Evil for Evil (95 page)

There was a long, dead silence. “Anything?”

Psellus nodded vigorously. “You name it. Money, land — you can have Eremia if we win, it’s no use to us, or the Vadani silver
mines if you’d prefer, it’s entirely up to you. Just say what you want and I’ll have a treaty drawn up. And in return, you’ll
lend us your army. Well?”

The ambassador took a moment to clear his throat. “Agreed,” he said.

“Splendid.” Psellus beamed at him. “There, we’ve made an alliance, and it was so much easier than I thought it’d be. When
Boioannes was in charge, it used to take weeks to hammer out a treaty, and he knew a lot about diplomacy, unlike me. Now,
how soon can your soldiers get here? Or —” Psellus frowned. “Here’s where it gets difficult again. I don’t know whether we
need them here at the City, or whether they’d be more useful hindering the savages and making it hard for them to reach us.
You’re the expert. What do you think?”

Nothing in the ambassador’s long and varied experience had prepared him for a question like that. “It’s a complicated decision,”
he said. “On the one hand —”

“The way I see it,” Psellus went on, “an army of a million people is obviously a great advantage in a battle, no doubt about
it, but until you actually get to the battlefield, it’s also a tremendous problem. Must be. Food and so forth, hay for the
horses, clean water. Now, we’ve done a little research — dreadful, really, it’s taken something like this to make us realize
just how woefully ignorant we are about everything other than making things and selling them — and we can’t see how the enemy
can keep themselves fed and watered just from what they can find in the fields and villages, which means they must be having
to bring in their food and so on from somewhere else. God only knows where,” Psellus added with a grin. “I mean to say, you
increase the population of the mountain duchies by a million, the Eremians and the Vadani could only just about feed themselves
at the best of times, so it’s not like there can be any huge granaries bursting at the seams with stockpiled sacks of flour.
Probably some of your merchants have been trading with them — it’s perfectly all right, I quite understand — but from what
little I know about your people, I don’t suppose that can have made much difference. No, the only source of supply I can think
of is the savages’ own herds of cattle — they’re nomads, as I’m sure you know, that’s how they live, and they must have managed
to bring their cattle with them across the desert when they came. Which is fine, of course, from their point of view, except
that there can’t be all that much pasture in the mountains for all those hundreds of thousands of animals; and when the grass
has all been eaten, and any hay that our men overlooked while they were there, they’ll have to slaughter most of them before
they starve. And yes, they can salt down the carcasses, but even that won’t last forever. Time, you see. They’re almost as
short of it as we are.” Psellus stopped talking for a moment, as if thinking about something, then added, “Of course, all
this stuff is just what’s occurred to me while I’ve been thinking about it, and like I’ve told you already, I’m hopelessly
ignorant about military matters, so I may have got it all completely wrong. But if I’m right — and if I’m not, do please say
so — it seems to me that the best use we can make of your army is messing about with their lines of supply. Would you agree?”

The ambassador hesitated, as though trying to translate what he’d heard into a language he could understand. “Of course,”
he said. “It’s the only logical —”

“Though of course,” Psellus went on, “there’s a bit more to it than that. The last thing we want to do is make them come here
before we’ve done what we can to get ready for them. If your soldiers were to drive off all their cattle, it could force them
to attack us straightaway, simply because the only reserve of food large enough to feed them and close enough to be any use
is what we’ve got here — though I think you ought to know, we’re not exactly well provided for in that department ourselves.
Of course, I’ve made arrangements for every ship we can buy or hire to bring in as much food as possible from across the sea
— the old country won’t send us soldiers anymore, but they’re still happy to sell us wheat, thank goodness — but it’s all
got to come in through Lonazep, and I understand it’s absolute chaos there at the moment. Still, they probably don’t know
that, and if they do, it’s not as though they’d have a choice, if we somehow contrived to run off all their livestock. So,
we don’t want to leave them starving. We just want to slow them right down, so we’ve got time to build up our walls and get
in as much food as we can for a long siege. That’s our best chance, I reckon. If it’s a matter of who starves first, I think
we can win. If it comes to fighting, we might as well not bother.” Psellus breathed out (he still wasn’t used to talking uninterrupted
for so long), then added, “Do you think I’m on the right lines here, or have I got it all wrong? Really, I’d value your opinion.
It’s been such a worry, trying to learn all this very difficult stuff in such a tearing hurry. It’d be such a relief if an
expert like yourself can reassure me I haven’t made a dreadful mess of it all.”

The ambassador looked at him warily for a while, then said, “Can I ask you what you did before all this?”

“I was a clerk.”

“A —”

Psellus nodded. “I was a records clerk for nine years, after I’d finished my apprenticeship. Then I got my transfer from the
executive to the administrative grade. I was a junior secretary in the Compliance directorate for six years, and then general
secretary for five years after that. And then,” he added sadly, “Ziani Vaatzes came along, and now look at me. Lord of all
I survey. I met him once, did you know that? Vaatzes. He’s the key to it all, of course.” Psellus shook his head. “I’m terribly
sorry, I’m rambling, and you’re a busy man. Now then, about this army of yours.”

Later, in the ten minutes or so between appointments (he had his beautiful clock to thank for such an indecent degree of precision;
he still loved it for its beauty, but it nagged him like a wife), he wrote down the minutes of his meeting with the ambassador
and compared them with the plan he’d prepared beforehand. Well, he thought, now at least we have a few soldiers, thanks to
the incredible stupidity of the Cure Doce. He still couldn’t quite believe it. But then, they’d been brought up to believe
the Republic was invincible — invincible and gullible. Two mistakes, and they’d probably cost the Cure Doce their existence.
Not that it mattered, if they could buy him time to turn the City into one of those extraordinary star shapes he’d seen in
the book.

He put the sheet of minutes on the pile of papers to be filed and spent his last two minutes of solitary peace going over
his plan for the meeting with the architects. He would never be able to understand the book, but they might.

Suddenly, he smiled. Wouldn’t it be a superb piece of irony, he thought, if we actually contrived to get away with it? A million
enemies, and we beat them because there’s too many of them to take the city. The sheer perversity of it appealed to him enormously.
They lose, because they sent a million men to do the job of fifty thousand; I beat a million men by fighting just one.

Which reminded him. He pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the pile, inked his pen and wrote, wastefully, in the middle of
the page:

His wife