Chapter 5 #3
That made no sense to her. I gave her a moment to figure it out. “You mean, the monster? You know who it was?”
“Is,” I corrected her. “They don’t die.”
My voice cracked up as I said it. “You recognised it,” she said. “Someone you used to know, in the old country.”
I nodded. “My dad,” I said.
I’d tried telling myself that I could be wrong, but it was no use.
The swelling had distorted his face, and all the years I knew him he’d had a full head of hair and a beard; there was room for scepticism, if you put your shoulder to it and pushed really hard.
But that look in his eyes, the scorn, the absolute dismissal – I couldn’t mistake that.
I’d seen it so many times, after all, in circumstances that made it hard to forget. I was always a disappointment to my old man.
Svangerd didn’t take it well. She didn’t say anything. She just stared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have told you.”
That didn’t make it any better. “You mean,” she said, “you’re one of those things.”
“No, of course not.” Not yet, at any rate. As I think I may have mentioned, it does tend to run in families. That thought was a particularly shrill voice in the chorus of voices howling at the back of my mind. “I’m me. You know me.”
“I thought I did.” She was making herself look at me. “But you got rid of it.”
“Yes.”
“You said they can’t die.”
“No. But it’s been burned to ashes and they’re going to throw the ashes in the sea. It’ll be a while before he’s in any fit state to bother anybody.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Years rather than months. Don’t ask me to be more specific than that. There’s no way of knowing, because nobody’s ever dumped the ashes out to sea before, because there is no sea in the Mesoge. That’s why I insisted. He won’t know what to do.”
“Your father.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “I didn’t even know he’d died.”
I think she wanted to feel sorry for me, but she couldn’t. “You’re sure it was him.”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t like it when there’s nothing she can do. “Was he a bad man, your father?”
“No, not particularly,” I said. “He didn’t suffer fools gladly and he had a temper, but he wasn’t Evil incarnate. It’s just something that happens in the Mesoge. It’s something you get, like fever. It doesn’t mean anything.”
She sat down, with her back to the side of the stall. “Why the hell did you want to go and get involved?” she said. “They’re going to ask us a lot of questions. If they find out who we are—”
“They won’t,” I told her. “There’s nothing to find out. We’re just delegates to the council. Anything else we might have been stopped when the princess died. Relax,” I added. “It’s over now. We answer their questions, and then we go home.”
The last time I saw him was when the cart arrived to take me to Volundardal.
We didn’t have a cart of our own, so we had to borrow one from our neighbour.
My eldest brother drove. I sat in the back, along with a load of wool bales our neighbour wanted dropped off along the way.
I saw my father in the long meadow, laying the hedge.
He had a billhook in his hand, and he was wrestling a hazel branch, twisting and bending it to make it go exactly where he needed it to be.
He must have heard the cart go by but he didn’t look up.
Now he was – dead? Well, yes and no. Nobody knows.
It’s a metaphysical grey area that would have scholars crawling all over it like flies if it happened anywhere other than the Mesoge.
Quite possibly it holds the key to a real understanding of the true nature of life and death.
But the finest minds of successive generations tended to prefer warmth and sunlight to cold and fog, so nobody ever saw fit to go to the Mesoge and investigate the matter in any depth. Perfectly understandable.
I didn’t get any sleep, needless to say.
A dozen soldiers came to take me to the council, just in case it had slipped my mind. When I tried to stand up, I found I couldn’t. My knee had swollen up, my ribs ached and I couldn’t bend my right arm. There was no skin left on the palm of my left hand, and both my feet were blistered.
That, the soldiers said, wasn’t a problem.
Two of them held a spear at knee height between them, and I sat on it all the way across town, with people standing in groups to see me as I went by.
Nobody cheered and nobody threw stones, suggesting that nobody had yet figured out what to tell them to think.
Every novice who’s ever joined a monastic order dreams of the day when he stands up to address a general ecumenical council in full conclave. My turn, and I wished I was a thousand miles away. I tried to stand up, and then somebody brought me a stool to sit on.
