Ziani reminded himself to breathe. "And the map?" he said.
"Oh heavens, the map." Valens nodded. "Well now, let's see. Take away your motive for lying, and we're more or less forced to accept that you're telling the truth. In which case, you sincerely believe in the map. I don't think you're the sort of man who buys treasure maps from people you meet in the street. In which case, it's likely that the salt woman-her name's Henida Zeuxis, and she used to live next door to the Temperance and Tolerance in the Horsefair, right? See? I know all sorts of things about people, including where they go on their days off-most likely the salt woman believes in the map as well. So the gamble is, was her husband lying to her, or exaggerating? I don't know. You've met her, I haven't. What do you think?"
Easy as that, apparently; at the end, after all the filing and shaping and fettling and fitting. "I don't think she'd got the imagination to lie, or the skill to forge the journals. And if her old man was as half-witted as her, he must've hit on something really good, or he'd have gone out of business. He strikes me as a plodder, your ideal employee. I had men just like him working for me at the ordnance factory. If he'd been a horse, you could've stuck him on a treadmill and forgotten about him till his next feed was due. Yes, I believe in her, and the map, and the short cut across the desert. For what my opinion's worth."
Valens breathed out, like a man putting down a heavy sack. "That's what it comes to," he said. "Little scraps of trivia about unremarkable people swaying the fate of the whole Vadani nation. My father'd be livid if he could see me now. He always reckoned that making history was strictly the preserve of the upper classes." He shook his head. "You'd never have thought it to look at him, especially when he'd been drinking, but he was an idealist. There was an old boy on the council who used to say to him, you act like we're living in the upstairs rooms when in fact we're camping out on the midden. My father could never figure out what he meant by that, but he was right." Ziani watched him pull himself together. "All right, then, we'll give it a try. Oh, and thanks." He grinned wearily. "Consider yourself provisionally awarded the rank of Hero of the Vadani People and public benefactor, first class. There's no salary, but if we end up anywhere half civilized, I'll get a medal struck or something."
"Thank you," Ziani said gravely. "That makes it all worthwhile."
Which left only one chore to be got out of the way. It could wait a little longer.
Meanwhile, there was plenty to do. Fixing up the carts was the priority. The arrival of the miners helped; the armor plates could be cannibalized off the worst-damaged wagons and fitted onto the miners' carts; the rejects could then be stripped for parts to fix up the salvageable vehicles. Once the armor had been moved over, he let Daurenja take charge of bullying and cajoling the Vadani carpenters, while he concentrated on fabricating and fitting parts that had to be specially made: braces, brackets, reinforcing plates and the inevitable infinity of nails. Anything requiring even a little skill he did himself; partly because experience had greatly increased his contempt for Vadani metalwork, partly because it was a sweet pleasure to be bashing and filing metal again; as though he was back in the factory; as though nothing had happened. Working with iron and steel was a holiday after so long spent forging and shaping human beings; unlike people, rods and billets responded predictably to fire and hammer, and when you cut into them you got filings, not blood.
Valens' scouts started coming back with thoughtful looks on their faces. They hadn't seen an army, or outriders, or any trace that a large body of soldiers had been on the move. Instead, they muttered about finding abandoned farmhouses, barns that were empty when they should have been packed with hay; a merchant convoy glimpsed in the distance that left the road as soon as it saw them; a newly built bridge across a small river in the middle of nowhere.
No interference from the Duke, at any rate. Instead of being everywhere all the time, nosing about, asking maddeningly good questions, he'd become increasingly hard to find. The consensus of opinion was that he was lying low in order to avoid Duke Orsea, who was on his case because of the Eremian nobleman, Ducas, who was still being held confined in a small, stinking corral with the other prisoners.
There were other excitements, eagerly discussed in raised voices over the incessant thump of hammers. A large party of the scavengers who'd done so well out of trotting along at the heels of the running battle, like a sausage-maker's dog, had been rounded up and brought in. They were penned up in a hollow square of empty lamp-oil jars and vinegar barrels, tied up, ignored by everyone except their guards, grudgingly and sporadically fed, mostly on soup made out of slightly spoiled barley which the horses were too picky to touch. What Valens wanted them for was a complete and perfect mystery. Better to wring their necks straightaway and save their food, even if it was just condemned horse-fodder.
Predictably, the weather took a turn for the worse. It started as fine, light rain, the kind that saturates your clothes before you realize you're getting wet. Then it poured. The dust turned instantly into thick, sticky mud, weighing down boots and gumming up hands, messing up tools, swallowing a dropped nail or pin, spoiling tolerances, souring tempers. It's hard to cut to the thickness of a nail-scribed line when your eyes are full of water, and every time you shift your feet, the ground under them tries to suck off your footwear. Forced into the cramped shelter of the wagons, the civilians suffered noisily, wringing hearts and wasting time. Rainwater seeped into sloppily sealed flour barrels, dripped through tears in wagon canopies, swelled timbers and coated bolts and spindles with a sheen of tacky orange rust. Soon there were no dry clothes to change into, and men's boots squelched in the morning when they crammed their feet into them. Valens sat under an awning and gazed wretchedly at the road, wondering if it was impassable yet. A rill off the side of the mountain swelled into a river in spate and washed two carts (two fully refurbished, perfectly roadworthy carts) off the road and down the slope, where they rolled onto the rocks and were scrunched into kindling. The forge fires bogged down into black sooty ooze and couldn't be relit. The work, nearly complete, was now clearly doomed to take forever. If the Mezentines didn't get them first, they were all going to drown; swallowed in their sleep by the mud.
The end of the work took Ziani by surprise. Quite suddenly (late one afternoon, an hour before the lamps were due to be lit), in spite of the rain and the mud, the spoiled food and the sodden timber, they finished off the last of the smashed-up carts, and the column was officially ready to set off. Someone found Valens and told him; he ruled that they might as well stay where they were until morning and get everything ready for an early start. In the meantime, they could deal with the leftovers of unfinished business-shoeing horses, making an inventory of supplies and munitions, drawing up watch rotas and executing the prisoners.