The Company Read online

  Kunessin smiled. “I’m eleven years older than you,” he said. “I was born on a farm a few miles north-west of town. All I ever wanted was to stay home, work hard, take over the farm eventually. But when I was a kid, they chose to fight a battle on our top pasture. We lost all our sheep, and because of all the dead bodies, the grazing was ruined and we had to sell the farm. My friend Kudei Gaeon’s family bought it; there’s a hell of a lot of brothers, all of them except Kudei with sons of their own now, so I’ll never get the farm back. Anyway, when we sold out I went off to military college, joined the army, the same time as my friends there. We fought in the war; when it was over, they came home but I stayed on, somehow got made a general, stuck it for as long as I could, then quit. Came back here, to see if I could get them to come with me to Sphoe. They agreed, and now we’re on our way. And there you have it.”

  At the end of Post Street, they turned left along the sea wall. The tide was in, and the waves were brown with dredged silt. He could see she was cold but wasn’t prepared to admit it.

  “Tell me about Sphoe,” she said.

  The speech got more fluent each time he made it; part of the fluency was an improvement in natural delivery, so that it sounded almost as though he was making it up as he went along. She was listening, but without making an effort to show him she was paying attention, and she stopped him four times to ask questions. When he’d finished, he said, “Well? What do you think?”

  “Could be worse.”

  He nodded. “What don’t you like about it?”

  “Oh, the obvious stuff,” she replied. “Being so far from home, strange place, people I don’t know very well, lack of creature comforts; and I don’t mind hard work, but I’m not going to pretend I enjoy it.” She frowned. “What exactly am I going to be expected to do once we’re there? Apart from being a brood sow, I mean.”

  He raised an eyebrow but let it pass. “Really, that’s up to you,” he said. “There’s basic housekeeping, of course, but as far as farm work goes, I don’t imagine we’ll need you out in the fields breaking up clods with a hoe. If you want to, you can be our chief clerk.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she replied. “So, how many of us will there be, exactly?”

  He explained about the indentured servants. “They’ll sign up for a minimum set term, for which they’ll be paid a fixed sum of money, which is already on deposit at the bank here. If they want to stay on, they can either sign up for a second term, or they can ask to be accepted as permanent members of the colony; that means they get a say in how it’s run and title to land. If they can afford it, they can bring in indentures of their own, but if they decide to quit and go home, they can’t sell up; their land reverts to the founders: that’s us. If everything goes well, in due course we’ll start inviting free settlers to join us, but that’s some way in the future. To begin with, until everything’s settled down and running smoothly, we want to be in control.”

  “I see,” she said. “So, not quite a model society, then.”

  “In time, maybe.” He shook his head. “The truth is, I want to settle down, but I haven’t seen anywhere I want to do it in. It’s like houses: if you can’t find one you like, you build one.”

  “Makes sense,” she said. “So, if you’ve got all these servants to do the work, what’ll you be doing all day?”

  He laughed. “Not all the work,” he said. “Just some of it, so we don’t kill ourselves hauling out tree stumps and breaking up unploughed land. There’s a certain minimum size the colony’s got to be if we don’t want to have to live like castaways after a shipwreck. The idea is to be sensible, make it as easy for ourselves as we possibly can and still live the way we want to. Which, I guess, is a reasonable definition of the model society.”

  “For you, yes.” She grinned at him. “That’s fine,” she said. “If you were a bunch of idealists, I’d be worried. And like I said, it’s got to be better than home.”

  They walked on a little further, until they could see the shipyard up ahead. “What was it like in the war?” she asked.

