Chapter 7 #2
Indeed. He’d be going home with twelve empty saddles and half a dozen long-term pensioners, which would have to come out of the divisional budget.
My heart bled for him. “Unconditional praise,” I promised him; and, since what you’re reading now is the closest I’ll ever get to making a report on the incident, let’s have two hearty cheers for Captain Shenderic and his gallant crew.
It’s a dirty, rotten job, but conventional wisdom holds that someone’s got to do it.
At least, Shenderic said, let my boys get those chains off her before we go, and I was happy to accept the offer.
Apparently, one man in every cavalry squadron is a trained farrier.
Unfortunately, that man in this instance was one of the twelve who didn’t make it, but they found his tools in his saddlebag, including a miniature anvil, a hammer, a cold chisel and a big, flat farrier’s rasp.
While they were cutting the chains, the Flos de Glaia scouts came back from their reconnaissance of the area and assured us there were no parties of more than two people anywhere in five square miles.
I was pleased to hear that. I wouldn’t have put it past the Order to have reinforcements hovering, just in case.
“We’ll leave you to it, then,” Shenderic said, as they loaded the last of the bodies.
“Take care of yourself, and I hope it all works out.” He spoke to me almost as though I was his friend, which I found faintly bizarre.
I waved, and he gave a signal, and the hussars thundered away, back to barracks and form-filling and making the best of a bad job.
I waited till I was quite sure he’d gone, then said, “Well?”
She looked at me. “Well what?”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” I wanted to hit her. “I suppose this is all grist to the mill as far as you’re concerned. More bloodshed, more death. Do you get extra credit for that?”
She sighed. “I’m not going to have this conversation all over again,” she said. “You’re upset, naturally. If you want to take it out on me, go ahead.”
I tried to decide if Svangerd would’ve said the same thing, only more robustly phrased.
Trouble was, I couldn’t be sure, which bothered me.
Normally, I’d reckon on being able to predict what she’d say or think, in a fairly clear-cut situation like this one.
But it was as though she was starting to slip away, the real Svangerd, not the unnatural alloy of body and soul who was rapidly taking her place.
Svangerd would’ve told me to piss off, go fuck myself.
Would she? Or would she simply have ignored me, as though I were a petulant child?
Memory is like that. When I was twenty-three, I suddenly realised I couldn’t picture my grandmother’s face any more.
She died when I was six, and how could I possibly forget her?
But I had. When I tried to visualise her, I caught myself constructing a generic old woman, with a face in shadow or hidden by the brim of her bonnet.
“I understand,” she said gently, as we rejoined the road.
“It was a horrible thing to have to watch, and if you hadn’t roped those men in to help you, they’d still be alive.
And you don’t approve of me, so it might as well be my fault.
Fine,” she said. “I take the blame for a lot of stuff I never actually did, everything from cities burning down to diseases of cattle.”
“My heart bleeds.”
“Think about it,” she said. “You know how it works; the grand design, the vast and intricate mechanism working slowly and steadily toward its ultimate objective. Now what possible use to the grand design is an outbreak of footrot in south-eastern Permia? Or, come to that, a dozen soldiers getting killed in a police action?”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“Actually,” she said, “how do you know that one of those twelve men wouldn’t have gone on to raise a rebellion, make himself a military dictator and enslave thousands, or millions? Think of Eumanrich, or Phocas the Slaughterer. They started off as cavalry troopers, same as those men back there.”
“Absolutely. You’re entirely right. Now can we please drop it?”
“You should be pleased with yourself. You may well have prevented a Third Social War.”
“I doubt it,” I snapped. “If I had, you’d be livid.”
“Not necessarily. The Third Social War may well have led to the formation of a new empire, followed by a thousand years of peace and prosperity. That’s why we call it the long game.
In a world without end, the war is never over, and nobody ever wins.
” She paused, then added, “Which is why you really can’t beat yourself up over anything that happens.
You just stopped the Third Social War. True, you also killed the Second Empire, but there you go, omelettes and eggs.
