Evil for Evil

4

The worst words a general can utter, his father had told him once, were, I never expected that.

He didn't say them aloud, but that was cheating and didn't absolve him. He pulled his horse out of the pursuit and trotted a few yards up the slope, out of the way of a charge he could no longer check in time. They'd set a trap for him, and he'd obliged them.

Who were these people, anyway? They all looked very much the same to him, with their pigs'-belly faces and unnatural, straw-colored hair. Not that it mattered particularly much at the moment; it'd only make a difference if he lived long enough to make his report. If the observation died with him, it was worthless. Still, he wasn't sure why he knew it, but these weren't Eremians. They handled their horses too well, and their clothes were too clean. In which case, they could only be Vadani.

All he could do now was watch. The counterattack came in perfectly on time, slicing into his column of charging heavy cavalry rather than chopping at it, parting the front three squadrons from the ten behind. The front section carried on with their now fatuous charge; quite possibly they didn't even know yet that they'd sprung a trap and were about to be rolled up and wiped out. The back section had been stopped in their tracks, as though they'd ridden into a stone wall. From where he was he couldn't actually see the heavy infantry who'd been positioned to take them in flanks and rear, but he knew they'd be there. Instead, he watched the front three squadrons press home their onslaught on an enemy that had faded away into the rocky outcrops. He wanted to shout a warning, but they were far too distant to hear him. Instead, he watched the ambushing party come up at a neat, restrained canter. No need to hurry, waste energy unnecessarily, risk breaking their own irreproachable order. He couldn't see the details of the fighting, but he could track its progress by the litter of dead men and horses left behind. Well, he thought, that was that. Time to think about getting away from here.

Uphill, he decided. Of course, there might be further enemy reserves waiting just over the skyline, but he doubted it. No need; and his opponent didn't seem the sort to waste resources on redundant safeguards. If he could get over the crest of the hill, he'd be on the wrong side of the battle, with his conquerors between himself and the road home, but he was just one more fugitive. The enemy would have better things to do than chase him. Ride as far as the river, double back, take it steady. He'd be starving hungry by the time he reached the camp in the ruins of Civitas Eremiae, but that would be the least of his problems.

His horse was far too tired to gallop uphill, and speed would just draw unwelcome attention. He booted the wretched animal into a sullen sitting trot.

The Vadani, he thought; well, that would make sense. He knew next to nothing about them-he'd been recruited to fight the Eremians, and his research time before leaving home had been limited-but he did know that their aristocracy had a long tradition of hunting. That cleared up one small mystery; it explained why the tactic that had defeated him (taken him completely by surprise and off guard) seemed in retrospect so infuriatingly familiar. It wasn't a military stratagem at all; it was simply a commonplace of the hunt adapted for use against men. Cornered, the boar will charge the dogs. While they pull his head down, the huntsman steps forward and stabs him in the flank. Stupid, he rebuked himself; no Mezentine would have seen it coming, of course, but we should've. Father-

I might not ever see him again, he thought; and all because of a stupid mistake.

Well, it wouldn't come to that; and when he got back to camp, he'd make a point of telling General Mesemphytes to get hold of all the hunting manuals and textbooks he could find. If only we'd known we weren't fighting proper soldiers, we wouldn't have got in this mess.

Over the crest of the hill, looking down; below him, two full squadrons of heavy cavalry. They stood still and calm, here and there a horse swishing away flies with its tail. They knew that they probably weren't going to have a part to play in the battle, but they were quietly ready, just in case; eyes front, concentrating on the standards, which would give them the sign to move into action if they were needed after all. No call for them, therefore, to look up the hill, because nothing of any relevance would be coming from that direction. All he had to do was turn round, nice and easy, and go back the way he'd just come.

Someone whistled. Heads began to turn in his direction. Suddenly terrified, hurt and angry at his stupid bad luck, he dragged his horse's head over and dug his spurs in viciously, as though it was all the animal's fault. A jolt from the cantel of the saddle, and now at least he was a moving target, not a sitter. He looked over his shoulder as he approached the skyline. They didn't seem to be following him, so that was all right.

Before he could turn his head back, he felt the horse swerve. Not the best time to lose a stirrup. Without thinking, he grabbed for the pommel of the saddle with both hands, dropping his sword and the reins (panic reaction; haven't done that for twenty years, since I was first learning to ride). It would probably have been all right if someone hadn't hit him.

