by K. J. Parker
There were two of them, at least; he heard a muffled cough somewhere in front of him, and a rustle of cloth away to his right. Aggravating; why weren’t they keeping to the road? The only reason he could think of was that they knew where the cart was and wanted to sneak up and surround it, which implied that they probably weren’t going to turn out to be friendly. Was the whole world like this, he wondered; and if so, how the hell was it still inhabited at all?
Someone walked past him, only a foot or so away, breaking into his circle. He kept his hand away from his sword hilt with an effort, confining himself to placing his toe behind the back of the other man’s knee and pushing. He heard the man go down, took an educated guess as to where his neck would be, and trod lightly there with the side of his foot. Judging by feel, he’d guessed about right.
‘Shh,’ he whispered. Then he waited to find out what would happen.
‘Gian,’ someone called out. ‘Are you all right?’
Gian, wisely, didn’t answer. His friend repeated the enquiry, and some other faint noises suggested to Poldarn that one – or more – of the invisible strangers was heading in his direction. That was what he’d wanted to happen, but it occurred to him that he hadn’t really thought it through; the idea of leaving the cart in the first place was to avoid being in a place where anybody could find him, to be a free agent in the darkness. Now he’d effectively told them where he was and invited them to come to him. He had the advantage of a hostage, of course, but they didn’t know that.
‘Stay where you are,’ he called out, ‘or I’ll break his neck.’
(Fine. If they do as they’re told, all we have to do is stay perfectly still till dawn. Piece of cake.)
‘Who’s there?’ another voice shouted back.
‘You first,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Who are you, how many, and what are you doing sneaking about in the dark?’
Gian squirmed slightly under his foot; a little additional pressure soon fixed that.
‘I’m Captain Olens of the domestic cavalry,’ the voice said confidently, ‘second regiment, fifth detachment, seventeenth squadron, forty-third platoon. Who the hell are you?’
Poldarn grinned. ‘Nobody important,’ he replied, ‘except that I’m standing on your friend’s neck, and if anybody does anything I don’t like, I’ll kill him. Understood?’
‘Understood,’ Captain Olens said nervously.
‘Splendid.’ Poldarn turned his head towards where he figured the cart should be. ‘Gotto,’ he yelled, hoping the carter was still there, alive and awake. ‘Gotto, are you there?’
‘Yes,’ the carter replied. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
Poldarn paused to listen, then replied, ‘No idea. Get the lantern lit and we’ll find out.’
Now came the awkward part. He stooped down, taking care not to compromise his balance and give Gian an opportunity to escape or attack, slid his sword quietly from the scabbard with his right hand and felt for Gian’s hair with his left. He connected and wound a loop of it round his fingers, to serve as a handle. ‘Shh,’ he repeated, as quietly as he could, shifted his foot off Gian’s neck and pulled on the hair at the same time as he straightened up. Gian came up with him, and as soon as they were both upright he let him feel the edge of the sword against his neck. Then he pushed him forward. Disaster would be bumping into someone. Success would be getting to the tailgate of the cart without letting go of Gian or killing him. Rather to his surprise, he achieved success without any serious complications.
The key, he figured, was the stranger’s horse, which they’d picked up on the way. He located it by colliding with it softly, and drew himself and his prisoner into the gap between the horse and the back of the cart, shielding them both. About two seconds after he was in position, Gotto’s lantern flared up.
‘Not on me, you idiot,’ he hissed. ‘Get down off the cart and walk forward in a straight line.’ For once the carter did as he was told without even arguing the toss. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘stop there. Right, the rest of you, head for the lantern and stop where I can see you.’I (Allegory, he thought; in the dark you aren’t anybody, or you’re who you say you are; with all the practice I’ve had lately, I should be good at this.)
A face appeared in the glow of the lantern; it was young and round, topped with curly dark hair. ‘I’m Captain Olens,’ it said. ‘We mean you no harm,’ it added, rather too obviously as an afterthought for Poldarn’s liking. ‘Now, who in buggery are you?’
‘Olens,’ said another voice, ‘is that you?’
