Poldarn was happy to leave most of the hewing to the Colscegsford household. Whatever their faults, there was no doubt but that they were experts with the hewing axe and the lipped adze, chipping the timbers square as freely and easily as if they were hoeing a patch of earth. When Poldarn surreptitiously checked their work with a square, he found the angles were exact (how the hell could they do that, all by eye?) and there was hardly a toolmark to be seen; you'd think the work had been finished off with a plane. Essential, of course, to have all the surfaces flat and square if they didn't want to have to work twice as hard when the time came to cut the joints.
It took three days to fell, hew and plank out the timber, and suddenly there wasn't a copse there any more, just a huge pile of lumber, all carefully piled with wedges between each piece to allow the air to circulate in the stack and prevent warping. When they arrived on the fourth morning, the crows were sitting on the log pile, looking bewildered. How the hell do you expect us to roost on that? they seemed to cry as the work party walked them off. The fourth day was spent in cutting joints, and by now most of the enthusiasm had worn off. Poldarn got involved in a silent battle of wills with a Colscegsford hand called Bren over a sloppy mortice in the south end house-post; it'd have been all right if Bren had admitted at the start that he'd marked it out wrong, but he carried on working even though he knew the slot was skewed, which was just plain foolish (and typical of Bren, someone told Poldarn later, though on what authority he was left to guess). When he noticed and told him to stop, Bren tried to pretend that it was all perfectly good and that Poldarn couldn't judge an angle, so Poldarn had to fetch the gauge and show him. That made Bren even angrier, particularly when Colsceg started in on him as well. The issue gradually brought all work to a standstill, and it was only after Bren had suddenly got up and walked away that Poldarn and Eyvind were able to consider the problem calmly and decide what was to be done. Eyvind maintained that the post was useless and would have to be discarded; they'd have to hunt around for another piece of timber from somewhere, possibly rob a timber off the derelict barn. Poldarn wasn't having that. They were going to use this piece and no other, and if Eyvind was half the joiner he tacitly claimed to be, he'd be able to figure out a way of salvaging it.
Of course Eyvind didn't like that; luckily he took the implied slight as a challenge, and spent the next two hours cutting a block that exactly filled the defective mortice, dowelling it in tight and cutting a new mortice into the patch. The result, he claimed, would be even stronger than if it'd been cut from the whole wood, and if Poldarn wasn't entirely convinced by that, he could at least see that the job was good enough and would hold.
Things got better after that. Bren wandered back an hour or so after Eyvind had finished his patch; needless to say, the rest of the work he did that day was beyond reproach.
'Now all we've got to do,' Colsceg announced at the start of the fifth day, 'is put the bastard together.'
Poldarn had a feeling that Colsceg hadn't exactly dedicated his life to winning friends and getting people to like him, but that was a bit much, even coming from him. Still, nobody said anything-he'd have been amazed if they had-and they set to work with grim determination, boring the dowel-holes with augers and hammering in the pegs to assemble the sections of the frame. Much to Poldarn's surprise and relief, the plates, posts and sills slotted together perfectly-no yawning gaps, no frantic bashing to squash a fat tenon into a thin mortice-and once the sides were raised with the help of a gin-pole crane and a lot of bad language, the cross-beams and girts slotted in place without any fuss and the pegs went home without jamming or splitting.
'Don't panic,' Eyvind said, observing Poldarn's fraught expression. 'Something'll go wrong soon, and then you can relax.'
Poldarn shook his head. 'It's toying with me, I can tell,' he replied. 'Nothing fits together this easily, ever.'
'Bullshit,' Colsceg interrupted, his mouth full of pegs. 'You do the cutting-out right, it goes together first time. I never have any bother-Fuck,' he added, 'this goddamn tenon's too short. Who cut this tenon?'
Curiously, nobody could remember having worked on that particular timber; and, since it was out of the question that Colsceg could've made a mistake like that, they were left with the conclusion that at some point during the previous day, they'd been helped out by a bunch of careless elves.
'This is silly,' Poldarn said. 'We can't just pack in and start all over again because of one lousy inch.'
For once, Colsceg didn't seem to have an opinion on the matter in hand, and for a while, it was very quiet all round. Finally, Egil (who hadn't said a single word since the job began, as far as Poldarn could remember) cleared his throat and asked how it would be if they cut off the end and spliced in an extension?
Nobody said anything, and Egil shrugged as if to apologise for saying something crass. But then Poldarn said, 'Yes, we could do that', and Colsceg said, 'No, we couldn't, bloody thing'd pull itself apart soon as it took the weight,' and the two of them looked at each other for a while, and they decided to try it. Colsceg sketched out a joint with a scrap of charcoal-a murderously complicated affair that looked like two spiders fighting-while Poldarn solemnly picked up a saw and began to cut off the beam. The two of them worked in silence for over an hour while the others, who had nothing they could usefully do, looked on like a gaggle of expectant fathers.
'All right,' Poldarn said eventually. 'This ought to work.'
'And if it doesn't?' someone asked.
'Then we tear the whole bloody thing down and start again.'
The frightening thing was that he meant it. To everyone's relief, it didn't come to that. Colsceg's double-housed lapped dovetail, or whatever the hell it was, took the strain without so much as a creak, while Poldarn's joinery (When and where the hell did I learn that? he wondered) was so precise that they couldn't pull a single hair through the join.
'Not bad,' Colsceg admitted, frowning. 'Mind you, when I was your age-'
After that, things went well. The rafters dropped into their pockets in the plates, the pegs slid home and tightened in their tapers with a few light taps of the mallet and the collar ties lay sweetly in their blind mortices.
'Finished,' Poldarn said, taking a step back. 'Well, apart from the thatch and the doors, and planking up the sides. But the frame's up, anyway.'
Later, when the rest of them were well into their beer, he lit a torch, called Elja down from the loft and took her down the river path to see it. 'Of course,' he pointed out, 'it'll look different when it's got walls and a roof-'
'I imagine so, yes. A bit more waterproof, for a start.'
'-But you get the general idea.' He hesitated and looked away. 'What d'you think?' he asked.
'I think it's very nice,' Elja replied solemnly. 'Can we go back inside now, please? It's freezing, and my feet are all wet.'
'In a moment,' Poldarn replied. 'Wait there a moment, will you?' He disappeared out of the light, and came back a minute later with a wooden cup in his hand. 'I just remembered I left this out here,' he explained. 'Go on, have a sip. It's water from our river.'