by K. J. Parker
He opened his eyes and immediately started choking.
‘He’s alive,’ someone said. Good, he thought. Improbable, but I’ll gladly take their word for it.
Someone was leaning over him. It was still raining, and drops of water dripped off the man’s sodden fringe onto his face. ‘It’s all right,’ the man said, ‘you’re going to be all right.’
‘Boarci,’ he said.
The man nodded. ‘He got to you just in time. Damnedest thing I ever saw, the man must be crazy or something. But he pulled you both out, is the main thing, and no harm done.’
You both, us both – am I forgetting something here? ‘Elja?’ he said.
‘She’s going to be all right too,’ Colsceg said. ‘Absolutely amazing, how he managed to do it. Must be as strong as a team of plough-horses. Just as well for you, really.’
Poldarn started coughing again, which was infuriating because he badly needed to know what had happened. ‘Tell me,’ was as far as he managed to get between spasms.
Colsceg had grabbed Poldarn’s arm. ‘It’ll be better if you can sit up,’ he said, jerking him upright so hard he nearly dislocated his shoulder (and his muscles were all torn and bruised as it was; no wonder, after the games he’d put them through). ‘There, you can breathe better now.’
Can I? Splendid, I’d never have known if you hadn’t told me. ‘What happened?’ he croaked, through a mouthful of phlegm.
‘Your friend,’ Colsceg said, shaking his head as if he couldn’t bring himself to approve of such goings-on. ‘He was up among the rocks with us, and he saw what was happening, when the mud trashed the house. Of course, we all told him not to be a bloody fool, but he wouldn’t listen, just hared off down the slope before we could grab hold of him. Slippery bugger, always dodging about.’
He stopped, turned his head slightly to the left, nodded. Behind his shoulder, Poldarn could see Colsceg’s sons, Barn and Egil. He guessed they were passing on some new development or other.
‘Like I was saying,’ Colsceg went on, ‘this friend of yours, he goes scrambling down the rocks, jumps a good fifteen feet onto a chunk of the old front door that’s floating on top of the mud, then what does he do but he hops from one bit of timber to another, like a kid on stepping stones – you wouldn’t credit it, I’d never have thought a big man like that could jump so far from a standstill – until he’s close enough to reach over and grab you; Elja first, then you, one under each arm like a shepherd carrying lambs. Then of course the stupid fool realises he’s stuck, standing there on a piece of sinking wood in the middle of the mudflow holding two people – dead weight both of you, we were sure you’d both drowned or choked to death. But then Egil here, and you could have knocked me over with a broom, I could have sworn he had more sense, Egil here sets off after him, catches up the rope we’d been using to get the kids up onto the rocks, and he goes out after him – not nearly so far, of course, but he gets close enough to throw the rope across, and your mad friend catches it; then Egil chucks the other end to me and Barn here, because of course we had to follow him, didn’t we, and to cut a long story short we pulled you out, all four of you bloody maniacs. Amazing, the whole performance, but here you are.’
Poldarn screwed his eyes shut, then opened them again. ‘Boarci rescued me,’ he said.
‘You and Elja,’ Colsceg grunted. ‘And then Egil rescued him, and we rescued Egil. Bloody miracle nobody was killed, of course. Never seen so many grown men acting so dumb.’
Oh, Poldarn thought. ‘Thank you,’ he tried to say, but his voice was too weak.
‘Sort of rounded things off,’ Colsceg was saying, ‘us saving you after you saved us. Course, if there’s a hero here today, it’s got to be you. We’d never have thought of that, going up the hill like you said. Sounded like suicide when you said it, but we’re bloody glad you did, else we’d all be dead and under the mud right now. Really was a stroke of luck, you showing up like that, and knowing all about volcanoes and mudslides and all.’
Poldarn breathed in slowly, trying to clear his mind. ‘Is everybody all right?’ he said. ‘Did you all manage—?’
