The Belly of the Bow f-2 Read online

  He lifted his head and looked towards land. He recognised the island in front of him; it was the same view of Scona he’d had from the ship that brought him here. Seen from this angle, there was a passing resemblance to Perimadeia, except that there was no upper city and no dramatic backdrop; the mainland was a grey and green blur daubed across the skyline in a hurry, and not allowed to dry properly. Something was different, though. Not hard to work out what it was.

  Scona Town was in ruins. Smoke was rising from the mess where the buildings had been. The harbour was empty, and the warehouses that lined the quay weren’t there any more. Something prompted him to stand up and peer over the side of the ship, and in the water a few yards away he saw a dead body, floating on its face. There were quite a few of them, in fact; too sodden and deep in the water for him to be able to tell what nationality they were, or even if they were men or women. Just bodies; blood, bone and meat, with everything else taken away. It’s not often that we get to see our fellow humans as things rather than people, as nothing more than the sum of their organic parts. Even when they’re dead, humans are generally recognisable as having once been individuals, but hide the face and the indications of gender and the clothing and belongings that serve to classify and distinguish, and all that’s left is so much blood, bone and meat, so much raw material.

  There’s been a battle, then, Alexius rationalised. Bodies in the water ought to mean a sea-battle, or a bad storm. The burnt town suggests a battle, and the lack of ships in the harbour suggests they were launched to fight an enemy fleet or evacuate the town. Either there was a catastrophic fire followed by a terrible storm – and surely the storm would have put out the fire – or else there was a sea-battle followed by a successful attack on the Town. If that’s the case, though, you’d think the attackers must have been Shastel, but Shastel doesn’t have any ships.

  ‘Alexius,’ said a voice behind him. ‘What’s going on?’

  Gannadius. I’ve been trying to find you.

  ‘Have you? I wasn’t aware…’

  Oh, thank you very much. So what’s all this about you knowing more about the Principle than any man alive?

  ‘You mean what Machaera said? She’s just young, that’s all. A bad case of hero-worship.’

  I should say. And what’s all this? And what are you doing here?

  Gannadius sat down on the barrel and grinned feebly. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I come here quite a lot. I find it soothing.’

  Soothing? A burnt city and dead bodies? Are you out of your mind?

  ‘Certainly not,’ Gannadius replied, nettled. ‘And compared with what I’ve been getting lately, it’s wonderfully soothing. The end of the war, and all that. When you’ve been forced to live through graphic scenes of hand-to-hand combat and the massacre of unarmed civilians, a bit of calm sea and sunshine makes a pleasant change.’

  You’ve seen the rest of the war?

  Gannadius smiled sadly. ‘Seen it? I’ve been writing it. Or whatever you do when you make up a different future out of your head. And before you ask why in blazes I should want to do such a thing, it isn’t really me. Oh, I’ve orchestrated and choreographed it, but that’s just me being professional. No, it’s that confounded student of mine who dreamt all this up, in the rough, so to speak.’

  That girl? She’s managed to curse an entire island?

  ‘It looks depressingly like it,’ Gannadius replied. ‘Quite unprompted, and certainly without any help from me. In fact, without being too obvious about it I’ve been trying to sabotage it, or at least tone down the nastiest bits. I don’t think she’s noticed, or at least not yet.’ He scowled. ‘You wouldn’t want to see what it was like before; just scrambling and chopping and blood spurting everywhere. I suppose that’s how someone that age who’s read books and heard songs and never seen real fighting must visualise a battle; swords cleaving and men run through and heads rolling in the gutters or bounding down the streets like those stuffed leather balls we used to make when we were children. Quite ghastly, the whole thing.’

  And you want this to happen, do you?

  Gannadius shook his head vigorously. ‘But what can I do about it?’ he said. ‘On my own, not a great deal. That’s why I’ve been trying to find you.’

  Sorry, but you’ll have to leave me out of it. Taking a curse off just one man nearly killed me, if you remember. Taking a curse off a whole island would finish me off for sure. Gods, though, this Machaera must be a bloodthirsty little thing, something like that awful girl we had to deal with back home.

