The administrator nodded. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’ve been giving the matter some thought; what I’d suggest is that we give them some time to reflect on what they’ve done and then send them a letter offering them a chance to buy their lives. Of course,’ he added, as the prefect raised an eyebrow, ‘they’d have to send us the heads of the ringleaders first, as a token of good faith – I always feel that getting rebels to execute their own leaders is far better than doing it oneself; you simply can’t make a martyr of a man whose head you’ve cut off yourself.’
‘An interesting point,’ the prefect conceded.
‘Then,’ the administrator went on, ‘we set the terms; we’ll accept their abject surrender on condition that they put their fleet at our disposal, fully manned – after all, that’s the object of the exercise, and that’s what our betters in the provincial office will judge us by, at the end of the day. We need Islanders to crew the ships; if we slaughter them to a man, we’ll have ships but no crews. If we do it my way, we’ll have crews who are acutely aware that their families and countrymen are hostages for their good behaviour and satisfactory performance-’
‘Thereby,’ interrupted the prefect, stroking his chin, ‘turning this ghastly business to our advantage and making something good out of it after all. Thank you; I do believe you’ve restored my faith in the value of clarity of vision.’
‘My pleasure,’ the administrator replied. ‘One of the pleasures of life, as far as I’m concerned, is taking a disaster and turning it into an opportunity.’ He smiled. ‘Fortunately, it’s a pleasure I rarely have a chance to savour.’
The prefect tilted his head back and gazed at the ceiling. ‘ “Lord, confound my enemies; or, if Thou must confound my friends, grant that I may be their salvation.” Do you know, the older I get, the more I appreciate Deltin; but he’s wasted on the young, and one must have something to look forward to.’
The administrator nodded. ‘So,’ he said, ‘that’s that settled. This is turning out to be a productive morning. Now, if we can only devise some way of rebuilding Perimadeia after all, we’ll have earned our lunch.’
The prefect opened his eyes and looked at him. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘You have an idea.’
‘Just an outline,’ the administrator replied, ‘slowly taking shape in my mind’s eye. And no, I don’t propose sharing it with you quite yet. After all, it wouldn’t do to disclose it until I’m certain it has merit, otherwise I’ll jeopardise my reputation for resourceful and imaginative thinking.’
‘That’s fair,’ the prefect conceded with a wry grin. ‘But you do have an idea. Or an idea for an idea.’
The administrator made a small gesture with his hands. ‘Always,’ he said. ‘But I try to be like a careful doctor: I make sure my mistakes are buried before anybody sees them.’
The messenger set out that afternoon, with orders to reach Captain Loredan as quickly as possible. It was imperative, he was told, that he get to the captain before he had a chance to react to the news of the disaster. This was a matter of the utmost importance to the well-being of the whole Empire.
What the dispatcher meant by that was: get a move on, don’t dawdle or stop to pass the time of day with any old friends you may happen to meet, no sight-seeing or shopping, no detours to deliver private letters or trade samples. But the dispatcher was an eloquent man with a forceful turn of phrase, and the messenger was young and rather conscientious. As a result, he set off in a cloud of dust, a map stuffed into the leg of his boot and three days’ rations bouncing against his back in a satchel.
There seems to be a law of nature that the more one hurries, the more ingeniously circumstances contrive to slow one down. He made excellent time as far as the Eagle River ford; but the river was in spate, the first time in thirty years it had flooded in the dry season, which meant he had to retrace his steps and head upstream to the Blackwood bridge. But the bridge wasn’t there; some idiot had been robbing stones from the base of the nearside pillar, and the whole thing had slumped quietly into the river one fine morning, damming it up just long enough to accumulate a sufficient body of water to saturate the sandhills on the nearside bank when eventually the blockage was swept away. In consequence the Blackwood ford was impassable as well, something the messenger found out the hard way when his horse went in up to its shoulders in the newly created quagmire. He tried in vain to get the wretched creature out for the best part of a morning before abandoning it and setting out on foot for the nearest of the border outposts to the south.
By this stage he was almost out of his mind with rage and frustration, so he was immensely relieved when he came across a small caravan of mixed Colleon, Belhout and Tornoys merchants taking a short cut to Ap’ Escatoy. It took him a further two hours of almost lethal frustration to persuade them to accept a provincial office assignat in payment for a horse, even though he knew he was paying nearly double what the animal was worth – it was just his luck that the only decent horse for sale belonged to a Belhout who, belonging to a nation who steadfastly refused on moral grounds either to read or to write, had extreme difficulty in relating to the concept of paper money. In the end he had to use his assignat to buy gold from a Colleon jeweller, at fifteen per cent over standard, with which to pay the Belhout; but the jeweller would only sell him gold by the full ounce, which meant he had to buy three quarters more than he needed… By the time he was back on the road, he was a day and half a night behind schedule, and still on the wrong side of the Eagle River.
But he still had his map; so he sat down under a wind-twisted thorn tree with a piece of string for measuring distances, and looked for an alternative route. He found one readily enough; he could carry on following the west bank of the Eagle until it became the north bank, thereby avoiding the need to cross it at all. That was also a much more direct route, which would allow him to make up nearly all the time he’d lost provided he could keep up a good rate of progress. The problem was that it took him within an hour’s ride of Temrai’s fortified camp.
He considered the risks. If he arrived late, going on what the dispatcher had told him, he might as well not arrive at all. One man alone, riding fast; if he dumped his mailshirt and helmet and wrapped his cloak round his head, riding a horse with a Belhout saddle and harness, he reckoned he could pass for a Belhout himself. The worst that could happen would be that he’d be caught, and the message would never get there – no worse than if he arrived late. Looked at the other way round, if he didn’t go this way, he’d most certainly be late, whereas if he took the risk, there was a reasonable chance he’d get there, and in time. From that perspective, he didn’t really have a choice.
He was a messenger, not a diplomat or a historian or a scholar interested in abstruse facts about remote tribes; so he couldn’t be expected to know that a small element among the plains tribes had a long-standing grudge against the Belhout, arising out of a half-forgotten feud about a disputed well.
The scouting party that ran him down, after a long and exciting chase that lasted well over an hour, brought back his head and stuck it up on a pole on the embankment they were working on at the fortress, until Temrai saw it and made them take it down. It wasn’t until some time later that the letter came to light, when the scouts were sharing out the dead man’s possessions; the man who received it took it home to his wife and told her to use the parchment to patch a hole in his wet-weather trousers. She couldn’t read either, but she happened to know that the three-headed-lion seal meant provincial office, and nagged her husband until he took the letter to his gang-boss, who took it to the head of his section who took it straight to Temrai. When Temrai read it he became angry, then very quiet.