by K. J. Parker
‘I see,’ Poldarn said. ‘Well, that’s a great comfort, I must say.’
‘And then there’s number four,’ Basano continued. ‘General Muno Silsny, there’s another really unpleasant man for you.’ He frowned. ‘Not in the same league as Feron Amathy or this Monach character, and of course he’s not the Emperor, but you’d have to be a total arsehole to be anything like as nasty as he is. And he only popped up a few years back. Hell of a taleteller, Silsny; that’s how he’s got on so fast. Came out of nowhere; he started off as nothing but a poxy little captain in some outfit of second-rate horsefuckers, but then there was this battle and he got his leg broke, and he went around telling everybody he was snatched out of the jaws of death by the divine Poldarn himself, no less. For some crazy reason folks believed him, and since then he’s every place you look. Fought alongside General Cronan, rest his soul, when he beat the raiders; then he was off fighting the rebels, really making a name for himself. But he must be smart, because he changed sides at just the right time, joined up with the Amathy lot right after he’d kicked shit out of them in some battle, and now he’s commander-in-chief of the home provinces, no less. And you can’t be him, either.’
Poldarn’s smile had glazed over, like a properly fired pot. Muno Silsny was the name of the wounded soldier he’d saved from being murdered by looters after some battle in a river; he’d practically tripped over the man, and for some reason had wasted time and effort getting him back to his camp instead of leaving him to die.
‘Number five, now,’ Basano was saying. ‘Now that’s a dead cert, no way you could be the fifth evilest bastard in the Empire, because she’s a woman, and you’re not.’
Poldarn had an uncomfortable feeling that he knew who Basano was talking about. ‘Who’s number five?’ he asked.
Basano grinned. ‘Good question,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows shit about her. Her regular name’s supposed to be something in one of those crackjaw southern languages, Xipho Dornosomething, and what she calls herself is the Holy Mother of Death or some such shit, but everybody knows her as Copis the Whore. On account of she used to be one, so people tell me. Anyway, she’s with this Monach character, rattling round with him in the steel-plated carts. Religious nut, apparently; telling everybody she screwed the divine Poldarn and had his kid. I don’t understand religion much, but by all accounts this gives her the right to go around burning down villages.’ He sighed. ‘I liked it better when religion was about not coveting your neighbour’s ox, and whether true angels have wings. Anyhow,’ Basano said, ‘there’s five really, really nasty people for you, and you aren’t any of them, so what are you worried about?’
The next morning, Poldarn had a headache, probably due to the smoke or the smell of rotten leaf-mould. Basano woke him to say that breakfast was ready, but Poldarn wasn’t hungry. ‘I think I ought to be getting back,’ he said. ‘They’ll be wanting to know about the charcoal.’
But Basano shook his head. ‘Can’t spare anybody to go with you, sorry,’ he said, ‘not with number four starting to burn through, and the wind being about to change any bloody minute. You can head off on your own if you like, but I wouldn’t recommend it.’
Poldarn thought about Battle Slough, and decided he didn’t like the idea of wandering into it because he’d lost his way in the woods. ‘How soon do you think you can spare someone?’ he asked.
‘Difficult to say,’ Basano replied. ‘Four should be burnt out to blue in four or five days’ time, but by then we’ll have fired up two again, unless it rains, in which case we’ll need all hands to rake out four before the whole lot spoils; and three’ll be ready for sifting and bagging up some time in the next week.’
‘Oh,’ Poldarn said. ‘No offence, but you make it sound like I’m going to be here for the rest of my life.’
Basano frowned at him. ‘Don’t talk soft,’ he said. ‘For a start, we’ll be sending three wagons down the road before the end of the month. You could hitch a ride with them, then get the post back to Scieza, it’s only a couple of days.’ He looked up, sniffed, and disappeared back into the lodge, emerging a moment later with a frying pan in his hand. ‘Sure you don’t want some?’ he said. ‘Fried oatcakes and wood mushrooms. Speciality of the camp.’
Poldarn was about to ask what wood mushrooms were; but then he caught sight of the strange black objects in the pan, carbonised versions of the repulsive-looking growths he’d seen on the boles of rotten ash trees. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘I don’t usually eat breakfast. Indigestion.’
