by K. J. Parker
Poldarn assumed he knew what that meant. 'What about you?' he said.
'If you must know,' the voice said, 'I'm a monk of the abbey of Deymeson. Possibly even the last one, I don't know; not that it matters, I'll be dead fairly soon.'
'All right,' Poldarn said. 'So why should I believe you're telling the truth?'
'You can if you like; I suppose it's like religion, a matter of faith. But if you want to know why I'm betraying the general, truth is I'm following orders. The abbot sent me to kill him, you see. Well, I haven't had the chance up till now.'
The man who was supposed to be General Cronan turned his head and swore at the man in the cart; one of us stepped forward and punched the back of his head, dropping him sprawled on the ground.
'Wouldn't have been right before the battle, anyhow,' the voice called Monach went on. 'We needed him, you see, to deal with you. But he's done that now.' The voice sounded very tired, but it was still clear and audible. 'Don't suppose any of this'll mean anything to you, but I'd like to tell someone how clever I've been. You want me to explain?'
'If you like,' Poldarn replied.
'How gracious of you. Right, then. I needed Cronan to beat you, because nobody else could and you had to be stopped. But now he's done that, he's definitely got to be killed; the only man to fight and defeat the raiders, that makes him the most terrible threat to the safety of the empire. He'd only have to say the word, and the whole imperial army would go over to him without a moment's hesitation. So we take him out of the picture, who does that leave? Tazencius is a nonentity, nobody's going to trust Feron Amathy; the government troops have fallen back on Sansory, which means the Amathy house can't sack it like they were planning to do. It's all turned out pretty well, if you ask me.'
Poldarn wasn't sure if any of that made sense, but it was none of his business anyhow. He turned his head in the direction that Eyvind's voice had come from. 'This is a slice of luck,' he said in our language. 'Seems like we've tripped over the enemy general, the one responsible for what happened. The other three are his advisers, and the man in the cart's a traitor. I think he's telling the truth.'
'Dear God,' Eyvind said. 'Well, things are looking up. What do you want to do with the traitor?'
Poldarn considered the matter. 'He reckons he's going to die anyway,' he said. 'Leave him be, I would.'
'Why not?' Eyvind replied, and while he was still speaking a backsabre chewed through General Cronan's neck. The sound carried a long way in the dark. One of the other staff officers tried to say something, but he wasn't fast enough. All the rest of them died in silence.
'Thank you,' said the voice from the cart. 'It's just like they said, everybody who rides with me gets killed, sooner or later. The unsettling thing is, what if I've averted the end of the world? I don't think I was supposed to do that.'
For some reason Poldarn knew it was safe to enter the circle now. He walked up to the cart and peered in. There was just enough light to see the man's face.
'Excuse me,' Poldarn said, 'but does the name Poldarn mean anything to you?'
The man looked back at him. 'Are you trying to be funny?' he said; then his face crumpled up with pain, and he passed out.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was a long walk to the ships. Shortly after the first dawn they reached the Mahec, which made navigation extremely simple but increased the risk of detection by enemy cavalry. A few days before, of course, they'd have regarded a chance encounter with the enemy as an opportunity rather than a threat, but attitudes had changed. The main thing now was to get home quickly and safely, without further loss.
'I don't suppose I understand these people any more than you do,' Poldarn said, as they followed the riverbank on the second afternoon. The man he was talking to (he hadn't caught his name) shook his head and smiled, but he persisted. 'No, really,' he said, 'you've got to bear in mind, when I woke up I couldn't remember anything. I've been learning about these people from scratch, just like you.'
The man clicked his tongue. 'There's a difference, for a start,' he said. 'We don't want to learn about them, at least not more than we need to know so we can beat shit out of them. I mean, why bother? It'd be like learning to speak sheep.'
Poldarn let that go by. 'My guess is, though,' he went on, 'they aren't going to bother us any more; I mean, why the hell should they? They'd have to be crazy. They've beaten us once and we're going home. If they fight us again, there's a good chance they'll lose, now they haven't got their military genius any more, and that's the advantage they've gained gone for ever.'
