‘Wouldn’t suit me,’ Bardas said, shaking his head. ‘But it’s true, I haven’t really done a proper day’s work since I left the farm; I mean, soldiering’s hard but you can’t really call it work, it’s a lethal mixture of boredom and adventure but it’s not
work
because it doesn’t actually produce anything, or do anything. And the fencing - well, that was just the soldiering without the boredom but with
very
unpleasant adventures. And as for the bow-making—’
‘Yes? Surely that was a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.’
Bardas shook his head. ‘No really,’ he replied. ‘My brother was making sure I was handsomely subsidised out of the procurement budget. I only had it explicitly confirmed the other day, but I suppose at the back of my mind I’d known it for some time. I was getting paid well over the odds, far more than the work was worth, which meant I was really only playing at it, like a hobby or something.’ He closed his eyes. ‘In other words, the whole thing was a waste of time. I might just as well have stayed in Scona Town and spent all day lounging around like an old blind dog, the way they wanted me to.’
Athli didn’t say anything, and they stood for a while looking at the distant speck on the seam between the sea and the sky where Scona had been. Then Athli muttered something about some chore she had to attend to, and walked away. Bardas stayed where he was.
I should be glad
, he chided himself.
Glad and cheerful. After all, look at it sensibly
. It was a valid point; he’d got what he wanted, or should have wanted, a chance to sweep the pieces from the board and set them up again any way he liked, a chance to break away entirely from his family and everything he’d ever been, nothing left over from the past except the boy and Athli, both of them listed in the short column of credits on the right-hand side of the ledger . . .
He let his head droop forward. He’d found an old and valued friend he’d been sure he’d lost for ever - after the awkwardness of seeing her again, his surprise, the shock of how well she’d done for herself, the disagreeable fact that she’d started making something of her life the moment she’d got away from him; after all that, it was as if they’d never been apart, that same taken-for-granted easiness between them that had been one of the few good things about the years he’d lived in the City. She was, after all, the only friend he had now, but a good enough friend that he didn’t really need any others (like the man who was recommended to read Stazio’s
Commentaries
and replied that it was all right, he’d already got a book). She’d proved what sort of friend she was many times; just recently, when the boy had turned up on her doorstep with some wild tale about Bardas Loredan having sent him to her for safekeeping (like a bank deposit; how apt), she’d taken him in without question, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Somehow, when he’d been with her, he hadn’t minded being himself so much. That part of it hadn’t come back, not so soon after that meeting with Gorgas. But perhaps it might, at that. Presumably that was what had moved him to go and look for her, his first step as a free man, a refugee, an ex-Loredan . . .
Then why are you doing this stupid thing?
demanded the voice in the back of his head.
The whole world to choose from, a ship effectively at your disposal, money in your pocket, and look where you decide to go
. And of course there was no answer to that.
‘Can I ask you something?’
He hadn’t heard the boy approaching over the noise of the sea and the general racket of a ship being worked. He looked round and saw that the boy was worried about something; not difficult to spot, he always scratched his neck when something was bothering him. ‘Go ahead,’ Bardas replied.
‘This place we’re going to,’ the boy continued, ‘Are we staying there? For good, I mean.’
Permanently, yes. Whether good’ll have any part in it I’m not sure yet
. ‘That’s my intention, yes,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for us on Scona, and it wasn’t exactly as if we chose to go there in the first place. A ship fished us out of the water and took us there, if you remember.’
‘Oh, I know that,’ the boy said. ‘I’m not bothered about it, I was just asking, that’s all.’ He leant on the rail; he could just reach. ‘What’s it like in the Mesoge? Does it really rain all the time?’
Bardas shook his head. ‘Gods, no. Tell the truth, it doesn’t rain nearly enough if you’re trying to grow things. And when it does, it all comes down at once and turns the roads into sludge.’
The boy nodded, and moved on to the next item on his list. ‘So it’s hot there, is it?’
Bardas considered before answering. ‘Muggy rather than hot,’ he replied. ‘The City was hot, but it was more of a dry heat. In the Mesoge, the temperature’s lower but the heat feels hotter, if you see what I mean, in summer at any rate. In the winter we have snow.’
