The Proof House

CHAPTER TEN

The war between the plainspeople and the Empire started late one afternoon, on the edge of a lake in the marshy region between Ap’ Escatoy and the Green River estuary. It was started, somehow appropriately, by a duck.

The party of trebuchet builders to which Temrai’s old friend Leuscai was assigned had run out of timber; accordingly, Leuscai was put in charge of a small scouting expedition and sent off to find tall trees suitable for shaping into the main arms of trebuchets. Straight, fast-growing pines were the best bet, though occasionally it was possible to find an unusually straight fir or spruce in the forests to the south. When Leuscai reached the region he’d been told to try first he found plenty of evidence of pine, fir and spruce: a considerable number of stumps, carefully sawn off close to the ground by generations of Perimadeian shipwrights, rough-hewn on the spot and shipped back to the City to be made into masts. Time was pressing; there weren’t enough suitable timbers in the store to furnish arms for the current production run, let alone the fifty extra trebuchets Temrai had just commissioned.

On the other side of the Green River, Leuscai knew, there were a fair number of suitable trees; he could see them as he sat on an ivy-covered pine-stump and gazed at the bank opposite. Technically, however, the southern bank of the river was Imperial territory – at least, it had been until recently part of a long, narrow tongue of land claimed by Ap’ Escatoy, although the claim had been unenforcible for at least forty years owing to the general decline in the city’s fortunes. Leuscai considered the risk; invading the Empire hadn’t been part of his mission briefing and he didn’t really want to do it, but he badly needed the timber, and he assessed the chances of being noticed, let alone challenged, by Imperial personnel as too slight to worry about, compared with the reception he’d undoubtedly face if he went back home, or even returned to the camp, without any timber. He took a deep breath and started thinking about how he was going to cross the river, which was wide, deep and fast.

After a long, irritable day of brainstorming, he rejected all the ideas so far canvassed and led the way downstream in the hope of finding a natural ford of some description. As luck would have it, he didn’t have to look far; he’d come out only a few miles up from a treacherous but passable shallow point just above some rather spectacular rapids. The crossing itself was tense and not particularly pleasant, but they made it without loss of life or any essential equipment. What they did lose were half a dozen supply mules which were carrying the food.

This stroke of bad luck changed their immediate priorities. Leuscai, who’d been brought up on the principle that starving in a forest or beside a river takes a deliberate act of will, split his group up into a number of hunting parties, told them when and where to meet up, and set off into the forest.

He was quickly disappointed. The forest turned out to be a swamp with trees growing in it, and what little game there was saw or heard him coming. He came back empty-handed to find that nobody else had done much better; but one party reported that they’d stumbled on a lake about a mile due south that looked promising for duck.

Leuscai wasn’t enthusiastic. He’d had enough of duck a few years back, when he’d been one of the men Temrai had sent to hunt the wretched creatures for food and feathers during a hiatus in supplies just before the attack on Perimadeia. He’d been a victim of his own success; they’d found what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of ducks and proceeded to exhaust it, grimly and piecemeal, with nets, slings, throwing sticks, arrows – in some cases, where they’d found a strain of particularly trusting, stupid ducks, their bare hands. For weeks on end he’d done nothing but wring necks and pull out feathers, with nothing but duck to eat (fishy and stringy) and the creatures’ obnoxious smell always in his nose. He’d come to loathe the sensation of killing them, gripping the neck tight just below the head and swinging the body round and round in circles until the bird suffocated – but you kept getting ones that were the next best thing to immortal, that carried on living even after you’d broken their necks and crushed their heads into the ground with your heel; nothing on earth is harder to kill than a horribly injured duck, not even a bull buffalo or a man in full armour. And here he was again, about to kill and eat yet more ducks if he wanted to stay alive. Maybe, he speculated, he was really the Angel of Death for ducks, and killing them was what he’d been put into the world to do (he thought of Colonel Loredan and the plainspeople); if so, there wasn’t any point trying to avoid the inevitable. Yes, he said, by all means; let’s go and scrag some ducks. So they went.

Inevitably, it seemed, they got lost; the lake had moved, because it wasn’t where the scouts said it was. They spent most of the day hunting for it, dragging through the wet, dangerous swamp, losing boots and getting filthy, having to pull each other out when they suddenly went in up to their thighs. When at last they stumbled on the lake, Leuscai was pretty sure it wasn’t the one they’d been looking for – the scouts had mentioned a hill at the southern end that rose above the tree line, and there was no sign of anything like that. But it was a lake, and it was unquestionably covered with ducks. Thousands of them, floating in enormous black and brown rafts, like the garbage flotsam washed down into a lake by the first storm rains of summer. They showed absolutely no inclination to go away when Leuscai and his men poked through the trees on to the shore; they quacked and steered away a little, obviously not aware that Death himself was watching them. Foolish, objectionable ducks.

Leuscai convened a brief ways-and-means conference. They had no nets, no slings, no throwing sticks, no dogs and no boat, which ruled out most of the conventional ways of slaughtering waterfowl. They had their bows, but not enough arrows that they could afford to waste any, sinking into the still water spitted through a dead duck. ‘We’ll just have to throw stones,’ someone suggested; and since there were no better suggestions, the motion was carried.

Leuscai, of course, was a master of the art of stoning ducks. They found a handy supply of stones in the bed of one of the streams that ran into the lake, and agreed their strategy. There was a small spit of dry land sticking out into the lake, and a particularly dense mob of ducks bobbing up and down in the horseshoeshaped bay it created. They’d be able to bombard the ducks from three sides; they’d have about twenty seconds of extreme activity before the whole flock got up off the water in an explosion of wings and spray, leaving their dead and wounded behind. If they didn’t manage to get enough the first time, they’d undoubtedly get another chance next morning, and next evening too, if need be. It would be rather like the bombardment of Perimadeia, with Leuscai and his men being the trebuchets (ironic, given what they’d originally come for).

