“On your feet,” he said.
I did the geometry. It wouldn’t come out. Distance to the nearest weapon, too far. Triangulation of antagonists, not favourable. I did as I was told.
One of them led the strawberry roan out from where I’d skilfully concealed it. “Up,” said the cook. I got into the saddle. The geometry was still wrong; in fact, it was worse. The Hetsuan were watching me with intense, educated attention. They knew all about this sort of thing. They had horses, too, and they mounted quickly and smoothly, allowing me no opportunities. I got the impression that the cook wasn’t just any cook. I bet he could do you a pot roast to die for.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Shut your face,” the cook snapped back, which was me told. There were no reins on the strawberry roan, just a leading rein which the cook took charge of personally.
It’s a terrible thing when, after a lifetime of doubt, you finally achieve true faith, only to find you’ve been had for a fool. For a while back there, I actually believed in Vistam. I’d crossed the wilderness and met Him, vicegerent of the Eternal Flame, brother of the Sun and Moon; he hadn’t felt able to let me see my daughter and he was screwing my wife, but he’d given me a really fine horse and a magic ring and arranged all that useful moonlight – but no, apparently not. Maybe even he could only operate in a strictly limited geographical area, say a fifty-mile radius of home. Now I was making my last journey, no idea how long, no idea where I was headed. I felt disappointed, but I knew that none of it mattered. The geometry was all over the place and, besides, could I be bothered any more? Not really. The convention is that once you’ve made the journey and had the beatific vision, you spend the rest of your life in contentment and inner peace. Clearly the rest of my life was going to be relatively short, but how I spent it was up to me. Contentment, inner peace: why the hell not? As I think I may have mentioned earlier, the calmer and more relaxed the animal, the better it tastes. And I was a guest in these people’s country. I wouldn’t want to leave a bad taste in their mouths, it’d be rude.
As usual, missing the point. The function of prey is to be caught; as prey you keep score, know how well you’re doing, by the length of time during which you can honestly say, they haven’t got me yet. Meanwhile the salmon struggles gamely upstream until he gets where he needs to go. Once he’s got there – fine. I’d struggled against the current as far as Vistam’s castle, under the mistaken impression that I was seeking my mate. I got there and found that my mate was much better off without me, which when you think of it amounts to pretty much the same thing. My mate was in Paradise, for crying out loud; surely that was enough, and no further action required on my part. Now let the salmon depart in peace, and you’d have to be downright churlish to deny the otters a decent meal.
We had a long ride, uneventful and boring. I tried asking: where are we going, why is it taking so long, are we there yet, is it soon yet? Shut your face. The more I asked, the angrier the cook got with me, so I gave up. When we passed through villages, people hurried inside and shut the doors. I got given a fair ration of bread and water each day, and I got to see a lot of the scenery of Hetsuan, which you can have, and welcome to it. I felt like a man falling off a very, very tall tower. It’s relaxing, wallowing lazily in a cushion of air, and quite boring after a while, and then the journey comes to an end and all your troubles are over—
It was about three hours after sunrise. I stood up in my stirrups and looked straight ahead. I recognised that low, featureless rise ahead of me. About a mile away, though of course I couldn’t see it from there, was a ditch. The other side of the ditch was Sashan territory.
I did the geometry and it was hopeless. They were riding in star formation, with me in the epicentre; I hadn’t noticed them shift position, which shows how demoralised I’d got. Well, I said to myself, here we are and this is it. Presumably it has to be here, because this is where I murdered Giraut de Borneil and stole his excellent horse. Fair enough. Just one more ditch to cross, so to speak, and I’m in the place where I truly belong.
We carried on. They were watching me the way guard dogs do, when they’ve come bounding up, howling bloody murder, and they surround you, and then they stop dead and stand there, doing that special low growl that loosens your bladder. We were getting closer and closer to the border, close enough that I could see the ditch; close enough to see a bunch of people on the other side. Hang on, I thought.
Closer still, and I could make out the faces of the people on the other side. There was Eudo, and there, in a red cloak and pretty as a picture, was Stauracia. They were all on horses, and behind them was a farm wagon, and more people I couldn’t quite make out, on horses, clustered round it in what looked very much like that classic star formation.
The cook stopped his horse on the very edge of the ditch. “Hey, you,” he called out.
Stauracia and Eudo rode up to their edge. They didn’t say anything. Someone behind me told me to get down off the horse, so I did. The cook turned and beckoned, and I saw bows being drawn.
“That him?” the cook said.
“That’s him,” Eudo said.
The cook took his foot out of its stirrup and booted me in the face. I toppled over and fell in the ditch. I lay there, wondering for a moment which side I was supposed to clamber out on. “Come on, for fuck’s sake,” Stauracia yelled at me. I scrambled a bit, and I was on Sashan soil, with a dozen Hetsuan arrows pointed precisely at me.
