Chapter 4 #2
Amazingly, we got across the cloister garden without any trouble and reached the base of the wall. It was much higher than it had looked from a distance, when I checked it out earlier. Rope would’ve been really useful. I didn’t say anything.
Some people have the charming habit of setting splinters of broken pottery in mortar on the tops of walls.
The trouble is, with a high wall, you don’t know till you get there.
The idea is, you take a heavy blanket with you, to lay over the sharp edges.
We didn’t have a heavy blanket. But we did have my habit.
It was almost dark enough for me not to mind stripping down to bare skin with Svangerd tutting impatiently next to me, but not quite. It’s all right, I told myself, and total humiliation is the least of your potential problems, but I wasn’t convinced. So sue me. I’m not used to being naked.
She looped my habit round her neck, then shinned up the wall like a squirrel.
I followed, slowly and with enormous difficulty; there were cracks in the pointing, big enough for her slim fingers and tiny feet, largely inadequate for mine.
She pulled me up the last couple of feet.
There were no potsherds on top of the wall, but I guess you can’t be too careful.
I lowered her as far as my habit-sleeves would go and she dropped the rest. I threw the habit down after her, then swung myself over and scrabbled with my toes for a foothold.
There wasn’t one. I was still looking when my fingertips gave way.
I slid down the wall, with the bricks rasping the skin off my kneecaps and stomach.
How I didn’t break a bone or two when I landed I have no idea.
I insisted on taking a moment to put my clothes back on, even though she hissed at me.
Then we were off, her running and me hobbling painfully on an excruciating twisted ankle, following the wall until we came to the stable block.
At which point I tripped over something, went sprawling and felt my head crack into something very solid.
I assume I must have taken a nap at that point, because I remember waking up. There were men standing around looking down at me. Svangerd and a man were kneeling beside me, and the hem of my habit was up under my chin.
“Look what they did to him,” Svangerd was sobbing. “There was nothing I could do; they just kept hitting him.”
“How many of them were there?” someone asked.
“Three, no, I think it was four. It was so dark, and it happened so quickly.”
The man kneeling beside me looked horribly military; a guard lieutenant, at a guess, in a padded gambeson with rust stains – I could see them quite clearly, so someone must’ve had a lantern – and one of those round flowerpot felt hats they wear under helmets.
I couldn’t see the other men so well, but I was pretty sure they were the lieutenant’s patrol. Joy unbounded.
“I’m guessing,” the officer said, over his shoulder, presumably to his sergeant, “that they came from the cloister garden, shinned over the wall and came down hereabouts. Spread out and take a look. They’re probably long gone, but you never know.”
The soldiers disappeared from the circle of light, leaving me, Svangerd and the lieutenant.
A great deal now depended on how bright the lieutenant was.
If he was smart, the kind of young man destined to go far in the service, he’d figure out that my injuries weren’t the sort of thing you get from being beaten up, but were entirely consistent with sliding down a brick wall – in which case, he probably had just under a minute to live.
If he was a bit dumb and rattled by all the fuss and still half asleep, he stood a fair chance of staying alive.
Which only goes to show that Saloninus’ famous theory of the survival of the fittest sounds very fine but doesn’t actually work in practice.
Time for me to do something, though I really didn’t feel like it. I stood up, dragging my habit down as I did so. “What happened?” I said. “Who were those men?”
The officer looked at me doubtfully, then made up his mind. “Get him to a doctor,” he told her. “I think he’s all right, but that bang on the head might need looking at. I’m sorry, I’d better go.”
“Of course,” she said. “Thank you.”
He gave me one more look, then darted off into the darkness. I could see which direction he went in, because he had the lantern.
“What the hell’s going on?” I said. “Did he say?”
She shook her head, then stopped and pulled something out of the ground: Aliz, her pet stiletto, which she’d planted in case she was searched.
She slid it back into her boot and dropped her hem.
“I told him we were on our way to matins,” she said.
