“You’re kidding,” I said.
Polycrates looked at me. “Straight up,” he said. “You can look for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
For crying out loud. One commodity you get plenty of in my line of work is fabrics, textiles – shirts, trousers, coats, blankets, tents, cart canopies, you name it, we peel it off the dead, darn the holes and sell it on. Even the pitiful haul we’d acquired from Sinderic’s last stand had yielded two full carts. “And you’re telling me,” I snarled at him, “there’s not a single bit of white cloth in the whole consignment?”
He gave me his hurt look. “Not much call for white in the army,” he said.
Which is essentially true. White gets grubby; also it costs money to bleach wool and linen, so why bother? Endless variations on the theme of dingy light brown, but that’s not the same thing at all.
“All I need is enough for a stupid flag,” I told him. “Come on. You can’t have looked properly.”
It turned out we did have just enough milk-white cloth for a flag of truce. It was my best shirt, the one I jealously preserve for meetings with important people and my once-in-a-decade days off. We tied the arms to a stick. It would have to do.
“You must be out of your mind,” Papinian said, as I hefted my flag. “As soon as you break cover, they’ll shoot you.”
“Shoot at me,” I corrected. “I have absolute faith in their marksmanship.”
Eudo had begged to be allowed to come with me. I pointed out that his presence would achieve nothing, he couldn’t protect me, he’d only get himself killed as well as me, and I didn’t need an idiot along to screw things up. Polycrates had found me a mail shirt to wear under my coat; it would’ve come down to my knees and slowed me up horribly if I had to run for it, so I told him where to stick it. Besides, I already had my very expensive genuine Echmen-made brigandine, though I didn’t tell him that.
My brigandine is made up of over a thousand small steel plates rivetted to canvas and backed with gorgeous red velvet. The individual plates are made of thin spring steel, hardened and tempered, and the weight is so perfectly distributed that you barely notice you’re wearing it. True, it didn’t save the life of its previous owner, but only because he got his head smashed in by a catapult shot. I hadn’t mentioned it to anybody because they’d have wanted to know where I got it, and why I’d kept something so eye-wateringly valuable for myself instead of adding it to the overall take, to shares of which they were entitled. It’s just that sort of petty dishonesty that wrecks the confidence in each other that you need in a business like ours. It’d be terrible for morale if I told them what I’d done, so I didn’t.
But it was nice to know it was there as I walked up the path through the holm oaks. Trees make a difference. If you’re watching someone through a curtain of trees, you only get part of the picture. Important details, such as a white flag, can get obscured by an inconvenient branch. I’m being pretty brave doing this, I said to myself, as I flinched at an imagined movement off to one side. Idiot, I thought. But it had to be done, so I did it.
They let me get to within sight of the two rocks. Then they came out from the trees, pointing bows at me. I could tell they were clowns because they had their bows at full draw. First thing they tell you in archery training: don’t hold your bow at full draw for a moment longer than you have to. It strains the wood and ruins the bow; also, your fingers might slip and you might shoot something you don’t want to. Such as me.
“That’s far enough,” said a tall, skinny man with a long beard. He was terrified. “Don’t try anything or we’ll kill you.”
The temptation to try something was almost irresistible, mostly because they’d crowded round me in a ring; if I ducked and they all shot, they’d wipe each other out. That would be satisfying but counterproductive. “I’d like to speak to your commanding officer,” I said. “Please,” I added. My mother would’ve been proud of me.
The skinny man looked at someone behind me I couldn’t see, then nodded. “Nice and easy does it,” he said. “This way.” I decided I loved him. He was a clown, and they’d put him in charge of the sentries.
“Do you mind if I leave this here?” I asked, giving the flag a little wiggle. “Only it’s my best shirt, and I don’t want anything to happen to it.”
“Shut up,” the skinny man said. His throat was dry with terror. It was almost certainly a trap, and any second now he was going to be hacked to pieces by monsters. I felt sorry for him. In his shoes I’d have been terrified, too. Actually, come to think of it, I was scared out of my wits. But I was used to it, and he clearly wasn’t.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be as quiet as a little mouse.”
