Pattern

Chapter Twenty-Three

In spite of Boarci's enthusiastic recommendation, they didn't eat earwigs for dinner that night. By a pleasing coincidence, the first of the migrating geese appeared in the sky a few hours before sunset, and two plump but stupid specimens dropped in on the flood in the yard. They never knew what hit them.

By another pleasing coincidence, Asburn had already made spits to roast them on and a knife to carve them with. It was, everyone agreed, the best meal they'd had since before the volcano erupted, though Hand, one of the men who'd come from Ciartanstead with Poldarn, said they'd have been better for a bit of cabbage and a few leeks. Meanwhile, Elja had found five elderly but serviceable blankets in a mildewed trunk in the trap-house; she cut four of them down the middle and kept the fifth intact for Poldarn and herself. That left them short by two blankets, but Raffen and Boarci said they weren't particularly cold anyway, and if they were they weren't sleeping under anything that had come from the back of an outhouse. They smashed up the trunk and put the bits on the fire.

Poldarn woke up well before dawn and realised he had no chance of getting back to sleep. He felt as full of energy as a child on a holiday, so he crept out of the bedroom through the hall-it was dark, but he seemed to know the way, because he got through without treading on anybody-and across the yard to the forge. When he opened the door he found that Asburn was already there, nursing the beginnings of the day's fire with gentle nudges from the bellows.

'That's good,' Poldarn said. 'You know, I never dared admit this before, but I haven't got a clue how to start a fire. Not without plenty of hay and charcoal, anyhow.'

Asburn grinned. 'I'd gathered that,' he said. 'But it didn't seem right for me to say so, you being the smith by right of birth and all that. Here, I'll show you if you like.'

When the fire was full and hot, they started work. By alternating, they were able to share the anvil and the hammer, one man striking while the other took a heat. Asburn started by making a spearhead, 'so Boarci can go and kill things up the mountain.' Poldarn made three chisels, welding steel tips to iron bodies, since their stock of hardening steel was distinctly limited. The welds took first time without any trouble. Next Asburn made another hammer, a twelve-pound sledge, and once they'd fitted it on a stem carved down from a wheel-spoke with one of Poldarn's chisels, they used it to draw down and flatten out two broken sword-blades: one into a scythe, the other into a saw. The latter had to wait until Poldarn had made a file so that the teeth could be cut; he used a snapped-off halberd point, which already had the right degree of taper. Once he'd forged it triangular, he took a good heat, clamped it in the vice and used his new chisel to score in the cutting ridges. It was slow work; the heat in the metal kept drawing the temper of the chisel, which had to be rehardened over and over again before the job was done. Finally it was ready; he caked the file in mud before hardening it, so the fire wouldn't burn the ridges off as it came up to cherry red. The saw was filed and finished by nightfall, by which time Asburn had also made a sett, an axe head and a drill bit.

'It's getting late,' Asburn said, cutting a trail through the layer of black soot on his forehead with the back of his wrist. 'We ought to stop now, I suppose.'

'I guess,' Poldarn replied. The day had gone unbelievably quickly, and for once it had left behind tangible and valuable accomplishments. 'I was going to make a start on a shovel. That stream in the yard needs banking up straight away, before we get any more rain.'

'That's a long job,' Asburn replied. 'You'd be better off running up a couple more knives for the house.'

'We haven't eaten anything all day,' Poldarn remembered. 'We'd better do that, before we get weak and fall over.'

The treasures they brought with them ensured them a hero's welcome back in the house. Each piece of work was handed round and admired as if it had been dug up from a king's grave. In turn, they had to admire the achievements of the rest of the household. Raffen had been out gathering firewood, picking out bits and pieces from the charred mess of Eyvind's plantation. Boarci had spent the day waiting for the geese, and one of them had come home with him; they'd have to eat quickly and well to get through all the meat they had on hand before it spoiled. Hand and the other hitherto nameless loyalist, Reno, had filled half a blanket with apples, pears, quinces, chestnuts and various evil-looking varieties of fungus. Rook had scooped clay out of the seam in the yard and squidged it into cups, plates and bowls, which were drying in front of the fire. Elja had found a bed of osiers and was weaving them into something, though it wasn't big enough yet to tell what it was going to be.

'It's a shame Rannwey isn't here,' Poldarn said. 'She's very quick at basket-weaving.'

They turned their heads and looked at him. At last, Elja said, 'You don't know?'

'Don't know what?'

