by K. J. Parker
Poldarn looked at him steadily. ‘Such as?’
‘Ah. Such as, was it also you who murdered Prince Mazentius during the course of a robbery on the Falcata to Ang Chirra road; how the Mad Monk and his motley crew are involved in all this, and when they’re planning to attack the foundry at Dui Chirra; and what exactly is your connection with the people who make and use this particular pattern of sword.’ The colonel sighed. ‘I’m sorry to have to say that if you say the right thing in answer to these questions, you’ll at least live long enough for a trip to Torcea. If it was up to me you wouldn’t be leaving this room alive, but I have to do what I’m told, more’s the pity.’
The driver was right, Poldarn thought; the next old woman I meet on the road can rot in hell. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I don’t understand.’
Colonel Lock shook his head sadly. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘Do we really have to go through the whole sorry pantomime? Go on, then, let’s be having you. Name.’
‘Actually—’ Poldarn hesitated. It’s worth a try, he thought; this man’s an idiot, just as well he doesn’t know it. ‘My name’s Poldarn,’ he said. ‘I’m a foundry worker at Dui Chirra.’
‘Is that so?’ Colonel Lock drummed his fingers on the table. ‘And what are you doing here? Last I heard, all leave at the foundry was cancelled.’
Poldarn shrugged. ‘I ran away,’ he said. ‘But if you send me back there, anybody can tell you that’s who I am. And they’ll tell you I can’t have done any murders or robberies, because nobody’s been allowed out of the place since the project started. You do know about that, don’t you?’
He could see Colonel Lock thinking about it; not quite as monolithic as the stage driver, but very similar. ‘So how come you’ve got the late General Muno’s personal candidature ring? Find it in the slack tub, did we?’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘He gave it to me,’ he replied. ‘He came to Dui Chirra specially to see me. Ask Brigadier Muno at the foundry if you like; he’s the general’s uncle.’
‘I know that.’ Colonel Lock was obviously the sort of man who gets irritable when he knows he’s out of his depth. Weak; easy mark. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘Suppose you tell me about the wiggly sword? Or did Muno Silsny give you that as well?’
‘No,’ Poldarn said patiently, ‘I made that myself; you can see, it’s not quite finished yet. I’m a blacksmith, I was making it in my spare time. Copy of one I saw once.’
‘Really.’ The colonel was getting flustered. ‘And this book. I suppose it’s just some light reading for the long winter evenings.’
‘Yes,’ Poldarn replied. ‘A friend gave it to me.’
‘Did he, now. Your friend was a sword-monk, then?’
Poldarn shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘He didn’t say where he got it from.’
Apparently he’d said something wrong, because Colonel Lock was smiling. But he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to share the joke. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s fine. Care to tell me why you left Dui Chirra, when you knew perfectly well you weren’t allowed to?’
‘I was bored.’
Colonel Lock looked at him for what seemed like a very long time. ‘You were bored,’ he repeated.
‘That’s right. There’s nothing to do there except sit about waiting for Spenno and Galand Dev to stop arguing. They’re sort of in charge,’ he explained. ‘And they can’t make up their minds how to go about things; and while they’re yelling at each other, the rest of us just have to hang around. I’d had enough, so I reckoned I might as well move on. I mean, I’m nobody important, they don’t need me for anything.’
The colonel raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s so crass I could believe it,’ he said, ‘except that I get the feeling there’s more to it than that. I heard all about General Muno Silsny finally tracking down his secret rescuer,’ he went on. ‘It was going to be a big story, and then it was killed dead. And then, shortly afterwards, so was General Muno. And here you are, the mystery hero, with Muno’s candidature ring and a raider backsabre, roaming about the countryside making an exhibition of yourself in the Falcata magistrates’ court.’ Suddenly he clapped his hands together. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the good bit is, I can hand you over to Brigadier Muno and let him deal with you. I’ve seen your sort before, every officer in the service has; trouble follows you about like flies round a horse’s arse. Sergeant,’ he called out, ‘get our guest a nice room on the top floor. I want two guards outside his door and another two under his window, in case he gets bored again. We want to be on the road at daybreak, back to Falcata and then on to Dui Chirra.’
