Читать книгу Andromedum - Sergey Brezhnev - Страница 3

"I’ll make it,” Jack told himself, the way he’d said it a hundred times now. “If I keep going, I will make it through"

He needed to believe that, even if there was a good chance it wasn’t the truth. Even if he couldn’t remember why it was so important anymore. The long run across the vast swathes of the fields around him was about more than just endurance. It was about tricking himself, chopping the distance into smaller pieces. About making it to the end of the row of wheat, then to the fence, then to the next. It was a trick he’d learned…

But no, there were some things he couldn’t trick his way around, and the vast empty spaces of his memory were one of them. They sat, as huge and open as the fields around him, hints of the past peeking through now and again like the ruined buildings that had dotted the way ever since the capital city. Memories retreated like waves when he reached for them though, impossible to grasp, impossible to even keep up with, too much hidden in their depths.

There were so few things that Jack knew. He knew that he had to run. He knew that hunters would be following, the same way they had been following ever since he had woken up in a cave full of bodies, back in the city. Jack had crawled out of that, clutching the short, stabbing sword he now held like a talisman.

“And it might not even be mine,” Jack said to the air around him. The sword was standard enough. A leaf shaped blade, as long as a man’s forearm, with a leather-wrapped hilt. Military issue, according to one of the corners of his mind that refused to give more when Jack turned his attention to it. The scabbard was more elaborate. It was red stained leather, worked with spiral patterns in what looked like silver.

Jack had clutched it to him as he’d risen from the grave they’d tried to put him in. He’d kept it with him even though it was probably the thing that most marked him as different. He’d treated it like it was special. His. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was really the property of some other poor soul from the cave? There had been plenty enough of those, after all. What if he was clutching some other man’s favorite weapon? Some fragment of another man’s past that had nothing to do with him? Jack laughed a cracked, broken laugh at that, before realizing that he needed the breath to run instead.

“Keep going,” Jack repeated once again. “Don’t stop until you reach the border. It will be safer across the border.”

The words were a certainty, made from stone as they sat at the heart of him. He probably sounded insane, talking to himself as he ran through an empty field. Perhaps he was insane, but there was no one else there to use for encouragement. There had been people here once. The burnt out buildings stood in testament to that. Some of them hadn’t even been finished before they’d been destroyed. Now though, there was just Jack, and the farmland, and the surrounding mountains.

Even the birds were silent today, the absence of their calls tuning the day to a tight stillness. Jack had vague memories of birdcalls. Something about seagulls cawing as they circled around a ship. No, below a ship, and that made no sense at all. What was the point of memories when he couldn’t trust them? When they betrayed him as surely as anyone else he met out there would.

“A horse would make this a lot easier,” Jack said, as much to break the silence as because the thought made sense. Where was he likely to get a horse?

Jack shivered slightly as he ran. The sweat from his running was cooling quicker now, and one glance at the sun said that night would be coming soon enough. He needed to find shelter before then. Real shelter, not just some burnt out husk of a place, where he’d be as likely to be crushed by falling timbers as sleep well. If he could make it to one of the mountains, there might be caves, but Jack knew that mountains had a habit of being further than they looked. Again, it was impossible to know how he knew it. Maybe it was simply something everyone knew?

There were things he did know. All the things that normal people needed to live in the world were still there, laid out as neatly as books upon a shelf. It was just that some things, like the reasons why it was amusing to think about whole shelves of books, eluded him, retreating into the dark corners of his brain. He knew enough to know the world he ran through, its coins and its people. He’d known enough to run every time he’d seen guards in royal colors, red and black compared to the dull grey of the peasant clothes he’d stolen from a line somewhere back in the city.

Jack ran on, past one of the old iron monsters sticking up from the fields. There were places, he’d heard, where these stood all in a row, wires connecting one to another like prisoners chained together. This one stood solitary, and Jack stared up at the metal framework stretching so far into the sky. No, he couldn’t believe that was true. The royalty of his own time ordered their monuments built out of stone, not caring how many people died building them. How powerful must the kings and queens of the old times have been to raise this thing of iron and steel? A whole string of them, forming lines across the land for no reason Jack could see, was too much to contemplate. The old civilization of the ancients might have done some strange things, but that would just have been insane.

