Memory

Poldarn lay awake long after Gain's breathing had fallen into the long, slow rhythm of sleep. As if in a court of law, he tried arguing a wide range of defences, each one of them further or in the alternative: Gain was lying; Gain was only telling part of the truth; Gain was lying about the murder; Gain was telling the truth about the murder but lying about betraying the cities to the raiders; Gain was telling the truth about betraying the cities (and it wasn't betraying, because they weren't Poldarn's people; the raiders were. You can't be a traitor if you betray the enemy-can you?) but lying about the murder. Elaos Tanwar had been murdered, but not Poldarn; or not for that reason. It was self-defence; or Tanwar had made up the story about him betraying the cities, and killing him was justified revenge. Or he'd done it, but only on the orders of Father Abbot, or Father Tutor, because Elaos Tanwar was the real traitor. So many possibilities, plausible alternatives; wasn't it perverse instinctively to believe in the one that showed himself up in the worst light? Besides; he'd taken a lot of lives, to his certain, recent knowledge. He'd killed soldiers, civilians, enemies, friends; just recently, he'd killed a kid less than half his age, in self-defence, there being no other way. He'd killed Eyvind's friend, that first time they'd met, on the road; he'd killed Eyvind. So what was one more death at his hands more or less? Might as well blame the scythe for chopping the necks of corn.

Eventually he drifted into sleep; and there was a crow There was a crow looking down at him from the top of a pillar; but it was only a carving, a mason's memory of a crow trapped in stone, like a fly in amber.

He was in the chapter house, but he was alone, just him and the crow. He was waiting for someone. The someone was late, maybe not coming at all. He wasn't pleased about that. It hadn't been easy getting there without being seen, and any minute the doors might open, someone else might come in, see him there, ask what he thought he was doing. He had no right to be there, it was against the rules As if that mattered; as if losing ten house points or getting detention mattered when blood had been shed (and all his fault, if he cared to look at it from that perspective). He didn't even have to stay here any longer; any day now, and he'd be out She came in through the small low door from the vestry, not the main doors as he'd been expecting. Typical Xipho, planning every entrance, figuring out the optimum strategic advantage, balanced against the acceptable and unacceptable risks. She treated life as extra tuition for core syllabus subjects.

She looked at him sourly. 'Melodrama,' she said. 'With you, everything's got to be a bloody performance. So, what do you want?'

'I needed to talk,' he said.

'Fine. Go ahead.'

'Xipho.' He felt like he wanted to be sick. 'I didn't kill him. Elaos. It wasn't me.'

'Well, of course it wasn't,' she replied. 'Father Abbot said so. Matter closed.'

'Yes,' he insisted, 'but is that what you believe?'

She looked into his eyes before answering. 'I don't have an opinion on the subject,' she said.

That made him angry. 'Of course you do,' he said. 'You've got an opinion on everything.'

'If you say so.'

Precepts of religion; the best fight is not to fight. 'Please, Xipho,' he heard himself say. 'Even if you think I did it, that'd be better than this.'

'Are you saying you did it?'

'No.'

'All right, then,' she said. 'Matter closed. Was that it, or did you want me for anything else?'

He shook his head. 'You don't believe me,' he said. 'You wouldn't be acting like this if you believed me.'

'I told you,' she said, 'I haven't got an opinion, and I don't believe anything. That's why we have doctrine, so we don't have to believe in every single bloody thing. Father Abbot says the matter's closed, which means that even if you confessed, even if you showed me a sword with blood on it, I wouldn't have an opinion. Do you understand that, or have you completely wasted the time you've spent here?'

He looked at her for a moment. 'You think I killed him,' he said. 'You think I killed him and Father Abbot either approved or he's got some reason for not doing anything about it. Bloody hell, Xipho, he was our friend.'

'No friends in religion,' Xipho replied. 'Against the rules.'

There was something about the way she'd said it. 'If I didn't kill him,' he said quietly, 'maybe I've got an idea who did.'

'That's an interesting choice of words,' Xipho said. 'Look, I'm sorry but I've got work to do. I thought you wanted to see me about something urgent. Not something that no longer exists.'