He’d have belted me for that, only he was scared of initiating violence. I was, after all, known to be dangerous; I might duck, weave, come up behind him and snap his neck with a single chop of my cupped hand. Instead he treated me to a glare of pure hatred. “This way,” he said, neither moving nor pointing. I waited patiently for further and better particulars, and we might all still be there if I hadn’t started to walk, slowly and with my hands behind my back, in the general direction of the two rocks.
Things had changed since I’d been there last. Someone had built a brick arch between the two rocks, narrowing the gap slightly but contributing nothing to the defensibility of the position. I saw pintles for hinges let into the brickwork but no gate; held up in committee somewhere, at a guess. The gap was guarded by armed men, who took a step back when they saw me.
If ever I’m emperor, my first official act will be to have all the mountains and hills levelled and all the buildings reduced to a single storey. I hate walking up things. I get out of breath, and the backs of my legs hurt. Down with up. I arrived at the top of the hill with the knees of my trousers glued to my skin with sweat, and a stitch in my chest. To be fair, my escort weren’t much better; I’d made a point of setting a stiff pace, which they struggled to match. It’s the little details that make all the difference, and first impressions are so important.
A short, fat man was standing in front of the castle gate, which was open. He looked at me as if I was a unicorn, then at the skinny man. “What the fuck have you done?” he asked.
“Prisoner.” The skinny man was out of breath. “Caught him in the forest.”
“Actually,” I said, “I’m here to negotiate, under a flag of truce.”
“What flag?”
“I left it at the bottom of the hill.” I turned to the skinny man. “Tell him there was a flag,” I said. The skinny man glowered at me and nodded. “Take me to your leader,” I said to the fat man. “Please,” I added.
The fat man had forearms like a blacksmith, and I got the impression of a sergeant with twenty years’ service, demobbed and gone to seed. Fine. He could be useful, too. Like I said, first impressions. He summed me up with a glance that read me as an officer – not a compliment, as far as he was concerned – then nodded. “With me,” he said. I followed him through the gate. The skinny man and his patrol stayed behind, relieved that they were still alive.
There were a few people milling about in the centre yard, loading sacks onto wheelbarrows, carrying jars. There was also a man in a pourpoint (that’s a padded jacket you wear under your armour) sitting on a barrel next to a mounting block with three steps. I thought I recognised him from somewhere. Surely not—
He saw me and stood up. “Where the hell did he come from?” he said.
“Caught him in the woods,” the sergeant replied.
“Actually, no,” I said. “I’m here to open negotiations, under a flag of—”
“Shut up,” said the man I thought I recognised. “Have you any idea who this is?”
The sergeant looked at me.
“He’s Florian,” said the man I thought I recognised. “That lunatic who did all that shit in Sirupat and nearly got us all killed. He’s worth an absolute fucking fortune.”
“And you’re Crabia,” I said. “Thought I knew you from somewhere. How’s her ladyship?”
He gave me a look you could’ve smeared on arrowheads. “Ask her yourself,” he said. “I’ll let her know you’re here.”
Many years ago, when I was sixteen and even more arrogant and stupid than I am today, I dressed up in an old coat I found in the stables and went drinking in the village. Everything was going fine and I was having a great time, making new and interesting friends and buying drinks for people; and then I must have said something, because one of my new friends suddenly spun round and hit me in the solar plexus. I treasure the memory of that punch, though it was no fun at all at the time, because it taught me more about human nature than all sixteen books of Theodotus’s Humanities – its relevance at this juncture was that stunned, winded, witless feeling, not being able to breathe because your lungs have been drained of air and your mind has been emptied of all traces of thought. I distinctly remember standing there, staring at the man whose name I’d just recalled to mind. That’s where I knew him from: he’d been one of her assistant goons, and during a long cart ride we took together we hadn’t hit it off at all. Maybe the penny should’ve dropped, at terrifying speed, like a meteor. But there are some contingencies you can’t possibly prepare yourself for, not if you want to stay sane and sleep at night. I remember thinking, well, at least it’s not my sister, and then someone grabbed me by the shoulder and shoved me through a door… And there she was.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “You.”
