by K. J. Parker
The enemy were moving about; walking slowly and wearily, like men gathering up their tools after they’d finished a job. Every few steps they paused and stooped, examining something on the ground. He realised they were checking the bodies, looking for any of their own, not finding any. He heard the occasional groan, but not often. It was all surprisingly quiet. He guessed the enemy weren’t in the mood to talk. Let’s get it over with and then maybe we can get some sleep; he’d felt that way often enough at the end of a long day.
The pain was a nuisance, like a dog wanting to play, but not too bad. Maybe pain was only unbearable when you knew it mattered. He felt no need or wish to move, though his knees were starting to ache, and he was profoundly cold. It started to rain, just softly enough to sting his eyes. He tried to think about the difference his absence would make, at the farm, to his family, but it all seemed a bit remote, as if home was something he’d believed in when he was a kid, when he was too young to know better.
The enemy came closer; stopped, looked in his direction, saw him. Coming his way, trudging, worn out by the effort of pulling boots out of deep, sticky mud. He lifted his head to look at him; it was rude to stare, but it couldn’t make things worse now, could it? The enemy came a little closer, then paused. He’s afraid of me, Linniu thought, amused; he’s afraid I’ll bite. He wanted to reassure him, but that would be ridiculous. He heard the enemy call out, and saw another one coming towards him. Oh come on, he thought scornfully, it doesn’t need two of you.
He heard the newcomer say something; and, maybe because his voice was higher or clearer, he could make out the words: “Live one here, sergeant.” For a moment he wondered what that meant.
A third man came into view. He moved quickly, a man in a hurry, and he didn’t seem to be hampered by the mud as much as the other two. As he got nearer, Linniu saw that he had the knack of stepping lightly so as not to sink in so deep; he dug his heels in and hopped. He’d have smiled at the sight, under other circumstances.
The sergeant didn’t seem to be afraid of him, at any rate. He came up close, and Linniu was able to make out the general shape of his face: a young man, quite thin, with hollow cheeks and a chin that tapered to a cleft point. He was clean-shaven, and his forehead was splashed with mud. He stopped just out of reach and peered at Linniu like a buyer at market examining a calf.
“He’ll do,” he said. “Him and three more, take them to the duty officer. If there’s any more after that, stick them in the rope store.” Quite unexpectedly he grinned wide. “They’re all just bloody kids,” he said, “that’s all they are. And you’ll need to get the surgeon to this one, once they’ve finished with him. There’s an arrow sticking out of his shoulder, the poor sod.”
Surgeon? He knew what that meant, some kind of doctor. He’d never met a doctor in his life, of course, but he’d heard about them. Once they’ve finished with him didn’t sound too good, but even so… Oddly enough, he felt relieved, if only because here at last was someone who seemed to know what to do, even if he was the enemy.
Then an unpleasant thought struck him. “Excuse me,” he heard himself say; at least, he assumed it was him. The voice sounded very small and sad.
The sergeant raised both eyebrows, as if he’d just been spoken to by an animal; animals shouldn’t talk, of course, it was unnatural, but he was too intrigued to be angry. “What?”
“The… surgeon.” He stumbled over the unfamiliar word. “That’s a doctor, isn’t it?”
The sergeant was having trouble not laughing. “That’s right, son. So what?”
“It’s just… I can’t see the doctor, I haven’t got any money to pay.”
The sergeant’s face turned into one enormous grin. “That’s all right, son,” he said. “It’s free in the army, you don’t have to pay. It’s one of the perks, you might say. Go on,” he continued, turning his head toward the two soldiers, “get him over to the duty officer, and see if you can find a bit of rag for that arm. No charge,” he added gravely. “You can bleed on it all you want, and it won’t cost you a penny.”
The two soldiers were on either side of him now. They caught hold of him firmly but carefully, avoiding his wounded shoulder, and lifted him out of the mud on to his feet. “No boots,” he heard the sergeant say. “Fancy sending kids to war with no boots.”
“I lost…” he started to say, but they were marching him along, and the sergeant had turned his back on them. Probably best not to say too much, in any case. Amazingly, it seemed they felt sorry for him, and although he couldn’t really understand that, he didn’t want to spoil it.
They had to step over quite a few bodies. He tried not to look at them. The two soldiers hardly seemed to notice they were there.
It couldn’t have been more than two hundred yards, but it felt like a day’s march. As they got further away from the river, the mud turned into firm ground. Fewer bodies to step over, and more enemy soldiers hurrying backwards and forwards, busy, not stopping to look. He saw a row of tents, elaborate things with awnings held up by poles. Outside one a man was sitting on a rickety-looking folding chair, with an equally flimsy-looking table in front of him, covered in papers. The man’s head was bowed low and his shoulders were hunched; he looked at though he’d just come in from ploughing. Apparently, that was who he was being taken to see. He raised his head as they approached, and Linniu was surprised to see how young he was.
“Prisoner, sir,” barked one of the soldiers.
“What? Oh, yes.” The man frowned. “Fine, well done. We’ll take him straight to the duke.” He paused, narrowing his eyes as he looked Linniu in the face, like someone trying to read small handwriting in bad light. “Does he understand… ?”
