by K. J. Parker
What should he do next? Trust his instincts, of course. Have faith. Above all, resist the disastrous temptation to think, because thought allows a moment to slide in between the breached circle and the draw, thought negates faith. To become God, you must become perfect, eliminate the moment, eliminate thought… Was that why he'd been chosen? Because he was the best of his year at swordfighting?
…And if my sister had six tits she'd be a cow, as they said in Sansory. He sighed, and shook his head. For a moment, he'd almost believed it, proving how easy it can be to pick up a bloody stupid notion, like a nail in the sole of your boot. Whoever he was (and at times it was hard to keep track, what with his true name and his name in religion and all those aliases), he was pretty certain he wasn't a god; and if he was a god he wouldn't be Poldarn, not if you paid him. The plain fact was, the gods didn't exist, as he'd known in his heart since he was a second-year novice. Religion wasn't about gods, it was all in your own mind, it was the self-denying moment between the instinct and the draw, nothing more or less than that. He grinned. A god who didn't know who he was, maybe. A god who's an atheist, no.
'Besides,' he said aloud, 'if I'm Poldarn, where's the crow?'
Whereupon not one but three crows erupted out of a tall, skinny ash tree beside the road and paddled noisily away through the wet air. For a moment, Monach sat quite still with his mouth open, then he burst out laughing.
He was still chuckling when he rolled into the camp at Cric. It was beginning to get dark, and the campfires stood out in the gloom, their light reflected in glowing clouds of smoke. The rain was falling steadily now, hard enough to make it difficult for Monach to think much further than shelter, warmth, food and sleep. He was wondering how these objectives might best be achieved when a soldier stepped out beside the cart and grabbed the lead horse's bridle.
'You're back, then,' he said. It was probably the man he'd spoken to earlier, he wasn't quite sure. 'You'd better get down and come with me. The general wants to see you.'
Monach woke up out of his train of thought with a snap. 'What?' he said. 'General Cronan?'
There were several soldiers now; lots of soldiers, a dozen at least and more coming. Two more were holding the horses, one was climbing up on to the box of the cart beside him, at least three behind him in the bed, and as many again closing in round him in a rapidly shrinking circle. While he sat still and tried to figure out what was going on, the soldier sitting next to him reached across and pulled the sword out of his scabbard, before he could do anything about it.
The first soldier's face broke into a grin. 'No,' he said, 'not General Cronan. General Feron Amathy. You coming quietly, or what?'
Chapter Twenty
'I've never seen anything like it,' Poldarn repeated.
'You can't remember seeing anything like it,' Copis pointed out. 'In your case, that doesn't mean much. For all you know, you used to live there.'
Poldarn frowned; he wasn't in the mood. 'It's amazing,' he said. 'And you honestly believe we're going to be able to sell them buttons?'
From the top of the rise they could see Deymeson, dramatically backlit by the sunset: the town, slopped round the foot of the hill as if it had seeped out under the walls of the castle; the fortress, with its double wall and star-pattern bastions; the abbey and the citadel, topped with a massive low, square tower. Nobody in their right mind would ever call it beautiful. It made Poldarn think of the machines in Potto Dec's factory: entirely functional, designed to execute some process or operation he couldn't begin to understand. If Copis had told him that the gods lived there, he'd probably have believed her.
'For what it's worth,' Copis was saying, 'I've never seen it before either; but I've heard about it, of course, and I'd have recognised it at once because there's a picture of it on the back of the silver hard-quarter. Doesn't do it justice, of course; makes it look pretty.'
Poldarn shook his head. 'I don't believe that anybody who could build something like that uses buttons. Or clothes, even. They're probably covered from head to foot with scales, or feathers.'
Copis sighed. 'We aren't here to sell to the monks, silly,' she said. 'You may not have noticed, but there's a fair-sized town as well as that granite monstrosity. That's where they keep the people who do all the work-you know, scrub the floors, slop out the latrines, cook the food. And do you know what makes them special, as far as we're concerned? They get paid, in money. Therefore,' she concluded with a smile, 'we can sell them buttons.'
