When Temrai opened his eyes, the light appalled him.
He shook his head like a wet dog, as if trying to get the dream out of his mind. Beside him, Tilden grunted and turned over, pulling the covers off his toes. She could sleep through anything, even the stifled yell he’d woken up with. If Tilden dreamed strange and terrible dreams, they were of casseroles spoiled by overcooking, or long-awaited tapestries which, when they finally arrived, didn’t go with the cushions after all. The thought made him smile, in spite of himself.
He sighed and sat up, carefully shifting his weight so as not to disturb her. In fact, the light was nothing more than a gentle smear of moonshine leaking through the smoke-hole; remarkable that it could have seemed so unbearably bright a moment ago.
Methodically, like a conscientious witness in front of the examining magistrate, he recalled the dream. He’d been in darkness, in some cave or tunnel underground; he’d been scrabbling frantically along, trying to get away from something, or someone, either the roof caving in or a man with a knife, and most of the time it had been both together. When his pursuer had caught up with him, and he’d felt a hand gathering his hair and pulling his head back to expose his throat to the cutting edge, he’d heard a voice thanking him, and another saying that the dead man was Sergeant Bardas Loredan, sacker of cities, bringer-down of walls, responsible for the deaths of thousands -
– Which was all wrong, of course. He, King Temrai the Great, was the sacker of cities and slayer of thousands; he was the one who’d brought down the walls of Perimadeia, after first burning to death all the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people trapped in there when he burst in. The wise and expensive Shastel doctor he’d sent for when the dreams he’d had since the fall of the City made him dangerously ill had told him that it was all perfectly natural, that it was hardly surprising that in his dreams he should put himself in the place of one of the people he’d burned to death; somehow, the wise and expensive doctor had left him with the impression that it was so normal as to be positively good for him, like drinking plenty of milk and taking regular exercise. He wondered what he’d have made of this new development; the caves, the man with the knife who was Bardas Loredan, the sacker of cities. He could work some of it out for himself; his guilt and self-loathing had made him identify himself with the most frightening and destructive man he’d ever encountered, so that in his mind he’d become Loredan, the ultimate degradation. No need to spend good money to be told that.
He yawned. Absolutely no chance of getting back to sleep; what he really wanted was company. Gently he slid off the bed, feeling with his toes for his soft felt shoes, pulled on his coat and crept out of the tent.
Who would be awake at this time of night? Well, the sentries, for a start (or else they were all in trouble) and the duty officer and the duty officer’s friend – there was a specific military technical term, but he hadn’t a clue what it was; basically, the job consisted of staying up all night playing draughts with the duty officer to keep him from falling asleep. Fairly soon the bakers would be up and about, starting off the next day’s bread. Almost certainly, somewhere in the camp, there’d be a bunch of young fools who’d stayed up all night drinking, and here and there a few men unable to sleep for worrying about whether they were going to die in the battle tomorrow. Quite likely he wasn’t the only man in twenty thousand who’d been turfed out of bed by a bad dream. A short walk through the streets of the camp would find him someone to talk to.
He yawned again. It was a warm night, with a smell of rain. To his surprise, he realised he was feeling hungry. What he really needed, in fact, wasn’t human companionship or someone to pour out his troubles to. What he really needed was a couple of white-flour pancakes smothered in sour cream and honey, preferably with a sprinkling of redcurrants and nutmeg. For a king spontaneously accorded the epithet Great by a devotedly loyal nation, that oughtn’t to be too much to ask.
He also had the advantage of inside knowledge. The best pancakes in the world, he happened to know, were made by Dondai the fletcher, a spry, toothless old man who spent his life pulling carefully selected feathers out of the wings of the increasingly resentful geese that formed the supplementary fletchings reserve. That was all he did. Someone else sorted the feathers into left side and right side; someone else again split them down the pith, trimmed them to shape and delivered them to the workers who actually served them to the arrowshafts with thin threads of waste sinew. When he wasn’t pulling feathers, though, Dondai made an awe-some pancake; and, being too old to need much sleep, there was a good chance he’d be awake right now.
Dondai’s tent wasn’t exactly hard to find, even in the middle of the night; all you had to do was follow the smell and sound of geese. Sure enough, at the entrance to the goose pen there was a small fire, beside which a man sat, with a furious goose struggling in his large, capable hands. The man had his back to Temrai, and it was only after he’d tapped him on the shoulder and the man had turned round that he realised it wasn’t the man he’d been looking for.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was looking for Dondai.’
The man looked at him, frowning slightly.
‘Dondai the fletcher,’ Temrai repeated. ‘Is he asleep?’
‘You could say that,’ the man replied. ‘He died three days ago.’
‘Oh.’ For some reason Temrai was shocked, out of all proportion. True, he’d been eating Dondai’s white-flour pancakes since he was a boy, but that was all the old man had meant to him, a sure hand with a pottery bowl and a flat iron pan. ‘I’m so sorry.’
The man shrugged. ‘He was eighty-four,’ he replied. ‘When people get that old, they tend to die. It’s not as if it’s unfair or anything. I’m his nephew, by the way, Dassascai. You were a friend of his, then?’
‘An acquaintance,’ Temrai replied. ‘You haven’t been in the army long, have you?’
‘I’m not in the army,’ Dassascai replied. ‘Until recently, I had a stall in Ap’ Escatoy market, selling fish. Lived there most of my life, in fact.’
‘Really?’ Temrai said. ‘It must have been terrible, these last few years.’
Dassascai shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It was a port, remember, and the provincial office couldn’t spare any ships. There were never any shortages, people were spending money; it was a good war as wars go.’
Temrai nodded slowly. ‘So what happened to you?’ he asked. ‘I’d sort of gathered that not many people made it out alive.’
‘That’s quite right,’ Dassascai said. ‘Fortunately, I wasn’t there when it happened; I was on my way here, to see my uncle like a good nephew and then on to the Island to buy salt cod. In fact, I left two days before it happened, so you can see I’m a very lucky boy. Except,’ he added with a sour grin, ‘that I never take my wife and family with me on business trips. Plus, there’s the small matter of a lifetime’s accumulated property, though you aren’t really supposed to mention that in the same breath as family. But the truth is, I know which I miss more.’
Temrai sat down on the ground, keeping the fire between them. ‘So what are you going to do? Follow in your uncle’s footsteps?’
‘Pulling wing-feathers out of live geese for the rest of my life? Hardly.’ Dassascai stood up, a furiously struggling goose hanging upside down by its legs in one hand, a small bunch of feathers in the other. ‘For one thing, goose down makes me sneeze. For another, they stink. I’m doing this now because if I don’t work, I don’t eat. But something else’ll come along, and when it does I’ll be on my way.’
‘Fair enough,’ Temrai said. ‘Any idea what form this something might take? In my line of work I occasionally come across good opportunities that need good people; I could keep my eyes open for you.’