by K. J. Parker
‘You don’t know, do you?’ Eyvind grinned. He had straight, white teeth, unlike most people in Sansory. Of course, Poldarn had good teeth too. ‘You talk our language; not only that, you talk with a strong South Island accent. Even if you were one of them who’d learned Western (and we’ve never heard of any of ’em who’s lived long enough to do that), you couldn’t do the woollyback voice, not unless you were born and bred within fifteen miles of Eddinsbrook.’ He thumped Poldarn between the shoulder blades with the flat of his hand; deceptively strong. ‘I don’t know who you are now, friend, but I can tell you who you were once. And this lot know it as well as I do, or you’d be dead on your face right now.’
Poldarn let what he’d been told sink in for a moment. ‘But they don’t look anything like me,’ he said.
‘So what? We’re all North Islanders. On South Island, they’re all as ugly as you are; and on Unnskerry too, but they don’t talk like that. More nasal, if you know what I mean, like they’ve always got a half a carrot shoved up their noses.’
Poldarn considered that. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But if I’m one of you, what the hell was I doing wandering around on a battlefield surrounded by dead people?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Eyvind replied. ‘And there’s at least one perfectly simple explanation. For years, you see, we’ve been planting a few of our people here, to spy out the land, let us know what to expect and where the good prospects are, keep us in touch with the traitors on their side who think they’re on our side, if you can follow all that. My guess is that you’re one of them. It all fits quite neatly,’ he went on, pulling an earring out of a dead monk’s ear like a man picking blackberries. ‘If you think about it, one of us who’s spent a year or so pretending to be one of them – well, he couldn’t help getting just a bit confused, having to be two completely different people at the same time. Then, suppose he gets a bash on the head and can’t remember for sure whether he’s who he really is or who he’s been pretending to be – well, you get the idea, I’m sure. And that’s who I think you are.’
Abruptly they left the road and plunged into the wood. Poldarn found it very hard to keep up – where Eyvind and his people always seemed to find deer tracks and gaps in the brambles, he kept blundering into thorny tangles, tripping and staggering and ripping his hands and face against trailing fingers of briar. He had a feeling that he wasn’t at home in woods.
‘Of course,’ Eyvind told him, when he said as much. ‘No woods worth talking about on South Island.’ He shook his head. ‘I keep forgetting, you don’t remember it at all.’
Poldarn decided to change the subject. ‘So how did you find these people?’ he asked. ‘Last time I saw you, you were on your own on the other side of the Bohec.’
Eyvind nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘But thankfully I got it in my head that I should keep going north; crossed the river and started walking in as straight a line as I could manage. Then one day I came over the top of a hill and there they were. It was enough to make a man religious, I’m telling you.’ He shook his head again; it was a common enough gesture among these people. Poldarn had caught himself doing something similar once or twice. ‘This lot’s just one scouting party,’ he went on. ‘Apparently the army that’s over here at the moment’s the biggest expedition ever to leave the islands. Ever hear of a man called Feron Amathy?’
Poldarn nodded. ‘All the time,’ he said.
‘And nothing good, I’ll bet. Well, he’s the brains behind all this, apparently. He’s got some scheme or other for taking over the empire; we don’t give a damn about that, goes without saying, but his plans fit in perfectly with ours, and he’s given us all kinds of useful information, things our own spies would never have found out – sally-ports, blind spots, soft spots where you can dig under walls, you name it. He says he learned it all back when he was hired by most of these cities as a mercenary soldier, at one time or another. You can believe that or not, whichever way suits you best. Personally, I figure anybody who’d sell out his own people like that doesn’t deserve to live.’
Poldarn didn’t express an opinion. ‘And where are you off to now?’ he asked. ‘Joining up with the rest of the army and going home?’
‘Don’t you believe it. We’ve hardly started yet. Talking of which, as far as I’m concerned you can hang on with us and we’ll give you a ride home – back to the islands, I mean. Best offer you’ll ever get.’
Poldarn thought for a moment before replying. ‘I’d like that,’ he said.
