by K. J. Parker
Poldarn nodded slowly. ‘So your son, the god in the cart – his father was a raider, and you killed him.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But he’s the god in the cart.’
‘I just told you that. You think I’m mental, don’t you?’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘I can’t see any reason not to believe you,’ he said. ‘Do you think you’d know him again if you saw him, after all these years?’
She scowled. ‘My own kid? Of course I would. He’s got my mother’s chin and his father’s nose. I’d know him anywhere.’
Poldarn stood up. ‘And you’ve been here ever since,’ he said. It wasn’t meant as a question. ‘How do you manage? What do you live on?’
She smiled. Once upon a time, it would probably have been a very nice smile. ‘I trade,’ she said.
‘I see,’ Poldarn said. ‘What do you trade?’
‘None of your business.’
‘I agree,’ Poldarn replied. ‘There’s no reason why you should tell me if you don’t want to, I’m just interested.’
With a turn of her wrist that was too fast for Poldarn’s eye to follow, she flicked the hatchet into the log, right between her knees. ‘I trade with Master Potto Ilec of Sansory,’ she said proudly. ‘He sends a wagon up here four times a year, with jars of flour and some cheese and bacon. He needs me,’ she added, ‘he can’t get the good stuff anywhere else, for fear of people knowing. He sends his own son and his two brothers and his uncle, because he won’t trust anybody else not to tell.’
Poldarn was holding his breath without knowing it. ‘Would you like to tell me what you give him in return for the food?’
She reached down, pulled up the sole of her foot, like a farrier shoeing a horse, and examined it. ‘Master Potto Ilec makes buttons,’ she said. ‘For the really special buttons he likes to use a special kind of bone, with a fine, straight grain and a good feather. It’s got to be properly dried and seasoned, and it’s got to be the right colour, dark brown. It’s the colour that makes it so hard to find.’
‘I think I see,’ Poldarn said.
‘You can’t stain it,’ she went on, ‘it only goes that colour when it’s charred in a fire – that dries it up, see, gets all the grease out – and then left to weather, out in the wind and the rain. Takes a long time to cure, according to Master Potto Ilec, you can’t rush it. Very hard to find these days.’
‘Thank you,’ Poldarn said, ‘you’ve been very helpful. Can I ask you one last question?’
She looked up at the sky. ‘Don’t see why not,’ she said.
He took a step closer. ‘Your son,’ he said, ‘did you give him a name, by any chance?’
She shook her head. ‘Didn’t get round to it. I had other things on my mind, really.’
‘Right. Does the name Poldarn mean anything to you?’
‘Poldarn.’ She thought for a moment. ‘No,’ she said, ‘doesn’t ring any bells.’
Poldarn felt in the pocket of his coat. ‘Those special buttons, ’ he said. ‘Are they anything like these?’
She glanced at the buttons he’d taken from his pocket and shook her head. ‘Too pale,’ she said. ‘And they’re not quite as big as that. They showed me one once, so I could be sure to match the colour.’
Poldarn stepped back towards the cart, still facing her every step of the way. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Is there anything you’d like us to bring you? We’ll be passing here again on our way back in a few days.’
She shook her head. ‘I got everything I need right here,’ she said, ‘thanks to Master Potto Ilec, and Feron Amathy.’
Poldarn looked at her. ‘You didn’t need the kid, then.’
‘No.’
‘Ah. Well, thank you for talking to us.’
‘You’re welcome. And now you can piss off and leave me in peace.’
Copis didn’t say anything for a long time, not until the ruins of Vistock were out of sight behind the horizon. It was as if she was afraid the mad woman would hear her. ‘You didn’t ask her name,’ she said.
‘You’re right,’ Poldarn replied, ‘I didn’t.’
‘Oh. Why not?’
He shrugged. ‘I forgot. I suppose I figured it wasn’t important. Talking of which, is Copis your real name?’
She laughed. ‘No,’ she replied.
