Pattern

'Really,' Poldarn said quietly. 'But when I was stranded in the mudslide at Colscegsford, you risked your life to help me. If I'd died, all your troubles would've been over.'

'Fuck you,' Egil shouted. 'What sort of bastard do you take me for? I couldn't stand by and watch someone die if I could help it.'

'Even so,' Poldarn said, icily rational, 'someone else could have gone. It wasn't your special assignment, keeping me alive.'

'I happened to be closest,' Egil said, clamping his hands to the side of his head. 'It was my job. Don't you understand us at all yet? There's a job to be done, whoever's closest does it. We don't have any choice in the matter.' He took a deep breath. 'Yes, I'd have been as happy as a lamb in springtime if you'd drowned in the mud. Or if it had been me, come to that. But it didn't turn out that way, that's all.' He walked over to the door, then looked back. 'You want to know my idea of a really evil man, someone so evil he could never be anything else? All right, I'll tell you. It's a man who's so selfish he'd follow up his curiosity without caring a damn who had to pay the price. Do you understand that?'

Poldarn nodded. 'I think so,' he said. 'Thank you for explaining it to me. Now I know.' In spite of everything, he couldn't help grinning. 'Like I keep saying, if people would just explain things, it'd make life so much easier.'

It took five days for Poldarn's legs to recover; five days during which the roof timbers of the bedroom at Ciartanstead grew steadily less and less interesting as the hours ground by. Every morning someone would drop by and assure him that it would be disastrous and irredeemable folly if he got up and walked about before his strained muscles were completely healed beyond any shadow of a doubt, and since they seemed to know ever so much more about the subject than he did, he had no choice but to go along with their advice. On the sixth day he got the same lecture, this time from Elja herself, but the thought of another minute, let alone another day, staring at that bodged lapjoint was more than he could bear. Far better to risk ending up crippled for life than certain death by tedium.

'You please yourself,' Elja sniffed, as he swung his feet off the bed and rested them tentatively on the floor. 'Just don't expect any sympathy from me if you end up rolling on the ground in agony.'

A quarter of an hour of hobbling round the yard, and he'd more or less forgotten what strained muscles felt like; his legs were in full working order and fit to be taken entirely for granted once more. 'So,' he said briskly to Raffen, who happened to be passing, 'that's me sorted out, I can get back to work. I expect there's a whole heap of things piled up while I've been out of it.'

Raffen thought for a moment. 'Can't think of anything,' he said.

'Oh come on,' Poldarn pleaded. 'There must be something I should've been doing. Try and think of something, please, or I just might burst into tears.'

'Oh.' Raffen frowned. 'Well,' he said, 'the crows are back on the peas. Made such a mess up there, it'll hardly be worth getting 'em in.'

'Bugger the bloody crows. I can't face another five days staring at the roof, I'll go mad.' Raffen's expression suggested that this had already happened, but Poldarn couldn't be bothered to stop and explain; he'd remembered something. 'The roof,' he said, 'there's a lapjoint in the third timber, whoever did that made a really piss-poor job of it. Needs fixing, before the whole lot comes down on our heads.'

Raffen scratched his ear thoughtfully. 'I think you did all those joints,' he said. 'In fact, I'm sure it was you. Should've been Colsceg's job, but he was behind.'

'Oh.' Now he came to mention it, Poldarn had a feeling Raffen was right. Odd that he hadn't remembered that before. 'Well, anyway,' he said, 'it's got to be fixed. I'll get a ladder.'

Raffen shook his head. 'Don't talk soft,' he said. 'You're in no fit state to go fooling about up ladders. Carey can do it this afternoon, after he's finished the south paddock wall.'

Poldarn scowled. 'Carey's got his own work to do,' he said.

'No, he hasn't. He was going to help me out in the middle house, but I'll get Boarci to give me a hand. Carey's a damn good carpenter, you should see the work he's done on the linhay roof. Besides, Boarci's got nothing to do, it'll keep him out of mischief.'

What about keeping me out of mischief? I thought that was the whole point. 'Oh, all right, if you say so. I'll go over to the forge, make some nails or something.'

Raffen nodded approvingly. 'Always useful, nails. Can't have too many of 'em.'

So Poldarn wandered across the yard, coaxed up a fire after several false starts, and made a dozen nails out of a rusty old spit. Then he remembered the axe head he'd found in the ditch, the one Egil had preached him a sermon about. He fetched it from the house and spent the next few hours working it over mercilessly-files, coarse and smooth stones, polishing powder and the buffing wheel-until he could see his face in the flat and shave hairs off his arm with the edge. A rasp and a certain amount of effort turned a broken wheel-spoke into an acceptable handle, and he shaped an offcut from the nail stock into a wedge, complete with a series of deeply chiselled keys to bite in the wood and hold it in place. Finally he wrapped the last hand's span of the handle with thatching twine and dunked the head in the slack-tub to swell up overnight. There, he told himself, job done; the only thing left to do was find a home for it. A pity, really, that he'd already made an axe for Boarci; this one was much better in every respect, but he'd look stupid if he insisted on taking the other one back and exchanging it for this. Nobody else had mentioned wanting such a thing, so he had no real option but to keep it for himself-not that he wanted an axe particularly, but the thought of putting it into stock and letting it get rusty and mildewed offended him after all the work he'd put into it.

By this stage the fire had gone out, and it seemed pointless wasting good coal and kindling getting it going again, when there really wasn't anything that needed doing in the forge. By the same token, of course, there wasn't anything that needed doing outside it, at any rate by him, so Poldarn raked the clinker out of the ashes and perched on the anvil, turning over what Egil had said in his mind.

It wasn't as if he needed convincing; he'd acknowledged quite some time ago that he didn't really want to remember who he'd been or what he'd done. At the time he'd reached that conclusion, he'd had nobody to think of but himself; it was mere selfishness, made marginally acceptable by the very fact of his isolation. To a man on his own, wandering about in a strange landscape and trying to keep out of harm's way, it was an allowable indulgence, and he'd had the consolation of knowing that he was paying a high price for the privilege of not remembering, in the form of the substantial risks he'd taken precisely because he didn't know who he was, who was his friend and who was his enemy. Then all that had changed. Suddenly the universal enemy had reared up in front of him and claimed him for its own-but they'd turned out not to be demons and monsters, just a parcel of farmers and artisans seen out of context, and he'd been glad to go with them to claim his apparent inheritance, stepping off the road and into security, a place of his own in the world, a ready-made home and family and happy-ever-after. It hadn't quite worked out like that, but it couldn't be denied that they'd given him everything a rational man could expect out of life-food, clothes, a fine house, land and livestock, a lovely and compatible young wife; they'd even bestowed on him the highest rank a man could aspire to in that society, leadership of a household (and if he still hadn't any real idea of what that meant exactly, that was surely his fault rather than theirs). The argument from isolation, that it didn't matter because it was nobody's business but his own, was no longer valid, but it had been replaced by something far more compelling and, for what it was worth, morally defensible: the good of the community. Now, it appeared, there were extremely cogent reasons why he shouldn't find out the truth, why he should take all necessary steps to make sure the truth never came out. If that didn't let him off the hook, what the hell ever would?