They stopped for the night at an inn down in the valley, where for some reason they seemed to cause something of a stir; the grooms and the servers looked at them oddly and wouldn't say why. That made Poldarn nervous, but Copis swore blind she'd never been there before, let alone tried out the act. 'I'd remember,' she said, 'trust me.'
In the morning they drove up the hill to the Foregate. The Foregate was a gate, but there was no town wall, just an arch, at least fifteen feet high and twelve feet wide, made up of mirror-smooth granite blocks with no decoration or embellishment of any kind, free-standing in the patchy grass. No walls, but two sentries.
'That's silly,' Poldarn pointed out. 'You could just drive round the whole thing.'
Copis shook her head. 'Wouldn't advise it,' she said. 'If you did that, they'd call out the guard and you'd find yourself in a cell in the watch-house, if you were lucky.'
Sure enough, the four carts that had been ahead of them on the road were drawn up in line, waiting to go through the gate, while the sentries questioned the drivers. 'Symbolism, you see,' Copis explained. 'Deymeson doesn't need a wall, because its defence is the awesome reputation of the sword-monks.'
'Fine,' Poldarn said. 'Then what's all that masonry further up the hill?'
'Walls, of course,' Copis replied. 'Symbolism is all very well, but some people are too stupid to understand it. The walls and towers and stuff are for their benefit.'
Apparently the sentry hadn't heard of buttons, or else didn't believe in them, because he insisted on opening all the barrels and rummaging about inside, like a man loading grain with his empty hands. He gave up eventually, but there was a resentful glow in his eyes that suggested that he didn't take kindly to being baffled, and would be keeping a very sharp eye on them in future.
Beyond the gate and the scrappy five-acre parcel of scuffed grass and bare mud it stood in were the first houses of the town, warehouses or granaries if their windowless facades were anything to go by. The main street led straight up the steep hill, and the buildings on either side of it gave no indication of what they were used for; two narrow windows per frontage, like scratches or blisters in the blank grey stone, and even those were all on the second or third floor. Some of them had no visible doors or windows at all. There were no people to be seen anywhere.
'I knew this was going to be a waste of time,' Poldarn muttered, 'as soon as you told me this was some kind of religious place. They're probably all at prayers or doing meditation or something.'
'Not the ones who live down here,' Copis said firmly. 'For a start, the order doesn't pray in the sense you're thinking of, they prance about hitting each other with wooden swords. And they live up in the castle, not down here. I don't suppose they see a monk in this part of town from one year's end to the next.'
Just then Copis noticed a turning on her left. It was an archway, just wide enough for the cart to get through if they weren't too fussy about scraping the wheel hubs. 'Let's try this,' she said.
'We can't. For all you know, that could be somebody's private courtyard.'
'Then they ought to put up a gate and lock it,' Copis replied, pulling the cart out in the middle of the street to give herself the right angle to get through the archway. 'Besides, I've got a theory.'
Poldarn signed. 'More symbolism?'
'We'll soon see.'
The archway led into a narrow passage, paved with slate and roofed over, very high up, with dark red tiles. After a very sharp bend, it led into a square.
'Now that's mor
e like it,' Copis said.
It was as if the street had been turned inside out, the way a cushion is turned to hide the seams. In the middle of the square was a fountain, flanked by two statues of young women playing harps. All four sides of the square were lined with open doors; some were shops, with trestles covered with merchandise standing under oilskin awnings; the rest were ordinary houses. Why their owners bothered having them wasn't clear, since it was fairly obvious that everyone spent most of their time out in the open air, standing on one side of the traders' trestles or the other. There was one boy with a tray of evil-looking sausages; another sitting on top of a huge barrel, his legs swinging, his hands cradling a big tin cup; on the side of the barrel was chalked a tariff-a quarter a cup, or six for a turner. As for the stalls, pretty much anything you could ever want to buy was there, in every possible permutation of size, colour and quality, from coarse white sailcloth to seven-colour brocade ('First time I've seen that north of the bay,' Copis whispered in awe), from cheap pine-handled bean-hooks to pattern-welded walking-swords, from clogs to court slippers with absurdly long toes and savagely tight gussets, from green-turned wooden bowls to four-handled pewter goblets, from blanket-cloth ship-jackets to the sort of complicated audience gown that needed two strong maids and a three-foot-long buttonhook to install-everything, in fact, except for buttons.
