The Two of Swords: Part 15

by K. J. Parker

Fanning out from the wood were at least fifty horsemen, possibly more; small men on light, slim horses; not something you want to see in Blemya. He heard Orderic sigh and say, “Well, that’s that, then.”

  “It’s a shame,” Genseric said. “We must be nearly there.”

  “You did your best,” Orderic said.

  Yes, but that wasn’t the point. Maybe if this had happened before they’d killed the patrol; no, still not the point. Failure; it was all that mattered. He could hear his father saying, “The best man always wins”. With a sigh, he drew his sword and dropped in on the ground; then he unwrapped the reins of her horse from his wrist and dropped them, too. “I hate losing,” he said.

  “I’d sort of gathered.”

  “None of the evil crap you do matters if you win.” He turned round in his saddle and looked at her. “Horse-archers,” he said. “We don’t mess with them. You’re free to go.”

  She looked at him, then nudged her horse forward. “Don’t do that,” he said, “it’ll step in its reins and get tangled. Here.” He swung out of the saddle – God, but his legs were stiff – picked up the reins and handed them to her. “You might put in a good word for us,” he said. “We tried to be nice. Really.”

  She looked down at him, and the question that had been at the back of his mind all quietly answered itself. Worth every stuiver, he thought. “I will,” she said.

  He told the whole story, complete and accurate, to the Blemyan officer at the fort. When he’d finished, the officer called for the guards and had him marched off to the cells.

  He didn’t think much of them. They were wood, not stone; a glorified shed, with a tiled roof and just one bolt on the door. But he was worn out, and he hadn’t slept properly since before the raid. I’ll escape later, he promised himself, and went to sleep.

  When they woke him up, it was screaming bright sunlight outside; he was politely escorted into the drill yard, where he saw Orderic sitting on a mounting block, polishing his boots.

  “I get the impression they don’t know what to do with us,” Orderic said cheerfully. “Are we murderers, prisoners of war or very badly behaved diplomats? By the way, I don’t know about where they put you, but mine was so flimsy I wouldn’t keep a goat in it. And the stables are over there.” He indicated the direction with the slightest of nods. “I’ll give it a go if you want.”

  Genseric shook his head. “Have you seen her Ladyship?”

  “No. Better quarters than ours, I’d imagine. Is it true Beal Defoir counts as an independent sovereign state?”

  “No idea. And I don’t suppose they know, either.”

  “We could try and snatch her,” Orderic said, with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “I mean, there’s two of us and only a hundred or so of them.”

  “They don’t pay me enough,” Genseric said firmly. “I suggest we stay quiet and try not to annoy them any more. The way things are going, we could probably do worse than sit out the rest of the war in a nice sunny place like this.”

  Orderic beamed at him. “Restful,” he said. “I think I’d like that. I wonder if the food’s any good.”

  Three days of peace and rest under a blue sky; and, yes, the food was perfectly acceptable –

  (“What the hell is this supposed to be?” Orderic demanded. “It looks like maggots. I’m not eating this.”

  “Your loss,” said the guard. “It’s yummy. Also, it’s all there is. We call it rice.”

  “What is it, some kind of edible larvae?”

  “It’s basically grass seeds. I’ll have it if you don’t want it.”) – once you got used to it, and the guards lent them a chess set and some bowling balls – no, sorry, no cards, strictly forbidden to military personnel. And when they found out that Genseric played the rebec and Orderic knew the flute, they lent them instruments and made up a quintet. Their repertoire was limited (Scantia, Procopius, Ermanaric; do you know any Oida? Yes, but nobody’s perfect) but they were competent and enthusiastic musicians, and it had been a long time since Genseric had heard anything decent. “The truth is,” Captain Dapha, the guard commander, told him, confirming his suspicions, “we aren’t really sure what you are. So we’re treating you as honoured guests who aren’t allowed to leave. I hope that’s all right.”

  A sharp poke in the ribs. Genseric opened his eyes, but it was too dark to see.

  “On your feet.”

