by K. J. Parker
That really didn't help, of course. Poldarn knew, because he'd been told, that when Halder and his wife Rannwey were both dead, this house would be dismantled, pulled apart log by log and plank by plank and the materials piled up so that the farm people could help themselves to free building materials for their own houses and barns, and most of the household goods (apart from a few valuable heirlooms) would be divided up the same way. By then, Poldarn would be living in a brand new house a mile away down the valley, called Ciartansford or Ciartanswood or something like that-he'd still own all the land and the stock (not 'own', of course; wrong word entirely) and the grain and straw and hay and wood and apples and cheeses and hides and leeks and pears and cider and beer and everything else the land produced would be stored in his barn and eaten off his plates on his table; but for some reason he simply couldn't grasp-nobody had told him what it was, because either you knew or you didn't-he didn't have the option of living here in this house; it was like walking on water or flying in the air, it simply couldn't be done.
'So you say,' Poldarn replied. 'And we won't go into all that again, it made my head hurt the last time we talked about it. So let's put it this way: if you were me, what do you think you'd be likely to be doing, right now?'
Eyvind frowned, as if he'd been asked a difficult question about a subject he'd never considered before. 'Well,' he said, as a particularly loud clang echoed across the yard from the direction of the forge, 'that, probably. Having a nasty accident, by the sound of it.'
'I see,' Poldarn muttered. 'That sounded like the anvil's just fallen on his foot. Would I absolutely have to?'
Eyvind shook his head. 'That wouldn't happen,' he explained. 'You see, you'd be the smith, you'd be more careful and the accident wouldn't happen. Asburn-well, he's a very nice man and he does some of the best work I've ever seen, but he's not a smith. Little wonder if he screws up from time to time.'
He could never tell whether Eyvind was joking or being serious when he started talking like this, probably both simultaneously. 'In other words,' he said, 'you're telling me I should be over there learning to bash hot iron, not sprawling around in a chair wasting your time.'
'I'm not telling you that,' Eyvind replied. 'But if you're asking me if I think it'd be a good thing for you to do, I can't see any reason why not.'
Poldarn nodded, and let his head rest against the back of the chair. It was a fine piece of work; old and beautifully carved out of dark, close-grained oak, with armrests in the shape of coiled dragons. Presumably it counted as an heirloom and he'd be allowed to keep it. Another thing you can help me with,' he said. 'That mountain. Is it meant to be doing that?'
Eyvind craned his neck round to look. 'Doing what?' he said.
'Breathing out all that steam,' Poldarn replied. 'Strikes me there's a lot more than usual.'
'Not really' Eyvind shook his head. 'Some days there's more than others, that's all. Why, has somebody been trying to scare you?'
'No,' Poldarn said, 'unless you count what you just said. What's there to be scared of?'
'Nothing.' Eyvind smiled. 'It's just that some of the old jokers around here would have you believe that once every so often-about a hundred years, on average, which means it'd have happened exactly twice since we've been here-the mountain starts sneezing fire and blowing out great big rocks and dribbling rivers of red-hot cinders-like a bad cold in the head, except with burning snot. In case you're inclined to listen to them, these are the same people who tell stories about man-eating birds and islands in the middle of the sea that turn out to be sleeping whales. I thought maybe they'd been picking on you because suddenly there's someone on this island who might actually believe them.'
'Oh, I see. So that's all right, then.'
Eyvind nodded. 'There's a whole lot of things to be afraid of in this life,' he said, 'but an exploding mountain isn't one of them.'
That was reassuring enough, but there was still an itch at the back of his mind, a sore patch where a buried memory might be trying to work its way through before bursting out in a cloud of white steam. Perhaps it was just the name of the mountain that bothered him so much; and because, out of all the kind and helpful people and solid, reliable things he'd encountered since he'd been here, the mountain was still the only one he really trusted. 'One of these days,' he said, 'will you take me up there to see the hot springs? I've heard a whole lot about them but I can't really imagine it. Sounds too good to be true, all that boiling hot water just coming up out of a hole in the ground.'
