Evil for Evil

by K. J. Parker

  The second day was no improvement; the worst part of it being the realization that there was going to have to be a third day, and quite possibly a fourth. This meant a further rations cut, which in turn led to a spate of nocturnal food looting, only just short of a full-scale riot, which cost another seven lives. By noon on the third day, the death toll had passed fifty, with three times that number of sick and injured incapable of walking. The soldiers were demanding to be allowed to jettison their armor; a fair number hadn’t waited for permission, and the sun sparkled on a trail of abandoned metalwork marking the column’s ascent, like the track of a snail. To check this before it got out of hand, Valens dressed in full armor to lead the way, a gesture he bitterly regretted after the first half-hour as the arches of his greaves chafed his ankles into mince.

  Just before dusk, someone told him that there was smoke in the valley below them. Since the only inflammable material on the whole mountain was the carts they’d left behind two days before, the implications were disturbing enough to take his mind off his aching feet for the last hour of daylight.

  “It’s possible,” someone conceded at that night’s staff meeting. “We’ve brought horses up here, so I guess they could too. Or maybe they’ve dismounted like we did; though in that case, I don’t see them catching us up in a hurry.”

  “They won’t try and attack us on the mountain,” someone else asserted confidently. “They’ll wait till we’re over the top and down on the plain. If they’re dismounted and leading their horses, they won’t have to try and catch us up; they can do that as soon as they’re back on level ground again.”

  “There’s no guarantee it’s the Mezentines at all,” someone else put in. “Could be scavengers, like the ones we ran into earlier.”

  “Unlikely,” Nennius murmured. “We killed them all, remember? Besides, why bother to burn our carts?”

  “No use to them without horses.”

  “True, but why let everybody between here and Sharra know where they are?”

  “The Mezentines would have a reason to burn them,” Nennius argued. “To stop us circling round behind them and going back to them. They’ll want to be sure they’ve seen the last of those armor plates.”

  “If the Mezentines want to attack us on the plain, I say let ’em,” someone else said. “The rate we’re getting through the food and hay, we’ll be able to afford to remount the cavalry by then, so we can give them a fight. By the time we get down there, they’ll be in no better condition than us. Worse, probably; they’ve had further to come without fresh supplies; they won’t have found anything at Limes Vitae, that’s for sure.”

  Midafternoon on the fourth day, and the view from the top was obscured by low cloud and mist. Below, a long way away, there was supposed to be a desert, with the Cure Hardy on the other side of it, and Valens was taking his people there because he had no choice. Squinting into the mist and seeing nothing, he retraced the workings of the mechanism that had brought him here. It had started with Orsea — no, to be fair, it had started with the peace settlement between the Vadani and the Eremians, which his father had arranged with her father, the Count Sirupat. While the Eremians and the Vadani had been at each other’s throats, the Perpetual Republic had ignored them both, since they posed her no threat. Then there was peace, which spawned Orsea’s original crass mistake; then Ziani Vaatzes — he’d played some part in all this — gave the Republic a pretext for disinfecting its border of undesirable savages; but instead of crumpling up like a leaf in a fire, the Eremians had fought too well, forcing the war to grow like a clever gardener growing early crops in a hotbed. That was when he’d been drawn in, for the sake of a woman he’d fallen in love with because (he knew the mechanism operated in a loop) of the peace negotiations, which had brought her to Civitas Vadanis as a hostage. For her sake he’d thrown the Vadani into the war; now, for the war’s sake, he’d lost her forever, while still having her on his hands like someone else’s precious possession left in his unwilling care; and he was here, on top of a mountain looking down at a desert which led to the wilderness of the barbarian nomads, his last and only hope of survival. Wonderful.

