Evil for Evil

26

Eight days of blundering through potholes and ruts. Intermittent rain; the carts bogged down twice, once in a mudslide, once in the bed of a shallow river that wasn't on the map and hadn't been mentioned by any of the guides. Food running low; rations had to be reduced by a third; fodder for the horses a worse problem. A mild outbreak of some kind of fever, which killed a dozen or so civilians. Ahead of them, the mountain range; beyond that, the edge of the desert. No sign, yet, of the Mezentines.

A village, Limes Vitae; Valens had heard about it, mostly because it was proverbially the last place on earth, the very edge of the world. According to family legend, one of his father's uncles had been there once, though why or what he thought of it wasn't recorded. It had sent a dozen light infantry to fight in the first war against the Eremians, and had last paid taxes seventy-four years ago. If there was still a settlement there, and if they had food and hay, getting over the mountain was possible. If not; well.

A few thin cattle on the stony plain bore witness to some level of habitation, as the carts ground up the road through the foothills. A boy, who stopped to stare and was scooped up by outriders, confirmed that the village was still where it had always been. There was food there; just enough to see the villagers through the winter, since it had been a poor year generally, and the merchants who traded root vegetables and salt fish for hides and wool hadn't arrived; there was some rumor about a war somewhere. Hay? Enough for all the horses in the column? The boy didn't want to commit himself on that, but the grown-ups had been saying that hay would be short that winter.

Valens left the boy in the custody of a grim-faced woman who cooked for the soldiers, and summoned his general staff. Limes Vitae, he told them, was unlikely to welcome them with open arms, and even less likely to offer to share its reserves. Accordingly, since they couldn't rely on being given, they were going to have to take.

Tactically, not very much of a challenge. Two wings of light cavalry moved into position on the far side of the village shortly before dusk, taking great care not to be seen. At dawn, a double squadron of heavy cavalry advanced at a gentle pace along the main road into the village. A shepherd raised the alarm; by the time Valens' heavy dragoons reached the village square, the place was deserted and the barns, cattle-pens, poultry runs and root cellars were empty. They made themselves at home as best they could, eventually turning up a few barrels of wheat beer that had been too heavy to load in the hurried evacuation. Nobly, they left half of the foul-tasting stuff for their colleagues in the light division, who rode in halfway through the afternoon, escorting the villagers and the carts laden with the missing supplies, which they'd ambushed as planned on the narrow road that led to the hidden valley the boy had told Valens about. Neat, flawless, bloodless, as a good operation should be.

Valens sent Nennius to give the villagers a choice; they could leave their homes and join the column, or stay where they were and starve through the winter. It didn't surprise Valens very much to learn that they preferred, unanimously, to stay. He couldn't blame them. Their only contact with the central government within living memory was a callous act of theft, carried out with all the precision and elan of the better class of professional brigand. So much for Valens the Good Duke.

A quick inventory of the supplies told him that the entire resources of Limes Vitae would supply the column, on half-rations, for ten days. Two days to the edge of the desert; eight days across it, if the dead merchant's diary could be relied on and they managed to find the short cut. No need for a decision, now that turning back was no longer an option. Just to be sure, he told Nennius to ask the villagers if they'd seen any Mezentines; black-faced men in armor on big horses. By their reaction, the villagers must have assumed he was making fun of them.

Climbing the mountain proved to be far harder than anybody had anticipated. Valens had assumed it would be slightly but not much more difficult than slogging up the slopes and scarps they'd tackled already; slow, painful climbing with occasional halts to fill in and rebuild crumbled road ledges or bridge storm-streams running down the hillsides. The dead merchant had managed it, with his team of mules. It had taken him two days.

Halfway through the first day, Valens realized why the merchant had used mules rather than a cart. Quite possibly there had been a road there, once upon a time when the world was new. Now, however, there was a thin scratch that zigzagged across the face of the mountain, the sort of line Vaatzes the engineer might have scribed on a piece of metal, rubbing in blue dye to make it visible. No earthly chance of taking a cart further than the first mile.

At a hastily convened meeting of the engineering department, Valens asked urgently for suggestions.

"It's a question of time," Vaatzes said, and for the first time since he'd met him, Valens saw that he was worried. "Yes, we could widen the road by cutting into the mountain; to a limited extent, we could bank up the other side with rocks. At a rough guess, working flat out we could reach the top in under a month. In two days…" He shrugged. "Either we turn back now, or we ditch the wagons, load what we can onto the horses' backs and walk. I don't suppose it'll take us that much longer on foot than it would've done if we could've taken the wagons, if that's any consolation."

"Your bloody trader-" Valens interrupted.

"If he could do it, I don't see why we can't," Vaatzes replied. "I didn't get the impression from reading the journals that he was any sort of adventurer, blessed with superhuman strength and endurance. He regarded crossing the mountains as a chore and a pain in the bum, but no worse than that."

"Just suppose we do make it over the mountains," someone said. "What then? I thought the idea was that the carts were going to be our mobile fortress. And there's shelter to think about."

"The carts won't go up the mountain," Daurenja said. "That's a plain fact, like something in mathematics you can demonstrate by doing a calculation. If we go back down the mountain, we've got eight days and then we starve. No disrespect, but I can't see what there is to talk about."

They left the carts. It wasn't the most popular order Valens had ever given. The sight of the Vadani people struggling up the road with enormous loads strapped to their backs, like city people out for a country picnic, would've been comic in a different context. As a gesture of solidarity, Valens made the cavalry dismount and load supplies on their horses, an initiative which at least had the merit of wiping the smirks off their faces. Cavalrymen dislike walking. Even then, it was a full-time job to stop the civilians from dumping their packs as soon as the gradient started to get tiresome; they seemed to be under the impression that there was more than enough food and forage piled up on the horses, and the Duke was making them carry stuff up a steep hill as part of a monstrously inappropriate practical joke. On the first day there were ninety-seven casualties-twelve deaths, sixteen broken legs, six non-fatal heart attacks and sixty-three debilitating sprains, falls and similar injuries-and they lost the use of fourteen horses.

