by K. J. Parker
‘Quiet,’ the man said, and he definitely wasn’t Eyvind. Who he was Poldarn had no idea, but he looked vaguely military – boots, long tatty coat over a mail shirt. ‘Don’t try shouting for your mates or I’ll skewer you.’
They’re no friends of mine, I haven’t got any friends . . . He nodded instead. Above the canopy of leaves and branches he could see the pale blue of dawn. Whoever this man was, he wasn’t alone, and the people with him were about to kill the sergeant and the rest of Poldarn’s escort. He wished that didn’t have to happen, but presumably it was necessary – for all he knew, the man with the spear and his colleagues might be the good guys. He wanted to ask if Copis had really been there, but he decided not to.
After what seemed like a very long time, the snap of a twig told him that someone was coming, someone who didn’t care if the man with the spear heard him. ‘All right?’ the man called out without taking his eyes off Poldarn’s face.
‘Job done,’ someone replied, sounding weary.
‘Get them all?’ the spearman asked.
‘Think so.’
The spearman frowned. ‘Did you or didn’t you? How many?’
‘Fourteen.’
(Poldarn tried to remember how many there’d been in the party, but he’d never counted them. It wasn’t something you did when you met new people, count them so you’d know later if they’d all been killed.)
But the spearman seemed relieved. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You, on your feet. Easy,’ he added, quite unnecessarily; Poldarn knew the drill by this stage without having to be told.
His legs felt weak and cramped, and his head (he noticed) was hurting a lot. Men had appeared out of the darkness, scaring the crows away. They were also wearing greatcoats over mail shirts; but they were altogether too scruffy to be regular army, not like the neatly modular units that had made up Brigadier Muno’s command at Dui Chirra. So: not government soldiers, definitely not raiders. Of the armed forces he knew to be operating in these parts, that meant they were either the Mad Monk’s outfit, or the Amathy house.
Someone he couldn’t see grabbed his hands, pulled them behind his back and tied them tightly with rope. A shove in the small of his back suggested that he should start walking; at the same time, the spearman turned his back and moved on ahead, leading the way. Absolutely no point whatsoever asking where they were taking him.
At some point, someone in front of him started to sing – quietly, badly, maybe without even realising that he was doing it. He sang:
Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree
Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree
Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree
Along comes the Dodger, and he makes it three.
When they stopped walking, the sun was directly overhead, call it seven hours at a fairly slow march, so something the order of fifteen miles (but since he had no idea where he’d started from and hadn’t recognised any of the places they’d been, meaningless). A hand on his shoulder pushed him down on his knees; the rest of the party sat down. Some of them took off their boots and shook out grit and small stones, or gulped water from canteens (didn’t offer him any; hadn’t expected them to). It was dry underfoot, soft leaf mould. They’d been following a shallow path, wider than a deer track, narrower than a cart road and not rutted up by the passage of wheels or horses. Someone seemed to know where they were supposed to be going. This time, he made a point of counting them: twenty-eight.
He was probably going to get thumped for asking, but it was worth a try. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to nobody in particular, ‘but who are you?’
Silence, lasting long enough that he was on the point of repeating the question. Then someone said, ‘Fuck me, it’s true.’
The man who’d spoken shifted round to face him. ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You don’t know who we are. Do you?’
‘No,’ Poldarn said.
‘Amazing.’ The man grinned. ‘He doesn’t know.’
‘I lost my memory, a year or so back,’ Poldarn ventured. ‘A few bits and pieces have come back since then, but I’m afraid I don’t remember any of you.’ He tried for an educated guess. ‘Are you the Amathy house?’
Someone thought that was highly amusing. ‘Wouldn’t have credited it,’ someone said. ‘I mean, you hear about stuff like that, people get a bash on the head and they can’t remember their own names, but – well, it’s a bit bloody far-fetched.’
‘Unless it’s just an act,’ someone else said.
‘On your feet,’ the spearman announced abruptly, and they all stood up. Poldarn did the same, and nobody seemed to mind. The spearman led the way, as before. It was nearly dark by the time they stopped again.
