Pattern

Chapter Twenty-Four

A week went by, and every day Poldarn did his arithmetic-a day and a half for them to get back to Ciartanstead, two at the most; a day for Eyvind to get his people organised; a day and a half to ride over here, two at the most-and every morning he adjusted the variables like a good actuary, allowing half a day here for a house meeting, a day there for making weapons or other such preparations, a day lost because of a stream in spate or a blocked ford. By the end of the week he was convinced that Eyvind was either coming with a fully equipped army, or he wasn't coming at all.

Eight days, and no sign of him. Nine days, and Poldarn allowed himself to tip the balance ever so slightly in favour of the second hypothesis. Ten days, and he found that he needed to exercise considerable ingenuity to stay worried. A fortnight, and he'd have been able to dismiss the whole incident from his mind-if Boarci hadn't gone missing.

He'd set off one morning, early, before anybody else had been awake, and they'd assumed that he was out killing things, as usual. At dinner time, Raffen said that Boarci had probably decided to sleep out on a trail so as to catch a particularly large and juicy buck on its way to its morning feed. At noon the next day, Asburn wondered if Boarci had fallen down somewhere on the mountain and damaged his leg. That night, nobody mentioned him at all, and conversation was generally subdued.

'It's just the sort of solution Eyvind would go for,' Poldarn told Elja, as they got ready for bed. 'Rather than pick a quarrel with all of us because of what Boarci did to that man, he's decided to make it a personal thing, himself and Boarci. It's quite clever thinking, actually, because after all, Boarci's the outsider, we wouldn't be under any real obligation to take the matter further. Eyvind knows he's got to do something, but he's giving us a way out of having to hit back.'

Elja nodded. 'Or maybe Boarci's slipped on loose shale and twisted his ankle,' she said. 'Or he's got bored with being in the one place for so long and gone off somewhere else. He's a drifter, it's what they do.'

'He wouldn't just go, without saying a word.'

'You reckon?' Elja shook her head. 'I think it's exactly what he'd do. And even if I'm wrong, there's another way of looking at it. Suppose he got to worrying about what he'd started, and he figured that the best thing he could do is clear out. That way, Eyvind can't touch him, because he can't find him; and Eyvind won't bother us, because we can say it was all Boarci's fault, nothing to do with us. Solves the problem neatly, don't you think?'

Poldarn hadn't thought of that. 'That's not like him at all,' he said. 'His idea of sorting out the mess would be going over there and planting an axe between Eyvind's eyebrows.' He paused. 'God,' he said, 'let's just pray he hasn't, or we really are in trouble.'

He slept badly that night, and was woken up out of a mystifying dream by the sound of horses in the yard outside. He jumped up and groped in the dark for the axe he'd put beside the bed the previous evening. Instead, he caught hold of Elja's toe, and got sworn at.

'Shut up,' he hissed, 'they're here. Horses, in the yard. Can't you hear?'

That woke her up. 'Maybe it's the missing horses,' she whispered. 'Maybe they found their own way home.'

Poldarn didn't answer. He felt his way along the wall with his hands, looking for the door. It took him far too long to find it; by then, the rest of the household was awake. He could hear someone unbolting the door, calling out, 'Who's there?' Not a sound tactical move, he thought.

'It's all right,' replied a familiar voice. 'It's only me.'

'Bloody hell,' Poldarn whispered under his breath. Then he found the door and pushed through it.

'Boarci,' he shouted, 'for crying out loud. Where have you been?'

Someone had managed to get a lamp lit. It was only a little one, squidged out of stream-bed clay and fitted with a rush wick, but it gave just enough light to show Boarci's face, grinning. 'Ciartanstead,' he said. 'And I've brought you all a present. Anybody going to help me get it in from the cart, or have I got to do every damn thing myself?'

'What cart?' Poldarn asked, but nobody was listening to him. A moment or so later, they were all helping him to haul a big, fat, strangely familiar barrel in through the doorway.

'Is that…?' Asburn said, in a voice quiet with wonder.

'Yes,' Boarci replied. 'And don't say I never do anything for you.'

It was one of Hart's salt-beef barrels. There was a rope tied round the top and another round the base. It hadn't been opened, though one of the staves was cracked, and the pickle was seeping through.

'Well, don't all thank me at once,' Boarci said.

Poldarn found that extreme anger made him talk softly. 'Where did you get that from?' he asked.

'From Ciartanstead,' Boarci replied. 'Where else?'

'I see.' Poldarn nodded. 'I thought for a moment you might have run into Hart and traded it for something. So you went over there and stole it.'

Raffen laughed. 'Wasn't stealing,' he said. 'It's our salt beef.' Then he caught Poldarn's eye and shut up rapidly.

