Colours in the Steel (23 page)

And now he found himself actually
looking
at his people, as if he was a man from the city come to spy on the clans. He saw men between five feet four and five feet nine inches tall, women a head or half a head shorter, who wore wool and felt and leather, ate dried meat, cheese, millet when there was any to be had, apples and olives in season provided they timed the itinerary right; people who lived in tents of felt and hide, smeared lard on their skins in the depth of winter to keep out the wind and the wet, wasted nothing, owned no more than a wagon and two packhorses could carry.

Here were people who had found a use for every part of a horse or a steer: milk, meat and blood for food; tallow for light, cooking and waterproofing; hide for clothing, tents, harness, hats and armour; hair for felt, rope and bowstrings; bones and teeth for buttons, needles, bow cores and nocks, buckles, tool handles, chesspieces, jewellery, flutes and glue; sinews for bow-backings; and dung for fuel for the fire. They were people who had no leisure and who never hurried, who had little and wanted nothing more, who wrote no books but knew the names of their ancestors for a hundred generations, who had no machines but knew about silver solder and could read the colours in the steel. Looking at them for the first time, he recognised how strange they were, how different.

This is what we are. The people who live in the plains. A hundred and one things to make with a dead cow
.

Someone nudged his arm; it was time to present the prizes for the running about and jumping over things. Having done that (and wondered, in passing, how come he’d allowed Sasurai’s second-best saddle and a brand-new pair of hawking gloves to be given away to men whose only remarkable talent was their ability to launch themselves over a frame of sticks on the end of a long pole), he picked up his bow and quiver and walked down into the arena for the archery.

At least, he thanked the gods, nobody’d tried to make him give away Sasurai’s bow. By rights it ought to have gone to Forever with him, and Temrai honoured in grateful silence the kind friends who’d managed to overlook it at the time. He had bows of his own, expertly made by himself and others, but this was the bow he’d learnt to shoot with. He knew this bow, and it knew him. If there was a better bow in the world, he didn’t want to know.

As he stepped inside it to fit the string, it was like coming home. A new string since he’d seen it last, but a good string nonetheless; the long sinew from a horse’s leg served from top to bottom in silk and properly waxed, with neat bone beads around the nocking point and an ivory kisser. Having braced the bow, he fitted the tab to the fingers of his right hand and buckled the guard round his left forearm, adjusted the height of his quiver, checked the fletchings of his arrows, fidgeted, tried to think of something else. Now that he was standing with his left foot beside the line, with an invisible tunnel between himself and his mark, he realised it was going to be hard work trying not to win. About the only thing going for him was the fact that the whole clan was watching him. That ought to be enough to put anybody off their aim.

When the time came for him to shoot, he’d made a fairly good job of talking himself out of what residual ability he had. The line judge gave the command to nock, and his hand shook a little as he fitted the horn notch of the arrow onto the string, cock-feather upmost. On the command ‘Draw’, he lifted the bow, grunted as he pushed with his left arm, drew with his right until he felt the bow yield and the weight shift from his shoulders to his back. As the socket of the arrowhead slid across the bottom joint of his left thumb, his right thumb brushed his chin and the kisser on the string touched his bottom lip, guaranteeing the alignment of arrow, hand and bow.

He fixed his eyes on the mark, eliminating everything else in the world, and for a second and a half was excused thinking about his father’s death, the city of Perimadeia and its defences, the duties and responsibilities of a clan chief and his own unanticipated strangeness among his own kind. There was too much else to think about; the left arm slightly bent, the elbow outwards, the second finger of the right hand more bent than the third to make sure the string lay level in the crease of the top joint of all three fingers holding the string, the impossibility of not thinking about the act of straightening those fingers as he loosed the string - for the perfect loose is simply the transition between the state of holding a string and the state of not holding it; as simple and as impossible as that—

And then the follow-through, and a distant
plump
as the arrow struck the mark, low and to the right, symptom of a sloppy loose.
Ah, well, if it was easy there’d be no point doing it
. He nocked his second arrow and drew. For the time it took him to loose a dozen arrows he had the luxury of being Temrai, the competent but mediocre archer, nothing more or less than the sum of his own strength and skill. At the back of his mind he knew that this was a moment to savour while it lasted, for there was no knowing when he would be allowed to be this Temrai again.

