Sharps (13 page)

She was holding out her hand. He grabbed it, and was hauled to his feet. “Thanks,” he said.

“Go to hell,” she said, letting go of his hand. He staggered, and found his balance.

“Even so,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just froze. I couldn’t—”

“I’d sort of gathered that,” she said. “Hell of a time to get religion. You can kill a duly elected member of the Senior House, but show you some peasant with a hedging tool and suddenly you’re a pacifist. Next time you’re on your own, understood?”

Next time, he thought. “Are you all right?”

“Like you care.” She walked away, and Giraut could see past her. There were bodies lying on the ground, a number greater than ten. It occurred to him to wonder if any of the others hadn’t been as lucky as him. He looked round, and saw Addo, standing quite still, looking at the longsword he was holding; and beyond him Phrantzes sitting on the ground while Tzimisces did something with a bandage. They’d got away with it, apparently; no thanks to Giraut Bryennius.

Well, he thought, they’ll have to let us go home now.

He felt a sudden great need to apologise to somebody. The logical person would be Phrantzes, he decided, so he walked over to where he was sitting. Phrantzes looked up and nodded awkwardly (so he knew what’d happened, evidently).

“That ought to do it,” Tzimisces was saying. “It’ll be all right, it’s really just a scratch. Ah, Giraut, I was just coming to talk to you. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Giraut said. “Look, I’m really sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Tzimisces replied, his tone of voice cancelling out his words. “Happens to us all at some point. Extremely impressive intervention from the Bringas girl. Tongue like a razor, but she kept her head splendidly, I thought. I do believe she’ll prove to be a real asset to the project.”

Unlike someone else who didn’t need to be specified by name. “She saved my life.”

“Yes.” Tzimisces looked at him; he felt like he was being squeezed dry. “And to think I was worried she’d go all to pieces. Women can be tigers sometimes. Well, it looks like nobody’s too badly hurt. I’ll write a full report as soon as we get to Permia.”

“We’re still going to …”

“Of course.” He’d said the wrong thing. “As soon as the coach arrives. Now, unless anyone needs me for anything …”

“Excuse me.” Addo had materialised behind Tzimisces’ shoulder. Tzimisces turned round and smiled at him. “Excuse me,” Addo repeated, “but I was just wondering. Why were all the swords in the fencing box sharp?”

It was as though he had just punched Tzimisces in the face, but not hard enough to put him down. “Just as well for us they were, don’t you think?”

“Oh, absolutely.” Addo looked like somebody’s pet dog, but he was standing his ground. “I just thought, it’s rather strange. We should’ve been issued with foils, surely.”

“Ah well.” Tzimisces smiled again. He had perfect teeth, apart from one missing right at the front. “If I was as much of a true believer as I suppose I ought to be, I’d say it was a miracle. Being something of a sceptic, I prefer to think that there was a mistake at the office. Phrantzes,” he said, turning and looking straight at him, “you put in the requisition. You did specify foils, didn’t you?”

Phrantzes nodded.

“There you are, then. My guess is, they didn’t have any foils in stock in the armouries, so they sent us sharps instead. It doesn’t matter. We can get them bated when we reach Permia.”

He started to walk, pausing to nudge something out of the way with his foot. It was a head, with no body attached. Giraut just managed to make it to the corner of the blockhouse before he threw up.

“Are you all right?” Addo’s voice.

He nodded. “I’m fine,” he said. “I just never saw …”

“Of course. My fault, I’m afraid.” Addo made it sound like he’d broken a cup. “Only, there were two of them coming at me at once, and I had to hit out a bit. And I hadn’t realised the sword was sharp.”

“That’s perfectly all right,” Giraut heard himself say, and then add: “At least you didn’t freeze up, like I did. I think I owe you an apology.”

“My dear fellow, certainly not.” Addo moved an inch closer. “This isn’t the army, none of us signed up to fight to the death, so to speak. Actually, in a way it does you credit.”

Giraut looked at him. “Cowardice?”

“Being reluctant to take someone’s life. That’s hardly something to be ashamed of.” Addo stopped, and turned red. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t suppose you want to hear my opinion about anything. I imagine you’d prefer to forget all about it.”

Yes, Giraut thought, in roughly the same way I’d quite like to have wings. But yes, let’s forget all about it, and talk about the weather. “Did you hear what he said? We’re still going to Permia.”

