by K. J. Parker
Eyvind tried to prop himself up on one arm, but gave it up with a groan. ‘What you’re saying doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘What happened was, I started my draw and you smashed me over the head. That’s not how the game works, it’s just a draw, not a draw and a cut.’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘Not where I learned it, apparently. It was just reflex – I honestly didn’t know what I was doing. It happened, but I can’t actually remember pulling that wooden thing out of my sash, let alone hitting you. It’s like I wasn’t even there.’
‘Sure,’ Eyvind grunted. ‘Look, didn’t I tell you? Don’t go raving mad, stay calm. And you managed it in all the other bouts, you did the moves just right, so don’t go trying to tell me you don’t know the rules. Then, when it’s me you’re facing, you suddenly go crazy and bash my head in. Everybody thinks you’re a dangerous lunatic or something.’
Maybe they’re right, Poldarn thought; how would I be supposed to know, anyhow? ‘I promise you,’ he said, ‘I really didn’t mean to hurt you, there wasn’t any malice in it. It was like a cat batting at a bit of wool.’
Eyvind didn’t reply immediately. ‘Well, maybe,’ he said grudgingly. ‘And I guess it’s just as well it was me you bashed, because I guess I can make allowances the way the others couldn’t, me not being one of the household. But you’ve really screwed up this time; it’s going to be years before they treat you like a normal person. They’re going to think you did it to show off, or because you enjoy hurting people. The thing is, people here don’t behave like that. I’ve been abroad, I know how different they are on the other side of the world. A lot of these people haven’t ever been further than Roersbrook or Vitesness. How are we going to explain this to them?’
‘I don’t know,’ Poldarn admitted. ‘But that can wait – I don’t actually care all that much. What bothers me is that I did this to you. And you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t do it deliberately. I’d never do anything like that on purpose, to you or anybody else.’
Eyvind turned his head slightly so he wasn’t looking at Poldarn any more. ‘That I doubt,’ he said. ‘Seems to me you’ve had a lot of practice. You know, when I first met you I was sure I had you figured out, but now it strikes me I don’t really understand you at all. We all thought that once you’d been here a while, it’d all come back to you and you’d slowly pick up where you left off. But maybe we were all wrong about you, and really you’re nothing like us at all.’ He sighed. ‘And it’s pointless asking you, because you know even less about who you are than we do. God, this is a mess. They’ll just have to find a way of putting it out of their minds, I suppose. Don’t ask me how, though.’
There didn’t seem to be anything more to say, and Poldarn had aches and pains of his own to complain about, though he couldn’t imagine anybody in either household wanting to hear about them. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and went into the inner room, where he was fairly sure of getting some privacy. He’d had enough of his people (these people) for one day.
He lay down on the bed, wincing as he did so. His clothes were filthy with dust and earth, but it was too much effort to take them off, and he was in no hurry to inspect the handsome crop of bruises that he suspected were coming into bloom all over his body. Not the sort of honeymoon he’d have chosen, given the choice. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, it was only because someone was prodding him on the point of his shoulder, where a couple of substantial hits had landed during the quarterstaff match.
‘Are you going to lie there all day?’ Elja said.
Poldarn turned his head. Light was flooding through the crack between the shutter and the window frame. ‘Bloody hell,’ he groaned, ‘what time is it?’
‘Well after sun-up,’ Elja replied. ‘Come on, there’s work to be done.’
‘Is there really,’ he grumbled. ‘Can’t see what that’s got to do with me. Why can’t they just get on with it, they all seem to know what they’re supposed to be doing. Wish I did.’
‘Get up.’ She prodded him again, and he howled.
Elja wasn’t very sympathetic. ‘Now what are you fussing about?’ she said. ‘You’re not the one who’s laid up with a busted head.’
