by K. J. Parker
Accordingly, he was as surprised as he was pleased when, about three hours after sunrise, he walked out of a thick curtain of holly and found himself standing on the edge of a broad rutted road. It wasn't where he'd expected to find himself, needless to say, since he'd been heading for the colliers' camp. But there was only one road that this could possibly be: the main post road from Falcata to Dui Chirra. Somehow he'd contrived to cut a day's march off his journey.
Amazing, Poldarn thought. I really should get lost more often.
By now, he had the sun to steer by, so he didn't hesitate before turning left, due west, up a gently rising slope. There were no fresh footprints or wheel tracks in the mud, and the ruts were full of dirty brown water, knee-deep. Obviously not the busiest road in the Empire, and that was reassuring; the destroyers of Falcata hadn't come this way, and he wasn't likely to catch them up round the next bend.
That evening, after a thoroughly exhausting day of picking his way between the ruts, he was eventually forced off the road by a shower of heavy rain, which drove him into the shelter of the trees. He didn't want to lose any time, since there was no knowing if Velzen and the soldiers were on his trail or how far behind they were, but blundering into a pothole in the dark and damaging himself would slow him up even more than stopping for a few hours. He found another patch of dense, scrubby holly and crawled into it to shelter from the rain, not that he could get any wetter than he was already. The thought of his dry shack inside the foundry stockade seemed almost unbearably luxurious. All he had to do was get to Dui Chirra and he'd practically be in paradise, because what more could anybody possibly want out of life than food, a change of clothes and a warm fire?
Poldarn must have fallen asleep; it was light again, though the rain was still falling as briskly as it had been when he'd closed his eyes. But there was another sound beside the patter of falling water on leaves and branches: the creak of wheels and the spattering noise of hooves in mud. Cautiously he peered through the holly branches and saw a small cart with an oiled-leather canopy.
Joy. Whoever they were, they must be going to Dui Chirra, or at least passing by it; and they'd have to have hearts of stone to refuse him a lift. He pushed out through the holly, hardly noticing the scatches on his face and hands, and charged across to meet the cart. Through the curtain of rain he could just make out two faces under the canopy.
'Hey,' he shouted, 'wait up. Are you going to Dui Chirra?'
'Yes,' someone called back. 'Want a lift?'
'You bet,' Poldarn yelled, splashing through the mud at a run. The cart stopped, and he hauled himself up onto the box as the two people sitting there budged up to give him room. The driver was a woman, though he couldn't see her face past the shoulder of the man next to her who was all muffled up in a hooded coat and a blanket. 'Thanks,' he added, as he sat down.
'No problem.' The man turned his face towards him, and grinned. 'You've saved us the job of looking for you. Hello, Ciartan.'
Before he could move, the man leaned forward and grabbed his collar. 'It is you, isn't it?' he said. 'Yes, thought so. Well, this is a happy coincidence.'
Looking at the man's face was like looking at his own reflection: the same white, melted, hairless skin. 'Gain,' Poldarn said.
'Like I said,' replied Gain Aciava, 'we were just on our way to look for you. What're you doing out of the camp? You aren't supposed to leave.'
Gain let go of Poldarn's collar. 'I ran away,' Poldarn replied. 'But then I sort of got into trouble, so I'm heading back. But what're you doing here? They said you were arrested by soldiers.'
'That's right.' Gain was smiling. 'Poor buggers,' he said. 'They're dead now, and it wasn't even their mistake. Just unlucky.'
'I don't understand,' Poldarn said. 'What happened?'
'They arrested the wrong man,' Gain said. 'It was you they were after; but that clown Muno gave them me instead. He'll say it was just a case of mistaken identity, but my guess is he was trying to save your life, repaying the family debt. His nephew,' Gain explained, as Poldarn stared at him blankly. 'One good turn deserving another, and all that. But anyway, it's all been sorted out now, and here we are. Good to see you again.'
No, it isn't, Poldarn thought; and then the driver reached up with her left hand and pushed aside the cowl of her hood, so that he could see her face. 'Hello, Ciartan,' she said.
