by K. J. Parker
Poldarn wasn’t quite sure he followed that, but he reckoned he’d got the general idea. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. The fact is, I’m completely lost; and then the arrow—’
‘Gare Brasson,’ the man growled; Poldarn guessed it was a name rather than abstruse swearing. ‘Careless bloody idiot, I’ll kick his spine out his ear for that, shooting where he can’t see. He might’ve shot you,’ he added, red-faced with rage. ‘I’m most terribly sorry about that,’ he went on, ‘only really, you shouldn’t be here. You see, it’s not actually very clever, wandering about in the middle of a boar hunt. Well,’ he added, with a grin, ‘I guess you’ve figured that out for yourself.’
‘Yes,’ Poldarn said. ‘But I didn’t know that that was what I was doing. Like I said, I’m lost.’
The hunter thought for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, smiling brilliantly, ‘no harm done. And it looks like we’re done here for today, so we might as well pack it in and go home. Where was it you said you wanted to go to? My name’s Ciana Jetat, by the way.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Poldarn replied. He realised he was shivering, and the knees and seat of his trousers were soaked in blood. ‘Would it be all right if—?’
‘Wash and a change of clothes? Of course,’ Ciana Jetat replied. ‘And if you’re not in too much of a rush, perhaps you’d care to stay for dinner. We’re only a mile or so over the way. Done your ankle?’
‘Knee, actually.’ Poldarn realised he was leaning against the tree, one foot off the ground. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘It’s not serious, I don’t think, but—’
‘Amil will be here with the horses directly,’ Ciana Jetat said. ‘If you don’t mind riding on the game cart.’ Poldarn assured him that that would be fine. ‘Splendid, then,’ Ciana said. ‘Didn’t catch your name, sorry.’
‘Poldarn,’ Poldarn said.
‘Really?’ Ciana laughed. ‘There’s a coincidence.’ Then he turned his head away, listened for a moment, stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled so loud that it hurt. ‘Amil and the cart,’ he explained. ‘Can you put your weight on your knee as far as the track?’
‘What track?’ Poldarn replied. Ciana took that for a joke, and laughed. The track, as it turned out, was no more than forty yards away, and wide enough for two carts to pass each other without scraping wheels. He’d probably been walking parallel to it for hours, and had never realised that it was there.
‘We’re just camping out in the lodge,’ Ciana said apologetically, ‘roughing it. We’re only stopping there the one night, so there didn’t seem to be any point tarting the place up or dragging the household staff out here in the middle of nowhere. Still, if you don’t mind basic campfire hospitality—’
Poldarn smiled; he knew what that meant, of course. When a rich sportsman talks about roughing it, he means honey-roast peacock in creamed artichoke sauce served on the ancestral silver in the Great Hall, by the light of a thousand scented candles. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Really, it’s very kind of you to share with me, especially after I mucked up your hunt.’
‘Oh, well.’ Ciana shrugged, like a man slipping off a very heavy fur cloak, then picked up his hunting bag, which he’d put down for a moment, and slung it over his right shoulder, using his left hand. Poldarn noticed that he hardly used his right hand for anything; the fingers were bent inwards, like a crow’s foot, presumably because of some accident. ‘It’s not every day you come across a three-hundred-pounder with nine-ounce ivories and all his rights, but what the hell. After all,’ he added, rather gloomily, ‘it’s only sport. Talking of which, I suppose, properly speaking, the tusks belong to you. I’ll have Cano cut them out for you.’
‘No, really,’ Poldarn said quickly. ‘You keep them. I think I saw quite enough of them when I was back under that tree.’
‘You sure?’ Ciana brightened up almost instantaneously. ‘Well, that’s very generous of you, very kind indeed.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You’re absolutely sure? I mean—’
‘Really,’ Poldarn said.
Ciana’s lodge proved to be a lopsided pole-and-brush lean-to tucked under the lee of a small hill. The fire smoked, the food had been better at the colliers’ camp, and the beer was only marginally less disgusting. Ciana and his people (there were about thirty of them, packed into a hut that would just about have housed a dozen dwarves) seemed to think it was all a great treat and tremendous fun.
‘I mean,’ Ciana explained, as another jug of revolting beer appeared out of nowhere, ‘this is what it’s all about – I mean, life. Real life. Bugger being cooped up in a poxy little counting house or joggling up and down in a cart till your pee froths or chucking your guts up over the rail of some horrible little ship. The hunt, the campfire, eating what you kill, a few good friends under the open sky. That’s what it’s supposed to be like, you know? That’s what we were put on this earth to do.’
