Shadow

Chapter Fourteen

'Just my rotten luck,' the new man was saying, 'just my rotten bloody filthy stinking luck. Fifteen of us in the pool, and he has to pick me. Typical.'

Poldarn had been learning the art of not listening. He'd had to pick it up as he went along, but desperation is a fine teacher. He had no alternative but to learn, and learn quickly, otherwise he'd have to kill the man to save himself from going crazy, and killing him would of course prove him right.

'Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you,' the new man went on, in exactly the same low mumbling voice he'd been using for the last three days. 'You didn't choose me, he did. I mean, I don't suppose it's much fun for you people, having everybody you ride with ending up dead. I mean, if it was me in your shoes, I wouldn't be able to sleep nights thinking about it. I'm sorry for you, really I am. No, it's him I'm angry with, really, really angry, because he had no call to go picking me, I never did him any harm-'

It was in Poldarn's mind to point out at some stage that so far they'd been on the road together for three days and two nights, and so far the worst peril they'd encountered had been the pea soup in the Mercy and Forbearance. He hadn't done so yet, partly because of tempting providence, partly because interrupting the new man's flow wasn't going to be easy. Words poured steadily out of him like grain flowing through a hole in the bottom of a manger, and all he could do was hang on and wait till eventually there weren't any more.

Which was a pity, because if he'd been able to have a normal conversation with the man there were all sorts of questions he'd have liked to have asked about Liancor, the place they were going to. For one thing, it was south of the Bohec, and it was the first time (first time he could remember) that he'd been across the river. Things were different on this side. Instead of sprawling shapelessly, the moor was parcelled up in neat, sheep-filled squares with birch-hedged banks and dry-stone walls. Here and there he saw buildings-sheds and linhays mostly, but a few houses and yards as well, suggesting that life on this side was settled and secure enough that people dared to live outside the villages. The road was narrower, sheltered from the wind by banks and hedges, more rutted and worn, and much busier-hardly an hour went by without another cart or wagon creaking past them, going the other way. There were birds other than crows on this side of the river: big mobs of pigeons and peewits, either pitched in the trees or down on the ground, munching devastating rides through fields of young cabbage and kale; every now and then a buzzard circling high over a copse or covert; just occasionally a heron standing in the bed of one of the fast, shallow rivers that drained down to the Bohec out of the moorland hills. It was useful, productive country, on your side rather than against you, and people quite definitely lived here. As for Liancor itself, he knew absolutely nothing about it apart from the name.

'What I want to know is-' The new man stopped abruptly and sat up, staring at something on the other side of the combe; then, just as Poldarn (who couldn't see anything) was about to ask what was.so interesting, he sighed. 'Oh well,' he said, 'I suppose that's it. Had to come sooner or later.'

Poldarn peered as hard as he could, but all he could see was a hillside, some walls, a couple of thorn trees bent sideways by the wind, and a small group of wild ponies. 'What are you talking about?' he said.

'Over there,' the new man said. 'Are you blind or something? Look, they're-'

Which was as far as he got. A stone whizzed out of nowhere and hit him in the middle of his forehead. His head jerked back and he fell on his back in the bed of the cart as another stone smacked into Poldarn's shoulder, wasting its force against the steel plates sewn into his gambeson. It was still enough to startle him out of his wits and move him in his seat, as if he'd been shoved. The next two rattled off the side of the cart, digging out finger-sized chunks of timber. He didn't hang around to see if the grouping improved. From the box he jumped on to the bank, scrambled over it and half slid, half fell into the ditch on the other side, which was about eighteen inches deep and full of water.

