The Belly of the Bow (39 page)

When she’d left him, rather melodramatically, just before the fall of Perimadeia, she’d believed for some time that she was three parts in love with him, and when someone had tapped her on the shoulder on the quay at Scona, and the someone had turned out to be Bardas Loredan, she’d told herself that yes, now she knew for sure what it was she’d been feeling for him. Here and now, in the Mesoge, she wasn’t so sure. The differences in him were subtle and apparently contradictory. For one thing he looked younger; he held his head up straighter, talked more, volunteered information instead of waiting to be asked. There was something almost boyish about the way he was showing off his home to his friends from Away. But at the same time he seemed to have diminished. He still spoke in the same way, with his usual inflections and turns of phrase, but in everything he said about the Mesoge and its people there seemed to be an underlying note of involuntary, almost grudged respect, so that every time he criticised something he was acknowledging that he was wrong to do so, and that his opinions were therefore worthless.
This is how it’s done here; it’s not how I’d do it; therefore I must be wrong
. Athli found this both unsettling and distasteful, and naturally began to wonder whether in fact she knew him at all, or whether the man she’d assumed she was in love with had never in fact existed. Thinking about it objectively, she realised that when she thought of Bardas, she saw him in her mind’s eye as a striking figure standing on the floor of the courthouse in Perimadeia, sideways on and with his sword-arm extended in the guard of the Old fence, or as a lost and angry man slumped on a bench in a tavern, drinking hard after an easy victory. Of course, she’d never really seen him as a soldier, certainly not as a bowyer or a farm boy, only as a fencer, a man alone in the middle. It was quite possible that she’d made a mistake. Maybe they just didn’t have love here, like they didn’t have curtains or decorated pottery, and so loving a Mesoge man was actually impossible. After all, love wouldn’t help you squeeze an extra four measures of barley out of a stony terrace or get a good edge on a badly tempered scythe-blade, so why would they give it house-room?

‘Do they really eat thrushes?’ she asked.

Bardas nodded. ‘We smear the branches of trees and bushes with lime,’ he said. ‘They perch and their feet stick, and all you have to do is pull them off and put them in a covered basket. Roasted, they’re not bad. And,’ he added, with a sideways glance at the boy, ‘it makes a welcome change from rabbit.’

The boy groaned, and Bardas laughed; a father teasing his son, Athli decided, and she wondered if that was one of the things that had made him decide to come back here; that if he was to be responsible for the boy, then the boy had to be brought up properly, in the Mesoge fashion. In all the years they’d known each other in Perimadeia, he’d mentioned home and his father three, maybe four times. Now she had enough information to draw a full mental picture of Clidas Loredan, who had apparently been everything a Mesoge father should be: wise, short-tempered, exacting, impatient with failure, able to turn his hand to anything, practical, realistic and (Athli added, with a malicious grin) doomed. It didn’t help that there were quite a few things about the Mesoge that she personally found highly amusing, though she knew for a fact that Bardas wouldn’t see the joke.

For a time it seemed as if they’d reach the wooded crest and the valley below it before nightfall on the fourth day. But, at the last moment, the Bailiff’s Drove suddenly ceased to exist and melted away into an overgrown lane too narrow to get the wagon down. Bardas swore and backed up the horses - there wasn’t room to turn round - as far as the last turning off they’d passed, which led them off to the east round the brow of another small hill. When the sun set and they put the canopy over the wagon for the night, the wooded crest appeared to be just as far away as it had been at noon, albeit that they were seeing it from a slightly different angle.

‘We’ll be there tomorrow,’ Bardas said cheerfully as he lit the fire. It was colder than it had been the previous evening, and Athli wished she’d brought more than one blanket. ‘I know this place, some cousins of ours used to be the tenants here, though they had to give up and move on. Just over the hill, on the slope, is where the landlord made them plant a vineyard. It didn’t come to anything, of course, but the landlord insisted and they wasted a hell of a lot of time over it. Apparently he’d read a book about viticulture and was convinced he could cover the slopes of these hills with vines and make a fortune. Unfortunately, he never actually finished the book, so he missed the bit about dry, well-drained soil. In the end he let us pull them up. The vinewood made pretty good toolhandles, as I recall.’

Athli looked up. ‘Is that how these people look at everything,’ she asked, ‘in terms of what it can be made into?’