I’d been expecting a lot of damnfool questions, but I think they were all too shocked by what had happened.
There was no posturing, no spinning the issues to make the other side look bad, no veiled accusations.
I guess they reckoned all that could wait, until they had some sort of an idea of what was going on.
So I tried to answer clearly and simply.
The monster, I told them, was a common phenomenon in the Mesoge, though to the best of my knowledge it didn’t occur anywhere else.
Yes, I was from the Mesoge, and I’d had personal experience of these creatures.
Yes, I recognised the monster’s handiwork as soon as I heard the details.
I hadn’t told anyone because I hadn’t expected anyone to listen; besides, there wasn’t anything that anyone could do.
Yes, I took it on myself to act without reporting my suspicions to the proper authorities, because I knew what had to be done, though I had no reason whatever to believe that I was capable of doing it.
The bell-tower and the bell were sheer good luck.
If it hadn’t been for them, I’d be dead now, and so would an unquantifiable number of other people.
Yes, to the best of my knowledge the measures I’d insisted on ought to work; that is, it was highly unlikely that the monster would be able to reassemble itself in the short to medium term.
I’d followed the approved procedure used in the Mesoge for time out of mind; my only modification was insisting that the ashes be dumped in the sea.
I explained why. As far as I knew, therefore, the danger was over, unless there were more of the creatures out there – unlikely, I said, because walkers are essentially solitary and have never been known to cooperate with each other.
However, I added before anyone could shut me up, since it was unprecedented to find one outside the Mesoge, it would be unwise to assume that any of the previously established facts about walkers still held true.
I had no idea, and didn’t care to hazard a guess, how it had got here.
It would be reasonable to entertain the possibility that someone had deliberately brought it here, though such a thing had never happened before and I couldn’t begin to imagine how you’d go about doing it.
That said, a walker leaving the Mesoge and coming to Choris of its own accord was even more improbable, in my opinion.
Awkward silence when I’d finished my testimony.
I sat still and quiet, and then tried to stand up, but my knees wouldn’t take my weight.
Nobody seemed to know whether I was supposed to go away or stay there till the end of the session.
Unthinkable that there shouldn’t be an established procedure for something happening at an ecumenical council.
Just one more unthinkable thing to add to the pile.
Vitimer, the new chairman, got to his feet.
I looked at him. I felt a bit sorry for him.
No doubt he’d dreamed of being chairman, and his dream had come true and he didn’t like it one bit, not like this.
He had no idea whether I was a true hero or an abomination.
I’d mentioned the fact that there was some hereditary element in the occurrence of walkers, though I’d neglected to say that the one I’d killed was my father.
But I was from the Mesoge, and everybody knows we’re all as interbred as chickens up there; on the other hand, I’d killed it, so presumably it was safe to assume that I was on our side. Maybe.
Under those conditions there was very little Vitimer could say, so he said it.
We’d all had a most terrible shock, he said, and surely it was no coincidence that the powers of Evil should choose to strike here, in the heart of all true religion, at this particularly historic moment.
Likewise, it should come as no surprise that the victim should have been our dear departed sister, who had done so much to further the cause of the true faith, and who therefore was the most logical target.
But, he went on, as usual, Evil had miscalculated.
Ever since time began, the true vine has been watered with the blood of martyrs, et cetera, et cetera – he speeded up and relaxed visibly when he got to that bit, because he knew he could do that sort of spiel in his sleep, and probably had on many occasions.
Gradually, the mood in the hall relaxed too.
They’d been given an explanation, and now they knew what they were supposed to think. Evil did it. Panic over.
At least, they knew what they were going to put in their letters home.
Looking round at them while Vitimer was talking, I wasn’t quite so sure that they believed it themselves.
Indeed, it did occur to me to wonder whether I might not be the only atheist in the building.
Saying it was all Evil’s fault was all very well, but what if Evil had a few flesh-and-blood accomplices? And as for the political implications …