Which was, oddly enough, exactly what I was thinking at the time.
We go way back, Stauracia and I. Sister Stauracia she calls herself, though the religious order of which she’s founder and sole autocrat is a gossamer-thin front for an operation very similar to mine. They call themselves the Sisters of Mercy or something like that, and the idea is that they go round battlefields tending the wounded and giving spiritual comfort to the dying. Like hell they do; and what annoys me is that she doesn’t pay for her scavenging rights, like me and the Asvogel boys and everyone else in the trade. Instead she puts on her snow-white wimple and goes and simpers at generals and princes (she’s very nice looking, which helps) and they give her the run of the carrion for free, often when they’ve already taken my money for the actual rights. If I boot her off she goes whining to the victorious general, who shouts at me for interfering with angels of mercy and confiscates everything I’ve painfully and expensively collected, and as often as not hands it over to her as a charitable donation. She saved my life on Sirupat, but only after she’d tried to kill me a couple of times. If I have to be scrupulously honest, I confess I like her a lot. I have no idea why, but liking someone isn’t the same thing as approving of what they do, not by a long shot, and you can like a real genuine hundred per cent proof pain in the arse, which she is, and so am I, for that matter. The fact that she’s one of my favourite people in the world says a lot about the world, if you ask me.
“What the fuck,” said Sister Stauracia, “are you doing here?”
“Besieging you, apparently. What are you doing here?”
She gave me a look that should have shrivelled me like a hundred years in the desert. I’m used to that look; it means I’ve got past her defence, which doesn’t happen all that often. I’d put her in an awkward position. In order to answer my question and continue the conversation, which she was clearly anxious to do, she’d have to send away the half-dozen or so of her people who were standing around earwigging like mad; doing that, however, would give the impression that she was about to conspire with me behind their backs.
“Take him away and lock him in the charcoal store,” she said. “And watch him. He’s as tricky as a snake.”
Precisely what I’d have done in her shoes. Just as well I’d brought a book to read.
I’d managed a chapter and a half of The Garden of Entrancing Images – it was a tiny, pocket-size edition and it’s just not the same without the pictures – when the door opened and she came in. “You shouldn’t read in this light,” she said. “You’ll strain your eyes.”
“Hello, Stauracia,” I said. “Sit down, relax.”
She was too smart to sit down in a white dress in a charcoal store. “You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re just kidding.”
“I’m just kidding. No, actually I’m serious. How about you?”
“Never mind about me.”
“I mind about you terribly. Are you really in charge of these pinheads?”
She gave me her best hurt scowl. “It’s all your fault.”
“Of course it is. How, exactly?”
She looked round for something to sit on or lean against. It was a charcoal store. She stayed standing. “That stupid mess on Sirupat you got me into.”
“What about it?”
A roll of the eyes; one of her signature gestures. “I ended up having to command an army.”
“You did it ever so well.”
“Too bloody well. These—” Pause to find suitable word; quest abandoned as impossible. “These lunatics needed someone to defend this place and they heard about Sirupat. They couldn’t hire a real soldier for various reasons, so they picked on me. Like I said, your fault.”
“Picked on.”
Slight nod. “You could say I’m not here through choice.”
“Me neither,” I said. “Are you getting paid?”
“That’s neither here nor there.” Then she looked at me: a curious look, one which I couldn’t immediately classify, and I collect her looks the way Gombryas collects dead people’s bits. “Saevus, they’ve got my son.”
