The Proof House Part 28

Someone was hammering at the door; he stood up, brushing away crumbs, and answered it. There were two soldiers standing in the doorway, and a clerk.

'Doctor Gannadius?'

'That's me.'

'The sub-prefect's compliments,' the clerk said, 'and he thought you might be interested to know there's been an unscheduled arrival, a ship from Shastel. It was blown off-course and put in here. The sub-prefect has asked them to hold over until tomorrow morning so they can carry some letters for him, and he thought you might like a berth on it.'

'That's very thoughtful of him,' Gannadius said. 'I'd like that very much. What's the ship called?'

'The Poverty and Forbearance; the master's name is Hido Elan, and it's down on the Drutz. They've agreed to take you home for free, as a gesture of goodwill.'

'Goodwill,' Gannadius repeated. 'Well, isn't everybody being kind to me today.'

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Colonel Ispel, in command of the provincial office's expeditionary force against Perimadeia, made an undisputed landfall and sent out his scouts. When they returned, they reported no sign of the enemy in any direction. Ispel pitched camp on the site of Temrai's recently abandoned settlement, spread out the maps on the floor of his tent and did his homework.

Because the enemy had abandoned their position and moved off inland, the reason for launching the offensive this way had become obsolete before he'd even embarked. Nevertherless, his situation was strong; he had just over fifty thousand men in arms, made up of twenty thousand heavy infantry, four thousand cavalry, sixteen thousand light infantry and ten-thousand-and-something archers, artillerymen, pioneers and irregular skirmishers. He left two thousand of the least useful irregulars to keep the crews of his ships from slipping away - they were, after all, Islanders, no threat but entirely untrustworthy - and set out with the main army to follow in Temrai's footsteps. In addition to the fighting men, he had a large but not unwieldy baggage and supply train, with enough supplies to see the army clear across the plains and back into Imperial territory - one thing he knew for sure about this country was that living off it was out of the question. Such a large enc.u.mbrance would obviously slow down the progress of his main force, but he resisted the temptation to send his cavalry too far ahead. The clans were extremely competent light cavalry and horse-archers, and what he'd read about them suggested that they would enjoy nothing more than an opportunity to hara.s.s a slow-moving column unprotected by cavalry, to the point where momentum broke down and the advance ground to a halt. Besides, he was in no great hurry; intelligence reports from Captain Loredan's army suggested that Temrai had dug in on top of some hill and was waiting for the end. If that was true, the only way this war could be lost was by making a stupid mistake, and he'd be far more likely to do that if he rushed blindly ahead into barren and largely unknown territory.

The plains turned out to be unlike any other country he'd served in. He'd fought in swamps and deserts and mountains, in h.e.l.l and in paradise, in bleaching sun and driving snow, but this was the first time he'd had to march across a landscape that was utterly, painfully boring. It wasn't called the plains for nothing; once he'd left behind the little fringe of mountains that overlooked Perimadeia itself, there was nothing on either side but flat land covered in coa.r.s.e, fat blue-green couch-gra.s.s for as far as the eye could see. Not that boring was necessarily a bad thing; in country this open an ambush was effectively impossible, and provided they kept to the road, they would be able to make extremely good progress. Off the road, of course, it was a different matter; the ubiquitous couch tended to grow in little tussocks about the size of a man's head, and trying to march an army across country would be courting disaster. Apart from the substantial monetary cost of keeping an army in the field (twenty thousand gold quarters a week), he wasn't facing any problems that called for forced marches and flying columns. The only niggling fear in the back of his mind was that Captain Loredan might have finished the job before he arrived, leaving him and his men with nothing to look forward to except a long, dull march home.

Nevertheless, he kept to standard operating procedures, just in case. Each morning he sent out scouts, in all directions except one, and every evening they came back with nothing to report. Every night he stationed sentries around the camp and pickets out in the open, so that he'd have plenty of warning if the enemy did somehow materialise and try a night attack.

The only direction he didn't probe with scouts was, of course, the one he'd just come from, and so the first he knew about the raiding party that had been following him all the way from the coast, riding at night and laying up during the day with sacks over their armour and weapons to stop them flashing in the sun, was a sudden explosion of activity at the one time of day when an Imperial army on the march was ever truly vulnerable: dinner-time.

It was, of course, the perfect time to attack. It was dark; the men were out of their armour, standing in line at the cookhouses; the pickets weren't in place yet and by the time the enemy rode down the sentries it was too late to raise the alarm. Quite suddenly there were armed hors.e.m.e.n inside the circle of firelight, galloping down the food lines slashing at hands and faces with their scimitars, spearing anybody who broke line and ran. The men who'd already got their food dropped their plates and cups and tried to get to the weapons stacks, but the hors.e.m.e.n kept pouring in, one unit crashing through the tents, another running off the cavalry horses, another rounding up the men in the queues like wild ponies in the autumn and driving them towards yet another unit, which surged forward to meet them. Ispel himself blundered out of his tent with his napkin still tucked in his collar, his sword-hilt tied to the mounts of the scabbard (to stop it falling out); by the time he'd picked out the knots there were hors.e.m.e.n in his street of tents, cutting guy-ropes and prodding the fallen heaps of canvas with long, narrow-bladed lances. He looked round and saw a gap in the line of tents which would let him through to the light-infantry camp, where the archers were quartered; archers and skirmishers, men who didn't fight in armour, were more likely to be able to cope with a sudden disaster like this. He plunged through and came out in the main thoroughfare of the light quarter, only to find it empty except for hors.e.m.e.n; the skirmishers, archers and mobile auxiliaries had used their mobility and quick reaction time to get out of the danger area and away from the camp and the sharp edges of the scimitars, and it was a sure thing that they weren't going to be coming back until it was safe.

