by K. J. Parker
Somehow, he figured that the esteem of the Perpetual Republic was something he could learn to live without. Other things-other people-might be harder to dispense with. Just suppose he was the only survivor (the only coward who ran away). The last Vadani duke. The last Vadani.
That wasn't a concept he was prepared to hold still for. He scrambled to his feet-one of the Mezentines saw or heard him, looked up, shouted, pointed, but his friends didn't seem interested-and scuttled along the side of the slope, using his hands as much as his feet, grabbing at tufts of heather and couch grass to stop himself from sliding and losing his balance. From the top of the slope, he'd have a better view.
Noise below him; thudding and voices, shouts. He paused, nearly lost his foothold, took a moment to steady himself before looking down. By then, the picture had changed. The road was flooded with horsemen; not Mezentines, because the few of them still on their feet were trying to scramble back onto the carts, out of the reach of the swords and lances. His old friend the Mezentine officer was yelling again, urgent, angry and terrified. His voice stopped dead in midsentence. From where Valens stood it was just a confused scuffle. He was a good hundred yards up; all he could see was horses, the tops of heads, too much movement to make sense of. No good at all. The shale under his foot gave way and he let himself slither on his back, until a chunk of rock against the sole of his boot stole his momentum. He jumped up, overbalanced, caught himself and looked down.
He'd missed it; all over, while he'd been fooling about in the dirt. No Mezentines to be seen; not live ones, anyway. Most of the Vadani had gone as well; he caught sight of a dozen or so disappearing over the lip of the slight rise that cut off his view. More shouting from that direction; the counterattack was still going on, but moving at a rate he couldn't catch up with. He struggled down the rest of the slope to the road. A cavalry trooper, dismounted, looked up sharply as he slid and crashed into view; stared at him for a moment as though he had two heads.
"What the hell's going on?" Valens shouted. "Yes, it's me," he added, as the trooper's mouth fell open. "What's happening?"
But the trooper didn't seem able to speak, even backed away a step or two, as if facing a ghost. For crying out loud, Valens thought. "Who's in command? I need to talk to him, now."
The trooper lifted his arm and pointed, back down the road, to where the noise was coming from. Another man stepped up beside him. He didn't seem able to speak, either. What was wrong with them?
"Fine," he snapped, "I'll go and look for myself."
There were horses standing nearby, but he'd seen the Mezentines try to catch them and fail; he really wasn't in the mood for recalcitrant animals. His knee was starting to ache where it had been clouted by the Mezentine, and the bottom edge of the greave was galling his instep. On the other hand, he thought, I could sit down on this rock and wait for whoever's in charge to come to me.
He wasn't kept waiting long. Over the lip came a column of riders; dusty, bloody but unmistakably Vadani. They rode with the same utter weariness as the victorious Mezentines had done, not so long ago. He recognized the officer riding at the front, though offhand he couldn't remember his name.
"What happened?" he asked again.
This time he got a reply. "I think we got them all," the officer said. "Near as makes no odds." He stopped his horse and flopped out of the saddle, landing heavily and wincing at the stiffness in his knees. "Strangest thing. Who'd have thought mercenaries would've held their ground like that?"
For a moment, Valens couldn't make any sense of what he'd just heard. "You mean we won?"
The officer's turn to look blank. "Well, yes," he said. "It took us a while and it got a bit grisly at the end, when we thought they were going to run for it but they didn't. But I don't think there was ever any doubt about it, not since that Eremian lunatic lost his rag and started laying into them."
"What Eremian?"
The officer shrugged. "I don't actually know his name." Someone next to him leaned down from the saddle and muttered something. "That's right," the officer said, "Jarnac Ducas. Great big bloke, never talks about anything except hunting." At that point it must have occurred to him that Valens had missed something important; he stood a little straighter and became a trifle more soldierly. "It was when the Mezentines stopped Duke Orsea's coach," he went on. "At least, they blocked it and cut the reins, but they didn't try and board it. But then this Ducas turns up-defending his duke, I guess, he seems that sort of man. Anyway, he went at it like you wouldn't believe. He'd got hold of one of those poleaxe things; not much finesse about it, but a lot of energy. I saw it myself; hell of a thing. He was pretty much cut to ribbons by the time they brought him down, and by then the tide had more or less turned. Colonel Brennianus rallied best part of a squadron of the household division, and we sort of snowballed from there. He didn't make it, unfortunately; neither did the Eremian. Otherwise, we came out of it pretty well. It was only here, in the middle, that things got out of hand."