She walked out, not looking back. He sat staring at the door she'd gone through for a while, as if it was somehow to blame for the use it had been put to; then he stood up and followed. Instead of taking the north cloister, however, he turned east, past the stairs that led to the tower where Elaos Tanwar had died, until he came to a small door. He wasn't supposed to know what was behind it, and he wasn't supposed to be able to get through it. But a small piece of wire passed through a crack where one of the panels had shrunk with age was enough to lift the latch on the other side. He pushed it open and shut it quickly behind him.

He'd known about this place for some time, ever since he'd overheard a conversation in the porter's lodge between the senior porter and a large, round, well-dressed man who'd arrived on the box of a large cart. The round man's name, he'd learned as he eavesdropped, pretending to check his pigeonhole for messages, was Potto Ulrec, a button merchant from Sansory, and he'd come to collect something: a large, bulky consignment that was going to prove awkward to shift and load, especially with Potto's trick shoulder playing him up again. The senior porter had taken pity on him or was more than usually anxious to rid his lodge of unseemliness, so he'd sent one of the junior porters to help Potto with whatever it was he was collecting. For some reason, Ciartan had been intrigued enough to follow unobtrusively. On the way, the junior porter had made a detour to the small yard behind the tool store at the back of the east quadrangle, and had picked up a fair-sized wheelbarrow. He had trouble keeping up with Potto Ulrec, who was clearly in a hurry.

And so they'd come to this door. The junior porter had been entrusted with the key, a huge lump of iron on a long loop of string, which he'd hung round his neck. He unlocked the door, but then stood back, as though unwilling to enter. Potto gave him a mildly scornful look and went past him through the doorway. A few moments later he came out again, his arms laden with a substantial heap of bones.

Leg bones mostly; some arms. He stacked them neatly in the wheelbarrow, the way Ciartan used to pile lopped branchwood back home, so as not to waste space in the bed of the barrow. When he went back in, the porter looked away with a nauseated expression on his face. It took Potto four trips to fill the barrow; once or twice he'd stop, go back, pick out a leg or an arm that somehow wasn't suitable and take it back in with him. Ciartan remembered wondering what on earth he wanted with a load of old bones, and where they'd all come from. When the barrow was full-overfilled by the look of it, with femurs and tibiae balanced on top of the load, wobbling ominously as the porter lifted the handles-Potto pushed the door to and followed the porter back in the direction of the lodge.

Deductions: well, for one thing Potto was buying these bones by the barrowload, hence his anxiety to cram in as much as possible; and of course they made bottons out of bone, and Potto was a button-maker. Beyond that, however, it was a mystery; and it stayed that way for a long time, until one day Elaos and Cordo had been talking about something, while they were all hanging about in Hall waiting for a class to begin, and somehow the conversation had come round to how the Order disposed of the remains of students who'd failed their year-end practicals. Cordo was saying how he'd sneaked out to look at the graveyard out back, and how he'd done a few sums, and there simply wasn't room in the burial plot for more than five or six years' worth of dead novices; and Elaos had replied, well, of course not; they only leave them in there for a few years, long enough to compost down nicely, and then they dig them up again, bleach the bones and store them in the ossiary Memories of memories, recalled in dreams; and here he was (in the place where novices weren't supposed to go but where most of them ended up anyhow). A large place, like a vault, with a high roof, plain, the air musty, the smell not very nice. Very much like a woodshed, with the bones all carefully stacked to make the best use of the space available: against one wall a tall heap of legs; on the other side, arms, ribcages, pelvises; in the middle a pyramid of skulls, all facing the same way, like a good display of turnips in the grocery market down in the lower town; fat oak-staved barrels full of finger and toe joints. The most efficient way to break down and store what remained of the human body after everything that could be stripped out was gone; no way to tell one person's bones apart from another's or figure out which arm had gone in which socket, which skull had once fitted on which spine. All memory purged; nothing left but basics, components, scrap, the raw materials for the celebrated Potto range of buttons for all occasions.