Pattern (61 page)

Everybody held perfectly still; it was as though they were unable to accept what they'd just seen – two men killed in a matter of seconds by their own kind. It was the same sort of bewildered horror Poldarn had noticed when the mountain had first erupted, the sort of reaction you'd expect if some malignant and terrifying supernatural creature had suddenly appeared in the middle of the farmyard, without warning.

Quite calm inside, Poldarn weighed up the options available to him. The men who were supposed to be marking him were looking the other way; it'd be easy for him, with his proven abilities in this field, to get past them, take a weapon away from one of them, and kill three or four men before anybody could be ready to oppose him; there was a good chance, better than evens, that he'd be able to get to Eyvind, and he knew he was Eyvind's match with weapons any day of the week. He could kill him, or use him as a hostage, to be sure of getting clear. Or he could go the other way, make for the man with the hay-fork and kill him – that'd be easier, there were fewer people in the way and they were all in a state of profound shock, no real opposition at all. After he'd killed the man with the fork he could take a hostage – really, any of them would do just as well as Eyvind, nobody would be expendable – and get out just as easily, if not more so. Either way, he'd need a horse (but he could demand that, with a hostage, and be sure of getting what he asked for) and a good head start if he wanted to reach Poldarn's Forge in time to organise some vestige of a defence. That would be difficult but – given how well he'd come to know the road across the mountain – by no means impossible. As to whether he should try and fight his pursuers at the Forge or tell his people to get up the mountain and hide there (no chance of them outrunning Eyvind's people, with only one horse), Poldarn wasn't able to reach a quick decision. It was all reasonable enough up to that point, but thereafter it could turn out very badly.

On the other hand, he didn't have to kill anybody at all. It was good to have that option to fall back on, it made a pleasant change. He realised that he didn't really want to kill anyone, or at least not now, under such adverse conditions. If he didn't (leaving aside issues of retribution for the time being) he couldn't guarantee his own temporary safety with a hostage, but he wouldn't be setting up a far more dangerous situation further down the line. He asked himself: Is it likely that if I sit still and do nothing, they'll kill me or do me any harm? On balance he concluded no, the crowd wasn't in that sort of mood; if anything, they were less likely to harm him now than they had been before Boarci was killed. On the other hand, he couldn't just slip away – the men marking him were too close and too well placed for him to be able to get by them without violence; and his own condition was such that if he had to fight to get past them, he couldn't be sure of being able to use only limited, non-lethal force.

So, what should he be looking to do? All things considered, the best odds lay with staying exactly where he was and waiting to see what they'd do next. His first priority, after all, was getting out of there and home in one piece. Killing the pitchfork man would be pointless, since the fellow was just some unfortunate clown who'd happened to get in the way. Killing Eyvind was definitely something Poldarn would like to do at some stage, but not enough to warrant taking unnecessary risks with his own life or the lives of the eleven people at Poldarn's Forge. Finally, on basic and fundamental principles, he wasn't willing to commit himself to a course of action without being at least fairly sure that he could predict what Eyvind was likely to do next; quite simply, he didn't have the faintest idea what the accepted protocol was in a case like this, assuming that there was one. To embark on any course, especially a drastic and irrevocable one, in the absence of such elementary data would be thoroughly irresponsible. Furthermore, there was a chance, albeit a remote one, that Eyvind might misjudge his response and commit a tactical error that could be exploited at some point in the future. With everything except instinctive anger pointing towards a policy of cautious observation, Poldarn resolved to stay where he was and do nothing.

No sooner had he arrived at this conclusion than Eyvind turned round and faced him. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I didn't mean for that to happen.'

Poldarn took a deep breath before answering. ‘No,' he said, ‘I don't suppose you did.'

They'd pulled Boarci's body clear of the man he'd knocked down. Poldarn stood up on the box of the trap, and they made way for him. He went over and looked down at Boarci's face, with its wide-open eyes and slightly parted lips. One more stunt like this, he thought, but it was only fair to say that he didn't think Boarci had intended it to turn out like this. He felt like a small boy whose friend has thrown a stone and broken a slat in the fence, and then run off and left him to face the anger of the grown-ups.

