Devices and Desires

Chapter Twenty

Since the first army had unaccountably been exterminated, it was just as well that the second army arrived earlier than anticipated, thanks to an unusually strong tailwind. If it hadn't been for the defeat and the massacre, their arrival would have been a logistical disaster. There wouldn't have been nearly enough food, blankets, tents or equipment for twelve thousand men arriving a week ahead of schedule; there'd have been chaos, and the whole venture would've teetered on the edge of failure.

Thanks, however, to the Eremians and their home-made scorpions, the stores and magazines held ample supplies for seven thousand men who weren't going to be needing them after all. To the clerks and administrators of the Treasury and Necessary Evil, it was a source of quiet satisfaction that the crisis was averted and all that expensive food, clothing and equipment wouldn't go to waste after all. In the event, the only problem posed by the early arrival of the second army that didn't effectively solve itself was transport, and that was no big deal. Unlike other shipments of imported goods, mercenaries can transport themselves. They have legs, and can walk.

The commanding officer of the new army, Major-General Sthoe Melancton, didn't see it quite like that. He'd been promised ox-carts to shift his men and their gear from Lonazep to the City. It was in the contract, he pointed out, so it was his right; also, his men were in prime condition, ready for the long march up the mountains. An unscheduled route march to the capital would inevitably result in wear and tear on footwear, vehicles and equipment that had not been allowed for in the original agreement. Further, it would mean an extra four days' service, for which he wanted time and a half. The Republic replied by pointing out that by arriving early, he was in fundamental breach of contract, time inevitably being of the essence in any contract for services, and that the failure to provide the agreed transport was entirely the result of his own breach, therefore not the Republic's fault. If anybody had a right to compensation and damages, in fact, it was the Republic; however, they were prepared to waive their claim in the interests of friendly co-operation. General Melancton rejoined by pleading that the tailwind was an unpredictable outside agency, not party to the contract, and therefore not his responsibility or his fault. The Republic countered by citing precedents from mercantile and shipping case-law. Melancton refused to accept Mezentine precedents, arguing that the contract had been finalised in his own country, whose law therefore applied to it. That argument was easily defeated by reference to the document itself, which clearly stated that the agreement was governed by Mezentine law. Melancton gave way with a certain degree of grace. The soldiers marched.

They were met just outside the City by the artillery train. It was at this point that Melancton found out what had become of his compatriots in the first army. Afterwards, it was generally agreed that he took the news better than had been expected. After a long moment of silent reflection, he told the representatives of Necessary Evil who'd broken the news to him that he was a man of his word and a professional, and he would do his job or else (here he was observed to dab a drop of sweat away from the side of his nose) die trying. He then asked a large number of detailed questions about the level of artillery support he could expect to receive, all of which the Mezentines were able to answer to his satisfaction. He thanked them politely and withdrew to confer with his senior staff.

In accordance with the ancient and honourable traditions of their craft, the merchants stayed in Civitas Eremiae until almost the last moment; and when they left, they took with them substantial quantities of small, high-value goods which the more pessimistic citizens had been only too pleased to exchange at a loss for hard cash. The general feeling was that it was better, on balance, that the merchants had them for a song than to keep them for the looters to prise out of their dead fingers.

All but one of the merchant caravans headed for the Vadani border by the shortest possible road. The exception, however, turned in a quite unexpected direction, on a course that seemed likely to leave her stranded and dying of thirst in the great desert that formed the civilised world's only defence against the Cure Hardy. What became of her, nobody knew or cared much. It was assumed that she was headed that way because the Mezentines wouldn't be taking that road in a hurry. Those sufficiently curious to speculate about the subject guessed that she had a retreat somewhere on the edge of the desert, where she planned to hole up until the war was over and it was safe to come out. The last recorded sighting of her was, curiously enough, by a column of Cure Hardy light cavalry, heading north to offer their services to the Mezentines in the coming war. How they came to be there, nobody knew and nobody liked to ask. The official explanation was that they'd come the long way round, enduring months of hardship and privation threading their way through the mountain passes that would have defeated an army of significant size-they were, after all, only one squadron of two hundred men. If it occurred to anybody that if that were the case they'd had to have set off long before the Guild Assembly had even considered the possibility of a war, they kept their hypotheses to themselves.

The arrival of outriders from the Cure Hardy squadron was like rain on parched fields to Melancton and his liaison committee from Necessary Evil. Negotiations had broken down and been patched up over and over again, always foundering on the vexed issue of skirmishers. Melancton hadn't brought any with him, because the contract hadn't specified them; there had been an ample contingent with the first army, so there was no need. With the threat of a scorpion ambush hanging over him, he absolutely refused to move across the border without an advance guard of light, fast, expendable scouts, which the Mezentines were not in a position to provide. The Cure Hardy were perfectly suited to the role. They came as the answer to a prayer; which was why asking them how they came to be available at such short notice wasn't considered, or else was dismissed with pointed references to gift horses' teeth.

To those who could be bothered to ask, the newcomers declared that they were a privateer war-band from the Doce Votz, under the command of one Pierh Leal, an obscure off-relation of the ruling family. They were perfectly willing to ride ahead of the advancing army, keeping an eye out for scorpion emplacements (it was highly unlikely they had any idea what a scorpion looked like, but it was assumed they'd find out the hard way soon enough) and declared that their speed and agility would preserve them from anything the war machines could throw at them. Perhaps some of the members of the liaison committee felt a slight degree of unease at the speed with which the outriders returned with the rest of the squadron; it argued that the Cure Hardy were adept at moving very quickly through even the most hostile terrain. But their arrival meant that the second expeditionary force could at last set out, and that came as a relief in the City, particularly to the officials of the Treasury. Melancton gave the Cure Hardy a day's start, then followed.

Much to his displeasure, he'd come to the conclusion after exhaustive debate that he had no alternative but to follow the same route as his predecessors, up the Butter Pass and on to the main road as far as Palicuro. After that, he had options, or at least alternatives, but he declared that he intended to keep an open mind until he reached Palicuro. After a slow start, due in part to a brisk and unseasonable cloudburst, he picked up speed in the middle and late afternoon, and was on time for his first scheduled rendezvous with the Cure Hardy at nightfall.

The scouts had very little to say for themselves. They claimed to have ridden a full day ahead of the edge of the search zone Melancton had assigned them, and to have seen no sign of the enemy, with or without war engines. Melancton was highly sceptical about these assertions, but had no choice but to rely on them and press on. The logistical support he'd insisted on before starting out was all in place, but he nevertheless wasn't inclined to dawdle and risk running short of supplies, thereby courting the same sort of disasters that had done for Beltista Eiconodoulus. Regrettably, this meant that he couldn't afford to wait for the artillery, which was making heavy weather of the road up the mountains and was believed to be at least half a day behind schedule. After a certain amount of soul-searching, he resolved to press on regardless. Artillery dismantled and packed on wagons wouldn't be any use to him if he was ambushed by scorpions in a narrow pass; in fact, they'd compound any disaster by falling into the hands of the Eremians. By keeping the artillery separate and behind him, he hoped to guard against that particular nightmare above all others.

