The Escapement

4

Linniu Matsinatsen was the eldest son of a fairly large farm in the Goinsolinnsa valley, the soft, misty heart of the rambling Cure Doce country. He was nineteen years old, which meant he knew how to plough and harrow, cut and stack hay, feed and herd cattle, carry water, castrate and dehorn the young bullocks, plane and mortice wood and forge nails; in a few years' time, he'd inherit the duties of pruning the fruit trees, looking after the bees, cutting the bracken for winter bedding, taking the pigs to the wood in acorn season and raising and killing the geese. After that, nothing would change until his father got old, at which point he'd take over the sowing and the harvest, slaughtering, malting, and the rest of the major work, subject to his father's instructions as to when, where and how. By then, of course, he'd have a son of his own, who'd start with feeding the poultry and slowly work his way up. Before the summons came, he'd never been more than seven miles from the farm, and he could remember the names and faces of everybody he'd ever met.

Now he was an archer in the People's Defence Force. He wasn't quite sure why; it was something to do with a vast army of savages who'd burst out of some place he'd never heard of and were planning to destroy the great city of Mezentia, where the axe-blades, hammerheads, saws, chisels, kitchen knives and needles came from, and this clearly couldn't be allowed to happen. Why this was clear he didn't know and didn't like to ask.

Being a soldier was something he'd dreamed about, needless to say. His uncle Loimen had been a soldier, for a month, thirty years ago. Loimen was older than Father, who'd been too young. He'd gone with fifty or so other sons of other considerable farms to fight the Vadani duke over something to do with water, and it had been the turning point in his life, for several reasons. He'd been away from the valley, for one. This automatically made him the district's leading and only authority on world affairs, strange and obscure customs in foreign lands, medicine, history and geography. He'd acquired (accounts varied as to how) a vast treasure in gold, silver and bronze, looted from the dead: buckles, buttons, a penknife with stagshorn scales, a fork and two pairs of scissors, together worth more than forty pence, and this wealth had made it possible for him to buy the pedigree Swayback bull on which was founded the celebrated Matsinatsen herd. He still owned a genuine Mezentine sword, which hung in stupendous honour over his fireplace. Finally, he'd lost an eye, and three fingers from his left hand, which meant he'd forfeited the main farm when his father died, since he wasn't up to running it, and was packed off to Lower End.

Such an ambiguous precedent left Linniu feeling uncertain when the summons came, and his parents' reaction hadn't helped much to clarify his mind. Mother had burst into tears and declared that he couldn't possibly go; he'd die, or come back horribly mutilated, and then there'd be nobody to run the farm and they'd all starve to death and Rinoj would never get a husband and it was the end of the world. Father hadn't said anything much, but Linniu got the distinct impression that he was pleased, because once Linniu came back he'd be the soldier, with a sword of his own for the fireplace, and Loimen wouldn't be able to throw his useless weight around quite so much in future; also, if there was any vast treasure in gold, silver and bronze to be had (and to hear Loimen talk, all you had to do was bother to fill your pockets), he had plenty of ideas on what it could be spent on, starting with a thoroughbred boar and a new share for the second-best plough. As for getting killed: well, the world was a dangerous place, but only idiots like his brother let it hurt them.

So far, it hadn't been so bad. Mostly it had been walking, and Linniu was good at that. He'd walked from the farm to the muster at Watersmeet, where he'd met the other soldiers. It had taken him a while to get used to so many strangers, but once he'd accepted the fact that he couldn't learn all their names or ask them all about their farms and herds, he'd realised that mostly they were just his own reflections in water; sons of other farms, his own age or thereabouts, most of them wearing older boots or shirts than him. He'd insisted on dressing in his best, of course. The pleasing thing was, so had they.

The camp at Loigna had been the same, only more so. The People's Defence Force had given them tents to sleep in, and stale bread and very poor bacon to eat (just as well, since his three days' rations from home had had to last him the best part of a week), and a genuine Mezentine helmet that was too small and hurt his head, but he didn't actually have to wear it all the time, so that was all right. He'd brought his own bow, naturally, and all seventeen arrows. He was a bit concerned on that score. They'd told him he was unlikely to have a chance to find them again after the battle (indeed, there might easily be more than one battle), and the arrows they'd brought along in big birchwood barrels were no good at all, warped in the shaft, the wrong spine for his bow and fletched with feathers from some bird he'd never heard of before. He had an uneasy feeling that when he got home, a fair slice of his vast treasure of gold, silver and bronze would have to be spent getting a decent set of arrows from the fletcher at Gollinagap. He'd tried to raise the issue (tactfully) with the officer, but the man had just looked at him.

Then came basic training, which left him more bemused than ever. Most of it seemed to be learning how to stand (something he'd been doing since he was a small child, but not the right way, apparently), walk up and down in an artificial manner, and hold the spear and shield he hadn't got in the approved manner. It was comforting that none of the other farm boys understood it or managed to get it right, but he couldn't help wondering. If a battle involved standing with your feet together until a sergeant told you to stand with your feet apart, it couldn't be anything like what he'd imagined. Eventually, however, they moved on to archery, which was reassuring, since he knew all about that. Indeed, to his great surprise and lasting joy, he came third, with eight golds out of ten at seventy-five yards. For that they made him a lance corporal, an honour he'd have appreciated even more if they'd explained what it meant.

After the archery competition, they were declared fully trained. After all, the sergeant told them, they were all country lads; they were fit, they knew how to move quietly, how to shoot; they'd all been beaters on driven days, or long-netted rabbits, so they knew how to work as a team, obey the line captain's orders, be where they were supposed to be and not make a noise. As far as the sergeant was concerned (he was Eremian, in his early fifties, with a scar on his face you tried not to look at), that made them better soldiers than arrow-fodder recruited in some town. Their officer wasn't so bad, he added, as officers went. They'd be all right.

