Shadow (Scavenger Trilogy Book 1)

by K. J. Parker

  ‘She never had any intention of buying any buttons,’ Poldarn said.

  ‘Of course not. Just passing the time. Lots of people do it, I have absolutely no idea why.’ She sighed. ‘This is completely pointless. Let’s fold up and get out of here.’

  Poldarn glanced up at the sky. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘we’ve left it a bit late if we want to reach that other place by dark.’

  ‘I’d rather sleep in the cart than stay here.’

  Poldarn could see her point. But packing up would mean having to get up and exert himself, and he was feeling lazy. ‘No,’ he said, ‘let’s stick to the original plan. Stay here the rest of the day and push on to Forial tomorrow.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Copis said. ‘But you can mind the stall on your own. I’m going to take a nap in the cart.’

  Poldarn couldn’t see any objections to that, so he nodded. Copis climbed up behind him, laid a blanket in the corner of the cart bed, and went to sleep. She had a knack of being able to sleep at will that he found both remarkable and enviable.

  Some time later a little girl, perhaps nine years old, wandered up and stood staring at the buttons as if they were six-headed goats. Apart from the time-waster’s baby, she was the first child he’d seen in town. There was something about the way she was standing and gawping that told him she was neither willing nor able to buy buttons, but Poldarn could see no reason why she should be a complete dead loss.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  The girl looked at him and said nothing.

  ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘I want to ask you a question.’

  The little girl scowled at him. ‘My mummy says not to talk to strange men.’

  ‘You should always listen to your mother. But I’m not strange.’

  The little girl assessed him. It didn’t seem to take her very long. ‘Yes you are,’ she said. ‘You’re old and ugly and you look like a crow.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, please stop looking at my buttons. You’ll look all the polish off them.’

  The little girl frowned. ‘You can’t do that, silly.’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘No you can’t. Looking at things doesn’t hurt them.’

  ‘Want to bet?’ Poldarn leaned back a little. ‘You know how if you leave something out in the sun for a while, like a piece of cloth or something like that, all the colour fades out of it? Same thing. The sun looks at it too long and it fades.’

  The girl thought about that. ‘But I don’t look as fiercely as the sun.’

  ‘Maybe. But you’re much closer, so it’s as broad as it’s long. Go away.’

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can stay here and look at your stupid buttons if I want to.’

  Poldarn rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but don’t come any closer.’

  He made a show of fiddling with the display, shifting the boards around, rearranging the buttons, turning some of them over. When he’d been doing this for a while, the little girl said, ‘What was the question you wanted to ask me?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he replied, not looking up. ‘You probably wouldn’t know the answer anyway.’

  ‘Bet you I would.’

  He laughed. ‘No point betting you, you’ve got nothing to bet with.’

  ‘Yes I have,’ the girl replied, annoyed. ‘I’ve got a brass ring and a rabbit-fur hood at home.’

  Poldarn shook his head. ‘They wouldn’t fit me,’ he said. ‘All right, you can push off now. I’m busy.’

  ‘What’s the question?’

  He made an exasperated noise with his tongue and teeth. ‘If I ask you the question, will you go away?’

  She shook her head. ‘You’ve got to bet me.’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud. All right, then, what do you want to bet?’

  ‘My hood and ring against a dozen buttons,’ she replied. ‘Those ones,’ she added, pointing. ‘They’re nice.’

  In Poldarn’s opinion the ones she’d chosen were the most hideous of the lot, although they had some pretty stiff competition. ‘If you insist,’ he said. ‘All right, here’s the question: where is everybody? Why’s this village got so few people in it?’

  The little girl put on a sad face, as if pulling on a glove. ‘They went away,’ she said. ‘The grown-up men had to go and join the—’ She said something that sounded like merlicia. It took Poldarn a second or so to work out she meant militia. ‘And then the raiders came and killed them all,’ she added casually. ‘Mummy said they aren’t dead, they just went on a long journey, but I know that’s not true because I saw where they got buried, in a big pit, hundreds and hundreds.’