The man wasn't convinced. 'You're assuming they're smart,' he said. 'You can get in a lot of trouble making assumptions like that. No, it's just as likely that they're too dumb to figure out what you just said, and they'll come after us to try and score another victory. Whoever their new commander is, won't he want to prove he's every bit as good as the dead guy?'
Poldarn had to admit that was quite likely from what he'd gathered about the way the empire's mind worked. 'Still,' he went on, 'if they do attack, we'll be ready for them. Last time they only won because they'd had time to plant those damn caltrops.'
His foot didn't hurt nearly as much as it had the previous day, which in turn had been an improvement on the first night. He'd had help, of course; men he didn't know but who seemed to know who he was had taken it in turns to lend him a shoulder; that, combined with the unrelenting pace of the march, had turned the whole business into some kind of deadly serious three-legged race. His arm was a different matter, unfortunately. Someone who seemed to know about such things had announced that the wound had gone bad. He'd known the cure, of course-seven different kinds of poultice, all involving garlic and bread mould, neither of which was available in the middle of nowhere, with the enemy possibly hot on their trail. 'You'll probably be all right, even so,' the man had told him, 'it'll just take longer, that's all.' He'd got the impression the man was trying to be positive rather than tiresomely accurate.
On the third evening they reached a village. For once news of their approach had preceded them, and the place was deserted. All traces of food had been cleared out of the houses, but they found apples on the trees in a big orchard, and several plots of leeks and onions more or less ready to be pulled. That was just as well; they'd had precious little to eat since the battle, though nobody had actually gone hungry. A dog followed them down the street as they left, wagging its tail but keeping a good twenty-five yards clear at all times. Poldarn noticed it, and for some reason realised that he hadn't seen a crow for days, and not many birds of any kind.
On the fourth day he was able to walk on his own, though Halder and Raffen took it in turns to walk on his lame side, keeping perfect step, in case he stumbled. Raffen didn't say anything, but Halder told him more about the farm; how he'd found the site himself when he was twelve, moved there when he was sixteen and built his first house, floating the timbers down the combe stream one at a time. His father had a fine place a day's walk to the east, he explained, but he'd never been comfortable at home; he had three elder brothers and he wanted somewhere of his own, so one day he followed the river until he came to the place where the house now stood. It was a hot day and he felt thirsty, so he lay down to drink. Somehow, when he stood up again, he knew that here was the place he was meant to be. He wasted the rest of the day walking the valley and the combe, and spent the night lying on his back beside the watersmeet, trying to count the stars. He woke up soaked with dew, and by the time he reached home he was running a bad fever that nearly killed him, but as soon as he was fit to be out again he took his father and brothers to see the place and formally laid a claim by raising a stone and cutting his name on it. When his father died, his brothers and their people helped him raise the house, gave him his share of the flock, the herd and the seedcorn, and left him to it. That suited him fine. The next time he left the farm, except to borrow tools or scrounge for iron, was three years later, when he walked down the river for two days to Gynnersford,
where he'd been told they had a spare daughter. Her name was Rannway, and some useful stock and a serviceable cart came with her. Their son, Tursten, was born a year later. The day after he was born Halder started planting a pine copse on the rise opposite the farm, the idea being that by the time Tursten was old enough to want a house of his own the trees would be the right age for felling and logging; the copse was called Tursten's Wood, and it was still there, since Tursten never showed the slightest inclination to get married or leave the main house. Nobody had ever got round to thinning the trees out, so they'd grown tall and spindly; there was a rookery on the southern edge, and the birds had an aggravating habit of pitching in when the men fed the calves and robbing the feed from under their noses.
(And when I was a kid, I declared war on those crows, and won a single glorious victory, Yes, I know all about that.)
'How old was my father when he died?' he asked.
Halder counted backwards for a moment. 'Nineteen,' he replied, 'just about to turn twenty.'