  Going down the mountain was much, much harder than getting up it. For some reason Valens couldn’t begin to imagine, someone had gone to the trouble of making the pathetic little track they’d followed up the mountain. Maybe there’d been a village there once, or a frontier station or a signal post, or a temple to some obsolete god. Nothing had gone down the mountain in a long, long time except water (and, presumably, Vaatzes’ dead merchant and his mules). There was no track. To start with, they tried following the course of a broad stream, but it quickly fell away into a series of waterfalls plunging off sheer edges. No wild animals were stupid enough to come up here, so there weren’t any deer or goat trails to follow. Valens realized quickly enough that there wasn’t a right way to go; the entire expedition would have to make its own way down as best it could, a slow, disorganized shambles, a human mudslide. Giving the order to halve the rations yet again (impossible to enforce, of course, with everybody spread out on the mountainside like butter on bread), he tried very hard indeed not to think about who might have set light to the abandoned wagons, or where the happy arsonists might be now.

  The worst problem proved to be the horses. By noon on the second day (the low cloud hadn’t lifted; if anything, it was thickening), he’d almost reached the point where he’d be prepared to give the order to turn them loose and leave them there, in the hope that some of them might find their own way down. Leading them was very nearly impossible, and the amount of time they were wasting trying to coax the wretched animals along was heartbreaking. Unhappy-looking officers reported to him every hour or so to tell him the latest casualty figures, animal and human; the number of injured civilians who couldn’t walk and so had to be carried was swelling at a terrifying rate, and Nennius had already urged him several times to leave at least some of them behind. So far, he hadn’t given in, but the only strength he could draw on to maintain his resolve was the thought that it was precisely the sort of thing Orsea would’ve done (reluctantly, blaming himself to death, doing the right thing). The hell with it, he told himself, over and over again; I’m stubborn and pig-headed, I won’t leave the injured and I won’t turn the horses loose. It’s just a matter of holding on a little longer, and then facing the decision again, once every hundred yards or so.

  Dawn on the third day of the descent. The low cloud had lifted during the night, and they could see: where they were, and where they were going. The good part of it was that they were at least three-quarters of the way down, and the gradient was easing up. Other than that, Valens was sorry to have lost the mist. The sight of the desert depressed him more than anything he could remember.

  There was a fringe of scrub — little stunted clumps of thorn bush, like an unshaved face — and then there was nothing but sand. He’d expected it to be gray, like the stuff washed down by rivers, the only sand he’d ever seen; instead, it was almost white, a glowing ocean like steel at welding heat. The rises and troughs looked so much like waves at this distance that he couldn’t help imagining that it was a vast lake — the idea of trying to walk on its surface seemed ludicrous; you’d wade in, and then you’d sink, and the sand would close over your head as you drowned. It wasn’t even flat; the sad little joke that had sustained them all, going up and down the mountain, was that the desert had to be better than all this bloody climbing. Apparently not. He realized, as he stared at it until his eyes hurt in the glare, that for a moment or so he’d forgotten the entire Vadani nation strung out all around him. He’d been thinking, how the hell am I going to get across that; I, not we. A fine time to be thinking about grammar (my decision, my mistake, our slow and painful death). One question, however, lodged in his head as he scrambled among the rocks: did I have Orsea killed not because he was a traitor but because I’d reached the conclusion that he was an idiot, too stupid to be allowed to live? The more the question preyed on his
mind (the further down the slope they went, the hotter it became; his clothes and even his boots were saturated with sweat), the more he was afraid that that was exactly what he’d done; the fool’s stupidity had offended him beyond endurance, and he’d taken the excuse to get rid of him. In which case, sooner or later, he was going to have to admit to what he’d done, and apologize to somebody.

  Evening staff meeting on the flat sand; bitterly cold, hardly warmed at all by crackling bonfires of dry thorn twigs, which flared up ferociously and went out almost straightaway. The main subject on the agenda …

  “According to the map, it’s there,” Vaatzes repeated for the third or fourth time. “We can’t see it because it’s over the horizon. But if we keep going due east from the double-pronged spur — which is exactly where it should be according to the map, by the way — we should reach the first oasis in about nine hours’ time. That’s what the map says; you can look for yourselves. And it’s no good scowling at me. I didn’t draw the bloody thing, and I’ve never been here before in my life. Either we trust the map, or we give up and die.”

