Pattern (28 page)

It took three days to fell, hew and plank out the timber, and suddenly there wasn't a copse there any more, just a huge pile of lumber, all carefully piled with wedges between each piece to allow the air to circulate in the stack and prevent warping. When they arrived on the fourth morning, the crows were sitting on the log pile, looking bewildered. How the hell do you expect us to roost on that? they seemed to cry as the work party walked them off. The fourth day was spent in cutting joints, and by now most of the enthusiasm had worn off. Poldarn got involved in a silent battle of wills with a Colscegsford hand called Bren over a sloppy mortice in the south end house-post; it'd have been all right if Bren had admitted at the start that he'd marked it out wrong, but he carried on working even though he knew the slot was skewed, which was just plain foolish (and typical of Bren, someone told Poldarn later, though on what authority he was left to guess). When he noticed and told him to stop, Bren tried to pretend that it was all perfectly good and that Poldarn couldn't judge an angle, so Poldarn had to fetch the gauge and show him. That made Bren even angrier, particularly when Colsceg started in on him as well. The issue gradually brought all work to a standstill, and it was only after Bren had suddenly got up and walked away that Poldarn and Eyvind were able to consider the problem calmly and decide what was to be done. Eyvind maintained that the post was useless and would have to be discarded; they'd have to hunt around for another piece of timber from somewhere, possibly rob a timber off the derelict barn. Poldarn wasn't having that. They were going to use this piece and no other, and if Eyvind was half the joiner he tacitly claimed to be, he'd be able to figure out a way of salvaging it.

Of course Eyvind didn't like that; luckily he took the implied slight as a challenge, and spent the next two hours cutting a block that exactly filled the defective mortice, dowelling it in tight and cutting a new mortice into the patch. The result, he claimed, would be even stronger than if it'd been cut from the whole wood, and if Poldarn wasn't entirely convinced by that, he could at least see that the job was good enough and would hold.

Things got better after that. Bren wandered back an hour or so after Eyvind had finished his patch; needless to say, the rest of the work he did that day was beyond reproach.

‘Now all we've got to do,' Colsceg announced at the start of the fifth day, ‘is put the bastard together.'

Poldarn had a feeling that Colsceg hadn't exactly dedicated his life to winning friends and getting people to like him, but that was a bit much, even coming from him. Still, nobody said anything – he'd have been amazed if they had – and they set to work with grim determination, boring the dowel-holes with augers and hammering in the pegs to assemble the sections of the frame. Much to Poldarn's surprise and relief, the plates, posts and sills slotted together perfectly – no yawning gaps, no frantic bashing to squash a fat tenon into a thin mortice – and once the sides were raised with the help of a gin-pole crane and a lot of bad language, the cross-beams and girts slotted in place without any fuss and the pegs went home without jamming or splitting.

‘Don't panic,' Eyvind said, observing Poldarn's fraught expression. ‘Something'll go wrong soon, and then you can relax.'

Poldarn shook his head. ‘It's toying with me, I can tell,' he replied. ‘Nothing fits together this easily, ever.'

‘Bullshit,' Colsceg interrupted, his mouth full of pegs. ‘You do the cutting-out right, it goes together first time. I never have any bother— Fuck,' he added, ‘this goddamn tenon's too short. Who cut this tenon?'

Curiously, nobody could remember having worked on that particular timber; and, since it was out of the question that Colsceg could've made a mistake like that, they were left with the conclusion that at some point during the previous day, they'd been helped out by a bunch of careless elves.

‘This is silly,' Poldarn said. ‘We can't just pack in and start all over again because of one lousy inch.'

For once, Colsceg didn't seem to have an opinion on the matter in hand, and for a while, it was very quiet all round. Finally, Egil (who hadn't said a single word since the job began, as far as Poldarn could remember) cleared his throat and asked how it would be if they cut off the end and spliced in an extension?

Nobody said anything, and Egil shrugged as if to apologise for saying something crass. But then Poldarn said, ‘Yes, we could do that', and Colsceg said, ‘No, we couldn't, bloody thing'd pull itself apart soon as it took the weight,' and the two of them looked at each other for a while, and they decided to try it. Colsceg sketched out a joint with a scrap of charcoal – a murderously complicated affair that looked like two spiders fighting – while Poldarn solemnly picked up a saw and began to cut off the beam. The two of them worked in silence for over an hour while the others, who had nothing they could usefully do, looked on like a gaggle of expectant fathers.

