by K. J. Parker
‘You’ve got to stop saying you’re silly,’ he said, pretending to be stern and serious. ‘No, I can see me coming home from the war without a scratch, raiders or no raiders.’
‘No wonder you win all these battles,’ she said, trying to sound bright and cheerful. ‘Though really, I suppose it’s cheating.’
‘Well, of course. You wouldn’t want me to play fair in a battle, would you? I might get hurt.’
‘True.’ She leant her head against his shoulder, winced, said ‘Ow!’ and lifted her head again. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘Is your neck still hurting?’
‘A bit. Silly old pulled muscle. It’ll be better in a day or so.’
The baby opened its eyes and started to cry. ‘It’s getting chilly,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should go inside.’
They stood up; and they must have startled the old black crow that had been perched on the top of the fountain, because it screamed angrily at them and spread its wings noisily. The woman shrieked and shrank away, squeezing the baby against her chest as the crow flapped slowly upwards, exerting itself to gain lift in the still air. For some reason he felt extremely angry, as if the crow had no right to be there, let alone startle his wife; he stooped down and picked something up off the grass, a chess piece that someone had left there. The crow was rising steadily, just about to turn, but he anticipated the move (he knew exactly what it was planning to do) and threw the chess piece so hard that he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder. It was a good throw; the crow folded up in the air, wings tight to its body, and fell dead with a thump on the cloister roof.
He turned back and looked at her. She was upset, unhappy at the sight of killing, but she did her very best not to show it; still, he could see her thoughts quite clearly. ‘Horrid thing,’ she said. ‘That was very clever of you,’ she added.
He pulled a face. ‘A friend of mine showed me how to do it,’ he said, ‘back when I was with the sword-monks. I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me. I guess I just don’t like crows very much.’
‘I hate them,’ she replied quickly. ‘Horrible gloomy creatures. And that one’s been hanging around here for days, I keep shooing it away and it keeps coming back, like it was laughing at me or something. Well done,’ she added firmly, convincing herself that he’d done a good deed.
He didn’t reply; he was thinking of something his friend had told him, about the time he’d killed a crow in a blacksmith’s forge, and never had a day’s good luck since. He tried to remember the friend’s name, but all he could recall was a nickname, Monach, which was just ‘monk’ in the Morevich dialect. Then he remembered that his friend was dead; killed by the raiders at Deymeson, possibly – most of the monks had died that day. But that was wrong, he wasn’t even sure that had happened yet. He shrugged the thought away, and reminded himself that this was just a dream, and he wasn’t really here.
The baby was howling, which made it impossible to think straight, anyway. ‘You go on in,’ he said, ‘I’ll join you in a minute or so.’ She went, walking under an old carved arch he hadn’t really taken any notice of before. He stood for a moment looking at it, until he saw what it was supposed to be: the divine Poldarn, standing up in his cart, bringing the end of the world to Torcea. Rather a gloomy subject for a carving, he thought; but of course, this house had once been a monastery, and the monks had a taste for the miserable and depressing in the decorative arts. He followed her, but as soon as he stepped under the arch he realised he wasn’t in the cloister garden any more; he was home, in his own house at Ciartanstead, alone in the bed he shared with his wife.
He tried to close his hands on the dream, bring it down as it opened its wings and flapped screeching away; but this time his aim was bad, and the dream dwindled into a speck in the distance. He sat up.
Well, he thought, at least the house is still here. Of course, even if he’d failed, it would take the fire-stream a long time to get here; days, even weeks, depending on whether it gained or lost speed coming down the slopes. Someone would have woken him if the molten rock was lapping round the front porch, or if the roof was on fire. Even in the worst possible outcome, he wasn’t likely to be burned alive in his bed. That was a comfort, he felt.
Nevertheless. The shutters were down and latched, but little blades of light were forcing their way through. It was time he was up and about, organising things, getting some work done. Assuming, of course, that there was anything for him to do.
By the time he’d dressed and got his boots on (a painful process; he’d escaped without anything he could properly describe as a burn, but his skin was horribly sensitive; like sunburn, only worse), the household was about its business, the tables were out and laid for breakfast, people were bustling in and out of the doors in pursuit of their appointed tasks. There didn’t seem to be as many of them as there should have been, and Poldarn remembered the casualties before he remembered the mistake at the breach; the missing numbers weren’t dead, just stranded somewhere in the valley on the other side of the mountain. He felt better after he’d realised that.
