Authors: K. J. Parker
Someone was standing over him; he looked up. He couldn’t make out a face, only a shape. Someone leaning forward a little,
holding out a bowl.
“Thanks,” he said, and took it. The man walked away.
Well, it was porridge, or maybe very thick soup; something cheap you could boil up in bulk; something that someone had had
to work for, and which he’d done nothing to earn. He scooped a wodge of the stuff onto his fingers and poked it into his mouth.
It didn’t taste of anything much, which was probably just as well. There are different sorts of dependence. There’s the social
contract between the lord and his people, and there’s the man who feeds barley mash to his pig. He thought about that too,
while he was at it. Without the farmer, the pig would starve; without him, the pig would never have been born. The pig owes
the farmer its life, and in due course the debt is called in, just as my bailiffs collect the rents from my tenants.
He finished the whatever-it-was, put down the bowl and looked round. A few people were still moving about, but mostly there
was the stillness of rest after hard work; of men whose only resource was their strength, saving it up for another day. If
I could walk, Miel thought, I could offer to help them tomorrow with digging the graves. I can’t even do that. I can’t do
anything.
He lay back. There was a stone or something just under his shoulder blade; he wriggled about to avoid it. Nothing to do; he’d
have expected to be bored, since all his life the one thing he could never abide was doing nothing. It wasn’t like that, though.
It was dark, so it was time to sleep; or, if sleep didn’t happen to pass by his way, he would be content to lie still and
wait for the dawn. Gradually, awareness of time slipped away from him, and then he slept.
When he woke up, there was someone standing over him again. He recognized the boots.
“On the cart,” the man with the mustache said. “Here, I’ll give you a hand up.”
Miel nodded, and let himself be lifted. “Are we going back to the battlefield?” he asked.
The man frowned, as though he hadn’t expected to be asked a question, and wasn’t quite sure it wasn’t against the rules. “You
go back to the camp,” he said. “They’ll look after you there.”
The tailgate closed behind him, and he snuggled back among the sacks. Fine resistance leader I turned out to be, he thought.
By now I should’ve overpowered a dozen guards, stolen a sword and a fast horse and be galloping home. Instead, they put me
on a cart. About the best thing anybody could say about me right now is that I’m reasonably portable.
But that’d be silly, he thought. You can’t overpower guards if there’s nobody guarding you, and I expect if I asked them nicely
they’d sell me a sword and a horse, assuming they haven’t stolen all my money. (He checked; they hadn’t. On the other hand,
all he had left was six copper turners and a twopenny bit.)
It was a long ride. The cart had to go slowly over the sad excuse for a track. (Weren’t we supposed to have built a new road
up here, Miel wondered, or did we never get round to it?) Shortly after noon he saw a small cluster of wooden buildings in
the distance. As he got closer they grew into five thatched sheds surrounded by a stockade. That suggested a degree of effort;
there weren’t any woods for miles, so someone had thought it was worth all the trouble of putting up some kind of fortification.
There was no smoke rising, and he couldn’t see any people about. Barns, then, rather than houses.
“Is that where we’re going?” he called out, and wondered if the driver would reply. He hadn’t said a word all day; but then,
Miel hadn’t either.
“Yes.”
There was a ditch as well as a stockade. The driver stopped the cart, jumped down and whistled. A gate in the stockade opened;
apparently it doubled as a drawbridge. The cart rumbled over it, jarring Miel’s knee. The drawbridge went back up again as
soon as they were across.
“Hold on, I’ll help you down.” The driver, now that he looked at him, was a short, stocky man with a fringe of sandy hair
round a bald citadel of a head. Miel thanked him — the Ducas always acknowledges help — and leaned on his shoulder as they
crossed the yard to one of the barns.
“Live one for you,” the bald man called out as they crossed the threshold into the darkness inside. He put Miel down carefully
and walked away.
He’d called out to someone, so presumably there was someone there; but it was too dark for Miel to see, so he stayed where
he was, leaned up against a wall, like a hoe or a shovel. He was getting used to being property, he decided, and so far it
hadn’t been so bad. That could change, of course. He decided to resume some responsibility.
“Hello,” he called out. “Anybody there?”
