Arrowheads? What in blazes did they want with five smilers' worth of arrowheads? Frowning, he looked across at the date of the entry. Last week. Well, yes. It did make some sort of sense. The City Academy, like most of the city's institutions, was responsible for the payment and outfitting of a company of the guard. So; arrowheads. Just so long as nobody expected him to dress up in steel knitting and tramp up and down the walls in the pouring rain.

Gannadius shivered, wondering what was going on in the chapter house, where he ought to have been instead of crouching here doing sums. Yesterday the Prefect had announced that Bardas Loredan's expeditionary force would be ready in three days' time, and that he felt sure that firm pre-emptive action would see an end to the matter. The Prefect had sounded confident; but then, he always did. Loredan himself had looked depressed, rebellious, embarrassed and scared. Being entirely ignorant of such things, Gannadius didn't know how to interpret that; for all he knew, that was exactly how a responsible commander should look on the eve of a major expedition. It stood to reason, Gannadius argued to himself, that anybody who wanted to lead an army probably shouldn't be allowed to for that very reason.

These and similar reflections occupied his mind so effectively that he was through the expenditures almost before he knew it. Now all he had to do was subtract the expenditure total from the receipts total and be left with the figure for cash in hand, and he could call the job done and go to bed. He swept off the counters, re-drew the lines an set out the numbers. It would be so immensely gratifying if, just for once in his life, the blasted thing worked out first time.

It didn't, needless to say; and for the next two and a half hours Gannadius forgot all about the Patriarch, Bardas Loredan and the army, the barbarian hordes and the antisocial by-products of philosophy while he ground his way through both sets of figures and compelled them to agree, like a mother forcibly reconciling her warring children. As he pinched out the lamp and rolled into bed, he spared one last thought for his sadly afflicted colleague and fellow-discoverer; then a great surge of weariness swept over him, he yawned and fell asleep.

The scouts found Temrai supervising the packing up of the first consignment of trebuchet parts. The trebuchets had proved easier to build than the torsion engines, but their sheer size and weight was causing an entirely new class of problems, to which Temrai was too tired and drained to find immediate solutions.

'Now what?' he said, as a man appeared behind his shoulder, just as he was about to eat something for the first time in twenty-four hours. 'Look, if it's something you can possibly deal with yourselves...'

'Message from the scouting party.' The man turned out to be Hedasai, until recently ex-officio commander of the duck-hunters. Now that there were no gullible ducks left anywhere within a week's ride, he'd been reassigned to lookout duties. It occurred to Temrai that Hedasai shouldn't be there.

'Well?'

Hedasai paused for a moment before answering. 'We think you should come and take a look for yourself. It could be trouble.'

Temrai looked up at him, a wedge of salted duck forgotten between his fingers. 'What kind of trouble?' he demanded. 'More observers from downriver?'

'We think it's more than that. It looks like it might be an army.'

What a ridiculous thing to say, Temrai thought. Either it's an army or it isn't; it's not exactly something you can mistake for anything else. And then he thought, Oh, gods.

'Well, I suppose I'd better see for myself,' he said. 'Jurrai, Modenai, I need you for something. Could you get my horse and my bow and meet me by the saw-pits?'

Nobody said anything much as they forded the river and rode up the winding road into the hills. From the highest point, where they'd built a signal beacon, it was possible to convince yourself that you could just see the tallest tower of the upper city; it was a splendid vantage point, and Temrai had had it in mind when he chose this place for the construction camp.

'Well?' he said, catching his breath. They'd had to dismount and lead the horses for the last half-mile, and he'd spent too long sitting and standing around over the last few months. 'Where's this army of yours?'

Hedasai pointed. A good way off in the distance, maybe fifteen miles, something flashed in the light. Temrai looked hard; was that his morbid imagination or a cloud of dust? 'Jurrai,' he said, 'you're the one with the eyesight. What do you make of it?'

'Not good.' Jurrai cupped his hands round his eyes and concentrated. 'I'd say that's a large body of men, cavalry by the dust they're putting up and the speed they're going at. Assuming they know where we are, they could be here in three hours or so.'