The next two days proved that the Cure Hardy were reliable informants. For reasons best known to themselves, the enemy had failed to take advantage of two perfect locations for ambushes, both of them narrow bottle canyons through which Melancton had no option but to pass. This omission played on his nerves more than a clear sighting would have done; to an army already lacking in self-confidence, the enemy is never more unnerving than when he's invisible. Resisting an almost overpowering urge to slow down, wait for the artillery and build redoubts to hide in until he found out exactly what the Eremians were up to, he pressed on. During the course of the next two days the scouts reported two possible sightings of lone Eremian horsemen, apparently watching the army from a distance of several miles. Of an army or scorpions, they'd seen no trace. The next day, they rode right up to the outskirts of Palicuro, and reported back that the village was apparently deserted.

Once again, they were proved right. In fact, Palicuro was more than deserted; overnight it had been burned to ash and charcoal and the village cistern had been fouled with the proceeds of the village's muckheaps and middens. Melancton had known better than to rely on being able to find food for his men and forage for his horses there, but he was disappointed nevertheless; as a result he'd have enough to get to Civitas Eremiae, but if the Mezentines wanted him to dig in under the walls for a siege, they'd have to send him a large supply train. Otherwise he risked the indignity of the well-fed defenders throwing their crusts and cabbage waste to his men out of pity.

Dispatches containing these observations arrived unexpectedly on the desk of Lucao Psellus early one morning, at a stage in his career when he'd pretty much convinced himself that his fellow commissioners believed he was dead, or had retired to the suburbs to grow sunflowers and keep bees. He'd given up trying to find out what was going on, or what they wanted him to do. Nobody was ever available to talk to him, his memos went unanswered, and copies of reports and minutes had stopped coming a long time ago. He nearly wept with joy to know they still remembered who he was.

With the dispatches was a curt note requiring him to expedite the supply train as requested. That he could do. It would involve a careful balancing of the three basic elements out of which all administration is ultimately formed: time, money and fear. Not many people, even full-time professional Guild officers, really understood the complex and fascinating interplay between these three monumental forces, but Psellus had been experimenting with them in different combinations and ratios for years, like a methodical alchemist. At last they'd given him a job he could do.

Of the unholy trinity, the most fundamental is money, since nothing can happen without it. Accordingly, he walked across two quadrangles and up and down six flights of stairs, and surprised his old friend Maniacis in the payments room, where he was working at his chequerboard.

It was, in its way, a beautiful thing; an enormous oak table, the sort that kings and barons in the barbarian countries would sit at to feast and drink, whose surface was inlaid with thousands of juxtaposed bone and ebony plates, all of them exactly the same size, about an inch and a half square. At the end of each row was a number, a multiple of ten. At the narrow end of the table sat Maniacis, a pile of wax tablets in front of him, a wooden pot at his elbow, a miniature rake with a long thin stem in his hand. Whenever he needed to make a calculation, he took small silver discs, like coins, from the pot and started laying them out on the squares of the bottom row to represent units. As soon as four squares were covered, he flicked them back with his rake, scooped them back into the pot and put one counter on the line between the bottom and the second row, to represent five units. The second row was tens, the third hundreds, while counters placed on the line dividing second and third were fifties. Mostly he would start a calculation slowly and carefully and gradually build up speed as he progressed, until his fingers were moving with extraordinary speed and the raked-back counters jingled and tinkled like a man running in scale armour. The counters were good silver, ninety parts fine, and stamped with the word TREASURY on one side and an inspiring scene from the history of the Republic on the other. New sets were issued every year, at which point the old sets were recalled and sent to be melted down, though the considerable number that reached the cabinets of avid counter-collectors suggested that the calling-in procedure wasn't absolutely watertight.

Psellus waited until his friend had his hand full of swept-up counters, then coughed. Maniacis dropped the counters, looked up and called him something.

'Now then,' Psellus replied, and grinned. 'You can't say that to me, I'm here in my official capacity'

'Is that right.' Maniacis scowled at him. 'In that case, triple what I said with spikes on. Your precious Necessary Evil's been running us ragged for weeks.'

Psellus frowned. 'Lucky you,' he said. 'They aren't even talking to me. I don't know what I've done to upset them, but they've cut me right out. I've been sitting counting the bricks in the wall.'

'Oh.' Maniacis looked at him thoughtfully. 'So, what're you here bothering me for?'

Psellus perched on the edge of the table and picked up a counter. On the reverse, a nude fat woman of indeterminate age was presenting a muscle-bound warrior with a garland apparently woven from turnip-tops, while in the background smoke rose from a distant mountain. Underneath was the legend The Eremian threat averted. He raised an eyebrow and put it back where he'd found it. 'A bit previous, surely,' he said.

Maniacis shrugged. 'Not pure silver, either. Don't suppose you noticed, but where it rubs on the table, like the edges of the laurel crown and the chubby bird's tits, the copper's starting to show through. Last year's issue were called in early and we got these instead, a week ago. They were supposed to go into service as part of the grand victory celebrations, but…' He shrugged. 'That's how tight things are,' he said. 'We needed the silver, so we pulled the old ones early and put these ones out ahead of time. Tempting providence if you ask me, but there it is, there's a war on.'

Psellus wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. 'I had no idea things were so bad,' he said.

'Oh, they aren't really,' Maniacis said with a sigh. 'Really, it's all to do with cashflow and housekeeping. The money's mostly there, but we're under orders to try and keep to within this year's budget. If we start breaking into next year's money, it looks very bad in Assembly. So, to tide things over, we're having to scratch about for loose change to bridge the gap.'

'I see,' Psellus said. 'How's it going?'

Maniacis shook his head. 'We lost the battle some time ago,' he said. 'So now we're having to borrow money from foreigners; the merchants, banks in the old country, even the Cure Doce. We'll pay it all back as soon as the new fiscal year starts, of course, but they'll screw us rotten for interest. That's politics for you. Your bloody Foundrymen, running scared of the Drapers.'

'We didn't start it,' Psellus replied automatically. 'Well, anyway, I'm here to make things worse for you. We've got to expedite supplies for the new army, so I'm here on the scrounge.'

Maniacis clicked his tongue. 'Not sure I can help you,' he said. 'How much do you need?'

When Psellus told him, he opened his eyes wide and blinked.

'I know,' Psellus said. 'It's a lot of money'

Maniacis rested his chin on his fingertips and thought for a moment. 'There's no way I can raise that much just by fiddling the books,' he said. 'Either we borrow it from the savages or you'll have to go to Assembly for a levy'

'Can't do that,' Psellus said immediately. 'For one thing it'd take too long. For another-like I said, I'm out of touch, but I can't see it getting through without blood on the floor.'

'Quite so.' Maniacis shook his head. 'With so many workers taken out and put on war work, production generally's right down the drain. That's not all; all the available shipping's tied up ferrying men and supplies, so goods are piling up in the warehouses with no ships to carry them. If we don't deliver, we don't get paid. This war's bloody terrible for business, which is the exact opposite of how it was supposed to be. If I was a Foundryman, I'd be looking for heads to roll on my management committee.'

