Pattern (69 page)

Beside me, my wife grunts and turns over. I nudge her hard in the small of the back, and hop out of bed.

‘Get up,' I tell her. ‘The house is on fire.'

‘What?' She opens her eyes and stares at me.

‘The house is on fire,' I tell her, annoyed at having to repeat myself in the middle of a crisis. ‘Come on, for God's sake.'

She scrambles out and starts poking about with her feet, trying to find her shoes. ‘No time for that now,' I snap, and unlatch the partition door. It opens six inches or so and sticks; someone's lying against it on the other side. That isn't good.

It occurs to me to wonder where the light's coming from, a soft, rather beautiful orange glow, like a distant view of the fire-stream slipping gently down the side of the mountain. The answer to that is through the gap where the partition doesn't quite meet the roof – it's coming through from the main room. Not good at all.

I take a step back from the door and kick it, stamping sideways with the flat of my foot. The door moves a few more inches, suggesting that I'm shifting a dead weight. I repeat the manoeuvre five times, opening a gap I can just about squeeze through.

‘Come on,' I urge my wife – comic, as if we're going to a dance and she's fussing about her hair. Hilarious.

The main room's full of orange light, but there isn't any air, just smoke. As I step through, the heat washes over me; I look down to see what the obstruction had been, and see Henferth the swineherd, rolled over on his side, dead. No need to ask what had killed him, the smoke's a solid wall of fuzzy-edged orange. Just in time, I remember not to breathe in; I lower my head and draw in the clean air inside my shirt.

Only six paces, diagonally across the floor, to the upper door; I can make that, and once the door's open I'll be out in cold, fresh air. The bar's in place, of course, and the bolts are pushed home top and bottom – I grab the knob of the top bolt and immediately let go as the heat sears my skin. Little feathers of smoke are weaving in through the minute cracks between the boards; the outside of the door must be on fire.

So what? Catching the end of my sleeve into the palm of my hand, I push hard against the bolt. It's stiff – heat expands metal – but I'm in no mood to mess about, and my lungs are already tight; also, the smoke's making my eyes prickle. I force the top bolt back, ramming splinters into the heel of my hand from a rough patch of sloppily planed wood, then stoop and shoot back the bottom bolt, which moves quite easily. That just leaves the bar; and I'm already gasping out my hoarded breath as I unhook it. Then I put my shoulder to the door and shove.

It doesn't move. I'm out of breath now, and there's no air, only smoke. I drop to the floor. Right down low, cheek pressed to the boards, there's clean air, just enough for a lungful.

As I breathe in, I'm thinking, The door's stuck, why? The door won't open, it's burning on the outside. No prizes for guessing what that means

The axe; the big axe. Of course the door's too solid to break down but with the big axe I can smash out the middle panel, at least enough to make a hole to breathe through. Where's the big axe? Then I remember. The big axe is in the woodshed, where the hell else would the big axe be? Inside there's only the little hand-axe, and I might as well peck at the door with my nose like a woodpecker.

Something flops down next to me and I feel a sharp, unbearable pain in my left foot and ankle. Burning thatch, the roof's falling in. ‘Bench,' I yell, ‘smash the door down with a bench.' But nobody answers. Come on, brain, suggestions. There's got to be another way out of here, because I've got to get out. The other door, or what about the window? And if they're blocked too, there's the hatch up into the hayloft, and out the hayloft door – ten-foot drop to the ground, but it'd be better than staying here.

But the other door's forty feet away; the window's closer, but still impossibly far, and the hatch might as well be on the other side of the ocean. There simply isn't time to try, and if I stand up I'll suffocate in the smoke. The only possible place to be is here, cheek flat on the floorboards, trapped for the rest of my life in half an inch of air.

Another swathe of burning thatch lands on me, dropping heavily across my shoulders. I feel my hair frizzle up before I feel the pain, but when it comes it's too much to bear. I snuff up as much air as I can get – there's a lot of smoke in it, and the coughing costs me a fortune in time – and try to get to my feet, only to find that they aren't working. I panic, lurch, overbalance and fall heavily on my right elbow. The fire's reached my scalp, it's working its way through my shirt to the skin on my back.

