Eseutz giggled. Athli smiled and said, ‘How very practical of you, Ven. Now if ever there’s a fire, you’ll have a record for the insurance.’
‘No, he won’t,’ Vetriz objected. ‘When he’d finished it he put it in the document cupboard in the counting house. It’ll get burned to a crisp along with everything else.’
‘My mother used to do that,’ Eseutz said. ‘Patch up old sheets, I mean. By the time she died, pretty well every scrap of cloth in the house had been mended so many times it was more twine than cloth. The whole lot ended up going to the paper mill. And it wasn’t that we couldn’t afford to buy new; she was just compulsive-’
‘Just as you are,’ Athli observed, ‘only the other way round. All the times I’ve been to your house, I’ll swear I’ve never seen the same wall-hangings twice.’
‘That’s business,’ Eseutz retorted. ‘Stock in trade. Anything I haven’t got room for in the warehouse I hang on the wall. Then when people come by and say, My dear, where did you get those divine hangings? I make a sale.’
The tenders were the traditional Island pattern, not found anywhere else; long, clinker-built barges with impractically high keels that served no known function and added days to the time it took to build one. From the front, they looked for all the world like a black swan landing on the water. Now they rode low in the water, wallowing under the weight of the bales of supplies and provisions that were appearing as if by magic from the lofts and doorways of the warehouses that faced the Wharf. The warehouses were probably the most beautiful and imposing buildings on the Island; built in imitation of a hundred different architectural styles from a hundred different places, no two of them were the same. Merchants who were happy to live in small, cramped apartments and drafty attics behind inconspicuous doors in the ramshackle streets and alley-ways of Town had spent fortunes on decorating the facades and metopes of their warehouses, arguing that they spent more time there than they did at home and met their customers there. The Great House of the Semplan family was seven storeys high, had solid brass doors twelve feet tall and three inches thick, and was faced with Colleon marble decorated with bas-reliefs depicting ancient sea battles; a hundred years ago, every detail of the sculptures had been carefully picked out in red, blue and gold paint, which the salt sea air stripped away within a matter of a few months. Nobody had the faintest idea whose the ships were, or what battle was recorded; Mehaut Semplan had taken them in settlement of a bad debt from a customer in the City, and spent as much as she’d originally lost on the deal getting them home and putting them up. The Semplan House, in the lower end of South Town, was hidden away behind a bonemeal store.
‘Where did all this stuff come from?’ Venart asked. ‘Presumably they bought it from us, but I don’t recognise any of it.’
‘Wretched, isn’t it?’ Eseutz agreed. ‘If you look closely, you’ll see provincial office batch numbers and store tallies stencilled all over everything. It’s all stuff from abroad; they’ve been taking delivery here and storing it for free in our warehouses, and now they’re sending it home on our ships. They don’t need us for anything.’
Athli grinned. ‘They may have been using your warehouse for free,’ she said. ‘But that’s your fault for not paying attention. You were too busy daydreaming about what you were going to do when you got your ship back.’
Eseutz scowled, then relaxed again. ‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘But I still say they’ve got a nerve, doing their buying and selling and storing here as if they owned the place, while we’ve been sitting on our hands all this time with nothing to do. It makes one feel useless, somehow. I’ll be glad when this is all over and they’ve gone home, and the hell with the money.’
‘I’m with you there,’ Venart said. ‘To be honest with you, they give me the creeps. Anybody who’s so cold-blooded about starting a war-’
‘Best way to be, surely,’ Athli said, expressionless. ‘Most efficient, anyway; make your preparations early, be sure you’ve got all your supplies and equipment in hand before you start, think out your plan of campaign well in advance. Look how well it worked for Temrai, after all. Don’t suppose I’d be here now if he’d just blundered up to the City gates and waited for someone to let him in.’
Understandably enough, there was an awkward silence. When it was starting to get embarrassing, Eseutz smiled brightly and said, ‘While I think of it, Athli, have you reached a decision about going into the armour business? I know you were thinking about it a while back.’
Athli sighed. ‘Not going into it myself,’ she said. ‘Just investing in someone else’s concern. And yes, it all checked out. Gods know, there’s enough demand for the stuff.’
