by K. J. Parker
They changed direction.
“They can’t have,” Teucer said, as they ran up the slope. “We weren’t on the skyline, we weren’t even moving. They can’t have seen us at that range.”
They came to a flat top, a table. The heather was about eight inches tall. No rocks, trees, anything like that. “They’re not bloody eagles,” Teucer said. “They can’t have seen us.”
Musen sat down in the heather. “The hell with running about,” he said. “You haven’t still got that stupid sash, have you?”
“What?” Teucer suddenly realised that he had.
“Get rid of it, quick.”
Get rid of it where? Teucer dragged it out and crumpled it into a ball; they tried to scrabble a hole, but the heather roots were woven into a mass thicker than armour, and they only had their fingers. They tried tearing it into little strips, but the weave was too dense. “Eat it,” Musen yelled, but Teucer knew better than to try. “All right, shove it up your arse. Just get rid of it.”
Teucer seriously considered that for a moment, but decided it wouldn’t fit. He jumped up and ran, a real sports-day sprint, a hundred yards in no time. He stooped, panting furiously, and tied the sash round a heather root. You couldn’t help noticing it. He dragged off his boot, stuffed it down inside the leg, and threw the boot away.
“How’s that going to help?” Musen said, when he’d limped back.
“I got rid of it.”
Musen pointed. The boot was plainly visible, even at that distance. “They’re coming up the slope,” Musen said. “We’re dead.”
They could hear them now, thumping hooves they could feel through their feet, and a jangling noise, like someone throwing tools around. “Lie down,” Teucer said.
“And have them ride over us? No, thanks.”
They came over the crest of the hill at a slow working trot. Not the same horsemen. Teucer froze. He had no idea if they were the enemy or not. They were heavy cavalry; chainmail from the feet up, and a jacket of small steel plates, laced together into a complicated mechanism of moving parts. Their helmets had cheekpieces that covered nearly all their faces, and tall plumes of white horsehair that nodded wildly with every movement. They looked like gods; the thought that anyone could possibly harm or resist them was simply ludicrous. The small area of skin visible between the cheekpieces was dark brown, almost black.
“Not ours,” Musen said.
Oh, Teucer thought, and the horsemen stopped.
“Keep still,” Musen said. “It won’t take long.”
One of the horsemen dismounted; he slipped his feet from the stirrups, lifted his left leg over the pommel of his saddle and slid to the ground, wonderfully graceful. He was maybe five feet tall, if that.
“They’re so short,” Teucer said.
“Shut up.”
Now he was unfastening the chinstrap buckle of his helmet. He lifted it off with an unconscious flourish. He had a white scarf twisted tight around his neck, and his hair was black and very short. He came towards them, stopped and smiled.
“Gentlemen.” His voice was high and beautiful, like birdsong. He had an accent like the surveyors’. “Could you possibly tell us the way to Spire Cross?”
They’re ours, Teucer thought, they’re our side. He felt a smile bursting on to his face. But Musen was radiating terror in all directions.
“That way.” Teucer realised he was pointing; not the right way, either. He adjusted his arm. “We just came from there. It’s about two days’ walk.”
The black man smiled. “You just came from there.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Now he shook his head. “You can’t have. We left no survivors.”
Hell, Teucer thought. “We’re not soldiers.”
“Yes, you are.” He was still smiling. “You’re deserters. Where’s your unit?”
“All dead.” The words came out of Musen like vomit, in a rush, involuntary. “Your people killed them. Down by a river.”
The black man nodded; that made sense to him. He knew what was going on. Well, he would. Gods do. “How many of you escaped?”
“Just us.”
He considered the statement, and his divine insight recognised the truth. He nodded. “Kill them,” he said.
“Just a minute,” Musen screamed. “Wait. My uncle’s a blacksmith.”
The black man stopped; and his men, who’d been about to do something, stopped too. He turned slowly and looked at Musen. “Is that right?”
