by K. J. Parker
“Carelessness,” Prexil said. “It’s just instinct, isn’t it? Someone lashes out at you, you raise your hand to protect your head. Of course, the first thing they teach you is, don’t do that, use your feet to get out of distance. And the first time in combat, what happens? Instinct takes over. Really, I’ve got nobody to blame but myself.”
Sweat dripped off his forehead into his eye. He pawed it away with the back of his wrist. “First time in combat.”
Prexil grinned. “I’m afraid so, yes. Strictly a parade-ground soldier, I’m ashamed to say. Like my father. Forty years in the service, never saw an arrow shot in anger.” He shook his head. “To be absolutely honest, I’ll be glad to be out of it. I always suspected I didn’t have what it takes.”
Daxin stared at him. Prexil had done everything: pulled the army together, figured out what had to be done, mostly from first principles, badgered and charmed and bullied forty thousand bewildered, terrified men and got them back on the march in good order, all in the space of a few hours. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “You can’t quit the service. First thing when we get back, I’m making you a general.”
“With respect—”
“No, I mean it. You’ve done an incredible job. You’ve single-handedly—” He stopped, horribly aware of what he’d just said. Maybe Prexil hadn’t noticed. “All on your own, you’ve saved the army. You’re obviously a natural leader.”
“With respect,” Prexil repeated firmly. “Let’s just wait and see how many of us are alive tomorrow before we start dishing out promotions. If that’s all right with you.”
Not just one dust cloud. Three.
Three clouds, sort of sandy grey: one dead ahead, one behind them, one over to the right. Impossible to say how far away, so Prexil sent out scouts. He didn’t know what to do. If they stepped up the pace, they’d be heading directly at the cloud in front of them. If they slowed down, the one behind would catch up. It was just possible that at least one of the clouds was a sandstorm, not an army. They’d know when the scouts got back. The scouts didn’t get back. They were slow, then late, then obviously not coming. Prexil sent out more.
“Really,” he said, for the fourth or fifth time, “we’ve got nothing to be afraid of. We’re forty thousand men, for pity’s sake. They’re the ones who should be scared.”
Every time he said it, Daxin found it harder to be comforted. There was still enough water, and the men were making good progress, twenty-five miles a day, excellent going in these conditions. Prexil had worked out impressive new protocols for sentries and what to do in the event of another night attack. They’d run drills, and the responses had been first class. In theory, the army was in optimum fighting condition. It was also so brittle with fear that one reverse, one minor calamity, would wreck everything.
That afternoon, Captain Mesajer of the auxiliary cavalry joined them at the head of the column and rode with them for an hour. Daxin had an idea that Prexil had sent for him, though neither of them said as much. Mesajer was a short, slight man with thinning hair, somewhere in his early thirties. He wore the usual tribesman’s quilted coat, long-sleeved and ankle-length. If he was sweating, it didn’t show. The only thing about him that might suggest he was a soldier was the beautiful red lacquer bow case, hanging from his saddle by an elaborately knotted silk rope, with tassels. Mostly they talked about desert geography, although Mesajer came from the grassy plains, two hundred miles to the north. He came across as a quiet man, extremely intelligent, exceptionally observant; softly spoken, precise, very polite.
“Excuse me,” Daxin said—they’d been talking about mirages. “I can’t help noticing, you don’t wear a hat.”
Mesajer looked mildly amused. “Sorry,” he said. “I can wear one if you like.”
“But the heat—”
“Oh yes.” Mesajer nodded gravely. “It’s very important to keep your head covered in the hot weather.”
Daxin was too overcome to contribute much to the conversation after that; Prexil asked a few questions about how the cavalry were bearing up, to which Mesajer gave positive but uninformative replies. Then he said something about duty rosters and rode back down the column.
“I don’t know,” Prexil said, after a long silence. “I simply don’t know.”
Daxin looked at him. “What?”
“Whether they’ll stick with us or go over to the enemy,” Prexil replied. “You never know where you are with those people. One minute you’re talking about the weather or some play you both saw in town, next minute they’re coming at you with butcher knives. It’s so difficult to tell what they’re really thinking.”
