Part 11 (1/2)

Good armour takes the blow, Bardas repeated to himself, bad armour pa.s.ses it on. 'So this is what you do here?' he said.

Anax grinned from ear to ear. 'I know,' he said, 'it's a b.l.o.o.d.y funny way to earn a living. I mean, take yourself, you're clearly an intelligent man, you've been around, been in the wars, I dare say - well of course you have, you're a hero, I was forgetting. You look at that -' he pointed to one piece of sc.r.a.p armour '- and then you look at that.' He indicated another, just as badly mangled. 'And you say to yourself, they're both busted, I guess they both failed. Wrong. It's a philosophy, you see,' he went on, wiping his nose on the inside of his wrist. 'It all fails, you see; there's nothing, no piece of munitions-grade plate in the whole world, that can stand up to Bollo here and the big, big hammer. It's how it fails that matters. And that's what I can't get them to understand, ' he added, a tiny spurt of anger showing in his pale eyes. 'Because unless you're me, or someone else who's been destroying and wrecking stuff day in, day out, all his life, long as he can remember, you can't even understand there's a good way to get smashed into sc.r.a.p, and there's a bad way. Your generals, now, and your bra.s.s in the provincial office, they say, we want a pattern that won't fail, period. And I say, all right; I can tell them how to make it, specifications, gauges and angles and heat treatment and all the rest of it, but you couldn't afford it and n.o.body could ever wear it. You want practical armour, you've got to come to an understanding with Bollo here and the number-four felling axe. And he'll sc.r.a.p it, every time.'

Bardas nodded, trying to look as if he'd understood something. 'And you say it's the sound it makes?' he said, but the old man just looked impatient.

'That's just one test,' he said. 'One criterion for one test. Believe me, we don't just bash on the stuff with hammers and axes. Oh no. We shoot at it with longbows and crossbows, we squash it between rollers, there's the puncture test, the shear test, the breaking-strain test, the crush test, the flex test - you don't want to know all the different ways we can prove a piece, if anybody ever gave us a piece that got that far. And the point I'm trying to make is, it always fails - if it didn't fail, it'd be a pretty useless test. We deal in extremes here, Mister Hero; otherwise there wouldn't be any point.'

Anax suddenly stopped talking; he was staring at something. 'What is it?' Bardas asked.

'Duff copper rivets,' Anax replied, as if drawing Bardas' attention to a widening crack in the sky. 'Look at that, will you?' He pointed with a long, brittle-looking finger. 'See there, the rivets in that cop. Shorn off.'

Bardas made a show of looking. 'All right,' he said. 'What's the significance of that?'

Anax sighed. 'It's the whole point of copper rivets,' he said. 'Your copper rivet, when you put it under a strain it can't handle, it stretches - look, here, like this.' He prodded a derelict gauntlet with his toe. 'That's what it's meant to do. Now look at these here, on the cop. Torn the heads off. So that lot's no good, not that anybody's going to want to know that. It'd mean junking the whole batch, probably a hundred thousand rivets; if we do that, there's some clerk in an office in Procurement who'll have to answer for it. But he doesn't want to do that, and n.o.body really believes me anyway, so they won't take any notice. I tell you, if this wasn't what I do, I wouldn't do it any more.'

Bollo, who'd been standing by with the axe over his shoulder, seemed to have lost patience; quite unexpectedly, he whirled the axe round and brought it down on the point of the Iron Man's shoulder.

'Sharp clunk,' Bardas said. 'Not good?'

'Terrible,' replied Anax sadly. 'But what they'll do is, they'll issue double padding to go inside the pauldron cup, and then it won't seem so bad; at least anybody who wears the stuff won't wind up with a smashed collar-bone. But it'll be wrong. And I'll know.'

'I suppose so,' Bardas said evenly.

'Well of course,' Anax said. 'I always know.'

Theudas Morosin had found a s.h.i.+p; that is, he'd spoken to a man, a dealer in bulk almonds, who'd been talking to the captain of another s.h.i.+p a week or so before, who'd happened to mention that once he'd found a buyer for his cargo of ebony bal.u.s.ter-rail blanks from Colleon (he had no idea how he'd come to have a hold full of thirty-inch sections of ebony suitable for making bal.u.s.ter rails out of, a.s.suming you had a lathe and a market for ebony bal.u.s.ter rails; price had been a part of the equation, but there'd been more to it than that) he was going to use the proceeds to buy a consignment of seven hundred sacks of duck-belly feathers he'd been promised by a man he knew in Ap' Helidon; the deal being, he'd have to go to Perimadeia (what used to be Perimadeia) to collect them. 'Although,' (he'd said, apparently), 'it may not be that much of a deal, at that, because who's to say how big a sack is?' The man Theudas had been talking to had then asked this other man, he didn't say how big the sacks were? And the man had replied no, but it can't be that important, because unless he was saying sack when really he meant bag, seven hundred sacks, at that price, is still a lot of feathers.

