The Two of Swords: Part 8 Read Free

in Beloisa,” Pleda observed as the ship dawdled through choppy water on the second day.
    Musen didn’t feel much like chatting. He appeared to be working on the assumption (unfounded, as Pleda knew only too well) that if you keep perfectly still, eventually it gets better. “It’s all changed now, I expect.”
    “Bound to be, since some bastard burned it to the ground. It wasn’t a bad old place when I knew it. A bit something-and-nothing, but I’ve seen worse.” He turned his back on the sea and rested his elbows on the rail. He’d forgotten, but actually he quite liked sailing. “I’m from Arad Sefny originally. Know it?”
    Musen shook his head. A mistake. He closed his eyes and swallowed a couple of times.
    “About a day and a half’s walk up from Burnt Chapel. Between Bray Downs and the Greenwater valley.”
    “Sorry,” Musen said. “No idea where that is.”
    Pleda shrugged. “We had a nice little farm, forty acres on the flat, grazed three dozen sheep on the downs. My mother bred geese, we used to drive them down into Burnt Chapel for the autumn fair. Three brothers, I was the youngest, and a sister; she married a man from Corroway. I used to go over there sometimes to help him with the peat-digging.”
    Musen turned his head. “You said your father was a fuller.”
    Pleda nodded. “Happy days,” he said. “Haven’t been home for, what, thirty years. Don’t suppose they’d recognise me if I walked through the door.”
    “In a town.”
    “Burnt Chapel. Smallish place. Used to be a chapel there, but it burned down.”
    Musen was grinning. “One contradiction.”
    “Good boy. I made it easy for you, mind.”
    Musen turned back so that his mouth was directly above the sea. “Where are you really from?” he asked.
    “Here and there. The lodge has always been my home. You go where you’re told. I like that.”
    The boy thought for a while before he spoke again. “I can see where it saves you a lot of fretting,” he said. “Lots of choices you don’t have to make.”
    Pleda frowned. “Oh, there’s choices,” he said. “All the bloody time, and the higher up you get, the more of them you’ve got to make. Don’t get any easier, either, and nobody thanks you for anything, nobody ever says well done, bloody good job.” He spread his elbows wider along the rail; it helped his back, a little. “I think that’s probably why the lodge works so well,” he said. “It’s not like anything else I know; not like governments or armies or Temple or any of that lot. Everywhere else, you always get people who want to get on, people with ambition. When the choices come along, they choose because they want to get to the top, because of the money and the power and all that rubbish. In the lodge, now, the higher up you get, the worse it is. No, don’t pull faces at me; it’s true. You don’t get paid, you live where you’re put, and if they send you to a tannery or a slaughterhouse, cleaning out the stalls, that’s where you go and that’s where you damn well stay. You don’t get fame and glory because there’s only a handful of people know who you are, and they’re lodge, not easily impressed. Just when you’ve got yourself settled in somewhere and your life feels like it’s starting to make sense, the bastards
promote
you, and it’s off somewhere else and start all over again, whether you like it or not. You can be Grand Vizier to the Sultan of Dog’s Armpit, and if you get promoted and the job means digging ore fifteen hours a day down an iron mine, that’s that, off you go, you don’t argue. Take me, for instance. Before I was put on this food-tasting thing, I was a chief clerk in a treasury office in the home provinces. Big house, nice bit of garden, servants, a bunch of little clerks to do all my work for me. And before that I was an assistant harbour master, and you can take it from me, there’s no better dodge going if you want to make a bit on the side. I could’ve raked it