Since Leuscai had absolutely no wish to repeat the performance, he took special pains in deploying his artillery; spook one duck, and there was a faint but disturbing chance that the whole lot would get up before a single stone could be dispatched. So the hunting party set off from well inland and crept up slowly and painfully to the shore, taking great care not to make a noise or a sudden movement. The plan was tactically sound and would surely have succeeded if one of the party hadn’t slipped and gone down in a boggy patch, grabbing at his neighbour as he went and pulling him down as well. As luck would have it, there was a single adventurous duck nosing about in the bushes at the edge of the lake a few yards away fom where the men went in, and their sudden, pitiful yells of distress sent the duck rocketing into the air, like a stone from a torsion engine. At once the whole flock rose with it, blotting out the sun like a huge volley of arrows lobbed over a city wall at extreme range. Leuscai howled with rage and frustration and hurled the stone he’d been gripping in his hand; he was well out of range, of course, and the stone splashed noisily into the water. The ducks swung and lifted over the trees, then swung again and headed out towards the middle of the lake, putting up other flocks until the whole surface of the lake seemed to be standing up, like a man getting out of bed.

The Imperial patrol, which had taken the afternoon off to go wildfowling on the other side of the lake, were furious. They’d been looking forward to their evening’s sport all week; they’d smuggled nets and slings and gunny-sacks out under their armour, trudged all the way across the swamp to get here, and just as they were about to set up and take their positions, something had spooked the birds and ruined everything. The sergeant’s first guess was a fox; but it was just too early for foxes to be about, and what else would panic the best part of five thousand ducks? The only other creature fearsome enough was a man, and that couldn’t be right, since this was a restricted area. A thought occurred to him, and he snapped at his men to shut up and keep still.

Sure enough, his fears were justified. On the far shore he saw men moving about. He couldn’t make out much in the way of detail, but he didn’t really need to; there were too many of them for their purpose in being there to be legitimate. For a while he simply couldn’t decide what to do for the best. He was outnumbered (nearly two to one, if his estimate of their numbers was at all accurate), but he had the element of surprise, and of course his men were Imperial heavy infantry, which put rather a different complexion on the matter. Received wisdom had it that a force of Imperial regulars facing only twice as many opponents could quite reasonably be held to be outnumbering them… That was all very well, and it did wonders for morale if you could actually get the men to believe it; as their sergeant, it was his job to preach one doctrine and believe another. The only alternative was to go back to the camp, a day and a half away through the marshes, and hand the matter over to Captain Suria – three, maybe four days’ delay, by which time finding the enemy again certainly wouldn’t be a foregone conclusion. In the end, the deciding factor was the thought of explaining to Captain Suria how they’d come to be at the lake at all, since it was quite some way from their designated beat; it’d be much easier to handle the interview if he’d just driven off an enemy invasion of Imperial territory and become a hero. True, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing (the Empire approved of heroism but generally despised heroes); but so far, in its thousand-odd years of history, the Empire had never court-martialled a hero for netting a few ducks.

Once he’d made his mind up, he gave the order to advance. With every squelching, bogged-down step closer to the enemy, the sergeant questioned his decision; there were even more of them than he’d thought there were, and they were quite definitely plainsmen, and they were armed with bows (and what else would plainsmen be armed with?) – he’d stumbled across a major raiding party, possibly the skirmisher line of a whole invading army, and he was proposing to give them battle with one platoon of heavies. The only way to avoid being shot down like – well, ducks, say – was to get very close very quietly, and rush them before they even had a chance to get their bows out of their cases.

Fortunately (the sergeant couldn’t fathom why) the enemy seemed determined to make his job as easy as possible. There were no pickets, no sentries; they appeared to be arguing violently among themselves, with their backs to the likeliest vector of attack. For the first time since he’d embarked on this idiotic venture, the sergeant began to feel just a little hopeful. One statement of official doctrine about the plainsmen that wasn’t just good-for-morale was that they were warriors rather than soldiers, basically undisciplined and disorderly.

Most of the way he was fairly sure of staying out of sight as long as he kept his men just inside the tree-line. He’d chosen to follow the western shore of the lake, and the choice turned out to be a good one; the trees grew close enough together on the western side that it was possible to hop from tree-root to tree-root, avoiding the boggy leaf-mould pits. By the time they reached the southern side, where the trees were older and more openly spaced, they were no more than a couple of hundred yards from the enemy. Still, it might as well have been a mile for all the good it did him, because the going became horrendously wet and sticky and nobody, not even Captain Suria and the Sons of Heaven, can wade up to their knees in thick black liquid mud and be unobtrusive about it. He called a general halt and tried to hustle his brains into coming up with a better strategy – unfair and uncalled-for, since he was only a sergeant and neither trained nor expected to be a battlefield tactician.

When he gave the order to go back, he could tell the men weren’t happy about it, but it was an order, and that was all there was to it. They hopped back about fifty yards; then he led them at right angles deeper into the woods, striking in about a hundred and fifty yards. His reasoning was simple: if he was going to have to make a noise, it’d be sensible to make it as far away from the enemy as possible for as long as he could. He’d swing round behind them and then make the best job he could of charging, or at least squelching quickly, into the enemy’s rear. He had no idea whether it’d work or not, but he was wet, muddy, extremely weary and very frightened, and he couldn’t think of anything else.

In retrospect, it would probably have been a very good strategy in the circumstances, if only they hadn’t got lost in the wood. But both distance and direction are notoriously hard to keep track of in a wood unless you happen to be an experienced forester; when the sergeant launched his charge, he found out the hard way that he’d come too far, as his breathless and dishevelled command burst through the undergrowth at the edge of the lake to find that instead of being behind the enemy, they were alongside them, about forty yards to the east.

A mistake; but in the event not a wholly decisive one. When Leuscai first became aware of an Imperial patrol materialising beside him, his first instinct was to hide weapons rather than ready them. The way he saw it, he’d been caught trespassing and poaching; his mind was busy trying to find a plausible lie to explain why he and his men were there (we got lost in the forest; excuse me, but are we right for the Green River?) and it didn’t occur to him that he was going to have to fight anybody until two of his men, who’d been trying to hide their bows behind their backs, were speared like fish by a couple of legionaries.