She took a deep breath. 'Rannwey's dead, I'm afraid. On the way down the mountain-we think it was her heart. I'm sorry.'

Poldarn froze, the basketwork still in his hands. 'Oh,' he said. 'Well, that's a shame. I'd assumed she'd gone to Ciartanstead with the others. I don't think she liked me very much.'

They were staring at him, that uncomprehending stare he'd seen so often. This time, it didn't bother him so much. The fact was that he felt nothing, except in an abstract, almost theoretical way. Rannwey had been his grandmother, his last living blood relative, and apparently she'd died. To him she'd been a pair of piercing eyes and a blank stare that he'd done his best to avoid; he'd always seemed to bewilder her more than he bewildered the others, and it had made him feel painfully embarrassed. The fact that he'd had no trouble in believing that she'd sided with his enemy was surely eloquent enough. He hadn't wanted her to die, but he was very glad she wasn't here, even if she could weave a good basket.

'Anyway,' Elja said with an effort, 'we're starting to get organised; that's good. Any chance of someone making a start on some furniture tomorrow? Two stools and the floor are all very well, but I could do with a little luxury, like a table.'

Then everyone began talking at once, urging the claims of their own favoured projects and laying claim to use of the tools. As for what Asburn and Poldarn should do the next day, there was no shortage of suggestions. Pot hooks and fire irons, rakes, pitchforks, hoes, mattocks, spades, more hammers, more files, more knives, more axes, more saws and chisels, an adze (Poldarn didn't happen to notice who asked for that, but he was impressed), pots and kettles, rasps, calipers, nails, a lamp-stand ('But we haven't got any lamps,' Asburn pointed out), new hinges for the barn door, bolts and hasps and brackets, and-if there was time-a lathe spindle, ploughshares and the metal parts for a spinning-wheel treadle. Poldarn kept nodding till he was dizzy; there didn't seem to be any reason why they couldn't make them all, if not tomorrow then the next day. It wasn't as if anything they were asking for was particularly difficult, it was just a matter of knowing what to do. And he did, he realised: somehow he'd known it all along but it was only just beginning to drift up from the depths of his memory. Suddenly he was having visions of himself beside an anvil, bending and twisting and drawing down and jumping up endless rods and bars and odd-shaped pieces from the scrap, while someone whose face he couldn't see was saying, No, not like that, and Now you've got it, that's the ticket. He found himself grinning because he'd known it all already, even when he'd been struggling to make a straight nail in the forge at Haldersness; he'd known the whole craft, even better than Asburn did-everything, of course, except how to get a fire going.

He woke up even earlier next day, and beat Asburn to the forge by several minutes. He still couldn't get the fire to catch, but this time at least he knew why. By the time he was so tired that the hammer was slipping through his fingers, he'd made a heap of priceless, indispensable tools and implements, each one a vital contribution to the life of the farm. Wire, Asburn was saying, if we could only make up some plates for drawing wire; but Poldarn knew exactly how to go about that, though he kept it to himself so he wouldn't look like he was boasting. He'd drawn wire before, any amount of it. It was like everything else, easy if you knew the trick. What a difference just a little scrap of memory made.

Poldarn thought about that as he dug a broken halberd-blade in under the coals. He considered the memory of steel, imparted by intense heat and sudden cold: take a piece of hardening steel, heat it until it glows red and quench it and heat it again until the colours crawl upwards, yellow and brown and purple and blue, and you can teach it to remember its own shape. Bend it back on itself and let it go, and it'll spring back into the shape you've taught it to keep. Heat it again and let it cool slowly in the air, and it forgets; bend it, and it stays bent, bend it back and forth often enough and it fatigues and breaks. Memory gives it not only identity, but strength.

Next he considered the memory of flesh, imparted by intense experience and sudden understanding: take a piece of flesh, fill it with knowledge, learning, wisdom, experience; quench it in pain, heat it again in friendship, love and understanding, and you can teach it to remember its own name. Bend it back on itself and let go, and it'll spring back into the identity it's learned to inhabit. Heat it again in horror, shame and understanding, let it cool slowly in confused sleep, and it forgets. Bend it, and it follows whatever force is applied to it, adapting itself without resistance to whatever shape will get it out of the way of the pressure, until in time it fatigues and breaks. Memory gives it not only identity, but strength.