For men who didn’t appear to be in a hurry, the raiders moved deceptively quickly. Poldarn soon came to understand how they achieved their effects of suddenly vanishing from one battlefield and miraculously appearing at the next. Magic had nothing to do with it; instead they used the terrain, following river valleys, crests and ridges to stay out of sight, and marching at top speed whenever they had no alternative but to cross open ground. They never seemed to get tired, either.
‘After all that,’ said one of them, coming back from a cautious glimpse over the top of a ridge, ‘we’re early.’
‘Typical,’ said another. ‘They must’ve stopped for a rest, or picked a fight somewhere. That’s the trouble with the Green River boys, they won’t take these things seriously.’
Poldarn didn’t need to look over the ridge to know where he was. On the other side of the hill was Deymeson, and the raiders were here to attack it. He hadn’t needed to be told that, either.
‘You’re not going to be much use with nothing but sweat in the palm of your hand,’ one of them said to him. ‘Here, try this for size.’ He reached over his shoulder and wriggled out of a strap, from which hung a cloth bundle about as long as Poldarn’s arm. Under the cloth was a backsabre.
‘Belonged to my cousin Bearci,’ the man went on, ‘but he didn’t make it this far. I’ll have it back when you’ve finished with it.’
It would have been rude to refuse outright, and he couldn’t explain – I’d rather not, thanks; you see, as soon as I can get away from you people, I’m going to run to Deymeson as fast as I can go and warn them you’re coming. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and take good care of it.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing special, not old or anything. Fits you nicely, though.’ He was looking at Poldarn’s hands. ‘Lucky to find one your weight.’
Poldarn realised that, without thinking, he’d been doing back flips, letting the sword flop backwards through his fingers and then bringing it back up again with a sharp snap of the wrist. He frowned and tried the other way, the widdershins flip (harder to control and flashier). He was very good at it, a fact that wasn’t lost on the man who’d just lent him the sword. ‘That’s hours of practice, that is,’ the man said. ‘I couldn’t do that, even when I was a kid.’
‘Thank you,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Obviously there was a stage in my life when I had way too much time on my hands.’
The man wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. ‘My name’s Sitrych,’ he said. ‘From Anniswood, in Blackdale. Do you know those parts at all?’
‘Anything’s possible,’ Poldarn replied, ‘apparently.’
Sitrych gave him a strange look, part concern and part amusement, as if he’d encountered a two-headed mouse. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘best of luck with it. Watch out, it’s sharp.’
‘Poldarn wasn’t sure whether that was some ancient customary joke or well-meaning advice to a presumed idiot. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘I’ll be careful with it. Don’t want to do anybody an injury.’
Sitrych frowned, shook his head and walked away. The raiders were doing something, though it wasn’t immediately apparent what it was; they were falling into groups – not hurrying so you’d notice, but in a few minutes they’d all found their places and formed ranks and files – and they were all looking up at the ridge, preparing their minds. They stopped talking without anybody telling them to; in fact, Poldarn realised, he hadn’t heard anybody give any orders, and he had no idea who their
leader was, assuming they had one.
Then they started to move. It wasn’t walking or running; they seemed to flow, like an incoming wave on the beach that’s lapping round your ankles before you realise, and by the time Poldarn had figured out what was going on, they were over the ridge and vanishing out of sight. ‘Come on,’ someone said cheerfully behind him – not someone he’d spoken to – and he felt a broad hand in the small of his back pushing him forward. Whoever it was didn’t seem to be running, but Poldarn had to run to keep up with him.
Over the ridge; and he saw Deymeson in the valley below, the gate in the invisible wall and the town rearing up out of the plain like a shying horse. The rest of the raiders were definitely running now, with the gradient to help them; they were covering the ground ridiculously fast, moving easily and gracefully, like deer. Not running away, Poldarn thought, running toward; here were people who knew exactly what they were doing and why. He wondered what that must feel like.
