‘Temrai? Is that you?’
He opened his eyes. He couldn’t see who it was talking to him, and he couldn’t quite place the voice. ‘Yes, of course it’s me. Help me up, I’m stuck.’
‘What seems to be – oh, right, I see. Hold still. This’ll probably hurt.’
‘Mind what you’re-’ he said, and then screamed and let go with his fingers. The next thing he was consciously aware of was the feeling of the flat ground under his back and head, and a slightly different modulation of the pain in his knee. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and opened his eyes.
‘That’s all right.’ It was Dassascai, the spy. ‘Now then, how the hell am I going to get you out of this?’
Temrai breathed in as far as he could manage. ‘What’s happening?’ he said.
‘We counter-attacked,’ Dassascai replied. ‘It wasn’t the cleverest move in the world, but we got them beat by sheer weight of numbers. You don’t want to know any more, for now.’
‘Don’t I? Oh, right. Can you get me out of the way somewhere, and then find Kurrai or someone-’
‘Not Kurrai,’ Dassascai said. ‘He wouldn’t be much use.’
‘Oh,’ Temrai repeated. ‘Damn, I can’t remember who’s next in seniority. Find someone, anyhow. I need to know what’s going on.’
‘First things first,’ the spy said. ‘I’m going to try dragging you over to that tree – oh, of course, you can’t see it from there. It’ll probably hurt a lot.’
‘All right,’ Temrai said. It did.
A little later, Dassascai knelt down beside him and asked, ‘Do you still want me to go to look for someone, or would you rather I stayed here? The last I saw we pushed them back, but I haven’t a clue whether we made it stick; they could be through here any minute. I really don’t want you to be lying here like this if they come back.’
Temrai shook his head. ‘You’d better go,’ he said. ‘Send someone to fetch me when you get the chance. And thank you.’
Dassascai nodded his head. ‘That’s all right,’ he said.
‘Excuse me asking, but are you really a spy?’
Dassascai looked down at him, smiled and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘All right, stay there. I’ll be as quick as I can.’
Temrai closed his eyes; above all, he realised, he was completely exhausted. It’d be very easy right now just to drift off to sleep. But that wouldn’t do, not in the middle of a battle. He thought about what Dassascai had just told him – not the cleverest move in the world, got them beat by sheer weight of numbers. I bet you really are a spy, he thought, and passed out.
When he came round, there were voices talking overhead.
‘-Wasn’t meant to be a decisive battle; just a probe, that’s all, to see what we’re about and slow us down a little. Gods help us when they really come after us.’
‘Quiet. He’s awake.’
He opened his eyes, and at first it was as dark as if he was underground. Then a lamp flared as someone lifted it over his head and put it down nearby.
‘Temrai?’ He recognised the voice and the face, but the name escaped him, which was odd, since he knew the man well. ‘Temrai, it’s all right. You’re back at the camp.’
Temrai tried to move his lips, but his palate was dry and numb. ‘Did we win?’
‘Sort of,’ the man replied. ‘We made them go away, at any rate. Now we’re falling back on Perimadeia.’
‘Basically,’ said the other voice, which was equally familiar, ‘basically, they’ve cut us off from the plains, it’s like they’re trying to bottle us up in the Perimadeian delta with our backs to the sea. Latest reports say they’ve got three separate armies in the field now. If we try to get through, they’ll come at us from both sides.’
‘I see.’ He thought of Tilden, his wife, back at the main camp. ‘Is Kurrai dead?’ he asked.
The second man frowned. ‘You are in a bad way, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Do I look particularly dead to you?’
‘Oh.’ Temrai closed his eyes and opened them again. ‘Sorry, yes. I’m a bit confused. Someone told me you were dead.’
‘A lot of people seem to have thought so,’ Kurrai replied. ‘I just hope they aren’t too disappointed.’
