Colours in the Steel f-1 Read online

  He noticed that he was slurring his words a little, like a man with bad toothache whose jaw becomes inflamed. That and the dizziness made him want to go back to his sleeping place and lie down. He would have assumed it was something to do with the drink, except that the men had drunk far more than him, and if anything they were even livelier than usual.

  ‘Drink up,’ said one of them, whose name was Milas. ‘Don’t they have wine where you come from, then?’

  Temrai replied that in his country they drank milk. The men nodded sagely and their eyes sparkled. ‘Wine’s better than milk,’ said another one, Divren. ‘Good for you. Full of sweetness, makes you strong.’

  Milas tilted the jug and Temrai found his cup was full again. He took a long pull at it, to get it over with. They were really very kind, hospitable people, but the stuff was disgusting.

  ‘We heard,’ said the oldest of the men, Zulas, ‘that in your country the men all have a hundred wives each. Is that true?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Temrai assured him. ‘Never more than six, and that’s only great lords, like my-Most people just have one or two. It’s because there’s more women than men.’

  ‘Are there? Why’s that?’

  ‘Because a lot of the men get killed,’ Temrai replied. He burped, but nobody seemed offended. ‘Fighting, or lost on the plains, or else they just go away for a few years. And then their wives marry someone else. Although,’ he added, frowning, ‘I don’t think marriage means the same here as it does at home.’

  Zulas winked at the others. ‘Doesn’t it?’ he asked. ‘What’s the difference, then?’

  Temrai thought hard. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘where I come from the men are out on the plains most of the time seeing to the horses and the sheep, while the women stay back at the wagons, so they don’t tend to spend a lot of time together. But here, they live with each other all the time. I think it’s amazing. Men and women weren’t meant to be together like that. They’re different. They get on each other’s nerves.’

  ‘True,’ said Milas, nodding gravely. ‘Here, have some more.’

  ‘Puts hairs on your chest,’ Divren agreed.

  ‘But then,’ Temrai went on, ‘there’s so many things that are different here. Like buying and selling, for instance. In this place, everything’s bought and sold; what you eat, what you drink, clothes, where you live. So you have a whole lot of people who do nothing but make shirts, and another lot who do nothing but buy food from one load of people and sell it to another load.’ He waved indiscriminately at his surroundings. ‘And there’s people who earn their living owning a house that other people live in. That’s strange. Or take you, I mean, us; it’s all different back home. All you do, or rather we do, is make swords all day. At home the smiths do smithing one day in ten, and the rest of the time they’re running their stock or fixing up their wagons or curing hides or whatever, just like everyone else. Even my – even the great lords ride out to the flocks when they haven’t got clan business to deal with. So we hardly buy and sell anything. It’s odd,’ Temrai went on, ‘because our way seems to work pretty well, and so does yours. They’re just as good as each other, but different.’

  ‘Wise words,’ said the fourth man, Skudas. ‘Wisdom in wine, isn’t that what they say? Have another.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Temrai said, holding out his cup. It got better the more you had. ‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘Here you’ve got people whose only job is fighting, and when they’re not fighting they’re practising fighting. All my people fight when there’s fighting to be done, but the rest of the time we don’t fight at all. Well, hardly at all. Mind you, we do fight quite a lot of the time, clan against clan and nation against nation. But it’s always over in a day, while you people go on fighting the same war for years on end. Where’s the point in that? Surely the whole point of fighting’s to see who’s the strongest, not who’s got the cleverest lords who can spin the war out even though the enemy’s got heaps more men. Doesn’t make sense to me.’