Three hors.e.m.e.n saw him simultaneously; obviously they'd recognised him, which spoke highly of their intelligence work. Two of them dragged their horses round, making them turn almost on the spot, but it was the third man, who calmly put an arrow on his bowstring, aimed and loosed, who got the most coveted prize of the evening; the small three-bladed bodkinhead nuzzled between his ribs, through his lung and would have made it out the other side if it hadn't jarred against his spine. When they saw where he'd been hit, the other two hors.e.m.e.n let him lie; he'd keep, and there was plenty for everybody.

Ispel died in a sort of dream, slowly, as his lungs filled with blood. It was maddening to have to lie there and die - he couldn't move at all, even to turn his head - without knowing what was going on, exactly how much damage the raiders were doing to his army. When he could no longer see, he tried to keep track of what was happening by the noises; there was a lot of shouting and yelling, but whether it was his officers calling out words of command as they rallied the men, or just the inarticulate noises of the terrified and dying, he simply couldn't tell. Just as he was certain he could make out at least one coherent voice giving orders, a plainsman jumped out of the saddle and cut off his head; it took him five blows before he was through the bone, and Ispel felt them all.

In fact, he'd been mistaken; the voice he'd heard calling out commands was that of the leader of the raiding party, a distant cousin of Temrai's by the name of Sildocai, and he was trying to call off the attack before they pushed their luck too far. n.o.body appeared to be taking any notice, however, and it didn't seem to matter; as soon as the enemy made any attempt at rallying or forming a coherent group, a party of hors.e.m.e.n was on top of them, cutting and prodding where the bodies were most closely packed together, until the blockage in the flow was cleared. It was, the raiders said later, like Perimadeia all over again; the few who tried to fight were killed quite early, and after that it was like chopping through brambles, hard work, heavy on the shoulders, arms and back. But they stuck at their work and cleared a lot of ground, and as the job wore on they got better at it, worked out the most efficient cuts and angles - waste of effort to slash away wildly at arms and legs; one carefully aimed blow to the head or neck gets it done, and don't hit harder than you have to, no point in wearing yourself out; try to get a rhythm going, it's easier that way.

In the end, the attack was only broken off because of a silly misunderstanding. The cavalry horses, driven off at the beginning of the engagement, stampeded off into the couch-gra.s.s and stayed there for a while; but couch-gra.s.s didn't make good eating, being coa.r.s.e and bitter, and they were getting hungry. Being used to moving together they headed back towards the camp in a herd, and when they were quite close a plains horse that had lost its rider blundered into them at the gallop and spooked them, sending them stampeding towards the light. A couple of raiders at the edge of the camp heard the thudding of hooves and a.s.sumed that it meant enemy cavalry; they raised the alarm and got out of the way, and within a few minutes the attack was over, although the Imperial army didn't realise until a while after they'd all gone.

It was one of the heaviest defeats ever inflicted on the Imperial army; fewer than four thousand killed outright in the raid (two thousand of them officers and sergeants), but over twenty thousand wounded, most of them slashed about the head and shoulders, losing too much blood from scalp and neck wounds. It was a long time before the NCOs could find an officer fit enough to take command, since the officers dined in separate messes in grander tents, and the raiders had found them quite easily. They'd also run off or killed most of the draught horses that pulled the supply wagons, and that was what caused most of the deaths.

Given a choice between carrying supplies or carrying their friends who were too badly cut up to walk, the soldiers decided to dump most of the provisions, on the grounds that they weren't too far from the ships and they'd have to make do until they reached them. With so many officers and NCOs dead, there was n.o.body to tell them otherwise; so, when the raiders came back the next day and attacked the column as it crawled back along its tracks, they met with only marginally more resistance than they had during the night. But what they did encounter was enough to persuade them against closing with the sword and the spear; instead, they held off at medium range and shot from the saddle, not the most efficient method in the short term, but extremely cost-effective as regards the casualty ratio. What was left of the imperial cavalry tried to shoo them away, but they didn't last long; there were only a few hundred horses among nearly four thousand men, and a horse is a large target. As for the light infantry and archers, whose job it ought to have been to swat flies in these circ.u.mstances, they'd made a serious error of judgement when they a.s.sumed that leaving the camp and plunging into the darkness was a safer option than staying put. It was the tussocks of couch-gra.s.s that did for them; they stumbled and fell, with twisted ankles and sprained knees, so that by the time Sildocai found them and put a cordon of archers round them, they'd more or less ground to a halt, sprawled on the gra.s.s and unwilling or unable to go any further. Most of them died where they lay, and the rest were pruned back later the next day.

