my cart, it's the Duke's, I can't take responsibility. Besides, this lot is urgent supplies. I got a special through-pass. You can see it if you don't believe me.'
'It's all right,' Ziani interrupted, 'nobody's going to smash up your cart.' He glanced round at the mess, looking for inspiration to help him reach a quick decision. 'We'll have to take the gatepost down, and the wall,' he said. 'Meanwhile, Daurenja, I want you to take some of the men, get the busted axle off; see if you can fix it with rawhide or letting in a splice or something; if not, use your imagination and think of something. You,' he went on, turning his head, 'I can't remember your name offhand. Unload the portable forge, the one with the double-action bellows, get it set up and lay in a fire. Also, I'll want the two-hundredweight anvil and whoever's best at forge- welds.'
'Can't weld the busted spring, you'll wreck the temper,' someone muttered. Ziani looked to see who it was, but someone else's head was in the way. 'You'd have to anneal the whole unit and re-temper it.'
'I know,' he said. 'And that's what we're going to do, so I'll need a water barrel or something like that for a slack tub. I'm assuming there's no oil left, so you'll have to quench in water and go nice and steady. And if anybody wants to show his ignorance by saying you can't butt-weld hardening steel, now's his chance. No? Fine, carry on.' He nodded to the carter. 'Let's leave them to it,' he said. 'Let me buy you a drink. So happens we've got a couple of bottles of the good stuff left.'
The carter had no objection to that. Ziani retrieved the bottle and led him well away from the noise of the work. 'Sorry about all this,' he said, sitting on the wall and cutting the bottle's pitch seal with his knife.
'That's all right,' the carter said. 'Just look where you're going next time.'
Ziani passed him the bottle. 'So,' he said, 'what've you got there that's so important?'
The carter glugged five mouthfuls, then passed the bottle back. 'Sulfur,' he said.
'Sulfur,' Ziani repeated. 'Seems an odd thing for the government to want shifted in a hurry. Where are you taking it?'
'Me,' the carter replied, 'as far as the Eremian border. Someone else is taking it on from there, and bloody good luck.'
'Quite.' Ziani handed the bottle back untasted. 'Not my idea of a quiet life, smuggling supplies into occupied territory. Specially if it's something useless, like sulfur. I mean, you'd feel such a fool if the Mezentines got you, wasting your life for something that's no good to anybody.'
The carter pulled a face. 'I just drive the wagon,' he said. 'No business of mine what the stuff's for.'
'That's right,' Ziani agreed. 'Trouble is, you've got me curious now. Tell you what; let's have a look at that pass of yours. It might have the name of the bloke this lot's going to.'
The carter glowered at him. 'Why would I want to show you that?'
Ziani smiled pleasantly. 'Because I'm asking you,' he said, 'and my men have got your cart in bits all over the road. Of course, if you'd like to put it back together again on your own…'
The carter must have seen the merit in that line of argument, because he fished down the front of his shirt and pulled out a folded square of paper. Ziani took it and his eye slid down the recitals until a name snagged his attention.
'Miel Ducas,' he said aloud. 'Small world.'
The hardest part, unexpectedly enough, turned out to be getting the cart unjammed. Only once the gatepost and the wall had come down was it possible to see what was really holding it; both nearside wheels, wedged deep in a rut. Because of the angle the cart stood at, there was no chance of using Ziani's wagon teams to pull it free, which meant they had to dig it out. That proved to be no fun at all. Whoever had built the road, a very long time ago, had laid a solid foundation of rubble and stones, over which two feet of mud had built up over the years. The ruts cut through the mud into the stone, and that was what was binding the wheels. Because the cart was in the way, there was no room to swing a sledge to drive in the crowbar. One of the men had his wrist broken by a careless hammer-blow, whereupon the rest of them declared they'd had enough and reminded Ziani of the basically sound idea of smashing the cart up into little bits. He had to shout to make them calm down. After that, nothing got done for a long time. The carter got hold of the other bottle while Ziani's attention was distracted, and went away somewhere. One of those days.
