Colours in the Steel (55 page)

Gannadius mumbled something polite. To him, the city looked like a collapsed sugarloaf; but he recognised the quotations the other man was reeling off, the conventional epithets and cliches that everybody mouthed without thinking what they meant. To be strictly accurate, in fact, the original line from Phyzas’
Homecoming
was ‘nurse of
fair
women’, not ‘fine’; but everybody got it wrong except the few who’d actually waded through the turgid thing.

‘Pity, really,’ the man said. ‘Still, when you’ve had your time, you’ve had your time.’ He looked up and studied Gannadius’ expression. ‘First time at sea, is it?’

Gannadius nodded.

‘You get used to it,’ the man said. ‘Eventually. The trick is, don’t fight it. Once you’ve chucked up a couple of times you’ll feel a whole lot better, believe me.’

There were a great many people up on deck, taking a final look at the city as it slowly disappeared below the horizon; like a tall, proud ship gradually sinking, Gannadius said to himself, how depressingly apt. In spite of what his neighbour on the rail had said he didn’t feel nauseous (he didn’t feel
well
either, but he didn’t feel nauseous). Nor was he overwhelmed by grief and the pathos of it all. Mainly, he supposed, he couldn’t accept that he was quite possibly seeing the city for the last time.

‘Me,’ the man said, ‘I’m from Scona originally, only been in the city about five years. You ever been to Scona? No, sorry, of course you haven’t. Miserable place, Scona. But at least people don’t go around burning it down every five minutes.’

‘You think it’ll come to that?’

The man laughed. ‘Right fool I’ll look if it doesn’t, after I’ve coughed up six hundred smilers for a ride on this tub. Well, don’t you? You must do, or why are you here?’

‘Actually, I’m on my way to a posting on the Island, so I’d have been leaving anyway,’ Gannadius said.

‘I see.’ The man didn’t need to call him a liar, or even imply it. ‘Fortuitous, that. What line of work are you in, then?’

‘Banking,’ Gannadius replied.

‘Really? Which bank?’

Gannadius winced; served him right for being a coward and not telling the truth. ‘It’s a small family bank,’ he replied, ‘you wouldn’t have heard of us. Boredan,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘Boredan? With a B?’

‘That’s right. The Boredan bank. Like I said, we’re very small, quite low-profile . . .’

The man looked at him. ‘I bet you get sick and tired of people muddling you up with the other lot,’ he said. ‘Must be very aggravating.’

‘It is,’ Gannadius replied, looking straight ahead. ‘How about you?’ he said. ‘What do you do?’

‘Oh, you know,’ the man said. ‘Letters of credit, bills of exchange, that sort of thing. Typical bits-and-pieces, hand-to-mouth credit trading. It’s odd, though, there being a
Boredan
bank and me never having heard of it. Pir Hiraut,’ he added, extending a hand. ‘Maybe we could put some business each other’s way sometime.’

Gannadius took the man’s hand - he had a grip like a bench vice - and smiled broadly. ‘That would be - I mean, yes, we must certainly explore the possibilities,’ he said. Inspiration struck; he clapped a hand to his throat and made a gurgling noise. Grinning, the man wished him luck and moved away.

‘Next time,’ said another voice, this time on his left side, ‘pretend to be a merchant. Something boring, like dried fish. Nobody ever wants to talk shop with a dried-fish merchant.’

Gannadius turned his head and grinned sheepishly. ‘You - ah - overheard?’

Vetriz nodded. ‘You should have told him you were a wi—a member of the Order,’ she said. ‘It really is very highly respected on the Island, you know. Is there really a foundation there?’

Gannadius nodded. ‘There is indeed. But it’s little more than a consulate, looking after our financial interests; they don’t do any teaching, precious little research either. Still, it’s a job. Better than landing as a penniless refugee.’

‘Somehow I don’t see this lot as penniless,’ Vetriz confided, ‘or they wouldn’t be on this ship. I think you’ll find there’s quite a few
real
bankers, as well as traders, merchant venturers, others of that sort; people whose lives aren’t completely confined within the city walls.’ She placed her elbows on the rail and cupped her chin in her hands. ‘That’s why they’re prepared to leave, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, we had no trouble filling the ship, but there weren’t great long queues either. Most people aren’t interested in getting out, not now the assault’s been repulsed.’