‘Ah,’ Basano replied. ‘Know what you mean.’ He stabbed one of the charred fungi with the point of his rusty knife, and Poldarn looked away. ‘Alternatively,’ Basano continued, ‘you could stay here till the new moon and catch the Chestnut Day party. Well worth hanging on for, that is.’
‘Oh? What’s Chestnut Day?’
Basano shrugged. ‘Once a year, we all give each other a bag of chestnuts. It’s a tradition,’ he explained, ‘very old, very important in the collier community. Actually, it’s just an excuse for a really good piss-up. And at midnight, we roast the chestnuts in the embers of Number Two and sing songs and stuff.’
Poldarn invented a smile from somewhere. ‘Sounds really good,’ he said. ‘But I really had better be getting back, or else they’ll start getting antsy and sign up for their charcoal with someone else.’
Basano pulled a face. ‘Impatient lot, you are,’ he said. ‘Well, in that case you’d better go off with the wagons.’ He paused, as if he’d just remembered something. ‘Or,’ he said, ‘tell you what. It’d be quicker, if you don’t mind roughing it a bit.’
Roughing it a bit, Poldarn repeated to himself, looking at the contents of the frying pan. No, I don’t think I’d mind that terribly much. ‘No problem,’ he said.
‘Well, in that case,’ Basano said with his mouth full, ‘Corvolo – you know, the old geezer you came in with – he’s going up to collect the mail; straight over the top, mind, it’s a pig of a walk, but you’ll come out on the road halfway between Iacchosia and Velny, and you can hitch a ride with the mail right into Scieza. How’d that be?’
Poldarn nodded enthusiastically. ‘Sounds good to me,’ he said. ‘When’s he leaving?’
Basano thought for a moment. ‘Now, probably,’ he said, ‘or else he’s already gone. Come on, we’ll see if he’s still here.’
It turned out that Poldarn wasn’t the only one going with Corvolo to get the mail; they were joined at the last moment by a tall, thin young man with short, spiky hair and an enormous burn scar on the left side of his face. He hadn’t said why he was coming with them, and Corvolo hadn’t asked. The young man hardly said a word all the way, though it could have been the steepness of the climb, which didn’t leave much spare breath for talking, or the difficulty of getting a word in edgeways. (Shortness of breath didn’t seem to be a problem with Corvolo, unfortunately.) It was only when they’d cleared the top of the hills and come to the edge of the tree line, with the road clearly visible a mile or so below them, that the young man said anything.
‘You,’ he said suddenly, stopping and looking Poldarn straight in the eye. ‘I know you from somewhere, don’t I?’
Poldarn nodded. ‘Quite possibly,’ he said. ‘I don’t know you, though.’
The young man frowned. ‘Well, that’s as may be. Were you ever in Torcea?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What d’you mean? If you’d ever been there, you’d know about it.’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘Long story,’ he said. ‘But yes, I may have been to Torcea, and no, I wouldn’t expect to remember if I had. Also,’ he went on, ‘I wouldn’t want to remember. No offence,’ he added. ‘It’s a personal thing.’
The young man looked mildly startled. ‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘Only, I’m sure I saw you once, long time ago. You were in a procession or a parade or something.’
‘Really.’ Poldarn shrugged. ‘Thanks, but I’d rather you didn’t tell me any more.’
; The young man started walking again. ‘Be like that,’ he said. ‘No skin off my nose. Only, I’m sure I remember you, because you were riding along down the street on a great big white horse, and people were cheering like you were somebody important.’
Poldarn grinned. ‘Do I look important?’
‘No,’ the young man said. ‘But neither do a lot of important people.’
‘There you go, then,’ Poldarn said. ‘If you really did see me and I looked important, then obviously I wasn’t, by your own admission. Glad to have cleared that up for you,’ he added kindly.
The young man didn’t seem to know what to make of that, but at least it shut him up for the rest of the journey.