Don’t you get it? Every good act has evil consequences.
Every evil act has good consequences. We twine round each other like ivy, until it’s practically impossible to tell us apart.
How far into the future do you have to go, for crying out loud?
So far that it doesn’t matter. After all, how long is the past remembered?
A thousand years? Five hundred? You can’t even remember your own grandmother. ”
I scowled at her. “Why would I want to? She was horrible.”
She shook her head. “No, she wasn’t,” she said.
“She was just a put-upon, long-suffering woman with a bad-tempered husband and three no-good sons. You were a sullen, spiteful little brat who never did as he was told. No wonder she slapped you round the head a couple of times. The poor woman was permanently at the end of her rope.” She paused, then grinned.
“She wasn’t to know you’d grow up to be the man who prevented the Third Social War. ”
Svangerd’s grin, so lovely it made my heart falter; so very rare. Svangerd hardly ever grins. Svangerd’s eyes, which never ever looked at me like that. “Stop it,” I said. “We had an agreement.”
“Sure we do. And I respect it. I’m not trying to seduce you. I just like you, that’s all.”
To bring us to our harm. Or maybe not, which would be infinitely worse. “Did I?” I said.
“Did you what?”
“Stop a war.”
She gave me a solemn look. “That’s need-to-know,” she said. “Sorry.”
So intention is everything, I thought, as she smiled at me, is that it?
Good leads to evil leads to good leads to evil, but we do what we think is right, and that’s our salvation, even though we start the war we intended to stop.
By the same token, the compassionate doctor slices into your arm and drains off a pint of blood to save your life, even though the Echmen proved nine hundred years ago that bloodletting has no therapeutic value whatsoever.
But there was only ever one copy of the Robur translation of the Sashan translation of the Theory of Medicine; it sat in the library of the Valley of Rocks monastery for eight centuries and nobody bothered to read it, and then I was sent to make a clandestine copy.
I read it, but they caught me before I could write it out and showed me the door, and a year later a fire in the abbot’s kitchen spread to the library, and there you go.
“That woman,” she said as we reached the top of the hill and looked down through a deep embankment at the Nimmer valley, “hasn’t finished with us yet, you can bet your life. She’ll try again, and keep on trying. She’s like that.”
As far as I know, that hilltop doesn’t have a name, or, if it does, only the locals know it.
But it never fails to astonish me. For a day and a half, you’ve been struggling up a bleak, empty moorland steep, nothing but couch grass, gorse and heather for as far as the eye can see, world without end.
All you’ve got to aim at and look forward to is the slice someone took out of the summit twelve hundred years ago, for a long-vanished road to go through.
Then you get there, and at your feet lie all the kingdoms of the earth, a hundred-and-eighty degree panorama of greens, the white city of Ridichen and more greens beyond it, fringed with blue-grey sea like the fur cuffs of a nobleman’s gown.
The closest thing to the way I feel each time I see it is probably hope, though I’m not really qualified to be dogmatic about that, since hope hasn’t really featured in my life all that much, ever since I took my three vows.
“Quite likely,” I said. “But she’s not stupid.
She can’t operate in the duchy, we’ve just proved that.
So she’ll make her move at the coast, or when we reach the other side.
Hassling us on the archduke’s turf is just throwing away expensive lives. ”
“Ah.” She gave me her owl imitation. “She knows you’re thinking that, so she’ll make her move inside the duchy, where you won’t be expecting it.”
“Then she’s missed her chance,” I said. “Pulling stunts on the moor is one thing. Down in the valley, there’s villages every few miles, and then you’re in the city. It’s about ten times harder to be inconspicuous, which is of course the very essence of covert—”
“Exactly. Which makes you complacent. You’ll be off your guard.”
I sighed. “Let’s assume you’re absolutely right. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Be careful, that’s all.”
Which is a bit like telling a fish to swim. Still, it meant I could sulk all the way down the hill, which saved me having to talk to her.