grandchildren are dead. Your wife was, indeed, the last of my family. Accordingly, her loss is more than usually unfortunate.' He could have said inconvenient just as easily. 'I must confess that when I heard the news of her death, I was greatly distressed. However, the circumstances under which the news reached me have done much to reconcile me to her loss.' The pitch of the voice changed very slightly, but enough to make Valens' flesh crawl. 'Is it really true? Did you cross the desert in nine days?'
Valens nodded.
For a moment, the little man's eyes seemed to flare, like embers blasted by the bellows. 'You must tell me all about it,' he said. 'The circumstances of her death, and your remarkable journey.'
For the next hour, Valens did just that; and if the little man found his imprecision and woeful carelessness in observing details annoying, he masked it behind a tiny fixed smile, except when he was asking one of his innumerable, razor-sharp questions. Every few minutes, someone he couldn't see would mutter something; each interruption must have registered with the little man, because he would acknowledge it with a flicker of his little finger; a full crook of the top joint apparently showing approval, a waggle indicating irrelevance or stupidity. All the time, his eyes stayed fixed on Valens' face, and if he blinked once, Valens must have missed it.
'Thank you,' he said, when Valens had answered his last question. 'It comforts me to know the truth.' A tiny sniff. 'Now you must be very tired.' (An order more than an observation.) 'A suitable coach will be at your disposal very soon. We will convey you and your followers'-an infinity of contempt in that word-'to our camp, where you can rest and recover your strength before we speak again. I am most grateful to you for talking to me. If there is anything at all that you or your people require, please tell one of my officers, and the matter will be dealt with immediately.'
Behind him, the coach door opened, flooding the world with painful scorching light. Someone covered the little man's head with a lace cloth. A finger, pressed very gently on Valens' shoulder, told him it was time for him to leave.
Outside, the sun was unbelievably bright. The immaculate young man in white led him to another coach, just as blinding but silvered rather than gilded. The carpet, step and awning appeared by the same magic. Valens followed the man in white like a sheep being led into a crush. There was one seat in the coach, and the blinds were drawn. As soon as the door clicked behind him, the coach started to move.
He could have lifted the blind, of course, but he knew he wasn't meant to; so he sat in the dark for an indeterminate period, somewhere between hours and days. The coach stopped twice; each time, the door opened just enough to admit a little silver tray (one silver cup of the hot dishwater and three tiny, rock-hard cakes) and a spotlessly clean silver chamber-pot, exquisitely decorated with scroll-and-foliage engraving. The coach's suspension was so perfect that pissing in the chamber-pot at the gallop was simplicity itself. Curiously, it wasn't removed at the second stop; but not a drop had been spilled, so that was presumably all right.
He was asleep when the coach stopped for the third time, and ferocious light woke him up out of a half- dream in which he was talking to the little man but couldn't hear a word either of them was saying. The door was open, and a different tall young man in white was beckoning to him. His back and legs ached unbearably, and the light was like nails driven into both sides of his head at once.
The first thing he noticed was tents; an ocean of them, all brilliant white, like a bumper crop of absurdly large mushrooms. Then he realized that there weren't any other coaches apart from his and the little man's golden miracle.
'Where are…?' he started to say. The young man smiled.
'They are being taken care of,' he said. 'Please follow me.'
He had to walk a whole ten yards, five of them on the dusty, gravelly soil rather than carpet. He could feel the young man's embarrassment, but obviously there was nothing he could do about that. The tent he was led into was about the size of an average farm barn, brilliant white on the outside, dark as a bag inside. These people, he decided, must regard light the way the Vadani felt about mud; there's a lot of it about, but the better sort of people take reasonable steps to avoid getting covered in it. He sat down on a heap of cushions, which were the only visible artifacts in the tent, apart from a solid gold chamber-pot the size of a rain bucket. He was alone again.
