by K. J. Parker
Somebody else was singing the song, from behind the wall. At once the monk yanked back on his reins, making his horse rear, and started shouting orders. The monks were drawing swords-why? There wasn't anybody to fight -Yes, there was. From over the wall, and from a ditch on the other side of the road that Poldarn hadn't even noticed, there came a great crowd of men, a hundred, perhaps two hundred, all standing up at the same time, like soldiers performing a drill. But they weren't armed The horseman on his right yelled something and started his draw. Difficult to gauge circles on horseback; Poldarn threw his weight to his left and slid off his horse, the quickest way of getting clear, and as his shoulder connected painfully with a large stone in the road, the horseman's sword sliced through the parcel of air where his head would have been. As he tried to get up and found that for some reason (some reason that hurt a lot) he couldn't, he saw another horseman slashing down at one of the men who'd come from behind the wall; some cut, clean through the spine on the diagonal, missing the collarbone, uncharacteristically wasted effort. Poldarn couldn't see any reason why the horseman should attack like thatOld crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree -The same tune, he realised. The other voice had been singing the same tune and words that meant the same thing, but in a different language.
Something hit the ground a few inches behind his head. He jerked his head back and bent his spine, and found he was nose to nose with a dead man, the monk who'd been riding on his right. A pair of boots stepped over him; it was one of the men from the ditch, and he wasn't unarmed by any means. He was swinging a short, fat sword with an unmistakable curved, concave blade, what Poldarn had come to know as a backsabre. The leg of his horse was in the way and he wasn't able to see the blow land, but he heard it, a sucking, hissing sound, like a man pulling his boot out of deep mud.
I think I probably know who these people are.
He'd been planning on lying still and pretending to be dead, but the horse backed up and scuffed him in the face with the back of its hoof, not hard, but enough to make him wince. He noticed one of the strangers watching him, and figured he must have seen the movement.
He knew the man's face: long, with a pointed chin and straggly, wispy hair. He was holding a backsabre, letting it hang by the rear horn of the hilt from two fingers. A sword-monk, on foot, stepped quickly up behind him-Poldarn couldn't see the sword in his hand, but he knew where it was from the position of the monk's arms.
Eyvind; that was the stranger's name. Pointless, remembering it a heartbeat before the poor fool had his head cut off-Later, Poldarn figured that Eyvind must have seen a change in the look in his eyes and somehow realised what it meant; something must have warned him of the danger, because he spun round astonishingly quickly, using the speed and momentum to swing the backsabre in a down-slanted side cut that opened the monk up a finger's breadth below his ribcage. The monk noticed what had happened, but he'd already embarked upon his own cut, which should have split Eyvind's head in two, like an apple. When it arrived, however, somehow Eyvind wasn't there. Poldarn didn't see him move, he just seemed to relocate, materialising instantly a yard to the monk's right. He tugged the backsabre out of the wound like a tired woodcutter freeing his axe, and let the monk flop to the ground; the next moment he was busy again, but Poldarn couldn't see, there was a boot in the way.
By the time it moved, it all seemed to be over.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He was standing on a cliff, with thin, wiry grass under his feet and a brisk, cold wind on his face, staring out at a blue-grey sea the colour of steel in the forge fire, just before it turns red. In the middle of the sea, he could see the white sail of a ship. Fifty yards or so to his left, two crows were pecking at something he couldn't quite see.
When he looked up again, the sail had disappeared; but he was minded to walk down the steep, rather terrifying path that ran diagonally across the cliff face, like the cut of a sword-monk's blade on a man's neck. At the bottom of the path there was a little triangle of shingle, folded in the arms of two spits of rock: a private one-berth harbour set in a fortress wall of gleaming yellow sandstone. You'd never find it if you didn't know exactly where to look.
Either the ship couldn't make it in, or it was in a hurry; instead they'd lowered a little frail boat, leather hides stretched over birch ribs and sewn up in thick, well-greased seams. Two men were rowing, two others sat with their backs to him. The boat was lower in the water than it should have been.