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ Gannadius sighed. ‘Timid, meek, polite, mousy creature, the sort that gets panic attacks trying to summon up the courage to ask a question after a lecture. If anything, that makes it even scarier, don’t you think?’

  Alexius nodded slowly. So tell me what happens, he said. Then we can start at the beginning and work out if there’s any practicable way of stopping it.

  ‘Quite straightforward,’ Gannadius said. ‘The Shastel fleet sails round the blind side of Scona island-’

  Just a moment, slow down. What Shastel fleet?

  ‘My sentiments entirely. But apparently there’s going to be one, and while it’s ferrying the army across the straits, out come the Scona ships and the fun starts. They sink fifteen Shastel ships, all of them crammed with soldiers, all drowned, and they set fire to another six. That’s before they’re all sunk.’

  Sunk. I see. Carry on.

  ‘It’s sheer weight of numbers, you see. It doesn’t matter how vastly superior the Scona ships are, because at the end of the day there’s just twenty-two of them, and any number of ours. Anyway, then the Shastel fleet forces a landing on the Strangers’ Quay – horrible business, that, we lose a lot of men there, but again we push through because we outnumber them so much. The rest of it’s just a great deal of killing. You can see the result over there.’

  Gannadius, this is horrible. We’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen.

  Gannadius gazed at him wearily. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘And how do we do that, exactly? You just spell it out in easy-to-follow stages and I’ll help as much as I possibly can. Well?’

  All right then, stop the girl. Make her see it’s wrong. Tell her to stop doing it. You’re her tutor, aren’t you? You ought to be able to control one young, timid student.

  ‘Oh, quite,’ Gannadius replied angrily. ‘Nothing simpler. And then she goes to the Dean and says, Doctor Gannadius saw I’d made up a victory for us in the war and told me to take it down again. They’d string me up from a lemon-tree and use me for javelin practice. No,’ he went on, ‘all I can think of that might work – and this is just guessing, mind – is killing her, and I can’t do that. Sorry.’

  Scona destroyed. Thousands dead on both sides. The Town burnt. Is there something in the life-cycle of towns and cities that makes a fiery death inevitable? Or is it more narrow than that? Say, just towns and cities I have anything to do with?

  ‘Besides,’ Gannadius went on, ‘I don’t think killing her would solve anything. No, if we want to head this off, it’s not her we should be talking to, it’s someone quite other.’

  Such as?

  ‘Such as the man behind the invasion, the man who leads the army and directs the fleet. And that’s where you come in, I think.’

  Me? Why?

  A wild grin spread over Gannadius’ face. ‘You,’ he said, ‘because the general’s name is Bardas Loredan.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Machaera woke up from the dream she could never remember, the one with the smoke and the killing and the man calling her name… Gone again. She didn’t mind in the least not being able to remember that one. It wasn’t the sort of thing any sane person would want to carry about in her head.

  She yawned and sat up. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep; she still had a third of Heraud’s Responsibility and Volition to prepare for Moderations, which were getting depressingly close. True, she was ahead of the rest of her year in Applied Science and Lesser Arts,
but she’d spent so much time lately on projections and the like that she was weeks behind on her required reading, and Best Authors was the first test in Moderations. Even with all the practical work, she would have been able to cope if it wasn’t for all the wretched headaches. According to the lodge Orderly, they might well be something to do with reading in a bad light, in which case she’d only be rid of them if she did her reading during the day. Maybe it would be best if she gave up the practical work for a while, at least until after Moderations. After all, Applied Science was only fifteen per cent of the marks.

  She tilted the water jug towards her and saw it was empty. With a sigh she picked it up and trotted down the spiral staircase to the rainwater tank in the courtyard to fill it. She was just straightening up with a full jug in her arms when she heard a voice behind her.

  ‘Hello,’ it said. ‘There you are. So where have you been hiding the last few weeks?’

  She sighed. ‘Hello, Cortoys,’ she replied. ‘I’ve been working. But you wouldn’t know about that.’

  ‘Very funny,’ Cortoys Soef said. ‘As it happens, I’ve been working very hard.’

  ‘Really? Two-syllable words and everything?’

