Academic Exercises Read online

  “I’m so glad you could come,” he said, town voice, educated, rather high for such a big man. He sounded like he meant it. “Such a very long way. I hope the journey wasn’t too dreadful.”

  I wondered what he’d done wrong, to have ended up here. “Thank you for your letter,” I said.

  He nodded, genuinely pleased. “I was worried, I didn’t know what to put in and leave out. I’m afraid I’ve had no experience with this sort of thing, none at all. I’m sure there must be a great deal more you need to know.”

  I shook my head. “It sounds like a textbook case,” I said.

  “Really.” He nodded several times, quickly. “I looked it up in Statutes and Procedures, naturally, but the information was very sparse, very sparse indeed. Well, of course. Obviously, this sort of thing has to be left to the experts. Further detail would only encourage the ignorant to meddle.”

  I thought about Grandfather; two shovels and an axe, job done. But not quite, or else I wouldn’t be here. “Quite,” I said. “Now, you’re sure there were no other deaths within six months of the first attack.”

  “Quite sure,” he said, as though his life depended on it. “Nobody but poor Anthemius.”

  Nobody had asked me to sit down, let alone take my wet boots off. The hell with it. I sat down on the end of a bench. “You didn’t say what he died of.”

  “Exposure.” Brother Stauracius looked very sad. “He was caught out in a snowstorm and froze to death, poor man.”

  “Near here?”

  “Actually, no.” A slight frown, like a crack in a wall. “We found him about two miles from here, as it happens, on the big pasture between the mountains and the river. A long way from anywhere, so presumably he lost his way in the snow and wandered about aimlessly until the cold got to him.”

  I thought about that. “On his way back home, then.”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  I needed a map. You almost always need a map, and there never is one. If ever I’m Emperor, I’ll have the entire country surveyed and mapped, and copies of each parish hung up in the temple vestries. “I don’t suppose it matters,” I lied. “You’ll take me to see the grave.”

  A faint glow of alarm in those watered-down eyes. “In the morning.”

  “Of course in the morning,” I said.

  He relaxed just a little. “You’ll stay here tonight, of course. I’m afraid the arrangements are a bit—”

  “I was brought up on a farm,” I said.

  Unlike him. “That’s all right, then,” he said. “Now I suppose we should join our hosts. The evening meal is served rather early in these parts.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Sleeping under turf is like being in your grave. Of course, there’s rafters. That’s what you see when you look up, lying wide awake in the dark. Your eyes get the hang of it quite soon, diluting the black into grey into a palette of pale greys; you see rafters, not the underside of turf. And the smoke hardens it off, so it doesn’t crumble. You don’t get worms dropping on your face. But it’s unavoidable, no matter how long you do it, no matter how used you are to it. You lie there, and the thought crosses your mind as you stare at the underside of grass; is this what it’ll be like?

  The answer is, of course, no. First, the roof will be considerably lower; it’ll be the lid of a box, if you’re lucky enough to have one, or else no roof at all, just dirt chucked on your face. Second, you won’t be able to see it because you’ll be dead.

  But you can’t help wondering. For a start, there’s temperature. Turf is a wonderful insulator; keeps out the cold in winter and the heat in summer. What it doesn’t keep out is the damp. It occurs to you as you lie on your back there; so long as they bury me in a thick shirt, won’t have to worry about being cold, or too hot in summer, but the damp could be a problem. Gets into your bones. A man could catch his death.

  It’s while you’re lying there—everybody else is fast asleep; no imagination, no curiosity, or they’ve been working so hard all day they just sleep, no matter what—that you start hearing the noises. Actually, turf’s pretty quiet. Doesn’t creak like wood, gradually settling, and you don’t get drips from leaks. What you get is the thumping noises over your head. Clump, clump, clump, then a pause, then clump, clump, clump.

