Monach didn't quite follow. 'What, here, you mean? This battle?'
'No, of course not. In Cric. At my house. After the pounding you took from the Amathy house, it'll be a week at least before you're fit to move, and besides, it won't be healthy for you in these parts until Feron Amathy moves on. Escaping was bad enough; breaking his finger into the bargain-that's a bad loss of face, he'll be taking it very seriously. But you'll be safe here.'
'Thank you,' Monach said, as General Cronan's army began to climb the slope. It was large, but not as big as his, Allectus', own. In the middle was a hedge of pikes, with a wispy line of skirmishers strewn untidily in front of it and blocks of armoured foot soldiers and cavalry on either wing. Behind the pikes he could see the baggage train, a sloppy column of carts and mules, packed too closely together. 'That's very kind of you.'
'On the contrary,' Allectus replied. 'After all, you're the man who's undertaken to kill my deadly enemy, General Cronan-not that you'll succeed, of course, but it's the thought that counts. If anything happens to me, by the way, don't panic. Just keep out of sight when they bring in the food, and leave the dirty plates and the washing. Sometimes I stay in the back room sulking for weeks on end, so they won't think anything of it; and as for the smell-well, who's going to notice, in here?'
'Thank you,' Monach repeated. He was aware of the army above and around him starting to get restless, muttering and shuffling. 'Am I really going to fail in the mission?'
'Yes,' Allectus told him, 'but not for the reason you think. You see, nobody knows where Cronan is; that's why he wasn't here, wasn't on the road where he should have been, wasn't where he told his people he was going to be. The plain fact is, he vanished a couple of months ago, on his way to Josequin, and nobody's seen or heard of him since.'
'What?' Monach shouted, but he couldn't make himself heard; his army had decided to ignore his orders and charge down the slope, and a moment later he was on the ground, his arms over his head to protect it from the boots and knees of the soldiers all around him. Allectus had vanished, in any case. Monach wound himself up into a ball, squeezing his legs and elbows in as tight as he could to get them out of harm's way, but a man running flat out tripped over him, and the men behind piled up on top of him, until Monach was buried under a mound of jerking, squirming bodies (a living grave, he thought, now that's original). He tried to breathe, but it rapidly went from difficult to impossible, at which point he suffocated and died -And sat up, to find both hands clamped tight over his nose and mouth, which would explain the asphyxiation. Thin spikes of sunlight were intruding under the door and between the gaps in the old, warped timbers of the shutters. He felt cold, probably because he was soaked in sweat. He tried to remember the dream he'd just tumbled out of, but it had passed by.
Next he tried to move, and that was a very bad idea. In eighth grade they'd done wounds, including how to recognise your own; they'd been taught a cumulative assessment system-ten points for a broken collarbone, thirty for an arm, fifty for a leg; you chose your course of action on the basis of your running total, and if it came to more than two hundred there was no recommended course of action. On that basis, he scored somewhere between one hundred and eighty and two hundred and fifteen, depending on whether there was major internal bleeding around the smashed ribs.
'Hello,' he called out. He could remember his host saying something about some local wise woman or witch doctor; country medicine wouldn't have been his first choice, but it was better than dying or (worse still, in a way) healing up with unset bones and being a cripple for the rest of his life. Not that he wanted to impose on his host in any way, but that was one offer of help he could reconcile himself to accepting.
'Hello,' he repeated, and then he realised that the shape in the corner, which he'd been assuming was a sack or a pile of old clothes, was a body.
He sighed. Too much to hope for, obviously, that the old fool could somehow manage to stay alive long enough to arrange for the doctor to call. That would've been too easy, not a sufficient challenge for a brother tutor of the order. The statistical probabilities intrigued him; of the two of them, he'd have bet money on who was more likely to survive the night, and he'd have lost.
If anything happens to me, by the way, don't panic. Just keep out of sight when they bring in the food, and leave the dirty plates and the washing. Someone had said that to him recently, but he couldn't remember who. He frowned-even frowning hurt, the tightening of the skin across his forehead tugging apart the lips of a gash that was only just beginning to knit together. Maybe the old man had said it last night, when he was drowsy and half asleep.
In the ninth grade they'd taught them basic field medicine and surgery, with a short and mostly hilarious session on how to set your own bones and bind your own wounds. It had been too close to the end of the term; they'd all been worn out with study, saturated with too much information, and nobody had really made any kind of an effort to learn the stuff properly. For the rest of the day, therefore, he was forced to rely on trial and error and instinct as much as authorised procedures. That was a great pity, since experimenting on one's own broken bones is a painful and demoralising experience. For bandages he had to use strips of the late General Allectus' threadbare and filthy carpet-a genuine Morevish tent rug, no less-which he slowly sawed and hacked to shape with Feron Amathy's unpractically shaped knife. All day he was pitifully thirsty, and there was a water jug no more than ten feet away, but somehow he never got around to crawling across the room and fetching it.
Eventually the splinters of light began to fade, suggesting the onset of evening. He wasn't conscious when the food arrived-he passed out at least a dozen times that day because of the pain and his general condition-and he woke up out of an involuntary doze to hear the door closing. Once he'd got the panic under control, he listened for the sound of someone moving about or breathing; while he was holding still and doing that, he had time to work out the various possible explanations for what he'd heard and the odds on each of them. The likeliest explanation was that the villagers were used to Allectus being asleep or crazy out of his mind, and left the food and the house without saying a word or making a loud noise. That would suit him just fine, of course. The food and the water and the clean clothes would be left beside the door; all he had to do was get from the inner room to the main room without tearing the loose confederation of injuries he called his body.
And if he didn't do that, of course, he'd be in desperate trouble, because if they came in and found that the food and drink hadn't been touched they'd be concerned (good, caring neighbours that they were), and would put their heads round the partition to make sure he was all right, and they'd find Allectus dead and a strange man propped up next to him.
So, taking advantage of their good nature was suddenly compulsory. Monach laughed; the whole thing was ludicrous, especially for a good monk and a student of ethical theory. He couldn't wait to get back to Deymeson and pitch it to his ethics class for discussion: Under what circumstances are deception and theft justifiable in the name of expediency? What difference does it make that the intended recipient of the charity is dead? That the deceiver's life is at stake? That the intended recipient gave his permission for the fraud?
Had he? Monach seemed to remember that he had, but not the exact context. Either Allectus had told him so, in unambiguous terms, or he'd dreamed it (Discuss, with reference to the moral ambiguity of unsubstantiated perceptions…). Remembering was difficult, and getting more so. It was just as well he'd had such a firm foundation in mental discipline.