Chapter 3 #4
“Perfect opportunity, actually,” she said.
“I’d have sworn blind you were sitting next to me during the debate, only you fell asleep, which is why you can’t tell anyone what was said.
It wouldn’t stand up to a proper investigation, but it doesn’t have to.
You should’ve done him and dropped the body in that cistern over there. That’d have been the sensible thing.”
“Yes, well, I didn’t do it, so there we go.” The delegates were starting to flow back to the main hall. “If I see him again, I’ll point him out to you. Meanwhile, we really need to figure out how we’re going to do this thing. My idea is clearly a washout, so we’d better think of something else.”
“I’ll think of something else,” she said firmly. “You’ve made enough messes for one day.”
The next item was a debate on the proposed amendments to the Ordinary Creed, with Megabazus proposing the motion and Gudmund the Weasel opposing it with every fibre of his considerable being.
As a display of intellectual and rhetorical athletics, it was like watching a prize fight between two archangels, but I have to confess my attention wandered.
I had a bad feeling about pretty much everything, and I tried to escape from it by focusing on practicalities.
Where would the princess go between sessions, where was she sleeping at night, how many guards were there, did she eat alone or in company, could we maybe get to her while she was on the toilet, that sort of bread-and-butter stuff that usually responds so well to methodical analysis.
Try as I might, however, I couldn’t focus.
I caught myself framing the same questions over and over again, and then drifting away into half-formed uneasy speculation.
Was I wrong, about the Invincible Sun and ghosts and spooks and goblins and all that stuff?
I knew I wasn’t, but sometimes knowing isn’t enough.
Here’s a case in point. I grew up in the Mesoge; enough said.
Actually, we were a cut above the neighbours; we were head tenants rather than serfs, we lived in a proper house with an upper room which you reached by a ladder, my father had ten men working for him as well as his sons and nobody ever went hungry at our place, not even at midwinter.
But I’m from the Mesoge, a fact I’ve never tried to conceal, and I lived there till I was twelve years old.
In the Mesoge you’re all grown up at that age, and eighteen years later you’re probably dead.
The Mesoge uses people up the way a carthorse gets through shoes; it doesn’t matter, because there’s always plenty more where they came from.
Nothing comes easily in the Mesoge, and there are two kinds of special pest, which can make all the difference between pulling through and going under.
Both of these pests do more or less the same things.
They’re both eight feet tall and horrendously strong.
They roam about in the wilderness, and God help you if you happen to run into one.
If you’re lucky, they’ll rip your arm off or crunch your leg into splinters.
During the day they tend to avoid human settlements unless they’re hungry or desperate, but at night they like to snoop around farmyards and cattle-pens, and get up on the roofs of houses.
Their principal weapons are their claws, and they can run faster than any man.
One of these pests, the bear, is fairly widely spread across the rest of the known world.
Our bears are black. They have brown bears in Olbia, grey bears in Sashan and Echmen, and I gather there’s a sort of golden-yellow bear in Blemmya, though it’s comparatively small and inoffensive and tastes quite like pork.
The other sort of pest (we call them walkers) is strictly a Mesoge phenomenon.
Walkers are human, or at least they were while they were alive.
In the Mesoge we have a saying: too mean to die.
If you’re thoroughly disagreeable and antisocial during your life, chances are you’ll be back, and the Great Change won’t have improved you very much.
It’s next thing to impossible to kill you since you’re dead already, so you don’t really give a damn.
The tendency runs in families, and all the families in the Old Country are hopelessly interrelated and interbred.
My great-uncle on my mother’s side was a walker. For all I know, he still is.
Holy Mother Church categorises bears as natural and walkers as an abomination, meaning supernatural in origin and deliberately created by Evil for a malign purpose.
This means that if your landlord is an abbey or a bishopric and you get attacked by walkers, they’re obliged to send somebody, but if you’ve got bears, you have to cope with them yourself.
I think the distinction is fatuous. As far as I’m concerned, they’re both just wildlife, a commodity in which the Mesoge is deplorably rich.
I’m also absolutely convinced that a thousand years ago, under the old empire, they knew of a perfectly rational scientific reason why certain families in the Mesoge don’t stay dead when they die, and almost certainly explained the reason quite clearly and conclusively in a book, which has since been lost. The walker phenomenon certainly raises some interesting points about the nature of life and death, which I’m sure the imperial philosophers explored and sorted out with their usual thoroughness, but does it prove anything about Good and Evil, God and the devil?
I don’t think so. I have no patience with superstition, the supernatural or anything else that begins with super-, as I think I may already have hinted, and I see no need to drag Evil into it, particularly since I don’t think it exists.
Svangerd could probably kill a bear, if she had the right kit handy.
She’d certainly give it her very best shot.
But a walker would paralyse her with fear, assuming she’d been told in advance what it was, and that it was somehow supernatural in origin.
Back home, we don’t give a damn. You’re just as dead if you get scrunched up by a bear, and bears are almost as difficult to deal with, though mostly they stay dead after you’ve done with them.
Actually, the contingency never arises, since bear is good eating.
I don’t recall anyone ever trying to eat a walker, not even during a famine year.
