Shadow (Scavenger Trilogy Book 1)

by K. J. Parker

  As the enemy army became visible inside the wood, they put up a colony of rooks and crows that flew ahead of them for a while, like the slow, shallow wave that comes before the breakers. ‘In a sense,’ the old man was saying, ‘all battles are just unpleasant, conscience-stricken memories, just as this one is; they’ve all happened before, and the only difference lies in who’s dreaming them this time. Then again, you can pass off all kinds of old rubbish by tacking in a sense in front of it.’

  Monach squinted; the wind was making his eyes water. ‘I can see them now,’ he said.

  ‘Can you? Splendid.’ The old man was looking at them too. ‘Interesting, I suppose, that you chose to come here, before the battle started. My guess is that your instincts led you to the moment before the draw, the point where they violate our circle. Since you believe in religion, the next part, the battle itself, doesn’t really exist; there’s just the moment before and the moment after. Or am I oversimplifying?’

  ‘Yes,’ Monach replied, ‘you are. The battle wouldn’t exist only if this was a perfect world, which it isn’t, or if you and I were gods, which we aren’t.’

  The old man grinned. ‘I’m not, for sure. As for you – well, I can’t see that it matters all that much, one way or the other. If I told you, Yes, you’re definitely a god, take my word for it, you wouldn’t believe me, after all. You’d say this is just a dream, and your dream at that.’

  Monach wasn’t sure whether that was a divine revelation or simple teasing. He thought it best to ignore it, on either count. ‘So,’ he said, as his instincts urged him to counterattack, ‘you really are General Allectus, then? May I ask, what’re you doing hiding out in a wretched little dump like this?’

  ‘I was born here,’ Allectus replied. ‘Not in the village, you understand; my grandfather owned the whole valley and half the moor – it was more trouble and expense than it was worth, which is why when he died my father just forgot about it, stopped trying to collect the rents, let the house fall down; at the best of times the income from the estate wasn’t enough to pay the gardeners at our main house, in Torcea.’ He wiped something out of the corner of his eye, a speck of dust or grit, or a small gnat. ‘But yes, we had a house here. If there’s time, you might make a detour and take a look at the ruins, if there’s anything still there to see; the villagers have been tearing it up for building stone for forty years, so there’s probably not much left. And yes, I was born here, while the family was spending the summer out here one year. We moved around a lot then, tracking from estate to estate, like a bunch of itinerants roaming the countryside with all our possessions packed in a cart. Of course it had to be a very big cart to get all our stuff inside. But a cart’s a cart.’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway,’ he continued. ‘When I lost the battle and my army and found myself in these parts, alone and with a price on my head, I suppose a sort of homing instinct drew me back.’ He smiled. ‘And it helped that I could remember a few bits and pieces from our visits here when I was a boy. I remembered the name of a servant we hired from this village who was just about my age, by the name of Jolect. He left with us, caught a fever and died. I hardly knew him. But when I came here, I decided to be him, coming home after a lifetime of service in the army. Fortuitously, the Jolect family had died out in the meanwhile, so nobody was left to say I wasn’t who I claimed to be; besides, nobody cared. I had twelve gross-quarters in gold coin when I arrived here – it was my pocket change, the day I ran away from this battle, but enough to represent a time-expired veteran’s life savings, enough to make me a rich man in Cric. I gave it to my neighbours so they could buy all the things they couldn’t grow or make – iron and steel for ploughs and tools, mostly, and some other materials, enough to last all of Cric for a generation – and in return I have this fine house, and they’ll feed and clothe me till I die. What more could a god ask?’

  Monach didn’t say anything.