Eudo turned and waved to the men beside the wagon. The wagon rumbled forward until it reached the ditch, the tailgate dropped down and a dozen or so people got out: four women, the rest kids. The women climbed awkwardly into the ditch and held up their arms to help the children; five or so Hetsuan dismounted to help them up the other side. The archers unbent their bows, keeping the arrows nocked on the string.
The cook looked at me. “Arsehole,” he said. Then he gave a signal with his hand, and the Hetsuan turned and rode away, in star formation around the women and the kids.
Something crashed into me. It was Eudo, giving me an enormous hug. Oh, I thought.
“We didn’t expect gratitude,” Stauracia said. “Still, there’s no need to be a total shit about it.”
“You must have been out of your tiny minds,” I yelled at her. “You could’ve started a war.”
I was seriously angry. I’m still not entirely sure why. “So what?” Stauracia said, tightening her horse’s girth. “War is good for business. I’d have thought you of all people—”
“It was all we could think of,” Eudo said. “I mean, you didn’t exactly make it easy for us, suddenly going off like that.”
“All I could think of, you mean,” Stauracia interrupted. “This idiot here was all for sneaking across the border at night and hoping for the best. Fortunately, one of us has a brain.”
Was I angry because I was still alive, and they’d saved me? That wasn’t supposed to happen. I was a lamb going serenely to the slaughter. “You know about these people, for crying out loud,” I growled at her. “Kidnapping innocent women and children—”
She put her foot in the stirrup and mounted the horse. Nearly everything she does is graceful, a pleasure to watch. “You prick,” she said. “I should’ve let them eat you.”
Eudo was already mounted. They’d provided me with a big chestnut mare, cavalry surplus. Compared to the horses in Hetsuan, it was a big slab of dog meat. When I was on it, I felt like I was a hundred miles off the ground. “We need to get away from here as quickly as possible,” I said. “If they come across the border, I want to be very hard to find.”
It was, of course, Stauracia’s idea. When she realised what I’d done, she had hysterics (according to Eudo and Gombryas) and had to be restrained from charging off after me. Ten minutes later, she’d come up with the plan: hire some local muscle, cross the border at night, snatch as many civilians as they could round up and still have enough time to get back across the ditch by daybreak, and then send one of them home with a message.
The message was: our friend, who’s a lunatic and not responsible for his actions, is trespassing in your territory. If you bring him back to us unharmed, we won’t kill the hostages.
“I’ve met these people,” I nagged at her, as we raced across the moor. “You really don’t want to play games with them. This is just the sort of thing that confirms what they think about us already.”
“Actually,” Eudo put in, “when you look at their record of actually going to war, they don’t, usually. For a start there’s all those checks and balances. When you think that over the last fifteen hundred years they’ve only—”
“Shut up,” I said, because he was probably right. I’d met the Hetsuan. They were vicious savage bloodthirsty monsters, in the Sashan sense. We think they’re ravenous predators. They think the same about us. We’re both right.
By the time we stopped for the night I’d calmed down a bit, and the feeling of disappointment and loss was wearing off. “So,” Stauracia said, raising the topic for the first time, “how did you get on? Did you get there?”
“Midons?” I said. “No. I think I may have seen it in the distance.”
“So you didn’t find her after all?”
“I found her,” I said. “Saw her, for about fifteen seconds.”
“That’s not very long,” Eudo said. “Was there a problem?”
Bless him. “You could say that,” I said. “She thought I’d come to murder her.”
“But you explained.”
“No,” I said. “Can we talk about something else?”
“You didn’t explain.”
“I explained to her husband,” I said.
Stauracia looked at me. I couldn’t see her face very well, because it was dark and she was leaning back from the light of the campfire. “And?” she said.
“He’s a nice guy,” I said. “I liked him.”
“And then you cut his throat.”
I sighed. “No,” I said. “That would’ve been pointless. He explained that Apoina and Eudocia – that’s my daughter – were absolutely convinced that I was hell-bent on killing them both. More to the point, they’re both about a million times happier than they ever could be with me in their lives. So—”
“So you gave up.”
“It seemed the sensible thing to do,” I said.
Long silence. Then Eudo said, “I think you were quite right. No offence, but you’re not exactly premium husband-and-father material, and if they’re happy, why spoil everything? And if you killed the husband, I don’t suppose that would have endeared you to her particularly.”
Stauracia and I stared at him for a moment. “My thoughts exactly,” I said. “So, yes, I gave up.”