‘All safe,’ Colsceg told him. ‘Right down to the old women and the kids, thanks to the rope. Couldn’t say whose idea that was, who had the wit to bring it along. Wasn’t me, that’s for sure.’ He chuckled. ‘Closest call you ever did see but everybody’s alive, nobody’s busted up or anything like that, and that’s got to be the main thing. Farm’s gone, of course, completely fucking buried under all that shit, but so what, big deal. When I was twenty-six years old I started out with nothing but what I could carry on my back, and I can do it again, for sure, doesn’t bother me one bit.’
His face told a different story, but Poldarn could hardly comment on that. ‘Egil,’ he said. ‘I want to ask him.’
‘What? Oh, right. Egil, he wants to ask you something. Don’t tire him out, mind, he needs his rest.’
Egil shuffled forward, looking nervous and very, very wet. ‘It wasn’t you, it was her,’ he said immediately. ‘She’s my sister, what else was I supposed to do?’
Poldarn nodded. ‘I assumed it was something like that,’ he said. ‘Still, thank you.’
‘Oh, that’s fine. I owed you a good turn anyhow. So now we’re quits, which is good.’ He didn’t look happy, however; in fact, he looked like a man who’d upset a keepnet full of carp trying to land a small eel. Poldarn got the feeling that if he’d stayed under the mud like he was supposed to have done, it’d have gone a long way towards reconciling Egil to the day’s events.
‘Suits me,’ he said. ‘Is Boarci anywhere near? I need to talk to him too.’
‘Your friend.’ Egil’s tone of voice was pretty much the same as his father’s. ‘He was here a moment ago, then he went off to help with digging the shelter.’ He scowled. ‘You can tell things are bad, we’re letting him help. A man like that.’
A man who saved your sister’s life, Poldarn thought; then he added, And mine too, of course. That might well explain it. He wasn’t convinced, though; the Colscegsford people just didn’t like Boarci, and it seemed that nothing he could do was going to change that. ‘Well, when you see him, tell him I’d like to thank him. That’s twice he’s saved my life. He must like me or something.’
Egil scowled. ‘You want to watch him,’ he said. ‘He’ll make trouble for you if you let him stay around. And what you want is a quiet life.’
‘That’s true,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Who doesn’t?’
Egil looked at him as if he was trying to be funny. ‘Sure,’ he replied, ‘who doesn’t? Of course, all this has been a stroke of luck for you. Oh, I don’t mean you planned it or you wanted it to happen, but all the same. Bet you’ll be resting easier in your bed from now on, with the farm under all that mud.’
Do I want to know what he means by that? Poldarn decided that, in spite of his better judgement, he probably did. ‘Is that so?’ he asked quietly. ‘Why would that be?’
‘Oh, right.’ Egil gave him a look of pure hatred. ‘I forgot, you lost your memory. Which is really convenient, now that you’re back home and you’re going to have Haldersness and be the big farmer. You know, I’m sure you’re telling the truth and you really don’t remember anything, which is just fine by me. And with the valley being buried in this ash and shit, there’s really only what you and I remember, nothing else that could ever be a problem. So if you’ve forgotten, that just leaves me and I’m telling you, I can’t remember anything either. In fact, my mind’s a complete fucking blank, you know? And keeping it that way would be a very good idea indeed.’
‘Egil.’ Poldarn reached out quickly and grabbed a handful of Egil’s coat. ‘You’re absolutely right, I have forgotten whatever it is you’re talking about, and I keep telling myself that I don’t want to know anything – well, anything bad about myself from the past, because I have a nasty feeling there’s a lot of that kind of thing, one way or another. But that’s not who I am; who I am now, I mean. I’ve been livin
g with myself for a while, and I’m pretty sure that if I was some kind of evil monster, I’d have noticed. But really.’ He let go of Egil’s coat. ‘Really, I haven’t seen any signs of that, I think I’m just a straightforward man who doesn’t mean any harm to anybody. At any rate,’ he added, looking away, ‘that’s who I desperately want to be, and I’m pretty sure I can manage it, so long as I’m allowed to get on with it. Does that make any sense to you?’
Egil nodded, and smoothed his rumpled coat. ‘It all sounds fair enough to me,’ he said sullenly. ‘Like, who wants trouble? Nobody. Not me, anyhow. Besides, we’ve got enough trouble as it is, with the mountain blowing up and losing the farm, that’s a whole lifetime’s worth all by itself. You think I’m going to stir up a load of old trouble, which’d screw things up for me just as bad as for you, you must be cracked in the head or something. And with you marrying my sister—’ He broke off, as though he’d just swallowed something rotten.