'Be that as it may,' Psellus said sharply, 'looks like you'll need to raise a loan. How long's that going to take?'

Maniacis shrugged. 'Not very long, actually,' he said. 'Just so happens, we've negotiated a line of credit with our new best friends, just in case things look like they're getting out of hand. Luckily they have plenty of money and their interest rates are not at all bad.'

Psellus caught something in his friend's tone of voice. 'There's a catch, isn't there?'

'Depends how you look at it,' Maniacis replied, with a humourless grin. 'The way we're viewing it in this department, there isn't a problem, but we can see how other people-you lot, for instance-might not like it very much. Which is why we haven't got around to telling anybody yet.'

Something dropped into place, and Psellus winced, as though he'd turned his ankle or cut himself. 'It's the Vadani, isn't it?' he said. 'That's who you're borrowing all this extra money from.'

Maniacis looked at him. 'You're perfectly at liberty to speculate,' he said. 'I'm not saying anything. But if you want money for your grocery bill, I'd be obliged if you kept your face shut and your wild guesses to yourself.' He looked away and said to the wall: 'One thing the Vadani have got plenty of is silver. All they've got to do is dig it out of the sides of the mountains. The bad thing is, we've run projections of what the final cost is likely to be, once we've taken Civitas Eremiae and finished the mopping-up. I won't bore you with details, but it's going to be tight. So much so that I don't see us being able to pay back these emergency loans next year or any time soon. In fact, unless we get lucky and find treasuries stuffed with gold and silver in the ruins of Orsea's palace, we're going to be in hock to our new best friends for a very long time. Now I don't understand politics, I'm proud to say, so I don't have to bother my silly little head about the implications of that. Instead, I can leave it to the likes of you, so you can start planning ahead. I seem to remember an old proverb about holding a wild boar by its bollocks; holding on is no fun at all, but letting go would probably be worse.' He sighed, leaned back, stretched. 'Let me have a formal writ of requisition as soon as you can,' he said. 'While you're doing the paperwork, I'll talk to my bosses and we can get everything set up. You know,' he added sourly, 'if only your precious Guildsmen had put locks on your office windows, none of this mess would've happened in the first place.'

General Melancton received the news that the supply train had been dispatched and was on its way with a mixture of relief and scepticism. He'd been taught in war school that fighting on two fronts is a bad thing, and of the two enemies he currently faced, the Mezentine Guilds worried him slightly more than the Eremians. He was, after all, allowed to kill the Eremians, assuming he could get close enough without being shot to ribbons by the artillery the Perpetual Republic had assured him he'd never have to face. Also, he felt confident that he could predict how they were likely to behave. The Guilds, on the other hand, were something he couldn't begin to understand. The one thing he knew about them was that if it suited them to do so, they'd strand him in the mountains without supplies or send him to his certain death without a second thought. It was a shame the savages were so poor; on balance, he'd far rather be fighting for them.

He sat in his tent studying the map. The ill-fated Captain Eiconodoulus had told him a few things about Mezentine cartography before they'd shipped him back home, and Melancton was inclined to take the captain's word over his employers'. This meant that he was obliged to rely increasingly on his scouts, the Cure Hardy light cavalry. He'd have preferred a company of properly trained surveyors from home, but there wasn't time to send for any; and the Cure Hardy possibly because they were nomads and therefore used to constant and painstaking reconnaissance, seemed to be doing a perfectly adequate job. It didn't matter at all that he didn't like them much; and he only disliked them because he found them more or less impossible to understand, even though they spoke quite passable Mezentine. But he couldn't figure out what they wanted; why they were here, risking their lives on behalf of him and his employers. Money didn't seem to interest them, in the same way fish aren't interested in music. They weren't here for the glory, he was pretty sure of that. In his time in the military he'd come across men who went to the wars simply because they liked to fight, but the Cure Hardy took great and laudable pains to avoid the enemy. Therefore they remained a mystery, one of very many, and that bothered him, on the rare occasions when he had time and leisure to dwell on it.

Today, however, they had particularly interesting news. There was a path (maybe thirty years ago it could have been called a road, but a lot of heather can grow and a lot of dirt and rock can be washed away in thirty years) that appeared to lead round the side of the foothills of Civitas Mountain, bypassing the obvious place for a final pre-siege pitched battle; and as far as the scouts could see, this path was completely clear of the enemy. Melancton was a realist, with a healthy distrust of cleverness. Someone with pretensions to tactical genius would be thinking in terms of fooling the enemy into making a stand at the obvious place by feinting at it with cavalry and light infantry, while sending the bulk of his army round by the cunning path to take them from the rear and slaughter them like sheep. As far as he was concerned, that would be a first-class way to lose the war at a stroke; something would go wrong with timing or communications, he'd find himself losing the pitched battle through lack of numbers while his encirclement party walked straight into an ambush on the hidden path. He stroked his beard and scowled. He was getting too old to play games.

He looked up. His chief of staff, Tachista Pantocrator, had arrived with the duty roster, which meant it was noon already and he still hadn't made up his mind. 'Tachista,' he said, 'if you were Duke Orsea, what'd you be most worried about?'

Pantocrator thought for a moment. 'Losing,' he said.

Not as silly an answer as it sounded. 'What's the most likely way you'd lose?' he asked.

'Easy. Sheer weight of numbers.'

Melancton nodded slowly. 'So you'd be thinking it'd-be nice to even things up by slaughtering a few thousand of the bastards before they even get to the city'

'It wouldn't hurt.'

'No. But we're contemplating what's losing you sleep.'

'I see. Well, in that case, I'd be scared stiff of throwing away such advantages as I've got.'

That made sense too. 'And your best advantage?'

'Geography,' Pantocrator replied immediately. 'Superb defensive site, impregnable walls, and now I've got something approaching parity in artillery.'

'So if you're smart,' Melancton said, 'what're you going to do?'

'Spend my time on the defences of the city, and laying in as much food and materials as I can before the siege starts.'

Melancton smiled. 'And you're not going to risk wasting men in a field battle out in the open, when they'll be much harder to kill standing behind your wonderful city walls.'

'I'd have to be stupid, wouldn't I?'

'Of course. In that case, tell the scouts to check out a day's march along the main road. I don't think they're going to come out to play. I think they'll stay in the city and wait for us until we're at the foot of their rotten hill. What do you think?'

Pantocrator shrugged. 'That's what I'd do, probably,' he said. 'But then, I lack imagination. You said so in my last assessment.'

'Fuck imagination,' Melancton replied.

