He frowned. Men were walking past him, trudging to their deaths like laborers off to work in the early morning. He let them pass him; some of them shouted to him or at him, but he took no notice. The one good thing was, it didn't matter anymore what anybody thought of him. He was discharged from duty, and the rest of his life was his own.
(In which case, he thought, I'd like to see her again before I die. A mild preference; it'd be nice to die in the company of the one person he'd ever felt affection for, who for a short while had felt affection for him. He frowned, trying to figure out where she was likely to be.)
'What's happening,' an old woman asked her. 'Can you see?'
'No,' she lied. 'There's too much going on, I'm sorry.'
'But we're winning,' the old woman said. 'Aren't we?'
'I think so.'
Not that she understood this sort of thing. She knew it was very technical, like chess or some similarly complicated game. You had to know what you were looking at to make sense of it. But unless the Vadani had some devastating ruse up their sleeves (and that was entirely possible), it wasn't looking good. Too much like the last time, except that it was happening in the open rather than in among crowded buildings. The line of horsemen she'd seen riding out to meet the enemy (the celebrated Vadani cavalry, generally acknowledged as the best in the world) simply wasn't there anymore; it had been absorbed like water into a sponge; evaporated; gone. There were more soldiers out on the edge of the oasis, she knew, but it seemed unlikely that they'd make any difference. Of course, she wasn't a soldier, and there wasn't anybody knowledgeable around to ask.
'The infantry'll hold them,' an old man was saying. 'It's a known fact, horses won't charge a line of spear- points. They shy away, it's their nature. And then our archers'll pick 'em off. They'll be sorry they ever messed with us, you'll see.'
Behind her, nothing but still, brown water. Would it hurt less to swim out and drown, or stay and be slashed or stabbed? It was a ludicrous choice, of course, not the sort of thing that could ever happen. To be sitting here, calmly weighing up the merits of different kinds of violent deaths; drowning, probably, because she'd swim until she was exhausted and then the water would pull her down, and the actual drowning wouldn't take long. She considered pain for a moment: the small, intolerable spasm of a burn, the dull, bewildering ache of a fall, the anguish of toothache, the sheer panic of a cut. She knew about the pain of trivial injuries, but something drastic enough to extinguish life must bring pain on a scale she simply couldn't begin to imagine. She'd seen the deaths of men and animals, the enormous convulsions, the gasping for breath that simply wouldn't come. She knew she wasn't ready for that; she never would be, because there could be no rapprochement with pain and death. She felt herself swell with fear, and knew there was nothing she could do to make it better.
She looked round instinctively for an escape route, and saw the old man and the old woman. They weren't looking at her; they were staring at a man walking quickly toward them.
('Isn't that the Duke? What's he doing here? He's supposed to be-'
'Shh. He'll hear you.')
Valens; of all people. It was a purely involuntary reaction; all the breath left her body, her mouth clogged and her eyes filled, because Valens had come to save her. At that moment (she hadn't forgotten Orsea, or the fact that she didn't love him, or that the sight of him made her flesh crawl and she didn't know why), she knew, she had faith, that she wasn't going to die after all. Valens would save her, even if he had to cut a steaming road through the bodies of the Mezentines like a man clearing a ride through a bramble thicket. She knew, of course, how little one man could do on his own, how hopeless the situation was, how even if they escaped from the Mezentines they had no chance of crossing the desert on their own. Those were unassailable facts; but so was his presence-her savior, her guarantee, her personal angel of death to be unleashed on the enemy. She tried to stand up, but her legs didn't seem to have any joints in them.
'We should try and get over to the left side,' he was saying. 'I've been watching, and their left wing's trailing behind a bit.' He stopped and frowned at her. 'Well? You do want to get out of this, don't you?'
'Yes, of course.'
'Fine.' He nodded. 'I've left a couple of horses. Can't go quite yet; if they see us making a break for it, they'll send riders to cut us off. But when the attack's gone in, they won't be so fussy about stragglers.' Suddenly he grinned at her. 'I'm running away,' he said. 'No bloody point hanging around here. The trick's going to be choosing exactly the right moment to make the break.'
The old woman was staring at him; she'd heard every word, and her face showed that her world had just caved in. 'Well?' he said. 'Are you coming or aren't you?'
The infantry screen lasted longer than expected; longer than it takes to eat an apple, not quite as long as the time you need to bridle a horse. A quick glimpse out of the corner of his eye as they rode for the little gap on the left flank told him that the Vadani were fighting like heroes. He scowled; the timings were precise, and if they held the Mezentines up for too long, they could screw up everything.
'We'd better go now,' he shouted, not turning his head, hoping she could hear him.
He kicked the horse on. It was a big, sullen gelding, civilian rather than military but all he'd been able to find. It sidestepped, pulling hard on the reins. He slapped its rump with the flat of the hanger, and it bustled angrily forward. He felt the hanger slip out of his hand; his only weapon. Oh well.
'Come on,' he yelled, and gave the horse a savage kick in the ribs. He saw its neck rise up to smack his face, felt his balance shift and his left foot lose its stirrup. He hung for a moment, then knew he was falling backward over the horse's rump. As he fell, he saw her fly past; then his shoulder hit the ground and his body filled with pain. He felt it take him over, driving every thought out of his head. Hoofs were landing all around him-his horse, the enemy, he neither knew nor cared. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
He heard a scream, assumed it was his own, realized it wasn't. He opened his eyes and tried to move.
It didn't hurt at first; he'd managed to prop himself up on one elbow before he made one slight movement too many and the pain flooded back. It took seven or eight heartbeats to subside.
Next to him, he could see now, lay a Mezentine. There was an arrow lodged in his temple; it had driven through the steel of his helmet but hadn't managed to get much further, since Valens could see the tips of the barbs. Not deep enough, evidently, to kill outright; the man's lips were moving, and his eyes were huge with enormous strain. For good measure his left leg was bent at the knee almost at right angles, the wrong way. That'll have been the fall, Valens decided. Falling off horses can be bad for you.
It occurred to him to wonder who'd been here shooting arrows at the Mezentines.
Then he felt the thump of hoofs, jarring up through his elbow into the complicated mess of pain. Instinct made him turn his head a little, and though his shoulder punished him for it, he shifted a little further to get a better view.
A horseman. He was rising elegantly to the trot, an eight-foot lance couched in the crook of his elbow. He wore glossy brown scale armor-leather, not steel-from collar to ankles, and under a high, pointed conical helmet his face was as pale as milk. A bow and quiver lolled beside his right thigh, and his horse's legs were short and thick. He came to a halt, stood up in his stirrups to look round, then slid into an easy, loping canter. Unmistakably, he was Cure Hardy.
27
The trial of Lucao Psellus before the Security Commission was a strangely muted affair. Given the nature and quality of the material, it should have been the showpiece of the autumn term. In the event, it was generally held to have been a botched, unsatisfactory affair which would have solved nothing, had it not been for the melodrama that followed it.
Partly, of course, the problem lay in the almost indecent haste with which it was conducted. None of the up- and-coming prosecutors had time to lobby for the brief, which was awarded to an elderly time-server by the name
