by K. J. Parker
Then the others started waking up, and he turned his attention to details.
‘On your feet,’ he told them all. ‘We’ve got a long way to go today, and we’re behind as it is.’
As they marched he went over the minutiae of the plan until he’d annoyed all of them to the point of mutiny. After he’d finished doing that, none of them said a word, to him or to each other. That made for a very long day.
Fortunately, he’d figured out the necessary diversions pretty well, and had estimated accurately the time their journey would take; as he’d anticipated, they came within sight of the roof of Ciartanstead just as the light was beginning to fade. When they’d reached the patch of dead ground where he’d paused after killing Carey, he ordered a halt.
‘We’ll hang on here for a while,’ he said.
Raffen, who’d sat down and was rubbing his neck where the straps of his rucksack had bitten into it, grunted. ‘How long’s a while?’ he asked.
‘As long as it needs to be,’ Poldarn replied. ‘If you like you can get some sleep, all of you. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.’
They didn’t need to hear the suggestion twice. How they could sleep, so close to the house, was beyond him entirely. While they slept, he kept watch from the lip of the rise. As he’d hoped, there was nothing to see. The Ciartanstead household were all inside, eating dinner, resting after what must have been a tense, fraught day. By now, he knew the routines so well that he could picture them all with total clarity – pulling out the benches and tables, sitting down, waiting for the food to be brought, passing round the dishes, porridge and onions again, why can’t we have a bit of meat for a change? Of course he couldn’t hear their voices or read their minds, but he could make himself think he could hear the silence as they concentrated wholeheartedly on the job in hand, eating and drinking with the same diligent efficiency that these people, his people, brought to everything they did. It would be a bit cosy in there tonight, needless to say, with all the Haldersness people as well as the Ciartanstead hands; they’d be squashed up tight on the benches, no room to spread elbows, they’d all be sitting up straight, shoulder to shoulder. Now they were done eating, and tables and benches were put away and the blankets were fetched out and laid on the floor; not to worry, room for everyone provided that nobody was selfish about personal space. Nobody was going to have any trouble getting to sleep tonight, not after such a tiring and eventful day; nobody was going to want to sit up late nattering, there was serious sleeping to be done. He wondered: when they sleep (when we sleep), do they dream, or is dreaming too frivolous and unproductive for them to countenance? And if they dream, do they all share the same words and images, do they all go to the same place and relive the same moments? Do they share the dreams of the head of house, taking their lead from him in that as in everything else? Where Eyvind was concerned, he could believe they did – he was a good householder, one you could confidently take as a model of a perfect community leader, a paradigm of his people. So; what did Eyvind dream about, he wondered, and did he remember his dreams when he woke up, or did they fade with the darkness? And even if he didn’t remember, how about the rest of them? Did they retain the dreams he forgot? Did they all share the same recurring nightmares?
(He hoped that the Poldarn’s Forge hands didn’t share his dreams, or at least not the one he’d been having lately, where he watched the executioners cut open the man who was either his best friend or himself, while either he or his best friend watched approvingly. That dream, for some reason, he had no trouble remembering, though on balance he’d have preferred it otherwise.)
By now they should all have been fast asleep; but he kept still and quiet, resolved to wait a little longer, just to be sure. Behind him as well as in front, his people were fast asleep (and whose dreams were Raffen and Rook and Asburn and Geir and Elja sharing, he wondered) and it seemed only fair to let them be peaceful for a little longer. After they were through here, they might not find it quite so easy to get to sleep, or if they did they might have bad dreams to contend with. He lay on his stomach and gazed at the red glow from the mountain and the fire-stream seeping over the horizon like a rival dawn, or like blood soaking through a bandage.
(In theory I could still abandon the whole idea; in theory, none of this has to happen – not this time round, anyway, it’ll keep till the next evolution of the wheel. But the little voice that kept whispering that in the back of his mind had missed the point completely. What was about to happen was even more inevitable than tomorrow’s dawn; it was the point of contact between the wheel and the ground as Poldarn’s cart rolled slowly towards the next condemned city.)