'Yes,' Boarci said. 'After they had the nerve to come over here, saying we were telling lies about their fucking horses. Also, Asburn said he fancied some salt beef.'

'Fine,' Poldarn said. 'Now, what's this about a cart? Where did it come from?'

'Same place,' Boarci said. 'Actually, it's not a cart, just the old trap.'

'So as well as stealing the beef,' Poldarn purred, 'you stole the trap and the horses.'

Boarci grinned. 'I found the trap out on the mountain road,' he said. 'Wheel'd come off, they'd ditched it. In open ground. I call that salvage, not stealing.'

'Actually, he's right,' Rook put in; then he shut up, as well.

'I found it,' Boarci went on, 'and I put the wheel back on-bloody fools don't know how to fix a busted cotter-pin out of an old nail, don't deserve to have a decent trap. The rule is, if you find something that's been ditched and you fix it up, it's yours to hang on to and use till the owner squares up with you for your time and trouble. Always been that way, hasn't it?'

The rest of the household seemed to agree, but they did so in dead silence. The only person who didn't seem to feel the tension was Boarci himself.

'So you fixed the cart,' Poldarn said. 'Then you went down to the farm and stole the horses, and then you used them to steal the barrel.'

Boarci shook his head. 'Catch me being so obvious,' he replied. 'Can't go stealing horses, they'd miss 'em and get upset. Different, of course, if you just happen to find a string of horses wandering about on the hill. Same rules as the trap, you see.'

'You found the horses-' Poldarn stopped abruptly and stood with his mouth open for a heartbeat or so, until his composure returned. 'All that time those men were here, and you knew where the bloody things were.'

'Don't talk soft,' Boarci replied cheerfully. 'It was after they'd pissed off home I found the horses. I was right, you see, they had been down in the combes there. That's why I went back, to see if I could pick up the trail. One of you lot must've walked right past it, I could see a man's trail clear as anything. So I followed it up, right onto the mountain, and there the buggers were, in a little fold beside the small rill.'

Poldarn nodded. 'But you didn't bring them back,' he said. 'You decided you'd steal them instead.'

'No, actually.' Boarci perched on the corner of the table. 'I thought, I'll take them back to Ciartanstead and that'll clear everything up. So I set off, and next thing I found was the trap, like I told you. Well, that was too good to miss, so I fixed it and carried on; and when I got there-it was just before dawn, nobody about, the idle bastards-I suddenly thought, I wonder if that barrel of beef's still there; you know,' he added, looking at Poldarn, 'the one you stashed away from the rest of us, in the back shed.'

This time, everyone looked at Poldarn. He was tempted to explain, because they were giving him those kind of looks and he'd hoped he'd seen the last of them; but he decided against it.

'So I thought,' Boarci went on, 'it's a dead certainty they don't know it's there; after all, nobody knew about it except you and Hart, and me because I just happened to see you sneaking it in there, all furtive. Well, it was still there, so I got some rope and some timbers and made up a sort of rough block-and-tackle; and here we are. And the joy of it is, they don't even know they've been robbed. Now we can take the horses back, and the trap too, and say, excuse me but we think these belong to you, all innocent and virtuous, and that'll put that right; and meanwhile, we're up a barrel of beef, just when it'll do us the most good. Now, is that neat, or what?'

Poldarn didn't know what to say. Inside, he knew what he had to do. He had to tell Boarci to leave the house and never come back. But why? Boarci had done a stupid thing, put all their lives at risk, but he'd done his stupid thing in such a clever way that it seemed pretty well certain that he'd got away with it, and all for their sakes; there was the barrel, crammed with Hart's exceedingly fine salt beef, at a time when they desperately needed it. It wasn't as though Boarci had acted selfishly; he'd been putting food on the table for them ever since they'd got there, and now he'd done it again, in style, as well as finding the wretched, elusive horses and given Poldarn a wonderful opportunity to snatch back the moral upper hand. It was a daring exploit, not a bloody stupid thing to do; at least, that was how everybody else in the house was taking it. Everybody except himself.

But Poldarn knew what he ought to do; not because of the risk, but because he'd told Boarci not to pull any more stunts after his fight with Terfen, and Boarci had disobeyed him. That was unforgivable, an abomination; things like that didn't happen here, because the hands didn't disobey orders, because heads of households didn't give orders for them to break. God, Poldarn thought, I'm starting to think like Eyvind. As if that's a bad thing, in this country.

'Well,' Elja said, 'what're you going to do? We can't give it back, if that's what you're thinking. If we give it back, we've got to tell them we stole it. And anyhow,' she said, 'what were you doing hiding it away in the first place?'

