by K. J. Parker
‘Didn’t make it,’ the man replied. ‘Same man as got you got him. I think he was trying to save you-’
Nice thought, Temrai said to himself, but I was there, remember? He simply didn’t know what hit him, same as me. So Jurrai’s dead. Well, we’ll have to deal with that later. Dammit, the battle isn’t even over yet, I ought to be doing something-
‘Are they safely away from the camp?’ he asked.
The man nodded. ‘Far as I can see. They lit out for the upper ford; maybe we’ll catch them there, I don’t know. Do you want to stay here talking in the middle of the river or shall we move on?’
Temrai allowed himself to be frogmarched onto dry land. They had to step over bodies – some dead, rather more still alive but probably past saving. That was a bad thing; all these men in the most desperate moment of their lives, scrabbling with their hands for help because they’re too weak to cry out, their voices won’t work any more, and we step over them as if they were cowshit in the road. ‘Get a message through, call it all off.’ Temrai’s voice was harsh, as if he was attributing blame. ‘I want everybody back to the camp, and then let’s see about clearing this lot up.’
The man who’d hit him – hadn’t he seen that face before? Quite possible; after all, it as less than six months ago that he’d been working in the city arsenal, perhaps some of these swords that were lying discarded on the grass were ones he’d made himself. Maybe even the one that had killed Jurrai, and nearly done for him. That’d be an amusing coincidence; but all that seemed so long ago and far away as to be part of some dream-time, and he was as different now as the moth is from the caterpillar. The hell with all that, too. Right now, there was work to be done.
Someone brought him a fresh horse – oh, hell, Thunder’s dead, my poor old friend, and I didn’t even think of that until now; I used to cry myself to sleep about losing a horse when I was a kid – and he hauled himself up into the saddle, suddenly aware of bruises, wrenched muscles, traumatised and shredded skin where he’d been ground against the stony bed of the ford. As he looked round he was subconsciously collecting faces, every face recognised a further piece of salvage, one less dagger in his conscience when the time came for him to face up to what he’d deliberately set in motion. But there wasn’t time for all that now; too much to organise, so many things to be sorted out before he could say this day was over.
‘Kossanai.’ The Chief Engineer was a sorry sight; soaked to the skin, one of the shoulder straps of his boiled-leather breastplate flapping loose and a raw cut underneath. But he was a reliable man and still on his feet; someone else could do some work for a change. ‘Get yourself over to the higher ford, make sure we’re pulling out and nobody’s gone dashing off in pursuit. Tell whoever’s in charge up there I need those men down here now.’ Kossanai nodded, wearily hauled himself into the saddle. ‘Stilchai, you’re in charge of picking up the wounded. Get hold of Nimren, tell her to organise the healers. And put someone in charge of prisoners. The sooner they’re rounded up the better, just in case there’s any that don’t know the battle’s over yet. Maltai, get some scouts out and let’s know for sure where everybody is instead of guessing.’
It was some time before the scouts came back. The enemy were long gone; they’d doubled back behind the ridge and disappeared downriver, presumably heading for the lower crossing. Nobody had shown the slightest inclination to chase after them.
Casualty figures gradually came in; for the enemy, nine hundred killed and a further three hundred and fifty captured, half of them cut up to a greater or lesser extent, as against the clan’s losses, currently standing at a hundred and seven dead and seventy-odd wounded, twenty or so seriously. It was, by any standards, a glorious victory; and if it should have been more glorious still as regards the body count, nobody seemed in too much of a hurry to dwell on that. On the contrary; for the first time in living memory, the clan had taken on the dreaded riders from the city and seen them off in no uncertain terms. Men and women whose mothers had terrified them into obedience with the threat of Maxen and his raiders had seen those same bogeymen pinned down and surrounded, caught in a pitfall and tethered for the slaughter. The fact that somehow they’d managed to slip away before their throats were actually cut was something the clan could afford to overlook; and besides, the more survivors who went home to tell the tale, the greater the panic and confusion of their enemies. A wholesale slaughter would only have served to stiffen their resolve, and made the rest of the job that much harder. As for Temrai; well, they’d always known he had the right stuff, hadn’t they? It was good to know they’d been right all along, but it came as no surprise.
