White Drakes don’t breathe fire, but there’s this stupid little lizard in Permia somewhere that does. About eighteen inches long, otherwise completely unremarkable; not to put too fine a point on it, it farts through its mouth and somehow contrives to set fire to it. You see little flashes and puffs of smoke among the reed beds. So it’s possible. Wonderful.
(Why would anything want to do that? Hrabanus, who has an answer for every damn thing, points out that the reed beds would clog up the delta, divert the flowing water and turn the whole of South Permia into a fetid swamp if it wasn’t for the frequent, regular fires, which clear off the reed and lay down a thick bed of fertile ash, just perfect for everything else to grow sweet and fat and provide a living for the hundreds of species of animals and birds who live there. The fires are started by the lizards, who appear to serve no other function. Hrabanus points to this as proof of the Divine Clockmaker theory. I think they do it because it’s what they do, though I’m guessing the lizards who actually do the fire-starting are resentful younger sons. Tell you about my brother in a minute.)
SHE FOUND ME in the library. Clearly she’d been talking to Ebba. “Well?” she said.
I told her what I’d decided to do. She can pull this face of concentrated scorn and fury. It’s so intensely eloquent, there’s really no need for her to add words. But she does. Oh, she does.
“I’ve got no choice,” I protested. “I’m the knight.”
“You’re fifty-six and you get out of breath climbing the stairs. And you’re proposing to fight dragons.”
It’s a black lie about the stairs. Just that one time; and that was the clock-tower. Seventy-seven steps to the top. “I don’t want to do it,” I pointed out. “Last bloody thing I want—”
“Last bloody thing you’ll ever do, if you’re stupid enough to do it.” She never swears, except when quoting me back at myself. “Just think for a minute, will you? If you get yourself killed, what’ll happen to this place?”
“I have no intention of getting myself—”
“Florian’s too young to run the estate,” she went on, as though I hadn’t spoken. “That clown of a bailiff of yours can’t be trusted to remember to breathe without someone standing over him. On top of which, there’s heriot and wardship, that’s hundreds and hundreds of thalers we simply haven’t got, which means having to sell land, and once you start doing that you might as well load up a handcart and take to the roads, because—”
“Absolutely no intention of getting killed,” I said.
“And for crying out loud don’t shout,” she shouted. “It’s bad enough you’re worrying me to death without yelling at me as well. I don’t know why you do this to me. Do you hate me, or something?”
We were four and a quarter seconds away from tears, and I really can’t be doing with that. “All right,” I said. “So tell me. What do I do?”
“I don’t know, do I? I don’t get myself into these ridiculous messes.” I wish I could do that; I should be able to. After all, it’s the knight’s move, isn’t it? A step at right angles, then jump clean over the other man’s head. “What about that useless brother of yours? Send him.”
The dreadful thing is, the same thought had crossed my mind. It’d be—well, not acceptable, but within the rules, meaning there’s precedents. Of course, I’d have to be practically bedridden with some foul but honourable disease. Titurel is ten years younger than me and still competing regularly on the circuit, though at the time he was three miles away, at the lodge, with some female he’d found somewhere. And if I really was ill—
I was grateful to her. If she hadn’t suggested it, I might just have considered it. As it was; “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Just think, if I was to chicken out and Titurel actually managed to kill this bloody thing. We’ve got to live here. He’d be insufferable.”
She breathed through her nose; like, dare I say it, one of the D things. “All right,” she said. “Though how precisely it’s better for you to get killed and your appalling brother moves in and takes over running the estate—”
“I am not going to get killed,” I said.
“But there, you never listen to me, so I might as well save my breath.” She paused and scowled at me. “Well?”
Hard, sometimes, to remember that when I married her, she was the Fair Maid of Lannandale. “Well what?”
“What are you going to do?”
“OH,” HE SAID, sort of half-turning and wiping his forehead on his forearm. “It’s you.”
Another close contemporary of mine. He’s maybe six months older than me, took over the forge just before my father died. He’s never liked me. Still, we understand each other. He’s not nearly as good a tradesman as he thinks he is, but he’s good enough.
“Come to pay me for those harrows?” he said.
“Not entirely,” I replied. “I need something made.”
“Of course you do.” He turned his back on me, dragged something orange-hot out from under the coals, and bashed it, very hard, very quickly, for about twenty seconds. Then he shoved it back under the coals and hauled on the bellows handle a dozen times. Then he had leisure to talk to me. “I’ll need a deposit.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. There was a small heap of tools piled up on the spare anvil. I moved them carefully aside and spread out my scraps of parchment. “Now, you’ll need to pay attention.”
THE PARCHMENT I’D drawn my pathetic attempts at sketches on was the fly-leaf out of Monomachus of Teana’s Principles of Mercantile Law. I’d had just enough left over to use for a very brief note, which I’d folded four times, sealed, and sent the stable boy off to deliver. It came back, folded the other way; and under my message, written in big crude handwriting, smudged for lack of sand—
What the hell do you want it for?
I wasn’t in the mood. I stamped back into the house (I’d been out in the barn, rummaging about in the pile of old junk), got out the pen and ink and wrote sideways up the margin (only just enough room, writing very small)—
No time. Please. Now.
I underlined please twice. The stable boy had wandered off somewhere, so I sent the kitchenmaid. She whined about having to go out in her indoors shoes. I ask you.
MODDO THE BLACKSMITH is one of those men who gets caught up in the job in hand. He whinges and complains, then the problems of doing the job snag his imagination, and then your main difficulty is getting it away from him when it’s finished, because he’s just come up with some cunning little modification which’ll make it ever so slightly, irrelevantly better.
He does good work. I was so impressed I paid cash.
“Your design was useless, so I changed it,” he’d said. A bit of an overstatement. What he’d done was to substitute two thin springs for one fat one, and add on a sort of ratchet thing taken off a millers’ winch, to make it easier to wind it up. It was still sticky with the oil he’d quenched it in. The sight of it made my flesh crawl.
Basically, it was just a very, very large gin trap, with an offset pressure plate. “It’s pretty simple,” I said. “Think about it. Think about birds. In order to get off the ground, they’ve got very light bones, right?”
Ebba shrugged: if you say so.
“Well,” I told him, “they have. And you break a bird’s leg, it can’t get off the ground. I’m assuming it’s the same with this bastard. We put out a carcass, with this underneath. It stands on the carcass, braces it with one foot so it can tear it up with the other. Bang, got him. This thing ought to snap the bugger’s leg like a carrot, and then it won’t be going anywhere in a hurry, you can be sure of that.”