When I was a kid, one of the gardeners had a tortoise. It was a phlegmatic beast, given to walking slowly and in deadly earnest in a straight line until it bumped into something. If you picked it up and turned it through a hundred and eighty degrees and put it down again, it would pause for a second then carry on walking, the same slow, determined pace, towards a completely different destination. I guess it must’ve been confused for a moment, but it took it in its stride. I envy that tortoise. When you pick me up and turn me through a hundred and eighty degrees, as she’d just done, I don’t recover half as smoothly.
“Son,” she said impatiently. “Male child. You’re one, if that helps at all.”
“You’ve got a—”
“Had,” she snapped. “They broke in and stole him, and I won’t ever see him again unless I do exactly what they tell me to. Saevus, he’s only three. I can’t let anything happen to him, I just can’t.”
“You’ve got a kid,” I said. “My God.”
Her eyes are the colour of well-seasoned walnut heartwood; or, if you prefer, of diarrhoea. “Yes,” she said. “I found him under a gooseberry bush, and it’s none of your stupid business. But if I don’t do this job for these people, they’re going to kill him. Got that?”
“I think so.”
“Splendid. So, what you’ve got to do is, you’ve got to lose.”
I kept perfectly still. “I’d love to,” I said. “Only it’s not that simple.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it isn’t. They’ve got my friends. My lot,” I explained. “The lunatics I’m working for.”
A tiny movement around the eyebrows indicated a sudden spurt of anger. “Tough,” she said.
“Stauracia—”
“No, shut your face. Look, I’ve met your friends. They’re not worth spit. This is my son we’re talking about.”
“They’re my friends.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, how can you be so selfish? Look, it’s easy. All you have to do is mount an attack in force. I beat it off with heavy losses. You lose half your men, and then it’s plainly impossible for you to take this castle with the resources remaining to you. You explain that to your bosses, they see it’s unreasonable to expect you to proceed, they let your pals go and that’s it, problem solved. And my son doesn’t get killed.”
“You aren’t listening,” I said. “They’re my friends.”
“So fucking what? You can always get new ones. No, I take that back, you’d have problems in that direction, I grant you that. But they’re just—” vague but impressive hand gesture “—people. They’re a bunch of strangers you happen to spend a lot of time with. He’s my son. Part of me.”
When Stauracia decided to make robbing the dead her career, the stage missed out on a great actress. She can say practically anything like she really means it, and sometimes even I can’t tell the difference. If she’s stopped at he’s my son, she’d have been fine. It was the part of me that was overdoing it. A great actress; not quite so good at writing the script. “You haven’t got a son,” I said. “Have you?”
She kicked me in the face. The upshot was that she got charcoal marks on the hem of her gown. I count that as a partial victory. “Arsehole,” she said.
She’d caught me on the cheekbone. It didn’t feel like anything was broken. Probably just a big, cheerful bruise for a week or so. “Tell me about it.”
“Why the hell should I? It’s none of your business.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, “and then, when I know all the facts, maybe I can figure a way out of this mess. Like I did on Sirupat.”
Stauracia feels about trusting people the way a cat feels about swimming: she can do it if she absolutely has to, but she knows she’s completely out of her element and it makes her mental fur feel all wrong. And, like me, she tends to regard telling the truth as an admission of failure. There’s no angle to be gained from telling the truth, no mechanical advantage: it’s like driving in a nail with a chunk of flint instead of a hammer. The truth is a gobbet of raw meat, not a casserole with herbs and red wine. I was asking her to do something that went entirely against the grain, and what was in it for her?
“I was young,” she said. “It was just before they arrested my dad and I had to go into service. There was this boy, our neighbour’s son. Like I told you, none of your fucking business.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Go on.”