“Seems to, sir. He talked to the sergeant.”
The man nodded, cleared his throat. “My name is Colonel Nennius,” he said, slowly and clearly. “Who are you?”
“Linniu Matsinatsen.”
The man frowned. “Mat… ?”
“Matsinatsen.” He didn’t know if he was supposed to say “sir”. At any rate, the man didn’t seem offended or upset that he hadn’t. “All right,” he said. “This way.”
More walking. They passed through groups of men walking or standing about, who quickly made way for them. Some of them did the standing-with-feet-together thing as the man passed. He didn’t seem to notice, or care.
Another tent, much like the man’s but about twice the size. A flap hung over what he took to be the entrance, and two soldiers with spears and shields stood in front of it, either to keep people out or to keep whoever was behind the flap in. They seemed to recognise the man, Colonel Nennius, because they stood aside to let him go through the flap. Linniu assessed his own state of mind and realised he was nervous rather than afraid. Curious, he thought.
There were lamps inside the tent, five of them; brass, and they didn’t look anything like the City-made lamps they had at home. Cruder, if anything. In front of them, so his face was backlit and hard to see, a man sat in another of those funny-looking folding chairs. He had his feet up on a little stool, and Linniu could see his boots: old, scuffed, loose stitching around the point of the left toe.
“You found me one, then?” he said. He spoke strangely; a strong accent, but easy enough to understand.
“It wasn’t easy,” replied Colonel Nennius. “Not many left to choose from.”
He heard a sort of muffled snort, acknowledgement of a grim joke. “Get him a chair, somebody.” A chair appeared as soon as he said it; Linniu couldn’t see it, but he could feel the front edge of the seat pressing against the backs of his knees. He sat down. The man nodded.
“Right,” he said. “There’s really just one question…”
“… just one question I want to ask you,” Valens said, lifting his hand to stifle a yawn. He paused, glanced back at Nennius, who was hovering on his left. “He can understand me all right, can he?”
“As far as we know.”
“Fine.” He turned back and looked
at the prisoner. Farm boy, he recognised. Somewhere under all that mud, he was probably wearing his best shirt, so as to look neat and tidy for the war. “All I want to know,” he went on, “is this. What the hell possessed you to come all this way and launch an amphibious night attack, just to burn down a flour store?”
The farm boy stared at him as though he’d got two heads. Valens frowned. “You sure he can understand me?” he asked.
“The sergeant who caught him seemed to think so.”
“Fine. He must just be fussy who he talks to.” He sighed. “Hello,” he said. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Valens Valentinianus, duke of the Vadani. And you are?”
The boy hesitated, then mumbled something. It was too long and complicated to be worth trying to remember.
“That’s introductions out of the way,” Valens said. “Now, I want you to tell me the purpose of your mission.” Pause. The boy was still staring. “Can you do that?”
“No.” Pause. “Sir.”
“I see. Under orders not to, or you just don’t know?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Valens frowned, and said nothing. He had an idea that embarrassment would get him more information than five torturers with hot pokers. Sure enough, the boy couldn’t resist the temptation to fill the terrible silence.
“They told us at” (somewhere he’d never heard of) “we were going to burn down a place where they make things, a factory. Where they build the stone-throwing machines for attacking cities.”
“Ah.” Valens smiled. “That’s what they told you.”
“Yes, sir.”
The smile warped into a grin. “Well,” he said, “it’s always nice to know the enemy are idiots. You may be interested to know that what you thought were engine sheds were just general stores. You managed to torch a week’s worth of flour, but that’s all.”
The boy seemed to be having trouble with that. “Flour?”
“Flour.” Valens nodded. “Which is tricky stuff when it catches fire, mind,” he added. “The shed went up like a volcano, we were lucky nobody got hurt. Nobody on our side,” he added. “Your people weren’t so fortunate. Tell me, do you happen to know the name of the military genius who organised all this? No? Pity. I’d have liked to write and thank him.”
The boy’s eyes had grown very wide and round; it wasn’t fair, teasing him. “Right,” Valens said. “I want you to tell me, nice and slowly, where you come from, where your unit was raised, the names of as many officers as you can, how long it took you to get here and the way you came. If you do that, I’ll tell them to see to your arm and give you a blanket and something to eat. All right?”
As the boy answered the questions, Valens looked for the place-names on his map. It wasn’t a very good map. Nobody had taken any interest in the Cure Doce for a very long time; there had been a border skirmish thirty-odd years ago, so there was a campaign map of that particular region, but the most recent general survey was a hundred years old, and the Vadani of that generation had been lousy cartographers. There were large areas of plain white in the middle, and Valens suspected that most of the drawn-in section was just plain wrong. A picture grew in his mind of the mapmakers sitting in an inn on the border interrogating the local carters; plenty of scope there for rustic humour. But who cared about the geography of a nation of nonentities anyway? Nobody ever went there, and if you wanted anything from Cure Doce territory, they brought it to you.
Fine. He pushed the map away, made some notes, wrote down the few names of officers that the boy managed to come up with. That was all. Hardly worth the effort. He ran out of questions.
