K Parker - Memory

'Your son,' the crow said, as the ferocious young swordsman Poldarn had killed in the woods strutted past. 'Lysalis's boy, Tazencius's grandson. Theme emerging?'

Poldarn laughed. 'Piece of cake,' he said. 'These are good people I've treated badly; though that boy wasn't so nice, he tried to kill me-'

'Quite,' the crow said. 'He did his best, and that's all you can ask of anybody. Pay attention.'

General Cronan rode by, and General Muno Silsny ('That's not fair, what harm did I do him?') and Carey the fieldhand walking beside them, his hand clamped to his slashed neck; and behind them a long stream of people Poldarn didn't recognise, thousands of them 'A representative sample,' the crow said. 'After all, the object of the exercise isn't just making you feel bad about yourself. Anyway, they're in reverse order, so it's the Falcata delegation at the front, then Choimera, followed by Josequin-You get the idea.'

Poldarn frowned. 'Where's Choimera?' he asked. 'I never heard of it.'

'You're a busy man,' the crow replied. 'You have people to deal with, that sort of thing.'

'Fine.' Poldarn tried to sit up, but the branch was slippery; the rain had started again. 'Point made. Point sledge-hammered into the ground. I haven't just harmed those bad people but all these innocent people too. That's why I don't want to remember any of it.'

'You just want to run away.'

'Exactly. The more I hang around the places I've already been, the more damage I do, on top of everything I've done already. Going back home proved that. Any contact I have with my past leads to more bad things; it's contagious, and I reinfect myself. Which is why I want to run away-really run away this time, get as far away from all of it as I possibly can. I thought I was doing that, coming here; all I wanted to do was get a job and settle down, it's not my fault that they all came chasing after me. But there's got to be some place I can go, somewhere outside the Empire, where nobody will ever find out who I used to be.'

'Fine,' said the crow. 'Look down.'

None of the people passing under the tree were familiar, though some of them looked up, smiled, waved. There were even more of them than before.

'Do you understand?' asked the crow.

'Yes,' Poldarn said. 'So what do you want me to do? Should I jump out of this tree and break my neck?'

'Look down,' said the crow again.

All strangers once more, and none of them acknowledged him; but the line went on out of sight in both directions.

'Really?' Poldarn said quietly. 'Even if I kill myself right now?'

'Of course,' the crow said. 'My, what a big head we have, assuming we can redeem the world by an act of supreme sacrifice. Look, there you go now.'

Sure enough, Poldarn could make out his own face in the crowd, just briefly, before it passed out of sight. 'One more victim wouldn't make things much worse,' the crow said. 'Wouldn't make it any better, either. Really, what was your tutor thinking of? You ought to have covered all this elementary stuff in second grade.'

'Maybe we did,' Poldarn said irritably. 'I really don't remember.' The branch was getting very slippery now; he was in danger of falling off. 'All right,' he said. 'I'm assuming there's a point to all this, so you tell me. What have I got to do?'

Then he fell out of the tree.

Comedy, he thought, as he opened his eyes; then, Where did that come from?

He was lying in deep mud; just as well, since he'd only a moment ago fallen thirty feet. It was broad daylight. A crow got up out of the branches above him and flapped away, shrieking. Poldarn didn't need to translate; he could remember what it had been saying.

The only difference is in what they've actually done.

And that, presumably, was the answer: find out who'd done most, and deal with him. I need someone I can ask, he thought. I need to speak to Cleapho, or Copis, someone who can tell me what's going on. Assuming, of course, that they'd tell me the truth.

Assuming I can find them again, having made such a spectacularly good job of making sure that they can't find me. Assuming, even, that I can ever get out of this horrible bloody wet forest.

Big assumption.

As if he'd woken out of something bigger and more malevolent than mere sleep, he got to his feet, stretched and flexed to make sure that nothing had got broken or bent in the fall, yawned and looked around. Trees. Lots of more or less interchangeable trees. Absolutely not a clue about where the hell he was. So breathtakingly well hidden that nobody on earth knew where he was, not even Poldarn or Ciartan Torstenson.

He remembered what the colliers had said about the Tulice forests: so dense that a man could walk for days and never realise that the main road was only twenty yards away to his left. And wet, too: full of nasty boggy patches that'd swallow you up before you'd figured out you were in trouble, in which case the best you could hope for was that you'd be sucked down over your head and drown or smother immediately, rather than stay mired up to your armpits until you starved to death, or the wolves or the bears or the wild pigs ate you (browsing off your arms and face like cows nibbling at a hedge; at the time he'd assumed that the colliers were just trying to put the wind up him…). Wonderful place to get lost in, the Tulice forest.

Poldarn walked for an hour in one direction, until the closeness of the trees and the depth of the shadows all around him made him feel like he was buried alive; so he turned left, and carried on that way for another hour or so, until that direction became just as unbearable, or more so. Left was obviously a bad idea, so he turned right. Right was worse. The canopy of leaves overhead was as tight as the lid on ajar; he needed light in order to breathe, and the canopy was choking the light, strangling him; and every change in direction led him to taller trees, thicker leaves, darker places. (Allegory, he thought bitterly; I hate fucking allegory.) How long he'd been blundering about he had no idea, but it didn't matter anyway; didn't matter if the sun had gone down, because it couldn't get any darker than this, could it? No trace, needless to say, of human beings here, nothing to suggest that a fellow human had ever been this way before-so much for the idea that all his problems had been caused by other people. Right now, he'd be overjoyed at any hint that there were such things as other people, that he wasn't the only talking biped left in the universe Something whistled in his ear, then went chunk. After a moment's bemused searching, he found it. It was a strange insect, with green and yellow wings and an absurdly long brown body, and it lived by boring into the bark of trees. No, it bloody well wasn't: it was an arrow. Some bastard was shooting at him.

Feeling rather foolish, because at least three seconds had passed since the arrow had hit the tree, Poldarn threw himself to the ground and crawled on his knees and elbows for the cover of a holly bush. Silly, he thought, holly not arrow-proof; but he curled up tight in a ball and waited, and no more arrows came. Even so.

Then he heard something, quite close. Grunting, snuffling; a fat man with a bad cold running uphill with a heavy weight on his back. The absurdity of it made him want to burst out laughing, because unless this neck of the woods was swarming with people and he'd just been walking blithely past them for the last five hours, it stood to reason that the grunting, snuffling fat man had to be the secret archer. Well, fine; if Gain and Copis and the most powerful man in the world were to be believed (which was by no means certain), Poldarn was a graduate of the Deymeson academy of killing people, and more than a match for a runny-nosed pork chop, even one with a bow and arrows. The noise was getting closer, so all he needed to do was stay perfectly still, and then, when Fatso came waddling past him any second now, just stick out a leg, trip him up and bang his head against a tree until he came up with directions to the nearest inn. Piece of It must already have seen him, some time before he saw it; that was what cowering in the bushes would get you, if you were so dumb that you couldn't tell the difference between a human being and a fully grown wild boar. When he lifted his gaze-purely chance that he happened to be looking in that direction at precisely that moment (rather than half a second later, when it'd have been a quarter of a second too late)-he saw a massive grey wedge with two tiny red lights halfway up the taper, growing huger and huger. His legs figured out what the thing was before his brain did, because by the time the words wild boar had congealed in his mind, he was already on his feet and trying to push through a thick screen of holly leaves.