Evil for Evil (80 page)

"Yes," she said. "Because Orsea would never be in love with someone else's wife."

He shook his head again. "Come on," he said, "you can do better than that. What did you say just now? The world well lost for love? Actually," he added, "I do know that one. Pasier, the fifth Eclogue. But only because they made me read it when I was a kid."

"You don't like Pasier?"

"Too soppy. His heroines sit around waiting to be rescued, you can practically see them tapping their feet impatiently, wondering where the hero's got to. And then the hero dies tragically, and they're all upset and miserable. Anybody with half a brain could've seen it'd all end in tears; and all the heroine need have done was pack a few things in a bag, wait till dark and slip out through the back door, instead of making some poor fool of a hero come and fetch her. Besides, how could a hero give a damn about somebody so completely insipid?"

She looked at him. "You don't like Pasier."

"No. I think his heroines are bitches and his heroes deserve everything they get. Which explains," he added, "why I don't go in much for self-pity, either. I have no sympathy for stupid people."

What was she thinking? The writer of the letters whose words he knew by heart had told him everything about herself. He had explored her mind like a scholar, like a pilgrim. The girl he'd spoken to once when he was seventeen was so well known to him that he could have told you without having to think what she would be likely to do or say in any possible circumstance. The woman sitting in front of him was different. He hardly knew her.

"You're wrong," she said. "It's from the seventh Eclogue, and the line is
the
world well lost for her sake
. Your version couldn't possibly be right, it wouldn't scan. Whatever you think about Pasier's heroes and heroines, his scansion's always impeccable."

He scowled. "Agreed. He obeys all the rules. I think that's why he's a bit dull for my liking. He always does the right thing; makes him sort of predictable. Same with his characters; they always do the right thing. It means you can always figure out well in advance what's going to happen in the end. They always die horribly, but with their honor intact, leaving the world a better place. Which is pretty much true to life, if you think about it. I mean, the world can't help but be a better place if there's one less dick-headed idealist cluttering it up."

She took a deep breath. "I know I haven't said this before," she said, "but what you did—saving Orsea and me when the city fell—it was the most wonderful—"

"Mistake," he interrupted. "Stupidest thing I ever did. It was a Pasier moment; exactly the sort of thing one of his boneheads in shining armor would've done. Probably, subconsciously, that's what I was thinking of when I made the decision. Self-image, I think that's the expression I'm looking for. I got this mental picture of myself as a romance hero, and it appealed to me. The world well lost for love. No, I should've stayed at home and read a good book."

"But you didn't."

"No. I didn't have that option. And if I could've foreseen what was going to happen… If I'd had a vision of this moment, so I could've seen exactly what a complete and utter fuck-up I was going to make, with dead civilians heaped up like cords for the winter log-pile and basically no chance at all of getting out of this in one piece, I'd still have done it. I'd do it again tomorrow." He closed his eyes for a moment. "Would you care to hazard a guess why? And you sit there, cold as last night's roast mutton, and tell me you love Orsea, final, nonnegotiable."

"I do."

"Well, fine." Valens jumped up and turned his back on her. "That's your privilege. I take it you're like me, don't suffer fools gladly. And since we're both agreed that I'm the biggest idiot still living, I quite understand your choice. Orsea may be a clown and a source of trouble and sorrow for everybody in the known world, but he's a harmless genius compared to me. You haven't got a spare copy of Pasier with you, by any chance? I feel in the mood for reading him again, but I left my copy back in the city, along with everything else I used to own."

"I'm sorry." He couldn't see the expression on her face, and her tone of voice was flat, almost dead. "You were the only real friend I ever had. I used to live for your letters. I think you're the only person I've ever known who's tried to understand me."

"But you love Orsea."

"Yes."

"There you are, then. Tell you what, why not get him to write to you?
Dear
Veatriz: how are you? The weather has been nice again today, though tomorrow
it might rain
. He could probably manage that, if he stuck at it for a while."

"I really am very sorry," she said, and, for the first time since his father died, Valens allowed himself to admit defeat; to recognize it, as if it was some foreign government whose existence he could no longer credibly ignore. "It's all right," he said. "Funny, really. I used to think you brought out the best in me, and now it turns out you have the opposite effect. Shows how much I really know you. After all, it's different in letters: you can be who you wish you were, instead of who you actually are."

"That's not true," she said. "I know who you really are. It's—well, it's a waste, really."

"Did you know my wife's dead?" he asked suddenly, almost spitting the information out. "The Mezentines killed her. I really wish I could feel heartbroken about it, or sorry, or even angry. Instead—you know how I feel? Like when I was a kid, and my father had arranged a big hunt, and then it pissed down with rain and we couldn't go out. But when he died, I felt so bad about that. He loved it so much, and I hated it. I started going out with the hounds again to punish myself, I guess. Now, when I go out, it's the only time I feel at peace with myself. Even reading your letters never made me feel that way. You know what I used to do? As soon as I got a letter from you, I'd cancel all my appointments, I'd read it over and over again—taking notes, for crying out loud—and then I'd spend a whole day, two or three sometimes, writing the reply. You can't begin to imagine how hard I worked, how I
concentrated;
there'd be books heaped up everywhere so I could chase up obscure facts and apposite quotations. First I'd write a general outline, in note form, with headings; then a separate sheet of paper for each heading, little diagrams to help me figure out the structure. Then I'd copy out a first draft, leaving plenty of space between the lines so I could write bits in over the top; then a second and third draft, often a fourth. If I'd have worked a tenth as hard on politics, I'd have conquered the Mezentines by now and be getting ready to invade the Cure Hardy." He laughed.

