The other day, for want of anything better to do, I tried to figure out how many people I’ve killed over the course of my life so far. I came up with a total of eighty-six. That surprised me.
A note on methodology. I’m talking here about people I’ve killed with my own hands, not the rather large number for whose deaths I could arguably be held morally responsible. Also excluded are those – twenty-seven, give or take – whose deaths I’ve ordered at the hands of others. If you count them in as well, we get a bottom line of one hundred and thirteen. Either way, that’s a lot.
Bear in mind that I’m not and never have been a professional soldier. In my defence, I think I can honestly say I’ve never killed anyone out of malice, spite, idealism, revenge, for financial gain or just for the sheer hell of it. All those homicides were, as far as I’m concerned, justified: it was them or me. Either directly, because they were coming at me with a weapon, or indirectly, because they were trying to catch me or prevent me from escaping, or they knew something about me I daren’t let anyone else find out; not my fault, because I didn’t start it. I’ve never started anything in my entire life (well, hardly ever) and all I ask is to be left in peace.
A number like eighty-six begs a serious question. Has my life – to date – been worth eighty-six lives of my fellow human beings? To which I reluctantly but without hesitation answer: no, no way. Worth a single one of them? By any meaningful criteria: no.
Define meaningful criteria. For example, some philosophers claim that in a fight or any form of serious conflict the better man always wins, because winning is the definition of being better. If I’m just that split second quicker with my block, parry and riposte, I’m a better fighter, therefore a superior animal, therefore I deserve to win; by the same token, if I’m a tad slower than you are or your feint high left suckers me into walking straight into your low right jab, God or natural selection has spoken and I’ve got nothing to moan about as my lifeblood soaks away into the sand.
Actually, I’d happily accept that, if it wasn’t for the inconvenient fact that the first man I ever killed – my brother, as it happens – was incontrovertibly the better man: not just morally, ethically, intellectually, so on and so forth, he was also a brilliant swordsman who’d have been remembered as probably the leading fencer of his generation if he hadn’t died at age fifteen, on the point of my sword, during a practice bout I’d tried my best to avoid taking part in. Who was worth more, him or me? I’m not even going to bother answering that. I only mention it to prove that the best man doesn’t always win, and therefore the proposition is flawed. A shame, but there it is. You can’t argue with the facts, though I’ve spent my life trying.
Meaningful criteria: what, for crying out loud? Making the world a better place – no, I reject that. Making the world a better place isn’t my job, I never signed up for it and it’s not my responsibility. I would argue that the world is probably just fine as it is and people are about as good as they’re capable of being. I’ve seen a lot of change and a lot of idealists. The change has invariably been disastrous and nineteen times out of twenty an idealist was to blame. Not making the world a worse place: well, on occasion I’ve tried, even put myself to a certain degree of inconvenience – as witness the ghastly mess on the island of Sirupat a few years back, which (four parts miracle, one part me) didn’t end up as the biggest, most destructive war in human history. The objection to that is that, for all I know, I’ve done loads of things that have led to really bad stuff not happening and never even knew it, let alone intended the consequence. I may have failed to save a child swept away by a river, and that child would’ve grown up to be a second Odovacar or Felix the Conqueror, who’d have slaughtered millions in pursuit of some crazed messianic dream. By the same token the sixpence I tossed in a beggar’s hat yesterday morning may have made the difference between starvation and life for the same kid. Or maybe it was you who tossed that coin. I wouldn’t put it past you.
The hell with it. Eighty-six is definitely not something I’m proud of, but neither am I cripplingly ashamed. Definitely, the next time someone comes at me with a knife or a warder tries to stop me escaping from the condemned cell, the thought of the eighty-six martyrs isn’t going to stop me or even slow me down. I am who I am, I do what I must, I didn’t start it, it’s not my fault. Now read on.
