The Proof House Part 32

Bardas hadn't expected the first sally to go home. It had been more in the nature of an experiment, a trial, a putting to proof. They'd pa.s.sed the second degree. He'd have expected nothing less. Meanwhile he'd field-tested the portable bridges and was satisfied that they were up to the job. He was pleased by that.

He directed the second and third batteries to pick another point on the stockade, the rest of the artillery to concentrate on the existing breach. Then he ordered the halberdiers and pikemen to form a column, with the cavalry out of harm's way on the flanks. The crossbowmen had taken too many casualties to be much use as a field unit, so he relegated them to the rearguard, and brought up the archers to replace them. Imperial archers weren't up to much, in his opinion, or at least these ones weren't; they had seventy-pound self flatbows, thoroughly inferior to the heavy composites of the plainsmen, and their place in this army was on the side of the plate, as salad. He was annoyed by that. If it had wanted to, the provincial office could have given him some of the best archers in the world, armed with longbows, composites, northern self recurves, southern cablebacks, on foot or mounted, light or heavy armoured, fighting as skirmishers or volley-shooters, in the open or from behind pavises. Instead he had crossbowmen and rabbit-hunters, neither of which were likely to be much use to him. But it didn't matter. He could manage perfectly well with what he'd got.

He allowed the batteries an hour to make the breaches, but they did the job in twenty minutes; so he rea.s.signed them to laying down a blanket barrage on the enemy artillery. The dust was an unexpected bonus; he could have managed perfectly well without that, too, but it made what he had in mind that bit easier. As the trebuchets changed angles and locked down on their new targets, he gave the order to sound the advance. As they moved forward, the halberdiers started to sing, and it no longer bothered him that he didn't understand the words.

This time, he tried a different tactic. Instead of simply flooding the breaches with heavy infantry, he sent in a few companies of skirmishers to set up pavises. As he'd antic.i.p.ated, Temrai's archers were there to oppose the a.s.sault; but instead of men to shoot at, he gave them oxhides, with his own archers returning fire through loopholes and from behind the edges of the screens. They didn't accomplish anything much, but he didn't really want them to; the purpose of the exercise was to give King Temrai an opportunity to shoot as many arrows as possible harmlessly into the pavises. He knew that each plainsman carried twenty-five arrows on his back, enough for three minutes' sustained fire - after that, they'd have to rely on supplies brought down the hill from the supply pits, along the pitted and gouged-out path, through the dust. Once the three minutes were up, the enemy archers wouldn't be a serious threat; a.s.suming, of course, that Temrai was short-sighted enough not to realise what he was doing.

But Temrai played his part as if they'd been rehearsing together for weeks; the pavises held up to the barrage (they were an improved design of his own, stretched hides backed with thick coils of the plaited straw matting the Empire issued for making archery targets with; designed by experts to stop an infinite number of arrows) and when the hail of arrows faltered and became sporadic, he opened the screens and sent the pikemen through.

It was a hedge of spears, dense as the undergrowth in an unmanaged wood. The archers carried on loosing into it, but their arrows didn't get very far, it was worse than trying to shoot through a matted tangle of thorns. The distance to be covered was only twenty yards or so; and then the pikes were close enough to touch, and the plainsmen tried to run away; but they were backed up on their own ranks, who were backed up on the supply carts bringing up more arrows, which were backed up on the reinforcements coming down the path. There was a certain limited scope for compression, as the front ranks cringed away from the spearblade hedge, like children on a beach skipping out of the way of the incoming tide. But when they'd flattened themselves against the men behind them, packed together like arrows in a barrel, there was nowhere left for them to go; all they could do was watch the pike-heads come on to them and into them.

