A Dirge for Sabis Read online

  So now the boy made an honest living, mixing firepowder and learning chemistry, making tools and learning mechanics, running errands and teasing poor Doshi for his gloom and his -bookishness—and Doshi seemed to enjoy the association thoroughly. Fair trade: Doshi helped Arizun with his reading and his math, and Arizun taught Doshi a hundred and one tricks of survival and success in the ways and byways of the city—many of them legal. With any luck, Sulun reckoned, they'd stick together, maybe set up a shop as a partnership when they finished their apprenticeship in Shibari's house.

  "The best of weapons, if it doesn't come too late," Zeren was muttering to himself, leaning on Omis's shoulder. "If we'd had it twenty years ago, Azgunedes wouldn't have fallen. Of course I wouldn't be here. D'I ever tell you my family were educated folk?"

  "Oh, yes," Omis sighed. "Many times."

  "We owned two thousand hectares above the southernmost loop of the Azesu." The mercenary had that sad, faraway look in his pale eyes again. "A good villa—smithy, tannery, potter's shop, ever'thing. In a good year, we sent ten wagonloads down to the capital. In a bad year we never needed set foot off our own lands: we could make everything we wanted. There were tutors taught all the kids on the estate. A respectable library. Even the cook's boy could read." Zeren peered into his winecup. "D'I ever tell you, when I was a boy I wanted to be a philos'pher?"

  "Natural philosophy?" Sulun pricked up his ears. "Is that why you hang around our little studio?"

  Zeren shrugged, looked away, and reached for the salad bowl.

  "Then why'd you become a soldier?" Doshi asked, all innocence, around a mouthful of bread.

  Yanados glared, and must have kicked him. Sulun winced.

  Zeren favored Doshi with a fast, angry glance, then looked away again, raking salad onto bread.

  "Really, Doshi," Omis said.

  "Really what?" Doshi asked, looking from side to side.

  Sulun said, under his breath, "Everybody knows what happened to Azgunedes."

  "Well, of course," Doshi said, rubbing his leg under the table. "The Armu horde—"

  "Doshi," Sulun said.

  "The Azesu river," Zeren said quietly, looking out the window. "We saw them coming—could see it from the villa wall, the dust they raised. They came wading across the ford half a day north of us, so many they made the river run mud. One day was all the warning we had. One day to pack everything we could carry, herd in all the cattle we could reach, and move everything down the road—right through the troops coming up from Zebes. And the army commandeered half the cattle, right there on the road. We got to the city with almost nothing, and the general ordered every able-bodied man we had pressed into the army—including me."

  "I'm sorry," Doshi whispered, staring at the tabletop.

  "Wasn't a bad life," Zeren said. "Oh, the food was terrible and the officers were worse, but at least I could strike back at the Armu. We had some hope we could throw them back, at least turn them, establish a new border—at first we thought that, anyway. I didn't see the fall of Zebes, never found out what happened to my family. It was just fighting and running, grabbing what supplies we could, fighting and running again, all the way into Murrek. Those of us who were left signed up with the Murrekan auxiliaries. . . ."

  Yanados cleared her throat and offered a lighter tone, "Didn't know Murrek ever had the money for auxiliaries."

  "Murrek didn't have shit." Zeren gave two syllables of a sour laugh and leaned back, easier. "Except for brains. Orders and officers changed every fortnight, and the royal house wasn't much better: assassinations, coups, intrigues under every table—total confusion. The wiser heads in Murrek packed up and ran for the south, even before the hordes took Sefet. I figured it was better to join them. South, all the way to Halas, where I joined the King's Own cavalry regiment." Zeren poured the last of the jug into his cup. "The things I saw, the stories I could tell you about Halas, about the whole south coast, in fact. I must have soldiered for every king and lordling clean across to Mez, right in front of the tide—and it just kept coming. Kingdom after kingdom. Never served in anything could hold it back—till I got to Sabis."

