Memory (50 page)

Spenno nodded slowly. ‘Of course,' he said. ‘I'd forgotten, you're right. Good riddance, too. I never did figure out what good it was supposed to be to anybody.'

‘First,' Copis said, ‘I need to know how much you remember. Just so we don't waste time telling you things you already know.'

The fire was struggling to stay alight on a diet of wet twigs and sodden leaves. The rain was still falling, and the best they could do by way of shelter was the canopy of the cart, rigged as a rather inadequate tent on four ash poles. Poldarn felt cold through to his bones, even though he was so close to the fire that his hands were stinging. It occurred to him to ask where the baby was, but he decided against it.

‘All right,' he said. ‘And the answer is, not very much. I'm pretty sure that my name is Ciartan and that my father was Tursten; he was killed before I was born. When I was about sixteen, I joined the order at Deymeson. You two were in the same class as me; we learned swordfighting, mostly. Also, I think Prince Tazencius had something to do with it. I may have married his daughter, even. Apart from that—'

Gain and Copis looked at each other; then Gain said: ‘That's all true. Actually, you know a lot more than that, because I told you myself.'

‘You didn't ask what you told me, you asked what I can remember. There's a difference.'

Copis smiled. ‘Meaning, Gain might not have been telling the truth. Fair point. After all, I lied to you from the moment I found you, back in the Bohec country. But what you just said: that's what you can actually remember?'

Poldarn shrugged. ‘I'm not sure,' he said. ‘It's getting hard to know what's memories and what's stuff I've been told. The things that I know are memories aren't particularly helpful – like, I can remember sitting in a hide in a field of peas, killing crows with a bucketful of stones, and I can remember going with my grandfather to see the hot springs on the mountain above our house. They're proper memories, sharp and clear. But a lot of it's just remembering dreams that I've been having lately, and for all I know they're just my mind chewing over stuff that people have told me – like you,' he added, looking at Gain, ‘and other people I've run into who reckon they know me. It's hard to believe that everybody's been lying to me – there'd have to be a very good reason. But what if there is a reason that good? I just don't know, is the straight answer.'

Copis poked the fire with a stick, stirring up a little swarm of sparks. ‘You still think like a member of the Order,' she said, ‘which is what I'd expect. And you're very suspicious, which is all part and parcel of the scientific method. What I don't understand, and it bothered me when we were going round in the cart together, is how it's like you don't really want to know; like you're aware you've done some terrible thing you're scared to remember so you're tiptoeing round it so you won't wake it up. That's not how we were taught.'

Poldarn looked at her. ‘Isn't it?'

‘Of course not,' she said briskly. ‘The whole purpose of religion is to annihilate doubt; and fear's just a kind of doubt, after all. The reason we learn how to fight with the sword is so that, once we've been trained, there's nothing on this earth that we need to be afraid of, nothing we can't kill. Once we know that – really know it, believe it – that's fear disposed of, and once we've got rid of fear we're free of the biggest restraint on us, we're at liberty to act purely in accordance with religion. That's absolutely basic, essential. Fear and doubt are what stand between the impulse for the draw and the cut itself. Once the draw's so perfect that it no longer exists, there's no longer any room for fear or doubt. It's what religion is for.'

‘You've got to excuse Xipho,' Gain interrupted. ‘She learned all that by heart for sixth-grade tests, and it sort of got stuck in her mouth, like a fishbone. She pukes it all up once a week, and then she's fine.'

Poldarn ignored him. ‘Well,' he said, ‘that's not the way I think. Yes, I'm afraid there's something I did that I don't want to know about. In fact, I'm absolutely terrified of it, and when Gain showed up and – well, threatened to tell me, that's what it comes down to: yes, I really didn't want to know. In fact, I only let him say what he did because by then I'd seen enough of him to form the impression that he wasn't to be trusted.'

Gain burst out laughing. ‘Screw you, Ciartan,' he said. ‘You were always saying things like that. No wonder nobody liked you.'