‘All right,' Poldarn said eventually. ‘This ought to work.'

‘And if it doesn't?' someone asked.

‘Then we tear the whole bloody thing down and start again.'

The frightening thing was that he meant it. To everyone's relief, it didn't come to that. Colsceg's double-housed lapped dovetail, or whatever the hell it was, took the strain without so much as a creak, while Poldarn's joinery (When and where the hell did I learn that? he wondered) was so precise that they couldn't pull a single hair through the join.

‘Not bad,' Colsceg admitted, frowning. ‘Mind you, when I was your age—'

After that, things went well. The rafters dropped into their pockets in the plates, the pegs slid home and tightened in their tapers with a few light taps of the mallet and the collar ties lay sweetly in their blind mortices.

‘Finished,' Poldarn said, taking a step back. ‘Well, apart from the thatch and the doors, and planking up the sides. But the frame's up, anyway.'

Later, when the rest of them were well into their beer, he lit a torch, called Elja down from the loft and took her down the river path to see it. ‘Of course,' he pointed out, ‘it'll look different when it's got walls and a roof—'

‘I imagine so, yes. A bit more waterproof, for a start.'

‘– But you get the general idea.' He hesitated and looked away. ‘What d'you think?' he asked.

‘I think it's very nice,' Elja replied solemnly. ‘Can we go back inside now, please? It's freezing, and my feet are all wet.'

‘In a moment,' Poldarn replied. ‘Wait there a moment, will you?' He disappeared out of the light, and came back a minute later with a wooden cup in his hand. ‘I just remembered I left this out here,' he explained. ‘Go on, have a sip. It's water from our river.'

Elja took the cup from him. ‘It's not really our river,' she said.

‘From here to the mouth of the combe it is,' Poldarn said. ‘All right, from the spring head to here it belongs to Haldersness, and from the mouth of the combe as far as Swartmoor it belongs to your father, and after that I'm not sure; but for the minute or so it takes for the water to get from here to there, it's ours. Don't be so damned literal all the time.'

Elja sipped; then she pulled a face and spat it out. ‘It's all muddy,' she said.

‘Yes, well,' Poldarn admitted, ‘probably I stirred it up a bit while I was washing the cup out. But I'll put in a gravel bed to filter it, and then we'll have the sweetest water this side of the mountains.'

‘If you say so,' Elja said. ‘And now, if it's all the same to you, I really would like to go back, because I'm getting married in a couple of days, and I don't want to say my vows with a streaming cold.'

‘Don't fuss,' Poldarn said sternly, and kissed her; and although she knew she wasn't supposed to, she kissed him back. ‘Anyway,' he said, ‘I think it looks better that way.'

‘What does?'

He nodded his head towards the house-frame. ‘The copse,' he replied.

‘Oh,' Elja said. ‘That. I think it's a very nice house, even if it's still a bit bald in patches. But I really would like to go back now, if it's all the same to you.'

‘Yes, it's all the same to me.' Poldarn sighed, feeling slightly ashamed of his petulance. ‘Sorry, I shouldn't have snapped. I just thought you'd like to see it, that's all.'

‘Thank you,' Elja replied gravely. ‘But I'm going to be seeing it every day for the rest of my life, and it's late, and I'd like to get some sleep now. I'm sure it'll be a really nice house,' she added, ‘when it's finished.'

Next day they started splitting the shakes for boarding in the walls. There was no easy way to go about it. Each felled log had to be carefully examined to see where the split-lines ran, and then it was a simple but tedious and exhausting matter of hammering in the froes, freeing them, driving them in a little further up the line, until the log cracked open lengthways to form two half-round planks. That was the theory, at any rate; but one log in three refused to split clean, leaving the chore of salvaging what material they could for filling and patching. As the day wore on, the hammers and axe-polls grew steadily heavier and more erratic, sometimes missing the froe altogether and landing a full-weight blow on the neck of the handle – whereupon the axe or hammer head would snap off and fly fast and wild through the air, adding a spice of danger to the monotony of the day's labours. By nightfall, the best that could be said was that half the job had been done and nobody had been killed yet; and when the Colscegsford people set to washing the dust out of their throats, Poldarn began to wonder how the beer could possibly hold out till the house was finished.

