Pattern (32 page)

Best not to go there, Poldarn decided. ‘Fine,' he said. ‘Thank you. Now, will you please tell me what I'm supposed to do at this wedding, because otherwise it's going to be extremely embarrassing.'

‘Well,' Eyvind began; at which point an unfamiliar twelve-year-old girl came bounding up to tell them it was time to begin, and everybody was waiting. ‘Actually,' Eyvind added, as the little girl led them away, ‘it should all be pretty obvious, you'll know what to say when the time comes.'

Poldarn wasn't in the least convinced, but it was too late now to do anything about it. Quite apart from the details of the ceremony, there were a great many other connected issues he'd have liked to talk through, but clearly he wasn't going to get the chance. He had the feeling of being on the box of a runaway cart trundling slowly down a hill, just about to gather pace.

The wedding was going to take place in the hall of the house – the old house, Poldarn told himself; I don't live there any more, for some reason nobody's seen fit to explain to me. That bothered him for a moment; the house wasn't his now, and since the new house was built he'd been given to understand that he wasn't supposed to set foot in it. No doubt there was a very good reason why the wedding should be held on foreign soil, so to speak. If Halder had still been alive, where would they have held the wedding? In his house, presumably. Poldarn was sure there was a reason for every detail – that seemed to be the way of things here – but he couldn't help wishing that someone would explain it to him. After all, he was the head of the household, supreme ruler in a society where nobody ever told anyone else what to do, nobody ever
needed
to tell anyone else what to do (except when mountains exploded and flooded the world with black mud). Ludicrous, he thought; nominally, I'm the most important man in this valley, and I'm the only one who hasn't got a clue what's happening. It's like a religion where everybody worships a god who doesn't know he's divine.

The little girl led Poldarn to the door (the back door, he noticed; any significance in that? Undoubtedly, though he could only guess at what it might be) and told him, rather abruptly, to wait there. So he waited. At first he stood up; then he began to feel fidgety, and leant against the door frame. Then he pulled over a log from the logpile and sat down. After a while, he wondered if they'd forgotten all about him, or whether the bride had changed her mind (assuming she had one to change), or if there was a furious debate raging inside about letting an offcomer marry into a respectable house; or maybe they'd all fallen asleep, or gone off to do something else, or died. Maybe they were all waiting impatiently for him, tapping their feet and picking at their sleeves, with Elja in floods of tears because she'd been left standing at the altar. He considered opening the door just a crack and looking in, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do that, for fear that he'd be noticed and everyone would swivel round and stare at him. Ridiculous, he thought; they can't leave me out here all day like a tethered donkey. Can they?

Apparently they could. After what seemed like a very long time – long enough for his left leg to go to sleep, at any rate – Poldarn came to the conclusion that if he was going to be stuck here indefinitely, he might as well find something useful to do, in accordance with the underlying philosophy of the place. He looked around, and saw a big splitting axe lodged in a big stump, with a stack of wood split into kindling, where someone had presumably downed tools in order to go to the wedding. There was still plenty of wood to be split, a whole pile of it, so he hauled himself painfully to his feet, levered the axe out of the chopping block, set a log on top and took a swing at it.

He'd taken aim at a shake-line in the log but he missed, and the axe bit deep into the log at a slant, sending a jarring shock up his arms into his shoulders. Poldarn winced, stood on the log and waggled the axe from side to side to get it free. His next shot was in line and on target, and the log did indeed split in two; no doubt about that, because the two halves flew apart and sailed through the air at just under head height, fast enough to do a serious injury to anybody unlucky enough to be in the way. That suggested to him that maybe he was using a bit too much force; better, probably, just to lift the axe and let it fall in its own weight (which had no doubt been carefully calculated by a competent smith for this very reason). He retrieved the two halves of the log, put one up and studied it, taking care to fix all his attention on the place where he wanted the axe to bite. Then he swung it up, letting the momentum of the swing bring it through its course, and allowed it to fall, guiding it with his hands like a skilled helmsman.