“His father had a stall in the market, wicker baskets. He said they’d look after the kid, provided I moved away and had nothing more to do with any of them, because of the shame of my father being in jail. That suited me fine. Anyway, the boy I – the kid’s father, he took over when his dad had a stroke, the year after I left. He did all right, nothing special. We hadn’t talked in years. I don’t think he’d ever forgiven me, because of my dad’s spot of trouble, and I never gave him a moment’s thought. He was just there, in the background, like home if you were born in Poor Town. And then these bastards came, the ones I’m working for. They wanted the kid, so I’d have to do what they wanted, but there was a scuffle and they smashed his head in, and then they took the kid.” She took a deep breath, then let it out again slowly. “One day I’ll deal with them, you can be absolutely sure about that. But first I’ve got to get my son, and I can’t do that until they decide I’ve finished the job. I don’t know where he is or anything. For all I know they’ve already killed him, but that doesn’t matter. One thing at a time, it’s the only way. Otherwise—”
She didn’t need to enlarge on otherwise. “Who are these people?” I said.
She shrugged. “Not a clue,” she said. “I know who they aren’t. They’re not government, they’re not guilds, they’re not part of any of the big trade syndicates, they’re not the Knights or the Poor Sisters or anyone we’ve heard of. They’ve got some money and some people, not a lot of either. I think they probably believe in something, politics or religion or shit like that. Apart from that, not a clue. And I care less. I just want to give them what they want. And then I’m going to kill them.”
Fair enough, I thought, if she was telling the truth. “So what do they actually want?” I asked. “Yes, they want you to defend the castle. But in aid of what?”
“Don’t know, couldn’t give a damn.” I could feel her patience run out. That could be awkward. “Look,” she said, “I’m really sorry, but I haven’t got the time or the energy for you to weave your special brand of magic. Really I ought to cut your stupid throat, but I feel bad enough about the kid’s father as it is without you loading guilt on me as well. So you’re going to have to stay here and be a hostage. It’s not all that hard. You just sit still and quiet. You can manage that, can’t you?”
“Now hang on a minute,” I said. “I came here in good faith—”
“That’s so sweet. Still and quiet, and I promise I won’t kill you if I don’t have to. For old times’ sake.”
Call me a naive, trusting halfwit, but I hadn’t anticipated that. Which is another way of saying I hadn’t expected to find Stauracia here. I’d assumed – never assume, that’s rule two. Rule one is, don’t get involved. I’m not good with rules.
“My boys aren’t going to be happy about that,” I said.
She smiled at me. “Is that who you’ve got down there? Your happy band of tame jackdaws? Oh, that makes everything a lot easier. Once they’ve heard I’ve got you chained up, they’ll piss off and find something else to do, and then all our problems will be over. You never did have the knack of instilling discipline among your employees. I thought you had soldiers. Well, that’s a weight off my mind. You’ve really cheered me up, you know that?”
The Garden of Entrancing Images is widely regarded as a classic of its genre. The plot is garbage and the characterisation isn’t up to much, but the descriptions – and it’s got a strong, independent-minded female lead who wears black leather when she’s wearing anything at all, not to mention an uplifting message and a happy ending, so you can see why it’s popular. But to get the full effect, you really need the pictures.
I sat there reading it until the light through the tiny grating in the ceiling died away and I couldn’t make out the cramped little letters. Then I laid it down on the floor, open more or less halfway, and ripped off the spine. Wedged into the now-exposed stub end, where the folded leaves are stitched together, was a little something I like to have by me for emergencies. It’s a whisker under six inches long, about half an inch wide, flexible spring steel and usefully sharp, with a point on it like a needle. I wrapped the strip of leather binding round the bottom two inches so as not to cut myself, and then I was ready to face the unfolding course of events.
Which turned out to consist of some poor slob bringing me my dinner: rye bread, a generous knob of cheese and a thumb’s length of smoked sausage, on a wooden tray. I was lying on the floor when he came in, doing my best to look like someone sunk in morbid depression. He looked down at me, I whimpered a bit, and just when he’d decided I wasn’t a threat I grabbed his ankles with one arm and cut the tendons behind his knees with my little thingamajig.
