by K. J. Parker
The driver thought about that for a moment. “It’s an ill wind,” he said brightly. “Where did you say you wanted to go?”
They still had thirty miles to cover before they could turn off the Military Trunk on to the Western Supply. The whole of the next morning they drove through wheatfields.
“This lot should’ve been cut weeks ago,” the driver commented. “It’ll all be spoilt by now.”
Oida didn’t reply. The country they were passing through was one of the principal growing areas for Rasch. It would be interesting to know what they were doing for bread in the big city.
They stopped at noon for a bowl of disgusting porridge, then picked up the pace on the long straight down into the Necua Valley. Then the road turned sharply. As they rounded the corner, a huge flock of rooks got up out of the standing corn and flew away shrieking.
“Bloody things,” the driver commented. “Once you get a few patches where the wind’s laid the corn flat, they go in and strip it bare. And what they don’t eat, they trample and shit on.”
Except that they weren’t rooks: too big and black, and they didn’t fly right for rooks. “You know what,” Oida said. “I think we should stop here a minute.”
They climbed down and walked into the wheat crop. A few yards in, Oida nearly tripped over a dead man. He wore Western-issue armour, minus the helmet, and the back of his head had been smashed in.
“What’ve you found?” the driver called out to him.
“I think it could be the Fifth Army,” Oida said. “No, don’t come any closer.” He knelt down and took another look at the dead man. He was cold and stiff, but the crows hadn’t been at him much. Therefore not more than a day and a half. The armour was the standard lamellar, as favoured by both empires; these days, usually supplied by Ocnisant or one of his competitors. But the neck scarf was the green and blue of the Western Fifth. He’d sung for them, not six months ago. They’d made him do three encores of “Eyes of the Eagles.” He stood up, and walked back the way he’d just come. “I’m guessing they were stragglers,” he said, “or running from the main action and got run down by cavalry. The battle proper would be somewhere over there.” He pointed north-east. “Of course, there’s no way of telling. Could be this was just one wing of the army that got caved in or routed. There’s lots of battles where a bit of one army got wiped out, even though their side won.” He looked round. There was nothing as far as the eye could see but standing corn. But the last time he’d seen that many crows was the day after Lucis Operna. “I think we’ll be all right back on the road,” he said. “If we lost, they’ll be headed for Rasch, and if we won there’s nothing to worry about.”
The driver had a terrified look on his face; he nodded, and walked quickly back to the coach. When they were both aboard, he said, “Shouldn’t we do something for them?”
Oida shook his head. “Ocnisant’ll be along directly,” he said. “My guess is, his carts were all full, so he’s gone to his big depot just this side of Rasch to unload, and then he’ll come back and clear up this lot. No hurry, after all. Those poor buggers aren’t going anywhere.”
The driver looked at him. “You could be all wrong about this,” he said. “I mean, you didn’t actually go and look.”
“Quite so,” Oida replied. “But it’s none of our business, is it? We’re going the other way.”
The driver looked unhappy. “That’s a bit hard, isn’t it?”
Oida shrugged. “I’m just a musician,” he said. “I don’t do politics.”
The road started to climb again. They were passing through the celebrated vineyards of Amportat, reckoned to be the most valuable real estate outside of the cities in the whole Western empire. There should have been men everywhere, harvesting the grapes. Instead, all they saw were vast flocks of starlings.
“I don’t like this,” the driver said. “It’s like there’s nobody left.”
“Well, what would you do if the war moved into your neighbourhood?” Oida said. “You’d clear out till it was gone. Common sense.”
“You don’t think they’re all dead, do you?”
