K Parker - Pattern

Poldarn felt sorry for Halder; he looked like he was having a long, hard day. 'Well,' he said, 'there's definitely something to be said for that. Let's see who agrees with her. Right, anybody who thinks we should leave here and go somewhere else, stick your hand up.'

Aldeur's hand shot up straight away. Nobody else moved.

'That's that settled, then,' Halder said. 'It's a good idea, but let's try and come up with something else. Anybody?'

Nobody. Poldarn wriggled uncomfortably on his bench. He'd come very close to putting his hand up when Halder called the vote, but he'd been waiting for someone else (apart from Aldeur) to go first. By the looks of it, he hadn't been the only one to do that.

'Fine,' Halder said. 'So, basically we've got two options. One is to get stuck in and start clearing away this ash, the other is to wait and let the rain do it for us, assuming there's going to be any more rain-and yes, I grant you, it looks like it'll come tipping down any day now. The question is, do we all really want to bet our livelihood and our lives-same thing, really-on a weather forecast. Because you know what rain's like, it's an evil bugger; pisses down for weeks on end when you don't want it to, but when you need it desperately, it stays up there and will it hell as like come down. A week, we could probably manage. Three weeks, we're looking at losing the stock and next year's crop. It's a simple bet. Personally, if I was going to put everything I've got on a wager, I'd rather stick to the horse racing. It's easier to gauge form.'

Perhaps, Poldarn thought, I ought to form an opinion on this; after all, I'm part of this household, I should act like one and care. Of course, that would constitute getting involved 'Halder's right.' Eyvind was on his feet, and everybody was looking at him, for a change. It occurred to Poldarn, for the first time, that Eyvind was an outsider too, he didn't belong to Haldersness, he had his own house on the other side of the mountain. In which case, he asked himself, what's he doing here? Shouldn't he be back home scraping ash off his own fields, or packing up his own pots and pans? What's keeping him here?

'Sure,' Eyvind was saying, 'we've got to think about mudslides. The worst thing anybody can say in a crisis is, I never thought of that. But sitting tight and doing nothing, or going and camping out while the sun shines, that doesn't make sense either. I say we've got to get the ash off the pasture and the ploughed ground first-keep an eye on the weather, I agree, but while we're waiting for it to rain, let's for God's sake do something useful.'

People were nodding their heads, muttering approval; even Aldeur, who'd wanted to leave the farm altogether just a moment ago. It was good to see the joint mind gradually coming back together, after the disconcerting spectacle of so many component parts starting to think for themselves. However-To his surprise, Poldarn found he was on his feet and about to say something.

'All due respect,' he heard himself say, 'but I'm not sure you've thought this thing through, either of you. You're saying, let's go and rake up the ash, like we raked up the yard. All right, now ask yourselves, how long did that take? All of you, working together, very hard? Now then. Any one of you knows a damn sight better than I do how large this farm is, how many head of cattle you're grazing, how many acres you've got ploughed and planted, so I'm not going to try and come up with any figures. You can do that for yourselves. How long's it going to take to clear the ash off enough ground to make doing the job worthwhile? A month? A year? Ten years? All right, you do the figuring. While you're doing that, ask yourselves this. If the whole household's out there dawn to dusk shovelling cinders, what about all the other work that needs to be done around the place? I've been watching ever since I got here, it takes all of you all of your time just to keep things running normally. That's fine; everybody's got work, everybody knows what to do, there's no waste of time or effort or materials. But everything's changed now-you can't just carry on doing what you've always done, you've got to deal with this new situation. And, to be honest with you, I don't see how any of the ideas that've been put forward is going to be enough, except maybe what she said just now: packing up and going somewhere else entirely. But you all agreed you didn't want to do that.'

They were all staring at him, of course; but this time there was something radically different in their faces, and he couldn't work out what it was. So he kept on talking instead.

'All right,' Poldarn went on, 'that's fine, we stay here. So let's see if we can't figure out how we can do that, without starving to death or drowning in mud. Anybody?' Nobody moved or made a sound; he really wished he could read what they were thinking. 'All right, then, how about this? We can't feed the stock here, so we drive them inland, as far as it takes to find empty country where there's enough grazing. Obviously, it's going to take a lot of manpower to do that, but the stock have got to be a priority: it'll take far longer to build up the herd from scratch than it would to get the arable side of things going again if we lose the crop. But I don't see why that's got to happen, either. If we're only talking about clearing the ash off the ground that's already been planted, I don't see why that shouldn't be possible, even with, say, a third of our people away with the livestock. After all, we don't have to get it all done in a week, it'll take a while for the crop to go bad under the ash, far longer than it'd take for the animals to starve to death. As for everything else that we do around here-well, we're going to have to look at that pretty carefully and see what we can cut out, if only for the time being. We don't need beer or cider, for one thing; we don't need the forge-sorry, Asburn, but that's two of us spending all day making stuff that's nice to have but not absolutely essential. Same goes for washing and mending clothes, all that sort of thing-I can't be specific about every single thing, because I haven't sat down and thought it all out, I'm just trying to put across the general principle; basically, if we don't need it for bare survival, it doesn't get done till the planted ground's clear. Now I'm sure there's a whole load of other things I haven't considered, because I don't know what they are yet. We can't think of everything right now, there's bound to be problems cropping up that we can't possibly foresee. But we'll just have to deal with them as we come to them, it's something you learn to do when you're living hand to mouth and on the fly, like I was doing back in the Empire before Eyvind here rescued me. As for the mudslides and whether it's going to rain or not; same thing goes for that, I think, as for the workload. We've got to be prepared to get out of the house and onto the higher ground literally at a moment's notice, so here's what I think we should do. Each of us wants to pack a bag-just a small cloth bag you can grab in a hurry, with just the things you absolutely need and no more-and we take that bag with us everywhere we go, sleep with it within arm's reach, so that as and when the mudslides start, we can grab it and run without even stopping to think. Anything too big to go in a bag, that we absolutely can't do without and can't readily make from scratch if we have to start all over again-I suggest that each of us is assigned one essential household item, and it'll be our job to rescue that one thing. It takes all the thought out of it, really; you don't have to stop and figure out what to take, you just get hold of your stuff and the thing you're responsible for, and hit the ground running.'

Poldarn paused for breath, then went on: 'I'm not saying I've got the answer to every damn thing we might have to face, because that'd be stupid. I'm not saying you can't think of better ways of dealing with specific problems, because I'm absolutely certain you all know far more about your particular job or function than I ever will, and so it makes much more sense for you to work out the details, rather than me. What I'm asking you to go along with is the general idea. First things first, get the stock safe, and then the planted crop. Be ready in case we get the mudslides, yes, but don't let them paralyse you with fear, like a mouse cornered by a weasel. Really, it's just common sense.'