He was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, bald, in a plain grey academic gown and expensive bespoke sandals, two angels a pair. He sat down on the stone ledge that ran along the cloister wall and folded his hands. “My name’s Carrhasian,” he said.
“No,” Forza said gently. “It isn’t.”
“Quite right.” A small, annoyed smile. “But for the purposes of this meeting, I am Director Carrhasian. Thank you for coming here, General Belot.”
Forza leaned forward a little. “Purely out of interest—”
“He’s indisposed.”
Forza guessed he hadn’t meant to snap like that; raw nerve. He made a note of it, for later. “Not to worry,” he said. “You’ll do, I’m sure. It’s a shame, though, I’d liked to have met Carrhasian. He was a remarkable man.”
“Yes.” A little bit more tension; excellent. A bow is only useful when it’s fully drawn. “Can we talk about the war now, please? We’ve got a lot to discuss.”
“Of course.” Forza spread his hands wide and pressed them palms down on his knees. “Though really I’m not sure why you want to talk to me about your war. It’s none of my business. The Eastern empire’s always had a good relationship with the desert nomads, thank God. They’re not our problem.”
“Quite,” the man said, “but the fall of Blemya would be.” He smiled; he had a mobile reserve. “Yours and your brother’s, of course.”
A position fortified in depth. “That goes without saying,” Forza replied calmly. “You think it might come to that.”
“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have asked you here.”
“All right,” Forza said. “So why me, and not Senza? Or have you got him in a side room somewhere, waiting his turn?”
You can learn so much just by watching people. He saw the corner of the man’s mouth move just a little, and remembered Fail Cross, where he’d seen an enemy cavalryman suddenly race away from his unit and gallop across the battlefield to the extreme left wing; from that he’d deduced Senza’s entire battle plan, and had been able to turn a horrific defeat into a bloody stalemate in the nick of time. The recollection made him smile. He’s talked to Senza already, he thought; and either Senza’s agreed to the plan or he hasn’t. Very well. Onwards.
“Anyway,” he said briskly, “yes, I take your point. The question is, which would my lord the emperor prefer as a strategically crucial buffer state, Blemya or two million nomads with their heads full of holy war?” He grinned. “You’ve got me,” he said. “I give in.” He paused to let the last three words sink in, then added, “So what did Senza say? Is he on board too?”
A faint hiss of escaping breath, as though he’d trodden on a nail or something. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, come on,” Forza said wearily. “Do you really think I’d be here if I didn’t know you’ve already put the same offer to my darling brother? Here’s the deal. If he’s in, so am I. If not, it was a pleasure meeting you.”
The man swallowed. He was breaking up. “He’s in.”
“Excellent.” Forza clapped his hands. “The Belot boys, united at last for the good of humanity. Did he happen to mention whether he’s cleared this escapade with his lords and masters, by the way, or doesn’t he bother with things like that?”
“He has full discretion,” the man said bitterly. “As do you.”
“Indeed.” In victory the essential thing to remember is not to follow up too far. “Well, in that case, we have a deal. Now then.” He sat up straight, puppy-dog eager. If he’d had a tail, he’d have wagged it. “What’s the position? Tell me all about it.”
Three days’ hard ride to get home; on a bloody schedule, as always.
He got rid of his escort at the Joy in Repentance; they stumbled into the taproom, too weary to argue when he said he was going on without them for a day or so. He left them drinking in grim silence, took out a fresh horse and followed the road, the last leg of the intolerable journey. Against regulations for the commander-in-chief to go wandering off without a half-company of cavalry at the very least, but he was sick to death of soldiers. Besides, if he brought them home with him, he’d have to feed them and find them beds, and that sort of thing quickly ran into money. He could picture her face as he told her that she had thirty men and thirty-six horses to cater for. He grinned. Screw regulations.
From the Joy to Chastel, four hours, or three if you thrash it. He made it in just over two. That was, after all, the Belot way—get there fast and unexpected, get in and do the job. Well, quite.
Just starting to get dark as he rode through the main gate. The hedges were badly overgrown, and there were clumps of shoulder-high nettles on either side of the drive. A few sheep in the park; the grass had been grazed away to nothing, but he wasn’t sure if that was all right with sheep. He smiled. She wanted him to be a farmer when he was at home, and he’d tried, but it was no good, it just wouldn’t stick. The rails beside the track needed patching up, he noticed. You turn your back for five minutes and the place goes all to hell.
There was a lamp in the stables, so he called out as he dismounted. The door opened and a groom he knew by sight came out and stared at him. “Flying visit,” he said, handing over the reins. The groom looked at him as though God had manifested Himself in the stable yard and was expecting him to work overtime. He turned and walked across the yard to the back door, three days of ridiculously fast riding catching up with him in a matter of seconds. Damn, he thought, I’m going to creak about like an old man. How attractive is that?
The back door was unlocked, which annoyed him. He lifted the latch, taking care not to make any noise, swung the door slowly open and slid inside. Just the one oil lamp glowing in the kitchen passage, bless her economical heart. He walked on the sides of his feet, as if he was stalking deer in a forest. At this time of day, where would she be?
“Hello, Forza,” she said. “Had a good time at the war?”
He spun round. She must’ve come out of the small pantry (but the door had been closed and there was no light showing under it). She was wearing one of those godawful tent-like nightdresses and carrying a candle in a plain pottery holder. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m home.”
One brief, crisp kiss; that was the rule. She swept past him, down the passage and into the small parlour, where four of the sixteen candles were lit and a fire was burning in the hearth. He sat down in the larger of the two chairs, the ornate monstrosity his father had given them as a wedding present. It looked awful, but it was profoundly comfortable. She poured water from the kettle simmering on the hearth into a blue porcelain teapot, then turned to look at him. Her eyes were shining. “Well?” she said.
He allowed himself a pause, then a slow grin. “You’ll never guess,” he said.
With an incredibly swift movement—that knack she had of sort of flowing, like a liquid—she sat on his knees and kissed him till his head began to swim. Then she said, “Well?”
“Meet the new commander-in-chief of the Blemyan army,” he said. “Well,” he added, “one of them, anyway.”
It was worth all of it just to see the look on her face. “You’re joking.”
“I’m not.” He darted a kiss at her, but she was too quick for him. “It’s all official,” he said. “Me and one other.”
He was looking at her mouth. Usually when he did that, she’d say “Stop it” with a mock scowl. “Not—”
“Oh yes.” He loved it when he was able to surprise her. “It’s going to be interesting,” he said.
She slipped out of his lap, stood up, crossed to the fireplace and threw on another log. He didn’t mind that; it gave him a chance to look at her properly. He loved that she was as tall as him and almost as strong. She’d distanced herself from him so she could think. “So it’s that bad,” she said.
“I think so,” he said. “It’s true, they’ve taken a major city. Grabbed hold of all the people and marched them off into the desert. Some clown of a politician went after them but never got anywhere near. If they want Blemya, as far as I can see, all they’ve got to do is take it.”
She shivered. He was almost hot enough to sweat, but her idea of comfortably warm was somewhere just below the melting point of copper. “So it’s the Belot brothers to the rescue,” she said. “What does he think about that?”
Forza shrugged. “He’s all right with it, presumably. I’d have heard if he wasn’t.”
“Don’t you think you ought to make sure?”
Well, he’d been in two minds. “All right,” he said. “I’ll write to him in the morning. Is there any food?”
She frowned. “Probably,” she said. “I’ve already had dinner. When do you go?”
“Day after tomorrow.” He hesitated. “Can you come?”
She made him wait. “Oh, I think so,” she said. “It might be warm there. I’m sick of being cold.”
