wheat beer that had been too heavy to load in the hurried evacuation. Nobly, they left half of the foul-tasting stuff for their colleagues in the light division, who rode in halfway through the afternoon, escorting the villagers and the carts laden with the missing supplies, which they'd ambushed as planned on the narrow road that led to the hidden valley the boy had told Valens about. Neat, flawless, bloodless, as a good operation should be.
Valens sent Nennius to give the villagers a choice; they could leave their homes and join the column, or stay where they were and starve through the winter. It didn't surprise Valens very much to learn that they preferred, unanimously, to stay. He couldn't blame them. Their only contact with the central government within living memory was a callous act of theft, carried out with all the precision and elan of the better class of professional brigand. So much for Valens the Good Duke.
A quick inventory of the supplies told him that the entire resources of Limes Vitae would supply the column, on half-rations, for ten days. Two days to the edge of the desert; eight days across it, if the dead merchant's diary could be relied on and they managed to find the short cut. No need for a decision, now that turning back was no longer an option. Just to be sure, he told Nennius to ask the villagers if they'd seen any Mezentines; black-faced men in armor on big horses. By their reaction, the villagers must have assumed he was making fun of them.
Climbing the mountain proved to be far harder than anybody had anticipated. Valens had assumed it would be slightly but not much more difficult than slogging up the slopes and scarps they'd tackled already; slow, painful climbing with occasional halts to fill in and rebuild crumbled road ledges or bridge storm-streams running down the hillsides. The dead merchant had managed it, with his team of mules. It had taken him two days.
Halfway through the first day, Valens realized why the merchant had used mules rather than a cart. Quite possibly there had been a road there, once upon a time when the world was new. Now, however, there was a thin scratch that zigzagged across the face of the mountain, the sort of line Vaatzes the engineer might have scribed on a piece of metal, rubbing in blue dye to make it visible. No earthly chance of taking a cart further than the first mile.
At a hastily convened meeting of the engineering department, Valens asked urgently for suggestions.
'It's a question of time,' Vaatzes said, and for the first time since he'd met him, Valens saw that he was worried. 'Yes, we could widen the road by cutting into the mountain; to a limited extent, we could bank up the other side with rocks. At a rough guess, working flat out we could reach the top in under a month. In two days…' He shrugged. 'Either we turn back now, or we ditch the wagons, load what we can onto the horses' backs and walk. I don't suppose it'll take us that much longer on foot than it would've done if we could've taken the wagons, if that's any consolation.'
'Your bloody trader-' Valens interrupted.
'If he could do it, I don't see why we can't,' Vaatzes replied. 'I didn't get the impression from reading the journals that he was any sort of adventurer, blessed with superhuman strength and endurance. He regarded crossing the mountains as a chore and a pain in the bum, but no worse than that.'
'Just suppose we do make it over the mountains,' someone said. 'What then? I thought the idea was that the carts were going to be our mobile fortress. And there's shelter to think about.'
'The carts won't go up the mountain,' Daurenja said. 'That's a plain fact, like something in mathematics you can demonstrate by doing a calculation. If we go back down the mountain, we've got eight days and then we starve. No disrespect, but I can't see what there is to talk about.'
They left the carts. It wasn't the most popular order Valens had ever given. The sight of the Vadani people struggling up the road with enormous loads strapped to their backs, like city people out for a country picnic, would've been comic in a different context. As a gesture of solidarity, Valens made the cavalry dismount and load supplies on their horses, an initiative which at least had the merit of wiping the smirks off their faces. Cavalrymen dislike walking. Even then, it was a full-time job to stop the civilians from dumping their packs as soon as the gradient started to get tiresome; they seemed to be under the impression that there was more than enough food and forage piled up on the horses, and the Duke was making them carry stuff up a steep hill as part of a monstrously inappropriate practical joke. On the first day there were ninety-seven casualties-twelve deaths, sixteen broken legs, six non-fatal heart attacks and sixty-three debilitating sprains, falls and similar injuries-and they lost the use of fourteen horses.
