The Two of Swords: Part 14 (8 page)

“Is this the headquarters?” Chanso asked. “Of the Lodge, I mean?”

“This place? God, no. Far too grand. The higher up the Lodge you go, the less you show off. This is just a school. We inherited it from the people who were before the empire. Bit of an embarrassment, really.”

Lonjamen marched him up to a desk, over against a far wall. There he spoke to a clerk in the language Chanso couldn’t understand. Then Lonjamen handed over the scrap of folded paper, and the clerk put it between the pages of a ledger, which he then closed.

“All done,” Lonjamen said, “you’re now official. Means they know you’re here, and it’s somebody’s job to feed you. They may even wash your shirts if you’re lucky. Come on, this way.”

Chanso, Lonjamen and the clerk appeared to be the only living creatures in the whole vast hall. “Are there many people here?” he asked.

“About five thousand,” Lonjamen replied, “on average. Now, mind you look about you and take note of where we go. This place is like an anthill.”

They came to a stretch of wall with dozens of identical doors. Lonjamen opened one and stood back to let him through. Then they were in a corridor, white floor and ceiling, the wall covered with blinding gold mosaic. “First thing you’ll need to do is learn to talk Imperial. Don’t pull faces, it’s easy. After that they’ll put you through the basic catechism, so you’ll understand what we’re all about, and after that you’ll be working on your special skill. Silverwork, isn’t it?”

“Carving.”

“Of course, woodcarving. You do realise, every last scrap of wood we use here has to come up that path on some poor bugger’s shoulder. No pressure,” he added pleasantly. “Marble we can just chip off the scenery, it’s the only thing we’re self-sufficient in. That and rainwater, if we’re lucky.”

Chanso thought for a moment. “Should I be learning stone-carving, then?”

“Of course not. Fat lot of use that’d be for decorating a wooden roof. No, the point is, while you’re here, you’re the centre of the universe, nothing’s too much trouble. You want it, you ask for it, it comes on a boat and they carry it up the hill for you. Live crocodiles? Of course, sir, how many? Enjoy it while you can,” he added. “Real life on the outside isn’t like that.” He grinned. “So they tell me, anyway.”

It sounded like there ought to be a
but
coming; if so, Lonjamen didn’t get round to it. They walked the length of the corridor, through a bronze gate (half the size of the front gate; still massive) and out into a narrow street. The shadows of the tall buildings on either side were so deep it could almost have been night, and the ground was paved with split flints. “Mind how you go,” Lonjamen advised him over his shoulder. “Bloody slippery, have you over. You get used to it in time.”

It was like walking down the bed of a river, and quite soon Chanso’s ankles ached. The street wound round, a bend every few yards and identical unmarked doors everywhere he looked. It was inconceivable that anyone could ever find his way here or remember where he’d been or where he was supposed to go. Chanso tried counting his paces, but the awkwardness of walking made that pointless.

“Two meals a day,” Lonjamen was saying – he’d gone on ahead, Chanso couldn’t keep up with him without slipping and falling over, “and if you’re peckish in between, go and be nice to the buttery, they’re the ones with the real power around here. If they like you, this is paradise. If not, probably best to jump off the wall now and save yourself the agonies of frustration. This is your chapter house,” he added, pushing open a door. “Number One Six-Three, in case you haven’t been counting.” He grinned. “Count everything, all the time. Becomes second nature after a while, like with musicians. Up the stairs to the top landing, seventh door on your right.” He paused, then added, “I know what you’re thinking. For weeks when I first got here, I thought I’d go out of my mind, being indoors, under roofs and ceilings. Don’t worry, you’ll adapt. This place grinds you down to begin with, but then you fit in and it’s wonderful. See you later, probably.”

Chanso had no idea how long it took him to learn Imperial. Afterwards he could remember days of unbelievable effort, when his mind was more utterly exhausted than his body had ever been in his life, followed by nights dreaming in a strange language, where he could make out one word in ten, then in four, then in three; and then there was the morning when he dragged himself up the eight flights of stairs to the rooftop where Domna Herec taught him, and she looked at him sourly and told him to go away.

He felt as though he’d been kicked in the face. “Why?” he asked. “What have I done?”

