Chapter 11 #4
If Rotlaug was fazed, it was only for a moment. He sprang forward, hog knife at the ready. She dodged him, nimble as a dancer, and grabbed his head as he passed her. She closed her hand and there was a crunching noise. I heard the hog knife clatter on the paving slabs.
She looked up. She was looking for someone in the crowd. She was looking for me.
Everybody started running at once, and I guess that’s what saved me.
I’ve seen the same thing happen with a bear, when a pack of dogs tries to pull it down.
What does for the bear is, it can’t decide which dog to swat first. It just stands there, a helpless victim of indecision, and by the time it’s made up its mind, there’s a dozen pairs of jaws locked in its flesh and the question has become academic.
I think it’s the multiple patterns of movement, or something like that, not that it matters particularly.
Anyway, people were running in every direction, so maybe she lost sight of me, and that was what gave me time to get clear.
I don’t know. I remember running and running, through doorways, under arches, through a gatehouse, down streets, then alleyways.
I slipped and fell over a dozen times, then scrambled up and carried on running.
The thirteenth time I fell and couldn’t get up, because I’d done something very bad to my ankle, so instead of running I crawled.
I wasn’t going to stop moving, not for anything.
Then I guess my strength failed me, and I remember dragging myself into a doorway and thinking, Oh well, she’ll just have to gore me; and the next thing I remember is waking up, in sunlight, and still being alive.
“And you a priest,” said the woman standing over me. “You make me sick, you know that?”
Yes, but the sun was shining and I was alive, so it really didn’t matter. “I wasn’t drunk,” I said. “I was being chased by a monster, and—”
She rolled her eyes and walked away. No matter. I stood up, winced as the cramp in my legs asserted itself, followed by aches in every joint and muscle, quite possibly something to do with falling down a flight of stone stairs and being hammered against a wall by –
Nuts, I thought, or words to that effect. Svangerd must know by now. It might easily kill her.
No, I told myself, people don’t die of stuff like that.
People can die of most things – a cough, a mushroom, a cut finger – but not grief or heartache or their world suddenly dissolving in doubt and misery.
Would that it were that simple. But it might easily break her, like Krimhild had broken my father’s head, and that was something I really didn’t want to contemplate.
I limped slowly back uptown, and gradually the sharp pains subsided into dull aches, and I could put my foot down on a paved surface without wanting to burst into tears. Just inside the main gate, I met the elderly man.
“I want a word with you,” I said.
He didn’t speak, but maybe that was because I had my hands round his throat. I eased off, just a bit. “What have you done?” I said.
“Let me go.”
“I’ve had about enough of you,” I said. A couple of respectable-looking clerics in grey habits walked past, staring at us. “You and your colleagues. Look, I don’t care if you want to play your stupid games with me, but you leave her out of it, understood? Or so help me, I’ll—”
The Mesoge way, I realised. We collect all those valuable weapons but when we’re mad, we use our bare hands. Could I crush his skull between my fingers and my thumb? Probably not, but I was itching to find out. Not now, I decided, but very possibly later, one day, when it’s my turn.
“It wasn’t me,” he said, and I felt his Adam’s apple move against the web of my hand. “It wasn’t us. We didn’t do it.”
“Like hell. You aren’t going to tell me Mother Krimhild decided to go walking of her own accord.”
“She was born in the Mesoge,” he said. “Hauksfell, the other side of the lake from you. Her father was Einar Egilson, your third cousin on your mother’s side. Her grandfather was a walker, and one of her uncles.”
I relaxed my grip a little more, but only because I was starting to get cramp. “If it wasn’t you,” I said, “who was it?”
“Them,” he said. “The Loyal Opposition.”
“Why? What’s in it for them?”
“They’re trying to cause a schism.”
I felt like I was the one being choked. “But that’s what you want.”
He tried to shake his head. “The plan’s changed,” he said.
“Well, of course it has, because of you. Because you wouldn’t do as you were told.
So, naturally, we had to go back to the drawing-board and reroute.
Now all our strategies are posited on there not being a schism.
So, naturally, the enemy wants one. And that—” he tried to nod at the courtyard behind me “—is the outcome. I trust you’re pleased with yourself, because it’s all your fault. ”
It was then I realised what Kotkel must’ve gone through, when we were kids.
Words can be so much more effective than mere brute force.
