11

“Of course we won,” I told them. “It’s not like anything else could have happened.”

The Aram Chantat had arrived, a day late, just in time to lend a hand with piling up the dead lancers for compost and skinning the horses. They’d come in a hurry, empty-handed, so the Luzir had to find food for them and places to sleep. All the other Dejauzi nations were on their way. There’s precious little surplus food in a Dejauzi community at the best of times. Luckily, nobody seemed to regard the problem as my fault so I wasn’t called upon to deal with it; just as well.

The mood under the walnut tree was a sort of muted, bewildered joy. It’s like you just inherited a million gold stamena from a distant cousin you’d never heard of. It’s so unexpected you can’t really believe or understand it, and you know there’s got to be a catch somewhere. “What happens now?” one of them asked.

She answered for me. “This is the worst defeat the Echmen have suffered in eighty years,” she said. “It’ll have to be avenged. Letting us get away with it is unthinkable.” She shot me a savage glance, then went on, “If you think we were in trouble before, you just wait.”

“Which is precisely what we’re not going to do,” I interrupted. “She’s right. They’ll be coming for us, as soon as they’ve called in their forces from the provinces. To give you an idea of what we’re up against, last time anyone counted, there were a little under a quarter of a million Echmen lancers, divided up into five regional armies. We’ve slaughtered a twentieth of them. It’s a start, but we’ve still got work to do.”

Stunned silence, which I took advantage of. Four hundred years ago, I told them, the Echmen invented head-to-toe armour, heavy horses and the lance charge. They annihilated anyone stupid enough to stand up to them, because all their enemies fought on foot, with light armour, self bows and javelins. By the time their territorial expansion brought them into collision with the Sashan, the Sashan had developed heavy cavalry of their own. For three and a half centuries, therefore, the definition of war in both Sashan and Echmen was waves of lancers crashing into each other with a thump you could hear a mile away. It’s a difficult way to fight, needing a lot of training and skill, and both sides were now very good at it. Any other form of armed conflict, however, was by now far beyond their contemplation. Fighting on foot, for example, or using bows or long pikes, simply wasn’t war. It was something else; probably a kind of criminal activity akin to banditry, and therefore the civil authority’s pigeon, nothing to do with the military.

“Right now,” I said, “the Echmen generals who haven’t been hanged for incompetence will be explaining to the emperor that the reason they lost was that they didn’t send enough lancers. We won’t be making that mistake again, they’ll be saying. Which means,” I went on, “three things. One, they’ll be back, in force. Two, it’ll be a while before they’re back. Three, when they come back, we can wipe the floor with them.”

A rather shaky voice said: “Are you sure about that?”

“Absolutely,” I said, and I think I may even have smiled. “It’s something called diminishing returns, or you could think of it as the right tool for the right job. Suppose you want to knock in a nail. You fetch a hammer. Now, if you’re an Echmen general, you say to yourself, if a little hammer works for driving in nails, a fifteen-pound sledgehammer must be even better. And the next thing you know, you’ve smashed the thing you were making and crushed your thumbnail to pulp. There’s a tipping point where more men and bigger armies make things worse, not better. They’re a liability. They make it pretty well certain that you’ll lose. All we have to do is set things up so that we reach that tipping point. Which is what we did yesterday, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

After the meeting I was shaking like a leaf. “You need to get a grip,” she told me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You look awful.”

Did I? No idea. “I’m fine,” I said.

“Liar.” She put both hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto my knees, then sat down beside me. We were in the shade of a chestnut tree. I had a lot of things I should’ve been doing. “I’ve seen healthier looking corpses. Admit it, you’re exhausted.”

It hadn’t occurred to me. “No, I’m not. I’ve just got the shakes a bit after doing my big speech. I get nervous. I always think someone’s going to hit me.”

“You’re trying to do too much,” she chided. “Most of the day you’re drilling the troops or doing bow training, and when it’s not that it’s something else. You’re running yourself ragged, you know that?”

“I’m not, really.” I stifled a yawn. “I don’t have a farm to run or cattle to look after, I don’t earn my own living, I don’t even have to translate for anyone. I’m unemployed. Gentleman of leisure.”

“And when you’re not doing that you’re reciting that stupid scripture for people.”

“Reading aloud isn’t work.”

“You need to rest,” she said firmly. “Come on.”

It occurred to me, as I closed my eyes lying on a heap of pillows in the Hus royal pavilion, that I hadn’t slept for three days. Proving that I didn’t need sleep.

They woke me up an hour or so later. The Maudit had arrived.

Just when you think everything’s about to collapse in on top of you, someone quite unexpectedly shows a glimmer of common sense, and it sort of lights up the world, like a sunrise. The Maudit had brought food with them, jars of flour, barrels of apples and sides of bacon, in carts; also tents, blankets, you name it, everything they needed and we couldn’t provide for them. I was so grateful I nearly burst into tears.

They also brought arrows, bundled up with string in faggots, and their own home-made copies of the horn and sinew bow. It was, if anything, better than the ones I’d taught the Hus to make, which put noses out of joint but what the hell. There were eighteen thousand Maudit, three divisions of six thousand, of whom five thousand were archers. I have no idea what their king had said to his people, but it must’ve been something pretty good.

After the Maudit came the Rosinholet, closely followed by the Cure Hardy. The Rosinholet had somehow contrived to get hold of thousands of bales (I can’t think of a better word offhand) of dried fish – weird, since they live a very long way from the sea, but I didn’t ask. They’d traded it for furs, apparently, thinking it might come in handy, and did anybody know what you’re supposed to do with it?