‘Absolutely,’ Poldarn replied, managing to give the impression that his beer-horn was still mostly full, and therefore not in need of a top-up. ‘I feel sorry for those other poor devils,’ he added cautiously.
‘Damn straight.’ Ciana carefully wiped ash off his chunk of burnt ham, and tore half of it off with his teeth, like a dog. ‘There’s times when I’m stuck in bloody Torcea, at some bloody stupid Guild meeting or whatever, I think I’ll go crazy if I don’t get out, breathe some fresh air, feel some space around me.’ He sighed. ‘Got to head back there tomorrow, worse bloody luck. Got fifty thousand jars of salt fish and nineteen thousand gallons of walnut oil due in from Thurm the first of the month, wouldn’t do at all if I’m not there to check the bills personally. Not saying the clerks couldn’t handle it, actually they’re a great bunch of lads, but really, you can’t delegate stuff like that, the really important things, you wouldn’t last a week. Still, we’ve had a good break, bloody good time all round, apart from not getting the big pig, of course. But otherwise—’ He fell silent and stared into the fire, as if there might be prize boar lying hidden among the clinker.
Poldarn didn’t look at him. ‘You’re heading for Torcea, then,’ he said.
‘Miserable bloody place,’ Ciana said. ‘But yes, that’s right.’
‘Do you think you could give me a lift there?’
If Ciana hesitated for a moment, it was probably only the thought of being responsible for a fellow human being ending up in the unspeakably horrible city. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What’d you want to go there for?’
‘Oh, just a spot of business,’ Poldarn answered, as lightly as he could. ‘Thing is,’ he went on, ‘I’m in rather a hurry; but getting lost in the forest has set me back a day, and I’m pretty sure that by the time I get to the coast, I’ll have missed the boat I was supposed to be on.’ His hand was in his pocket; he fingered Mino Silsny’s valuable ring. ‘I’ll gladly pay you, of course, whatever it costs—’
Ciana waved the offer away as if it was a moth he was trying to swat. ‘Wouldn’t hear of it,’ he replied, ‘don’t be daft. We’ve got our own ship sat there waiting for us at Far Beacon, loads of spare room, no bother at all. Glad of the company,’ he added, as someone behind him jostled his arm, making him spill beer all over his own feet.
‘Thank you,’ Poldarn said, hoping that it was a big boat.
Chapter Fifteen
It was a reasonably big boat; but since it had to hold the entire hunting party, their weapons, equipment, camping-out gear, leftover beer, trophies (several sacks full of deer skulls, boar skulls, hares’ feet, foxtails, wolf pelts, and bits and pieces of various animals that Poldarn couldn’t identify and didn’t really want to), as well as Ciana himself, it could have been twice the size and still uncomfortable. It sat alarmingly low in the water, and since the jolly huntsmen were also the crew, Poldarn had severe misgivings about the whole enterprise. On the other hand, it was a free ride to Torcea, always assuming that they didn’t sink halfway across the bay.
They didn’t. The storm that had been threatening to
burst ever since they’d embarked managed to wait until they were unloading at Torcea dock before letting rip. Consequently, Poldarn’s first impression of the big city was a stinging curtain of rain that cut visibility down to less than fifteen yards, with a backdrop of forked lightning.
‘Looks like we brought the weather with us,’ Ciana said, yelling to make himself heard over the drumming of the rain. He was soaked to the skin, his grey hair plastered down over his forehead, even his vast moustache limp and soggy, but the cold and the wet didn’t seem capable of damping down his infuriating good humour. ‘It’s not usually like this until mid-autumn, but obviously the wet season’s set in early. No bad thing, it washes the stink off the streets.’
Poldarn tried to say goodbye as soon as they’d finished hauling the gear across to Ciana’s warehouse, but the hunter wasn’t so easily shaken off. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he roared, when Poldarn suggested looking for an inn for the night. ‘You won’t find anywhere round here at this time of year – you’ll end up dossing down under the viaduct arches. You come on home with me, I’ll show you my trophy collection.’
The hammering of raindrops on the warehouse roof drowned out Poldarn’s response, which was probably just as well. He had no money, no clothes other than those he stood up in, and his left boot had sprung a leak. Also, he had no idea where to go, or how to set about accomplishing what he’d come here to do. ‘Thanks,’ he replied, ‘that’s really very kind of you.’
