Memory (46 page)

As their circles collided, he drew and so did she.

There was a moment during which time was the circular room in which the examination was taking place. In the middle of the room he stood facing her: at his back was the past – Elaos, Cordo, Gain, the Earwig, the rest of his year, Father Tutor and the two external examiners, draped in heavy black robes like a crow's plumage; behind her was the future, but she was standing in the way and he couldn't see it clearly. But he saw her hand slip down onto the sword hilt, saw the blade sliding smoothly out over her sash, rising to meet him, until its bevelled side collided with its mirror image, his own sword, like the reflection of a face in a still, shallow pool.

There are no moments in religion; no present, only past and future waging war over a disputed frontier. As her hand dropped to her waist, he saw both of them draw, and then the blades smacked together, flat on flat.

A voice inside his head was telling him what to do; and he knew it was his own voice, calling to him from across the border, where he'd already watched the fight and knew what had happened. The voice directed his moves as he cut, parried, lunged, sidestepped –
you tried a cut to her right temple but she anticipated and cut to your left knee
– so he moved across and back as he slashed at her head, and when her counter-attack came, his knee wasn't there any more;
and then you tried a draw-cut across the inside of her elbow, but at the last moment you pulled it and turned it into a jab to her throat, but she dodged back and feinted at your chin, you fell for that and she swung at your wrist
, so he dropped his wrist as he jabbed and her cut missed him by the thickness of a leaf.
And then she recovered before you did and tried for a lunge straight at your neck
—

He opened his eyes, but it was still dark. Something was pricking his throat.

‘Easy,' said a voice behind and above him, very softly. ‘Perfectly still or you'll do yourself a mischief.'

(But that wasn't right; because he'd woken up, so Xipho should've been left behind, in the dream. Or had she stayed behind just a moment too long, and the dream had left without her?)

‘Now then,' Copis's voice whispered, ‘nice and slow, I want you to stand up. I will kill you if you try anything.'

(But that was wrong too, because he remembered that term-end duel as if it had only finished a minute ago. She'd lunged at his neck, actually pricked him and drawn a single tiny drop of blood; but he'd expected it, that was the bait in his trap, and a split second later he'd kicked her legs out from under her and ended the fight, the first ever bloodless victory in a sixth-grade year-end duel in Deymeson's history—)

He did as he was told. The violation of his circle told him she was shifting, sidestepping carefully round him like a cat walking along the top of a door. The pressure behind whatever it was that was pricking his throat remained perfectly constant, very nearly hard enough to pierce the skin but not
quite
. You had to admire the control.

‘Walk forward,' the voice went on. ‘Keep going till I say stop. Then turn sixty degrees left.'

Once he'd performed the manoeuvre, the pressure lightened a little, enough so that he wouldn't kill himself if he moved his throat muscles sufficiently to speak. ‘Are you going to kill me?' he asked. No answer. He carried on walking, one slow step at a time.

Fifteen paces; and then Copis's voice said, ‘Not yet. Not unless you make me, like by stopping unexpectedly or turning round. Keep going.'

By his reckoning, another two dozen paces would take him outside the circle of firelight, out of the clearing where they'd pitched tents for the night, and back into the forest. If he tripped along the way – too many tree roots and fallen branches for blind dead reckoning – the sharp thing pressing into his neck would be the death of him. All the more reason, then, to go nice and steady.

His eyes were getting used to the dark, which meant he could make out the larger obstacles under his feet (a big brown and grey flint, a fungus-covered tree trunk, a single deep rut in the path). ‘Copis,' he said, statement rather than question. ‘Is that you?'

‘Yes.'

At the edge of the clearing, just as he'd anticipated, the pricking under his chin stopped. But his spy from the future had either gone off duty or looked the other way, because he wasn't expecting the bash on the back of his head with something thick and heavy—

He woke up and opened his eyes.

He wasn't quite sure what he'd been expecting to see, being uncertain whether the episode where he'd felt a knife at his throat and thought he'd heard Copis's voice was just a coda to the dream about some school fencing-match, or whether it had actually happened. In the event, what he saw was a man standing over him, holding a spear.

