Pattern (10 page)

(
There was a crow in this dream; but it was floating on top of the hot air rising from the fire, a long way out of stone-throwing range. It called to him in crow language, but he couldn't understand what it was saying. Its presence implied that he was still dreaming, though he could distinctly remember having woken up. Were there really such things as crows when he was awake? Or were they some species of fabulous beast, the sort you can only believe in when you're dreaming
?)

From the courtyard he had a good view of the problem. At some point during the night, the enemy had got tired of lobbing stones and arrows over the wall into an empty square with nothing left in it to break or hurt and had started sending over firepots instead. Most of them had smashed harmlessly on the flagstones and burnt themselves out – throughout the attack, he'd been convinced that his greatest asset and ally was the enemy's chief engineer, who clearly couldn't read a scale or set an accurate trajectory if his life depended on it – but one or two had overshot the yard completely and pitched on the vestry slates, where their burning oil could drip through the cracks made by their impact into the roof space below. It was a pity, all things considered, that the monks had decided to use the roof space to store a thousand years' worth of archives.

‘I say let it burn,' said the ranking engineer, third from the top in the chain of command and clearly not happy at being woken up in the middle of the night. ‘After all, it's freestanding – even if the wind changes it's not going to spread to the other buildings. And it's got no strategic importance, it's just a chapel.'

He couldn't agree more; but unfortunately he had his orders. ‘Unacceptable,' he said. ‘We've got to put it out. What I'm asking you is, how?'

The red and yellow light of the fire made the engineer's face shine grotesquely in the darkness. ‘That's a very good question,' he said. ‘Once a building like that makes up its mind to burn to the ground, there's not a lot you can do. What with the confined space and the lack of equipment, you're down to a lot of men with buckets. There's the well in the yard, but it's too deep and narrow to give you enough water for this job. You'd be better off with a longer chain, drawing off the carp ponds or the aqueduct. Both would probably be best.'

‘Fine,' he replied. ‘All right, you round up every bucket and basin you can find.' He turned to face the guard commander. ‘You get anybody who can move, I want a chain from the ponds and another from the aqueduct, like he just said. See if you can get up the back stairs as well as the front; if we can tackle the fire from both ends at once, I reckon we'll have a better chance.'

Neither of them looked exactly hopeful as they scurried off on their respective errands, and he couldn't say he blamed them; from where he was standing the fire was already fairly well established, and even a slight breeze would turn the whole building into a furnace. He'd seen enough fires in his time to know that.

(
And yet, when you're camping out in the cold rain and what you need most in the whole world is a nice cheerful roaring fire, can you get one to light? Can you hell as like. Just like when you've got a busy day ahead of you in the forge, and the coal's damp and there's no kindling in the bucket. The fire god's sense of humour isn't his most attractive attribute
.)

They did the best they could in the circumstances, but that was never going to be enough. A hundred men dragged out of desperately needed sleep and told to put out a well-established fire in an entirely superfluous building with an inadequate supply of buckets and water were always going to be wasting their time. When the rafters and joists were starting to burn through and the situation got too dangerous to justify the risk, he called them off and told them to forget it. By that stage they were too exhausted to get back to sleep, and most of them stood aimlessly in the yard, watching the building gradually subsiding into the flames. They didn't seem to care particularly, one way or the other.

‘It was a lost cause,' said a voice beside him. He looked round, and saw the diminutive figure of the vice-chaplain, whose name he couldn't remember offhand.

‘Even so, I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I know how priceless those papers were. A thousand years of history—'

He stopped; not because the chaplain had interrupted him, but because he could sense that the little man was laughing at him. ‘Please,' the chaplain said, ‘don't worry about that, it really doesn't matter. True, we've just lost ten centuries of collected theological commentaries, speculation and debate. Good riddance. They were all wrong, you see.'

He frowned. ‘Oh,' he said.

