Under any other circumstances there would have been a certain amount of debate, politicking, trading favours and remembering obligations; but it was too late in too overwhelming a day for anybody to have the patience or the stamina to play games. In consequence, the nominations were sensible and the debate mercifully short; even so, Uncle Anakai’s head was starting to nod forward by the time Temrai declared his decision, and the pad of bloodsoaked cotton fell from Anakai’s hand onto the rug, revealing the full ugliness of the wound, the crudeness of the chewed-sinew suture it had hastily been sewn up with. My fault again, Temrai reflected; all the sinew they’d normally have used had been requisitioned by the bowmakers for strings and back-facings, so the healers had to unwrap old stuff from tools and furniture and chomp it soft in their mouths in order to stitch up wounds.
That’s something else we’ll have to deal with; we can’t go into battle again with nothing to patch the casualties up with. He thought for a moment about the word
casualties
; a nice technical term, suitable for military use. You didn’t talk about people slashed open and bleeding, people with arms and legs missing, people with holes in them or scars that made their own children frightened of them; you said
casualties
, and after a while you talked about
acceptable losses
and then
expendable forces
, and pretty soon it all became a game of chess, observed from the top of a hill, part of a sequence of games, a tournament. And then you wonder why your friends don’t talk to you the same way any more, and after that you start worrying about conspiracies and treason; and after that, the chances are you’ll really have conspiracies and treason to worry about. And to think; there’s people who actually
want
this job. Crazier still; there are places where people who want this sort of job are allowed to do it.
Which is how wars start; or, at least, how they’re caused.
‘Next on the agenda,’ he heard himself saying, ‘is the formal vote of thanks to the gods for keeping our casualties down to an acceptable level. Uncle, if you’d care to do the honours.’
Loredan didn’t mind. If anything, he was glad of the peace and quiet, relieved to be on his own. He stretched out, hands behind his head, legs extended, feet crossed. The stone bench was cold, but not unbearably so.
I could get to like this
, he said to himself.
If he’d felt it was unjust, that he didn’t deserve to be here, it’d be a different matter. As it was, what had the Prefect called it?
Culpable negligence, dereliction of duty, gross errors of judgement
; he couldn’t really argue with that. A thousand men dead or in the hands of the enemy, because he’d been too busy sulking to notice that they were walking into a trap. Culpable negligence was putting it mildly; it couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d cut the word TRAP in eight-foot letters in the chalk.
If Maxen was alive, he’d have pulled my lungs out for what I’ve done.
Yes, but Maxen was dead. Hence all this.
Held pending an immediate inquiry, the Prefect had said. Loredan hoped it wouldn’t be too immediate. A week or two here in the quiet and the dark would do him the world of good, let him get rid of the horrors before he had to go out and explain himself to people. Right now, a stone bed in a cell under the council chamber was infinitely preferable to getting yelled at in the chapter house; he could easily imagine the panic inside and the hysteria outside, the mobs baying for someone’s blood, rioting down at the docks as people fought for berths on outgoing ships, a wonderful pretext for another night of looting and breaking down the doors of unpopular neighbours.
As to what happened after that, he couldn’t really summon up the energy to worry about it. Maybe he’d be put to death, here in his cell or in some quiet guardroom on the wall. That kind of death he could accept; somehow it wasn’t nearly as depressing as the thought of dying in the courtroom had been, when he’d been facing the prospect of fighting Alvise for the greater glory of the charcoal people. That would have made very little sense, his last dying thought would have been,
Gods, how stupid
. This way? Well, fair enough, in context. He owed a death to the people of the plains. This way he’d been able to get four-fifths of the army home and still pay off his debt to the enemy.
Someone walked past in the corridor outside; heavy boots, a jangle of metal, keys probably. Were there other prisoners down here, or was he the only one? Other enemies of the state, out of sight and mind? He wondered what they’d done. You had to be pretty fair-average wicked to end up in the cells; mere piracy, rape or murder weren’t enough to get you free board and lodging in this town.
