‘Arly—’ I laughed—‘I have no memory of any of this!’
‘—finally they let us in,’ he finished. ‘We brought the wagon right inside, through the gates of the dead man’s house. You knew I was scared too!’ he added, accusingly. ‘You looked at me when the mules went by the big stone posts and grinned!’ Then, smiling down into his cup, he shifted on his rock. His scarred stump moved in a kind of sweeping motion that would have placed the missing limb at no particular position, save possibly kicking into the air. And I thought, how many hundreds of times had I seen it do that? Yet, I’d never thought of it once in all these years. ‘They told us to take a single little room on the castle’s top floor, up some old, steep, stone stairs. And you got very angry afterwards, because it meant all three of us would have to sleep in the same chamber, and you said you didn’t want to have to sleep in the same room with a smelly barbarian and a dirty soldier—’
I started to protest. ‘Surely I’d only meant it wouldn’t look proper to the great house’s remaining servants…’ My picture of myself for that period was (and still is) wholly egalitarian—more, perhaps, than was even wise. But the truth is, once within the baron’s gates, I had no memory at all. Till that moment, had you asked me if I’d ever been inside the home of my tragic relative, the Baron Inige, I’d have answered, ‘No,’ convinced I spoke the truth.
I said: ‘Terek could let himself get rather dirty, couldn’t he?’
I wanted to stay in the room, because I was scared to walk around in the halls and corridors where the dead man had walked. But when it got dark, you and the soldier—Terek? Was that his name?—decided to play a trick on me and took me up on the castle’s roof. I didn’t want to go. But you made me!’
‘Now how did we get you to go anywhere that you didn’t want to?’ For I had a few solid memories of Arly’s stubbornness—an all too fabled barbarian trait.
‘You went,’ Arly said. ‘I wasn’t going to stay in there alone!’ He drank more rum. ‘There wasn’t any wall around the roof, either. And there were lots of stone things—like stone huts and places where windows stuck up and things. Part of the roof was sloped, too, right down to the edge.’ Certainly I knew the kind of castle roof he meant. But equally certainly I had no memory of ever being out on one with Arly. ‘It had been raining, and the roof slates were still wet. And you know this—’ he bent to slap his hand against the flattened and frayed end of his crutch—‘doesn’t hold so well on wet stone as this—’ and he swung his soiled hand back against the cracked and blackened sole of his foot. ‘The clouds were blowing fast, now over the moon, now free of it. One minute it was dark as pitch. The next it was light. The two of you ran away and hid from me, and began to make strange noises, and pretend to be demons and monsters and strange beasts, and chase me around and hide from me again.’
‘But you must have known it was only us…?
‘Ahhh!’ Arly’s voice rose, with his chin, in dismissal of my protest. ‘I knew it was you. But in such a house, perhaps the demons that haunted the place actually now possessed you. That’s why you played such pranks. That’s why I was so afraid. In such a house, with such a death only that morning, it was a reasonable fear—at least from the way you carried on! Once, when I was running from you, the soldier stuck the end of his spear out from behind some stone abutment and tripped me, so that I fell.’
‘Arly—!’ Though even as I spoke, memories returned of moments when Terek’s teasing (if not my own) of the one-legged youth had probably gone too far. What came back even more strongly, however, were those chases and games of tag where all of us contended that Arly on his crutch was as fast and agile as either of us—which was, indeed, almost true. Some of those chases were at night, even in the moonlight—but surely not on the roof of my dead cousin’s house. ‘Arly, I just don’t think we—’
‘Then you ran right out into me.’ He put his cup down and clapped his blackened hands together. ‘And knocked me over. Then you laughed, while I rolled down the slope toward the edge of the roof. Oh, I knew, then, that monsters chased me, and that I would now fall to my death!’
I swallowed another mouthful of rum. ‘But didn’t we catch you…?’
