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  'That's what I'd assumed,' said Poldarn mildly.

  Boarci rolled up his sleeves and plunged his arms inside the bear's ribcage, right up to the elbows. 'It was all circumstances beyond my control,' he said sadly. 'That and a parcel of miserable neighbours who took against me for no reason, and saw fit to believe the worst of me on the strength of hardly any evidence at all. If it hadn't been for that, I'd be back in Ayrichsstead right now, with a nice house of my own and a herd of fat cows. Instead of which,' he added, hauling out a nauseating-smelling armful of bear guts, 'here I am, crawling up dead animals for a living and sleeping in shepherds' huts. Life can be a real arsehole sometimes.'

  'So I believe,' Poldarn agreed. 'Well, if you want, you can come and stay with us at Haldersness for as long as you like. If you don't mind working, that is.'

  Boarci looked at him over the mound of steaming guts. 'That's mighty generous of you,' he said, 'but I won't hold you to it, you not being used to people's ways and all. Thing is, farmers don't take kindly to the hands fetching in strangers off the hill. No offence, but I figure it wouldn't take long for this Halder to pitch me out in the straw, and then I'm back where I started. Thanks all the same,' he added, lifting his horrible burden and staggering a few yards with it before dumping it on the ash.

  'I don't think that'll be a problem,' Poldarn said. 'You see, Halder's my grandfather, and my father's dead, so I'm sort of next in line. And when I tell him you saved me from a hungry bear, I don't think he'll be in any hurry to turn you away.'

  'Well.' Boarci frowned. 'If you reckon there might be work going over your place-'

  'Positive,' Poldarn interrupted. 'If you don't mind raking ash all day long. I think they'd be glad of the help.'

  'You don't say,' Boarci muttered pensively. 'So, if there's all this needing doing at your place, can I ask what you think you're doing out here?'

  'Visiting my future in-laws,' Poldarn answered. 'Which is just a polite way of saying they're so sick to the teeth of me having to have everything explained a dozen times, and getting under their feet when they're working, they bundled me off to be in the way somewhere else. Besides,' he added, 'they're much closer to the mountain, so I expect Grandfather was worried about how they're coping.'

  'Right,' Boarci said, as he teased a bloody pink leg out of its skin. 'You're basically no bloody good round the farm, so when their best neighbour's in trouble, they send you. Guess I must've missed something basic along the way.'

  Poldarn hadn't thought of it in those terms. 'I don't know,' he said. 'You'll just have to figure it out for yourself,' he went on. 'And besides, it doesn't matter what prompted them to send me. All that matters in the long run is what I actually do while I'm there.'

  Boarci nodded. 'Can't argue with that,' he said. A moment later he stood up, bending his back and drawing away as he did so. The bear's pelt came off like a tight wet shirt. 'Not so bad,' he gasped, as he paused to let his lungs catch up with the rest of him. 'Look, about the horse.'

  'Yours,' Poldarn said firmly. 'I said that and I meant it. There's plenty more where that came from. If you do come and stay with us, mind you, I can promise you you'll earn it twice over. Raking ash is a back-breaking job, so they tell me.'

  Boarci was spreading out the bearskin. 'You don't know from first hand, then.'

  'They wouldn't have me,' Poldarn told him. 'I'd just be in the way, slow everyone up. It's because-well, you don't need me to tell you.'

  'Don't I?'

  'Apparently you do. It's because they can't read my mind. Goes the other way about, too. But surely you can see this for yourself, can't you?'

  Boarci shook his head slowly. 'Can't do that so well myself,' he said. 'Leastways, not with folks from these parts. Back where I came from, of course; but that's a long way from here, and also, most of 'em are dead now. Look,' he said, manhandling rather than changing the subject, 'I don't want to hurry you but it's not smart to hang around in bear country when you've just dressed out, the smell of blood and guts draws 'em in like crazy. If you could see your way to giving me a hand with this lot, we can get out of here. Where was it you said you were making for?'

  Poldarn got up. His legs felt weak, but that was just the aftermath of fear. 'Colscegsford,' he said. 'I'm engaged to Colsceg's daughter. Apparently,' he added.