Of the fifty thousand who disembarked from the ships, fifteen thousand made it back, with Sildocai's men coming down to the coast to see them on their way; of the other thirty-five thousand, at least half were left behind in the empty plains; Sildocai went home, the fleet sailed back to the Island, and there was, as Ispel had so acutely observed, very little to eat on the plains, if you had the misfortune not to be a goat.

Sildocai attributed his victory to a souvenir he'd picked up in the sack of Perimadeia; it was a small book, ent.i.tled The Use Of Cavalry In Extended Campaigns In Open Country, by Suidas Bessemin; one of the few City military historians ever to study in detail the campaigns of the ill.u.s.trious Perimadeian cavalry commander, Bardas Maxen.

The prefect of Ap' Escatoy heard the news from the fastest, most experienced courier in the Imperial messenger corps, who left the island twenty minutes after the first ship landed. The prefect took the news calmly; having personally seen to it that the messenger was given the fastest horse in the cavalry stables for his journey to the provincial office in Rhoezen, he called for jasmin tea and honey-cakes, sent for his advisers, and sat down for a long day and night of sensible, hard-headed planning.

Bardas Loredan heard the news from the army courier sent out by the sub-prefect of the Island three hours after the news broke there. He had to be told the story three times; then he sent everybody away and sat in the dark all night. When he finally came out, he didn't seem unduly worried or upset; he gave orders to step up the pace of the advance and post extra scouts and pickets.

Gorgas Loredan heard the news from his man in the Shastel proctors' office, who made sure the official courier took a detour on his way south with the commercial dispatches. After he'd seen the courier, Gorgas took the big axe, which he'd had to put a new handle on himself, and spent the morning in the woodshed, splitting logs. Then he sent out three messengers of his own; one to the Island, with lugubrious condolences and offers of a.s.sistance; a second also to the Island, accompanied by a party of fifty or so ferocious-looking men whose letters of transit identified them as trade negotiators; and a third, the best man he had left, towards Temrai's camp at the far end of the plains.

Temrai himself heard the news from Sildocai, as the raiding party returned home at record speed, even faster than the Imperial post-coach. He said 'How many?' and shook his head when the figures were repeated. Then he went back to supervising the reinforcement of the inner gates, and was in a foul mood for the rest of the day.

The provincial governor heard the news on the morning of his eldest daughter's fourteenth birthday. He immediately cancelled all the scheduled celebrations, as was only fitting in the circ.u.mstances, and wrote a long letter to the prefect of Ap' Escatoy expressing his sympathy, his support, his unwavering confidence and his profound disgust, promising a new army of a hundred and fifty thousand infantry, sixty thousand cavalry and genuine artillery support, to be despatched within two months, and enquiring politely after a silk painting by Marjent which the prefect had promised to send him a month ago, but which didn't seem to have arrived yet. He then wrote another letter to the office of central administration, eight weeks' ride away in Kozin province, asking whether the prefect should be put on trial, merely replaced, or left where he was. Finally, being a kind-hearted man, he rescheduled his daughter's birthday by having the provincial astronomer-general insert into the calendar a special non-recurring intercalary month, to be named Loss-and-Reaffirmation, starting at midnight on the day the news reached him. It was generally agreed to be a particularly elegant and thoughtful gesture, and there was some talk of making it permanent.

Gannadius heard the news at dinner the day before the ships reached the Island; a survivor of the Imperial light infantry, striking out on his own for the coast, had lost his way and strayed north, where he ran into a party of Shastel commercial messengers returning home with important news about likely developments in the spot-market price of Bustrofidon copper. Because their message was so urgent, they'd taken the risk of riding overland through the war zone, and their first instinct on seeing an Imperial soldier running up the road towards them was either to shoot him or run away. When they realised what they'd stumbled across, however, they speeded up even more (they had to leave the soldier behind, not having any spare horses) and were thus able to bring the news to the Citadel before the close of that day's trading; an act of heroism on their part that paid dividends for the Order's commercial arm. Gannadius himself didn't seem unduly surprised by the news; it was almost, his colleagues at High Table whispered after he'd gone to bed, as if he'd already heard about it from somewhere else. This greatly increased their respect for and resentment of the Perimadeian scholar and suspected wizard, who carried on with his daily routine as if nothing had happened.

When the news reached Voesin province, it sparked off a minor revolt in that already unsettled and unreliable corner of the Empire. A man appeared out of nowhere in the town square in Rezlain on market day, announcing that he was G.o.d's chosen envoy, sent to lead the people out of slavery, and dragging along with him a startled and apparently half-witted young man who turned out to be the last descendant of the former royal house of Voesin. About six thousand people straggled into the rebel camp before the cavalry arrived; although a third of them were women, old men or boys, they managed to hold out for six days, until a full company of artillery was brought up from Ap' Betnagur and the camp was buried under a mountain of seventy-pound trebuchet shot.

