Memory

'I never figured you for a quitter,' she said.

'Really?' He smiled bleakly. 'Maybe it was just that I couldn't remember ever having been to Torcea, and everybody ought to see the capital once in their lives.'

She thought for a moment. 'Do you want me to tell you?' she said.

'No,' he said firmly. 'I've changed my mind since I've been here.'

Cold look. 'Because of me.'

He nodded. 'And the things that come with you, of course, such as clean clothes and regular meals. The plain fact is, when it comes to whether I live or die, I really don't have particularly strong views one way or the other. I'm-empty,' he said. 'Describes it pretty well. I might as well go on living as not, and that's about it.'

She looked at him, then looked away. 'Well, do that, then,' she said. 'I feel a bit like that right now; but it matters to me that I don't lose. I need to get what I want and then hang on to it, or else I feel I've been beaten by somebody. Pretty poor justification for the things I've had to do, but then, I'm not accountable to anybody.' She looked past him, over his shoulder. 'It feels like it's been a very long day and I'm very tired and just want to fall into bed and go to sleep; so, as long as I can make my unilateral declaration of victory without anybody contradicting me, I'll settle for what I've got and not worry about anything else. Does that make any sense to you?'

'Perfect sense,' he said. 'What did he mean, "the new man"?'

She was still looking away, so he couldn't see her expression. 'The man who took over the job you were doing.'

'You mean, when I lost my memory?'

'Shortly before that.'

Inside the cloister was the usual small garden: a square of green lawn, four formal flower beds, diamond-shaped, with a stone fountain in the middle. A single crow dropped out of the air, its approach masked by the cloister columns, so that it looked as if it had come out of nowhere. It settled on the lip of the fountain and pecked lightly at the surface of the water, as if looking at its reflection. Poldarn, who knew about crows and their behaviour, guessed it was a scout, sent on ahead of the main party, to see if it was safe and if there was anything there worth eating.

The guests are starting to arrive, he thought; the Amathy house, and whoever else is coming to dinner. Possibly, Feron Amathy himself would be there-Feron Amathy, who Cleapho had tried to persuade him was the most evil man in the world. That'll make three of us, then, Poldarn thought. Just like the song, which suddenly he could rememberTwo crows sitting in a tall thin tree Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree And along came the Dodger, and he made up three.

He felt better for remembering that; a half-remembered song is like an itch you can't reach, and its incomplete pattern rattles around in your head, the broken parts spinning round in an infuriating cycle that gradually drives out everything else. He had no idea what it meant, or who the Dodger was supposed to be, or why they sang the same, fairly uninspiring, song both here in the Empire and far away, at Haldersness. Presumably at some distant time, someone had made up the song to commemorate some important event; the reason for the song had long since been forgotten but the song remained behind, like the head of an arrow deep in a wound when the shaft has been broken off. Memory had put the song there, and then been lost, leaving only its barbed and rusty sting behind. (The bee dies when it stings, its guts pulled out; the sting remains in the wound. Probably religion; everything else is.)

'What was that you were humming?' she said.

'Sorry, I didn't realise.' He felt embarrassed, to be caught humming in public. 'Just a song I heard somewhere. You know what it's like when one gets stuck in your mind.'

'Like getting something wedged between your teeth,' she said. 'I know exactly what you mean.'

Poldarn thought for a moment. 'You didn't recognise the tune, then?'

'You hum very badly,' she told him, 'always did. It was endearing when you were very young.'

'It's a song about crows in trees,' he said. 'That's all I know about it.'

'Oh, that song,' she said. 'My mother used to sing it when I was a small child. I never liked it much.'

He grinned. 'I must've liked it a lot,' he said. 'It was practically the only thing I could remember, when I woke up that time.'

'Oh.' She looked at him, face blank. 'That's odd, I don't remember ever hearing you singing or whistling it.'

'I wonder where I picked it up,' he said. 'Not that it matters. It's just that I suddenly remembered the last line, just now. Of all the things to remember-'

'Or you may have heard it since, somewhere,' she said. 'It's a very common song, people sing it all the time.' She sighed. 'Apparently, Cleapho's going to be at this dinner party, assuming he gets back from Tulice in time.'

'Cleapho,' Poldarn said. (The guests are beginning to arrive.) 'What do I need to know about him?'

She counted off on her fingers. 'He controls the Treasury and most of the civil service, which is fine because it saves Father a lot of work he doesn't like doing; he also controls the army, now that Muno Silsny's gone-he killed Muno, of course, but we can forgive him that, I suppose; but he doesn't have any support in the Amathy house, which is why they're coming to dinner. I'm not sure why he wants to be Emperor; it may sound odd, but you don't make it as far as Father or Cleapho unless you actually have a strong motive. In Father's case it was simply staying alive that bit longer, but Cleapho-deep down, I have a nasty feeling that he believes in something. Not religion per se, gods and stuff; but I think he believes in religion in a sort of abstract sense, which is rather worrying. I think he wants to do things with the Empire, rather than just having it. He was at school with you, of course, but I think you already know that. He was very close to-well, Feron Amathy, a year or so back, but something went badly wrong and threw out all his plans, which is how Father was able to get his foot in the door. He means to kill us all, probably just because he feels we make the place look untidy. That's about it.'

Poldarn shrugged. 'Most of that went over my head, I'm afraid,' he said. He hesitated, then asked: 'How old is Feron Amathy? He seems to have been around for years.'

She didn't answer.

Why am I here? he asked himself.

It was dark; the curtains were as thick as armour, proof against even the sharpest point of light. He'd hoped to be able to snatch an hour's sleep before the ordeal of the dinner party, but apparently not; instead he lay on his back on the bed and stared at the darkness where the ceiling could be assumed to be.

Why am I here?

That was too complex a question, so he broke it down into smaller pieces, splitting off How did I come to be here? since most of that had been other people's doing. What remained was Why did I leave Dui Chirra and head for Torcea? He still couldn't make much headway with it.

He could remember quite clearly what the answer used to be. He'd come to Torcea because he was fairly sure he'd find Tazencius here; and he'd very much wanted to kill him, for some reason that had blurred somewhat in the intervening time. As far as he could recall, the justification was that Tazencius was to blame for everything bad that had happened to him; Tazencius had sent to the far islands for a weapon, and Halder had sent him his own grandson, to be sharpened, burnished and used. Tazencius had put him through school and set him up in business as the most evil man in the world. It was all his fault.

That lie had kept him moving and motivated as far as Falcata; at which point it fell to bits like an old rotten tree stump, though he'd pretended he still believed it. Since leaving Falcata, he'd been more concerned with running away than with arriving anywhere, right up until the moment he'd blundered into Ciana (who was really his old school chum, the prince Turvo) in the woods. Even then, if he was honest with himself, he'd only asked for a lift to Torcea because he needed to specify a destination, and he'd still been kidding himself about what he was planning to do.