The Belly of the Bow (33 page)

Machaera was about to scold him for being so self-centred when he suddenly burst into tears. This was thoroughly disconcerting. Cortoys had
never
cried, not in all the years she’d known him; not even when he was just turned five and he’d fallen down the steps near the north cistern and taken all the skin off his knees. He’d wanted to cry; she’d stood there, watching him carefully as if observing an interesting astronomical phenomenon, waiting for him to cry, but he hadn’t, not then and not ever. It was one of the things about him that irritated her most.

‘Cortoys—’ she said.

‘Oh, damn all this to hell,’ he muttered through a big sob. ‘This is so
stupid
. And now you’ll go around telling everybody—’

‘Cortoys, I wouldn’t.’

He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter whether you do or not,’ he said, wiping his nose on his wrist. ‘You know what really worries me?’ he went on. ‘I know, really
know
, that if I’d been there, like I was supposed to have been, I’d have been so terrified I’d either have run or else been so scared I’d have just stood there. I don’t know, it’s just the idea of it, being in a battle, all that anger and danger. You know what I’ve only just realised? I’ve been a coward all my life and never knew it.

Machaera wanted very much to be somewhere else, but unfortunately she didn’t have that option. Part of her hated Cortoys more than ever for choosing her to break down in front of. Part of her wanted to hug him tight and tell him it didn’t matter; which was strange, because she really didn’t like him, not one bit. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, as briskly as she could (a bit like Master Henteil when he got impatient in Metaphysics tutorials). ‘You’re no such thing. Everybody gets these ideas from time to time, imagines they won’t be up to it when the moment comes. That doesn’t make them cowards.’

Cortoys shook his head. ‘From now on,’ he said, staring at the fashionably pointed toes of his shoes, ‘I’m going to make damned certain the situation never arises. And I don’t care what anybody says; the further away I stay from the fighting, the happier I’ll be.’

Machaera grinned in spite of herself. ‘You could start a new faction. The Don’t-Want-to-Fight faction. It’d be original, at any rate. I’m absolutely positive nobody’s thought of
that
one before.’

‘I’d be famous,’ Cortoys answered, looking up at her with a tearful smile. ‘The first all-new faction in Shastel for fifty years.’

‘Doing your bit for the Soef family name,’ Machaera added.

‘Oh, quite,’ Cortoys replied. ‘Uncle Renvaut would have been so proud.’

 

Gorgas Loredan slipped off his horse and handed the reins to the sergeant of his escort. ‘You lot had better make yourselves scarce,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Stay in earshot just in case I do need you for anything, but I don’t think that’s very likely.’

He approached the long barn from its blind side, stopping every now and then to look and listen, like an archer walking up a rabbit in long grass, just before the first cut of hay. He couldn’t hear anything that suggested activity; no smooth
sshk
of plane-blade on wood, no sounds of sawing or rasping, no voices. He’d assumed, reasonably enough, that Bardas would be in his workshop. After all, he was an artisan with a living to earn, so while the light was still good he ought to be at his place of work. That’s where working men are during the day.

Unless he’s out somewhere chopping down trees. Or dead. Or scared stiff by the raiders and run off into the hills somewhere
. He frowned at this last speculation; men who have commanded armies and made their living as professional swordfighters don’t scamper away into the bushes like bunnies at the first sight of a halberdier’s greatcoat.
All right, then, he’s out delivering, or buying materials. Or shopping, even
.

He walked slowly round the corner of the long barn into the yard and paused for a moment to look round. No signs of life anywhere, and he didn’t have that nebulous but unmistakable feeling of being watched. Nobody home, his instincts told him, but there are several words to describe people who rely on their instincts in situations of this sort, most of them synonyms for ‘dead’. Unlikely, of course, that Bardas would plop an arrow between his shoulders or jump out from behind the water-butt with a sword in his hand, but the whole object of the exercise was to stalk the quarry, not flush it out; the more notice he gave his brother of his arrival, the smaller his chances of scooping him up and taking him back to Town. Gorgas allowed himself a little smile, thinking back to the days when he and his brothers were regularly landed with the loathsome and near-impossible chore of rounding up the ducks off the pond, stuffing them in great big wicker baskets and bringing them back to the long poultry-shed. There are few things quicker moving or less predictable then a startled duck, and the fun usually began when there were only ten or so left. Gorgas had never worked so hard or sweated so much before or since.