(There was also the somewhat discordant note struck by the families and friends of the hundred and seven dead, and the rather ungrateful attitude of the badly injured, who would rather have had their legs and hands back than all the generous praise of a grateful nation; Temrai wondered if he had time to deal with all that yet, and decided it would have to wait until the burial details had reported in and the horses had been seen to.)
The final task of the day was to finish dismantling the last seven trebuchets, so as not to fall too badly behind schedule. There were any number of willing volunteers, most of whom got under the engineers’ feet and made the job take half as long again as it should have done. Once that was out of the way, everybody was at liberty to go back to their tents and campfires; except for Temrai and his heads of department, who had the long and tedious business of thinking the whole thing through and deciding what had to be done about it.
‘They may try again,’ Uncle Anakai said, ‘but I doubt it. Not immediately, anyway. They’ll be too busy deciding whose fault it was, if I know the city people.’
He was talking slowly because of the ball of cotton waste pressed to the side of his face; an arrow had slit his cheek open for three inches directly in line with his mouth. It had almost certainly been friendly fire, since the enemy had loosed off relatively few arrows.
‘Let’s assume they don’t,’ Ceuscai replied. ‘I had a good look at them, after all. They didn’t know what hit ’em.’ He shook his head, as if unable to accept what he’d seen. ‘That can’t be their real army,’ he went on. ‘For all we know, it could just have been some privateer outfit; you know, if the Emperor won’t do anything about it, we will. I can’t believe the city’s main field army’s as easy to beat as that lot was.’
Ceuscai was reasonably undamaged; slightly stiff in one knee after an awkward fall from his horse (he’d led the ambush party at the higher ford; his misadventure had come about when he was caught in the press of his own men surging forward to massacre the encircled enemy.)
Temrai grunted in agreement, nodded slightly. ‘I think you may well be right on the first count,’ he said, ‘not so sure about the second. Whether or not that was their proper army, I reckon we’ve got to expect some sort of attempt on the engines when we unload them at the final camp downstream. That’s what I would do; strike hard and close to home. We can’t rely on that, however. From now on we’ll have to work on the principle that they could come at us at any time, which’ll mean having to take people away from making and moving the engines and put them on escort duty. That’ll slow us down, and won’t that make us still more vulnerable?’
‘What about a punitive expedition?’ Shandren interrupted. ‘Think about it. They’ve just been badly beaten in the field, for almost the first time ever. Isn’t it likely they’ll want to set the record straight, if only for the sake of their own self-image? They’ll need to do something to restore morale.’
Anakai shook his head. ‘Far more likely to take it out on their own people,’ he said. ‘Punishing the General’ll make it so they can feel good about themselves again, and they won’t have to risk a second defeat. No, I think that if they want to intercept the engines, they’re most likely to do it while they’re on the water. There’s several places where the river’s pretty wide between here and the final camp, and they know how we feel about boats.
If they launch a few barges full of soldiers, they could sink the rafts or tow them off without ever coming within bowshot. We’d pursue along the bank, and either fall into an ambush or leave the construction camp exposed for a hit-and-run attack. Thinking about it, that was the obvious thing to have done instead of what they actually did; more support for your theory, Ceuscai, about this lot not being the regular army.’
‘I don’t think there is a regular army,’ Temrai put in. ‘I’ve said this before and nobody’s paid any attention.’ He shifted his weight off his painful side before continuing. ‘There’s a few permanent guards on the walls, and a part-time levy who’re supposed to be trained men and aren’t. As far as most of them are concerned, the part-timers treat their training allowance as a sort of state handout to the needy and feckless, and the rest of them look on it as a sort of drinking club. Oh, I’m not saying they won’t do their best when the walls are actually under attack; I just don’t see them being used as a field army away from the city. It’d be lunacy, and they know it.’
‘Maybe,’ Ceuscai conceded. ‘But so was this.’
