Pattern

'That's exactly what I want too,' Eyvind said, obviously relieved. 'It's very bad that something like this had to happen, but it's good that we're able to deal with it in a reasonable manner, like sensible people.'

It took a fair amount of ingenuity and patience to get the beef barrels loaded onto the trap, and even more to rig up frames so that the horses could carry the oats and the rest of the stuff. But they managed it somehow, and found a way to fasten the horses' leading rein to the bed of the trap. 'Take it slowly and you should be all right,' the man who'd done the fixing told him. 'And they're good steady horses, shouldn't give you any trouble on the way back.'

The last horse in the string carried Boarci's body, slung over the saddle like a carpet or other saleable merchandise. As for his few possessions, Poldarn stowed them in between the barrels in the trap; all except Boarci's axe, the rather scruffy one Poldarn had made for him before they left Ciartanstead; Poldarn tucked it through his belt and drew his coat round it to conceal it.

His journey home was quick and uneventful, and he arrived at Poldarn's Forge in mid-afternoon. They were surprised to see him back so soon. They were even more surprised to see the horses and the trap. They asked where Boarci was.

'He's dead,' Poldarn replied, easing himself off the trap box. He was painfully stiff after several days driving a trap with defective suspension, and the last thing he wanted to do was talk to anybody or explain anything. Clearly, though, he had no choice. 'He was killed by one of Eyvind's people.' (He didn't say who, or that the killer had been a Haldersness man. Best to keep it simple, for now.)

The household received the news in stunned silence, pretty much as Poldarn had expected. By now it was pretty apparent that killings-homicide, murder, whatever you chose to call it-simply didn't happen here. It was as if he'd told them that the sky had opened and Boarci had been lifted up into the courts of heaven on the back of a snow-white eagle. 'It was partly his fault,' he went on. 'Apparently, someone saw him taking that barrel; they started to grab hold of him, he lashed out with his axe and stoved somebody's head in; then he tried to get away and fell on a hay-fork somebody happened to be holding. It was more of an accident, really.'

Now at least they believed him, but they still couldn't understand. 'Then what happened?' Elja asked.

Poldarn sighed, and sat down on the porch. 'Oh, Eyvind offered compensation for him, and they gave us some barrels of beef and oats, plus the horses and the trap. Then I came home.'

Raffen had noticed the corpse-sized lump under a blanket, slung over the back of one of the horses. He didn't say anything, but pretty soon they were all staring at it.

'Anyway,' Poldarn went on, 'that's about the size of it. There's some cloth, too, and some blankets-useful stuff. Oh, and his things, everything they took from him when they moved in. Would someone else mind doing the unloading? I'm dead on my feet.'

Automatically, Raffen and Asburn slipped away and set to work. The rest of the household stayed exactly where they were, silent and motionless, like tools on a rack. Poldarn decided he couldn't be doing with any more of that, so he went inside and lay down on the bed. Very soon he was fast asleep.

As he slept, he found himself once again on the box of the trap; except that it was now a cart, and the back was full of dead crows. He couldn't imagine what he could be doing (that in itself had a familiar feel to it) carting a load of carrion down what appeared to be a long, straight, dusty road across a dry moor; but he knew that, just beyond the ridge to his left, the moor fell away steeply into the Bohec valley, and that his job was to deliver his cargo to the Falx house in Mael Bohec. That made sense; after all, he was just a courier, it wasn't his business to know what he was carrying or why.

The crows were talking behind his back, which was annoying, but he couldn't be bothered to make anything of it.

'What about you?' one of them said. 'You're new, aren't you?'

'Just got in,' another one replied. The voice was, of course, familiar.

'What happened to you, then?' asked a third voice.

'My own silly fault,' said the voice he recognised. 'Tried to start a fight where I was surrounded. Got jabbed in the neck with a fork, would you believe. Bloody ridiculous way to die, but there it is.'

Several of the crows cackled, but the first voice said gravely: 'I never heard where there was a good way. Doesn't matter, anyhow. Here we all are, and there's an end to it.'

'True enough,' the familiar voice said. 'So, how about you?'

'Oh, I just keeled over and turned up my toes,' the first voice said; and it too was familiar, now that he thought about it. 'Died of a broken heart, you could say, though really it was just overdoing it. That and the worry, with the mountain blowing up and all. Tried to do more than was good for me at my age.'

'Accident, then?' asked the second voice.

'Misadventure,' the first voice replied, 'same as you. Same as the rest of us, if the truth be told. Like, he didn't kill any of us because he hated us, or anything like that. No, we just happened to get in the way, or we were soldiers in a battle trying to do our job, and met him trying to do his, or we were living in a city that had to be burned down and all the people killed so there'd be no witnesses. He never kills anybody for a bad reason, such as because he hates them. Mostly he doesn't even want to hurt them, particularly. We all just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

'It's usually to do with what side you're on,' put in another voice. 'It's like we're on one side, wanting to eat the corn or the peas or whatever, and he's on the other side, wanting to keep 'em safe. Or else we're defending our homes or our friends or our leaders, whatever, and he's on the attacking side. Nothing personal in it, it's just the way things are.'

'Sounds fair enough to me,' commented the second voice. 'Sure are a lot of us, though.'

'I think he leads an unhappy life,' said a fourth voice. 'At least, he's always getting into trouble and danger and having to cut his way out again. I kind of feel sorry for him, actually.'

Poldarn felt something brush against his shoulder, and saw that there was someone with him on the box. It was the man he'd killed shortly after he first woke up beside the river, the original god in the cart. 'Don't mind them,' he said. 'They just chatter on. Don't mean anything by it.'

Poldarn frowned. 'But they're making it sound like I killed them all,' he said. 'And that's not right. Boarci got killed by one of Eyvind's people. And Halder's heart stopped when I wasn't even there.'

The god laughed. 'Oh, you killed them all right,' he said. 'But it doesn't matter. You didn't mean anything by it, same as they don't. I mean, if we held a grudge, would I be sitting here talking to you like this?'

'I suppose not,' Poldarn conceded. 'In your case it was simple self-defence.'

'Sure.' The god grinned sheepishly. 'I was smashed out of my head, and I went for you with a halberd or something. Served me right, I never did well by drinking. Truth is, it's never your fault. Either it's just bad luck, happening to get in the way when there's something you need to do, or else it's our own damn stupid fault, like pitching in and wrecking the peas, or it's self-defence, or something like that. You don't want to go worrying about it, or you'd never sleep at night.' He laughed. 'It's all a game, isn't it? Chances are you don't even remember most of us. Some of us you never even knew about, where we died a long way away because of something you did someplace else. Isn't that right?' he called out over his shoulder.