'It was for you,' Poldarn said at once. 'I could see you were sick to death of porridge and leeks. And the salt beef was getting eaten so fast, I wanted to make sure there'd be some left for you by the time you got back.'

'Oh.' Elja looked at him, and shrugged. 'Well, next time I'll thank you not to make me your accomplice without asking me first. Anyway, all's well that ends well: we're a barrel of beef to the good, thanks to Boarci. Now, I suggest we let the matter drop and go back to bed.'

No, Poldarn thought, we can't do that, it's far too serious. If we just forget about it, there'll be big trouble in the end. 'All right,' he said, 'let's do that. Only, please,' he added, grabbing Boarci by the arm as he passed, 'I want you to give me your word that you won't do any more stuff like that. We got away with it this time, but we won't be so lucky again.'

'Sure,' Boarci replied with a grin. 'Whatever you say.'

A few hours later, they were up and about again, and they had to choose who was going to take the horses and the trap back to Ciartanstead. Much to Poldarn's annoyance, Boarci claimed the right, since he'd found them. 'I want to see the look on their faces,' he explained, and apparently everyone apart from Poldarn reckoned that was fair enough.

'All right,' Poldarn said. 'But in that case I'm going with you, just to make sure you don't get tempted to play any more games while you're there. Is that all right with you?'

Boarci shrugged. 'Whatever,' he replied. 'Just us two? Or do you want anybody else along?'

'Two men out for four days is bad enough,' Poldarn said. 'We can't spare any more than that, not with all the work we've got on. Do you want to drive the trap, or would you rather ride and lead the horses?'

Boarci thought for a moment. 'I'll ride,' he said. 'The springs on that trap are shot. I'd rather stay behind than get shaken to death.'

'Suit yourself,' Poldarn said. 'All right, we'll be as quick as we can. But remember, we're going to have to walk back, so expect us when you see us.'

Packing didn't take long and, once assembled, their luggage proved to be light, the food bag in particular. They left quickly, without fuss, as if they were just going as far as the top of the yard.

'Don't know about you,' Boarci said, as they laboured up the mountain, 'but I'm getting sick to the teeth of this trip. Maybe they've got the ford open again.'

'Or maybe not,' Poldarn replied. 'And in any case, this way's quicker than skirting the edge. I want to get there and get back as soon as possible, if it's all the same to you.'

Boarci laughed. 'You didn't have to come at all,' he said. 'I'm perfectly capable of delivering a few horses. Or you could've sent Raffen with me, or one of the others.'

'You know perfectly well why I'm here. For your sake as much as mine. You ask for trouble so much, one of these days somebody's going to oblige you.'

Boarci laughed.

They made good time, as it happened, reaching Ciartanstead an hour before noon the next day. It felt strange to see the place again; now it looked remarkably foreign, so that Poldarn had trouble remembering that he'd built the house with his own hands. Eyvind had made changes; not great ones, but enough to set his mark there. The cider house was gone, and where it had stood there was a handsome new long barn, built mostly of stone and roofed with turf. 'Someone's been thinking sensibly about the next time the mountain blows its top,' Boarci said. 'That Eyvind's brighter than you'd give him credit for. We could do something like that back home; there's plenty of good building stone in the lower combes.'

Poldarn agreed; the same thought had occurred to him more than once, but he hadn't dared suggest it, because it would be too different, and probably an abomination-coming from him, at least. 'That's new,' he said, pointing to a long cultivated strip that started just below the north wall of the house. 'Something else we should have thought of. I can't remember-what was there before?'

'The smithy,' Boarci replied. 'Fancy you forgetting that.'

'Of course.' Poldarn looked round, but there was no sign of anybody. 'Where have they all got to?' he said aloud. 'This time of day, there ought to be loads of people about the place.'

Boarci nodded. 'My guess is,' he said, 'they're out the other side of the house. Eyvind's building a smoke-house, or he was a few days ago when I was last here. I guess they're raising the frames or something.'

Boarci was right. The whole household-the old Bollesknap outfit, and most of the former Haldersness and Ciartanstead houses-were there, pulling on ropes and lifting timbers, with nobody giving orders or directing the work. For an outsider, it was an amazing sight to see. As soon as they'd finished the stage they were working on, they stopped and turned to stare at Poldarn and Boarci. That was unnerving, to say the least.

After what felt like a very long time, Eyvind emerged from the crowd and walked slowly towards them. He looked different too; more solid, somehow, slower and more assertive in his movements, as if every step had to be taken seriously. Poldarn noticed a new, fresh scar on his right arm, and wondered how he'd come by it.