He tried not to grin, but failed miserably. “That’s all right, then,” he said. “It’s a pretty godforsaken place, mind.”
He thought about that. “No.”
“Then that’s all right.” She poured tea into two tiny bowls, handed him one. Jasmine and black pepper; delicious. “I’ll pack a few things tonight.”
And that was that; she was coming with him, and the horrible job facing him suddenly wasn’t so bad after all. He wondered if she’d write and tell her parents, or let them find out from the official bulletins. They’d be furious; they always were. Ladies from fine old Imperial families shouldn’t sleep in tents and shit in ditches. Exactly what they were supposed to do all day nobody had quite figured out yet; be put away in cupboards when not in use seemed to be the prevailing opinion. Raico wasn’t like that; she loathed spinning and weaving, couldn’t do embroidery to save her life, couldn’t sit still and quiet for two minutes together. Whatever possessed her to go and marry that soldier—Something her mother could never hope to understand, that was for sure.
“You’re doing it again,” she said.
He laughed. “Sorry,” he said. “I haven’t seen you for—what, three months? I’m allowed.”
“Husbands shouldn’t ogle their wives,” she said firmly. “It’s not polite.”
“I’m not ogling, I’m admiring.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Admiring is what you do to old buildings,” she said. “Go on. I’ll be up as soon as I’ve seen to everything.”
He stood up. “And anyway,” he said, “I can’t ogle worth a damn if you insist on wearing that tent thing. It’s absolutely guaranteed ogle-proof.”
“Forza, don’t be annoying. Go and get cook to cut you some bread and cheese.”
Much later, when she was asleep and he was lying on his back with his eyes open—when he was at home sleeping was such a waste—he thought about the day he’d first seen her, coming out of the fire temple; taller than her father and brothers, wearing one of those ridiculous golden mushroom hats that were in fashion back then; extraordinary rather than beautiful, but he’d known there and then what the purpose of his life had to be. Even now, after ten years of marriage, she fascinated him; his secret ambition was to spend a day just observing her, trying to predict what she was going to do or say—a good general is never taken by surprise, he anticipates every possibility, but she ambushed him all the time without even trying. He remembered the first time he managed to scrape an invitation to the family’s town house; a whole afternoon of making small talk with her obnoxious mother and father; then, when the whole enterprise seemed lost, he’d launched his forlorn hope. I gather you play chess, he’d said, and she’d given him a look, later he’d realised it was fair warning; yes, she played chess. They had a magnificent coral and ivory set, worth a thousand acres of good arable land. He’d made a soft opening, the way you do when you’re playing a girl, and suddenly he found himself staring defeat in the face—he’d never lost a game except three times, to Senza. Suddenly he realised he was playing for his life. The game lasted three hours, all the other guests had gone home, the servants wanted to lay for dinner and her parents went from vexed to embarrassed to livid; he knew he couldn’t win, but there was just a faint hope of a stalemate, so he hung on, dug deep, concentrated, like he’d never done before off the battlefield; and finally she beat him, and as he sat there, numb with defeat and mental exhaustion, she’d smiled at him, and he knew—
Ah well. He’d beaten her twice since then: once on their honeymoon, though he still suspected her of throwing the game, and once on the day she lost the baby. And two out of eight hundred and six wasn’t too bad, against such an opponent.
He turned round and prodded her in the back. She grunted. “Let’s play chess,” he said.
She made a noise like a pig. “Forza, it’s the middle of the night.”
“Hey, so it is. I’ll be white.”
She turned her head; fortunately it was dark, so he couldn’t see the look on her face. “Forza.”
“Please?”
The game lasted an hour. He very nearly made a draw of it, but she caught him when he least expected it.
The pillar was famous, apparently. Three hundred years ago a colony of holy men, sun-worshippers, had lived on top of it. They’d built a huge scaffolding tower, two hundred and seven feet tall, so as to be able to get themselves and their possessions up there. When the sixty stylites, their books and vestments and chickens and instruments of self-mortification had been safely offloaded on the pillar’s flat top, the carpenters down below sawed through the legs of the tower, which came crashing down, leaving the colony alone with each other and God. According to the legend, each man had just enough room to sit cross-legged. There was one rope, for hauling up water and sacks of grain. There they stayed for thirty years until the last surviving stylite untied the rope and let it fall. It was the sun-worshippers’ third holiest shrine, and a quarter of a million pilgrims crossed the desert every year to see it.
Senza had dismounted all the trebuchets, onagers, wall-pieces and heavy scorpions from the defensive batteries on the walls of the City and brought them to the base of the pillar, with two crews to each machine. Just getting such a vast quantity of equipment across the desert was a remarkable achievement. Doing it so fast and so quietly that the nomads didn’t find out until the artillery crews had been pounding the top of the pillar non-stop for six days and nights was little short of a miracle. By the time the nomad army arrived, the pillar was only half the height it should have been, and there was no way of telling which of the countless boulders scattered across the sand at its base were fragments of the sacred rock and which were profane missiles launched by the enemy. As for Senza’s expeditionary force, it had vanished without trace.
When he heard the news, Goiauz the prophet solemnly shaved off his hair, eyebrows and beard, buried himself in ashes and didn’t speak or move for two days. Then he announced that he had been granted a vision of the Invincible Sun in glory. The Sun had told him that every non-believer in the world now belonged to Him, and that it was Goiauz’ duty to go out and bring home the flocks and the herds.
The column that set out up the Great South road wasn’t just an army. It was essential, Goiauz said, that the entire nation should join together in the sacrament. They would follow the enemy’s road to the sea and take their capital city; then, embarking on the enemy’s ships, they would sail to the Eastern capital, then march overland to the West. As he had already demonstrated beyond any possible doubt, the enemy were entirely incapable of withstanding the onslaught and arrow storm of the faithful. He was aware that the two brothers who led the armies of East and West were united against them, and that they were reckoned to be very fine generals. He wasn’t particularly concerned about that. No living man, no matter how cunning, could withstand the wrath of the Invincible Sun, whose power was so great that all those who even looked at Him directly were struck blind. In six months’ time—he, Goiauz the prophet, undertook it—the great work would be complete and the entire world would be filled with the glory of the holy truth.
“I had an idea it would be here,” Forza said quietly.
Dead bodies don’t stink in the desert the way they do in more temperate regions. Anywhere in the empire so many bodies would’ve attracted attention from miles away. As it was, they could easily have passed by without finding this place; you’d never find it if you didn’t know it was there. The nomads had chosen a spot where the ground fell away sharply into a steep-sided bowl; quite possibly there had been an oasis there once, which would explain why someone had been to the trouble of dragging rocks into a circle. The wooden stakes—thirty thousand or so of them, a huge drain on the nomads’ slender reserves of timber—were a new addition, though you could see them as a long-term investment. Wood doesn’t rot in the desert; they could last hundreds of years, as could the sun-dried corpses nailed to them, unless some busybody came along and interfered. Forza made a mental note to do just that, at some point.
“Well,” Forza said, “we’ve found the Erithryans. Though I guess better late than never doesn’t really apply.”
No way of knowing how long they’d been dead, though perhaps an expert on the desiccation of human tissue might have ventured an opinion. The absence of visible wounds on the bodies suggested that they’d been alive when they were nailed to the stakes. That made a sort of sense; they’d been given to the Sun god to do as He liked with, and He’d chosen to dry them out like raisins. Indeed. They’d keep better that way, practically indefinitely. Desert logic.
He was upsetting her, he could tell. She didn’t much like gallows humour. His instinct, when faced with genuine horror, was to fight back instantly with a joke, like using archers and slingers in open order to slow up the advance of a pike formation. “What are you going to do?” she said.