The second day was no improvement; the worst part of it being the realization that there was going to have to be a third day, and quite possibly a fourth. This meant a further rations cut, which in turn led to a spate of nocturnal food looting, only just short of a full-scale riot, which cost another seven lives. By noon on the third day, the death toll had passed fifty, with three times that number of sick and injured incapable of walking. The soldiers were demanding to be allowed to jettison their armor; a fair number hadn't waited for permission, and the sun sparkled on a trail of abandoned metalwork marking the column's ascent, like the track of a snail. To check this before it got out of hand, Valens dressed in full armor to lead the way, a gesture he bitterly regretted after the first half-hour as the arches of his greaves chafed his ankles into mince.

Just before dusk, someone told him that there was smoke in the valley below them. Since the only inflammable material on the whole mountain was the carts they'd left behind two days before, the implications were disturbing enough to take his mind off his aching feet for the last hour of daylight.

"It's possible," someone conceded at that night's staff meeting. "We've brought horses up here, so I guess they could too. Or maybe they've dismounted like we did; though in that case, I don't see them catching us up in a hurry."

"They won't try and attack us on the mountain," someone else asserted confidently. "They'll wait till we're over the top and down on the plain. If they're dismounted and leading their horses, they won't have to try and catch us up; they can do that as soon as they're back on level ground again."

"There's no guarantee it's the Mezentines at all," someone else put in. "Could be scavengers, like the ones we ran into earlier."

"Unlikely," Nennius murmured. "We killed them all, remember? Besides, why bother to burn our carts?"

"No use to them without horses."

"True, but why let everybody between here and Sharra know where they are?"

"The Mezentines would have a reason to burn them," Nennius argued. "To stop us circling round behind them and going back to them. They'll want to be sure they've seen the last of those armor plates."

"If the Mezentines want to attack us on the plain, I say let 'em," someone else said. "The rate we're getting through the food and hay, we'll be able to afford to remount the cavalry by then, so we can give them a fight. By the time we get down there, they'll be in no better condition than us. Worse, probably; they've had further to come without fresh supplies; they won't have found anything at Limes Vitae, that's for sure."

Midafternoon on the fourth day, and the view from the top was obscured by low cloud and mist. Below, a long way away, there was supposed to be a desert, with the Cure Hardy on the other side of it, and Valens was taking his people there because he had no choice. Squinting into the mist and seeing nothing, he retraced the workings of the mechanism that had brought him here. It had started with Orsea-no, to be fair, it had started with the peace settlement between the Vadani and the Eremians, which his father had arranged with her father, the Count Sirupat. While the Eremians and the Vadani had been at each other's throats, the Perpetual Republic had ignored them both, since they posed her no threat. Then there was peace, which spawned Orsea's original crass mistake; then Ziani Vaatzes-he'd played some part in all this-gave the Republic a pretext for disinfecting its border of undesirable savages; but instead of crumpling up like a leaf in a fire, the Eremians had fought too well, forcing the war to grow like a clever gardener growing early crops in a hotbed. That was when he'd been drawn in, for the sake of a woman he'd fallen in love with because (he knew the mechanism operated in a loop) of the peace negotiations, which had brought her to Civitas Vadanis as a hostage. For her sake he'd thrown the Vadani into the war; now, for the war's sake, he'd lost her forever, while still having her on his hands like someone else's precious possession left in his unwilling care; and he was here, on top of a mountain looking down at a desert which led to the wilderness of the barbarian nomads, his last and only hope of survival. Wonderful.

Going down the mountain was much, much harder than getting up it. For some reason Valens couldn't begin to imagine, someone had gone to the trouble of making the pathetic little track they'd followed up the mountain. Maybe there'd been a village there once, or a frontier station or a signal post, or a temple to some obsolete god. Nothing had gone down the mountain in a long, long time except water (and, presumably, Vaatzes' dead merchant and his mules). There was no track. To start with, they tried following the course of a broad stream, but it quickly fell away into a series of waterfalls plunging off sheer edges. No wild animals were stupid enough to come up here, so there weren't any deer or goat trails to follow. Valens realized quickly enough that there wasn't a right way to go; the entire expedition would have to make its own way down as best it could, a slow, disorganized shambles, a human mudslide. Giving the order to halve the rations yet again (impossible to enforce, of course, with everybody spread out on the mountainside like butter on bread), he tried very hard indeed not to think about who might have set light to the abandoned wagons, or where the happy arsonists might be now.

The worst problem proved to be the horses. By noon on the second day (the low cloud hadn't lifted; if anything, it was thickening), he'd almost reached the point where he'd be prepared to give the order to turn them loose and leave them there, in the hope that some of them might find their own way down. Leading them was very nearly impossible, and the amount of time they were wasting trying to coax the wretched animals along was heartbreaking. Unhappy-looking officers reported to him every hour or so to tell him the latest casualty figures, animal and human; the number of injured civilians who couldn't walk and so had to be carried was swelling at a terrifying rate, and Nennius had already urged him several times to leave at least some of them behind. So far, he hadn't given in, but the only strength he could draw on to maintain his resolve was the thought that it was precisely the sort of thing Orsea would've done (reluctantly, blaming himself to death, doing the right thing). The hell with it, he told himself, over and over again; I'm stubborn and pig-headed; I won't leave the injured and I won't turn the horses loose. It's just a matter of holding on a little longer, and then facing the decision again, once every hundred yards or so.

Dawn on the third day of the descent. The low cloud had lifted during the night, and they could see: where they were, and where they were going. The good part of it was that they were at least three-quarters of the way down, and the gradient was easing up. Other than that, Valens was sorry to have lost the mist. The sight of the desert depressed him more than anything he could remember.

