Shadow

'It'd be no fun at all riding all that way with a broken leg,' Poldarn said, mostly just to break the silence before it choked him. 'I suppose you'd better hitch a ride with us.'

The man's face was a study in relief. 'That's very kind of you,' he said.

Poldarn shrugged. 'We're headed that way anyway,' he said, walking round the back of him so the man couldn't turn and look at his face without hurting himself badly. He wondered if he was doing the right thing, but he simply didn't have enough facts to go on. Soldiers, the stranger had said, and a lot of stuff about danger and risk. For his part, Poldarn decided, he mostly wished he was somewhere else. Here was the past come to visit, like one's least favourite relatives calling unannounced at the worst possible time. He envied the stranger the fluency with which he'd changed faces, and wondered if it was something that could be acquired with practice, like skill at arms, or whether you had to be born with it, like being able to divine water with a twig or read minds. He wished he could do something like that; walk over the top of complexity, like a fly skittering across a pool.

He reached down and pulled the stranger up by the hand on to his good leg and caught him before he could topple over. He put his shoulder under the man's arm. 'Nice and steady,' he said. 'It's not far to the cart. Here, Gotto, give me a hand.'

The mist cleared as soon as they got down off the high ground, but it was dark and the road was rutted and soft, and the carter's temper wasn't improving. 'The hell with this,' he said, after a jolt nearly broke the axle and made the stranger yelp with pain. 'I say we stop here for the night. It's at least two more hours to Vauc Dosime, and I've had enough.'

There didn't seem to be much point in arguing, although, as Poldarn pointed out (just to be difficult), they didn't have any food with them, and nothing to build a fire with. The carter didn't bother to reply, so presumably he didn't think much of either argument. Poldarn could also have pointed out that there was only one blanket, namely the one the carter was sitting on, but he felt that that could lead to unpleasantness and bad feeling, so he let the matter slide. There was always the cart cover (though it still had about half a gallon of water collected in its folds after the late afternoon rain) and his coat; on the other hand, he felt obliged to offer that to the stranger.

'No, it's all right, really,' the stranger replied. 'I've caused you enough trouble as it is.'

Poldarn shook his head. 'Take the damn coat,' he said.

The stranger grinned and accepted. 'If you're sure,' he replied.

'I offered, didn't I?' He fished in his satchel for the small flask of strong spirits that Eolla had advised him never to travel without and offered it to the stranger. As he did so he caught sight of the carter looking sideways at them both. He felt painfully exposed; the silence was unnatural, not appropriate for a rescue, a good deed. Some small talk was called for.

'Have you got friends in Mael who'll look after you?' he asked.

'No; but it's all right, my-' The stranger paused, searching for the right word. 'The people I'm with have an office there, lodgings for couriers and travellers, that sort of thing. I'll be all right.'

'Sounds like a fairly big concern,' Poldarn said. 'Mercantile? Banking?'

'That sort of thing,' the man replied calmly. 'How about you?'

'We're in the dried fish and sausage business,' Poldarn said. 'Just our luck that we get held up on the way there, of course. If we were on the way home, we'd be fully loaded with dried tuna and blood sausage, not to mention a couple of jars of Mael beer.'

'Just my luck,' the stranger said, 'I missed a treat. But there you go, you don't always make your own luck.'

'I suppose not,' Poldarn said. 'Well, get some sleep if you can. We're going to have to try to make up time tomorrow, so it won't be very comfortable.'

Judging by the sound of his breathing, the stranger had no trouble at all getting to sleep; remarkable, if there was any truth in what he'd said about the danger they were both in. Poldarn, on the other hand, was wide awake. He pulled his collar up around his chin and drew his sleeves down as far as they'd go, but it didn't help much. It was a cold night, even if it wasn't raining, and there seemed to be rather more of it than was actually necessary.

About three hours before dawn, by Poldarn's reckoning, he was startled out of a train of thought concerning his unusually broad knowledge of languages and dialects and the implications that went with it by what he thought might have been the sound of someone coughing quite some way away in the direction they'd come from. He listened carefully for a while, but there was nothing else to hear, and it could just as easily have been a fox as a human. Nevertheless he sat up enough so that he could get to his sword if he had to. Perversely, he was now starting to feel drowsy; although he couldn't see the back of his own hand, he knew that if he closed his eyes, even for a moment, he'd be fast asleep in no time. He lifted and shook his head; that helped, though only for a short while.

He'd come to the conclusion that it was all his imagination, egged on by Falx Roisin's colourful account of what had happened to his predecessors, combined with the stranger's dark mutterings about soldiers (whom they were supposed to be slipping past without being seen, with the implication that their lives depended on it), when he heard what was without doubt the sound of two pieces of metal grating together, as it might be the rim of a shield against a tasset or a sword chape against a greave. He caught his breath and dug his elbow into the carter's back.

'Wake up,' he hissed.

'Piss off,' the carter mumbled.

He dug rather harder this time, and the carter sat up with a shudder. 'What the bloody-?'

'Quiet.' There must have been something in his voice that impressed the carter, who did as he was told for the first time since they'd started working together. 'There's someone coming.'

'So what?' the carter muttered. 'It's a road. You get people on roads, it's life.'

'Shh.' This time, it was a creak; a stiff boot, perhaps, or shifting weight on a belt. The carter heard it too; Poldarn could feel the cart move slightly as he jumped in his seat and started rummaging on the floor for the sack he kept his sword in. That gave him an idea. As quietly as he could, so the carter wouldn't know he'd gone, he slipped over the side of the cart and dropped to the ground, reaching out with his toes to ease himself down. On the sides of his feet (the quietest way; how come he knew that?) he walked round to where he figured the tailgate must be, feeling his way with the back of his outstretched left hand, then stopped and worked out a mental diagram, marking the strategic points and relevant distances. He'd almost completed this task when he remembered the stranger's horse, which for some reason the carter had tethered separately from their own, behind the cart. He added it to the schematic in his mind, just in case it proved important later.

There were two of them, at least; he heard a muffled cough somewhere in front of him, and a rustle of cloth away to his right. Aggravating; why weren't they keeping to the road? The only reason he could think of was that they knew where the cart was and wanted to sneak up and surround it, which implied that they probably weren't going to turn out to be friendly. Was the whole world like this, he wondered; and if so, how the hell was it still inhabited at all?

Someone walked past him, only a foot or so away, breaking into his circle. He kept his hand away from his sword hilt with an effort, confining himself to placing his toe behind the back of the other man's knee and pushing. He heard the man go down, took an educated guess as to where his neck would be, and trod lightly there with the side of his foot. Judging by feel, he'd guessed about right.

'Shh,' he whispered. Then he waited to find out what would happen.

'Gian,' someone called out. 'Are you all right?'

Gian, wisely, didn't answer. His friend repeated the enquiry, and some other faint noises suggested to Poldarn that one-or more-of the invisible strangers was heading in his direction. That was what he'd wanted to happen, but it occurred to him that he hadn't really thought it through; the idea of leaving the cart in the first place was to avoid being in a place where anybody could find him, to be a free agent in the darkness. Now he'd effectively told them where he was and invited them to come to him. He had the advantage of a hostage, of course, but they didn't know that.