“Fair enough,” Stauracia said. “Only I wouldn’t have thought you’d have done that. I assumed—”
“So did Praeclara.” And I explained to them what Praeclara had assumed. It left them silent and thoughtful for a moment or so. Then Stauracia said, “Smart woman. We really ought to kill her for that.”
“I wish I’d thought of it,” she said. “It’s – what’s the word I’m looking for? Economical.”
Eudo was gazing at me. “You really met the rightful king of Sashan?”
I nodded. “Nice man,” I said. “I liked him.”
“So that’s why you didn’t kill him?”
“No.”
Which wasn’t strictly true. Or it wasn’t the whole truth. “Anyway,” Eudo said, “that’s a wonderful thing, meeting a real live king like that.”
Eudo is like the toothache. For a long time, you tell yourself it’s not so bad and you can bear it. Then you reach the point where you no longer can. “I think I’ll go to sleep now,” I said. “It’s been a funny old day.”
But I couldn’t sleep, needless to say, and after a couple of hours lying on my back looking at a bunch of disappointing stars I got up and went for a walk about. I found Eudo still sitting by the fire, reading a book.
“So it was her idea,” I said.
“Oh, yes. We all tried to talk her out of it, but she was dead set.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
He closed the book and laid it down. “Do you think the Hetsuan—?”
I shook my head. “Probably not,” I said. “Luckily, nobody actually got hurt, and I managed to get away without doing anything particularly bad while I was over there. And they’ve only got two choices: all-out war or pretend it didn’t happen. If it’d been Antecyrene or Tyrsenia, they might well go to war. But I don’t see them committing themselves to wiping the Sashan Empire off the face of the earth if they can possibly help it.”
He thought about it for a moment. “That’s all right, then.”
“Yes, probably it is. What’s that you’re reading?”
“Oh, just something I picked up somewhere. It’s pretty boring, actually.”
He handed it to me to look at. I glanced at the title, written on the spine in typical librarians’ abbreviations. Concerning Textiles. “Where did you say you got this?”
“Can’t remember. Actually, yes I can. I picked it up at that castle place. It was just lying about, so I thought—”
I wasn’t listening. I was leaning as close to the fire as I could get without my eyebrows getting burned off, so I could read the librarian’s precis on the title page; a book concerning the manufacture, use and decoration of textiles, with some irrelevant digressions about different types of loom used in remote countries, notes about dyestuffs and an inaccurate account of the life cycle of the silkworm. The first edition; later copies were amended and much spurious and unsubstantiated material omitted.
“What’s the matter?” Eudo asked. “Are you all right?”
I ignored him. Dyestuffs; first edition; much spurious and unsubstantiated material omitted. “Just lying about,” I said.
“Yup. It was in that room in the tower. I fancied something to read.”
“You lunatic,” I said. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
He gave me a blank look. “It’s just a rather dull book about flax,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
I considered him, the way Vistam had considered me: an equation, difficult but capable of being solved – actually, I wasn’t at all sure about that. “You maniac,” I said. “All right, wake everybody up. We’re moving.”
“Now.”
I thought about it carefully, and decided that Stauracia probably needed to know, or that I owed her something for something. She was sleeping peacefully, like an angel curled up in a blanket. I prodded her shoulder with my toe and she was awake instantly. “What?”
“The book,” I said.
She didn’t need to be told which book. “What about it?”
I showed it to her. “Know what this is?”
“It’s a book. So what?”
“It’s the book.”
She can go from fast asleep to wide awake in a heartbeat, like a cat. “The one Praeclara wants.”
“Yes.”
“How do you—?” She didn’t bother finishing that. She trusted me.
“Eudo had it all the time,” I said.
Her eyes went round. “The fucking shit.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think he realised,” I said. “I think he just wanted something to read.”
“The arsehole.” So much, in her view, for reading books. “You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure. I’ll have to look through it to confirm, but it all makes sense now.” I paused for a moment. “It’ll be worth a lot of money,” I said.
We both knew what I meant by that. We didn’t have to use it as a lure to trap Praeclara. We could sell it and be stupidly rich, and all our troubles would be over. “Fuck it,” she said.
“Sure?”
She grinned. “You know what?” she said. “I’ve spent my life on the trail of the big score, ever since I can remember, and it’s always been so close I can practically smell it. So, fuck it. There’ll be another one along in a minute. There always is.”
I looked at her. I couldn’t see her, because it was still dark, but I could see her clear as day in the Sashan sense. I imagine it was the magic of the Great King’s signet ring, or something like that. “No,” I said. “I mean a great deal of money. Enough money. Even for you and me.”
She was only human. She hesitated. Maybe a whole second. “Fuck it,” she repeated. “And there’s no such thing as enough, believe me.”
