little more notice . . .”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” he replied; his polite-to-nuisances voice. “Listen, is there somewhere I can hire a horse and two mules?”

  Looking rather dazed, the harbourmaster gave him directions: through the Landgate, second on your left, then sharp right—

  “Coopers Row,” he interrupted. “Thanks, that’s fine.”

  The harbourmaster’s eyes opened very wide. “You’ve been here before then, General?”

  “Yes.”

  One thing that had changed in seventeen years was the cost of hiring a horse in Faralia. It had doubled. All the more surprising because, as far as he could tell, it was the same horse.

  “Is this the best you’ve got?” he asked. “I’ve got a long way to go.”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  The horse shivered. It wasn’t a particularly cold day. “Thanks,” Kunessin said. “Forget the horse and make it three mules.”

  The groom looked at him; cheapskates aren’t welcome here. Kunessin smiled back. “How’s your uncle, by the way?” he asked pleasantly. “Keeping well?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Two things, then. “Not that one,” he said, “it’s lame.” He counted out two dollars and nine turners. “Thank you so much,” he said.

  The groom handed him the leading reins. “Do I know you?”

  “No,” he replied, because at six and a half turners per half-dead mule per day, he was entitled to a free lie. “I’m a perfect stranger.”

  Climbing the hill eastwards out of town, his feet practically dragging on the ground as the mule panted mournfully under his weight, he thought: hell of a way for the local hero to travel. And that made him laugh out loud.

  Because he took a long loop to avoid Big Moor, it took him two and a half hours to reach Ennepe, at which point he got off the mule and walked the rest of the way, to save time.

  No change, he thought. Even the gap in the long wall was still there, a little bit bigger, a few more stones tumbled down and snug in the grass. Seventeen years and they still hadn’t got around to fixing it. Instead, they’d bundled cut gorse into the breach and let the brambles grow up through the dead, dry branches. He smiled as he pictured them, at breakfast round the long kitchen table: one of these days we’d better fix that gap in the wall, and the others all nodding. Seventeen years; seventeen years slipping by, and they’d never found the time. For some reason, that made him feel sad and rather angry.

  Walking down the drove, Stoneacre on his left, he could see Big Moor clearly in the distance. Seventy-five acres of bleak, thin hilltop pasture, a green lump. It cost him a good deal of effort to avoid looking at it, but he managed.

  At the point where the drove crossed the old cart road (now it was just a green trace in the bracken; by the look of it, the lumber carts didn’t come this way any more), he saw a boy sitting on a fallen tree, staring at him. He pushed his hat back a little, to show his face, and called out, “Hello.”

  The boy’s head dipped about half an inch. Otherwise he didn’t move. Kunessin understood the look on the boy’s face all too well: the natural distrust of newcomers, at war with the furious curiosity about a stranger, in a place where strangers never came.

  “There’s a stray ewe caught in the briars up at the top, just past the deer track,” he said. “One of yours?”

  The boy studied him for three heartbeats, then nodded a full inch. His lips moved, but “thanks” didn’t quite make it through. He stood up, but didn’t walk.

  “You’ll be Nogei Gaeon’s boy,” Kunessin said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m on my way up to the house now. Is he likely to be in the yard, this time of day?”

  Desperate hesitation; then the boy shook his head. “He’ll be up at the linhay,” he replied, “feeding the calves.”

  “Over Long Ridge?”

  The boy’s eyes widened; he couldn’t understand how a stranger would know the names of the fields. “Thanks,” Kunessin said. “How about your uncle Kudei? Where’d he be?”

  The boy gave him a long, frightened look. “You from the government?”

  Kunessin grinned. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said.

  He left the boy and carried on down the hill until he reached the top gate of Castle Field, which led into Greystones, which led into Long Ridge. The hedges were high, neglected, and they shielded him from the sight of Big Moor.

  (Well, he thought, I’m home, as near as makes no odds; the last place on earth I want to be.)

  Then, before he was ready, he was standing at the top of the yard, looking down the slope. Directly in front of him was the old cider house, which had finally collapsed. One wall had peeled away, and the unsupported roof had slumped sideways, the roof-tree and rafters gradually torn apart by the unsupportable weight of the slates; it put him in mind of the stripped carcass of a chicken, after the meal is over. A dense tangle of briars slopped out over the stub of the broken wall, and a young ash was growing aggressively between the stones. It must have happened so slowly, he thought: neglect, the danger dimly perceived but never quite scrambling high enough up the pyramid of priorities until it was too late, no longer worth the prodigious effort needed to put it right. There would have been a morning when they all came out to find it lying there, having gently pulled itself apart in the night. They’d have sworn a bit, shaken their heads, accepted the inconvenience and carried on as before.

  A man came out of the back door of the house: tall, bald, slightly stooped shoulders. He was carrying a large basket full of apples. Halfway across the yard he stopped and looked up. For a moment he stayed quite still; then he put the basket down. Kunessin walked down to meet him.

  “Oh,” the man said. “It’s you.”

  Kunessin smiled. “Hello, Euge,” he said. He noticed that the apples in the basket were all wr
inkled, some of them marked with brown patches. Forgotten about, left too long in store, spoiled, now only fit for the pigs.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “Visiting,” Kunessin replied. “Where’s Kudei?”

  Euge Gaeon nodded in the direction of the foul, wet pasture beyond the house. “You still in the army?” he asked.

  “No,” Kunessin said. “I retired. How’s the farm?”

  Euge shrugged, as if the question didn’t make sense: might as well ask, how are the mountains? Just behind him, a rat scuttled across the yard and vanished into a crack in the feed store wall.

  “You staying long?” Euge asked.

  Kunessin shook his head. “Flying visit,” he said.

  Well, at least he’d made somebody happy today. He left Euge to his melancholy task, rounded the back porch of the house (the midden was buried under the finest crop of nettles he’d ever seen in his life, but he could just see the remains of a dead sheep, and a large clot of sodden chicken feathers), climbed over the back rails and squelched across the small orchard to the beech-hedged bank that divided it from Little Moor. There was no gate in the gateway; instead, four or five broken willow hurdles had been wedged together and tied to each other with flax twine. He climbed over, grazing his ankle in the process, and saw a man in the distance.

  Kudei Gaeon was standing a few yards from the single oak tree that grew in the top left corner of the field. He was watching a handsome heifer calf, which he’d clearly just tied to the tree with three feet of rope. The calf was tugging furiously, its feet dug into the soft ground, leaning back with all its weight, its head turned sideways. Ten yards or so beyond, a thin cow was watching, angry but too apprehensive to get involved. Kudei took a piece of rag from his coat pocket and bound it round his left hand; rope burns, Kunessin supposed.