He smiled again and walked away.
26
Eight days of blundering through potholes and ruts. Intermittent rain; the carts bogged down twice, once in a mudslide, once in the bed of a shallow river that wasn't on the map and hadn't been mentioned by any of the guides. Food running low; rations had to be reduced by a third; fodder for the horses a worse problem. A mild outbreak of some kind of fever, which killed a dozen or so civilians. Ahead of them, the mountain range; beyond that, the edge of the desert. No sign, yet, of the Mezentines.
A village, Limes Vitae; Valens had heard about it, mostly because it was proverbially the last place on earth, the very edge of the world. According to family legend, one of his father's uncles had been there once, though why or what he thought of it wasn't recorded. It had sent a dozen light infantry to fight in the first war against the Eremians, and had last paid taxes seventy-four years ago. If there was still a settlement there, and if they had food and hay, getting over the mountain was possible. If not; well.
A few thin cattle on the stony plain bore witness to some level of habitation, as the carts ground up the road through the foothills. A boy, who stopped to stare and was scooped up by outriders, confirmed that the village was still where it had always been. There was food there; just enough to see the villagers through the winter, since it had been a poor year generally, and the merchants who traded root vegetables and salt fish for hides and wool hadn't arrived; there was some rumor about a war somewhere. Hay? Enough for all the horses in the column? The boy didn't want to commit himself on that, but the grown-ups had been saying that hay would be short that winter.
Valens left the boy in the custody of a grim-faced woman who cooked for the soldiers, and summoned his general staff. Limes Vitae, he told them, was unlikely to welcome them with open arms, and even less likely to offer to share its reserves. Accordingly, since they couldn't rely on being given, they were going to have to take.
Tactically, not very much of a challenge. Two wings of light cavalry moved into position on the far side of the village shortly before dusk, taking great care not to be seen. At dawn, a double squadron of heavy cavalry advanced at a gentle pace along the main road into the village. A shepherd raised the alarm; by the time Valens' heavy dragoons reached the village square, the place was deserted and the barns, cattle-pens, poultry runs and root cellars were empty. They made themselves at home as best they could, eventually turning up a few barrels of wheat beer that had been too heavy to load in the hurried evacuation. Nobly, they left half of the foul-tasting stuff for their colleagues in the light division, who rode in halfway through the afternoon, escorting the villagers and the carts laden with the missing supplies, which they'd ambushed as planned on the narrow road that led to the hidden valley the boy had told Valens about. Neat, flawless, bloodless, as a good operation should be.
Valens sent Nennius to give the villagers a choice; they could leave their homes and join the column, or stay where they were and starve through the winter. It didn't surprise Valens very much to learn that they preferred, unanimously, to stay. He couldn't blame them. Their only contact with the central government within living memory was a callous act of theft, carried out with all the precision and elan of the better class of professional brigand. So much for Valens the Good Duke.
A quick inventory of the supplies told him that the entire resources of Limes Vitae would supply the column, on half-rations, for ten days. Two days to the edge of the desert; eight days across it, if the dead merchant's diary could be relied on and they managed to find the short cut. No need for a decision, now that turning back was no longer an option. Just to be sure, he told Nennius to ask the villagers if they'd seen any Mezentines; black-faced men in armor on big horses. By their reaction, the villagers must have assumed he was making fun of them.
Climbing the mountain proved to be far harder than anybody had anticipated. Valens had assumed it would be slightly but not much more difficult than slogging up the slopes and scarps they'd tackled already; slow, painful climbing with occasional halts to fill in and rebuild crumbled road ledges or bridge storm-streams running down the hillsides. The dead merchant had managed it, with his team of mules. It had taken him two days.
Halfway through the first day, Valens realized why the merchant had used mules rather than a cart. Quite possibly there had been a road there, once upon a time when the world was new. Now, however, there was a thin scratch that zigzagged across the face of the mountain, the sort of line Vaatzes the engineer might have scribed on a piece of metal, rubbing in blue dye to make it visible. No earthly chance of taking a cart further than the first mile.
At a hastily convened meeting of the engineering department, Valens asked urgently for suggestions.
"It's a question of time," Vaatzes said, and for the first time since he'd met him, Valens saw that he was worried. "Yes, we could widen the road by cutting into the mountain; to a limited extent, we could bank up the other side with rocks. At a rough guess, working flat out we could reach the top in under a month. In two days…" He shrugged. "Either we turn back now, or we ditch the wagons, load what we can onto the horses' backs and walk. I don't suppose it'll take us that much longer on foot than it would've done if we could've taken the wagons, if that's any consolation."
"Your bloody trader-" Valens interrupted.
"If he could do it, I don't see why we can't," Vaatzes replied. "I didn't get the impression from reading the journals that he was any sort of adventurer, blessed with superhuman strength and endurance. He regarded crossing the mountains as a chore and a pain in the bum, but no worse than that."
"Just suppose we do make it over the mountains," someone said. "What then? I thought the idea was that the carts were going to be our mobile fortress. And there's shelter to think about."
"The carts won't go up the mountain," Daurenja said. "That's a plain fact, like something in mathematics you can demonstrate by doing a calculation. If we go back down the mountain, we've got eight days and then we starve. No disrespect, but I can't see what there is to talk about."
They left the carts. It wasn't the most popular order Valens had ever given. The sight of the Vadani people struggling up the road with enormous loads strapped to their backs, like city people out for a country picnic, would've been comic in a different context. As a gesture of solidarity, Valens made the cavalry dismount and load supplies on their horses, an initiative which at least had the merit of wiping the smirks off their faces. Cavalrymen dislike walking. Even then, it was a full-time job to stop the civilians from dumping their packs as soon as the gradient started to get tiresome; they seemed to be under the impression that there was more than enough food and forage piled up on the horses, and the Duke was making them carry stuff up a steep hill as part of a monstrously inappropriate practical joke. On the first day there were ninety-seven casualties-twelve deaths, sixteen broken legs, six non-fatal heart attacks and sixty-three debilitating sprains, falls and similar injuries-and they lost the use of fourteen horses.