Devices and Desires (71 page)

“Well, quite.” The Ducas grinned. “It’s getting so difficult to find good help these days.”

He didn’t seem to want anything else, so Ziani made his excuses and took his leave. He felt a strong urge to look back over
his shoulder, but he resisted it. Thanks to the Ducas, he’d learned a valuable lesson about compassion, and its deceptive
relationship to love. With every step he took away from the place, he found it easier to bring to mind the fact that it was
Duke Orsea who’d taken pity on him, on the day when he’d been dying in the mountains, and that the Ducas had been all in favor
of having him quietly killed, or left to die. Not that it mattered, as things had turned out. The Ducas had paid him back
many times over. Besides, compassion at first sight is generally like love at first sight; both of them are dangerous instincts,
often leading to disaster.

He turned up the long, wide street whose name he could never remember (it was something to do with horses, not that that helped
much) and followed it uphill toward the center of the city. At the lower crossroads he paused. If he turned right, he could
go to his patron Calaphates’ house. He hadn’t spoken to his benefactor for a long time, let alone sent him any accounts, or
a statement of his share of the profits. Calaphates had been kind to him, though largely out of self-interest; he owed him
some consideration, the bare minimum required by good manners. Or he could turn left and take the wide boulevard lined with
stunted cherry trees that led to the inner wall, and beyond that, the Duke’s palace. If he owed a duty to his patrons, he
certainly ought to make time to report to Duke Orsea, who’d shown him kindness even though he was an enemy, at a time when
anybody would have forgiven him for doing the exact opposite. The thought made him smile, though part of him still regretted
all of it, deeply and with true compassion. He went left. At the palace gatehouse he asked to see the chamberlain. After a
shorter wait than he’d anticipated, he was seen and granted an interview with the Duke, at noon precisely, the day after tomorrow.
It occurred to Ziani that if the Ducas was right, that would be the day before the Mezentine army was due to arrive. Couldn’t
be better, he decided.

After he’d seen Vaatzes, Miel Ducas spent an hour going over the plans for the cavalry raid one last agonizing time. He was
sure there was at least one fatal flaw in his design, probably two or three, and that anybody with a faint trace of residual
common sense would be able to spot it, or them, in a heartbeat. It was as though he could hear voices in the next room and
knew they were discussing the disastrous failure of the coming raid, and how it had ultimately led to the fall of Eremia,
but he couldn’t quite make out what they were saying.

The same voices haunted him all evening. He took them with him when he went to bed (very early, since he had to be up well
before dawn the next day) and they kept him awake until he was at the point where sleep would do him more harm than good.
When the footman woke him up with hot water and a light breakfast he felt muzzy and cramped, with a tight feeling at the sides
of his head that wanted to be a really nasty headache when it grew up.

It wasn’t a good day for headaches; nor for stomach upsets, but he had one of them too. When he clambered awkwardly onto his
horse, well behind schedule, he felt as though some malicious person was twisting his intestines tightly round a stick. Nerves,
he promised himself; also he knew for a fact that there couldn’t possibly be anything inside him left to come out.

As was only proper for the Ducas going to war, he wore a middleweight gambeson with mail gussets under a heavyweight coat
of plates with full plate arm and leg defenses, right down to steel-soled sabatons on his feet. Because he was the commander
in chief and therefore under an obligation to keep in touch with what was going on around him, he’d substituted an open sallet
for the full great-helm, but someone had failed to check to see whether the Ducas crest (which was essential as a means of
identification in the field) would fit the sallet’s crest-holder. It didn’t, so the sallet had to go back and the great-helm
came out instead. Inside it, of course, he could barely see, hear or breathe; so he compromised by giving it to his squire
to carry and going bare-headed.

He rode with only his squire for company as far as the Horse-fair, where he was joined by half a dozen mounted men in full
armor, hurrying because they were running late. They slowed down when they saw it was him; one of them joked that he must’ve
got the time wrong, because he was sure the muster had been set for half an hour earlier.

