by K. J. Parker
“Oh yes. And he was a great admirer of the cavalry. I mean, look at the late charge at Farnaxa.”
Daxin decided not to show his ignorance. “Well,” he said, “there you are. The cavalry’s always fought well for the Kingdom.”
“Against other enemies,” Prexil said. “I mean, it’s perfectly understandable. How would you feel if someone ordered you to kill your own blood relations?”
“You never knew my aunt Loxor.”
That got a wan smile, which was probably all it deserved. “Seriously,” Prexil said. “We do need to be very careful with these people. Trouble is, what do you do? Can’t send them away or they almost certainly will defect; can’t keep them close in case they stab us in the back.”
“That doesn’t leave many options,” Daxin said. “Unless you cut their throats here and now.”
“The thought had occurred to me.”
Daxin looked away so that Prexil wouldn’t see the shock on his face. He’d meant it. “I don’t think we need go that far,” he said.
“It’s the practicalities more than anything,” Prexil replied. “How exactly do you go about slaughtering two thousand horsemen in cold blood in the middle of the desert?”
All three dust clouds were still there as the sun set, and no scouts had returned. Prexil hadn’t said anything; nor had he sent out more scouts. The soldiers moved to their night attack positions without waiting for orders. There was a general air of bewilderment, as if nobody could quite understand how it had come to this. Shortly before midnight, Prexil had a blazing row with the engineer – something technical, about fascines and enfilading fire. Daxin wanted to get between them and stop it, but they were so angry he was afraid they’d hit him for interrupting. Prexil ordered the engineer confined to his tent. The engineer refused to go. Prexil yelled for the guard, who stood and did nothing, whereupon Prexil stormed off into the darkness, leaving the engineer swearing at him at the top of his voice. Then he went back to what he’d been doing, and nobody spoke.
A watch before dawn there was a sudden commotion on the far western edge of the camp. A thousand men of the mobile reserve ran across in full armour. When they got there, there was nothing to see, and the sentries swore blind they hadn’t seen anything.
Dawn came, and after that, the heat. Nobody had got any sleep. It took considerably longer than usual to pack away the tents and break camp, and the sun was high before they eventually got moving. Prexil wanted to up the pace, to make up time. The junior officers tried to argue with him, and he started shouting about insubordination and courts martial. The orders were given. The pace slowed down a little, if anything. The dust clouds were still there.
“They’re too scared of us to attack,” Prexil said. “They know there’s absolutely nothing they can do, so they’re just tagging along, keeping station. Pretty soon they’ll give up and go away.”
Daxin had been looking at a map. He’d found it in Ixion’s tent, and nobody had seemed to want it for anything. He’d been over it many times, not sure if he was interpreting the symbols correctly; a light blue dot was water, wasn’t it, and if he’d calculated the scale correctly and if he was holding the damn thing the right way up, the three enemy units hadn’t been anywhere near water for a long time. He wondered what that meant. But it was safe to assume that Prexil had all the relevant information and knew the answer, and as things stood he didn’t feel like raising the issue with him.
A scout came back; just one, on a horse without saddle or bridle or shoes. He was from the second group, and they’d got up as close as they dared to the dust cloud directly behind the column. From six hundred yards away, it looked like an ordinary trading caravan. They closed in to three hundred yards; about ninety pack horses, fifteen camels, thirty-odd men walking, five women on horseback, a small flock of sheep. The scouts withdrew, taking care not to be seen, and started to ride back to the column. After an hour or so, one of them said something like, that’s a pretty small caravan to kick up that much dust. The others said no, not really, and we ought to be getting on, we haven’t got much water left. So they rode on a bit further, and the scout who’d made the fuss started up again; look, he said, the cloud’s bigger than it was, a lot bigger. Don’t be stupid, the others said, you’re imagining it. I’ll go back and take a look, said the difficult scout. Please yourself, the others said, we aren’t going to wait for you.