Oida turned his head and looked at him. “No,” he said. “And I’ll tell you for why. I don’t think this is one of those campaigns where the invaders go through the countryside killing everything that moves. I’ve seen what that looks like. So far we haven’t come across burned-out farmhouses or deliberately spoiled crops, or stray livestock on the road, or dead bodies thrown in the hedges. It’s not that sort of campaign. I think Senza’s moving very fast; he hasn’t got time for scorched-earth stuff. My guess is, his whole army is on horseback, cavalry, mounted infantry, horse artillery. It’s the only way he could move so damned fast, and it’s just the sort of crazy, brilliant idea he’d come up with. I think he’s making a hell-for-leather charge straight at Rasch, hoping to get there before they can gather enough supplies to stand a siege, with a view to taking the city before the Western armies can get back home. I think the countryside is deserted because we’re following exactly the same route as he did, and if we turned off and went inland a few miles, we’d find people and cattle and life going on more or less as usual. I think that this time next week, the people who ran away when they saw Senza coming will start drifting back—stands to reason, surely. Either he wins, in which case he’ll stay in Rasch and fortify it, or he loses, and the crows will get a treat. In any event, he won’t be coming back this way any time soon. This is probably the safest place in the empire right now.”
The driver looked petrified. “You think he could win?”
Oida considered his answer. “It’s possible, yes. If anybody could do it, Senza could. People are so scared of him, as soon as he’s visible from the city walls, the army commanders could figure they’ve got no chance, change sides, kill the emperor’s guards and hand over the emperor and the keys of the city. Things like that have happened; it’s not impossible. A lot would depend on how much food they’ve got in store. A city like Rasch is too big to stand a siege for very long, unless they drive out the civilians to fend for themselves. If they did that, assuming the garrison is anything like up to strength, they could probably hold out indefinitely, certainly long enough for the Second and the Fourth and the Eighth to get here and relieve the siege. Of course, that could be what Senza wants, to bring them to battle. If he can wipe all three of them out at a stroke, basically he’s won the war.”
The driver looked at him oddly. “You know a lot about this stuff,” he said, “for a fiddle player.”
Oida grinned. “I play a lot in grand houses,” he said; “you can pick up all sorts of things, eavesdropping.” He put his hands behind his head and yawned. “The point I’m making is this. It may look a whole lot like the end of the world, but I don’t think it is, not this time. I mean, take a really extreme case; let’s suppose Senza wins, the West surrenders, the emperor’s strung up and the streets of the capital run with blood. So what? Big deal. In a year’s time there’ll be a new government, pretty much the same as the old one, except the capital will now be in Choris, six hundred miles away, instead of here on the doorstep. Won’t change anything that matters. The only real difference will be, the war will be over and things can start getting better again. And you’ll be taking on men to drive your fleet of carts, and building yourself a big house somewhere.”
They pressed on until it was quite dark, hoping to reach the turning before nightfall. But eventually it was too dark to see, and the driver refused to go on, in case they missed the crossroads. In the morning, they woke up to find that they’d spent the night in the middle of a battlefield.
The dead were all Western light cavalry; they’d been shot, and the arrows were still in the bodies, which strongly suggested haste, since no sensible archer leaves a good arrow behind if he can possibly retrieve it. Once again, they’d beaten the crows to it, though none of the bodies they examined was warm.
“I wish I could make out tracks,” Oida said with feeling. “But they built these b
loody roads so well you can’t see a damn thing. I want to know if they came down the road or up, and which direction they left in.”
The driver was badly shaken, and Oida guessed he hadn’t had much experience with battlefields; he neglected to point out the implications for a possible career with Ocnisant. “What about if they come back?” he kept saying, and Oida grew tired of pointing out that one coach, carrying one civilian, was unlikely to be seen as a threat or a military prize worth stopping for, and that in any event they’d hear them coming even if they didn’t see them, in plenty of time to ditch the coach and hide among the vine rows. It bothered him a little that he hadn’t been able to calm the driver down and soothe his nerves; the man was getting as jumpy as a cat and was clearly worrying himself to death—with good reason, sure enough, but it was Oida’s job as a communicator to mislead him into thinking there was nothing to be scared of.
“Don’t worry,” he said, as they scrambled back aboard the coach. “Once we find that turning and get on the Western Supply, we won’t be seeing any more of that sort of thing. There’s absolutely no reason why Senza should go a single yard further west than he has to. He’s headed for Rasch, remember.”
