by K. J. Parker
After the lighting ceremony, which turned out to be almost exactly the way Poldarn had imagined it would be, the small crowd of charcoal burners (‘only be sure to call them colliers,’ Basano told him in a loud whisper, ‘it’s very important to get it right’) quickly thinned out and drifted away, leaving Poldarn and Basano alone in front of the newly lit dome, which was gushing out fat plumes of white smoke from top and sides. The colliers mostly lived in tiny low hutches the size of an army tent, built of slabs of turf laid on rickety frames of green sticks. As burn-master, however, Basano enjoyed the privilege of sleeping in the watchman’s lodge, which proved to be a slightly bigger version of the same thing. Once Poldarn had got used to the thin light of the single oil lamp, and the rather unnerving sight of wriggling worms poking out through the ceiling, he found it wasn’t too bad, if you didn’t mind damp and smoke.
‘Hungry?’ Basano asked; and before Poldarn could answer, he’d pulled the lid off a large stone crock and fished out an elderly loaf and a slab of pale, glazed-looking cheese. ‘There’s beer in the jug,’ he added, pointing at what Poldarn had taken to be the jerry. The taste of its contents didn’t do much to persuade him that he hadn’t been right all along. ‘We’re a bit rough and ready,’ Basano added, as Poldarn’s teeth grated on the crust of the cheese, ‘but we do all right for ourselves.’
‘So I see,’ Poldarn said, spitting out a small piece of grit, or tooth enamel. ‘How’s business?’
‘Bloody wonderful,’ Basano replied. ‘Can’t make enough of the stuff. They’re desperate for it in the towns, like it’s gold dust or something.’
‘That’s good,’ Poldarn said. ‘But you reckon you can guarantee us a regular supply?’
‘Oh, that won’t be a problem,’ Basano said decisively. ‘You just tell me how much you people need, and we’ll see you get it.’
‘Fine,’ Poldarn said. Something dropped from the turf roof onto his head and squirmed. ‘And there won’t be any difficulty about the grade? The sort of work we’re doing, we have to be sure the fuel’s consistent to get exactly the right temperature. If it burns too hot or too cool, it can screw a job up completely. You get cracked moulds, cold shuts, air bubbles—’
Basano shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick your supplies out myself. First-grade lump, from the top centre of the stack, where it gets raked off first. That way there’s no danger of it getting overcooked, or coming up brown in the middle. You can bet your life on that.’
Poldarn wasn’t sure he was prepared to go that far; but Basano seemed confident enough, and in spite of the old man’s intensive coaching Poldarn didn’t know enough about the trade to contradict him. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘that ought to suit us just fine.’
Basano nodded and poured out more beer; and that, apparently, was all there was to it. So simple; a pity, Poldarn couldn’t help thinking, it couldn’t all have been settled back at the Virtue Triumphant, where the beds were dry and you couldn’t stand a spoon upright in the beer. On the other hand, if he’d done the deal in Scieza, he’d have missed a two-day trudge through the woods and all that fascinating stuff about mote-pegs and flipes. He drank some of the beer. It tasted disgusting. He drank a little more, nevertheless.
‘Nice drop of beer, though I say it myself,’ Basano said. ‘It’s a traditional colliers’ recipe,’ he added, with more than a hint of pride. ‘Bracken instead of hops, gives it that sort of nutty tang.’
For a moment, Poldarn hoped he was kidding. ‘Distinctive,’ he said. ‘So, you do your own brewing here?’
‘And baking,’ Basano replied. (Well, that accounted for the bread.) ‘Not that we can’t afford stuff from town; like I told you, business is damn good. But it helps pass the time, you know?’
‘I’m sure,’ Poldarn replied.
Basano drained his cup and poured out some more. ‘Essential supplies,’ he said. ‘Dry work, see, and then there’s all the sitting around. Got to stay close to the fire all the time, see, keep an eye on it in case the wind changes. A good burn’ll take you, what, sixteen, seventeen days till the core’s cooled down and you can rake out. Doesn’t seem nearly so long if you’ve got a drop to drink.’
Poldarn smiled thinly. ‘I’ll bet,’ he said.
