by K. J. Parker
“I’d rather take my chances than starve to death, thanks all the same.”
Teucer wriggled his toes in the new left boot Iser had given him. It was slightly too big, but it had a sole. What a difference that made. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want to be a soldier any more.”
Musen laughed. “Me neither. But I’ve had it with wandering about in the fucking wilderness. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and every friend I ever had is dead. I just want to get home quick as I can.” He lowered his head, and spat. “They’ve got maps at Spire Cross. Just one look at a proper map, that’s all.”
“Who taught you to read?”
“So,” Musen said, “if you don’t fancy Spire Cross, that’s fine. See you back home, maybe. Look after yourself.”
“Fine,” Teucer said quickly. “Spire bloody Cross. But if it all turns to shit—”
“Of course,” Musen said. “My fault. Every damn thing can be my fault.”
The heather was dry and springy, and under it the soil was flaking into dust. “You’d think it’d be worth someone’s while to fetch a few sheep out here,” Musen said, as they followed the zig-zag path downhill. “People are always moaning about the grazing being flogged out. It wouldn’t kill them to drive out over this way.”
“There’s a war on,” Teucer said.
“This close to the barracks, you’d be fine.” Musen stopped for a drink of water. It was almost noon. “And you could make good money, selling to the military. In fact, if anyone in there had half a brain, they’d have a flock of their own. I mean, it wouldn’t cost them hardly anything, they’ve got all those men sitting round all day with nothing to do, and I bet you half of them were farm boys before they joined up.”
Thin lines of smoke rose from the camp, straight up in the air, no wind at all. At least they could be sure someone was home. “Well, there you go,” Teucer said. “In five years, you could be rich.”
All bullshit, of course. One thing that wouldn’t be in short supply, once they got home, was land in need of working. Two of them, and the old men, to farm the whole of Merebarton. He didn’t want to think about that. Instead, he asked, “What was all that about, back at that village?”
“You what?”
“All that about a cart,” Teucer said.
“I told you, don’t—”
Yes, but they were nearly at Spire Cross, and then Teucer wouldn’t need Musen any more; so offending him no longer mattered. “It was bloody obvious we hadn’t got a cart,” he said. “If I hadn’t had a brainwave and put the idea of it getting stolen in their heads—”
“Shut up about that.”
“You could’ve got us both killed.”
“They’d have killed us anyway,” Musen snapped, “if they’d wanted to. People don’t just kill other people because they don’t like them.”
Musen was walking fast again, and it was costing Teucer breath to keep up. “They kill people who might be a nuisance,” he said, panting slightly. “Like, if they’ve managed to stay hidden for years and years, and then two strangers show up, soldiers, who might go and tell the authorities.”
“So,” Musen said. “In that case, they’d have killed us anyway. But, oh look, we’re still alive. So don’t you give me a hard time, all right?”
“So you made up all that shit about a cart just to get us out of the village.”
“Worked, didn’t it?”
“Yes, but—”
“It worked,” Musen said. “So shut your face.”
The last hour was a long trudge across the flat. “So what are we going to tell them?” Musen suddenly asked. It was the first thing he’d said for a long time.
“How about the truth?”
“Fine. Two survivors of a massacre. You clown, you just don’t get it. We don’t want to be noticed. We don’t want to get involved.”
“All right,” Teucer said. “We’ll say we’re deserters. After all, that’s what they’re bound to think anyway. And we can spend the rest of our lives rowing a galley in the middle of the fucking sea.”
Maybe, just possibly, Musen hadn’t considered that. “All right,” he said. “We tell them about the river. They’re going to shove us in with a bunch of strangers and send us straight off to the war.”
Teucer stopped dead. “You arsehole,” he said. “This was your idea.”
“It was my idea not to starve to death on the moor,” Musen said. “Teucer, for once in your life, use your head. Now, say after me, we are not soldiers.”
“Oh, right. So what the hell are we doing out here?”
