Poldarn nodded. 'From what I gather, getting rid of the ash was the least of their problems.'

  'That's true,' Colsceg said. 'But we're all right on that score—we're high up, so mudslides won't be a problem.'

  'Unless they come straight down off the mountainside at you,' Poldarn pointed out. 'But I expect you've considered that.'

  Colsceg frowned. 'We're trying not to scare ourselves to death thinking of every bloody thing,' he replied. 'It's bad enough as it is without dreaming up new ways we could all get killed.'

  That seemed to close that topic of discussion. 'I'm sure Halder will want to send you anything we can spare,' Poldarn said. 'I'll talk to him about it when I get home.'

  Nobody seemed very impressed by what Poldarn reckoned was a very generous offer, not to mention a distinctly reckless one. He had a feeling that as far as the Haldersness people were concerned, charity began at home and stayed there. In fact, he wished he'd kept his mouth shut.

  * * *

  Chapter Nine

  'I love organised religion,' said the old man with the long grey hair, wiping brains off the blade of his sword with the hem of his coat. 'I love its pomp and pageantry, its traditions, its stabilising influence on society' He kicked a dead body just to make sure before pulling a ring off its finger. 'I just wish there was more of it. There don't seem to be nearly as many monasteries as there used to be when I was your age.'

  The younger man (I know him; I'm sure I've seen him before, somewhere or in something) laughed. 'Too right,' he said. 'But you've burned down most of them. You can't have your cake and eat it, you know.'

  (The crows were already beginning to circle. He couldn't see them, but he could hear their voices, as if they were calling out to him, trying to tell him something—a warning, maybe, or just vulgar abuse because he was in the way. He felt that he ought to be able to understand what they were saying, but either they were just too far away for him to make out the words, or else it was one of the arcane rules of the dream.)

  The older man shrugged the point away. 'So what?' he said. 'If these people were really serious about religion, they'd rebuild them. Bigger and more splendid—' The ring didn't want to come off, so he knelt down, put the finger in his mouth and sucked. 'Useful trick, that,' he said, 'just the sort of thing you're here to learn.' He spat the ring out into his hand. 'Where was I?'

  'Bigger and more splendid.'

  'Absolutely.' The older man held out his arm, so that he could be helped up. 'Seems to me,' he went on, 'that if my country was being assailed by ruthless bands of wandering pirates—'

  'It is.'

  '—Then I'd do everything I possibly could to woo the favour of the gods,' the older man went on, grunting as he straightened his back, 'especially building monasteries and endowing them with fine silverware. Gods hate cheapskates, it's a well-known fact.' He frowned, drawing together his monstrous ruglike eyebrows. 'You aren't just going to leave that perfectly good pair of boots, are you?'

  Of course, the older man was showing off (I know him, too; you couldn't forget someone like that) in front of his dazzled and devoted apprentice. He was usually like this after a massacre, clowning and cracking jokes to vent the stress and the anger and the self-loathing from his system. 'Sorry,' the younger man replied meekly, stooping and dragging off the dead man's left boot. 'I don't know what I could've been thinking of.'

  Feron Amathy; the old man's name is Feron Amathy. I wonder if I'll remember that when I wake up. 'Hurry up, will you?' Amathy said, 'we've got a lot to get done. Oh, for pity's sake,' he added, as the younger man struggled with a tangled bootlace, 'just cut it and be done with it.'

  The young man did as he was told. In fact, they weren't particularly good boots; the uppers were immaculately polished, but the soles were rough and thin. But Feron Amathy had to make his point.

  Across the courtyard, a bunch of soldiers were making a long job of setting light to the thatched eaves of the stables; the thatch was still soaking wet after the morning's rain. 'Look at them, will you?' Feron Amathy sighed. 'No more idea than my old mother's parrot. What they want to do is get a pair of bellows—there's bound to be one in the kitchens or the smithy—and get some air behind it, otherwise we'll be here all day, till the sun comes out. If there's one thing I can't be doing with, it's sloppy workmanship.'

