The Last Witness

by K. J. Parker

  The stupid branch had hit her in the eye all right. It was all blood, welling up and pumping out of this impossible hole in her face. Then she covered it with her hands, still yelling. I realised what I’d done. I felt—well, you can imagine. Actually, no, you can’t.

  “Stop yelling,” I said. “It’s only a scratch. Here, let me look.”

  She shied away, like the calf you can’t catch. “You did it on purpose.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “You did it on purpose. I know. I saw you.”

  I hate the truth sometimes. “I didn’t,” I said. “It was an accident. I’m sorry. It wasn’t my fault.”

  You can’t really lie to someone who knows the facts. She’d seen me; holding back the branch just long enough to giver her the impression it was safe to take the next step forward, then opening my hand, relaxing my grip, like an archer loosing an arrow, deliberate, precise, accurate. She’d witnessed it, she understood what I’d done, and she was going to tell on me.

  I remember stooping down. There was this stone. You could kill someone with a stone like that.

  “I can’t see,” she said. “You did it on purpose. You did.”

  I think I would have killed her, there and then. I was looking at her, I remember, not as my sister, a human being, but as a target—just there, I’d decided, above the ear; that’s where the old man in the village got kicked by the horse, and he died just like that. I was staring at the exact spot; and then the side of her head seemed to melt away—

  And that’s a curious thing, because at that age I’d never seen a library, never even seen a book; heard of them, vaguely, like you’ve heard of elephants, but no idea what they looked like or how you used them. Goes without saying, I couldn’t read. But I could; at least, I could read the books inside her head, well enough to find what I needed, the moment when I let go of the bent branch and it came swinging at her, filling her field of vision and blotting it out in red. I knew what to do, too. It came perfectly naturally, like milking a goat or killing a chicken. Like I’d been doing it all my life.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “My face hurts,” she sobbed. “I can’t see.”

  “What happened?”

  “A branch jumped back and hit me in the eye.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  I remembered I was still holding the stone. I opened my fingers and let it drop. “It’ll be all right,” I remember telling her. “We’ll get you home and then it’ll all be just fine. You’ll see.”

  It turned out that I was the hero of that story. They couldn’t save the eye, of course. It was too far gone. But everyone said how well I’d handled the situation, how calm I was, how grown-up and sensible. And what the hell; why not? The bad thing had already happened, it was gone, past repair. If the truth had come out, it’d have torn our family apart, just think of all the damage it’d have done, to all of us, right down the line forever. There’s too much unhappiness in the world as it is.

  Anyhow, I think that was me. Pretty sure.

  After all, what is truth but the consensus of memories of reliable witnesses? I think He (the fire-god, the Invincible Sun, whoever, whatever; I’ve had so many genuine mystical experiences, all totally convincing, most of them hopelessly contradictory) put me on this Earth as a sort of antidote to the truth—you know, like dock leaves and nettles. Under certain circumstances, I can do this amazing thing. I can reshape the past. I can erase truth. It sounds pretentious, but I regard it as my mission in life. Truth is like love; it’s universally lauded and admired, and most of the time it just causes pain and makes trouble for people. Obviously, I can’t be there for everybody, and there are some things so big and blatantly obvious that I can’t do anything about them—the Second Social War, for example, or the Great Plague. But I stand for the wonderful revelation that the past is not immutable and the truth is not absolute. This ought to inspire people and give them hope. It doesn’t, of course, because the essence of my work is that nobody knows about it, apart from the people who commission me (and half of them don’t remember doing so, for obvious reasons), and they ain’t telling.

  * * *

  The memory of a priest, however, is a real bitch. People confess to priests. I guess being a priest is the closest anybody normal ever gets to being me. They have to open their minds and their memories to all the poisonous waste of Mankind—imagine being a priest with a memory like mine, it’d kill you. They have their faith, of course, which is a wonderful thing. It must be like those gravel beds they build in watercourses, to filter out all the crap. Breaking into a priest’s memory is, therefore, not something I enjoy.

  Now I think I’ve given you the impression that I’m rather better at my job than I really am. I’ve let you think that I go in, get precisely what I want, and get out again, completely unaware of and unaffected by anything else that might be in there. If only. True, I only read—well, the titles of the scrolls, the list of contents, the index. That’s bad enough. Each entry in the ledger (I’m beginning to realise how inadequate my library metaphor is; sorry) embodies a minuscule but intensely compressed summary. Your eye rests on it for a split second, and immediately you get the gist of it. I can skim down the average man’s lifetime of memories in the time it takes you to read a page of your household accounts. But every entry is like a tiny, incredibly detailed picture, and I have (so to speak) exceptional eyesight.

  Furthermore, some memories leak. They’re so bright and sharp and vivid that they stand out, your eye’s drawn to them, you can’t help looking at them. I try and mind my own business, of course I do, but some things—

  Like the men who murder their wives and the women who murder their children, the men who poison wells and kill whole towns, the rapists and the sadists and the broad rainbow spectrum of human maladjustment; and they go to their priests to get rid of it, and the priests take away the sins of the world and file them in their archives, and then I come along. I really don’t like doing priests. It’s like walking barefoot through a dark room with broken glass on the floor. Oh, and I did that once, or someone did. No fun at all.