  “Dapha?” Genseric scrubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “What’s the matter?”

  “On your feet,” Dapha repeated. “You’re moving out.”

  “All right, just give me a moment.”

  A hand closed in his hair and pulled up. He rose, protesting, and something hard hit him in the pit of the stomach. Through the partition, he heard Orderic shout something and then abruptly fall silent. Ah, he thought. Clarification of status has been received.

  He was being towed by his hair. “Can I put my boots on?” he asked, and took the impact of a spear butt against his ear as meaning no, he couldn’t. Well; he couldn’t blame them. Nobody wants to get into trouble.

  Outside in the yard, by torchlight, he saw a coach. It wasn’t an elegant thing; it was built of inch planks, like floorboards, and there were no windows. Nothing to sit down on, either. Once he and Orderic were inside, the door slammed and he counted three bolts. He realised he hadn’t had an opportunity to ask about his men – the marine and the sailor – but consoled himself with the thought that he wouldn’t have been given an answer.

  “What d’you reckon?” Orderic said. “Sit up against the wall, or flat on the floor?”

  It was so dark he couldn’t tell which side of him Orderic was on. “Don’t suppose it’ll matter much.”

  He heard someone shouting something, couldn’t make out the words. “Do you think this is it?” Orderic asked. “You know.”

  “Oh, be quiet,” he said.

  When at last the door opened, the light burned his eyes and he cringed away from it; and he heard a voice saying, “Dear God, look at the state of you.” The voice’s tone was not sympathetic.

  He was hauled out by a man in uniform into a wide paved yard surrounded on all four sides by tall, impressive buildings. He was too weak to stand up, but they didn’t hit him. Someone said, “They can’t go in looking like that. Get them cleaned up and find them something to wear.”

  Nothing about food or drink, which was a pity, but Genseric was largely past caring. The coach had stopped at least a dozen times, but only for the time it takes to change horses. The rest of the time it had kept up a horrible bruising pace, no suspension on badly rutted roads. He felt like he’d been in a fight for days on end, and never landed a single punch. They had to carry Orderic out, like a sack of logs.

  He was helped rather than dragged across the yard, through an arch into a stable yard. There they sat them both down on a mounting block, peeled off their clothes and washed them down with brooms, brushes, curry-combs and cold water from a bucket until their skins were raw but perfectly clean. Long woollen gowns were then dragged down over their heads, and wooden-soled sandals strapped to their feet. A seven-foot sergeant in award armour stood over Genseric with a comb in his hand and looked at his loosened, tangled hair, shook his head and tossed the comb into the bucket, along with the contaminated brushes. “They’ll do,” said a young man in a shiny gold breastplate. “Come on, move. You know what she’s like if she’s kept waiting.”

  Genseric started to get up, but his knees failed; they caught him before he pitched on to his face and put him back on the mounting block. “You’ll just have to chair them,” the golden boy said. “At least as far as the portico.”

  Four men crowded round Genseric with spears. For a moment, all he could think of was Orderic’s question – do you think this is it? – but apparently not; one spear was for him to sit on, one went under the joints of his knees; the other two ran lengthways, to support his arms. It was actually quite comfortable, even at the jogtrot.

  Out into the yard again – that hor
rible coach had gone, thank God; death rather than another ride in that thing – and up the steps of the biggest, tallest building, through two impossibly tall bronze gates embossed with stylised fighting eagles, across a marble-floored hall to another set of bronze doors; then they were lowered until their feet touched the ground, the spears were slid out from under them and they were lifted upright and left to fend for themselves. Someone whispered in Genseric’s ear, “If you fall over, I’ll kill you.” He made an effort and put one foot in front of another. It was hard, like walking with numb feet, just before the pins and needles set in – but he reckoned it was worth the effort. The vast doors opened and a hand in the small of his back propelled him forward, into what appeared to be the House of God.

