K Parker - Memory

There had been six of them; the Crow's Head Gang, named after the crumbled, slapdash carved stone corbel that looked down over their stall in the chapter house at Deymeson, where they'd stood patiently shivering and bored through countless assemblies, chapters, lectures, liturgies. Elaos Tanwar, born leader, prime mover, inspiration and guiding spirit, long since incontrovertibly dead, for what little that seemed to be worth nowadays. Xipho Dorunoxy, born second-in-command, always the cleverest, always the most sensible, the most patient, the one who stopped the rest of them fighting among themselves, the one who'd somehow got it into her head that the Gang mattered, that it was about something other than breaking rules and relieving boredom. Ciartan-always had been a nasty piece of work, but he'd had other qualities then: a narrow and rigid loyalty, courage, a reckless disregard for risk and danger, an evil bastard but their evil bastard, even more terrifying to outsiders than he was to the other members of the Gang. Cordomine: always there, never left out, never missed a council of war or a staff meeting, always knew what was going on, what the opposition was up to (the faculty, the groundsmen and domestics, the other gangs; how he knew they never found out, never asked); always thinking long thoughts, cherishing grudges, exploiting little cracks and rifts, always listening, never a wasted word; always top at Expediences, and Doctrine too, for some bizarre reason. Gain Aciava, Cordomine's self-appointed henchman: at times no more than an associate member, and then suddenly he'd be in the thick of it, master of alternatives, the eternal custodian of Plan B; always talking, never saying anything unless he wanted to-and in the end he'd proved to be something rather more than Cordomine's shadow, an extension of his friend's mind; more and worse; and of course, it was Gain who brought Ciartan to Deymeson, having found him wandering in the wilderness, like some prophet in scripture. It'd be nice, Monach thought, if he'd seen the last of Gain Aciava, but he wasn't at all sure about that. Himself the seventh; and of all seven, the one he knew least about and had the most trouble labelling and pigeonholing. At the time he'd have said: always the most reasonable, always the most boringly sincere, the one whose homework the others copied, not because he was the best but because he always did the work. The most stolid, reliable, prosaic; Father Tutor's pet, the one who wanted to do well at lessons, the one who actually cared about religion and stuff. That had been then, of course; and it was notoriously hard to form a clear view of history while it was actually going on. To the above, he could also add, always the most marginal, the least important, the least valued, always the one picked last for the team, always the one they had to remember not to leave out. Since then he'd always believed: the last one left, the only survivor-until Xipho had turned up, popping up out of the ruins of Deymeson and shattering what little peace of mind he had left by announcing that she'd been the priestess of the god in the cart he'd been vainly chasing after, while the world had been getting ready to end all around him. Then, in the same breath, bloody Ciartan; he was still around, and worse still, at some point in the intervening years he'd somehow become the most important (Ciartan, always the least likely to succeed), until suddenly he'd lost it all in the muddy fringes of some river, surrounded by dead bodies and crows (He remembered; it was Ciartan, of course, who'd come up with the gang's name. Who else?)

And now Cordo, materialising out of the darkness like a fairytale goblin, bashing heads and abducting princesses (unless she'd gone willingly; unless she'd been waiting for him; maybe she'd been the one who hit him, not Cordo-); and he'd asked after Gain, implying that he was still out there somewhere, still hovering and listening and cooking up little plots. Still the same old gang, out to cause mischief, insisting that he join in but not bothering to tell him what it was all about-And his one triumph, his late achievement; it had almost made up for the trashing of Deymeson and the death of the order. Finally, at the end, it'd been him, the runt of the litter, who'd scooped the pool (by right of survivorship only, he'd freely admitted that) and got what the other five never managed: he'd got Xipho. Sure, she'd been with Ciartan, she'd had his child, even named the little brat after him, but that had all been in the line of duty, yet another intolerable burden she'd borne for the sake of the order; but (she'd told him, beetroot red with embarrassment and shame) actually, always, it had been him she'd loved, right from the start, only she'd never given in to it for the sake of the gang, knowing that if she did it'd be the end of them, splitting them up, driving them apart (as if that'd have mattered; after all, it was only an informal student's club, a trivial thing…) Until at the end, in the ashes and rubble Had she told Ciartan the same sort of lies? No, of course not, because he'd lost his memory; she'd have had to think up some different lies for him. So, what about Cordo? Had she loved him and him only, all along, too?

As if it mattered, Monach told himself. Far more important issues to be dealt with here-an army to command, lives at stake, all these poor fools depending on him, following him to the ends of the earth, his people. (And you could ask two dozen of them exactly why were they following him, to achieve what ultimate purpose, and get maybe one sensible answer-if you were lucky.)

And then it got worse.

The fact that he'd been expecting it didn't help terribly much. All the way up that terrifying chimney of hedges and high banks he'd been waiting for the moment when armed men would start pouring down on him, like burning lava from a volcano. Of course, it happened only when he'd eventually stopped watching the sides of the road and allowed his attention to wander. Worse still, they attacked when the army was at its most vulnerable, straddled across a deep, fast ford.

It began with rocks and stones; then a fat old chestnut tree yawned and flopped across the track, so closely following Monach's worst-case scenario that for a moment he almost believed he was remembering something that had already happened. The attackers gushed out of the dense cover behind and on both flanks like sea water flooding a holed ship.

No room, Monach acknowledged hopelessly; no room to turn the carts to form defensible redoubts, which was about the only worthwhile trick he and his officers knew. Without that slim advantage, Monach's army quickly resolved itself into what it had really been all along: a loose and unreliable confederation of poorly motivated individuals. As if that wasn't bad enough, he realised that he hadn't got a clue who these predictable but horribly efficient enemies were. Not regular army, not raiders, not rustic levies. Amathy house? Didn't matter. No time to bother with trivia, such as who precisely was killing his people, let alone why.

Clarity; give me clarity, or else let me die quickly and avoid the shame. Training told; he snapped into focus, assessed the situation, calculated the inevitable outcome. Unfortunately it wasn't good. Whoever these people were, they had ambushes and surprise attacks polished up as sharp as a needle. No point looking for mistakes, they wouldn't have made any. Simple as that.

Precepts of religion, Monach thought wildly as the man standing next to him was pulled down off the cart by his ankles. Strength is weakness; and the precepts are never wrong, it's just that occasionally humans are too obtuse to grasp the subtleties. Strength is weakness; their strengths were surprise, speed and efficiency. All right then, bugger precepts of religion. We're just going to have to slog it out and see what happens.