by K. J. Parker
He stood up, faced the shelves like a general addressing his troops on the eve of battle, and made a choice.
Regentius' Calendar of Hawks and Ladies had been one of the original hundredweight. It was a big, fat book with lurid pictures of birds of prey and couples having sex, apparently drawn by a scribe who'd never seen either, but there was one chapter that justified keeping it. The woman is a heron who feeds alone on the marshes; the man is the wild falcon who hunts her and is himself hunted by the austringers, who wish to break him and sell him to the king. To catch the hawk, the austringers first snare the heron with lime and stake her out under a cage-trap. The falcon knows something is wrong, because no heron ever stood still for so long under a tree; but although he knows it's a trap, he can't deny his nature and eventually he swoops to the kill and triggers the snare; the cage drops down around him and he is caught. An allegory, the sort of thing that was considered the height of sophistication two hundred years ago; just in case the reader fails to make the obvious interpretation, there are brightly colored vignettes of men and women in the margin to point him in the right direction.
The point being: the falcon cannot deny its nature, even though it can see the cage hanging from the branches on a rope. The poet is too busy with his stylish double entendres to develop the theme properly, but it's there nevertheless, like a large rock in the middle of a road.
Valens read it (he knew it by heart already), and found that he'd picked up a sheet of paper and his pen without knowing it. He frowned, then began to write. Suppose that, as the cage fell, it broke the falcon's wing. It'd be worthless then, and if the austringers were humane men, they'd break its neck. The heron is of value because it can be eaten, but a dead falcon is just bones and feathers. The hunters want to catch it so that it can hunt; it needs to hunt (and therefore destroys itself in their trap, and becomes worthless) because that is its nature. Since the heron is the only element in the story that is valuable in itself, wouldn't it have been more sensible to catch and eat the heron and leave the falcon in peace?
Besides, the falcon wouldn't stoop to a tethered bird. It'd be invisible. A falcon can't strike a stationary target, they can only see movement.
He closed the book, folded the paper and dropped it in the pile of spills beside the fireplace (because when you come to rely on the written word, it's time to light the fire with it). He glanced out of the window again, and pulled his collar up round his ears before leaving the room. It had started raining again.
2
He opened his eyes expecting to see the kingdom of Heaven, but instead it was a dirty, gray-haired man with a big mustache, who frowned.
"Live one here," the man said. Miel assumed the man wasn't talking to him. Still, it was reassuring to have an impartial opinion on the subject, even though the man's tone of voice suggested that it was a largely academic issue.
Miel tried to remember where his sword had fallen, but he couldn't. The man was kneeling down, and there was a knife in his hand. Oh well, Miel thought.
"Easy," the man said. "Where's it hurt?"
He put the knife away in a sheath on his belt. Next to him, Miel noticed a large sack on the ground. It was full of boots. There was one particularly fine specimen sticking out of the top. Miel recognized it. That explained why his feet were cold.
"Well?" the man said. "Can't you talk?"
"I don't know," Miel said. His head was splitting, which made it hard to sort out awkward, uncooperative things like words. "What's wrong with me, I mean."
"Can't hurt too bad, then," the man said. "Try getting up."
Behind the man, Miel could see more like him. They were plodding slowly up and down, heads bent, like workers in a cabbage field. Some of them had sacks too; others held swords, spears, bows, bundled up with string like faggots of wood, or sheaves of corn. Harvesters, he thought. Of a kind.
"I can't," he discovered. "Knee doesn't work."
"Right." The man bent over him and unbuckled the straps of his chausse. "No bloody wonder," he said. "Swelled up like a puff-ball. Got a right old scat on it, didn't you?"
He made it sound like deliberate mischief, and Miel felt an urge to apologize. "I can't remember," he said. "I was in the fighting…" He paused. Something had just occurred to him. "Did we win?"
The man shrugged. "Search me," he said. "Get a hold of my arm, come on."
The man hoisted him up and caught him before he could fall down again. "This way," he said. "Get you on a cart, you'll be all right."