From Loigna they moved on to Sicrypha; not walking, riding in carts, which made him think of haymaking when he was a boy. By now he was something of a hero, because of his eight out of ten, and because his boots were practically new and not hand-me-downs, and because when the cart got stuck in deep ruts in a stony lane, he'd taken charge and got it out again by rolling it back just far enough to pack the ruts with withy brash-didn't everybody know that was what you did? Apparently not.

At Sicrypha, they got paid. That made him very happy. Twelvepence in coined money, not lead tokens; vast treasure already, and they hadn't so much as seen a single marauding savage. He tied the coins up securely in a bit of cheesecloth.

From Sicrypha they went to Doulichar, where they got off the carts and walked for two days until they met up with the rest of the army. That was a remarkable thing. Later, someone told him that they'd mustered over two hundred, something he found hard to believe, even though he'd seen the huge sprawl of tents with his own eyes. Two hundred people, all in one place. It was impressive, even magnificent, but it made him feel uneasy.

Doulichar (he'd heard the name often enough, never expected to go there) was a river town, built around a wharf where the Lonazep barges stopped to load. The carter who collected their malt, oats and honey came here twice a year; he'd talked about the rows of squashed-up-together houses and sheds, the strangers that not even the locals knew, the brown faces of the Mezentine buyers who came down once in a blue moon. He'd always listened to that sort of talk with a blend of wonder and scepticism, half believing it as though it was fairy-tales or his uncle's more extreme reminiscences. Actually to be there, seeing it, made him feel very strange, as if he'd wandered into a story himself, like the boy who fell asleep on the haunted bank and was kidnapped by the elf-king's daughter. It was all very wonderful, but he wasn't sure he liked it. It seemed like a terrible lot of trouble and expense to go to, if the job they were supposed to be doing was as simple and straightforward as everybody seemed to think. The impression he'd got from the sergeant had been of a slightly more dangerous version of a boar-hunt, but as he watched the other companies shooting at the butts or practising the standing-with-feet-together thing over and over again, he wasn't at all sure. Boar-hunting, after all, wasn't exactly difficult, so long as you observed a few simple rules. There had to be more to it than they were letting on.

Three days at Doulichar, very busy doing nothing; and then the barges the carter had told him about turned up early one morning, except they weren't there to load oatmeal.

"We're getting on that?" he heard someone say.

"Yes." The sergeant; an Eremian, like the one at Loigna. "What about it?"

"But I've never been on a boat before."

"So?"

Being on the barge was very strange indeed. They all had to sit in the hold-fancy name for the bottom of the boat; rather like being in a pit, because the sides of the barge were so high you couldn't see anything except other people and sky-and there wasn't a lot of room. When you needed to pee, you had to call to a man up the other end, who made his way down to you, treading on people's legs and feet, and brought you a bucket. When it was full he emptied it over the side; not a good thing if the wind was blowing. The sky was getting steadily darker all the time, and he could smell rain. He thought of wet days in the field: netting snipe on the marsh, clambering over tussocks of coarse grass and sinking past his knees in stinking black mud. Wherever they were going, he hoped it wouldn't rain there. Things always went wrong in the wet.

Two days on the boat; cheese like hard plaster, bread you could've sharpened knives on, cold sausages you wouldn't have fed to the dog back home. Which was odd; because a while back, when they'd loaded oats and cheese and bacon for the carter, he'd said something about prices being high because of having to feed the Mezentine army in Eremia, and the stuff they'd sent off had been plain but perfectly good, not like this rubbish. Maybe the army did something to the food, on purpose-God only knew why they'd want to, but everything they did was so totally inexplicable, one more mystery shouldn't make any odds.

On the third day, he woke up to find the boat wasn't moving. He started to ask the man next to him what was going on, but the sergeant hissed at him to be quiet. Talking wasn't allowed, apparently, and so they spent the whole day huddled in silence, going nowhere, nothing to see but the lead-black clouds. Just after noon it started raining. There was no cover on the boat, so they got very wet. Nobody explained why this was helping the war.

About an hour before sunset, the officer started picking his way along the hold, looking at them all. It was impossible to guess what he was looking at, and he didn't say anything, but he seemed preoccupied and a little bit scared. After he'd peered at them all, he climbed up on a barrel and started talking to them in a loud voice, which seemed a bit strange after they'd had to keep quiet all day.

They were here, the officer said, to carry out a daring raid into the heart of enemy territory. That, in fact, was where they were right now (oh, Linniu thought, not liking the sound of it much). As soon as it was dark, they were going to float downstream in dead silence until they reached the headquarters of the enemy army, where they'd disembark quickly and quietly and, fully exploiting the element of surprise, set fire to some sheds, shoot off as many arrows as they had time for, then back on the boats and away off out of it before the enemy had time to react. Provided they didn't make a noise and give the game away, there shouldn't be any problems. He had every confidence, their cause was just, they were fighting for the very survival of freedom and their way of life, and a lot of other stuff like that. Then he repeated: no noise, get off the boat when I tell you to, set fire to the sheds-great big things, couldn't miss them-shoot arrows, leave quickly. All there was to it.

During the very long hour of total silence that followed, Linniu contemplated the things the officer hadn't said: what they were to do if anything went wrong; who'd tell them what to do, and how he'd tell them, in the pitch dark, with people running in all directions as like as not, arrows everywhere, and burning buildings too; or (even more puzzling) what good getting back on the boats was supposed to do them, when the current would carry them further downstream, instead of back upstream, the way they wanted to go. It was, of course, impossible that the clever men who ran the People's Defence Force hadn't thought of something as elementary as that; in which case there was a plan, and presumably the officer hadn't had time to tell them about it. He wondered what it could be, and whether it had something to do with standing-with-feet-together-they'd gone to the trouble of teaching them how to do it, after all, so it had to come in somewhere.

