by K. J. Parker
It didn’t move. He barged against it again, but this wasn’t just an annoying case of a sticky door, damp swelling the exposed end grain. He was out of breath now, and there was no air, only smoke. Most men would’ve panicked; fortunately, he remembered something else he must have picked up somewhere (where?) and dropped to the floor. Right down low, cheek pressed to the boards, there was clean air, just enough for a lungful.
As he breathed in he was thinking, The door’s stuck, why? He hadn’t stopped to think, Why is the house on fire? If his mind had addressed the problem at all, it had assumed some accident – a glowing cinder lodged in the thatch, carelessness with a lamp. But the door wouldn’t open, the wood was burning on the inside. He knew exactly what that meant.
Behind him, someone was coughing horribly. He recognised the cough (she had a weak chest, always woke up coughing in winter). ‘Get down,’ he hissed, wasting precious breath. ‘On the floor.’ He didn’t look round to see if she was doing as she was told, or even if she’d understood him. Right now, time was calibrated in units of air, and he had very little of it left. Certainly not enough to fritter away on fear or other self-indulgent luxuries; there’d be plenty of opportunities for that kind of stuff later, when he wasn’t so busy.
The axe, he thought; the big axe. Of course the door was too solid to break down – he’d made it himself, he was just too damn painstaking for his own good – but with the big axe he could smash out the middle panel, at least enough to make a hole to breathe through. Where was the big axe, he wondered; there was something wrong with his memory, maybe the smoke had got in it and spoiled it, like oil curdling milk. Then he remembered. The big axe was in the woodshed, where the hell else would the big axe be? Inside there was only the little hand-axe, and he might as well peck at the door with his nose like a woodpecker.
Something flopped down next to him and he felt a sharp, unbearable pain in his left foot and ankle. Burning thatch, the roof was falling in. Oh, he really didn’t need that. ‘Bench,’ he yelled, emptying his lungs (like spilling water in the desert; and when had he ever been in the desert?), ‘smash the door down with a bench.’ But she didn’t answer, in fact he couldn’t hear her at all, not even that goddamned horrible rasping cough. Oh well, he thought, can’t help that now (plenty of time for that later, as well) and it screws up the bench idea. 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 was forty feet away; the window was closer, but still impossibly far, and the hatch might as well have been on the other side of the ocean. There simply wasn’t time to try, and if he stood up he’d suffocate in the smoke. The only possible place to be was here, cheek flat on the floorboards, trapped for the brief remainder of his life in half an inch of air.
Another swathe of burning thatch landed on him, dropping heavily across his shoulders. He felt his hair frizzle up before he felt the pain, but when it came it was too much to bear – he couldn’t just lie still and feel himself burn. He snuffed up as much air as he could get – there was a lot of smoke in it, and the coughing cost him a fortune in time – and tried to get to his feet, only to find that they weren’t working. Panic started to circle, like crows round a dead sheep, but he shooed it away as he lurched, overbalanced and fell heavily on his right elbow. The fire had reached his scalp and worked its way through his shirt to the skin on his back.
A man might be forgiven for calling it a day at this point, he thought; but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do that, not yet. He’d be horribly burned, of course – he’d seen men who’d been in fires, their faces melted like wax – but you had to be philosophical about these things: what’s done is done and what’s gone is gone, salvage what you can while you can. Like his life, for instance. Yes, how about that?
It hadn’t been so bad back in the inner room – why the hell had he ever left it, he wondered? Seemed like a good idea at the time. So he shrugged off the pain, like kicking away a yapping dog, and started to crawl back the way he’d just come. He made a good yard that way (the palm of his hand on his wife’s upturned face; he knew the feel of the contours of her cheeks and mouth, from tracing them in the dark with his fingertips, tenderly, gently, like he meant it; but no air to waste on that stuff now) before the beam fell across his back and pinned him down, making him spill his last prudent savings of air. The pain – no, forget that for a moment, he couldn’t feel his hands, even though he knew they were on fire, his back must be broken He tried to breathe in, but there was just smoke, no time left at all. Forget it, he thought, I can’t be bothered with this any more.
