The Escapement (12 page)

"You don't…" Psellus didn't say the rest of it:
you don't actually know, you
haven't actually been there yourself
. Well, why should he? It didn't matter, after all. But for some reason he felt surprisingly disappointed. "I'm only guessing the mills are big enough to block the river," he heard himself say. "You might get that checked, if you wouldn't mind."

Curt nod (he doesn't like being found out, Psellus guessed).

"It's actually quite important," Psellus went on, "because the ambassador is talking about trying to get his men in there by water, rather than on foot. He doesn't think there'd be much hope of getting there from the south; coming down through the forest from the north would be better, but even so he's afraid his people would be seen by the logging teams on their way. But if they could float right up to the sheds on barges, he feels they're in with a chance, of sorts. Hence," he went on with a smile, "we do need to know which direction the river runs, and since we don't seem to have any other reliable maps…"

"Understood," Phryzatses said. "I'll see to it." He hesitated, then added: "I should point out that we don't actually know these sheds are where the engines are going to be built, it's just a supposition at this point. I wouldn't want—" Psellus nodded. "Quite," he said. "But obviously he needs large buildings to make the engines in, and you tell me there aren't any others that'd be suitable. So it must be these."

"It would appear likely, yes."

It would appear likely;
but of course, that's one of the tiresome things about war. So much guesswork and supposition, when it'd be so much more civilised to write the enemy a polite letter and ask him if the sheds really are his arms factory. Even more civilised, of course, and hugely more sensible not to have a war at all.

"Let's hope you're right," he said wearily. "They may be Cure Doce, but they're the only soldiers we've got. The days when we could afford to be extravagant with our armies because there's always plenty more where they came from are over, I'm sorry to say. Still, I'm sure you've done everything possible, so we'll leave it at that. Just find out about the river, please, if you could. How long will that take, do you think?" When Phryzatses had gone, Psellus sat and stared at the map for a long time, screwing up his eyes to read the little numbers, and looking them all up in turn in the key at the bottom. He tried to distil the lines and colours into a picture, but he couldn't. Hardly surprising, he told himself. Apart from his visit to Civitas Vadanis, he'd only been out of the City a few times in his life, and never so far that he couldn't see the top of the gatehouse towers in the distance. Great rivers, hidden valleys, forests—he believed in them, the same way men believed in gods they knew they'd never see, but his imagination skated off them, like a file off hard steel. Later that evening, he sent for the Cure Doce ambassador, showed him the map, promised him a copy by morning, and gave the formal order to proceed with the raid. Afterwards, he walked slowly down the hundred and seven granite steps from the reception rooms to the courtyard. It was a clear night, and the stars were shining; their light shocked him, and for a moment he had an unaccountable feeling that they were falling down on him, like snow, or the shining heads of a volley of arrows.
4

Linniu Matsinatsen was the eldest son of a fairly large farm in the Goinsolinnsa valley, the soft, misty heart of the rambling Cure Doce country. He was nineteen years old, which meant he knew how to plough and harrow, cut and stack hay, feed and herd cattle, carry water, castrate and dehorn the young bullocks, plane and mortice wood and forge nails; in a few years' time, he'd inherit the duties of pruning the fruit trees, looking after the bees, cutting the bracken for winter bedding, taking the pigs to the wood in acorn season and raising and killing the geese. After that, nothing would change until his father got old, at which point he'd take over the sowing and the harvest, slaughtering, malting, and the rest of the major work, subject to his father's instructions as to when, where and how. By then, of course, he'd have a son of his own, who'd start with feeding the poultry and slowly work his way up. Before the summons came, he'd never been more than seven miles from the farm, and he could remember the names and faces of everybody he'd ever met. Now he was an archer in the People's Defence Force. He wasn't quite sure why; it was something to do with a vast army of savages who'd burst out of some place he'd never heard of and were planning to destroy the great city of Mezentia, where the axe-blades, hammerheads, saws, chisels, kitchen knives and needles came from, and this clearly couldn't be allowed to happen. Why this was clear he didn't know and didn't like to ask.

Being a soldier was something he'd dreamed about, needless to say. His uncle Loimen had been a soldier, for a month, thirty years ago. Loimen was older than Father, who'd been too young. He'd gone with fifty or so other sons of other considerable farms to fight the Vadani duke over something to do with water, and it had been the turning point in his life, for several reasons. He'd been away from the valley, for one. This automatically made him the district's leading and only authority on world affairs, strange and obscure customs in foreign lands, medicine, history and geography. He'd acquired (accounts varied as to how) a vast treasure in gold, silver and bronze, looted from the dead: buckles, buttons, a penknife with stagshorn scales, a fork and two pairs of scissors, together worth more than forty pence, and this wealth had made it possible for him to buy the pedigree Swayback bull on which was founded the celebrated Matsinatsen herd. He still owned a genuine Mezentine sword, which hung in stupendous honour over his fireplace. Finally, he'd lost an eye, and three fingers from his left hand, which meant he'd forfeited the main farm when his father died, since he wasn't up to running it, and was packed off to Lower End. Such an ambiguous precedent left Linniu feeling uncertain when the summons came, and his parents' reaction hadn't helped much to clarify his mind. Mother had burst into tears and declared that he couldn't possibly go; he'd die, or come back horribly mutilated, and then there'd be nobody to run the farm and they'd all starve to death and Rinoj would never get a husband and it was the end of the world. Father hadn't said anything much, but Linniu got the distinct impression that he was pleased, because once Linniu came back he'd be the soldier, with a sword of his own for the fireplace, and Loimen wouldn't be able to throw his useless weight around quite so much in future; also, if there was any vast treasure in gold, silver and bronze to be had (and to hear Loimen talk, all you had to do was bother to fill your pockets), he had plenty of ideas on what it could be spent on, starting with a thoroughbred boar and a new share for the second-best plough. As for getting killed: well, the world was a dangerous place, but only idiots like his brother let it hurt them. So far, it hadn't been so bad. Mostly it had been walking, and Linniu was good at that. He'd walked from the farm to the muster at Watersmeet, where he'd met the other soldiers. It had taken him a while to get used to so many strangers, but once he'd accepted the fact that he couldn't learn all their names or ask them all about their farms and herds, he'd realised that mostly they were just his own reflections in water; sons of other farms, his own age or thereabouts, most of them wearing older boots or shirts than him. He'd insisted on dressing in his best, of course. The pleasing thing was, so had they.