'Damnation.' Temrai scowled. To his surprise, there wasn't much fear, very little compared to the anger. Of all the things he didn't need, a pitched battle against heavy cavalry in front of the construction camp, where he had two hundred dismantled catapults and fifty trebuchets in the process of being fitted together and taken apart again - as if he didn't have enough to worry about. 'Oh, well, we'd better get ready for them. Modenai, get back to the camp, have the men saddled up and ready. Hedasai, take your scouts and go with him; I don't want stray riders wandering about where they can be seen, I want these people to think we're careless and stupid. Jurrai, you're with me.' Suddenly he grinned. 'Do you know how to plan a battle? I don't.'

'You didn't know how to build catapults, either.'

The two of them rode down a little way under the skyline and sat in silence for a full quarter of an hour, learning the landscape by heart and considering the implications of what they saw. Then Temrai's face softened into a smile.

'It's perfect,' he said. 'Jurrai, we can do this if we keep calm and don't try to be too clever.'

Jurrai nodded. 'I know what I'd be doing if I was their man. What had you in mind?'

'Well.' Temrai collected his thoughts; it would help him clarify matters in his mind if he explained to someone else, and there was always the chance he'd missed something obvious that Jurrai had noticed. 'He's over there, with nothing much except open country between him and us except these hills. Now, our camp is on the other side of the river, on the flat between the river and the high ground over there; which means he's got to cross the river to get to us, and there's only two places he can do that.' He stopped, rubbed his chin. 'There's the main ford down below us, opposite the eastern ends of both ridges, with our saw-pits and the jetty right beside it. Then there's the bend in the river, with those two little copses, and the other place you can just about ford the river, which is maybe a mile and a half from the camp. What he'll want to do is creep up on the other side of this ridge here, hoping that we don't see him behind the ridge until he's actually on the ford. Agreed?'

Jurrai nodded. 'Mind you,' he said, 'if I was him and wanting to do things properly, I'd be trying to make some use of that higher crossing. It'd be a crying shame to let all that natural cover go to waste.'

Temrai thought about that for a moment, trying to make believe he was the other man, whoever the other man was. 'I think you're right,' he said, 'which makes it even better for us. What if he splits his army in two when he reaches the eastern point of the ridge? He sends the best part of his forces up to the higher ford, to sneak round between the two copses and behind the head of the ridge on the camp side of the river - he'd reckon there was a better than even chance of getting into position there without being seen since we wouldn't be expecting an attack from our side of the river. Then he sends the rest of his people over the main ford; we charge off to meet him there, and his main force pops out from behind the ridge on our side and hits us from behind. Next thing we know, we're surrounded, the only way to run is back downstream, and he's got control of the camp and can destroy the engines at his leisure. Good plan.'

Jurrai nodded. 'Assuming he's counting on us not having seen him coming,' he said. 'Although we'll know soon enough by the direction he takes. He can't cross the river downstream of the camp for about ten miles, to the best of my knowledge.'

'I didn't know that,' Temrai nodded. 'But let's assume he does, it forces his hand even more. Now then, here's what we do. You take, say, two-thirds of the men and split them into two, one lot behind each of the two copses. You ambush him, one in front and one behind so he'll have nowhere to go except to run due east, which'll take the best part of his forces out of the reckoning entirely.' Temrai stood up in his stirrups, staring at the ground beyond the river bend, trying to imagine it swarming with shouting men and panic-stricken horses. 'He'll see all that, and it'll make him think that all our men are up that end of the field and the camp's unguarded. He'll then make a dash for the camp, which'll be a big mistake from his point of view, because I'll have one detachment over the river actually in the camp ready to meet him, and my main force on this side, just below where we are now, all ready to jump out and cut him off from behind. If we're really lucky we might even be able to catch him while he's crossing the ford and squeeze him into the river from both ends.' Temrai stopped, and stared at Jurrai, his eyes wide. 'Gods, Jurrai, what if it doesn't go like that? We'd have our people split up into four groups. I don't like it.'

Jurrai shook his head. 'Better than being all bunched up in the camp,' he replied. 'And your contingent's got a back door if things don't work out; you can just run for it downstream and hope you're faster than he is. If I were in his position I don't think I'd risk an extended pursuit. The same goes for my lot,' he added. 'We can always split and run east, then double back behind the ridge and join up with you downriver.' He bit his lip, and added, 'It does all seem a bit too perfect, doesn't it? Or maybe we're just brilliant tacticians and never knew it.'

Temrai sat back into his saddle, his eyes fixed on what was now quite definitely a cloud of dust far away on the flat plains. 'You've been in battles,' he said. 'What's it like?'