(He expected death would come at that moment of abjuration; like a rough boys’ game, you shout ‘I give in’ and it stops. But nothing seemed to change, as the time drew out – how was he paying for this time, now he was penniless for air? Had he discovered, in the very nick of time, the secret of breathing smoke? Nice trick, but pointless if his back was broken, and he was on fire too. Talk about irony.)
‘What are you doing here?’
He looked up. He couldn’t look up, because he was paralysed. He saw his grandfather looking down at him.
‘What are you doing here?’ the old bastard repeated. He sounded put out, as if his authority had been challenged. ‘Get up,’ he said, frowning, ‘it’s time to get up. You’ve overslept.’
You could put it that way, he thought; then he remembered. What am I doing here? How about what’s he doing here, he’s been dead for six months—
‘What are you doing here?’ the old man said—
‘Sorry,’ said the man facing him, ‘am I boring you?’
Suddenly awake; he was sitting on a chair outside his grandfather’s house at Haldersness, under the porch eaves, on a cold, bright day. The man opposite was Eyvind, his friend. His name was—
‘No, of course not, go on,’ he said. He hadn’t fallen asleep, really, he’d just closed his eyes because the sun was so bright. His name was—
‘All this talking,’ Eyvind said apologetically, ‘I’m not used to it. Truth is, among ourselves we don’t talk much. Don’t need to. Are you cold?’
‘What? No, I’m fine, really.’
Eyvind smiled. ‘You’re huddled up in your jacket like a caterpillar,’ he said. ‘Perfectly understandable; where you’ve been all these years, it’s much warmer. We sweat like pigs when we go there. Would you rather go inside?’
In front of him, over Eyvind’s shoulder, was the great white-headed mountain. From its sides rose tall columns of milk-white steam, billowing out of the cracks and fissures where the natural hot springs bubbled up from the mountain’s fiery heart. It was an amazing sight against a blue sky. ‘No, thanks,’ he replied. ‘I like sitting here. Nice view.’
Eyvind laughed. ‘I suppose it is,’ he said, ‘but I don’t notice it any more. Would you like me to get you a blanket or something?’
‘No, really.’ It was bitter cold; he could feel it in his feet, in spite of his thick leggings and felt-lined boots. Everybody said he’d get used to it.
‘Wait there,’ Eyvind said. ‘I’ll get a rug from the laundry.’
Well, it would give him an opportunity to wake up – not that he’d been asleep, of course. Once Eyvind had gone, he was able to wriggle a little deeper into the lining of his coat without appearing feeble in front of his friend. He didn’t like the way everybody treated him like an invalid; after all, he was perfectly fit and healthy, he just felt the cold more than they did. And his name—
His name, he remembered, was Poldarn. At least, that wasn’t his real name, it was the name of a Morevich god he’d impersonated while touring round the Bohec valley with a female confidence trickster who’d picked him up after he’d lost his memory a year ago. So far, only a part of that memory had come back; but th
ese people, who lived an ocean away from where he’d woken up in the bed of a river surrounded by dead bodies, these people had told him his name was Ciartan, and he knew they were right. He’d grown up here, he could remember names (not his own, of course) and places, pictures in his mind that turned out to be real. Above all, now that he was here at least somebody knew who he was, and that was a great comfort after his experiences back in the empire.
Don’t knock it, he thought, it’s not everybody who gets a fresh start at the age of forty-one, especially a start like this. After all, his grandfather owned this enormous farm – ‘owned’ was the wrong word, of course, but it was easier to think of it that way – and everybody was going out of their way to be nice to him: they knew about his loss of memory, they understood how difficult it must be for him, they were only too pleased to help in any way they could, they even jumped up and fetched blankets for him without having to be asked. He couldn’t have had a more luxurious, pampered life if he really had been a god.