Hardening steel was the real problem. They'd run out of ordinary plain iron too, but the city was full of the stuff, in various shapes and forms. With the backing of the Ducas, Ziani had organised platoons of soldiers with nothing better to do into browsing parties, scouring the streets for frivolous and non-essential ironwork-door-hinges, gates, railings, lamp-standards, fire-dogs, boot-scrapers, sign-brackets, anything that could be drawn down, jumped up or hammer-welded together to make up bar stock. Hardening steel, on the other hand, had always been a rare and expensive commodity. Cart springs were the obvious resource, but he'd already stripped the city bare of them; likewise pitchfork tines, spade and shovel blades, they were even prising perfectly good horseshoes off soundly shod hoofs just to feed the furnaces. As if that wasn't ridiculous enough, they were eking out the hardening steel by pattern-welding it into billets two to one with wrought iron, so that each twelve-by-three-by-three that went to be drawn through the plates into spring wire had been forge-welded, twisted, folded and welded again and again like the finest swords of ancient heroes. If you looked closely at the finished wire you could actually see the patterns-pool-and-eye, maidenhair, hugs and kisses. It was ludicrous and a truly desperate way of going about things, but they had no choice. Pattern-welded springs, though; if that wasn't an abomination, then the term had no meaning.

As he shuttled between the factory and the ramparts where the scorpions were being set up, Ziani felt like a newly-wed wife getting ready to entertain her in-laws to dinner for the first time. He wanted everything to be perfect for the Mezentines when they arrived. Every scorpion had to be aligned exactly in its cradle and zeroed at each of the set distances, the dampening struts clamped down tight, the sliders and locks greased, every nut and wedge retightened after twenty trial shots. He had a team of four hundred volunteers doing nothing all day but retrieving shot bolts from the targets and bringing them back up to the wall. He wanted to be everywhere, doing everything himself; instead he had to watch half-trained, half-skilled Eremians doing each job more or less adequately, which was torture. Finally, he decided he'd had enough. If he had to watch one more thread being stripped or cradle-truss warped out of line, he'd go mad. With a tremendous effort he turned his back on the lot of them and walked slowly down the stairs to the street.

Someone was waiting for him; a tall, broad, bald man with a ferocious grey moustache. 'You Vaatzes?' he asked.

It was too stupid a question to risk replying to, so he nodded. 'Who're you?'

'Framea Orudino, sergeant-at-arms to the lesser Ducas,' the bald man replied, puffing his chest out like a frog. 'You wanted fencing lessons. I've been trying to find you all day, but nobody knew where you'd got to.'

Ziani grinned. 'You found me,' he said. 'Right, let's get to it. What do I have to do?'

Orudino studied him for a moment, as though he was a consignment of defective timber. 'Follow me,' he said.

Orudino led him down the inevitable tangle of narrow, messy streets, alleys and snickets until they reached a grey door in a sand-yellow brick wall. To Ziani's surprise, the door didn't open into a beautiful secret garden or a cool, fountain-strewn courtyard. Instead, they were inside a building that reminded him of all the warehouses he'd ever seen. The walls were bare brick, washed with lime. The floor was grey stone flags, recently swept. In one corner was a stout wooden rack, in which he saw about a dozen matching pairs of long, thin swords.

'Foils,' Orudino explained. 'The point's been blunted and wrapped in twine, so it can't hurt you, unless you get stuck in the eye. But I'm good enough not to hit where I don't want to, and you'll never be good enough to hit me unless I want you to, so there's no problem.'

Ziani decided he didn't like Sergeant Orudino, but that hardly mattered. 'What comes first?' he asked.

'We'll get you standing right,' the sergeant said. 'Now then. Over there, see, painted on the floor are two footprints. Put your feet on them, and that's your basic stance.'

Orudino was bored, making the little speeches he'd made hundreds of times before, plodding through the stages of the lesson like a mule turning a flywheel. That was unfortunate, because Ziani found the whole business completely alien, and needed to have each step explained and demonstrated over and over again. The footwork in particular he found almost impossible to master; it was almost as bad as dancing, and he'd never been able to dance. Maybe he could have managed it if he'd been able to look down and see where he was putting his feet, but the sergeant wouldn't let him, on the grounds that in a real fight he'd need to keep his eyes fixed on the other man's sword-point to the exclusion of everything else. So Ziani stumbled, blundered, tripped over his feet, fell over twice, with nothing to spur him on but his rapidly burgeoning hatred for the loud, pompous, bullying bald man with the bored voice and the supercilious grin. If anything, he loathed his condescending praise on the rare occasions when something went right more than his martyred patience with the bungles and mistakes. He kept himself going by chanting in his head, if this shithead can do it, so can I; and slowly, gracelessly, he tightened up the tolerance, while his arms and legs and wrists and forearms and neck and back screamed pain at him, and the tip of the sergeant's foil stung him like a wasp.

He learned the four wards (high, side, low, middle); the steps ordinary and extraordinary; the advance, the retreat, the pass, the lunge; the wide and the narrow measure; the counter in time and double time; the disengage, the block, the beat; the mastery of the enemy sword and the slip-thrust, the stop-thrust, the tip-cut and the sidestep riposte in time. He learned to feint and to read feints, to wait and to watch, to move hand and foot together, to keep his kneecap over his toe in the lunge, to fend with his left hand and to close to disarm. Orudino killed him six dozen times, with thrusts to his throat, heart, stomach and groin, with draw-cuts and tip-cuts and the secret cut of the Ducas (a wrap with the false edge to sever the knee-tendon). Every death was a chore to the sergeant, and most of them were disappointments, because a child of twelve should have been able to master the relevant defence by now.

'You're thrashing about like a landed fish,' the sergeant said, as Ziani lunged at him and missed. 'It's no good if you can't land a thrust where it'll do some good. Come over here, I'll show you.' He led Ziani to the middle of the floor, where a piece of string hung from a rafter. From his finger he pulled a heavy ring, brass with a little silver plate still clinging to it, and tied it to the string. Then, with a mild sigh, he lunged. The tip of his foil passed through the middle of the ring without touching it.

'Right,' he said sadly. 'You try.'

Hopeless, of course. A couple of times he managed to swat the string, like a kitten batting at wool. Otherwise he missed outright. The sergeant laughed, took down the ring and replaced it with a small steel hoop about the size of an outstretched hand. 'Come on,' he said, 'you ought to be able to hit that'; but Ziani tried and couldn't. The best he could do was slap into the string, setting the hoop swaying.

'Don't they practise fencing where you come from, then?' Orudino asked. Ziani shook his head.

'We aren't allowed to have weapons,' he replied. 'It's against the law'

The sergeant looked at him with contempt. 'Doesn't stop you picking on the likes of us, though,' he said. 'Well, you aren't at home now. Concentrate. Fix your eyes on where you want to hit, and it should just come naturally.'

Did it hell. After a long time and a great many attempts, the sergeant stopped him, took down the hoop and said, 'Let's stick to the basic defences for now. Right, high guard, sword-hand in First, watch what I'm doing and step in to block and push away.'

The defences were slightly better than the attacks, but they still weren't easy. At last, however, he grasped the idea of taking a step back or to the side to keep his distance. Try as he might, however, he couldn't organise himself well enough to counter each attack with a simultaneous attack of his own. One thing at a time, his brain insisted, defend and then attack; but by the time he'd blocked, deflected or avoided, there wasn't time to hit back. There was always another attack on the way, and pretty soon he found himself backed into a corner with nowhere to go.