Some of the front rank were killed outright. Others hung from the pikes still living, like the chunks of meat on skewers that the Sons of Heaven ate with rice and peppers. The force of the advance was enough to lift them off their feet, still struggling like speared fish (because the halberdiers were backed up too, the rear ranks pressing forward were still advancing, cramming into the ranks in front so that they couldn't have lowered their pikes even if they'd wanted to; so the long shafts of ash and apple bent like bows under the weight of the skewered meat, but being tested and approved to the highest specifications of the empire, they didn't break and neither did the men packed in round them). The second rank of the enemy joined the first on the spike, like a second layer of cloth joined to the first by the needle; a few pikeshafts snapped, but not enough to matter. After the first two ranks had been gathered up on the pikes, the forward progress stopped; dead or impaled, they served the third rank like a gambeson or some other form of padded or quilted armour, resisting the thrust with softness rather than strength or deflection (the padding of the gambeson smothers and dissipates the force of the thrust, clogging the advance of the blade). The forward momentum of the pikemen faltered, as the shower of arrows had done; the manoeuvre had run its course, and it was time for the next stage.

Temrai, meanwhile, had seen another opportunity. He was on the path, looking down at the compressed ma.s.s of the slaughter, when the advance stalled and the two sides stood staring at each other through the dust across the ashwood thicket, like two neighbours on either side of a hedge. He turned to the man next to him, a section leader called Lennecai, and tugged at his sleeve.

'They're stuck,' he said.

'What?'

'They're stuck,' Temrai repeated. 'They can't move, same as us. Get this path clear and bring down six companies of archers.'

They cleared the path by dumping the carts, pus.h.i.+ng them off the crumbling track. Most of them tumbled harmlessly down, smas.h.i.+ng into junk timber as they bounced off the rocky face of the slope; a few landed like trebuchet shot in the compacted ma.s.s of bodies, some on one side of the hedge, some on the other. Lennecai lined his archers out in a double column and ordered them to face about; enough of them had a clear shot down into the pikemen to make the manoeuvre worthwhile. Bardas' men instinctively looked up as the arrows hissed and whistled into the air, and were able to watch the arrows bank and pitch, slanting in at them like rain on a windy day. Of course there was no hope of getting out of the way; they had no choice but to stand and watch the arrows, as closely packed as rows of standing wheat. It wasn't just the front rank, or the front three ranks. The archers were raking the whole formation from front to back.

As men died or were spitted, so they stopped pus.h.i.+ng; the momentum went out of the push of pikes like tension from a rope bridge when one of the main hawsers is cut through. The ma.s.s started to crumple, just as a crushed plate folds up under the hammer, until the pressure from the men on the other end of the spears forced them to give ground. As they slipped back so the formation no longer supported the weight of the pikes, with their tremendous weight of meat hanging from the sharp end. The pikes went down, like trees felled in an overgrown forest, fouling and tangling in the undergrowth. Now would be a good time for a counterattack, Temrai observed, and a few moments later he saw it happen, as the survivors of the third and fourth ranks of his men pushed and shoved their way past the bodies of their fellows and tried to press home an attack with their scimitars. It was only a partial success; there still wasn't enough room to swing a sword, to bring down an overhead blow, and in any case the pikemen's helmets and pauldrons were easily proof against light cuts delivered with the force of the arm and wrist alone. The best they could do was trim off a few fingers, ears and noses (like foresters tr.i.m.m.i.n.g a newly felled trunk).

'He's about to make a mistake,' Bardas said aloud.

The pikemen were slumping, falling back; and Temrai's men were pus.h.i.+ng forward, following up an opportunity they'd never antic.i.p.ated. Bardas sent a couple of runners to the sergeants of halberdiers, and another to the artillery crews.

Temrai saw it too, but not quite in time; by that stage it was out of his control, as his men surged out through the breaches in pursuit of the pikemen, and were immediately enfiladed by Bardas' archers, positioned on either side. The shock of volley fire at close range stopped them in their tracks, as men went down like cut corn; before they could turn round and go back, the halberdiers moved in to cut them off. Temrai's runners arrived in time to stop anybody else going beyond the stockade, but for those already outside nothing could be done. The work crews had started piling trash in the breaches to block them up even before the last of the pursuit party were killed. Bardas' second opportunity didn't amount to much; the trebuchets only managed two clear shots each on the archers lined up on the path before Temrai pulled them out.