He looked back over his shoulder to the top of the rise. “Nothing,” he said. “We can’t bury them; we don’t have time. They’ll keep. Also, I don’t think we want to tell anyone about this. Men don’t tend to do as they’re told when they’re angry.”
She frowned at him. “I’d have thought—Well, motivation.”
“Too much of a good thing,” he said, with just a hint of what he felt. “We’d better get back; they’ll be wondering what the hell we’ve been up to.”
They rode back over the rim of the hollow. The adjutant gave him an enquiring look but he shook his head. “False alarm,” he said. “Right, on we go.”
The whole of the fifteenth book of Cartesuma’s Life of Forza Belot is devoted to the campaign against the nomads, but the battle of the Twenty-third Oasis occupies a mere two pages. Understandably enough; all the imagination, vision, technical brilliance and élan was expended in luring the enemy out into the middle of the desert and then reaching the only oasis first and fortifying it against them. Cartesuma describes in loving detail the night marches and the remarkable skill of the navigators, the cunning measures taken to disguise the movements of the army, the triumphs of intelligence gathering and misinformation, and quite rightly makes the point that Forza Belot, in this campaign, completely revolutionised the science of desert warfare, with consequences for the history of the empires that cannot be overestimated. The battle itself, he points out, was practically an anticlimax; for the connoisseur of the Belot style, there’s very little of interest. All Forza had to do was keep the enemy from reaching the water for two days, and this he achieved by the simple expedient of a strong natural defensive position quickly but effectively fortified and defended by an adequate number of archers supplied with a sufficiency of arrows. The genius of the Twenty-third Oasis lay in the preparations, not the fight itself; the battle had been won long before the first shot was loosed, and total victory was by that point inevitable. Having launched wave after wave of horsemen against the oasis, until all their arrows were spent, their horses exhausted, their casualties insupportable, their spirit utterly broken, the defeated nomads reeled away into the desert with what little water they had left and to date no trace of them has ever been found. The prophet Goiauz and a handful of companions were the only survivors, and for obvious reasons they chose not to dwell on the events of the Twenty-third Oasis, ascribing the defeat to the wrath of the Invincible Sun over a catalogue of offences against doctrine committed by the prophet’s political enemies some time earlier.
Fully a third of Cortesuma’s account is taken up with a narrative of the remarkable way in which Raico Belot took command and held the line towards the end of the battle, while her husband was cut off from the army and wandering lost in the desert. For scholars interested in the so-called Raico Question, indeed, this incident provides the only point of real interest in the battle. Pro-Raico authors use the accounts of her conduct of the defence as telling evidence that she was indeed a major contributor to her husband’s success and a considerable strategist and tactician in her own right; the anti-Raico school maintains that by that stage in the proceedings there was precious little that needed to be done except to encourage the men to keep shooting, and to conceal the fact that the general was missing, presumed dead; the accounts of her initiative and inspirational leadership were subsequently either grossly expanded or entirely fabricated by Senzaite historians expressly to detract from Forza’s own achievements and, by giving credit to his wife, to belittle Forza himself. Clearly there is more than a kernel of truth in these allegations, and it is unlikely that, in such a politically charged and sensitive area of Imperial history, the actual course of events will ever be known.
Forza launched a wild diagonal swing at the tribesman’s head; with a grin, he raised his right arm and blocked it easily. Splendid. As quickly as he could, Forza pulled down, drawing the concave cutting edge of the backsabre deep into the tribesman’s forearm. For a moment there was an almost comical look of dismay on the poor fellow’s face, as he realised he’d been taken for a fool; then Forza rammed the point into his stomach and twisted the hilt through ninety degrees. The tribesman’s mouth opened but no words came out, only blood. He staggered a little, then stepped back, then fell over. Well. Served him right for not moving his feet.
Forza wiped the dead man out of his mind, straightened his back and looked round quickly. Five yards away, he saw the last man of his escort shot in the face at point-blank range; the arrow went in just to the left of his nose and the point poked through at the base of his skull. The archer swung round, searching for the next target, not looking down as he fumbled the next arrow from his quiver. There was no time. Forza threw the backsabre at him. Sheer luck, it hit him on the bow hand, side on, with just enough force to loosen his fingers and make him drop the bow. He stooped to pick it up. That meant his chin was at a wonderfully convenient height, a moment later, for Forza’s boot. Forza felt the man’s jaw crack, but that wasn’t enough on its own. Luckily, the backsabre was just in reach, if he was quick. He grabbed it without stooping and swung, missed the neck, hit the side of the head, cutting off the top half of the ear. The man yelled, so still alive, but unlikely to be a problem. Forza looked back and saw a little gap between two rapidly converging tribesmen. I’m not that fast, he thought, I won’t get there in time. Other possibilities, none.
Cursing himself for having no options, he ran at the gap. A tribesman had closed it; he’d drawn and was taking aim. Forza threw himself forward, landed on his elbows, heard the swish of the arrow passing over his head. He kicked at the sand, found his feet, shot up like a startled bird. A tribesman loomed into his field of view; Forza stretched out his right arm, holding the backsabre, and felt the edge run up against something as he passed. He heard a scream, so that was probably all right. He ran, waiting for the impact of the arrow in his back. He heard another swish, the flapping noise of the fletchings as they spun in flight, changing pitch as they went past him. He kept running.
As he ran, all he could think was: she’ll be all right, the diversion worked, we drew them off. He had absolutely no way of knowing if that was true, because there were about a thousand tribesmen blocking his view. He tried to visualise—the breach in the barricade, the enemy surge, like floodwater; they’d closed it up a bit with dead bodies, shooting them as they nudged and elbowed through the gap, but not enough. He tried to remember how many reserves he’d had at that point in the line, but he couldn’t. Nothing he could do about it now. Why hadn’t they shot him yet?
He ran for a while, and then his chest hurt too much, nothing he could do got any air into his lungs. His throat was burning, he guessed it was a bit like drowning. His foot caught on something and then he was nose down in the sand. Ah well. He didn’t bother trying to move. Enjoy breathing while you still can; won’t be long now.
But he lay there, and nothing much happened. Gradually he started getting some air past the cramps and the burning sensation. He concentrated on breathing in deep, and his head began to clear. He wondered if there was an arrow sticking out of his back. Sometimes you don’t feel it go in, apparently, or maybe the pain he’d taken as cramps was a puncture wound. He wriggled his back, felt no impediment. She’d be all right, wouldn’t she? He tried not to think about it. The urge to get up and go back, to save her, while there was still time, was like a halter round his neck, dragging at him, choking him. He tried blocking it with logic. What could you possibly do, on your own? They’d kill you before you got anywhere near. You’re in no fit state.
He raised himself on to his hands and knees, and a fit of coughing nearly split him in two. His knuckles brushed against something sharp; he looked at his hand, and saw he’d cut himself slightly on the edge of the backsabre. That made him want to laugh, but he couldn’t spare the breath.
It took a bit of twisting and wriggling, but he turned himself round and sat up. All he could see was sand, with a double line of deep, scuffed footprints. Had he really run that far? He couldn’t see anyone, standing or lying dead on the ground. Suddenly he felt the sun, like an extraordinary weight. His head swam, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to do anything until it cleared. The sensible thing, surely, would be to close his eyes, just for two minutes.
When he came round, it was beginning to get dark. The temperature was dropping. He started to get up, but found he’d carelessly mislaid his strength. He remembered that there was something terribly important, but he had no idea what it might be.
