So they chopped down the four sill-trees, trimmed them to length and pared off the branches; 'We'll leave rough-hewing till tomorrow,' he said. 'I don't want to commit myself to dimensions more than I have to until I've got an idea of what shape this thing's going to be.'
The others could see his point; so they left the timbers in the bark and finished off the foundation, laying the last few stones just before dark. 'It'll do,' Poldarn announced, after he'd inspected it. The rest of the party were relieved. 'It'll do' in Poldarn's terms had turned out to mean that the work was irreproachably perfect; corners exactly square, levels checked with a stick floating in a bowl of water. If it had been a little out of true, not exactly right but good enough, Poldarn realised that he was perfectly capable of making them pull it all apart and do it again by torchlight. The things you find out about yourself when suddenly you're the one making the decisions, he thought. It left him feeling a little uncomfortable. Somehow, they'd been shifting away from the gloriously clear picture he'd had in his mind first thing that morning; a detail here, a measurement there slightly adjusted to save an hour's gruelling work with adze and drawknife, but every change knocked on, requiring two slight modifications to this piece or that, an extra wedge or a jowled post instead of a plain one. No big deal, nothing to worry about; but he could feel himself starting to drift, the perfect cutting edge of his earlier clarity gradually growing dull with every expedient compromise. It was annoying, not the way it ought to be. Illogical; but Poldarn couldn't help thinking that if someone else was doing the job, it wouldn't be getting out of hand like this.
An hour or thereabouts before it was time to pack up for the day, a thought struck him that was so utterly horrible in its implications that he had to say it out loud. Colsceg, Barn and Carey were working with him at the time.
'I suppose,' he said, 'it's all right to use green timber like this. Only, what if it shrinks or starts splitting as it dries out? The whole thing could pull out of shape.'
But Colsceg gave him a reassuringly contemptuous look. 'You hear a lot of bullshit about building with green timber these days,' he said. 'Bullshit,' he repeated. 'When my great-great grandfather first moved out here from the east, there wasn't time to season your timbers. It was either put 'em up green or spend six months camping out in the rain. So they put 'em up green, same as I did when I built my place, and you know what? It's still there. You build it right, as the timbers dry out they move together, you get stronger joints and tighter laps, not the other way around. Only time you need to worry about green timber's when you're putting it together with nails and straps, 'stead of regular joints and dowels; and only a damn fool of an easterner'd do such a thing to begin with.'
That seemed to settle that, and Poldarn was far too tactful to point out that Colsceg's house wasn't there any more. Irrelevant, anyway; even the most meticulously dried lumber wasn't supposed to be proof against freak cataracts of fast-moving black mud. All the same, it did occur to Poldarn to wonder where exactly, in Colsceg's view, the west ended and the feckless east began. Colsceg himself had never said anything definite on the subject, but Poldarn had an idea that the frontier lay somewhere just the other side of the eastern boundary of Colscegsford.
The Colscegsford household appeared to have worked up a substantial thirst during the day, because they were heavier than usual on the beer at dinner that night. That was unusual behaviour-Poldarn couldn't remember seeing anybody get drunk since he'd come home, and had come to the conclusion that it probably wasn't even possible: how could any one man drink enough beer to addle a brain he shared with several dozen other people? That night, however, the Colscegsford people seemed to be giving it their best shot, though they didn't succeed. The beer didn't seem to affect them in the slightest, as far as Poldarn could tell; no slurred words or loud behaviour, if anything they were quieter and more withdrawn than usual. If it had been the Bohec valley instead of the far islands, he'd have come to the conclusion that the loss of their home was finally beginning to get to them and they were trying to drown their sorrows, but that didn't seem very likely. Maybe they were just thirsty, at that.
Fortunately, the Haldersness contingent had the sense not to try and keep up with Colsceg's people on the beer, so there weren't any uncomfortably sore heads when Poldarn came round to wake them up an hour before dawn the next day. It was raining, needless to say, but no more than a light, cool drizzle, falling almost vertically out of a blue-patched sky.
They sharpened the axes on the big crank grindstone on the back porch, and set off for the combe, leaving trails in the long, wet grass. Poldarn led the way, with the slabbing rail over his shoulder-he was showing off, but the others must have figured that if he wanted to rick his back, this once he was entitled. Overladen or not, he kept up a smart pace all the way to the copse.
To begin with, they felled the thickest trees, the ones that would provide the rafters, joists, girts and braces. These had to be sawn into planks, and it made sense to bring those down first, so the fellers could move on while the sawyers were dealing with them. While he and Eyvind alternated cuts on either side of the main joist tree, Poldarn tried hard to put out of his mind the fact that he was cutting down one of his trees, harvesting it, killing it; but the thought was too stubborn and refused to go quietly. So far, the project had been all about growth; if the trees stopped growing, would he stop with them? At the back of his mind he could remember a story (whose story or where it was from he didn't have a clue) about the glorious hero who'd been cursed to live just as long as the oak sapling in the corner of his mother's kitchen garden-that had been a strange curse, he thought, because oaks live for hundreds of years if nobody fells them, and of course the hero's mother had built a wall round the little tree and set the household to guard and nurture it; and in time it grew mighty and strong, just as the hero did, and both of them shaded and sheltered their households for three hundred years, until the hero became cruel in his old age and tormented his people, until his own great-grandson lopped his head off with a felling axe, on the same night that lightning split the great tree, showing up the rot that was eating its heart out… He must have thought that was a pretty good story when he'd heard it, full of significance and inner meaning. But lumber is just lumber, and a man should be practical at all times; it was practical of grandfather to plant these trees, and now here was Poldarn, being practical, cutting them down.
After the first couple of hours, he was too weary and busy to bother with sentimental stuff. The tree that was supposed to provide the middle cross-beam turned out to be ring-shaken; exposed to the wind on the edge of the copse, it had been twisted and flexed so much that the growth rings inside had pulled apart about a third of the way in, and great flakes of wood peeled off when they tried to rough-hew it. With luck, they'd be able to saw it cross-grain and get a couple of floor-joists out of it, but that was all. Accordingly, the third joist tree got a field promotion to middle cross-beam. Poldarn wasn't happy about that-he reckoned it'd be a bit too thin, because of the wane two-thirds up-but Colsceg and Carey and Eyvind looked it over and pronounced it suitable, provided they didn't hew it true square like the other cross-beams, but left more of the sapwood on. Poldarn agreed reluctantly but insisted that all the bark should come off, since woodworm and beetle love dry bark. Halfway through the morning, Rook's trick elbow gave out on him, and Poldarn had to take his place on the planking saw, which didn't exactly please him. He found the job absurdly difficult; his problem lay in maintaining a rhythm with the man on the other end of the saw (in this case, Colsceg's stolid elder son, Barn, who was known to be good at it). It worked out well enough, however. The hard part was always the first cut off the log, after it had been felled and dressed and heaved up onto the blocks. That was where the slabbing rail came in; you laid it over the curved back of the log and used its flat face to guide the saw, ensuring a flat, level finish on the bottom that would guide the next cut. As they went, they hammered wedges into the kerf to keep it from closing tight on the blade and jamming it. Even so, it was painfully hard work, tearing all the time at the tendons of the forearms.