The man noticed that Bardas was staring. ‘Do you want something?’ he asked.
‘I’m the new deputy inspector,’ Bardas replied. ‘Tell me about what you’re doing.’
‘Planishing,’ the man replied. ‘You know what planishing means?’
‘You tell me. In your own words,’ Bardas added.
‘All right.’ The man grinned. ‘They send you people out here, don’t they, and you haven’t got a bloody clue. No skin off my nose, though. Right, planishing is where we hammer the outside of the nearly finished article to take out the bumps and dents, get it smooth for the polishers. All the actual shaping, see, that’s done from the inside; so to finish off, we just go over it lightly from the outside, not enough to move any metal, really it’s just to leave it looking nice. I wouldn’t tell you that if you were a real inspector, or else I’d be out of a job. You want to watch how I do this?’
Bardas nodded, and the man carried on with what he’d been doing, angling the work down on to the ball and smoothing the marks out of it with a series of crisp, even taps, letting the hammer fall in its own weight and bounce back off the surface of the metal. ‘The trick is not to bash,’ the man explained. ‘Bashing gets you nowhere fast, you just let the mallet drop and the weight does all the work. That’s why I’m holding it just so, trapped between my middle finger and the base of my thumb, look.’ He held up his right hand to demonstrate. ‘Here, you want a go?’
Bardas hesitated. ‘All right,’ he said, and held out his hand for the hammer. ‘Is that right?’
The man shook his head. ‘You’re gripping,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to grip, you’re not trying to strangle the bloody thing, you just want to hold it firm enough so you can keep control – there, you’re getting it. Pretty simple once you know, but you’ll never get there just by light of nature.’
‘Strange,’ Bardas said. ‘I’d never have guessed a lot of little gentle taps with a bit of rolled-up leather could actually shape a piece of steel.’
The man laughed. ‘That’s the whole point,’ he said. ‘Thousands and thousands of little light taps with the hide mallet make the thing so hard and close-grained that a bloody great hard two-handed bash with a six-pound axe just bounces off.’ He lifted the piece of work off the steel ball and ran a fingertip over it. ‘A bit like life, really,’ he went on. ‘The more you get shit kicked out of you, the harder you are to kill.’
CHAPTER SIX
No, no, they’d told him – they’d sounded quite shocked – you mustn’t call it a civil war, it was a rebellion. It’d only have been a civil war if they’d won.
It wasn’t the sort of victory Temrai wanted to dwell on any more than he had to; but it was in order, diplomatically speaking, for his new neighbours in the provincial office to express their pleasure, now it was all safely over, that the best man had won. A simple letter would have done; or a messenger with his words written out for him in big letters on a bit of parchment; there wasn’t really any need to send a full proconsular delegation (although strictly speaking, as Deputy Proconsul Arshad carefully explained, since the mission was to a recognised non-aligned friendly sovereign state, from a provincial directorate as opposed to a provincial governor, it being a directly governed province and therefore in theory under the direct supervision of the chancellor of the Empire, by way of his duly appointed delegates, protocol did require a personal attendance by the senior ranking diplomat; anything less, Arshad implied, would have been an insult, or at the very least a display of bad manners and ignorance).
‘I see,’ Temrai replied untruthfully. ‘Well, it’s very kind of you to have come all this way; but as you can see, I’m still very much in one piece, as are the rest of my senior officers and ministers; really, in fact, no harm done.’ He stopped, unable to think of anything else to say. Of all the people he’d met in the course of his extremely eventful life, Deputy Proconsul Arshad was the most inhuman. Light seemed to fall away into his eyes like water draining into sand, and when he spoke, the words seemed to come from a great way off. Temrai felt compelled to carry on talking, in an effort to fill the gap in nature the man seemed to produce. ‘Of course,’ Temrai went on, ‘it was a dreadful business; we were fighting people who we thought of as our friends – well, more than friends, family. I’m still not sure what it was all about, to be honest with you. It just happened, I suppose. One minute we were all on the same side, wanting the same things, just not completely in agreement about how to go about achieving them. Next thing we knew, we weren’t talking any more, and they’d left the camp and gone off somewhere with their horses and sheep and goats. Well, that was all right, if they didn’t want to stay here, that was up to them. But then they started making trouble; nothing terrible, just awkward, rude I suppose you could call it. They wouldn’t let some of our people water their stock at a river they’d decided was theirs; stupid thing to argue over, especially since if our side had moved a couple of miles up river, they’d have been drinking exactly the same water (just a few minutes earlier) and everybody would have been happy.
‘But it didn’t turn out that way, worse luck; first there was a standoff, then there was a scuffle, you couldn’t call it more than that, but a man was killed, so I had to get involved; looking back, I keep asking myself if I could have handled it differently, found some way not to make an issue out of it. But I found myself insisting that the man who’d struck the actual blow had to be sent back here to answer for what he’d done; they refused, so I sent some people to fetch him. There was more fighting-’ He shook his head. ‘It shouldn’t have happened, gods know, but it did; and now here we are, looking back on our first civil war. I suppose it’s a sign of how far we’ve come, in a way. I mean, it’s things like this that sort of define a nation.’ Temrai bit his lip; he couldn’t believe some of the things he was hearing himself say. But Deputy Proconsul Arshad was just sitting there, drawing the words out of him like a child sucking an egg. Presumably that was what he’d come for. Even so, he couldn’t really see the point of the exercise. It was like deliberately opening a vein.
‘A most unhappy sequence of events,’ Arshad said eventually, moving his head very slightly forward, though the rest of his body remained motionless. He had an ugly scar running from the corner of his left eye right down to the lobe of his ear, and it was all Temrai could do not to stare at it helplessly. ‘Let us hope that by dealing with the problem so quickly and decisively, you’ve effectively forestalled any further opposition to what we consider to be a most welcome and positive program of social reforms. As you say, if your actions here have ensured that something like this is unlikely ever to happen again, you’re entitled to feel a considerable degree of satisfaction.’
‘Thank you,’ Temrai replied, though he wasn’t entirely sure what he was thanking this peculiar man for. What he really wanted, of course, was for the Son of Heaven and his grim-faced retinue to go away and never come back. Maybe there was a special way diplomats could say that sort of thing without giving offence or starting a war; but if there was, nobody had let him in on the secret. ‘Personally, I’ve had enough of wars and fighting to last me a lifetime. I mean to say, just because you’re really quite good at something, it doesn’t actually follow that you like doing it. Definitely that way with me and fighting wars – well, not just me, all of us, really. I’d say that, as a nation, we’ve been through all that proving-ourselves stuff and now it’s time to move on.’