K Parker - The Belly of the Bow

The clerk shrugged. ‘Pests are pests,’ he replied amiably. ‘You get mice, rabbits, rooks and pigeons, and you get soldiers. You bring in what’s left. You make allowances and budget accordingly. And if you lose the lot one year, you increase your borrowing and start again.’ He frowned and looked away. ‘That’s how it all started,’ he said quietly, ‘and how it’s gone on. Just as well there’s people like us who’re prepared to do something about it.’

‘Quite,’ Gorgas replied, rolling onto his side. ‘And now I think I’d like to get some sleep, if it’s all the same to you.’

The clerk grinned. ‘You’re upset because you bust your nice bow,’ he said. ‘Which is fine,’ he added. ‘I can understand that.’

Gorgas thought for a moment. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I am. Like I said, I’ve had the thing for years, ever since I was a boy. My brother made it for me, as a matter of fact.’

‘Which one? You’ve got so many.’

Gorgas smiled. ‘I’ve made some good shots with this bow in my time,’ he said. ‘Got me out of trouble more often than I care to think. And in it, too; but that wasn’t the bow’s fault, just mine.’ He collected the broken limbs and held them up to the yellow light of the oil-lamp. ‘Went in the belly, would you believe,’ he said. ‘There, in the layer of horn, that’s where the crack started, right up through the wood into the sinew.’

‘Really,’ said the clerk, bored. ‘Well, that’s just…’ He didn’t bother to finish the sentence. Gorgas put the remains down beside him and tucked his hands behind his head.

‘I shall have to get him to make me another one,’ he said.

‘The Director will send for you presently,’ the man said. He nodded at a cold, hard-looking stone bench, and walked away.

Alexius thought of his piles, groaned inside and sat down on the bench, which was just as cold and hard as he imagined. Perhaps it’d be better to stand; but he thought of his rheumatism and decided against it. All in all, he reflected, he was too old to hang around in stark, miserable waiting rooms outside the offices of people with titles like Director. Come to that, he’d been too old for that game on the day he was born.

Which was not to suggest that the place didn’t have a certain grandeur about it. The anteroom was wide and high, with a hammer-beam roof and thick ornamental pillars of roughly finished pink granite; no decoration, not even whitewash, but everything built in a way that suggested money and resources were no problem. That impression, he reckoned, was true enough. The Director (whoever that turned out to be) had enough of both effectively to buy him from the Islanders and have him whisked away on a big, fast ship before his rich and powerful friends on the Island had been able to do anything about it. But who these people were, let alone what they could possibly want him for, was beyond him entirely. This didn’t look like the establishment of someone who collected philosophers as a hobby.

The bench wasn’t getting any more comfortable with the passage of time, so he made the effort to stand up and hobble on his protesting legs as far as the doorway he’d just come through. That at least was vaguely familiar. It was an attempt to copy the grand Perimadeian style, done by somebody who’d never been to the City or seen anything like what he was being asked to copy. It looked bizarre and ever so slightly ridiculous.

Most of all, he realised, what offended and disconcerted him most about this place was the fact that it was obviously all so new. He was no expert, but if the clean, neat, sharp lines and unfaded colours were anything to go by, this whole building was no more than five years old. It even still had a faint residual smell of new building, the slight musty dampness of new plaster and the unmistakable scene of stone-dust. That tells me something , he said to himself. Not only rich, but suddenly taken rich . He tried not to let the thought worry him, but he couldn’t help it. Being a Perimadeian, he was uncomfortable in new buildings; even the outside privies in the City had been four hundred years old and made of polished basalt.

Suddenly taken rich; well, that could be honest trade – a newly discovered seam of silver or a better sea-route to the South – or piracy, or revolution and civil war. It could be a new dynasty or a usurping warlord, except in that case he’d be waiting to see a king, not a director. Director suggested trade, and he felt marginally more comfortable with the idea of a merchant prince of some kind. But didn’t newly wealthy merchants fill their palaces with gorgeous and vulgar splendour, the skimmings of five continents jumbled up together in a casserole, statues in every niche and pictures jostling each other for wall-space? This austerity suggested something else, something that was ever so slightly familiar – a contemplative order, perhaps, as it might be some newly schismatic and successful heresy. The combination of sparseness, discomfort and unlimited expenditure put him in mind of some of the establishments of his own Foundation back home, while the lack of ornament might suggest some taboo against pictorial images. Or it could just be a monumental lack of imagination, again not incompatible with contemplation and scholarship.

The far door opened and a man came out; not the one who’d brought him here, but very similar. He was gone before Alexius could even clear his throat. A busy man, then, which suggested trade or administration – but where were the sumptuous robes and round stomach of the clerk? Could it have been the Director? The man had looked more like a soldier, stiff-backed and quick-moving, and his drab dark-brown clothes could easily have been the sort of thing a fighting man puts on under his armour. Alexius shook his head and sat down again. He was cold, hungry and confused, and his bladder needed emptying as a medium-term priority. He decided he didn’t like this place very much.

I’m a philosopher, I should be sitting here contemplating the infinite, not the pain in my backside. What I wouldn’t give for something to read . But the only writing in the place was a single line of unfamiliar letters cut into the stone above the Director’s door, and he didn’t need to be a linguist to recognise NO ENTRY EXCEPT ON OFFICIAL BUSINESS when he saw it. He folded his hands, closed his eyes and wished he could go to sleep.

Curiously enough, he managed it; because somehow the place changed around him, and he was standing in a workshop of some kind, looking at the back of a man’s head. It was dark where he was; the man stood in the middle of a shaft of light that flooded in through the open door. He was standing over a workbench, planing a long, narrow piece of wood. The air was full of floating specks of dust, clearly visible in the limited beam of sunlight.

The man was Colonel Bardas Loredan, the fencer-at-law. What was he doing here?

Alexius tried to speak, but his voice didn’t seem to work properly here. Oh dear, this must be the future again. I thought I was done with all that . He noticed streaks of grey in the hair above Loredan’s ears; well, it had been two years, and Alexius was only too aware of how much he’d aged over that time. He tried to move to see Loredan’s face, but his feet appeared to be stuck, so he tried craning his neck instead. That didn’t help either. There was a horrible smell, which he recognised as burning bone, and he looked back over his shoulder and saw an iron pot simmering over a charcoal fire, the smoke drifting slowly up and out through a hole in the thatch.

A boy appeared in the doorway, briefly interfering with the light, until Loredan told him to shift.

‘Sorry,’ the boy replied, offended. ‘But you said…’