At least they had food with them: small round barley cakes, stale and hard as crab shells, and cheese you could’ve used to wedge axe heads. As an afterthought, when they’d all eaten something and complained about how revolting it was, someone got up and brought Poldarn two of the cakes – no cheese, Poldarn rationalised, because if it was as hard as they said it was, he might’ve used the edge to saw through his ropes. The man laid the two cakes on a flat stone a couple of feet away from where Poldarn was sitting, then used another stone to smash them into fragments. Then he went back to his place. After sitting for a while staring at the bits of cake shrapnel, Poldarn shuffled forward, leaned down from the waist and gobbled up a mouthful like a dog feeding from a bowl. His escort found this performance mildly entertaining, which was more than could be said for the cakes.
‘Better give him something to drink as well,’ he heard someone say, as he bent down for another mouthful. ‘Don’t want him croaking on us, when all’s said and done.’
So someone brought him a canteen and allowed him four swallows of warm, muddy-tasting water. Poldarn said thank you very politely; the man didn’t seem to hear.
They were talking quietly among themselves now, keeping their voices down, and Poldarn could only make out a few unenlightening words, though at least one of them mentioned Falcata, Dui Chirra and Brigadier Muno. Then someone said something that the rest appeared to find extremely funny, and one of them got up and sat down next to Poldarn, six inches or so outside his circle.
‘Straight up,’ he said. ‘Is that right, you really can’t remember back past a year or so?’
‘Yes,’ Poldarn replied.
The man turned to smile over his shoulder at his mates; he was medium height, unusually broad across the shoulders, with a grey stubble of hair sprouting on his shaved head. He had burn scars on his left cheek, old and probably as close to being healed as they were ever going to get. ‘So,’ he went on, ‘you’re telling me you don’t know who I am, either.’
Poldarn looked at him. ‘We’ve met before?’
Everyone, the burned man included, burst out laughing. Poldarn waited for them to stop, then said: ‘I guess that means you know me.’
‘You could say that,’ the burned man answered, grinning.
‘Don’t suppose you’d care to—’
‘No.’
Well, he’d expected as much; he’d already got the impression that they didn’t seem very well disposed towards him. ‘Do you know a man called Gain Aciava?’ he asked.
This time the burned man looked blank. He shook his head.
‘Xipho Dorunoxy? Copis?’
‘Doesn’t ring any bells. All right, my turn,’ the burned man said. ‘How about Dorf Bofor? Recognise the name? Sergeant Dorf Bofor?’
Poldarn shook his head slowly. ‘Doesn’t mean anything to me, I’m afraid. Sorry, is that your name?’
This time, everyone laughed except the burned man, who looked as if he was about to kick Poldarn in the face. ‘No, it bloody well isn’t,’ he replied. ‘But I got this here’– and he pointed to the burn – ‘fishing you out of a burning library when you went back in after him, the useless fat bastard; and there’s others, good friends of mine, died that day because of you wanting to be a fucking hero. And you don’t remember that.’
‘No,’ Poldarn replied and braced himself for the attack; it was a kick aimed at his chin, but the burned man missed and connected with his collarbone instead. On balance, the chin would’ve been better. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, as soon as he could speak again. ‘But I can’t remember anything, not for certain, and that’s just a fact. There’s no malice in it.’
‘Yeah, right,’ the burned man said. ‘No malice. Coming from you, that’s a bloody laugh.’
Going to get kicked again, but that can’t be helped. ‘What did I do?’ he asked.
The laughter had an edge to it this time. ‘What did you do?’ the burned man repeated. ‘You want to know, then.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry,’ the burned man said with mock contrition, ‘but we only got till dawn; what’s that, ten hours?’ A small ripple of brittle laughter. ‘Couldn’t tell you the half of it in ten hours.’
‘Never mind, then,’ Poldarn said. ‘Just pick a few bits at random.’
This time the burned man caught him on the elbow. Not quite as painful, but enough to be going on with. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘There was Vail Bohec. Mean anything to you?’
Poldarn shook his head.
