The Proof House (72 page)

Bardas smiled, as if sharing the joke. ‘What’s going to happen to him?’ he asked. ‘The rebel leader, I mean.’

The Son of Heaven was watching him out of the corner of his eye. ‘Oh, he’ll be extradited, tried and sentenced; we have to balance the books, after all. Fortunately, our system of audit allows one man to bear the blame for his country’s defaults; it’s efficient and humane, and it simplifies performance reviews. Thus King Temrai’s paid for his people, Master Auzeil and his cohorts will pay for theirs; we can draw a line under both columns and rule the page off. Similarly,’ he went on, his voice so gentle that it almost degenerated into a drawl (except that no Son of Heaven would ever sink so low), ‘we can conclude our rather pointless entanglement in the Mesoge with one simple act of accounting.’

Bardas kept perfectly still.

 

They had, of course, been reading his letters. It was standard operating procedure when an officer was under review following an unsatisfactory or questionable action.

The letter in question had reached him at a bad time, when he was in the middle of trying to sort out a mess he’d made with the duty rosters. ‘Not now,’ he’d said, and then seen the expression on the face of the man who’d brought it. He looked as if he wanted to be sick.

‘What’ve you got there?’ he asked.

‘Letter for you,’ the man replied. ‘And that.’ He pointed to a large earthenware jar, which was being held by another distressed-looking soldier. ‘We’ve got the man who brought them in the guardhouse.’

Bardas nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he said, wondering what was going on. ‘Give me the letter and put the jar in my tent. I’ll be along in a minute’

In the event it took him nearly half an hour to straighten out the rosters, by which time he’d clean forgotten about the letter. It wasn’t until that evening, when he managed to scrape up an hour for a rest and a sit-down, that he saw the jar beside his chair and remembered.

The seal was broken - well, he was used to that - but familiar; the Loredan Bank, which meant the letter was from one of two people. And he couldn’t imagine his sister Niessa sending him a letter, let alone presents.

Bardas rolled up the letter; then he cut the wax around the neck of the jar, eased off the stopper and pulled out what he found inside.

At first he thought it was a pig’s head, like the ones he’d always dreaded as a boy, though his father and Gorgas considered them a great delicacy. The drill was to bone out the skull, leaving the mask intact; it was then cured with salt and stuffed with good things - cloves, allspice, basil, black and red Colleon pepper-corns, mace, cinnamon, cumin, dried apricots and root ginger - and steeped in thin, clear, almost white domestic honey. Even then, Bardas had been both intrigued and disgusted by the paradox of the sweet, delicious, fragrant inside and the grotesque, dead exterior; he wondered who could possibly have thought up the idea of such a bizarre combination. As a dutiful son, he’d always made a show of tackling his share and miming enthusiasm, trying to make himself concentrate on the gorgeous smell and the rich, sweet taste - after all, you don’t have to look at something in order to eat it, you just reach out with your knife and cut.

It was the same recipe; he could imagine Gorgas writing it out in detail and sending it to his cook, with strict instructions not to try to improve it (Gorgas had a flair for cooking and a tremendous ability to enjoy food; details mattered to him. On reflection, Gorgas would have made a fine Son of Heaven). But it wasn’t a pig’s face that dangled from the mop of honey-slicked hair between his fingers; shrunken and distorted (probably by the drying action of the salt), it was the face of King Temrai.

Honey trickled down the dimpled, overripe-peach cheeks like golden tears; the eyelids were closed on the empty sockets (Bardas knew how much closed eyes could see) and the mouth was sewn up with finely twisted sinew, which had in one or two places torn through the thin fabric of the lips as the skin contracted and tightened. It was soft and yielding to the touch, like a leather bag - like the footballs they used to make out of bladders crammed with straw, or the savoury winter puddings his mother stuffed into the stomach of a sheep. Under the white-gold glaze, the skin was pale and marbled, like mother of pearl.

(How curious, Bardas thought; how curious and impractical of the makers of men to put the hard armour of the skull inside the softness of the face. Surely it ought to be the other way round, the tough, uniform bone sheltering the vulnerable, distinctive features that made one individual different from another. In that respect, if in no other, they knew better in the proof house.)

Soft and unformed, yet shrivelled and lined, Temrai looked both very young and very old. In this face he could see the boy who’d hidden from him under a cart, in a place not far away from here; and he could see the old man that Temrai would have been (the river or the wheel, unless one preferred the analogy of the camshaft) - and he thought for a moment about the process of preservation (curing the meat), which is an attempt to dam the river and stop the wheel, to find a way of failing to sack the doomed city or kill the accursed man. Someone who believed in the Principle might be inclined to make that into a theory, as if there hadn’t been enough reshaping of raw material already.

‘It’s a bit late to worry about that now,’ observed Anax, standing behind his shoulder. ‘And besides, the ability to make things into other things is what makes us human. Or makes us the humans we are,’ he added, with a wheezy chuckle. ‘You know what,’ he went on, ‘dried out and properly padded you could use that as a helmet liner.’

‘Go away,’ Bardas said.

‘You’re just cranky because you never had a chance to say thank you,’ Anax replied. ‘And you’re the man who was always bitching in the mines about never getting to see the face of his enemy.’

Bardas frowned. ‘I never thought of him as that,’ he said. ‘In fact, to be honest with you, I never really thought about him as a human being.’

