The Folding Knife Part 28

Then he explained to Ba.s.sano, who'd asked politely. They were in the drawing office on the second floor of the War Building (which was what everybody called it; strictly speaking it was a temple, but there weren't any priests). It was a long room with high windows, to catch the first and last light. There were long benches, where map-copiers sat, carefully painting seas blue, mountains brown, and forests a darker shade of green. At the north end there was a raised dais with a table running crosswise. For some reason, the war was being run from there; it was buried so deep in papers, books, reports, dispatches, inventories and rosters that Ba.s.sano wondered if Aelius was trying to grow his own coal.

"The problem," Aelius said, prodding the map in front of him with his broad, square-ended forefinger, "is this stuff here. All the brown and dark green. It cuts the country in two."

Ba.s.sano nodded. He'd figured that out for himself. "So we need to land in the north and the south simultaneously and work from the ends towards the middle."

Aelius laughed; private joke, presumably. "That'd be nice," he said. "But not practical. We've got enough ships and men, we can build carts, no trouble. What we're desperately short of is carthorses. No horses, no transport, no supplies; and you can forget about living off the land. The Mavortines can't manage it, and they live there. No, everything we eat and wear and use has got to come across the sea in ships, then cross-country on carts. We've got enough horses for one supply train, but not two."

Ba.s.sano pursed his lips. "Can't we get more horses?"

"Trying," Aelius said, ma.s.saging his eyebrows. "So far, no good. Cavalry horses, no problem; riding horses. But draught horses..." He sighed. "Far as I can gather, all the draught horses in the world come from the far north. They're a special breed, and the people who raise them don't sell stallions; they keep 'em all, so they've got the monopoly. Now apparently-this is what I've been told-they've had four really hard winters in a row up there, a lot of the young horses died, and there's snowdrifts blocking all the mountain pa.s.ses, so the drovers can't get through. There haven't been any new horses on the market for three years. Prices have gone through the roof, and that's if you can find any to buy; most people who've got 'em are holding on to them because they need them for themselves. Requisitioning can only take us so far, because if we take all the draught horses, how are they going to bring grain and flour into the City, let alone take out all the stuff we export? Truth is, we've got barely enough horses to keep the City running as it is."

"Mules," Ba.s.sano said.

Aelius nodded. "Good suggestion," he said. "But no, it won't work. It'd take twelve to fifteen mules to carry what you can get on one big cart, but they eat nearly half what a horse does. We haven't got the fodder, and if we did, we'd have to transport it, which means even more mules, and-you get the idea."

"Replace the City horses with mules and send the horses to Mavortis."

"Same objection. And you'd have thousands of mules in the streets all day long, instead of wheeled traffic only moving at night; the city'd be jammed up. Also, we'd still need more horses. Also, there just aren't enough mules in the world."

Ba.s.sano shrugged. "Forget that, then. What are you going to do?"

"There's not a lot I can do," Aelius said; he's controlling his temper, Ba.s.sano thought, because he doesn't want to shout at me. "If there's no horses, there's no horses. So we can't do a simultaneous landing. We'll just have to make the best of it."

Ba.s.sano said: "Have you mentioned this to my uncle?"

"He just says he doesn't understand strategy and whatever I do is fine by him."

"Flattering and completely unhelpful," Ba.s.sano said. "But have you asked him about horses specifically?"

Aelius confessed that he hadn't. "Didn't seem much point," he said. "If he's not interested in the grand design, I don't suppose he'll want to be bothered with details."

"I'm not so sure about that." Ba.s.sano was frowning. Aelius was beginning to understand that look. "A shortage of draught horses is something he can understand. It's just commodities. What he doesn't want to have to deal with is great big things like armies."

Aelius considered that. "He's lying, isn't he? He's read all the books. He must understand strategy."

"Of course he does," Ba.s.sano replied. "Also, he understands that he's read about it in books, which means that if he interferes, he could really screw things up. My uncle has very few limitations, but he respects them so much he practically worships them."

Ba.s.sano volunteered to ask Ba.s.so about horses. A week later, at the end of an intelligence briefing, Ba.s.so asked Aelius if he had a minute, and led him out into the garden.

"That's new," Aelius said, looking at a tall steel screen that blocked out the light from the street wall side.

