Colours in the Steel (10 page)

Gannadius lifted his head. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘don’t worry. You’ll live.’

The pain stopped.

‘Keep still,’ Gannadius went on. ‘And calm down. Try and breathe normally.’ He stood up, stiff and awkward after his cramped sleep, and poured half a cupful of strong black wine. ‘This’ll help,’ he said. ‘Go on, drink it. If you were going to die, you’d be dead by now.’

Alexius made a face as the wine burnt his insides. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Was that a heart attack or was I stabbed?’

‘Both. My fault, I’m afraid. Give me the cup, I’ll get you another.’

‘
Your
fault?’

Gannadius nodded. ‘I had to do something to stop him killing the girl. Shoving you in the way was all I could think of. It’s just as well you weren’t really there, or it could have been very dangerous.’

‘Of all—’ Alexius waved the cup aside feebly. ‘You do realise what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘Now I’m under a curse of my very own. And the girl still killed him, so it was all for nothing.’

Gannadius shook his head. ‘Think,’ he said sternly. ‘You were under that curse already; that’s what’s been wrong with you these past weeks. All I’ve done is bring matters to a head, so to speak. No,’ he continued, ‘if it hadn’t been for me things would have been much worse. Loredan would have killed the girl, and then where would we all be?’

‘You’re not the one who’s going to get run through,’ Alexius pointed out. ‘At the very best, we’re back exactly where we started.’

‘Oh, no,’ Gannadius objected, ‘not at all. For one thing, we’ve done some extremely valuable practical research into an area of the Principle about which deplorably little was hitherto known. I shall write a paper about this.’

The Patriarch closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘That aside,’ he said.

‘That aside, I do believe we’ve made some worthwhile progress. Instead of having a vague idea that you were suffering from an adverse reaction but not knowing what form it’s taken, we now know exactly what you can expect. Likewise, we were in time to prevent the potentially disastrous consequences of this second intervention, no small achievement in itself. Add to that the fact that none of the reaction appears to have attached itself to me, and I believe we can congratulate ourselves on a job well done.’ Gannadius smiled. ‘And now I suggest that you try and sleep for a while. I’ll have a guest room made up for you. Heart trouble isn’t something to be taken lightly, you know.’

Alexius groaned. ‘What really depresses me,’ he said, ‘is that you and I are the world’s leading exponents of this particular skill. If this is the best we can do, perhaps we ought to leave well alone. For pity’s sake, we’re supposed to be able to do this sort of thing for a living.’

Gannadius looked at him for a long time. ‘A living,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you may care to rephrase that.’

The chief trainer was vexed.

‘True,’ he conceded, ‘there have been female advocates before. Some of them lived to be nearly twenty-five. But that was mostly because nobody wanted to hire them, so they scarcely ever got any work. You don’t want to join this profession. Go away.’

The girl said nothing; instead she held out a squat leather purse on the flat of her hand. The trainer couldn’t help noticing how full it looked.

‘We aren’t really equipped to take female students,’ he said. ‘We’d need separate changing rooms, and we simply haven’t got the space. Not to mention chaperones,’ he added, suddenly inspired. ‘And before you say you don’t need chaperoning, you try telling that to the Public Morals Office. That’s just the sort of thing that could get me closed down, just like that. And what about the costume?’ he went on, wondering why none of this seemed to be having any effect at all. ‘You couldn’t be expected to fight in trousers, and there just isn’t an accepted form of solemn-procedure dress for women in the courts. You’d be a laughing stock.’

The girl said nothing. The purse sat there on her palm. A sense of bewildering frustration swept over the trainer; why couldn’t he get through to this pig-headed girl? Over the years he’d talked literally hundreds of stupid young kids out of joining a profession in which they stood no chance of survival. He was a conscientious man and besides, he had his trainer’s licence to think of. He could just imagine himself trying to explain to a frantic mother and father and a stony faced Public Safety Office official why he allowed a slip of a girl to join up and get herself killed in her first fight. It was a fat purse, but not fat enough to compensate him for the loss of a business he’d been nurturing for nine hard years.

‘Please?’ he said. ‘If you won’t listen to sense, then at least go away and make life miserable for one of my competitors. I can give you a list of places to try.’

‘You’re the best,’ the girl said. ‘I want to learn here.’

Behind them, the long exercise hall echoed to the clatter of blades and the shouts of short-tempered instructors. The floor shook as thirty feet came down hard in unison in the first, second, third steps of the Orthodox guard, the back foot riposte, the fleche, the defensive lunge, the Southern parry, the fencer’s turn, the
mandritta
. Every day brought a fresh crop of bright, keen, idiotic young faces, of distraught fathers whose only sons had run away from home and family businesses to follow the wild dream of becoming a lawyer. Every week there were funerals to attend, new names to inscribe on the roll of ex-pupils who had given their lives for the profession. One way or another, the chief trainer saw an awful lot of young people with an urge to die, but never one as persistent as this. Mostly, he reckoned, it was the way she wasn’t pleading or cajoling or begging that was getting to him. It was as if she was demanding an inalienable right which he was trying to cheat her of on the flimsiest of pretexts. It’d serve her right, he told himself, if he did let her join.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘here’s the deal. You tell me why it’s so all-fire important to you to be an advocate, and then maybe I might be persuaded.’

Silence. For the first time, the trainer could sense a slight trace of reluctance; a questionable motive, perhaps, something on which he could quite reasonably base a refusal. He decided to press the advantage.

‘The point being,’ he said, ‘that there’s only one valid reason for wanting to join this profession. Anything else, and you’re disqualified instantly. And I’ve got an idea it’s not the reason that’s motivating you.’

