K Parker - Pattern

Poldarn shook his head. 'It was all sorted out by her father and my grandfather,' he replied. 'I've only seen her once, come to that.'

'Cute?'

'I guess you could say that, yes.'

'That's good. They're all as tricksy as snakes and bad-tempered, but if you've got to marry one, cute's better than ugly. Course, cute don't last, and then all you've got is the tricksiness and the bad temper. Still, better than nothing, I reckon.'

Poldarn grinned. 'You're not married, then.'

'Was married, once. She was cute, if you don't mind 'em small. But her folks turned her against me. They never liked me anyhow.'

For some reason, Poldarn wasn't surprised. But it was a pleasant change to have someone to talk to-talk in an almost normal way, as opposed to the strange bouts of communication he went through back at the farm, with people for whom speech wasn't the usual method. 'It was very impressive,' he said, 'the way you were able to get up close to the bear without being noticed. You must be good at stalking.'

Boarci laughed. 'And even if I was,' he said, 'it'd be a joke with all this black shit all over the ground, crunching under your feet like a thousand men eating celery. Truth is, if you hadn't gotten his attention, I wouldn't have had a prayer of getting that close, in daylight and in the open like that.'

'Glad I could help,' Poldarn muttered.

Boarci chuckled. 'You weren't planning on helping me,' he said, 'and I wasn't planning on saving you. Just kind of turned out that way, like a happy accident. Which is good. But don't go getting the idea I'm the sort of man who'd pick a fight with a fucking big bear just to stop some stranger from getting all chewed up. That's not my style, I'm afraid.'

'I've only got your word for that,' Poldarn said politely. 'For all I know, you could spend your whole life going round helping people, and just pretending to be a homeless drifter because you can't stand being made a fuss of.'

'Sure.' Boarci laughed again. 'That's me exactly, how did you guess?'

'Good judge of character, presumably.'

It was hard enough at the best of times to find the valley in which Colscegsford nestled. With nothing to see except black ash, the job proved to be too hard for Poldarn, distracted as he was by the unaccustomed luxury of talking to someone. It was only when they stopped to look down into the next valley along and found no house or buildings there that Poldarn paused to think and get his bearings.

'Of course,' said Boarci, 'the house not being there could be because it burned down or got buried, and the ruins are just under the cinders somewhere.'

They turned back and retraced their steps. Still no sign of Colsceg's farm. 'We could spend our lives doing this,' Poldarn grumbled. 'Damn it, the miserable place must be somewhere, whole farms don't just melt into the ash or vanish.'

'They do if it's the end of the world,' Boarci pointed out. 'Leastways, that's what my grandmother taught me. Didn't say anything about fire-breathing mountains, but the rest of it, the old lady wasn't so far off the mark.'

In the end, they found what they were looking for, after they'd walked past it three times. It was only a thin ribbon of light blue smoke briefly visible against the skyline that betrayed the farm's secret.

From the head of the combe, there was nothing much to see apart from a few chimney pots and the central ridge of one roof (and you had to be looking for them specifically). A river ran down the middle of the combe, fast and quite deep as it gathered momentum from the steepening gradient. They followed its course-Boarci pointing out that if the place was called Colscegsford, there was probably a ford there, so the river might be a good place to start their search-until they came to a sharp bend, almost a right angle, where the valley suddenly saw fit to drop away at an alarming angle. The river, though, switched over to the side of the combe, forced to follow the rather less precipitous western slope by a long knife-backed ridge that pulled it away like a deliberately built dam. The ridge petered out into a flat plain at the bottom of the combe, where the river slumped into a series of lazy S-bends, in the angle of one of which they found the farm. It wouldn't take much, Poldarn could see, to flood the plain completely; but the farm itself was built on a steeply banked platform between the river bank and the soaring bare rock of the western escarpment. If the river did slip out of its channel, the farm would be an island; but it would take a sea to fill up the valley enough to threaten its inhabitants.

'Good place to build,' Boarci said. 'Only it must get bloody tiresome having to carry all your water up that steep slope every day.'

Poldarn wasn't surprised to find a welcoming party waiting for them as they struggled up the hillside. He recognised Colsceg and Egil (who looked at him with a mixture of hatred and terror that must surely have rattled the brains of all the mind-readers in the district) and the gatepost-stolid Barn; Elja wasn't there, but what business was it of hers? She was only the girl he was engaged to, after all. Also included in the party were five or six chunky-looking men with expressionless faces poking out through impressive beards.

'Hello,' Colsceg said to him; then he turned slightly to face Boarci. 'We could certainly use the meat,' he said, 'but there's no work for you here. I'm sorry.'

Can mind-readers lie? Poldarn asked himself. Apparently they could-the yard was two-thirds buried in cinders, and one of the barns had only a few charred rafters for a roof-but not convincingly. It didn't take a mind-reader to see that Colsceg knew perfectly well that Boarci didn't believe him, and furthermore wasn't too bothered about it.

'This is Boarci,' Poldarn said. 'He saved my life by killing the bear, just as it was about to kill me. He's coming back with me to Haldersness as soon as I'm through here. I hope you don't mind if he stays here in the meanwhile.'

'That'll be fine,' Colsceg replied. 'Any friend of Haldersness is always welcome here.'

Definitely not convincingly, Poldarn thought. Still, that's their business. In any event, Boarci didn't seem unduly put out; he just grinned and kept his face shut.

'Thanks,' he said. 'Is Elja at home? I'd like to see her, if that's all right.'

The request seemed to puzzle Colsceg, but he nodded, and one of the bushy-faced men walked away, presumably to fetch her. The others started to unload the bear. 'That'll do nicely for tonight's dinner,' Colsceg said, and somehow Poldarn got the impression that dinner would've been considerably more sparse if they hadn't shown up when they did. The burned-out barn probably had something to do with that.

'You lost a building, then,' he said.

Colsceg nodded. 'The main storehouse,' he grunted. 'Flour, bacon, dried fish, apples, onions-couldn't save any of it. Won't be long before we're slaughtering the stock just to put food on the table. Not that we can pasture them anyhow; they're eating this winter's hay already, and God only knows what we'll do when that's gone. Terrible business, and we haven't got a clue what needs to be done. How about at your place?'

Poldarn shrugged. 'We're not much better off,' he said, 'except we've still got our stores, of course. But we decided to send our stock away up country; at least there's grazing for them there. Meanwhile, we're trying to scrape the ash off the ploughed land so the crop won't rot. There's a difference of opinion about whether that's a good idea or not; some of us reckon that as soon as there's any heavy rain, it'll wash all this stuff away for us, save us the bother.'

'We were wondering that,' Barn interrupted. 'They had rain over at Lyatsbridge.'

Poldarn nodded. 'From what I gather, getting rid of the ash was the least of their problems.'