  “Are we sure that’s the right double-pronged spur?” someone asked nervously; he was sitting just outside the ring of firelight, and Valens didn’t recognize the voice. “For all we know, there could be two or three more or less similar. And if we set off on the wrong line, we’re screwed; we’ll never find the oasis just by roaming about — assuming there’s an oasis to find, which is by no means —”

  “What are you proposing?” Valens interrupted quietly. “Do you think we should stay here while the scouts ride up and down the foothills looking for more double-pronged spurs? It’s a good idea,” he added. “Actually, it’s the right thing to do, simple common sense. Unfortunately, we can’t. No time. As it is, I predict we’ll run out of food before we’re halfway there, even if we hit the right course and everything’s where the map says it is. Sorry,” he went on, with a slight shake of his head, “but we’re just going to have to assume it’s the right two-pronged spur and press on regardless. Unfortunate, but there it is.” He grinned suddenly. “My only hope is that the Mezentines really are on our heels with a huge army, and that they follow us out there and starve to death a day or so after we do. Not that I’m vindictive or anything. I just feel that fatal errors of judgment are things you should share with your enemies as well as your friends.”

  Short, embarrassed silence; then someone said: “If they really are following us, we should see them tomorrow, coming down the slope. At least then we’ll know what’s going on, whether we’ve got them to contend with as well as everything else.”

  “I should say they’re the least of our worries,” Valens said confidently. “Which is rather splendid, don’t you think, to be able to dismiss the threat of the most powerful nation in the world in one trite phrase? I like to think I’ve contrived to screw things up on so magnificent a scale that getting slaughtered by the Mezentines is probably the second-best thing that could happen to us.”

  They didn’t like him talking like that, of course, but he couldn’t really motivate himself to stop it and behave properly. All through that part of his life that separated his first sight of her from that night in the slaughter before Civitas Eremiae (the realization ambushed him like a squadron of Mezentine dragoons, unexpected here among the ruins of everything), at every turn he’d faced a choice, between giving up and forcing a way through, and always he’d chosen to press on; stumbling forward instead of running away, because he’d known where he was supposed to be going. The route was marked for him in the map by success; everything he’d done had turned out right, and so he’d known he was doing the right thing. Then had come the second phase, between rescuing her from the Mezentines and forfeiting her when he ordered Orsea’s death, during which everything he’d done had gone wrong, and the signposts along the way had brought him here, to the desert’s edge. Here began the third phase, finding him without purpose or direction, no choices left; a rare kind of freedom.

  Walking on the sand was like treading in deep mud; even on the flat, every step was an effort, draining strength from his knees and calves. Honor required him to carry a heavier pack than anybody else, to walk in front, to set a smart pace and only stop out of compassion, to let the weaklings catch their breath. Years of trudging up the steep sides of combes to approach upwind of grazing deer and wading through marshes to reach the deep pools where the ducks flocked up had given him the strength and stamina of a peasant, but after a couple of hours of treading sand, only shame and the last flare of arrogance kept him on his feet and moving. If they kept going, they had a chance of reaching the first oasis (if it existed) before nightfall. Something told him that if they failed to reach it by the time darkness fell, they’d never reach it at all. It wasn’t, of course, a line of reasoning he could justify to anybody else; so, if he wanted to get them there before it was too late, the only way he could do it was to walk on ahead of them and thereby force them to follow him. Crude but simple.

  As if making fun of his self-induced melodrama, the oasis appeared suddenly out of nowhere about two hours before dusk. It had been hiding from them in a little saucer of dead ground, and the first Valens knew of it was when he hauled himself up the scarp of a dune and realized he was looking straight at the top of a tall tree. He was too tired to run toward it, or even to yell for joy; good, he thought, and carried on plodding. As he approached, the oasis rose politely out of the saucer to greet him. A stand of spindly trees, about a quarter of an acre, surrounded by a neat lawn of wiry green grass, fringed with hunched-up thorn bushes; beyond question the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. He kept going until he was a hundred yards from the edge of the lawn, just in case it turned out not to be real; but when the sun sparkled on something in the middle of the stand of trees, he realized that he hadn’t got the strength to cover the last stage of the journey. He sat down awkwardly in the sand and started to cry.

