10

“You’ve gone too far,” she said. “If I’d known you were thinking of something like this, I’d have stayed in Echmen.”

“And got your throat cut,” I said.

“You keep saying that. And I don’t suppose it’ll matter much in the long run. You’re going to get us all killed anyway, so what the hell?”

“I wish you didn’t have to be so negative all the damn time.”

She gave me that you’re-a-real-piece-of-work look I’d come to know so well. “I thought you were on my side,” she said. “I honestly thought you did it all to save me. Save my life.”

“Did you?” I said. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you—”

Someone said, Saloninus probably, that you can’t really hate someone else unless you first hate yourself. As a general rule, I think that’s garbage, but in her case; maybe. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Is it true? What they told me about you.”

“Yes.”

“Just once,” she said, “I’d like to meet someone who doesn’t make things worse for me. Just once.”

“You don’t need anyone else for that,” I said. It just slipped out. She took it well, considering.

Even so, I was anticipating further negativity from her when the kings of the Dejauzi held their next summit conference under the walnut tree. I was pleasantly surprised.

“The Echmen killed my father,” she told them, “and my whole family. They put my people in chains. Now they’re coming to finish the job. I don’t want a war, nobody in their right mind would. But there’s going to be one, so let’s do everything we can to win it. Otherwise—” She had this clever gesture, a very slight droop of the hands that said it all. She sat down. The king of the Luzir looked at me. “Well?” he said.

“So now you’re all agreed,” I said.

“We were wrong,” said the Maudit. “What do you want, an apology?”

“Don’t look at me,” I said, “I’m just a representative.”

That got me a hatful of dirty looks, but anything else would’ve been out of character. “You’re all agreed,” I repeated. “That’s good. Now, what are you going to do?”

“You tell us,” said the Rosinholet.

“Oh no you don’t,” I said. “I’m not in charge. I’m not even Dejauzi. And if you’re under the impression that She’s hovering about somewhere invisibly whispering the answers in my ear, forget it. I don’t even know why you want me sitting in on these meetings.”

She breathed out through her nose. “You were in the Robur army.”

“Yes, for a while. I was a junior lieutenant. Cockroach level.”

“You went to the Robur war school,” one of them said.

“True.”

“So you know about war.”

“Never been in one,” I replied. “And all we did at military academy was read books. If you’re looking for a general, leave me out of it.”

They weren’t expecting that. “But you’re the prophet.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.”

Eventually, after heated argument and angry words, I finally let them browbeat me into leading the army, which was what I’d intended all along. Dejauzi politics, I’d come to realise, is pretty straightforward if you’ve ever tried to get a horse on board a ship. It’s the only useful thing I learned in the army, but it made the whole experience – almost the whole experience – worthwhile. The horse doesn’t want to go aboard the ship, reasonably enough. If you tug at his bridle, he starts backing away, and he’s stronger than you. So you turn him round and tug at his bridle the other way; whereupon he backs away right up the gangplank, and there you are. Same with the Dejauzi. Refuse to do something and they’ll bully and badger you until you agree to do it. The extraordinary thing is that the Dejauzi have never figured that out for themselves. The benefit of a fresh perspective, I guess.

“On one condition,” I said. “I won’t be your commander-in-chief, but I will be joint commander. With her.” I pointed. “Otherwise, you can forget it. I mean it.”

“Fine,” said the Luzir. “Anyone got a problem with that?”

“Because,” I explained to her, “the Hus are outsiders among the Dejauzi, as you well know. If I’d chosen one of the kings, all the others would’ve been nervous as cats, in case someone got an advantage over someone else. But nobody’s friends with the Hus, not even now. It’s good to be the outsider sometimes.”

That wasn’t the reason, of course, but she accepted it at face value. “You’ve got everything you wanted,” she said. “What I don’t understand is what you want it for.”

That was a bit too close for comfort. “You said it yourself,” I told her. “The Echmen slaughtered your family. They were about to kill you. They marched off your people in chains. That’s not right.”

“What business is that of yours?”