The detainees in the Auzeil house were probably among the last people on the Island to hear the news, which arrived in the early hours of the morning in the form of a bench, borrowed from outside the Faith and Integrity four doors down the alley, and which smashed a panel out of Venart's front door. The soldiers on duty scrambled out of their bivouac in the courtyard to investigate; but by that time the door was open and a dozen armed men were in the hallway. What followed wasn't a fight in any realistic sense; one soldier made it halfway up the main staircase before an arrow between the shoulders brought him down again, b.u.mp-b.u.mp-b.u.mp on his face, but otherwise it was all very controlled and efficient.

They found Venart hiding under his bed ('I told you that'd be the first place they'd look,' Vetriz commented as they hauled him out; she hadn't done much better, ducking behind the curtains) and told him that he was now the new leader of the Island resistance army, which was poised to retake the city and drive the enemy into the sea.

'Who the h.e.l.l are you?' Venart demanded, trying in vain to tug his collar out of the grip of the man who'd thus hailed him. 'And what the h.e.l.l do you think you're doing?'

The man grinned. 'We're your allies,' he replied. 'Gorgas Loredan sent us to rescue you. Look sharp, the glorious revolution can't hang about while you put your socks on.'

'Gorgas Loredan?' Venart managed to say, before they bustled him out of the house. Meanwhile, another of the liberators had caught Eseutz Mesatges trying to shin down a drainpipe, and brought her out too. 'Ask her,' the squad leader went on, 'she was one of the people he talked to when they had the meeting.'

'Eseutz?' Venart looked mystified. 'What meeting?' Eseutz was struggling to get dressed (she'd grabbed the first thing that came to hand when she heard the door being smashed in; unfortunately it was the warrior-princess outfit, which properly speaking needed the help of a strong maidservant to get into). 'I don't know what he's talking about,' she said.

'You're lying,' Venart replied. 'For G.o.ds' sakes, stop fooling about and tell me, what's been going on?'

'All right,' Eseutz admitted angrily, straining to reach a stray shoulder-strap that was dangling out of reach behind her back. 'Yes, I did meet Gorgas b.l.o.o.d.y Loredan; he was going around saying we should stick the provincial office for more money for the ships.'

'It was his idea?'

'I suppose so,' Eseutz said. 'Anyway, he was suggesting it to everybody in the Ship-Owners' who'd listen. G.o.ds only know why.'

Venart shook his head. No, he couldn't make sense of any of it, but he had an uncomfortable feeling that there was sense in there somewhere, only he wasn't devious enough to understand it. 'So it was his fault,' he said, 'all this - the occupation and everything. Because he was stirring up trouble.'

'Give yourselves some credit,' the squad leader interrupted. 'Mostly it was you people's fault, because you're greedy and very, very stupid. But yes, Gorgas planted the idea in your pathetic little heads; and now that the army's been wiped out, he's going to help you get out of it again.'

Eseutz grabbed his arm. 'What do you mean,' she said, 'the army's been wiped out?'

'You haven't heard?' The squad leader laughed. 'You've got King Temrai to thank for your freedom,' he said. 'I'm amazed you don't know. There's been riots in the streets here pretty well non-stop the last two days, and the sub-prefect can't do anything about it, not with half his garrison all cut up from the battle and the other half on permanent guard to keep the ships from sailing away.' He nudged Venart painfully in the ribs and grinned. 'You'd better get a move on, ill.u.s.trious leader, or you'll be late for your own revolution.'

'What do you mean,' Eseutz repeated, 'wiped out? That's impossible.'

'Wiped out. Forty thousand dead. Caught 'em on the plains and cut 'em to ribbons. I must say, I never knew they had it in 'em. I mean, taking Perimadeia, yes; but my old granny and her cat could've done that. Knocking off an Imperial army, though - that takes some doing.' He looked up; his men had found Athli and brought her out too. 'Makes four,' he said, 'right, that'll do. We'll head for the Faussa warehouse; there's ten thousand quarters' worth of halberds and partisans in there that old man Faussa somehow forgot to mention to the sub-prefect when they were doing the confiscations. Once we get that lot out on the street, things'll really start to happen.'

To Venart Auzeil it all looked worryingly familiar; he'd been in Perimadeia on the night of the Fall, and the sight of armed men running in the streets was something he found highly evocative. But he told himself that these were our armed men; and it was true enough, you only had to look closely at them to see they'd never handled a weapon before in their lives. But a poleaxe or a bardische isn't like a harp or a jeweller's lathe; you don't have to be terribly good at it to make it work in some fashion, and when the enemy aren't standing to face you, some fashion is good enough.

Apart from a few desultory foot patrols and the sentries posted outside some buildings, there weren't any soldiers to be seen. According to the squad leader, they were all either barricaded into the Merchant Venturers' Hall or crowded on to the ships down on the Drutz. Venart didn't like the sound of that.

'We can't just leave them there,' he said. 'How are we going to get them out?'

