Pattern (2 page)

‘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 these 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.'

‘Not really.' Eyvind shook his head. ‘Some days there's more than others, that's all. Why, has somebody been trying to scare you?'

‘No,' Poldarn said, ‘unless you count what you just said. What's there to be scared of?'

‘Nothing.' Eyvind smiled. ‘It's just that some of the old jokers around here would have you believe that once every so often – about a hundred years, on average, which means it'd have happened exactly twice since we've been here – the mountain starts sneezing fire and blowing out great big rocks and dribbling rivers of red-hot cinders – like a bad cold in the head, except with burning snot. In case you're inclined to listen to them, these are the same people who tell stories about man-eating birds and islands in the middle of the sea that turn out to be sleeping whales. I thought maybe they'd been picking on you because suddenly there's someone on this island who might actually believe them.'

‘Oh, I see. So that's all right, then.'

Eyvind nodded. ‘There's a whole lot of things to be afraid of in this life,' he said, ‘but an exploding mountain isn't one of them.'

That was reassuring enough, but there was still an itch at the back of his mind, a sore patch where a buried memory might be trying to work its way through before bursting out in a cloud of white steam. Perhaps it was just the name of the mountain that bothered him so much; and because, out of all the kind and helpful people and solid, reliable things he'd encountered since he'd been here, the mountain was still the only one he really trusted. ‘One of these days,' he said, ‘will you take me up there to see the hot springs? I've heard a whole lot about them but I can't really imagine it. Sounds too good to be true, all that boiling hot water just coming up out of a hole in the ground.'

‘Sure,' Eyvind replied, ‘though it's a hell of a climb, and most of the way you've got to walk. It's always struck me as a hell of a long way to go just to see some hot water you can't actually use for anything.' He shrugged. ‘When I want hot water, I fill the copper and put it over the fire. Takes a while to come to the boil, but it beats hay out of all that walking.'