The next time he woke up, he was shaking. That, it turned out, was because of the cold. It was pitch dark to start with, and then his eyes adjusted. A little faint moonlight became enough to see by. He tried to swallow but his throat was too dry. Oh hell, he thought, I’m going to die in the desert. He closed his eyes but he was too cold to sleep. He couldn’t control the shivering, and there was nothing to crawl under or wrap himself in. He tried rubbing his legs, but his hands were numb, stupid useless things on the ends of his arms that wouldn’t do as they were told. For some reason, when his eyes were closed, he could see the dead Erithryans, hanging off their posts like a lot of limp flags. Of course, if you die lying down, sooner or later drifting sand will cover you up. He thought, if I’ve been wrong all these years and there really is a fire god and an afterlife, it’s going to be dreadfully embarrassing when I get there. Something in the order of a hundred thousand Easterners; oh, it’s you, they’d all say, we want a word with you.
There was nothing he could do except crouch, his hands wrapped round his knees, and wait for the sun to rise. It took its own sweet time about it. At some point during the long wait he remembered—Raico, the attack, he had no idea if she was dead or alive. He could feel the panic, it was like an itch, or, rather, it was like being full of ferocious energy while also being unable to move; he couldn’t sit still, but he could barely lift his arm. For God’s sake, he thought. He strained his eyes staring at the sky, willing it to change colour.
When at last the dawn came, he stood up. For a while he didn’t dare move; he was like someone standing on a very narrow bridge or a ledge, one slight misstep and he’d be gone. Somehow he managed to get his legs swinging, short steps to begin with; it didn’t matter, because it couldn’t be very far and he’d be at the oasis. Ridiculous, really; he’d been there all night in the vicious cold, and the oasis and the army couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards away. He could do that crawling on his hands and knees, if needs be.
Think of something else. So he tried to order up images of home, of his house, the park, the barn where they laid up the store apples, wrapped in straw, on shelves; of her. He realised after a while that he was making up fake images and fake memories, because the real ones didn’t seem to be there any more. Even her face was becoming indistinct, obscured, turned away, in shadow. He stopped. He’d come a long way, he was sure of it. He shot a glance upwards at the sun and saw it was high in the sky. He looked round. Then it slowly dawned on him that he’d been walking in the wrong direction.
Here lies Forza Belot, who died of stupidity. He sank to his knees, outraged at the sheer bitter unfairness of it. He tried to swallow and found he couldn’t. The heat was like lead ingots strapped to his arms and legs. Of all the bloody ridiculous things, he thought, and a shadow fell across him.
Where they’d come from, he had no idea; he’d looked round a moment ago and seen nobody. But there they were: four tribesmen, on horses. They were looking at him. Then one of them leaned down and took his bow from the case that hung beside his leg. It wasn’t strung; he watched the tribesman string it one-handed, very neatly done, with the elegant grace of long practice. He watched him choose an arrow. The distance was no more than twenty yards. The other three were watching him, as if they were going to mark him out of ten on his performance.
The backsabre was long gone, of course, lying forgotten in the sand somewhere. Made no difference; he knew he wouldn’t have had the strength. He realised he felt nothing at all, no fear, no sudden spurt of survival instinct; he felt as if he was a long way off, watching something unimportant happening to someone else. The tribesman nocked his arrow, fixed his eyes on the target, pushed out with his bow hand, pulled back with the arrow hand, looking at Forza over the arrow tip. When his left arm was nearly straight, the power of the bow would drag the string out past his bent fingers and launch the arrow, it was a simple matter of geometry, a certain point on a straight line. The tribesman closed one eye, concentrated, approached the critical point; then he fell sideways off his horse and hit the sand face first.
His three companions had absolutely no idea what was happening. They leaned forward to peer, saw the arrow in their dead friend’s back, swung round in their saddles; another one toppled backwards over his horse’s arse. One of the remaining two dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and yelled; he got about five yards, then slowly drooped sideways and toppled off. The last man just sat there, until an arrow hit him in the ear.
Unbelievable, Forza thought. Absolutely fucking mad.
That said, there were now three horses there for the taking. He tried to get to his feet, but it was as though his feet were caught in something. The hell with that; the horses were about to spook, any moment now they’d be off and that’d be that, the last ludicrous twist of the farce. No sudden movements, he told himself, rather superfluously. He stared at the nearest horse, trying to catch its eye, then remembered: horses don’t like eye contact, it scares them. Let’s all keep perfectly calm and still, and—
Quite suddenly, the horses put their ears back and sprang into a gallop. Forza tried to yell, but he couldn’t make a sound. He watched them sprint away, no catching them now, not without twenty riders with ropes. Just so, so unfair. He closed his eyes, and then thought: so who shot the four arrows?
The answer was riding straight at him at a brisk trot: a dozen men in flowing white robes, so presumably they were angels or something. As they got closer, he realised they actually were angels, because they were too big to be ordinary humans, stupidly tall and absurdly broad across the shoulders, though it struck him as faintly ludicrous that angels should choose to ride stocky little black cobs; the angels’ feet were so low they were practically trailing on the ground. But no matter; he’d reached the stage where he was seeing angels, and he knew perfectly well what that meant. He wondered if he’d hallucinated the four tribesmen, too. No, he decided, they looked pretty real, dead on the ground with arrows in them, lying in the unique carelessly dropped postures that are impossible for living men ever to fake. Four real men, and they’d been shot. By imaginary angels? In a way he was glad he was nearly out of it all. Trying to make sense of it would’ve been so very tiresome.
Two of the angels dismounted and came towards him. They cast shadows, which angels aren’t supposed to do. They had scarves over their faces, but there was a little window around the eyes, and he noticed that one of the angels was an Imperial. One, but not the other. Fancy that.
“He’s alive all right,” said the Imperial angel. Forza opened his mouth; he wanted to say, no, I can’t be, or I wouldn’t be able to see you. On the other hand, could an angel be wrong about a question of life and death? He had to say, they weren’t making a very good impression. “Fetch the water.”
The other angel had blue eyes, like a Northerner. He nodded, went away, came back with a water bottle. The Imperial took it and pulled out the stopper. “Can you hear me?”
Forza mouthed yes, then nodded.
“Two mouthfuls, then count to twenty, then two more, got that? If you drink it all at once, it’ll kill you.”
Now he came to think of it, the Imperial angel was a head and a half shorter than the blue-eyed angel. Suddenly he thought, they aren’t angels at all, they’re big, tall Northerners commanded by an Imperial officer; in which case, he wasn’t dead—
He grabbed the water bottle out of the Northerner’s hand and gulped at it. He’d managed four huge swallows before the Imperial snatched it out of his hand. “No,” the Imperial said. “Oh, why doesn’t anybody ever listen? Two mouthfuls, then count twenty, then two more. What the hell’s so difficult about that?”
“You’re incredibly lucky,” the Imperial said. “I mean it. Somebody up there must love you very, very much.”
They’d caught one of the dead tribesmen’s horses and put him on it, and they were riding back along a line of hoofprints, presumably in the right direction, though Forza had no idea. Nobody had asked his name or what he’d been doing or how he’d come to be there, which was probably just as well; for all he knew, they could be Senza’s men, or bandits who’d hold him to ransom if they found out he was valuable. At least he’d found out why they wore the white robes: white reflects the light, like a mirror, so you don’t get quite so hot. He made a mental note of that.
“Everybody in the desert knows that,” the Imperial said. His name was Duzi, and he’d long since got on Forza’s nerves. “When you’ve been in the desert as long as I have—”
“How long would that be?” His voice was still horribly croaky. He wondered if it’d ever be right again.
