Memory (Scavenger Trilogy Book 3)

by K. J. Parker

  ‘Now then,’ it said, ‘I want you to pay attention. Look down there, to your left. Can you see?’

  ‘No,’ Poldarn said. ‘Oh, just a moment, yes. There’s people coming, on horses. Is that what you meant?’

  ‘Look closely,’ the crow said. ‘Now, I’m going to open up your memory just a little bit – not too far, obviously, so don’t worry about things getting out and escaping. Just enough so you’ll know—’

  At which point, the man on the leading horse glanced up, looked Poldarn in the eye and smiled at him. ‘You know who that is?’ asked the crow.

  ‘Of course I know him,’ Poldarn replied. ‘That’s Feron Amathy.’

  ‘Watch closely.’

  The man rode on, out of sight. Behind him came a troop of cavalry, carrying spears and wearing mail shirts.

  ‘All right so far?’ the crow asked. Poldarn nodded.

  A moment later, Poldarn saw a column of men on foot, also armed. But they weren’t regular soldiers or even irregulars like the Amathy house. They wore old farm clothes, and their only weapons were backsabres.

  ‘And they are?’ asked the crow.

  ‘Easy,’ Poldarn said. ‘My lot. I never did find out what we call ourselves, but in these parts they’re called raiders. Or savages,’ he added, with a slight frown.

  One of them looked up, saw Poldarn, and scowled: Eyvind. Sore loser.

  ‘Still happy?’ asked the crow.

  ‘I guess so,’ Poldarn said. ‘Is there any point to this?’

  ‘Be patient. Now, who’s this?’

  Prince Tazencius rode under the tree. He didn’t look up, though clearly he knew Poldarn was there. Embarrassed; doesn’t want to be seen with the likes of me. Fine.

  ‘Nearly there,’ the crow said. ‘Now, while we’re waiting, let’s see if you can tell me what the connection is. Well?’

  ‘Too easy,’ Poldarn said. ‘Evil. These are all bad people.’

  The crow shifted an inch or so along the branch. ‘Yes. And?’

  Poldarn thought for a moment. ‘They’re all bad people I’ve been mixed up with over the years.’

  ‘Yes. And?’

  Cleapho rode under the tree, lifting one hand off the reins in a gesture of dignified acknowledgement. For some reason, Boarci was walking next to him, holding the horse’s bridle. Poldarn frowned. ‘They’re all people I’ve betrayed,’ he said. ‘Or treated badly in some way.’

  ‘Yes. And?’

  ‘And nothing,’ Poldarn replied, slightly annoyed. ‘They’re bad people, and I’ve treated them badly. Big deal. They had it coming.’

  The crow sighed. ‘Oh dear,’ it said, ‘and you were doing so well. Now, then. I want you to look down on your left side.’

  Poldarn turned and looked down. ‘I know her,’ he said. ‘That’s my wife.’

  The crow laughed. ‘Which one?’

  ‘First,’ Poldarn replied. ‘No, second – no, hang on, first. Lysalis. Tazencius’s daughter.’

  ‘Very good.’ Lysalis smiled up at him and did a little finger-fluttery wave. ‘Next.’

  Next came Halder, walking, and Elja. ‘My second wife,’ Poldarn explained. ‘Only, I have a bad feeling that she’s also my daughter. Who’s that boy she’s with?’

  ‘Your son,’ the crow said, as the ferocious young swordsman Poldarn had killed in the woods strutted past. ‘Lysalis’s boy, Tazencius’s grandson. Theme emerging?’

  Poldarn laughed. ‘Piece of cake,’ he said. ‘These are good people I’ve treated badly; though that boy wasn’t so nice, he tried to kill me—’

  ‘Quite,’ the crow said. ‘He did his best, and that’s all you can ask of anybody. Pay attention.’

  General Cronan rode by, and General Muno Silsny (‘That’s not fair, what harm did I do him?’) and Carey the fieldhand walking beside them, his hand clamped to his slashed neck; and behind them a long stream of people Poldarn didn’t recognise, thousands of them—

  ‘A representative sample,’ the crow said. ‘After all, the object of the exercise isn’t just making you feel bad about yourself. Anyway, they’re in reverse order, so it’s the Falcata delegation at the front, then Choimera, followed by Josequin— You get the idea.’