He didn’t make any comment about that, which annoyed her. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what my real name is?’ she said.
‘No,’ Poldarn replied. ‘You can tell me if you want to.’
She scowled. ‘If you must know, it’s Xipho Dorunoxy. And I’m not really from Torcea, though I did live there for years, when I was a kid. I’m from Exo.’
‘I see,’ Poldarn said. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Oh, a long way away, inland to the east. It isn’t even a province of the empire any more. I think it broke away about sixty years ago, though our people still come and go quite freely across the border. You aren’t interested, are you?’
He shook his head. ‘One thing I’ve learned lately,’ he said, ‘is how little it matters what people call themselves or where they come from. They seem to have an idea that without things like that they’ll lose their shape and collapse, like a bowl of water if you suddenly take the bowl away. Well, I’m here to prove it isn’t true.’
She looked at him in silence for a while. ‘You’re really trying hard to believe that, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Any luck?’
‘Not really, no.’
She laughed again. ‘Did I ever tell you what the iron-master told me?’
‘What iron-master.’
‘Ah.’ She took off her shoe and shook something out of it, then put it back on. ‘Well, I’ve told you that some of the customers where I used to work liked to talk sometimes, tell me things. I haven’t a clue why; I suppose I had a knack of looking like I was interested, and men who’re important in business like to talk about what they’re doing, stuff they’re pleased or proud about, but of course it’s usually technical, so nobody outside the shop can understand what they’re talking about. Anyway, they used to explain things to me – how things work, how they’re made, that sort of stuff.’
‘And you listened.’
‘It was better than work, that’s for sure.’ She pushed her hair back behind her ears. ‘One of them was an iron-master, like I said. He had a big foundry for brass and copper, and an enormous furnace and great big trip-hammers for the iron and steel – apparently you can’t melt iron, the fire’s not hot enough, you can only make it soft and squeeze it out of the ore into big lumps, what they call blooms. Then if you want to make plates or bars or whatever, you’ve got to get it hot till it’s soft and beat it into shape.’
‘I see,’ Poldarn said. ‘How fascinating.’
‘Shut up, I’m getting there. With scrap, you see, it’s different. You sort it all out into piles – soft iron in one pile, hard steel in another, and the soft iron that gets turned into steel, like old horseshoes and wheel tyres and stuff, in a third; and then what you do is you get them all hot and you hammer them and hammer them until they’re all welded together into the shapes your customers want – bars and plates and rods. Ever such a lot of work, he told me.’
Poldarn yawned. ‘I can imagine,’ he said.
‘The point is,’ Copis went on, ‘when you make steel hard, you make it able to hold a shape. That’s what hard is, really, being able to stay the same shape even if you get bashed on, unless you’re too hard and brittle, in which case you shatter. Anyway, this being able to hold a shape; according to him, the word they used for it was memory. Like a cart spring or a crossbow prod, or a sword; if you bend it, it can remember the shape it used to be and go back into it, exactly the same shape it used to be before you twisted it back on itself. Or, if the memory’s really strong, you can hammer and file at it all day and all you’ll do is wreck your tools, because it won’t budge.’ She was looking straight ahead, not at him. �
�But if you heat it up, past sunrise red and blood red and cherry red to orange, it’ll lose its memory just like you lost yours, and then it stops being hard or springy and turns soft, so you can bash it and shape it and do whatever you like with it. Then, if you just let it cool down slowly in the air, it’ll stay soft; but if you take it all red and bloody out of the fire and dip it straight into a pool of water, it’ll immediately freeze hard, like the Bohec in winter, and then it’ll have a memory all over again. Do you see what I’m getting at?’
‘It’d be difficult not to,’ Poldarn replied. ‘You believe in the sledgehammer school of allegory, I can tell.’
She looked offended for a moment, then shrugged. ‘I was just trying to be nice,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘It’s the thought that counts.’ He rubbed his face with the palm of his hand. ‘So why did you start calling yourself Copis?’