At the gate he found everybody else waiting for him. Cousin Jarnac had apparently assumed temporary command in his absence.
Jarnac, of course, looked the part so much more than he did. The battle harness of the lesser Ducas was blued spring steel,
with a single-piece placket instead of the coat of plates, and a bevored sallet with an eighteen-inch boiled leather crest
in the form of a crouching boar. If he hadn’t known better he’d have followed Jarnac unquestioningly; so, he suspected, would
everybody else.

All told, the armored contingent numbered over four hundred; the rest of his army was made up of five hundred mounted archers
and eight hundred lancers, middleweight-heavy cavalry in munition-grade black-and-white half-armor. Dawn was soaking through
the dark blue sky, and a trace of mist hung round the main gate as, feeling horribly self-conscious about his appearance,
horsemanship and perceived lack of any leadership ability whatsoever, Miel Ducas led the way out of the city and down the
long road to the valley floor.

Because they were late starting, there was nothing for it but to take the old carters’ road, Castle Lane, round the side of
the hog’s back crossed by the main road. That would save an hour, assuming it wasn’t blocked by a landslide or fallen trees,
and they’d come out five hundred yards from the fork where the Packhorse Drove branched off. The drove would take them down
into the wooded combe that ran parallel to the road; at the Merebarton (assuming it wasn’t a swamp after the late rain) they’d
split into two and try and bottle the enemy up in the Blackwater Pass. Even if everything went perfectly they’d only be able
to hold the two ends of the pass for a short while, but every Mezentine they killed today was one they wouldn’t have to deal
with later. At the council of war where the plan had been discussed, someone had described this approach as trying to empty
a river with a tablespoon. Thinking about it, it had been Miel himself who said that, and nobody had contradicted him.

Castle Lane proved to be reasonably clear, and they made good time. Halfway down Packhorse Drove, however, they came almost
within long bowshot of an enemy scouting party, who took one look at them and galloped away. Disaster; if the scouts got back
to the main army, the whole plan would be ruined. Miel’s first instinct was to send a half-squadron of lancers after them,
but fortunately he didn’t give in to it. God only knew how the enemy were managing to raise a gallop on the rock-and-mud surface
of the drove; their horses must have iron hoofs and no bones in their legs. Trying to catch them or match their pace would
be impossible for mere mortal horses, and the fewer men he sent charging around the landscape at this stage, the better. The
only thing for it was to cut up diagonally across the rough to the road instead of taking the deer-trails he’d planned on
using. That way, with luck, his men would stay between the scouts and their army, so they wouldn’t be able to deliver their
message. They’d come up a quarter-mile away from the gates of the canyon on the south side, but (with more luck) they’d be
able to close that distance before the enemy got there. The northern wing would have to take its time getting into position.
First screw-up of the day, Miel acknowledged sourly, and highly unlikely to be the last.

Cutting across the rough sounded fine when you said it, briskly and confidently, to your cool, eager staff officers. Putting
the order into practice was something else entirely. Even the perfectly trained and schooled horses of the Ducas house weren’t
happy about leaving the path and crashing about through holly and briars; for the most part, the archers’ and lancers’ horses
followed where the knights led, but it could only have been out of bewildered curiosity. Above all, they made a racket that
surely could’ve been heard in the city. Only one man actually fell off and hurt himself, but he was the lesser Nicephorus,
an enormous man in full plate, and the crash bounced about among the trees like a small bird trapped in a barn.

Coming out of the forest onto the road and into the light was a terrifying experience. Very reluctantly, but with duty forcing
him on like a jailer, Miel led the way and was the first to break cover. He expected yells, movement, a flurry of arrows,
but he had the road to himself. He reined in his horse and stood quite still for a moment or so, feeling as though he was
the last man on earth. He could hear no birds singing, not even a bee or a horsefly, and it occurred to him that the enemy
had already been and gone. But a glance at the road set his mind at rest; no hoofmarks, footprints, wheel-tracks to be seen.

Which reminded him. He turned in the saddle and waved his men on, then rode back to intercept one of the line officers, a
man he trusted.

“Have the rearguard remembered to cut some branches?” he asked. He realized while he was saying it that the branch-cutting
detail weren’t this officer’s responsibility; but he nodded and said yes, he’d watched them doing it, and did the Ducas want
him to go back and make sure it was all done right?