‘No!’ Arly declared, an astonished questioning to it even greater than the exclamation, as if there was no reason in the world to think we might have. He said: ‘I just didn’t roll that far. I hurt my leg real bad, too, when you pushed me down.’ He reached forward to rub his calf, as if memory brought back the pain. ‘Then the soldier came out and stood there and laughed at me because I was such a frightened fool. But I was afraid to say how much it hurt, because I thought you might start in again and say you would leave me behind to be a slave in that haunted and frightening castle.’
‘But—’ As I started to protest again, the faintest memory returned, however: Terek standing with his spear, in light dim enough to have come from a beclouded moon, laughing over a seated, unhappy Arly, who had just slipped or fallen across his crutch, while I looked on. Could that have been atop the castle roof? Could my purposeful push have been the cause of the fall? The memory was no clearer than that of the servant woman at the gate. And even had I recalled the two faint recollections on my own, I never would have remembered that they were from the morning and evening of the same day, or what Arly claimed lay between.
Arly sat, rubbed, smiled. ‘We had some good times, then, didn’t we? I went a lot of places with you, saw a lot of things.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I was still trying to think: Could I have been a partner in torment of that lame, ignorant youth—and forgotten it? We did.’ But the topic itself seemed too complicated to pursue through the warmth of the day and the glow of the rum. ‘Well, tell me: did you ever learn any more of Belham or Venn, after our trip? I’ve often wondered how all that struck you.’
Arly looked at me and frowned. ‘Belham?’ he said. ‘And that other name? Were they some peasants we let ride in the wagon once?’
‘No, Arly!’ I was both astonished and amused—happily so, as it drove away some of my discomfort. ‘Don’t you remember—?’
But he had reached out for the jar to pour himself another cupful. ‘Belham, that’s a barbarian name. But not the other. “Venn,” it was? It sounds like a name from far away. Maybe from the islands or someplace…’
Somewhere a crutch tapped on the rock floor; barbaric eyes lifted toward the cave ceiling…
We talked about many other things that day. Oh, I mustn’t suggest that we had no memories in common. We talked a lot of Terek, and even though Arly had not remembered his name, we were still soon mustering new opinions about him, as if our friend were only off for a walk in the woods and was expected back in minutes—though neither of us had seen him in more than a decade.
I supposed we helped to elaborate his monster.
Although with each cup of rum he drank, Arly would again declare how fine a time we’d had together, in general his memories were not so pleasant as mine. But then, neither had his life been as pleasant, before or since. Also, I thought later, he had the recollections one might expect from a man who, with great bravery, had traveled only once—and that in order to get from the village where he’d been born to the town where, in all probability, he would die. Through the afternoon, somehow I never brought up my own (nor questioned Arly’s) reminiscences of the border god who’d terrified us the night I’d tried my futile flight. It just did not seem the proper time to speak much more of monsters.
Soon Arly hobbled with me back through the dreary huts to point me toward my hosts’ home at the other side of the village. We parted in a convivial glow of rum and late afternoon sun caught among leaves immobile in a breezeless spring. I walked through that little city, rehearsing the tale I would make of it to my friends when they arose from their afternoon naps: You’ll never guess who I…or perhaps better, While I was out walking this afternoon, of all the people in the world I met…But in this way I went on trying to tell myself what had just happened, for the
whole of the forty-minute walk back. Yet as I came in sight of my hosts’ garden wall, their two-story home showed above it, with its facing tiles and terra-cotta cornices, any anecdotes contoured to the good feeling of the encounter so intimately and intricately worked through with its troubling revelations seemed more and more impossible—till, I confess, once I actually entered the gate, I could not bring myself to mention the meeting with Arly at all, for all my slightly tipsy rehearsals of it on my way home; though, indeed, I feel sometimes I have been rehearsing it ever since, now one way and now another—this only the most recent, though by no means the final, run-through.
