It was only a very little gap, between the tail end of one line and the front of another, and it was closing fast; but if he was very quick, he might just be able to slip through and get down the path without having to fight for every step.
‘After him,’ someone was screaming (Temrai, probably). An arrow glanced off his left elbow-cop and jagged sideways into the advancing line. He nearly lost his balance twice – once when he trod on a dead man’s head he hadn’t noticed was there, once when he stumbled on the lip of a trebuchet-shot crater – but the weight of his armour gave him so much momentum that he was able to correct the errors and keep going, almost bouncing off the ground (like a hammer on an anvil). In the event, he had to push one man out of his way and carve a chunk off the shoulder of another, but he made it. He was on the path -
– Which was, of course, in a deplorable state after days on end of constant bombardment. The crumbling dirt gave way under his weight and suddenly he was sliding on his backside down the slope. He managed to slow himself down by digging into the piled-up spoil with his heels before he veered off the verge and over the drop, and used the momentum to bounce himself back on to his feet and on to the path. After that he took it rather more slowly; his pursuers were doing the same, so it didn’t matter much. He crashed into one fool of a plainsman who didn’t get out of the way in time, sending him sprawling over the edge. Clumsy, he thought, as he wobbled himself back upright. A menace to traffic, that’s what I am.
At the bottom of the path there was a confused mess of bodies, like sandbags piled up to keep the rainwater out of the house; he had to stop and lift his legs over with his hand. That gave the two men chasing him time to catch up, an opportunity they didn’t live long enough to regret. They were still fighting down in the lower circle. There were too many bodies lying about to allow for organised manoeuvres (it reminded Bardas of the parts of the plains where the tussocks of couch-grass made it nearly impossible to walk) and the combatants were picking their way through the litter towards each other and then trading blows from a standstill. The gate, of course, was shut and barred; but he could see a clear path to the ramp that led up to the catwalk running around the inside of the stockade. He shuffled his way towards it, fending off a few half-hearted attacks, and dragged himself wearily up the ramp. He couldn’t see anybody else up there with him, so he leaned the scimitar against the log wall and set about unbuckling his armour.
A full set of plate is far easier to get out of than into, and where a buckle was jammed or twisted, he simply cut the strap. He’d just discarded the breastplate and was sawing through the vambrace hanger when he heard shouts not far away. There were a dozen plainsmen on the ramp, pointing at him and yelling to another group threading their way through the battle. Bardas swore under his breath and carried on sawing, cutting himself as the blade slid off a rivet. By the time they reached him he was free of all his burdens.
They stopped abruptly and stared at him down the length of their spears. He could almost taste the fear they brought with them, and he was sure that if he’d clapped his hands and shouted, at least two of them would have run away. He didn’t blame them; in the middle of what was possibly the greatest victory in their nation’s history, they’d been detailed to chase after defeat, humiliation and certain death. ‘It’s all right,’ he called out cheerfully, ‘I’m not stopping,’ then he jumped up from a standstill, got his fingers over the edge of the stockade, hauled himself up and sat astride the fence for a moment before swinging his leg over and pushing off. He landed in the river in a sitting position and hit the water with a comically loud splash and a great plume of spray.
Shock and exhaustion caught up with him halfway between the fortress and the camp, and he dropped down in the dirt, unable to move. The extreme elation he’d felt at getting out of the trap was wearing thin. All he could think about was the weight of his legs and the pain in his knees. He lay still for half an hour, his eyes shut (if anybody stumbled over him they’d assume he was dead). There was nothing to see behind his eyelids any more, and nothing existed outside his painful, overworked body.
Then it began to rain, and when he was soaked to the skin and hardly able to see for the water running down his forehead and into his eyes, it occurred to him that there were tents back at the camp, and rather more comfortable places to rest. Standing up proved to be a major operation, involving the co-ordination of a number of complex manoeuvres that his body no longer seemed capable of. Because the rain was particularly wet and cold, however, he found a way to pull things together, and limped back to the camp dragging his left foot, which had suddenly decided that it had got itself sprained at some unspecified stage.
The bed looked wonderfully comfortable but it was too far away, so he dropped into his chair and let his head roll forward on to his chest. Nobody seemed to have noticed that he was back, which was a relief; there would be an unendurable amount of work to be done (and no Theudas to help him) and he couldn’t face doing it now. He closed his eyes, glad of the dark, but the ache in his muscles and joints was far too dominant in his mind to allow him to fall asleep. Nonetheless he was just starting to slip away into an intermediate doze when he felt something pricking the back of his neck. It might have been a thorn, or a sliver of steel from his mangled armour, but he didn’t think so. ‘Hello?’ he said.
‘Hello yourself.’
The voice was familiar. ‘Who is it?’ he asked.
‘Me. Iseutz Hedin, Niessa’s daughter. Remember me?’
‘Of course,’ Bardas replied without moving. ‘How did you get here?’
‘The usual way, by ship,’ she replied. ‘We had the wind behind us all the way, which made for a quick but exciting trip. But I can see you’re not really interested, so I’ll kill you and be done with it.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Bardas said, and the fear made him slur his words slightly, the way a man does when he’s not drunk but not sober either. ‘I can’t remember, did we ever talk about this? I’d like to know why you hate me so much.’
‘Easy. You ruined my life.’
‘All right,’ Bardas said, ‘but it was a fair fight, you’d have killed me if I hadn’t-’
‘I’m not talking about that,’ Iseutz interrupted. ‘Sure, cutting off my fingers didn’t exactly make me love you, but as you say, it was a fair fight; that’s not the reason, as well you know.’
Bardas could feel his hands aching, weak with both exertion and terror. ‘So you’re still angry with me because I killed your uncle-’ He couldn’t remember the man’s name. Something Hedin. Tactless to betray the fact he’d forgotten it. ‘Really? After all this time?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. But that was a fair fight too; come on, you were a law-fencer yourself for a while. Really, I don’t see the difference.’
He heard Iseutz breathe out through her nose (all terribly familiar, this; knives in the dark, not being able to see the enemy, having to rely on sounds and smells – and yes, she’d recently eaten something flavoured with coriander). ‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘I’m not surprised. You should try listening to people when they tell you things. I said I’m going to kill you because you ruined my life. And you did.’
One thing about fear he’d forgotten: the way it saturates everything else in your mind, like lamp-oil spilt on a pile of papers. ‘But really, that doesn’t follow,’ he said. ‘The City would still have fallen whether I’d killed him or not; your life would still have been messed up. Dammit, if you want to play logic games, try this: if I hadn’t killed your uncle, would you have been in that alleyway the night the City fell? Because if the answer’s no, you’d have been killed. I saved your bloody life, remember? Doesn’t that count for anything?’