“We’re drovers,” Musen said. “We were driving sheep, all right? From Cleeve.”
“To where from Cleeve?”
“Here, of course. To the army camp. Figuring they might want some nice fresh meat. But these enemy cavalry came out of nowhere. Friends all dead, sheep all gone. We can do that bit, easy.”
Teucer thought about it. Practically impossible to prove otherwise. “Musen, why have you got to lie all the time? What’s wrong with telling the truth?”
“It gets you in the shit,” Musen replied. “So let’s run it through one more time. We’re drovers, from Cleeve. That’s fine, we know where Cleeve is, they can’t catch us out there.”
“You ever been to Cleeve?”
“Once,” Musen said. “There’s a big old apple tree in the square, and they hang lanterns in the branches at midsummer. That’s all anybody knows about Cleeve.”
“I went there a couple of times with my cousins.”
“Well, that’s all right, then. So, we were out on the open moor, about two days from here. Actually, we were lost. Got lost in the fog. Happens all the time.”
“What fog?”
“The fog.”
“We’ve been on the moor for I don’t know how long and there hasn’t been any bloody fog.”
“All right, we just got lost. Easy as anything, God knows. The sheep got spooked, and by the time we rounded them up again, we’d completely lost our bearings. So there we were, lost on the moor—”
“Why do we have to have been lost? Why make it complicated?”
“Lost on the moor,” Musen said, “and suddenly these horsemen appear. We can do the horsemen, just tell it how it was. We had the wit to pretend to be dead. Horsemen bugger off, there we were, alone and screwed. See? Nothing at all about being soldiers.”
Teucer nodded. “How about the army boots?”
“What?”
“We’re wearing army boots. How do we explain that?”
Musen paused for a moment. “Took them off some dead men.”
“What?”
“No. Listen, it’s perfect. We took them off some dead soldiers we found by the river. And then they’ll say, what dead soldiers, and they’ll be much too interested in that to bother about us. And then they give us food and clothes and we go home to Cleeve. It’s perfect,” he repeated. “It’s a lie with the truth sort of folded up in it, like cheese in a chunk of bread.” He grinned. “Always tell as much truth as you can when you’re lying,” he said. “Nothing deceives like the truth.”
The main gate of the camp was open. When they’d left it, Teucer could remember the gate closing behind them. “Musen,” he said.
“What?”
“What’s that? Lying in the gateway.”
They stopped. The gate was maybe six hundred yards away. The shape on the ground could’ve been anything.
“Shit,” Musen said.
“Could just be a log. Or a crate.”
“Who’d leave a log lying about in a gateway?”
“There’s smoke,” Teucer pointed out. “That’s cooking fires. It’s all right. It must be just a log or something.”
Not cooking fires. Much later, Teucer found out that the Jazyges don’t bury their dead, they burn them, on great big bonfires, which can go on smoking for days, sometimes a whole week. Six bonfires; they’d smashed up rails and fences to get the firewood. They hadn’t bothered with the dea
d soldiers, or else it was deliberate. Some people, savages, believe that until the body is buried or burned, the soul can’t be released; so they leave their enemies to rot, on purpose – total war, in this world and the next.
“They can’t have taken all the food,” Musen said. “Not every last fucking scrap.”
He was wrong about that. What they couldn’t do was take all the water out of the well, so they’d thrown some dead men down it instead. Musen drew up a bucketful, looked at it and said, “I’m not drinking that.”
There had been water barrels all round the parade ground, which the enemy had smashed, and a rainwater tank, which they’d allowed to drain, so that the earth all round it was still slightly damp. “How about if we boiled it?” Teucer said.
“In what?”
In, eventually, a helmet. They finally managed to punch four holes in the rim, using an arrowhead they found embedded in a door and a brick. They hung it from bowstrings over a barrel-stave fire, which took for ever to light. They also found a jar of pickled walnuts; the Jazyges had opened it, but clearly hadn’t identified it as food. What they’d thought it was, Teucer hated to think.
