Выбрать главу

'Please yourself. Your voice sounds a little bit familiar, that's all.'

'Yours, too, come to that.' Poldarn frowned. This wasn't helping, and he could feel Eyvind frowning at him. 'Answer the damn question,' he said. 'Who are these people?'

There was a brief silence, then the voice said, 'The medium tall one in the middle is General Cronan.' Two of the troopers twitched, as if they'd been meaning to have a go at rushing the cart, and their nerve had failed at the last moment. 'I don't know the names of the other three, but they're senior staff officers. Congratulations, whoever you are, you've thrown a double nine. I think that means you get a free go.'

Poldarn assumed he knew what that meant. 'What about you?' he said.

'If you must know,' the voice said, 'I'm a monk of the abbey of Deymeson. Possibly even the last one, I don't know; not that it matters, I'll be dead fairly soon.'

'All right,' Poldarn said. 'So why should I believe you're telling the truth?'

'You can if you like; I suppose it's like religion, a matter of faith. But if you want to know why I'm betraying the general, truth is I'm following orders. The abbot sent me to kill him, you see. Well, I haven't had the chance up till now.'

The man who was supposed to be General Cronan turned his head and swore at the man in the cart; one of us stepped forward and punched the back of his head, dropping him sprawled on the ground.

'Wouldn't have been right before the battle, anyhow,' the voice called Monach went on. 'We needed him, you see, to deal with you. But he's done that now.' The voice sounded very tired, but it was still clear and audible. 'Don't suppose any of this'll mean anything to you, but I'd like to tell someone how clever I've been. You want me to explain?'

'If you like,' Poldarn replied.

'How gracious of you. Right, then. I needed Cronan to beat you, because nobody else could and you had to be stopped. But now he's done that, he's definitely got to be killed; the only man to fight and defeat the raiders, that makes him the most terrible threat to the safety of the empire. He'd only have to say the word, and the whole imperial army would go over to him without a moment's hesitation. So we take him out of the picture, who does that leave? Tazencius is a nonentity, nobody's going to trust Feron Amathy; the government troops have fallen back on Sansory, which means the Amathy house can't sack it like they were planning to do. It's all turned out pretty well, if you ask me.'

Poldarn wasn't sure if any of that made sense, but it was none of his business anyhow. He turned his head in the direction that Eyvind's voice had come from. 'This is a slice of luck,' he said in our language. 'Seems like we've tripped over the enemy general, the one responsible for what happened. The other three are his advisers, and the man in the cart's a traitor. I think he's telling the truth.'

'Dear God,' Eyvind said. 'Well, things are looking up. What do you want to do with the traitor?'

Poldarn considered the matter. 'He reckons he's going to die anyway,' he said. 'Leave him be, I would.'

'Why not?' Eyvind replied, and while he was still speaking a backsabre chewed through General Cronan's neck. The sound carried a long way in the dark. One of the other staff officers tried to say something, but he wasn't fast enough. All the rest of them died in silence.

'Thank you,' said the voice from the cart. 'It's just like they said, everybody who rides with me gets killed, sooner or later. The unsettling thing is, what if I've averted the end of the world? I don't think I was supposed to do that.'

For some reason Poldarn knew it was safe to enter the circle now. He walked up to the cart and peered in. There was just enough light to see the man's face.

'Excuse me,' Poldarn said, 'but does the name Poldarn mean anything to you?'

The man looked back at him. 'Are you trying to be funny?' he said; then his face crumpled up with pain, and he passed out.

Chapter Twenty-Six

It was a long walk to the ships. Shortly after the first dawn they reached the Mahec, which made navigation extremely simple but increased the risk of detection by enemy cavalry. A few days before, of course, they'd have regarded a chance encounter with the enemy as an opportunity rather than a threat, but attitudes had changed. The main thing now was to get home quickly and safely, without further loss.

'I don't suppose I understand these people any more than you do,' Poldarn said, as they followed the riverbank on the second afternoon. The man he was talking to (he hadn't caught his name) shook his head and smiled, but he persisted. 'No, really,' he said, 'you've got to bear in mind, when I woke up I couldn't remember anything. I've been learning about these people from scratch, just like you.'