The long ride to Beloisa was no fun. We were all terrified, every step of the way. We took longer than we should have because we went the long way round any settlement bigger than a village. We had every right to be scared. We were exposed in open country, moving painfully slowly; anyone could have found us and scooped us up, and that would have been that.
When we got there it was even worse. Out in the open, we could see them coming. Beloisa is one of the biggest cities on our side of the Friendly Sea. Spotting an enemy there is like looking out for one particular mackerel in a shoal.
I found Gombryas in the Nine Pillars of Understanding, where the booze is toxic but reasonably priced. He was meeting a small-time dealer who claimed to have a kneecap of Carnufex the Irrigator. It turned out to be a fake, as Carnufex relics almost invariably are, so he was understandably annoyed. “Where the hell did you get to?” he demanded. “We’ve been stuck in this shithole for a week.”
I gave him a condensed version. He stared at me. “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’re fucking lunatics, the lot of you.”
“Yes,” I said. “How did it go?”
“You really kidnapped a load of—”
“Yes. How did it go?”
He pulled a sad face. “All right,” he said. “Lousy hot weather and everything crawling with flies, but we cleared two thousand net. Polycrates got blood poisoning from a rusty arrow but the doc pulled him through.”
You can’t have everything. “You’ve sold the stuff.”
“I just told you, didn’t I? Did you really—?”
“So we’re ready to move out.”
“Yes.”
We moved out. There were a lot of complaints. Polycrates made the valid point that he and the rest of them had just carried out a relatively successful operation with absolutely no help, guidance or input from me, so what did they actually need me for? He also raised the issue of where we were going, and when I told him, back to the castle, he asked why. Shut your face, I suggested, and there the matter rested, but I could see he wasn’t happy, and neither were most of the others. We went, all the same. Mostly, I think, through force of habit; and if I were to step down as leader of the gang, who’d replace me? Better the arsehole you know, seemed to be the general verdict, even if he does keep leading us into mortal peril and we never seem to make any money.
On the way we stopped over in Eisi Celeuthoe, where I got into a bidding war with the Company of Vultures for a small police action just over the Blemyan border into Doria. I only did it to draw attention to myself, and let everyone know that I was back and very much still in business. The Vultures made sure of that, telling everyone who’d listen about pissy little cowboy operators who gave the industry a bad name by overbidding and driving up prices generally.
“You realise,” Stauracia said, “that you’ve just told the entire trade where you are and where you’re going to be in eight weeks’ time. I thought we were keeping a low profile.”
“Really?” I said. “What made you think that?”
“But—” She gave me that look, the one that deals with my exaggerated opinion of my own intelligence, and various related issues. I’m so used to it that I’ve got callouses on my face, from where she glares at me. “You want Praeclara to know where you are.”
“Now that we’re back in the West, yes,” I said. “I figure it might save us a long journey.”
It did. We were two days from Beloisa, camped in a wood on top of a hill, at the foot of which the Southern Main snaked along the bottom of the Calama Downs. It was an ideal defensive position, where you’d feel safe from any trouble. Accordingly, I posted three cordons of sentries, and told everybody to sleep with strung bows and an arrow nocked on the bowstring.
It was a clear night, so I figured she’d make her move about four hours after midnight, when the dark would be starting to thin out. She’d come for me there anticipating that I wouldn’t bother to be careful in such a strong position. She underestimates me, which is the only advantage I have in dealing with her.
My orders were to let her through the first two cordons; the third cordon greeted her with shouts and yells, picked up straight away by the two cordons that were now right behind her. They made enough noise to give her the impression she was surrounded by superior forces, which she was, in the Sashan sense. She’d have made a fight of it, knowing that my followers were sincerely chickenshit when it came to violence, but her people weren’t prepared to get into a fight with sharp weapons on her say-so and gave up immediately. Carrhasio dragged her in by her hair, pushed her to the ground and stood with his foot on her neck until I told him to pull himself together, which he did with a bad grace. She got up and glowered at me in the red light of dawn.
“I’m not talking to you,” I said.
“Arsehole,” she said.
From my pocket I produced the book. I opened it so she could see the librarian’s inscription on the front page, and held it in front of her face. “Is this it?” I said.
“Yes.”
I snapped it shut and stuffed it in my pocket. “Fool you twice, shame on you,” I said. “I think I’ll keep it. I earned it, after all.”
She looked straight at me. “Why do you say that?”
“I did what you wanted,” I said. “I killed Vistam. That’s what you sent me to do, isn’t it?”
I could almost hear her heart ringing inside her like a bell, but her face didn’t change. “Say that again. You killed Vistam.”
“Yes.” I let that sink in. “Pity, really. He was a good man. She loved him, you know. Of course, that’s why I killed him.”