Fancy there being no Emperor, he said to himself, still not quite able to believe what he’d heard. The Prefect had been very matter-of-fact about it, as if he’d been talking about the tooth fairy or the headache elves, things you grew out of believing in when you turned seven. According to the Prefect, there hadn’t been an Emperor for the whole of Loredan’s lifetime -
but didn’t we always pick flowers for his garland on his birthday when we were kids? What did they do with all those hundreds of flowery garlands that got handed in with such ceremony at the upper-city gate each year? Disturbing, somehow, to think of all that love going to waste, like water draining into sand
.
When Callelogus IV died with no heirs and the succession stood to be disputed between three distant cousins, foreign princes who couldn’t speak the language and whose table manners alone would have rendered them entirely unacceptable to the city, it occurred to the City Prefect and his cronies that if the people weren’t told the Emperor was dead, then nobody would know, and what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Since then, the upper city had been empty except for a few caretakers and some officials who had offices there; Callelogus had lived to be ninety-six, and on his death the diadem passed to an entirely made-up nephew, the son of a wholly fictitious sister who’d supposedly been married off to an unknown princeling in a far-distant land just long enough ago that nobody could be expected to remember it happening. Meanwhile, the government of the city stayed in the hands of the people whose trade was governing cities, quietly and piecemeal; secretaries of state, officials, middle-city men who knew how to repair roads and negotiate trade agreements. The more Loredan thought about it, the more he favoured it as a system of government. They had, after all, done a good job.
Up till now, at least.
Gods
, Loredan thought,
what if the city is going to fall?
Unthinkable; the wall still stood, after all, and nobody could ever get past that. But he’d seen siege engines in the plainsmen’s camp, catapults and trebuchets, sections of siege wall, mobile housings for battering rams, sections of siege towers, and he couldn’t help thinking that if they’d managed to make such things, homeless savages who lived in tents, then there was a will and a determination there that wasn’t going to be put off by the city’s reputation for being impregnable. That thought disturbed Loredan far more than the prospect of his own death.
And yet it would be fair enough, all things considered. It wasn’t a matter of right and wrong; even if such things existed, they had nothing to do with the life cycle of cities and nations. The city’s dealings with the people of the plain were no more reprehensible than the lion’s relationship with the deer, but that worked both ways. If it was the clan’s turn to be the lion, that was the way it was meant to go. You couldn’t
disagree
with something like that. All you could sensibly do was leave and find somewhere else to live.
More footsteps outside, coming this way, stopping outside the door, A slim blade of light slit the darkness, then turned into a flood. There were two outlines in the doorway.
‘Just give me a shout when you’re done, Father,’ said a voice Loredan recognised as the warder’s. ‘I’ll be right outside.’
The door closed, but the light stayed inside; yellow and warm from a small lamp. It turned the other outline into Patriarch Alexius. Taken aback, Loredan swung his legs off the bench and stood up.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘sit down.’
‘Thank you. I will,’ Alexius replied. In the melodramatic light of the oil lamp he looked like a corpse, and it took him a while to hobble the length of the small cell. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Just let me catch my breath, will you? Stairs,’ he added.
Loredan sat on the floor, his back to the wall, waiting for the Patriarch to say something. He didn’t want to be rude, but he was in no mood for small talk.
‘You’ll be out of here fairly soon,’ Alexius went on after a minute or so. ‘We’ve just had a rather annoying meeting, lots of foolish people saying stupid things; the gist of it is that I’m to address the crowd and tell them to calm down and go home, and they’re letting you go. You’ll have a chance to have a bath and a shave before the next meeting.’
Loredan’s mouth dropped open. ‘Next meeting?’ he repeated. ‘What, you mean I’m still—?’
Alexius nodded. ‘I had an idea at the time you wouldn’t be overjoyed about it. It’s all a matter of expediency, you see. We need scapegoats for the defeat, but we also need a hero for the people to trust.’ He sighed; the marks of fatigue on his face were as clear as the portrait on a newly minted coin. ‘That’ll be you,’ he continued. ‘I shall tell my fellow citizens that the five generals responsible for the disaster were the ones who died in the battle; Bardas Loredan, on the other hand, saved the day, snatched four-fifths of the army out of the jaws of death, turned a humiliating defeat into a moral victory—’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’
‘Don’t be so ungrateful,’ Alexius replied. ‘And besides, it’s near enough to the truth. And if you’re determined to be a martyr, you might yet get your chance. You haven’t heard the funny bit yet.’
