by K. J. Parker
No further explanation needed. “Where?” Valens snapped, jumping up like a roe deer startled out of a clump of bracken. The runner was too breathless to speak; he pointed.
(Well, now, Ziani thought; and in his mind’s eye the porch door opened.)
An orderly defense, according to the big brown book Valens had grown up with (Precepts of War, in which is included all manner of stratagems and directions for the management of war, at all times and in all places, distilled from the best authorities and newly illustrated with twenty-seven woodcuts), must be comprised of five elements: a strong position well prepared, proper provision of food and water, good supply of arms, a sufficient and determined garrison and a disciplined and single-minded command. Precepts of War had been three times a week, usually sandwiched in between rhetoric and the lute, and had consisted of copying out from the book into a notebook. The five elements of an orderly defense were as much a part of him as being right-handed.
As they watched the dust-cloud swelling, he ran through them one more time in his mind. Position: open on all sides. Provisions: none. Arms: all those barrels of carefully reclaimed arrows they’d left behind with the carts. Garrison: a mess. Command …
So much for his education. The cloud was rolling in, a strange and beautiful thing, sparkling, swirling, indistinct. Faintly he could hear the jingling of metal, like bells or wind-chimes. He had seen and heard approaching armies before, but this time everything felt different, strangely new and unknown.
“We’ve done everything we can,” someone was reassuring him. “The men are in position.”
He wanted to laugh. There was a thin curtain of cavalry, little more than a skirmish line; behind that, the infantry and dismounted dragoons were drawn up in front of the stand of spindly trees that fringed the oasis. Behind them, the civilians. He knew what the Mezentines would do. Light cavalry to engage and draw off the horsemen. Heavy cavalry to punch through the foot soldiers and send them scrambling back as far as they could go, themselves forming the clamp that would crush the civilians back to the edge of the water. From there it would be a simple matter of surrounding the oasis and pressing in, slowly and efficiently killing until there was nobody left. There were other ways in which it could be played out; he could abandon the oasis and run, in which case the Mezentines with their superior mobility would surround them in the open, or he could attack and be shredded on their lance-points, with a brief flurry of slaughter afterward.
They were trying to tell him things, details of the defense, who was commanding which sector, how many cavalry they’d managed to scrape together for him. He pretended to listen.
Visible now; he could make out individual horses and riders, although there was precious little to distinguish one from another. He was impressed; the Mezentines had managed to cross the mountain and the desert in remarkably good shape, and they held their formations as precisely as a passing-out parade. Clearly they’d found a way of coping with the difficulties that had defeated him, and he could think of no terribly good reason why he should add to their problems by trying to kill or injure a handful of them before the inevitable took its course. It was obvious that they were superior creatures, therefore deserving victory; even so, it did occur to him to wonder how they’d contrived to get this far in such astonishingly good order — as if they’d known, rather better than he had, where they were going and what they were likely to have to face. But that was impossible …
“They’ll offer a parley,” someone was telling him. “They won’t just attack without trying to arrange a surrender first. You never know, they might offer terms …”
Valens grinned. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Unless my eyesight’s so poor I can’t see the wagons full of food they’d need to get us back across the desert alive. No, they’ve come to finish us off, simple as that.”
“We’ll let them know they’ve been in a fight,” someone else asserted. Valens couldn’t be bothered to reply.
He’d chosen a point in the sand, a dune with its edge ground away by the wind. When they reached that point, he’d give the order for his cavalry screen to advance. It’d be automatic, like a sear tripping a tumbler, and then the rest of the process would follow without the need of any further direction. He’d considered the possibility of telling the cavalry to clear out — get away, head off for the next oasis, in the hope that the Mezentines would be too busy with the massacre to follow them. There was a lot to be said for it: several hundred of his men would have a chance of escaping, instead of being slaughtered with the rest. He wasn’t sure why he’d rejected it, but he had. Maybe it was just that it’d be too much trouble to arrange — giving the new orders, dealing with the indignant protests of the cavalry, imposing his will on them. If they had any sense, they’d break and run of their own accord. If they didn’t, they had only themselves to blame.
