The Proof House (27 page)

They’re coming
, Pollas realised; but there still wasn’t anything he could do other than get himself and his family out of the way; and he knew without being able to account for why that he’d left it rather too late for that. It was too difficult to accept the reality of the situation. A few moments ago, less time than it took to boil a pot of water, everything had been normal. He could see people he recognised, shopkeepers and dock hands and quayside loafers, running away from the shield-wall or stumbling and falling; but he’d seen roughly the same sort of thing in dreams before now, when the nameless-familiar enemy or monster was chasing him along an alley or searching for him in the house - there had been this same illogical sense of detachment (
it’s all right really, you’re asleep
), this feeling of being an uninvolved spectator—

Someone was tugging at his arm. He looked round and saw his wife. She was pointing with one hand, pulling at him with the other, and he couldn’t make out what she was saying. He allowed himself to be pulled, and looked back as she hustled him away; they were using the bench from in front of the Happy Return to bash in the doors of the cheese warehouse. They were inside Dole Baven’s house, because there he was, with no clothes on, scrambling out of the back window, but he hadn’t looked to see what was underneath. He’d dropped down right in front of one of the other parties, and a pirate stuck him under the ribs with a halberd.

‘Come
on
,’ his wife was shrieking (basically the same intonation she used for chivvying him in from the barn when dinner was on the table, going cold), and he could see the sense in that; but they were killing his friends, the least he could do was watch. It would be terrible if nobody even knew how they’d died.

‘Mavaut, come back!’ His wife’s voice again; she was watching their daughter sprinting away on her own, terrified, going the wrong way. Belis wanted to go after her, but he grabbed her wrist and wouldn’t let her (she didn’t like that). He watched as Mavaut bundled down the hill in a flurry of skirts, suddenly came up against the shield-wall, spun round and came scampering back.

They were coming up the hill now, this way. If they ran, they might still get out of the road. ‘All right, I’m coming,’ he said, and an arrow appeared in the air above him, hanging for a very brief moment before dipping and falling towards him. He could see it quite distinctly, down to the colour of the fletchings, and he watched it carefully all the way down and into his stomach, where it passed at an angle through him and out the other side, leaving six inches of shaft and the feathers still in him. Belis was screaming but after the slight shock of impact he couldn’t feel very much, except for the strange and disturbing sensation of having something artificial inside his body. ‘All
right
,’ he snapped, ‘don’t fuss, for gods’ sakes.’ Time to be sensible, he decided, and led his family up the hill, then at right-angles along Pacers’ Alley. As he’d anticipated, the pirates carried on up the hill. They had better things to do than break order to go hunting stray civilians.

He sat down on the front step of Arc Javis’ house and looked at the arrow. There was blood all over his shirt, soaking into the broad weave of the cloth. There would be no point trying to stand up again now; his knees had failed completely, even his elbows and wrists felt weak and he was confused now, distracted, unable to concentrate his mind. The best thing would be to lean his head against the door and close his eyes for a while, just until he felt a little stronger.

His wife and daughter were arguing again - well, they always argued, Mavaut was at that age - and they seemed to be arguing about whether they ought to pull the arrow out or leave it in there. Belis was saying that if they took it out now it’d make the bleeding worse and he would die; Mavaut had to know different, of course, and she was nearly hysterical. With what was left of his consciousness, Pollas hoped his wife wouldn’t give in, the way she usually did when Mavaut worked herself up into a state, because an overindulged child would be an awful thing to die of.

He must have been asleep for a while, though it hadn’t seemed like it; he’d just closed his eyes for a moment. But he could hear different sounds; shouting, men shouting information backwards and forwards, like dock hands loading an awkard cargo. Orders; he could hear a man’s voice telling someone to keep in line, another voice shouting,
Dress your ranks, raise your halberds
, or something along those lines. He raised his head - it had got very heavy - but there was nobody in the alley except Belis, Mavaut and himself; the battle, if that’s what it was, seemed to be happening fifty yards or so away, on the main street. He applied his mind, trying to work out what was going on just by listening, but without seeing he had no idea which lot of foreigners were the pirates and which were Gorgas Loredan’s men. Of course he knew nothing about the shape of battles, about how they worked; it was like trying to work out where the hands of the town clock were just by listening to it ticking. More orders, a lot of shouting; it hadn’t occurred to him how busy the sergeants must be in a battle, how many things they must have to think about at once; like the captain of a ship, or the master of a work crew. He couldn’t make sense of the orders, though; the technical stuff was outside his experience -
port your arms, dress to the front, wheel, make ready at the left there
. He could hear feet shuffling, the nailed soles of boots scraping on cobbles, a few grunts of effort, the occasional clatter of a dropped weapon; but not the ring of steel or the screams of the dying, the sort of thing he’d been led to expect. It was remarkably quiet, in fact, so presumably they hadn’t started fighting yet.

