The Two of Swords: Part 8 (3 page)

The Beloisa prefecture was a genuine stone, brick and tile building, one of the five still standing. The prefect, a pale, thin man Pleda had never heard of, took the tube as though he’d just been handed a sleeping cobra. “What’s this?” he said.

“You might like to read it,” Pleda suggested.

The prefect had difficulty getting the parchment out of the tube. First he tried to pinch hold of the end with his fingernails, but they were too short. Then he tried prodding with his forefinger, but somehow he managed to get the base of the parchment crumpled so that it jammed. Then he got up, crossed the room to a big rosewood chest on a stand, opened the chest, rummaged around for a while until he found a foot-long piece of ebony dowel, the sort of thing people who need to draw lines on maps use as a ruler. He tried that, but it was too wide to fit in the tube.

“Let me,” Pleda said. He poked the uncrumpled end of the tube with his little finger, and the roll of parchment slid out on to the prefect’s desk. The prefect gave him a baffled look, unrolled the parchment and started to read. Then he lifted his head and stared. “Sorry,” he said. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

Not nearly as much, it turned out, as they’d hoped. Horses, yes, not a problem. They could go to the stables and help themselves from a wide selection of military-spec thoroughbreds. Only trouble was, they were cavalry horses – first class for charging the enemy, no good at all for pulling carts. All the draught horses in the place had been requisitioned, day before yesterday, and loaded on transports and whisked away over the sea. Not best pleased, as you gentlemen can imagine, since there was now no way of moving supply carts, hauling firewood or emptying the latrines. Sorry about that.

Pleda replied that that wasn’t good enough. He had a warrant in the emperor’s own handwriting promising him whatever he needed. It would not go well with the prefect, he suggested, if he was responsible for making the emperor break his promise. The prefect gave him a smile of pure hate and fear and said he’d see what he could do.

An hour later, by some miracle, two carthorses were suddenly available. Sheer coincidence, the prefect told them, some farmer just wandered in off the moor and offered to sell them. They weren’t bad animals, as it happened: shaggy, short-legged, nearly as broad as they were tall. Pleda gave the prefect a list of the emperor’s other promises, and the prefect assured him everything would be loaded on the cart in an hour. Until then, perhaps they would care for a bite to eat in the officers’ mess.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me you’d got a warrant?” Pleda said, with his mouth full. Roast pork with chestnut stuffing.

“We didn’t need anything.”

Farm boy, he thought. No matter. “Well, it’s nice to know it’s there if we need it. Don’t suppose it’ll be much help once we’re out of here, not unless we run into soldiers. Still, you’d better let me keep it.”

Musen looked at him, then nodded. Pleda mopped up gravy with his bread. It would be interesting to find out, he told himself, just how good a thief the boy was. The first thing, of course, would be to remove the warrant from the tube; a fair bet that it was the tube he’d be after, since it was shiny and pretty. “You know the way, I take it.”

“Me? God, no.”

Oh joy, Pleda thought. “Fine,” he said. “They’re bound to have a map.”

“Their maps are all wrong.”

Naturally. “Well, in that case, what do you suggest?”

Musen thought about it for a while. “I may be able to remember enough,” he said. “But we didn’t come straight here, last time. We got lost and wandered about a lot.”

“We?”

“Me and someone else from my village. Don’t know what happened to him.”

Pleda sighed. “Not to worry,” he said. “I’ll ask the prefect nicely for the good map. There’s always one.”

No, there wasn’t. Instead, there was the military survey, seventeenth edition, which still showed Norsuby as the regional capital, or the prefect’s own heavily revised and annotated version, copied for them in rather too much of a rush by a sullen clerk with questionable eyesight and poor handwriting. They chose the survey. After all, Pleda said, where they were going there weren’t any villages or other man-made features, not any more, and the hills and rivers were probably in the same place as they were a hundred years ago; and, anyway, who needs a map when you’ve got the stars to guide you?

“We just keep going north till we can see the Greenstock mountains, then we turn left along the Blackwater till we reach the Powder Hill pass, then due south and we’re there. Adds a couple of days to the journey, but we simply can’t go wrong.”

Musen looked at him. “If you say so.”

“Trust me,” Pleda said. “Geography’s a bit of a hobby of mine. Soon as I get my bearings, I won’t need any stupid maps.”