For a moment he couldn't decide what to do. If he tried to jump off the cart, Gain would grab hold of him, and there'd be a fight; he suddenly remembered that he'd left the halberd behind in the holly bushes, not that it'd have done him any good at such close quarters. Besides, he had no idea whether he wanted to escape or not-it was precisely the sort of useful knowledge that he'd been having to do without ever since he'd woken up in the mud beside the Bohec river three years ago.
He took a deep breath and let it go slowly. At the most fundamental level, it was a choice between walking in the rain or riding in a covered cart. No contest.
'Hello, Copis,' he replied.
Chapter Thirteen
'You're getting better,' she said. 'The last two times I've been driving in a cart with a man and met you on the road, you've killed him. And don't call me Copis,' she added. 'My name's Xipho-or had you forgotten?'
'You see,' Gain interrupted, before he could reply, 'she hasn't changed a bit, even after all these years. Next she'll be saying she won't help you with your homework.'
'Shut up, Gain,' Copis said dismissively, like a mother automatically rebuking a difficult child. 'Well,' she went on, 'I'd like to say you're looking good, but that'd be lying. You look ghastly, just like the idiot boy here. Somebody should've told you two not to play with fire.'
It was a moment before Poldarn managed to figure out what she was talking about. She went on: 'It's just as well Gain's with me, I honestly don't think I'd have recognised you; except, of course, I knew I was looking for a man with a horribly burned face. And your voice is the same. I guess I'd know it anywhere. But what the hell are you doing out here? You never did have any consideration. All the trouble we've been to, just so we'd meet you at Dui Chirra, and you weren't even bloody well there.'
So that was it, the question answered. Gain had been telling the truth. Poldarn felt as though he'd walked across a desert, just to find himself back where he'd started from. 'I don't understand,' he said.
For some reason, they both found that highly amusing. 'It's all right,' Gain said, 'you aren't supposed to. And besides, your sensibilities are probably the least important thing in the whole world right now. Isn't that right, Xipho?'
'Yes.' She took one hand off the reins to wipe rainwater out of her eyes. 'A bit like old times, really; except that this time we're the ones who know what's going on, and you aren't. Shall we tell him, Gain, or would it be more fun to let him sweat for a while?'
'Probably,' Gain replied. 'But remember who we've got here-the most slippery boy in the whole school. Got to do something to keep him from running away. Either we bash him over the head and tie him up, or we tell him a story. What do you reckon?'
'Tell him the story,' Copis replied. 'I haven't got the energy to play games.'
While they were talking, Poldarn was figuring out the chances of getting away: a sitting jump off the box into the mud, followed by a frantic sprint for the cover of the trees. If only he could get a few yards into the forest, he felt sure he could lose them, but in order to get that far he'd have to be faster, cleverer for two whole seconds, maybe even three. It'd be like trying to outdraw two sword-monks simultaneously. Might as well try to escape drowning in a river by strangling it with his bare hands.
He turned and looked Gain Aciava in the eye. 'All that stuff you told me,' he said. 'Was it true?'
Gain grinned. 'Would I lie to you? I never have yet. And I've known you since you were seventeen.'
'I've lied to you a lot,' Copis put in. 'But Gain's not like me. Painfully straightforward. Did he tell you what he's been doing for a living lately? Selling false teeth?'
Poldarn looked at both of them. He was quick, he had reflexes that could only be explained by reference to religion, fast and accurate enough to knock a flying crow out of the air with a stone. But not quick enough. 'Who are you?' he asked. 'And why were you looking for me?'
In the end, it was a straightforward race: a quarter-mile dash through the mud, carts on one side, horsemen on the other. The carts won, by a whisker; all but two of them made it in through the gate before Brigadier Muno's outriders could intercept them. The two stragglers were cut off only yards from the stockade, but the defenders had no choice but to slam the gates in their faces, whereupon the riders surged round them like the incoming tide.
Fine, Monach said to himself, as he watched from the picket tower, it'll have to be a siege, then. I've never done a siege before, it'll be a new experience for me.
