The Folding Knife Part 22

Interrogation, according to the old Guild maxim, is no job for amateurs. Needless to say, neither the Vesani nor the Sclerians had any knowledge of scientific procedure, so they had to rely on brute force, first principles and enthusiasm. As a result, when the prisoner finally agreed to talk, they had the greatest difficulty in understanding what he was trying to tell them. Eventually, they got what they wanted: the name of a village, a dozen miles or so to the south.

At first light, a Vesani sloop left the estuary and sailed straight home. On board were the Mavortine and the Vesani hairdresser (who received a full pardon for his earlier indiscretions, and a pension of twenty nomismata a year for life, paid by the First Citizen personally). General Aelius' professional interrogators quickly confirmed that, in their opinion, the prisoner was telling the truth. After a brief meeting with Ba.s.so, Aelius and two Treasury officials boarded the sloop and set sail. Instead of going direct to Inguiomera, however, they made for Anno, the nearest town of any size on the Cazar Peninsular.

It was the first time Aelius had been home for over thirty years, but he was in a hurry. He hired a horse in Anno and rode for twelve hours into the foothills of the Great Crest mountains, where his mother's family had come from. Forty-eight hours later he was back, with sixty distant cousins, discreetly but effectively armed and bound by the most dreadful oaths of loyalty and good faith recognised by Cazar tradition. The rest of the men, he told the Treasury officers, would be along in a day or so.

The Treasury men had chartered a caravel for Aelius and his party. They themselves stayed in Anno and were lucky enough to find a Vesani stone barge, which had come to collect marble from the quarries. Using the letter of authority Ba.s.so had given them, they requisitioned it, bought supplies, and had it ready to rendezvous with Aelius' party and load up the stolen gold a.s.suming (big a.s.sumption) that it had been recovered. They also managed to commandeer a grain freighter for the two hundred Cazar.

Thanks to a freak turn of the wind, Aelius was already in Inguiomera. He disembarked alone, went straight to the Vesani lodge and was given the map he'd been promised. Two hours after sunset (it was pitch dark and raining) he led his sixty cousins south to the blind side of the ridge overlooking the village the prisoner had told him about. He waited until just before dawn.

There was nothing complex about his strategy. He sent twenty men to go round the other side of the village, taking care to keep below the ridge for as long as possible. Half an hour later, he led the rest of his men down the hill at a brisk run. At the village gate, he detached two parties of ten men to go ahead and drive villagers from the outer houses towards the centre. With the remaining twenty, he worked from the centre out.

It went well. Two villagers, a young man and a boy, slipped between the outer and inner flus.h.i.+ng parties and had to be shot; after that, there was no trouble. When all the villagers had been herded together in front of the main lodge, Aelius explained the situation to them through an interpreter. Time, he said, was of the essence. Although he and his men had been as quiet and un.o.btrusive as possible, it wouldn't be long before the alarm was raised and the men who'd buried the gold in or near their village came rus.h.i.+ng out to protect their treasure. Being a cautious man, he estimated he had something like four hours. (There was a problem with the word hour; the interpreter had to point at the sun and wave his arms.) Much to his regret, therefore, he could only allow himself the time it would take him to count to five hundred before he'd have to start killing villagers, five at a time. On this schedule, a.s.suming n.o.body was prepared to tell him what he needed to know, he'd have time to execute fifty of them; then he'd have no choice but to drive the rest of them into the lodge, wedge the doors from the outside and set fire to the roof. He thanked them for their attention and began counting.

At three hundred and forty, a man stood up and led him to one of the village's six wells. It was all down there, he said; the well was dry, and they'd sewed it all up in goatskins and dropped it in. Aelius sent a man down on a rope; he came back up with a goatskin sack gripped in both hands.

Thanks to the impression he'd made on them, Aelius had no trouble persuading the villagers to deal with getting the gold out of the well. He detailed ten men to watch them, and stationed the remaining fifty around the village perimeter to watch for new arrivals. In the event, his estimate of four hours proved to be remarkably accurate. He immediately pulled his men back inside the village, barred the gate and went up onto the watchtower to open negotiations. But the raiders shot arrows at him, so he withdrew and stood to his defence.

His position was not as bad as he'd originally a.s.sumed. The village was surrounded by a ditch and bank, topped by a palisade of eight-inch fir trunks. There was only one gate, commanded by one watchtower. The gate itself was reasonably solid, with stout hinges and bars. He put the ten of his men who had bows in the tower; they quickly demonstrated that they were much better shots than the enemy, who pulled back out of range to consider their options. The tower detail counted heads as best they could and put the size of the opposing force at less than two hundred. Aelius was greatly encouraged; that put the numbers well within the approved offensive/defensive ratio, and the enemy appeared to have little or no understanding of siege procedures. He, on the other hand, had food and hostages. His main disadvantage was the lack of a catwalk or fighting platform on his side of the palisade; apart from that and his limited stock of arrows, he was modestly confident that he could hold the status quo. Everything would depend, therefore, on which arrived first: his reinforcements, or the rest of the raiding party. To buy a little extra time, he had the interpreter shout out a warning that if the raiders didn't withdraw to double bowshot immediately, he would execute two hostages. The raiders made no move, so Aelius had ropes put round the necks of the two villagers who'd been shot earlier, and hung them off the tower. The raiders screamed at him and shot a few arrows (which fell short), then backed off a further two hundred yards. They stood around for a while, then sat down cross-legged on the turf.