"Thank you," Miel said. The man grinned.
It was only a dozen yards or so to the cart, which was heavily laden with more stuffed sacks and sheaves of weapons. The man helped Miel to sit up on the tailgate. "You bide there," he said. "Don't go anywhere."
Miel watched him walk away; the slow, measured stride of a man at work. After a while he couldn't tell him apart from the others.
He knew that this sort of thing happened, of course, but he'd never actually seen it before. Once a battle was over, he left; pursuing in victory, withdrawing in defeat. What became of the battlefield after that had never really been any business of his. He knew that people like this existed, companies of men who went round stripping the dead. As a member of the ruling classes, he understood why they were tolerated. There was a convention, unwritten but mostly observed, that in return for the harvest they buried the dead, tidied up, made good generally. They put the badly wounded out of their misery, and-that would explain it-salvaged those likely to recover and returned them to their own people in exchange for money. It was, he'd heard, strictly a commercial decision as to who they recovered and who they didn't bother with. Apparently, a damaged knee meant he was still viable. So that was all right.
He made an effort, told himself to stay still. Before he closed his eyes (how long ago was that? He sniffed; not too long, the dead hadn't started to smell yet), everything had mattered so much. The battle; the desperate, ferocious last stand. If they'd won, the Mezentine Fifth Light Cavalry presumably no longer existed. If they'd lost, there was nothing standing between the enemy and the four defenseless villages of the Rosh valley. Last time he'd looked, it was important enough to kill and die for; but the man with the mustache didn't know and didn't seem to care, so perhaps it hadn't mattered so very much after all.
An unsettling thought occurred to him. If they'd lost, the resistance was over and done with. In that case, they wouldn't be there anymore to redeem their wounded. But the Mezentines would pay good money for him, if these people found out who he was. On balance, it was just as well the man with the mustache had appropriated his expensive boots. The armor wasn't a problem, since it was captured Mezentine. Jewelry; it took him a moment to remember. All his life, as the head of the Ducas, he'd been festooned with rings and brooches and things on chains round his neck, till he no longer noticed they were there. Luckily (he remembered) he'd sold them all to raise money for the cause. There was still his accent, of course, and the outside chance that someone might recognize him, but he knew he was a lousy actor. Trying to pretend to be a poor but honest peasant lad would just draw attention.
Still, it would have been nice to find out what had happened. It had always struck him as unfair that the men who died in a battle never got to know the result; whether they died for a victory or a defeat. If anything mattered at the point of their death, surely that would. He reassured himself that he'd find out eventually, and in the meantime there was nothing he could do. Well, there was something. He could take his armor off, and save his preservers a job.
Force of habit made him stack it neatly. Not too much damage; he was glad about that, in a way. They had, after all, saved him from dying painfully of hunger and exposure on a hillside covered with dead bodies, so he felt obligated to them, and the Ducas feels uncomfortable while in another's debt. He balanced a vambrace on top of the pile. He hadn't really looked at it before. The clips, he noticed, were brass, and the rivets holding them on were neatly and uniformly peened over. Say what
you like about the Mezentines, they made nice things. And at a sensible price, too.
He looked up at the sky. Still an hour or so to go before sunset. He frowned; should've thought of it before. The battle had started just before dawn, and he'd left it and gone to sleep about an hour and a half later, so he'd been out for quite a while. His head still hurt, but it was getting better quickly. It wasn't the first time he'd been knocked out in a battle, but on those previous occasions he'd always woken up in a tent, with clean pillows and people leaning over him looking worried, because the Ducas, even unconscious, isn't someone you leave lying about for just anybody to find. On the other hand, the headache had been worse, all those other times. On balance, things weren't as bad as they could be.
The men were heading back to the cart, leaning forward against the weight of the burdens they were carrying. He remembered when he was a boy, and they'd ridden out to the fields to watch the hay-making; he'd sat under the awning and seen the laborers trudging backward and forward to and from the wains with impossibly big balls of hay spiked on their pitchforks, and thought how splendid they were, how noble, like fine horses steadily drawing a heavy carriage in a procession. Men at work.