In any event, he reflected sadly, he could kiss his seventeen arrows goodbye. Ninepence for a new set still left him threepence out of his pay, but Father wasn't going to be happy when he got home. He'd set his heart on the thoroughbred boar.

Very gently, without warning, the boat started moving again. He glanced up at the sky, because it was his only source of information. Getting dark-he realised he'd lost track of time, and tried to work it out. The heavy black cloud made the light an unreliable gauge, but his best guess was that it was past afternoon milking, getting on for shutting up the poultry and feeding the horse. In which case, dark in an hour. He wondered how soldiers managed to calibrate the passage of time, since their days were so often different. At home, if you knew the season and the time of day, you knew exactly where you'd be and what you'd be doing, and surely that was the way people were supposed to live. All the uncertainty of the military life must unhinge your head, sooner or later.

Movement or progress, there was a danger in confusing the two. They were moving, slow and steady, down the river and into darkness, but without knowing where he was or what was happening, he had no idea if things were going right or wrong. Not knowing where he was-he thought he'd been getting used to that, after a lifetime of certainty, but apparently not. He could feel panic stirring inside, but did his best to ignore it. If he had any part to play in all this, panic wouldn't help. For the first time, he was quite sure he regretted coming on this adventure, valuable treasure or no valuable treasure.

It was quite dark now, and he couldn't make out the man sitting next to him. He knew his name, where he was from, how many acres and the size of his herd, the bare essentials, but that was all. That wasn't good. When the time came, if there really was going to be fighting, he'd need to know a lot more about all his companions if they were going to work together. He'd never had to co-operate before with someone he hadn't known all his life.

From time to time he heard scraping, which he identified as the branches of trees brushing against the side of the barge. It sounded murderously loud, and weren't they supposed to be keeping quiet? It was just as well, he told himself, that the officers knew what they were doing. But they were proper soldiers, and there wasn't anything to worry about. If there was one thing he could rely on in this whole baffling, disconcerting experience, it was that they wouldn't have been entrusted with men's lives unless they knew everything there was to know about soldiering. That was why he'd been trained to trust them implicitly.

The barge shook; it must've hit something, or run into the bank. Someone shouted, and Linniu thought, no, be quiet; but whoever it was shouted again, and he realised they were receiving orders: get up, move, let's go. But the voice sounded scared.

He jumped to his feet, collided with someone, staggered, fell against someone else. A boot crushed his instep. He suddenly realised he hadn't even strung his bow yet; of course he hadn't, nobody had told him to, so presumably he wasn't meant to do it. He thought about the sergeant's much-repeated phrase, wait for the command. Someone shoved him in the small of the back, pushing him forward. He couldn't see where he was supposed to be going.

Shouting; not on the boat, and he couldn't make out the words. Then someone yelled. He'd heard a yell like that before, just once, a barn-raising at his cousins' place, when the youngest son of the farm fell off a scaffolding and broke his leg. It meant someone was in trouble; and then he thought, well of course, this is a war. A thought like that was an odd thing to have in his mind.

More pushing, shoving, stumbling. He barked his shin on something, and realised it was the rung of a ladder. Was he supposed to climb up it? Nobody had said. Then someone grabbed his arm and dragged him forward, and there was nowhere else to go but up the ladder. It was awkward, with his bow in his right hand and not being able to see. He climbed, and then ran out of rungs. Someone pushed him; he felt himself fall, thought, this can't be right, and landed in mud.

He expected people to laugh, because that was what happened when you did a spectacular belly-flop in deep, sticky mud; he must've got it wrong, and now they'd be ribbing him about it for ever. But no laughter, and he heard a body land very close beside him, felt muddy spray on his face. Apparently that was how you got off a boat in the People's Defence Force. Strange way to go about things.

Getting to his feet wasn't easy. His hands were full of mud. He paused, trying to wipe them clean, because you couldn't hold or use anything if your hands were clogged and slippery. He scrabbled about for his bow and found it. He'd landed on it and snapped it in half. Disaster.

Disaster, because a good bow cost tenpence; because the only reason for him being there at all was to use the bow, and he couldn't now, could he? Obviously he had to tell someone; they were relying on him to play his part in this manoeuvre, and before it had even started he'd contrived to render himself completely useless. They were going to be so angry; but first things first, they had to be told. Then, presumably, he'd have to get back on the boat and wait until it was all over. His boots were full of mud, and he felt completely stupid.

Finding someone to tell… There were shapes, bodies, moving all around him, and it suddenly occurred to him that he was out of position and in danger of being left behind. It'd be like getting out of line in a woodland drive, one man could wreck everything. Bad enough that he'd broken his bow. The last thing he wanted was to make it even worse.

Someone barged against him; he grabbed, found himself holding an arm. "The sergeant," he shouted. "Where's the sergeant? I need to tell him-" But someone's boot rammed into the back of his knee and he went down again, belly in the mud. He felt a kick; someone tripped over him and landed on his back, scrambled up cursing. This was terrible. He was ruining the whole mission, all by himself. He had to get out of everybody's way, then find the sergeant and be told what he had to do. The worst day of his life, he thought.

Light. Up ahead, yellow and orange, like a building on fire. But that was what they were there for, of course, stupid. By the glow he could see definite shapes, men all around him, moving forward. As a shape lunged past him he called out, "Hey, I've broken my bow, what should I…?" but whoever it was didn't seem to have heard him. In fact, nobody was taking any notice of him at all.

