by K. J. Parker
Well, Valens thought, I've seen worse. He put his foot on the step and climbed out of the penumbra of the gold fire into total darkness. He heard the door click precisely behind him.
"We have the honor of greeting our son-in-law," said a tiny voice.
Not pitch dark after all; a faint gleam of light leaked out through a gold gauze lampshade surrounding a single small oil lamp. By its meager glow Valens could see a tiny, shriveled little man, completely bald, smooth forehead, cheeks gaunt as a corpse, thin lips, no more than seven teeth, wrapped up like a baby in a massive swathe of heavy white wool blankets. There were figures on either side of the little man, but all he could see of them were dim, bulging shapes.
The little man was waiting for a reply, but Valens couldn't think of anything to say. Someone cleared his throat, a short, clipped sound.
"I take it I have the privilege of addressing Duke Valens Valentinianus," the little man said, in the most perfectly correct Mezentine accent Valens had ever heard. "Allow me to offer my heartiest greetings, despite the tragic circumstances of this meeting."
Son-in-law, he remembered. This exquisite maggot must be her father. He realized with a dull ache of horror that he couldn't remember her name.
"Pleased to meet you," he mumbled. "And thank you. I…"
Whatever he'd been intending to say, it didn't seem to want to clot into words. The little man raised a claw about an eighth of an inch. More would have been mere vulgar display.
"When your Major Nennius contacted our frontier patrol, they quite properly sent a messenger to inform us. He rode at top speed until his horse died under him; fortuitously, he was able to requisition another horse within a matter of minutes. He too died shortly after reaching us, but not before delivering his message. We came at once, not stopping to change our clothes or provision ourselves for the journey. We have driven without pause, stopping only to change horses. We are greatly relieved to have arrived here in time to greet you ourselves, instead of delegating such a momentous privilege to others. We are pleased that you have come, and await with trepidation your confirmation that our soldiers have served you adequately."
Valens blinked. He had no idea what the little man was trying to say.
"They saved our lives," he said. "I'm very grateful."
The claws came together in a silent clap. "Excellent," said the little man. "Words cannot express my delight. And now we must have some tea."
Something tinkled faintly, and from somewhere in the darkness a small gold tray appeared, held steady as a rock by two tiny pale hands. On it rested a little gold bowl, from which steam rose.
"For me?" Valens asked stupidly.
"If you would care for it," the little man said.
It burned his mouth and tasted of slightly stale water. As soon as he put the cup back on the tray, it disappeared completely.
"Please sit." Valens had forgotten he was standing. Pale hands, not the same ones that had produced the tea, put down a plain low white stool. It was made of bleached ivory, and proved to be as uncomfortable as it looked.
Deep breath. "I'm very sorry," Valens said, "about your daughter."
"My great-granddaughter." The voice was small and precise as the point of a needle. "All my children and grandchildren are dead. Your wife was, indeed, the last of my family. Accordingly, her loss is more than usually unfortunate." He could have said inconvenient just as easily. "I must confess that when I heard the news of her death, I was greatly distressed. However, the circumstances under which the news reached me have done much to reconcile me to her loss." The pitch of the voice changed very slightly, but enough to make Valens' flesh crawl. "Is it really true? Did you cross the desert in nine days?"
Valens nodded.
For a moment, the little man's eyes seemed to flare, like embers blasted by the bellows. "You must tell me all about it," he said. "The circumstances of her death, and your remarkable journey."
For the next hour, Valens did just that; and if the little man found his imprecision and woeful carelessness in observing details annoying, he masked it behind a tiny fixed smile, except when he was asking one of his innumerable, razor-sharp questions. Every few minutes, someone he couldn't see would mutter something; each interruption must have registered with the little man, because he would acknowledge it with a flicker of his little finger; a full crook of the top joint apparently showing approval, a waggle indicating irrelevance or stupidity. All the time, his eyes stayed fixed on Valens' face, and if he blinked once, Valens must have missed it.