Ba.s.so pulled a sour face. "That b.l.o.o.d.y security man of yours made me put it there," he said, scowling viciously. "As if they'd try the same thing twice. Anyway, I've dealt with all that. There won't be another attempt. At least, not by the same people."

Aelius pulled a face and eloquently said nothing. Ba.s.so ignored him. "Horses."

"Ba.s.sano told you about it, then."

"Yes." Ba.s.so poured Aelius a drink. "Just as well one of you's prepared to talk to me."

"I didn't want to bother you with details."

"This isn't a detail," Ba.s.so said severely. "It's a detail-sized segment of a really big problem. Anyway, I think I might have something for you."

He explained. He said that the True Way mining corporation (a joint venture between four leading Sclerian n.o.ble houses, the Sclerian government and three local princes) had an extensive copper-mining operation on the island of Feralia, sixty miles up the coast from the northern border of Mavortis. They were all deep mines, cut into the side of a substantial range of hills. In order to get the ore to the surface, they used ponies-small but incredibly st.u.r.dy animals who spent most of their lives underground, pulling heavily laden carts loaded with rock. He didn't have accurate figures, but the people he'd talked to who'd been there and seen it estimated that they had to have at least a thousand ponies. He'd also talked to people who knew about horses (he made it sound as if they were experts in some abstruse dead language), who could see no reason why a thousand pit-ponies couldn't do the work of, say, four hundred thoroughbred draught horses. Also, the ponies had been bred to live on practically nothing; a thousand of them would eat more or less the same amount of fodder as four hundred horses, possibly less. It wouldn't take much to convert stone barges into horse transports, and they had plenty of barges. Well?

Aelius frowned. "Sounds ideal," he said. "How are you going to persuade the miners to lend us their ponies?"

"Simple," Ba.s.so replied. "I'll buy the mine. Then I'll close it down for the duration of the war. We could probably use the miners as engineers; very handy for siege operations, I believe, and I expect they could build walls and raise fortifications. It's all digging and shifting dirt, isn't it?"

"Buy the mine," Aelius repeated, as though the words made no sense. "Can you do that?"

"Actually, it's a nice little business," Ba.s.so said. "With the nomisma so strong against the Sclerian thaler, it wouldn't be a bad investment, long-term. When I say I'll buy the mine, of course, I mean a joint venture between the government and the Charity & Social Justice. What do you think?"

Aelius looked at him for a while. Then he said, "I think that if someone tried to rob you in the street, you'd pick his pocket, sell him a better knife and probably offer him a job as a tax collector."

Ba.s.so raised an eyebrow. "I choose to take that as a compliment," he said.

Nine hundred and twelve ponies, to be precise. Two-thirds of the miners enlisted; the remainder stayed on to maintain the mine workings, dig new shafts and build a new ore-washing plant, for when production resumed. The ponies were corralled close to the docks, to await collection.

Because he hadn't expected to be able to use them, Aelius hadn't done anything about getting or building carts for the ponies to pull. Ba.s.so turned over B Yard at the Severus shipyard to cart-building. The Severus cart was stronger, with a larger payload, and cheaper than anything the professional cartwrights could turn out. Ba.s.so gave orders for the yard managers to draw up plans for a cart factory, to be built as soon as possible.

The Hus cavalry had made their way to Leir, the port at which they were to embark for Mavortis. They were two months early. Ba.s.so had made sure there was food waiting for them, but they soon got bored, complained that they and their horses were getting fat, and started looting the neighbouring villages. The governor of Leir, nominally a dependency of the Empire, wrote Ba.s.so a formal complaint: if the nuisance didn't stop immediately, he'd have no option but to send for help to the nearest Imperial garrison. As threats went, it was a fairly empty one. The nearest garrison was two hundred miles away, and although it had a paper strength of twelve hundred infantry, in practice it had eroded down to a hundred or so veterans, theoretically still on the reserve but in fact long since settled down on the sc.r.a.ps of land they'd been granted as their pensions. Rather more serious was the pretext such an appeal would give the Empire for future interference.

"They can't stay there," Aelius said, "and we can't send them to Mavortis on their own. Seems to me you've got no choice but to pay them off and send them home."