He came fifth in the end, and that was the best he could do. In a way it pleased him more than winning. He’d made a reasonable show, and he had the comfort of knowing that there were at least four archers in his army who were better shots than he was. In the circumstances, it would have been downright depressing if he’d won.

He stayed just behind the line while the remaining distances were shot, unwilling to go back to his place of honour until he absolutely had to. If his presence among them was a little unsettling to the other competitors, that was no bad thing. No doubt the two-hundredweight stones from the trebuchets on the land-wall towers would be more unsettling still, and they’d have to cope with them soon enough. The standard of marksmanship was really rather good. He made a mental note to call for the aggregate once the match was over, and wondered if anybody remembered any comparable scores which would help him work out whether the clan’s shooting had improved or declined over the intervening years. A conscientious chief, he reasoned, ought to know such things.

It was time for the popinjay, the grand finale. Precisely why the people of the clan found it so enthralling to see men shooting arrows at a bird tethered by its foot to the top of a fifty-yard-high mast, Temrai had never been quite sure. Perhaps it was because it was faster-paced than the conventional rounds at the marks; one shot from each competitor, and if the first man to shoot hit the target, that was the end of the competition. Maybe the thrill lay in something tangible actually getting hit and falling over - hard to be enthusiastic about hearing the gentle
tock
of distant arrows dropping into felt, when only the people nearest the marks could see where the shots had landed. It couldn’t be good old-fashioned bloodlust, because usually the popinjay was a leather bag stuffed with straw, dipped in glue and rolled in feathers. His own personal theory was the frisson of danger from all the arrows that didn’t hit the mark and fell erratically back to earth, as often as not landing among the spectators.

This time there was a real bird; a big tawny eagle, tethered by one foot to the masthead and protesting savagely about the indignity of it all. That would account for the more than usual excitement, since every man who’d lost kids and lambs to the mountain eagles could share in the symbolic revenge. For his part, Temrai would just as soon have shot at the bag of straw. He’d spent too many hours with the herd as a boy, vainly trying to keep the loathsome creatures at bay with shouts and stones, to feel sorry for the wretched bird, but this wasn’t pest control so much as a public execution. Besides, the straw version didn’t jiggle about so much.

One shot. He looked down at his quiver until he saw the one particular arrow he’d been looking for. It had been his favourite ever since he was young, even though it was an inch too long for him. He had no idea where it had come from; it bore the chief’s purple fletchings, but it hadn’t been made on the plains. The clan made their arrows from one piece of wood, the same diameter for the whole length of the shaft. This arrow had a cedar mainshaft spliced into a cornelwood footing, and it tapered very slightly from a point eight inches below the head down to the nock. The narrow, unusually heavy head was almost square in section, as opposed to the familiar three-sided profile favoured by the clan smiths. He had a feeling that it was very old, and had originally come via the city from Scona, where the finest bowyers and fletchers in the world made equipment for the finest archers. The fletchings were goose rather than eagle or crow, and in need of replacement fairly soon. He held it up to his eye to make sure it hadn’t warped or split, then had to jump quickly to one side to avoid a descending arrow that had caught the wind at masthead level and come straight back down again.

He had drawn the seventh shot, so he didn’t have long to wait. No real danger of winning this particular event; the specialised skill of shooting straight up in the air wasn’t one he’d ever seen any point in mastering, since it wasn’t needed in war except when you were right under the walls of a city, and he’d never mastered the knack of shooting birds on the wing. Plenty of people had, however, and five of the clan’s best birdhunters had drawn places ahead of him.

