Memory

by K. J. Parker

  After a while, he stopped, leaning forward, hands on knees, catching his breath and listening. Nothing to suggest he’d been followed (and why should they go haring off into the trees when they were already outnumbered?) He’d got away, free and clear. No harm done.

  Even so.

  Even so, it hadn’t been the right thing to do. Chiruwa and the rest were criminal idiots, but unfortunately he was on their side. The coach guards had looked as though they’d make short work of the foundrymen, assuming they hadn’t done so already. But there could be survivors – or prisoners, which was worse still. With a sigh Poldarn turned round and headed back toward the road.

  It hadn’t gone well, for his side at least. As he approached the edge of the wood, he could see two of them quite clearly. One was lying on his face, his arms under him, both feet pointing to the left. The other one lay on his back, and he’d been cut almost in two. One of the guards was sitting with his back against a tree, unarmed and helmetless; the dark pool surrounding him implied that he’d bled to death. There didn’t seem to be anybody else about.

  Shouldn’t have come back, Poldarn decided; there was nothing he could do for the two dead foundrymen and his sense of duty stopped short of searching for the others with an unspecified number of enemies close at hand. Everything had changed, of course. The highway-robbery project was over now, for good. Assuming he managed to get clear of the scene, he had grave reservations about going back to the foundry when it started up again after the lay-off, since some of the others might have made it back, and he’d been the first to run. The colliers’ camp was probably out, too. In spite of everything he couldn’t help grinning; here he was again, alone except for dead bodies at the scene of a fight he’d missed out on. The pattern emerging, as the tallow burns out, leaving a gap – but this time he had a memory of sorts; and this time, no options at all that he could think of.

  ‘You,’ someone yelled behind him. ‘Turn and fight, you thieving bastard.’

  Not the sort of voice he’d have expected: high, slightly shrill, a deep-voiced woman or a boy. No point speculating in ignorance; he turned round and saw a boy, maybe fourteen years old and tall for his age. He was wearing a mail shirt – fine quality, junior size, what the well-dressed nobleman’s son was wearing to the wars these days – and a gilded helmet with enamel and niello decoration, all in excellent taste. And he was holding a sword – short-bladed, regulation length for concealed carry for a sword-monk, just the right size for a kid’s two-hander. The boy was standing in a second-position upper-back guard straight out of the coaching manual, and scowling at him horribly.

  Poldarn relaxed. ‘Piss off,’ he said.

  The boy seemed shocked by the bad language, but not deterred from his grim purpose. ‘I said stand and fight,’ he piped, ‘or I’ll cut you down like a dog.’

  It was the first good laugh Poldarn had had in a while, and he indulged himself. That didn’t please the boy at all. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I warned you’. He took a big stride forward, sweeping the sword up and round his head in the approved circular movement.

  It was at this point that Poldarn thought about something Gain Aciava had said; about being young sword-monks, and training at fencing since they were kids. The boy, he suddenly realised, seemed to know exactly what he was doing; and there Poldarn was, a nice large target for cutting practice, armed with nothing but a hatchet.

  He jumped sideways in time, but only just; the sword blade sliced the air where he’d been just a moment ago, and if he’d still been there, it would have severed his leg artery. I wonder, Poldarn thought, as he danced out of the way of another pretty respectable cut, I wonder if I was this good when I was his age? No, because I was still at Haldersness. Aciava, maybe? Assuming he was telling the truth—

  An inch-and-degree-perfect sixth-grade rising cut next, and Poldarn made a mess of the avoid. There was just time to block it with the handle of the axe (but clumsy and shameful; the block is the last resort, the admission of failure) and take a standing jump backwards without time to see what he was likely to be landing on. Unfortunate, since he pitched on a large chunk of flint, jarring his ankle and losing his balance; the boy was at him with a good clean middle cut and he had to block again, this time with the poll of the hatchet. He could feel the sword’s edge cut the soft iron of the poll, and recognised that he’d been lucky not to have the axe knocked out of his hand.

  Bastard, he thought. Go pick on someone your own size.