‘The other man,' he said. ‘I suppose he's dead, too.'

Someone nodded, and Poldarn threaded his way through the crowd to look at him. He recognised the face, with its incongruous bloody mark gouged out of the forehead: it was Scild, one of the Haldersness field hands who'd chosen to stay home; formerly one of his own, until he'd chosen to forfeit the obligation.

When he'd seen enough he turned round to face Eyvind. ‘Right,' he said. ‘What happens now? I'm afraid I don't know the right procedure.'

Eyvind looked like he wasn't too sure of it himself, but he wasn't going to admit anything of the kind in front of his household. ‘There's got to be some sort of settlement, obviously,' he said. ‘Normally, I think the thing to do would be to set off your man against mine – we can forget about the theft, obviously, since that was Boarci's business, not something between our houses.' He paused there, clearly hoping Poldarn would agree; but Poldarn kept quiet and said nothing. ‘On the other hand,' Eyvind went on, ‘it's arguable that my man provoked the whole thing by trying to lay hands on your man; your man overreacted, I think we can agree on that, but I'm prepared to accept the extra blame, in the circumstances.'

Poldarn stayed quiet, and dipped his head slightly to mark his agreement. Eyvind swallowed, and went on: ‘In which case, I'd be agreeable to waiving any claim for Scild and offering a full settlement on Boarci – which is generous, I'd say, since he was an offcomer, not a regular household man – with all other issues stayed. Does that sound reasonable to you?'

‘I think so,' Poldarn said. ‘As I told you, I'm not familiar with the way these things are handled, so I'm having to rely on you to do what's right. But I think I can take your word for it.'

‘Good.' Eyvind didn't seem overjoyed at the rather grudging praise; chances were that he felt he'd been more than generous in the circumstances, and was annoyed that Poldarn hadn't acknowledged the fact. ‘In that case, how would you like to fix the amount of the settlement? We can do it here and now, or if you prefer we can find someone to arbitrate. I don't mind.'

‘Let's get it over and done with,' Poldarn replied. ‘What did you have in mind?'

Eyvind frowned, thinking on his feet. ‘What about this?' he said. ‘First, you can have the trap and the horses. On top of that, I'd suggest five barrels of salt beef and five barrels of oats, say a dozen blankets, and twenty yards of the ordinary wool cloth. And for good measure I'll throw in the dead man's personal things, all the stuff that was confiscated when we moved in here. Will that do, do you think?'

Poldarn made a show of giving it careful thought, as though he was doing long division in his head. ‘I won't argue with that,' he said. ‘I don't know what the going rate is, obviously, but I'm sure you aren't going to try and cheat me or anything like that. Mostly I'd like to get things settled as quickly and quietly as possible, so we can put all this behind us. I'd just like to remind you that I didn't start this quarrel, not intentionally at any rate, and I really don't want to see it continue, let alone get worse. Losing a man means a great deal more to our house than to yours, obviously; we're so much smaller than you are, and Boarci was our hunter – he was pretty much feeding us single-handedly, until the first crops came in. On that basis, the beef and the oats should tide us over, if we're careful, so yes, it's a fair deal. I'll be glad to accept it, on the understanding that it puts everything square between us.'

‘That's exactly what I want too,' Eyvind said, obviously relieved. ‘It's very bad that something like this had to happen, but it's good that we're able to deal with it in a reasonable manner, like sensible people.'

It took a fair amount of ingenuity and patience to get the beef barrels loaded onto the trap, and even more to rig up frames so that the horses could carry the oats and the rest of the stuff. But they managed it somehow, and found a way to fasten the horses' leading rein to the bed of the trap. ‘Take it slowly and you should be all right,' the man who'd done the fixing told him. ‘And they're good steady horses, shouldn't give you any trouble on the way back.'

The last horse in the string carried Boarci's body, slung over the saddle like a carpet or other saleable merchandise. As for his few possessions, Poldarn stowed them in between the barrels in the trap; all except Boarci's axe, the rather scruffy one Poldarn had made for him before they left Ciartanstead; Poldarn tucked it through his belt and drew his coat round it to conceal it.