(Another dream? Eyvind had stood over him with a spear, that time when he turned them all out of Ciartanstead. And there were crows, two of them, sitting in the high branches of a rowan tree on his right—)

‘Quiet,' the man said, and he definitely wasn't Eyvind. Who he was Poldarn had no idea, but he looked vaguely military – boots, long tatty coat over a mail shirt. ‘Don't try shouting for your mates or I'll skewer you.'

They're no friends of mine, I haven't got any friends . . . He nodded instead. Above the canopy of leaves and branches he could see the pale blue of dawn. Whoever this man was, he wasn't alone, and the people with him were about to kill the sergeant and the rest of Poldarn's escort. He wished that didn't have to happen, but presumably it was necessary – for all he knew, the man with the spear and his colleagues might be the good guys. He wanted to ask if Copis had really been there, but he decided not to.

After what seemed like a very long time, the snap of a twig told him that someone was coming, someone who didn't care if the man with the spear heard him. ‘All right?' the man called out without taking his eyes off Poldarn's face.

‘Job done,' someone replied, sounding weary.

‘Get them all?' the spearman asked.

‘Think so.'

The spearman frowned. ‘Did you or didn't you? How many?'

‘Fourteen.'

(Poldarn tried to remember how many there'd been in the party, but he'd never counted them. It wasn't something you did when you met new people, count them so you'd know later if they'd all been killed.)

But the spearman seemed relieved. ‘Right,' he said. ‘You, on your feet. Easy,' he added, quite unnecessarily; Poldarn knew the drill by this stage without having to be told.

His legs felt weak and cramped, and his head (he noticed) was hurting a lot. Men had appeared out of the darkness, scaring the crows away. They were also wearing greatcoats over mail shirts; but they were altogether too scruffy to be regular army, not like the neatly modular units that had made up Brigadier Muno's command at Dui Chirra. So: not government soldiers, definitely not raiders. Of the armed forces he knew to be operating in these parts, that meant they were either the Mad Monk's outfit, or the Amathy house.

Someone he couldn't see grabbed his hands, pulled them behind his back and tied them tightly with rope. A shove in the small of his back suggested that he should start walking; at the same time, the spearman turned his back and moved on ahead, leading the way. Absolutely no point whatsoever asking where they were taking him.

At some point, someone in front of him started to sing – quietly, badly, maybe without even realising that he was doing it. He sang:

When they stopped walking, the sun was directly overhead, call it seven hours at a fairly slow march, so something the order of fifteen miles (but since he had no idea where he'd started from and hadn't recognised any of the places they'd been, meaningless). A hand on his shoulder pushed him down on his knees; the rest of the party sat down. Some of them took off their boots and shook out grit and small stones, or gulped water from canteens (didn't offer him any; hadn't expected them to). It was dry underfoot, soft leaf mould. They'd been following a shallow path, wider than a deer track, narrower than a cart road and not rutted up by the passage of wheels or horses. Someone seemed to know where they were supposed to be going. This time, he made a point of counting them: twenty-eight.

He was probably going to get thumped for asking, but it was worth a try. ‘Excuse me,' he said to nobody in particular, ‘but who are you?'

Silence, lasting long enough that he was on the point of repeating the question. Then someone said, ‘Fuck me, it's true.'

The man who'd spoken shifted round to face him. ‘It's true, isn't it?' he said. ‘You don't know who we are. Do you?'

‘No,' Poldarn said.

‘Amazing.' The man grinned. ‘He doesn't know.'

‘I lost my memory, a year or so back,' Poldarn ventured. ‘A few bits and pieces have come back since then, but I'm afraid I don't remember any of you.' He tried for an educated guess. ‘Are you the Amathy house?'

Someone thought that was highly amusing. ‘Wouldn't have credited it,' someone said. ‘I mean, you hear about stuff like that, people get a bash on the head and they can't remember their own names, but – well, it's a bit bloody far-fetched.'

