by K. J. Parker
'Next time,' Poldarn repeated.
'That's right,' the sergeant said. 'About eighteen months after, it must've been, because the amnesty wasn't for a year. I got caught, along with most of Allectus's men who weren't killed on the spot or directly afterwards, ended up in prison camp-miserable bloody place, more of us died there than in the war-and then the amnesty came through and we had the option, stay there or join up with the regular army. Well, we couldn't sign up fast enough. Anyhow, practically the first job we're put on doing is clearing out all the free company blokes and bits-and-piecers, the ones who'd come to the Bohec valley with Feron Amathy for the war, then stayed on after to hang around looting and suchlike. Easy job it was, our lot weren't front-line, we were on escort duty, fetching prisoners back to Josequin. And bugger me if the second batch of prisoners we took on, there you were. Recognised you at once.'
'Oh,' Poldarn said.
'That's right. Of course,' the sergeant went on, looking past him, over his shoulder, 'it's human nature, really. Getting even, I mean. Like, this scar, it didn't heal up for a long time, went bad on me, had a hell of a time with it. And it's not pretty now; back then it was a right mess. Long and the short of it was, first chance I got, me and some of my lads-if an officer hadn't come by and made us stop, we'd have killed you for sure. I mean,' he added, 'we reckoned you were good as dead anyway, we might as well save the government the price of a rope. The officer said leave you where you were, it'd waste too much time carrying you; and that's the last I saw of you, sat up under a tree, all bloody. Like I said,' he added, 'no hard feelings. I mean, you were just another bloody bandit; and the stuff you'd been doing-'
'Quite,' Poldarn said. 'Just doing your duty, I suppose.'
'Exactly. Funny, though,' the sergeant went on. 'I mean, that first time, I was with the rebels and you-well, whatever way you look at it, you were on the government side. And then the next time, I'm the government and you're the outlaw. And both times, I end up leaving you for dead. Makes you think, really-you know, third time lucky and all.'
Poldarn smiled bleakly. 'You mean this time you really are going to kill me?'
The sergeant had the grace to look uncomfortable. 'My orders are, fetch you back to Dui Chirra. And in one piece.' He hesitated. 'Got any idea what's going to happen to you when you get there?'
'Not really. Best guess is, I'll get shouted at for a bit, and then it'll be back to shovelling mud out of the river bed. Nothing horrible, at any rate.'
The sergeant seemed relieved. 'Well,' he said, 'that's all right, then. I can't remember: did you tell me why you went AWOL in the first place?'
'I got bored,' Poldarn said. 'It's a very boring place.'
The sergeant looked at him. 'You get bored real easy,' he said.
The road was still a mess; the knee-deep ruts were full of mud, and the carts bottomed out and stuck fast with depressing regularity. When it wasn't raining, the sun shone spitefully hot-typical Tulice summer, someone said, and Poldarn assumed he knew what he was talking about. They were taking a short cut, following a road Poldarn hadn't been on before; it was a colliers' road, bypassing Falcata to the south, skirting a large patch of forest where there were several large charcoal camps. By the time they stopped for the night, he was filthy and shattered. It would've been far less trouble to have walked. At least he was so tired that he slept without dreaming.
They started early next morning, to try and make up some of the time they'd lost the previous day, but most of the day was wasted in trying to haul the carts out of a particularly deep and tenacious mud hole. In the end, the sergeant decided the mission was more important than the hardware, and gave the order to leave the carts behind, sending a rider back to camp for a team of oxen to drag them free and unblock the road, while the rest of them continued on foot. Though nobody said anything, it was painfully obvious that every man in the escort blamed Poldarn for what was turning into a horribly memorable assignment. He could see their point. If only he'd stayed put in Dui Chirra in the first place, they'd all have been spared the unpleasantness.
That evening, they called a halt at the first building they'd seen all day. Farms were few and far between in those parts; this one gave every indication of having been deserted for many years. Quite common, someone said; the smaller farms were failing, being bought up by the big proprietors, who took the land and let the houses fall down. Tulice, apparently, didn't have much of a future. It cost more to get local produce to market than to ship corn and dried food across the bay and float it down the rivers to the larger towns; meanwhile, anybody who had the option was leaving the land, heading for the cities or the colliers' camps. The more trees that were felled for charcoal, the worse (apparently) the flooding became. Pretty soon, Tulice would be nothing but a wilderness of derelict farms and rotting tree stumps, linked by a network of impassable roads. It was all somebody's fault, but nobody seemed to know whose.