Suddenly he sat up. He’d arrived; this was the right time.
Gently, he nudged Asburn’s shoulder. ‘Wake up,’ he said, ‘we’re here.’
The blacksmith opened his eyes, and maybe there was a very brief moment when he wasn’t aware of where he was or what he was about to do. But it was over very quickly, and Poldarn could feel the weight of memory settling on him. ‘All right,’ Asburn said. ‘I’m ready.’
The rest of them woke up without having to be prodded. One or two of them yawned, but nobody said anything as they gathered their tools and equipment and slowly got to their feet. They didn’t wish each other luck – that would have been wildly inappropriate, and unnecessary as well. Whatever other problems they might be about to face, the risk of failure wasn’t one of them. After all, it wasn’t as if what they were about to do was difficult.
They walked slowly down the slope to the yard. It was very dark, but Poldarn didn’t need light to find his way around the farm he’d built himself. They stopped outside the barn, opposite the main door of the house. They all knew what to do; there was no need for Poldarn to give orders or instructions. Each of them took a couple of deep breaths to steady their nerves, and went to work.
As was only fitting, Poldarn and Raffen saw to the most important task, that of barring the main door. It was perfectly straightforward, simply a matter of dragging the heavy timbers that leant up against the side of the barn across the yard, butting one end into the ground and wedging the other end against the door. That would be enough to keep the people inside from crashing their way out long enough for Poldarn and Raffen to do a proper job, passing stout battens across the door and nailing them securely into the frame on either side. Once they’d jammed the door with the timbers they waited for the others to do their part – Asburn and Lax to do the same for the side door, Rook and the rest of Geir’s people to board up the shutters, the rest to stand by with the long poles from the woodstack, ready to push back anybody who tried to break out through the thatch.
Once he was satisfied that everyone was in place, Poldarn reached in his bag and found the hammer and the cloth bag that held the nails he’d forged for this purpose. Raffen held the battens up while Poldarn drove the nails home. He worked quickly but carefully, knowing that the first blows of the hammer would wake up everybody inside, and it wouldn’t take them long to figure out what was going on. That shouldn’t matter, with the long beams holding the door shut, but Poldarn wasn’t minded to take any risks. If the people inside did get out, he and his crew would be hopelessly outnumbered and the whole project would founder. From the back of the house he could hear Asburn’s hammer counterpointing his own, while further pounding of steel on iron at either side of him reassured him that the others were keeping up, as they drove in the staples through which they’d pass the iron bars that would keep the shutters cramped down.
He’d got one side finished before he heard any voices from inside; then he felt the door quiver, as someone tried to open it. The vibrations in the wood intensified – whoever it was, he was trying to kick the door open or burst it out with his shoulder. But the timbers did their job admirably, just as he’d hoped they would, and he knocked in the remaining nails without any problems.
He knew without needing to be told when Asburn finished with the back door; the shutters were already secure
. He put the hammer carefully back in his bag – it was a good hammer, he didn’t want to drop it in the dark – and took a step back. Inside they were shouting, but it was all right, all the angles were covered, everything was still perfect. Hand and Rook brought up the big sack full of kindling, and emptied it on the ground. Poldarn took out his tinderbox and tried to get it to light.
No luck. It was the moment he’d been dreading most. It’s not me who should be doing this, he thought ruefully, it should be Asburn or one of the others, I never could get a fire started to save my life. But, just as he was about to give up and call for help, a little spiral of smoke stood up out of the dry moss in the pan of the box; he gave it a couple of puffs, and a tiny orange ember started glowing brightly. Quickly he piled the moss up round it while Hand made a little nest of dry leaves and straw; then Poldarn dumped the box’s contents into it, dropped to his knees and let go a series of long, slow breaths until the tinder caught and the first flame broke through, like the first corn-shoot of spring.
