The Two of Swords: Part 6 (2 page)

Too late now, no point beating himself up about it. A man like Forza didn’t deserve a nice wife like that. Probably he’d only married her for politics, and the legendary grand romance was all just publicity. She’d find out about him soon enough. They all did eventually, poor devils. Not for the first time, he cursed the wretched fact of his destiny – yes, someone’s got to deal with Forza, otherwise the world’s not safe, but why did it have to be
him
?

Suddenly he remembered Lysao, that exquisite image of her combing her hair; clever Forza, to have put it into his mind, knowing it’d be there for days, spoiling everything. She always gave the impression of being overwhelmed by her hair, as if it was some monster that lived on top of her head and needed to be contained, lest it escape and cause havoc among the civilian population. He remembered how it got in the way – ouch, you’re pulling my hair – at the most inconvenient moments possible, how she loved and hated it, a glory and a burden and a dreadful tiresome responsibility, as though she was doomed to lug around a life-size statue by Teromachus everywhere she went. Once she’d threatened to give it to the nation, so it’d be up to the government, not her, to maintain it. And the combing ritual – dear God, every night, an hour and a quarter, like some religious ceremony. It’s my duty, she’d say, and he’d think, yes, and Forza’s mine. My duty and my fault.

He watched the last stages of the battle, but it was like reading a book you’ve read six times before. When he’d had as much as he could take, he called over a guardsman and sent him down with a message: that’s enough, fall back, give them room to withdraw; and get a sedan chair or something up here, quick as you like.

The chair came quite quickly, and they were helping him into it when he glanced back one last time at the battle and saw something. “Just a second,” he said and looked again. Something wasn’t quite right about the way Forza’s men were drawing out. He leaned on a guardsman’s shoulder and superimposed the chessboard. Two, maybe three opportunities; if he’d been down there with a full staff of messengers, he could’ve had a world of fun with them, but up here he might as well be on the moon. Forza would never have left him openings like that, so evidently Forza wasn’t down there running things; in which case, where was he? After all that, had Forza outplayed him with some brilliant long-reaching mechanism, a hidden reserve or a really wide outflank? The thought made him shiver all over. He called a runner and sent him down with a message: get out of there
fast
. Then he looked again, to see if any of Forza’s capital assets were unaccounted for. No, but that didn’t signify, Forza could summon up armies out of thin air. Where the hell was he? He’s up to something, or else he’s—

Surely not. I didn’t hit him that hard. Did I?

The world stopped.
What if he’s dead?
What if I killed him?

It was that empty feeling again; he knew it so well – the day his father died, the day Lysao went away, those dreams he had sometimes. He couldn’t be, surely; I bashed him on the head a couple of times, but those helmets just shrug it off; he was certainly alive and full of beans when I left— Concussion? Fractured skull, internal bleeding? I couldn’t have, could I?

“Well, don’t just stand there,” he shouted at the porters. “Get me down there, quick.”

There’s always so much mess after a battle: so many bodies, so many damaged men, so much ruined property scattered about. All things being equal (which they rarely are) the priorities are to see to your side’s wounded, then the enemy’s; strip and bury your dead, pile up and count the opposition; retrieve as much equipment as you can, though usually time, supplies and patience run out long before then, and the job is left to the private sector – first on the scene, the locals (if any), until they’re chased off by the professionals, who follow the wars at a safe distance and bring their own carts. Ideally, by the time they’ve finished up and set off back to the nearest town big enough to host an auction, there should be nothing left but graves, ashes, trampled crops and the hoof marks of the cavalry.

When both sides are in a hurry to get away, it’s not like that. A quick skirmish for the wounded, leave the dead; it takes an hour for the crows to figure it’s safe, they’re canny birds with a highly developed system of reconnaissance, more than capable of recognising live humans from half a mile off. To start with, they come in singly, gliding in on the wind, banking and turning into it to brake, dropping with wings outstretched, touching down and waddling; then twos and threes, then by the dozen; they circle, for choice pitch in nearby trees to make a leisurely assessment before committing themselves; when at last they settle, they cover the field like black snow, and you can hear them a thousand yards away. Then the first human scavengers show up, and the crows rise like angry smoke, yelling abuse at the interlopers. It takes a minute or so for the last reluctant stragglers to lift up and flap away – they know their place in the pecking order, but they don’t feel obliged to be gracious about it.