“Let’s get out of here. We can’t do anything tonight. ”
By the time we got back to the More Joy in Heaven, my skinned knees had stiffened up and I could barely hobble. I just about managed to climb the ladder to the hayloft. “Don’t be such a girl,” she told me. “It’s only a few scratches.”
“That’s easy for you to say. What in God’s name led you to think that that wall was a viable escape route?”
“I didn’t have any trouble,” she said. “Nor did you, till you tripped over that trough. You should learn to look where you’re going.
Still,” she conceded, “it turned out all right. It was much easier to explain us away with you lying there all covered in blood than if we’d just been walking along with our hands in our sleeves.
” She yawned. “Complete fucking waste of time,” she said.
“And now presumably there’s been some sort of thing, and security will be tight as a drum till the end of the council.
We should’ve guzzled the bitch as soon as we got here, like I said we should. ”
“I’m not going to be fit to do anything for at least a couple of days,” I said. “Maybe by then things’ll have calmed down a bit, I don’t know. What the hell could all that flap have been about? We need to find out.”
“You really think so?” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it, I could tell. “I’d better go and do that, then. Stay here and try not to fall over anything. You always were a bloody liability.”
She wasn’t gone long. When she came back, she had the oddest look on her face.
“We needn’t worry about guzzling the princess,” she said. “Someone’s done it for us.”
And done it in style. They found her when it was time to go to matins. She was on the floor of her room. Every bone in her body was broken, and her head had been crushed flat.
I’ve seen injuries like that. Once I was there when they dug a man out from under a collapsed stack of bricks.
Another time I was in a war zone; I arrived with the army that relieved a siege, and a few hours earlier, the city had been bombarded with heavy catapults.
They were rolling heavy shot and collapsed masonry off people who’d been out in the street when the bombardment started.
It’s not something you easily forget, even if you’re from the Mesoge.
But there were no brick-stacks in the princess’s room, and nobody had been loosing off artillery. And the relevance of the Mesoge reference will become clear shortly, when I tell you that the first time I saw a body smashed up like that, I was seven years old.
The dead woman was my aunt. It was one night in winter, and she must’ve heard the chickens squawking and reckoned it was a fox, because they found her beside what was left of the chicken coop.
My father told me it was a bear, because he reckoned I was too young to know the truth.
But I knew about all that stuff already, thanks to my brothers, and the flat head gave the game away.
Bears rip you up and crush you till all your bones snap, but they don’t stamp on your head. Something else does that.
Crisis of conscience time. While Svangerd was chattering away about the technicalities – no sign of a forced entry, apparently; the guards saw nothing; as far as she could tell it had been the perfect hit – I was thinking about a short, annoying man I’d spoken to recently, and who’d told me a lot of lies.
I knew they were lies, because the organisation he referred to doesn’t exist. I knew that. How did I know that? Because I had faith –
Yes, but walkers aren’t the supernatural, I told myself.
An afterlife of sorts and malevolent revenants are a well-documented phenomenon in the Mesoge; that’s science, not superstition, and there’s most definitely a sound scientific explanation for it, which Saloninus or one of those guys wrote down in a book a thousand years ago, and which has since been misplaced.
You knew all about walkers long before you met the short man. Nothing has changed. It’s all right.
Yes, I thought. But this isn’t the Mesoge.
If the killing had happened in Hrafnsvik, where the princess was born, or Segwald, where she lived and worked, I might just have been able to accept it.
Hrafnsvik is roughly six hundred miles from the Mesoge border.
Segwald, maybe seven-fifty. But Choris – halfway across the known world, two and a half thousand miles if it’s a step, with both the Bitter Sea and the Friendly Sea in the way; besides, it wasn’t just about distance.
Choris is another world. The sun shines most of the year.
You don’t get bears in Haymarket or Temple Row.
You don’t get bears, because a very long time ago, under the empire, the last bear was killed by the emperor’s huntsmen, making Choris a safe place to live.
The Mesoge was never part of the empire; too cold, too miserable, not worth the effort of invading.
At which point I paused in my train of thought, uncertain whether that point was for or against the motion.
Whereupon I realised I wasn’t entirely sure what the motion was.