by K. J. Parker
On the rare occasions during the day when Poldarn wasn’t working in the smithy, he either helped one of the others with some heavy job that needed two pairs of hands or walked over to the newly built pen to see to Eyvind’s horses. They didn’t need much looking after, but he felt an obligation to ensure that when they were called for they’d be in prime condition, groomed and combed, well fed but properly exercised; he felt he owed Eyvind that at least, for giving him this fine house and excellent farm. It was smaller than Ciartanstead but there was less waste – no hills too steep or too rocky for the plough, no bogs or outcrops. Several times, after the evening meal was over and the table (made by Raffen and Rook from chestnut planks sawn with the long two-handed saw he’d forged for them) had been put up against the wall, he wandered out of the house on the pretext of finishing up some job he’d been working on, and strolled round the home fields, taking note of new growth in the crops and the latest tactical manoeuvres of the enemy – the crows and pigeons and rabbits and rats. He couldn’t think of anywhere he’d rather be, or anybody he’d rather be there with. Happiness, Poldarn decided, was a simple matter of being in the right place at the right time, with the right people, and the strange trail of circumstances that had brought him there, leading him step by step through the maze from the banks of the Bohec by way of burnt cities and battlefields and ambushes beside the road, murders and plots and betrayals, volcano and fire-stream and destruction of past and future, astounded him by its scope and complexity. Any wrong turning along the way, any apparent misfortune eluded, would have brought him to quite another place in entirely different company, and would have been a disaster. If he’d never left this country to begin with, he’d be a completely different person now – Ciartan of Haldersness, a dispossessed wanderer whose house lay buried under a huge fat worm of slowly cooling rock, conscious of nothing but his own unbearable loss. If he hadn’t met with whatever the misadventure was that had stranded him in the mud beside the river, surrounded by dead men whose names he couldn’t remember, he’d have lived out a totally different life on the wrong side of the sea, he’d never have ended up here in another man’s house on another man’s inheritance, which just happened to be the only place on earth where he could be who he was supposed to be. Time and again he tried to reconstruct the course of events in his mind, looking for the points in the story where things could have gone an entirely different way. Running into Copis and killing her partner, the god in the cart – but hadn’t she turned out to be an agent of the sword-monks, trailing him before the incident beside the river, being on hand at that crucial moment to guide him along the right path? Stumbling on Tazencius when he’d fallen off his horse and hurt his leg – but hadn’t he turned out to be part of some joint conspiracy, carrying him down the right path like the boulders dragged down the mountain by the fire-stream? Very well, then: being waylaid by Eyvind and his companion on the road to whatever that city was, the one ruled by clerks – that was pure chance, Eyvind having been cut off from the rest of his party and stranded in the middle of hostile territory. How easily he could have killed the wrong man that day, or even taken a different road or the same road at a different time or at a slightly slower or faster pace and missed him altogether. When he thought of how he’d got there, like a pilot navigating a ship blindfold through the shoals, he found it almost impossible to believe that it had all been mere chance, nothing but sheer good luck, like calling the spin of a coin correctly a hundred times in a row.
One day, just before noon, Poldarn was putting an edge on a bean-hook when Raffen burst into the forge, looking tired and extremely annoyed.
‘Those bloody horses,’ he said. ‘Bust out of the pen and trampled right across the damned beans. Could be any bloody place by now.’
Poldarn frowned and put the hook down. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘You’ve got no idea where they could have gone?’
‘That’s what I just said.’
‘That’s bad,’ Asburn put in as he hauled on the bellows handle. ‘What’s going to happen when Eyvind’s people turn up here to collect them? They’re going to think we’ve got them hidden away somewhere and don’t want to give them back.’
Poldarn thought for a moment. ‘We can’t have that,’ he said. ‘It’s their fault, the idle bastards, for leaving them here so long. All right,’ he said wearily, ‘we’ll need to get the search properly organised, we’ve got a hell of a lot of ground to cover with just the twelve of us.’
They spent the rest of the day tramping up and down the slopes of the mountain. It was hard to figure out how anything as conspicuous as ten horses could escape being seen in such open country, but they couldn’t even find any tracks, let alone the horses themselves.
‘Which ought to tell us something,’ Poldarn pointed out, when they met up again that night at the house. ‘If they aren’t leaving tracks, it’s got to be because they’re on stony ground, somewhere up the mountain.’
‘Except you can see for miles up there,’ Boarci pointed out. ‘You can take my word on that, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks stalking deer in the open without so much as a dandelion to take cover behind. If they were up there, I’d have seen them, you bet. I reckon they’ve got to be hiding out in one of the little dips on the other side of the fire-pit.’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘But that’s in completely the opposite direction to where they started from, coming from the pen across the bean field. To get down there they’d have had to double back, go right across the yard in plain sight of the lot of us.’
‘Then that’s what must have happened,’ Boarci grumbled. ‘Because it’s the only place they could possibly be.’