'Messy,' Jurrai replied. 'Mostly, you get frightened because you don't know what's going on. Usually - at least, all the fighting I've ever been in - you start off with a long, boring wait, which is when the nerves get to you and you end up convincing yourself that you're going to get killed and it's going to hurt, and you tell yourself you can't possibly keep your nerve, you'll run away at the first sight of the enemy and everybody'll despise you for ever.

'Well, you're just about ready to kill yourself there and then and save the other side the bother when the action starts, and in my experience you don't have the time or energy to be scared after that; either you're in the line and you're desperately trying to hear the orders over the shouting and keep up with the others and do what you're supposed to be doing, or else you're in command yourself, and you're so busy trying to make yourself heard, trying to keep your men together and doing what they're told, you probably wouldn't notice if you had arrows sticking out of you like prickles on a hedgehog.

'And the actual fighting; well, that's even more of a mess. You can forget all your sword training and archery practice; you're loosing off arrows as fast as you can draw, you don't think about aiming, or if you do, that'll be the moment you drop the arrow or the string breaks or the enemy suddenly change direction and ride off out of range.

'As for the hand-to-hand stuff, you're riding forward, usually too fast to be in any sort of control, and suddenly there's people all round you, yours and theirs; if you really want to, you can usually ride straight through a melee and nobody'll try and stop you, because the chances are the other side are just as scared and confused as you are, and nobody really wants to fight if they can help it. If you do fight, it won't be a five-minute fencing match. You hit and he hits, and perhaps one of you'll make contact, and then you'll be past him and either dead or onto the next one. If you're hit, you may well not know it. If you get killed, it'll probably be by someone you hadn't even seen. It's a bloody dangerous hobby, sure enough, but don't imagine it'll any of it be deliberate. It's ninety-five parts luck, and the other five depends on the generals. That's what fighting's like. Is that any help?'

'Not really,' Temrai replied. 'It sounds like what I remember of when the camp got attacked when I was a kid, except we weren't even trying to fight back. The crazy thing is,' he added hopelessly, 'I started all this. I must be out of my mind.'

'As Your Majesty pleases,' Jurrai replied politely. 'Let's get back to the camp.'

When the enemy reserve suddenly appeared out of nowhere and came crashing into the rear of the column, trapping them half in and half out of the river and throwing the whole party into utter confusion, all Loredan felt was a vague sense of relief; the worst had happened, there were unlikely to be any more unpleasant surprises; all he had to do now was fight it out and it'd all be over for the day. Even as the men behind him dropped off their horses into the water, dead before they fell, he knew that he wasn't going to be killed; not here, not this way. It was strange, this calm, this sensation of not being involved except as a spectator; perhaps it was because he'd been expecting something like this ever since they left the city. Now things were going the way he thought they'd go, at least he knew where matters stood. It was starting to make some sort of sense. Just as the old man always said; the enemy you can see is the least of your problems.

His greatest and most insoluble problem, namely his five so-called co-commanders had been solved for him. Two of them were dead already, to his certain knowledge. As for the other three, well, if they were still alive, there wasn't much damage left for them to do. He tugged hard on his left rein, lifted his sword and selected one of the enemy to take out his anger on.

It had been, of course, all his fault. If he hadn't whined and complained solidly about being put in charge of this ludicrous venture, in the hope of being replaced by someone else, he wouldn't have had five deadheads foisted on him the day before the expedition was due to set out, each one of them apparently convinced he was the commander-in-chief and the other five were only there for decoration.

Six generals, for crying out loud. Sheer lunacy under any circumstances. Six generals in charge of five thousand untrained volunteers meant they'd never stood a chance.

The plainsman rode straight at him, spear levelled. Loredan pulled up, watched him come, dragged his horse round at the last minute and severed the other man's spine just above his shoulders with a short-arm cut as he flashed past. Something hit him six inches or so above the left knee; it felt like a sword or an axe, wasting its force on the heavy-duty mail and the thick padding underneath. Damn fool of an amateur; never hit unless the blow achieves something, you should kill 'em or leave 'em alone. He'd estimated where the other man would be before he'd finished turning round; the enemy horseman was almost past him, his back turned, but not so far past that he was safe from a long-arm thrust under his armpit, where there was a gap in the boiled-leather armour just nicely convenient for a sword to go in and reach the heart. The dead man's own forward momentum pulled him off the sword; Loredan watched just long enough to see him topple forwards, then spurred his horse on and rode for a gap in the melee. He wasn't achieving anything by just sitting there killing people, and he needed time to think.