The squad leader smiled and picked a lantern off a wall-sconce outside a tavern. 'Easy,' he said. 'Watch and learn.'

The crowd surrounding the Merchant Venturers' was large and noisy, but standing back a respectful distance after the Imperial archers had given them a demonstration of the effective range of an issue crossbow - ('Lucky for us,' the squad leader pointed out. 'They sent all the longbowmen with the army, and they didn't come back; all they've got here are crossbows, and they can only shoot once every three minutes.') - But the sheer number of them was what impressed Venart the most. He hadn't imagined that his fellow countrymen would be so quick and so eager to risk their lives for their liberty. On the other hand, it wasn't as if they had anything to lose.

'They're in there all right,' someone reported to the squad leader; another of Gorgas' men, presumably, since Venart had never seen him before, and he looked too fierce to be an Islander. 'Did you find any oil?'

The squad leader shook his head. 'Don't need any,' he replied. 'All right, sort out a cordon; I want halberds and poleaxes in the front two ranks, axes and hammers behind. Keep 'em well back; for one thing, this is going to burn hot.'

He was right; oil or pitch or sulphur would have been redundant. As soon as the first few torches pitched in the thatch, the Merchant Venturers' burst into flames like a beacon, lighting up a circle as bright as noon as far as the buildings on the other side of the square. The Islanders were shocked to see it go up; for a hundred years it had been a source of civic concern to make sure the thatch didn't catch fire, and setting it alight on purpose would never have occurred to them.

For what seemed like an impossibly long time nothing happened, and Venart found himself wondering if the Imperials were in there, standing to attention as they burned to death at their posts - from what he'd seen of them, he wouldn't put it past them. Then the front and side doors seemed to explode outwards and the soldiers came pouring into the light, their armour and helmets dazzling; it was like watching molten metal glowing white as it runs from the crucible into the mould, and Venart couldn't see any way it might be stopped, not by his fellow citizens and a few spikes on long sticks. He didn't want to watch, he could feel his skin crawling at the thought of cutting edges on bare skin, but it happened too quickly for him to look away in time. At first, the fiery bright ram crashed into the line of points and rode it down; but the ma.s.s of bodies behind soaked up the momentum, as the soft padding inside the armour absorbs the blow; the charge slowed and came to a stop, cooling, solidifying into individual men; at which point Venart saw that the outcome was inevitable. Herded together, without room to swing their weapons, the soldiers were crushed down, like an egg in a man's fist - the brittle sh.e.l.l, the armour, not standing up to the soft pressure all around it, not coming up to this level of proof. They were pulled down, their helmets ripped off; they were bashed down with hammers and axes and spades, mattocks and bidels, until all the shining steel shapes were crumpled into a heap of sc.r.a.p lying on the ground, under the feet of the people. When it was over, there was a long silence.

So that's that, Venart thought; and as the crowd surged away from the circle of light and down the hill towards the Drutz, he wondered how this strange creature, this soft and flexible anvil, had been subdued so easily in the first place, when the soldiers first came out on to the streets and the notice of annexation was pinned to the door. It was still there, or at least strips of it were, burning fast and turning into soft ash, but everything else seemed to have changed, and he couldn't quite work out what had made all the difference. But then he looked sideways at the squad leader, Gorgas' carefully selected emissary, signalling to his men at the edges of the crowd, effortlessly directing the mob; the Loredan touch, he said to himself; of course, it makes all the difference.

Lieutenant Menas Onasin, in command of the army because everybody else was dead, looked back over his shoulder at the sea. Here we are, then, he thought. We can die on our feet, or we can drown. Spoiled for choice, really.

They were throwing stones; big, jagged stones, chunks of pavement, arms and heads smashed off the statues that lined Drutz Promenade. The man standing next to him in the line had been killed by a marble head, a bizarre way to die, with undesirable overtones of comedy. Having no archers to return fire, he had no option but to stand and take it; he'd tried charging the mob five times, and each time he'd led out a company and brought back a platoon. It was like fighting the sea, or a sandstorm.

His princ.i.p.al mistake had been leaving the cover of the ships in the first place. At the time it had seemed like the sensible thing to do; ships, like thatched buildings, are inflammable, and he hadn't relished the prospect of fighting on two fronts (the mob on land, the mutinous crews below decks) while trapped between fire above his head and water under his feet. Face them on dry land, he'd told himself, where we can at least stand up straight and use our weapons.

Someone had set up one of the light trebuchets they'd mounted on the forecastles of the ships and was loosing off ranging shots; the first stone fell short, nearly creaming the front row of the mob, the second, third and fourth had gone splash in the water. If the man behind the arm was being at all methodical in his approach, number five was due to pitch into the exact centre of the army, and there was nothing that Lieutenant Onasin could do about it. It was like old times, standing still while quick learners lobbed rocks at his head; he was a Perimadeian, a refugee from the Fall, and he'd learned everything he knew about motionless cowering during Temrai's bombardment of the City.