The man clicked his tongue. 'There's a difference, for a start,' he said. 'We don't want to learn about them, at least not more than we need to know so we can beat shit out of them. I mean, why bother? It'd be like learning to speak sheep.'

Poldarn let that go by. 'My guess is, though,' he went on, 'they aren't going to bother us any more; I mean, why the hell should they? They'd have to be crazy. They've beaten us once and we're going home. If they fight us again, there's a good chance they'll lose, now they haven't got their military genius any more, and that's the advantage they've gained gone for ever.'

The man wasn't convinced. 'You're assuming they're smart,' he said. 'You can get in a lot of trouble making assumptions like that. No, it's just as likely that they're too dumb to figure out what you just said, and they'll come after us to try and score another victory. Whoever their new commander is, won't he want to prove he's every bit as good as the dead guy?'

Poldarn had to admit that was quite likely from what he'd gathered about the way the empire's mind worked. 'Still,' he went on, 'if they do attack, we'll be ready for them. Last time they only won because they'd had time to plant those damn caltrops.'

His foot didn't hurt nearly as much as it had the previous day, which in turn had been an improvement on the first night. He'd had help, of course; men he didn't know but who seemed to know who he was had taken it in turns to lend him a shoulder; that, combined with the unrelenting pace of the march, had turned the whole business into some kind of deadly serious three-legged race. His arm was a different matter, unfortunately. Someone who seemed to know about such things had announced that the wound had gone bad. He'd known the cure, of course-seven different kinds of poultice, all involving garlic and bread mould, neither of which was available in the middle of nowhere, with the enemy possibly hot on their trail. 'You'll probably be all right, even so,' the man had told him, 'it'll just take longer, that's all.' He'd got the impression the man was trying to be positive rather than tiresomely accurate.

On the third evening they reached a village. For once news of their approach had preceded them, and the place was deserted. All traces of food had been cleared out of the houses, but they found apples on the trees in a big orchard, and several plots of leeks and onions more or less ready to be pulled. That was just as well; they'd had precious little to eat since the battle, though nobody had actually gone hungry. A dog followed them down the street as they left, wagging its tail but keeping a good twenty-five yards clear at all times. Poldarn noticed it, and for some reason realised that he hadn't seen a crow for days, and not many birds of any kind.

On the fourth day he was able to walk on his own, though Halder and Raffen took it in turns to walk on his lame side, keeping perfect step, in case he stumbled. Raffen didn't say anything, but Halder told him more about the farm; how he'd found the site himself when he was twelve, moved there when he was sixteen and built his first house, floating the timbers down the combe stream one at a time. His father had a fine place a day's walk to the east, he explained, but he'd never been comfortable at home; he had three elder brothers and he wanted somewhere of his own, so one day he followed the river until he came to the place where the house now stood. It was a hot day and he felt thirsty, so he lay down to drink. Somehow, when he stood up again, he knew that here was the place he was meant to be. He wasted the rest of the day walking the valley and the combe, and spent the night lying on his back beside the watersmeet, trying to count the stars. He woke up soaked with dew, and by the time he reached home he was running a bad fever that nearly killed him, but as soon as he was fit to be out again he took his father and brothers to see the place and formally laid a claim by raising a stone and cutting his name on it. When his father died, his brothers and their people helped him raise the house, gave him his share of the flock, the herd and the seedcorn, and left him to it. That suited him fine. The next time he left the farm, except to borrow tools or scrounge for iron, was three years later, when he walked down the river for two days to Gynnersford, where he'd been told they had a spare daughter. Her name was Rannway, and some useful stock and a serviceable cart came with her. Their son, Tursten, was born a year later. The day after he was born Halder started planting a pine copse on the rise opposite the farm, the idea being that by the time Tursten was old enough to want a house of his own the trees would be the right age for felling and logging; the copse was called Tursten's Wood, and it was still there, since Tursten never showed the slightest inclination to get married or leave the main house. Nobody had ever got round to thinning the trees out, so they'd grown tall and spindly; there was a rookery on the southern edge, and the birds had an aggravating habit of pitching in when the men fed the calves and robbing the feed from under their noses.