While he waited for the boat to crawl through the lively waves, he took a moment to admire the ship, not that he knew anything much about ships, but it was the aesthetics rather than the technicalities that appealed to him. Long and sweet it appeared to him; the castles at either end melodramatically high, the wide, fat middle absurdly low. It was built to roll with the waves without capsizing, even he could see that; as it bobbed and wallowed in the water, its lines seemed to flow unceasingly, sinuous and meretricious as a dancer.
You'd never get me out in one of those things, he told himself. Not if you paid me.
Then he felt impatient, without yet knowing why, so much so that he splashed several yards into the water, wincing as the cold unpleasantness seeped in round his toes and ankles. The boat was still a long way out when he took a deep breath and shouted, 'Have you got it?'
One of the men with his back to him turned half around; the movement was ill advised and nearly swamped the boat. The oarsmen yelled at him to sit still at the same time as he shouted something inaudible, presumably a reply to the question.
He found this extremely frustrating. 'I said, have you got it?' he yelled, even louder. This time he could just make out the man's reply. 'Yes.'
That was evidently the answer he'd wanted to hear; he could feel joy flooding his heart, as palpably as the sea had flooded his worn-out boots. Of course, he hadn't got a clue what it was.
Perhaps it was because this was a dream, and in a dream things happen at extreme speed, so that you can dream a week in a few minutes of real time, but the minute or so it took for the boat to reach the shore seemed to last an entire lifetime. Just before the brittle prow bit into the shingle, a single crow dropped down on the rock beside him and turned its head away.
'Well?' he shouted.
The man who'd answered his question hopped over the side into the water, then reached back into the boat and picked up a familiar-looking bundle. 'He's asleep,' the man said, 'for a change, the little bastard. You're bloody lucky we didn't pitch him over the side.'
'It's a boy, then.'
The man scowled. 'Well, of course it's a boy. Do you think we'd have bothered otherwise? Here, you take the dirty little snot. If I never see him again, that'll suit me just fine.'
Stepping a yard or so further into the water he took the bundle from the man's outstretched hands and at once felt an all-consuming sense of relief that nearly stopped him from breathing.
'My grandson,' he murmured.
'Yes,' the man from the boat confirmed. 'Almost as big a pain in the bum as his grandpa, if you ask me. Next time you want a kid fetched from a long way over the sea, do it yourself. Now, if you don't mind getting out of the way, we've got valuable cargo to land.'
Some other men had come down the path; they were helping the men from the boat with barrels and jars and boxes. The baby in his arms looked like some exotic wild animal.
'Thank you,' he said, and the man from the boat nodded.
'That's all right,' he replied. 'Tursten was a good lad, I'm sorry.'
He turned away and started on the long, painful climb back to the top. He didn't notice the gradient, or the treacherous footing, or the wind that tried to comb him off the side of the cliff. He was utterly fascinated by the way the strange creature was opening and closing its tiny five-fingered hands, almost but not quite the way a human being would do it. It occurred to him that if some inhuman thing, a monster or a god, were to take a human body to live in for reasons of expedience or policy, probably
it would familiarise itself with the way the thing worked by flexing the muscles and testing the nerves and tendons, just as this strange object seemed to be doing. The thought made him stop for a moment and frown. The idea had been that his dead son would somehow have found his way into this small body (because Tursten couldn't really be dead, that would be unthinkable; there had to be a way round it), but now that he was actually holding it, he wasn't sure. Maybe something else was in there, as well as or instead of Tursten.
Well, he thought, it'll be interesting finding out. Even if it is my son, he can't be expected to remember anything of his previous life, it'll be as if Tursten had come home but with all his memories wiped away-in which case, of course, he wouldn't be Tursten at all any more. Take away someone's memories and all you've got left is an empty bottle, a piece of scrap only fit for putting in the fire and bashing into something else.