Well, he thought, fine; and it occurred to him (a guilty thought at the back of his mind, wicked but tempting) that in all this darkness and mess, it didn't matter that he'd screwed up really badly and done everything wrong, because how would anybody ever know? If he kept his nerve, went along with the crowd, went through the motions, how would they ever find out? Later he could pretend he'd done his bit, shot off all his arrows, and then lost his bow right at the last minute. Damn it (he grinned stupidly into the dark at the thought of it), he could probably even put a claim in, get the People's Defence Force to buy him a new one, or at least pay something towards it. Well, it'd be worth a try; and it was their fault as much as his that it'd got broken. At the very least they should have warned him about the ladder.

So he started to drag his way forward, his feet desperately heavy with the weight of caked mud. Furtively he started pulling arrows out of his quiver and dropping them on the ground. A wicked waste, but he couldn't very well claim he'd fought like a hero till his bow snapped if he reported back with a full quiver. Uncle Loimen always said you had to be crafty in the army.

Something fluttered past him in the dark. A bat, only bats didn't whistle. He felt the cool air on his wet face and wondered what it could be.

Somebody screamed.

For a moment he froze, and then his better instincts took over. A scream like that; someone was hurt. He tried to place where it had come from. It changed everything, of course; his whole clever plan, pretending he still had his bow, but he knew what he had to do if someone was hurt that badly, even if it meant getting found out. He stopped moving. Someone bashed into his shoulder, though he didn't see him. The firelight was getting brighter, but he couldn't spot the injured man, there were too many moving bodies in the way. Over there, he told himself, that's where it came from. He started forward, tripped over something and fell.

This time, though, he didn't land in mud. His chin hit something hard, jarring his teeth. A man's head. He opened his mouth to apologise, then realised, though he wasn't quite sure how he knew, that the man was dead.

His first thought was: shit, I've killed him; knocked him over, made him bang his head on a stone or something. It was actually a relief, for a split second, when he saw the arrow.

Then he thought, what do I do? Well, obviously he had to tell someone; the sergeant, the officer, there's a man dead over here, what should I do? He hauled himself up on to his knees and looked round: in front, to the sides, over his shoulder. At which point, he noticed it.

First he thought, how the hell did that get there? It took a moment for his mind to clear; an arrow, or rather the foreshaft of an arrow, the rest of it had broken off, sticking out of his shoulder: impossible. For a start, it should be hurting like hell. Then he remembered the man who'd blundered into him, but whom he hadn't seen. Not a man after all. It had felt just like a shove at the time (but then, he told himself gravely, I've never been shot before, so how should I know?).

Like someone who'd fallen asleep on the job and been found out, the pain suddenly started and made up for lost time. He heard a whimper and realised it was him, but somehow it didn't seem like it was actually happening, though the pain was real enough. I've been shot with an arrow, he had to tell himself. Men were bustling past him all the time, and there was a lot of shouting now. I've been shot, he repeated; and then he thought, well, look on the bright side, it definitely means I'm excused duty. I can go back to the boat, and…

He remembered he'd left his helmet on the boat. Bloody fool, he thought; and his entire head started to itch, as he thought, there's arrows flying about all over the place and I haven't got my helmet. Fuck that, I could get killed…

(Yes, he realised suddenly. Of course he'd thought about that before, but never actually believed it. Now full, paralysing belief dropped down on him, like a bag over his head. I could die here, he thought; and he felt piss run down his leg.)

Excused duty; back to the fucking boat. He tried to turn round, but while he'd been standing still he'd sunk deeper into the mud than he'd realised, and now he couldn't move. Panic; he wrenched his foot up, felt it slide out of the boot, the hell with the stupid boot. He felt the mud squelch up through his bare toes. Just get back to the boat and everything will be fine.

A man was yelling at him, "Where do you think you're-?" but he didn't finish the question because he died. An arrow hit him in the face, his cheek, just under his eye. His expression didn't change, he just fell over. Linniu tried to run, but the mud was hands grabbing his ankles. He lost his other boot, which made the next few steps easier, but then he slipped and went down on his face. As soon as he landed he was scrabbling to get up again; he felt the arrowhead move inside him, the strangest sensation. He managed a few more steps, then something broke or failed. All his strength drained out of him and he was suddenly too weary to move. His legs gave way and he was kneeling in the mud. Any sort of movement was too much effort. Even the fear was gone. Nothing mattered.

(He thought about long-netting; how when you've walked up the line with the lanterns to drive the rabbits into the net, sometimes you find one that hasn't bolted but just sits there, frozen, until you grab its legs and it starts kicking like crazy till you pull its neck. Just sits there.)

At some point, he heard and felt a great thump. It came through the air and up through the mud at the same time. He had no idea what it was, but it made the firelight flicker.

Then it was as though he'd woken up (he thought, I can't possibly have fallen asleep, but I definitely wasn't here for a while), and there was a man standing a few yards away. Of course, he thought; it's all right. I'm not alone, there's other people here, someone will help me. He'd forgotten about help, because all through his strange and terrible experiences it was as though he was completely alone, the only man in the world. But that was just panic. All he had to do was call out, and the man would pull him out of the mud and help him to the barge, and then all his troubles would be over.

The man turned his head, and Linniu breathed in to shout. But there was something wrong about the man. He wasn't an archer. He was wearing armour and holding a blade on a pole, something like a long-handled billhook but with a spike on the front. There hadn't been anybody like that at Sicrypha or Doulichar. He wondered who on earth it could be, and then the answer came. The enemy.

He mustn't see me. If he sees me, he'll kill me. He felt an urge to flop down into the mud, lie flat; but that'd mean moving, and maybe, just possibly, the enemy hadn't noticed him yet. Movement got you noticed. He kept perfectly still and held his breath.

(The enemy; not something he'd given any thought to. In his mind, they'd been targets, concentric rings of colour with a yellow centre, things that only existed to be shot at; definitely not people, because the one thing you're taught before you get your first bow is, don't point it at anyone. The enemy. The same word, of course, for one man or the whole lot of them, a million savages, they reckoned. Perhaps it was just the confusion inherent in the word, but as he looked at the man with the billhook, there didn't seem to be any difference. He was one man, but he was also all of them: the enemy. The slightest movement, and the enemy will see me.)