They reached the road just before sunset. According to Corvolo, the mail coach would pass the two hundred and seventh milestone (‘That big lump of rock you’re sat on,’ he explained) three hours after sunrise the next morning; meanwhile, they could camp out by the road and be sure of catching the coach, or they could kip down for the night in a spinney two hundred yards down the slope, and hope they woke up in time. Poldarn said that where they were would do him just fine, and the young man didn’t seem to have an opinion on the matter, so they unrolled their blankets and built a fire, using some of the charcoal samples Basano had given Poldarn to take back with him. It was good charcoal, no doubt about it, but he didn’t say anything for fear of another lecture from Corvolo. Nobody seemed to have brought along anything to eat, but Corvolo had a leather bottle full of beer. If anything, it tasted worse than the stuff Basano had given him; it also gave him heartburn, which kept him awake long after the other two had dropped off and begun to snore.
Poldarn lay on his back and thought about names: Tazencius, Copis, Monach, Muno Silsny, Feron Amathy. The last time he’d seen Copis, she’d tried to kill him and he’d had to hit her, so hard that he’d broken her jaw. He still wasn’t clear in his mind about why she’d picked him up in her cart the day he’d woken up and found his memory gone. From what he’d been able to gather – she hadn’t told him, of course, that’d have been too simple – the sword-monks of Deymeson had ordered her to accompany him, as a spy or a bodyguard, or just possibly because he was really the Divine Poldarn returned to earth to bring about the end of the world, and Poldarn needed to have a priestess with him in order to make the prophecies come out right. At one time he’d imagined he loved her – no, not quite that, but they’d been close enough that she’d apparently been carrying his child – when she’d pulled a sword on him in the ruins of Deymeson, at which point he was back with his grandfather’s people, the raiders, burning the place and slaughtering the monks. He thought about that. For a man who never deliberately did any harm, who had no reason to hurt anybody in the world, fire and death did tend to cling to him rather, like the smell on a pig farmer’s boots. Then he thought about the reason why he’d left the islands in the far west: because he’d started a bloody feud, murdered a man called Cary in cold blood, burned his best friend to death in his own house – and there had been good reasons for all of that, anybody else would’ve done exactly the same in his place, probably.
Precepts of religion, he thought (and his eyes closed, and he drifted towards sleep like a carelessly moored boat); the guilty are innocent, only the innocent can commit crimes. The god in the cart is foretold, preordained, inevitable, and therefore not to be blamed for what he does. The only crime is to try and interfere with the working out of the pattern. But that—
A man was speaking; a big, fine-looking man with a bushy black beard, standing in a pulpit at the front of a huge, high-roofed stone building full of people. But that, he was saying, conflicts with another essential precept, whereby Poldarn returns in wrath to punish the evildoers and avenge the sins of men. Think (said the big, fine man, whose name was Cleapho) about the logic behind that. Poldarn’s coming is foretold, inevitable, it must happen; yet it is the deadly consequence of free choice, the choice on the part of the people to commit sins. See the fallacy. If the people’s choice was free, then Poldarn is not inevitable; the people might decide not to sin, and the punishment might not be incurred. But if Poldarn is inevitable, then the choice cannot be free, the people are doomed to sin, whether they want to or not – and if they don’t want to sin, how can they be wicked enough to merit punishment, since it is not the act alone that makes a crime, but the evil intention as well. Accordingly (said the big man, and Poldarn wondered where he, Poldarn, was all this time: in the audience, listening, or in the pulpit, preaching?) religion has another precept to cover the discrepancy. Only the innocent are punished.
Something settled on Poldarn’s nose, making him jump up; a moth, or possibly a big mosquito. The sky was lighter now. Time had passed, so presumably he’d fallen asleep after all. He discovered that he’d been lying on his left arm, and his hand was cramped up and painful. If that was dawn coming up in the corner of the sky, the coach would be here in three hours – reasonable enough, if it stopped overnight in Iacchosia and started out again at first light. He could remember Iacchosia quite clearly, having been through there a couple of months previously. A poxy little town, no big deal, entirely unmemorable. He propped himself up on his right elbow and looked round. The old man, Corvolo, was still fast asleep. There was no sign of the young man.