  ‘Besides,’ Allectus went on, ‘there’s a beautiful symmetry about it. I was born the son and heir to this huge demesne – worthless, maybe, but vast by any standards – and now in my old age here I am again, the squire, the old master, loved, respected, tolerated and put up with by my faithful tenants.’ He pulled an exaggeratedly sad face, as the sun flashed alarmingly on the spears of Cronan’s army, far away in the distance. ‘We have a habit of turning out to be what we’re supposed to be, regardless of whether we like it or not, or know it or not. If you understood religion instead of just knowing all about it, you’d see that that’s what the Poldarn story’s all about, an allegory for that simple fact. Of course the Poldarn story also happens to be true, every word of it, but that doesn’t stop it being an allegory as well. You can stay here as long as you like, you know.’

  Monach didn’t quite follow. ‘What, here, you mean? This battle?’

  ‘No, of course not. In Cric. At my house. After the pounding you took from the Amathy house, it’ll be a week at least before you’re fit to move, and besides, it won’t be healthy for you in these parts until Feron Amathy moves on. Escaping was bad enough; breaking his finger into the bargain – that’s a bad loss of face, he’ll be taking it very seriously. But you’ll be safe here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Monach said, as General Cronan’s army began to climb the slope. It was large, but not as big as his, Allectus’, own. In the middle was a hedge of pikes, with a wispy line of skirmishers strewn untidily in front of it and blocks of armoured foot soldiers and cavalry on either wing. Behind the pikes he could see the baggage train, a sloppy column of carts and mules, packed too closely together. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Allectus replied. ‘After all, you’re the man who’s undertaken to kill my deadly enemy, General Cronan – not that you’ll succeed, of course, but it’s the thought that counts. If anything happens to me, by the way, don’t panic. Just keep out of sight when they bring in the food, and leave the dirty plates and the washing. Sometimes I stay in the back room sulking for weeks on end, so they won’t think anything of it; and as for the smell – well, who’s going to notice, in here?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Monach repeated. He was aware of the army above and around him starting to get restless, muttering and shuffling. ‘Am I really going to fail in the mission?’

  ‘Yes,’ Allectus told him, ‘but not for the reason you think. You see, nobody knows where Cronan is; that’s why he wasn’t here, wasn’t on the road where he should have been, wasn’t where he told his people he was going to be. The plain fact is, he vanished a couple of months ago, on his way to Josequin, and nobody’s seen or heard of him since.’

  ‘What?’ Monach shouted, but he couldn’t make himself heard; his army had decided to ignore his orders and charge down the slope, and a moment later he was on the ground, his arms over his head to protect it from the boots and knees of the soldiers all around him. Allectus had vanished, in any case. Monach wound himself up into a ball, squeezing his legs and elbows in as tight as he could to get them out of harm’s way, but a man running flat out tripped over him, and the men behind piled up on top of him, until Monach was buried under a mound of jerking, squirming bodies (a living grave, he thought, now that’s original). He tried to breathe, but it rapidly went from difficult to impossible, at which point he suffocated and died—

  —And sat up, to find both hands clamped tight over his nose and mouth, which would explain the asphyxiation. Thin spikes of sunlight were intruding under the door and between the gaps in the old, warped timbers of the shutters. He felt cold, probably because he was soaked in sweat. He tried to remember the dream he’d just tumbled out of, but it had passed by.

  Next he tried to move, and that was a very bad idea. In eighth grade they’d done wounds, including how to recognise your own; they’d been taught a cumulative assessment system – ten points for a broken collarbone, thirty for an arm, fifty for a leg; you chose your course of action on the basis of your running total, and if it came to more than two hundred there was no recommended course of actio
n. On that basis, he scored somewhere between one hundred and eighty and two hundred and fifteen, depending on whether there was major internal bleeding around the smashed ribs.

  ‘Hello,’ he called out. He could remember his host saying something about some local wise woman or witch doctor; country medicine wouldn’t have been his first choice, but it was better than dying or (worse still, in a way) healing up with unset bones and being a cripple for the rest of his life. Not that he wanted to impose on his host in any way, but that was one offer of help he could reconcile himself to accepting.

  ‘Hello,’ he repeated, and then he realised that the shape in the corner, which he’d been assuming was a sack or a pile of old clothes, was a body.