Just so happens I’d read about it in a book. Your dried fish is baked in the sun until it’s indistinguishable from a slab of tree bark. Try and bend it over your knee; it’s stiff, then it snaps. All you do is soak it in water till it turns soft, then boil it or grill it or do what the hell you like. It’s light to carry, it keeps practically forever so long as the damp doesn’t get at it, mice won’t touch it, and in an emergency you can shove it up your shirt as a really quite functional form of armour.

The Rosinholet are like that. They love buying and selling things, and it’s rather a shame they’re not better at it. But it means that traders from all over the place battle their way across deserts and over sky-high mountain passes, knowing that when they finally get there they’ve got a chance of offloading all that stuff their brother-in-law bought when they were out of town and which they never thought they’d ever see the back of. In return the Rosinholet supply furs: brown bear, white fox, black hare, ermine, rabbit, beaver, caracole, muskrat and sable, all derived from the prolific hordes of vermin that make agriculture next thing to impossible in their neck of the woods. At age six a Rosinholet can hit a running rat at twenty yards, but the multitude of furry horrors still devour every spring lamb, ear of corn and blade of grass in the river valleys as soon as it appears. It was a glorious day for the whole nation when it turned out that there were people who actually wanted the waste products of dead pests. The supply is inexhaustible, so they never could be bothered to haggle. They heaped up ramparts of pelts and were pleased and grateful for whatever they got given in exchange. In consequence they’re a nation of fatalists, resigned and accepting, firm believers in wild swings of fortune, stoical endurers, fine shots and absolutely the people you’d be glad to have at your side if ever you wanted anything skinned.

The Cure Hardy aren’t as straightforward as the Rosinholet. Ask the other Dejauzi about them, and they’ll all immediately tell you the same thing; the Cure Hardy eat people. Which is true, up to a point. If someone dies under the age of thirty, not from an infectious disease, it’s the duty of the next of kin to roast the body and eat certain parts of it − the heart, the brain, the liver and the bone marrow, which is where they reckon the soul lives. The idea is to reabsorb the essential part of the deceased into the family so that he or she can live out their full term, unnaturally cut short, through their closest relatives. It’s all very respectful and loving and I could foresee the most dreadful problems once the Cure Hardy started fighting the Echmen. How the hell were we going to get dead bodies from the front back to the home villages before they went off? The idea of not eating their honoured dead was so appalling to them when I suggested it that I was almost tempted to send the lot of them home. But they’re gritty fighters, cheerful and resourceful when the going gets tough, and they’d brought food and a ridiculously large quantity of arrowheads, so I didn’t want to lose them; a compromise was therefore necessary. We discussed various options – salting, pickling in brine or vinegar, preserving in honey, air-drying into biltong (my preferred option, because it didn’t call for additional materials or large storage vessels, but no good because of the marrow) – before settling on a form of representative adoption. All Cure Hardy, so their traditions say, are descended from one original patriarch; therefore, all Cure Hardy are related to each other, and by extension to the king. Adoption inside the family is common practice – you can hop from one branch of the family tree to another on a whim, if you’re so inclined – so it was perfectly legal and proper for the king to adopt all Cure Hardy on active service as his sons; illegitimate, naturally, so as not to confer succession rights, but in every other respect flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. It would then be his responsibility to take at least one token nibble of all the warriors who fell in battle, and that was that problem sorted. Cannibalism aside, the Cure Hardy are an amiable bunch, musical, kind to strangers and with a great sense of humour, though they tend to be sore losers at organised sports.

So everyone who was coming was here. Between them the six nations mustered a whisker over sixty-five thousand men; eighteen thousand archers with horn and sinew bows, the rest pikemen. We cut the skirts off the Echmen scale coats, and those combined with our home-made linen breastplates provided armour for nearly half the pikemen. We’d scraped together nine thousand carts but only eight thousand teams of oxen to pull them and not nearly enough flour, beans or cured meat −

“You’re the prophet, right?”

Four Cure Hardy sitting round a campfire, roasting some kind of meat on skewers. I was getting used to being told who I was, but it still felt strange, like jarring your back when you slip and fall.

“That’s me,” I said.

“We thought it must be. Tall skinny black man, see?”

“Ah.”

They grinned at me. “You stuck it right up those Echmen bastards.”

“We stuck it right up,” I amended. “The queen of the Hus is commander-in-chief. I’m an adviser.”

“Sit down and join us,” one of them said. “There’s plenty.”

Four Cure Hardy offer you a bit of meat on a stick. “Thanks,” I said. “I already ate.”

That made them laugh. “Try some,” they said. The ‘or else’ was silent, like the P in psalm.

I sat down. They passed me a skewer. A bit chewy and slightly too sweet for my taste, but edible. “Not bad,” I said. “It’s been a while since I tasted beef.”

More laughter. “That’s not beef.”

I told you they had a sense of humour. “Tastes like beef,” I said.

“Horse.”

“Ah.”

I chewed up another bite, then said, “You people like horse, then.”

“When we can get it,” one of them said. “Bit of a delicacy back home. I mean, you don’t go killing good horses just to eat. But when we got here we saw a couple of guys skinning a dead horse, and we asked, do you want that, and they said, go ahead, help yourselves. So why not?”

I chewed a bit more. “It definitely grows on you,” I said. Then I nodded at the cart they were sitting next to. It was laden with barrels. My guess was, they were the carters. “What’s the load?”

“Salt,” said one of them. “We figured, someone might want to buy it.”

