Shadow s-1

by K. J. Parker

  Getting up the steps past the silent sitters looked like it would be next to impossible; but Copis exhibited a thoroughly efficient technique that basically consisted of treading hard on the hands and ankles of anybody who didn't shift out of the way, and Poldarn followed nervously in her wake. The owners of the squashed fingers and joints swore at them, but didn't bother to look up; instead, they mumbled their curses into the air, like sleepy monks saying their responses.

  The porters at the main door looked at them closely but let them pass (the man behind them wasn't so lucky, and ended up on his back on the stairs) and they found themselves in an enormous hallway. The ceiling was so high that Poldarn had to lean his head back as far as it would go in order to see the paintings, still startlingly beautiful despite the effects of decades of smoke and grime on their colours and gold leaf. The mosaics on the walls were even finer, though only a few patches were still discernible. He found that he couldn't afford to stand gawping for long, however. There were too many people in the hallway, moving too fast. For her part, Copis barged her way through to a trestle table set up in the far left corner; she came back some time later with two more bone tickets, one of which she handed to him.

  'These aren't quite so precious,' she said. 'We have to show them to get food or a place to sleep in the dormitory. Still, if you lose yours you'll end up outside with the rest of the poor sad people, because that's the last of our money. We'd better give some thought to how we're going to get some more.'

  Again he thought about the lump of gold, and probably would have mentioned it if she'd stayed put long enough to let him. Instead she started pushing and slithering her way to the door. 'To be honest with you,' she explained, when they were back in the fresh air again, 'I don't like it much in there. A bit too crowded, and I'm not desperately keen on the smell. Let's go and find the junk market, see if we can get something for your predecessor's boots.'

  The fifth boot stall they tried in the junk market was buying, and they came away with three and a half quarters, a quarter more than Copis had been expecting. 'Which means he figures he can get five,' she pointed out, as they turned sideways to squeeze through a narrow gap between two barrows. 'Wonder why rubbish like that's going so dear. Panic, probably; because of what happened to Josequin. People get scared, prices go up. Fact of life.'

  There was something about the goods for sale in the junk market that Poldarn found familiar, though he couldn't quite work out what it was. It was only when they had to stand and wait beside a clothing stall while a wide cart went by and he saw a big brown stain around a hole in a tunic that he realised where all the stuff came from.

  'That's right,' Copis confirmed, when he asked her. 'It's one of the biggest businesses in town. Someone told me once that three-quarters of all the stuff stripped off bodies on battlefields ends up in Sansory market sooner or later. It's because so many of the free companies have their headquarters here, and all the others have at least a recruiting office or a dormitory. They're all in the upper town, of course; they wouldn't be seen dead down here in the Sump.'

  'Pity,' Poldarn said. 'If only I'd known, we could have made some money here.'

  'What do you mean?'

  He remembered; he hadn't told her about the two dozen dead men he'd woken up with. Hadn't got round to it, and it was too late now. 'Oh, I was just thinking about those horsemen we ran into,' he said.

  'True. But at the time we weren't planning on coming here. And used military equipment isn't the safest thing in the world to carry around with you, especially if you've come by it the hard way, like we did.'

  'Fair enough,' he said. 'Well,' he added, stopping and looking about him, 'at least nobody's burned it down yet. Makes a pleasant change as far as I'm concerned.'

  The stalls were colourful, if nothing else, and (as Copis was at pains to point out) you'd be unlikely to see anything like them anywhere else in the empire. There was a whole stall full of helmets, for instance, well over half of them crushed, cut or punctured in some way; the ones on the back shelves had been straightened, beaten out and patched, while the rest were presumably as the gleaners had found them. There were several stalls selling nothing but loose links for mailshirts, and behind them two or more old women were slowly dismantling shirts that were too badly damaged to be worth repairing. One old woman would cut the rivets with a big pair of shears, while another opened out the rings with two pairs of pinchers and dropped them in a copper basin by her feet. You could have had your choice of half-pairs of marching boots; three stalls sold only left boots, whereas four sold only right. There were belt stalls, buckle stalls, tunic, cloak and trouser stalls, button stalls, stalls selling plates, pots, pans and cauldrons, stalls with neat trays of horn buttons, bone and steel needles, sharpening stones and belt loops for carrying them in; stalls selling knapsacks, water bottles, blankets and tents. There were racks of tools for blacksmiths, armourers, farriers, carpenters and a host of other trades; also spades, shovels, picks and even a few wheelbarrows; folding chairs, tables and beds. It was hard to think of anything that wasn't there, in some shape or form, right down to fur-lined slippers, books and musical instruments, though their comparative rarity suggested that they'd come from the bodies of senior officers rather than ordinary footsloggers.