Without any conscious effort on the part of either commander, they’d managed to hit on the optimum conditions for bloodshed. There was just enough time for the majority of Leuscai’s men to get their bows out, nock and draw, and just enough time for the Imperials to close with the plainsmen nearest to them. It was a short battle and extremely uncharacteristic; neither side could very well avoid killing the enemy, or being killed themselves. Leuscai’s archers were loosing at point-blank range, easily punching their bodkinhead arrows through plate and into muscle and bone. The patrol were thrusting and slashing at effectively unarmed men, without armour, shield or sword to ward off the blows. Interestingly enough from a theorist’s point of view, the casualty ratio more or less validated provincial-office doctrine (one Imperial footsoldier to three plainsmen) to the extent that if the fighting had carried on to the point of annihilation, there should have been four Imperials left standing, and no plainsmen. Unfortunately for military science, the experiment was abandoned early, with the survivors of both parties giving up as if by mutual agreement and pulling back; so the data, although persuasive, cannot be taken to constitute proof.

Leuscai died in the brief third phase of the engagement, when the Imperials closed for a second time after taking the plainsmen’s one devastating volley. He’d been rushing to get a second arrow on to the string; he fumbled the nock, dropped the arrow in the mud and was reaching over his shoulder for another one when a man he hadn’t even seen wedged a spearhead between his ribs. The blade was too broad to penetrate any further and too firmly stuck to be withdrawn, so its owner wisely abandoned it and tried to finish the job with his sword. But he was rushing things, too; instead of a clean, coaching-manual, skull-splitting blow, all he managed was a cack-handed slash that scived half the scalp off the left side of Leuscai’s head and toppled him into the oozing leaf-mould. As the mud covered his raw flesh like a poultice, he was aware of the man for the first time, putting one heavy boot on his chest as he tugged at the shaft of his spear, vainly trying to get it unstuck. After three goes he gave up and went away, leaving Leuscai to bleed peacefully to death. It turned out to be not nearly as traumatic as he’d imagined it would be. Ironically, the last sound he was aware of hearing was the distant quacking of ducks, cautiously drifting back to the middle of the lake.

‘Wonderful,’ said Eseutz Mesatges. ‘Now we can have the war, get it over with, get our money and have our ships back.’

She’d met Athli Zeuxis in the street outside a dress-maker’s shop, one of the best and most expensive on the Island – one of the few things left to spend money on was clothes, and for some unaccountable reason there had just been a wave of seismic activity in women’s fashions; the warrior-princess look was out, stale and dead as last night’s scraps, its place triumphantly usurped by the nomad-caravan look, all cloudy silks and bare midriffs. This suited Eseutz perfectly – warrior princess had placed what she felt was an unhealthy emphasis on cleavage, and the leather made her sweat.

‘We won’t have the details for a day or so,’ Athli said. ‘That’ll have to wait until I get the official despatch from head office in Shastel. But their reports are always pretty reliable.’

Eseutz thought for a moment. ‘Short term, it’s going to create havoc,’ she said. ‘It’ll be the same as it’s been since this started, only worse, too much money chasing too few opportunities, everybody desperate to buy before prices soar, but nothing to spend the money on.’

‘Except futures,’ Athli replied. ‘Which is an area I’ve always tried to keep out of, since I don’t happen to be a qualified fortune-teller. If I were you, I’d hang on to my money until things start getting back to normal; pretty soon, everybody who’s overbought in the first rush of excitement is going to want to sell, and that’ll be the time to buy. Sadly,’ she went on, ‘I haven’t got the luxury of following my own advice; everybody’s going to be wanting their money so they can start spending, which means that unless I can arrange cover from head office, I’m going to be in an awkward position for a week or so.’

Eseutz held a spangled slipper up to the light. ‘Give ’em paper,’ she said. ‘They’ll grumble, but they’ll take it. After all, everybody knows Shastel scrip is good; mind you,’ she added, with a grin, ‘that’s what they used to say about Niessa Loredan.’

‘Quite,’ Athli said, looking down at a tray of silver ankle-bracelets. ‘And if I start flooding the Island with paper, it won’t be long before it’s “that’s what they used to say about Athli Zeuxis”. No, thank you. I’ll just have to write some of it off with Hiro and Venart. It shaves my margins, but at least I’ll still be here this time next year.’

One of the dressmaker’s girls appeared from the back room and started fluttering round Eseutz with a measuring tape. Eseutz didn’t seem to have noticed she was there. ‘I wouldn’t object to a bit of that, if there’s any to spare,’ she said innocuously. ‘Bear me in mind, will you?’

Athli smiled. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Ah well, no harm in trying,’ Eseutz replied. ‘Actually – no kidding – just at this precise moment in time I’d be good for the money.’ She frowned. ‘That’s what’s bothering me; I’m not used to being in credit. Being in credit is nature’s way of telling you you’re missing out on an opportunity somewhere.’

‘Maybe,’ Athli said. ‘But your opportunities have an unfortunate habit of sinking.’

‘That’s an exaggeration. It was just the one time…’

‘Or getting impounded by the excise,’ Athli went on, ‘or stolen by pirates, or infested with weevils, or repossessed by the original owner…’

‘It’s true, I do like to go after investments with a certain element of risk. They don’t all turn yellow on me, you know.’

‘All the ones I ever backed did.’

‘Oh, come on. What about those seventeen barrels of turmeric?’

Athli wrinkled her brow. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I’d forgotten that. I’ll admit, that turned out all right in the end, after I bought out that other partner of yours you hadn’t got around to telling me about, and paid off the import duty you’d forgotten to mention. The profit I made on that deal kept me in lamp-oil for a week.’ She winced slightly, as the girl with the tape started on her. ‘No offence, but I’ll take my chances with Hiro and Venart, thank you very much. Hey, what do you reckon?’ she added, holding up an amethyst-and-silver pendant. ‘Will it go with the mauve silk, do you think?’

Eseutz shook her head. ‘Overstated,’ she said. ‘You want something small and intense with that, like diamonds. So, how long do you think the war will last? You ought to know about these plainspeople, if anyone does.’