Aelius discussed the situation with his cousins, who agreed with him that the enemy would most likely attack an hour or so before dawn. Aelius therefore decided he would attack an hour after midnight. As soon as it was dark he set a party of villagers to digging a tunnel under the palisade into the ditch, on the opposite side of the village to the gateway and the tower. When the time he'd chosen came, he left ten of his men to guard the villagers and keep a lookout from the tower, then led the rest of his force through the tunnel. They took a long detour, eventually coming out on the blind side of the slope just above the place where the enemy were. They crept to the top of the crest and ran down towards the campfire the raiders had thoughtfully lit, around which most of them were now sleeping.

In so far as they could think at all, woken from sleep by hostile yells and the screams of their wounded colleagues, the enemy naturally a.s.sumed that the men invading their camp and slaughtering them at will must be Vesani reinforcements. Quite sensibly and properly, they ran, most of them not bothering to pick up their weapons. Those who stayed, through drowsiness or valour, were quickly dealt with. Aelius told his men to leave their bodies where they lay and get back to the village, just in case the fugitives came back. However, he made a point of collecting all the abandoned weapons they could find by firelight, in particular bows and arrows. Then he retired to the village.

It's safe to a.s.sume that the fugitives knew which direction their reinforcements were coming from, and ran to tell them what had happened. They arrived two hours after dawn, to find thirty of their colleagues lying dead on the gra.s.s and the village gate firmly shut. As far as they were aware, the sixty or so men who'd taken the village had been reinforced by an unknown but quite substantial number of allies, at least doubling the garrison. That put the odds at something in the order of five to one-marginal but acceptable according to the tables at the back of Aelius' copy of The Art of War; rather less inviting to the raiders, whose respect for their enemy had increased significantly. There was some sort of council of war, which Aelius watched with interest from the tower. Then a small number of raiders went off in a hurry, while the rest sat down, comfortably out of bowshot.

It was easy enough for Aelius to reconstruct the arguments used during the council. One faction would have insisted on sending for reinforcements. The opposition would have pointed out that that would entail telling their neighbours at least the bare outline of events, which in practice would mean inviting the entire Mavortine Confederacy to come and share the loot with them. Further, there was no way of knowing how many more Vesani were on their way; the longer they delayed, the greater the risk not only of losing the treasure but of being killed or (probably worse) captured and taken back to the City. True, they were in no position to rush the gate and break it down in the face of determined and highly professional opposition. The one advantage they had was numbers; if they attacked the gate and simultaneously dug their way under the palisade, preferably in two places, they had a chance of dividing the garrison and overwhelming them. Otherwise, they might as well go home, pack their belongings and emigrate; it would be interesting to see how far they'd get before the Vesani tracked them down.

Moved, therefore, that they send a small number of men to the nearest large farm, to buy, borrow or steal digging equipment, carts and horses. Voted on and approved by something in the order of a two-thirds majority.

The commandeering party came back with four hay carts and a lumber wagon. They used the carts as mobile cover for the sapping parties (in effect, reinventing the pavise from first principles; Aelius was impressed) and the garrison quickly stopped wasting arrows on them. There were, after all, other expedients, approved by the Book and standard procedure. When the Mavortine sappers were about halfway through, they were startled and horrified to find a hole caving in the side of their trench, out of which crawled armed men: Aelius' cousins had dug a tunnel of their own. They chased the survivors of the sapping parties out of the ditch as far as the carts, then stopped, dragged the carts into the open away from the palisade, smashed four spokes out of each cartwheel, and retired to their tunnel, which they filled in after them with previously prepared sacks of rubble.

Aelius, meanwhile, had been lucky. While ransacking a house for sacks to fill with rocks, he found something he definitely hadn't expected to find, but which filled his heart with joy: a jar of good-quality refined s.h.i.+pwrights' pitch, bearing an Auxentine revenue seal. With this crucial ingredient in hand, he had no trouble finding lamp oil; sulphur was another unexpected bonus. There was only one suitable pipe in the village, running down the side of the lodge, but the smithy provided him with a fine double-action bellows, and the shoemaker had an adequate stock of thick tanned hide. After that, all he had to do was choose between half a dozen entirely suitable large iron kettles.

Shaken by the disastrous failure of the undermining attempts, the raiders decided to put everything into a full-scale a.s.sault on the gate. They had one cart left; they filled it with rocks, for weight, and tied in it lengthways the trunk of the only decent-sized oak tree within ten square miles, which happened to grow on the ridge overlooking the gate. As they manhandled their improvised ram towards the gate they suffered cruelly from the accurate and surprisingly far-reaching archery of the defenders in the tower; however, for each man shot, another rushed to take his place, and as they came to the last ten yards of their distance, they began to feel a faint but distinct degree of hope.