“Eight years,” Duzi said. “Not a lot of people last that long out here, unless they’re born to it. That’s why they send me out the greenhorns, see, so I can show them the ropes, nursemaid them. They come here without a bloody clue, they go back hard as millstones or not at all …” He lowered his voice. “I reckon I’ve got my work cut out with this lot, though. Bloody Northerners, soft as butter, all they do is whine about the heat. That said, it’s pretty cold up there, or so they tell me. Must be a bit of a shock, if you’re used to breaking out in a sweat every time the ice starts to melt.”
I must not ask questions, Forza repeated to himself. If he asked questions, he’d put Duzi on his guard and he’d clam up, though that would have the valuable collateral advantage of stopping him talking. But if he let him ramble on, he could easily learn something. “It must be difficult for you,” he said.
“You’re telling me. Though, to be fair—” Duzi wiped sweat out of his eyes with the underside of his wrist. There was probably a reason for that; he had reasons for every damn thing. “To be fair, a couple of these lads show a bit of promise. Rhesea, that’s the one on the end, he’s a natural with the horses, he can do anything with them. And Teucer, that’s the carrot-top, he’s a hell of a shot. It was him knocked off those savages for you. Hundred and twenty yards, and quick as you like. He was some sort of a national champion back home, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him. Looks like he’s half asleep most of the time. Reckons he’s never shot a man before, just targets and animals. I told him, it’s no different. Think of it as a target, do everything the same as on the range, you’ll be just fine. He’s from some place called Rhus, never heard of it myself, only been out here a week or so. He’s handling the heat well, say that for him, or at least he doesn’t moan all the time like the others. They’re like a lot of bloody women.”
Forza moistened his lips with his tongue. They felt like oyster shells. “Rhus to Blemya. That’s about as far as you can get.”
“You do see the world in this game,” Duzi said, “that’s one thing you’ve got to say for it. Of course, I’m from Torus originally, you know, on the south-east coast. Know it?”
Know it? Burned it. “I’ve heard of it,” Forza said. “Wasn’t there a really bad siege there a few years ago?”
“Not a siege, no. What happened was, the Belot boys had one of their scraps, and Torus happened to be right in the middle. No great loss, though. Miserable bloody place.”
“Oh, come on,” Forza said. “Your home—”
“If I’d liked it, I wouldn’t have left,” Duzi said firmly. “Fourteen when I went to the Academy, never been back since, and too late now, of course. Never look back, that’s always been my rule.”
“Oh, them.” Duzi shrugged. “No, the Order’s been my real family. Yes, I know it’s a cliché, but it happens to be true. They looked after me when I was a stupid kid, they taught me everything I know, gave me everything I’ve ever had, and that’s why I’m doing the same thing for these kids here. You’ve got to put something back, I always say, or what’s the point of us being here at all?”
Which reminded him. “I don’t think I’ve thanked you properly,” Forza said, “for saving my life. If you hadn’t shown up when you did—”
“Actually—” Duzi gave him a slightly guilty grin “—we’d been following your trail for a while, and then we saw those buggers and we held back. We’re not supposed to fight the tribesmen, see, not unless it’s absolutely unavoidable. So I told my lads, leave it to the very last minute. Didn’t reckon on them taking it quite so literally. I saw that bastard stringing his bow and I said to the lads, what the hell are you waiting for? And Rhesea looked at me, you said leave it, and I said, for crying out loud; and then fortunately Teucer there, up with his bow, ping, ping, ping. Like I said, you’re incredibly lucky. Almost like it was meant, if you believe in that stuff; can’t say I do myself, but there you are.”
The sun was high and Forza felt its weight; it was wonderful to be carried on a horse instead of having to make the intolerable effort of walking. There was a full water-skin hanging from his saddle, but he didn’t like to drink too much in case his saviours needed it. For a dead man, though, he was feeling really quite well. He let Duzi’s gentle flow of speech sweep round and over him, soothing now rather than annoying, now he’d got used to it and it was evident that he wasn’t required to contribute. He was just starting to doze when Duzi reined in his horse and pointed at the skyline.
“See that rise over there?” he said. “Your oasis is just the other side, about eighty yards. Your lot’s still there; we’d have seen the dust if they’d moved out.”
Forza waited for a moment, and then it sank in. The army, his people, Raiso, and he didn’t know if she was alive or dead. He’d forgotten. He said something, some trite expression of gratitude, and kicked the horse hard. It shot away, nearly toppling him off. He grabbed a fistful of mane with his left hand and gripped hard with his knees. He heard Duzi shout after him, but couldn’t make out the words. He didn’t dare look back, for fear of falling off the horse.
“So who were they?” she asked.
The lamp was burning low, but neither of them wanted to get out of bed to top it up. The flame was flaring and stretching, throwing strange extended shadows on the tent wall. “I have no idea,” he said. “I mean, the leader was an Eastern Imperial, and his men were Northerners. I could tell you large parts of the leader’s life story, if you need help getting to sleep.”
“Large parts.”
“Very large parts.” Forza grinned. “Everything except what I wanted to know. They were following us, and their job seems to be rescuing survivors from battles, which is very nice of them. Why they do it, or what side they’re on—” He shrugged. “They’re an order, but that could mean anything. Anybody can be an order if they’re prepared to spend five angels on a few badges.”
“They were following us.”
He looked at her. If I was as clever as that, he thought, I’d make damn sure people knew it. Or maybe that was the whole point. “Quite,” he said. “Forza Belot, the military genius, unparalleled in all of history for his ability to move quickly and unobserved.” He looked at her, but she shrugged. “I don’t believe they just happened to be in the middle of the desert, saw us and thought, wonder where they’re headed, let’s follow them. They knew.”
“Senza?”
“He doesn’t know where I am, or at least I really, really hope he doesn’t know. After all, the joint enterprise has been brought to a successful conclusion, so—” He didn’t say any more. She didn’t like it when he talked about Senza. “The only outfit I can think of that seems to know every damn thing is the lodge, but—”
“Daxen Maniaces met some lodge people in the desert,” she said. “It was in his statement. Their job was trailing round rescuing survivors.”
“Specifically craftsmen,” Forza said, “but, yes, that’s right. But Daxen said they had a truce with the nomads and wouldn’t interfere. This lot shot first, they didn’t try and bargain or anything.”
“You said they told you they only shot at the last minute. They weren’t supposed to fight the nomads unless absolutely necessary.”
“You’re right, he did say that.” Forza smiled at her. “There you are, then, problem solved. I’m still not sure I’m madly excited at the idea of the lodge knowing all my top-level military secrets, but I guess I owe them. If it hadn’t been for—”
“Quite,” she said briskly. “Anyway, that’s that. What next?”
He put his hands behind his head and lay back on the bed. “Seek out and destroy the enemy,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “That.”
That night he dreamed about the war. It had gone on for so long that there were only forty-six men and thirty women left in the world, and they lined up to fight. The men charged; the women kept formation right up until the last moment, when they realised they had no weapons. They were all killed, and so were all but six of the men. It doesn’t matter, the six survivors said; we’ll build a new heaven and a new earth. Then Raico pointed out that there weren’t any women left, so the human race was bound to die out. That made Senza laugh out loud, so Forza shot him with an arrow in the back of the head; he pulled it out and looked at it, then threw it away. Then Forza and Senza and Raico were in bed together, because it was only right that he should share the last surviving woman with his brother. Senza was fast asleep and snoring, so Forza gently dug his fingers into Raico’s back to wake her up. But his fingers went straight through her skin, which was as thin as paper; he took hold of her shoulder and pulled her towards him, and he saw that she was dead; the sun had dried her out, she was thin crisp skin overlaid on bone but no flesh, and her hair was brittle and snapped off when his arm brushed against it, and her fingernails were long and curled inwards, like claws. Then Senza opened his eyes and grinned at him, and said, Well, what did you expect?
