The Proof House (21 page)

The thing from the rafters turned out to be a net bag containing a big round cheese coated in plaster. ‘Clefas, is there any fresh bread?’

‘No,’ Clefas replied.

‘Oh. Well, never mind, we’ll have to make do. Any cider in the jug?’

‘No.’>

Gorgas sighed. ‘I’ll get some more from the cellar,’ he said, picking up the jug. ‘Won’t be a moment.’

He seemed to be gone for a very long time, during which neither of his brothers moved perceptibly. When he returned, he had a solid-looking loaf under one arm and the cider-jug in his hand. ‘Fire could do with another log,’ he said, but nobody seemed concerned. It was cold, as well as damp. Gorgas was sawing at the loaf with his knife.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you wanted to see the Mesoge; this is about as typical as you’re likely to get. Here.’ He was holding out a plate with some bread and cheese on it. ‘I’ll get you a mug and you can have some cider.’

‘No, really,’ Poliorcis protested, but he was too late. There wasn’t enough light to see the cider by, but he could make out a little wisp of straw floating on the top. ‘You can sleep in my room,’ Gorgas went on. ‘I’ll muck in with Zonaras.’

Zonaras grunted.

‘Well.’ Gorgas sat down and broke off a piece of bread, which he dipped in his mug. ‘This is home,’ he said. ‘Take it or leave it. Personally, I don’t think you can beat plain, old-fashioned Mesoge hospitality.’

Poliorcis reminded himself that he was a diplomat and said nothing; because he was decidedly hungry, he even nibbled at a corner of the cheese, which was very strong and rather disgusting. Gorgas was asking if there was any bacon left. There wasn’t.

‘Thatch on the trap-house needs looking at,’ Clefas said. ‘Won’t have time now till after we’ve got the hay in. If the reed doesn’t come to anything, we’ll have to buy in. That’s if anybody’s got any.’

‘Oh, well,’ Gorgas said.

‘Got to move the apples out,’ Clefas went on. ‘Damp’s getting in; we’ll lose the whole lot otherwise. I haven’t got time,’ he added.

‘Don’t look at me,’ replied Zonaras. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing all week, sitting on my hands?’

Gorgas sighed. ‘I’ll send some men down,’ he said. ‘You just tell them what needs doing, they’ll see to it.’

‘What we need is someone to push the rooks off the laid barley,’ Clefas said. ‘I counted a hundred and four in there the other day. If it gets any worse it won’t be worth cutting.’

‘Hasn’t come to anything special anyhow,’ Zonaras pointed out. ‘Too damn wet. We need ten days’ clear sun before it’ll be anything like ready. We should have put the beans in there like I said.’

‘We had beans there last year,’ Clefas replied. ‘And we needed them in the top five-acre to put some strength back in the ground. Might as well plough them back in, the way they’re shaping up.’

It was as much as Poliorcis could do to stop himself laughing; but Gorgas Loredan, self-anointed Prince of the Mesoge, was nodding his head sagely and looking grave; he’s playing the part of a farmer, Poliorcis realised, but he hasn’t quite got it right; he tries to think himself into all these various parts - farmer, prince, diplomat, hard-bitten professional soldier - but he never quite manages to get below the surface. I wonder who he really is. I expect he does, too.

Gorgas’ room (the master bedroom, so he’d been informed, where Father used to sleep after Mother died) turned out to be a small loft, up a set of steps that were more like a ladder than a staircase. There was a bed, a mattress stuffed with very old reed, no pillow, one vintage blanket that had been carefully turned sides-to-middle round about the time Poliorcis had just started shaving (that would be back before Gorgas’ mother died, unless it was the handiwork of Niessa Loredan, before she got involved in international finance). Poliorcis peeled off his wet boots, swung himself on to the bed and pinched out the wick of the lamp. He could hear something pattering about on the roof - not rain, because nothing was dropping into the half-filled pans strategically placed around the room to catch the drips. Cats? Squirrels, if they come out at night? It could be rabbits - the eaves of the house backed into the low hill. Whatever it was, it made enough noise to keep Poliorcis awake, even though he was painfully weary.