The man seemed terribly calm. He was turning his head slowly as though looking for something in particular-me, Linniu thought; he knows I'm here somewhere and he's looking for me-taking his time, unafraid, a man who knew what he was doing. Then, after a very long time, he started to walk, leaning forward to break the suction of the mud around his boots. After a few steps he raised his arm and called out, then carried on, moving steadily away.

Relief made Linniu's head swim. The enemy had been there, but hadn't seen him; and while that had been going on, he'd had a chance to rest. He felt a little stronger, and he'd realised that not getting killed did matter, after all. And all he had to do was get back to the boat.

He looked round, trying to make out its shape, and realised that there was light behind him now-that was how he'd been able to see the enemy-as well as in front. Helpful. Maybe he could see the boat from here. Then it occurred to him that the light was coming from where the boat should be.

The light was the boat. Burning.

And where was everybody, anyway? Suddenly he realised there weren't many people about, which didn't make any sense. He looked at the few he could see. They were the enemy, too.

Oh, he thought.

As soon as he realised what had happened, he accepted it. His side, everybody except him, must all be dead; the battle's over, we've lost, everybody's been killed except me. The explanation was so very easy to believe. It slipped down into his mind without the faintest hint of a struggle, and the only question was, what's going to happen next? He felt quite detached about it, though there was a certain degree of general apprehension. Will they kill me here, or has something else got to happen first? He was prepared to accept it, but it bothered him that he didn't know the procedure.

There had been more than one boat. He hadn't been aware of that before. Somehow, he'd assumed that his barge was the only one, but there were five sources of glowing orange light in the direction of the river. He tried to work out how many men had been on the barge with him: forty, fifty? As many as two hundred and fifty men, then; they couldn't all be dead, could they (apart from him, of course), in such a short space of time? Everything changed, of course; each day on the farm was a slight turn of the wheel, one degree in three hundred and sixty-five. But so much change, so quickly. Then he thought about early summer, when it was time to kill the surplus cock-birds out of the spring hatching. It was always a morning's solid work, forty, forty-five necks to pull, each one a sombre repetition of the last sad panic and desperate, pointless flapping of wings. When it was done, you noticed the change. Stillness in the runs where there'd been movement, silence where there'd been sound. He thought about it some more. It was a job he neither liked nor hated. The grab-jerk-twist was fluent, second nature to him after ten years. He thought of the birds in his hands. They'd crouch still as he held them, wings clamped against the body, their eyes very wide open, until he started the procedure. Then there'd be the panic, every last scrap of the bird's strength applied pointlessly against him, because he was so much bigger and stronger, and that was all there was to it. The struggle did no good. In fact, it was counterproductive; death would come even quicker and easier if they didn't try and thrash about, though it made very little difference, usually. He wondered if he'd struggle when the moment came, and assumed he would. Instinct, after all.

The enemy were moving about; walking slowly and wearily, like men gathering up their tools after they'd finished a job. Every few steps they paused and stooped, examining something on the ground. He realised they were checking the bodies, looking for any of their own, not finding any. He heard the occasional groan, but not often. It was all surprisingly quiet. He guessed the enemy weren't in the mood to talk. Let's get it over with and then maybe we can get some sleep; he'd felt that way often enough at the end of a long day.

The pain was a nuisance, like a dog wanting to play, but not too bad. Maybe pain was only unbearable when you knew it mattered. He felt no need or wish to move, though his knees were starting to ache, and he was profoundly cold. It started to rain, just softly enough to sting his eyes. He tried to think about the difference his absence would make, at the farm, to his family, but it all seemed a bit remote, as if home was something he'd believed in when he was a kid, when he was too young to know better.

The enemy came closer; stopped, looked in his direction, saw him. Coming his way, trudging, worn out by the effort of pulling boots out of deep, sticky mud. He lifted his head to look at him; it was rude to stare, but it couldn't make things worse now, could it? The enemy came a little closer, then paused. He's afraid of me,

Linniu thought, amused; he's afraid I'll bite. He wanted to reassure him, but that would be ridiculous. He heard the enemy call out, and saw another one coming towards him. Oh come on, he thought scornfully, it doesn't need two of you.

He heard the newcomer say something; and, maybe because his voice was higher or clearer, he could make out the words: "Live one here, sergeant." For a moment he wondered what that meant.

A third man came into view. He moved quickly, a man in a hurry, and he didn't seem to be hampered by the mud as much as the other two. As he got nearer, Linniu saw that he had the knack of stepping lightly so as not to sink in so deep; he dug his heels in and hopped. He'd have smiled at the sight, under other circumstances.

The sergeant didn't seem to be afraid of him, at any rate. He came up close, and Linniu was able to make out the general shape of his face: a young man, quite thin, with hollow cheeks and a chin that tapered to a cleft point. He was clean-shaven, and his forehead was splashed with mud. He stopped just out of reach and peered at Linniu like a buyer at market examining a calf.

"He'll do," he said. "Him and three more, take them to the duty officer. If there's any more after that, stick them in the rope store." Quite unexpectedly he grinned wide. "They're all just bloody kids," he said, "that's all they are. And you'll need to get the surgeon to this one, once they've finished with him. There's an arrow sticking out of his shoulder, the poor sod."

Surgeon? He knew what that meant, some kind of doctor. He'd never met a doctor in his life, of course, but he'd heard about them. Once they've finished with him didn't sound too good, but even so… Oddly enough, he felt relieved, if only because here at last was someone who seemed to know what to do, even if he was the enemy.