‘Mind you.’ Basano pulled a face, then blew his nose loudly into the palm of his hand. ‘There’s some up north as prefers cider. Well, they burn a lot of fruitwood, and apple’s as good as any,’ he added, with the air of someone making a flimsy excuse for an unspeakable perversion. ‘You like cider?’
‘No.’
‘Nor me.’ Basano belched suddenly. ‘Gives me wind, cider. Want some more cheese?’
‘No, thanks. I’m fine.’
‘Have some more beer.’
‘Thanks.’
Basano passed the jug, and Poldarn filled his cup. It was still horrible, but there were worse things in life than the taste of dead yeast and stale eggs. ‘So,’ Basano went on, ‘you been in the foundry business long?’
Poldarn thought for a moment. Absolutely no reason why he should share his life story with a stranger; lots of excellent reasons why he shouldn’t. Nevertheless. ‘Just over two years,’ he said. ‘Really?’ Basano squinted at him, as if the hut was full of smoke. ‘No offence, but you’re a bit old to go taking up a new trade.’
‘Long story.’
Basano grinned. ‘Best kind, hanging round a charcoal camp.’
‘I guess so,’ Poldarn said.
Short pause. ‘So,’ Basano said, ‘you from round here?’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘You aren’t sure?’
‘That’s right.’ Poldarn could feel cramp coming on in his left leg. He tried to stretch out, but there wasn’t room. ‘Truth is,’ he said, ‘I don’t really know much about myself.’
Basano looked at him.
‘Really,’ Poldarn felt compelled to add. ‘Actually, the first thing I can remember, apart from a few little scrappy bits, is waking up lying in the mud beside a river; and that was just under four years ago.’
‘Get away.’
‘Honestly.’ Poldarn swallowed a yawn, and went on: ‘I guess I must’ve had – well, an accident or something, because I woke up and suddenly I realised I couldn’t remember anything. Not my name, or where I was from, or what I did for a living, whether I had any family, nothing at all.’
‘Fuck,’ Basano said, with feeling. ‘So how long did that last?’
Poldarn smiled weakly. ‘It’s still lasting,’ he said, tilting the jug over his cup and handing it back. ‘To start with, I kept expecting it all to come back to me, but it didn’t, or at least it hasn’t yet. Anyhow, while I still thought there’d be a chance of remembering, or running into somebody who could tell me who I was, I just sort of wandered about, not settling to anything – well, where’d be the point, if at any moment I’d be going home? But time went on, and nothing came back to me, so I thought, screw this, I’d better get on and make a new life for myself.’
‘So you joined up at the foundry?’
Poldarn hesitated. There’d been a lot more to it than that, of course, but he was damned if he was going to tell anybody about it, even if the beer was starting to taste almost palatable. ‘That’s right,’ he said.
Basano’s face crumpled into a thoughtful scowl. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but surely there’s some thing you’ve been able to figure out. Like, your accent, the way you talk. That ought to place you pretty well. I mean, round here they can tell which village you were born in just from the way you fart.’
‘Not in my case,’ Poldarn said. ‘At least, nobody I’ve met so far’s recognised my accent and said, “Ah, you’re from such and such a place.” Actually, I don’t even know how many languages I can speak. It’s half a dozen at least, maybe more.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Basano said, clearly impressed.
Poldarn shook his head. The hut wobbled a little. ‘Oh, it’s not like it’s anything clever,’ he
said. ‘Don’t even know I’m doing it half the time. Sometimes I’ll be talking to someone and they’ll start looking at me all funny, and it’s because I’ve suddenly switched to a different language without realising it. I just hear my own voice in my head, you see.’
‘Oh. And what about when other people talk to you?’
‘Same thing. I just hear what they’re saying, not the words they use. I think—’ He checked himself. He’d been about to say that it could be something to do with his people back home on the islands in the western sea being natural telepaths; but if he said that, Basano would only stare at him even more fiercely, since nobody in the Empire knew that the western islands existed, let alone that their inhabitants were the merciless, invincible raiders who’d burned so many cities and done so much damage over the years. Saying something that’d identify him with them probably wasn’t a good idea. ‘I think I must be from the capital or something, where there’s people from all over the Empire. You’d probably pick up several languages if you lived somewhere like that, maybe even get so used to switching from one to the other without thinking that you wouldn’t notice.’