"Thank you," he said, when Valens had answered his last question. "It comforts me to know the truth." A tiny sniff. "Now you must be very tired." (An order more than an observation.) "A suitable coach will be at your disposal very soon. We will convey you and your followers"-an infinity of contempt in that word-"to our camp, where you can rest and recover your strength before we speak again. I am most grateful to you for talking to me. If there is anything at all that you or your people require, please tell one of my officers, and the matter will be dealt with immediately."
Behind him, the coach door opened, flooding the world with painful scorching light. Someone covered the little man's head with a lace cloth. A finger, pressed very gently on Valens' shoulder, told him it was time for him to leave.
Outside, the sun was unbelievably bright. The immaculate young man in white led him to another coach, just as blinding but silvered rather than gilded. The carpet, step and awning appeared by the same magic. Valens followed the man in white like a sheep being led into a crush. There was one seat in the coach, and the blinds were drawn. As soon as the door clicked behind him, the coach started to move.
He could have lifted the blind, of course, but he knew he wasn't meant to; so he sat in the dark for an indeterminate period, somewhere between hours and days. The coach stopped twice; each time, the door opened just enough to admit a little silver tray (one silver cup of the hot dishwater and three tiny, rock-hard cakes) and a spotlessly clean silver chamber-pot, exquisitely decorated with scroll-and-foliage engraving. The coach's suspension was so perfect that pissing in the chamber-pot at the gallop was simplicity itself. Curiously, it wasn't removed at the second stop; but not a drop had been spilled, so that was presumably all right.
He was asleep when the coach stopped for the third time, and ferocious light woke him up out of a half-dream in which he was talking to the little man but couldn't hear a word either of them was saying. The door was open, and a different tall young man in white was beckoning to him. His back and legs ached unbearably, and the light was like nails driven into both sides of his head at once.
The first thing he noticed was tents; an ocean of them, all brilliant white, like a bumper crop of absurdly large mushrooms. Then he realized that there weren't any other coaches apart from his and the little man's golden miracle.
"Where are…?" he started to say. The young man smiled.
"They are being taken care of," he said. "Please follow me."
He had to walk a whole ten yards, five of them on the dusty, gravelly soil rather than carpet. He could feel the young man's embarrassment, but obviously there was nothing he could do about that. The tent he was led into was about the size of an average farm barn, brilliant white on the outside, dark as a bag inside. These people, he decided, must regard light the way the Vadani felt about mud; there's a lot of it about, but the better sort of people take reasonable steps to avoid getting covered in it. He sat down on a heap of cushions, which were the only visible artifacts in the tent, apart from a solid gold chamber-pot the size of a rain bucket. He was alone again.
Presumably he must have fallen asleep when the tent flap opened and yet another tall young man in white brought him a tray of food. This time, it wasn't a sparse little snack of cakes; in fact, he was amazed that someone so slight-looking could carry that much weight, let alone put it down so effortlessly, without grunting. It was all, needless to say, lean roast meat. He guzzled as much of it as he could bear, and washed it dow
n with the thimbleful and a half of water that came with it, in a dear little silver bottle.
Nobody could stay awake for very long after that. He woke up some time later, tortured with indigestion and dry as parchment, in the dark. No trace of light seeped through the heavy fabric of the tent, which suggested it was night. He lay on his back, too uncomfortable to sleep. The likeliest explanation was that at some point he'd died without noticing it, and this was the afterlife they promised you in the old stories; whether it was one reserved for the very good or the very bad he wasn't quite sure.
Dawn came painfully slowly, gradually building up a glow in the tent walls. He couldn't hear anything at all-he had to prove to himself that he hadn't gone deaf by dropping the silver bottle onto the tray. While he was doing that, he noticed that his filthy clothes had somehow turned into spotlessly clean white robes, like the ones worn by the tall young men, and his boots had evolved into ridiculous little silver-thread slippers with pointy toes and no backs. It was that which helped him clarify his newly found religious faith. This had to be the very bad people's place.