Then the gate suddenly swung open, just enough to reveal one end of an ordinary baked-clay water pipe. One of the raiders had the experience or the intuition to yell a warning and jump clear, but if his colleagues realised why he was so terrified, they had no time to react.

The first recorded use of Vesani fire by the Republic's navy was in AUC 576, over four centuries previously; and ever since the recipe for the infamous incendiary compound, which burned even on water and which Vesani s.h.i.+ps shot at their enemies with a giant syphon through a tube, was one of the Republic's most closely guarded secrets. Even Aelius didn't know it; but he knew that the closest anyone else had ever come to duplicating it was by mixing pitch, lamp oil, sulphur and distilled birch resin. The workings of the projector were common knowledge, since examples had been recovered from wrecked Vesani s.h.i.+ps; you simply pa.s.sed a jet of air through a vessel full of the compound down a tube, in the mouth of which you'd previously stuffed a handful of smouldering rag or moss.

All the Mavortines knew about Vesani fire was that it was certain death-if it hit you, there was no way of putting it out, not even if you jumped into the sea. In the event, Aelius' improvised projector only worked indifferently well; it sent an impressive jet of flame just over the heads of the men pus.h.i.+ng the ram, missed the ram itself and set fire to one side of the cart, which burnt in a gradual and unspectacular manner for the rest of the day. That didn't seem to matter, as far as the raiders were concerned. All they knew was that the garrison was armed with the Vesani Republic's deadliest and most secret weapon, and they had no interest whatsoever in getting any closer to it than they could help.

The debate that followed was pa.s.sionate and bitter and lasted well into the night. Aelius was tempted to try another sortie, but resisted the temptation; his position was now comfortably strong, and a failed sortie was one of the few ways he could bring about his own defeat. He contented himself with shooting a few fire-arrows; they fell well short, but each time one streaked through the sky, the raiders stopped talking and stayed silent for some time.

Just in case, Aelius had thought out a number of strategies, both pa.s.sive and active, for the next day. In the event, they weren't needed. His Cazar reinforcements arrived in the night, waited in the approved manner until just before dawn, and attacked. Aelius immediately led his men out of the village to take the enemy in flank and rear. There was no real resistance, and the standard encirclement manoeuvre Aelius used to keep any of the raiders from getting away worked perfectly. When there were fifty or so of them left, Aelius halted the ma.s.sacre and accepted their surrender; the Vesani, he knew, would feel cheated in spite of everything if they had n.o.body to execute.

In the event, the fifty prisoners made very useful porters. One thing the Treasury men hadn't been able to procure at Anno was carts; which meant that they would have to carry twenty million nomismata down to the sea on their shoulders. To make matters worse, the nearest isolated and unfrequented anchorage capable of accommodating the stone barge was twelve miles away; fifteen, if they were sensible and took the long way round to avoid coming too close to the next village.

Even with the prisoners, Aelius recognised that he had no choice but to press-gang the villagers as porters; he would need at least fifty of his two hundred and seventy-eight men as guards, able to move fast and use their weapons. This would mean they would be both slow and conspicuous, and he had no doubts at all that the arrival of his reinforcements had been noticed in Inguiomera and had excited local curiosity. He would be in difficult, unfamiliar country (unfamiliar to him, but not to the people most likely to attack him) with only a sixty-year-old map copied by a scholar of the Studium from an unknown, unverified source to guide him. So far, true enough, the map had proved marvellously accurate-a miracle, in the circ.u.mstances-but, as he is reported to have said to one of his cousins at the time, luck is like an old country bridge: you don't want to have to rely on it when carrying fifteen tons of gold.

His luck held for most of the way. When it ran out, it did so to maximum effect. The band of Mavortines who eventually blocked his way had chosen their ground with care. They waited until Aelius' column had forded, with great difficulty, a deep, fast-flowing river running down from the mountains; then they jumped up from their hiding place among the rocky outcrops that flanked both sides of the only pa.s.s marked on the map through the curtain of steep hills that rose above the beach where the stone barge was presumably waiting. Escape to left or right was not attractive. Twenty-five yards on either side of the cattle-drove Aelius had been following, he could see a screen of four-foot-high tussocks of coa.r.s.e-bladed swamp gra.s.s, the unambiguous sign of treacherously wet ground. The drove ran along a causeway, roughly twenty feet wide, six feet or so higher than the marsh, presumably built to allow cattle to be driven down to the sea. If he fell back and tried to escape across the river, the enemy would charge and take him in rear while he was battling with the current. Leaving the causeway and taking his chances in the march would be suicide. Three directions out of four were therefore closed to him, which left him with the cheerful prospect of charging into a narrow defended s.p.a.ce, with the enemy commanding the heights above it. Any fool could see that he hadn't brought the Vesani fire projector with him, so the secret-weapon ploy wasn't available this time. He had a hundred men whose hands were free to fight, but at least half of them would be needed to keep the villagers and the captured raiders from running away as soon as his attention was engaged elsewhere.

