Shadow

Poldarn shook his head. 'He was the driver, I was the guard. A man tried to rob the cart; killed him with a slingshot, then came for me. I killed him.'

'Right.' The clerk nodded, didn't look up. 'That's fine, then; my condolences on your loss, sign the register here-' He turned the book round and pushed it across the table, then handed Poldarn the pen. 'Oh, you can write, that's good. All right, I'll make out a certificate and forward that to the prefecture at Sansory, copy for my file, job done. Thank you, you can go now.'

'Thank you,' Poldarn replied, getting up. He put the stool back where he'd found it, then asked, 'So you believe me, then?'

The clerk looked at him. 'Does it matter?' he said.

He left the office and asked the boy who'd been minding the cart where the Fejal house was.

'What?' the boy replied.

'The Fejal house.'

The boy looked puzzled, then grinned. 'Oh, right, the Feejle house.' (Poldarn had pronounced it Feyjarl, as Falx Roisin had done.) 'Sorry, but you talk funny. Right, you follow this street till you come to the tannery, then twice left, right, left again by the Virtue's Own Reward, follow that road round, you'll see the old ropewalks on your right-'

'Better still,' Poldarn interrupted, 'you show me and I'll give you another quarter.'

'Sure,' the boy said and hopped up on to the box. 'So,' he said, 'what're you carrying?'

Poldarn realised he didn't know. The load was roped in at the back, covered up with waxed hides and sailcloth. He shrugged. 'You tell me,' he said. 'What do they do at the Fejal house?'

The boy grinned. 'Biggest button-maker this side of the Bohec,' he replied, 'so probably it's either horns or bones. Maybe both. I'll take a look if you want.'

'I'm not bothered,' Poldarn replied.

'Aren't you just a little bit curious?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'For reasons I won't bore you with,' he said, 'I'm not curious about anything any more.' The letter inside his shirt was for someone else, a man called Huic Penseuro, but all he had to do was hand it over to Fejal Nas, along with the stuff in the cart. 'Where's a good place to get something to eat?'

There were, it turned out, two Fejal Nasses, father and son; the father was out, but the son seemed to be expecting the letter and gave him thirty quarters for his trouble. 'Any problems along the way?' he asked.

'Nothing to do with the letter,' Poldarn said. 'Will there be a reply?'

Fejal Nas shook his head. He hadn't opened the letter. 'Just out of interest,' he said, as Poldarn was getting ready to leave, 'but have you been to the Cunier house in Mael Bohec lately?'

It occurred to Poldarn that the sensible reply would be No. 'Yes,' he said. 'Why?'

'Nothing. I just heard Falx Roisin had got a new courier, that's all.'

There was obviously a lot wrong with that answer, and equally obviously Fejal Nas didn't care. 'That's me,' Poldarn said.

'Ah. Well, I expect I'll be seeing you again, then. Safe journey home.'

Obviously more to that than met the eye, he thought, as he waited for the porters to unload the cart, but, as he'd told the boy, he didn't want to know. It was bad enough keeping himself from facing up to the implications of what Eyvind had told him. He'd been carrying that all the way from the place where the fight had happened, making him feel like an ambassador at a special reception held in his honour who can't think of anything except how desperately he needs to take a leak. Sleep, for example; he knew for certain that unless he got himself drunk enough to pass out in a chair or on the floor, he'd lie awake all night desperately not thinking about it, not endlessly turning the various explanations, likely and improbable, over and over in his mind till they'd rubbed sores on the backs of his eyes-raider, traitor, duly authorised negotiator, herald. Every conceivable possibility had flared up in his imagination long before Eyvind had finished talking, the arguments for and against each hypothesis had been analysed, correlated and compared with archived data, debated and voted on, appealed against, decided on by a whole hierarchy of levels of imagination and belief. He felt like the garrison of some small fortress surrounded on all sides by the armies of the greatest power in the world, bombarded by engines, assaulted with rams and ladders, undermined by saps and camouflets, enfiladed by archers from cavaliers and ravelins, invested and breached in every bastion, on the point of arriving at the critical moment when the losses make further defence impossible.

'That's the lot,' the head porter said, putting his hand inside his shirt to wipe the sweat from his neck and shoulder. 'Bloody lumpy stuff,' he added, 'you're not going to tell me that was just bones.'

'You're right,' Poldarn replied with a smile. 'In fact, I'm not going to tell you anything at all. Thanks for your help.'

He didn't quite catch what the head porter called after him as he drove away.

The original plan had been to hang around Liancor for the rest of the day, drinking heavily and eventually winding up in a gutter somewhere, but he had the cart to think of; Falx Roisin would probably forgive him for losing another driver, but he seemed to treat the rolling stock as if they were his own children. He didn't relish the prospect of going back the same way, probably passing the two dead bodies (he had a horrible vision of Eyvind jumping down on the cart from the branches of a low tree, missing his footing and getting crushed to death under the wheels), but he wasn't in the mood for creative navigation. In a vague attempt to keep his mind off the things it wanted to be on, he tried singing, but he only knew one songTwo crows sitting in a tall thin tree, Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree, Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree, And along comes the Dodger and he says, 'That's me.' -and he didn't like it much anyway. Nevertheless, he sang it; and after he'd droned through it a couple of times it occurred to him that before there'd only been one crow. He decided he didn't really want to know where the other one had come from.

He spent the night beside the road, sitting with his legs spread out in front of him and his back against the front wheel, not sleeping. As soon as there was enough light to see by, he set off again, hoping to get across the river early. Fortunately as it turned out, he lost a cotter pin about an hour after sunrise and wasted a lot of time whittling a replacement out of green oak; it was just after midday when he approached the top of the heavily wooded scarp overlooking the Bohec valley, and heard the noise.

At the back of his mind he was surprised, disappointed even, that it didn't jog his memory. Given what he'd pieced together about himself, particularly the most recent evidence, he'd have thought that the sound of a battle in full swing should have been specially evocative to him, possibly enough to crack open the seal. Instead he recognised it for what it was, not because it was familiar, but because there's no other sound on earth like it.

He reined in the horses and sat still for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. Turning round and heading for Liancor as quickly as possible seemed to have a logic to it that was hard to fault. Apart from the matter of his own safety, he had a feeling that he really ought to let them know there was a war on the way. There again, however, his lack of background knowledge made him hesitate. It might well be their war, one they'd started against somebody or other, one that everybody else in the world knew about but him. There was also the possibility that the war was headed for Liancor with the intention of wiping it off the map, in which case being stuck inside the gates might not be a good idea. He could set off across country, maybe, but he had no idea what lay out of sight of the stretch of road he'd travelled along, and he was getting sick and tired of the unknown. That left the option of trying to get round the war somehow and returning to Sansory. Assuming Sansory was still there.

He pulled a face. He might not know what the best choice was, but it certainly wasn't sitting still in the middle of the road a few hundred yards away from a battle. Back in one of the identical streets of Mael Bohec he'd seen a large, ugly statue of a chunky nude female, whose inscription told him that it had been set up to celebrate One Thousand Years Of Peace. What was it like in the empire, he thought, when it was officially at war?