'I see,' Gannadius replied when his nephew had finished explaining all this. 'And you're hoping that when this man, the one who's buying the feathers, comes to collect his cargo, he'll take us with him.'

'Yes,' Theudas said. 'And then we'll be home again. Well, what do you think?'

Gannadius considered his reply. 'It depends,' he said. 'If they're small sacks, maybe he won't bother. If they're big sacks, there may well not be room for us on the boat. And didn't you say all this depends on him finding a buyer for a s.h.i.+pload of ebony stair-rods?'

'Bal.u.s.ter rails,' Theudas amended. 'Oh, come on. I'd have thought you'd be pleased.'

Gannadius scratched his nose. 'I'm just trying to tell you not to get your hopes up, that's all. And didn't you say this man comes from Ap' Helidon? I don't remember you saying he was going to take the feathers to the Island when - if - he got them. I don't really want to go to Ap' Helidon, if it's all the same to you. If it's where I think it is, it's part of the Empire. We'd be worse off than we are here.'

'No, we wouldn't.' Theudas folded his arms and looked away. 'Anywhere would be better than here. Here is nowhere.'

Outside the tent somewhere a man was singing, while a couple of other men accompanied him on a pipe and some kind of stringed instrument. The words didn't seem to make much sense - Gra.s.shopper sitting on a sweet-pepper vine

Gra.s.shopper sitting on a sweet-pepper vine

Gra.s.shopper sitting on a sweet-pepper vine

And along comes a chicken and he says, 'You're mine'

- but the music was fast and cheerful, and the men sounded like they were enjoying making it; there were worse noises, both outside and inside Gannadius' head. 'There'll be a s.h.i.+p,' he said sleepily, 'sooner or later. We've just got to be patient, that's all. What we don't want to do is go blundering about the western seaboard just for the sake of doing something. For one thing, I might die, and how are you going to explain that to Athli?'

That just made Theudas more irritable. 'I don't see what that's got to do with anything. And what's all this stuff about dying? You aren't even ill, you're just lazy.'

Gannadius smiled. 'That nice lady doctor wouldn't agree with you. She says I still need plenty of rest, after what I've been through.'

'Oh really? And what was that, exactly? I don't seem to remember anything all that dreadful. I mean, I was there too, and I'm not lying on my back groaning all the time.'

'All right,' Gannadius replied, laughing. 'All right. If your duck-feather man really does show up, and if he's going our way and if he agrees to take us and if there's room on his s.h.i.+p, we'll go. It'll be a comfortable ride, sitting on all those feathers.'

Theudas stood up. 'I'm going for a walk,' he said, 'before I lose my temper.'

It was bright outside the tent; so bright and hot that n.o.body was moving about. Instead, they were lying in whatever shade they could find. The three men who'd been making that awful noise had stopped now, thank G.o.ds; they were lounging in the shadow of a large timber frame they'd been working on, pa.s.sing a big jug of some sort of drink from hand to hand, and eating nuts from a pot.

'Your friend,' one of them called out as Theudas walked past. 'How's he doing?'

Theudas stopped. 'Oh, he's all right,' he replied awkwardly.

'That's good.' The man was beckoning him over; it would be difficult not to refuse. Hate them quietly, Gannadius had said. Theudas went over and sat beside them. 'Is it true what they're saying?' the man asked.

Theudas stiffened a little. 'I don't know,' he said. 'What are they saying?'

The man laughed and handed Theudas the jug. 'That he's a wizard,' he said. 'One of the Shastel wizards. Well, is it true?'

Theudas nodded. 'Though really they aren't wizards,' he said. 'Actually, there's no such thing as wizards. They're scholars.'

'Whatever.' The man seemed to regard the distinction as trivial. 'Then it must be true, what I've heard,' he went on. 'The Shastel wizards are going to help us win the war.'

Theudas frowned. 'What war?'

'The war against the Empire,' the man said. 'King Temrai and the Shastel wizards are forming an alliance, so that when the Empire attacks one of us, the other joins in too. It's about time,' he went on. 'I mean, fun's fun, but it's high time somebody took this thing seriously.'

Theudas' frown grew deeper. 'I didn't know there was going to be a war,' he said.

'Of course there's going to be war,' said one of the other men, the one who'd been playing the pipe. 'Because they've taken Ap' Escatoy at last. Now they're coming after us.'

'Or Shastel,' the third man interrupted.

'Or Shastel,' agreed the piper. 'Which is why we need to make an alliance with the wizards. n.o.body else is going to help us, after all. n.o.body else is left.'

Theudas handed the jug to the piper, hoping n.o.body would notice he hadn't drunk any of what was in it; cider, he suspected, and he'd always hated cider, ever since he was a boy. They'd drunk nothing else in Perimadeia, and now the plainsmen had taken to it as well. 'What's this you're making?' he asked, hoping to change the subject.