‘Na Herec was eighty years old and the most terrifying human being he’d ever encountered. She must have been six feet tall when she was younger, and very beautiful. Now she had one appalling eye, sparse white hair scraped back into a bun and a tone of voice like fingernails digging into a burn. He’d spent every waking hour with her for as long as he could remember; ten days, possibly twelve.

“You’ve finished, that’s what,” she said. “Go away, I’m busy.”

He felt terrible; all the effort she’d put in, all the patience she’d wasted on him, all the furious anger at his ineptitude she’d bottled up behind that one piercing eye, and finally she’d decided he was hopeless and she’d given up on him. “I’m sorry,” he blurted out. “Please, can’t we try again? I’ll do better, I promise. I’ll try really hard.”

She gave him that look. “What language are we speaking?”

“Oh.”

“Go away,” she repeated, “and come back this time tomorrow, we’ll be starting the next course. Try not to be late, if you can possibly manage it.”

The next day she told him it was probably because he’d never learned to read. Illiterates (that was him) found it much easier to pick up new languages, because their minds and memories hadn’t been spoiled, they still worked like a child’s. And now, she went on, I’m going to teach you to read.

Reading was easy; it was like sheep tallies, except that each mark stood for a sound rather than a number or a place or ewe or ram. The hardest part was learning how to hold the stick. To start with, he gripped it so firmly it broke. Then he pressed down too hard, and went right through the half-inch of beeswax and split the wood. For a carver, she told him, he was incredibly cack-handed; is that how he handled his chisels and gouges?

What are chisels and gouges, he asked.

This, said Domna Seutz, is a chisel and this is a gouge. You can tell them apart because the chisel is flat and the gouge is half round. And what in God’s name do you carve with where you come from if you don’t know about chisels? What,
that
?

There were twenty-six chisels on Domna Seutz’s rack, all different, and sixteen gouges. ‘Na Seutz was younger than ‘Na Herec, a short, solid woman with a man’s hands and a humped back. Her eyes, she said, weren’t what they were, so she had a round piece of glass, flattish, with thin edges and a thicker centre, mounted in a gold setting with wires sticking out of it. The wires fitted into carefully sewn sleeves in the linen band she wore round her forehead, and kept the glass a constant three-quarter inch from her right eye. When Chanso looked through it at his fingernail, it was nearly twice its normal size. No, he couldn’t have one; these glasses had been made in Mezentia, a thousand years ago or something like that. There were only a few left, and nobody had been able to figure out how to make more of them. This one was Lodge property, on loan to her for the rest of her working life. Nobody knew what it was worth, but Emperor Glauca had one like it in his collection, and he’d traded the city of Scand Escatois to the Aelians to get it.

‘Na Seutz wasn’t nearly as fierce as ‘Na Herec, but she was much harder to please. She didn’t like the primitive style, she told him. What’s that? It’s what you do, she explained. She preferred Classical and Mannerist, though she didn’t mind Formalism. The idea of art, she explained, is not to show things as they are, but as they could be. Only the Great Smith could make something perfect – everything he made was perfect – but surely it was the duty of his servants to come as close to perfection as they could. Therefore, let every man be handsome, every woman beautiful, every tree and flower gracefully formed, every mountain symmetrical, every dog and squirrel as close to the ideal as possible. Portraits, in her opinion, were an abomination; a deliberate record of human inferiority and divergence from the ideal form. However, she recognised that Chanso had been sent to Beal to learn to be the best possible primitive-style carver he could become, so it wasn’t her place to try and influence him in any way. But if he could possibly make his people’s faces just a bit less ugly, she would take it as a personal favour.

Chanso reckoned she was probably mad. But she taught him a lot of very useful stuff about using the new, strange tools, and once he’d got used to them he found them quite helpful – if nothing else, they were quicker than gnawing away a flake at a time with a knife, and you could do straight lines and square edges, assuming you wanted to. And she could get an edge on a blade better than anyone he’d ever known, including his Uncle Vastida.

“You might want to take a look at this,” she said, on the day he finished his first large piece for her. He was proud of it – a stag pulled down by dogs, with the huntsmen closing in; she said it was a bit too busy for her taste, but she was pleased that he’d finally grasped the concept of proportion, and the dogs’ heads were the right size for their bodies.