Then he considered the broken steel and the broken flesh. One can be put back in the fire over and over again; each time it goes from intense heat to sudden cold to gradual, accumulating heat it accepts a new memory, gains new strength, becomes capable of taking and holding an edge. Put the other in the fire and it burns away, converted into smoke and ash, like the effluent of a volcano. The defining property of flesh is that it can only be worked once; unlike steel, which, if it warps in the quench and comes out distorted, crooked, bad, can be saved by fire and water and more fire, making it infinitely more versatile and enduring than muscle, skin and bone. Even supposing it were possible to take flesh with a bad set and heat out the offending memory, the result would inevitably be weak and ductile, unable to hold an edge, bending and stretching and buckling under pressure until finally the ignorant material fatigues, cracks, tears, snaps, fails. Memory is understanding. Memory is strength.

But supposing you were to take flesh that could withstand heat, even the heat of the fire-stream that had turned Barn and the old man who'd wanted to help into ash and smoke, but that had taken a bad set in the quench and become warped, distorted, untrue. Supposing you could find such a piece of flesh in a ditch or the corner of a barn or in the mud and blood of a river bank, annealed of its memory until it was as soft as a bloom of virgin iron, and supposing you heated and forged and heated and quenched and heated it, in the fire of burning houses and Polden's Forge and the river mud of the Bohec (as he'd coddled the file-blade in mud so the fine steel of the teeth wouldn't burn; yes, maybe that was how to save flesh from burning)-suppose you could do that, and keep on doing it over and over again until at last, eventually, it came out straight from the quench, filled with good memory and set in the desired shape. That would be the very best hardening flesh. That would be a god.

But he doubted that-because flesh burns, even when coated in mud or wrapped in oxhides saturated with water; a defining property of flesh is that it burns. That limits its usefulness and cramps its versatility, because nothing survives burning except smoke and the ash that covers fields and buries growth. The thought depressed him, because he'd had such high hopes for flesh as a material for the manufacture of useful and enduring things. But then he thought of how steel burns too, if too much heat gets into it, blanching the orange to white; he thought of the welding heat, the incandescent white that crackles and glitters with sparks, at which point it can be joined to another piece in marriage under the hammer, in the brief moment of love between taking a heat and burning. He considered the way Asburn had made the pattern-welded blade, binding together flat leaves of steel and bringing them to the very brink of burning, and how his hammer had joined the many into one (like the mind of the crows, or the people of Haldersness and Ciartanstead). It seemed to him that in order to make a join in steel or flesh, it was necessary to bring the material to the point of destruction, when the skin is molten and fluid and one piece can flow into another, as the Mahec and the Bohec merge into each other and then the sea, at Boc Bohec. Once joined, of course, they can take heat and sudden cold and incremental heat as well as a piece of the solid, and the only indication that they were ever separate is-of course-the pattern: the maiden's hair, the butterfly, the pools and eyes. And that made him wonder whether the best hope for flesh wasn't the coddling in clay but the welding heat, the love of separate pieces achieving union at the point of burning. In the pattern weld, he remembered, Asburn had interleaved hardening steel and soft iron, so that the brittle strength of one should be saved by the soft ductility of the other while still being capable of taking and holding an edge, taking and keeping memory. He remembered what Asburn had told him; that when they first came to this country these people (his people) were dangerously short of good material and so learned the knack of burning and hammering separate pieces of scrap into useful and enduring things; at least until they'd grown strong enough to go across the sea and strip what they needed from the dead bodies of their enemies. Maybe, he thought, the answer to the problem of flesh is the pattern-weld, where muscle and skin and bone are fluxed out and burnt away, but the memory remains in the pattern, the ripples of the pools and eyes, the ascending rungs of Polden's Ladder.

'You look thoughtful,' Asburn said. 'Problem?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'Just trying to remember something,' he said. 'Did you ever come across a man called Hart? He lives over the other side of the moor somewhere.'

Asburn frowned. 'I think so,' he replied. 'Do you mean Egil Colscegson's friend, the one who breeds lurchers? I seem to remember seeing him once, over at Colscegsford, years ago. Tall man, big hands, not much good with horses.'

'That sounds like him,' Poldarn said, 'though I didn't know he was friends with Egil.'

'It was Egil or Barn,' Asburn replied. 'Most likely Egil, because Barn was always a bit timid around dogs. Why do you ask?'

'Oh, no reason. It was him I traded that salt beef with. I was wondering if he had any more going spare. We could do with it.'

'That's true. But what have we got that we could trade?'

'I don't know. It was just a thought.' Poldarn pulled his piece of steel out of the fire. It was still only dull red, so he put it back and hauled on the bellows handle.