He hadn’t been paying attention. The Mezentine front line had already passed his ground-down dune, and he hadn’t noticed. He shouted the order, and someone relayed it with a flag. The skirmish line separated itself and moved diffidently forward; a slow amble, like a farmer riding to market. In reply the front eight lines of Mezentines broke into movement, swiftly gathering speed. He wasn’t able to see the collision from where he was standing, but he didn’t need to.
A lot of silly noise behind him. From what he could hear of it, people were panicking. He assumed they had a better view than he did. The first Mezentine heavy cavalry appeared in front of him; they’d broken through the skirmish line, no surprise there, and they were charging the infantry screen. He sighed and stood up. It was time to go and fight, but he really didn’t want to shift from where he was. His knees ached. He felt stiff and old. Even so …
He frowned. Men were walking past him, trudging to their deaths like laborers off to work in the early morning. He let them pass him; some of them shouted to him or at him, but he took no notice. The one good thing was, it didn’t matter anymore what anybody thought of him. He was discharged from duty, and the rest of his life was his own.
(In which case, he thought, I’d like to see her again before I die. A mild preference; it’d be nice to die in the company of the one person he’d ever felt affection for, who for a short while had felt affection for him. He frowned, trying to figure out where she was likely to be.)
“What’s happening,” an old woman asked her. “Can you see?”
“No,” she lied. “There’s too much going on, I’m sorry.”
“But we’re winning,” the old woman said. “Aren’t we?”
“I think so.”
Not that she understood this sort of thing. She knew it was very technical, like chess or some similarly complicated game. You had to know what you were looking at to make sense of it. But unless the Vadani had some devastating ruse up their sleeves (and that was entirely possible), it wasn’t looking good. Too much like the last time, except that it was happening in the open rather than in among crowded buildings. The line of horsemen she’d seen riding out to meet the enemy (the celebrated Vadani cavalry, generally acknowledged as the best in the world) simply wasn’t there anymore; it had been absorbed like water into a sponge; evaporated; gone. There were more soldiers out on the edge of the oasis, she knew, but it seemed unlikely that they’d make any difference. Of course, she wasn’t a soldier, and there wasn’t anybody knowledgeable around to ask.
“The infantry’ll hold them,” an old man was saying. “It’s a known fact, horses won’t charge a line of spear-points. They shy away, it’s their nature. And then our archers’ll pick ’em off. They’ll be sorry they ever messed with us, you’ll see.”
Behind her, nothing but still, brown water. Would it hurt less to swim out and drown, or stay and be slashed or stabbed? It was a ludicrous choice, of course, not the sort of thing that could ever happen. To be sitting here, calmly weighing up the merits of different kinds of violent deaths; drowning, probably, because she’d swim until she was exhausted and then the water would pull her down,
and the actual drowning wouldn’t take long. She considered pain for a moment: the small, intolerable spasm of a burn, the dull, bewildering ache of a fall, the anguish of toothache, the sheer panic of a cut. She knew about the pain of trivial injuries, but something drastic enough to extinguish life must bring pain on a scale she simply couldn’t begin to imagine. She’d seen the deaths of men and animals, the enormous convulsions, the gasping for breath that simply wouldn’t come. She knew she wasn’t ready for that; she never would be, because there could be no rapprochement with pain and death. She felt herself swell with fear, and knew there was nothing she could do to make it better.
She looked round instinctively for an escape route, and saw the old man and the old woman. They weren’t looking at her; they were staring at a man walking quickly toward them.
(“Isn’t that the Duke? What’s he doing here? He’s supposed to be —”
“Shh. He’ll hear you.”)