Another thing about the Cure Hardy. In the back end of their territory, there’s a mountain of pure salt. It’s a bitch to get to unless you actually live there, so it costs outsiders more than it’s worth to mine and ship it. The locals just turn up with picks and shovels and help themselves. “Did many of you boys bring salt with you?”

One of them nodded. “To pay for those fancy new bows. We figured someone might want it. It’s all we’ve got.”

Salt, and – assuming we won – an inexhaustible supply of dead horses. And if we lost, we wouldn’t be needing food anyway. Another problem bites the dust.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. She stopped and looked at me. “What are you doing?”

I had a shovel in my hands and I was standing over a narrow, steep-sided, flat-bottomed trench about three feet deep. Beside the trench was a mound of earth, liberally studded with fist-sized flints. Stout denial would be pointless. “Digging a hole,” I said.

“Why?”

On the other side of the trench was a wooden crate I’d knocked up out of bits of plank I’d scrounged from the Hus wainwrights. Sawn timber is nothing at all in the City, barely one step up from junk, but if the Hus want a plank, they have to start with a tree and keep going with a saw. I’ve known important men who’ve put less work into building their entire careers than a Hus devotes to a simple piece of lumber. Inside the crate was an oilskin bag. Inside the bag was my bow.

“I’m storing something.”

“You’re not very good at digging.”

“I came to it relatively late in life.”

She looked at the box, considering its dimensions. “How do you reckon on finding it again?”

“I thought a pile of rocks.”

She shook her head. “Someone’ll come along and take them for hardstanding,” she said. “Or dig up whatever it is you’re burying. A tree would be better.”

“It’s rocks or nothing,” I said.

“When we want to hide something,” she said, “we dam up a river, dig a hole in the riverbed, line it with three sheets of lead, then break the dam. You can hide something real good that way.”

“What have any of your people ever had that would be worth all that effort to hide?”

She sat down on the bank of spoil, preventing me from finishing the job. “That’s more or less what I’ve been thinking about,” she said.

I sat down opposite. “In what way?”

“Something you said,” she replied. “About us and the Echmen. The worms of the earth against the lions.”

“It’s a quotation.”

“Thought it must be. All the clever things you say turn out to have been said by someone else. What does it mean?”

“Once upon a time,” I told her, “the lions declared war on the earthworms. Everyone was sure the lions would win, but the worms were clever. They dug deep holes in the ground so the lions couldn’t get at them. Then, at night when the lions were asleep, they came back up, crawled in through the lions’ ears and ate their brains. It’s an old Robur fable.”

She nodded. “And that’s your idea, is it?”

“Basically, yes. The worms won because they figured out a new way of fighting. Which is what we’ve done.”

She thought for a moment. “In the story, the lions started it.”

“The lions always start it,” I said. “By being lions.”

That shut her up for several seconds. “You believe that.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you’re doing this?”

I chose my words. “I don’t like predators,” I said.

“This is about those friends of yours who cut you up.”

It was a question that deserved a thoughtful answer, maybe even a true one. Or maybe not. “Partly,” I said. “Yes and no.”

“This is about those friends of yours who cut you up.”

“Partly. And it’s about what the milkfaces did to the Robur. And what the Echmen did to you. You singular and plural. To us.”

“And?”

“A war to end all wars,” I suggested. “Reorganising the world so wars don’t happen any more. Wars and genocides and whole nations marched off into slavery—”

“Like the Robur used to do.”

“We called it spreading civilisation and core Robur liberal values, but yes.”

She nodded again. “Why you?”

I acknowledged the merit of the question with a nod of my head. “Because I suddenly realised I was in the right place at the right time with the right materials all within easy reach. Meaning you. The Hus. And the Echmen. And if not me, who else? The opportunity might not occur again, ever. It sort of came to me, in a flash.”

“In a dream, maybe?”

“I had a dream once. I think I saw the Queen of Heaven. Of course, back then I didn’t know it was her. But I was off my head through blood loss at the time. That wasn’t the flash, though. I was wide awake, in the library.”

“You want to rule the world.”

It was like a slap in the face. “I suppose so,” I said. “Like they say. If you want something done properly, do it yourself. And from what I’ve seen, nobody else is fit to be trusted with it.”

“And you are.”

“Me, no. You, maybe. But even I couldn’t make a bigger hash of it than everyone who’s tried so far.”

“I see. What gives you the right?”

“Self-defence.”

She sighed. “So you picked on me to be your crowbar.”

“Do you want to know what I really think?” The words came out like blood from a wound, a sight I’m familiar with. “I think you and I are very much alike. The lions came looking for us, we didn’t start it. They murdered your father and all your family, and me—” I grinned. “They cut me up. But that’s a thing about worms. You cut one in half, all you achieve is two worms.”

She frowned. “We’re not really all that alike,” she said. “For a start, I’m a queen and you’re—” Her turn to choose her words with care. “Nobody.”

“True. But being a queen wasn’t doing you a lot of good when you were sitting in that cell. And the queen of the worms is still a worm.”

I could see her thinking it over, weighing one consideration with another. “If you’d told me this was what you had in mind at the start, I’d never have gone along with it, I’d rather have died. But you’ve been so smart and fixed things up so well for yourself that the only way I can see to stop it is to kill you. And that would be—”

“Yes?”

“Ungrateful,” she said. “And, yes, the lions are bad. It’s time something was done about them. I expect that if we win, in a hundred years we’ll be lions ourselves, but I won’t be here to see that, so fuck it.” She looked at me. “Is it possible the Queen of Heaven really did choose you, only she forgot to tell you? Or maybe she figured that if you knew, you’d screw everything up.”