  'Fine.' Boarci had folded the bearskin, neat as a rug except that it had a bear's head and paws dangling off it, and laid it carefully over the saddle. 'You grab the front quarters, I'll get his arse. Now, on three-'

  Even severely edited, it was a very heavy bear. 'You know,' Boarci said, while Poldarn was catching his breath, 'I'd have thought that just now, when you woke up and saw this old bear coming at you-Well, it should've solved this memory thing, right?'

  Poldarn frowned. 'What, you mean I'd have been dead and it wouldn't have mattered any more?'

  Boarci shook his head. 'No, you're missing the point. What I meant was, folks do say that when you're just about to die, your whole life flashes in front of your eyes. So, didn't it?'

  Poldarn thought for a moment. 'No,' he said.

  'Shit,' Boarci commiserated. 'And I always reckoned that old story. Still,' he went on, brightening up, 'maybe it only works when you're really about to die, not just when you think that's what's going to happen. And you're still alive, see.'

  'Possibly.' Instinctively, Poldarn went to wipe his bloody hands on the grass, but there wasn't any, just black cinders. 'Except that if only people who actually die get to see it, how would anybody know that's what happens? Nobody would live to tell them.'

  Boarci sighed. 'Damn shame,' he said. 'Though as far as I'm concerned it's no bad thing. Wouldn't want to see my life again, it'd just make me cranky. This way, you said?'

  'That's right,' Poldarn confirmed. 'Just head for the middle spur. Over there, look, where those trees are.'

  Walking on the cinders was slow, difficult and exhausting, like wading through coal. Boarci didn't seem to have much trouble, but Poldarn guessed he'd had more time to get used to it. Unfortunately, Boarci was the one leading both the horse and the way. 'Slow down, will you?' Poldarn panted eventually. 'What's the tearing hurry, anyway?'

  'I wasn't hurrying,' Boarci replied. 'Sorry, it's been a while since I went any place in company. So, you been to this farm before? Guess you must have, if you're going to marry their girl.'

  Poldarn shook his head. 'It was all sorted out by her father and my grandfather,' he replied. 'I've only seen her once, come to that.'

  'Cute?'

  'I guess you could say that, yes.'

  'That's good. They're all as tricksy as snakes and bad-tempered, but if you've got to marry one, cute's better than ugly. Course, cute don't last, and then all you've got is the tricksiness and the bad temper. Still, better than nothing, I reckon.'

  Poldarn grinned. 'You're not married, then.'

  'Was married, once. She was cute, if you don't mind 'em small. But her folks turned her against me. They never liked me anyhow.'

  For some reason, Poldarn wasn't surprised. But it was a pleasant change to have someone to talk to-talk in an almost normal way, as opposed to the strange bouts of communication he went through back at the farm, with people for whom speech wasn't the usual method. 'It was very impressive,' he said, 'the way you were able to get up close to the bear without being noticed. You must be good at stalking.'

  Boarci laughed. 'And even if I was,' he said, 'it'd be a joke with all this black shit all over the ground, crunching under your feet like a thousand men eating celery. Truth is, if you hadn't gotten his attention, I wouldn't have had a prayer of getting that close, in daylight and in the open like that.'

  'Glad I could help,' Poldarn muttered.

  Boarci chuckled. 'You weren't planning on helping me,' he said, 'and I wasn't planning on saving you. Just kind of turned out that way, like a happy accident. Which is good. But don't go getting the idea I'm the sort of man who'd pick a fight with a fucking big bear just to stop some stranger from ge
tting all chewed up. That's not my style, I'm afraid.'

  'I've only got your word for that,' Poldarn said politely. 'For all I know, you could spend your whole life going round helping people, and just pretending to be a homeless drifter because you can't stand being made a fuss of.'

  'Sure.' Boarci laughed again. 'That's me exactly, how did you guess?'

  'Good judge of character, presumably.'

  It was hard enough at the best of times to find the valley in which Colscegsford nestled. With nothing to see except black ash, the job proved to be too hard for Poldarn, distracted as he was by the unaccustomed luxury of talking to someone. It was only when they stopped to look down into the next valley along and found no house or buildings there that Poldarn paused to think and get his bearings.

  'Of course,' said Boarci, 'the house not being there could be because it burned down or got buried, and the ruins are just under the cinders somewhere.'

