K Parker: Memory

Basano frowned at him. 'Don't talk soft,' he said. 'For a start, we'll be sending three wagons down the road before the end of the month. You could hitch a ride with them, then get the post back to Scieza, it's only a couple of days.' He looked up, sniffed, and disappeared back into the lodge, emerging a moment later with a frying pan in his hand. 'Sure you don't want some?' he said. 'Fried oatcakes and wood mushrooms. Speciality of the camp.'

Poldarn was about to ask what wood mushrooms were; but then he caught sight of the strange black objects in the pan, carbonised versions of the repulsive-looking growths he'd seen on the boles of rotten ash trees. 'Really,' he said. 'I don't usually eat breakfast. Indigestion.'

'Ah,' Basano replied. 'Know what you mean.' He stabbed one of the charred fungi with the point of his rusty knife, and Poldarn looked away. 'Alternatively,' Basano continued, 'you could stay here till the new moon and catch the Chestnut Day party. Well worth hanging on for, that is.'

'Oh? What's Chestnut Day?'

Basano shrugged. 'Once a year, we all give each other a bag of chestnuts. It's a tradition,' he explained, 'very old, very important in the collier community. Actually, it's just an excuse for a really good piss-up. And at midnight, we roast the chestnuts in the embers of Number Two and sing songs and stuff.'

Poldarn invented a smile from somewhere. 'Sounds really good,' he said. 'But I really had better be getting back, or else they'll start getting antsy and sign up for their charcoal with someone else.'

Basano pulled a face. 'Impatient lot, you are,' he said. 'Well, in that case you'd better go off with the wagons.' He paused, as if he'd just remembered something. 'Or,' he said, 'tell you what. It'd be quicker, if you don't mind roughing it a bit.'

Roughing it a bit, Poldarn repeated to himself, looking at the contents of the frying pan. No, I don't think I'd mind that terribly much. 'No problem,' he said.

'Well, in that case,' Basano said with his mouth full, 'Corvolo-you know, the old geezer you came in with-he's going up to collect the mail; straight over the top, mind, it's a pig of a walk, but you'll come out on the road halfway between Iacchosia and Veiny, and you can hitch a ride with the mail right into Scieza. How'd that be?'

Poldarn nodded enthusiastically. 'Sounds good to me,' he said. 'When's he leaving?'

Basano thought for a moment. 'Now, probably,' he said, 'or else he's already gone. Come on, we'll see if he's still here.'

It turned out that Poldarn wasn't the only one going with Corvolo to get the mail; they were joined at the last moment by a tall, thin young man with short, spiky hair and an enormous burn scar on the left side of his face. He hadn't said why he was coming with them, and Corvolo hadn't asked. The young man hardly said a word all the way, though it could have been the steepness of the climb, which didn't leave much spare breath for talking, or the difficulty of getting a word in edgeways. (Shortness of breath didn't seem to be a problem with Corvolo, unfortunately.) It was only when they'd cleared the top of the hills and come to the edge of the tree line, with the road clearly visible a mile or so below them, that the young man said anything.

'You,' he said suddenly, stopping and looking Poldarn straight in the eye. 'I know you from somewhere, don't I?'

Poldarn nodded. 'Quite possibly,' he said. 'I don't know you, though.'

The young man frowned. 'Well, that's as may be. Were you ever in Torcea?'

'I don't know.'

'What d'you mean? If you'd ever been there, you'd know about it.'

Poldarn shook his head. 'Long story,' he said. 'But yes, I may have been to Torcea, and no, I wouldn't expect to remember if I had. Also,' he went on, 'I wouldn't want to remember. No offence,' he added. 'It's a personal thing.'

The young man looked mildly startled. 'Oh, right,' he said. 'Only, I'm sure I saw you once, long time ago. You were in a procession or a parade or something.'

'Really.' Poldarn shrugged. 'Thanks, but I'd rather you didn't tell me any more.'

