by K. J. Parker
The driver looked at him oddly. “You know a lot about this stuff,” he said, “for a fiddle player.”
Oida grinned. “I play a lot in grand houses,” he said, “you can pick up all sorts of things, eavesdropping.” He put his hands behind his head and yawned. “The point I’m making is this. It may look a whole lot like the end of the world, but I don’t think it is, not this time. I mean, take a really extreme case; let’s suppose Senza wins, the West surrenders, the emperor’s strung up and the streets of the capital run with blood. So what? Big deal. In a year’s time there’ll be a new government, pretty much the same as the old one, except the capital will now be in Choris, six hundred miles away, instead of here on the doorstep. Won’t change anything that matters. The only real difference will be, the war will be over and things can start getting better again. And you’ll be taking on men to drive your fleet of carts, and building yourself a big house somewhere.”
They pressed on until it was quite dark, hoping to reach the turning before nightfall. But eventually it was too dark to see, and the driver refused to go on, in case they missed the crossroads. In the morning, they woke up to find that they’d spent the night in the middle of a battlefield.
The dead were all Western light cavalry; they’d been shot, and the arrows were still in the bodies, which strongly suggested haste, since no sensible archer leaves a good arrow behind if he can possibly retrieve it. Once again, they’d beaten the crows to it, though none of the bodies they examined was warm.
“I wish I could make out tracks,” Oida said with feeling. “But they built these bloody roads so well you can’t see a damn thing. I want to know if they came down the road or up, and which direction they left in.”
The driver was badly shaken, and Oida guessed he hadn’t had much experience with battlefields; he neglected to point out the implications for a possible career with Ocnisant. “What about if they come back?” he kept saying, and Oida grew tired of pointing out that one coach, carrying one civilian, was unlikely to be seen as a threat or a military prize worth stopping for, and that in any event they’d hear them coming even if they didn’t see them, in plenty of time to ditch the coach and hide among the vine rows. It bothered him a little that he hadn’t been able to calm the driver down and soothe his nerves; the man was getting as jumpy as a cat and was clearly worrying himself to death – with good reason, sure enough, but it was Oida’s job as a communicator to mislead him into thinking there was nothing to be scared of.
“Don’t worry,” he said, as they scrambled back aboard the coach. “Once we find that turning and get on the Western Supply, we won’t be seeing any more of that sort of thing. There’s absolutely no reason why Senza should go a single yard further west than he has to. He’s headed for Rasch, remember.”
A burned-out way station didn’t help matters, and it was just as well they reached the turning without stumbling on anything else. They stopped at the crossroads and looked down the Western Supply, a straight grey line running downhill for as far as they could see. “We made it,” the driver said. “Thank God for that. All that death and gore was starting to do my head in.”
“I suggest we try and make up speed on the downhill section,” Oida said. “I expect we’ll both feel better if we can get a few miles behind us.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have said that. The driver went fast; too fast, as it turned out. They’d been on the road about an hour when they heard a loud thump and the coach began to judder and weave and then to track wildly to the left. The driver swore and hauled on the reins. When the coach stopped, it was listing over.
“You know what,” Oida said. “This trip is starting to get on my nerves.”
It wasn’t the axle, as Oida had thought; it was the wheel itself. A spoke must’ve broken, and taken all the others with it. All that remained was the hub, with smashed stubs sticking out of it, like a badly laid hedge. The driver walked back down the road, found the rim and brought it back, rolling it like a hoop.
“Can you fix it?” Oida asked. The driver looked at him. “Sorry,” Oida said, “stupid question. Right, so what do we do?”
The driver shook his head. “God knows,” he said. “We aren’t going very far on that. It needs new spokes fitting, and that’s a wheelwright’s job. I reckon we’re going to have to footslog it as far as the way station.” He stopped. No need to say what had just passed through his mind. He sat down on the ground and stared at the coach, as if he’d never seen one before.
“Well, obviously,” Oida said quickly. “And even if there’s nobody there, I don’t imagine they’ll have cleared out all the tools and the spoke blanks. If needs be, we can whittle something up ourselves, it doesn’t have to be pretty. Come to think of it,” he went on – the driver was still staring blankly into space – “isn’t the whole point about these mail coaches that they’re all built to a pattern, so if something breaks you can just grab a spare off the rack and slot it in? Bet you anything you like they’ve got spare wheels there, stacks of them. Your tax money at work. Where’s the map?”
The driver shook his head. “No map.”
Oh. “All right. So where’s the next way station?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t do this route.”
Oida took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, it can’t be far,” he said. “Twenty miles at the very most, and maybe they’ll lend us mules so we won’t have to walk back carrying a bloody wheel.” He looked up the road, running dead straight up into the hills. It would have to be uphill, he said to himself, I hate bloody up. Still, downhill on the way back, something to look forward to. “Wonder what made the spoke suddenly go like that,” he said. “I thought they built these things to take any sort of punishment.”
“It was me,” the driver said, “going too damn fast. It’s a judgement on me, for deserting.”
