K Parker - Memory

He was, he supposed, here to overthrow the Empire, kill the most evil man in history and bring about the end of the world. A brief rest, wash and a brush-up, bite to eat, and then it'd be business as usual. Poldarn remembered washing his face in the fern-fringed pool, on the first day, when Copis had found him; this was better, but otherwise the two experiences were pretty much the same, and he was really no further forward.

Dinner with Ciana and his family (which was huge and excessive, like everything else to do with him) would have been an ordeal, except that the food was very good indeed, and there were no soldiers, sword-monks, bandits, pirates, mysterious women who turned into crows or old school friends anywhere to be seen. Ciana's wife, a large woman with thick red hair down to her waist, had taken one horrified look at Poldarn's face and then made up her mind that he was invisible; her three brothers scowled at him through the forest of silverware; an assortment of thickset, hairy men who were probably cousins tried to make him eat and drink enough to feed a large village, and burst out in raucous laughter whenever he asked someone to pass the mustard. Ciana himself told a succession of improbable hunting stories, which neither Poldarn nor anybody else paid any attention to. There was also a tall, slim woman, with grey eyes and light brown hair that curled where it touched her shoulders, who sat opposite him. He guessed she must be Ciana's baby sister; she didn't talk to anyone, and ate nothing except bread, a carrot and a few thin slices of smoked lamb, and if his appearance bothered her, she gave no sign of it. Miraculously, once the last course had been stripped off the plates and cleared away, Ciana stood up and walked away from the table, promptly followed by the rest of the company. Poldarn, who'd assumed that he'd be stuck there half the night while the household drank itself into a coma, found himself following a severe-faced manservant back through the panelled corridors to his room, where someone had lit the lamps and turned down the coverlet. He pulled off his clothes, dropped on the bed like a shot deer, and fell asleep.

Soft red light light outlined the edges of the window frame when he opened his eyes. Three women were standing over him, holding jugs of water and towels; it took him some time to persuade them to go away and let him wash on his own. They'd left him yet another change of clothes, and a pair of beautifully soft green leather slippers; his boots, however, had vanished without trace. The implication was that he wasn't going anywhere, at least for a while. For a moment he was annoyed; but what the hell, he thought, will it matter so very much if I destroy the world tomorrow rather than today?

No sooner had he dressed than the door opened (nobody ever knocked) and yet more women came in; one of them was the woman he'd reckoned was Ciana's sister. She smiled at him.

'I'm Noja,' she said. 'My brother asked me to fetch you down to breakfast.' More food, Poldarn thought, surely not; she met his gaze and laughed. 'You've missed him and the rest of them, I'm afraid,' she went on. 'He thought you'd probably rather sleep in. But if you're not starving to death, maybe you'd like some bread and cheese and some fruit-'

'Thanks,' Poldarn said quickly, 'that'll be fine.'

She nodded. 'Food is a serious hazard in this house,' she said, as she led him down the stairs. 'It sort of stalks you like a predator. You have to be very careful or it'll overwhelm you. Which is why I never leave my room in the mornings till everyone else is safely out of the house, and nobody's likely to jump out at me and make me eat roast pork and sausages.'

Poldarn shrugged. 'I've got nothing against roast pork,' he said, 'or sausages, even. But I've been, well, travelling for quite a while, and I guess I'm out of practice where competitive eating's concerned.'

'I see,' Noja replied. 'In that case, later on I'll show you some good places where you can hide during mealtimes. You can trust me, I've had years of experience.'

She didn't lead him back to the great hall where they'd eaten the previous evening; apparently she had a small breakfast-room of her own, where she could indulge her perverted taste for not guzzling in polite seclusion. It seemed odd to Poldarn that there could be such a small, plain room in Ciana's house; it was scarcely larger than the shed Spenno and Galand Dev had built to house the master furnace, and only about half a dozen servants stood around and watched while they ate their hot rolls and watermelon.

'You probably think my brother's a clown,' Noja said suddenly, as she washed her fingers in a silver bowl. 'Actually, he's not. Our father was a tenant farmer in Tulice; my brother came here with two shirts and a writing set, and worked day and night for five years as a jobbing clerk until he'd saved the deposit for a loan on his first ship. He sent for me when I was fourteen, saved me from having to marry the boy next door, for which I'll always be grateful. The hunting thing comes from when he was about ten, before I was born. The landlord's sons used to come out to Tulice to hunt, and they used to let him carry the nets and work the dogs, and when they'd had a good day they'd give him a generous tip, five or six quarters; that's how he was able to save up the fare and the price of his ink bottles and writing slope. These days he's doing very well, thanks to a good eye for quality and a fair amount of common sense, but he's never forgotten those hunting trips when he was a kid, he's always trying to get back there, even though he knows he can't-he says there's a hole in time that's just big enough for his mind to slip through, but his body's got too fat. I suppose we've all got one or two special memories that we hold on to, like an anchor or climbing up a rope.'

Poldarn looked at her. 'Not me,' he said.

'Really?' Her look suggested that she didn't believe him.

'Really,' he said. 'Which is probably just as well. If memory's a rope, my guess is that the other end would be round my neck.'

She stared at him, then laughed. 'What an extraordinary thing to say,' she said. 'You make it sound like you've got memories, but you've found out how to avoid them, the way I avoid mealtimes.'

'They haven't caught me yet,' Poldarn said, 'but I have a feeling it's more luck than judgement.'

Noja examined him again, like Spenno assessing the strength of a welded seam, then smiled. 'Well, best of luck, anyhow. What would you like to do today? Jetat said that if this is your first time in Torcea, maybe you'd like me to show you the sights.'

'Actually-' Poldarn hesitated. There was definitely a case to be made for it, probably a whole sheaf of precepts of religion about the importance of thorough reconnaissance; it'd be better than having to ask the way in bakers' shops, and he didn't have any money to buy a map, assuming there were such things as maps of cities. 'That would be very kind of you,' he said, 'if you can spare the time.'

Her smile widened, like a flaw in a casting. 'I'm entirely at your disposal,' she said gravely (Copis, assigned to him by the Faculty of Deymeson). 'I'll tell them to get a carriage ready.'

The Ciana family's second-best carriage certainly made a change from carts. The spokes of its wheels were impossibly slim, and there was a dainty little set of folding steps to preserve passengers' dignity as they got in. Two coachmen sat in front, and two large men in livery sat behind (chaperones or bodyguards, or maybe they were just there to produce food in case a passenger had somehow managed to go an hour without eating something). There were four matched horses, and enough non-functional silverwork was riveted and stitched to the harness to pay for a road across the Tulice marshes. Which was, of course, exactly the degree of style appropriate for the entry of the god in the cart into Torcea 'That's the Oratory, over there,' Noja was saying, 'and you can just see the spire of the North Star Tower over there-no, you've missed it, that's the Merchant Venturers' Hall, and down from there on the left is the Ordnance Grounds, with the Processional leading to the North Bridge-'