by K. J. Parker
(—the last time I did this? But it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event, that’s the whole point.)
Beer, he thought, we’ll need plenty of that, and cold beef and cold smoked lamb and bread and cheese, can’t expect men to work hard on an empty stomach (and he saw the Haldersness women packing up food in baskets, out in the cider house, filling a row of half-gallon barrels with beer from a newly tapped hogshead; he could see the beer was bright and clean, which meant it must have been racked and fined and left to settle at least a week ago, and how the hell had they known to do that, when Halder was still very much alive and showing no signs of being about to die?). Of course there’ll be at least one thing we’ll find we haven’t remembered when we get there, and we’ll have to send someone running back for it while we all stand around waiting; that’s inevitable, it wouldn’t be right unless that happened, it’d be bad luck on the house or something. But it’d be nice if we could keep it down to the one token forgotten thing.
At the back of Poldarn’s mind there was a memory, a genuine one; he could feel it, like a bone stuck in his throat or a fibre of meat lodged between his teeth, but he couldn’t prise it loose. It was infuriating, because he was sure it was something relevant (just as the one piece of steel you can’t seem to find in the scrap pile would undoubtedly be just the right width and thickness for the job in hand, and the more you search for it, the more clearly you can picture it in your mind’s eye; and nine times out of ten, when you come across it by chance a week later, after you’ve used something else, it turns out that it wouldn’t have been suitable at all, it was just your imagination playing games with you). But as he worried away at it, he could feel it growing vague and flimsy, as if he was trying to pick up a page that had burned to ash.
Chapter Twelve
It must have rained heavily in the early hours of the morning, after Poldarn had fallen asleep for the second time, because the grass was very wet, soaking through their boots as they made their way down the combe to the wood. Nobody seemed unduly troubled by that; it was a pleasure to see it again, after what had seemed like a lifetime of staring at a carpet of black ash. As soon as the sun was up, of course, it’d all dry out in no time. Every indication suggested a fine, bright day, warm but not so hot as to make heavy work a burden. They walked quickly, gradually speeding up as they got closer to their objective. Two large crows shadowed them all the way from Haldersness to where the river bent just before they reached the wood, and then pulled off in a wide circle, as if they were expecting to be shot at.
The first job, needless to say, was a solid stone platform for a foundation. Poldarn didn’t need to bother with troublesome mental arithmetic; they would need ten cartloads of double-hand-span wide flat stones, which they should be able to find in the bed of the river just before and after the bend; failing which, there was always the old fallen-down linhay two-thirds of the way up the slope, but it’d be savagely hard work to ship them down from there. Far easier to grovel around in the water for a few hours.
Picking the stones and building the foundation turned out to be a miserable job, which wasn’t helped by the heavy rain that set in at mid-morning and carried on till just before sunset. There was also the small detail of how long and wide the foundation should be. Since all four sills were still growing up out of the ground with needles on their branches, they were left with three choices; guess, or fell the sill-trees early, or climb up the shortest trees with a piece of string and measure the wretched things.
‘We fell them,’ Poldarn decided. ‘Like we should be doing with all the timbers, only we seem to have started in the middle instead of at the beginning. Stands to reason, you cut and shape before you build the foundation.’
So they chopped down the four sill-trees, trimmed them to length and pared off the branches; ‘We’ll leave rough-hewing till tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to commit myself to dimensions more than I have to until I’ve got an idea of what shape this thing’s going to be.’