‘That’s right,’ Poldarn said gently. ‘I’m going to be marrying your sister. We’ll be brothers-in-law. I need to know there won’t be anything bad to spoil that.’
‘Not from me,’ Egil said, staring past Poldarn’s head. ‘I mean, Polden knows I wouldn’t have chosen you – I love my sister. But I’m not going to go saying anything and put my own neck on the block, you can bet your life. I may be a lot of things – leastways, I may have been a lot of bad things – but I’m not that dumb.’ He was struggling, almost as if he was wrestling with some enemy. ‘You take good care of her, you hear? You make sure you treat her right, God help us all, because it’s not fair, what she’s got stacked up against her, she never did no harm to anybody. So if you – you of all people – if you go treating her wrong, that’d be really bad. And like I said, I won’t be telling anything to anybody, but even so I might just find myself killing you one of these days. I mean, I could do that and still nobody would ever know the truth, even if I got caught.’
There was something about his manner that made Poldarn feel very nervous indeed. ‘That’s interesting,’ he said. ‘But surely, if you did that, you’d just be swapping one problem for another. And the new one would be far worse, wouldn’t it?’
‘Sure.’ Suddenly Egil grinned. ‘Why do you think you’re still alive, at that? If I killed you, next morning the whole household’d know what I’d done and I’d really be screwed. But only me, if you get my meaning; and my life’s all shit anyhow, it doesn’t bother me as much as some other stuff does. It makes no mind really what happens to me, I’d rather stay alive and keep going on, one day to the next, but I figure it’s really only force of habit, or instinct or something.’ He shook his head. ‘Maybe the best thing for everyone’d be if you got your new friend to stick that axe of his in the back of my head some day. Quietly, when nobody’s looking. Can’t say it’d bother me a whole lot, and you’d really be clear then. Other than that—’ He shrugged wearily. ‘I’ve said what I wanted to say,’ he continued. ‘And you did real good, saving us all from the mudslide, so maybe you’re not so bad, at that.’ He stopped suddenly and looked up at the sky. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘It’s stopped raining. About time.’
Egil was quite right. ‘That’s good,’ Poldarn said. ‘But don’t try and change the subject. Can’t you try and get it into your stupid thick head, nobody’s going to get killed, there’s no need for it. It seems to me, if something can be forgotten about so completely that only two people in the whole world know about it, and life goes on, it can’t have been all that terrible to start with. God, that sounds all wrong, I know, but let’s face facts. We’re still alive, we came through the mudslide. I’d be dead if you hadn’t risked your life for me, and Colsceg tells me you’d all be dead if I hadn’t said go up the slope instead of down into the valley.’ He stopped, trying to untangle the mess of unruly thoughts in his head. ‘I see it like this,’ he said. ‘If I’d died that day beside the river, when I woke up and realised I’d lost my whole life up to that point, if whoever bashed my head in had hit me just a little bit harder, then you’d all be dead – half of Haldersness would be dead, too. If Boarci hadn’t killed the bear before it got me, you’d be under the mud right now. If I hadn’t gone away when I did – same thing, exactly. What I’m trying to say is, if I hadn’t done this thing I’m supposed to have done, I’d never have left here, I’d still be one of you. But because I left, I became an outsider, and I came back just when an outsider was needed. Do you see what I’m getting at? If I hadn’t done this thing, we’d all be dead because of the volcano or the mountain or the divine Polden, whatever you want to call it, we’d all be dead and there’d be nothing left, just mud and ash and a few burnt-out ruins. Whatever the hell it was that I did, was it so bad that it’d have been worth all our lives for it never to have happened? I don’t know,’ he said wretchedly, tense with frustration, ‘maybe I did something you could never forgive, maybe I killed someone, I really don’t want to know. But suppose that’s what it was. If I’d never killed whoever it was, he’d be under the mud with the rest of us right now, and what the hell good would that be to anybody?’