'We're just not getting anywhere,' the sergeant said. 'I've been teaching fencing for twenty years, I've taught kids of ten and old men of sixty, and I've never had a complete failure, not till now. Sorry, but I don't think I can help you. Best thing you can do is buy yourself a thick padded coat or a breastplate, and try and stay out of trouble.'

Ziani leaned against the wall. His legs were weak and shaky from the effort, his elbows and forearms hurt and he had a blinding headache. He hated the sergeant more than anybody he'd ever met. 'Let's give it one more go,' he said. 'Don't try and teach me the whole lot. Let's just concentrate on one or two things.'

The sergeant shrugged. 'I've got nothing better to do,' he said. 'But I think you're wasting your time. All right, then, let's have a middle guard in Third. No, bring your back foot round more, and don't stick your right hand so far out, not unless you're trying to draw me in on purpose.'

Slowly, bitterly, with extraordinary effort, Ziani learned to defend from the middle guard. 'It's better than nothing,' the sergeant told him. 'Forget about countering for now, just concentrate on distance. If you aren't there, you can't be hit. Simple as that.'

The sergeant wanted to leave it at that, but Ziani refused. 'I want just one thing I can use,' he said. 'Like the hedgehog in the proverb.'

'I don't know any proverbs about hedgehogs.' The sergeant shrugged. 'All right,' he said, 'we'll try the back-twist. Actually it's a pretty advanced move, but for anybody sparring with you, it'd come as a complete surprise. Now; middle guard in Third, like normal; and when I thrust at you on the straight line, you bring your back foot a long step behind your front foot, till you've almost turned away from me. That takes you right out of the way of my attack, and you can stab me where you like as I go past.'

To the complete surprise of both of them, Ziani got it almost right on the third attempt. 'It's like I always say,' the sergeant told him, 'if someone can't learn the easy stuff, teach him something difficult instead. You'd be surprised how often it works.'

So they practised the back-twist many, many times, until Ziani was doing it without thinking. 'It's actually a good one to learn,' the sergeant said, 'because if you get it right, that's the fight over before it starts. It's half a circle instead of a straight line. All right, a couple more times and then I'm calling it a day.'

It was a glorious relief to get away from him, out of his bare brick box into the open air. Ziani only had a very vague idea of where in the city he was, but he didn't care. He was content to wander, choosing turnings almost at random to see where they led. Almost perversely, he had no trouble finding a way home.

Cantacusene was in the main gallery, shouting at someone for ruining a whole batch of springs. He waited till he'd finished, then called him over.

'You know about swords and things,' he said. 'Where's the best place to buy one?'

Cantacusene frowned. 'Depends,' he said, predictably. 'What do you want?'

'A side-sword,' Ziani replied, 'or a short rapier, preferably with a bit of an edge. Imported,' he added quickly. 'Nothing flashy, just something simple and sturdy.'

Cantacusene told him a name, and where to find a particular stall in the market. 'You can say I sent you if you like,' he added. 'She's my second cousin, actually.'

'Thanks. What was that about a batch of springs, then?'

The next day, early, he went to the market and found Cantacusene's cousin; a tall, fat woman with a pleated shawl over her red bodice and gown. For some reason, she seemed to think he wanted something very expensive with a swept hilt, fluted pommel and ivory grip; it took him quite some time to convince her otherwise, but he managed it in the end and came away with a short rapier, slightly browned with age, in a battered scabbard. He left it propped against the wall of his tower room and went back to work.

Not long after midday, a messenger arrived, from Miel Ducas: could Vaatzes come immediately, please. He followed the messenger (he was getting tired of having to be led everywhere, like a blind man) to the Ducas house. Miel Ducas was waiting for him in a small room off the main cloister. He was sitting behind a table covered with maps, letters, lists and schedules, and he looked exhausted.

'Bad news,' the Ducas said straight away. 'They've bypassed the Barbuda gate-that's here,' he added, jabbing his forefinger at some squiggle on a map, 'and at the rate they're going, they'll be down there in the valley this time day after tomorrow. I'm taking three squadrons of cavalry to give them a bit of a hard time at a place I know, but really that's just to show willing. Fact is, the war's about to start. How ready can you be by then?'

Ziani shrugged. 'I'm ready now,' he said. 'We've run out of hardening steel and we're nearly out of ordinary iron. I'm still making machines by bodging bits together, but I don't suppose I've got enough material for another full day's production. Really, we're as ready as we'll ever be. I've already got four hundred and fifty scorpions installed and ready; actually, it'd be a bit of a struggle to fit any more in on the wall.'

'I see,' the Ducas said. 'Is that going to be enough?'

Ziani smiled. 'No idea,' he said. 'When you're dealing with the Republic, there's no such thing as enough. It's like saying, how many buckets will I need to empty the sea? But,' he went on, as the Ducas scowled at him, 'they're going to need a bloody big army if they don't want to run out of men before we run out of scorpion bolts.'

That seemed to cheer the Ducas up a little. He sighed, and nodded his head. 'You've done very well,' he said, 'I'm grateful, believe me. If we get out of this ghastly mess in one piece, I'll see to it that you're not forgotten.' He shrugged. 'You know,' he said, 'there's a part of me that still doesn't really believe that all this can be happening. Try as I might, I can't understand why they're doing it. Doesn't make sense, somehow.'

Ziani smiled wryly. 'That's because you think it's about you,' he said. 'It isn't. It's really an internal matter; Guild politics, that sort of thing. I don't suppose that's any consolation.'

The Ducas shook his head. 'I don't imagine it'll be much comfort to the poor bastards on the wrong end of your scorpion bolts,' he said. 'Tell me, what on earth possesses them to sign up, anyway? Isn't there any work for them back wherever they come from?'

'No idea,' Ziani said. 'All I know about the old country is that we came here to get away from them, a long time ago, and now we do a lot of business with them, mostly textiles, farm tools and domestic hardware. The general impression I've got over the years is that they're a practically inexhaustible supply of manpower, but I can't remember them ever getting slaughtered like sheep before. It's possible they may not want to keep coming if that happens.'

'Well, quite.' The Ducas grinned. 'It's getting so difficult to find good help these days.'

He didn't seem to want anything else, so Ziani made his excuses and took his leave. He felt a strong urge to look back over his shoulder, but he resisted it. Thanks to the Ducas, he'd learned a valuable lesson about compassion, and its deceptive relationship to love. With every step he took away from the place, he found it easier to bring to mind the fact that it was Duke Orsea who'd taken pity on him, on the day when he'd been dying in the mountains, and that the Ducas had been all in favour of having him quietly killed, or left to die. Not that it mattered, as things had turned out. The Ducas had paid him back many times over. Besides, compassion at first sight is generally like love at first sight; both of them are dangerous instincts, often leading to disaster.

