by K. J. Parker
Now at least they believed him, but they still couldn’t understand. ‘Then what happened?’ Elja asked.
Poldarn sighed, and sat down on the porch. ‘Oh, Eyvind offered compensation for him, and they gave us some barrels of beef and oats, plus the horses and the trap. Then I came home.’
Raffen had noticed the corpse-sized lump under a blanket, slung over the back of one of the horses. He didn’t say anything, but pretty soon they were all staring at it.
‘Anyway,’ Poldarn went on, ‘that’s about the size of it. There’s some cloth, too, and some blankets – useful stuff. Oh, and his things, everything they took from him when they moved in. Would someone else mind doing the unloading? I’m dead on my feet.’
Automatically, Raffen and Asburn slipped away and set to work. The rest of the household stayed exactly where they were, silent and motionless, like tools on a rack. Poldarn decided he couldn’t be doing with any more of that, so he went inside and lay down on the bed. Very soon he was fast asleep.
As he slept, he found himself once again on the box of the trap; except that it was now a cart, and the back was full of dead crows. He couldn’t imagine what he could be doing (that in itself had a familiar feel to it) carting a load of carrion down what appeared to be a long, straight, dusty road across a dry moor; but he knew that, just beyond the ridge to his left, the moor fell away steeply into the Bohec valley, and that his job was to deliver his cargo to the Falx house in Mael Bohec. That made sense; after all, he was just a courier, it wasn’t his business to know what he was carrying or why.
The crows were talking behind his back, which was annoying, but he couldn’t be bothered to make anything of it.
‘What about you?’ one of them said. ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’
‘Just got in,’ another one replied. The voice was, of course, familiar.
‘What happened to you, then?’ asked a third voice.
‘My own silly fault,’ said the voice he recognised. ‘Tried to start a fight where I was surrounded. Got jabbed in the neck with a fork, would you believe. Bloody ridiculous way to die, but there it is.’
Several of the crows cackled, but the first voice said gravely: ‘I never heard where there was a good way. Doesn’t matter, anyhow. Here we all are, and there’s an end to it.’
‘True enough,’ the familiar voice said. ‘So, how about you?’
‘Oh, I just keeled over and turned up my toes,’ the first voice said; and it too was familiar, now that he thought about it. ‘Died of a broken heart, you could say, though really it was just overdoing it. That and the worry, with the mountain blowing up and all. Tried to do more than was good for me at my age.’
‘Accident, then?’ asked the second voice.
‘Misadventure,’ the first voice replied, ‘same as you. Same as the rest of us, if the truth be told. Like, he didn’t kill any of us because he hated us, or anything like that. No, we just happened to get in the way, or we were soldiers in a battle trying to do our job, and met him trying to do his, or we were living in a city that had to be burned down and all the people killed so there’d be no witnesses. He never kills anybody for a bad reason, such as because he hates them. Mostly he doesn’t even want to hurt them, particularly. We all just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘It’s usually to do with what side you’re on,’ put in another voice. ‘It’s like we’re on one side, wanting to eat the corn or the peas or whatever, and he’s on the other side, wanting to keep ’em safe. Or else we’re defending our homes or our friends or our leaders, whatever, and he’s on the attacking side. Nothing personal in it, it’s just the way things are.’
‘Sounds fair enough to me,’ commented the second voice. ‘Sure are a lot of us, though.’
‘I think he leads an unhappy life,’ said a fourth voice. ‘At least, he’s always getting into trouble and danger and having to cut his way out again. I kind of feel sorry for him, actually.’
Poldarn felt something brush against his shoulder, and saw that there was someone with him on the box. It was the man he’d killed shortly after he first woke up beside the river, the original god in the cart. ‘Don’t mind them,’ he said. ‘They just chatter on. Don’t mean anything by it.’
Poldarn frowned. ‘But they’re making it sound like I killed them all,’ he said. ‘And that’s not right. Boarci got killed by one of Eyvind’s people. And Halder’s heart stopped when I wasn’t even there.’
