Part 15 (1/2)

When he got back to the store, Furio went straight to the back store room. As usual, there was an open bottle of white brandy; today, a quarter full. He sloshed brandy over his blistered hands and winced sharply.

His aunt had left him some dinner (mutton stew in a bowl covered with a dishcloth). He devoured it so quickly that later he couldn't remember having eaten, then limped out to the porch. Teucer was there.

”Good day at work?” she asked.

He wasn't in a Teucer mood. ”Fine,” he said. ”We're making excellent progress. Gignomai's turned the operation into a partners.h.i.+p.”

”Equal shares?”

”Not quite.”

She shrugged. ”It's a really stupid idea,” she said. ”As soon as Home finds out, they'll send a platoon of soldiers and shut you down. You'll be lucky if you're not arrested.”

Furio turned his head. There was a light in the upper window of the livery. ”Unlikely,” he said. ”For a start, they won't have a chance to find out till the spring s.h.i.+p comes, by which time we'll be up and running, and people will have started getting stuff from us-cheaper, better stuff than they get off the s.h.i.+ps. Uncle Marzo will be raking in money from his end of the deal, and the farmers who'll be buying the stuff won't be in any hurry to squeal to the government. And if they do find out, we're not on colony land. They won't risk a war with the savages.”

”You quoted all that from memory,” she said. ”I'm impressed.”

He felt a little surge of anger, partly with her, partly with himself (though ”risk a war with the savages” was the only direct direct quote from Gignomai). ”You lay off him,” he said. ”He's my friend.” quote from Gignomai). ”You lay off him,” he said. ”He's my friend.”

She yawned. ”I think he's getting bored with you.”

”Thank you for sharing your opinion with me.” He s.h.i.+vered, like a horse trying to dislodge a horse-fly. It didn't get rid of her. ”I expect you're frozen, sitting out in the cold night air. You'd be better off indoors in the warm.”

”I've got my shawl,” she said equably.

He remembered how he'd felt the first time he saw her. Hard to believe, now that he knew her better, and a valuable warning against judging by first impressions.

”He's up to something,” she said abruptly. ”And he's going to drag you into it, and you'll be sorry.”

He made himself laugh. ”Is that based on hard evidence, or your unique insight into human nature?”

”You don't have to listen to me if you don't want to. But you know I'm right.”

”You're just miserable,” Furio snapped. Then inspiration prompted him to add, ”You're down on him because he doesn't fancy you. Well?”

She shrugged. It was her best gesture, and he guessed she knew it. ”What I think about it isn't the issue. You're angry because you know I'm right.”

The proper course of action would have been to go inside and leave her there. Instead, he said, ”Up to what?”

”I don't know. You should, you're his friend. Think about it. Why would he have a secret scheme and not tell you about it?”

”He doesn't have a secret scheme. Unless you count liberating the Colony.”

”That's not a secret,” she replied imperturbably. ”That's just something he hasn't told everybody about yet. Well, they'll have to know, won't they? You can't have a revolution and not tell people.”

”You have a wonderful imagination,” Furio said. ”You ought to try and find something useful to do with it.”

She gave him a sad, sweet smile, stood up and went into the house. In the distance, a fox barked. The light had gone out in the window of the livery.

The hardest week of his life, no question about that. He'd appropriated a pair of gentlemen's kid gloves from a box of fancy goods Uncle Marzo had bought sight unseen from a s.h.i.+p's captain and regretted ever since. They quickly wore into large holes, but they protected his hands from the worst of it. The partners noticed him wearing them, of course, but he never managed to find out what they said about him when his back was turned. He tried his very best to be useful and occasionally succeeded. Gignomai didn't talk to him much, he was far too busy, issuing orders, setting the pace. The partners didn't say things about him when his back was turned. Of course, Furio reflected, that's one of the marks of your true n.o.bility: leaders.h.i.+p, leading by example, never asking the men to do something you can't or wouldn't do yourself.

”Where did you learn to saw a straight line?” he asked Gignomai, on one of the rare occasions when they talked.

