Chapter 6 #2
A nice bit of reasoning, though garbage. “I hadn’t thought of it in those terms,” I said.
“I don’t suppose you had. So,” he went on, “we face a terrible situation. A monster is loose and, if you are to be believed, nothing we do can stop it. We must therefore anticipate further martyrdoms.” At which point, I think the implications of what he’d just said hit him, like a branch across the road hitting a galloping horseman.
But he went on: “That is as He wills. The history of Holy Mother Church is a record of its martyrs, and there is no greater privilege than to die for the faith. We must accept that and move on.”
I think he was talking to himself rather than me, and I felt really bad for keeping so much from him.
Also, Svangerd would be livid if she ever found out that I’d effectively lied to a very senior cleric.
“I do have one suggestion,” I heard myself say; then I scrabbled frantically in my mind to find a suggestion to make.
“Go on.”
“If you’re right about it targeting me, we can use that. I got lucky the first time, incredibly lucky. There just happened to be a bell, the only thing on the premises that could damage a walker.”
“Luck,” he said. “I prefer to call it providence.”
“Indeed,” I said. “In which case, let’s learn from providence’s example. If it’s coming for me, we can set a trap for it.”
He looked up. Hope; oh dear. Hope is such an ambivalent thing.
I particularly like the old Sashan fairytale, about the box which the gods gave to the inquisitive girl, with strict instructions not to open it.
So of course she did, and inside were all the horrors and miseries that afflict us poor mortals; the last winged crawling thing to creep out of the box was Hope, the greatest and most insidious pest of all – because it keeps you going, prepared to endure endless suffering instead of doing the sensible thing and hanging yourself.
I’d given Vitimer hope, which was cruel of me, just to tide over an awkward hiatus in the conversation.
“What sort of trap?” he said.
Fatuous, because of course the walker wasn’t coming for me.
He’d come for the princess, and then the true gospels, or maybe the bureau chief of the Loyal Opposition; definitely not me, because I’m nobody.
Therefore I could sit festooned with traps until the sea ran dry and the mountains crumbled into dust and he wouldn’t come for me.
But never mind. I was showing willing, inspiring hope and clocking up good-conduct points for being a brave soldier.
As I mentioned to Vitimer, over the years we’ve learned a thing or two about pest control in the Mesoge.
We’ve learned that there’s a special sort of greyish sand that you can dig out of the bed of one particular stream; cut open a piece of raw meat and sprinkle a generous pinch of the special sand, then leave it lying about where you know there’s a bear, and you’ve got one less bear to worry about.
That approach doesn’t work for walkers, because they don’t eat, so you have to try something else.
Meanwhile, it occurred to me to wonder what the short man had been doing in the hayloft of the More Joy.
He’d made it clear to me that he knew all about the box and what was inside it, and he’d been pretty quick off the mark hiring the loft, when he had perfectly good accommodations already.
But, having gone to the hayloft and presumably found the box, he didn’t go away again; he stayed there, and got his head stamped flat.
Considered objectively, that wasn’t the behaviour of a thief.
More like he’d gone there to guard the horrible box, until I was fit enough to come and recover it.
Twice that day I nearly told Svangerd about the box, but I couldn’t quite make myself do it. She was still right on the edge after hearing about who the short man was, or claimed to be, and I was terrified of losing her completely. And I needed her, more than ever.
“You must be out of your tiny mind,” she said.
“It’s a well-established procedure in the Mesoge,” I said. “And I’ve got two broken ribs and half a dozen sprains. I can’t fight the loathsome thing.”
“No.”
“Chicken.”
That just made her very angry. “If you weren’t a pathetic excuse for a man I’d smash your face in for that. I’m not scared of anything. Except Evil.”
“There’s no such thing as—”
“What if it can kill my soul?” She said it so urgently that I decided to keep my mouth shut. “You don’t know, that’s the thing. Touching something like that. What could it do to you?”
I took a deep breath. “Listen,” I said. “These things are common as mud in the Mesoge. But there’s absolutely no reason to suppose—”
“You don’t know that.” She was controlling herself, barely; trying to explain her fear to me, instead of breaking my jaw and running away.
That was amazingly touching. “Suppose it’s, what’s the word, contagious.
You say there’s lots of these things. Maybe that’s because people who come in contact with them get infected.
I don’t want to end up like that. It’s too horrible. ”
Sore topic, given that the condition runs in families, as I may have mentioned.
“I don’t think it works like that,” I said.
“I’ve heard all the stories and the legends, and I don’t know of a single instance where a foreigner ever turned into a walker.
It’s strictly a Mesoge thing. I don’t know, it’s something to do with the soil or the water, something that gets into your bloodstream from what you eat or drink.
Or maybe it’s purely hereditary, and there are so many cases because we’re all hopelessly interbred up there.
I really don’t believe you can get it from not washing your hands or having someone sneeze in your face. ”
She gave me a look I don’t care to dwell on. “Yes,” she said, “but you believe all sorts of stupid, wicked things, so I’m not particularly interested in what you think.”
“Based on evidence,” I said. “Look, just because it’s me saying it, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it isn’t true. Besides, you’re not making any sense. It’s not logical. You’re a true believer. Nothing can hurt your soul if you have true faith.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“No, but you do.”
I felt like I’d been kicking a favourite dog. “What the hell do you need me for anyway?” she said. “Vitimer’s got lots of soldiers. Get them to help you.”
“I don’t trust them,” I said. “I want the best.”
That got me a sort of lopsided grin. “Piss off,” she said.
“Honestly and sincerely,” I said. “And anyway, it’s not going to happen.
The monster won’t show up. I’m right and Vitimer’s wrong; this isn’t about me.
It can’t be. Either the monster won’t come back or it’ll come back and kill somebody else, someone who matters.
Therefore laying this trap for it is perfectly safe. ”
“If it’s perfectly safe, you don’t need me.”
“That’s assuming I’m right,” I said. “Based on what you know of me, are you really prepared to stake my life on my judgement?”
She has a particular expression in which contempt and affection are irrevocably alloyed, like copper and tin in bronze. It’s the closest I’m ever likely to get, so I value it highly. “Fuck you,” she said. “All right, what sort of trap?”
So I told her about my third cousin Siggeir.
I didn’t tell her he was my cousin. But I explained how Siggeir was a particularly annoying specimen.
He broke into barns in midwinter, when all the stock was indoors, and slaughtered everything: cows, horses, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens.
During the night you’d hear the most appalling racket, and in the morning the yard would be scattered with body parts and the barn was a nightmare.
His favourite trick was dumping guts down wells; the water froze over them, so you couldn’t climb down and fish them out until the thaw came, by which time they’d rotted and all the water was hopelessly poisoned, so the well had to be drained with buckets before you could draw on it again.
That was bad enough, but then he started breaking into houses, at which point the neighbourhood reluctantly agreed that somebody ought to do something.
Define somebody: enter Gisli the Rat. He farmed a large but mostly useless spread on the wind-facing side of Laugardale, so strictly speaking it was none of his concern, but he needed hay for the winter and nobody liked him very much, so he decided to win the love and gratitude of his neighbours by getting rid of Siggeir.
A more unlikely hero you wouldn’t hope to meet.
By all accounts he was a long, skinny man, somewhere between forty and sixty, bald, with a nose like a beak, practically no chin and an Adam’s apple that made him look like he’d tried to swallow an anvil.
If you asked him a question he’d look at you as though you’d barked at him like a dog, and he mumbled.
His wife had been killed by a bear many years earlier, but he had a son, a smaller version of himself but with bigger ears.