by K. J. Parker
‘I know,’ he said, ‘be nice.’ He frowned, then looked up. ‘You got your memory back yet?’ he said, as though asking after an errant falcon or a mislaid book.
‘No,’ Poldarn said. ‘People have been telling me things, but I’m not sure I believe all of them.’
Tazencius looked at his daughter, then folded his hands. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I guess it’s time we stopped fighting. Faults on both sides, that sort of thing. Besides,’ he went on, ‘as your wife’s been at great pains to tell me, essentially I was nursing a murderous grudge against someone who doesn’t really exist any more.’
‘I’m glad you can see it that way,’ Poldarn replied slowly. ‘I know I did a lot of bad things. I get the impression that a lot of the bad things involved you. What I haven’t got straight is how much of them I did with you, and how much to you.’
Tazencius was silent for what felt like a very long time. Then he said, ‘Like it matters. The fact is, you’re my son-in-law, whether I like it or not, and if anything happens to you, she’ll never speak to me again. Silly, isn’t it? All my life I’ve been trying to get – well, this; and in the end, all I care about is whether my daughter likes me. I guess you’re the punishment I deserve.’
She scowled at him, but didn’t say anything. He seemed not to have noticed.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘we don’t have to like each other, just be civil. Will you be wanting your old job back? I hope not. I’d far rather you just hung about the place eating and drinking and sleeping; I don’t need you for anything any more.’
‘Suits me,’ Poldarn replied. ‘For what it’s worth, I have a vague idea what my old job was, but I’d really rather you didn’t tell me.’
‘As you like,’ Tazencius said. ‘It’s a pity about the new man – he did me a good turn. But he’s got to go. It’s time to kick away the ladder.’
Whatever that meant; asking for explanations was the last thing on Poldarn’s mind. Right now, everything was painfully awkward and embarrassing, but it was better than sleeping in a turf shack and being forced to kill strangers all the time. Besides, he kept telling himself, an opportunity will crop up, and I will be able to run away and get clear of all these people, sooner or later.
‘Anyway,’ Tazencius was saying, ‘tonight it’s dinner with the Amathy house. Horrible chore, but we need to be out in the open about that sort of thing.’
Amathy house? Weren’t they the enemy? Poldarn decided not to worry about it. People have dinner with their enemies all the time. ‘Thank you,’ he decided to say.
‘What for?’
Poldarn grinned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’re clearly making a big effort to put a lot of things out of your mind so we can all put the past behind us and get on with our lives. Since I don’t know what the things are, I can’t gauge exactly how magnanimous you’re being. But thank you, anyhow.’
Tazencius looked puzzled; then he laughed. ‘I’ll take that in the spirit in which I think it was meant,’ he said. ‘But I still don’t see us ever being friends.’
‘Unnecessary,’ Poldarn replied. ‘I just want to keep out of everybody’s way.’
As they walked back down a long, high-roofed cloister, she frowned at him. ‘You were rude,’ she said, ‘talking to him like that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Poldarn said. ‘It’s the only way I know how to talk to people.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ she replied. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I think the best thing would be if you stay out of his way as much as possible.’
‘That’d suit me.’
She walked on a little further, then stopped and looked at him. ‘Tell me the truth,’ she said. ‘Did you really come to Torcea in order to murder him?’
Poldarn laughed and shook his head. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Why on earth would I want to do a thing like that?’
She shrugged. ‘Because he’s a very bad man who’s done some appalling things.’
‘None of my business,’ Poldarn replied promptly. ‘Anything he’s done to me I’ve forgotten. And things he’s done to other people are nothing to do with me. I may be a lot of bad things myself, but at least I’m not an idealist.’
She laughed, for some reason. ‘Nobody could ever accuse you of that,’ she said. ‘So why did you come?’
He shrugged. ‘I got sick to death of blundering about in the dark,’ he said. ‘People would insist on telling me things, but only because they hoped I’d be useful if I was nudged along, one way or the other. That man Cleapho, who apparently is someone I went to school with: he’s the one who wants me to kill your father. All I wanted was to find out the truth – not because I want my past back, I’d have to be crazy to want that; but I figured that if I came here and gave myself up, then either your father would kill me or not, but the chances were that at least he’d tell me the truth.’