“Yes. He lives in Merebarton, in the second street. The fifth house, on the third floor. He keeps his hammers and his anvil at our house.”
The black man frowned a little. “Go on.”
Musen clearly didn’t know what to say next. Panic. The black man’s face was starting to cloud over. “He’s a long way from home.”
“Of course he is,” the black man said. He sounded impatient, annoyed. “So?”
And then Musen must have remembered, because Teucer could feel him relax. “He shoes the horses that plough the lower meadows.”
“Mphm.” The black man was satisfied. “All right,” he said, “you’re with us. You’re lucky we’ve got spare horses. Him too?”
Musen looked at Teucer. I’m sorry but you’re not worth it. “No.”
The black man nodded. “Shoot that one,” he said.
He turned away. A horseman moved, somewhere behind Musen’s head. “Musen,” Teucer started to say, and then the arrow must have hit him.
He opened his eyes and couldn’t move. Fine, he thought, I’m dead. That didn’t seem such a big deal.
Then he realised he couldn’t move because there was an arrow. It was right through him, between the collarbone and the round muscle of the shoulder, and it was pinning him to the ground. He peered sideways, and saw the feathers, sitting on his sopping-wet chest like a big, fat hornet. His shirt was glistening wet. He tried moving again, and a swarm of angry flies got up and buzzed in front of his eyes; that made him squirm, and it hurt really badly. Some fool, he thought. Some idiot, careless with a bow. Hadn’t he realised, bows and arrows can be dangerous? It’s the first thing they tell you.
“I said,” came a voice. “Are you Teucer?”
Not at home; not in Merebarton. He turned his head the other way, and saw two feet. Very strange feet. They were covered in chainmail, with thick leather soles sewn or served in between the rings. He looked up. It was the black man.
So he really is a god, Teucer thought. No wonder we lost, if we’re fighting gods. “Yes,” he said.
“Teucer from Mere Barton?” He made it into two words.
“Yes.”
“You shot a perfect score at a hundred yards.”
He couldn’t help grinning. Definitely a god. Not just eternal glory but eternal life. “Am I going to heaven?”
“Did you shoot a perfect score at a hundred yards?”
“Yes,” Teucer said, “that’s right, that was me.”
The god turned his head. “Patch him up,” he said, and walked away.
They’d pulled out the arrow, and it hurt so much he went away again, a very long way indeed. He considered not coming back, gave it serious thought. On balance, though—
He opened his eyes, and saw blue sky. Then a face appeared, directly over him. A black man, a different one, older. “You’ll live,” he said.
He had to ask. “Are you gods?”
“What? Yes, sure we are. Compared to you, anyhow.” The man did something to him, and it hurt. “Keep still,” he said. He was poking about inside the arrow hole with a bit of stick. He took it out; there was a tuft of wool wrapped round it, messy with blood and some yellow stuff. “Try not to move,” the black man said. “If it starts bleeding again, you’ll probably die.”
He couldn’t see much, but he was sure it was a different place. There were hills on the skyline that hadn’t been there before. “So you’re the champion archer,” the black man said.
“What? Oh, yes. Yes, that’s r
ight.”
“You won’t be drawing a bow for a while,” the black man said. His voice wasn’t like the surveyors’; Teucer understood the words, but it was a totally different way of saying them. “Eventually, maybe, but not for a while. You were lucky.”
Define luck. “Am I going to be all right?”
The black man shrugged. “Keep still and quiet,” he said. He unstoppered a small glass bottle, dabbed liquid on another tuft of wool and poked it into the arrow hole. It hurt badly, then stopped hurting altogether. “We aren’t going any further today.”
“Where’s Musen? My friend?”
The black man walked away. Teucer stared up at the sky, trying very hard not to move.
The black man came back a long time later, looked at him, nodded and went away again without saying anything. Later, when it was dark, Musen appeared over him. He leaned down, and his face blotted out the world.
“You let them shoot me,” Teucer said.
