Memory (38 page)

‘No, sir,' he'd said, ‘I'm not a relative, but I do know her.'

The clerk looked mildly disappointed. ‘And can you vouch for the truth of her account?'

Poldarn hesitated. ‘Well,' he said, ‘what she just said is pretty much what she told me the first time I met her, on the carrier's cart out near Tin Chirra.' (He changed the locale at the last moment; saying he'd been near Dui Chirra probably wasn't a good idea.) ‘And I can't see why she'd have wanted to lie to me back then; I mean, she wasn't asking for money or anything.'

The magistrates were muttering to each other, and you didn't have to be a lip-reader to make out the gist of it:
if he wants to take responsibility for her, let him.
After that, it was all nice and straightforward. He'd paid her fine (ten quarters for sleeping in a doorway; another ten for assaulting an officer of the watch) and hustled her out of the courthouse into the rain before she did or said anything that'd get them both arrested.

‘Thank you so much,' she kept on saying over and over again. ‘You've been so kind and I don't know how I can possibly ever repay you, but do you think you could possibly just nip back inside and see if you can find that watch sergeant and ask if he could let me have my poor darlings back? They'll be so dreadfully frightened, not to mention hungry—'

Fuck, Poldarn thought. But she had enough strength of will to tame wild horses, and eventually he'd begged her to stay there, not move an inch, while he went back in and found the sergeant; recognising him wasn't hard, he was the one with the spectacular black eye. The sergeant had been only too glad to give him the cage, which smelled disgustingly of rodent pee and was distinctly moist on the underside.

‘Now listen,' he'd said to her over her grateful chirpings. ‘I haven't got any money to give you this time—'

(‘That's quite all right . . . Far too generous already . . .')

‘But,' he'd continued, raising his voice a little to make himself heard over her unwanted gratitude, ‘I'm going to give you this badge. No, listen please, this is very important. This is an army courier's badge, they're very rare and valuable, and if you ever get in trouble again or run out of money or anything like that, you're to show this badge to a sergeant or an officer – don't for pity's sake try explaining anything, or he'll think you've stolen it or picked it up in the street. Just show it to him, like this, and tell him what you want, and it'll do the trick. Now, do you understand me, or do you want me to explain it again?'

Remarkably, she'd understood straight away; more useless thanks and not-worth-the-breath-they-were-uttered-with promises of recompense at some indefinite future date, and then he'd marched her over to the stage office and put down seven quarters of good Torcea money to buy her a seat on the carrier's cart to Fort Cheir and the Torcea ferry. Which was why Poldarn was currently sitting outside on the box of the Tela Ixwa stage in the driving rain, when he could've been sitting inside, in the dry.

Almost as hard to account for as the act itself was the urge to tell the driver all about it. All the driver had done to unstopper this flood of reminiscence was to say it was a pity Poldarn couldn't have paid the extra quarter and a half, since it was pissing it down and there was a perfectly good empty seat inside the stage; but for some reason, Poldarn had been moved to justify himself by telling this story. Maybe he was proud of what he'd done (though he'd left out the really generous bit, the gift of the courier's badge, to save having to invent some tale about how he'd come by it in the first place); or perhaps it was something about barbers and carters that made you tell them stuff you wouldn't normally tell your best friend; or maybe he was just getting chatty in his old age—

‘Pretty decent thing to have done, though,' the driver said with less than absolute sincerity, ‘looking after a poor old mad woman like that. Just hope you don't catch your death being out here, is all.'

—Or perhaps he'd done it in hopes that the driver would exercise his discretion and let him have the empty seat in the dry as far as the next stop; in which case he'd wasted his time.

‘Oh well,' he heard himself say, bravely cheerful, ‘she's probably somebody's mother, bless her daft old heart.'

The driver shook his head. ‘Doubt it,' he said. ‘Like, if she was my old mum I wouldn't let her go wandering about like that, getting herself arrested and all.'

The subject was getting boring very fast. ‘Maybe her son died and that's what drove her off her head,' Poldarn said with a yawn. ‘Anyway, with any luck that's the last time she'll cross my path. How long before we reach the – what did you say its name was?'

‘The Piety & Fortitude,' the driver grunted. ‘Maybe three hours, could be four if the ford's up and we got to go round by the bridge. Assuming the bridge isn't down.'