Valens; of all people. It was a purely involuntary reaction; all the breath left her body, her mouth clogged and her eyes filled, because Valens had come to save her. At that moment (she hadn’t forgotten Orsea, or the fact that she didn’t love him, or that the sight of him made her flesh crawl and she didn’t know why), she knew, she had faith, that she wasn’t going to die after all. Valens would save her, even if he had to cut a steaming road through the bodies of the Mezentines like a man clearing a ride through a bramble thicket. She knew, of course, how little one man could do on his own, how hopeless the situation was, how even if they escaped from the Mezentines they had no chance of crossing the desert on their own. Those were unassailable facts; but so was his presence — her savior, her guarantee, her personal angel of death to be unleashed on the enemy. She tried to stand up, but her legs didn’t seem to have any joints in them.
“We should try and get over to the left side,” he was saying. “I’ve been watching, and their left wing’s trailing behind a bit.” He stopped and frowned at her. “Well? You do want to get out of this, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Fine.” He nodded. “I’ve left a couple of horses. Can’t go quite yet; if they see us making a break for it, they’ll send riders to cut us off. But when the attack’s gone in, they won’t be so fussy about stragglers.” Suddenly he grinned at her. “I’m running away,” he said. “No bloody point hanging around here. The trick’s going to be choosing exactly the right moment to make the break.”
The old woman was staring at him; she’d heard every word, and her face showed that her world had just caved in.
“Well?” he said. “Are you coming or aren’t you?”
The infantry screen lasted longer than expected; longer than it takes to eat an apple, not quite as long as the time you need to bridle a horse. A quick glimpse out of the corner of his eye as they rode for the little gap on the left flank told him that the Vadani were fighting like heroes. He scowled; the timings were precise, and if they held the Mezentines up for too long, they could screw up everything.
“We’d better go now,” he shouted, not turning his head, hoping she could hear him.
He kicked the horse on. It was a big, sullen gelding, civilian rather than military but all he’d been able to find. It sidestepped, pulling hard on the reins. He slapped its rump with the flat of the hanger, and it bustled angrily forward. He felt the hanger slip out of his hand; his only weapon. Oh well.
“Come on,” he yelled, and gave the horse a savage kick in the ribs. He saw its neck rise up to smack his face, felt his balance shift and his left foot lose its stirrup. He hung for a moment, then knew he was falling backward over the horse’s rump. As he fell, he saw her fly past; then his shoulder hit the ground and his body filled with pain. He felt it take him over, driving every thought out of his head. Hoofs were landing all around him — his horse, the enemy, he neither knew nor cared. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
He heard a scream, assumed it was his own, realized it wasn’t. He opened his eyes and tried to move.
It didn’t hurt at first; he’d managed to prop himself up on one elbow before he made one slight movement too many and the pain flooded back. It took seven or eight heartbeats to subside.
Next to him, he could see now, lay a Mezentine. There was an arrow lodged in his temple; it had driven through the steel of his helmet but hadn’t managed to get much further, since Valens could see the tips of the barbs. Not deep enough, evidently, to kill outright; the man’s lips were moving, and his eyes were huge with enormous strain. For good measure his left leg was bent at the knee almost at right angles, the wrong way. That’ll have been the fall, Valens decided. Falling off horses can be bad for you.
It occurred to him to wonder who’d been here shooting arrows at the Mezentines.
Then he felt the thump of hoofs, jarring up through his elbow into the complicated mess of pain. Instinct made him turn his head a little, and though his shoulder punished him for it, he shifted a little further to get a better view.
A horseman. He was rising elegantly to the trot, an eight-foot lance couched in the crook of his elbow. He wore glossy brown scale armor — leather, not steel — from collar to ankles, and under a high, pointed conical helmet his face was as pale as milk. A bow and quiver lolled beside his right thigh, and his horse’s legs were short and thick. He came to a halt, stood up in his stirrups to look round, then slid into an easy, loping canter. Unmistakably, he was Cure Hardy.
27
The trial of Lucao Psellus before the Security Commission was a strangely muted affair. Given the nature and quality of the material, it should have been the showpiece of the autumn term. In the event, it was generally held to have been a botched, unsatisfactory affair which would have solved nothing, had it not been for the melodrama that followed it.