He couldn't see very well for all the people in the way, but it seemed fairly certain that they were hemmed in back and front, with the deep water of the river on either side. That meant there was nothing for it but to force a way through either front or back. Chances were the main force of the enemy were behind them, since that was his logical line of retreat. In which case, he'd have to go forwards, try and break through to the camp and perhaps throw them off balance by getting between the camp and the ridge. If only he could keep things mobile, there was even a chance of outrunning the force behind them, coming up on the enemy detachment who'd ambushed the flanking party, spooking them, rescuing what was left of his people upriver and getting out of this shambles with some vestige of order.

First things first. He pulled his horse round and forced a way through the mass of terrified men that formed the centre of his column. A more useless congregation of human beings would be hard to find, but enough of them followed him to give him a little impetus, just enough to give him a chance of reversing the flow of the melee on the east bank of the ford. Luckily the enemy were slackening off, starting to think they'd done enough and that it was now just a matter of finishing the job. He killed seven men and carved up another four before he finally made it through to the other side; his right arm ached so badly he could hardly breathe, and his head was splitting after a bash on the side of his helmet from something he hadn't seen.

The wedge of men behind him forced a breach in the enemy line - not so much a line as a mob, jammed tight by weight of their own numbers, certainly no longer in the mood to fight after they'd decided in their minds that they'd already won. If you've won, why risk getting killed? More amateur thinking. At long last, something resembling a survival instinct led his column to push through the gap. The enemy let them go, too busy with their own sudden and unexpected panic to initiate any further hostilities. They wanted to be left alone now, and Loredan was happy to oblige them. When he looked back over his shoulder at the ragged stream of horsemen emerging from the slaughter of the ford, he was pleasantly surprised to see that he'd managed to get nearly four-fifths of his people out. The rest were as good as dead; the hell with them.

Still in business, he congratulated himself. Now then.

His assumptions held good. The last thing the enemy were expecting him to do was attack, and so when he rode up between the head of the ridge and the southernmost of the two little copses, he had a clear run straight into the rear of the happy throng of slaughtermen who were surrounding what was left of his flanking party. Once they realised what was happening, they cleared off without even making a pretence of a fight, heading upriver to cut him off from the high-river ford across which they were expecting him to go. Reasonable guess, but amateur thinking nonetheless. What he needed most at this point in the proceedings was time, space, peace and quiet; they were going to let him have some, and that ought to be enough grace to save all their lives. As soon as he was sure he'd got as much of his flanking party with him as he was likely to get, he signalled a right wheel and led the column off east at the double.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Having realised he was still alive, Temrai opened his eyes and yelled. After a minute or so, his dead horse was pulled off him and he was lifted up out of the water. It occurred to him that he was shaking like a man having a fit, but there was nothing he could do about it.

'What happened?' he gasped. 'I thought we'd won.'

'We have,' replied the man who was holding his right arm. 'They've got away from us, and they're running for it. Are you all right?'

Temrai nodded. 'What happened?' he repeated. 'Everything went like we wanted it to, and then the next minute they were all over us.' He shuddered, remembering the sudden terror that had paralysed him as the other man, the one who'd started it all, burst out through a solid wall of Temrai's guard and came straight at him, his face so completely calm, almost serene, that for a moment Temrai had taken him for Death itself.

He remembered how there had been no time at all - the man was on him, his sword-arm through with the thrust before Temrai could even make up his mind what to do, but it had all gone so slowly, so that he'd had time to think all sorts of things before the other man's sword-tip came out through the other side of his horse's neck, and he'd felt both of them gradually toppling over into the water. He remembered the extraordinary feeling of calm and resignation after that - oh, well, here goes, that was that - as he waited to hit the stony bed of the ford, feel the hooves of the oncoming enemy landing on his face and chest-And here he was, apparently alive and not hurting, nothing broken, no blood he could definitely say was his own. Just like Jurrai had said: a mess . . .

'Where's Jurrai?' he asked, already knowing the answer.

'Didn't make it,' the man replied. 'Same man as got you got him. I think he was trying to save you-'

Nice thought, Temrai said to himself, but I was there, remember? He simply didn't know what hit him, same as me. So Jurrai's dead. Well, we'll have to deal with that later. Dammit, the battle isn't even over yet, I ought to be doing something- 'Are they safely away from the camp?' he asked.

