Sharps (23 page)

More noise, deafening, the joy of perfect strangers at his miserable undoing. Then someone was dragging him along by his feet, and he was still alive.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Phrantzes was saying. “Everybody loses sooner or later.”

An Imperial surgeon was sewing up his face. The pain was appalling, but he kept still and quiet because he was too ashamed to wince. Iseutz was watching, but his eyes were blurred and he couldn’t see her expression. Probably just as well. His left trouser leg was warm and soaking wet. He ought to be wishing he’d died, but he couldn’t. Too weak to die, too humiliated to live. The surgeon leaned forward – for a moment he thought he was going to kiss him, but instead he bit neatly through the suture and turned away. “He’ll be fine,” he heard the surgeon say. No he won’t. Not ever.

“You were lucky,” Phrantzes said. “Four inches down and he’d have cut your jugular vein. As it is, you’ll just have to grow a beard.”

Giraut was peering over Phrantzes’ shoulder. He’d seen people look like that at funerals, paying their respects to the white, cold dead. Behind him, Tzimisces was talking loudly to three men in dark red gowns. He laughed, and one of the men nodded vigorously.

“Anyway, it’s over and we’re all more or less in one piece,” Phrantzes went on. “Which is a hell of a lot more than I could’ve hoped for not so long ago. Well, you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got to go and talk to the Permians about this reception. Well done.”

Well done. Was he trying to be funny?

Perhaps the worst thing about the world at that moment was that it was so horribly full of people. No sooner had Phrantzes gone away than Iseutz and Giraut came and hovered over him. “Are you all right?” Iseutz asked. Giraut stood a pace behind her – long measure – wearing an embarrassed-in-the-presence-of-suffering look.

He nodded. He had a good excuse for not talking, though it was in fact a lie. The wound was only just starting to stiffen up.

“You did pretty well not to get killed,” Iseutz said.

He managed to shut her up with a grunt, followed by an exaggerated wince. “Sorry,” she said, “you can’t talk, I understand. I’m going to speak to the creep about this. That wasn’t fencing, it was …” She opened her mouth, but maybe the word she’d chosen was too big to get out from between her teeth. “I’ll talk to him,” she said. “I’ll make sure he listens.”

She patted him lightly on the shoulder, and his flesh crawled. She turned away quickly. Giraut nodded gravely and bolted after her. Addo screwed his eyes shut, but that pulled on the cut on his forehead, which was just starting to scab over. He could feel his heartbeat through both wounds, as though being damaged was his only evidence that he was still alive.

“We can be pleased with ourselves,” Tzimisces said. “It all went off extremely well.”

He looked perfectly at home: a wine glass in his hand, a freshly pressed shirt under his gown, the reception politely raucous behind him. He was smiling. He reminded Phrantzes of a lizard.

“In fact,” he went on, “it’s hard to see how it could’ve gone better, in the circumstances. We won three out of four events, they won the only match they care about, nobody got killed, so we’re all still friends. No harm done, and I think we can say we’ve made a pretty solid start.”

Phrantzes could think of nothing to say. Fortunately, he wasn’t called on for a contribution.

“I had a word with the representatives of their Board of Control,” Tzimisces went on, “and off the record, they don’t mind in the least if we wipe the floor with them in rapier and longsword. Quite the reverse. Apparently they’re quite concerned about the recent trend towards what they regard as effete Western disciplines. If we can put their fencers off fighting rapier, so much the better; they’ll stick to messers, which is the traditional form, and that’ll please the Board. Longsword’s always been a minority form here, and we didn’t completely humiliate them, so they’re not bothered about that. As for the girls, they’re ambivalent about women in the sport, to say the least. There’s a long tradition of it, granted, but …”

Phrantzes nodded and made an I’m-listening noise. He’d looked all round the room, but he couldn’t see Suidas anywhere. He became aware that the lizard had stopped talking, and tried to remember where the conversation had got to.

“I don’t see young Deutzel anywhere,” Tzimisces said. “He really ought to be making the rounds. After all, he’s our national champion.”

Phrantzes got away with a nod.

“What was all that about, by the way?” Tzimisces went on. “Deutzel was supposed to be fencing messer, wasn’t he? Only I made rather a thing of it: our champion, their national form. Perhaps next time you change the game plan, you might have a word with me first.”