('Now are you glad we came?' Copis muttered.
'All right, yes.')
The nearest thing to a button in the square was a card of sand-cast brass toggles, rough and unfinished and priced at five quarters. Copis grinned like a dog smelling blood. 'No competition whatsoever,' she sighed happily. 'The one thing I was afraid of was that there'd be a deep-rooted button cartel who'd run us out of town for trying to shove in on their pitch.'
'Doesn't look that way,' Poldarn replied. He'd tied up the horses to a conveniently placed rail and was unstepping the awning poles. 'This is extraordinary. Nothing at all like this in Sansory.'
Copis nodded. 'And this is the first place we came to. For all we know, the whole damn town could be like this. You know, we should've brought all the stock.'
They set up the stall, expecting a soldier or bailiff to arrive at any moment and demand to see their trading permits, but nobody paid any attention, apart from a few good-natured enquiries about what they were selling. To their relief, when they replied, 'Buttons,' they weren't stared at or asked what a button was; in fact, quite a crowd had gathered by the time they opened the stall for business. By noon, the table was looking decidedly threadbare.
'Definitely coming back here again,' Copis said, during an uncharacteristic lull. 'And we can easily jack the prices up a quarter or so; to judge from what they've been saying, they reckon we're practically giving the stuff away.'
'We'll see,' Poldarn replied. As far as he was concerned, their mark-up was steep enough as it was without increasing it further. In fact, there was something about trade in general that struck him as rather dishonest, only a step or two removed in legitimacy from the god-in-the-cart scam. 'I figure luck's a bit like a cart. Pushing it when you're struggling uphill is usually all right, but when you're coasting gently downhill it's probably not a good idea.'
Copis shook her head. 'Don't believe it,' she replied. 'I know this kind of people, they're like we used to get in Torcea. The more expensive something is, the more likely they are to buy it. I mean, look at some of the stuff on these stalls. This lot aren't short of a quarter.'
Poldarn shrugged, not being inclined to take the subject further. He beckoned to the boy sitting on the barrel and held a coin up in the air. The boy duly brought him a tin cup, which turned out to be full of quite palatable wine, not stale beer as he'd expected.
'And a quarter a cup, too,' Copis remarked, after she'd had a mouthful. 'That's very reasonable. You know, we could do worse than buy a barrel or two while we're here and sell it on in Sansory. No point taking the cart home empty.'
'We could,' Poldarn replied without much enthusiasm. Something was definitely making him uneasy, though whether it was Deymeson, the morality of commerce or something else he couldn't quite put his finger on, he wasn't sure. 'Next time, maybe,' he added, 'once we've had a chance to find out if there's actually a market for the stuff there. And we'd better look into things like excises and tariffs if we're going into the wine trade.'
Copis sighed. 'That's the problem with you,' she said, 'no spontaneity. I think you were probably a counting-house clerk in your previous life. And I'll bet your books always balanced at the end of the day.'
'And that'd be a bad thing?'
'You know perfectly well what I mean,' Copis replied. 'Still, I suppose it's a good combination, one brave and impetuous and the other sensible and boring.'
Poldarn looked up. 'That's how you see us, is it?'
Copis nodded. 'I was exaggerating a bit,' she said, 'but not that much. The thing about you is, I think that deep down you've got this urge to live a really dull, ordinary, commonplace life, which suggests that to you it's all new and fascinating, being ordinary, and that before this you used to be something dashing and dangerous.'
'You just said I was probably a clerk.'
'Changed my mind.'