“All right,” he said wearily. “That’s it.” He closed his eyes, rubbed them. “Now listen,” he said. “This is important. I want you to take a message…” He paused. The boy was still staring. He wished he’d stop. “I want you to take a message to your leaders, all right? I want you to tell them I’ve got no quarrel with your people. Tell them they owe me for a shedful of flour, but apart from that there’s no harm done, and I haven’t the energy to go killing people for the sake of it, so if they mind their own business and stop helping the Mezentines, we’ll forget this ever happened. But if I catch any more of your people playing soldiers, I’ll make you all wish you’d never been born. Now, do you think you can remember that?”
The boy frowned, his head a little on one side, just like a spaniel. “You’re letting me go,” he said.
Valens nodded. He’d had enough of idiots for one day. “It would appear so, yes. They’ll patch up that shoulder for you, dig the arrow out, and you can be on your way in a day or so. I don’t suppose you know how to get home, so a couple of my scouts’ll have to take you to the border. You can ride a horse?”
“Yes.”
“Splendid.” He looked up and caught Nennius’ eye. “Don’t bother bringing me any more,” he said. “I’ve got a feeling they’re all like this.” He paused and thought for a moment, then looked at the boy again. “One other thing,” he said. “Tell your lot to send half a dozen carts to the border. When we’ve got a spare minute, we’ll send back the other survivors. I can’t be bothered to feed them, and they’re no good to anybody dead. But please try and make your people understand, I’m doing this because I’m too busy right now to wipe you off the face of the earth, not because I’m a nice, kind man. Quite the opposite. All right?”
He considered the look on the boy’s face. Might as well talk to sheep. He nodded, and the two guards who’d brought the prisoner in took him away again. Valens lifted a finger to tell Nennius to stay behind.
“Well,” he said. “What do you make of all that?”
Nennius sat down. “I think it’s good,” he said. “The Mezentines must be totally desperate, if that’s the best they can do.”
Valens smiled. “I’d like to think so,” he said. “It’s the old joke about lulling us into a true sense of security.” He sighed and stretched his legs. “I don’t suppose we’ll be getting any more trouble from them, but keep the scouts out just in case. Commendations to them for tonight, by the way. I don’t think that lot would have done us much harm even if we hadn’t known they were coming, but it’s always nice to be in control.” The back of the chair was digging into him; he wriggled, and heard it creak. “What we need to do,” he said, “is capture some actual Mezentine staff officers. I don’t want the men, but I hear they’ve got really comfortable travelling furniture. Why can’t any of our lot make a decent folding chair?”
Nennius smiled. “Get Vaatzes on it,” he said.
“I might just do that. Or at any rate his sidekick, the creepy bastard. He’ll do anything for anybody, that one.” Valens closed his eyes. It’d be wonderful to get some rest, at some point. “Thinking about it,” he said, “I guess we ought to make something out of this. Tell you what: I want you to pass the word around – usual channels, you know what I mean; let them think we’re putting a brave face on it, but actually this raid was successful. Mission accomplished. It wasn’t just a flour store they torched, it was the main engine shed. All the really important production machinery wrecked beyond hope of repair. Six months’ work gone up in smoke, right back to square one. I think I’d like the Mezentines to believe that.”
“But you told the boy the truth.”
“Which means the Mezentines will automatically believe the opposite, especially if we help them out a little. You might want to get a couple of carts loaded up with scrap iron, take them out somewhere they can see you and dump them in a bog or something. Give them a cavalry escort, to make sure they take notice. They’ll think we’re chucking out the ruined machines.” He frowned. “That’s assuming their scouts are bright enough to take the hint. But it can’t do any harm. I’m sure Psellus would love to believe it’s true. I’m serious about the chair, by the way. This useless article’s ruining my back.”
Nennius left. Valens stood up, whimpered at the stab of cramp, and lay down on his bed. He still had a great deal of work to do, bu
t he absolved himself with the excuse that he was too tired to do it properly. Instead, he reached out and tugged the latest scouts’ report from the bottom of the pile of documents heaped up on a stool beside the bedstead. He opened it and began to read, though he practically knew it by heart already.
The scouts were puzzled. He knew the men who’d made this report; conscientious but unimaginative. They reported that the Mezentines were apparently getting ready to dig holes in the plain in front of the City. They’d gone to enormous lengths to organise work details, mobilising every able-bodied citizen who wasn’t actively engaged in essential war work. The ordnance factory had assigned one of its four volume production lines, and a large amount of hard-to-come-by blade-quality hardening steel, to making shovels. Lines had been surveyed and marked out (see sketch). Presumably all this effort was to do with additional fortifications, but the stonemasons were being issued shovels along with everybody else, and there hadn’t been any recent orders sent out to the quarries.
Valens took another look at the sketch. When he was a boy, there had been these puzzles; sheets of thin copper foil pierced with tiny holes. You laid them on a sheet of paper and stuck a pin through each hole in turn. Then you took a charcoal stick, and you had to find a way of joining the pricked dots on the paper to make a picture: a castle, or a horseman, or a waterwheel. He’d never thought much of the puzzles. They were too easy.
