K Parker - The Belly of the Bow

Gorgas took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Did her daughter go with her?’

The clerk looked puzzled. ‘Sorry?’ he said.

‘Her daughter. The Lady Iseutz.’

‘Oh. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think she took anyone with her, just some bodyguards and the crew of the ship.’

Gorgas leant against the wall and rubbed his cheeks with his fingertips. ‘All right,’ he said again. ‘There just isn’t time for this now. Who are the headquarters staff reporting to?’

The clerk shrugged. ‘I don’t think anybody’s bothering with any of that,’ he said. ‘I think most of the clerks are, well, getting ready to leave too.’

Gorgas scowled and snatched the sack of counters out of the clerk’s hand, spilling them all over the floor. ‘I bet,’ he said. ‘Well, that’d better stop. Anybody caught trying to leave his post will have to explain himself to me; you make sure that reaches all your colleagues, or I’ll hold you responsible. What did you say your name was?’

The clerk sighed. ‘Riert Varil,’ he said. ‘Chief deputy, copying pool.’

‘Right. Pass the message round, then get back to your desk. No, forget that. Find out if there’s been any messages, and where in hell the southern guard units have got to. I need to know if there’s any more of the enemy left.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t have thought so,’ the clerk replied. ‘I thought you said you’d just wiped them out.’

‘Find me as soon as you know. I’ll be in the Director’s office.’

It was true, Gorgas said to himself, lifting his feet and planting them in the middle of her desk, she must have gone, or where’s that little applewood cup of hers, the one Bardas made for her out of the stump of the kitchen tree? It isn’t here, so she must have gone. And so, he observed, has everything else, except for the few bits and pieces that weren’t worth anything or were too firmly fastened to the walls to be easily removed. He’d known she was gone when he’d put his feet up on her desk without being worried in case she suddenly came in through the door. He couldn’t feel her in any part of the building. She’d gone because she couldn’t trust him to defend her against her enemies. Again.

The clerk reappeared, looking distinctly nervous. ‘No messages, Director,’ he said. ‘And I’ve spoken to the heads of department-’

‘Director,’ Gorgas repeated. ‘All right, carry on.’

‘I’ve spoken to the heads of department, and the staff are being put back to work. Sergeant Graiz and the southern guard left for the marshes as you ordered, but nothing’s been heard of any enemy units.’ The clerk hesitated. ‘The war would appear to be over for now,’ he said. ‘Will there be anything else?’

Gorgas looked at him for a moment. ‘Does anybody know why she left?’ he asked. ‘Did she say anything?’

The clerk nodded. ‘I gather she decided the war had become too expensive to pursue any further,’ he said.

‘Too expensive.’

‘So I gather. She formed the view that it was time to cut her losses by closing down her operation here and concentrate on her other business interests.’

Gorgas stared. ‘What other business interests?’ he demanded.

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Oh, for gods’ sakes,’ said Gorgas angrily. ‘No, I don’t. What other business interests?’

So the clerk told him: the half-share in a Colleon merchant venturers’ company, the tannery on Gasail; the lumber mill at Visuntha; the vineyards at Byshest; the stake in the Dakas copper-mining syndicate; the ropewalk on the Island-

‘Go away,’ Gorgas said.

Bardas picked up the bow.

Ideally, he would have liked to have left the glue to cure for at least a week, preferably longer than that; but time was a luxury and besides, the glue he’d made from this batch of exotic, expensive rawhide dried remarkably quickly in the fierce sunlight. He picked up the string and dropped one loop over the bottom nock, then hesitated. There was every chance that, when he flexed the bow for the first time to string it, the thing would snap in two and all his work and hard-to-come-by materials would be wasted.

The first stage had been shaping and fitting the butt-spliced sections of bone to the belly of the wooden core; a slow, frustrating business for a man aware that he was working to a tight deadline. But it had to be right; unless the sections fitted together exactly, the belly would be weak, the terrifying forces of compression would find the vulnerable points where the sections met and tear the work to pieces. So he had filed and scraped and polished, smearing soot onto one face of each join with the tip of his finger, assembling them, taking them apart, until the soot marked both faces evenly and they came together so tightly that he couldn’t pull a hair into the fissure of the joint. Having located, sized and numbered each section, he smeared on the glue, pressed each one into place against the core and wrapped it round tightly with stout cord, one turn every eighth of an inch. To make sure, he added clamps packed with slivers shaved from the spare bone to distribute the force of the clamps evenly. To help pass the time while the glue set, he carded and sorted the sinew for the backing once again, and wove and served the string.

As soon as the glue was hard and he’d slipped off the clamps and unwound the cord, he’d mixed up another batch and begun the tedious, messy work of putting on the sinew backing. First, he’d sized the back of the core once again, this time with the residue of the last batch of hide glue. Next, he set it up on blocks at the front of the workbench, on which lay forty neatly sorted bundles of sinew fibres at convenient intervals. The glue was right – still warm and the consistency of new thin honey. He picked up the sliver of bone he’d chosen to use as a smoother and put it in a small clay cup full of water.

He selected the first bundle of sinew, the longest he had, and dipped it in the glue until it was saturated and limp. He squeezed out the excess, starting at the top and working the runout down to the bottom, flattening the bundle in the process, then carefully laid it down the middle of the core’s back above the handle, spreading it from the centre outwards with the piece of dampened bone until it was just over half an inch wide. The next bundle he butt-ended onto the first, pushing firmly with the smoother to stretch the fibres slightly, and repeated the process until he’d covered a strip up the centre of the back from nock to nock. When that was done he paused briefly to wash some of the surplus glue off his hands.

As he laid in the next row, to the left of the first, he made sure that the butt-seams didn’t line up to create a weak spot, two seams side by side; instead he staggered them like rows of bricks in a wall, then worked each bundle over with the smoother until it was indistinguishable from the material above, below and beside it. He continued until the whole of the back and sides of the core were covered in a homogenous mat of glue-sodden sinew, a long, flat artificial muscle that, once dry, would be next best thing to impossible to break no matter how hard it was stretched. As soon as he’d done one layer he laid on the second, working fast while the glue was still tacky and malleable so that each bundle of fibres would be fused with its neighbour and no weak spots could form. Finally he used up the last of the sinew in wrapping the joints in the bone on the belly, and smoothed all the leftover glue over the back; every last fibre of sinew and smear of glue used up, without waste or spoilage.

Because time was so short, he’d made up a drying oven out of slabs of firebrick; he heated the bricks in the fire until they were just too hot to hold and stacked them round the blocks on which the bow was mounted, where the sunlight through the window would catch them and keep the bricks warm once the heat of the fire had dissipated. He’d never used this technique before, and was afraid that the intensity of the heat would warp or spoil the bow, or that the glue would dry brittle, or that the sinew would dry too fast and pull away from the back as it shrank (and those were only the disasters he could easily anticipate; the unforeseen problems would doubtless be even worse).