  He didn’t reply straight away. “It was great fun,” he said. “It was worse than anybody who wasn’t there could ever understand. It was boring as hell. It was so terrifying that sometimes you just lay on the ground and refused to move. It was about being quicker and smarter and stronger than anybody else in the whole world, and knowing no harm could possibly come to you, no matter what you did. It sounds unlikely, but fighting the enemy was almost beside the point. What I tend to remember is waking up in a ditch, in filthy clothes that’d been soaking wet for a week, starving hungry, constant diarrhoea, hardly any soles to your boots, and thinking: back home there’s tramps better off than we are, and we’re senior officers of the Grand Continental army. And then there was having to deal with the way that people disappeared: you’d spend a year with someone, practically every waking moment, till he was closer to you than family could ever be, and suddenly he’s not there any more.” He frowned, then said, “After all that, battles were a chance to let off steam, at least until the fear got to you. Once that started, you were done for, completely useless. Then it’d be up to the others to get you out of it in one piece.”

  “Did you kill a lot of people?”

  “I suppose so, yes. I didn’t keep score, or anything like that.”

  “Rough guess?”

  He thought for a moment. “Hundreds,” he said. “Probably not four figures. It’s like everything, a knack. And we were better at it than anybody else, on either side. We were specialists, you see. I won’t bore you with the details.” He looked away. “Before I joined up, I worked in the tannery. We used to buy in all the barren, worn-out cows that were too old to be worth eating. I did three months on the slaughtering line. There were five of us, standing in stalls. They’d drive a cow into the stall, and I’d kill it, smack it between the eyes with a poleaxe, then tie a rope round its legs so the crane could hoist it up to the next floor, where they’d flay it. We did eight an hour, ten hours a day, seven days a week, and you had to hit them just right and very hard indeed. It was exhausting. My friend Muri Achaiois worked in the tannery too. His job was to crack open the skulls and scoop out the brains, which is what they use to cure the hides. Bone is a lot tougher than most people think; it’s not like splitting logs. The closest thing to it I can think of is breaking very thick ice.”

  She frowned. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

  “You asked.”

  “So I did.”

  They walked on fifty yards in silence, then Kunessin said: “If it was up to you, would you have married me? Do you want to come with us?”

  She smiled. “That’s a non-question,” she said. “Like, if it was up to you, would you grow wings and fly like a bird? Well, yes, I would, but it’ll never happen. How about you? If it was up to you, would you die?”

  Kunessin sighed. “What I’m trying to say is, if you really can’t stand me, or if the thought of going to Sphoe is utterly appalling, I’m sure we could sort something out—”

  “It’s all right,” she interrupted him. “It really doesn’t matter. The way I see it, it’s always like the fairy tale - you know, the one where the hideous monster who lives in the castle in the forest forces the pretty peasant girl to come and live with him, or else he’ll do something horrible to her family; and guess what, time goes by and the monster turns out not to be so bad after all. I think that’s why arranged marriages are such a good idea. You’re so sure you’re going to get the monster, when he turns out to be just a human being, you’re so grateful and pleased you really do your best. But a girl I used to know, she married for love - there were the most terrible rows about it, but she got her way and married this man she was crazy about; and he was handsome and charming and sensitive and considerate and kind, but as soon as they got married, he turned out to be just a husband, after all. The difference was, she thought she’d got the monster - the fairy tale in reverse, you see. Reckoned she was r
eally hard done by. So,” she said briskly, turning to look him in the eye. “What do you think is the moral of this story?”

  “Well,” he said, furrowing his brow as though doing mental long division. “I think you’d probably see the whole issue quite differently if you hadn’t had the rotten bad luck to be born with that thing on your face. That said, I tend to agree with you. Also, I think you’ll do well on Sphoe. Maybe you’ll end up running the place.”

  She laughed. “Have we really got to go and look at the ship?”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “No. I have an idea I’ll be seeing quite enough of it in the next few weeks.”

  “Understood.” Kunessin turned on his heel; she blinked, as though amazed he could move so fast, so precisely. “Well, we’ve got the next two hours free. What would you like to do?”

  She thought for a while, then said: “What I’d really like is to get measured for two pairs of really comfortable yard boots. You know, ones that actually fit my feet. Ktesi Laon in Fishgate’ll have them made by noon tomorrow, and I can’t think of anything else that’d do more to improve my quality of life.”

