by K. J. Parker
They were all still there, of course. Seven pairs of needle-sharp eyes, pressing on him like a headache, and they showed absolutely no sign of moving so long as he was there. So he stood up, wincing slightly at the touch of very wet, cold cloth against his skin. ‘Do you think you could tell me who’s in charge here?’ he said.
‘You what?’
Something under the table was sniffing his leg, pressing a cold, wet nose against his ankle. He really didn’t want to know what it was. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘like a town council, parish board, levy and muster committee, burial club – anything like that,’ he added, trying not to sound as wretched as he felt. ‘I’ve got some questions to ask, and I need to know who to see.’
The old woman appeared to have lost the power of speech. ‘Nothing like that here,’ My Daughter Melja said eventually. ‘No call for it in these parts. Bloody fuss,’ she added, dismissing all hierarchies everywhere with a rather magnificent hint of pride. ‘What kind of questions?’ she added, her eyebrows crowding together.
‘Nothing terrible,’ he replied, smiling weakly. ‘I’m not the government or anything. Truth is,’ he ground on, feeling like a man pouring wine into the sand, ‘I’m a scholar.’
‘A what?’ the old woman interrupted.
‘A scholar. I like to learn things about – well, things. Religion,’ he added quickly, before any of them could ask What things? ‘Not that I’m a priest or anything. I’m just interested. ’
There was a long silence; then the old woman shook her head, as if wondering sadly how it had come to this, and said that maybe he should go over to the old man’s place, because he knew all manner of interesting stuff. The edge she put on the word interesting would probably have cut silk in its own weight.
‘Thank you,’ the brother said. ‘Which old man would that be?’
The old woman pursed her lips; then she reached out sideways and grabbed the eight-year-old boy. ‘Ebit’ll show you the way,’ she said. ‘And then he’ll come straight back, or I’ll clip his ear so it’ll make his head spin.’ The boy muttered something and took a short, nervous step forward. ‘Straight back, mind,’ the old woman added.
Ebit led him down and across the street. They were all still there, under their porches and up in their lofts. Absolutely nothing whatsoever better to do, he guessed. Ebit stopped outside a plank door that was grey with age where it wasn’t green with mould, and lifted the latch. ‘In there,’ he said, as if he was feeding a condemned man to the timber wolves at Torcea Fair.
‘Thank you,’ the brother answered, ducking his head as he walked in.
It was almost completely dark inside, apart from a faint orange glow from the last embers of a fire. He found a table by walking into it, and leaned his hands on the rough-sawn top. No sign of an old man, or sound of breathing apart from his own. Rustic humour? Or had the old boy died and nobody had noticed yet? In support of the latter theory was the extremely strong smell; though nauseating, however, it wasn’t quite the odour of decaying flesh. Or at least, not exclusively.
‘Over here,’ said a voice in the shadows. ‘By the fire.’
‘Ah,’ the brother said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see you there. My name’s—’
‘Monach.’ It was a very dry, thin voice, tenuous as the glow of the dying coals, but it wasn’t a rube voice. The brother was very good at accents, but this was one he couldn’t begin to place.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘How did you know my name?’
The voice laughed. ‘Lefit Melja’s eldest girl was listening under the window when you told her mother,’ it said. ‘She guessed they’d send you over here when they’d taken some money from you. So you’re the priest, are you?’
Shrewd, too; as if it had experience in interrogation. ‘Well,’ Monach replied, ‘sort of. Actually, I’m not a priest – not ordained or anything. I’m more of an amateur scholar, a bit of a dilettante really.’
Slight pause. ‘It’s all right,’ the voice said, ‘I know what the words mean, I’m just thinking about it.’ Thin laugh; essence of laughter, strained and purged so many times that all the flavour had been lost. ‘I’ve passed your test, but you haven’t passed mine, or at least not yet. It takes me so long to think things through these days.’
Monach shifted uneasily. ‘What’s to think through?’ he said. ‘I haven’t even told you what I’m here for yet.’