‘Or maybe you were in the army,’ Basano said. ‘Been posted all over the place, learned a bit of this and that every place you’ve spent time in. I knew a man once, he’d been in the services, and he could do that. Knew twenty-six different words for beer.’
‘Useful,’ Poldarn said with a grin, whereupon Basano passed the jug. Nothing would ever make him like the stuff, of course, but he was feeling rather dry, he couldn’t help noticing. The heat, or something to do with the hut being built of turf. Something like that, anyhow.
‘Still,’ Basano was saying, ‘must be bloody odd. I mean, the thought that once you had a completely different life, and any minute it could all come back, like a roof falling in. I mean, any second now, maybe you’re going to turn to me and say, “Bloody hell, I just remembered, I used to be a rich merchant,” or “My dad used to run the biggest brewery in Tulice.”’ He shook his head. ‘That’d get to me, the thought that I could be, you know, really stinking rich or a nobleman or something, and yet here you are wasting your life pounding sand in the foundry. All that money just waiting for you to come back home and spend it. Or women, maybe. Or you could be the son and heir of a district magistrate, even.’
Poldarn looked away. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Or maybe I was something really horrible, like a day labourer in a tannery. Or an escaped convict, maybe, or like you said, I was in the army and I deserted. That’s why I stopped trying to find out, actually, for fear that I wouldn’t like what I discovered. Think about it: what if I turned out to be somebody really evil and disgusting, someone that everybody hates?’
Basano thought for a moment. ‘Well, if everybody hated you, surely you’d have been recognised before now. And if you were on the run from the gallows or the stone-yards, they’d have been looking for you and someone would’ve caught you. And if you were like a dangerous nutcase or whatever, sooner or later you’d murder someone or set fire to a temple or whatever it might be, and then you’d know that way. And if you found out you’d only ever been a milkman, or the bloke who cleans the blood off the slaughterhouse floor, well, that’d be all right, you wouldn’t have to go back to your rotten old life if you didn’t want to, and that way at least you’d know—’
Poldarn pulled a face. Partly it was the foul taste of the beer. ‘There’s other bad things it could be,’ he said. ‘Like, suppose I was married and there was trouble at home, something like that. My theory is, you see, that deep down I don’t want to remember, which is why my memory hasn’t come back long since. I reckon you’d have to be stupid to take a risk like that.’
Basano pursed his lips. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘It’d depend on how good life was where I am now. I mean, do you really, really like working in the foundry?’
Poldarn shrugged. ‘It’s all right, I suppose.’
‘You’re settled in just the way you like it? Got yourself a really tasty bird, nice house, all that stuff?’
‘Well, no.’ Poldarn frowned. ‘But that sort of thing comes with time. I mean, you find somewhere you want to be and settle down, and happiness just sort of grows on you, like moss on rocks.’
Basano nodded. ‘And you don’t think any happiness had grown on you before you had your accident and forgot it all? I mean, a man of your age, you’d expect to be settled and doing well. So maybe you were.’
‘Like you are, you mean?’
‘Oh, I’m not doing so bad,’ Basano answered, wriggling sideways as a handful of dirt dropped from the roof onto his head. ‘I told you, we’re doing a hell of a trade, I’m putting a lot of good money by. Another ten years or so, I’ll be able to retire, buy a place, spend the rest of my life playing at being a gentleman.’ He grinned. ‘I got it all worked out, don’t you worry. See, I know where I’m from, so I can make up my mind where it is I want to go. You don’t, so you can’t. See what I’m getting at?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Well, there you go.’ Basano suddenly froze, and said, ‘Shit.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Beer jug’s empty. Excuse me, I have to go to the outhouse and fill it up again.’
That, Poldarn felt, was open to misinterpretation; but when Basano came back and refilled both their cups, the beer tasted no worse than before. ‘I was thinking,’ Basano said.
‘Hm?’
‘About what you were saying. You not wanting to know, in case you turned out to be the nastiest man in the world. Well, you can set your mind at rest there.’
‘Can I? Oh, good.’