After a thousand years or so, the tent flap opened again. Not a tall, slim young man in white this time; an older man, in a plain robe of sort-of-gray woolen cloth, wearing sensible boots that Valens would have traded his duchy for. The man looked at him for a moment as if he was something regrettable that couldn't reasonably be avoided, and said, "This way."
This way proved to be the five yards or so to the tent next door, across a red, blue and purple carpet. Inside, the tent was pitch black; a clue, he decided, to the identity of his host.
"You have rested." Not a question. "Please sit down. You must try the orange and cinnamon tea; it's stronger, but one needs a little stimulation in the morning."
Stimulation; the little man sounded so frail that Valens reckoned anything more stimulating than slow, shallow breathing would probably kill him. "Thank you," he said.
The cup was put into his hand.
"I must apologize," the little man's voice went on, "about the rather dim light. I'm afraid that my eyes are rather sensitive. Direct sunlight gives me a headache."
"That's quite all right," Valens mumbled.
"In fact," the voice continued, quite matter-of-fact, "practically everything in my life hurts me these days-breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping, waking up, moving, keeping still, every kind and description of bodily function brings with it a different and complementary pain. I had hoped," he added wistfully, "to have died earlier this year, but regrettably I realized that I could not permit myself to do so. My last surviving son, you see; quite suddenly, my doctors tell me it was his heart. With only my great-granddaughter left-you can appreciate the problem, I feel sure. At the best of times, a line of succession is such a slender thing, a single strand of spider's web, and our enemies are so strong, so unrelenting." A short pause, no doubt to gather strength. "The Rosinholet and the Bela Razo made a joint attack on us earlier this year; not just a cattle raid, but a concerted attempt to wipe us out. My son undertook the defense, but he had turned into an old man; too weak to ride a horse, too confused to manage all the intricacies of a serious war. I had to relieve him of command in the end. We saw them off, eventually, but I knew then that something had to be done. They will return, I feel certain of it; with them, I expect, they will bring the Aram no Vei and the Luzir Soleth. The simple fact is, there are too many of us; the Cure Hardy, I mean. We have bred too many cattle and too many children, and the pasture will not support us all. Some nations have tried sitting down-staying in one place all the time, I mean, as you do-but we simply can't live like that. The only logical solution is for one of the nations of the confederacy to go away, or else be wiped out."
Silence; not expecting a reply or a comment, just a pause for breath and reflection. Nevertheless, Valens said, "You want to cross the desert and settle there?"
"Precisely." The little man sounded pleased that he wasn't going to have to explain. "We heard about the annihilation of the Eremian people by the Perpetual Republic of Mezentia. Most regrettable, of course; but it stands to reason that if a nation is wiped out, their lands fall empty."
"But Eremia's not big enough, surely," Valens said without thinking.
"No, of course not," the old man sighed. "We should need the entire territory between the mountains and the sea. But if the Eremians have disappeared, and we allied ourselves with you, that would only leave the Mezentines to be disposed of-assuming," he added, with the ghost of a chuckle, "that we could get across the desert without losing more than half our number of effective fighting men. That was the question that remained unanswered when my great-granddaughter left here to marry you." He sighed again, a long, thin noise like the last exhalation of a dying animal. "And now you have brought us a safe, quick path across the desert; now, I need only live long enough to see Mezentia got rid of, and my duty will at last be done. My people will have a safe home, I will have my successor, and you…" A laugh like dry twigs snapping. "I assume you would like to be revenged on the murderers of your wife. Personally, I've never been able to see the merit in revenge, except as a deterrent to further offense, but my people think very highly of it. My great-granddaughter's death will be all the pretext they need, without the prospect of a new home." Pause. "I take it you would wish to see the Mezentines destroyed?"