  The young man’s face became uncharacteristically serious. ‘You bet,’ he said. ‘I’ve had this irresistible urge to study lately. Ever since,’ he went on, ‘I had my name pulled off the list for the Scona raiding party by Doc Gannadius because I was overdue on my Lesser Arts dissertation. It’s that sort of thing that reminds me just what a bookish type I really am, deep down. As far as I’m concerned, you can lock me in a good library and chuck away the key.’

  Machaera’s eyes widened a little. ‘You were supposed to be on the raiding party?’ she said.

  Cortoys nodded. ‘Uncle Renvaut pulled some strings, arranged for me to go along as his adjutant or his page or something. Pleased as punch, I was, till Doc Gannadius interfered.’ He looked away. ‘They’re saying the rebels have stuck Uncle Renvaut’s head up on a pole on the Strangers’ Quay. Apparently it’s the first thing you see when you walk up the promenade towards the customs house.’

  Machaera shuddered. ‘It’s probably not true,’ she said gamely. ‘Most of these rumours are nonsense. Ramo says they’re deliberately put about by rebel spies, so as to worry us and make us think we’ll lose the war.’

  Cortoys shrugged. ‘Well, if that’s what they’re trying to do, they’re doing a pretty good job where I’m concerned. All those people, Machaera. There were friends of ours on that expedition. Hain Goche. Mihel Faim. Very nearly me, too. And Mihel was younger than me; damn it, I’ve been teasing him about being six weeks younger than me ever since we were in letters school together. How can someone younger than me possibly be dead?’

  Machaera thought for a moment. ‘Your cousin Hiro died when he was fifteen,’ she said, and immediately wondered why she should want to say anything so mindlessly tactless; after all, reminding him of the death of a much-loved cousin wasn’t going to make him feel better, was it?

  ‘True,’ Cortoys said dispassionately, ‘but he was ill for six months, at least we all knew he was going to die, we had a chance to get used to the idea. But Hain and Mihel weren’t ill. Damn it, Hain borrowed my Geometry notes only a few weeks ago to copy out the bits he’d missed. How the hell am I going to get them back in time for the test?’

  Machaera was about to scold him for being so self-centred when he suddenly burst into tears. This was thoroughly disconcerting. Cortoys had never cried, not in all the years she’d known him; not even when he was just turned five and he’d fallen down the steps near the north cistern and taken all the skin off his knees. He’d wanted to cry; she’d stood there, watching him carefully as if observing an interesting astronomical phenomenon, waiting for him to cry, but he hadn’t, not then and not ever. It was one of the things about him that irritated her most.

  ‘Cortoys-’ she said.

  ‘Oh, damn all this to hell,’ he muttered through a big sob. ‘This is so stupid. And now you’ll go around telling everybody-’

  ‘Cortoys, I wouldn’t.’

  He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter whether you do or not,’ he said, wiping his nose on his wrist. ‘You know what really worries me?’ he went on. ‘I know, really know, that if I’d been there, like I was supposed to have been, I’d have been so terrified I’d either have run or else been so scared I’d have just stood there. I don’t know, it’s just the idea of it, being in a battle, all that anger and danger. You know what I’ve only just realised? I’ve been a coward all my life and never knew it.

  Machaera wanted very much to be somewhere else, but unfortunately she didn’t have that option. Part of her hated Cortoys more than ever for choosing her to break down in front of. Part of her wanted to hug him tight and tell him it didn’t matter; which was strange, because she really didn’t like him, not one bit. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, as briskly as she could (a bit like Master Henteil when he got impatient in Metaphysics tutorials). ‘You’re no such thing. Everybody gets these ideas from time to time, imagines they won’t be up to it when the moment comes. That doesn’t make them cowards.’

  Cortoys shook his head. ‘From now on,’ he said, staring at the fashionably pointed toes of his shoes, ‘I’m going to make damned certain the situation never arises. And I don’t care what anybody says; the further away I stay from the fighting, the happier I’ll be.’

  Machaera grinned in spite of herself. ‘You could start a new faction. The Don’t-Want-to-Fight faction. It’d be original, at any rate. I’m absolutely positive nobody’s thought of that one before.’

