He sat up, retrieved the sword and looked at the blood and toothmarks on his hand where he'd been bitten. There was no call for that, he thought, and if his head wasn't hurting he'd go over there and tell her what he thought about it (she was tugging a dead man's shirt off over his head as if she was skinning a rabbit). He pulled himself upright, swayed for a moment and flopped back on to his knees. Must stop getting bashed on the head, he thought; can't be good for you.
While he was catching his breath and building up his strength for another assault on standing up, he looked round again, searching this time not for similarities but differences. The first and most striking of these to engage his attention was the size and scope of the scrap pile. It was far bigger than anything he'd seen before, bigger than Eolla's collection in the stores, bigger than the whole of the salvage market in Sansory. There were certainly hundreds of bodies, possibly a thousand or more (all those shirts, trousers, boots, belts, laces, buttons, knives, purses, satchels, coats, to say nothing of the weapons and armour; looked at with the right attitude, this was better than the first week of harvest), implying that this must have been a major battle, whether it was meant to be one or not. He remembered the voices he'd heard (assuming they hadn't been a dream); something had gone wrong according to them, the battle shouldn't have happened or shouldn't have got out of hand to such an extent. He wondered where the armies were now, and why they'd had to rush off without stopping to bury their dead.
He heard a shriek of fear and looked around. He saw his friend the old woman and another just like her; his one (he could tell her from the other by the asymmetrical set of her jaw) was kneeling behind a wounded man, holding his arms back, while the other one drew a knife from her belt. It was, of course, none of Poldarn's business. But there was a stone of the right size and shape right next to his hand, and he was still annoyed about being bitten. He picked up the stone and threw it as hard as he could. In a sense he missed, since he'd been meaning to hit the woman with the knife somewhere on the arm or shoulder. Instead the stone hit her just above the ear, and she went down with a few frantic flaps of her baggy black wings and lay still. The other woman looked up, saw him and screamed something at him, then let go of the soldier's arms, snatched up a bundle of shirts, boots, trousers and stockings so fat she could hardly get her arms around it, and hobbled off at a fair speed into the wood.
Poldarn stood up, went over and turned the other woman's body over with his toe. She was still breathing, just about, but there was blood pouring from her nose, mouth and ear. A humanitarian would probably put her out of her misery, but he wasn't in the mood.
'Thank you,' someone said. Poldarn looked behind; he'd forgotten the soldier whose throat they'd been about to cut. Strictly speaking, of course, Poldarn had just saved his life.
'That's all right,' he said. 'It was instinct more than anything. Maybe I grew up on a farm.'
The other man didn't know what to make of that but laughed anyway. 'I don't know how they can do that,' he said. 'That's really terrible.' He stopped, and looked down. Poldarn noticed for the first time that his legs didn't look right. 'Horses,' the man said. 'The last thing I remember was falling off mine. I guess I'm lucky they only trampled my legs.'
Poldarn frowned. There was no reason why he should help; equally, no reason why he shouldn't. Instinctively he felt for the letter, then remembered that he'd already delivered it. In that case, his time was his own. He went across and knelt beside the man.
'This is going to sound strange,' he said, 'but if you want me to help you, listen carefully and don't interrupt. I got bashed on the head a while back and lost my memory, and it hasn't come back yet. This means I don't know who you are, or what this battle was about, or whether you're the good guys or the bad guys. Understood?'
The man looked at him, and he could see him take the decision not to say anything, just nod.
'Splendid. Now,' he went on, 'it follows that I don't know who you belong to, or where I should return you to. You're going to have to tell me. It'd be really helpful if you can give me a straightforward answer.'
The man grinned. 'Easy,' he said. 'My name is Muno Silsny, I'm a junior captain in the seventh light cavalry division under Major-General Actis. If I'm right in thinking we won the battle, you'll find our camp on the other side of the river, somewhere between here and Sansory; quite close, I'd imagine, probably only a mile or so. Might as well be on the moon, of course, for a man with two broken legs, so if you don't help me I'll almost certainly die. Not that I'm trying to put pressure on you or anything.'
Poldarn nodded. 'That's lucky for you,' he said. 'I'm going to Sansory. If I take you back to your people, will they trade you for a horse?'
'Undoubtedly.'
'That's all right, then. Of course,' Poldarn went on, 'if my cart's still there I won't need one. But I have a feeling it probably isn't. Stay there, I won't be long.'
As he walked away, the man yelled out something like, 'Where are you going? Come back!' but he couldn't be bothered to reply. He retraced his steps as far as he could remember them back into the wood; there was the tree; some more dead bodies (stripped to the skin, of course); there was the road. No cart. No surprise there.
'No cart,' he told the wounded man a little later. On his way to and from the wood he'd seen at least a dozen other living men, cut up and broken in various ways, but he had to draw the line somewhere. 'Bloody nuisance. How am I supposed to get you across the river and down to your camp without a cart?'
The man looked worried. 'I don't know,' he said.
'Damn.' Poldarn sighed. 'I do,' he said. 'Just as well for you I'm at a loose end right now.'
Poldarn was impressed with how strong he turned out to be. The soldier wasn't a big man, but he wasn't a featherweight either, yet after the initial strain and effort of getting him over his shoulder Poldarn found he could carry him without actually killing himself. The soldier did his best not to be any trouble; although the manhandling it took to lift and sling him must have been agonising for someone with two broken legs, he hardly made any noise about it.
The other side of the river turned out to be as far as he could go. 'Sorry,' he panted, 'but I've got to stop here.' Being put down probably hurt as much or more than being picked up, but that wasn't Poldarn's problem, and the soldier coped with it well enough. 'You all right?' Poldarn asked, as soon as he had some breath spare for talking. The man nodded, eyes closed, lips squeezed together. A liar, but all in a good cause.
'So your lot are presumably some sort of government army,' he went on, when the soldier had opened his eyes. 'What about the enemy?'
Captain Muno pulled a face. 'Also some sort of government army,' he replied. 'At least, about two-thirds of them were. The other third were a detachment from one of the free companies, the Amathy house. Have you heard of a man called Tazencius?'