The man who’d encouraged him over the ridge was right behind his shoulder, keeping perfect pace with him, unobtrusively deliberate on the extreme edge of his circle. There was no possibility whatsoever of getting away, he was committed to these people and their course of action; they’d swallowed him up and absorbed him as easily as the incoming tide absorbs a rockpool. That was disconcerting; right up to the moment when they’d cleared the ridge he’d been reassuring himself that as soon as an opportunity presented itself he’d sneak away and warn the monks – his people – and help them fight, as he was morally obliged to do (after all, these were the raiders he’d heard so much about, the common enemy, the forces of evil). But something had happened, so subtle that he hadn’t noticed it happening, and now that was out of the question. He was committed, he’d already taken sides (without knowing it, apparently) and here he was, part of the unstoppable onset of darkness—
(Except that, if he allowed his concentration to slip for a moment, he could already see himself thinking of these people as his friends, his people, his own; it was as if he’d slotted into place, suddenly and in the dark, or as if he’d been wandering in circles in a blinding fog on the moors and finally stumbled on a house, and only discovered when he pushed the door open that it was his own.)
Academic, in any case, since even if he managed to outrun the man behind him and the rest of the raiders, all of whom were faster than he was, and got to the abbey gates and raised the alarm, it’d only be a matter of moments before the raiders caught up with him, and what could the sword-monks do to save themselves in that time? Besides, if he had enough time to achieve anything he wouldn’t spend it warning the abbot, he’d waste it looking for Copis (waste it, because he was sure she was dead, or too heavily guarded to be rescued).
There was nothing he could do for the monks. Unless they could outfight the raiders, they were already dead. In fact, he could see them now, their bodies draped and dumped and piled and dropped in the streets and over and behind walls, under tables and beds where they’d tried to hide, heaped up in stairwells or at the foot of towers they’d fallen or been pushed from. He could see the dust and dirt forming a skin over pools of their blood, the caked and clotted blood masking the tremendous backsabre cuts, from the side of the neck to the middle of the chest; quite vividly, like a man recalling some traumatic memory, he saw them, most dead, a few still dying, painfully dragging breath into punctured lungs, dribbling blood from their mouths like old men or children trying to drink soup. He saw Torcuat, the monk who’d arrested him when he tried to run, lying on his back on the dorter steps, his head lolling at an impossible angle to his shoulders, his eyes wide open. He saw the abbot himself, only just visible under a pile of arms and legs and trunks and heads, all haphazard and confused, like the scrap in Sansory market; a cut had split his face on a diagonal running from the right eye socket to the left corner of his mouth, though the stroke that killed him had been a stab just under the ribcage, with the palm-wide point of a backsabre. He saw Copis, still alive, one leg severed at the knee, her back broken over the side of a cart—
That’d be right, he thought; I can’t remember the past, only the future.
The raiders were at the invisible wall already. The guard at the gatehouse took one look at them and ran, but the foremost raider caught up with him before he reached the bottom of the hill, grabbed him by the left shoulder, spun him round and ripped him open with a short, quick flick of the wrist. As usual, the street leading up the hill was empty; the raider who’d just killed the guard didn’t stop or even break stride, but started to run up the hill, hardly slowing down in spite of the gradient. Meanwhile, five other columns of raiders had appeared out of nowhere and were streaming across the open ground; Poldarn was sure there were others that he couldn’t see, approaching the hill from the north, west and east. He could almost see them, or at least he remembered seeing them pouring into the abbey courtyard, like floodwater overwhelming a house. At some point he’d quickened his pace so that he was almost keeping up. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, but he found he didn’t feel tired or short of breath, it was as if he was drawing on a shared strength that came from the others all around him. He saw Sitrych, the man who’d lent him the sword, dodging round the side of the gatehouse and lengthening his stride as he approached the hill, and another man he’d spoken to on the way there – Engfar, his name was – only a pace or two behind him, and gaining. If he’d had the breath, he’d have been tempted to cheer them on, as if he had money on the outcome.
By the time he reached the bottom of the hill he could just hear the sound of something going on at the top over the pounding of his own heart. He kept running, without knowing how; he was a boat on the back of a big wave, arching its back like a cat before jumping on its prey. At one point he had to jump over the dead body of a monk to keep himself from tripping and sprawling. Someone was screaming somewhere, but he had no way of knowing what it was about.
