Sharps (62 page)

“Get back to bed. Now!” he snapped.

Gignomai did exactly as he was told, and stayed there until the noise in the yard had died down. Then he made his way down to the hall. Stheno and Luso were there, and Father, looking extremely irritable. Stheno was telling Father that the woodshed had caught fire; they’d tried to put it out but the fire had taken too good a hold by the time they got there and there had been nothing they could do. Luckily, the fire hadn’t spread, but it was still a disaster: half the winter’s supply of seasoned timber had gone up in flames, along with twelve dozen good fence posts. Father gave him a look that told him that domestic trivia of this nature wasn’t a good enough reason for disturbing the sleep of the head of the family, and went back to bed.

Next day, Stheno went through the ashes and found the twisted frame of a lantern. Some fool, he announced, had left a light burning in the woodshed, and a rat or something had knocked it over, and now they’d all be cold that winter. It would go hard, he implied, with the culprit if he ever found out who it was. But his enquiries among the farm hands produced a complete set of perfect alibis, and Stheno had too many other things to do to carry out a proper investigation.

The attacks on the chickens stopped, of course, but nobody noticed, having other things on their minds.

Gignomai wasn’t proud of what he’d done. Clearly, he hadn’t thought it through. On the other hand, he’d done what he had to, and the wolf, quite likely the last wolf on the Tabletop, was dead and wouldn’t kill any more chickens. That was important. The violation of the family property wouldn’t happen again, so there’d be no need for him to repeat his own mistake. Accordingly, he didn’t feel particularly guilty about it, either. It was a job that had needed doing, and he’d done it.

A little while later, when he thought it was all over, his sister came to him and said, “You know the night of the fire.”

“What about it?” Gignomai replied.

“I was in the kitchen,” she said. “I went down to get a drink of water, and when you came in, I hid and watched you climb out of the window.”

“Oh,” Gignomai said. “Have you told anyone?”

She shook her head. “Why did you burn down the woodshed?” she asked.

He explained. She looked at him. “That was really stupid,” she said.

He shrugged. “I killed a wolf,” he said. “How many kids my age can say that?”

She didn’t bother to reply. “I ought to tell Father,” she said.

“Go on, then.”

“But I won’t,” she said, after an agonising moment. “He’d just get mad, and then there’d be shouting and bad temper and everybody in a mood. I hate all that, specially when it goes on and on for days.”

“Fine,” Gignomai said. “Up to you, of course.”

“You might say thank you.”

“Thank you.”

“It was still a really stupid thing to do,” she said, and left the room.

After she’d gone he thought about it for a long time and, yes, she was right. But he’d done it, and it couldn’t be helped, and it had to be done. The only criticism he could find to make of himself was idleness and lack of foresight. What he should have done was stack brushwood in the old cider-house, which was practically falling down anyhow (Stheno was going to fix it up sometime, when he had a moment) and would’ve been no great loss to anybody.

Next time, he decided, I’ll make sure I think things through.

The Year When

H
is first real command were pigs. There were fourteen of them, quarter-grown light brown weaners, and it was his job to guard them while they foraged in the beech wood and keep them from straying. He dreaded it more than anything else. The men from the farm – proper stockmen who knew what they were doing – drove them up there from the house in the morning and led them back at night, but for the whole of the day they were his responsibility, and he was painfully aware that he had no control over them whatsoever.

Fortuitously, they were naturally gregarious animals and stuck together, generally too preoccupied with snuffling in the leaf mould to wander off and cause him problems. But he had an excellent imagination. What if something startled them? He knew how easily they spooked and once that happened and they started dashing about (they were deceptively fast and horribly agile) he knew he wouldn’t stand a chance. The whole litter would scatter and be lost among the trees, and that’d mean turning out the whole household to ring and comb the wood in a complex military operation that would waste a whole day, and it would be all his fault. The list of possible pig-startlers was endless: a careless roebuck wandering into the clearing and shying; a buzzard swooping down through the canopy; the crack of a dead tree falling without warning; Luso down in the long meadow, shooting his stupid gun. Or what if a wild boar decided to burst out of a briar tangle and challenge him for leadership of the herd?