  ‘Ah,’ Poldarn said, feeling a little rattled. ‘And what about the lady grown-ups? Did they go away too?’

  ‘Some of them were killed,’ the girl said, playing with a pulled thread on her sleeve, ‘and some of them got sick and died. But a lot of them just went away. My mummy went away and I’ve got to live with my aunt. I don’t like her very much. She smells.’

  Poldarn nodded absently. ‘That’s dreadful,’ he said. ‘Where did they go? The ones who went away, I mean?’

  ‘Don’t know. Do I get my buttons now?’

  ‘In a minute,’ Poldarn replied. ‘What do you know about religion?’

  The girl looked at him. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Gods and stuff.’

  ‘Oh,’ the girl said, ‘that. Well, there’s lots of gods, and some of them live in the sky and some of them live under the ground or at the bottom of the sea, and the rest just sort of wander about. What do you want to know about them for?’

  ‘Have you heard of a god called Poldarn?’

  ‘Poll what?’

  ‘Or a god who rides around in a cart, bringing the end of the world?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ the girl said, her face relaxing as she addressed something familiar at last. ‘Everybody knows about him.’

  ‘What do they know?’

  The little girl gathered her thoughts for a moment. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘nobody knows what he’s called, and he goes around from village to village, and wherever he goes gets burned down or invaded and all the people die; but it’s not his fault, it’s bad men like the raiders who do the actual burning and invading. He just sort of goes in front. Oh yes,’ she added, ‘and there’s a silly bit, too, but I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Tell me anyway,’ Poldarn said.

  The little girl pulled a face. ‘Well, they say he doesn’t actually know he’s a god, he just thinks he’s one of us, a person. And he starts off by climbing up out of a river, and he keeps on going till he meets himself coming in the opposite direction. And then that’s the end of the world. Like I said,’ she added disdainfully, ‘it’s really silly, and I don’t think anybody really believes it. Now do I get my buttons? You did promise.’

  Poldarn found the right jar and counted out a dozen buttons. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You won your bet after all. You’re clever.’

  ‘I know,’ the girl jeered, and skipped away.

  By the time Copis woke up he’d got the awning down and folded up the trestles. ‘You were right,’ he said, ‘absolutely no point staying here. We’ll make a start towards Deymeson and sleep out; with luck, that’ll get us to Forial good and early. Assuming,’ he added, ‘it’s still there when we arrive.’

  Forial was still there, and it was well and truly open for business. They did a very brisk trade all day, and in the rare intervals when he wasn’t taking money Poldarn tried to find out about what had happened in the other village. Yes, it was true what the girl had told him; in fact the place had had a fairly dreadful time of it over the last twenty years or so. First it had been completely erased by the raiders, or by somebody – a lot of people reckoned it was the Amathy house, since they’d been in the district at the time on their way back from a war that got cancelled at the last moment, but of course there wasn’t any proof; then the emperor himself had
sent money and builders to restore it, by way of showing how much he cared about the northern provinces, not that anybody believed him. But it had been a good job, and quite soon they were doing a wonderful business in fruit and vegetables with Sansory and everybody was starting to get annoyingly prosperous. Then the Amathy house had shown up – definitely them this time, they were fighting for General Allectus against General Cronan, and they needed a couple of hundred labourers to build a wall or dig a trench or raise a siege mound or something of the sort, so they rounded up all the men and quite a few of the women and the older children – they had the authority; some kind of general warrant issued by the prefect of Sansory – and marched them off to do whatever it was that needed doing, but it all went wrong; the thing they were building fell down or caved in, or the enemy attacked it suddenly, and they were all killed. It was a terrible shame, the people of Forial told him, and a bloody good job Feron Amathy had gone there instead of here for his work detail. Feron Amathy was a menace, no two ways about it, though this new man, Cronan, he was probably just as bad, because when you came right down to it, they all were; them and the raiders and the government soldiers too. Still, at least it wasn’t as bad as what happened to Vistock.

  What happened to Vistock, Poldarn asked; and where was Vistock, anyway?

