K Parker: Evil for Evil

The tailgate closed behind him, and he snuggled back among the sacks. Fine resistance leader I turned out to be, he thought. By now I should've overpowered a dozen guards, stolen a sword and a fast horse and be galloping home. Instead, they put me on a cart. About the best thing anybody could say about me right now is that I'm reasonably portable.

But that'd be silly, he thought. You can't overpower guards if there's nobody guarding you, and I expect if I asked them nicely they'd sell me a sword and a horse, assuming they haven't stolen all my money. (He checked; they hadn't. On the other hand, all he had left was six copper turners and a twopenny bit.)

It was a long ride. The cart had to go slowly over the sad excuse for a track. (Weren't we supposed to have built a new road up here, Miel wondered, or did we never get round to it?) Shortly after noon he saw a small cluster of wooden buildings in the distance. As he got closer they grew into five thatched sheds surrounded by a stockade. That suggested a degree of effort; there weren't any woods for miles, so someone had thought it was worth all the trouble of putting up some kind of fortification. There was no smoke rising, and he couldn't see any people about. Barns, then, rather than houses.

"Is that where we're going?" he called out, and wondered if the driver would reply. He hadn't said a word all day; but then, Miel hadn't either.

"Yes."

There was a ditch as well as a stockade. The driver stopped the cart, jumped down and whistled. A gate in the stockade opened; apparently it doubled as a drawbridge. The cart rumbled over it, jarring Miel's knee. The drawbridge went back up again as soon as they were across.

"Hold on, I'll help you down." The driver, now that he looked at him, was a short, stocky man with a fringe of sandy hair round a bald citadel of a head. Miel thanked him-the Ducas always acknowledges help-and leaned on his shoulder as they crossed the yard to one of the barns.

"Live one for you," the bald man called out as they crossed the threshold into the darkness inside. He put Miel down carefully and walked away.

He'd called out to someone, so presumably there was someone there; but it was too dark for Miel to see, so he stayed where he was, leaned up against a wall, like a hoe or a shovel. He was getting used to being property, he decided, and so far it hadn't been so bad. That could change, of course. He decided to resume some responsibility.

"Hello," he called out. "Anybody there?"

"Just a minute, I'll come down." A woman's voice, which made a change. Not a pleasant voice, though. The best you could say for it was that it sounded like it meant what it said. You knew where you were with a voice like that, even if it wasn't anywhere you'd ever want to be.

There was a hayloft, and a ladder. She came down slowly; a tall, red-haired woman in a plain, clean gown, tied at the waist with plaited straw rope. She was much younger than her voice, maybe his own age, a year or two older; nice-looking, too-no, revise that.

The Ducas is trained in good manners from infancy, like a soldier is trained to obey orders. He's almost incapable of inappropriate or boorish behavior. He instinctively knows how to put people at their ease, and he never, ever reacts to physical ugliness or deformity. He keeps a straight face, and he never stares.

Which was just as well. At some point in the last year or so, the woman had lost her left eye. The scar started an inch above the middle of her eyebrow and reached down to the corner of her mouth. If he'd had to give an opinion, Miel would have said it was probably a sword-cut. It hadn't been stitched at the time, and had grown out broad. Her eye socket was empty. In order to learn that aspect of his trade, Miel had been taken when he was twelve years old to see the lepers at Northwood. For the first time, he felt grateful for having had such a thorough education.

"What's the matter with you?" she said.

It took Miel a second to realize what she meant. "My knee," he said. "I got hit there in…" He hesitated. Presumably she was part of the business: doctor, nurse, jailer, all three? "In the fighting," he said. "I don't know if-"

"Hold still." She knelt down and prodded his knee sharply with her index finger. Miel yowled like a cat and nearly fell over. "That seems all right," she said. "The swelling and stiffness won't last long, a few days. You'll have to stay here till it's right again, we can't spare transport to take you back to your outfit. Have you got any money?"

"Excuse me?"

"Have you got any money?"

"Yes. I mean, not very much."

She frowned at him. "How much?"

"Eighteen turners, I think."

"Oh." She sighed. "It's six turners a day for food and shelter, so you'll just have to mend quickly. Not much chance of you working for your keep, is there? What do you do, anyway?"

Now there was a good question. "I'm a falconer," Miel said.

"Are you really?" She looked at him. "Which family?"

"The Ducas."

"Oh, them." She shrugged. "Well, try and keep out of my way." She frowned, creasing and stretching the scar. "What did that to you? One of your birds?"

For a moment he couldn't think what she was talking about. Then he remembered that he had a scar of his own; not as flamboyant as hers, because skillful men with needles had done something about it while there was still time. It had been so long since anybody had appeared to notice it that he'd forgotten it was there.

"A goshawk in a bate," he replied. "I unhooded it too early. My own fault."

She turned away, the set of her shoulders telling him he no longer mattered, and picked up a sack of boots. Then she stopped.

"My brother used to say you should keep them hooded for three days before you start manning them," she said, not turning round.

"Was he a falconer?"

"No." She paused, as though weighing up the issues for an important decision. "You can sew, then."

Of course he couldn't; but a falconer could. "Yes," he said.

"Fine. Something useful you can do. Stay there."

She went out, and came back a little later with a sack full of clothes. Miel had rested his head on it during the cart-ride. From the pocket of her gown she took a thread-bobbin; there was a bone needle stuck into the thread. "Darn the holes as best you can," she said. "Anything that's past repair you can tear up for patches. Don't break the needle."

Bloody hell, Miel thought; then, Well, how hard can it be? "All right," he said.

Apparently, unloading the cart was her job. She came and went with the sacks and the bundled-up weapons, sorting them and stacking them against the walls; no sign of the carter. He tried not to watch her. Instead, he tried desperately to figure out how you were supposed to get the thread to go through the hole in the needle.

As far as he could judge, it was physically impossible. The end, where it had been cut off, was frayed and tufty, not to mention fiendishly hard to see in the poor light, and the hole in the needle was ridiculously small. It was like trying to pull a turnip through a buttonhole. He tried to think; he'd seen women sewing before, you couldn't turn round at home without seeing some woman or other sitting placidly in a corner, her arm moving gracefully up and down. He concentrated, trying to refine a memory. Every so often they'd stop sewing and do something; but they did it quickly and easily-the bobbin would just appear in their hands, they'd run off about a forearm's length of thread, they'd hold the needle steady, and then they'd do something, if only he could remember what it was.

(Come on, he thought; if they could do it, it couldn't be all that hard.)

He tried to squeeze the picture up into his mind. The head would go forward, he remembered that. Something to do with the hand and the mouth. But of course the Ducas is trained not to stare at people, which is another way of saying, trained not to notice things that don't concern him; things and people.