The Proof House (17 page)

Bardas nodded, and the man carried on with what he’d been doing, angling the work down on to the ball and smoothing the marks out of it with a series of crisp, even taps, letting the hammer fall in its own weight and bounce back off the surface of the metal. ‘The trick is not to bash,’ the man explained. ‘Bashing gets you nowhere fast, you just let the mallet drop and the weight does all the work. That’s why I’m holding it just so, trapped between my middle finger and the base of my thumb, look.’ He held up his right hand to demonstrate. ‘Here, you want a go?’

Bardas hesitated. ‘All right,’ he said, and held out his hand for the hammer. ‘Is that right?’

The man shook his head. ‘You’re gripping,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to grip, you’re not trying to strangle the bloody thing, you just want to hold it firm enough so you can keep control - there, you’re getting it. Pretty simple once you know, but you’ll never get there just by light of nature.’

‘Strange,’ Bardas said. ‘I’d never have guessed a lot of little gentle taps with a bit of rolled-up leather could actually shape a piece of steel.’

The man laughed. ‘That’s the whole point,’ he said. ‘Thousands and thousands of little light taps with the hide mallet make the thing so hard and close-grained that a bloody great hard two-handed bash with a six-pound axe just bounces off.’ He lifted the piece of work off the steel ball and ran a fingertip over it. ‘A bit like life, really,’ he went on. ‘The more you get shit kicked out of you, the harder you are to kill.’

No, no
, they’d told him - they’d sounded quite shocked -
you mustn’t call it a civil war, it was a rebellion. It’d only have been a civil war if they’d won.

It wasn’t the sort of victory Temrai wanted to dwell on any more than he had to; but it was in order, diplomatically speaking, for his new neighbours in the provincial office to express their pleasure, now it was all safely over, that the best man had won. A simple letter would have done; or a messenger with his words written out for him in big letters on a bit of parchment; there wasn’t really any need to send a full proconsular delegation (although strictly speaking, as Deputy Proconsul Arshad carefully explained, since the mission was to a recognised non-aligned friendly sovereign state, from a provincial directorate as opposed to a provincial governor, it being a directly governed province and therefore in theory under the direct supervision of the chancellor of the Empire, by way of his duly appointed delegates, protocol did require a personal attendance by the senior ranking diplomat; anything less, Arshad implied, would have been an insult, or at the very least a display of bad manners and ignorance).

‘I see,’ Temrai replied untruthfully. ‘Well, it’s very kind of you to have come all this way; but as you can see, I’m still very much in one piece, as are the rest of my senior officers and ministers; really, in fact, no harm done.’ He stopped, unable to think of anything else to say. Of all the people he’d met in the course of his extremely eventful life, Deputy Proconsul Arshad was the most inhuman. Light seemed to fall away into his eyes like water draining into sand, and when he spoke, the words seemed to come from a great way off. Temrai felt compelled to carry on talking, in an effort to fill the gap in nature the man seemed to produce. ‘Of course,’ Temrai went on, ‘it was a dreadful business; we were fighting people who we thought of as our friends - well, more than friends, family. I’m still not sure what it was all about, to be honest with you. It just happened, I suppose. One minute we were all on the same side, wanting the same things, just not completely in agreement about how to go about achieving them. Next thing we knew, we weren’t talking any more, and they’d left the camp and gone off somewhere with their horses and sheep and goats. Well, that was all right, if they didn’t want to stay here, that was up to them. But then they started making trouble; nothing terrible, just awkward, rude I suppose you could call it. They wouldn’t let some of our people water their stock at a river they’d decided was theirs; stupid thing to argue over, especially since if our side had moved a couple of miles up river, they’d have been drinking exactly the same water (just a few minutes earlier) and everybody would have been happy.