At least he was off to a good start, thanks to some appallingly bad judgement on the part of the supply-team drivers, who hadn't realised that Muno's people were, like themselves, government troops. The first they'd known of their mistake was when they'd thundered in through the gates and noticed that the armed men cheering them on and grinning were a bit too scruffy for regular soldiers. Then the gates swept shut, and the garrison men were jumping up on the carts, grabbing the drivers, twisting their arms behind their backs, and it was too late to get away. Monach couldn't help feeling just a little bit sorry for them.
And grateful, too; if they hadn't driven that last couple of miles with breathtaking skill and desperate courage, any further resistance on his part would've been out of the question. Even now, he only had enough supplies to last three weeks, four at the very most; but he had a shrewd suspicion that Muno was probably even worse off in that respect than he was. In Tulice in the wet season, a loaf in the stores was worth a bushel in a supply depot fifty miles away down swamped and flooded roads. Back in sixth grade, they'd been taught a reliable mathematical formula for calculating the probabilities of success in a siege. Assuming he'd remembered it correctly and his data was accurate, the odds were fifty-six to forty-four in his favour; so that was all right The bad thing about sieges, Monach rapidly discovered, was the overwhelming amount of administration they entailed. Guard shifts, rations, working parties to secure the defences; officers of the day, officers in charge of supply, officers reporting to other officers reporting to him. Proper soldiers, of course, were trained for this sort of thing and took it in their stride; but he wasn't a proper soldier, he was a sword-monk, and all he really knew about was pulling a sword out of a scabbard. If he'd wanted to be a clerk, he'd have stayed home and gone into the dried-fish business.
Fortunately, Monach soon discovered, he had an ally. Exactly how Spenno the pattern-maker had come to hate the government so much, he wasn't quite sure, though as far as he could tell it was mostly to do with the titanic clash of personalities between himself and the admittedly insufferable Galand Dev. In any event, Spenno was if anything even more determined than he was that Brigadier Muno shouldn't recapture the Dui Chirra foundry; and whereas Monach was a mere warlord, Spenno was a foreman-the same degree of difference, he soon realised, as between cast iron and tempered steel. From the moment when Monach found the courage to abdicate responsibility for the defence of Dui Chirra and let Spenno get on with it, everything seemed to flow as smoothly as a coil of tangled rope teased patiently apart by an expert. Within the hour, teams of efficient workers (foundrymen, Monach couldn't help noticing, rather than his somewhat temperamental and unreliable fellow warriors) were stacking flour barrels, carrying planks of wood and buckets of nails, and hauling carts and wheelbarrows through the standing pools of rainwater in the yard. He had no idea what they were doing; but they did, which was all that mattered. Shaking his head, he went back up the picket tower, to watch the antlike scurrying and listen to the distant but clearly audible sound of Spenno's fluent, musical swearing.
On the other side of the stockade, Monach observed with great pleasure, things didn't seem to be going nearly as well. Brigadier Muno-he recognised him at once by his fine full-length blue cloak-stood in the centre of a buzzing cloud of staff officers, like an azure cow-pat surrounded by flies; but not much work seemed to be getting done. His soldiers were either leaning on their spears or sitting on their shields in the mud, not even bothering to try and find shelter from the pelting rain. Best of all, he had a clear view of Muno's store-tents. Unless he'd arranged for a substantial supply train to follow on after him, Muno was only a few days away from starvation-and even if a hundred heavy wagons laden with flour and biscuits were already on their way, their chances of getting through were poor and getting worse with every gallon of water that fell out of the sky. Another thing Muno seemed to have forgotten in his haste to get underway was a sufficiency of tents. Monach looked up at the thick banks of iron-grey clouds piling in from the south and, for the first time he could remember, thanked the gods for rain: so much deadlier, he couldn't help thinking, than a monk's sword, or even a backsabre.