The man nodded. 'Far as I can see. They lit out for the upper ford; maybe we'll catch them there, I don't know. Do you want to stay here talking in the middle of the river or shall we move on?'

Temrai allowed himself to be frogmarched onto dry land. They had to step over bodies - some dead, rather more still alive but probably past saving. That was a bad thing; all these men in the most desperate moment of their lives, scrabbling with their hands for help because they're too weak to cry out, their voices won't work any more, and we step over them as if they were cowshit in the road. 'Get a message through, call it all off.' Temrai's voice was harsh, as if he was attributing blame. 'I want everybody back to the camp, and then let's see about clearing this lot up.'

The man who'd hit him - hadn't he seen that face before? Quite possible; after all, it as less than six months ago that he'd been working in the city arsenal, perhaps some of these swords that were lying discarded on the grass were ones he'd made himself. Maybe even the one that had killed Jurrai, and nearly done for him. That'd be an amusing coincidence; but all that seemed so long ago and far away as to be part of some dream-time, and he was as different now as the moth is from the caterpillar. The hell with all that, too. Right now, there was work to be done.

Someone brought him a fresh horse - oh, hell, Thunder's dead, my poor old friend, and I didn't even think of that until now; I used to cry myself to sleep about losing a horse when I was a kid - and he hauled himself up into the saddle, suddenly aware of bruises, wrenched muscles, traumatised and shredded skin where he'd been ground against the stony bed of the ford. As he looked round he was subconsciously collecting faces, every face recognised a further piece of salvage, one less dagger in his conscience when the time came for him to face up to what he'd deliberately set in motion. But there wasn't time for all that now; too much to organise, so many things to be sorted out before he could say this day was over.

'Kossanai.' The Chief Engineer was a sorry sight; soaked to the skin, one of the shoulder straps of his boiled-leather breastplate flapping loose and a raw cut underneath. But he was a reliable man and still on his feet; someone else could do some work for a change. 'Get yourself over to the higher ford, make sure we're pulling out and nobody's gone dashing off in pursuit. Tell whoever's in charge up there I need those men down here now.' Kossanai nodded, wearily hauled himself into the saddle. 'Stilchai, you're in charge of picking up the wounded. Get hold of Nimren, tell her to organise the healers. And put someone in charge of prisoners. The sooner they're rounded up the better, just in case there's any that don't know the battle's over yet. Maltai, get some scouts out and let's know for sure where everybody is instead of guessing.'

It was some time before the scouts came back. The enemy were long gone; they'd doubled back behind the ridge and disappeared downriver, presumably heading for the lower crossing. Nobody had shown the slightest inclination to chase after them.

Casualty figures gradually came in; for the enemy, nine hundred killed and a further three hundred and fifty captured, half of them cut up to a greater or lesser extent, as against the clan's losses, currently standing at a hundred and seven dead and seventy-odd wounded, twenty or so seriously. It was, by any standards, a glorious victory; and if it should have been more glorious still as regards the body count, nobody seemed in too much of a hurry to dwell on that. On the contrary; for the first time in living memory, the clan had taken on the dreaded riders from the city and seen them off in no uncertain terms. Men and women whose mothers had terrified them into obedience with the threat of Maxen and his raiders had seen those same bogeymen pinned down and surrounded, caught in a pitfall and tethered for the slaughter. The fact that somehow they'd managed to slip away before their throats were actually cut was something the clan could afford to overlook; and besides, the more survivors who went home to tell the tale, the greater the panic and confusion of their enemies. A wholesale slaughter would only have served to stiffen their resolve, and made the rest of the job that much harder. As for Temrai; well, they'd always known he had the right stuff, hadn't they? It was good to know they'd been right all along, but it came as no surprise.

(There was also the somewhat discordant note struck by the families and friends of the hundred and seven dead, and the rather ungrateful attitude of the badly injured, who would rather have had their legs and hands back than all the generous praise of a grateful nation; Temrai wondered if he had time to deal with all that yet, and decided it would have to wait until the burial details had reported in and the horses had been seen to.) The final task of the day was to finish dismantling the last seven trebuchets, so as not to fall too badly behind schedule. There were any number of willing volunteers, most of whom got under the engineers' feet and made the job take half as long again as it should have done. Once that was out of the way, everybody was at liberty to go back to their tents and campfires; except for Temrai and his heads of department, who had the long and tedious business of thinking the whole thing through and deciding what had to be done about it.