Senza wouldn’t be hard to find. All he had to do was look at a map and ask himself where he’d least want to fight a battle.
“That’s easy,” she said. “There.”
He smiled. “That’s what I thought at first,” he said. “He’s got his back to the oasis, rough ground there for his light infantry, and the rock formations; he’d know I’d worry myself sick, has he hidden his reserve cavalry there or hasn’t he? But—” He sipped his tea, which had gone cold. “Then he’ll have asked his local knowledge people, and they’ll have told him there’s a big field of sand dunes, here to here. I could come up through and be right into him and he’d never see me coming. So, not there.”
She scowled at him. “You said just from the map. That’s cheating.”
“Yes,” he replied. “It’s what we do. Now here—” He rested a finger on the map. “That’s more like it.”
For a moment she didn’t see it. Then she gave him a horrified look. “Oh, come on,” she said.
He sighed. “I know,” he said. “But he’s my brother. I’d hate to disappoint him.”
As usual, they met before the battle. Senza rode up with six of his beloved fish-men: Imperial regulars, covered head to foot in small steel scales. Forza took seven of his Parrhasian horse archers. It had been proved, many times, that their short bows could shoot through the fish scales. They drew up ten yards from each other. It was as close as they ever got.
“One question,” Senza called out. “How did you know?”
Forza lifted his helmet on to the back of his head so he could hear. “I’ve got spies in your senior staff. Four of them. Want their names?”
Senza only grinned. “I only need one spy,” he said. “The one who’s fucking your wife.”
Forza nodded. “Here we go, then. The usual,” he said. “I’ve got you stitched up like a baby in a blanket and I know exactly what you’re going to do. You’re screwed, because I got here first. There’s no earthly point in fighting. If you give a shit about your men, surrender now and let the poor buggers live.” He paused, counted three under his breath. “Thought not,” he said. “Ah well. You always were a heartless bastard, Senza.”
He expected his brother to make a rude gesture and go. This time, however, he seemed inclined to linger. Forza shortened his reins to ride away.
“Nice bit of work, back there,” Senza said.
“What, you mean—?”
Senza nodded. “We picked up a few of their survivors,” he said. “But I gather you nearly got yourself killed.”
“Nearly,” Forza said. “Not quite.”
“You want to be a bit more careful,” Senza said. “Dashing off being brave, leaving your wife. You shouldn’t drag her round with you all the time, a fine lady like that. It’s not safe.”
Forza sighed. “Maybe if you’d kept Lysao a bit closer she wouldn’t have run off. Oh, I know where she is, by the way. Want me to tell you?”
“You’re a real mine of information today, aren’t you?” Just a tiny flicker; then Senza raised the grin again. “Sometimes I think to myself, this is stupid. He’s my brother, for God’s sake; we ought to be able to sort things out, at the very least we ought to be able to coexist without trying to kill each other all the damn time. And then I see you again and I realise, no, we can’t, he’s got to go.” He lifted one hand in a courteous salute. “This time,” he said.
Forza returned a formal nod. “This time,” he replied, and rode away.
It was the perfect place, a slaughterhouse, a killing bottle. Senza had only two choices. He could attack uphill, his cavalry slowed to a walk by the gradient and the rocks and the shale, or he could stand his ground, receive Forza’s furious charge and be driven back into the marshes, which had in their time swallowed up whole armies. Both flanks were closed; the left flank by the river, which was in spate, the right flank by the sheer cliff wall of the Hammerhead. The road he’d come in by was now blocked by two thousand of Forza’s regular pikemen, who held the only bridge over the river. The trap was perfect, because Senza had designed it himself. His only mistake, if you could call it that, was getting there five hours after Forza; and it would’ve been asking a lot of him to have expected him to know about the hidden pass over the Hammerhead, because it wasn’t on any map drawn in the last three hundred years. As Forza made a few final adjustments to his order of battle, he was sick with worry. Too perfect; he’d missed something. Or maybe it really would be this time, and that—
Over and over again, he kept asking himself, What would I do if I was him? So far, he’d come up with six answers, all of them brilliant; but he’d countered them all. His Northern archers were marking the fish-men, so Senza wouldn’t try the sudden unexpected hook on the left wing. The false retreat, the feigned central collapse, the bull’s head, the lobster and the threshing floor were all safely accounted for and taken care of. It was like playing chess against himself.
He went back to his tent to put on his armour. He hated wearing it. He’d had it made by the best armourer in the world—an Easterner, as it happened; he’d had the man and his family abducted, and the entire contents of his workshop packed up and brought to him; then, when the work was done, he sent him back with a thousand angels and a plausible story—but putting it on always demoralised him. She had it all ready, laid out on the bed.
She looked at him. “Baby,” she said.
“Fine.” He sat down and extended his left leg for the greave. She knelt and bent back the silver clips, then slid the greave over his shin. He winced as the clips tightened. He consoled himself by admiring the rounded muscles of her shoulders, which never failed to delight him. “Other one,” she said. He stretched out his leg.
“It’s too perfect,” he said. “I’m worried.”
“So you should be.” She kissed his knee, then slid the greave into place. “I’d be worried if you weren’t worried. Stand up.”
The fish-scale skirt clanked as she lifted it. “Any ideas?”
Her arms encircled his waist as she tightened the buckle. “You’ve put on weight,” she said.
“Impossible. I was starving in the desert.”
“You’ve made up for it since. Remind me; I’ll have to punch another hole. Right, arms.”
Obediently, he held his arms straight out in front so she could lace up the manicae and vambraces. “Not too tight,” he pleaded.
“Any looser and they’ll slide off. There, how’s that?”
He flexed his hands. “All right,” he said grudgingly. “Well? Any ideas what he’ll do?”
She laced the clamshells over the backs of his hands. “Probably something you couldn’t possibly hope to anticipate,” she said. “So you’ll just have to make it up as you go along.”
She grunted as she lifted the brigantine. It weighed eighteen pounds. “Head,” she said; he lowered his head, and she draped the neck-strap over him. He supported the weight while she did up the buckles. “There, can you breathe?”
“You’ll do. Oh, hold on.” She took a little swab of wool she’d tucked up inside her sleeve, and wound it round the neck-strap so it wouldn’t chafe the back of his neck. “Nearly done,” she said.
“This could be the last time,” he said. “Really, I think it could. I—I don’t—”
She looked at him. “You’ve been having that dream again.”
“Have I?”
“Arm. Other arm.” He raised his left arm, and she dropped the pauldron over it, then teased the laces through the holes and tied them in a graceful bow. “Yes,” she said, tightening the buckles. “You shouted, and then told me to wake up. But you were fast asleep.”
“Sorry.”
“Other arm. It’s all right, it’s not your fault. There.” She stood back and examined her work. “How does it feel?”
“Horrible.”
She rolled her eyes. “Can you move, or is anything binding anywhere?”
He experimented. “Fine,” he conceded. “I’ll just carry the helmet.”
“No, you won’t.”
He hated the helmet most of all. The liner was still damp with sweat, from when he’d worn it earlier. “I’ll get a headache.”
“Tough.”
It felt like cold, wet fingers pawing at his head as it pushed down. He took a couple of steps. “I clink,” he said. “It’s undignified.”
“Everybody clinks. It’s what soldiers do.”
“Couldn’t you get them to stick little pads of felt on the insides of the scales? It’d muffle the noise.”
“And everyone will think you’re a pansy. Stay there and I’ll get your sword.”
He’d have forgotten it. “Thanks.”
She stood on tiptoe to get the strap over his head. “There’s my brave soldier,” she said. “Right, off you go.”
