Colours in the Steel (22 page)

Someone screamed. The boy’s sword dropped from his fingers and crashed noisily to the floor, and a moment later his whole dead weight fell on the trainer’s blade, pulling the handle out of his hands, the hilt of the sword, projecting out of his ribcage, cracking sharply on the flagstones. He was dead before he hit the ground.

The trainer stood like a statue (
what’s the matter, haven’t you ever killed anyone before? And you call yourself a professional
) while the class slowly backed away and people in the rest of the hall turned round to stare. Loredan, suddenly looking round, got a slap from a foil-point across his cheek but didn’t seem to notice. Someone shouted; people began to run. One of the trainer’s pupils grabbed him by the arm, but he didn’t move. Several voices now were yelling for help, or a doctor, or some other external but ineffectual agency to come and intervene. They were crouching round the dead boy now, gingerly poking at him, trying to find a pulse where there was never one to begin with. Athli could feel her knees weakening, a tightness in her stomach that suggested she was about to be sick.

‘Gentlemen.’ It was Loredan speaking, his tone mildly annoyed, as if he was about to rebuke a child for talking in class. ‘If you find this sort of thing disturbs you, might I suggest you’re training for the wrong profession? Nothing to do with us. Now then, where were we?’

Because Temrai had been away at the time, the clan had postponed Sasurai’s funeral games. The winners would have felt cheated if they didn’t receive the prizes from the hand of their new chief, and the prizegiving was traditionally the occasion for the new chief to make a formal address, setting out his aims and objectives for the first few years of his reign.

They’d used the time to make more than usually elaborate preparations; marking out the course for the horse race with stone cairns, putting up wooden goalposts for the polo match, digging proper butts for the archery and so forth, and the main contenders had had the luxury of several clear days’ match practice. The compressed-felt archery targets were already well-pocked, with a few tell-tale holes and splinters in their wooden frames demonstrating how badly needed the practice had been. There had even been time to catch a live eagle for the popinjay shoot, instead of the stuffed dummy that usually had to suffice. Best of all, the stewards had cajoled the clan into digging a long, low bank to serve as a grandstand, which meant that for once people who weren’t in the front row would stand some sort of chance of seeing something more entertaining than the neck of the man in front.

For Temrai there was a proper wooden throne, with carpet for him to walk on and a table to one side to display the prizes on. Traditionally, of course, the prizes consisted of special treasures from the dead chief’s personal possessions, and Temrai had to make an effort not to glance wistfully at various select components of what he’d hoped would be his inheritance, laid out splendidly as tokens of his semi-divine munificence. There, for instance, were Sasurai’s golden spurs, his personal drinking horn, a pair of his finest and most richly embroidered slippers and a quiver of first-class flight arrows with purple fletchings to identify them as the chief’s own.

Damn, said Temrai to himself. Oh, well, never mind.

It was, to all intents and purposes, obligatory for him to enter at least one event, and the height of bad form for him to win - a graceful fourth place was the ideal, enough to demonstrate prowess but well clear of the prizes - so he’d announced he’d take part in the close -range archery match and the popinjay shoot; he was a good enough archer to be able to throw the short-range match if need be without being too obvious about it, and if he shot near the bottom of the order in the popinjay event, someone else would be bound to have skewered the eagle before his turn, therefore relieving him of the obligation of taking part. As befitted the prestige of the discipline, the archery came at the end, which allowed Temrai to sit back and watch the riding events in comfort.

The horse races - five, ten and fifteen circuits of the course with and without hurdles - went smoothly and with a bare minimum of cheating. There were no surprises in the results. Tobolai Mar and his six sons shared all the prizes in four of the six races and were well-represented in the others, with Remtai Mar and Piridai winning the short and medium hurdles by a clear margin.

The polo matches were the usual joyful mess. Bestren cheated blatantly throughout the women’s game, but there would have been a riot if he’d sent her off before the young men had had a good long look at her in her riding costume, and since she stopped short of actually killing anybody, there was no harm done. In the event her team lost by seven goals to ten, so everyone was happy; especially Temrai, who was thus spared the embarrassment of having to give her the prize. She’d been after him in a painfully obvious way since she’d been old enough to choose a husband, and for all that she was unquestionably decorative, the most he’d ever been able to feel for her was a sort of fascinated loathing. It was far more agreeable to be able to hand over the golden belt and brooch to Sargen-pel-Tazrai, a sensible girl with a pleasing sense of humour, whose engagement to Limdai’s eldest son had apparently evaporated while Temrai had been away. He managed to keep his congratulatory smile from turning into a leer, and had held onto the belt just a fraction of a second longer than necessary when handing it over. All in all, it tended to improve his opinion of polo matches.

After the horseback events came the foot races. These had never been popular with the spectators, and were really only there to provide an interval between the riding and the archery. It was during the buzz of revived interest that followed the last foot race that Temrai stood up and made his surprise announcement. It turned out to be a felicitous piece of timing.

There would be, he announced, one additional event; not a new event, because there were references to it in some of the clan’s oldest songs, but one which hadn’t been staged in living memory. A team event, he went on, because team games serve to foster a spirit of co-operation and mutual support - and so on, until he got bored listening to himself. Then he announced the log race.