Daxin found that rather disturbing, on several levels. “What makes you think they’ll go over to the enemy?”
“They’ve got so much more in common with them than with us,” Prexil replied. “And they’ve never really liked us much, let’s face it. After all, we conquered their country.”
“Hundreds of years ago.”
“I don’t think that matters. I think they’d turn on us in an instant if the mood took them.”
“I don’t,” Daxin said firmly. “I’m really glad we’ve got them with us. As far as I can see, they’re our best bet for beating off an attack.”
Prexil gave him a startled look. “Ixion didn’t think so,” he said. “His idea was to keep them well out on the wings and away from the action. He figured that if they weren’t called on to choose between us and their desert cousins, there’d be less chance of them actually defecting. They’d just sort of watch and see who won.”
“Ixion said that?”
“Oh yes. And he was a great admirer of the cavalry. I mean, look at the late charge at Farnaxa.”
Daxin decided not to show his ignorance. “Well,” he said, “there you are. The cavalry’s always fought well for the Kingdom.”
“Against other enemies,” Prexil said. “I mean, it’s perfectly understandable. How would you feel if someone ordered you to kill your own blood relations?”
“You never knew my aunt Loxor.”
That got a wan smile, which was probably all it deserved. “Seriously,” Prexil said. “We do need to be very careful with these people. Trouble is, what do you do? Can’t send them away or they almost certainly will defect; can’t keep them close in case they stab us in the back.”
“That doesn’t leave many options,” Daxin said. “Unless you cut their throats here and now.”
“The thought had occurred to me.”
Daxin looked away so that Prexil wouldn’t see the shock on his face. He’d meant it. “I don’t think we need go that far,” he said.
“It’s the practicalities more than anything,” Prexil replied. “How exactly do you go about slaughtering two thousand horsemen in cold blood in the middle of the desert?”
All three dust clouds were still there as the sun set, and no scouts had returned. Prexil hadn’t said anything; nor had he sent out more scouts. The soldiers moved to their night attack positions without waiting for orders. There was a general air of bewilderment, as if nobody could quite understand how it had come to this. Shortly before midnight, Prexil had a blazing row with the engineer—something technical, about fascines and enfilading fire. Daxin wanted to get between them and stop it, but they were so angry he was afraid they’d hit him for interrupting. Prexil ordered the engineer confined to his tent. The engineer refused to go. Prexil yelled for the guard, who stood and did nothing, whereupon Prexil stormed off into the darkness, leaving the engineer swearing at him at the top of his voice. Then he went back to what he’d been doing, and nobody spoke.
A watch before dawn there was a sudden commotion on the far western edge of the camp. A thousand men of the mobile reserve ran across in full armour. When they got there, there was nothing to see, and the sentries swore blind they hadn’t seen anything.
Dawn came, and after that, the heat. Nobody had got any sleep. It took considerably longer than usual to pack away the tents and break camp, and the sun wa
s high before they eventually got moving. Prexil wanted to up the pace, to make up time. The junior officers tried to argue with him, and he started shouting about insubordination and courts martial. The orders were given. The pace slowed down a little, if anything. The dust clouds were still there.
“They’re too scared of us to attack,” Prexil said. “They know there’s absolutely nothing they can do, so they’re just tagging along, keeping station. Pretty soon they’ll give up and go away.”
Daxin had been looking at a map. He’d found it in Ixion’s tent, and nobody had seemed to want it for anything. He’d been over it many times, not sure if he was interpreting the symbols correctly; a light blue dot was water, wasn’t it, and if he’d calculated the scale correctly and if he was holding the damn thing the right way up, the three enemy units hadn’t been anywhere near water for a long time. He wondered what that meant. But it was safe to assume that Prexil had all the relevant information and knew the answer, and as things stood he didn’t feel like raising the issue with him.