Asburn shrugged. 'Come to think of it,' he said, 'if you want to know about Hart, you ought to ask Elja. I think she went to stay with him once or twice, when she was a kid. Her and Egil both. Or Barn. One of the two.'

Poldarn matched his breathing to the gusts of the bellows. 'It might be worth following up,' he said. 'If he's an old friend of the family, maybe he'd let us have the salt beef now and wait till later, when we've got something to trade for it.'

'Good idea. You should go over there and see him, when you've got the time.'

Poldarn stared into the fire. 'Yes,' he said, 'I could do that.'

That evening, when they gathered for dinner, Raffen happened to mention that a big mob of crows had settled on some flat patches in the barley and were making a mess of it.

So Poldarn got up early the next morning and took a bucketful of stones out to the long meadow. But his luck wasn't in; the birds were there all right, but the hedge was too low and thin to give him enough cover; they saw him in plenty of time and flew wide rings round him, screaming and flinching out of range whenever he drew his arm back, until he gave up and went back to the house. According to Raffen, they came back an hour after he'd gone and stayed there the rest of the day.

During the two weeks that followed, Poldarn found himself beginning to believe that life could, after all, be a pleasant and rewarding affair, rather than the lamination of tedium and horror he'd come to expect. He got up with the sun and went straight to his day's work, knowing from the moment he opened his eyes exactly what he was going to do that day, and joyfully aware that by the time he closed them again, he'd have achieved something that would make the next day easier and more pleasant for himself and those around him. He enjoyed the heat of the forge and the weight of the hammer. He relished the challenge of imposing his will on iron and steel, the satisfaction of teaching it shapes that it would hold for a hundred years. He was delighted to find that, as he went about each new project, he remembered in precise detail how to do it. Some operations he knew he'd done before at some time, others he was able to figure out from basic principles that turned out to be ingrained in his mind. Suddenly he could forge-weld better than Asburn, knowing as soon as he drew the spitting white steel out of the fire whether or not it would take. The four-pound hammer became frustratingly light and slow, so he made himself a six-pound straight-peen with a stem as long as his forearm from fingertips to elbow. He found that he didn't have to wrap a wet rag around a piece of heated bar before he could bear to hold it. His arms and the backs of his hands became pitted with scores of little burns from sparks and flying cinders, but instead of yelping and wincing when they landed on his bare skin, he ignored them and carried on working. Elja tanned the skin of a deer that Boarci had killed on the lower slopes of the mountain, and sewed it with its own sinew into an apron and a pair of long-cuffed gloves; he was delighted by the thought behind it, but rarely bothered to wear them.

On the rare occasions during the day when Poldarn wasn't working in the smithy, he either helped one of the others with some heavy job that needed two pairs of hands or walked over to the newly built pen to see to Eyvind's horses. They didn't need much looking after, but he felt an obligation to ensure that when they were called for they'd be in prime condition, groomed and combed, well fed but properly exercised; he felt he owed Eyvind that at least, for giving him this fine house and excellent farm. It was smaller than Ciartanstead but there was less waste-no hills too steep or too rocky for the plough, no bogs or outcrops. Several times, after the evening meal was over and the table (made by Raffen and Rook from chestnut planks sawn with the long two-handed saw he'd forged for them) had been put up against the wall, he wandered out of the house on the pretext of finishing up some job he'd been working on, and strolled round the home fields, taking note of new growth in the crops and the latest tactical manoeuvres of the enemy-the crows and pigeons and rabbits and rats. He couldn't think of anywhere he'd rather be, or anybody he'd rather be there with. Happiness, Poldarn decided, was a simple matter of being in the right place at the right time, with the right people, and the strange trail of circumstances that had brought him there, leading him step by step through the maze from the banks of the Bohec by way of burnt cities and battlefields and ambushes beside the road, murders and plots and betrayals, volcano and fire-stream and destruction of past and future, astounded him by its scope and complexity. Any wrong turning along the way, any apparent misfortune eluded, would have brought him to quite another place in entirely different company, and would have been a disaster. If he'd never left this country to begin with, he'd be a completely different person now-Ciartan of Haldersness, a dispossessed wanderer whose house lay buried under a huge fat worm of slowly cooling rock, conscious of nothing but his own unbearable loss. If he hadn't met with whatever the misadventure was that had stranded him in the mud beside the river, surrounded by dead men whose names he couldn't remember, he'd have lived out a totally different life on the wrong side of the sea, he'd never have ended up here in another man's house on another man's inheritance, which just happened to be the only place on earth where he could be who he was supposed to be. Time and again he tried to reconstruct the course of events in his mind, looking for the points in the story where things could have gone an entirely different way. Running into Copis and killing her partner, the god in the cart-but hadn't she turned out to be an agent of the sword-monks, trailing him before the incident beside the river, being on hand at that crucial moment to guide him along the right path? Stumbling on Tazencius when he'd fallen off his horse and hurt his leg-but hadn't he turned out to be part of some joint conspiracy, carrying him down the right path like the boulders dragged down the mountain by the fire-stream? Very well, then: being waylaid by Eyvind and his companion on the road to whatever that city was, the one ruled by clerks-that was pure chance, Eyvind having been cut off from the rest of his party and stranded in the middle of hostile territory. How easily he could have killed the wrong man that day, or even taken a different road or the same road at a different time or at a slightly slower or faster pace and missed him altogether. When he thought of how he'd got there, like a pilot navigating a ship blindfold through the shoals, he found it almost impossible to believe that it had all been mere chance, nothing but sheer good luck, like calling the spin of a coin correctly a hundred times in a row.

