by K. J. Parker
But Poldarn shook his head. ‘That may be the truth,’ he said, ‘but it sure as hell isn’t the whole truth. How do you know all that stuff about me, and why did you go to all the trouble of finding me?’
Aciava grinned offensively. ‘I could give you an answer, only it’s not allowed. If you want to know why you’re worth busting my arse to find—’
‘All right,’ Poldarn conceded, ‘you’ve made your point.’ He stood up. There wasn’t really enough room in the chapel for pacing up and down, at least not without making himself look ridiculous; but he felt uncomfortable staying still. ‘Perhaps it’d be better if I just left.’
‘For you, maybe,’ Aciava said. ‘But don’t I get a say in the matter? Come on, give me a chance. I’ve been rattling about in mail-coaches for a week, and that’s not taking account of three years of painstaking, dreary investigation. Surely I deserve some consideration.’
‘Why? I never asked you to—’
‘How,’ Aciava interrupted calmly, ‘do you know that? I mean,’ he went on, ‘for all you know, there was an evening many years ago when you took me on one side, confessed that your biggest fear in all the world was losing your memory, and made me swear on my mother’s life that if it ever happened to you, I’d find you and tell you who you are.’
Poldarn looked at him. ‘And did I?’
‘No. But there could be all sorts of reasons. Maybe there are people who need you. Have you ever once considered that?’
‘Yes,’ Poldarn said, without much confidence. ‘But – well, I may not remember further back than three years, but I learned a few things about myself back in the old country – not things I did, things I am. I reckon anybody who knew me before is probably better off without me.’
‘Oh, sure,’ Aciava said, pulling a face. ‘You’re a sadistic wife-beater and you carry thirteen infectious diseases. While sleepwalking, you set fire to hospitals and orphanages. You are, in fact, the god who brings the end of the world. But apart from that—’
‘Fine.’ Poldarn sat down. ‘Just tell me, why was finding me so important?’
Aciava hesitated, then grinned sheepishly. ‘I missed you,’ he said.
Poldarn stared. ‘You what?’
‘Straight up. I’d better explain. At Deymeson – you do know, don’t you, you were at Deymeson?’
Poldarn nodded.
‘Well, that’s something. You were a novice there. You joined in second year of the third grade; you were eighteen months older than the rest of us, but Father Tutor reckoned you had to stay down, because you were so far behind. Anyhow, that’s beside the point. There were six of us. No, that’s misleading, because there were twenty of us in the class; but there were six of us who always went round together. Bestest friends, that sort of thing. There was you, and me; and Elaos Tanwar – he’s dead now – and the only girl in our year, Xipho Dorunoxy—’
Poldarn felt as if he’d just been slammed back in his chair by a kick in the stomach. ‘Copis.’
‘That’s right, Copis. That makes five. And one more. Cordomine was what we knew him as, but he’s better known these days as Chaplain Cleapho.’
There was a long silence. ‘I don’t believe you,’ Poldarn said eventually.
‘Oh.’ Aciava frowned. ‘What a shame, because it’s true. I can prove it, you know.’
‘I don’t want you to prove it,’ Poldarn shouted; then he took a deep breath. ‘No matter what you say,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to believe you. See, I’ve been through this before; I was at Deymeson – before the raiders burned it down – and they told me all sorts of stuff, all perfectly plausible, about who I was. And I believed them; but then I found out they were lying, using me, it was something to do with the war and some general called Cronan—’
Aciava nodded. ‘I know about that,’ he said. ‘Hardly surprising, you weren’t very popular with the sword-monks after you left. Anyway, that was when Copis told you she’d been – well, looking after you, bad choice of words, on their instructions, and then she pulled a sword on you. No wonder you’re suspicious when I tell you I used to be a monk too. And you don’t believe she was one of them, because you were in love with her at the time. Sort of.’
‘No,’ Poldarn said.