‘Daddy telling the truth,’ she mused. ‘No, I don’t see that.’
‘I do,’ Poldarn said. ‘Because he knows it’d hurt me more than anything else he could do. The clever trick I’d have played on him is that not knowing, now that I’ve been told all these things that may be lies or may be true, hurts even more.’ He breathed out slowly. ‘Perhaps I wanted him to kill me,’ he added. ‘Put me out of my misery, as they say. There comes a time when holding still and being caught begins to have a definite appeal.’
‘I never figured you for a quitter,’ she said.
‘Really?’ He smiled bleakly. ‘Maybe it was just that I couldn’t remember ever having been to Torcea, and everybody ought to see the capital once in their lives.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Do you want me to tell you?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ve changed my mind since I’ve been here.’
Cold look. ‘Because of me.’
He nodded. ‘And the things that come with you, of course, such as clean clothes and regular meals. The plain fact is, when it comes to whether I live or die, I really don’t have particularly strong views one way or the other. I’m – empty,’ he said. ‘Describes it pretty well. I might as well go on living as not, and that’s about it.’
She looked at him, then looked away. ‘Well, do that, then,’ she said. ‘I feel a bit like that right now; but it matters to me that I don’t lose. I need to get what I want and then hang on to it, or else I feel I’ve been beaten by somebody. Pretty poor justification for the things I’ve had to do, but then, I’m not accountable to anybody.’ She looked past him, over his shoulder. ‘It feels like it’s been a very long day and I’m very tired and just want to fall into bed and go to sleep; so, as long as I can make my unilateral declaration of victory without anybody contradicting me, I’ll settle for what I’ve got and not worry about anything else. Does that make any sense to you?’
‘Perfect sense,’ he said. ‘What did he mean, “the new man”?’
She was still looking away, so he couldn’t see her expression. ‘The man who took over the job you were doing.’
‘You mean, when I lost my memory?’
‘Shortly before that.’
Inside the cloister was the usual small garden: a square of green lawn, four formal flower beds, diamond-shaped, with a stone fountain in the middle. A single crow dropped out of the air, its approach masked by the cloister columns, so that it looked as if it had come out of nowhere. It settled on the lip of the fountain and pecked lightly at the surface of the water, as if looking at its reflection. Poldarn, who knew about crows and their behaviour, guessed it was a scout, sent on ahead of the main party, to see if it was safe and if there was anything there worth eating.
The guests are starting to arrive, he thought; the Amathy house, and whoever else is coming to dinner. Possibly, Feron Amathy himself would be there – Feron Amathy, who Cleapho had tried to persuade him was the most evil man in the world. That’ll make three of us, then, Poldarn thought. Just like the song, which suddenly he could remember—
Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree<
br />
Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree
Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree
And along came the Dodger, and he made up three.
He felt better for remembering that; a half-remembered song is like an itch you can’t reach, and its incomplete pattern rattles around in your head, the broken parts spinning round in an infuriating cycle that gradually drives out everything else. He had no idea what it meant, or who the Dodger was supposed to be, or why they sang the same, fairly uninspiring, song both here in the Empire and far away, at Haldersness. Presumably at some distant time, someone had made up the song to commemorate some important event; the reason for the song had long since been forgotten but the song remained behind, like the head of an arrow deep in a wound when the shaft has been broken off. Memory had put the song there, and then been lost, leaving only its barbed and rusty sting behind. (The bee dies when it stings, its guts pulled out; the sting remains in the wound. Probably religion; everything else is.)
‘What was that you were humming?’ she said.
‘Sorry, I didn’t realise.’ He felt embarrassed, to be caught humming in public. ‘Just a song I heard somewhere. You know what it’s like when one gets stuck in your mind.’
‘Like getting something wedged between your teeth,’ she said. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
Poldarn thought for a moment. ‘You didn’t recognise the tune, then?’