‘Depends.’ Athli carefully gathered up the pendant chain and put it back. ‘An all-out assault, and it ought to be over quickly. If they let themselves get bogged down, it could drag on for months.’

‘This man Loredan,’ Eseutz went on. ‘What’s he like? You knew him for years, didn’t you?’

Athli nodded. ‘I worked for him,’ she said, ‘as a clerk. Gods, that seems like another life. Somewhere at home I’ve got a sword that used to belong to him. I wonder if I should send it on.’

Eseutz examined her carefully for a moment, as if she were an investment with a certain element of risk. ‘You’ve gone all woolly,’ she said. ‘Well, none of my business-’

‘Actually, you’re wrong. But yes, it’s none of your business. I thought you were asking for my opinion of him as a military leader.’

‘Mphm. Any good?’

Athli nodded. ‘He did amazingly well, considering what he had to put up with from the City authorities. But I don’t think he’d have been able to save the City, even if he’d had a free hand. He doesn’t really have the single-mindedness you need to be a high-class general.’

‘But this thing he’s supposed to have over the plains King,’ Eseutz said. ‘Is there any truth in that?’

Athli shrugged. ‘There was something there, I’m pretty sure. But he never talked about that stuff, so I wouldn’t know. Besides, from what I’ve gathered, he’s only going to be a sort of figurehead; it’s the provincial office commanders who’ll actually be running the war, and I don’t know the first thing about any of them. If they’re provincial office staff, you can be sure they’re competent, at the very least. The job will get done, one way or another.’

On her way home, Athli couldn’t help thinking about the war, and her tiny part in it. Had there ever been a time, she wondered, when she hadn’t been in the business of making money out of other people’s deaths? That’s what she’d done as Bardas’ clerk, that’s what she was about to do now. Yet she’d never seen herself in those terms, as some kind of carrion-eater circling high over plague-pits and battlefields. All she’d ever set out to do was earn a decent sum, on her own merits, living an independent life. And she’d succeeded, going from strength to strength; except that so many people had to die to keep her in the manner to which she’d become accustomed. It was the Loredan factor – in spite of all her efforts, everything she’d ever been was by and through him; as his clerk in Perimadeia, now this war – and she’d only got her start here on the Island through Venart and Vetriz Auzeil, who she’d met because of Bardas. What was it, she wondered, about these damned Loredans that meant that they started everything, finished everything, ran through everything like a bloodstain saturating cloth? She thought of Alexius, and the Principle; she missed Alexius.

As if to confirm her musings, she found Vetriz Auzeil waiting for her at home, wanting to know if she had any news about the war.

‘You mean any news about Bardas,’ she replied, because she was tired and fed up. ‘No, sorry. If there’s anything in the despatches from Shastel, I’ll let you know.’

‘Oh.’ Vetriz smiled. ‘That obvious, is it?’

‘Pretty well,’ Athli replied, wondering just what Eseutz had meant by ‘woolly’. An odd term to use. ‘If you’re that bothered, why not just write him a letter? I’m pretty sure the Shastel courier would pass it on; there’s a regular diplomatic bag now between Shastel and the provincial office, and once it’s there, the Imperial post is excellent.’

‘Thanks,’ Vetriz said, ‘but I don’t really have anything to say. I was just curious, really; you know how it is, when someone you know is mixed up in something important. You take an interest.’

Hanging around in someone’s porch waiting for them to come home just in case they had some news struck Athli as rather more than just taking an interest; but it wouldn’t help matters to point that out. ‘Coming in?’ she asked.

‘Why not?’

Athli opened the door. ‘Actually,’ she went on, ‘I did hear something that might interest you, since you spent all that time as a guest of the other Loredans. Gorgas is making trouble again.’

Vetriz caught her breath. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

‘I’m going to pour myself a drink; can I get you anything? Apparently, he wrote to the prefect offering an alliance against Temrai. The prefect turned him down flat.’

‘Well, he would,’ Vetriz said. ‘Who’d want to be associated with the likes of Gorgas Loredan?’

Athli smiled. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but it gets better. A day or so after Gorgas got the get-lost letter from Ap’ Escatoy, he managed to capture a man called Partek-’

‘Now that name’s familiar.’

‘It should be,’ Athli said. ‘He’s been on the Empire’s Most Wanted list for years. He’s some kind of rebel leader, apparently.’

She handed Vetriz a cup of sweet cider, spiced Perimadeian style with honey and cloves. Vetriz managed not to pull a face when she sipped it. ‘Really? I didn’t think the Empire had rebels.’

‘Well, it does,’ Athli said, dropping on to a couch and kicking off her slippers. ‘Though they hate admitting to it; the warrants always say pirate or highway robber. But it’s common knowledge that they’ll do whatever it takes to get hold of Partek.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I must admit, I resent it when people like Gorgas get strokes of luck like that. I mean, it’s not as if he’ll do anybody any good with it; probably not even himself, if his record’s anything to go by.’

Vetriz had become uncharacteristically quiet; she was staring at the wall a foot or so above Athli’s head as if something was written there. Athli decided to change the subject-

But Vetriz wasn’t listening. Oh, damn, she thought, I thought I’d seen the end of this sort of thing. Apparently not; she was standing in some kind of workshop or factory, and the first thing she noticed (couldn’t help but notice) was the noise. Men were bashing bits of metal with hammers. The light slanted in from high, tall windows, marking out silver squares on the floor and making the rest of the building seem dark and gloomy by comparison. In the middle of the floor she could see a pile of what looked like body parts: arms, legs, heads, torsos, heaped and jumbled up – it was in the dark part, and she couldn’t see clearly, only a flash of metal and the evocative shapes of joints and limbs. The men at the benches were bashing away at more of the same, hammering a leg or a torso or a hand, then adding it to the pile. Why were they doing this, she wondered? There didn’t seem much point, bashing a limb that was already severed; or maybe this was a factory where they made mechanical men, like the ones in the fairy tale she remembered from when she was little. Then the angle of the light shifted a little, and she saw that they were making armour -

(Same thing, really; perfect steel men, can’t be broken or damaged from the outside. If only these people were a little bit more clever, maybe they could find a way of doing without the soft, fallible bit that goes on the inside.)