“Of the two,” I said, “that’s the more likely. Why? Do you think I really—?”

“It’s a weird thought,” she said. “And, no, I don’t think that. But if she was going to choose someone to be her prophet, maybe someone like you would be the sort of person she’d go for. An outsider, cut off from everybody else, nothing to live for, left with nothing to want, no desires.” She paused, as though doing mental arithmetic. “There’s wealth, of course, money. But money’s only good for buying things. If you had all the money in the world, what would you buy with it?”

“I don’t know. Armour, possibly. A castle. Or I’d build a pillar.”

“A what?”

“Couple of hundred years ago,” I said, “there were these holy men, out somewhere on the Robur−Sashan border. They persuaded devout believers to build enormously tall pillars, with a platform on the top. The holy men took a pillar each. They climbed up a ladder to the top, then pushed the ladder away. When they needed food or a particular holy book, they lowered a basket on a bit of string. When eventually they died, they toppled off and the devout took them away and buried them. Possibly the single most selfish thing I’ve ever heard of, but there are times when I can see the attraction.”

She nodded. “The danger would be someone coming along with a ladder while you’re asleep. But you’re not a holy man, are you?”

“Not to my knowledge. Though who says the Queen of Heaven has to choose a believer? Like you said. A believer would probably make a mess of it.”

She stood up. “I wouldn’t bury it if I were you,” she said. “The damp’ll get into the glue and it’ll all come apart. You’d be better off lodging it up a tree.”

“I’m scared of heights.”

“Then take the stupid thing with you.”

I shook my head. “If I did that,” I said, “someone might expect me to shoot someone with it. Or it’d get lost or left behind or stolen. It’s all I’ve got.”

“Then it’s one thing too many, if you’re serious about being a prophet. And you’re never going to shoot anyone. You’d be too scared to get close enough.”

She said it like it was a bad thing, but I think fear is wonderful, in its place. It keeps you out of all sorts of trouble. On the other hand, it gets you into all sorts of other trouble, so maybe it’s as broad as it’s long.

Real generals working for proper countries have spies, who keep them up to date on what the enemy’s doing wherever he’s doing it. We had scouts, who flatly refused to go further than twelve hours’ ride from home. Accordingly, if we wanted to figure out the enemy’s plans, we had to use our imaginations.

If I was the Echmen chief of staff, what would I be doing? Well, now. I have a paper strength of a quarter of a million lancers, according to the annual military review, as presented to the emperor on his birthday each year, illuminated vellum exquisitely bound in gilded calfskin. In practice, things are a little different.

What I actually have is a quarter of a million legal obligations. Every Echmen subject who owns property worth more than a certain amount is legally required to do thirty days of military service, for which he provides his own horse, armour, grooms and batmen, at his own expense. There are a number of recognised exemptions; benefit of clergy is the main one, and you can also opt out if you’re the last male in your family, so that if anything happens to you, your family name dies out; there are a few others as well, but they’re complicated. If you’re exempt, or too old and fat, or you simply don’t fancy killing and getting killed, you can hire a substitute, provided he’s of acceptable social standing. This would usually be one of your neighbour’s or cousin’s younger sons – no use to anyone, no great loss if he doesn’t come back, and unlikely ever to amount to anything except by virtue of a successful career in the military.

The sad fact is, though, that not everybody fulfils their legal obligations. A quarter of a million paper lancers probably represents two hundred thousand real ones. Furthermore, twelve thousand of your lancers – real, not paper – are dead, thanks to some tiresome savages who now have to be dealt with.

That still leaves a hundred and eighty-eight thousand, and with an army that size you could comfortably storm heaven and slaughter all the gods. It’s not quite as simple as that. It’s a legal requirement that twenty-five thousand men should be stationed at the capital at all times, to protect the person of the emperor, and even suggesting that all or some of them should be seconded to other duties is treason, punished by death. Each provincial governor – there are five of them – has an army of forty thousand paper, thirty thousand actual soldiers, to guard his terrifyingly long and vulnerable borders and remind the subject nations of the benefits of civilisation; the twelve thousand we killed came from the eastern provincial army, now standing at eighteen thousand strong. Even if the governors of the northern, north-eastern, western and south-western provinces could be persuaded to part with their forces, it would take time to get them to where we were. The soldiers themselves were lancers and could cover forty miles a day if they absolutely had to, but food for them and their horses moved on oxcarts, which can do ten miles a day on good roads.

In practice, therefore, the Echmen commander-in-chief has at his disposal the army of the governor whose province he’s operating in, plus his reserve, the field, as opposed to provincial, army. On paper, the field army is twenty-five thousand men, the second best in the service after the Imperial guards garrisoning the capital. But there’s a catch.

In theory, the Echmen emperors are descended in an unbroken line from God. Actually, there have been twenty-six dynasties, completely unrelated to each other. Twenty-one of those dynasties were founded by generals, following military coups or civil wars. There is, accordingly, a certain reluctance on the part of the emperor to leave large numbers of fighting men under the direct, unsupervised control of a general, particularly if he’s any good at his job or if his soldiers like him. The field army (a large number of fighting men under the direct, unsupervised control of the commander-in-chief) is never allowed to reach its nominal strength, and is normally kept at around five thousand, including clerks, storekeepers and administrators.

I did the maths. General Alyattes, supreme commander of the Imperial forces, would have at his disposal the eighteen thousand men left in the eastern provincial army, plus between two and three thousand of his personal reserve; something over twenty thousand lancers actually available to slaughter us like sheep and grind our bones into dust. I, on the other hand, had sixty thousand Dejauzi.