‘You hum very badly,’ she told him, ‘always did. It was endearing when you were very young.’
‘It’s a song about crows in trees,’ he said. ‘That’s all I know about it.’
‘Oh, that song,’ she said. ‘My mother used to sing it when I was a small child. I never liked it much.’
He grinned. ‘I must’ve liked it a lot,’ he said. ‘It was practically the only thing I could remember, when I woke up that time.’
‘Oh.’ She looked at him, face blank. ‘That’s odd, I don’t remember ever hearing you singing or whistling it.’
‘I wonder where I picked it up,’ he said. ‘Not that it matters. It’s just that I suddenly remembered the last line, just now. Of all the things to remember—’
‘Or you may have heard it since, somewhere,’ she said. ‘It’s a very common song, people sing it all the time.’ She sighed. ‘Apparently, Cleapho’s going to be at this dinner party, assuming he gets back from Tulice in time.’
‘Cleapho,’ Poldarn said. (The guests are beginning to arrive.) ‘What do I need to know about him?’
She counted off on her fingers. ‘He controls the Treasury and most of the civil service, which is fine because it saves Father a lot of work he doesn’t like doing; he also controls the army, now that Muno Silsny’s gone – he killed Muno, of course, but we can forgive him that, I suppose; but he doesn’t have any support in the Amathy house, which is why they’re coming to dinner. I’m not sure why he wants to be Emperor; it may sound odd, but you don’t make it as far as Father or Cleapho unless you actually have a strong motive. In Father’s case it was simply staying alive that bit longer, but Cleapho – deep down, I have a nasty feeling that he believes in something. Not religion per se, gods and stuff; but I think he believes in religion in a sort of abstract sense, which is rather worrying. I think he wants to do things with the Empire, rather than just having it. He was at school with you, of course, but I think you already know that. He was very close to – well, Feron Amathy, a year or so back, but something went badly wrong and threw out all his plans, which is how Father was able to get his foot in the door. He means to kill us all, probably just because he feels we make the place look untidy. That’s about it.’
Poldarn shrugged. ‘Most of that went over my head, I’m afraid,’ he said. He hesitated, then asked: ‘How old is Feron Amathy? He seems to have been around for years.’
She didn’t answer.
Why am I here? he asked himself.
It was dark; the curtains were as thick as armour, proof against even the sharpest point of light. He’d hoped to be able to snatch an hour’s sleep before the ordeal of the dinner party, but apparently not; instead he lay on his back on the bed and stared at the darkness where the ceiling could be assumed to be.
Why am I here?
That was too complex a question, so he broke it down into smaller pieces, splitting off How did I come to be here? since most of that had been other people’s doing. What remained was Why did I leave Dui Chirra and head for Torcea? He still couldn’t make much headway with it.
He could remember quite clearly what the answer used to be. He’d come to Torcea because he was fairly sure he’d find Tazencius here; and he’d very much wanted to kill him, for some reason that had blurred somewhat in the intervening time. As far as he could recall, the justification was that Tazencius was to blame for everything bad that had happened to him; Tazencius had sent to the far islands for a weapon, and Halder had sent him his own grandson, to be sharpened, burnished and used. Tazencius had put him through school and set him up in business as the most evil man in the world. It was all his fault.
That lie had kept him moving and motivated as far as Falcata; at which point it fell to bits like an old rotten tree stump, though he’d pretended he still believed it. Since leaving Falcata, he’d been more concerned with running away than with arriving anywhere, right up until the moment he’d blundered into Ciana (who was really his old school chum, the prince Turvo) in the woods. Even then, if he was honest with himself, he’d only asked for a lift to Torcea because he needed to specify a destination, and he’d still been kidding himself about what he was planning to do.
Now here he was, in Torcea, in Tazencius’s house; and killing Tazencius was no longer even a daydream. Instead, apparently, he’d come home. Maybe that was because, having run out of people to lie to, he’d had a go at lying to himself, and failed; at which point, somehow, inexplicably, the game was over.
So: what am I going to do now?
