The Proof House (55 page)

And there he stuck, because the momentum of the mob easily matched the momentum of the charge. He found that he was looking directly into the face of the man who was holding the halberd; he was wearing an expression of panic and what could only be described as acute embarrassment (which was quite understandable; after all, what do you say to a perfect stranger who’s impaled himself on the spike you happen to be clinging on to?) and if he’d had any control over the muscles of his face, he’d have been tempted to smile, or even wink.

It was the trebuchets that saved him. There were ten of them in action now, and they all loosed in unison, suddenly flattening the men in the ranks directly behind him. With no more pressure from them he found himself being thrust back; then his feet caught on something, he stumbled and went down on his backside, wrenching the halberd out of the other man’s hands. Now it was the other man’s turn to be shot forward; Onasin felt the sole of the man’s boot on the side of his jaw as he stumbled forward, then a savage pain in his shoulder as somebody else stood on that. Then he lost count, and fell asleep.

When he opened his eyes, he found that he was staring into another man’s eyes; but this man was quite definitely dead. In fact there were dead men everywhere. Mass grave. He opened his mouth to scream, but only a little squeak came out, so he tried waving his arms and legs instead. They were scarcely more co-operative than his throat and lungs, but apparently he’d done enough, because he heard someone shout, ‘Hold on, we’ve got another live one.’

He wasn’t sure how they got him out again; the grave was pretty deep and sheer-sided, so he guessed someone had had to jump down in there, on top of all the really dead people. That didn’t strike him as a pleasant thing to have to do - well, he wouldn’t have fancied it himself - so he tried to say thank you as he swung face-down through the air; but if anybody heard him, they didn’t acknowledge it.

‘Will you look at that?’ someone he couldn’t see said as he was flipped over on to his back. ‘He’s never going to make it with a hole that size.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ someone else replied. ‘I knew a man once who was gored by a damn great bull - when they got the horn out you could literally see daylight through him, poor bugger. He made it, though.’

‘All right,’ said the first voice, ‘put him over there with the others. If there’s a medic with nothing better to do—’

‘You’ll be lucky.’

But there was a medic, eventually, a sad-faced man who cleaned and bandaged the wound. Whether his sorrow arose from the horrors he’d seen or the remoteness of his chances of getting paid for his work, there was no way of knowing. By then, of course, the battle was over, the enemy had been killed or captured, the fires put out; and the Islanders were moving wearily about the streets, clearing up wreckage, repairing damage, stumbling over bodies that had been overlooked by the corpse details. After they’d filled up two deep graves, they stopped bothering with such niceties, loaded the dead on to two enormous grain freighters and dumped them in the sea.

Onasin ended up on a similar grain-ship, which had been pressed into service as a prison hulk. It could have been worse; it would have been far worse if it had been an Imperial prisoner-of-war compound. From what he could overhear of the guards’ conversation, they explained away their humanity by claiming that the men in their charge were potentially valuable hostages, but by this time Onasin knew them better than that. This was, after all, their first war; they hadn’t learned yet.

 

‘A tragedy,’ sighed the prefect of Ap’ Escatoy. ‘A tragic, wretched waste. And so futile, too.’

The chief administrator nodded sadly. ‘It is rather heartbreaking,’ he said, wiping honey from his fingertips with a damp cloth. ‘And, as you say, they’ve achieved nothing by it. If anything, they’ve made matters worse for themselves.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ the prefect said. ‘But I’m afraid they’ve forfeited my sympathy, given what they’ve done. I know, vindictiveness is an ugly emotion, but on this occasion I’m going to allow myself that luxury. They will be made to pay for what they’ve done.’

‘Figuratively speaking, of course.’