'All right.' Ziani pulled himself together. He was, after all, in charge, though he really didn't want to be. 'This is what we're going to do. Daurenja, I want you to…' He looked round. He'd become so used to the thin man hovering a few inches away that he was surprised to find he wasn't there. Instead, he was on his knees under the cart, peering up at something. 'Daurenja,' he repeated, 'leave that, for crying out loud, I want you to-'
'Sorry.' Daurenja seemed to bounce upright, a movement that no ordinary human being should have been capable of making. 'I was just wondering, though.'
Ziani sighed. 'What?'
'This is probably stupid,' Daurenja said, 'but why did you decide against lifting the cart up out of the ruts, rather than excavating?'
It was one of those questions that makes your head hurt at the best of times. 'What are you talking about?'
'Well,' Daurenja said, 'I was just looking at the cart chassis, and I can't see why we can't just raise it on levers and keep putting stone blocks underneath until we've lifted it up out of the rut. Presumably you considered that and saw why it wouldn't work. I guessed it was because there wasn't anything in the chassis strong enough to take the strain of levering, which was why I was looking at the spring mountings, which I thought looked plenty strong enough, but-'
'Fine,' Ziani said, 'let's try that.'
It worked. They raised the cart on crowbars, piled stones from the broken-up wall under it and floated it over the ruts, which they then filled with gatepost debris. The spliced axle and welded spring went back in without a hitch. It couldn't have gone more smoothly if they'd been practicing it for months.
'There you go,' Ziani said to the carter, as he staggered across to inspect his perfectly refurbished cart. 'Piece of cake. Sorry for the inconvenience.'
'Took your time, didn't you?' the carter replied. It took him several goes to get up onto the box. 'If I miss my transfer at the border…'
'Drive fast,' Ziani advised him. 'Don't worry about the road surface, you'll make it. A few bumps and jiggles never hurt anybody.'
The carter gathered his reins, whipped on the horses and set off at a rather wild trot. A minute or so later, once he'd left the Mezentine and his convoy well behind, he began to wonder whether the second bottle had been such a good idea after all. But then he hadn't expected that they'd be able to fix the cart so quickly, or at all. So much, he thought, for the Duke's famous Mezentine engineer. Sure, he was good at shouting and ordering people about, but it hadn't been him who sorted it in the end. It was that long, thin, evil-looking bugger with the flat nose, and he was no Mezentine. He frowned; then a jolt shot him three inches into the air, and when he landed his teeth slammed together, and he whimpered. Maybe it'd be a good idea to slow down a little.
Screw the Mezentine, he thought. And anyway, aren't we supposed to be at war with those buggers? So, really smart, having one of them in the government, or whatever. The Duke was all right, but he was too trusting. The creep was probably a spy, or a saboteur, and he'd seemed very interested in the cargo. The carter thought about that, as his horses slowed to an amble. He wasn't sure who bothered him more, the Mezentine with his black face and his loud mouth, or the thin, snake-faced one with the pony-tail. Nasty pieces of work, both of them, and now he was going to be late and lose his bonus.
The providence that looks after honest working men was there for him, however, and brought him to the border with a good hour to spare. They grumbled at him, claiming he'd kept them waiting and cost them money, but he couldn't be bothered to get into an argument about it. They gave him his docket, which was what he needed to get paid, shifted the barrels from his cart to theirs, and trundled away, until the dust swallowed them. He dismissed them from his mind and went for a drink.
The team who'd undertaken to carry the sulfur from the border into Eremia consisted of an old man and his twelve-year-old grandson. Before the war they'd been held in low esteem by the authorities on both sides of the border, who'd accused them of smuggling and all manner of bad things. Now they were patriotic heroes, which they didn't mind, since heroism paid slightly more, and the risks were roughly the same. The work was no different, and they were good at it. The thing to remember, the old man never seemed to tire of saying, is to stay off the skyline and go nice and steady; that way, you get to see the bogies long before they see you. If his grandson had any views