For an unnervingly long time nothing happened. Poldarn had wound up lying on his left side so that his head and right shoulder were out of the water; the rest of him was submerged. Having no reason to move, he stayed put. He was reconsidering this policy when a head bobbed up over the bank, looked both ways in a cursory fashion, and popped down again. He heard someone say, 'No sign of the bugger.' Then, after another infuriating pause, he saw a man standing up on the box of the cart. Because the bank was in the way, all he could see was the back of his head-matted, curly brown hair blowing in the wind-and the tops of his shoulders, before the man bent or knelt down and was out of his sight. While he was analysing what he'd learned, another head appeared, this time three-quarter face; same sort of hair, a thin, long face with a pointed chin scruffy with a slight growth of woolly fuzz, a very young man who probably hadn't been eating well lately.

Lying still and quiet seemed rather more attractive at this point. He'd come to the conclusion that the weapons used were most likely slings. He found that he seemed to know a lot about slings, probably including how to use one: you could make one out of anything, they were difficult to use but could be both accurate and effective, but the rate of fire was slow and up close they were useless. Just right for knocking drivers off carts, but if that was all they had, there shouldn't be any problem.

If. Time for another choice, damn it. The argument for staying where he was struck him as unusually persuasive; he was a courier, not a cart guard; he had an important letter to deliver, and getting involved in fights would only put the letter at risk; he hadn't liked the new man, not one bit. The argument for scrambling out of the ditch, vaulting over the bank and starting a fight was so insubstantial and vague that he couldn't even reduce it to words. But, he realised as his boots hit the planks of the cart bed and the two men spun round to face him, it must have had its merits, or why the hell was he doing it?

The man on the right took a step towards him. His hand may have been raised to throw a punch, or he may just have been lifting it to help him balance as he tried to jump down off the cart and escape. In any event, the step brought him inside Poldarn's circle, and he fell backwards off the cart and out of sight before Poldarn even had a chance to see what sort of wound he'd inflicted. The other man stayed very, very still.

'I'm sorry,' he said, 'really I am. I didn't recognise you.'

For a moment, Poldarn's mind was completely blank, then he decided he'd better put his sword away before he did himself an injury with it. He flicked the blood off the blade with a crisp crack of his wrist, drew the back over the web of his left thumb and slid it into the scabbard without looking down.

'What?' he said.

'I didn't know it was you,' the man said, perfectly still except for his mouth. 'All we could see was two men on a cart. I'm really sorry.'

Poldarn breathed out slowly. 'It's all right,' he said, 'I'm not going to hurt you. Just don't go away quite yet. You know who I am?'

The man shrugged. 'Yes,' he replied. 'Well, sort of. I saw you at the rendezvous when we landed.'

Poldarn stared at him a moment or so longer. 'Listen to me,' he said. 'You may know who I am, but I don't. I got a bash on the head, and when I woke up I couldn't remember anything; not my name, where I'm from, nothing like that at all. Tell me what you know, or so help me-'

'All right.' The man winced, and Poldarn caught sight of a little pool of liquid forming on the boards of the box, next to the man's left ankle. He resisted the temptation to burst out laughing, and instead said, 'It's all right, I promise I'm not going to do anything to you. Just help me out, please.'

The man took a deep breath. 'All right,' he said. 'I'm sorry, I don't know your name. I only saw you the one time. I don't even know if you're one of us or one of them; I was on watch, I saw you walking down the path from the cliffs, and before I could challenge you the skipper said it was all right, you were expected. You walked past me-close as you are now-and about an hour later you came back, went off the way you came. That's it.'

All Poldarn could do was sigh. He didn't need to ask the next question, he already knew the answer. He'd guessed it a moment ago, when he'd realised that the language he was talking and hearing wasn't the one he'd been living with for the last few weeks.

'You're raiders,' he said.

It seemed to surprise the man that this point needed confirmation. 'That's right,' he said. 'Me and Turvin and about five others, we got cut off after the battle following up too far, so when the relief came, we couldn't get back; then a squad of horsemen chased us up, and when we stopped running we hadn't a clue where we were, what direction we'd come, anything like that. Later on the sun came up, we found out we'd been going south, so we tried to head back north-west, only we walked straight into the bloody relief again. Turvin and me, we got away, the others didn't; we kept on going till we reached the river-they'd sent another squad after us, the bastards, we thought they were on our side, and we didn't give them the slip till nightfall. Well, we were so scared by then that we dumped all our kit into the river-trying to make it look like we'd drowned, though I don't suppose it fooled anybody-and swam across; we figured they wouldn't expect us to go southeast, away from the ships, so that was the only safe way to go. Anyhow, we wound up here, and here we've been ever since.'