  Poldarn frowned. ‘Where’s Choimera?’ he asked. ‘I never heard of it.’

  ‘You’re a busy man,’ the crow replied. ‘You have people to deal with, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Fine.’ Poldarn tried to sit up, but the branch was slippery; the rain had started again. ‘Point made. Point sledgehammered into the ground. I haven’t just harmed those bad people but all these innocent people too. That’s why I don’t want to remember any of it.’

  ‘You just want to run away.’

  ‘Exactly. The more I hang around the places I’ve already been, the more damage I do, on top of everything I’ve done already. Going back home proved that. Any contact I have with my past leads to more bad things; it’s contagious, and I reinfect myself. Which is why I want to run away – really run away this time, get as far away from all of it as I possibly can. I thought I was doing that, coming here; all I wanted to do was get a job and settle down, it’s not my fault that they all came chasing after me. But there’s got to be some place I can go, somewhere outside the Empire, where nobody will ever find out who I used to be.’

  ‘Fine,’ said the crow. ‘Look down.’

  None of the people passing under the tree were familiar, though some of them looked up, smiled, waved. There were even more of them than before.

  ‘Do you understand?’ asked the crow.

  ‘Yes,’ Poldarn said. ‘So what do you want me to do? Should I jump out of this tree and break my neck?’

  ‘Look down,’ said the crow again.

  All strangers once more, and none of them acknowledged him; but the line went on out of sight in both directions.

  ‘Really?’ Poldarn said quietly. ‘Even if I kill myself right now?’

  ‘Of course,’ the crow said. ‘My, what a big head we have, assuming we can redeem the world by an act of supreme sacrifice. Look, there you go now.’

  Sure enough, Poldarn could make out his own face in the crowd, just briefly, before it passed out of sight. ‘One more victim wouldn’t make things much worse,’ the crow said. ‘Wouldn’t make it any better, either. Really, what was your tutor thinking of? You ought to have covered all this elementary stuff in second grade.’

  ‘Maybe we did,’ Poldarn said irritably. ‘I really don’t remember.’ The branch was getting very slippery now; he was in danger of falling off. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m assuming there’s a point to all this, so you tell me. What have I got to do?’

  Then he fell out of the tree.

  Comedy, he thought, as he opened his eyes; then, Where did that come from?

  He was lying in deep mud; just as well, since he’d only a moment ago fallen thirty feet. It was broad daylight. A crow got up out of the branches above him and flapped away, shrieking. Poldarn didn’t need to translate; he could remember what it had been saying.

  The only difference is in what they’ve actually done.

  And that, presumably, was the answer: find out who’d done most, and deal with him. I need someone I can ask, he thought. I need to speak to Cleapho, or Copis, someone who can tell me what’s going on. Assuming, of course, that they’d tell me the truth.

  Assuming I can find them again, having made such a spectacularly good job of making sure that they can’t find me. Assuming, even, that I can ever get out of this horrible bloody wet forest.

  Big assumption.

  As if he’d woken out of something bigger and more malevolent than mere sleep, he got to his feet, stretched and flexed to make sure that nothing had got broken or bent in the fall, yawned and looked around. Trees. Lots of more or less interchangeable trees. Absolutely not a clue about where the hell he was. So breathtakingly well hidden that nobody on earth knew where he was, not even Poldarn or Ciartan Torstenson.

  He remembered what the colliers
had said about the Tulice forests: so dense that a man could walk for days and never realise that the main road was only twenty yards away to his left. And wet, too: full of nasty boggy patches that’d swallow you up before you’d figured out you were in trouble, in which case the best you could hope for was that you’d be sucked down over your head and drown or smother immediately, rather than stay mired up to your armpits until you starved to death, or the wolves or the bears or the wild pigs ate you (browsing off your arms and face like cows nibbling at a hedge; at the time he’d assumed that the colliers were just trying to put the wind up him . . .). Wonderful place to get lost in, the Tulice forest.