Poldarn clicked his tongue, a habit he'd picked up from Copis. 'If I'm going out of my way to avoid excitement and adventure, I'm not making much of a fist of it,' he said. 'Except for the last week or so, I suppose, that's been refreshingly quiet. In fact, it's been days since I last killed anybody.'
'My heart bleeds,' Copis replied gravely. 'You'll just have to make do with fleecing people instead. Not as effective as killing them, but it means you can carve off another slice or two the next time you're passing through. I guess you could say it's the difference between hunting and rearing livestock.'
The market dissolved abruptly an hour before sunset, like a giant turned to stone by the first light of dawn. The stallholders lifted their tables off the trestles and carried them, still laden with goods, back into their houses, while their wives and children scurried backwards and forwards with table legs, stools, barrels and bales. It all happened so quickly that if Poldarn had happened to be kneeling down lacing his boot at the time, he'd have missed it and stood up again to find the square suddenly and inexplicably different (ah, the difference one moment can make…).
'You'd better get a move on,' someone said as he stood gawping at the empty square. 'If the bailiffs come round and catch you still trading, you'll be for it.'
'Oh,' Poldarn said. 'Thanks. Why?'
'Curfew,' the stranger replied, and hurried away.
'Wonderful,' Copis muttered, grabbing dishes and trays of buttons and pouring them into jars at random. 'Well, don't just stand there, tear down the stall. And if you can stop someone and ask, find out if it's a general curfew or just trade.'
She seemed to be taking it very seriously, so he dismantled the canopy and unshipped the poles as quickly as he could. Nobody came close enough to the cart to be stopped and questioned; in any event, they were moving too fast and too purposefully towards their houses, which suggested that the curfew was general and that they really didn't want to get caught. That, of course, presented them with a fresh problem.
'There'll be an inn or something,' Copis reassured him. 'Nothing to worry about.'
As soon as they had the stall down and packed away in the cart, they headed across the square to the inn (the Dogma and Doctrine), arriving a couple of heartbeats after the door bolts went home and the shutters were snatched in with a bang. Knocking on the door proved to be a complete waste of time.
'Marvellous,' Copis said edgily. 'Now what?'
Poldarn wasn't listening; he was watching three robed men with staffs walking across the square towards them. Since there was nobody else in sight, it wasn't difficult to guess what they wanted.
'I suppose they must be sword-monks,' Copis whispered. 'You hear all sorts of things about them, of course, but I've never seen one before.'
'Well, they don't s
eem to be carrying swords,' Poldarn said. I'll have to take your word about the monk part.'
'Quiet,' Copis replied. 'I should be able to handle this.'
Sword-monks or not, the three men didn't seem to be in any hurry; they were strolling rather than marching. 'Hello,' one of them called out from about fifteen yards. 'You're strangers in town, aren't you?'
'That's right,' Copis said. 'We're terribly sorry, we didn't know about the curfew.'
The monk who'd spoken to them shrugged his shoulders. 'That's all right,' he said. 'We aren't going to lock you up for ignorance. I take it you haven't got anywhere to stay.'
Copis nodded. 'We tried the inn over there, but they've locked the doors.'
'Don't worry, we'll see to that,' the monk said, and nodded to one of his colleagues, who set off quickly across the square towards the inn. 'Right,' the monk went on. 'The rules are pretty straightforward. Nobody on the streets after curfew-that's three-quarters of an hour before sunset, there's sundials in every square, so knowing the time's easy enough. All inns and shops closed and locked on time; all foreigners registered with the prior's office and able to show proof of accommodation for the night. You aren't either of those, are you?'
Copis shook her head.
'Not to worry,' the monk said, and nodded towards the inn. 'It's perfectly straightforward; I issue a vagrancy notice and billet you in the nearest registered accommodation. If they're full you might have to put up with a night in the stables, but it's bound to be better than the watch-house lock-up. I'll trust you to report to the prefecture by an hour after sunrise tomorrow morning; just tell them who you are and why you're here and that you didn't know the rules before you arrived, and they'll issue you with the necessary passes and stuff. Quite painless,' he added, 'so long as you follow procedure.'