Aciava shook his head. ‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘you were. You were in love with her back in fifth grade – sorry, I’m not allowed to tell you that, am I? But she wouldn’t have anything to do with you, so it’s probably all right.’ He smiled. ‘Actually, it’s bitterly unfair, because when you did finally get her in the sack, you weren’t to know that you were finally achieving a lifetime ambition.’ He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. As he did so, a fold of his coat fell away, revealing the hilt of a short sword tucked into his sash. Poldarn wondered if it was deliberate. ‘Now do you want me to piss off and leave you in peace? If you do, I will.’
Poldarn closed his eyes. ‘No,’ he said.
Then the door opened, and the sutler came in with a big jug of beer. ‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘You haven’t finished the first one.’
‘Leave it,’ Aciava said, ‘we’ve got a use for it.’
The sutler went away again. ‘Sorry,’ Aciava said, ‘I’ve lost my thread. Did you just agree that you do want me to tell you?’
Poldarn sighed. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said.
‘Progress,’ Aciava said brightly. ‘A few moments ago, you were absolutely dead set against it.’
‘That was before—’
‘Would you rather I hadn’t told you? About Xipho – sorry, Copis?’
‘That’s academic, isn’t it? You’ve told me now.’ He slumped forward onto his elbows. ‘I guess you’d better tell me the rest.’
But Aciava shook his head. ‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘I’ve still got your best interests at heart, remember. I’ll tell you some things, but only what’s good for you. All right?’
‘I’m not in the mood for games.’
‘Ah.’ Aciava grinned. ‘I’ve heard you say that before. You always were an impatient sort – you know, always reading ahead, wanting to learn lesson five before you’d properly got the hang of lesson three. I can still just get up and leave, and I will if you don’t behave. Understood?’
‘Fuck you,’ Poldarn said. But he stayed where he was. ‘Go on, then.’
‘Thank you so much.’ Aciava settled himself in his chair and picked up a slice of smoked lamb in his fingers. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘one step at a time. Do you want me to tell you your name – not Ciartan, the name you had in the order? Or not; it’s up to you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Splendid. You were called Poldarn.’ Aciava smiled. ‘No, I’m not kidding you, it was the name Father Tutor chose for you, since he refused to call you Ciartan, he said there was no such name; and it’s quite usual for novices to take a name-in-religion. Signifies a complete severance of ties with the outside world, or some such shit. Anyhow, that’s what we all knew you as.’ He breathed in deeply, like a man of sensibility smelling a rare flower. ‘My guess is, Xipho was playing a game with you. Probably, being told to look after you put the idea of the god-in-the-cart stunt into her mind. Also, it’d be easier for her, so there wouldn’t be any risk that she’d suddenly call you Poldarn by mistake, out of habit, and then you’d get suspicious. Either that, or it was just her idea of a joke. You see, it was always a source of extreme merriment and wit in our gang, Father Tutor giving you such a wonderfully apt name.’ He paused. ‘You do know why it’s apt, don’t you?’
‘Enlighten me.’
Aciava sighed. ‘Well, Poldarn’s the god of fire and the forge, and before you joined up, you were working in a blacksmith’s shop. You learned the trade back in Haldersness, and when you wound up over here and needed to start earning a living, it was the only useful thing you knew how to do.’
‘I see,’ Poldarn said. ‘That explains – no, forget it. None of your business.’
‘Suit yourself.’ Aciava shrugged. ‘So that’
s your name,’ he said. ‘I reckoned there couldn’t be any harm in telling you, since that’s what you’ve been calling yourself anyway. And of course, it’s not your actual name, because really you’re Ciartan. Bit of a non-issue, really.’
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ Poldarn said, jumping up again. ‘I think I was right to start with. I don’t want to know any more, it’s just making me angry—’
Aciava nodded gravely. ‘Because you’re finding out you’ve been made a fool of. Same old Poldarn, always was scared to death of being made to look stupid in front of the class.’
If he’d had a sword, Poldarn would probably have drawn it; he could feel the intrusion into his circle, like a splinter in the joint of a finger. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But you’ve told me now, and I don’t want to know any more, thanks all the same. You can piss off now.’
