The Two of Swords: Volume One

1

The Crown Prince

The draw in Rhus is to the corner of the mouth; it says so in the Book, it’s the law. In Overend, they draw to the ear; in the South, it’s the middle of the lower lip—hence the expression, “archer’s kiss.” Why Imperial law recognises three different optimum draws, given that the bow and the arrow are supposedly standardised throughout the empire, nobody knows. In Rhus, of course, they’ll tell you that the corner of the mouth is the only possible draw if you actually want to hit anything. Drawing to the ear messes up your sightline down the arrow, and the Southerners do the kiss because they’re too feeble to draw a hundred pounds that extra inch.

Teucer had a lovely draw, everybody said so. Old men stood him drinks because it was so perfect, and the captain made him stand in front of the beginners and do it over and over again. His loose wasn’t quite so good—he had a tendency to snatch, letting go of the string rather than allowing it to slide from his fingers—which cost him valuable points in matches. Today, however, for some reason he wished he could isolate, preserve in vinegar and bottle, he was loosing exactly right. The arrow left the string without any conscious action on his part—a thought, maybe: round about now would be a good time, and then the arrow was in the air, bounding off to join its friends in the dead centre of the target, like a happy dog. The marker at the far end of the butts held up a yellow flag: a small one. Eight shots into the string, Teucer suddenly realised he’d shot eight inner golds, and was just two away from a possible.

He froze. In the long and glorious history of the Merebarton butts, only two possibles had ever been shot: one by a legendary figure called Old Shan, who may or may not have existed some time a hundred years ago, and one by Teucer’s great-uncle Ree, who’d been a regular and served with Calojan. Nobody had had the heart to pull the arrows out of that target; it had stayed on the far right of the butts for twenty years, until the straw was completely rotten, and the rusty heads had fallen out into the nettles. Every good archer had shot a fifty. One or two in the village had shot fifty with eight or fifty with nine. A possible—fifty with ten, ten shots in the inner circle of the gold—was something completely different.

People were looking at him, and then at his target, and the line had gone quiet. A possible at one hundred yards is—well, possible; but extremely unlikely, because there’s only just enough space in the inner ring for ten arrowheads. Usually what happens is that you drop in seven, maybe eight, and then the next one touches the stem of an arrow already in place on its way in and gets deflected; a quarter-inch into the outer gold if you’re lucky, all the way out of the target and into the nettles if you’re not. In a match, with beer or a chicken riding on it, the latter possibility tends to persuade the realistic competitor to shade his next shot just a little, to drop it safely into the outer gold and avoid the risk of a match-losing score-nought. Nobody in history anywhere had ever shot a possible in a match. But this was practice, nothing to play for except eternal glory, the chance for his name to be remembered a hundred years after his death; he had no option but to try for it. He squinted against the evening light, trying to figure out the lie of his eight shots, but the target was a hundred yards away: all he could see of the arrows was the yellow blaze of the fletchings. He considered calling hold, stopping the shoot while he walked up the range and took a closer look. That was allowed, even in a match, but to do so would be to acknowledge that he was trying for a possible, so that when he failed—

A voice in his head, which he’d never heard before, said quite clearly, go and look. No, I can’t, he thought, and the voice didn’t argue. Quite. Only an idiot argues with himself. Go and look. He took a deep breath and said, “Hold.”

It came out loud, high and squeaky, but nobody laughed; instead, they laid their bows down on the grass and took a step back. Dead silence. Men he’d known all his life. Then, as he took his first stride up the range, someone whose voice he couldn’t identify said, “Go on, Teuce.” It was said like a prayer, as though addressed to a god—please send rain, please let my father get well. They believed in him. It made his stomach turn and his face go cold. He walked up the range as if to the gallows.

When he got there: not good. The marker (Pilad’s uncle Sen; a quiet man, but they’d always got on well) gave him a look that said sorry, son, then turned away. Six arrows were grouped tight in the exact centre of the inner gold, one so close to the others that the shaft was actually flexed; God only knew how it had gone in true. The seventh was out centre-right, just cutting the line. The eighth was in clean, but high left. That meant he had to shoot two arrows into the bottom centre, into a half-moon about the size of his thumb, from a hundred yards away. He stared at it. Can’t be done. It was, no pun intended, impossible.

Pilad’s uncle Sen gave him a wan smile and said, “Good luck.” He nodded, turned away and started back down the range.