Ciana’s house was slightly smaller than Falcata, but not by much. Once they’d passed under the gate in the outer wall (twenty feet high and six feet thick at the base) they crossed a courtyard big enough to corral a couple of hundred head of cattle, passing a small town of outbuildings, sheds and storehouses, until they reached another gate in another vast defensive wall, which Ciana opened with a small silver key.
‘I’m home,’ he bawled, as he led the way into a lobby that reminded Poldarn of a fairy story he must’ve heard when he was young, about the prince who climbed up the magic pepper-vine to the giant’s castle. A giant would’ve been perfectly comfortable in Ciana’s house, provided that he had plenty of furniture to fill up the open spaces.
Doors flew open, and men and women streamed out and started grabbing luggage, bustling it away out of sight, all with the same horrible cheerfulness that Poldarn had got so tired of over the last two days on the boat. In the time it took them to walk from the front entrance to the next set of doors, Poldarn and Ciana were stripped of their wet clothes, towelled dry, and dressed in long, warm wool gowns that made a soft huffing noise as they dragged over the shiny marble floor; while behind them, three tall, gaunt men with mops wiped away their wet, muddy footprints.
‘That you?’ screeched a woman’s voice as the second set of doors were opened for them. Now they were in a dining hall half as long and high again as the Charity & Diligence in Sansory, where Poldarn had first met Cleapho. A high gallery, its turned wooden balustrades painted and gilded in an overwhelming variety of colours, ran round three sides of it. Dead centre of the gallery on the far side stood a woman – at least, Poldarn assumed there was a human being somewhere inside the vast billow of fabrics from which the loud voice appeared to be coming. ‘That you?’ she repeated. ‘Have a good trip?’
‘Fine,’ Ciana replied, as if he’d just stepped out to buy anchovies. ‘This is Poldarn, he’ll be staying a few days. Where’s the mail?’
‘Study,’ replied the voice among the draperies. ‘Dinner’s cooking.’ Poldarn’s newly acquired instinct helped him judge the distance between the woman on the balcony and himself; too far away for her to see his burned, melted face. ‘Tell your friend he can have the Oak Suite.’
She disappeared backwards through a pair of enormous panelled doors. ‘My wife,’ Ciana explained. ‘Come on, I’ll show you to your room.’
Up the gallery stairs, down one side, down a long corridor hung with dark tapestries that stank of dust, left down another corridor, carpeted and lined with frescoes of sea battles. Eventually, Ciana stopped outside a door (it looked like it had been planked out of a single tree, except there couldn’t possibly ever have been a tree that tall and wide) and pushed it open with his fingertip. ‘Hope this’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘We don’t entertain much, so we only keep a couple of rooms ready. Still, it keeps the rain off.’
Before Poldarn could say anything, four women pushed past him into the room, carrying a huge laundry basket between them like orderlies bearing the wounded from a battlefield. Once inside, they moved so fast, brandishing sheets and blankets and skinning pillowcases off horse-sized pillows, that it was impossible to see past them and admire the view. ‘Someone’ll be up with water for a bath,’ Ciana was saying, ‘and then it’ll be time for dinner. Not the same as a simple meal under the trees, but you can’t have everything.’ Then Poldarn lost sight of him behind the whirling clouds of laundry, though he saw the door close.
The women finished whatever they’d been doing and vanished like elves, leaving Poldarn alone in the Oak Suite. Why it was called that he wasn’t quite sure, since as far as the eye could see every surface was either black marble or extravagantly carved and gilded burr walnut. In the far corner was a sort of pavilion affair, inside which he guessed there was a bed. On a broad table (wealthy farmers in Tulice worked smaller acreages) was a tall pile of neatly folded clothes for him to change into. A solid silver bath stood in front of the fireplace like a raider ship dragged home and set up as a trophy of war. He’d just taken off the gown that he’d been manhandled into in the entrance hall and was about to put on the new clothes (thick, soft and surprisingly plain woollen shirt, trousers and socks) when the door opened yet again and a dozen women – different ones, as far as he could tell – burst into the room holding tall copper jugs that filled the air with steam. They took no notice of Poldarn, standing in the middle of the room with a face covered in scar tissue and no clothes on; they filled the bath, laid out a tall pile of white towels, and disappeared.
