The Two of Swords, Part 4

by K. J. Parker

  Prexil was going to say something; Daxen managed to catch his eye in time. “Six thousand,” he said. “That’s going to cost a lot of money.”

  “Two million.” Genseric dismissed the figure with a tiny shake of his head. “We can afford it.”

  “They left three times that in the Treasury here.”

  Genseric sighed. “You don’t understand,” he said. “That would be stealing. They don’t steal. Ransoms are different: they’re honourable. If you don’t study your enemy, how can you ever hope to deal with him?”

  “You’ve done that,” Daxen said. “Studied them, I mean.”

  “Of course.”

  “And they talk to you.”

  Genseric smiled. “We have full diplomatic relations,” he said. “Our scholars and theirs have been in communication for centuries. That’s how respect is earned. They know we have no quarrel with them.”

  Prexil made an exasperated noise. “You’re on their side.”

  “Prexil, be quiet.” He hadn’t meant it to come out quite like that, but never mind. “I’m sorry,” he said to Genseric. “Major Prexil’s been under considerable strain lately, as you can imagine. It’s been difficult for all of us. The fact is, we don’t know a lot about these people. Not nearly as much as we thought we did, anyway.”

  “You’re out of your depth.” Genseric said it casually, a statement of fact that it would be pointless to deny. At that moment, Daxen would’ve paid good money to be allowed to hit him. “That’s unfortunate. These are difficult people you’re dealing with, complex, sensitive. We’ve known them a long time, but they’re continually surprising us.”

  Daxen looked straight at him. “You are on their side.”

  Quite unexpectedly, Genseric laughed. “Well, if I had to choose,” he said. “Fortunately for all concerned, I don’t. In fact, I’m expressly forbidden to. As I keep telling you, I’m here to observe and help craftsmen. Beyond that I couldn’t go, even if I wanted to.”

  Daxen took a deep breath. He couldn’t remember disliking anyone more than he disliked Genseric at that moment. “Naturally,” he said, “the Blemyan treasury will reimburse you for the ransoms you’ve already paid. I’m officially asking you to use your good offices to negotiate the ransom of the remaining citizens presently in their hands. That wouldn’t be taking sides,” he said firmly. “That’d be helping both parties to get what they want.”

  Genseric sighed, shook his head. “You really don’t understand, do you?” He picked up his helmet. “First, we can’t take any money from you, I’d have thought you’d have worked that out by now. And if you think the tribes kidnapped your people with a view to extorting money, you couldn’t be more wrong. They released our craftsmen as a special favour. They accepted the ransom because it would be a sin against their god to part with His property without getting something for Him in return. They don’t want money. They don’t use it, their laws forbid it. If I were to offer them money on your behalf for your people, it’d be an unforgivable insult tantamount to a declaration of war. The ransom payment will be dedicated to the god in a solemn ceremony and then buried somewhere remote in the desert.” He stood up. “As far as they’re concerned your citizens are now divine property, all of them, every man, woman and child in Blemya. That’s good news, because once they’ve captured them they’ll give them food and water and look after them, like they do with their sheep. But the only way you’d ever get them back is by force, and I strongly recommend you don’t try.” He paused for breath; Daxen could see he was struggling to keep his temper. “We’re going to leave now,” he said. “As a gesture of goodwill, I’ll give you some badly needed advice. If you want to try and save your kingdom, get your army on the road and head for the capital. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch them up before they get there. If you honestly believe you can beat them, fight them as soon as possible, though I would suggest you send away all the craftsmen in your army beforehand, tell them to go home to their families. They’ve got a chance. Frankly, you haven’t.”

  Daxen knew what he had to do, but it took him the rest of the day to nerve himself to do it. He summoned a full military council, and formally relieved Prexil of command. In the circumstances, he said, it was his clear duty as the queen’s proxy to lead the army himself. This action was no reflection on anyone present, and he would of course continue to rely on their advice and assistance. The army would march at dawn for the capital. Desperate though their situation was, as far as food and other supplies were concerned, he could see no other reasonable course of action. He was taking command because he wanted it to be unequivocally clear that the responsibility for everything that happened from that point on was his and his alone.

