Chapter 4 #3
Nothing, I repeated to myself, has changed.
Walkers were real yesterday, and the day before that, and when you were a kid in Einarsness.
Therefore if they’re real today, so what?
The relevant fact is that someone had found a way to weaponise one of our quaint old Mesoge traditions, and had turned the result loose on the woman we’d have had to murder.
I couldn’t begin to imagine how he’d done it, but that was because I’m ignorant, not because it’s impossible. Do try not to get those two mixed up.
And the short man? Just some wanker who thought he could scare me by making the results of intense surveillance sound like goblins-and-spooks stuff. Nothing to see here. Move on.
*
“This is wonderful,” I said, interrupting her in mid-sentence. “You know what this means? Someone’s done our job for us. We can go home.”
She looked at me. “Have you been listening to a word I said?”
“No.”
At times I wonder why she puts up with me. “I was saying,” she said, “that whoever did this, they were making a statement.”
“Probably. What about it?”
“Not just killing her: crunching her to bits. That’s sending a message loud and clear.”
“Agreed,” I said, agreeing with her more than she realised. “What message?”
She grinned. “No idea,” she said. “That’s why I think we should stick around and find out.”
“Absolutely not.” As I said the words, it occurred to me to wonder how many other delegates to the council had been born in the Mesoge, to a family with a proven record of producing walkers.
“For a start, they’re bound to call the council off after what’s happened, so we’d have no reason for hanging about here.
Also, we don’t have orders to investigate anything.
We can’t just go making up our own orders. ”
“Fine. We’ll write home and ask for instructions.”
“That’d take the best part of a month. We can’t do that. We haven’t got enough money, for a start.”
She smiled. She has ways of raising money in hostile territory. “Not a problem,” she said. “Look, be sensible. Whatever’s going on here, Simocatta’s going to want to know about it. If we go back now with nothing to tell him, he’ll be livid. Well? He will be, you know that.”
She was right, of course. In which case we had to stay. In which case, I needed to tell her what I knew. Some of it, anyway.
So I told her about growing up in the Mesoge, about bears and other vermin. I’d like to say she took it well, but she didn’t.
“No,” I said, when I finally managed to get a word in. “You were right: we’ve got to stay. This needs to be investigated. More to the point, it needs to be investigated by us. I know about these critters, from personal experience.”
She gave me a dreadful look, as though she’d just caught sight of cloven hooves under the hem of my habit. “You, maybe,” she said. “Not me. I’m going home. You can do what you damn well like.”
“No,” I said. “I need to be here because of what I know. You need to be here to look after me.”
“Piss off.”
“Listen,” I said. “Right now, I’m a valuable asset. I know stuff about walkers that nobody else knows, unless they’re from the old country too. It’s not stuff you can read in books, or intelligence reports, for that matter. For a start, I know how to deal with them.”
Her eyes widened.
“Exactly,” I said. “I don’t suppose there’s anyone else south of Butter Cross who knows that.
Therefore it makes sense that I should be here.
And to quote a certain person whose opinion I deeply respect and believe, I’m not fit to be let out on my own without a nursemaid. ” I smiled. “That’d be you.”
She shuddered, as though she was freezing cold or she’d just swallowed a worm. “I was just being nasty,” she said. “You can handle it. I’d just be in the way.”
“I need you here,” I said; at which point it occurred to me that I’d just signed myself up for considerably more than I’d intended.
Where had this idea of fighting and killing walkers come from?
Me and my big, eloquent mouth. “Think about it,” I said.
“We need to know who sent it, who’s controlling it. Who’s likely to know that?”
She shrugged.
“Walkers,” I said, “aren’t animals you can tame and train to perform simple tasks. If someone managed to catch one and bring it here and turn it loose on a specific target, that’s completely unprecedented and amazing. It’s still a long way from taming the bloody thing.”
“So?”
“So,” I said, “it’ll want to carry on behaving the way walkers behave. Which means, now it knows there’s easy pickings in these parts, it’ll be back.”
She looked at me. “If that’s a reason for sticking around, it’s not a very good one.”