A bath, Poldarn thought, staring at it. Not a dip in a river or a splash of water out of a pool or dunking your head in the slack-tub: an actual bath, indoors, in hot water. Have I ever had one of these before? Must have, or else the smell of the steam wouldn’t seem so familiar, and I wouldn’t be looking forward to it so much. Chances are I used to enjoy baths, at some stage in my career.
The water was hot; considerably hotter than he’d anticipated when he’d vaulted over the towering side and plunged in. For three or four agonising heartbeats he was convinced he was about to die, but then the pain and shock faded, replaced by a feeling of overwhelming comfort. Wonderful bath, he thought, I’ve missed this— He frowned but decided not to worry about it. Someone had left a tall, slender bronze jug on a pedestal next to the bath, where he could just manage to reach it from where he lay. It was full of some white, milky liquid, and a little voice at the back of his mind said that the right thing to do was pour this stuff over his head, knead it into his hair, hold his breath and duck under the water for a bit. He wasn’t quite sure what this performance was designed to achieve, but the instinct was terribly strong. He tried it, and surfaced a few moments later to find that the bathwater had all turned the same milky white colour. Amazing, he thought.
What in the gods’ names am I doing here? he asked himself. Superficially, the answer was perfectly straightforward: he’d had the extreme good fortune to scrape acquaintance with a wealthy, generous eccentric, and in consequence was wallowing in a hot bath full of milky white stuff instead of crouching under a cold stone arch in the wet streets, hoping his boots would still be on his feet when he woke up. No problem with that; and he’d forgotten, assuming he’d ever known, just how extremely nice pleasure could be. A man could easily go out of his way for pleasure; he could do far worse than spend his whole life hunting for it, like Ciana stalking the big pig. True, there wasn’t really any need for the furniture and tapestries and life-size marble statues and enough servants to colonise a sm
all continent. A bath was probably enough, and clean clothes whose previous owner hadn’t died by violence, and something half decent to eat. A man could be fooled into believing this sort of thing was normal if he hung around here long enough.
Normal as a two-headed dog, Poldarn reminded himself, sticking his toes up out of the water and looking at them as if he’d never seen them before. He was, after all, in Torcea, the capital of the Empire, in the house of a giant. (A short giant, maybe; but if he drew back those enormous shutters and looked out of the window, it was a safe bet he’d see outsize leaves and the tree-thick stem of the giant pepper-vine, and below that a soft white mat of clouds.) None of this was why he was here; he hadn’t fought and killed his way from Haldersness to Dui Chirra and slaughtered a giant boar with a tree branch just so that he could have a relaxing bath.
Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree
Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree
Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree—
—Still couldn’t think of the last line, damn it. The song spun round in his mind, the jagged edge where the final line was missing grazing all his thoughts, leaving them raw and painful. He decided to think about something else.
He was, he supposed, here to overthrow the Empire, kill the most evil man in history and bring about the end of the world. A brief rest, wash and a brush-up, bite to eat, and then it’d be business as usual. Poldarn remembered washing his face in the fern-fringed pool, on the first day, when Copis had found him; this was better, but otherwise the two experiences were pretty much the same, and he was really no further forward.
Dinner with Ciana and his family (which was huge and excessive, like everything else to do with him) would have been an ordeal, except that the food was very good indeed, and there were no soldiers, sword-monks, bandits, pirates, mysterious women who turned into crows or old school friends anywhere to be seen. Ciana’s wife, a large woman with thick red hair down to her waist, had taken one horrified look at Poldarn’s face and then made up her mind that he was invisible; her three brothers scowled at him through the forest of silverware; an assortment of thickset, hairy men who were probably cousins tried to make him eat and drink enough to feed a large village, and burst out in raucous laughter whenever he asked someone to pass the mustard. Ciana himself told a succession of improbable hunting stories, which neither Poldarn nor anybody else paid any attention to. There was also a tall, slim woman, with grey eyes and light brown hair that curled where it touched her shoulders, who sat opposite him. He guessed she must be Ciana’s baby sister; she didn’t talk to anyone, and ate nothing except bread, a carrot and a few thin slices of smoked lamb, and if his appearance bothered her, she gave no sign of it. Miraculously, once the last course had been stripped off the plates and cleared away, Ciana stood up and walked away from the table, promptly followed by the rest of the company. Poldarn, who’d assumed that he’d be stuck there half the night while the household drank itself into a coma, found himself following a severe-faced manservant back through the panelled corridors to his room, where someone had lit the lamps and turned down the coverlet. He pulled off his clothes, dropped on the bed like a shot deer, and fell asleep.