‘Because nobody could be bothered to say Dorunoxy,’ she replied. ‘So they called me Xipho, which of course is my last name, not my first, and where my family come from it’s really rude to call someone just by their last name unless you know them really well, and even though I knew they didn’t mean anything by it, it used to upset me a lot. So I changed it.’
‘Fair enough. What about Copis?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, it’s a common enough name in Torcea, particularly,’ she added, with a grin, ‘in that line of work. It’s the sort of name the customers expected me to have, so it was easy.’
He nodded. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘what do you think of yourself as, Dorun-whatsit or Copis?’
‘Copis.’ She pulled a face. ‘Which is really bad, because – well, a Copis, you can be pretty sure what kind of person a Copis is.’
‘And you’re not.’
Her expression changed. ‘No. Well, what do you think?’
‘Does it matter what I think?’
‘Why are you deliberately trying to annoy me?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t think you’re a Copis, no. I’m just disproving the point you were trying to make at such interminable length a moment ago, that’s all. You’ve changed your name and the shape you appear in, but you’ve still got the old memory; you’re not a Copis, you’re a – whatever it was. However hard you try to be a button, you’re still a bone.’
She shook her head. ‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘This is all getting a bit too involved and personal for me. I suggest we talk about something else, before we fall out.’
‘All right.’
‘That woman,’ Copis said. ‘Who was she?’
‘I don’t know. I forgot to ask her name, remember?’
‘Be like that.’ She turned her head away and pretended to look at the scenery for a while. There wasn’t any, just a flat plain, and some mist where the Deymeson hills should have been. ‘So why did we go out of our way to see her?’
‘I was curious.’ Poldarn shivered a little. ‘Back in the other place, where we sold the buttons, they said she reckoned her son was the god in the cart. The subject interests me. Should be fairly obvious why.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you said you didn’t ever want to do the god act again.’
‘I don’t. I’m just interested in finding out who I’ve been, that’s all.’
Chapter Nineteen
Monach drew and cut, and as he watched the soldier drop to his knees and slump forward he thought, I can’t believe I’ve made such a mess of it. Everything’s going wrong, and it’s all my fault.
The other three soldiers were closing in; one dead ahead, one on either side. He took a step back, sheathing his sword – this was a standard exercise he’d learned in third grade, but the sequence started from rest, sword sheathed, and he wasn’t in the mood for improvisation. As soon as they impinged on his circle, the sequence began; it was as if it couldn’t wait and had started without him. The knuckles of the right hand touched the sword handle; as the hand flipped over and the fingers found their place around the handle, the left foot came back half a step, then turned inwards, placing heel against heel at ninety degrees, so that as the sword left the scabbard, the body pivoted towards the left-hand target and the cut slid out into the space the oncoming target’s neck was about to occupy. No time to waste looking to see if the cut had connected; the back foot went forward in a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, swinging the body round to face the right-hand target, while the arms lifted the sword up and back till the point touched the base of the spine, at which moment (like a mechanism engaging an escapement) the left-side diagonal overhead cut launched the sword into a perfectly located slice (number four in the manual, ‘dividing the earth from the heavens’); the momentum pivoted the right heel as the arms followed through and used the spare energy of the last stroke to reset the correct position as he turned to face the enemy in front; another perfect cut, to be taken on trust since there still wasn’t any time to waste on gawping; pivot once again to face the first target and deliver a conclusive, if redundant, finishing cut down the line of the collarbone. A simple but impressive sequence; a good sixth-year should be able to complete it and return to rest, sword flicked free of blood and back in the scabbard, in the time it takes for an apple to drop from a tree.
Monach felt the sword click back into the tight jaws of its sheath, and looked to see what had happened just as the first target hit the ground. The other two followed a fraction of a second later. There was still a fine mist of blood hanging in the air.
