Monach tried to think, but it was like trying to walk through a peat bog; as soon as he tried to put his weight on some reliable known fact, it gave way and started to suck him down. 'But what about the raiders?' he asked in desperation. 'If Tazencius and Feron Amathy have really made a deal with them, they'd be strong enough to beat Cronan.'
'There's no deal,' the abbot said, smiling, as if telling a small child there wasn't really a tooth fairy. 'We know that. Unfortunately, Cronan doesn't. Oh, he's well aware how desperately unlikely a deal would be, but he doesn't know it for a fact. Which is why he has no choice but to take the bait and give battle to Tazencius, just in case the story's true; and that's why Feron Amathy started the rumour that he's implicated in the raider attacks on the cities deliberately to give the impression that he's on some kind of terms with the raiders, so that Cronan will have to take this new rumour about a deal seriously. Indeed, I wouldn't put something like that past Feron Amathy. Whatever else he maybe, he's imaginative.'
Although it was a terrible breach of protocol, Monach leaned against the abbot's desk to steady himself. 'Why can't we just tell the emperor?' he said. 'If he recalled Cronan and sent someone else to fight Tazencius-'
'Then Tazencius would win,' the abbot replied. 'And Cronan would still end up fighting him, but with the added incentive of having to do so on the south side of the bay, within a few miles of Torcea.' He signed the letter he'd been writing, sprinkled it with sand, and pushed the end of a stick of wax into the flame of the lamp on his desk. 'This is a general warrant,' he said. 'It'll authorise you to take any steps and appropriate any resources you need to carry out your mission. In theory it's restricted to ecclesiastical manpower and property only, but I think you'll find that most civilian and military authorities don't know that, so this letter and a little bluster ought to get you anything you need. You can bluster, can't you?'
'Yes,' Monach replied.
'Really? You sound like a choir novice admitting he's been stealing apples.' He poured a deep pool of wax on to the bottom of the page, then took his seal from a small wooden box on the desk and rested it gently on the meniscus. Monach had seen the print of the abbot's seal on decrees and title deeds-two ravens on either side of a drawn sword, surrounded by a circle-but not the seal itself. It was reckoned to be a thousand years old. 'Now then,' he said, 'any questions? No? That's good. I'll see to recalling the sword-monks. You go and get ready. Four hours, remember, you haven't got much time.'
'No,' Monach said, more to himself than the abbot. 'Thank you,' he added, taking the letter as if he expected it to climb up his arm and bite out his throat. He tried to think of something appropriate to say, but all he could think of was, 'I'll do my best.'
The abbot frowned. 'Your best had bloody well better be good enough,' he said. 'You do realise that you're about to take the life of the cleverest, most skilful tactician the empire's produced in two centuries. This isn't going to be an easy job, and to be brutally honest with you, if anybody else could do it, I wouldn't be sending you.' He sighed. 'I read your report about the Poldarn impersonators,' he went on. 'I'd have rather more confidence in your abilities if you hadn't got that completely the wrong way round.'
Monach's breath caught in his throat and for a moment he couldn't breathe. 'Oh,' he said. 'I mean, I'm very sorry. What did I…?'
'Your research,' the abbot replied. 'Sloppy. Obviously, all you did was look up Poldarn in the Concordance; you didn't go back to the primary sources and see what the Concordance left out. Bad scholarship,' he said. 'I take the view that a man who can't be bothered to look up a reference when he's sitting comfortably on his backside in a nice warm library is hardly likely to pay proper attention to detail when he's out in the field.' He shook his head. 'For your information, if you'd taken the trouble to go back to the Morevish texts, you'd have known that one of the most important things about the second coming of Poldarn is that when he arrives, he won't actually know who he is, or that he's a god at all, until most of his work's been done. It's actually the key to the whole allegory, which is why it appealed so much to the later Mannerists.' The abbot picked up a ruler, flicked it over with his fingertips. 'You were going around looking for someone in a cart calling himself Poldarn. Anybody using the name Poldarn couldn't possibly be Poldarn, because Poldarn doesn't know that's who he is. A valiant effort on your part, but completely worthless.'
Chapter Seventeen
Vague images, changing too quickly to be meaningful, leaving only impressions, like the flashes of colour behind your eyelids when you've looked directly at the sun. Early memories, formed before he'd had the words to shape them with: lying on his back in a basket as the sky and the horizon flickered around him, feeling frightened by the jostling, wondering why his mother was running; lying in a dark place with his mother's hand clamped over his mouth, trying to pull her fingers away; a man's face directly overhead, so big that his nose and mouth and moustache seemed to fill the world, and the instinctive knowledge that something was wrong; some years later-he was standing, looking down-being shown a long rectangle of newly turned earth that looked like a freshly dug flowerbed and wondering why they'd planted his mother in the ground. Then another early one: sitting up in a cot or something of the sort, waving his hands to try and scare off the big, cruel-looking black bird that was perched on the side rail, examining him with round black empty eyes. Vague images, but for once he knew that he was there, that the eyes he was watching through had been his own: a three-legged cat crossing a paved yard, an old man with a white beard pointing at the sky, an endless journey over bumpy roads in a cart He woke up and opened his eyes. It was dark. He was lying on his back, just as he had been in the dream (already very nearly drained away; a few pictures clinging to his mind like limpets on a rock, but meaningless without context), and he could hear somebody breathing in the room with him.
Then he remembered. The woman lying beside him was Copis, of course, and there was nothing sinister or bad about her being there; arguably, quite the opposite, or so it had seemed at the time. Now she was lying on her left side, one arm underneath her (how can anybody sleep like that? It must be really uncomfortable), not snoring exactly, but making a gentle snuffling noise every time she breathed in-not loud at all, but once noticed, impossible to ignore. He lay still for some time, listening for the little noise, counting out the interval between. Her hair smelt like rainwater.
He closed his eyes, made a conscious effort not to listen for the noise, which was naturally self-defeating. Did this feel natural, he wondered, sharing a bed with someone? It must be something you learned how to do, the knack of keeping to your own space, like the knack of not rolling off the edge and landing on the floor. If he'd learned the knack, did he have a wife somewhere, or had he had one once? He concentrated, fishing in the dark for a face. There wasn't anything there, needless to say; the dream was long gone, and even Copis, the only woman he knew now, was hard to call deliberately to mind, so that he had to build up her face out of composite memories, eyes and nose, contours of cheeks, the radius of her forehead, the faint lines at the sides of her mouth. It occurred to him that when they'd both slept in the cart she hadn't made the snuffling noise (but they'd never slept together in a bed, so perhaps she only did it when she had a mattress and pillows, or when she was making space for someone else in a bed). He let his thoughts stray, and after a while he found himself looking for something that wasn't there, a curved line that should have been visible in the air, a circle.