‘Fine.’ Poldarn sighed. ‘And did you bother to look down there?’
‘Yes,’ Boarci admitted. ‘And no, of course I didn’t find them. But I was on my own, they could’ve slipped past while I was in the dead ground, and I wouldn’t have known a bloody thing about it. I’ve known deer do that before now.’
Poldarn slumped forward over the table, his face in his hands. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose it’s worth taking a proper look tomorrow, all of us strung out in a line so they can’t slip by, if that’s what they’re doing. We’ve tried everywhere else, after all.’
‘Bit late for that,’ Boarci replied. ‘If they kept on moving after sundown they could be any bloody place by now.’
‘Sure,’ Hand put in, ‘but down there in the little combes they’d be bound to have left tracks, especially if there’s been a heavy dew. We don’t have to find them straight off, so long as we can pick up the trail.’
‘That makes sense,’ Poldarn said. ‘All right, that’s what we’ll do, first thing in the morning. In the meantime, everybody just pray that Eyvind doesn’t pick tomorrow to come collecting his property.’
Nobody slept well that night, and the household assembled some time before dawn, impatient to get on with the search so that the horses could be found and life could get back to normal. It was still dark when they set off – ‘A mistake,’ Boarci told them. ‘We could be walking right past their tracks and never see the buggers. What I wouldn’t give right now for a pair of good dogs.’
That made Poldarn think of Hart and Egil, but it didn’t seem the right time to raise that subject. ‘We’ll just have to take the risk,’ he said. ‘I’m not turning back now. If we pick up the trail and it leads right back the way we’ve just come, you can say I told you so.’
The search wasn’t exactly fruitless. They found a ring of big round yellow puffballs that Boarci swore blind were edible; and a solitary cock-pheasant jumped out of the grass at Raffen’s feet, only to regret its bad timing when he brought it down with an instinctively aimed stone. They also stumbled across several unmistakable deer tracks, which Boarci took careful note of, and the ruin of a shepherd’s hut, roofless and with a small oak tree growing inside it. No sign of any horses.
‘Fine,’ Poldarn said, as they dropped down to rest shortly after noon. ‘So we can be fairly positive t
hey aren’t here. Where else could they be?’
No one replied. It was too hot for climbing up and down hills, and nobody had brought anything to drink. Poldarn could tell that they’d lost interest in the search some time ago and wanted to get home and carry on with the work they were supposed to be doing. He could sympathise with that; it did seem ridiculous to waste their valuable time combing the countryside for their enemy’s property.
‘I’ll bet you they’ve headed straight back to Haldersness,’ Rook yawned. ‘Right now they’re probably in the stable munching oats, and Eyvind is feeling pleased because he hasn’t got to waste three days traipsing up here to fetch them.’
‘Who cares?’ Boarci muttered. ‘If they’re lost, let him go looking for them. We should ask him to send over some men and a cartload of lumber to fix up the pen; it was his damn horses that bust it up, after all.’
‘All right,’ Poldarn said. ‘If nobody’s got any suggestions, I say we should try a bit further down the ridge, where the rill comes out. In this weather, it’s a fair bet they’re thirsty. It’s the closest water this side of the house.’
So they pressed on as far as the stream that came down off the side of the mountain and meandered over the flat before soaking away into a treacherous-looking marsh. No trace of any horses anywhere.
‘Of course,’ Hand said, ‘it’s possible they did come this way, wandered out into the boggy stuff and got sucked in. I saw a cow do that once, in the bog up behind the old house. One minute it was ambling along, next minute you’d never guess there’d been a cow there. Spookiest thing you ever did see.’
That didn’t really help matters; so they agreed to forget about the search and headed for home. They were a long way out by that point, and the sun was starting to set by the time they reached the house. Outside, tied to the rail of the smashed-up pen, they saw four horses.
‘Of course they could be ours,’ Raffen muttered, ‘and whoever found them could have saddled them up and ridden them back here. But I doubt it.’
Inside they found four men, sitting round the table looking bored. They didn’t recognise them, but they had a fair idea who they were.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ one of the strangers asked.
Poldarn walked up the hall toward them. ‘You’re Eyvind’s people,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ another one of them replied. ‘We’ve come to pick up those horses that were left here, but we can’t find them, and there was nobody about. What’s going on here?’
Poldarn took a deep breath. ‘Your horses aren’t here,’ he said. ‘When you were looking round, you may have noticed the pen out front. We had the horses in there but they broke through the rails and got out. We’ve just spent the last two days searching for them.’
The strangers looked at each other. ‘Like hell,’ one of them said. ‘You don’t really expect us to believe that, do you?’
‘Maybe not,’ Poldarn said, ‘but you don’t have to. You can do that mind-reading trick, can’t you?’
‘Not on you,’ said another of the strangers. ‘You’re all barricaded up. Eyvind told us you’re a freak.’