Then an unpleasant thought struck him. "Excuse me," he heard himself say; at least, he assumed it was him. The voice sounded very small and sad.

The sergeant raised both eyebrows, as if he'd just been spoken to by an animal; animals shouldn't talk, of course, it was unnatural, but he was too intrigued to be angry. "What?"

"The… surgeon." He stumbled over the unfamiliar word. "That's a doctor, isn't it?"

The sergeant was having trouble not laughing. "That's right, son. So what?"

"It's just… I can't see the doctor, I haven't got any money to pay."

The sergeant's face turned into one enormous grin. "That's all right, son," he said. "It's free in the army, you don't have to pay. It's one of the perks, you might say. Go on," he continued, turning his head toward the two soldiers, "get him over to the duty officer, and see if you can find a bit of rag for that arm. No charge," he added gravely. "You can bleed on it all you want, and it won't cost you a penny."

The two soldiers were on either side of him now. They caught hold of him firmly but carefully, avoiding his wounded shoulder, and lifted him out of the mud on to his feet. "No boots," he heard the sergeant say. "Fancy sending kids to war with no boots."

"I lost…" he started to say, but they were marching him along, and the sergeant had turned his back on them. Probably best not to say too much, in any case. Amazingly, it seemed they felt sorry for him, and although he couldn't really understand that, he didn't want to spoil it.

They had to step over quite a few bodies. He tried not to look at them. The two soldiers hardly seemed to notice they were there.

It couldn't have been more than two hundred yards, but it felt like a day's march. As they got further away from the river, the mud turned into firm ground. Fewer bodies to step over, and more enemy soldiers hurrying backwards and forwards, busy, not stopping to look. He saw a row of tents, elaborate things with awnings held up by poles. Outside one a man was sitting on a rickety-looking folding chair, with an equally flimsy-looking table in front of him, covered in papers. The man's head was bowed low and his shoulders were hunched; he looked at though he'd just come in from ploughing. Apparently, that was who he was being taken to see. He raised his head as they approached, and Linniu was surprised to see how young he was.

"Prisoner, sir," barked one of the soldiers.

"What? Oh, yes." The man frowned. "Fine, well done. We'll take him straight to the duke." He paused, narrowing his eyes as he looked Linniu in the face, like someone trying to read small handwriting in bad light. "Does he understand…?"

"Seems to, sir. He talked to the sergeant."

The man nodded, cleared his throat. "My name is Colonel Nennius," he said, slowly and clearly. "Who are you?"

"Linniu Matsinatsen."

The man frowned. "Mat…?"

"Matsinatsen." He didn't know if he was supposed to say "sir". At any rate, the man didn't seem offended or upset that he hadn't. "All right," he said. "This way."

More walking. They passed through groups of men walking or standing about, who quickly made way for them. Some of them did the standing-with-feet-together thing as the man passed. He didn't seem to notice, or care.

Another tent, much like the man's but about twice the size. A flap hung over what he took to be the entrance, and two soldiers with spears and shields stood in front of it, either to keep people out or to keep whoever was behind the flap in. They seemed to recognise the man, Colonel Nennius, because they stood aside to let him go through the flap. Linniu assessed his own state of mind and realised he was nervous rather than afraid. Curious, he thought.

There were lamps inside the tent, five of them; brass, and they didn't look anything like the City-made lamps they had at home. Cruder, if anything. In front of them, so his face was backlit and hard to see, a man sat in another of those funny-looking folding chairs. He had his feet up on a little stool, and Linniu could see his boots: old, scuffed, loose stitching around the point of the left toe.

"You found me one, then?" he said. He spoke strangely; a strong accent, but easy enough to understand.

"It wasn't easy," replied Colonel Nennius. "Not many left to choose from."

He heard a sort of muffled snort, acknowledgement of a grim joke. "Get him a chair, somebody." A chair appeared as soon as he said it; Linniu couldn't see it, but he could feel the front edge of the seat pressing against the backs of his knees. He sat down. The man nodded.

"Right," he said. "There's really just one question…" "… just one question I want to ask you," Valens said, lifting his hand to stifle a yawn. He paused, glanced back at Nennius, who was hovering on his left. "He can understand me all right, can he?"

"As far as we know."

"Fine." He turned back and looked at the prisoner. Farm boy, he recognised. Somewhere under all that mud, he was probably wearing his best shirt, so as to look neat and tidy for the war. "All I want to know," he went on, "is this. What the hell possessed you to come all this way and launch an amphibious night attack, just to burn down a flour store?"

The farm boy stared at him as though he'd got two heads. Valens frowned. "You sure he can understand me?" he asked.

"The sergeant who caught him seemed to think so."

"Fine. He must just be fussy who he talks to." He sighed. "Hello," he said. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Valens Valentinianus, duke of the Vadani. And you are?"

The boy hesitated, then mumbled something. It was too long and complicated to be worth trying to remember.

"That's introductions out of the way," Valens said. "Now, I want you to tell me the purpose of your mission." Pause. The boy was still staring. "Can you do that?"

"No." Pause. "Sir."

"I see. Under orders not to, or you just don't know?"

"I don't know, sir."

Valens frowned, and said nothing. He had an idea that embarrassment would get him more information than five torturers with hot pokers. Sure enough, the boy couldn't resist the temptation to fill the terrible silence.

"They told us at" (somewhere he'd never heard of) "we were going to burn down a place where they make things, a factory. Where they build the stone-throwing machines for attacking cities."

"Ah." Valens smiled. "That's what they told you."

"Yes, sir."

The smile warped into a grin. "Well," he said, "it's always nice to know the enemy are idiots. You may be interested to know that what you thought were engine sheds were just general stores. You managed to torch a week's worth of flour, but that's all."

The boy seemed to be having trouble with that. "Flour?"

