The clot that had formed in Valens' throat eased a little, and he breathed in deeply. 'What about General Mezentius? And the Cure Hardy?'
(He'd tried to say, and my wife, but for some reason he felt embarrassed about using the word, as though it was somehow an admission of weakness.)
The officer didn't answer. After two, maybe three seconds, Valens asked, 'All of them?'
'I can't say for sure,' the officer replied. 'But I saw them stop and board the coach; and Mezentius was riding with them at the time. That was two days ago, and nobody's told me…'
'It's all right,' Valens heard himself say, as a gate closed in his mind, shutting some things out and some things in. 'You've done well.' (Was that really him speaking? It seemed so improbable, somehow.) 'For a while there, I thought we'd had it.' I ran away, was what he wanted to say. 'Just my luck to have missed the good bit.' He took a deep breath. 'We need to get moving again,' he said. 'What about horses for the carts?' And after that he was back to business, the kind of thing he was competent to deal with. Others joined him, clotting around him like blood in a wound. He could feel the Vadani beginning to heal about him. Soon he was giving orders, pulling out of his mind the important details that other people tended to overlook but which he always remembered. They were giving him back his place in the machine-the axle, spindle, driveshaft, from which the other components drew their power. He had no trouble performing the function, but he felt like an imposter-the man who turned and ran, masquerading as the Duke. If only he'd known, he kept telling himself; if he'd known the battle was going their way and his bit of it was an unimportant aberration, he would never have even considered running; he'd have held his place on the deserted cart, kept fighting, almost certainly been killed. Instead, while he was crouched down halfway up the hillside, an Eremian and a cavalry colonel whose name was only vaguely familiar to him had checked the enemy advance, driven them back, wiped them out and died in the process. Stupid guilt, irrational, pointless and far too strong to beat.
Apart from the fact that they were alive and had won a stunning victory, everything was about as bad as it could be. Horses: half of the wagon teams had been run off or killed, and the mounts of dead cavalrymen-plenty of those-weren't trained to drive, needless to say. More than a quarter of the carts themselves were damaged to the point where they couldn't move. This problem was, to some extent, mitigated by the number of dead civilians, who wouldn't be needing transport anymore. On that score, the best that could be said was that there were still plenty of them left; sobbing, shrieking, refusing to obey orders, demanding to speak to someone in authority, rushing about searching for lost relatives, fussing about the burial of their dead, needing to be fed and watered and listened to. Valens could probably have coped with them better if they'd been angry with him, or blamed him. Instead, they took to cheering him whenever he broke cover; women grabbed at him as he scurried past, blessing him for saving them. They were firmly convinced that he'd led the counterattack and wiped out the Mezentines. He overheard men swearing blind that they'd seen him at the front of the cavalry charge, in shining armor, sword in hand, swiping off heads like a boy with a stick topping nettles. He wanted to feel proud, honored, choked with emotion; instead, he found it irritating and desperately inconvenient. He gave them permission to bury their dead, mostly to give them something to do and keep them from getting under his feet. The column was stuck, after all. Food was running out (they should have reached the first of the supply dumps by now), there was plenty of water in the river down in the valley but a shortage of casks and barrels to carry and keep it in. Just when he needed him, Mezentius was thoughtlessly, selfishly dead, and the civilians had taken an instant dislike to Major Tullio, the officer who'd led the vital counterattack and done most of the work since. For some reason they blamed him for the deaths and losses, saying he'd hung back, waited too long, stood by while women and children were butchered. A whole long day of that sort of thing; and then the other column arrived.
If Valens had spared them a thought since the battle, it was only a vaguely guilty relief that they hadn't been there to be slaughtered with the rest. The first he knew about their return was when some young fool whose face he vaguely remembered from somewhere came charging up to him while he was busy with a map, and told him his name was Captain Nennius, and he needed seven tons of flour as a matter of urgency.
