Free Academic Exercises by K. J. Parker

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 what?”
    “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