K Parker - Shadow

'Your dad was a clever man,' he told the child, who was asleep now. That was no lie, he reflected. Tursten could be a vicious little bastard when he wanted to, but he was clever.

Probably would've made a good soldier, if he'd hated the enemy like he hated the crows.

As he walked down the meadow slope he caught sight of a face framed in the upstairs window, but at that distance he couldn't be sure who it was, Elgerd or Bergtura. Probably not Elgerd. It occurred to him that he hadn't really considered how she'd take it, being expected to bring up her dead husband's child by some foreign woman whom he'd raped and who'd then killed him. Come to think of it, he couldn't remember any occasion when anybody had stopped to consider Elgerd's feelings about anything, so it was probably safe to assume that she didn't have any. Not that it mattered, Bergtura had enough for both of them (Gods help us all!). It was a safe bet that the face in the window was hers.

Well, he thought, for some reason, it's too late now. He pushed open the back door with his left hand, and heard his wife's clogs clumping down the stairs. He wondered what on earth he was going to say to her; something utterly banal, probably, such as, 'Here he is,' or, 'I'm home.'

'Here,' someone called out, 'you missed one.'

Poldarn opened his eyes, the dream exploding like a glass bowl dropped on a stone floor. He started to get up, but someone behind him put a heavy boot between his shoulder blades, forcing him back down into the mud and perceptibly stretching his bones. Out of options once again, and this time he was on the ground and couldn't move. He made himself relax, theorising that the pain would be less if his muscles were tense and stressed when the blade cut into them. He felt surprisingly, agreeably calm.

'Hold on.' The voice could have been Eyvind, but he didn't know him well enough to be sure. 'Leave him alone, will you? I know him.'

'You sure?' A different voice, puzzled. 'He was with the column.'

'Yes, well, he would be. Byrni, stop treading on the poor bugger.'

The pressure relaxed. 'What's all this about, then?' Another voice, this time directly above him.

'You'll see. Hey, whatever your name is. Say something, that'll prove you know Western.'

That made sense; nobody in the empire knew the raiders' language, which was what he assumed they were all talking. 'Is that you?' he managed to say. 'Eyvind? The man I met on the road?'

'That's him,' said the voice. 'Yes, it's me. Don't just stand there, you bloody fools, help him up.'

They hauled him to his feet as if he was a dead weight, an inanimate object of some kind. He saw the man who'd called himself Eyvind, the same one he'd seen before, on the road and later in the battle. Please, he prayed silently to the divine Poldarn, don't let anything happen to this man, not until I'm safe and out of here. All around, the raiders were stripping the dead, bending to their work like field hands pulling carrots. He noticed one of them dead on the ground; all the other bodies were sword-monks, carved with deep cuts sloping diagonally inwards from the junction of shoulder and neck.

'Yes,' Eyvind said, 'I definitely know this man. Saved my life.' That was an exaggeration, as Poldarn remembered it; all he'd done was refrain from killing him when he killed his companion. But his memory was tricky, at the best of times. 'He's one of us, I promise you.'

'Really?' The man who'd been treading on his spine sounded good-natured, curious. 'Then what was he doing with all these freaks?'

Poldarn remembered something. It came as a flash of bright light in his mind, blotting out everything around him, even the fear of dying that was still clouding up his mind; but it wasn't anything special, just a memory of himself standing next to an older man in a ditch beside a bank-the man with him was draping a little net across the mouth of a rabbit hole with his right hand; his left was down by his side, holding the back legs of a furiously kicking rabbit. He wasn't taking any notice of the animal; a methodical man, one thing at a time. Get the net back in place first, in case the dog flushed another one out, then kill the one you've got in hand. While he was resetting the net, the man was talking about something else, some routine job they'd have to start tomorrow if the weather held off. That same calm, detached, methodical economy of movement that the raiders displayed as they searched the dead bodies for articles of value (things trivial enough: a penknife, a sharpening-steel, a belt buckle, a dozen horn buttons; obviously valuable enough to these people to be worth killing for, as the rabbit's meat and fur were to the old man), and carefully and thoroughly despatched any monks who were still alive.

Eyvind was saying something to the other man, Byrni. Everybody else had lost interest and gone back to work. 'My guess is,' Eyvind was saying, 'Uncle Cari'll know who he is. He was much more involved in all the preparations than I was; at least, I was there but I wasn't listening half the time.'

Byrni laughed. 'Sitting still's never been your strong point,' he said. 'All right, can't see any harm in it. If he does anything I don't like, mind, I'll cut him in half He turned his head and looked Poldarn in the eye. 'Did you hear that, mister?' he said.

Poldarn nodded, to indicate that he had. 'Don't worry about Byrni,' Eyvind interrupted, 'he just likes scaring people.'

'He's very good at it,' Poldarn replied.

For some reason, Byrni thought that was enormously funny. 'He's a smartass and no mistake,' he said, clouting Poldarn on the shoulder with his left hand. In his right hand he held a backsabre, its cutting edge dirty with blood, dust and grime. He looked as if he'd just been trimming back a hedge, and had paused for a whet and a sly mouthful of beer.

'You two.' Someone else, further up the road. 'Whatever you're doing, do it later. We've got a war to fight, or had you forgotten?'

The raiders weren't hurrying, just doing their work more quickly. Poldarn noticed how little effort they wasted, like old men doing a familiar job. Mostly they were young, between nineteen and twenty-four, but they looked older; they had the broad chests and thick necks of hard workers, square heads and solid jaws, small noses and broad foreheads, and their skin had been burnished by long exposure to cold, hard winds. They didn't look like him at all, but the way they moved and stood and walked seemed right, in a way that none of the other people he'd come across did. The monks, for example, moved with almost excessive grace, as if everything they did had been practised for hours in front of a mirror-the grace wasn't inherent but painfully acquired. In Sansory, people moved too quickly; in the villages, they lumbered, as if they were forever carrying heavy sacks on their shoulders and wearing lead-soled boots. In Mael, they'd walked about like factory hands or field workers coming home after a double shift. Copis-she'd been different, her movements were like someone dancing the steps of one dance to the tune of another, and making it work thanks to an amazing natural ability to improvise. These men, he realised, moved entirely naturally, the way humans were meant to move. He couldn't imagine one of them slipping in mud or catching his foot in a tree root or accidentally barging into a heavily laden trestle in a market.

Eyvind grabbed his arm and pulled him to one side. 'I think it'll be all right,' he said. 'I don't suppose you've been able to remember anything since the last time I saw you?'

Poldarn shook his head.

'Oh well. So what were you doing with this bunch of old women?' He prodded a dead man with his toe by way of illustration.

Poldarn cracked his face with a grin. 'Actually,' he said, 'I was on my way to be killed. They were to make sure I didn't get away.'