There was a fringe of scrub-little stunted clumps of thorn bush, like an unshaved face-and then there was nothing but sand. He'd expected it to be gray, like the stuff washed down by rivers, the only sand he'd ever seen; instead, it was almost white, a glowing ocean like steel at welding heat. The rises and troughs looked so much like waves at this distance that he couldn't help imagining that it was a vast lake-the idea of trying to walk on its surface seemed ludicrous; you'd wade in, and then you'd sink, and the sand would close over your head as you drowned. It wasn't even flat; the sad little joke that had sustained them all, going up and down the mountain, was that the desert had to be better than all this bloody climbing. Apparently not. He realized, as he stared at it until his eyes hurt in the glare, that for a moment or so he'd forgotten the entire Vadani nation strung out all around him. He'd been thinking, how the hell am I going to get across that; I, not we. A fine time to be thinking about grammar (my decision, my mistake, our slow and painful death). One question, however, lodged in his head as he scrambled among the rocks: did I have Orsea killed not because he was a traitor but because I'd reached the conclusion that he was an idiot, too stupid to be allowed to live? The more the question preyed on his mind (the further down the slope they went, the hotter it became; his clothes and even his boots were saturated with sweat), the more he was afraid that that was exactly what he'd done; the fool's stupidity had offended him beyond endurance, and he'd taken the excuse to get rid of him. In which case, sooner or later, he was going to have to admit to what he'd done, and apologize to somebody.

Evening staff meeting on the flat sand; bitterly cold, hardly warmed at all by crackling bonfires of dry thorn twigs, which flared up ferociously and went out almost straightaway. The main subject on the agenda…

"According to the map, it's there," Vaatzes repeated for the third or fourth time. "We can't see it because it's over the horizon. But if we keep going due east from the double-pronged spur-which is exactly where it should be according to the map, by the way-we should reach the first oasis in about nine hours' time. That's what the map says; you can look for yourselves. And it's no good scowling at me. I didn't draw the bloody thing, and I've never been here before in my life. Either we trust the map, or we give up and die."

"Are we sure that's the right double-pronged spur?" someone asked nervously; he was sitting just outside the ring of firelight, and Valens didn't recognize the voice. "For all we know, there could be two or three more or less similar. And if we set off on the wrong line, we're screwed; we'll never find the oasis just by roaming about-assuming there's an oasis to find, which is by no means-"

"What are you proposing?" Valens interrupted quietly. "Do you think we should stay here while the scouts ride up and down the foothills looking for more double-pronged spurs? It's a good idea," he added. "Actually, it's the right thing to do, simple common sense. Unfortunately, we can't. No time. As it is, I predict we'll run out of food before we're halfway there, even if we hit the right course and everything's where the map says it is. Sorry," he went on, with a slight shake of his head, "but we're just going to have to assume it's the right two-pronged spur and press on regardless. Unfortunate, but there it is." He grinned suddenly. "My only hope is that the Mezentines really are on our heels with a huge army, and that they follow us out there and starve to death a day or so after we do. Not that I'm vindictive or anything. I just feel that fatal errors of judgment are things you should share with your enemies as well as your friends."

Short, embarrassed silence; then someone said: "If they really are following us, we should see them tomorrow, coming down the slope. At least then we'll know what's going on, whether we've got them to contend with as well as everything else."

"I should say they're the least of our worries," Valens said confidently. "Which is rather splendid, don't you think, to be able to dismiss the threat of the most powerful nation in the world in one trite phrase? I like to think I've contrived to screw things up on so magnificent a scale that getting slaughtered by the Mezentines is probably the second-best thing that could happen to us."

They didn't like him talking like that, of course, but he couldn't really motivate himself to stop it and behave properly. All through that part of his life that separated his first sight of her from that night in the slaughter before Civitas Eremiae (the realization ambushed him like a squadron of Mezentine dragoons, unexpected here among the ruins of everything), at every turn he'd faced a choice, between giving up and forcing a way through, and always he'd chosen to press on; stumbling forward instead of running away, because he'd known where he was supposed to be going. The route was marked for him in the map by success; everything he'd done had turned out right, and so he'd known he was doing the right thing. Then had come the second phase, between rescuing her from the Mezentines and forfeiting her when he ordered Orsea's death, during which everything he'd done had gone wrong, and the signposts along the way had brought him here, to the desert's edge. Here began the third phase, finding him without purpose or direction, no choices left; a rare kind of freedom.

Walking on the sand was like treading in deep mud; even on the flat, every step was an effort, draining strength from his knees and calves. Honor required him to carry a heavier pack than anybody else, to walk in front, to set a smart pace and only stop out of compassion, to let the weaklings catch their breath. Years of trudging up the steep sides of combes to approach upwind of grazing deer and wading through marshes to reach the deep pools where the ducks flocked up had given him the strength and stamina of a peasant, but after a couple of hours of treading sand, only shame and the last flare of arrogance kept him on his feet and moving. If they kept going, they had a chance of reaching the first oasis (if it existed) before nightfall. Something told him that if they failed to reach it by the time darkness fell, they'd never reach it at all. It wasn't, of course, a line of reasoning he could justify to anybody else; so, if he wanted to get them there before it was too late, the only way he could do it was to walk on ahead of them and thereby force them to follow him. Crude but simple.

As if making fun of his self-induced melodrama, the oasis appeared suddenly out of nowhere about two hours before dusk. It had been hiding from them in a little saucer of dead ground, and the first Valens knew of it was when he hauled himself up the scarp of a dune and realized he was looking straight at the top of a tall tree. He was too tired to run toward it, or even to yell for joy; good, he thought, and carried on plodding. As he approached, the oasis rose politely out of the saucer to greet him. A stand of spindly trees, about a quarter of an acre, surrounded by a neat lawn of wiry green grass, fringed with hunched-up thorn bushes; beyond question the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life. He kept going until he was a hundred yards from the edge of the lawn, just in case it turned out not to be real; but when the sun sparkled on something in the middle of the stand of trees, he realized that he hadn't got the strength to cover the last stage of the journey. He sat down awkwardly in the sand and started to cry.