“Yes, it is,” I heard myself say, though a riot was breaking out in the back of my mind, where I keep my common sense and survival instinct. “Walkers can talk. Therefore, they can answer questions.”
“You want to catch this thing and talk to it?”
No, I thought. “Yes,” I said. Then, with a merry grin, “For all I know, it could be my uncle.”
She gave me her best that’s-not-funny look. “That’s horrible,” she said. “You should be down on your knees praying for absolution, not making stupid jokes.”
I realised I’d handled it very badly. The last thing I needed was a stake through my heart while I was sleeping.
Explaining that it wasn’t like that, it was just a hereditary condition, like a weak heart or the Teufelstein nose, would only make things worse.
“It’s all right,” I said, “I’m still me, the same person I was ten minutes ago.
I’m not suddenly going to sprout horns and a tail. ”
That didn’t help. She gave me a cold, wary look, as though she’d just caught me peering into a baby’s cot and licking my lips. “So what do you reckon you need me for?” she said.
To fight the monster, I didn’t say. “Backup,” I said. “Come on, you don’t need me to spell it out. This isn’t something I can do on my own. You’d be the first one to say it.”
Suddenly it occurred to me that I was asking too much; in which case, I was going to have to do this incredibly stupid thing on my own.
How had I got myself into this mess? Answer: the pig and the cart.
In case you’ve never kept pigs, I’d better explain.
If you want to load a pig into a cart, don’t try and shoo him in or whack him with a stick, because that’ll just make him resolve to die before he cooperates.
What you need to do is shoo or drag him by the ears away from the cart, in which case he’ll back into it, because that’s the opposite of what he thinks you want; and then you slam the tailgate real quick and congratulate yourself on belonging to a higher species.
Quite. I’d just backed myself into the cart, the tailgate was down and latched, and I had a pretty shrewd idea of where the cart was going. I’ve known myself for thirty years, and even now I surprise myself with my own stupidity.
No, not really. I was kidding myself. I’d far rather have believed that I was stupid rather than suicidal, or (even worse) having doubts about my faith. Hence the wishful thinking and the excuses.
I realised, thinking it over during the course of a long day spent not listening to the debates I’d have sold my grandmother for a chance of hearing a few hours earlier, that I wanted to talk to this walker.
I wanted it very much. In particular, I wanted to ask it one question.
Do you happen to know, I wanted to ask, a short man?
It was practically inevitable that the walker would crush my ribs and stamp my head flat long before I got to ask my question – and that would be just fine, because that would mean that the question never got asked, so if the answer was yes, I’d never get to hear it.
Something the short man had said – blessed are those who have seen and yet have not believed.
I’ve never minded being alive – I can’t really put it any more strongly than that.
I don’t love my life. I can put up with it just fine, but does the thought of a day breaking which I won’t be there to see fill me with terror?
No, not really. You’re terrified of death because of other people: wives, husbands, children, parents – the ones you love who’ll be devastated and heartbroken when you’re gone, because they love you.
It took me a while to figure it out, but I count it as a blessed revelation.
The enemy isn’t Evil or death or the Loyal Opposition.
The thing that makes human life a misery is love, because love plus loss equals pain, and loss is inevitable.
So I’m lucky, because nobody’s going to be heartbroken and inconsolable when I go.
I’m one of the few members of my species who can truly say that his life is his own.
You have no idea how liberating that is.
Everybody else spends his life holding a knife to the throats of those he loves most, but not me.
Therefore, if the walker killed me, big deal. But I know myself reasonably well, and I knew that I had no choice but to ask him the question, or die trying.
Or I could ask the short man. Of course, he might lie to me. But it was worth a shot.
Assuming I could find him. Instead of listening to Donatus of Litharend on the ambivalence of grace, therefore, I spent the afternoon session scanning the hall for a short man, but I couldn’t see him there.
Asking around was pointless but I did it anyway.
Have you seen a short man? Most of those I asked gave me the benefit of the doubt and reckoned I was drunk or trying to be funny.
I went back to the More Joy when it was starting to get dark. Svangerd wasn’t there. Drat, I thought, or words to that effect.