The others could see his point; so they left the timbers in the bark and finished off the foundation, laying the last few stones just before dark. ‘It’ll do,’ Poldarn announced, after he’d inspected it. The rest of the party were relieved. ‘It’ll do’ in Poldarn’s terms had turned out to mean that the work was irreproachably perfect; corners exactly square, levels checked with a stick floating in a bowl of water. If it had been a little out of true, not exactly right but good enough, Poldarn realised that he was perfectly capable of making them pull it all apart and do it again by torchlight. The things you find out about yourself when suddenly you’re the one making the decisions, he thought. It left him feeling a little uncomfortable. Somehow, they’d been shifting away from the gloriously clear picture he’d had in his mind first thing that morning; a detail here, a measurement there slightly adjusted to save an hour’s gruelling work with adze and drawknife, but every change knocked on, requiring two slight modifications to this piece or that, an extra wedge or a jowled post instead of a plain one. No big deal, nothing to worry about; but he could feel himself starting to drift, the perfect cutting edge of his earlier clarity gradually growing dull with every expedient compromise. It was annoying, not the way it ought to be. Illogical; but Poldarn couldn’t help thinking that if someone else was doing the job, it wouldn’t be getting out of hand like this.
An hour or thereabouts before it was time to pack up for the day, a thought struck him that was so utterly horrible in its implications that he had to say it out loud. Colsceg, Barn and Carey were working with him at the time.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘it’s all right to use green timber like this. Only, what if it shrinks or starts splitting as it dries out? The whole thing could pull out of shape.’
But Colsceg gave him a reassuringly contemptuous look. ‘You hear a lot of bullshit about building with green timber these days,’ he said. ‘Bullshit,’ he repeated. ‘When my great-great grandfather first moved out here from the east, there wasn’t time to season your timbers. It was either put ’em up green or spend six months camping out in the rain. So they put ’em up green, same as I did when I built my place, and you know what? It’s still there. You build it right, as the timbers dry out they move together, you get stronger joints and tighter laps, not the other way around. Only time you need to worry about green timber’s when you’re putting it together with nails and straps, ‘stead of regular joints and dowels; and only a damn fool of an easterner’d do such a thing to begin with.’
That seemed to settle that, and Poldarn was far too tactful to point out that Colsceg’s house wasn’t there any more. Irrelevant, anyway; even the most meticulously dried lumber wasn’t supposed to be proof against freak cataracts of fast-moving black mud. All the same, it did occur to Poldarn to wonder where exactly, in Colsceg’s view, the west ended and the feckless east began. Colsceg himself had never said anything definite on the subject, but Poldarn had an idea that the frontier lay somewhere just the other side of the eastern boundary of Colscegsford.
The Colscegsford household appeared to have worked up a substantial thirst during the day, because they were heavier than usual on the beer at dinner that night. That was unusual behaviour – Poldarn couldn’t remember seeing anybody get drunk since he’d come home, and had come to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t even possible: how could any one man drink enough beer to addle a brain he shared with several dozen other people? That night, however, the Colscegsford people seemed to be giving it their best shot, though they didn’t succeed. The beer didn’t seem to affect them in the slightest, as far as Poldarn could tell; no slurred words or loud behaviour, if anything they were quieter and more withdrawn than usual. If it had been the Bohec valley instead of the far islands, he’d have come to the conclusion that the loss of their home was finally beginning to get to them and they were trying to drown their sorrows, but that didn’t seem very likely. Maybe they were just thirsty, at that.
Fortunately, the Haldersness contingent had the sense not
to try and keep up with Colsceg’s people on the beer, so there weren’t any uncomfortably sore heads when Poldarn came round to wake them up an hour before dawn the next day. It was raining, needless to say, but no more than a light, cool drizzle, falling almost vertically out of a blue-patched sky.
They sharpened the axes on the big crank grindstone on the back porch, and set off for the combe, leaving trails in the long, wet grass. Poldarn led the way, with the slabbing rail over his shoulder – he was showing off, but the others must have figured that if he wanted to rick his back, this once he was entitled. Overladen or not, he kept up a smart pace all the way to the copse.