He felt no pain from the blow itself, but the ground hitting his shoulder was another matter. Bad, he thought, in the split second before the horse's back hoofs kicked him in the head.

When he woke up, he was flat on his back. He remembered that he was in danger and tried to get up, but found he couldn't. Ropes; no ropes. No need for ropes. Very bad indeed.

He could move his head, though; and he saw dead bodies, men and horses; spears sticking in the ground like vine-props blown over in a high wind. Plenty of dead people (nearly all his men, he realized, and was surprised at how little that affected him), but nobody alive that he could see.

His neck was tired and getting cramped, and on balance he'd rather look at the sky than the consequences of his own negligence. He rested his head on the turf, but that turned out to be a bad idea. He let it flop sideways instead. The picture in front of his eyes was blurring up. Well, he thought.

Some time later he felt a shadow on his face, and something nudged him; he couldn't feel it, but he deduced it from the fact that he moved a little.

"Live one," someone said.

He thought about the words, because they didn't seem to mean anything, but after a while he figured it out. Inaccurate, in any case.

Whoever it was said something else, but it didn't have proper words in it, just bulving and roaring, like livestock far away. He decided he couldn't be bothered with people talking anymore. If he just lay still they'd go away and leave him in peace.

"I said, can you hear me?"

No, he thought; but instead he forced his mouth open and said something. It came out as meaningless noise. A very slight increase in the warmth of the sun on his cheek suggested that the shadow-caster had gone away. Good riddance.

So, I won't be going back to camp to tell them about the Vadani, or hunting manuals. I suppose I'll just have to write them a letter. Can you write letters when you're… (what's the word? Begins with D), and will there be someone to carry it for me once I've written it?

Suddenly there were two faces directly above him; the ugliest, scariest faces he'd ever seen. He wanted to kick, fight and scream, but apparently that wasn't possible. Then everything hurt at the same time, and while it was hurting he left the ground and was raised up into the air. Angels, he thought; no, not angels, I think we can be quite definite about that. Demons. They come and rip your soul out of your body at the moment of the thing that begins with D, except that we don't believe in demons and all that superstilious nonsense in our family.

Wrong about that, apparently. Shame.

The demons were carrying him; and he thought, I must have led a very evil life, to have deserved this. He couldn't see them anymore because his head was lolling back. All he could see was a cart-plain old farm cart; apparently there're no fine social distinctions in the place where you go when you've been bad, and the fiends that torment you forever have pale skin, like the Eremians-and he was being loaded onto it, like any old junk.

"Get a move on," someone was saying. "Jarnac's men'll be back any time."

He thought about that, but it didn't make any sense. Technical demon talk, he assumed; and then it occurred to him that he hadn't died after all. Now that was unsettling.

He was alive, then; alive, paralyzed and lying in a dirty old cart along with weapons, boots, soldiers' clothes, belts, ration bags and water bottles. He thought of the phrase they used at country auctions back home, when a farm was being sold up: the live and dead stock. From where he was lying, there didn't seem to be much in it, but such subtle distinctions define the world.

Fine, he told the universe. If it's all the same to you, I'd prefer to die now, please. Apparently the universe wasn't listening.

He'd often ridden in carts, of course. As a boy he'd loved haymaking, riding in the wain as the men pitched the hay up. His job had been to compress it by trampling it down; he could remember how it yielded and bounced under his feet like a flexing muscle, as if it was trying to trick him into falling over. He'd loved the view, the fact that for two weeks a year he could be taller than the grownups and see further. He'd imagined himself in a chariot, not a cart, bringing home the spoils of war in a grand procession.

He flicked his eyes sideways and saw the junk heaped up all round him; spoils of war. An ambition fulfilled, he thought, and passed out.

He woke up because something hurt; in fact, he came out of sleep trying very hard to scream, but he didn't seem able to make any sound. Very bad indeed.

"Splint," someone said. He tried to remember what a splint was, but there were holes in his memory large enough for words to fall through. Anyway, whoever it was didn't seem to be talking to him. It hurt, though, and he clenched his hands to work out the pain.

Oh, he thought. Maybe not so bad after all.

"He's awake," someone said, and a face appeared above him; huge and round, like an ugly brick-red sun. Its eyes, round and watery blue, looked at him as if he was a thing rather than a human being; then the head lifted and looked away. "He'll keep," the voice said.