  "Well, Sabis won't fold." Yanados tried to sound cheerful. "They've hit us before. We're still here. And you're doing all right second captain of the City Guard—"

  "I'm not sure even Sabis can hold out." Zeren sighed, refusing now to be cheered. "Good gods, look around you. Who's on the throne? A nine-year-old child and his aging grandfather. Who rules the court? An army of courtiers and clerks and dotty wizards, the whole court worm-eaten with its own petty intrigues—"

  "Zeren, be careful!" Arizun glanced significantly at the windows.

  "So who bloody cares?" Zeren growled.

  "Nobody but our neighbors," Doshi said.

  "Gods know, they probably tell worse on us. Hell with the court. Taxes on everything. All of it to feed an army that's full of outland mercenaries like me! I make no claims for any great virtue, but most of them are far worse, and far stupider, than I am. Gods, I've seen them back stab each other for pennies, mutiny, duck out of fighting whenever they can, never stop to think this is the last, the last damn place that's got a chance to hold out! If the cities north of here fall, it goes; and their money won't buy them anything—not the court, not the mercs. Not after that."

  "Ah . . . should I go out for more wine?" Arizun asked, neatly snagging the empty jug.

  "Hell, yes!" Zeren threw him a silver coin. "Keep the change."

  Arizun grabbed the coin and darted out the door.

  Silence lingered.

  "Well," Yanados said cheerfully, desperately. "Well, half an army's better than none. With the Armu busy tearing up the east, maybe it'll be barbarian against barbarian a while; maybe nobody else will push toward Sabis. Why attack the sheepdog in a field full of sheep?"

  "Not just the Armu now." Zeren glowered at the dropping level in his winecup; took another drink. "The last few pushes—the ones that took north Jarrya—"

  Doshi winced, and took a drink himself.

  "—were from a new tribe, these damn Ancar you've been hearing about. Not Armu. Who, d'you think, pushed the Armu hordes south in the first place?"

  "We always thought it was the drought," Doshi muttered. "Those bad years in the north, Grandpa always said—"

  "Bad weather pushed the Ancar. The Ancar pushed the Armu. The battle of the Gor kicked the Armu eastward then, they came down on the south—but the Ancar still kept coming. They're two hundred leagues south of the Gor already, that's what the scouts say. That's what they're not telling out in the streets—yet. Ancar's hell and away a worse enemy than our grandfathers fought in the Armu wars, and Sabis's hell and away a lot weaker now. Lost the east to the Armu, north's already going. What in hell are we going to do with the Ancar?"

  "Oh, come, come," Sulun felt obliged to put in. It was all getting too grim, too desperately grim. "Sabis's got more people now than it did then. A bigger army than it's ever had. You can't say it's weaker."

  "Where'd it get those people?" Zeren gave him a sad half-smile and idly brushed bread crumbs off the leather strips of his armor skirt. "Same place it got me. Collapsing borders. Lost provinces. Where's the trade that used to feed the world, with the east torn up by invasions and internal squabbles and border wars? Where's the food coming from now? Jarrya-south. Jarrya-north is gone. And overseas from the south. But where's the sea trade in general, with that rat's nest of pirates raiding everything that comes near Sakar?"

  Yanados flinched visibly; drew her arms off the table. "What choice did the fleet have?" she snapped. "When the old navy was betrayed in that damned Pergian coup, who offered to pay them? Who offered them a port? Where else could they go?"

  Sulun raised an eyebrow. Stranger and stranger things, on this inauspicious day. Just how, he wondered, did his apprentice Yanados happen to know so much history—and so much about the lamentable affairs of Sakar? Yanados never had really said much about where she had come from when she turned up asking ap
prenticeship with Shibari's house tutor-cum-engineer. She had just given the general impression that her family had been merchants in Cerinde, or maybe Alise. But what if . . . ?

  "Doesn't matter now," Zeren said. "Fleet's gone. What does matter is that Sakar harbors a legion of pirate ships, and they've sliced a good piece out of the sea trade, no matter if they're hunting supplies or just damned well looting. Just ask Sulun how much your master Shibari's lost this last year on pirated cargoes."

  Yanados fell silent. Shibari was indeed neck deep in clamoring debts. And that was something none of them liked to think about.

  There was profit to be had. Sulun knew, for instance, there was a big cargo coming in from Ista—big cargo, big profit in the shortages that plagued Sabis.

