He’s talking to me, Bardas realised, entirely as one of us – a subordinate, naturally, but us includes us all, even me. ‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘As you say, it’s a matter of priorities.’
Magnanimously, the Son of Heaven offered to pour him some more wine. He’d noticed that they liked to do this, either because it made some point about their relationship as servants of the Empire, or because they couldn’t trust outlanders not to disturb the sediment. He nodded thank you politely.
‘As a matter of fact,’ the Son of Heaven went on, ‘during my discussions with him, I found the rebel leader rather more shrewd than I’d anticipated – a bad lapse of judgement on my part, I confess. Well,’ he added, pursing his thin lips, ‘not shrewd, exactly; it was more that curious blend of cunning and stupidity that characterises mercantile nations. In my experience they tend to have an uncanny knack of being able to understand motivations on the individual human level, whereas larger issues that would be perfectly obvious to you and me seem to pass them by entirely. Hence,’ he added, with a trace of a smile, ‘the aptness of the personal approach, the misguidance – is there such a word? I wonder – that we would be sending you, somebody they could both trust and manipulate. Of course he was a fool to base his entire strategy on a wholly unsupported assurance, a vague statement of probable future intent. The remarkable weakness I’ve found among traders is their apparent desire, in spite of their facade of cynicism, to trust someone. Making him trust me was easy; people like that can’t help trusting people they’re afraid of.’
Bardas smiled, as if sharing the joke. ‘What’s going to happen to him?’ he asked. ‘The rebel leader, I mean.’
The Son of Heaven was watching him out of the corner of his eye. ‘Oh, he’ll be extradited, tried and sentenced; we have to balance the books, after all. Fortunately, our system of audit allows one man to bear the blame for his country’s defaults; it’s efficient and humane, and it simplifies performance reviews. Thus King Temrai’s paid for his people, Master Auzeil and his cohorts will pay for theirs; we can draw a line under both columns and rule the page off. Similarly,’ he went on, his voice so gentle that it almost degenerated into a drawl (except that no Son of Heaven would ever sink so low), ‘we can conclude our rather pointless entanglement in the Mesoge with one simple act of accounting.’
Bardas kept perfectly still.
They had, of course, been reading his letters. It was standard operating procedure when an officer was under review following an unsatisfactory or questionable action.
The letter in question had reached him at a bad time, when he was in the middle of trying to sort out a mess he’d made with the duty rosters. ‘Not now,’ he’d said, and then seen the expression on the face of the man who’d brought it. He looked as if he wanted to be sick.
‘What’ve you got there?’ he asked.
‘Letter for you,’ the man replied. ‘And that.’ He pointed to a large earthenware jar, which was being held by another distressed-looking soldier. ‘We’ve got the man who brought them in the guardhouse.’
Bardas nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he said, wondering what was going on. ‘Give me the letter and put the jar in my tent. I’ll be along in a minute’
In the event it took him nearly half an hour to straighten out the rosters, by which time he’d clean forgotten about the letter. It wasn’t until that evening, when he managed to scrape up an hour for a rest and a sit-down, that he saw the jar beside his chair and remembered.
The seal was broken – well, he was used to that – but familiar; the Loredan Bank, which meant the letter was from one of two people. And he couldn’t imagine his sister Niessa sending him a letter, let alone presents.
Dear Bardas,
You’re reading this, which means you’ve won the battle. Congratulations! Now, let’s go back a bit.
When I’ve finished writing this letter, it’ll go to my man in Temrai’s camp. He’s been working for me for a while now; basically, his job’s been to make sure nothing happens to Temrai until you catch up with him; then to make sure, come what may, that he doesn’t escape. If you get him – well, fine, you won’t be reading this letter. If he’s managed to give you the slip – well, it’s all right.
It was the least I could do. I know how important it is for you – your career, your future – to make a success of this war. It’s been touch and go, hasn’t it? First they were going to send that huge great army, which would’ve meant you never got your chance. Well, we couldn’t have that, could we? Luckily, I was able to arrange a little diversion there; the Islanders are so stupid and greedy that all I had to do was suggest that they might consider holding out on the deal and demanding more money, and that was that. Then, of course, they went too far and got themselves annexed; I felt a bit foolish when I heard about that, I can tell you. Luckily, though, there was enough time to send some of my people across to start a neat little rebellion – a long shot, but it worked. I had a feeling it would work; because, you see, I know this war is meant to happen for you, and nothing’s going to stand in your way this time.
I hope you like the present. You’ve been making things for me ever since we were kids (you were always the clever one with your hands). Now, you know I can’t make things to save my life, so I’ve got this clever fellow Dassascai to do this for me. What with being an assassin and a cook, he ought to have made a fair job of it. If not – well, it’s the thought that counts.
As always,
Your loving brother,
Gorgas.
Bardas rolled up the letter; then he cut the wax around the neck of the jar, eased off the stopper and pulled out what he found inside.
At first he thought it was a pig’s head, like the ones he’d always dreaded as a boy, though his father and Gorgas considered them a great delicacy. The drill was to bone out the skull, leaving the mask intact; it was then cured with salt and stuffed with good things – cloves, allspice, basil, black and red Colleon pepper-corns, mace, cinnamon, cumin, dried apricots and root ginger – and steeped in thin, clear, almost white domestic honey. Even then, Bardas had been both intrigued and disgusted by the paradox of the sweet, delicious, fragrant inside and the grotesque, dead exterior; he wondered who could possibly have thought up the idea of such a bizarre combination. As a dutiful son, he’d always made a show of tackling his share and miming enthusiasm, trying to make himself concentrate on the gorgeous smell and the rich, sweet taste – after all, you don’t have to look at something in order to eat it, you just reach out with your knife and cut.
It was the same recipe; he could imagine Gorgas writing it out in detail and sending it to his cook, with strict instructions not to try to improve it (Gorgas had a flair for cooking and a tremendous ability to enjoy food; details mattered to him. On reflection, Gorgas would have made a fine Son of Heaven). But it wasn’t a pig’s face that dangled from the mop of honey-slicked hair between his fingers; shrunken and distorted (probably by the drying action of the salt), it was the face of King Temrai.
Honey trickled down the dimpled, overripe-peach cheeks like golden tears; the eyelids were closed on the empty sockets (Bardas knew how much closed eyes could see) and the mouth was sewn up with finely twisted sinew, which had in one or two places torn through the thin fabric of the lips as the skin contracted and tightened. It was soft and yielding to the touch, like a leather bag – like the footballs they used to make out of bladders crammed with straw, or the savoury winter puddings his mother stuffed into the stomach of a sheep. Under the white-gold glaze, the skin was pale and marbled, like mother of pearl.
(How curious, Bardas thought; how curious and impractical of the makers of men to put the hard armour of the skull inside the softness of the face. Surely it ought to be the other way round, the tough, uniform bone sheltering the vulnerable, distinctive features that made one individual different from another. In that respect, if in no other, they knew better in the proof house.)