“Just because I – can’t love you doesn’t mean I don’t care.” Had I judged the little catch in the throat just right? I really wish I’d studied acting rather than Sozen III’s innovative use of light artillery. “I couldn’t just do nothing. Trouble is, doing something meant doing this. Nothing less would be any use.” I made a show of pulling myself together, after all the mushy stuff. “You know all that. I told you. We talked about it. You agreed.”

“A prophet.”

“They weren’t going to buy it without a dirty great shove,” I said. “Now we’ve got them eating out of our hand. And you’re leading the army.”

Her cold look. “I was going to ask you about that. What the hell are you playing at?”

The cold look back at her. “Your people don’t like the other Dejauzi. Well?”

“No.”

“Well, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, you’ll be the queen of the entire Dejauzi nation. Don’t say I never do anything for you.”

Her eyes opened wide. “You’re kidding. Tell me that’s your idea of funny.”

“Isn’t that what the Hus have always wanted? Your boots on their necks? It’s the only way you can be safe from them. Just as it’s the only way you’ll be safe from the Echmen.”

For a count of five, dead silence. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

I knew it was coming, sooner or later; like the Echmen, only harder to deal with. “Because it’s what you want,” I told her. “What you really want, deep down. What you deserve.”

“Fine,” she said. “Don’t tell me, see if I care. I’ll just have to guess. You’re doing this because you want to be the king of whole world.”

I smiled at her. See above under muscle memory. “Really.”

“I know,” she said, “it sounds crazy. It’s such a totally crazy thing to want. But I think you want it.” She was shredding a scrap of linen offcut in her broad, stubby fingers. “Otherwise I can’t think of a reason why you’ve done all this. I’m guessing it’s all to do with your people being wiped out, the almighty Robur empire, so much better than everybody else that God even made them a different colour, so there’d be no excuse for not knowing. I think that really got to you.”

“I’m not denying that,” I said.

“So,” she went on, “you figured it something like this. The world belongs to the Robur. I’m the only Robur left. Therefore the world belongs to me.”

“That’s a syllogism,” I said. “I didn’t know you’d learned logic.”

“I read a book about it,” she said. “It was all bullshit.”

“You mean you couldn’t understand it.”

“I understood it just fine. But it was bullshit. Like all the stuff you’ve been trying to kid me into believing. I think you believe that because you’re the last of your incredibly superior kind, you’ve got the right to be king. Maybe even God, some of the stuff you pulled. You’re going to make yourself a god-king and punish the world for what it did to your darling blueskins.”

I nodded. “It’d be a plausible scenario,” I said, “except for one thing. I hate the Robur.”

Sometimes, however hard you try, sincerity seeps through. She had an amazing ear for sincerity. On her day she could detect one part of it in a million parts of bullshit. “Do you?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Because of what they did to me. They made sure that I’d be cut off, pun fucking well intended, from my family, my people, the entire human race, for the rest of my life. And do I blame the Robur for that, or just specific individuals? No, I blame the lot of them, because the ones who did this to me were about as representative as you can get. They stood for everything my people believe in; know your place, respect your betters, do your duty, my only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my motherfucking country. They took my father, they made my mother despise me, and they made me into—” Deep breath. “What I am. That’s what they do. Did. So they’re responsible. I’m their fault. Just look at me, will you? No, really, look. No wonder I hate them.”

If I didn’t know better I’d have said she was shocked. “You swore.”

“What?”

“You used foul language. I’ve never heard you do that before.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You must’ve had a reason. You always choose your words carefully.”

“Do I.”

“Yes, you do. And Dejauzi isn’t even your language.”

“It is now,” I said. “And the Hus are now my people. I don’t think you can have a nation of one, it’s a grammatical impossibility.”

“That would matter to you. The grammar.”

“Yes,” I said. “Nation is a collective noun.” I was using the Echmen words, of course, but she understood them. “So if I belong to a nation, it’s got to be plural, not singular. Therefore I may have been born Robur, but now I’m Hus.”

“I don’t think so. People aren’t words, you can’t just translate them.” She considered me. It wasn’t a comfortable experience. “Actually, hate them? Really and truly?”

