'That's fine,' Poldarn said, surprising himself by his own vehemence. 'Good idea. I think you should get away from here, go somewhere you'll be safe. I'd feel much better-'
'You want me to go.' She was positively angry now. 'Fine, I'll go. Now get lost, you're scaring my customers away.'
'All right,' Poldarn said. 'But for what it's worth, I'm very glad you're all right. You helped me out when I needed it; you deserve a bit of luck.'
'Drop dead,' Copis said.
He walked down the alley without looking round, and fairly soon he found himself in another area of the market where they sold excellent coats dirt cheap. This time he decided not to bother looking round and bought the first one he found that fitted. It was dark grey, with strings at the neck and a hood, some sort of blanket material, his for nine and a half quarters including the buttons.
On his way back to the Falx house, he heard a noise up ahead and saw that a crowd was gathering, watching something go by. It turned out to be a cart, very much like the one Copis had owned; it was being escorted by four cavalrymen in brightly polished helmets and breastplates, and in it sat a man and a woman, looking very frightened, covered with bruises, dried blood and dirt. The bystanders were yelling and jeering, and if they weren't throwing things it was only for fear of hitting the cavalrymen and being arrested.
'What's going on?' Poldarn asked the old woman he was standing next to.
'They caught 'em,' she replied with obvious satisfaction, 'and now they'll be tried and strung up, and a bloody good job. Hanging's too good for 'em, I say.'
'Really?' Poldarn caught sight of their faces again between the heads and shoulders of the crowd. 'What've they done?'
'You don't know?' (He was getting thoroughly sick of hearing those words, but he put up with it.) 'They're the two imposters who've been going all round the place in that cart, pretending to be the god and his priestess, the bastards. Asking for trouble, that is; they ought to be ashamed of themselves. And cheating honest folk out of their money and food. It's disgusting.'
Poldarn pursed his lips. 'What happened?' he said. 'How did they catch them?'
The old woman grinned. 'Got careless, didn't they?' she said. 'Tried the same trick in the same village twice. Only someone noticed there was something odd the second time, like they hadn't realised they'd been there before-well, a god'd know that sort of thing, wouldn't he?-and there happened to be a squad of the Company men riding through, so the village people turned 'em over and the Company men brought them here. There's a judge here, see, and a regular court, all legal and everything. And now they'll be strung up, and good riddance. I did hear tell there was a reward on them, but nobody said anything about who's paying it or why. Still, doesn't matter, does it? Main thing is, they're going to get what's coming to them.'
By the time she'd finished saying that the cart was out of sight and the crowd was too thick to allow him to catch up and take another look at their faces. That was probably just as well.
He got back to the Falx house about mid-afternoon to find the place in more or less complete chaos. Two carts were jammed solid in the gateway; the hub of one cart's offside front wheel was caught between the spokes of the other cart's nearside back wheel, perfectly immobilising both carts, and there was so little space left between the pillars of the arch that the house carpenters couldn't get in to cut them apart. Ignoring the protests of the carpenters, carters and sundry bystanders, Poldarn hopped up on to the boom of the outgoing cart, walked down it as far as the box, ducked under the arch and jumped off the tailgate at the other side. There was hardly enough room to jump down into; there was a line of a dozen carts wedged into the courtyard, so close that the tailgate of each one was pressing on the chests of the lead horses of the one behind. It might have been possible to clear the jam by backing the last cart in the line up into the coach-house, except that the coach-house doors opened outwards… On either side of the line waited men with barrows and handcarts, unable to cross from one side of the yard to the other.
Falx Roisin was standing on the box of one of the stuck carts, his hands clawing his hair. He gave the impression of having gone beyond the shouting stage and the all-right-let's-figure-this-out-calmly stage and was most of the way through the prayer stage. Eolla was standing in the doorway of the main house, yelling unheeded directions at a group of men who were trying to do something complicated with ropes and scaffolding poles. (Later, Poldarn found out that he'd been told to set up an A-frame crane to try and lift out one of the carts, thereby freeing up the others; Falx Roisin had realised how incredibly stupid and dangerous this idea was about three minutes after giving the order and had countermanded it; the clerk given the task of calling it off had told the men assigned to winch duty, but had forgotten to tell Eolla and his men. Fortuitously, they didn't even get as far as fetching the poles out of the store; otherwise, there could easily have been a nasty accident.)
Poldarn wriggled his way through the crowded yard and climbed up into the loft above the counting-house, where he had a good view of the whole thing. He lay there propped up on his elbows for half an hour, then went back down the stairs and pushed and clambered his way through to the cart Falx Roisin was standing on.
'Can I make a suggestion?' he said.
'What?' Falx Roisin looked down, staring at him as if he'd just grown an extra head. 'Yes, why not, every other bugger has, that's how we got in this mess to start with.'
'Right,' Poldarn replied. 'Here's what you've got to do.'
It took longer to explain the plan than it should have done, mostly because Falx Roisin kept interrupting and jumping forward to incorrect conclusions. When he'd finally finished his explanation, Falx Roisin scowled, closed his eyes for a moment and said, 'Oh, the hell with it, yes, give it a try. It's that or burn the whole place down and start again. You realise we've been stuck like this since just after breakfast?'
Phase one, which should have been the easiest part, turned out to be the hardest, or at least the most annoying, yet all it comprised was getting twelve men and some tools and equipment (spades, shovels, pickaxes, shauls, crowbars, buckets, planks of wood, saws, hammers, nails) out through the gate the way Poldarn had just come in. Why it was so difficult, Poldarn wasn't sure, even after he'd done it.
Phase two was digging a vertical shaft eight feet deep by four feet square. The Falx house had some fine diggers among its members, as well as four thoroughly competent carpenters, and the shaft was dug, braced and boarded in no time at all. There was a pause between the completion of phase two and the start of phase three, while Poldarn and a couple of men he didn't know but who seemed to reckon they knew something about mining operations tried to figure out a way of making sure phase five came up in the right place. The negotiations were fraught from the outset, and Poldarn eventually resolved them by unexpectedly applying the heel of his hand to the chin of one of the experts; after which, the other expert went away and left him in peace to do his calculations.
He'd expected phase three to be a real cow-digging a shaft four feet square and six feet long four feet under the gatehouse floor-but in the end it was no bother at all; the diggers dug, the dirt-haulers lifted out the spoil in buckets, while the carpenters cut and shaped the props and rammed them home. Phase four was the part of the exercise that called for precision: dig a vertical shaft upwards, to come out directly under the axles of the jammed carts, allowing the carpenters to saw through the axles, take out the two jammed wheels, and retreat. In the event the tunnel came up a foot short, which meant that phase five (sawing the axles) was trickier than it should have been, the carpenters having to work leaning diagonally with their backs braced on planks. They managed it, however, just about, and if the wheels came away rather sooner than expected and crashed down into the shaft with potentially lethal force (something Poldarn realised he should have anticipated but hadn't), it was all right, because of the shaft being offset and the carpenters accordingly just out of the way. ('Bloody clever, that was,' one of them congratulated him a few minutes later, 'the way you figured that drop just right. I was stood there while they were digging thinking, bugger me, that shaft's going to come up short, but of course I didn't realise it was on purpose. Bloody smart thinking, chum; well done.') Once the impacted wheels had been hauled back down the tunnel and out of the way, phase six, attaching ropes to the outgoing cart and hauling it clear, was easy as pie, as was phase seven, putting all the dirt back down the hole and making good so that the rest of the carts could get through without the risk of caving in the tunnels.