by K. J. Parker
As they led the horses to the Westgate, they passed a shed in an alley. A tall Mezentine in very dirty clothes came out and called to them. He seemed nervous and walked as though there was something wrong with his legs, but the woman couldn’t help noticing the quality of what was left of his coat, and the fashionably pointed toes of his boots.
“You’re a merchant,” he said. “Are you leaving town?”
It was the way he spoke; she was reminded of the lofty clerks who’d been messing her about all day. There were very few beggars in Mezentia, and they didn’t talk like that or wear the remains of silk brocade morning coats. Nevertheless, she told him to go away.
“I want a ride out of the City,” he said. “I’ve got money.”
Normally… But these weren’t normal circumstances. True, the cart had been fixed, the horses had been fed, just about, and they’d earned eleven miserable dollars. On the other hand, they’d had a long, gruelling dash for nothing, and she’d almost certainly missed out on the grain deal. “How much?” she asked.
The man grinned at her and opened his clenched fist. The brooch resting on his grubby palm was gold filigree set with a cluster of star-cut first-water diamonds supporting a large solitaire ruby; a hundred City dollars for a quick sale anywhere.
“Fine,” she said. “Sevio, give him your coat and hat. If anyone asks, we’ve hired you to load the cart. Please don’t tell me who you are, I really don’t want to know.” She held out her hand for the brooch, but the man closed his fist again. Well, fair enough.
“I want to go to Erbafresc,” the man said, shrugging off his coat. “It’s a small town on the Vadani frontier. I imagine you know it.”
“I know lots of places,” the woman replied. “We’re going back to the Cure Doce, where it’s safe. Once we reach the border, you can go where the hell you like.”
He didn’t seem happy about that, but he put on the carter’s coat and hat. She made him walk in the middle, flanked by her men, so his appearance wouldn’t attract attention. She made him carry her bag, which was rather heavy. He didn’t like that, either.
When they got there, they found the Westgate jammed with carts and men heading for the dam workings. They struggled their way through to the gatehouse, where they found their cart. She stopped to inspect the repairs, and was impressed: new springs and carriers, new bearings, the damaged spokes neatly mended with spliced-in patches, and they’d even replaced the worn front offside tyre; say what you like about the Mezentines, they did good work. Getting the horses hitched up in the cramped gatehouse with men jostling past all the time wasn’t easy, but nobody seemed the slightest bit interested in their new companion. The traffic jam escorted them slowly as far as the palisade, where they crossed the ditch on a plank bridge.
“You’re getting out just in time,” someone said to them. “After we’ve cracked the dam, this whole ditch’ll be flooded. That’ll give those bastards something to think about.”
As she crossed the bridge, the woman looked down. The ditch was deep enough, but shouldn’t they have faced the inside wall with something to stop the water washing it away? None of her business. There was a column of carts backed up on the far side, waiting to cross into the city; they were cutting it fine if they were planning on getting out again. Presumably they believed it was safer inside the walls than outside. Somehow, she was inclined to doubt that, but then again, she’d never been too keen on confined spaces.
There were guards on the other side, making a half-hearted attempt to marshal the traffic. Guards; they had armour and helmets but that didn’t make them soldiers. She could tell by the fact that they were clearly not used to standing still for hours at a time. All their equipment looked far too clean and new: breastplates still mirror-bright from the buffing wheel, without the scratches that came from being cleaned off in a sand-barrel, spear blades with the packing grease still on them. And their eyes were wrong: they kept looking towards the downs, to see if the enemy were coming. It made her grateful she was leaving.
“Any sign of them?” she asked one of the guards.
He shook his head. “Not since yesterday afternoon,” he said. “And that was just a handful.”
Fine; a dash across the flat, and they’d be at the border. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that if they did run into an allied patrol, having a Mezentine on the cart with them wouldn’t look too good. “Best of luck,” she said to the guard as the cart moved off. He said something in reply, but she didn’t hear it.
As instructed, the passenger kept his head down and his mouth shut all the way to the frontier post. Once they were five hundred yards or so past the Cure Doce side, she told the driver to stop the cart.
“Get off,” she told the Mezentine.
He scowled at her. “No,” he said. “I want you to take me to Erbafresc. Otherwise you don’t get paid.”
She sighed and nodded. The nod wasn’t for him. Behind him, Sevio the carter recognised the signal. He picked up a small hammer from the floor of the cart, and bashed the Mezentine hard on the side of the head. He slumped forward, and Sevio and one of the porters pitched him out of the cart on to the ground. She got down, knelt beside him and prised the brooch out of his clamped fingers, while Sevio took back his coat and hat, and the other two searched his pockets and tugged a couple of rings off his fingers.
“Give me those,” she said. They were good pieces, though not as valuable as the brooch. “Leave him his boots,” she added. “We aren’t thieves.”
One of the porters was looking at the brooch. “How much do you reckon that’s worth, then?”
“Forty dollars.”
The porter whistled. “We did all right, then.”
She nodded. “How much did he have on him in cash?”
“Ten dollars and change.” The porter frowned. “That’s odd,” he said. “He looks like a tramp. What’s a tramp doing with that kind of money?”