– And there was someone she knew; they were building him, piece by piece from the feet up, and when they put the head on, it had his face (but there’s nothing inside. There was something inside once, it’s customary for there to be something inside. Maybe in his case they’ve made an exception) -

‘Triz?’

‘Sorry,’ Vetriz said. ‘I was miles away. What were you saying?’

The battle wasn’t going well.

Temrai leaned away, settling his weight over the heel of his back foot, and kept his guard up, his wrists low, watching his enemy along the outstretched, upwards-tilted flat of his sword. He was completely out of his element here, of course, struggling to remember position one from fencing lessons fifteen years ago. He’d just about got the hang of position one when the camp was raided and there was no more time for education; so as far as scientific swordfighting was concerned, that was it.

Don’t look at your sword, look at me, they’d told him – encouragingly, patiently, angrily, loudly, until he’d made himself do what he was told just so he’d be allowed to lower his guard and ease the pain in his wrists. Now he could see what they’d been getting at; but it was too late now to ask what he should do next.

All he could see in the other man’s eyes was intense, single-minded concentration, something he found infinitely more disturbing than mere hatred. It was as if he could see the lines, angles, geometric projections that he was calculating behind his expressionless steel face; it was like trying to stare down pure mathematics. Just as he was thinking seriously about dropping his sword and running away, the other man made his move; a wonderfully co-ordinated manoeuvre involving a long step forward with the front foot, a powerful swivel of the waist, a minimal-backlift sideways cut with the bend of the wrists accelerating the blade swiftly and smoothly through the arc of the swing. In reply, Temrai jumped backwards with both feet and pushed his sword at right angles towards the other man’s face, as if urging him to take it from him. He felt the shock of the blades colliding run up past his wrists into his elbows; it was a dull, bone-jarring pain, like hitting your own thumb with a hammer.

It had all gone wrong so quickly. First, a volley of arrows dipping down at them out of the sky – it was like the time he’d been cutting ferns for the horses’ litter and inadvertently sunk his hook into a wasps’ nest, the same bewildering, unexpected suddenness. The column was still bucking and scrambling and rearing and picking itself up off the floor when the heavy infantry had erupted out of a small copse the scouts had certified as clear only a few minutes before; they made contact while the last of the arrows were still dropping in and pitching (like pigeons or rooks on a patch of rain-flattened beans, with a swirl and a flourish). They pulled the men on the outside down from their horses and trod on them as they squashed their way in, pushing men and horses out of the way with their shields, slashing at exposed arms and legs and knees as if they were trimming back a hedge. Temrai had just worked out who they were and where they’d come from when the pikemen slammed into the column from the rear; then he’d been knocked off his horse by the man next to him, toppling out of the saddle like a badly secured sack of flour, and for a while he’d seen nothing of the battle except the hooves of spooked horses, trampling the ground all round his head.

Apparently, he’d parried the first blow; but even he could see that he’d done it the wrong way, got himself deeper into trouble. With a small, precise movement, the other man disengaged his sword from the block, made a slight adjustment of angle and lunged, far too quickly for Temrai to do anything about it. The sword-point hit him at the top of the arch of his ribs; but amazingly the angled contour of the breastplate turned it, made it slide away across his chest and under his armpit. Without really knowing what he was doing, Temrai slammed his own sword across the other man’s forehead, making a terrible thumping noise. The other man took a step back, put his heel down on the head of a dead man behind him, turned his ankle over and went sprawling down on his backside, his legs lifting up in the air so sharply that Temrai would have had his teeth smashed in if he hadn’t managed to dodge the flailing sabaton.

Unfortunately, in all this excitement he’d dropped his sword. By the time he’d stooped awkwardly down and picked it up out of the mud the other man was sitting up, backing away, scrabbling for his own sword. Temrai hit out at him and managed to connect with the side of his helmet, the force of the blow glancing off the sloped plate; and the grip was so slippery with mud that he couldn’t hold on to it, and it slipped through his fingers like the first trout he’d ever managed to tickle off the bed of a stream and then didn’t dare hold on to. The other man was on his knees, swishing at him with his sword – easily avoided by taking a step backwards, but that was a mistake, since his own sword was now about five yards away, behind his enemy.

The hell with this, Temrai said to himself; and he jumped over the flailing arc of the sword blade, landed with his knees round the other man’s neck and went over, grabbing at the top of his head as he fell. His shoulder hit the ground first; then he felt a screaming pain in his knee where he’d twisted it round almost half a turn. Without thinking much about what he was trying to achieve, he got his fingers under the bottom rim of his enemy’s helmet and dragged upwards as hard as he possibly could. He could feel the other man twisting and struggling between his legs, hands trying to grab his; so he tugged harder, shrieking as the pain from his knee surged up through his whole body. It hurt so much that it was several seconds before he realised that the other man had stopped moving, strangled by his own chinstrap.

Temrai realised that he couldn’t let go; if he did, all his weight would fall on his dislocated knee, and he couldn’t bear the thought of that. ‘Help!’ he yelled, but of course nobody could hear him – half the men within a five-yard radius were the enemy, and all of them were dead. Fat lot of use they were to a man in a nasty spot of trouble.

Wonderful stuff, armour, he thought, in the small part of his mind that wasn’t saturated with pain. Mine saved me, his killed him. Pity we can’t train it to fight on its own; then we could all stay at home. Then the pain leaked through into that compartment as well. He closed his eyes and tried to numb out the ache in his fingers, which were starting to slip. He could feel the sharp edge of the helmet rim methodically cutting the skin on the inside of his top finger-joints. If he held on long enough, say for a week, would it eventually slice through the bone?

‘Temrai? Is that you?’

He opened his eyes. He couldn’t see who it was talking to him, and he couldn’t quite place the voice. ‘Yes, of course it’s me. Help me up, I’m stuck.’

‘What seems to be – oh, right, I see. Hold still. This’ll probably hurt.’