The point being, I believe in walkers, as a natural but unexplained phenomenon.
I have to believe, since I grew up with them.
They’re a fact of life, like thunderstorms – which some people regard as indisputable proof of the existence of God, and which I treat as bad weather.
Or the Sun. It’s God or a bright thing in the sky, depending on your level of ignorance and credulity.
These days we write, those few of us who can, all our letters the same size.
Under the empire, they went through a phase of writing the first letters of sentences and people’s names a bit bigger, though it didn’t last very long.
Accordingly, you could turn a word into a name by sticking a Big Letter in front of it.
For instance, you could write sun as Sun.
Doing that made the bright thing in the sky into a name, then a person, then God.
You’ll have noticed that I’ve adopted this mannerism myself, partly out of antiquarian interest, partly to show what tricks you can play with people’s heads just by altering the height of a letter.
It’s still just a trick, though, same as religion, and if I can do it, so can any bloody fool.
“I’ve decided,” she said. “We do it tomorrow morning, early. We sneak in, we guzzle the princess, we’re out of here and on our way before anyone has a chance to put two and two together.” She paused and looked at me. “You’re not making difficulties. Why?”
“Because you haven’t told me the details yet.”
“Fine. All right, how about this? In our order, the first office of the day is lauds. She’ll be there, naturally, in the Lady Chapel.
I’ve had a scout around, and to get to the chapel from anywhere outside the building, you’ve got to go through a fairly narrow cloister.
Now there’s a window, looking out onto the cloister garden.
We wait in the garden, then when she and her goons process down the corridor and get to the narrow point, all we’ve got to do is hop in through the window, do the guzzle, then run away like fuck the way we came in.
We may have to waste a few guards, I don’t know, but in a confined space it’s nothing we can’t handle.
You can beat up on the guards while I do the actual guzzling, or the other way round if you like, doesn’t make any odds to me. What do you think?”
“Fine,” I said.
She stared at me. “You what?”
“It sounds like a good idea. A basic blind canyon manoeuvre, like Calojan at the Laban Forks. And you’ve got an escape route, which is always nice, and the early hours of the morning is a good time.
We might be able to get a couple of berths on a boat leaving on the dawn tide, and then we’d be out of town before anyone comes looking for us. Definitely one of your better plans.”
“What’s the matter with you?” she said.
She knows me quite well. “Nothing,” I said.
“Bullshit. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. On balance, I think you’re right. You do the killing while I hold off the guards. You know what I’m like, I might make a mess of it.”
She had that worried look. “Fine,” she said.
“That’s what we’ll do, then. Meanwhile, you go and find us a boat.
I’ll have another look round, see what I can find out about her morning routine.
Won’t be easy, because I don’t want to rattle any cages, but I should be able to get something out of the chapel novices.
And I’ll plan us a route from the gardens to the street.
There may be a wall to climb, or perhaps we can duck out through the stable yard. ”
“I’ll leave all that to you,” I said.
As I think I mentioned before, she isn’t scared of anything, but she worries. “You sure you’re feeling all right?”
“Never better.”
I walked down to the docks, pausing in a deserted alley to make a few changes to my costume.
The monastic habit is a wonderfully versatile thing.
Just by swapping the leather belt for a piece of old rope and turning in the facings of the cowl, you can go from being a distinguished scholar to a street-corner mendicant friar in a matter of seconds.
I made a point of kneeling in some mud and getting dirt on my sleeve, and then I was ready to go.
I try and keep my ears open wherever I am, so I’d already picked up the useful fact that the herring boats put out to sea just before first light.
I found the skipper of one such boat in a dockside bar and asked him if he’d mind giving me and a poor sister a lift as far as the crab-fishing station on Long Spit, which is six miles off the coast. He looked at me and said no.
I showed him two deniers. He said yes. See you in the morning, I said, and left the bar.
So far so good. That was the boat we wouldn’t be taking.
I’d made a point of talking quite loudly, and the poor-friar character I’d assumed wouldn’t have been nearly so free with clinking money; when the watch came looking for suspicious characters boarding boats in the early hours of next morning, I was pretty sure they’d remember me.
Leaving a little later was a wine cog, shipping bulk Olbian white to Scona.
From Scona, we could easily get a boat to Mavais, or somewhere else, depending on how hot we’d made things for ourselves by that point.
The cog’s master was sorry but he couldn’t spare deck space for a couple of freeloaders.
I whined and said that he’d get his reward in heaven.
We haggled, and ended up agreeing on his reward in heaven plus three farthings, which is exactly the sort of deal you’d expect a genuine friar to make.
Fleeing assassins don’t bicker over halfpence. That was the boat we’d be on.
I stopped on my way back to Old Town to dust off my knees and sleeve, turn out my hood and change my belt, then I was just in time to catch the tail end of the debate between Melboin and Gundarius on the physics of transubstantiation.
It was vintage stuff from two theological giants I’ve always idolised, and I didn’t follow a word of it. My mind was on other things.
As we were filing out of the Chapter House, I caught sight of the short man. He saw me and smiled, and then I lost sight of him behind someone’s shoulder.