The prefect smiled grimly. ‘Unfortunately,’ he said. ‘I wish it were otherwise, but it isn’t.’ He shook his head. ‘No, the fact must be faced, and we must come to terms with it: this confounded battle has cost me my refurbishment grant, and with it goes my best chance of rebuilding Perimadeia. All gone, and no actual benefit to anybody. And on reflection it isn’t tragic; tragedy has a certain nobility about it that this shambles lacks. It’s waste, plain and simple.’ He picked up a corner of the tablecloth and rubbed it between the palms of his hands, as if wiping away the unpleasantness of life. ‘But there, it’s done, and now it’s up to us to make the best we can of the circumstances we’re faced with. Practical, pragmatic and positive,’ he added with a little smile - it was obviously a quotation or a reference to something (the prefect was an inveterate slipper-in of apt but abstruse quotations, to the point where it wasn’t safe to assume that anything he said was necessarily his own words) but the administrator couldn’t place it; so he nodded and twitched his lip in token refined mirth. ‘And we should start,’ the prefect went on, ‘with the war. The main thing is to make sure there aren’t any more defeats. Send a letter to Captain Loredan telling him to stay put and do nothing, just make sure Temrai doesn’t slip past him and escape. I want the actual
coup de grâce
to come from the new army, the one the provincial office is sending. Just defeating them won’t be enough; they have to be completely outnumbered and crushed if we’re to put this mess into perspective.’

‘Agreed,’ said the administrator. ‘Now then, what about the Island? That’s going to be awkward, isn’t it? We’re going to have to get some ships from somewhere.’

The prefect shrugged. ‘We’ll need ships anyway, for the war. Potentially, of course, this Island business could be far worse for us than Temrai and losing an entire army.’ He turned his head and sat still for a moment or two, watching a kestrel in a lemon tree in the courtyard below; it had a small bird, still alive, gripped in one claw and was trying rather awkwardly to kill it without letting go of the branch with its other foot. ‘In a way,’ he went on, ‘a major setback like the one Temrai’s given us needn’t be an entirely negative thing. Once in a while, it can even be - well, almost desirable. The point is, there’s no prestige to be gained from overrunning a weak and negligible opponent. A serious defeat, provided it’s followed up in short order by a complete victory, serves to give the enemy a degree of stature. And, of course, it helps keep standards up in the army; nothing like getting your face slapped once in a while to stop you getting complacent. The Island business, though; as I said, there’s nothing to be gained from that. There’s all the difference in the world between a setback along the way to an inevitable triumph, and getting kicked out of a place we’re supposed to have subdued and added to the collection, so to speak. What makes matters worse is that everybody
knows
that the Islanders aren’t worthy opponents or formidable warriors, let alone noble savages whose primitive virtues we can admire, et cetera, et cetera; they’re fat, smug, slightly obnoxious little men who make a living by buying cheap and selling dear.’ The prefect was starting to get annoyed now; there was nothing to show it in his face or his voice, but he’d pulled the ring off his little finger and was twisting it round, as if tightening a screw. When he did that, wise men who knew the score found excuses to go elsewhere for a while. ‘Still,’ he went on, ‘getting worked up about the situation won’t help it, and it might lead us to make more mistakes. For that reason, I feel we ought to leave them alone for a while; at the very least, until the war’s over.’

The administrator nodded. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’ve been giving the matter some thought; what I’d suggest is that we give them some time to reflect on what they’ve done and then send them a letter offering them a chance to buy their lives. Of course,’ he added, as the prefect raised an eyebrow, ‘they’d have to send us the heads of the ringleaders first, as a token of good faith - I always feel that getting rebels to execute their own leaders is far better than doing it oneself; you simply can’t make a martyr of a man whose head you’ve cut off yourself.’

‘An interesting point,’ the prefect conceded.

‘Then,’ the administrator went on, ‘we set the terms; we’ll accept their abject surrender on condition that they put their fleet at our disposal, fully manned - after all, that’s the object of the exercise, and that’s what our betters in the provincial office will judge us by, at the end of the day. We need Islanders to crew the ships; if we slaughter them to a man, we’ll have ships but no crews. If we do it my way, we’ll have crews who are acutely aware that their families and countrymen are hostages for their good behaviour and satisfactory performance—’

‘Thereby,’ interrupted the prefect, stroking his chin, ‘turning this ghastly business to our advantage and making something good out of it after all. Thank you; I do believe you’ve restored my faith in the value of clarity of vision.’

‘My pleasure,’ the administrator replied. ‘One of the pleasures of life, as far as I’m concerned, is taking a disaster and turning it into an opportunity.’ He smiled. ‘Fortunately, it’s a pleasure I rarely have a chance to savour.’

The prefect tilted his head back and gazed at the ceiling. ‘ “Lord, confound my enemies; or, if Thou must confound my friends, grant that I may be their salvation.” Do you know, the older I get, the more I appreciate Deltin; but he’s wasted on the young, and one must have something to look forward to.’