I recommend that approach, by the way, if ever you find yourself in an awkward spot. There’s not a great deal a hamstrung man can do to make a nuisance of himself. He goes down like a felled tree, and the shock empties his mind completely, and the pain isn’t so bad that he starts yelling the place down; you should have plenty of time to boot the side of his head and send him to sleep, and all done neatly, efficiently and without any tiresome fuss. If you haven’t had the foresight to equip yourself with a handy equaliser, anything reasonably sharp will do – bit of broken glass, potsherd, lengthwise-cracked flint, whatever – and the nice thing is, you haven’t had to kill anybody. Crippled for life, maybe, but still very much alive, and I think it’s important to care for your fellow man, even though he’s just some goon, if at all convenient.
I hadn’t explored that part of the castle in any detail when I stayed there before, but I know a bit about buildings and how they work. A charcoal store in a castle is going to be near three things: the kitchen, the main boiler for the hypocausts and the gatehouse, for ease of deliveries. Usually there’s a hatch or grating in the roof, or a chute, but I’d looked carefully and hadn’t found one, so presumably the stuff was lugged there in sacks, a stupid arrangement if you ask me. Still, it suggested to me that I couldn’t be all that far from the gatehouse. They’d put a bag over my head when they brought me down there, so all I had to go on was counting the number of footsteps. That number included crossing the main courtyard from the main hall, which was where I’d had my chat with Stauracia, and the hall was opposite the main gate. I’d done my best to reconstruct the geography of the place from what I could remember, but the hard data at my disposal was scant and vague, and I decided not to rely on it.
Out through the door, remembering to close it behind me. I figured I had a couple of minutes clear before the goon’s colleagues noticed that he hadn’t come back yet. Nobody had any reason to be in the corridor I found myself in, which was just as well. I stood still and listened – it wastes time, but it’s worth it for the information. In this case, silence. Valuable data. There’s always people coming and going round the kitchen, but the boiler only gets stoked five times a day. I slipped my little metal friend between the pages of The Garden of Entrancing Images bookmark-fashion, and walked slow and flat-footed up the corridor, which led me into, guess what, the furnace room.
Now of course I knew where I was. Whoever built the castle was, I’m guessing, not from around there. He came from a warmer climate, and felt the cold. Therefore he designed the central keep around a system of hypocausts, which are square brick-lined shafts designed to circulate hot air throughout a building. Naturally, he put the furnace that produces all the heat as close to the centre of the structure as he could manage, and underground because hot air rises. That agreed quite well with the twelve steps down I’d counted on my bag-obscured way in. Being a cunning bastard, the castle builder would have had the kitchen backing onto the furnace, so that all you had to do was swing open a cast-iron door, and the furnace doubled as a range and a roasting oven.
It was nice to know where I was, but I couldn’t help wishing it was somewhere else. There would be two flights of stairs connecting the kitchen, furnace and cellars to the ground floor. One of them, the kitchen stairs, would lead up into the hall, where people gathered to eat. The other one, if I was very lucky, would come up into the yard next to the gatehouse; or it could come up in the gatehouse itself, in which case I’d push open a door and find myself nose to nose with a couple of armed sentries. That wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the world if I managed to preserve the element of surprise, but I’ve learned by experience that surprise tends to work both ways. All you can do is press on, expecting everything to go wrong in a manner you didn’t anticipate, and hope for the best.
Sure enough, the back stairs came up in the gatehouse. And, sure enough, directly in front of the door I pushed open was a goon in a pourpoint, eating an apple. He looked round as I made my entrance, and I smashed his face in and he fell over, which was fine. But, of course, there was another goon directly behind me, where I couldn’t see, and by the time his mate hit the floor, the second goon had recovered from the shock and figured out I was up to no good. Luckily for me, he drew his sword, which made a grating noise as the blade cleared the chape of the scabbard and told me he was there; I had just enough time to take a long step forward, pick up a spear which some fool had left leaning against the wall – rule one: don’t leave unsecured weapons lying around in an area where you can reasonably expect bad things to happen – spin round and jab with it in a threatening manner, designed to cause fear and alarm.
