by K. J. Parker
‘It’s what I was born for,’ Copis said, ‘to drive you around, round and round in circles, from this mountain to the next and back again, year after bloody year.’ She sighed melodramatically. ‘Always a priestess, never a god, just my rotten luck. I get the blame, you get all the burnt offerings. I really wish you could remember at least some of this when you wake up, it’d save me a great deal of physical pain, not to mention the emotional shit. But there we go. I think we’re here,’ she added, as the mountain, belching fire, appeared in the background. ‘You’re on. Break a leg.’
He opened his eyes.
‘So there you are.’ The older man’s face: Feron Amathy, staring at him as if he’d seen a rather unsatisfactory ghost, not the one he’d been waiting for. ‘You kept on dying and we were all set to bury you, and then you’d start breathing again, you bugger. God, you’ve cost me a lot of money.’
He tried to sit up, but that proved to be a very bad idea. Everything hurt, very badly.
‘The good news is,’ Feron Amathy went on (and behind his head was the peak of a tent, with other faces peering over his shoulder), ‘apart from a broken leg and some scratches and singes, you’re all right, you’ll live.’ He frowned. ‘Did I say that was the good news? Matter of viewpoint, I guess. The bad news is, you fucked up and cost the lives of three good men, as well as buggering up my plans and ruining six months’ work. If I didn’t love you like my own son, I’d rip your stomach open and peg you out for the crows.’
He remembered what had happened. ‘Sergeant Bofor—’
Feron Amathy shook his head. ‘Make that three good men and one buffoon, though I’m not holding Fat Bofor against you. I’m assuming that it was his own stupidity that got him killed. Is that right?’
He tried to nod, but it hurt too much. ‘He pulled a bookcase down on his head,’ he croaked, ‘I think it must have knocked him out.’
‘Figures. But the other three are your fault, for rushing into a burning building to save a dead idiot. Different for them, of course; they rushed into a burning building too, but there was a slight chance their idiot was still alive. Since they were proved to be correct, I’m calling them heroes rather than irresponsible arseholes. Benefit of the doubt, and all that.’
He closed his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was only trying to do the right thing.’
‘I know,’ Feron Amathy said tenderly. ‘That’s what makes you such a fucking menace. In case you’re remotely interested, the men you killed – not too strong a word, in my opinion – were Has Gilla, Cuon Borilec and Fern Ilzen. Tully Galac got out alive – dragged you out with him – but he’s burnt to hell and he’s lost one eye, it’s touch and go whether he’ll make it or not. If this is what you achieve when you’re trying to be good, Poldarn help us all if you ever decide to be bad.’
He could feel tears forming in his eyes. ‘The library,’ he said.
‘Oh, that. You failed. I have no idea how you managed it, but only about half the books actually got burned; a wall fell in and cut the rest off from the fire – it’s a bloody miracle, if you ask me. Anyway, who gives a shit about a load of old books? The point is, with you hovering on death’s door like a hummingbird, we had to call off the attack on Josequin and hole up here; and now the bloody rain’s set in, we haven’t got a hope in hell of getting back down the mountain with the roads all turned to mud, so it looks like we’re stuck here for a month at the very least. If the food holds out it’ll be another bloody miracle. Can you do miracles? Apart from coming back from the dead, I mean. If so, now would be a really good time.’
A sharp pain shot up his leg and paralysed him for a very long moment. ‘I don’t think I can,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, great,’ Feron Amathy sighed. ‘A fat lot of use you turned out to be, then.’
He opened his eyes.
‘Wake up, for crying out loud.’ Colsceg was leaning over him, shaking him by the shoulder. ‘We need you to tell us what to do.’
There was something in his mind, something incredibly important; but the light – and the sound of Colsceg’s voice – washed it away, like a flood dissolving snow. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked sleepily.
(The main hall at Colscegsford; he could see the joists and cross-beams of the roof behind the old man’s head. For some reason they seemed horribly threatening, as if they could fall in on him at any moment. Why? he wondered; I must have been dreaming.)