“Really and truly,” I said.

“And you’d rather be Hus than Robur?”

“Hus wouldn’t have been my first choice,” I said. “But, yes. Every time.”

“Because we’re dumb savages and you can kid us into doing what you want us to.”

I sighed. “You want the truth?”

“Yes.”

I let my shoulders slump, as though I’d just put down a heavy sack. “All right, then,” I said. “I was the lowest form of life in the Robur diplomatic mission. I got sent to Echmen because I was an abomination to my own people and they couldn’t stand the sight of me. Fine, I told myself, I screwed up, I deserve it. Then one day, no more Robur, gone, ceased to exist. I wasn’t sorry, but I was terrified. So scared I couldn’t hardly breathe. Imagine you’re a little kid, your parents take you to the big city and you get separated from them. They’ve gone off and left you behind. You’re surrounded by huge strangers, and all you know about strangers is that you’re not to talk to them, because they’re dangerous. That’s how it felt. I was this close to standing on a chair with a rope round my neck and jumping, only I was too frightened. What if I did it wrong and instead of dying I broke my neck and ended up paralysed? The Echmen might’ve kept me alive, out of pity, they do stuff like that. It’s my worst nightmare, lying there not able to move.”

She was weighing the evidence. “Go on,” she said.

“Then you rescued me,” I said. “And suddenly I wasn’t a lost kid any more. You were rude and thoughtless and you made it clear you didn’t like me—”

She scowled. “You singular?”

“You plural,” I said, “which includes the singular. But that was fine. Like I said, not necessarily the nation I’d have chosen, but beggars can’t be choosers. At least I existed.” I paused, then went on; “And then the Echmen wanted some throwaway people to build a wall, and they chose mine. Oh, sure, I could have stayed on as a jobbing translator, made myself useful, earned enough money to keep myself fed and have a tiny little room all to myself. But I could never be Echmen, not with my unfortunate skin condition.”

“True,” she said.

“I know it’s true. It’s worse than leprosy to the Echmen, because before you got leprosy you were a human being. But this—” I drew a fingertip down my cheek. “I might as well have scales, or feathers. I could never be human to them. And,” I went on, “it wasn’t like I was spoiled for choice. I could stay with the Echmen and be an animal all my life, or I could throw in with you people. Did I tell you my name means lucky?”

“You did mention it, yes.”

“I chose your lot,” I said. “Unfortunately, the choice came with a problem. Your lot were being marched off as slaves. My only link to the Hus was you, and you were on the point of being discreetly murdered. Which meant if I wanted to be a Hus rather than a non-human biped I had to save you. And to do that I had to save the Hus, and to do that I had to take control of all the Dejauzi. And to do that, I had to start a war. Not just any war, but the Dejauzi against the Echmen empire, the worms of the earth against the lions. It’s like I’m locked inside a building and the only way to get out is to smash down all the walls and scramble out over the rubble. I ask you, though. What the hell else could I have done?”

She gazed at me. “That’s a very strange way of looking at things,” she said.

I shrugged. “You wanted the truth,” I said. “You got it.”

“Fine. Now what?”

“That’s up to you,” I said. “It wouldn’t be too hard for you to get rid of me. There’s poison, or someone who wants to do you a favour. If you can get rid of the body quietly, you can say you saw me carried up to heaven in a fiery chariot.” I smiled at her. “Nothing I can do to stop you, if that’s the way you want to go.”

“Or?”

“We do it my way,” I said, “and see where we end up. Could be an absolute bloody disaster, for all I know. Or we could end up ruling all the kingdoms of the earth. Would you like that?”

She thought about it. “I can’t see the point,” she said.

“Nor me. But you never know. Maybe it’s like what my mother used to tell me when I got invited to kids’ parties and I didn’t want to go. You’ll enjoy it when you get there, she used to say. Maybe we’ll get there and find it’s fun.”

She looked at me. “How would it be,” she said, “if I asked around and got enough bits of gold and silver junk to fill the saddlebags of a mule, and you just went away and never came back?”

I shook my head. “If I wanted that, it’d already have happened.”