Somehow, though, they all contrived to miss, with the result that Temrai found himself standing on the line, craning his neck and staring almost straight into the sun, trying to make out the bird’s outline against the painfully bright sky. He drew and took aim in the general direction, relaxed the fingers of his right hand and got ready to let fly.

He was just about to commit to the loose when the sun dipped behind what was virtually the only cloud in the sky, giving him a clear view of the target. He felt the string biting into his fingers through the tab, and his shoulders ached. It was time to get rid of this wretched arrow. He concentrated on the bird and stopped holding the string.

Damn, he thought.

How many times had there been when he’d have given anything to have hit the mark in a popinjay shoot in front of the whole clan? More times than he cared to remember, when he’d spent days driving arrows into a felt boss hung from the side of the wagon, trying to find that last elusive touch of skill that would make the shot go exactly where he wanted it to, instead of somewhere in the general direction. As he watched the arrow strike, the bird fold up, topple and hang like a saddlebag from its tether, he cursed and wondered how such a thing could possibly happen. All he could think of was that the gods had stored up ten years’ worth of his prayers for a straight shot and then maliciously chosen to grant them now just to spite him.

There was an awkward silence as the entire clan tried to work out whether they were meant to applaud, or whether they were free to express their disapproval of so wanton a breach of etiquette. The other competitors picked up their arrows and put their bows back in their cases without a word or a glance in his direction. It would have to be the popinjay, the one event where he couldn’t magnanimously disqualify himself and let the real contestants carry on. And how in the gods’ names was he supposed to go about presenting the prize to himself?

All he could think of to say was, ‘Sorry.’

Still, nothing he could do about it now. He cased his bow and walked back to his seat. Now, of course, he had to make his speech.

He’d prepared it, and he knew it was good. First, a succinct and gracefully worded eulogy for his predecessor. Next, a formal declaration of his intention to lead the clan against the enemy, stating his reasons and motivating his people for the struggle that lay ahead. A few words on the clan’s manifest destiny, a bit of mysticism for those who expected it, and, to conclude, a nicely phrased summary and a memorable saying that folks could tell their grandchildren. He had it all off pat.

Instead, he cleared his throat and said, ‘You don’t want to listen to a lot of speeches, so here’s what we’re going to do. Once we’ve made it through the Nadsin pass, we’re going south out of our way to cut timber. We’re then going to float it down the river - we’ve never tried it before, but I know it’s been done, so we can do it - and once we’re there, we’re going to build siege engines. It’s all right, I’ve learnt how and there’s nothing to it, really. The archery’s pretty good - too good, in some cases - but we’re going to have to practise with the logs if we’re to have a hope in hell of bashing in the city gates, so I’ll want volunteers for a specialist ram detail; names to the wing leaders in the next three days. There’s a lot I haven’t thought out yet, but we’ve got time in hand, and I’ll keep you posted as we go along. That’s about it, really, so I’ll shut up and let you get on with the party. Here’s health. Oh, and if you didn’t want your eagle shot, you shouldn’t have left it there.’

It wasn’t much of a joke; but even as he sat down he knew he’d just given a new proverb to the language. A hundred years from now, men who’d let their unbranded cattle get mixed up with someone else’s herd, or whose neglected wives started to look elsewhere, would have their protests met with a smirk and, ‘Yes, well, if you didn’t want your eagle shot—’ In the meantime, he’d just spoken to his people like a chief, as opposed to a boy wearing his father’s oversized hat. He’d have his volunteers for the ram squads, and his rafts of timber floating down the river; and nobody would mutter behind his back that they reckoned Chief didn’t have a plan at all, because he’d just admitted it and that was fair enough. It was probably going to work, and it was because he’d learnt that if a target’s there to be shot at, you shoot at it and the hell with the rules.

Sasurai hadn’t realised that; Sasurai didn’t storm Perimadeia. I do, and I will.

He was still sitting reflecting on this when they came to load up the throne and the carpets. They didn’t exactly turf him out onto the ground, but they made it clear that they had work to do and he was in the way. He apologised and left them to it.