‘But it didn’t turn out that way, worse luck; first there was a standoff, then there was a scuffle, you couldn’t call it more than that, but a man was killed, so I had to get involved; looking back, I keep asking myself if I could have handled it differently, found some way not to make an issue out of it. But I found myself insisting that the man who’d struck the actual blow had to be sent back here to answer for what he’d done; they refused, so I sent some people to fetch him. There was more fighting—’ He shook his head. ‘It shouldn’t have happened, gods know, but it did; and now here we are, looking back on our first civil war. I suppose it’s a sign of how far we’ve come, in a way. I mean, it’s things like this that sort of define a nation.’ Temrai bit his lip; he couldn’t believe some of the things he was hearing himself say. But Deputy Proconsul Arshad was just sitting there, drawing the words out of him like a child sucking an egg. Presumably that was what he’d come for. Even so, he couldn’t really see the point of the exercise. It was like deliberately opening a vein.

‘A most unhappy sequence of events,’ Arshad said eventually, moving his head very slightly forward, though the rest of his body remained motionless. He had an ugly scar running from the corner of his left eye right down to the lobe of his ear, and it was all Temrai could do not to stare at it helplessly. ‘Let us hope that by dealing with the problem so quickly and decisively, you’ve effectively forestalled any further opposition to what we consider to be a most welcome and positive program of social reforms. As you say, if your actions here have ensured that something like this is unlikely ever to happen again, you’re entitled to feel a considerable degree of satisfaction.’

‘Thank you,’ Temrai replied, though he wasn’t entirely sure what he was thanking this peculiar man for. What he really wanted, of course, was for the Son of Heaven and his grim-faced retinue to go away and never come back. Maybe there was a special way diplomats could say that sort of thing without giving offence or starting a war; but if there was, nobody had let him in on the secret. ‘Personally, I’ve had enough of wars and fighting to last me a lifetime. I mean to say, just because you’re really quite good at something, it doesn’t actually follow that you like doing it. Definitely that way with me and fighting wars - well, not just me, all of us, really. I’d say that, as a nation, we’ve been through all that proving-ourselves stuff and now it’s time to move on.’

Deputy Proconsul Arshad studied him for a moment in silence, as if making up his mind whether to knock him on the head now or throw him back and let him grow a little bigger. ‘I most sincerely hope those aspirations will prove to be attainable,’ he said. ‘For the present, may I remind you of something from my people’s most respected treatise on the art of war. To paraphrase - necessarily - it says that trying to make peace without total victory is like trying to make soup without onions; it can’t be done.’ He didn’t smile, but there was a space for where a smile would have been, had he been human. ‘You have work to do; I’ve trespassed on your time long enough. May I conclude by saying that the Empire is delighted that at long last we have you for a neighbour.’

When Arshad had gone - Temrai saw him leave, but he had a totally irrational feeling that he might still be there somewhere, lurking - he breathed a long sigh of relief and asked, ‘Anybody care to tell me what all that was about?’

Poscai, the newly appointed treasurer (his predecessor had been on the other side in the civil war, and hadn’t survived it), smiled ruefully. ‘Welcome to politics,’ he said. ‘They say it gets easier as you go along, but I have my doubts. I think it gets worse and worse, until finally both sides give up and go to war, the way human beings were meant to.’

Temrai shook his head. ‘Why on earth should they want to start a war with us? We haven’t done them any harm. And I can’t believe we’ve got anything they could possibly want. Do you really think they’re going to attack us, Poscai? Maybe I wasn’t listening properly, but I don’t think I heard anything you could actually describe as a threat. Nothing so straightforward,’ he added.

General Hebbekai pulled the cushion off the chair Arshad had been sitting on, put it down next to Temrai’s feet and sat on it. ‘Oh, there were threats all right. If the provincial office tells you it likes the shoes you’re wearing, that’s a threat: they’re going to kill you and take your shoes. If they say it’s a nice day for the time of year, that’s a threat too. If they don’t say anything at all, just sit there and smile at you, that’s a really bad threat. You don’t think a man like that’d come all this way just to borrow a pair of shears.’

Temrai shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘And neither would you, come to that. Face it, Hebbekai, we don’t know
anything
about these people, or at least not yet.’

Poscai shook his head. ‘Speak for yourself,’ he said. ‘Here’s a cold fact for you. At any one time, Arshad and his friends in the provincial office - that’s just one province, remember, and by no means the biggest province in the Empire - they’ve got a standing army of at least a hundred and twenty thousand men, all highly trained and beautifully equipped, not to mention lavishly paid. Armies aren’t for decoration; if they’ve got an army like that it’s because they’re going to use it. Can’t do otherwise.’