‘Fine,' Poldarn said. ‘Tell me, why do all these inns have such god-awful self-righteous names?'

The driver frowned. ‘How do you mean?' he said.

They arrived at the Piety an hour after dark, by which point Poldarn was so wet it hadn't mattered for hours. Since he had very little money (apart from the magnificent gold-and-gemstone ring purportedly worth twenty times more than the inn and its contents) he had his dinner out of the kitchen stewpot and dossed down in the hayloft directly over a very noisy, flatulent horse. Sleep proving elusive in this context, he lay in the dark staring upwards, wondering if the mad woman was sleeping cosily in the guest quarters of the Fort Cheir prefecture; wondering also why he'd done such a bloody stupid thing.

He must have dropped off at some point, because the next thing he was aware of was a boot nudging him in the ribs. He opened his eyes and saw the head of a spear, mostly out of focus because it was so close to his face. Someone was telling him to get up.

The soldiers took him into the taproom; it was empty, and the fire was dying out. The man sitting behind the table told one of the soldiers to throw a scoop of charcoal on it before taking notice that Poldarn was in the room.

‘Bloody hell,' he said. ‘You been swimming?'

Poldarn decided that the question didn't need an answer. ‘What's going on?' he asked.

‘Shut up and sit down,' the man replied, by way of an explanation; then he caught sight of Poldarn's face and shuddered, as though someone had just poured cold water down his neck. ‘Turn out your pockets on that table there. Sergeant, have you got his baggage there?'

‘Just the blanket roll, sir,' the sergeant said. He put something down with a thump, just out of Poldarn's line of sight. Poldarn did as he was told and emptied his pockets.

The man appeared to have recovered from his nasty turn. ‘Right,' he said, with a predatory smile, ‘let's see what we've got here. Bring that thing over here, sergeant, I want a good look at it.'

Not good;
that thing
was the nearly finished backsabre, possession of which was going to be very hard to explain away. The man studied it carefully, turning it over in his hands as if reading invisible writing, then laid it down next to him, well out of Poldarn's reach. ‘Fine,' he said. ‘Now let's see that book.'

Concerning Various Matters
didn't interest the man nearly as much as the sword had done; he opened it at random a few times, shrugged and put it down. He also examined the blanket, the water bottle and the rest of Poldarn's meagre kit before signalling to the sergeant to bring him the contents of Poldarn's pockets: a small knife, an insignificant sum of money, and a gold ring.

From the expression on the man's face, he'd been expecting to see the ring from the outset. ‘That's all, is it?' he said. ‘No, I'm talking to you, not Sergeant Illuta. Is this all of it, or have you got any more, squirrelled away somewhere?'

‘I'm sorry,' Poldarn said. ‘I don't quite follow.'

The man smirked and shook his head. ‘Makes no odds to me,' he said. ‘It's not the trinkets I'm after.' He sighed. ‘All right,' he said, ‘here we go. My name is Lock Xanipolo, colonel, officer commanding Falcata garrison. Day before yesterday I get a report that some scruff with a burnt-off face's been trawling round all the goldsmiths' houses trying to sell an extremely valuable candidature ring with a Faculty of Arms crest. Stage office tells me a man answering the description caught the common stage for Tela Ixwa; so here I am. Now, do you need me to tell you how a tramp like yourself comes to have a ring that used to belong to General Muno Silsny, who was murdered by bandits on this very same road four months ago, or can we cut all that and get on to some of the stuff I don't already know?'

Poldarn looked at him steadily. ‘Such as?'

‘Ah. Such as, was it also you who murdered Prince Mazentius during the course of a robbery on the Falcata to Ang Chirra road; how the Mad Monk and his motley crew are involved in all this, and when they're planning to attack the foundry at Dui Chirra; and what exactly is your connection with the people who make and use this particular pattern of sword.' The colonel sighed. ‘I'm sorry to have to say that if you say the right thing in answer to these questions, you'll at least live long enough for a trip to Torcea. If it was up to me you wouldn't be leaving this room alive, but I have to do what I'm told, more's the pity.'

The driver was right, Poldarn thought; the next old woman I meet on the road can rot in hell. ‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘but I don't understand.'

