'It's funny you should say that.' Monach looked round; standing right next to him on his left was the old man from Cric, the one who might once have been General Allectus, the one on whose floor Monach's body was sleeping.
'I'm sorry?' Monach said.
'It's quite all right,' the old man said. 'And I shouldn't have startled you like that. No, it's all right. No matter what orders you give them, I'll still lose the battle, history will take its course. Those men there-' he gestured to his left with the back of his hand, 'the Amathy house,' he went on, 'they'll change sides as soon as things start to go wrong for me, and that'll be that. But we're drifting away from the point, I apologise. I just wanted to set your mind at rest, so you can enjoy the dream without fretting about getting home again afterwards.'
'Thank you,' Monach felt obliged to say.
'My pleasure. Now, what was I about to tell you? Oh yes.' The old man wiped a strand of fine white hair out of his eyes; the wind was getting up, and here on the slope they were in a position to catch the worst of it. 'This idea of yours about getting trapped in a dream.'
'What? Oh, right, I see.'
'It's not a new thought,' the old man went on. 'In fact, in some versions of the Poldarn myth, that's what happens to him; he falls asleep under a lime tree on Deymeson Hill and in his dream he suddenly finds himself sitting on the box of a cart, dragging across the moors to a place called Cric. But he doesn't remember who he is or where he came from, or anything like that, let alone the fact that he's a god, not a mortal.' The old man laughed; he seemed to be in rare high spirits. Of course, he was younger than Monach remembered him. 'Anyway,' he went on, 'what my men-sorry, your men-are looking out for is the first sign of General Cronan's army, which is due to come out from behind that wood any moment now. When it does, you'll give the order to stay put and receive them here. It's a very sensible order, and even now I can't help wondering what'd have happened if they'd obeyed it.' He sighed, and suddenly he was an old man again, though only for a moment. 'They don't, of course,' he went on. 'They let Cronan's men get halfway up this slope, and suddenly take it into their minds to charge. That works very well to begin with, until Cronan springs his trap and two thousand heavy cavalry come out of the wood, race up the hill on the flanks and cut us in half. The lower half keeps on pushing forward, bursts through the line and carries on down the slope and into that wood. They don't come out again, ever. The top half-well, Feron Amathy changes sides, and the rest of them pull back in good order to the top of the ridge and withdraw from the field. I-you-we stay here, trying to rally enough men for a stand; the enemy cavalry catch sight of us and at the last minute we break and run away-you and me with them, of course, which is why I'm alive and trapped here. If for some reason you decide to stay, please try not to win the battle. As I told you a moment ago, winning'd be the easy option. And it wouldn't matter, even if you did win. You'd still lose, but it'd all take longer and the casualties would be higher. Ah,' the old man said sharply, 'they're here, and about time too.'
As the enemy army became visible inside the wood, they put up a colony of rooks and crows that flew ahead of them for a while, like the slow, shallow wave that comes before the breakers. 'In a sense,' the old man was saying, 'all battles are just unpleasant, conscience-stricken memories, just as this one is; they've all happened before, and the only difference lies in who's dreaming them this time. Then again, you can pass off all kinds of old rubbish by tacking in a sense in front of it.'
Monach squinted; the wind was making his eyes water. 'I can see them now,' he said.
'Can you? Splendid.' The old man was looking at them too. 'Interesting, I suppose, that you chose to come here, before the battle started. My guess is that your instincts led you to the moment before the draw, the point where they violate our circle. Since you believe in religion, the next part, the battle itself, doesn't really exist; there's just the moment before and the moment after. Or am I oversimplifying?'
'Yes,' Monach replied, 'you are. The battle wouldn't exist only if this was a perfect world, which it isn't, or if you and I were gods, which we aren't.'
The old man grinned. 'I'm not, for sure. As for you-well, I can't see that it matters all that much, one way or the other. If I told you, Yes, you're definitely a god, take my word for it, you wouldn't believe me, after all. You'd say this is just a dream, and your dream at that.'
Monach wasn't sure whether that was a divine revelation or simple teasing. He thought it best to ignore it, on either count. 'So,' he said, as his instincts urged him to counterattack, 'you really are General Allectus, then? May I ask, what're you doing hiding out in a wretched little dump like this?'
'I was born here,' Allectus replied. 'Not in the village, you understand; my grandfather owned the whole valley and half the moor-it was more trouble and expense than it was worth, which is why when he died my father just forgot about it, stopped trying to collect the rents, let the house fall down; at the best of times the income from the estate wasn't enough to pay the gardeners at our main house, in Torcea.' He wiped something out of the corner of his eye, a speck of dust or grit, or a small gnat. 'But yes, we had a house here. If there's time, you might make a detour and take a look at the ruins, if there's anything still there to see; the villagers have been tearing it up for building stone for forty years, so there's probably not much left. And yes, I was born here, while the family was spending the summer out here one year. We moved around a lot then, tracking from estate to estate, like a bunch of itinerants roaming the countryside with all our possessions packed in a cart. Of course it had to be a very big cart to get all our stuff inside. But a cart's a cart.' He shook his head. 'Anyway,' he continued. 'When I lost the battle and my army and found myself in these parts, alone and with a price on my head, I suppose a sort of homing instinct drew me back.' He smiled. 'And it helped that I could remember a few bits and pieces from our visits here when I was a boy. I remembered the name of a servant we hired from this village who was just about my age, by the name of Jolect. He left with us, caught a fever and died. I hardly knew him. But when I came here, I decided to be him, coming home after a lifetime of service in the army. Fortuitously, the Jolect family had died out in the meanwhile, so nobody was left to say I wasn't who I claimed to be; besides, nobody cared. I had twelve gross-quarters in gold coin when I arrived here-it was my pocket change, the day I ran away from this battle, but enough to represent a time-expired veteran's life savings, enough to make me a rich man in Cric. I gave it to my neighbours so they could buy all the things they couldn't grow or make-iron and steel for ploughs and tools, mostly, and some other materials, enough to last all of Cric for a generation-and in return I have this fine house, and they'll feed and clothe me till I die. What more could a god ask?'
Monach didn't say anything.
'Besides,' Allectus went on, 'there's a beautiful symmetry about it. I was born the son and heir to this huge demesne-worthless, maybe, but vast by any standards-and now in my old age here I am again, the squire, the old master, loved, respected, tolerated and put up with by my faithful tenants.' He pulled an exaggeratedly sad face, as the sun flashed alarmingly on the spears of Cronan's army, far away in the distance. 'We have a habit of turning out to be what we're supposed to be, regardless of whether we like it or not, or know it or not. If you understood religion instead of just knowing all about it, you'd see that that's what the Poldarn story's all about, an allegory for that simple fact. Of course the Poldarn story also happens to be true, every word of it, but that doesn't stop it being an allegory as well. You can stay here as long as you like, you know.'