“It was a last-minute thing,” Phrantzes managed to say.

“Fair enough.” Tzimisces was looking thoughtfully at him, as if trying to decide if he was safe to eat. “And we’ve got to hold something in reserve for the big match in the capital, so it’s worked out quite well. Maybe we should have Bryennius fence messer at the next place.”

“I don’t—” Phrantzes cut himself short and took a breath. “I don’t think he’s up to it,” he said. “It wouldn’t be safe.”

That, apparently, was a good enough reason. “Well, we don’t want anything like that,” Tzimisces said. “So, we’ll stick with Carnufex for Beaute, and save Deutzel for the grand finale. Yes, I’m quite happy with that.” He gave Phrantzes what was presumably meant to be a warm smile. “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve handled it all very well indeed.”

I haven’t done anything
, Phrantzes wanted to yell. Just as well he didn’t; it’d have sounded like he was a prisoner being dragged away. “Thank you,” he muttered.

“But you’d better just cut along and find Deutzel,” Tzimisces added. “I know he’s been dry for quite a while now, but this would be a very bad time for him to have a relapse.”

Phrantzes hadn’t thought of that. “I’ll find him,” he said, and fled.

Addo chose a Permian at random, cleared his throat, smiled and said, “Excuse me, but where’s the …?”

The Permian looked at him; not unfriendly, but puzzled. “Excuse me?”

“The … um.”

“The what, sorry?”

“I wish to urinate. Where should I go?”

The Permian frowned and pointed to a door. “Thank you,” Addo said, and headed for it.

Outside, the air smelt of rain. Addo looked round. It was too dark to see beyond the dim leakage of light showing through the half-open door. He unbuckled his belt and lowered his trousers.

“Addo? Is that you?”

He froze. He hadn’t seen Suidas, crouched on the ground in the shadows. He mumbled an apology and hauled his trousers up, as Suidas slowly dragged himself to his feet.

“How are you feeling?” Suidas said.

“Oh, could be worse.”

Suidas shook his head. His face was in shadow. “There’ll be a scar,” he said.

“Not to worry. It’s not like I was ever a thing of beauty.”

Suidas moved away a little. “The important thing,” he said, “is finding a way of dealing with it. In my case, I killed every Permian I could find. Then, after the war, I drank myself stupid. I wouldn’t recommend either of those. On balance, they caused more problems than they solved. I’m sorry,” he added.

“What for?”

“Fine.” Suidas shook his head. “It doesn’t alter what happened, though. But I really am sorry.” Suddenly he laughed. “Ludicrous, isn’t it? Here we are again, in Permia, only this time the orders are
don’t
kill Permians. A man could get seriously confused.”

Addo looked at him carefully. “My father says you were a war hero.”

“Does he? Then it must be true, mustn’t it?”

“When I agreed to come here, I asked him who I’d be going with. He made some enquiries. He let me read the dispatches, about the time when you—”

“You don’t want to go believing everything you read,” Suidas said. “And don’t ever talk about that stuff again. Please,” he added. “All right?”

“Of course.”

“Wonderful. And now I’ll leave you to pee in peace. You must be bursting.”

The lodgings provided for them had once been a temple, built before the Empire came, before it split into East and West. The names of its gods were still discernible, engraved on pedestals of missing statues, written under painted figures faded into blank silhouettes; but the language and alphabet had been mislaid at some point, and nobody knew what they meant. Each of the party was given a chapel to sleep in: a plain, narrow bed in the centre of a huge square room with an impossibly high vaulted ceiling; no other furniture. No fireplace, either. Instead, they were each provided with a small iron charcoal brazier, military issue.

“Don’t use the bloody things, whatever you do,” Suidas warned them. “No chimney. You’ll be dead by morning from the fumes.”

Iseutz stared up into the belly of the dome above her head, shivered and decided she’d risk it; better to suffocate painlessly in her sleep than freeze to death. Eventually she got the thing lit, using the last of the tinder she’d brought from home. The brazier gave out a faint orange glow, not nearly enough to read by, and no perceptible heat. She pulled the sheets and the one thin blanket off the bed, wrapped them around her like bandages, and looked round for a corner to huddle in. It was, of course, a circular room.