The chaplain laughed; not the sort of hysterical cackle you might expect from someone who's watching his entire world slowly drifting down in the form of thin slivers of white ash, but the genuine amusement of someone who's fully recognised his own absurdity. ‘Well, of course,' he said. ‘For a thousand years, we've been anticipating the return of the divine Poldarn. Every possible interpretation and analysis and hypothesis, every argument and refutation and counter-refutation – I don't know if you're familiar with the Sansory school of intaglio jewellery, but its main feature is that every last pinhead of space is covered with florid, intricate engraving and decoration, unspeakably vulgar and overdone. That's religious scholarship, only we don't just limit ourselves to the superficial level. We've left our tasteless little acanthus-leaf scrolls on
everything
. And now we have the satisfaction of knowing that everything we ever said and wrote about the subject was completely wrong.'

‘You do?'

‘Obviously we do,' the chaplain said. ‘It's as plain as day. Poldarn has indeed returned, and he's nothing at all like what we'd thought he'd be. All in all, they've done us a favour, setting light to the archive, covering up the monumental waste of time, effort and money. Otherwise, we'd have had to do it ourselves, sooner or later.'

He scowled. ‘No,' he said, ‘you're wrong. Poldarn hasn't returned, and the man passing himself off as Poldarn is really nothing more than a vicious, unscrupulous two-quarter mercenary soldier. He's no more a god than I am, believe me.'

‘Well.' The chaplain shrugged. ‘I agree with you about the man's character and antecedents. But he's Poldarn, no doubt about it.'

The roof-tree of the vestry fell in, showering the courtyard with brilliant orange sparks that were burnt out by the time they reached the ground. ‘Excuse me,' he said wearily, ‘but that doesn't make sense. Either he's a god or a mercenary captain. He can't be both.'

‘Why not?'

Dislodged by the fall of the roof-tree, the cross-beams gave way, one by one, pulling the rafters down with them. ‘All due respect, Father,' he said, ‘but it speaks for itself. Human beings are human beings, gods are gods. If they weren't gods, where's the point in having them?'

That amused the chaplain, for some reason. ‘The truth is, Commander,' he said, ‘you're far too clear-headed and straightforward to be a theologian.'

‘You're too kind,' he grunted.

‘Now I've offended you,' the chaplain sighed. ‘I'm sorry. What I meant was, it takes a rather warped sort of mind to follow high doctrine. It's like doing arithmetic using only the odd numbers, and arbitrarily missing out any figures that begin or end with a seven.
You
live by logic and common sense, which is why you'll never understand theological theory.'

He coughed as the light breeze blew smoke into his face. ‘Probably just as well,' he said.

‘Oh, quite. You're far more use to everybody, myself and yourself included, doing what you were born to do, commanding a regiment—'

‘Actually,' he interrupted, ‘I don't. You've promoted me two ranks. I command a battalion, which isn't the same thing at all.'

‘There,' the chaplain said cheerfully, ‘that's exactly the sort of thing I have in mind. No, the point is, there's no reason at all why this bandit chieftain can't be the god Poldarn; and all the evidence suggests that that's precisely who he is. Of course,' he added, yawning, ‘I'm not suggesting for one moment that he knows he's the god. In fact, it's almost certain he doesn't.'

‘I see,' he said, inaccurately. ‘Well, thank you for taking the time to explain. Can't say I believe any of it, but that's my loss, isn't it?'

‘I suppose so. He's just as much a god if nobody believes in him; and since believing in him won't do you the slightest bit of good now that the world's coming to an end and we're all going to die, I can't see that it matters terribly much one way or another.' Almost absent-mindedly, the chaplain picked a glowing cinder off his sleeve. ‘Which is why there's no earthly point in trying to save the archives; first, because they're all wrong, second, because even if they'd all been totally accurate and every prophecy and prediction had been correctly interpreted, we're all going to fry in a month or two, so, honestly, who cares? Still.' He shrugged his lean shoulders. ‘My order has just lost its memory,' he said. ‘From now on, for the very short time remaining to us, we don't know who we are, what we stand for, what we've said or done for the last thousand years. All that's left of us is us, and that simply isn't sufficient to justify our existence.'

