The Two of Swords: Part 13 Read online

  The headache was getting worse. I’m maimed for life, he thought; I’m useless, nobody will want me for anything if I can’t hear what they’re saying. He filled his lungs and yelled as loud as he could; he felt the breath leave him, but heard nothing at all. The effort made him feel sick again, and his mouth filled with acid. Just as well there wasn’t anything in there to come out.

  He closed his eyes, which was worse, so he opened them again, and looked at the horse. Probably a good idea to grab hold of it as soon as possible; if anything spooked it and it bolted, that wouldn’t be good. He stood up, and this time managed to stay up, though the pounding in his skull made him want to cry. Even if there was a spring nearby, he had nothing to carry water in. He took a step, and his knees buckled. God, what a state to be in. At times like this, you can see the real advantages of death; so much less pain and misery than the other thing.

  Maybe the horse was sorry for him. It held still – a mare, he noted, maybe nine, ten years old; well, it had got this far, so maybe it was tougher than it looked. His hands had somehow turned stupid while he’d been asleep, and it took him a long time to lengthen the stirrup leathers. He saw something he recognised, but couldn’t understand what it was doing there. He hoisted himself into the saddle and felt the mare wince and sag. And why not? Misery isn’t something you hoard, it’s something you share.

  Actually, it was better in the saddle than on his inadequate, swaying feet. He waited for his head to stop pumping, then looked up and down the road. Which way? He couldn’t remember. Did we come up the road or down it?

  Up; because there behind him were the Horns, definitely past those; therefore this way. Onwards. He nudged the mare with his heels. She stayed where she was. Women.

  The familiar thing he’d seen was a maker’s mark. Where was it, now? Oh, yes, on the girth. A curious sigil, embossed into the leather. But it was just a plain old ordinary maker’s mark, that was all. Seen dozens like it.

  Down this road somewhere was Senza Belot’s army. They’d have doctors, you could bet your life. They could tell him about his injuries; yes, and he wouldn’t be able to hear a word they said.

  The sun was low in the sky by the time he reached the bottom of the dip, and there wasn’t much point in staring at the ground for hoofmarks or the scrapes of wheels. In front of him the road climbed steeply. Right at the top, he knew for a fact, there was a stream that ran down the side of the rock face and under the road; it came out again about forty yards on the other side, and there was a soft patch, plainly marked with reeds. He decided it would keep till morning. A good night’s sleep, that was what he needed. While there was still light enough to see, he scouted round for enough cover to hide himself and the horse; deaf, he was easy prey. But he found just the thing, a place where a large boulder had rolled down the slope and split in two; the crack was just wide enough for a man and a horse to lodge in comfortably, and there was even a patch of grass, about the size of a spread-out cloak, to take the horse’s mind off her misery for a while. He wrapped the reins round his ankle and double-knotted them to make sure, then lay down with his rolled-up coat as a pillow. He was freezing cold again, and thirsty, and painfully hungry, but at least he couldn’t hear the kites laughing at him.

  The horse woke him up, tugging at his ankle. For a moment he couldn’t remember anything; why something was trying to yank his foot off, why it was so damn quiet. Then it all came back to him, infinitely depressing. He opened his eyes and saw clear blue sky. His forehead was faintly damp with dew. He ran the back of his hand over his brow, then licked it.

  The horse gave him a look that would have touched a heart of stone; he swore at it, disentangled the reins from his leg and levered himself upright by bracing his arms on the sides of the split boulder. A kite got up suddenly a few feet away in a silent explosion of wings. He tried to lead the horse on, but she dug her heels in. At least his head had stopped hurting. Another glorious day in the arsehole of the universe.

  When he reached the road, he saw that it had changed. Loose stones had been split or ground to powder; the verges were shredded with hoofprints; apple cores and a hat monstrously squashed. He stared for a whole minute, then burst out into silent laughter. Senza’s army had passed him in the night, and he hadn’t heard a damn thing.