An alliance between the Empire and these clowns - it was ludicrous to think that he’d even considered it. At best, Gorgas had - what, a thousand men? Probably not that many, and how many of those would he be able to spare, being realistic, from the job of bullying and bashing his fellow peasants into line? It was a sad reflection on his own gullibility; he’d wasted time here, and most of what he’d found out was worthless. At best, he had an insight of sorts into this curious tribe, the Loredans, who’d somehow managed to involve themselves so deeply in matters that were significant enough to affect Imperial policy. As he shifted about, trying to find a level patch of mattress big enough to accommodate his back, he reflected on this strange phenomenon, trying to make sense of it.

Niessa Loredan, for example; no longer relevant, but for a while she’d been dangerous enough to destabilise the Shastel Bank, and the piddling little army that she’d paid for and Gorgas had trained had killed a few thousand of the Order’s halberdiers (and every little helped, potentially). She was out of the picture now; and so, he was certain, was Gorgas; this peculiar little nest of bandits he’d scraped together for himself would keep the Mesoge depressed and unimportant for years to come - keeping it warm, so to speak, just in case it should ever suit the convenience of the provincial office to look this way. That in itself was unlikely - Tornoys might be a useful base for a squadron of galleys, if the Empire ever built up a
proper
fleet, as opposed to the disorganised clutter of hired and captured ships that was referred to in the supply ledgers as the Imperial Navy, but Gorgas palpably didn’t control Tornoys; if he tried to muscle in there, it would probably be the undoing of him.

Which left Bardas Loredan, once colonel, now sergeant; the hero of Ap’ Escatoy, the last defender of Perimadeia, the angel of death as far as the plainspeople were concerned. Poliorcis frowned in the dark, trying to remember what little he’d understood of basic causality theory. In the end, he gave it up; he was a diplomat, and the Empire had plenty of professional metaphysicians without needing any input from him on the subject. But even he, relying on the scrapings of his memories of a two-week foundation course at the Ap’ Sammas military academy, could tell that there was work to be done in this area before any long-term plans could properly be made; and the data he was gathering here would probably be important at that stage. The thought comforted him; it had been a maxim of his division tutor that the first and most essential stage in doing useful work is finding out what work it is that one is supposed to be doing. Well, now he knew. He was here to study the pathology of Bardas Loredan. So that was all right.

Eventually he fell asleep; and if he had bad dreams sleeping in that bed in that house, it was most likely because of the cheese.

 

Vetriz Auzeil sat on the front step of her house, watching a small boy in the street below. He’d gathered a substantial hoard of small stones, and he was throwing them, with great deliberation, into a clump of raggety, neglected ornamental shrubs that grew in the front yard of the house opposite. Nobody had lived in that house for years - it was only still empty because Venart, bless him, was trying to buy it (and, being Venart, was going about it in a counterproductively devious way, using phantom intermediaries supposedly undercutting each other’s offers and pulling out just before an agreement was due to be sealed - it was costing him a fortune, but it made him feel cunning, which was the main thing); nevertheless, Vetriz had a feeling that small boys throwing stones were a bad thing on general principles, and that as (gods help her) a grown-up, she was invested with all due authority to tell him to stop - except that she couldn’t make out for the life of her what he was throwing the stones at, with such care and deliberation.

Finally her curiosity reached torture levels, so she went down the steps and asked him.

‘Spiders,’ he answered.

‘Spiders?’

‘That’s right.’ The boy pointed; and, sure enough, just inside the tangle of bushes was a veritable city of spiders’ webs, most of them with a big fat brown spider in the middle; they hung so still and moody that they reminded Vetriz of stallholders in a market on a quiet day, gloomily poised for the onset of any customers who might eventually appear.

‘Any luck?’ Vetriz asked. She detested spiders. When she was a little girl, it had been an entirely passive loathing, but now she was an adult, it had evolved into something more militant.

‘Four so far,’ the boy replied proudly. ‘It only counts if you kill them dead; if they just fall off and run away you don’t score anything.’

That was as much of an invitation (a challenge, even) as she needed; she selected a pebble from the munitions dump, made her best guess at elevation and windage, and let fly -

(
- Like the trebuchets at Perimadeia. In a way.
)

‘Missed,’ the boy said, perfectly expressing by tone of voice alone the eternal contempt of the male at womankind’s ineptitude at missile warfare. ‘My go.’ He picked up a stone, looked at it between his fingers, looked at the spider of his choice, and launched.

‘Missed,’ said Vetriz.

‘I never said it was easy,’ the boy replied, scowling.