  It was slightly smaller than the great hall of the Imperial palace at Rasch, and the roof wasn’t quite as high as the Golden Mountain temple; nevertheless, Genseric realised at once just how country cousin and provincial those two places were; sad imitations of the real thing, in which he now stood. The floor was porphyry, polished to a watery gloss. The walls and ceiling blazed with gold mosaic, scenes that cried out and demanded to be gazed at, studied in detail and adored. Two rows of fluted, gilded columns strode down the hall, where stood a raised dais of white marble, supporting a throne tall and wide enough for the King and Queen of Heaven to sit comfortably side by side. As he tottered towards it, there was some bizarre optical illusion that made it look as though it was rising up into the air – and then he realised it was no illusion, that monstrous, unbelievable weight really was slowly lifting upwards, floating with no apparent support. There were people in the hall, row upon row of them, like worshippers in Temple; they weren’t looking at him, only at the slowly rising throne. When he was fifty yards away from it, he thought he could just make out a tiny human figure, probably a child, perched on the cloth-of-gold-drape bench seat. At twenty yards, a hand on his shoulder stopped him and pushed him gently to his knees. It never occurred to him not to kneel; he’d been waiting for an opportunity.

  Then he saw something else. On the marble dais, next to where the throne must have rested before it began to float, was a single straight-backed wooden chair. In it sat Lysao, in a snow-white gown, and she was looking straight at him. Oh, he thought. But never mind. No doubt at some point they’d kill him, probably in a very unpleasant way, but that scarcely seemed to matter. They could only damage his body, and already he felt that he had passed beyond all that, that he was no longer flesh but spirit. If they killed his flesh and his spirit could stay here, that wouldn’t be so bad. In fact—

  “That’s her up there,” he heard Orderic whispering next to him. “Must be.”

  He had to think for a moment, and then he remembered. They were in Blemya; and the one thing everybody knew about Blemya was that it was ruled by a woman; by a little girl. He looked up, but all he could see was a suit of extraordinary clothes – a long purple gown, glittering with gold thread and seedpearls like a dragon’s underbelly; a shining gold sash, coiled round the folds of the gown like a python; a monstrous crown like a weathervane, three times the size of a human head. The fact that the clothes sat upright instead of crumpling in a heap suggested there must be someone inside there, but he or she was completely invisible.

  Genseric realised someone was speaking; had been, for some time. He caught his own name, but the echo caught everything else and made it a reverberating jumble, one voice bickering with a thousand copies of itself. He tore his eyes away from the throne and located a bald man in a gown rather like the one he was wearing, standing a few yards away, talking up to the bundle of clothes. For a moment, he wondered what was going on, and then it dawned on him. The bald man was the prosecutor.

  Under other circumstances, it would’ve struck him as unfair that he couldn’t understand what was being said against him. But the reasoning behind it came in a flash of intuition. The acoustics of this place were pitched so that the occupant of the throne, so high up and far away, could hear every word; nobody else mattered. Almost certainly, whoever it was up there knew all the facts already, could read minds and hearts, could count all the grains of sand on the seashore and all the stars in the sky. There were certain formalities, but that was all they were. Judgement, when it came, would be undeniable and perfect. Arguing the toss would be unthinkable; obscene.

  Then he caught Lysao’s eye again, and shivered.

  The prosecutor had finished and backed away, out of sight among the congregation. For one horrible moment, Genseric wondered if he was supposed to say something. But he was spared that. Lysao stood up, made a perfunctory nod at the base of the throne, and began speaking. Again, he couldn’t make out any of it, but he fancied he could guess what the gist of it was. The echo swirled her voice, mixed it up with itself, bounced it off the walls and ceiling like a ball. There was no beauty in it now, it was harsh, shrill, querulous. He guessed she couldn’t hear herself, because otherwise she’d stop, appalled. He felt ashamed of himself for ever having been born.

  At last she finished whatever it was she’d been saying; she did the offensive nod once again, sat down and looked bored. There was a moment of silence which went on and became awkward. Then she spoke to him.

  He heard his name, clear as flute music, so close he started to look round to see who was right beside him. He heard it again and realised where it was coming from. He looked up at the distant figure. “Your Majesty,” he said.