On the far side of the yard, a peacock was clambering about on the thatched roof of the barn. When he’d first arrived he’d never seen a peacock before (as far as he could remember, though Grandfather insisted he’d killed one with his first bow and arrow, when he was seven) and even now he found it difficult to believe in the existence of such a gorgeous, unnecessary, stupid creature, because animals and birds were supposed to be above that kind of thing, they didn’t have aristocracies and leisured classes. But the peacock was clearly some kind of duke or viscount, useless, troublesome and splendidly ornamental. Eyvind would have him believe they were just another breed of poultry, only there to get fat and then get eaten, but he didn’t believe a word of it.
From the other side of the barn he could hear the shrill, musical clang of a blacksmith’s hammer – Asburn the smith, getting down to some work at last. Properly speaking, that should have made him feel guilty, since by rights the job belonged to the head of the house, but Grandfather was too old now, his only son was dead, and his grandson, Ciartan, who’d only just come back from abroad, had left home before learning the trade and hadn’t got a clue how to light the forge, let alone make anything in it. As a result Asburn, who was born to mend tools, sharpen hooks and scythes and generally make himself useful, had spent the last twenty years doing the wrong work; and the fact that he did it exceptionally well was neither here nor there. You could tell Asburn wasn’t a smith just by looking at him: he was a little scrawny man with weedy arms and sloping shoulders. Poldarn, of course, looked every inch a blacksmith, and the sooner he knuckled down and learned the trade, the sooner everything could get back to normal.
But not today, Poldarn thought, even though it’d be nice and warm in the forge and out here it was freezing cold. Today he was far happier sitting and looking at the mountain, because he’d recognised it as soon as he saw it, and it reassured him more than anything else. As long as he could see it, he knew where he was. More than that, he knew who he was, just as long as he could see the mountain.
He’d nearly fallen over when they’d told him what it was called.
‘Here you are,’ Eyvind said, appearing suddenly behind him; and he felt the comforting weight of a thick woven rug descending round his shoulders. That was much better, of course, but even so he felt obliged to grumble.
‘Wish you wouldn’t do that,’ he said quarter-heartedly. ‘You’re treating me like an old woman.’
Eyvind grinned and sat down. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘My mother’s seventy-one, and right now I expect she’s out hoeing turnips. You wouldn’t catch her lounging about on porches on a fine day like this.’
‘Thank you so much,’ Poldarn grunted, feeling even more useless than the peacock. ‘Now, if only someone would tell me what I’m supposed to be doing, maybe I could muck in and start pulling my weight around here.’
‘I wish you’d listen when I tell you things,’ Eyvind replied, ‘instead of falling asleep all the time. Makes it very boring for me, having to say the same thing over and over again.’
‘Give it one more try,’ Poldarn grumbled. ‘You never know, this time it just might stick.’
‘All right, but please try and stay conscious.’ Eyvind leaned back in his chair, his hands folded in his lap, a wonderful study in applied comfort. ‘The reason nobody’s tried to tell you what to do,’ he said, ‘is that we just don’t do things like that here. There’s no need to. For example,’ he went on, sitting up and looking round, ‘there over by the barn, look, that’s Carey. You know him?’
Poldarn nodded. ‘Ever since I was a kid,’ he replied. ‘So they tell me.’
‘Right. Now, Carey wakes up every morning knowing what he’s going to do that day. If I’d been you, of course, I’d have said he knows what he’s got to do; but that’s not the way to look at it. He knows that today he’s going to muck out the pigs, chop a stack of firewood, mend a broken railing in the middle sty and a bunch of other chores. He knows this because, first, he’s got eyes in his head, he can see what needs doing, and he knows who does what around here; second, he knows because when he was a kid he watched his old man doing exactly the same sort of stuff, the same way his father watched his grandfather and so on. He doesn’t need to be told, it’d be a waste of time telling him; more to the point, nobody could tell him because nobody knows Carey’s work better than Carey does. Do you get what I’m driving at?’