He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. He never did say anything on these occasions. “Go on,” she said. “You’ll be late, and the other boys will tease you.”
He turned his back on her—it was better that way—and strode out of the tent. Clink, clink, clink. As soon as he was out in the light, he made a stupendous effort and emptied his mind. For a moment he was blank. Then, methodically, he assembled the thoughts and concerns of General Forza Belot, with a battle to fight. He pictured the chessboard, superimposed it on what he saw in front of him. She’d told him once, it’s the way you can suddenly concentrate, like closing a fist. Of course, Senza could do it too. Better.
The general staff was waiting for him, and the groom, with the damned horse. He realised he couldn’t face it, not just yet. “Thanks, we’ll walk,” he said. “Well? Has he moved?”
Tavassa, colonel of the Seventh, shook his head. “Just stood there,” he said.
“Won’t be able to keep that up for long, in this heat,” someone said, he didn’t notice who. “We’re fine, we’re in the shade. It must be like an oven out there in the open.”
“That won’t bother him,” Forza said. “Not even the bloody fish people.”
As usual, he found the sight of the army disturbing. They covered the hillside like some strange crop, a composite of thousands of individual heads forming a single commodity. It had always bothered him to think that he was the head to this body; it seemed so improbable, somehow. He looked past them into the distance, where he could make out blocks of colour. Concentrate. Now then, what’s the most unlikely thing I could possibly do?
He half-closed his left eye; for some reason, that always seemed to help. Almost at once, he saw it; such a little thing, a tiny part of a larger gap between two enemy units. He saw it in both space and time: an opening through which a fast-moving cavalry unit could break through, and two and a half minutes before Senza’s mobile reserve could reach them. At times like this what he saw wasn’t the present but a liquid stream of the future, as though he was remembering something he’d seen in the past, something that had already happened. Yes, that was the key point where the Third Auxiliary split the left front—do you remember that?—and then Senza made a desperate effort to plug the hole, and that’s when the Tirsen horse archers suddenly darted in and caught his reserve in flank, and then the whole damn thing started to come apart. He watched it all happen; it was like one of those complicated town clocks, where there’s a huge whirring, crawling mechanism to make a model of a man in armour come out through a doorway and hit a bell. His mind was full of cams and levers—pressure at this point to draw that unit that much to the side, so that this unit here could mask the advance, bringing this unit forward until it was close enough to make the dash across the gap; all mechanical, all self-activating, automatic once the lever’s been pressed and the sear’s been tripped, all starting with one set of orders, given by one man, in about thirty seconds—
The adjutant couldn’t see it, of course. The orders made no sense. But he listened gravely and carefully, because this was Forza Belot, the greatest living general. He waited till Forza had finished, repeated the orders back to him word for word, jumped on his horse and thundered away, and men scampered to get out of the way before he rode them down.
It worked, of course. The slight shift in the position of the main front, made to look like a slight error of judgement, induced Senza to wheel his Fourth Guards just the precise amount to the left to open the gap; masked by the two concurrent infantry movements, the auxiliary cavalry edged their way forward and suddenly broke out, racing across the open ground between the two fronts and wedging themselves into the gap with a crash Forza could hear half a mile away. Forza counted to ten under his breath; off went Senza’s reserve, straight into the curved line which only he could see represented the trajectory of the Tirsen horsemen. The reserve stopped dead, wheeled left in perfect order to receive cavalry; that meant their right flank was just in range of the five hundred Northern longbowmen Forza had seeded into the front rows of his heavy guards. The first volley arched across the open ground like a black rainbow. Now the Fifth—
“Sir.” A voice somewhere off to the left. “They’re behind us.”
Made no sense. They were out there, getting shot and cut up and trampled. He dragged his mind out of the machinery. “What?”
“Behind us, sir. They’re coming over the Hammerhead.”
Forza spun round. “What?”
It was a young captain he couldn’t remember having seen before. “The enemy, sir. Thousands of them, coming down the pass we came in by. Sir, what do we do?”
In that moment, he realised how a fly must feel when it hits the gossamer. He forced himself to understand. Somehow, God only knew how, Senza had got men round the back of the mountains and through the Hammerhead pass, and now, right now, they were pouring down into the camp, which was undefended, where she was— “Mobile reserve,” he shouted; fatuous, they were six minutes away. Where the hell was Colonel Tacres? Someone had to take charge while he—He realised he’d stopped breathing and now his lungs seemed to have seized up. “Find Tacres,” he yelled at the captain, and started to run.
You’ve been having those dreams again.
Her voice was in his head as he sprinted up the slope. Men were staring at him—the general, running; the general never ran—and he knew he was making a mistake, possibly a fatal one, but he was in the wrong place. He needed to get there fast (Forza Belot, who always got there first, who was the greatest general in history because he was always in the right place at the right time, except for now) and there was too much stupid distance in the way—Ahead of him, he could see frantic movement among the tents, unnatural movement, all wrong. Concentrate. He forced his mind to show him a plan of the camp, and the disposition of his resources. Nobody back here, nobody at all—except for the Second Pioneers, and they weren’t even proper soldiers—
A man appeared, running like a deer, straight at him, but he was looking back over his shoulder. They collided with breathtaking force and collapsed in a tangled heap. Forza had had all the air knocked out of him, but at that moment air was a luxury. He dragged himself free, not caring that he trod on the man’s face, and threw himself into a run. The Second Pioneers, for God’s sake. Still—
And then it was like when you’re trying to repair a smashed pot, but there’s no way the pieces could ever have fitted together, and then you find one little bit you’d overlooked, and suddenly you have it. The gap in Senza’s front, and the ease with which he’d been able to exploit it. It shouldn’t have happened, because Senza should have read him like a book; but Senza hadn’t, because Senza wasn’t there. Oh no. Senza was somewhere else entirely, leading a party of picked men over the sheer, narrow trails of the Hammerhead. Everything down below—the two armies, the slaughter of whole regiments, was just bait, to set up the real thing, the story that would appear in the textbooks, which would happen up here: how Senza Belot won the war by killing Forza Belot’s wife—
You’ll just have to make it up as you go along. Yes, but with nothing to work with except the Second bloody Pioneers. Never mind. Concentrate. His chest was burning and his legs were weak and empty. He brought the plan of the camp into focus and thought: what would Senza least expect me to do?
Easy. Senza knows I hate getting my hands wet. So—
Five men were running towards him. For a moment he couldn’t tell if they were friend or enemy; then he saw that they were wearing those stupid round felt hats, the sort that only the Pioneers wear, because they’re not proper soldiers. The Second, led by Major, by Major, what was the bloody man’s name, Major Harsena. They were within shouting distance. He stopped, swayed, called out, “Where’s Harsena?” The words came out as a whisper.
Fortunately, one of the men was Harsena. “They’re in the—” he started to say, but Forza put his hand over the poor man’s mouth. “Listen,” he said, and he was amazed at his own voice; calm, reasonable. “Rally your men, go round the side, in past the latrines, take them in flank. Have you got that?”
Harsena couldn’t speak because Forza’s hand was clamped over his mouth, so he nodded.
“Very good. Off you go.”
Harsena and his friends turned and raced away, and Forza took a moment to breathe. No good to anyone if he passed out from exhaustion. Right, then; he’d set up the main show, what he needed now was the diversion. For which he needed at least eighty men. He looked round. Why are there never eighty soldiers around when you need them?