The first half-dozen times he performed his wretched duty (“It’s time your brother started pulling his weight on the farm,” his father had pronounced. Why couldn’t they have told him to muck out the goose-house instead?) he’d spent the whole day at a breathless, stitch-cramped trot, trying to head off any pig that drifted more than a yard from the edge of the clearing, an exercise in counterproductive futility. It didn’t help that the beech wood was on a steep slope. Since he clearly couldn’t carry on like that for any length of time, he resolved to think the thing through and find an answer. There had to be one.

In the long barn, he knew where to find a large oak bucket, which everybody else had apparently forgotten about (the farm was crammed with such things, perfectly good and useful but long since mislaid and replaced). He also knew where they kept the yellow raddle. He got up very early one morning, mixed a pint of raddle in a derelict saucepan and used it to paint the bucket, which he carried up to the clearing in the wood. Next morning, he stole half a sack (as much as he could carry – actually, slightly more) of rolled barley and took that up as well, hiding it safe and dry in the crack of a hollow tree.

The idea was simple and based on sound principles of animal husbandry he’d learned from watching the stockmen. Three times a day, he fed the pigs from the yellow bucket. He knew the pigs loved rolled barley above all things – the sight of fourteen of them scrambling over each other and scrabbling across each other’s heads to get into the bucket was really quite disturbing – and he made sure that each feed was preceded by a distinct and visible ritual, because pigs understand that sort of thing. When he walked to the foot of the hollow tree, they all stopped rooting and snuffling and watched him, still and tense as pointing dogs. When the sack appeared, they started barking and squealing. As soon as he moved, holding the sack, there’d be a furious torrent of pigs round his ankles, and he’d have to kick them out of the way to get to the bucket to fill it.

A great success, whose only drawback was that it was strictly illegal – he’d requisitioned equipment and drawn restricted supplies without authority, a serious crime, the consequences of which didn’t bear thinking about, but the risk of detection, given the way the farm was run, was acceptably low. He took great pains to hide the yellow bucket when not in use, and was almost excessively careful in planning his raids on the rolled-barley bin. It was, however, a significant part of his nature that he didn’t believe in perfection. The system worked just fine, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be improved.

The most beneficial improvement would be doing without the barley, but he knew that wouldn’t work, or not for long. He could rely on the squealing of the main body of pigs to draw in any outlying stragglers in an instant, but wouldn’t it be better if he could train them, by association, to come to a feeding call of his own? The stockmen did it with the cows. All they had to do was call out, and the herd came quick-shambling to them right across the forty-acre meadow. He tried various calls, but the pigs just looked at him as if he was mad. In desperation, he tried singing. It worked.

His mother had once told him he had a fine singing voice (but then, she’d told Luso that he was handsome and Pin that she was pretty). He wasn’t quite sure what “fine” was supposed to mean in this context. If it meant loud, Mother’s words were a statement of undeniable fact, not a compliment. He thought he sang rather well, but he was realistic about his own judgement. In any event, the pigs seemed to like it.

To begin with, he restricted himself to a few short simple halloos and volleys, the sort of thing Luso used to communicate with the hounds ever since he’d lost the hunting-horn in the river. They worked perfectly well. By the fifth note out of eight, all the pigs came running, even if the sack was still in the tree (though he knew he had to keep faith and fulfil the contract by feeding them or the whole procedure would fail). Nevertheless, he felt the need for improvement or, at least, further elaboration. He extended the halloos into verses from the usual ballads, and the pigs didn’t seem to mind. But he didn’t like ballads much, they were plain and crude, and the words seemed a bit ridiculous taken out of their narrative context. So he began to invent words and music of his own, using forms from his mother’s music book. He made up serenades to call them, estampidas for while they were feeding (the only form boisterous enough to be heard over the sound of happy pigs) and aubades for the minute or so of forlorn sniffing and searching before the pigs managed to accept that all the barley was really gone. Gradually, as he elaborated and improved his compositions, the singing became an end in itself rather than a function of practical swineherding, and the terrifying chore blossomed into a pleasure.