Presumably he must have fallen asleep when the tent flap opened and yet another tall young man in white brought him a tray of food. This time, it wasn't a sparse little snack of cakes; in fact, he was amazed that someone so slight-looking could carry that much weight, let alone put it down so effortlessly, without grunting. It was all, needless to say, lean roast meat. He guzzled as much of it as he could bear, and washed it down with the thimbleful and a half of water that came with it, in a dear little silver bottle.
Nobody could stay awake for very long after that. He woke up some time later, tortured with indigestion and dry as parchment, in the dark. No trace of light seeped through the heavy fabric of the tent, which suggested it was night. He lay on his back, too uncomfortable to sleep. The likeliest explanation was that at some point he'd died without noticing it, and this was the afterlife they promised you in the old stories; whether it was one reserved for the very good or the very bad he wasn't quite sure.
Dawn came painfully slowly, gradually building up a glow in the tent walls. He couldn't hear anything at all-he had to prove to himself that he hadn't gone deaf by dropping the silver bottle onto the tray. While he was doing that, he noticed that his filthy clothes had somehow turned into spotlessly clean white robes, like the ones worn by the tall young men, and his boots had evolved into ridiculous little silver-thread slippers with pointy toes and no backs. It was that which helped him clarify his newly found religious faith. This had to be the very bad people's place.
After a thousand years or so, the tent flap opened again. Not a tall, slim young man in white this time; an older man, in a plain robe of sort-of-gray woolen cloth, wearing sensible boots that Valens would have traded his duchy for. The man looked at him for a moment as if he was something regrettable that couldn't reasonably be avoided, and said, 'This way.'
This way proved to be the five yards or so to the tent next door, across a red, blue and purple carpet. Inside, the tent was pitch black; a clue, he decided, to the identity of his host.
'You have rested.' Not a question. 'Please sit down. You must try the orange and cinnamon tea; it's stronger, but one needs a little stimulation in the morning.'
Stimulation; the little man sounded so frail that Valens reckoned anything more stimulating than slow, shallow breathing would probably kill him. 'Thank you,' he said.
The cup was put into his hand.
'I must apologize,' the little man's voice went on, 'about the rather dim light. I'm afraid that my eyes are rather sensitive. Direct sunlight gives me a headache.'
'That's quite all right,' Valens mumbled.
'In fact,' the voice continued, quite matter-of-fact, 'practically everything in my life hurts me these days- breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping, waking up, moving, keeping still, every kind and description of bodily function brings with it a different and complementary pain. I had hoped,' he added wistfully, 'to have died earlier this year, but regrettably I realized that I could not permit myself to do so. My last surviving son, you see; quite suddenly, my doctors tell me it was his heart. With only my great-granddaughter left-you can appreciate the problem, I feel sure. At the best of times, a line of succession is such a slender thing, a single strand of spider's web, and our enemies are so strong, so unrelenting.' A short pause, no doubt to gather strength. 'The Rosinholet and the Bela Razo made a joint attack on us earlier this year; not just a cattle raid, but a concerted attempt to wipe us out. My son undertook the defense, but he had turned into an old man; too weak to ride a horse, too confused to manage all the intricacies of a serious war. I had to relieve him of command in the end. We saw them off, eventually, but I knew then that something had to be done. They will return, I feel certain of it; with them, I expect, they will bring the Aram no Vei and the Luzir Soleth. The simple fact is, there are too many of us; the Cure Hardy, I mean. We have bred too many cattle and too many children, and the pasture will not support us all. Some nations have tried sitting down-staying in one place all the time, I mean, as you do-but we simply can't live like that. The only logical solution is for one of the nations of the confederacy to go away, or else be wiped out.'
Silence; not expecting a reply or a comment, just a pause for breath and reflection. Nevertheless, Valens said, 'You want to cross the desert and settle there?'
'Precisely.' The little man sounded pleased that he wasn't going to have to explain. 'We heard about the annihilation of the Eremian people by the Perpetual Republic of Mezentia. Most regrettable, of course; but it stands to reason that if a nation is wiped out, their lands fall empty.'
'But Eremia's not big enough, surely,' Valens said without thinking.