The administrator nodded. ‘So,’ he said, ‘that’s that settled. This is turning out to be a productive morning. Now, if we can only devise some way of rebuilding Perimadeia after all, we’ll have earned our lunch.’

The prefect opened his eyes and looked at him. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘You have an idea.’

‘Just an outline,’ the administrator replied, ‘slowly taking shape in my mind’s eye. And no, I don’t propose sharing it with you quite yet. After all, it wouldn’t do to disclose it until I’m certain it has merit, otherwise I’ll jeopardise my reputation for resourceful and imaginative thinking.’

‘That’s fair,’ the prefect conceded with a wry grin. ‘But you do have an idea. Or an idea for an idea.’

The administrator made a small gesture with his hands. ‘Always,’ he said. ‘But I try to be like a careful doctor: I make sure my mistakes are buried before anybody sees them.’

 

The messenger set out that afternoon, with orders to reach Captain Loredan as quickly as possible. It was imperative, he was told, that he get to the captain before he had a chance to react to the news of the disaster. This was a matter of the utmost importance to the well-being of the whole Empire.

What the dispatcher meant by that was: get a move on, don’t dawdle or stop to pass the time of day with any old friends you may happen to meet, no sight-seeing or shopping, no detours to deliver private letters or trade samples. But the dispatcher was an eloquent man with a forceful turn of phrase, and the messenger was young and rather conscientious. As a result, he set off in a cloud of dust, a map stuffed into the leg of his boot and three days’ rations bouncing against his back in a satchel.

There seems to be a law of nature that the more one hurries, the more ingeniously circumstances contrive to slow one down. He made excellent time as far as the Eagle River ford; but the river was in spate, the first time in thirty years it had flooded in the dry season, which meant he had to retrace his steps and head upstream to the Blackwood bridge. But the bridge wasn’t there; some idiot had been robbing stones from the base of the nearside pillar, and the whole thing had slumped quietly into the river one fine morning, damming it up just long enough to accumulate a sufficient body of water to saturate the sandhills on the nearside bank when eventually the blockage was swept away. In consequence the Blackwood ford was impassable as well, something the messenger found out the hard way when his horse went in up to its shoulders in the newly created quagmire. He tried in vain to get the wretched creature out for the best part of a morning before abandoning it and setting out on foot for the nearest of the border outposts to the south.

By this stage he was almost out of his mind with rage and frustration, so he was immensely relieved when he came across a small caravan of mixed Colleon, Belhout and Tornoys merchants taking a short cut to Ap’ Escatoy. It took him a further two hours of almost lethal frustration to persuade them to accept a provincial office assignat in payment for a horse, even though he knew he was paying nearly double what the animal was worth - it was just his luck that the only decent horse for sale belonged to a Belhout who, belonging to a nation who steadfastly refused on moral grounds either to read or to write, had extreme difficulty in relating to the concept of paper money. In the end he had to use his assignat to buy gold from a Colleon jeweller, at fifteen per cent over standard, with which to pay the Belhout; but the jeweller would only sell him gold by the full ounce, which meant he had to buy three quarters more than he needed . . . By the time he was back on the road, he was a day and half a night behind schedule, and still on the wrong side of the Eagle River.

But he still had his map; so he sat down under a wind-twisted thorn tree with a piece of string for measuring distances, and looked for an alternative route. He found one readily enough; he could carry on following the west bank of the Eagle until it became the north bank, thereby avoiding the need to cross it at all. That was also a much more direct route, which would allow him to make up nearly all the time he’d lost provided he could keep up a good rate of progress. The problem was that it took him within an hour’s ride of Temrai’s fortified camp.

He considered the risks. If he arrived late, going on what the dispatcher had told him, he might as well not arrive at all. One man alone, riding fast; if he dumped his mailshirt and helmet and wrapped his cloak round his head, riding a horse with a Belhout saddle and harness, he reckoned he could pass for a Belhout himself. The worst that could happen would be that he’d be caught, and the message would never get there - no worse than if he arrived late. Looked at the other way round, if he didn’t go this way, he’d most certainly be late, whereas if he took the risk, there was a reasonable chance he’d get there, and in time. From that perspective, he didn’t really have a choice.