by K. J. Parker
At that point, the door opened. Through it came another soldier of the type he’d decided were the enemy; he was wearing the same kind of mailshirt and holding the same kind of halberd. The pattern repeated; clarity, then complication. It was like some kind of board game.
‘Bloody hell,’ the soldier said. ‘I thought it was you.’
Poldarn hadn’t been expecting that; he’d been anticipating something straightforward and easy to deal with, such as a halberd blade shoved in his face. ‘You know me?’ he asked.
‘What? It’s me, you idiot, Sergeant Lovick. You been getting bashed on the head a lot lately or something? Quick,’ he went on, before Poldarn had a chance to reply, ‘straight out the door behind me, takes you across the yard to the stables, you can get a horse and clear out. I never saw you. Right?’
‘But just a . . .’
‘I said quick. Before you get us both killed.’
‘What you said just now,’ Poldarn protested. ‘About getting bashed on the head. That’s what happened, I can’t remember anything. Can you—?’
Sergeant Lovick (whoever the hell he was) scowled horribly at him. ‘Pack it in, will you? Haven’t got time for your stupid jokes right now. Look, if anybody comes then so help me, I’ll have to kill you. Go on, clear off, now.’
Poldarn could feel anger about to explode inside his head; there wasn’t much he could do about it, even though he knew how much it could complicate matters. ‘No,’ he shouted. ‘Not till you tell me.’
‘I said, I haven’t got time . . .’ The man was getting angry too. ‘Bloody hell, chief, can’t you take anything seriously?’
Chief? Why couldn’t he have used my name instead? Thoughtless, inconsiderate bastard. ‘I’m not joking, you idiot. Look, can’t you at least tell me my name? Do that, I promise I’ll go. Word of honour.’
Before Sergeant Lovick could say anything the door behind him opened; another soldier came in, saw Poldarn; his face instantly filled with anger. ‘It’s all right,’ Lovick said loudly, not looking round, ‘I’ve got him, he’s mine. You get back and tell them . . .’
‘Hell as like,’ the newcomer said. ‘Kill the bugger now, have done with it.’
Lovick shook his head. ‘Our orders were . . .’ he began.
‘Screw the orders,’ the other man said, taking two steps forward, his halberd at guard. ‘Not worth the risk. You try and take this bastard alive, he’ll do us both before we can get him across the yard. Oh come on, man, don’t be so bloody pathetic.’
Lovick’s face didn’t change, but suddenly he was two strides closer and the move he was making with his halberd was either a killing thrust to the face or a feint to mask an equally lethal cut to the right temple. More choices.
Poldarn decided to cheat by circumventing both possibilities. He took a standing jump backwards, which gave him a yard of clear space, then threw himself to the right, drawing the sergeant into a clubbing stroke with the butt of the halberd. The sergeant dutifully obliged, and in the fraction of a second before the steel butt-shoe crunched into the bone of his skull, he grabbed the wooden shaft and pulled hard left, drawing the beard of the cutting edge deep into the web of Lovick’s right hand. As anticipated, the shock and pain were enough to make him lose his grip, and as soon as Poldarn had control of the weapon he reversed the pull into a brisk upward thrust. He misjudged it a little because Lovick flinched, and instead of driving the point into his throat he caught him square in the left eye; just as good, if not better. Before the dead man could fall backwards he pushed again, throwing the body the way a builder’s labourer throws a shovelful of dirt. The other soldier had to step to his right to avoid it, and in doing so walked into a thrust to the groin, which he avoided just in time. It didn’t do him much good, since it was only a feint; the killing blow hit him in the ear, and the shock of steel bursting through layers of bone and membrane jarred down the halberd shaft into Poldarn’s arm, wrenching a muscle and making him grunt with pain.