Three stone steps up to the barn door, and he put his head cautiously round the frame. The workshop was dark, shutters drawn. In theory, a man could hide behind the stacks of felled, trimmed timber, or behind the clay-pipe-and-brick contraption in the corner (Gorgas recognised it as a steamer, for steaming the limbs of a bow into a recurve; his father had tried to build one once and failed), but Gorgas only made a cursory inspection. At this range, he was prepared to go with his instincts. If Bardas was here he’d know it, and he wasn’t.

Gorgas sighed and sat down for a moment on the bench.
Scruffy
, he noted.
Tools left lying about, shavings ankle-deep on the floorboards, whatever happened to Tidiness is the Mother of Efficiency?
He picked up a drawknife and held it up to the light. There were spots of rust like raindrops already starting to form on the polished blade. Father would have had a fit.

He put the drawknife carefully back where he’d found it and brushed away a little pile of shavings, resisting the urge to sneeze. There was a three-quarters-finished bow in the vice, a straight, flat self-bow intended for military use. Gorgas ran a finger along the belly and was impressed by the quality of the finish. Someone had been to a lot of trouble to get it feeling so smooth and glasslike. Why? Where was the point in exceeding the level of quality prescribed by the standard military specification? No one would ever notice or appreciate it -
correction, brother; nobody but you and me. Well, either you’ve shrivelled down into a perfectionist in your old age, or you’ve got an apprentice with not enough work to keep him fully occupied. Bad business, either way. Just as well you’ve got a brother who’s in charge of military procurement who makes sure you get paid twice the going rate, or you’d never have lasted as long as you have
. Gorgas grinned at the thought of his brother’s naïvety; no question but that Bardas hadn’t yet realised that he was being secretly subsidised; he’d have a fit if he knew. A fine man, Bardas Lordan, but just a little bit unworldly.

He left the barn, closing the door behind him, and crossed the yard to the house. That proved to be empty as well; not just of people, but of pretty well everything. It reminded Gorgas of his brother’s sparse, horrible apartment in one of the ‘island’ blocks in Perimadeia. Obviously, Bardas had some sort of hang-up about accumulating possessions, which was a new development since they were children, but understandable in the light of what had happened in between. Still, he reflected as he surveyed the main room, it takes a special skill to be sparse and scruffy at the same time.

He poked about for a while until he found what he was looking for - a cloth bundle tied up with hemp cord and shoved under the mattress, containing a rare and extremely valuable Guelan broadsword. No chance whatsoever that Bardas would go away for good and leave that behind. Quite apart from its monetary worth, it was one of the finest swords ever made and no fencer who’d once owned such a thing could possibly bear to be parted from it by choice. If the sword was still here, Bardas would be back. Gorgas sat in the solitary and uncomfortable chair -
for a bowyer, brother, you’re a piss-poor carpenter
- and settled down to wait.

 

What with one thing and another, Venart didn’t really feel in the mood for conducting business. Still, he didn’t have much choice; he had money to pay out and collect, loading to supervise, charter-parties and bills of lading to read through, provisions and chandlery to buy before he could leave Scona, and if he didn’t do it, it wasn’t going to get done.

It’s one of the immutable laws of trading life that the busier a man is and the less time he has, the more complicated every simple thing becomes. The people who owed him money weren’t at home; if he was quick he might just catch them at the Quay, or at the Golden Square, or on their way back from the Bank. His creditors, on the other hand, had no trouble at all in finding him, and he didn’t seem to be able to make them understand that the longer they kept him hanging about talking, the longer it would be before he’d be able to collect his money and pay them. Then he couldn’t find any porters to load his cargo, and when he finally managed to round up a gang of dead-beats and loafers who belonged to the necessary guilds, he arrived at the customs house to find that the portmaster was away for the rest of the morning and might be back later, or not, depending on how things went generally. Then there was a mistake in the cargo manifest that meant the whole thing had to be written out again (but the clerk who’d done it wasn’t in his office, and all the other clerks in Scona Town were all apparently too busy to take on a rush job), the provisioners were clean out of raisins, and the price of four-ply sailmaker’s twine had somehow managed to shoot up overnight from three quarters a roll to ten. All in all, for a town that apparently didn’t want him, it was making it very hard indeed for him to leave.