Ba.s.so gave him a sour look. "Even if I did that," he said, "which I'm not going to, there's no guarantee they'd go. If they like it there and the pickings are easy, they'll stay, until someone sends an army and pushes them out. No, we'll have to think of something else."

As so often recently, he looked for inspiration in a map, and duly found it. There was an island, Voroe, some twenty miles down the coast from Leir. Ba.s.so had heard of it, vaguely; something or other came from there (he couldn't remember what offhand), but it could have been on the Moon for all he knew or cared. But Voroe turned out to be another leftover sc.r.a.p of the Empire; at least, n.o.body had bothered to conquer it when the Imperial forces withdrew, and so it didn't belong to anybody else (the idea that it might belong to itself was not the sort of thing that occurred to diplomats and formulators of high strategy). According to the reference he found in the Complete Description of the World, the lamentably fallible standard text on faraway places, it had one city, also called Voroe, about the size of an Auxentine market town, and half a dozen vaguely defined villages. Its sole export (Ba.s.so remembered as soon as he read it) was oyster sh.e.l.ls, of the rare and precious variety that, when ground into powder, could be used as purple dye.

"But why?" Aelius objected.

Ba.s.so counted off the reasons on his fingers. "To get them out of Leir, before they trash the place," he said. "To secure Voroe as a base of operations; we can stockpile supplies there, rather than hauling them direct from the City. To give the Hus people to rob who don't matter to anybody but themselves."

"It's Imperial territory," Aelius objected.

"I was coming to that," Ba.s.so said. "One finger left, see? To find out if the Empire's looking in this direction these days. As you know, I believe it may well be, but it'd be nice to have it confirmed one way or another."

"Fine," Aelius said. "Leave them in Leir. We know that's Imperial."

Ba.s.so shook his head. "If we leave them there causing trouble, after we've been politely asked to get them out, that'd be a hostile act, which could be held against us later on when the Empire's looking to pick a fight. If we send them to Voroe and the Empire objects, we can say we're terribly sorry, we didn't realise the island was still part of the Empire, and of course we'll remove our forces-by the time the messengers have shuttled back and forth we'll be ready to ship them to Mavortis in any case. If that happens, we'll ask the Empire for permission to have a base on Voroe; they'll say yes because we were good about withdrawing our forces. Or, if we don't get a protest from the Imperials, we'll know they're still too busy cutting each other's throats to give a d.a.m.n about the West."

Ba.s.so wrote a formal apology to the mayor of Leir, and the Hus went to Voroe, where they sacked the town, raided the villages and robbed a Sclerian merchant fleet who'd come to collect a shipment of oyster sh.e.l.l. Not a word from the Empire. Ba.s.so set up a trading company to collect, process and market purple dye; its product was good-quality and considerably cheaper than the imported Sclerian equivalent, and proved extremely popular. The Hus, once they'd slaughtered every living creature on Voroe (apart from Ba.s.so's men, who they knew were off-limits), started to complain about being bored. Since they were on an island and had no ships, Ba.s.so ignored them.

Reluctantly, the city prefect gave orders for Ba.s.so to be informed. It was the middle of the night. Fortunately, he was still awake, as anybody who'd known him would have realised.

His sons, the prefect's men informed him, were in the central Guard station, in the cells. The prefect deeply regretted that this had proved necessary. However, given the gravity of the charges, he had no choice. He a.s.sumed that Ba.s.so would want to come over straight away.

Ba.s.so thanked the prefect's men politely, and said it could wait till morning. Then he sent for Cinio, Sentio and the Secretary of the Interior, a new appointee by the name of Furio.

"Basically it's up to you," Furio said. He was a young man, chosen mainly for his energy and appet.i.te for administrative trivia; short, thin, pale-eyed, with unusually large feet. "If you give me a direct order, I can have them out of there and the charges torn up in half an hour. If you want my opinion, politically, I think you can get away with it. As far as I can tell at this stage, the girls are n.o.body special; your people can make it sound like they're just a couple of tarts, and things got a bit out of hand. Then I a.s.sume you'll bury it with war news."

"Or," Ba.s.so said.

Furio frowned. "Or," he said, "they'll be remanded in custody while the complaint is processed, and within three days they'll appear in front of the investigating magistrate. I can make sure he knows the score. We'll have to make him a judge, but that's easy enough."

