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getting a word in edgeways. (Shortness of breath didn’t seem to be a problem with Corvolo, unfortunately.) It was only when they’d cleared the top of the hills and come to the edge of the tree line, with the road clearly visible a mile or so below them, that the young man said anything.
    â€˜You,’ he said suddenly, stopping and looking Poldarn straight in the eye. ‘I know you from somewhere, don’t I?’
    Poldarn nodded. ‘Quite possibly,’ he said. ‘I don’t know you, though.’
    The young man frowned. ‘Well, that’s as may be. Were you ever in Torcea?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜What d’you mean? If you’d ever been there, you’d know about it.’
    Poldarn shook his head. ‘Long story,’ he said. ‘But yes, I may have been to Torcea, and no, I wouldn’t expect to remember if I had. Also,’ he went on, ‘I wouldn’t want to remember. No offence,’ he added. ‘It’s a personal thing.’
    The young man looked mildly startled. ‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘Only, I’m sure I saw you once, long time ago. You were in a procession or a parade or something.’
    â€˜Really.’ Poldarn shrugged. ‘Thanks, but I’d rather you didn’t tell me any more.’
    The young man started walking again. ‘Be like that,’ he said. ‘No skin off my nose. Only, I’m sure I remember you, because you were riding along down the street on a great big white horse, and people were cheering like you were somebody important.’
    Poldarn grinned. ‘Do I look important?’
    â€˜No,’ the young man said. ‘But neither do a lot of important people.’
    â€˜There you go, then,’ Poldarn said. ‘If you really did see me and I looked important, then obviously I wasn’t, by your own admission. Glad to have cleared that up for you,’ he added kindly.
    The young man didn’t seem to know what to make of that, but at least it shut him up for the rest of the journey.
    They reached the road just before sunset. According to Corvolo, the mail coach would pass the two hundred and seventh milestone (‘That big lump of rock you’re sat on,’ he explained) three hours after sunrise the next morning; meanwhile, they could camp out by the road and be sure of catching the coach, or they could kip down for the night in a spinney two hundred yards down the slope, and hope they woke up in time. Poldarn said that where they were would do him just fine, and the young man didn’t seem to have an opinion on the matter, so they unrolled their blankets and built a fire, using some of the charcoal samples Basano had given Poldarn to take back with him. It was good charcoal, no doubt about it, but he didn’t say anything for fear of another lecture from Corvolo. Nobody seemed to have brought along anything to eat, but Corvolo had a leather bottle full of beer. If anything, it tasted worse than the stuff Basano had given him; it also gave him heartburn, which kept him awake long after the other two had dropped off and begun to snore.
    Poldarn lay on his back and thought about names: Tazencius, Copis, Monach, Muno Silsny, Feron Amathy. The last time he’d seen Copis, she’d tried to kill him and he’d had to hit her, so hard that he’d broken her jaw. He still wasn’t clear in his mind about why she’d picked him up in her cart the day he’d woken up and found his memory gone. From what he’d been able to gather – she hadn’t told him, of course, that’d have been too simple – the sword-monks of Deymeson had ordered her to accompany him, as a spy or a bodyguard, or just possibly because he was really the Divine Poldarn returned to earth to bring about the end of the world, and Poldarn needed to have a priestess with him in order to make the prophecies come out right. At one time he’d imagined he