Venart frowned. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ he said. ‘As soon as this war’s over the market’s going to be flooded with war surplus and loot; it always is, after a war. I remember a few years back after the Scona thing – and that was only a little war, mind – there was so much looted and stripped chain-mail floating about, you couldn’t give it away. And halberds – they were cutting them down for bill-hooks or selling them by weight for scrap. And as for arrows-’
‘Ah,’ Athli interrupted, bright red in the face, ‘but that was different. The Empire’s going to win this war, and they never sell off equipment, they just put it into store. And once they’ve won and got control of the City – sorry, the place where the City used to be – everybody west of the straits is going to start wondering who’ll be next, and there’ll be a demand for armour and weapons like you can’t imagine; not that it’ll do them any good, but that’s none of my business. Next to shipbuilding, armour’s the best possible area to invest in at the moment.’
Venart lifted his head slightly. ‘Shipbuilding?’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ Athli replied, looking out over the Wharf. ‘For when they realise the armour won’t help and they start evacuating.’
Dassascai the spy (so called to distinguish him from another man with the same name who repaired tents) sat beside his fire next to the duck pen and sharpened a knife. It had a long, thin blade with a clipped back, the sort used for cutting meat off the bone. He’d finished with the oilstone and the waterstone and was stropping it slowly on the untanned side of a leather belt.
He was possibly the only man sitting still in the whole camp; Temrai had decided to move the clans south-east, towards the Imperial army approaching from the direction of Ap’ Escatoy. After nearly seven years in one place, the plainsmen were moving stiffly, like someone getting up in the morning after too little sleep.
Half the workforce had left at first light to begin the awkward job of rounding up the herd. After seven years of continual grazing, there was barely a blade of grass left in the immediate vicinity of the camp. Instead of being close at hand, therefore, as it always used to be in the old wandering days, the herd was split up and scattered across thousands of acres of the eastern plain. Many of the boys riding with the herding party had never seen a full-scale roundup and weren’t quite sure what to do; for the most part, they were sensibly treating the whole thing as an adventure, and their enthusiasm was enough to stop the men from thinking too hard about the implications of Temrai’s decision. Each rider had his goatskin provisions bag over his shoulder, a bow and quiver on either side of his saddle, his coat and blanket rolled up and stowed behind the crupper. A few of the men wore helmets and mailshirts, or carried them wrapped in waxed cloth covers or wicker panniers; nobody knew for certain where the enemy might suddenly appear – they’d already taken on many of the attributes of fairy-tale sprites and demons, who lurk in dark woods and pounce unexpectedly from the shadow of tall rocks.
The other half of the clan were busy breaking the camp; uprooting tent-poles, folding felts and carpets, trying to stow seven years’ worth of sedentary life into panniers and travoises designed to hold only the essentials. Many people were discarding the wondrous but useless treasures they’d looted from the sack of the City – up and down the rapidly vanishing streets of the camp there were bronze tripods and ivory tables, huge bronze cooking-pots, an incongruous assortment of bits of bronze and marble statue (a head here, an arm or a colossal booted foot there; not a single complete piece anywhere, so that the camp field looked like the aftermath of a battle between two tribes of giants). Wherever possible, they were dismantling the machines and tools they’d built over the years, sawbenches and lathes and water-powered grindstones, trebuchets and mangonels, presses and winches and treadmills and watermills, dismembered like carcasses in a butcher’s store and loaded on to flat-bed carts, but far too much would have to be left behind, either for lack of transport or for sheer size and weight. The enormous butter-churn, for example, that Temrai himself had helped design and build, was set in brick foundations to keep it from toppling over. They had already stripped the giant looms and dismantled the shed they’d stood in for the lumber; now the frames stuck up from the ground like the bones of dead men buried in thin soil, while women cut up the huge carpets that had been woven on them into small, practical squares. They’d tried to salvage the fish-weirs, but most of the main timbers were already too badly rotted to be worth taking; and on the high bank where they’d built permanent butts for archery practice, the great round woven-straw target-bosses lay on their faces, too big to carry, their frames broken up and used to make improvised rails for the carts. Already, the camp looked as if it had been overrun by an enemy; on all sides lay spoil and waste, disregarded wealth and broken equipment, while the banked-up fires where they’d burned off the surplus hay and provender added an evocative stench of smoke.