The last problem was, of course, the least of his worries. In the confined s.p.a.ce where the fighting would take place, numbers were as likely to be a hindrance as a help. That was a precept of war, written down in the Book; along with the principle that the best place to attack an enemy is his strongest point, because that's where he least expects it. After a quick conference with his section leaders, Aelius detached his fifty fighters and led them up the causeway toward the enemy.

They were met with a cloud of arrows, which fell short. That he found encouraging. The enemy, it appeared, were no archers. At a hundred and seventy-five yards range, he called a halt and ordered volleys of six shots rapid, aimed not at the defenders of the pa.s.s but the men on the hill. The Mavortines draw their bows to the corners of their mouths; the Cazars draw to the ear, and their bows are recurved and backed with sinew. At a hundred and seventy-five yards, the enemy might as well have been shooting at the sun, but they were comfortably within long range of the Cazars.

They killed no more than a dozen of the men on the slopes, but that wasn't the objective; the rest scampered for the cover of the rocks, at which Aelius gave the order to drop bows and go in. It was a risk: he was charging straight at archers, though the narrow mouth of the pa.s.s was only wide enough to allow eight men to stand and shoot. His quick mental estimate had been four shots from eight men in the time it'd take him to run a hundred and seventy-five yards; according to the tables at the back of the Book, that should cost him between six and ten men, a price he had no choice but to pay.

In all likelihood, the speed and ferocity of the charge, together with the unnerving sight of seeing their colleagues on the hill shot down or driven off at an apparently impossible distance, had a bad effect on the nerves of the archers in the pa.s.s. They managed to get off three shots each, but their first volley went high, the second was rushed and s.n.a.t.c.hed and scored no hits; two of Aelius' men were hit by the third discharge, but he'd put the men with some form of armour in the front rank, and all three hits glanced off. The archers, having seen with their own eyes that arrows had no effect on these terrible people, dropped their bows and tried to run, only succeeding in barging into their colleagues jammed in behind them. At that point, Aelius' charge went home.

His last order had been: kill as few as possible. Dead bodies, he knew only too well, clog up a narrow s.p.a.ce like nothing else. Unfortunately, presented with a confused ma.s.s of men who were more concerned with wrestling their way past their own rear echelon than trying to fight, it was an impossible order to follow. Even so, it didn't prove to be an insuperable problem. Scrambling over the mat of dead bodies, they quickly cut through into the open; the enemy had untangled themselves and run, leaving the road downhill to the sea wide open.

Aelius immediately called a halt. He could still lose the engagement and everybody's lives by pressing on to pursue an enemy he had no real interest in, and there were still enemies on the slopes above and behind him. He went back to the mouth of the pa.s.s and waved to his column to advance at the double; then he sent his men up onto the slope to flush out the enemies there.

Having seen the main strength of their force slaughtered and routed, the archers on the hill showed no interest in mounting a desperate counter-attack. They ran; and when Aelius was satisfied that they were going to keep running for some time, he sent twenty men ahead to make sure the road was clear and there were no further ambushes. He followed at the head of the column, forcing a lively pace. With no further annoyance from the enemy, they made it down to the seash.o.r.e in excellent time, to find that there was no sign of the stone barge.

At that point, Aelius later admitted, he was sure he was going to die. If the s.h.i.+p wasn't there, it could only be because something had happened: it had sunk or been attacked or impounded, and it wasn't going to come. By now, he'd killed so many Mavortines that the obligation to revenge their dead would matter more to their kinsmen than the gold, which meant that dumping the treasure and running away wouldn't solve everything at a stroke. He seriously considered it, however; they could run a lot faster without the weight, and without several hundred prisoners. However, he dismissed the idea. It would be worse than death, he said, to have abandoned the gold and watched the survivors of the ambush help themselves to it, only to be rescued by the slightly delayed stone barge half an hour later. In short, the only option left to him was to sit on the beach and hope the s.h.i.+p came, and that he proceeded to do.

As Aelius had guessed, the s.h.i.+p had had its own adventures to contend with. When the two Treasury officials requisitioned the s.h.i.+p, naturally they didn't tell the crew what it was needed for. But they must have guessed, or overheard an indiscreet conversation between the Treasury men, because as soon as they were out of sight of land, they seized their captain and first mate and secured them in the charcoal hatch, and sent representatives to the Treasury men to tell them that they knew what the mission was, and they wanted five per cent of the recovered money as their fee for their part of the job.