Sen’s nephew Pilad was his best friend, something he’d never quite been able to understand. Pilad was, beyond question, the glory of Merebarton. Not yet nineteen (he was three weeks older than Teucer) he was already the best stockman, the best reaper and mower, champion ploughman, best thatcher and hedge-layer; six feet tall, black-haired and brown-eyed, the only possible topic of conversation when three girls met, undisputed champion horse-breaker and second-best archer. And now consider Teucer, his best friend; shorter, ordinary-looking, awkward with girls, a good worker but a bit slow, you’d have trouble remembering him ten minutes after you’d met him, and the only man living to have shot a hundred-yard possible on Merebarton range—

He stopped, halfway between butts and firing point, and laughed. The hell with it, he thought.

Pilad was shooting second detail, so he was standing behind the line, in with a bunch of other fellows. As Teucer walked up, he noticed that Pilad was looking away, standing behind someone’s shoulder, trying to make himself inconspicuous. Teucer reached the line, turned and faced the target; like the time he’d had to go and bring in the old white bull, and it had stood there glaring at him with mad eyes, daring him to take one more step. Even now he had no idea where the courage had come from that day; he’d opened the gate and gone in, a long stride directly towards certain death; on that day, the bull had come quietly, gentle as a lamb while he put the halter on, walking to heel like a good dog. Maybe, Teucer thought, when I was born Skyfather allotted me a certain number of good moments, five or six, maybe, to last me my whole life. If so, let this be one of them.

Someone handed him his bow. His fingers closed round it, and the feel of it was like coming home. He reached for the ninth arrow, stuck point first into the ground. He wasn’t aware of nocking it, but it got on to the string somehow. Just look at the target: that voice again, and he didn’t yet know it well enough to decide whether or not it could be trusted. He drew, and he was looking straight down the arrow at a white circle on a black background. Just look at the target. He held on it for three heartbeats, and then the arrow left him.

Dead silence, for the impossibly long time it took for the arrow to get there. Pilad’s uncle Sen walked to the target with his armful of flags, picked one out and lifted it. Behind Teucer, someone let out a yell they must’ve heard back in the village.

Well, he thought, that’s forty-five with nine; good score, enough to win most matches. And still one shot in hand. Let’s see what we can do.

The draw. He had a lovely draw. This time, he made himself enjoy it. To draw a hundred-pound bow, you first use and then abuse nearly every muscle and every joint in your body. There’s a turning point, a hinge, where the force of the arms alone is supplemented by the back and the legs. He felt the tip of his middle finger brush against his lip, travel the length of it, until it found the far corner. Just look at the target. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It matters, said the voice. But that’s all right. That helps.

He’d never thought of it like that before. It matters. And that helps. Yes, he thought, it helps, and the arrow flew.

It lifted, the way an arrow does, swimming in the slight headwind he presumed he’d allowed for, though he had no memory of doing so. It lifted, reaching the apex of its flight, and he thought: however long I live, let a part of me always be in this moment, this split second when I could’ve shot a hundred-yard possible; this moment at which it’s still on, it hasn’t missed yet, the chance, the possibility is still alive, so that when I’m sixty-six and half blind and a nuisance to my family, I’ll still have this, the one thing that could’ve made me great—

Uncle Sen walked to the target. He wasn’t carrying his flags. He stood for a moment, the only thing that existed in the whole world. Then he raised both his arms and shouted.

Oh, Teucer thought; and then something hit him in the back and sent him flat on his face in the grass, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe, and it hurt. He was thinking: who’d want to do that to me; they’re supposed to be my friends. And then he was grabbed by his arms and yanked upright, and everybody was shouting in his face, and Pilad’s grin was so close to his eyes he couldn’t see it clearly; and he thought: I did it.

He didn’t actually want to go and look, just in case there had been a mistake, but they gave him no choice; he was scooped up and planted on two bony shoulders, so that he had to claw at heads with his fingers to keep from falling off. At the butts they slid him off on to his knees, so that when he saw the target he was in an attitude of worship, like in Temple. Fair enough. Arrows nine and ten were both in, clean, not even touching the line. They looked like a bunch of daffodils, or seedlings badly in need of thinning. A possible. The only man living. And then he thought: they won’t let me pull my arrows out, and they’re my match set, and I can’t afford to buy another one—

And Pilad, who’d been one of the bony shoulders, gave him another murderous slap on the back and said, “Nicely, Teuce, nicely,” and with a deep feeling of shame and remorse he realised that Pilad meant it; no resentment, no envy, sheer joy in his friend’s extraordinary achievement. (But if Pilad had been the shooter, how would he be feeling now? Don’t answer that.) He felt as if he’d just betrayed his friend, stolen from him or told lies about him behind his back. He wanted to say he was sorry, but it would be too complicated to explain.