"Flour." Valens nodded. "Which is tricky stuff when it catches fire, mind," he added. "The shed went up like a volcano, we were lucky nobody got hurt. Nobody on our side," he added. "Your people weren't so fortunate. Tell me, do you happen to know the name of the military genius who organised all this? No? Pity. I'd have liked to write and thank him."

The boy's eyes had grown very wide and round; it wasn't fair, teasing him. "Right," Valens said. "I want you to tell me, nice and slowly, where you come from, where your unit was raised, the names of as many officers as you can, how long it took you to get here and the way you came. If you do that, I'll tell them to see to your arm and give you a blanket and something to eat. All right?"

As the boy answered the questions, Valens looked for the place-names on his map. It wasn't a very good map. Nobody had taken any interest in the Cure Doce for a very long time; there had been a border skirmish thirty-odd years ago, so there was a campaign map of that particular region, but the most recent general survey was a hundred years old, and the Vadani of that generation had been lousy cartographers. There were large areas of plain white in the middle, and Valens suspected that most of the drawn-in section was just plain wrong. A picture grew in his mind of the map-makers sitting in an inn on the border interrogating the local carters; plenty of scope there for rustic humour. But who cared about the geography of a nation of nonentities anyway? Nobody ever went there, and if you wanted anything from Cure Doce territory, they brought it to you.

Fine. He pushed the map away, made some notes, wrote down the few names of officers that the boy managed to come up with. That was all. Hardly worth the effort. He ran out of questions.

"All right," he said wearily. "That's it." He closed his eyes, rubbed them. "Now listen," he said. "This is important. I want you to take a message…" He paused. The boy was still staring. He wished he'd stop. "I want you to take a message to your leaders, all right? I want you to tell them I've got no quarrel with your people. Tell them they owe me for a shedful of flour, but apart from that there's no harm done, and I haven't the energy to go killing people for the sake of it, so if they mind their own business and stop helping the Mezentines, we'll forget this ever happened. But if I catch any more of your people playing soldiers, I'll make you all wish you'd never been born. Now, do you think you can remember that?"

The boy frowned, his head a little on one side, just like a spaniel. "You're letting me go," he said.

Valens nodded. He'd had enough of idiots for one day. "It would appear so, yes. They'll patch up that shoulder for you, dig the arrow out, and you can be on your way in a day or so. I don't suppose you know how to get home, so a couple of my scouts'll have to take you to the border. You can ride a horse?"

"Yes."

"Splendid." He looked up and caught Nennius' eye. "Don't bother bringing me any more," he said. "I've got a feeling they're all like this." He paused and thought for a moment, then looked at the boy again. "One other thing," he said. "Tell your lot to send half a dozen carts to the border. When we've got a spare minute, we'll send back the other survivors. I can't be bothered to feed them, and they're no good to anybody dead. But please try and make your people understand, I'm doing this because I'm too busy right now to wipe you off the face of the earth, not because I'm a nice, kind man. Quite the opposite. All right?"

He considered the look on the boy's face. Might as well talk to sheep. He nodded, and the two guards who'd brought the prisoner in took him away again. Valens lifted a finger to tell Nennius to stay behind.

"Well," he said. "What do you make of all that?"

Nennius sat down. "I think it's good," he said. "The Mezentines must be totally desperate, if that's the best they can do."

Valens smiled. "I'd like to think so," he said. "It's the old joke about lulling us into a true sense of security." He sighed and stretched his legs. "I don't suppose we'll be getting any more trouble from them, but keep the scouts out just in case. Commendations to them for tonight, by the way. I don't think that lot would have done us much harm even if we hadn't known they were coming, but it's always nice to be in control." The back of the chair was digging into him; he wriggled, and heard it creak. "What we need to do," he said, "is capture some actual Mezentine staff officers. I don't want the men, but I hear they've got really comfortable travelling furniture. Why can't any of our lot make a decent folding chair?"

Nennius smiled. "Get Vaatzes on it," he said.

"I might just do that. Or at any rate his sidekick, the creepy bastard. He'll do anything for anybody, that one." Valens closed his eyes. It'd be wonderful to get some rest, at some point. "Thinking about it," he said, "I guess we ought to make something out of this. Tell you what: I want you to pass the word around-usual channels, you know what I mean; let them think we're putting a brave face on it, but actually this raid was successful. Mission accomplished. It wasn't just a flour store they torched, it was the main engine shed. All the really important production machinery wrecked beyond hope of repair. Six months' work gone up in smoke, right back to square one. I think I'd like the Mezentines to believe that."

"But you told the boy the truth."

"Which means the Mezentines will automatically believe the opposite, especially if we help them out a little. You might want to get a couple of carts loaded up with scrap iron, take them out somewhere they can see you and dump them in a bog or something. Give them a cavalry escort, to make sure they take notice. They'll think we're chucking out the ruined machines." He frowned. "That's assuming their scouts are bright enough to take the hint. But it can't do any harm. I'm sure Psellus would love to believe it's true. I'm serious about the chair, by the way. This useless article's ruining my back."

Nennius left. Valens stood up, whimpered at the stab of cramp, and lay down on his bed. He still had a great deal of work to do, but he absolved himself with the excuse that he was too tired to do it properly. Instead, he reached out and tugged the latest scouts' report from the bottom of the pile of documents heaped up on a stool beside the bedstead. He opened it and began to read, though he practically knew it by heart already.

The scouts were puzzled. He knew the men who'd made this report; conscientious but unimaginative. They reported that the Mezentines were apparently getting ready to dig holes in the plain in front of the City. They'd gone to enormous lengths to organise work details, mobilising every able-bodied citizen who wasn't actively engaged in essential war work. The ordnance factory had assigned one of its four volume production lines, and a large amount of hard-to-come-by blade-quality hardening steel, to making shovels. Lines had been surveyed and marked out (see sketch). Presumably all this effort was to do with additional fortifications, but the stonemasons were being issued shovels along with everybody else, and there hadn't been any recent orders sent out to the quarries.