I felt like he must have felt when I taunted him and wouldn’t shut up.
It spoke volumes for Kel’s self-control that he hadn’t killed me.
In his place, I’d have done it, I’m pretty sure.
“Shut your face,” I said. “It’s nothing to do with me.
You’re the one who’s playing stupid games. ”
“Is that right? So I bought the box in the shop in Mavais. I decided to keep it, rather than immediately throw it on the fire. I came here intent on murdering the princess. And I’m the one who’s prepared to unleash schism and war and a new Dark Age because I’m in love with a whore. A whore who likes murdering people.”
Decision time: crush his windpipe or let him go. I had to do one or the other before I drew another breath. I knew which one I wanted to do. I did the other. “Fine,” I said. “Can you stop it?”
He was crouching against the wall, sucking in deep breaths. “Can you? Answer me.”
“No.”
“The hell with no. You’re the angels, you’re supposed to be able to do anything.”
He looked up at me. “Hardly,” he said. “I couldn’t even make you obey a simple instruction, and you’re supposed to be a monk. You swore vows. Clearly your definition of obedience isn’t the same as mine.”
“So you can’t stop Krimhild.”
“No.”
“But they can?”
He shrugged. “How should I know?”
I’m sorry to say I kicked him, rather hard, on the shoulder. “You could control Kotkel,” I said, “and my dad. Tell me how it’s done, or I’ll kick your head in.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That information is restricted. It’s not my job to handle assets directly.”
“But you can find out.”
He shook his head. “It’s not something I need to know. If I ask, they won’t tell me.”
“You need to know it, trust me,” I said. “In order to stay alive.”
“I don’t think that would constitute a good reason, as far as my superiors are concerned.”
The more he spoke, the more I wanted to hurt him. “Fine,” I said. “So take me to whoever controls the walkers, and I can beat it out of him. Come on. Now.”
He made an enormous effort and stood up. “I can’t do that,” he said. “You’ll just have to kill me. I’m prepared for that. We all are.”
Kotkel, I recalled, had punched a hole in a wall.
But my hands weren’t as robust as his, and I had work I needed them to do.
“I can’t do any good if I’m in a prison cell on a murder charge,” I said.
“That’s the only reason you’re still alive.
Later, when I’m free of my obligations, I’m going to find you and rip you apart. Got that?”
He shrugged. “You must do as you see fit,” he said. “It’s the sort of thing I’d expect from someone like you, a savage, from the Mesoge.”
“You think this is me being savage? Trust me, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
That made him grin – painfully, as though he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it. “What?” I shouted at him. “What’s the joke?”
The grin spread, like plague. “You’ll see.”
That made me turn cold inside. “The hell with you,” I said. “You’re not the angels, or the devil. You can’t do magic and you can’t see into the future. Either you’re a fraud or you’re really, really gullible. At any rate, it’s all dogshit and I don’t believe in any of it.”
“No,” he said, with a hint of mild surprise in his voice, “I don’t think you do, which is really quite remarkable, in context.
Actually, you’re just as much a true believer as the rest of us, except in a negative rather than a positive sense.
Anyway, it’s something we’ve got in common: the blessed integrity of the closed mind.
I suppose it’s like courage or determination, one of those things that can just as easily be vices as virtues, all depending on which side you’re on.
Which means, I guess, that sides are the only things that matter, and everything else is just spin.
Also,” he added, gently removing my hands from his neck, “you’re a bloody fool.
Whether that makes it better or worse I really couldn’t say.
Nor do I care.” He stood up. “I suggest you think about what’s happened – really think – and then perhaps you’ll realise what a truly stupid thing you’ve done.
By then it’ll be far too late, of course, but I should like to think of you suffering. ”
He started to walk away, then turned back. “The librarian,” he said, “has a friend who knows classical Aelian. I’d ask him, if I were you.”
“Ask him what?” I said, but he’d disappeared round the corner into the lodge.
“Go away,” she said.
“We need to talk about this,” I said. “Look, I can understand how you feel, but the implications—”
She threw a chair at me. I got my head out of the way, but it caught me on the shoulder and hurt like hell. “Get out,” she said. “This is all your fault. I ought to kill you.”
Fine. No use trying to point out that she was in my room, so properly speaking she was the one who should leave. I backed out into the corridor and shut the door behind me.