“Not as insane as still being outside at night,” Jack muttered, and kept running. He needed shelter. He was still at least a week away from the border. He knew that with a certainty that he didn’t know anything about himself. That meant more nights out in the wilds, just himself, with little in the way of supplies. He had no water left in his water skin. He had the sword of course, and so far that had been enough to keep away predators of both the animal and human varieties, but the rest of what he owned was ragged now.

Jack smiled grimly at that. “At least I fit in.”

That was true. Away from the capital, the folk who worked the land were as ragged as he was, grubby with work and usually suspicious of strangers. It was a world where those in charge took what they wanted from the ones who worked the land. At least once on his run, groups of villagers had driven him off with shouts and thrown stones. Some nagging part of Jack said that they ought to be running from him, not the other way around. Yet from a distance, Jack looked like one of them. Only the sword, the sword that might not even be his sword, gave him away, and half of those he met assumed he had stolen it anyway. He hadn’t tried to explain what had really happened. It would have only have invited trouble for him, and when had the truth ever made a difference in this world anyway?

Jack stopped, resting on his hands and knees for a moment. The sun was closer to the horizon now and darkness would soon be following in its wake. Hunger gnawed at Jack, but he ignored it. He was stronger than that. Not much stronger, but stronger nonetheless. There wasn’t anything to hunt here, and he still hadn’t covered enough ground. He wouldn’t have covered enough until he finally made it across the border a week from now. It wasn’t safety, but it was as close as he was going to get with everything that was following him.

Jack rose to press on, but then stopped as he saw one thing that he hadn’t been expecting: an intact farm. Where the others were burnt out, this stood complete and untouched. It was a little ramshackle, with one shutter hanging off its window frame, the slow turning windmill above rickety in its construction, but it was there, and it looked too good to ignore. Especially since there was smoke rising from the chimney.

Jack hadn’t thought that there would be a working farm here. The capital stretched out its arms, but those outside its reach were prey to whoever came along. There were enough bandits and thieves in the world that a place like this shouldn’t have lasted long alone, even though it technically sat within the boundaries of the kingdom. Yet here it was. The smell of smoked meat came to him on the breeze and Jack felt his mouth watering.

Was this an oasis, or simply the next part of what he had to do? He’d been running automatically, without a plan or even real thought, but perhaps this was about more than that. At the very least, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Jack started to make his way towards the farm.

“Hello there!” he called out as he came closer. “Is there anybody home?”

The fire said that there was, but it was better to call out. Better to approach openly, rather than risk looking like he was trying to sneak in to steal from the place. If it had survived out here with nothing around it, presumably those within were capable of protecting themselves. Either that, or they’d been lucky in a way that people didn’t have a right to be.

“Says the man who crawled out of a cave full of the dead,” Jack muttered to himself as he got closer. He held the sword by the scabbard in his left hand, well away from his body. It was better to let anyone within see that he had it. Let them see that he could protect himself, but that he wasn’t trying to hide anything.

When the door swung open, he wasn’t expecting the combination of people who stood there. In a place like this, he’d been expecting strong young men, used to the backbreaking work of the farm, certainly coming out first when there was a man like him approaching. Instead, an old man and a younger woman came out onto the porch of the house.

The man had probably been strong once. In his youth, he might even have been in the royal army, judging by the way he held himself. But age had chipped away at him, shrinking his skin around his muscles while adding folds and lines around his face. His beard was broad enough that it was hard to get much of a sense of the man beneath, but the eyes there were intelligent, darting this way and that as they took everything in, obviously checking for an ambush.

Although how Jack knew what that looked like was anyone’s guess.

The woman’s eyes were hostile, which was a problem given that she was holding a loaded crossbow, the bolt unwavering as she pointed it straight at Jack. She looked like she was only looking for an excuse to pull the trigger, and worse, she looked nervous. An angry person might have shot Jack eventually. A nervous person might do it by accident.

Jack knew that his best option was to talk, and talk quickly. “I’m not here for trouble.”

“Then maybe you should move on,” the woman said. Her voice would have sounded pretty, but for the hard edge to it as she continued to keep the crossbow trained on Jack.

“Dahlia,” the old man said, “that’s no way to talk to someone.”

“I’m just here looking for food and shelter,” Jack said. “I don’t know what you’re doing out here, but I’d be a fool to think I could try anything stupid.”

“Yes,” the woman, Dahlia, agreed. “You would.”

“Dahlia,” the old man repeated with a warning note in his voice. He turned to Jack, stepping between him and the crossbow. “You look like you’ve come a long way. I’m Henry, and this is my daughter, Dahlia.”