Someone was saying to the others: "Right, let's call it a day. Have to come back in the morning to do the burying." A short, thin, bald man walked past him without looking at him, but said, "Best get on the cart, son, we're going now." Not an order or a threat. Miel leaned back and hauled his damaged leg in after him, and the thin man closed the tailgate and dropped the latches.
The sacks of clothing made an adequate nest. Miel put a sack under the crook of his bad knee, which helped reduce the pain whenever the cart rolled over a pothole. The driver seemed to have forgotten about him, or maybe he wasn't in the habit of talking to the stock-in-trade. Miel leaned back and watched the light drain out of the sky.
He wouldn't have thought it was possible to go to sleep in an unsprung cart on those roads; but he woke up with a cricked neck to see darkness, torchlight and human shapes moving backward and forward around him. "Come on," someone was saying, "out you get." It was the tone of voice shepherds used at roundup; fair enough. He edged along the floor of the cart and put his good leg to the ground.
"Need a hand?"
"Yes," he replied into the darkness, and someone put an arm round him and took his weight. He hobbled for a bit and was put down carefully next to a fire. "You stay there," said the voice that came with the arm; so he did.
It wasn't much of a fire-peat, by the smell-and the circle of light it threw showed him his own bare feet and not much else. Well, they hadn't tied him up, but of course they wouldn't need to. He had nowhere to go, and only one functioning leg. If they were going to kill him they'd have done it by now. Miel realized that, for once in his life, he didn't have to take thought, look ahead, make plans for other people or even himself. His place was to sit still and quiet until called for, and leave the decisions to someone else. To his surprise, he found that thought comforting. He sat, and let his mind drift.
He supposed he ought to be worrying about the resistance, but the concept of it seemed to be thinning and dissipating, like the smoke from the fire. He considered it from his new perspective. He had been using every resource of body and mind left to him to fight the Mezentine occupation; what about that? Until today, he'd managed to make himself believe that he was doing a reasonable job. He'd won his battles; he counted them: seventeen. At least, looking at each encounter as a contest, he'd done better than the enemy. His ratio of men lost to enemies killed was more than acceptable. He'd disrupted their supply lines, wrecked carts and slaughtered carthorses and oxen, broken down bridges, blocked narrow passes. For every village they'd burned, he'd made them pay an uneconomic price in men, time and materiel. A panel of impartial referees, called in to judge who had made a better job of it, him or his opponent, would show him significantly ahead on points. But winning… Winning, now he came to think of it, meant driving the Mezentine armies out of Eremia, and he understood (remarkably, for the first time) that that was never going to be possible. He might be winning, but his people weren't. They didn't stand a chance.
But they weren't alone, of course. Silly of him to have forgotten that: the Vadani were helping him, or rather the other way about. His job (the Vadani agent had explained all this) was to keep up the pressure, make a nuisance of himself, cost the enemy money. The purpose of this was to undermine the enemy's political will, to give the Mezentine opposition a chance to bring down the government. Excellent strategy, and the only way to beat the Perpetual Republic. So, you see, we can still do it, and it doesn't really matter how many villages get burned or how many people get killed; we're just one part of someone else's greater design…
He frowned. The smoke was stinging his eyes. That morning, he'd been able to see the design quite clearly, as though it was a blueprint unrolled on a table. Since then, he'd been bashed on the knee and left for dead, and somehow that had made a difference. It was almost as though a ship had sailed away and left him behind. He'd heard stories about men who'd been stranded on islands or remote headlands. A simple thing, the unfurling of sails, the raising of an anchor; a few minutes either way, the difference between boarding a ship and not making it. In his case, a bash on the knee and another one on the head. In the stories, the castaways accepted that the world had suddenly changed; they'd built huts on the beach, hunted wild goats and cured their hides for clothing, until the world happened to come by again, pick them up and take them home. Those were the ones you heard about, of course. The ones who were never rescued by passing ships, or who simply lay on the beach and waited to die, were never heard from again and therefore ceased to exist.