A scout came back; just one, on a horse without saddle or bridle or shoes. He was from the second group, and they’d got up as close as they dared to the dust cloud directly behind the column. From six hundred yards away, it looked like an ordinary trading caravan. They closed in to three hundred yards: about ninety pack horses, fifteen camels, thirty-odd men walking, five women on horseback, a small flock of sheep. The scouts withdrew, taking care not to be seen, and started to ride back to the column. After an hour or so, one of them said something like, that’s a pretty small caravan to kick up that much dust. The others said no, not really, and we ought to be getting on; we haven’t got much water left. So they rode on a bit further, and the scout who’d made the fuss started up again; look, he said, the cloud’s bigger than it was, a lot bigger. Don’t be stupid, the others said, you’re imagining it. I’ll go back and take a look, said the difficult scout. Please yourself, the others said, we aren’t going to wait for you.
He rode away, and the others cursed him and decided they’d better wait; they dismounted and sat in the shadows of their horses, and someone got out a pack of cards. They’d played four hands, and then one of the scouts fell forward, like he’d gone to sleep, but he’d been shot in the back. They all jumped up; all but one tried to get on their horses and were shot. One, the survivor, just ran. Arrows passed him—he said it was like one time when he’d put his foot in a hornets’ nest, and the hornets had chased him half a mile—but he kept running until he was out of range, and didn’t look back. He guessed they didn’t bother chasing him, since without a horse or water he’d be dead in a few hours. He never saw the men who’d shot at them. He ran until he fell over, and then he was too exhausted to move, and he just lay there until it got dark, and in the night he very nearly froze to death—it was like there was an open door, he said, and all I had to do was take a few steps more and go through; I wasn’t all that bothered, but I thought, no, not yet. At sunrise he got up and started to walk, slowly, no idea which direction, until it got hot. Then he must’ve collapsed and passed out, because he could remember waking up and there was this horse standing over him, shading him from the sun. Good caravan horses learn to do that, the scout said. He had no idea where the horse had come from. It held perfectly still while he scrambled up on its back; then he looked round for the dust clouds and headed for the biggest. He was pretty certain he’d die of thirst anyway. He got light-headed and stopped trying to guide the horse; just as well, because he dozed off and woke up, and there in front of him was a pan of filthy water about twenty yards across, with some rocky outcrops and a few scrubby thorn bushes round it, and a huge broad mess of footprints to show that a lot of people had been that way quite recently. Either the horse had smelt the water or it was used to coming that way. There was nobody to be seen anywhere. He drank too much and was violently ill, which wasted a lot of time. Then he aimed the horse at the biggest dust cloud, and that was about it, really.
Prexil didn’t believe him, and put him under close arrest. “He’s a tribesman,” he said, which was true enough; regular cavalry, ten years’ service. “And you don’t just find horses in the middle of the desert. Obviously, he’s a spy. I’ll see to it he’s tried and hanged when we get back.”
Daxen didn’t argue, because there was no point; but he couldn’t see it himself. A lot of trouble to go to, he felt, to disseminate misinformation that couldn’t possibly benefit the enemy. He decided the scout was telling the truth, in which case the enemy were clever, paid close attention to detail and knew about water that wasn’t on the map. But he’d more or less figured that out already. He was getting more and more worried about Prexil, who was having to shout and scream to get anything done, even straightforward, routine things. He thought about relieving him of command, but there wasn’t anyone else; the engineer was more or less in hiding, and the junior officers didn’t inspire confidence. That said, the column was making tolerable progress; Prexil had cut the water ration by a fifth, which was just about tolerable and meant they should have enough to get home comfortably. The dust clouds were neither closer nor further away. Nothing is actually happening, Daxen thought, which is really very strange.
“That shouldn’t be there,” a junior officer said. He was looking at the flat-topped blob of rock that had suddenly appeared on the skyline dead ahead of them. It hadn’t been there yesterday, and it wasn’t on the map. It was as though someone had neatly cut down a mountain and left the stump.
