‘When’s the next one?’ he asked.
‘Three weeks.’
‘The charcoal people?’
Athli nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Any idea who they’ve got yet?’
‘I haven’t heard anything definite,’ Athli lied.
‘Indefinitely, then.’
She pulled a face. ‘Alvise,’ she said. ‘Perhaps. Like I said, it’s not confirmed.’
‘Alvise. I see,’ Loredan sighed; he looked very, very tired. ‘Looks like our boys offended the opposition good and proper, if they’re prepared to lay out that sort of money.’
What a dismal epitaph, Athli reflected. What she said was, ‘Probably just a rumour, to make our boys settle out of court. He’d cost them twice the sum in issue.’
Loredan shrugged painfully. ‘Matter of principle, quite probably. Ah, well, we’ll see.’
Athli opened the door. ‘If you like, I can drop by later on, make sure you’re all right.’
‘I’ll be fine. Thanks again.’
Athli could feel the blood seeping through her gown onto her skin; cold and clammy, like sweat. ‘Be seeing you, then,’ she said, and closed the door behind her.
Loredan listened to the clicking of her footsteps on the stairs; then he rolled uncomfortably onto his back and lay staring at the long crack in the ceiling. In three weeks, with this messy cut just starting to knit together properly (if he was lucky and it stayed fresh) he’d have to stand up in court against Ziani Alvise, the Advocate General and Imperial Champion. There was better fencers; four of them, maybe five, none of whom was Bardas Loredan. Strange, he reflected, how calmly I’ve accepted advance notice of my own death. A nod of the head, a wry face, as if to say, Well, that’s that, then; two lines of script cut on a plain headstone-
BARDAS LOREDAN
There were, Loredan knew perfectly well, no gods; and if there were any, they lived far away in less enlightened lands, well out of earshot. Nevertheless, he prayed; If I get out of this, I’ll pack it in for good, retire, set up a school or something. And if there were gods, he knew they wouldn’t believe him, because they’d heard it all before. And here he still was, an advocate of ten years’ call, a man who showed promise while still young but failed to live up to it, and then simply failed to live.
Perhaps the charcoal people would settle, after all. Men like Alvise only fight one in ten of the cases they’re retained for, because no litigant likes to go into court when there’s money at stake knowing for certain he’s going to lose. But the charcoal cartel weren’t the settling kind; he’d met them, recognised them at once. They were the sort of men who get themselves tangled up in the most desperate messes through their own pig-headed greed, and then react with astonishment and fury when the inevitable disaster follows. He could picture them, striding out of the court with their heavy gowns flapping round their ankles, muttering bitterly about the incompetence of their late advocate and the unfairness of the legal system, and swearing great oaths that they’d rather be skinned alive than pay one penny of the bill for such a badly handled case.
I could always back out, he thought. There is always that possibility. It would make perfectly good sense; I’d be finished in the profession, but so what? I’d still be alive. I could do something else.
He grinned, and rolled over onto his side. Of course, he could never withdraw from a case just because he was afraid, or even because he knew he was going to die. It was one of those things that just don’t happen; if it did, the whole system would collapse and then where would everyone be? It was, after all, the solidity of its commercial law that had made Perimadeia the greatest trading city in the world. And besides, you didn’t become an advocate in order to live for ever.
He had decided, many years ago, that the last thing he wanted to do was live for ever. Twelve years later, here he was; and if he hadn’t done much, he’d done enough. Traditionally, a fencer’s coffin is borne by six of his colleagues in the profession, wearing their collegiate robes and with empty scabbards on their belts, while on the coffin lid rides the deceased’s second-best sword – his best sword, of course, having reverted to the winner – and a single white rose, symbolic of Justice. In practice it was rather different, of course; the coffin rode on the shoulders of six men who’d had the sense to leave the profession early and take up pallbearing instead, the sword was hired from the undertaker and, somehow, it always seemed to rain. He’d stood beside a lot of muddy graves when he was younger. These days he didn’t bother to go.
Just my luck that the Guelan should break right when I need it most.
A thought occurred to him and he leant over, groaning, and groped under the bed until his fingers made contact with a coarse woolen bundle. He pulled it out. It was garlanded with cobwebs and grey with dust, but the knot fell away easily, leaving him holding a battered black scabbard with a plain brown steel hilt projecting out of it. Now here’s a thing, he said to himself; I haven’t given it a thought in ten years. But why not? It can’t make any difference, after all.
Twelve years ago, a young man already old after three years in the foreign wars had joined the fencing school by the Protector’s Gate, paying his fees in ready money from a fat purse and bringing with him a cheap, plain sword with no maker’s name on the ricasso. Once he’d finished the course, there was enough coin left in the purse to buy a genuine Guelan, and the cheap, plain sword had been consigned to second best, third best, emergency use only and finally a blanket under a bed on the seventh floor of Island Thirty-nine. It wasn’t, properly speaking, a lawyer’s sword at all; just a military blade from the arsenal ground down to reduce the weight, roughly re-tempered and fitted with a plain turned grip. It had killed a lot of men before it lost weight, but since then it had been used for school work and practice, never once being called upon to carry the weight of a man’s life. It was worth a quarter and a half, if that. He’d never liked it much. It didn’t owe him anything. It would do.
He closed his eyes and went to sleep. His dreams were not pleasant.
Temrai looked down into his cup and saw that it was still almost half-full of the stuff. He wished it wasn’t. He was tempted to pour it away while nobody was looking; but his new friends had bought it for him and to pour away a gift would be an insult as well as waste. Even so; it tasted horrible and it was making him feel ill.
‘And is it true,’ one of them was asking, ‘that when you get old they take you out into the desert and leave you there to die? Only I heard somewhere…’
They had stopped by his bench earlier that evening; four broad-shouldered middle-aged men who worked on the furnaces, cheerful, loud-voiced and sociable. When he’d seen them bearing down on him, Temrai had felt a little apprehensive. It’d only be natural if they resented a foreigner (and a plainsman, at that) walking into the arsenal and taking a job that would normally have gone to one of their own. From what he’d overheard, many of the more skilled workers in the arsenal belonged to some sort of secret clan reserved for masters in the craft; perhaps these men belonged to it and had come to chase him away. It was something of a relief to find out that all they wanted was to invite him to drink with them.
‘No,’ he replied, shaking his head (and for some reason that was enough to make him feel dizzy). ‘That’s not right at all. We have great respect for old people, who are so wise and know so much. They make all our decisions and tell us how things ought to be done. My father…’
He caught himself just in time, and covered the mistake by pretending to choke on his drink. The men thought that was highly entertaining and pounded him on the back with their enormous hands. Strange, that; he had a vague impression that they were sharing some hidden joke, almost as if someone had tied a rat to another man’s pigtail without him noticing.