“Did you have this headache the other times?” Croaker demanded. “You never mentioned it.”
“It was there but not this bad. Just a minor discomfort. A four-beer hangover kind of headache, if it was beer brewed by Willow Swan and Cordy Mather. That mean anything?”
Croaker smiled at the reference to the world’s second worst beer. “Between me and Goblin we watched you almost every minute since you got back from the Grove of Doom. It seemed likely that this would keep happening. I didn’t want us to miss anything.”
And that keyed a serious question. Since while I am in this time I can remember the future occasionally how come I never remember the trips to the past that I am going to make?
And how could they watch me that closely? I never noticed them. And I try to stay alert. You never know when a Deceiver might pop out of a shadow swinging his strangling scarf.
“So what did you get?”
“We didn’t see a thing.”
“I am on the job now, though,” One-Eye said, preening.
“Now that really inspires me with confidence.”
“Everybody’s got to be a wiseass anymore,” One-Eye complained. “I remember when young people respected their elders.”
“That was in the days when they didn’t get a chance to know the old folks very well.”
“I have work to do,” Croaker said. “One-Eye, stick with Murgen when you can. Keep talking about Dejagore and what’s been happening to him. There’ll be clues there somewhere. Maybe we don’t recognize them yet. If we keep at it something will pop.” He left before I could say anything.
Something had passed between Croaker and One-Eye about and beyond me. And maybe we all had cause to be concerned. This time I could not remember much about where I was. Things seemed to be new, first time, yet some shaking, terrified
I little creature way back in the night warrens of my mind insisted I was still reliving yesterdays and the worst of those were yet to come.
One-Eye said, “I think we’ll just take you home now, Kid.
Your wife will have the cure for what ails you.”
She might. She was a miracle. Even One-Eye, who seems incapable of offering respect to anyone, treated her and spoke to and of her, as though he considered her an honored lady.
She is, of course. But it is nice to have others confirm that.
“Now that’s the first thing you’ve said that I wanted to hear. Lead on, brother.” I didn’t know the way.
I cast a backward glance at Smoke and the covered Deceiver. What in the hell?
31
My in-laws make very little effort to improve anyone’s opinion of Nyueng Bao. Mother Gota, in particular, is a major pain in the ass. The old battleaxe barely tolerates even me and that only because the alternative is to lose her daughter entirely. She is very nasty toward the Old Man.
Still, Sarie and I rated enough for Croaker to insist we swap quarters when her folks showed up last month, in town slumming from their glamorous swamps. But they won’t make it back to paradise if Mother Gota doesn’t control her lip in the street.
The Old Man never reacts to her constant complaints. He told me, “I’ve had thirty years of Goblin and One- Eye. One crabby old woman hurting from gout and arthritis is nothing. You did say she’s only here for a few weeks, didn’t you?”
Right. I did say that. I wondered how those words would taste with soy sauce. Or maybe a lot of curry.
Now that Lady is in the south most of the time, emptying her cornucopia of rage onto the Shadowlands, Croaker has no need for a large apartment. Our old space was little more than a monk’s cell. There is just room enough for him, Lady when she visits, and a cradle that was given to Lady by a man named Ram who later died trying to protect her and her baby from Narayan Singh. Ram made that cradle himself. Most likely he died because, like almost every man who spends much time around Lady, he fell for the wrong woman.
Croaker gave me his apartment, all right, but it came with limitations. I could not turn it into the new home of the Nyueng Bao. Sahra and Thai Dei belonged. Mother Gota and Uncle Doj were welcome for visits. And not one freeloading cousin or nephew more.
People who accuse the Captain of using his position to feather his nest ought to take a close look at the nest. The Liberator, Mr. By Golly Military Despot of all the Taglians and their many conquests and dependencies, lives just the way he did back when he was only the Company physician and Annalist.
Also, he moved me to provide me adequate work space. He sets great store by these Annals.
My books are not coming out so good. I don’t always get stuff down the best way. In his time, when he was on the mark, Croaker was really good. I can’t help comparing my stuff to his. When he tried to be Captain and Annalist at the same time his work suffered. And Lady’s writing strikes me as too direct, too curt, and sometimes mildly self-indulgent. Neither was honest all the time and neither considered trying to be consistent with the other, with their predecessors, or even with their own earlier selves. If you read either one closely and you spot some of their slips, neither will admit any screwup. If Croaker says that it is eight hundred miles from Taglios to Shadowcatch and Lady calls it four hundred, who is correct? Both say they are. Lady says the discrepancy is because they grew up in different places and times where different weights and measures were in use.
What about character? They for sure see with different eyes there. You will never catch Croaker portraying a Willow Swan who is not bitching about something. Lady makes Swan energetic and rattle-mouthed and a lot more mellow. And the difference could be that both Croaker and Lady know Swan’s interest in Lady is not brotherly.
And consider how they saw Smoke. You wouldn’t think they they were writing about the same animal, they looked at that traitor so differently. Then there is Mogaba. And Blade. Both blackhearted traitors, too. There is nothing in Croaker’s Annals because he was no longer writing when Blade deserted but in daily life, constantly, he shows you that he hates Blade with a blue-assed passion, on no rational basis. Meantime, he seems almost willing to forgive Mogaba. Lady sees those two the other way around. She would broil Mogaba right in the same pot with Narayan and probably let Blade go. Blade was another case like Ram and Swan. I guess you don’t need to agree on everything to be lovers. They wrote differently, too. Croaker mostly kept his Annals as he went along, then went back later to fill in after he heard from other sources. He tended to fictionalize his secondary viewpoints, too, so his Annals are not always absolutely straightforward history.
Lady wrote her entire book after the fact, from memory, while she was laid up waiting to have her baby. Her alternate viewpoint material is mainly secondhand hearsay. I am replacing her more dubious stuff with material I consider more accurate while I am in the process of putting all the confused stuff into a uniform format.
Lady is not always pleased with my efforts, he understated.
My major fault is getting trapped in elaborate digressions. I have trouble leaving things out. I spent some time with the official historians at Taglios’s royal library and those guys assured me that the real keys to history are the details. Like the entire course of history can veer sharply because one man gets dinged by a random arrow during a minor skirmish.
My writing room is fifteen feet by twenty-two. That gives me space for all my references, for copies of the old Annals, and for a large trestle table where I work on several projects at once. And there is an acre of floor space left for Thai Dei and Uncle Doj.
While I write and study and revise he and Thai Dei clack away with wooden practice swords or squeal and kick and bounce off the walls. Whenever one of them lands in my space I toss him back. They are amazingly good at what they do-they ought to be with all that practice but I think they are more likely to hurt each other than any seriously large person, like our Old Crew guys.
I like this job. It beats hell out of being standardbearer though I am stuck with that, too, still. The standardbearer is always the first guy into a scrape and he always has one hand tied up keeping a bigass pole from falling over.
I worry about not catching details the way Croaker did. And I envy him his naturally sardonic tone. He claims he did good only because he had the time. In those days the Black Company was just a raggedyass gang sneaking