It was still slashing down when a small group of riders squelched up to the gates, one of them holding a stick from which drooped a thoroughly sodden white flag. Muno, it transpired, was prepared to negotiate, in the interests of avoiding unnecessary bloodshed. Big of him, Monach thought cheerfully, and gave the order for them to be allowed in. It was Spenno, clearly far crueller and more adept at mental warfare than he was, who had them shown into the warm, dry charcoal store and given hot soup and dry clothes.
That night, once the heralds had reluctantly gone home to their sodden blankets and two slices of wet bread, Spenno banked up the drawing-office fire with charcoal and poured Monach a mug of beer. 'I remember doing sieges in fourth-grade Tactics,' he said, 'but I never thought it'd be like this. Cosy,' he added, with a grin.
Monach frowned. 'Let's hope Brigadier Muno sees the funny side as much as we do,' he replied. 'I hate to say this, but my men aren't soldiers. If they decide to attack, we haven't got a clue how to go about defending a fortified position.'
'We know that,' Spenno replied. 'He doesn't. Don't get me wrong,' he added. 'Muno's a good soldier. Which means cautious. Which means sitting out there in the mud till his food runs out, then going away.'
Monach nodded. 'Sure,' he said, 'this time. But we've got nowhere else to go. What's going to happen when it stops raining, and he comes back? It was amazing luck, the supply train showing up when it did, but there won't be any more carts coming down the road from now on.'
Spenno drank his beer and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. 'He'll come back, all right,' he said. 'It's when he comes back that's important. They way I've got it figured, it'll be three days before he packs up and leaves then a week to get supplies. He'll be doing really well if he's back again inside of a fortnight. We've got food for three weeks.'
Monach got the feeling he was missing the point. 'Wonderful,' he said. 'So he comes back, we sit here for a week and then surrender. By which time-'
But Spenno was shaking his head. 'Eight days,' he said. 'That's all I need.'
'Oh.' Suddenly, Monach realised what Spenno was talking about.
'Maybe even less,' Spenno went on. 'Drilling out the bore's going quicker than I thought, and we've made a few mods to the rig that ought to save a whole lot of time when we come to do the next batch. Sawing off the sprues, too, I reckon we can halve the time on that. And making the carriages-well, I was reckoning on having to build limbers, for hauling the bloody things cross-country. Fixed carriages, for shooting down from the watchtowers, much easier. By the time old Muno comes back again, we'll have a welcome for him he'll never forget.'
I wouldn't go that far, Monach said to himself: it's amazing what you can forget if you really set your mind to it. 'You're serious, aren't you?' he said. 'You think we can drive off a full battalion of regular Imperial troops with these tubular-bell things.'
Spenno looked hurt. 'And you call yourself a man of the cloth,' he said. 'You've got no bloody faith.' He shook his head. '
Fine visionary leader you turned out to be. I've been asking around,' he added slyly. 'This is all your idea, this Brotherhood of Light or whatever it's called.'
Monach sighed, as a raindrop filtered through a tiny hole in the roof and fell on the back of his hand. 'Hardly,' he said. 'Oh sure, I'm the Mad Monk. After Deymeson got destroyed-well, actually, I was laid up for months after that, I got in a fight-'
Spenno nodded. 'I know,' he said. 'With Feron Amathy. You wanted to kill him or something like that.'
Monach shook his head. 'Not exactly, no,' he said. 'The man I was sent to kill was General Cronan; Father Tutor reckoned it was a good idea, but he died before he could tell me why. Still, that was no reason not to obey orders. I failed, of course.'
'But he died anyway.'
'People die,' Monach replied, 'even without me killing them. He was caught by the raiders. I was there at the time. But that's beside the point. After Deymeson was trashed and once I was back on my feet again-no, I'm skipping ahead.' He paused. 'Are you sure you want to hear this? It's a long story.'
'Nothing better to do,' Spenno replied equably.
'Thank you so much.' Monach looked away; the expression on Spenno's face was vaguely disconcerting. 'Anyhow, after the battle when the raiders got a bloody nose, I was sort of left behind, I was nobody's business but my own; which would've been fine except I had four broken ribs and a whole lot of other injuries, and I really thought I'd had it that time. But then someone found me, someone I was at school with-'
