Evil for Evil (76 page)

Daurenja was the first to break the silence. "I'm guessing they were going to come back and bury them," he said. "It's what they usually do. Looks like something drove them off before they could get around to it."

Nennius had seen dead bodies before, of course: on the frontier, and when he'd ridden with Duke Valens to the relief of Civitas Eremiae. He was no expert, but he knew a bit about the subject: the waxy look of the skin, the degree to which the flesh had shrunk, the beginnings of a stench. A lot depended on how hot it had been, whether it had rained or not, how heavy the dew had been. An informed guess: no more than three days.

"No carts," said one of the junior officers. "But they'd have taken them along with the clothes and armor and stuff, so that's nothing to go on." A long silence; then someone else asked, "So, do you think we won?"

"Took some of the bastards with them, at any rate," the junior officer replied.

"Some of them," he repeated.

The ratio of men to women and children among the Vadani dead: maybe four to one. So far, nobody had recognized anybody they knew among the log-piles. Their faces, Nennius noticed, looked rather like apples that had been stored in the barn a little bit too long.

"I gather it's something of an industry these days, looting the dead," someone else said. "Well organized, a lot of people involved. Makes you wonder where they're planning on selling the stuff, though. I wouldn't have thought there's any customers left."

The man at Nennius' feet had a grave, wise expression on his face, spoiled rather by the damage a crow had done to his left eye. Mezentine. Cause of death a puncture wound in the chest, too big for an arrow. A horseman's lance, possibly a boar-spear with a crossbar, by the way it had caved in the ribs on its way through.

"Have any of the outriders come back yet?" he asked, well aware that the answer would be no; not in the five minutes since he'd last asked the question. For all he knew, his scouts were right there, in one of the neat stacks. "Send out another dozen; and I want the looters found, they may know what happened." He paused, then added: "Bring in half a dozen. If you find any more, I don't need to know what's become of them."

Someone dismounted close by. "It carries on quite a way," he reported. "It's like this for a good half-mile up ahead, and that's as far as I went."

"Suggesting a running battle rather than an ambush," someone commented.

"Which is more or less how the Duke had got it planned, isn't it?" Nobody said,
That could have been us; I'm so glad we weren't there
. No need. Someone else joined the discussion. "Hoofprints and cart tracks," he said. "Of course they're all scraped up, and there's no way of knowing which are the looters. A lot of horses, though."

"Do you think it was the garrison from the inn?" someone asked.

"Too many for that. We were told there was only one squadron."

"That's what I saw," Daurenja said. "In which case, this must be a different unit. It'd be helpful to know which direction they came from, but I expect that's too much to ask."

"Makes you wonder how they found us," someone said. All very calm and reasonable; like men contemplating the root harvest, or the outcome of a race meeting. "Mind you, if their scouts saw us, it wouldn't take a giant leap of imagination to figure out we'd been left behind for some reason and the main body was up ahead. They'd go after the Duke first, and then come back for us."

"Assuming they've won," someone else pointed out. "We don't even know that for sure."

In the pile was a Vadani man with blood caked under his fingernails, lying on top of a Mezentine with both arms missing.
Both
arms. An arm's a bitch to cut through at the best of times, tough as dry wood and springy as willow brash. The angle needs to be just right, and even then it takes a lot of strength and an uncluttered swing. Both arms…

"The looters won't have gone far," the junior officer was saying. "It'll have taken them a good while to strip all this lot, then stacking the bodies; and they won't be moving too fast with so much stuff to carry. If we had any idea of which direction they went in…"

Intelligent questions; good, helpful, intelligent observations. We are, above all, professionals. "We can't stop to bury them," Nennius said. "I don't know whether to press on or go back. If they've won…"

If they've won, then it follows that we're all that's left. Suddenly, we're the sum total of the Vadani people, under the command of Captain (acting duke) Nennius Nennianus. He swung round, looking for somewhere to hide. Pointless, of course. What if the Mezentines were coming, and they really were all that was left? Would anybody survive to tell future generations that it had all been Captain Nennius' fault?

"We'd better keep going," Daurenja said quietly beside him. "If the Mezentines are on their way back to get us, they'll find us easily enough even if we turn round. If Valens is still out there, we need to join up with him as quickly as possible. We'd better get ready for a fight, though. No point in making it easy for them." They were waiting for him to say something. "Yes," he said, "we'll do that. And I want those looters found. The sooner we find out what's happened, the sooner we'll know what we've got to do."

That seemed to be enough. Suddenly, everybody seemed to know what they were supposed to be doing (apart from himself, of course). He envied them. His life so far had hardly been easy, but its lines had been straight and its signposts legible. Apparently, a few naked dead men piled up in orderly ricks beside a road had been enough to change all that. The implication was unwelcome but perfectly clear. Up to now, he'd been missing the point entirely.

Walking back to find his horse, he ran into the Eremian: Miel Ducas, the resistance leader. His instinct was to quicken his pace and turn his head, to avoid pointless conversation. Instead, he slowed down, long enough for the Eremian to catch his eye.

"Excuse me," Ducas said. "Can you tell me what's going on?"

"There's been a battle." Not, when he thought about it, the best way of saying it.

"We've found bodies; ours and theirs. It's not clear who won. We're pressing on, same plan as before."

"Oh." Ducas nodded. "Thank you," he added; reflexive politeness of the nobility, meaningless. "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"No. Thank you," Nennius added quickly. "All under control."

"Thanks to Daurenja." Ducas was looking at him as though pleading for something. "I gather he's pretty well saved you from disaster."

"Yes." Damn all monosyllables. "Yes, we'd have been sunk without him." Nennius hesitated, then made himself go on. "Is it true? What the other man said."