'You,' he said, and Poldarn realised he was talking to Boarci. 'You must be out of your mind coming here.'

'Maybe,' Boarci replied, grinning. 'We've found your horses, look. And your trap, the one your men broke and left for dead. We've even put the wheel back on for you.'

But Eyvind just stood looking at him, clearly trying to choose between various courses of action. The decision must have been a difficult one, to judge by the unease in his face.

'Boarci found the trap on the mountain,' Poldarn said, with the uncomfortable feeling that nobody was listening to him. 'We brought it straight back. You can have it, we don't want anything for finding it or doing the wheel.'

Eyvind wrestled with his decision silently for a while longer, then made a small gesture with his head. At once, a dozen or so men surged forward. One of them grabbed the reins of the trap; two more stood either side of Boarci's horse, while a third took hold of its bridle. A fourth pulled Boarci's spear out of its bucket on the saddle and levelled it in a vaguely menacing manner.

'Take him to the barn and bar the door,' Eyvind said. 'We'll have to decide what to do with him later.'

'Hold on,' Poldarn said urgently. 'What the hell is all this about?'

Eyvind scowled at him. 'All right,' he said, 'maybe you don't know, at that. Anyhow, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Your man, this one, came sneaking over here a few days back and stole a barrel of salt beef. One of my men saw him at it, but he was long gone by the time he could raise the alarm. He's going to have to pay for that.'

Poldarn felt cold. His own stupid fault, he told himself, for assuming that they'd got away with it just because Eyvind hadn't come storming over the hill with weapons. 'I did know about it,' he said, 'after the event. Boarci told me.'

'Doesn't matter,' Eyvind replied sharply. 'I'm choosing to see it as your man acting off his own hook, so I won't have to take action against the rest of you. Count yourself very lucky,' he added. And I won't be so forbearing again.'

Poldarn could feel the blood pounding in his arms and hands. Any moment now, he knew, something could happen that would set off the instincts he knew lay buried deep inside him; someone would try to grab hold of him or pull him down off the cart, and he'd strike out before he had time to stop himself. He didn't know much about the man who'd lived in his body before Poldarn had inherited it, that day he'd woken up in the mud beside the Bohec; but he'd come to know a little about how he reacted to perceived danger. He was afraid of himself, far more than he was afraid of Eyvind or his people.

Distracted as Poldarn was, he didn't actually see what happened, only the aftermath. Afterwards, in his mind's eye and in recurring dreams, he figured out that it must have started when someone tried to pull Boarci down off his horse. Boarci must have pulled his axe out from inside his coat-he generally carried it concealed, even among friends-and struck out, catching the man in the forehead, just above the bridge of the nose. Immediately, the man who'd confiscated Boarci's spear tried to stab him with it, but apparently Boarci had anticipated that and dodged sideways, trying to slip off the horse and run. Unfortunately he couldn't have seen the man who stepped up on his blind side, intending to force him to surrender by prodding him with a four-tine hay-fork. The outcome was that Boarci slid onto the fork; two of the tines passed through his neck on either side of the spine, killing him instantly. By the time Poldarn realised that something was happening it was nearly all over; the man with the fork was staggering backwards, carrying Boarci's substantial weight on the fork handle, like a youngster showing off by trying to pitch a stook that was far too heavy for him. After a moment of agonised stillness he let go of the handle and Boarci flopped out of the saddle onto the ground, knocking another man off his feet and landing on top of him.

Everybody held perfectly still; it was as though they were unable to accept what they'd just seen-two men killed in a matter of seconds by their own kind. It was the same sort of bewildered horror Poldarn had noticed when the mountain had first erupted, the sort of reaction you'd expect if some malignant and terrifying supernatural creature had suddenly appeared in the middle of the farmyard, without warning.

Quite calm inside, Poldarn weighed up the options available to him. The men who were supposed to be marking him were looking the other way; it'd be easy for him, with his proven abilities in this field, to get past them, take a weapon away from one of them, and kill three or four men before anybody could be ready to oppose him; there was a good chance, better than evens, that he'd be able to get to Eyvind, and he knew he was Eyvind's match with weapons any day of the week. He could kill him, or use him as a hostage, to be sure of getting clear. Or he could go the other way, make for the man with the hay-fork and kill him-that'd be easier, there were fewer people in the way and they were all in a state of profound shock, no real opposition at all. After he'd killed the man with the fork he could take a hostage-really, any of them would do just as well as Eyvind, nobody would be expendable-and get out just as easily, if not more so. Either way, he'd need a horse (but he could demand that, with a hostage, and be sure of getting what he asked for) and a good head start if he wanted to reach Poldarn's Forge in time to organise some vestige of a defence. That would be difficult but-given how well he'd come to know the road across the mountain-by no means impossible. As to whether he should try and fight his pursuers at the Forge or tell his people to get up the mountain and hide there (no chance of them outrunning Eyvind's people, with only one horse), Poldarn wasn't able to reach a quick decision. It was all reasonable enough up to that point, but thereafter it could turn out very badly.