‘Shut up, Gain,' Copis said, like a mother to a fractious child. ‘Well, at least I can set your mind at rest on that score – assuming you'll believe me, of course, but that's up to you. Look, I can't tell you about anything you may've got up to before Deymeson, but I do know everything that's happened to you since then. And yes, you've done some pretty severe things, including killing people, and not just soldiers or enemies in a fair fight. But there's nothing you've done that you need to be afraid of. Nothing you can't live with, I mean.'

Poldarn looked at her for a long time. ‘You reckon,' he said.

‘I know for a fact,' she answered briskly. ‘You did things in self-defence, or to protect other people, or to help the cause, religion. You did things that would've been unforgivable without the right motive. But the justification was always there. Nothing you did was – well, evil, for want of a better word. And each time, it's hard to think of what else you could've done, in the circumstances. Now it's true,' she went on, ‘what I said to you that time, at Deymeson, when you were with the raiders, attacking
us
.'

‘I remember,' Poldarn said quietly. ‘You told me I was the most evil man in the world. You wanted to kill me.'

Copis nodded. ‘I know,' she said. ‘I was wrong.'

Next to her, Gain whistled. ‘Did you hear that?' he said. ‘I never thought I'd live to—'

‘Be
quiet
. I was wrong,' Copis repeated. ‘At the time, there were things I didn't know, hadn't been told. They were things I couldn't be allowed to know if I was to do my job as your keeper. Once that job was over, it was necessary that I should be told, so I could do the next job that was lined up for me. So now I understand a whole lot more about you, why you did those things.'

‘Those things,' Poldarn repeated. ‘What sort of things?'

Copis shivered a little, probably because of the cold. ‘Well, for one, taking part in the attack on Deymeson, not warning us or helping us fight back. At the time, I didn't understand; I thought you could've got away from the savages before they launched the attack, come and warned us what they were going to do. I thought you'd betrayed us out of selfishness, because they'd turned out to be your people, where you came from.'

‘Copis,' Poldarn broke in angrily, ‘I'd just escaped from your fucking Order, they'd been setting me up to believe I was General Cronan himself, or someone else I wasn't; they were playing some horrible trick on me, as part of some grand strategy. I
wanted
to help my people kill every last one of the bastards.'

‘I know,' Copis replied calmly. ‘At the time I thought that was wrong. But now I know it was right. Deymeson had to be taken out, obliterated. It was in the interests of religion for it to be destroyed. And before you say that wasn't why you helped the savages,' she went on, before he could interrupt, ‘actually, it was. The Deymeson Order had to be taken out because it was following the wrong path, and the error it was making was what prompted it to try and use you, the way it did. So yes, you were right and I was wrong. I hope,' she added stiffly, as though proposing a toast at a formal dinner, ‘that you can forgive me for that.'

Poldarn decided not to reply to that. ‘What else?' he said. ‘What other things?'

This time Copis smiled. ‘Are you sure you want to know?'

‘I think so, yes.'

‘Excellent – we're making progress. Well,' she went on, ‘first, you betrayed someone who trusted you; someone who'd always shown you nothing but favour, kindness even. Including giving you his own daughter.'

‘Tazencius,' Poldarn said.

‘Tazencius. He was your sponsor at Deymeson. He got you a place there, because you were brought up by the savages and he wanted someone to be a go-between for him with them. So he got you the best possible education, and then he bound you to him with a marriage alliance, to make sure of your loyalty. But you betrayed him: you took all the advantages he'd given you, the training and the skills and the contacts, and you sided with his enemies. Not just a spur-of-the-moment thing, you knew right from the start, from before you married Lysalis, that that's what you were going to do. But you did it for the right reason. For religion.'

Poldarn frowned. ‘You mean for the Order,' he said.

‘Same thing,' Copis replied, almost casually. ‘Father Abbot and Father Tutor knew what Tazencius had in mind for you; you told Father Tutor yourself, as soon as you realised. And he asked you to go along with it until the time was right, and then you betrayed Tazencius – to the Order. To us.' She paused, probably for emphasis. ‘And when you did that, you betrayed your wife as well; she loved you, and I think you probably loved her, in a way; and your son, too, as a father should. You had to betray both of them, and you did, because it was the right thing to do.'

‘Was it?' Poldarn asked.