The god laughed. ‘Oh, you killed them all right,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t matter. You didn’t mean anything by it, same as they don’t. I mean, if we held a grudge, would I be sitting here talking to you like this?’
‘I suppose not,’ Poldarn conceded. ‘In your case it was simple self-defence.’
‘Sure.’ The god grinned sheepishly. ‘I was smashed out of my head, and I went for you with a halberd or something. Served me right, I never did well by drinking. Truth is, it’s never your fault. Either it’s just bad luck, happening to get in the way when there’s something you need to do, or else it’s our own damn stupid fault, like pitching in and wrecking the peas, or it’s self-defence, or something like that. You don’t want to go worrying about it, or you’d never sleep at night.’ He laughed. ‘It’s all a game, isn’t it? Chances are you don’t even remember most of us. Some of us you never even knew about, where we died a long way away because of something you did someplace else. Isn’t that right?’ he called out over his shoulder.
The dead crows in the back mumbled their agreement. ‘Like he said,’ one of them replied, ‘there’s nothing for you to feel guilty about. You were only ever doing what you had to do.’
That sounded eminently reasonable, but deep down he knew it wasn’t true. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but these things tend to happen to me a lot, and there’s very little time, always.’
‘It’s fine, really,’ the god replied. ‘I know for a fact that I’d have done the same in your shoes. Anyhow, who’s to say it won’t be completely different next time around?’ He leaned across the box, confidentially. ‘Don’t tell anybody I told you this, but I was you once. Poldarn, I mean; I was the god who brought the world to an end, driving round in my little cart, like some travelling hawker selling buttons. Hell of a long time ago, of course, the cities that burned down then are just grassy mounds now; you’d have to get a spade and dig real deep to find ’em. Take that island you were raised on, for instance. A thousand years ago, maybe two or five thousand, a squirrel could’ve run across the rooftops from one coast to the other; but now it’s just grass and woodland, and all the houses are buried under the ash – you’d never find them again. And in another thousand, five thousand years, there’ll be houses and workshops and temples and God only knows what where your grandfather grew his onions, all sitting round the foot of the mountain ready for when Poldarn blows his top and smears a whole new country over the top of ’em. Makes no mind. And that’s why nothing matters, of course, because all they can ever do is just kill the scouts. You could fill a whole valley with stones and kill a crow with every stone, and still all you’d be doing is killing scouts.’
Poldarn frowned. ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ he said. ‘How could you have been me?’
This time the god laughed out loud. ‘I forgot,’ he said. ‘How dumb can you get, huh? Of course, you don’t know. All right, go figure. Poldarn can read Poldarn’s thoughts, because Poldarn is the flock, not just a scout. Poldarn sends out scouts, and the scouts get dead as often as not, but Poldarn never dies. That’s what being a god’s all about, see. Every time the world ends, Poldarn buries it in burning melted rock, and it all starts over again, each time the old man dies and the youngster builds his house. Houses, shops, temples, palaces, doesn’t signify; they’ll all die and get buried under the ash. But that’s how it’s meant to be – hell, you know that as well as I do. The single dots aren’t worth shit, only the pattern. Which is why we have memory, in the gaps between the fires.’
&n
bsp; Poldarn thought for a moment. ‘Often when I go to sleep,’ he said, ‘I have these dreams, where I’m somebody else. And while I’m dreaming I’m this other person and me at the same time. Can you tell me anything about that?’
‘Simple,’ the god replied. ‘You’re an islander, you can see inside other people’s minds – which is putting it the wrong way round, of course, but let’s get your question answered first, and then we can put this shit straight. You can see inside these people’s heads, so you know what they were thinking; it’s all bits of memory in the scrap, and you pull out what you need whenever you make something. But that’s starting at the end, like I said. The reason you know what the others are thinking, it’s because you’re remembering, way back, from the time round when you were them. Like, this time round you’re Ciartan, right? Well, the time before the time before last, let’s say you were Colsceg, or Tazencius, or Feron Amathy; and this time you’re Ciartan, but you remember. That’s how it’s done; no magic, no big deal. Round and round and round again; none of it exists, the people and the buildings and the places, the same way a hummingbird’s got no wings.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Poldarn confessed.