'They may try again,' Uncle Anakai said, 'but I doubt it. Not immediately, anyway. They'll be too busy deciding whose fault it was, if I know the city people.'

He was talking slowly because of the ball of cotton waste pressed to the side of his face; an arrow had slit his cheek open for three inches directly in line with his mouth. It had almost certainly been friendly fire, since the enemy had loosed off relatively few arrows.

'Let's assume they don't,' Ceuscai replied. 'I had a good look at them, after all. They didn't know what hit 'em.' He shook his head, as if unable to accept what he'd seen. 'That can't be their real army,' he went on. 'For all we know, it could just have been some privateer outfit; you know, if the Emperor won't do anything about it, we will. I can't believe the city's main field army's as easy to beat as that lot was.'

Ceuscai was reasonably undamaged; slightly stiff in one knee after an awkward fall from his horse (he'd led the ambush party at the higher ford; his misadventure had come about when he was caught in the press of his own men surging forward to massacre the encircled enemy.) Temrai grunted in agreement, nodded slightly. 'I think you may well be right on the first count,' he said, 'not so sure about the second. Whether or not that was their proper army, I reckon we've got to expect some sort of attempt on the engines when we unload them at the final camp downstream. That's what I would do; strike hard and close to home. We can't rely on that, however. From now on we'll have to work on the principle that they could come at us at any time, which'll mean having to take people away from making and moving the engines and put them on escort duty. That'll slow us down, and won't that make us still more vulnerable?'

'What about a punitive expedition?' Shandren interrupted. 'Think about it. They've just been badly beaten in the field, for almost the first time ever. Isn't it likely they'll want to set the record straight, if only for the sake of their own self-image? They'll need to do something to restore morale.'

Anakai shook his head. 'Far more likely to take it out on their own people,' he said. 'Punishing the General'll make it so they can feel good about themselves again, and they won't have to risk a second defeat. No, I think that if they want to intercept the engines, they're most likely to do it while they're on the water. There's several places where the river's pretty wide between here and the final camp, and they know how we feel about boats. If they launch a few barges full of soldiers, they could sink the rafts or tow them off without ever coming within bowshot. We'd pursue along the bank, and either fall into an ambush or leave the construction camp exposed for a hit-and-run attack. Thinking about it, that was the obvious thing to have done instead of what they actually did; more support for your theory, Ceuscai, about this lot not being the regular army.'

'I don't think there is a regular army,' Temrai put in. 'I've said this before and nobody's paid any attention.' He shifted his weight off his painful side before continuing. 'There's a few permanent guards on the walls, and a part-time levy who're supposed to be trained men and aren't. As far as most of them are concerned, the part-timers treat their training allowance as a sort of state handout to the needy and feckless, and the rest of them look on it as a sort of drinking club. Oh, I'm not saying they won't do their best when the walls are actually under attack; I just don't see them being used as a field army away from the city. It'd be lunacy, and they know it.'

'Maybe,' Ceuscai conceded. 'But so was this.'

The glow of the fire lit up the ring of faces; twelve people who knew each other well, talking calmly and rationally about something that might well have been the end of the world. There were also places where someone should have been, but wasn't; Jurrai as leader of the horse archers, Pegtai and Sorutai as members of the chief's household - I broke Sorutai's flute when we were children, and now I'll never be able to make it up to him; he doted on that flute, and I broke it because I was jealous. Why did I do that? - but the gaps could be filled with others just as good, it was in the order of business for tonight's meeting, together with formal thanks to the gods for letting our losses be so light. Had Sasurai ever had to do this, Temrai wondered, carry on as if nothing had happened, accept a loss because it couldn't be helped and things might have been a whole lot worse? And what were his friends in the city thinking, as the first reports came in? Nine hundred empty beds in the city tonight; would they be filled so easily, and without the comforting reassurance of victory to let the rest of them declare that it had all been worthwhile? To die for one's people is bad enough; to die for one's people and lose as well must be a dreadful thing.