A moment ago she’d had her nose in the leaf mould, and Carrhasio’s boot on her spine. Now she had to fight to keep the joy out of her voice. “I told you the truth,” she said. “I didn’t lie to you. I told you where to find her, and there she was.”
“You arranged for me to assassinate the rightful Great King,” I said, “to suit your maniac agenda. So what? We’re just two deeply unpleasant people who were able to do each other a favour. But I get to keep the book. It’s worth a great deal of money.”
She had to ask. “How the hell did you get out of Hetsuan?”
“My friends rescued me.”
Not what she’d expected to hear. “What, that lot?”
“Loyal and resourceful,” I said. “And brave as tigers. You didn’t anticipate that, I don’t suppose.”
She was thinking. I knew the name, Vistam; how would I have found it out unless I’d actually been there? Therefore I was telling the truth. “Apoina,” she said.
“Oh, exactly as you’d set it up,” I said. “She now hates me worse than ever. Eudocia, too, they both think I’m the devil incarnate. I had nothing to lose on that score, so I killed him and came home. As far as I’m concerned the whole thing was a total washout. Still, it’s nice to go to new places and meet new people. Which reminds me,” I added. “Got something for you.”
“Go on, then.”
“Just a moment.” I nodded to Eudo, who came forward with a razor, a basin of water and a bar of soap. “Oldest trick in the book,” I said, as Eudo started shaving my head. “Luckily they don’t seem to have read Rodebart’s Chronicles in Hetsuan.”
Eudo took his time, because I didn’t want to get even the slightest cut or nick on my scalp. “There,” I said, leaning forward so she could see.”
She read what Vistam’s valet had tattooed on my scalp; fortuitous that the Hetsuan have a long tradition of body decoration. Like I said, the oldest trick in the book; shave the messenger’s head, tattoo the message, let the hair grow back. Not only is the message highly unlikely to be found by anyone intercepting the messenger, but the messenger himself can’t see what’s been written. “She begged me,” I said. “She went down on her knees. I reckoned it was the least I could do, since I’d just murdered her husband.”
Actually, I knew exactly what it said, because Vistam and I had composed it between us. I knew roughly what I wanted it to say, and he tweaked it so it sounded just like Apoina, including the secret codeword she only used when writing to her mother, so Praeclara would know the message was genuine. Credit where it’s due: it was Vistam’s idea, though he would’ve been content to forge Apoina’s handwriting on a piece of paper. But I’d come up with the tattoo thing, which I remembered from reading the Chronicles; partly because I didn’t trust his ability as a forger, partly because if I was captured (as indeed I was) they’d search me and find it. And they did search me, but they didn’t find it. I imagine they’re now under the mistaken impression that foreign savages tattoo weird talismans on their scalps, along with all the other bizarre things we do to ourselves.
I can’t remember word for word what we came up with, but the gist was: Saevus has murdered my husband; I’m all alone here and I’m terrified; please come immediately – followed by a detailed account of the secret passwords, safe houses et cetera she’d need to cross Hetsuan unmolested. It’s fortunate I have rather a large head, or the valet would never have been able to fit it all on.
Anyway, Praeclara read it, turning paler and paler every second. “Well?” I said, when she’d finished. “Will you go?”
She sublimated her fear into hatred for me, a useful knack. “You bastard,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “It was all your idea. And now your daughter’s stuck in the middle of Hetsuan, and only you can save her. Your own silly fault, if you ask me.”
“How do I know it’s safe?”
“You don’t,” I said. “It’s what Vistam set up, just in case something like this happened, but whether or not it’ll work I have absolutely no idea. You might get there, or you might not. Your choice.”
The fear made her look ten years older. “How do I know—?”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m smart, but even I’d have difficulty tattooing my own head, in a language I don’t even know. And if you think I had it done after I got back, use your brain. My hair doesn’t grow that fast.”
She thought about it, very carefully. She was thinking that while she was there she could surreptitiously acquire Vistam’s head, as proof, always assuming nobody had thoughtlessly cremated him. But the Hetsuan wouldn’t like that, so the head was probably still around somewhere… “The book,” she said. “I need the book.”
“What for?”
“For when I get back,” she said. “For the next stage, now that Vistam’s dead.”
I sighed. “You really take the cake, don’t you? Tell you what. You go and rescue Apoina and bring her back, and then we’ll talk about it.”
“No,” she said. “I want the book now, or I’m not going.”
(And that’s how I won my bet with Stauracia; most expensive bet I’ve ever won, but I’m not complaining.)
“The hell with what you want,” I said. “I’m sick to death of you and your constant manipulating. If you want the book you can buy it, cash money.”
“How much?”