‘Of course. Tazencius was going to throw the whole Empire into chaos, because of his ambitions, his lethal feud with General Cronan, who was the only hope against the savages. Thanks to you, we stopped him dead in his tracks. It saved the Empire. It was the right thing.'

Poldarn breathed in slowly, decided not to comment. ‘What else?' he said.

Copis nodded. ‘You joined the Amathy house,' she said. ‘It was Tazencius's idea, and ours as well. We knew that Feron Amathy was an even bigger danger than Tazencius; he had the same idea, about using the savages to attack the Empire, so that whoever got rid of them would automatically gain power. He and Tazencius were in it together, at least to begin with, though both of them were planning to get rid of the other at the earliest opportunity. It was Tazencius who introduced you to him, you can guess what for. So, while you were with the Amathy house, you helped us with Tazencius. Then, when that was all sorted out, you did the same with Feron Amathy: betrayed him, to us. And the result was that Feron Amathy ceased to be a threat to the Empire, at that time.'

‘Just a moment,' Poldarn interrupted. ‘Feron Amathy's still very much alive, and Tazencius is the Emperor. Did something go wrong?'

Copis shook her head. ‘Not at all,' she said. ‘The beauty of Father Tutor's strategic planning was its economy. He had a genius for reusing the same pieces, instead of having to get rid of them and bring on new ones. Both Tazencius and Feron Amathy were – how shall I put it, they were adapted, or put on the right track; we altered them, so they'd be useful rather than harmful. Like taking a broken piece of scrap iron and making a useful tool out of it. Oh, I'm not saying we made them into good people,' she added, with a wry grin. ‘Far from it. Feron Amathy really is the most evil man in the world, there's no possible doubt about that; and Tazencius is just plain stupid. But it's like taking a weapon away from an enemy and using it to defend yourself. The weapon remains the same, but the use it's put to changes. They're now weapons for us, rather than against us. Like,' she added, ‘the Deymeson Order, which I helped destroy. It'd become a liability rather than an asset.'

Poldarn couldn't help noticing the look of disquiet on Gain's face while she was saying all this; and he's used to her, he thought. ‘And me,' he said. ‘What am I, right now?'

‘Oh, an asset, like you've always been. Isn't that what I've been trying to tell you?'

He decided to ignore that, too. ‘I get the impression,' he said, ‘from what you've said, and Gain too, that this Father Tutor's dead now. Is that right?'

She nodded. ‘He died before Deymeson fell, if that's what you were thinking.'

Poldarn shook his head. ‘Couldn't care less,' he said. ‘But if he's gone, who's making all the decisions now? Who's in charge—?'

At that, Copis smiled; warmly, for her. ‘You'll be meeting him shortly,' she said. ‘Of course, you've met him before. You'll know him when you see him.'

‘But you can't tell me his name?'

‘I could,' Copis replied. ‘But then it wouldn't be a surprise.'

‘This is it, then,' Monach said doubtfully.

It lay across two sturdy oak trestles in the small shed behind the charcoal store: a seven-foot shiny yellow log with a hole down one end, as though the pith of the tree had rotted out. The other end was rounded, and halfway along its length two pegs stuck out, like the stubs of trimmed branches. Somewhere, Monach decided, between a very long, thin bell and a giant parsnip.

‘That's it,' Spenno replied gloomily. ‘Course, the bloody thing might blow itself to bits as soon as we touch it off. No way of knowing till we try it.'

Monach knelt down and peered into the mouth of the hole; as he did so, an uncomfortable thought occurred to him. ‘It hasn't got anything in it, has it?' he asked, standing up quickly and stepping to one side. ‘The volcano dust, or whatever you call it.'

‘Not likely.' Spenno grinned. ‘We're storing that right over the other side of the compound, well away from the main buildings. Tricky stuff, see: one hot ember from the fire and it'd go up like the Second Coming. They'd have to get the surveyors in from Torcea to redraw the maps.'

Monach didn't like the thought of that. ‘So,' he said warily, ‘when are you going to try it out?'

‘Tomorrow,' Spenno replied gravely, ‘first thing. Assuming it's not raining. That's a problem with the bugger, it won't go off in the wet. We're working on that,' he added hopefully.