Then—later he went down on his knees and thanked the fire god, in whom he didn’t really believe—he heard hooves behind him; he dragged himself round and saw, guess what, cavalrymen, the Parrhasians, his personal guard, who were never supposed to let him out of their sight once the unpleasantness started. There were forty-five of them. He did a quick calculation and decided they’d do. The captain, Jorteszon, drew up beside him. It was unfortunate that the man spoke no Imperial. To compensate, Forza shouted, “With me.” Jortsezon looked at him. Oh, for crying out loud. Forza jumped up and pulled a rider out of his saddle, then hauled himself on to the man’s horse. “Follow,” he bellowed, then wrenched the horse’s head round and gave it an unnecessarily brutal kick. It reared a little and Forza nearly fell off; then it shot away like an arrow from a bow, fortuitously in the right direction.
Forty yards later, it shied at something and this time he did fall off. Not to worry; it was a quick and efficient way of dismounting. He scrambled to his feet and ran for the camp gate, tugging at his sword, which had got itself jammed in the scabbard. He got it free just in time; it slid out, nearly slicing into the web of his hand. Dead ahead of him was one of Senza’s horrible fish-men, dear God, why did it have to be them, but not to worry, this was far too important to let a little thing like virtual invulnerability get in his way. The fish-man raised his sword and assumed the orthodox iron-gate guard, the attitude of total defence, and then one of the Parrhasians shot him and he fell over.
In his mind he could hear his own voice, twenty years ago, to his father, after two hours’ gruelling sword drill: What have I got to learn this stupid stuff for, anyway? I’m never ever going to be a soldier. Inside the camp, the fish-men were everywhere. He looked up the main street, towards his tent. He felt weak and sick. Then he heard a roar, and turned to face a fish-man, almost on top of him. He was taking a big stride forward, his sword raised over his head. Forza concentrated on the sword hand; as it came down, he stepped smartly backwards to take his head out of measure, and lifted his own sword, just so. The fish-man’s wrist came down on Forza’s edge, there was a grotesque spray of blood; Forza nudged past him, shouldering him out of the way, and ran up the main street.
His concentration was completely gone now; all the plans and diagrams. He could see nothing but the distance he still had to run. A fish-man lunged at him but the expensive brigandine turned the thrust; he ran past, not bothering to look back. An archer or two must’ve been keeping up with him, because three more fish-men folded up and collapsed as he approached; the Parrhasians adored him, though he had no idea why. Two more fish-men; he killed them, or let them kill themselves on his sword; he was furious with them for holding him up. “Get out of the way,” he yelled at the second one, then sidestepped his lunge and let him run on to his sword point; he pulled the blade clear without looking round. It was a wicked thing to do, to end a man’s life and not pay him the simple courtesy of witnessing his death, but there simply wasn’t time.
He could see his tent, and there was a man standing outside it, relaxed but on guard. Just for a moment he took him for one of his own officers, but then, as he got closer—One brother doesn’t need to see another brother’s face to recognise him; he knows him from a long way off just by the way he stands, the slight and subtle details of proportion that come from total familiarity. He slowed to a walk, then, ten yards away, he stopped. It was as close as they ever got, these days.
“Shoot him!” he yelled; then he looked round. No Parrhasians behind him, they’d been slowed up or killed. Senza lifted his helmet on to the back of his head and laughed at him.
“Boys,” he said.
Five fish-men came out of the tent. Well, of course; get there first, and with superior forces, and Senza knew him so well, knew how much he loathed fighting. One against two maybe, just possibly one against three and sheer rage might be enough, rage and anger and thirty years of motivation. One against five, though; simple mathematics. Four would almost certainly have done, but Senza loved his margins.
Then his father’s voice again, the time he’d burst into the hall and pulled Forza off the fencing master, a split second before Forza could smash his skull with a broken chair: What the hell’s got into you, boy? And then, after he’d seen the look on his son’s face: All right, you’ve made your point. Because, at that moment, his father had understood why his eldest son didn’t like to fight; because deep down, in a place neither of them ever wanted to go again, Forza liked hurting people a little bit too much.
But what the hell.
The first fish-man was a full stride ahead of the rest. Forza barged straight into him, trusting to the best armour in the world, took a savage thrust in the stomach, which the brigandine turned; because he wasn’t dead, as he should have been, he was able to reach over the fish-man’s arms and flick his sword under his chin, a light but firm scoring motion. While the man was dying, Forza kicked him straight at the man behind, then saw a tiny chance and cut off the hand of the fish-man on the extreme right. As he doubled up with pain (pain debilitates, said the fencing master, use it whenever you can) Forza skirted him, using him to block the remaining three—just for a second, but that was long enough to stretch out (he got hit on the head in doing so, but the fish-men didn’t know how much he’d paid for that helmet) and slid his edge purposefully over the unprotected tendons on the back of an outstretched leg. He drew his arm back smartly enough that the ferocious cut that landed on it wasn’t quite well enough placed to break the bone; the manica turned the edge, of course, and he was able to place a neat little jab into the gap between the bottom of the fish-man’s helmet and the roped neck-guard of his cuirass. All he’d achieved, of course, was to clear away the hindrance and clutter obstructing his last opponent and give him room to swing and move his feet. No matter; Forza was just nicely warmed up now, totally confident and enjoying himself more than he’d done for twenty years, and this time his father wasn’t there to stop him. He opened himself right up so the fish-man couldn’t help but be drawn in; the fish-man obligingly took his swing, and Forza winced as the blow hammered down on his pauldron. It should’ve smashed his collarbone, but the best armourer in the world understood the art of padding as well as the heat treatment of steel. Then Forza grabbed the sword hand before he could snatch it away and held it just long enough while he cut the fish-man’s throat.
Senza was staring at him, and he recognised that expression; so like the one his father had worn that time, but, then, Senza definitely had a look of the old man about him, especially as he’d got older. The same blend of horror and disgust; and, once again, it made Forza want to laugh. “Now if it’d been ten,” he said, and Senza slashed at his head.
He felt it this time; he felt his brain move. But he’d learned this sequence, and how to counter it, from the same teacher as his brother; he gave ground, pivoting on his back foot, and gave himself a clear cut at the back of Senza’s neck, remembering as he launched the blow just why he’d chosen that specific armourer and no other; because he’d made a suit for Senza, and it was just as good. At least Senza staggered; his head was probably spinning, too, and he was probably seeing double. Forza cut low, Senza anticipated and stepped back, giving himself measure for the stop thrust; it slid off Forza’s double-proof chest-plates and exposed Senza’s right side, whose armour shrugged off his counter-thrust. But he’d felt something give, a rib maybe; he could read pain in Senza’s movements as he wound up for a cut to Forza’s exposed neck, then aborted and gave ground. A good move, and he knew exactly what Senza had in mind. In particular, Senza would know he wouldn’t risk a rising backhand cut to the chin, since, if Senza trusted his helmet and let the blow go home, it’d expose the unarmoured patch under Forza’s armpit. So he did just that; taken off guard, Senza’s head flew back, giving Forza just enough time to step in and grab for the sword arm—except that it wasn’t there, it was low, stabbing the sword point up into the tiny crack between the cuirass and the scale skirt. He felt a searing pain and immediately gave ground (how the hell did he do that, I never expected—) and Senza, stepping forward, kicked his exposed left knee sideways and dropped him neatly on the ground; and, as he fell, Forza glimpsed out of the corner of his eye a Parrhasian archer bending his bow, taking aim—
“No!” he yelled, because Senza was directly in front of the tent, and the archer might miss or the arrow might glance off, and she was inside. He tried to push himself up off the ground, but all his strength had gone off somewhere; he pushed, and it was like arm-wrestling, the ground was pushing back and it won. “Don’t shoot,” he tried to say, but his voice didn’t work, and all he could see was the deep black hole he was falling into.