Partly, of course, the problem lay in the almost indecent haste with which it was conducted. None of the up-and-coming prosecutors had time to lobby for the brief, which was awarded to an elderly time-server by the name of Basano Philargyrus, who had previously specialized in minor default cases and undefended adulteries. Inevitably, the hearing was restricted; members of Necessary Evil and the Security Commission only. Even so, a few previews of some of the more sensational evidence would normally have been released through the usual channels. As it was, the only hard data to seep through was the charge itself, and that was so nebulously phrased as to be meaningless: neglect and dereliction of duty, unauthorized contact, failure to apprehend a fugitive. To a public desperate for some kind of reassurance after the disaster, it was too little, too grudgingly supplied. Worse, instead of making capital out of the general resentment, none of the opposition factions seemed prepared to take up the matter or even acknowledge that there was an issue.
The charge actually recited before the hearing (held, for reasons nobody could quite understand, in the cloister garden where Necessary Evil held their regular alfresco meetings) was somewhat more detailed:
That the accused, Lucao Psellus, had exceeded his authority in negotiation with the abominator Ziani Vaatzes; that in doing so, he had knowingly or inadvertently allowed Vaatzes to use him as his agent in designs against the Guilds and the Republic; that he had exercised insufficient care and diligence; that he had failed to report relevant information to the proper officers of the Commission …
“Which are grave enough charges, fellow Guildsmen, even when stated so plainly. The facts that underlie these charges, however, are infinitely more serious. For the avoidance of doubt, allow me to summarize as follows.”
Prosecutor Philargyrus hesitated for a moment, to wipe his forehead on the back of his hand and shift his weight to his other foot. Someone at the back of the group whispered to his neighbor that, if anything, the prosecutor looked more nervous than the accused.
“Under direct instructions from Commissioner Boioannes himself — which instructions are freely admitted; we shall be entering a full transcript into evidence at the discovery stage — Commissioner
Psellus traveled to the Vadani border in an attempt to open negotiations with the abominator. The extent of his authority was clearly defined; essentially, he was to offer such inducements as were necessary to deceive Vaatzes into returning of his own free will into territory under the control of the Republic. Any promises made to him would not be considered binding. Any information helpful to the Republic which Psellus could obtain from Vaatzes would be welcome, but was not of the essence of the mission. Commissioner Psellus has at no time claimed that he did not perfectly understand these instructions, and therefore they may be deemed to be undisputed evidence.”
On the back row, someone had started to fidget. This sort of solid, pedestrian opening summary might be all very well at defaulters’ sessions, but political juries had a right to expect daintier fare. It was almost as though someone was deliberately trying to make what should have been a thrilling occasion as dreary as possible. But who would do such a thing?
“Arriving at the border, Commissioner Psellus quickly established contact with Vaatzes and a face-to-face meeting was arranged. Note that, although having the resources to do so, Psellus neglected to inform your Commission of this development before the meeting took place. Having traveled to Civitas Vadanis, Commissioner Psellus found the city deserted. Again, note that he did not immediately retrace his steps and communicate this momentous fact to the military authorities, but proceeded to attend the meeting.”
Frowns in the second and third rows. These minor derelictions should have been left to the end, where they wouldn’t have cluttered up the flow.
“Now,” Philargyrus went on, his voice flat and only just audible, “we come to the meeting itself. For what took place we have only Commissioner Psellus’ own account; but that account, even if it represents a full and fair summary of what was said and done, constitutes in our view a clear admission of guilt as far as the charges are concerned. In brief, Commissioner Psellus and the convicted abominator Ziani Vaatzes together concocted a scheme to discredit the fugitive and war criminal Orsea Orseoli, former Duke of Eremia, in the eyes of the Vadani government. It was an elaborate, rather fanciful business, involving the fabrication of compromising documents, the suborning of a Vadani merchant venturer and her cold-blooded murder. As matters have turned out, it would appear to have been successful; and you may be tempted to credit Commissioner Psellus for exacting some kind of crude justice on an acknowledged and declared enemy of the Republic. Before doing so, however, we invite you to consider the real cost of the bargain.”