K Parker - Memory

Shit, Poldarn thought. Made a right hash of that.

Not the first time, either.

He stepped back, felt his ankle fade and give way, and ended up sprawled on his backside, spine painfully jarred, a mess. Not the first time; I've done this before. Years ago, I killed a kid the same age as this one, in the same way exactly. That's how I knew what he was about to do before he did it; because I was remembering the last time. Precisely the same: the absolute precision of the drill hall (a floor divided into a grid by scored lines deeply engraved in the slate flagstones, each square and each junction lettered and numbered; Father Tutor calling out coordinates and the designation of each stance, ward, cut, move, his eyes shut, the whole duel worked out beforehand for both sides, so that in effect it had already happened before it began-)

(Suppose there's no such thing as learning, or intuition, or skill, or thought. Suppose instead that it's all just memory; suppose that every cut and counter-cut and parry and block is just recollection of the same fight fought out a lifetime ago. Suppose the draw is religion, the sword before and the sword after, because when the hand closes around the hilt, the sword has already been drawn and swung, and the skin cut open. Suppose that nothing is learned-languages, names, skills, facts-only remembered from the last time round, which was nothing more than a memory of the time before that, the same sequence of moves repeated over and over at the instructor's word of command until they're perfect, and that's religion.)

'Bloody hell.' Chiruwa's voice came from directly behind him. 'What did you want to go and do that for?'

Poldarn stood up, pulled his heel out of the squelching mud, and wobbled as though he was drunk.

'Fuck off,' he said. 'He nearly killed me.'

'Nearly killed you? For God's sake, he's just a kid. We're going to be in so much shit-'

'He nearly killed me,' Poldarn repeated. 'Stupid bloody rich bastard, he'd been trained, knew all the moves, straight out of the book. And I did my ankle.'

'You did your ankle? So bloody what? You're a grownup.'

Poldarn shook his head. He couldn't care less what Chiruwa thought, anyway. 'Sword-monk training,' he said. 'You have heard of the sword-monks, haven't you? If it'd been you instead of me, he'd have paunched you like a rabbit.'

'Listen.' Chiruwa was shouting, the clown. 'You don't go killing bloody kids. Not noblemen's sons, anyhow. They'll send soldiers and start burning down villages till they find out who did it. You know how bad this is? We're dead already, that's how bad. Well, don't just stand there, let's get out of here-'

'Just a moment,' Poldarn said. 'The others. Where'd they get to?'

Chiruwa didn't answer; he just shook his head. For a moment Poldarn didn't understand; then he said, 'What, all of them?'

'Except you and me. You ran, you bastard.' Chiruwa suddenly remembered. 'You fucked off and left us, and now they're all dead except you and me.'

Poldarn shrugged. 'I came back, though, didn't I? So what about the soldiers? Where'd they go?'

'Same place as the lads. Fucking hell, this is a shambles. Doing the soldiers was bad enough-you wait till they find out we killed a nobleman's kid. Trust me, you'll wish you'd let the little shit kill you.'

'Maybe I do already,' Poldarn replied. 'But that won't change anything. Do you have any idea who this lot are?'

Chiruwa shook his head. 'Don't want to know, either. The less we know, the less chance there is of giving something away. Not that it matters worth shit; they'll figure out it was us and then they'll hunt us down and kill us slowly. You ever see a man vivisected to death?'

All this negativity was starting to get on Poldarn's nerves. 'Be quiet,' he said, 'and let me think. Now then; if it wasn't us, who was it?'

'But it was us. It was you, you bloodthirsty northern bastard.'

Poldarn managed a smile. 'No, it wasn't,' he said. 'We were never here. But of course they won't believe that, so it'd better have been someone else. Do you understand that?'

Chiruwa nodded sullenly.

'Fine. So who'd do a thing like this? Massacre a whole half-platoon of soldiers, and a dozen harmless foundrymen who just happened to blunder across them at the wrong moment? Suggestions?'

'Well.' Chiruwa was frowning. 'It'd have to be someone really sick and vicious. Feron Amathy?'

Poldarn grinned. 'What about the raiders?' he said. 'Think about it. For all we know, Feron Amathy spent all day today playing pegball with the Emperor-we can't pin it on him unless we know for sure he could've done it. No,' he went on, 'we'll make it the raiders. Everybody knows, they appear out of nowhere and just vanish when they've done. And it's completely their style, killing without reason.'

'Right. So you're an expert on the raiders now, are you?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'I never could understand them, not one little bit. Fortunately, neither does anybody else. All right, how about this? We got separated from our mates here, and when we caught up to them, this is what we found. Dead bodies everywhere, including the kid.' He frowned, then glanced round. 'Tell me something,' he said. 'What does your average raider look like?'

Chiruwa stared at him. 'God knows. Nobody's ever seen one and lived, remember?'

Not entirely true; but that was what people believed, so close enough. 'Precisely,' Poldarn said. 'Now, who around here don't we care about?'

After a short interlude of indecision, Poldarn chose a dead foundryman by the name of Dancuta, mostly because he'd never liked him much. He dragged the body across to the coach and found the cause of death: a simple stab wound, entering under the left armpit, straight to the heart. Fine. Chiruwa held the body still, propped up against the coach wheel, while Poldarn took careful aim and, using the dead kid's very fine and fancy sword, slashed down the dead man's face, slicing off the nose and cutting away the lips and the point of the chin. Nice job, no denying it; the mutilation could easily have been the result of a wild or lucky cut, and those parts of Dancuta's face that had made it possible to tell him apart from a million other tall, fat men were lying in the leaf mould. Next step was to strip off his coat, which was too obviously a cheapie from Falcata market, and his boots. (Ex-army; old, but well looked after. Luckily, they were just Poldarn's size.) The last and most important touch was the best part of all-because Chiruwa was wrong: some things were known about the raiders in the Empire. Shortly before Poldarn had left and gone across the sea to the islands where the raiders lived, the late General Cronan had inflicted on them the only defeat they'd ever suffered. It went without saying that government officers had been over the dead bodies left behind after the disaster, searching them diligently for any sort of clue that might cast light on the mystery of who they were and where they came from; and it was virtually certain, Poldarn was sure, that at least half of those dead bodies would've been wearing the distinctive thick-soled ankle-length horse-hide boots that the raiders brought from home, though Imperial footwear was better, no doubt about it-so much better, in fact, that Poldarn had often thought about getting himself a pair of decent Tulice shoes to replace the boots he'd made for himself at Polden's Forge, back in the old country, and worn ever since.

Trading shoes with a dead man wasn't easy, and it took Poldarn an age to get his old boots onto Dancuta's feet. He managed it in the end, however, and dumped the body face down in the stream. He wiped his hands on a clump of grass before standing up.

'What the fuck do you think you're playing at?' Chiruwa said.

'Needed a new pair of shoes,' Poldarn replied. 'Waste not, want not, after all. Right, that's that. Time to go.'