  Ah, they told him, good question. Well, if he carried on up the road another half a day and he kept his eyes open and it was a time of year when the grass was short, he might just be able to make out some scorched patches on the ground, even now. That was Vistock. And that really was the raiders, they added. It all happened a long time ago, mind, over forty years ago, and though the land around there wasn’t bad and it was all up for grabs, what with everybody being dead, nobody’d ever shown any interest at all in going out there and staking a claim. Well, apart from one old woman who still lived there, in some kind of mouldy old hut, but she was crazy, so that didn’t count.

  Poldarn supposed you’d have to be crazy to live all alone out in the wilds like that.

  Ah yes, but she was a lot crazier than that. She figured she was the mother of the god in the cart; you know, the one who’s going to turn up at the end of the world. Now that had to be a special kind of crazy, didn’t it?

  By nightfall they’d sold the best part of eight hundred buttons. When they’d packed up the stall, Copis asked where the inn was. There wasn’t an inn. But the blacksmith might be prepared to let them sleep over in his barn for a few quarters. A few turned out to be six, rather more than they’d have spent in a reasonably good inn; the barn was cold, with a damp floor (like the Potto house) and a thoroughly objectionable goose, which brayed at them all night and managed to get out of the way of everything they threw at it.

  They were ready to leave as soon as the sun rose. ‘Deymeson,’ Copis said. ‘There’s nothing to stop for between here and there, so we should be able to get there in a day if we don’t hang about.’

  Poldarn shook his head. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I want to stop off on the way.’

  Vistock wasn’t hard to find. It was where a village should have been, where the road forded a small, inoffensive river. The first thing they could make out was the shell of a millhouse, with a wrecked and moss-grown wheel sunk in the water. Inside the building they found a lump of rust that had once been an anvil and the charred stump of a trip-hammer. There was only one other structure still standing: half a barn (the other half had fallen in a long time ago, there were still signs of fire on the rounded ends of the rafters) surrounded on two sides by an overgrown wall.

  ‘Over there, I suppose,’ Poldarn said.

  ‘What the hell could there possibly be in there worth stopping for?’ Copis asked.

  ‘No idea,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Come on.’

  Someone had made a half-hearted attempt at boarding in the remaining half of the barn. There was even a door, hanging out of the fence of rotten timbers on two straps of mouldy rope. There really didn’t seem to be much point in knocking, since you could get through the gap between the door and the fence if you went sideways and held your breath, but Poldarn knocked anyway.

  ‘Go away,’ said a voice from inside.

  ‘Good God,’ Copis whispered. ‘There’s someone in there.’

  ‘I know,’ Poldarn replied. ‘That’s why we’re here.’

  He opened the door into darkness. An egg hit him in the face.

  Luckily it caught him on the chin, so he didn’t have to worry about razor-sharp splinters of shell in his eyes. He wiped it away with the back of his left hand and called out, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Piss off. I got a knife.’

  Poldarn peered round, but it was very dark indeed inside and he couldn’t see anything. ‘Can I come in?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Get lost, before I stick this knife in you.’

  ‘There’s no call to be like that,’ Poldarn said.

  ‘Yes there is. Get out, or I’ll kill you.’

  Poldarn was using the voice to find whoever it was. It was low for a woman’s voice, rather breathy in a way that suggested some kind of chronic lung trouble. ‘We don’t mean you any harm,’ he said. ‘I’d just like to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘Get out. Go away, before I set the dogs on you.’

  It was fairly obvious that there weren’t any dogs. ‘Really,’ he said, listening hard, ‘we aren’t going to hurt you or steal your stuff. We’ve come a long way.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn if you’ve come all the way from bloody Morevich, you’re not—’ That was enough for Poldarn to get a fix; he reached out quickly into the dark and grabbed, and connected with a thin, tight arm. He could feel small muscles, as hard as rope, under old skin.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, dragging on the arm, ‘but I do need to ask you some things. Won’t take long.’

