he was the guest of honor. A cluster of men he didn't know were waiting for him at the gate, like runners in a relay race. They led him through the city to the yard, which was jammed with men and carts; and each cart had a square plate of sheet iron bolted to one side, supported by a frame of wooden battens, loads shifted to the other side to counterbalance the weight. 'Is there a problem?' he asked several times, but maybe they were too far ahead of him to hear. They were walking fast, and he had to make an effort to keep up.
He saw the cranes, jigs and fixtures, but nobody was doing anything. There was one cart drawn up in position, one iron sheet dangling from a crane. A man was leaning on the crossbar of an auger; another held a long spanner for tightening the retaining bolts; and standing next to him, Daurenja.
He guessed before Daurenja spoke. 'Thought you might like to be here when we finished the last cart,' Daurenja said, beaming like an idiot. They'd already drilled the holes, done the alignment, inserted the bolts. Some kind of ceremony, then. Well, presumably it was good for morale, or something like that. He looked round and saw Duke Valens, looking uncomfortably cold in a long gray coat, surrounded by bored-looking officials. He hoped there wouldn't be any speeches.
Daurenja nodded to someone he couldn't see. The crane winch creaked as it took the strain, lifting the iron sheet a few inches. Two men pressed against it, moved it slightly to line up the projecting bolt-ends with the holes in the sheet. The man with the spanner stepped forward; someone passed him the nuts and he wound them on- finger-tight to begin with, then tightening them all in turn with the long wrench. Nobody seemed particularly inspired or overawed, even when the spannerman put his weight on the long handle for the last time, straightened his back and stepped away. The job was finished, successfully and on time. So what?
The Duke stood up and began to speak. Not a speech, any more than his own mumbled, preoccupied words to his workers were speeches; he was giving the order for the evacuation to begin, commands without explanations-schedules, details of who should report where and when, rules and prohibitions. The Vadani listened in complete silence.
'… utmost importance that we shouldn't take anything with us we won't immediately need; food, clothes, blankets, tools, weapons, and that's it. For security reasons I can't tell you which direction we'll be heading in. You'll find that out soon enough in any case. Don't worry about how long the food's going to last. We've got supply points already in place, plenty for everybody so long as we're careful; don't go loading your wagons down with a year's supply of salt fish and dried plums, you'll only slow yourselves down, and anybody who can't keep up the pace is going to get left behind, as simple as that.'
The silence was amazement, fear, a little anger (but not at Valens), but mostly they were listening carefully so they could do exactly as they were told. Remarkable, Ziani thought. Just think about that for a moment. He stands up and says they're going to have to leave their homes, all their things, all the places they know, their work, all the components that make up the mechanisms of their lives. Prospects of ever coming back: uncertain at best, probably none. Some people, of course, couldn't accept something like that. Some people would refuse, or at least they'd go with the full intention of coming back, even if they had to make a bit of trouble along the way.
(He thought of the rosewood box and the burr reamer; there's more than one way of refusing to go along.)
Yet here were the Vadani; careless, inept craftsmen, the sort of people who can't be taught why it's morally wrong to use a chisel as a screwdriver, but so flexible, so trusting that they'll pack up a few scraps of their lives in a steel-plated cart and take to the cold, windy road, just because the Duke thinks it's the best idea in the circumstances. It could only be faith; and hadn't he had faith, in the Guilds, the doctrine of specifications, the assertion that perfection had been found and written down? Could you get the Mezentines to leave their city, pile onto wagons and leave everything behind to be burned, looted, trashed by savages? Of course, the Guilds would never give such an order. They'd prefer to stay in the city and burn with it. In the end, for a Mezentine, it comes down to place: knowing one's place and staying there, if the worst comes to the worst fighting to the death to get back there. For the Vadani, it must be different somehow, presumably because they're primitives, more pack animals than men. That had to be it. No other explanation could account for it.