  He sighed. Too much to hope for, obviously, that the old fool could somehow manage to stay alive long enough to arrange for the doctor to call. That would’ve been too easy, not a sufficient challenge for a brother tutor of the order. The statistical probabilities intrigued him; of the two of them, he’d have bet money on who was more likely to survive the night, and he’d have lost.

  If anything happens to me, by the way, don’t panic. Just keep out of sight when they bring in the food, and leave the dirty plates and the washing. Someone had said that to him recently, but he couldn’t remember who. He frowned – even frowning hurt, the tightening of the skin across his forehead tugging apart the lips of a gash that was only just beginning to knit together. Maybe the old man had said it last night, when he was drowsy and half asleep.

  In the ninth grade they’d taught them basic field medicine and surgery, with a short and mostly hilarious session on how to set your own bones and bind your own wounds. It had been too close to the end of the term; they’d all been worn out with study, saturated with too much information, and nobody had really made any kind of an effort to learn the stuff properly. For the rest of the day, therefore, he was forced to rely on trial and error and instinct as much as authorised procedures. That was a great pity, since experimenting on one’s own broken bones is a painful and demoralising experience. For bandages he had to use strips of the late General Allectus’ threadbare and filthy carpet – a genuine Morevish tent rug, no less – which he slowly sawed and hacked to shape with Feron Amathy’s impractically shaped knife. All day he was pitifully thirsty, and there was a water jug no more than ten feet away, but somehow he never got around to crawling across the room and fetching it.

  Eventually the splinters of light began to fade, suggesting the onset of evening. He wasn’t conscious when the food arrived – he passed out at least a dozen times that day because of the pain and his general condition – and he woke up out of an involuntary doze to hear the door closing. Once he’d got the panic under control, he listened for the sound of someone moving about or breathing; while he was holding still and doing that, he had time to work out the various possible explanations for what he’d heard and the odds on each of them. The likeliest explanation was that the villagers were used to Allectus being asleep or crazy out of his mind, and left the food and the house without saying a word or making a loud noise. That would suit him just fine, of course. The food and the water and the clean clothes would be left beside the door; all he had to do was get from the inner room to the main room without tearing the loose confederation of injuries he called his body.

  And if he didn’t do that, of course, he’d be in desperate trouble, because if they came in and found that the food and drink hadn’t been touched they’d be concerned (good, caring neighbours that they were), and would put their heads round the partition to make sure he was all right, and they’d find Allectus dead and a strange man propped up next to him.

  So, taking advantage of their good nature was suddenly compulsory. Monach laughed; the whole thing was ludicrous, especially for a good monk and a student of ethical theory. He couldn’t wait to get back to Deymeson and pitch it to his ethics class for discussion: Under what circumstances are deception and theft justifiable in the name of expediency? What difference does it make that the intended recipient of the charity is dead? That the deceiver’s life is at stake? That the intended recipient gave his permission for the fraud?

  Had he? Monach seemed to remember that he had, but not the exact context. Either Allectus had told him so, in unambiguous terms, or he’d dreamed it (Discuss, with reference to the moral ambiguity of unsubstantiated perceptions . . .). Remembering was difficult, and getting more so. It was just as well he’d had such a firm foundation in mental discipline.

  He closed his eyes. Outside it was raining, but he couldn’t hear that. He couldn’t hear the sound of boots squelching in mud, or cartwheels in the street, as the Amathy house left Cric and went to war.

  What difference would it make if the deceiver acts in furtherance of the general good? Of a manifest destiny? What difference would it make if the deceiver incorrectly but sincerely believes that he acts in furtherance of a just cause or a manifest destiny? What difference would it make if the deceiver commits the deception knowing that the legitimate just cause or manifest destiny so authorising his deception has failed? Assuming that the deceiver is so justified, would that justification extend to fraudulent use or consumption of articles conducive to mere physical comfort, as opposed to the bare essentials required for survival? In such context, what would such bare essentials consist of?

  What difference would it make if the deceiver were a god?