  He laughed. “Good on you,” he said. “There’s an old saying in the service: an army marches on its feet. Never underestimate the crucial importance of good footwear.”

  For some reason that made her burst out laughing too; and Kunessin was reminded of how he’d felt in a battle when he’d looked round and seen the white helmet plumes of the cavalry in the distance, riding in to force open the crack in the line that he’d made, so he could pull back and rest.

  Chapter Six

  When Menin Aeide was thirteen years old, the war came back to the Bluewater valley. General Anculometin and the Seventh Militia, squeezed between the two wings of the enemy’s last and most desperate attempt to cut the loyalists in half and break through to the sea, fell back into the hill country where his predecessor had brought about his own total ruin six years earlier. Everyone, including General Anculometin, expected the militia to break and run when faced with massed pikes; but at Round Cop they held the line for six hours as the push of pike tried repeatedly to force the holm-oak woods on the steep western slope. Anculometin had already quit the field; ironically enough, he was caught and killed by an enemy scouting party as he withdrew his staff towards the imagined safety of the Aeide house. But the Seventh stayed put - as one veteran famously said afterwards, “We had no place to go” - and took their stand on the edge of Golden Hill Cover. At the end, when the archers had spent all their arrows, legend has it that the militiamen hacked at the oncoming pikes with felling axes and billhooks; rather more plausible are the accounts that lay stress on the marshy nature of the ground, where the surface water from the early autumn rain was soaking away down the valley, and the timely arrival of Auxin’s light cavalry on the north wing. Even those factors, important though they might have been, do not wholly explain the crucial and entirely unexpected victory won by the leaderless Seventh on that day. Round Cop may not have been the turning point of the war, though most contemporary accounts saw it as such, but it left the enemy high command unable to avoid the harsh truth that they no longer possessed sufficient resources to hold the territory they had already acquired, let alone take the war forward; the only sensible course left to them was to withdraw to the mainland in the best order possible in the circumstances.

  That was the day when Menin Aeide walked back from her aunt’s house in Faralia with the month’s supply of salt. Aunt had been in two minds about letting her go, because of the rumours of soldiers, but the Aeide family were due to kill the pig, and they needed the salt, and besides, the road back to Round Cop was straight across the ridge. If there were soldiers about, Menin would be bound to see them long before they saw her, in which case she was under strict orders to turn round and go straight back to town.

  Menin saw the soldiers as she came up on to the top road from the Woodcombe side. She immediately ducked behind a clump of gorse, before realising that they were at least a mile away. Furthermore, they were quite far down in the valley; she guessed they were following the course of the brook, in which case going back down into Woodcombe was the last thing she should do. If she kept to the top road, on the other hand, she could see everything that moved for miles around, and she was only about a mile from the dense woods of Cylinder Hill Top, where she was confident she could creep past unnoticed even if the woods were full of soldiers. If the worst came to the worst, there was always the cave under the waterfall; as far as she was aware, only she and her brothers knew it was there. She could hide in the cave till it got dark, then follow one of the rhines down to the edge of Culin’s duck ponds, and sprint the last half-mile home.

  But the soldiers stayed down in the valley. She was almost disappointed; she’d thought up such a good, sensible plan, but it wasn’t going to be needed after all. She saw more soldiers - loads and loads of them - in the distance, on Golden Hill, but nothing at all on her side of the Bluewater. She told herself that it was just as well and she was very lucky; also that her parents must be worried sick about her, and she really ought to get home as soon as possible.

