K Parker - Shadow

In the short term, however, he now had something to fight with, if he had to, not to mention an unexpected but valuable ally in his forthcoming battle with the brambles; and the rest had done him good, as well. All he had to do now was find out where the war had got to, and he'd be right back on schedule.

Back inside the wood it was dark, wet and complicated. For a while he made good progress in spite of everything, stepping high over tangles of briar, crashing sideways through brushwood and the dead branches of fallen trees, ducking under swiping shoots of bramble like a man in a swordfight. The further he went, however, the less familiar it looked, until he was forced to acknowledge that, in spite of his good intentions, he'd managed to come the wrong way after all, and every brave, energetic step he took was taking him further away from where he wanted to be. He stopped and relaxed, noticing for the first time how heavy and cramped his legs had become, and looked around for some point of reference.

But Cronan was from Thurm province, where trees came in by road with their branches already neatly trimmed away; he'd never learned to tell them apart. So he tried to remember details of how he'd got to the clearing with the watermill. He recalled that at one point the ground was boggy and soft under the leaf-mould; here it was firm and damp rather than sodden wet. Boggy ground suggested the presence of a stream, or at least a valley or fold between two ridges; here, the ground was level, although rising in a gentle slope away from him. Pretty well everything, in fact, was different, as if he'd wandered out of one story and into another without noticing the transition. He hadn't a clue where he was, or which way was north, or how far off the right track he'd come, and all this time, presumably, the war and history were going on without him, disasters (which would be his fault for ever) could be happening only a hundred yards or so away to his left, or his right, and he wasn't there to take charge or responsibility. He felt as if a god had picked him up and put him away in a box, and for the first time in a long time, General Cronan felt afraid.

That wouldn't do, not for a moment. Walking through woods, he told himself, was easy. People did it all the time, woodcutters and poachers and all manner of people with far less brains and common sense than he had. Chances were that he hadn't come more than a few hundred paces from the clearing; maybe the sensible thing would be to swallow his pride, retrace his steps and start again. At least that way there'd be some kind of logical progression behind his actions, instead of this aimless blundering about.

So he tried that, and fairly soon he stopped and admitted to himself that he was now in another completely new and unknown place, a dense thicket of holly on the side of a dry, rocky slope. The holly saplings stood so close together that he couldn't squeeze between them. 'We'll see about that,' he told himself and set about clearing a path with the backsabre. Thanks to the weapon's exceptional cutting and edge-holding abilities, he cleared a path nearly six yards long before he became too exhausted to stand.

Of course, he still had the option of retracing his steps… This time, he did make it back to the clearing, though for some reason he couldn't begin to imagine he was on the other side of it, facing the front gate of the millhouse. That bothered him, as did the discovery that the man he'd killed wasn't there any more.

He searched until he found a patch of blood on the grass and his own discarded sword. There were bootprints in the soft mud beside the millstream that didn't fit his own boots. He sat down at the foot of the pear tree and thought about the implications of that, with special regard to the implications for his latest idea, of staying where he was and waiting for someone to come and fetch him. On the tramp back from the holly glade, that had seemed an extremely sensible idea; on the other hand, if the men who'd been here since he left the place had carefully retrieved the dead man's body, it suggested that they were the enemy, and if they'd come here once, they could just as easily come back. It was one of those awkward problems; the more you think about it, the harder it gets. He hated those.

When he considered the matter rationally, he knew that he had no choice but to go back into that loathsome wood and find his people, the war and his life as quickly as possible. Irrationally, though, he couldn't quite bring himself to stand up, partly because he was worn out, partly because it was quiet and peaceful here, wherever it was, and being here took no effort at all. Of course, he couldn't stay put indefinitely. Sooner or later he'd need something to eat, and of course he had responsibilities, vitally urgent ones that couldn't spare him for a moment. If only, he thought, he could have some kind of warranty or affidavit confirming that if he went back in the wood he'd get hopelessly lost all over again and end up coming back here over and over again; then he'd have no choice but to stay and wait and see what happened. Even the prospect of a half-platoon of the enemy bursting out of the undergrowth didn't bother him as much as it probably should have done. After all, if there were parties of them roaming about the edges of the battle, he'd be just as likely to run into them in the wood as out here, and if he stayed where he was there was some chance that he'd hear them coming long before they saw him, and he'd have time to hide or withdraw.

Maybe the battle was over by now. Maybe, depending on the outcome of the battle, the war was over, too; in which case, supposing the enemy had prevailed, the empire and civilisation and the world as he knew it would also be over, and staying here, learning how to snare rabbits, repairing and working the mill, would be a supremely wise choice. Perhaps he'd been brought here by the direct intervention of the divine Poldarn, who'd thereafter been at great pains to keep him here by rearranging the forest to prevent him from leaving. Poldarn, as everybody knew back home, worked in mysterious ways, to the point where the people of Thurm had stopped trying to figure them out and let the god get on with it. If the god had brought him here for a reason, stripped him of his responsibilities and the burdens of his previous life, it would be blasphemy to move from the shade of this tree. Maybe-it hadn't occurred to him before-the crow sitting in the branches above his head, watching him with patent disapproval, was Poldarn himself, directing the flow of events from a high place like a general on a battlefield. And maybe these thoughts (and the dizziness and nausea) had something to do with the bash on the head the dead man had given him-the dead man who wasn't here any more; even dead people can leave this misbegotten clearing, so why not me?

He fell asleep (and in that sleep, he wondered, is he dreaming of a man hiding in a coach-house in the back alleys of Sansory?) and when he woke up there were a couple of dozen men standing watching him, and another one kneeling beside him with a worried look on his face. For a moment he couldn't remember who they were or who he was.

'Cronan? Are you all right? What the hell's been happening to you?'

Then he remembered, and the return of his memory was like the family coming home from the fair, lighting a fire in the hearth and pulling out chairs and tables for dinner. 'I think so,' he replied. 'Who won?'

The man-his name was Feron Amathy and he was an ally, not a subordinate-grinned at him. 'We did, of course. Beat the crap out of them. Caught up with Allectus a mile or so beyond the ford; he's waiting for you back at the camp, or at any rate his head is. Cheer up, you miserable bastard, you've just saved the empire. Again.'

'Have I?' Cronan replied. 'That's nice.' Then he was sick, all down the front of Feron Amathy's mailshirt He woke up. It was pitch dark, and he had no idea where he was. Unaccountably, he had the feeling that recently he'd been walking in a forest, but that was obviously nonsense, because he was lying on stone and he could smell horseshit. Then he remembered. He was in a coach-house…