The young man started walking again. 'Be like that,' he said. 'No skin off my nose. Only, I'm sure I remember you, because you were riding along down the street on a great big white horse, and people were cheering like you were somebody important.'

Poldarn grinned. 'Do I look important?'

'No,' the young man said. 'But neither do a lot of important people.'

'There you go, then,' Poldarn said. 'If you really did see me and I looked important, then obviously I wasn't, by your own admission. Glad to have cleared that up for you,' he added kindly.

The young man didn't seem to know what to make of that, but at least it shut him up for the rest of the journey.

They reached the road just before sunset. According to Corvolo, the mail coach would pass the two hundred and seventh milestone ('That big lump of rock you're sat on,' he explained) three hours after sunrise the next morning; meanwhile, they could camp out by the road and be sure of catching the coach, or they could kip down for the night in a spinney two hundred yards down the slope, and hope they woke up in time. Poldarn said that where they were would do him just fine, and the young man didn't seem to have an opinion on the matter, so they unrolled their blankets and built a fire, using some of the charcoal samples Basano had given Poldarn to take back with him. It was good charcoal, no doubt about it, but he didn't say anything for fear of another lecture from Corvolo. Nobody seemed to have brought along anything to eat, but Corvolo had a leather bottle full of beer. If anything, it tasted worse than the stuff Basano had given him; it also gave him heartburn, which kept him awake long after the other two had dropped off and begun to snore.

Poldarn lay on his back and thought about names: Tazencius, Copis, Monach, Muno Silsny, Feron Amathy. The last time he'd seen Copis, she'd tried to kill him and he'd had to hit her, so hard that he'd broken her jaw. He still wasn't clear in his mind about why she'd picked him up in her cart the day he'd woken up and found his memory gone. From what he'd been able to gather-she hadn't told him, of course, that'd have been too simple-the sword-monks of Deymeson had ordered her to accompany him, as a spy or a bodyguard, or just possibly because he was really the Divine Poldarn returned to earth to bring about the end of the world, and Poldarn needed to have a priestess with him in order to make the prophecies come out right. At one time he'd imagined he loved her-no, not quite that, but they'd been close enough that she'd apparently been carrying his child-when she'd pulled a sword on him in the ruins of Deymeson, at which point he was back with his grandfather's people, the raiders, burning the place and slaughtering the monks. He thought about that. For a man who never deliberately did any harm, who had no reason to hurt anybody in the world, fire and death did tend to cling to him rather, like the smell on a pig farmer's boots. Then he thought about the reason why he'd left the islands in the far west: because he'd started a bloody feud, murdered a man called Cary in cold blood, burned his best friend to death in his own house-and there had been good reasons for all of that, anybody else would've done exactly the same in his place, probably.

Precepts of religion, he thought (and his eyes closed, and he drifted towards sleep like a carelessly moored boat); the guilty are innocent, only the innocent can commit crimes. The god in the cart is foretold, preordained, inevitable, and therefore not to be blamed for what he does. The only crime is to try and interfere with the working out of the pattern. But that A man was speaking; a big, fine-looking man with a bushy black beard, standing in a pulpit at the front of a huge, high-roofed stone building full of people. But that, he was saying, conflicts with another essential precept, whereby Poldarn returns in wrath to punish the evildoers and avenge the sins of men. Think (said the big, fine man, whose name was Cleapho) about the logic behind that. Poldarn's coming is foretold, inevitable, it must happen; yet it is the deadly consequence of free choice, the choice on the part of the people to commit sins. See the fallacy. If the people's choice was free, then Poldarn is not inevitable; the people might decide not to sin, and the punishment might not be incurred. But if Poldarn is inevitable, then the choice cannot be free, the people are doomed to sin, whether they want to or not-and if they don't want to sin, how can they be wicked enough to merit punishment, since it is not the act alone that makes a crime, but the evil intention as well. Accordingly (said the big man, and Poldarn wondered where he, Poldarn, was all this time: in the audience, listening, or in the pulpit, preaching?) religion has another precept to cover the discrepancy. Only the innocent are punished.