  Prexil waited till he’d finished speaking, then got up and walked away without a word. The rest of them stayed where they were, dead quiet.

  Daxen’s throat was so dry he could barely speak. “Any questions?”

  Long silence; then someone whose name he didn’t know said, “You believe it, then. About the savages.”

  He thought for a moment. “I don’t think we can afford not to,” he said. “If they had the power to do what they did here, we’ve got to assume Genseric was telling the truth. If we stay here and the kingdom falls—” He found he couldn’t complete the sentence. No need, fortunately. He’d made his point.

  There were a few questions about details, practical and sensible. He didn’t know the answers and said so. “I’ll have to leave it to you,” he said. “We all know I’m no soldier. But you’ll all do the best you can.”

  Nobody argued. There were no more questions. He dismissed the council, and they trooped out in silence. Daxen sat down in his folding chair and watched the oil lamp on the table burn itself out. After that, he sat in the dark until the sun rose.

  The next five days were the strangest of Daxen’s life so far, and the loneliest. He rode a white horse at the head of the army, agonisingly arrayed in the late General Ixion’s golden breastplate and helmet. The helmet was too big and the breastplate was too small; the inside edge of the pauldrons chafed his neck raw, so he had to wear a scarf, which he had to change every hour because it became sodden with sweat and chafed even worse; the helmet was padded with four pairs of wool socks to stop it falling over his face, and the sweat pouring down his face made him look as though he was crying his eyes out; fortuitously, this went down very well indeed with the men, who thought he was grieving for Erithry; copious tears together with his bolt-upright seat in the saddle (essential because if he slouched even a little bit the pain in his thighs was unbearable) made him a heroic figure, strong and compassionate in equal measure. The junior officers congratulated him on the fact that the men had awarded him the supreme accolade of a nickname, which meant they really liked him; however, they were curiously reluctant to tell him what it was.

  The supply problem didn’t bother anyone particularly since, as they all assured him, once they reached the wheat belt everything would be fine. And so it was, up to a point. They marched through an endless ocean of wheat, just right for cutting or maybe the tiniest bit gone over. At one point he stopped, dismounted, picked an ear and bit into a few kernels: hard like a nut, no softness or milkiness. And there it was, still standing, uncut; and no human beings to be seen anywhere except for the soldiers. At this time of year the fields should be swarming with men, women and children, frantically busy with the three hardest weeks’ work of the year. Instead, the only movement was explosions of rooks and crows, bursting up out of the laid patches where the weight of the grain had dragged the stalks down and the birds could pitch to feed. They erupted suddenly and unexpectedly, shrieking abuse, thick black clouds of furious movement that dissipated into twisting columns, thick curling smoke in the wind. Each evening the soldiers went out to reap with their swords, trampling trenches in the crop, spoiling five times what they stole; they threshed with their belts over spread-out cloaks, and every boot and garment in the camp was full of sharp, gritty chaff. There was no
smoke from burning roofs, no bodies swollen on the road, no riderless horses; no sign that anyone had ever been there at all.

  “It’s all pretty desperate,” young Captain Euxis assured him. “This lot’s not just supposed to feed Erithry, this is the breadbasket for Cumnis and most of the South. If it isn’t cut and carted pretty damn quick, it’s not going to be pretty, that’s for sure.”

  Daxen had figured that much for himself. He’d seriously considered halting the march and sending the men out to harvest the wheat. In his mind he could see the pages of two books; one read, by this sensible act, Daxen wisely secured the vital food supply and saved the kingdom from famine; the other said, meanwhile, as Daxen’s army wasted precious time over their commander’s futile gesture, the enemy column swept remorselessly on through the south, slaughtering and enslaving at will. In the end, he figured that since he had no grain sacks and no carts to carry them on, there was no decision to make. He was painfully aware that this line of reasoning was deeply flawed, but he did his best not to think about it.

