Egil turned his head. 'Elja, do you accept this man as your husband?' There was a muted squeak from the shadows that might have been a yes, or a rodent narrowly avoiding a cat.
Egil seemed inclined to accept it as consent, or else he was too busy rehearsing his own lines in his head to listen; he grunted, and went on: 'Who is prepared to guarantee this marriage?', as if he were a general ordering brave men to their deaths. Eyvind stood up with the speed of a sword-monk's best draw; then nothing happened. Several heartbeats passed, and Poldarn finally sneezed.
'Here,' someone said in the darkness outside the yellow circle, and Boarci threaded his way through the crowd, somehow managing not to knock anybody over or cause any injuries with the axe in his right hand. Poldarn winced; if I'd only known, he thought, I'd have made more of an effort with the polishing. It made sense, of course; they'd never have allowed Boarci on the top table. For some reason, Poldarn had a picture of him being given his portion of the wedding breakfast in a bowl on the floor, with the other domestic animals.
'It's all right,' Boarci muttered in Poldarn's ear as he took his post directly behind him. 'Cheer up, nobody's going to eat you.' Eyvind scowled at him for that; nobody else appeared to have noticed.
'Guarantors,' Egil said crisply, whereupon Eyvind stooped and came up holding a backsabre, which he'd left on the floor where nobody could trip over it; he put it on the table as if he was waiting on a grand banquet and the sword was a tray of cinnamon cakes. Boarci leaned over, shoving Poldarn's head slightly to one side with his arm, and dumped his axe next to it; the two weapons clattered together noisily. 'All right,' Egil said. His sister stood up, reached across and laid the flat of her hand on the blade of the sword, nodding very slightly at Poldarn. He interpreted that as meaning that he was supposed to do the same thing, and rested his fingertips on the axe head. It was cold and very smooth, like steel skin. Poldarn felt ashamed at the sight of the file marks around the eye.
'Bear witness,' Egil said, in a rather wobbly, high-pitched voice, 'these weapons, and if these vows are broken, avenge them.' He finished the speech with a stifled cough-he was standing over one of the lamps, and the smoke was tickling his throat. Poldarn managed not to laugh, though it was one of the funniest things he could remember having seen. 'Bear witness,' he repeated, coughing himself, and he picked up the sword and the axe and waggled them half-heartedly in the air.
At that point, he must have swallowed a mouthful of lamp smoke the wrong way, because instead of just coughing he choked, and the spasm must have messed up his coordination; in any event, he lost his grip on the axe, made a desperate attempt to recapture it, and dropped it right on top of the lamp, which shattered and flooded the table with oil, which immediately caught fire. At first, nobody seemed to realise what was happening. Then the burning oil set light to their cuffs and sleeves; they jumped up, swearing and flapping their arms like so many crippled birds, prancing round in circles, bumping into each other-under other circumstances it would have made a very pretty burlesque dance, appropriate for a country wedding, except for the presence of the uninvited guest and master of ceremonies, the spirit of fire. Poldarn immediately looked to see if Elja was all right; but she didn't have any sleeves, and she'd got her hand out of the way in time. Then he looked down at his own hands, and saw that although the cloth at his wrists was dark and shiny with oil, for some reason the fire hadn't taken to him. Egil was staggering backwards, pawing at his face; Eyvind was on fire from his wrists to his chin, contriving to set light to his whole body as he tried to slap out the flames. Apparently Colsceg had more imagination than the rest of them; he'd doused his sleeve with a jug of beer, but the oil refused to stop burning. Another lamp, a little further down, burst in the heat and showered the table with burning oil and sharp potsherds, like a miniature volcano.
Oh for pity's sake, Poldarn thought, because this was all so unnecessary; it was just a little fire to start with, and there was no earthly reason why it should be spreading so dramatically. He knew he ought to be doing something-head of the household, hero of the mudslides, a little domestic fire ought to be child's play to him-but for the moment all he could do was stand and stare. Nobody in the mob behind him seemed to be moving, so perhaps they all thought it was part of the ceremony.
'Hold still,' someone was shouting; it was Boarci, wrapping his coat round his left arm. 'For God's sake hold still, before you set the house on fire.' But nobody seemed prepared to listen to him, or else they simply couldn't understand a direct order; so he pushed past Poldarn, scrambled over the table, kneeling in the burning oil as he did so, and shoved Eyvind over onto the ground. Somebody was yelling at him, but he was too busy to notice; he was clubbing out the flames that Eyvind was wearing like a suit of clothes, as he did so choosing to disregard the fire that was clinging to his own legs and body. Egil had pulled off his coat by now, and was whacking at his father's arms and chest with it, while Colsceg stood perfectly still and stared at him as if he'd just gone mad. Another lamp exploded 'Well,' said a voice by Poldarn's side, 'here we are again. Trouble really does seem to follow you around, doesn't it?'
He recognised the face, which hadn't been there a heartbeat ago; and the voice was even more familiar, though God alone knew where from. 'Who the hell are you?' he asked.
'Oh, don't mind me, I'm not really here.' The man laughed. 'I was here, many years ago, and of course I'll be here again. Right now, I'm somewhere else, but don't worry about it. You think I'd let a piddling little thing like geography keep me from my best friend's wedding?'
'Who are you?' Poldarn repeated.
'Good question,' the man replied. He was wearing the robes of a sword-monk in full academic dress, with a broad crimson sash to hold his sword in, and a white fur trim to his hood. 'You know, I call myself so many names, it's a pain sometimes remembering who I'm meant to be. When in doubt, I just say Monach, which is the word for monk in some language or other that nobody knows any more. In case you're wondering,' he went on, 'this is actually some time later.'
Poldarn wanted to move, at least to get close enough to smash this idiot's face in, but found he couldn't. 'What've you done to me?' he shouted.
'Me? Nothing. How could I, when I'm not even here? Now pay attention, I'm trying to explain. You think you're still at the wedding, in the middle of the fire. Not so. Right now you're lying on a heap of straw in a deep sleep, with your devoted subjects and newly minted in-laws taking bets on whether you'll ever wake up out of it. Didn't I mention, you're one very sick man?'
'No,' Poldarn replied. In front of his eyes, Boarci and Egil were still flapping away with their coats; everything was moving, but nothing was changing. 'What happened?'
Monach laughed. 'Oh, it hasn't happened yet-in the time-frame you're looking at, I mean. In this time-frame, we're about twenty seconds away from the fire spreading to the thatch, which is where the trouble starts. In about five seconds, though, you'll fall over backwards and hit your head, so I'd better get a move on. You trip over your feet, bang your head and go to sleep-is this starting to sound familiar, by the way?-then the building catches light, everybody panics and squashes out through the door; it's only later, when the fire's taken hold and the roof's starting to fall in, that someone says, Hey, where's Ciartan? and they realise you must still be inside. You know,' Monach went on, reaching past a burning man and taking a honeycake off a plate, 'your life is woven from two dominant threads, tragedy and lack of originality. Not only do really shitty things happen to you, they happen over and over again.' He bit into the cake and chewed before continuing. 'There's a very good reason for that, by the way, like there's a very good reason for everything that goes on around here, and you're the only person in the whole wide world who isn't allowed to know what it is. That must really get up your nose sometimes, I guess.'