A man might be forgiven for calling it a day at this point, but I can't quite bring myself to do that, not yet. I'd be horribly burned, of course – I've seen men who've been in fires, their faces melted like wax – but you've got to be philosophical about these things, what's done is done and what's gone is gone, salvage what you can while you can.

It hadn't been so bad back in the inner room – why the hell did I ever leave it? Seemed like a good idea at the time. So I start to crawl back the way I've just come. A good yard (the palm of my hand on her upturned face; I know the feel of the contours of her cheeks and mouth, from tracing them in the dark with my fingertips, tenderly, gently; but no air to waste on that stuff now) before the beam falls across my back and pins me down, making me spill my last prudent savings of air. The pain – no, forget that for a moment, I can't feel my hands, even though I know they're on fire, my back must be broken. Try to breathe in, but there's just smoke, no time left at all. Forget it, I can't be bothered with this any more—

Poldarn opened his eyes. ‘He's dead,' he announced. They looked at him. ‘Who's dead?' one of them asked.

‘Eyvind.' Poldarn let out the breath he'd been holding (as if he'd been the one trapped in the smoke, hoarding air like a prudent farmer stockpiling grain against a hard winter). ‘All of them. It's finished.'

Someone – Raffen or Rook, in the darkness they all looked the same – coughed a couple of times and said, ‘Well, we did it, then.'

‘Yes,' Poldarn replied. ‘We did it, and it's over. I wish we hadn't.'

‘Bloody fine time to say that.' He wasn't sure who'd spoken. ‘Bloody fine time. Next you'll be telling us it was all a mistake.'

Poldarn shrugged. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.'

‘Is that supposed to be funny?' That sounded like Hand, but he couldn't be sure. ‘Because if it was, I don't think much of it.'

‘Sorry.' Poldarn wanted to look away – the brightness of the flames was hurting his eyes – but he couldn't. ‘But it's true, at the time it seemed like the right course of action. Now, I'm not so sure. It was a terrible thing to do.'

‘That's no lie.' This time, he was almost certain it was Raffen. ‘But the bastards asked for it. They had it coming, turning us out of our own house.'

Someone else said, ‘That's right,' but it sounded like he was trying to convince himself. And failing.

‘And the way they went about it.' Asburn's voice, slightly hesitant. ‘Sure, we've just done something pretty bad, but they started it. They got what they deserved. We showed them. And anyway, it's too late now.'

‘What the hell are you all moaning about?' That was Elja, and she sounded hard, firm, resolute. ‘It was all Eyvind's fault; he was supposed to be your friend, and he started this stupid feud. If it hadn't been for him, we'd all be getting on with our lives in the places where we ought to be. Come on, we all knew that before we started this. Otherwise we wouldn't have done it.'

The roof-tree fell in, lifting up a cascade of sparks, like a mob of crows put up off a newly sown field. It was a beautiful sight, regardless of context. ‘If anything's to blame,' someone said, ‘it's the mountain. If that hadn't started playing up, we'd none of us be in this mess.'

‘Yes,' Poldarn said, ‘but it was my decision. It all went wrong when Boarci died. I could overlook the rest, there was a sort of cack-handed justice about it, but he saved my life, and there wasn't anybody else to stand up for him. But getting killed like that was his own fault. He should never have stolen that barrel.'

‘True,' Elja said. ‘But if you hadn't hidden it, he couldn't have stolen it. You shouldn't have done that.'

‘I did it for you,' Poldarn mumbled. ‘So you'd have something to eat besides porridge and onions. It was only a little thing.'

‘So's the peak of a mountain,' Elja replied, ‘but everything else stems from it. I don't suppose it matters now, but if you want to know where it all started to screw up, that was it.'

‘You should have killed Eyvind back in the old country,' Asburn said. ‘Didn't he try to kill you the first time you met him?'