From complicated back to simple in a few easy moves. He let the dead man’s own weight draw him off the halberd spike, then laid the weapon across the table and rubbed his forearm where he’d hurt it. Just my luck, he thought; it didn’t take much imagination to see how, if there was going to be more of this sort of thing, a pulled muscle or a sprain or a cramp, anything that detracted from the perfection of these instinctive plays he somehow knew how to make, could easily be enough to kill him. The anger that had been building up before the fight, when Lovick wouldn’t answer him, tell him the one word he needed to know (and he could have said it so easily, it wouldn’t have cost him anything; damn it, quite likely it would’ve saved his life) – all that anger was still there but directed now against these two selfish, malicious men who’d kept knowledge from him and damaged his right arm when he needed it most. It only made it worse that one of them had apparently been a friend.
The door was still open. He stopped and listened before he looked through it. There didn’t seem to be anybody about. He picked up the halberd, then put it back; even though he was having to work out so much from first principles, he was fairly sure that wandering around the courtyard of a busy inn with a bloodstained halberd in his hands wasn’t a good idea. Besides, he’d managed without quite well so far, and whenever he’d needed a weapon there had always been someone on hand to give him one.
It was quite dark outside by this time, although there were lanterns on sconces all round the yard. He stood for a moment outside the door – yet another choice: go to the dormitory or the refectory and try to find Copis, or do what Lovick had advised, head for the stables, or compromise and make for the coach-house, to retrieve the cart or, at the very least, the big lump of fused gold that was bound to come in useful sooner or later . . . He decided on the compromise, mostly because the coach-house door was directly opposite, only a few seconds away. Of course, there was a fair chance of finding more soldiers there, waiting for him, but that was true of the whole inn, and quite possibly the whole world. Simplify: to the coach-house.
The coach-house was empty; no grooms and no soldiers. And no cart. That made him angry, but it wasn’t unexpected, by any means; in fact, he’d resolved on a contingency plan before he even pushed open the door. This consisted of taking the back way out of the coach-house, which (if he was remembering straight) would take him into a little narrow alley that led to the hay store, which had its own direct access to the stables. Once he’d got a horse and was out into the main courtyard, the likeliest problem would be if the soldiers, the enemy, had thought to close the main gate – in which case he’d have to forget about the horse and shin over the wall somewhere. He tried to recall a suitable point for climbing over while he was saddling up the sturdy grey gelding he’d chosen, and he’d just brought to mind an ideally suitable wicket gate in the back wall of the tower courtyard as he rode through the open main gate, thereby rendering all his diligence and foresight redundant. Always the way, he thought resentfully. Just when you’ve managed to get all eventualities covered, along comes a stroke of good luck, and it’s all been for nothing.
The streets were disconcertingly quiet, which made him wonder whether there was some kind of curfew in Sansory. The basic premise he’d founded his careful strategy on was that once he was outside the Charity and Diligence he’d be able to melt away into a crowd within seconds and become invisible; as it was, the sound of his stolen horse’s hooves on the cobbles struck him as being probably the loudest noise ever made since the creation of the world.
Another choice: abandon the horse and make his way slowly but rather more unobtrusively to the nearest gate, or rely on speed and to hell with the racket. He didn’t need to be told that he had no way of making an intelligent decision without knowing one vital fact, namely whether the city gates were shut at night, and if so, when.
Common sense, he thought. Why bother having gates at all if you don’t close them at night? Furthermore, it’d be shameful to make the same mistake twice and fail to look at
the problems that lay beyond the accomplishment of his immediate objective, getting out of town. On foot, on the north road or west along the riverbank, he’d be exposed and vulnerable; with a horse, at least he stood a chance of outrunning anybody who might be after him. If he could find somewhere quiet to sit still and wait till morning, he wouldn’t have to give up the horse, but unless the enemy were stupid or in a hurry, wouldn’t they think to watch the gates? Irrelevant, of course, if the gates were shut already. Complications were springing up all around him, snagging him like bindweed growing up through ivy. As for all the implications of what had happened to him that day, he really didn’t want to think about them.