'Sure,' Eyvind replied, 'though it's a hell of a climb, and most of the way you've got to walk. It's always struck me as a hell of a long way to go just to see some hot water you can't actually use for anything.' He shrugged. 'When I want hot water, I fill the copper and put it over the fire. Takes a while to come to the boil, but it beats hay out of all that walking.'
Poldarn nodded. 'Thanks,' he said, 'I'll hold you to that.'
'Please do; wouldn't have offered if I didn't mean it. Well,' Eyvind went on, glancing up at the sky, 'you may not have any work to do, but I've got a bucketful' He jumped to his feet. 'Catch you later, probably.'
Poldarn got up as well. 'Can I come and help?' he asked.
'You don't know what the job is.'
'True. But I'm bored stiff with sitting around.'
Eyvind shrugged. 'Suit yourself,' he said. 'Your grandfather's given our house two dozen barrels of river gravel, for metalling the boggy patch at the bottom of our yard. All I've got to do is collect it and take it away.'
A slight twinge in Poldarn's left shoulder seemed to urge him to back out now, while he had the chance. 'I reckon I'm on for that,' he said. 'So, where is it now?'
Eyvind laughed. 'In the river, of course; that's where river gravel comes from.'
'Oh.'
'Thought you'd say that. First, we get a few long-handled shovels and dig it out, then we load it into barrels, which Halder's kindly lending us for the purpose, then we load the barrels onto a couple of carts, job done. It's bloody hard work and it'll take the rest of the day.' His face relaxed a little. 'Really' he said, 'you don't have to if you don't want to. Turburn and Asley'll give me a hand.'
Poldarn knew who they were. Turburn was a huge man with a bald head and with shoulders as wide as a plough yoke; Asley looked like Turburn's big brother. Either of them could pick up a three-hundredweight barrel of gravel and walk right round the farm carrying it without realising it was there. 'Honestly,' he said, 'I don't mind, I need the exercise.'
Eyvind was looking at him as if he was a troll or a merman, some strange supernatural being who happened to look a bit like a human. 'That's something I'll never get used to,' he said. 'You say one thing, and you mean the exact opposite. I don't know how the hell you can do that. I couldn't, to save my life.'
Poldarn sighed. 'Well,' he said, 'obviously I'm not very good at it, if you can read me so easily.'
Judging by Eyvind's expression, he'd touched on some kind of important topic here, one that his friend didn't want to start discussing right then. 'Don't worry about it,' Eyvind said. 'All right, if you're dead set on volunteering, you come on. At the very least, it'll teach you never to do it again.'
It turned out to be an unspeakable job, back-breaking and shoulder-wrenching; and Poldarn made matters far worse by trying to keep up, at least to begin with, until he'd frittered away his strength and stamina, leaving fifteen barrels still empty. After that, all he could do was disconnect his mind and keep his arms and legs moving. He was painfully aware that he wasn't really contributing-his shovel pecked at the river bed, and he spilled most of what he dug up before it reached the barrel. Furthermore, his boots were letting in water, his knees had given out, and the strip of rag he'd bound round his hand wasn't really doing much to protect his blisters from the shovel handle. Anyone with any sense would've admitted defeat and crawled back to the house, but it appeared that he'd misplaced his brains along with his memory. It was lucky he didn't cause an accident when it ca
me to hefting the barrels up onto the cart; he couldn't take the weight, and more than once the barrel nearly twisted out of his grip and fell on Turburn's leg. In the end, though, the job got done in spite of him, and he collapsed against the side of the cart, sitting down squarely in a pool of churned-up mud. Didn't matter, he was already filthy from head to toe. The other three weren't, of course.
'Thank you,' Eyvind said, and although all Poldarn's instincts insisted his friend was being facetious, chances were he really meant it. 'Don't know about you, but I'm ready for a beer. Coming?'