That appeared to be that. A threat had presented itself and been dealt with quickly and efficiently; he could be forgiven for thinking that he’d actually got something right, for a change. But he hadn’t. The plan had been to sneak up on the patrol, grab one of them and force General Cronan’s current location out of him. As it was, all four of them were dead, and in no position to tell him anything. Screwed it up again.
It wouldn’t be so bad if he had a clue where he was, but he didn’t. Somewhere in the woods below the hilltop village of Shance, where Major-General Ambosc’s cavalry detachment was spending the night before pressing on, probably just after first light, to meet up with the main army, and the general, at Cric. Put like that, it sounded precise and entirely sufficient; but the whole truth was rather different. In practice he had no idea which direction to go in, or where he was in the wood. He was lost.
. . . Which was infuriating, because there wasn’t time for any such nonsense, not if he was to stand any chance of intercepting Cronan on his way to Cric (when he’d be at his most vulnerable, with only an honour guard of half a dozen cavalrymen, out in the open with nowhere to hide). He didn’t even know for sure whether that plan was still feasible, since he wasn’t very clear about how long he’d been in this damned wood, let alone how long it was going to take him to get out again. Of course the soldiers he’d stumbled across on the edge of this small, deceitful clearing could have told him, if only he’d had the wit to pretend to be a wandering trader or a government courier or something. Instead he’d killed them all. If it wasn’t such a nuisance it’d be a joke.
He sat down on a moss-covered log and applied his mind to the problem. Now, unless the soldiers were lost too, it stood to reason that they were passing through the wood on their way somewhere, presumably following the track that he could just make out between the trees. Whether they’d been going up the track or down it was a secret they’d taken with them to the shadows; likewise, which direction led to Shance, and which ran straight back to Mahec Ford, where he’d just come from. Choices, options, decisions; Monach shook his head, he could-n’t be doing with them. There’s nothing on earth as helpless as a man lost in a wood, he reflected bitterly. It’s as bad as losing your memory; you’re left with nothing but what you’re wearing and carrying, cut off from everything that might help you, with no very clear idea of what to do next or for the best.
Nothing else for it, he was going to have to guess. He pulled a face; ordained sword-brothers of the order didn’t guess; either they knew or they found out. He wasn’t eve
n sure he knew how to go about it any more. Should he just close his eyes and start walking, or would it be more appropriate to use some formal method – tossing a coin, blowing a dandelion clock, observing the flight of roosting birds? Undoubtedly it was a point addressed somewhere in Doctrine, though he didn’t know where was the best place to start researching the point. Genistus’ Observances? The Secondary Digest? Lathano on General Procedure?
Roosting birds would seem to be the best bet; it was starting to get dark, and the sky was full of rooks and crows, wheeling and shrieking all around him. He chose a tree at random. If ten birds flew past it on the right before an equal number went by on the left, he’d go up the track, and vice versa. The idea had a certain charm; he could pretend it was an omen from the divine Poldarn, master of crows, rather than a wild, feckless guess.
Nine to the right, all in a clump, and only three to the left. One more needed on the right; but instead, a mob of seven flew left while the right side stayed clear. He followed the seven; six of them carried on but one peeled off, circled behind him and came back in on the right. Monach sighed. Did that one count, or would it constitute cheating? He shrugged. The way things were going with him, if he’d decided to flip a coin instead the wretched thing would probably have ended up landing on its edge.
Just to be awkward he went down the track, realising after a few yards that it was probably a mistake. After all, Shance was on the top of a hill, so didn’t it stand to reason that he’d have to go uphill to get there? Unfortunately it wasn’t quite as simple as that. He’d been going uphill whenever possible for a long time now, several hours at least, and where was he? Lost.
But he carried on nonetheless, and was rewarded by a sudden violent change in gradient. No question about it, he was going uphill now, for sure. This was promising, even if he did have to stop and lean against a tree for a few moments to catch his breath. The comforting width and straightness of the trail was reassuring too, a trail that gave every sign of knowing where it was going. Or coming from.