‘Twenty thousand people, all killed in a day. Ackery: fifteen thousand. Berenna Priory – boarded up the monks in the chapter house and burned them all to death. Josequin: you weren’t there, but you planned it all out, right down to the last detail. General Allectus: stabbed him in the back, eighteen thousand of his men cut down where they stood. You don’t remember that, of course.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Course not. How bloody convenient. Weal Huon: thirteen thousand. Morannel. Deymeson. And whose fault is it we’ve got that arsehole Tazencius sitting in the palace at Torcea pretending he’s the Emperor? Or Caen Daras: the river got so blocked with dead bodies it flooded right up through the Rookwood valley. Who’d want to remember something like that if they didn’t have to?’
‘That’s all just names, though,’ Poldarn said. ‘Why won’t you tell me what actually happened? Why it was my fault. I mean, I can’t have killed all those people with my own hands.’
Third time lucky, as far as the burned man was concerned; and Poldarn had been wrong, the chin was far worse than the collarbone. ‘You want to know who I am?’ the burned man was shouting. ‘Sergeant Illimo Velzen, that’s my name. You think you can remember that, you bastard, or do you need something to help remind you?’
‘All right, that’s enough,’ said a voice that sounded a long way off – the man with the spear who’d been there when Poldarn woke up. ‘It’s my arse on the line if he’s dead on arrival. Sit down and save your strength, we’ve got a long day ahead of us tomorrow.’
It took the burned man a minute or so to get a grip on himself, with the spearman and various others telling him to calm down, leave it, Poldarn wasn’t worth it and so forth; then he turned his back and sat down, leaving Poldarn crumpled up where he’d fallen. It could’ve been worse, he eventually decided, nothing broken as far as he could tell (though he’d learned one thing about himself: he had exceptionally tough, strong bones). He wriggled about until he was as comfortable as he could make himself, and tried to clear his mind of what he’d heard – which was impossible, of course.
A pity, though. All that information the burned man had given him, and he still didn’t know whether they were the Mad Monk or the Amathy house. On balance, he reckoned, probably the latter; but he had to admit he was mostly guessing. He tried closing his eyes, but that just made things worse; without really wanting to, he started on the mental arithmetic: twenty thousand plus fifteen thousand plus eighteen plus thirteen, that made fifty-six thousand, no, sixty-six, he’d forgotten to carry the one – ten thousand people, snuffed out of memory by a simple mathematical error. Not that it mattered, because the data was incomplete in any event. And almost certainly the burned man didn’t even know about Eyvind, or Egil Colscegson, or the two gods in the cart, or the troopers he’d killed on the way to Cric. He grinned suddenly. A new cure for insomnia: why count sheep when you can count dead people—?
As he stood up, three crows lifted out of a tall tree and beat an undignified retreat, screaming at him as they flew away. The sound alerted them, and they turned round to see who was there.
‘Over here,’ he said quietly; and he noticed with amusement that he was speaking his own language with a distinct foreign accent. Been away far too long; but whose fault was that?
A moment of tense silence; then a voice he recognised. ‘Ciartan?’
‘Over here,’ he repeated. ‘You’re late.’
‘No, you’re early.’ Scaptey’s voice; it was absurd, hearing it here, on the other side of the world, on this alien continent. ‘Where are you, Ciartan? I can’t see you.’
He smiled to himself and started to walk towards them. ‘Now can you see me, you blind old fool?’
‘Not so much of the old.’ There was Scaptey, the familiar shape of his head and shoulders, a memory coming together out of the dark. ‘Bloody hell, boy, it’s good to see you again. How’ve you been?’
Scaptey’s bear-hug crushed most of the breath out of his lungs; still, he managed to say, ‘Don’t tell me I’ve grown, or I’ll smash your face in. How’s the old man? Is he all right?’
Close enough to see his face. ‘Halder’s just fine,’ Scaptey said. ‘He sends his love.’
‘And the farm?’
‘Just how you left it,’ Scaptey said; then he grinned as he added, ‘Except for the fucking crows. They got in on the winter wheat where it got flattened in the spring rains, hardly worth cutting after they were done with it. We need you back home, I reckon, teach them buggers a lesson.’
‘And there was me thinking I’d killed them all.’ He laughed. ‘Who else is with you? Anyone from the valley?’