‘I don’t follow,’ Temrai said.

‘Don’t you?’ Poscai frowned. ‘All right then, picture this. You have a hundred and twenty thousand of the best fighting men in the world, and you tell them you don’t need them any more. That’s it, they’ve done the job, they’re free to go. So what do they do? Remember, these are professional soldiers. After six months, you’d need another quarter of a million men just to get rid of them, kill them or chase them off your land. No, once you’ve got an army like that, you don’t really have a choice. You’ve got to keep on going. And now,’ he concluded sadly, ‘they’ve reached us.’

‘Poscai’s right,’ said Hebbekai. ‘Basically, we now have two options: fight them, or pack up and get out of their way.’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he went on, ‘I thought you’d worked all this out for yourself. That’s what we just had a civil war about.’

Temrai looked up, startled. ‘Are you serious?’

‘I thought it was obvious. They wanted to pack up and leave, after what happened to Ap’ Escatoy, follow the old ways - and what that really meant was, go back to the plains, as far away from these people as we can get. You decided against it. Your call. So we had a civil war. Isn’t that right? Poscai? Jasacai? You tell him, I can see he doesn’t believe me.’

Temrai held up his hand. ‘You’re trying to tell me I’ve just fought a civil war and nobody thought to tell me what it was
about
?’

‘We assumed you knew,’ said the chancellor, Jasacai. ‘After all, it’s so obvious.’

Temrai slid back in his chair and let his chin drop on his chest. ‘Not to me,’ he replied. ‘All right,’ he went on, ‘I want you to promise me something. Next time we go to war, will somebody please tell me why?’

 

Another Imperial diplomat, not quite so grand but nevertheless a thoroughly competent man with nearly twenty years’ experience, landed from a civilian merchant ship at Tornoys, the free port through which passed most of the traffic to and from the suddenly relevant backwater of the Mesoge. His name was Poliorcis, and although he wasn’t a Son of Heaven (originally he was from Maraspia province, right on the other side of the Empire) his appearance alone was enough to make him stand out among the usual crowd on Tornoys pier. Mesoge people, and the traders who did business with them, tended to be short, square and functional, as if someone had made a conscious effort to get as many of them as possible out of a limited quantity of raw material. By contrast, Maraspians came fairly close to extravagance verging on deliberate waste.

While the porters were unloading the cargo, near the bottom of which were the various barrels and bundles of trade-goods and junk that constituted his persona of itinerant textiles dealer, Poliorcis took the time to watch a mildly interesting and informative little scene being played out in the doorway of a ships’ chandlery at the town end of the pier.

Blink twice, and you’d have missed it; more likely, you’d have seen it out of the corner of your eye and dismissed it as too commonplace to be worth eavesdropping on. Hence, among other reasons, the provincial office’s habit of sending complete strangers when it wanted discreet observations made.

The old man was drunk; no question about that. Whether or not he was disorderly would depend on what passed for good order in any given place, and in Poliorcis’ opinion this was the sort of place where singing and waving one’s arms about in an exuberant but not overtly intimidating fashion would be, at worst, a nuisance and at best, ambience. Since the old man was quite decrepit, definitely not a threat to anybody but himself, and not that bad a singer if only he’d take the trouble to learn more than the first five words of any of the songs in his limited repertoire, Poliorcis was inclined to mark him down, in context, as ambience. At home, of course, it would have been quite different - ambience was about as popular as garbage from a fifth-storey window where he came from, and just as severely regarded by the authorities. But in a setting like this, you’d have expected no reaction beyond a tendency for passers-by to cross the road. Instead, a soldier coming out of a tavern stopped, reached out, grabbed the old man by the front of his disreputable shirt and cracked his head sharply against the doorframe, then let go and watched him slump to the ground, leaving a smear of blood on the timbers. At least four people must have seen the incident apart from Poliorcis, but none of them turned his head or gave any other indication of having noticed anything, whether from familiarity or policy the stranger wasn’t sure. The old man lay still; the soldier went on his way. It had been neatly done, as if it was something they practised in the drill-yard, over and over again until they got it right.