  They tell you, when you’re a kid and you ask, that it’s the sound of dead men riding the roof-tree. They tell you that dead men get up out of the ground, climb up on the roof, sit astride the peak and jiggle about, walloping their heels into the turf like a man kicking on a horse. You believe them; I never was quite sure whether they believed it themselves. When you’re older, of course, and you’ve left the farm and gone somewhere civilised, where it doesn’t happen, you finally figure it out; what you hear is sheep, hopping up onto the roof in the night, wandering about grazing the fine sweet grass that grows there, picking out the wild leeks, of which they’re particularly fond. Sheep, for crying out loud, not dead men at all. I guess they knew really, all along, and the stuff about dead men was to keep you indoors at night, keep you from wandering out under the stars (though why you should want to I couldn’t begin to imagine). Or at least, at some point, way back in the dim past, some smartarse with a particularly warped imagination made up the story about dead men, to scare his kids; and the kids believed, and never figured it was sheep, and they told their kids, and so on down the generations. Maybe you never figure it out unless you leave the farm, which nobody ever does, except me.

  As a matter of fact, I was just beginning to drift off into a doze when the thumping started. Clump, clump, clump; pause; clump, clump, clump. I was not amused. I was bone tired and I really wanted to get some sleep, and here were these fucking sheep walking about over my head. The hell with that, I thought, and got up.

  I opened the door as quietly as I could, not wanting to wake up the household, and I stood in the doorway for a little while, letting my eyes get used to the dark. Someone had left a stick leaning against the doorframe. I picked it up, on the offchance that there might be a sheep close enough to hit.

  Something was moving about again. I walked away from the house until I could see up top.

  It wasn’t sheep. It was a dead man.

  He was sitting astride the roof, his legs drooping down either side, like a farmer on his way back from market. His hands were on his hips and he was looking away to the east. He was just a dark shape against the sky, but there was something about the way he sat there; peaceful. I didn’t think he’d seen me, and I felt no great inclination to advertise my presence. If I say I wasn’t scared, I wouldn’t expect to be believed: but fear wasn’t uppermost in my mind. Mostly, I was interested.

  No idea how long I stood and he sat. It occurred to me that I was just assuming he was a dead man. Looked at logically, far more likely that he was alive, and had reasons of his own for climbing up on a roof in the middle of the night. Well; there’s a time and a place for logic.

  He turned his head, looking down the line of the roof-tree, and lifted his heels, and dug them into the turf three times; clump, clump, clump. (And at that point, I realised the flaw in my earlier rationalisation. Three clumps; always three, ever since I was a kid. How many three-legged sheep do you see?) At that moment, the moon came out from behind the clouds, and suddenly we were looking at each other; me and him.

  My host had been right; he was purple, like a grape. Or a bruise; the whole body one enormous bruise. Swollen, he’d said; either that, or he was an enormous man, arms and legs twice as thick as normal. His eyes were white; no pupils.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He leaned forward just a little and cupped his hand behind his left ear. “You’ll have to speak up,” he said.

  Words from a dead man; a purple, swollen man sitting astride a roof. “Tell me,” I said, raising my voice. “Why do you do that?”

  He looked at me, or a little bit past me. I couldn’t tell if his mouth moved, but there was a deep, gurgling noise which could only have been laughter. “Do wha
t?”

  “Ride on the roof like it’s a horse,” I said.

  His shoulders lifted; a slow, exaggerated shrug, like he didn’t know what a shrug was, but was copying one he’d seen many years ago. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I feel the urge to do it, so I do it.”

  Well, I thought. One of the great abiding mysteries of my childhood not quite cleared up. “Are you Anthemius?” I asked. “The schoolmaster?”

  Again the laugh. “That’s a very good question,” he said. “Tell you what,” he went on, “come up here and sit with me, so we can talk without yelling.”

  In the moonlight I could make out the huge hands, with their monstrous overripe fingers. How tight the skin would have to be, with all that pressure against it from the inside. Breaking a neck would be like snapping a pear off a tree.

  “Let me rephrase that,” I said. “Were you Anthemius? When you were—”

  “Yes,” he said, speaking quickly to cut off a word he didn’t want to hear. “I think I was. Thank you,” he added. “I’ve been trying to remember. It’s been on the tip of my tongue, but somehow I can’t seem to think of any names.”

