They started with the headlands, clearing a swathe round all four sides. Then they lined out and moved forward, like well-drilled heavy infantry following up the skirmishers in an attack that was actually going according to plan. At first Poldarn made the mistake of trying to make the scythe cut, instead of lifting it and letting its own weight do the work. Once his shoulders and back started to ache, however, he stopped putting effort into it and found he was making much better progress, letting the scythe hang off his right hand and lightly guiding it with his left, with a slight flick up and back at the end of the stroke to make good use of the full length of the blade. The shearing click of the corn against the steel reminded him of many things, some of which he decided he could do without remembering, but once he'd got the hang of the job he found it came easily, as easily as killing crows. As the day wore on and the sun started to chafe his skin he found himself stopping to whet his blade rather more often than it needed. But he wasn't the only one by any means; he reckoned it'd be safe to bet that by the time the scythes were put away for the night, they'd be considerably sharper than they'd been when they started work.
After the midday break, Poldarn handed his scythe over to Raffen and took his turn at stacking and binding; it was harder work, but simpler, and he decided that on balance he preferred it. Not only that; but it gave him a chance to watch a true artist at work, and that was something he enjoyed.
Raffen was good at cutting. He knew how to read the lie of each swathe he cut, so that where the stems were bent or drooping he moved his feet and altered his angle of attack, always taking full advantage of the angle and the curve of the cutting edge. As he studied Raffen's technique, it seemed to him as though Raffen wasn't cutting the corn; the corn was crowding up against the scythe and cutting itself. There seemed to be no effort in the procedure, only the bare minimum of movement in the forward and back strokes. It was like religion as practised by the sword-monks-the draw, the cut, the follow-through, the return to rest that set up the next cut perfectly. Definitely there was religion in the way Raffen sliced and moved on, and every stem he cut through was a sacrifice, exactly the way it was with the monks of Deymeson. Poldarn wondered about that. Was that the secret of religion, a measured and controlled process of severing, separating the good from the evil, the stem from the root, the wheat from the chaff? He'd always assumed that the monks cut and sliced because their, enemies had to be dealt with, that the objects of their swords were the weeds, not the wheat. But suppose that was wrong, and that the very act of drawing steel through matter was the essence of religion, that the sacrifice was what counted, not the victim. It was an intriguing hypothesis, particularly when transferred to the killing of crows, or other living things traditionally slaughtered in the open field, in the name of some cause.
Maybe, he thought as he bent and gathered and knotted, maybe the difference lay in the picking-up afterwards; and he couldn't help thinking of the old women in black who'd flocked round the carrion after that battle in the river, when he'd saved the life of a wounded soldier. Perhaps the purpose of the battle was the carrion, an equitable means of distributing wealth among the rural poor; in which case it was not religion to drive off the old women or kill the crows, since he had no use for the bodies and the crows themselves were the appointed beneficiaries of slaughter. That, or the crow-killer was doubly blessed, since he preyed on the predators who fed upon the dead. Perhaps that latter function was the proper office of a god, in his capacity as the ultimate remainder-man of all mortality.
Of course, a god would know that kind of thing without having to stop and figure it out from first principles; much as he'd turned out to know how to handle a scythe, or a sword, or a small stone, or a four-pound straight-peen hammer. That brought him back to the old question, like a man wandering round in circles in a thick fog: what did he know by light of nature and what was simply seeping through from his bottled and caulked store of memories, and were the gods omniscient only because they were remembering it all from the last time they'd swooped round in their endless circling over the world? Once he reached that point, Poldarn decided to give it up and think about something else.
For some reason, however, the sword-monks stayed in the back of his mind all the rest of that day, and he found himself following up that line of thought to Copis, who had been their loyal servant and spy, and who was carrying his child; in fact (he tried to figure out the dates), wasn't she due any time now? And what would become of his son or daughter, whose mother he hadn't seen since she'd tried to kill him in the ruins of Deymeson? He shook his head at that. How many wives and children had he got, for God's sake? Who and where were they, and how had he happened to come by them? Some girl had been the reason why he'd left home in the first place; then there was Tazencius's daughter, and apparently he'd been genuinely fond of her, according to her father; and Copis, of course, and now Elja. The thought of so much activity in that field of endeavour appalled him rather, and what they'd all seen in him he couldn't begin to imagine. Still, it made him grin as he stooped over the fallen corn; maybe he'd taken rather too many people out of the world in his time, but by all accounts he'd done his best to make up for it by replacing them with his own offspring. Very appropriate, he decided; very godlike. Give him twenty more years at this rate, and he could populate the entire world with innumerable first cousins.
Each day of the harvest grew a little longer and a little easier, as the work became more familiar and less interesting. Poldarn's back started to hurt after two days, and was fine again after six. When they were through with cutting they started on threshing, and for several days the area around the long barn was covered in a thin layer of white chaff, lighter than the ash from the volcano and less destructive but just as pervasive. Halfway through the job they realised that they were facing a desperate shortage of jars, sacks and barrels; they couldn't spare the hands or the time to make any more, and they couldn't do without them, either. The best they could come up with was a stake-and-plank silo built into the corner of the barn, all done in one night by a tired and bad-tempered workforce. They looked at it when it was finished and could see perfectly well that it wasn't really good enough; but it wasn't as though they had any alternative, and there'd be time to do a proper job later, after the rush was over. Finally, when the threshing was done and the straw had been stooked up and stored away, Elja told Poldarn she was going to have a baby. He wanted to tell her what a curious coincidence that was, since he'd been thinking about that only a week or so before, but he realised it probably wouldn't come out sounding right if he tried to share it with her, so he told her it was wonderful news and left it at that.
'I think we ought to call him Halder,' she said, 'after his great-grandfather. What do you think?'
'Good idea,' Poldarn replied. 'Unless he turns out to be a girl, just to spite us.'
Elja frowned. 'Well, in that case we'll call her Cremeld, after my grandmother. But he'll be a boy, I'm sure of it.'
'Good,' Poldarn said, 'though a girl would be nice too, of course. Can women be heads of houses, by the way, if there's no son to succeed?'
'I'm not sure,' Elja confessed. 'It's not something that ever happens, because they get married and their husbands take over. But I suppose that if a girl was the only child and her father died before she got married, she'd have to be, wouldn't she? That's an odd thing to ask about, isn't it?'
'It just crossed my mind, that's all. I like the name Cremeld, by the way. I suppose I ought to think about planting some trees.'