Presumably someone came along and helped him the rest of the way, because at some point he found himself standing on the edge of a pan of rusty brown water. It appeared to be full of Vadani, who'd waded in up to their shoulders and necks. Some of them were swimming in it; others were conscientiously watering their horses on the edge, their clothes dripping wet, their hair plastered down on their foreheads. They'd brought no barrels or water-bottles with them down the mountain, because water weighs ten pounds a gallon.

"There, you see?" Vaatzes' voice buzzing in his ear. "Just like I said it'd be. Piece of cake."

Brown, gritty water, more than they could possibly drink; but you can't eat water. They were talking about slaughtering the horses while there was still some meat on their bones.

"Or," suggested Ziani Vaatzes, "we could send a message to your in-laws and ask them for some food. It'd only be polite to let them know we're here."

The rest of the general staff looked at him as though he was mad. Valens thought for a moment.

"Not a bad idea," he said. "Assuming I can find volunteers. And assuming horses can go faster than men in this shit."

"I believe so," Vaatzes replied. "At least, that's the impression I got from the journals. According to the merchant, once you've crossed the desert, if you keep going straight on you come to the big salt pan, and there's always people there, even when the rest of the tribe's moved on. They keep a good stock of food and forage-not sure it'll be enough to last all of us very long, but anything we can get must be better than nothing. The main assumption will be that they've heard of you. I don't know how closely the ordinary Aram Chantat follows current affairs. I'd have thought the marriage of the crown princess would've counted as big news, but you never know. The danger is that if they don't know who we are, they'll swoop down and cut us to pieces for being foreign."

(The journals had been right about the sheds that the merchant had built here; the pen for the mules, the cover and even the grain bins. They turned out to be empty, of course.)

"I'm prepared to risk that," Valens replied confidently. "If I was bothered about that side of things, I'd be more worried about showing up without my dear wife. They'd only have my word for it that the Mezentines killed her; besides, even if they believed me, letting your wife get killed suggests a degree of carelessness that they might be reluctant to forgive. I wish now I'd taken the trouble to find out a bit more about the way they think."

Eventually, after a painfully embarrassing silence, Major Nennius volunteered. He set off with an escort of twelve very unenthusiastic troopers, leading a change of horses loaded with supplies. In his saddlebag was a carefully traced copy of the map, and a letter of credentials addressed to the Aram Chantat. The look on his face as he rode away reminded Valens unsettlingly of Orsea on his way to execution.

A full two days to reach the second oasis. No longer even any pretense that the food crisis was under control. Civilians couldn't be trusted to carry what little was left, and the soldiers were having trouble coping with the begging and screaming of mothers with hungry children; their friends, neighbors, relatives. At least a dozen horses were killed during the night; the carcasses were stripped bare in minutes, and fights broke out over the marrow in the bones. It didn't make it easier to handle to realize that it was panic, the fear of hunger rather than hunger itself. The worst side effect was exhaustion. Men and women who'd been rioting and scuffling all night had trouble keeping up during the day. Valens could no longer be induced to listen to the reports. He'd become obsessed with the idea that he could see a dust-cloud closing in rapidly on them from behind, the occasional flash of light. The fact that nobody else could see anything had no effect on his conviction. There was no point talking to him, the officers said, he wasn't listening. With Nennius gone, generally presumed dead, it was anybody's guess who was in charge. The officers went through their routines, more to occupy their minds than out of duty or hope. Nobody knew who had the map, or who was navigating, or who was in the lead. Reaching the second oasis inspired no celebrations, and nobody waded in up to the neck in the water this time.

Early the next day, Valens left his tent (for the last time; he'd given orders for it to be jettisoned as surplus weight). He washed quickly in the brown water of the oasis, then sat down under a tree to comb his hair. It was a last flicker of vanity, which had never been a particular fault of his at the best of times-his clothes were torn and caked in sand, all the work that had gone into them wasted, and he'd never cared about how he looked, provided that he looked like a duke; today, however, he took the trouble, because it really didn't matter anymore. His reflection in the water was thin and indistinct, so he combed more or less by feel. It wasn't a face he particularly wanted to see, in any case.

But there was another face looking down into the water beside his. He jumped up, slipping in the sandy mud and catching his balance just in time.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I startled you."

Valens, lost for words. "That's all right," he said.

Of course he hadn't seen her since Orsea died. He hadn't even asked after her, sent anybody to see how she was. The fact that she was here told him she'd managed to get over the mountains and across the desert. She looked terrible, in fact: her hair tangled, her face red in patches from the sun, the hem of her dress filthy, her shoes (stupid little satin sandals, believe it or not) wrecked like a barn blown down in a storm. She walked slowly over to him-she was limping-and sat down, her heels in the mud like a little girl.

"I wanted to tell you," she said. "I don't blame you."

If there was anything about himself that Valens was proud of, it was his ability to know if someone was lying to him. He tried not to exercise it.

"I'm absolutely furious with Orsea." She made it sound like he'd come home drunk and been sick in the wardrobe. "It was such a stupid thing to do. And so typical. If only he'd told me, I'd have talked him out of it, I know. It'll have been his idea of doing the right thing. I imagine they told him I'd be safe if he-"

"That's right," Valens heard himself say. "It's pretty clear from the letter we found that that's what the deal was."

"Letters!" She laughed. "Who'd have thought squiggles on a bit of dried sheepskin could cause so much trouble in the world. Letters and good intentions; and the other thing."

No need to ask what the other thing was.

"I had to do it," Valens ground on; he felt like he was wading in mud, and each time he dragged his boot out, his other foot sank in even deeper. "I couldn't have covered it up; if people had found out, I wouldn't have been able to lead them anymore, and they needed someone to get them-"

He was about to say, get them here. Not, he conceded, the most compelling of arguments.

"Oh, I know." She shook her head. "I know he'd have done exactly the same thing." Suddenly she giggled, at the same time as a tear broke out from the corner of her eye. "That doesn't really make you feel any better, does it?"