“Just a minute, I’ll come down.” A woman’s voice, which made a change. Not a pleasant voice, though. The best you could say
for it was that it sounded like it meant what it said. You knew where you were with a voice like that, even if it wasn’t anywhere
you’d ever want to be.
There was a hayloft, and a ladder. She came down slowly; a tall, red-haired woman in a plain, clean gown, tied at the waist
with plaited straw rope. She was much younger than her voice, maybe his own age, a year or two older; nice-looking, too —
no, revise that.
The Ducas is trained in good manners from infancy, like a soldier is trained to obey orders. He’s almost incapable of inappropriate
or boorish behavior. He instinctively knows how to put people at their ease, and he never, ever reacts to physical ugliness
or deformity. He keeps a straight face, and he never stares.
Which was just as well. At some point in the last year or so, the woman had lost her left eye. The scar started an inch above
the middle of her eyebrow and reached down to the corner of her mouth. If he’d had to give an opinion, Miel would have said
it was probably a sword-cut. It hadn’t been stitched at the time, and had grown out broad. Her eye socket was empty. In order
to learn that aspect of his trade, Miel had been taken when he was twelve years old to see the lepers at Northwood. For the
first time, he felt grateful for having had such a thorough education.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said.
It took Miel a second to realize what she meant. “My knee,” he said. “I got hit there in …” He hesitated. Presumably she was
part of the business: doctor, nurse, jailer, all three? “In the fighting,” he said. “I don’t know if —”
“Hold still.” She knelt down and prodded his knee sharply with her index finger. Miel yowled like a cat and nearly fell over.
“That seems all right,” she said. “The swelling and stiffness won’t last long, a few days. You’ll have to stay here till it’s
right again, we can’t spare transport to take you back to your outfit. Have you got any money?”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you got any money?”
“Yes. I mean, not very much.”
She frowned at him. “How much?”
“Eighteen turners, I think.”
“Oh.” She sighed. “It’s six turners a day for food and shelter, so you’ll just have to mend quickly. Not much chance of you
working for your keep, is there? What do you do, anyway?”
Now there was a good question. “I’m a falconer,” Miel said.
“Are you really?” She looked at him. “Which family?”
“The Ducas.”
“Oh, them.” She shrugged. “Well, try and keep out of my way.” She frowned, creasing and stretching the scar. “What did that
to you? One of your birds?”
For a moment he couldn’t think what she was talking about. Then he remembered that he had a scar of his own; not as flamboyant
as hers, because skillful men with needles had done something about it while there was still time. It had been so long since
anybody had appeared to notice it that he’d forgotten it was there.
“A goshawk in a bate,” he replied. “I unhooded it too early. My own fault.”
She turned away, the set of her shoulders telling him he no longer mattered, and picked up a sack of boots. Then she stopped.
“My brother used to say you should keep them hooded for three days before you start manning them,” she said, not turning round.
“Was he a falconer?”
“No.” She paused, as though weighing up the issues for an important decision. “You can sew, then.”
Of course he couldn’t; but a falconer could. “Yes,” he said.
“Fine. Something useful you can do. Stay there.”
She went out, and came back a little later with a sack full of clothes. Miel had rested his head on it during the cart-ride.
From the pocket of her gown she took a thread-bobbin; there was a bone needle stuck into the thread. “Darn the holes as best
you can,” she said. “Anything that’s past repair you can tear up for patches. Don’t break the needle.”
Bloody hell, Miel thought; then, Well, how hard can it be? “All right,” he said.
Apparently, unloading the cart was her job. She came and went with the sacks and the bundled-up weapons, sorting them and
stacking them against the walls; no sign of the carter. He tried not to watch her. Instead, he tried desperately to figure
out how you were supposed to get the thread to go through the hole in the needle.
As far as he could judge, it was physically impossible. The end, where it had been cut off, was frayed and tufty, not to mention
fiendishly hard to see in the poor light, and the hole in the needle was ridiculously small. It was like trying to pull a
turnip through a buttonhole. He tried to think; he’d seen women sewing before, you couldn’t turn round at home without seeing
some woman or other sitting placidly in a corner, her arm moving gracefully up and down. He concentrated, trying to refine
a memory. Every so often they’d stop sewing and do something; but they did it quickly and easily — the bobbin would just appear
in their hands, they’d run off about a forearm’s length of thread, they’d hold the needle steady, and then they’d do something,
if only he could remember what it was.