  He could see the boy earnestly concentrating, as if the youngster was playing a difficult new flute piece for his proud mother and father. As Poldarn stumbled backwards, feeling his crocked ankle unreliable under his weight, he tried to remember; if he’d been a sword-monk he must have taken the same classes, learned the same drills, memorised the same precepts of religion, which set down in firm, definitive terms the infallible techniques for dealing with such a situation without killing or being killed. Defence is no defence; strength is weakness; resistance is surrender. He could almost hear the words, though where they were coming from was another matter entirely. Thought is confusion; the winning fight is no fight; wisdom is an empty mind. Wonderful stuff, but what the hell did it all mean?

  The boy swung at him again, and Poldarn could see two circles in the air, his own and the boy’s, about to collide. He scrambled backwards but his ankle gave way; as he slumped to the ground he instinctively put out his right hand to steady himself, and as his wrist took his weight he felt something give in his forearm, just above the elbow. At some point he must have shifted the axe into his left hand, because there it was; and there was a fine killing shot, a peck to the right temple, avoiding the space that the sword blade would be occupying, blocking the boy’s right arm with his left elbow, he could see it as plain as a sketch in the manual of arms; but he couldn’t do that, kill a thirteen-year-old kid just because of his own clumsiness in ricking his ankle on a stone. There had to be a non-lethal defence, he knew there was one but he couldn’t, at that precise moment, recall what it was. I wish, he thought, I wish I had my memory back—

  The boy cut him. For a thin sliver of time Poldarn panicked, but the moment didn’t last. It was just a nick, the very tip of the blade tracing the skin over his cheekbone, a trivial scratch. Another hop-and-skip backwards, disentangling the circles; step back into safety, keep away, keep the danger out of his circle – and he could hear that same voice in his mind: safety is danger, danger is safety; if he can reach you, you can reach him. Let live and die; kill and live. Precepts of religion. There was an empty space in his mind, where the tallow had been melted out, but its shape defined all the other shapes around him, just as the past shapes the present and the present shapes the future.

  The past shapes the future; action is self-betrayal. Poldarn stepped back once more, feeling the slimy mud of the stream under his heel, and at that moment he saw the boy shuffle forwards and sideways, toe leading, heel dragging; and at the same moment that he saw the lad lift his arms, he saw the cut as well, as though it had already happened; he saw the answer to the question at the same moment as the question itself, as if he’d broken into Father Tutor’s study and peeked at the next day’s test paper. The answer was one step forward, right into the middle of the opposing circle – safe as safe could be, because he could see the boy’s sword coming down even as he was lifting it, and all he needed to do was edge out of its way, and—

  In religion there is no in between; only the sword before and the sword after.

  Poldarn hadn’t known the answer, because the question and the answer were simultaneous; he made the move before he knew what it was, because in religion there is no moment in between knowledge and action. As the axe blade, sliding through the gap in the boy’s guard, sliced through the youth’s jugular vein on the push-stroke, the answer became apparent. Strength is weakness – Poldarn hadn’t fought back, because he was older and stronger than the boy. Let live and die; kill and live.

  It was a messy answer. Poldarn fe
lt the heat of the blood as it splashed across his face like a duellist’s glove. The light went out in the boy’s eyes, and he stopped, like a mistake abruptly corrected; then he dropped straight down into the mud beside the stream, an untidy pile of joined-together limbs.

  Shit, Poldarn thought. Made a right hash of that.

  Not the first time, either.

  He stepped back, felt his ankle fade and give way, and ended up sprawled on his backside, spine painfully jarred, a mess. Not the first time; I’ve done this before. Years ago, I killed a kid the same age as this one, in the same way exactly. That’s how I knew what he was about to do before he did it; because I was remembering the last time. Precisely the same: the absolute precision of the drill hall (a floor divided into a grid by scored lines deeply engraved in the slate flagstones, each square and each junction lettered and numbered; Father Tutor calling out coordinates and the designation of each stance, ward, cut, move, his eyes shut, the whole duel worked out beforehand for both sides, so that in effect it had already happened before it began—)

  (Suppose there’s no such thing as learning, or intuition, or skill, or thought. Suppose instead that it’s all just memory; suppose that every cut and counter-cut and parry and block is just recollection of the same fight fought out a lifetime ago. Suppose the draw is religion, the sword before and the sword after, because when the hand closes around the hilt, the sword has already been drawn and swung, and the skin cut open. Suppose that nothing is learned – languages, names, skills, facts – only remembered from the last time round, which was nothing more than a memory of the time before that, the same sequence of moves repeated over and over at the instructor’s word of command until they’re perfect, and that’s religion.)