"No."

"He was an idiot." She smiled. "Always the right thing, no matter how much damage it caused. The tragedy was, it always was the right thing to do; it was just that either he did it the wrong way-oh, he had a wonderful talent for missing by a hair-or else something unexpected would happen that only a clever man-a reasonably clever man-could've foreseen. He was a good, decent, ordinary human being, which is what I loved so much about him…"

(And why I could never love you; unspoken.)

"And that's why he treated me so badly, I guess," she went on, dabbing at her eye with her filthy sleeve and leaving urchin-like streaks of grime on her cheek. "He felt he didn't deserve me, and he resented it; somehow it turned into my fault, and it was because he loved me so much. He couldn't talk to me for months before the end; we just sort of grunted at each other, like an old miserable couple waiting to see who'll be the first to die." She looked up at him. "I don't blame you," she said. "You're no more to blame than a tree-branch that falls on someone's head."

Again he was reluctant to look at her, because that'd tell him if she meant it. "I don't know," he said, looking at the brown water. "You can't help blaming the weapon, even though it's stupid and pointless. You know, there are times when I think that's all I am: a weapon, being used by someone else. At least, I like to think that way. It'd mean none of this was really my fault." He sighed. "My father used to collect fancy weapons; there was a room full of them, back at the palace. He'd buy them and prance about with them for a few minutes-he was a lousy fencer, I guess that's why he made me learn-and then they'd be put away and never looked at again. I did the same thing, I have no idea why. The difference is, he liked the things because they were pretty and he reckoned they were the sort of thing a duke ought to have. I bought them because I hate fighting, and I've had to do rather a lot of it." He frowned. "There's my tragedy, if you like. I've always been so very good at the things I don't like doing, and being good at them makes me do them, until I forget I hate them. The things I wanted to do, or wanted to be, for that matter-well; if you love drawing but can't draw, you don't bother with it. No point being reminded of your shortcomings. Always play to your strengths, my father told me."

"I remember him," she said quietly. "I didn't like him very much."

"Neither did I. It's a shame I've turned into him over the years. But you don't need to like someone in order to love them."

She laughed. "I always liked Orsea," she said. "I suppose I've got a soft spot for weak people."

(Which is why you and I were friends, once; he could have written that in a letter, but he couldn't say it out loud.)

"Can't say I ever did," Valens replied stiffly. "I couldn't get past the ineptitude. I don't like people who can't do things well."

"He liked you." She was looking away now. "He thought you were everything he ought to be; admired you and liked you as well, which I think is probably a rare combination. But he knew he bothered you, so he tried to keep his distance. He didn't want to be a nuisance."

Valens smiled. "He was just like me, then," he said. "We've both got the knack of being the opposite of what we want to be. I feel so sorry for him now…" He waved his arm in a vague encircling gesture. "Now that I've brought us here, I mean. Now that I know what it feels like. You know what? If I'd been him, in this situation, I'd have done what he did. The only difference is, I wouldn't have been found out."

She stood up. "I'd better let you get on," she said. "I expect you're very busy."

"Me?" He shrugged. "I ought to be, but I'm not. They keep trying to make me take an interest, but the truth is, I've more or less given up. Which disappoints me; I'd always assumed I'd keep going to the bitter end, just in case there was a way out I hadn't noticed yet. But this is the first time I've really screwed up, and it's shown me just how feeble I really am. You know what? In the battle, when the Mezentine cavalry were cutting up the column, I very nearly ran away-I was halfway up the hill, and I only stopped because I was worn out; and then it turned out we'd won after all, so there wasn't anything to run away from. I haven't been able to get over that. I just couldn't see why I should hang around and get killed when it wouldn't do anybody any good."

"Well," she said. "It wouldn't have."

He shook his head. "I'd have lasted about half an hour," he replied. "About as long as it took me to find a tree and a bit of rope. I think the Mezentines killed me that day, and ever since I've just been wandering about wondering how come I can still breathe."

She looked at him. "Orsea would never have done that," she said. "When the city fell, he went rushing out trying to get himself killed. He made a mess of it, of course."

Valens nodded. "Would you have wanted him to have succeeded?"

"No. There's never any excuse for dying. It's such a selfish thing to do, if there are people who love you."

(Which was the difference, she didn't say; the condition that didn't apply in Valens' case. So he didn't ask: what about me; if I'd been in Orsea's place that day, should I have stood my ground and fallen nobly? He didn't want to make her tell a deliberate lie.)

"You're right." He vaulted to his feet-showing off, like a teenager-and straightened his back. "I really should be attending to business, rather than lounging around like a gentleman of leisure. How are your feet, by the way?"

"My feet?"

"Blisters. You were limping earlier."

She shrugged. "I turned my ankle over in the sand. I expect it'll wear off."

Valens smiled. "I'd better find you a horse to ride."

"No thanks. It'd look bad, and I'm unpopular enough as it is. Being the widow of a condemned traitor… It's all right," she added, "I'll manage. I'll admit that walking isn't my idea of fun, but I'm getting the hang of it."

"You're being brave."

"If you like. Really, it's a matter of having other things to think about."

"If you change your mind…" He clicked his tongue. "I've got no idea how all this is going to end," he said. "Badly, I imagine."

"As far as I'm concerned, it already has. Go on, I'm holding you up."

He turned and walked away, not looking round.

The morning of the seventh day in the desert, and he was suffering from nerves.

The way he felt reminded him of the first time he'd seen her. All he knew about her was that she was the foreman's daughter; as such, she represented advancement, promotion, a means of rising in his trade without needing to rely on other people being able to recognize his true merits. In his mind's eye, therefore, he'd seen her as a vital component in a mechanism, beautiful in the simplicity and economy of its design. He'd been kept waiting in the porch of her father's house. She won't be out till she's good and ready, her father had said with a wry grin; she'll be doing her face, puts more effort into it than any of you buggers making bits for scorpions. That remark had caught his imagination as he stood, half in and half out of the street, watching his breath cloud in the cold air. He'd perceived her then as an artifact, something manufactured, her face engineered with skill and dedication; and he was delighted to think that his prized component was being engineered to exacting tolerances and the tightest possible specification. Of course, the old man went on, I don't suppose any son-in-law of mine's going to stay on the fitting bench very long, and old Phylactus'll be retiring before the year's out. He remembered how he'd fixed his eyes on the door, not looking at the old man, ready to catch his first glimpse of her as soon as the latch lifted and she came out. The excitement; the nerves.