That made Musen angry, for some reason. “What else could I do?” he snapped. “For crying out loud. I couldn’t tell him you were one of us; you don’t even know—” He stopped, made an effort. “Then I’d have been in the shit, for vouching for you. You do see that, don’t you?”
“One of who?” Teucer said. “Who’s us?”
“You wouldn’t understand. Anyway, you’re all right. They’ve heard of you.”
He made it sound like Teucer had done it on purpose. “Who’s us?”
“Anyway,” Musen said, “it’s not so bad. This lot are Blueskins, Western regular heavy cavalry. The other bastards, at the river, they were auxiliaries, they’d have killed us without even thinking about it.” He stopped, breathing hard. “You do know, this is all your fault.”
Teucer opened his eyes wide. “Really.”
“Too bloody right. They didn’t just happen to come along. They were looking for us. Looking for you.”
Too much to take in. “So who told you this? Your new friends?”
“Listen,” Musen hissed. “We’re on bloody thin ice here, so don’t try and be clever.”
Something in the way he’d said it. “You mean, you are,” Teucer said. “They came looking for me because I’m the champion archer. How the hell did they know about that? Nobody knows outside Merebarton.”
That put Musen on his guard for some reason. “I don’t know, do I? Somebody must’ve said something back at Spire Cross.”
Teucer tried to shake his head, but every muscle and tendon in his upper body was horribly stiff and sore. “Don’t think so,” he said. “And I think these friends of yours were too busy killing everybody at Spire Cross to stop and ask, hey, do you know any really good archers round here? How did they know, Musen? Who told them?”
“Just shut your face and don’t rile them,” Musen said.
“If you’re a prisoner of war, how come you’ve got the run of the place, walking about talking to people? Shouldn’t you be tied up or something?”
“It’s complicated,” Musen said. “You wouldn’t understand. I’m not a spy, if that’s what—”
“Course you’re not,” Teucer said; “you don’t know anything. Musen, who taught you to read?”
“Piss off,” Musen said, and left him.
In the morning, the doctor came and examined him. “Not bad,” he said, prodding the huge black scab with his fingernail. “No sudden movements, you’ll be good. Amazing luck, the arrow didn’t hit anything important on the way through. Now we’ve just got blood poisoning to watch out for.”
After that, four cavalrymen in full armour came and put him on a horse. “I can manage,” he said, but they weren’t interested. One of them knelt down so Teucer could use his shoulder as a mounting block. “Any chance of a pair of boots?” he asked. They didn’t answer. They took the reins off his horse’s bridle and tied a leading rein to it instead.
Much to his relief, they walked rather than galloped. By now he’d completely lost any inkling of direction he might once have had, and the landscape was completely unfamiliar; just the moor, endless and featureless, though he guessed Musen would have an idea where they were. He rode with a horseman on either side of him, in silence. All the horsemen were short, and the horses were no bigger than large ponies, by back-home standards. They had the same short, bent-back bows the men at the river had used, carried unstrung in smart wooden cases, painted red.
Around midday they stopped and dismounted; there was a man kneeling for him to step down on to, and then they made him lie on the ground. There was the most delicious smell, which made him feel savagely hungry. The doctor came and nodded at him, and then they brought him some food. They spooned it into his mouth with a shiny bronze ladle. It was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted, and he had no idea what was in it.
Then back on the horse, another long ride. At nightfall, when they stopped, the first black man, presumably the officer, came to see him. A soldier fetched an ingenious folding chair for him to sit on, and a green cushion.
“You’re Teucer the archer,” he said.
Teucer nodded.
“We came all the way out here to find you.” He smiled. “You should’ve stayed in Mere Barton.”
Again, two words. The fact that this man knew the name of his village scared Teucer to death. “Not my idea,” he said.
The officer laughed. “I’m Captain Guifres,” he said. “You’re a feather in my cap. Get well. Don’t die.” He peered at Teucer’s shoulder. “Have you had anything to eat?”
“No.”
