by K. J. Parker
Dawn on the third day of the descent. The low cloud had lifted during the night, and they could see: where they were, and where they were going. The good part of it was that they were at least three-quarters of the way down, and the gradient was easing up. Other than that, Valens was sorry to have lost the mist. The sight of the desert depressed him more than anything he could remember.
There was a fringe of scrub-little stunted clumps of thorn bush, like an unshaved face-and then there was nothing but sand. He'd expected it to be gray, like the stuff washed down by rivers, the only sand he'd ever seen; instead, it was almost white, a glowing ocean like steel at welding heat. The rises and troughs looked so much like waves at this distance that he couldn't help imagining that it was a vast lake-the idea of trying to walk on its surface seemed ludicrous; you'd wade in, and then you'd sink, and the sand would close over your head as you drowned. It wasn't even flat; the sad little joke that had sustained them all, going up and down the mountain, was that the desert had to be better than all this bloody climbing. Apparently not. He realized, as he stared at it until his eyes hurt in the glare, that for a moment or so he'd forgotten the entire Vadani nation strung out all around him. He'd been thinking, how the hell am I going to get across that; I, not we. A fine time to be thinking about grammar (my decision, my mistake, our slow and painful death). One question, however, lodged in his head as he scrambled among the rocks: did I have Orsea killed not because he was a traitor but because I'd reached the conclusion that he was an idiot, too stupid to be allowed to live? The more the question preyed on his mind (the further down the slope they went, the hotter it became; his clothes and even his boots were saturated with sweat), the more he was afraid that that was exactly what he'd done; the fool's stupidity had offended him beyond endurance, and he'd taken the excuse to get rid of him. In which case, sooner or later, he was going to have to admit to what he'd done, and apologize to somebody.
Evening staff meeting on the flat sand; bitterly cold, hardly warmed at all by crackling bonfires of dry thorn twigs, which flared up ferociously and went out almost straightaway. The main subject on the agenda…
"According to the map, it's there," Vaatzes repeated for the third or fourth time. "We can't see it because it's over the horizon. But if we keep going due east from the double-pronged spur-which is exactly where it should be according to the map, by the way-we should reach the first oasis in about nine hours' time. That's what the map says; you can look for yourselves. And it's no good scowling at me. I didn't draw the bloody thing, and I've never been here before in my life. Either we trust the map, or we give up and die."
"Are we sure that's the right double-pronged spur?" someone asked nervously; he was sitting just outside the ring of firelight, and Valens didn't recognize the voice. "For all we know, there could be two or three more or less similar. And if we set off on the wrong line, we're screwed; we'll never find the oasis just by roaming about-assuming there's an oasis to find, which is by no means-"
"What are you proposing?" Valens interrupted quietly. "Do you think we should stay here while the scouts ride up and down the foothills looking for more double-pronged spurs? It's a good idea," he added. "Actually, it's the right thing to do, simple common sense. Unfortunately, we can't. No time. As it is, I predict we'll run out of food before we're halfway there, even if we hit the right course and everything's where the map says it is. Sorry," he went on, with a slight shake of his head, "but we're just going to have to assume it's the right two-pronged spur and press on regardless. Unfortunate, but there it is." He grinned suddenly. "My only hope is that the Mezentines really are on our heels with a huge army, and that they follow us out there and starve to death a day or so after we do. Not that I'm vindictive or anything. I just feel that fatal errors of judgment are things you should share with your enemies as well as your friends."
Short, embarrassed silence; then someone said: "If they really are following us, we should see them tomorrow, coming down the slope. At least then we'll know what's going on, whether we've got them to contend with as well as everything else."
"I should say they're the least of our worries," Valens said confidently. "Which is rather splendid, don't you think, to be able to dismiss the threat of the most powerful nation in the world in one trite phrase? I like to think I've contrived to screw things up on so magnificent a scale that getting slaughtered by the Mezentines is probably the second-best thing that could happen to us."
They didn't like him talking like that, of course, but he couldn't really motivate himself to stop it and behave properly. All through that part of his life that separated his first sight of her from that night in the slaughter before Civitas Eremiae (the realization ambushed him like a squadron of Mezentine dragoons, unexpected here among the ruins of everything), at every turn he'd faced a choice, between giving up and forcing a way through, and always he'd chosen to press on; stumbling forward instead of running away, because he'd known where he was supposed to be going. The route was marked for him in the map by success; everything he'd done had turned out right, and so he'd known he was doing the right thing. Then had come the second phase, between rescuing her from the Mezentines and forfeiting her when he ordered Orsea's death, during which everything he'd done had gone wrong, and the signposts along the way had brought him here, to the desert's edge. Here began the third phase, finding him without purpose or direction, no choices left; a rare kind of freedom.