Miel thought: I've lost everything. I was the Ducas, the head of the family, the Duke's principal adviser, Orsea's best friend. I had land and houses and money, hawks and hounds, clothes and weapons. Thousands of people depended on me. They lived their lives through me, I was the one who made their decisions for them, decided what they should be doing. I wasn't just one man, I was thousands; I was Eremia. Now I can't even walk on my own, and I've got nothing, not even a pair of boots.
I was…
Perhaps it was just the sting of the smoke. He rubbed his eyes, and thought about it some more.
Well, he thought, I suppose it's because I was born to it. Orsea wasn't, and that's probably why he did so very badly. All my life I've been aware of it, the responsibility for other people, the knowledge that I can't just do what I want, because so many people depend on me. I could argue that that makes me a good man-except that I had the houses and the land, the hawks and hounds, and I never had to lean on plow-handles in the baking sun or stoop over all day hoeing onions. But I never chose anything, not for myself. I have always tried to do the right thing, because people depended on me.
Someone was standing over him; he looked up. He couldn't make out a face, only a shape. Someone leaning forward a little, holding out a bowl.
"Thanks," he said, and took it. The man walked away.
Well, it was porridge, or maybe very thick soup; something cheap you could boil up in bulk; something that someone had had to work for, and which he'd done nothing to earn. He scooped a wodge of the stuff onto his fingers and poked it into his mouth. It didn't taste of anything much, which was probably just as well. There are different sorts of dependence. There's the social contract between the lord and his people, and there's the man who feeds barley mash to his pig. He thought about that too, while he was at it. Without the farmer, the pig would starve; without him, the pig would never have been born. The pig owes the farmer its life, and in due course the debt is called in, just as my bailiffs collect the rents from my tenants.
He finished the whatever-it-was, put down the bowl and looked round. A few people were still moving about, but mostly there was the stillness of rest after hard work; of men whose only resource was their strength, saving it up for another day. If I could walk, Miel thought, I could offer to help th
em tomorrow with digging the graves. I can't even do that. I can't do anything.
He lay back. There was a stone or something just under his shoulder blade; he wriggled about to avoid it. Nothing to do; he'd have expected to be bored, since all his life the one thing he could never abide was doing nothing. It wasn't like that, though. It was dark, so it was time to sleep; or, if sleep didn't happen to pass by his way, he would be content to lie still and wait for the dawn. Gradually, awareness of time slipped away from him, and then he slept.
When he woke up, there was someone standing over him again. He recognized the boots.
"On the cart," the man with the mustache said. "Here, I'll give you a hand up."
Miel nodded, and let himself be lifted. "Are we going back to the battlefield?" he asked.
The man frowned, as though he hadn't expected to be asked a question, and wasn't quite sure it wasn't against the rules. "You go back to the camp," he said. "They'll look after you there."
The tailgate closed behind him, and he snuggled back among the sacks. Fine resistance leader I turned out to be, he thought. By now I should've overpowered a dozen guards, stolen a sword and a fast horse and be galloping home. Instead, they put me on a cart. About the best thing anybody could say about me right now is that I'm reasonably portable.
But that'd be silly, he thought. You can't overpower guards if there's nobody guarding you, and I expect if I asked them nicely they'd sell me a sword and a horse, assuming they haven't stolen all my money. (He checked; they hadn't. On the other hand, all he had left was six copper turners and a twopenny bit.)
It was a long ride. The cart had to go slowly over the sad excuse for a track. (Weren't we supposed to have built a new road up here, Miel wondered, or did we never get round to it?) Shortly after noon he saw a small cluster of wooden buildings in the distance. As he got closer they grew into five thatched sheds surrounded by a stockade. That suggested a degree of effort; there weren't any woods for miles, so someone had thought it was worth all the trouble of putting up some kind of fortification. There was no smoke rising, and he couldn't see any people about. Barns, then, rather than houses.