He woke Corvolo up and told him. Corvolo offered no explanation, but didn’t seem unduly concerned. Colliers were like that, he said, especially the young ones; suddenly they’d take it into their heads to move on, and off they’d go, without collecting their stuff, as often as not, or even their pay. Probably he’d decided to try his luck at one of the other camps further down the line – not that it’d do him any good, all the camps were pretty much alike, but that was colliers for you. Why, when he’d been a kid . . .
The mail coach arrived before Corvolo had a chance to tell Poldarn the complete history of his life, which was probably just as well. Corvolo had an amazing memory and could recall trivial conversations from thirty years ago, apparently word for word. If the coach had been even a quarter of an hour late, Poldarn was sure he’d have murdered the old man.
The coach only stopped for a few moments; just long enough for the postillion to hurl a cloth bag off the box, and for Poldarn to grab the running-rail and hoist himself aboard. As for it being a coach, that was an exaggeration; it was nothing but an ordinary cart, slightly longer and broader than the basic farm or carrier’s pattern but just as bare and uncomfortable. Apparently, the Empire didn’t believe in wasting good hardening steel on cart springs, Poldarn concluded, when it could be used for making spear blades; there were two soldiers to guard the mail, just in case.
‘In case of what?’ Poldarn asked the driver, who appeared not to hear him this time.
Fine, Poldarn thought. Not so long ago, he’d had a short but exciting career as a courier, working for the Falx house back in the Bohec valley. Two trips; and on both occasions he’d made it back alive but the driver hadn’t. He gave up trying to make conversation with the mail driver. If past experience was anything to go by, there wouldn’t be much point trying to get to know him.
Instead, he exchanged a few words with the other passengers. One of them was just a crazy old woman; she was dressed in a man’s shabby coat several sizes too big for her, and her lanky grey hair was mostly crammed under a cracked old leather travelling hat. On her lap she nursed a small wicker basket as if it was a newborn baby. She started to tell Poldarn a very involved-sounding story about her younger son’s progress in the district excise office in Falcata, but fortunately she fell asleep in the middle of a sentence.
The other passenger was a man. He was wrapped up in more coat than the slightly chilly air called for, with the collar drawn tight round his chin and the hood down over his eyes. This gave him an almost comically furtive look, like a caricature of a spy, or of the young prince in exile on the run from the usurper’s guards. When Poldarn asked him who he was, however, he replied that he was a travelling salesman on his way to Scieza.
His particular line of business, he added, was dental prosthetics.
‘What?’
The salesman grinned under his hood. ‘False teeth,’ he said.
Poldarn frowned, puzzled. ‘How do you mean, false?’ he asked.
For a moment the salesman wilted, as if the thought of explaining it all again was too much for him. But he pulled himself together and launched into what was clearly a well-worn sales pitch. Are you missing a tooth or two? he asked dramatically. Are you one ivory chorister short of a full choir? Do you find excuses not to smile, because of the ugly secret your lips protect? If so, help is at hand, because—
‘No, actually,’ Poldarn said. ‘I’ve got pretty good teeth, as it happens. Look.’ And he smiled.
‘Fine,’ said the salesman tetchily. ‘Good for you. Now, if it so happened that you weren’t so almighty fortunate in that respect, our company would undoubtedly be able to help you out and improve your quality of life to a degree you wouldn’t have thought possible. Our individually made, twenty-four-carat fine replacement gold teeth can be fitted painlessly in minutes, and are guaranteed to last you a lifetime of normal and reasonable use. For only thirty-five quarters, we undertake to replace any standard-size front or back tooth—’
‘Oh,’ Poldarn said, ‘I see. Hang on, though – thirty-five quarters for a little stub of gold? That’s a lot of money.’
The salesman scowled at him. ‘Cheap at half the price,’ he grunted. ‘I mean, twice. Well, anyway, there’s no point telling you any more because, like you said, you don’t need one. Though,’ he added half-heartedly, ‘that’s no reason why you shouldn’t join the long list of satisfied customers who’ve discovered that a Collendis Brothers gold tooth is an outstandingly impressive fashion statement.’ He stopped, and leaned forward a little in his seat. ‘I know you from somewhere, don’t I?’