‘What’s the matter, he says.’ Colsceg scowled at him. ‘You bloody fool, can’t you hear it?’
He could hear something; it was a gentle, familiar noise, one that he rather liked, because of pleasant associations he could no longer quite remember. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘tell me. What’s going on?’
(And then he recognised the sound—)
‘I’ll tell you what’s going on,’ Colsceg shouted, as if it was all his fault. ‘It’s raining.’
Chapter Ten
Poldarn pushed past Colsceg and burst through the door.
The rain was hard, each drop hitting his face like a slingstone, and so thick that he could only just make out the shapes of the encircling mountains. But he didn’t need to see them. In his mind’s eye, he had a clear vision of what was happening. The ash was dissolving into mud, slithering off the rocky slopes, following the channels and contours like sheep herded by a well-trained dog. Soon it would form its lines and columns, its ranks and files, ready to march; then it would move with terrifying speed (like the raiders, his people, swooping down on Josequin or Deymeson), gathering strength and pace as it went, before cascading in a black river into the valley, and filling it like molten metal poured into a mould. It would be here very soon, too soon to put together a coherent plan of action, organise the household, allocate duties and responsibilities, establish an effective chain of command – all the things that needed to be seen to if anything was ever to get done.
‘Well,’ Colsceg shouted at him, ‘so what do we do?’
He thought about it for a whole second. ‘Run,’ he said.
‘Fine. Where to?’
Ah, Poldarn thought, now there you have me. He looked round, more with his mind and memory than with his eyes. The valley plain was out of the question. He thought of Rook’s account of the mudslides at Lyatsbridge; if they ran out onto the flat, there was every chance they’d be swamped and buried before they went more than a few hundred yards. Going up the slopes was no better, they ran the risk of being in the way of a mudslide coming down; it’d be quicker, though not by much, and that was the best to be said for it. Bloody hell, he thought, why’s it got to be up to me, this isn’t even my house. Why can’t someone else tell me what to do, for a change?
‘Up the hillside,’ he said, and as he said it he knew perfectly well that he was only saying the first thing that came into his head, because there wasn’t time to reach a considered decision. ‘Keep to the high ground, away from the dips and trenches. You’ll be just fine.’
Colsceg nodded and ran off; Poldarn could see people hurrying towards him. Of course, he and he alone was at liberty to please himself, he didn’t have to go with the rest of them or allow his mind to be swamped by theirs. He could stay where he was, observe, collate more data, drown in mud, because he wasn’t a part of this community. He only had himself to think about.
Not true. The hell with this, he thought; where’s Boarci? Damn him to hell, Boarci was his responsibility now, and of course he was nowhere to be seen. Suppose it took him three minutes to find him, that’d use up his little allowance of grace and then it’d be too late to save either of them, even if he knew how to go about it. Waiting for him, looking for him would be an act of monumental stupidity, like running back into a burning house to try and save someone who was probably dead already. Only an imbecile would even consider doing something like that.
‘Boarci,’ he yelled, but he could only just hear himself over the hammering of the rain.
This would be a good time to be a mind-reader, Pold
arn thought as he splashed and skidded across the yard. Already the rain had created pools in every bump and dip; it was flooding down off the eaves and gathering in miniature rivers, scuttling down the slight incline towards the edge of the plateau. The stables, he told himself; if I were Boarci, I’d try and get a horse, see if I could outrun the mud on the flat. Now that wasn’t a bad idea, though needless to say it wasn’t applicable to the Colscegsford household; there weren’t enough horses to go round, and if they couldn’t all go, none of them would even consider trying. But Boarci wasn’t a part of this house, not even remotely, by betrothal; he could clear out and leave them all to die, and nobody would know he’d even been here. Now if only he could be trusted to think that way for himself, Poldarn would be relieved of the obligation of thinking for him, and that’d be one less thing to waste time on. But it wouldn’t be safe to assume that Boarci would do that, and so Poldarn had no choice but to keep looking for him (and that’d be comical, if Poldarn died trying to save the one man in the place who managed to get away).