‘Tell me the funny bit,’ Loredan said.
Alexius stiffened as a cramp came and went. ‘This is our illustrious Prefect’s idea of a compromise,’ he said. ‘At an unspecified date in the future, you’re to stand trial in a court of law.’ He paused, then continued: ‘Until then, you’re appointed Deputy Lord Lieutenant, with responsibility for organising the defence of the walls and the lower city. Don’t say it,’ he added quickly, ‘I think everyone thinks so too. It only goes to show: who needs an Emperor when we can be imbeciles all by ourselves?’
‘I think that’s the most glorious piece of idiocy I’ve ever heard in all my life,’ Loredan said, his eyes closed. ‘What if I refuse?’
Alexius shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s allowed,’ he said. ‘Put another way, if you don’t do it, it won’t get done. They didn’t like my idea,’ he added. ‘A pity. It was a good one.’
‘Really? What as that?’
‘I wanted you made Commander-in-Chief,’ Alexius replied. ‘I may not know anything about tactics and battles, but I can recognise a natural leader when I hear of one.’
Loredan didn’t say anything to that. ‘So when do I get out of here?’ he asked. ‘Not that I’m in any hurry.’
‘Once the crowds have been told you’re a hero. Until then, you’re better off here. There’s a mob several thousand strong demanding your head on a pole at the lower-city gate. If they get through and break in here—’
‘I see.’ Loredan nodded. ‘Your idea also?’
Alexius shook his head. ‘One of the pointy-faced types from the Office of Supply,’ he replied. ‘They’re all fools, but some of them are surprisingly cunning.’ He leant back and rested his head against the wall. ‘If I may,’ he said, ‘I’d like to stay here until it’s time for me to go and make my speech. It’s agreeably peaceful. How up to date are you with the news?’
‘Not very. What’s the situation outside?’
‘Quiet,’ Alexius said. ‘There hasn’t been any activity upriver; as far as we can tell, they’re carrying on with building engines and rafting them down the river. All they’ve done is put a cavalry escort - three or four thousand, no more - on the downstream camp where they’re landing the engines.’
‘That puts them no more than five miles from the city,’ Loredan said thoughtfully. ‘Gods, I wish we hadn’t mounted that stupid expedition. Now’s the time we should be making sorties, and of course we won’t, for fear of another good hiding.’ He looked up. ‘I assume the Lord Lieutenant’s in command of external operations.’ Alexius nodded. ‘What about what’s left of the task force? With four thousand men, provided we think about what we’re doing this time, we could still cut out those engines at the landing point without too much trouble—’
‘He won’t hear of it,’ Alexius replied. ‘And he has got a point. If we were to suffer another defeat, particularly one so close to home, the city’d be ungovernable. You can’t imagine what it’s like down there.’
‘So we sit tight and wait for a siege. What about supplies and the like? It won’t be long before the news crosses the sea, and then we’ll have the harbour crammed with people come to sell us grain at sky-high prices.’
‘Sky-high or not, we’ve authorised the Prefect to buy everything he can lay his hands on. Not that food and supplies will be a problem; there’s nothing the clan can do to interfere with shipping, so there’s no reason we can’t have business as usual. But it’ll reassure the people if they see us stockpiling, and then maybe they’ll stop looting the bakeries.’
Loredan shook his head. ‘They
like
looting bakeries,’ he said, ‘It’s only afterwards they start complaining, when they can’t get their usual orders because the place has burnt down.’ He smiled. ‘It’s times like these that bring out the best in people. What are they doing about recruitment? Has anything been organised yet?’
‘Not really,’ the Patriarch replied. ‘At the moment, we’ve got old men and boys by the thousand demanding to be allowed to volunteer, while most of the able-bodied men are busy smashing the city and beating up the guard. And of course everyone wants to know why the Patriarch isn’t using his arcane powers to avert the danger. I anticipate quite a lot of that when I go out to make my speech.’