And there he stuck, because the momentum of the mob easily matched the momentum of the charge. He found that he was looking directly into the face of the man who was holding the halberd; he was wearing an expression of panic and what could only be described as acute embarrassment (which was quite understandable; after all, what do you say to a perfect stranger who’s impaled himself on the spike you happen to be clinging on to?) and if he’d had any control over the muscles of his face, he’d have been tempted to smile, or even wink.
It was the trebuchets that saved him. There were ten of them in action now, and they all loosed in unison, suddenly flattening the men in the ranks directly behind him. With no more pressure from them he found himself being thrust back; then his feet caught on something, he stumbled and went down on his backside, wrenching the halberd out of the other man’s hands. Now it was the other man’s turn to be shot forward; Onasin felt the sole of the man’s boot on the side of his jaw as he stumbled forward, then a savage pain in his shoulder as somebody else stood on that. Then he lost count, and fell asleep.
When he opened his eyes, he found that he was staring into another man’s eyes; but this man was quite definitely dead. In fact there were dead men everywhere. Mass grave. He opened his mouth to scream, but only a little squeak came out, so he tried waving his arms and legs instead. They were scarcely more co-operative than his throat and lungs, but apparently he’d done enough, because he heard someone shout, ‘Hold on, we’ve got another live one.’
He wasn’t sure how they got him out again; the grave was pretty deep and sheer-sided, so he guessed someone had had to jump down in there, on top of all the really dead people. That didn’t strike him as a pleasant thing to have to do – well, he wouldn’t have fancied it himself – so he tried to say thank you as he swung face-down through the air; but if anybody heard him, they didn’t acknowledge it.
‘Will you look at that?’ someone he couldn’t see said as he was flipped over on to his back. ‘He’s never going to make it with a hole that size.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ someone else replied. ‘I knew a man once who was gored by a damn great bull – when they got the horn out you could literally see daylight through him, poor bugger. He made it, though.’
‘All right,’ said the first voice, ‘put him over there with the others. If there’s a medic with nothing better to do-’
‘You’ll be lucky.’
But there was a medic, eventually, a sad-faced man who cleaned and bandaged the wound. Whether his sorrow arose from the horrors he’d seen or the remoteness of his chances of getting paid for his work, there was no way of knowing. By then, of course, the battle was over, the enemy had been killed or captured, the fires put out; and the Islanders were moving wearily about the streets, clearing up wreckage, repairing damage, stumbling over bodies that had been overlooked by the corpse details. After they’d filled up two deep graves, they stopped bothering with such niceties, loaded the dead on to two enormous grain freighters and dumped them in the sea.
Onasin ended up on a similar grain-ship, which had been pressed into service as a prison hulk. It could have been worse; it would have been far worse if it had been an Imperial prisoner-of-war compound. From what he could overhear of the guards’ conversation, they explained away their humanity by claiming that the men in their charge were potentially valuable hostages, but by this time Onasin knew them better than that. This was, after all, their first war; they hadn’t learned yet.
‘A tragedy,’ sighed the prefect of Ap’ Escatoy. ‘A tragic, wretched waste. And so futile, too.’
The chief administrator nodded sadly. ‘It is rather heartbreaking,’ he said, wiping honey from his fingertips with a damp cloth. ‘And, as you say, they’ve achieved nothing by it. If anything, they’ve made matters worse for themselves.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ the prefect said. ‘But I’m afraid they’ve forfeited my sympathy, given what they’ve done. I know, vindictiveness is an ugly emotion, but on this occasion I’m going to allow myself that luxury. They will be made to pay for what they’ve done.’
‘Figuratively speaking, of course.’
The prefect smiled grimly. ‘Unfortunately,’ he said. ‘I wish it were otherwise, but it isn’t.’ He shook his head. ‘No, the fact must be faced, and we must come to terms with it: this confounded battle has cost me my refurbishment grant, and with it goes my best chance of rebuilding Perimadeia. All gone, and no actual benefit to anybody. And on reflection it isn’t tragic; tragedy has a certain nobility about it that this shambles lacks. It’s waste, plain and simple.’ He picked up a corner of the tablecloth and rubbed it between the palms of his hands, as if wiping away the unpleasantness of life. ‘But there, it’s done, and now it’s up to us to make the best we can of the circumstances we’re faced with. Practical, pragmatic and positive,’ he added with a little smile – it was obviously a quotation or a reference to something (the prefect was an inveterate slipper-in of apt but abstruse quotations, to the point where it wasn’t safe to assume that anything he said was necessarily his own words) but the administrator couldn’t place it; so he nodded and twitched his lip in token refined mirth. ‘And we should start,’ the prefect went on, ‘with the war. The main thing is to make sure there aren’t any more defeats. Send a letter to Captain Loredan telling him to stay put and do nothing, just make sure Temrai doesn’t slip past him and escape. I want the actual coup de grace to come from the new army, the one the provincial office is sending. Just defeating them won’t be enough; they have to be completely outnumbered and crushed if we’re to put this mess into perspective.’
‘Agreed,’ said the administrator. ‘Now then, what about the Island? That’s going to be awkward, isn’t it? We’re going to have to get some ships from somewhere.’
The prefect shrugged. ‘We’ll need ships anyway, for the war. Potentially, of course, this Island business could be far worse for us than Temrai and losing an entire army.’ He turned his head and sat still for a moment or two, watching a kestrel in a lemon tree in the courtyard below; it had a small bird, still alive, gripped in one claw and was trying rather awkwardly to kill it without letting go of the branch with its other foot. ‘In a way,’ he went on, ‘a major setback like the one Temrai’s given us needn’t be an entirely negative thing. Once in a while, it can even be – well, almost desirable. The point is, there’s no prestige to be gained from overrunning a weak and negligible opponent. A serious defeat, provided it’s followed up in short order by a complete victory, serves to give the enemy a degree of stature. And, of course, it helps keep standards up in the army; nothing like getting your face slapped once in a while to stop you getting complacent. The Island business, though; as I said, there’s nothing to be gained from that. There’s all the difference in the world between a setback along the way to an inevitable triumph, and getting kicked out of a place we’re supposed to have subdued and added to the collection, so to speak. What makes matters worse is that everybody knows that the Islanders aren’t worthy opponents or formidable warriors, let alone noble savages whose primitive virtues we can admire, et cetera, et cetera; they’re fat, smug, slightly obnoxious little men who make a living by buying cheap and selling dear.’ The prefect was starting to get annoyed now; there was nothing to show it in his face or his voice, but he’d pulled the ring off his little finger and was twisting it round, as if tightening a screw. When he did that, wise men who knew the score found excuses to go elsewhere for a while. ‘Still,’ he went on, ‘getting worked up about the situation won’t help it, and it might lead us to make more mistakes. For that reason, I feel we ought to leave them alone for a while; at the very least, until the war’s over.’