The Treasury men denied all knowledge of any money, which annoyed the crew, who dropped anchor. The Treasury men then admitted that they were on their way to pick up the stolen gold, but they themselves had no authority to make any sort of deal, so it was pointless holding up the mission and quite probably dooming it to failure in an attempt to extort from them promises that they freely admitted would be worthless. If, however, they cooperated, released the captain immediately and did everything they could to make up lost time, there was still a chance that the mission would succeed, in which case they were quite confident that First Citizen Ba.s.so would show his generous grat.i.tude to everybody involved in the recovery, including themselves. If the mission failed because of the crew's actions, however, they held out little or no hope of them ever returning safely to the City; instead, they would most certainly be arrested and charged with piracy, obstructing government agents and quite possibly aiding and abetting the raiders after the fact, any one of which offences carried the death penalty.

They presented their case well, and eventually the crew gave in; by then, however, the wind had dropped, and they had to wait four hours before it came back. By the time they reached the rendezvous point, they were running six hours late and night was falling. There was no sign of anybody on the beach. The crew representatives took this to mean that the mission had failed, and that if anybody was waiting for them, it would be hostile Mavortines. They therefore refused to take the s.h.i.+p in. It was only after a further hour of bitter debate that the Treasury men induced them to launch a boat and go in close, to see if anybody came out to make contact.

By then it was pitch dark, and the boat crew refused to show a light. The most they would agree to do was call out in Vesani and wait for a reply. On their third hail they were answered by Aelius himself (the only Vesani speaker in the party), who a.s.sured them that he was there, and asked them what they thought they were playing at.

The captain of the barge pointed out to the Treasury men that beaching the s.h.i.+p in the dark was too dangerous to contemplate. Either they could try and get the gold and the men aboard using the barge's two boats (big enough to carry six men, or two men and five hundredweight of cargo), or else they would have to wait for daylight. The boat went back to Aelius with these options, and Aelius reluctantly chose the latter. He and his men had been fortunate enough to find a cave, just above the tideline, where they'd cached the gold and the prisoners. If absolutely necessary, they could spend the night there. The s.h.i.+p, meanwhile, should stand out to sea, in case the Mavortines tried swimming out and boarding it.

Dawn brought with it the unwelcome sight of about four hundred Mavortines, drawn up on the beach; presumably the survivors of the fight in the pa.s.s, together with as much support as they'd been able to raise in a hurry. It was evident that they had too much respect for Aelius to try and force the cave, even in the dark. Beaching the s.h.i.+p with them there would, of course, be impossible. Aelius was (by his own later admission) at a loss when heralds came forward and asked to negotiate.

Their demands, they felt, were reasonable. They wanted a third of the gold, together with indemnities of a hundred nomismata per man for those of their colleagues who'd been killed at the village and in the pa.s.s: a sum which, by their calculations, came to seventy thousand nomismata. In return, they would go away and leave the Vesani to load their s.h.i.+p.

Aelius replied that he would give them a quarter of the gold in full settlement, but in return they would have to help load the other three-quarters. The heralds conferred for a while and said that that was acceptable, provided that the Vesani released the fifty survivors of the original raiding party before they started loading. Aelius said he would release the men, but only when loading was complete. The revised terms were agreed. The heralds went back to their colleagues, and Aelius' men began bringing the gold out of the cave onto the beach. Aelius, meanwhile, flashed the agreed signal to the barge to come in to land.

By the time the s.h.i.+p had been drawn up on the sand, Aelius' men had stacked the gold sacks in two piles. At this point, Aelius released the villagers and told them to run, not walk, down the beach, away from the Mavortine war party; this they were only too happy to do. He sent the fifty prisoners, with their hands firmly tied and linked to each other with a rope, to stand between the two heaps of gold sacks. Then he beckoned the Mavortines to come across and help with the loading. When they were fifty or so yards away, Aelius gave the order for sixty of his men to start shooting. The Mavortines, who had come armed but without their bows and quivers, were either shot down or put to flight. The rest of Aelius' men formed up in front of the gold, apart from a detachment of fifteen who drove the prisoners up the beach and onto the s.h.i.+p. Once they were safely on board, Aelius' men (apart from the cordon of archers) started loading the gold on the s.h.i.+p. The Mavortines charged, took heavy casualties at seventy-five yards from the archers, fell back and stayed back; it was clear that they'd had enough. Aelius himself waited until the last sack of gold had been loaded before helping shove the barge off the beach; he was pulled aboard out of the sea on a rope.

By the time the barge reached the City, the Treasury men had weighed the gold (there was obviously too much to count each coin) and were able to report that losses, by weight, did not exceed the value of six thousand nomismata. As for the human cost, casualties to the recovery party and the s.h.i.+p's crew amounted to one broken arm (aboard s.h.i.+p), three cases of broken ribs (the armoured men hit by arrows in the pa.s.s) and minor cuts and bruises.

Ten.