Egil shook his head slowly. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Like I said, you’re lucky about the mudslide, and so am I. Let’s say we leave it at that. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’ Poldarn suddenly felt more tired than he could remember being before. ‘Look, if it’s all the same to you, would it be all right if I got some rest now? I’ve had a rather exhausting day and it’s going to be a long way to Haldersness without any horses.’
‘You do what the bloody hell you like,’ Egil said, and walked away.
It would have been a long walk under any circumstances, up steep hills and down again, with the ground either bruising rock or infuriating bog after the torrential rain. Most of the ash and cinders were gone – no prizes for guessing where – but there were dips and hollows waist-deep in thick black mud; after a near-disaster when they experimented briefly with wading through one of them, they resolved to go round them, even if it meant retracing their steps up a steep-sided combe. Poldarn did his best to walk on his own, but after the fifth or sixth unexpected detour his legs gave out completely and he sat down suddenly and hard in the grey shale of a particularly steep escarpment, after which Boarci grabbed him round the waist and wrenched an arm across his enormous shoulders. After an hour or so of trying to keep pace with Boarci’s enormous strides Poldarn wasn’t entirely sure that his new friend’s help was making things any easier for him, but at least he kept moving, having no other option.
Covering the whole distance in one day proved to be out of the question, and they ended up spending the night huddled in the nominal shelter of a solitary thorn tree with an absurdly bowed and twisted trunk. It didn’t take long for them to figure out how it had got that way; the wind was cold and brisk, and of course they had nothing in the way of blankets or even coats, while all their attempts to make a fire proved to be fatuous—
(‘You have a go,’ Colsceg muttered at one point, dumping an inadequate bundle of scavenged twigs in Poldarn’s lap. ‘You’re supposed to be a blacksmith, you should be good at starting a fire.’)
In spite of the cold, and hunger that was steadily getting harder to ignore, and the general wretchedness of everything, Poldarn fell asleep – at least, he assumed he must have done, because he woke up with a horribly cramped back, pins and needles in both feet and a dreadful ache in his arms and shoulders to remind him of how he’d spent the previous day. The only way he could get up from the ground was by rolling onto his side and pulling himself slowly up the tree with his hands, which had clamped tight shut during the night and had to be prised open, like scallops. He took so long about it that they very nearly left without him.
The second day was much like the first, only worse; the hills seemed to get steeper, the ash-mud bogs more frequent, the wind harder and colder. When they passed the place where Boarci had killed the bear, it seemed to Poldarn like he was revisiting a scene from his childhood
, a time long ago and wonderfully happy and carefree, when his whole life was still in front of him and he still had a horse.
‘Fat lot of good it did you,’ he said to Boarci, who was still hustling him along like a sheaf of cut corn.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘That horse I gave you, for saving me from the bear.’
Boarci shrugged. ‘Serves you right for being too generous,’ he replied. ‘I could’ve told you at the time no good’d come of it.’
Faced with a choice between staggering painfully along on his own two feet and listening to much more of that sort of thing, Poldarn decided he preferred the pain. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, wriggling out of Boarci’s grip, ‘I’m feeling much better now, I can walk on my own. Thanks all the same,’ he added.
‘Suit yourself,’ Boarci grunted. ‘I could do without you treading on my feet every third step, that’s for sure.’
Poldarn slowed down, letting him get safely ahead, and this brought him up level with Elja, who was also walking on her own. He hadn’t spoken to her since the mudslide, and she hadn’t come near him; he wondered if there was anything wrong between them, or whether it was just a point of etiquette.
‘So,’ he said, ‘how are you feeling?’
‘Tired,’ she replied.
He nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘I feel like I’ve been walking my whole life. Still, it’s not much further now.’
She frowned. ‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘That’s Riderfell over there, and down in the dip is Fleot’s Water, so at this rate we won’t get there till just before dark, if we’re lucky.’
‘True,’ Poldarn admitted. ‘I was just trying to cheer you up.’
‘Oh.’ She looked at him. ‘By telling me a lie?’
‘Well, the truth’s pretty depressing,’ he said. ‘Any bloody fool can tell you the truth and make you feel miserable.’
Elja stared at him for a moment, then laughed. ‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘You know, you’re strange.’
