A slight twinge in Poldarn's left shoulder seemed to urge him to back out now, while he had the chance. 'I reckon I'm on for that,' he said. 'So, where is it now?'
Eyvind laughed. 'In the river, of course; that's where river gravel comes from.'
'Oh.'
'Thought you'd say that. First, we get a few long-handled shovels and dig it out, then we load it into barrels, which Halder's kindly lending us for the purpose, then we load the barrels onto a couple of carts, job done. It's bloody hard work and it'll take the rest of the day.' His face relaxed a little. 'Really' he said, 'you don't have to if you don't want to. Turburn and Asley'll give me a hand.'
Poldarn knew who they were. Turburn was a huge man with a bald head and with shoulders as wide as a plough yoke; Asley looked like Turburn's big brother. Either of them could pick up a three-hundredweight barrel of gravel and walk right round the farm carrying it without realising it was there. 'Honestly,' he said, 'I don't mind, I need the exercise.'
Eyvind was looking at him as if he was a troll or a merman, some strange supernatural being who happened to look a bit like a human. 'That's something I'll never get used to,' he said. 'You say one thing, and you mean the exact opposite. I don't know how the hell you can do that. I couldn't, to save my life.'
Poldarn sighed. 'Well,' he said, 'obviously I'm not very good at it, if you can read me so easily.'
Judging by Eyvind's expression, he'd touched on some kind of important topic here, one that his friend didn't want to start discussing right then. 'Don't worry about it,' Eyvind said. 'All right, if you're dead set on volunteering, you come on. At the very least, it'll teach you never to do it again.'
It turned out to be an unspeakable job, back-breaking and shoulder-wrenching; and Poldarn made matters far worse by trying to keep up, at least to begin with, until he'd frittered away his strength and stamina, leaving fifteen barrels still empty. After that, all he could do was disconnect his mind and keep his arms and legs moving. He was painfully aware that he wasn't really contributing-his shovel pecked at the river bed, and he spilled most of what he dug up before it reached the barrel. Furthermore, his boots were letting in water, his knees had given out, and the strip of rag he'd bound round his hand wasn't really doing much to protect his blisters from the shovel handle. Anyone with any sense would've admitted defeat and crawled back to the house, but it appeared that he'd misplaced his brains along with his memory. It was lucky he didn't cause an accident when it came to hefting the barrels up onto the cart; he couldn't take the weight, and more than once the barrel nearly twisted out of his grip and fell on Turburn's leg. In the end, though, the job got done in spite of him, and he collapsed against the side of the cart, sitting down squarely in a pool of churned-up mud. Didn't matter, he was already filthy from head to toe. The other three weren't, of course.
'Thank you,' Eyvind said, and although all Poldarn's instincts insisted his friend was being facetious, chances were he really meant it. 'Don't know about you, but I'm ready for a beer. Coming?'
Poldarn nodded, and didn't move. It was nearly dark (they'd have finished long since without him, and the carts would've been on the road by now; as it was, they'd have to wait till morning, and the routine at Bollesknap would be out of joint for days), and the white clouds hanging over the mountain showed up as a dull, flat grey; on the opposite horizon, the sun was going down in fire. 'You go on,' he said. 'I'll catch you up. Think I'll just sit here for a bit.'
Some time later, when he'd got the use of his head back, it occurred to Poldarn that here he was again, sitting in the churned-up mud beside a river, still not really knowing who he was or what the hell he was supposed to be doing. He'd come a fair way since that first river-across a huge ocean, to an enormous island in the far west that the people back in the empire didn't even know about; couldn't come much further than that-and at least on this occasion he wasn't sharing the mud with any dead bodies. That said, he could close his eyes and it'd be the same river-that wasn't too hard to arrive at, if he supposed that the Bohec ran into the sea, the sun drew up water from the ocean and dumped it on this island as rain, it could easily be precisely the same water that he'd woken up beside-and the only change would be in his perceptions, because he hadn't known anything back then; for all he knew, he'd been digging gravel out of the Bohec when the unknown enemies attacked My perceptions, he thought. Well, for one thing, I perceive that I'm covered in mud, so I'd better have a wash before I go indoors. Taken one step at a time, any riddle you like can be broken down into little easy pieces; the trick is in putting them all back together again afterwards.
Getting his bum out of the mud was one of the hardest things Poldarn had ever had to do. All the engineers in Torcea couldn't have made it easy.
The place to wash was a little pool behind the house, where the stream collected in a natural stone basin before falling down the side of the combe on its way to join the river. It served the house as a combination bath house, laundry and mirror, performing all these functions rather better than any of the artificial facilities he'd seen in the crowded cities of the Bohec valley. The water was perishing cold, of course, but that was all right, it helped you wake up in the morning and gingered you up when you were tired at night. Like everything in this extraordinary place, even the disadvantages had their advantages.
Poldarn stood for a moment and looked at his reflection, backlit in sunset fire and blood, before smashing it to pieces with his hands; but, as usual, there was nothing to see except his face, no additional information. Maybe it was a true reflection, the only accurate mirror in the world, showing you what you really were: head, neck, shoulders and no past. He bent at the waist and dipped his hands through his face into the water. It was ice cold, and so clean it was hardly there at all.
When Poldarn reckoned he'd done about as much as could be achieved by way of damage limitation, he straightened his back, shuddered at the pain and hobbled back towards the house. Someone had said something, he seemed to remember, about beer.
Chapter Two
By the time Poldarn had finished washing and kicked off his mud-weighted boots in the back porch, they were ready to start dinner.
His instincts yelled at him to offer to help, but he knew better than that after the first time, when he'd tried his best but had managed to get under everyone's feet and had been banned on pain of certain death from ever helping again. Instead, he stood in the doorway, blissfully happy to have a door frame to lean against, and watched the curious, perfect ballet.
The first movement was the fetching-out of the tables. During the day, the tables and benches were pushed back against the panelled walls, leaving a broad empty space in the middle of the room large enough to accommodate a beached ship, provided its mast was unstepped first. Out of nowhere, four of the farmhands suddenly materialised, lifted the benches onto the tables and carried the tables into the middle of the room. Fifty years of instinctive precision had worn ruts in the baked-clay-and-cowdung floor to show where the table legs should be set down; as a result, every night they stood in exactly the same place, give or take the width of a sycamore leaf. There was no reason why the tables should be so exactly located, as far as Poldarn could judge. The ruts were just a visible display of the awesome power of force of habit, as silent and unregarded as an oak tree curled up in an acorn, or the fire sleeping under a volcano. When the tables were in place, they lifted down the benches and slid them into position in their own set of floor grooves.
(Bizarre, Poldarn thought. A man could go away for forty years and come home blind, and still be able to find his proper place at table by memory alone.)