One day, just before noon, Poldarn was putting an edge on a bean-hook when Raffen burst into the forge, looking tired and extremely annoyed.

'Those bloody horses,' he said. 'Bust out of the pen and trampled right across the damned beans. Gould be any bloody place by now.'

Poldarn frowned and put the hook down. 'Damn,' he said. 'You've got no idea where they could have gone?'

'That's what I just said.'

'That's bad,' Asburn put in as he hauled on the bellows handle. 'What's going to happen when Eyvind's people turn up here to collect them? They're going to think we've got them hidden away somewhere and don't want to give them back.'

Poldarn thought for a moment. 'We can't have that,' he said. 'It's their fault, the idle bastards, for leaving them here so long. All right,' he said wearily, 'we'll need to get the search properly organised, we've got a hell of a lot of ground to cover with just the twelve of us.'

They spent the rest of the day tramping up and down the slopes of the mountain. It was hard to figure out how anything as conspicuous as ten horses could escape being seen in such open country, but they couldn't even find any tracks, let alone the horses themselves.

'Which ought to tell us something,' Poldarn pointed out, when they met up again that night at the house. 'If they aren't leaving tracks, it's got to be because they're on stony ground, somewhere up the mountain.'

'Except you can see for miles up there,' Boarci pointed out. 'You can take my word on that, I've spent the last couple of weeks stalking deer in the open without so much as a dandelion to take cover behind. If they were up there, I'd have seen them, you bet. I reckon they've got to be hiding out in one of the little dips on the other side of the fire-pit.'

Poldarn shook his head. 'But that's in completely the opposite direction to where they started from, coming from the pen across the bean field. To get down there they'd have had to double back, go right across the yard in plain sight of the lot of us.'

'Then that's what must have happened,' Boarci grumbled. 'Because it's the only place they could possibly be.'

'Fine.' Poldarn sighed. 'And did you bother to look down there?'

'Yes,' Boarci admitted. 'And no, of course I didn't find them. But I was on my own, they could've slipped past while I was in the dead ground, and I wouldn't have known a bloody thing about it. I've known deer do that before now.'

Poldarn slumped forward over the table, his face in his hands. 'Well,' he said, 'I suppose it's worth taking a proper look tomorrow, all of us strung out in a line so they can't slip by, if that's what they're doing. We've tried everywhere else, after all.'

'Bit late for that,' Boarci replied. 'If they kept on moving after sundown they could be any bloody place by now.'

'Sure,' Hand put in, 'but down there in the little combes they'd be bound to have left tracks, especially if there's been a heavy dew. We don't have to find them straight off, so long as we can pick up the trail.'

'That makes sense,' Poldarn said. 'All right, that's what we'll do, first thing in the morning. In the meantime, everybody just pray that Eyvind doesn't pick tomorrow to come collecting his property.'

Nobody slept well that night, and the household assembled some time before dawn, impatient to get on with the search so that the horses could be found and life could get back to normal. It was still dark when they set off-'A mistake,' Boarci told them. 'We could be walking right past their tracks and never see the buggers. What I wouldn't give right now for a pair of good dogs.'

That made Poldarn think of Hart and Egil, but it didn't seem the right time to raise that subject. 'We'll just have to take the risk,' he said. 'I'm not turning back now. If we pick up the trail and it leads right back the way we've just come, you can say I told you so.'

