Pattern

by K. J. Parker

  Poldarn was silent for a while. ‘Well,’ he said eventually, with an effort, ‘thanks for telling me, anyway. You can see why I’m a bit concerned about this. For a start, what’s going to happen if I run into this woman at some point? It could get very difficult.’

  ‘No danger of that,’ Hart replied. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Oh. You didn’t mention anything about that. I thought you’d told me everything.’

  ‘I forgot,’ Hart said lamely. ‘So happens I ran into Halder a few years later. I asked after you, how were you getting on, when were you coming back, that sort of thing. He said he didn’t know, he’d more or less lost touch; but it’d be all right for you to come back at that point, because the woman had died. Like I said, I really didn’t want to know the details, so I left it at that and changed the subject quick. And that really is everything, I promise you.’

  ‘Fine,’ Poldarn said abruptly. ‘And you’re positive that you and Halder were the only other people who knew?’

  ‘That’s what he told me. Come to think of it, he reckoned he only found out because you’d told him – told him out loud, he didn’t see it in your mind or anything like that. And if it’d been common knowledge at any point, I’m pretty sure I’d have heard about it. You can’t keep stuff like that quiet for very long in these parts, once word gets out.’

  Poldarn drew a long sigh. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said. ‘It’s just worrying, that’s all. You can imagine, I’m sure – not knowing what you’ve done in the past, what secrets you might have been hiding, all that. At times, I feel like there’s this other person who looks like me who’s following me around, just waiting to cut my throat as soon as he figures I’m not looking. I’m getting a bit sick of him, to tell you the truth. I only came here to get away from him, but it seems like he’s followed me. I wish to God he’d pack up and go away.’

  Hart smiled. ‘You should count yourself lucky,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been what you’d call a tearaway, but there’s still nights when I wake up sweating, thinking about some of the really stupid things I’ve done over the years. I guess everybody does that. Except you, of course, because you’ve forgotten it all. That’s a pretty good trick, if you ask me. I wouldn’t complain about it if I were you.’

  That seemed to be all that was fit to be said about the subject, and neither of them mentioned it again as they creaked back to Ciartanstead, unloaded the trap and stowed the rest of the freight in the hay cart. Once Hart was safely on his way, Poldarn took the damaged wheel down to the old house for Horn the wheelwright to look at. As he’d expected, the prognosis wasn’t good; it’d be far easier and quicker to scrap it, salvage the unbroken spokes and make a new wheel. Fortuitously, both Horn and Asburn weren’t too busy, and they reckoned they could get the job done before Hart came back; especially, they hinted, if they had prime salt beef to sustain them instead of the same old porridge and mouldy leeks, which didn’t comprise the sort of diet a man needed if he was expected to exert himself over a rush job. Poldarn could see the sense in that; in fact, he’d anticipated it, because one of Hart’s barrels had travelled down to the old house along with the wheel.

  Back at Ciartanstead, the advent of the beef barrels was greeted with the closest thing to enthusiasm that Poldarn could remember having seen since he’d first landed on the island. People actually smiled at him, and even Rannwey made a point of saying that he’d made a good bargain. In fact, he got the impression that the beef coup had done more to raise him in the estimation of his household than taming the volcano. He could understand why they should see it that way; after all, they’d been making do with porridge and leeks for a very long time, and at least his latest exploit hadn’t cost any lives. That was one trend he’d be delighted to see continued.

  Needless to say, after the first gluttonous beef feast, the barrels were spirited away to a secret hiding place known only to Rannwey and her most trusted lieutenants, from which their contents emerged slowly and in very small quantities. But that was all to the good, Poldarn decided, because he wanted some to be left for when Elja got home; she was an enthusiastic carnivore, and the porridge-and-leek regime had affected her more than most. Indeed, that might have been at the back of his mind when he squirrelled away the extra barrel he’d extorted out of Hart as payment for the use of the hay cart.

  Poldarn tried to figure out how long it would be before Elja could be expected back; but the days passed, refuting his calculations, and he had to make a conscious effort not to worry. Left to himself, he’d have taken a spare horse and gone out to meet her, but he got the impression that that wouldn’t be proper. There weren’t enough horses or places in carts for the whole party, and giving someone special treatment simply because she happened to be someone’s wife was sure to be against the rules. To take his mind off her absence, he decided to throw himself heart and soul into his work; then, when he couldn’t find any to do, he went back to aimless mooching and threw himself heart and soul into that, instead. Ten days dragged by; he did nothing all day and slept badly at night, chafing at his own company like an old married couple who discover, in the leisured evening of their lives, that they never really liked each other very much.