Poldarn groaned. ‘No, but I wouldn’t give more than scrap value for the rest of me. Can’t I go back to sleep and wake up in a month or so, when I’m better?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, all right, then.’ He swung his legs off the bed, but they were cramped and painful. His ankle protested as soon as he put his feet on the ground. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll tell me, but I’d really like to know what I’m meant to do this morning. Just for once, it’d be nice to be in on the deadly secret. I thought it’d be different, after we all worked together building this house, but now it’s like we’re all back to where we were before.’
Elja laughed. ‘You’re strange,’ she said. ‘You really don’t know, do you?’
‘No.’
‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you.’
‘You will?’
‘Of course, why shouldn’t I?’
‘Thank you,’ Poldarn said gratefully, and tried to stand up, but his knees weren’t up to the challenge. He sat down again and massaged them with the palms of his hands. They were painful, too.
‘Well,’ Elja said, pulling her shawl around her shoulders, ‘mostly the men are working on the cattle pens, and laying the stone foundations for the main barn. We’re going to be sewing, mainly: curtains for the doors and some shirts. That’s the morning taken care of.’
Poldarn nodded gravely. ‘That seems reasonable enough,’ he said. ‘What about this afternoon?’
‘The pens should be finished by then, barring accidents, so the men’ll probably head off down to the old house and start tearing down the outbuildings.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘For the lumber, silly. Where else are you going to get materials from?’
Poldarn frowned. ‘But your father and his lot,’ he said. ‘I thought it was settled, they’re going to move in down there until they can rebuild Colscegsford.’
There was a disapproving tone in Elja’s voice as she replied. ‘They’ve agreed to stay in the house, for now,’ she said. ‘But you can’t let them have the barns and buildings too, there just isn’t enough timber to go round. Not unless you’ve got another plantation squirrelled away somewhere that you haven’t told us about.’
Best not to argue, Poldarn told himself; after all, it wasn’t as if he was talking to just one individual here. Everything Elja was thinking and saying had undoubtedly come direct from the Colscegsford household, popped into her mind like a pinch of sage sprinkled into a pot of stew. Somehow or other, what he’d assumed was the generous gesture of letting Colsceg and his brood have the use of Haldersness had turned into a mortal affront to their dignity, or something of the kind. He wished Elja’d explain how that worked too, but he didn’t want to overtax her patience.
‘Fair enough, then,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way everybody wants to do it. But where’s your dad supposed to get his timber from?’
‘That’s his business,’ Elja replied promptly. ‘I’m part of this household now, so there.’
She stood up and pushed her hair back over her shoulders, a gesture that Poldarn found strangely familiar. ‘You really ought to get up,’ she said. ‘You know they can’t start without you.’
Poldarn sighed. ‘You mean,’ he said wretchedly, ‘that every day for the rest of my life I’ve got to be awake and up and about before everybody else, or nothing will ever get done. That’s a really depressing thought.’
‘You’re just lazy,’ she told him. ‘Comes of spending all those years abroad, I guess. No wonder we can walk all over them, if they’re all like you.’
It proved to be a very long day indeed. Against all expectations, theirs and his own, Poldarn found that he was able to do his share and more on the cattle pen, swinging the massive iron post-rammer and hauling rails; but the pai
n in his back and shoulders didn’t go away, however hard he tried to ignore it, and by midday he’d had more than enough. But instead of crawling away and lying down somewhere out of the way he had to go and sit in the hall while the midday meal was eaten, because they couldn’t have it without him, and as soon as it was over he had to get up and lead them all back to work. That made him feel ridiculous, like a duck leading a gaggle of ducklings down to the pond.