‘Don’t need to,’ the voice replied gently. ‘I ask myself, what’s a priest – I’m sorry, what’s a scholar doing in Cric, assuming he’s not hopelessly lost on the road? It’s got to be something to do with the god in the cart. And if it’s something to do with that, then yes, I suppose you could be a gentleman scholar, or you could be a priest; and there’s all sorts of different kinds of religious, so if you’re a priest, what sort are you?’ A soft, dry chuckle. ‘Twenty years ago I’d have had the answers before you were through the door; not now, though. So suppose you help me along and tell me the answer. It’ll save you an hour or so, if you’re in a hurry.’
Definitely not a rube. ‘By all means,’ Monach replied. ‘My name is Sens Monach; you may just have heard of my father, Sens Reuden, if you were ever in the military. I’m his younger son. Anyway, I’ve been making a study of manifestations of the divine for twenty years, gathering material for a book, and so when I heard about this god in the cart business—’
Loud coughing fit; then: ‘Yes indeed, I’ve heard about General Sens. I never heard he had two sons, never heard he didn’t. It’s perfectly possible, I suppose; if Sens had a younger son, he could well have turned out idle and bookish – often the way with a self-made man. I’ll say this for you: if you’re a liar you’re a conscientious one.’ Slight pause, and a muffled scraping noise, possibly the foot of a chair on a stone floor. ‘So you want to hear about the god in the cart.’
Monach perched on the edge of the table; it wobbled a bit. ‘Yes please,’ he said.
‘All right. You’ll have to excuse the dark, by the way,’ the voice added. ‘It rests my eyes and I can’t afford to waste charcoal. If you’ve brought your own lamp, though, you can feel free to light it.’
‘Left it in my saddlebag,’ Monach replied truthfully. ‘It doesn’t matter. I can remember well enough without having to take notes.’
‘Good.’ Pause, and more scraping. ‘I expect you’re curious about me, too,’ the voice said (still the same weary, strained tone, slow delivery of words). ‘And yes, I’m wandering off the subject, but you’ll have to bear with me, sometimes I like to talk while I’m thinking. I don’t suppose they told you my name.’
‘No.’
‘That’s good, too. Let’s see. My household name is Jolect, and my family name’s nothing to interest you; but you may want to have a name to call me by. You’re Monach and I’m Jolect.’ Another of those laughs. ‘For the sake of argument, at any rate.’
‘If you say so,’ Monach replied.
‘Now then. Who I am, I’m a retired soldier. I was born here, and when I was through with my work, I came back here, and here I’ve been ever since. But I’ve seen a thing or two, Brother Monach – oh, I’m sorry, there I was still thinking you’re a priest. I’ve seen a thing or two around the empire, let me tell you, and I know a little more about some things than my neighbours. Is that about in line with what you’d imagined? ’
Monach laughed in spite of himself. ‘Almost,’ he said. ‘I had you down for a religious yourself, possibly a renegade from the order. I suppose the room being in darkness put that thought into my head, but you’ve explained about that, so I must’ve been mistaken. After all, not everybody who sits in the dark is hiding from something.’
‘I must also apologise,’ Jolect went on, ‘about the smell. When I was a soldier I was more than usually fussy about my kit – I used to annoy the drill sergeant no end because he couldn’t ever find fault with it. These days, though, it’s a terrible effort to stand up, let alone do all the cleaning and tidying and throwing away.’ A sigh. ‘An old woman used to come
in and see to the place, but she died. Hardly surprising, she was older than me. I don’t like it much, this mess,’ the voice said, ‘but it’s not as if I have a choice.’
‘I can imagine it must be hard to bear,’ Monach replied. ‘I like things neat and tidy myself, though I hope I don’t take it to extremes. Of course, it’s easy to be fastidious when you’ve always had people to tidy up after you. About the god in the cart—’
‘Oh yes. Let me see, now, what’s the best way to explain? I suppose it depends on whether you believe in the gods. Do you?’
‘Yes,’ Monach answered promptly. ‘Well, up to a point, at any rate.’
‘I see. And do you believe in a god called Poldarn?’
‘Yes. At least, I see no reason not to believe in him, though I don’t actually know very much about him. But that shouldn’t make any odds. After all, I don’t know very much about the forests of northern Beltach, but I believe that they exist.’