‘Wool grease,’ the last chandler in town muttered, stroking his chin thoughtfully. ‘Wool grease. I might have some. There’s not a lot of call for it.’

Venart waited long enough to count to ten. ‘Then would you mind looking for it?’ he suggested. ‘I need two gallons, minimum. I’ll take three if you’ve got it.’

The chandler shrugged. ‘If I’ve got any, it’ll be in the cellar,’ he replied, and Venart couldn’t tell from his tone of voice whether this was just a statement of fact or the chandler’s roundabout way of saying that the cellar was blocked off or he didn’t dare go in there because of the spiders.

‘Would you mind going down into the cellar and looking, please?’ Venart said.

‘I could do,’ the chandler conceded. ‘Can you come back tomorrow, say about midday?’

Venart released a sigh that had been building up inside him for the last twenty minutes. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll try somewhere else.’ He turned to go, but just as he was about to pass through the door, the chandler said, ‘Wait there, I won’t be long,’ and disappeared, apparently straight down through a hole in the floorboards.

Half an hour later he came back empty handed. ‘I’ve got olive butter,’ he said, in a slightly awed voice, ‘barrels and barrels of it. You can have as much of that as you like.’

Venart explained that he needed wool grease to proof his hull against shipworm, and olive butter would be not just useless but counter-productive. ‘You sure you haven’t got any?’ he asked.

‘I might have some in the roof,’ the chandler replied.

Venart drew in a deep breath; but before he could say anything, he heard a familiar voice behind him.

‘I can lend you some if you like,’ said Athli. ‘You can pay me back when I get home.’

For the first time in several days, Venart felt relatively happy. ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’ he added.

‘You’re looking at the Zeuxis Commercial Bank,’ Athli replied smiling. ‘All five foot three of it. Come on, I’ll get you that wool grease. And you look like you could use a drink.’

‘I didn’t know your other name was Zeuxis,’ Venart admitted as they walked together towards the Quay. ‘Come to think of it, it never occurred to me to ask.’

Athli shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose the topic ever came up,’ she said. ‘You look harrassed. Things not going well?’

Venart pulled a face. ‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘But don’t get me started on that subject. What’s all this about a bank, then?’

‘I’ve got the Island agency for Shastel,’ Athli replied. ‘Clinched it just the other day, in fact. And, since I was passing, I thought I’d stop off on Scona and see what the soft-furnishing market’s like here. To tell you the truth, I don’t reckon much to it. These people strike me as a miserable lot.’

Venart frowned. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ he said,’ but there’s something of a war going on between Scona and Shastel. I’m not sure that makes you being here such a terribly good idea.’

Athli shrugged. ‘Nobody seems to mind,’ she replied. ‘As far as I can tell it doesn’t seem to work like that. Actually, if we’re going to be pedantic about it, there isn’t actually a war, just a series of unfortunate incidents that are being actively reviewed by representatives of both parties in the hope of reaching a meaningful settlement in the short to medium term. Which,’ she added, ‘is just a way of saying “war” in gibberish, but it does open up interesting possibilities for an imaginative trader.’

Venart looked at her. ‘Does it?’

‘Oh, yes. Think about it, Ven. Without imaginative traders, with a war going on, how are they supposed to do business with each other?’

‘I didn’t think they wanted to.’

Athli grinned. ‘It’s hardly a matter of choice. There’s at least five big merchant companies on Scona who’re heavily involved in joint ventures with Shastel houses, and the Faims - that’s one of the leading Poor families - have most of their working capital invested on Scona.’

‘That’s crazy,’ Venart objected.

‘True,’ Athli agreed. ‘But Niessa Loredan pays a better rate of interest. It’s one of the things I like about this part of the world,’ she added. ‘They don’t let war get in the way of sound commercial propositions.’