  On the eleventh night, after lying on his back staring at the still unrectified mistake in the rafters (it was too dark to see it, but he knew it was there) he drifted into sleep and found himself in command of a wing of cavalry, drawing up outside a lonely farmhouse in the first dull glow of morning. He slid from the saddle, handed his reins to a trooper, and walked quickly up to the main door. There he paused, waiting for his men to take their pre-arranged positions: two to each shuttered window, two on the back door, six scrambling up onto the low roof, in case anybody tried to break out through the thatch and escape that way. He was impressed at his own thoroughness, though he had an uneasy feeling that it was born of a series of embarrassing failures resulting from carelessness and inattention to detail. When everyone was in position and ready – they’d been quick about it, knowing what they had to do without needing to be told – he stepped back from the door and gave it the hardest kick he could manage. The grey oak panels flexed but didn’t give way. He was ready for that – the two men standing next to him stepped up and laid into the door with long-handled felling axes that smashed and splintered as much as they cut. He heard noises inside, shouting and scuffling, the sound of benches being dragged across a planked floor. His axemen quickened their strokes, striking alternately like well-trained hammermen in a smithy, concentrating on the middle panels where the bar ran across on the inside. A few heartbeats later they’d cleared away the panels and their axe blades were chewing on the bar itself; it was straight-grained seasoned oak, but they went about the job in the approved fashion, each cut slanting in diagonally opposite its predecessor and clearing out its chips. In no time at all the bar cracked downwards, clenting on the axes and then falling away. ‘Right,’ he said, and kicked the lower panels of the door again. This time it budged, only to come up against a blockage; benches, probably, or tables, thrust against it on the inside. He was ready for that, too. His reserve, half a dozen men plus the axemen and himself, slammed their shoulders against the side of the door and pushed, forcing the blockage back until the crack between door and frame was just wide enough for a man to wriggle through. He stepped back, and one of the axemen went ahead. He vanished into the house, but immediately they heard a grunt, and the sound of a dead weight slumping against the door. The rest of them shoved again, until the door flew open and they stumbled into the house. He saw a spearhead darting out at him like a snake’s tongue; he didn’t have time to react, but fortunately as he fell forward the spear passed over his bent neck. Now he could see the man behind it, just enough of him to constitute a target for a backhanded rising cut with the backsabre. His stroke connected with the spearman’s wrist and sliced deep into the bone; he gave the blade a sharp twist to free it, and followed up with the point into the spearman’s ribs. There too he encountered bon
e, but the smooth curve of the sword-point rode over it and into a gap. The dead man’s own weight as he slumped pulled him off the swords blade.

  By now they were inside. The only light was the sullen red glow of the embers in the long hearth, but it was enough to show him the situation. Four sleepy-looking men were backing away from him, hiding behind halberds and bardisches. One look at them told him they weren’t going to fight. Behind them was a short, white-haired man in a long nightshirt; it was patched at the knees, he noticed, and the collar and cuffs were frayed. The man was holding a sword with an etched blade and was standing in front of a piece of gilded furniture, but almost immediately he dropped the weapon on the floor, flinging it away as if it was still hot from the forge.

  ‘Let them go,’ the man said. It took him a moment to realise the man was talking about the four halberdiers. ‘They’re just conscripts, they haven’t done anything.’

  He nodded, and the four guards knelt down, carefully laying their weapons on the floor. He snapped his fingers, and his men went forward and pushed them down flat on the floor. When it was obvious they weren’t capable of posing a threat, he walked past them and grabbed the old man by the hair on the back of his neck, jerking him off balance so that he slipped and fell onto his hands and knees.

  ‘Get up,’ he said.

  The man obeyed, moving stiffly and painfully – arthritis, he guessed, bad enough to make him shake a little. Quite suddenly the man’s name floated up from the bottom of his memory. He was called General Allectus.

  Not that that signified; he wasn’t going to start a conversation, he was there to arrest the traitor and bring him back to General Cronan’s camp, near the village of Cric. He tightened his grip on the old man’s hair and bundled him out roughly.

  ‘Do you want us to set fire to the house?’ one of his men asked.

  He shook his head. ‘We haven’t got time to waste on that,’ he said. ‘Besides, there’s no need. I don’t know whose house this is, but I don’t think he’s ever done me any harm.’

  The soldier shrugged. ‘What about these?’ he asked, meaning the four halberdiers.

  ‘Them?’ He frowned. ‘They’re rebels. Kill them.’

  He didn’t wait to see if his order was obeyed. A soldier helped him sling General Allectus over the back of the spare horse; he took the leading rein himself, looping it twice around his wrist to make sure. All in all, he thought, a pretty neat operation: the old bastard ought to be grateful, since I’m clearing up his mess. He won’t be, but who gives a damn?

  Apparently the soldiers had decided to burn the house down after all. He charitably assumed that they had a good reason for disobeying a direct order; there wasn’t time to ask them what it was. With the red glow of dawn and burning thatch behind him, he spurred his horse into a canter.

  He opened his eyes.

  It was still dark, though there were traces of red seeping in past the shutters. Someone was standing over him; he shifted, intending to sit up, but something pricked his throat. He stayed exactly where he was, his weight uncomfortably on his wrists.

  ‘He’s in here,’ the man called out. He could just make out a black line running up from under his chin into the man’s hands. It was almost certainly a spear. It would make better sense, he thought, if he was still dreaming, but he was fairly sure he wasn’t.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  The man didn’t answer; in fact, he didn’t seem to have heard. So Poldarn stayed where he was. By this point he was certain he was awake, which made the situation he found himself in rather alarming.