He cleared his throat, but he couldn't think of the right words; he felt awkward, because this was a social situation his upbringing hadn't prepared him for. "Excuse me," he said.

The eyes narrowed a little, as if seeing a man inside the body for the first time. "It's all right," the man said. "You'll be fine. You had a bash on the head, and your arm's busted. Nothing as won't mend."

"Thanks," he replied. "Where is this?"

The man hadn't heard him, or wasn't prepared to acknowledge his question. "You got a name, then?"

Yes, but it's slipped my mind. "Gyges," he heard himself say. It took him a moment to realize he was telling the truth.

"Gyges," the man repeated. "What unit were you with?"

"Fourteenth Cavalry." Also true. Fancy me knowing that.

"Rank." A different voice; someone talking over the man's shoulder.

Oh well, he thought. "Lieutenant colonel," he said.

The man's left eyebrow raised. "Well now," he said-he was talking to his friend, the man behind him. "Not so bad after all."

"Excuse me," he said-that ridiculous phrase again, like a small boy in school asking permission to go to the toilet. "Who are you?"

The man smiled. "Nobody important. Don't worry, we'll get you back to your people, soon as you're fit to be moved."

That didn't make sense; they were Eremians, he was an officer in the Mezentine army, so surely he was a prisoner of war. "Thank you," he said, nevertheless.

The man made a tiny effort at a laugh. "No bother," he said. "Lie still, get some rest."

"What happened in the battle?" he asked, but the man had gone. Besides, he realized, he wasn't all that interested in the narrative. He knew the gist of it already.

Lieutenant Colonel Phrastus Gyges, formerly of the Seventeenth Mercenary Division, currently on detached service with the Fourteenth Cavalry. He remembered it now-not clearly, not yet; it was like thinking what to say in a foreign language. But at least he had a name now, and a body to feel pain with, and possibly even a future; there was a remote chance that, sooner or later, he'd once again be the man whose name he'd just remembered, rather than an item of damaged stock in the back of a wagon. Well; he'd come a long way in a short time.

They had apparently tied a thickish stick to his left forearm. Splint, he remembered; and the man had said his arm was broken. Also a bash on the head. The battle; and he'd taken his helmet off so as to be able to hear the reports of his subordinate officers. Bloody stupid thing to do. It occurred to him that this Lieutenant Colonel Gyges couldn't be all that bright.

He lay back, and saw rafters. He was in a barn. For some reason, he felt absurdly cheerful; he was alive, no worse damage than a broken arm, and all he had to do was lie peacefully for a while until someone took him home. Meanwhile, he'd been granted leave of absence from his life. A holiday. Nothing wrong with being in a barn. He'd been in barns a lot when he was a kid. Better than work, that was for sure.

More sleep. This time, he felt himself slide into it, like the crisp sheets on a newly made bed. When he woke up, there was a different face looking down at him. It was just as pink and ugly as the other faces, and it had a large, three-sides-of-a-square scar on the left cheek, just below the eye. A smile crinkled the scar's shiny red skin.

"Hello," the man said. "So you're Phrastus Gyges."

A different kind of voice. The accent was still horrible. He hadn't been able to get used to the way people spoke his language on this side of the sea. The Mezentines were bad enough, with their flat, whining drawl; the savages (the Eremians, at least; he hadn't heard a Vadani yet) did unspeakable things to all the vowels, and didn't seem able to tell the difference between Ts and Ds. This man was an Eremian, but he didn't sound like the men who'd found him.

"That's right," Gyges replied.

The man nodded. "It's good to be able to put a face to the name at last. I'm Miel Ducas."

Not good.

"You've heard of me, then?" the man went on.

Gyges nodded. He hadn't been expecting anything like this.

"I hope you don't mind me introducing myself like this," Ducas said, "but we've been fighting each other long enough that I feel I've known you for ages. Ironic, isn't it, that we should both end up here."

Gyges breathed out slowly. "Where's here, exactly?" he said.

Ducas grinned. "Haven't you figured that out yet? These people-our hosts, I should say-are the hard-working souls who clear up our messes. They bury the dead, salvage clothing and equipment, and ransom the survivors. We owe them our lives, by the way, so don't go getting judgmental. In my case…" He shrugged. "Well, why not? A little melodrama won't hurt. Your showing up here's probably signed my death warrant." He frowned. "I could've put that better, I suppose, but not to worry. You see, they've been trying to decide what to do with me: ransom me back to the resistance or sell me to the Mezentines. As far as I can tell, there can't have been much in it either way, but now you've appeared on the scene they've come to a decision. Since they're going to have to take you back to your camp anyway, they may as well send me along with you. Simple economy of effort, really; saves them having to make two journeys, and they've only got the one cart. While it's away ferrying the likes of you and me around, they can't make collections or deliveries. It's perfectly rational once you see the thinking behind it. Are you thirsty? I can fetch you some water if you like."