The worst thing about my line of work is when we’re called in late. We need time – to get there, to plan out the job, decide how many carts and barrels and sacks and wicker baskets we’re going to need, how we’re going to do the clearing up and then shift the stuff to where we need it to be. Most of all, we need to get on site before the bodies start swelling up and the flies get into them.
It’s probably very wrong of me, but I don’t much care for flies. Crows I can take or leave alone – they have so much in common with me, after all – and dogs and foxes run away before you come close; even slugs don’t get to me the way flies do. It’s an irrational reaction. Flies don’t do nearly as much repulsive physical damage as birds or mammals. They don’t chew off extremities or peck out eyes. And what’s a fly, compared to a human being? They’re so small, they really shouldn’t register, let alone matter. Logically, therefore, Brother Fly and Sister Bluebottle shouldn’t bother me to the extent they do. Logically, it should be quite the reverse. Crows and foxes and rats come to gorge, stuff their beaks and muzzles with everything they can get for free; flies are constructive. They firmly believe in the future: a better future, for their larvae and their larvae’s larvae. To them, taking account of scale, a dead body is a promised land, given to them by Providence as a place where they settle down, lay eggs, raise families, improve themselves, develop an orderly egalitarian society under the rule of law, quite possibly evolve in due course into a race of perfect beings, like the gods only rather less self-centred.
Even so, I dislike them. Their buzzing gets to me, and the way they move in swarms, one shape made up of thousands of restless, fast-moving components. Maybe it’s because they aren’t scared of me, the way crows and rats and foxes are. Maybe it’s because they have no real cause to be scared of me, because I’m too slow and predictable to be a threat. I like being a threat. It means I get left in peace.
In my line of work, we aren’t nearly as constructive or positive as the flies. We get called in when there’s been a battle, to clear up the godawful mess. In return for gathering up and burning or burying the bodies, the dead horses and the smashed-up hardware, we get to keep the armour, weapons, clothes, shoes and personal effects, which we patch up and sell. For this privilege we pay good money, cash in advance; and, since there are always two sides to a quarrel, we have to pay double, to the ultimate winner and the ultimate loser, because beforehand there’s no way of knowing which will be which. Factor in the overheads – I employ five hundred men; the bigger outfits, such as the Asvogels or the Resurrection Crew, field squads four times that – and make provision for the occasional disaster, like a whole train of fully laden carts getting washed away in a flooded river or ambushed by bandits, and you’ll be forced to agree with me that we earn our profits, such as they are. Vultures and parasites we may be, but we put in a lot of hard, dirty work for our disgusting and inhuman gains. Morally, that makes no difference whatsoever, but a lot of people can be fooled into thinking it does, and I sincerely hope you’re one of them.
Imagine my joy, therefore, when Count Sinderic, instead of fighting a pitched battle with the Avenging Knife on a flat, level plain half a mile from a major seaport, decided to send his cavalry to intercept the enemy as they crossed the Tabletop, a plateau eight hundred feet above sea level, only accessible through a narrow pass through the foothills of the Spearhead Mountains.
I was tempted to wash my hands of the whole thing and go home, but I couldn’t. I’d borrowed money at silly interest to buy the rights to this war, which I normally wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole, but it was the only war in town, so to speak, and we hadn’t worked for a while. An unfortunate consequence of my noble and heroic acts on Sirupat (see above) had been an abnormally long spell of peace, and such action as there had been recently had been snapped up by the Asvogels, who paid stupid money for the rights with a view to starving out the smaller operators like myself and thereby achieving a monopoly. Thanks to them, I’d had to bid well over the odds for this idiotic scrap between Sinderic and his latest crop of rebels. My margins were already as thin as a butterfly’s wing, and now I had to go zooming off into the mountains or risk defaulting on my loans, which would spell death for my business and a deplorable number of broken bones for me personally.
