The Folding Knife (44 page)

"You walked," Basso said.

Bassano nodded awkwardly; he was shivering. "Habit I picked up at fencing school," he said. "Exercise. It's funny, I always hated exercise, and now I do some every day. Can't seem not to, if you see what I mean."

Basso poured him a small brandy, which he gobbled down. It stopped him shivering. "Well?" he said.

"My mother." Bassano was flexing his fingers. "She says that unless I promise never to speak to you again, she'll have you charged with killing my father."

"That's right," Basso said calmly. He was pleased with himself for that. "She came to see me. First time in a long time."

"Well?"

Basso shrugged. "I told her to go ahead. I said she'd be doing me a favour."

"Maybe you'd care to explain that."

Basso explained. When he'd finished, Bassano sat up straight in his chair and said, "Is that true?"

"Yes," Basso replied. "If she were to go ahead, I'm not sure yet how I'd play it. Killing the charges would be the safest way, but I'd be tempted to let it go to trial. Show the people that the First Citizen doesn't consider himself to be above the law."

"And you're sure you'd be acquitted. You're
sure
."

"Yes," Basso said. "For a start, I'd take a few simple precautions, like choosing my own jury. Say, two newly enfranchised foreigners, two Bank employees, a couple of clerks from the House and someone who owes me money--a truly representative cross-section of society, when you think about it. Also, for what it's worth, I'm innocent. And I can prove it, even without suborning false witnesses, which of course I'd do anyway. Also, I'd retain the best lawyers in the City for my defence, and hire all the other half-competent lawyers on other matters, so they wouldn't be available to act for your mother. Apart from that, and a few well-chosen words to the judge beforehand, I'd be happy to let justice take its course."

Bassano frowned, then laughed. "I guess I didn't really think it through," he said. "I was scared. She sounded so convincing."

Basso smiled. "She thinks I'd be afraid of the scandal," he replied. "But the killing's been common knowledge for twenty years, and apart from the daily patter of jokes and sly comments, it's never done me any harm. Getting it out in the open would probably do more good than harm. No, what she's relying on is that you'll believe there's a serious threat. I think it may be hard for me to forgive her for that, but I'll try."

"Well, then." Bassano stretched like a cat. "In that case, three cheers for our legal system."

"Best in the world," Basso replied gravely. "Did you know she tried to have me killed?"

There was a silence so brittle that a sound would have splintered the world. "Do you mean that?"

Basso nodded. "Ask Aelius if you don't believe me. She arranged it through the Studium, which is really high-class; I dread to think how much it cost her, and she's comfortable, but not exactly rich, by social-register standards." He shook his head. "They shot at me with an artillery piece, of all things. Came this close." He held his hands about eight inches apart. "Not bad shooting, at two hundred and fifty yards."

Bassano looked at him. "Why?"

"I don't think she likes me," Basso replied. "Also, my guess is, she knows as well as we both do that her grand threat isn't going to work. Frustration, I suppose, at losing to me yet again. She always did have a nasty temper when she couldn't get her own way."

Bassano was sitting very still. "What are you going to do?" he said.

"Nothing," Basso replied. "Well, I'm hardly going to hang my own sister, and if I take it out on the hired hands, one of them's bound to try and drag her into it. Better to let the whole thing slide and blame it on the Mavortines." He paused. "I wasn't going to tell you," he went on, "and probably I shouldn't have done. It doesn't change anything, and you'll think I'm being spiteful, turning you against her. I'm sorry."

"No," Bassano said, his voice a little shaky. "No, you had to tell me."

"I had to tell someone," Basso replied. "Couldn't tell Aelius, he'd be livid, try and make me do something. Antigonus is dead. Melsuntha would probably arrange to have your mother poisoned; she's rather protective of me, which is sweet, but not appropriate in this instance. So that just leaves you. Like I said, I'm sorry." He took a deep breath, then went on, "Please, if you can, don't hold it against her. She's quite right that I ruined her life. I'd let her have her precious revenge if I wasn't quite so selfish. Also," he added, "I've got you to think about, though that probably comes under the heading of my selfishness. Anyway, try and forget about it."

Bassano grinned. "You know," he said, "that may not be possible. It's the sort of thing that tends to stick in your mind."