‘Fine.’ Aciava held his hands up. ‘Whatever you like. But a moment ago you were dead set on knowing why I’d come looking for you. Obviously you’ve changed your mind.’
Poldarn closed his eyes. ‘You said you missed me.’
‘Oh, I did.’ Aciava laughed. ‘But I miss loads of people. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t ask myself what happened to old so-and-so. But I don’t go hunting them down across half the Empire. There’s a reason why I’m here, something that affects your present and your future, not just your past. You can ignore it if you like.’
‘Thank you,’ Poldarn said, and left.
Three hours’ walk, down a muddy, rutted lane in the dark, when he could probably have had a good night’s sleep on a soft mattress in the Virtue Triumphant, at the gold-tooth people’s expense. He cursed himself as he walked; never did know a good thing when he saw it. It was hard to imagine a sensible person in his situation walking out on a good offer like that. All that had been expected of him in return was sitting still and listening to some stuff about some people he used to know, one of them being himself. He carried on, feeling the mud slopping under his boots. It was a long nine miles, and his own stupidity went with him all the way.
The tragedy of my life, he thought; wherever I go, I take myself with me. And I expect my mother warned me about getting into bad company.
Copis, he thought (and at that moment, the low branch across the road that he knew was around there somewhere smacked him across the face; it probably laughed at him too, behind his back). Why the hell should the worst thing, the most important thing, be that she made a fool of me? All that time, on the road, in that bloody cart; she knew and I didn’t. At Deymeson she said she was quietly hating me all the way, under her breath, because she knew who I was and what I’d done. Our kid’ll be – what, two, nearly three by now, assuming she didn’t strangle it as soon as it was born.
It’d be so much simpler, so much better, if Aciava (his real name? God knows) was lying. Sure, he knew all that stuff about the old country, but maybe a whole lot of people knew that once, in which case he could’ve found it out easily enough. Poldarn stopped, one foot in a puddle; just because he knows who I am doesn’t necessarily mean he’s telling me the truth. Think of what the sword-monks did to me, and he even says he’s one of them. Probably I was one of them – it’d explain this knack of being able to pull out a sword and kill people. And Aciava said it himself, they had some reason to hate me. So I’d have to be crazy to believe them, wouldn’t I?
He remembered an old joke: I wouldn’t believe you if you told me my own name.
He shook his head, like a carthorse bothered by flies. It all came down to whether he wanted to know. What could there be in the past that he could conceivably want back? Like the old character-assessment question, what one thing would you save if your house was on fire? It stood to reason, he’d been three years away from his past and there hadn’t been any one thing he’d felt the lack of. He could sleep in ditches and eat stale bread and raw meat; the state of his clothes or his boots didn’t seem to bother him; luxury and comfort and pleasure weren’t worth going back for, he could manage without them just fine. Company, now; in the past three years he’d had two lovers and a friend. Hadn’t worked out too well; the lovers he’d lost to the past, but the friend— He remembered what it had felt like, that very short time when he’d been able to do what everybody else back in the old country could do: hear other people’s thoughts. It had been while he stood outside the house at Ciartanstead, while Eyvind, his friend, was burning to death inside.
I killed him; and that wasn’t the past’s fault. That was just some quarrel over some trees.
Indeed; that had been a bad business, and in consequence he’d left the old country and come back here, so as to transfer Eyvind’s murder from his present to his past, like a banker moving money from current account to deposit. The past would be useful if you could use it like that, as a place where you could bury dead bodies, shovelling this convenient loss of memory into the grave to cover up their faces. That’s not what the past was for, though. It was where the present went to rot down, so you could use it to grow the future.
He smiled; nice piece of imagery, but it was too glib to fool anyone.
What harm could it do? After all, just because I know about the past doesn’t mean I’ve got to go back there. And besides, it’ll make it easier to avoid the bad stuff if I know what I’m avoiding.
That made Poldarn wonder if there was a little tiny lawyer lurking maggot-like deep inside his brain. It was a specious argument, designed to lure him into a trap. Yes, but.