Actually, I did better than that, if better’s the right word in this context; I stuck the poor sod neatly in the base of the throat, that handy gap between the collarbones that God put there to help hard-working killers. His eyes rolled as he went straight from living to dead – no matter how many times I see it, it always freaks me out – and he fell backwards onto a chair and was no longer any concern of mine.
And there I was, with a spear in my hand, thinking, is that it? Apparently it was. I listened, but all I could hear was someone whistling, a barrel being rolled across a cobbled floor, two men having a cheerful conversation some distance away, somebody knocking in a nail.
I envy those people who can take things in their stride. I’ve worked with men, and two women, who’d have been out of that gatehouse like a rat up a drain, completely unfazed by what they’d just done, their minds perfectly and exclusively centred on the next stage of the operation. Not me. I had to stop and let my brain catch up.
Well, what was I supposed to do, sit there like a good little boy until she decided on the best way to make use of me? The hell with that. I don’t react well to being locked up, or under authority in any shape or form. I don’t like violence, it makes my skin crawl, but I didn’t start it, by ignoring a flag of truce. I have my faults, God knows, but on my day I can be usefully sharp, so people who play with me can expect to get cut.
Did that make me feel any better? Of course not. But it gave me a chance to get a grip, and now it was time to go. I could see sunlight coming in through the gatehouse door, which meant the gate itself was open. The next stage might involve a certain amount of running, but what the hell. All in all—
There was a table, and on the table was a bag. I’d seen bags like that before. It was a particular grade of coarse grey linen, neatly stitched and sealed with a lead seal. I couldn’t make out the impression on the seal, because it was in shadow, but I didn’t need to. Those bags are sewn by prisoners in a jail on the outskirts of Kudei Gaion, to a rigidly set pattern. Everything about them is uniform, down to the number of exposed stitches in the fold through which the drawstring runs; from time to time a guard comes and counts the stitches, and if there’s one more or one less he finds out who sewed that bag and bashes him across the face with the rim of his shield. I’ve still got the scar.
Strictly speaking, that bag didn’t belong to me. But, I figured, I’d already killed one man and viciously assaulted two more. Compared to that, theft of a bag whose intrinsic value was a couple of coppers didn’t really signify. Besides, those bags are made to contain documents, and I fancied something to read, and I was sick to death of The Garden of Entrancing Images. I slipped the bag inside my shirt, peered round the doorway to make sure I had a clear run, and ran.
There were a couple of archers outside the gate, purportedly guarding it. They got off a couple of shots at me as I ran, and arrows have got to go somewhere, even if loosed by incompetents. One of them hit me right between the shoulder blades, hard enough to knock me off my feet. That’s it, then, I thought; then I remembered my beautiful and expensive brigandine, decided I was still alive, scrambled to my feet and carried on running. Along the way I passed my shirt on a stick, still leaning against a tree where I’d left it, but I couldn’t be bothered to stop. There are times when shirts matter, and this wasn’t one of them.
“Where the hell did you get to?” Polycrates said. “We were just about to pack up and go home.”
Home in that context would be Auxentia City, the last place God made, where we bought a couple of sheds not long after the Sirupat debacle. I wasn’t in favour of the purchase, mostly because owning real property in Auxentia City, even a couple of semi-derelict sheds, might be construed as some kind of endorsement of the place; it’s the slave-dealing hub of the Friendly Sea, it has bad associations for me and I have an idea that technically I was condemned to death in absentia there for killing a guard a few years back. What the hell do we need a shed for, is how I phrased my objection, and they all looked at me. After all those years living in tents and carts, the poor bastards wanted somewhere, some infinitesimal slice of geography they could call their own, and, yes, it was Auxentia, but the price was right, so I was overruled.