‘He saved my life,' Poldarn replied. ‘And anyway, it's not as simple as that. Nobody's to blame here except me. I killed a man, for no reason. I hid the barrel. I turned the fire-stream away. I brought Boarci home, and if I hadn't he'd still be alive.' He tried to look away, but the burning house held him, as though he was the one lying pinned by a fallen rafter. ‘I did it all, everything. At the time, each time round, I thought I was doing the right thing – no, I
was
doing the right thing. At every turn, all I wanted was to be a good man, honourable, putting others ahead of myself. And this is where I've brought you all to, by doing the right thing. I guess that's the way it's got to be, with me. Everything I do turns bad on me, and I've never knowingly done anything wrong, in the small part of my life that I can remember. I don't know; Raffen, you're a sensible sort of man, what would you have done, if it'd been up to you? If you'd been the head of house and the fire-stream was headed straight at you down the mountain, what would you have done?'

Raffen laughed. ‘Not what you did, that's for sure. But only because I wouldn't have had the wit to think of it. Maybe you're too smart for your own good.'

‘You can't say you're sorry for doing that,' Asburn put in. ‘It was amazing, how you thought of it. Anybody else would've run away, but you didn't. You figured out a way to save the house, and you made it happen. Nobody else could've done it but you.'

Poldarn closed his eyes. ‘And look what happened. I saved the house from being burnt down by the fire-stream, then came back and did the job myself.'

Someone was pulling at his arm. ‘Stop it.' Elja's voice. ‘Listen to yourself, will you? You're trying to make out you're some kind of evil monster. Well, if you were, wouldn't I be the first person to know it? After all, I'm married to you. But I know for a fact you aren't evil, you're just a man who's done what he had to do, and in the end it's meant you've done some pretty unpleasant things. So, that's how it is sometimes. But I don't blame you, because it's not your fault, really it isn't. I don't think it was anybody's fault, it was just the way things turned out. Worse things than this happen every day, and the world doesn't come to an end. Don't stand there staring at me,' she went on. ‘You've all done worse things than this, and for less good reasons – or haven't any of you gone raiding over the winter, and burned down whole cities, not just one house, all so there won't be witnesses, anybody who can say what we look like or where we come from? Is that a good reason for killing people, women and children? Oh, you can say it's because of what was done to us in the old country, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, but that's not why you do it, and you know it. It's just the most efficient way of going about the job, and you don't care about the people who get killed any more than you care about smoking out a wasps' nest. And that's all right,' she continued, ‘because everybody does it and nobody even thinks about whether it's right or wrong. But you –' she tugged at his arm again, like an impatient child – ‘you've been fretting and worrying yourself about whether you're doing the right thing or not, but it's not like you ever had any choice – well, except for hiding the barrel, but you didn't mean for any harm to come of it, you were just trying to be nice. And when Boarci got himself killed, you did the right thing, you sorted out a settlement; and then they had to go and break it, sneaking over here and stealing that horse because Eyvind changed his mind. That was that, there was no way we could trust them after that. One morning we'd have woken up and there we'd be again, them pointing spears at our throats and moving us on because they wanted their farm back, or killing us even, because Eyvind had changed his mind again. You thought, the only way we'll ever be safe is if Eyvind and all his people are dead and can't hurt us any more. There really wasn't anything else you could have done, honestly.'

Poldarn pulled his arm free. ‘I know that,' he said. ‘That's what I've been trying to tell you. Even when I do the right thing, it comes out bad. In which case, what sort of a man am I? I don't know, I can't remember. But even if a fire can forget it's a fire, if you stick your hand in it, it'll still burn you. The only thing that matters is what people do. Everything else is beside the point.'

‘And you're forgetting something really important,' Raffen added. ‘We won, remember? They're all dead and we're all alive. Isn't it obvious what that means? We must've been right and they must've been wrong. Otherwise, nothing makes any sense.'

Nobody replied to that. Instead, there was an uncomfortable silence, until Asburn said: ‘Well, so what're we going to do now?'

Poldarn opened his eyes and turned round to face them all. ‘We're going to go home and get on with our work,' he said. ‘There's nothing more to be done here, and plenty to be getting on with at home.' He looked up at the sky, but the red glow in the east was the fire-stream rolling over Haldersness. ‘We'll have to stay here for the rest of the night,' he said. ‘It's still four or five hours before sun-up. I don't think this is a good place to hang about, but we can get our heads down in the barn. Even if anybody does turn up looking for us, they won't expect to find us there. Then, as soon as it's light, we'll be on our way.'