Orsea: something he'd forgotten, which he was sure he'd never forget. "Duke Orsea's party," Valens said quickly. "Are they all right?"
"Thanks to that Ducas fellow, not a scratch. Well, the Duke himself got a tap on the head quite early on; got cut off trying to lead from the front, I imagine. Then Ducas went in after him, and that's when it got going."
The clot that had formed in Valens' throat eased a little, and he breathed in deeply. "What about General Mezentius? And the Cure Hardy?"
(He'd tried to say, and my wife, but for some reason he felt embarrassed about using the word, as though it was somehow an admission of weakness.)
The officer didn't answer. After two, maybe three seconds, Valens asked, "All of them?"
"I can't say for sure," the officer replied. "But I saw them stop and board the coach; and Mezentius was riding with them at the time. That was two days ago, and nobody's told me…"
"It's all right," Valens heard himself say, as a gate closed in his mind, shutting some things out and some things in. "You've done well." (Was that really him speaking? It seemed so improbable, somehow.) "For a while there, I thought we'd had it." I ran away, was what he wanted to say. "Just my luck to have missed the good bit." He took a deep breath. "We need to get moving again," he said. "What about horses for the carts?" And after that he was back to business, the kind of thing he was competent to deal with. Others joined him, clotting around him like blood in a wound. He could feel the Vadani beginning to heal about him. Soon he was giving orders, pulling out of his mind the important details that other people tended to overlook but which he always remembered. They were giving him back his place in the machine-the axle, spindle, driveshaft, from which the other components drew their power. He had no trouble performing the function, but he felt like an imposter-the man who turned and ran, masquerading as the Duke. If only he'd known, he kept telling himself; if he'd known the battle was going their way and his bit of it was an unimportant aberration, he would never have even considered running; he'd have held his place on the deserted cart, kept fighting, almost certainly been killed. Instead, while he was crouched down halfway up the hillside, an Eremian and a cavalry colonel whose name was only vaguely familiar to him had checked the enemy advance, driven them back, wiped them out and died in the process. Stupid guilt, irrational, pointless and far too strong to beat.
Apart from the fact that they were alive and had won a stunning victory, everything was about as bad as it could be. Horses: half of the wagon teams had been run off or killed, and the mounts of dead cavalrymen-plenty of those-weren't trained to drive, needless to say. More than a quarter of the carts themselves were damaged to the point where they couldn't move. This problem was, to some extent, mitigated by the number of dead civilians, who wouldn't be needing transport anymore. On that score, the best that could be said was that there were still plenty of them left; sobbing, shrieking, refusing to obey orders, demanding to speak to someone in authority, rushing about searching for lost relatives, fussing about the
burial of their dead, needing to be fed and watered and listened to. Valens could probably have coped with them better if they'd been angry with him, or blamed him. Instead, they took to cheering him whenever he broke cover; women grabbed at him as he scurried past, blessing him for saving them. They were firmly convinced that he'd led the counterattack and wiped out the Mezentines. He overheard men swearing blind that they'd seen him at the front of the cavalry charge, in shining armor, sword in hand, swiping off heads like a boy with a stick topping nettles. He wanted to feel proud, honored, choked with emotion; instead, he found it irritating and desperately inconvenient. He gave them permission to bury their dead, mostly to give them something to do and keep them from getting under his feet. The column was stuck, after all. Food was running out (they should have reached the first of the supply dumps by now), there was plenty of water in the river down in the valley but a shortage of casks and barrels to carry and keep it in. Just when he needed him, Mezentius was thoughtlessly, selfishly dead, and the civilians had taken an instant dislike to Major Tullio, the officer who'd led the vital counterattack and done most of the work since. For some reason they blamed him for the deaths and losses, saying he'd hung back, waited too long, stood by while women and children were butchered. A whole long day of that sort of thing; and then the other column arrived.