Gyges looked at him. Miel Ducas, his enemy. "Thank you," he said; and Ducas stood up and went away.

But that's absurd, he thought. These people are Eremians; he's the rebel leader. They wouldn't hand him over to us. He thought about that some more. People who made their living by robbing the dead might not be able to afford finer feelings. Besides, the Eremians were a treacherous people. Hadn't one of them opened the gates of Civitas Eremiae? Presumably money had changed hands over that; he hadn't heard the details, or not a reliable version, at any rate. Besides, money wasn't the only currency. The Mezentines' stated objective was the obliteration of the Eremian nation, and large-scale treachery could well be the price of a blind eye turned to a few survivors. The thought made him uncomfortable; it was something he hadn't really considered before. Wiping out an entire people; it must be strange to have a mind that could process ideas like that. Meanwhile, the last vain hope of the Eremians had just gone to fetch him a drink of water.

"There you are," Ducas said, handing him a short horn cup. "There won't be anything to eat until the rest of the men get back. Probably a sort of sticky soup with barley in it. It's an acquired taste, and I haven't, yet. Am I annoying you, by the way, or are you usually this quiet? The thing is, there's not many people about here to talk to."

Both hands around the cup; he managed to get two mouthfuls, and spilled the rest. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm not really up to talking much. But you go ahead."

Ducas laughed. "It's all right," he said. "I'll buzz off and leave you in peace, let you get some rest. They said you'd had a nasty bump on the head. Maybe later, if you feel like a chat. We could talk about some of the battles you lost. I'd like that."

The water tasted of something nasty he couldn't quite place. "If you're here," he said, "who's in charge of your army?"

"Who finally beat you, you mean." Ducas' smile widened. "I don't know," he said. "Wish I did. Whoever it is seems to be doing a good job; better than me, anyhow. It comforts me to know that the war is in better hands than mine." He frowned. "I never really expected to be a soldier," he said. "Oh, I was trained for it, of course, because it was one of the things a man in my position needs to know how to do. War, administration, good manners and chasing animals, and it doesn't hurt if you can play a musical instrument. On balance, I'm a slightly better rebec player than I am a general, but I wouldn't want to have to earn a living doing either; not if I had to compete with professionals." He shrugged. "You'd better get some rest now," he said. "The men will be back soon, and they'll have spent the hottest part of the day burying the dead, they may not be in the best of moods. It's been a pleasure talking to you."

So, Miel thought, as he turned his back and walked away, that's Phrastus Gyges. Younger than I'd expected; otherwise, pretty much like I'd imagined he'd be. And now, I suppose, I'd better think about leaving. I guess that means stealing the horse.

Standing against the middle of the wall was a big old wooden feed bin. He'd noticed it earlier, and what was inside it. Presumably such things were so familiar to them that they no longer noticed them; careless but understandable. Casually, he lifted the lid and peered inside.

Mostly it was sidearms, assorted various; he could see the scabbard chape of a Mezentine Type Fifteen, the scent-bottle pommel and wire-bound grip of a good-quality Eremian double-fullered backsword, the brass stirrup-guard and horn scales of a village-made hunting hanger. Any of them would do, since he wasn't proposing to use it; just something to wave in the face of anybody who tried to stop him. He was pretty sure they wouldn't fight him lo keep him from getting away, just in case he managed to hurt someone-that'd mean a man off work, possibly for a long time or even permanently, and they couldn't afford to carry the loss. The horse, on the other hand; horses, he knew from eavesdropping and his own experience, were a serious problem in this war. Not enough of them to go round; if, after a battle, you had to choose between rounding up the spare horses and seeing to your immobilized wounded, you had to go for the horses whether you liked it or not. They might well fight him for the horse. Unfortunately, he needed the head start. If he tried to get away on foot, with his recent injuries and vague knowledge of the local geography, he wouldn't really stand a chance. He wished that, at the very least, he had some money, so he could leave them enough to buy another horse. Come to think of it, he'd never stolen anything before. Never needed to, of course.

