Shadow (Scavenger Trilogy Book 1)

by K. J. Parker

  (Kill half of them? No, that didn’t work. Kill the other half, maybe? No, then they’d just be cheerfully dead. Are I really seriously contemplating going to live in a place where everybody’s cheerful all the bloody time? If I’m not mad now, I soon will be . . .)

  Someone looked up and called out, ‘Eyvind, over here.’ Eyvind stopped the cart – a couple of men stood up and started seeing to the horses; nobody had told or even asked them to – and jumped out. ‘This way,’ he said. ‘I want you to meet my uncle Sigfus.’

  There was something bizarre, almost dreamlike, about the overwhelming wholesomeness of it all; Eyvind didn’t say, ‘Uncle, this is my new best friend,’ but the genial smile and the firm handshake were straight out of some daydream of the bright, impossible Better Place where everybody’s learned to get along just by being nice to each other . . . On the edge of a battlefield, with a caltrop stuck through his arm, he wasn’t sure whether he could cope with it.

  Eyvind was asking his uncle what he reckoned; and Uncle Sigfus was saying that pulling it out now might easily set off a lot of heavy bleeding, but on the other hand it had to come out eventually and the longer it stayed in there the worse it would probably get. He made it sound like a bad tooth. ‘Uncle Sigfus knows all there is to know about wounds and serious injuries,’ Eyvind told him. ‘He’ll have you fixed up in no time flat.’

  Uncle Sigfus reached his decision quickly and very abruptly, suddenly plucking the caltrop out of Poldarn’s arm like a man picking an apple. ‘Bloody things,’ he said, frowning as he held the caltrop up and examined it, ‘that’s no way to fight a war.’ Poldarn was still reeling from the pain. ‘Quick,’ Sigfus went on, ‘run and find something we can use for a bandage. It may hurt for a while,’ he told Poldarn, ‘but you’ll just have to put up with that, I’m afraid.’ (If he calls me a brave little soldier, Poldarn decided, I’ll have no option but to cut his throat. You can’t just let something like that go by.)

  Then he felt painfully weak, and Eyvind and Sigfus took his arms and carefully lowered him to the ground, as if he was a slightly cracked jar. ‘You stay put and get some rest, now,’ Sigfus told him. ‘There’s still a couple of hours before sunset, and closing your eyes for a bit will do you the world of good.’

  But Poldarn didn’t want to close his eyes or sleep; in fact, it was out of the question—

  ‘Well,’ said the crow, ‘here we are again.’

  Poldarn looked up, and round. His instincts shrieked at him to run or hide, but he discovered that he couldn’t move. ‘Dream?’ he asked.

  ‘Are there many talking crows where you come from?’ the crow asked patiently. ‘Well, then. At least you can be fairly sure you’re awake. Whether this is strictly speaking a dream or a vision, I can’t tell you, I never did go to college. A sword-monk would know, if you should chance to see one anywhere.’

  That was presumably a pointed reference to his part in the attack on Deymeson, so he decided to ignore it. ‘What’s going on here, anyway?’ he asked.

  The crow hopped through forty-five degrees. ‘Over there,’ he said, ‘is the destruction of Sansory. You’ll observe that they broke through at the Southgate—’

  ‘Who did?’ Poldarn asked.

  ‘—Which,’ the crow went on, ‘is a fine example of the old military adage about attacking your enemy’s strengths, not his weaknesses. Over here—’ It hopped round another twenty degrees. ‘Over here, we have the riots in Mael, just before the rebels open the gates to the enemy—’

  ‘Who are the enemy?’

  ‘—A bad mistake on their part, since once the enemy get inside they kill everybody they can find regardless of which side they’re on and set fire to the place, thereby making the civil war supremely irrelevant. Next to that—’ Another fifteen degrees. ‘Next to that, there’s the razing of the walls of Boc Bohec; just beyond that, if you look closely, you can see the smoke from the fires of Torcea, right off on the other side of the bay, which goes to show what a big fire it is. All those thatched roofs, you see, and all those old wooden buildings in the shanty towns round the base of the walls; any fool could’ve told you it was a disaster waiting to happen, but of course nobody ever wants to hear uncomfortable stuff like that. Finally,’ the crow added, hopping round to within a few degrees of where it started from, ‘smaller but just as significant as far as you’re concerned, the burning at Turcramstead – there, you can just make out the people trying to get out through the hole in the roof, and the enemy with their long poles pushing them back in again. Which brings us back to Sansory, of course.’