Yes, I met Terek once, too—a little over a year after my afternoon with Arly. It was high summer in Kolhari; a day off from the school, and I’d gone to visit a merchant friend, a man of some travel himself. I was to meet him not at his home but at one of the caravan yards among the store buildings adjoining the New Market. Indeed, I’d known he’d been awaiting the arrival of a large commercial caravan for some weeks now: it had been gone seven months and was expected any day.
The half-dozen closed carriages and several high-piled wagons must just have pulled into the yard minutes before I strolled up. The drivers and grooms were joking with one another around the horses. The loaders had not been given their instructions yet and lounged by the warehouse wall. And the caravan soldiers sat about the yard in little clusters, playing bones, or stood leaning on their spears and watching.
My first thought was that my merchant friend would probably not be able to go to lunch with me now as we had planned. I did not see him in the yard. No doubt he was within, conferring with Her Majesty’s inspectors. But as I made my way toward the lashed-back hanging over the wide door, I saw a soldier standing by the wall, leaning on his spear before him, rubbing his chin on his forearm.
I frowned.
Could it possibly…?
I walked toward him. Tall, dark, lanky, yes, the man had a once-broken nose. As I neared, he let go his spear with one hand to reach up and rub his cheek. The same gnawed pits of broken and scabby horn were sunk on his fingertips, well back from the crowns. I glanced below his leather kilt, for the scar on his leg.
It was there.
‘Terek…?’ I said.
He didn’t turn.
‘Terek…!’ I stepped before him.
His eyes blinked in a gaunt, weathered face that, save the nose, I must say did not seem overly familiar, now that I was closer.
‘Your name’s Terek, isn’t it?’
The soldier gave the smallest nod—and waited. Clearly, he did not recognize me.
I smiled. ‘Do you remember me? You were a guard on a caravan of mine, oh—more than ten years ago now!’
Among his sullen features, a smile only threatened his mouth and eyes—but not of recognition; it was the one you give a stranger who’s made some well-intentioned mistake. For all his identifying marks, he looked less and less familiar, so that, again, I asked: ‘Your name is Terek…?’
‘Yes…?’ He waited for some explanation.
‘Well, you were a guard. On a caravan of mine. It was a rough one too. It wasn’t as big as this. But we lost both our carriages. We traveled most of the last months with just a wagon, and only the three of us—you, me, and a barbarian called Arly. He had only one—’
‘You mean—’ shifting position, he said suddenly—‘when we went through the Menyat? Where the stores ran out and half the guards mutinied? I had to stick my blade in the gut of three of my best friends on that one! Then we were stuck down in the canyon, and all there were was berries and cactus pith, for four months, caught down in those rocks!’ (The sudden outburst in the sullen demeanor was Terek—the Terek I remembered. It made me smile—and perhaps he thought, from that, I recognized his account.) ‘We didn’t dare come up, because of the bandits…’
While I smiled, at first I wondered if this were simply another incident he recalled that I’d forgotten. But no; neither my carriages nor my cart had gone as far west as the Menyat Canyon. ‘How long ago was that?’ I asked.
(What my own memories brought back as I had struggled a moment with his was a young, broken-nosed man on a leafy road thrusting his blade through the neck of a shrieking brigand.)
‘Four years.’ Terek considered. ‘Maybe five years back. I was out almost two whole years on that one.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘What I was talking about was over ten years ago. And I don’t think it was that rough.’
He reached up to rub his neck again. ‘More than ten years,’ he said. ‘That’s a long time ago. Were you the steward?’ He sounded doubtful.
‘No.’ Still smiling, I shook my head. ‘We knew each other. You told me all about how you got that scar. The young officer in the army—’ I pointed to his leg. (He glanced down then looked up with a raised eyebrow like someone who’d forgotten a scar was there.) ‘We were friends, you and I. I was practically a boy. You stayed on when the others left me. In the end, it was just three of us and a wagon: you, me, and a crippled barbarian—he lives off to the west of the city, now. I saw him just last year. It was…my caravan.’ I really felt odd saying that, for I truly treasured the memory of what I’d still thought was a three-way friendship among equals, even with Arly’s additions. ‘You don’t remember?’