We got there in the end. Sinderic had sent his cavalry because he needed to cover a lot of ground quickly; we therefore had to do the same, but we had carts loaded with empty barrels and hampers, which tended to bounce off and scatter all over the ground every time a wheel ran over a rut or a stone. There comes a point, travelling in that manner, that the faster you try and go the less progress you make. We settled down into a grim, earnest trudge. We tried travelling by night as well as by day, but that was hopeless because we wore out the horses; quite a few of them went lame, and that slowed us down even more. “The hell with it,” I told Gombryas when he nagged me about how slowly we were going. “We’ll just have to take our time and get there properly.”
It’s all about perspective. I was muddy and bruised after helping fix a cracked axle; he’d been sitting on the box of a wagon all day, with nothing to do except experience the passage of time. “At this rate,” he said, “by the time we get there, everything’ll be maggots. You hate maggots. You’ve told me that enough times, God knows.”
“Absolutely true,” I told him. “But if we rush, we’ll break more axles and take longer getting there, and then there’ll be even more fucking maggots. Nice and steady does it. That’s being sensible.”
Gombryas is my friend. Define friend. I see him every day. I talk to him without having to think carefully about what I say. If I broke my leg, he’d do what it took to see me all right, provided he didn’t have a very good reason not to; and vice versa. I know a lot about him, and he knows a certain amount about me. Some things he does amuse me, and his more disgusting habits don’t offend me, because his value to me outweighs the revulsion. He works for me (at a flat rate plus a share of the profits) and he’s very good at his job, which is an important one. If I tell him to do something, it generally gets done, so on balance he makes my life easier. If he died tomorrow, I’d be sorry and upset. If he died tomorrow and someone equally good at his job stepped immediately into his shoes, I’d still be sorry and upset. We choose to overlook each other’s faults. He’s familiar, like inherited furniture. Just occasionally, he says something that hadn’t already occurred to me, and there are some things he thinks about so I don’t have to. He knows me very well (which isn’t the same thing as knowing a lot about me). We trust each other, up to a clearly defined point. He’s my friend.
“Fuck you,” said my friend. “Why don’t you and me and Polycrates go on ahead on the riding horses, and then we can make a start before everything’s gone completely shit, and the wagons can catch us up?”
I hadn’t thought of that; and I’m supposed to be smart, and he’s supposed to be thick as a brick. I spent a frantic moment trying to think of a reason why not, but failed. “That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “See to it, would you?”
Immediately he started whining. I was supposed to be in charge; why did he have to do every single bloody thing? I explained that it was because he was so smart, and thought of things I was too dim to envisage. He didn’t know what envisage meant. He called me some names and stopped the cart, so he could get down and run around organising things. He likes doing that, though he always moans about it.
There are lots of little valleys and combes all around the edge of the Tabletop, and you could have a quite substantial battle in one of them and nobody would ever know, because you’d be completely hidden from sight. But we had no trouble finding the right place, thanks to the crows, and the stink.
And the starlings. Starlings aren’t big carrion eaters, but they like flies, grubs and maggots. A huge flock of them whirred up off the ground, so loud we could hear them as soon as we broke the skyline. They lifted before the crows did. Starlings getting up are a cloud, whereas crows are like snow falling in a blizzard, only in the other direction. It always makes me feel guilty when I disturb so many thousands of my fellow creatures. They’re getting along just fine, minding their own business in these hard times in the carrion trade, and then I come along and spoil everything. Foxes and badgers and other mammals always act like criminals caught in the act. They lift their heads, give you a horrified stare and run for it, like they know they’re doing something wrong. But crows yell abuse at you, and threaten you with lawsuits for restraint of trade.
“Told you,” Gombryas said. “God, what a stink.”
But after a while you stop noticing it. For a while I lived next to a tannery, and people passing by in the street would stop dead, cover their faces and retch; as far as I was concerned, it was just ordinary breathing air. You can get used to all sorts of things. “It’s not so bad,” I said. Gombryas threw up. Maybe it was that bad after all.