It was an improvement on the hayloft; in fact, it was the best bed Poldarn could remember having come across, soft yet firm, with clean linen sheets. There was even a basinful of water for washing in, and a decent fire in the hearth.
‘Thanks,’ he said, as the guard opened the door and gestured him into the room. ‘If you get cold standing out there in the passage, feel free to pop in and warm yourself up.’
The guard gave him a look that would’ve cleaned rust off an abandoned ploughshare, and shut the door behind him. Poldarn kicked off his boots, lay down on the bed and looked up at the roof timbers, which were carved and gilded. He guessed (not that it mattered) that, like most inns, this one had started off as a monastic house, an outlying priory, and this had once been the prior’s or abbot’s lodgings. Nice of the government to put him up in the best room in the house.
Such a soft, restful bed; all he had to do was lie down on it, and all the aches, pains and nagging little injuries he was so acutely aware of would vanish, like water splashed on the hearth. Instead, he perched on a wooden stool in the corner. Just as well the colonel had confiscated his book. A man could slip off to sleep so easily reading that. But going to sleep would be a very bad thing, wouldn’t it? Sleep into dreams, dreams into memories, finding out the next part of the story. He wriggled about, looking for the most uncomfortable position to sit in. All those times when he’d wanted to go to sleep but hadn’t been able to, because of some minor discomfort. It wasn’t too much to ask, a few hours of being awake until the soldiers came back and took him away; and nobody could fall asleep in the saddle on the road back to Dui Chirra, all that rain and mud, seeping through into the bone—
He could see quite clearly, but he also knew his eyes were closed; which could only mean—
Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree.
It started up as he rode past, yelling reproachfully at him as it battled its way into the headwind, which was pulling it in a direction it didn’t want to go. For a long moment it hung still in the air, its wings beating hard. Then it was moving sideways, unable to resist; then it gave in and tried to tack a course back onto the line it wanted to follow.
You and me both, Ciartan thought, shifting his reins into his left hand, flexing the fingers of his right, which were beginning to get numb. Ahead, over the shoulder of the rider in front, he could see a small round building that could only be a gatehouse: too small to be practical, too ornate to be a poor man’s house. Some rich bastard, someone who took a perverse delight in manipulating his environment, had had it put there as a conspicuous display of wasted money. He’d arrived, then.
From the gatehouse to the house itself, best part of half an hour, along a pointlessly winding road that weaved its way like a drunk between blatantly obvious landscape features: a raised lake, a grove of flowering cherries, a toy vineyard, a bog garden, a larch avenue. All the daintily engineered exhibits had been chosen so they’d look their best, be in flower or fruit or silver leaf during precisely the same two weeks each year; the two weeks, presumably, that Prince Tazencius deigned to spend at this quaint little sixty-bedroom cottage while Court was in recess for the midsummer half-term. Ciartan found the rest of the ride up to the front door rather annoying. He’d grasped the point quite some time ago, thank you very much, and didn’t need it rammed home with a sledgehammer.
So here he was, the Prince’s prospectiv
e son-in-law, finally dropping by to meet the folks. She’d be there, of course, the beautiful Lysalis, his bride-to-be; he thought about her, wondering what would be passing through her mind right now. Was she excited at the thought of seeing him again? Would she be sitting at the top of that tower over there, watching the drive? He doubted that, unless Prince Tazencius considered it a necessary detail. If she was excited, it’d be because Daddy had ordered her a special new dress for the occasion. He had an idea that Lysalis’s life was mostly a series of short intervals between pretexts for special new dresses. Which was fine, if you liked that sort of thing.