(And that voice, Poldarn realised, was the stranger, the man with the broken leg. That was either good or bad, depending on context and general world view.)
‘Sir?’
‘Olens, you bloody clown.’ (Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere.) ‘Will you stop prancing about and leave these people alone? They’re on our side.’
‘Sir,’ Captain Olens replied bitterly. ‘All right, fall out, over here. Sir,’ he went on, ‘Sergeant Gian—’
‘What? Oh, yes. Excuse me, but would you mind letting him go? These people are—’ A very long pause, as if the stranger was making up his mind about something. ‘Well, I know them, they won’t hurt us.’
Poldarn thought about that. Trouble is, people don’t have their designation written on their foreheads – friend, good guy, ambusher, assassin, rescuer. Depending on what decision the stranger had come to, releasing the hostage might prove to be a bad, and final, mistake. On the other hand, he was getting cramp in his sword arm. He let go of Gian’s hair, laid his left hand flat between the man’s shoulder blades, and shoved. Then he followed, heading towards the light.
There was Gotto, on one side of the lantern; on the other side, four faces, almost immediately joined by a fifth. ‘Excuse me,’ called out the stranger with the broken leg, ‘but if you could bring the light over here, Captain Olens can see it’s me and maybe we can all calm down a bit.’
Even Gotto could see the sense in that. Poldarn followed, taking care to stay out of the yellow circle, determined to be nobody and nowhere for as long as he could.
‘Olens,’ the man with the broken leg was saying, ‘where the devil did you get to? I was lying in a ditch in the fog for an hour with a broken leg. If it hadn’t been for these people—’
‘Sir,’ Captain Olens replied. He had the knack of investing that one word with a whole language’s worth of meanings. ‘I think we went past you in the fog, after we got separated. Then we realised you weren’t with us and went back; then I gave the order to search the ground on either side of the road inch by inch, in case you’d fallen and been knocked out, or—’ Slight pause. ‘Or something like that.’
‘Idiot.’ The man with the broken leg didn’t strike Poldarn as the forgiving sort. ‘Right, we can’t do anything till morning. I suppose you and your men had better get some sleep. I suggest underneath the cart.’
‘Sir.’
He turned his head, looking for Poldarn. ‘I say,’ he called out, ‘you can come back in now, it’s all right.’
Poldarn thought before replying. ‘In a moment,’ he said. ‘First, suppose you tell me what the hell this is all about, and who these clowns are.’
The other man grinned. ‘About time, I suppose,’ he said. ‘All right. My name is Tazencius – Prince Tazencius if you want to be all formal about it, which I don’t. These men are supposed to be my bodyguard; which should mean,’ he added, raising his voice a little, ‘that they rescue me from the jaws of death, and not the other way round. But that’s by the by.’
Poldarn sighed. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘that’s your name. Now, who are you?’
‘Oh, for crying out loud.’ Tazencius looked Poldarn in the eye and shook his head slowly, the very image of a man whose patience ran out long ago, leaving him with only a faded memory of what it was like to deal with rational, normal people. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t have assumed you’d know who I am. I’m the emperor’s third cousin; rather more to the point,
I’m the imperial prefect of Mael Bohec – hence the splendid but utterly useless honour guard.’
Poldarn turned his head away. ‘Gotto,’ he said, ‘have you heard of anybody called – what was that name again?’
‘Tazencius.’
‘Of course I have, you moron,’ Gotto replied. ‘But how do we know it’s really you? I mean, I could put a saucepan on my head and call myself the God of Boiled Dumplings; wouldn’t mean I was telling the truth.’
Tazencius smiled, rather more warmly than the joke merited. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘Still, since you were willing to help me when I was just some fool who’d fallen off his horse, I hope you won’t change your mind now there’s at least a possibility that I’m rich and famous.’
Gotto scowled. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I reckon if you were really Tazencius, your guards would’ve commandeered the cart by now.’
‘Oh, I think even Captain Olens knows when he’s done enough damage for one night,’ Tazencius replied. ‘After all, this cart’s not going to move any faster even if it were to become government property for a day or so; the only difference would be that I’d have annoyed two strangers who’ve gone out of their way to help me.’