The first thing you do when you find a battlefield, after making absolutely sure there’s no active soldiers on site and, if you’re Gombryas, wiping the last dribble of sick off your chin, is make a thorough skirmish of the field. It’s amazing how often you think you’ve done it all and finished, and then you come across a dell or a dip or a little fold of dead ground, and guess where the heaviest action was, the heroic counter-attack, the desperate last stand of the Imperial guard. By that point you’re already behind schedule, in grave danger of being caught out by the spring floods or missing the ships you’ve booked all that expensive cargo space on; furthermore, you’ve calculated precisely how much food and water you need to supply five hundred men for the return journey, not to mention oats and hay for the horses… So Gombryas and Olybrius and Carrhasio and I trudged through the swollen, purple bodies, figuring out what had happened. If you know what happened, you know where to look. Simple as that.
On this occasion, to begin with, it didn’t make sense. Then I realised why.
“Stone me,” I said. “The Knife won.”
“Don’t talk stupid,” Carrhasio said. He was a soldier most of his life, so he reckons he knows about strategy and tactics. “They never stood a chance.”
Not long after that we found a sunken river. The bulk of Count Sinderic’s army, running for their lives, had slithered down one side, then found the opposite bank was too steep and slippery to climb. The Knife, meanwhile, had crossed the river further up, which meant they could station their archers on top of both banks and shoot up Sinderic’s men, floundering in the deep, fast-running river below. There was no cover, the current made it hard to stand up, let alone shoot back with any accuracy or effect; escape upstream was out of the question, so a fair number of the poor bastards tried to go downstream, and were caught at a sharp bend, where the water suddenly got deep; the Knife’s archers on the bank enfiladed them as they tried to swim back against the current, and the few who weren’t shot drowned.
“Piss and fuck,” Polycrates observed, gazing down at the tangle of sodden bodies. “That’s no bloody good.”
I could see his line of reasoning. A significant percentage of our profit comes from clothing – shirts, trousers, tunics, coats, boots, hats. Nearly a week of being buffeted about in fast-running water does even the sturdiest fabrics no good at all. There was no point stripping the bodies: all their clothes and footwear were irreparably spoiled. Basically, all we’d be able to salvage from this site would be metalwork; and iron, especially chain mail, isn’t exactly improved by being soaking wet. It goes without saying, the principal form of defensive armour issued to Sinderic’s men was a knee-length long-sleeved mail shirt. By the time we got them back to somewhere we could work on them, they’d be solid blocks of rust.
“Some people,” Eudo observed solemnly, “have no consideration for others.”
Absolutely. We wouldn’t be able to burn the bodies in their sodden clothes, which meant either stripping them and dumping the clothes, an exercise which I felt might prove distasteful, or else digging a very big deep hole (in thin, stony soil) and burying them. Leaving them in the water to let nature take its course was out of the question, since the river feeds the aqueduct that supplies fresh water to Audoria, a substantial market town and our next destination if we wanted to get to the coast in time to catch our ships.
Mercifully, half a mile downstream from the main killing point was a dense reed bed. It had acted as a filter, keeping the bodies from being carried any further. I gave Eudo a hundred men and left him to it. Gombryas and a hundred more went back up the hill to deal with the rest of the battle, where at least the salvage would be dry, the bodies would burn and we might even pick up some stuff somebody might eventually want to buy. The rest of the crew stayed with me, and we tackled the worst of it. There’s a considerable degree of inherent technical interest in what we do, and you’d probably find a detailed account of how we solved our various problems both informative and useful, but I’m afraid you’re out of luck. I can’t face reliving all that again just to satisfy your morbid curiosity. We got the job done, that’s all I’m saying.
By the time we’d finished we were all miserable, except for Gombryas. He collects body parts from famous people (he rents a converted smithy in Boc Bohec, where he’s got them all on display, desiccated and nailed up on boards or carefully pickled in bottles), and to his great joy he found Count Sinderic, dry and reasonably well preserved apart from a hole in his skull, which ruined it as a collectible. After a certain amount of careful thought, he decided to keep an eye and six fingers for himself, and the other eye and fingers, nose, toes, ears, dick and scalp to use as swapsies with other collectors. The residue, after much soul-searching, he chucked on the bonfire along with those of the common people who were dry enough to burn. On balance, he told me later, there was more to be gained from scarcity value than selling or trading additional pieces, not to mention the aggravation involved in getting any of the larger bits home.
