Evil for Evil (78 page)

Ziani handed it to him. Valens glanced at it.

“There has been a traitor working for the Mezentines,” he went on. “That’s how come there was a full regiment of Mezentine
cavalry waiting for us at Cor Evenis, down on the main east road. For all I know they’re still there, wondering why we haven’t
shown up yet. I told the traitor that’s where we were headed, just before we left the city; then I sent some fast scouts,
to see if there was an ambush laid for us. They reported back just before the attack on the column here; too late for me to
do anything about it, because the traitor got killed in the battle. You may have come across him; General Mezentius.”

“He was a —”

Valens nodded. “Rather a shock to me. Still, I suppose he figured we didn’t stand a chance in the war, and wanted to get in
with the winning side. Can’t blame him. Loyalty’s a wonderful thing, but any virtue taken to excess turns into stupidity in
the end. The silly part of it is, it was a Mezentine who told me about him; inadvertently, of course. Anyway, that’s beside
the point. The question is, do I believe in you and your map? And if I believe in you, do I also believe there really is a
road across the desert?” He sighed. “It’d be lovely if I could,” he said. “Even if the Mezentines managed to follow us, I
don’t suppose they’d want to risk upsetting the Cure Hardy. I get the impression that they’re the only force on earth your
lot are genuinely scared of; not that it’s ever lost them any sleep, because there’s that wonderful desert in the way, keeping
them penned in like a bull in a paddock. If ever they got the idea that the desert could be crossed after all, I reckon they
might make some serious changes to their entire foreign policy.” He closed his eyes. “I’m not entirely sure how the Aram Chantat
will react if I turn up without their crown princess. They’re likely to be upset, but whether with me or the Perpetual Republic
I couldn’t safely predict. There’s also the fact that I’ve sent out a lot of scouts — good men, my own personal intelligence
corps — and they assure me there aren’t any Mezentine forces I don’t already know about lurking behind rocks this side of
the city. If you really were leading me into an ambush, they’d probably have found the assault party by now. A regiment of
heavy cavalry’s not an easy thing to hide in open country.”

Ziani reminded himself to breathe. “And the map?” he said.

“Oh heavens, the map.” Valens nodded. “Well now, let’s see. Take away your motive for lying, and we’re more or less forced
to accept that you’re telling the truth. In which case, you sincerely believe in the map. I don’t think you’re the sort of
man who buys treasure maps from people you meet in the street. In which case, it’s likely that the salt woman — her name’s
Henida Zeuxis, and she used to live next door to the Temperance and Tolerance in the Horsefair, right? See? I know all sorts
of things about people, including where they go on their days off — most likely the salt woman believes in the map as well.
So the gamble is, was her husband lying to her, or exaggerating? I don’t know. You’ve met her, I haven’t. What do you think?”

Easy as that, apparently; at the end, after all the filing and shaping and fettling and fitting. “I don’t think she’d got
the imagination to lie, or the skill to forge the journals. And if her old man was as half-witted as her, he must’ve hit on
something really good, or he’d have gone out of business. He strikes me as a plodder, your ideal employee. I had men just
like him working for me at the ordnance factory. If he’d been a horse, you could’ve stuck him on a treadmill and forgotten
about him till his next feed was due. Yes, I believe in her, and the map, and the short cut across the desert. For what my
opinion’s worth.”

Valens breathed out, like a man putting down a heavy sack. “That’s what it comes to,” he said. “Little scraps of trivia about
unremarkable people swaying the fate of the whole Vadani nation. My father’d be livid if he could see me now. He always reckoned
that making history was strictly the preserve of the upper classes.” He shook his head. “You’d never have thought it to look
at him, especially when he’d been drinking, but he was an idealist. There was an old boy on the council who used to say to
him, you act like we’re living in the upstairs rooms when in fact we’re camping out on the midden. My father could never figure
out what he meant by that, but he was right.” Ziani watched him pull himself together. “All right, then, we’ll give it a try.
Oh, and thanks.” He grinned wearily. “Consider yourself provisionally awarded the rank of Hero of the Vadani People and public
benefactor, first class. There’s no salary, but if we end up anywhere half civilized, I’ll get a medal struck or something.”

“Thank you,” Ziani said gravely. “That makes it all worth-while.”

Which left only one chore to be got out of the way. It could wait a little longer.