Poldarn nodded. 'And how long ago was that?'
Halder looked at him, then realised the point of the question. 'Forty-one years ago,' he replied, 'give or take a month. The woman was ten years older than him, they reckon. When I heard what'd happened, I looked up the men who'd been with him at the time-they were from Colscegsbridge, on the other side of the island-and made them promise to take me there the next year when they went, in case there was anything left to see. We found her there, among the ruins, with the baby. We tried to creep up nice and quiet but she must've heard us. She was in the barn, and there was a hole in the back wall we hadn't spotted. By the time we figured what had happened, she was out back and running, with you tucked under her arm like a parcel. We saw her just in time, and chased after her; I fell behind, but Asley and Turcram, two of the men, were good runners, they were closing in; suddenly she stopped-I saw this myself-and she put you carefully down on the ground, then she ran off, fast as she could.'
'Oh,' Poldarn said.
'Well,' Halder went on, 'Asley carried on after her, Turcram stopped to pick you up. To cut a long stick short, Asley tripped on a molehill and twisted his ankle, she got away, and we were left with you. Of course, soon as I saw you I knew you were Tursten's boy; so I brought you home, and handed you over to Rannway-that's your grandmother-'
'Yes, you told me that,' Poldarn said.
'So I did. Anyway, she died two years later, but there were women at the farm to look after you, you never wanted for anything, and that's all there is to tell. At least, that's all till you were just turned nineteen, old enough to go abroad for the first time.' The old man shook his head. 'Should've known better, of course,' he said, 'but you were wild keen to go, and I couldn't see the harm. Worst thing was, I was laid up that season, I'd fallen out of a pear tree, of all the damn fool things to do, and broken my leg. So I didn't go, and you didn't come back. That's something to think about,' he added. 'There's only been two years since I turned twenty-three that I didn't go abroad; the first time I lost Tursten, the second time I lost you. I guess that's why I'm here now, for fear of what'll happen if I miss another year, because the only one I'd got left to lose by then was me.'
That night they slept in the ruins of a town, long since overgrown. Halder said he had an idea that he'd been with the expedition that burned it, forty-seven or forty-eight years ago, but he couldn't be sure. The wind was coming up from the east, but there were some bits and pieces of wall still standing, enough for most of them to get behind. Poldarn fell asleep as soon as he lay down, and had a dream in which his mother appeared to him and forgave him for something he couldn't remember having done, but she didn't look anything like the old woman from the barn at Vistock, and he couldn't help wondering if the dream had really been meant for somebody else.
The next day, just after mid-afternoon, they reached the coast (which was good), at least half a day south of where they thought they'd come out (which wasn't); the confusion turned out to be the result of following the southern fork of the Mahec at the point at which it split into two. Everybody in the party seemed very upset and disappointed, though nobody blamed anybody else; they seemed to regard it as an omen or a punishment from heaven, and none of them seemed to be in any mood to talk about anything for the rest of the day. They pressed on, apparently hoping they'd be able to force the pace enough to make the ships by nightfall, but they'd underestimated the terrain and ran into complications they didn't appear to have been expecting: boggy ground, woods, places where the path ran along the cliff face and occasionally crumbled away into the sea. Five men left the main party of their own accord and went ahead to scout out a safe route; they hadn't come back by the time the main body decided to stop where they were and wait for morning.
Poldarn lay down and went to sleep lying on a flat rock. When he woke up he realised that the rock sloped downwards at a sharp angle, and was perched on the end of a spur hanging out over the sea.
The next morning they set out early, the consensus of opinion being that they couldn't be more than an hour from the ships, if that. Four or five hours later they still hadn't found any ships, or even any landmarks they recognised, nor had the scouts come back. This didn't make sense, so another five men set off to find the way and see if they could figure out what had happened to the other advance party. They came back soon afterwards and announced that they'd seen the ships, and they weren't far away, but there was a problem. Between the raiders and the ships was the mouth of the main spur of the Mahec River; it was too wide to cross, and there didn't seem to be a ford or a bridge. Rather than muck about and waste time following the river upstream looking for one, they'd come back to report and warn the others, who would doubtless be able to think of some way round the difficulty.