'Let's sum up then, shall we?' Temrai said, swallowing a yawn. 'We don't think they'll attack again, or at least not for a while, but it'd still be sensible to have a mobile reserve just in case. I'm not sure that's quite the answer; a reserve that's too small to make any difference is worse than no reserve at all, because it's taking people away from the jobs they should be doing. My own view is that they're not going to risk another humiliation by attacking us here, but they might have a go at the camp downstream, simply because it's nearer, it's got less people to defend it and - let's face it - that's where all the finished engines are, or will be soon enough. So I've decided that we'll have a fairly strong force down at the bottom camp, which can serve both as a guard and an early-warning post to let us know if a substantial army's on its way here. Ceuscai, I'd like you to think it over tonight and let me know tomorrow what you'll want by way of men and supplies; once I know what you're taking down there, I'll be able to reassign people here to cover.' He yawned again and stretched, wincing as his stiffening muscles protested. 'I think that covers it, don't you? Right, next, we've got vacancies on this council to fill. Nominations, please.'

Under any other circumstances there would have been a certain amount of debate, politicking, trading favours and remembering obligations; but it was too late in too overwhelming a day for anybody to have the patience or the stamina to play games. In consequence, the nominations were sensible and the debate mercifully short; even so, Uncle Anakai's head was starting to nod forward by the time Temrai declared his decision, and the pad of bloodsoaked cotton fell from Anakai's hand onto the rug, revealing the full ugliness of the wound, the crudeness of the chewed-sinew suture it had hastily been sewn up with. My fault again, Temrai reflected; all the sinew they'd normally have used had been requisitioned by the bowmakers for strings and back-facings, so the healers had to unwrap old stuff from tools and furniture and chomp it soft in their mouths in order to stitch up wounds.

That's something else we'll have to deal with; we can't go into battle again with nothing to patch the casualties up with. He thought for a moment about the word casualties; a nice technical term, suitable for military use. You didn't talk about people slashed open and bleeding, people with arms and legs missing, people with holes in them or scars that made their own children frightened of them; you said casualties, and after a while you talked about acceptable losses and then expendable forces, and pretty soon it all became a game of chess, observed from the top of a hill, part of a sequence of games, a tournament. And then you wonder why your friends don't talk to you the same way any more, and after that you start worrying about conspiracies and treason; and after that, the chances are you'll really have conspiracies and treason to worry about. And to think; there's people who actually want this job. Crazier still; there are places where people who want this sort of job are allowed to do it.

Which is how wars start; or, at least, how they're caused.

'Next on the agenda,' he heard himself saying, 'is the formal vote of thanks to the gods for keeping our casualties down to an acceptable level. Uncle, if you'd care to do the honours.'

Loredan didn't mind. If anything, he was glad of the peace and quiet, relieved to be on his own. He stretched out, hands behind his head, legs extended, feet crossed. The stone bench was cold, but not unbearably so. I could get to like this, he said to himself.

If he'd felt it was unjust, that he didn't deserve to be here, it'd be a different matter. As it was, what had the Prefect called it? Culpable negligence, dereliction of duty, gross errors of judgement; he couldn't really argue with that. A thousand men dead or in the hands of the enemy, because he'd been too busy sulking to notice that they were walking into a trap. Culpable negligence was putting it mildly; it couldn't have been more obvious if they'd cut the word TRAP in eight-foot letters in the chalk. If Maxen was alive, he'd have pulled my lungs out for what I've done.

Yes, but Maxen was dead. Hence all this.

Held pending an immediate inquiry, the Prefect had said. Loredan hoped it wouldn't be too immediate. A week or two here in the quiet and the dark would do him the world of good, let him get rid of the horrors before he had to go out and explain himself to people. Right now, a stone bed in a cell under the council chamber was infinitely preferable to getting yelled at in the chapter house; he could easily imagine the panic inside and the hysteria outside, the mobs baying for someone's blood, rioting down at the docks as people fought for berths on outgoing ships, a wonderful pretext for another night of looting and breaking down the doors of unpopular neighbours.

As to what happened after that, he couldn't really summon up the energy to worry about it. Maybe he'd be put to death, here in his cell or in some quiet guardroom on the wall. That kind of death he could accept; somehow it wasn't nearly as depressing as the thought of dying in the courtroom had been, when he'd been facing the prospect of fighting Alvise for the greater glory of the charcoal people. That would have made very little sense, his last dying thought would have been, Gods, how stupid. This way? Well, fair enough, in context. He owed a death to the people of the plains. This way he'd been able to get four-fifths of the army home and still pay off his debt to the enemy.

Someone walked past in the corridor outside; heavy boots, a jangle of metal, keys probably. Were there other prisoners down here, or was he the only one? Other enemies of the state, out of sight and mind? He wondered what they'd done. You had to be pretty fair-average wicked to end up in the cells; mere piracy, rape or murder weren't enough to get you free board and lodging in this town.