(Come on, he thought; if they could do it, it couldn’t be all that hard.)
He tried to squeeze the picture up into his mind. The head would go forward, he remembered that. Something to do with the
hand and the mouth. But of course the Ducas is trained not to stare at people, which is another way of saying, trained not
to notice things that don’t concern him; things and people.
They licked it. That was it; they licked the end of the thread. Presumably, if you got the tufty bit wet, you could sort of
mat it down and stop it being all fluffy and hard to manipulate. He tried it, and found he could twist the strands tightly
together into a point that would just about go through the needle-hole (there was a word for it, wasn’t there? The eye of
a needle). He tried that. At first he thought it was going to work. The tip of the point went through easily, and he tried
to pinch hold of it with his fingernails as it came out the other side. But clearly it wasn’t as simple as that. He’d got
most of the strands through, but not all of them, so that when he pulled, the thread started to unravel and jammed. He felt
his arms and neck clench with frustration, but he daren’t let her see. He tried again, carefully rolling the tip of the thread
between his lips; it didn’t do to hurry when you were trying something new and complicated. Still no joy; one or two strands
stubbornly evaded the eye, like sheep who are too scared to go back into the pen. He was confident that he’d got the technique,
but evidently it took both skill and practice to execute. For crying out loud, he thought; human beings are supposed to be
resourceful, why can’t somebody invent a tool to do this quickly and easily? Or make needles with bigger holes in them, come
to that.
The fourth time; he didn’t quite know what he’d done differently. It just seemed to go, as if it had given up the struggle.
Victory; now what? He went back to his memories. They threaded it, right, and then they cut or broke off a foot or two of
thread. He scowled. It stood to reason that if you stuck the needle in and pulled it through, the thread would simply pass
through the cloth and come out the other side, and you’d be sitting there with the cloth in one hand and a threaded needle
in the other. There had to be some way of anchoring the end of the thread in the cloth; did you tie it to something, or stick
it down with glue, or what? All his life, all those hundreds of sewing women, all he’d have had to do was stop and ask and
one of them would’ve been happy to explain it to him. As it was …
They tied a knot in the end of the thread. He remembered now, he could picture it. The knot was thicker than the hole the
needle made in the cloth, so it stuck. Excellent. He laid the needle carefully down on his knee — the last thing he needed
was for the thread to slip out of the eye after all that performance getting it in there — and found the other end. Was there
a special kind of knot you had to use, like sailors or carters? The women in his memory hadn’t used any special procedure
that he could recall, however, so he’d just have to take his chances on that. He dropped the knot and retrieved the needle.
Now, he imagined, came the difficult part.
Think about it, he ordered himself. Sewing is basically just tying two sheets of material together with string. Surreptitiously,
he turned over his wrist and unbuttoned his cuff.
The Ducas, of course, has nothing but the best, and this rule applies especially to clothes. He had no idea who’d made his
shirts — they tended to appear overnight, like mushrooms — but whoever they were, it went without saying that they were the
best in the business. Obviously, therefore, they didn’t leave exposed seams, not even on the inside, where it didn’t show,
and their stitches were small enough to be practically invisible. He cursed himself for being stupid; looking in the wrong
place. He put his hand into the sack and pulled out a shirt; a proper, honest-to-goodness, contractor-made army shirt, Mezentine,
made down to a price and with nice exposed seams on the inside that even the Ducas could copy. He studied them. Apparently
the drill was, you stacked the edges of the two bits of cloth one on top of the other; you left about three-sixteenths of
an inch as a sort of headland (why couldn’t it have been farm work instead of sewing? he asked himself; at least I know something
about farm work), and then you ran a seam along to join them together. But even the army-issue stitches were too small to
be self-explanatory; he stared at them, but he couldn’t begin to figure out how on earth they’d ever got that way. It was
a mystery, like the corn or the phases of the moon.