The Proof House (39 page)

‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ Venart asked. ‘Presumably they bought it from us, but I don’t recognise any of it.’

‘Wretched, isn’t it?’ Eseutz agreed. ‘If you look closely, you’ll see provincial office batch numbers and store tallies stencilled all over everything. It’s all stuff from abroad; they’ve been taking delivery here and storing it for free in our warehouses, and now they’re sending it home on our ships. They don’t need us for anything.’

Athli grinned. ‘They may have been using your warehouse for free,’ she said. ‘But that’s your fault for not paying attention. You were too busy daydreaming about what you were going to do when you got your ship back.’

Eseutz scowled, then relaxed again. ‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘But I still say they’ve got a nerve, doing their buying and selling and storing here as if they owned the place, while we’ve been sitting on our hands all this time with nothing to do. It makes one feel useless, somehow. I’ll be glad when this is all over and they’ve gone home, and the hell with the money.’

‘I’m with you there,’ Venart said. ‘To be honest with you, they give me the creeps. Anybody who’s so cold-blooded about starting a war—’

‘Best way to be, surely,’ Athli said, expressionless. ‘Most efficient, anyway; make your preparations early, be sure you’ve got all your supplies and equipment in hand before you start, think out your plan of campaign well in advance. Look how well it worked for Temrai, after all. Don’t suppose I’d be here now if he’d just blundered up to the City gates and waited for someone to let him in.’

Understandably enough, there was an awkward silence. When it was starting to get embarrassing, Eseutz smiled brightly and said, ‘While I think of it, Athli, have you reached a decision about going into the armour business? I know you were thinking about it a while back.’

Athli sighed. ‘Not going into it myself,’ she said. ‘Just investing in someone else’s concern. And yes, it all checked out. Gods know, there’s enough demand for the stuff.’

Venart frowned. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ he said. ‘As soon as this war’s over the market’s going to be flooded with war surplus and loot; it always is, after a war. I remember a few years back after the Scona thing - and that was only a little war, mind - there was so much looted and stripped chain-mail floating about, you couldn’t give it away. And halberds - they were cutting them down for bill-hooks or selling them by weight for scrap. And as for arrows—’

‘Ah,’ Athli interrupted, bright red in the face, ‘but that was different. The Empire’s going to win this war, and they never sell off equipment, they just put it into store. And once they’ve won and got control of the City - sorry, the place where the City used to be - everybody west of the straits is going to start wondering who’ll be next, and there’ll be a demand for armour and weapons like you can’t imagine; not that it’ll do them any good, but that’s none of my business. Next to shipbuilding, armour’s the best possible area to invest in at the moment.’

Venart lifted his head slightly. ‘Shipbuilding?’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ Athli replied, looking out over the Wharf. ‘For when they realise the armour won’t help and they start evacuating.’

Dassascai the spy (so called to distinguish him from another man with the same name who repaired tents) sat beside his fire next to the duck pen and sharpened a knife. It had a long, thin blade with a clipped back, the sort used for cutting meat off the bone. He’d finished with the oilstone and the waterstone and was stropping it slowly on the untanned side of a leather belt.

He was possibly the only man sitting still in the whole camp; Temrai had decided to move the clans south-east, towards the Imperial army approaching from the direction of Ap’ Escatoy. After nearly seven years in one place, the plainsmen were moving stiffly, like someone getting up in the morning after too little sleep.

Half the workforce had left at first light to begin the awkward job of rounding up the herd. After seven years of continual grazing, there was barely a blade of grass left in the immediate vicinity of the camp. Instead of being close at hand, therefore, as it always used to be in the old wandering days, the herd was split up and scattered across thousands of acres of the eastern plain. Many of the boys riding with the herding party had never seen a full-scale roundup and weren’t quite sure what to do; for the most part, they were sensibly treating the whole thing as an adventure, and their enthusiasm was enough to stop the men from thinking too hard about the implications of Temrai’s decision. Each rider had his goatskin provisions bag over his shoulder, a bow and quiver on either side of his saddle, his coat and blanket rolled up and stowed behind the crupper. A few of the men wore helmets and mailshirts, or carried them wrapped in waxed cloth covers or wicker panniers; nobody knew for certain where the enemy might suddenly appear - they’d already taken on many of the attributes of fairy-tale sprites and demons, who lurk in dark woods and pounce unexpectedly from the shadow of tall rocks.

The other half of the clan were busy breaking the camp; uprooting tent-poles, folding felts and carpets, trying to stow seven years’ worth of sedentary life into panniers and travoises designed to hold only the essentials. Many people were discarding the wondrous but useless treasures they’d looted from the sack of the City - up and down the rapidly vanishing streets of the camp there were bronze tripods and ivory tables, huge bronze cooking-pots, an incongruous assortment of bits of bronze and marble statue (a head here, an arm or a colossal booted foot there; not a single complete piece anywhere, so that the camp field looked like the aftermath of a battle between two tribes of giants). Wherever possible, they were dismantling the machines and tools they’d built over the years, sawbenches and lathes and water-powered grindstones, trebuchets and mangonels, presses and winches and treadmills and watermills, dismembered like carcasses in a butcher’s store and loaded on to flat-bed carts, but far too much would have to be left behind, either for lack of transport or for sheer size and weight. The enormous butter-churn, for example, that Temrai himself had helped design and build, was set in brick foundations to keep it from toppling over. They had already stripped the giant looms and dismantled the shed they’d stood in for the lumber; now the frames stuck up from the ground like the bones of dead men buried in thin soil, while women cut up the huge carpets that had been woven on them into small, practical squares. They’d tried to salvage the fish-weirs, but most of the main timbers were already too badly rotted to be worth taking; and on the high bank where they’d built permanent butts for archery practice, the great round woven-straw target-bosses lay on their faces, too big to carry, their frames broken up and used to make improvised rails for the carts. Already, the camp looked as if it had been overrun by an enemy; on all sides lay spoil and waste, disregarded wealth and broken equipment, while the banked-up fires where they’d burned off the surplus hay and provender added an evocative stench of smoke.