At the top of the cliff he paused and looked back. There was the sail, more or less exactly where it had been when he first looked down from there (but since then, everything had changed; the old world had come to an end and a new one had slipped in and taken over the physical remains). He noticed something yellow and shiny in the child's left hand, just visible through the gaps between the soft, damp fingers. A gold ring, or something of the sort; he wondered where that had come from, and what it meant.
The child opened its mouth, miming a cry though no sound came out. He cast about in his mind for a nice soothing lullaby, but all he could think of was: Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree Hardly a wonderfully apt choice; but the kid seemed to like it, so he carried on: Dodger sitting on the red-hot coal, Dodger sitting on the red-hot coal, Dodger sitting on the red-hot coal, Then he jumped in the slacky-tub to save his soul.
The child started to howl, which suggested a certain degree of taste, if nothing else. He laughed, and started to sing 'Sweet Meadowgrass' instead, but found he could only remember the first two lines.
He took his time walking home, as if part of him didn't really want to get there. At the top of Enner's Steep he stopped and leaned against the orchard gate, looking down over the sprawl of thatched and tiled roofs of the farm. For some reason he felt a need to preserve an image of it in his mind, as if something he was just about to do would change it for ever. He made a careful mental note of the position of each building, taking the main house as an obvious datum and locating the barns and outhouses in relation to it, then he looked up at the sun to check the time, though that was hardly necessary. At Enner's, you didn't need the sun to tell you the time, you looked up at the thin, spindly fir trees and then down at the yard. If the crows were roosting, it was early morning, midday or evening. If they were in the yard, mobbing the stalls, it was morning or afternoon feed. If they were pitched out on the grass in the long meadow, it was mid-morning or mid-afternoon; and if they were crowding together on the branches of the apple orchard, it was morning or evening milking and the boys had driven them off the yard as they walked the stock through. As often as not, you could tell the time with your eyes shut just by listening to them. All the years he'd lived here, he'd been aware of them nearly all the time, their single cold mind reaching into his, groping in the dark for his thoughts-where was he going, what was he doing, was it safe to be out or was it time to fall back to safe positions and wait for him to go away? Once a year, ever since he was old enough to toddle and throw a stone, they'd assaulted the castles and cities in the fir copse with every weapon at their disposal, from pebbles and slingshots to blunt arrows and twenty-foot poles, trying to break up the nests while the season's children were too young to fly; every year, no matter how hard they tried to wipe them out, they killed or drove off a third of them, thereby preserving an exact balance with their normal rate of population growth. It was the only time they could even pretend to win a victory against the rookery; the rest of the time, the raiders raided, stole, wrecked and withdrew, undefeated and unassailable.
(Tursten hated the crows, always had; he could remember him as a small boy, standing in the yard screaming at them. As he got older he stopped screaming and went quiet, his cold, savage mind devising some better way, and as always he'd found one. He collected twelve birds whose wings he'd managed to break with stones, and pegged them out a dozen yards out from the meadow hedge, their legs tethered to short sticks. At midday, the birds in the trees flew down and pitched next to them, assuming they were the scouts sent out to find safe pasture; Tursten was waiting for them in a hide of freshly cut hazel, perfectly still, with his forty-pound bow and plenty of lead-nosed blunts. Every bird he stunned, he pegged out, until he had dozens of decoys; and the more decoys he put out, the more birds came to join them. At dusk he went out and killed them all, apart from half a dozen he kept for the next day. After three days the survivors got wise and circled above his head all morning, screaming at him the way he'd screamed at them; he appreciated that. It was the greatest victory ever achieved in the war, but he never managed to repeat it; and two years later, the numbers were back to where they'd always been.)
'Your dad was a clever man,' he told the child, who was asleep now. That was no lie, he reflected. Tursten could be a vicious little bastard when he wanted to, but he was clever.