If there are no humans, of course, they can take their time. They don’t do much of a job. Too much meat is inaccessible under steel and leather, mostly they only get faces and hands – hair is useful, of course, during nesting season – and they’re comparatively slow feeders. They don’t get much help from other birds, foxes, the lesser vermin, nor do they do much to keep the flies off. Generally speaking, they leave a worse mess than they find. In those parts where jackals, kites and vultures are the predominant carrion species, it’s a different story, but they’re not often seen north of the Seventy-third Oasis.

Eight days after the battle, Senza came back. He left his escort on the far side of the Hammerhead and climbed the narrow path alone; he knew what he wanted to see, and the picture would be delicate, fragile; one ill-judged movement would spoil it. From the top of the rock he looked down and read the view below him like a book.

From the distribution and feeding patterns of the crows, which he’d taken great pains not to disturb, and from the smell, he gathered that nobody had been there for at least five days. The black stains the crows made on the brown and green would have told him the narrative of the battle as clearly as any despatch, if he hadn’t known it already; the places where men had fallen thickest, the paths traced by stragglers and fugitives cut down by pursuers, the windrows of dead men shot by archers as they charged, or enfiladed as they advanced and retreated – dogs can read the past by smell, Senza could do the same thing by reading crows. It came from long practice.

When he’d seen all he needed, he walked down towards the place where he’d fought his brother. The tents, he saw with surprise, were still there; Forza’s men must have left in a tearing hurry, and it seemed reasonable to assume that nobody had been in charge. Forza would never have left the tents behind unless he’d been driven forcibly from the field, which Senza knew for a fact hadn’t been the case. He retraced his own movements, stepping over the guardsmen who’d died to save him (eyeless now, cheekbones showing through lacerated skin) and poked about in Forza’s tent for a while. The maps and papers had gone, but the table, chair and bed were still there. Under the pillow, where he knew it would be, he found three small painted wooden panels, hinged with leather straps to make a triptych. He unfolded them, and saw for the first time in fifteen years the fire god in glory, attended by the greater and lesser seraphim. It had always stood on a shelf above the hearth; his mother nodded to it every time she passed, the reflexive dip of the head you accord to neighbours you meet in the street. He stood and stared at it for a very long time; fancy meeting you here. Then he took off the scarf he wore to keep his armour from chafing his neck and wound it six times round the boards; then he turfed junk out of his coat pocket until the bundle fitted snug and safe. A voice in his head told him that the battle had been worth it, just for this. He knew that was terribly wrong, but he couldn’t deny his own belief.

She’d left her trunk behind; he went out, picked up a sword from the ground and used it to lever open the lid – the hasp was mighty strong and he bent the sword blade before the hinge pin finally gave way. His sister-in-law had good but expensive taste. At the bottom of the trunk he found a small bundle of letters, in his brother’s handwriting. He grinned and pocketed them, for later.

Now, then. If Forza had been badly hurt, wouldn’t they bring him in here and lay him down on the bed until someone found the doctor? He examined the blanket for traces of blood, but there weren’t any. Likewise, the first thing you’d do for a wounded man would be peel off all that armour – yes, but they’d take that away with them regardless of the outcome, just as they’d taken the maps, though not her trunk; true, but they’d have stripped off the arming coat as well, probably other bits of clothing too, and there was nothing of the sort lying on the ground or on the bed. A dead body, though, you’d just load that up as it was and cart it away, once you were sure there was nothing that could be done. Or maybe he was jumping to conclusions. Maybe he was thinking too much like Forza – organised, efficient, intelligent. Suppose you were some captain or lieutenant, horribly stuck with command as your general lies at your feet groaning and bleeding, and (not being a military genius) you have no idea at all what the military genius leading the opposition has in mind; you’d get the chief and his wife out of there as soon as possible; maybe you’d have the residual trace of wit to grab the maps and papers, but not the personal stuff. You most definitely wouldn’t know what was under the chief’s pillow. All you’d be able to hear would be the voice in your head screaming
get out of there
, which you would obey implicitly, without hesitation.

