(In case you aren’t familiar with the high culture of the Cradle of Civilization, once a month, all the citizens of the City crowd into a huge enclosure to watch the fighting; men against wild animals, animals against animals, men against men. Now, I find this odd, since the Empire has been at war against the heathen for six hundred years, doing quite badly most of the time; every family loses at least one man every generation, and the City itself has been besieged twelve times, so you’d think they’d have seen quite enough fighting and killing for free, without paying a silver sixpence for a seat at the back, probably behind a pillar or a woman with a tall hat. Apparently not.)
Oh, and dragons, of course, he told me. We caught half a dozen dragons. Then he stopped and grinned at me. You think I’m shitting you, he said. I bet you don’t think dragons even exist.
Oddly enough, I said, I do.
He looked at me. Well, they do, he said, and we had to catch them, alive, undamaged. Bet you can’t guess how we did it.
I’m more interested in lions, I told him. Tell me how you used to catch lions.
Same way as we caught dragons, basically, he said. What you do is—
He was a good man, though he took some getting used to, and what he didn’t know about dragons—Somehow he never quite grasped that it wasn’t a subject I was comfortable talking about, but he was a wonderful horseman and taught me how to shoot a hundred-pound-draw shortbow from the saddle, set a broken arm, and cure mountain fever. I have no idea what happened to him. His squadron was cut off by an outflanking wing that came out of nowhere. A day or so later, I went back and picked over the bodies, but I didn’t find his there. Proving nothing.
A thousand angels. A lot of money.
I met an alchemist once, and he explained the theory to me. All things corrupt, he told me, all things decay and fall apart and go to waste and ruin, except for gold. You can leave it out in the rain or bury it in the damp earth for a hundred years, and it’ll come out looking just as shiny and clean as when it went in. There are only two things, he said to me, that survive and pass through the taints and decays and corruptions of this world unscathed and unchanged: God and gold. And one of them is all around us every day, in everything and comprised in and comprising everything, and the other one is very rare, and has to be crushed and sweated out of a rock or sifted, tiny speck by tiny speck, from the stinking silt of a riverbed. Guess which one people value the most. Go on, guess.
And (he went on) neither of them can be reduced to an essential form, since they’re both perfect already; but both of them have the virtue of rejuvenating, of restoring and perfecting. Both of them, in fact, can work miracles.
I told him I wasn’t sure about that. I’ll show you, he said, and he led me through the bazaar to an archway in a wall, and through the arch into a courtyard with a door, and he rang a little brass bell. Someone opened the door for us, and beyond it I saw a walled garden, rows of lavender and sage and marjoram, apple trees espaliered on wires, and in the center a fountain. Ten years ago, he told me, this was a tanner’s yard, and you could smell the slurry and the rotting brains halfway across town. Then I bought it, and I spent a thousand nomismata making it like this, but it was worth it. Gold transforms, he said, gold purifies. Gold can turn a cesspit into a paradise.
I like a pretty garden as much as the next man, but if I had a thousand angels I knew what I’d do with it. First I’d hire all the casual labor I could get, and I’d clear and plough up all the land in Loucy that’s gone to rack and ruin since my grandfather’s time, and I’d rebuild all the fallen-down barns and walls, have all the hedges laid so the stock couldn’t get out and stray onto my lord’s land, never to return. I’d plant out a vineyard on Conegar, clear the weeds and the cow parsley out of the millrace and get the mill working again, get the fish traps and weirs on the river fixed up, order new ploughs and harrows, maybe even go to Chastelbest abbey fair and buy a really good pedigree bull. They’ll tell you in the schools that alchemy is abstruse and difficult to understand, but I think it’s pretty clear and simple, once you understand the basic principles.
I’ll need money, I’d told him, for expenses. He’d looked offended and sad, and told the chancellor to give me a writ for fifteen angels. What I’d actually asked for was fifty, but the prince is slightly deaf in one ear.
Still, fifteen angels is a lot of money. I took the writ down to the chancellery and they counted fifteen coins into my hand and made me sign a receipt.
I’ve known the blacksmith at Loucy all my life. When I was a boy, I used to hang around the forge watching him, trying not to get under his feet. If I’d been Raimbaut, that wouldn’t have been allowed, but a third son has more latitude in precise gradations of status, especially when his father isn’t entirely sure when he’ll be in a position to pay the blacksmith’s bill. It’d be an exaggeration to say that he ever liked me much. I was a small boy who sat in a corner of the room and stared at him and never said anything, even when spoken to. But he got used to me.
Then my lord the duke decided to go to Outremer, and with him went his seventeen horses, and the horses needed a farrier. The blacksmith of Loucy had a son, a promising young man who was already a master of the trade and known to be particularly good with horses. He’d already made his mind up to volunteer, he told me, when my lord’s man came with the summons. It was an honor and a privilege, and the money was very good, and he’d always had a fancy to travel.
Two days after he told me that, he was dead. I can’t remember offhand whether it was cholera or the flux; one of the two. When we were kids, he used to duck my head in the slack bucket when he was sure nobody was watching, and once, he stole my shoes and I had to pretend to my father that I’d lost them crossing the river. When I told his father, I made out that he’d died bravely fighting the heathen; he dashed forward to rescue a fallen comrade, I said, and a savage stabbed him in the back.
So, Garcio and I know each other tolerably well. Which means he knows me well enough to make me show him actual money before I tell him what I want made.
“What in God’s name is that supposed to be?” he said.
I’d drawn a sketch in chalk on a roof slate. “It’s to scale,” I told him. “I measured it with dividers and calipers.” He’d taught me to do that, though he hadn’t meant to; I’d watched him, with his back to me. Saved my life once, being able to draw up an accurate sketch. I never told him that, of course.
“What is it?”
“It’s a trap,” I told him.
He peered at the slate. His eyes aren’t what they were, on account of staring at white-hot metal for forty years. “What’s that supposed to be?”
“That’s the sear,” I said. “The tripwire disengages the sear from the notch, which releases the shutter.”
He looked at me. “What’s it a trap for?”
“Lions,” I said.
“What do you want to trap lions for?”
“I don’t.”
Like I said, he was used to me. “How thick’s this strut got to be?”
“An inch. Actually, you might get away with seven-eighths, but what the hell.”
“Rivetted?”