Pattern (74 page)

He frowned, doing mental arithmetic. Suppose the survivors went for help; nearest place would be the village on the far western edge of the forest, and the very earliest they could get there and get back (assuming the villagers downed tools, left their dinners on the table and ran straight out to help as soon as they arrived) was five days, more likely six. But it wasn't as straightforward as that; in order to do any good they'd need to bring tools and ropes and poles and planks, that'd mean carts or packhorses at the very least. Six days or more likely seven.

Fine, thought Feron Amathy. No further action required. Time to go home.

‘Battle Slough, it's called,' said the old man, ‘on account of there was a battle here once.'

Poldarn nodded. The logic was impeccable.

‘Hell of a battle too, it was,' the old man said. ‘One lot, they chased the other lot into the slough, they got stuck – midwinter it was, slough's mortal sticky in winter, and that's nowadays, with all the drains they dug over Winterhay taking off the worse of it – and the first lot, they just walked away and left 'em there. You can still find bones, if you look.'

Poldarn looked at him. ‘What happened?' he said.

The old man shrugged. ‘Oh, they all died,' he said. ‘Stuck in the mud, couldn't get out. Nothing their mates could do for 'em. Oh, they went for help, but by the time they came back, they'd all died. Just stood there – well, not standing, they were all slumped over like stooks of reed, strangest thing you ever saw in your life. Makes you wonder, though, what it must've been like.'

Poldarn decided he'd like to change the subject. ‘It's mostly oak here, then.'

The old man nodded. ‘Some oak,' he said, ‘some chestnut, but mostly oak. Damn good charcoal wood, oak. There's some as prefers beech, but it's too hot for our line of work. Oak holds the fire longer, see.'

‘Seems a waste, though,' Poldarn said, without thinking. Back home (of course, he'd never once thought of it as that while he'd been there) he'd seen maybe half a dozen oak trees, no more; and even the spruces and firs were precious, as he'd found out to his cost. Curious; he'd had to leave the islands because he'd accidentally burned down a small stand of immature firs, and now here he was on his way to a charcoal camp, where on average they burned a dozen fully grown oaks a day.

The old man was looking at him. ‘Why?' he asked.

‘Oh, nothing,' Poldarn answered awkwardly. ‘But aren't you worried you'll run out, the rate you're felling at?'

This time the old man stared at him for a moment before laughing. ‘I keep forgetting,' he said, ‘you're not from round here. Odd, though, you sound like you're a local boy. Leastways, most of the time you do – and I can tell an off-comer soon as he opens his mouth,' he added, with pride. Poldarn had worked out that ‘offcomer' (which was probably the most offensive term in the old man's vocabulary) meant someone born out of earshot of where they were standing. ‘Plenty more where these came from,' the old man went on, ‘plenty more. I been felling in these woods since I was a kid, and we ain't hardly started yet.'

He made it sound like he was a man with a mission, to rid the world of the lurking threat of deciduous timber once and for all. Good luck to him, Poldarn thought, though he couldn't really bring himself to share the old fool's passion. Chopping down very big trees was too much like hard work, in his opinion. ‘Well, that's all right, then,' he said. ‘Is it much further? Only—'

‘Nearly there,' said the old man. ‘Just up over the steep and down along through.'

Poldarn nodded, wishing he hadn't asked; the old man had given him exactly the same answer a good hour ago, and his left heel was beginning to blister. ‘Are there many of you up at the camp?' he asked, by way of making conversation.

‘Dozen,' the old man said vaguely, ‘couple of dozen. Folks come and go, see. Some of 'em stay a couple weeks or a month, some of 'em's been there twenty years, and nothing to say they won't be up and gone come the morning. Always work in the burning for them as wants it, but some folks can't settle to it, and then they move on.' The old man shook his head sadly, as if to say that humankind was a sadly unsatisfactory breed. That at least was something Poldarn could agree with, though he'd probably arrived at that conclusion by a different route.

No way in a forest of knowing how long they stumbled on for; no way of seeing the sun, to gauge the passage of time. It felt like hours and hours and hours, probably because they were mostly going uphill, and where it wasn't boggy and wet, the way ahead was blocked with curtains of brambles and low branches. Poldarn had already learned to walk bent over like an elderly cripple, his left hand pushed out in front to ward off flailing twigs and briars. He had, of course, not the faintest idea of where he was or which direction he'd come from. If there was a path, he couldn't see it, and all the trees looked identical.

