by K. J. Parker
For a moment, Geir had that bewildered look on his face; but it came and went quickly, and he shook his head. ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ he said, ‘I don’t know cousin Bolle from a pile of dirt, let alone cousin Eyvind, and we only came here because the relationship gave us a tiny scrap of a claim on his hospitality. You’ve said you’ll take us in, and we’re kin to your enemy, so I get the feeling we’ll be better suited here. Besides, it looks like you could use us.. If Eyvind’s house is as big and prosperous as you say it is, there’s no place for us there and sooner or later we’d have to go. We’re outsiders now, offcomers, and we’re coming to terms with that: it’s the worst thing anybody could ever be, though I don’t suppose you can begin to imagine.’
Poldarn smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I might; but that’s a long story, and there’s plenty of time for it later. Just remember, that’s all. This is more likely to be the start of all your troubles than the end.’
The new arrivals couldn’t have shown up at a better time. Eyvind had planted fine and extensive crops of wheat and barley, which stood up well and ripened quickly, untroubled by blight or crows, in a flurry of late sunshine. If Poldarn and the others had had to try getting it in with just ten men, they’d have been forced to leave at least a third of it to wilt and rot. As it was, they stood a reasonable chance of making a decent harvest of it; which would mean a substantial surplus over and above what they’d need for themselves, something they could trade with other farms for things they needed but didn’t have the time or the materials to make. From what they gathered from such contact as they’d had with other farms in the area, the volcano had done serious damage in many places, so that quite a few houses would be only too glad to buy in food, if they could find anyone to buy it from. This was, of course, an unfamiliar, unheard-of concept, the idea of not being able to provide for all one’s needs from one’s own resources, and it was taking people a long time to get used to it. Ironically, there was a strong possibility that Eyvind would be a customer. Halder had planted his usual quantities of wheat and barley at Haldersness and it had done reasonably well, though not as well as usual; the Ciartanstead crop had more or less failed, after the overlay of ash had poisoned the ground. Since Eyvind had more mouths to feed than either Halder or the Ciartanstead people had contemplated when they planted, he was facing a serious problem in the not too distant future. Poldarn’s heart bled for him.
Grandiose plans for a far-flung commercial empire all depended, of course, on being able to get the crop cut and threshed, and that was no foregone conclusion, even with six more scythes and four more binders and gleaners.
The first day of the cut dawned bright and clear, with a mild breeze to keep the workers cool. They started early, leaving the house before sunrise, so as to get as much as possible done before the sun came up and the heat slowed them down and wore them out. Poldarn couldn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t start with the nearest parcel and work their way out, so they didn’t have far to walk that first morning, with their scythes balanced on their shoulders, the blades pointed carefully down so as not to maim anyone walking behind. It occurred to Poldarn as they reached the field that he might not know how to cut corn; fortunately, this turned out not to be the case.
They started with the headlands, clearing a swathe round all four sides. Then they lined out and moved forward, like well-drilled heavy infantry following up the skirmishers in an attack that was actually going according to plan. At first Poldarn made the mistake of trying to make the scythe cut, instead of lifting it and letting its own weight do the work. Once his shoulders and back started to ache, however, he stopped putting effort into it and found he was making much better progress, letting the scythe hang off his right hand and lightly guiding it with his left, with a slight flick up and back at the end of the stroke to make good use of the full length of the blade. The shearing click of the corn against the steel reminded him of many things, some of which he decided he could do without remembering, but once he’d got the hang of the job he found it came easily, as easily as killing crows. As the day wore on and the sun started to chafe his skin he found himself stopping to whet his blade rather more often than it needed. But he wasn’t the only one by any means; he reckoned it’d be safe to bet that by the time the scythes were put away for the night, they’d be considerably sharper than they’d been when they started work.
After the midday break, Poldarn handed his scythe over to Raffen and took his turn at stacking and binding; it was harder work, but simpler, and he decided that on balance he preferred it. Not only that; but it gave him a chance to watch a true artist at work, and that was something he enjoyed.
Raffen was good at cutting. He knew how to read the lie of each swathe he cut, so that where the stems were bent or drooping he moved his feet and altered his angle of attack, always taking full advantage of the angle and the curve of the cutting edge. As he studied Raffen’s technique, it seemed to him as though Raffen wasn’t cutting the corn; the corn was crowding up against the scythe and cutting itself. There seemed to be no effort in the procedure, only the bare minimum of movement in the forward and back strokes. It was like religion as practised by the sword-monks – the draw, the cut, the follow-through, the return to rest that set up the next cut perfectly. Definitely there was religion in the way Raffen sliced and moved on, and every stem he cut through was a sacrifice, exactly the way it was with the monks of Deymeson. Poldarn wondered about that. Was that the secret of religion, a measured and controlled process of severing, separating the good from the evil, the stem from the root, the wheat from the chaff? He’d always assumed that the monks cut and sliced because their enemies had to be dealt with, that the objects of their swords were the weeds, not the wheat. But suppose that was wrong, and that the very act of drawing steel through matter was the essence of religion, that the sacrifice was what counted, not the victim. It was an intriguing hypothesis, particularly when transferred to the killing of crows, or other living things traditionally slaughtered in the open field, in the name of some cause.