Meanwhile, there was plenty to do. Fixing up the carts was the priority. The arrival of the miners helped; the armor plates
could be cannibalized off the worst-damaged wagons and fitted onto the miners’ carts; the rejects could then be stripped for
parts to fix up the salvageable vehicles. Once the armor had been moved over, he let Daurenja take charge of bullying and
cajoling the Vadani carpenters, while he concentrated on fabricating and fitting parts that had to be specially made: braces,
brackets, reinforcing plates and the inevitable infinity of nails. Anything requiring even a little skill he did himself;
partly because experience had greatly increased his contempt for Vadani metalwork, partly because it was a sweet pleasure
to be bashing and filing metal again; as though he was back in the factory; as though nothing had happened. Working with iron
and steel was a holiday after so long spent forging and shaping human beings; unlike people, rods and billets responded predictably
to fire and hammer, and when you cut into them you got filings, not blood.

Valens’ scouts started coming back with thoughtful looks on their faces. They hadn’t seen an army, or outriders, or any trace
that a large body of soldiers had been on the move. Instead, they muttered about finding abandoned farmhouses, barns that
were empty when they should have been packed with hay; a merchant convoy glimpsed in the distance that left the road as soon
as it saw them; a newly built bridge across a small river in the middle of nowhere.

No interference from the Duke, at any rate. Instead of being everywhere all the time, nosing about, asking maddeningly good
questions, he’d become increasingly hard to find. The consensus of opinion was that he was lying low in order to avoid Duke
Orsea, who was on his case because of the Eremian nobleman, Ducas, who was still being held confined in a small, stinking
corral with the other prisoners.

There were other excitements, eagerly discussed in raised voices over the incessant thump of hammers. A large party of the
scavengers who’d done so well out of trotting along at the heels of the running battle, like a sausage-maker’s dog, had been
rounded up and brought in. They were penned up in a hollow square of empty lamp-oil jars and vinegar barrels, tied up, ignored
by everyone except their guards, grudgingly and sporadically fed, mostly on soup made out of slightly spoiled barley which
the horses were too picky to touch. What Valens wanted them for was a complete and perfect mystery. Better to wring their
necks straightaway and save their food, even if it was just condemned horse-fodder.

Predictably, the weather took a turn for the worse. It started as fine, light rain, the kind that saturates your clothes before
you realize you’re getting wet. Then it poured. The dust turned instantly into thick, sticky mud, weighing down boots and
gumming up hands, messing up tools, swallowing a dropped nail or pin, spoiling tolerances, souring tempers. It’s hard to cut
to the thickness of a nail-scribed line when your eyes are full of water, and every time you shift your feet, the ground under
them tries to suck off your footwear. Forced into the cramped shelter of the wagons, the civilians suffered noisily, wringing
hearts and wasting time. Rainwater seeped into sloppily sealed flour barrels, dripped through tears in wagon canopies, swelled
timbers and coated bolts and spindles with a sheen of tacky orange rust. Soon there were no dry clothes to change into, and
men’s boots squelched in the morning when they crammed their feet into them. Valens sat under an awning and gazed wretchedly
at the road, wondering if it was impassable yet. A rill off the side of the mountain swelled into a river in spate and washed
two carts (two fully refurbished, perfectly roadworthy carts) off the road and down the slope, where they rolled onto the
rocks and were scrunched into kindling. The forge fires bogged down into black sooty ooze and couldn’t be relit. The work,
nearly complete, was now clearly doomed to take forever. If the Mezentines didn’t get them first, they were all going to drown;
swallowed in their sleep by the mud.

The end of the work took Ziani by surprise. Quite suddenly (late one afternoon, an hour before the lamps were due to be lit),
in spite of the rain and the mud, the spoiled food and the sodden timber, they finished off the last of the smashed-up carts,
and the column was officially ready to set off. Someone found Valens and told him; he ruled that they might as well stay where
they were until morning and get everything ready for an early start. In the meantime, they could deal with the leftovers of
unfinished business — shoeing horses, making an inventory of supplies and munitions, drawing up watch rotas and executing
the prisoners.

