K Parker: The Belly of the Bow

Bardas jumped up and grabbed him; he didn’t resist. ‘What the hell do you mean, it doesn’t matter, it’s all right? Gorgas, I just killed your son ! I killed your son and I made him into a bow, and you’re telling me it’s all right. What is wrong with you?’

Gorgas had his eyes shut. ‘What’s done is done,’ he said firmly. ‘Luha is dead, we can’t bring him back. I’ve lost a son, but I can always have another one, I can make sons, I can’t make brothers. If I – if anything happened to you, you’d be gone for ever, and there’d be no point in that, it’d be a waste .’

Bardas let go of him and slumped against the wall. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘You’re forgiving me. Gorgas, I always knew you were evil, but I never thought you were as bad as this.’

Gorgas shook his head. ‘Not evil,’ he said. ‘Unlucky. There’s no such thing as evil, Bardas, it’s a myth, a sloppy, wasteful way of thinking. There’s just bad luck that makes us do things, even though we’re trying to do what’s best. You can’t fight bad luck, you’ve just got to accept it, the way I did when I-’

‘When you killed our father.’

Gorgas nodded. ‘It was bad luck, but I was practical, I knew I’d done a bad thing but I knew I could make amends for it, if I really tried hard. That’s why it doesn’t matter, Bardas, what either of us has done. I’m still your brother.’

Bardas walked away, back into the main room, and sat down. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if that doesn’t beat cock-fighting. What have I got to do to stop you loving me, Gorgas? There must be something, sort of killing you. I can’t kill you, Gorgas, that’d mean you’d have won, you’d have escaped, got away free.’

Gorgas came through and sat opposite him. ‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked.

‘Me? The gods know, I haven’t given it any thought. I’d assumed I’d be dead about two minutes after you saw that thing in there.’

‘You don’t know me, then, do you?’

‘Apparently not,’ Bardas replied. ‘I made the mistake of thinking you’d react like a human being rather than a Loredan.’

Gorgas grinned at him; his face was like the face in the other room. ‘We’re one hell of a family,’ he said. ‘On balance, it’s probably just as well there’s not more of us.’

Anaut Mogre stood in front of his army and gazed across the downs to the southern gate of Scona Town, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut.

The horrible fact was that the three thousand or so men behind him were more or less all that was left; if they went the same way as the armies led by Sten Mogre, Avid Soef and the third man whose name he couldn’t for the moment remember, the Foundation would have more senior staff officers than halberdiers. Unlike his three predecessors, he was proposing to lay siege to the enemy in a highly defensible town, as opposed to fighting a pitched battle in the open with an overwhelming advantage in numbers. For a man who hadn’t left the Citadel for thirty-two years, it was a daunting prospect.

‘The scouts are back,’ said a sergeant, appearing at his side. ‘No sign of any activity. The gates are shut, but if there’s anything more than the usual number of sentries on the wall, we can’t see them. It’s as if they aren’t interested.’

Mogre said nothing. So far, if what he’d been told was correct, twenty-six members of the Mogre family had been killed in this war, or were at the very least missing in action and unaccounted for. Two of them, Juic Mogre and his son Imerecque, had been pulled out of the disused stone quarry in the mountains a few days ago, starved to death; not, as far as he knew, by deliberate malice, but simply because they’d been forgotten about. Twelve men were all that were left of cousin Sten’s army.

So far, he’d met with no resistance at all. He’d sent detachments to the sites of the three battles, found out as much as he could about what had actually happened, taken his time, all without seeing so much as a single archer. He felt like someone who’s come a long way to pay a visit, only to find he’s come on the wrong day and everybody’s gone out.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s Scona Town. If anybody’s got any suggestions for what we do next, I’m willing to listen.’

There was a long silence; then somebody said, ‘Why not try talking to them?’

Anaut Mogre thought about that. ‘It has the merit of originality, ’ he said. ‘How do you suggest going about it?’

Half an hour later, he was standing under the gatehouse with a small escort, all visibly unarmed, with a nervous-looking lance-corporal trying to hide behind a long banner with the pennant reversed. When he’d asked, he found that nobody knew what the Scona convention for a flag of truce was, so he’d ordered them to set up a flag using the Shastel protocol and hoped to hell that the enemy were better informed than he was. It had been a long and nervous walk from his camp to the gate, but the storm of deadly arrows he’d been more than half expecting hadn’t materialised. There was, in fact, no indication that anybody inside the city had even noticed that they were there.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he said, looking up at the empty rampart above his head. ‘What do we have to do, ring the bell?’

‘There isn’t a bell,’ someone pointed out.

Anaut Mogre stepped back a pace or so and craned his neck upwards. He wanted to pick up a stone and throw it, or shout; something he hadn’t done since his student days, when he’d tossed pebbles at the shutters of girls’ bedrooms while their fathers slept.

‘Look up,’ someone observed behind him. ‘Signs of life.’

A man’s head appeared above the rampart. The face was vaguely familiar, or at least it reminded Mogre of faces he knew. ‘Hello?’ the man called out.

‘Hello,’ Mogre called back self-consciously.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ the man replied. ‘Are you the commander of the Shastel army?’

‘Yes,’ Mogre called back. His neck hurt. ‘My name is Anaut Mogre.’

‘Bardas Loredan,’ the man replied. ‘Have you come to demand the surrender of the Town?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve got it.’ Something flew through the air and landed in the dust with a metallic clang. Everyone had jumped back, Mogre included, as if they’d been expecting some diabolical weapon; a jar of burning pitch, or a hail of white-hot caltrops. It was, in fact, a large steel key.

Mogre looked up again. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

The man smiled. ‘I think I’m the Director of the Bank of Scona,’ he replied. ‘Do you mind talking like this, or would you rather let yourselves in and we can talk somewhere more comfortable?’

Mogre hesitated. ‘Explain what you just said,’ he called back. ‘Then we’ll come in.’

‘Fair enough,’ the man said. ‘Niessa Loredan’s gone and so has Gorgas Loredan; between them they’ve taken all the money and the movable valuables and skipped off. Since I’m their brother, arguably I’ve inherited the Bank. More to the point, I found that key in Niessa’s office. One thing, though. If I’ve got this right, it’s the Bank you’re at war with, rather than Scona itself, yes?’

Mogre had to think before he replied. ‘That’s right.’

‘I thought so.’ The man made an all-reasonable-men-here gesture with his arms. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘rather than any more fighting and killing and waste of resources, wouldn’t the simplest thing be if I were to give you the Bank – what’s left of it, anyway; like I said, Niessa and Gorgas took pretty well everything that wasn’t pegged down, but there’s still the realty and the mortgages, of course. I mean, you can’t be at war with something you own, can you?’