It goes without saying that odds of three to one are meaningless in such a context, since one Echmen lancer is worth a hundred savages, and no mob of half-naked barbarians would ever dare to challenge the might of the greatest nation on earth. Even so.

“That’s a map,” said the king of the Rosinholet. “How does it work?”

The Rosinholet know their own territory like the backs of their hands and they never go anywhere else, so the need for maps has never arisen. “Imagine you’re a bird,” I said, “very high up in the air.”

He shrugged. “Where are we?”

“Here,” I said. “And here’s where the enemy are most likely to be, where my thumb is.”

“That’s very close.”

About a hundred and twenty miles, but I wasn’t going to undeceive him. “It’s only a rough sketch,” I said. “It’s the best I could do. But, yes, that’s us and that’s them. And this here is the mountains, and that’s the river.”

“That sort of squiggle.”

“Yes. We can be here—” I pointed, keeping it vague “—in five days. The supplies he needs to feed his army will be coming down this road here. If we cut him off from his supplies, he’s screwed. He’ll have to fight us or starve.”

“I thought the Echmen foraged for supplies,” said the Maudit.

“Yes,” I said, “they do. But there’s nothing to forage out here, where they’re coming from. The nearest sheep and villages are here, look, so they’ll be coming down this road. And here’s where we’ll be, right between the Echmen and what they need.”

“It’s what you did before,” she said. “Only last time it was water and this time it’s food. Won’t they be expecting that?”

“Probably not, if they’re underestimating us, which they will be. Also, they can expect till they’re blue in the face, there’s nothing they can do about it. Not unless they go all the way round through here, where there’s plenty of stuff to forage. But by the time they’ve done that, we could be across the border and burning major cities.”

“So what?” she said. “Better that than fight a battle you might well lose.”

“Not if you’re an Echmen general. If you lose a battle, that’s not necessarily fatal. You might be able to put the blame on someone else. But if an important city gets burned down, one the emperor’s heard of, and you made no effort to save it, your head will be stuck up on a pike somewhere faster than butter melts.”

Silence. Then: “That’s stupid,” said the Cure Hardy.

“It’s how they do things,” I said. “It’s why they’re civilised and you’re not. If we shade our line of march a bit south, along here, we’ll look like we’re making directly for one of these cities here, in which case he’ll have to stop us before we reach the border. Here,” I pointed. “Which is where I want us to be. With your approval, of course.”

Nobody spoke. I waited. I knew what they wanted to say – can’t we forget about it and go home? Five divinely anointed kings of five fiercely independent nations. “That’s settled, then,” I said. “Let’s get weaving.”

Some people have no luck at all, and General Alyattes was one of them. He’d been supreme commander of the Echmen army for about eighteen months, after a lifetime in the military. Received opinion around the Imperial court was that he’d got the job because of his proven skill and expertise in keeping costs down and improving response times and connectivity in the upper-middle echelons of the army clerical corps; under his iron governance, memos were getting from desk to desk in half the time it had taken under his predecessor, the endemic culture of fiddling that had plagued commissariat and supply for as long as anyone could remember had suffered a mortal blow, and major contractors were now charging the government the going rate for supplies and services, rather than double less a colossal sweetener for the relevant officials. At the time of his appointment he’d been exactly what the service needed, and ever since then he’d been doing a marvellous job. Of course, nobody back then had imagined that the Echmen would shortly find themselves fighting a serious war, let alone one against a completely unknown quantity who played by different rules.

But Alyattes was nobody’s fool, and he took his duties seriously. He’d never been in combat himself, but he knew plenty of people who had, and he wasn’t too proud to take advice. He got together the best, most experienced commanders in the army and asked them, how do we beat these people?

Simple, they said. You avoid pitched battles. Instead, you evacuate all the major cities between the border and the capital. You confiscate or destroy all food stores, livestock and standing crops. You let them go where they like, shadowing them every step they take with a large mobile army but never getting close enough for them to engage you. The rest of your troops you send to their homelands, where you kill, smash and burn everything. Give it nine months and they’ll give up and go home. Then arrange for their leaders to be assassinated and make sure to get the right people to replace them. Easy as that.

It was the right advice and Alyattes knew it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t take it. His rivals would have his job and his head if he even suggested doing something like that. He was an honourable man, prepared to die for his country, at least in the vague abstract – but not like that. And even if he did, he rationalised, it wouldn’t do any good. Whichever of his colleagues got his job would immediately launch a full-scale attack seeking a decisive pitched battle. The battle was therefore going to happen, it was inevitable, there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it. So; either he led the army into this hopelessly ill-advised battle, or someone else would, somebody incompetent, arrogant, downright stupid, absolutely certain to fail. But if he led the army himself, there was always the chance that he might think of something clever on the day, or the savages might make a mistake. Things like that did happen. They’d happened in the past, surprisingly often. Old Echmen proverb: when falling off a high tower, try to fly. You never know your luck and what’ve you got to lose?

Early in his three-year course at the Echmen Imperial Military Academy, Alyattes would have read and learned by heart the thirty-six axioms of warfare, attributed to the Diamond Emperor but more likely composed during the interminable wars of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties. The seventh axiom states that out of every ten battles, two are won by the victors whereas eight are lost by the losers. Sometimes – more often than you’d think – the first half of the battle is lost by side A, whereupon side B makes an even worse mistake, making it possible for A to snatch victory out of the jaws of thoroughly deserved defeat. Generals and their subordinate officers make mistakes all the time. Trouble is, you can’t predict or rely on the other man’s errors. Not unless you lead him into temptation.