For shot number five they used a torso, all that was left of Renvaut Razo's masterpiece Triumph of the Human Spirit, which had stood in the courtyard of the Copper Exchange ever since Onasin had first visited here as a boy of nine, brought along by his father as a special treat. He could remember the statue vividly; it was huge and dramatic, and the head was far too small for the colossal, mountain-breasted body; but when he'd pointed that out, his father had told him to be quiet, and he'd kept the secret to himself ever since. Now there were bits of the Triumph of the Human Spirit all around him - not just the torso, which had squashed seven armoured men like beetles, but arms and hands and drapery shrapnel too, not to mention the too-small head (which had flattened one man and wrenched the leg off another). He remembered eavesdropping on two earnest-looking women who'd stood for ages just staring at the statue; according to them, what made it so special was the ease and power of its movement. He'd waited twenty years to find out what they'd meant by that. They were right, too; hurled from the sling of a trebuchet, Razo's gift to the ages moved like s.h.i.t off a shovel and packed a devastating punch.

They were setting up more trebuchets. It was a pity that the soldiers of the Empire were universally known not to surrender, not under any circ.u.mstances, because a few more direct hits were going to panic the men, and that would open gaps in the line; and when that happened, the sea in front of him would come rushing in and sweep him off the dock into the sea behind him, and he was too well armoured to swim. Surrender would be an excellent option right now; but he'd already tried it twice and they simply hadn't believed him.

Another charge would also break up the line; but on balance Lieutenant Onasin preferred the thought of dying fighting to either drowning or being squashed, so he yelled out the appropriate orders and the front three ranks dressed to the front. A stair, ripped out of the steps that led up to the customs house, enfiladed the front rank, knocking off heads. Onasin raised his arm and stepped forward, straight into the path of a brick. It bounced off his gorget, crimping the metal so that he couldn't turn his head. d.a.m.n, he thought, and dropped his arm to signal the advance.

After that, there wasn't any point in deluding himself that he had any control whatsoever. The momentum of the ranks behind him boosted him forward like driftwood on a wave, and all he could do was keep his legs moving, so that he wouldn't get shoved over and trampled. As he was propelled forward, he saw the spike on the head of the halberd dead ahead, but of course he couldn't slow down, or even move sideways. The man behind him rammed him on to the spike like a cook driving a skewer into a cut of meat; he felt himself being jolted forward as the spike finally burst through the belly of his breastplate, then the shock of coming to a sudden stop as the crossbar at the end of the spike held him back. The pressure on his backplate wasn't getting any less, which meant that his body was being crushed between the man behind him and the crossbar, the main effect being to drive the spike deeper into his compressed belly.

And there he stuck, because the momentum of the mob easily matched the momentum of the charge. He found that he was looking directly into the face of the man who was holding the halberd; he was wearing an expression of panic and what could only be described as acute embarra.s.sment (which was quite understandable; after all, what do you say to a perfect stranger who's impaled himself on the spike you happen to be clinging on to?) and if he'd had any control over the muscles of his face, he'd have been tempted to smile, or even wink.

It was the trebuchets that saved him. There were ten of them in action now, and they all loosed in unison, suddenly flattening the men in the ranks directly behind him. With no more pressure from them he found himself being thrust back; then his feet caught on something, he stumbled and went down on his backside, wrenching the halberd out of the other man's hands. Now it was the other man's turn to be shot forward; Onasin felt the sole of the man's boot on the side of his jaw as he stumbled forward, then a savage pain in his shoulder as somebody else stood on that. Then he lost count, and fell asleep.

When he opened his eyes, he found that he was staring into another man's eyes; but this man was quite definitely dead. In fact there were dead men everywhere. Ma.s.s grave. He opened his mouth to scream, but only a little squeak came out, so he tried waving his arms and legs instead. They were scarcely more co-operative than his throat and lungs, but apparently he'd done enough, because he heard someone shout, 'Hold on, we've got another live one.'

He wasn't sure how they got him out again; the grave was pretty deep and sheer-sided, so he guessed someone had had to jump down in there, on top of all the really dead people. That didn't strike him as a pleasant thing to have to do - well, he wouldn't have fancied it himself - so he tried to say thank you as he swung face-down through the air; but if anybody heard him, they didn't acknowledge it.

'Will you look at that?' someone he couldn't see said as he was flipped over on to his back. 'He's never going to make it with a hole that size.'

'You'd be surprised,' someone else replied. 'I knew a man once who was gored by a d.a.m.n great bull - when they got the horn out you could literally see daylight through him, poor b.u.g.g.e.r. He made it, though.'

'All right,' said the first voice, 'put him over there with the others. If there's a medic with nothing better to do-'

'You'll be lucky.'

But there was a medic, eventually, a sad-faced man who cleaned and bandaged the wound. Whether his sorrow arose from the horrors he'd seen or the remoteness of his chances of getting paid for his work, there was no way of knowing. By then, of course, the battle was over, the enemy had been killed or captured, the fires put out; and the Islanders were moving wearily about the streets, clearing up wreckage, repairing damage, stumbling over bodies that had been overlooked by the corpse details. After they'd filled up two deep graves, they stopped bothering with such niceties, loaded the dead on to two enormous grain freighters and dumped them in the sea.

