K Parker - Pattern

It's not like I've done anything clever or unusual. Bloody hell, if Asburn can do it, it can't be difficult.

After he'd ground up the blade and set a good edge, Poldarn went out to the woodpile and found a piece of seasoned straight ash branch as long as his arm, which he turned up on the rickety old pole lathe to make a reasonably functional handle (tapered, with a knob at the end so the head couldn't come off, and every blow would fix it on tighter). As a finishing touch, he served the grip with twine, right up as far as the head. Then he went to look for Boarci.

'Yeah, it's all right,' Boarci said, waggling it up and down in his hand. 'Ugly as hell, but who cares so long as it cuts and doesn't bust on me first time I use it. I liked the old one better, though. And this bloody string'll give me blisters.'

'Tough,' Poldarn said. 'It's like that so it won't get slippery with sweat and fly out of your hand.'

Boarci shook his head. 'My hands don't sweat,' he said. 'But it was a nice thought, I guess. Still, I'll strip that off when I've got a moment. A useful bit of string's worth having.'

Poldarn wasn't unduly impressed by that; so he retreated to the hayloft over the stables, where he could be sure of being out of the way for a while. It was dark there, but pleasantly warm, and he liked the smell of hay. He lay down with his hands behind his head, and tried to make sense of what had just happened in the forge.

Certainly, for a moment at least, he'd been somebody different, but he couldn't say for sure whether it had been someone else entirely or an extra part of himself that he hadn't known about (like a child growing up in a big house who finds his way into the attic for the first time). By way of experiment, he tried to think of a complicated piece of ironwork-the man-sized free-standing candleholder in the main hall was the first thing that came to mind-and settled down to figure out how he'd go about making it. He imagined a stack of iron bars, and tried to picture himself working them down, drawing out and swaging and jumping up and welding them until they became a finished piece of work. At first it was difficult, almost impossible to hold the shapes in his mind, but gradually Poldarn found that if he concentrated hard enough on the image, the pictures materialised behind his eyes, like the afterglow of the white-hot iron, and he knew that if he relied on instinct and let his hands and eyes do the work, he'd be able to make the wretched thing eventually. That set him speculating: was that how they read each others' minds, by staring with an extra eye until they could see what they were looking for?

'Something like that,' said a voice in the darkness. This time, Poldarn knew there wasn't anybody there, so he wasn't too worried. It was a girl's voice; he wasn't very good at identifying people's ages by their voices, but he was prepared to hazard a guess at somewhere between sixteen and twenty-four. 'Actually, it's easier than that, once you get used to it. Like walking; it takes you six months of desperate effort when you're a little child, and then you just stop thinking about it for years and years, until you're old and it gets to be a dreadful pain again.' The voice hesitated. 'That's not what I meant,' it continued, 'because I didn't mean that we have trouble hearing each other as we get older, I don't know why I said that last bit. I think it was the symmetry of it that took my fancy. But you can forget all that.'

'Thank you,' Poldarn said gravely. 'Forget what?'

'Well, all the-' The voice sighed. 'Don't tease,' it said. 'You never used to tease, it gets me flustered. That's a real boy thing, teasing.'

'I'm sorry,' Poldarn replied. 'I won't do it again. Would you mind telling me who you are, by the way? I'm sure I should know you, but I've forgotten.'

The voice tutted. 'More teasing. If you don't stop, I'm leaving.'

'No, really.' Poldarn sighed. 'It's too complicated to explain, but I promise you, I really don't remember-'

He stopped. The voice was giggling. 'My turn to tease you,' it explained. 'Yes, of course I know about you losing your memory, I was there at the time, I saw you. You didn't see me, of course. My name's Herda.'

Poldarn listened to the sound of the name, but it didn't mean anything at all to him. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

'Quite all right, I'm not offended or anything. Actually, I'm Elja's mother.'

'Oh. But I thought she was dead.'

'Well, of course I'm dead, silly' The voice laughed. 'I've been dead for nineteen years-I died when Elja was born. You know that.'

'That's what I'd been told.'

'Ah, a cautious man, very sensible. But just this once, you're being told the truth. Make the most of it, it's not likely to happen to you very often.'

Something she'd said registered belatedly in Poldarn's mind. 'You said you were there,' he said, 'when I lost my memory. That's impossible, if you died when Elja was born.'

'Oh, you. You're always so damned literal. What I meant was, I was watching over you at the time. Like I always do. Your guardian angel, in fact. Do you want to know what happened, that day by the river?'

Poldarn found it hard to get out the word 'Yes,' but he managed it, somehow.

'Well.' The voice paused. 'You know, I don't really think I ought to tell you, it might upset you. You always were one for getting upset, the least little thing had you in tears when you were a little boy. Like the time you had that pet bird-oh come on, you must remember that, the old bald crow with the broken wing. You kept it for years, in a little hutch that Scaptey made for you.'

'Remind me,' Poldarn said, very quietly.

'All right. It was when you were-let me see, you can't have been more than five, possibly younger than that, and one day the poor thing was flapping around in the yard, I think one of my father's dogs had caught it and brought it down, but it managed to get away; and there it was, capering round the yard and flapping helplessly, and the dog was chasing after it in a frightful rage because every time he tried to grab it, the wretched creature did a flutter and a jump and just managed to get clear. The rest of us kids, well, you know how brutal children are, we were standing there watching and laughing our horrid little heads off, when you came thundering out of the trap-house waving a stick, and you whacked that dog across the back so hard I'm amazed you didn't kill it. And then you got a broken milk-pail, and you crept up on that funny old crow, really patiently, talking to it really gently and sweetly. It kept jinking about and it took you ages and ages, but you didn't lose your temper or give up, you carried on being nice and gentle until finally you got the pail over it; and then you picked it up so carefully, even though it panicked and scratched your face and pecked you till you were all covered in blood. You kept it in a feed bin, and Halder was furious, couldn't think why anybody could possibly want to make a pet of vermin as he called it; he couldn't read in your mind why you were doing it, you'd somehow managed to close your thoughts up so he couldn't see them. That was the first time you did it, and everybody was very shocked, of course, they said it was unnatural. But that's beside the point. Halder was livid, but old Scaptey-he was always so fond of you-he made you the hutch for your crow and you fed it and put in fresh straw every week and you'd sit there for hours chattering away to it-we used to creep up when you weren't looking and listen to you, and really, it was just like you were having a proper conversation with it, because you'd stop talking and crouch there like you were listening to what it was saying, and then you'd reply, and so on. We laughed at you like mad and teased you, but you didn't seem to mind, you said it was our loss not having a magic bird for a pet, because it told you all sorts of wonderful things, about the past and the future too; and then we got frightened, just in case it really was a magic bird, and we asked you, what sort of things was it saying to you, about the future? Well, then you started telling us things that were going to happen, really confidently, not as though you were making them up out of your head, and sure enough, they began to happen just as you'd told us-little things to start with, like when the old lame ewe was going to lamb, how many barrels of apples we'd get off the split tree, stuff like that; and after that, really big stuff-women getting pregnant and people dying. That went on for several years, I think, and all that time Halder was getting angrier and angrier, he said it wasn't right and no good would come of it, you were teaching the rest of us bad ways and all sorts of other dreadful things, and he was really worried because whenever he tried to tell you off, you'd close your mind up tight, like a box, and nobody could see what you were thinking at all. So he decided he'd have to get rid of the bird, but he couldn't bring himself to do it openly, because he knew you'd be so angry. Are you sure you don't remember this?'