Poldarn nodded. 'Robbing carts,' he said.

'Trying to rob carts.' The man grinned. He couldn't be more than twenty. 'Just our luck, the first time we actually connect with anything-'

'I see,' Poldarn said. 'And that's all you know about me? You're sure?'

The man dipped his head in confirmation. 'You came to the ships just after we landed. They were expecting you. At the time I guessed you were one of ours-you know, we've got scouts in deep-but I was just assuming.'

'Fine. Do I look like one of you?'

'I guess. From the south island, anyhow. But you could be one of them, too. Truth is, I haven't seen enough of them to know. This is my first time, see.'

'First time?'

'First time over here. The first expedition I've ever been on.'

'Ah.' Poldarn clicked his tongue. 'Things haven't been going well for you lately, have they?'

The young man nodded. 'It's been a thoroughly rotten year,' he said. 'First we lost twenty lambs in the cold snap, then our big shed fell in the sea during the high winds, then the sheep got into the leeks, and then we found the blight had got in the apples, ended up slinging half of 'em, and then all the bees just upped and died on us, like that, so we sold all our spare timber to get places on a ship to come here, hoping we'd be able to make enough to set it all straight, and now look. God knows what's become of Dad and Raffenkel, I'm stuck here in the middle of enemy territory, and I can't even rob a cart. It's enough to make you give up.'

Poldarn agreed that it all sounded a bit much. 'What's your name?' he asked.

'Eyvind,' the young man replied. 'And Dad's Kari. We live at a place called Ness-any of this ring any bells?'

'No,' Poldarn said. 'But that doesn't mean anything.' He thought for a moment. 'All I can suggest is that you get away from here as fast as you can, before someone comes along and finds these bodies. I'll say there was only one of you; he killed my carter, I killed him. That's all I can do for you, I'm afraid.' He paused. 'No, that's not true,' he said. He pulled his purse from his sleeve and counted out twenty quarters, leaving himself fifteen to cover his expenses for the rest of the trip. 'You could try pretending to be deaf and dumb, I suppose,' he said. 'At any rate, you'll stand a better chance than if you try and make a living as a highwayman. Do I speak with an accent?'

Eyvind nodded. 'Yes,' he said, 'but I can't place it. And there's all sorts of accents up and down the south island, depending on where people came from originally. Like I said, you could be us, you could be them. No way of knowing.'

'Fine,' Poldarn said. 'I don't think his boots'll fit you, but you could pad them out with bits of shirt. I'd leave the jacket, though.' He frowned, then said, 'You can have my coat instead, I'll take his jacket. You know, I have about as much luck with coats as you do with your life in general.'

'Thank you,' Eyvind said. 'I-'

'Goodbye,' Poldarn interrupted. He pulled the dead carter up by his arms, slid him out of his jacket and toppled him off the cart; then he wriggled out of his coat, slung it out on top of the body and walked the horses on.

Of course, he hadn't much idea of where he was, so it was fortunate that the road went straight to Liancor, with no options or choices to betray him. The first things he saw, as he laboured up a slope between two high hedges and suddenly found himself at an unexpected crest overlooking a deep, hidden valley, were two sand-yellow towers four or five miles away, their tops poking up above the folds of the ground like the heads of Eyvind and his dead colleague. Half an hour or so later the gentle hills got out of the way and he was able to look down on the whole town.

