Luha frowned. ‘I thought you said you weren’t any good at it.’
‘I’m not,’ Bardas replied. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not better at it than you.’
Luha thought for a moment; he was one of those boys you can watch thinking. ‘If you like,’ he said, ‘but I’m not bothered. I always do my homework on my own. Father says I should.’
‘You carry on, then,’ Bardas said. ‘I’ll sit here and talk to my niece.’
Luha nodded and went back to his corner. Bardas sat back in his chair and let his hands trail on the grass.
‘This is cozy,’ Iseutz said. ‘If you like, I’ll send him to fetch Heris and little Niessa.’
‘Don’t trouble him on my account,’ Bardas replied. ‘But thank you for being so civil,’ he added. ‘I must admit, I expected a scene when we next met.’
Iseutz shrugged. ‘You’ll keep,’ she said. ‘But I still can’t get over seeing you here. You must be really demoralised.’
Bardas nodded. ‘That’s a fair assessment,’ he said. ‘Mostly, though, it’s only morbid curiosity. Try as I might, I just couldn’t imagine Gorgas with a home and a family. It’d be like going round to Death’s house for dinner. But apparently I was wrong.’
Iseutz smiled. ‘Don’t be fooled,’ she said. ‘It’s like those toy houses they sell for little girls’ dolls; it’s all perfect, absolutely true to life, all the doors and windows actually open, and it was all ordered sight unseen from a catalogue. Except me, of course, and I’m in the process of being slowly digested. In a few years’ time I’ll probably be quite housebroken. Hey, if I’m really good maybe my fingers’ll grow back.’
‘I think you came with the set,’ Bardas replied. ‘I think you’re the token skeleton in the cupboard, utterly lifelike but made of wax and only three inches tall. Now you’re upset,’ he added, grinning. ‘Didn’t I teach you always to keep your guard up?’
She nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You know what I’m going to do now? I was just going to bide my time, be patient and kill you when I had the chance. But that’s be too good for you. So I’m going to hurt you.’
Bardas raised eyebrow. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘And how do you propose doing that?’
Iseutz smiled. Under other circumstances, she might have had a nice smile. ‘I’ll tell you something I know and you don’t, something Uncle Gorgas told me. I’m guessing it’ll burn you up.’ She shrugged her bony shoulders. ‘And if it doesn’t, I’ll just have to find something that does. But this ought to do the trick.’
Bardas made a show of yawning. ‘I’m listening,’ he said. ‘What’s this tremendous secret that you know and I don’t?’
Iseutz turned her head away, flipped her fringe out of her eyes, and then looked back, like a young girl flirting. ‘It’s about who opened the gates of Perimadeia,’ she said.
Later that evening, Bardas Loredan went back to the Bank. He was allowed to come and go freely now, so long as he told his sister where he was going. A little clerk from the back office followed him everywhere and told Niessa where he’d really gone and what he’d really been doing. He knew this. It didn’t matter.
He had two rooms, one to sleep in and the other for amusing himself. The second room was large and airy, with one big window about seven feet off the ground, looking out over a back alley, and a midden. It was empty except for a chair, a stool, and a long table robust enough to be used as a workbench. There were also two caskets full of the tools he’d asked for, though so far he hadn’t had the energy to unpack them.
He unpacked them now, carefully arranging them in a logical order on or under the bench, wiping the preservative grease off the blades with handfuls of the hay they’d been packed in. Three saws; two drawknives, one straight, one curved; five assorted planes, ranging from the long, bulky boxwood try plane to the neat little brass-bodied block plane; four spokeshaves, straight and curved; any number of files, rasps, chisels and gouges; three short-bladed knives for whittling and scraping; abrasive reeds and pots of sand and grit and resin for bonding them to blocks, wood, brass and iron clamps, in a great variety of shapes and sizes; pots and jars of glues and gessos, and a pestle and mortar; beeswax and the makings of lacquers and polishes; a glue kettle; steel and brass hammers, bastard, ball-pein, planishing and tack; drifts and punches; copper, hide, lead and lignum vitae mallets; whetstones, oilstones, slipstones; a bow-drill, a breast-drill, a screw-drill, all with boxed sets of various collets and a rosewood tray of fine steel drill-bits; three ebony rules and two squares, one boxwood and one brass; charcoal and chalk; calipers and dividers and contour gauges; an awl and a fretsaw and a couple of handy-looking little objects even Bardas didn’t immediately recognise; all new and clean and of the finest quality, their edges fresh from their first grinding, their faces true and unbattered, enough tools to build the world.
When he’d finished unpacking he took a stick of charcoal and started drawing sketches on the benchtop.
Gorgas had seriously underestimated the skill of his archers; there were just over three hundred and fifty bodies clogging up the river, bobbing gently up and down like a raft of logs on its way from the forest to the sawmill.
The good news was that they’d pulled off one of the most remarkable feats of arms in recorded military history; the total defeat of a hugely superior force, with negligible losses to themselves, in a remarkably short period of time. The bad news was that they now had nearly five hundred prisoners, dying of starvation and exhaustion, in desperate need of food and a secure billet. The disused stone quarry was almost large enough and the sides were far too steep to climb, except for one easily guarded track, but they were open to the violence of the sun, and of course there was no water. At a bare minimum of a pint and a half of water and half an Ordnance loaf per man per day, that came to nearly a hundred gallon jugs to be filled at the river, carried four miles along difficult roads, lugged down the steep track and up again; sixty trays of Ordnance loaves to be got from somewhere (Where, for pity’s sake? Keeping his own men fed was a serious strain on his ingenuity); two shifts of forty guards, making up a third of his mobile army. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he had a major river blocked with dead bodies, and deputations from the four villages downstream whose drinking water was red and stinking. He was going to have to order his battle-weary soldiers to wade chest-high in that disgusting water to drag out all the swollen, sodden corpses, heap them up in stacks like bricks of newly cut peat, and dig three broad, deep pits in stony ground before they could even think of resting, patching up their worn and damaged kit, dressing their own minor wounds – assuming, of course, that they weren’t facing an overnight forced march to take on one of the other two armies he knew were still on the loose somewhere on the island. Only one thing worse than a defeat, somebody once said, and that’s a victory. Trite, Gorgas reflected, but true.
His rapid inspection tour of the holding camp in the quarry only depressed him further. He didn’t have enough medical orderlies for his own men, let alone any to spare for the enemy; but there were men dying of comparatively minor injuries, and that was a waste. He didn’t have to be a doctor or a scientist to know that unless the prisoners were moved on soon, a great many of them would die in the quarry from poisoned wounds, dysentery, malnutrition, any number of combinations of injuries and afflictions exacerbated by heat and squalor. Under any other circumstances he wouldn’t let such a dreadful thing happen, but as it was there was very little he could do. If any of them did survive and make it back to Shastel, the tales they’d have to tell of their treatment at his hands would be enough to harden the enemy’s resolve to fight to the last man if needs be, to make sure Scona was erased from the earth and rubbed out of human memory. It was what he’d want to see happen if he was in their place.