At that point everybody started talking at once, and it wasn't long before Poldarn came to realise that this was a sure sign that nobody had the faintest idea what to do. Of course, he didn't either. If the nearest crossing place was a day's march upstream-well, that was two days wasted, during which time the enemy might show up at any moment. (Did they have ships of their own? Nobody knew. If so, were they patrolling the coast in the hope of finding the beached ships? If so, why hadn't they already done so?) To make matters worse, they'd be kidding themselves if they reckoned they had enough food left for a square meal, so there was a very real prospect of a long detour on an empty stomach. A few enthusiasts started talking about swimming out to the ships and bringing them into the mouth of the river. Others, more sensible, explained why this would be a bad idea. It was the first time Poldarn had seen them disagreeing among themselves, and it struck him that they weren't very good at it, presumably through lack of practice. Nobody particularly wanted to listen to anybody else's views or suggestions, they were too busy shouting out their own, with a degree of vehemence that suggested that fairly soon they'd reach the conclusion that words weren't going to be enough, and start reaching for their backsabres.
Someone asked why they hadn't considered this problem when they beached the ships there in the first place. The explanation seemed to be that they hadn't anticipated coming back that way. It had been assumed, reasonably enough in the light of past experience, that they'd be following the north bank of the main spur of the Mahec, having come down on it from the north about a day out from the sea. The river hadn't been an issue since the trail they'd been planning to follow both going out and coming back sheared off north-east from the river road, and nobody had actually carried on that way far enough to notice any fords, bridges or ferries.
By this point the argument was going round in circles, but there wasn't anybody either willing or able to stop it and bring the discussion to order. Poldarn, who didn't feel he was qualified to join in, wandered away and sat under a thorn tree, one of the few windbreaks on the open moor. He rested his head against the trunk and closed his eyes Don't I know you? he thought.
The woman from his previous dream was standing in front of him, while the obligatory cr
ow flew in overhead and pitched in the spindly branches of the tree. Poldarn stayed where he was.
I don't know, the woman replied, do you?
That didn't seem very helpful. The woman was about forty years old, with a thin face, very pale, and a small, sharp nose. This time, apparently, she wasn't his mother.
I'm sorry, he said, but I don't know who you are. Not that that means anything, I don't even know who I am, let alone anybody else.
Well, you should know me by now, the woman replied, I'm your wife.
Oh, Poldarn thought; and he said, I'm sorry, I hadn't realised I'm married.
The woman gave him an unpleasant look and said, Well, you aren't, not any more. Poldarn said, I'm sorry, I don't quite follow. The woman shook her head and said, That's a joke, when you think that it was you who had me killed. Murdered, she amended; you had me murdered, because I'd become a nuisance and you wanted to marry someone else, Prince Tazencius' daughter, who's less than half your age. So you had two of your men push me down a well, and I remember floating there, after I got too weak to swim any more and drowned, and I was listening to you telling everybody that there'd been a dreadful accident, you were bawling and sobbing-I'll bet you managed real tears, somehow or other-and they all believed you, or they put up a bloody good show; and all this time I'd been thinking, at least he remembers, at least his conscience must be ripping into him sometimes, probably in the early hours of the morning, when you wake up and can't get back to sleep again. Now it turns out you've forgotten, and that makes me feel so angry I'm sorry, Poldarn repeated, but I honestly don't remember. I don't know your name, even.
She grinned at him unpleasantly. I like that, she said. My name's Faleris, and we were married for seven years. We have a son, who's five, and a daughter who's just turned three. At least, that's how old they were when I died. You have no way of knowing when that was, and I'm damned if I'm going to tell you. I'll leave you to think about that in the early hours of the morning, that time when you've woken up and you can't seem to be able to get back to sleep. That'll give you something to think about other than wars and fighting and plundering, assuming you're capable of doing that.