He rode away, and the others cursed him and decided they’d better wait; they dismounted and sat in the shadows of their horses, and someone got out a pack of cards. They’d played four hands, and then one of the scouts fell forward, like he’d gone to sleep, but he’d been shot in the back. They all jumped up; all but one tried to get on their horses and were shot. One, the survivor, just ran. Arrows passed him – he said it was like one time when he’d put his foot in a hornets’ nest, and the hornets had chased him half a mile – but he kept running until he was out of range, and didn’t look back. He guessed they didn’t bother chasing him, since without a horse or water he’d be dead in a few hours. He never saw the men who’d shot at them. He ran until he fell over, and then he was too exhausted to move, and he just lay there until it got dark, and in the night he very nearly froze to death – it was like there was an open door, he said, and all I had to do was take a few steps more and go through; I wasn’t all that bothered, but I thought, no, not yet. At sunrise he got up and started to walk, slowly, no idea which direction, until it got hot. Then he must’ve collapsed and passed out, because he could remember waking up and there was this horse standing over him, shading him from the sun. Good caravan horses learn to do that, the scout said. He had no idea where the horse had come from. It held perfectly still while he scrambled up on its back; then he looked round for the dust clouds and headed for the biggest. He was pretty certain he’d die of thirst anyway. He got light-headed and stopped trying to guide the horse; just as well, because he dozed off and woke up, and there in front of him was a pan of filthy water about twenty yards across, with some rocky outcrops and a few scrubby thorn bushes round it, and a huge broad mess of footprints to show that a lot of people had been that way quite recently. Either the horse had smelt the water or it was used to coming that way. There was nobody to be seen anywhere. He drank too much and was violently ill, which wasted a lot of time. Then he aimed the horse at the biggest dust cloud, and that was about it, really.
Prexil didn’t believe him, and put him under close arrest. “He’s a tribesman,” he said, which was true enough; regular cavalry, ten years’ service. “And you don’t just find horses in the middle of the desert. Obviously, he’s a spy. I’ll see to it he’s tried and hanged when we get back.”
Daxen didn’t argue, because there was no point; but he couldn’t see it himself. A lot of trouble to go to, he felt, to disseminate misinformation that couldn’t possibly benefit the enemy. He decided the scout was telling the truth, in which case the enemy were clever, paid close attention to detail and knew about water that wasn’t on the map. But he’d more or less figured that out already. He was getting more and more worried about Prexil, who was having to shout and scream to get anything done, even straightforward, routine things. He thought about relieving him of command, but there wasn’t anyone else; the engineer was more or less in hiding, and the junior officers didn’t inspire confidence. That said, the column was making tolerable progress; Prexil had cut the water ration by a fifth, which was just about tolerable and meant they should have enough to get home comfortably. The dust clouds were neither closer nor further away. Nothing is actually happening, Daxen thought, which is really very strange.
“That shouldn’t be there,” a junior officer said. He was looking at the flat-topped blob of rock that had suddenly appeared on the skyline dead ahead of them. It hadn’t been there yesterday, and it wasn’t on the map. It was as though someone had neatly cut down a mountain and left the stump.
Another officer explained. Although the gradient was so gentle it was easy not to notice it, they
’d been going uphill for two days now. They’d just reached the top of the rise, which had hidden the mountain, or whatever you wanted to call it. Hardly surprising it wasn’t on the map, because the surveyors had stuck to the military road, which was over there (vague gesture) and considerably higher up. Y ou wouldn’t see the mountain unless you left the road and came quite some way over; and even if you did, from a distance it’d just look like a big sand dune or something. Anyway, it didn’t matter. It was just a lump of rock.
