K. Parker - The Proof House

The courier was splashing his head and shoulders with water from a leather bucket. ‘You want a wet?’ he called out. ‘Wash some of the dust off.’

Bardas looked down; he hadn’t noticed how dusty and grimy he was. ‘All right,’ he replied, and the courier dipped the bucket in a water-butt and passed it to him. The water was slightly cloudy with disturbed sediment.

‘Time to go,’ the courier told him, then turned round to shout a message back to one of the outriders; Bardas didn’t catch what he was saying. The stagekeepers had finished changing the horses and were crawling about under the coach, painting grease on the axles from large clay tubs and checking the cotter pins. ‘You’d better climb up,’ the courier went on. ‘We leave as soon as they’ve done, whether you’re on board or not.’

Bardas hauled himself up over the box. He was only just in position in his valley in the cargo when the coach started to move.

As the courier had promised, the next stage seemed to go on for ever. Imperial roads were famous for being straight and, where humanly possible, flat; the provincial office’s engineers thought nothing of hacking a high-sided cutting through a substantial hill for no other reason, or so it seemed, than to prove that they could. Bardas considered the cargo piled up around him; jars of dates, figs and cherries preserved in honey, foot-stools and hat-boxes, book-boxes (a lot of those) and brass tubes that held rolled-up silk paintings; it seemed a lot of effort to go to, slicing the middle out of a mountain just so that a prefect could have fresh grapes and the latest anthology of occasional verse; but the Empire could do that sort of thing, so why not? It wasn’t as if they were particularly attractive hills to begin with.

At the third stage of the day, the coach took on another passenger. ‘Shift over,’ she said. Bardas looked at her, and shifted.

‘I brought my own food,’ she went on, burrowing into a huge wickerwork basket that only just fitted into the gap between the piled and roped-down boxes. ‘I’ve been on this run too often to poison myself with government rations.’ She emerged, like a rat from a hole in the wall, with a squat, flat packet made of vine leaves. Honey oozed out between the folds. ‘Of course, you need a digestion like a compost heap to keep anything down on a post coach,’ she went on. ‘All that bumping and lurching on a full stomach; it’s far worse than being on a ship, I can tell you.’

She was small, grey-haired and dark-eyed, bundled up in a thick woollen coat with a high fur collar, secured at the neck with a huge, vicious-looking brooch. Bardas, who was already down to his shirt because of the heat, couldn’t help staring; she wasn’t sweating at all.

‘You think I’m overdressed,’ she said without looking up, as her small, bent fingers picked at the string of her packet. ‘You wait till you’ve spent a couple of nights on the road, you’ll wish you’d brought something a bit warmer than that. Military?’ Bardas nodded. ‘Thought so. Well, it doesn’t take a great analytical mind to come up with that one, why else would – well, one of your lot be on a government coach? Not that it bothers me, needless to say. There just isn’t any room for those kinds of attitudes now, not if we’re really serious about being one Empire and all that sort of thing. I dare say in twenty years or so’s time, people just won’t think about it any more. And quite right too, if you ask me. It’s like this whole Sons and Daughters of Heaven thing; we don’t believe it any more, you don’t believe it (or if you do, you’re a sight more gullible than I gave you credit for) so really, where’s the point? People are people, and that’s all there is to it.’ She stripped away the vine leaves to reveal a golden-brown slab of cake, dripping liquid honey and scattering crumbs of nut. ‘There really isn’t a polite way to eat this stuff,’ she said, ‘so the hell with it. Here goes.’ She opened her mouth as wide as it would go, stuffed about a quarter of the cake into it, and bit hard. ‘Not bad,’ she went on, as soon as her mouth was clear enough of cake to let her speak, ‘though I do say so myself. Properly speaking, that was meant for my son in Daic, but what he wasn’t expecting he’ll never miss. Don’t talk much, do you?’

‘I prefer to listen,’ Bardas replied.

‘Very sensible,’ the woman said. ‘One mouth and two ears, like my mother used to tell us when we were children. How far are you going?’

‘Sammyra,’ Bardas said. ‘Apparently I change coaches there for Ap’ Calick.’

The woman was chewing. ‘Ap’ Calick,’ she said. ‘I used to call there when I was younger. The manager of the government brickyard there was a very good customer. Perfume,’ she added, by way of explanation. ‘Twenty years in the trade, either side of when the children were small; took over from my father when I was seventeen, bought out both my brothers by the time I was twenty. I’m hoping my youngest girl will take over from me in due course; she’s very good on the production side, but she doesn’t like the travelling. With me, of course, it’s the other way round, so we work very well together. My son hates me still being on the road, of course; I expect he thinks it makes him look bad, but who the hell cares? Still, I won’t deny it’s a great help having a son in the roads commission. For one thing, I can scrounge a lift on the post whenever I need to, and that’s a real advantage. I’m not sure I’d be quite so keen on the road if I was having to slog across this lot on a mule. Have you been to Sammyra before?’

Bardas shook his head. ‘Just a name to me,’ he said.

The woman sniffed. ‘It’s nothing much, really; been going downhill ever since they lost the indigo trade. The baths are worth a visit if you get time, but I wouldn’t bother too much with the market. You can get exactly the same stuff in Tollambec at about half the price.’

Bardas nodded. ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said.

‘Now the best thing about Tollambec,’ the woman went on, ‘is the fish stew. How they ever got a taste for fish living that far from the sea heaven only knows, but the plain fact is I’d rather have salt fish Tollambec style than the fresh stuff any day, and I don’t care who knows it. Do they eat much fish where you come from?’

‘I used to live in Perimadeia,’ Bardas replied.

‘Perimadeia,’ the woman repeated. ‘So, plenty of cod and mackerel, some tuna, eels, of course…’

Bardas shrugged. ‘I don’t know, I’m afraid. We used just to call it fish. It was grey and came in a slice of bread.’

The woman sighed. ‘My son’s just the same,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t know good food if it bit him. That’s such a shame; I mean, so much of life’s about eating and drinking. If you don’t take an interest, it’s such a waste.’

‘I suppose so.’

Just as the woman had said, as soon as it got dark, it got cold. Fortunately, there was a spare oxhide folded up in a corner of the cart, and Loredan crawled into it. The outriders stopped and lit lanterns, then carried on at not much less than the pace they’d set during the day.

‘One advantage of a straight, flat road,’ the woman said. ‘Doesn’t really matter if you can’t see where you’re going.’›

The government rations the woman had spoken so slightingly of turned out to consist of a long, flat coarse barley loaf flavoured with garlic and dill, some strong hard cheese and an onion. ‘They say you can tell someone who’s been on the post from several yards away,’ the woman commented, ‘just from the smell. You’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty obnoxious combination.’

Bardas smiled, though of course she couldn’t see. ‘I like the smell of garlic,’ he said.