The stupid thing is, he thought, I don't really want to leave. I'd be happier staying here, learning to patch up chainmail and bury corpses. Now there's an interesting comment on my life so far.

Nobody seemed to be watching; just in case, though, he turned his back so as to mask what he was doing, and slid his arm in under the lid of the bin until his fingers connected with something. By the feel of it, the stirrup-guard hanger-not his first choice, but he was hardly in a position to be picky. He fished it out, got it over the edge of the bin, nearly dropped it, point downwards, on his foot, and shut the lid as quietly as he could. He didn't look down at the short sword dangling by its guard from his little finger; instead, he drew it flat against his stomach and walked slowly away, waiting for someone to yell at him. No yell. His first act of theft-his first crime-successfully carried out.

The idea was to steal a weapon now, while the place was empty and there was nobody about to see. He couldn't leave until much later, because the men hadn't brought the horse back yet. Once they'd come home he was going to have to wait a couple of hours, at least, until they'd finished their work for the day; also, the horse would be tired too, and not in the mood for further strenuous exercise. What he needed now, therefore, was somewhere to hide the sword until it was time to make his move. He hadn't realized how complicated a life of crime could be.

He looked round. His pretext for leaving the barn would be going outside for a leak. Nearly everybody went round the south side of the barn, simply because it was sheltered from the wind. If you went round the east side, you ran a substantial risk of coming back in wearing what you'd gone out to dispose of. Fair enough. He wandered over to the door, doing his very best to look like a man with a mildly full bladder. He had no illusions about his abilities as an actor, but nobody seemed interested in him anyway, so that was fine. Once outside, he turned left, round the corner, and looked carefully about. When he was sure nobody could see him, he reached up and shoved the sword into the loose, ragged thatch of the eaves, until only the little rectangular knob of a pommel was showing. It'd be dark when he came out to retrieve it, but he'd be able to find it by touch.

He paused and frowned, noticing how he'd been feeling ever since he lifted the lid of the feed bin. I'm afraid, he thought, and that surprised him. It had been quite a while since he'd been afraid of anything-haven't had the time or the attention to spare, he realized. When he'd been leading his men into an ambush there was simply too much else to think about. Now, with nobody to consider but himself, he could afford to be self-indulgent. Stupid, he thought; all I'm doing is stealing a twenty-shilling horse, not cutting up a column of Mezentine cavalry at odds of three to one. Maybe, if I manage to get away with this, I can find the time to develop a sense of perspective. It'd be nice to have one of those for a change.

Perspective, he thought, as he went back inside the barn (it was pleasantly cool indoors; nice to be back). Perspective is mostly about value; what things are really worth, in context. Not so long ago (he sat in the corner nearest the door and stretched his legs out), I was a wealthy nobleman. If someone had come up to me and asked me how many swords and how many horses I owned, I'd have had to ask the steward; and he wouldn't have known offhand, he'd have had to check the house books. Now, when I actually need them, I'm reduced to stealing them from men who have next to nothing.

(Outside, heavy wheels were grinding on stones; the cart was coming home.)

So, Miel thought, I've come down in the world. So what? When I was a boy, I used to worry about that all the time. What'd become of me if we suddenly lost all our land and our money? I used to have nightmares about it; I'd be in my room and nasty men would come bursting in to take away the furniture; they'd throw me out into the street, and all the poor people and ugly beggars and cripples would jeer at me and try and take my shoes. Apparently I used to wake up screaming sometimes; the servants used to ask what on earth the matter was, and of course I refused to tell them.

Any moment now, the door would open and the men would come in. Once they did that, everything would become irrevocable. Someone would tell Juifrez Stratiotes about their latest acquisition, and Juifrez (a pleasant enough man, and painfully shy when talking to his ex-landlord) would make the inevitable business decision, based on cost-efficiency and the availability of the horse. Miel thought about that. If he was Juifrez, he'd tell a couple of his men to keep an eye on the Ducas, just in case he'd put two and two together; don't be obvious about it, he'd say, but don't let him too far out of your sight. He considered the practical implications of that for a moment, decided on a plan of action and put it out of his mind. I wish I didn't have to go, he thought. But it's not up to me. That made him smile. The pleasure, the release, had been in not being in control of his own destiny for a while; but because he was the Ducas, as soon as he stopped being his own master he turned into valuable property, with potentially lethal consequences. He therefore had no choice. His holiday was over, and the best he could hope for was getting away from this place in one piece, preferably without having to hurt anybody. Beyond that, he didn't want to speculate; didn't care.