Ambiguous, therefore; maybe he’s dead, maybe he isn’t. Fairly safe to assume that, at the moment of the army’s departure, Forza wasn’t in command; potentially fatal to assume that he wasn’t in command now, and racking his brains to figure out what his kid brother would do next. If I was him, he thought, I’d sent back a half-squadron, at the very least; tell them to hold off still and quiet so as not to disturb the crows; as soon as the crows get up, go in there fast. Would Forza guess that he’d be here? Yes, because he
was
here, and Forza knew him so well. In which case—

He ran out of the tent and looked round; half a squadron would kick up dust, unless Forza had ordered them to go on foot for that very reason. He couldn’t see movement of any sort, anywhere. Which proved nothing. Time he wasn’t there.

As he ran back up the path, he realised: come what may, if Forza was alive, he’d have sent someone for the painting, and probably his wife’s letters, if he knew about them (he’d know). The absolute certainty of it hit him like a hammer; he stopped dead, unable to take a single step. Dead, or just possibly in a coma – no, because
she’d
know what he kept under his pillow,
she’d
know it had to be retrieved at all costs; no reason to believe she was dead too. He felt utterly weak and helpless, as though he’d just had a stroke. Forza—

Suddenly into his mind came an image of the Basilica at Vetusta, the biggest and most magnificent man-made structure in the world. Four generations of labourers had worked on it, he’d read somewhere; great-grandfather, grandfather, father, son, their whole lives spent on that one extraordinary piece of work – masons, carters, carpenters, smiths, brickmakers, plasterers, architects, painters, sculptors, all of them trades that traditionally run in families, like soldiering or ruling empires – until one day, one clearly defined, absolutely different day, someone took a step back, looked up, down again at the plans; nodded his head, probably, and declared that it was finished, and everyone could go home. A moment of triumph – the greatest achievement of the human race, brought to a magnificently successful conclusion – but also, for the fourth-generations achievers, the end of the world, everything they’d ever known over, done with and gone, their purpose fulfilled, their experiences obsolete; a frontier post on the border between present and past. A week later, they’d all have scattered far and wide, building cowsheds. Hereditary trades; family businesses. Like, say, the Belot brothers, purveyors of fine carrion to discerning crows everywhere.

Self-pity; because if a job’s worth doing, do it yourself.

No confirmation, of course. He led the army back across the border, expecting to find messengers waiting, but there weren’t any. He hadn’t said anything to the men, but he had an idea that the shrewder ones were guessing pretty close to the truth. There was a buzz of excitement on the march and around the camp; we’re going all the way this time, it’ll all be over by midsummer – as though something was about to begin, rather than everything had just ended. The senior staff kept quiet, waiting for an announcement.

They stopped for three days at the old fort at Stroumena, ostensibly to wait for supplies. On the third day, when Senza had given up and was getting ready to move on, a breathless young lieutenant told him five horsemen were approaching the camp, escorting a covered chaise. He didn’t actually use the words Imperial courier service, but he didn’t need to. He was grinning.

Senza watched them from the top of the observation tower. He saw a big man in a blue hooded cloak get out of the chaise; there was something familiar about him, though Senza could only see the top of his head. There was a woman with him; she got out, handed him a satchel with the ends of a couple of brass despatch rolls sticking out, then got back into the chaise. Two of the riders started to follow the blue-cloaked man, but he sent them back and set off across the courtyard. Definitely something familiar about the way he walked; an aggressively long stride, impatient, a man very much aware of the value of his time. So much to do, and only me capable of doing it. He disappeared through a gateway, and Senza drew back from the window. Ridiculous, he thought. What on earth would he be doing here, middle of nowhere, in a war zone?

He heard footsteps running up the spiral stairs, and then there was a guardsman in the doorway, with a look on his face like someone who’s just seen God coming out of the drapers’ on the corner. “It’s him, sir. Oida. Wants to see you.”