  The approved procedure for coping with the restless dead is, essentially, what Grandfather did; though of course we make rather more of a fuss about it. The approved procedure should, of course, be carried out in daylight; noon is recommended. Should you chance to encounter a specimen during the night, there are two courses of action, both recommended rather than approved. One, you draw your sword and cut its head off. Two, you challenge it to the riddle-game and keep it talking all night, until dawn comes up unexpectedly and strands it like a beached whale in the cruel light.

  Commentary on that. I am not a man of action. I don’t vault onto roofs, I don’t carry weapons. One of the reasons I left the farm in the first place was, I have trouble lifting even moderate loads. So much for option one; and as for option two—

  Also, I was curious. Interested.

  “What happened to you?” I said.

  “You know, I’m really not sure,” he replied; and the voice was starting to sound like a man’s voice, my ears were getting the hang of it, the way my eyes had got used to the dark. “I know I was out in the snow and I’d lost my way. I got terribly cold, so that every bit of me hurt. Then the pain started to ease up, and I sort of fell asleep.”

  “You died,” I said.

  He didn’t like me saying that, but I guess he forgave me. “I remember waking up,” he said, “and it was pitch dark and terribly quiet, and I couldn’t move. I was very scared. And then it occurred to me, I wasn’t breathing. I don’t mean I was holding my breath. I wasn’t breathing at all, and it didn’t matter. So then I knew.”

  I waited; but I hadn’t got all night. “And then?”

  He turned his head away. No hair, just a bulging purple scalp. A head like a plum. “I was terrified,” he said. “I mean, I had no way of knowing.” He paused, and I have no idea what was passing through his mind. “After a long time, I found I could move after all. I got my hands up against the lid, and I pushed, and I could feel the wood burst apart. That scared me even more, I thought the roof, I mean all the earth on top of me, I thought it’d cave in and bury me.” He paused again. “I was always frightened of tight places,” he said. “You know.”

  I nodded. Me too, as it happens.

  “I guess I panicked,” he went on, “because I kept pushing, and I somehow knew that I was incredibly strong, much stronger than I’d ever been before, so I thought, if I push hard enough. I wasn’t thinking straight, of course.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “Pushed right up through the dirt and into the moonlight,” he said. “Amazing feeling. The first thing I wanted to do was run to the nearest farm and tell them, Look, I’m not dead after all.” He stopped; he’d said the word without thinking. “But then I thought about it; and I still wasn’t breathing, and I couldn’t actually feel anything. I could move my hands and feet, I could stand upright and balance, all that, but—you know when you’ve been sitting a long time and your feet go numb. It was like that, all over. It felt so strange.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  He didn’t, not for a long time. “I think I sat down,” he said. “I don’t know why I’d have done that, standing up didn’t make me tired or anything. I don’t feel tired, ever. But I was so confused, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. It all felt wrong.” He lifted his heels slowly and let them drop; clump, clump, clump. “And while I was there the sun started to come up, and the light just sort of flooded into my head and bleached everything away, so I couldn’t think at all. I guess you could say I passed out. Anyway, when I opened my eyes I was back where I’d started from, lying in the dark.”

  I frowned. “How did you get back there?”

  “I just don’t know,” he said. “Still don’t. It always happens, that’s all I know. When the sun comes up, my mind washes away. If I’ve gone any distance, I know I have to get back. I run. I can run really fast. I know I’ve got to be back—home,” he said, with a sort of breaking-up laugh, “before the sun comes up. I’ve learned to be careful, to give myself plenty of time.”

  He was still and quiet for a while. I asked, “Why do you kill things?”

  “No idea.” He sounded distressed. “If something comes close enough, I grab it and twist it till it’s dead. Like a cat lashing out at a bit of string. Reflex. I just know it’s something I have to do.”

  I nodded. “Do you go looking—?”

