by K. J. Parker
‘Oh, he wouldn’t mind,’ she said, a little too quickly. ‘And it’d mean he’d be busy a lot of the time, so we wouldn’t be getting under each other’s feet. It’d be showing willing more than anything else.’
He couldn’t help grinning; she was headed right for the gap in the pattern, the killing zone. He’d learned this basic truth many years ago, in a ploughed field at Haldersness; you can’t pull in a crow to the decoys unless it wants to come in. The trick lies in making it want to. ‘If you really want to go,’ he said, ‘I suppose it’d be all right.’
She wriggled over and hugged him; he managed not to wince at the intrusion into his circle. ‘That’s so sweet of you,’ she said – and for a moment he felt really bad about it, because she was young and beautiful and sweet, and he’d thoroughly enjoyed taking her, in spite of it all. But there was no reason for that, no reason why he shouldn’t enjoy his work; mostly it was nasty and unpleasant, and the pleasure he usually got from it was definitely not something to be proud of; something relatively peaceful and normal, like making love to a lovely girl, was definitely an improvement on his usual daily round. Besides, he reassured himself, there’s more ways of killing a crow than pulling its neck.
‘That’s all right,’ he said, remembering to play up the part (attention to detail at all times). ‘After all, I’m part of the family now, it’s worth making the effort.’ He yawned. Now he’d got what he wanted, he really would like to get some sleep. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘snuggle up.’ He reached round and started stroking the small of her back, which never failed to put her to sleep. ‘Busy day tomorrow,’ he added, more to himself than to her. ‘With any luck, we’ll get the rest of the usable lumber off the old barn, and then we can make a start on the new one.
She grunted sleepily, while he thought, What was all that about? What old barn? And then he remembered – breaking up the old barn at Colscegsford after the heavy snow caved in the roof, all those years ago. What had put that into his head all of a sudden, he wondered; then he remembered that, too. Same moment, same half-lucid interval between waking and sleep, different girl. Very different girl, but somehow the moment was always the same. He was pleased with himself for thinking that.
‘What?’ Elja muttered drowsily.
‘I was just saying,’ Poldarn repeated, ‘once we’ve finished salvaging the lumber, we can make a start on the new barn.’
‘Oh,’ Elja said, ‘right. That’s nice. I want to go to sleep now.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Mphm.’ She wriggled away from him, pulling the bedclothes with her. Typical, he thought, as the cold air hit his toes, they all do that (and then he stopped and wondered how he knew that, and who they all had been).
‘Elja,’ he said.
‘Now what?’
‘I love you.’
‘Love you too,’ she mumbled. ‘See you in the morning.’
Yes, he thought. And that’ll be something to look forward to.
Chapter Seventeen
Eyvind was up and about early the next morning, still obviously below par but determined to make himself useful. He said good morning amiably enough but didn’t stop to talk, and Poldarn was left to guess whether this signified forgiveness, diplomacy or just ingrained good manners.
Of course, Poldarn didn’t have a clue how to go about building a barn; but although he’d lost his memory he still had enough common sense to realise that he wouldn’t go far wrong if he used the old one as a pattern. So, when nobody was looking, he carefully paced out the distances between the corner posts, cut surreptitious witness marks on the main timbers with his knife and even managed to scratch a ground plan on the back of a bit of broken pot. It wasn’t quite the same as having a glorious revelation of how to go about the job, as had been the case with the house itself; but he could see that the shades of his ancestors, while obliged to enable him to put a roof over his head, couldn’t be expected to go to the same degree of trouble over a grain store and junk depository.