Probably would've made a good soldier, if he'd hated the enemy like he hated the crows.
As he walked down the meadow slope he caught sight of a face framed in the upstairs window, but at that distance he couldn't be sure who it was, Elgerd or Bergtura. Probably not Elgerd. It occurred to him that he hadn't really considered how she'd take it, being expected to bring up her dead husband's child by some foreign woman whom he'd raped and who'd then killed him. Come to think of it, he couldn't remember any occasion when anybody had stopped to consider Elgerd's feelings about anything, so it was probably safe to assume that she didn't have any. Not that it mattered, Bergtura had enough for both of them (Gods help us all!). It was a safe bet that the face in the window was hers.
Well, he thought, for some reason, it's too late now. He pushed open the back door with his left hand, and heard his wife's clogs clumping down the stairs. He wondered what on earth he was going to say to her; something utterly banal, probably, such as, 'Here he is,' or, 'I'm home.'
'Here,' someone called out, 'you missed one.'
Poldarn opened his eyes, the dream exploding like a glass bowl dropped on a stone floor. He started to get up, but someone behind him put a heavy boot between his shoulder blades, forcing him back down into the mud and perceptibly stretching his bones. Out of options once again, and this time he was on the ground and couldn't move. He made himself relax, theorising that the pain would be less if his muscles were tense and stressed when the blade cut into them. He felt surprisingly, agreeably calm.
'Hold on.' The voice could have been Eyvind, but he didn't know him well enough to be sure. 'Leave him alone, will you? I know him.'
'You sure?' A different voice, puzzled. 'He was with the column.'
'Yes, well, he would be. Byrni, stop treading on the poor bugger.'
The pressure relaxed. 'What's all this about, then?' Another voice, this time directly above him.
'You'll see. Hey, whatever your name is. Say something, that'll prove you know Western.'
That made sense; nobody in the empire knew the raiders' language, which was what he assumed they were all talking. 'Is that you?' he managed to say. 'Eyvind? The man I met on the road?'
'That's him,' said the voice. 'Yes, it's me. Don't just stand there, you bloody fools, help him up.'
They hauled him to his feet as if he was a dead weight, an inanimate object of some kind. He saw the man who'd called himself Eyvind, the same one he'd seen before, on the road and later in the battle. Please, he prayed silently to the divine Poldarn, don't let anything happen to this man, not until I'm safe and out of here. All around, the raiders were stripping the dead, bending to their work like field hands pulling carrots. He noticed one of them dead on the ground; all the other b
odies were sword-monks, carved with deep cuts sloping diagonally inwards from the junction of shoulder and neck.
'Yes,' Eyvind said, 'I definitely know this man. Saved my life.' That was an exaggeration, as Poldarn remembered it; all he'd done was refrain from killing him when he killed his companion. But his memory was tricky, at the best of times. 'He's one of us, I promise you.'
'Really?' The man who'd been treading on his spine sounded good-natured, curious. 'Then what was he doing with all these freaks?'
Poldarn remembered something. It came as a flash of bright light in his mind, blotting out everything around him, even the fear of dying that was still clouding up his mind; but it wasn't anything special, just a memory of himself standing next to an older man in a ditch beside a bank-the man with him was draping a little net across the mouth of a rabbit hole with his right hand; his left was down by his side, holding the back legs of a furiously kicking rabbit. He wasn't taking any notice of the animal; a methodical man, one thing at a time. Get the net back in place first, in case the dog flushed another one out, then kill the one you've got in hand. While he was resetting the net, the man was talking about something else, some routine job they'd have to start tomorrow if the weather held off. That same calm, detached, methodical economy of movement that the raiders displayed as they searched the dead bodies for articles of value (things trivial enough: a penknife, a sharpening-steel, a belt buckle, a dozen horn buttons; obviously valuable enough to these people to be worth killing for, as the rabbit's meat and fur were to the old man), and carefully and thoroughly despatched any monks who were still alive.