Prising apart the long barn turned out to be a nightmare of a job. The nails were mostly rusted in and wouldn’t draw out, which meant their heads had to be chiselled or filed away. Even the dowels and pegs refused to come out clean; they broke off flush or cracked halfway through, leaving one or two inches of inaccessible taper to be drilled or bored out. Plank after plank proved to have splits or cracks in them – of course, they only found this out after they’d got them free, at which stage it was impossible to put them back, or use them for anything except firewood. The main timbers were in a rather better state by and large, but there were still a great many casualties (and each timber that failed would have to be replaced with a new one, which meant felling rather more of the scarce and precious trees than anybody would have chosen; nobody raised the problem of combining green and seasoned timber in the same structure, presumably because it was too depressing to contemplate). In the end, they were reduced to splicing patches into some of the broken timbers, which everybody knew was the wrong thing to do, but it wasn’t as though they had any realistic alternative. The job was nowhere near finished by nightfall, but they left it and trooped back up to the new house, tired and silent. The evening meal was porridge, leeks and flat beer, because that was all that was left, thanks to the strain on the stores of feeding two households. When Poldarn expressed concern on that score, Rannwey told him there was nothing to get worried about, they had enough porridge and leeks and flat beer to last almost indefinitely; a prospect that depressed Poldarn rather more than the threat of starvation.
After the meal was over and the tables had been stacked away, the household immediately grabbed their blankets and got ready to go to sleep; Poldarn, who was tired but not at all sleepy, had no alternative but to retire to the inner room, since the pattern suggested that they couldn’t close their eyes till he’d closed his. The mental image of a hall full of exhausted people wrapped in blankets and waiting impatiently for his first snore to filter through the partition was extremely disconcerting, and made him feel more awake than ever.
‘It’s all right,’ Elja assured him. ‘They can get their heads down now you’re in here.’
He looked at her. ‘How did you know what I was thinking?’ he said.
She smiled at him. ‘I saw it in your thoughts,’ she said.
‘But I didn’t think you could do that.’
‘Usually I can’t,’ she replied, slipping off her dress. ‘But I guess you’re so tired and fed up you let your guard down, and there it was, plain to see. It’s all right,’ she added with a grin, ‘it’s back up again now, I can’t see a thing. Just goes to show, though, you really are one of us – you’ve just got this knack of shutting us all out.’
‘Oh.’ Poldarn sat down on the bed and tried to reach his boots, but his arms and legs were knotted with cramp. ‘But I don’t want to do that. I just want to be normal, like the rest of you.’
‘Obviously you don’t,’ Elja replied. ‘Not deep down. And I think I know why, too. You see, really you think you’re normal and the rest of us are weird. That’s why you keep us out. It must be very difficult.’
‘You could be right,’ Poldarn sighed. ‘But I wouldn’t know, I can’t see. I guess I’m as closed off to myself as I am to the rest of you. Mostly though,’ he added, ‘I’m worn out.’
‘Are you?’
He nodded. ‘What with dragging around big lumps of wood all day, and all that stupid stuff yesterday; and the day before that getting bashed on the head when I fell over. I expect something horrible happened to me the day before that, too, but I can’t remember that far back.’
‘You poor thing.’ She wriggled across the bed and draped her arms around his neck. ‘One thing’s for sure, it’s been far more exciting around here since you showed up. Mostly horrible, of course, but exciting. Especially for me. If you hadn’t turned up when you did, I’d probably have ended up marrying Turgren, from out over Vitesness.’
He gave up trying to reach his boot. The feel of her arm against his cheek was extraordinary. ‘That wouldn’t have been a good thing, then.’
She shook her head. ‘He’s bald and fat and about ten feet tall. I’d have needed to stand on a chair to kiss him, though why I’d want to do that God only knows. He’s only got four teeth.’
He put his hands on her hips. ‘Teeth aren’t everything,’ he said.
‘True.’ She traced round his lips with the tip of her tongue. ‘So you think I should’ve married him instead?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘But you didn’t, so I guess we’ve both got to make the best of a bad job.’ Very carefully, he brushed his knuckles up and down her left nipple; she shivered, and her smile faded. ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Did they feel that next door?’
‘I hope not. They need their sleep.’
Poldarn grinned. ‘I expect they’re asleep already.’