Onasin ended up on a similar grain-ship, which had been pressed into service as a prison hulk. It could have been worse; it would have been far worse if it had been an Imperial prisoner-of-war compound. From what he could overhear of the guards' conversation, they explained away their humanity by claiming that the men in their charge were potentially valuable hostages, but by this time Onasin knew them better than that. This was, after all, their first war; they hadn't learned yet.

'A tragedy,' sighed the prefect of Ap' Escatoy. 'A tragic, wretched waste. And so futile, too.'

The chief administrator nodded sadly. 'It is rather heartbreaking,' he said, wiping honey from his fingertips with a damp cloth. 'And, as you say, they've achieved nothing by it. If anything, they've made matters worse for themselves.'

'Undoubtedly,' the prefect said. 'But I'm afraid they've forfeited my sympathy, given what they've done. I know, vindictiveness is an ugly emotion, but on this occasion I'm going to allow myself that luxury. They will be made to pay for what they've done.'

'Figuratively speaking, of course.'

The prefect smiled grimly. 'Unfortunately,' he said. 'I wish it were otherwise, but it isn't.' He shook his head. 'No, the fact must be faced, and we must come to terms with it: this confounded battle has cost me my refurbishment grant, and with it goes my best chance of rebuilding Perimadeia. All gone, and no actual benefit to anybody. And on reflection it isn't tragic; tragedy has a certain n.o.bility about it that this shambles lacks. It's waste, plain and simple.' He picked up a corner of the tablecloth and rubbed it between the palms of his hands, as if wiping away the unpleasantness of life. 'But there, it's done, and now it's up to us to make the best we can of the circ.u.mstances we're faced with. Practical, pragmatic and positive,' he added with a little smile - it was obviously a quotation or a reference to something (the prefect was an inveterate slipper-in of apt but abstruse quotations, to the point where it wasn't safe to a.s.sume that anything he said was necessarily his own words) but the administrator couldn't place it; so he nodded and twitched his lip in token refined mirth. 'And we should start,' the prefect went on, 'with the war. The main thing is to make sure there aren't any more defeats. Send a letter to Captain Loredan telling him to stay put and do nothing, just make sure Temrai doesn't slip past him and escape. I want the actual coup de grace to come from the new army, the one the provincial office is sending. Just defeating them won't be enough; they have to be completely outnumbered and crushed if we're to put this mess into perspective.'

'Agreed,' said the administrator. 'Now then, what about the Island? That's going to be awkward, isn't it? We're going to have to get some ships from somewhere.'

The prefect shrugged. 'We'll need ships anyway, for the war. Potentially, of course, this Island business could be far worse for us than Temrai and losing an entire army.' He turned his head and sat still for a moment or two, watching a kestrel in a lemon tree in the courtyard below; it had a small bird, still alive, gripped in one claw and was trying rather awkwardly to kill it without letting go of the branch with its other foot. 'In a way,' he went on, 'a major setback like the one Temrai's given us needn't be an entirely negative thing. Once in a while, it can even be - well, almost desirable. The point is, there's no prestige to be gained from overrunning a weak and negligible opponent. A serious defeat, provided it's followed up in short order by a complete victory, serves to give the enemy a degree of stature. And, of course, it helps keep standards up in the army; nothing like getting your face slapped once in a while to stop you getting complacent. The Island business, though; as I said, there's nothing to be gained from that. There's all the difference in the world between a setback along the way to an inevitable triumph, and getting kicked out of a place we're supposed to have subdued and added to the collection, so to speak. What makes matters worse is that everybody knows that the Islanders aren't worthy opponents or formidable warriors, let alone n.o.ble savages whose primitive virtues we can admire, et cetera, et cetera; they're fat, smug, slightly obnoxious little men who make a living by buying cheap and selling dear.' The prefect was starting to get annoyed now; there was nothing to show it in his face or his voice, but he'd pulled the ring off his little finger and was twisting it round, as if tightening a screw. When he did that, wise men who knew the score found excuses to go elsewhere for a while. 'Still,' he went on, 'getting worked up about the situation won't help it, and it might lead us to make more mistakes. For that reason, I feel we ought to leave them alone for a while; at the very least, until the war's over.'

The administrator nodded. 'I agree,' he said. 'In fact, I've been giving the matter some thought; what I'd suggest is that we give them some time to reflect on what they've done and then send them a letter offering them a chance to buy their lives. Of course,' he added, as the prefect raised an eyebrow, 'they'd have to send us the heads of the ringleaders first, as a token of good faith - I always feel that getting rebels to execute their own leaders is far better than doing it oneself; you simply can't make a martyr of a man whose head you've cut off yourself.'

'An interesting point,' the prefect conceded.