Then, without warning, he shouldered through a screen of holly leaves and found himself on top of a steep rise, looking down into a clearing. For maybe five hundred yards in front, there were no trees, only stumps. In roughly the middle of the cleared space stood four huge round domes. How they'd been made and what they'd been made from he couldn't tell at this distance; in fact, they hardly looked artificial at all, and if the old man had told him they were some kind of massive woodland fungus he'd probably have believed him.

‘Here we are,' the old man said.

As they climbed down the slope, Poldarn got a better look at the domes; in particular, the furthest dome away on his left, which was only half-built. Fifteen yards across and five yards high; inside, it was composed of stacks of neatly split logs about four feet long, stood on end like books on a shelf; these, the old man told him, were the shanklings, whatever that signified. Covering the wood was a six-inch layer of bracken, straw and dry leaves, which in turn was covered with a skin of fine soil. (‘We call that the sammel', the old man told Poldarn, who nodded seriously, as though he could care less.) Here and there, men were fooling about with rakes, hooks and odd-looking arched ladders. They were moving slowly, as though they'd been doing this job for a hundred years and had another hundred still to go.

‘Got to be careful, see,' the old man was saying. ‘Hearth's got to be dead flat, and you've got to be careful there's no stones or anything. Leave a stone and like as not it'll shatter in the burn and poke a bloody hole out the sammel, and then you'd be buggered.'

Poldarn learned a great deal more about the art and science of burning charcoal before they reached the bottom of the slope. He learned that the slabs of turf that the slow little men were fitting carefully round the apex of the dome made up the cope; that the thick log stuck in the very centre was called the mote peg; that the gap between the bottom skirt of the sammel and the ground was the flipe. He heard about how the rate at which the fire burned was governed by the amount of air it drew in through the flipe, and how the burn was controlled by packing sand round the base, and how the sand had to be dug out and moved each time the wind changed direction, to make sure the burn was even all the way through. There was something about the old man's voice, probably its pitch, that made it impossible to ignore, no matter how hard Poldarn tried.

‘To start the burn off,' the old fool was saying, ‘you pull out the mote peg and drop in a bucket of hot coals, then fill up flush with clean charcoal – lumps, mind, not fines or dust; then you cap off with fresh turf and there you go. To start with you get a lot of white smoke and steam, that's the roast drawing the wet out, see. Then it goes blue, and you know it's time to shut down the burn. That's when it gets tricky, mind.'

‘I see,' Poldarn lied. ‘It's obviously a very skilled trade. I never knew there was so much to it.'

The old man grinned. ‘Oh, that's not the half of it,' he said. Poldarn was sure he was right, at that; fortunately, before the old man could educate him further, Poldarn caught sight of a familiar face – Basano, the man they'd done the deal with, back in the relative sophistication of the stable yard of the Virtue Triumphant in Scieza.

He waved hard, and Basano waved back, slowly. Poldarn frowned. Back in Scieza, Basano had come across as almost normal, apart from the length of his beard and the powerful stench of smoke that clung to everything he wore. At any rate, Poldarn hadn't noticed any particular sloth about the way the man moved. Here in the woods, though, he seemed to have slowed down like everyone else; he was trudging up the rise to meet them as though he was one of the unfortunate soldiers trapped in the mud of Battle Slough, all those years ago. Maybe it was something to do with prolonged exposure to extreme heat roasting the nerve endings; or perhaps it was what happened to you if you breathed in too much smoke.

‘You got here all right, then,' Basano said. Poldarn nodded, figuring a little white lie was permissible in the circumstances. ‘Olvo's been looking after you, I hope.'

‘Oh yes,' Poldarn said, with a nice smile. ‘He's been telling me all about how you do things.'

‘Splendid,' Basano replied. ‘Actually, you couldn't have come at a better time. We'll be lighting up number four later on this evening, so you'll be able to watch.'

‘Wonderful,' Poldarn muttered. ‘I'll look forward to that.'