Bardas looked at her curiously. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ he replied. ‘The last couple of years I’ve been walking round Scona and every time I pass a tree I say Yes or No, depending on whether I can make bows out of it or not. It’s instinctive, I guess; is this thing likely to be any use to me or not? Can I make something out of it? You do the same; you look at the rolls of cloth in the market and think, how much would they go for on the Island and what can I get them for? It’s human nature.’

Athli shook her head. ‘In a market, yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what markets are for. But I don’t go around weighing up everything I see as a potential source of profit, or pricing everything as I go, like an auctioneer’s clerk.’

Bardas shrugged. ‘I suppose it depends on what you’ve trained yourself to notice,’ he replied. ‘But I think that that’s what people do, its the essence of being human. You take pieces of junk - a bit of tree, or some lumps of iron ore - and you make them into something useful and good.’

‘Even if they were perfectly good as they were?’ Athli queried. ‘Like the thrushes?’

Bardas laughed. ‘Maybe, but they aren’t doing
me
any good just flying around in the air and going tweet-tweet. Surely all of life’s about change; how we change things and how things change us. Otherwise we’d eat grass and sleep standing up. That was always the City mentality,’ he went on, turning his head away and looking at the hillside. ‘Everybody in Perimadeia was involved in making things, one way or another. They sat on a rock surrounded by sea and turned everything they could lay their hands on into something useful or valuable. Useful to them, of course - they tended to regard anything they couldn’t use as trash and a nuisance, which is how they came to get on the wrong side of Temrai and his people. Here in the Mesoge we’re similar, but we tend not to muck about with people, just things. Hence, no wars.’

Athli decided that she didn’t want to continue with the discussion. ‘One thing they can’t make here,’ she said, ‘and that’s a decent road. But then, if you don’t ever go anywhere, what do you need roads for? Pass me the bread-bag, please, I’m starting to feel hungry.’

‘And no rabbit,’ added the boy. ‘Please.’

‘Or thrushes,’ Athli said. ‘Or squirrels or weasels or frogs or any other free delicacies from Mother Nature’s larder. Just bread and cheese and some of that apple chutney will do me.’

‘Are you sure?’ Bardas said, with a concerned look on his face. ‘I bet you that if I looked around for a minute or so I could find you something to go with it - a few beetles, maybe, or a handful of woodlice. Though personally I prefer my woodlice marinaded in honey, with just a faint garnish of chives—’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Athli said.

 

‘You again.’

‘That’s right,’ Gorgas said cheerfully, ‘me again. No,’ he added, as the warder started to close the door, ‘leave it. She’s free to go.’

The warder didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. His face reminded Gorgas of the bas reliefs of allegorical subjects that City architects loved to decorate the top of arches with: all melodrama and action, with every face registering extremes of graphic emotion. Any archtop in Perimadeia would have been pleased to have the warder up there, radiating the very essence of Relief and Deliverance From Tribulation. Gorgas denied himself the smile.

‘You’re kidding,’ said Iseutz. ‘She’s letting me go?’

‘That’s right. Normally I’d say get your things together, but I really can’t imagine anybody wanting to take anything out of here except to burn it.’ Now he smiled. ‘Present company excepted, of course.’

‘Witty, Uncle Gorgas, witty. It’s nice to think that when you’re a beggar scratching a living on the street corners of Shastel, you’ll have a valuable talent like that to fall back on.’

Gorgas nodded gravely. ‘Clearly it runs in the family,’ he said. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? You can go. Now. Soon as you like.’

She shook her head. ‘Not till I know what’s involved,’ she said. ‘You don’t expect me to believe that you and my mother have had a sudden change of heart and realised the error of your ways, do you? It’s some sort of game, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, for gods’ sakes. Get out of here, will you, before I change my mind.’

Iseutz grinned at him, leant against the wall, slid down it and squatted on her heels. ‘The more you want me to do something, Uncle Gorgas, the harder I’ll fight not to do it. There now, do you think I’ll be the first person in history ever to be thrown
out
of jail?’

Gorgas sighed and settled himself comfortably on the bed, lying on his back with his hands behind his head. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘there is a certain appeal to this place. I can see how you could get used to it; it’d be so easy to wallow in that feeling of the worst having already happened. When you’ve reached that point, of course, there’s absolutely nothing left to be afraid of. It must be wonderful not to be afraid of anything any more.’ He yawned. ‘Shut the door on your way out, there’s a good girl.’

