Steph Swainston - No Present Like Time

Gio Ami emerged from the Senate House hefting a large rectangular shield which had a metal bracket to hold and a big padded hook for his upper arm to bear the weight while carrying it. He immediately sheltered behind a pillar, sword drawn. He seemed dazed and was hangover-pale; I could not decide whether the poison was working on him with reduced efficacy, or whether he was sick with tension. He bent nearly double to yell, “I’m here! I’m well. Look!”

“Shoot him,” I told Lightning.

Lightning dipped his head, trying to see Gio. I leaned out and shouted at the crowd, “Tornado’s coming. Mist is sailing half the Castle’s fleet into harbor! Thirty caravels full of fyrd and an Eszai on each ship!”

Gio’s adherents drew toward him but the woman beckoned people to join her. “Come on, we must reach the boats before Tornado arrives.” They surged toward the boulevard.

Gio tried again: “Come back! Listen, they’ll hang you as pirates! I’ll pay you an equal share of everything in this town! There are no more ships! Alone, you’ve no chance against Mist!”

I stuck my head out. “Tornado’s fyrd will arrest anyone who stays with Gio! He’ll be brought to justice!” I withdrew rapidly as an axe smashed into the window frame and fell onto the people beneath. I remarked to Lightning, “Gio can’t stop them leaving. I’ve managed to split them up.”

“Good.” He sighed.

A young swordsman gestured up at my window and babbled something vehemently. Gio shook his head but his friend continued to remonstrate. Gio pointed his rapier. “No, Tirrick!”

Tirrick looked at Gio, seeing a dirty and disheveled figure, and he must have realized at the same time as I did that Gio was not poisoned; it was his paranoia making him act as cautiously as if he was really feeling symptoms. I said, “I think Ata’s right-Gio is mad.”

Lightning said, “Maybe, but fortunately Wrenn is even madder.”

Tirrick glanced at the guards standing by the library entrance, and then ran past Gio into the Senate House.

“Now the fencing masters are arguing between themselves.”

Lightning bit his lips together. “I have always disliked Gio Ami because he professes to be a man of honor but he only lives by the codes that suit him-like his damn Ghallain traditions. He was married once, you know; if he still was then perhaps we would be spared this. But he feigned respect for the peninsula custom. They receive a candle as a gift on their wedding day. If they argue in the following years, they must light the candle and leave it burning for a time corresponding to the length of the argument. So, when it is burned down completely, the couple are automatically considered divorced. It happened to Gio. He called his wife a troublemaker, separated her from the Circle, and home she rode to find her friends aged and infirm, or dead and buried. Poor lady.”

I strained to see farther down the boulevard. White puffs of smoke like cotton bolls were rising from the base of the hill, where the harbor wall was hidden behind lines of houses. “I think Mist’s signaling. She must have figured that it’s all gone wrong. I bet she’s burning canoes…I just don’t know if the signal is for me or the Petrel. ”

Lightning watched the stairwell sourly. He said, “Like amateurs we chose a stronger bow than we could manage and missed the mark. If I don’t survive, Jant, will you remember to take my message?”

I nodded, dumbstruck. I had never heard a fatalistic word from Lightning before.

The sky above the Senate was pale gray now; I was able to distinguish the features of the people below. A dark coat became burgundy red, drab showed as light blue, a boy’s hair was highlighted with henna. Dawn permeated a pallid, cloudless winter day.

I looked to the sea again and gave a yelp. The beacon islet was now dimly discernible, the surf breaking on its seaward shore. Heeling around it with four masts in full sail was a ship tiny with distance. She headed into harbor at a great rate of knots, her long pennants snaking. “The Petrel! See, the Petrel ’s coming in!”

Lightning sighed with relief. A few minutes later, some lads in padded jackets hurtled up the boulevard, pushed eagerly to Gio. Gio listened, then waved them aside and called out, “This is it! We must meet the Castle’s flagship. I tell you, there’s only one caravel. There are two Eszai aboard and we’ll overwhelm them. Let me have the satisfaction of dealing with Wrenn-and your prize is the Stormy Petrel !”

The crowd yelled. Gio lifted his shield and hastened across the square, shouting his rabble into a formation akin to a fyrd division. The Ghallain swordsmen he arranged at the front, then the biggest, roughest men, the Hacilith boys and a couple of harridan girls at the rear.

But the swordsmen at the library door refused to move and glowered when Gio beckoned to them. His authority had gone but he pretended that it didn’t matter, gave up and returned to the thick column.

Lightning thought aloud: “I can improve the odds for Wrenn and Ata.” He instantly flexed his bow and loosed. A man at the head of the column reeled with a scream and fell, the arrow through his thigh. Lightning selected another shaft from the quiver at his hip, let fly and the astonished lad behind the first man yowled and squatted to the ground. I could barely see the arrow projecting from his leg above the knee. Lightning started counting backward from thirty, “Twenty-eight, twenty-seven…” as he lamed each of the men along the nearest edge of the formation, who were arranged like targets in a gallery.

Hearing their screams, the column flashed shields along its length. It surged away from us, bending and abandoning the wounded men, leaving around twenty sprawling and crawling on the mosaic. One man cried loudly as he snapped the fletchings off the arrow and pulled the shaft out through his thigh.

Gio, invisible behind his shield, led his file to the boulevard. They emptied very quickly out of the square, hurried between the slender stone walls and snaked around the hairpin bends. They left the battered mosaic empty; Alyss and the Insects were carious with missing tesserae. Litter was stacked up in the corners against the library and ash blew out of the cooling bonfire into the colonnade. Lightning cleanly and methodically shot down the rearmost rebels in the column, hitting the left thigh of each man. “You, four; and you, three…two…one. There. That’s all the arrows I dare to spend. Is this not disagreeable work?”

Some footsteps scuttled on the floor below us. Lightning called, “Join our gathering, by all means. But please introduce yourselves so I know who I’m shooting.”

A movement at the Senate House caught our attention. A swordsman began to back out, lugging one of Gio’s heavy coffers between himself and his friend. Another followed, and a fourth, until all the chests and ornate boxes containing Gio’s fortune were lined up on the mosaic.

Lightning asked, “What are those?” but I hardly heard him because I was seething with anger. Tirrick, the goateed little creep, was stealing the treasure and I could do nothing about it.

The senators were next to stumble out of the door at the foot of the pillars. A frightened youth in a pale tunic, then a dumpy old man were corralled by the swordsmen. Vendace came out last, reluctantly, being goaded by Tirrick behind him. The tall, wiry Trisian leaned his head at a strange angle because Tirrick held a dagger across his throat. Tirrick shoved him out onto the mosaic, and looked straight up at our window with a bold smile.

They’re parading the senators where we can see them,” I said.