Addo nodded. “I thought we would be. Tremendously important diplomatically speaking, and so forth. Look,” he went on, lowering his voice and leaning a bit closer, as though he was just about to suggest they sell their souls to the Devil. “Would you like a drink? Brandy,” he added. “I’ve got a small flask. It might, well, cheer you up a bit.”

“Yes,” Giraut said quickly. “Please,” he added. Addo handed him a small, exquisite silver flask, in the shape of a sitting dog. It had tiny blue sapphires for eyes. He fumbled out the stopper and swallowed four times. “Go ahead,” he heard Addo say, “finish it off. I don’t actually drink myself, so you’re more than welcome to it.”

There were two swallows left; then he handed back the flask. “Thanks,” he said. “I feel better now.”

“You’ve had a shock,” Addo said. “My father. He doesn’t drink either, but he always carried brandy with him, during the War. He said it did more good than most of the medical corps.”

The brandy was burning his throat where vomiting had made it raw. He nodded weakly. “I can believe it,” he said. Then, for no immediately clear reason apart from curiosity, he asked, “Were you in the War?”

Addo shook his head. “My father kept me off the draft,” he said. “My papers came shortly after my brother was killed.”

“Did you want to go?”

“No.” Addo’s face twisted into a painful grin. “For what it’s worth, I’m a pacifist. I don’t think war’s justifiable, ever. If there’s another one, I’ll go to jail rather than join up.”

With that, he walked away. Giraut propped himself up against the blockhouse wall. The brandy was making his head swim, and he wished he hadn’t drunk it. His clothes were still wet, clinging to him like the wife of a departing soldier, and the damp wool smell was disgusting. On the positive side, he told himself, I’m still alive. On the other page of the ledger, I’ve marked myself out indelibly as a coward, I’ve almost certainly mortally offended Addo, and my life’s been saved by a
girl
.

Later the sun came out, almost but not quite enough to dry his clothes. Nobody was talking; they stood or sat against the blockhouse wall, facing the direction a coach from the City would come from. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Suidas found some water, a dull brown trickle on the slope just below the blockhouse, but the rusty pan from the stable he filled with it sat undisturbed in the sun; nobody was quite that desperate, at least not yet. Tzimisces was writing something in a small brown book, with ink from an exquisite traveller’s inkstand that he’d called into being from the apparently limitless pockets of his coat, and an ivory-handled gold-nibbed pen. Two buzzards circled overhead for quite some time, but went away eventually. Addo and Iseutz started a game of chess. After half a dozen moves she lost a castle, immediately resigned and stalked away. Suidas went into the stable, and Giraut heard a lot of banging noises, the reason for which he couldn’t be bothered to speculate about. Phrantzes just sat, a short measure away from one of the dead bodies, staring at the road.

It was beginning to get dark when Giraut heard what he was sure was hooves on the metalled road. He sat up. It was notoriously difficult to judge these things, but he felt sure the sound was coming from behind them; the east, the other direction, the wrong way. He went over to Phrantzes, and said, “Did you hear something just now?”

Phrantzes shook his head. “But I’m slightly deaf on my left side,” he said. “My wife gets very impatient sometimes. What did you hear?”

“Sounded like horses,” Giraut said. “Of course, I could be wrong.”

Phrantzes broke his fixed eye contact with the road and turned his head a little. “I wasn’t expecting the coach to get here before morning, at the earliest,” he said. “Of course, our messenger may have run into a routine patrol, or maybe the relief garrison for this post. You’d have thought—”

“There it is again,” Giraut interrupted.

“You’re sure it’s horses?”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

Phrantzes nodded sharply, as if accepting a good offer. “It’s about time something went right,” he said. “I’ll tell Tzimisces.”

He stood up and walked away. Giraut stayed where he was. The sound he’d heard was definitely behind them; in which case, it was coming from the general direction of Permia. That made him shiver, although of course that was ridiculous. They were still well inside the territory of the Republic, with the whole of the Demilitarised Zone between them and their neighbour, with whom there was no cogent reason not to believe they were still at peace. Phrantzes was talking to Tzimisces, who carefully marked the place in his book and stoppered his inkwell before standing up. Suidas came out of the stables, with a bundle of smashed planks under his arm. “Did anybody just hear horses?” he called out.