Another officer explained. Although the gradient was so gentle it was easy not to notice it, they’d been going uphill for two days now. They’d just reached the top of the rise, which had hidden the mountain, or whatever you wanted to call it. Hardly surprising it wasn’t on the map, because the surveyors had stuck to the military road, which was over there (vague gesture) and considerably higher up. You wouldn’t see the mountain unless you left the road and came quite some way over; and even if you did, from a distance it’d just look like a big sand dune or something. Anyway, it didn’t matter. It was just a lump of rock.
Prexil didn’t like it at all. He didn’t like the way it had reared up out of nowhere, like a predator lying in ambush. You could hide a huge army behind a thing like that, and nobody would be any the wiser until it was far too late. Daxen wanted to point out that in order to hide an army you’d have to get it there first; they’d have seen the dust cloud, and the three clouds were still exactly where they’d always been—unless you’d sent it on ahead weeks ago, in which case the army would have died of thirst long since; unless there was a well on the rock somewhere—did you get wells on flat-topped mountains? He had no idea—and in any case, that would presuppose that the enemy had known for quite some time that they’d be coming this way, which was impossible. He made himself stop thinking about it. He had an uncomfortable feeling he was starting to think, and sound, like Prexil.
They gave the mountain a very wide berth, heading east, back towards the military road. The change of course had a significant effect on Prexil, as though he’d just won something, or figured out a deeply laid plot against him. He started smiling again, and didn’t shout nearly as much, and the junior officers did what they were told without the awkward silences. “In fact,” Prexil said, “we might as well go the whole hog and get back on the road for the last leg of the journey. We could water at a way station, which would be wonderful. Clearly they’re not going to attack us now. They’ve had their chance, God knows.”
It was hard to argue with the logic of that, and Daxen made a point of agreeing with him; the road would solve a lot of problems, and they could hardly be at greater risk there than out here in the middle of the desert. He suggested sending scouts ahead, but Prexil only smiled. “They’re not going to attack,” he said. “Where’s the point?”
Three days later, they found the road. It was a wonderful thing; something human and artificial in the middle of the desert. He made a point of appreciating it for the achievement it was. Dead stra
ight; a five-foot-high embankment, twenty yards wide; the bed of the road was compacted rubble, levelled and paved with flat slabs of stone precisely two feet square. It had been built by the empire, long before the civil war. It was the sort of thing a god might make, if the gods ever did anything useful.
Prexil showed him the way stations on the map. “We’re somewhere here,” he said, stabbing at an area an inch wide. “So, at the very worst, we’re no more than a couple of days from the nearest station, which is this one here. It’s not manned, of course, but there’ll be a water tank, and shade for a day while we have a breather and pull ourselves together. There may even be fodder for the horses, which would be just as well; we’re getting low. Or the savages may have stolen it; you just don’t know.”
The enemy had become the savages; a recent development, ever since the decision to head for the road. It wasn’t the word Daxen would have chosen. The enemy were clearly intelligent, sophisticated, patient, realistic, organised, all sorts of things that savages aren’t. They’d seen Prexil’s scouts and sent out the fake caravan to distract them, even had the wit to halt their advance until the scouts had been dealt with so there’d only be one dust cloud. On balance, he figured they’d been wise not to attack the column, even though their night raid had been so successful; wise also not to repeat it, correctly assuming that if they came again they’d find themselves up against men who were drilled and ready. Instead, they’d left the army to worry and lose sleep. It was mere chance that the sawn-off mountain had prompted Prexil to make for the road, but Daxen had his own ideas about that. A large body of men moving along the road would raise no dust; they’d be invisible until they actually appeared, and one thing they could reasonably assume about the enemy was that they had a healthy respect for the element of surprise. If they marched up the road by night, then got off the road and laid up still and quiet during the day—cavalry, of course, who could make up ground so much faster than men on foot. It’s what I’d do, Daxen reflected, not that that meant a great deal. Still, he was inclined to wonder if it had been simple bad luck that Ixion and his staff had been killed in the night raid. Ixion had been determined to avoid the road, and yet here they were, walking cheerfully down it as though they were off to town to buy olives.