K Parker - Pattern

Poldarn shrugged. 'Afraid so,' he said. 'Bits and pieces of my memories about this place drift back from time to time, but that's all.'

There was a scar on the back of Egil's hand; Poldarn knew that, though he was sure he hadn't seen it. Only a little one, a patch of smooth white about a thumbnail's width long. No big deal.

'I see,' Egil said. 'And none of these bits and pieces have got me in them.'

'That's right. Not so far, anyway.'

'Good,' Egil said. 'You've changed since you've been away.'

Almost impossible to figure out what he meant by that. 'Have I?'

A short nod. 'You've changed a lot,' Egil said.

'For the better, by the sound of it.'

'Maybe. I'm in no position to judge.'

Poldarn couldn't help grinning. 'That makes two of us,' he said. 'You know, since I've been back, everybody's been trying to make me feel like I was only away for a week or so, not twenty years. But it stands to reason I'll have changed, people do.' He paused, trying to make a decision, then went on: 'Were we friends, then?'

Egil's face had gone dead. 'Oh yes,' he said. 'Very good friends.'

'We used to knock around together? Do things?'

'At one stage.'

A picture formed in Poldarn's mind. 'I think we went crow's-nesting once,' he said. 'I've got this image of us walking across a meadow towards a wood; you were about ten, eleven years old. We're carrying long, thin poles, for pushing the nests out of the trees with.'

'Fancy you remembering that.'

It's not what they say, these people, it's the way they say it. 'It happened, then?'

Egil nodded. 'It was Grather's wood,' he said. 'You know, for his house. A big mob of crows had built in it, and they were flighting in on our spring wheat. Grather was supposed to come with us, but he couldn't make it. You remember Grather?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'Another friend of ours?' he said.

'My cousin.'

Well, that wasn't much help. 'And what happened?'

Egil didn't answer straight away. 'We did a good job,' he said. 'At least,' he went on, 'you did most of it. You and crows, it was like you couldn't bear to see the buggers. Every time one flew past you'd scowl at it, or throw a stone.'

'Grandfather's told me that, too,' Poldarn replied. 'Sounds like I had a real thing about them.'

'Meaning you don't, any more.'

Poldarn shrugged his shoulders. 'They don't seem to bother me particularly,' he said. 'I can see they're a major pest, after planting or when the corn's starting to sprout.'

'Well,' Egil said, 'I'd best be getting along-they'll want to know where I've been. Are you back for good now, then?'

For good, Poldarn thought; it's just an expression. 'Can't see why not,' he said. 'I've got no idea what sort of a life I had back over there, but it's no use to me if I can't remember it. Like buried treasure, if you've lost the map.'

'Buried treasure,' Egil repeated. 'Anyway, I'd better go. Expect I'll be seeing you around, now you're marrying Elja.' He laughed. 'Welcome to the family.'

'Thank you.'

'That's quite all right,' Egil said, and walked quickly away into the light.

Poldarn didn't follow. It was quiet and peaceful in the middle house, now that everybody had gone. He sat down on a broken sawhorse and rested his chin in his hands.

Whatever it was, he thought, it can't have been too bad; not if I'm going to marry his sister. If it was something dreadful, he'd tell his father and stop the wedding from happening.

Could be anything; something trivial from when he was a kid. If I'd done something dreadful here, everybody wouldn't be so annoyingly glad to see me all the time.

Poldarn pushed the thought out of his mind, like a host at daybreak shooing away the last overstaying guests. More important stuff to mull over: the future, rather than the past. Yes, on balance she seemed a perfectly nice girl And perfectly nice wasn't the sort of thing lovesick poets crooned under balconies. It wasn't so long ago that he'd arrived at the conclusion that he was in love with Copis, the lady con artist who'd saved his life, given him his name and briefly made him into a god. She hadn't been perfectly nice; she'd turned out to be a spy working for the monks of Deymeson, and hadn't she tried to kill him at one point? But that didn't necessarily change anything; and Poldarn had thought about her more than once since he'd been here, wondering if she was all right, what she was doing, whether their child had been born yet… Well, that was one relationship he did know about. There was also this wife of his, Tazencius's daughter, who'd married him for love, against her father's express wishes-probably not your 'perfectly nice' type either, by the sound of it. Bloody hell, he reflected, I'm old enough to be her father; what kind of life is that for a perfectly nice young girl? But she doesn't seem to mind the idea.

Doesn't seem to mind wasn't a standard phrase in love poetry, either. Maybe they didn't have love over here, or at least not that variety of the stuff. Thinking about it, Poldarn couldn't call to mind any examples of it that he'd observed (and you'd have thought you'd have come across at least one pair of starry-eyed young idiots while you'd been here; they weren't hard to spot when they were in that condition, after all). Maybe they made do with the sort of absent-minded affection he'd noticed between his grandfather and grandmother, for example, or Terwald and his wife, or whatever his name was who looked after the ewes, the one who was married to the fat woman. In a set-up as profoundly organised as this was, he could see where something as unruly and messy as genuine love wouldn't really fit in: it'd cause all sorts of problems with people missing shifts or even dodging off work altogether. Then there'd be quarrels and jealousies and fights, adulteries and girls kicking up a fuss about being married off to the wrong man, general disorder and disruption of agriculture. The likeliest explanation was that it was just one more of those charcoal things; they knew about it but had made a decision not to use it, probably for some good commonsense reason that everybody else on the island knew about but him.

Not that it mattered, since Poldarn couldn't remember ever having been really in love-Copis didn't count as that; for the short time they'd been together, their relationship had been more of a military and diplomatic alliance, offensive and defensive, against a mutual enemy consisting of the whole world. More than that, it was the next best thing to impossible to imagine being in love at Haldersness. In these parts, perfectly nice and doesn't seem to mind were probably about as ardent as it ever got.

Anyway; it could all be far worse. He could easily have been slated to marry someone twice his weight, with no teeth. He wasn't sure he'd have chosen those particular inlaws, but it was a safe bet that there was some kind of worthwhile property transaction in the background, and it was high time he started thinking like an heir apparent and giving such considerations their proper degree of weight. Mind you, that wasn't easy when nobody was prepared to tell him what was going on.

Which reminded him; at some stage this morning, Grandfather was supposed to be taking Poldarn to see the wood, the one they'd be building his house out of (like Grather, whoever he was). When the time came, Grandfather would expect to find him in the forge, getting on with his lessons. He sighed; but he knew perfectly well that hiding in the middle house wasn't going to solve anything.

By the time he reached the forge, Asburn had finished drawing down the scythe blade on his own, and shaping it was very much a one-man job, for which Poldarn wasn't the right one man. So he found the nail sett, fished a strip of wire out of the scrap and set to making nails-couldn't have too many nails, after all, and it was so easy even he could do it. True, Asburn could turn out a bucketful in the time it took him to make one, and the nails Asburn made were straight. So what; it was the thought that counted.