A burned-out way station didn’t help matters, and it was just as well they reached the turning without stumbling on anything else. They stopped at the crossroads and looked down the Western Supply, a straight grey line running downhill for as far as they could see. “We made it,” the driver said. “Thank God for that. All that death and gore was starting to do my head in.”
“I suggest we try and make up speed on the downhill section,” Oida said. “I expect we’ll both feel better if we can get a few miles behind us.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have said that. The driver went fast; too fast, as it turned out. They’d been on the road about an hour when they heard a loud thump and the coach began to judder and weave and then to track wildly to the left. The driver swore and hauled on the reins. When the coach stopped, it was listing over.
“You know what,” Oida said. “This trip is starting to get on my nerves.”
It wasn’t the axle, as Oida had thought; it was the wheel itself. A spoke must’ve broken, and taken all the others with it. All that remained was the hub, with smashed stubs sticking out of it, like a badly laid hedge. The driver walked back down the road, found the rim and brought it back, rolling it like a hoop.
“Can you fix it?” Oida asked. The driver looked at him. “Sorry,” Oida said, “stupid question. Right, so what do we do?”
The driver shook his head. “God knows,” he said. “We aren’t going very far on that. It needs new spokes fitting, and that’s a wheelwright’s job. I reckon we’re going to have to footslog it as far as the way station.” He stopped. No need to say what had just passed through his mind. He sat down on the ground and stared at the coach, as if he’d never seen one before.
“Well, obviously,” Oida said quickly. “And even if there’s nobody there, I don’t imagine they’ll have cleared out all the tools and the spoke blanks. If needs be, we can whittle something up ourselves: it doesn’t have to be pretty. Come to think of it,” he went on—the driver was still staring blankly into space—“isn’t the whole point about these mail coaches that they’re all built to a pattern, so if something breaks you can just grab a spare off the rack and slot it in? Bet you anything you like they’ve got spare wheels there, stacks of them. Your tax money at work. Where’s the map?”
The driver shook his head. “No map.”
Oh. “All right. So where’s the next way station?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t do this route.”
Oida took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, it can’t be far,” he said. “Twenty miles at the very most, and maybe they’ll lend us mules so we won’t have to walk back carrying a bloody wheel.” He looked up the road, running dead straight up into the hills. It would have to be uphill, he said to himself, I hate bloody up. Still, downhill on the way back, something to look forward to. “Wonder what made the spoke suddenly go like that,” he said. “I thought they built these things to take any sort of punishment.”
“It was me,” the driver said, “going too damn fast. It’s a judgement on me, for deserting.”
“Right,” Oida said. “Because if you’d done your duty and gone scampering after the enemy and actually managed to find them and got yourself killed about two seconds later, what a difference that would’ve made.” He picked up the rim of the wrecked wheel and rested it on his shoulder; he reckoned it’d be less of a pain to carry than the spokes. “Come on,” he said. “Sooner we start, sooner we get there.”
The vineyard country stopped at the top of the rise. Beyond that was moorland; a shallow dip, and then the road rose steeply. There was nothing to see but heather, starting to go over, and couch grass and bog cotton, with the occasional island of startlingly yellow gorse. The driver had brought his bow as an afterthought, but there was absolutely no point; the deer would see them coming three miles away, the birds flew too high or got up too quick, there should have been sheep but there wasn’t a single one to be seen. Whatever had happened here, Oida was at a loss to understand, and it was fortunate, in a way, that there was no point trying; if he managed to figure it out, he’d only upset himself, and what would that achieve? He concentrated on trying to remember once-glimpsed maps. Logic demanded that there should be at least one way station on the link between the Military and the Great West. He could just about visualise a straight line marked in blue, drawn with a ruler by a clerk who’d never been outside the city but who believed unshakably in the straightness of military roads; his handwriting, the rather affected cursive government minuscule—looks crystal clear from a distance, but up close you have to look really close to read it—Boa Cyruos or Bos Cypua, something like that? Not that the name mattered a damn, except that if it had a name on a map, it had to be there. It’d be on lists and schedules, and Supply would send it shipments of food, tools, footwear, forage, stationery, horseshoes and copies of Imperial decrees; if the driver got there and found nothing but heather and bog cotton, he’d report it when he got back and they’d inform the Survey, and the Survey would send someone out to look—You had to believe in the way stations, because the alternative was mental and spiritual anarchy.
