K Parker - Shadow

'Then some very bad people pretending to be Poldarn were here a month ago. Or another god passed through here in a cart, and for reasons best known to himself he pretended to be Poldarn.' The voice laughed. 'Let me put it another way. If there are such things as gods, there was one in the cart. I'm sceptical about virtually everything, but that's a fact.'

Monach smiled in the dark. 'And if there's no such thing as gods?'

'Ah. In that case, some very bad people who could raise the dead, heal the sick, predict the future and call lightning down out of the sky passed through here not long ago in a cart, but they weren't gods. Exactly the same as a god, but different.'

Monach nodded. 'And you saw all this?' he said.

'Oh yes. I can still see, you know, and I can hear, and people in these parts answer my questions truthfully. I saw the thunderbolt, I saw the healing and the raising from the dead, and I heard the prophecy. I was at the back of the crowd, mind you, having to peer over Pein Annit's shoulder, but I saw it.'

'And you believed?'

'I believe that I saw what I saw. Of course, the woman who was with him wasn't really a priestess. She was a Torcean, about your age, quite pretty in a blanched sort of a way. She didn't believe; I suspect she thought she was a confidence trickster.'

'Really,' Monach said, in a rather strained voice. 'How could you tell?'

'She was afraid,' Jolect said. 'It wasn't particularly warm, but she was sweating-the ends of her fringe were stuck together in little spikes, and there were dark patches in the cloth of her gown under the arms and in the small of her back. She was trying quite hard to take no notice of us-a very good performance, well thought out-but she couldn't help flicking very quick glances at us out of the corner of her eye; I don't suppose she even knew she was doing it, but she was. Also there were inconsistencies in what she told us, things she simply couldn't have said if she actually believed. Oh, and the people she gave medicine to didn't get better; she made a false diagnosis, though it's hard to blame her for that. She thought they had pneumonia, and what they really had was deer-tick fever. The symptoms are almost exactly the same in the early stages.'

Monach took a deep breath. 'So she was a fraud, then.'

'Beyond doubt. I didn't say anything, of course; she'd done me no harm, and nobody would've believed me, in any case. And it didn't matter. If the god is genuine, what difference does it make if the priest isn't what he claims to be? Or even if he doesn't believe.'

'Quite,' the brother muttered. 'All right, you've explained why the priestess was a fraud. Why was the god genuine?'

Another laugh. 'I thought I'd told you that. Because he raised the dead, healed the sick, made thunder and forecast the future.' A pause. 'The thunder could have been a fraud, of course, because it is possible to manufacture thunder artificially. But it could just as easily have been the real thing.'

Monach thought about that for a moment. 'The same could be true of the healing,' he said. 'Perhaps the god wasn't a god, just a good doctor.'

'What an intelligent young man you are,' the voice said. 'But not in this case, since he didn't give them a medicine or examine them, or do any of the things doctors do.'

'Ah,' Monach interrupted. 'Then how can you be sure it was the god who healed them, if he didn't do anything?'

Another scrape, as if someone was shifting his weight in a chair with one shrunken leg. 'Because when he arrived in town there were four men and two women dying of marsh fever-which, as I'm sure you know, is always fatal if it lasts beyond the second week; and during the night he was here all four of them sweated out the fever and woke up the next morning, and now they're fully recovered. And Lassie Nurico's daughter died just after they arrived, and Pons Quevi a couple of hours later; they were quite dead, I saw their bodies myself and found no pulse or signs of life, and they were taken over to the Fennas' barn and laid out for burial. And in the morning they were alive again, and they're still alive now. What more proof do you need?'

Monach rubbed his chin. 'There are other possible explanations,' he said.

'Of course.' The voice clicked its tongue. 'But Seuro Eliman's boy climbed up into the rafters of the tower courtyard roof and watched the god most of the night, and he told me the god sniffed six times and sneezed twice; and if you've heard or read the stories about Poldarn you'll know that when he cures disease he sniffs, and when he raises the dead he sneezes. And I heard that when I was a boy, so it's not something made up after the fact. As for the prophecy, the priestess said he had business in Josequin, and Josequin was burned to the ground.'

'Coincidence?' Monach suggested.

A laugh, which turned into a dry, painful-sounding cough. 'Veusel says in the second book of his commentaries that five or more consecutive coincidences may be construed as proof of a doubted or disputed proposition. You can't argue with Veusel, he's been part of the syllabus for two hundred years.'

Monach, who'd suffered painfully from Veusel's commentaries in his youth, remembered just in time that he wasn't a monk any more. 'Who's Veusel?' he asked.

Silence. The sound of fingernails tapping on the arm of a chair, as Monach remembered that although he wasn't a monk, he was an enthusiastic amateur scholar. Damn, he thought.

'So, yes,' the voice resumed, 'you could say it was all coincidence, and you could say it was a man and a woman in the cart, not the god. Of course, I find it easier to believe because I saw him and you didn't. But I can't show you what I saw, I can only tell you various facts and leave you to draw your own conclusions. What else would you like to know?'

Monach was getting cramp from sitting on the table for so long. 'What did they look like?' he asked.

'The woman,' the voice said, 'was about medium height for a Torcean, with a narrow face, pointed nose and chin, high cheekbones, dark brown hair; I wasn't close enough to see the colour of her eyes, but they were dark too. She was wearing a dark blue dress, probably from Torcea; I don't know anything about women's fashions so I can't give you any technical details-it's a sad gap in my knowledge. I believe that you can tell how old a dress is and where it came from if you know about such things, and of course that could be useful in a case like this.'

'Thank you,' Monach replied. 'And what about the man? I mean the god.'

'He looked like Poldarn,' the voice replied. 'Just like he does in all the statues and paintings and ivory carvings and engravings on the backs of mirrors. Which reminds me, going back to the question of proof. Jira Fider, the miller's wife, had a gold ring that belonged to her great-grandmother. She took it off to wash some shirts-the hot water makes her fingers swell, and it was a tight fit at the best of times-and put it down on the step while she was working; a black bird dropped out of the plum tree, picked the ring up in its beak and flew away. She assumed it was a jackdaw, but for some reason they've never been common in these parts. That was the morning of the day they came. Coincidence, of course.'

Monach rubbed his eyes. 'When you say he looked like Poldarn-'

'The cart,' the voice continued, 'was just a cart, and if you can find anybody who can describe it in any detail I'll give you six quarters. All carts that are just carts look the same, you see. Fortunately I don't believe that there's such a thing as just a cart, so I took a careful look. It was a short two-horse back-sprung haulier's cart, painted grey a long time ago and neglected since, with one grab-handle missing from the box and a patch welded on to the front offside tyre. I think that's all the facts I can remember. If you like we can talk a bit more about metaphysics, or I can tell you some stories about my life as a soldier; you could go back and check the references, to give you an idea of the quality of my memory and powers of observation. I'd rather not, though, since you might use them to work out who I could be; somebody important who was at the same battles as I was. Purely by coincidence, you understand.'