“Right,” Musen said. “Well, that’s one problem solved.”
It was getting dark. Fixing a drink of water had taken them all afternoon. They’d managed to recover two unsmashed chairs from some officer’s quarters, and took them out into the parade yard, where the water was simmering. Solemnly, they each ate three walnuts.
“Musen.”
“What?”
“What about Merebarton? Do you think—”
Musen shook his head. “There’s a lot of other villages,” he said. “And why would they bother? It’s a war. It’s soldiers they’re after.”
Teucer sipped some warm water from the edge of the ladle they’d found in the quartermaster’s store. There was a definite taste, of something. “They were a bit bloody thorough, looking for food. I reckon they’re hungry.”
“There’s a lot of other villages,” Musen repeated. “Also, by now, our lot’s going to be out there looking for them. We do have an army, you know.”
Had an army. “Maybe the war’s over already. Maybe we lost.”
“The war’s been going on for years,” Musen said. “And we’ve got General Belot.” Musen waved his hand vaguely. “This is just—”
“What?”
“Temporary,” Musen said. “It happens. The tide comes in, it goes out. Any day now, Senza’ll be along and he’ll give them a bloody good smacking. Then it’ll be our turn.”
“What if —” Teucer stopped. What he wanted to say was: what if everybody else is dead, except us and Iser’s people, who go around robbing the bodies? What if we’re all that’s left? “What was all that stuff you said to the blacksmith? There’s no smiths in your family.”
“Just making conversation.”
“Who taught you to read?”
“None of your business.”
Teucer yawned. “If we empty the jar and wrap the walnuts up in a bit of cloth, we can use the jar to carry water.”
“Good idea,” Musen said. “We’ll do that.”
“Should we take the helmet?”
Musen shook his head. “No army stuff,” he said.
“If we took the helmet, we could boil the bog water. Heather burns. There’s loads of those muddy boggy patches.”
“No army stuff.”
They hung around all the next morning, on the off chance that Iser and his people showed up, but by noon there was no sign of them. “They can’t just have vanished,” Teucer said. “They were headed this way.”
“They should have got here before we did.”
True; in which case they should have arrived to find bodies being stripped and buried. But Iser and his men were nowhere to be seen, no indication that they’d ever been there. There were fifteen walnuts left. Why, Teucer asked himself, couldn’t there have been an even number?
“Toss you,” Musen said. “For the fifteenth walnut.”
He’d accumulated a fistful of coins. The Jazyges had taken all the silver, but copper was apparently beneath their notice. “You have it,” Teucer said. He noticed that Musen didn’t argue. Bastard.
“No maps,” Musen said sadly. “No paper of any kind. I’m guessing they used it all for kindling.”
“Or they ate it.”
“I hope it gave them the shits.”
Part of Teucer didn’t want to leave. After all, it was a shelter, a man-made structure in the middle of the empty moor, like a tiny point of light in the dark. Besides, sooner or later the army would send someone to find out what had happened. And the enemy had already been there, stripped it of everything they wanted and left it for dead; it stood to reason, therefore, that they’d be unlikely to come back. “We should bury the bodies,” he said.
“You’re being funny, aren’t you? There’s hundreds of them.”
Dozens rather than hundreds, but the point was valid. “What do you think happened to Iser?”
Musen shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“I mean, this sort of thing, it’s what they do. They wouldn’t have just taken one look and run away in horror.”
“I said, I don’t know, all right? Why do you expect me to know every damn thing?”
Pilad had said that once, the exact same words. But Pilad always knew everything, or figured it out. “We’d better go,” Teucer said, “while it’s still light.”
“I guess so,” Musen said. “It’s a bloody shame about the maps.”
Quite. All those dead men, but the maps would’ve been useful. “Why won’t you tell me who taught you to read?”
“Shut your face,” Musen said.
“When we get home, you could teach me.”