The carter furrowed his brows. ‘I still reckon—’ he began.
‘Gotto,’ Poldarn interrupted, ‘shut up. As for you,’ he went on, ‘what about your men? I heard the officer say something about being cavalry. So where are their horses?’
This time, Tazencius frowned. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s a very good point. I hadn’t thought of that. They had them last time I saw them. Captain Olens,’ he called out, ‘did you hear that?’
‘Sir,’ replied a voice, muffled by the boards of the cart. ‘I left them with Corporal Vestens back where we first noticed you were missing, so we could comb the area for you. Too dark to go searching for someone on horseback.’
‘That makes sense,’ Poldarn admitted. ‘All right, let’s all get some sleep. The main thing is,’ he went on, staring hard at Tazencius, ‘I can’t think of any reason why you or your people would want to cut our throats, so I’ll trust you not to. Agreed?’
Of course, Poldarn had no intention of sleeping, even if there had been any chance that he might. As far as he could judge from the sound of their breathing, Tazencius and his escort (and Gotto, for what little that mattered) all fell asleep quite quickly and easily, but he wasn’t prepared to trust his judgement on that point, or many others. It’d all be easier, he reckoned, when daylight came and gave the world back its memory. Dealing in anonymity and trust in the pitch dark was no way for grown men to do business.
He couldn’t help wondering, all the same (and it was that time in the early hours of the morning when perspectives are generally different): first Chaplain Cleapho, escaping (presumably he’d escaped) an ambush by the skin of his teeth; now the man Tazencius, whom Cleapho had mentioned (and who’d turned out to be prefect of Mael Bohec, whatever that signified), wandering about in the mist with a rather small escort, surely, for an important man (guessing that prefects were as important as they sounded); add a variety of different types of soldier, the burning of Josequin, all manner of alarms, excitements and coincidences following him round like a tripe butcher’s dog—
(This man who called himself Prince Tazencius, some off-relation of the emperor himself, who reckoned that the two of them were hopelessly shackled together by some secret bond of guilt and fear . . . First the emperor’s chaplain, now the emperor’s cousin, claiming to be his fellow conspirators in some desperate venture. Poldarn squeezed his nails into the palm of his hand. He’d tried explaining, and asking; perhaps it was time to take the hint. The pig doesn’t stop to ask the slaughterman why the abattoir gate’s been left unexpectedly open.)
He yawned. All in all, he’d been happier alone in the dark, with his boot on a stranger’s neck. That way, at least, he’d had some measure of control, and he’d been invisible. There was clearly a lot to be said for being nobody nowhere, at least in the short term.
Then, in spite of himself and everything, he fell asleep. If he dreamed, he didn’t remember any of it when he woke up, or any splinters of memory sticking into his mind were quickly dislodged by what he saw when he opened his eyes—
—Gotto, still sitting squarely on the box but with his head leaning right back on to his shoulder blades, his throat cut to the bone, blood still glistening black in the fibres of his coat. No sign of anybody else, no horses, just himself, a dead man and – inevitably, inevitably – two crows opening their wings in exasperation as he interrupted them in their work.
Chapter Eleven
The letter was still there; so was his sword. He jumped down from the cart and tried to trace the direction the horses had been driven off in from the hoofprints in the mud, but there was just a confused mess, open to various interpretations. He looked up and down the road, right and left; two choices, back to that old game again. This time at least, he had something to motivate him: the letter, a job to do, his duty to the Falx house, their trust in him . . . He didn’t give a damn about the Falx house, but it made a pleasant change to have some reason to do something. On to Mael Bohec, then. Easy.
After he’d been walking for a couple of hours, he saw three men on horses coming down the road towards him. Not again, he thought, but when they were close enough for him to see more than an outline he relaxed. There was a large middle-aged man in a red cloak and a broad black felt hat, and two younger men in rather less gorgeous clothes who were almost certainly his sons; the older man was leading a packhorse, unladen (so the chances were that they were on their way home). ‘Excuse me,’ he called out, ‘but can I buy your horse?’