While he was standing in the yard trying to figure out this dilemma, the first mudslide made its spectacular entrance. It must have come down off the very steep escarpment at the far end of the plateau, because it landed on the roof of the grain store, smashed it into kindling and scooped up the mess before butting through the fence like an unusually ornery bull and slopping over the edge into the valley. Poldarn spun round to gawp, and by the time he’d seen enough the walls of the middle stable were being folded down flat as a torrent of black muck shouldered its way through, heading straight for the main house. That wasn’t a problem, it was going away from where he was standing, and he’d noticed a nice sharp outcrop well above the channel it was following down the slope. If he looked sharp about it, he could see no reason why he couldn’t get up there and be as safe as any man can be in this notoriously uncertain world. But before he could set off (time, of course, being very much of the essence) he realised that Elja was still inside the house. He didn’t have a clue how he knew this, but he knew it.
Marvellous, he thought. But you’d have to be plumb crazy to try and outrun something moving that fast.
Poldarn ran; and, to his surprise, he found that he was making ground on the mudslide with every forced stride. By his calculations, the mud was shifting along at slightly more than a brisk walking pace, too slow for him to be able to abandon his responsibilities with a clear conscience. The door was wide open, as he’d left it, but he slipped in a pool of mud under the eaves and collided painfully hard with the door frame. He landed on his left knee, with a painful impression of having done it no good at all, but he couldn’t spare the time for it to hurt or anything self-indulgent like that. Instead he pulled himself up on the edge of the door and charged into the house, howling Elja’s name.
She came out of the inner room, looking sleepy.
‘Mudslide,’ he tried to say, but he was too out of breath to be able to shape words. Instead, he grabbed her arm and yanked her after him, reaching the doorway just as the mud caved it in.
Too late after all, Poldarn concluded sadly, as the mud swept his feet from under him and he flopped awkwardly onto his side, half falling and half collapsing, like an old shed in a high wind. He pulled Elja down with him, of course, and she screamed at him, bending back the fingers of his left hand where they were closed around her wrist. Now that really was painful, but he didn’t have time or breath left to ask her to stop. The current carried him on a yard or so, twisting him round until he was lying on his back, watching the roof timbers getting pulled out of their mortices. He wondered whether he’d live long enough for the pain of having his head crushed by a falling beam to make him scream; he hoped not, since he didn’t want to look pathetic in front of Elja.
But it didn’t happen like that. Under the pressure of the mud, the walls were forced outwards, and the rafters and joists were pulled free of their sockets on the left-hand side before they cleared those on the right. In consequence, the roof beams folded rather than fell, crashing down diagonally into the mud and spraying it in all directions, but he was too far over to be in their line of collapse. Meanwhile, the wall nearest to him was floating on top of the mud, like a grotesquely oversized raft.
I could get on that, he thought. We could get on that, he corrected himself, and then at least we won’t drown in the river of mountainshit. Death was one thing, but the thought of being sloughed over by a huge black slug of sodden ash was too revolting to bear thinking about. So he crawled, waded and flipped his way onto the flattened wall, like a salmon forcing its way upstream, and managed to haul himself over the precisely trimmed log-ends and flop, breathlessly, face down in a pool of his own mud.
A scream reminded Poldarn that he still had duties to attend to. Just in time, he reached out and grabbed Elja’s wrist, before the current dragged her too far away. He pulled, and felt something go in her arm; she screamed again, this time from simple, everyday pain, and tried to shake him off. Instinct, he told himself, and pulled as hard as he could, ignoring whatever damage he was doing to her tendons and bones. A ludicrous picture of her hand coming off in his floated into his mind, somehow hopelessly mixed up with a memory of trying to wring a hen’s neck, yanking straight when he should have twisted, and getting horribly scratched in the face by the claws of a decapitated chicken. But Elja’s hand stayed on and she slopped down beside him on the wall-raft, flapping and wriggling like a landed fish.