“Like hell.”
They left the camp with four or five hours of daylight left – “This way,” Musen said, but he was frowning – and walked slowly until it was too dark to see. Teucer had an odd feeling, of not being human any more; what he’d turned into he wasn’t quite sure, but it was something allied to rather than inhabiting the weary, rather unsatisfactory body he was obliged to take with him. He felt about it the way he was sure Musen felt about him. At least it meant that he was able to take a rather more objective view of the countless aches, pains and niggles that had been building up since he joined the army: pulled muscles, blisters, the foundations of a trick ankle. He despised them, put up with them, but they weren’t really his fault any more.
They found a shepherd’s hut. The roof was turf, and it had sagged and slipped, crushing the lintel, squashing the doorposts, like a mouth trying to chew something a bit too big. There was just enough room for them to squeeze in sideways. Inside, the floor was covered with a thick growth of tall, thin-stemmed yellow toadstools. In the far corner, they found a complex of bones, but it was too dark to form an opinion as to whether they were human or animal. Rather more to the point, they found a coat and a pair of boots, hanging from a rafter and therefore relatively undamaged, except for mould. Musen decided he wasn’t that desperate, so Teucer tried on the coat; the arms parted from the body as soon as he opened his shoulders. Without really thinking, he put his right hand in the pocket and found something: a leather purse, with coins. Five of them, blackened silver, completely unlike any either of them had seen before. There was also a bow leaning against the wall, but it was riddled with woodworm.
“You know what.” Musen was trying to light a peat fire, using the broken-up bow as kindling. “I think this is as good as our luck is going to get.”
“If this was a shieling,” Teucer said, “there should be a village down in the valley. Maybe we should drop down and look for it.”
“After the last time? Don’t be stupid.” Musen had achieved a tiny red spot on a patch of the dead coat, which quickly went out. “If there ever was a village, it’s probably long gone. Nobody lives here now.”
“The war?”
Musen shrugged. “This war, a different war, somethin
g else. Who knows, who gives a damn? No bloody good to us, that’s for sure.”
Teucer thought of Merebarton; of its long and intricate history, of his own imperishable glory within it. “If there ever was a village,” he said, “there’s probably a river down in the valley.”
“Not necessarily. If there is a river, we’re completely lost. Shouldn’t be any rivers till we reach the Brett, and that’s way over there, to hell and gone.” He sighed and rocked back on his heels. “I have no idea where we are,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
“Not your fault.”
“No,” Musen said, “it isn’t. Still, I’m disappointed. I thought I’d be able to cope. I mean, walking across the moor, how difficult is that? Too hard for me, apparently.”
“You didn’t ask to come here.”
“That’s no lie.”
They each ate two walnuts. Ridiculous; they couldn’t help laughing. “We’re not going to make it, are we?” Teucer said.
“It could go either way,” Musen replied. “But no, probably not. Still, it’d have been a shit life anyway. There’d have been just us to do all the work. We’d have had to pack up, head for—” He paused, frowning. “God, I don’t know. We’d all have starved inside a year anyhow.”
“All the—”
“They’re dead,” Musen said. “Hell of a way to go, too. Fucking war. At least Anser and Nical and Pilad got it quick, never knew what hit ’em. It’s like they took the short cut and we get to go the long way round. I’m going to go to sleep now,” he added, rolling on to his side. “We want to set off early as possible in the morning, get as far as we can before it gets hot.”
The next day, about three hours after dawn, they saw horsemen.
“Oh come on,” Musen shouted. He was furious about something. “That’s just not fair. All that fucking long way, and they still catch us.”
“Maybe it’s not them,” Teucer said. “Maybe it’s our lot.”
“I don’t think so,” Musen said.
Hard to say how far away they were; half a mile, maybe less. They’d come out of nowhere, which presumably meant a folded-in combe or valley. “They won’t have seen us,” Teucer said, kneeling down as Musen had done.