  Poldarn turned round slowly, studying the patterns of destruction by fire, the constants and the variables. ‘It looks like the end of the world,’ he said.

  ‘Very good,’ replied the crow. ‘And all your fault, of course; all directly your fault. I want you to be sure and remember this moment, later, when all this happens.’

  Poldarn looked round again, taking careful note of various details – a building collapsing in a shower of sparks, a mob of soldiers dragging a woman out of her house, dragging the baby from her arms and tossing it like a log of firewood into the flames, noteworthy items that would jog his memory when he came to witness them. ‘What do you mean, my fault?’ he asked. ‘Is this to do with who I was, or what I’m going to become?’

  The crow looked past him. ‘Same difference,’ it said. ‘You’ll be who you always were; wiping our your memory hasn’t changed who you are, all it’s done is rearrange the schedule a little, added a few refinements, tinkered a little with a few of the causality chains. I mean,’ it went on, ‘you haven’t really changed a bit, in spite of this wonderful fresh start you were given, this chance to stop being you. You’ve acted differently, mostly because you haven’t been in much of a position to do harm deliberately, but you still have the same mind, the same temperament.’

  ‘I see,’ Poldarn said. ‘Well, if you can show me the future, can you show me my past as well? I’d like to be able to see that.’

  The crow didn’t move, but everything else changed around it; now they were standing in a prison cell, lit by one window very high up in the wall. Through it Poldarn could just make out the legs and feet of passers-by. He found that he was sitting in the middle of the floor, secured with chains to the point where he could hardly move, let alone accomplish anything. ‘That’s the essential you,’ said the crow, ‘trapped in a prison in your own mind; and you know why? Prisons can be ambiguous things, you know; maybe this one isn’t what you assume. The man in the middle there is you. Some prisons aren’t built to keep the inmates from getting out, you see, they’re to keep everybody else from getting in, with a rope and a chair, to deal with you as you deserve.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Poldarn asked.

  ‘That,’ the crow answered, ‘is a very good question. You ought to ask him that,’ it added, opening its wings and pitching on the chained man’s shoulder. ‘He could tell you that, if only you could reach him. But you can’t, because deep down – as far below the surface as this prison is – you don’t want to find out, because you already know. Oh sure, not a name or any memories, but you can feel the sort of man you are, and really, you don’t want to go back. Understandable, God only knows, but it isn’t going to do you any good.’

  The crow suddenly vanished, in less time than it’d take a sword-monk to draw, and where the chained man had been Poldarn saw a sword-monk. He was in a bad way, with blood on his face and seeping through the cloth of his shirt. ‘Who are you?’ Poldarn asked.

  ‘You know, I can’t seem to remember,’ the monk replied. ‘But lately, I’ve been using the name Monach. It’s just the word for monk where I came from originally.’

  ‘Monach, then,’ Poldarn said. ‘All right, do you know who I am?’

  The monk laughed. ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘You’re the evil bastard who did this to me. At least,’ he added, ‘I think you are. Your face is different, but I can see you very clearly hiding behind its eyes.’


  ‘I don’t understand,’ Poldarn said.

  The monk shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘it’s what you’ve done that matters. Would you like to see that? Some of it, anyway, there isn’t time to show you more than a few examples. ’

  Before Poldarn could reply, the monk vanished. Poldarn looked round to see where he’d gone to, and realised that he was flying, a long way up above the ground. All around him were columns of smoke, and when he looked down he saw that they were billowing up out of cities.