"Your mother," Basso said with a sigh. "My sister. You know, there are times when I catch myself thinking that my life would be a whole lot more pleasant without her. Oh, I don't mean have her killed," he added quickly, "and I was worried to death when the plague was on, in case she caught it. No, what I mean is, I find it hard not to blame her, for a whole lot of things that are really my fault. And every time something good happens, or something turns out just right, and I'm inclined to feel happy about it, I think about your mother, and how I've made her life so utterly miserable, and I'll be honest with you, I don't know what to do. Worst possible thing for someone like me, knowing there's a problem that can't ever be fixed."

Bassano said carefully, deliberately weighing each word: "I find it hard to remember that I'm her son. Like this last business. She'd have stopped me if she could; not because it's wrong for me, but to spite you. I find that..." He paused, then went on, "I find that inconsistent with the proper functions of motherhood. I don't think she really feels anything for me."

Basso nodded. "My fault, again," he said. "I should've stayed away from you. But I was misguided enough to think that helping you along might make it up to her in some way; and by the time I realised that was the last thing she wanted, it was too late. I'd got to know you, and you weren't just her son any more, you were Bassano, and I couldn't make myself give you up, not even for the sake of doing the right thing. With the result," he went on, "that as far as she's concerned, you're a weapon in the fight between her and me; a bit like two men struggling over one knife, and whoever gets control of it kills the other. I think it was Sostratus or someone like that who said people are the best weapons. Always thought it was rather a glib little quote, but actually it's about right. And that's my fault," he said. "That was my second unforgivable crime; and it wasn't self-defence, and I did have a choice, and I was selfish. For crying out loud, Bassano," he said, and his voice was loud, half-joking, "look what I've done to you. Killed your father, turned your mother against you, messed your whole life up for you. Don't you feel that?"

Bassano shook his head. "No," he said. He thought for a while, then went on: "It might have been different if I could remember my father, but I can't. And I think my mother stopped loving me when I was quite young, so that's another thing I never knew and so haven't missed. And you were the first person who ever talked to me like you were talking to a grown-up."

Basso laughed. "Funny you should say that. I don't think anybody ever noticed I was a child. Gloriously self-centred man, my father was, and my mother treated everybody like they were a bit stupid." He shrugged. "I guess love when I was growing up was a bit like the heating in a big house, where they've got a great big boiler out back and pipes under the floor. It's there, but you don't see an open fire in the hearth. Result, you're never cold but you're never really warm, either." Suddenly he yawned, and said, "I get the impression you've made up your mind."

"Have I?" Bassano frowned. "Yes, now you mention it, I suppose I have, without noticing. Because when my mother said, I'm doing this, which means you can't go, I felt hurt and angry, like someone had taken something away from me. So, yes, I'll go."

"Splendid," Basso said crisply. "Only now there's a condition. You can only go if you can promise me you're not just doing it to get back at your mother."

Bassano pursed his lips, swallowing a smile. "All of a sudden you're so concerned about reasons, Uncle Basso. You of all people should know there doesn't have to be just one reason."

"Funny man," Basso said sourly. "And it doesn't work, because you're not me."

"Accepted," Bassano said. "In which case, yes, I promise. Malice isn't my primary motive."

"Fine," Basso said. "What is?"

"You know what, I have no idea." Bassano shrugged. "I just asked myself, 'do I want to do this?', and I answered myself, 'yes, I do.' " He raised his eyebrows. "Is that a valid reason, do you think?"

Basso said solemnly, "It's the only one that's any good at all."

"All I have to do," Basso said, "is write a letter, and twelve thousand Cazars drop what they're doing and come running. Must be a strange place, where you come from."

Aelius laughed. "I think you'd find it very strange," he said. "Basically, it's a mess. If you'd ever been there, you'd understand why its population's so mad keen to escape."

Basso frowned. "Oh come on," he said. "It can't be that bad."

On the table between them lay the muster requisitions, now duly ratified by the House. They authorised the First Citizen to hire soldiers, at his unfettered discretion, for the Mavortine war. Basso himself had insisted on a maximum of fifteen thousand for a period of six months; the House would have given him twice that, or simply left the number, duration of service and scales of pay entirely up to him.

"If I say it's a sea of grass," Aelius said, "you'd think it was just a cliche. Also, the sea's flat. The Peninsular is--well, it's like the desert, only it's green, not white or red. We haven't got hills so much as dunes in the grass. And open, as far as the eye can see."

