‘Half decent?’ Iseutz squawked. ‘He made his living killing people. People he didn’t even know.’
‘True,’ Gorgas replied. ‘But compared with the rest of us…’
The girl was about to reply; then suddenly she giggled. ‘You know,’ she said, resting her elbows on the foot of the bed, ‘when you come to think of it, we’re a pretty sick bunch. I think that’s probably why I hate Mother more than you or even Uncle Bardas. At least you two are just murderers. What I can’t forgive her for is making me the way I am.’
‘Oh, please yourself,’ Gorgas grunted, sliding off the bed and standing up. ‘Maybe you’re right, at that. But that’s not the way I see things; I don’t believe in this idea that evil people are evil and can’t ever be anything else. I mean, do you confine that to individuals, or does it go for whole nations as well? Just because our ancestors massacred some other city or tribe a thousand years ago, does that mean we’re going to carry on being bastards for the rest of time? There wouldn’t be anybody left. And think about it: doesn’t it work both ways? Take Temrai and the plainsmen. They sacked the City and killed all the people; all right, they’re evil, they’re bastards. But they did it because the City people used to go around killing them-’
‘My Uncle Bardas used to go around killing them.’
For the first time, there was something in Gorgas’ expression that suggested he might be getting angry. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and he also saved your life. He spared your life when you were trying to kill him, and then he got you out of the City when he should have been thinking about himself. And you still say no, he’s got to die. All right, so if you’d killed him, what’d that have made you?’
She thought for a moment. ‘A chip off the old block, presumably.’ She held up her truncated hand. ‘Look at me, for pity’s sake. I’m as bad as the rest of you, and I’m incompetent. I’m a murderer who can’t even get the job done. You’ve no idea how proud it makes me feel, knowing I’m useless as well as rotten.’
Gorgas reached out and banged twice on the door with his fist. ‘Melodrama,’ he repeated. ‘High tragedy. Family curses, poisoned blood and the downfall of the gods. Give me a shout when you’ve had enough and maybe I’ll show you round the real world some time. In the meantime you can stay here and write your lines. I’ll just make sure that nobody else gets to hear them.’
The key turned in the lock and he barged the door open, pushing the sergeant out of the way. The door rolled shut and the key turned again.
‘All right,’ Gorgas said, ‘get me out of here. And for pity’s sake get that cell cleaned up. I wouldn’t keep a pig in that state. I don’t care how it got that way, but there’s no excuse for not clearing up a mess.’
He felt better as soon as he was above ground again, and by the time he was clear of the guard house and out into the fresh air of the courtyard, the feelings of frustration and anger were back to manageable levels, which was just as well. Gorgas Loredan had built his life around the principle that positive thinking gets things done; he found monolithic negatives impossible to understand and therefore hard to deal with, and so he’d always managed to find a way to go round the immovable object. One of his favourite stories was about two generals in command of an army who found themselves faced with the prospect of laying siege to an impregnable city. As they sat in their tent, staring wretchedly at the massive walls before them, the old general sighed and declared, ‘We’ll never find a way of taking that city.’ The younger general smiled at him and said, ‘In that case, we’d better find a way of not having to take that city.’ Whereupon he explained how it might be possible to lead the army round another way, bypassing the city entirely, and fall upon the enemy’s unprotected homeland, thereby winning the war and rendering the insurmountable obstacle irrelevant. For the moment, he couldn’t yet see how to apply this lesson to dealing with his intransigent niece, or his equally intransigent brother; but he knew there must be a way, simply because there always is.
Another gift that had helped him greatly over the years was the ability to put a difficult problem out of his mind entirely, leaving him free to tackle something he could manage. Solving the soluble problem, he’d generally found, often gave him the confidence and the sheer momentum to overwhelm the apparently insoluble one. Fortunately, the next job on his list was eminently soluble, and he found that he was looking forward to it.
He walked briskly down the hill to the Quay and took the boat to the small island at the mouth of the harbour where the refugees from Shastel were housed in a large sprawl of wood and canvas structures, a sort of hybrid of huts and tents, while they were waiting to be permanently resettled. To someone without Gorgas’ attitude to problem-solving, the Camp would have been a depressing place, full of uncomfortable reminders of failure. Here, after all, was the place where people ended up when the Bank had failed to make good its promise to protect them from the vindictiveness of the Foundation. The families crowded in here had all seen their houses burnt down, their cattle driven off, their crops trampled; by definition, they were here because they had nowhere else to go, and the people who’d said it was all going to be all right had let them down and were now faced with the burden of looking after them and finding them somewhere else to live and work.
To Gorgas Loredan, however, they were the answer to a prayer. At first he’d looked here for recruits for his army, because at first that was what he needed most; but there were women and children and old men here too, and they constituted a resource that it would be wasteful to neglect; almost as bad as leaving a good field fallow for want of a bucket of seedcorn and the effort of ploughing. He’d taken charge of the running of the Camp, made an inventory of what was available, and worked out the best way to make use of what he’d got.
Thanks to his imagination and hard work, the Camp was now an inspiring place to visit. As he walked through the gates (permanently open, now that there was no need to keep starving malcontents penned up out of harm’s way) he passed the training ground on the left, where his hand-picked corps of instructors were turning the adult males into an efficient and disciplined force of archers, and carried on down the narrow lane that ran between the long sheds where the women and children were employed making the things the Bank so badly needed. Each shed housed a different manufacture. First he passed the door of the clothing shop, where they produced uniforms and boots for the army, all to the best specifications. Next to that was the mailshirt factory, where several hundred women sat on benches at long tables twisting together the thousands of steel rings that went to make up each issue-pattern mailshirt; each worker was equipped with two pairs of pliers to grip and twist the rings, which were brought to them by the ten thousand in closely woven wicker baskets by porters who spent all day going backwards and forwards between this shed and the wire foundry, where a hundred anvils were grouped in a circle around one enormous central furnace; at each anvil, one worker hammered and drew the red-hot billets of steel into wire, while another wound the wire around a mandrel before slitting the coil down its length to produce another bucketful of rings.
Next to the foundry was the fletching shed, where he had four hundred women and children occupied sorting feathers by sizes, splitting them down the middle with sharp knives and peeling them apart, trimming them and serving them to the finished arrowshafts with sinew dipped in glue. The shafts themselves were produced in the next shed down the row, where the workers sat in front of table with three-foot-long grooves scored into them; in these grooves they laid the dogwood and river-cane shoots the arrows were made from, planing each surface flat and then turning them a few degrees until eventually they were left with a perfectly round, straight shaft, each one of uniform length and diameter. All told, there were sixty sheds in the Camp, each one producing the Bank’s entire requirement of some essential military commodity, and all at a fraction of what it would have cost to buy them on the open market. As for the workers, they were fed, clothed and occupied instead of aimless and starving. It was, Gorgas couldn’t help feeling, a remarkable achievement; and all the result of looking at a problem and seeing an opportunity.