  Zulas waved his hand for another jug, then said, ‘So you don’t like it here, then?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Temrai replied, shaking his head vigorously. ‘Didn’t say that at all. I think it’s absolutely wonderful here, all these incredible things you’ve got, and the way you all live heaped on top of each other and hardly ever lose your tempers. If my people had to live here cooped up like horses in a corral, they’d be at each other’s throats in a day or so. But it’s hard to have feuds and quarrels when you’re all doing things together, like getting the caravan across a river or bringing the horses in to be broken.’ He stopped to drink more wine, and then continued, ‘I think the clan’s much more like a family than your city is. Everybody’s a man on his own here, and you all live in your own houses and shut the doors at night and lots of you don’t even know the people who live half an hour’s walk away. That’s strange.’

  Another strange thing, Temrai noticed, was the way the room was going round. He’d only ever felt this way before when they’d banked up the fire for a dance for the gods and the old women had burnt herbs and holy leaves. It was all right to feel dizzy and strange then, because the gods came down and joined in the dances, and the presence of gods has a peculiar effect on mortals. Could it be that there were gods in the inn tonight? He’d heard stories of gods going round in disguise to keep an eye on mortals, and if the gods were travelling, it was only logical they’d put up at an inn for the night rather than sleep out in the open. Surreptitiously he glanced round, trying to spot anybody who might be a god. He couldn’t see any obvious candidates, but that didn’t mean anything. But wasn’t it the case that there weren’t supposed to be any gods in the City of the Sword? Well, maybe there were, and perhaps that’s why they’re in disguise. In which case, best to pretend he hadn’t noticed anything.

  ‘And another thing,’ he said.

  He carried on talking for a while; but now he couldn’t clearly make out what he was saying. It was like trying to listen to a conversation in the next tent. He could hear a voice, but the words were all bent and worn away, like on a coin picked out of a river. If he’d been right about gods, then the chances were there were quite a few of them in the inn tonight. Also, he didn’t feel terribly well.

  The next thing he was aware of was the landlord shaking him by the arm and speaking to him in a weary, disagreeable voice. Temrai tried to explain about the gods, and that appeared to annoy the landlord, because soon after that he found himself out in the street, lying in a puddle of something that didn’t seem to be water and feeling very sick. He looked around for Zulas and Milas and the others but they’d gone. He was terribly afraid he’d offended them by acting strangely; he was, after all, a foreigner, and a plainsman into the bargain. It had been very kind of them to buy him all that wine. He’d have to make a point of thanking them the next day, and saying he was sorry.

  Eventually a soldier with a lantern came along and kicked him until he got up. After that he wandered around for a while trying to find where he lived, gave up and went to sleep under a wagon. His last thought before his mind slipped away was that the city was a very strange place indeed, but some of the people were very kind and good-hearted; good old Zulas and Minas and Skudas and Divren. He would have to remember to make a point of asking his father to spare their lives, once the city had been taken.

  Twelve years ago, a party of horsemen rode in through the Dawn Gate. They looked ragged and tired; their clothes were patched and threadbare, their mailshirts mostly held together with wire. Many of them were as hideous as the ogres in children’s stories; badly set fractures left limbs out of shape, scar tissue had formed over wounds that had been inadequately dressed or septic. Men and horses alike were almost comically thin, their hands and feet seeming out of all proportion to their bodies.

  They were, or course, heroes, though nobody came out to meet them, and a few people threw things at them because they’d lost. They were all that was left of the army.

  Maxen’s Pi
tchfork had been, for as long as anyone could remember, the city’s one and only defence against the vague and constant threat posed by the nomadic clans of the western plains. Because they did their job so well, the citizens took them for granted, giving them honour, respect and twenty-five quarters a month all found; accordingly they never thought to ask themselves how a thousand heavy cavalry could possibly be expected to hold back the virtually limitless manpower of the clans. After all, it worked, and they did manage it; and whenever a citizen woke up in the middle of the night out of a nightmare of shrieking savages and clouds of arrows, he would remember General Maxen, Lord Count of the Exterior, turn over and go back to sleep.