Faith is traditionally tested in the wilderness; according to the best philosophers, it’s what the wilderness is for. (It was at times like this that Oida reverted to thinking in essay titles; In a Created universe, account for the existence of deserts; 25 marks. Instinctively he began to marshal his arguments, then remembered he wasn’t nineteen any more.) It was hard to believe in way stations, or anything human. There was the road, of course, but it was so perfectly straight, so unyieldingly regular, that it seemed improbable that fallible mortals had had anything much to do with it—the gods built it, presumably, or the giants, on one of their better days. For a giant, twenty-five yards in one stride, the road would be useful, manageable. Just too damn big for humans. Imagine ants trying to use the cities of Men.
The driver had gone quiet, which wasn’t a good sign. He was probably one of those people who need time for things to sink in. Jollying him along wasn’t working, and neither was plausibly argued optimism; probably best to leave him alone and let him sweat it out, and if he did decide to sit down on the verge and die, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. There had to be coaches or horses or mules or donkeys still, somewhere on earth, it was just a matter of plodding on until he found them, and then getting a real move on to make up the time he’d lost, which was another thing he didn’t particularly want to think about.
He remembered the name of the way station, Bes Cyroia, just as it came in sight on the top of the rise, as they trudged up out of the dip that had hidden it. All the stations west of Rasch look the same—square, flat-roofed red-brick boxes, with three rectangular sheds out back. He quickened his pace, which reminded him of how much the calves of his legs hurt. The driver lagged behind
, the hub of the broken wheel cradled in his arms like a refugee’s baby.
The door was open and there was nobody home. The inside was neat, tidy and clean, as though the station crew weren’t sure whether it was an invasion or a proctors’ inspection. They’d taken the food, but not much else. Oida was in and out before the driver caught up; he shook his head, then hurried across the paved yard to the furthest shed: forge, wheelwright’s shop and stores. There was a big military-issue padlock on the door—a good sign, but military padlocks and hasps are the best that taxpayers’ money can buy.
“We need a sledgehammer,” Oida said. “And an axe.”
A way station ought to have plenty of both. They’d be in the stores.
So; no hammer and no axe. What they did have was time, and the driver’s muscle and Oida’s patient ingenuity. After various experiments with stone slabs, crowbars and a bit and brace they found in the stables, Oida hit on the idea of clambering up on the roof and smashing their way in through the slates. There was no rope anywhere, but they found six pairs of decommissioned reins in the stables, dismantled them and knotted them together. Oida volunteered to be lowered down through the hole. The improvised rope was almost long enough.
Once inside, Oida had the pleasure of being vindicated. There were rows and rows of coach wheels, new and brightly painted, racked up between rails, the iron tres still clammy with grease. They tried hauling one up through the hole in the roof, which broke the improvised rope; so Oida passed up a cold chisel and a big hammer, then sat down for a much-needed rest while the driver took out his feelings on the padlock. He used the time to reflect on the pattern of dereliction and abandonment he’d observed along the road; he had the feeling of a shape, which wasn’t the shape he’d expected but which had a sort of internal logic of its own. If his hypothesis proved to be right, the West was in even deeper trouble than he’d assumed it to be: they hadn’t been taken by surprise by Senza’s onslaught; they’d seen it coming and abandoned huge swathes of the inner empire as indefensible—a strategy of defence in depth based on letting Senza reach the capital unopposed, in the hope of mauling him a bit on his way back. It was a strategy they taught in military academies, suitable for situations where you can’t possibly hope to win, but there’s still an outside chance that the enemy might be induced to lose. It was also the equivalent of cutting twelve-foot letters into a chalk hillside reading FORZA IS DEAD. He thought about that, but couldn’t make up his mind.