‘Then they’ll have interesting dreams.’ Elja caught hold of his hand and steered it back to her breast. ‘I’ve got a feeling you’ve done this sort of thing before.’
‘Probably,’ he replied, thinking about Prince Tazencius’s daughter, who’d married him for love, apparently. ‘I can’t remember, though.’
‘Pity.’
He repeated his earlier manoeuvre, finding that he knew exactly where to place his hand without having to look (it was like making the draw, in that sense). ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I find that these things tend to come back to me, in emergencies.’
She called him an idiot and kissed him, suddenly and ferociously; and for some time after that he was too busy to think. But afterwards he listened for her in his mind, and still, in spite of everything that had happened between them, she wasn’t there; so he lay on his back in the darkness, eyes open, feeling hopelessly alone and lost.
At some point he must have let his mind wander, because the voice had been speaking for some time before he started listening to what it was saying.
‘That’s the extraordinary thing,’ she was saying, ‘it’s like suddenly I can feel you inside my mind, as well as the rest of me. I don’t know, maybe everybody feels that way when it’s someone they really love. It’s a very nice feeling, though. Sort of complete.’
He had no idea who she was; but now she mentioned it, he could remember the moment she was talking about, when he’d taken advantage of her complete surrender to break into her mind. It had been much easier than he’d expected, he’d hardly needed to apply any material degree of force (and she, poor innocent thing, had probably assumed it was usual under such circumstances). Once he was in there, it had proved to be something of a disappointment, like battering into a castle and finding nothing but plain farmhouse furniture, wooden plates and bowls and one small box of brass jewellery. Somehow he’d assumed that such impressive defences must contain something worth stealing, but apparently not; just the ordinary thoughts of a commonplace young mind, and a great deal of rather nebulous infatuation.
‘I know what you mean,’ he mumbled sleepily.
She rolled over towards him and laid her hand on his chest; he found the intrusion annoying, but put up with it. ‘Suddenly I felt like I really knew you,’ she went on, ‘all of you, like you’d taken the clothes off your soul and I could see it, all bare.’
‘You liked what you saw.’
‘Oh yes.’ Somehow he doubted that. If she’d seen anything, it must have been what she wanted to see. He’d never really given his soul much thought, but he had a pretty shrewd idea that if she’d really seen it, she wouldn’t be lying next to him purring like an overfed cat.
She’d be halfway back to her father’s house, and still running. ‘Is it like this for everybody, do you know?’ she asked. ‘Or is it something special, just for you and me?’
‘I don’t know, I’d have to ask everybody. And that’d take a while.’
‘Silly. My guess is that it’s a bit like this, but for us it’s something really special. I love you,’ she added, sounding like a monk reciting a prayer; a formal phrase, constantly reiterated, encapsulating a great deal of scripture.
‘I love you too,’ he replied, wondering how long it’d take her to get to sleep. He made a rule of trying to be as accommodating as he could in such circumstances, but he never could see the point in this sort of aimless chatter at this stage of the proceedings. How nice it would have been, he thought wistfully, if he’d managed to get one who’d just shut up and go to sleep.
‘I was thinking,’ she went on. ‘When Daddy gets back from the city, it’d be nice if we could go and visit, just for a day or so.’ She paused, a little too self-consciously to carry conviction. ‘You know, I’m sure that if you two really got to know each other—’
He smiled, safe in the darkness, and made a vaguely disapproving noise.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m being selfish; and of course I haven’t forgiven him for what he said to you.’
‘It’s all right,’ he replied, the perfect self-denying martyr, ready to overlook anything for his true love’s sake. ‘It doesn’t bother me any more, really. I was just thinking, do we really need all those other people round us? There’s sure to be a big crowd at your father’s place.’
She sighed. ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘There usually is.’
‘Especially now,’ he went on, gentle and careful as the crow glided down onto the pattern of decoys, ‘with the big reconciliation thing, your father and General Cronan. I can’t imagine he’d want us there, with all that going on.’
