K Parker - Pattern

The wood was smaller than he'd thought it would be; about six dozen tall, thin trees on a very gentle slope, next to a flat, bare platform standing on a pronounced mound; a highly suitable place to build a house, though the view wouldn't be up to much. As they approached, a mob of crows got up out of the treetops and flapped slowly, angrily away, like resentful tenants being evicted; not that far off the mark, Poldarn reckoned, since they'd lose their roost when the trees were taken down. Their problem, he told himself. As he watched them toiling laboriously into the air, he felt something on his face and the top of his head; a lighter touch than rain, more like snow. He ran his hand across his forehead and noticed a few specks of black ash. It reminded him of the awkward-to-walk-on black rocks on the mountain, between the snow and the grazing. If the others noticed it, they weren't curious enough to investigate, or else retrieving bits of debris off yourself in public was bad manners.

'Good lumber,' Barn said suddenly. It was the first thing Poldarn had heard him say.

'Scrawny,' Halder replied. 'Should've thinned them out fifteen years back. Didn't seem any point back then, though. Still,' he added, with a sigh, 'it'll have to do.'

It was just a clump of trees, a stand of timber-and then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, Poldarn caught his breath, because it wasn't just that. As he stared at the trees, he began remembering them, only he wasn't seeing them as they had been or even as they were now, but how they would be, one day, one day soon. Just to the right of the middle of the stand grew the roof-tree, the backbone of the house; surrounding it were the girts, joists, floorboards and rafters; below them, slightly asplay on the gentle gradient, stood the braces, sills and plates, with the cross-beams standing out above them. He could see them as trees, still cluttered with branches and clothed in bark. He could also see them as sawn, planed timber, a skeleton of a house (like the skeletons of dead animals and men that litter the ground on a battlefield that nobody's dared go near for twenty years, on account of ghosts and ill fortune); he could see them in place, slotted together, tenon mated into mortice, joints lapped, dowels clouted home, waiting to be cladded in green-sawn planking, or else the outer skin had rotted or burnt away, leaving only the naked frame.

Poldarn passed his hand through his hair. It was thick with black ash.

'I remember this lot,' he said aloud. 'We came here when I was just a kid, and you pointed out all the trees, told me what they'd be used for. We even cut tallies on them, in case we forgot.' He lifted his head, then pointed. 'Look,' he said, 'there's one, you can still just about see it.'

Halder nodded. 'Thought it might ring a few bells,' he said. 'You used to come here all the time, about twenty-five years back.'

'Did I?' Poldarn frowned. 'That I don't remember.'

Halder laughed. 'You came up here flighting crows,' he said. 'You'd sit just inside the wood, just as it was starting to get dark; and when they dropped in and pitched to roost, you'd try and knock them down with a slingshot or a stone. Got quite good at it, too. Always struck me as a bit of a waste of time, but you always said it was too hard to get 'em out in the fields, you'd do better catching them where they lived. Some sense in that, I guess.' Halder shook his head. 'Always seemed to me you took it personal, them trespassing in your wood. Hated the buggers, you did.'

'Really.' Poldarn wasn't sure he wanted to hear about it. 'Well.' He took a few steps forward and rested the palm of his hand against the trunk of the tree that would one day be the middle cross-beam. He could feel it flexing ever so slightly, as the wind mussed up its branches. Then it occurred to him to wonder what they were doing there, at that particular moment. As he understood it, a man only built his house when his father (or grandfather) died, because then the old house would be pulled down and split up. It was as if, by bringing him here, Grandfather was serving a formal notice of his own impending death. Just the suggestion filled Poldarn with unanticipated panic; he looked round, just to make sure the old man was still there.

Halder was looking into the cupped palm of his right hand, which was grimy with ash. 'Bloody stuff,' he said.

'I think it's from the volcano,' Poldarn replied. Colsceg and his tribe seemed to recognise the word, although the only people he'd mentioned it to were Halder and the long-barn hand, Rook. 'I think it's what the big black cloud's made out of. The hot air from the fire shoots it way up in the air, and now it's starting to come down.'

'Figures,' Colsceg said, after a long pause. 'It's coming down everywhere, look. Like snow'

Like black snow, at any rate. 'Let's hope it doesn't get any worse than that,' Poldarn said. 'A few cinders I can handle.' He dusted his hands off, but black smudges still clung to them. Like soot from Asburn's forge, he thought.

'Filthy mess,' Halder muttered, and Poldarn realised he was actually afraid of it-well, fair enough, fear of the unknown; he'd got over that quite some time ago, since he'd woken up beside a muddy river and found that nearly everything had suddenly become the unknown. In that respect at least, he was rather better off than all the rest of them.

'Maybe we should be getting back to the house,' he said.

Colsceg turned his head and looked at him suspiciously. 'What's the hurry?' he said. 'We only just got here.'

'I don't know,' Poldarn admitted. 'It's just a feeling I've got; like, we shouldn't be too far from home, just in case something bad happens. How long will it take Rook to ride to the Lyat place?'

Halder scratched the back of his head. 'Couple of hours, maybe. It isn't far, good track all the way. Why?'

'I just wondered, that's all,' Poldarn said. 'Maybe it'll stop soon. After all, there can't be too much of the stuff in there, surely.'

'We might as well go back now,' Colsceg said.

As soon as they cleared the bend in the river, they all looked back at the mountain. It was still pumping out smoke, but far less than before, and the red glow had faded into a smudge. So that's all right, then, Poldarn thought. But he quickened his pace all the same. The cinders crunched as he walked on them, and he thought how uncomfortable it'd been, making his way over the black rocks on the way to the hot springs.

For some reason, Elja was walking fast too; in fact, she fell into step beside him, leaving her father and the rest of them behind. She didn't say anything, though.

'Well,' Poldarn said brightly, as he felt obliged to do, 'so what do you think of it?'

She looked at him as if he'd farted during a religious ceremony. 'Sorry?' she said. 'What do I think of what?'

'The site. Where the house is going to be.'

'Oh.' She shrugged. 'Very nice.'

Very nice. And said with such zest, too. 'It should be fairly well sheltered from the weather,' he said. 'And well above the river-line, in case of flooding. That's important, too.'

'I suppose so,' Elja replied. 'Did you really spend all your time killing crows when you were a boy?'

Poldarn cringed a little. 'So they tell me,' he replied. 'I can't remember anything about it myself.'

'Oh. I don't like crows. I think that horrid slow way they fly is creepy.'

'Well, yes,' Poldarn said awkwardly. 'To tell you the truth, I don't really notice them. I mean, everywhere you look, there one of them is.'

'Maybe. I think that just makes it worse.'

Well, at least they were talking about something. 'When I woke up,' Poldarn said, 'after I lost my memory, I mean, the only thing I could remember was a bit of a song. That was about crows.'

'Really.'

Poldarn nodded, passionately wishing he hadn't brought the subject up in the first place. 'It went, "Old crow sitting in a tall, thin tree-"'