The others were standing by, waiting to light the torches they’d made, hay and straw wrapped tight around a stick and drenched in lamp oil. Once the torches were ablaze there was light to see by, not that they needed it; and once they’d tossed the torches up onto the roof and the thatch had started to burn, it was soon as light as day.
So far, he thought, so good; the roof was burning cheerfully, and they could turn their attention to the rest of the house. Raffen, Geir and Reno were carrying armfuls of kindling out from the woodshed; Asburn was on his way back from the forge with the first sack of charcoal. Surprisingly quickly, they built up a series of small pyres all round the house, primed with oil from the quench and lard and beeswax from the storehouse. Some of these they lit with their torches and portfires; others were set alight by handfuls of burning thatch sliding down from the roof.
Someone inside was attacking the main door with an axe; but that wouldn’t do him any good – the battens themselves would take a quarter of an hour to chop through, let alone the main timbers of the door itself. They were screaming in there now, as well as shouting, but so far nobody had thought to try getting out through the roof; that was surprising, he’d given them credit for more ingenuity than that.
The smoke was stinging his eyes; he closed them, taking a step back, and in that moment he realised that what he could hear, muffled and indistinct in the background, wasn’t the shouting or the screaming, all that was quite different in tone and pitch; what he could hear were the thoughts passing through their minds, a confused jumble of voices all talking at the same time. He couldn’t make any sense at all of it, so he concentrated until he found the one voice he was looking for—
I’m waking up out of a dream about faraway places. I can see smoke.
It’s hanging in the air, like mist in a valley; the chimney’s blocked again. But there’s rather too much of it for that, and I can hear burning, a soft cackle of inaudible conversation in the thatch above my head, the scampering of rats and squirrels in the hayloft.
Beside me, my wife grunts and turns over. I nudge her hard in the small of the back, and hop out of bed.
‘Get up,’ I tell her. ‘The house is on fire.’
‘What?’ She opens her eyes and stares at me.
‘The house is on fire,’ I tell her, annoyed at having to repeat myself in the middle of a crisis. ‘Come on, for God’s sake.’
She scrambles out and starts poking about with her feet, trying to find her shoes. ‘No time for that now,’ I snap, and unlatch the partition door. It opens six inches or so and sticks; someone’s lying against it on the other side. That isn’t good.
It occurs to me to wonder where the light’s coming from, a soft, rather beautiful orange glow, like a distant view of the fire-stream slipping gently down the side of the mountain. The answer to that is through the gap where the partition doesn’t quite meet the roof – it’s coming through from the main room. Not good at all.
I take a step back from the door and kick it, stamping sideways with the flat of my foot. The door moves a few more inches, suggesting that I’m shifting a dead weight. I repeat the manoeuvre five times, opening a gap I can just about squeeze through.
‘Come on,’ I urge my wife – comic, as if we’re going to a dance and she’s fussing about her hair. Hilarious.
The main room’s full of orange light, but there isn’t any air, just smoke. As I step through, the heat washes over me; I look down to see what the obstruction had been, and see Henferth the swineherd, rolled over on his side, dead. No need to ask what had killed him, the smoke’s a solid wall of fuzzy-edged orange. Just in time, I remember not to breathe in; I lower my head and draw in the clean air inside my shirt.
Only six paces, diagonally across the floor, to the upper door; I can make that, and once the door’s open I’ll be out in cold, fresh air. The bar’s in place, of course, and the bolts are pushed home top and bottom – I grab the knob of the top bolt and immediately let go as the heat sears my skin. Little feathers of smoke are weaving in through the minute cracks between the boards; the outside of the door must be on fire.
So what? Catching the end of my sleeve into the palm of my hand, I push hard against the bolt. It’s stiff – heat expands metal – but I’m in no mood to mess about, and my lungs are already tight; also, the smoke’s making my eyes prickle. I force the top bolt back, ramming splinters into the heel of my hand from a rough patch of sloppily planed wood, then stoop and shoot back the bottom bolt, which moves quite easily. That just leaves the bar; and I’m already gasping out my hoarded breath as I unhook it. Then I put my shoulder to the door and shove.