He remembered something, and glanced down. The arrow wasn’t there any more, and once he saw that he started to feel an intrusive ache, like the worst kind of bellyache.
Damn
, he thought,
they pulled the arrow out after all.
They were sitting quite still beside him, holding on to each other as if they were afraid the other one would blow away in the wind.

Then the noise started; and yes, a battle was pretty loud. It was the sound of a forge, of metal under the hammer, not ringing but dull pecks and clunks and bangs - he could almost feel the force of the blows in the sound they made, unmistakable metal-on-metal, force being applied and resisted, thumping and bashing. They were going at it hard all right, if the noise was anything to judge by. There was effort behind those sounds; it must take an awful lot of effort to cut and crush helmets and breastplates and armour. He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate, isolate sounds so as to interpret them better, something which is of course much easier to do in the dark. It was hard work, though; the shouting of the sergeants got in the way, drowning out the nuances of the metal-on-metal contact, blurring his vision in the darkness.
Typical
, he thought.
First time I’m ever at a battle and I can’t see a bloody thing
.
Fine story this’ll make to tell my grandchildren
.

Quite suddenly, the battle moved on. The likeliest thing Pollas could think of was that one side or the other had given ground or run away, because the noise was muffled and distant, but whether it was up the hill or down he couldn’t make out. Down the hill was what he wanted, presumably, Gorgas’ men driving the pirates back into the sea (unless they’d somehow changed places, so that Gorgas’ men were attacking up the hill - all he knew about tactics was that they were complicated, like chess, and he couldn’t even beat Mavaut at chess these days). Besides, he couldn’t concentrate properly any more, the bellyache got in the way of his hearing and pretty well everything else, and his head was spinning as badly as if he’d just drunk a gallon of cider on an empty stomach. All in all, he didn’t feel very well, so he was probably excused observing battles for now. Oddly enough, though, the pain didn’t get in the way of falling asleep; so he did that -

- And then he was in a bed, his own; the room was dark and there was nobody else there, so he couldn’t ask if he was dead or alive (and he had no way of knowing for himself). It followed, though, that his side had won; so that was all right.

In the courtyard below the prefect’s office, a madman was reciting scripture. The words were right, as accurate as any scholar could wish, but the madman was howling them at the top of his voice, as if uttering curses. The prefect frowned, disturbed by the inconsistency; here was everything that was beautiful and good, unmarred by error or omission, and yet it was utterly wrong.

The district administrator paused in the middle of his summary, aware that his superior wasn’t paying attention. Being slightly deaf, he hadn’t found the distant noise intrusive, but now he could hear it too. The two men looked at each other.

‘Shall I send the clerk for the guard?’ the administrator asked.

The prefect shook his head. ‘He isn’t doing anything wrong,’ he replied.

The administrator raised an eyebrow. ‘Disturbing the peace,’ he said. ‘Loitering with intent. Blasphemy—’

‘I didn’t say he wasn’t breaking any laws,’ the prefect replied with a smile. ‘But it’s every man’s duty to preach the scriptures. It’s just a pity that he’s choosing to do it at the top of his voice.’

(But it wasn’t that, of course; it was the tone of voice that was so disturbing, the savage anger with which the fellow was reciting those calm, measured, impersonal statements of doctrine, those elegantly balanced maxims, so perfectly phrased that not one single word could be replaced by a synonym without radically altering the sense. It was like listening to a wolf howling Substantialist poetry.)