“Two mules.”

“There isn’t enough gold in the Dejauzi nation to fill four saddlebags. And if there was, the answer would be the same. I happen to have brought with me,” I added, “Sirupat’s Concerning Poisons. It’s the standard reference, and it’s in Echmen, so you wouldn’t need a translation. Lend it to you if you like.”

“Maybe later,” she said. “All the kingdoms of the earth.”

“What you control,” I said, “can’t hurt you. You’d need bodyguards and a food taster, but apart from that you’d be free and clear. Or you can spend the rest of your life glancing up at the skyline, it’s up to you. But if you have me killed, I won’t be there to save you the third time.”

“Do you really think you can beat the Echmen?”

“I think we can,” I said.

“But you’re only a little soldier. All you’ve done is read books. And we don’t even like fighting.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And that, I do believe, is why we can beat the Echmen.”

One of the reasons people get irritated with me is my incurable flippancy. Everything’s a joke to you, they sooner or later say, you can’t be serious about anything. Which, I think, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of humour.

There’s a sort of cuttlefish, so they tell me. When it’s chased by a shark or whatever, it squirts ink in its eyes and dashes for cover. For ink, read joke. The whole world scares me. A lot of the time, even thinking about who’s coming for me next makes me ill with fear. So, because I assume everything and everybody is hostile, I spend my life behind a screen of floating ink. Of course, the danger I’m most afraid of is the one I carry around inside my head. And sometimes the screen is so thick I can’t see a damn thing through it.

Trust me on this: behind the screen I’m deadly serious. You can’t look at a sharp knife that close to you and see the look in the eyes of the man holding it and not be. The knife is there with me every day. It’s like you’ve got a terminal illness and every morning you wake up and it’s the first thing you remember.

No matter. Always the good-natured jibe and the merry quip. See? I’m harmless.

It started with a shepherd. They brought him in shortly after dawn. His jaw was smashed and half his face had been cut away, which made him hard to understand.

He’d been with his sheep, about ten miles out into the hill country. There’d been nothing to see or do all day, and he’d gone to the brook to fill his cooking pot with water. From over the brow, where he’d left his flock, he heard bleating, so he went to look. What he saw was a dozen horsemen. They wore long, shiny metal coats and rode the biggest horses he’d ever seen in his life, and they were driving off his sheep.

He dropped down and tried to edge back over the skyline, but one of the horsemen saw him and whistled to the others. Three of them broke off and came after him. He jumped up and ran like a hare. Obviously they closed in on him before he could get away, but he saw a big old disused anteater’s hole and hurled himself into it feet first. It would’ve been a good idea, if only he’d been a handspan shorter. As it was, the top of his head stuck out, just the scalp and the hair. He couldn’t see what happened next, but he heard hooves thumping towards him and felt the ground shake, and then the most terrible pain and his eyes were full of blood. He passed out, which probably saved him, the lancers assuming that he was dead.

When he came round, he realised that he was wedged in the hole, his arms pinned to his sides. He’d have died there, sure as eggs are eggs, if his cousins hadn’t come looking for the sheep and followed the trail of hoofprints. They managed to get him out and onto the back of their donkey, and here they all were to tell the tale.

I had a look at the wound before they plastered it up with turmeric and plantain, and my guess is that the lancer jabbed at him as he rode past and thought he’d connected fair and square when in fact all he’d done was slice the skin off his face with the cutting edge of his spearhead. The last twist to free the blade must’ve been what broke the shepherd’s jaw, levering against it in a confined space. He was lucky, and it should have been far worse. He’d be fully entitled to change his name to Felix.

I explained what it meant. A small party of lancers, a routine patrol or a scouting party, carries its rations with it. You only get foraging parties when a large body of men is out on an extended operation. Since there’d been no other reported encounters (at least, not yet) we could assume this party had come a long way from its parent column, which made sense if they were following the course of the old caravan road, which hadn’t been used for a long time but which was still marked on the Echmen ordnance maps. In which case, I could make a fair guess where they were now, and which direction they’d be coming from once it had dawned on them that maps sometimes lie.