It doesn’t move. I’m out of breath now, and there’s no air, only smoke. I drop to the floor. Right down low, cheek pressed to the boards, there’s clean air, just enough for a lungful.
As I breathe in, I’m thinking, The door’s stuck, why? The door won’t open, it’s burning on the outside. No prizes for guessing what that means
The axe; the big axe. Of course the door’s too solid to break down but with the big axe I can smash out the middle panel, at least enough to make a hole to breathe through. Where’s the big axe? Then I remember. The big axe is in the woodshed, where the hell else would the big axe be? Inside there’s only the little hand-axe, and I might as well peck at the door with my nose like a woodpecker.
Something flops down next to me and I feel a sharp, unbearable pain in my left foot and ankle. Burning thatch, the roof’s falling in. ‘Bench,’ I yell, ‘smash the door down with a bench.’ But nobody answers. Come on, brain, suggestions. There’s got to be another way out of here, because I’ve got to get out. The other door, or what about the window? And if they’re blocked too, there’s the hatch up into the hayloft, and out the hayloft door – ten-foot drop to the ground, but it’d be better than staying here.
But the other door’s forty feet away; the window’s closer, but still impossibly far, and the hatch might as well be on the other side of the ocean. There simply isn’t time to try, and if I stand up I’ll suffocate in the smoke. The only possible place to be is here, cheek flat on the floorboards, trapped for the rest of my life in half an inch of air.
Another swathe of burning thatch lands on me, dropping heavily across my shoulders. I feel my hair frizzle up before I feel the pain, but when it comes it’s too much to bear. I snuff up as much air as I can get – there’s a lot of smoke in it, and the coughing costs me a fortune in time – and try to get to my feet, only to find that they aren’t working. I panic, lurch, overbalance and fall heavily on my right elbow. The fire’s reached my scalp, it’s working its way through my shirt to the skin on my back.
A man might be forgiven for calling it a day at this point, but I can’t quite bring myself to do that, not yet. I’d be horribly burned, of course – I’ve seen men who’ve been in fires, their faces melted like wax – but you’ve got to be philosophical about these things, what’s done is done and what’s gone is gone, salvage what you can while
you can.
It hadn’t been so bad back in the inner room – why the hell did I ever leave it? Seemed like a good idea at the time. So I start to crawl back the way I’ve just come. A good yard (the palm of my hand on her upturned face; I know the feel of the contours of her cheeks and mouth, from tracing them in the dark with my fingertips, tenderly, gently; but no air to waste on that stuff now) before the beam falls across my back and pins me down, making me spill my last prudent savings of air. The pain – no, forget that for a moment, I can’t feel my hands, even though I know they’re on fire, my back must be broken. Try to breathe in, but there’s just smoke, no time left at all. Forget it, I can’t be bothered with this any more—
Poldarn opened his eyes. ‘He’s dead,’ he announced. They looked at him. ‘Who’s dead?’ one of them asked.
‘Eyvind.’ Poldarn let out the breath he’d been holding (as if he’d been the one trapped in the smoke, hoarding air like a prudent farmer stockpiling grain against a hard winter). ‘All of them. It’s finished.’
Someone – Raffen or Rook, in the darkness they all looked the same – coughed a couple of times and said, ‘Well, we did it, then.’
‘Yes,’ Poldarn replied. ‘We did it, and it’s over. I wish we hadn’t.’
‘Bloody fine time to say that.’ He wasn’t sure who’d spoken. ‘Bloody fine time. Next you’ll be telling us it was all a mistake.’
Poldarn shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘Is that supposed to be funny?’ That sounded like Hand, but he couldn’t be sure. ‘Because if it was, I don’t think much of it.’
‘Sorry.’ Poldarn wanted to look away – the brightness of the flames was hurting his eyes – but he couldn’t. ‘But it’s true, at the time it seemed like the right course of action. Now, I’m not so sure. It was a terrible thing to do.’