  But Maxen, who had spent thirty-eight of his sixty years in the field fighting the clans, suddenly did the inconceivable thing and died – of gangrene, following a fall from his horse during a routine punitive expedition. As soon as news of his death spread among the clans, there came the inevitable explosion. For the clansmen, Maxen had been quite simply the most terrifying thing in the world, a demonic force that appeared in the middle of the night, surrounded by blazing torches and slashing swords, killing every living thing in a whole caravan and then melting away into some crack in the earth, invisible in the vast emptiness of the plains. Maxen’s death was like the death of fear itself; so, when his second-in-command, Alsen, met the assembled clans beside the Crow River, they threw themselves against the Pitchfork as if charging straw dummies in a training exercise. Alsen, who had been on the plains twenty-five years since joining the regiment as an ordinary trooper, was a brilliant soldier, the kind whose campaigns might under other circumstances have been studied in military academies. As it was, he faced odds of twenty-five to one and inflicted such devastating losses on the enemy that an assault on the city was rendered impossible for many years to come. But he fell, and eight hundred and eighty of his men died with him. The husk of his army hurried back to Perimadeia under the command of Maxen’s nephew, a lad of twenty-three who had only been on the plains for seven years; one Bardas Loredan.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘To say that the Principle enables one to tell the future,’ said the Patriarch, his mind elsewhere, ‘is tantamount to saying that the main function of the sea is the delivery of driftwood. It would be more accurate, though still basically erroneous, to state that one who closely observes the Principle can make certain assumptions about the effects it is likely to have on the material world. Anything further than that would be misleading.’

  The young woman whose name he couldn’t remember wasn’t a member of the class any more. She had got what she came for, or something approximating to it, and left. Alexius had the troublesome feeling that he was in the position of an innkeeper’s daughter who has spent an amusing night with a handsome stranger and is beginning to feel sick in the mornings. The after-effects of the curse were getting to him; he needed to see the girl again if he was to have any hope of putting things right.

  ‘Consider a road,’ he continued, as the students bent their heads over their writing tablets, diligently committing his wisdom to marks in wax. ‘A man rides along a steep-sided valley, in a region notoriously infested with robbers. From where he is he cannot see them waiting for him around the next bend of the road, although he suspects they may be there. An observer high up on the hillside can see him and the robbers as well. There is no magic in this; simply a high vantage point. It follows also that you cannot see the ambush if you are riding the road; only the impartial observer, watching the affairs of others, can perceive the imminent danger.’

  It was, Alexius knew, a hopelessly flawed comparison; but it would do for freshmen. Later, when they knew better, they could have the pleasure of gloating over its obvious faults, which would be good for their confidence.

  ‘Or consider,’ he went on, ‘a cup of water standing on a table. The cup cannot move or spill the water of its own accord; but if there should chance to be an earthquake, or even a train of heavy wagons passing in the street below, the cup will appear to tremble of its own accord. The man who detects the first signs of the earthquake, before it is perceptible to the untrained eye, or who sees the wagons entering the street, will know that the cup will move. He can predict; he can interfere by picking up the cup, preventing it from being shaken off the table and breaking. If he is unscrupulous, he can claim that by his tremendous powers he can cause the cup to shake and the water to spill, and then appear to make good his boast.’

  Putting ideas into their heads? None that weren’t there already an hour after they were born. Alexius detested fortune-tellers even more than those who pretended to heal the sick or lay curses for money. The sad fact was that such prophecies had a tendency to come true, mostly of course because the customer expected them to and acted accordingly.

  ‘We who study the Principle,’ he resumed, ‘can stand back and see the lurking robbers or the approaching wagons. Sometimes, our observations make it possible for us to intervene; in which case we expose ourselves to all the dangers we warn others about; we run down into the pass to warn the traveller, or hurry to where the earthquake is to be in the hope of saving someone. To assert that we can avert bandits or spill water from a cup without touching it, however, is not only dishonest but terribly dangerous. The bandits will leave the traveller alone and attack us. We, rather than the person we have come to warn, will spill the water. There are those who say that when we see a disaster approaching and do nothing, we are acting reprehensibly; think of it rather as preferring that the robbers will have only one victim instead of two. That concludes the lecture; by tomorrow, read the first twenty chapters of Mycondas’ Syllogisms and be prepared to answer questions.’