They packed up the portable bridges and withdrew in good order, without interference from Temrai's battered and out-of-commission artillery. Once the a.s.sault party was safely home, the bombardiers restored the trebuchets to their previous settings, locked down the handwheels and carried on with the bombardment of the path and the engine emplacements.

'On balance,' Bardas explained, 'we came out ahead. We killed more of them, we made them waste a lot of arrows, and of course there's the morale effect of having the advantage at the end. More to the point, we learned another lesson about close fighting in the fortress, and we learned it in a practice run rather than the actual main a.s.sault. All they can say is that they're still there, and that hardly counts as progress.' He sighed; and if he could see the wounded men sprawled on the wagons outside the surgeons' enclosure, he didn't say anything about them. 'We've got a long way to go yet,' he said, 'but we're getting there. After all, Perimadeia wasn't built in a day.'

'What, me?' Gorgas looked shocked. 'Certainly not. Why should I do such a stupid thing?'

The envoy's expression didn't change - did they breed them that way, Gorgas wondered, or did they have the sinews in their cheeks and jaws cut when they were children, as part of a lifelong apprentices.h.i.+p in the art of diplomacy? 'I'm only repeating what we were told,' he said. 'Our sources say that the rebellion was started by your men, acting on your orders. The fact that you're discussing the matter with me rather than twenty thousand halberdiers ought to give you some indication of how much faith we put in reports from that particular source.'

Gorgas laughed, as if the envoy had just told a funny story. 'Well,' he said, 'unless you tell me where the report came from I can't really comment. I suppose it's possible that these troublemakers you're talking about were my men, in the sense that they served with me at some time or other, but anything they may have done certainly wasn't on my orders. Perish the thought. After all,' he added, 'I may not be a genius, but I'm not stupid enough to go picking a fight with the Empire for the sake of a bunch of merchants who've never done me any favours. That'd be suicide. Can I get you something to eat?'

The envoy looked at him startled, then shook his head. 'No, thank you,' he said. 'I'm sorry to have bothered you. Obviously, if you do find out anything about who might have been responsible-'

'Of course. I'd be glad to have the chance to do something to show just how serious the Mesoge is about becoming a loyal and useful member of the Empire. I'm right in thinking, aren't I, that we're the first nation ever to join the Empire voluntarily?'

'I'm afraid I don't know,' the envoy said, standing up and brus.h.i.+ng moss and leaf-mould rather vigorously from his cloak. 'One other thing before I go: have you by any chance heard anything from your sister or her daughter? We've had rather disturbing reports that suggest they may have been abducted.'

'You don't say,' Gorgas replied. 'It's true, I haven't heard from either of them lately. I was planning to write to Niessa soon anyway; I'll see what I can find out.'

'Thank you,' said the envoy gravely, staring pointedly at the axe lying across Gorgas' knees. 'I'll let you get back to what you were doing.'

'Gateposts,' Gorgas replied. 'It's a shame to fell this old oak - I remember climbing up it when I was a kid - but it's stone dead; better to cut it down now than have it come down on the roof some windy night. And you can't beat oak for gateposts.'

'I'm sure,' the envoy said. One of his escort held the stirrup for him and he lifted himself rather stiffly into the saddle. 'Thank you for your time.'

'Always a pleasure,' Gorgas said.

By the time the envoy and his party were out of sight, Gorgas was nearly through, so he decided to finish off before going back to the house. He'd made cuts on three sides so as to be able to dictate which direction the tree would fall in; all he had to do now was cut out the remaining quadrant until he reached the point where the narrow core at the centre could no longer support the shearing force of the tree's weight. Then he ought to be able to tip the tree down with just the pressure of his hand.

It fell well, more or less where he'd wanted it to go, and he allowed himself a moment of rest and satisfaction, leaning on his axe and listening to the soft patter of raindrops falling from the leaves of the tall elm behind him. It had rained all night, but the morning had been fine and fresh - if there was one smell that meant home, it was the sweet aftermath of rain.

It was a shame he couldn't stay a little longer; but there was work to do indoors before he could get back to this job (and it had waited thirty years; it'd probably keep another hour without causing a disaster). He leaned the axe against the elm tree and walked slowly back to the house.