‘Mind what you’re-’ he said, and then screamed and let go with his fingers. The next thing he was consciously aware of was the feeling of the flat ground under his back and head, and a slightly different modulation of the pain in his knee. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and opened his eyes.

‘That’s all right.’ It was Dassascai, the spy. ‘Now then, how the hell am I going to get you out of this?’

Temrai breathed in as far as he could manage. ‘What’s happening?’ he said.

‘We counter-attacked,’ Dassascai replied. ‘It wasn’t the cleverest move in the world, but we got them beat by sheer weight of numbers. You don’t want to know any more, for now.’

‘Don’t I? Oh, right. Can you get me out of the way somewhere, and then find Kurrai or someone-’

‘Not Kurrai,’ Dassascai said. ‘He wouldn’t be much use.’

‘Oh,’ Temrai repeated. ‘Damn, I can’t remember who’s next in seniority. Find someone, anyhow. I need to know what’s going on.’

‘First things first,’ the spy said. ‘I’m going to try dragging you over to that tree – oh, of course, you can’t see it from there. It’ll probably hurt a lot.’

‘All right,’ Temrai said. It did.

A little later, Dassascai knelt down beside him and asked, ‘Do you still want me to go to look for someone, or would you rather I stayed here? The last I saw we pushed them back, but I haven’t a clue whether we made it stick; they could be through here any minute. I really don’t want you to be lying here like this if they come back.’

Temrai shook his head. ‘You’d better go,’ he said. ‘Send someone to fetch me when you get the chance. And thank you.’

Dassascai nodded his head. ‘That’s all right,’ he said.

‘Excuse me asking, but are you really a spy?’

Dassascai looked down at him, smiled and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘All right, stay there. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

Temrai closed his eyes; above all, he realised, he was completely exhausted. It’d be very easy right now just to drift off to sleep. But that wouldn’t do, not in the middle of a battle. He thought about what Dassascai had just told him – not the cleverest move in the world, got them beat by sheer weight of numbers. I bet you really are a spy, he thought, and passed out.

When he came round, there were voices talking overhead.

‘-Wasn’t meant to be a decisive battle; just a probe, that’s all, to see what we’re about and slow us down a little. Gods help us when they really come after us.’

‘Quiet. He’s awake.’

He opened his eyes, and at first it was as dark as if he was underground. Then a lamp flared as someone lifted it over his head and put it down nearby.

‘Temrai?’ He recognised the voice and the face, but the name escaped him, which was odd, since he knew the man well. ‘Temrai, it’s all right. You’re back at the camp.’

Temrai tried to move his lips, but his palate was dry and numb. ‘Did we win?’

‘Sort of,’ the man replied. ‘We made them go away, at any rate. Now we’re falling back on Perimadeia.’

‘Basically,’ said the other voice, which was equally familiar, ‘basically, they’ve cut us off from the plains, it’s like they’re trying to bottle us up in the Perimadeian delta with our backs to the sea. Latest reports say they’ve got three separate armies in the field now. If we try to get through, they’ll come at us from both sides.’

‘I see.’ He thought of Tilden, his wife, back at the main camp. ‘Is Kurrai dead?’ he asked.

The second man frowned. ‘You are in a bad way, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Do I look particularly dead to you?’

‘Oh.’ Temrai closed his eyes and opened them again. ‘Sorry, yes. I’m a bit confused. Someone told me you were dead.’

‘A lot of people seem to have thought so,’ Kurrai replied. ‘I just hope they aren’t too disappointed.’

‘Casualties,’ Temrai said, remembering a time when he wouldn’t have used the word; he’d have asked, How many of my people were killed? How many of my people were badly hurt?

‘Not good,’ said the other man, the one who wasn’t Kurrai.

It cost him a good deal of effort, but Temrai managed to scowl. ‘Define a good casualty,’ he said. ‘How many did we lose?’

The two men looked at each other. ‘Over two hundred, ’ Kurrai said. ‘I think it was two hundred and thirty, something like that. Plus another seventy-odd wounded. We got about thirty of them.’

Temrai nodded. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Two hundred and thirty killed out of a column of five hundred. What are we going to do?’

The man he hadn’t identified yet frowned. ‘I don’t know about the rest of us,’ he said, ‘but you’re going to get some sleep. Doctor’s orders.’

‘Oh. Are you a doctor, then?’

‘What do you mean, am I a doctor? Dammit, Temrai, I was your doctor before you were even born.’

Temrai smiled weakly. ‘Just kidding,’ he said.

‘Like hell you were,’ the doctor replied. ‘Did you get bashed on the head during the battle?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘Well no, quite possibly you don’t. It’s my fault, I should have examined you more thoroughly. Feel sick at all? Headache, lights flashing in front of your eyes?’

‘You think I’ve lost my memory,’ Temrai said.

‘Bits of it,’ the doctor said. ‘It happens that way sometimes.’

Temrai smiled, and the smile widened into a broad grin. ‘If only,’ he said cheerfully. ‘If only.’

Poliorcis the diplomat shivered and wiped rain out of his eyes with the back of his hand.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ he asked. The carter grunted without looking round. The rain was dripping in soft, fat drops off the broad brim of his leather hat. He didn’t seem to be aware of it. Quite probably, by his standards, this constituted a sunny day.

Usually Poliorcis trusted his sense of direction, a valuable attribute for a man who spent so much of his time travelling in unfamiliar places. On this occasion, however, he was completely lost. The route the carter was taking was completely different from the one Gorgas Loredan had taken; either because Gorgas had been showing him the scenic route, or because Gorgas wasn’t aware of the short cut. He’d also lost track of time, which was most unlike him. He put it down to the effect this country had on him. It reminded him rather of swimming in the lagoon off Ap’ Sendaves; floating on his back in still water, gradually ceasing to be aware of his body, of anything around him, until he was nothing but a consciousness without context, an awareness with nothing to be aware of. That had been a bizarre feeling but a pleasant one. The Mesoge, in his opinion, certainly wasn’t pleasant, and it didn’t strike him as interesting enough to be bizarre; but it left him feeling disorientated in much the same way.