‘Sure.’ Basano grabbed two handfuls of wood and threw them on the fire. ‘It’s like this. You go anywhere, ask anybody you like who’s the nastiest man in the world, they’ll all give you the same answer. Well,’ he added, after a pause for thought, ‘maybe not, because we’ve just had the taxes round here, so a lot of folks would say the Emperor. Bastard,’ he added, with feeling.
‘He’s not popular?’
‘You can say that again.’
Poldarn nodded. ‘I don’t even know who the Emperor is,’ he confessed.
‘Really? Well, we had a change recently, just over a year ago. The old Emperor died. Throat cut. Terrible business, even if he was a complete arsehole.’
‘I’m sure. So who’s Emperor now?’
Basano yawned. ‘A man called Tazencius,’ he replied. ‘Cousin or second cousin of the last bloke.’
‘And he cut the last man’s throat, did he?’
Basano shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘In fact, he was hundreds of miles away when it happened. Oh, he was in on the plot all right, he just wasn’t around for the actual killing. Anyhow, everybody was mighty pleased when the old bastard got cut up, but by all accounts, this Tazencius is even worse. Well, that goes without saying: taxes up by a fifth. And what’s worse, they actually collect them, even out here.’
‘That’s unusual, is it?’
‘Too right. First tax collector some of the younger blokes had ever seen, caused quite a stir. Anyhow, we cracked him over the head and stuck his body in number three, and reckoned that ought to be the end of it.’
‘And was it?’
‘No way.’ Basano pulled a wry face. ‘Couple of months later, a whole army shows up. Well, several dozen, anyhow, all in armour and stuff, asking had we seen this man, because he’d gone missing, and he’d been headed out our way. So we said, no, we’d never set eyes on anybody like that; and of course they couldn’t prove anything. But they made us hand over the money. Two thousand gross-quarters. Worse than robbery, if you ask me, because with robbers at least you can fight back. But if you scrag two dozen soldiers, all that happens is that next time they send two hundred, and then you’re screwed.’
Poldarn dipped his head by way of acknowledgement. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m definitely not the Emperor Tazencius,’ he said. No earthly point in mentioning that he had good reason to believe that
Tazencius, assuming they were talking about the same man, had at one stage been his father-in-law. ‘How about the second nastiest?’
Basano grinned. ‘If you ask me, Tazencius is a pussycat compared to five or six other people. No, if you’d asked the question any time when we hadn’t just had the taxes, what everybody’d have said was Feron Amathy. General Feron Amathy, he is now, or probably Marshal or Protector, because it’s practically a known fact that it was him as had the old Emperor killed. Pretty much running things, especially since he married Tazencius’s daughter. Makes him next in line to the throne, see, if anything happens to Tazencius. Which it will,’ Basano added, ‘or I’m an earwig.’
Poldarn dipped his head again. ‘So that’s two nasty men I’m definitely not,’ he said.
‘Three,’ Basano said, pouring beer and getting a respectable proportion of it into the cup. ‘Third nastiest by anybody’s reckoning is this priest bastard, the one who’s running around with all the sword-monks and that sort.’
‘Sword-monks,’ Poldarn repeated. ‘Weren’t they all killed by the raiders?’
‘Most of them,’ Basano confirmed. ‘But not nearly enough. Actually, that made things a whole lot worse; because before the raiders burned down the monks’ castle, place called Deymeson, the monks mostly stayed home and didn’t bother anybody, apart from princes and rich merchants and the like. But now they’ve got no home, so they’re just sort of wandering about the place, stealing and killing anything that moves. And a lot of other scumbags have joined up with them. Supposed to be all about religion – the end of the world is nigh and all that shit – but if you ask me it’s just an excuse for riding round the home provinces in this huge caravan of carts and slaughtering people. Anyhow, their boss is some ex-monk who goes by the name of Monach – which is just some foreign word for “monk”, so nobody knows what his real name is. Could care less; he’s just some evil shit who likes killing people. Wouldn’t be you, though, since he only started off doing it a couple of years ago, and only last month he was in Iapetta.’
‘I see,’ Poldarn said. ‘Well, that’s a great comfort, I must say.’
