K Parker - Shadow

Poldarn had sheathed the sword without realising. 'You do, though,' he said.

The old man shrugged. 'I've seen men who can draw that fast before. Temple fencers. If you can do that-well, figure it for yourself. Of course, you could've learned it somewhere else. Maybe you picked it up from a book, or worked it out for yourself, I don't know.'

Poldarn took a step closer. It seemed to him that the old man didn't like that much, 'But you don't think so,' Poldarn said.

'No,' Eolla replied, stepping sideways towards the door. 'If you want my opinion, you learned that in the temple.'

'What temple?' Poldarn asked.

'Good afternoon,' the brother called out, leaning forward a little in his saddle and wiping rain out of his eyes. 'I wonder, can you tell me if I'm on the right road for Cric?'

The two rubes looked up at him as if a trapdoor had just opened in the sky and he'd stepped out of it, silhouetted against a dazzling mandala of pure white light. 'You what?' the older man said.

'Cric,' the brother repeated, slowly and loudly. 'There's a village by that name somewhere around here, isn't there?'

What the hell the two rubes thought they were doing, scrabbling about on their knees in the peat-mud in the driving rain, he couldn't begin to imagine. At least, they were building a dry-stone wall; but in weather like this, with the rain lashing down on them? On the other hand, they gave every impression of not having noticed the rain, or the wind.

The older man nodded, tipping water off the brim of his tatty leather hat. 'Keep on the road an hour, maybe two, that'll fetch you to Cric.'

'Thank you,' the brother said. 'I should make it there by nightfall, then.'

'Maybe.'

'Is there an inn there, somewhere I can put up for the night?' the brother persevered.

'No.'

'I see. Thank you, you've been incredibly helpful.' He turned his face back into the rain and nudged his horse on with a slight pressure of his heels. He could feel the rubes staring at his shoulder blades all the way to the skyline.

The lousy weather cut visibility down to spitting distance and he was sure he didn't see a single living thing on the road, so how everybody in Cric knew he was coming he had no idea. But they did; they were standing out under their porches or watching out for him from haylofts, dozens of them-women and children mostly, with a few old men and invalids peering over their shoulders. That was disconcerting for someone who'd spent a lifetime learning how to be too boring to be worth noticing. He looked round for some logical place to stop, an inn or forge or other community centre, but there wasn't one, just a miserable-looking tower at the far end of town, which was bound to be cold and damp and foul-smelling. What he wanted was a nice extravagant fire, some hot soup and warm spiced wine, if possible a bath hot enough to scald the feathers off poultry. No chance.

Plenty of houses, nothing at all to choose between them. He scowled under his hat; there were times when he hated the very concept of choice. Doctrine wasn't terribly keen on it either, he remembered-choice and doubt come between the hand and the hilt, they constitute fatal obstacles to the perfection of the draw; God neither doubts nor chooses, God's thoughts and actions are simultaneous and identical. Lauctans, Fifth Homily of the Edge, XIV, 2. Stuff choice, then; he pulled up, jumped off the horse, tied it to the nearest porch post and banged on the nearest door.

Bearing in mind that he'd seen six women of various ages and a seven-year-old boy gawping at him from the loft hatch, it was pretty stupid of them to pretend not to be at home. He banged again, waited a little longer, then lifted the latch and walked in.

That stare, again; I really must do something about this second head, he thought as seven pairs of eyes stuck into his face like bradawls, it's turning out to be a liability. Years ago he'd been to a place where they still had the quaint old custom of sticking the heads of criminals up on pikes in the market square. That was it; he knew he'd seen that expression somewhere before.

'Excuse me for barging in like that,' he said cheerfully, dislodging a small torrent of water on to the dried-clay-and-cowshit floor as he took off his hat, 'but I don't think you heard me knock, and it's raining. You wouldn't happen to know of somewhere I could hire a bed for the night?'

The magic of the word hire unfroze them like the secret incantation waking up the sleeping giants in the old kids' story. 'Not round here,' the oldest woman said. 'But you could stop here, I s'pose. We got room.'

'Splendid,' the brother replied. 'Would three quarters a night be enough, do you think? It's probably only for tonight, but I may have to stop over tomorrow if I don't finish my work in time to get to the next inn by nightfall.'

There was a younger woman sitting next to the old matriarch whose face showed that she didn't believe there was such a sum as three quarters in the whole world, unless you melted down the wheel tyres of the wagon of the moon and ran the bloom under a coining-press. 'That'll do fine,' the old woman said. 'And this is my daughter Melja.'

If Melja's part of the deal, he thought, I'll try my luck next door. Not giving offence is one thing, but there's limits. 'Pleased to meet you,' he said, with a slight bow. 'My name is Monach.'

(Monach was, of course, just the word for 'monk' in southern pidgin Torcean, but it was easy to remember, and nobody had figured it out in all the years he'd been using it.)

He clinked four quarters in the palm of his hand, then put them down on the table. 'Any chance of something to eat?' he asked. 'And I suppose a bath would be out of the question.'

He supposed dead right, but after a shocked silence the matriarch prodded Melja in the ribs and she vanished into the back room and came back almost immediately with the end of a loaf and a block of greyish cheese that looked startlingly like the medium-grit waterstone he used for sharpening halberds. Nothing to drink with it, but of course he hadn't asked for it; the moral being, with rubes, specify exactly.

As it turned out, the cheese was too crumbly to have made a good waterstone, though the bread would probably have done the job at a pinch. 'Is that all you want, then?' the old woman asked when he couldn't face any more. He nodded. She shrugged. 'That'll be just two quarters, then,' she said.

He paid up, dipping his head to her in sincere respect as he did so. He'd been to a lot of places, been rooked and shaved by some of the best short-changers and cheese-scrapers in the business. This old woman, though, was something else.

They were all still there, of course. Seven pairs of needle-sharp eyes, pressing on him like a headache, and they showed absolutely no sign of moving so long as he was there. So he stood up, wincing slightly at the touch of very wet, cold cloth against his skin. 'Do you think you could tell me who's in charge here?' he said.

'You what?'

Something under the table was sniffing his leg, pressing a cold, wet nose against his ankle. He really didn't want to know what it was. 'You know,' he said, 'like a town council, parish board, levy and muster committee, burial club-anything like that,' he added, trying not to sound as wretched as he felt. 'I've got some questions to ask, and I need to know who to see.'

The old woman appeared to have lost the power of speech. 'Nothing like that here,' My Daughter Melja said eventually. 'No call for it in these parts. Bloody fuss,' she added, dismissing all hierarchies everywhere with a rather magnificent hint of pride. 'What kind of questions?' she added, her eyebrows crowding together.

'Nothing terrible,' he replied, smiling weakly. 'I'm not the government or anything. Truth is,' he ground on, feeling like a man pouring wine into the sand, 'I'm a scholar.'