‘It’s all right,’ he shouted (but his mouth was full of mud), just as the roof subsided into the black mess, pushing up a wave that nearly submerged them both. He slid his own length down the raft on his belly, his feet ramming her in the neck and ear and almost shunting her off the timbers into the mud. Then – fortuitously – the raft came up against something solid and was jolted sideways, shooting them both back up the way they’d just come. Unfortunately, the impact was enough to wrench the wall-boards apart; the raft disintegrated into its component timbers (he saw Colsceg as a young man, marking each growing beam with his knife so he’d know which tree was to go where when the time came) and he needed both arms to grab on to a floating joist, just to keep his head above the surface. He couldn’t look round to see what had become of Elja, but it didn’t take much imagination to guess.
What a bloody mess, Poldarn said to himself, and he wondered how they were getting on at Haldersness, whether the rain was cleaning the ash off the fields, whether there were mudslides there, and was everybody dead. It didn’t seem to matter; even if he contrived to keep his grip on the log he was hanging on to, sooner or later the current would sweep him off the plateau and he’d end up dead on the plain below, drowned in mud or crushed by house-lumber – if the fall itself didn’t kill him. He’d failed, of course; Elja dead in spite of his heroic self-sacrifice, and Boarci clean forgotten about, though in the event he wouldn’t have been able to do anything for him. It was almost annoying to be still alive, saved by the happy accident of the angle at which the roof fell, the conveniently handy wall that had served him as a raft – he’d had nothing to do with all that, he hadn’t arranged it or done anything the least bit clever, and all that had come of it was that he’d lived a few rather unpleasant minutes longer, minutes he wouldn’t have minded missing out on, at that. Pointless and faintly ridiculous, the whole thing.
I’ll die, and I’ll never know who I was. Maybe I should remember now; after all, what harm can it possibly do? But his memory remained obdurately locked, and he couldn’t be bothered to argue with it. Something Boarci had said, about his life flashing before his eyes at the moment of death, flitted into his mind and made him smile. The rain was cold and brutal; he’d have preferred to die in the warm sun, but apparently that wasn’t going to happen.
Ciartan, Ciartan. Maybe someone was calling his name, or maybe it was just a voice in his head, such as you sometimes hear in the middle of the night, mindlessly enunciating some word or other. On balance, Poldarn hoped it was the latter. It’d be dreadful
if the last thing he saw was some poor fool trying to rescue him and getting himself killed in the process. To have that on his conscience at the final moment would be intolerable, particularly since his mind had gone to such elaborate pains to hide his past sins from him, in case they upset him. Above all, he wanted to die in peace; death and haircuts should both be free from idle and distracting chatter, he told himself, and regretted that he’d never have a chance to use the line in conversation, because he rather liked it.
‘Ciartan, you bloody fool. Over here.’
Definitely not a voice in his head; but he couldn’t look round to see who it was without loosening his grip on the timber. ‘Go away,’ he shouted. ‘Leave me alone, for God’s sake.’
‘Fuck you,’ replied the voice, and he recognised it: Boarci, his new best friend. Particularly galling, he thought; here he was in his last few moments of life, and his dependent, the man he felt most responsible for, was calling out to him to save him. Everything I do turns to horseshit on me, Poldarn thought sadly, as he realised that his grip was about to weaken. Why couldn’t I have died back in the Bohec valley, where I wasn’t any bother to anybody?
He tried to tighten his grip, but he had nothing left. The beam slipped out from under his fingers, and he felt the mud rushing into his nose and mouth, too quickly for him even to take a breath.
He was in some kind of dream, though for some reason there weren’t any crows. The mud had turned to linen, and the soft pressure on his face was a sheet. He batted it away with the back of his hand and turned his head. Next to him on the pillow was a glorious tangle of golden hair. He caught his breath; and she yawned and rolled over to face him.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
She giggled. ‘Oh, just some girl you picked up at a dance,’ she replied.
(The crazy part of it was, he could distinctly remember her saying that.)