"I don't know," Miel replied. "But I heard him admit it. And I don't see any reason why they'd lie about something like that." Hesitation. "I can see what a difficult position it puts you in."

For some reason, Nennius found the sympathy infuriating; his own reaction surprised him. "Not at all," he said. "Like I told you before, it's not my jurisdiction. I'm not even sure the Duke's got any authority in the case, since it's crimes committed by an Eremian against Eremians in Eremia."

"He's not even Eremian," Ducas said. "Daurenja, I mean. He's Cure Doce by birth, apparently." He frowned. "So who would be the competent authority?"

"Don't ask me, I'm not a lawyer. Your own duke, I suppose. He's with the Vadani, last I heard. But it'd be complicated by the fact that Daurenja's an officer in Vadani service; you'd have to get Valens' permission to proceed against him, even if you could find the proper Eremian official to hear the case; and that's unlikely, since—"

"Since so many of the Eremians are dead now." Ducas nodded reasonably. "But in this case, I suppose the proper authority would be me. Theoretically, I mean. All that side of Eremia used to be my land, and strictly speaking Framain and his household were my tenants." Suddenly he smiled, a nervous, frightened expression.

"Which makes me judge and chief prosecution witness. As though it wasn't complicated enough already. I don't suppose you're the slightest bit interested, are you?"

Nennius looked away. "I've got rather a lot to do right now," he said. "And I need Daurenja, at least until we meet up with Valens' party, assuming they're still alive. I can take formal notice of what you've just told me, but that's about it, I'm afraid. And I'd be obliged if you wouldn't make an issue out of it. At least, not till things have sorted themselves out."

"When the Mezentines have been wiped out to the last man, you mean." Ducas nodded again. "Of course. Thank you for your time. I'm sorry for wasting it." He started to walk away.

"I'll make sure Daurenja doesn't leave the column until we meet up with the others," Nennius said.

"Of course; he's a very useful man, and we owe him our lives." Ducas grinned; not the sad smile of a moment ago. "Pity, that. If he could just desert and go away, it'd make life so much easier. I'll do what I can to keep Framain from cutting his throat in the night."

Nennius' horse wasn't where he'd left it. Someone had moved it, no doubt trying to be helpful. He stood completely still for several minutes, entirely unable to decide what to do. Then they found him again.

There had been, they told him, a development. Come with us, we'll show you. It turned out to be just another stack of dead people, naked and cut about. "Pure fluke," some excitable young officer was saying.

"Someone happened to barge into this pile with a cart, and I was at the wedding, I saw her quite close up, so I recognized her. And then I saw him, too." He was standing over two bodies that had been separated from the others; he looked like a dog standing over a toy it wants you to play with. Such cheerful enthusiasm. Nennius looked at the bodies. A man he recognized; a strange-looking young woman. She'd been hit with a spear through the ribs; her head had been half split, like a stringy log with a knot in it.

"That's General Mezentius," Nennius said. "Who's she?"
Don't you know
? the young officer's face was shouting. "That's the Duchess," he said. "Valens' wife."

23

And again.

As his fingers took the strain of the bowstring, he realized from the pain that something was wrong with them. He glanced down and saw that the skin on either side of the middle joints of his first two fingers had been blistered and rasped away. He pushed the bow away from him with his left arm, hauled the string back with his right until his thumb knuckle brushed the corner of his mouth. The bow was fighting him now, like a panicked animal on a tether. Down the shaft, on the point of the arrowhead, he saw his target (impossible to think of it as a living thing, let alone a human being. His instructor had told him that, years ago: shoot at a deer and you'll miss; shoot at the sweet spot behind the shoulder, size of a man's hand, and you'll have no problem). As the string began to pull through his fingers, he raised his left arm a little for elevation and windage. At just the right moment, the arrow broke free, lifted as the air took the vanes of the fletchings, peaked and swooped like a hawk. He watched it into the target, heard the strike. A straightforward heart-and-lungs placement; he was still moving, but already dead. Valens pinched the nock of another arrow between thumb and forefinger and drew it from the quiver. And again. Only three arrows left in the quiver now. A minute or so since he'd refilled it, frantically scrabbling arrows out of the open barrel while keeping his eye fixed on the next target. Good archers only count the misses; he'd missed four times today. The stupid, stupid thing was that he liked archery, it was one of the few things he actually enjoyed doing (and so, of course, never had time for). Every stage of it soothed and pleased him; the smooth softness of putting the doeskin glove on his right hand, the expression of strength in the draw, the instinctive precision of the aim, the complete concentration, the fine judgment of tremendous forces poised in a moment of stillness, the visceral joy of the loose, the beauty of the arrow's parabola, the solid pride of a well-placed hit. Using this precious, delightful skill to kill people was obscene. Using it to defend himself and his people from extinction was simply ridiculous, like dancing or flirting for your life.

And again. A Mezentine had managed to scramble up the side of one of the iron plates; he'd lost his momentum and was hanging from the top edge by his fingertips, his feet scrabbling wildly for an impossible foothold on the smooth, flat surface. Valens watched him for a moment; he was trying so hard, he'd done so well to get that far when all the others had failed; he wanted him to succeed, simply out of admiration for his courage and agility. The Mezentine got the sole of his foot flat on the plate and boosted himself up, an astonishing effort; he'd got his upper body up onto the edge and was using his weight to balance. He'd made it; so Valens shot him. He slithered back down the way he'd come and pitched in a slovenly heap of limbs on the ground. The cartwheel rolled over his head, crushing it into a mash. As Valens nocked the next arrow, he spared a moment to glance into the barrel. Empty.