On his left he noticed something that looked highly promising: an empty coach-house, its doors open just wide enough to allow him to ride through without scraping his knees. He decided to accept it as an omen or portent advising him to lie low and wait for morning, which suited him fine. He was, he realised, exhausted.
He unsaddled the horse and tied it to a ring conveniently set in the wall, then closed the door and used a couple of lengths of wood he found on the floor to wedge it shut. It wasn’t completely dark inside; a little moonlight seeped in through the gaps in the roof where slates were missing, and he was able to move about by judging the textures of shadows. His chores finished, he sat up against the far wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, and closed his eyes.
Probably he was far more tired than he thought, because the next thing he saw was a waterwheel towering above him, triangles of blue sky blurred in the gaps of the turning frame. Behind it was a high brown wall built of large, carefully shaped blocks of sandstone, at whose foot the mill-leat lapped and splashed through a dense filter of brambles, weeds and rushes. Beside the wheel grew a tall, thin pear tree, in whose leafless branches, not surprisingly, perched two crows. One of them had a stick in its beak – just a plain, ordinary twig. The other gripped a gold ring, but it was having trouble with it, and after a few failed attempts to get it under control it let the thing fall into the thick grass at the foot of the tree.
Ah, he thought, symbolism. But I like this dream more than the last one, and the one before. More homely. Cosier.
Judging by the position of the sun it was mid-afternoon, while the yellow quality of the light, the bare branches and the slight but palpable nip in the air suggested late autumn. General Cronan sat up and looked for a distant line of hills obscured by mist (or low cloud, or heat-haze); instead he saw trees all around him, covering dramatic scarps and slopes on either side of the river from which the mill-leat had been carefully drawn off. At the junction of river and leat there was an extremely impressive dam and lock – he hadn’t a clue how it worked, but it involved two leadscrews with painted iron turn-wheels and a bunch of heavy-toothed cogs obscured by a generous smearing of thick black grease. A raft of sodden brown and red leaves floated on the still water of the dam pool, supporting his earlier observations about the time of year.
He walked over to the pool and looked at his reflection. (Him again, he thought, as the crows resentfully spread their wings and flapped out of the pear tree, and then he remembered that last time he was the young, stupid nobleman called Tazencius who’d tried to kill the man whose face he could see in the water.) He found the cut, which started an inch or so above the hairline and ran sideways to just over his left ear; not so bad after all, in spite of the alarming quantity of blood. Apparently he’d been wrong about that particular helmet; it had done a pretty good job after all.
A single drop of blood trickled down over his eyebrow and fell into the water, dissolving into a small, veined brown cloud. Absently he wiped away the rest of it from his forehead with the base of his thumb, and dismissed the injury to a very low place in his priorities ladder. Instead, he turned his mind to the more important issues: the battle, the fate of the empire, the future of civilisation as he knew it, all of which were going on in that wood over there, without him to keep an eye on them. That was bad.
But just for once he didn’t want to go back and get on with the job. It came to something when a desperate hand-to-hand fight with a larger, stronger, younger enemy, from which he’d barely escaped with his life, was nothing more than an annoying distraction from his work, an aggravating and inconvenient waste of time . . . Surely they could spare him for just a quarter of an hour, until he’d had a chance to have a rest and a drink of water, and maybe even stop bleeding.
He smiled; not likely. He turned to face the wood, trying to remember the way he’d come (he hadn’t been paying too much attention, on account of being chased by the enemy; a poor excuse, not much better then the dog ate my homework, but the best he could do at the moment), and noticed a flattened patch in the random hedge of briars, where he’d burst through on his way out. Going back in that way in cold blood wasn’t an inviting prospect, but he knew his own sense of direction too well to trust it. If he didn’t retrace his steps exactly, he’d end up hopelessly lost. Standing in front of a divine tribunal and explaining to the immortal gods that he hadn’t been there to save the empire because he’d taken a wrong turning in a wood was an even less appealing thought than the brambles.