“They must think the Hus went that way,” I explained, “following the old road. It’ll lead them to the river, at which point they’ll know you didn’t come that way after all. So they’ll follow the river upstream, right here. They know about this place because traders come here from all over to buy stuff to sell in Echmen. They should be able to cover thirty miles a day, easily. So, two days, give or take. Then they’ll be here.”

The Aram said: “My people may be here by then.”

“That’s good,” I said, “but I’m not counting on it.”

She stirred ominously. “It sounds like you’ve got something in mind,” she said.

“I had a few thoughts,” I said. “You know, just in case.”

The Maudit said; “Let’s hear it.”

“If you like,” I replied. “Basically, we can’t go on the defensive, this town simply isn’t big enough to hold all the country people, even if we could round them up in time. The technical term is chevauchée, which is Sashan for cruising around at your leisure burning houses and barns, driving off livestock and trashing standing crops. Oh, and killing people, of course. It’s how the Echmen prefer to fight less developed nations, and they’re very good at it. The idea is to force them into a pitched battle, which the Echmen inevitably win because of their superior equipment and training. All of you are wide open for it, and they know that. And, obviously, you can’t possibly win.”

I was sitting in the middle, with the kings in a circle round me. I couldn’t join the circle since I wasn’t their equal, but they wanted me where they could all see and hear me. Hence the seating arrangements; they the planets, me the sun. I didn’t plan it that way. Just occasionally, things fall right without being pushed.

“So?”

“So,” I said, “we do what they aren’t expecting. We take the field against them.”

She glared at me. “You just said, if we fight a pitched battle, we lose.”

She was in the half of the circle that was outside the shade of the walnut tree, hot and dazzled by the sun. “That’s not quite what I said. I choose my words carefully. If we’re forced into a pitched battle, then yes, we’ll probably lose. But if the battle happens when we want and where we want, that would be different.”

The Rosinholet laughed. “I thought you said you weren’t a general.”

“I’m not,” I said. “All I ever did was read books. Very good books, some of them.”

So we talked about what we’d got, and what we could get in time, and what we were going to have to do without. So far, the Hus had made about twelve thousand of the new-model horn and sinew bows, but they’d made them to sell to the other Dejauzi. We had just under five thousand finished but not yet delivered. Similarly with the linen armour; the Hus had made thirty thousand linen breast and backplate harnesses, but twenty thousand had already been shipped. The Luzir had twelve thousand pikes in store, nearly all of them serviceable, and any amount of arrows, mostly unsuitable for the new bow, but what the hell. I’d taught the Luzir drill instructors to shoot flight rather than precision; what that means is, rather than trying to hit an individual target, which takes a long time to learn and is very difficult, you shoot at a linen sheet pegged down a hundred and fifty yards away. When you can hit that, you move the sheet back fifty yards. The idea is to learn the elevations you need to put an arrow there or thereabouts at a given distance, and most people can get the hang of it in an afternoon, assuming they already know the basics of archery. The real problem should have been getting them to draw the bow at all, given that it was twice or three times the weight they were used to. But they got on top of that remarkably quickly, presumably through wounded pride and spite. If I could do it, they sure as hell could; so they did. Anyhow, you can shoot flight with a hundred and twenty-pound bow and arrows spined for sixty pounds; they won’t go straight and they won’t hit as hard as properly spined ones, but never mind. A damn sight better than nothing.

We spent that evening and most of the night sorting out provisions and things to carry them in, sorting people into units, some very quick and dirty drilling in the three or four simple manoeuvres that I’d chosen to rely on. Keep it simple, it says in the good books, be realistic, never overestimate the courage and resolve of the ordinary fighting man; within those limitations, you can actually achieve a great deal, if you’re smart. The next morning, we marched out, sorry, we shuffled out to war.

The scouts were gone a long time. They found the Echmen more or less where I’d hoped they’d be, working their way up the river, slowed down by the lack of things to forage. Any Dejauzi could have told them that at that time of year the flocks would be on the lower slopes of the hills, not down in the river meadows, but it hadn’t occurred to them to ask. Yes, they were driving a substantial herd of sheep and goats, but not really enough to keep such a large army – twelve thousand lancers, God help us – going for any length of time. Pretty soon they’d need some more. Splendid.