‘Missed your chance for that, I’m afraid,’ Anax said, in a told-you-so voice. ‘Because that’s not human, it’s just a thing. Comes to us all in time, of course; we gradually grow these inhuman skins - a bit like trees, really, except the other way round; with us, it’s the living bit that’s on the inside and the dead bit that’s outside. Which reminds me, was that or was that not an amazingly fine suit of armour I made for you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is that all you can say, yes? Talk about passing proof; you sit there without a mark on you, and all you can say is
yes
.’>

Bardas smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but that was just war. It never had to withstand Bollo and the big hammer.’

Anax smiled; Bardas couldn’t see the smile, but he knew it was there. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing on earth that strong. It’s like those boxing booths you used to see at fairs; rule of the house, Bollo always wins. The fun’s to see how many rounds you can go.’

‘Fun?’

‘For want of a better word.’

A little later, Bardas went to the guardhouse.

‘That man who brought the letter for me,’ he said. ‘Have you still got him there?’

They told him yes, he was still here.

‘Fine. Have you asked him his name?’

Sure, they replied. Dassascai, he called himself. Made no secret of it. Seemed to be under the impression he had a nice reward coming.

‘Absolutely,’ Bardas replied. ‘Now, get a couple of men and a flag of truce, and take this Dassascai up the hill to King Sildocai - I suggest you keep a tight hold of him, he might not want to go - along with this jar and this letter. Then, if I were you, I’d get out of there as quick as you can.’

 

The Son of Heaven leaned back in his chair. ‘Just out of curiosity,’ he asked, ‘what was in the jar?’

‘Victory,’ Bardas replied, smiling weakly. ‘At least, something that achieved the same result as victory. You might say it was a kind of secret weapon.’

‘I see.’ The Son of Heaven raised an eyebrow. ‘Like the incendiary liquid you used during the siege of Perimadeia, something like that?’

‘Not quite,’ Bardas said, ‘though of course that came in a jar too. Excuse me, please, I’m starting to say the first thing that comes into my head.’ He stroked his chin, as if thinking something over. ‘So, when do I leave?’ he asked.

‘As soon as your relief arrives; later today or early tomorrow. You’re to report to him as soon as he gets here - Colonel Ilshel. Still quite young, but a certain degree of promise; we have high hopes for him. He’ll supervise the enemy evacuation, escort them as far as the mountains. It should be a perfectly straightforward job.’

‘Very good,’ Bardas replied, without apparent feeling (and his face didn’t move, as if it was already dead and pickled).

 

‘You been on the post before, then?’ the courier asked.

Bardas nodded. ‘A couple of times,’ he replied.

The courier seemed impressed. ‘You must be important, then,’ he said. ‘What was your name again?’

‘Bardas Loredan.’

‘Bardas - hang on, that rings a bell. Ap’ Escatoy. You’re the hero.’

Bardas nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said.

‘Bugger me,’ the courier said. ‘It’s not every day I get a hero on the round. So, what was it
really
like?’

‘Boring, mostly. With occasional interludes of extreme terror.’

The courier laughed. ‘Oh, they all say that,’ he said, ‘when you ask ’em about what they did in the war. You’re not allowed to talk about it, I get the picture. So, where are you off to now? Or is that hush-hush as well?’

‘Some place called Hommyra,’ Bardas told him, ‘wherever that is. Do you know where it is?’

‘Hommyra.’ The courier frowned. ‘Well, if it’s where I think it is, it’s right on the other side of the Empire, out east. I never even knew they were having a war there, though of course that doesn’t mean anything.’

‘They told me it’d take me six weeks to get there,’ Bardas said, ‘on the post. So I guess that sounds about right.’

‘Promotion?’

‘They’re making me up to full captain.’

‘You don’t say. That’s pretty good going for an outlander. ’

‘Thank you.’

Bardas had changed coaches in Ap’ Escatoy. It had disturbed him to discover that the camp and the temporary city there felt something like home, that he’d almost experienced a sense of belonging. He’d tried not to dwell on that thought; just as he’d avoided going under the gate over which, someone told him, they’d hung the heads of three notorious rebels responsible for the recent disaffection on the Island. Once he knew what they were he hadn’t looked up, for fear of recognising them or catching sight of the labels pinned to them, detailing the offenders’ names and crimes.

‘This business with the plainspeople, now,’ the courier was saying, ‘of course it could have been handled a bit smarter, but in the end it all worked out; we’ve got rid of them, their king’s dead and we picked up a fleet of ships along the way. All this talk you hear about a blow to Imperial prestige and stuff, that’s just sour grapes. It’s only the score at the end that matters, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Absolutely,’ Bardas replied.

‘Just a minute.’ The courier looked round at him. ‘You were in that lot, weren’t you? I’m sure I heard that somewhere, the Ap’ Escatoy bloke was joining the plains war. Is that right?’

‘I was in on the tail end of it,’ Bardas said.

‘Hey! See any action?’

‘A little.’

‘Would you credit it?’ The courier grinned. ‘They’re saying it was the artillery did the donkey work, though the cavalry had a good war. Is that right?’

‘More or less.’

‘They’re always the unsung heroes, the artillery,’ the courier stated gravely. ‘Bloody pikemen give themselves airs, say they’re the ones who actually get the job done - and fair play to them, they’re good, very good. But for sieges and stuff like that, you can’t beat the corps of engineers. Well, look at you, for instance.’

‘Me?’