  ‘I’d be famous,’ Cortoys answered, looking up at her with a tearful smile. ‘The first all-new faction in Shastel for fifty years.’

  ‘Doing your bit for the Soef family name,’ Machaera added.

  ‘Oh, quite,’ Cortoys replied. ‘Uncle Renvaut would have been so proud.’

  Gorgas Loredan slipped off his horse and handed the reins to the sergeant of his escort. ‘You lot had better make yourselves scarce,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Stay in earshot just in case I do need you for anything, but I don’t think that’s very likely.’

  He approached the long barn from its blind side, stopping every now and then to look and listen, like an archer walking up a rabbit in long grass, just before the first cut of hay. He couldn’t hear anything that suggested activity; no smooth sshk of plane-blade on wood, no sounds of sawing or rasping, no voices. He’d assumed, reasonably enough, that Bardas would be in his workshop. After all, he was an artisan with a living to earn, so while the light was still good he ought to be at his place of work. That’s where working men are during the day.

  Unless he’s out somewhere chopping down trees. Or dead. Or scared stiff by the raiders and run off into the hills somewhere. He frowned at this last speculation; men who have commanded armies and made their living as professional swordfighters don’t scamper away into the bushes like bunnies at the first sight of a halberdier’s greatcoat. All right, then, he’s out delivering, or buying materials. Or shopping, even.

  He walked slowly round the corner of the long barn into the yard and paused for a moment to look round. No signs of life anywhere, and he didn’t have that nebulous but unmistakable feeling of being watched. Nobody home, his instincts told him, but there are several words to describe people who rely on their instincts in situations of this sort, most of them synonyms for ‘dead’. Unlikely, of course, that Bardas would plop an arrow between his shoulders or jump out from behind the water-butt with a sword in his hand, but the whole object of the exercise was to stalk the quarry, not flush it out; the more notice he gave his brother of his arrival, the smaller his chances of scooping him up and taking him back to Town. Gorgas allowed himself a little smile, thinking back to the days when he and his brothers were regularly landed with the loathsome and near-impossible chore of rounding up the ducks off the pond, stuffing them in great big wicker baskets and bringing them back to the long poultry-shed. There are f
ew things quicker moving or less predictable then a startled duck, and the fun usually began when there were only ten or so left. Gorgas had never worked so hard or sweated so much before or since.

  Three stone steps up to the barn door, and he put his head cautiously round the frame. The workshop was dark, shutters drawn. In theory, a man could hide behind the stacks of felled, trimmed timber, or behind the clay-pipe-and-brick contraption in the corner (Gorgas recognised it as a steamer, for steaming the limbs of a bow into a recurve; his father had tried to build one once and failed), but Gorgas only made a cursory inspection. At this range, he was prepared to go with his instincts. If Bardas was here he’d know it, and he wasn’t.

  Gorgas sighed and sat down for a moment on the bench. Scruffy, he noted. Tools left lying about, shavings ankle-deep on the floorboards, whatever happened to Tidiness is the Mother of Efficiency? He picked up a drawknife and held it up to the light. There were spots of rust like raindrops already starting to form on the polished blade. Father would have had a fit.

  He put the drawknife carefully back where he’d found it and brushed away a little pile of shavings, resisting the urge to sneeze. There was a three-quarters-finished bow in the vice, a straight, flat self-bow intended for military use. Gorgas ran a finger along the belly and was impressed by the quality of the finish. Someone had been to a lot of trouble to get it feeling so smooth and glasslike. Why? Where was the point in exceeding the level of quality prescribed by the standard military specification? No one would ever notice or appreciate it – correction, brother; nobody but you and me. Well, either you’ve shrivelled down into a perfectionist in your old age, or you’ve got an apprentice with not enough work to keep him fully occupied. Bad business, either way. Just as well you’ve got a brother who’s in charge of military procurement who makes sure you get paid twice the going rate, or you’d never have lasted as long as you have. Gorgas grinned at the thought of his brother’s naivety; no question but that Bardas hadn’t yet realised that he was being secretly subsidised; he’d have a fit if he knew. A fine man, Bardas Lordan, but just a little bit unworldly.