  “Do you wish to say anything?”

  His words were still swooping and filling the air around him; he’d heard them only as a sort of confused howling. He shook his head, realised she probably couldn’t see him. “No, your Majesty,” he said, and winced at the horrible noise. Everyone was looking up at the throne, waiting. He wished the moment could last for ever.

  “The appellant Lysao,” said the heavenly voice, “claims to be a citizen of Beal Defoir, which I am informed is recognised by this house as a sovereign nation. She further claims that she was abducted against her will by soldiers of the Western emperor, led by Major Genseric, who is before us. The Domestic of the Bedchamber claims that Major Genseric has told the representatives of this house that the appellant is a fugitive from justice in the West, and that he was executing a lawful warrant. Major Genseric has declined to speak in his own suit.”

  A brief silence. There were no echoes to die away.

  “This house recollects,” the voice went on, “that no treaty of extradition exists or has ever existed between Blemya and either empire. Therefore this house cannot hear any request for extradition, and indeed, none has been formally made.”

  Genseric felt delighted and confused. He’d been sure he was the one on trial, for killing the soldiers. Or hadn’t they got that far yet?

  “The appellant claims,” said the voice, “that as a priestess she is entitled to sanctuary as against Major Genseric. However, she has neglected to furnish any proof that the West seeks to extradite her in connection with any alleged offence related to the office of priest, and therefore her claim in this regard must be refused.”

  Another pause. Orderic was tugging at his sleeve. He ignored him.

  “The Domestic claims that Major Genseric and his companions killed twelve soldiers of the coast patrol in an attempt to resist arrest. However, the Domestic has not furnished sufficient corroborative evidence for this claim to enable this house to hear the matter, and that claim is also dismissed.”

  Genseric felt his jaw drop open. He let it hang. He had no strength left.

  “This house confesses to a certain difficulty in deciding what should become of the parties in this case. The appellant is not obliged to go with Major Genseric, nor has she any standing to stay in Blemya. There seems to be no obligation on this house to incur the trouble and expense of conveying her home to Beal Defoir. The appellant further claims that her life would be in danger were she to be conveyed by land to the frontiers of either the Western or Eastern empires, but offers no proof of this claim other than hea
rsay. This house finds that it is under no obligation to the appellant, other than the simple and basic duty of hospitality. This house has always held that duty in the highest possible regard, and therefore resolves that the appellant be allowed to stay in Blemya, as the guest of this house, until suitable arrangements can be made for her return to Beal Defoir. As for Major Genseric and his three companions, they are to be escorted with all due expedition to the Western frontier and allowed to depart in peace.”

  “We’re going to be in so much trouble,” Orderic muttered. “They aren’t going to like this one little bit.”

  “Be quiet,” Genseric said absently. His mind was still just full enough of the visions he’d seen to be peacefully numb, but every word Orderic spoke made it harder to keep it that way. He glanced up at the sun and figured it must be mid-afternoon. They’d reach the border by nightfall, they’d assured him, guaranteed. This time they were on a magnificently kept road in a well-sprung chaise bearing the livery of the royal messengers. He kept expecting to wake up and find himself in the other coach; except that in the other coach sleep had been impossible.

  “All we’ve achieved,” Orderic said, “was to take her out of somewhere where she was vulnerable and put her in what’s probably the safest place on earth right now. Oh, and along the way we violated Blemyan territory and killed a dozen of their soldiers. Is Forza going to be pleased with us? I think not.”

  “I thought I told you to be quiet,” Genseric said, yawning. “That’s an order.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be in a position to give orders much longer,” Orderic replied sadly. “Me neither. I don’t know which’d be worse, strung up or broken back to the ranks and sent to the front. Why the hell didn’t you say something while you had the chance? You could tell she was bending over backwards to find a reason for helping us. Last thing she wants is to piss off both the Belot brothers simultaneously, but thanks to you—”

  “If you don’t shut your face,” Genseric said, “I’ll shut it for you. Got that?”