“Since you’re family, half a million. I could probably get double that from the Knights, or the Poor Sisters.”
“I haven’t got half a million.”
“It sucks to be poor,” I said. “How much have you got?”
She breathed at me through her nose. “Two hundred thousand,” she said. “In the Merchant Venturers’ in Auxentia City.”
“Just a moment,” I said, “while I confer with my associates.”
I staged a little huddle, in whispers. “What’s she talking about, two hundred thousand?” Gombryas said. “Shut up,” I replied. “And keep your voice down or you’ll ruin everything.”
Huddle over. “I’ll need a sealed bill of exchange,” I said. “You’ve got your seal with you, naturally.”
She called me a rude name. I pointed out that I could seal the bill just as easily with the seal still on her severed finger. She took it off and threw it at me: a nice touch, I thought. “Thank you,” I said. “Here’s your book.”
I put it down on the ground with my foot resting on it. She got down on her hands and knees and teased it out from under my toecap, expecting to get the other boot in her teeth. I disappointed her, which gave me much more satisfaction.
Needless to say, there was no account in her name with the Merchant Venturers’. Gombryas and Polycrates were upset about that; they’d believed her, and insisted on traipsing back to the coast and taking a boat to Auxentia City. They rejoined us at Xedes, the nearest port to where we were going in Blemya, and gave me a hard time about going all that way for nothing.
But, as I explained to Stauracia and Eudo the next day, it was only fair that Praeclara should’ve lied to me, since I’d lied to her about Vistam’s carefully planned escape route and network of safe houses, which was of course a figment of Vistam’s and my imagination. For what it’s worth, I have no positive proof that Praeclara got caught and eaten by the Hetsuan. Nobody’s heard anything about her since that night, but it’s quite in keeping with her way of doing things to disappear for long periods of time. For all I know she may still be alive and well and brimming over with malice same as ever.
Stauracia said I was stupid to give her the book, maybe because she was sore about losing her bet; she couldn’t believe that Praeclara would have the nerve to make the book a condition of saving her own daughter’s life, and told me she had ten staurata that thought the same way. She was lying: she didn’t have ten staurata. I told her she could owe it to me. She still does. But (she went on) I was still stupid. I should’ve killed Praeclara when I had the chance, instead of making up that idiotic rigmarole with the faked message and the shaved head, the scars of which would stay with me the rest of my life. She was right, of course; she generally is. But when Vistam suggested it, I knew immediately that it was the right thing to do. It would mean, he said, that the only decent, human thing Praeclara ever did in her entire life would result in a horrific, terrifying death; a solemn lesson, to those of us in the know, about how vital it is for the leopard not to change its spots.
“You’re still a moron,” Stauracia said. “That book was worth half a million, and now it’ll end up chucked under a hedge somewhere in Hetsuan and be no good to anybody. That’s just a pointless waste.”
“It’s not quite as bad as that,” I said. “I may have been able to salvage something from the wreck. We’ll see.”
She sat gazing into the campfire for a while. “You really hate her, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not like you. You don’t usually hate people.”
“She has that effect on me.”
“Because of your wife.”
I nodded. “That’s what love does,” I said. “I’ve always reckoned the positive emotions cause more harm than anything else in this life. It’s like altruism and idealism. Altruism and idealism have caused more wars and more deaths—”
“Don’t start all that again,” she said, reasonably enough. “And you don’t know the first thing about love. All you’re interested in is saving your own skin.”
I looked at her. “If it wasn’t for love, I’d never have needed to,” I said. “Two people in my life I’ve really loved, my brother and my wife. Things don’t tend to go well with people I love, or with me because of them. I’d be rather more comfortable with a pet scorpion. At least they only sting you if you tease them.” I thought about that for a moment. “Part of me wants Praeclara to make it after all. I couldn’t have killed her in cold blood. This way, at least she’s got a chance. A properly small one, but a chance all the same.”
She gave me an odd look. “You’re pathetic,” she said, and left me to my brooding.
The trivial little police action in Doria had started by the time we got there, but we had no trouble finding it; just follow the trail of burned-out villages and crucified insurgents. “This is a complete waste of time and money,” Polycrates said, as we rattled along an arrow-straight military road through sand and thorn-scrub. “The savages aren’t going to fight a pitched battle with the Blemyan military. Nobody’s that stupid. They’ll just play hit and run a few times while the soldiers round up their women and their cattle, and then the Blemyans will go home and that’ll be that. How much did you say you paid for the rights to this piece of shit?”
I wasn’t really listening to him. I was more interested in the crows. They’re not especially common in Blemya, where the main scavengers are kites, which miaow like cats when they’re circling and whistle when they’re scared. We’d been whistled at for most of the morning, as we put up dozens of kites from every gibbet and cross we passed, and when I heard crows screaming in the distance it almost made me homesick.