Silence broke his train of thought. Valens had stopped talking, and the dead quiet that followed had a curious quality about it. In other places his speech would've been received with shouts and cheers, or there'd have been trouble. No such reaction from the Vadani, just as the foreman doesn't get a round of applause after handing out the day's assignments. He'd given them their instructions, and that was all there was to it. No enthusiasm, no grumbling, not even any discussion. People started to walk away. A man clambered up onto the newly plated cart, as the ostlers backed the horses into the traces. He'd go home, load his few permitted possessions, then go to the place where he'd been told to go, pick up his neighbors' things, a few passengers, elderly, sick, babes in arms, and set off to join the convoy. Remarkable; except for one enormous difference, which Ziani cursed himself for only just spotting. They weren't leaving home, because they were taking home with them. To them it wasn't a place; it was people.
He remembered Jarnac Ducas when he saw him: a huge man, far too much material for one human being, like a double-yolked egg. He remembered his annoying manner, his knack of coming too close and talking a little bit too loud; his vast smile, his insufferable good humor.
'Broad Street's clear and moving freely.' Boomed into his face, like the blast from a forge. 'There's a bottleneck in the Haymarket, of course, only to be expected, but I've got some men down there directing traffic. We'll stagger the departures, naturally, so I'm not expecting any problems there.'
'Excellent,' Valens said, trying not to meet those ferociously blue, shallow eyes. He wasn't sure why. For all his size, volume and intrusiveness, there wasn't anything intimidating about Jarnac. Maybe it was just fear of bursting out laughing, and giving offense. 'You've got it all under control, then. That's good.'
Jarnac Ducas soaked up praise like a sponge; it made him grow even bigger. 'Just one other thing,' he said. 'What about you? Your party, I mean. I don't seem to have any details down in the manifest…'
'Don't worry about that,' Valens replied. 'I'll be riding with the rearguard, and we'll be escorting my wife and her people. Tell you what,' he added. 'You could do me one last favor.'
'Of course.' Big, expectant eyes, like a dog watching you at mealtimes.
'I'd like you to ride with Orsea and his lot,' Valens said. 'Unless you've made other arrangements.'
Jarnac grinned, as though he'd been given the treat he'd been hoping for. 'I'd be happy to,' he said. 'I'll keep an eye on them for you.' As he said it, a thought must've crossed his mind; the frown was there and gone again as fast as a twitch. Valens had a fair idea of what the thought must have been: that it wasn't Orsea he wanted specially guarded… Not that it mattered what Jarnac Ducas thought about anything.
'Fine, thanks,' Valens said, 'carry on.' That had the desired shooing effect; Ducas bowed and strode away. It was enough to exhaust you, just watching him walk. There was a man who went through life like someone forcing his way through a tangle of briars, powering through the obstacles by sheer determined energy, not caring too much if the thorns caught and snagged him. A rare breed, fortunately.
There was something he'd forgotten to do. What was it, now? Ah yes. Pack.
The Duke, of course, wasn't bound by his own orders and could therefore take with him whatever the hell he liked, even if it meant filling up half the carts in the convoy with superfluous junk. He could be absolutely certain that nobody would object. They'd naturally assume that whatever the Duke chose to take with him had, by definition, to be essential-velvet gowns, porcelain dinner services, stuffed bears' heads, whatever. With that in mind, Valens rammed two clean shirts, a pair of trousers, two pairs of boots and a scarf into a satchel, and filled another small bag with books. He opened the closet where his armor was stored, and saw that his business harness wasn't there; someone else had packed it for him, so that was all right. He looked round the tower room at his possessions; he knew each of them so well that he could close his eyes and picture them, or describe them in detail from memory, down to the last chip and scratch. Not to worry. The Mezentines could have them, and welcome. As a very last afterthought, he grabbed the cheap and nasty hanger the stallholder in the market had given him, and tucked it under his arm. He supposed it had brought him luck when the Mezentine raiding party had attacked; either the hanger, or something else. Anyway, he took it.
On the threshold, he paused. It was a rule of his life that, every time he packed to go away, he forgot something. He wondered, with a sort of detached interest, what it'd turn out to be this time. All of it, said a voice in his head, and that was entirely possible. He'd known all his life but never admitted that his claim that he'd never been in love had always been a lie. There were things in this room, possessions, that he loved far more than any human he'd ever known. He loved the silver niello of his Mezentine falchion for its startling beauty; the comfort and