  At least he knew which way they’d gone, by the direction of the hooves: back the way he’d just come. Incredible; it must have taken them hours to file past the place where he’d been sleeping, and he’d missed the whole thing; like that man who came all the way from North Permia just to hear Oida sing at the Old and New Festival at Choris, got slightly delayed and arrived just as the audience were filing out of the amphitheatre.

  The horse didn’t want to let him get on her back. She wouldn’t keep still, walking on when he had one foot in the stirrup and one on the ground. At one point, he seriously considered leading her all the way back up the damn hill, but eventually he made it into the saddle, using a stone as a mounting block and leaping through the air.

  They couldn’t be that far ahead of him, surely. He tried to kick the mare into trotting up the hill, but she preferred being booted in the ribs to killing herself.

  Halfway up the rise, he realised he knew something important, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Definitely there was something, he knew it for sure. Quite possibly it had come to him during the night, the solution to a problem gradually working its way up to the surface, like an arrowhead in too deep for surgery. He wondered if it was something to do with the bang on the head; perhaps, as well as being deaf for the rest of his life, he’d have great big holes in his memory and not be able to concentrate. Perhaps something significant had happened, but he’d forgotten it completely, because of the concussion; he’d been through something similar once before, except that on that occasion it had been strong drink rather than a boot to the temple. He tried to distract his mind by thinking of what he’d do to that bloody woman if ever he caught up with her, but that didn’t work at all. The stupid thing was, he was more worried about her than anything else. If Forza’s scouts got her, and she had anything in the way of official papers on her, they might well lynch her as a spy.

  Something appeared on the skyline, and he couldn’t make out what it was; the sun was behind it and it was shrouded in dust. He stopped the mare and gazed at it, and made out a man, on foot, running faster than he’d ever seen a man run before. That was all the more remarkable because the runner was wearing full armour, forty pounds of small rectangular steel plates from knee to collarbone and a six-pound crested helmet. A moment later, two horsemen came up over the rise, also going ridiculously fast. They were horse-archers, slim, long-haired young men on ponies, no stirrups, their toes almost trailing on the ground. The armoured runner wasn’t looking round. It was incredible how he could run so fast on an imperfect surface without stumbling, but he was managing it. But the horsemen overtook him, parting so as to come up on either side of him. They passed him, and he was lying on his face, two arrows sticking out of him, like withies growing out of the trunk of a fallen willow. The horsemen crossed each other, miraculously not colliding, wheeled and turned back; a moment later they’d vanished, as though they’d never been there.

  The armoured man was moving, a slow, irregular crawl, dragging himself along with his elbows. He stopped about ten yards from where Corason was sitting. He’d left a furrow behind him in the dust you could’ve sown artichokes in.

  Maybe it was the silence that made it seem so unreal. Corason sat staring for a long time, then nudged the mare into a slow walk. He looked down at the dead man, but didn’t stop. Part of him really didn’t want to see what was going on on the other side of the rise, but he knew he couldn’t stop and go back. He was being drawn, like filings by a magnet.

  As he reached the top and looked down, he remembered what it was that he’d forgotten.

  If the Great Smith had chosen to sell tickets to the battle, Corason knew he could never have afforded to be where he was:
best seat in the house. Below him he could see the whole thing, the greatest show on earth, staged in a natural amphitheatre to delight the discerning student of history. The bigger, faster moving specks were cavalry – Senza Belot, ambushing the ambush; so obvious, he’d chosen practically the only square mile in the two empires where the plan could work, he must’ve set the whole thing up months ago, all leading up to this; the smaller specks, scurrying in terrified swarms, were the last concentration of the forces of the West, rounded up, chivvied and worried and funnelled into killing zones. Horse-archers were the key, of course; he must have got them from Blemya, or the savages in the southern desert who’d been giving the Blemyans a hard time; captured them, maybe, when he and Forza had cooperated for the one and only time.

