‘I see,’ Jurrai said, poking the fire with a long stick. ‘And you reckon you’ve worked out a way of prising this strongbox open?’
‘Not me,’ Temrai replied with a grin. ‘They did it themselves, years ago. Then they forgot they’d done it.’ He sighed, and lay back on his saddle. ‘That’s the Perimadeians for you. Too clever for their own good.’
‘So? Are you going to let me in on the secret, or have I got to wait till the council?’
‘You’ll wait rather longer than that,’ Temrai replied with a yawn. ‘You’ll know soon enough, believe me. Actually, it’s all pretty simple.’
Jurrai grunted, and broke off a handful of bread. ‘Beats me how they can live on this stuff,’ he said. ‘It bloats you out and then you feel hungry again soon after.’
‘You get used to it,’ Temrai said drowsily. ‘Only the rich can afford meat more than once or twice a month, and even then it’s salted and spiced to buggery. You can have all the cheese you can eat for two coppers, but it doesn’t taste of anything. Oh, and they eat fish.’
‘So I’ve heard,’ Jurrai replied, frowning. ‘I had fish once. Won’t forget that in a hurry. They’re welcome to it.’
‘Theirs comes from the sea,’ Temrai murmured, his eyes closed. ‘Mostly it’s dried and salted, or else they smoke it. You get used to that, too. It’s cheap.’
‘What about the drink? Wine and cider, isn’t it?’
‘You want to be careful of that stuff. It’s evil.’
‘And the women?’
Temrai snored.
‘Right,’ said Bardas Loredan, masking his true feelings, ‘let’s have a look at you.’
It wasn’t an inspiring sight. A long, straggly lad of about eighteen, with a jealously tended wisp of beard on what there was of his chin; another, similar, but without notional beard; an enormous sullen boy of maybe sixteen in an obviously new and slightly-too-small set of what the prosperous farmers of Lussa thought the city was wearing this season; a small, wiry kid with a baby face who might possibly have made the grade if he was six inches taller and forty pounds heavier; a girl who stared at him; a plump young man of good family, too old at twenty-four and plainly not really interested. Great.
He took a deep breath. ‘First things first,’ he said. ‘Names.’
In fact, he knew most of their names without asking. The huge peasant was called Ducas Valier; throw a handful of pebbles at a hiring fair in any of the market towns of Lussa, and be sure you’d hit at least three Valiers, one of them called Ducas. The lad with the beard was Menas Crestom – a city name, pottery or brickyards district, younger son of a second-generation affluent family with a depressingly misguided idea of what constituted giving a kid a good start in life. His beardless shadow was the same basic stock; Corrers were as thick on the ground in the foundries as piles of fluxed skimmings or splashes of waste metal, and a quarter of the kids his age in the city were Folas, after Folas Manhurin, champion boxer five years in a row a quarter of a century back. The wiry boy had the good eastern suburbs name of Stas Teudel and the rich kid was inevitably a Teo-something, though the variation was a new one to Loredan – Teoblept Iuven. When he heard the boy’s family name, Loredan cringed. A century back, the Iuvens had owned fifty of the best merchant ships in the bay; these days they still lived in one of the most prestigious houses in the second city, but their tailors insisted on something on account before they set shears to cloth. As for the girl, she was something nondescript that went in one ear and out the other; with any luck, she’d answer to ‘You’ and a nod in her direction.
‘Next,’ he said. ‘Money.’
Out came the purses, from under coats, off belts or out from where they hung round sweaty necks. Master Iuven offered a gold five-piece, apologising smugly for not having anything smaller. Loredan forgave him and kept the balance on account.
‘Good,’ Loredan said. ‘Now we can get down to business. Who’s got their own sword? Anybody?’
All except the girl, unfortunately; as offbeat a collection of ironmongery as you’d ever expect to meet outside a scrapyard. The peasant boy held up a two-hundred-year-old broadsword that would have been big medicine back in the days when men lumbered into battle under sixty pounds of steel scales and boiled leather. A collector would probably offer him good money for it, despite the heavy pitting and the missing point. The three city lads proudly offered for inspection the latest in cheap and shiny fashion accessories – young master Teudel looked deeply offended when Loredan took his pride and joy and bent it almost double over his knee without apparent effort. The sprig of the nobility had a genuine Fascanum, which Loredan immediately told him to put away and not look at again for six months, remembering a lean patch a while back when he’d lived for the best part of eight months on the sale proceeds of one of those. He could just picture the expression on Daddy’s face when the family heirloom came home after the first day’s parrying practice, with five notches in each edge and the exquisitely chiselled lion missing off one end of the quillon.
‘Fortunately,’ he said, ‘I took the precaution of bringing a few practice swords, which I’ll issue you with when you’re fit to be trusted with them. For the time being, we’ll use wooden foils; with which,’ he added sternly, ‘it’s perfectly possible, not to mention fatally easy, to put someone’s eye out if you’re careless.’ He handed out the foils; two and a half feet of arrowshaft set in a simple wooden hilt, with a big button on the business end just in case anybody did happen to land a blow on his sparring partner. Luckily he’d managed to get a case of the things cheap; sure as anything, at least one of these idiots would contrive to break one in the course of the first day. On cold mornings he could still feel the cuff round the ear he’d had from Master Gramin for just such an offence.
It turned out to be a long day; but, by the time the Schools closed Loredan had taught his unlikely pupils the elements of both kinds of guard, the advance step and the retreat step, the crouched shuffle forwards and backwards along a straight line of the City fence, the straight-backed circular movement of the Old fence, until in spite of their natural ineptitude and individual deficiencies they bore a passing resemblance to fencers. The high-class schools, he knew very well, didn’t even touch on the Old fence until the end of the first week, and even then most of their scholars tended to move like old women taken short in the middle of the night.
Of his six, he reflected, as he slumped into a chair in the nearest affordable tavern (the new rule was No Taverns, but just this once wouldn’t hurt), the two tall, skinny lads did more or less what they were told and seemed desperately eager to learn. He knew their type; he’d killed enough of them over the last ten years. The peasant wasn’t as clumsy or as stupid as he looked, and with his obvious strength might make a good Zweyhender fighter, but Loredan was fairly certain he’d drop out after a week or so. The wiry boy from the suburbs had turned out to be a lost cause; he’d learnt the drills well enough by rote, but showed no indication at all of being able to think. It would be cold-blooded murder ever to allow him to practise law in Perimadeia. Master Iuven had proved irritatingly competent once he’d at last consented to pay attention, but Loredan already knew he’d never make a fencer, call it cowardice or call it enough sense to avoid a fight. Which left whatsername. The girl.