The door opened. In came the men; silent, too tired to talk. The woman, Juifrez's wife, had gone with them. It occurred to him that he'd have liked to say goodbye to her, but clearly that was out of the question. Now she'd remember him as the man who'd stolen their horse.

If he hadn't already known what they'd been doing all day, he'd have had no trouble at all figuring it out from the smell they brought in on their clothes and boots. He'd done many things in his time, but no digging. He'd always drawn the line at it, even in the kind of military crisis where rank and status were unaffordable luxuries, and even the Ducas was no more than another pair of hands. Digging, in his mind, was about as low as you could sink; miserable hard work, exhausting, tedious, repetitive, the epitome of his old morbid fears of poverty and destitution. Digging graves for strangers in the thin, stony soil of the northeastern hillsides would, by that reasoning, have to be the worst job in the world, and he was fairly sure he wouldn't be able to do it. Half an hour at the most and his soft, aristocratic hands would be a squishy mess of blisters, his back would be agony, and everybody would be jeering at him. He'd rather face a platoon of Mezentine heavy cavalry on his own than dig a hole. He watched them sitting, slowly unlacing boots, resting their forearms on their knees and their backs against the barn wall, their minds empty, their bodies finally at rest. If they had cares and troubles beyond aches and fatigue, they gave no sign of it. Whatever else they might be, they were firmly anchored in the present, with nothing more or less than the people and possessions within easy reach of their seats. It would be so very easy to envy them, Miel realized.

Food and drink went round: cheese, an old store apple each, half a dense, gritty loaf. Miel knew all about that kind of bread. It was made from flour ground from the last of the previous year's grain, the two or three inches left over in the bottom of the bins when they had to be cleared out to make way for this year's newly threshed corn. Perfectly wholesome, of course; but because it was dredged off the bin floor, it was inevitably full of dust, grit, shreds of stalk and husk. Sensible estate managers bought it cheap for poultry feed and to make bread for the seasonal casual workers. You could break a tooth on it; the old joke said it was better than a stone for sharpening scythe-blades. The Ducas, of course, had outlawed its use on his estate, and made a point of giving away the bin-end grain to the poor (outcasts, beggars, men who dug for a living). The silly thing was that, apart from the grit, it didn't taste too bad at all.

He glanced across at Phrastus Gyges. Stratiotes was there talking to him, keeping his voice down, like a man at market buying his neighbor's sheep. They're talking about me, Miel thought. Half an hour and I'll have to make a move. A pity, but what can you do?

When he got up, he stood for a moment or so and yawned. Nobody was looking at him; he wasn't important enough to merit anybody's limited reserves of attention. He stretched. No need to fake the cramp in his legs. He walked slowly toward the door, the very picture of a man reluctantly compelled to make the effort to stagger outside for a piss. It was only as he smelled the night air outside that he realized there were two men behind him.

Oh well, he thought.

He followed the outside of the barn, past the usual place. Someone called out: "Where do you think you're going?"

He paused, didn't turn his head as he replied, "Need a leak."

"What's wrong with here?"

"I don't like the smell."

"Is that right?"

He carried on until his way was blocked. One man behind him, following; the other had gone round the other way to cut him off. He looked at the man in front of him, trying to feign irritation. "Do you mind?" he said.

"You carry on," the man replied. "Never seen a toff piss before."

Miel laughed. "You haven't lived," he said. "Pay close attention, you might learn something."

He could just make out the frown on the man's face as he turned to face the wall, his left hand reaching for his fly, his right hand apparently resting on the eaves just above his head. Not there; and the horrible thought crossed his mind that someone might have found it and guessed why it had been put there. Then his finger traced something cold and smooth. He explored a little further and found the junction of the grip and the stirrup-guard. He straightened up, the way you do, and used the movement to pull the hilt of the sword out far enough to get his hand round the grip.

Maybe it was moonlight glinting on the blade as it pulled out of the thatch, or it could have been some slight carelessness in the way he lifted his arm that sent a danger signal. "Just a minute," the man to his right said. Miel took a long step back to give himself the right distance, and held the sword out in front of him in a loose approximation to the middle guard. "Sorry," he said.