Gannadius shrugged. ‘I hope they’re right,’ he said. ‘And if they are, I shall wait a while and then creep quietly home and try and burrow my way back into the hierarchy of the Order. I’ve lost my chance of becoming Patriarch, of course, but to be honest I don’t much care. It isn’t quite the wonderful life everybody supposes it to be.’

Vetriz furrowed her brow. ‘
He
stayed, though,’ she said.

‘Alexius’ health wouldn’t permit him to travel,’ Gannadius replied. ‘He conceals it to some extent, but he’s not at all well.’ Gannadius was silent for a moment, wondering if he’d ever see his friend again. There hadn’t been time to say goodbye; he’d scribbled a few lines on a tablet and thrust it into the messenger’s hands, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. He regretted that. Anything approaching genuine friendship in the upper reaches of the hierarchy was extremely rare, something you came not to expect. Having found it, he was sorry to lose it again.

But the thought of getting out - escaping - was irresistible. And since, thanks to Alexius’ last-minute improvisation, he was able to leave with a vestige of honour and a job to go to, he’d have been mad to pass up the opportunity.

The city had almost completely sunk; only the blinding whiteness of the upper city remained, glaring in the sun. It put Gannadius in mind of the old fable, about the Lost City of Myzo, the fabulously wealthy and magical island-kingdom that angered the gods and sank beneath the waves a million years ago, when there still were gods and such things were permitted to happen. These days, of course, geography wasn’t quite so amenable to the demands of poetic justice, or so the city people reckoned.

Well. Possibly.

Feeling some gesture was called for, he raised his hand to shoulder height, palm facing the faraway flash of white until it was completely gone, and then let it fall.

‘Saying goodbye?’

‘Being melodramatic,’ he replied. ‘I’ve spent so long teaching that I have a persistent weakness for showmanship, even when it’s entirely out of place. Do you know, this is the first time I’ve been out of sight of the city in my entire life. I’m fifty-four,’ he added. ‘I suppose I should feel quite lost, but I don’t.’

‘Pleased to hear it,’ Vetriz replied. ‘There’s plenty of time for you to feel homesick later on.’

She left him and crossed the deck to see how her other new friend was getting on. Vetriz had been sympathetic, but tears were something she’d always found unsettling and hard to cope with; accordingly, she’d left her to pull herself together.

‘I’m sorry,’ Athli said. ‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you. It’s just—’ She left the sentence unfinished, her eyes still fixed on the horizon.

‘You really thought he’d come? At the last minute?’

Athli shook her head. ‘Oh, it wasn’t that,’ she said. ‘But leaving the city, not knowing if it’ll be there when I come back...’

Vetriz didn’t say anything; she wasn’t sure she believed what Athli was trying to tell her, but there was no way of knowing. She was over-inclined, she knew, to see storytellers’ romance where there really wasn’t any evidence for it outside her own imagination. On the other hand, this was a situation where her instinctive interpretation could quite reasonably be expected to be the correct one.

Besides, it was none of her business.

‘It’ll be there,’ she said, ‘just you wait. It’ll have to be, if we’re going into the fancy-goods business. Can’t let a silly old war get in the way of a good business idea.’

Athli smiled. ‘Particularly one your brother didn’t think of.’

‘Precisely.’ As she said it, Vetriz knew she was saying the opposite of what she believed. Somehow she knew the city would fall, sooner or later. It wasn’t something she cared to dwell on long enough to rationalise the intuition; thinking about it, in fact, quite literally gave her a headache. She knew, that was all; just as she’d known the last time she saw her great-aunt Alamande (ninety-two years old and crippled with arthritis; for the last ten years she’d been waiting for death like an impatient traveller waiting for the ferry) that it was the last time, a proper occasion for formal leavetaking. She hadn’t been particularly attached to Great-Aunt Alamande, and she wasn’t particularly attached to the Triple City of Perimadeia (pleasant enough to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there). Perhaps you needed to be detached to have the proper perspective; in any event, that was why she’d given in to the impulse to try and get all her new friends out of there and away to safety. It was a pity the Patriarch hadn’t come; and Loredan too, of course. But it was scarcely a surprise; they were both men with a strong sense of honour and duty, not the kind to run away.

(
Honestly
, she thought.
Men!
)

Venart would be on the forecastle, looking out impatiently for the seamarks that would bring him home. She went to join him, feeling suddenly glad that she was who she was, and that the most they had to worry about was a cargo of rope at the bottom of a harbour and the prospect of a good market lost.