“Gombryas,” I asked him, as he meticulously smeared the inside of the scalp with saltpetre, “will you keep a bit of me when I’m gone?”
He looked at me. He doesn’t like it when I get morbid.
Essentially we work on a departmental basis. I’m the boss, and also head of disposal, which means I’m in charge of getting rid of the bodies. Each department head has his own squad and looks after a specific stage in the process. Gombryas and his boys collect up all the weapons and armour. Armour used to be Polycrates’s side of things, but he and I don’t always see eye to eye… We had a major row on the job before last and I told him to take what was owing to him and go to hell. He realised I was serious and backed down, albeit with a lot of hissing and snarling and tail-puffing-up; I accepted his apology (if that’s what it was) but sideways-promoted him to head of footwear. That looks like a demotion, because he now has thirty fewer men in his gang, but footwear is actually rather more profitable than weapons and armour, so his percentage of the gross tends to be slightly higher than it used to be. I gave Gombryas armour and twenty more men because Gombryas doesn’t like Polycrates much either. Gombryas was happy because he now had two slices off the top rather than one, which meant he could afford to buy more bits of interesting and sought-after people. Footwear used to be Rutilian, but he caught something nasty from a mouldy boot a while back and died. Olybrius ran his department for a while, along with his own clothing operation, but the two portfolios are too much for one man, which Olybrius freely confessed, so I took on Eudo as a sort of floating trainee head of helping out the others until we could all decide what he’d be best at. Papinian is chief medical officer, and he and his twenty-odd ghouls patch up any wounded survivors overlooked by the soldiers, so we can sell them back to their owners. We do this at cost plus fifteen per cent, more as a public relations exercise than anything else – the industry has a bad reputation with pretty much everybody, mostly thanks to the Asvogels and the College of Vultures, who simply don’t give a shit; I have this naive belief that snatching a few mothers’ sons from the jaws of death and restoring them to their loved ones at sensible prices might go some way to reversing that, but my breath remains resolutely unheld. Papinian has the most amazing knack of healing people and raising the very nearly dead, but he doesn’t like me, so I find it hard to warm to him. Athanaric is head of supply, Dodilas is i/c transport, Inguimer does shipping and handling, a massive undertaking which he makes look far too easy, and Carrhasio is head of small items of value – cash money, rings, brooches, prophylactic amulets and gold teeth. That isn’t really a cabinet-level portfolio, but Carrhasio’s been with the firm since before I took it over, and I felt obliged to give him something to do now he’s not up to heaving corpses about any more. If I told him he wasn’t wanted at staff meetings he’d barge in anyway, so what the hell. As it happens he runs his department at a healthy profit, and his habit of cutting off the nose of anyone caught pilfering portables from the deadstock is probably quite good for corporate morale.
We ended up having to dig a pit, so I appointed Eudo acting head of digging, a promotion he accepted with a wry smile and a few uncouth words, and we all joined in except for Papinian’s medics, who are above that sort of thing. Just to add to the general feeling of joy and contentment it started to rain heavily, which it wasn’t supposed to do for another two months. The pit filled up with water when it was about half as deep as it was supposed to be, so we revised our design parameters and went scrabbling round for rocks and big stones for a cairn instead. Properly speaking, cairns are extra, and very few customers are willing to pay, but we decided that the avenging Knife’s extraordinary achievement in securing victory over a superior enemy called for some sort of monumental recognition. We even stuck a wooden pillar in the top, leaving it blank so the Knife could add their own inscription later on, if they decided they could be bothered.