On the other hand, he didn't have to kill anybody at all. It was good to have that option to fall back on, it made a pleasant change. He realised that he didn't really want to kill anyone, or at least not now, under such adverse conditions. If he didn't (leaving aside issues of retribution for the time being) he couldn't guarantee his own temporary safety with a hostage, but he wouldn't be setting up a far more dangerous situation further down the line. He asked himself: Is it likely that if I sit still and do nothing, they'll kill me or do me any harm? On balance he concluded no, the crowd wasn't in that sort of mood; if anything, they were less likely to harm him now than they had been before Boarci was killed. On the other hand, he couldn't just slip away-the men marking him were too close and too well placed for him to be able to get by them without violence; and his own condition was such that if he had to fight to get past them, he couldn't be sure of being able to use only limited, non-lethal force.

So, what should he be looking to do? All things considered, the best odds lay with staying exactly where he was and waiting to see what they'd do next. His first priority, after all, was getting out of there and home in one piece. Killing the pitchfork man would be pointless, since the fellow was just some unfortunate clown who'd happened to get in the way. Killing Eyvind was definitely something Poldarn would like to do at some stage, but not enough to warrant taking unnecessary risks with his own life or the lives of the eleven people at Poldarn's Forge. Finally, on basic and fundamental principles, he wasn't willing to commit himself to a course of action without being at least fairly sure that he could predict what Eyvind was likely to do next; quite simply, he didn't have the faintest idea what the accepted protocol was in a case like this, assuming that there was one. To embark on any course, especially a drastic and irrevocable one, in the absence of such elementary data would be thoroughly irresponsible. Furthermore, there was a chance, albeit a remote one, that Eyvind might misjudge his response and commit a tactical error that could be exploited at some point in the future. With everything except instinctive anger pointing towards a policy of cautious observation, Poldarn resolved to stay where he was and do nothing.

No sooner had he arrived at this conclusion than Eyvind turned round and faced him. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I didn't mean for that to happen.'

Poldarn took a deep breath before answering. 'No,' he said, 'I don't suppose you did.'

They'd pulled Boarci's body clear of the man he'd knocked down. Poldarn stood up on the box of the trap, and they made way for him. He went over and looked down at Boarci's face, with its wide-open eyes and slightly parted lips. One more stunt like this, he thought, but it was only fair to say that he didn't think Boarci had intended it to turn out like this. He felt like a small boy whose friend has thrown a stone and broken a slat in the fence, and then run off and left him to face the anger of the grown-ups.

'The other man,' he said. 'I suppose he's dead, too.'

Someone nodded, and Poldarn threaded his way through the crowd to look at him. He recognised the face, with its incongruous bloody mark gouged out of the forehead: it was Scild, one of the Haldersness field hands who'd chosen to stay home; formerly one of his own, until he'd chosen to forfeit the obligation.

When he'd seen enough he turned round to face Eyvind. 'Right,' he said. 'What happens now? I'm afraid I don't know the right procedure.'

Eyvind looked like he wasn't too sure of it himself, but he wasn't going to admit anything of the kind in front of his household. 'There's got to be some sort of settlement, obviously,' he said. 'Normally, I think the thing to do would be to set off your man against mine-we can forget about the theft, obviously, since that was Boarci's business, not something between our houses.' He paused there, clearly hoping Poldarn would agree; but Poldarn kept quiet and said nothing. 'On the other hand,' Eyvind went on, 'it's arguable that my man provoked the whole thing by trying to lay hands on your man; your man overreacted, I think we can agree on that, but I'm prepared to accept the extra blame, in the circumstances.'

Poldarn stayed quiet, and dipped his head slightly to mark his agreement. Eyvind swallowed, and went on: 'In which case, I'd be agreeable to waiving any claim for Scild and offering a full settlement on Boarci-which is generous, I'd say, since he was an offcomer, not a regular household man-with all other issues stayed. Does that sound reasonable to you?'

'I think so,' Poldarn said. 'As I told you, I'm not familiar with the way these things are handled, so I'm having to rely on you to do what's right. But I think I can take your word for it.'

'Good.' Eyvind didn't seem overjoyed at the rather grudging praise; chances were that he felt he'd been more than generous in the circumstances, and was annoyed that Poldarn hadn't acknowledged the fact. 'In that case, how would you like to fix the amount of the settlement? We can do it here and now, or if you prefer we can find someone to arbitrate. I don't mind.'