‘Not on me,’ Poldarn said patiently. ‘One of the others. Look inside their heads, you’ll see I’m telling the truth.’
But the stranger who’d spoken first shook his head. ‘We don’t trust you,’ he said. ‘There could be all sorts of reasons. Maybe it’s just you who hid the horses, and you’ve had these people out looking for them, believing they’re lost. Or maybe you can do things to their minds – there’s no knowing what sort of tricks you’re capable of. Aren’t you the one who knew the mountain was going to blow up before it even happened?’
Poldarn sighed. ‘The horses got out,’ he said. ‘We went looking for them, but we can’t find any trace of them. That’s all there is to it.’
‘That’s not very likely,’ one of the strangers said. ‘There’d be some tracks, no matter what. Ten horses don’t just vanish. Not unless they get a lot of help.’
‘Listen.’ Poldarn sat down on the bench, gently pushing a stranger aside and making him move down. ‘We’re tired and hungry, we’ve just wasted two days chasing after horses that don’t even belong to us, which you left here without even asking permission. You can believe us or not, that’s up to you, but in any event, go away. We aren’t in the mood.’
‘It’s dark,’ one of them said. ‘We can’t go back round the mountain in the dark, it’d be asking for trouble.’
‘Fine, then you can stay here. Just shut up and let us go to bed.’
The stranger who’d spoken first stood up. ‘He’s lying,’ he said. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t shut off his mind like that, obviously he’s got something to hide. He knows perfectly well where the horses are.’
‘Sit down, for God’s sake,’ Poldarn said. ‘You’re getting on my nerves.’
The stranger hesitated for a moment, then sat down. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we haven’t got any quarrel with you, but if we go back without those bloody horses, Eyvind’ll skin us alive. You don’t want him for an enemy. Trust me, I’ve known him a long time.’
‘Funny,’ Boarci said to nobody in particular, ‘I wouldn’t have called throwing us out of our own house all that friendly. Still, you folks in these parts have some pretty strange ways.’
‘Boarci, shut up,’ Poldarn said. ‘Listen to me,’ he went on, looking the stranger in the eye. ‘If I knew where the horses are, I’d tell you. I don’t want to pick a fight with Eyvind or anybody else. If you think we’ve got them hidden somewhere, please go ahead and look. Take all the time you need, make a really thorough search. Tell me what you want us to do to prove to you that we haven’t got them, and we’ll do it. Now, is that fair, or what?’
The stranger pulled a tragic face. ‘I can’t go back and tell him that,’ he said. ‘The bloody things have got to be somewhere. For God’s sake, quit fooling around. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen here.’
‘I know why we couldn’t find them,’ put in one of the other strangers. ‘It’s damned obvious, when you think about it. Like, when we left them here they didn’t have any food. They’ve killed them and eaten them, for sure.’
Poldarn would have laughed out loud, except that he remembered what Boarci had said on the first evening. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t do that.’
‘Oh really?’ The stranger leant forward across the table. ‘So what have you been eating, then? Tell me that.’
‘Roast venison, mostly,’ Boarci said with a yawn. ‘Also goose, duck, pheasant, stuff like that. Better than what you’ve been eating, I’ll bet. What’s for dinner at Haldersness these days, boys? Porridge and onions?’
The expression on the strangers’ faces suggested that Boarci was probably right. ‘Bullshit,’ one of them said. ‘There’s no game in this valley; I lived here all my life, never seen a deer closer than a mile away.’
Boarci grinned. ‘That I can believe, he said. ‘You’re too fat and dumb to get closer than a mile to any deer, unless it’s dead already.’
Poldarn scowled at him, then said, ‘It’s since the mountain blew up, it’s driven the deer down from the high ground. There’s quite a lot of them about, thank God. Otherwise yes, we’d have had a hard time of it. If you like, I’ll take you out back and you can see the bones in the midden.’
‘Sure,’ the stranger muttered. ‘Horse bones. Maybe we can take a few back to Eyvind. He’d be interested in seeing them, I’ll bet.’
‘If he’s so dumb he can’t tell horse bones from deer bones—’ Boarci started to say, but Poldarn interrupted him with a furious glare. ‘Once and for all,’ he said, ‘we haven’t eaten your goddamned horses. We haven’t hidden them away, we don’t know where they are, otherwise we’d give them to you and get you out of our lives. That’s the truth, and you can tell Eyvind what the hell you like.’ He stood up, and the rest of his household stood up with him. ‘Now,’ he went on, ‘you’re welcome to stay the night her
e, in the barn, or you can be on your way tonight, whichever you like. Meanwhile, we’re very tired and we want to have our dinner and go to bed.’
The strangers looked at each other. ‘You’re making a big mistake,’ one of them said.
‘Maybe,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Don’t suppose it’d be the first time, or the last. But my offer still stands: you tell us what we’ve got to do to convince you and we’ll do it. But if you aren’t going to take me up on it, you can go to the barn, or you can set off home. Is that clear?’