To begin with, they felled the thickest trees, the ones that would provide the rafters, joists, girts and braces. These had to be sawn into planks, and it made sense to bring those down first, so the fellers could move on while the sawyers were dealing with them. While he and Eyvind alternated cuts on either side of the main joist tree, Poldarn tried hard to put out of his mind the fact that he was cutting down one of his trees, harvesting it, killing it; but the thought was too stubborn and refused to go quietly. So far, the project had been all about growth; if the trees stopped growing, would he stop with them? At the back of his mind he could remember a story (whose story or where it was from he didn’t have a clue) about the glorious hero who’d been cursed to live just as long as the oak sapling in the corner of his mother’s kitchen garden – that had been a strange curse, he thought, because oaks live for hundreds of years if nobody fells them, and of course the hero’s mother had built a wall round the little tree and set the household to guard and nurture it; and in time it grew mighty and strong, just as the hero did, and both of them shaded and sheltered their households for three hundred years, until the hero became cruel in his old age and tormented his people, until his own great-grandson lopped his head off with a felling axe, on the same night that lightning split the great tree, showing up the rot that was eating its heart out . . . He must have thought that was a pretty good story when he’d heard it, full of significance and inner meaning. But lumber is just lumber, and a man should be practical at all times; it was practical of grandfather to plant these trees, and now here was Poldarn, being practical, cutting them down.
After the first couple of hours, he was too weary and busy to bother with sentimental stuff. The tree that was supposed to provide the middle cross-beam turned out to be ring-shaken; exposed to the wind on the edge of the copse, it had been twisted and flexed so much that the growth rings inside had pulled apart about a third of the way in, and great flakes of wood peeled off when they tried to rough-hew it. With luck, they’d be able to saw it cross-grain and get a couple of floor-joists out of it, but that was all. Accordingly, the third joist tree got a field promotion to middle cross-beam. Poldarn wasn’t happy about that – he reckoned it’d be a bit too thin, because of the wane two-thirds up – but Colsceg and Carey and Eyvind looked it over and pronounced it suitable, provided they didn’t hew it true square like the other cross-beams, but left more of the sapwood on. Poldarn agreed reluctantly but insisted that all the bark should come off, since woodworm and beetle love dry bark. Halfway through the morning, Rook’s trick elbow gave out on him, and Poldarn had to take his place on the planking saw, which didn’t exactly please him. He found the job absurdly difficult; his problem lay in maintaining a rhythm with the man on the other end of the saw (in this case, Colsceg’s stolid elder son, Barn, who was known to be good at it). It worked out well enough, however. The hard part was always the first cut off the log, after it had been felled and dressed and heaved up onto the blocks. That was where the slabbing rail came in; you laid it over the curved back of the log and used its flat face to guide the saw, ensuring a flat, level finish on the bottom that would guide the next cut. As they went, they hammered wedges into the kerf to keep it from closing tight on the blade and jamming it. Even so, it was painfully hard work, tearing all the time at the tendons of the forearms.
Poldarn was happy to leave most of the hewing to the Colscegsford household. Whatever their faults, there was no doubt but that they were experts with the hewing axe and the lipped adze, chipping the timbers square as freely and easily as if they were hoeing a patch of earth. When Poldarn surreptitiously checked their work with a square, he found the angles were exact (how the hell could they do that, all by eye?) and there was hardly a toolmark to be seen; you’d think the work had been finished off with a plane. Essential, of course, to have all the surfaces flat and square if they didn’t want to have to work twice as hard when the time came to cut the joints.
It took three days to fell, hew and plank out the timber, and suddenly there wasn’t a copse there any more, just a huge pile of lumber, all carefully piled with wedges between each piece to allow the air to circulate in the stack and prevent warping. When they arrived on the fourth morning, the crows were sitting on the log pile, looking bewildered. How the hell do you expect us to roost on that? they seemed to cry as the work party walked them off. The fourth day was spent in cutting joints, and by now most of the enthusiasm had worn off. Poldarn got involved in a silent battle of wills with a Colscegsford hand called Bren over a sloppy mortice in the south end house-post; it’d have been all right if Bren had admitted at the start that he’d marked it out wrong, but he carried on working even though he knew the slot was skewed, which was just plain foolish (and typical of Bren, someone told Poldarn later, though on what authority he was left to guess). When he noticed and told him to stop, Bren tried to pretend that it was all perfectly good and that Poldarn couldn’t judge an angle, so Poldarn had to fetch the gauge and show him. That made Bren even angrier, particularly when Colsceg started in on him as well. The issue gradually brought all work to a standstill, and it was only after Bren had suddenly got up and walked away that Poldarn and Eyvind were able to consider the problem calmly and decide what was to be done. Eyvind maintained that the post was useless and would have to be discarded; they’d have to hunt around for another piece of timber from somewhere, possibly rob a timber off the derelict barn. Poldarn wasn’t having that. They were going to use this piece and no other, and if Eyvind was half the joiner he tacitly claimed to be, he’d be able to figure out a way of salvaging it.