It wasn’t a complete surpise, of course; he’d chosen the team captains the day before, and the crews who’d found and cut the logs were obviously in on the secret as well. Nevertheless there was a gratifying air of excitement as the two enormous tree trunks were unloaded from the long wagon and dragged into the middle of the lists by two teams of horses. There was certainly no shortage of young men wanting to take part; fortunately he’d anticipated that and the two captains were properly briefed on who to select out of the crowd of eager volunteers.

The object of the race, he explained, was to carry the log from the start to the finish without dropping it or allowing the other team to get there first. The prize would be a Perimadeian gold piece for each man and a red and purple hat for the team captain. As soon as the teams were in position he stood up, raised his cap in the air and let if fall.

It soon became evident that the competitors’ skill fell rather short of their enthusiasm. They weaved in and out like drunks, trod on each other’s heels and ended up running more sideways than straight, ultimately colliding with rather than crossing the rope. As far as Temrai was concerned, this was no bad thing. It demonstrated the need for practice as far as this particular skill was concerned, something he could stress when he made his closing speech. In the event, it was such a close-run thing that the decision had to be made by the referees he’d wisely positioned on the finishing line. Quite properly, Ceuscai’s team won in the end, which was just as well since it was his measurements Temrai had given to the feltcutters for the prize hat.

In common with most of the clan he allowed his attention to wander slightly during the athletic events; instead, he permitted himself the luxury of observing his people. It wasn’t something he’d ever done before, understandably enough. He was, after all, one of them, and had been all his life. Now, however, he felt an undefinable but definitely perceptible barrier between them and himself; partly because he was now the chief, but mostly because he’d been to the city and seen something different - something, he was forced to admit, that was in many ways better, or at least more advanced. After the stone and brick houses, the paved streets, the abundant water instantly available in every square, the tents of the clan seemed primitive, and he was no longer able to be content with primitive surroundings. The clan couldn’t be blamed for not having invented for itself the wonderful things they took for granted in the city; there’s nothing wrong or wicked about not being as clever as someone who’s cleverer than yourself, because some people are cleverer than others just as some are taller. But to know that better things were possible and not to want to have them; now surely that
was
stupid, possibly even wicked—

—Unless, of course, the price demanded for these wonderful things was more than they were worth; there, he suspected, was the answer he was looking for. It wasn’t a new idea. Quite the opposite - it had been the complaint of generations of self-justifying travellers returning from the city. He considered it.

The Perimadeians have gained all manner of wonders, but they have lost the best part of themselves; so said the travellers, smugly sipping mead and milk beside the fire under the bright, cold stars. They have become hard and selfish, despising lesser races and thinking themselves justified in plundering them in order to maintain their own reprehensible taste for unnatural luxury.

Yes, Temrai thought, well. Travellers tell many other stories, including encounters with enormous flying lizards and creatures with the bodies of men and the heads of animals, and some of us believe them and some don’t. I have seen the people of the city and they’re not very different from us, once you cut through the bark and the sapwood to the core. There were some differences, it’s true; they accepted strangers, even strangers from nations that were traditionally their direst enemies, without suspicion or hostility. If they said anything, it was more likely to be an interested enquiry about the truth of some wild rumour they’d heard (is it true you people all have seven wives? Is it true that where you come from men and women do, well, you know what, in the saddle and at the gallop? Do you really make your enemies’ skulls into drinking cups and cut off the scalps of men you kill in battle? And what’s it
really
like . . .?)

Another difference: in the city there was a whole neighbourhood occupied by doctors, whose business it was to try and keep alive people the clansmen wouldn’t bother with, because even if they got well they’d be too old or frail to be any use. The clan looked after its people, sure enough, but only up to the point where doing so was in the clan’s interest. In the city, keeping people alive was an end in itself. It went further than that, too. Here, apart from one or two people who had skills the rest didn’t, everyone did the same work and owned more or less the same amount of property, and no-one thought any more about it. In the city, it was different. More than that he couldn’t really say, because it was complicated; but since the poorest people there seemed to have more than most of us here in the plains, where was the harm in it? A man could stay where he was in the city’s infinitely complex hierarchy, or he could work hard and maybe raise himself three or four degrees in the perpetual order. Temrai couldn’t make up his mind about that, but at least he could recognise that there was a difference.

And now here he was, back again, looking at his people. The first thing that struck him was how many there were of them. It was nobody’s business to know exactly how many, and he certainly didn’t. At the start of a major war, it was the custom for the fighting men to file past the chief’s tent, each man putting an arrow in a basket as he passed. The baskets were then loaded onto packhorses, and used as a reserve supply for the main war-party. The last time this was done, some twelve or thirteen years ago, there had been over a hundred horses in the arrow train, but it was too long ago for him to remember how many baskets each horse carried, or the average number of arrows in each basket.

There were other ways in which he could work out the numbers, more or less - how long it took the clan to ford a particular river, how long the line of march was over a known stretch of straight road, how many hides went to the tanners each month (which would tell him how many steers were slaughtered, and thus how many mouths had to be fed), but he had to admit that he wasn’t interested enough to bother, and besides, it wasn’t his legitimate concern. Numbering his people would feel too much like counting his herds. It would imply that he owned them, which of course he didn’t. He’d heard it said that once upon a time in the city, men owned other men in the same way they owned livestock and tools, but he didn’t believe it, any more than he believed in the two-headed lions or the talking trees that were also supposed to have existed long ago when the world was young.