Dismantling the last few timbers and loading them onto carts took up the morning and most of the afternoon, and they finished unloading in the dark. Next day, it rained hard and if he’d had any say in the matter they’d have stayed indoors, but apparently he didn’t; so they had to lay out and mark up with rain in their eyes and water trickling down the backs of their necks. Progress was slow, mistakes were made; Root, one of the Haldersness field hands, slipped in the mud while supporting a cross-beam, which fell and hit Eyrich, the Colscegsford wheelwright, on the point of the shoulder, breaking his collarbone. That held things up for a long time, and although nothing was said, even Poldarn could feel the tension it caused between the two households. Then, just when they’d got back into some sort of a rhythm, Barn contrived to miss a wedge with the big hammer and cracked himself on the ankle. Further delays, reduced manpower, loss of key personnel (not so much Barn himself; but Colsceg and Egil insisted on helping him back to the house, and Colsceg was the best mortice-cutter in either household); the further they fell behind schedule, the more jobs were rushed and therefore botched, resulting in more wasted time as skilled workers were called off what they were supposed to be doing to put right the mistakes, leaving the unskilled crews standing around with nothing to do. That was patently unacceptable, so Poldarn grabbed a chisel and a mallet and cut the mortices himself, only to find that it didn’t come quite as naturally as he’d expected. That was embarrassing as well as counter-productive, and ended up with the whole job grinding to a halt until Colsceg came back and patched up the mess Poldarn had made of a particularly complicated step-lapped rafter seat.
‘Cheer up,’ Boarci said, appearing suddenly behind him. It was an order rather than a suggestion. ‘Compared to most barn-raisings I’ve been on, this one’s flowing like warm honey. It’s when you’ve finished and you take a step back, and the whole lot slumps over to the left and flops down in a heap; that’s when you want to pack it all in and find a nice dry cave somewhere.’
‘Fine,’ Poldarn replied. ‘I’ll bear that in mind when the time comes. Are you any good at single shoulder tenons?’
Boarci laughed. ‘Better than you, anyway,’ he said. ‘Mind you, so’s my mother’s cat. Here, give me that chisel before you fuck up any more dead trees.’
He turned out to be a very competent joiner, almost as good as Colsceg and considerably quicker. ‘Outstanding,’ Poldarn said, as the tenon snuggled into the mortice and the dowel slid home. ‘Only, if you’re so good at this, why’ve you been wasting your time lugging planks on and off carts? We could’ve used you here.’
‘Not my place,’ Boarci replied. ‘If you weren’t as blind as a bat, you’d have seen that for yourself. I’m not from around here, remember, I can’t go pushing a man out of the way and doing his job just because I can do it a bit better than he can. All that’ll get you is an open door and a boot up the bum, and serve you right. That’s the sort of thing you need to know if you’re going to run a house, basic stuff like that. Otherwise you’ll only make trouble for yourself.’
Poldarn sighed. ‘How about if I ask you to do my job for me?’ he said. ‘Does that make it all right?’
Boarci shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘But if it’s that or risk the roof coming down on some poor bugger’s head, I suppose you haven’t got much choice.’
The closing stages, which should have been the easy part, turned out to be the most difficult of all. Half the boarding planks turned out to be shaken or rotten, but there wasn’t enough new material to replace them. Accordingly, they had no alternative but to splice patches into the spoiled timbers, a hatefully fiddly job even for a fresh, dry crew, and nearly impossible for men who were tired, wet and thoroughly out of sorts. When the sun set behind the rain clouds that had been concealing it all day anyway and the light went, it looked like there was only a little bit left to do, so, rather than leave an annoying little tag end of a job unfinished over night, Poldarn sent up to the house for lamps and torches and they ca
rried on, only to find that they’d underestimated the scope of the tiresome odds and ends, which they compounded in turn with a rash of small, stupid mistakes. Then the damp got into the lamp wicks, the rain got worse, and they were forced to drop their tools and run for shelter until it slackened off. By that time, nobody was prepared to carry on, and they trudged back to the house for their dinner of porridge and leeks. A day in the driving rain had made them all too wet to dry out, even if they hadn’t been too tired to face the effort of undressing; so they banked up the fire with fuel they couldn’t afford to waste and went to sleep in their wet clothes.
