Chương 84: 76. The Customs House

"I have watched three candidate be enclosed by their own institutions before the candidate understood what was being built around her. Institutions do not relinquish power easily." — Codex of the Long Watch, Field Observation The Customs House At the head of the column the Baron had not turned to watch the party come through. He had given the order to move and expected the party to follow. Arthur went through the gap in the line of men first, with Donna a half-step behind, her axe already in her hand.

Sarah came next, the medical bag slung across her chest and her face composed with careful neutrality. Steve followed her with the pack on one shoulder and the pouch of cores in the other. He hadn't had the chance to finish the morning accounts. The camp watched them go. Mifsud stood beside his trestle with the pencil poised between two fingers. Rita Camilleri stood at the medical tent's flap with one hand on the canvas, and the boy Pawlu was somewhere near the cooking fire.

The seven Sarah had trained for the last three days were arranged across the clearing in a half-circle with a mixture of emotions and confusion on their faces. The other nameless faces in the camp huddled in small groups, whispering amongst themselves. Behind the party, the fifty men closed the gap, and the morning's escort was made. * The road out of Marsaxlokk climbed up onto the limestone spine of the island in a long, easy gradient.

They were given a cart to ride in, and the column moved at the pace the Baron's men set, which was slower than a walk and faster than a procession. This seemed like an unusual arrangement considering that the Baron and Azzopardi were walking at the head of the column. Arthur counted the escort once again. Fifty was about right.

Two-thirds of them were Maltese legionnaires in their grey, half of those carrying the Hospitaller-pattern weapons Azzopardi had drawn out of the Valletta armoury, and the other third were the Baron's people. Donna was sitting on the wooden rail of the cart opposite Arthur, the axe across her thighs, watching the column. After they had been on the road for half an hour, she said, "They could have moved us at night." Arthur turned his head toward her.

"They could have managed with a small detail," she said.

"Use the harbour road south with no one to watch us go or ask too many questions. Instead they walked us out of the camp in the morning in front of every Maltese who could find a flap to look through. They are walking us up to Mdina by the main road. They want a thousand witnesses."

"To what end?" Arthur said.

"This is theatre. Every farmer in the upper village goes home tonight and tells his wife he saw the Captain and the Baron walking together at the head of fifty men with four foreigners in the back of a cart. This seems like setting a precedent and establishing a power structure." She watched the head of the column.

"They are not extracting us. They are introducing themselves." Steve was sitting on the bench beside Arthur and had been quiet. Arthur had watched him hold himself back since the morning the Baron had walked into the camp, and the discipline of it was something Arthur had not seen from him before. Steve was doing his work in his head. Now, looking out across the fields to where the high ground was beginning to rise toward the central plateau, he spoke for the first time in an hour, more to himself than to Arthur.

"The Citadel, the Phoenicians built it. They called it Maleth. When the Romans came they walled the inner city tighter and called it Melite. In the ninth century the Arabs pulled down the Roman walls and built the bastion the Knights eventually inherited. Mdina is the Arab name. The Knights kept it." He paused for a moment, watching the city resolve in the distance.

"There has been a deputation walking up this road to that gate to deliver some kind of news to whoever was inside it for nearly three thousand years." Steve looked at the walls beginning to come into view in the distance.

"They built the city up there to make the visitor walk up to it to be heard. And so that all could watch the visitor walk." * The walls came into view a long way out. They sat on the high ground at the centre of the island in a long unbroken line of limestone, golden in the late-morning light and built to look low against the sky until you came close enough to see how thick they were.

The road ran up at them straight and unshielded, the kind of approach engineered by men who wanted to know who was coming and how they wanted to greet the visitors.

"It is one of the most continuously inhabited fortified sites in the Mediterranean," Steve said.

"The Carthaginians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Aragonese and the Knights all kept living inside it after they modified it to their own purposes." Donna was watching the gate as it grew on the horizon.

"The Order walked their prisoners up this road for two hundred and fifty years," Steve continued.

"Trial in the morning, sentence by midday, out by the lower gate before dark."

"And the sentence usually being what," Donna said. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Whatever the Inquisitor said. The Inquisitor was a man appointed by Rome who sat in the Palace of the Inquisition. Which is two streets, I think, from where we are going." Donna nodded once and went back to watching the head of the column. The street inside the walls was narrow, paved in worn stone, flanked by buildings on both sides. The streets were quiet but not empty. Behind shuttered windows, people watched. A door opened a hand's width as the carts passed and was pulled closed again.

A child's face appeared at a balcony and was pulled back. Two old men sat on a bench in a small square and turned their faces away when the column came through. The Compact had already taught the people when to look and when to look away. * The customs house was a long, low building on a side street off the main square, with a high arched door and a newly painted mark above it in a square red sigil. Arthur did not recognise it and was not curious enough to ask Steve about it.

