The Belly of the Bow (16 page)

Niessa shrugged, eyes on her work. ‘The whole second book is based on a false premise anyway,’ she replied, ‘as you well know. Mometas proved that a hundred years ago. And,’ she added casually, holding the seam up to the light, ‘his refutation is basically a circular argument, so the whole thing’s a waste of time.’

Alexius wasn’t expecting that. In spite of himself, he couldn’t help asking for details.

‘Oh, it’s quite simple,’ Niessa replied. ‘He takes the analogy of light refracted in a rainbow, and then knocks down the hypothesis he’s just built up by saying it’s just an analogy. It’s very well argued, of course, but it’s still as obvious as a bull in a chicken-run. He’d have starved to death if he’d been in the linen trade.’

She’s right
, Alexius thought angrily.
Either she’s read something none of the rest of us ever saw, or she figured it out for herself. She’s right. Dear gods, if I were thirty years younger I’d give up philosophy and get myself indentured to a sack-maker
. ‘It’s an interesting theory,’ he heard himself say, ‘but what about Berennius and the irregular flux theory? I think you’ll find that for the last fifty years, Mometas’ theorem has only ever been regarded as a starting point, not an end in itself.’

‘Whatever.’ Niessa Loredan dismissed the whole topic with one small wave of her needle. She’d won that round, they both knew it, she had nothing to gain by continuing the battle on that front. ‘Obviously you know far more about the subject than I do. Frankly, I’d be appalled if you didn’t. Now then.’ She carefully folded her work and laid it in her lap. ‘Let’s get down to business. It’s time we did some magic.’

 

‘Well?’ asked the boy anxiously.

Bardas Loredan pursed his lips. This was awkward.

On the one hand, his father had never been tactful with him. When he’d been learning this particular skill, the old man’s way of indicating that he’d got it wrong was pulling it out of the vice and snapping it across his knee, while adding a few short, pithy remarks about wasting good timber. (As far as Bardas could remember, he’d never actually said that good wood doesn’t grow on trees, but he’d been close to it on several occasions.) On the other hand, Bardas Loredan wasn’t his father.

‘It’s terrible,’ he said. ‘Do it again.’

The boy looked at him as if he’d just killed his pet sparrow by crushing it in his fist. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

Bardas sighed. ‘You really need to be told?’ he said. ‘I knew you weren’t listening. All right, here we go. First, the belly should be flat, and it isn’t. Second, when you’re shaping the back you should follow one growth ring, otherwise you’re wasting your time, and you haven’t. Look,’ he went on, pointing to where the boy had shaved through three years’ worth of growth, ‘it’s a mess. Third, you’ve got to leave knots and pins standing proud, or else they’ll form weak spots and the bow’ll snap. You’ve just planed right through them. Fourth—’

‘All right,’ said the boy. ‘I’m sorry.’

Bardas breathed out sharply. ‘It’s not a matter of being
sorry
,’ he said wearily. ‘It’s not as if you’ve done something wicked. You’ve just not done it right, that’s all. True, you’ve wrecked a perfectly good piece of wood, but we all do that. Just . . .’ He sighed again, not really knowing what to say. ‘Just go away and do it again, and this time do it right. You think you can manage that? Or would you rather watch me do one, and this time—’

‘I’ll try again,’ the boy interrupted swiftly. ‘This time I’ll do it right, I promise.’

‘Sure,’ Bardas replied. ‘Well, do your best, anyway. And when you’ve done that, get this mess swept up, we’re knee-deep in shavings again.’

The boy made himself scarce, and Bardas sat down on the bench, his chin cupped in his left hand. In the vice in front of him was another mess; a banjax, a really lousy, crummy piece of work, an abortion, garbage, trash, junk. It also represented several weeks’ work and about twenty quarters’ worth of bought-in material. He’d already tried swearing at it, but it hadn’t helped.

‘My own bloody stupid fault for listening,’ he grumbled, opening the vice and lifting out the wreck. It had all started with a chance remark made by a man who called in occasionally to sell him timber, the rare and exotic stuff that came from the South Coast, types of wood he didn’t know the names of from trees he’d never seen. The man had said that once he’d seen a bow made out of buffalo ribs—

‘You mean horn,’ he’d interrupted. ‘Buffalo horn. You slice it thin and glue it—’

‘Ribs,’ the man had repeated firmly. ‘Lovely thing, it was; no more than a yard long, a thumb wide at the handle, fingertip wide at the ends. Bloke who showed it to me said it drew fifty pounds and shot an arrow two hundred and twenty yards.’