The search wasn't exactly fruitless. They found a ring of big round yellow puffballs that Boarci swore blind were edible; and a solitary cock-pheasant jumped out of the grass at Raffen's feet, only to regret its bad timing when he brought it down with an instinctively aimed stone. They also stumbled across several unmistakable deer tracks, which Boarci took careful note of, and the ruin of a shepherd's hut, roofless and with a small oak tree growing inside it. No sign of any horses.

'Fine,' Poldarn said, as they dropped down to rest shortly after noon. 'So we can be fairly positive they aren't here. Where else could they be?'

No one replied. It was too hot for climbing up and down hills, and nobody had brought anything to drink. Poldarn could tell that they'd lost interest in the search some time ago and wanted to get home and carry on with the work they were supposed to be doing. He could sympathise with that; it did seem ridiculous to waste their valuable time combing the countryside for their enemy's property.

'I'll bet you they've headed straight back to Haldersness,' Rook yawned. 'Right now they're probably in the stable munching oats, and Eyvind is feeling pleased because he hasn't got to waste three days traipsing up here to fetch them.'

'Who cares?' Boarci muttered. 'If they're lost, let him go looking for them. We should ask him to send over some men and a cartload of lumber to fix up the pen; it was his damn horses that bust it up, after all.'

'All right,' Poldarn said. 'If nobody's got any suggestions, I say we should try a bit further down the ridge, where the rill comes out. In this weather, it's a fair bet they're thirsty. It's the closest water this side of the house.'

So they pressed on as far as the stream that came down off the side of the mountain and meandered over the flat before soaking away into a treacherous-looking marsh. No trace of any horses anywhere.

'Of course,' Hand said, 'it's possible they did come this way, wandered out into the boggy stuff and got sucked in. I saw a cow do that once, in the bog up behind the old house. One minute it was ambling along, next minute you'd never guess there'd been a cow there. Spookiest thing you ever did see.'

That didn't really help matters; so they agreed to forget about the search and headed for home. They were a long way out by that point, and the sun was starting to set by the time they reached the house. Outside, tied to the rail of the smashed-up pen, they saw four horses.

'Of course they could be ours,' Raffen muttered, 'and whoever found them could have saddled them up and ridden them back here. But I doubt it.'

Inside they found four men, sitting round the table looking bored. They didn't recognise them, but they had a fair idea who they were.

'Where the hell have you been?' one of the strangers asked.

Poldarn walked up the hall toward them. 'You're Eyvind's people,' he said.

'That's right,' another one of them replied. 'We've come to pick up those horses that were left here, but we can't find them, and there was nobody about. What's going on here?'

Poldarn took a deep breath. 'Your horses aren't here,' he said. 'When you were looking round, you may have noticed the pen out front. We had the horses in there but they broke through the rails and got out. We've just spent the last two days searching for them.'

The strangers looked at each other. 'Like hell,' one of them said. 'You don't really expect us to believe that, do you?'

'Maybe not,' Poldarn said, 'but you don't have to. You can do that mind-reading trick, can't you?'

'Not on you,' said another of the strangers. 'You're all barricaded up. Eyvind told us you're a freak.'

'Not on me,' Poldarn said patiently. 'One of the others. Look inside their heads, you'll see I'm telling the truth.'

But the stranger who'd spoken first shook his head. 'We don't trust you,' he said. 'There could be all sorts of reasons. Maybe it's just you who hid the horses, and you've had these people out looking for them, believing they're lost. Or maybe you can do things to their minds-there's no knowing what sort of tricks you're capable of. Aren't you the one who knew the mountain was going to blow up before it even happened?'

Poldarn sighed. 'The horses got out,' he said. 'We went looking for them, but we can't find any trace of them. That's all there is to it.'

'That's not very likely,' one of the strangers said. 'There'd be some tracks, no matter what. Ten horses don't just vanish. Not unless they get a lot of help.'

'Listen.' Poldarn sat down on the bench, gently pushing a stranger aside and making him move down. 'We're tired and hungry, we've just wasted two days chasing after horses that don't even belong to us, which you left here without even asking permission. You can believe us or not, that's up to you, but in any event, go away. We aren't in the mood.'

'It's dark,' one of them said. 'We can't go back round the mountain in the dark, it'd be asking for trouble.'

'Fine, then you can stay here. Just shut up and let us go to bed.'