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Chiruwa’s voice came from directly behind him. ‘What did you want to go and do that for?’

  Poldarn stood up, pulled his heel out of the squelching mud, and wobbled as though he was drunk.

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said. ‘He nearly killed me.’

  ‘Nearly killed you? For God’s sake, he’s just a kid. We’re going to be in so much shit—’

  ‘He nearly killed me,’ Poldarn repeated. ‘Stupid bloody rich bastard, he’d been trained, knew all the moves, straight out of the book. And I did my ankle.’

  ‘You did your ankle? So bloody what? You’re a grown-up.’

  Poldarn shook his head. He couldn’t care less what Chiruwa thought, anyway. ‘Sword-monk training,’ he said. ‘You have heard of the sword-monks, haven’t you? If it’d been you instead of me, he’d have paunched you like a rabbit.’

  ‘Listen.’ Chiruwa was shouting, the clown. ‘You don’t go killing bloody kids. Not noblemen’s sons, anyhow. They’ll send soldiers and start burning down villages till they find out who did it. You know how bad this is? We’re dead already, that’s how bad. Well, don’t just stand there, let’s get out of here—’

  ‘Just a moment,’ Poldarn said. ‘The others. Where’d they get to?’

  Chiruwa didn’t answer; he just shook his head. For a moment Poldarn didn’t understand; then he said, ‘What, all of them?’

  ‘Except you and me. You ran, you bastard.’ Chiruwa suddenly remembered. ‘You fucked off and left us, and now they’re all dead except you and me.’

  Poldarn shrugged. ‘I came back, though, didn’t I? So what about the soldiers? Where’d they go?’

  ‘Same place as the lads. Fucking hell, this is a shambles. Doing the soldiers was bad enough – you wait till they find out we killed a nobleman’s kid. Trust me, you’ll wish you’d let the little shit kill you.’

  ‘Maybe I do already,’ Poldarn replied. ‘But that won’t change anything. Do you have any idea who this lot are?’

  Chiruwa shook his head. ‘Don’t want to know, either. The less we know, the less chance there is of giving something away. Not that it matters worth shit; they’ll figure out it was us and then they’ll hunt us down and kill us slowly. You ever see a man vivisected to death?’

  All this negativity was starting to get on Poldarn’s nerves. ‘Be quiet,’ he said, ‘and let me think. Now then; if it wasn’t us, who was it?’

  ‘But it was us. It was you, you bloodthirsty northern bastard.’

  Poldarn managed a smile. ‘No, it wasn’t,’ he said. ‘We were never here. But of course they won’t believe that, so it’d better have been someone else. Do you understand that?’

  Chiruwa nodded sullenly.

  ‘Fine. So who’d do a thing like this? Massacre a whole half-platoon of soldiers, and a dozen harmless foundrymen who just happened to blunder across them at the wrong moment? Suggestions?’

  ‘Well.’ Chiruwa was frowning. ‘It’d have to be someone really sick and vicious. Feron Amathy?’

  Poldarn grinned. ‘What about the raiders?’ he said. ‘Think about it. For all we know, Feron Amathy spent all day today playing pegball with the Emperor – we can’t pin it on him unless we know for sure he could’ve done it. No,’ he went on, ‘we’ll make it the raiders. Everybody knows, they appear out of nowhere and just vanish when they’ve done. And it’s completely their style, killing without reason.’

  ‘Right. So you’re an expert on the raiders now, are you?’