  ‘Not bad,’ said a voice that seemed to be coming from between his shoulder blades. It sounded like the monk he’d just been talking to. ‘Considering that when you first arrived in this country you had nothing but the clothes you stood up in and a backsabre bashed out of an old beanhook, it represents a fairly impressive achievement. There’s Culhan Bohec, look – of course, you’ve never heard of Culhan Bohec. Not many people have, these days. And there’s Sirouesse, that used to be on the north-west coast, where the Mahec meets the sea; your first major work, and there’s many as reckon it’s still your best. Oh, and there’s Josequin. I guess you could call that your posthumous masterpiece, since strictly speaking it happened after your death-of-memory. But even though you weren’t there in person, it was definitely all yours, conceived, planned, realised and produced by you, got your signature all over it. And another thing you’ve got to bear in mind is how quickly you achieved all this. Twelve years; dammit, if you’d stayed a monk, like me, what would you have accomplished in those twelve years? Maybe, if you’d practised really hard and brown-nosed your way round the faculty, you might just have gone from ninth to twelfth grade, to the point where you’d be allowed to learn how to fight three imaginary enemies at the same time.’ The voice sighed wistfully. ‘Amazing, isn’t it, the different ways our lives turned out. You went on and made something of yourself, out here in the world: burned cities, killed thousands – make that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands even – made and overthrew emperors, played knucklebones and bouncing-bunny with the destinies of millions. I stayed in the abbey, cutting neat slices of empty air, to the point where I was allowed to go outside and kill – what, two dozen? Three? Can’t actually remember offhand, but it can’t have been more than five dozen, and that’s including guards, witnesses and other dross. As for making a difference and diverting the course of history’s river, forget it; all right, I may have wasted a few big-noses here and there, but I never had the faintest idea who they were or why they were important, so I really can’t claim any of the credit.’ The voice made a tut-tutting noise. ‘Got to face facts,’ it said. ‘If there’s a life after death and we all meet up in some sulphur-pit for a class reunion, no prizes for guessing who’ll get the lifetime achievement award. I mean, who else in our year went on to become a god? No, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ the voice added, as Poldarn felt himself losing height, swooping down on wide, scraggy black wings towards the burning roofs of Josequin. ‘No offence, but you don’t want to go there. Might prove bad for your health, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ Poldarn replied. ‘I can’t seem to climb.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the monk. ‘Oh, that is a pity. My weight, probably, forcing you down. Never mind, it’ll probably be quick, if that’s any consolation. Of course, if you could see your way to waking up at this point, you’d save us both a lot of bother.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Poldarn said.

  ‘Damn. The closer we get, you see, the sharper the focus gets; they stop being tiny little scurrying dots and start turning into people. Hey, look at that, will you? That’s really recent. Today, in fact. Look!’

  A gust of wind caught hold of him and dragged him down; beating his wings didn’t help, and he couldn’t turn into the wind to slow down. On the rapidly approaching ground below him he could see the derelict barn at Vistock, the crazy old woman who sold bones, and four men dragging her out into the light. He saw a fifth man: bald, with a brown, liver-spotted head, clearly not a day less than eighty years old but still tall, upright, imposing; he was absentmindedly doing backflips with a mirror-burnished backsabre as he waited for the old woman to be brought to him and crushed down to her knees by skilful pressure on the joints of her outstretched arms; she was cursing and screaming in a language he didn’t understand; she was in the middle of a sentence when the old man swung the backsabre smartly back to gather blade-speed and cut off her head in one fluid, graceful movement.

  ‘Got to admire that style,’ said the monk approvingly. ‘Never had a day’s formal tuition in his life, I don’t suppose, but did you see that inswing? Damned if I could do that, even with a proper sword, not one of those overgrown hedge-trimmers. I guess that’s what they mean when they talk about the true skill being no skill, only instinct.’ One of the men had stooped down, picked up the head by its hair. ‘Well,’ the voice went on, ‘you wanted to find out more about your family.’

  They’d fetched a stick, a clothes prop. One of them was sharpening the end with a little knife.

  ‘Do you remember,’ the voice continued (and the ground kept on getting bigger and closer), ‘how you used to stake out the dead crows, with a sharpened stick shoved up through the underside of the jaw, to keep the head up and make the decoy look lifelike? Maybe that’s where he got the idea from.’