Giraut’s room was on two levels. There was a raised section, like a stage, where a high altar had once stood. The floor was veined green marble. He lay down on top of the bed and immediately fell asleep.

Addo’s chapel was being used as overflow storage for the Fencers’ Guild library. There were books stacked everywhere on the floor; you could’ve built a fortress out of them and held off an army. There was also a lamp. He lit it, picked up a book at random and lay down on the bed, propped up against the head-board so his face wouldn’t touch the pillows. The book was an early edition of
The Fencer’s Mirror
, a text he was well acquainted with. But this version was about a hundred years earlier than his father’s copy, with strange, stick-like figures instead of the magnificently muscled, superbly bearded demigods he’d grown up with, and the guards and moves they illustrated were ever so slightly different. He leafed slowly through until he came to a picture of two men facing each other with long, curved knives.
Here they fight with messers. God help them
. He retrieved the bread and cheese he’d liberated from the reception and settled down to read.

In spite of the cold, Suidas eventually fell asleep, and dreamt, as he did occasionally, of the destruction of Flos Verjan. In his dream, he was standing on a bridge, looking down into the turbulent waters of a river. Suddenly the river rose, as if waking up, and lifted the bridge, with him still on it, and swept it away. He turned his head and saw the city; the river was taking him there, he was riding on its back like a cavalryman. He was so high, he was looking down on the city, as though he was approaching the edge of a waterfall. Through a curtain of fine spray he could see streets, buildings, crowds of people staring up at him.
I can’t help that
, he thought, and the wave started to fall, the streets and the people grew larger. It was all right, though; all he had to do was cross the bridge and he’d be safe. He took a step, but there was someone in the way, a Permian with a messer in his left hand. He turned, but the same man was blocking the other side – which shouldn’t be happening, because the general had sent men to secure this bridge, no matter what the cost. He reached for his own messer but it wasn’t there.

Phrantzes couldn’t get to sleep, so he lay awake and worried about his wife, stuck in a convent with sixty elderly, hostile nuns. It’d be cold there (Sphagia despised the cold) and there’d be bells every hour to call the nuns to prayer, and she snarled like a tiger if anything disturbed her sleep, and they ate bare bread and salted porridge, so the poor girl must be starving. After three or four hours of that, he got up and lit the lamp, sat on the edge of the bed and tried to think what to do about Addo.

Tzimisces was given a room, but he didn’t sleep there.

Giraut was woken by Lieutenant Totila, looking singularly beautiful in gilded parade armour and a floor-length purple cloak with a white fur collar. “Breakfast,” he said. “In the chancel.”

“The what?”

“Through the door,” Totila said, “left down the corridor till you come to a pair of bronze and silver gates. Straight through, you can’t miss it.”

Nor did he. It was vast, and the walls were decorated with frescoes of the torments of the damned in Hell. There was a table in the middle of the floor, like an island in an ocean. Iseutz was there, and Phrantzes. They were eating honey cakes.

“Morning,” Phrantzes said brightly. “Lieutenant Totila, won’t you join us?”

Totila smiled. “On duty, alas. I just thought I’d let you know I’ve been assigned to escort you as far as Beaute. I hope that’s all right.”

“Excellent,” Phrantzes said, and Iseutz gave him a sour look. “You’ve taken such good care of us so far.”

Totila smiled, turned crisply and marched out, his heels clattering on the black slate floor. Giraut sat down. There was one honey cake left; also a big loaf that looked like a millstone and a tall brown stone jar.

“What’s in the jar?” he asked.

“Pickled cabbage.”

“Ah.” He reached for the loaf. There was nothing to cut it with. He took the last honey cake.

“Political Officer Tzimisces,” Iseutz said, “is nowhere to be found. I looked in his room and his bed hasn’t been slept in. Of course, that’s presupposing he sleeps in a bed, instead of hanging upside down from a hook in the ceiling.”

Giraut frowned. “Is there a hook?”

Iseutz nodded. “As it happens, yes, there is. Probably for hanging a thurible from.”

“A what?”

“Incense burner. My cousin’s a priest,” she explained. She turned to Phrantzes. “Well, where is he?”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t the faintest idea. I was hoping to talk to him myself.”

They heard footsteps and saw Addo coming towards them. He looked tired, and had a book under his arm. “You’re too late,” Iseutz called out. “We’ve eaten it all.”