  Presumably someone came along and helped him the rest of the way, because at some point he found himself standing on the edge of a pan of rusty brown water. It appeared to be full of Vadani, who’d waded in up to their shoulders and necks. Some of them were swimming in it; others were conscientiously watering their horses on the edge, their clothes dripping wet, their hair plastered down on their foreheads. They’d brought no barrels or water-bottles with them down the mountain, because water weighs ten pounds a gallon.

  “There, you see?” Vaatzes’ voice buzzing in his ear. “Just like I said it’d be. Piece of cake.”

  Brown, gritty water, more than they could possibly drink; but you can’t eat water. They were talking about slaughtering the horses while there was still some meat on their bones.

  “Or,” suggested Ziani Vaatzes, “we could send a message to your in-laws and ask them for some food. It’d only be polite to let them know we’re here.”

  The rest of the general staff looked at him as though he was mad. Valens thought for a moment.

  “Not a bad idea,” he said. “Assuming I can find volunteers. And assuming horses can go faster than men in this shit.”

  “I believe so,” Vaatzes replied. “At least, that’s the impression I got from the journals. According to the merchant, once you’ve crossed the desert, if you keep going straight on you come to the big salt pan, and there’s always people there, even when the rest of the tribe’s moved on. They keep a good stock of food and forage — not sure it’ll be enough to last all of us very long, but anything we can get must be better than nothing. The main assumption will be that they’ve heard of you. I don’t know how closely the ordinary Aram Chantat follows current affairs. I’d have thought the marriage of the crown princess would’ve counted as big news, but you never know. The danger is that if they don’t know who we are, they’ll swoop down and cut us to pieces for being foreign.”

  (The journals had been right about the sheds that the merchant had built here; the pen for the mules, the cover and even the grain bins. They turned out
to be empty, of course.)

  “I’m prepared to risk that,” Valens replied confidently. “If I was bothered about that side of things, I’d be more worried about showing up without my dear wife. They’d only have my word for it that the Mezentines killed her; besides, even if they believed me, letting your wife get killed suggests a degree of carelessness that they might be reluctant to forgive. I wish now I’d taken the trouble to find out a bit more about the way they think.”

  Eventually, after a painfully embarrassing silence, Major Nennius volunteered. He set off with an escort of twelve very unenthusiastic troopers, leading a change of horses loaded with supplies. In his saddlebag was a carefully traced copy of the map, and a letter of credentials addressed to the Aram Chantat. The look on his face as he rode away reminded Valens unsettlingly of Orsea on his way to execution.

  A full two days to reach the second oasis. No longer even any pretense that the food crisis was under control. Civilians couldn’t be trusted to carry what little was left, and the soldiers were having trouble coping with the begging and screaming of mothers with hungry children; their friends, neighbors, relatives. At least a dozen horses were killed during the night; the carcasses were stripped bare in minutes, and fights broke out over the marrow in the bones. It didn’t make it easier to handle to realize that it was panic, the fear of hunger rather than hunger itself. The worst side effect was exhaustion. Men and women who’d been rioting and scuffling all night had trouble keeping up during the day.Valens could no longer be induced to listen to the reports. He’d become obsessed with the idea that he could see a dust-cloud closing in rapidly on them from behind, the occasional flash of light. The fact that nobody else could see anything had no effect on his conviction. There was no point talking to him, the officers said, he wasn’t listening. With Nennius gone, generally presumed dead, it was anybody’s guess who was in charge. The officers went through their routines, more to occupy their minds than out of duty or hope. Nobody knew who had the map, or who was navigating, or who was in the lead. Reaching the second oasis inspired no celebrations, and nobody waded in up to the neck in the water this time.