  'Seen enough yet?' Copis asked, trying to detach him from a display of thick woollen socks. 'This lot gives me the creeps, if you must know.'

  Poldarn shrugged. 'I was just looking around,' he said. 'After all, if I see something I remember, like a uniform I may have worn once, or some distinctive-looking kit from the bodies of people I used to fight against, it might set the ball rolling and help me remember the rest.'

  She clicked her tongue. 'You're not still on about that, are you?' she said wearily. 'Look, if I were you I'd let it go. After all,' she added, lowering her voice, 'there's a chance that if it does all come flooding back, it'll be stuff you really don't want to know. Or me, for that matter. Leave it alone, is my advice.'

  Before Poldarn had a chance to state his views on the matter, Copis looked up at the sky and announced that they'd better be getting back if they didn't want to miss dinner. As if to reinforce her point, she added that it'd be quicker if they took a short cut through the scrap market. 'This way,' she said firmly and walked away quickly, so that he had to run a few steps in order to keep up.

  The scrap market, filled up a long, quite narrow alley between the back of the Faith and Hope (formerly the prebendary temple) and the outer wall of the garden of one of the big commercial houses. There were stalls on both sides, leaving only just enough room for two files of pedestrians, or one cart; it seemed a profoundly illogical place in which to buy and sell large quantities of bulk metal, but Poldarn was quickly learning that logic had very little to do with the design or growth of cities. Here, Copis explained as they shoved and weaved their way through, was where all the busted and mangled metalwork left lying about on battlefields ended up, the stuff that was only fit for cutting up or the melt.

  The explanation wasn't really necessary; the stock in trade crowded round him as he passed-piles of crushed and mangled breastplates, with rust clotting on the sharp edges of rips and punctures, crates and barrels of sword blades broken at the forte or sheared at the tang, spearheads snapped off at the top of the socket, arrowheads with their points curled in like seashells, plackets and beavers and gorgets twisted into bizarre shapes, coats of scales and coats of plates with the memory of the killing wound frozen in the distortion of the metal, where other metal had passed through and been drawn out. Each ruined artefact was as eloquent as a witness in a trial, recording its own failure-a bardische cracked along a flaw, exposing the white, gritty grain; a helmet torn apart along a welded seam; an overtempered spearhead bent double; links of a mail-shirt whose rivets had pulled through the eyes under the force of an axe cut. It was like some kind of eternal damnation of metal, where each piece was condemned to stay for ever in the image of that last moment of inadequacy, the point at w
hich it had betrayed its owner or simply given up trying to hold the shape its maker had given it. In every tear, puncture, fracture and distortion was a memory of its own death-was that how the souls of evil men are punished, Poldarn thought idly, by being frozen for all time in the moment of agonised transition?

  He hoped not, since he had no idea what he'd done and therefore couldn't repent and seek salvation, and he didn't want to end up on a stall in some crowded market of scrapped souls.

  'What the hell do people want with all this junk?' he asked.