Prince Tazencius’s landscape architect hadn’t finished with him yet, not by a long way. True, the main house was now only about five hundred yards away as the old black crow flew; but first he had to be forced to admire the carp ponds, the castellated granite dovecote, the belvedere, the ivy garden, the sunken lawn and the peacock enclosure. There had to be a short cut, for when Tazencius was in a hurry to get somewhere. Probably you could be on the main road in five minutes flat if only you knew the way.
Poor Lysalis, he thought; she was just as much an exhibit as the mulberry plantation or the rose garden, and about as necessary. Whatever it was Tazencius wanted him for was undoubtedly some straightforward piece of business, something that could be sorted out in ten minutes of straight talking in the back room of an inn somewhere, without all this tedious and wasteful business of marrying into the family. But that wasn’t how things got done around here, apparently. There was probably a perfectly sound reason for it, something to do with the delicate balance of power at Court, which of course he’d never understand no matter how long he studied it in Expediencies. In the end, all the protocols and forms and procedures came down to a three-handed arm-wrestling bout between the main factions inside the royal family, and all these bits and pieces– castles and daughters and lavender-edged south-facing knot gardens – were just rather ornate chess pieces. Back home at Haldersness, of course, none of this would even be possible, and if it was it’d be resolved in an afternoon on the moor with spears and axes. He couldn’t help feeling that was a more efficient approach, but it was easy to be all superior when you couldn’t see the full picture.
Now then, he told himself, concentrate. You’re letting your contempt for all this decadence distract you from your basic preparations, which is probably the purpose of the exercise. Strip away all the junk, and let’s have a look at what’s going on.
He cleared his mind, until all he could see was two circles, his own and Prince Tazencius’s, gradually preparing to coincide.
A while back, Tazencius’s daughter visits her brother at school. While she’s there, she happens to meet one of his circle of acquaintances, a promising student but as ineligible as it’s possible to be – no money, no family, nothing. A few months and several visits later, the promising student finds himself engaged to be married to the Prince’s daughter, and now here is the promising student, working his way like a chessboard knight through the Prince’s interminable grounds, on his way to find out exactly what it was that the Prince wanted him for in the first place.
(And it only goes to show, Ciartan thought; because I do believe that she is really quite fond of me, insofar as she’s capable of liking anything she can’t wear. But there; I’ll believe anything, me.)
The welcoming tableau was inch-perfect: Tazencius precisely in the centre of the group; his wife, a thin, gaunt-looking woman in an outfit that must’ve cost almost as much as the house (but unless you’d been taught in Expediencies to notice trivia, you’d quite easily fail to see her there at all); assorted stewards, chamberlains, personnel both functional and decorative, human salad. No sign of Lysalis, because she’d be making her entrance in just a few moments, probably down a long spiral staircase. She’d look stunningly lovely, of course, or heads would roll.
Gradually nearer; and then the moment came, and the circles coincided. Ciartan stood quite still; no sword in his sash today, of course, which was probably just as well, since it’d have taken a tremendous effort not to give in to that hard-gained instinct and draw, the sense of confrontation being so overwhelming.
‘Hello, Ciartan.’ Prince Tazencius was smiling. Charming smile. ‘It’s so good to meet you at last. Lysalis has told me so much about you.’
(Has she? What, exactly? Or did she just read out the summary of the reports?)
‘It’s really kind of you to invite me,’ Ciartan replied.
‘Not at all. You’re practically family already. Come in and have something to eat – you must be starving.’
Amazing dining hall: long oak table, like the ones back at Haldersness, except that it was polished immaculately smooth, like a mirror (no mirrors at Haldersness ever reflected that clearly). Twenty places set: twenty silver plates, cups, knives and napkin rings, and each setting identical to the one next to it, like crows in a flock. Bizarre people, quiet and grave and respectful, all following the Prince’s lead (like the household at Haldersness, but they weren’t mind-readers, they were obeying orders, orders so fundamental that they didn’t need to be spoken out loud; so it was like Haldersness and also its exact opposite, a mirror image). And amazing food, things he’d never eaten before, things he’d never have believed were edible. Actually it tasted horrible, but it was amazing nonetheless.