'Let's get it over and done with,' Poldarn replied. 'What did you have in mind?'

Eyvind frowned, thinking on his feet. 'What about this?' he said. 'First, you can have the trap and the horses. On top of that, I'd suggest five barrels of salt beef and five barrels of oats, say a dozen blankets, and twenty yards of the ordinary wool cloth. And for good measure I'll throw in the dead man's personal things, all the stuff that was confiscated when we moved in here. Will that do, do you think?'

Poldarn made a show of giving it careful thought, as though he was doing long division in his head. 'I won't argue with that,' he said. 'I don't know what the going rate is, obviously, but I'm sure you aren't going to try and cheat me or anything like that. Mostly I'd like to get things settled as quickly and quietly as possible, so we can put all this behind us. I'd just like to remind you that I didn't start this quarrel, not intentionally at any rate, and I really don't want to see it continue, let alone get worse. Losing a man means a great deal more to our house than to yours, obviously; we're so much smaller than you are, and Boarci was our hunter-he was pretty much feeding us single-handedly, until the first crops came in. On that basis, the beef and the oats should tide us over, if we're careful, so yes, it's a fair deal. I'll be glad to accept it, on the understanding that it puts everything square between us.'

'That's exactly what I want too,' Eyvind said, obviously relieved. 'It's very bad that something like this had to happen, but it's good that we're able to deal with it in a reasonable manner, like sensible people.'

It took a fair amount of ingenuity and patience to get the beef barrels loaded onto the trap, and even more to rig up frames so that the horses could carry the oats and the rest of the stuff. But they managed it somehow, and found a way to fasten the horses' leading rein to the bed of the trap. 'Take it slowly and you should be all right,' the man who'd done the fixing told him. 'And they're good steady horses, shouldn't give you any trouble on the way back.'

The last horse in the string carried Boarci's body, slung over the saddle like a carpet or other saleable merchandise. As for his few possessions, Poldarn stowed them in between the barrels in the trap; all except Boarci's axe, the rather scruffy one Poldarn had made for him before they left Ciartanstead; Poldarn tucked it through his belt and drew his coat round it to conceal it.

His journey home was quick and uneventful, and he arrived at Poldarn's Forge in mid-afternoon. They were surprised to see him back so soon. They were even more surprised to see the horses and the trap. They asked where Boarci was.

'He's dead,' Poldarn replied, easing himself off the trap box. He was painfully stiff after several days driving a trap with defective suspension, and the last thing he wanted to do was talk to anybody or explain anything. Clearly, though, he had no choice. 'He was killed by one of Eyvind's people.' (He didn't say who, or that the killer had been a Haldersness man. Best to keep it simple, for now.)

The household received the news in stunned silence, pretty much as Poldarn had expected. By now it was pretty apparent that killings-homicide, murder, whatever you chose to call it-simply didn't happen here. It was as if he'd told them that the sky had opened and Boarci had been lifted up into the courts of heaven on the back of a snow-white eagle. 'It was partly his fault,' he went on. 'Apparently, someone saw him taking that barrel; they started to grab hold of him, he lashed out with his axe and stoved somebody's head in; then he tried to get away and fell on a hay-fork somebody happened to be holding. It was more of an accident, really.'

Now at least they believed him, but they still couldn't understand. 'Then what happened?' Elja asked.

Poldarn sighed, and sat down on the porch. 'Oh, Eyvind offered compensation for him, and they gave us some barrels of beef and oats, plus the horses and the trap. Then I came home.'

Raffen had noticed the corpse-sized lump under a blanket, slung over the back of one of the horses. He didn't say anything, but pretty soon they were all staring at it.

'Anyway,' Poldarn went on, 'that's about the size of it. There's some cloth, too, and some blankets-useful stuff. Oh, and his things, everything they took from him when they moved in. Would someone else mind doing the unloading? I'm dead on my feet.'

Automatically, Raffen and Asburn slipped away and set to work. The rest of the household stayed exactly where they were, silent and motionless, like tools on a rack. Poldarn decided he couldn't be doing with any more of that, so he went inside and lay down on the bed. Very soon he was fast asleep.

As he slept, he found himself once again on the box of the trap; except that it was now a cart, and the back was full of dead crows. He couldn't imagine what he could be doing (that in itself had a familiar feel to it) carting a load of carrion down what appeared to be a long, straight, dusty road across a dry moor; but he knew that, just beyond the ridge to his left, the moor fell away steeply into the Bohec valley, and that his job was to deliver his cargo to the Falx house in Mael Bohec. That made sense; after all, he was just a courier, it wasn't his business to know what he was carrying or why.