One thing you couldn't do to the voice was lie to it. "Yes," Valens said. "I'd like to see them butchered to the last man, woman and child. I'd like to stand and watch, when I get too tired to take part myself. But not if it means risking the lives of what's left of my people. I'd rather let the Mezentines get away with what they've done completely unscathed."
Two hands too weak to clap patted each other. "Splendid answer," the voice said. "Exactly what my successor should have said; and I have no doubts at all about your sincerity, let me stress that. Everything I have heard of you leads me to believe that you are a good king, like your father before you. Which is why," he went on, "I shall have to live long enough to do the taking of revenge myself. I told you I don't believe in it; I don't believe in our gods, either, but my people do. On balance, it seems far more likely that they are right than I am. We will wipe out the Mezentines for you; you won't have to make that choice. If you prefer, you are welcome to stay here and wait until the job is done and our army returns. You may regard it as a belated wedding present, if you wish. As reciprocation for the wonderful gift you've given us-the safe way across the desert-it is, I fear, wholly inadequate. Tell me," and the voice quickened just a little, "how did you find out about it? There have been rumors, of course. Many of my people have claimed there was such a thing, over the years. Only recently a foolish young man called Skeddanlothi-a cousin of mine, unfortunately too distant to be able to succeed me-declared that he had found it and would prove his assertion by going there himself. Of course, he never came back, so presumably he was misinformed."
"A merchant," Valens heard himself say. "A trader from my country found it, apparently. He came here several times to buy salt; when he died, he left a diary, and a map. One of my…" He couldn't think of a word to describe Vaatzes. "One of my people found the map, and when the Mezentines were closing in on us, we took a chance and followed it; and here we are."
The noise that greeted these words didn't sound at all like laughter, but what else could it be? "Remarkable," the voice said eventually. "And salt, of all things. Well; I don't suppose it matters how the way was found, so long as it really exists. Tell me about the oases; will they water an army of two hundred thousand, do you think? Of course, I have sent surveyors, men who know about that sort of thing; I shall know for sure soon enough. But I'm impatient. What do you think? Will there be enough water?"
Valens heard a voice saying, "Yes," and realized it was his own. "And water won't be a problem once you reach the mountains on the other side; it's how to transport the quantities of food you'll need…"
"Oh, don't worry about that." The voice sounded almost cheerfu
lly dismissive. "We have vastly more experience in that sort of thing than you do, by all accounts."
Despite the dark, Valens' eyes felt tired. He rubbed them before saying: "Can you really field an army of two hundred thousand?"
The strange sound again, equivalent to laughter. "An expeditionary force of two hundred thousand light cavalry and lancers, followed by the heavy cavalry and dragoons-say three hundred and fifty thousand-would probably be adequate for the task and still leave a sufficient reserve here in case of further attacks from our enemies." Short pause. "I should, of course, be asking your opinion, not purporting to state a fact. Do you think five hundred and fifty thousand cavalry would be enough to deal with the Mezentines? I understand that their field army is made up entirely of foreigners serving for money; a mixed blessing, at best, I should imagine. We could send a larger force, but my experience is that once you pass a certain point, a large army is more of a hindrance than a help."
This time it was Valens who paused before speaking. "How many of you are there?" he said.
Laughter again; a different sound, like the barking of a very small dog. "How delightful, that you feel sufficiently at ease already to ask such a direct question!" Then the pitch of the voice changed again; lower, quite businesslike. "I regret to say that I don't have an up-to-date census to hand; five months ago, however, when we held the usual muster and games to celebrate my birthday, on the fifth day all the men of military age fit for active service paraded on the plain beside the Swallow River. As each regiment marched past its commander-in-chief, each man placed an arrow on a pile. When the parade was over, the arrows were gathered up into barrels, each holding one thousand. We filled seven hundred barrels, with a few hundred arrows left over. If you ask me what proportion of our people are fit for military service, I would estimate somewhere between an eighth and a tenth. Does that answer your question?"