  He stopped speaking and, as far as the students were concerned, ceased to exist. Some of them, he knew, would quite simply not believe him. They would far rather assume that he and his fellow masters were trying to keep the best tricks back for themselves. Let them; too ignorant as yet to harm anybody but themselves.

  As the last few of them trooped out, chattering to each other about everything except what they’d just been told, Alexius let his mind slip back to the question of the young woman and the curse, which was still hurting him like a grain of sand trapped under an eyelid. Where was she? Perhaps one of the other students might know; except that she’d been here such a short time that it was highly unlikely that she’d confided in any of them. Besides, in comparison they were all hopelessly young and immature. Who would entrust secrets to a mere child? If she told them why she was leaving and explained about the curse, doubtless there would be a few fools who attempted to do the curse for themselves. Well; if they were lucky, they might escape with nothing worse than the failure of a trick.

  The Patriarch of Perimadeia, hunting high and low after a girl student who had left the course on its second day; a girl who had spent a considerable part of the evening of the first day in the Patriarch’s cell. He could imagine what his junior colleagues would make of that if they got the opportunity. Which, he decided, they would not. He would have to find some other way to cure himself of this malady.

  He was aware of someone behind him, walking quickly to catch up. Without looking round, he slowed down.

  ‘Fascinating.’ He recognised the voice; Gannadius, the Archimandrite of the City Academy. Too late now, however, to quicken his pace. ‘Every year five hundred new faces, and yet within a week or two they look and sound exactly the same as their predecessors. Do we do that to them, I wonder, or are all young people basically interchangeable?’

  ‘Both, I suspect,’ Alexius replied. ‘Whatever individuality they may still have when they arrive here is soon ground away by the necessity of being indistinguishable from their peers in appearance, tastes and opinions. The best thing anyone can say for youth is that eventually we all grow out of it.’

  The customary exchange of epigrams having taken place, Alexius hoped that his colleague would now go away. No such luck; today, Gannadius had something to say. When he would eventually g
et around to saying it was anybody’s guess.

  ‘It distresses me to think that I was once that young,’ Gannadius sighed. ‘I assume that I was, although for the life of me I can’t remember it. As far as I’m concerned I’ve always been the same age. My friends, however, have grown old around me.’

  Wonder why? Alexius asked himself. ‘I read once,’ he replied, ‘that each man has a certain age that is appropriate to him; once he reaches it, he stays there, although his body continues to wear out.’

  ‘In my case, it would have to be forty-three.’

  In spite of himself, Alexius was interested. ‘Really? Why forty-three?’

  ‘I was that age when I first read the Analects,’ Gannadius said simply. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve reached it yet,’ Alexius confessed. ‘I can distinctly remember being three, and wondering what being three meant. And I was seventeen for a very long time, but I’m not any more. I think I stopped being seventeen when I realised I was no longer afraid of my immediate superiors.’

  ‘And that was when?’

  ‘When I became Patriarch,’ Alexius replied. ‘Now I’m afraid of my immediate inferiors, but that’s scarcely the same thing.’

  Gannadius nodded wisely. ‘To change the subject completely,’ he said, ‘are you feeling well?’

  Alexius stopped walking and rubbed his chin to cover his surprise. ‘Is it that obvious?’ he asked.

  ‘My dear friend, you’ve been walking around like a man with his foot in a trap. Would it be impertinent for me to speculate that you have, so to speak, trodden on a hidden rake among the proceedings of the Principle and been struck a sharp blow on the nose in consequence?’

  Alexius smiled. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Because I knew exactly what I was letting myself in for. I did a curse, and I’m afraid it didn’t agree with me.’