  They turned back and retraced their steps. Still no sign of Colsceg's farm. 'We could spend our lives doing this,' Poldarn grumbled. 'Damn it, the miserable place must be somewhere, whole farms don't just melt into the ash or vanish.'

  'They do if it's the end of the world,' Boarci pointed out. 'Leastways, that's what my grandmother taught me. Didn't say anything about fire-breathing mountains, but the rest of it, the old lady wasn't so far off the mark.'

  In the end, they found what they were looking for, after they'd walked past it three times. It was only a thin ribbon of light blue smoke briefly visible against the skyline that betrayed the farm's secret.

  From the head of the combe, there was nothing much to see apart from a few chimney pots and the central ridge of one roof (and you had to be looking for them specifically). A river ran down the middle of the combe, fast and quite deep as it gathered momentum from the steepening gradient. They followed its course-Boarci pointing out that if the place was called Colscegsford, there was probably a ford there, so the river might be a good place to start their search-until they came to a sharp bend, almost a right angle, where the valley suddenly saw fit to drop away at an alarming angle. The river, though, switched over to the side of the combe, forced to follow the rather less precipitous western slope by a long knife-backed ridge that pulled it away like a deliberately built dam. The ridge petered out into a flat plain at the bottom of the combe, where the river slumped into a series of lazy S-bends, in the angle of one of which they found the farm. It wouldn't take much, Poldarn could see, to flood the plain completely; but the farm itself was built on a steeply banked platform between the river bank and the soaring bare rock of the western escarpment. If the river did slip out of its channel, the farm would be an island; but it would take a sea to fill up the valley enough to threaten its inhabitants.

  'Good place to build,' Boarci said. 'Only it must get bloody tiresome having to carry all your water up that steep slope every day.'

  Poldarn wasn't surprised to find a welcoming party waiting for them as they struggled up the hillside. He recognised Colsceg and Egil (who looked at him with a mixture of hatred and terror that must surely have rattled the brains of all the mind-readers in the district) and the gatepost-stolid Barn; Elja wasn't there, but what business was it of hers? She was only the girl he was engaged to, after all. Also included in the party were five or six chunky-looking men with expressionless faces poking out through impressive beards.

  'Hello,' Colsceg said to him; then he turned slightly to face Boarci. 'We could certainly use the meat,' he said, 'but there's no work for you here. I'm sorry.'

  Can mind-readers lie? Poldarn asked himself. Apparently they could-the yard was two-thirds buried in cinders, and one of the barns had only a few charred rafters for a roof-but not convincingly. It didn't take a mind-reader to see that Colsceg knew perfectly well that Boarci didn't believe him, and furthermore wasn't too bothered about it.

  'This is Boarci,' Poldarn said. 'He saved my life by killing the bear, just as it was about to kill me. He's coming back with me to Haldersness as soon as I'm through here. I hope you don't mind if he stays here in the meanwhile.'

  'That'll be fine,' Colsceg replied. 'Any friend of Haldersness is always welcome here.'

  Definitely not convincingly, Poldarn thought. Still, that's their business. In any event, Boarci didn't seem unduly put out; he just grinned and kept his face shut.

  'Thanks,' he said. 'Is Elja at home? I'd like to see her, if that's all right.'

  The request seemed to puzzle Colsceg, but he nodded, and one of the bushy-faced men walked away, presumably to fetch her. The others started to unload the bear. 'That'll do nicely for tonight's dinner,' Colsceg said, and somehow Poldarn got the impression that dinner would've been considerably more sparse if they hadn't shown up when they did. The burned-out barn probably had something to do with that.

  'You lost a building, then,' he said.

  Colsceg nodded. 'The main storehouse,' he grunted. 'Flour, bacon, dried fish, apples, onions-couldn't save any of it. Won't be long before we're slaughtering the stock just to put food on the table. Not that we can pasture them anyhow; they're eating this winter's hay already, and God only knows what we'll do when that's gone. Terrible business, and we haven't got a clue what needs to be done. How about at your place?'

  Poldarn shrugged. 'We're not much better off,' he said, 'except we've still got our stores, of course. But we decided to send our stock away up country; at least there's grazing for them there. Meanwhile, we're trying to scrape the ash off the ploughed land so the crop won't rot. There's a difference of opinion about whether that's a good idea or not; some of us reckon that as soon as there's any heavy rain, it'll wash all this stuff away for us, save us the bother.'