The crows were circling around a small lake or large pond – there’s a technical term in Blemyan – and I decided to take a look. Always follow the crows; they know what they’re doing.
Easy to figure out what had happened. Two regiments of Blemyan regular heavy infantry and a squadron of lancers had stopped at the lake for the night. They knew the lake was there, it was on the maps, and their route had been carefully planned to make sure they never ran short of water. They hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the bad guys for three days, and if they were being followed, they’d have seen a dust cloud. So there was nothing at all to worry about. They reached the lake just before sunset, pitched their tents, filled their water bottles, posted their sentries and went to sleep.
The rebels, of course, had got there first. I’m guessing they’d been there for five or six days, knowing that the enemy would have to stop there to get water; they’d dug shallow trenches on the edge of the belt of greenery surrounding the lake and roofed them over with thorn branches. If the sentries heard them coming, it didn’t matter. It would all have been over in five minutes or so. They managed to take most of the Blemyans alive; presumably the poor fools thought they were being given a chance to surrender, but I guess that by that stage in the relationship the rebels were good and mad at them. They nailed the officers to tree trunks by their hands and feet, beheaded the rank-and-file, stacked the heads in a neat pyramid and slung the bodies into the lake. Nobody would be drinking that water for a good long time, which meant a further punitive expedition was out of the question. I guess the rebels belonged to the small subsection of humanity who think more clearly when they’re angry. It’s not a bad character trait to have, if you ask me.
If we’d got there a day later, the whole lake would’ve been stinking and we’d have been in serious trouble. As it was, there were a couple of smaller subsidiary pools that hadn’t got polluted yet, and we were able to fill up our water jars for the trip home. Once we’d got that done, we were able to turn our attention to business.
The only thing the rebels had taken were the horses; everything else was where it had been when the rebels burst in and started rounding people up. A thousand tents, nearly three thousand sets of bedding, mess kits, boots, uniforms – too hot to sleep if you’re wearing anything, so everything was laid out neat and soldierly, armour sand-polished, boots paired and gleaming, belts and straps freshly whitened with pipeclay, unissued arrows bundled in three-dozens in sealed cloth bags, cooking pots and kettles cleaned out and burnished, ready for tomorrow’s breakfast; the rebels had even left the food, barrels of pork and apples, twenty-gallon jars of olives and pickled cabbage, sacks and sacks of oats for the horses, all neatly stacked ready for us to load onto the carts, as though we’d been expected. We dug a pit for the heads and the desiccated officers, and that was all we had to do. “I really like these people,” Olybrius said. “Let’s hope they invade the empire. They’re so clean and tidy.”
We left the crows shrieking at us, without even sun-dried officers to eat, and rumbled back the way we’d come. We cleared twenty-six thousand eight hundred staurata when we got to Boc Bohec, net of shipping, harbour dues and local taxes; it was one of our best jobs ever, and far and away the easiest.
“What’s she getting a share for?” Dodilas wanted to know, when we did the split after I’d cashed the bills we’d been given. “She’s not even a member.”
“She did her share of the graft,” I said.
“What, helped lift a few barrels onto a cart?” Carrhasio wasn’t impressed. “The hell with that. If she’s not a member she’s not entitled. What’s she doing, anyway, still hanging around? I don’t remember anyone being asked if she could tag along.”
“Fine.” Stauracia got up. “Fuck the lot of you, then.” She looked at me and I had a fair idea what she expected me to say, but I didn’t say it. I vaguely remembered a conversation we’d had, about her staying with us as far as Boc Bohec; presumably it had slipped her mind. “She gets a full share,” I said. “She can have mine. I’d be a pile of turds in Hetsuan right now if it hadn’t been for her.”
“That’s your business,” Polycrates said. “But if she’s joining us, we need to vote on it, and I wouldn’t trust her as far as I can piss.”
I’m not what you’d call a gesture person. I don’t wave my hands about, yell or stamp my little foot, and I try not to do things simply because they feel right at the time. But nobody’s perfect. “No problem,” I said. “She goes. Me, too. I’ve had it with you people. From now on you can look after yourselves, and the best of luck to you.”
There was a stunned silence as everyone wondered: does he mean it? They should have known me better than that. I stood up and walked away, out of the gate of the livery yard where we were staying, down an alley that led into Cornmarket, across the square and into the Kindly Light. Technically I was still barred from the Light for antisocial behaviour, but that was five years ago and it had burned down twice since then. I spent two of my five remaining thalers on a jug of beer and a rather indifferent sea bass with spinach and almonds, and considered what I’d just done. All in all, I couldn’t find much wrong with it.
