The Last Witness Read Online Free

day and stuffing them inside a hollow tree I knew I’d be passing on the way out, so to speak. Fortuitously, it stood on the banks of the river. Stupid dogs all crowded round the tree, jumping up and yelling their heads off, while I swam upstream a bit, hopped out, and went on my way rejoicing. The men who were after me were livid, as you can imagine—I wasn’t there to see, of course, but I remember the looks on their faces quite clearly. Gave me the best laugh I’d had in ages.
    Still; once the warm inner glow of profound cleverness had worn off, I reflected on my position and found it largely unsatisfactory. There I was, sopping wet, one angel thirty to my name, no place to go, no friends, no identity. Naturally, I wasn’t the first person in history to find himself in that state. After all, that’s how cities came about in the first place; it’s what they’re for.
    The nearest city was only twenty miles away. I knew it quite well, so it was useless; somebody would recognise me, and word would get about. My angel thirty would’ve been just enough to buy me a seat on the stage to the next city down the coast, but I decided not to risk it, since coachmen sometimes remember names and faces. As things had turned out, I’d left home in a pair of wooden-soled hemp slippers, the kind you wear for slopping about the house in. There wasn’t much left of them by the time I dared risk stopping and thinking. They certainly weren’t in a fit state to carry me eighty miles on bad roads, assuming I was prepared to take the chance of staying on the road, which I wasn’t. Remember when you could buy a decent pair of boots for an angel thirty? You could back then; but first you have to find a shoemaker, for which you need a city. One damn thing after another.
    I find that when you’re in a deep pit of doubt and perplexity, Fate jumps in and provides you with an answer, almost invariably the wrong one. As in this case. First thing I saw when the sun rose was a farmhouse, practically rearing up on its hind legs at me out of the early morning mist. I thought; there’ll be boots in there. I’ll walk up to the door and offer to buy a pair. Easy as that.
    Idiot. A stranger hobbling up out of nowhere wanting to buy footwear would tend to snag in the memory, particularly out in the wild, where nothing ever happens. I had good reason to wish not to be memorable. The hell with it, I thought. I was by now more or less resigned to the fact that I’m no angel; what’s one more minor transgression? Be a man. Steal the stupid boots.
    Sad fact. It’s not enough to be a thief. You need to be a good thief. I’m not. My problem is, I don’t look where I’m going. I try, ever so hard; but sooner or later there’ll be a chair or a table or a tin plate or a bowl of apples that I somehow contrive to overlook. Crash it goes on the hard flagstone floor, and that’s that. Here we go again.
    The farmer was an old man, feeble, with a bad leg. I could’ve taken him easily. His son and his four grandsons were a different matter. What they were doing, hanging around the house when the sun was well up and they should’ve been out grafting, I have no idea. They didn’t approve of thieves. There was an apple tree just outside the back door, with a low branch sticking out practically at a right angle. They had, they assured me, plenty of rope, not to mention a dung heap. And besides, they said, who’d miss me?
    The human memory is a wonderful thing. They say that when you die, at the moment of departure, your entire life flashes past your eyes in a fraction of a second. This isn’t actually true; but all sorts of stuff crowds into your mind when you’re standing on the bed of a cart with a rope round your neck; among them, in my case, the circumstances of my sister’s accident. To be honest, I hadn’t given it much thought in the intervening time—tried to put it out of my mind, I guess, and who can blame me?—but it came right back to me at