  The younger man smiled dutifully. It pleases him, he thought, to play up this burlesque of what he actually is, as though it'll somehow diminish the offence. He's a fool to do that, the young man realised, it weakens him. Really, there's no need to be guilty or ashamed, this is just a perfectly natural transaction, in the order of things; if you leave valuable stuff lying about without proper security measures, you're asking for someone to come along and kill you for it. Good and evil have got nothing to do with it. 'So what's left to do?' he asked, in a businesslike tone of voice. 'We've done the chapel and the main building. How about the library?'

  Feron Amathy pursed his lips. 'Now then,' he said, 'here's a test for you. In this library—' he pointed with his sword at the rather grand and over-ornate square building in the opposite corner of the quadrangle '—is a collection of very rare and precious books, many of them unique. What should we do?'

  The young man thought for a moment. 'Books are heavy and bulky and a pain in the arse to handle,' he said, 'but if you can find the right market, they're worth a fortune. Rich people'll pay ridiculous amounts of money for rare old books.' He looked round. 'We could use those carts over there,' he said. 'It's a straight road over the hill, and we can store them in the big cave under the long escarpment.'

  But Feron Amathy sighed. 'Sometimes I wonder if you ever listen to a word I say,' he said. 'Right; where do you propose getting rid of them?'

  This time the younger man felt confident about his reply. 'Mael Bohec,' he replied. 'I happen to know there's a special book market there, behind the filler's yard in the old town. Our best bet'd be to sell them off to a trader, get a price for the whole lot, because—'

  'Idiot,' said Feron Amathy. 'What did I say about the books?'

  'Rare and precious, many of them unique,' the younger man said. 'Which surely means they must be worth—'

  'A collection of rare and unique books,' Feron Amathy repeated. 'And since this is a monastery, what kind of books d'you think you'll find here? History? Poetry anthologies? Practical advice to farmers and craftsmen, profusely illustrated with several hundred line drawings?'

  'Well, religious books, obviously. But they're the most valuable of all, someone told me, because—'

  'Precisely' Another piece of gold jewellery caught his eye, and he swooped like a jay. 'A magnificent, world-famous library of religious texts, many of them unique. For generations, monks have come here from all over the empire, because this library has the only copy of many crucial scriptural texts. Have you got any idea at all what I'm driving at?'

  The young man nodded remorsefully. 'Of course,' he said. 'If there's only one copy and it suddenly shows up on a market stall, everyone'll know it came from here—'

  'Which is impossible,' Feron Amathy went on, 'because everybody's been led to believe this town was razed to the ground by the pirates—'

  'Who burn and kill everything and then disappear back across the sea to where they came from.'

  'Which means?'

  'Which means they don't sell the stuff they've stolen through the usual fences. All right, I got that one wrong. I'm sorry.'

  Feron Amathy sighed. 'That's all very well. But the day'll come when I'm not here to be apologised to, let alone save you from making incredibly dangerous mistakes. And then your head will end up on a spike over some gateway somewhere, and all this invaluable trade knowledge I'm passing on to you will have been wasted. So, all right then. What do we do with the books?'

  'Burn them,' the young man said.

  Feron Amathy sighed with exaggerated relief. 'Finally we're there. All right, you get the job as a reward for your performance in the test. Round up a dozen men and get on with it. We really haven't got all day.'

  (And that, he realised as he watched, was one of the crucial moments, the turning points, the places where it could so easily have gone either way. I wish I knew how, precisely, he thought.)

  The younger man nodded and trudged across the yard. It didn't take him long to assemble a working party—they weren't happy about being dragged away from looting the place and made to do hard, hot, unprofitable work, but they didn't hesitate or make excuses. Amathy house discipline was stronger and better than in any regular imperial unit.

  Buoyed up by their confidence and high spirits, the younger man managed to kick in the library door, though he felt sure he'd broken a small bone in his foot after he missed the door itself and drove his boot hard against the metal-work. As a result, he was hobbling as he walked inside.