Valens took another look at the sketch. When he was a boy, there had been these puzzles; sheets of thin copper foil pierced with tiny holes. You laid them on a sheet of paper and stuck a pin through each hole in turn. Then you took a charcoal stick, and you had to find a way of joining the pricked dots on the paper to make a picture: a castle, or a horseman, or a waterwheel. He'd never thought much of the puzzles. They were too easy.

The lines so meticulously sketched by the scouts could mean only one thing. He'd seen them before; in a book in his father's library, one of a job lot he'd bought-histories and ordinances of the famous wars, lives of the great commanders, soldiers' mirrors, didactic dialogues between A Master and Some Students concerning the various branches of the military sciences. Junk, most of them. He particularly treasured the explanation offered in one gloriously illustrated volume of why feathers on arrows and wooden fins on crossbow bolts make them fly straighter. The projections catch the air, making the missile spin. The spinning motion unseats the malignant spirits of inaccuracy who love to perch on arrows and make them fly wide of the mark. The tiny demons fall to the ground, allowing the arrow to fly unhindered towards the mark. There was even a picture, of weensy blue pointy-eared fiends scrabbling air as they fell, their lips curled in baffled fury. Obvious, really, when you thought about it.

Almost as ludicrous (he'd always thought) was the catapult book. It had been a particular favourite when he was ten years old, because it had lots of drawings of funny-looking machines. Some of them looked like carts with enormous spoons sprouting out of them, others reminded him of giant wheeled violins, complete with bows; there were things like cheese-presses with crossbows wedged between the weights, and a sort of bent-back sapling arrangement that flicked a giant arrow off a pole. Also, there were the weird shapes. Stars, crinkly wheels, zigzags, knobbly things like overgrown cogs. When curiosity drove him to read the accompanying text, he found that these were supposed to be ground plans of fortified cities. That was what made him classify the book along with the treatise on arrow-riding pixies, because nobody would go to the bother and ruinous expense of building a city like that. All those spikes and wedges and sticking-out bits, and hardly any room left in the middle where people could live. Some old fool with too much time on his hands, he'd decided. And now, here those shapes were again, unmistakable as footprints.

(The book was, of course, still on the shelf in the library of the ducal palace at Civitas Vadanis. He'd sent riders to find it and bring it back. In the meantime, he'd have to make do with what little he could remember.)

He considered his enemy, Lucao Psellus. Impossible that anybody, let alone the newly promoted clerk, could have reinvented those exact shapes from first principles. It followed, therefore, that Psellus had his own copy of the book, and enough sense (unlike the young Duke Valens) to appreciate the value of what he was looking at.

There was a bright side, though. As far as he could remember, the writer had devoted a whole chapter to demonstrating (with really impressive mathematical formulae that Valens hadn't even bothered to try and understand) that, in the absence of grossly disproportionate forces and various other material factors, an attacker who followed the book's precepts was likely to beat a defender following the same precepts six times out of ten. The list of possible vitiating factors was long and complicated, and Valens could only remember three of them (outbreak of plague among besiegers/defenders; failure of ammunition supply for one side's artillery; treachery). It'd be interesting to read the full list again, and see how many of them applied in this case.

Sandcastles, he thought; another game I used to play, in the big pit where the foundry workers dug out the fine white sand they used for filling mould-boxes.

Sending for the book was all very well, but he was realistic enough to know that it wouldn't be much use to him unless he also had someone who could understand it. For that reason, he'd also sent for Ziani Vaatzes. Both of them should arrive within the next two or three days, and then…

Valens growled, rolled off the bed and sat on the uncomfortable chair. And then, he'd have no excuse not to get started. The siege of Mezentia; it sounded like the title of a play. A tragedy in three acts, complete with hero, villain, love interest, hero's tragic flaw, betrayal, confusion and finally lots of death. He picked up a report, glanced at it; his father had enjoyed a good play, though he tended to talk to people during what he considered were the boring bits. He liked the fencing, he said, and the speeches before the battles, and the deaths, which were inventive, gripping and so much better than the real thing. Also, he'd been told once that a great duke should be a patron of the arts. It gave an impression of class, and the writers always found a way of getting your name in somewhere. When he'd died, Valens had paid off the Duke's Men, cancelled all outstanding commissions and made it known there weren't going to be any more.

He'd given no explanation for his decision, and apart from the actors themselves, nobody seemed to have minded or even noticed. There had been a very good reason at the time, which had since slipped his mind. Of course, nothing spoiled a good play as much as a bad performance of it.

The siege. It went without saying that the City had to be destroyed. If he let them off the hook, his Cure Hardy allies would probably push him out of the way and do the job themselves. Even if they simply gave up and went back home (which they couldn't do, of course), that'd only make things worse. If the savages withdrew, the Mezentines would have no trouble recruiting mercenaries, and then he'd be back where he started, postponing the inevitable annihilation of the Vadani. No, the City had to fall, just to secure some sort of future for his people, as tolerated satellites of the Cure Hardy in self-imposed exile. A pity, but there it was. It was unfortunate that his one act of impulsive folly should have led to all this, but at the time he'd had no choice. And besides, as a result of it, hadn't he gained the one thing he'd always wanted, and never thought he'd ever have? She was waiting for him back at Civitas Vadanis. As soon as the war was over and the City was rubble and ashes, they could at last be together, as they should have been from the very beginning.

Well, then; that settled it. If a city with a population of over a million had to be razed to the ground just so he could go home to his wife… sledgehammers and nuts, to be sure, but it wasn't his fault. There didn't seem to be any other way of achieving the objective, and it was something he had to do, just as a dropped stone has to fall.