If Valens had spared them a thought since the battle, it was only a vaguely guilty relief that they hadn't been there to be slaughtered with the rest. The first he knew about their return was when some young fool whose face he vaguely remembered from somewhere came charging up to him while he was busy with a map, and told him his name was Captain Nennius, and he needed seven tons of flour as a matter of urgency.
When Nennius had recovered sufficiently from Valens' reaction to explain himself coherently, they managed to sort out everything that needed to be done straightaway, and Nennius went away to let his people know they'd found the Duke, but there wasn't going to be any food. They rode in with their carts loaded down with dead people, which didn't really improve the situation. Valens did his best to make Nennius into a substitute hero, but since he hadn't actually fought anybody or mended any carts with his own hands, it didn't work terribly well. There weren't nearly enough picks, mattocks, buckets, spades and shovels for the burial details, the ground was rock hard, and soldiers kept drifting away to help with grave-digging when they should've been doing something useful. And as if that wasn't enough…
He knew Miel Ducas, vaguely; they were distant cousins, after all, and he'd met him during the peace negotiations to end the Eremian-Vadani war. Back then, as he remembered, the Ducas had been tall, handsome, bouncy and insufferable. Now he was just tall, and a nuisance Valens could have done without. He fended him off for a while with commiserations on the death of his cousin. That didn't work too well, since it was the first the Ducas had heard of it.
"Jarnac?"
"Yes. He died very bravely. In fact, if it hadn't been for him, I don't-"
"Jarnac's dead?"
"Yes."
The Ducas frowned, as if he'd just been told that his cousin had been elected king of the elves. Then he shook himself like a dog and said, "I need to talk to you about this man Daurenja."
Talk about changing the subject. "What about him? I haven't seen him for days, not since we left the city."
The Ducas explained, and when he'd finished, the headache that Valens had been warding off all day was suddenly there, fully formed and perfect as a hen's egg in a nest of straw. "He's with your lot now, then?" he said.
"Yes. Captain Nennius has placed him under informal arrest, whatever that means."
Precisely nothing. Valens suspected it was something the young officer had made up on the spur of the moment, to keep the Ducas quiet. Officer-level thinking; he was impressed. "I'm not quite sure what you want me to do," Valens said. "I'd have thought it's a matter for Duke Orsea rather than me."
"That's what Nennius said," the Ducas replied. "Though, properly speaking, under Eremian law the proper court of first instance would be the district assize for the place where the crimes were committed. Meaning me," he added mournfully. "Orsea would only be involved if Daurenja was convicted and lodged an appeal. But there's a problem with that, since I'm the chief witness. I'm the only outside party who heard the confession, you see."
As well as the headache, Valens had a sort of prickly feeling at the nape of his neck, something halfway between a tickle and an itch. Eremians, he thought.
"I'm afraid you're going to have to sort it out yourselves," he said, "and then there'd have to be extradition proceedings, if Daurenja decided he doesn't want to come quietly; I can't just hand him over to you neatly wrapped in straw and twine. More to the point, right now he's my chief engineer, until that bloody Mezentine turns up again. You say he was the one who fixed all those broken carts?"
"Yes, but he's a murderer. And a rapist, and I don't know what else. You can't just let him prowl around as though nothing's happened. You've got to do something about it."
There; that was all it took, to turn Valens the model duke into a tyrant who didn't give a damn about justice. "Come to think of it," Valens said quietly, "I seem to remember you're a bit of a fugitive from justice yourself. Weren't you under arrest for treason when Civitas Eremiae fell?"