The god grinned. ‘You ever seen a hummingbird hover? ’Course you have. Now, have you ever seen its wings? No way, they move too fast for your eye to follow; all you see is the pattern, little wings pumping up and down, making a blur where you know the wings should be. You don’t see any damn thing, just the pattern everything moves in as it spins round and round; like you’ve never seen the spokes of a cartwheel spinning, just the blur. And that’s all you ever see, the blur, not the thing or the person.’
Poldarn nodded slowly. ‘I think I understand,’ he said. ‘Like looking at a big flock of birds a long way off; you don’t see the individuals, just the flock.’
The god stamped his foot cheerfully. ‘Now you’re getting it,’ he said. ‘A god lives for ever, right, so time goes real slow past him; your life and mine, we’re moving too fast, so all he sees is the blur. But of course, he’s not watching with his eyes, he’s remembering with his mind – thousands of Ciartans and Cronans, millions of Raffens and Eyvinds, a blur where they go round. The pattern is memory. Everything’s memory, locked right down into the grain of the steel; so, when you bend it, it jumps right back to exactly where it was before. Otherwise, it’d be a fucking shambles; every time a kid was born he’d be like a damn animal, having to figure every single thing out for himself, instead of just learning it. You do see that, don’t you?’
Poldarn rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘But I woke up in the mud with no memory at all.’
The god smiled and shook his head. ‘You remembered it all,’ he replied. ‘You just didn’t know what it meant. But you remembered. It was all in the song.’
What song? Poldarn wondered; and then it came back to him—
Old crow sitting in a tall, thin tree—
(‘That’s right,’ said the god. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, all this time.’)
Old crow sitting in a tall, thin tree,
Old crow sitting in a tall, thin tree—
(‘Which is the same words,’ the god pointed out, ‘over and over.’)
– And along comes the Dodger, and he says—
‘That’s me,’ said the god. ‘And you, of course, and every other damn fool in the flock. Couldn’t have made it much plainer if I’d drawn diagrams.’
Poldarn sighed. ‘Then why can’t I see into their minds, or they see into mine? That really bothers me, sometimes.’
‘Because they’re too fast, and you’re too slow. You can’t interpret the blur, and they don’t recognise just the one spoke, not moving. Of course, it’ll all be different at the end, you’ll see. Well,’ the god added, ‘here we are. You jump out, and you can give me a hand unloading this lot.’
They’d stopped in a place Poldarn recognised, except that he remembered it as a battlefield. It was only after they’d dragged out all the dead bodies and put them where they had to go that he was able to get the two pictures to fit, one superimposed exactly on the other—
He woke up with a start, and as he opened his eyes he heard himself say, ‘So that’s fine, all I’ve got to do is not forget —’ And then the dream was gone, not leaving so much as the shape of a single black feather behind.
Chapter Twenty-Five
After that, nobody mentioned Boarci again. There was no need to; the salt beef took the place of the venison and duck and hare, and since he’d done precious little around the farm other than bringing home dead meat, there was no need to rearrange patterns of work to cover for his absence. Nobody mentioned Eyvind either, or where the blankets had come from. Apart from a few barrels stacked in the stores of memory, Boarci had never existed and nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Perhaps because the mountain had screwed up the weather in some way they couldn’t fathom, the crops came in late and all at once. This was something between a nuisance and a disaster. There weren’t enough hands to get them in before they started to spoil, there wasn’t enough storage space, not enough barrels and sacks and jars. In the end, well over a quarter of the crop went to waste, though that wasn’t as bad as it might have been; Eyvind had planted to feed a full household, whereas now there were only eleven of them.
Typically, everything except the main wheat and barley crops were in and stored when the strangers showed up. There were ten of them; six men and four women, dirty and ragged and lame from walking too far on too little shoe leather. Nobody had any idea who they were, or where they’d come from, and of course their minds were closed tight shut as far as Poldarn’s people were concerned.