The next morning was hot and muggy. The bits and pieces they’d hoped to clear up by torchlight proved sufficiently awkward to keep them occupied until shortly after midday, and even then there were a few out-of-square window frames and uneven floorboards, things that could just about be ignored but which would have to be seen to sooner or later. Viewed from a distance of twenty-five yards or so, the end result could easily be mistaken for a barn, but if he closed his eyes, Poldarn could see every single glitch, snag and imperfection, from the clumsily nailed splices to the door that had to be lifted into its frame. That sort of thing could be overlooked in a building that’d been standing for fifty years, but in a newly built barn it was all rather shoddy and sad, and he knew perfectly well that until the faults were fixed, he’d notice them every time he walked through the doorway.
Even so, several minutes had passed and it was still standing, without even a couple of props wedged in against the walls – more than could be said for some barns on this side of the mountain. It wouldn’t win any prizes, but Poldarn couldn’t recall any being offered. When they began to move things in, he tagged along with one of the gangs and tried to look useful, in spite of his aching joints and pulled muscles.
‘I can’t see what you’re making such a fuss about,’ Elja told him as she rubbed his back with some singularly horrible-smelling embrocation. ‘I mean to say, it’s all going to get pulled down in forty years or so, and I dare say it’ll manage to stay put till then. It’s only a barn, not Polden’s temple. You’ve still got two more barns to do, remember, and that’s before you start on the small houses. If we’re going to have all this agonising after each one, I think I’ll leave you and go home to Daddy.’
‘You do that,’ Poldarn replied, ‘and take that disgusting mess with you. What do they put in that stuff, anyway?’
‘You’re better off not knowing,’ she told him cheerfully. ‘And if you think it’s nasty, what about me? I’ve got to put my hands in it, and sleep next to it.’
He pulled a face, though of course she couldn’t see. ‘I think that’ll do,’ he said. ‘I feel a whole lot better now.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes. Or at least, I will as soon as you stop putting that stuff on me.’
More by luck than judgement, the other two barns weren’t nearly so much trouble; they’d been rethatched more recently and so the damp hadn’t swollen the joints, which meant that the wedges and pins came out cleanly and there were fewer breakages. That was just as well; they were almost out of new split and sawn lumber, and the last thing Poldarn wanted to do was send anyone to put an axe to the last few growing trees that had survived the volcano and the black ash. He’d already been putting out feelers about a logging expedition into the unsettled woods of the north and east, a project that would mean joining forces with three or four other households besides the two he was currently responsible for. The initial reactions weren’t encouraging. Lyatsbridge desperately needed timber, of course; they had a house to rebuild from the ground up, and no materials whatever. But unless Poldarn undertook to feed them through the winter, which he was in no position to do, they were going to be far too busy scraping together enough food to live on, and had already resigned themselves to camping out for the foreseeable future, or else packing up and moving away. Eyvind had sent home to Bollesknap to see if his father and brothers were interested in coming in on the project, but he didn’t think they would be – they had more than enough timber for their own needs, but not quite enough that they could afford to spare any. Braynolphscombe was too far away to send a message to – it’d mean having a man away from the house for two weeks when they needed all hands for the rest of the buildings. It was a good idea, was the general consensus, but completely impractical.
So it was just as well that they seemed to have got the hang of taking apart the old houses without causing too much damage. The work was getting done, slowly but surely, and gradually Ciartanstead was starting to look like a farm, rather than a house that had got picked up by a freak gust of strong wind and planted down in the middle of nowhere. Needless to say, they’d taken far too long about it. Planting season would be on them before they knew it, with its entrancing prospect of a future that didn’t involve porridge and leeks for every meal, but it seemed hopelessly inefficient to abandon the building works when they were nearly finished, and then go back to them several weeks later, when the pattern had faded from their minds. Unfortunately, ‘nearly finished’ proved to be an alarmingly imprecise and elastic measurement of time and quantity. Eventually, they had to face the humiliating reality of the situation and split the workforce into two; half to build and half to plant, which meant there were now two jobs that weren’t getting done instead of just the one.