Poldarn nodded, and didn't move. It was nearly dark (they'd have finished long since without him, and the carts would've been on the road by now; as it was, they'd have to wait till morning, and the routine at Bollesknap would be out of joint for days), and the white clouds hanging over the mountain showed up as a dull, flat grey; on the opposite horizon, the sun was going down in fire. 'You go on,' he said. 'I'll catch you up. Think I'll just sit here for a bit.'
Some time later, when he'd got the use of his head back, it occurred to Poldarn that here he was again, sitting in the churned-up mud beside a river, still not really knowing who he was or what the hell he was supposed to be doing. He'd come a fair way since that first river-across a huge ocean, to an enormous island in the far west that the people back in the empire didn't even know about; couldn't come much further than that-and at least on this occasion he wasn't sharing the mud with any dead bodies. That said, he could close his eyes and it'd be the same river-that wasn't too hard to arrive at, if he supposed that the Bohec ran into the sea, the sun drew up water from the ocean and dumped it on this island as rain, it could easily be precisely the same water that he'd woken up beside-and the only change would be in his perceptions, because he hadn't known anything back then; for all he knew, he'd been digging gravel out of the Bohec when the unknown enemies attacked My perceptions, he thought. Well, for one thing, I perceive that I'm covered in mud, so I'd better have a wash before I go indoors. Taken one step at a time, any riddle you like can be broken down into little easy pieces; the trick is in putting them all back together again afterwards.
Getting his bum out of the mud was one of the hardest things Poldarn had ever had to do. All the engineers in Torcea couldn't have made it easy.
The place to wash was a little pool behind the house, where the stream collected in a natural stone basin before falling down the side of the combe on its way to join the river. It served the house as a combination bath house, laundry and mirror, performing all these functions rather better than any of the artificial facilities he'd seen in the crowded cities of the Bohec valley. The water was perishing cold, of course, but that was all right, it helped you wake up in the morning and gingered you up when you were tired at night. Like everything in this extraordinary place, even the disadvantages had their advantages.
Poldarn stood for a moment and looked at his reflection, backlit in sunset fire and blood, before smashing it to pieces with his hands; but, as usual, there was nothing to see except his face, no additional information. Maybe it was a true reflection, the only accurate mirror in the world, showing you what you really were: head, neck, shoulders and no past. He bent at the waist and dipped his hands through his face into the water. It was ice cold, and so clean it was hardly there at all.
When Poldarn reckoned he'd done about as much as could be achieved by way of damage limitation, he straightened his back, shuddered at the pain and hobbled back towards the house. Someone had said something, he seemed to remember, about beer.
Chapter Two
By the time Poldarn had finished washing and kicked off his mud-weighted boots in the back porch, they were ready to start dinner.
His instincts yelled at him to offer to help, but he knew better than that after the first time, when he'd tried his best but had managed to get under everyone's feet and had been banned on pain of certain death from ever helping again. Instead, he stood in the doorway, blissfully happy to have a door frame to lean against, and watched the curious, perfect ballet.
The first movement was the fetching-out of the tables. During the day, the tables and benches were pushed back against the panelled walls, leaving a broad empty space in the middle of the room large enough to accommodate a beached ship, provided its mast was unstepped first. Out of nowhere, four of the farmhands suddenly materialised, lifted the benches onto the tables and carried the tables into the middle of the room. Fifty years of instinctive precision had worn ruts in the baked-clay-and-cowdung floor to show where the table legs should be set down; as a result, every night they stood in exactly the same place, give or take the width of a sycamore leaf. There was no reason why the tables should be so exactly located, as far as Poldarn could judge. The ruts were just a visible display of the awesome power of force of habit, as silent and unregarded as an oak tree curled up in an acorn, or the fire sleeping under a volcano. When the tables were in place, they lifted down the benches and slid them into position in their own set of floor grooves.
(Bizarre, Poldarn thought. A man could go away for forty years and come home blind, and still be able to find his proper place at table by memory alone.)