It was an ancient law of the Republic, designed to limit the prestige of individual commanders and curb the cult of personality within the military, that no general should be permitted to make a triumphal entry into the City twice in one year. General Aelius, who hadn't enjoyed the ceremonies the last time, was openly relieved, but Ba.s.so felt that something had to be done to mark the occasion. As he told the House during the debate on the wording of the official vote of thanks, it was not merely a case of what Aelius had done, but the manner in which he had done it. The speed, the resourcefulness, the sheer elan of the operation, the fact that Aelius had overwhelmingly defeated the enemy at every turn without the loss of a single man, clearly demonstrated to the whole world that the Vesani Republic, far from being weak, was stronger than ever before. Aelius had turned a potential humiliation into a magnificent victory, and it was essential for its own self-respect that the House should find some appropriate way of honouring him. He therefore proposed that...

"No," Aelius said. "No. Absolutely not."

Ba.s.so smiled indulgently at him. "You don't have a say in it, I'm afraid," he said. "The House has voted. It's out of my hands now."

"I won't do it."

"Yes," Ba.s.so said gently, "you will. If need be, the Speaker will send armed proctors to your house to drag you there. Cheer up," he added briskly, "back in the old days it was the highest honour the state could bestow, and you'll be the first man in three hundred years-"

"Oh for crying out loud," Aelius snapped. "Don't try and put the blame on them; it was all your idea." He was crouching in his chair, his fingers wrapped round his elbows. "What harm have I ever done you?"

Ba.s.so looked at him sternly. "Well," he said, "for one thing, you've cost me personally a great deal of money in lost interest on the loans I won't now be making to the Treasury. For which," he added graciously, "I'm prepared to forgive you, but only on condition that you stop acting like a child and do what's expected of you. If the people of this city don't get a chance to cheer at you and wave little flags, they're going to be very unhappy."

The Order of the Headless Spear was founded in AUC 171, to honour the Paterculi brothers, who held the pa.s.s of Rhomphaea for six days against a vast Sclerian army, thereby saving the city. Members.h.i.+p of the Order was reserved for Vesani citizens who by their extraordinary courage and devotion to duty on the battlefield had preserved the City from destruction. The insignia, a simple ashwood pole, recalled the last stand of the Paterculi, when, their spearheads having snapped off in the bodies of their enemies, they fought on with the headless shafts. It was conceded even in official circles that the symbolism was rather unfortunate and provided regrettable scope for low humour and double entendre. Nevertheless, it was one of the Republic's oldest and proudest traditions, and the origins of the ceremony that went with it had been lost in the mists of antiquity.

Over the centuries, many scholars had tried to make sense of the ritual, and the best gloss they had been able to come up with was as follows. The candidate for admission to the order was stripped naked because the Paterculi had fought so long and so hard that all their armour had been cut away. The candidate rode to Temple on a donkey because the Paterculi, unable to find horses to get them to the pa.s.s before the enemy, had commandeered mules from a nearby farm. Why the candidate was obliged to ride the donkey the wrong way round, facing its tail, was uncertain, though it might possibly refer to a later incident, the exploits of Bracteatus against the Lobar, when Bracteatus infiltrated the enemy camp by pretending to be a madman, riding backwards on a draught ox. The ritual pelting of the candidate with pomegranates was almost certainly a reference to the siege of AUC 207, when the Sclerian army camped outside the walls had mocked the starving citizens within by throwing rotten fruit into the city. There was no obvious derivation for the triple drenching of the candidate's head (in water, wine and whey), although some researchers felt that these elements were survivors of a much older ritual, now totally obscure, which had been incorporated into the Headless Spear ceremony at an early stage of its evolution.

After the third drench, Aelius was towelled off and clothed in a simple sackcloth robe by the laticlavular and angustoclavular tribunes and led up the Temple steps, where he was officially received by the City legate and the deacon of the Studium. His eyes were then blindfolded as he was escorted into the nave of the Temple, while the choir sang "Hail, Invincible Sun" and "Behold Him who in glory". His eyes were uncovered at the foot of the steps of the high altar, where the Patriarch of the Studium presented him with the headless spear, while outside, in accordance with tradition, twelve sergeants from his regiment were supposed to be scattering handfuls of silver and copper coins (provided by the candidate) among the crowds. Since all of Aelius' men had gone straight back to the Cazar Peninsular as soon as they'd been paid, their place was taken by twelve senior NCOs of the City Guard. In another break with tradition, the coins distributed were gold, provided (an open secret) by the First Citizen; they were the very first release of the newly commissioned Victory issue, struck from the stock of foreign gold that the raiders hadn't touched, with Ba.s.so's head on one side and on the other, a helmeted, draped and cuira.s.sed bust of General Aelius, holding the headless spear, under the inscription Saviour Of His Country.

"It doesn't look anything like me," Aelius said.

Ba.s.so laughed. "Everybody hates their portrait on the money," he said. "I remember my father moaned about it for weeks; said they'd made him look like a chicken. And as for that hideous caricature of me-"

"I didn't say I didn't like it," Aelius interrupted. "But this is some hero, not me." He turned the coin over, hesitated and handed it back. "At least I got to see one," he said.

"You'll be sick of the sight of it," Ba.s.so replied. "We're minting twenty thousand. Just think. All over the world, thousands of people who've never seen you will believe you look like that."