Poldarn had hoped that the coolness between Eyvind and himself following the wedding games debacle would gradually thaw as they worked together and made progress, but it didn’t. There was no overt hostility; Eyvind was always polite, superficially friendly and unfailingly helpful and hard-working, but it didn’t take a mind-reader to see the resentment behind his eyes, or hear the reserve in his voice. At first Poldarn pretended nothing was wrong, in the hope that it’d all sort itself out. Next he tried the direct approach and asked Eyvind if something was the matter or if he’d done something (something else) to upset him. In return he got a chilly assurance that everything was fine, whereupon Eyvind abruptly changed the subject and started talking about wall studs, wind braces and half-lap joints. In spite of himself, Poldarn couldn’t help finding this annoying, and he told himself that if Eyvind wanted to sulk, that was his right as a free man and the heir to a fine house. His counter-sulk lasted two days, at the end of which Eyvind announced that he was going home.
‘Just for a few weeks,’ he added, looking away. Poldarn knew he was lying. ‘I really ought to see how things are going at home, before they forget what I look like and all the dogs start barking at me.’
‘Of course,’ Poldarn said. ‘I really appreciate all the time you’ve spent here and all your help, but naturally you’ve got to think about your own household.’ He sounded like a diplomat, he realised, an experienced ambassador skilfully making an invasion sound like a routine patrol and fooling nobody, because both sides knew the truth. ‘As and when you can see your way to dropping by again, we’ll be delighted to see you, of course.’
Eyvind smiled weakly. ‘I expect that by the time I get back, you’ll have finished the outbuildings and made a start on the fencing; I won’t know the place, probably.’
‘We’ll do our best,’ Poldarn said. ‘And remember, you’re always welcome here. I want you to treat this place like your own home.’
Poldarn wasn’t there when Eyvind finally took his leave; he was up at the top pasture, where they were building a small linhay for storing winter fodder. He felt Eyvind’s absence long before anybody mentioned his departure; apparently he’d said something about starting off early so as to make Nailsford by nightfall, which was why he hadn’t wanted to wait till Poldarn got back. He’d taken the horse he’d had sent up from home and the clothes he’d brought with him, but he’d left behind everything Poldarn or the Haldersness household had ever given him, from the fine brass oil lamp Halder had brought back from the Empire to the new pair of working shoes that had been made for him when his old pair fell to pieces. To Poldarn’s mind, that only made it worse; all Eyvind�
��s things were there, in their usual place, and he couldn’t get it out of his mind that his friend would walk in through the door at any moment. At the same time, he knew that it was highly unlikely that Eyvind would ever come back. This made him feel more isolated than ever before, his last link to his previous life severed. In a way, this should have been a good thing, but he found it hard to see it in that light.
Two days after Eyvind’s departure, just as they were about to tackle the dismantling and relocation of the forge, a thin feather of black smoke appeared on the side of the mountain. The first Poldarn knew about it was when he came out of the old forge building at Haldersness and found virtually the entire combined household standing in the yard, their faces turned towards the mountain as if they were taking part in a religious ceremony. Nobody said a word – he was reminded of that night in Cric when he’d been the god in the cart, facing just such a wall of silent, staring faces from the other side of the curtain.
Once he’d found out what was going on, Poldarn’s first reaction was to load the carts with everything they could cram on board, and set off for the east. If he’d suggested it, the household would almost certainly have agreed; they were all quite obviously terrified, and it was probably only their strange unspoken communion that kept them from panicking. Somehow, though, he knew that it would be the wrong thing to do; it’d be like running because your shirt was on fire, pointless because wherever you ran to, the fire would go with you. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of a better alternative.
‘Well,’ somebody said at last, ‘here we go again.’
‘Maybe it won’t be so bad this time,’ someone else suggested hopefully. ‘It’s only a little bit of smoke, less than last time round.’
That would have been helpful and comforting if it had been true, but it wasn’t, and everybody knew that. ‘It’ll be different down the valley,’ someone else put in, ‘we’ll be further away, it won’t be nearly so bad.’