  Poldarn shook his head. ‘I never could understand them, not one little bit. Fortunately, neither does anybody else. All right, how about this? We got separated from our mates here, and when we caught up to them, this is what we found. Dead bodies everywhere, including the kid.’ He frowned, then glanced round. ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘What does your average raider look like?’

  Chiruwa stared at him. ‘God knows. Nobody’s ever seen one and lived, remember?’

  Not entirely true; but that was what people believed, so close enough. ‘Precisely,’ Poldarn said. ‘Now, who around here don’t we care about?’

  After a short interlude of indecision, Poldarn chose a dead foundryman by the name of Dancuta, mostly because he’d never liked him much. He dragged the body across to the coach and found the cause of death: a simple stab wound, entering under the left armpit, straight to the heart. Fine. Chiruwa held the body still, propped up against the coach wheel, while Poldarn took careful aim and, using the dead kid’s very fine and fancy sword, slashed down the dead man’s face, slicing off the nose and cutting away the lips and the point of the chin. Nice job, no denying it; the mutilation could easily have been the result of a wild or lucky cut, and those parts of Dancuta’s face that had made it possible to tell him apart from a million other tall, fat men were lying in the leaf mould. Next step was to strip off his coat, which was too obviously a cheapie from Falcata market, and his boots. (Ex-army; old, but well looked after. Luckily, they were just Poldarn’s size.) The last and most important touch was the best part of all – because Chiruwa was wrong: some things were known about the raiders in the Empire. Shortly before Poldarn had left and gone across the sea to the islands where the raiders lived, the late General Cronan had inflicted on them the only defeat they’d ever suffered. It went without saying that government officers had been over the dead bodies left behind after the disaster, searching them diligently for any sort of clue that might cast light on the mystery of who they were and where they came from; and it was virtually certain, Poldarn was sure, that at least half of those dead bodies would’ve been wearing the distinctive thick-soled ankle-length horsehide boots that the raiders brought from home, though Imperial footwear was better, no doubt about it – so much better, in fact, that Poldarn had often thought about getting himself a pair of decent Tulice shoes to replace the boots he’d made for himself at Polden’s Forge, back in the old country, and worn ever since.

  Trading shoes with a dead man wasn’t easy, and it took Poldarn an age to get his old boots onto Dancuta’s feet. He managed it in the end, however, and dumped the body face down in the stream. He wiped his hands on a clump of grass before standing up.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’ Chiruwa said.

  ‘Nee
ded a new pair of shoes,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Waste not, want not, after all. Right, that’s that. Time to go.’

  Chiruwa was delighted to leave, and they walked quickly in silence until they were deep in the wood, well clear of the road. On the way, Poldarn checked the details in his mind. Because of the kid, it wouldn’t be just the local garrison commander investigating. They’d send to the fort at Falcata, or maybe even to Tarwar, and the colonel would send his own men to figure out what had happened; they’d be smart enough and well enough informed to notice that one tiny elusive clue – raider boots on one of the dead men– and they’d report back with smug grins on their faces, having been clever enough to solve the mystery. The raiders would be blamed; and, since they were effectively an act of the gods, the whole affair would in real terms be nobody’s fault, which meant it could be dropped and forgotten about. And not only that; Poldarn was better off by a pair of good-quality army boots, on which he could walk back to Dui Chirra as soon as the foundry started up again. No real harm done, and nearly everybody off the hook and happy—

  (A dead body with no face, no identity, lying in the mud beside a shallow stream, surrounded by dead bodies. No face, no identity, all the memory leached out of it, except for a pair of horse-hide boots representing an elaborate deception. Had Aciava been lying too, or had he been telling the truth?)

  —And behind them, two fat, scraggy old crows, floating down through the trees. A better class of scavenger, more efficient; not concerned with boots, only the very essence of the waste they feed on.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Chiruwa said. ‘I’m telling you, if we’d known there were raiders on the loose in the woods, we’d have been out of there so fast—’

  The foundrymen nodded sympathetically. The story had grown a little each time it had been told, like a tree growing in rings. At the centre, the original lie, and radiating out from it the layers of embellishment. Pretty soon, Chiruwa would start believing it himself.