"That doesn't sound so bad," Basso said.

"Then I'm not describing it right," retorted Aelius. "For one thing, there's no trees. There used to be a few, but my people cut them all down and split them up really small to make into arrow-shafts, or charcoal for steelworking. Talking of which, all the weapons and bits of armour are really old; there's nothing left to burn, so we can't make anything any more, and we can't afford to import, not even pick-ups from other people's battlefields. Everything's old and mended so many times you can't see what it used to look like when it was new. Everywhere's so overgrazed now, we kill most of our calves at ten months, and then we have to sell nearly all the meat to buy grain for the winter."

Basso nodded. "Cazar veal," he said. "I assumed it was your traditional delicacy."

"Hardly." Aelius grinned. "On the rare occasions we eat beef, it's some stringy old brood cow that's gone barren or dropped dead. Literally, it hurts your jaws chewing it, and it's always undercooked because we're so short of fuel for our fires. We sell all our wool and hides, we get pennies for them because the Auxentines have basically got a monopoly and decide the prices. We live in turf shacks in the winter and tents in summer, because there's no building wood and no stone worth a damn; it's all chalk." He shook his head sadly. "In all our history we've never been conquered by foreigners, and you know why? Not because we're such wonderful fighters. It's because we haven't got anything worth conquering us for."

"Except lead," Basso said quietly. "And tin, and a bit of silver."

"Why bother?" Aelius was scowling. "When we'll dig it out of the ground for you and deliver it to the beach, in return for less wheat and barley than you'd feed to your chickens. We can't use it ourselves, nothing to melt it down with. The worst part of it," Aelius added, "is that it's all our own fault. Can't blame wicked imperialist foreigners, because we've always been left alone. The fact of it is, the land sucks, but the worst thing about it is the people."

Basso made a maybe-you're-right gesture. "The strange thing is," he said, "Cazars over here are as good as gold--they work hard, they're happy with low wages and rotten living conditions, they don't cause trouble; they make the best soldiers in the world. Why aren't they like that at home, I wonder?"

"On their best behaviour," Aelius replied sourly, "for fear they'll get sent home."

Twelve thousand men, out of thin air. The recruiting officers said that the only problem had been choosing who to accept out of so many eminently suitable, desperately eager candidates.

They arrived on grain freighters, lumber boats and stone barges, all wearing identical light brown woollen shirts, trousers and shaggy-fringed cloaks, each man carrying a goatskin bowcase and quiver and an empty satchel woven from dried rushes, which had contained their three days' rations for the journey.

("They travel light, then," Basso said.

"Not difficult," Aelius replied. "That's all they've got.")

Basso had appointed a man called Choniates, a senior supervisor from the Severus shipyards, to deal with housing, feeding, clothing and equipping them. It was an appalling task, which Choniates carried out calmly and efficiently; all Basso had to do was approve and sign the book-thick sheaves of bills that arrived on his desk twice a day. Choniates requisitioned the old, disused cattle market, two miles outside the City. The sheds he had built there were brutally sparse (still better than anything you'd find back home, Aelius said), but the roofs were weathertight and the chimneys drew; the men slept on fleeces on the floor and ate three meals a day, porridge, bread and bean-and-bacon stew. The building materials, fleeces and most of the food were supplied to the government by a specially formed trading consortium, financed and largely owned by the Bank of Charity & Social Justice, at five per cent above cost; because the company's buyers had struck such good deals with suppliers in Scleria and the West, the company made good money and the Treasury paid less than market wholesale. Any other mercantile concern in the Republic wouldn't have broken even at those prices. Military equipment, everything from helmets to boot-nails to corn-mills, had to come from the Arsenal, which meant that deliveries were late or non-existent, and the quality was embarrassing. On Basso's instructions, Choniates had every item inspected, and everything that didn't meet the Arsenal's own specifications (well over half, as it turned out) was stamped with a Condemned mark, returned and not paid for. Very soon, furious questions were asked in the House, and the Arsenal's monopoly, enshrined in law for a hundred years, was quickly withdrawn. The resulting tender was won by a specially formed manufacturing consortium, financed and largely owned by the Bank. Production got under way astonishingly quickly--Basso had been quietly buying up plant and equipment and poaching the Arsenal's best workers ever since the war was first debated--and both quality and productivity were well above specification, for a fraction more than the Arsenal would have charged.