‘Still,’ Poldarn pointed out, as they watched them trailing down the yard towards the house, ‘the fact remains, we’re badly short of hands here, we’ve just proved that. And I’m not going to turn anybody away just because they’re offcomers.’
He hadn’t expected enthusiasm, so he wasn’t disappointed. When the strangers were close enough to be talked to without shouting, he stepped forward and waited for one of them to speak.
‘I’m sorry,’ one of them said, ‘I don’t know you. Isn’t this Bollesknap?’
He was a big man, tall and broad, though hunger and hard walking was starting to hollow him out. He had a small, squat nose and a round face, and his hair was grey with a few untidy smears of dark brown.
‘It used to be,’ Poldarn replied. ‘But now it’s called Poldarn’s Forge. If you’re looking for Eyvind, you’ve missed him by about four months.’
The man looked confused. ‘He’s gone, then.’
‘Round the other side of the mountain,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Do you know Haldersness?’
‘Heard of it,’ the man answered doubtfully, as if to say that he’d also heard of two-headed goats and sea serpents, but he didn’t necessarily believe in them. ‘Never been there, though.’
‘Well, that’s where he’s gone,’ Poldarn said. ‘Will we do instead? My name’s Ciartan.’
‘I’m Geir.’ The man hesitated for a moment, as if he was about to say something rude. ‘Truth is,’ he went on, ‘we’re in a bit of trouble. Have you heard of our place, Geirsdale, about six days west?’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘Can’t say I have,’ he replied. ‘What sort of trouble?.’
‘That.’ Geir nodded resentfully towards the mountain. ‘Cut a long story short, our house is somewhere under a bloody great big pile of ash. There used to be seventy-two of us, but the rest are still in the house.’ He grinned painfully. ‘That’s about it,’ he said. ‘Except that we’re off-relations of Bolle – that’s Eyvind’s uncle, if you didn’t know already.’
‘Off-relations,’ Poldarn repeated. ‘How off, exactly?’
‘Oh, a long way, something like fifth cousins on his mother’s side. Is that good or bad?’
‘Could be worse,’ Poldarn said. ‘You’d better come in and have something to eat.’
&
nbsp; They ate like crows on sprouting corn, finishing everything, taking whatever was offered, gazing warily at their hosts while they ate, just in case it turned out to be a trap. Eventually, Poldarn figured out that the only way to stop them eating was not to provide any more food.
‘So,’ he said, when he reckoned he had their attention. ‘What are your plans?’
Geir shrugged. ‘Plans are for people who know where their next meal’s coming from. I suppose what we’re aiming to do is head out into the new territories, stake out some land, start over. But obviously we won’t be in a position to do that any time soon, with no stock or gear. Till then, we’ll go where we can, stay as long as we’re allowed, and do whatever we have to do to earn our feed.’
‘Well, that’s putting it straight enough,’ Poldarn said. ‘Sounds like you haven’t got your hearts set on getting your own place; at least, not at the moment. Am I right?’
Geir smiled wanly. ‘Going hungry is a pretty good cure for ambition,’ he said. ‘You look a bit short-handed here, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘That’s no lie,’ Poldarn replied. ‘What you see is all of us. I think we can quit treading carefully and say it out loud. If you want to stop here, you’re welcome, for as long as you like. But you’ll have to work, and you’re not much use to us if you’re planning on moving on in a week or so.’
‘Not much chance of that,’ Geir said.
‘That’s all right, then. But there’s one thing we need to get absolutely straight. If you want to stick around here, that’d suit both of us. But I’d better warn you, we had a bad falling-out with Eyvind and his people, and it’s just got a whole lot worse. If you’re relations of his, you’d probably be better off carrying on to where he’s living now; it’s only a day or so further on, and you’ll be more comfortable there for sure – they’ve got far more of everything than we have and there’s a whole lot more of them than there is of us. If things get any worse it could easily come to fighting. You don’t want to find yourselves up against your own family, or on the losing side.’