It reminded him of a lake, filling the lowest point in a valley, as if the houses and buildings had drained down the hillsides and flooded the flat water meadows on either side of the shallow, lively river that wound away at right angles to the road. Certainly, Liancor gave the impression that it had got there by some natural process of accretion, that it had grown there or been carried there like river silt over a very long period of time. The light brown stone and brown-grey thatch gave the impression of camouflage, as if the town was an animal who'd grown that way to avoid the attention of predators.

He'd made a point of finding out the correct procedure, so the first thing he did was ask the way to the prefecture, which turned out to be a doorway in the side of a long, low, scruffy-looking building with large chunks missing from the outside rendering. He gave a small boy a quarter to look after the cart and went inside. There were three clerks sitting at a bench, huddled together so as to be able to share the narrow beam of light from the one small window high in the wall to their left. One of them looked up as he walked in; the other two carried on writing slowly and carefully in big ledgers.

'Hello,' he said. 'I need to report a death.'

The clerk glowered at him as if he was a small child pestering his mother for sweets. 'Right,' he said irritably; he pushed away the ledger in front of him, stretched out an arm for another ledger behind him without looking round, laid it on the desk and let it fall open at the bookmark. 'Citizen or offcomer?'

Poldarn frowned. 'Me or him?'

'Both of you.'

'Both from Sansory,' Poldarn said.

That cheered the clerk up a little. 'Fine,' he said. 'Where?'

'Four hours by cart towards the Bohec, about a day south of the river.'

'Splendid,' the clerk said. 'Outside the jurisdiction,' he explained. 'Outside the jurisdiction, I just take names and details, check the outstanding warrants, you sign or make your mark and that's that. Inside, I have to arrest you and hold you for interrogation.'

Since the clerk was short, fat, just the right side of sixty and younger than his two colleagues, that told Poldarn a lot about the way things were done in Liancor. There was a three-legged stool against the wall next to the door. Poldarn picked it up, carried it over to the table.

'Sorry,' the clerk said, 'forgot my manners. Yes, please take a seat. Names. His first.'

As the clerk dipped his pen in the inkwell, Poldarn realised that he didn't actually know the dead driver's name; the man had been sitting on the box of the cart Falx Roisin had pointed to, Poldarn had got up beside him, the cart had moved off and the man had started moaning about how unfair it all was. Quite justifiably, as it had turned out.

'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I don't know his name. He was new; at least, it was the first time we'd worked together.'

'Oh.' The clerk looked sad. 'I need a name,' he said. 'Who do you work for?'

'Falx Roisin,' Poldarn replied. 'He runs a-'

'Unknown, Falx house, Sansory,' the clerk recited as he wrote. 'That'll do fine. You see, we pass our returns on to the prefecture in Sansory, they check them against their returns, it'll be sorted out then. Your name?'

'Poldarn.'

'Poldarn what?'

'Just Poldarn. I'm a southerner.'

The clerk looked up for a moment. 'Oh well,' he said. 'All right, just Poldarn. Now then, what happened? Accident?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'He was the driver, I was the guard. A man tried to rob the cart; killed him with a slingshot, then came for me. I killed him.'

'Right.' The clerk nodded, didn't look up. 'That's fine, then; my condolences on your loss, sign the register here-' He turned the book round and pushed it across the table, then handed Poldarn the pen. 'Oh, you can write, that's good. All right, I'll make out a certificate and forward that to the prefecture at Sansory, copy for my file, job done. Thank you, you can go now.'

'Thank you,' Poldarn replied, getting up. He put the stool back where he'd found it, then asked, 'So you believe me, then?'

The clerk looked at him. 'Does it matter?' he said.

He left the office and asked the boy who'd been minding the cart where the Fejal house was.

'What?' the boy replied.

'The Fejal house.'

The boy looked puzzled, then grinned. 'Oh, right, the Feejle house.' (Poldarn had pronounced it Feyjarl, as Falx Roisin had done.) 'Sorry, but you talk funny. Right, you follow this street till you come to the tannery, then twice left, right, left again by the Virtue's Own Reward, follow that road round, you'll see the old ropewalks on your right-'

'Better still,' Poldarn interrupted, 'you show me and I'll give you another quarter.'