Miel had absolute confidence in his subordinates, but even so he hung back and watched as the rearguard tied cut branches
to the pommels of their saddles and dragged them behind as they rode on, sweeping away the column’s hoofprints. The result
didn’t look right, but it was less obvious than the tracks of a thousand horses.

He remembered the canyon, though it was several years since the last time he’d been there, hunting late-season wolves with
Jarnac and the Sphax twins. On that occasion the place had played cruelly on his nerves, because he hadn’t yet got the hang
of not being at war with the Vadani and therefore constantly at risk from maverick raiding parties, and because anybody with
more imagination than a small rock could see it was a perfect place for an ambush. He started worrying; the enemy commander
was by definition a professional soldier, trained from childhood to spot dangerous terrain. Surely he’d have recognized the
risk from his scouts’ reports. Either he wouldn’t show up at all, which would be horribly embarrassing, or else he’d figured
out an ingenious counter-ambush of his own that’d leave the Eremians trapped in their own snare. The more he thought about
it, the more obvious it was that that was precisely what was about to happen. At any moment, archers would appear on the skyline,
or the sun would disappear behind a curtain of falling scorpion bolts. Maybe he’d be lucky and die in the first volley, thereby
spared the humiliating pain of knowing he’d led the flower of Eremian chivalry to a pointless, shameful death…

I’m turning into Orsea,
he thought.
Maybe it’s something that comes with being in charge.
As his men filed past, he scanned the top of the ridge on both sides. If there was an ambush waiting up there, they’d missed
their chance. He’d got away with it after all.

Once they’d taken up position at the canyon neck, there was a great deal to be done. The lancers dismounted and started felling
trees to build the roadblock, while the designated specialists in each unit unloaded and spread the caltrops and snagging
wires they’d brought with them from the city. Miel couldn’t recall offhand whose suggestion the caltrops had been, though
he had a nasty feeling it’d been his. They were crude, put together in a hurry; a wooden ball the size of a large apple, with
eight two-inch spikes sticking out in all directions. Wouldn’t it be the most delicate irony if the battle turned against
him and those spikes ended up buried in the frogs of his own horses’ hoofs, as a painful lesson in poetic justice to anybody
who presumed to use weapons of indiscriminate effect against the Mezentines?

Once the preparations had been made, he pulled all his men back into cover, and settled down to wait. He knew this would be
the hardest part of the job, a lethal opportunity to shred his own self-confidence to the point where he’d order the retreat
sounded the moment a single Mezentine appeared in the distance. He almost wished he was the one being ambushed, since at least
he wouldn’t have to cope with the anticipation.

When the enemy finally arrived, of course, he was looking the other way. Worse; he was on foot, in a small holly grove, taking
a last pre-battle piss. He heard the creak of an axle, followed by shouting; more shouting, as he fumbled numbly with his
trousers (no mean feat of engineering for a man wearing plate cuisses) and battled his way out of the holly, stumbling on
exposed roots and fallen branches as he tried to get back to where he’d left his horse. He mounted badly, twisting his ankle
as he lifted into the saddle, winding himself as he sat down. There were screams among the shouts now, and a clattering of
steel like blacksmiths trying to work the metal too cold. For a split second his sense of direction deserted him and he couldn’t
remember where the battle was.

His horse scrambled awkwardly out onto the road, and there was nobody there; he turned his head in time to see the last of
his men joining in a full-blown charge.
They could’ve waited for me,
he thought, unfairly and incorrectly; he followed them, a shamefaced rearguard of one. Before he reached them he passed five
dead men and nine sprawled horses, all Eremians. Wonderful omen.

Immediately he saw what the problem was. Quite properly, whoever had taken command while he was away urinating had seen an
opening in the enemy front and thrown a full charge at it. Also quite reasonably, he hadn’t expected the level of success
that in the event he’d achieved. The charge had gone home and then gone too far, like an unbarred spear into a charging boar.
The risk now was of being enveloped from the sides. Miel looked round in desperation for the horn-blower to sound the disengage.
He found him almost straight away; lying on the ground, covered from the waist down by his fallen horse. He was dead, of course;
and the horn lay beside him where he’d dropped it. At least one horse had trodden on it, crumpling it up like stiff paper.