That got their attention. The man in the red cloak introduced himself as Cobo Istin. The other two were Cobo this and Cobo that; Poldarn didn’t catch their names, and he got the feeling he wasn’t missing much. Yes, Cobo Istin said, he might entertain the idea, provided the price was right. (It was a rather sad horse; it didn’t take much imagination to picture the look of amazed joy on the face of Cobo Istin’s wife when her husband walked through the door and announced, ‘Guess what, I’ve sold Dobbin!’) When Poldarn offered him thirty quarters he said, ‘Yes,’ without thinking, and his hand shot out like a lizard’s tongue to receive the money.
‘We haven’t got any spare tack,’ Cobo Istin added mournfully as soon as his fingers had clamped tight around the coins. ‘Otherwise we’d—’
‘That’s all right,’ Poldarn replied. ‘I can make up some sort of bridle out of the leading rein.’ The expression in his eyes warned Cobo Istin that the leading rein was included in the price; Cobo let the missed opportunity pass with only a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth.
‘By the way,’ Poldarn continued, ‘are you going to Sansory?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Good. I want you to do me a favour. About an hour down the road, you’ll find a cart with a dead body in it. When you get to Sansory, send someone over to the Falx house and let them know about it; it’s their cart and their dead body. I can’t go myself. I’ve got things to do.’
Cobo Istin looked at him as if to say, I knew this was too good to be true. ‘Now just a moment,’ he said.
‘It’s all right,’ Poldarn sighed. ‘Don’t if you don’t want to. But Falx Roisin usually pays ten per cent salvage when someone helps him get his stuff back. I’d have thought you’d have known that.’
He left Cobo Istin torn between the prospect of still more free money and the threat of getting involved; he felt slightly guilty about ruining the man’s day, and he hoped Falx Roisin wouldn’t react too noisily if Cobo did show up at the door and start asking for money.
Gotto had mentioned something about a village with an inn and other amenities of civilised life on the road one day out from Mael. Because the horse turned out to be rather less sad than it had looked, Poldarn arrived there just before sunset. The inn wasn’t hard to find (it was the first building he came to in
the village and it had INN written in big letters on a hanging sign over the door) and the innkeeper was delighted to see him and take his money; as a glimpse of another, entirely different way of living, in which things generally went all right and people were still there and alive the next day, it was all painfully tantalising. For his two and a half quarters he got a stall for the horse, a genuine bed in an otherwise empty room, and a bowl of bean and bacon soup that didn’t taste bad at all.
It was raining when he woke up, but nothing horrible or even unusual happened to him all that day, and he reached Mael Bohec in the late afternoon. He’d been expecting it to be another Sansory – perhaps a little bigger, a little tidier, but basically the same sort of thing. Whether the reality of it came as a pleasant surprise or a shock, he wasn’t sure for some time.
Mael Bohec started two or three miles from the walls and gates, at the point where the high, rolling moor dropped down into the flat river valley. Later, he learned that the place was known as the Crow’s Nest, after the lookout platform on top of the mast of a ship; from there you could see right down the river as far as the point at which it bent round the foot of Streya, the range of tall, bare-topped hills that separated the Mael valley from Weal and the more favoured country to the west. What struck Poldarn first was the astonishing precision of the roads, walls and hedges of the rich garden country between himself and the city; they all ran for miles in perfectly straight lines, like marks scribed by a skilled craftsman on a sheet of brass. The fields and enclosures and the small woods that made up the chequerboard pattern all looked to be the same size as each other, and arranged in an orderly pattern – five fields down and you came to a hedged lane, five fields across and you came to a drain or a rine; every fifteen fields along, a road, every thirty fields down each road a building; every third field diagonal was fallow, every twelfth field a wood. In the middle of the chequerboard was the perfectly square city, with a gate in the middle of each wall flanked by two identical hexagonal towers and a great square tower on each corner. Even the river was straight, and worked carefully into the pattern so as not to offend regularity or symmetry, since it was balanced on the northern side by the road and a thick line of trees. Whoever designed this place, Poldarn couldn’t help thinking, couldn’t draw a curve to save his life.