Maybe, he thought as he bent and gathered and knotted, maybe the difference lay in the picking-up afterwards; and he couldn’t help thinking of the old women in black who’d flocked round the carrion after that battle in the river, when he’d saved the life of a wounded soldier. Perhaps the purpose of the battle was the carrion, an equitable means of distributing wealth among the rural poor; in which case it was not religion to drive off the old women or kill the crows, since he had no use for the bodies and the crows themselves were the appointed beneficiaries of slaughter. That, or the crow-killer was doubly blessed, since he preyed on the predators who fed upon the dead. Perhaps that latter function was the proper office of a god, in his capacity as the ultimate remainder-man of all mortality.
Of course, a god would know that kind of thing without having to stop and figure it out from first principles; much as he’d turned out to know how to handle a scythe, or a sword, or a small stone, or a four-pound straight-peen hammer. That brought him back to the old question, like a man wandering round in circles in a thick fog: what did he know by light of nature and what was simply seeping through from his bottled and caulked store of memories, and were the gods omniscient only because they were remembering it all from the last time they’d swooped round in their endless circling over the world? Once he reached that point, Poldarn decided to give it up and think about something else.
For some reason, however, the sword-monks stayed in the back of his mind all the rest of that day, and he found himself following up that line of thought to Copis, who had been their loyal servant and spy, and who was carrying his child; in fact (he tried to figure out the dates), wasn’t she due any time now? And what would become of his son or daughter, whose mother he hadn’t seen since she’d tried to kill him in the ruins of Deymeson? He shook his head at that. How many wives and children had he got, for God’s sake? Who and where were they, and how had he happened to come by them? Some girl had been the rea
son why he’d left home in the first place; then there was Tazencius’s daughter, and apparently he’d been genuinely fond of her, according to her father; and Copis, of course, and now Elja. The thought of so much activity in that field of endeavour appalled him rather, and what they’d all seen in him he couldn’t begin to imagine. Still, it made him grin as he stooped over the fallen corn; maybe he’d taken rather too many people out of the world in his time, but by all accounts he’d done his best to make up for it by replacing them with his own offspring. Very appropriate, he decided; very godlike. Give him twenty more years at this rate, and he could populate the entire world with innumerable first cousins.
Each day of the harvest grew a little longer and a little easier, as the work became more familiar and less interesting. Poldarn’s back started to hurt after two days, and was fine again after six. When they were through with cutting they started on threshing, and for several days the area around the long barn was covered in a thin layer of white chaff, lighter than the ash from the volcano and less destructive but just as pervasive. Halfway through the job they realised that they were facing a desperate shortage of jars, sacks and barrels; they couldn’t spare the hands or the time to make any more, and they couldn’t do without them, either. The best they could come up with was a stake-andplank silo built into the corner of the barn, all done in one night by a tired and bad-tempered workforce. They looked at it when it was finished and could see perfectly well that it wasn’t really good enough; but it wasn’t as though they had any alternative, and there’d be time to do a proper job later, after the rush was over. Finally, when the threshing was done and the straw had been stooked up and stored away, Elja told Poldarn she was going to have a baby. He wanted to tell her what a curious coincidence that was, since he’d been thinking about that only a week or so before, but he realised it probably wouldn’t come out sounding right if he tried to share it with her, so he told her it was wonderful news and left it at that.
‘I think we ought to call him Halder,’ she said, ‘after his great-grandfather. What do you think?’
‘Good idea,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Unless he turns out to be a girl, just to spite us.’
Elja frowned. ‘Well, in that case we’ll call her Cremeld, after my grandmother. But he’ll be a boy, I’m sure of it.’
‘Good,’ Poldarn said, ‘though a girl would be nice too, of course. Can women be heads of houses, by the way, if there’s no son to succeed?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Elja confessed. ‘It’s not something that ever happens, because they get married and their husbands take over. But I suppose that if a girl was the only child and her father died before she got married, she’d have to be, wouldn’t she? That’s an odd thing to ask about, isn’t it?’
‘It just crossed my mind, that’s all. I like the name Cremeld, by the way. I suppose I ought to think about planting some trees.’
Elja nodded. ‘Just not too close to the house, if you don’t mind. The last thing we want is a rookery, right next to the barn.’
First, of course, Poldarn had to find some trees to plant. It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder where they were supposed to come from; should he have thought about it long before this, planted out a nursery with pine seeds and trained up a hundred or so saplings, so as to be ready? He’d have to ask someone about that, Raffen or Rook or one of the other old hands. As to where it ought to go, that was another awkward question. Normally he’d have been looking at the far end of the farm, where Eyvind’s wood had been; but now that he’d diverted the flow of molten rock from the volcano, any future eruption could well send a fire-stream rushing down in that direction, and his unborn grandson wouldn’t thank him for a stream of red-hot liquid stone running through the kitchen garden. That really only left the spur at the other end of the farm, and that’d be an awkward place to build a house, with Poldarn’s Forge standing in the way between the new house and the fields. It was strange to think that a choice he made now could have such a profound effect in twenty years’ time on someone who wasn’t born yet. With that in mind he compromised, and surveyed a patch halfway between the house and the filled-in combe. It wasn’t what he’d have chosen, but it would have to do. It wasn’t as if he was spoiled for choice.