The next monk he met was definitely still on his feet, a lay brother who stepped out of a house a yard or so in front of him holding a short pike. Yesterday he’d have stopped and taken guard, knowing how difficult it is for a swordsman to get the better of a spearman in a one-to-one fight. Today he swerved round him, slashing wildly as he went past to ward off any thrust the man might make – no intention of killing anybody, just defence. He didn’t feel any shock of contact run up his arm from the sword blade, and he didn’t have time to look round. The lay brother was dead anyway, he’d already seen it, so there didn’t seem to be much point.
His magic strength evaporated, suddenly and completely, about fifty yards from the top of the hill. Without warning his knees folded under him, and once he’d stopped he felt a pain in his chest so severe that nothing else could possibly matter. When he could at last see again he watched the raiders engulfing a couple of lone sword-monks who’d stood and waited for them instead of running away. When the raiders had passed them by, they were still there, but broken and cut up, ground into the dirt until their shapes ceased to be human.
(So this is how the raiders win all their battles, he decided; the deadly secret of their success. What would General Cronan have thought of it, he wondered; would he have realised that there was nothing at all to be done about it, this ability to run past and through their enemies as if they weren’t really there? He dismissed the thought abruptly.)
‘Dawdling again.’ His self-appointed shadow, directly behind him. ‘What’s the matter, stone in your shoe?’
‘Worn out,’ Poldarn replied. ‘All this running about is too bloody energetic for me.’
The voice laughed. ‘You need to get yourself in shape,’ it said. ‘You’ll miss out on the good bit if you aren’t careful.’
‘There’s a good bit?’
‘Oh yes,’ the voice replied, ‘there’s a good bit.’
Poldarn found the good bit soon afterwards, after he’d dragged himself up the rest of the slope and into the abbey proper. The porters hadn’t had time to close the gates; the
raiders had streamed past them, cutting them down as they went almost as an afterthought. The monks were spilling out into the yard singly or in groups of two or three, apparently not realising what was going on – many of them weren’t wearing their swords – and the raiders were surging up round them, six or seven to one. That was beyond the limits of religion; even the most advanced forms, practised by the upper ten per cent of the order, only envisaged facing four opponents at once. Faced with such blatant violation of the rules, such an abomination, the monks weren’t even trying to draw, and those that did found their cuts parried with moves that weren’t on the syllabus, while illegally placed enemies stepped up behind them and severed their necks. True, a group of about twenty monks were crowded together in the doorway of a janitor’s hut and were standing shoulder to shoulder, their drawn swords forming an impenetrable fence; but the raiders were standing off fifteen yards or so and pelting them with bricks from a pile left over from some minor building works. Poldarn watched, fascinated; for the first dozen seconds or so, the monks managed to bat the bricks out of the air with their swords (those lovingly nursed cutting edges, sharpened with a steel instead of a stone and lightly anointed with camellia oil every night and every morning), but then there was one brick too many, and it cracked a monk just about the right eyebrow and he grunted and folded up; one gap compromised the wall, and five seconds later the raiders rushed in to chop up the fallen. They’re overwhelming the monks, Poldarn thought, just as they overwhelmed me. They don’t fight, they simply prevail. Like gods.
A monk came running straight at him. He recognised him: Torcuat, who’d presided over his defeat and humiliation, back when he’d tried to escape. Torcuat’s face was distorted into a mask of sheer hatred; it was the masterpiece of a great artist who’d spend his entire life trying to paint the pure essence of an emotion. His sword was drawn and he was holding it in both hands over his head as he ran. Poldarn turned to face him and flipped the backsabre over the back of his hand – showing off, and he didn’t know why, it had just happened – and just as the monk edged against the outer limit of his circle, like a runner breasting the finishing rope, he stuck out his hand with the sabre in it, a very short, mundane little movement, the sort of thing a novice would do from pure instinct on his first day in the schools. Torcuat’s momentum drove the broad point deep into his stomach until it jarred against bone, whereupon the shock of contact shot up Poldarn’s arm to his elbow, making him let go. Torcuat fell forward on to the sabre hilt, and as he landed, the sword-point burst through his back like a crocus.