Yes, but if I’d known then what I know now, Copis couldn’t have played that dirty trick on me. And what about the sword-monks at Deymeson? If I find out about my past, they won’t find it so easy the next time.
Assuming this isn’t the next time.
Big assumption, given that the source of the information appeared to be a sword-monk. If he was going to believe anything one of them told him ever again, he might as well go the whole hog, shave his scalp and have the word IDIOT tattooed on it in bright purple letters. Except, of course – what if they were the only people who knew the truth and could tell him? In that case, better not to know?
Clearly, he told himself, there are arguments on both sides, like an ambush in a narrow pass. Now, if he wanted something really scary to occupy his mind with, how about the ease with which this joker had found him? He hadn’t come to this godforsaken place because he liked mud and fog, or because he’d always wanted to be a bell-founder when he grew up. If someone could find him here—
Assuming anybody wanted to; anybody else, apart from the incredibly annoying man who claimed his name was Aciava; who apparently wanted him for something, and had been prepared to tell him what it was (assuming he hadn’t been lying)—
Fine. Poldarn’s head was spinning, and he hadn’t even stopped long enough to drink much of the free beer. Which was another way of saying the same thing. He was going to be miserable anyway, so why not have something tangible to be miserable about?
Stupid line of reasoning; stupid, like the very rich merchants in Falcata, who took crucial business decisions on the basis of the phases of the moon, and whether Saturn was in the fifth house. Stupid; but the answers thereby derived must’ve been right, or the merchants wouldn’t have ended up very rich.
Did it really matter that Copis had made a fool of him, after all? Arguably, he’d had the last laugh, if the man had been telling the truth; he’d got her into bed in the end, hadn’t he, just like he’d always wanted. No wonder she’d wanted to kill him, come to think of it.
(It was all a bit like his name, assuming it was his name. First he’d been a god. Then he was called after a roof-tile. Then it turned out the roof-tile was named after the god. And now it turned out it really was his name – called after the god, who’d probably been called after the roof-tile in the first place. Is that where gods come from, he wondered?)
Or he could carry on as he was (assuming they didn’t burst in and drag him away if he wouldn’t come quietly). He could stay here, in flat, wet, foggy, horrible
Tulice, living in a turf house and working in the foundry. A lot of people lived in Tulice, in turf houses, working in foundries; and as far as he could tell, most of them seemed to get away with it, without ever being recognised or discovered or ambushed by their past lives. It couldn’t be difficult, if they could manage it. Old joke: if a Tulicer can do it, so can a small rock. So, if they could do it, so could he.
Or maybe the bastard was lying to him. Ready-made pasts had to be on the list of things you weren’t supposed to accept from strangers. Not without—
Ah, Poldan thought (and there was a faint, thin yellow light in the distance, the lantern burning outside the foundry gates), that’s the word I’ve been searching for. Not without proof.
(—Assuming Aciava has any, and that he hasn’t been so offended that he gets on the dawn mail-coach and buggers off back where he came from before I can ask him. Assuming I’m going to ask him. Come to think of it, the whole of our world is made up of assumings, like chalk is the bones of billions of small dead fish.)
At least the turf houses at the foundry were better than the horrible little dirt dog-kennels at the charcoal-burners’ camp. The foundry had been in business for over a century, and the workers’ houses had to be at least forty years old, if not older; long enough for the turf to put down roots and knit together nicely. The foundrymen were almost proud of them, in a way. It wasn’t everybody, they said, who lives in a living house, with walls and a roof that grow, even if it is a bit like living in your own grave.
Poldarn was shaken out of a dream about something or other he couldn’t remember by Banspati the foreman. ‘You’re back, then,’ he said, looming over Poldarn like an overhanging cliff.
‘Looks like it,’ Poldarn mumbled. ‘What’s the time?’
Banspati grunted. ‘Some of us’ve been up for hours,’ he said. ‘So, how did you get on?’
The question puzzled Poldarn for a moment; then he remembered. The charcoal. He tried to recall how all that had turned out. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘We did the deal.’