Pattern

'Don't you believe it,' Eyvind replied. 'Oh, it's rare enough, but it happens. Not in the same household, of course, that would be impossible, but neighbours do fall out occasionally, and it can get rather unpleasant if you're not careful. Which is why getting it into your head that someone's got it in for you is a bad idea, believe me.'

'All right,' Poldarn said appeasingly, 'I promise to love all my fellow human beings to bits. And if you think Egil would do it, sure I'll ask him. I just doubt it, that's all.'

Eyvind stood up. 'I'll ask him for you, if you like,' he said abruptly. 'That way, you won't feel tempted to say something stupid or offensive.'

'Good idea,' Poldarn sighed. 'Why don't you do that?'

'All right.'

Poldarn had hoped that Eyvind wasn't serious, or that Egil would refuse; but apparently not. 'He says he'll be delighted,' Eyvind announced happily, a few minutes later. 'And he reckons he knows all the words and what to do, so that's all right. I think he liked the idea of playing at being a head of household for a while, since he won't ever get the chance otherwise. Pity, that,' Eyvind added, 'he'd be good at it, or at least better than his brother would be. Mind you, the same would hold true of a small piece of rock.'

Best not to go there, Poldarn decided. 'Fine,' he said. 'Thank you. Now, will you please tell me what I'm supposed to do at this wedding, because otherwise it's going to be extremely embarrassing.'

'Well,' Eyvind began; at which point an unfamiliar twelve-year-old girl came bounding up to tell them it was time to begin, and everybody was waiting. 'Actually,' Eyvind added, as the little girl led them away, 'it should all be pretty obvious, you'll know what to say when the time comes.'

Poldarn wasn't in the least convinced, but it was too late now to do anything about it. Quite apart from the details of the ceremony, there were a great many other connected issues he'd have liked to talk through, but clearly he wasn't going to get the chance. He had the feeling of being on the box of a runaway cart trundling slowly down a hill, just about to gather pace.

The wedding was going to take place in the hall of the house-the old house, Poldarn told himself; I don't live there any more, for some reason nobody's seen fit to explain to me. That bothered him for a moment; the house wasn't his now, and since the new house was built he'd been given to understand that he wasn't supposed to set foot in it. No doubt there was a very good reason why the wedding should be held on foreign soil, so to speak. If Halder had still been alive, where would they have held the wedding? In his house, presumably. Poldarn was sure there was a reason for every detail-that seemed to be the way of things here-but he couldn't help wishing that someone would explain it to him. After all, he was the head of the household, supreme ruler in a society where nobody ever told anyone else what to do, nobody ever needed to tell anyone else what to do (except when mountains exploded and flooded the world with black mud). Ludicrous, he thought; nominally, I'm the most important man in this valley, and I'm the only one who hasn't got a clue what's happening. It's like a religion where everybody worships a god who doesn't know he's divine.

The little girl led Poldarn to the door (the back door, he noticed; any significance in that? Undoubtedly, though he could only guess at what it might be) and told him, rather abruptly, to wait there. So he waited. At first he stood up; then he began to feel fidgety, and leant against the door frame. Then he pulled over a log from the logpile and sat down. After a while, he wondered if they'd forgotten all about him, or whether the bride had changed her mind (assuming she had one to change), or if there was a furious debate raging inside about letting an offcomer marry into a respectable house; or maybe they'd all fallen asleep, or gone off to do something else, or died. Maybe they were all waiting impatiently for him, tapping their feet and picking at their sleeves, with Elja in floods of tears because she'd been left standing at the altar. He considered opening the door just a crack and looking in, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do that, for fear that he'd be noticed and everyone would swivel round and stare at him. Ridiculous, he thought; they can't leave me out here all day like a tethered donkey. Can they?

Apparently they could. After what seemed like a very long time-long enough for his left leg to go to sleep, at any rate-Poldarn came to the conclusion that if he was going to be stuck here indefinitely, he might as well find something useful to do, in accordance with the underlying philosophy of the place. He looked around, and saw a big splitting axe lodged in a big stump, with a stack of wood split into kindling, where someone had presumably downed tools in order to go to the wedding. There was still plenty of wood to be split, a whole pile of it, so he hauled himself painfully to his feet, levered the axe out of the chopping block, set a log on top and took a swing at it.

He'd taken aim at a shake-line in the log but he missed, and the axe bit deep into the log at a slant, sending a jarring shock up his arms into his shoulders. Poldarn winced, stood on the log and waggled the axe from side to side to get it free.

His next shot was in line and on target, and the log did indeed split in two; no doubt about that, because the two halves flew apart and sailed through the air at just under head height, fast enough to do a serious injury to anybody unlucky enough to be in the way. That suggested to him that maybe he was using a bit too much force; better, probably, just to lift the axe and let it fall in its own weight (which had no doubt been carefully calculated by a competent smith for this very reason). He retrieved the two halves of the log, put one up and studied it, taking care to fix all his attention on the place where he wanted the axe to bite. Then he swung it up, letting the momentum of the swing bring it through its course, and allowed it to fall, guiding it with his hands like a skilled helmsman.

He missed the log with the axe head but not with the shaft; with the result that the head snapped off and shot off at a ridiculous pace, thumping against the back door of the house with a noise that must've been audible at Colscegsford. As he stood there feeling incredibly stupid, the door opened and Eyvind came out.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?' he asked.

'Sorry,' Poldarn mumbled. 'I was just trying to make myself useful, that's all.'

'There's a time and a place, you know,' Eyvind said, shaking his head. 'Anyway, the hell with that. There's a problem.'

Poldarn nodded. 'I had a feeling there might be. What's up?'

Eyvind pulled a face. 'We haven't got a guarantor, is the problem.'

'Oh.' Poldarn looked grave. 'What's a guarantor?'

'What? Oh, of course, you wouldn't know. The guarantor is the man who guarantees the wedding vows.'

The way Eyvind said it made it sound like the most obvious thing in the world, until you stopped and thought about it. 'Ah,' Poldarn said. 'What does that mean? In practice,' he added quickly. 'What's he got to do in the ceremony, I mean.'

'Not a lot,' Eyvind admitted, 'but you can't have a wedding without one, because then it wouldn't be a wedding. All he's got to do is stand around looking solemn, and when you and the girl say your vows, he holds out a sword or a spear, and you rest your hand on it.'

'Oh,' Poldarn said. 'What's that in aid of?'

Eyvind fidgeted impatiently. 'The general idea is that if either side breaks one of the wedding vows, the guarantor's there to make sure they're punished for it. That's what the sword's for, it's symbolic. Like the seconds in a duel.'

'Really? At a wedding?' Poldarn shrugged. 'Still, what do I know about it? Anyway, why haven't we got one? Surely there's established procedures for figuring out who it's got to be.'