  Copis grinned. 'It may look like junk to you, but it's prettier than a field of buttercups to some people. Just think of that town we passed through, where they'd cut down all the trees for charcoal. It costs a small fortune to make good iron, and as much again to turn it into steel, and here's all the raw material you could ever want, all ready to be heated up and bashed into any shape you like, none of that tedious mucking about with smelting and rolling and hammering into blooms. It's all good stuff, this,' she went on, gesturing vaguely at the heaps and piles. 'They don't make armour and weapons out of any old rubbish. Where else could you get best oil-hardening steel at twenty quarters a hundredweight?' She realised that Poldarn was looking at her oddly. 'I had a regular who was in the scrap trade,' she explained. 'Really loved his work, I guess, he'd go on for hours about what he called the poetry of it all-you know, taking something that was all busted up and finished with and turning it into something new and useful. I've got to admit, the idea of that appealed to me in a funny sort of a way. I mean, if you've got to have wars, it's nice that someone can get something useful out of it at the end.'

  Poldarn nodded gravely. 'It's just a shame they can't do the same sort of thing with all the dead bodies,' he said.

  'Don't you believe it.' Copis shook her head. 'There's bone-meal, and compost; and they say the ash from funeral pyres makes wonderful lye, for soap and perfumes and stuff. I've never heard of anybody making a business out of it, but then, it's not the sort of thing you'd admit to, not if you didn't want to turn off all your potential customers. I mean, one block of soap looks pretty much like another; who knows or cares where it came from?'

  'You're joking, aren't you?'

  'Yes,' Copis admitted. 'Probably. It was the look on your face. I had no idea you were so squeamish.'

  'Am I?'

  'Apparently. My guess is that in your previous life you were some kind of clerk, spent your life perched on a stool copying out letters and yelling the place down if you nicked your finger when you sharpened your pen.'

  He looked seriously at her. 'Do you think that's a possibility?'

  'Anything is possible, but that would be pretty low down the list.'

  The evening meal at the Charity and Diligence consisted of boiled leeks and red cabbage in a thin grey gravy, with a slab of coarse barley bread the size of a roof slate and a wedge of hard white cheese. 'Nourishing,' Copis remarked with her mouth full, 'wholesome, and tastes disgusting. Welcome to the city.'

  The dining-room, which had served the same function when the building was still a religious house, was almost as big as the hall. There were four long lines of tables and benches on either side, enough room for three hundred people who didn't mind their neighbours' elbows in their gravy. It was full, and extremely noisy. From time to time a server passed up and down the aisles with a big earthenware jug; it was just as well that they'd managed to get places at the top end of a table, near the kitchens and the buttery, since the jugs never seemed to make it further than a third of the way down the line before running dry. Catching the server's attention was a simple matter of sticking out an arm or a knee. The paintings on the ceiling weren't quite as fine as those in the hallway, but the frescoes on the walls must have been exquisite at one time, before the damp got behind them and levered them out in handfuls. 'Scenes from scripture,' Copis told him with a yawn, when he asked. 'Not that I'm any expert; half of these don't mean anything to me. But there's Actis stealing the sun from the giants-bloody silly story, that-and that one's Cadanet sieving the stars, assuming that big round thing's meant to be a sieve, and the one next to it is Sthen and Theron drinking the sea.' She hesitated for a moment, then looked at him. 'You haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, have you?' she said.

  He looked away. 'I know what you're thinking,' he said. 'We must have different gods where I come from.'

  'Well…' She shrugged. 'I don't want to know. Eat your dinner before it gets cold.'

  That seemed a sensible suggestion, and while he was doing it he tried not to look at the walls or the roof. It stood to reason, though; a man might forget his name and family, but something as basic as scripture (or mythology, or fairy-tales, whatever you liked to call it) ought to have stuck somewhere, along with language and how to tie knots and which hand to wipe your bum with. Even if they'd been knocked back into the scrap, seeing pictures that told the stories ought surely to bring them huddling back into the light. But she was right: none of it meant anything to him, except…

  He froze, halfway through chewing his last slab of cheese. He'd recognised one of them, he was sure of it. He'd recognised it, but it was so familiar that he hadn't noticed it; his mind had pushed past it in search of something more interesting. He looked round, had to look three times before he found it 'That one,' he said, pointing. 'Over there, just under the window.'

  Copis frowned at him. 'I'd really rather we didn't go into this,' she said.

  'Yes,' he replied irritably, 'but I think I know what it is. That big man with the white beard, isn't he just about to open that box? And when he does, I think something escapes.'