Scaptey shook his head. ‘Green River folk, mostly,’ he said, ‘Halder couldn’t spare a crew this year. Fences need doing all up the north side, and we’re building three new barns. Just Raffen and me this time; Halder reckoned we weren’t no good for anything, so we wouldn’t be missed. Rannwey sends her love too,’ he added. It was the first time he’d ever heard someone from back home tell a deliberate lie. ‘And you have grown too, you bugger. Must suit you, over here.’
‘Three new barns,’ he said. ‘That sounds pretty good. Sounds like you were able to manage without me after all.’
Scaptey grinned. ‘Well, we’re getting along somehow,’ he said. ‘Except, we need you over at the forge. That kid Asburn, he does his best, but of course he was never bred to it like you were. He’s all right for simple things but when it comes to anything a bit clever he hasn’t got a clue.’
‘Well.’ For some reason, what Scaptey had just said made him want to smirk with pride. And there was something else besides: he was jealous. It wasn’t right that Asburn the odd-job boy should be working in his forge, using his tools, taking his place. ‘Maybe I’ll be back sooner than you think,’ he said, though he had no call to be saying anything of the sort. ‘Anyhow, that’s enough about home. I think I’ve got all the information you’ll need.’ And he launched into his report, like a small child reciting a carefully learned lesson: the location, topography and defences of Caen Daras, the number and disposition of its garrison, the little-known road across the hog’s-back ridge that would bring them unseen to within half a mile of the east gate. He explained the plan of campaign, stressing how vital it was that there should be no survivors. He told Scaptey where the carts would be waiting to carry the raiders’ share of the plunder back to the ships, and where to leave the gold and silver hidden so that the Prince’s men would be able to find it. When he’d been through everything he’d been briefed about, along with all his own observations that were likely to prove useful, and answered questions about various points that Scaptey wasn’t sure about, the first red stains were already starting to seep through into the eastern sky. ‘Time I wasn’t here,’ he said. ‘R
emember what I told you, and good luck. Though it ought to be easy as shelling peas.’
Scaptey nodded. ‘With all you’ve told me,’ he said, ‘we should be able to get there and do the job with our eyes shut.’
‘You could,’ he agreed, ‘but it’ll be easier with ’em open. See you next year, then.’
His horse was where he’d left it, with Sergeant Velzen standing guard, wide awake and obviously terrified. He smiled. As far as Velzen was concerned, the creature he’d just been talking to was as strange and unnatural as a werewolf, and twenty times more dangerous; but Scaptey was just the old dairyman, who’d taught him how to race sticks down the home paddock stream when he was six. ‘All done,’ he said. ‘We can go back now.’
The relief in Velzen’s face was comical to see. ‘Have to get a move on,’ he muttered, ‘if you want to be back in camp by reveille.’ He pronounced it rev’lly, in the approved manner for old sweats. ‘You said you’d only be an hour.’
‘Time flies when you’re having fun,’ he replied, and had the pleasure of watching Velzen’s skin crawl. They mounted up and made good time, once they were on the post road. As soon as they reached the camp, he went straight to the staff tent and made his report, leaving out a few bits and pieces that weren’t important, and some other things that were nobody’s business but his own. It was awkward and wearing, always having to be so careful about what he said and didn’t say, always needing to remember who he was being at any give time. Still, as Cordo would’ve said, it was better than drawing swords for a living—
He woke up suddenly, to find that two crows were perched on his knees, taking a professional interest in the raw wounds he’d been left with after his one-sided fight with the burned man, the one who’d called himself Illimo Velzen. He tried to grab them but they were too quick, and drew themselves into the air with their wings like men rowing a boat against the current.
He watched them circle a couple of times before they pitched in a high, spindly ash tree. For some reason, probably the associations of the dream, he found himself thinking about home. No woods and forests like this one there – what wouldn’t they give for a few dozen loads of this tall, straight lumber; and how horrified they’d be at the thought of the colliers’ camps, where so much precious timber was chopped up into cords and logs and wantonly burned into black cinders. No wonder Asburn had never let him use charcoal to get the forge fire started; it would’ve been an unspeakable crime, like wasting water in the desert.