They'd just about managed to scrape together enough dry wood for a fire and were fixing something to eat when the sentry called out: a small party coming in up the road toward them. It turned out to be three men, regular army, by the look of them more dead than alive. They were surprised, and relieved, to meet anybody on the road; they hadn't eaten for two days, and they'd been on the point of leaving the road and trying to find the colliers before they starved to death. The sergeant asked them where they'd come from.
'Falcata,' one of them answered. 'What's left of it.' The sergeant asked him what that was supposed to mean; by his reckoning Falcata was due north, on the other side of the forest.
The soldier shook his head. Not any more, he said. No Falcata any more; just burned wood and cracked stone. The raiders had finally come to Tulice.
Chapter Eleven
Charcoal, Monach thought: it's all these people think about. Show them a tree or a lump of wood, and they burn it to black, crumbly cinders. Even if it happens to be part of a house.
There was, of course, an alternative explanation. The question was, who could have been bothered to do this to a place like Falcata?
'Normally,' said the man he was talking to, a former sword-monk by the name of Mezentius, nominally a captain of infantry, 'the obvious answer would be us. But we didn't do it. Or did I sleep late that day?'
Monach shook his head. 'Not us,' he replied. 'Besides, there's not enough of us, it'd take a proper army to do this.'
Mezentius nodded. 'Won't stop them blaming us,' he replied. 'So, it's either the Amathy house or-' He frowned. 'That's not a nice thought,' he said. 'The raiders aren't supposed to have reached this far south, surely. They'd have to come across the bay to get here, for one thing.'
'Maybe they did,' Monach said.
'What, right past Torcea?'
'Maybe Torcea isn't there any more.'
Whoever had destroyed Falcata, they'd been thorough. Though the cracked stone was still hot, there were hardly any traces to show that anybody had ever lived there, or that the horrible mess that currently occupied the site had ever been habitable: no dead bodies, hardly anything in the way of human artefacts. The heat from the fire had been hot enough to melt the nails out of the walls. Mezentius reckoned that they must've herded the townspeople inside the walls and barred the gates before setting light to some very scientifically laid fires; it had burned out like a furnace, he said, total combustion, like they'd learned about in sixth-grade metallurgy.
'Which suggests it was the raiders,' Mezentius went on. 'Don't know if you saw Josequin after they'd finished with it, but it looked pretty much like this. And from what I've heard, it's by way of being their trademark. Apparently, it's what they do back home, where they come from; when they have wars or feuds or whatever, they barricade their enemies in their own houses and burn them to death. Probably,' he added, 'a religious thing.'
Monach made an effort and swept his mind clear. 'The problem is,' he said, 'we were planning on picking up supplies in Falcata. In case you hadn't noticed, we're practically out of food.'
More to the point, there was a small but well-supplied outpost at Dui Chirra: too small to interest a city-devouring army, but big enough to have enough food to feed them. Ironic, Monach couldn't help thinking. When he'd wanted to go to Dui Chirra, they'd decided it was too dangerous, too well defended. Now he'd come to terms with not going there, that was where they were headed, the only alternative being starvation. Was there a precept of religion that said you only got what you wanted when you didn't want it any more? If not, there damn well ought to have been.
That night, when they were pitching camp, the pickets came in with a bewildered-looking old man who was, they reckoned, the last surviving resident of Falcata.
'Who was it?' Monach demanded, as they pushed the poor fool down into a chair. 'Who did it? Was it the raiders?'
The old man glared at him. 'Don't know what you're talking about,' he replied, for all the world as if Monach was accusing him of having razed the city single-handed.
'Falcata,' Monach said. 'The city. Who destroyed it?'
The old man looked at him as if he was mad. 'Destroyed?' he repeated.
Oh, Monach thought. 'Falcata-it's been burnt down.'
'Bloody hell.' The old man's face looked as though it had suddenly melted. 'What about-?'
'All dead.'
So; fat lot of use he was, and Monach hadn't the heart to have him thrown out, not after that. Some time later, the old man asked Monach who he was.
'Me?' Good question. 'Well, I'm sort of in charge.' He hadn't put that terribly well, but his mind was on other things.
'You mean you're the general?'
'I guess you could say that.'
'Oh. What's it for, then, your army? Who are you?'
Another good bloody question. 'It's a crusade,' Monach said. 'For religion. To save the Empire.'
'Oh. So what're you doing in these parts, then?'
Haven't been on the sharp end of so many good questions since fourth-grade finals. 'We felt this was where we needed to be,' Monach said awkwardly.
'What, to save the city?'
'Well, no.'
'Because you made a piss-poor job of it.'
Eventually they gave him some money and sent him away. Of course, there was nowhere he could spend it, and nothing he could buy with it. But it was the least they could do, in the circumstances.