Captain Guifres stood up and clapped his hands. A soldier appeared from nowhere, and Guifres said something Teucer couldn’t hear. “They’ll be along in a minute. Sorry about that.”
“What are you going to do to me?”
Guifres laughed. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “You’re valuable. Collector’s item.” He was still smiling. “Don’t ask questions,” he said. “Understood?”
Teucer nodded.
“Good man. Tell me something,” he went on. “How big’s the aiming mark in your country?”
“What?”
“The aiming mark. The target. What you shoot at.”
“Archery?” Guifres nodded. “Two feet,” Teucer said.
“And the gold?”
“Ten inches.”
Guifres seemed impressed. “Imperial standard. And you hit ten inner golds in ten shots at a hundred yards.”
“Yes.”
“With a hundred-pound bow.”
“Well, yes. That’s what we use.”
Guifres stood up. “And the others from where you come from. They can shoot well, too?”
“Pretty well.”
“Just as well we killed them all, then. Take it easy, now.”
He started to walk away. Don’t ask questions, he’d said. “Captain.”
Guifres stopped. “Yes?”
“Why didn’t you kill my friend?”
Guifres turned a little and grinned at him. “Ask him that,” he said, and walked away, and a soldier came and folded up the chair.
Riding was better than walking, even with a hole in his shoulder. He learned to forget about his body from the waist down – it was part of the saddle, nothing to do with him – and made an effort to keep his back straight. One of the cavalrymen even complimented him on his riding style; he had a good seat, whatever that meant. The Blueskins rode as though they’d been grafted on to their horses, like you do with apple trees, so he felt vaguely smug. They were polite and kind to him, on the rare occasions when they spoke to him. He didn’t know which one of them had shot him, and decided not to ask.
Whenever they dismounted, the doctor would look at him, occasionally prod the scab – “Does that hurt?” “Yes” “Good, that’s very good” – and Captain Guifres made a point of talking to him once a day, immediately after the evening meal. One time Teucer asked, “If you were looking for me, why did you shoot me and leave me for dead?” Guifres didn’t mind the question. He opened the fl
at leather satchel that was always looped round his neck, and took out a little scrap of paper.
“Sorry,” Teucer said, “I can’t read.”
Guifres grinned. “It says, he has red hair.”
“Oh.”
“We’d been given a description of you,” Guifres went on, “but it said, look for a very tall, big man with blue eyes, nineteen years old, and that applied to practically all your lot we came across, dead or alive. When I first saw you, no offence, I thought you were younger than nineteen, so it couldn’t be you. A courier rode eighty miles in a day to bring me this bit of paper, and by the time we got it we were on our way back. Soon as I read it, I knew it had to be you we’d shot. Luckily for us both, you were still alive.”
Teucer frowned. “Why am I so important?”
Guifres shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Apparently, I don’t need to know the reason. All I was told was, bring him in alive or don’t bother coming back. Somebody wants you for something.”
“Why did you spare my friend?”
“You keep asking me that.”
The next day, he asked, “What sort of thing do you think someone would want me for?”
“Ah.” Guifres smiled. “Actually, I’ve been giving that a certain amount of thought myself. I’ve more or less narrowed it down to three possibilities: a template, a specimen, or a gift for the man who has everything. I’m just guessing, though.” He paused, and looked at Teucer with his head slightly on one side. “Would you like to learn how to read?”
Teucer felt as though he’d just walked into a low branch he hadn’t known was there. “Yes,” he said, “very much. Why?”
“I’ll teach you, if you want.”
“Thank you. Why?”
Guifres shrugged. “We’ve got a long way still to go. Anything to pass the time.”
Which wasn’t a credible answer. Still. “Can we start now?”
“Why not?” Guifres opened his satchel and took out a long, thin, flat rectangle of wood. It was coated on both sides with beeswax, and there was a hole drilled down into it to hold a nail. With the nail, Juifrez scratched a symbol in the wax. “Right, then,” he said. “This is Amma.”
It looked like a wall with two poles leaning against it. “Amma.”