Aelius frowned. "Here, let me see it again," he said. Ba.s.so spun him the coin; he caught it, looked closely and frowned. "One thing," he said. "The way I'm holding the stick."

"Ah, yes," Ba.s.so said. "Sorry about that. Open to misinterpretation, especially when it's worn down a bit. That's what happens when you have to push things through in a hurry. Still, at least you'll have a different nickname now, instead of Cows.h.i.+t."

Aelius looked at him. "Quite," he said. He handed the coin back, but Ba.s.so waved it away. "Keep it," he said. "Drill a hole in it and hang it round your neck for a lucky piece."

"Not likely," Aelius said. "I can't afford expensive jewellery. You know," he went on, "I'm deeply conscious of the honour, and I'm sure most men would give their right arm to have a chance of being totally humiliated in front of a hundred thousand people, but all things considered, I'd rather have had some money. Not a fortune necessarily," he added, "but just something would've been nice. At least enough to replace the pair of boots I ruined wading about in salt water."

Ba.s.so shook his head. "Out of the question," he replied. "It'd be considered the most appalling insult."

"Oh."

"Well, of course. Think about it. The Headless Spear's reserved for citizens; which in practice, back when it was all dreamed up, meant members of the n.o.ble families who traditionally ran the army. Goes without saying, they didn't give a d.a.m.n about money, since they were all born with far more than anybody could spend in a lifetime. All they cared about was honour. Which is why," he added, "everybody else involved on our side gets a nice lump sum in cash, and you get a stick." Ba.s.so looked at him, and narrowed his eyes a little. "What's the matter, Aelius?" he asked. "You're not short of money, are you?"

Aelius raised his hand, palm outward. "Not in that sense, no," he said. "And I'm not asking for a pay rise, either. I'm perfectly comfortable on what I'm getting. And, of course, for what I get paid each month, you could buy half the Cazar Peninsula. It's just..." He turned his head away just a little. "I was thinking about retiring, that's all."

Ba.s.so's head shot up. "Out of the question," he snapped. "Sorry."

"You gave that a lot of careful thought."

"Didn't need to," Ba.s.so said, and when Aelius turned back to face him, he found that Ba.s.so was staring at him with a look of barely restrained fury. "I don't know what I did to deserve that," Ba.s.so went on. "Funny, I'm sure I'd have remembered if I'd stabbed you in the back or had your entire family hunted down and murdered."

"Don't give me that," Aelius said, with a certain degree of bl.u.s.ter. "I'm not indispensable."

"That's for me to decide," Ba.s.so replied. "And I've decided, and you can't leave. I couldn't do without you when everybody was demanding I have you arrested and slung in jail, and I can't do without you now. That's all there is to it." He paused for a moment or so, then went on (quieter and gentler): "Look, if this is anything at all about money, just say how much and I'll write you a personal draft." Aelius glowered at him; he smiled. "I knew it wasn't," he said. "All right. Is it a protest about having to ride backwards on a donkey with no clothes on? Because that was just show business, for your fellow citizens. You know how it is. Ninety per cent of my job is keeping them entertained."

Aelius looked down at the floor. "I'm starting to feel my age," he said.

Ba.s.so laughed. "Don't be ridiculous."

Aelius looked offended, if anything. "Back home, I'd be an old man. My grandfather died at fifty-six-that's just five years older than I am now. He didn't die of anything, just wore out."

"Then be grateful you've been living in a civilised country," Ba.s.so replied. "Besides, you didn't do too badly for an old man the other day."

Aelius furrowed his brows. "They didn't want me with them," he replied. "My mother's people, when I went to hire them. They said they'd do the job, but they wanted me to stay behind. They said I'd slow them up."

"Then they were wrong."

Aelius shrugged. "I had a real job keeping up," he said. "When they were hardly feeling it, my lungs were bursting and my legs felt like lead. It was only because I had other things on my mind all the time that I didn't give up and just lie down and pa.s.s out. All right, I'm not quite dead yet, but I'm too old for all that b.l.o.o.d.y running about."

"Fine," Ba.s.so said impatiently. "And how often are you going to have to do that?"

"I had to the other day."

"Then train someone to run about for you," Ba.s.so snapped. "Find a good man and teach him how to be you. When you've done that, I'll let you go. Till then, I can't spare you. Is that clear?"

Aelius looked at him for a moment, then let his shoulders sag. "It's proof that I'm right," he said, "that I haven't got the strength to argue with you."

"You'll stay."

Aelius made a let-me-be gesture. "I only said I was thinking of retiring," he said. "I mean, what's wrong with that? I was considering how pleasant it would be to buy a nice house with a bit of land out back somewhere in the southern suburbs. Put on some weight, grow roses. I wasn't actually about to resign my commission." He twisted round in his chair, so he could look out of the window. "You're right about one thing, though. I need to bring on someone I can rely on, for things like this latest business."

Ba.s.so nodded. "A Cazar."