“Right,” Oida said. “Because if you’d done your duty and gone scampering after the enemy and actually managed to find them and got yourself killed about two seconds later, what a difference that would’ve made.” He picked up the rim of the wrecked wheel and rested it on his shoulder; he reckoned it’d be less of a pain to carry than the spokes. “Come on,” he said. “Sooner we start, sooner we get there.”
The vineyard country stopped at the top of the rise. Beyond that was moorland; a shallow dip, and then the road rose steeply. There was nothing to see but heather, starting to go over, and couch grass and bog cotton, with the occasional island of startlingly yellow gorse. The driver had brought his bow as an afterthought, but there was absolutely no point; the deer would see them coming three miles away, the birds flew too high or got up too quick, there should have been sheep but there wasn’t a single one to be seen. Whatever had happened here, Oida was at a loss to understand, and it was fortunate, in a way, that there was no point trying; if he managed to figure it out, he’d only upset himself, and what would that achieve? He concentrated on trying to remember once-glimpsed maps. Logic demanded that there should be at least one way station on the link between the Military and the Great West. He could just about visualise a straight line marked in blue, drawn with a ruler by a clerk who’d never been outside the city but who believed unshakably in the straightness of military roads; his handwriting, the rather affected cursive government minuscule – looks crystal clear from a distance, but up close you have to look really close to read it – Boa Cyruos or Bos Cypua, something like that? Not that the name mattered a damn, except that if it had a name on a map, it had to be there. It’d be on lists and schedules, and Supply would send it shipments of food, tools, footwear, forage, stationery, horseshoes and copies of Imperial decrees; if the driver got there and found nothing but heather and bog cotton, he’d report it when he got back and they’d inform the Survey, and the Survey would send someone out to look— You had to believe in the way stations, because the alternative was mental and spiritual anarchy.
Faith is traditionally tested in the wilderness; according to the best philosophers, it
’s what the wilderness is for. (It was at times like this that Oida reverted to thinking in essay titles; In a Created universe, account for the existence of deserts; 25 marks. Instinctively he began to marshal his arguments, then remembered he wasn’t nineteen any more.) It was hard to believe in way stations, or anything human. There was the road, of course, but it was so perfectly straight, so unyieldingly regular, that it seemed improbable that fallible mortals had had anything much to do with it – the gods built it, presumably, or the giants, on one of their better days. For a giant, twenty-five yards in one stride, the road would be useful, manageable. Just too damn big for humans. Imagine ants trying to use the cities of Men.
The driver had gone quiet, which wasn’t a good sign. He was probably one of those people who need time for things to sink in. Jollying him along wasn’t working, and neither was plausibly argued optimism; probably best to leave him alone and let him sweat it out, and if he did decide to sit down on the verge and die, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. There had to be coaches or horses or mules or donkeys still, somewhere on earth, it was just a matter of plodding on until he found them, and then getting a real move on to make up the time he’d lost, which was another thing he didn’t particularly want to think about.
He remembered the name of the way station, Bes Cyroia, just as it came in sight on the top of the rise, as they trudged up out of the dip that had hidden it. All the stations west of Rasch look the same – square, flat-roofed red-brick boxes, with three rectangular sheds out back. He quickened his pace, which reminded him of how much the calves of his legs hurt. The driver lagged behind, the hub of the broken wheel cradled in his arms like a refugee’s baby.
The door was open and there was nobody home. The inside was neat, tidy and clean, as though the station crew weren’t sure whether it was an invasion or a proctors’ inspection. They’d taken the food, but not much else. Oida was in and out before the driver caught up; he shook his head, then hurried across the paved yard to the furthest shed: forge, wheelwright’s shop and stores. There was a big military-issue padlock on the door – a good sign, but military padlocks and hasps are the best that taxpayers’ money can buy.
“We need a sledgehammer,” Oida said. “And an axe.”
A way station ought to have plenty of both. They’d be in the stores.
So; no hammer and no axe. What they did have was time, and the driver’s muscle and Oida’s patient ingenuity. After various experiments with stone slabs, crowbars and a bit and brace they found in the stables, Oida hit on the idea of clambering up on the roof and smashing their way in through the slates. There was no rope anywhere, but they found six pairs of decommissioned reins in the stables, dismantled them and knotted them together. Oida volunteered to be lowered down through the hole. The improvised rope was almost long enough.
Once inside, Oida had the pleasure of being vindicated. There were rows and rows of coach wheels, new and brightly painted, racked up between rails, the iron tres still clammy with grease. They tried hauling one up through the hole in the roof, which broke the improvised rope; so Oida passed up a cold chisel and a big hammer, then sat down for a much-needed rest while the driver took out his feelings on the padlock. He used the time to reflect on the pattern of dereliction and abandonment he’d observed along the road; he had the feeling of a shape, which wasn’t the shape he’d expected but which had a sort of internal logic of its own. If his hypothesis proved to be right, the West was in even deeper trouble than he’d assumed it to be; they hadn’t been taken by surprise by Senza’s onslaught, they’d seen it coming and abandoned huge swaths of the inner empire as indefensible – a strategy of defence in depth based on letting Senza reach the capital unopposed, in the hope of mauling him a bit on his way back. It was a strategy they taught in military academies, suitable for situations where you can’t possibly hope to win, but there’s still an outside chance that the enemy might be induced to lose. It was also the equivalent of cutting twelve-foot letters into a chalk hillside reading FORZA IS DEAD. He thought about that, but couldn’t make up his mind.
