The dead crows in the back mumbled their agreement. 'Like he said,' one of them replied, 'there's nothing for you to feel guilty about. You were only ever doing what you had to do.'
That sounded eminently reasonable, but deep down he knew it wasn't true. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'but these things tend to happen to me a lot, and there's very little time, always.'
'It's fine, really,' the god replied. 'I know for a fact that I'd have done the same in your shoes. Anyhow, who's to say it won't be completely different next time around?' He leaned across the box, confidentially. 'Don't tell anybody I told you this, but I was you once. Poldarn, I mean; I was the god who brought the world to an end, driving round in my little cart, like some travelling hawker selling buttons. Hell of a long time ago, of course, the cities that burned down then are just grassy mounds now; you'd have to get a spade and dig real deep to find 'em. Take that island you were raised on, for instance. A thousand years ago, maybe two or five thousand, a squirrel could've run across the rooftops from one coast to the other; but now it's just grass and woodland, and all the houses are buried under the ash-you'd never find them again. And in another thousand, five thousand years, there'll be houses and workshops and temples and God only knows what where your grandfather grew his onions, all sitting round the foot of the mountain ready for when Poldarn blows his top and smears a whole new country over the top of 'em. Makes no mind. And that's why nothing matters, of course, because all they can ever do is just kill the scouts. You could fill a whole valley with stones and kill a crow with every stone, and still all you'd be doing is killing scouts.'
Poldarn frowned. 'I'm not sure I understand,' he said. 'How could you have been me?'
This time the god laughed out loud. 'I forgot,' he said. 'How dumb can you get, huh? Of course, you don't know. All right, go figure. Poldarn can read Poldarn's thoughts, because Poldarn is the flock, not just a scout. Poldarn sends out scouts, and the scouts get dead as often as not, but Poldarn never dies. That's what being a god's all about, see. Every time the world ends, Poldarn buries it in burning melted rock, and it all starts over again, each time the old man dies and the youngster builds his house. Houses, shops, temples, palaces, doesn't signify; they'll all die and get buried under the ash. But that's how it's meant to be-hell, you know that as well as I do. The single dots aren't worth shit, only the pattern. Which is why we have memory, in the gaps between the fires.'
Poldarn thought for a moment. 'Often when I go to sleep,' he said, 'I have these dreams, where I'm somebody else. And while I'm dreaming I'm this other person and me at the same time. Can you tell me anything about that?'
'Simple,' the god replied. 'You're an islander, you can see inside other people's minds-which is putting it the wrong way round, of course, but let's get your question answered first, and then we can put this shit straight. You can see inside these people's heads, so you know what they were thinking; it's all bits of memory in the scrap, and you pull out what you need whenever you make something. But that's starting at the end, like I said. The reason you know what the others are thinking, it's because you're remembering, way back, from the time round when you were them. Like, this time round you're Ciartan, right? Well, the time before the time before last, let's say you were Colsceg, or Tazencius, or Feron Amathy; and this time you're Ciartan, but you remember. That's how it's done; no magic, no big deal. Round and round and round again; none of it exists, the people and the buildings and the places, the same way a hummingbird's got no wings.'
'You've lost me,' Poldarn confessed.
The god grinned. 'You ever seen a hummingbird hover? 'Course you have. Now, have you ever seen its wings? No way, they move too fast for your eye to follow; all you see is the pattern, little wings pumping up and down, making a blur where you know the wings should be. You don't see any damn thing, just the pattern everything moves in as it spins round and round; like you've never seen the spokes of a cartwheel spinning, just the blur. And that's all you ever see, the blur, not the thing or the person.'
Poldarn nodded slowly. 'I think I understand,' he said. 'Like looking at a big flock of birds a long way off; you don't see the individuals, just the flock.'
The god stamped his foot cheerfully. 'Now you're getting it,' he said. A god lives for ever, right, so time goes real slow past him; your life and mine, we're moving too fast, so all he sees is the blur. But of course, he's not watching with his eyes, he's remembering with his mind-thousands of Ciartans and Cronans, millions of Raffens and Eyvinds, a blur where they go round. The pattern is memory. Everything's memory, locked right down into the grain of the steel; so, when you bend it, it jumps right back to exactly where it was before. Otherwise, it'd be a fucking shambles; every time a kid was born he'd be like a damn animal, having to figure every single thing out for himself, instead of just learning it. You do see that, don't you?'
Poldarn rubbed his chin thoughtfully. 'I guess so,' he said. 'But I woke up in the mud with no memory at all.'
The god smiled and shook his head. 'You remembered it all,' he replied. 'You just didn't know what it meant. But you remembered. It was all in the song.'
What song? Poldarn wondered; and then it came back to himOld crow sitting in a tall, thin tree('That's right,' said the god. 'That's what I've been trying to tell you, all this time.') Old crow sitting in a tall, thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall, thin tree-('Which is the same words,' the god pointed out, 'over and over.') -And along comes the Dodger, and he says'That's me,' said the god. 'And you, of course, and every other damn fool in the flock. Couldn't have made it much plainer if I'd drawn diagrams.'
Poldarn sighed. 'Then why can't I see into their minds, or they see into mine? That really bothers me, sometimes.'
'Because they're too fast, and you're too slow. You can't interpret the blur, and they don't recognise just the one spoke, not moving. Of course, it'll all be different at the end, you'll see. Well,' the gad added, 'here we are. You jump out, and you can give me a hand unloading this lot.'
They'd stopped in a place Poldarn recognised, except that he remembered it as a battlefield. It was only after they'd dragged out all the dead bodies and put them where they had to go that he was able to get the two pictures to fit, one superimposed exactly on the other He woke up with a start, and as he opened his eyes he heard himself say, 'So that's fine, all I've got to do is not forget-' And then the dream was gone, not leaving so much as the shape of a single black feather behind.
Chapter Twenty-Five
After that, nobody mentioned Boarci again. There was no need to; the salt beef took the place of the venison and duck and hare, and since he'd done precious little around the farm other than bringing home dead meat, there was no need to rearrange patterns of work to cover for his absence. Nobody mentioned Eyvind either, or where the blankets had come from. Apart from a few barrels stacked in the stores of memory, Boarci had never existed and nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Perhaps because the mountain had screwed up the weather in some way they couldn't fathom, the crops came in late and all at once. This was something between a nuisance and a disaster. There weren't enough hands to get them in before they started to spoil, there wasn't enough storage space, not enough barrels and sacks and jars. In the end, well over a quarter of the crop went to waste, though that wasn't as bad as it might have been; Eyvind had planted to feed a full household, whereas now there were only eleven of them.