‘You’re not going, then,’ someone said, as Dassascai flicked his blade backwards and forwards across the strop.

‘Of course I’m going,’ Dassascai replied. ‘But my stuff won’t take long to get ready. No point rushing to pack everything away and then sitting on my hands for a couple of days waiting for the rest of you.’

‘Won’t be a couple of days, if Temrai’s got anything to do with it,’ the man replied. ‘We’re out of here at dawn tomorrow; anybody and anything that isn’t ready, stays.’

Dassascai smiled. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘I think he’s forgotten exactly what’s involved in moving this camp. It’s not like we’ve only been here a week; you can’t just bundle seven years in a bag and sling it over your shoulder.’

‘That’s what he said,’ the man answered. ‘You want to take the matter up with him, you go ahead.’

‘No need,’ Dassascai said. ‘All I’ve got to do is fold the tent, catch up the ducks and I’m ready to go. You get practice moving on at a moment’s notice when you’re a refugee.’

The man grinned. ‘I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Here, is it true what they say? About you being a spy?’

Dassascai inclined his head. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Pulling feathers off ducks is just a hobby.’

The man frowned, then shrugged. ‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘If you really are a spy, stands to reason you wouldn’t admit it.’

‘Do you think I’m a spy?’ Dassascai asked.

‘Me?’ The man thought for a moment. ‘Well, people say you are.’

‘I see. So who am I spying for? The provincial office? Bardas Loredan? The Bad Tooth pixies?’

‘How should I know?’ the man replied, irritated. ‘Anyway, whoever it is, won’t do them any good. Temrai’ll keep one step ahead, just you see.’

‘So I should hope, if he’s supposed to be leading the way.’

When the man had gone, Dassascai carefully wrapped the knife in an oiled cloth and put it away in his satchel. Then he pulled out a little brass tube, tapped the roll of paper out of it and spread it over his knee. There was nothing written on it. Having first looked about him to make sure nobody was paying him any attention, he reached down and fished a thin piece of charred wood out of the dead edge of the fire. He tested it on a corner of the paper. It wrote well.

He didn’t start off with the name of the person he was writing to; only one person would ever see it, and that person didn’t need to be told his own name. Instead, he wrote,
For gods’ sakes, tell me what you want me to do
, rolled the paper up again and stuffed it into the tube. Then he reached into the duck pen, pulled out a large, fat drake and broke its neck by gripping it just below the head and whirling the body round fast, like a man with a slingshot. When it was dead he picked a little folding knife out of his sash, opened it and slit the duck from just under the ribs down to the vent. With a sharp turn of his wrist, almost gracefully easy from long practice, he flicked the stomach and intestines out through the slit, slipped the message tube in their place, and quickly stitched the slit up with horsehair and a steel needle that lived buried in the fabric of his coat collar. That done, he walked away from the camp towards the mouth of the river, where a single ship was tied up to the remains of the old Perimadeia wharf. He was just in time to intercept the two people he wanted to see.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.

Gannadius looked up. ‘Yes?’

‘Sorry to trouble you,’ Dassascai said, ‘but I need to send someone a duck. Would you be kind enough to take it to the Island for me?’

Gannadius looked at him. ‘You’re sending somebody a duck?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Alive or dead?’

‘Oh, dead.’

Gannadius frowned. ‘But that’s silly. You can buy a duck from any poulterer’s stall.’

‘Not like this duck you can’t. It’s a sample. Special order.’ He smiled. ‘Got the delivery instructions today. If he likes the sample, he’ll take them a thousand at a time. You’d be doing me a real favour.’ Dassascai smiled pleasantly and pulled the duck out from inside his shirt. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Now admit it, that’s a real honey of a duck.’

‘I suppose so,’ Gannadius said doubtfully. ‘But won’t it have gone - well, you know, bad?’

Dassascai shook his head. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. ‘Four days is just about perfect to bring out the flavour. My friend’ll see you right for your trouble, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

‘Oh, no, that’s all right,’ Gannadius replied quickly. It was a matter of honour with Islanders that they always carried and delivered letters if they possibly could; an essential ethic for a commercial nation. Expecting a reward for doing so was considered extremely bad form, like asking a drowning man for cash in advance before rescuing him. ‘It’s just - well, all right.’

‘Thanks,’ Dassascai said, beaming. ‘That’s a great weight off my mind. I’ve been trying to close this deal for ages, but there’ve been so few ships going your way I was worried sick my man’d lose interest and the whole thing would fall through.’

He handed Gannadius the duck, head upright. Gannadius looked at it with faint disgust. ‘No offence,’ he said, ‘but it looks just like an ordinary duck to me.’

Dassascai nodded. ‘Exactly. But it’s a
cheap
duck. They’re the rarest and most sought-after variety there is.’>

‘Fair enough,’ Gannadius replied dubiously. ‘But wouldn’t it be better to send him a live one? Then he could kill it himself and there’d be no risk of it going bad.’

‘Ah.’ Dassascai furrowed his brow and grinned. ‘And suppose somebody else gets hold of it and starts breeding from it; that’d be the end of my business opportunity, for sure. If you knew ducks, you’d realise what you’ve got there.’

‘If you say so,’ Gannadius said, wishing he hadn’t got involved in the first place. ‘All right, who’s it to go to?’

‘I’ve written it down,’ Dassascai answered. ‘Don’t look so surprised,’ he added with a smile. ‘Some of us can read and write, you know.’