‘Actually,’ Venart said, a little later, ‘it may be a - damn, what’s the opposite of a mixed blessing? A blessing in disguise, or at least an opportunity. Sure, we lose a market, and a very good one. But it’s not the end of the world; there’s still a whole world out there wanting to buy and sell, and if they can’t do it in Perimadeia, they’ll have to do it somewhere else. This could be the big chance the Island’s been waiting for; I mean to say, it’s not that long ago we were trying to destroy the place ourselves, for precisely that reason.’

‘Ah,’ Vetriz said ominously. ‘So that’s all right, then.’

Venart clicked his tongue. ‘Yes, I know it sounds callous and unfeeling, and believe me, I really do feel sorry for them, though when you come to think of it they did rather bring it on themselves, letting the enemy wander in and learn how to make engines and things, no questions asked. The fact remains, we’ve got a living to earn, and it’s an ill wind...’

Vetriz nodded. ‘So you think we could be on the brink of a wonderful new opportunity?’ she asked.

‘Quite possibly. Quite possibly.’

‘Splendid.’ Vetriz smiled happily. ‘So, with all this new business coming our way, it’d only be sensible to take on an extra clerk. I’ll tell Athli, she’ll be so pleased.’

‘Vetriz—’ Venart saved his breath for a long, resigned sigh. The truth was, once his sister had made up her mind that something was going to happen, as often as not it did and that was that. The only sensible thing to do was to accept it, and try and find some way to mitigate the expenditure it would inevitably involve without letting her realise it.

In front of him, he imagined he saw a straight, wide road leading home. To go home, with a profitable cargo, money in his pocket, something that’d be of use to him once he got there; it wasn’t much to ask.

 

As sieges go, it could have been far worse.

There are sieges where the defenders starve; where a dead rat or blackbird changes hands for the price of a bushel of fine wheat-flour, and dark rumours of robbed graves and cannibalism spring up out of the general despair like mushrooms in the dark; where the besiegers camp in the steaming marshes outside a strong and well-supplied city, watching the guards on the wall walking off their dinners with a pleasant stroll while fever and hunger desiccate their enemies; sieges where the trebuchets of the besiegers throw rotting carcasses into the city to spread pestilence, sieges where the trebuchets of the city throw stale bread into the besiegers’ camp to mock their starvation. Some cities suffer two sieges; the enemy outside and plague inside. Sometimes the plague spreads from one enemy to another, so that on both sides of the wall men evaporate like rain on hot stones. Savage heat oppresses the defenders in summer, snow and ice ravage the besiegers in winter. All in all, it can be an unpleasant business for all concerned. A stagnant war seldom does anybody any good.

Not so the siege of Perimadeia, if it could be called a siege at all. True, the city people couldn’t venture out on the land side; but then again, who really wanted to? The Drovers’ Bridge was where foreigners came in and out of the city; Perimadeians came and went from the harbour when they travelled at all. As for the commodities that came by land; who needed them? Food and some raw materials, nothing that couldn’t come by sea, and if it meant paying a little more, that could be covered by a modest rise in prices. Once it became obvious that there was to be no fresh assault, that the rafts on the river weren’t bringing in the components of more engines, ladders, rams, canopies, the people of the city gradually began to lose interest; indeed, except for the continuing debate over the ethics of using fire-oil (which the political factions managed to keep going, like the flame of a lamp with a damp wick), they put it out of their minds and went back to work.

Temrai’s people also found themselves settling into the comfort of a routine. The land behind the city hadn’t been grazed for over a decade, making it good country for the flocks and herds. Water was plentiful, and after the frantic activity of engine-building and engine-moving, a rest was welcome. There were still things to be done. They were rebuilding the causeway opposite the bridgehouse, there were arrows to be turned and fletched, arrowheads to be made, armour to be repaired and reinforced. Whether to increase efficiency or simply to keep his men occupied, Temrai had organised weekly archery competitions, with good prizes for the winners and compulsory training for the bottom tenth of the losers; that gave them something to speculate about and gamble on, and went some way towards repairing the damage the battle of the rafts had done to his relationship with his people. Very few of them still speculated as to what the next phase was going to be; the generally accepted view was that they were all waiting for something to happen, and until then there were worse places in the world to pitch camp for a month or so.