'Sure,' the boy said and hopped up on to the box. 'So,' he said, 'what're you carrying?'

Poldarn realised he didn't know. The load was roped in at the back, covered up with waxed hides and sailcloth. He shrugged. 'You tell me,' he said. 'What do they do at the Fejal house?'

The boy grinned. 'Biggest button-maker this side of the Bohec,' he replied, 'so probably it's either horns or bones. Maybe both. I'll take a look if you want.'

'I'm not bothered,' Poldarn replied.

'Aren't you just a little bit curious?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'For reasons I won't bore you with,' he said, 'I'm not curious about anything any more.' The letter inside his shirt was for someone else, a man called Huic Penseuro, but all he had to do was hand it over to Fejal Nas, along with the stuff in the cart. 'Where's a good place to get something to eat?'

There were, it turned out, two Fejal Nasses, father and son; the father was out, but the son seemed to be expecting the letter and gave him thirty quarters for his trouble. 'Any problems along the way?' he asked.

'Nothing to do with the letter,' Poldarn said. 'Will there be a reply?'

Fejal Nas shook his head. He hadn't opened the letter. 'Just out of interest,' he said, as Poldarn was getting ready to leave, 'but have you been to the Cunier house in Mael Bohec lately?'

It occurred to Poldarn that the sensible reply would be No. 'Yes,' he said. 'Why?'

'Nothing. I just heard Falx Roisin had got a new courier, that's all.'

There was obviously a lot wrong with that answer, and equally obviously Fejal Nas didn't care. 'That's me,' Poldarn said.

'Ah. Well, I expect I'll be seeing you again, then. Safe journey home.'

Obviously more to that than met the eye, he thought, as he waited for the porters to unload the cart, but, as he'd told the boy, he didn't want to know. It was bad enough keeping himself from facing up to the implications of what Eyvind had told him. He'd been carrying that all the way from the place where the fight had happened, making him feel like an ambassador at a special reception held in his honour who can't think of anything except how desperately he needs to take a leak. Sleep, for example; he knew for certain that unless he got himself drunk enough to pass out in a chair or on the floor, he'd lie awake all night desperately not thinking about it, not endlessly turning the various explanations, likely and improbable, over and over in his mind till they'd rubbed sores on the backs of his eyes-raider, traitor, duly authorised negotiator, herald. Every conceivable possibility had flared up in his imagination long before Eyvind had finished talking, the arguments for and against each hypothesis had been analysed, correlated and compared with archived data, debated and voted on, appealed against, decided on by a whole hierarchy of levels of imagination and belief. He felt like the garrison of some small fortress surrounded on all sides by the armies of the greatest power in the world, bombarded by engines, assaulted with rams and ladders, undermined by saps and camouflets, enfiladed by archers from cavaliers and ravelins, invested and breached in every bastion, on the point of arriving at the critical moment when the losses make further defence impossible.

'That's the lot,' the head porter said, putting his hand inside his shirt to wipe the sweat from his neck and shoulder. 'Bloody lumpy stuff,' he added, 'you're not going to tell me that was just bones.'

'You're right,' Poldarn replied with a smile. 'In fact, I'm not going to tell you anything at all. Thanks for your help.'

He didn't quite catch what the head porter called after him as he drove away.

The original plan had been to hang around Liancor for the rest of the day, drinking heavily and eventually winding up in a gutter somewhere, but he had the cart to think of; Falx Roisin would probably forgive him for losing another driver, but he seemed to treat the rolling stock as if they were his own children. He didn't relish the prospect of going back the same way, probably passing the two dead bodies (he had a horrible vision of Eyvind jumping down on the cart from the branches of a low tree, missing his footing and getting crushed to death under the wheels), but he wasn't in the mood for creative navigation. In a vague attempt to keep his mind off the things it wanted to be on, he tried singing, but he only knew one songTwo crows sitting in a tall thin tree, Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree, Two crows sitting in a tall thin tree, And along comes the Dodger and he says, 'That's me.' -and he didn't like it much anyway. Nevertheless, he sang it; and after he'd droned through it a couple of times it occurred to him that before there'd only been one crow. He decided he didn't really want to know where the other one had come from.