  Poldarn walked for an hour in one direction, until the closeness of the trees and the depth of the shadows all around him made him feel like he was buried alive; so he turned left, and carried on that way for another hour or so, until that direction became just as unbearable, or more so. Left was obviously a bad idea, so he turned right. Right was worse. The canopy of leaves overhead was as tight as the lid on a jar; he needed light in order to breathe, and the canopy was choking the light, strangling him; and every change in direction led him to taller trees, thicker leaves, darker places. (Allegory, he thought bitterly; I hate fucking allegory.) How long he’d been blundering about he had no idea, but it didn’t matter anyway; didn’t matter if the sun had gone down, because it couldn’t get any darker than this, could it? No trace, needless to say, of human beings here, nothing to suggest that a fellow human had ever been this way before – so much for the idea that all his problems had been caused by other people. Right now, he’d be overjoyed at any hint that there were such things as other people, that he wasn’t the only talking biped left in the universe—

  Something whistled in his ear, then went chunk. After a moment’s bemused searching, he found it. It was a strange insect, with green and yellow wings and an absurdly long brown body, and it lived by boring into the bark of trees. No, it bloody well wasn’t: it was an arrow. Some bastard was shooting at him.

  Feeling rather foolish, because at least three seconds had passed since the arrow had hit the tree, Poldarn threw himself to the ground and crawled on his knees and elbows for the cover of a holly bush. Silly, he thought, holly not arrow-proof; but he curled up tight in a ball and waited, and no more arrows came. Even so.

  Then he heard something, quite close. Grunting, snuffling; a fat man with a bad cold running uphill with a heavy weight on his back. The absurdity of it made him want to burst out laughing, because unless this neck of the woods was swarming with people and he’d just been walking blithely past them for the last five hours, it stood to reason that the grunting, snuffling fat man had to be the secret archer. Well, fine; if Gain and Copis and the most powerful man in the world were to be believed (which was by no means certain), Poldarn was a graduate of the Deymeson academy of killing people, and more than a match for a runny-nosed pork chop, even one with a bow and arrows. The noise was getting closer, so all he needed to do was stay perfectly still, and then, when Fatso came waddling past him any second now, just stick out a leg, trip him up and bang his head against a tree until he came up with directions to the nearest inn. Piece of—

  It must already have seen him, some time before he saw it; that was what cowering in the bushes would get you, if you were so dumb that you couldn’t tell the difference between a human being and a fully grown wild boar. When he lifted his gaze – purely chance that he happened to be looking in that direction at precisely that moment (rather than half a second later, when it’d have been a quarter of a second too late) – he saw a massive grey wedge with two tiny red lights halfway up the taper, growing huger and huger. His legs figured out what the thing was before his brain did, because by the time the words wild boar had congealed in his mind, he was already on his feet and trying to push through a thick screen of holly leaves.

  The pig squealed, a silly, high-pitched angry noise like a little girl whose brother was pulling her hair. There was a little blood, black and shiny, on its shoulder. The boar flattened the holly bush about a heartbeat after Poldarn got clear of it.

  Then Poldarn hit a tree.

  Bloody stupid thing to do, run flat out into a stupid great big oak tree. He scrambled back onto his feet just as the boar thrust its ridiculously thick neck out; one handspanlong tusk gashed the bark an inch below his outspread fingers as he ducked round the tree, hide-and-seek fashion. The pig blundered on, skidded to a halt in a spray of leaf mould, and swung round. (But aren’t they supposed to carry on charging? Apparently not.) Superior intellience, Poldarn thought, and superior biped mobility: I’ll just dance round and round this handy tree until the bugger gets bored and goes away. Annoyingly, though, he discovered that when he’d run into the tree he’d bashed his kneecap, and it didn’t seem to be working properly. So much for superior mobility; that just left intelligence. In which case (the pig lowered its head and shot itself towards him like a huge squat arrow), forget it—

  He stumbled, tripped over backwards, and sat down, jarring his back painfully against the tree trunk. Good as dead, in that case, and the pig was very close. But right next to him was a fallen branch, and just by way of going through the motions he picked it up, jammed the butt end against the tree and pointed the other end at the pig’s chest.

