Evil for Evil Read Online Free PDF Page B

bodies, so he felt obligated to them, and
     the Ducas feels uncomfortable while in another’s debt. He balanced a vambrace on top of the pile. He hadn’t really looked
     at it before. The clips, he noticed, were brass, and the rivets holding them on were neatly and uniformly peened over. Say
     what you like about the Mezentines, they made nice things. And at a sensible price, too.
    He looked up at the sky. Still an hour or so to go before sunset. He frowned; should’ve thought of it before. The battle had
     started just before dawn, and he’d left it and gone to sleep about an hour and a half later, so he’d been out for quite a
     while. His head still hurt, but it was getting better quickly. It wasn’t the first time he’d been knocked out in a battle,
     but on those previous occasions he’d always woken up in a tent, with clean pillows and people leaning over him looking worried,
     because the Ducas, even unconscious, isn’t someone you leave lying about for just anybody to find. On the other hand, the
     headache had been worse, all those other times. On balance, things weren’t as bad as they could be.
    The men were heading back to the cart, leaning forward against the weight of the burdens they were carrying. He remembered
     when he was a boy, and they’d ridden out to the fields to watch the hay-making; he’d sat under the awning and seen the laborers
     trudging backward and forward to and from the wains with impossibly big balls of hay spiked on their pitchforks, and thought
     how splendid they were, how noble, like fine horses steadily drawing a heavy carriage in a procession. Men at work.
    Someone was saying to the others: “Right, let’s call it a day. Have to come back in the morning to do the burying.” A short,
     thin, bald man walked past him without looking at him, but said, “Best get on the cart, son, we’re going now.” Not an order
     or a threat. Miel leaned back and hauled his damaged leg in after him, and the thin man closed the tailgate and dropped the
     latches.
    The sacks of clothing made an adequate nest. Miel put a sack under the crook of his bad knee, which helped reduce the pain
     whenever the cart rolled over a pothole. The driver seemed to have forgotten about him, or maybe he wasn’t in the habit of
     talking to the stock-in-trade. Miel leaned back and watched the light drain out of the sky.
    He wouldn’t have thought it was possible to go to sleep in an unsprung cart on those roads; but he woke up with a cricked
     neck to see darkness, torchlight and human shapes moving backward and forward around him. “Come on,” someone was saying, “out
     you get.” It was the tone of voice shepherds used at roundup; fair enough. He edged along the floor of the cart and put his
     good leg to the ground.
    “Need a hand?”
    “Yes,” he replied into the darkness, and someone put an arm round him and took his weight. He hobbled for a bit and was put
     down carefully next to a fire. “You stay there,” said the voice that came with the arm; so he did.
    It wasn’t much of a fire — peat, by the smell — and the circle of light it threw showed him his own bare feet and not much
     else. Well, they hadn’t tied him up, but of course they wouldn’t need to. He had nowhere to go, and only one functioning leg.
     If they were going to kill him they’d have done it by now. Miel realized that, for once in his life, he didn’t have to take
     thought, look ahead, make plans for other people or even himself. His place was to sit still and quiet until called for, and
     leave the decisions to someone else. To his surprise, he found that thought comforting. He sat, and let his mind drift.
    He supposed he ought to be worrying about the resistance, but the concept of it seemed to be thinning and dissipating, like
     the smoke from the fire. He considered it from his new perspective. He had been using every resource of body and mind left
     to him to fight the Mezentine occupation; what about that?