  She may have been lying about the dogs, but not the knife, but Poldarn knew the moment her hand violated his circle, and he caught her wrist easily. A quick twist, enough to hurt without damaging, was enough to make her drop the knife. He pulled firmly, overcoming rather more resistance than he’d expected, and led her out into the light.

  Not a pretty sight. It was fairly evident that she didn’t feel the cold, since she wasn’t wearing any clothes; as a result, it was hard to miss the shiny white scar that ran from her left hip almost to her navel. She had a fuzz of tangled grey hair, with things in it, and a jaw that had set badly after being broken a long time ago. She stopped struggling when Poldarn let go of her, and sat down on a log that looked as if it had done long service as a chopping-block.

  ‘Who the bloody hell are you, then?’ she asked, and sneezed.

  Poldarn grinned. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s a very good question. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a question of my own first. Is it true you’ve got a son?’

  She scowled at him, and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. ‘Come to make fun, have you?’ she said. ‘I know your sort. You’ll be old too one day, and then you’ll be sorry.’

  Poldarn shook his head. ‘I’d really like to know,’ he said.

  ‘All right.’ She reached down behind the log and produced a small axe – Poldarn could have sworn it hadn’t been there a moment ago. ‘But you lay off me, or so help me I’ll smack your head in. You got that?’

  ‘Sure,’ Poldarn replied. ‘So, is it true?’

  She nodded. ‘I did have a son once, yes. Had him for all of ten days, before they came over from Vistock; said they reckoned it was about time for the kid to be born, and it wasn’t right, trying to bring up a kid out here. They told me I had to go with them, I said I wasn’t going. One of them grabbed him, my baby, so I cut his throat.’ She paused to pinch something out of her eye; she was very delicate and precise about it, nipping whatever it was off her eyeball with the ends of her jagged nails and flicking it away. ‘Well, that was him dealt with, and they went away. But they took the boy, and I’ve never seen or heard of him since. That was a long time ago.’

  Poldarn,
who was kneeling down beside her, nodded. ‘What about this story I heard in Forial,’ he asked, ‘about the god in the cart? How did that start?’

  She turned her head and looked at him. ‘Oh, that’s who he was, all right,’ she said. ‘He told me so himself.’

  ‘I see,’ Poldarn said, without emphasis. ‘When he was ten days old.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ she replied, frowning. ‘Don’t talk so stupid. No, it was in a dream. I saw him.’

  ‘You saw him,’ Poldarn repeated. ‘As a baby, or was he grown up?’

  ‘Oh, he was all grown up,’ she replied. ‘But I knew it was him. And he knew who I was, too. He stopped the cart and got out – he was standing about where that stone is.’ She pointed with her left hand, but Poldarn didn’t turn to look; the axe was still in her right hand, and he didn’t want to take his eye off it just yet. ‘Anyway, he smiled at me – always did have a nice smile, of course – and then he got back in and rode away. The smile’s from my mother’s side, though he had his father’s nose.’

  ‘His father.’

  ‘Yes, him.’ She frowned. ‘One of Feron Amathy’s men, he was,’ she went on, looking down at her feet. ‘It was them burned the village, you know, and killed everybody. Never knew why; I suppose we were in the way or something.’

  ‘Oh,’ Poldarn said. ‘I’d heard it was the raiders.’

  ‘That’s right. Feron Amathy’s men. From across the sea.’ She found a stub of twig and started whittling at it with the hatchet blade. ‘When he was finished with me he was going to kill me, but I was too quick for him. Always was quick with my hands,’ she added with a smile. ‘That’s how I got my knife. Been a good knife over the years, I’d be lost without it. It was lying there on the ground, he was reaching for it, but I got it first and stuck it in his ear. Just there,’ she added, ‘where you’re kneeling, that’s where he fell. Landed on his face, and I pulled the knife out and ran. One of his mates was just by the door, he took a swing at me with one of those big inside-out swords of theirs – that’s how I got this, in case you were wondering. ’ She drew a fingertip down the line of the long scar, tracing it by feel, almost affectionately. ‘And this was later,’ she added, touching her jaw, ‘when the government soldiers came through. Was that what you wanted to ask about?’