Colonel Lock shook his head sadly. ‘Oh, come on,' he said. ‘Do we really have to go through the whole sorry pantomime? Go on, then, let's be having you. Name.'

‘Actually—' Poldarn hesitated. It's worth a try, he thought; this man's an idiot, just as well he doesn't know it. ‘My name's Poldarn,' he said. ‘I'm a foundry worker at Dui Chirra.'

‘Is that so?' Colonel Lock drummed his fingers on the table. ‘And what are you doing here? Last I heard, all leave at the foundry was cancelled.'

Poldarn shrugged. ‘I ran away,' he said. ‘But if you send me back there, anybody can tell you that's who I am. And they'll tell you I can't have done any murders or robberies, because nobody's been allowed out of the place since the project started. You do know about that, don't you?'

He could see Colonel Lock thinking about it; not quite as monolithic as the stage driver, but very similar. ‘So how come you've got the late General Muno's personal candidature ring? Find it in the slack tub, did we?'

Poldarn shook his head. ‘He gave it to me,' he replied. ‘He came to Dui Chirra specially to see me. Ask Brigadier Muno at the foundry if you like; he's the general's uncle.'

‘I know that.' Colonel Lock was obviously the sort of man who gets irritable when he knows he's out of his depth. Weak; easy mark. ‘All right, then,' he said. ‘Suppose you tell me about the wiggly sword? Or did Muno Silsny give you that as well?'

‘No,' Poldarn said patiently, ‘I made that myself; you can see, it's not quite finished yet. I'm a blacksmith, I was making it in my spare time. Copy of one I saw once.'

‘Really.' The colonel was getting flustered. ‘And this book. I suppose it's just some light reading for the long winter evenings.'

‘Yes,' Poldarn replied. ‘A friend gave it to me.'

‘Did he, now. Your friend was a sword-monk, then?'

Poldarn shrugged. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘He didn't say where he got it from.'

Apparently he'd said something wrong, because Colonel Lock was smiling. But he didn't seem to be in any hurry to share the joke. ‘Well,' he said, ‘that's fine. Care to tell me why you left Dui Chirra, when you knew perfectly well you weren't allowed to?'

‘I was bored.'

Colonel Lock looked at him for what seemed like a very long time. ‘You were bored,' he repeated.

‘That's right. There's nothing to do there except sit about waiting for Spenno and Galand Dev to stop arguing. They're sort of in charge,' he explained. ‘And they can't make up their minds how to go about things; and while they're yelling at each other, the rest of us just have to hang around. I'd had enough, so I reckoned I might as well move on. I mean, I'm nobody important, they don't need me for anything.'

The colonel raised an eyebrow. ‘That's so crass I could believe it,' he said, ‘except that I get the feeling there's more to it than that. I heard all about General Muno Silsny finally tracking down his secret rescuer,' he went on. ‘It was going to be a big story, and then it was killed dead. And then, shortly afterwards, so was General Muno. And here you are, the mystery hero, with Muno's candidature ring and a raider backsabre, roaming about the countryside making an exhibition of yourself in the Falcata magistrates' court.' Suddenly he clapped his hands together. ‘Well,' he said, ‘the good bit is, I can hand you over to Brigadier Muno and let him deal with you. I've seen your sort before, every officer in the service has; trouble follows you about like flies round a horse's arse. Sergeant,' he called out, ‘get our guest a nice room on the top floor. I want two guards outside his door and another two under his window, in case he gets bored again. We want to be on the road at daybreak, back to Falcata and then on to Dui Chirra.'

It was an improvement on the hayloft; in fact, it was the best bed Poldarn could remember having come across, soft yet firm, with clean linen sheets. There was even a basinful of water for washing in, and a decent fire in the hearth.

‘Thanks,' he said, as the guard opened the door and gestured him into the room. ‘If you get cold standing out there in the passage, feel free to pop in and warm yourself up.'

The guard gave him a look that would've cleaned rust off an abandoned ploughshare, and shut the door behind him. Poldarn kicked off his boots, lay down on the bed and looked up at the roof timbers, which were carved and gilded. He guessed (not that it mattered) that, like most inns, this one had started off as a monastic house, an outlying priory, and this had once been the prior's or abbot's lodgings. Nice of the government to put him up in the best room in the house.