He spent the night beside the road, sitting with his legs spread out in front of him and his back against the front wheel, not sleeping. As soon as there was enough light to see by, he set off again, hoping to get across the river early. Fortunately as it turned out, he lost a cotter pin about an hour after sunrise and wasted a lot of time whittling a replacement out of green oak; it was just after midday when he approached the top of the heavily wooded scarp overlooking the Bohec valley, and heard the noise.

At the back of his mind he was surprised, disappointed even, that it didn't jog his memory. Given what he'd pieced together about himself, particularly the most recent evidence, he'd have thought that the sound of a battle in full swing should have been specially evocative to him, possibly enough to crack open the seal. Instead he recognised it for what it was, not because it was familiar, but because there's no other sound on earth like it.

He reined in the horses and sat still for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. Turning round and heading for Liancor as quickly as possible seemed to have a logic to it that was hard to fault. Apart from the matter of his own safety, he had a feeling that he really ought to let them know there was a war on the way. There again, however, his lack of background knowledge made him hesitate. It might well be their war, one they'd started against somebody or other, one that everybody else in the world knew about but him. There was also the possibility that the war was headed for Liancor with the intention of wiping it off the map, in which case being stuck inside the gates might not be a good idea. He could set off across country, maybe, but he had no idea what lay out of sight of the stretch of road he'd travelled along, and he was getting sick and tired of the unknown. That left the option of trying to get round the war somehow and returning to Sansory. Assuming Sansory was still there.

He pulled a face. He might not know what the best choice was, but it certainly wasn't sitting still in the middle of the road a few hundred yards away from a battle. Back in one of the identical streets of Mael Bohec he'd seen a large, ugly statue of a chunky nude female, whose inscription told him that it had been set up to celebrate One Thousand Years Of Peace. What was it like in the empire, he thought, when it was officially at war?

He jumped down from the cart, left the road and picked his way between the trees and brambles, heading for the crest. There was little point even trying to be quiet, with the noise of the battle so close and insistent: shouting, banging, clattering, industrial noises of various kinds. When he'd reached the top of the rise, he poked his head up to see what he could see, and realised his view of the river and the battle was blocked by a clump of young, spindly pines. He found that frustrating (he was curious; he wanted to see what a battle looked like), so, having looked round carefully for any signs of an unfriendly presence in the immediate vicinity and found none, he lowered his head, ducked under a swathe of brambles and shoved and wriggled his way to the foot of a big, bent chestnut tree. As he'd hoped, climbing trees turned out to be one of his many talents; he shinned up the trunk without thinking about how he was doing it, reached the low branches with a certain amount of effort, and found that the middle branches formed a convenient natural ladder. As he hauled himself up to the point where he could see the valley, he dislodged a very big, squat crow-practically put his hand on the bird's feet before he saw it-and nearly fell out of the tree in surprise as it shot out its wings, more than trebling its size, and flopped sullenly into the air, calling him names as it went.

Ah yes, he said to himself, grinning. That'll be the other one.

Then he remembered what he'd come to see: the battle. Most of all, from this height and perspective, it looked untidy, as if a naughty child had deliberately scattered its toys right across the field as a protest against being sent to bed; the black, familiar shapes lying where they'd been dropped, the toy horses, carts, wagons left lying on their sides, knocked over and trodden on and broken by a spoiled child who didn't value what it had been given. It was an affront to all his instincts of good behaviour, this wanton mess and the attitude it implied.