The glow of the fire lit up the ring of faces; twelve people who knew each other well, talking calmly and rationally about something that might well have been the end of the world. There were also places where someone should have been, but wasn’t; Jurrai as leader of the horse archers, Pegtai and Sorutai as members of the chief’s household – I broke Sorutai’s flute when we were children, and now I’ll never be able to make it up to him; he doted on that flute, and I broke it because I was jealous. Why did I do that? – but the gaps could be filled with others just as good, it was in the order of business for tonight’s meeting, together with formal thanks to the gods for letting our losses be so light. Had Sasurai ever had to do this, Temrai wondered, carry on as if nothing had happened, accept a loss because it couldn’t be helped and things might have been a whole lot worse? And what were his friends in the city thinking, as the first reports came in? Nine hundred empty beds in the city tonight; would they be filled so easily, and without the comforting reassurance of victory to let the rest of them declare that it had all been worthwhile? To die for one’s people is bad enough; to die for one’s people and lose as well must be a dreadful thing.
‘Let’s sum up then, shall we?’ Temrai said, swallowing a yawn. ‘We don’t think they’ll attack again, or at least not for a while, but it’d still be sensible to have a mobile reserve just in case. I’m not sure that’s quite the answer; a reserve that’s too small to make any difference is worse than no reserve at all, because it’s taking people away from the jobs they should be doing. My own view is that they’re not going to risk another humiliation by attacking us here, but they might have a go at the camp downstream, simply because it’s nearer, it’s got less people to defend it and – let’s face it – that’s where all the finished engines are, or will be soon enough. So I’ve decided that we’ll have a fairly strong force down at the bottom camp, which can serve both as a guard and an early-warning post to let us know if a substantial army’s on its way here. Ceuscai, I’d like you to think it over tonight and let me know tomorrow what you’ll want by way of men and supplies; once I know what you’re taking down there, I’ll be able to reassign people here to cover.’ He yawned again and stretched, wincing as his stiffening muscles protested. ‘I think that covers it, don’t you? Right, next, we’ve got vacancies on this council to fill. Nominations, please.’
Under any other circumstances there would have been a certain amount of debate, politicking, trading favours and remembering obligations; but it was too late in too overwhelming a day for anybody to have the patience or the stamina to play games. In consequence, the nominations were sensible and the debate mercifully short; even so, Uncle Anakai’s head was starting to nod forward by the time Temrai declared his decision, and the pad of bloodsoaked cotton fell from Anakai’s hand onto the rug, revealing the full ugliness of the wound, the crudeness of the chewed-sinew suture it had hastily been sewn up with. My fault again, Temrai reflected; all the sinew they’d normally have used had been requisitioned by the bowmakers for strings and back-facings, so the healers had to unwrap old stuff from tools and furniture and chomp it soft in their mouths in order to stitch up wounds.
That’s something else we’ll have to deal with; we can’t go into battle again with nothing to patch the casualties up with. He thought for a moment about the word casualties; a nice technical term, suitable for military use. You didn’t talk about people slashed open and bleeding, people with arms and legs missing, people with holes in them or scars that made their own children frightened of them; you said casualties, and after a while you talked about acceptable losses and then expendable forces, and pretty soon it all became a game of chess, observed from the top of a hill, part of a sequence of games, a tournament. And then you wonder why your friends don’t talk to you the same way any more, and after that you start worrying about conspiracies and treason; and after that, the chances are you’ll really have conspiracies and treason to worry about. And to think; there’s people who actually want this job. Crazier still; there are places where people who want this sort of job are allowed to do it.
Which is how wars start; or, at least, how they’re caused.
‘Next on the agenda,’ he heard himself saying, ‘is the formal vote of thanks to the gods for keeping our casualties down to an acceptable level. Uncle, if you’d care to do the honours.’
Loredan didn’t mind. If anything, he was glad of the peace and quiet, relieved to be on his own. He stretched out, hands behind his head, legs extended, feet crossed. The stone bench was cold, but not unbearably so. I could get to like this, he said to himself.