Iseutz scrambled up and stood over him, her arms folded. ‘Oh, there’s plenty to be afraid of in a place like this,’ she said. ‘Like the thought that you’re never going to get out of here. The thought that they might even
bury
you in here - or I suppose they’ve got a pit or a wellshaft they sling the bodies down. Sometimes I think about that, and I run over to the door and bash on it till my wrists bleed, yelling for them to let me out. I don’t like it in here, Uncle, I don’t like it one little bit. But I’m not leaving till you tell me why.’

‘Please yourself,’ Gorgas muttered drowsily. ‘It’s no big secret. I’ve been on at Niessa to let you out ever since she put you in here, and now, bless her heart, she’s agreed. Simple as that. I expect she got sick and tired of the sound of my voice, the way I’m sick and tired of yours.’

She didn’t move, just went on looking down at him. ‘So I can go, can I? Go wherever I like?’

‘Mhm.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘And what if I tell you I’m going straight to Briora - that’s the name of the village, isn’t it? - to find Uncle Bardas and kill him?’

‘You’re welcome to try.’

‘Really?’ She frowned. ‘And you won’t try and stop me?’

‘You can give it your very best shot if you like. It won’t get you very far, but that’s your business. You go right ahead.’

She knelt down beside him, and he noticed how graceful the movement had been. ‘Come on, Uncle Gorgas, be a sport, tell me what you’re up to. Please,’ She folded her arms, rested her cheek on them and smiled.

‘For gods’ sakes,’ Gorgas snapped, ‘leave it alone, will you?’ It wasn’t right to see her acting girlish, acting her age. She looked like a monster, with her matted hair, thin, bony arms, hands unnaturally large; there were white scars along the blades of her hands, from the base of the little finger to the projecting bones at her wrists. ‘Get away from me, will you? You’re disgusting.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied gravely. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

‘For the last time, nothing’s going on.’

‘Then why are you letting me go, when the first thing I’ll do is . . .’

‘No, you won’t,’ Gorgas said angrily, ‘because he’s not here. He’s gone. Left Scona. And before you ask, I don’t have a clue where, and that’s the truth.’

‘I see.’ She looked steadily at him, her eyes very large and round and brown; then she spat in his face. Gorgas shuddered and slapped her across the cheek, striking her on her hard, fleshless cheekbone so hard that she lost her balance and fell over backwards.

I’m sorry,’ Gorgas said immediately, ‘I didn’t mean to do that, you just . . .’

‘You were provoked,’ she said, as he got up from the floor. ‘My fault. Really, Uncle Gorgas, I don’t have any quarrel with you. But why did you let him go?’

Gorgas shrugged. ‘He wanted to go, and I couldn’t stop him. Simple as that.’

‘And now me. All the baby chicks flying the coop, Uncle Gorgas. I expect Mother’s livid.’

‘She’s not best pleased.’ He stood up. ‘Look, are you all right? I didn’t mean to hit so hard, it’s just - well, things are getting to me and I took it out on you. I shouldn’t have done that.’

‘It’s all right, really.’ Iseutz smiled, and Gorgas noticed that her eye was already beginning to swell. ‘You know, part of you is a decent human being. That’s the strange thing about you. In spite of the really incredible things you did, you’re not really a monster either. You know, I used to lie here thinking about that - what sort of person could do something like that, murder his own father without a moment’s hesitation? Well, obviously a monster, I thought, something more and less than human. But I don’t see that somehow.’

Gorgas slumped against the wall and rubbed his cheeks with the palms of his hands. ‘It was a mistake,’ he said. ‘I made a mistake. People do, you know. And the stupid part of it is, the whole thing only took - what, three minutes, four at the most. True, there was all that stuff with Niessa and the City boys before, but so what? Pimping for your sister’s part of growing up in the Mesoge, it’s one of the things you do for a little extra money when you’re young, like scaring crows or picking blueberries on the moors. No, when you analyse it rationally, it was a few minutes, less time than it takes to boil a kettle. Everything else bad I’ve done in my life has been in the normal course of business, the sort of thing you’re never really ashamed of, deep down; there was just one thing I did, and that’s all, but it’s the only thing about me anybody ever sees. I’m Gorgas the patricide, the man who killed his own father. They talk about me as if it was what I did for a living, like I do it every day; like I kiss my wife and children goodbye every morning and go off to spend the day murdering members of my family. And that’s not me. That’s putting me on a level with some lunatic who kills people for no reason and keeps on doing it till someone stops him, or an assassin who murders people for money.’ He stopped short, and shook his head. ‘The gods only know why I’m telling you this,’ he said. ‘Ask anybody who knows me, I don’t lie about what happened but I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, either.’