‘Obviously we’d have to be circumspect about it. We could issue a paper full of mistakes and wait to see who takes issue with it.’
‘Fine. Have you any idea how long that’d take? And suppose the natural’s a foreigner, as you suggested, and all set to leave the city. We simply don’t have time to do this properly.’
‘Guess, you mean?’
‘Educated guess. A trap to catch a natural.’ Alexius gazed over his steepled hands at the chandelier moorings in the middle of the floor. ‘Anything’s better than sitting here bickering with each other.’ He smiled painfully. ‘Remarkable, isn’t it? We’re supposed to be good at this.’
‘We are,’ Gannadius replied gloomily. ‘That’s what worries me.’
Loredan woke up with blood on his shirt. He examined the cut, bound it up with fresh wool and damp moss, and put on another shirt.
No bread in the apartment; so he struggled painfully into his coat (his side was stiff, and putting his arm in the sleeve wasn’t pleasant), trudged down the stairs and through the maze of narrow streets to the south of the ‘island’ and a bakery he knew well. They were used to him there, and were no longer offended when he came in asking for mouldy bread.
‘Saved some for you,’ the baker’s son replied. ‘It’s the blue kind you like, isn’t it?’
He’d given up trying to explain long ago, and smiled instead as he handed over a copper quarter. The boy waved the money away. ‘On the house,’ he said magnificently. ‘We don’t get many famous people in here.’
‘In that case I’ll have a fresh loaf as well. What d’you mean, famous?’
The boy chuckled. ‘The great Bardas Loredan, they’re calling you. Made a lot of friends round here yesterday.’
‘Did I? How did I manage that?’
‘Bet on you, didn’t we?’
Loredan raised an eyebrow. ‘Neighbourly loyalty?’
‘Bloody good odds, more like. Hell, if I’d known you were going to win, I’d have laid more’n a copper half. Still, at two hundred to one-’
Loredan picked up his bread. ‘Sounds like you made more out of the case than I did,’ he said irritably. ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me they were offering two hundred to one? I could have done with some of that.’
Back home, up the interminable stairs. Other fencers kept in shape by running or fooling about in the gymnasium at the Schools; all he had to do was get from the street to his front door. The loaf the baker had kept for him was admirably suited for his purpose; covered in horrible-looking blue and white spots all over one side. Carefully he scraped the best of the blue bits into the palm of his left hand with the point of his dagger, and poured them onto a fresh sheet of parchment. Then he unwound the bandage, patted the mould gingerly onto the raw cut, and tied the harness back up again. He had no idea whether this particular ritual did any good or not; he hadn’t had a badly infected wound since he’d started doing it, but law-swords were usually kept clean and rust-free anyway, so perhaps it was simply coincidence. He cut a slice of the new loaf and tipped out the last half-cupful of yesterday’s wine.
The business with the bread mould was something he’d learnt on the plains, a long time ago. When he’d first heard about it, he’d assumed it was just another leg-pull for the benefit of a raw recruit, a joke in the same category as mules’ eggs and the legendary left-handed arrows every kid soldier gets sent to fetch from the quartermaster. In time he realised it wasn’t a joke, though he shrank from using the treatment himself. The old story was that a group of wounded men who had nothing to stop their wounds with except the stale bread in a saddlebag had all healed up in record time. A likely story, Loredan felt. His own theory was that it had something to do with the similar-looking mould the plainsmen deliberately put into their evil-tasting goats’ milk cheese. After all, they did have a way with unlikely sounding cures and medicines. There was one highly suspect recipe involving willow bark boiled in water that really did work against headaches, to his certain knowledge.
The plainsmen; it was the second time he’d thought about them since the fight. It was the snapping of yet another good sword that brought them to mind, and the explanation he’d given the tiresome girl at the tavern. Because they brazed the edges of their swords to the cores with some sort of solder that melted at a much lower heat, they were far less likely to muck up the temper of their blades and in consequence their swords tended not to snap. True, the plains sword was a curved single-edged affair, totally unsuitable for legal work; but the technique was presumably valid for any design. He wondered if anyone in the city knew how to use the plains method, and if so how he could find out who it was without letting anyone else know what he had in mind.
Then he remembered. Through with all that now; quitting the profession, going to do something else. He scowled, and cut another slice of bread.
He’d considered it many times before; after practically every fight these last six years. Thinking about it and actually doing it were different matters entirely. Always his excuse had been that there was nothing else he could do, no other way of making a living, too late to learn a new skill and so forth. Until yesterday, he’d managed to force himself to believe it, although he’d known for a long time it wasn’t true.
The truth was that for the last ten years or so he’d been walking around with a terrible sense of being left over from the war, needing to be used up like scraps of meat or offcuts of leather. It was a stupid attitude, not to mention a dangerous one, and he despised himself for it. But he had never quite managed to face up to it, with the result that he’d carried on, a fight at a time, collecting scars on his body and cutting a thick swathe through a whole generation of advocates.
It was time to admit that it didn’t work. If it was going to work, it should have done so yesterday.
Even so. Starting a school or running a tavern. All the wonders of the world are at your fingertips; all you have to do is stay alive long enough.
He put his coat back on (even more painful this time) and toiled up the hill to the Schools. It was the last place he felt like going the day after a big case. There would be other advocates, clerks, the unsavoury hangers-on, the profession in all its glory, and he’d rather not have to make conversation and put up with a succession of left-handed congratulations. He pulled his collar up round his neck and crept in through the side door.
The number of trainers working in the Schools tended to vary, depending on a large number of factors ranging from the health of the economy to the time of year. There were six long-established and savagely expensive schools which had appropriated sections of the building and installed their own fixtures and fittings; a constantly changing pool of old men and nerve-cases who hung about the colonnades offering to make you invincible in a day, money back if you get killed within a year; and ten or twelve establishments between the two extremes providing some sort of training in arms for a vaguely realistic fee. The latter group, mostly comprising the proprietor, perhaps one assistant and a combination clerk, registrar and bursar, used the main hall and the communal fixtures, and paid a modest rent to the governors for the privilege. To start up a new school, you paid a month’s rent in advance and put up a wooden board on the wall with your name under it, beneath which students could assemble at the start of each day.
On his way to the governors’ office, Loredan saw someone he recognised. There wasn’t time to turn round or duck behind a column.
‘Congratulations.’
‘Thank you,’ he replied.
The man’s name was Garidas. He had been an advocate for six years before losing an eye in a banking dispute; now he worked as an assistant with the second-best of the grand schools, as well as helping out with the book-keeping. His father had been in the cavalry, and Loredan had watched him die of an arrow wound one cold morning in a ruined sentry post on the plains. His last words had been a desperate plea to look after his boy, and Loredan had happened to be the nearest. He was fairly certain the dying man had thought he was talking to someone else.