He looked at the thing she’d put on the bench in front of him. “It’s a book,” she explained. “You read it.”

“All of it?”

She looked at him. “Yes.”

He picked the book up and opened it. “Both sides?”

“Give it here.” She took it from him and turned the pages. “All of them,” she said. “Both sides.”

“My God.”

He took the book back to his cell that evening, lit the lamp, put the book down on the floor and lay on his stomach, his head propped on his hands. Extraordinary thing; the black letters on the smooth, flat white page were so much easier to make out than the scratches in the beeswax – a clever bit of design, he had to admit – and after a while he found he didn’t have to say the words aloud. They seemed to talk to him inside his head; they sounded rather like ‘Na Herec, but without the seething impatience. He couldn’t actually follow any of it – lots of names of people he hadn’t heard of and words he didn’t know; it was supposed to be about carving, but there was nothing about work-holding or following the grain, or how to get the last little flakes and fibres out of a corner – but that hardly seemed to matter. It was like a vision, or eavesdropping on angels. Sobering thought, that the people who lived in this unbelievable place read books all the time. He carried on until all the oil in his lamp was burned up; then he rolled on to his back (one thing he hadn’t mastered yet was beds; there was nothing to stop him rolling off while he was asleep, and he had bruises he hoped he’d never have to explain) and dreamed of a great voice from heaven denouncing neo-formalism, while the sea rose up and lashed at the white encircling walls.

He was quite used to eating alone. The kitchens served two meals a day, but ‘Na Herec and ‘Na Seutz didn’t approve of eating and wouldn’t let him leave while there was still light in the sky just because of food. So when it was dark and they reluctantly let him go, he counted doors to the buttery and looked pathetic and sad until one of the bakers took pity on him. Pity usually took the form of that morning’s bread (officially stale and only for pigswill; it was the most wonderfully soft bread he’d ever tasted) and whatever the bakers were having for dinner. They kept trying to get him to drink beer; he took it away in a brown jug and poured it down the drain outside his chapter house. Apart from the bakers and his teachers, he hadn’t spoken to anyone since he arrived, but it didn’t seem to bother him. The streets were usually deserted when he walked through them, and the people in the neighbouring rooms were all still asleep when he got up in the morning and out when he got back at night. He no longer winced when he heard Imperial spoken; he was beginning to think in it, and it was disconcerting sometimes when there was something he wanted to say and he realised there was no way of saying it. “Quite,” ‘Na Herec said, when he told her about the problem. “Imperial isn’t a very good language. No Vei’s much better for thinking big thoughts in, and Aelian is so much better for logical arguments. Imperial’s good for laws and legal documents, and that’s about all. But we’re stuck with it, and there it is.” She gave him that look. “I never could understand why a bunch of savages like your lot should have produced a language ideally suited for metaphysical debate, it seems such a waste.”

Then ‘Na Herec said she didn’t want to see him again; he was fluent in Imperial, he could read adequately and his handwriting, though dreadful, was no worse than that of the Dean of Humanities. Instead, he was to report to Domna Lysao for his Ordinary Catechism—

“But I’ve done that,” he said. “We did it together. You said I was—”

“Yes, and you are. But that’s the Simple Catechism. Now you’re going to do the Ordinary Catechism, which is different. Fairly different,” she amended. “It covers the same basic core material, but this time you’ve got to show you understand it.”

He looked at her. “Couldn’t you—?”

Maybe just a tiny movement at the corner of her mouth, using the muscle other people used for smiling. “Yes, but I’m sick to death of the sight of you. Also, believe it or not, you’re not the only student at Beal Defoir. I, however, am the only teacher who knows Erech Nichar. So Lysao gets you, and I wish her the very best of luck.”

Two days before ‘Na Lysao wanted to see him. An opportunity to lie in in the morning. But Lonjamen came and hammered on his door at the crack of dawn and dragged him down to breakfast.

“Are all the teachers here women?” he asked.

“What? No, of course not. About half and half, actually. You haven’t got a problem with that, have you? They speak very highly of you.”

That made no sense. “What, you mean ‘Na Seutz and ‘Na Herec? They both think I’m a disaster.”