money for the cause. There was still his accent, of course, and the outside chance that someone might recognize him, but he knew he was a lousy actor. Trying to pretend to be a poor but honest peasant lad would just draw attention.
Still, it would have been nice to find out what had happened. It had always struck him as unfair that the men who died in a battle never got to know the result; whether they died for a victory or a defeat. If anything mattered at the point of their death, surely that would. He reassured himself that he'd find out eventually, and in the meantime there was nothing he could do. Well, there was something. He could take his armor off, and save his preservers a job.
Force of habit made him stack it neatly. Not too much damage; he was glad about that, in a way. They had, after all, saved him from dying painfully of hunger and exposure on a hillside covered with dead bodies, so he felt obligated to them, and the Ducas feels uncomfortable while in another's debt. He balanced a vambrace on top of the pile. He hadn't really looked at it before. The clips, he noticed, were brass, and the rivets holding them on were neatly and uniformly peened over. Say what you like about the Mezentines, they made nice things. And at a sensible price, too.
He looked up at the sky. Still an hour or so to go before sunset. He frowned; should've thought of it before. The battle had started just before dawn, and he'd left it and gone to sleep about an hour and a half later, so he'd been out for quite a while. His head still hurt, but it was getting better quickly. It wasn't the first time he'd been knocked out in a battle, but on those previous occasions he'd always woken up in a tent, with clean pillows and people leaning over him looking worried, because the Ducas, even unconscious, isn't someone you leave lying about for just anybody to find. On the other hand, the headache had been worse, all those other times. On balance, things weren't as bad as they could be.
The men were heading back to the cart, leaning forward against the weight of the burdens they were carrying. He remembered when he was a boy, and they'd ridden out to the fields to watch the hay-making; he'd sat under the awning and seen the laborers trudging backward and forward to and from the wains with impossibly big balls of hay spiked on their pitchforks, and thought how splendid they were, how noble, like fine horses steadily drawing a heavy carriage in a procession. Men at work.
Someone was saying to the others: 'Right, let's call it a day. Have to come back in the morning to do the burying.' A short, thin, bald man walked past him without looking at him, but said, 'Best get on the cart, son, we're going now.' Not an order or a threat. Miel leaned back and hauled his damaged leg in after him, and the thin man closed the tailgate and dropped the latches.
The sacks of clothing made an adequate nest. Miel put a sack under the crook of his bad knee, which helped reduce the pain whenever the cart rolled over a pothole. The driver seemed to have forgotten about him, or maybe he wasn't in the habit of talking to the stock-in-trade. Miel leaned back and watched the light drain out of the sky.
He wouldn't have thought it was possible to go to sleep in an unsprung cart on those roads; but he woke up with a cricked neck to see darkness, torchlight and human shapes moving backward and forward around him. 'Come on,' someone was saying, 'out you get.' It was the tone of voice shepherds used at roundup; fair enough. He edged along the floor of the cart and put his good leg to the ground.
'Need a hand?'
'Yes,' he replied into the darkness, and someone put an arm round him and took his weight. He hobbled for a bit and was put down carefully next to a fire. 'You stay there,' said the voice that came with the arm; so he did.
It wasn't much of a fire-peat, by the smell-and the circle of light it threw showed him his own bare feet and not much else. Well, they hadn't tied him up, but of course they wouldn't need to. He had nowhere to go, and only one functioning leg. If they were going to kill him they'd have done it by now. Miel realized that, for once in his life, he didn't have to take thought, look ahead, make plans for other people or even himself. His place was to sit still and quiet until called for, and leave the decisions to someone else. To his surprise, he found that thought comforting. He sat, and let his mind drift.
He supposed he ought to be worrying about the resistance, but the concept of it seemed to be thinning and dissipating, like the smoke from the fire. He considered it from his new perspective. He had been using every resource of body and mind left to him to fight the Mezentine occupation; what about that? Until today, he'd managed to make himself believe that he was doing a reasonable job. He'd won his battles; he counted them: seventeen. At least, looking at each encounter as a contest, he'd done better than the enemy. His ratio of men lost to enemies killed was more than acceptable. He'd disrupted their supply lines, wrecked carts and slaughtered carthorses and oxen, broken down bridges, blocked narrow passes. For every village they'd burned, he'd made them pay an uneconomic price in men, time and materiel. A panel of impartial referees, called in to judge who had made a better job of it, him or his opponent, would show him significantly ahead on points. But winning… Winning, now he came to think of it, meant driving the Mezentine armies out of Eremia, and he understood (remarkably, for the first time) that that was never going to be possible. He might be winning, but his people weren't. They didn't stand a chance.
But they weren't alone, of course. Silly of him to have forgotten that: the Vadani were helping him, or rather the other way about. His job (the Vadani agent had explained all this) was to keep up the pressure, make a nuisance of himself, cost the enemy money. The purpose of this was to undermine the enemy's political will, to give the Mezentine opposition a chance to bring down the government. Excellent strategy, and the only way to beat the Perpetual Republic. So, you see, we can still do it, and it doesn't really matter how many villages get burned or how many people get killed; we're just one part of someone else's greater design…
He frowned. The smoke was stinging his eyes. That morning, he'd been able to see the design quite clearly, as though it was a blueprint unrolled on a table. Since then, he'd been bashed on the knee and left for dead, and somehow that had made a difference. It was almost as though a ship had sailed away and left him behind. He'd heard stories about men who'd been stranded on islands or remote headlands. A simple thing, the unfurling of sails, the raising of an anchor; a few minutes either way, the difference between boarding a ship and not making it. In his case, a bash on the knee and another one on the head. In the stories, the castaways accepted that the world had suddenly changed; they'd built huts on the beach, hunted wild goats and cured their hides for clothing, until the world happened to come by again, pick them up and take them home. Those were the ones you heard about, of course. The ones who were never rescued by passing ships, or who simply lay on the beach and waited to die, were never heard from again and therefore ceased to exist.
Miel thought: I've lost everything. I was the Ducas, the head of the family, the Duke's principal adviser, Orsea's best friend. I had land and houses and money, hawks and hounds, clothes and weapons. Thousands of people depended on me. They lived their lives through me, I was the one who made their decisions for them, decided what they should be doing. I wasn't just one man, I was thousands; I was Eremia. Now I can't even walk on my own, and I've got nothing, not even a pair of boots.
I was…
Perhaps it was just the sting of the smoke. He rubbed his eyes, and thought about it some more.
Well, he thought, I suppose it's because I was born to it. Orsea wasn't, and that's probably why he did so very badly. All my life I've been aware of it, the responsibility for other people, the knowledge that I can't just do what I want, because so many people depend on me. I could argue that that makes me a good man-except that I had the houses and the land, the hawks and hounds, and I never had to lean on plow-handles in the baking sun or stoop over all day hoeing onions. But I never chose anything, not for myself. I have always tried to do the right thing, because people depended on me.
Someone was standing over him; he looked up. He couldn't make out a face, only a shape. Someone leaning forward a little, holding out a bowl.
'Thanks,' he said, and took it. The man walked away.
Well, it was porridge, or maybe very thick soup; something cheap you could boil up in bulk; something that someone had had to work for, and which he'd done nothing to earn. He scooped a wodge of the stuff onto his fingers and poked it into his mouth. It didn't taste of anything much, which was probably just as well. There are different sorts of dependence. There's the social contract between the lord and his people, and there's the man who feeds barley mash to his pig. He thought about that too, while he was at it. Without the farmer, the pig would starve; without him, the pig would never have been born. The pig owes the farmer its life, and in due course the debt is called in, just as my bailiffs collect the rents from my tenants.