He turned up the long, wide street whose name he could never remember (it was something to do with horses, not that that helped much) and followed it uphill towards the centre of the city. At the lower crossroads he paused. If he turned right, he could go to his patron Calaphates' house. He hadn't spoken to his benefactor for a long time, let alone sent him any accounts, or a statement of his share of the profits. Calaphates had been kind to him, though largely out of self-interest; he owed him some consideration, the bare minimum required by good manners. Or he could turn left and take the wide boulevard lined with stunted cherry trees that led to the inner wall, and beyond that, the Duke's palace. If he owed a duty to his patrons, he certainly ought to make time to report to Duke Orsea, who'd shown him kindness even though he was an enemy, at a time when anybody would have forgiven him for doing the exact opposite. The thought made him smile, though part of him still regretted all of it, deeply and with true compassion. He went left. At the palace gatehouse he asked to see the chamberlain. After a shorter wait than he'd anticipated, he was seen and granted an interview with the Duke, at noon precisely, the day after tomorrow. It occurred to Ziani that if the Ducas was right, that would be the day before the Mezentine army was due to arrive. Couldn't be better, he decided.

After he'd seen Vaatzes, Miel Ducas spent an hour going over the plans for the cavalry raid one last agonising time. He was sure there was at least one fatal flaw in his design, probably two or three, and that anybody with a faint trace of residual common sense would be able to spot it, or them, in a heartbeat. It was as though he could hear voices in the next room and knew they were discussing the disastrous failure of the coming raid, and how it had ultimately led to the fall of Eremia, but he couldn't quite make out what they were saying.

The same voices haunted him all evening. He took them with him when he went to bed (very early, since he had to be up well before dawn the next day) and they kept him awake until he was at the point where sleep would do him more harm than good. When the footman woke him up with hot water and a light breakfast he felt muzzy and cramped, with a tight feeling at the sides of his head that wanted to be a really nasty headache when it grew up.

It wasn't a good day for headaches; nor for stomach upsets, but he had one of them too. When he clambered awkwardly on to his horse, well behind schedule, he felt as though some malicious person was twisting his intestines tightly round a stick. Nerves, he promised himself; also he knew for a fact that there couldn't possibly be anything inside him left to come out.

As was only proper for the Ducas going to war, he wore a middleweight gambeson with mail gussets under a heavyweight coat of plates with full plate arm and leg defences, right down to steel-soled sabatons on his feet. Because he was the commander in chief and therefore under an obligation to keep in touch with what was going on around him, he'd substituted an open sallet for the full great-helm, but someone had failed to check to see whether the Ducas crest (which was essential as a means of identification in the field) would fit the sallet's crest-holder. It didn't, so the sallet had to go back and the great-helm came out instead. Inside it, of course, he could barely see, hear or breathe; so he compromised by giving it to his squire to carry and going bare-headed.

He rode with only his squire for company as far as the Horsefair, where he was joined by half a dozen mounted men in full armour, hurrying because they were running late. They slowed down when they saw it was him; one of them joked that he must've got the time wrong, because he was sure the muster had been set for half an hour earlier.

At the gate he found everybody else waiting for him. Cousin Jarnac had apparently assumed temporary command in his absence. Jarnac, of course, looked the part so much more than he did. The battle harness of the lesser Ducas was blued spring steel, with a single-piece placket instead of the coat of plates, and a bevored sallet with an eighteen-inch boiled leather crest in the form of a crouching boar. If he hadn't known better he'd have followed Jarnac unquestioningly; so, he suspected, would everybody else.

All told, the armoured contingent numbered over four hundred; the rest of his army was made up of five hundred mounted archers and eight hundred lancers, middleweight-heavy cavalry in munition-grade black-and-white half-armour. Dawn was soaking through the dark blue sky, and a trace of mist hung round the main gate as, feeling horribly self-conscious about his appearance, horsemanship and perceived lack of any leadership ability whatsoever, Miel Ducas led the way out of the city and down the long road to the valley floor.

Because they were late starting, there was nothing for it but to take the old carters' road, Castle Lane, round the side of the hog's back crossed by the main road. That would save an hour, assuming it wasn't blocked by a landslide or fallen trees, and they'd come out five hundred yards from the fork where the Packhorse Drove branched off. The drove would take them down into the wooded combe that ran parallel to the road; at the Merebarton (assuming it wasn't a swamp after the late rain) they'd split into two and try and bottle the enemy up in the Blackwater Pass. Even if everything went perfectly they'd only be able to hold the two ends of the pass for a short while, but every Mezentine they killed today was one they wouldn't have to deal with later. At the council of war where the plan had been discussed, someone had described this approach as trying to empty a river with a tablespoon. Thinking about it, it had been Miel himself who said that, and nobody had contradicted him.

Castle Lane proved to be reasonably clear, and they made good time. Halfway down Packhorse Drove, however, they came almost within long bowshot of an enemy scouting party, who took one look at them and galloped away. Disaster; if the scouts got back to the main army, the whole plan would be ruined. Miel's first instinct was to send a half-squadron of lancers after them, but fortunately he didn't give in to it. God only knew how the enemy were managing to raise a gallop on the rock-and-mud surface of the drove; their horses must have iron hoofs and no bones in their legs. Trying to catch them or match their pace would be impossible for mere mortal horses, and the fewer men he sent charging around the landscape at this stage, the better. The only thing for it was to cut up diagonally across the rough to the road instead of taking the deer-trails he'd planned on using. That way, with luck, his men would stay between the scouts and their army, so they wouldn't be able to deliver their message. They'd come up a quarter-mile away from the gates of the canyon on the south side, but (with more luck) they'd be able to close that distance before the enemy got there. The northern wing would have to take its time getting into position. First screw-up of the day, Miel acknowledged sourly, and highly unlikely to be the last.

Cutting across the rough sounded fine when you said it, briskly and confidently, to your cool, eager staff officers. Putting the order into practice was something else entirely. Even the perfectly trained and schooled horses of the Ducas house weren't happy about leaving the path and crashing about through holly and briars; for the most part, the archers' and lancers' horses followed where the knights led, but it could only have been out of bewildered curiosity. Above all, they made a racket that surely could've been heard in the city. Only one man actually fell off and hurt himself, but he was the lesser Nicephorus, an enormous man in full plate, and the crash bounced about among the trees like a small bird trapped in a barn.

Coming out of the forest on to the road and into the light was a terrifying experience. Very reluctantly, but with duty forcing him on like a jailer, Miel led the way and was the first to break cover. He expected yells, movement, a flurry of arrows, but he had the road to himself. He reined in his horse and stood quite still for a moment or so, feeling as though he was the last man on earth. He could hear no birds singing, not even a bee or a horsefly, and it occurred to him that the enemy had already been and gone. But a glance at the road set his mind at rest; no hoofmarks, footprints, wheel-tracks to be seen.

Which reminded him. He turned in the saddle and waved his men on, then rode back to intercept one of the line officers, a man he trusted.

'Have the rearguard remembered to cut some branches?' he asked. He realised while he was saying it that the branch-cutting detail weren't this officer's responsibility; but he nodded and said yes, he'd watched them doing it, and did the Ducas want him to go back and make sure it was all done right?

Miel had absolute confidence in his subordinates, but even so he hung back and watched as the rearguard tied cut branches to the pommels of their saddles and dragged them behind as they rode on, sweeping away the column's hoof-prints. The result didn't look right, but it was less obvious than the tracks of a thousand horses.