When Nennius had recovered sufficiently from Valens' reaction to explain himself coherently, they managed to sort out everything that needed to be done straightaway, and Nennius went away to let his people know they'd found the Duke, but there wasn't going to be any food. They rode in with their carts loaded down with dead people, which didn't really improve the situation. Valens did his best to make Nennius into a substitute hero, but since he hadn't actually fought anybody or mended any carts with his own hands, it didn't work terribly well. There weren't nearly enough picks, mattocks, buckets, spades and shovels for the burial details, the ground was rock hard, and soldiers kept drifting away to help with grave-digging when they should've been doing something useful. And as if that wasn't enough…
He knew Miel Ducas, vaguely; they were distant cousins, after all, and he'd met him during the peace negotiations to end the Eremian-Vadani war. Back then, as he remembered, the Ducas had been tall, handsome, bouncy and insufferable. Now he was just tall, and a nuisance Valens could have done without. He fended him off for a while with commiserations on the death of his cousin. That didn't work too well, since it was the first the Ducas had heard of it.
'Jarnac?'
'Yes. He died very bravely. In fact, if it hadn't been for him, I don't-'
'Jarnac's dead?'
'Yes.'
The Ducas frowned, as if he'd just been told that his cousin had been elected king of the elves. Then he shook himself like a dog and said, 'I need to talk to you about this man Daurenja.'
Talk about changing the subject. 'What about him? I haven't seen him for days, not since we left the city.'
The Ducas explained, and when he'd finished, the headache that Valens had been warding off all day was suddenly there, fully formed and perfect as a hen's egg in a nest of straw. 'He's with your lot now, then?' he said.
'Yes. Captain Nennius has placed him under informal arrest, whatever that means.'
Precisely nothing. Valens suspected it was something the young officer had made up on the spur of the moment, to keep the Ducas quiet. Officer-level thinking; he was impressed. 'I'm not quite sure what you want me to do,' Valens said. 'I'd have thought it's a matter for Duke Orsea rather than me.'
'That's what Nennius said,' the Ducas replied. 'Though, properly speaking, under Eremian law the proper court of first instance would be the district assize for the place where the crimes were committed. Meaning me,' he added mournfully. 'Orsea would only be involved if Daurenja was convicted and lodged an appeal. But there's a problem with that, since I'm the chief witness. I'm the only outside party who heard the confession, you see.'
As well as the headache, Valens had a sort of prickly feeling at the nape of his neck, something halfway between a tickle and an itch. Eremians, he thought.
'I'm afraid you're going to have to sort it out yourselves,' he said, 'and then there'd have to be extradition proceedings, if Daurenja decided he doesn't want to come quietly; I can't just hand him over to you neatly wrapped in straw and twine. More to the point, right now he's my chief engineer, until that bloody Mezentine turns up again. You say he was the one who fixed all those broken carts?'
'Yes, but he's a murderer. And a rapist, and I don't know what else. You can't just let him prowl around as though nothing's happened. You've got to do something about it.'
There; that was all it took, to turn Valens the model duke into a tyrant who didn't give a damn about justice. 'Come to think of it,' Valens said quietly, 'I seem to remember you're a bit of a fugitive from justice yourself. Weren't you under arrest for treason when Civitas Eremiae fell?'
Clearly the Ducas hadn't been expecting that. Long pause, then, 'Strictly speaking, yes. But that was-'
'In which case,' Valens said, 'I'm afraid I'm going to have to place you under informal arrest,' wonderful phrase, that; he'd have to promote Nennius to full colonel for it, 'until things have calmed down a bit and I've got the time and the energy to be bothered with the fine points of Eremian jurisprudence. Talking of which: if you're an indicted traitor, would that debar you from sitting in judgment on Daurenja? I don't know how you used to do things in Eremia, but I imagine a clever lawyer could have some fun with it. I guess we'd have to try you for treason first.' He smiled savagely. 'I know,' he went on. 'Why don't you go and talk it over with Orsea, right now? I'm sure he'd be delighted to see you after all this time. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a war to fight.'
He started to walk away; then the Ducas said: 'Fine. You could join us. Maybe you'd care to explain to Orsea