  * * *

  I went to where I was supposed to be meeting them. The young man was there; no sign of the old man. He was sitting on a bench in front of the Blue Star Temple, reading a book. He looked up as my shadow fell across the page. “Well?” he said.

  “All done.”

  He frowned at me, as though I were a spelling mistake. “How do I know that?”

  I get tired sometimes. “You don’t. Instead, you trust me and my colossal reputation among respected leaders of the community.”

  “You’ll be wanting your money.”

  “Yes.”

  He moved his feet, and I saw a fat leather satchel. “You lunatic,” I said. “I can’t walk home carrying that. I wouldn’t get a hundred yards.”

  “I got here just fine.”

  “You don’t live where I do.”

  He shrugged. “Your problem,” he said. “Well? Do you want to count it?”

  I smiled at him. “People don’t double-cross me,” I said. “They simply wouldn’t dare.”

  An unpleasant thought must have crossed his mind just then. “No, I don’t suppose they would. Anyway, it’s all there.”

  I leaned forward to take hold of the strap but he shifted his feet again. “We can trust you, can’t we?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean,” he went on, “we’re not killers, my dad and I, or we’d have had that old fool’s head bashed in. But there comes a point where you have to look beyond your principles, don’t you know. I just thought I’d mention that.”

  I put the back of my hand against his calf and moved it sideways. Then I pulled the satchel out. It was reassuringly heavy. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m an honourable man.”

  “Really.”

  I stood up. I remember thinking; no, don’t do it, there’s no call for that s
ort of behaviour. “And I do try to give value for money,” I said. “I want my customers to think they’ve got what they paid for. It’s good for business.”

  “Right. Well, goodbye.”

  “So if I sense that a customer isn’t satisfied,” I went on, “I throw in something extra, for goodwill. He’s not your father.”

  His eyes were very wide. “You what? What did you say?”

  “Goodbye.”

  * * *

  Actually, I was lying, though of course he had no way of knowing that. So what? He asked for it. The truly splendid, insidious thing about it is, when his father and mother eventually die and only he is left, the last surviving witness to those events, it will be true—in his mind, the only archive. So you see, I can create truth as well as delete it. Clever old me.

  * * *

  Several of my clients, misguided souls who thought they wanted to get to know me better, have asked me how I got into this line of work in the first place. I tell them I can’t remember.

  There was this spot of trouble when I was seventeen. As I my have mentioned, I’m no angel. There was a small difficulty, and I had to leave home in rather a hurry. Luckily, it was a dark night and the people looking for me didn’t know the countryside around our place as well as I did; their dogs were rubbish, too. I took the precaution of bringing along the clothes I’d been wearing the previous day and stuffing them inside a hollow tree I knew I’d be passing on the way out, so to speak. Fortuitously, it stood on the banks of the river. Stupid dogs all crowded round the tree, jumping up and yelling their heads off, while I swam upstream a bit, hopped out, and went on my way rejoicing. The men who were after me were livid, as you can imagine—I wasn’t there to see, of course, but I remember the looks on their faces quite clearly. Gave me the best laugh I’d had in ages.

  Still; once the warm inner glow of profound cleverness had worn off, I reflected on my position and found it largely unsatisfactory. There I was, sopping wet, one angel thirty to my name, no place to go, no friends, no identity. Naturally, I wasn’t the first person in history to find himself in that state. After all, that’s how cities came about in the first place; it’s what they’re for.

  The nearest city was only twenty miles away. I knew it quite well, so it was useless; somebody would recognise me, and word would get about. My angel thirty would’ve been just enough to buy me a seat on the stage to the next city down the coast, but I decided not to risk it, since coachmen sometimes remember names and faces. As things had turned out, I’d left home in a pair of wooden-soled hemp slippers, the kind you wear for slopping about the house in. There wasn’t much left of them by the time I dared risk stopping and thinking. They certainly weren’t in a fit state to carry me eighty miles on bad roads, assuming I was prepared to take the chance of staying on the road, which I wasn’t. Remember when you could buy a decent pair of boots for an angel thirty? You could back then; but first you have to find a shoemaker, for which you need a city. One damn thing after another.

  I find that when you’re in a deep pit of doubt and perplexity, Fate jumps in and provides you with an answer, almost invariably the wrong one. As in this case. First thing I saw when the sun rose was a farmhouse, practically rearing up on its hind legs at me out of the early morning mist. I thought; there’ll be boots in there. I’ll walk up to the door and offer to buy a pair. Easy as that.

  Idiot. A stranger hobbling up out of nowhere wanting to buy footwear would tend to snag in the memory, particularly out in the wild, where nothing ever happens. I had good reason to wish not to be memorable. The hell with it, I thought. I was by now more or less resigned to the fact that I’m no angel; what’s one more minor transgression? Be a man. Steal the stupid boots.