The crows were talking behind his back, which was annoying, but he couldn't be bothered to make anything of it.

'What about you?' one of them said. 'You're new, aren't you?'

'Just got in,' another one replied. The voice was, of course, familiar.

'What happened to you, then?' asked a third voice.

'My own silly fault,' said the voice he recognised. 'Tried to start a fight where I was surrounded. Got jabbed in the neck with a fork, would you believe. Bloody ridiculous way to die, but there it is.'

Several of the crows cackled, but the first voice said gravely: 'I never heard where there was a good way. Doesn't matter, anyhow. Here we all are, and there's an end to it.'

'True enough,' the familiar voice said. 'So, how about you?'

'Oh, I just keeled over and turned up my toes,' the first voice said; and it too was familiar, now that he thought about it. 'Died of a broken heart, you could say, though really it was just overdoing it. That and the worry, with the mountain blowing up and all. Tried to do more than was good for me at my age.'

'Accident, then?' asked the second voice.

'Misadventure,' the first voice replied, 'same as you. Same as the rest of us, if the truth be told. Like, he didn't kill any of us because he hated us, or anything like that. No, we just happened to get in the way, or we were soldiers in a battle trying to do our job, and met him trying to do his, or we were living in a city that had to be burned down and all the people killed so there'd be no witnesses. He never kills anybody for a bad reason, such as because he hates them. Mostly he doesn't even want to hurt them, particularly. We all just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

'It's usually to do with what side you're on,' put in another voice. 'It's like we're on one side, wanting to eat the corn or the peas or whatever, and he's on the other side, wanting to keep 'em safe. Or else we're defending our homes or our friends or our leaders, whatever, and he's on the attacking side. Nothing personal in it, it's just the way things are.'

'Sounds fair enough to me,' commented the second voice. 'Sure are a lot of us, though.'

'I think he leads an unhappy life,' said a fourth voice. 'At least, he's always getting into trouble and danger and having to cut his way out again. I kind of feel sorry for him, actually.'

Poldarn felt something brush against his shoulder, and saw that there was someone with him on the box. It was the man he'd killed shortly after he first woke up beside the river, the original god in the cart. 'Don't mind them,' he said. 'They just chatter on. Don't mean anything by it.'

Poldarn frowned. 'But they're making it sound like I killed them all,' he said. 'And that's not right. Boarci got killed by one of Eyvind's people. And Halder's heart stopped when I wasn't even there.'

The god laughed. 'Oh, you killed them all right,' he said. 'But it doesn't matter. You didn't mean anything by it, same as they don't. I mean, if we held a grudge, would I be sitting here talking to you like this?'

'I suppose not,' Poldarn conceded. 'In your case it was simple self-defence.'

'Sure.' The god grinned sheepishly. 'I was smashed out of my head, and I went for you with a halberd or something. Served me right, I never did well by drinking. Truth is, it's never your fault. Either it's just bad luck, happening to get in the way when there's something you need to do, or else it's our own damn stupid fault, like pitching in and wrecking the peas, or it's self-defence, or something like that. You don't want to go worrying about it, or you'd never sleep at night.' He laughed. 'It's all a game, isn't it? Chances are you don't even remember most of us. Some of us you never even knew about, where we died a long way away because of something you did someplace else. Isn't that right?' he called out over his shoulder.

The dead crows in the back mumbled their agreement. 'Like he said,' one of them replied, 'there's nothing for you to feel guilty about. You were only ever doing what you had to do.'

That sounded eminently reasonable, but deep down he knew it wasn't true. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'but these things tend to happen to me a lot, and there's very little time, always.'

'It's fine, really,' the god replied. 'I know for a fact that I'd have done the same in your shoes. Anyhow, who's to say it won't be completely different next time around?' He leaned across the box, confidentially. 'Don't tell anybody I told you this, but I was you once. Poldarn, I mean; I was the god who brought the world to an end, driving round in my little cart, like some travelling hawker selling buttons. Hell of a long time ago, of course, the cities that burned down then are just grassy mounds now; you'd have to get a spade and dig real deep to find 'em. Take that island you were raised on, for instance. A thousand years ago, maybe two or five thousand, a squirrel could've run across the rooftops from one coast to the other; but now it's just grass and woodland, and all the houses are buried under the ash-you'd never find them again. And in another thousand, five thousand years, there'll be houses and workshops and temples and God only knows what where your grandfather grew his onions, all sitting round the foot of the mountain ready for when Poldarn blows his top and smears a whole new country over the top of 'em. Makes no mind. And that's why nothing matters, of course, because all they can ever do is just kill the scouts. You could fill a whole valley with stones and kill a crow with every stone, and still all you'd be doing is killing scouts.'