The girl said nothing, but her cheeks were beginning to glow red. Professional that he was, the trainer could sense a fault in her guard that would repay pressure. He moved onto the offensive.

‘The only reason for fighting people for a living,’ he said, ‘is money. Not love of justice, or honour, or adventure, or prowess, or the desire to be the best. Certainly not the pleasure of killing; most definitely not because secretly you want to find a way you can die before your time without it being your fault. It has to be the money, or nothing. And if you’re about to tell me that it’s all right, you don’t actually intend to practise once you finish the course, you’re just here for the education, then I suggest you get out of my establishment before I have you thrown out into the street. Of all the dirty, disgusting words I know, the very worst of all is
amateur
. And that’s what you are, isn’t it?’

He was winning; because when the girl replied her voice was unsettled, worried. ‘How would you know?’ she said sullenly.

‘Because,’ he said, ‘you turn up with payment in full in advance, all ready, not even a pretence of haggling or offering to pay in instalments or asking me to wait till you’ve started earning. That’s what professionals do. Obviously, therefore, you’re not a professional.’

Victory. The girl’s hand closed around the purse and dropped to her side. ‘The hell with you, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll just have to go elsewhere.’

‘Best of luck,’ the trainer replied, relieved that the fight was over. Even so, now that he’d won, he couldn’t help feeling a burning curiosity. After all, she hadn’t answered his question. He asked it again.

‘None of your business.’

‘If you tell me,’ he said, ‘I might be able to point you in the right direction.’

The girl shrugged; the matter was no longer important. The mere gesture seemed to devalue his victory. ‘Revenge,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

‘Ah,’ the trainer replied, ‘I might have guessed. If there’s one thing I despise almost as much as amateurs, it’s melodrama.’

The girl gave him an unpleasant stare. ‘My uncle was killed by an advocate called Bardas Loredan. The only way I can legally punish him is to become an advocate myself. So that’s what I’m going to do.’

In spite of himself, the trainer couldn’t help being intrigued. ‘What’s so significant about being legal?’ he asked. ‘If it’s so terribly important to you, why not just hire a couple of bright lads to cut his throat in an alley somewhere? I could definitely give you a few recommendations there; quite a few of our ex-students diversify into that area of the profession after a couple of years.’

The girl shook her head. ‘That would be murder,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in murder, it’s wrong. This has to be done right.’

Several replies occurred to the trainer, but he voiced none of them. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Start a lawsuit against one of his regular clients, and hire a better fencer. He’ll be killed and it’ll be completely legal.’

‘That would still be murder,’ the girl replied. ‘It’s not as if Loredan’s done anything wrong, after all. He was just doing his job, so he hasn’t committed any crime that would put him outside the law. But he killed my uncle and so he’s got to be punished.’

Before the trainer could say anything, she had turned and walked away; out of the hall and out of his life. Most of him was only too glad to be rid of her; but there was one small dangerous part of him that regretted losing so unusual a subject for observation. The trainer had seen all kinds of strange people - the sad, the sick, the disturbed, the crazy and the plain old-fashioned stupid - but never one like this. Probably, he reminded himself, just as well. Bad trouble on two legs is always best avoided.

 

It wasn’t until quite late in the afternoon that Loredan woke up. He was hung over, depressed and angry with himself for not coping better. He decided to go out for a drink.

If a man wants to get thoroughly drunk in the lower city of Perimadeia, there are any number of places he can go, between them covering all the nuances of the mood, from boisterous jollity to utter self-loathing and all the fine gradations in between. From the fashionable inns where respectable people talked business over good wine to the unlicenced drinking-clubs behind a curtain in the back room of someone’s house, there was an abundance of choice that was sometimes offputting. There were taverns that advertised their presence with enormous mosaic signs, and others which did their best to be invisible. There were taverns that were government offices, taverns that were theatres, taverns that were academies of music or pure mathematics; there were temples to forbidden gods, corn exchanges and futures markets, dancing floors and mechanics’ institutes, places that allowed women and places that provided them, places to go if you wanted to watch a fight, places to go if you wanted to start one. There were even taverns where you went to argue over which tavern you were going to go to. And there were places you could go and sit on your own until you were too drunk to move. In fact, there were a lot of those.

The one Loredan chose didn’t have a name or even many customers; it was basically the back room of a wheelright’s shop, with four plain tables, eight oil lamps and a hatch you banged on when you wanted more to drink. Nobody spoke much, though occasionally someone sang for half a minute or so. There was a channel under the back wall to piss in if you were feeling refined. If you happened to die where you sat, nobody would hold it against you. The wine was no worse for you than a dose of malaria.

Loredan was halfway through a small jug of the stuff when someone walked up and sat down opposite him.

‘Bardas,’ he said.

Loredan raised his head. ‘Teoclito,’ he replied. ‘Aren’t you dead?’

‘Not yet.’ Teoclito put down his jug and filled both cups. ‘Mind you, I’m not trying as hard as you. How’s life in the legal profession?’

‘Depressing.’

‘Good money, so I hear.’

Loredan shrugged. ‘Better than the army, and you get to wear your own clothes. What about you?’

Teoclito looked about seventy; in fact, he was only five or so years older than Loredan. The last time the two of them had sat together over a jug of wine had been in a tent pitched among the ruins of a town they had reached three days too late. The next day, there had been a bit of a scrimmage with the clans; Teoclito was one of the wounded who was past helping. They’d gone back to put him out of harm’s way, but he hadn’t been where they’d left him. It followed that the clans had him. It helped not to think too hard about such things.