By this point, needless to say, we were so far behind schedule that wasn’t worth worrying about it any more. The ships we’d booked space on would be sailing the next day, and we were nearly a week from the coast; no chance whatsoever of getting my money back, and no way of knowing when there’d be more ships going where we wanted them to go. Palaeopolis isn’t your regular trading port, where ships come and go all the time. It only exists to service the indigo trade, which is where all the money in those parts comes from. I don’t know the first thing about indigo, except that it’s a sort of plant with ferny leaves and little bean pods; I don’t know if you make the dye from the leaves or the roots or the pods, nor do I care particularly. I know that it’s one of the things they use for making blue cloth, the alternative being whortleberries, and it only works on fabric; if you want blue paint, you have to save up or steal a vast fortune and buy a tiny scrap of lapis lazuli, which is why the Holy Mother always has a blue gown in the high-class paintings whose donor’s name appears in small gold letters in the bottom right-hand corner of the frame. Indigo, by contrast, is relatively inexpensive – the Holy Mother most likely did wear a blue gown, because she was cheap trash and brought up in Poor Town, an irony that probably has deep spiritual significance if you’re into that sort of thing. Anyway, indigo moves around in bulk at certain times of year, but once it’s gone on its way ships don’t call at Palaeopolis until it’s time for the next stage in the cycle. What that meant for us was waiting till the indigo freighters came home empty from Scona or Perimadeia, at which point we might be able to hire half a dozen to ship us and our loot fifty miles up the coast to Boc Bohec, which trades all the year round; more expense, calling for more money, which I hadn’t got, so I’d probably have to sell an advance share of the loot to the Asvogels, care of their agent in Boc Bohec, for delivery on Scona, which would mean a detour – long story short: if I handled all of a complex string of interrelated deals exceptionally well, I’d probably come out of it with enough to pay off my loans before my legs got broken, but I’d then have to take out more loans to pay my employees their shares off the top, and yet more loans to finance the next job, which I’d need to undertake to pay off the debts I’d already incurred. I believe the technical term for this activity, as applied to my particular line of business, is war profiteering. Fair enough, except where the profit part of that comes in, I’m not entirely sure.
We loaded up what we’d managed to get and set off back the way we’d come, only to find that the heavy rain had flooded the higher ground, and what had been dry gullies when we came up the mountain were now foaming torrents, which we had no hope of getting across. Luckily, Papinian (of all people) knew the country; he’d been there before, many years ago, and pointed out that if we went back up the mountain, crossed the plateau at the top and went down the other side, there was a relatively straight road leading down to the Ochys valley. This road had been built by military engineers about four hundred years ago and ran along the top of embankments designed to keep it clear of floodwater streams, so we ought to be able to get the carts down it without too much trouble. Of course, that would bring us out on the wrong side of the mountains, which in turn would mean a gruelling overland slog all the way to Weal Bohec, where we could hire barges to float us downstream to Boc. On the other hand, it would save us the cost of the indigo freighters at Palaeopolis, not to mention the time wasted waiting for the fleet to return from Scona. If all went well, it’d all be as broad as it was long, apart from the agony of the overland hike, and we’d be in Boc at around the same time we would’ve got there if we’d followed the original plan.
“That’s a bloody stupid idea,” Polycrates said, which surprised me. Usually, he and Papinian agree about everything. Mind you, usually the subject for discussion is me and my shortcomings. “If we’re going all that way overland, where the hell are we supposed to pick up the extra supplies we’ll need? Fat lot of use getting the stuff to Boc if we all starve to death along the way.”
Papinian gave him his most patrician look (he’s Echmen, so all westerners are naturally inferior) and pointed out that all he’d done was suggest a possibility. It wasn’t up to him, he added, to thrash out the minutiae; that’s what our fearless leader was for, and if he couldn’t figure out a way to do this perfectly simple thing—
“We’ve enough to get us over the mountain and down into the valley,” I said firmly, not having a clue whether or not it was true. “There’s villages in the valley; we can buy what we need as we go along. The alternative is ditching the stuff and the carts and walking back to Palaeopolis empty-handed. We can do that if you like, but I’d rather give the doc’s idea a go. What do you think?”