Poldarn sighed. ‘I think so,’ he replied. ‘Where I lose the thread is when it comes to why they all do it. If there’s nobody in charge telling everybody else what to do, why do they bother doing all this work, when they could be – well, sitting around on the porch admiring the view?’
Eyvind laughed. ‘If you need to ask that,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand us at all. But you will, in time. It’s really very simple. What you’ve got to do is simplify your mind, throw out all that junk that got lodged in there while you were abroad. God only knows how they manage to survive without starving to death over there, the way they do things.’
Poldarn didn’t say anything. Every time Eyvind tried to explain things to him, they ended up at this point and never seemed to get any further. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so you tell me: how am I supposed to find out what I’m meant to be doing, if I don’t know what my job is and neither does anybody else? You can see the problem, can’t you?’
(Far away on the side of the mountain, at the point where the snow began, a fat white cloud shot out of the rock and hung in the air.)
‘Give it time.’ Eyvind yawned. ‘It’ll come back to you, or you’ll pick it up as you go along. Anyway, let’s be realistic. In a month or so you’ll have built a house of your own, you’ll be starting from scratch with your own people – well, not from scratch, exactly, but once you’re in your own house, running your own farm, you’ll know what’s got to be done without needing anybody to tell you. Believe me,’ he added, ‘I’ve done it.’
That really didn’t help, of course. Poldarn knew, because he’d been told, that when Halder and his wife Rannwey were both dead, this house would be dismantled, pulled apart log by log and plank by plank and the materials piled up so that the farm people could help themselves to free building materials for their own houses and barns, and most of the household goods (apart from a few valuable heirlooms) would be divided up the same way. By then, Poldarn would be living in a brand new house a mile away down the valley, called Ciartansford or Ciartanswood or something like that – he’d still own all the land and the stock (not ‘own’, of course; wrong word entirely) and the grain and straw and hay and wood and apples and cheeses and hides and leeks and pears and cider and beer and everything else the land produced would be stored in his barn and eaten off his plates on his table; but for some reason he simply couldn’t grasp – nobody had told him what it was, because either you knew or you didn’t – he didn’t have the option of living here in this house; it was like walking on water or flying in the air, it simply couldn’t be done.
‘So you say,
’ Poldarn replied. ‘And we won’t go into all that again, it made my head hurt the last time we talked about it. So let’s put it this way: if you were me, what do you think you’d be likely to be doing, right now?’
Eyvind frowned, as if he’d been asked a difficult question about a subject he’d never considered before. ‘Well,’ he said, as a particularly loud clang echoed across the yard from the direction of the forge, ‘that, probably. Having a nasty accident, by the sound of it.’
‘I see,’ Poldarn muttered. ‘That sounded like the anvil’s just fallen on his foot. Would I absolutely have to?’
Eyvind shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t happen,’ he explained. ‘You see, you’d be the smith, you’d be more careful and the accident wouldn’t happen. Asburn – well, he’s a very nice man and he does some of the best work I’ve ever seen, but he’s not a smith. Little wonder if he screws up from time to time.’
He could never tell whether Eyvind was joking or being serious when he started talking like this, probably both simultaneously. ‘In other words,’ he said, ‘you’re telling me I should be over there learning to bash hot iron, not sprawling around in a chair wasting your time.’
‘I’m not telling you that,’ Eyvind replied. ‘But if you’re asking me if I think it’d be a good thing for you to do, I can’t see any reason why not.’
Poldarn nodded, and let his head rest against the back of the chair. It was a fine piece of work; old and beautifully carved out of dark, close-grained oak, with armrests in the shape of coiled dragons. Presumably it counted as an heirloom and he’d be allowed to keep it. ‘Another thing you can help me with,’ he said. ‘That mountain. Is it meant to be doing that?’
Eyvind craned his neck round to look. ‘Doing what?’ he said.
‘Breathing out all that steam,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Strikes me there’s a lot more than usual.’