“Jack,” Jack said, because he didn’t have any more than that to give them.

“Just Jack?” Dahlia asked. She’d moved around her father now. The crossbow wasn’t pointing at Jack anymore, but it was obvious that she could bring it right back up again if she needed to.

Jack shrugged. “That’s all I remember.”

“And your sword?” Henry asked.

All Jack could do was shrug again. “It’s just a sword. I’m really just here for food and shelter. And a horse, if you have one to spare. I need to get to the border as quickly as possible.”

“Oh, is that all you-” Dahlia began, but Henry raised a hand to stop her.

“You’d best come inside then, Jack, and have something to eat,” Henry said. He walked back inside as though there was nothing further to say on the matter. Dahlia watched him go in with obvious incredulity, but she followed a second later.

The door sat open in front of Jack, the invitation clear. He made his way towards it, and as he did so he found himself wondering what kind of man he was. There were men in this world, he knew, who would take advantage of an offer like this. Who, once they were close enough to knock the crossbow from the woman’s hands, would take what they wanted, from her and the farm. Who would probably kill both her and her father, leaving nothing in their wake but blood, emptiness, and one more burnt out farm.

Even thinking that disgusted Jack. What kind of man was he that he could think about something like that as if it were obvious? But then, it was obvious, because that was the world they occupied. Just as it was obvious that he was disgusted by it, and he wasn’t going to do anything there but eat.

“At least I know that much about myself,” Jack said. It wasn’t much of a start, but it was something.

He stepped into the house. It wasn’t in much better repair on the inside than the outside. It had the look of a place that had once been loved and well cared for, but now had seen a few too many seasons with no repairs. It seemed obvious that the old man and his daughter had done their best, but that there was only so much they could do as the years closed in on Henry.

Even so, it was comfortable in there. The wooden walls were hung with pictures sketched in charcoal, while there were rugs on the floor in bright colors. All of the furniture looked like it had been made by hand, probably a long time ago. A large table dominated the room, sitting in front of a fire on which a pot sat bubbling. Dahlia put a bowl of thick brown stew down on the table with bad grace. Her father sat at the table, opposite that spot, while Dahlia moved away a little. Still close enough to listen in though, Jack noted.

“Sit,” Henry said. “Eat.”

Jack didn’t need a second invitation, sitting and picking up the wooden spoon that went with the stew. A vague memory flickered inside him, a flash of silver. No, holding something silver. He’d been sitting somewhere, a silver spoon in his hand, eating… no, it was gone again as quickly as it had come.

“I’ve seen that look in the mirror,” Henry said. “Usually around the time I’ve walked into a room and can’t remember why. You were serious before? About not remembering more than your name?”

Jack nodded, but by then he was too busy eating to say anything. Another man would have been warier. Would have demanded a different bowl taken from the pot while he watched, but the truth was that he was too hungry to care. And anyway, there was a part of him that wanted to trust these two. He ate… well, like a man who hadn’t eaten properly since starting his flight from the capital, what seemed like an eternity ago.

“He’s lying,” Dahlia said from the other side of the room. “Look at him. Look at that sword. It’s obvious that he’s a deserter.”

“About as obvious as your lack of manners today, Dahlia,” Henry said.

She fell silent.

“You might be right,” Jack said between mouthfuls. “I might be a deserter. I think…” it was hard to grasp at the memories.

“Don’t think too hard,” Henry advised. “With something like this, trying to force things won’t help. It might even make things worse. Sometimes, all you can do is be patient.”

“And sometimes it’s better not to be,” his daughter insisted. “Not if you want things to change.”

That had the feel of an old, well-worn argument to Jack. At least, neither of them kept going with it, as though they knew that doing so would only make things worse and wouldn’t convince the other one. Jack wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“So, a deserter?” Henry said. “There aren’t many men who would admit to that.”

“He didn’t,” Dahlia pointed out. “Not until I challenged him on it. Even now he says he’s forgotten. Like that’s an excuse.”

“You don’t like deserters then,” Jack said. It wasn’t a question.

Dahlia shrugged. “What’s to like? The royal army is bad enough, coming out here and making sure we all hand over everything we have to the capital, but deserters… they’re just thieves and murderers. Or they try to be.”

“But you stop them with your crossbow,” Jack said with the barest twitch of a smile.

Dahlia’s smirk wasn’t as carefully hidden. “Mostly I just poison their stew.”