In his second year at the academy, Alyattes would’ve studied the battle of Merope in the Second Mercantile War between the Sashan and the Ordoac. He will have been told to mark, consider and inwardly digest how the recklessly arrogant Sashan king committed his entire army to a frontal attack, only to find that he’d walked straight into a trap. So completely was he fooled that his entire baggage train – carrying among other things the royal pavilion, wardrobe, dinner service and privy purse, about twenty heavily laden wagons – was snapped up by the enemy before he could do a thing to save it. Luckily for him. Confronted with wealth on a scale they’d never imagined was possible, the Ordoac heavy infantry forgot about the battle and settled down to some serious looting. Meanwhile, the commander of the Sashan light cavalry somehow managed to rally his decimated troops and lead a counter-attack, catching the Ordoac infantry just as they’d started fighting among themselves over the spoils. That’s why you’ve never heard of the Ordoac. A few months later, they ceased to exist.

Alyattes didn’t go in for solid gold dinner services, but he did have six million gold tremisses, the tax revenue for the entire eastern province, on the point of being sent up to the capital in a fleet of heavy wagons. The problem was making sure we knew about it, which he solved by prompting a dozen or so of his Aram no Vei auxiliaries to desert. The no Vei made sure we knew all about the gold, then headed home.

It was a good plan. It’s the sort of thing I’d have done myself in his shoes, if I’d been smart enough to think of it.

What the no Vei said to us was: You want to watch those bastards. They’re up to something.

“Really?” I said. “Such as what?”

The oldest no Vei, spokesman by virtue of seniority, grinned at me. “They’ve got a load of big carts, and in them they’ve got all the gold money they screwed out of the towns and villages on their side of the line. You want to tell me why they’re taking that with them into the desert, into harm’s way, instead of sending it to the emperor?”

I nodded. “Bait,” I said.

“Our colonel was dead keen you heard about it,” said the spokesman. “So much so, we got sent home early with double pay, just so we could tell you. Six million tremisses, he said, if that means anything to you.”

“It means a lot of money.”

“We gathered that,” the old man said with a grin. “Six million of anything’s got to be worth something.”

“A tremissis is a chunky gold coin the size of your thumbnail.”

“No shit.” The old man was impressed. “Six million of them. What would anyone want with all that?”

I smiled at him. “It’ll all go on administration,” I said. “That means hiring a lot of people to do things that don’t need doing instead of growing wheat and raising sheep. It won’t do any good to anyone, it’ll just sort of melt away. The Echmen are like that.”

“Screw them,” said the no Vei. “Thanks for the soup.”

About the Aram no Vei. You’d assume from their name that they’re something to do with the Aram Chantat, but they aren’t. They’re not Dejauzi. They live north-east of the Luzir Soleth, half in and half out of Imperial territory. They don’t like the empire much, because of its habit of taking their sheep and their people and not paying for them, but they’ve adapted. Whenever the Imperials come tax gathering, they simply up sticks and move in with their cousins on the other side of the fence until the nasty men go away. They’re short and slightly built, the only milkfaces east of the Friendly Sea, with hair the colour of rust or flax and slate-blue eyes. They’re easy-going, hard-working, generous people, down to earth and very reluctant to get involved with violence. The Echmen military use them as porters, carters, latrine diggers, grooms (they’re good with horses), stockmen and general fetchers and carriers. The Echmen pay them good money, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the no Vei language uses the same word for employee and slave.

“If you felt like it,” I said, “you could do me a favour.”

The old man looked at me. “Such as what?”

“It wouldn’t take you five minutes, and it’d be a poke in the eye for the Echmen.”

“Such as what?”

The south-eastern border of no Vei territory consists of a high ridge topped by a plateau, the home of the Suessonians. It’s a godawful place to live. It’s bleak, windswept, practically nothing grows there and you have to carry your drinking water a long way uphill along tracks too steep for donkeys even. But it’s a magnificent natural defensive position, which is why the Suessonians went there.

Everybody hates the Suessonians, and with good reason. Originally they were followers of one Suesso, a lecturer at the Imperial College of Theology, who founded an extreme religious movement. He predicted that the end of the world was nigh, at which time the righteous would be transfigured in glory while the unrighteous fried; since the unrighteous were as good as dead already and dead men can’t take it with them, why bother observing their property rights? Their neighbours hate them because when they arrived as refugees from Echmen justice and took possession of their impregnable plateau, where they felt they needed to live to be safe from the vindictiveness of the unrighteous, they quickly found they couldn’t feed themselves by agriculture, so went back to robbery with violence instead. Mostly they steal food, but they’re not averse to pretty shiny things of all sorts, and since they sincerely believe that the world is about to end and we’ll all be dead this time next year anyhow, they’re not afraid of anybody or anything, even Imperial lancers.

Because of how their nation came to be, the Suessonians don’t have a king. Instead they have a professor, the Chair of Applied Theology. When the current Chair heard from a party of no Vei returning home that a huge sum of money was practically passing his door – two days’ ride for his lightning swift light cavalry – he decided that it would be wicked ingratitude to Providence to let it trundle past unmolested, even though it was being escorted by an Imperial army. Normal business practice for the Suessonians is to sneak up under cover of darkness, cut out what they want and run for it, and they’ve got it down to a fine art. Carthorses are far too slow to keep up with the Suessonians’ hill ponies, so they take their own specially trained draught teams with them and couple them up to other people’s carts, using a highly ingenious form of linkage that’ll fit on practically anything with wheels. They reckon to be able to get the wagons hooked up and moving before the enemy’s even awake; then they stampede his horses, shoot up his camp to sow a little confusion and head for home as fast as they can go. By the time the enemy’s ready to follow they’ve usually got a handy head start, and they station ambushes and diversions along the escape route to slow them up further. You’ve got to admire people who do their job well, and, when it comes to stealing things, the Suessonians are the business.