“Who cares?” She climbed back on to the cart. “We never saw him, all right? Come on, let’s get going. If we’re lucky, we might just catch up with the grain people at the Sincerity.”
Which, as it happened, she did. Furthermore, they gave her a hundred and eighty dollars for the brooch, and seventy more for the rings, which paid for the grain with twelve dollars over. She sold the grain to the Vadani at the camp for two thousand Vadani quarters cash; she could have had three thousand in letters of credit but, as she pointed out to the supply officer, what could she buy for three thousand quarters in Vadani territory that anybody could possibly want?
The supply officer conceded the point gracefully. “Any more where that came from?” he asked.
“There might be,” she replied. “What sort of quantity are you looking for?”
“Unlimited.” He didn’t smile as he said it. There, she thought, stands a worried man.
“Cash,” she said firmly, “no paper. I’ve had enough of paper recently. It may take a while. Are you staying here or moving on?”
He did grin at that. “You’ll have no bother finding us,” he replied. “Just look for the smoke.”
She nodded. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “It’s getting harder all the time.”
“I know,” the supply officer said. “That’s what I hate about this job. You wear yourself down to the bone getting food for this lot, and then the ungrateful buggers eat it all. Still, what can you do?”
Jokes, she thought. When they start making jokes to strangers, it means things aren’t going well. “You won’t be here much longer, though, surely,” she said. “Not after what’s happened to the duke.”
His face changed. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
They didn’t know. Oh well. “I’d like to talk to the duty officer, please,” she said.
When he woke up, his head hurt. That made him panic, in case he’d suffered some kind of permanent injury. He reassured himself with a quick inventory of his faculties. Even so.
They’d taken the brooch, n
aturally; also his rings and the money in his pockets. He sat down and pulled off his boots, shaking them until the pieces of jewellery he’d stuffed in the conveniently pointed toes came loose and fell out on the ground. Not so bad, then. He thought of the disapproving looks his former colleagues in Necessary Evil had given him when he’d started dressing up in flashy brooches, rings, bracelets, fobs and buckles; vulgar ostentation, they’d said behind his back, all that finery, like some duke of the savages; looks like the great Maris Boioannes has finally lost his grip. On the contrary, he thought, and smiled. A man who may need to leave home in a hurry can never have too much jewellery.
Of course he only had the vaguest idea of where he was. Somewhere in the Cure Doce country; all very well in diplomatic theory, but he fancied that national boundaries wouldn’t be much of a deterrent to a Vadani patrol who spotted someone with a brown face just over the line. Besides, he’d overheard the merchant’s people chattering, something about Cure Doce rangers having attacked the Vadani duke. In which case, the border probably didn’t mean anything any more, which was extremely inconvenient. People could be so thoughtless sometimes.
He put his boots back on and stood up. The middle of nowhere. For a two-hundred-dollar brooch, they might at least have left him a horse. Walking, in his opinion, was strictly for poor people (to which category, in all fairness, he now belonged). Working on the hopeful assumption that the road must eventually go somewhere, he started trudging. Something (a diamond, or an emerald, maybe) was chafing his big toe.
Well now, he thought, more to occupy his mind than anything, suppose the Vadani duke really is dead. Does that mean the end of the alliance with the savages, or merely a change in leadership? Pointless, of course, to speculate without hard facts. The real question was what the savages wanted out of the war. Revenge for their murdered princess; well, he could believe that savages thought like that, took honour and blood-vengeance and the like quite seriously, but enough to bring their entire army, not to mention their herds and families, all the way across the desert? It was infuriating that he only had snippets of overheard gossip to go on. Nevertheless, he was inclined to favour the other theory he’d heard about: pressure on the Aram Chantat from other, stronger tribes; a need to find new land and new grazing, or be wiped out. It only mattered because it had a bearing on how serious they were about taking the City; and that, of course, mattered a great deal. More immediately relevant was whether it was true that Duke Valens had been killed by the Cure Doce. If so, some form of punitive action, swift and massive, was inevitable. A full-scale invasion? He thought about that. If they had the manpower to blockade the City while they were about it, then most certainly, yes; it was the best possible pretext for looting and foraging, thereby getting hold of the vast quantities of food and supplies they’d need for a sustained siege of Mezentia. If he was right about their motivation, the savages wouldn’t object; more territory, more land they could depopulate and use to graze their wasteful, inefficient flocks and herds. Duke Valens was, of course, far too shrewd to embark on war on two fronts unless he absolutely had to; but if he really was dead…
These and other reflections turned over and over in his mind, like a woman making butter, and the more he thought about them, the harder and more elusive they became. His course of action, needless to say, was obvious, dictated by circumstances. Really, he had no choice in the matter, if he wanted to stay alive and salvage something from the ruin of his fortunes. Valens’ death (if he really was dead) made little difference, unless it marked the end of the Alliance and the war. Once again he found himself frustrated beyond measure by the lack of reliable information. Without it, he was a bird with a broken wing, flapping wildly, knowing perfectly well how to fly but unable to get off the ground.