‘You’re up, then.’ Rannwey was in charge of catering today. Usually it was Elja’s job, but she wasn’t there, of course, and wouldn’t be back for days. ‘We let you sleep in, you were dead beat when you got home last night.’
‘Thanks,’ Poldarn muttered, wondering how they’d managed to wake up before he did; that was supposed to be impossible, wasn’t it? Well, maybe things had changed, either because half the household was away or for some other reason nobody had seen fit to tell him about. Better that way, needless to say. He was pretty sure he wasn’t really a morning person at the best of times.
‘You sit down,’ Rannwey continued briskly, not looking at him. She never looked at him; always over his head or just past his shoulder, as if he wasn’t there. ‘Porridge and leeks again,’ she added. ‘Same as usual.’
He nodded. ‘We’re going to have to do something about that,’ he said. ‘We can’t go on eating that muck for ever.’
Rannwey looked at him. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘It’s good, wholesome food. Also, it’s all we’ve got.’
‘Yes, I know. But we must be able to get something different from somewhere. Trade for it with another house, something like that.’
‘Really? Where? You don’t suppose anybody else is going to be any better off, do you? Worse off, most of ’em, I shouldn’t wonder. You want to count your blessings, before you go turning your nose up at good food.’
Well, that was him told; so he sat down and tried to look hungry. He wasn’t. Thirsty, yes, but he had no appetite for food just then. But he got porridge and leeks anyway, and did his best to eat it. When breakfast was finally over, he jumped up and headed outside.
The red glow over the mountain was as bright as ever, and there had been a light sprinkling of black ash; nothing to worry about, though, just a slight film of dust, such as you’d find in a neglected house. The good news was that the fire-stream hadn’t moved at all in their direction, and where it had been glowing red the last time he’d seen it from down in the valley, now it was just a black smudge on the mountainside. Beyond the mountain, over its shoulder, so to speak, Poldarn could see a column of black smoke rising straight up into the air – no wind to speak of, which was good, since it meant there wasn’t anything to blow ash out their way. Nobody else was looking at the mountain, he noticed. That job was over and done with, evidently, as far as they were concerned.
Well, that was good too. Everybody was extremely busy, naturally enough – with half the household absent, everyone had at least two jobs to do. Almost everyone. However busy and rushed off their feet they might be, they didn’t appear to need Poldarn’s help with anything. It was all right, they assured him, they could manage just fine, nothing needed doing that they weren’t able to handle, or that couldn’t wait. He must have far more important things to do than scrape down yards or chop firewood, and they wouldn’t dream of keeping him from them.
Af
ter spending the whole morning unsuccessfully touting for work – this must be what it was like for Boarci, he realised – Poldarn took a brush-hook and a small axe, and set off to cut back the greenery that was sprouting up all round the bridge over the river. It wasn’t really a job that needed doing, the vegetation wasn’t nearly tall or thick enough to clog the flow of the river or anything like that, but it was something that would have to be done sooner or later. He arrived only to find that Reed, Carey’s eldest boy, had got there first and nearly finished one whole side. He sighed, and trudged back to the house.
‘There you are.’ Poldarn recognised the face of the man who’d spoken to him but couldn’t put a name to it. ‘They said you were around the place somewhere – I’ve been looking all over for you. Got a minute?’
Did he have a minute? Yes, he probably did. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but who are you?’
The man looked confused, then laughed. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘they did tell me about your memory loss but I’d forgotten. My name’s Hart. From Hartsriver, over the south ridge. Actually, I don’t think I’ve seen you since you got back. You stayed over my place one summer, just before you went off.’
‘Ah,’ Poldarn said, ‘I thought I recognised you. Anyway, what can I do for you?’
Hart was looking at him oddly, but he knew what that meant; it was that bemused look they gave him when they first realised they couldn’t read his mind. He was used to that by now, of course. No need to say anything. They generally got the message soon enough.
‘Really,’ Hart said, ‘it’s more what I can do for you, though actually you’d be doing me a favour as well. Truth is, I was on my way to Eylphsness with twenty-six barrels of salt beef when the wheel came off my cart, just by your southern boundary there. I was wondering if you could run me up a new linchpin and weld my tyre.’