Clearly the Ducas hadn't been expecting that. Long pause, then, "Strictly speaking, yes. But that was-"
"In which case," Valens said, "I'm afraid I'm going to have to place you under informal arrest," wonderful phrase, that; he'd have to promote Nennius to full colonel for it, "until things have calmed down a bit and I've got the time and the energy to be bothered with the fine points of Eremian jurisprudence. Talking of which: if you're an indicted traitor, would that debar you from sitting in judgment on Daurenja? I don't know how you used to do things in Eremia, but I imagine a clever lawyer could have some fun with it. I guess we'd have to try you for treason first." He smiled savagely. "I know," he went on. "Why don't you go and talk it over with Orsea, right now? I'm sure he'd be delighted to see you after all this time. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a war to fight."
He started to walk away; then the Ducas said: "Fine. You could join us. Maybe you'd care to explain to Orsea why you were writing letters to his wife."
No, I mustn't, Valens thought; and then, Well, why not? He turned round, using the pivoting motion to back up the punch. He caught the Ducas unprepared on the point of the chin; he staggered and sat down in the dirt, looking completely bewildered.
That should have been that, except that a couple of soldiers who'd seen their duke forced to defend himself against the Eremian (it had to have been self-defense, because Valens would never hit someone unprovoked) ran up looking concerned. "He's under arrest," Valens snapped. "Stick him in one of the empty carts until I can be bothered to deal with him, and make sure he doesn't get away. He's got a history of breaking arrest."
It was because of the Ducas that she came.
Orsea came first; that night, when he'd finished the day's work and finally managed to get rid of everybody. He'd closed the tent flaps, thrown a scoop of charcoal on the brazier and taken off his shirt; and suddenly, there was Orsea's stupid face at the opening, letting the cold air in.
"I need to talk to you," he said. "About Miel Ducas." Valens shivered. It was cold, and he was tired. "Who? Oh yes, I remember. I think I've done you a favor."
"I'm sorry?"
Valens sighed. "Come in, if you're coming." Orsea had to stoop to get in the tent; unfair, that someone so useless should be taller than him. "What I meant was, I've caught your traitor for you. He's yours. Do what you like with him."
Orsea looked at him. "I don't think it's quite as simple as that," he said. "Bearing in mind what it was he actually did."
"It was some business with a letter, wasn't it?"
It had been too easy; the temptation too great. Orsea gazed at him with the sullen resentment of the man who's been hit and knows he can't hit back. "Miel Duca
s hasn't done you any harm," he said quietly. "You might as well let him go."
"Does that constitute an acquittal?" Valens replied. He had no idea what he was fighting with Orsea about, but the urge to fight him was irresistible; he was so weak, so easy to hurt. "If so, I'll release him into your custody. Would that suit you?"
Orsea, of course, said nothing.
"Fine," Valens snapped. "Or maybe I'll keep him. I gather he's a useful man. They say he made a pretty good job of defending Civitas Eremiae, before you had him jailed."
Orsea sighed wearily. "Look," he said, "I don't know what I've done to upset you. I know I haven't been much use to anybody since-well, since I came here. But there's no point taking it out on someone else. Obviously, what Miel did doesn't really matter anymore, except to me."
"I see. So you're dropping the charges?"
"I suppose so, yes."
"I can turn him loose, then. Not a stain on his character."
"Yes."
Valens nodded briskly. "I'll do that, then," he said. "Provided he lays off my engineer. For all I know, this Daurenja's a murderer and a rapist, and probably a cannibal and a demon-worshipper and all sorts of other interesting things, but he's also the sort of man who can fix busted carts; and I happen to be fighting a war. Nasty business needs nasty people. The pure in heart only fuck things up and get people killed." He smiled pleasantly. "I'm sure you know that better than anybody."
"Yes," Orsea said. "I'd sort of arrived at that conclusion for myself."
"Splendid. In that case, there's the deal. Your Ducas can go free provided he leaves me and my officers in peace. I'll give him a horse and a feed-sack full of money, and he can go off into the wide world to seek his fortune. Agreed?"
Orsea breathed out slowly; the man who'd rather get beaten up than fight, because victory would make things worse for him than defeat. "Knowing Miel, I don't think he'll agree to that."