Chapter 9 #3
There’s loads of interesting stuff in books, she told me at one point.
I think of you people and books as like squirrels and nuts.
You gather up all the nuts and you bury them in books, to see you over the long cold winter.
But, actually, squirrels very rarely go back to their hoards, did you know that?
Mostly they bury them and then forget where.
Stupid little creatures, really, hopping about, trying to do something sensible but not quite managing. Remind you of anyone?
I tried telling myself: she’s doing it to make you hate her, to keep you alive, so it’s all with the very best of intentions, or at least she’s hopping from square to square, like a squirrel. But you can think or you can push, you can’t do both, and I was more concerned with pushing.
The fact is, she said, squirrels were once much smarter, a long time ago.
God taught them to provide for the hard times by burying nuts, because He loves all creation.
But after the Fall the squirrels got stupid and forgot the rationale behind nut burying, so now they just do it out of habit.
Which is good, incidentally, because it means a lot of nuts get planted far away from the tree, which helps forests to spread, and of course that was all part of the grand design from the very outset.
He wanted forests to spread so there’d be lots of trees for men to cut down and burn into charcoal to make steel, for tools and weapons.
Needless to say, it was my lot who helped you to forget how to make steel, just as we helped the squirrels forget to go back for the nuts.
She’s doing what I used to do to my brothers, I told myself.
They hit me with their fists and their boots, I hurt them with words.
I can’t remember who started it, and of course it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that it wasn’t really self-defence, because it just made them hit me more.
I did it because I enjoyed it, and getting thumped was a small price to pay.
The savages in northern Markland believe that a man who dies in battle goes to War Hall, and he spends the rest of eternity fighting with the great heroes of antiquity, slicing into them and getting sliced; then every evening all the chopped-off heads and hands and arms and legs get put back together, and everybody goes in to dinner together and gets roaring drunk, before the whole process starts again in the morning.
War Hall is the best thing a Marklander can hope for, and the inmates don’t hate each other, quite the reverse; they’re Warfather’s elect, the chosen ones, the sons of light, the blessed company of saints; brothers in arms. My brothers and I were in arms against each other all the time, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love them, or them me.
What you need, she said, is a good book to read. Take your mind off being cold. Oh, sorry, forgot, all the good ones got burned. So here’s a less good one. Enjoy.
It was Bausa on metallurgy, the book she’d been trapped in. I may have flicked through it while I was pushing. There’s a time and a place for reading books, and I had other things to do. You can take your book, I told her, and shove it where the squirrel shoved the nuts.
Very good. I think it’s wonderful that you can still make jokes, in spite of everything. Oh, and by the way, we’ve arrived.
Arrived where? Home, presumably, at the Golden Star monastery, where Mother Tysapherna was waiting impatiently.
Bloody woman. I tried very hard to feel some sympathy for what she was about to go through, but I made a hash of it, as usual.
When the demon slipped inside her, she’d be furious, livid, roaring mad and very angry.
She’d push with every scrap of her exceptionally powerful mind, and the fact that she couldn’t budge it a thousandth of an inch would make her even angrier.
She’d be fine; no chance of her freezing with all that energy and effort to keep her toasty warm.
Served her right for getting me into this mess.
I was heaving and straining till my moral fibres ached, same as I’d been doing for as long as I could remember – note the use of the imperfect tense – when I felt something give.
What’s happening, I roared. So long, she said, a very long way away, thank you for having me.
And then my body and my mind were empty, apart from me, all on my ownsome, and I was standing in a room I knew quite well; standing because there was only one chair, and Mother Tysapherna was sitting in it.
She had an odd look on her face. Poor woman, I thought.
“Well,” she said, “it took a while, but we got here in the end. Thank you.”
“Piss off,” I said.
“You’re upset.” She frowned. “Understandable, I guess. I take it we’re no longer friends.”
I could kill her, of course. She’d more or less admitted that if the host body died while she was in it, she’d be neutralised, powerless, for a time –
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t,” she said.