Jack paused for a long moment, the spoon poised halfway to his mouth. He looked from the old man to his daughter, then he kept eating.

“Good,” Henry said. “It’s important to trust people. And Dahlia wouldn’t poison a guest’s stew.”

“I poisoned the main pot instead,” Dahlia said.

Jack raised a questioning eyebrow. “Why would you do that?”

“I figured that if you killed us, you’d still take that for food, and I’d know that you weren’t going to hurt anyone else.”

“But that only works if I’d killed you,” Jack pointed out. “What if I’d taken you with me, and used the food as rations? You’d have been poisoned too.”

“In that case, I’d probably be better off poisoned,” Dahlia said, matter-of-factly, like they weren’t talking about the possibility of the two of them being killed. “And in that case, it would be worth it to stop you hurting anyone else.”

Jack wasn’t sure he could understand that. “It would be worth dying to stop me hurting anyone?”

“I wouldn’t expect a deserter to understand,” Dahlia said. She smiled again, and there was a hard edge to it. “More stew?”

Jack shook his head, continuing to work his way through the bowl he had. It gave him an excuse to simply sit at the table and try to collect his thoughts. Thoughts about this place, the strange pair who occupied it, and about himself. Jack looked over towards the spot where the bookshelf lay. He could read the words on the spines, and some vague half-memory told him that not everyone could. One title in particular stood out for him.

“Principles of advanced physics?” Jack asked.

“A family heirloom,” Henry said evenly.

“An impressive family then, given that this is a farm.”

Henry spread his hands. “The world shifts and changes. Sometimes we have to change with it, and sometimes we have to know what to hold onto.”

“And you seem to have held onto a lot of books,” Jack said, making a joke of it. But it wasn’t a joke, not really. The army tended to seize books like this. They had standing orders. Something to do with preservation. The phrase was… what was it?

“Let no scrap of information be lost,” Jack said aloud.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dahlia edging towards her crossbow. She was trying not to be too obvious about it, but the very act of trying to sneak drew attention to it. Jack stood and she grabbed for it, but even in his weakened state, Jack was faster. He snatched it up and took the bolt out. Dahlia stood glaring at him, looking around as though she might try to find a knife with which to stab him.

“I’m not here to try to take anything from you,” Jack said. “Your books are as safe as everything else here.”

“And I should trust our safety to a deserter’s word?” Dahlia said.

“Better a deserter than someone still in the army,” Henry said, his tone soothing. “We’d be dead now if a soldier saw them who had any plans to go back. But who is Jack here going to tell? If he really is a deserter, then he’s dead if he goes back.”

Dahlia seemed to consider that for a moment or two, but then nodded. Some of the tension seemed to dissolve, and she held out her hand for the crossbow. Jack handed it over, but he put the crossbow bolt on the table, just in case. It paid to be careful.

“Better,” Henry said. “What interests me more is how you know that phrase, Jack.”

Jack shrugged. That corner of his memory was as closed to him as the rest. “I just know it.”

Henry frowned at that, then gestured for Jack to follow him. “Come with me. We’d better find you somewhere to sleep.”

The change was abrupt enough to catch Jack a little by surprise. Henry led the way out of the main farm building to a small barn behind it. There was a horse there, a surprisingly strong looking bay gelding that whickered as the two of them approached. There was also a ladder, which led up into a hay loft.

“We don’t have a lot of room in the house,” Henry said, “but I think you’ll probably be comfortable enough in here.”

“And you wouldn’t want to trust me too much,” Jack guessed. “Especially not so close to your daughter. After all, you don’t know what kind of man I am.”

“I think you’re more likely to run off with my horse than my daughter,” Henry said. “So I’m trusting you plenty letting you sleep right above it. As for what kind of man you are, I think that’s for you to decide.”

Jack wasn’t sure what to say to that. Instead, he looked around the hayloft. The hay looked comfortable enough to sleep on, and the roof was sound. It would definitely be a lot warmer and drier than any place he might have been able to sleep down in the wilds.

“We’ll fetch blankets from the house,” Henry said. “And uncover the window if you want to make it more comfortable. No candles or lamps though. We don’t want to risk a fire. You can come into the main house for meals, or if you need anything.”

“You make it sound like I’ll be staying,” Jack said. He shook his head. “I just need to stay the night. I’ll be leaving tomorrow, making for the border.”