Walking on the sand was like treading in deep mud; even on the flat, every step was an effort, draining strength from his knees and calves. Honor required him to carry a heavier pack than anybody else, to walk in front, to set a smart pace and only stop out of compassion, to let the weaklings catch their breath. Years of trudging up the steep sides of combes to approach upwind of grazing deer and wading through marshes to reach the deep pools where the ducks flocked up had given him the strength and stamina of a peasant, but after a couple of hours of treading sand, only shame and the last flare of arrogance kept him on his feet and moving. If they kept going, they had a chance of reaching the first oasis (if it existed) before nightfall. Something told him that if they failed to reach it by the time darkness fell, they'd never reach it at all. It wasn't, of course, a line of reasoning he could justify to anybody else; so, if he wanted to get them there before it was too late, the only way he could do it was to walk on ahead of them and thereby force them to follow him. Crude but simple.
As if making fun of his self-induced melodrama, the oasis appeared suddenly out of nowhere about two hours before dusk. It had been hiding from them in a little saucer of dead ground, and the first Valens knew of it was when he hauled himself up the scarp of a dune and realized he was looking straight at the top of a tall tree. He was too tired to run toward it, or even to yell for joy; good, he thought, and carried on plodding. As he approached, the oasis rose politely out of the saucer to greet him. A stand of spindly trees, about a quarter of an acre, surrounded by a neat lawn of wiry green grass, fringed with hunched-up thorn bushes; beyond question the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life. He kept going until he was a hundred yards from the edge of the lawn, just in case it turned out not to be real; but when the sun sparkled on something in the middle of the stand of trees, he realized that he hadn't got the strength to cover the last stage of the journey. He sat down awkwardly in the sand and started to cry.
Presumably someone came along and helped him the rest of the way, because at some point he found himself standing on the edge of a pan of rusty brown water. It appeared to be full of Vadani, who'd waded in up to their shoulders and necks. Some of them were swimming in it; others were conscientiously watering their horses on the edge, their clothes dripping wet, their hair plastered down on their foreheads. They'd brought no barrels or water-bottles with them down the mountain, because water weighs ten pounds a gallon.
"There, you see?" Vaatzes' voice buzzing in his ear. "Just like I said it'd be. Piece of cake."
Brown, gritty water, more th
an they could possibly drink; but you can't eat water. They were talking about slaughtering the horses while there was still some meat on their bones.
"Or," suggested Ziani Vaatzes, "we could send a message to your in-laws and ask them for some food. It'd only be polite to let them know we're here."
The rest of the general staff looked at him as though he was mad. Valens thought for a moment.
"Not a bad idea," he said. "Assuming I can find volunteers. And assuming horses can go faster than men in this shit."
"I believe so," Vaatzes replied. "At least, that's the impression I got from the journals. According to the merchant, once you've crossed the desert, if you keep going straight on you come to the big salt pan, and there's always people there, even when the rest of the tribe's moved on. They keep a good stock of food and forage-not sure it'll be enough to last all of us very long, but anything we can get must be better than nothing. The main assumption will be that they've heard of you. I don't know how closely the ordinary Aram Chantat follows current affairs. I'd have thought the marriage of the crown princess would've counted as big news, but you never know. The danger is that if they don't know who we are, they'll swoop down and cut us to pieces for being foreign."
(The journals had been right about the sheds that the merchant had built here; the pen for the mules, the cover and even the grain bins. They turned out to be empty, of course.)
"I'm prepared to risk that," Valens replied confidently. "If I was bothered about that side of things, I'd be more worried about showing up without my dear wife. They'd only have my word for it that the Mezentines killed her; besides, even if they believed me, letting your wife get killed suggests a degree of carelessness that they might be reluctant to forgive. I wish now I'd taken the trouble to find out a bit more about the way they think."
Eventually, after a painfully embarrassing silence, Major Nennius volunteered. He set off with an escort of twelve very unenthusiastic troopers, leading a change of horses loaded with supplies. In his saddlebag was a carefully traced copy of the map, and a letter of credentials addressed to the Aram Chantat. The look on his face as he rode away reminded Valens unsettlingly of Orsea on his way to execution.
A full two days to reach the second oasis. No longer even any pretense that the food crisis was under control. Civilians couldn't be trusted to carry what little was left, and the soldiers were having trouble coping with the begging and screaming of mothers with hungry children; their friends, neighbors, relatives. At least a dozen horses were killed during the night; the carcasses were stripped bare in minutes, and fights broke out over the marrow in the bones. It didn't make it easier to handle to realize that it was panic, the fear of hunger rather than hunger itself. The worst side effect was exhaustion. Men and women who'd been rioting and scuffling all night had trouble keeping up during the day. Valens could no longer be induced to listen to the reports. He'd become obsessed with the idea that he could see a dust-cloud closing in rapidly on them from behind, the occasional flash of light. The fact that nobody else could see anything had no effect on his conviction. There was no point talking to him, the officers said, he wasn't listening. With Nennius gone, generally presumed dead, it was anybody's guess who was in charge. The officers went through their routines, more to occupy their minds than out of duty or hope. Nobody knew who had the map, or who was navigating, or who was in the lead. Reaching the second oasis inspired no celebrations, and nobody waded in up to the neck in the water this time.