‘He can’t have said ribs,’ Bardas maintained. ‘He meant horn.’

‘Ribs,’ the man repeated. ‘Buffalo ribs.’

And there the matter would have rested if it hadn’t been for his own stupid pride and a chance encounter with a dealer in hides who’d said yes, well, there was no call for them, not
ribs
, but as a special favour . . . And a month later they’d arrived, greasy, smelly and expensive; and once he’d paid out all that good money, he was obliged to continue.

‘Stupid,’ he muttered under his breath as he turned the horrid thing over in his hands. ‘Should know better at my age.’

There followed hours of work with the drawknife and the spokeshave, whittling the bones down into flat, even strips, checking with the calipers after every dozen or so strokes to make sure the strips matched exactly at four-inch intervals, identical in width, depth and profile. When the strips were precisely three sixteenths of an inch thick, he’d set them aside and made a wooden core out of a choice billet of imported red cedar, which he’d painstakingly heated over a steaming cauldron, draping a thick hide over the top to keep the steam in, until the wood could be bent into broad, flowing recurves at the tips so that it looked like a crawling snake, or the upper lip of a smiling girl. Then he’d set to work to make up a specially strong pot of glue, flaking small crumbs of hide into the pot, adding the boiling water and simmering the mess until it was the consistency of year-old honey. Clamping the bone to the core had been a special nightmare; he’d used every clamp in the shop, and improvised a dozen more out of wood and rawhide, and the glue oozing out of the joint had slopped everywhere, making the thing almost impossible to hold. Then it had taken forever to dry - just his luck to be doing the job during a rainy spell, when the damp got into the glue and stopped it hardening - and he’d needed the clamps for other work but didn’t dare take them of because the glue-drips were still sticky and he was terrified of the heavily stressed bone pulling off the core.

Finally, when at last the glue was hard enough and he’d got the use of his clamps back and the thing was actually holding together and not peeling itself apart like the skin of a grape, he’d spent a day with a full glue-pot and an extravagant amount of his best deer-leg sinew, laying the glue on the bow’s back and smoothing the bundles of sinew into it with the handle of a wooden spoon, making sure that every bundle overlapped and the thickness of the backing was consistent. That too seemed to take a lifetime to dry; but at last the day came when the glue was as hard and brittle as glass, and he’d chipped away the excess, scraped the back smooth, rubbed the whole thing down with abrasive reed and bent it for the first time, just enough to get the string on it. That had been first thing this morning.

‘Useless bloody thing,’ he growled, his fingers following the flowing curve of the mid-limb section, feeling how perfectly smooth he’d made the back and belly. To look at it was an absolute delight, quite possibly the most graceful and elegant bow he’d ever seen, let alone made. The proportions were perfect, the recurves immaculately balanced; with the string on, it had the classic double-juxtaposed-S shape of the thoroughbred composite bow. The trouble was, it didn’t work.

When he’d first set it up on the tiller and drawn it a tentative inch, it had felt wonderful, the indescribable combination of yielding and resistance that only comes with the bonding together of sinew, wood and horn. But this wasn’t horn, it was bone, and (as he now knew extremely well) bone will bend so far and no further; in this case, seventeen inches, at which point it jammed solid and refused to budge any further. The wood and sinew stopped it breaking, but nothing he could do would induce it to flex another inch; which left him with a forty-two-pound bow with a seventeen-inch draw, not much use for shooting a thirty-inch arrow. Oh, it propelled the arrow, sure enough - if you were prepared to contort your arms and shoulders into a knot, like crawling through a hole not much wider than your head, but trying to aim with it was the next best thing to impossible. For all practical purposes it was completely useless, unless he ever came across a rich tiny man with very short arms who was looking for a lightweight bow for shooting squirrels with. Stone-deaf squirrels, at that; the thing made a horrible creaking noise every time he drew it that’d frighten away every living creature within a square mile.

He looked it over one more time, then laid it on the bench and went back to rubbing the big sore yellow patch on his left wrist where the string had hit him.
Useless
, he reflected,
and it bites, too. Well, we all make mistakes. I just hate it when it’s me
.