  The market town of Tollens was famous for its brassware, its delicate blue and white glazed pottery, the Pauxen opera house, the annual flower festival, its traditional lattice-top meat pies and its distinctively nutty-tasting wheat beer. The gates were open. It was deserted.

  “What I can’t make out,” Prexil said, “is how they reckon on feeding that many prisoners. Yes, granted, they’ve taken every damn item of food in the town, right down to walnuts and ground pepper. But that’s not going to last very long, is it? Not with a whole town on the march.”

  A sound enough man within his limitations, Prexil, but no imagination. More to the point, in Daxen’s view, was which direction the prisoners had been sent off in. Tollens stood at the junction of three roads: the Great South, which they’d just come up; the West High, which stalked off into the mountains and eventually petered out into cart tracks; and the East Military, which veered away south-east dead straight for two hundred miles before forking into the Great East and the South-East High. It stood to reason that the enemy would have sent their prisoners away under escort, so as not to impede their own progress, while their fighting men pressed on up the Great South towards the capital. Logic dictated that they should have taken the East Military, which would bring them back to the desert in a relatively short loop. Logic also dictated that they’d be mad to go the way their enemy expected them to go, so undoubtedly they’d taken the West High; struck out west for fifty miles or so, then cut across country, rejoined the Great South at some point between Tollens and Erithry, then merrily on their way to the tribal heartlands. The more he thought about it, the more loops and tangles formed in his mind, until he despaired of the whole issue. With forty thousand men – some of the time, forty thousand was an intolerable burden, a vast multitude to feed and water and move about, like trying to carry an anvil on your shoulder; other times, it wasn’t nearly enough – detach five thousand to garrison Erithry, five thousand to cut the corn, send a thousand cavalry down the West High: if he started down that road, pretty soon there’d be no one left. When he closed his eyes he was surrounded by piles of books, all The Rise and Fall of the Kingdom of Blemya, all open at this precise moment, all different, some of them with alarmingly few pages left to go. No chance, Genseric had said; he’d sounded confident, as though he’d read to the end. No chance; don’t bother, nothing you do will really make any difference. He’d said it with such feeling—

  A sparrowhawk, hovering next to the road, on the left. You were supposed to be able to read the future by observing and interpreting the flight of birds; also the movement of stars and planets, the entrails of slaughtered animals, the fall of dice, playing cards. Was that the sort of esoteric wisdom the wise men of the craft devoted their lives to? Maybe Genseric had thrown the dice or made a detailed study of a fieldfare, and that was why he was so sure. Our scholars and theirs have been in communication for centuries. Not just their scholars, either. It seemed absurd that an Imperial could talk to these people rationally, conduct civilised negotiations with them; with these creatures of sand and darkness, who ate up whole populations and then vanished into the desert glare. Genseric had used the word respect. Bizarre. The tribesmen lived in the baking hot desert and thought the sun was God. For crying out loud. So was sweat running down your legs supposed to be some kind of sacrament?

  On the sixth day they came across an army. Which army it had been, led by whom, was anybody’s guess, because every single body had been stripped naked, and the heat had swollen them into unrecognisable lumps. You could just about tell the Imperials, because they were plum-brown rather than purple.

  “We ought to bury them, surely,” Euxis said. The crows were screaming again, and Daxen could see their point. First they chase us off the laid wheat, now the carrion. What harm did we ever do them? Nobody was inclined to walk up and down among the bodies and carry out a systematic count, so they made do with a rough guess; fifteen thousand, call it twelve regiments plus auxiliaries. Nearly all arrow wounds (but the enemy hadn’t left a single arrow. Waste not, want not). From a distance, they looked like a spectacular crop of mushrooms, overgrown and just about to spoil.