It’s different for me. My family collected geography. A man can’t really call himself a gentleman, my grandfather used to say, unless he’s got at least one of everything: his own house, his own estate, his own deer park, his own quarry, his own lake, his own river, his own mountain, his own town, his own forest, his own coal mine, his own seaport. If he can’t sit on the highest point of his domain and see nothing in any direction that doesn’t belong to him, he tends to feel cramped, belittled, put upon; he can’t breathe, or he shouldn’t be able to. When I left home I left that mindset behind, along with some clothes, a few books and a stuffed felt lion called Smiley; from time to time I miss Smiley and one or two of the books, but not the land, the buildings, the live and dead stock. Home is just a nail that secures you to the cross; home through one palm, love through the other, conscience driven economically through both insteps.
The subset love in this context includes friendship. They were just about to pack up and go home, to Auxentia fucking City. I told myself he hadn’t really meant it. The hell with the truth; who needs it?
“You’ll never guess,” I told him, “who I’ve just been talking to.”
The point being, I told myself, that they hadn’t packed up and gone. “Who?”
“Sister Stauracia.”
Sometimes I like saying things that have the effect of a stone through a stained-glass window. This was one such time; I felt he’d deserved it. His mouth fell open, and he had that look on his face.
“Large as life,” I reassured him, “and just as pretty. She’s defending the castle. Don’t ask,” I added, before he had a chance to speak, “because I don’t know. I mean, she told me some story, but I know she’s lying.”
“Fuck,” said Polycrates. I don’t have a lot of time for him generally, but occasionally he has the knack of putting things rather well.
“Yes,” I said.
So I called a heads-of-department meeting (four barrels under a beech tree). “Suggestions,” I said.
They looked at each other. Then they looked at me.
“Quite,” I said. “For what it’s worth, her people are negligible. As far as I could tell, it’s about twenty of her regular crew and thirty-odd deadheads she must’ve picked up at a hiring fair. Probably,” I added, “in the late afternoon or early evening. But the castle is a bastard, even if we can get up close to it, and offhand I can’t think of a way of doing that. And let’s face it, we’re not soldiers. I don’t know about you boys, but as far as I’m concerned our percentage of acceptable losses is nil. Of course, that includes Gombryas and Olybrius and the rest of them. Frankly, I don’t know what to do. Any thoughts?”
“Starve them out,” Polycrates suggested.
I gave him my patient look. “They’ve got more food than us,” I said. “I give it a week, and then someone’s going to have to go to their front door and ask if we can borrow a bowl of flour and half a dozen eggs. Also, please bear in mind that we’re on a schedule.”
“A night attack,” Eudo said. “We wait till it’s dark, then we sneak up on them, silently eliminate the guards – yes, all right. But you did ask.”
“You’ve talked to her,” Papinian said. “What did she say?”
“Plenty,” I said. “Very little of it true. Her orders are to hold the fort, and I think she’s got a pretty good incentive, though I don’t know what it is.”
He nodded. “She’s only a girl,” he said. “And you’ve read all those books you’re always quoting from.”
He was just trying to be annoying. “That girl commanded an army of regulars on Sirupat,” I pointed out. “And she’d have won, if I hadn’t been there.”
If I hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t have been commanding anything because there wouldn’t have been a war. Everything is my fault.
“We need to do a deal,” Papinian said. “Like that wisecrack you’re always quoting. The one with the donkey.”
Indeed. Attributed to Cyprian the Great: no fortress can be considered impregnable if it can be approached by a man leading a donkey loaded with money. “I don’t think she’s for sale,” I said. “No, that’s not true. She’s out of our price bracket.”
Papinian looked down his nose at me. “Leverage,” he said. “Something she wants.”
Occasionally Papinian says something clever. “Such as?”
“I don’t know, do I? You know her better than we do. Think of something.”
Working on that, I didn’t tell him. “In other words,” I said, “we have no ideas. In which case, I propose we prepare for a straightforward frontal assault, textbook style. It’s not what I’d have chosen, but I don’t think we have an alternative.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Polycrates asked, reasonably enough. “You said it yourself, that place is as tight as a drum. And we aren’t soldiers.”
I sighed. “That’s why I asked for suggestions,” I said. “Pity there weren’t any.”