It had started raining again, and he crossed the shop and pulled the shutter closed. If it got any darker he’d have to light a lamp, even though it was still only early afternoon. The pattering of water on the thatch soothed him a little, as it always did; it reminded him of days when it was too wet to do anything outdoors, and his father ushered them all into the long barn to learn a new skill at the workbench. Back then he’d assumed that his father knew how to do everything, that there was nothing he couldn’t make or mend if only he could be talked into it and the rain kept on long enough. It annoyed him, then and now, that there had never been quite enough time, what with the real work that always needed to be done outside, and the way his father had to slow down so that the others, who weren’t nearly so quick or so keen when it came to making things, could follow too. He’d always been the impatient one, who’d already worked the next stage out for himself while the old man was trying to get it across to Gorgas or Clefas; Clefas was the slowest, he remembered, Gorgas was perfectly capable of understanding but simply couldn’t be bothered, Niessa could grasp some things almost instinctively and then completely fail to understand the next step, and Zonaras - well, the old man had stopped wasting his time and patience on Zonaras by the time he was ten. No doubt about it: he’d always been the very best at making things, just as Gorgas had been the best at using the things that other people made. Nobody could lay a hedge like Gorgas, not even the old man; nobody could handle a net or lay a wire like he could, or spear fish at the weir or shoot a bow . . .

Bardas thought about that for a long time, and then smiled. Odd, that of all of them he should be the one who ended up making a living out of his manual dexterity; he, not Gorgas, had been one of the most successful fencers-at-law in the history of Perimadeia, fighting and killing with the sword, a tool notoriously awkward to manipulate. Odd that he, not Gorgas, had ended up making a living out of killing people. It only goes to show, we’re given talents but don’t always use them.

He put the thought of his brother Gorgas carefully to one side, stowed the useless bone bow under the bench and looked around for something to do. No shortage of that; the billets of that ash they’d cut in the mountains needed to be drawn down into staves, preferably before the boy turned them all into firewood for the benefit of his education. He climbed up onto the bench and pulled one out of the stack stowed between the rafters, then got down again, picked up his drawknife and tested the edge with his thumb. Blunt, of course; his diligent young apprentice had been using it, and as usual had left it as sharp as a tomato. Bardas growled softly and looked round for the stone.

‘I think I left the stone out by the back gate,’ Bardas said, ‘when we were cutting back the brambles. Go and see if it’s there, would you?’

‘It’s raining,’ the boy pointed out.

‘So? You weren’t made of salt last time I looked.’

The boy muttered something under his breath about justice and the fair division of labour, and slouched very slowly towards the door. ‘You sure it’s not under the bench?’ he asked, as he reached for the latch.

‘Sure,’ Bardas replied. ‘I looked there just now.’

‘There’s all sorts of places it could be.’

‘Very true. Now get down to the gate and fetch it.’

While he was gone, Bardas tidied away some of the tools he’d been using that morning. Under the heap he found the stone.
Damn
, he said to himself, and set about putting an edge on the drawknife. He’d just about got it right when the boy came hurrying in, his hair plastered round his head like seaweed on a wet rock.

‘Sorry about that,’ Bardas said, ‘it was here all the—’

‘There’s two boats down below in the cove,’ the boy interrupted, the words spilling out of his mouth.

Bardas frowned. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. ‘Who’s dumb enough to be out fishing in this weather?’

‘They aren’t fishing boats,’ the boy went on in a sort of terrified glee. ‘They’re barges. They were just coming in past the Horn Rock.’

‘Barges,’ Bardas Loredan repeated, as if the word was meaningless.

‘Two of them, full of men. I think they’re soldiers, from Shastel.’

Barges. Soldiers from Shastel. That doesn’t make any kind of sense
. ‘Are you sure about that?’ he said. ‘Damn it, why am I asking?’ He straightened up, stopped and hesitated. ‘You’re sure?’ he repeated.

‘Of course I’m sure,’ the boy replied angrily. ‘Really, it was two barges, I stopped and looked. They didn’t see me, because as soon as I saw them I ducked down behind a rock, but I saw them and they were both full of men. I couldn’t see them properly because they were all wearing hoods because of the rain, but what else would two barges full of men be?’