He didn't know, of course, how long the battle had been going on for, but it wasn't too hard to pick up the plot. The opposing sides had drawn up on either side of the river, held position long enough to plant a few flags and standards, and then, for some reason, the army nearest to him had charged down the slope and rushed the ford. They'd got a small part of their forces across by the time their enemy reached the river; but somehow or other the enemy had been able to stop them and retake the ford, cutting off the men who'd already crossed and surrounding them. That hadn't happened all that long ago, to judge by the number who were still standing and the rate at which they were going down; meanwhile, the army on his side of the river was trying rather too hard to retake the ford and rescue them, pouring men into a space where large numbers wouldn't fit, with the result that about a quarter of the men trying to push through were getting shoved out of the way and into the deep water, where the current was doing a reasonable job of flushing them away. The men defending the ford, however, didn't seem to have appreciated the strength of their position; instead of holding still and letting the enemy make trouble for themselves, they were trying to push forward and get ashore on the other side-where, surely, they'd be running the risk of repeating the enemy's mistake. In any event, the battle had lost whatever subtlety and tactical interest it might once have had, and had turned into a nasty, disorganised shoving-match, a confluence of two mistakes. Even from a distance Poldarn could see that the men involved were squashed far too close together to be able to fight. Instead they'd become soft weapons for the men behind them to barge and thrust at the enemy with, a blunt and fragile pike-hedge and shield-wall that reminded Poldarn rather too vividly of the fight between the decrepit old men he'd seen when he first arrived in Sansory. The worst part of it, perhaps, was the fact that the two sides seemed so evenly matched in numbers that he couldn't see how there could be an outcome before both had been decimated; while they were so completely engaged with each other, jammed together like the two carts in Falx Roisin's gate, even if they both agreed to stop fighting immediately it'd take hours of joint effort and a lot of imaginative thinking to get them apart again.

If he'd been hoping that watching a battle might let slip some of his own memories, such as another battle in a river between exactly matched forces, he was disappointed, and the very act of watching like this, when he was nothing to do with either side, struck him as morbid and distasteful, as if he'd climbed up on a roof and poked a hole through the thatch to watch two extremely ugly people making love. It was also, after a while, boring; nothing very much was happening, apart from the stalemate in the ford, and he was starting to feel cramped and uncomfortable on his tree branch. The hell with it, he thought; I've had enough of this, I think I'll leave now.

He gave that some thought. Getting across the river was clearly impossible here. He could try going up-or downstream for a mile or so and looking for somewhere to cross, but downstream he stood a fair chance of running into men who'd been swept away by the river and survived, whereas upstream there was a risk of stumbling into a cavalry squadron sent to outflank the main battle, assuming either party had the brains to think of such a move. Going back to Liancor, on the other hand, looked much more promising. If he was reading this battle correctly, by the time it was over neither side would be in any fit state to sweep down on Liancor and lay it waste, even if that was the intention. The worst that could happen, as far as he was concerned, would be for the army on his side of the river suddenly to break off and pull back, retreating up the road in panic. That didn't seem likely, though, unless something extremely melodramatic and improbable happened, such as divine intervention.

He was two-thirds of the way down the tree, at a point where he was having to wrap his arms round the trunk and sidle down inch by inch towards the next convenient foothold, when he heard shouts and crashing noises disconcertingly close by. There was, of course, no way he could turn round to see what was going on. Unless whoever was making all the noise and fuss was blind, however, it was a cinch that they could see him. At the very least, it was embarrassing.

Or maybe they weren't looking, having other things on their minds. As he reached the foothold, someone screamed and then stopped screaming very abruptly. Then there was a quite distinctive sucking noise, which he couldn't remember having heard before, but guessed was the sound of a long, thin, probably fluted blade being pulled out of flesh. It was at that point that he was stable enough to turn round.