He gave a shrug I want to think was so small because he might have been embarrassed. ‘Maybe,’ he said. He pursed his lips a moment. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, ten, twelve years, or more…’ I shrugged too. ‘That is a long time. But it was you.’
‘Maybe,’ he repeated.
I watched him, remembering the strange transformations of recognition in those moments meeting Arly. This lack of recognition was, in its way, almost as interesting. Terek had not grown particularly bald or fat, nor had he gone through any other great bodily change. Where before he’d been a young soldier, now he was a middle-aged one. He’d guarded caravans before mine; clearly he’d guarded them since. The trip with me had simply not been that memorable. I thought of trying to identify it further for him—tripping Arly on the castle roof? The terror at the border? Perhaps with a drink or two he might have been prompted to recall….
But many men simply do not set much store in memory. They are just not interested in what happened more than three months back, and then they only retain the incidents about those who are currently their friends.
I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Well, it’s good to see you again, Terek. Good luck.’
He looked at my hand (rather as though it didn’t belong there), looked back at me with narrowed eyes, still wondering, perhaps, if he had known me.
I nodded to him, dropped my hand, and left to go look for my merchant friend. Indeed, I had to go in and out of the warehouse several times to find him. Each time, I glanced at the soldier standing by the wall.
He looked at me only once—and I had the sudden notion that he did not even remember our conversation from minutes before, or, at any rate, was by now quite convinced that I had been mistaken.
I found my merchant friend. Yes, he could slip off for a quick bite at a tavern close by. I remember all through our meal I was on the verge of telling him about my encounter with his caravan guard. And didn’t.
I crossed the Old Market square that Carnival night remembering memories of Arly and Terek—my memories, theirs…From that play of the recalled and the forgotten (my forgetfulness, theirs), with whatever distortions lie between, monsters are formed, whether they be gods or great men, or even ordinary boys, sick unto death with a plague that has much of the monstrous about it.
Yes, I learned about monsters that trip. And I learned about them in these encounters after:
Yes, monsters are real.
And, they are us.
I turned down one street where only a few people held up torches.
I cut across a yard to skirt a cistern wall as the half-moon edged its light above a roof.
A few turnings down a few more streets: I
crossed some filled with revelers and some near empty. I went with shoulders hunched through a narrow alley, an arch at its end, and breathed deeply along another street, with only the usual rare night-strollers.
Through the shutters of the old inn, I saw the flicker of lamps. I waited a minute across from the door, to see if anyone entered. Certainly I’d found the proper building. I could have been late or early, of course. Waiting seems to be a part of such disreputable activity. From down the street came voices; red torches moved out from the corner. Someone in the group was playing a reedy flute. So I crossed, pushed back the creaking leather, and slipped inside.
Once within the low-ceilinged tavern, I knew I’d found the place. The way people stood or sat was just not the way people ordinarily stood or sat in a tavern at Carnival time. For one thing, no one spoke. There was an air of expectation. In the light of the lamps hanging by chains from the ceiling beams, I recognized a dark-haired woman at a table with a big barbarian—both looked up at me. It was the woman who handled the school laundry and the barbarian shoemaker she lived with, who sometimes used to drive her laundry cart.
I nodded.
They did the same, looking quickly away.
And I felt as much as they that further talk would be out of place, right here, right now.
I wondered should I go purchase a drink, or simply take a seat, as some had done, or—as had some others—go stand by the wall and wait. As I walked among the benches and tables I heard the hide creak again behind me. I glanced back as an old woman with a brown hood pulled forward about a deeply seamed face stepped tentatively in, peered about, obviously nervous and feeling out of place.
Outside, boisterous revelers passed, singing and laughing.
The Complete Series Page 122