Polycrates pointed out that even if there were villages along the way, which he wasn’t prepared to admit, there was no guarantee that they had surplus food or would be willing to sell it to us – perfectly true, and entirely unhelpful, like most of the things Polycrates says. “Fine,” I said. “In that case we dump the carts right here and get ready to try swimming the flooded rivers. It’s entirely up to you. You can all swim, can’t you?”
I knew for a fact that Papinian and Dodilas can’t, and I had a shrewd suspicion about Athanaric and Carrhasio. “Shut your face, Polycrates,” Gombryas put in at this point. “Unless you can come up with a better idea, I vote we go with what Doc says. It’ll be a piece of piss.”
I’ve known Gombryas for quite some time now and I’ve never quite been able to work out what a piece of piss is: something vaguely positive, I think, but that’s as far as I’m prepared to commit myself. “Fuck swimming,” Carrhasio said. “And if we dump the stuff, that’s it: the end of the company. And you,” he added, turning his head to glare at Polycrates, “can go fuck yourself.”
There are times – few and far between, but worth waiting for – when democracy actually works. “Let’s vote,” I said. “In favour. All right. Against?”
Against, Polycrates’s solitary paw, upraised to an unheeding heaven. Papinian abstained, like he always does. Voting, in his view, is for slaves. “That’s fine, then,” I said. “We do what the doc said.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Papinian said. “I just happened to mention there was a road.”
(Just to go back to what we were talking about earlier: friends, my definition thereof. Friends? These people were my friends, more or less the only ones I’d got. At least, they met the definition I gave you just now – even Polycrates, whose drinking water I could cheerfully spike with foxglove juice if I thought he wouldn’t notice the funny taste; my friends, my crew, the people I know and work with. The people I’m responsible for. When you get to know me, you’ll understand that I’m responsible for an awful lot of people, and things, most of which I didn’t intend but which somehow happened anyway.)
If my life had gone the way it should have, instead of melting into shit not long after my seventeenth birthday, I’d have spent three years at the military academy at Hago Sagittarum learning how to be an officer. There they’d have taught me, among other things, leadership – how to inspire and deserve the confidence and loyalty of your men, how to make wise decisions, how to anticipate events and plan accordingly, how to take responsibility (that word again) for the lives of those under your command and balance it against the imperative of achieving the greater objective, as ordained by the chain of command.
I missed out on all that useful stuff, owing to a mistake with a sharp rapier. The irony of it is, I’ve spent the greater part of my adult life as a leader of men, and all the things I should have learned at Hago I’ve had to make up as I go along. That’s just silly. If I believed in Destiny, I’d be so angry I might even write a letter of complaint to somebody. Why set before me a life of duty and obligation, but deprive me of the training necessary for me to do my duty properly?
Shucks. Instead, I get on with it as best I can. I keep score by asking myself, each year end when I do the accounts: how many of us got killed this year, and are we still solvent? If the answers to that are less than five and yes, I figure I’m doing all right. When a day comes when I don’t get those answers, I’ve promised myself I’ll pack it all in and find some other way of earning a living. Of course, I tend to break my promises.
Climbing back up the mountain was no fun, and crossing the Tabletop wasn’t much better. It rained and carried on raining, so we spent more time pushing the carts out of bogs and flooded ruts than riding on them. The rain washed most of the mud off, but when you’re soaked to the skin and you’ve got no dry clothes to change into, your perspective on life changes: all the downside of being a fish and none of the advantages. We broke open the barrels where we’d packed such clothing as we’d managed to salvage from the battlefield and shared it out, but that didn’t help much; and then it was all sodden, too, so wet we daren’t repack it or it’d all be ruined by mould by the time we got to Boc; we piled it up in the carts, draped over the luggage, and squelched on our sad way down the disused military road.