The main thing was, they still had plenty of food and water; not to mention beer, cider and tea, which Pleda took great pleasure in brewing up on the tiny portable charcoal stove the prefect had given them. “Charcoal,” he explained, as he fried pancakes in a dear little tinned-copper pan, “because there’s no smoke. No smoke, people can’t see you.”

“We’re lost, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know how you can say that,” Pleda replied, wounded. “We’re going north, like I said we should. Any day now we’ll see the Greenstocks.” He paused to flip the pancake. It landed with a delicate
plop
. “True, I can’t actually point to a place on a map and say, this is where we are. But
lost
—”

“Well,” Musen said, sitting down on the rock beside him. “I don’t know about you, but I’m lost. I have no idea where we are.”

“You can’t be lost,” Pleda said. “You’re with me.”

The important thing to bear in mind was, they still had plenty of water. The flour would last another two days, three if they were careful. By then, they were sure to reach the Greenstocks, at which point they would have the river dead ahead of them, and Pleda was an expert angler. “Used to spend hours on the riverbank when I was a boy,” he said, wiping grit out of his eyes. “Give me a bit of string and a bent pin, I can feed us indefinitely.”

“Have we got a bit of string and a bent pin?”

Secretly, however, Pleda was somewhat concerned. There should have been a road. He remembered it clearly from the last time he was here – a long time ago, admittedly, but roads don’t just vanish. Instead, they were creaking slowly over heather, stopping occasionally to lever, drag, lift, worry and prise the cart out of the boggy patches that you simply didn’t see till you were in them. They’d brought two changes of clothes each, but every garment they had was now caked with black, stinking bog mud, which never seemed to dry out and wouldn’t brush or wash off. It was ingrained so deep into their hands that they might as well be Imperials. Even the rain didn’t wash it off, even though it soaked right through to the skin and trickled down their bodies and legs, when the wind was behind it. Water, though; not a problem. Wring out a shirt, you had enough for a week.

“This moor’s so flat,” Musen was saying, “you must be able to see for, what, thirty miles?”

And the horizon was still flat. Quite. Pleda had been wondering about that. Was it possible that the mountains simply weren’t there any more – commandeered for the war effort, stolen by profiteers to make ballast for the fleet, demolished by the Belot brothers in a supreme moment of collateral damage? He doubted it. Even the war couldn’t level mountain ranges, or so he’d always been led to believe.

“It can’t be thirty miles,” he said firmly. “Here.” He reached down inside his shirt and pulled out the map. There wasn’t much left of it. Rain had washed off all the coloured ink, and a lot of the black had rubbed off against his chest; the parchment was soft and squishy, and smelt like newly boiled rawhide. “Look for yourself. There’s no open space three hundred and sixty square miles big. Too many hills and mountains. It must just be a trick of the contours.”

That was his latest phrase. He’d come to believe in it, the way a dying man believes in the gods. He wasn’t entirely sure it meant anything. Musen handed the map back without looking at it. “If you say so,” he said.

“Sod this,” Pleda said. “We might as well stop for the night, get under cover before that lot over there sets in.”

Musen glanced at the skyful of thick, black low cloud dead ahead of them. “It’s an hour away,” he said. “And there isn’t any cover.”

“Shut your face.”

They slept under the cart, their backs in pooled bog water. When he woke up, Pleda could see a brilliant blue sky, and three pairs of boots.

Oh, he thought.

One thing they hadn’t brought was weapons. Asking for trouble, he’d told the prefect. Anybody catches us with weapons in the middle of a war zone, they’ll think we’re spies or saboteurs. Ah well.

He nudged Musen in the ribs. The boy groaned. Not a morning person. “Wake up,” he said quietly. “We’re in trouble.”

Musen lifted his head, opened his eyes and saw the boots. To his credit – Pleda was genuinely impressed – he didn’t panic or anything like that. He rolled over on to his face and crawled out from under the cart. Pleda did the same.