  ‘Who are those people?’ Poldarn asked; any moment now they were going to crash into the ground, but although he could feel the speed and momentum gathering they didn’t seem to be moving—

  ‘One of the paradoxes of religion,’ the monk explained. ‘Best exemplified in the moment of the draw, but it’s a fundamental rule of how we view the universe. The fastest movement is no movement at all – like, for example, the movement of the hand to the sword hilt, so fast it doesn’t actually happen, that moment never exists. What would it be like, we speculate, if somehow one found oneself trapped in that not-moment for ever? Maybe, we speculate further, that’s what it means to be a god. Of course,’ he added, as they hung still and the rest of the world raced past them, ‘it’s only a theory. Absolutely no means of proving it, one way or the other.’

  They’d stuck the old woman’s head on the pole; one of them had knelt down, holding the head neck uppermost on the ground, while the other had stabbed the clothes prop into the stub of the windpipe. Now they were hoisting it up and planting it in the ground.

  ‘You see?’ the monk said, as Poldarn finally managed to bank into the wind, and felt the shock of the air in his wings, cutting his speed enough that he could put his wings back and glide in to pitch. ‘This decoying method of yours, it works every time.’

  He woke up with a start, sitting forward and raising his hand to guard his face. Someone leaned over him and pushed him gently back.

  ‘It’s all right,’ the voice said, ‘you were having a bad dream, that’s all.’

  The sky was overhead again, back where it should be; but he could feel the memory of the dream rushing past him, as if he was falling out of it. A man was looking down at him, a worried look on his face. He was old, at least eighty, with a bald, wind-tanned head and huge shoulders.

  ‘Is he going to be all right?’ the man said.

  ‘I should think so.’ That sounded like Eyvind’s uncle Sigfus. ‘Just tired out, I think. God only knows when he last had anything to eat, either.’

  The man stared at him for a few moments, then said, ‘Do you recognise me?’

  ‘No,’ Poldarn said, then, ‘Yes, you were in a dream I was having. You cut off an old woman’s head.’

  The man nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Who are you?’ Poldarn asked.

  The old man’s voice was very deep, and his eyes were sunk right back into his skull. ‘My name is Halder,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m your grandfather.’

  Poldarn thought for a moment. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

  This time the old man smiled, just a little twitch at the side of the mouth, but his
eyes glowed warmly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Do you know who you are?’

  ‘No,’ Poldarn said.

  The old man nodded. ‘You’re called Ciartan,’ he said, ‘after my father; so your full name is Tursten’s Ciartan, of Haldersholt. Tursten was my son,’ the old man went on. ‘He died before you were born; oddly enough, not twenty yards from this very spot.’

  Poldarn breathed in slowly, then out again. ‘The old woman—’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ the old man said. ‘She killed my son. Not that I blame her, but things have to be done. I’m just sorry it took so long.’

  Poldarn thought about that, and he remembered what the old woman had said, about selling the old bones that lay in the ashes to the Potto house, to make buttons from. ‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ he said, ‘at least, at the moment it doesn’t, I can’t remember anything.’

  The old man straightened up a little and rubbed the small of his back. ‘So I gather,’ he said. ‘Strange business, that, but I’ve heard of cases like it over the years. Well,’ he went on, ‘here’s something, I must say. Never thought I’d see you again after nigh on twenty-five years.’

  I must know this man, Poldarn thought, because although there’s no expression in his voice or his face, I know him well enough to recognise joy when I see it. Something in his eyes, and the set of his lips. He’s telling the truth.

  (And then a door opened in his mind, only a crack between door and frame, through which he could see a small part of the landscape behind: a high, square-cut hedge running down a steeply sloping hill, an old man trimming back the hedge with a brush-hook while the boy raked up the spoil; winter, nothing else to do around the farm, so time to tidy up, impose a few straight lines and square edges on the curved and rounded forms of nature; the old man was all straight lines and square edges, he remembered. Of course, he hadn’t really been old then, Poldarn realised, he couldn’t have been much more than twelve years older than I am now, but to me he was as strong and stern and remote and timeless as a god, undisputed master of two enormous valleys, and everybody else around the place called him the boss, or the owner. He’s hardly changed at all in thirty-odd years, but the boy – that’s me, I recognise that old green shirt – something must’ve happened to him between then and now, some great sorrow or trial, or an unwanted apotheosis.)