by K. J. Parker
He thought about it for a moment. Scorpion bolts; and the Mezentines had a ferociously guarded monopoly on field artillery. It was the only possible explanation.
“In that case,” he said slowly, “we’ve got to tell them, and then they’ll stop.”
“Fine,” the other man snapped. “You go.”
“I can’t,” Eiconodoulus said, quiet and reasonable. “My knee’s all broken up. I can just about crawl a couple of yards, that’s all.”
The other man was scowling at him; he had a thin, dry face and he spoke with an eastern accent. “Fucked if I’m going out there,” he said.
“Why not?” Eiconodoulus said. “You just told me it’s not safe under here. The only way we’ll be safe is if someone goes and finds the battery and tells them to stop shooting. I can’t do it.” He paused, watching the man’s face. “I wouldn’t get fifty yards.”
He could see the other man doing the mathematics; only two of us, he can’t go… “I’m not going out there,” he said, as though Eiconodoulus had made an indecent suggestion. “No, you can forget that.”
Best not to say anything; so he shrugged and kept quiet. The man protested a few more times, then slowly crawled out from under the cart, straightened up — cramp, probably — and began to run, wobbling like a baby calf. Eiconodoulus could only see his legs from the knee down; he followed him until he was out of sight. Well, he thought; it’s my job to give orders.
He lay on his back, and the pleasure of being still and quiet surged through him like a wave. He closed his eyes to rest them, knowing it was impossible to go to sleep, here in the middle of so much danger. He tried to rally his thoughts, but it was too much effort. There wasn’t anything he could do anyway. The responsibility was slipping away from him; he wasn’t in charge anymore, because he had the perfect excuse.
Light, movement, the sound of voices. His body was awake before he was; he woke up in the act of shrinking away, dragging himself backward with his elbows. As his eyes opened, he found himself staring at an extraordinary human being. The spectacle reminded him of something he’d read about or heard, maybe in a briefing; the man’s face and hands were the most remarkable color: pale, bone-white tinged with pink. At the back of his mind he was sure he knew about this, but the only explanations that occurred to him were that the man had been rolling in white slip, the thin clay wash potters paint on the outsides of big jars, or he’d managed to get himself covered in flour.
Then he remembered; where he was, what had happened, his wrecked knee, the fact that the enemy, the Eremians, were a white-skinned race.
“Got one,” the man was shouting. “Over here.” Eiconodoulus wondered what had become of the cart, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off the white man. He couldn’t see a weapon, but he was under no illusions about what would happen next. The Eremians (a casual aside in a briefing, months ago) don’t take prisoners.
That was that, then.
(All his adult life, he’d wondered about this moment, which he’d long since accepted as inevitable; the moment when he faced the enemy who would kill him. He’d assumed that it would be a spasm of blind, hurting, thrashing pain and terror — he’d seen wounded animals being dispatched, men being executed, victims of accident and artillery — and it had bothered him, because he’d die a wriggling, squirming, convulsing thing, and the weapon tearing into his body would hurt unbearably. The thought had almost been enough to make him quit the profession, but there had always been good, sensible reasons to hang on for another six months, another year. Now that he faced it, he felt like an explorer or a philosopher finally arriving at the place he’d searched all his life to find; the great question, what will it be like, was finally going to be answered, and he found himself considering the situation objectively, as though he’d have the opportunity to report back to a commission of inquiry. He’d tell them, I felt sick, very wide awake, completely aware of everything everywhere apart from my own body, and calm.)
Other white men were standing over him; one on each side, maybe two behind. Out of the corner of his eye he could see a spearhead — so it’d be a stab rather than a cut, he noted; good, because puncture wounds kill quickly, by organ damage, whereas slashes tend to kill by shock and loss of blood. A small part of his mind that was still interested in collecting information noted that the white men spoke good Mezentine but with a strong, rather comical accent.
“What do you want to do?” one of them asked.
“Take him back with the wagons,” said another, a disembodied voice over his head. The others mumbled agreement, and arms came down out of the air and dragged him up. He stood for a moment, then collapsed.
