K Parker: Colours in the Steel

He closed his eyes and went to sleep. His dreams were not pleasant.

Temrai looked down into his cup and saw that it was still almost half-full of the stuff. He wished it wasn’t. He was tempted to pour it away while nobody was looking; but his new friends had bought it for him and to pour away a gift would be an insult as well as waste. Even so; it tasted horrible and it was making him feel ill.

‘And is it true,’ one of them was asking, ‘that when you get old they take you out into the desert and leave you there to die? Only I heard somewhere…’

They had stopped by his bench earlier that evening; four broad-shouldered middle-aged men who worked on the furnaces, cheerful, loud-voiced and sociable. When he’d seen them bearing down on him, Temrai had felt a little apprehensive. It’d only be natural if they resented a foreigner (and a plainsman, at that) walking into the arsenal and taking a job that would normally have gone to one of their own. From what he’d overheard, many of the more skilled workers in the arsenal belonged to some sort of secret clan reserved for masters in the craft; perhaps these men belonged to it and had come to chase him away. It was something of a relief to find out that all they wanted was to invite him to drink with them.

‘No,’ he replied, shaking his head (and for some reason that was enough to make him feel dizzy). ‘That’s not right at all. We have great respect for old people, who are so wise and know so much. They make all our decisions and tell us how things ought to be done. My father…’

He caught himself just in time, and covered the mistake by pretending to choke on his drink. The men thought that was highly entertaining and pounded him on the back with their enormous hands. Strange, that; he had a vague impression that they were sharing some hidden joke, almost as if someone had tied a rat to another man’s pigtail without him noticing.

‘What you’re probably thinking of,’ he went on, ‘is when a man grows very sick, so that he knows he’s going to die. When that happens, quite often he’ll go off into the plains on his own, so as to spare his clan the distress of watching him die. And it saves on rations too, of course. Among my people, waste is a terrible thing.’

He noticed that he was slurring his words a little, like a man with bad toothache whose jaw becomes inflamed. That and the dizziness made him want to go back to his sleeping place and lie down. He would have assumed it was something to do with the drink, except that the men had drunk far more than him, and if anything they were even livelier than usual.

‘Drink up,’ said one of them, whose name was Milas. ‘Don’t they have wine where you come from, then?’

Temrai replied that in his country they drank milk. The men nodded sagely and their eyes sparkled. ‘Wine’s better than milk,’ said another one, Divren. ‘Good for you. Full of sweetness, makes you strong.’

Milas tilted the jug and Temrai found his cup was full again. He took a long pull at it, to get it over with. They were really very kind, hospitable people, but the stuff was disgusting.

‘We heard,’ said the oldest of the men, Zulas, ‘that in your country the men all have a hundred wives each. Is that true?’

‘Oh, no,’ Temrai assured him. ‘Never more than six, and that’s only great lords, like my-Most people just have one or two. It’s because there’s more women than men.’

‘Are there? Why’s that?’

‘Because a lot of the men get killed,’ Temrai replied. He burped, but nobody seemed offended. ‘Fighting, or lost on the plains, or else they just go away for a few years. And then their wives marry someone else. Although,’ he added, frowning, ‘I don’t think marriage means the same here as it does at home.’

Zulas winked at the others. ‘Doesn’t it?’ he asked. ‘What’s the difference, then?’

Temrai thought hard. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘where I come from the men are out on the plains most of the time seeing to the horses and the sheep, while the women stay back at the wagons, so they don’t tend to spend a lot of time together. But here, they live with each other all the time. I think it’s amazing. Men and women weren’t meant to be together like that. They’re different. They get on each other’s nerves.’

‘True,’ said Milas, nodding gravely. ‘Here, have some more.’

‘Puts hairs on your chest,’ Divren agreed.

‘But then,’ Temrai went on, ‘there’s so many things that are different here. Like buying and selling, for instance. In this place, everything’s bought and sold; what you eat, what you drink, clothes, where you live. So you have a whole lot of people who do nothing but make shirts, and another lot who do nothing but buy food from one load of people and sell it to another load.’ He waved indiscriminately at his surroundings. ‘And there’s people who earn their living owning a house that other people live in. That’s strange. Or take you, I mean, us; it’s all different back home. All you do, or rather we do, is make swords all day. At home the smiths do smithing one day in ten, and the rest of the time they’re running their stock or fixing up their wagons or curing hides or whatever, just like everyone else. Even my – even the great lords ride out to the flocks when they haven’t got clan business to deal with. So we hardly buy and sell anything. It’s odd,’ Temrai went on, ‘because our way seems to work pretty well, and so does yours. They’re just as good as each other, but different.’

‘Wise words,’ said the fourth man, Skudas. ‘Wisdom in wine, isn’t that what they say? Have another.’

‘Thanks,’ Temrai said, holding out his cup. It got better the more you had. ‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘Here you’ve got people whose only job is fighting, and when they’re not fighting they’re practising fighting. All my people fight when there’s fighting to be done, but the rest of the time we don’t fight at all. Well, hardly at all. Mind you, we do fight quite a lot of the time, clan against clan and nation against nation. But it’s always over in a day, while you people go on fighting the same war for years on end. Where’s the point in that? Surely the whole point of fighting’s to see who’s the strongest, not who’s got the cleverest lords who can spin the war out even though the enemy’s got heaps more men. Doesn’t make sense to me.’

Zulas waved his hand for another jug, then said, ‘So you don’t like it here, then?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Temrai replied, shaking his head vigorously. ‘Didn’t say that at all. I think it’s absolutely wonderful here, all these incredible things you’ve got, and the way you all live heaped on top of each other and hardly ever lose your tempers. If my people had to live here cooped up like horses in a corral, they’d be at each other’s throats in a day or so. But it’s hard to have feuds and quarrels when you’re all doing things together, like getting the caravan across a river or bringing the horses in to be broken.’ He stopped to drink more wine, and then continued, ‘I think the clan’s much more like a family than your city is. Everybody’s a man on his own here, and you all live in your own houses and shut the doors at night and lots of you don’t even know the people who live half an hour’s walk away. That’s strange.’

Another strange thing, Temrai noticed, was the way the room was going round. He’d only ever felt this way before when they’d banked up the fire for a dance for the gods and the old women had burnt herbs and holy leaves. It was all right to feel dizzy and strange then, because the gods came down and joined in the dances, and the presence of gods has a peculiar effect on mortals. Could it be that there were gods in the inn tonight? He’d heard stories of gods going round in disguise to keep an eye on mortals, and if the gods were travelling, it was only logical they’d put up at an inn for the night rather than sleep out in the open. Surreptitiously he glanced round, trying to spot anybody who might be a god. He couldn’t see any obvious candidates, but that didn’t mean anything. But wasn’t it the case that there weren’t supposed to be any gods in the City of the Sword? Well, maybe there were, and perhaps that’s why they’re in disguise. In which case, best to pretend he hadn’t noticed anything.