Now here he was, in Torcea, in Tazencius's house; and killing Tazencius was no longer even a daydream. Instead, apparently, he'd come home. Maybe that was because, having run out of people to lie to, he'd had a go at lying to himself, and failed; at which point, somehow, inexplicably, the game was over.
So: what am I going to do now?
That was an even harder question. He had no idea what the answer might be. What he wanted to do was escape, yet again; but he'd finally been forced to come to terms with the fact that he was the King of the Snails, that whenever he tried to run away, he had no choice but to take his home with him.
So: eventually, after enduring unspeakable hardships and battling overwhelming odds, here he was, and he had no idea what he wanted to do next. Absurd; because an easier man to please didn't draw breath. How absurdly happy he could've been, digging mud at Dui Chirra or staring into the colliers' fire at the charcoal camp, or mindlessly following the pattern of chores assigned to him before he'd even been born, if only he'd been a fieldhand's son at Haldersness rather than the heir apparent. Instead, here he was: an expensive but obsolete piece of equipment, hung up in the rafters because nobody had any use for it any more. He didn't even have a use for himself. The only person who wanted him, apparently, was his wife, Tazencius's daughter, and she only wanted him as an ornament or curio.
A dog running through a cornfield with a burning torch tied to its tail. Was the dog to blame, or the man who made and attached the torch? Was it really possible that all the false, forged prophecies had actually come true, out of spite, and that he genuinely was Poldarn, the god in the cart? He grinned; he could dismiss that one out of hand, because gods didn't exist. Poldarn, he knew for a fact (because Copis had told him, or someone else), was an unmitigated fraud, invented by greedy monks to boost offertory revenues. Unless, of course, he'd created the god himself without even meaning to, like a careless sorcerer accidentally summoning the wrong demon.
He thought: The crows are beginning to arrive, because someone's set out a convincing pattern of decoys. Now that was fair comment; he'd been tricked and beguiled here just like the thousands of birds he'd drawn into his killing zones, back in the fields at Haldersness. He'd come expecting to kill, and now What makes a good decoy? Why, familiarity, which itself is born of memory. The crows see what look like a mob of their own kind pitched among the pea-vines. But there the comparison ended. Whatever had drawn him down here, it wasn't the search for his own memories. He'd been trying to run away from them all along.
Even so; they were starting to arrive, wheeling and turning in to the wind, gliding and dropping into the killing zone, all the old crows from the song. The question was: had he come here drawn by the decoys, or was he the pathfinding scout, leading the rest of the flock? What if (What if there was a traitor in the flock-one crow who deliberately led the rest down onto the decoys, into the killing zone? There never could be such a creature, of course, since all crows shared the same mind, just like the Haldersness people. But what if a crow lost its memory, mislaid its share of the group mind; and, while its mind was empty, was persuaded or tricked into turning traitor? What if one crow led the others down onto the bean field, and it turned out to be the cinder bed of a volcano, or the decoy pattern of the boy with the bucket full of small stones? Would that, he wondered, meet the criteria for a moment of religion?)
What if they were all still lying, he wondered; what if Noja, who apparently was his wife Lysalis, mother of his son, the youth whom he'd killed in ignorance on the road in Tulice while moonlighting as a scavenger; what if she'd decoyed him here to be killed, because Tazencius hated him, or because he was the most evil man in the world?
Like it mattered. The truth was, he'd reached the moment of religion where the outcome is no longer important, only the state preceding it-because what we practise is the draw; the death of the man drawn against is an incidental, because the man is different every time. Only the draw can be perfect, since it's capable of infinite repetition, each time exactly the same. He'd reached just such a perfect moment, where there was no longer anything he wanted-not to kill or be killed, not to stay or escape; no material things had any attraction for him, and all people were now the same to him, friends and enemies and lovers and family. In this moment, every individual thing and person had blended together into a great, undistinguished flock, all colourless (the black of a crow's wing is the absence of colour), all sharing the same mind, face, memory. It was the moment when all the wonderful things made by men's hands are broken up and loaded into the furnace to be purged by the fire into a melt. If they killed him, how could it possibly matter? Nothing unique would die with him, since he had no memories of his own. The scouts drop in on the decoys and die, and the rest of the flock takes note and goes elsewhere to feed. How sensible.
He sat up, walked to the window and drew the curtains; light flooded the room, scattering the shadows like startled crows. It was probably about time to leave for the dinner party.
I don't have anything I brought with me any more; all my clothes are new, my boots, everything. I could be anybody at all. But I'm not.
At least there was one thing-the backsabre he'd made with his own hands, the unique mark of his people, unmistakable anywhere. She'd given it back to him-the gods only knew how she'd got her hands on it, but she had a knack for finding things-and he'd hidden it away under the bed, just in case. He knelt down and fumbled for it. Of course, it wasn't there any more.
Not that it mattered.
'Feron Amathy isn't coming,' Poldarn overheard someone say. 'He got held up, is the official report; but there's a rumour going around that he's dead. Met with an accident, so to speak.'
He looked round, but it was hard to match words to speakers in this mob: dozens of people pressed in tight together, wearing identically fashionable clothes, all with the same well-bred voices, all saying more or less the same sorts of thing. Like monks, or soldiers, or black-winged birds gathered on a battlefield to feast.
'Sure,' said another voice. 'That'll be the fifteenth time this year. Listen: you couldn't kill Feron Amathy if you threw him down a well and filled it up with snakes.'
Poldarn wouldn't have minded hearing a bit more of this conversation; but people were moving, shuffling out of the way to make room, and they'd suddenly gone quiet. Tazencius? Poldarn wondered; but it wasn't that sort of silence. More shock, disgust and then pained forbearance. It didn't take much imagination to deduce that the Amathy house had just come to dinner.
They didn't horrify him particularly. Mostly they were just working men dressed in rich men's clothes, and they'd had their hair cut and their fingernails cleaned. They didn't seem in any hurry to mingle with the home side; instead, they hung back in a mob near the huge double doors. Quite likely standard procedure for a peace conference, if that was what this was.
Noja, or Lysalis, arrived, looking older and smaller than before. She smiled thinly at him through the gap between some people, but didn't join him. Apart from her, there was nobody there he knew, and that was more a comfort than otherwise.
After what seemed like a long time, someone opened another pair of huge doors, and the flock headed through them without having to be told (like mealtimes at Haldersness). Poldarn followed them into a long, high-roofed dining hall, where someone he didn't know tapped him discreetly on the arm and led him up the side to the top table, in the middle of which stood a wonderfully lifelike ebony statue of a crow with a ring in its beak. That was odd, because he was quite certain he wasn't dreaming; maybe the crow was a scout that had pitched there earlier to see if it was safe for the rest of the flock to feed. Opposite the statue sat Tazencius, quietly dressed for an emperor; Lysalis was sitting next to him, and on his other side was the broad-shouldered snub-nosed man whom Poldarn thought of as Cleapho, though at school his name had apparently been Cordomine. The table was covered with broad silver dishes and jugs. Poldarn was led to a seat down at the end, between two of the home team, both alarming in red velvet and seed pearls. Neither of them seemed to realise he was there, which was probably a blessing.