This time, Vetriz tried to be more scientific in her approach. She pictured in her mind the trajectory of the stone, the decay of its arc as its mass overcame the initial momentum of launch. With the picture clear in her mind as if it had been scribed on the back of her eyelids, she cocked back her wrist and let go -

‘We shouldn’t be doing this anyway,’ she said huffily. ‘It’s cruel. Those spiders never did us any harm.’

‘They’re poisonous,’ the boy replied. ‘If they bite you, you swell up and go black and you die.’

‘Really?’ Vetriz said. ‘I never heard that.’

‘It’s true,’ the boy assured her. ‘My friend told me.’ ‘Oh, well then,’ Vetriz said, sneaking another stone. ‘In that case, I suppose it’s our duty - there,’ she added. ‘Direct hit.’

‘Doesn’t count,’ the boy said. ‘It wasn’t even your go.’

Vetriz smiled. ‘And you’re just a rotten loser,’ she said. ‘Now stop doing that at once, before I tell your mother.’

The boy looked at her savagely, his eyes accusing her of treason in the first degree; then he kicked over the pile of stones and slouched away. Vetriz, unaccountably delighted with her prowess, went back to her step, where she’d been supposed to be double-checking the stock ledger. She was trying to puzzle out a double-looped squiggle (Venart was a sucker for fashionable new abbreviations, but he tended to forget what they meant the day after he started using them) when a shadow fell over the page. She looked up.

‘Vetriz Auzeil?’

She nodded and looked away quickly, trying desperately not to stare. But it was hard; too hard for her. After all, she’d never seen a Son of Heaven before.

‘I’m looking for your brother, Venart,’ the man said. ‘Is he at home?’

Vetriz shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘he’s away on a business trip. Can I help you?’

The man smiled, as if the offer had come from a six-year-old child. ‘Thank you, but no. It’s business.’

It was well known among her friends that you only ever patronised Vetriz Auzeil once. ‘Then it’s me you need to see,’ she replied, smiling sweetly. ‘Please come in. I can spare you a quarter of an hour.’

The man looked at her, but followed. She led him into the counting house, which she knew would be empty at this time of day, when the clerks were either at the warehouse doing the stock reconciliations or in the tavern. ‘Please excuse the mess,’ she said, indicating the immaculately neat desks with a sweeping gesture. ‘Now then, what can I do for you?’ She sat down behind Venart’s desk, the one he’d been lumbered with as part of a mixed lot of Perimadeian war loot, bought sight unseen; it was huge, ornate and unspeakably vulgar, and Venart hated it. ‘Sit down, please,’ she said, knowing full well that the stool on the other side was so low that you had to sit on a cushion just to see over the desktop. Disconcertingly, the Son of Heaven didn’t seem to have that problem; were they all this damnably tall? she wondered.

‘Thank you.’ She watched the man trying to squirm himself comfortable; impossible on that stool. ‘My name is Moisin Shel, and I represent the provincial office. We’re interested in chartering a number of ships.’

Vetriz nodded, as if this sort of thing happened every day. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘What sort of ship, how many, and how long for?’

Moisin Shel looked at her, raised an eyebrow. ‘You have a ship called the
Squirrel
,’ he said. ‘We understand it’s a twin-masted square-rigger capable of sustaining six knots with a following wind, and that you’re used to sailing a close-hauled course with the wind abeam, on coastal runs. It should be suitable for our purposes, if the capacity is adequate. Am I right in thinking the
Squirrel
is at least a hundred and thirty tons?’

‘Oh, easily,’ Vetriz replied, not having the faintest idea what the man was talking about. ‘What cargo do you have in mind?’

Moisin Shel didn’t seem to have heard her. ‘A few technical points, before we go any further - I’m sorry if this sounds fussy, but we have to satisfy ourselves that your ship conforms to the provincial service specifications before we can enter a charter agreement. Are you able to answer such questions, or should I wait until your brother comes home?’

‘No problem,’ Vetriz replied firmly. ‘Ask away.’

‘Very well.’ The man steepled his fingers. ‘Are the garboard strakes mortised to the keel rabbet, do you know?’

To her credit, Vetriz managed to keep a straight face. ‘The
Squirrel
is a working merchant ship, Mr Shel, not a pleasure yacht. I can assure you, you need have no worries on that score.’