I’d finished the sea bass and I was picking my teeth with one of the big bones when Eudo came in, looked round and saw me. “What was all that about?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’s about time I moved on,” I said.
“We’re your friends.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I’m doing them a favour. They don’t need me, and I keep getting them in trouble.”
He sighed. I poured him some of the beer, which was all right but nothing special. “This is about Stauracia, isn’t it?” he said.
“No, not really.”
“You’re not running away from us. You’re running away from her.”
I yawned. “I’m not sure I’ve got the energy left to run anywhere any more,” I said, “to or from anyone or anywhere or in any particular direction. The hell with running. Drink your beer.”
“You can’t just take off like that.”
“Oh, I think I probably can.”
“Really? Got any money?”
I showed him my three thalers.
“That’s not going to last very long.”
“True,” I said. “But when that’s gone I’ll just have to get some more.” I stood up. “I suppose I ought to go and find Stauracia,” I said. “She’ll be wanting someone to shout at.”
He looked up at me. From above, I could see where his hair was starting to get thin. He’d be bald as an egg in five years, at that rate. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
“You what?”
“You think you’re really smart and you know about people, but really you haven’t got a clue. I’m sorry for you.”
Nobody’s been sorry for me since I was twelve. I sat down again. “Sorry,” I said, “I don’t follow.”
“She rescued you, for crying out loud,” he said, leaning forward into my face further than was strictly necessary. “She cares about you. She—”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It’s not like that with her and me.” I stood up again. “I know her. All she’s ever been interested in is the big score, which is why she’s such a mess. The sad part of it is, one of these days she’ll make it, and what will the robin do then, poor thing? Till then, though, she’s as single-minded as an arrow. Get a grip on yourself and don’t read so much poetry.”
He looked at me. “You’re an idiot, Saevus. Sorry, but you are.”
I looked for her but I couldn’t find her, and then it was dark and I decided I didn’t want to wander around Boc Bohec when I couldn’t see people’s faces. So I went back to the Light. Eudo had gone, leaving a message at the bar that he’d be back in the morning. One thaler for a bed for the night, which is robbery, even in Boc.
Someone had been round nailing up proclamations on all the inn doors, which was a scandalous waste of expensive paper. I helped myself to one – something about a rise in municipal property tax – and borrowed the landlady’s pen and ink from her cubbyhole in the cellar. Then I retired to the overpriced ten square feet of hayloft floor and wrote something down before I forgot it. While the ink was drying (like a fool I’d forgotten to steal any blotting sand) I looked around and found the ideal place, a little space between two rafters, just the right size for wedging a government proclamation, folded four times. I daubed a bit of spiderweb over it to help it be inconspicuous.
Eudo was there bright and early. I found him talking to Gombryas, who jumped up as soon as he saw me. “You’re coming back, right?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“Fuck that. You’re coming back. Otherwise it’ll be that clown Polycrates. He’ll get us all killed inside a month.”
“Then don’t elect him,” I said. “Tell you what, you can be leader. Or Olybrius. Not Carrhasio, obviously, or Dodilas, and definitely not Polycrates, but it’s not exactly difficult work, or else I couldn’t have done it all these years. You’ll get on splendidly, trust me.”
We argued for a bit and Gombryas went away in a huff. I hoped I’d see him again someday, but I was glad he’d stalked off calling me an arsehole. Anything more tender than that would’ve upset me. “You mean it, don’t you?” Eudo said. “You’re leaving them.”
“Yes,” I said. “Before I bring down something really nasty on them. They’re my friends. I don’t want anything bad to happen to them.”
He nodded. “I think you’re probably right,” he said. “By the way, I’m sorry. Last night. I was out of line.”
“Were you? I can’t remember. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Did you find her?”
I shook my head. “She’ll turn up,” I said. “She always does, when you need her least.”
He didn’t think that was funny. “I got to thinking about it,” he said. “It’s the same as with Gombryas and Carrhasio and the lads. Anybody you really care for—”
“Is better off without me, yes. I learned that in Hetsuan. No, I tell a lie, I’ve known it for years, Hetsuan just reminded me, very forcefully. So I think I’ll just go a long way away and make a great deal of money. So long, Eudo. Thanks for rescuing me, even if you did try and start a major war.”
He frowned. “Any idea where you’ll go?”
“Echmen,” I said. “Not straight away, of course, but it’s where I plan to end up eventually. They have more money in Echmen than any other country on earth.”
He grinned. It was forced grin, strained for, like bad constipation. “Here,” he said, and on the table he placed four staurata, one on top of another in a neat column. Neatest man I ever met in my life. “Pay me back when you’re stupid rich.”
“Of course I will,” I said, and left him.