  'That's right,' Copis said, sounding excited. 'The four seasons. The old man is Cadanet, of course, and-'

  'Cadanet,' he replied. 'Yes, I knew that. And his wife-that'll be the thin woman with the funny hat-'

  'Veil of stars, actually, but-'

  'Her name,' he went on, closing his eyes, 'is Holden. She gave him the box.'

  'You've got it.' Copis nodded frantically. 'Go on, what else can you remember? Where did she get the box from?'

  He clenched his fists, as if trying to squeeze the information out between his fingers. 'No,' he said, 'I don't know that. But it was some kind of trick.'

  'That's it,' Copis said. 'Olfar gave her the box while Cadanet was sleeping.'

  'And before he opened it, it was always summer?'

  'Exactly.' Copis breathed a sigh of relief. 'You've no idea how relieved I am to hear you say that.'

  He thought for a moment before answering. 'All right,' he said, 'but it doesn't prove anything. Just because I remember one story…'

  'It's a start,' Copis interrupted. 'And it's a pretty basic story, the fall from grace. I think the first time I heard it was when I was four. Maybe even earlier than that, because everything before I was six is really just a jumble. What I mean is, it'd be one of the first ones you learned, so it stands to reason it'll be one of the first you remember. Assuming it works like that,' she added.

  'Assuming.'

  'Well, I don't know, do I? And why have you got to be so downbeat about everything? It gets on my nerves sometimes.'

  He grinned. 'Who's being downbeat? I've actually remembered a name. You have no idea…' He paused; another picture had caught his eye. Irritatingly, it was too high up and far away for him to be able to see it clearly, but he could definitely make out a man and a woman in a cart, with a burning town in the background. He pointed at it.

  'What?' Copis said.

  'There,' he replied. 'Top left corner. It's in shadow from where we're sitting, but-'

  'My God, yes, fancy that.' Copis leaned back to get a better view, jogging the elbow of the woman sitting next to her; she swore, and went back to her food. 'You know,' she said, 'that's odd. I could've sworn the cart was my idea.'

  'What do you mean by that?'

  'When I was a little girl, the end-of-the-world god rode around the place on a black horse with a white spot on its forehead. But th
ere weren't any black horses with white spots in my price range when I was figuring out the act, so I went for a cart instead. Yes, that's definitely off.'

  'Stay there,' he said, getting up. 'I'm going to have a closer look.'

  From the other end of the room, staring directly up at it, he could see rather more detail. The man, for instance, had a short black beard and a golden crown of some kind (nothing at all like the tiara-thing they used in the act), and while he was brandishing what was presumably meant to be a thunderbolt in his left hand, he was holding an oddly shaped curved sword in his right. The burning town was just a random pattern of black silhouetted squares and rectangles, but the carthorses were both skewbalds, just like the two the grooms had led away to the stables. The part that really caught his attention, however, was the other panel of the painting, which he hadn't been able to see at all from where he'd been sitting. The man in it was definitely the same one as in the first panel; no sign of the woman or, indeed, the cart, but here were two other men standing with him, one on either side, and he was walking down the gangplank of a ship towards a landscape of green grass and decidedly unnaturalistic sheep.

  He was about to turn away when someone bumped into him. Instead of swearing at him, the man apologised, which Poldarn took to indicate that he was an offcomer too. 'No problem,' he mumbled, expecting the man to go away. But he didn't.

  'Looking at the painting?' the man asked.

  'What? Oh, yes. Rather good, isn't it?'

  The man grinned. 'I think it's awful,' he replied. 'But it's an interesting subject. Actually, I've just come twelve days' ride to see it.'

  Poldarn turned his head and looked at him. He was enormous, the size and shape of a bear who'd got himself apprenticed to a blacksmith; he had a short black beard, just like the man in the picture, a small stub nose and very big round brown eyes. He was smiling.

  'Professional curiosity,' the man explained. 'It's the only known pictorial representation of this particular myth this side of Morevish. Pity it had to be in a shithole like this, really.'