The stranger who'd spoken first stood up. 'He's lying,' he said. 'Otherwise he wouldn't shut off his mind like that, obviously he's got something to hide. He knows perfectly well where the horses are.'

'Sit down, for God's sake,' Poldarn said. 'You're getting on my nerves.'

The stranger hesitated for a moment, then sat down. 'Look,' he said, 'we haven't got any quarrel with you, but if we go back without those bloody horses, Eyvind'll skin us alive. You don't want him for an enemy. Trust me, I've known him a long time.'

'Funny,' Boarci said to nobody in particular, 'I wouldn't have called throwing us out of our own house all that friendly. Still, you folks in these parts have some pretty strange ways.'

'Boarci, shut up,' Poldarn said. 'Listen to me,' he went on, looking the stranger in the eye. 'If I knew where the horses are, I'd tell you. I don't want to pick a fight with Eyvind or anybody else. If you think we've got them hidden somewhere, please go ahead and look. Take all the time you need, make a really thorough search. Tell me what you want us to do to prove to you that we haven't got them, and we'll do it. Now, is that fair, or what?'

The stranger pulled a tragic face. 'I can't go back and tell him that,' he said. 'The bloody things have got to be somewhere. For God's sake, quit fooling around. This sort of thing just doesn't happen here.'

'I know why we couldn't find them,' put in one of the other strangers. 'It's damned obvious, when you think about it. Like, when we left them here they didn't have any food. They've killed them and eaten them, for sure.'

Poldarn would have laughed out loud, except that he remembered what Boarci had said on the first evening. 'Don't be ridiculous,' he said. 'We wouldn't do that.'

'Oh really?' The stranger leant forward across the table. 'So what have you been eating, then? Tell me that.'

'Roast venison, mostly,' Boarci said with a yawn. 'Also goose, duck, pheasant, stuff like that. Better than what you've been eating, I'll bet. What's for dinner at Haldersness these days, boys? Porridge and onions?'

The expression on the strangers' faces suggested that Boarci was probably right. 'Bullshit,' one of them said. 'There's no game in this valley; I lived here all my life, never seen a deer closer than a mile away.'

Boarci grinned. 'That I can believe,' he said. 'You're too fat and dumb to get closer than a mile to any deer, unless it's dead already.'

Poldarn scowled at him, then said, 'It's since the mountain blew up, it's driven the deer down from the high ground. There's quite a lot of them about, thank God. Otherwise yes, we'd have had a hard time of it. If you like, I'll take you out back and you can see the bones in the midden.'

'Sure,' the stranger muttered. 'Horse bones. Maybe we can take a few back to Eyvind. He'd be interested in seeing them, I'll bet.'

'If he's so dumb he can't tell horse bones from deer bones-' Boarci started to say, but Poldarn interrupted him with a furious glare. 'Once and for all,' he said, 'we haven't eaten your goddamned horses. We haven't hidden them away, we don't know where they are, otherwise we'd give them to you and get you out of our lives. That's the truth, and you can tell Eyvind what the hell you like.' He stood up, and the rest of his household stood up with him. 'Now,' he went on, 'you're welcome to stay the night here, in the barn, or you can be on your way tonight, whichever you like. Meanwhile, we're very tired and we want to have our dinner and go to bed.'

The strangers looked at each other. 'You're making a big mistake,' one of them said.

'Maybe,' Poldarn replied. 'Don't suppose it'd be the first time, or the last. But my offer still stands: you tell us what we've got to do to convince you and we'll do it. But if you aren't going to take me up on it, you can go to the barn, or you can set off home. Is that clear?'

After a long pause the strangers stood up, all but one of them. He folded his arms across his chest and said, 'I'm not budging from here till you tell us what you've done with the horses.'

His companions shifted uneasily, and one of them gestured to him to get up. He ignored the signals and pulled a face that was presumably intended to express irresistible resolve, though Poldarn reckoned it just looked silly.

'Come on, Terfin,' one of the other strangers said. 'Let Eyvind deal with these clowns-it's not worth it.'

'Screw you,' Terfin said angrily.

Poldarn was trying not to laugh; but suddenly Boarci darted forwards, grabbed Terfin's arm, twisted it savagely behind his back until he screamed, and hauled him to his feet. 'Ciartan told you to leave,' he said quietly. 'Are you deaf as well as stupid?'

