The second day was no improvement; the worst part of it being the realization that there was going to have to be a third day, and quite possibly a fourth. This meant a further rations cut, which in turn led to a spate of nocturnal food looting, only just short of a full-scale riot, which cost another seven lives. By noon on the third day, the death toll had passed fifty, with three times that number of sick and injured incapable of walking. The soldiers were demanding to be allowed to jettison their armor; a fair number hadn't waited for permission, and the sun sparkled on a trail of abandoned metalwork marking the column's ascent, like the track of a snail. To check this before it got out of hand, Valens dressed in full armor to lead the way, a gesture he bitterly regretted after the first half-hour as the arches of his greaves chafed his ankles into mince.
Just before dusk, someone told him that there was smoke in the valley below them. Since the only inflammable material on the whole mountain was the carts they'd left behind two days before, the implications were disturbing enough to take his mind off his aching feet for the last hour of daylight.
"It's possible," someone conceded at that night's staff meeting. "We've brought horses up here, so I guess they could too. Or maybe they've dismounted like we did; though in that case, I don't see them catching us up in a hurry."
"They won't try and attack us on the mountain," someone else asserted confidently. "They'll wait till we're over the top and down on the plain. If they're dismounted and leading their horses, they won't have to try and catch us up; they can do that as soon as they're back on level ground again."
"There's no guarantee it's the Mezentines at all," someone else put in. "Could be scavengers, like the ones we ran into earlier."
"Unlikely," Nennius murmured. "We killed them all, remember? Besides, why bother to burn our carts?"
"No use to them without horses."
"True, but why let everybody between here and Sharra know where they are?"
"The Mezentines would have a reason to burn them," Nennius argued. "To stop us circling round behind them and going back to them. They'll want to be sure they've seen the last of those armor plates."
"If the Mezentines want to attack us on the plain, I say let 'em," someone else said. "The rate we're getting through the food and hay, we'll be able to afford to remount the cavalry by then, so we can give them a fight. By the time we get down there, they'll be in no better condition than us. Worse, probably; they've had further to come without fresh supplies; they won't have found anything at Limes Vitae, that's for sure."
Midafternoon on the fourth day, and the view from the top was obscured by low cloud and mist. Below, a long way away, there was supposed to be a desert, with the Cure Hardy on the other side of it, and Valens was taking his people there because he had no choice. Squinting into the mist and seeing nothing, he retraced the workings of the mechanism that had brought him here. It had started with Orsea-no, to be fair, it had started with the peace settlement between the Vadani and the Eremians, which his father had arranged with her father, the Count Sirupat. While the Eremians and the Vadani had been at each other's throats, the Perpetual Republic had ignored them both, since they posed her no threat. Then there was peace, which spawned Orsea's original crass mistake; then Ziani Vaatzes-he'd played some part in all this-gave the Republic a pretext for disinfecting its border of undesirable savages; but instead of crumpling up like a leaf in a fire, the Eremians had fought too well, forcing the war to grow like a clever gardener growing early crops in a hotbed. That was when he'd been drawn in, for the sake of a woman he'd fallen in love with because (he knew the mechanism operated in a loop) of the peace negotiations, which had brought her to Civitas Vadanis as a hostage. For her sake he'd thrown the Vadani into the war; now, for the war's sake, he'd lost her forever, while still having her on his hands like someone else's precious possession left in his unwilling care; and he was here, on top of a mountain looking down at a desert which led to the wilderness of the barbarian nomads, his last and only hope of survival. Wonderful.
Going down the mountain was much, much harder than getting up it. For some reason Valens couldn't begin to imagine, someone had gone to the trouble of making the pathetic little track they'd followed up the mountain. Maybe there'd been a village there once, or a frontier station or a signal post, or a temple to some obsolete god. Nothing had gone down the mountain in a long, long time except water (and, presumably, Vaatzes' dead merchant and his mules). There was no track. To start with, they tried following the course of a broad stream, but it quickly fell away into a series of waterfalls plunging off sheer edges. No wild animals were stupid enough to come up here, so there weren't any deer or goat trails to follow. Valens realized quickly enough that there wasn't a right way to go; the entire expedition would have to make its own way down as best it could, a slow, disorganized shambles, a human mudslide. Giving the order to halve the rations yet again (impossible to enforce, of course, with everybody spread out on the mountainside like butter on bread), he tried very hard indeed not to think about who might have set light to the abandoned wagons, or where the happy arsonists might be now.
The worst problem proved to be the horses. By noon on the second day (the low cloud hadn't lifted; if anything, it was thickening), he'd almost reached the point where he'd be prepared to give the order to turn them loose and leave them there, in the hope that some of them might find their own way down. Leading them was very nearly impossible, and the amount of time they were wasting trying to coax the wretched animals along was heartbreaking. Unhappy-looking officers reported to him every hour or so to tell him the latest casualty figures, animal and human; the number of injured civilians who couldn't walk and so had to be carried was swelling at a terrifying rate, and Nennius had already urged him several times to leave at least some of them behind. So far, he hadn't given in, but the only strength he could draw on to maintain his resolve was the thought that it was precisely the sort of thing Orsea would've done (reluctantly, blaming himself to death, doing the right thing). The hell with it, he told himself, over and over again; I'm stubborn and pig-headed; I won't leave the injured and I won't turn the horses loose. It's just a matter of holding on a little longer, and then facing the decision again, once every hundred yards or so.
Dawn on the third day of the descent. The low cloud had lifted during the night, and they could see: where they were, and where they were going. The good part of it was that they were at least three-quarters of the way down, and the gradient was easing up. Other than that, Valens was sorry to have lost the mist. The sight of the desert depressed him more than anything he could remember.
There was a fringe of scrub-little stunted clumps of thorn bush, like an unshaved face-and then there was nothing but sand. He'd expected it to be gray, like the stuff washed down by rivers, the only sand he'd ever seen; instead, it was almost white, a glowing ocean like steel at welding heat. The rises and troughs looked so much like waves at this distance that he couldn't help imagining that it was a vast lake-the idea of trying to walk on its surface seemed ludicrous; you'd wade in, and then you'd sink, and the sand would close over your head as you drowned. It wasn't even flat; the sad little joke that had sustained them all, going up and down the mountain, was that the desert had to be better than all this bloody climbing. Apparently not. He realized, as he stared at it until his eyes hurt in the glare, that for a moment or so he'd forgotten the entire Vadani nation strung out all around him. He'd been thinking, how the hell am I going to get across that; I, not we. A fine time to be thinking about grammar (my decision, my mistake, our slow and painful death). One question, however, lodged in his head as he scrambled among the rocks: did I have Orsea killed not because he was a traitor but because I'd reached the conclusion that he was an idiot, too stupid to be allowed to live? The more the question preyed on his mind (the further down the slope they went, the hotter it became; his clothes and even his boots were saturated with sweat), the more he was afraid that that was exactly what he'd done; the fool's stupidity had offended him beyond endurance, and he'd taken the excuse to get rid of him. In which case, sooner or later, he was going to have to admit to what he'd done, and apologize to somebody.