‘Casualties,’ Temrai said, remembering a time when he wouldn’t have used the word; he’d have asked, How many of my people were killed? How many of my people were badly hurt?
‘Not good,’ said the other man, the one who wasn’t Kurrai.
It cost him a good deal of effort, but Temrai managed to scowl. ‘Define a good casualty,’ he said. ‘How many did we lose?’
The two men looked at each other. ‘Over two hundred, ’ Kurrai said. ‘I think it was two hundred and thirty, something like that. Plus another seventy-odd wounded. We got about thirty of them.’
Temrai nodded. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Two hundred and thirty killed out of a column of five hundred. What are we going to do?’
The man he hadn’t identified yet frowned. ‘I don’t know about the rest of us,’ he said, ‘but you’re going to get some sleep. Doctor’s orders.’
‘Oh. Are you a doctor, then?’
‘What do you mean, am I a doctor? Dammit, Temrai, I was your doctor before you were even born.’
Temrai smiled weakly. ‘Just kidding,’ he said.
‘Like hell you were,’ the doctor replied. ‘Did you get bashed on the head during the battle?’
‘Can’t remember.’
‘Well no, quite possibly you don’t. It’s my fault, I should have examined you more thoroughly. Feel sick at all? Headache, lights flashing in front of your eyes?’
‘You think I’ve lost my memory,’ Temrai said.
‘Bits of it,’ the doctor said. ‘It happens that way sometimes.’
Temrai smiled, and the smile widened into a broad grin. ‘If only,’ he said cheerfully. ‘If only.’
Poliorcis the diplomat shivered and wiped rain out of his eyes with the back of his hand.
‘Are we nearly there yet?’ he asked. The carter grunted without looking round. The rain was dripping in soft, fat drops off the broad brim of his leather hat. He didn’t seem to be aware of it. Quite probably, by his standards, this constituted a sunny day.
Usually Poliorcis trusted his sense of direction, a valuable attribute for a man who spent so much of his time travelling in unfamiliar places. On this occasion, however, he was completely lost. The route the carter was taking was completely different from the one Gorgas Loredan had taken; either because Gorgas had been showing him the scenic route, or because Gorgas wasn’t aware of the short cut. He’d also lost track of time, which was most unlike him. He put it down to the effect this country had on him. It reminded him rather of swimming in the lagoon off Ap’ Sendaves; floating on his back in still water, gradually ceasing to be aware of his body, of anything around him, until he was nothing but a consciousness without context, an awareness with nothing to be aware of. That had been a bizarre feeling but a pleasant one. The Mesoge, in his opinion, certainly wasn’t pleasant, and it didn’t strike him as interesting enough to be bizarre; but it left him feeling disorientated in much the same way.
He even felt too bemused to rehearse what he was going to say, or run through in his mind the arguments he was going to use. That was unfortunate – he felt more uneasy about this meeting than any number of far more important negotiations he’d been involved in – but the harder he tried to pull himself together, the more his mind wanted to wander. If it wasn’t for the rain he could close his eyes and get some sleep; but nothing helps you stay awake better than the feeling of rainwater seeping under your collar and down your back. He pulled the sodden wreckage of his own hat a little further down and gave up trying to think; instead he gazed sullenly at the wet green all around him, the hedges dripping rain, the pools of brown water filling the wheel-ruts in the track ahead, the leaves of the docks and ferns glistening. The air was moist and tickled his throat, and he was painfully cold.
Must be easier ways of making a living, he muttered to himself, a man of my age. It was ridiculous for one of the provincial office’s senior departmental negotiators to be squelching and bumping along in a carrier’s cart in the rain, risking pneumonia and pleurisy at the very least, on his way to try to reason with a lunatic who had no official standing, whose authority wasn’t even recognised by the Empire, in order to secure the person of a minor troublemaker who’d happened to be taken up and turned into some kind of popular hero by a bunch of malcontents who probably wouldn’t recognise him if he was sitting at their kitchen table.