He saw a dozen or so men on foot in a circle around a single horseman; they had short-shafted halberds in their hands and were closing slowly, with the air of skilled tradesmen not about to ruin an important job by rushing it. There was a riderless horse a few yards away, standing calm and patient over a slumped body. The horseman in the middle of the ring was flailing at arm's length with a sword-one of the famous backsabres, to be precise; it was too heavy for him to use one-handed, and his swishes were uncontrolled and weak but still well worth staying clear of in the absence of any pressing reason to get close. The horseman was wearing a velvety red surcoat over some expensive-looking scale armour and a high conical helmet with a noseguard that obscured his face, but the odds were definitely against him and in favour of the halberdiers, who were also colourfully and incongruously dressed in the sort of fabric Poldarn associated with the higher class of textile stalls in the Undergate in Sansory.

Then one of the halberdiers happened to look up and see him as he reached with his toe for the next foothold. He could see the man's face, not that it was anything remarkable, and the man could see his.

'Bloody hell,' the man said, and stepped backwards out of the circle. Not again, Poldarn thought; the man was staring at him, as he swung the halberd single-handed overarm and back, getting ready to throw it javelin fashion. The horseman stopped thrashing about; just for a moment, nobody was paying him any attention.

'It can't be,' one of the halberdiers said, as the halberd left the first man's hand and sailed slowly, spinning, through the air. 'He's dead.' Very nearly true; Poldarn was so mesmerised, so thoroughly sick of the same thing happening, over and over again, that he left ducking to the last moment and was nearly pinned to the tree by his neck. As it was his left foot slipped off the branch and there was an awkward moment when he almost lost his balance. As he was wavering, scrabbling at the bark with the fingernails of his right hand for a grip to steady himself by, he heard someone else shout, 'You three, get after him, we'll deal with-' He didn't hear the rest; it was drowned out by the sound of splintering wood as the branch he was standing on gave way.

Hell of a time to fall out of a tree, so it was just as well he had sharp reflexes and was able to get a hand round a branch on the way down. He wasn't able to hang on long enough to pull himself back up, but at least he managed to make a controlled landing, with only about four feet to drop before his feet touched down. He stumbled immediately-he'd landed on a tree root, which did something painful to his ankle-but managed to shift his weight on to his back foot in time to swing round and face the closest halberdier in some semblance of good order.

Luckily the first man to reach him was the one who'd just thrown away his halberd; he also had a sword, but only a rather vague idea of what to do with it, and in the end he proved more of a help than a threat, since he fell straight backwards as soon as Poldarn made his draw, and the man behind him had to sidestep in order to get out of the way. Unluckily for him, this manoeuvre opened up his left side, giving Poldarn a brief but clear opportunity for a second-rib-level thrust that he didn't neglect. Number Two dropped unhelpfully to his knees, but the speed with which his two colleagues had been killed clearly stunned the third man to such an extent that he stopped dead in his tracks, thereby losing the initiative. Poldarn feinted at him low and left, then, as the halberdier executed a slow and clumsy block, he stepped neatly past him, kicking in the back of his right knee as he went, and sprinted for the spare horse, which was waiting obligingly for him with a vacant expression on its face.

The horseman who'd been the centre of attention a few moments ago must've had enough intelligence to know a good thing when he saw it, because as soon as Poldarn's foot touched the stirrup the ring of halberdiers appeared to collapse in on itself, and he caught a brief glimpse of another horse moving off in the opposite direction just as he'd got control of the reins. He didn't have time to see what happened to the other rider (a halberdier materialised suddenly on his left and had to be kicked hard in the face before he'd go away), but when he looked round again the man was nowhere to be seen.

I know him, Poldarn thought. Tazencius?

Poldarn's own situation was far from ideal, as the only way he could get clear of the soldiers was to ride down the road towards the battle. But it wasn't as if he had a choice (just this once, a choice would've been welcome), so he kicked the horse smartly on and ducked low on to its mane to avoid an overhanging branch. He was congratulating himself on having strolled unscathed out of yet another desperate encounter when two men jumped up at him out of a clump of brambles, waving their arms. The horse shied and reared, and the last thing he remembered seeing was a blurred snap of a dead and rotten tree branch growing larger in front of his eyes at an alarmingly high rate.