The Proof House by K. J. Parker

Author:K. J. Parker [Parker, K. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780316233231
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2000-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Dassascai the spy (so called to distinguish him from another man with the same name who repaired tents) sat beside his fire next to the duck pen and sharpened a knife. It had a long, thin blade with a clipped back, the sort used for cutting meat off the bone. He’d finished with the oilstone and the waterstone and was stropping it slowly on the untanned side of a leather belt.

He was possibly the only man sitting still in the whole camp; Temrai had decided to move the clans south-east, towards the Imperial army approaching from the direction of Ap’ Escatoy. After nearly seven years in one place, the plainsmen were moving stiffly, like someone getting up in the morning after too little sleep.

Half the workforce had left at first light to begin the awkward job of rounding up the herd. After seven years of continual grazing, there was barely a blade of grass left in the immediate vicinity of the camp. Instead of being close at hand, therefore, as it always used to be in the old wandering days, the herd was split up and scattered across thousands of acres of the eastern plain. Many of the boys riding with the herding party had never seen a full-scale roundup and weren’t quite sure what to do; for the most part, they were sensibly treating the whole thing as an adventure, and their enthusiasm was enough to stop the men from thinking too hard about the implications of Temrai’s decision. Each rider had his goatskin provisions bag over his shoulder, a bow and quiver on either side of his saddle, his coat and blanket rolled up and stowed behind the crupper. A few of the men wore helmets and mailshirts, or carried them wrapped in waxed cloth covers or wicker panniers; nobody knew for certain where the enemy might suddenly appear – they’d already taken on many of the attributes of fairy-tale sprites and demons, who lurk in dark woods and pounce unexpectedly from the shadow of tall rocks.

The other half of the clan were busy breaking the camp; uprooting tent-poles, folding felts and carpets, trying to stow seven years’ worth of sedentary life into panniers and travoises designed to hold only the essentials. Many people were discarding the wondrous but useless treasures they’d looted from the sack of the City – up and down the rapidly vanishing streets of the camp there were bronze tripods and ivory tables, huge bronze cooking-pots, an incongruous assortment of bits of bronze and marble statue (a head here, an arm or a colossal booted foot there; not a single complete piece anywhere, so that the camp field looked like the aftermath of a battle between two tribes of giants). Wherever possible, they were dismantling the machines and tools they’d built over the years, sawbenches and lathes and water-powered grindstones, trebuchets and mangonels, presses and winches and treadmills and watermills, dismembered like carcasses in a butcher’s store and loaded on to flat-bed carts, but

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