  At Cylinder Beacon, she paused to look out at the sea. If you could see the top of Stickholm, five miles out from Faralia harbour, it was a sure sign that rain was coming, but grey clouds and a smear of sea mist blotted the island out completely, so the weather was headed further up the coast, to Letho and Ennea, semi-mythical places she’d never been to. She could still see the soldiers on Golden Hill. They didn’t seem to have moved in the last hour, so even if they left whatever it was they were doing and came charging straight at her, by the time they’d crossed the Bluewater she’d be safe in Cylinder Woods and as good as home. She sat down on an old, half-rotten tree stump, uncovered her basket and scrabbled around till she found the barley cakes that Aunt had put up for the family. Under normal circumstances, it’d be more than her life was worth to rob one. But, she decided, her parents would be so overjoyed to see her safe that one missing cake would hardly signify.

  There was a little dip in the road between the Beacon and Cylinder Cop. She’d forgotten all about it, until she came over the top. On the brow she stopped dead, suddenly terrified. It was only a little dip, only big enough to conceal two or three soldiers, but two or three would be plenty. Her brothers had told her all about what soldiers liked to do to young girls, and although she didn’t believe half of it, the other half was enough to give her nightmares. Ten more yards, and anybody down in the dip couldn’t help but see her, silhouetted against the skyline. She could run quite fast, but outrun a grown man? Hardly.

  Going back the way she’d come, on the other hand, was out of the question. The first lot of soldiers she’d seen would be in Woodcombe by now; for all she knew, they were coming up the lane making straight for the top road, and if she ran into them there she’d have nowhere to hide. Cylinder Woods, on the other hand, were only a couple of hundred yards away. If she could make it in there, she knew she’d be safe. She’d known them all her life; it was inconceivable that any harm could come to her in so familiar a place. All she had to do, she decided (it was hard to think with her heart beating so fast, and her stomach muscles knotted up like rope), was leave the road and sneak through the clumps of gorse and tussocks of couch grass. If there were soldiers in the dip, chances were they wouldn’t even see her, if she went quiet and steady. If they did, she stood a much better chance of getting away from them on the rough ground than on the road. Grown-ups weren’t very good at going fast through the couch bogs; they tripped over their feet or got stuck in the soggy patches, whereas she knew from long experience how to jump from tussock to tussock, and tread close to the clump roots where the going was soft. Taking a very deep breath - it was supposed to help, but it didn’t - she left the road and picked her way with exquisite care in a wide semicircle until she was well clear. Then, crouching down low, she crept over the brow of the ridge and looked anxiously down into the dip.


  She saw the horse first. It was off the road, no more than ten yards away, head down, nibbling delicately at the fine shoots of edible grass that grew under the crown of the couch tussock. She dropped down, nearly squashing her basket. A horse meant a rider, but she couldn’t see one. What she could see was that the horse’s front legs were tangled up in its own reins, effectively hobbling it. Deliberate? She didn’t think so; it was too messy to have been done on purpose. That implied that the horse had bolted, got caught up and come to a stop, unable to go any further. Still dangerous; a bolted horse’s rider might well come looking for it, if he was alive and capable of moving. Praying that she was as well hidden as she thought she was, she determined to stay perfectly still and quiet until something happened.

  Later, she was quite proud of the way she managed to stick to her resolution, in spite of the damp and her own fear and merciless cramp in her left leg. She hadn’t moved at all when the rider finally showed up.

  He’d been there all the time, but she hadn’t seen him because he was curled up in a soft patch under a clump of gorse. She saw him when he tried to move. First he lifted his head; then he reached out his arm (it was thin but very muscular, and filthy with bog mud), grabbed the stem of the gorse plant, and tried to drag himself along by it. He didn’t get very far. It was obvious he was exhausted, badly hurt or both; no danger to anybody, in any case.

  Even so, she managed to stay sensible. She crept forward, watching him intently for any sign that he’d noticed her, until she could see the glistening black mess of drying blood on the side of his head. She’d seen something like it before, when one of the woodcutters had been brought down to the house after a hanging branch dropped on his head. She’d had a good look at the damage, but Mother had sent her away after a while, so she wasn’t there to see him die. This man’s injury was just like the woodcutter’s; as bad, possibly worse.