They were there, same as usual; staring at each other across the dark room like two dogs. Why his sister and his niece insisted on sulking like this he couldn't make out, but he had a feeling that trying to bounce them into reconciliation would most likely do more harm than good.

'Someone came asking after you two today,' he said. Neither of them said anything. 'From the provincial office, letting me know there was a chance you'd been - abducted, was the word he used. So you'd better stay indoors a bit longer, just in case they've got someone watching. I'm sorry,' he went on, as both women protested angrily, 'but I don't need the aggravation of being caught with you two, not until I've had time to straighten things out.' He sat down and pulled the cider-jug towards him; nothing like chopping down a tree to raise a healthy thirst. 'I think we'll go along with this abduction idea,' he said. 'What happened was, you were both kidnapped by pirates; they sent to me for a ransom, I pretended to play along, paid out the ransom, got you back, then went after the pirates and dealt with them. When someone gives you a perfectly serviceable lie, it's only polite to follow it up.'

Not a word, from either of them. He sipped his drink and smiled; it had taken a while to get used to the taste of raw home-made cider again, but it was one of those flavours that grew on you, a sort of comfortingly familiar unpleasantness. 'Mostly,' he went on, 'I don't want to cause any upsets until Bardas has beaten Temrai; it can't be much longer, so we'll just have to sit tight. That d.a.m.ned Imperial was sniffing about that, too, but of course they can't prove anything.'

Niessa turned and looked at him. 'What was all that about, anyway?' she said. 'Someone told me you'd sent soldiers to the Island-'

'Who told you that?' Gorgas asked.

Niessa frowned. 'One of the sergeants who came up here the other day, the tall ginger-haired one-'

Gorgas nodded. 'I know who you mean,' he said.

'He a.s.sumed I knew all about it,' Niessa went on. 'I hope I haven't got him in trouble.'

'It's understandable,' Gorgas said. 'After all, it's not so long ago they were taking their orders from you, not me. It's all right, I'll deal with it.'

That didn't sound very hopeful for the red-headed sergeant, who really had been most reluctant to tell her anything, but Niessa wasn't going to let herself get sidetracked. 'So what have you been up to?' she asked. 'You really shouldn't play power-politics, you know. You aren't very politic and you're certainly not very powerful.'

Gorgas grinned. 'It's like cutting down a tree,' he said, 'it's just a matter of making sure things fall the right way. I knew that if the provincial office had their way it'd be their general and the troops from the Island who ran down Temrai, and Bardas would only be there to round up the stragglers. Which would have been no use at all to anybody. So I made sure the fleet didn't sail on time.'

'You did?' Iseutz asked, smiling. 'Oh, sure. And how did you manage that?'

'Easy,' Gorgas said. 'I went round some of the merchants I know on the Island, put the idea into their heads of trying to hold up the provincial office for more money. I expected it to be much harder work than it actually was; for a nation that call themselves businessmen, they're as naive as they come. Of course,' he went on, 'I knew there was a risk the Imperials would do what they in fact did - annex the Island and get hold of the s.h.i.+ps that way; but I wasn't bothered by that, because I was figuring on Bardas catching up with Temrai in the open, rather than having to dig him out. So, when the Imperials made their move, I sent a few of my people to cause trouble on the Island; which they did, bless them, and now Bardas has the field pretty much to himself. It's all turned out much better than I thought it would, actually.'

There was a moment's silence. Niessa was shaking her head contemptuously. 'One thing that occurs to me,' said Iseutz. 'Do you actually have any proof that Bardas wants to be the one to bring back Temrai's head to the prefect, that it actually matters to him? For all you know, he was quite happy to potter about on the borders, well away from the fighting.'