  Later, Daxen overheard some of the junior officers talking; they were riding behind him, he didn’t recognise their voices and he couldn’t see their faces. One was saying: fifteen thousand dead, doesn’t that make it the greatest defeat in Blemyan history? No, another one said, that’s Second Antecyra, sixteen thousand four hundred. Then there’s Choris Axeou, sixteen thousand two-fifty. Yes, said the first one, but Second Antecyra, wasn’t that where the bridge collapsed, you can’t count that, it was a separate thing. Yes, said the second, but the bridge collapsing was during the battle, so properly speaking it counts. Choris, said a third voice, wasn’t that where we lost about eight hundred to friendly fire from the garrison batteries? No, said the second voice, you’re thinking of Gavetta; Choris was where five hundred men got marched off a cliff in the dark, during the night outflanking manoeuvre. Fine, said the first voice, knock off five hundred, you’re down to fifteen seven-fifty, and bear in mind we didn’t do an accurate count, it could’ve been more than fifteen seven-fifty. At any rate (said the first voice, resolutely defiant), it’s got to be the second-worst defeat in Blemyan history. Well, hasn’t it? And the third voice said, Hang on, though, aren’t you forgetting about the Hyaxan Forks?

  The next day, five hours before they reckoned on arriving at Laxen’s Ferry, they met a cart.

  The outriders raced back with the news: there’s a cart on the road. About a mile ahead, just one cart, two people in it, possibly a man and a woman. For a moment or so, Daxen and his senior staff were too bewildered to speak. Then someone said, fetch them here, right now. Someone else said, hang on, what if it’s a trap? One cart, someone else said, out in the open, it should be all right. The second voice explained that he’d meant it as a joke.

  “Bring them in,” Daxen said (and a part of his mind realised: trap, pony and trap, oh I see) “Quick as you can.”

  They were Oxelas and Ruxen, and they had a small coopers’ yard in Laxen’s Ferry, and they were on their way to a vineyard at a little place called Brown Reach, and if the soldiers didn’t believe them, they could look for themselves. See? Two dozen half-hogsheads, as ordered. Yes, they’d left Laxen’s that morning, end of fourth watch, soon as the gates opened. Invasion? What invasion?

  When Daxen told them, they went deadly pale. We’ve got to get home, the woman said to the man, what about the children? The man gestured her quiet, and asked if the invasion had got as far as Brown Reach. Little place, he repeated, about four miles off the road, there’s a track off to the left. Daxen said he didn’t know, which seemed to surprise the man very much. Sorry, he said. You’re the army, I thought you’d know something like that.

  Daxen thanked them and sent twenty cavalry with them as an escort. Then he called a staff meeting. They sat on folding stools beside the road, while the army leaned on thei
r shields and waited for orders.

  “They can’t just have vanished into thin air,” Prexil said. “If they turned back, we’d have run straight into them. They can’t have gone off cross-country, or we’d have seen signs. You can’t march a huge army through cornfields without leaving a trail.”

  Daxen pointed out that they’d passed a major crossroads early that morning. He clicked his fingers for the map and found a thin blue line. Castle Street, he read out; runs parallel to the river, then forks, and one branch swings back down to join the East Military. He looked up. “Maybe they’ve gone home,” he said.

  There was a bewildered silence. “Why would they do that?” Euxis said. “I thought they were headed for the capital.”

  The engineer shrugged. “We don’t know that,” he said. “That lodge bastard sort of implied it, but we don’t know.”

  “More likely,” Prexil said, “they’ve changed course, trying to throw us off. Where’s that map?”

  Daxen kept hold of it. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If they turned off down this Castle Street thing, there’s nowhere to cross the river for fifty miles, not till you get to Holden. And from Holden back to town is a hell of a hike, up through the forest and all sorts.” He stopped and looked round. “Has anyone sent scouts to Laxen’s Ford?” he asked.

  No, they hadn’t. The omission was swiftly rectified. “If they wanted to give us the slip,” said the engineer, who’d got hold of the map while Daxen was occupied with other things, “surely they’d have carried on just past Laxen’s and taken the Old Express. That way, they could’ve led us a merry dance through the Mesoge and still not have had to go very far out of their way. That’s assuming they know the geography, but I think we can take that for granted.”