'Do you think you can climb those?' the Autarch asked.
'If I can use my hands,' I said.
He went before me, and I crawled up ignominiously after him, dragging my wounded leg. The seats, long benches that followed the curve of the hull on either side, were upholstered in fur; but even this fur felt colder than any ice. Behind me, the aperture narrowed and vanished.
'We will have surface pressure in here no matter how high we go. You don't have to worry about suffocating.'
'I am afraid I am too ignorant to feel the fear, Sieur.'
'Would you like to see your old bacele? They're far to the right, but I'll try to locate them for you.'
The Autarch had seated himself at the controls. Almost the only machinery I had seen before had been Typhon's and Baldanders's, and that which Master Gurloes controlled in the Matachin Tower. It was of the machines, not of suffocation, that I was afraid; but I fought the fear down.
'When you rescued me last night, you indicated that you had not known I was in your army.'
'I made inquiries while you slept.'
'And it was you who ordered us forward?'
'In a sense I issued the order that resulted in youmovement, though I had nothing to do with your bacele directly. Do you resent what I did? When you joined, did you think you would never have to fight?'
We were soaring upward. Falling, as I had once feared to do, into the sky. But I remembered the smoke and the brassy shout of the graisle, the troopers blown to red paste by the whistling bolts, and all my terror turned to rage. 'I knew nothing of war. How much do you know? Have you ever really been in a battle?'
He glanced over his shoulder at me, his blue eyes flashing. 'I've been in a thousand. You are two, as people are usually counted. How many do you think I am?'
It was a long while before I answered him.
XXV
The Mercy of Agia
At first I thought there could be nothing stranger than to see the army stretch across the surface of Urth until it lay like a garland before us, coruscant with weapons and armor, many-hued; the winged anpiels soaring above it nearly as high as we, circling and rising on the dawn wind.
Then I beheld something stranger still. It was the army of the Ascians, an army of watery whites and grayish blacks, rigid as ours was fluid, deployed toward the northern horizon. I went forward to stare at it.
'I could show them to you more closely,' the Autarch said. 'Still, you would see only human faces.'
I realized he was testing me, though I did not know how. 'Let me see them,' I said.
When I had ridden with the schiavoni and watched our troops go into action, I had been struck by their look of weakness in the mass, the cavalry all ebb and flow like a wave that crashes with great force then drains away as mere water, too weak to bear the weight of a mouse, pale stuff a child might scoop up in his hands. Even the peltasts, with their serried ranks and crystal shields, had seemed hardly more formidable than toys on a tabletop. Now I saw how strong the rigid formations of our enemy appeared, rectangles that held machines as big as fortresses and a hundred thousand soldiers shoulder to shoulder.
But on a screen in the center of the control panel I looked under the visors of their helmets, and all that rigidity, all that strength, melted into a kind of horror. There were old people and children in the infantry files, and some who seemed idiots. Nearly all had the mad, famished faces I had observed the day before, and I recalled the man who had broken from his square and thrown his spear into the air as he died. I turned away.
The Autarch laughed. His laughter held no joy now; it was a flat sound, like the snapping of a flag in a high wind. 'Did you see one kill himself?'
'No,' I said.
'You were fortunate. I often do, when I look at them. They are not permitted arms until they are ready to engage us, and so many take advantage of the opportunity. The spearmen drive the butts of their weapons into soft ground, usually, then blast off their own heads. Once I saw two swordsmen a man and a woman who had made a compact. They stabbed each other in the belly, and I watched them counting first, moving their left hands one two three, and dead.'
'Who are they?' I asked.
He shot me a look I could not interpret. 'What did you say?'
'I asked who they are, Sieur. I know they're our enemies, that they live to the north in the hot countries, and that they're said to be enslaved by Erebus. But who are they?'
'Up until now I doubt you knew you did not know. Did you?'
My throat felt parched, though I could not have told why. I said, 'I suppose not. I'd never seen one until I came into the lazaret of the Pelerines. In the south, the war seems very remote.'
He nodded. 'We have driven them half as far to the north as they once drove us south, we autarchs. Who they are you will discover in due time What matters is that you wish to know.' He paused. 'Both could be ours. Both armies, not just the one to the south Would you advise me to take both?' As he spoke, he manipulated some control and the flier canted forward, its stern pointing at the sky and its bow to the green earth, as though he meant to pour us out upon the disputed ground.
'I don't understand what you mean,' I told him.
'Half what you said of them was incorrect. They do not come from the hot countries of the north, but from the continent that lies across the equator. But you were right when you called them the slaves of Erebus. They think themselves the allies of those who wait in the deep. In truth, Erebus and his allies would give them to me if I would give our south to them. Give you and all the rest.'
I had to grip the back of the seat to keep from falling toward him. 'Why are you telling me this?'
