Free Pattern by K. J. Parker Page A

leaking wineskin. They stood and scowled at it for a short while, then moved on.
    More than once as they walked, Poldarn had looked sideways at Elja; but each time, she was looking straight ahead, absolutely no trace of an expression on her face. Egil, he noticed, stayed the other side of her, as far away from Poldarn as he could get, and he just looked bored and slightly constipated. Well, Poldarn thought, who wants chatty in-laws and a wife who talks all the time?
    His first sight of the wood came as they rounded a slight bend in the river, where the western slope of the combe fell sharply down to the bank. Over its shoulder he could make out the tops of pine trees. The sight was extremely familiar – which didn’t make any sense at all, he realised, since the last time he’d been here, the trees would have been too short to show above the hillside. He dismissed it as his imagination coining false memories for him.
    The wood was smaller than he’d thought it would be; about six dozen tall, thin trees on a very gentle slope, next to a flat, bare platform standing on a pronounced mound; a highly suitable place to build a house, though the view wouldn’t be up to much. As they approached, a mob of crows got up out of the treetops and flapped slowly, angrily away, like resentful tenants being evicted; not that far off the mark, Poldarn reckoned, since they’d lose their roost when the trees were taken down. Their problem, he told himself. As he watched them toiling laboriously into the air, he felt something on his face and the top of his head; a lighter touch than rain, more like snow. He ran his hand across his forehead and noticed a few specks of black ash. It reminded him of the awkward-to-walk-on black rocks on the mountain, between the snow and the grazing. If the others noticed it, they weren’t curious enough to investigate, or else retrieving bits of debris off yourself in public was bad manners.
    â€˜Good lumber,’ Barn said suddenly. It was the first thing Poldarn had heard him say.
    â€˜Scrawny,’ Halder replied. ‘Should’ve thinned them out fifteen years back. Didn’t seem any point back then, though. Still,’ he added, with a sigh, ‘it’ll have to do.’
    It was just a clump of trees, a stand of timber – and then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, Poldarn caught his breath, because it wasn’t just that. As he stared at the trees, he began remembering them, only he wasn’t seeing them as they had been or even as they were now, but how they would be, one day, one day soon . Just to the right of the middle of the stand grew the roof-tree, the backbone of the house; surrounding it were the girts, joists, floorboards and rafters; below them, slightly asplay on the gentle gradient, stood the braces, sills and plates, with the cross-beams standing out above them. He could see them as trees, still cluttered with branches and clothed in bark. He could also see them as sawn, planed timber, a skeleton of a house (like the skeletons of dead animals and men that litter the ground on a battlefield that nobody’s dared go near for twenty years, on account of ghosts and ill fortune); he could see them in place, slotted together, tenon mated into mortice, joints lapped, dowels clouted home, waiting to be cladded in green-sawn planking, or else the outer skin had rotted or burnt away, leaving only the naked frame.
    Poldarn passed his hand through his hair. It was thick with black ash.
    â€˜I remember this lot,’ he said aloud. ‘We came here when I was just a kid, and you pointed out all the trees, told me what they’d be used for. We even cut tallies on them, in case we forgot.’ He lifted his head, then pointed. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s one, you can still just about see it.’
    Halder nodded. ‘Thought it might ring a few bells,’ he said. ‘You used to come here all the time, about twenty-five