“Fuck,” someone said. “Look at his knee.”
They don’t know I can understand them, he realized. Not that it mattered; he had nothing to say to them. It occurred to him that if he revealed the fact that he could communicate with them, they might torture him for information before they killed him. That thought made him horribly aware of how painful and sensitive his knee was; anything would be better than being hurt by them, death would be much better. Suddenly he felt fear take over; he was shaking, and he couldn’t make it stop. His body felt loose, as though all the joints had slipped and come unstrung; all his strength had evaporated, he was hanging from their hands, a dead weight. Why couldn’t they just kill him and be done with it?
“He’s in pretty bad shape,” someone said. “Put him in the wagon and let’s get out of here.”
They carried him, gently. As he was moved along he could see dozens of the white men, busily at work. Some of them were getting the carts ready to drive off, others were plucking up the clothes-props, carrying them in bundles, like men harvesting maize. At that moment, he realized that the Eremians had war engines too (not that it mattered to him, of course) and he’d blundered into a carefully laid ambush. At another time he’d be furious with himself for letting it happen; it was somehow pleasant to be released from the obligation to feel shame and self-reproach.
They put him carefully in the back of one of his own carts; they laid out blankets for him to lie on, and tried not to jar his knee as they put him down. They made a bad job of it, but he was bewildered by their concern. He’d braced himself for a different kind of pain, the being-dropped, slamming kind, and instead it was the awkward, clumsy sort. A white man sat next to him in the cart, and when it started to move Eiconodoulus nearly screamed, as a jolt twisted his knee the wrong way. The white man frowned at him, then looked away; his hands were clamped tight on the side of the cart.
Not dead yet, he thought, as the cart pitched and jostled over the ruts and stones; not dead yet, but don’t go getting your hopes up. Look at it logically; things can really only get worse. Are hours or days of pain really worth staying alive for? Of course not. Then let’s hope they kill me quickly, before this numb feeling wears off and I go to pieces. He tried to calculate in his mind the distance from the ambush site to the city (presumably where they were headed) but he couldn’t quite get the map into his mind. It was as if it was part of a dream, in which he’d been a career officer of engineers in charge of a routine convoy, and it was swiftly fading away, as dreams tend to do in the light.
Ludicrous (he told himself when he woke up) that I should have wasted my last few hours of life in sleep; but then, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed them anyway. He opened his eyes and saw blue sky overhead; the jolting underneath him told him he was still on the cart. He realized that he felt unbearably impatient — why can’t they just kill me now, instead of making me live through this interminable cart ride? — and while he’d been asleep his knee had locked up stiff and hurt worse than ever. If it hadn’t been for the thought of how ridiculous it would sound, he’d have started demanding to be killed immediately; he grinned as he heard his own high, querulous voice in his mind, insisting…
Suddenly a great gray stone shape appeared overhead, like a swooping hawk; he was passing under an arch. The blue sky was edged with gray walls and red roof
tiles, and the jolting was the multiple taps of steel-rimmed wheels on cobblestones. Here we are, then — at which point, a desperate feeling of reluctance swept over him, so that if he’d been able to move at all he’d have tried to jump off the cart and run. As it was, all he could do was lever himself up a little way on the points of his elbows. The white man next to him looked down, his face registering no interest. Eiconodoulus’ strength ran out and he slipped back to rest.
Bouncing on cobbles for a very long time; then the cart stopped and the white man jumped up, calling to someone he couldn’t see. Four or five of them appeared over him; they lifted him up (that hurt) and put him carefully on something long and flat, possibly a door or a hurdle. He couldn’t make out what they were saying; there were unfamiliar words, possibly names. They moved him quickly; he had to close his eyes to keep from getting dizzy.