  It was dark inside the library; the windows were shuttered, to prevent (he remembered) the light from fading the exquisitely illuminated capitals of the books set out on display on the great brass lecterns that stood in front of the rows of shelves. He drew his sword and held it out in front of him—no point in stubbing his toe on a lectern or a bench—and edged his way across the floor until he came to the nearest bookshelf. He located a book by feel, grabbed a handful of pages and tugged. But the book was best-quality parchment, far too tough to tear, so he dumped it on the ground, knelt beside it and groped in his coat pocket for his tinder-box.

  This would be the hard part.

  Everybody else in the world, right down to tottering old women and village idiots, could work a tinderbox. Little children who'd never been taught, who'd been expressly forbidden to play with fire, could have a merry blaze crackling away in the dry moss within a few heartbeats. Any bloody fool could do it, with one exception.

  Painfully aware that his men were waiting for him, he teased out the moss, making sure it was dry. He felt the edge of the flint, which was good and crisp. All he had to do was turn the little brass crank (he had a very fine, genuine Torcean tinderbox, formerly the property of an Imperial courier, state of the art and beautifully finished and engraved) and by rights he'd have a little red glow in no time. He cranked. He cranked slowly and fast, smoothly and abruptly, with and without little wristy spurts. He blew into the moss pan, soft as a summer breeze, hard as a tornado. He stopped, slackened off the clamp and fitted a brand new flint. He turned the moss over. Nothing.

  'You all right in there?' one of the men called out from the doorway.

  'Fine,' he called back. 'Just lighting a fire.'

  Needless to say, any one of them could have done it. The requirements for joining the Amathy house weren't exactly stringent—you had to be taller than a short dwarf and have at least one arm—there certainly weren't any tests of practical everyday skills before you were allowed to sign on. But any one of Feron Amathy's men could have lit a tinderbox, not excluding the two or three old stagers who no longer quite met the at-least-one-arm criterion. The only man in the whole house who couldn't was the man entrusted with starting a fire. Bloody comical, that was what it was.

  He sighed. 'Bofor,' he shouted, 'get in here.'

  Bofor, the sergeant, was a piss-poor excuse for a soldier, but he kept his mouth shut. 'Where are you?' he called out.

  'Here. Watch where you're going,' he added, a little too late. He could hear the sergeant swearing softly and fluently in the darkness. 'Shut up and get a fire lit,' he hissed, handing over the tinderbox.

  Two turns of the crank later, Bofor was nursing a tidy little blaze in the moss reservoir. 'Thanks,' the younger man sighed. 'All right, stay where you are. Soon as I've got this book going, you'll be able to see what you're about.'

  He tipped the burning moss between the pages of the opened book, and fairly soon smoke was stinging his eyes. A vague circle of flickering red light seeped out into the shadows, thinning them. 'There we go,' he said. 'Now, give me back my box and go and fetch some books.'

  Bofor grunted and went about his assigned duty. He found the shelf without difficulty; then, having apparently decided to do the thing methodically and start on the top shelf, he reached up and started pulling books down. The shelf fell on him, knocking him off his feet and burying him in literature.

  Well, he wasn't to know, as the younger man was, that in monastery libraries the top shelves are reserved for restricted books, the ones that ordinary, unprivileged brothers aren't meant to read, and are locked and chained to the bookcase. Damn, the younger man said to himself, I should've remembered and warned him. Still, it seemed unlikely that Bofor would have survived upwards of thirty pitched battles only to be killed by an out-of-date copy of Jorc On Building Disputes.

  He sighed. It's just not my day today, he thought, everything I touch turns to horse manure, I should've stayed in my tent and told them I had a headache. He looked down, and saw the cheerful glow of burning parchment. At least he'd been able to set light to one book, though at this rate torching the whole library would take him the rest of his life.

  Think, he ordered himself, apply your mind, what's left of it. There was enough light from the burning book to guide him as far as the next bookshelf, which contained manuscripts and rolls rather than bound volumes. That was rather more like it; he gathered an armful and carefully stoked his little fire until it was burning vigorously—so well, in fact, that he felt the hair on his forehead frizzle, and jumped back. He carried on building the fire with supplies from the manuscript shelf, but even that was going to be too slow, if he had to carry every single book in the library over to his bonfire. What he needed to do was rig up torches that he could stuff into the gaps between shelves.