‘I’ve never seen snow,’ the boy replied. ‘Is it hilly or flat?’
‘Flat near the coast, hilly inland. But they’re hills rather than mountains, not as tall as the back hills beyond Perimadeia, and more rounded than Scona.’ He smiled. ‘Scona always struck me as a tatty sort of a place, because you could see where the rock had worn through the grass, like the elbows of an old man’s coat. You don’t get those spectacular rocky outcrops in the Mesoge. In fact, you don’t get spectacular anything. To look at, it’s fairly dull compared with what you’ve been used to. Good cattle country, good for sheep, and horses down on the flat by the sea. In the low hills, where we’re going, it’s indifferent poor land for grain, plenty of woodland - it was never worth anybody’s while to clear it - better climate than the coast or the top hills. It’s not so parcelled up into fields as the coast, but it’s not moorland, like the top. Up there’s only fit for running sheep and cutting peat.’
‘I see,’ the boy said. ‘Are there a lot of people?’
‘Depends on where you are,’ Bardas said, looking out to sea again. ‘Obviously it’s more crowded on the plains and sparser up on the moors. The middle part’s a bit more heavily populated than Scona was, but not all that much. It seems more crowded because people live out on their farms, rather than living in villages and going out to work every day. You’re rarely out of sight of someone’s house, but there’s never more than one or two houses together.’
‘That sounds strange,’ the boy said. ‘Sort of cramped and lonely all at the same time.’
Bardas nodded. ‘You do tend to see a lot of your immediate neighbours and not much of anybody else,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t actually matter very much, because all the Mesoge people are pretty much the same. I mean, they all do the same work, there’s precious few foreigners, they even look the same.’
‘Like you?’ the boy asked.
‘I suppose so, yes,’ Bardas answered, after a moment’s thought. ‘On average we’re taller than they are on Scona or in the City, most of us have dark hair. You won’t have much trouble understanding what people are saying, though the accent’ll sound fairly dull and flat to you. We, on the other hand, find the sing-song City accent rather irritating. But not nearly as bad as the Scona bleat. It’s sort of nothingish, like most things about the Mesoge.’
The boy collated the information. ‘It doesn’t sound so bad,’ he pronounced.
‘Oh, it isn’t,’ Bardas said. ‘Not bad, not good, just ordinary. It’s a sort of leftover soup of a place - bits of everything, but nothing in particular. It’s like that with the people, too. Because we don’t live in villages we generally have to do everything for ourselves - no specialist tradesmen, you see. So we can all do a bit of smithying, a bit of weaving and building and carpentry and pottery; all the boys your age can make a passable bow, good enough to shoot rabbits with—’
‘There’s rabbits in the Mesoge?’
‘Any amount of them, unfortunately.’
‘Oh.’
‘Like I was saying,’ Bardas continued, ‘we can all do a bit of everything, as much as we need to get by and no more. Nobody’s
good
at anything, because that’d be a waste of effort and resources. Far more efficient to be competent at everything, because you don’t need a
good
bow, or a good plough or a good bucket, just one that works, and usually the one thing you haven’t got is time. You get the job done and move on to the next job, and when you’ve finished that there’s always something else. So, a bit of rope’ll do to hold a gate shut instead of a latch, and if a bent nail will do the trick as well as a mortice and tenon joint, you use a bent nail.’ He caught sight of the boy’s expression, and laughed. ‘It’s not as bad as all that, really. I mean, it has its advantages too. For one thing, there hasn’t been a war fought in the Mesoge for over two hundred years. And people don’t bolt their doors at night, either.’
‘Don’t they? You mean there’s no stealing?’
‘Not really. What’d be the point, when everybody’s got more or less the same as everybody else? And besides, you can’t do anything without at least two people seeing you. Everybody knows everybody’s else’s business, and a stranger - well, a stranger wouldn’t be able to spit without everybody knowing about it for five farms in each direction.’
‘Right,’ the boy said. ‘So when we get there, what are we going to do?’
The
Fencer
made landfall at Tornoys, where Athli made a half-hearted attempt at justifying the expedition in commercial terms by buying four dozen bales of reasonable-quality local worsted for only slightly more than she would have paid for it on Scona or Colleon, and two dozen caged song-thrushes.