“A broken neck I can fix just like that.” She snapped her, Mother Tysapherna’s, fingers.
“You dying of a moral vacuum would’ve been different.
It’d have taken all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to get you back up and running, and it simply wasn’t expedient, under the circumstances.
Tysapherna wants to live. You didn’t. Big difference. ”
I tried not to think. Of course, you can’t, can you?
“Nobody would believe you, for one thing,” she said.
“Some clerk forces his way into a closed meeting of the oversight committee and starts yelling that Mother Tysapherna’s possessed by a devil.
Absolutely. Also, you’re not going to get the chance.
” There was a little brass bell on the floor by her feet.
She stooped down, picked up and shook it.
It went tinkle, tinkle. The door behind me opened.
“Take him away and lock him up,” she said.
As luck would have it, the chief jailer is a pal of mine.
Actually, he’s not the chief jailer, he’s brother castellan, in charge of security for the monastery campus, and what he mostly does is stop the hired help from pilfering from the kitchens.
He’s a pal of mine because I inadvertently barged in on him and a very young novice doing something expressly forbidden in the Book of Amaliel, chapter six, verse three.
“If I were in your shoes,” he told me, “I’d stay put and count your blessings. This is quite a good place for you to be right now.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed.
“Trust me,” he said, “you’re better off.
I’ve got two men on the door I can absolutely vouch for, and another of my best men making sure nothing untoward goes in your bread and water.
They can’t burn you out, because this whole building is solid brick, and the window’s too small for anyone to climb through.
A really good crossbowman on the dormitory roof might just get a shot at you if you stand directly in front of the door, so I wouldn’t do that if I were you.
Probably if I were them I’d be looking into a visitor with a highly contagious and lethal disease, but that’d take time to set up, obviously.
Meanwhile, for the time being, you’re probably fairly safe. ”
Oh, I thought. “Who—?”
“Oh, pretty much everybody. As well as Tysapherna, and Simocatta, naturally, there’s a valid extradition warrant with your name on it from Angkola, something about several murders and burning down a library, and you’re wanted for questioning by His Holiness in Choris on a charge of falsifying documents.
We’ve also got three scary-looking types from Kouden in the guest wing.
They won’t say what they’re here for, but no prizes for guessing.
Oh, and Svangerd’s back. She’s locked up in a cell six doors down.
If I were you, she’s who I’d be most afraid of. ”
“Why’s she—?”
“Purification, mostly,” he said. “After she had that thing in her, they want to keep her isolated for a bit just to be on the safe side. Also she was full of all sorts of crazy stuff about the devil and Tysapherna, and Mother Grimhild, of all people. And you. Especially you. We’ve got her chained to the wall, and even so it’s not pleasant for the poor devils who bring her food.
Tysapherna says we’ll give her a few weeks to see if she snaps out of it, otherwise she’ll have to go back to Kouden. ”
I thought about that. “You couldn’t do me a favour, could you?” I said.
“What?”
“How about something to read? And a lamp would be nice.”
He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “but you can kill someone by smearing poison on the pages, and there’s also stuff you can put in lamp oil to give out poison vapour. Not worth the risk.”
I thought about that, too. Brother castellan is my pal, but only because I know things about him that could get him hanged.
If harm came to me, my knowledge would die with me, like ancient wisdom in a rare book.
Someone else, therefore, was anxious to keep me alive.
Not Mother Tysapherna, because she was the first person my pal thought of.
Not Simocatta, because why would he give a damn?
Mother Grimhild just possibly, which would explain why she’d sent three goons to get me, but somehow I doubted it.
Someone – a number of people, actually – had told me recently that I was needed, therefore not expendable, but were they in a position to influence policy in my own monastery?
I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about that.
Six days with nothing to read. On the seventh day my pal came to see me. “Still alive, then,” he said.
“Yup.”
He looked round, which was ridiculous in context, then produced something from deep in his sleeve. “They’ll crucify me if they find out,” he said. “Here.”