(Of course, he'd spoiled it all by falling in love with her.)

That same excitement, as he watched the glowing, indistinct line that separated the sand from the sky. They were coming; when they came, that was where he'd see them first, and know that everything he'd built was finally fitting together; the active and passive assemblies engaging, the male and female components matching up, every gear-tooth meshing, every key moving in its keyway.

(It was a pity there had to be a battle and so many people killed, but you can't have everything.)

To occupy his mind, he ran calculations. Assuming a constant for the speed of a horseman in the desert, assuming that everybody was in the right place, making allowances for human inefficiencies; he glanced up at the sun, that imperfectly calibrated timepiece. There was still time. Besides, if he'd been right in his assessment of the properties of his materials, they wouldn't show up till they were good and ready. Doing their faces, as it were. All allowed for in his tolerances.

The nerves annoyed him, but there wasn't anything he could do about them. He made himself relax; leaned back against the thin tree trunk, spread his arms wide, exaggerated a yawn. At least the nervousness kept his mind off how hungry he was (and if his calculations were out, of course, he'd starve to death, along with everybody else; his life depended on the precision of the mechanism, but he couldn't bring himself to be afraid of death, only of failure).

Could horses gallop in the sand? Come to that, how long could a horse gallop for, even under ideal conditions, without having to stop for a rest? He'd used some figure he'd heard somewhere for the maximum sustainable speed of heavy cavalry, added fifteen percent tolerance, and based his workings on that. Was fifteen percent enough to allow for sand? Filthy stuff, he hated it. They didn't have it in Mezentia, except as a packaged material for making foundry molds; they didn't have it lying about all over the floor, making it well-nigh impossible for people to move and go about their business. The untidiness of these miserable places revolted him. Why couldn't the rest of the world be decently paved and cobbled, like it was back home?

A thought occurred to him and he hurriedly looked round. Daurenja had been trailing round after him for days now, like a dog sniffing round the fuller's cart, and he really didn't want to talk to him; now or ever. It would be so sweetly convenient if he got himself killed in the battle… But that'd be too much like good luck. There'd be time and scope to get rid of him later.

Falling in love with her had been a mistake; but it had also been the beginning of his life, the moment when things began to matter. That moment, when the door opened and she'd come nervously out into the porch, had given birth to this one, and all the moments in between; this had all started then, because without her, none of this would have been necessary. Suppose he hadn't fallen in love with her; he'd be foreman of the ordnance factory, presumably married to someone or other-happy enough, in all probability, but he wouldn't have been Ziani Vaatzes. That complex, unsatisfactory component only existed in relation to her. Remove her, and there was nothing, no point. It'd be like eating an orange simply to produce orange peel. The machine exists for a purpose, and every part, every assembly follows on from that purpose; without it, you're left with nothing but scrap metal, no matter how marvelously engineered.

He couldn't help smiling. Love had been his downfall, sure enough, but without it, he'd never have existed in the first place.

There'd be a man doing his job, wearing his clothes and answering to his name, but he'd be a complete and irrelevant stranger.

"Vaatzes." Someone calling for him. He pressed his back to the tree trunk and slid up it to his feet. "Over here," he called out.

He recognized the face, but couldn't put a name to it. "You're wanted," the face said. "Staff meeting."

"What, another one?" Ziani scowled. "What's the point? There's nothing to talk about."

Whoever-it-was shrugged. "He wants to see you. Over there, by that big rock at the edge of the water."

Ziani nodded, and started to walk. Valens probably just wanted someone to bully (are you sure the map's accurate? Can you be certain that's what the journal said, and was the merchant telling the truth? To which he'd reply, no, of course not; and the Duke would scowl horribly at him. Presumably it had some therapeutic value; in which case, he was happy to oblige. Like Miel Ducas, he lived only to serve).

"I know you can't vouch for the accuracy of the map" (well; nearly right), "but maybe you can cast your mind back and remember if there was anything in the journals…" Ziani nodded, allowing his mind to disengage, while saying the right things to keep Valens reasonably happy. Would it matter terribly much if he made up a few spurious diary entries? On balance, better not to.

"The food position's fairly straightforward," Valens was saying to somebody else. "Tomorrow we start eating the horses. Ever since I realized how much time we'd lost getting over that fucking mountain, I've been banking on the horses to get us across this desert. In which capacity they do it, as transport or as provisions, doesn't really matter at this stage. We've got nothing left for them to pull or carry, and if we do get to the other side, we won't need them desperately. Either the Cure Hardy'll take us in and look after us, or they'll slaughter us. Besides, if we don't kill the horses, they'll starve anyway. The fodder's completely gone, and they won't get far on a bellyful of oasis grass. It's that coarse, wiry stuff mostly, they won't eat it even when they're famished. It'd be good if we could keep a few of the thoroughbreds as presents for our hosts. They were quite keen on a few to improve their bloodlines. We'll start with the scraggiest specimens and leave the best till last. Common sense. Next on the agenda, casualties. Anybody interested in the figures, or shall we skip and go on?"

They skipped. Someone started talking earnestly about watch rotations. Ziani tried to concentrate on what he was saying, to keep his mind from dwelling on what ought to be about to happen. Apparently, they were presently working to a six-shift rotation, but wouldn't it be much better to go to seven shifts, thereby allowing each duty officer an extra half-hour's sleep, even though it would mean using more officers? The benefit of this approach…

Ziani never got to find out what the benefit was likely to be. The first thing he noticed was a head turning; then another, then four or five more, and the watch rotation enthusiast shut up in the middle of a sentence and tried to peer over Valens' shoulder to see what everybody was looking at.