Fancy there being no Emperor, he said to himself, still not quite able to believe what he'd heard. The Prefect had been very matter-of-fact about it, as if he'd been talking about the tooth fairy or the headache elves, things you grew out of believing in when you turned seven. According to the Prefect, there hadn't been an Emperor for the whole of Loredan's lifetime - but didn't we always pick flowers for his garland on his birthday when we were kids? What did they do with all those hundreds of flowery garlands that got handed in with such ceremony at the upper-city gate each year? Disturbing, somehow, to think of all that love going to waste, like water draining into sand.

When Callelogus IV died with no heirs and the succession stood to be disputed between three distant cousins, foreign princes who couldn't speak the language and whose table manners alone would have rendered them entirely unacceptable to the city, it occurred to the City Prefect and his cronies that if the people weren't told the Emperor was dead, then nobody would know, and what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. Since then, the upper city had been empty except for a few caretakers and some officials who had offices there; Callelogus had lived to be ninety-six, and on his death the diadem passed to an entirely made-up nephew, the son of a wholly fictitious sister who'd supposedly been married off to an unknown princeling in a far-distant land just long enough ago that nobody could be expected to remember it happening. Meanwhile, the government of the city stayed in the hands of the people whose trade was governing cities, quietly and piecemeal; secretaries of state, officials, middle-city men who knew how to repair roads and negotiate trade agreements. The more Loredan thought about it, the more he favoured it as a system of government. They had, after all, done a good job.

Up till now, at least.

Gods, Loredan thought, what if the city is going to fall? Unthinkable; the wall still stood, after all, and nobody could ever get past that. But he'd seen siege engines in the plainsmen's camp, catapults and trebuchets, sections of siege wall, mobile housings for battering rams, sections of siege towers, and he couldn't help thinking that if they'd managed to make such things, homeless savages who lived in tents, then there was a will and a determination there that wasn't going to be put off by the city's reputation for being impregnable. That thought disturbed Loredan far more than the prospect of his own death.

And yet it would be fair enough, all things considered. It wasn't a matter of right and wrong; even if such things existed, they had nothing to do with the life cycle of cities and nations. The city's dealings with the people of the plain were no more reprehensible than the lion's relationship with the deer, but that worked both ways. If it was the clan's turn to be the lion, that was the way it was meant to go. You couldn't disagree with something like that. All you could sensibly do was leave and find somewhere else to live.

More footsteps outside, coming this way, stopping outside the door, A slim blade of light slit the darkness, then turned into a flood. There were two outlines in the doorway.

'Just give me a shout when you're done, Father,' said a voice Loredan recognised as the warder's. 'I'll be right outside.'

The door closed, but the light stayed inside; yellow and warm from a small lamp. It turned the other outline into Patriarch Alexius. Taken aback, Loredan swung his legs off the bench and stood up.

'Here,' he said, 'sit down.'

'Thank you. I will,' Alexius replied. In the melodramatic light of the oil lamp he looked like a corpse, and it took him a while to hobble the length of the small cell. 'That's better,' he said. 'Just let me catch my breath, will you? Stairs,' he added.

Loredan sat on the floor, his back to the wall, waiting for the Patriarch to say something. He didn't want to be rude, but he was in no mood for small talk.

'You'll be out of here fairly soon,' Alexius went on after a minute or so. 'We've just had a rather annoying meeting, lots of foolish people saying stupid things; the gist of it is that I'm to address the crowd and tell them to calm down and go home, and they're letting you go. You'll have a chance to have a bath and a shave before the next meeting.'

Loredan's mouth dropped open. 'Next meeting?' he repeated. 'What, you mean I'm still-?'

Alexius nodded. 'I had an idea at the time you wouldn't be overjoyed about it. It's all a matter of expediency, you see. We need scapegoats for the defeat, but we also need a hero for the people to trust.' He sighed; the marks of fatigue on his face were as clear as the portrait on a newly minted coin. 'That'll be you,' he continued. 'I shall tell my fellow citizens that the five generals responsible for the disaster were the ones who died in the battle; Bardas Loredan, on the other hand, saved the day, snatched four-fifths of the army out of the jaws of death, turned a humiliating defeat into a moral victory-'

'Oh, for pity's sake!'