'Don't be silly, Iseutz,' Gorgas said. 'I know Bardas, you don't. When he sees an opportunity, he makes the most of it - he's like me or your mother in that respect, I suppose it runs in the family. Look at how well he's done already since he's been in the army; he took Ap' Escatoy for them, and now he's in charge of an army with a field command and the chance to avenge a terrible defeat and restore the prestige of the Empire. They'll have to give him a prefecture after this, it'll be the making of him. And I don't suppose he'll be heart-broken at the prospect of settling the score with Temrai, either, though he's not what I'd call a vindictive person. Unlike some,' he added meaningfully, looking at Iseutz. 'No, what Bardas has got that the rest of us haven't is this strong moral sense; he'll want to see Temrai punished, not out of spite or because it'll give him pleasure, but because he knows it's something that's got to be done, and he won't feel right until it's been done and he's done it.'

'And you've taken steps to make sure he gets the opportunity.'

'It was the least I could do,' Gorgas replied. 'I wouldn't have felt right if I hadn't done it. And really, it was so easy in the end. Now then,' he went on, 'that's enough of that, I've got letters to write. Have either of you seen Zonaras? I want him to nip out to Tornoys for me.'

Iseutz shrugged. 'Which one is Zonaras?' she asked. 'I still can't tell them apart.'

Gorgas frowned at her. 'Very amusing,' he said. 'I take it that means you haven't. Well, if you do see him, I'll be in the office.'

What Gorgas called the office was a small room at the back of the house; originally it had been a smokehouse, where the hams were hung up over a smouldering cairn of oak-chips, but Clefas and Zonaras hadn't bothered much with curing meat, and they'd used it as a dump for sundry clutter. Gorgas had had it re-thatched and repointed, and had knocked a doorway through and put in a window. He had plans for a new, much larger smokehouse on the other side of the yard, once he'd finished repairing the fence and restoring the woodshed and the trap-house; but that was going to have to wait.

He had a desk, rather a fine one with a slanting face at chest height (Gorgas was old-fas.h.i.+oned and preferred standing up to write), a lamp-bracket that swung sideways on a pivoted arm, another arm with a hole in it for the ink-horn and a tray on top for his penknives, sealing wax, sharpening stone, inkstone, sand-shaker and all the other marginally useful paraphernalia that tend to accrue to people who spend a significant proportion of their time writing. Under the face was a board that pulled out and was supported by two folding struts, just the right size for a counting board, with a rack for your reckoning counters let into the side. Needless to say it had been made in Perimadeia, about a hundred years ago; the wood was dark and warm with beeswax, and across the top was carved the motto DILIGENCE-PATIENCE-PERSISTENCE, suggesting that it had been made for a customer in the Shastel Order. Gorgas remembered it well from his childhood - where his father had got it from he hadn't the faintest idea, but he'd used it as a cutting-board for making and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g arrow-fletchings, as witness the hundreds of thin lines scored across the face. When he'd rescued it from the dead furniture store in the half-derelict hayloft, Gorgas had intended to reface it with leather or fine-sawn Colleon oak veneer, but in the end he'd kept it as it was, not wanting to deface any of the visible signs his father had left behind.

He'd trimmed a fresh pen only the day before, out of a barred grey goosefeather; it didn't need sharpening but he sharpened it anyway, using the short knife with the blade worn paper-thin by decades of sharpening that had always been in the house for as long as he could remember (but his mother had used it in the kitchen, for skinning and jointing). Then he folded back the lid of the ink-horn (it was one he'd made himself; but Bardas had made the lid and the little bra.s.s hinge, beaten them out of sc.r.a.ps of bra.s.s scrounged from a scabbard-chape they'd found, green and brittle, in the bed of a stream), dipped the pen and started to write. It was a very short letter written on a tiny sc.r.a.p of thrice-sc.r.a.ped parchment, and when he'd sanded it he rolled it up tight and pushed it into a bra.s.s foil tube slightly thinner than an arrowshaft. Then he reached under the desk and fished out an arrow.

It was a standard Imperial bodkinhead, with a small diamond-section blade and a long-necked socket. He pulled the head off without any real effort and pushed the bra.s.s tube up inside the socket as far as he could get it to go. Then he took a little leather bag from the top of the desk, opened it and tapped a few brown crystals out into the palm of his hand. There was also a small bra.s.s dish on the tray, one of the pans from a long-lost pair of scales. Having transferred the crystals into the pan he took the penknife and made a small nick in his forearm, angling his arm so that the blood dripped on to the crystals. When they were amply covered, he wrapped a piece of cloth over the cut and carefully spat into the pan until the proportions of blood and spit were roughly the same. Finally he added a fat pinch of sawdust from a twist of parchment he'd had tucked under his cuff.