For a while after that, things blurred, like drops of water on a painting. He was carried about on the flat thing, then put down, then picked up again and carried some more. There were apparently long periods of lying still, sometimes voices overhead. Occasionally he made out one or two words, but they were meaningless out of context. Then came a long, bad patch; someone was digging about in his damaged knee, twisting it and stabbing into it with a knife or a tool. He opened his eyes and tried to sit up, but hands pushed him down flat. He could see white men standing over him, but he couldn’t see the torturer himself. He waited impatiently for the questions to start — why the hell torture someone if you don’t ask questions, where’s the point? — but all he could hear was the men murmuring to each other. They aren’t torturers, they’re doctors, he realized; he laughed out loud, and then the pain blotted out everything. He wasn’t aware of trying to move, but the men were having trouble keeping him still. At some point, the world went out like a snuffed candle.
A voice was murmuring overhead. It was talking. It was talking to him. “How are you feeling?” it said.
He didn’t know, of course. He took a moment to gather the necessary information, then he opened his eyes.
The white man didn’t seem to want an answer after all, because he went on, “My name is Miel Ducas. What’s yours?”
Excellent question; don’t know. He went to the very back of his mind and dragged it out. “Captain Beltista Eiconodoulus,” he said. He shouldn’t have told them that, of course.
“You’re going to be all right,” the man called Miel Ducas told him. “I’m afraid they couldn’t save the leg, though. I’m sorry.”
Save the leg? What was he talking about? His leg was still hurting, of course, but what did it matter, since they were going to kill him? He felt confusion pressing on him like a pillow over his face.
“As soon as you’re fit to travel we’re sending you back,” Miel Ducas went on. “We’d like you to take a message to your commanding officer. We won’t bother with that now. You get some sleep, if you can.”
All the confusion welled up into a bubble, a blister; he tried to sit up, failed, and heard himself say, “What happened?”
Miel Ducas sort of grinned. “You got ambushed,” he said. “You very nearly didn’t, mind. We had scouts out tracking you up the Butter Pass, but then you went diving off the road into the shale and they lost you completely. We only managed to pick you up later, when you lit some fires.”
Fires. Ah yes, roasting the wild sheep. But we had no choice, we were starving.
“Anyhow,” Miel Ducas went on, “you were obliging enough to come to the lure in the end, and thank you very much for the scorpions. With those and what we’ve already got, we reckon we can defend this city against anything you can throw at us. We’d have liked a bit more in the way of ammunition, of course, but, well; gift horses’ teeth, and all that.”
He didn’t understand what that meant, but he couldn’t be bothered to ask. Instead, he took a moment to look at his surroundings. The bed he was lying on was in the middle of the floor of a circular room — where do you get those? In the turrets of castles. There was a straight-backed, carved oak chair, dark with age and assiduous polishing, and a door, and a narrow window. Miel Ducas looked at him for a moment, then went on: “You’ve been out of it for a week, believe it or not. During that time we used your scorpions, with their sweet little carriages, to attack the main column you were supposed to meet up with. We ran out of bolts before we were able to get them all, but the latest reports say we cleared about seven thousand men, which isn’t bad going for a race of backward mountain savages, don’t you think? Anyhow, what’s left of them have scuttled back down the pass; they took their wounded but left the scorpion bolts, which shows your people have no idea about priorities. Anyway,” he went on, leaning back in his chair a little, “that’s enough for now. You get some rest, and I’ll be back to give you our message later on.”
When Miel Ducas had gone, he stretched out full length and shut his eyes; he felt dizzy and uncomfortable, and his head was aching. Apparently he wasn’t going to die after all. It should have been a moment of sheer joy but it wasn’t. He was going to live; they were sending him back to Mezentia. They’d cut off his leg.
Carefully he sat up. There was a blanket over him, which he twitched away; it fell on the floor, where he wouldn’t be able to retrieve it. He hadn’t realized before that he had no clothes on. He could see his thigh, down to the knee. It was wrapped in bandages, and there was nothing beyond it. Extraordinary.
Instinctively, he tried to wiggle his toes. The left side worked fine. He frowned. It was like when he’d been lying awkwardly and woken up with his leg completely numb; unless he grabbed it with his hand, he couldn’t move it. There was actually nothing there. It was a bizarre feeling, like something out of a dream.
Now what? He tried to imagine what it was going to be like, but he couldn’t. Soon his leg would stop being numb and he’d have a ferocious attack of pins and needles. He concentrated. Well, for one thing, he wouldn’t be able to walk.
