K Parker - Shadow

None of them said anything, but the look on their faces was pure hatred. But, since Poldarn had decided by now that he didn't like them either, he carried on humming even louder. Needless to say, they were too well trained and disciplined to rise to the bait, which was fine, too, since he didn't want to fight anybody, just be annoying. He started to sing: Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree He wasn't, he realised, a particularly good singer. He resolved not to let that deter him. Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree 'Do you mind?' said the horseman to his left. 'If you must sing, perhaps you'd care to sing something else.'

'I don't know anything else.'

'Oh, come on.' He could tell that the man was furiously angry about something, for all that he sounded like a man discussing the best way to grow carrots. 'Of course you do. The Vespers hymn. The "Come, Shining Light". How about "There Is No Rose"?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'Sorry,' he said. 'Don't know any of them.'

'You must do, you're a brother of the order.'

'What, are they religious songs or something?'

That, apparently, made the man too angry to speak at all. Poldarn shrugged and went back to singing the song about the crows, softly, under his breath, but just loud enough that the horseman would know what he was doing. At one point he noticed the monk looking round at him and frowning, but he pretended he hadn't noticed. Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree It was the kind of tune that works its way into your head and stays there, itching and annoying, like a burr in your shoe or a little strand of meat lodged between two teeth. It was getting on his nerves now. He made a special effort to stop singing it and put it out of his mind. A few minutes later he realised he'd started singing it again. Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree There was an old dry-stone wall on the north side of the road, and behind it a stand of spruce trees; seventy years or so ago, someone had planted them out for timber, but he'd died or gone away before thinning the stand out, and the trees were far too crowded and close together; they'd grown up spindly and crooked, no good for anything. Poldarn could see where a few of the tallest and weakest had blown down, falling halfway before their branches fouled in those of their neighbours and stopped them, allowing briars and other green rubbish to spring up and tangle their shoots in the thin, dead twigs. Holly and birch and hazel had sprung up to fill in the gaps, turning the copse into a fortified position. Poldarn smiled; talk about your tall thin trees Two crows got up and hung circling in the air, almost directly above his head, screaming abuse at him He was still singing, instinctively, without thinking. And so was somebody else: Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, And along comes the Dodger and he says, 'That's me.'

Somebody else was singing the song, from behind the wall. At once the monk yanked back on his reins, making his horse rear, and started shouting orders. The monks were drawing swords-why? There wasn't anybody to fight -Yes, there was. From over the wall, and from a ditch on the other side of the road that Poldarn hadn't even noticed, there came a great crowd of men, a hundred, perhaps two hundred, all standing up at the same time, like soldiers performing a drill. But they weren't armed The horseman on his right yelled something and started his draw. Difficult to gauge circles on horseback; Poldarn threw his weight to his left and slid off his horse, the quickest way of getting clear, and as his shoulder connected painfully with a large stone in the road, the horseman's sword sliced through the parcel of air where his head would have been. As he tried to get up and found that for some reason (some reason that hurt a lot) he couldn't, he saw another horseman slashing down at one of the men who'd come from behind the wall; some cut, clean through the spine on the diagonal, missing the collarbone, uncharacteristically wasted effort. Poldarn couldn't see any reason why the horseman should attack like thatOld crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree -The same tune, he realised. The other voice had been singing the same tune and words that meant the same thing, but in a different language.

Something hit the ground a few inches behind his head. He jerked his head back and bent his spine, and found he was nose to nose with a dead man, the monk who'd been riding on his right. A pair of boots stepped over him; it was one of the men from the ditch, and he wasn't unarmed by any means. He was swinging a short, fat sword with an unmistakable curved, concave blade, what Poldarn had come to know as a backsabre. The leg of his horse was in the way and he wasn't able to see the blow land, but he heard it, a sucking, hissing sound, like a man pulling his boot out of deep mud.

I think I probably know who these people are.

He'd been planning on lying still and pretending to be dead, but the horse backed up and scuffed him in the face with the back of its hoof, not hard, but enough to make him wince. He noticed one of the strangers watching him, and figured he must have seen the movement.

He knew the man's face: long, with a pointed chin and straggly, wispy hair. He was holding a backsabre, letting it hang by the rear horn of the hilt from two fingers. A sword-monk, on foot, stepped quickly up behind him-Poldarn couldn't see the sword in his hand, but he knew where it was from the position of the monk's arms.

Eyvind; that was the stranger's name. Pointless, remembering it a heartbeat before the poor fool had his head cut off-Later, Poldarn figured that Eyvind must have seen a change in the look in his eyes and somehow realised what it meant; something must have warned him of the danger, because he spun round astonishingly quickly, using the speed and momentum to swing the backsabre in a down-slanted side cut that opened the monk up a finger's breadth below his ribcage. The monk noticed what had happened, but he'd already embarked upon his own cut, which should have split Eyvind's head in two, like an apple. When it arrived, however, somehow Eyvind wasn't there. Poldarn didn't see him move, he just seemed to relocate, materialising instantly a yard to the monk's right. He tugged the backsabre out of the wound like a tired woodcutter freeing his axe, and let the monk flop to the ground; the next moment he was busy again, but Poldarn couldn't see, there was a boot in the way.

By the time it moved, it all seemed to be over.

He was standing on a cliff, with thin, wiry grass under his feet and a brisk, cold wind on his face, staring out at a blue-grey sea the colour of steel in the forge fire, just before it turns red. In the middle of the sea, he could see the white sail of a ship. Fifty yards or so to his left, two crows were pecking at something he couldn't quite see.

When he looked up again, the sail had disappeared; but he was minded to walk down the steep, rather terrifying path that ran diagonally across the cliff face, like the cut of a sword-monk's blade on a man's neck. At the bottom of the path there was a little triangle of shingle, folded in the arms of two spits of rock: a private one-berth harbour set in a fortress wall of gleaming yellow sandstone. You'd never find it if you didn't know exactly where to look.

Either the ship couldn't make it in, or it was in a hurry; instead they'd lowered a little frail boat, leather hides stretched over birch ribs and sewn up in thick, well-greased seams. Two men were rowing, two others sat with their backs to him. The boat was lower in the water than it should have been.

While he waited for the boat to crawl through the lively waves, he took a moment to admire the ship, not that he knew anything much about ships, but it was the aesthetics rather than the technicalities that appealed to him. Long and sweet it appeared to him; the castles at either end melodramatically high, the wide, fat middle absurdly low. It was built to roll with the waves without capsizing, even he could see that; as it bobbed and wallowed in the water, its lines seemed to flow unceasingly, sinuous and meretricious as a dancer.