Ba.s.so shook his head. "That'd be begging the Optimates to make him a better offer," he said. "I have a deep-rooted objection to giving hostages."

"Well," Furio said; he sounded slightly bewildered. "If the complaint goes in front of an impartial magistrate, on what we know at the moment there's a case to answer, and it'll go to trial. By that point, your best bet would be to choose a good jury." He shrugged. "I suppose a straight acquittal would be better than anything that could be interpreted as the case being dropped through undue influence. But there'd be a risk of something going wrong, and then you'd have to arrange for them to be let off on appeal. Apart from anything else, there's the matter of timescale. Under due process, it could drag on for the best part of a year; and they'd be in jail all that time, remember. Bail's never given in rape cases, without conspicuous leaning on the magistrate."

"I suppose they did do it," Ba.s.so said.

Cinio interrupted. "That's hardly the point."

"True." Ba.s.so sighed. "For two pins I'd leave them there," he said. "Of all the b.l.o.o.d.y stupid inconsiderate things to do, just when I'm about to embark on a substantial war and the Opposition can't touch me."

"That's not a serious suggestion, is it?" Sentio said nervously. "I'd hate to have to put a positive angle on the First Citizen's sons being tried for rape."

Ba.s.so frowned. "I don't know," he said. "You couldn't do much better for proof of integrity. What about all the old stories about great statesmen of the past, who executed their own sons for treason?"

Sentio decided not to answer. Cinio said: "People like integrity, but they don't much like heartless b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. At best, I think it'd be neutral."

"Rape's different," Ba.s.so said. "Very emotive. Treason you could smooth over as an irreconcilable clash of principle, which doesn't sound at all bad if you pitch it right. Rape's just nasty. I have to admit," he went on, "I'm disappointed in them, if it's true. Sort of thing my late brother-in-law might have done. Right now, I'm inclined to let it go to trial." He frowned. "I've always had an unpleasant suspicion that the twins took after their mother in some respects." He scratched his head, looked down at his hands. "All right," he said. "You three go home, and please bear in mind that you were never here. I'll let you know what I decide."

He didn't have long to wait.

"This is splendid," he said. "All those years when we never saw each other, and now two visits in as many months."

His sister gave him a patient look. "I'm glad you can still make jokes, Ba.s.so. I'd have thought that after this latest business, you might have lost your sense of humour."

"Please sit down," he said. "Can I get you anything?"

She remained standing. Naturally, the opposite of what he said. If only it was that simple. "I've been expecting something like this, of course."

"Really? It came as a complete surprise to me."

"What, that your sons take after their father? Hardly surprising."

Ba.s.so nodded slowly. "That thought has occurred to me a few times over the last two days," he said. "You see, I've often wondered who the twins' father really was. I suppose this could be taken as circ.u.mstantial evidence."

She gave him a cold stare. "If you try and hush this up," she said, "I'll make sure you don't get away with it."

"Really?" He smiled encouragingly. "How?"

"Rape is an offence against the majesty of the Invincible Sun," she said. "I'm sure the Patriarch could be persuaded to take up the issue, if you try and use your influence to get the charges dropped."

Ba.s.so nodded. "I don't think the Patriarch is going to be in any kind of a hurry to pick a fight with me," he said. "I know he's anxious to secure his place in history, but I doubt he'll want to be remembered as the first Patriarch to be executed for conspiracy to murder the First Citizen."

She was perfectly still and silent for several seconds. Then she said: "If you have some sort of hold over the Patriarch, I can have him replaced."

Ba.s.so's eyes opened a little bit wider. "Is that right?"

"Oh yes." But, he thought, she always sounds so confident; maybe she could, at that. "Please don't think you can blackmail your way out of this. I intend to see that justice is done."

Ba.s.so smiled faintly. "Has it occurred to you that the twins might be innocent?"

"It wasn't their guilt that I had in mind."

"No, I don't suppose it was." Ba.s.so frowned. "And if it does go to trial," he said. "I a.s.sume you'll try and use the priesthood to manipulate the outcome."