Prexil didn’t like it at all. He didn’t like the way it had reared up out of nowhere, like a predator lying in ambush. You could hide a huge army behind a thing like that, and nobody would be any the wiser until it was far too late. Daxen wanted to point out that in order to hide an army you’d have to get it there first; they’d have seen the dust cloud, and the three clouds were still exactly where they’d always been – unless you’d sent it on ahead weeks ago, in which case the army would have died of thirst long since; unless there was a well on the rock somewhere – did you get wells on flat-topped mountains? He had no idea – and in any case, that would presuppose that the enemy had known for quite some time that they’d be coming this way, which was impossible. He made himself stop thinking about it. He had an uncomfortable feeling he was starting to think, and sound, like Prexil.
They gave the mountain a very wide berth, heading east, back towards the military road. The change of course had a significant effect on Prexil, as though he’d just won something, or figured out a deeply laid plot against him. He started smiling again, and didn’t shout nearly as much, and the junior officers did what they were told without the awkward silences. “In fact,” Prexil said, “we might as well go the whole hog and get back on the road for the last leg of the journey. We could water at a way station, which would be wonderful. Clearly they’re not going to attack us now. They’ve had their chance, God knows.”
It was hard to argue with the logic of that, and Daxen made a point of agreeing with him; the road would solve a lot of problems, and they could hardly be at greater risk there than out here in the middle of the desert. He suggested sending scouts ahead, but Prexil only smiled. “They’re not going to attack,” he said. “Where’s the point?”
Three days later, they found the road. It was a wonderful thing; something human and artificial in the middle of the desert. He made a point of appreciating it for the achievement it was. Dead straight; a five-foot-high embankment, twenty yards wide; the bed of the road was compacted rubble, levelled and paved with flat slabs of stone precisely two feet square. It had been built by the empire, long before the civil war. It was the sort of thing a god might make, if the gods ever did anything useful.
Prexil showed him the way stations on the map. “We’re somewhere here,” he said, stabbing at an area an inch wide. “So, at the very worst, we’re no more than a couple of days from the nearest station, which is this one here. It’s not manned, of course, but there’ll be a water tank, and shade for a day while we have a breather and pull ourselves together. There may even be fodder for the horses, which would be just as well; we’re getting low. Or the savages may have stolen it, you just don’t know.”
The enemy had become the savages; a recent development, ever since the decision to head for the road. It wasn’t the word Daxen would have chosen. The enemy were clearly intelligent, sophisticated, patient, realistic, organised, all sorts of things that savages aren’t. They’d seen Prexil’s scouts and sent out the fake caravan to distract them, even had the wit to halt their advance until the scouts had been dealt with so there’d only be one dust cloud. On balance, he figured they’d been wise not to attack the column, even though their night raid had been so successful; wise also not to repeat it, correctly assuming that if they came again they’d find themselves up against men who were drilled and ready. Instead, they’d left the army to worry and lose sleep. It was mere chance that the sawn-off mountain had prompted Prexil to make for the road, but Daxen had his own ideas about that. A large body of men moving along the road would raise no dust; they’d be invisible until they actually appeared, and one thing they could reasonably assume about the enemy was that they had a healthy respect for the element of surprise. If they marched up the road by night, then got off the road and laid up still and quiet during the day – cavalry, of course, who could make up ground so much faster than men on foot. It’s what I’d do, Daxen reflected, not that that meant a great deal. Still, he was inclined to wonder if it had been simple bad luck that Ixion and his staff had been killed in the night raid. Ixion had been determined to avoid the road, and yet here they were, walking cheerfully down it as though they were off to town to buy olives.
The way station was a perfect white cube that shone like silver. It grew bigger and bigger as they got nearer; when they were close enough for Daxen to get a sense of perspective, he realised it was larger than the Blue temple back home. It was built of what they called army stone – you mixed sand and water and some sort of powdered rock from a special mountain in Thyrnessus, and you could pour it in huge moulds like molten brass and it set hard like fired clay. It wasn’t used any more, since Thyrnessus was in the East, but the refineries where it was ground into powder were just over the border in the West; presumably the method was written down somewhere, but nobody seemed to know it. Close up, it wasn’t actually white but a sort of light grey.