Poldarn frowned. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘At least, I think I should be able to. Or you can use our forge, if you prefer. I’m still rather new to blacksmith work, you see.’
Hart laughed. ‘Well, you’re better at it than me, that’s for sure. My brother’s the smith in our house. Anything you can do will be fine, I’m sure. Also,’ he went on, ‘how would you feel about a trade? You see, I owe Eylph fifteen barrels of beef, and I was going to trade him the some other stuff we need – hay and oats, mostly, and some apples if he’d got any. But like I said, what I mostly need is hay and oats. Since I’m here—’
‘I’m sure we can work something out,’ Poldarn said smoothly, trying not to show his emotions. ‘All our stock’s away at the moment,’ he went on, ‘till the mountain’s stopped playing up, you understand. So we’ve got plenty of hay in hand, and oats—’ He smiled. ‘Oats won’t be a problem. Can’t help you with apples, I’m afraid, but if you could use a few leeks—’
Hart thought for a moment. ‘So happens I could,’ he said. ‘Bloody ash wiped out half our crop. Yes, that sounds like a good deal as far as I’m concerned. And it’ll save me trying to haul my stuff all the way to Eylphsness on a dodgy axle. I could take the fifteen barrels of beef up there, and then stop off for the hay and the rest of the stuff on my way back.’
Hart was a big man, very straight-backed and with broad shoulders, his hair thinning on top but compensated for by a dense bush of grey fur under the chin and swarming up both cheeks. He had the biggest hands Poldarn could remember having seen, and a pair of very watery pale blue eyes. ‘Sounds ideal,’ Poldarn said. ‘In fact, if you like you can take one of our carts over to wherever it is you’re going, and we can have yours spruced up and properly fixed by the time you get back.’
Hart seemed to think that was an excellent idea. ‘All I need is a little two-wheeler trap,’ he said. ‘Tell you what; we can use it to run your barrels back here, along with my busted wheel; then once we’ve unloaded I’ll run the trap over to Eylph’s. How does that sound?’
It sounded just fine when compared with the alternative (mooching around the farm all day with nothing to do) so Poldarn smiled brightly and led the way to the trap-house. Disconcertingly, the ostlers had already backed the steady grey gelding into the shafts. He thought about that, and came to the conclusion that they must have seen it in Hart’s mind, and taken his agreement for granted.
The trap badly needed new springs and a new axle; every bump and dip in the ground shot them out of their seats straight up in the air. ‘It won’t be so bad coming back,’ Hart pointed out, ‘the barrels’ll weight it down a bit, damp most of this out. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the big chunks of ash still lying around.’
Two bone-rattling hours later, they reached Hart’s derelict wagon. The wheel looked to be quite some way past repair. Five spokes were cracked, the tyre was nearly worn through in two places as well as being buckled, and the hub was three parts split. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Poldarn sighed. ‘We can make you a whole new one. Horn down at the Colsceg house is a pretty fair wheelwright, and I can probably find a tyre to fit in the scrap – there’s a whole bunch of ’em, hardly worn.’
It took a long time and a lot of effort to shift the barrels, but Poldarn didn’t mind that. They were bigger than he’d expected, and a bigger barrel holds more. His bargain was looking more and more promising every minute. ‘The trap ought to take it as far as the house,’ he said, ‘but you might as well borrow the hay cart for the rest of your trip. I don’t think this old heap’s up to going that far.’
‘If you’re sure it’s no bother,’ Hart replied. ‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Poldarn replied, imagining the look on his people’s faces when they got meat with their dinners instead of porridge and leeks. ‘If a man can’t help out a neighbour, it’s a pretty poor show.’
Laden down with barrels and the dead body of Hart’s wheel, the trap was far more demure on the way home, though it creaked rather alarmingly. Poldarn took it more slowly on the way back, partly to save wear on the trap, partly because he wasn’t in any great hurry to get home and resume doing nothing. ‘It’s interesting that you recognised me straight off after all those years,’ he said. ‘Sounds like I can’t have changed much.’
Hart laughed. ‘You’ve changed plenty,’ he said. ‘Truth is, I know all the Haldersness mob by sight. I didn’t actually recognise you when I saw you, so it stood to reason you had to be Ciartan.’