'Then,' the administrator went on, 'we set the terms; we'll accept their abject surrender on condition that they put their fleet at our disposal, fully manned - after all, that's the object of the exercise, and that's what our betters in the provincial office will judge us by, at the end of the day. We need Islanders to crew the ships; if we slaughter them to a man, we'll have ships but no crews. If we do it my way, we'll have crews who are acutely aware that their families and countrymen are hostages for their good behaviour and satisfactory performance-'

'Thereby,' interrupted the prefect, stroking his chin, 'turning this ghastly business to our advantage and making something good out of it after all. Thank you; I do believe you've restored my faith in the value of clarity of vision.'

'My pleasure,' the administrator replied. 'One of the pleasures of life, as far as I'm concerned, is taking a disaster and turning it into an opportunity.' He smiled. 'Fortunately, it's a pleasure I rarely have a chance to savour.'

The prefect tilted his head back and gazed at the ceiling. ' "Lord, confound my enemies; or, if Thou must confound my friends, grant that I may be their salvation." Do you know, the older I get, the more I appreciate Deltin; but he's wasted on the young, and one must have something to look forward to.'

The administrator nodded. 'So,' he said, 'that's that settled. This is turning out to be a productive morning. Now, if we can only devise some way of rebuilding Perimadeia after all, we'll have earned our lunch.'

The prefect opened his eyes and looked at him. 'Don't tell me,' he said. 'You have an idea.'

'Just an outline,' the administrator replied, 'slowly taking shape in my mind's eye. And no, I don't propose sharing it with you quite yet. After all, it wouldn't do to disclose it until I'm certain it has merit, otherwise I'll jeopardise my reputation for resourceful and imaginative thinking.'

'That's fair,' the prefect conceded with a wry grin. 'But you do have an idea. Or an idea for an idea.'

The administrator made a small gesture with his hands. 'Always,' he said. 'But I try to be like a careful doctor: I make sure my mistakes are buried before anybody sees them.'

The messenger set out that afternoon, with orders to reach Captain Loredan as quickly as possible. It was imperative, he was told, that he get to the captain before he had a chance to react to the news of the disaster. This was a matter of the utmost importance to the well-being of the whole Empire.

What the dispatcher meant by that was: get a move on, don't dawdle or stop to pa.s.s the time of day with any old friends you may happen to meet, no sight-seeing or shopping, no detours to deliver private letters or trade samples. But the dispatcher was an eloquent man with a forceful turn of phrase, and the messenger was young and rather conscientious. As a result, he set off in a cloud of dust, a map stuffed into the leg of his boot and three days' rations bouncing against his back in a satchel.

There seems to be a law of nature that the more one hurries, the more ingeniously circ.u.mstances contrive to slow one down. He made excellent time as far as the Eagle River ford; but the river was in spate, the first time in thirty years it had flooded in the dry season, which meant he had to retrace his steps and head upstream to the Blackwood bridge. But the bridge wasn't there; some idiot had been robbing stones from the base of the nearside pillar, and the whole thing had slumped quietly into the river one fine morning, damming it up just long enough to acc.u.mulate a sufficient body of water to saturate the sandhills on the nearside bank when eventually the blockage was swept away. In consequence the Blackwood ford was impa.s.sable as well, something the messenger found out the hard way when his horse went in up to its shoulders in the newly created quagmire. He tried in vain to get the wretched creature out for the best part of a morning before abandoning it and setting out on foot for the nearest of the border outposts to the south.

By this stage he was almost out of his mind with rage and frustration, so he was immensely relieved when he came across a small caravan of mixed Colleon, Belhout and Tornoys merchants taking a short cut to Ap' Escatoy. It took him a further two hours of almost lethal frustration to persuade them to accept a provincial office a.s.signat in payment for a horse, even though he knew he was paying nearly double what the animal was worth - it was just his luck that the only decent horse for sale belonged to a Belhout who, belonging to a nation who steadfastly refused on moral grounds either to read or to write, had extreme difficulty in relating to the concept of paper money. In the end he had to use his a.s.signat to buy gold from a Colleon jeweller, at fifteen per cent over standard, with which to pay the Belhout; but the jeweller would only sell him gold by the full ounce, which meant he had to buy three quarters more than he needed . . . By the time he was back on the road, he was a day and half a night behind schedule, and still on the wrong side of the Eagle River.

But he still had his map; so he sat down under a wind-twisted thorn tree with a piece of string for measuring distances, and looked for an alternative route. He found one readily enough; he could carry on following the west bank of the Eagle until it became the north bank, thereby avoiding the need to cross it at all. That was also a much more direct route, which would allow him to make up nearly all the time he'd lost provided he could keep up a good rate of progress. The problem was that it took him within an hour's ride of Temrai's fortified camp.

He considered the risks. If he arrived late, going on what the dispatcher had told him, he might as well not arrive at all. One man alone, riding fast; if he dumped his mailshirt and helmet and wrapped his cloak round his head, riding a horse with a Belhout saddle and harness, he reckoned he could pa.s.s for a Belhout himself. The worst that could happen would be that he'd be caught, and the message would never get there - no worse than if he arrived late. Looked at the other way round, if he didn't go this way, he'd most certainly be late, whereas if he took the risk, there was a reasonable chance he'd get there, and in time. From that perspective, he didn't really have a choice.