  But even if the ships clung to the south coast all the way up to the coast of Mez, there was still the risk the Sakar pirates would raid them.

  And if that happened, if Master Shibari lost that investment—

  "The point is," the soldier went on, "Sabis is poorer and weaker today than it was when the Armu came down. Fifty years ago the center of the empire fought off the invading barbarians, but is it going to be lucky twice?"

  "There's still the wizards!" Doshi said.

  "There's their wizards," Zeren said. "Who're you going to bet on?"

  Worse and worse. A man who worked with firepowder didn't like to go far down that train of thought. The poets made stories about wizards who could rain down fire and smoke on their enemies, but that wasn't real. What was, was your wizards sat down and ill-wished your enemies and good-wished your side, and their wizards sat down and did the same thing only in the other direction, and if your wizards were more powerful than their wizards, then everything that could go wrong on their side went wrong and everything that could go wrong on your side didn't.

  If a piece of harness had a flaw, if a wheel could come off, magery could find it—and there was no way to tell when a wheel fell off your cart whether it was bad luck or somebody's bad-wishing; if a spark was remotely possible, for instance, too close to the firepowder. . . .

  Sulun gave a little shudder.

  Not that he believed the neighbors could or would hire anybody . . .

  Not that he believed that anybody they could afford was more than Arizun had been; or even, if that Anybody had real magery, that anybody could out-mage master Shibari's house wizard . . .

  Which ought to let a man stop worrying and do his work, and not think about things like that. Natural philosophy didn't have to compass magery; by its very definition, natural philosophy didn't have to worry about things like that. The wizards did, and because they did, you just did the best you could in the natural world and didn't leave any flaws for the mages to get a foothold in; that was the first and best defense.

  Of course, if you worried that hex could hex you right into making a flaw in the first place. . . .

  A man could go crazy down that track. So a man didn't think about it when he struck a spark from the tinderbox.

  " . . . still wizards," Zeren scoffed. "And they have wizards." The soldier drained his cup and swept the room with a long, sad glance. "Sulun, my delightful little philosopher friend, Sabis desperately needs one wizard-factor that will give it the advantage over a vast horde of dangerously good foot soldiers. Some wizard-factor like this little toy of yours. Give me a hundred of these, a hundred that can be fired over and over without blowing themselves to the nine hells, and I could turn even the Ancar."

  There was a long moment's silence, wherein Omis kept running his fingers through his curls, and saying over and over, "It's the seam. The seam never holds. But how do you make a tube without a seam?"

  And Yanados said, "And where do we get enough firepowder for a hundred bombards? Charcoal, that's no problem. Saltpeter in every old dungheap. But sulfur, now . . ."

  Doshi pushed his cup across the table. "Omis?" he said timidly. "Maybe like this?"

  "Huh?" Omis asked. "Like what?"

  "A tube. Imagine this cup deeper, longer, more of a tube. There's no seam in it. Look."

  Omis picked up the empty tin cup. "No seam, true. But it's only half a ball shape, hammered out of a flat sheet onto a form. Tin-smithery. You couldn't hammer it much deeper, let alone in a tube-shape. You stretch it. You fold it . . ." He turned the empty cup in his hand, studying its shape and its construction. "Thin metal. Bending metal. Thin enough to hammer around a form is thin enough to burst in the charge. But if it wasn't hammered . . ."

  "Where do you find sulfur?" Yanados was wondering. "I know you mine it. But from what sort of land? Mountains? Seashores? Where do they find it?"

  "Near certain kinds of hot springs," Sulun said absently, scratching his chin. He had an appointment with Shibari: he had to shave, go back up to the big house with the accounts and explain his expenses. Shibari was anxious about mounting expenses and little return from this house Shibari's dwindling resources maintained for Sulun and his disciples and hangers-on in this waterfront neighborhood—a laboratorium, as Sulun had called it in laying out his plans and his diagrams and his financial requirements, in a neighborhood, as Sulun had also put it, more tolerant of the unusual and the noisy. Sulun's stomach was upset.

  Yanados: "What kind of hot springs?"