The next day, everybody was on edge, as if they expected the Amathy house, and the regulars, and the raiders, by the hundreds of thousands, to jump out at them from behind every tree stump and drystone wall. As a result they made good time, in spite of the pitiful state of the road; nobody wanted to dawdle or stay in one place long enough to tie up a bootlace. Hardly the right attitude for an army of avenging angels: a loud noise or a sudden ambush by three field mice would have them all drawing and carving each other to pieces. But what could anybody expect from a thousand scared peasants led by a hundred over-trained academics? It'd be different, Monach couldn't help thinking, if only Xipho was here; because, when all was said and done, Xipho had always been the only one who really seemed to know what they were supposed to be doing, or why it was so important that they should do it. And where the hell was she, assuming she was still alive? (But if she'd been captured-by the government, the Amathy house, the raiders, someone else-they'd had the forethought to take the kid as well; Ciartan's son, of course, which put a further bewilderingly unfathomable perspective on it all. The day she'd gone missing, at least he'd had some idea what to do-find her, rescue her; or was he supposed to follow on and meet up at some prearranged rendezvous she'd told him about, on some occasion when he hadn't been listening properly? And Cordo-Cordo was still alive, in spite of the fact that he'd died, stabbed to death by Ciartan and left to burn in the Old Library.)
When the attack eventually came, of course, they'd got over their jitters and weren't ready for it. They hadn't even realised how close they were to Dui Chirra, not until their counter-attack smashed a hole in the enemy front line and they burst out the other side, scampered up a slope in order to regroup, and found that they were looking straight down at the front gate. It proved to be a stroke of luck; whoever was commanding the enemy (they had no idea, of course, who they were fighting) was under the impression that the counter-attack was a concerted effort to get to the foundry compound at all costs. In consequence, their unknown opponent drew back on the wings, where Monach's people were on the point of running away, and made a dash for the gates; mistimed it, found himself caught between the counter-attack coming down the hill and the re-formed and newly motivated wings in hot pursuit of an enemy who'd suddenly and without provocation posted their unilateral declaration of defeat… After that, it was just a mess, which only ended when the enemy second in command opened the gates in order to lead a sortie just as his superior had managed to force Monach and the advance party back over the brow of the hill. As soon as he saw Monach's flank men brushing the sortie aside and streaming in through the gate, he must've lost it altogether; he ordered a ramshackle, last-hope charge which allowed the back end of Monach's little army to smash into his flank and rear. If fifty of his men managed to escape with him down the Falcata road, that was all.
'What happened?' someone asked, as Monach slumped against the inside of the gate and pulled off his helmet.
'I don't know,' Monach replied. 'We won, but buggered if I know how. Who were those people, anyway?'
'Government,' someone else replied. 'Too well kitted out for Amathy house, and if they'd been raiders we'd all be dead by now. My guess is, they were the garrison here.'
Brigadier Muno, then. Fine, Monach thought, it's always nice to know who you've been fighting. But wasn't Muno supposed to be some sort of tactical genius? Or was that his nephew, the one who'd died? 'Anybody know how we made out?'
'Not so bad,' someone told him. 'It looked worse than it was on the wings-our lads didn't get close enough to 'em to come to much harm. We may've lost a couple of dozen killed, same again injured, but it's no worse than that. For what it's worth,' the speaker added, 'we must've got a couple of hundred of them, maybe more.'
Big deal. 'Well,' Monach said, 'anyhow, we won. Let's just hope there's some food left. That's what we came for, after all.'
Men were starting to peep out at them from doorways and windows. It was years since Monach had been in a foundry, and that hadn't been anything like as big as this one. He looked round, suddenly wondering if the garrison's antics hadn't all been a ruse to lure him into the compound, where he'd be surrounded by five thousand heavily armed foundrymen. There did seem to be an awful lot of them 'Look up,' someone whispered at him. 'Someone's coming. Probably the foreman, manager, whatever he's called.'
Monach stopped slouching, stood up straight and tried to look like a ruthless conqueror. At least the man approaching looked to be marginally more scared than he was. 'Right,' he called out, when the man was a dozen or so yards away, 'who're you?'
'My name is Galand Dev,' the man replied. He was short, bald, looked like a giant who'd been squashed down to fit inside a dwarf. 'I'm the Imperial representative here. Who are you?'
It was a question Monach was rapidly coming to dread. 'My name doesn't matter,' he replied. 'I speak for the brothers of the Avenging Angels of Light.' He hoped that Mezentius and the others couldn't hear him; they'd have trouble keeping straight faces. 'We claim this post in the name of religion.
Bring us all your food, now.'