He wished he hadn't got caught up in this conversation; the longer it went on, the more he could feel it oozing in over the tops of his boots. ‘Well,' he said, ‘if you're right about the end of the world and all that nonsense, pretty soon you won't have an existence to justify, and the problem won't arise.'

‘True. And at times like this, it's a great comfort, believe me.'

The last of the girts and stays collapsed in a flurry of hot embers, filling the sky with spots of fire, like a volcano. It was obvious that the chaplain had come badly unstuck – hardly surprising, in the circumstances – and although he was talking in the most rational, lecture-to-first-years voice, all that was coming out of his mouth was half-digested drivel. On a basic infantry brigadier's pay of ninety quarters a month plus five quarters armour allowance, he wasn't paid enough to listen to elderly academics assuring him that the world was going to be burned to cold ashes before Harvest Festival.

‘Anyway,' he said, ‘I'll certainly bear that in mind. Still, just in case you're wrong, I suppose I'd better see about this fire.'

‘Certainly,' the chaplain answered. ‘You go right ahead. I think I'll stay here and enjoy the smoke.'

There was enough of it, no doubt about that. Something inside the vestry – whether it was the books or the tapestries or the wall hangings or the irreplaceable masterpieces of eighth-century religious painting – was spewing out rolling black clouds of the stuff, foul-smelling and probably very bad for your health if you breathed in too much of it. Not that there was anything he could do now, needless to say, but he very much wanted to get away from the chaplain; so he walked slowly towards the empty door frame where the bronze double gates had been.

Someone was yelling to him. He looked round and saw a young first lieutenant, whose name eluded him for the moment.

‘Problem, sir,' the kid panted, wheezing like an old man. ‘My platoon was on the bucket end in the south chapel when the roof came down. We were all accounted for except one. Now we've found him.'

‘So?'

‘It's where we found him,' the kid replied. ‘He must've been in the Lady chapel when the roof fell in, and now he's got a rafter across his leg and can't shift.'

He thought for a moment: Lady chapel. Oh yes. No mouldy old books in there, but there'd been a pair of very nice gold candlesticks, a complete service of silver communion ware, and of course the offertory chest as well. All irreplaceable works of art, that went without saying, and it was very brave and heroic of the soldier to go back in there and try and save them for posterity, but now, thanks to his sheer bloody altruism, some poor suicidal fool was going to have to go in there and fish the bugger out.

Even from back here, the heat from the blaze was enough to blister someone's face. No way he could bring himself to send anyone in there; which left him with precisely one candidate for the mission. Fortunately, he'd just had it on the very best authority that the world was going to end any day now, so even if it was a suicide mission it was all as broad as it was long.

A few simple precautions, nonetheless; he confiscated a soldier's heavy overcoat and soaked it with water; did the same with two empty feed sacks and wrapped them round his face; no gloves to be found anywhere, of course, until someone suggested the bee-keeper's hut behind the guardhouse. The wet fabric felt clammy and revolting against his skin, but he couldn't think of anything better at such short notice.

He posted the young lieutenant in the doorway, with strict instructions to keep everybody else out; then a very deep breath, and inside—

Poldarn woke up to find that for some reason he'd tangled himself up comprehensively in the bedclothes, as if he'd deliberately twisted them round himself.

‘Fire,' he shouted. ‘Come on, the building's—'

He opened his eyes wide. Nothing to see. He was lying on the floor of the great hall. Everybody else had long since trooped off to work.

There'd been something utterly terrifying going on just a moment ago, but he couldn't remember what it was.

He stood up, rubbed his eyes until they could be trusted to stay open, and tottered out into the daylight. Nothing even remotely scary out there, either; all peaceful and industrious and as it should have been – apart from the carpet of black cinders lying over everything, of course.

One of the women came out of the house, carrying a basket. He stopped her.