'I'm sorry to hear you talk like that,' the monk replied, and he sounded quite sincere. 'You were my student, you know, for two years. I'd never met anybody that age with such an intuitive grasp of abstract theology.'
'Thank you,' Poldarn said. 'What's abstract theology?'
The monk kept his promise and had one of the horsemen untie the ropes. Poldarn hadn't realised how cramped and painful his arms had become until he had the use of them again. 'Of course,' the monk warned him, signalling the column to move on, 'if you even look like you're thinking about trying to escape, I'll kill you myself. Please don't make the mistake of thinking I like you,' he added, with a little smile. 'I don't. In fact, it's only the extreme unlikeliness of your getting out of Cronan's camp alive that's reconciling me to doing this. If I thought there was a serious risk of you surviving, I'd cut your throat now and deal with Cronan myself. I just thought I'd tell you that,' he went on. 'Just in case nobody's thought to mention it to you.'
After that nobody said anything for a long time. They were making good progress without hurrying unduly, which suggested to Poldarn that they had a long way to go. He still didn't have a very clear picture in his mind of where Deymeson and Cric were in relation to each other; his mental geography was calibrated in other units besides measurements of physical distance. He let his mind wander-very easy to do when you're riding a horse and not having to navigate for yourself-and found himself humming a tune. It was, of course, the only tune he knew: Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, And along comes the Dodger and he says, 'That's me.'
The monk had made him think of it, of course, by reciting the words just now. He hummed it a little louder, and suddenly realised that all the horsemen near enough to be able to hear were staring at him.
'Sorry,' he said. 'It wasn't that bad, was it?'
None of them said anything, but the look on their faces was pure hatred. But, since Poldarn had decided by now that he didn't like them either, he carried on humming even louder. Needless to say, they were too well trained and disciplined to rise to the bait, which was fine, too, since he didn't want to fight anybody, just be annoying. He started to sing: Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree He wasn't, he realised, a particularly good singer. He resolved not to let that deter him. Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree 'Do you mind?' said the horseman to his left. 'If you must sing, perhaps you'd care to sing something else.'
'I don't know anything else.'
'Oh, come on.' He could tell that the man was furiously angry about something, for all that he sounded like a man discussing the best way to grow carrots. 'Of course you do. The Vespers hymn. The "Come, Shining Light". How about "There Is No Rose"?'
Poldarn shook his head. 'Sorry,' he said. 'Don't know any of them.'
'You must do, you're a brother of the order.'
'What, are they religious songs or something?'
That, apparently, made the man too angry to speak at all. Poldarn shrugged and went back to singing the song about the crows, softly, under his breath, but just loud enough that the horseman would know what he was doing. At one point he noticed the monk looking round at him and frowning, but he pretended he hadn't noticed. Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree It was the kind of tune that works its way into your head and stays there, itching and annoying, like a burr in your shoe or a little strand of meat lodged between two teeth. It was getting on his nerves now. He made a special effort to stop singing it and put it out of his mind. A few minutes later he realised he'd started singing it again. Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree There was an old dry-stone wall on the north side of the road, and behind it a stand of spruce trees; seventy years or so ago, someone had planted them out for timber, but he'd died or gone away before thinning the stand out, and the trees were far too crowded and close together; they'd grown up spindly and crooked, no good for anything. Poldarn could see where a few of the tallest and weakest had blown down, falling halfway before their branches fouled in those of their neighbours and stopped them, allowing briars and other green rubbish to spring up and tangle their shoots in the thin, dead twigs. Holly and birch and hazel had sprung up to fill in the gaps, turning the copse into a fortified position. Poldarn smiled; talk about your tall thin trees Two crows got up and hung circling in the air, almost directly above his head, screaming abuse at him He was still singing, instinctively, without thinking. And so was somebody else: Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, And along comes the Dodger and he says, 'That's me.'
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.