  For someone of his ingenuity and resourcefulness, no problem; all it took was a big scroll, tightly wound so it'd burn steadily instead of flaring up and burning itself out before he could get it in place. Now that he had a viable plan of action, he could deploy his workforce; so he called in the rest of the men and told them what to do. It wasn't long before every case in the building was wreathed in sheets of billowing yellow fire—a rather attractive effect, he decided, reminding him of a set of very expensive silk wall hangings he'd seen in a government office somewhere. Not long after that, the soaring flames reached the rafters and cross-beams, burning off a couple of centuries of dust before catching on the timbers themselves. He stood for a moment or so with his hands on his hips, admiring the spectacle until the smoke got into his lungs and forced him outside.

  'Right,' he said, once he'd stopped choking. 'Job done.'

  A black pillar of smoke stood over the library roof, and little flakes of grey ash drifted down all around him, disintegrating as they touched the damp gravel. The heat made his face throb and glow, but it was a pleasant warmth, making him conscious of his achievement.

  'Where's Fat Bofor?' someone said.

  He felt his heart lurch in his chest. 'Anybody seen him?' he asked. 'He did come out, didn't he?'

  Nobody said anything.

  He stared at the burning library. Already, shoots of fire were sprouting out of holes in the roof tiles, where rafters and joists had burned through and collapsed. Smoke was pouring out of the windows between the charred stumps of the shutters, while a gaudy display of flames burgeoned out of the doorway like some exotic shrub growing in a ruin. Not a shadow of a doubt about it; if Sergeant Bofor was still in there, he was already dead and reduced to ash, and anybody who tried to go in after him wouldn't get very far before ending up the same way.

  'Shit,' he said, because (now that he thought of it) it was his first command, and he'd lost ten per cent of his unit through sheer carelessness. 'Quick,' he barked, 'get me a bucket of water. You, give me your coat.'

  The soldiers stared at him as he struggled into a second coat and upended the bucket over his head. 'Hang on,' one of them said, 'you aren't thinking of going in there, are you?'

  'Shut up,' he replied, dowsing his hat in the dregs of the bucket. 'Whatever you do, don't come in after me, understood?'

  'Don't be bloody stupid,' one of them said, but by then he was already on his way. He heard them yelling, 'Come back, what the hell do you think you're doing?' as he scrambled clumsily through a ground-floor window and landed awkwardly on one foot, standing in a pile of glowing ash.

  He had one hoarded lungful of air, no more. Get your bearings, he ordered himself. Door's on my right, Bofor was by the first bookcase on the left. He dropped down onto his hands and knees—he could feel the skin on his palms scorching, but physical pain was the least of his problems—and scuttled like a hyperactive toddler across the floor in what he hoped was the right direction. Of course he couldn't see anything but smoke, so thick it was practically solid; but he'd got this far, so it was inconceivable that he'd fail now. Fat Bofor would still be alive, all he had to do was grab his ankles and walk backwards, straight out through the door. It would be simple, easy if he factored out the pain and injury. He wouldn't be here and still alive if it wasn't going to work out just fine in the end.

  Something came down thump a foot or so to his left, making him jump so sharply that he almost let go of his breath. It could have been a bookcase collapsing, or a length of rafter; or just a particularly thick and heavy book toppling off a burnt-through shelf; it didn't matter, there wasn't enough time. He had to be crawling in the right direction, Fat Bofor had to be here somewhere, already so close that he could stretch out and grab him. He couldn't fail, because otherwise—

  He felt a stunning blow across his shoulders. It knocked all the air out of him, and when he breathed in, all he got was unbearable smoke. Oh, he thought; and—

  'Hello,' he said. 'What are you doing here?'

  His friend laughed at him. 'Don't be stupid,' he replied cheerfully. 'I live here, remember?'

  He frowned. 'Oh,' he said. 'I thought you'd got a transfer to Deymeson.'

  'I did,' his friend replied. 'I was there for years, on and off, when I wasn't charging about running errands. But then some bloody fool came along and set light to the place, so here I am.'

 

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