  “Yes.” He mumbled the word, like a kid admitting a crime. “Yes, I do. I do my best to keep away from where there might be people. It’s all the same to me; sheep, foxes, men. I’d go a long way away, into the mountains, if I could. But I have to stay close, so I can get back in time.”

  I’d been debating with myself, and I knew I had to ask. “What were you?” I said. “What did you do?”

  He didn’t answer. I repeated the question.

  “Like you said,” he replied. “I was a schoolteacher.”

  “Before that.”

  When he answered, it was against his will. The words came out slow, flat; he spoke because he had to. “I was a Brother,” he said. “When I was thirty, they said I should apply to the Order, they thought I had the gift, and the brains, and the application and the self-discipline. I passed the exam and I was at the Studium for five years. Like you,” he added.

  I let that go. “You joined the Order.”

  “No.” The flat voice had gone; there was a flare of anger. “No, I failed matriculation. I retook it the next year, but I failed again. They sent me back to my parish, but by then they’d got someone else. So I ended up wandering about, looking for teaching work, letter-writing, anything I could do to earn a living. There’s not a lot you can do, of course.”

  Suddenly I felt bitter cold, right through. Took me a moment to realise it was fear. “So you came here,” I said, just to keep him talking.

  “Eventually. A lot of other places first, but here’s where I ended up.” He lifted his head abruptly. “They sent you here to deal with me, am I right?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Of course they did,” he said. “Of course. I’m a nuisance, a pest, a menace to agriculture. You came here to dig me up and cut my head off.”

  This time, I was the one who had to speak against my will. “Yes.”

  “Of course,” he said. “But I can’t let you do that. It’s my—”

  He’d been about to say life. Presumably he tried to find another way of phrasing it, then gave up. We both knew what he meant.

  “You passed the exams, then,” he said.

  “Barely,” I replied. “Two hundred seventh out of two hundred twenty.”

  “Which is why you’re here.”

  His white eyes in the ash-white moonlight. “That’s right,” I said. “They don’t give out research posts if you come two hundred seventh.”

  He nodded gravely. “Commercial work,” he said.

>   “When I can get it,” I replied. “Which isn’t often. Others far more qualified than me.”

  He grunted. It could have been sympathy. “Public service work.”

  “Afraid so,” I replied.

  “Which is why you’re here.” He lifted his head and rolled it round on his shoulders, like someone waking up after sleeping in a chair. “Because—well, because you aren’t much good. Well?”

  I resented that, even though it was true. “It’s not that I’m not good,” I said. “It’s just that everyone in my year was better than me.”

  “Of course.” He leaned forward, his hands braced on his knees. “The question is,” he said, “do I still have the gift, after what happened to me. If I’ve still got it, your job is going to be difficult.”

  “If not,” I said.

  “Well,” he replied, “I suppose we’re about to find out.”

  “Indeed,” I said. “There could be a paper for the journals in this.”

  “Your chance to escape from obscurity,” he said solemnly. “Under different circumstances, I’d wish you well. Unfortunately, I really don’t want you cutting off my head. It’s a miserable existence, but—”

  I could see his point. His voice was quite human now; if I’d known him before, I’d have recognised him. He had his back to the moon, so I couldn’t see the features of his face.

  “What I’m trying to say is, you don’t have to do it,” he said. “Go away. Go home. Nobody knows you came out here tonight. I promise I’ll stay away until you’ve gone. If I don’t show up, you can report that there was no direct evidence of an infestation, and therefore you didn’t feel justified in desecrating what was probably an innocent grave.”

  “But you’ll be back,” I said.

  “Yes, and no doubt they’ll send someone else,” he said. “But it won’t be you.”

  I was tempted. Of course I was tempted. For one thing, he was a rational creature; with my eyes shut, if I hadn’t known better, I’d have said he was a natural man with a heavy cold. And what if the gift did survive death? He’d kill me. I had to admit it to myself; the thought that I could get killed doing this job hadn’t occurred to me. I’d anticipated a quick, grisly hour’s work in broad daylight; no risk.