Once they’d got the wheel outside, they offered it up against the remains they’d brought with them and were pleased to find it was an exact match. That was good; not so good was the weight of the thing. The driver could lift it and stagger a few yards before he had to put it down again, but that was about as much as he could do. They tried rolling it along the road, but it kept veering off and falling over. Then Oida hit on the idea of passing a long pole through the axle hole and carrying it like a stretcher, or the spoils of the hunt. By then it was pitch dark outside. They broke a lantern and a jar of lamp oil out of the stores, but they didn’t need it; they were asleep within minutes.
Oida woke up the next morning with agonising cramp in his hips and calves, to find the driver roasting something on a spit over a fire of broken door planks. It was about the size of a small dog and tasted foul, and Oida knew better than to ask.
The driver was fretting about his horses. He’d left them hobbled rather than tethered, and there was probably enough grazing for them, and they’d probably have smelt the bog pool twenty yards from the coach by now and had the sense to drink without getting stuck in the bog, but he couldn’t be sure; and they needed those horses, and, besides, a man gets attached to his team. Oida pointed out that worrying about it wouldn’t help them and made him less efficient, but he got the impression the driver couldn’t quite grasp the logic behind that.
There was a rainwater barrel under the eaves of the shed. The water in it was a dark brown colour, but Oida decided to risk it; he loathed being dirty. He washed as thoroughly as he could and climbed back into his clothes, which stuck to his skin, as on a particularly hot day. His razor, face powder, hair oil, nail clippers and other basic necessities of life were in his luggage, supposedly on its way back from Blemya – God only knew where it was now, or who it belonged to – so he spent a long time putting the best edge he could manage on the tiny silver-handled penknife he carried in his sleeve, and had a go at shaving. He stopped when he saw blood on his hands, and hoped he hadn’t scarred himself for life.
“What happened to you?” the driver asked.
“Tried to shave.”
“Is that right? I guessed you’d been fighting.”
Oida grinned. “It was a bit like that, and I lost. I suppose we’d better be on our way.”
The driver looked at him. “I was thinking. Maybe we could just hang on here till they come back.”
“Better not,” Oida said, as gently as he could. “We might be waiting some time.”
So they started to walk, with the wheel on a pole and the pole on their shoulders. Oida had doubled over his scarf as a pad, but it wasn’t enough to keep the pole from chafing on his collarbone. He tried shifting it, but sooner or later it always managed to work its way back on to the most painful spot. He could feel the torn skin move under his lapel and the scarf. He tried to think of something else, the war, politics, the things they’d need to do as a matter of urgency once the coach was fixed, theological doctrine, music, the exact dimensions of his student room at the Studium, rivers in Permia beginning with the letter Y, but the pain got into everything, like sand at a beach picnic. He called out, “Do you think we could stop for a bit?” but the driver didn’t seem to have heard him. He thought about torture, about various men and women who’d ended up in the hands of torturers through his direct and indirect agency. He felt sick.
“You should’ve said something,” the driver told him, when eventually they did stop and Oida tried to improvise a dressing of some sort for the mess. “You shouldn’t have let it get in this state.”
The driver had come up with a dressing for it; pads of bog cotton splodged with mashed-up dock leaves and two other plants he didn’t recognise. To begin with it stung like hell; then the pain faded into a hot glow, and then his whole shoulder went completely numb. It was the most wonderful feeling he’d ever had in his life. He kept saying “thank you” over a
nd over again, until the driver gave him a funny look and told him to shut up about it. “It’ll be stiff as buggery in a few hours,” he warned, “you won’t be able to move that arm at all. Fat lot of good to me you’ll be when we’re fitting the stupid wheel.”
Oida apologised, several times. “This stuff is amazing,” he said. “Where’d you learn about it?”
The driver looked blank. “I thought everybody knew,” he said.
He made the driver show him the plants he’d used and tell him their names; but they just looked like weeds to him, and the names were obviously what those plants were called within five miles of the driver’s birthplace and nowhere else. Still, he committed them lovingly to memory: blue marwort and shepherd’s sandal. If ever I get out of this alive, he promised himself, I’ll get seeds and plant five acres of them and make enough money to retire on.
What he should have done, the driver explained to him as to a small child, was cut the soles out of three pairs of military boots from the stores, wrap them in cloth and pad them underneath with a double handful of sheep’s wool twisted into a ball. Since he’d neglected to do that, he’d have to make do with his shirt, folded into ever-decreasing rectangles. It wasn’t nearly as good as doing it properly, but it protected his other shoulder quite adequately the rest of the way, which was nearly all downhill.