Deserted, of course; but the enormous tank was three-quarters full of clean water under its heavy wooden shutters, and five long sheds built into the eastern wall were packed tight with hay, old but still good. The only thing that appeared to be missing were the station’s four doors – according to specification, five inches of six-ply oak, cross-grained to resist battering, fitted with four hinges each weighing a quarter of a ton. No sign of any doors, which made the building useless as a defensive position. Prexil decided that they’d been stolen by the savages and broken up for firewood and scrap; he advanced no explanation for the fact that the hay was still there. There was no sign that anyone had been there recently, but the charcoal cellars had been filled to capacity, which wasn’t scheduled for another three months.
“We might as well stop over for a day,” Prexil said, “maybe even two, get ourselves back into shape, that sort of thing. It’s going to be bad enough when we get home telling everyone that we’ve achieved absolutely nothing. I don’t want us marching into Erithry in this state.”
True enough, the army didn’t shine and gleam like it did when it set out, and the military put so much stock in things being shiny. Now they were on the road again, it would be no more than five days to Erithry, and Prexil would have to march his army through the Lion Gates, with crowds watching. A parade-ground soldier, he’d called himself. No wonder he’d been so irritable lately.
There was an empty cellar next to the charcoal stores. It was wonderfully, gorgeously cool, and if you left the trapdoor open there was plenty of light to read by. Daxen announced that he had despatches to write, and left them to it.
That night, for the first time he could remember, Daxen was actually warm. He had two charcoal fires, one on either side of him. He was a little nervous at first – the Emperor Glycerian, returning in triumph from the Second Jazygite War, had died in his tent, asphyxiated by the fumes from a charcoal stove – but after an hour or so he found he was still alive, so it was probably all right. Someone had found an amazing treasure in a remote storage room: a palm’s width thick with dust, nine barrels of fermented cabbage, a little bit cottony on top but perfectly good otherwise, and four barrels of salted herrings. That, and all the water you could drink. Someone had tentatively suggested that really they ought to share it with the men, but someone else had pointed out that the ration would be one thin strand of cabbage and a pinhead of herring each, which would just be a waste. Rank, they decided, had its privileges. General Ixion always said that, and the men respected him for it. Besides, only the officers and two quartermaster-sergeants knew about it, so that was fine.
> A day spent polishing things had a marvellous effect. When they set out the next morning, thirty-nine thousand men marching smartly in step, they made the ground shake, and the sun blazed on their sand-burnished spearheads like the epiphany of the fire god. It did occur to Daxen that the flash would be visible for miles around, cancelling out the absence of dust cloud that came with using the road, but he couldn’t see that it mattered any more. On the road, five days from Erithry, at the head of a mighty army with polished boots and shiny buckles – an undefeated army, let’s not forget, since you couldn’t call the sneak attack a defeat; he thought about that, in his capacity of formulator of policy for the Kingdom of Blemya. Now that he’d seen the desert for himself, he could judge these issues sensibly. There was absolutely no point, he knew now, in a punitive expedition. The fall of Seusa had been a tragedy, but the simple, heartbreaking fact was that a city out in the middle of the desert was unsustainable. Seeing the road, the way station, had made him understand, the way no written report ever could. In order to rule the desert, you had to be able to build things like the road and the stations, works that even the gods would hesitate to undertake, and the stations had to be garrisoned. The old empire had been able to do that sort of thing, for a while, a short while, until the sheer weight of its obligations tore it in half. It had done it by bleeding the people white, confiscating their sons and sending them off to be soldiers, rounding old men and women up like sheep and forcing them to build roads at slave wages. Seusa – he’d never been there, but by all accounts it had been a fine city, in its day – simply wasn’t worth all that. When the nomads calmed down and wanted to start trading again, they could come to Erithry, and have only themselves to blame for the extra journey. Meanwhile, if they wanted the desert, they could have it, with watercress garnish on a bed of wild rice.
An hour out from the way station, and someone pointed out that the dust clouds were still there.