It was a long, wretched and tedious job. Originally the idea was to hang them in a civilized fashion, but it didn’t take long
for Major Nennius, officer in charge, to realize that that wasn’t going to work. There were no trees sturdy enough to serve
as makeshift gallows, and he was only able to scrounge up enough four-inch-square-section long timbers to build two sets of
scaffolds. Even hurrying things along at maximum speed, he could only turn off two men every fifteen minutes; eight an hour,
and he had sixty-seven to deal with, or sixty-eight if the Ducas was going to join them (apparently that hadn’t been decided
yet). In addition to which, the rain had soaked into the ropes, which meant the knots didn’t slide properly. Someone suggested
waxing them with beeswax, a smart-sounding idea that turned out to be useless in practice. Two hours into the job, after five
of the first eight executions had gone unpleasantly wrong, Nennius decided that hanging was a refinement he couldn’t afford.
They were already working by torchlight, and his men had spent the day working on the carts; they were tired, wet, hungry
and miserable, and he had the impression that their patience wasn’t unlimited.

Unwilling to take the decision himself, he balloted his junior officers. Three of them were ardently in favor of beheading
and argued their case with a fervor he found more than a little disturbing. The other four voted for strangling. Hooray, Nennius
told himself, for democracy.

Once the decision had been taken, however, it turned out that nobody could be found with a good working knowledge of practical
strangulation. It was simple, someone said, you just put a bit of rope round a chap’s neck and pull it tight until — well,
until it’s all over. Nennius, however, wasn’t convinced. He’d never seen a man strangled to death but he had an idea that
there was rather more to it than that. Someone suggested having a prisoner in and doing a trial run. Nennius shuddered and
sent out for chopping blocks and axes.

Not, he had to concede, that he’d ever seen a man decapitated in cold blood before, either. But he felt rather more confident
about it than about strangling. Provided they could find a way to make the prisoner keep still, how hard could it be? A bit
like chopping through tree-roots, he told himself. He gave orders for the axes to be carefully sharpened.

Perhaps it was because it was late and wet and dark; it didn’t go well. The first prisoner presented himself with admirable
resignation, as if he could sense that everybody was fairly close to the end of their rope, and he didn’t want to make things
any more fraught than they already were. But the headsman muffed the stroke, cutting into the poor man’s shoulder blade instead
of his neck. The prisoner jumped in the air and squirmed about uncontrollably — not his fault, Nennius had to concede, it
was pure instinct and muscle spasm — and finally had to be put out of his misery with spear-thrusts and a heavy rock to the
back of the head. The spectacle had a very bad effect on the rest of the prisoners, who turned uncooperative; the next victim
needed four men to hold him down, and the headsman refused to swing for fear of hitting one of the helpers. Further delay,
while some men botched up a sort of a crush — a heavy oak beam with a strong leather strap to secure the head, and a thick,
wide plank to lay over the body, on which three men could sit. The arrangement worked, more or less, although the headsman’s
nerves were shot and he needed three cuts to clear his third victim, who yelled like a bullock being dehorned throughout.
The next six went through all right, and then the headsman’s hands slipped on the wet axe-handle, so that the blade glanced
off the back of the victim’s skull and sank two inches into the headsman’s left foot.

After that, nobody seemed to want the job, until a smarmy young ensign who Nennius particularly disliked volunteered and,
in default of other applicants, was appointed. He’d been one of the fervent pro-decapitators in the debate earlier, and he
went at it with three parts enthusiasm to one part skill. It’d have been all right if he’d been a big, brawny man with plenty
of upper body strength; instead, he was short and scrawny, too weak to control his swing, and he was quickly demoted on appeal
from the helpers, who feared for their lives. At this point it dawned on Nennius that if he wanted to have any credibility
left come morning, he was going to have to do the filthy job himself.

It wasn’t like chopping tree-roots, or splitting logs. It wasn’t like anything else he’d ever done before. It was exhausting,
difficult, disgusting and very, very precise. But if you concentrated furiously all the time and held the axe at just the
right angle and hit very hard indeed, you could sort of chip the head off the neck with one cut; whereupon it slid through
the restraining strap and flipped up in the air, while the trunk jerked and spasmed, upsetting the men perched grimly on the
board into the sticky red mud. An eighth of an inch either way and you’d screwed it, and that meant fifteen seconds or so
of frantic hacking, which more often than not broke the neck rather than cutting it. All in all, Nennius decided, this wasn’t
what he’d joined the service for. In fact, it was a thoroughly unsatisfactory way of doing things, and there was still a very
long way to go.