At exactly the same moment as the benches slotted into place, Rannwey and five other women came through the doorway from the kitchen, carrying enormously long wooden trenchers, on each of which rested a colossal loaf. One loaf went to each table, perfectly centred-Poldarn knew without having to try the experiment that if he took a piece of string and measured, he'd find each crust-end of each loaf was definitively the same distance from the table's two top corners-while a gaggle of young boys followed on, each with an armful of wooden plates. Behind them came older boys and girls carrying wicker baskets clinking with cutlery-horn spoons, looted silver forks from the Empire, plain twisted iron forks from Asburn's forge, a jumble of misplaced heirlooms stolen out of other people's lives and practical home-made implements, all function and no history. By the time they'd finished setting the places, Rannwey and her party were back with earthenware beer-jugs, and as they returned to the kitchen they passed the boy-and-girl platoons on their way back with wooden and horn cups and beakers. Each item stood square on its mark like a runner at the start of a race, none of them so much as a finger's breadth out of line (as if standing a trifle to one side or another was likely to constitute an unfair advantage when the starting-flag fell). A place for everything, everything in its place. Perfection, even.
There was a heartbeat, two at most, dividing the setting down of the last mug and the entry of the first batch of farmhands, ready to take their seats. Poldarn recognised them as the long-barn crew: Eutho, Halph, Simmond and his twin brother Seyward-they worked furthest from the house, so presumably there was some kind of logic to their sitting down first. Next came Carriman and Osley from the stables, and after them Raffen, Olaph, Eyvind and his men (as long-term guests, apparently, they counted as honorary members of the trap-house crew); and so on, each outbuilding reproduced exactly as a grouping inside the house, until at the end Halder and Rannwey took their places in the centre of the middle table, and everybody pulled out their knives-alarming sight if you weren't used to it-and started carving up the long loaves.
At this point, Poldarn realised he should be sitting down, too. There was a place for him, of course, opposite Halder, an expanse of bench precisely the same width as his backside.
'There you are,' Halder said as he sat down. 'You're filthy.'
There didn't seem to be much Poldarn could say to that, apart from 'Yes'. Instead, he reached for the bread. There was one slice left, opposite his hand.
The young boys were back, this time with dishes of roast meat and round, flat bowls full of boiled leeks, baked apples, onions. A small mountain of food appeared on Poldarn's plate, filling up all the space not already taken up with bread. His cup had somehow filled itself with beer. Just as well-he was starving.
Halder had speared a small whole onion with the point of his knife, and was nibbling his way round it,
like a squirrel. It occurred to Poldarn to wonder whether he'd done the same thing yesterday and the day before; there had to be some pattern to the actual eating of the food, or the whole business wouldn't make sense. He made a mental note to observe, over the next week or so. There were important questions to be asked: did everybody start with, say, the leeks, then the onions, then the apples, then the meat and finally the bread? How many mouthfuls of food did they take in between sips of beer? Did each individual have a degree of discretion as to which side of the plate he started from, or was there an orthodoxy about that, too? The night before last he'd caught someone on the table below staring at him in wonder as he ate a slice of beef; was this because he'd eaten it before he'd finished his onions, or because he'd gone six mouthfuls without a drink? If all else failed, of course, he could even grit his teeth and ask somebody; but it hadn't reached that point yet, as far as he could tell.
Six tables of hungry people eating together can't help but produce a certain volume of noise, but nobody was talking. This was another aspect of the ritual that Poldarn found somewhat oppressive, since it seemed fairly natural to him that mealtimes were a good opportunity for relaxed conversation, in the course of which he could ask useful questions without everybody suddenly going dead quiet and staring at him. But the man on his left, Raffen, and the woman on his right (whose name escaped him for the moment) were bent over their plates like clockmakers engraving a face, giving their full attention to the job in hand; if he tried to start a conversation, the shock might make them swallow something the wrong way and choke. At the very least, they'd probably lose their places and have to start the whole meal over again.
Never mind, Poldarn reflected; it was very good roast beef, and he hadn't had to kill anyone to get it. The beer was good too, although it disconcerted him slightly when he drained his cup only to find a serious-faced child standing over him, waiting to fill it up again.
