K Parker: Memory

'Thank you,' Poldarn said, and left.

Three hours' walk, down a muddy, rutted lane in the dark, when he could probably have had a good night's sleep on a soft mattress in the Virtue Triumphant, at the gold-tooth people's expense. He cursed himself as he walked; never did know a good thing when he saw it. It was hard to imagine a sensible person in his situation walking out on a good offer like that. All that had been expected of him in return was sitting still and listening to some stuff about some people he used to know, one of them being himself. He carried on, feeling the mud slopping under his boots. It was a long nine miles, and his own stupidity went with him all the way.

The tragedy of my life, he thought; wherever I go, I take myself with me. And I expect my mother warned me about getting into bad company.

Copis, he thought (and at that moment, the low branch across the road that he knew was around there somewhere smacked him across the face; it probably laughed at him too, behind his back). Why the hell should the worst thing, the most important thing, be that she made a fool of me? All that time, on the road, in that bloody cart; she knew and I didn't. At Deymeson she said she was quietly hating me all the way, under her breath, because she knew who I was and what I'd done. Our kid'll be-what, two, nearly three by now, assuming she didn't strangle it as soon as it was born.

It'd be so much simpler, so much better, if Aciava (his real name? God knows) was lying. Sure, he knew all that stuff about the old country, but maybe a whole lot of people knew that once, in which case he could've found it out easily enough. Poldarn stopped, one foot in a puddle; just because he knows who I am doesn't necessarily mean he's telling me the truth. Think of what the sword-monks did to me, and he even says he's one of them. Probably I was one of them-it'd explain this knack of being able to pull out a sword and kill people. And Aciava said it himself, they had some reason to hate me. So I'd have to be crazy to believe them, wouldn't I?

He remembered an old joke: I wouldn't believe you if you told me my own name.

He shook his head, like a carthorse bothered by flies. It all came down to whether he wanted to know. What could there be in the past that he could conceivably want back? Like the old character-assessment question, what one thing would you save if your house was on fire? It stood to reason, he'd been three years away from his past and there hadn't been any one thing he'd felt the lack of. He could sleep in ditches and eat stale bread and raw meat; the state of his clothes or his boots didn't seem to bother him; luxury and comfort and pleasure weren't worth going back for, he could manage without them just fine. Company, now; in the past three years he'd had two lovers and a friend. Hadn't worked out too well; the lovers he'd lost to the past, but the friend-He remembered what it had felt like, that very short time when he'd been able to do what everybody else back in the old country could do: hear other people's thoughts. It had been while he stood outside the house at Ciartanstead, while Eyvind, his friend, was burning to death inside.

I killed him; and that wasn't the past's fault. That was just some quarrel over some trees.

Indeed; that had been a bad business, and in consequence he'd left the old country and come back here, so as to transfer Eyvind's murder from his present to his past, like a banker moving money from current account to deposit. The past would be useful if you could use it like that, as a place where you could bury dead bodies, shovelling this convenient loss of memory into the grave to cover up their faces. That's not what the past was for, though. It was where the present went to rot down, so you could use it to grow the future.

He smiled; nice piece of imagery, but it was too glib to fool anyone.

What harm could it do? After all, just because I know about the past doesn't mean I've got to go back there. And besides, it'll make it easier to avoid the bad stuff if I know what I'm avoiding.

That made Poldarn wonder if there was a little tiny lawyer lurking maggot-like deep inside his brain. It was a specious argument, designed to lure him into a trap. Yes, but.

Yes, but if I'd known then what I know now, Copis couldn't have played that dirty trick on me. And what about the sword-monks at Deymeson? If I find out about my past, they won't find it so easy the next time.

Assuming this isn't the next time.

Big assumption, given that the source of the information appeared to be a sword-monk. If he was going to believe anything one of them told him ever again, he might as well go the whole hog, shave his scalp and have the word IDIOT tattooed on it in bright purple letters. Except, of course-what if they were the only people who knew the truth and could tell him? In that case, better not to know?

Clearly, he told himself, there are arguments on both sides, like an ambush in a narrow pass. Now, if he wanted something really scary to occupy his mind with, how about the ease with which this joker had found him? He hadn't come to this godforsaken place because he liked mud and fog, or because he'd always wanted to be a bell-founder when he grew up. If someone could find him here Assuming anybody wanted to; anybody else, apart from the incredibly annoying man who claimed his name was Aciava; who apparently wanted him for something, and had been prepared to tell him what it was (assuming he hadn't been lying) Fine. Poldarn's head was spinning, and he hadn't even stopped long enough to drink much of the free beer. Which was another way of saying the same thing. He was going to be miserable anyway, so why not have something tangible to be miserable about?

Stupid line of reasoning; stupid, like the very rich merchants in Falcata, who took crucial business decisions on the basis of the phases of the moon, and whether Saturn was in the fifth house. Stupid; but the answers thereby derived must've been right, or the merchants wouldn't have ended up very rich.

Did it really matter that Copis had made a fool of him, after all? Arguably, he'd had the last laugh, if the man had been telling the truth; he'd got her into bed in the end, hadn't he, just like he'd always wanted. No wonder she'd wanted to kill him, come to think of it.

(It was all a bit like his name, assuming it was his name. First he'd been a god. Then he was called after a roof-tile. Then it turned out the roof-tile was named after the god. And now it turned out it really was his name-called after the god, who'd probably been called after the roof-tile in the first place. Is that where gods come from, he wondered?)

Or he could carry on as he was (assuming they didn't burst in and drag him away if he wouldn't come quietly). He could stay here, in flat, wet, foggy, horrible Tulice, living in a turf house and working in the foundry. A lot of people lived in Tulice, in turf houses, working in foundries; and as far as he could tell, most of them seemed to get away with it, without ever being recognised or discovered or ambushed by their past lives. It couldn't be difficult, if they could manage it. Old joke: if a Tulicer can do it, so can a small rock. So, if they could do it, so could he.

Or maybe the bastard was lying to him. Ready-made pasts had to be on the list of things you weren't supposed to accept from strangers. Not without Ah, Poldarn thought (and there was a faint, thin yellow light in the distance, the lantern burning outside the foundry gates), that's the word I've been searching for. Not without proof.

(-Assuming Aciava has any, and that he hasn't been so offended that he gets on the dawn mail-coach and buggers off back where he came from before I can ask him. Assuming I'm going to ask him. Come to think of it, the whole of our world is made up of assumings, like chalk is the bones of billions of small dead fish.)