  "Hot springs in certain mountains," Sulun said, thinking still about those accounts, "the sort where one also finds black glass."

  "Maybe not hammered at all," Omis murmured, turning the cup faster and faster in his hands. "Cast? But you can't get the impurities out without hammering. Got to start with twenty-times-hammered iron, a sheet or a rod or a block . . . Maybe drilled? But what could drill iron?"

  "Find your answer soon, friends," Zeren muttered under his breath, "find it soon or not at all."

  Chapter Two

  The great houses hove up in splendid independence on the heights of Sabis—occupying the hilltops, generally, set to catch the wind in their upper tiers. The block-long apartment buildings that were the lot of the most of Sabis's citizens occupied the low ground of the riverside and the valleys between Sabis's fair hills, territory prone to settling (and unheralded building collapses), prone to stale air and river stench (and the stink of other things, since the city provided sewers to the street, but not to the buildings), lately prone to overcrowding, since the city had become, over fifty years of dwindling provinces, the refuge and the economic hope for the world (the sink of all the sewers of the earth, the late Emperor had said on his deathbed—so the story ran).

  There were Houses and there were Houses, and Shibari's was, like the family, old, well-suited, and cracking in its walls. It sprawled over a large area of the hill of Muzein, with a splendid view of the river and the poor district of warehouses that had grown up in a utilitarian age more dependent on trade than on a warrior aristocracy.

  It overlooked the warehouses, it lived off the warehouses, now that the world went as it did. No more divine right for lords: just the Emperor—on the highest of all hills, outside town—and the Emperor's soldiers, also mostly outside town. Sabis had become increasingly polyglot, the old Sabirn aristocracy increasingly strangers in their own city, in the ascendancy of the nine-year-old son of a provincial-born general and his Sabisan maternal -grandfather—who had been a gentleman farmer and an atrocious poet before he became a regent.

  So in the modern city, the old House of Shibari survived—in the neighborhood of woodcarvers, a couple of taverns, three slightly seedy apartments, and a wineshop of odd and criminal patronage barely down the street from its vine-covered walls and sheds and its still-magnificent front entry, its plaster pillars incised more with accidents—the bash of a cart here, the knock of a box-edge there, over the centuries—than the graffiti that scored the walls in the poorer areas just slightly downhill from here.

  The front doors were still bright; the fish-tailed, twenty-breasted goddess Ioth on the right, and snake-tailed Baiz, pouring the waters of his river from a bottomless jar, on the left. The sea and the rivers indi
cated an ancient past, a claim on Sabis's long past, when the Sabisi had come in from the sea and conquered the peninsula, when the sea-lords had become the first lords of Sabis, the aristocracy of the aristocracy that arrived later and settled at its skirts.

  Of that most ancient past, Shibari was one of the most ancient, perhaps—certainly no one of this nervous age dared speculate—with an ancient claim on imperium, on the throne itself.

  But mostly Shibari just struggled, like any house however noble, to pay its war-tax, and struggled with business decisions (because the great Houses traded nowadays; the emperor had confiscated too much of the land in too many previous rebellions, and doled too many holdings out to new favorites, and levied too severe a tax on old wealth for a House to live on past glories.)

  And business decisions, Sulun knew, trudging up the cobbled, littered street toward that facade and an unwelcome necessity to confess his results—business decisions were what had to prevail, increasingly.

  * * *

  "Sulun! Sulun!" It was a swarm of youngsters, inside the marble hall, with the sea-goddess frescoes and the bronze figure of a ship prow for a centerpiece—ties to the sea, always, where Shibari's fortunes had begun. And always the children: Omis's three, the cook's two, several slave kids, Shibari's own four—voices pealing off the high ceilings, small feet pattering on the marble . . .

  He used to make fireworks, little poppers, paper rolls with just enough firepowder to make a flash—to the annoyance of Shibari's house wizard, whose daughter Memi had been no less a participant in the fireworks.

  Memi stood at the back now: a quiet, sullen child.

  "Did it work, did it work?" Tamiri asked, clapping her hands. Omis's daughter, who had seen the bombard in its forging, who had, at least to her own estimate, considerably helped Omis work the bellows.