Another day to split the rest of the shakes and shingles, another two days to nail and peg them to the frames; then, quite suddenly early one afternoon, Colsceg stood back, looked at the house and said, ‘Right, it's finished.'

Poldarn, who'd been fussing over a tight shutter, looked up in surprise. ‘Are you sure?' he asked.

‘Well.' Colsceg shrugged. ‘It all needs sealing with pitch, of course, and that blacksmith of yours said the latches'd be ready two days ago and I haven't seen any sign of 'em so far, and there's a few bits and bobs that need sorting out, same as you get on any new building. But yes, it's finished.'

‘Oh.' Poldarn took a few steps back. ‘So it is,' he said. ‘You know what, it isn't bad.'

‘Seen worse,' Colsceg conceded. ‘And so long as it keeps you dry and doesn't fall on your head in the night, who gives a damn?' He leaned on his axe and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. ‘You're right, it's not so bad, though I say so myself. 'Course, if we had the job to do all over again, I'd use birds' mouths for the rafter seats instead of step laps and I'd probably stop the splayed scarfs with double wedges, but it's too late now to worry about that, not unless you want to tear the whole lot down and do it again.' He sighed. ‘It'll get the job done, that's the main thing. Should see you out, anyway.'

‘I like it,' Poldarn replied. ‘You know what, I think I could get to know who I really am in a house like that.'

Colsceg frowned, as if to say that he didn't know what to make of a remark like that, and probably just as well. ‘Let's just hope the mountain doesn't brew up again and flatten it,' he said. ‘That'd be a choker, after all the work I've put in.'

Poldarn smiled. I dedicate this monument to my future father-in-law Colsceg, he said to himself, without whose dedication, hard work and helpful suggestions, this house would've been completed two days ago. ‘I couldn't have done it without your help,' he said. ‘Thank you.'

Colsceg seemed genuinely surprised by that; he frowned, and muttered that it was a job that needed doing, so he'd done it. ‘Besides,' he went on, ‘it's not just you that'll be living there, it's my daughter as well. Don't worry about it.'

Making Colsceg feel uncomfortable was almost as pleasant as building the house. ‘No, honestly,' he said, ‘I can't tell you how grateful I am. It was really kind of you to spare the time, especially when things have gone so badly for you. Most people in your position would've been far too preoccupied with their own business to have mucked in the way you did.'

‘No, they wouldn't,' Colsceg protested, as if Poldarn had just said something outrageous. ‘Look, it's no big deal, so let's not say any more about it, right?'

Poldarn shrugged. ‘That's very generous of you,' he said, unable to resist a final twist of the knife before drawing it out of the wound. ‘And the least I can do by way of thanks is to insist that you move into Haldersness, as soon as we're settled in here. After all,' he went on, barging through Colsceg's protests like an impatient carter running down chickens in the road, ‘it's just standing there empty, and your people need a roof over their heads. Please, I want you to treat it as your own for as long as you like.'

‘But—' Colsceg was now so bewildered that Poldarn almost felt sorry for him. ‘Well, for one thing, it's a good day's ride from our farm, we'd spend more time trekking back and forth than working. And there's a hell of a lot to do – well, you know that, you were there. If we moved into Haldersness, it'd be a nightmare.'

Reluctantly, Poldarn decided to let him off the hook. ‘I suppose you're right,' he said. ‘But at the very least, I want you to have all the timbers and the thatch, so all you'll have to do is take it down, cart it over to your place and put it back up again. I mean to say, where else are you going to find enough lumber to build with?'

There he had a point. Not long ago there had been a very fine wood at Colscegsford – Barn's wood, for building his house when Colsceg was dead – and another, rather smaller and less well looked after, for Egil; but both of them had been scooped up and smashed into kindling by the mud-slides, and the nearest stands of unclaimed timber were weeks away to the south-east. Cutting and carting so far from home would require the entire household to move out there for the best part of six months, during which time they'd have to fend for themselves as best they could by hunting and gathering. Or else they'd have to leave half the household camped out at Colscegsford to raise whatever crop they could grow in the mud, while the other half took twice as long to do the cutting and hauling. Poldarn fancied that he could see all these arguments tracking painfully across Colsceg's mind.