The second day was no improvement; the worst part of it being the realization that there was going to have to be a third day, and quite possibly a fourth. This meant a further rations cut, which in turn led to a spate of nocturnal food looting, only just short of a full-scale riot, which cost another seven lives. By noon on the third day, the death toll had passed fifty, with three times that number of sick and injured incapable of walking. The soldiers were demanding to be allowed to jettison their armor; a fair number hadn't waited for permission, and the sun sparkled on a trail of abandoned metalwork marking the column's ascent, like the track of a snail. To check this before it got out of hand, Valens dressed in full armor to lead the way, a gesture he bitterly regretted after the first half-hour as the arches of his greaves chafed his ankles into mince.
Just before dusk, someone told him that there was smoke in the valley below them. Since the only inflammable material on the whole mountain was the carts they'd left behind two days before, the implications were disturbing enough to take his mind off his aching feet for the last hour of daylight.
'It's possible,' someone conceded at that night's staff meeting. 'We've brought horses up here, so I guess they could too. Or maybe they've dismounted like we did; though in that case, I don't see them catching us up in a hurry.'
'They won't try and attack us on the mountain,' someone else asserted confidently. 'They'll wait till we're over the top and down on the plain. If they're dismounted and leading their horses, they won't have to try and catch us up; they can do that as soon as they're back on level ground again.'
'There's no guarantee it's the Mezentines at all,' someone else put in. 'Could be scavengers, like the ones we ran into earlier.'
'Unlikely,' Nennius murmured. 'We killed them all, remember? Besides, why bother to burn our carts?'
'No use to them without horses.'
'True, but why let everybody between here and Sharra know where they are?'
'The Mezentines would have a reason to burn them,' Nennius argued. 'To stop us circling round behind them and going back to them. They'll want to be sure they've seen the last of those armor plates.'
'If the Mezentines want to attack us on the plain, I say let 'em,' someone else said. 'The rate we're getting through the food and hay, we'll be able to afford to remount the cavalry by then, so we can give them a fight. By the time we get down there, they'll be in no better condition than us. Worse, probably; they've had further to come without fresh supplies; they won't have found anything at Limes Vitae, that's for sure.'
Midafternoon on the fourth day, and the view from the top was obscured by low cloud and mist. Below, a long way away, there was supposed to be a desert, with the Cure Hardy on the other side of it, and Valens was taking his people there because he had no choice. Squinting into the mist and seeing nothing, he retraced the workings of the mechanism that had brought him here. It had started with Orsea-no, to be fair, it had started with the peace settlement between the Vadani and the Eremians, which his father had arranged with her father, the Count Sirupat. While the Eremians and the Vadani had been at each other's throats, the Perpetual Republic had ignored them both, since they posed her no threat. Then there was peace, which spawned Orsea's original crass mistake; then Ziani Vaatzes-he'd played some part in all this-gave the Republic a pretext for disinfecting its border of undesirable savages; but instead of crumpling up like a leaf in a fire, the Eremians had fought too well, forcing the war to grow like a clever gardener growing early crops in a hotbed. That was when he'd been drawn in, for the sake of a woman he'd fallen in love with because (he knew the mechanism operated in a loop) of the peace negotiations, which had brought her to Civitas Vadanis as a hostage. For her sake he'd thrown the Vadani into the war; now, for the war's sake, he'd lost her forever, while still having her on his hands like someone else's precious possession left in his unwilling care; and he was here, on top of a mountain looking down at a desert which led to the wilderness of the barbarian nomads, his last and only hope of survival. Wonderful.
Going down the mountain was much, much harder than getting up it. For some reason Valens couldn't begin to imagine, someone had gone to the trouble of making the pathetic little track they'd followed up the mountain. Maybe there'd been a village there once, or a frontier station or a signal post, or a temple to some obsolete god. Nothing had gone down the mountain in a long, long time except water (and, presumably, Vaatzes' dead merchant and his mules). There was no track. To start with, they tried following the course of a broad stream, but it quickly fell away into a series of waterfalls plunging off sheer edges. No wild animals were stupid enough to come up here,