  Superior intelligence after all; because the pig charged straight, just like an arrow, and by the time its chest met the branch it had picked up an extraordinary amount of speed. The branch was the nail, the boar’s body the hammer and also the wood; the first eighteen inches of the branch crumpled up like dried ferns scrunched in a first, but the next foot burst through first skin, then muscle, until it jarred against bone, broke that, went in a bit further, found more bone, and stopped. The branch bent like a bow, but the boar kept on coming, its broad wet nose no more than two feet from Poldarn’s left hand where it gripped the branch: the bastard thing was coming up the branch at him, like someone climbing a rope, and the hell with the mess it was making of its own guts in the process— And then the pig must’ve impaled its own heart, because it stopped and squealed in utter frustration at the injustice of the world, and the light in its vicious little eyes went out, and time stopped.

  Not dead yet, Poldarn thought; I’m still alive, that’s so totally fucking wonderful— Also, he was forced to admit, bitterly unfair on the pig, who had every right to be pissed as hell, because it’d been a wild and unforgivable fluke, sheer luck. He breathed out what he’d been absolutely sure at the time was his last-ever breath, and savoured the taste of its replacement, the sweetest thing he’d had in his mouth at any time.

  ‘Shit,’ said a voice from the sky; not from the sky, from the tree above his head. A tree-god, swearing at him. He looked up. ‘Shit,’ the voice repeated, and he could identify astonishment, admiration and extreme annoyance, all balled up into one repeated word. Then something scrambled down the tree-trunk and landed flump! next to him.

  ‘Bastard,’ it said.

  Poldarn took a moment to notice that the ground he was sitting on was swamped in pig’s blood. Then he looked up. Staring down at him was a round face, a long way off the ground; bright grey eyes, a little snub nose, grey hair and a huge shaggy grey moustache.

  ‘What?’ Poldarn said. In his right hand the man was holding a spear, blade as broad as the head of a shovel. But I haven’t got a sword right now, and besides, I can’t be bothered any more—

  ‘Bloody amazing,’ the man said. ‘Never seen the like in all my born days.’ He seemed to remember something, and his huge eyes narrowed into a scowl. ‘Who the hell are you, anyhow? Have you got any idea how long I’ve been after that fucking pig?’

  Poldarn looked at him. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘All my bloody life,’ the man yelled suddenly. ‘That’s how long, ever since I was a kid. Thirty years it took me, to find a trophy boar good as this one. And you just jump up out of nowhere and down the fucking thing with a bit of old stick—’ Quite suddenly, the man seemed to notice the bu
rn scars that covered Poldarn’s face. He opened his eyes wide, took a step back, then (with a visible effort; even so, Poldarn was impressed) dismissed them as irrelevant.

  Poldarn couldn’t help grinning, because it was so delightfully funny. ‘You’re a hunter,’ he said, as if he was accusing the grey-haired man of being a unicorn.

  ‘Well, of course I am,’ the man said. ‘You think I sit up trees in the middle of the woods in rainy season to cure my piles? What did you think I was, a flower fairy?’

  Poldarn burst out laughing. ‘So it was you,’ he said. ‘You shot that arrow.’

  ‘Me? No, definitely not.’ Now the hunter was offended, on top of everything else. ‘You take me for some kind of bloody hooligan? Besides, I haven’t got a bow. I was sitting up waiting – and then you come along, from the southeast . . .’ He made it sound like some particularly pernicious heresy. ‘What’re you grinning at, anyhow?’ he added angrily.

  ‘Sorry,’ Poldarn said. ‘It’s just that I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.’

  The man scowled horribly at him, then began to laugh too. ‘I do apologise,’ he said, sticking out a hand – it took Poldarn a second or so to realise that the hunter was offering to help him up off the ground. He noticed that the man was left-handed. ‘It’s just, I was all keyed up waiting for the pig, and then you happened. Weirder than a barrelful of ferrets,’ he added. ‘Never seen anything like it. That was amazing, felling a pig that size practically with your bare hands.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Poldarn said. ‘I didn’t realise it was a private pig.’

  The man laughed at that. ‘Not your fault,’ he said. ‘Bugger was going to kill you, you did bloody well. Pig that size, it’d have ripped you open like a letter. No, what fazed me was, I was expecting it to come from the north-west, I was actually facing the other way; first I knew about it was you hitting the tree – and by the time I’d wriggled my bum round on the branch, I was thinking, what the hell was that, a deer maybe, and there you were, and the pig was running up your bit of stick like a fucking squirrel. Talk about nerves of steel, you must piss ice.’