Always, says the book, give the enemy what he wants, within reason. What he wanted just then was large, poorly defended resources of livestock. I arranged for that. We drove everything we could round up in the time available out onto the lower slopes, where their outriders could see them. The column changed direction with a whoop of joy, and rode off towards the herd. By the time they got there the shepherds were long gone, so no fighting required. They drove the herd back down the hill towards the river, only to find that while they’d been gone, ten thousand Dejauzi pikemen had slipped in between them and the river, the only drinking water within two days’ ride.

It’s bad enough at midday in that part of the country if you’re wearing nothing but a light tunic and a hat. An Echmen lancer sports a collar-to-ankle oxhide coat, to which are laced more than four thousand small steel plates, shaped like fish scales and overlapping. On his head is a wraparound helmet weighing six pounds, with a faceplate down to his chin. Think how hot anything made of metal gets when you leave it out in the sun. The lancers like to stay close to water whenever they possibly can.

I had the pikemen fan out along the riverbank with their backs to the river. The Echmen must’ve smiled when they saw that, because I’d made a really stupid mistake: no escape route. Absolutely. Carrying those pikes were roughly ninety per cent of the adult male Hus, about whom I had few illusions. If they could run, they would. The Hus are fine athletes, very proficient runners, not so good at swimming. Luckily they didn’t appreciate the truly awful situation I’d put them in until the Echmen lowered their lances and charged and it was far too late to do anything about it, or they’d never have followed my orders.

I got them lined them up in three rectangular blocks about a hundred yards from the riverbank. When the Echmen began their charge, with the impetus of riding down the slope in their favour, I’d told the middle block to pull back. We’d rehearsed it a dozen times. All I want you to do, I said, is turn around, walk fifty yards, stop, turn round again. That’s all. Even so, I don’t know if I could’ve done it if I’d been there with them, which needless to say I wasn’t. Turning your back on twelve thousand charging lancers and walking, not running, in the opposite direction. I really admire them for doing that.

Fifty yards, stop, turn. To the Echmen, of course, it looked exactly as though the centre of my line had given way and started to retreat, exactly what they were expecting. So they bunched up to concentrate their impact on the centre block, expecting to plough into the backs of terrified retreating men. What they got, when the centre block turned and stood, was a hedge of sixteen-foot pikes, and no horse ever bred will throw itself onto something like that and get spiked. I saw the moment when the steel wave dissolved into foaming breakers of rearing, terrified horses, the front ranks stopping dead, the ranks behind crashing into them at top speed. Lancers have far more sense than to try and charge a hedge of pikes, but they hadn’t been doing that, they’d been running down fugitives, until it suddenly all went wrong. That was the point at which the other two blocks of pikemen wheeled in on them through ninety degrees and started to close up the space.

Faced with pike hedges on three sides, the lancers knew when to quit. They dragged their horses round and made for the one open side. At which point, the archers I’d concealed in dead ground two hundred yards back stood up and started to loose.

A short while later, a knot of about seventy lancers who still had horses managed to squeeze through the gap between the middle and the left-hand pike blocks. I was happy to let them go. I wanted witnesses. The rest of the lancers weren’t so lucky. Their fault, not mine.

I watched the performance from a hilltop on the other side of the river. A long time ago, someone had built a cairn and set up five prayer flags, the rags of which still rattled in the stiff breeze. I’d chosen it because I could see the whole of the action from up there, and also because it put a broad, fast-flowing river between me and the fighting. It was far enough away for the people to dwindle down into dots, flashing bright Echmen stars in a sandy sky, thickets of spears, ragged geometrical shapes, nothing recognisably human. I could hear the noise, but it blended together into a confused symphony. Better that way.

