'You don't say' Boarci shrugged. 'Heard of cases like that, never really believed them. Course, I don't believe in the marsh pixies either, and it's never seemed to bother them any.' He knelt down and wrestled the bear over onto its back; it took all his strength to do that. 'Fair-sized animal,' he said, 'now all I've got to do is dress the bugger out. I hate this job.' He paused, and then looked pointedly at Poldarn's horse. 'Mind you,' he added, 'dressing out's a piece of cake compared with lugging the meat to the nearest farm—a man can do himself a serious injury that way. Times like this, I really wish I had a horse.'

  The hint was heavier than any bear that ever trod grass. 'Well,' Poldarn said, 'since you were kind enough to save my life, the least I can do is give you mine.'

  'Oh.' Boarci looked slightly stunned. 'Actually, I wasn't meaning that. All I meant was, it'd be real handy if wherever you're going, you wouldn't mind walking and letting my bear ride.'

  Poldarn smiled. 'I know that's what you meant,' he replied, 'but I think you've earned the horse. Besides,' he added, 'it isn't mine. Well, not really, it belongs to Haldersness, but everybody keeps telling me it amounts to the same thing, so you're welcome to it.'

  'Haldersness,' Boarci repeated. 'Can't say as I know it. Close?'

  Poldarn jerked his head back. 'Not far that way. But I was planning on going that way, to Colscegsford.'

  Boarci shrugged. 'Broad as it's long to me, provided they can use some fresh meat at where you said. Doesn't bother me where I go.'

  Poldarn nodded. 'Fine,' he said. 'Look, excuse me if this sounds ignorant, but am I right in thinking you're a professional hunter?'

  'Yeah.' Boarci laughed; a deep, grumbling noise that seemed to happen somewhere around his navel. 'That's what I am, a professional hunter. More like, when I can find a bear or a wild ox or something worth eating that's dumb enough to hold still, I bang it on the head and take it on. Folks aren't quite so quick to show you the door if you bring dinner.'

  'I see,' Poldarn exaggerated. 'So what else do you do apart from hunting, if you don't mind me asking?'

  'I move around a lot,' Boarci replied, pulling a big knife out of the top of his boot and prodding the bear's stomach with a carrot-thick forefinger. 'If there's any work needs doing, I do it, until my face stops fitting and it's time to move on. I'll be straight with you, most folks don't seem to take to me, they worry when I'm around. Because I'm not settled, see, I don't belong anywhere. This thing with the mountain catching fire's been a godsend, actually; I got a week's work at some farm down the valley digging ditches to carry off flood water, and two days at another place shovelling this black shit out of their yard, and now a bear. I reckon it got pushed out of the forest, they don't hardly ever come up so far as this.'

  Poldarn frowned. 'And when you get to the next farm, you sell the meat, right? Do people actually eat the stuff?'

  Another laugh. 'Now I believe you about the memory thing,' Boarci said. 'Because if you'd ever had roast bear steaks, you wouldn't have forgotten it in a hurry. Best eating there is, barring spring beef and maybe wine-cooked venison.'

  'Really' Poldarn shrugged. 'Well, there's certainly plenty of it there.'

  'You bet. And no, I don't sell it, that's not how it's done. I give the farmer the bear, he's more likely to let me stick around a while, find me some work to do. Not always, though. I've had 'em take a bear or a deer, thank you very much, and please close the door on the way out. Bastards,' he added dolefully.

  'It does seem a bit ungrateful,' Poldarn said.

  Apparently Boarci had found what he'd been looking for, because he slid the knife in and started sawing. 'Can't blame 'em, actually. Hell, if I was them, I'd probably set the dogs on me. How're they supposed to know I'm not a whole load of trouble—like, if I'm all right, what'm I doing straggling round all over instead of having a good place on a farm somewhere, like regular people?' He suddenly jerked the knife sideways, putting all his weight behind it. There was a terrific crack, like a branch snapping. 'Truth is, most of us you come across wandering around, it's because we did something bad or we can't get along with folks, so what do you expect? Course,' he added, wiping blood out of his eyes, 'I'm not like that. I'm out here on my own because of an unfortunate run of bad luck.'

  '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 getting 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.'

 

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