The Two of Swords: Part 10 Read Online Free PDF Page A

station?”
    “Don’t ask me. I don’t do this route.”
    Oida took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, it can’t be far,” he said. “Twenty miles at the very most, and maybe they’ll lend us mules so we won’t have to walk back carrying a bloody wheel.” He looked up the road, running dead straight up into the hills. It would have to be uphill, he said to himself, I hate bloody up. Still, downhill on the way back, something to look forward to. “Wonder what made the spoke suddenly go like that,” he said. “I thought they built these things to take any sort of punishment.”
    “It was me,” the driver said, “going too damn fast. It’s a judgement on me, for deserting.”
    “Right,” Oida said. “Because if you’d done your duty and gone scampering after the enemy and actually managed to find them and got yourself killed about two seconds later, what a difference that would’ve made.” He picked up the rim of the wrecked wheel and rested it on his shoulder; he reckoned it’d be less of a pain to carry than the spokes. “Come on,” he said. “Sooner we start, sooner we get there.”
    The vineyard country stopped at the top of the rise. Beyond that was moorland; a shallow dip, and then the road rose steeply. There was nothing to see but heather, starting to go over, and couch grass and bog cotton, with the occasional island of startlingly yellow gorse. The driver had brought his bow as an afterthought, but there was absolutely no point; the deer would see them coming three miles away, the birds flew too high or got up too quick, there should have been sheep but there wasn’t a single one to be seen. Whatever had happened here, Oida was at a loss to understand, and it was fortunate, in a way, that there was no point trying; if he managed to figure it out, he’d only upset himself, and what would that achieve? He concentrated on trying to remember once-glimpsed maps. Logic demanded that there should be at least one way station on the link between the Military and the Great West. He could just about visualise a straight line marked in blue, drawn with a ruler by a clerk who’d never been outside the city but who believed unshakably in the straightness of military roads; his handwriting, the rather affected cursive government minuscule – looks crystal clear from a distance, but up close you have to look really close to read it – Boa Cyruos or Bos Cypua, something like that? Not that the name mattered a damn, except that if it had a name on a map, it had to be there. It’d be on lists and schedules, and Supply would send it shipments of food, tools, footwear, forage, stationery, horseshoes and copies of Imperial decrees; if the driver got there and found nothing but heather and bog cotton, he’d report it when he got back and they’d inform the Survey, and the Survey would send someone out to look— You had to believe in the way stations, because the alternative was mental and spiritual anarchy.
    Faith is traditionally tested in the wilderness; according to the best philosophers, it’s what the wilderness is for. (It was at times like this that Oida reverted to thinking in essay titles; In a Created universe, account for the existence of deserts; 25 marks. Instinctively he began to marshal his arguments, then remembered he wasn’t nineteen any more.) It was hard to believe in way stations, or anything human. There was the road, of course, but it was so perfectly straight, so unyieldingly regular, that it seemed improbable that fallible mortals had had anything much to do with it – the gods built it, presumably, or the giants, on one of their better days. For a giant, twenty-five yards in one stride, the road would be useful, manageable. Just too damn big for humans. Imagine ants trying to use the cities of Men.
    The driver had gone quiet, which wasn’t a good sign. He was probably one of those people who need time for things to sink in. Jollying him along wasn’t working, and