  'We were wondering that,' Barn interrupted. 'They had rain over at Lyatsbridge.'

  Poldarn nodded. 'From what I gather, getting rid of the ash was the least of their problems.'

  'That's true,' Colsceg said. 'But we're all right on that score-we're high up, so mudslides won't be a problem.'

  'Unless they come straight down off the mountainside at you,' Poldarn pointed out. 'But I expect you've considered that.'

  Colsceg frowned. 'We're trying not to scare ourselves to death thinking of every bloody thing,' he replied. 'It's bad enough as it is without dreaming up new ways we could all get killed.'

  That seemed to close that topic of discussion. 'I'm sure Halder will want to send you anything we can spare,' Poldarn said. 'I'll talk to him about it when I get home.'

  Nobody seemed very impressed by what Poldarn reckoned was a very generous offer, not to mention a distinctly reckless one. He had a feeling that as far as the Haldersness people were concerned, charity began at home and stayed there. In fact, he wished he'd kept his mouth shut.

  Chapter Nine

  'I love organised religion,' said the old man with the long grey hair, wiping brains off the blade of his sword with the hem of his coat. 'I love its pomp and pageantry, its traditions, its stabilising influence on society' He kicked a dead body just to make sure before pulling a ring off its finger. 'I just wish there was more of it. There don't seem to be nearly as many monasteries as there used to be when I was your age.'

  The younger man (I know him; I'm sure I've seen him before, somewhere or in something) laughed. 'Too right,' he said. 'But you've burned down most of them. You can't have your cake and eat it, you know.'

  (The crows were already beginning to circle. He couldn't see them, but he could hear their voices, as if they were calling out to him, trying to tell him something-a warning, maybe, or just vulgar abuse because he was in the way. He felt that he ought to be able to understand what they were saying, but either they were just too far away for him to make out the words, or else it was one of the arcane rules of the dream.)

  The older man shrugged the point away. 'So what?' he said. 'If these people were really serious about religion, they'd rebuild them. Bigger and more splendid-' The ring didn't want to come off, so he knelt down, put the finger in his mouth and sucke
d. 'Useful trick, that,' he said, 'just the sort of thing you're here to learn.' He spat the ring out into his hand. 'Where was I?'

  'Bigger and more splendid.'

  'Absolutely.' The older man held out his arm, so that he could be helped up. 'Seems to me,' he went on, 'that if my country was being assailed by ruthless bands of wandering pirates-'

  'It is.'

  '-Then I'd do everything I possibly could to woo the favour of the gods,' the older man went on, grunting as he straightened his back, 'especially building monasteries and endowing them with fine silverware. Gods hate cheapskates, it's a well-known fact.' He frowned, drawing together his monstrous ruglike eyebrows. 'You aren't just going to leave that perfectly good pair of boots, are you?'

  Of course, the older man was showing off (I know him, too; you couldn't forget someone like that) in front of his dazzled and devoted apprentice. He was usually like this after a massacre, clowning and cracking jokes to vent the stress and the anger and the self-loathing from his system. 'Sorry,' the younger man replied meekly, stooping and dragging off the dead man's left boot. 'I don't know what I could've been thinking of.'

  Feron Amathy; the old man's name is Feron Amathy. I wonder if I'll remember that when I wake up. 'Hurry up, will you?' Amathy said, 'we've got a lot to get done. Oh, for pity's sake,' he added, as the younger man struggled with a tangled bootlace, 'just cut it and be done with it.'

  The young man did as he was told. In fact, they weren't particularly good boots; the uppers were immaculately polished, but the soles were rough and thin. But Feron Amathy had to make his point.

  Across the courtyard, a bunch of soldiers were making a long job of setting light to the thatched eaves of the stables; the thatch was still soaking wet after the morning's rain. 'Look at them, will you?' Feron Amathy sighed. 'No more idea than my old mother's parrot. What they want to do is get a pair of bellows-there's bound to be one in the kitchens or the smithy-and get some air behind it, otherwise we'll be here all day, till the sun comes out. If there's one thing I can't be doing with, it's sloppy workmanship.'