He remembered the canyon, though it was several years since the last time he'd been there, hunting late-season wolves with Jarnac and the Sphax twins. On that occasion the place had played cruelly on his nerves, because he hadn't yet got the hang of not being at war with the Vadani and therefore constantly at risk from maverick raiding parties, and because anybody with more imagination than a small rock could see it was a perfect place for an ambush. He started worrying; the enemy commander was by definition a professional soldier, trained from childhood to spot dangerous terrain. Surely he'd have recognised the risk from his scouts' reports. Either he wouldn't show up at all, which would be horribly embarrassing, or else he'd figured out an ingenious counter-ambush of his own that'd leave the Eremians trapped in their own snare. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it was that that was precisely what was about to happen. At any moment, archers would appear on the skyline, or the sun would disappear behind a curtain of falling scorpion bolts. Maybe he'd be lucky and die in the first volley, thereby spared the humiliating pain of knowing he'd led the flower of Eremian chivalry to a pointless, shameful death…

I'm turning into Orsea, he thought. Maybe it's something that comes with being in charge. As his men filed past, he scanned the top of the ridge on both sides. If there was an ambush waiting up there, they'd missed their chance. He'd got away with it after all.

Once they'd taken up position at the canyon neck, there was a great deal to be done. The lancers dismounted and started felling trees to build the roadblock, while the designated specialists in each unit unloaded and spread the caltrops and snagging wires they'd brought with them from the city. Miel couldn't recall offhand whose suggestion the caltrops had been, though he had a nasty feeling it'd been his. They were crude, put together in a hurry; a wooden ball the size of a large apple, with eight two-inch spikes sticking out in all directions. Wouldn't it be the most delicate irony if the battle turned against him and those spikes ended up buried in the frogs of his own horses' hoofs, as a painful lesson in poetic justice to anybody who presumed to use weapons of indiscriminate effect against the Mezentines?

Once the preparations had been made, he pulled all his men back into cover, and settled down to wait. He knew this would be the hardest part of the job, a lethal opportunity to shred his own self-confidence to the point where he'd order the retreat sounded the moment a single Mezentine appeared in the distance. He almost wished he was the one being ambushed, since at least he wouldn't have to cope with the anticipation.

When the enemy finally arrived, of course, he was looking the other way. Worse; he was on foot, in a small holly grove, taking a last pre-battle piss. He heard the creak of an axle, followed by shouting; more shouting, as he fumbled numbly with his trousers (no mean feat of engineering for a man wearing plate cuisses) and battled his way out of the holly, stumbling on exposed roots and fallen branches as he tried to get back to where he'd left his horse. He mounted badly, twisting his ankle as he lifted into the saddle, winding himself as he sat down. There were screams among the shouts now, and a clattering of steel like blacksmiths trying to work the metal too cold. For a split second his sense of direction deserted him and he couldn't remember where the battle was.

His horse scrambled awkwardly out on to the road, and there was nobody there; he turned his head in time to see the last of his men joining in a full-blown charge. They could've waited for me, he thought, unfairly and incorrectly; he followed them, a shamefaced rearguard of one. Before he reached them he passed five dead men and nine sprawled horses, all Eremians. Wonderful omen.

Immediately he saw what the problem was. Quite properly, whoever had taken command while he was away urinating had seen an opening in the enemy front and thrown a full charge at it. Also quite reasonably, he hadn't expected the level of success that in the event he'd achieved. The charge had gone home and then gone too far, like an unbarred spear into a charging boar. The risk now was of being enveloped from the sides. Miel looked round in desperation for the horn-blower to sound the disengage. He found him almost straight away; lying on the ground, covered from the waist down by his fallen horse. He was dead, of course; and the horn lay beside him where he'd dropped it. At least one horse had trodden on it, crumpling it up like stiff paper.

Not so good, then. He sat still, frantically trying to decide what to do, painfully aware that the battle had slipped away from him, like a cat squirming out of a child's arms. Common sense urged him to stay out of the fighting, but he was the Ducas, and his place was in the thick of it. Muttering to himself, he pushed his horse into a half-hearted canter and, as something of an afterthought, drew his sword.

A horseman was closing on him; not an Eremian, therefore an enemy. He spurred forward to meet him, but the rider swerved away. Miel realised he was an archer, one of the Cure Hardy scouts. He pulled his horse's head round, determined to be at least a moving target, but the enemy was more concerned with getting away; he had his bow in his right hand and his left was on the reins. Before Miel could decide whether or not to do anything about him, the archer slumped forward on his horse's neck, dropped his bow and slid sideways out of the saddle. His foot snagged in his stirrup-leather just as his head hit the ground. His helmet came off and a tangle of long, dark hair flowed out like blood from a wound. He was being dragged. With each stride of the horse his head was jerked up, only to bump down again and bounce off a stone or the lip of a pothole. After a few yards, the horse slowed down; his foot came free from the stirrup, he rolled over a couple of times and came to rest. The side of his head was white with dust, like a fine lady's face-powder, blood blotting through it in a round patch, like blusher. The stub of a broken-off arrow stuck out of his neck, just above the rolled edge of his breastplate.

Miel looked up. He'd forgotten that, as he was moving into position, he'd dismounted his own archers and sent them to command the tops of the ridges that flanked the road. His own tactical skill impressed him. His archers were already in position, and because the attacking cavalry had forced the enemy out of the way and over to the sides, they had a clear view with minimal risk of dropping stray shots into their own men. If he'd planned it that way, it would have been a clever and imaginative tactic. Planned or not, though, the archers had turned a potential disaster into the makings of a famous victory. The arrows were driving the enemy back into the centre of the canyon, where they were coming up against the Eremian cavalry; crushed between arrows and lances, like ears of wheat between two grindstones, they were gradually being ground away. In the distance he heard louder, shriller yells, from which he gathered that battle had been joined on the other side of the canyon.

It is incumbent upon the Ducas always to fight in the front rank, always to be the best… Query, however: is the Ducas obliged to fight in the front rank even if nobody's watching? The battle was coming along very nicely without him, thanks to the timely intervention of the archers, and the sheer aggression of the horsemen. The charge had long since foundered and lost all its momentum. The knights and lancers were no longer moving. Instead they were standing in their stirrups, bashing down on the helmets and coats of plates of the enemy infantry, who were too tightly cramped together to be able to swing back at them with anything approaching lethal force. With a considerable degree of reluctance, he pushed his horse forward into the fighting.

It reminded him of a thrush cracking snail-shells against a stone. His fellow knights were whirling and swinging their swords, flattening their delicately honed edges against the cheap munitions plate of the enemy footsoldiers. Even the swords of the Phocas, the Suidas, the Peribleptus couldn't cut into sixteenth-inch domed iron sheet. Farm tools or hammers would probably have been more use, but noblemen didn't use such things. Instead, they tried to club the enemy to the floor with their light, blunt swords; it was perfectly possible, provided you hit hard enough and took pains to land your blows on the same spot. Cursing the aimless stupidity of it all, Miel Ducas dug his spurs into his horse's side and forced the poor creature into a clumsy, unwilling canter.