Fear choked him like hands tight around his throat. He curled up in a ball and for a long time all he could do was try and fight off the waves of terror and despair. If only they’d killed him; he was ready for that, it would’ve been no big deal. This kind of mutilation, though, that was far worse. Better death than life as a cripple. (He was making gestures, striking poses; even while he raged and cringed against the horror of it, a calm voice in the back of his mind was making lists — things I can still do, things I can’t — and figuring out ways of coping. Meanwhile, the rest of him relaxed into the comfort of despair: as soon as I’m out of here, I’ll get hold of some poison, or I’ll just refuse to eat. Thinking about killing himself helped him calm down, because it was one thing he knew he’d never do.)
He was lost in these thoughts when the door opened again. He froze, suddenly aware that he hadn’t got any clothes on. The newcomer came in and looked down at him. He wasn’t white, like the others; his skin was the normal color. An ambassador maybe, or someone who’d been sent to negotiate for his release, or supervise a prisoner exchange? Highly unlikely that he’d be here on his own; he’d be escorted, there’d be guards with him.
“Who are you?” he heard himself say.
The newcomer smiled. “I’m Ziani Vaatzes,” he said.
Eiconodoulus knew who he was. “They told us you’re dead,” he said.
Vaatzes raised an eyebrow. “Is that right?” he said. “Well, I’m not. In fact, I’d be grateful if you would set the record straight when you go back to the City. I’m most definitely still alive. Furthermore, the scorpions that shot up your column were built by me. Maybe you’d be kind enough to emphasize that when you make your report.”
“All right,” Eiconodoulus said.
“Thank you.” Vaatzes dipped his head in mock courtesy. “Was that one of my bolts?” he asked, nodding toward the bandaged stump.
Eiconodoulus shook his head. “My horse fell on me,” he said.
“Really? What dreadful bad luck. Infection, I suppose. When you get back to the
City, ask to be taken to the Coppersmiths’ Guild. Don’t ask me why, but the artificial limb-makers count as coppersmiths for the purposes of registration. Anyhow, they’ll fix you up. It’s amazing, the quality of their work. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had you walking again, eventually. One model they make, for above-the-knee cases like yours, it’s got a joint so it bends just like the real thing; and there’s a really neat little spring-and-catch arrangement that locks the joint up when you put weight on it, and releases it when you take the weight off again. Once you’ve learned to sort of throw the false leg forward as you move, you can actually get along at close on normal walking speed, though I understand it can’t be used on stairs or anything like that.”
“I’ll do that,” Eiconodoulus said. He nearly added, “Thank you,” but decided against it. Instead he asked, “Is it true? What they told me, about the attack on the main column.”
Vaatzes nodded. “At least seven thousand killed,” he said. “They ran out of bolts. Unfortunately, the ones I made don’t work with the genuine article. But they’re interchangeable the other way round — my scorpions can loose genuine ordnance bolts — so I’m changing the pattern a little. By the time you attack again, we’ll have a good supply.”
Eiconodoulus frowned. “Do you want me to tell them that too?”
“You can if you like,” Vaatzes replied. “But that’s not why I’m here. I want you to take a message for me, a private message, for a friend of mine. He’s bound to be in close contact with the main army, he’s foreman of the ordnance factory, so someone’ll take it to him. Falier, his name is.”
“Falier,” Eiconodoulus repeated.
“You’ve got it. And by the way, it’ll be well worth your while, trust me. It’ll make it possible for your side to win the war.”
Eiconodoulus was sure he hadn’t heard that right. “What did you just say?”
“This message,” Vaatzes said, “to my friend Falier. It’ll tell him how to get past our defenses.” He grinned. “It’s called treachery,” he said. “It’s frowned on in some quarters, but it saves lives and gets results. Now, I want you to listen very carefully, because this is important.” He paused and furrowed his brow. “You’re looking at me strangely,” he said. “You do want your side to win the war, don’t you? I mean, it’ll be good for you, not to mention getting your own back, for the leg and everything.”