  The door opened, letting in a bit more light – enough, at any rate, to allow him to recognise the man who came in and stood next to the stranger with the spear. ‘Eyvind?’ Poldarn said. ‘What’s happening?’

  It was Eyvind, no question about that. ‘Hello, Ciartan,’ he said. ‘Don’t move, or Elbran here’ll kill you. I’d rather that didn’t happen, but it wouldn’t break my heart.’

  ‘Please,’ Poldarn said, ‘for pity’s sake, tell me what this is all about. I don’t understand.’

  Eyvind smiled, rather bleakly. ‘It’s quite simple,’ he said. ‘I’m taking your house.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Poldarn repeated.

  Eyvind looked down at him, the smile fading. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose you do. All right,’ he told the man with the spear, ‘that’ll do. Give me that, I’ll deal with him.’

  The stranger – Eyvind had mentioned his name but Poldarn hadn’t taken note of it – handed over the spear and left the room. Eyvind lifted the point away from Poldarn’s face, just enough to let him stand up but no more. He looked as though he’d be delighted to have a pretext for using the weapon.

  ‘Stand up,’ Eyvind told him. ‘I will kill you if I have to, so don’t make trouble.’

  As soon as Poldarn was on his feet, Eyvind stepped behind him, and Poldarn felt the spear-point digging into the small of his back. ‘You go on through,’ Eyvind said, ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

  The main hall was even more crowded than usual. Poldarn saw his people, the household, lined up against the west wall; they looked confused and scared, which was very unusual. He didn’t recognise any of the other men, but they were all holding weapons of various sorts – spears, backsabres or axes. He guessed they must be Eyvind’s people.

  Eyvind made Poldarn sit down on a stool in the middle of the floor, which had apparently been put there for the purpose, to give the impression of a trial of some sort – or at least the conclusion of a trial, after the verdict had been brought in.

  ‘Now, then,’ Eyvind said, leaning on his spear, ‘I don’t suppose you know what I’m doing here. Do you?’

  ‘No,’ Poldarn said.

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you.’ Eyvind took a deep breath, and it occurred to Poldarn that he was having trouble figuring out how to say whatever it was that he had in mind. He could sympathise with that; quite plainly, his friend was having a hard time, for whatever reason. Poldarn could feel his nervousness, he could discern traces of it in the way he spoke and moved, a slight and uncharacteristic degree of awkwardness and physical ineptness that suggested Eyvind was under rather more stress than he was used to. Not quite enough, Poldarn decided, to be useful tactically; enough to slow Eyvind down, so that it ought to be possible to get past him, get the spear away from him, but not enough to guarantee a certainty if Poldarn were to try and take him hostage, as a way of getting past the men with weapons and out of the house. Poldarn made a quick, rough estimate of the odds and decided against anything of the sort, at least until he had more to go on as far as the cause of all this was concerned. For all he knew it could be a ludicrous misunderstanding, something that could be set right with a few calm words. Escalating it into bloodshed was uncalled for at this stage.

  ‘About a fortnight ago,’ Eyvind said quietly, ‘you took it upon yourself to go up the mountain and divert the stream – damn it, I don’t know what to call it, all the burning shit that’s coming out of the side. I’ve heard how you did it. I’m impressed, it was no end clever, and it worked just fine. You must be very proud.’

  ‘Not really,’ Poldarn said. ‘Some people got killed. I don’t think it was worth it, for that.’

  Eyvind breathed in sharply through his nose, as if Poldarn’s words had taken him by surprise. ‘Interesting you should say that,’ he said, ‘because I’d assumed you were just showing off. You’re always trying to do that.’

  ‘I don’t mean to,’ Poldarn murmured.

  ‘Maybe.’ Eyvind scowled. He was having problems with something. ‘I guess you do a lot of things you never meant to do. Is that right?’

  Poldarn shrugged. ‘I’ve got no idea,’ he said. ‘You know why.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Eyvind nodded briskly. ‘You lost your memory, you haven’t got a clue who you are or what you’ve done, so we’ve all got to make allowances and forgive you. Well, that’s fine, except t
hat this time it isn’t going to work, because you should have thought, you should have considered—’ He paused, painfully aware that he wasn’t expressing himself well. ‘I’ll tell you what you did, Ciartan. You diverted the stream. You turned it away from where it was going, and you sent it down the other side of the mountain. Is that right? I mean, I don’t want to make any false accusations. You do agree with what I’ve said?’

  ‘Of course. That’s what happened.’

  ‘Good, at least we haven’t got to argue over the truth. So; did it occur to you to wonder where you were sending all that burning stuff? Did you even look to see where it was going to go?’

  Poldarn frowned. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I did. But it was just an empty valley. There was a farm, but a long way away, and the lie of the ground meant the fire-stream wouldn’t go anywhere near it. There was a small, deep combe; I figured it’d flow into that, and no harm done. It wasn’t even grazing land, just a bit of scrubby old woodland.’