‘That’s an interesting approach,’ the voice said. ‘Very well; if you believe in Poldarn, then he was here a month or so ago.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘Then some very bad people pretending to be Poldarn were here a month ago. Or another god passed through here in a cart, and for reasons best known to himself he pretended to be Poldarn.’ The voice laughed. ‘Let me put it another way. If there are such things as gods, there was one in the cart. I’m sceptical about virtually everything, but that’s a fact.’
Monach smiled in the dark. ‘And if there’s no such thing as gods?’
‘Ah. In that case, some very bad people who could raise the dead, heal the sick, predict the future and call lightning down out of the sky passed through here not long ago in a cart, but they weren’t gods. Exactly the same as a god, but different.’
Monach nodded. ‘And you saw all this?’ he said.
‘Oh yes. I can still see, you know, and I can hear, and people in these parts answer my questions truthfully. I saw the thunderbolt, I saw the healing and the raising from the dead, and I heard the prophecy. I was at the back of the crowd, mind you, having to peer over Pein Annit’s shoulder, but I saw it.’
‘And you believed?’
‘I believe that I saw what I saw. Of course, the woman who was with him wasn’t really a priestess. She was a Torcean, about your age, quite pretty in a blanched sort of a way. She didn’t believe; I suspect she thought she was a confidence trickster.’
‘Really,’ Monach said, in a rather strained voice. ‘How could you tell?’
‘She was afraid,’ Jolect said. ‘It wasn’t particularly warm, but she was sweating – the ends of her fringe were stuck together in little spikes, and there were dark patches in the cloth of her gown under the arms and in the small of her back. She was trying quite hard to take no notice of us – a very good performance, well thought out – but she couldn’t help flicking very quick glances at us out of the corner of her eye; I don’t suppose she even knew she was doing it, but she was. Also there were inconsistencies in what she told us, things she simply couldn’t have said if she actually believed. Oh, and the people she gave medicine to didn’t get better; she made a false diagnosis, though it’s hard to blame her for that. She thought they had pneumonia, and what they really had was deer-tick fever. The symptoms are almost exactly the same in the early stages.’
Monach took a deep breath. ‘So she was a fraud, then.’
‘Beyond doubt. I didn’t say anything, of course; she’d done me no harm, and nobody would’ve believed me, in any case. And it didn’t matter. If the god is genuine, what difference does it make if the priest isn’t what he claims to be? Or even if he doesn’t believe.’
‘Quite,’ the brother muttered. ‘All right, you’ve explained why the priestess was a fraud. Why was the god genuine?’
Another laugh. ‘I thought I’d told you that. Because he raised the dead, healed the sick, made thunder and forecast the future.’ A pause. ‘The thunder could have been a fraud, of course, because it is possible to manufacture thunder artificially. But it could just as easily have been the real thing.’
Monach thought about that for a moment. ‘The same could be true of the healing,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the god wasn’t a god, just a good doctor.’
‘What an intelligent young man you are,’ the voice said. ‘But not in this case, since he didn’t give them a medicine or examine them, or do any of the things doctors do.’
‘Ah,’ Monach interrupted. ‘Then how can you be sure it was the god who healed them, if he didn’t do anything?’
Another scrape, as if someone was shifting his weight in a chair with one shrunken leg. ‘Because when he arrived in town there were four men and two women dying of marsh fever – which, as I’m sure you know, is always fatal if it lasts beyond the second week; and during the night he was here all four of them sweated out the fever and woke up the next morning, and now they’re fully recovered. And Lassic Nurico’s daughter died just after they arrived, and Pons Quevi a couple of hours later; they were quite dead, I saw their bodies myself and found no pulse or signs of life, and they were taken over to the Fennas’ barn and laid out for burial. And in the morning they were alive again, and they’re still alive now. What more proof do you need?’
Monach rubbed his chin. ‘There are other possible explanations, ’ he said.