The camp at Loigna had been the same, only more so. The People's Defence Force had given them tents to sleep in, and stale bread and very poor bacon to eat (just as well, since his three days' rations from home had had to last him the best part of a week), and a genuine Mezentine helmet that was too small and hurt his head, but he didn't actually have to wear it all the time, so that was all right. He'd brought his own bow, naturally, and all seventeen arrows. He was a bit concerned on that score. They'd told him he was unlikely to have a chance to find them again after the battle (indeed, there might easily be more than one battle), and the arrows they'd brought along in big birchwood barrels were no good at all, warped in the shaft, the wrong spine for his bow and fletched with feathers from some bird he'd never heard of before. He had an uneasy feeling that when he got home, a fair slice of his vast treasure of gold, silver and bronze would have to be spent getting a decent set of arrows from the fletcher at Gollinagap. He'd tried to raise the issue (tactfully) with the officer, but the man had just looked at him.

Then came basic training, which left him more bemused than ever. Most of it seemed to be learning how to stand (something he'd been doing since he was a small child, but not the right way, apparently), walk up and down in an artificial manner, and hold the spear and shield he hadn't got in the approved manner. It was comforting that none of the other farm boys understood it or managed to get it right, but he couldn't help wondering. If a battle involved standing with your feet together until a sergeant told you to stand with your feet apart, it couldn't be anything like what he'd imagined. Eventually, however, they moved on to archery, which was reassuring, since he knew all about that. Indeed, to his great surprise and lasting joy, he came third, with eight golds out of ten at seventy-five yards. For that they made him a lance corporal, an honour he'd have appreciated even more if they'd explained what it meant.

After the archery competition, they were declared fully trained. After all, the sergeant told them, they were all country lads; they were fit, they knew how to move quietly, how to shoot; they'd all been beaters on driven days, or long-netted rabbits, so they knew how to work as a team, obey the line captain's orders, be where they were supposed to be and not make a noise. As far as the sergeant was concerned (he was Eremian, in his early fifties, with a scar on his face you tried not to look at), that made them better soldiers than arrow-fodder recruited in some town. Their officer wasn't so bad, he added, as officers went. They'd be all right. From Loigna they moved on to Sicrypha; not walking, riding in carts, which made him think of haymaking when he was a boy. By now he was something of a hero, because of his eight out of ten, and because his boots were practically new and not hand-me-downs, and because when the cart got stuck in deep ruts in a stony lane, he'd taken charge and got it out again by rolling it back just far enough to pack the ruts with withy brash—didn't everybody know that was what you did?

Apparently not.

At Sicrypha, they got paid. That made him very happy. Twelvepence in coined money, not lead tokens; vast treasure already, and they hadn't so much as seen a single marauding savage. He tied the coins up securely in a bit of cheesecloth. From Sicrypha they went to Doulichar, where they got off the carts and walked for two days until they met up with the rest of the army. That was a remarkable thing. Later, someone told him that they'd mustered over two hundred, something he found hard to believe, even though he'd seen the huge sprawl of tents with his own eyes. Two hundred people, all in one place. It was impressive, even magnificent, but it made him feel uneasy.

Doulichar (he'd heard the name often enough, never expected to go there) was a river town, built around a wharf where the Lonazep barges stopped to load. The carter who collected their malt, oats and honey came here twice a year; he'd talked about the rows of squashed-up-together houses and sheds, the strangers that not even the locals knew, the brown faces of the Mezentine buyers who came down once in a blue moon. He'd always listened to that sort of talk with a blend of wonder and scepticism, half believing it as though it was fairy-tales or his uncle's more extreme reminiscences. Actually to be there, seeing it, made him feel very strange, as if he'd wandered into a story himself, like the boy who fell asleep on the haunted bank and was kidnapped by the elf-king's daughter. It was all very wonderful, but he wasn't sure he liked it. It seemed like a terrible lot of trouble and expense to go to, if the job they were supposed to be doing was as simple and straightforward as everybody seemed to think. The impression he'd got from the sergeant had been of a slightly more dangerous version of a boar-hunt, but as he watched the other companies shooting at the butts or practising the standing-with-feet-together thing over and over again, he wasn't at all sure. Boar-hunting, after all, wasn't exactly difficult, so long as you observed a few simple rules. There had to be more to it than they were letting on.

Three days at Doulichar, very busy doing nothing; and then the barges the carter had told him about turned up early one morning, except they weren't there to load oatmeal.

"We're getting on that?" he heard someone say.

"Yes." The sergeant; an Eremian, like the one at Loigna. "What about it?"