The man on his left got the message. The other one didn't. Either he hadn't seen the sword or else he had the mistaken idea that toffs couldn't fight worth spit; he took a stride forward and reached for Miel's arm, quickly and confidently, like a stockman roping a steer.

The middle guard is a good, solid basis for defense, but it lacks flexibility. Against a threat coming in front and high, it can only be developed into a thrust in straight time.

Miel didn't see the point go in. No need; he knew what the inevitable outcome would be, and he needed to give all his attention to the other vector of threat. The other man, the one on his left who'd stopped dead in his tracks, had time and distance on him, making him an intolerable risk. Without hesitating to look at him, Miel took a half-step back and sideways, using the pivoting movement to power the cut. The technique uses only the first half-inch of the sword-blade to cut the jugular vein. Miel had been practicing it once a week for twenty-five years, but this was the first time he'd ever used it in live play. It worked just fine.

The second man was dead before the first man hit the ground, and Miel was still moving (a half-turn and step away, to avoid the thick spray of blood from the severed artery). When he stopped, he found his right arm had swung up into a high hanging guard, to ward off a possible counterattack in second. He froze, thinking, What do I do now, I've forgotten; then he remembered. The fight was over, he'd won. Marvelous.

They lay perfectly still, one on his face, the other twisted half sideways, like clothes dropped on the floor by a drunk undressing. Miel closed his eyes, opened them again, and lowered the sword, keeping the blade well away from him, as if it was some disgusting thing he'd just found. Just marvelous, he thought; and a voice in the back of his head was yelling at him for standing like an idiot when he should be stealing the horse and getting away from there. It was their fault, he tried to tell the voice (which wasn't listening and didn't care); they should have let me go, they should have realized, they were stupid. The voice replied: Well, what can you expect from people like that? No, Miel told the voice, but he couldn't get it to listen. There was no point even trying to make it understand. Get the fucking horse, it kept on saying, and Miel knew it wouldn't shut up until he did as he was told. He stepped backward, knowing that once he took his eye off them it'd be over and everything would change. You fool, the voice explained to him; any moment now they'll wonder what's taking so long, more of them'll come out, do you want to have to kill the whole bloody lot of them? That made him angry, but he knew he couldn't fault the logic. He turned his back on them and stumbled (don't run, you bloody fool; tripping and turning your ankle at this point would be the supreme humiliation) toward the stable.

He knew, of course, how to put a bridle on a horse. The stupid animal lifted its head and scowled at him, ears back. He put down the sword, lifted the bridle off its hook and stepped forward. The horse backed away. It can smell the blood, Miel thought, they're sensitive to things like that. He swore at it, then clicked his tongue and chirruped, "Wooze, horse," the way all the grooms he'd ever known had always done. It lifted its head and kept still as he guided the bit into its mouth and fumbled its ears through the headband. Noseband and throat-lash-the straps were swollen and greasy with saddle soap and wouldn't fit through the loops. Saddle; no, you clown, don't stop to check the girths or shorten the stirrups. What with the shouting of the voice and the blur behind his eyes, he could hardly think; just as well this sort of thing was second nature, or he'd be screwed. He mounted awkwardly, dropped the reins and had to lean forward to gather them. He'd forgotten the sword; well, he'd just have to do without. No, couldn't risk it. He dismounted, grabbed the stupid thing in his left hand, nearly cut himself to the bone on it as he remounted. Finally ready, like a woman going to a dance. He kicked the horse much harder than he needed to, and nearly forgot to duck as they went sailing out through the stable door.

Warm night air; he had to work hard to remember where the path was. Light was spilling out of the barn doorway, he heard a voice but not what it was saying. He kicked the horse again, then smacked it spitefully with the flat of the sword. That got its attention. He made no effort to steer; it knew the area far better than he did. He realized that he didn't have a clue where he was heading for; not that it mattered. The horse was too tired to do anything more than a grudging trot. Its back was uncomfortably wide and the stirrups far too short. All in all, Miel thought, I've had better days.

He made the horse keep up its pace for as long as he could, then slumped into the saddle and let it amble. He noticed that he was still holding the sword; its weight was hurting his elbow, so he tucked it between his left thigh and the saddle. The voice was telling him to use the stars to find north. He ignored it. For the first time in his life, he felt totally, abjectly ashamed.

Well, he told himself, at least now you can say you've met the common people. A decent enough bunch, in their way, and they certainly hadn't done anything to deserve the likes of you.