Five men. Three of them were sitting on chairs, the other two standing behind them like footmen in a great house; they might have been sitting for a portrait. Certainly they were dressed for it. The left- and right-hand chairs were regulation military folding, but the middle one was a deluxe model, gilded, delicately curved and tapered legs, arm rests carved into lions’ heads. On it sat the most handsome man Pleda had ever seen in his life. Not particularly tall (it’s so hard to tell when someone’s sitting down); strongly built but perfectly proportioned; beautiful hands with long fingers; dark hair just shy of shoulder length; high cheek bones, quite a long face ending in a square chin, straight nose, clean-shaven, clear grey eyes, a strong mouth, a smile of mild amusement. He was wearing an ornate, heavily embroidered robe with a fur collar, the sort affected by merchants with three times as much money as taste, but on him it wasn’t the least bit flashy or vulgar; he had dark green boots, and a broad-brimmed leather travelling hat rested on his right knee. The men on either side and behind him wore armour, regulation, an eclectic and informed blend of the best of East and West. They sat and watched like the audience in a theatre, waiting for the actors to come on stage.

Pleda scrambled to his feet; Musen stayed kneeling, in the wet. Pleda felt sure he had a reason, though he couldn’t see what it might be. The handsome man smiled. “Good morning,” he said. His voice was soft, deep and accentless.

Five men, three chairs, no horses. “Hello,” Pleda said. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

He’d said something amusing. “You know, I can’t think of anything,” the handsome man said. “The cart’s loaded, and you’ll see we’ve already tacked up the horses. No, I don’t think we need you for anything at all.”

Well, hardly a surprise. “Are you going to kill us?”

The handsome man shrugged. “I haven’t decided,” he said. “What do you think?”

“I wouldn’t bother,” Pleda said.

The handsome man rested his chin on his beautiful right hand. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “My colleagues here reckon it’d be tidier to get rid of you. I took the view that with no food and no transport, it’s a moot point anyway.” He inclined his head just a little toward the cart. “Is that really all you’ve got in the way of supplies?”

“We’re lost,” Musen said. “We’ve been wandering about for days.”

“That’d explain it,” the handsome man said. “Well? Haven’t you got anything to say for yourselves?”

Pleda looked at him, and then at the four men in armour. The handsome man was clean, well-groomed, his gown untorn, his boots unscuffed; the other four looked like soldiers on active service with a good outfit, kit clearly well used but properly looked after. The standing man on the left held a strung longbow, though there was no arrow on the string. “Where’s your horses, then?”

“No horses,” the handsome man said, “we walked. We owe you our lives. I’m sorry we can’t be properly grateful.”

“You’re lost,” Pleda said.

The handsome man considered him for a moment, as if translating him from some abstruse dead language. “True,” he said. “So are you.”

“You don’t want to listen to the boy,” Pleda said. “We’re not lost. We’ve got a map.”

“Is that right?” The soldier on the left leaned across and muttered something in the handsome man’s ear. “I’d like to see it please.”

“I bet.”

“I can take it from your dead body if you’d rather.”

“Fine.” Pleda reached slowly inside his shirt and took out the map. He lifted it so it could be plainly seen, then threw it on the ground. Nicely pitched; about halfway between him and the men. The soldier on the right sighed, got up, retrieved it and gave it to the handsome man.

“This is no good,” he said. “It’s ruined; I can’t read it.”

Pleda smiled. “No, you can’t,” he said. “But I can remember what was on it.”

The handsome man nodded slowly, as if in approval. “Of course you can,” he said. “And there’s only enough flour in your jar to last us a day or two, so if we kill you we’re killing ourselves. But you know where the nearest village is. You’re not the least bit lost, and your friend there’s talking nonsense. Well?”

Pleda was still smiling. “If you’re lost in the wilderness,” he said, “why bother lugging those chairs around with you? Why not dump them?”

“I like to sit down in a civilised manner. They carry them because I tell them to. Well?”

“I know where the nearest village is,” Pleda said. “He only said we’re lost because it’s his village. He doesn’t want to lead the likes of you there. He’d rather die than betray his family and friends. Me—” Pleda shrugged. “Screw them.”

The handsome man looked at Musen, who was still kneeling; he’s got a knife or something, Pleda realised, something he can throw; he’s doing mental geometry. The man on the handsome man’s left said, “We don’t need both of them, do we?”

“Yes,” Pleda said, “you do.”

“I don’t think so,” the handsome man said. “Gatho, shoot the boy.”

The archer took an arrow from the quiver at his waist. Musen stood up and threw. It was a knife – he’d had it hidden in the bandages of his sling, though Pleda had looked for it when the boy was asleep and hadn’t found it – and it didn’t fly true. Rather a lot to ask at that range. Instead, it hit the archer’s cheek side on, cutting him deeply and making him drop his bow. Oh for God’s sake, Pleda thought. Here we go.