He missed the log with the axe head but not with the shaft; with the result that the head snapped off and shot off at a ridiculous pace, thumping against the back door of the house with a noise that must've been audible at Colscegsford. As he stood there feeling incredibly stupid, the door opened and Eyvind came out.

‘What the hell do you think you're doing?' he asked.

‘Sorry,' Poldarn mumbled. ‘I was just trying to make myself useful, that's all.'

‘There's a time and a place, you know,' Eyvind said, shaking his head. ‘Anyway, the hell with that. There's a problem.'

Poldarn nodded. ‘I had a feeling there might be. What's up?'

Eyvind pulled a face. ‘We haven't got a guarantor, is the problem.'

‘Oh.' Poldarn looked grave. ‘What's a guarantor?'

‘What? Oh, of course, you wouldn't know. The guarantor is the man who guarantees the wedding vows.'

The way Eyvind said it made it sound like the most obvious thing in the world, until you stopped and thought about it. ‘Ah,' Poldarn said. ‘What does that mean? In practice,' he added quickly. ‘What's he got to do in the ceremony, I mean.'

‘Not a lot,' Eyvind admitted, ‘but you can't have a wedding without one, because then it wouldn't be a wedding. All he's got to do is stand around looking solemn, and when you and the girl say your vows, he holds out a sword or a spear, and you rest your hand on it.'

‘Oh,' Poldarn said. ‘What's that in aid of?'

Eyvind fidgeted impatiently. ‘The general idea is that if either side breaks one of the wedding vows, the guarantor's there to make sure they're punished for it. That's what the sword's for, it's symbolic. Like the seconds in a duel.'

‘Really? At a
wedding
?' Poldarn shrugged. ‘Still, what do I know about it? Anyway, why haven't we got one? Surely there's established procedures for figuring out who it's got to be.'

Eyvind laughed. ‘Oh, it's easy. Younger brothers of the bride and groom, one on each side; failing which, male relatives in order. Unfortunately, there aren't any. You've got no living relatives, apart from your grandmother. On her side, Colsceg can't do it, because he's her father, and he's too old. Barn can't do it, because he'll be head of house when Colsceg's gone. Normally it'd be Egil, but he's conducting the ceremony. We're stuck.'

Poldarn thought about it for a moment. ‘It's got to be family,' he said.

‘Well, it should be. But in this case, obviously not.'

‘Yes,' Poldarn said impatiently, ‘but this can't be the first time something like this has happened. There's got to be a back-up procedure, surely.'

Eyvind nodded slowly. ‘Well, yes, there is. Where there's no family, it should be two outsiders – neighbours, of course, but they shouldn't be under the jurisdiction of either side. Well, obviously,' he added, and Poldarn didn't ask for an explanation. ‘Actually,' he went on, ‘Colsceg suggested me for your side, and I suppose there's no reason why I shouldn't, it's just a ceremonial thing after all. But that still leaves us short for their side.'

Poldarn sighed. ‘This is silly,' he said. ‘Come on, there must be someone. Haven't they got cousins or nephews or something?'

‘Oh sure. But not here, they all live a long way away, that's the problem. It'd be days before they could get here, and one thing you really can't do is stop a wedding once it's started. That's really bad.'

Poldarn nodded. ‘And nobody considered all this before now?' he asked. ‘All those people scurrying about with baskets of leaves and stuff, and no one thought about who was going to say the words or do this guarantor business?'

‘No.' Eyvind grinned. ‘If you knew us, you wouldn't be at all surprised. It's not usual, you see, it never happens like this, so nobody thought about it. Halder would've thought about it, of course, that'd have been his job, but he's not here. So you'd have thought about it, but you don't know.'

‘Nobody told me.'

‘It didn't occur to anybody you wouldn't know. Except me, I guess; but I'm not even supposed to be here. I can't suddenly stand up and start telling people what to do – I'm a guest in this household.'

He seemed to be getting upset, so Poldarn headed him off. ‘That makes sense, I suppose. It's a bloody nuisance, though. What are we going to do?'

‘No idea,' Eyvind confessed. ‘Same for everybody. You're head of house, this sort of thing is up to you. It's what you're for.'