The Baron's people opened the door and the party was walked into a small antechamber where two clerks at a side table did not look up at the new arrivals. A second door let them into the room beyond. The room was high-ceilinged and cool, the walls lime-washed and the floor tiled in the worn yellow limestone Arthur had seen in every Maltese interior since Marsaxlokk. A long table of dark oiled wood ran most of its length, with chairs on both sides and three at its head.

A bottle of wine had been set out at the table's centre, and beside it was a board with a half-loaf of bread and some cheese on it. Around the perimeter of the room, men stood at intervals of about a metre, weapons at their hips. Arthur counted in his head: fifteen inside the room, four at the door, an unknown number around the building. The Baron took the middle chair at the head of the table. Captain Azzopardi sat to his left. The woman to his right was perhaps sixty, grey-haired and simply dressed.

She sat with a thin folder on the table in front of her and a brass-nibbed pen laid neatly across the top of it.

"My friends." The Baron gestured at the chairs across from him.

"Please. Sit. Eat." The party took the chairs without touching the bread or the wine. The Baron poured wine into four cups and slid them across the table. He did not pour for himself, and the cups stayed where he had put them. He smiled and went back to his seat.

"This is Pia Borg," he said, with a courteous half-turn to the woman on his right.

"Madam Borg has agreed to act as the Compact's procedural witness today. She was a magistrate in Valletta until the courts dissolved. Mela, she has spent her professional life ensuring that an institution observes its procedure, and she will do the same here." Pia Borg inclined her head one degree and opened the folder. She did not meet anyone's eye.

"And what institution is this? What is the Compact?" Arthur said.

"My friend, the Compact is a lawful body. It was formed a few days ago by the surviving groups of Malta: the Captain's legionnaires, my organisation, the civilian magistrates of whom Madam Borg is one, and the remaining settlement councils of Mdina, Mosta, the Three Cities, and Gozo. It exists to coordinate the island's resources during the reconstruction. People are being housed. Food is being moved. The roads are being patrolled. It is good work." He inclined his head at the room.

"I am here in the role of interlocutor. The Compact has asked me to speak on its behalf to your party because I know you. Mela, this is a courtesy." Donna had been counting the men along the walls. She looked across the table at the Baron and said, evenly, "Lawful does not need a room full of guards." The Baron's smile was small and economical. A procedural smile.

"It does, my friend. Especially when it is new. Mela, would you have us pretend we are not in serious times? Every customs house in the Mediterranean has had guards since before it was called the Mediterranean. The guards are here for everyone. Including you." The lie was obvious and the Baron did not attempt to hide it.

"Now." He set his hands flat on the table.

"There is a piece of business. Madam Borg." Pia Borg slid a single sheet of paper across the table to Arthur. The handwriting on the page was small and neat, a handwriting born out of a lifetime of court records. The page was dated three days earlier. The header read COMPACT TARIFF SCHEDULE, and below it, in careful clerical lines: Goods extracted from Compact cultural heritage sites: full duty, one hundred per cent. Artefacts removed from Compact territory: full duty pending council review.

Strategic documentation of Compact infrastructure: full duty pending council review. Use of Compact transit assets by non-Compact parties: passage fee, set at the discretion of the operating council. There was an appeals clause beneath the four articles. Disputes were heard within twenty-four hours by an appeals panel of which Captain Azzopardi was the senior member. The schedule was signed by the Baron and witnessed by Pia Borg.

Arthur read the page once, all the way to the bottom, and then went back to the top and read it again slowly. The second read was where he did his work. The schedule was not, when you stripped the procedural language off it, complicated. There was a legal argument the party could make if they wanted to. None of the cores in Steve's pouch had come out of any Maltese cultural heritage anyone had recognised before Day Zero.

The caprids and the guardians were system-spawned, the Hypogeum's actual archaeological contents were untouched, and a competent magistrate, if a competent magistrate could be found, would have to listen to that before signing the schedule. There was also a verification problem. The cores looked like the cores. One that had come out of a Tarxien caprid and one that had come out of a creature in Marseille were almost identical to the eye.

You could differentiate between major and minor cores but you could not say where two minor cores came from. There was no instrument the Compact could put in front of them that would be able to make the differentiation. Arthur did not bother to make either argument, because the arguments were beside the point. The Compact had decided what the party owed. The Compact had put fifteen men in the room and four at the door and an unknown number outside it to enforce that decision.

The schedule was just paperwork that the Compact had created around the decision so that they would not have to use the word coercion. The Baron was watching him read.

"You may contest any item, my friend," he said.

"The appeals process Madam Borg has described is open to you, and the Captain sits on the panel. Mela, I would recommend that you understand what you are contesting before you contest it. There are paths besides the appeals process. I hope we do not have to walk those today." Arthur did not answer. He passed the sheet across the table to Steve. Steve read it once, his mouth thinning as he did, and then went back to the top and read it through a second time with the same deliberate care Arthur had used.

He voiced what Arthur had not.

"How will you distinguish," he said, "between cores we took from Tarxien and the Hypogeum and the cores we have been carrying with us since Marseille?" The Baron's smile did not change.

"Madam Borg will enter all cores in your possession as a single inventory. The Compact will not distinguish."