They let him go eventually. Pilad and Nical walked with him as far as the top of the lane. He explained that he wanted to check on the lambs, so he’d take a short cut across the top meadow. It’s possible that they believed him. He walked the rest of the way following the line of the hedge, as though he didn’t want to be seen.

It was nearly dark when he got home; there was a thin line of bright yellow light under the door and he could smell roast chicken. He grinned, and lifted the latch.

“Dad, Mum, you’re not going to believe—” He stopped. They were sitting at the table, but it wasn’t laid for dinner. In the middle of it lay a length of folded yellow cloth. It looked a bit like a scarf.

“This came for you,” his father said.

He said it like someone had died. It was just some cloth. Oh, he thought. He took a step forward, picked it up and unfolded it. Not a scarf; a sash.

His mother had been crying. His father looked as though he’d woken up to find all the stock dead, and the wheat burned to the ground and the thatch blown off.

“I shot a possible,” he said, but he knew it didn’t matter.

His father frowned, as though he didn’t understand the words. “That’s good,” he said, looking away; not at Teucer, not at the sash. “Well?” his father said suddenly. “Tell me about it.”

“Later,” Teucer said. He was looking at the sash. “When did this come?”

“Just after you went out. Two men, soldiers. Guess they’re going round all the farms.”

Well, of course. If they were raising the levy, they wouldn’t make a special journey just for him. “Did they say when?”

“You got to be at the Long Ash cross, first light, day after tomorrow,” his father said. “Kit and three days’ rations. They’re raising the whole hundred. That’s all they’d say.”

It went without saying they had records; the census, conducted by the Brothers every five years. They’d know his father was exactly one year overage for call-up, just as they’d known he had a son, nineteen, eligible. It would all be written down somewhere in a book; a sort of immortality, if you cared to look at it that way. Somewhere in the city, the provincial capital, strangers knew their names, knew that they existed, just as people a hundred years hence would know about Teucer from Merebarton, who’d once shot ten with ten at a hundred yards.

He wasn’t the least bit hungry now. “What’s for dinner?” he said.

He woke up out of a dream, and all that was left of it was someone saying, he must’ve had eyes like a hawk, and then he remembered: what day it was, what he had to do. He slid off the bed, found his clothes and wriggled into them by feel, because it was too dark to see.

The idea was to leave the house before anyone else was awake. Nice idea, but Teucer had always been clumsy. He sideswiped a chair with his thigh, and the chair fell over, and something that must’ve been on the chair clattered on to the flagstones, making a noise like chain-making at the forge, only a bit louder. He realised that it was his bow, quiver, knapsack and tin cup. He lowered himself to his knees and groped on the floor till he’d found them all. The noise he made would’ve woken the dead, but there was no sound from the other room. Mum and Dad would be wide awake, so presumably they’d guessed what he was doing. Well.

He’d put his boots in the porch the night before, the sash stuffed into the leg of the right boot. He wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to wear it yet; in theory, he knew, you were a soldier from the moment it was handed to you (so when he shot the possible, was he already a soldier?) and so he guessed he was entitled to wear the damned thing. But old men in the village who’d been in the service told all sorts of blood-curdling stories about what happened to raw recruits who broke the secret laws of military protocol. There were, he knew, thirty-six different ways of wearing the sash: only five of them were correct, and two of those were reserved for twenty-year men. Unfortunately, either the old men hadn’t specified, or he hadn’t been paying attention. He fished it out, shoved it in his pocket and put his boots on.

The sky was cloudless, before-dawn deep blue, and it had rained in the night so everything smelt sweetly of wet leaves and slaked earth. He walked up the yard, stopped by the corner of the hay barn and looked back. He knew this moment. It was one of the best, getting up early and walking round the fields to see if he could shoot a couple of rabbits, maybe a fox, a deer if he was absolutely sure nobody was looking. On such days he’d always stop and look back at this point, just in case there was a rabbit sitting out on the edge of the cabbage bed. No such luck today. He grinned, turned easily and walked on, taking care to make no sound, out of force of habit.

Pilad and Musen were waiting for him by the oak stump on the top road, silhouettes against the blue sky. Musen was wearing a hat and a scarf, which seemed a bit excessive for the time of year. He nodded as Teucer came up, grunted, “All right, then?” Pilad was eating an apple.

“Where’s Dimed?” Teucer asked.

Pilad shrugged. “Shacked up, probably. Last taste of home, that sort of thing.”

“Do we wait?”

“No chance.” Musen stood up. “Catch me getting in trouble because he can’t be arsed to get up in time.”

Teucer glanced at Pilad, who nodded, threw away the apple and rose to his feet. “He’ll catch up,” he said.