‘Ah,' Poldarn said, ‘well, that answers an important question that's been bothering me for a while. So I've got to choose someone, have I?'

Eyvind nodded.

‘And if I make a choice, everybody's got to go along with it? No arguments or people stamping off in a huff?'

‘Certainly not.' Eyvind looked mildly shocked at the thought. ‘Of course, you've got to choose the right person.'

‘Of course.' Poldarn leant the broken axe handle tidily against the woodpile. ‘All right, we need an outsider. That narrows it down to two; and you're already in, and I'm the bridegroom . . .'

‘You aren't an outsider.'

Poldarn pursed his lips, then went on: ‘So that just leaves Boarci, doesn't it? Slice of good luck him showing up when he did, really.'

Eyvind made an exasperated noise. ‘You can't choose him,' he said, ‘he's an offcomer.'

‘Isn't that the point?'

‘Yes, but—' Eyvind stopped, then nodded slowly. ‘All right,' he said, ‘that's fine, I'll go and ask him if he'll do it. You wait there.'

‘Well, but—' Poldarn said; but by then, Eyvind was back in the house and the door was closing behind him. Poldarn waited for a few minutes, then he picked up the axe handle, sat on his log and started whittling back the broken tongue with his knife.

He'd done one side and was scraping down the other when the door opened again. This time, though, it wasn't Eyvind; it was Barn, his future brother-in-law, looking uncharacteristically anxious.

‘There you are,' he said. ‘We've been looking for you all over. Are you coming in, or not?'

Poldarn put down the axe handle and stowed his knife carefully away. ‘Might as well,' he said. ‘Have you sorted everything out yet?'

Barn frowned. ‘Of course we have,' he replied. ‘Everything's ready. Come on, will you, they'll be wondering what the hell's going on.'

They
'll be wondering, Poldarn thought. ‘Fine,' he said. ‘Lead the way, then.'

Though it had been only a few days since he'd lived there, he'd forgotten quite how dark the inside of the house could be. The only light came through the small side windows (which on this occasion were firmly shuttered), the smoke-hole in the roof, and a battery of assorted pottery lamps lined up on a single table at the far end of the hall. Fortunately, people got out of his way before he blundered into them, and at least there wasn't any furniture left in the house for him to trip over. He followed Barn up to the top table. He felt horribly nervous, more so than if he'd been expecting to have to fight for his life (but that wasn't a fair comparison; he knew he was good at that sort of thing, but this was all new to him). He could feel a sneeze gathering momentum just above the bridge of his nose, and keeping it down was harder than carrying newly felled lumber.

Once Poldarn was inside the circle of pale yellow light, he was able to make out a few faces. There was Colsceg, right in the middle of the table, looking worried and depressed. There was Egil, white as a sheet and very tense, his left hand crushing his right fist. Next to Egil was Eyvind, doing a fine imitation of a dead body, and next to him was Elja, who gave him a very quick, conspiratorial smile before tightening her mouth into a thin line. It was that smile that made him think that, just possibly, this whole mess might somehow come out all right in the end. For some reason they'd draped her in bits of trailing greenery – for some reason, for some reason; he'd have given the farm and the clothes he stood up in for an insight into the coherent stream of logic that he was sure lay at the back of all this, but for the life of him he couldn't see why a young girl couldn't get married without having to be festooned with salad. That said, it suited her, in a bizarre sort of way. The dark, shining green of the leaves, reflecting the dull glare of the lamps, emphasised the thickness and body of her abundant, slightly coarse brown hair (and maybe that was the only reason; and a very good reason it would be, if only he could be sure). They'd put her in a plain light brown sack of a dress – somehow he knew without any doubt at all that she hadn't chosen it herself – but in spite of everything it looked just right, bringing out the creamy white of her skin and the very dark red of her lips. Pure luck that she should be so perfectly suited to the traditional outfit, which ought to have looked ridiculous; but at that moment, he was almost prepared to forgive and accept all the outlandish and inexplicable things about these people (his people; must remember that), simply because Elja proved that, once in a while, they worked pretty well.