"Wouldn't have to be," Aelius replied. "I went to my mother's clan because they were the only people I could think of in a hurry who could do the job, and who I'd dare trust with all that money. That's not to imply Cazars are the world's best fighting men. Actually, it'd be far better if we had a unit capable of jobs like that stationed here, permanently-picked men, really well trained, a.s.sured loyalty..." He frowned. "Why are you pulling that face?"

"Don't even think about it," Ba.s.so said. "a.s.sured loyalty: who to? What you're describing is what in other countries they call the palace guard. Bad idea. Next thing you know, they're running the Republic. We've always steered well clear of that sort of thing, thank you very much."

"Which is why the bandits were able to stroll right up Portgate and rob the Treasury."

"Maybe." Ba.s.so spread his hands. "And we got the money back. If we're dumb enough to station a standing army in the City, we stand to lose a h.e.l.l of a lot more than twenty million nomismata. No, I can see why the idea appeals to you-it's plain common sense from a military perspective-but politically it'd be plain lunacy. Simple rule. Vesani aren't soldiers. Vesani hire soldiers. They row in the fleet, sure, but that's quite another matter. We're the only civilised country in the world that doesn't have an aristocracy that doubles as the military elite. Which is why you don't see so many kings and dictators around the place as you do abroad."

Aelius grinned. "I'm so glad I don't do politics. So, I can't have a City garrison, but I can have an apprentice. Is that about the strength of it?"

He had to wait a full second for an answer. For that second, he got the impression that Ba.s.so was miles away. "That's it," Ba.s.so said. "A bright young man looking for a good career with prospects. That's exactly what you need."

He went straight from the meeting with Aelius to the House, where the Opposition had tabled a motion calling for punitive action against the Mavortine Confederacy. On the way there, he read through his briefing notes, which told him nothing he didn't already know. There was, of course, no case to answer. In reality there was no such thing as the Mavortine Confederacy. The peace treaty between the nineteen tribes had lasted less than ten years, and that had been ninety years ago. Since then, there had been nothing any civilised man could recognise as a government. The tribal elders had a vague customary authority over their own clans, but clan leaders.h.i.+p was decided by a challenge to mortal combat, and leaders tended not to last very long. From time to time a strong man tried to unite his tribe for an attack on a neighbour, but before long he was killed in the ring or poisoned.

As far as the interrogators had managed to find out, the raid on the Treasury had been a purely private-enterprise affair, the raiders being outlaws and exiles drawn from half a dozen different tribes. The organiser (killed on the beach) had been a bricklayer in the City for five years, during which time he'd painstakingly planned every stage of the operation, walking the route to be taken over and over again, memorising distances and times (he couldn't write them down because he was illiterate). When he returned to Mavortis, he spent another two years recruiting, taking infinite care over security so that n.o.body outside the conspiracy should have the faintest idea what he had in mind; the raiders weren't told which city they'd be attacking until they were on board s.h.i.+p, though a few of them, who'd been in the City themselves, had a shrewd idea. The village wasn't even the ringleader's home; it was just a village close to the sea whose headman had agreed to stash the loot in return for a generous payment. Wiping the Mavortines off the face of the earth would, therefore, solve nothing. More to the point, it would be a difficult and expensive job; the Mavortine economy was nearly all subsistence farming, which meant there were no stocks of food larger than a single household's winter store. An invasion army would therefore have to take its provisions with it, and there would have to be a long and difficult supply chain. It was a very large country, spa.r.s.ely populated. Catching the Mavortines would be a protracted, tedious busines: they had an endless supply of remote mountains and impenetrable forests to hide in. Starving them out wasn't a practical option, since twelve of the tribes were practically nomadic-they could hide themselves and their flocks and herds in the rough country and survive there for years, with no chance of bringing them to battle against their will. Victory, in other words, would be slow, costly and difficult to achieve, or even define; and there was always the risk of defeat, which would do untold damage to the Republic's prestige. The game wasn't worth the candle, and that was all there was to it.

He stopped his chair at the House door, but didn't get out straight away. Instead, he sat reading the brief one more time. It was a splendidly thorough doc.u.ment, put together by a young clerk by the name of Tzimisces, a recent discovery by Antigonus. All the facts, clearly arranged in a logical sequence; sections on geography, society, economy, history, all the statistics neatly tabulated in an appendix; when he'd finished reading, he found himself staring at the page as if the words were one of those children's games, a picture cut up into hundreds of irregularly shaped pieces, which you put back together again. There was a pattern, a shape hidden in among all those facts, dates, numbers, but he wasn't quite sure what it was supposed to be.

Lazio Rufrio opened the debate for the Optimates. He was his usual melodramatic self. An insult to the Vesani people that could only be avenged by blood; the eyes of the world were watching for a hint of weakness; only a show of immediate and overwhelming force would be adequate; the First Citizen's duty to his people to eradicate this nest of thieves, pirates and murderers. Ba.s.so could have told him what he was going to say before he opened his mouth, except that Ba.s.so would've put it considerably better.