Which at least existed. I’d had my doubts, which was wrong of me, but Papinian doesn’t make mistakes. The road was exactly where he’d said it would be.
It was a good road, too. Someone had been to a lot of trouble. Their engineers had sort of averaged out the landscape, cutting off the high ground and using it to fill in the dips, the way the social reformers in Aelia wanted to do with people fifty or so years ago, before the First Social War. On top of their nicely level surface they’d laid a thick layer of rubble topped with meticulously puddled clay and finished off with limestone slabs three inches thick and perfectly square – limestone absorbs moisture, which meant the road didn’t get slick and slippery in the wet. It was such a splendid achievement that I asked Papinian where the road started and where it went to. He didn’t know. Apparently nobody did. The military had built it, presumably to achieve some objective, but by the time the road was finished history had moved on and the objective no longer mattered. It was, he said, a perfect example of the means justifying the ends. He says things like that occasionally, and all you can do is smile and pretend you understand them.
Anyway, it did us proud, and then it came to an abrupt halt in the middle of a swamp, something Papinian had neglected to mention. There was no way in hell we could get the carts across it, so we turned round and tramped twelve miles back up the beautiful road to where we remembered the going offroad was still reasonably hard, and tried to figure out where to go from there.
“Those,” Polycrates said, pointing to the cloud-blurred horizon, “must be the Cantrips, which means that if we head basically south-east, sooner or later we’ll hit the river, and—”
“The whats?” I asked.
“Cantrips. The Cantrip hills. Those big sticking-up things on the skyline.”
My eyesight is better than his. “Those,” I told him, “are clouds.”
“No, they’re not, they’re mountains. Once we hit the river, we just follow it down to where the treeline ends and we’ll be in the valley, where there’s farms and people we can ask.”
“Clouds,” I repeated. “Besides, if you’re right and those are the Cantrips, right now we should be standing up to our necks in Lake Houba. Are you standing in a lake, Polycrates? I don’t think I am.”
“I’ve got a map,” Eudo put in, “if that’s any help.”
A map. Joy kept me from smashing his face in. “Where did you—?”
“I found it on one of the bodies. I don’t know if it’s any good or not.”
Valid point. The events I’d reconstructed on the battlefield had led me to the conclusion that Sinderic’s men had gone badly astray in their geography, which was how they’d ended up in the death-trap riverbed. A dud map might account for that. Even so. “Give it here,” Polycrates said. I intercepted it before his fingers could close on it, so he came behind me and peered over my shoulder, breathing heavily in my ear.
Polycrates had been right, in a sense. He hadn’t seen them, because they were wreathed in cloud, but behind those clouds were the Cantrip hills. The lake was the other side of the Tabletop. The beautiful road we’d just come down was clearly marked. It ended at a large town, with walls and a cathedral, more or less where we’d run into the swamp. An old map, I reckoned, or a new copy of an old map. “You arsehole,” I said to Eudo, not unkindly, “why didn’t you—?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I thought you knew where we were, so I didn’t mention it.”
With an actual map to go by, we had no trouble figuring out our next step. If we left the road and held a bit north, we could cross a nice dry moor and come down into the gently rolling, intensively farmed valley whose market town was the terminus of a road that led straight to Weal Bohec, and all our troubles would be over. Nearly all of them, anyway.
I outlined my proposals to the heads of department, who looked bored. “Let’s do that, then,” Gombryas said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. Mildly stunned by their unanimous support, I agreed. Dodilas wandered off to organise the carts – we’d been in column and now we needed to be in line, apparently – while I took another look at the map, just to make sure everything was right and I wasn’t holding the stupid thing upside down.
“Who do you suppose they are?” Olybrius asked, pointing at something I couldn’t see.
“No idea,” I replied. “Shepherds, probably, or someone out hunting. Life goes on, and all that. How many of them are there?”
“Oh, not many. A few horsemen and a cart.”
“Fuck them,” I said tolerantly.