"Bet you thought I just scribbled down the first thing that came into my head. I wrote them so that's what you'd think—like we were talking, and everything came spontaneously from my vast erudition and sparkling, quicksilver mind. I spent a whole day on one sentence once. I couldn't decide whether it'd sound more natural and impromptu if the relative clause came at the beginning or the end. Actually, it was a bloody masterpiece of precision engineering, though I do say so myself. And the irony is, you never realized. If you'd realized, it'd have meant I'd failed." He stopped talking and turned round sharply; he'd heard the tent flap rustle. A sergeant was hovering in the doorway, looking worried and trying to apologize for interrupting.

"It's all right," she said, "I was just going."

He couldn't bear to see her go, so he looked down at the ground until he saw her shadow pass out into the light and break up. Then he turned on the sergeant like a boar rounding on the pack.

"What the fuck do you want?" he said.

The sergeant looked terrified. "It's Vaatzes, sir," he said. "That Mezentine. He's come back."

24

Until he left the city, Ziani had never thought much about food. Like all Mezentines, he'd taken it for granted. He'd had a vague idea that vegetables somehow came up out of the ground, and meat was the bodies of dead animals; anyhow, it was crude, primitive and mildly distasteful, and he really wasn't interested. The Republic's attitude to eating was that it was just another bodily function, to be performed as quickly and efficiently as possible, in private. A long time ago there had been grain mills in the city, but now their races and wheels were more profitably employed powering the driveshafts of machine shops. Mezentia bought its flour from the savages ready-ground and handed it over to the Bakers' Guild, to be converted into manufactured wares as swiftly as possible. The bakers produced three types of loaf (small, medium, large); each loaf identical to others in its category, its weight and dimensions strictly in accordance with the prescribed specification. Because nobody in the city ever went hungry, it was hard for Ziani to grasp the idea of there being no food; a whole population with nothing to eat. It was impossible, because in the city the bakers had a carefully agreed rota system that governed their opening hours, making sure there was always a bakery open for business at any hour of the day or night. Trust the savages to be different. Their food came from farms; it traveled from the farms to markets—big open spaces crammed with heaps and bins of raw, untreated, inchoate food, which people bought and took away to process themselves. And that was when the system was functioning perfectly. When something went wrong—in a war, for example—even that pathetic excuse for organization broke down, and there was a very real danger of people not having anything to eat. Extraordinary, but that's how some people manage to live; like cottages perched on the rim of a volcano.

Not that he objected; quite the reverse, since it had given him the opportunity to make a hero's entrance when he arrived in Valens' camp at the head of a short column of carts laden with flour, root vegetables, salted and preserved meat, cheese and a load of other stuff he didn't even recognize, but which the general manager of the miners' camp at Boatta assured him was both edible and wholesome. The food had actually been an afterthought, a by-product of his detour to Boatta, which in turn had been nothing but camouflage, to explain away his long absence. The fact that it meant that everybody in Valens' column was pleased to see him was an unexpected but very welcome bonus.

"Before we left, we thought it'd be a good idea to empty out the stores and bring the stuff on with us," he explained truthfully. "To stop the Mezentines getting hold of it, as much as anything. It was only when the manager went through the inventory that we realized just how much food they'd got stockpiled there. My guess is that there was a standing order for so much flour and whatever each month, which was more than the miners needed, but nobody ever thought to reduce the amount; so the unused supplies were just squirreled away in the stores."

Valens shrugged. "Three cheers for inefficiency and waste, in that case," he said.

"They've just saved all our lives."

They were unloading the flour barrels, rolling them down improvised ramps from the tailgates of the miners' carts. Crowds of civilians were watching, with the wary but rapt attention of dogs watching their owners eat. It's just flour, Ziani thought; even if they're starving hungry, it's just an inert white powder with no moving parts.

"Nobody told me what you were doing," Valens was saying, "or where you'd got to. I don't remember telling you to go and bring in the miners from Boatta."

"Don't you?" Ziani looked at him blankly. "I thought we discussed it; or maybe it was Carausius who gave me the order, I can't remember offhand. Anyway, it seemed logical enough; I had to go over there anyway to make sure they'd made a proper job of sabotaging the silver workings, so while I was there, why not get the evacuation organized at the same time? I'm just glad it worked out so well." Valens nodded. "It's just as well you were able to find us," he said pleasantly. "I hadn't actually decided on the itinerary when we left the city, so you can't have known we were headed this way. I hate to think what might have happened if you'd missed us."

"Oh." Ziani raised his eyebrows. "I'm surprised to hear you say that. I knew you'd be on this road, because the first supply dump's at Choris Andrope—you showed me the list of depots, or I saw it somewhere, and I knew you'd be following the mountain roads, but obviously keeping as much distance as you could between yourself and the Eremian border. So, this was the only possible road you could've taken."

"I see," Valens said. "You figured it out from first principles."

"Well, it's hardly applied trigonometry." Ziani shrugged. "Besides, we were able to confirm your position when we picked up a couple of Mezentine stragglers on the way. Which reminds me," he added, looking away for a moment, "there's something I need to talk to you about, when you can spare a moment."

"Now?"

"It'll keep," Ziani replied, slightly awkwardly. "It's a delicate matter for discussing in the open like this."