He saw the enemy. Things weren't going well with them. Tidemarks of dead bodies showed where they'd tried to scramble up the slope to get at the archers, only to find out by trial and error that it couldn't be done. Instead, they'd tried to go back, and that, presumably, was when they'd discovered that the other end of the canyon was blocked. There were thousands of them, all the scouts had agreed on that, but just now their vast weight of numbers was working against them. Jammed together as their flanks cringed away from the archers, most of them were useless to their commander; they were a traffic jam, obstructing the passage of orders and intelligence from one end of the canyon to the other. It occurred to Miel that if he'd only had another couple of thousand men, he could probably kill enough of them from this position to end the war. But that wasn't the case; and at any moment, the sheer pressure of men trying to get away from the spearhead of knights wedged into their centre would explode up the canyon sides and flush away his archers, albeit with devastating loss of life… Entirely against his will and better judgement, he spared a moment to consider that. Ever since childhood he'd trained with weapons, as a nobleman should; he'd fought with the quintain and the pell, sparred with his instructors, shot arrows into targets both stationary and moving. In due course he'd put the theory into practice, against the Vadani, in what proved to be the last campaign of the war, and afterwards in border skirmishes and police actions against brigands and free companies. All his life he'd learned to fight a target-a wooden post wrapped in sacking, a sack dangling from a swinging beam, a straw circle with coloured rings painted on it, an exposed neck or forearm, the gap beside the armpit not covered by the armour plates. It hadn't ever worried him, until now. He paused to consider how deeply troubled he was, now that he was in command, and all these deaths and mutilations were by his order and decision. It troubled him, he discovered, but not enough.

Devastating loss of life; the sides of the canyon could be covered with dead men, packed close enough together that if it rained, the dust wouldn't get wet, and it'd still only be three thousand dead, maybe four, and that wouldn't be enough to end the war or even affect it significantly. It was an extraordinary thought; he could litter the landscape as far as the eye could see with the most grotesque obscenities he could imagine, and it wouldn't actually matter all that much, in the great scheme of things. He considered the duty of the Ducas, and the beneficial effect on morale that the sight of their commander in the thick of the fighting would have on his men, and thought, to hell with that. He'd had enough. What he needed most of all was a horn-blower.

What he got was a couple of Mezentines. Two infantrymen who'd squeezed and wriggled their way past, through, under, over the heaped corpses of their friends were running towards him, yelling what he assumed was abuse. Dispassionately, he assessed them from the technical point of view. Their defences consisted of kettle-hats, mail collars and padded jacks reaching just below the waist. They were armed with some form of halberd (were those glaives or bardisches? He ought to know, but he always got them mixed up). Calm, determined and properly trained in the orthodox school of fencing they'd be formidable opponents, worthy of six pages of detailed drawings and explanatory text in the manual. As it was, they were a chore.

He rode at them, pulled left at the last moment, overshot the neck with a lazy thrust and severed the appropriate vein with a long, professional draw-cut. He felt blood on his face, which saved him the bother of turning his head to look. He could, of course, let the other man go, but that would be failing in his duty. He stopped his horse, dragged its head round and rode down the second man, hamstringing him with a delicate flick of the wrist as he passed him on the right. As chores went it hadn't exactly been arduous, but he felt annoyed, imposed upon; he was a busy man with a battle to stop, and he didn't have time for indulgences.

He found a horn-blower and ordered the disengage followed by the withdrawal in good order. The horn-blower looked at him before he blew. The effect was immediate. The archers vanished from the ridgetops, the knights and lancers wheeled and cantered away, leaving the butchered, stunned enemy staring after them. Pursuit, he knew, wouldn't be an issue. He asked the horn-blower if there was a recognised call for 'back the way we came'. Apparently there was.

Back into the cover of the trees, back down the deer-trails they should have taken the first time, back to the forest road, and they were safe. The archers joined them almost immediately. Their captain rode over and announced that his losses were fewer than twenty killed, a handful injured. Miel thanked him and rode on; he hadn't actually thought about it, or asked for a similar report from the captains of the knights and the lancers. That reminded him that he hadn't given any thought to the fate of the other half of his army, the men who'd blocked the far end of the canyon. Before he could ask anyone or send a scout, they appeared out of the trees in front of him. He could see riderless horses being led by their reins-how many? A dozen? Twenty? But their captain seemed in good spirits.

'How'd it go?' he asked.

'Wonderful,' Jarnac replied, his voice comically muffled as he lifted off his helmet. 'Couldn't have gone better if we'd rehearsed it with them beforehand. Your end?'

Miel nodded. 'I think we should get out of here,' he said. 'I'm not inclined to push my luck any further today'

Jarnac grinned at him. 'Quite right,' he said. 'It never does to be greedy, and the rest'll keep for another day. I couldn't see it all, of course, but I'm fairly sure our score's up into four figures. If only we'd brought another three squadrons, we could've had the lot.'

Miel nodded and drew away from his cousin. He felt exhausted, angry and very sick. He cast his mind back to another massacre, when the scorpion bolts had curtained off the sun and it had been Eremians rather than Mezentines carpeting the dirt. That had been easier to bear, somehow.

The exuberance of his men had worn off by the time they reached the city; they were quiet as they rode in through the gate, too tired to care about much more than getting out of their armour, washing off the smell of blood and going to sleep. Even Jarnac (who'd insisted on riding beside him for much of the way) had stopped singing; instead he was whistling softly, and Miel couldn't make out the tune. There were a hundred and sixteen dead to own up to; mostly lancers, but of the twelve knights, one was the younger brother of the lesser Phocas (a brash, arrogant boy whom Miel had always disliked). The guilt of a victory is different from the guilt of a defeat, but no less depressing.

He gave the necessary orders to dismount, stand down and dismiss the army; a quick run-through his mental checklist, and he concluded that he'd done everything that was required of him and the rest of the day was his own. He went home; the streets were nearly empty, and there were only a few old women and drunks to stop and stare at the blood-spattered horseman in full armour, plodding up the cobbled street with his reins long and his horse's head drooping. Grooms were waiting at the gate to help him down and take the horse inside. The housekeeper and one of the gardeners helped him out of his armour.

'Where's Bucena?' the gardener asked; and Miel realised that he hadn't seen Bucena Joac, his squire, the head gardener's nephew, since shortly before the ambush. He didn't know whether the boy was alive or dead, so he couldn't answer the question. The two servants drew their own conclusions from his silence; they didn't say anything, which made for an awkward atmosphere. At any other time, Miel would've run out and looked to see if Bucena had come home; if not, he'd have found out what had become of him before stopping to shed his armour or wash his face. Instead, he told the housekeeper, 'I need a bath. Soon as possible.'

He fell asleep in his bath, and woke up shivering in the cold water. Someone was banging on the door, which wasn't a suitable level of behaviour for the Ducas house. He demanded to know who was making that abominable noise. It was the porter, and he had the butler, the sergeant and the housekeeper with him. Some men had come from the palace to talk to the Ducas. They had a piece of paper with a big red seal at the bottom. Apparently, they wanted to arrest him.