What's the matter? Ziani thought. Never seen a running man before? Whoever he was, he was going flat out, veering precariously to avoid people in his way, or jumping over their legs if they didn't shift quickly enough. When he reached the rock and the general staff, he only just managed to keep from toppling over into the water. He looked round for Valens, and gasped, "Dust-cloud."

No further explanation needed. "Where?" Valens snapped, jumping up like a roe deer startled out of a clump of bracken. The runner was too breathless to speak; he pointed.

(Well, now, Ziani thought; and in his mind's eye the porch door opened.)

An orderly defense, according to the big brown book Valens had grown up with (Precepts of War, in which is included all manner of stratagems and directions for the management of war, at all times and in all places, distilled from the best authorities and newly illustrated with twenty-seven woodcuts), must be comprised of five elements: a strong position well prepared, proper provision of food and water, good supply of arms, a sufficient and determined garrison and a disciplined and single-minded command. Precepts of War had been three times a week, usually sandwiched in between rhetoric and the lute, and had consisted of copying out from the book into a notebook. The five elements of an orderly defense were as much a part of him as being right-handed.

As they watched the dust-cloud swelling, he ran through them one more time in his mind. Position: open on all sides. Provisions: none. Arms: all those barrels of carefully reclaimed arrows they'd left behind with the carts. Garrison: a mess. Command…

So much for his education. The cloud was rolling in, a strange and beautiful thing, sparkling, swirling, indistinct. Faintly he could hear the jingling of metal, like bells or wind-chimes. He had seen and heard approaching armies before, but this time everything felt different, strangely new and unknown.

"We've done everything we can," someone was reassuring him. "The men are in position."

He wanted to laugh. There was a thin curtain of cavalry, little more than a skirmish line; behind that, the infantry and dismounted dragoons were drawn up in front of the stand of spindly trees that fringed the oasis. Behind them, the civilians. He knew what the Mezentines would do. Light cavalry to engage and draw off the horsemen. Heavy cavalry to punch through the foot soldiers and send them scrambling back as far as they could go, themselves forming the clamp that would crush the civilians back to the edge of the water. From there it would be a simple matter of surrounding the oasis and pressing in, slowly and efficiently killing until there was nobody left. There were other ways in which it could be played out; he could abandon the oasis and run, in which case the Mezentines with their superior mobility would surround them in the open, or he could attack and be shredded on their lance-points, with a brief flurry of slaughter afterward.

They were trying to tell him things, details of the defense, who was commanding which sector, how many cavalry they'd managed to scrape together for him. He pretended to listen.

Visible now; he could make out individual horses and riders, although there was precious little to distinguish one from another. He was impressed; the Mezentines had managed to cross the mountain and the desert in remarkably good shape, and they held their formations as precisely as a passing-out parade. Clearly they'd found a way of coping with the difficulties that had defeated him, and he could think of no terribly good reason why he should add to their problems by trying to kill or injure a handful of them before the inevitable took its course. It was obvious that they were superior creatures, therefore deserving victory; even so, it did occur to him to wonder how they'd contrived to get this far in such astonishingly good order-as if they'd known, rather better than he had, where they were going and what they were likely to have to face. But that was impossible…

"They'll offer a parley," someone was telling him. "They won't just attack without trying to arrange a surrender first. You never know, they might offer terms…"

Valens grinned. "I don't think so," he said. "Unless my eyesight's so poor I can't see the wagons full of food they'd need to get us back across the desert alive. No, they've come to finish us off, simple as that."

"We'll let them know they've been in a fight," someone else asserted. Valens couldn't be bothered to reply.

He'd chosen a point in the sand, a dune with its edge ground away by the wind. When they reached that point, he'd give the order for his cavalry screen to advance. It'd be automatic, like a sear tripping a tumbler, and then the rest of the process would follow without the need of any further direction. He'd considered the possibility of telling the cavalry to clear out-get away, head off for the next oasis, in the hope that the Mezentines would be too busy with the massacre to follow them. There was a lot to be said for it: several hundred of his men would have a chance of escaping, instead of being slaughtered with the rest. He wasn't sure why he'd rejected it, but he had. Maybe it was just that it'd be too much trouble to arrange-giving the new orders, dealing with the indignant protests of the cavalry, imposing his will on them. If they had any sense, they'd break and run of their own accord. If they didn't, they had only themselves to blame.

He hadn't been paying attention. The Mezentine front line had already passed his ground-down dune, and he hadn't noticed. He shouted the order, and someone relayed it with a flag. The skirmish line separated itself and moved diffidently forward; a slow amble, like a farmer riding to market. In reply the front eight lines of Mezentines broke into movement, swiftly gathering speed. He wasn't able to see the collision from where he was standing, but he didn't need to.

A lot of silly noise behind him. From what he could hear of it, people were panicking. He assumed they had a better view than he did. The first Mezentine heavy cavalry appeared in front of him; they'd broken through the skirmish line, no surprise there, and they were charging the infantry screen. He sighed and stood up. It was time to go and fight, but he really didn't want to shift from where he was. His knees ached. He felt stiff and old. Even so…

He frowned. Men were walking past him, trudging to their deaths like laborers off to work in the early morning. He let them pass him; some of them shouted to him or at him, but he took no notice. The one good thing was, it didn't matter anymore what anybody thought of him. He was discharged from duty, and the rest of his life was his own.

(In which case, he thought, I'd like to see her again before I die. A mild preference; it'd be nice to die in the company of the one person he'd ever felt affection for, who for a short while had felt affection for him. He frowned, trying to figure out where she was likely to be.)

"What's happening," an old woman asked her. "Can you see?"

"No," she lied. "There's too much going on, I'm sorry."

"But we're winning," the old woman said. "Aren't we?"

"I think so."