  Sad fact. It’s not enough to be a thief. You need to be a good thief. I’m not. My problem is, I don’t look where I’m going. I try, ever so hard; but sooner or later there’ll be a chair or a table or a tin plate or a bowl of apples that I somehow contrive to overlook. Crash it goes on the hard flagstone floor, and that’s that. Here we go again.

  The farmer was an old man, feeble, with a bad leg. I could’ve taken him easily. His son and his four grandsons were a different matter. What they were doing, hanging around the house when the sun was well up and they should’ve been out grafting, I have no idea. They didn’t approve of thieves. There was an apple tree just outside the back door, with a low branch sticking out practically at a right angle. They had, they assured me, plenty of rope, not to mention a dung heap. And besides, they said, who’d miss me?

  The human memory is a wonderful thing. They say that when you die, at the moment of departure, your entire life flashes past your eyes in a fraction of a second. This isn’t actually true; but all sorts of stuff crowds into your mind when you’re standing on the bed of a cart with a rope round your neck; among them, in my case, the circumstances of my sister’s accident. To be honest, I hadn’t given it much thought in the intervening time—tried to put it out of my mind, I guess, and who can blame me?—but it came right back to me at that precise moment, and I remember thinking, I wish I could do that trick where I went into her mind and pulled the memory out, it’d be really useful right now if I could do that. And suddenly I found I could.

  False modesty aside, it was a tour de force. Six men and five women, one after the other, in a matter of seconds. I’ve done bigger jobs since, but that’s with the benefit of considerable experience. For what was only my second go at it, I did remarkably well. Incentive helps, of course. It wasn’t the neatest work I ever did, I had to hurt them quite a lot—like I cared—the pain kept them off balance and sort of woozy, which helped considerably. When I’d finished, we were left with this tableau; a kid standing on a cart under the apple tree, with six men and five women crowded round. No rope, I’d chucked that into the nettles. How we all got there, a total mystery to everybody except me.

  I cleared my throat. I think my voice must’ve been a bit high and croaky, but I did my best. “Well, thanks for that,” I remember saying. “I’d better be getting along.”

  One of the grandsons helped me down off the cart. He had a sort of dazed look. I took a long stride, and felt the dewy wet grass under my feet. “I almost forgot,” I said. “The boots.”

  The old man looked at me. “What?”

  “The boots,” I repeated. “Really kind of you.” He was still holding them in his hand; evidence, I guess. I reached out, took them, and pulled them on. Lousy fit, but what can you do? “Thanks again,” I said, and walked quickly away. You learn not to look back. It takes some doing, but it’s worth the effort.

  * * *

  I’m not the sort of man that people tend to remember. Just look at me and you’ll agree. I’m about five seven, thickset, small nose, small ears, low forehead, leg-of-pork forearms, the typical farm boy up from the country. I slip out of people’s minds as easily as a wriggling fish. People hardly notice me, in the street, in a crowded room. Most of the time, I might as well not be there.

  Remember what I told you about why I don’t like doing priests? For three days afterwards, I wandered around feeling useless and stupid, like having a headache but without the pain. I knew there was something on my mind, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I filled the time in with chores. I bought a new (to me) pair of boots. I fixed the leak in the roof—at that time I was living in the roofspace above a grain store; one wall had cracked and was bulging out in a disturbing fashion, so it was empty until the owners raised the money to repair it; the rats had the ground floor, I had the penthouse. I mended both my shirts where they’d started to fray. Stuff like that.

  And then, on my way to the market early, to see if I could buy some windfall apples cheap, I met a man I knew slightly. I pretended I hadn’t seen him. He called out my name. I stopped.

  “Long time no see,” he said.

  “I’ve been busy,” I told him.

  He nodded. “Working?”

  “Yes.”

  “Splendid. Get paid?�
��

  “Yes.”

  “In funds, then.”

  I sighed a little sigh. “Yes.”

  “Destiny,” he said, and grinned. “Back of the Sincerity & Trust, one hour after sunset. Be there.”

  I walked away without saying a word.

  * * *

  I sometimes wonder if I’m like that hero in the old legends whose strength was as the strength of ten, but only as long as the sun was in the sky. In my case, strength of will. All that day, while the Invincible Sun rode the heavens, blessing us poor mortals with the sacrament of His light, I was utterly determined. I wasn’t going. No force on Earth would get me within a mile of the Sincerity until noon tomorrow. Throughout the morning I felt the power within me grow; at midday, I was solid as a rock. I stayed that way till halfway through the afternoon, and as the shadows began to lengthen I kept checking up on myself, to see if my strength of purpose was going to hold out—and it did, right up till the first red streaks began to show in the sky. I don’t know, maybe I’m more like a werewolf or something like that. Maybe it’s the darkness that affects me, or more precisely the yellow glow of lighted windows. They call to me; come inside, they say, where it’s warm and friendly. I noticed to my surprise that I was only two blocks from the Sincerity. The light was fading rapidly. I quickened my pace and walked the other way.

  I believe it happens a lot in deserts. You walk and walk and keep on walking, and suddenly you realise you’ve gone in a circle and you’re back where you started from. In this case, just across the street from the back door of the Sincerity at one hour after sunset.