‘What do you want them for?’ Bardas asked, as the wicker hampers of frantically warbling birds were carried up the ramp.
‘There’s a craze for them on the Island,’ Athli replied. ‘Bored wives tweet and gurgle at them and feed them crumbs on the ends of silver tweezers. And I know where I can get all the cute little bronze cages I can use, cheap.’
‘Ah,’ Bardas replied, nodding. ‘In the Mesoge, we eat them.’
Athli bought a wagon and two adequate horses for less than the going rate, and they followed the coast road as far as Lihon, which was the nearest thing the Mesoge had to a city. From there they followed the main carters’ road, a semi-connected tracery of cart tracks and cattle-droves that meandered from farmstead to farmstead in no particular order. As luck would have it, they were trying to go up country in the week before Lihon Fair, which meant that they were continually fighting their way upstream against a fierce current of sheep, goats and pigs being driven south, which sometimes threatened to overwhelm them and sweep them back the way they’d just come. At the end of the second day, Bardas pointed out the wooded crest of a range of hills, which he said overlooked the small valley they were heading for. At the end of the third day, they were exactly the same distance from it, but now they were approaching it from the west rather than the south.
‘Not meaning to be rude,’ Athli said, ‘but how much longer is this going to take?’
Bardas shrugged. ‘I don’t honestly know,’ he replied. ‘I’ve only ever come this way once, and then I was going in the opposite direction, from home to the coast. Actually, I think I came a different way, or else the roads have moved. I seem to remember it took about five days last time.’
On the fourth day they finally left the plain and found themselves on a straight, horribly rutted track that led up the first range of hills in the direction they wanted to go. ‘This is the old Bailiffs’ Drove,’ Bardas explained. ‘When I was a boy, most of this part was owned by big City families and let to local tenants like my father. The City owners’ bailiffs had this road made so they could drive cattle direct from a couple of mustering-stations to the coast; they reckoned that if they took their land up here in hand and could arrange continuity of supply, they’d be able to flood the City with cheap beef and mutton from their own estates. It didn’t work, though; they couldn’t agree wayleave terms with the farmers on the coastal plain, so the big joint droves they’d planned got this far and then had to pick their way through the lanes just like we’ve been doing. In the end, they gave it up as too expensive and went back to letting the land, or sold it off to the tenants in possession. That’s when we bought out our place.’
Athli nodded. The further they got from the sea, the more Bardas was using words like ‘we’ and ‘us’ instead of ‘they’ and ‘them’, and although most of what he said about the country was a series of variations on themes of inefficiency, stagnation and an utterly provincial mindset, she couldn’t remember ever having seen him so animated. To a certain extent she was pleased; it was the nearest she’d ever seen him to being happy, or at the very least taking an interest. On the other hand, she didn’t like the Mesoge, for all the reasons Bardas himself had given. All around her she felt an oppressive indifference to anything except the job in hand, which was subsistence farming. She hadn’t seen a painted door since they’d left Lihon, and the men they passed in the fields all wore virtually identical smocks of pale undyed wool and sturdy but oafish-looking wooden-soled boots. Once she thought she saw a garden and pointed it out to Bardas, who explained that the cheerful-looking yellow and purple flowers were local varieties of flax, grown as cattle fodder. It was the first time he could remember, he said, that anybody had ever mentioned the colours of the flowers. Athli thought of the times when he’d made fun of her back in the City for caring about what colour things were - what earthly difference did it make if the shirt was grey or green, what was it about a blue-enamelled inkwell that made you write more legibly than you would with a plain brass one, and so on. Back then she’d taken it for a rather endearing deficiency of taste; here, she could see it was just Mesoge, buried two or three layers down under his skin. It wasn’t as if he seemed to like the place any more than she did, but his attitude suggested that he somehow thought it was
right
, the way things should be, and that any difficulty he had in accepting it was a fault in himself rather than a difference of opinion.
Five years here and he’ll be a farmer again
, she reflected, wondering as she did so why that thought depressed her so much.
And not a particularly good one, either
, she added, with a touch of malice.