‘Of course.’ The voice clicked its tongue. ‘But Seuro Eliman’s boy climbed up into the rafters of the tower courtyard roof and watched the god most of the night, and he told me the god sniffed six times and sneezed twice; and if you’ve heard or read the stories about Poldarn you’ll know that when he cures disease he sniffs, and when he raises the dead he sneezes. And I heard that when I was a boy, so it’s not something made up after the fact. As for the prophecy, the priestess said he had business in Josequin, and Josequin was burned to the ground.’
‘Coincidence?’ Monach suggested.
A laugh, which turned into a dry, painful-sounding cough. ‘Veusel says in the second book of his commentaries that five or more consecutive coincidences may be construed as proof of a doubted or disputed proposition. You can’t argue with Veusel, he’s been part of the syllabus for two hundred years.’
Monach, who’d suffered painfully from Veusel’s commentaries in his youth, remembered just in time that he wasn’t a monk any more. ‘Who’s Veusel?’ he asked.
Silence. The sound of fingernails tapping on the arm of a chair, as Monach remembered that although he wasn’t a monk, he was an enthusiastic amateur scholar. Damn, he thought.
‘So, yes,’ the voice resumed, ‘you could say it was all coincidence, and you could say it was a man and a woman in the cart, not the god. Of course, I find it easier to believe because I saw him and you didn’t. But I can’t show you what I saw, I can only tell you various facts and leave you to draw your own conclusions. What else would you like to know?’
Monach was getting cramp from sitting on the table for so long. ‘What did they look like?’ he asked.
‘The woman,’ the voice said, ‘was about medium height for a Torcean, with a narrow face, pointed nose and chin, high cheekbones, dark brown hair; I wasn’t close enough to see the colour of her eyes, but they were dark too. She was wearing a dark blue dress, probably from Torcea; I don’t know anything about women’s fashions so I can’t give you any technical details – it’s a sad gap in my knowledge. I believe that you can tell how old a dress is and where it came from if you know about such things, and of course that could be useful in a case like this.’
‘Thank you,’ Monach replied. ‘And what about the man? I mean the god.’
‘He looked like Poldarn,’ the voice replied. ‘Just like he does in all the statues and paintings and ivory carvings and engravings on the backs of mirrors. Which reminds me, going back to the question of proof. Jira Fider, the miller’s wife, had a gold ring that belonged to her great-grandmother. She took it off to wash some shirts – the hot water makes her fingers swell, and it was a tight fit a
t the best of times – and put it down on the step while she was working; a black bird dropped out of the plum tree, picked the ring up in its beak and flew away. She assumed it was a jackdaw, but for some reason they’ve never been common in these parts. That was the morning of the day they came. Coincidence, of course.’
Monach rubbed his eyes. ‘When you say he looked like Poldarn—’
‘The cart,’ the voice continued, ‘was just a cart, and if you can find anybody who can describe it in any detail I’ll give you six quarters. All carts that are just carts look the same, you see. Fortunately I don’t believe that there’s such a thing as just a cart, so I took a careful look. It was a short two-horse back-sprung haulier’s cart, painted grey a long time ago and neglected since, with one grab-handle missing from the box and a patch welded on to the front offside tyre. I think that’s all the facts I can remember. If you like we can talk a bit more about metaphysics, or I can tell you some stories about my life as a soldier; you could go back and check the references, to give you an idea of the quality of my memory and powers of observation. I’d rather not, though, since you might use them to work out who I could be; somebody important who was at the same battles as I was. Purely by coincidence, you understand. ’
‘That’s all right, really,’ Monach said. ‘Besides, if I believed you were something other than an ordinary retired soldier, I think I know who I’d reckon you are. And if you were him—’
‘Which I’m not.’
‘Oh, I believe you. But if that person was still alive and living in obscurity in a village somewhere, I can see why he’d rather nobody knew who he really was.’
‘So can I,’ Jolect replied. ‘Actually, I knew him once. Quite well. He might have amounted to something, you know, if it hadn’t been for General Cronan and a good deal of bad luck.’
Monach smiled. ‘I think so too,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your help.’
‘My pleasure. You can give me a small amount of money if it makes you feel any better. Money isn’t actually worth anything here, but one or two of the grander farmers’ wives collect it, to show how sophisticated they are, and usually they’ll trade food and firewood for it. Your hostess, for instance.’