”Here,” Gignomai replied. ”Had to, no choice in the matter. I got Senza to show me once and made sure I took it all in. Actually it's not hard, once you've got the hang of it.”

Furio couldn't make a saw do what he wanted it to no matter how hard he tried. ”I thought you had to be brought up in the trade from childhood,” he said. ”That's what people've told me.”

Gignomai grinned. ”Well, they would,” he said. ”They want you to pay them for doing a job you can do yourself.”

At some point Uncle Marzo lost his wonderful eyegla.s.ses, the ones Gignomai had given him, the ones he'd stolen from his father. Uncle had the whole house and store turned upside down, but there was no sign of them. A homeless man who sometimes did odd jobs at the livery was suspected, since he'd come in the store at some point, but when he was looked for he couldn't be found.

By the end of the week, the front and rear frames were in place. Furio hitched lifts to and from the site on lumber carts, which at least saved him the misery of the long walk. One of the carters was furiously angry with the three partners who'd deserted the sawmill. He yelled at them each time he set eyes on them and had a hammer thrown at his head for his trouble. Another carter wanted to run away and join the project, but Gignomai told him gently that they weren't hiring right now. Empty flour and bean barrels went back on the carts at night. There seemed to be an awful lot of them, and Furio thought about Uncle Marzo's dilemma. He'd heard people talking in the store about how much stuff was going out to the met'Oc boy's wild venture, and how there was bound to be a shortfall-higher prices to start with, and most likely shortages to follow. Two or three men from the colony found their way out to the site and asked for work. Furio reckoned Gig was right to send them away; either they were known to be no good or hiring them would cause trouble with their families. Besides, as Gig pointed out, the work was coming along just fine. They didn't need anybody else.

One night he waited for the livery window to light up, then walked silently down the street to the corner. He'd climbed into the livery many times when he was a boy, using the stunted sycamore tree as a handy leg-up and hauling himself up onto the roof by the guttering. Time had pa.s.sed, of course. He weighed more and was rather less flexible. There were a couple of nasty moments, as branches groaned and slates came away in his hand. He made it, though, and decided he had two weeks of grinding manual labour to thank. He was certainly fitter and stronger than he used to be. It was just a shame that everything hurt all the time.

Once he was on the roof it was easy. The back eaves overhung the hayloft door; it was no trouble dropping down onto the loading platform, where men stood to fork up the hay, and of course the hayloft door wasn't barred. He opened it as carefully as he could, but the faint creak of the hinges sounded like a scream in the quiet dark. He left the door slightly ajar, and crawled over the hay until he could look down onto the main area of the top floor.

The light came from a big bra.s.s lamp on a strong-looking table. Behind it stood a man. Furio could only see the top of his head, which was bald and garlanded with wisps of thin grey hair. The man was bending over a solid, heavy-duty bench vice, a rare and expensive item that Furio had last seen in Uncle's back store, lying on a bed of straw and still in its grease from the foundry. Clamped in the jaws of the vice was a small metal thing, too small to make out but s.h.i.+ning with the harsh white gleam of newly cut steel. The man was working on it with a round file, slowly, carefully, a few strokes then stop, examine, measure with calipers. There were at least a dozen files lying on the table, also a couple of small hammers, cold chisels, two frame-saws with thin blades like wire. There was something else, which Furio didn't recognise, about eighteen inches long, steel and wood, wrapped in cloth. From time to time the man took the metal thing out of the vice and compared it with something else, another small metal thing that lay beside the vice when he wasn't using it. At one point he clamped that thing and the thing he'd been filing in the vice together, back to back, presumably so he could use one as a pattern for the other. The smell of cut steel was strong enough to make itself noticed over the hay.

The man took the thing he was working on out of the vice and held it up to the light. As he did so, something on his face sparkled, and Furio knew where Uncle's eyegla.s.ses had got to.

The next day he took Gignomai aside and asked him, ”Why is Aurelio camping out in the livery?”

Gignomai looked at him. ”What?”