Pulling the lamp-arm toward him, he held the pan over the flame and stirred the mixture with the penknife handle, dissolving the crystals (glue, extracted from steeped rawhide). When he was satisfied with the consistency he took a dollop of the glue on the tip of his little finger and smeared the end of the arrowshaft where the socket was to go. After putting the socket carefully back on and making sure it was straight, he served the joint with a length of fine nettle-stem twine, using the last of the glue to stick down the ends.

The last step was to mark the arrow; he dipped the pen back into the ink and painstakingly wrote this one between the c.o.c.k feather and the bottom fletching, in tiny, angular clerk's letters. Then he laid it flat on the window-sill to dry.

He had other letters to write, and he was busy with them when Zonaras came in (as usual, without knocking).

'Well?' he said.

Gorgas looked up. 'There you are,' he said. 'Do me a favour and ride over to Tornoys-'

'What, today?'

'Yes, today. Go to the Charity and Chast.i.ty - I don't need to tell you where that is - and ask for Captain Mallo, who's going to Ap' Escatoy. Give him these letters and this arrow-'

'What's he want with just one arrow?'

'Just you make sure he gets it,' Gorgas said, in a tone of voice that made Zonaras open his eyes wide. 'He knows what to do. Once you've done that,' he added, reaching into his pocket, 'and not before under any circ.u.mstances, have a drink on me.' He handed over a couple of silver quarters, which Zonaras took quickly without saying anything. 'All right?'

Zonaras nodded. 'The mare's cast a shoe,' he said.

'What? When was that?'

Zonaras shrugged. 'Day before yesterday,' he said.

Gorgas sighed. 'Fine,' he said. 'Take my horse, just try not to ride her down any rabbit holes. We'll shoe the mare when you get back.'

Zonaras frowned. 'I've got a lot on right now,' he said.

'All right, I'll shoe the mare. Now get on; remember, Captain Mallo, going to Ap' Escatoy, at the Charity and Chast.i.ty. You think you can remember that?'

'Course.'

After he'd gone, Gorgas leaned against the desk and scowled. If anybody was capable of messing up a simple job, it was Zonaras. On the other hand, Zonaras riding to the Charity and Chast.i.ty in Tornoys and drinking himself stupid was the most natural thing in the world, a regular event these last twenty years, a sight so familiar as to be practically invisible.

Before he left the study, Gorgas paused in the doorway and looked up, as he always did, at the mighty and beautiful bow hung on two pegs over the top of the frame. It was the bow Bardas had made for him, just as he'd once made the ink-horn cover and the little copper sand-shaker and the folding three-piece box-wood ruler, which had been with Gorgas wherever he'd gone (it got broken in Perimadeia while he was there; he'd kept the pieces and, years later, had the best instrument-maker in the City put them back together again, with the finest fish-bladder glue and tiny silver tacks so small you could hardly see them; he'd had a rigid gold and silver case made for it at the same time, to make sure it didn't get broken again).

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Hoping to force Temrai into giving him an opportunity, Bardas kept up the bombardment for three days without changing the settings; he described it to his staff officers as 'planis.h.i.+ng the enemy'. They didn't really understand what he was talking about, but they could see the reasoning behind it. The major obstacle was still the disparity in numbers; if they could force Temrai into an ill-advised sortie, they had a chance of killing enough men to bring the odds to within acceptable parameters. It was sound Imperial thinking, and they approved.