His journey home was quick and uneventful, and he arrived at Poldarn's Forge in mid-afternoon. They were surprised to see him back so soon. They were even more surprised to see the horses and the trap. They asked where Boarci was.

‘He's dead,' Poldarn replied, easing himself off the trap box. He was painfully stiff after several days driving a trap with defective suspension, and the last thing he wanted to do was talk to anybody or explain anything. Clearly, though, he had no choice. ‘He was killed by one of Eyvind's people.' (He didn't say who, or that the killer had been a Haldersness man. Best to keep it simple, for now.)

The household received the news in stunned silence, pretty much as Poldarn had expected. By now it was pretty apparent that killings – homicide, murder, whatever you chose to call it – simply didn't happen here. It was as if he'd told them that the sky had opened and Boarci had been lifted up into the courts of heaven on the back of a snow-white eagle. ‘It was partly his fault,' he went on. ‘Apparently, someone saw him taking that barrel; they started to grab hold of him, he lashed out with his axe and stoved somebody's head in; then he tried to get away and fell on a hay-fork somebody happened to be holding. It was more of an accident, really.'

Now at least they believed him, but they still couldn't understand. ‘Then what happened?' Elja asked.

Poldarn sighed, and sat down on the porch. ‘Oh, Eyvind offered compensation for him, and they gave us some barrels of beef and oats, plus the horses and the trap. Then I came home.'

Raffen had noticed the corpse-sized lump under a blanket, slung over the back of one of the horses. He didn't say anything, but pretty soon they were all staring at it.

‘Anyway,' Poldarn went on, ‘that's about the size of it. There's some cloth, too, and some blankets – useful stuff. Oh, and his things, everything they took from him when they moved in. Would someone else mind doing the unloading? I'm dead on my feet.'

Automatically, Raffen and Asburn slipped away and set to work. The rest of the household stayed exactly where they were, silent and motionless, like tools on a rack. Poldarn decided he couldn't be doing with any more of that, so he went inside and lay down on the bed. Very soon he was fast asleep.

As he slept, he found himself once again on the box of the trap; except that it was now a cart, and the back was full of dead crows. He couldn't imagine what he could be doing (that in itself had a familiar feel to it) carting a load of carrion down what appeared to be a long, straight, dusty road across a dry moor; but he knew that, just beyond the ridge to his left, the moor fell away steeply into the Bohec valley, and that his job was to deliver his cargo to the Falx house in Mael Bohec. That made sense; after all, he was just a courier, it wasn't his business to know what he was carrying or why.

The crows were talking behind his back, which was annoying, but he couldn't be bothered to make anything of it.

‘What about you?' one of them said. ‘You're new, aren't you?'

‘Just got in,' another one replied. The voice was, of course, familiar.

‘What happened to you, then?' asked a third voice.

‘My own silly fault,' said the voice he recognised. ‘Tried to start a fight where I was surrounded. Got jabbed in the neck with a fork, would you believe. Bloody ridiculous way to die, but there it is.'

Several of the crows cackled, but the first voice said gravely: ‘I never heard where there was a good way. Doesn't matter, anyhow. Here we all are, and there's an end to it.'

‘True enough,' the familiar voice said. ‘So, how about you?'

‘Oh, I just keeled over and turned up my toes,' the first voice said; and it too was familiar, now that he thought about it. ‘Died of a broken heart, you could say, though really it was just overdoing it. That and the worry, with the mountain blowing up and all. Tried to do more than was good for me at my age.'

‘Accident, then?' asked the second voice.

‘Misadventure,' the first voice replied, ‘same as you. Same as the rest of us, if the truth be told. Like, he didn't kill any of us because he hated us, or anything like that. No, we just happened to get in the way, or we were soldiers in a battle trying to do our job, and met him trying to do his, or we were living in a city that had to be burned down and all the people killed so there'd be no witnesses. He never kills anybody for a bad reason, such as because he hates them. Mostly he doesn't even want to hurt them, particularly. We all just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.'