‘Unless it's just an act,' someone else said.

‘On your feet,' the spearman announced abruptly, and they all stood up. Poldarn did the same, and nobody seemed to mind. The spearman led the way, as before. It was nearly dark by the time they stopped again.

At least they had food with them: small round barley cakes, stale and hard as crab shells, and cheese you could've used to wedge axe heads. As an afterthought, when they'd all eaten something and complained about how revolting it was, someone got up and brought Poldarn two of the cakes – no cheese, Poldarn rationalised, because if it was as hard as they said it was, he might've used the edge to saw through his ropes. The man laid the two cakes on a flat stone a couple of feet away from where Poldarn was sitting, then used another stone to smash them into fragments. Then he went back to his place. After sitting for a while staring at the bits of cake shrapnel, Poldarn shuffled forward, leaned down from the waist and gobbled up a mouthful like a dog feeding from a bowl. His escort found this performance mildly entertaining, which was more than could be said for the cakes.

‘Better give him something to drink as well,' he heard someone say, as he bent down for another mouthful. ‘Don't want him croaking on us, when all's said and done.'

So someone brought him a canteen and allowed him four swallows of warm, muddy-tasting water. Poldarn said thank you very politely; the man didn't seem to hear.

They were talking quietly among themselves now, keeping their voices down, and Poldarn could only make out a few unenlightening words, though at least one of them mentioned Falcata, Dui Chirra and Brigadier Muno. Then someone said something that the rest appeared to find extremely funny, and one of them got up and sat down next to Poldarn, six inches or so outside his circle.

‘Straight up,' he said. ‘Is that right, you really can't remember back past a year or so?'

‘Yes,' Poldarn replied.

The man turned to smile over his shoulder at his mates; he was medium height, unusually broad across the shoulders, with a grey stubble of hair sprouting on his shaved head. He had burn scars on his left cheek, old and probably as close to being healed as they were ever going to get. ‘So,' he went on, ‘you're telling me you don't know who
I
am, either.'

Poldarn looked at him. ‘We've met before?'

Everyone, the burned man included, burst out laughing. Poldarn waited for them to stop, then said: ‘I guess that means you know me.'

‘You could say that,' the burned man answered, grinning.

‘Don't suppose you'd care to—'

‘No.'

Well, he'd expected as much; he'd already got the impression that they didn't seem very well disposed towards him. ‘Do you know a man called Gain Aciava?' he asked.

This time the burned man looked blank. He shook his head.

‘Xipho Dorunoxy? Copis?'

‘Doesn't ring any bells. All right, my turn,' the burned man said. ‘How about Dorf Bofor? Recognise the name? Sergeant Dorf Bofor?'

Poldarn shook his head slowly. ‘Doesn't mean anything to me, I'm afraid. Sorry, is that your name?'

This time, everyone laughed except the burned man, who looked as if he was about to kick Poldarn in the face. ‘No, it bloody well isn't,' he replied. ‘But I got this here'– and he pointed to the burn – ‘fishing you out of a burning library when you went back in after him, the useless fat bastard; and there's others, good friends of mine, died that day because of you wanting to be a fucking hero. And you don't remember that.'

‘No,' Poldarn replied and braced himself for the attack; it was a kick aimed at his chin, but the burned man missed and connected with his collarbone instead. On balance, the chin would've been better. ‘I'm very sorry,' he said, as soon as he could speak again. ‘But I can't remember anything, not for certain, and that's just a fact. There's no malice in it.'

‘Yeah, right,' the burned man said. ‘No malice. Coming from you, that's a bloody laugh.'

Going to get kicked again, but that can't be helped. ‘What did I do?' he asked.

The laughter had an edge to it this time. ‘What did you do?' the burned man repeated. ‘You want to know, then.'

‘Yes.'

‘
Sorry
,' the burned man said with mock contrition, ‘but we only got till dawn; what's that, ten hours?' A small ripple of brittle laughter. ‘Couldn't tell you the half of it in ten hours.'