After the lighting ceremony, which turned out to be almost exactly the way Poldarn had imagined it would be, the small crowd of charcoal burners (‘only be sure to call them colliers,' Basano told him in a loud whisper, ‘it's very important to get it right') quickly thinned out and drifted away, leaving Poldarn and Basano alone in front of the newly lit dome, which was gushing out fat plumes of white smoke from top and sides. The colliers mostly lived in tiny low hutches the size of an army tent, built of slabs of turf laid on rickety frames of green sticks. As burn-master, however, Basano enjoyed the privilege of sleeping in the watchman's lodge, which proved to be a slightly bigger version of the same thing. Once Poldarn had got used to the thin light of the single oil lamp, and the rather unnerving sight of wriggling worms poking out through the ceiling, he found it wasn't too bad, if you didn't mind damp and smoke.

‘Hungry?' Basano asked; and before Poldarn could answer, he'd pulled the lid off a large stone crock and fished out an elderly loaf and a slab of pale, glazed-looking cheese. ‘There's beer in the jug,' he added, pointing at what Poldarn had taken to be the jerry. The taste of its contents didn't do much to persuade him that he hadn't been right all along. ‘We're a bit rough and ready,' Basano added, as Poldarn's teeth grated on the crust of the cheese, ‘but we do all right for ourselves.'

‘So I see,' Poldarn said, spitting out a small piece of grit, or tooth enamel. ‘How's business?'

‘Bloody wonderful,' Basano replied. ‘Can't make enough of the stuff. They're desperate for it in the towns, like it's gold dust or something.'

‘That's good,' Poldarn said. ‘But you reckon you can guarantee us a regular supply?'

‘Oh, that won't be a problem,' Basano said decisively. ‘You just tell me how much you people need, and we'll see you get it.'

‘Fine,' Poldarn said. Something dropped from the turf roof onto his head and squirmed. ‘And there won't be any difficulty about the grade? The sort of work we're doing, we have to be sure the fuel's consistent to get exactly the right temperature. If it burns too hot or too cool, it can screw a job up completely. You get cracked moulds, cold shuts, air bubbles—'

Basano shook his head. ‘Don't worry about it,' he said. ‘I'll pick your supplies out myself. First-grade lump, from the top centre of the stack, where it gets raked off first. That way there's no danger of it getting overcooked, or coming up brown in the middle. You can bet your life on that.'

Poldarn wasn't sure he was prepared to go that far; but Basano seemed confident enough, and in spite of the old man's intensive coaching Poldarn didn't know enough about the trade to contradict him. ‘In that case,' he said, ‘that ought to suit us just fine.'

Basano nodded and poured out more beer; and that, apparently, was all there was to it. So simple; a pity, Poldarn couldn't help thinking, it couldn't all have been settled back at the Virtue Triumphant, where the beds were dry and you couldn't stand a spoon upright in the beer. On the other hand, if he'd done the deal in Scieza, he'd have missed a two-day trudge through the woods and all that fascinating stuff about mote-pegs and flipes. He drank some of the beer. It tasted disgusting. He drank a little more, nevertheless.

‘Nice drop of beer, though I say it myself,' Basano said. ‘It's a traditional colliers' recipe,' he added, with more than a hint of pride. ‘Bracken instead of hops, gives it that sort of nutty tang.'

For a moment, Poldarn hoped he was kidding. ‘Distinctive,' he said. ‘So, you do your own brewing here?'

‘And baking,' Basano replied. (Well, that accounted for the bread.) ‘Not that we can't afford stuff from town; like I told you, business is damn good. But it helps pass the time, you know?'

‘I'm sure,' Poldarn replied.

Basano drained his cup and poured out some more. ‘Essential supplies,' he said. ‘Dry work, see, and then there's all the sitting around. Got to stay close to the fire all the time, see, keep an eye on it in case the wind changes. A good burn'll take you, what, sixteen, seventeen days till the core's cooled down and you can rake out. Doesn't seem nearly so long if you've got a drop to drink.'

Poldarn smiled thinly. ‘I'll bet,' he said.

‘Mind you.' Basano pulled a face, then blew his nose loudly into the palm of his hand. ‘There's some up north as prefers cider. Well, they burn a lot of fruitwood, and apple's as good as any,' he added, with the air of someone making a flimsy excuse for an unspeakable perversion. ‘You like cider?'