When I was sure it was safe I came down, the conquering hero picking his squeamish way through thousands of dead and dying horses scattered everywhere. Their riders had nearly all died in one place. Dismounted, they’d huddled together in a square, but their lances were seven feet shorter than our pikes. The Dejauzi were fine about it. They weren’t close enough to see individual bodies and faces through the hedge in front of them; all they had to do was walk forward until they felt resistance on the ends of their pikes, then grip hard and shove. When there were too few Echmen left to be a threat, I pulled the pikemen out and brought up the archers. We had about six thousand newly made arrows, bodkin heads – a flying nail rather than the usual flying knife. I wanted to prove to the Dejauzi that the new bow would shoot through Echmen scale armour at close range. It did, just fine. It took less than a minute, and I was too far away to see anything that might disturb me.

The dead horses were lying everywhere, spaced like trees in an orchard. A long-range hit with a broadhead, slanting down at an angle of around sixty degrees, wasn’t nearly enough to knock them down. Instead, it opened a wide cut about two inches deep. They went wild with pain and fear, rearing and kicking and thrashing around till they bled out, which took somewhere between one and five minutes. I spent a summer in the City when I was young, just downwind of a slaughterhouse, so the smell of all that blood made me feel homesick.

“Can you tan horsehide?” I asked one of the Luzir who was acting as my bodyguard.

“You bet. Makes great shoes, among other things.”

“There’s enough material here for a whole industry.”

Well, you’ve got to be practical. Quality leather goods weren’t the only harvest of victory, of course. We now had best part of ten thousand sets of Echmen heavy armour; also boots, shirts, trousers, saddlery, tents, blankets and the round felt pillbox hats they wear under their helmets as padding. All made to Imperial specifications, the very best money can buy. Even the kings of the Dejauzi could never afford to dress that well. I decided that armour and weapons belonged to the state, everything else to the individual private-enterprise looter. Nobody seemed to mind that. A gilded parade helmet with velvet lining and an ostrich feather plume makes an attractive keepsake, but trousers are trousers.

There were about a hundred survivors. I went and had a look at them. They looked stunned mostly, as though they couldn’t believe what had happened. About a third of them were badly carved up. The rest were walking wounded. “What unit are you?” I asked in Echmen.

“Third Lancers,” someone replied.

“Go home,” I told them. “Tell your superiors what you saw here today. Don’t take the road you came by, there’s a much quicker route with an oasis about halfway. Here, I’ll draw you a map.”

I sketched some squiggles in the dust with the toe of my boot. Close enough.

“What about the wounded?” one of them asked. “They won’t make it on foot across the desert.”

“Take them with you or leave them here and we’ll patch them up.”

“We’ll take them with us,” said someone I took to be an officer. “I’m not leaving my men in the hands of savages.”

“I knew a drill sergeant like you once,” I said. “He’s dead now.”

I like the Echmen; some of them, some of the time. They limped away into the desert, carrying their dying brethren. I found out later, quite by chance, that six of them made it. Six more than I expected, to be honest.

Twenty-seven Hus had been killed, forty more cut up or trampled by horses. Nobody could remember the last time twenty-seven people had all died on the same day. Fortunately for me the Hus tradition favours quiet, secluded mourning. You shave your head, stay indoors and don’t eat for a week, and family and friends stay the hell away from you, like you’ve caught something nasty. Meanwhile, cousins in the second degree take the body away and dig a hole somewhere and don’t tell you where, and the dead person’s name isn’t spoken for five years. There’s no Dejauzi word for grave, tombstone or funeral. I guess there’s no sensible way to behave around death, though some ways are more repugnant than others, to me anyhow. The Echmen burn their dead on enormous bonfires and throw expensive parties. The Sashan take the body out into the wilderness and leave it for the vultures, and they hire people, widows and orphans for choice, to sit on their doorsteps and scream for three days. In Permia they act as though nothing’s changed; a place is laid at table, the dead man’s clothes are washed, pressed and put out ready for him to wear, when he condescends to come back from wherever he’s popped out to, for a whole year. In Blemya the corpse is gutted, sun-dried, embalmed and transferred to an underground house with everything as nice as the family can afford to make it, and you go once a month and visit your elderly relatives in their beautiful home; just like we do, I guess, only they don’t talk so much.