Of course Eyvind didn’t like that; luckily he took the implied slight as a challenge, and spent the next two hours cutting a block that exactly filled the defective mortice, dowelling it in tight and cutting a new mortice into the patch. The result, he claimed, would be even stronger than if it’d been cut from the whole wood, and if Poldarn wasn’t entirely convinced by that, he could at least see that the job was good enough and would hold.
Things got better after that. Bren wandered back an hour or so after Eyvind had finished his patch; needless to say, the rest of the work he did that day was beyond reproach.
‘Now all we’ve got to do,’ Colsceg announced at the start of the fifth day, ‘is put the bastard together.’
Poldarn had a feeling that Colsceg hadn’t exactly dedicated his life to winning friends and getting people to like him, but that was a bit much, even coming from him. Still, nobody said anything – he’d have been amazed if they had – and they set to work with grim determination, boring the dowel-holes with augers and hammering in the pegs to assemble the sections of the frame. Much to Poldarn’s surprise and relief, the plates, posts and sills slotted together perfectly – no yawning gaps, no frantic bashing to squash a fat tenon into a thin mortice – and once the sides were raised with the help of a gin-pole crane and a lot of bad language, the cross-beams and girts slotted in place without any fuss and the pegs went home without jamming or splitting.
‘Don’t panic,’ Eyvind said, observing Poldarn’s fraught expression. ‘Something’ll go wrong soon, and then you can relax.’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘It’s toying with me, I can tell,’ he replied. ‘Nothing fits together this easily, ever.’
‘Bullshit,’ Colsceg interrupted, his mouth full of pegs. ‘You do the cutting-out ri
ght, it goes together first time. I never have any bother— Fuck,’ he added, ‘this goddamn tenon’s too short. Who cut this tenon?’
Curiously, nobody could remember having worked on that particular timber; and, since it was out of the question that Colsceg could’ve made a mistake like that, they were left with the conclusion that at some point during the previous day, they’d been helped out by a bunch of careless elves.
‘This is silly,’ Poldarn said. ‘We can’t just pack in and start all over again because of one lousy inch.’
For once, Colsceg didn’t seem to have an opinion on the matter in hand, and for a while, it was very quiet all round. Finally, Egil (who hadn’t said a single word since the job began, as far as Poldarn could remember) cleared his throat and asked how it would be if they cut off the end and spliced in an extension?
Nobody said anything, and Egil shrugged as if to apologise for saying something crass. But then Poldarn said, ‘Yes, we could do that’, and Colsceg said, ‘No, we couldn’t, bloody thing’d pull itself apart soon as it took the weight,’ and the two of them looked at each other for a while, and they decided to try it. Colsceg sketched out a joint with a scrap of charcoal – a murderously complicated affair that looked like two spiders fighting – while Poldarn solemnly picked up a saw and began to cut off the beam. The two of them worked in silence for over an hour while the others, who had nothing they could usefully do, looked on like a gaggle of expectant fathers.
‘All right,’ Poldarn said eventually. ‘This ought to work.’
‘And if it doesn’t?’ someone asked.
‘Then we tear the whole bloody thing down and start again.’
The frightening thing was that he meant it. To everyone’s relief, it didn’t come to that. Colsceg’s double-housed lapped dovetail, or whatever the hell it was, took the strain without so much as a creak, while Poldarn’s joinery (When and where the hell did I learn that? he wondered) was so precise that they couldn’t pull a single hair through the join.