Not that she understood this sort of thing. She knew it was very technical, like chess or some similarly complicated game. You had to know what you were looking at to make sense of it. But unless the Vadani had some devastating ruse up their sleeves (and that was entirely possible), it wasn't looking good. Too much like the last time, except that it was happening in the open rather than in among crowded buildings. The line of horsemen she'd seen riding out to meet the enemy (the celebrated Vadani cavalry, generally acknowledged as the best in the world) simply wasn't there anymore; it had been absorbed like water into a sponge; evaporated; gone. There were more soldiers out on the edge of the oasis, she knew, but it seemed unlikely that they'd make any difference. Of course, she wasn't a soldier, and there wasn't anybody knowledgeable around to ask.

"The infantry'll hold them," an old man was saying. "It's a known fact, horses won't charge a line of spear-points. They shy away, it's their nature. And then our archers'll pick 'em off. They'll be sorry they ever messed with us, you'll see."

Behind her, nothing but still, brown water. Would it hurt less to swim out and drown, or stay and be slashed or stabbed? It was a ludicrous choice, of course, not the sort of thing that could ever happen. To be sitting here, calmly weighing up the merits of different kinds of violent deaths; drowning, probably, because she'd swim until she was exhausted and then the water would pull her down, and the actual drowning wouldn't take long. She considered pain for a moment: the small, intolerable spasm of a burn, the dull, bewildering ache of a fall, the anguish of toothache, the sheer panic of a cut. She knew about the pain of trivial injuries, but something drastic enough to extinguish life must bring pain on a scale she simply couldn't begin to imagine. She'd seen the deaths of men and animals, the enormous convulsions, the gasping for breath that simply wouldn't come. She knew she wasn't ready for that; she never would be, because there could be no rapprochement with pain and death. She felt herself swell with fear, and knew there was nothing she could do to make it better.

She looked round instinctively for an escape route, and saw the old man and the old woman. They weren't looking at her; they were staring at a man walking quickly toward them.

("Isn't that the Duke? What's he doing here? He's supposed to be-"

"Shh. He'll hear you.")

Valens; of all people. It was a purely involuntary reaction; all the breath left her body, her mouth clogged and her eyes filled, because Valens had come to save her. At that moment (she hadn't forgotten Orsea, or the fact that she didn't love him, or that the sight of him made her flesh crawl and she didn't know why), she knew, she had faith, that she wasn't going to die after all. Valens would save her, even if he had to cut a steaming road through the bodies of the Mezentines like a man clearing a ride through a bramble thicket. She knew, of course, how little one man could do on his own, how hopeless the situation was, how even if they escaped from the Mezentines they had no chance of crossing the desert on their own. Those were unassailable facts; but so was his presence-her savior, her guarantee, her personal angel of death to be unleashed on the enemy. She tried to stand up, but her legs didn't seem to have any joints in them.

"We should try and get over to the left side," he was saying. "I've been watching, and their left wing's trailing behind a bit." He stopped and frowned at her. "Well? You do want to get out of this, don't you?"

"Yes, of course."

"Fine." He nodded. "I've left a couple of horses. Can't go quite yet; if they see us making a break for it, they'll send riders to cut us off. But when the attack's gone in, they won't be so fussy about stragglers." Suddenly he grinned at her. "I'm running away," he said. "No bloody point hanging around here. The trick's going to be choosing exactly the right moment to make the break."

The old woman was staring at him; she'd heard every word, and her face showed that her world had just caved in. "Well?" he said. "Are you coming or aren't you?"

The infantry screen lasted longer than expected; longer than it takes to eat an apple, not quite as long as the time you need to bridle a horse. A quick glimpse out of the corner of his eye as they rode for the little gap on the left flank told him that the Vadani were fighting like heroes. He scowled; the timings were precise, and if they held the Mezentines up for too long, they could screw up everything.

"We'd better go now," he shouted, not turning his head, hoping she could hear him.

He kicked the horse on. It was a big, sullen gelding, civilian rather than military but all he'd been able to find. It sidestepped, pulling hard on the reins. He slapped its rump with the flat of the hanger, and it bustled angrily forward. He felt the hanger slip out of his hand; his only weapon. Oh well.

"Come on," he yelled, and gave the horse a savage kick in the ribs. He saw its neck rise up to smack his face, felt his balance shift and his left foot lose its stirrup. He hung for a moment, then knew he was falling backward over the horse's rump. As he fell, he saw her fly past; then his shoulder hit the ground and his body filled with pain. He felt it take him over, driving every thought out of his head. Hoofs were landing all around him-his horse, the enemy, he neither knew nor cared. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out.

He heard a scream, assumed it was his own, realized it wasn't. He opened his eyes and tried to move.

It didn't hurt at first; he'd managed to prop himself up on one elbow before he made one slight movement too many and the pain flooded back. It took seven or eight heartbeats to subside.

Next to him, he could see now, lay a Mezentine. There was an arrow lodged in his temple; it had driven through the steel of his helmet but hadn't managed to get much further, since Valens could see the tips of the barbs. Not deep enough, evidently, to kill outright; the man's lips were moving, and his eyes were huge with enormous strain. For good measure his left leg was bent at the knee almost at right angles, the wrong way. That'll have been the fall, Valens decided. Falling off horses can be bad for you.

It occurred to him to wonder who'd been here shooting arrows at the Mezentines.

Then he felt the thump of hoofs, jarring up through his elbow into the complicated mess of pain. Instinct made him turn his head a little, and though his shoulder punished him for it, he shifted a little further to get a better view.

A horseman. He was rising elegantly to the trot, an eight-foot lance couched in the crook of his elbow. He wore glossy brown scale armor-leather, not steel-from collar to ankles, and under a high, pointed conical helmet his face was as pale as milk. A bow and quiver lolled beside his right thigh, and his horse's legs were short and thick. He came to a halt, stood up in his stirrups to look round, then slid into an easy, loping canter. Unmistakably, he was Cure Hardy.