‘Oh.’ Poldarn clicked his tongue. ‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘Changed in what sort of way?’
‘Well.’ Hart hesitated, and Poldarn could see he was getting ready to be tactful. ‘You know how it is, twenty-odd years is a long time. I don’t suppose I look much like I did twenty years ago.’
‘As bad as that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, in some respects you’ve improved. Not so skinny, for one thing.’ Hart nodded gravely. ‘All knees and neck and elbows,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen healthier-looking skeletons. My wife, rest her soul, she was convinced you were starving to death, she used to shovel food into you like stoking a furnace, but it never seemed to do a bit of good. Took a real shine to you, she did,’ he added innocently. ‘Mind, you always did have the knack of appealing to other men’s wives.’
Poldarn looked up sharply. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he said.
‘Just seeing how much you really do remember,’ Hart replied, with a grin. ‘No offence intended.’
‘None taken,’ Poldarn replied, drawing the trap to an abrupt halt. ‘But you’re going to explain what you just said, or we aren’t moving from this spot.’
Hart sighed. ‘Another thing about you that’s changed, you always used to be able to take a joke. I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean anything by it.’
Poldarn grunted impatiently. ‘I’m not upset,’ he said, ‘just curious. Really, I don’t mind jokes so long as I’m let in on them. What’s all this about other men’s wives?’
‘It was just the one time,’ Hart said sullenly, ‘or at least, just the one time I know about. That’s how you came to be spending
time over at my place, because you were having some kind of fling with a married woman. And before you ask,’ he went on, ‘no, I don’t know who it was. I didn’t want to know then, and I don’t want to know now. That sort of thing doesn’t happen very much in these parts – well, think about it, one thing you can’t do is keep a secret. But you could. You had this knack you’ve got now, of closing off your mind so nobody can see what’s going on inside it. They tell me you’ve pretty much stuck like it since you’ve been back, but in the old days you could turn it on and off whenever you wanted to, and I guess the woman, whoever she was, she could do the same. It’s more common than we like to think, actually.’
Poldarn nodded. ‘All right.’ he said, ‘but it seems a bit unlikely to me. I can’t have been old enough to interest married women, back then.’
‘Apparently you were,’ Hart said, looking away. ‘Your grandfather – he was the only one who knew about it, except for you and me – he said it was an old fool who’d married a young girl, which is usually a mistake, of course.’
‘Quite,’ Poldarn said coldly. ‘And somebody local, presumably.’
‘I guess so,’ Hart said. ‘Otherwise it’d have been a bit obvious, you’d have been spending too much time away from home.’
‘Well,’ Poldarn said thoughtfully, ‘that must narrow it down a bit; one of the farms within a day or so’s ride of Haldersness. Can you think of anybody who fits the bill?’
‘No,’ Hart said, a little too quickly. ‘It was a long time ago, and my place is a long way from yours. I didn’t get out this way often enough to know all the families round here. Look, all I know is this. I was over your place, on my way back from visiting my uncle’s family on the coast. I stopped off at Haldersness just to be polite, say hello, and one evening Halder called me outside and asked if I’d do him a favour, put you up for a month or two until you’d got over this thing with some other man’s wife. I didn’t like the sound of it much, because – well, put yourself in my shoes, will you? I knew Halder, sure, always got on pretty well with him, but we weren’t close friends or anything. Would you want some love-struck kid mooning about your place, with maybe a jealous husband turning up on the doorstep with an axe one morning? But Halder told me it was all right, it hadn’t gotten very far and if you could be got out of the way for a while it’d all blow over sure enough. So I agreed, and you rode back with me – it was your idea, you knew this thing was trouble waiting to happen – and as it turned out you settled in, made yourself useful, no trouble to anyone. Most of the time you spent out on the barley, scaring off the birds. Then one day you came to me and said it wasn’t working and you’d decided to go abroad for a while, completely out of harm’s way, where you couldn’t make trouble for anybody. Seemed a bit over the top to me – I mean, going to live abroad, it’s practically unheard of – but you’d set your heart on it. Halder agreed, apparently he’d thought up something you could be doing while you were over there, and so when the raiding season came on, off you went, and that was the last I saw of you till today. And that’s it,’ he concluded, ‘that’s all I know. Sorry I can’t tell you any more, but there you are.’