He even felt too bemused to rehearse what he was going to say, or run through in his mind the arguments he was going to use. That was unfortunate – he felt more uneasy about this meeting than any number of far more important negotiations he’d been involved in – but the harder he tried to pull himself together, the more his mind wanted to wander. If it wasn’t for the rain he could close his eyes and get some sleep; but nothing helps you stay awake better than the feeling of rainwater seeping under your collar and down your back. He pulled the sodden wreckage of his own hat a little further down and gave up trying to think; instead he gazed sullenly at the wet green all around him, the hedges dripping rain, the pools of brown water filling the wheel-ruts in the track ahead, the leaves of the docks and ferns glistening. The air was moist and tickled his throat, and he was painfully cold.

Must be easier ways of making a living, he muttered to himself, a man of my age. It was ridiculous for one of the provincial office’s senior departmental negotiators to be squelching and bumping along in a carrier’s cart in the rain, risking pneumonia and pleurisy at the very least, on his way to try to reason with a lunatic who had no official standing, whose authority wasn’t even recognised by the Empire, in order to secure the person of a minor troublemaker who’d happened to be taken up and turned into some kind of popular hero by a bunch of malcontents who probably wouldn’t recognise him if he was sitting at their kitchen table.

The cart had stopped. He lifted his head and looked up, but all he could see was rain.

The carter didn’t move. ‘Stay here,’ Poliorcis said. ‘I’ll need you to take me back to Tornoys.’

He started to ease himself down off the cart, but with a movement faster than anything he’d have imagined the man was capable of, the carter grabbed him by the elbow.

‘Two quarters,’ he said.

Poliorcis nodded and burrowed about in his drenched sleeve for the money. ‘Stay there,’ he repeated, and tried to reach the ground with his feet. He was too high up; but the hem of his robe caught in something, and he ended up kneeling in the mud. ‘Stay there,’ he said, one more time; then he got up, muddying his hands in the process, and headed for the gate he could just make out through the rain. While he was grappling with the catch (which was rusted up – presumably Gorgas and his brothers clambered over, and never bothered opening the thing; that would explain why it sagged so desperately on its one good hinge and the tangle of coarse hemp twine that did service for the other one) he heard the reins crack behind him, and the sound of wheels slowly rolling through a puddle.

The farmhouse door was open, but there didn’t seem to be anybody about. ‘Hello?’ he called out. Nobody answered. He stood for a moment, watching rain drip off him and on to the stone flags, then decided that this simply wouldn’t do. He might not be a Son of Heaven, but he represented the Empire; the Empire doesn’t stand dripping in doorways, it marches in and puts its feet up on the furniture.

At least it was dry inside the house, and what remained of the fire gave off a little warmth. He parked himself in the chimney corner, still wrapped up in his travelling coat, which was now three parts water to one part cloth. The settle was more comfortable than it looked. He let his head rest against the back and closed his eyes.

He woke up to find Gorgas Loredan leaning over him, a slightly scornful expression on his face. ‘You should have let us know you were coming,’ he was saying, ‘I’d have sent a carriage for you.’

‘Doesn’t matter, really,’ said Poliorcis, who’d just realised that he’d woken up with a splitting headache. ‘I’m here now.’

‘Good.’ Gorgas Loredan sat down next to him on the settle, so close that he had to budge along a little to avoid being in contact with him. ‘In that case we can cut the small talk and get down to business. I assume you’re here to make me an offer.’

‘Well, yes,’ Poliorcis mumbled. ‘And no.’ His mind was foggy and furred up, and he couldn’t remember a single one of the principal bargaining positions he’d been working on over the last few days. ‘It’s more a case of asking what you want from us. I think you’ll find we’re willing to consider any reasonable proposals.’

Gorgas sighed and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I must have misunderstood. You see, I was under the impression that we were going to work this thing out together in a constructive and sensible fashion, instead of playing games. Goodbye.’

‘I see.’ Poliorcis stayed exactly where he was. ‘After I’ve come all this way, you’re throwing me out.’

‘I’d never dream of being so rude,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Still, since you don’t appear to have anything to say to me, I must confess I can’t see any point in your being here; and since you’ve already seen all the sights, and our climate doesn’t seem to agree with you-’

‘All right.’ Poliorcis had an unhappy feeling that he’d given away the initiative in the negotiations before they’d even begun, and had no real chance of getting it back. ‘Here’s a firm offer, no ambiguities at all. Money: how much will you take for your prisoner?’

Gorgas laughed. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘let’s at least pretend to respect each other. You’ve seen the Mesoge; what possible use would money be to me in a place like this?’

Just outside the back door, a dog was barking furiously. The noise picked at the pain in Poliorcis’ head like fingers plucking harpstrings. ‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘Not money. What else? Something we have, presumably, that you need. Tools? Weapons? Raw materials?’

Gorgas shook his head. ‘You’re making fun of me,’ he said. ‘Personally, I don’t regard that as very diplomatic. Tell me, do you really despise us that much? Do you really think we’re nothing but bandits and thieves, little better than the gangs who go around fishing through open windows with a hook on the end of a pole? I thought you’d have understood, when I took the trouble to show you; we’re farmers, peaceful people who want to make friends with our neighbours. Show us just a little respect and I’ll give you your damned rebel for free.’

‘You’re talking about the alliance,’ Poliorcis said. ‘I can only say that I’m extremely sorry, but the provincial office feels that a formal alliance at this time would be inappropriate.’

‘Inappropriate.’

Poliorcis felt as if he was slowly sinking up to his knees in mud. ‘I’d just like to point out,’ he said, ‘that what you’re asking is entirely without precedent. We have no formal alliances with anybody; not Shastel or the Island or Colleon. Please try to understand our concerns; if we made an alliance with you, what sort of message would that send to them, after we’ve turned down overtures from all of them? Quite simply, it’s not the way we do things.’