Nevertheless, the Imperial army was feeling the strain. A third of the halberdiers and pikemen had to be kept standing to at all times, in case Temrai launched a night attack; another third were fully occupied quarrying and hauling stone shot from the nearby outcrops (and the supply of useful rock was dwindling rather quicker than Bardas had allowed for); he'd had to detail two troops of cavalry to help the artillerymen. The troopers were disgusted at this reduction in status, while the bombardiers complained bitterly about cack-handed horse-soldiers doing more harm than good; the trebuchets themselves were starting to shake apart after so much continuous use, and Bardas found he was alarmingly low on both timber and rope, neither of which were available locally. He'd already given the order to break up the newly built siege towers for timbers and materials (but it didn't look like they'd be needed now, and the hide coverings could be scavenged to make up more pavises, when he could spare a few carpenters from trebuchet maintenance).

It was just as well he had Theudas to help him; he had plenty of soldiers, but only a few competent clerks, and most of his work seemed to be drawing up rosters and schedules, allocating materials, updating stores manifests, the sort of thing he could do if he had to but which Theudas actually seemed to enjoy.

'Don't worry about it,' the boy told him. 'If I can help kill Temrai with a notebook and a counting-board, he's as good as dead already.' Then he launched into a highspeed resume of the latest daggers-drawn dispute between the chief carpenters of number-six and number-eight batteries over who had a better claim to the one remaining full keg of number-six square-head nails- 'Deal with it,' Bardas interrupted with a shudder.

'No problem,' Theudas replied cheerfully.

Bardas smiled. 'It's good to see you've found something you can actually do,' he said. 'You were a pretty rotten apprentice bowyer.'

'I was, wasn't I?' Theudas shrugged. 'Still, everybody's good at something.'

Two men met in a shed on the outskirts of the sprawling Imperial supply depot at Ap' Escatoy. It was dark. They didn't know each other.

After a short interval during which they studied each other like cats, one of them reached under his coat and pulled out a bundle wrapped in cloth. 'Special delivery?' he asked.

'Yeah, that's me.' The other man reached for the bundle. 'I hope you know where it's supposed to be going, because I don't.'

'It says on the ticket.' The first man pointed at a sc.r.a.p of paper attached to the thin, coa.r.s.e string that held the bundle together.

'All right,' the other man replied, frowning. 'So what does it say?'

'I don't know, I can't read.'

The other man sighed. 'Give it here,' he said. He felt the package curiously. 'Feels like a stick. You got any idea what's in here?'

'No.'> 'Your work fascinates you, doesn't it?'

'What?'

'Nothing.'

The next morning, someone stole a horse from the couriers' stable, using a forged requisition. He was believed to have left in the direction of the war. n.o.body could be spared to go after him, but a memorandum was added to the incident log, so that the matter could be dealt with later.

Temrai had got out of the habit of keeping his eyes open. There hadn't been much point the last few days (how many days? No idea). There was nothing to see except dust, which clogged your eyes and blinded you anyway, to the point where it was easier to keep them shut and rely on your other senses for finding your way about. His hearing, on the other hand, had become an instrument of high precision, to the point where he could tell from the noise it made coming down almost exactly where the next shot was going to pitch. This method proved to be ninety-nine per cent reliable, the only serious exception being the shot that landed a few feet above him on the path, dislodging a great ma.s.s of rock and rubble and burying him.

That's strange; I thought you had to die first. He opened his eyes, but there was nothing to see. Hands, legs, head, nothing he could move; breathing was just about possible, but so difficult and time-consuming that it const.i.tuted a full-time occupation. It'd be all right, though; they'd come and dig him out in a minute or so.

a.s.suming, of course, that they knew where he was, or that he'd been buried at all. Now he came to think of it, there was no reason to believe that anybody had been watching when the hill fell on him; seeing your hand in front of your face was something of an achievement, thanks to the dust. How long would it take them, he wondered, to notice that he wasn't there any more? Even if they missed him almost immediately, it wasn't exactly an instinctive response to say, Hey, we can't find Temrai, he must be buried alive somewhere. He thought of the number of times he'd gone looking for someone, failed to find them and given up in a temper, a.s.suming they didn't want to be found.

'It's all right,' said a voice beside him. 'They'll find us. We've just got to be patient and try to stay calm.'

Temrai was surprised, but pleased. He couldn't remember seeing anybody near him when the hill came down (but thanks to the dust, that was hardly conclusive). 'Are you all right?' he asked.