Early the next day, Valens left his tent (for the last time; he'd given orders for it to be jettisoned as surplus weight). He washed quickly in the brown water of the oasis, then sat down under a tree to comb his hair. It was a last flicker of vanity, which had never been a particular fault of his at the best of times-his clothes were torn and caked in sand, all the work that had gone into them wasted, and he'd never cared about how he looked, provided that he looked like a duke; today, however, he took the trouble, because it really didn't matter anymore. His reflection in the water was thin and indistinct, so he combed more or less by feel. It wasn't a face he particularly wanted to see, in any case.
But there was another face looking down into the water beside his. He jumped up, slipping in the sandy mud and catching his balance just in time.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I startled you."
Valens, lost for words. "That's all right," he said.
Of course he hadn't seen her since Orsea died. He hadn't even asked after her, sent anybody to see how she was. The fact that she was here told him she'd managed to get over the mountains and across the desert. She looked terrible, in fact: her hair tangled, her face red in patches from the sun, the hem of her dress filthy, her shoes (stupid little satin sandals, believe it or not) wrecked like a barn blown down in a storm. She walked slowly over to him-she was limping-and sat down, her heels in the mud like a little girl.
"I wanted to tell you," she said. "I don't blame you."
If there was anything about himself that Valens was proud of, it was his ability to know if someone was lying to him. He tried not to exercise it.
"I'm absolutely furious with Orsea." She made it sound like he'd come home drunk and been sick in the wardrobe. "It was such a stupid thing to do. And so typical. If only he'd told me, I'd have talked him out of it, I know. It'll have been his idea of doing the right thing. I imagine they told him I'd be safe if he-"
"That's right," Valens heard himself say. "It's pretty clear from the letter we found that that's what the deal was."
"Letters!" She laughed. "Who'd have thought squiggles on a bit of dried sheepskin could cause so much trouble in the world. Letters and good intentions; and the other thing."
No need to ask what the other thing was.
"I had to do it," Valens ground on; he felt like he was wading in mud, and each time he dragged his boot out, his other foot sank in even deeper. "I couldn't have covered it up; if people had found out, I wouldn't have been able to lead them anymore, and they needed someone to get them-"
He was about to say, get them here. Not, he conceded, the most compelling of arguments.
"Oh, I know." She shook her head. "I know he'd have done exactly the same thing." Suddenly she giggled, at the same time as a tear broke out from the corner of her eye. "That doesn't really make you feel any better, does it?"
"No."
"He was an idiot." She smiled. "Always the right thing, no matter how much damage it caused. The tragedy was, it always was the right thing to do; it was just that either he did it the wrong way-oh, he had a wonderful talent for missing by a hair-or else something unexpected would happen that only a clever man-a reasonably clever man-could've foreseen. He was a good, decent, ordinary human being, which is what I loved so much about him…"
(And why I could never love you; unspoken.)
"And that's why he treated me so badly, I guess," she went on, dabbing at her eye with her filthy sleeve and leaving urchin-like streaks of grime on her cheek. "He felt he didn't deserve me, and he resented it; somehow it turned into my fault, and it was because he loved me so much. He couldn't talk to me for months before the end; we just sort of grunted at each other, like an old miserable couple waiting to see who'll be the first to die." She looked up at him. "I don't blame you," she said. "You're no more to blame than a tree-branch that falls on someone's head."
Again he was reluctant to look at her, because that'd tell him if she meant it. "I don't know," he said, looking at the brown water. "You can't help blaming the weapon, even though it's stupid and pointless. You know, there are times when I think that's all I am: a weapon, being used by someone else. At least, I like to think that way. It'd mean none of this was really my fault." He sighed. "My father used to collect fancy weapons; there was a room full of them, back at the palace. He'd buy them and prance about with them for a few minutes-he was a lousy fencer, I guess that's why he made me learn-and then they'd be put away and never looked at again. I did the same thing, I have no idea why. The difference is,
he liked the things because they were pretty and he reckoned they were the sort of thing a duke ought to have. I bought them because I hate fighting, and I've had to do rather a lot of it." He frowned. "There's my tragedy, if you like. I've always been so very good at the things I don't like doing, and being good at them makes me do them, until I forget I hate them. The things I wanted to do, or wanted to be, for that matter-well; if you love drawing but can't draw, you don't bother with it. No point being reminded of your shortcomings. Always play to your strengths, my father told me."
"I remember him," she said quietly. "I didn't like him very much."
"Neither did I. It's a shame I've turned into him over the years. But you don't need to like someone in order to love them."
She laughed. "I always liked Orsea," she said. "I suppose I've got a soft spot for weak people."
(Which is why you and I were friends, once; he could have written that in a letter, but he couldn't say it out loud.)
"Can't say I ever did," Valens replied stiffly. "I couldn't get past the ineptitude. I don't like people who can't do things well."
"He liked you." She was looking away now. "He thought you were everything he ought to be; admired you and liked you as well, which I think is probably a rare combination. But he knew he bothered you, so he tried to keep his distance. He didn't want to be a nuisance."