‘All right.’ Gorgas yawned. ‘If there’s one thing I pride myself on, it’s flexibility. Flexibility, realism, always look for the deal that’s good for both sides. Now, you’re telling me the Empire doesn’t have any allies, and I’m sure you’d never lie about a thing like that. Well then, we’ll forget all about an alliance, and I’ll tell you straight exactly what’s in my mind. The truth is, whether or not we’re formal allies, all I want is for you, the provincial office, to give me a chance to do something I need to do; you think about it and tell me if you can see a way it can be done. After all, you’re the diplomat; I’m just a soldier and a farmer and I’m really out of my depth here. I need to pay off an old debt – no, that’s not it. I need to set right a really bad thing I did once. You see, I made it possible for Temrai to sack Perimadeia. Does that shock you?’

Poliorcis looked at him. ‘I know,’ he said.

‘Oh.’ Gorgas sat still, expressionless. ‘What do you think about that?’

‘I don’t,’ Poliorcis replied. ‘That is, I know why you did it, what your reasons were; it was because your sister owed a lot of money to rich individuals in Perimadeia, and she knew she could never pay them back. It was a business decision. Now, I can give an opinion as to whether that was wise or unwise from a commercial point of view, but if you’re expecting me to say whether I think what you did was right or wrong, I’m afraid I can’t. I don’t think in those terms; it’s as if I was colour-blind and you wanted my opinion about a certain shade of green. So,’ he went on, ‘what has that got to do with us?’

Gorgas breathed out, rubbed his chin. ‘I suppose I’m the one who’s shocked,’ he said. ‘I’m not colour-blind, as you put it. I can see that what I did was terribly wrong. I knew my brother was fighting for the City; I ruined his life and nearly got him killed. That’s what I’ve got to put right. I have to kill Temrai and destroy the plains tribes, fighting side by side with him, paying my debt. Can you see that? Even you must be able to see that. Now, I don’t care what my official standing is, I just need to be there and to do my share, otherwise I won’t be able to live with myself. Because of what I did, I’m already responsible for the death of my own son; I owe it to him as well. Can you see how simple and straightforward this all is?’

Poliorcis thought for a while. ‘One thing I’m sure about,’ he said, ‘you’re an interesting man. And if there’s one thing the Sons of Heaven are interested in, it’s interesting people. But let’s think this through, shall we? With all due respect, we already have all the military resources we need. When we first met, you were talking about archers, how we don’t have enough. The fact is, we do. We have whole nations of archers in the Empire – longbow, short recurve, long recurve, horse archers, crossbowmen, you name it. Our factories can deliver twenty thousand bows and two hundred thousand arrows a week, all made to specification, identical, though the factories might be a thousand miles apart. So really, we don’t need any more archers. Now, you’ve told me why you feel you need to fight this war. Let me tell you why we’re fighting it. We have more regular full-time soldiers than there are men, women and children in all of Shastel and the Island and Colleon and Perimadeia and all the other places you’ve ever heard of put together. We built that army so that nobody – nobody – could ever be a threat to us. Between the Sons of Heaven and the remotest possibility of danger there’s a wall of steel and muscle so thick that nothing on earth could ever break through it. If the ground suddenly opened and swallowed our homeland up, we could fill the hole with human bodies and rebuild our homes on top of them. No, we make war because we need to find our army something to do, to keep them from getting bored and restive and out of shape; so you see, we really don’t want anybody else fighting our battles for us – it’d defeat the whole object of the exercise. I’m sorry, but there it is. I can’t help you.’

Gorgas nodded slowly, as if he’d just had a difficult calculation explained to him. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘And sooner or later you’ll come here, walking the dog, so to speak; and it’d be embarrassing for you to be seen to pick a fight with people you once treated as friends and allies. That’s sound enough reasoning, I can accept that. But it doesn’t solve my problem. Poliorcis, I’m asking you because you’re the expert: how can we arrange it so that you get what you want, this pirate of yours, and I get what I need? There has to be a way. All we’ve got to do is figure out what it is.’

Poliorcis frowned. ‘I must say,’ he said, ‘you’re dealing with the news of your impending conquest and subjugation very well. Most people would probably have got angry, or frightened.’

‘Pointless,’ Gorgas said. ‘You weren’t telling me anything I didn’t know. It’s obvious enough; you said it yourself, that’s one of the reasons I wanted the alliance. But you’re too smart for me, and I accept that; there’s still no reason why we can’t put our heads together and find a way of making the inevitable a little bit less painful than it’ll otherwise be. Flexibility. Realism. That’s what it’s all about.’ He bit his lip, then clapped his hands together so loudly that Poliorcis jumped. ‘I know,’ Gorgas went on. ‘I know exactly what we can do. I hereby surrender the Mesoge to the Empire, and throw myself and my people on your mercy.’ He smiled beautifully. ‘And as a gesture of goodwill, it’d be really appreciated if we could take our place as auxiliary soldiers in your expeditionary force against Temrai. There, doesn’t that cover everything beautifully?’

It had been a long time since Poliorcis had been shocked by anything, and he wasn’t sure he remembered how to deal with it. ‘You’re joking,’ he said.

Gorgas shook his head. ‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m practising what I preach. I’m sparing my people the horrors of a war we could never hope to win, and getting to pay my debt off at the same time. If you want me to abdicate, I will – well, look, you can see for yourself, I’m not exactly comfortable as a military dictator. All I want to do once I’ve settled that old score is to live here and work my farm; I’m sure the provincial office won’t mind me doing that. Now then, you think of the advantages; think of Tornoys and the Mesoge as a base for your conquests in this region, how much easier it’ll make it to pick off the neighbouring states one by one. Think of what it’ll mean to you personally – you came here to get a rebel, you succeed, and you take home a new province for the Empire into the bargain. Can you possibly imagine a better outcome? Well?’

It was the enthusiasm, above all; the waggy-tailed-dog boisterousness of the man. It was almost more than Poliorcis could bear. But, ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I can’t say that I can. Well, you’ve certainly given me a lot to think about. Will it be all right if I rest here tonight and start for home in the morning?’

Gorgas gave him a smile as big and bright as sunrise. ‘Whatever you say,’ he replied. ‘After all, you’re the boss.’