"I feel sorry for you," she said. "You honestly believe that everybody's mind works like yours. As I said just now, I will spare no effort to see that justice is done, by whatever means necessary." She was holding a tiny lace handkerchief in her left hand, he noticed, as though it was some kind of weapon. "I hope you understand that I'm serious about this. I don't make idle threats."

"I never said you did," Ba.s.so replied evenly. "Though you could do with reading a good book on tactics. Why warn me in advance of what you've got in mind? If you think I'm going to get the charges dropped, why not let me do it and then come after me with all the priests you can muster? Vestigial sense of fair play, maybe?"

He thought he knew all her expressions, but this one was new. It was disgust, contempt and just a little pity. "You call it fair play. I prefer the word justice. I don't want to catch you out, Ba.s.so. I want you, just for once in your worthless life, to watch something coming and not to be able to do anything about it. I want you to realise you're not in control. I think that'd be fair, don't you?"

Ba.s.so shrugged. "Only the other day, you just wanted me dead."

"I still do," she said, and left the room.

He couldn't put it off any longer, so he went to see the twins.

They weren't in the general cells. Instead, the guard captain had put them in the tower overlooking the back courtyard. Two hundred years ago, when the building was the headquarters of the Imperial garrison, the tower had been the garrison commander's private quarters. There were worse places.

"Well?" Ba.s.so said.

"I swear to you, we didn't do it," Festo said. Ba.s.so tried to remember the last time he'd spoken to him-before the Cazar recruits had arrived, but exactly when he couldn't call to mind. "It's got to be some sort of horrible mistake. Honestly."

Ba.s.so looked at Pio, but just saw fear. "Please don't lie to me," he said coldly. "You're very bad at it, you always have been. I used to think that was a good thing about you. Now I'm more inclined to think it's because you can't do anything right."

Pio said, "We didn't mean it to happen."

"Really." Ba.s.so couldn't be bothered to look at him. "You'll excuse my ignorance, but I didn't think rape was something that happens by accident. I don't want to know," he said, as Festo tried to say something. "I'm really not interested in the details. I wouldn't have thought my opinion of you could get any lower than it is right now, but maybe you two could manage it."

Pio was sitting on the floor, even though there was a perfectly good chair. But he'd always sat on the floor, Ba.s.so remembered, like a dog who's not allowed on the furniture. "What's going to happen?" he asked.

Ba.s.so looked at a place on the wall exactly between them. "There'll be a hearing before the magistrate," he said. "If he finds there's a case to answer, you'll go to trial."

It wasn't the answer they'd been expecting. "Surely there's something-" Festo started to say.

"Sorry," Ba.s.so cut him off. "I'm afraid I owe you both an apology. If I was just a businessman, I could probably bribe you out of this mess. In my position, however, that luxury is denied to me. If I tried anything like that, my enemies would be down on me like a ton of bricks, and you'd almost certainly be convicted, even with the best lawyers in the City. I'm afraid that because of who I am, you're going to have to stay put and see it through. Any fooling around will just make things worse for you."

For a moment he felt sorry for them; but then, there had been times when he'd felt sorry for rats, when the stable hands blocked up all the holes but one and poured in boiling water. "So that's it, then," Festo said, and it was the first time Ba.s.so had heard anything like anger in his son's voice. "They'll put us on trial, and-"

"Shut up," Ba.s.so said, "you're upsetting your brother. n.o.body's going to hang you."

Probably true, he reflected, on the way back to the House. Two overprivileged young men, drunk, and a barmaid. They think she's just playing hard to get. No real malice in them, gentlemen of the jury; just profound stupidity, thoughtlessness, worthlessness-if those were hanging offences, gentlemen, the City would be pretty empty. There were two alternative punishments for rape, both designed to make sure the offender never did it again. No great loss, Ba.s.so couldn't help thinking. After all, some of his best friends were eunuchs.

But there was the question of reasons, the issue that seemed to dominate his life. Why does Ba.s.so do what he does? Ba.s.so, always so quick to tell you a good reason, always a different reason, depending on who he's talking to. Talking to himself (first sign of madness, they reckoned), what reason would he offer? Because they did it now, with the war almost ready, the grand design, Ba.s.sano's inheritance; now, of all times, as if they'd thought hard about it and chosen the worst possible moment. Hard to forgive, even if he was fond of them, which he wasn't.