“Do you think you would make it?” Henry asked. He looked Jack up and down. “You don’t look like much, boy, but I’ve had to learn how to read men in this world. I’ve had to learn how to tell which ones will betray me and which will be firm friends, which ones are there to help and which ones are spies. You might be a deserter, but there’s more to you than that, Jack. My guess is that there are going to be people looking for you.”

“Maybe,” Jack admitted. That was one certainty that had burned itself into his brain. It had been enough to keep him running this far. “Yes. But I don’t know why.”

Henry nodded. “Let me see your head.”

He said that in a tone that just made it obvious that Jack would obey. He sounded the way a general might sound, or a king before a battle. And Jack had to wonder how he knew what either of those things sounded like. He sat on the floor, leaning forward so that Henry could run his hands over Jack’s scalp. Jack hissed as Henry touched a spot just above his temple.

“You’ve got a nasty graze here. You were lucky. A little to the left… tell me, Jack, do you know what kind of weapon could leave this kind of injury?”

“No,” Jack replied. He watched the other man’s face. “But you do, don’t you?”

Henry shrugged.

“What about that phrase from before? The one where you wanted to know where I’d heard it?”

Henry didn’t answer for a long time. “There are some things that are better left unsaid. When your memory returns, if your memory returns, we can talk then. It’s better not to try to force these things.”

“You’re talking again like I’m going to be here,” Jack said. “Hunters or no hunters, my best chance is to run. I can take your horse and be at the border in a matter of days.”

“And what if they get there first?” Henry asked. “What if you’re important enough for them to have run ahead of you?”

“I don’t even know if anyone knows I’m alive,” Jack said.

“If they don’t, you lose nothing by staying here. If they do, you gain something. A safe place to stay until you can do what you need to do.”

“Running is better,” Jack said. “I can stay ahead of them, running. I just need supplies and the horse.”

Henry shook his head. “What do you have to trade for them? That horse is the only one we have on the farm. It’s the way I take the little spare food I have to market. It’s the way I get to talk to the outside world.”

“I have this sword,” Jack said.

Henry smiled. “Is that a threat or an offer, boy?”

He sounded like he wasn’t going to be impressed no matter which it was.

“You’re not going to let me have the horse, are you?” Jack asked.

Henry tilted his head to one side. “A month.”

“What?”

“That’s what my horse will cost you. A month’s work. There are things around the farm I’m not strong enough to do anymore, and while Dahlia likes to pretend that she can handle everything, it’s too much work for one person. So stay here for a month and work, and you can have the horse, along with all the supplies that will fit on it.”

Jack shook his head. “I need to keep moving.”

“You need to keep running, you mean?” Henry laughed at that. “You want to keep running, I can spare you a couple of days’ supplies, but you can go without the horse. How long do you think you’ll last like that?”

“I don’t know,” Jack admitted.

“I do, and it’s not long enough to finish those supplies.” Henry started to walk back towards the ladder, and Jack could feel the weight of his sword in its scabbard. It would be so easy to just kill the old man now.

“Of course,” Henry said, not turning around, “you’ve got another choice. You could always kill me and steal the horse. You wouldn’t even have to go back to the house to hurt Dahlia. Although a man who would do the first probably wouldn’t have any qualms about the second. You wouldn’t have to work, and you could keep running. You could just take what you want. Or you could work for it, for a month.”

Henry waited for a second, presenting the target of his back, then climbed back down the ladder, leaving Jack in the hayloft.

He stayed there through the night. At some point, Dahlia came by with blankets, but Jack barely noticed when she came in. Eventually, Jack must have slept, but he didn’t remember doing it. Time passed in the dark, and Jack held his sword across his knees, illuminated only by the moonlight spilling in through the window. A rat scuttled somewhere in the dark and Jack threw the sword on instinct, plucking it from the rodent’s body a second later. He’d done it all without thinking about it, almost too fast to follow.

“What kind of man am I?” Jack asked in the dark. There weren’t any answers waiting for him there. It occurred to him that the horse sat below, and he probably wouldn’t even need to hurt Henry now to take it. Briefly, Jack crept to the top of the ladder, then went back to his sleeping place and sat there once more.

He waited until the sun was well over the horizon before he went back to the house. Henry was waiting for him by the door, while Dahlia was visible in the farmyard, tending to a small flock of chickens.

“All right,” Jack said. “One month. I’ll work.”

“Yes,” Henry assured him. “You’ll definitely do that.”