Highway robbery was quite some way down on Alyattes’ list of things to worry about. He was more concerned with the sequence of events in the carefully planned trap he’d designed for us. He’d arranged his order of march so that, when we broke through, we’d carry on right through the centre of his formation to get to the gold wagons, where we’d then be outflanked, enveloped and cut to ribbons. To achieve this, he’d positioned the wagons at the rear of his column, practically sticking out at the end, therefore highly vulnerable to a late-night smash and grab raid. If the security implications occurred to him, he dismissed them. Thanks to his highly efficient corps of scouts he knew exactly where we were: heading north-west to cut off his supply line. We had no cavalry to speak of, and were therefore in no position to conduct lightning raids.

Imagine his fury, therefore, when he was dragged out of bed to learn that unidentified hooligans had crept up in the night, murdered the sentries, stolen the tax money, driven off the horses and butchered a hundred or so lancers in their bunks before galloping away into the darkness. He’d signed for that money. If he lost it – not to the enemy, to criminals – he’d be recalled and executed long before he even came in sight of a Dejauzi. One damn thing after another, I imagine he thought, and why did he ever want to be a soldier in the first place?

He had to wait for dawn before he could pick up the trail, and of course the thieves had done everything they could to make life interesting for him: false trails, roads blocked with boulders and fallen trees, infuriating hit-and-run ambushes that wasted time and utterly demoralised the men. There was also the humiliation of chasing after a bunch of lowlifes when he ought to be saving the empire. At least he knew where we were, which was something. We’d have to wait until he’d caught and stamped on the thieves, and then he could take out his feelings on us, which would be a positive pleasure.

It was unfortunate for him that I’d learned from a wise and perceptive woman the merit of getting where you need to be ahead of the messenger. The further Alyattes galloped in pursuit of the thieves, the further his scouts had to go to report on our movements. Consequently, they never got a chance to tell him that we’d moved out and gone. They were still chasing after him when he found us for himself.

Or, rather, we found him. Under normal circumstances he’d never have allowed himself to get caught in that hoariest of poison chestnuts, the narrow canyon with steep, unscalable sides. When he scrambled to a dead stop because the road ahead was blocked with a landslide, he was still thinking about bandits and six million gold coins. It was only when our pikemen fell in at the other end of the canyon, and our archers appeared on the two facing skylines and started shooting his horses, that it dawned on him that he’d been had.

There was nothing he could do and, to his credit, he did it very well. Heaped ramparts of dead horses provided a modest level of cover from our archers, and he had the comfort of knowing that our pikemen, standing undisturbed in full armour for hour after hour, must be getting very hot, whereas it was shady and cool for his men cowering under the canyon walls. But our men had plenty of water and he didn’t. As the noonday sun peeped down squarely onto his soldiers’ helmeted heads, he decided that it was probably a good time to talk to the enemy, if any of the savages could speak Echmen.

“The battle of Merope,” I said to him. “Good idea. It should have worked.”

He looked at me. He was dripping with sweat, and his beautiful Imperial court hairdo was plastered to the top of his head in a melange of melted lacquer. I’d brought a leather bottle of water with me, and he kept looking at it out of the corner of his eye. “We surrender,” he said.

“Not so fast,” I replied. “We don’t take prisoners.”

I could practically hear the voice inside his head; oh well, it was saying, this is it, then. Followed by, at least I won’t have to go home and face all that. I felt sorry for him. But I had a job to do.

“Not because we’re bloodthirsty butchers and cannibals,” I added, “but because we simply aren’t set up for that sort of thing. Feeding and guarding all this lot. We don’t have the resources. I’ve got enough on my plate looking after my own people without playing nursemaid to the enemy as well.”

A little fly of hope started buzzing in his mind, too fast and erratic to swat. “Fine,” he said. “Let us go.”

“I’d like to, really,” I said. “But if I let you keep your horses you’ll come after us and fight us, and if I don’t you’ll run out of water and die. Unless, of course—”

(Those conditional clauses. A syntactical form that can change the world.)

“Unless, of course, you want to talk about politics. I’ve got the time, if you have.” I held out the water bottle. He hesitated, grabbed it and guzzled. Water went all down his face and neck, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“Politics,” he said. “Fire away.”

“I think,” I said, “that if you go home, they’ll kill you. Am I right?”

He nodded. “I’ve made a pretty thorough mess of things, so yes.”

“That would be a pity,” I said. “You haven’t done anything wrong. A Merope-type trap was a great idea, it’s just bad luck we happen to have read the same books.”

He looked at me. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Me? I’m just the translator. But the queen doesn’t speak Echmen, so you’ve got me instead. Don’t change the subject. You were unlucky. I don’t regard that as a capital crime, do you?”

“I should’ve known better,” he said. “Anyway, what’s that got to do with it?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “It just seems to me, a system where a man like you should be forced into a position where he’s fighting with one hand tied behind his back all the time can’t really be much good, can it? The system sets you up so you fail, and then it blames you and off goes your head. That’s just stupid, surely.”

“I can’t say I like it much,” he replied. “But it’s not up to me.”