If he’d felt it was unjust, that he didn’t deserve to be here, it’d be a different matter. As it was, what had the Prefect called it? Culpable negligence, dereliction of duty, gross errors of judgement; he couldn’t really argue with that. A thousand men dead or in the hands of the enemy, because he’d been too busy sulking to notice that they were walking into a trap. Culpable negligence was putting it mildly; it couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d cut the word TRAP in eight-foot letters in the chalk. If Maxen was alive, he’d have pulled my lungs out for what I’ve done.
Yes, but Maxen was dead. Hence all this.
Held pending an immediate inquiry, the Prefect had said. Loredan hoped it wouldn’t be too immediate. A week or two here in the quiet and the dark would do him the world of good, let him get rid of the horrors before he had to go out and explain himself to people. Right now, a stone bed in a cell under the council chamber was infinitely preferable to getting yelled at in the chapter house; he could easily imagine the panic inside and the hysteria outside, the mobs baying for someone’s blood, rioting down at the docks as people fought for berths on outgoing ships, a wonderful pretext for another night of looting and breaking down the doors of unpopular neighbours.
As to what happened after that, he couldn’t really summon up the energy to worry about it. Maybe he’d be put to death, here in his cell or in some quiet guardroom on the wall. That kind of death he could accept; somehow it wasn’t nearly as depressing as the thought of dying in the courtroom had been, when he’d been facing the prospect of fighting Alvise for the greater glory of the charcoal people. That would have made very little sense, his last dying thought would have been, Gods, how stupid. This way? Well, fair enough, in context. He owed a death to the people of the plains. This way he’d been able to get four-fifths of the army home and still pay off his debt to the enemy.
Someone walked past in the corridor outside; heavy boots, a jangle of metal, keys probably. Were there other prisoners down here, or was he the only one? Other enemies of the state, out of sight and mind? He wondered what they’d done. You had to be pretty fair-average wicked to end up in the cells; mere piracy, rape or murder weren’t enough to get you free board and lodging in this town.
Fancy there being no Emperor, he said to himself, still not quite abl
e to believe what he’d heard. The Prefect had been very matter-of-fact about it, as if he’d been talking about the tooth fairy or the headache elves, things you grew out of believing in when you turned seven. According to the Prefect, there hadn’t been an Emperor for the whole of Loredan’s lifetime – but didn’t we always pick flowers for his garland on his birthday when we were kids? What did they do with all those hundreds of flowery garlands that got handed in with such ceremony at the upper-city gate each year? Disturbing, somehow, to think of all that love going to waste, like water draining into sand.
When Callelogus IV died with no heirs and the succession stood to be disputed between three distant cousins, foreign princes who couldn’t speak the language and whose table manners alone would have rendered them entirely unacceptable to the city, it occurred to the City Prefect and his cronies that if the people weren’t told the Emperor was dead, then nobody would know, and what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Since then, the upper city had been empty except for a few caretakers and some officials who had offices there; Callelogus had lived to be ninety-six, and on his death the diadem passed to an entirely made-up nephew, the son of a wholly fictitious sister who’d supposedly been married off to an unknown princeling in a far-distant land just long enough ago that nobody could be expected to remember it happening. Meanwhile, the government of the city stayed in the hands of the people whose trade was governing cities, quietly and piecemeal; secretaries of state, officials, middle-city men who knew how to repair roads and negotiate trade agreements. The more Loredan thought about it, the more he favoured it as a system of government. They had, after all, done a good job.
Up till now, at least.
Gods, Loredan thought, what if the city is going to fall? Unthinkable; the wall still stood, after all, and nobody could ever get past that. But he’d seen siege engines in the plainsmen’s camp, catapults and trebuchets, sections of siege wall, mobile housings for battering rams, sections of siege towers, and he couldn’t help thinking that if they’d managed to make such things, homeless savages who lived in tents, then there was a will and a determination there that wasn’t going to be put off by the city’s reputation for being impregnable. That thought disturbed Loredan far more than the prospect of his own death.