”Your man Aurelio,” he said. ”The blacksmith. What's he up to in the livery?”

Gignomai was holding a hammer in one hand and a pine s.h.i.+ngle in the other; he had a nail between his lips. He slid the hammer into his belt and spat the nail out into his hand. ”I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

”Ah,” Furio replied. ”Only someone's been staying at the livery. He's been there a few weeks now. And he's got a workbench in there and a bunch of tools, and he's doing some kind of fancy metalwork.”

”Is that right.” Gignomai frowned slightly. ”Well, he's nothing to do with me.” He located the s.h.i.+ngle against the uprights and positioned the nail, jamming the s.h.i.+ngle in place with his elbow. ”What makes you think it's Aurelio?”

”I just a.s.sumed,” Furio replied. ”I wouldn't know, I've never seen the man. Where is he, anyway?”

”He got sick,” Gignomai said. ”So he's out at the Lascio farm in the long valley. They're some kind of off-relations.”

Furio nodded and went back to work. In consideration of his skill and ability with a hammer and a nail, he'd been given the essential and uniquely responsible job of piling up s.h.i.+ngles in stacks of twenty. That wasn't right, he thought. Hadn't Aurelio left the colony in a hurry as a young man, on account of some bother over a girl that left one man dead and another a cripple, and weren't the victims supposed to be members of his own family? In which case, his relatives would doubtless be delighted to see him, but not the other way round. It was possible that time had healed the wound, but not likely. Good-quality grudges were treated like heirlooms in the colony, where the desire to draw blood was never far from the surface, but rarely found a solid enough pretext. When the news of Aurelio's defection had broken, come to think of it, there had been a certain amount of excitement and speculation about his whereabouts. Ra.s.so at the livery was, however, a good friend of Uncle Marzo and deeply in his debt.

He's up to something, she'd said, she'd said, and he's going to drag you into it and he's going to drag you into it.

He dropped an armful of s.h.i.+ngles and scowled at them. He asked himself if the warning had come from anybody else, would he be less reluctant to consider it? The answer had to be yes, which tormented him like an unreachable itch. On the other hand, Gignomai was his friend, had been ever since they were kids; he'd repeatedly broken out of the Tabletop just to visit him, which was no small matter. Besides, what secret could Gig possibly have that he wouldn't want to share with his oldest, his only friend? Surely Gig knew that there was absolutely no chance he'd betray Aurelio to his family, not even by an inadvertent slip of the tongue. And in any case, why would Aurelio be hiding dangerously in town, rather than here at the site, where his relatives and other enemies wouldn't dare come after him?

I ought to ask him, he told himself. It was more of a rebuke than a decision. If he needed to ask, he couldn't be sure of getting a straight answer, and more than anything else he dreaded creating a situation where Gig lied to him and he knew it was a lie. It would be one of those places you can't get back from, and he didn't want to think about the inevitable consequences.

Velio Fasandro had been helmsman on a beef freighter until a falling spar crushed his back and rendered him more or less useless, at which point he was promoted to harbour master of the colony. Most days he sat on a barrel on the quay, watching seagulls. In the falling down wooden shack that const.i.tuted the harbour office and de facto seat of colonial government he had a slate, on which he scratched the names and due dates of incoming s.h.i.+pping with a nail, which lived in a hole bored in the door frame specifically for that purpose. He had no calendar or almanac, so the dates were somewhat detached from relevance, but so long as the sky was clear he could guess the time of the month more or less adequately by the phases of the moon. Besides, Marzo at the store always told him well in advance when a s.h.i.+p was due. Not that it mattered terribly much. He was always at his post, on his barrel, and when a s.h.i.+p came in, all he had to do was take official notice of it, scratch its name off his slate, and stay out of the way while it was unloading.

On the day in question, therefore, when he saw what looked disturbingly like a mast on the horizon he a.s.sumed it was a product of his failing eyesight and looked the other way for an hour or so. When he looked back again, however, it was palpably a mast, with a s.h.i.+p under it, heading straight for the line of buoys that marked the only safe road into the harbour.