  It wasn’t real, of course. It was a vision, hallucinations induced by concussion or possibly a prophetic insight, the sort that sages and ascetics came to this place to find. He knew it had to be something of the sort because there was no sound, not even his own heartbeat or the incessant nagging of the kites.

  And he knew exactly what it was that he’d noticed yesterday, when he was fooling with the mare’s stirrups. A maker’s mark on the girth: two crossed hammers over a horseshoe. Of course it was familiar, because he’d seen it so many times; because it was the mark of the Lagriana brothers, that well-respected and old-established family firm of saddlers and harness-makers whose workshop was just outside the main gate at Division and who worked exclusively for the higher echelons of the Lodge. She wasn’t a Western spy, or an Eastern spy pretending to be a Western spy; she didn’t work for either empire, of course not, neither of the Imperial governments employs women in any capacity that doesn’t consist of cooking or cleaning or folding laundry. Only the Lodge, enlightened, all-accepting, recognises that there are some important jobs that a woman can do just as well as a man, and sometimes better. Only the Lodge.

  He watched the battle; it would have been churlish not to, since he’d been granted the unique privilege of this vision. But his mind wasn’t on it. All he could think about was the terrifying, unbearably true fact that the Lodge had sent someone to spy on him, kick his ears out and leave him for dead in the wilderness. Which was impossible. It was an abomination so horrible he couldn’t stand it; he wanted to crawl into a hole and drag a rock over his head, get away from it where it couldn’t follow.

  Something was happening. He realised he hadn’t been following; like when you’re preoccupied and you read the words of a book without taking them in. Another mob of cavalry, a substantial one, had popped up out of nowhere and was driving a straight line down the middle of the battlefield, cutting it in half. No doubt Senza had his reasons, but they seemed to be getting in the way. He saw them collide with a much smaller unit; a mess; were any of Senza’s officers capable of making a mistake like that? Then the small unit was swept out of the way, squashed up against the side of the mountain; it stopped moving, like it was dead. Suddenly all the cavalry was pulling back, breaking on the newcomers like small, ineffectual waves against a breakwater, and Corason realised that the new arrivals weren’t part of Senza’s plan, or his army.

  That would be Forza Belot.

  It was a bit like that puzzle; where you stare at the silhouette of two wineglasses, and suddenly realise you’re looking at a human face. It was a trap all right, but not a trap for the Westerners. Whoever was commanding them (it couldn’t be Forza; he was dead) had sacrificed his entire infantry strength to spring it, but it was a deliberate trap and a deadly one. Senza’s cavalry was being rounded up, kettled and confined in surrounded circles or wedged up against sheer mountainsides; horse-archers, no armour, most of them didn’t bother carrying a weapon apart from the bow, and they were being ground like wheat.

  Whoever that man is, Corason thought, remind me never to play cards with him.

  To sacrifice a hundred thousand just to kill twenty thousand didn’t make sense. He looked for the Western infantry, but he could see no sign of them. They weren’t reforming or regrouping, or even running away. They just weren’t. Made no sense.

  To sacrifice a hundred thousand just to kill one man. Now that made sense.

  Something on the edge of his vision caught his attention. He looked round and saw a boy on a pony. He was young, and he wore his long hair in braids down his back; a loose-fitting white shirt with effeminate sleeves; and a bow.

  The boy looked at Corason for some time, frowning, as though he was a badly placed ornament that spoilt the symmetry. Then he nocked an arrow on his bowstring – no hurry, might as well have been practising at the range – drew smoothly and took careful aim.

  “It’s all right,” Corason said. “I’m not—”

  Then the boy shot him.

  Read on in The Two of Swords: Part 14.

  K. J. Parker is the pseudonym of Tom Holt, a full-time writer living in the south-west of England. When not writing, Holt is a barely competent stockman, carpenter and metalworker, a two-left-footed fencer, an accomplished textile worker and a crack shot. He is married to a professional cake decorator and has one daughter.

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