Poldarn frowned. 'I'm not sure I understand,' he said. 'How could you have been me?'

This time the god laughed out loud. 'I forgot,' he said. 'How dumb can you get, huh? Of course, you don't know. All right, go figure. Poldarn can read Poldarn's thoughts, because Poldarn is the flock, not just a scout. Poldarn sends out scouts, and the scouts get dead as often as not, but Poldarn never dies. That's what being a god's all about, see. Every time the world ends, Poldarn buries it in burning melted rock, and it all starts over again, each time the old man dies and the youngster builds his house. Houses, shops, temples, palaces, doesn't signify; they'll all die and get buried under the ash. But that's how it's meant to be-hell, you know that as well as I do. The single dots aren't worth shit, only the pattern. Which is why we have memory, in the gaps between the fires.'

Poldarn thought for a moment. 'Often when I go to sleep,' he said, 'I have these dreams, where I'm somebody else. And while I'm dreaming I'm this other person and me at the same time. Can you tell me anything about that?'

'Simple,' the god replied. 'You're an islander, you can see inside other people's minds-which is putting it the wrong way round, of course, but let's get your question answered first, and then we can put this shit straight. You can see inside these people's heads, so you know what they were thinking; it's all bits of memory in the scrap, and you pull out what you need whenever you make something. But that's starting at the end, like I said. The reason you know what the others are thinking, it's because you're remembering, way back, from the time round when you were them. Like, this time round you're Ciartan, right? Well, the time before the time before last, let's say you were Colsceg, or Tazencius, or Feron Amathy; and this time you're Ciartan, but you remember. That's how it's done; no magic, no big deal. Round and round and round again; none of it exists, the people and the buildings and the places, the same way a hummingbird's got no wings.'

'You've lost me,' Poldarn confessed.

The god grinned. 'You ever seen a hummingbird hover? 'Course you have. Now, have you ever seen its wings? No way, they move too fast for your eye to follow; all you see is the pattern, little wings pumping up and down, making a blur where you know the wings should be. You don't see any damn thing, just the pattern everything moves in as it spins round and round; like you've never seen the spokes of a cartwheel spinning, just the blur. And that's all you ever see, the blur, not the thing or the person.'

Poldarn nodded slowly. 'I think I understand,' he said. 'Like looking at a big flock of birds a long way off; you don't see the individuals, just the flock.'

The god stamped his foot cheerfully. 'Now you're getting it,' he said. A god lives for ever, right, so time goes real slow past him; your life and mine, we're moving too fast, so all he sees is the blur. But of course, he's not watching with his eyes, he's remembering with his mind-thousands of Ciartans and Cronans, millions of Raffens and Eyvinds, a blur where they go round. The pattern is memory. Everything's memory, locked right down into the grain of the steel; so, when you bend it, it jumps right back to exactly where it was before. Otherwise, it'd be a fucking shambles; every time a kid was born he'd be like a damn animal, having to figure every single thing out for himself, instead of just learning it. You do see that, don't you?'

Poldarn rubbed his chin thoughtfully. 'I guess so,' he said. 'But I woke up in the mud with no memory at all.'

The god smiled and shook his head. 'You remembered it all,' he replied. 'You just didn't know what it meant. But you remembered. It was all in the song.'

What song? Poldarn wondered; and then it came back to himOld crow sitting in a tall, thin tree('That's right,' said the god. 'That's what I've been trying to tell you, all this time.') Old crow sitting in a tall, thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall, thin tree-('Which is the same words,' the god pointed out, 'over and over.') -And along comes the Dodger, and he says'That's me,' said the god. 'And you, of course, and every other damn fool in the flock. Couldn't have made it much plainer if I'd drawn diagrams.'

Poldarn sighed. 'Then why can't I see into their minds, or they see into mine? That really bothers me, sometimes.'

'Because they're too fast, and you're too slow. You can't interpret the blur, and they don't recognise just the one spoke, not moving. Of course, it'll all be different at the end, you'll see. Well,' the gad added, 'here we are. You jump out, and you can give me a hand unloading this lot.'

They'd stopped in a place Poldarn recognised, except that he remembered it as a battlefield. It was only after they'd dragged out all the dead bodies and put them where they had to go that he was able to get the two pictures to fit, one superimposed exactly on the other He woke up with a start, and as he opened his eyes he heard himself say, 'So that's fine, all I've got to do is not forget-' And then the dream was gone, not leaving so much as the shape of a single black feather behind.