He retrieved his sword, only to find that the blade was hopelessly notched about four inches down from the point, useless; he left it where it was, found the body of his enemy and nervously rolled it over with his foot. Beyond question the man was dead; he was practically in two pieces, so that if by some horrible miracle he did get up again, he’d fall apart like a badly built lean-to. Nevertheless he was the enemy, and if he could cause trouble, he would – for example, by having dropped or thrown his sword where it couldn’t be found when it was needed.
After a frustrating search, Cronan eventually found it a good five yards away in the middle of a tall and awkward bed of nettles. He managed to dislodge it with the toe of his boot, wasting valuable time as he did so, and bent down to pick it up. It was the first time he’d handled one of these semi-mythical objects, the dreaded raider backsabres. He’d been expecting it to be wrist-breakingly heavy, but it wasn’t; if anything, it felt lighter and livelier in the hand than his own government-pattern sword, the kind he’d drilled with every day for twenty years. That surprised him, and he took a moment to look at it critically and objectively, as a piece of equipment rather than as an icon of the looming apocalypse.
It was as long as his arm, from the point of his shoulder to the tip of his outstretched middle finger, though nearly a third of that length was the two-handed grip, protected by the spectacular inward-curving horns on the blade side that swept out above and below the hand to form the pommel and hand-guard. The blade itself curved sharply forward and down, making the sword look as if it was the wrong way up, until it flicked back up again a finger’s length from the point to form a swan’s beak. Underneath the edge flared out, widening as it followed the inward curve, ending in a thin, flat cutting section nearly a palm’s breath across, at which point it followed the upwards sweep of the topside, giving the blade the appearance of a dolphin leaping. Just below the spine of the blade was a broad, shallow fuller that followed the profile of the curve, lightening it without sacrificing strength and throwing the centre of percussion forward into the pit of the hook. As a practitioner of the trade of cutting human tissue, Cronan could see that it was, quite simply, the most perfect instrument for shearing through flesh and bone ever made, incapable of development or improvement, since any change to the design must inevitably detract from its perfection. It was, accordingly, a deeply disturbing object, being proof that the people who made it weren’t just very tall, very strong and very ferocious, all attributes that could be dealt with quite easily using existing procedures and techniques; they were also intelligent, perceptive and thorough. Now that was something to worry about.
In the short term, however, he now had something to fight with, if he had to, not to mention an unexpected but valuable ally in his forthcoming battle with the brambles; and the rest had done him good, as well. A
ll he had to do now was find out where the war had got to, and he’d be right back on schedule.
Back inside the wood it was dark, wet and complicated. For a while he made good progress in spite of everything, stepping high over tangles of briar, crashing sideways through brush-wood and the dead branches of fallen trees, ducking under swiping shoots of bramble like a man in a swordfight. The further he went, however, the less familiar it looked, until he was forced to acknowledge that, in spite of his good intentions, he’d managed to come the wrong way after all, and every brave, energetic step he took was taking him further away from where he wanted to be. He stopped and relaxed, noticing for the first time how heavy and cramped his legs had become, and looked around for some point of reference.
But Cronan was from Thurm province, where trees came in by road with their branches already neatly trimmed away; he’d never learned to tell them apart. So he tried to remember details of how he’d got to the clearing with the watermill. He recalled that at one point the ground was boggy and soft under the leaf-mould; here it was firm and damp rather than sodden wet. Boggy ground suggested the presence of a stream, or at least a valley or fold between two ridges; here, the ground was level, although rising in a gentle slope away from him. Pretty well everything, in fact, was different, as if he’d wandered out of one story and into another without noticing the transition. He hadn’t a clue where he was, or which way was north, or how far off the right track he’d come, and all this time, presumably, the war and history were going on without him, disasters (which would be his fault for ever) could be happening only a hundred yards or so away to his left, or his right, and he wasn’t there to take charge or responsibility. He felt as if a god had picked him up and put him away in a box, and for the first time in a long time, General Cronan felt afraid.