That was an even harder question. He had no idea what the answer might be. What he wanted to do was escape, yet again; but he’d finally been forced to come to terms with the fact that he was the King of the Snails, that whenever he tried to run away, he had no choice but to take his home with him.
So: eventually, after enduring unspeakable hardships and battling overwhelming odds, here he was, and he had no idea what he wanted to do next. Absurd; because an easier man to please didn’t draw breath. How absurdly happy he could’ve been, digging mud at Dui Chirra or staring into the colliers’ fire at the charcoal camp, or mindlessly following the pattern of chores assigned to him before he’d even been born, if only he’d been a fieldhand’s son at Haldersness rather than the heir apparent. Instead, here he was: an expensive but obsolete piece of equipment, hung up in the rafters because nobody had any use for it any more. He didn’t even have a use for himself. The only person who wanted him, apparently, was his wife, Tazencius’s daughter, and she only wanted him as an ornament or curio.
A dog running through a cornfield with a burning torch tied to its tail. Was the dog to blame, or the man who made and attached the torch? Was it really possible that all the false, forged prophecies had actually come true, out of spite, and that he genuinely was Poldarn, the god in the cart? He grinned; he could dismiss that one out of hand, because gods didn’t exist. Poldarn, he knew for a fact (because Copis had told him, or someone else), was an unmitigated fraud, invented by greedy monks to boost offertory revenues. Unless, of course, he’d created the god himself without even meaning to, like a careless sorcerer accidentally summoning the wrong demon.
He thought: The crows are beginning to arrive, because someone’s set out a convincing pattern of decoys. Now that was fair comment; he’d been tricked and beguiled here just like the thousands of birds he’d drawn into his killing zones, back in the fields at Haldersness. He’d come expecting to kill, and now—
What makes a good decoy? Why, familiarity, which itself is born of memory. The crows see what look like a mob of their ow
n kind pitched among the pea-vines. But there the comparison ended. Whatever had drawn him down here, it wasn’t the search for his own memories. He’d been trying to run away from them all along.
Even so; they were starting to arrive, wheeling and turning in to the wind, gliding and dropping into the killing zone, all the old crows from the song. The question was: had he come here drawn by the decoys, or was he the pathfinding scout, leading the rest of the flock? What if—
(What if there was a traitor in the flock – one crow who deliberately led the rest down onto the decoys, into the killing zone? There never could be such a creature, of course, since all crows shared the same mind, just like the Haldersness people. But what if a crow lost its memory, mislaid its share of the group mind; and, while its mind was empty, was persuaded or tricked into turning traitor? What if one crow led the others down onto the bean field, and it turned out to be the cinder bed of a volcano, or the decoy pattern of the boy with the bucket full of small stones? Would that, he wondered, meet the criteria for a moment of religion?)
What if they were all still lying, he wondered; what if Noja, who apparently was his wife Lysalis, mother of his son, the youth whom he’d killed in ignorance on the road in Tulice while moonlighting as a scavenger; what if she’d decoyed him here to be killed, because Tazencius hated him, or because he was the most evil man in the world?
Like it mattered. The truth was, he’d reached the moment of religion where the outcome is no longer important, only the state preceding it – because what we practise is the draw; the death of the man drawn against is an incidental, because the man is different every time. Only the draw can be perfect, since it’s capable of infinite repetition, each time exactly the same. He’d reached just such a perfect moment, where there was no longer anything he wanted – not to kill or be killed, not to stay or escape; no material things had any attraction for him, and all people were now the same to him, friends and enemies and lovers and family. In this moment, every individual thing and person had blended together into a great, undistinguished flock, all colourless (the black of a crow’s wing is the absence of colour), all sharing the same mind, face, memory. It was the moment when all the wonderful things made by men’s hands are broken up and loaded into the furnace to be purged by the fire into a melt. If they killed him, how could it possibly matter? Nothing unique would die with him, since he had no memories of his own. The scouts drop in on the decoys and die, and the rest of the flock takes note and goes elsewhere to feed. How sensible.