Colsceg had to be told, of course. Since they weren’t entirely sure where he was, they resigned themselves to sending out a messenger who might not be back for some weeks. Raffen volunteered to go, but Poldarn didn’t like the thought of being without his best worker for so long and in the end they chose one of the newcomers instead – a young man called Stolley.
(‘But I don’t know the way,’ Stolley protested, when they told him he’d just volunteered. ‘I’ve never been west of Locksdale in my life.’
‘You’ll be all right,’ Rook assured him. ‘Just follow the trail over the mountain till you get to Ciartanstead and ask there. They’ll tell you where Colsceg’s gone. Be reasonable; if it wasn’t something any bloody fool could do, do you think we’d be sending you?’)
One morning, when Poldarn was busy in the forge making a pot-hook, one of the offcomer women – her name was Birta, and she was Geir’s kid sister – came by with the water jug.
‘That’s good timing,’ Poldarn said, and he took a long drink straight from the jug. ‘Thanks.’
‘That’s all right,’ Birta replied; as usual, she was slightly taken aback at being thanked. One of these days, Poldarn promised himself, I’ll get out of the habit, and then maybe I won’t get stare at quite so much. ‘Oh, and there’s a message for you,’ she went on, ‘from my brother. He said to tell you the Ciartanstead men came by and picked up the horse.’
Poldarn rested the jug on the anvil. ‘Sorry?’
‘The Ciartanstead men. They came by and picked up the horse.’
He frowned. He could ask again, and she could repeat her message, and maybe they could carry on having the same conversation all day. ‘Where’s Geir now?’ he asked.
‘In the trap-house, fixing the roof,’ she replied. ‘At least, he was a minute ago.’
Geir was still there. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘two men, I didn’t catch their names. That’s all right, isn’t it?’
Poldarn looked up at the roof. There was a hole in the thatch. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘What did they have to say for themselves?’
Geir shrugged. ‘That they’d come to collect the horse, and you knew all about it, you’d fixed it up with Eyvind. Why, is something wrong?’
‘It’s probably nothing,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Chances are there’s a perfectly good explanation, only nobody’s bothered to tell me about it. That sort of thing happens a lot round here, you’ll find that out for yourself.’
But nobody else knew anything about any horse, so Poldarn went back to Geir and asked him for more details.
‘Well,’ Geir told him, ‘one of them was a big, thin man, something between forty and sixty, with a nose like the beak on an anvil. The other one was short and quite broad, with a little thin beard. Does that help at all?’
The thin man sounded like Carey, the Haldersness stockman. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ Poldarn said. ‘But I just might run over there sometime and sort it all out.’
He thought about it some more, and went and saddled up a horse. He told the stable hands to tell Elja he’d be away for a day or so, but it was no big deal, just something that needed clearing up.
He needn’t have bothered them with the message, because he met Elja coming out of the rat-house. ‘Where are you off to?’ she asked.
‘Ciartanstead,’ he replied, tightening the girth. ‘There’s some kind of silly mix-up about a horse, I thought I’d better go over there and put it straight before it gets out of hand.’
She nodded. ‘Got any food for the journey?’
‘Salt beef and a bottle of water,’ he replied. ‘I don’t plan on being very long.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘It’s not a good time to go swanning off on sociables.’ Elja pushed aside the saddle-blanket. ‘You’r
e taking Boarci’s axe with you,’ she observed.
‘I thought I might,’ Poldarn said. ‘Just in case there’s still any bears left that he didn’t bash on the head.’
‘Well, have a safe trip,’ she told him. ‘See you in a day or so.’
On his way up and down the mountain, Poldarn put the missing horse out of his mind and thought about the future. Planting some trees; that was definitely something he was going to have to do. There was also the question of the Haldersness herd, which was presumably still somewhere out west, along with a dozen or so of the Haldersness men. The mountain hadn’t played up at all since they’d moved into Poldarn’s Forge, and fresh milk, meat, cheese and wool would come in very handy indeed; so would the herdsmen, if they could be induced to come and settle at the Forge. He could remember the names of two of them – Odey and Lothbrook – but nothing else about them at all. In their shoes, of course, he’d throw in his lot with Eyvind and use the herd to pay his membership dues; but of course he wasn’t a bit like these people (his people) and what he’d do in any given situation wasn’t a reliable guide. He couldn’t see that Eyvind had any justifiable claim on the herd, simply because he’d stolen the house and the farm; if they saw it differently, however, he recognised that there was precious little he could do about it. The most sensible thing would be to agree a compromise with Eyvind and divide the herd between them – after all, he didn’t have the manpower to look after the whole herd, even if he could get his hands on it. That would be the most practical, logical course of action. No question about it.