'Boarci, let him go, for God's sake,' Poldarn shouted; but Boarci was grinning. 'It's all right,' he said, 'he's just leaving, him and his pals. And if I ever see them round here again, they'll be going home on their backs. You got that?' One of the other strangers started to move, but Boarci twisted Terfin's arm a little further, making him howl like a cat.

Poldarn closed his eyes. 'Boarci,' he said, 'you let that man go or you'll need somewhere else to live. Whatever it is you think you're doing, it isn't helping.'

Boarci laughed, and pushed Terfin across the room. He hit the wall and fell down. 'I'm not afraid of any little turd like that,' he said.

'No,' Poldarn said, 'but I am, and I don't give a shit who knows it. You,' he said to the strangers, 'get out now, before this gets any worse. And you,' he went on, turning to Boarci, 'I'll forgive you this once, because of how you saved me from the bear. But if you ever do anything like that again, I'll throw you out of here so fast your head'll spin.'

Boarci grinned; the strangers left without a word, and a moment or so later Poldarn could hear them mounting up in the yard. He sighed, and rested his head on his elbows. Nobody spoke for a long time.

'Well,' Elja said, 'that could have gone better.'

'You think so?' Boarci yawned. 'I'd say we handled it pretty well, considering.'

For a moment Poldarn wanted to hit him, but he was too tired. 'I meant what I said,' he told him. 'One more stunt like that and you're out. Do you understand me?' But Boarci only grinned, and asked what was for dinner.

'Well, there's the pheasant,' Elja said, 'and those revolting looking fungus things. Or there's the last pickings off that hare from the day before yesterday. Or I suppose I could fix up some soup.'

Raffen looked up. 'What kind of soup?' he said.

'No particular kind,' Elja replied. 'Just soup.'

'In that case,' Raffen replied, 'I suggest you make it the pheasant. What're you groaning at?' he added, as Asburn let out a long sigh. 'Got the guts-ache or something?'

Asburn shook his head. 'Nothing,' he replied. 'I was just thinking of all that salt beef we got off that up-country type. What I wouldn't give for a plate of that right now'

Boarci made a show of being offended. 'What, better than fresh roast venison?' he growled. 'Some people are just plain ignorant.'

'I like salt beef,' Asburn replied plaintively. 'All this wildlife stuff's all very well, I guess, but it's not what you'd call proper food. Salt beef, some good strong cheese and a big fat chunk of new bread; now that's what I call food.'

Boarci shook his head sadly. 'You'll just have to dream,' he said. 'Now,' he went on, 'I know where I can get you a nice neck fillet of horse-'

'That's very funny, Boarci,' Poldarn said. 'You could die laughing at a joke like that. All right,' he went on, 'let's have the pheasant and the poison mushrooms, and then for God's sake let's go to bed and get some sleep.'

Later, when they were lying alone together in the dark, Elja asked him: 'What do you suppose Eyvind'll do now?'

Poldarn stared up at the roof. 'I don't know,' he replied. 'From what I know of him, he'd be prepared to leave the business with the horses. Whether he believes us or not, he's got more sense than to pick a fight over something trivial. And he's got all my horses, those and his own are more than he needs. It's not in his nature to quarrel with his own kind, even with a freak like me.'

'Ah,' Elja said drowsily. 'So that's all right, then.'

But Poldarn shook his head. 'It's not the horses I'm worried about,' he said. 'It's Boarci starting a fight with that man. You can be sure they'll tell Eyvind all about that; they'll want to make a big deal about it so he won't think too much about them coming home empty-handed. If they make it sound like we slung them out, Eyvind won't take that well, it'll offend his sense of what's right. It's us freaks beating up on regular folks, it'll get him worried and angry. The point is, he's afraid of me. He thinks I made the mountain blow up.'

'He's an idiot,' Elja mumbled.

'Maybe.' Poldarn sighed. 'But he feels responsible, because he brought me here, and ever since then, nothing's been the way it ought to be. First the mountain blew up, then I was telling people what to do, and now I'm stealing horses and beating up his men when he asks for them back. If I was going out of my way to make him afraid of me, I couldn't have done a better job.'

'Then it's your own silly fault,' Elja said. 'Next time, think carefully before you go setting off any volcanoes.'

Poldarn shifted, but he couldn't get comfortable. The blanket felt hot and heavy. 'I wish I understood him better,' he said. 'It's like I can see one half of him but not the other. This is all going wrong, just when I thought I was making some sense of it.'

Elja yawned, and pulled the blanket over to her side of the bed. 'Shut up and go to sleep,' she said.