He walked on, curling his feet inside his boots to take the weight off the blisters. There were people, so he’d heard, who walked for pleasure; bizarre thought. He tried to recompile the map in his mind. An inch along this road (he struggled to remember the map’s scale; was it two or five miles to the inch?) there ought to be a well-used, clearly defined cart track that went directly to Erbafresc. Or would it be more sensible to carry on to the next turning, which would bring him to the river that led, eventually, to the allied camp? Tactically, Erbafresc would be better, and in theory a Mezentine face would be safer in Cure Doce territory than across the border. On the other hand, if they were still actively looking for him and had notified their Cure Doce allies to watch out for a stray Mezentine wandering about on his own, he’d be far safer on the Vadani side, and to hell with the finer points of strategy. It’d be better to announce his presence to the allies from neutral territory than simply to allow himself to be picked up by a patrol, but if, after the Valens incident (if it had happened at all), the Cure Doce were now regarded by the allies as outright enemies, a patrol finding him in Cure Doce country would be more likely to kill him on the spot rather than accept his surrender. The train of thought made him grin: you wanted choices, you’ve got them.
He found the Erbafresc road, exactly where the mapmaker had shown it. Decision time. In the end, he chose to go on and take the shorter route to the Vadani border simply because it meant less walking.
There was a customs post on the frontier; abandoned, needless to say. More than that, someone had been to the trouble of setting fire to it, though it looked as though they’d been in a hurry and hadn’t bothered to wait and see if the fire caught properly. The inside was gutted and blackened, but the flames had barely touched the rafters, so the roof was intact. He looked up at the sky and guessed it would be dark in a couple of hours; might as well spend the night here, under a roof. He went inside and sat down on the floor, his back to a wall. He was worn out, his feet ached even after he’d taken his weight off them, and he was miserably hungry. He sat still and quiet, trying very hard not to think about food, dozing rather than sleeping, until dawn.
Vaatzes, he thought as he woke up; through a gap in the roof he saw a grey sky, the colour of weathered lead. He’d been fretting over nothing, because Vaatzes, not Valens, was the key. Foolish of him to have lost sight of that, though such a lapse was forgivable in the circumstances. But of course, it could only be Vaatzes (poor Ziani, as he tended to think of him, even now), because after all, he’d studied him, analysed him, trained him to a certain extent, moulded and shaped him, designed the whole huge, intricate mechanism around him. In comparison, the Vadani duke was a nobody – he didn’t even know his name when the groundwork for the plan was laid, he only knew that the Vadani had a duke, well thought of in some quarters, just sufficiently intelligent and capable to be useful in some capacity. Vaatzes, on the other hand…
He sat up, suddenly awake. Voices, not far from the customs shed; too indistinct for him to be able to make out what they were saying, or what language they were saying it in. He had no idea what the Cure Hardy language sounded like. Frustrated, he crept to the window and looked out.
A dozen or so soldiers were riding past; weary men in rusty Mezentine armour (but everybody wore it) on big, strong-looking horses, too military to be Cure Doce, therefore either Eremians or Vadani. He had his doubts about Eremians, because of the destruction of their city and the massacres during the occupation. They might just kill anybody with a brown face on principle, whereas he’d heard the Vadani were relatively disciplined, for savages. No way of telling. But the alternative was struggling on alone, and he couldn’t face that. His feet hurt, and he was so very hungry.
He limped to the doorway. By the time he got there, of course, the idiots had ridden past, not looking round. He shouted, “Over here!” – stupid thing to say, but for once his usual knack for the right turn of phrase eluded him.
Two of the riders turned their heads. They hadn’t seen him. Frantically, he jumped up and down and waved.
As it turned out, they were Eremians. His fears, however, proved groundless. The leader, a tall, skinny man with a badly scarred face, clearly understood the significance of a
Mezentine prisoner, especially one who gave himself up voluntarily and promised valuable information, though the way he grinned was disconcerting, as though he was smiling at some private joke.
“Don’t let it bother you,” the leader replied, when he asked what was so funny. “It’s just that you’re not the first tatty-looking Mezentine I’ve picked up on my travels. My name’s Ducas, by the way. You may have heard…”
“No,” he replied honestly; then a faint echo in his memory prompted him. “Just a moment,” he said. “You were a leader in the Eremian resistance. And before that, you were arrested for treason, during the siege.”
“Quite right.” Ducas smiled, twisting the scar tissue on his cheek. “And if you’ve heard of me, it bears out what you said, about you being somebody important. As I understand it, only the high-ups in your government know anything about what goes on outside the city walls. Or is it all different in wartime?”
“You know a lot about the Republic, for an Eremian.”
Huge grin, rather disconcerting. “A friend told me all about you people,” he said. “But he left before the war started, so maybe what he told me’s out of date by now.” The grin faded into a mere smile. “What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. But my name is Maris Boioannes.”
Ducas’ face froze; he nodded slowly. “You can’t prove that, I suppose? No, of course you can’t. Let’s see, who could vouch for you? I don’t imagine Ziani Vaatzes knows you by sight.”