For the afternoon feed of the day in question he’d worked up what he considered was his finest effort yet. He’d started with the basic structure of the aubade, by its very nature a self-limiting form – but he’d extended it with a six-bar lyrical coda that recapitulated the opening theme transposed into the major key with a far livelier time signature. He’d run though the coda many times during the day, sitting with his back to the fattest, oldest beech in the glade. A wolf tree, the men from the farm called it. It had been there before the rest of the wood grew up, and instead of pointing its branches directly at the sky, it spread them wide, like his mother making a despairing gesture, blocking the light from the surrounding area so that nothing could grow there, and thus forming the clearing which generations of pigs had extended by devastation into a glade. When the angle of the beams of light piercing the canopy told him it was time for the feed, he got up slowly, brushed himself free of leaf mould and twigs, and hauled the yellow bucket out from its secure storage in a holly clump. Three pigs looked up, their ears glowing translucent against the slanting light. He grinned at them, and lugged the bucket into the middle of the clearing. Then he walked slowly to the hollow tree and felt inside the crack for the barley sack. Two more pigs lifted their heads, still diligently chewing. He cleared his throat with a brisk cough and began to sing.

La doca votz ai auzida
…

(Lyrics weren’t his strong point. They had to be in the formal language of Home, or he might just as well sing ballads and, in theory, he was fluent in it as befitted a boy of noble birth albeit in exile. In practice, he could pick his way through a few of the simpler poems and homilies in the books, and say things like “My name is Gignomai, where is this place, what time is dinner?” As far as writing formal verse went, however, he hadn’t got a hope, so he tended to borrow lines from real poems and bend them till they sort of fitted.)

De rosinholets savatges
—

He stopped suddenly, the next phrase congealed in his throat. A string of horsemen had appeared through the curtain of leaves and were riding up the track towards him. In the lead was his brother Luso, followed by half a dozen of the farm men and one riderless horse.

His first impression was that they’d been out hawking, because he could see a bundle of brown-feathered birds, tied at the neck, slung across the pommel of Luso’s saddle. But there was no hawk on Luso’s wrist. Had Luso lost the hawk? If so, there’d be open war at dinner. The hawk had come on a ship from Home; it had cost a fortune. There had been the most appalling row when Luso turned up with it one day, but Father had forgiven Luso because a hawk was, after all, a highly suitable possession for a gentleman. If Luso had contrived to mislay the wretched thing …

Luso looked at him without smiling. “What was that awful noise?” he said.

There was no way he could explain. “Sorry,” he said.

They hadn’t been hawking. They were wearing their padded shirts, with horn scales sewn into the lining. Two of the men had wide, shiny dark red stains soaking through their shirts, Luso had a deep cut just under his left eye, and they all looked exhausted. The birds on Luso’s saddle were chickens.

“Keep the noise down, will you?” Luso said. He was too tired to be sarcastic. For Luso to pass up an opportunity like this, something had to be wrong. The men rode by without saying anything. Their horses had fallen into a loose, weary trudge, too languid to spook the pigs. He didn’t bother trying to hide the barley sack behind his legs; Luso didn’t seem interested. Under the chicken feathers, he could see the holsters for the snapping-hen pistols. The ball pommel of one pistol was just visible. The other holster was empty.

When they’d gone, he performed the feeding ritual quickly and in silence. It worked just as well without music. When the swineherds showed up to drive the pigs back to the farm, they were quiet and looked rather scared. He didn’t ask what the matter was.

Father was angry about the man getting killed, but he was absolutely furious about the loss of the pistol, so furious that he didn’t mention it at all, which was a very bad sign. Gignomai heard the shouting before they were called in to dinner – that was all about the man’s death, how it’d leave them short-handed at the worst possible time, how Luso had a sacred duty by virtue of his station in life not to expose his inferiors to unnecessary and frivolous dangers – not a word about the pistol, but it was plain as day from what was said and what wasn’t that the real issue wasn’t something that could be absolved through sheer volume of abuse. Dinner was, by contrast, an eerily silent affair, with everybody staring at their hands or their plates. When the main course was served, however, Father looked up and said, in a terrible voice, “What the hell is this supposed to be?”