‘Sooner or later,’ the prefect went on, ‘someone else will call the guard, the wretched creature will be taken away and we’ll have some peace again. Until then, I shall pretend I can’t hear it. I’m sorry, you were saying—’

The administrator nodded. ‘The proposed alliance,’ he went on, ‘is of course out of the question; this man Gorgas Loredan is nothing but an adventurer, a small-scale warlord who’s set himself up in a backwater and is desperately trying to enlist powerful friends against the day when his subjects get tired of him and throw him out. Doing anything that would appear to recognise his regime would reflect very badly on us. Quite simply, we don’t do business with that class of person.’

‘Agreed,’ replied the prefect, trying to concentrate. ‘But there’s more to it, I can tell.’

The administrator nodded wearily. ‘Unfortunately,’ he went on, ‘the confounded man has had a quite extraordinary stroke of good luck. Two days ago, the small port that lies on his border - Tornoys, it’s called - was raided by a pirate ship. One ship, fifty or so men; they were after the dispatch clipper from Ap’ Escatoy, which they’d been stalking all the way up the coast until it was driven into Tornoys by a sudden storm on the previous day. They followed it in, got badly knocked about by the storm themselves, and spent the night riding it out before coming into harbour just after dawn. Now I’m not sure what happened after that, but Gorgas Loredan and his men arrived before they could do anything about the clipper and engaged them in battle; half of the pirates were killed, and Gorgas has the survivors locked up in a barn somewhere. He’s also holding on to the clipper, though he hasn’t given any reasons.’

The prefect was scowling. ‘It’s Hain Partek, isn’t it?’ he said.

The administrator nodded. ‘And Gorgas knows precisely who it is he’s got hold of,’ he went on. ‘Well, he’d have to be singularly ill-informed not to; after all, we’ve been offering large sums of money for him and posting his description up all over the province these past ten years; and of course it’s wonderful news that he’s been caught, I suppose. I just wish, though, that it had been somebody else and not this Gorgas person.’

‘Quite.’ The prefect leaned back in his chair. ‘Had we told him we weren’t interested in his alliance?’

‘Unfortunately, yes,’ the administrator said, picking up a small ivory figure from the desk, examining it briefly and putting it back. ‘The timing couldn’t have been worse. As soon as he got our response, he sat down and fired off a reply; most extraordinary letter I’ve read in a long time, a thoroughly bizarre mixture of obsequiousness and threats - you ought to read it yourself, if only for the entertainment value. My assessor reckons he’s off his head, and after reading this letter I’m inclined to agree with him. Apparently, when the letter telling him we didn’t want the alliance reached him, he was in a farmyard splitting wood.’

‘Splitting wood,’ the prefect repeated. ‘Why?’

‘I get the impression he likes splitting wood. Not
per se
; he enjoys making believe he’s a farmer. He comes from a farming family, apparently, though he had to leave home in something of a hurry. So far, the only possible explanation I’ve heard for what he’s done in the Mesoge is that it was the only way he could ever go home.’

‘He does sound deranged, I’ll admit.’ The prefect made a slight gesture with his hands. ‘Insanity isn’t necessarily an obstacle to success in his line of work, though,’ he observed. ‘Frequently, in fact, it’s an asset, if properly used. Has he said what he wants from us yet?’

The administrator shook his head. ‘All we’ve had is a terse little note saying he’s got Partek in custody and would like us to send someone to discuss matters with him. I imagine he’d far rather we made the opening bid; which is reasonable enough, I suppose, from his point of view. I mean, all he knows is what we’ve said openly, he’s got no way of knowing how important to us Partek really is.’ The administrator hesitated for a moment, and then went on. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I’m not entirely sure myself. What’s the official line on that these days?’

The prefect sighed. ‘He’s important enough,’ he said. ‘Not as important as he was five years ago, but he’s still a damned nuisance; not because of anything he’s done or anything he’s capable of doing, it’s more the fact that he’s still out there, and we haven’t been able to do a damn thing about it.’ He frowned, and scratched his ear. ‘It’s amusing, really; the less he actually achieves, the more his legend grows. In some parts of the south-eastern region, they’re firmly convinced he’s in control of the western peninsula and he’s raising an army to march on the Homeland. No, we need to be able to point to his head nailed to a door in Ap’ Silas; if we could do that, it’d be a good day’s work.’