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They came for him the next morning, just as the voice in the night had said they would, and they took him to the abbot’s lodgings, where the abbot told him all the lies the voice had warned him to expect. He pretended to believe them, just as the voice had advised him to do: Of course, he said, his voice low with wonder, it’s all coming back to me now. I remember this place – over there’s the drill hall, where I did my twelve grades, and the novices’ dormitory’s in the next yard over, and opposite that’s the dining-hall. The voice had drilled it into him the night before, made him repeat it all a dozen times, to make sure the geography of the place was firmly fixed in his mind.

  Listening to the deceptions, knowing the truth, Poldarn couldn’t help feeling a sense of elation, of release – partly because he was the one who was deceiving them, not the other way round, mostly because now, for the first time in a long time, he knew who he was. To begin with it had come as a complete shock; then he’d started to remember – not actual memories, but fragments of dreams in which he’d been the man he now knew he was, in which he’d heard and seen and known things that couldn’t possibly have been picked up by eavesdropping on stray conversations or extrapolating from what Copis had told him. Also, it made perfect sense, explained so many of the strange, meaningless things that had happened to him – the attack on the cart by the three horsemen, shortly before they reached Cric; the meeting with Chaplain Cleapho in Sansory, and the soldier who’d recognised him in the kitchens of the inn, the one he’d had to kill before he could make the man tell him his own name. Most exhilarating of all was the realisation that his life had meant something, that he’d attempted and achieved things worthy of his talents and abilities, that he was on the right side.

  (And now he was about to achieve something else, far more important and beneficial than anything he’d ever done before; furthermore, he’d have the opportunity to punish the order with appropriate savagery for trying to trick and use him. No wonder he was the sworn enemy of these people, or that they’d been so keen to get him out of the way.)

  He listened carefully to what they had to say, while speculating as to which of the grave, solemn men sitting round the table was the voice he’d heard the night before. Only one of them spoke, making it possible for Poldarn to eliminate him at once (the prior of observances; and he was too tall, anyhow), which left him nine to choose from. Five of them were the right height and build. He’d have time and opportunity to figure it out over the next few days, and then he’d be able to make direct contact with his ally and put into operation a plan of his own that
ought, if everything went as it should, to set everything right.

  (Your name, the voice had told him, is Cronan Suvilois. You were born on the sixth day of the Ninth, in the fourth year of Emperor Massin Dasa, in Torcea. Your family are southerners. Your father’s name was Lalicot, and your mother, before her marriage, was called Actin Doricalceo. Your family was comfortable rather than wealthy, minor provincial nobility, of no great account in the capital; your father felt, correctly, that in order to make your way in the world you would need to follow a career, either the army or religion. Accordingly, when you were six years old, he sent you to the Paupers’ Institute at Collibortaca—)

  ‘Of course,’ the abbot was saying, ‘we appreciate the fact that you probably won’t remember the details of what you used to know for some while yet; as it happens, we have doctors here who’ve made a study of your sort of condition and probably know more about it than anybody else in the empire. When there’s time, we’ll send them to take a look at you, see if there’s anything they can do. I believe they’ve managed to cure some pretty stubborn cases in the past.’

  ‘That’d be wonderful,’ Poldarn said, making a mental note to add this to the list of crimes for which these people had to be punished, this wanton planting of false hopes. ‘You don’t know how much it means to me, even the hope of someone finding a cure. It’d be something to live for.’

  The abbot nodded. ‘Plenty of time for that later,’ he said. His face was stern but sympathetic, wisdom, justice and mercy combined in it like three elderly sisters sharing a house, ideal for the role of father, or god. ‘First things first; we’ve got to get you back to where you’re needed. Probably best if we supply you with an escort – trying to keep track of where you’d be likely to run into one of Cronan’s scouting or foraging parties is a sure way to go mad, the way this war’s going. With fifty horsemen along for the ride, it won’t actually matter who you run into, short of a full cavalry squadron or a field army.’