‘Ciartan,’ the Prince was saying, from his place at the head of the table, through a mouthful of what Ciartan had an uncomfortable feeling were probably snails. ‘Lysatis tells me you aren’t from a religious family. Is that right?’
He remembered just in time: specialist vocabulary. What Tazencius meant was, he didn’t come from a long line of supposedly celibate career monks. ‘Quite right, sir,’ he said.
‘She tells me,’ the prince went on, sounding quietly amused, ‘that you really only got into religion because of a chance meeting. Can that really be true? The most promising student in your year?’
Which he wasn’t, of course. ‘It’s true I really only joined up on a whim, yes,’ he said. ‘I met a boy about my own age, and he told me he was on his way back for the start of the new term. He told me about Deymeson, and it sounded interesting. And that’s all there was to it, really.’
‘Remarkable.’ Tazencius’s smile was warm and friendly, like your own fireside after a long day in the winter fields. All lies, of course. ‘You must have an exceptional degree of natural aptitude, to have caught up so quickly.’
‘I had a lot of help,’ Ciartan lied. ‘Extra coaching and so on.’
‘Even so.’ Tazencius had finished his snails; now he was scrabbling about with a long, thin silver hook inside the shell of some revolting-looking crustacean. Did the high nobility only eat armoured food? ‘I also gather that you’re quite the linguist.’
As he said it, the prince looked him full in the eye, and his expression clearly said, agree with me. ‘I’m not too bad at languages,’ Ciartan said hesitantly. ‘I mean, I can pick them up fairly quickly, at a basic level.’
‘Excellent. Only,’ Tazencius went on, pausing to remove a tiny shard of shell from the tip of his tongue, ‘I have some documents in my study which are written in some language that none of us can understand – we don’t even know what it is. If you wouldn’t mind taking a look at them, perhaps you could cast some light on the mystery.’
‘Sure,’ Ciartan said.
The next course was soup – soup with shellfish and whole small crabs bobbing up and down in it. The drill was to fish them out with your fingers and use the butt of your knife to smash the shells. It might have made a degree of sense if they weren’t three days’ ride from the nearest bit of sea. During the soup course, Tazencius ignored Ciartan completely, preferring to talk to a thin bald man on the other side of the table; Lysatis’s mother, on the other hand, suddenly seemed to become aware of his existence, and chattered away for the duration of the course about the latest Torcea fashions in soft furnishings. Odd; although she never once appeared to draw breath, she fin
ished her soup (shell-smashing and all) while Ciartan was still struggling to disembowel his second crab. Also, her fingers remained perfectly clean, while his were soon all coated in creamy white slime.
The next course – Poldarn help us, thought Ciartan – was hedgehogs, quills still on, in butter sauce.
Tazencius, on the other hand, was talking to him again. ‘Am I right in thinking,’ he was saying, ‘that when you were a boy you were taught, um, blacksmithing?’ He made it sound like a filthy habit.
‘That’s right, sir,’ Ciartan said. ‘It’s traditional, back home; the head of the household is the smith, you see, so I was brought up to the trade ever since I was little.’
‘How very sensible,’ Tazencius replied, ‘learning a practical skill, and at the same time keeping control of the most essential craft safely in the family. I suppose you could say that we do roughly the same sort of thing, except that instead of metalwork we teach our sons the martial arts. But the principle’s very much the same, I dare say.’
‘Absolutely,’ Ciartan said distractedly. He’d just figured out what the style of eating favoured by these wonderfully refined gentry reminded him of: crows, pecking daintily at carrion with their long, precise beaks. ‘We see it as both a privilege and a responsibility; much, I suppose, as you do with the fighting skills.’
And other rubbish like that. Lysatis, he couldn’t help noticing, hardly said a word to anyone all through the meal. As soon as it was over, however, he saw her join her mother in shepherding the guests out of the hall, swift and totally efficient, until the only people left were Tazencius and himself.