Somehow, he figured that the esteem of the Perpetual Republic was something he could learn to live without. Other things-other people-might be harder to dispense with. Just suppose he was the only survivor (the only coward who ran away). The last Vadani duke. The last Vadani.
That wasn't a concept he was prepared to hold still for. He scrambled to his feet-one of the Mezentines saw or heard him, looked up, shouted, pointed, but his friends didn't seem interested-and scuttled along the side of the slope, using his hands as much as his feet, grabbing at tufts of heather and couch grass to stop himself from sliding and losing his balance. From the top of the slope, he'd have a better view.
Noise below him; thudding and voices, shouts. He paused, nearly lost his foothold, took a moment to steady himself before looking down. By then, the picture had changed. The road was flooded with horsemen; not Mezentines, because the few of them still on their feet were trying to scramble back onto the carts, out of the reach of the swords and lances. His old friend the Mezentine officer was yelling again, urgent, angry and terrified. His voice stopped dead in midsentence. From where Valens stood it was just a confused scuffle. He was a good hundred yards up; all he could see was horses, the tops of heads, too much movement to make sense of. No good at all. The shale under his foot gave way and he let himself slither on his back, until a chunk of rock against the sole of his boot stole his momentum. He jumped up, overbalanced, caught himself and looked down.
He'd missed it; all over, while he'd been fooling about in the dirt. No Mezentines to be seen; not live ones, anyway. Most of the Vadani had gone as well; he caught sight of a dozen or so disappearing over the lip of the slight rise that cut off his view. More shouting from that direction; the counterattack was still going on, but moving at a rate he couldn't catch up with. He struggled down the rest of the slope to the road. A cavalry trooper, dismounted, looked up sharply as he slid and crashed into view; stared at him for a moment as though he had two heads.
"What the hell's going on?" Valens shouted. "Yes, it's me," he added, as the trooper's mouth fell open. "What's happening?"
But the trooper didn't seem able to speak, even backed away a step or two, as if facing a ghost. For crying out loud, Valens thought. "Who's in command? I need to talk to him, now."
The trooper lifted his arm and pointed, back down the road, to where the noise was coming from. Another man stepped up beside him. He didn't seem able to speak, either. What was wrong with them?
"Fine," he snapped, "I'll go and look for myself."
There were horses standing nearby, but he'd seen the Mezentines try to catch them and fail; he really wasn't in the mood for recalcitrant animals. His knee was starting to ache where it had been clouted by the Mezentine, and the bottom edge of the greave was galling his instep. On the other hand, he thought, I could sit down on this rock and wait for whoever's in charge to come to me.
He wasn't kept waiting long. Over the lip came a column of riders; dusty, bloody but unmistakably Vadani. They rode with the same utter weariness as the victorious Mezentines had done, not so long ago. He recognized the officer riding at the front, though offhand he couldn't remember his name.
"What happened?" he asked again.
This time he got a reply. "I think we got them all," the officer said. "Near as makes no odds." He stopped his horse and flopped out of the saddle, landing heavily and wincing at the stiffness in his knees. "Strangest thing. Who'd have thought mercenaries would've held their ground like that?"
For a moment, Valens couldn't make any sense of what he'd just heard. "You mean we won?"
The officer's turn to look blank. "Well, yes," he said. "It took us a while and it got a bit grisly at the end, when we thought they were going to run for it but they didn't. But I don't think there was ever any doubt about it, not since that Eremian lunatic lost his rag and started laying into them."
"What Eremian?"
The officer shrugged. "I don't actually know his name." Someone next to him leaned down from the saddle and muttered something. "That's right," the officer said, "Jarnac Ducas. Great big bloke, never talks about anything except hunting." At that point it must have occurred to him that Valens had missed something important; he stood a little straighter and became a trifle more soldierly. "It was when the Mezentines stopped Duke Orsea's coach," he went on. "At least, they blocked it and cut the reins, but they didn't try and board it. But then this Ducas turns up-defending his duke, I guess, he seems that sort of man. Anyway, he went at it like you wouldn't believe. He'd got hold of one of those poleaxe things; not much finesse about it, but a lot of energy. I saw it myself; hell of a thing. He was pretty much cut to ribbons by the time they brought him down, and by then the tide had more or less turned. Colonel Brennianus rallied best part of a squadron of the household division, and we sort of snowballed from there. He didn't make it, unfortunately; neither did the Eremian. Otherwise, we came out of it pretty well. It was only here, in the middle, that things got out of hand."
Orsea: something he'd forgotten, which he was sure he'd never forget. "Duke Orsea's party," Valens said quickly. "Are they all right?"
"Thanks to that Ducas fellow, not a scratch. Well, the Duke himself got a tap on the head quite early on; got cut off trying to lead from the front, I imagine. Then Ducas went in after him, and that's when it got going."
The clot that had formed in Valens' throat eased a little, and he breathed in deeply. "What about General Mezentius? And the Cure Hardy?"
(He'd tried to say, and my wife, but for some reason he felt embarrassed about using the word, as though it was somehow an admission of weakness.)
The officer didn't answer. After two, maybe three seconds, Valens asked, "All of them?"
"I can't say for sure," the officer replied. "But I saw them stop and board the coach; and Mezentius was riding with them at the time. That was two days ago, and nobody's told me…"
"It's all right," Valens heard himself say, as a gate closed in his mind, shutting some things out and some things in. "You've done well." (Was that really him speaking? It seemed so improbable, somehow.) "For a while there, I thought we'd had it." I ran away, was what he wanted to say. "Just my luck to have missed the good bit." He took a deep breath. "We need to get moving again," he said. "What about horses for the carts?" And after that he was back to business, the kind of thing he was competent to deal with. Others joined him, clotting around him like blood in a wound. He could feel the Vadani beginning to heal about him. Soon he was giving orders, pulling out of his mind the important details that other people tended to overlook but which he always remembered. They were giving him back his place in the machine-the axle, spindle, driveshaft, from which the other components drew their power. He had no trouble performing the function, but he felt like an imposter-the man who turned and ran, masquerading as the Duke. If only he'd known, he kept telling himself; if he'd known the battle was going their way and his bit of it was an unimportant aberration, he would never have even considered running; he'd have held his place on the deserted cart, kept fighting, almost certainly been killed. Instead, while he was crouched down halfway up the hillside, an Eremian and a cavalry colonel whose name was only vaguely familiar to him had checked the enemy advance, driven them back, wiped them out and died in the process. Stupid guilt, irrational, pointless and far too strong to beat.