This time, it was plain and unmistakable, the clatter of shod hooves on stone. “It’s from behind us,” Iseutz said. “That’s not right.”

“That’s just the wind playing tricks,” Phrantzes said. “Or it could be the garrison from here, coming back, if they went east.”

Giraut could think of other explanations, the most comfortable of which was that it was the bandits’ friends arriving with a wagon, to load up and carry away their expected takings.

“I think I’ll just take a walk over that way,” Tzimisces said quietly, and pocketed his book, pen case and inkwell. They watched him until he was out of sight on the eastern skyline. The sound was continuous now.

“We should get away from the buildings,” Suidas said. “They’ll see the coach, of course, but that can’t be helped. Best place would be the bank we slept under last night. It’ll be dark soon, so it should be all right.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Iseutz said; and then, Giraut guessed, the answer to her question dawned on her, and she went very pale. “You think …”

“Let’s just be sensible and get out of sight,” Suidas said. His voice was quiet and harsh, like a fine saw cutting slowly. “No, leave the weapons,” he added sharply, as Addo moved towards the packing case. “If it’s who I think it is, it’s quite important that we’re just civilians. Come on.”

They followed him to the bank and lay down, as they’d done the previous night. Giraut couldn’t see the road from where he was. The light was still good, although the sun was just about to set. There can’t be another war, he thought.

He heard someone close to him catch his breath, and a moment later a horseman appeared, roughly level with where Giraut lay. When the horseman was no more than five yards away, he stopped and shifted a little in his saddle, turning his head and shoulders to face the bank.

He rode a black mare with a single white star on its forehead, bigger than any horse Giraut had ever seen before. He was fully armoured – not the chainmail shirt and breeches that the Republic issued as standard, but the laced-together small steel plates of the Eastern Empire, flexible as linen, reckoned to turn arrows at point-blank range. On his thighs and knees he wore steel splints, with articulated steel shoes. At his cuffs and neck, Giraut could see the pale yellow fur lining of his coat, teased out to keep the steel from chafing; he also had a red wool scarf up to his chin. His tall conical helmet was made from a single piece of steel – too difficult for the smiths of the Republic, who riveted four smaller plates to a frame – and the edges were rolled and roped; the rivet heads that secured the lining were gilded, and he wore a foot-high plume of white horsehair that nodded gently even when he was still. He shivered slightly, and with his free hand pulled his scarf a little tighter round his neck. The small part of his face that was still visible between scarf and helmet was dark brown, the colour of polished and waxed mahogany; he had a thin line of moustache on his upper lip, and a small, neat black tuft on his chin. He was a Blueskin.

Well, Giraut thought, so we’re at war after all. At least it wasn’t the Aram Chantat, who never took prisoners. He felt like a child who’s inadvertently wandered into a room where the grown-ups are sitting, and they break off their serious, mysterious conversation and look at him. The saddlecloth was green velvet, he noticed, worn and dirty but fifteen nomismata a yard in the Cloth Market, if you could find any. In his left hand he held a long spear, with a blue-painted shaft.

The Blueskin was looking straight at him.

Giraut realised he was paralysed. It wasn’t fear of death; he knew what that felt like now, and the symptoms were subtly different. Besides, he’d faced death in the bell tower, and it hadn’t affected him nearly as strongly as the Blueskin’s stare. It was more the way he imagined he’d feel if he’d woken up and found an angel standing over him: awe and wonder and a kind of terror that wasn’t anything to do with possible harm to his body. He couldn’t move, because to move in the presence of such an entity would be an abomination, unless he was ordered to, in which case refusal would be an equally appalling sin. He felt as though he was waiting for a verdict.

“Excuse me,” the Blueskin said.

Nobody moved, though Giraut could feel a massive build-up of furious energy, like the air just before a thunderstorm, -somewhere to his right. The Blueskin frowned slightly.

“Excuse me,” he repeated, a little louder and slower, “but would you gentlemen happen to be Jilem Phrantzes’ party?”

He spoke in the most beautifully clear, pitch-perfect upper-class accent, the sort you only hear on the stage, or in a country castle. Well, of course he did. That was the accent of the Empire, which the nobility preserved as jealously as a saint’s shinbone in a gold casket. The voice itself was remarkable enough. The words simply didn’t make sense.