“Here’s one scenario,” I said. “We all sit here until your men shrivel up and die. Then I take my seventy thousand soldiers and start picking off big cities, until some other poor fool is sent to stop me and ends up where you are now. Sooner or later the empire will fall, and tens of thousands of good Echmen soldiers will be dead. Probably hundreds of thousands of civilians, if that matters to you. I have no real problem with that, but it strikes me as wasteful.”

“Or?”

“Join us. No, don’t be like that, I’m serious. We don’t want to sweep through the empire killing and burning, we’re not monsters. All we want is to put things right.”

“Really.”

“Yes, as it happens. You know what your emperor did to us? He rounded us up like sheep, marched us away from our homes and made us into slaves, building his fucking wall. Is that what you signed up to protect? Civilisation?”

He shrugged. “I don’t make decisions like that,” he said.

“No, you don’t. If you did, maybe that sort of thing wouldn’t happen. Maybe a lot of things would be different. Maybe you could even go home one day and see your children.”

There’s a convention, of course, that all fathers long to see their offspring and will go to any length to be near them. I don’t think that would’ve cut much ice with my father. But you never know. It’s a good argument when you’re arguing with yourself, even if you don’t actually mean it.

“What’s all this leading to?” he said.

“It’s very simple,” I said. “We’ve come to make sure the empire never does anything like that to us ever again. We can do it by stamping on your heads till you’re dead. That’s fine, we can do that. It’s well within our capability. Or we can adjust the empire so it works properly. No more forced labour, no more extortionate taxes, no more government by corrupt bureaucratic elites. Maybe even an empire that helps people once in a while.”

“You must be out of your mind.” He peered at me. “I read about you in the briefing,” he said. “You’re some kind of mad religious zealot.”

I nodded. “People will insist on telling me who I am,” I said. “It’s very sweet of them to care, but I wish they’d get their facts straight. But don’t let’s talk about me. Let’s talk about the empire. Do you believe that, under the current management, everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds?”

He sighed. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” he said.

“All right. In that case, let’s talk about history. The history of the Echmen empire, from the earliest times to the present day. How long has the present dynasty been in power?”

“What?”

“You heard.”

He shrugged. “A hundred and sixty years.”

“That’s right. Five emperors. Now, what did the first of those emperors do for a living before he got crowned?”

He looked at me for a while. “General Lydas,” he said. “He commanded the Fifth army on the north-eastern frontier.”

“He was a soldier,” I said. “Just like you. Now there’s a coincidence.”

I had his attention. “What are you suggesting?”

“History tells us,” I went on, “that when General Lydas made a real mess of a border skirmish with the Sashan and was informed that he’d been condemned to death in absentia for incompetence by the Imperial court, he rallied his troops and marched on the capital. Along the way he was joined by three of his fellow divisional commanders, who were sick to death of the cruel and arbitrary regime of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty. It was a practically bloodless takeover, and apart from the emperor everybody lived happily ever after. Lydas got to go home. He got a better job. Not bad for a man living on borrowed time.”

“You talk a lot, for an interpreter.”

“You listen a lot, for a general. That’s good. It means you might learn something.”

It was very hot, and I’d taken back the water bottle. I offered it to him. He swallowed three gulps and handed it to me. “Let’s see if I’ve got this right,” he said. “You came all this way and went to all this trouble and killed thousands of Imperial lancers just to make me the emperor.”

“Not my primary objective. An incidental benefit.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“So people tell me. That doesn’t mean I’m not serious. I can be trusted implicitly so long as our interests absolutely coincide. What about you?”

He looked at me again. “I need to think about it.”

“Take all the time you need.” I emptied the water bottle and put it down next to him. “We’re not going anywhere.” I stood up. “By this time,” I said, “the Suessonians – that’s the bandits who robbed you – will be miles away and the money will be in a safe place where you’ll never be able to get it back. So, even if you come home in triumph with my head dangling from your saddlebow, you’re for the chop. My way, though, you may yet live to smell the spring flowers. Think about it.”

We took their weapons away, of course, and a third of their surviving horses, which we needed for eating. Their function was to march by our side, comrades in the glorious cause, rather than do any actual fighting; at least until they were so thoroughly compromised in the eyes of the empire that they’d have no choice but to join with us for real. As a wise man once said, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

“You did what?” the kings said, but she was onto them before I had a chance to open my mouth. Why were we doing this? To make sure the Echmen never bothered us again. How? We had a choice: kill the lot of them, and she didn’t know about them, but she wasn’t going to be party to that, even if it was possible, which it wasn’t. Or control them; and what better way of doing that than put our own puppet emperor on the throne, someone who’d do exactly as he was told. Or did we want to leave our lives behind, move to the Echmen city and live there till we died, spend all our time signing things and organising things and negotiating and arbitrating and sorting out all their endless stupid quarrels about money and making nice to diplomats and merchants and guilds and commercial attachés – and even if we did, we’d make a total fuck of it, since we have no idea about that shit, so we’d have to rely on Echmen advisers anyway, so why the hell not have a pretend emperor do it for us? Really it was no different from hiring a steward. And the alternative was to fight all five of the Echmen armies, one at a time or all together, and the hell with that, she personally had better things to do and who knows, we might lose. Whereas this way, if there had to be any more fighting, we could get the Echmen to do most of it for us, which would be perfect. Well?

“You said that like you meant it,” I said.

“I did mean it.”

Something in the way she said it bothered me. You have to listen carefully for nuances when you’re a translator. People often say one thing and mean another. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but it’s true.