‘And you’ve taken steps to make sure he gets the opportunity.’
‘It was the least I could do,’ Gorgas replied. ‘I wouldn’t have felt right if I hadn’t done it. And really, it was so easy in the end. Now then,’ he went on, ‘that’s enough of that, I’ve got letters to write. Have either of you seen Zonaras? I want him to nip out to Tornoys for me.’
Iseutz shrugged. ‘Which one is Zonaras?’ she asked. ‘I still can’t tell them apart.’
Gorgas frowned at her. ‘Very amusing,’ he said. ‘I take it that means you haven’t. Well, if you do see him, I’ll be in the office.’
What Gorgas called the office was a small room at the back of the house; originally it had been a smokehouse, where the hams were hung up over a smouldering cairn of oak-chips, but Clefas and Zonaras hadn’t bothered much with curing meat, and they’d used it as a dump for sundry clutter. Gorgas had had it re-thatched and repointed, and had knocked a doorway through and put in a window. He had plans for a new, much larger smokehouse on the other side of the yard, once he’d finished repairing the fence and restoring the woodshed and the trap-house; but that was going to have to wait.
He had a desk, rather a fine one with a slanting face at chest height (Gorgas was old-fashioned and preferred standing up to write), a lamp-bracket that swung sideways on a pivoted arm, another arm with a hole in it for the ink-horn and a tray on top for his penknives, sealing wax, sharpening stone, inkstone, sand-shaker and all the other marginally useful paraphernalia that tend to accrue to people who spend a significant proportion of their time writing. Under the face was a board that pulled out and was supported by two folding struts, just the right size for a counting board, with a rack for your reckoning counters let into the side. Needless to say it had been made in Perimadeia, about a hundred years ago; the wood was dark and warm with beeswax, and across the top was carved the motto DILIGENCE-PATIENCE-PERSISTENCE, suggesting that it had been made for a customer in the Shastel Order. Gorgas remembered it well from his childhood – where his father had got it from he hadn’t the faintest idea, but he’d used it as a cutting-board for making and trimming arrow-fletchings, as witness the hundreds of thin lines scored across the face. When he’d rescued it from the dead furniture store in the half-derelict hayloft, Gorgas had intended to reface it with leather or fine-sawn Colleon oak veneer, but in the end he’d kept it as it was, not wanting to deface any of the visible signs his father had left behind.
He’d trimmed a fresh pen only the day before, out of a barred grey goosefeather; it didn’t need sharpening but he sharpened it anyway, using the short knife with the blade worn paper-thin by decades of sharpening that had always been in the house for as long as he could remember (but his mother had used it in the kitchen, for skinning and jointing). Then he folded back the lid of the ink-horn (it was one he’d made himself; but Bardas had made the lid and the little brass hinge, beaten them out of scraps of brass scrounged from a scabbard-chape they’d found, green and brittle, in the bed of a stream), dipped the pen and started to write. It was a very short letter written on a tiny scrap of thrice-scraped parchment, and when he’d sanded it he rolled it up tight and pushed it into a brass foil tube slightly thinner than an arrowshaft. Then he reached under the desk and fished out an arrow.
It was a standard Imperial bodkinhead, with a small diamond-section blade and a long-necked socket. He pulled the head off without any real effort and pushed the brass tube up inside the socket as far as he could get it to go. Then he took a little leather bag from the top of the desk, opened it and tapped a few brown crystals out into the palm of his hand. There was also a small brass dish on the tray, one of the pans from a long-lost pair of scales. Having transferred the crystals into the pan he took the penknife and made a small nick in his forearm, angling his arm so that the blood dripped on to the crystals. When they were amply covered, he wrapped a piece of cloth over the cut and carefully spat into the pan until the proportions of blood and spit were roughly the same. Finally he added a fat pinch of sawdust from a twist of parchment he’d had tucked under his cuff.
Pulling the lamp-arm toward him, he held the pan over the flame and stirred the mixture with the penknife handle, dissolving the crystals (glue, extracted from steeped rawhide). When he was satisfied with the consistency he took a dollop of the glue on the tip of his little finger and smeared the end of the arrowshaft where the socket was to go. After putting the socket carefully back on and making sure it was straight, he served the joint with a length of fine nettle-stem twine, using the last of the glue to stick down the ends.
The last step was to mark the arrow; he dipped the pen back into the ink and painstakingly wrote this one between the cock feather and the bottom fletching, in tiny, angular clerk’s letters. Then he laid it flat on the window-sill to dry.
He had other letters to write, and he was busy with them when Zonaras came in (as usual, without knocking).
‘Well?’ he said.
Gorgas looked up. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour and ride over to Tornoys-’
‘What, today?’
‘Yes, today. Go to the Charity and Chastity – I don’t need to tell you where that is – and ask for Captain Mallo, who’s going to Ap’ Escatoy. Give him these letters and this arrow-’
‘What’s he want with just one arrow?’
‘Just you make sure he gets it,’ Gorgas said, in a tone of voice that made Zonaras open his eyes wide. ‘He knows what to do. Once you’ve done that,’ he added, reaching into his pocket, ‘and not before under any circumstances, have a drink on me.’ He handed over a couple of silver quarters, which Zonaras took quickly without saying anything. ‘All right?’
Zonaras nodded. ‘The mare’s cast a shoe,’ he said.
‘What? When was that?’
Zonaras shrugged. ‘Day before yesterday,’ he said.
Gorgas sighed. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Take my horse, just try not to ride her down any rabbit holes. We’ll shoe the mare when you get back.’
Zonaras frowned. ‘I’ve got a lot on right now,’ he said.
‘All right, I’ll shoe the mare. Now get on; remember, Captain Mallo, going to Ap’ Escatoy, at the Charity and Chastity. You think you can remember that?’
‘Course.’
After he’d gone, Gorgas leaned against the desk and scowled. If anybody was capable of messing up a simple job, it was Zonaras. On the other hand, Zonaras riding to the Charity and Chastity in Tornoys and drinking himself stupid was the most natural thing in the world, a regular event these last twenty years, a sight so familiar as to be practically invisible.
Before he left the study, Gorgas paused in the doorway and looked up, as he always did, at the mighty and beautiful bow hung on two pegs over the top of the frame. It was the bow Bardas had made for him, just as he’d once made the ink-horn cover and the little copper sand-shaker and the folding three-piece box-wood ruler, which had been with Gorgas wherever he’d gone (it got broken in Perimadeia while he was there; he’d kept the pieces and, years later, had the best instrument-maker in the City put them back together again, with the finest fish-bladder glue and tiny silver tacks so small you could hardly see them; he’d had a rigid gold and silver case made for it at the same time, to make sure it didn’t get broken again).