Chapter 59: End of Spring

By late spring there were half a hundred chimneys smoking in one corner of the citadel.

Oddr had not believed the boy about the weather.

Nobody had. You do not go that far north, past the ice, past the last rock any living man has a name for, past the edge of every map ever drawn by anybody, and then stand there and be told by an eighteen-year-old that the summers are warm.

Yet the snow had gone in a fortnight. The meltwater had gone after it. And by the turn of the season the flagstones of the lower plaza were too hot at noon to stand on with a bare foot, and the air came up off the terraces thick and green and smelling of things growing too fast, and the old man had taken to walking about in his shirt.

Warm as a southern coast, the boy had said, of a place where the sea had been frozen solid four moons ago.

And warm as a southern coast it was.

Oddr had stopped being surprised by that sort of thing somewhere around the second week.

Two other matters had settled themselves over the same season, and both of them were worth noting.

The first was that every morning, before there was light enough to see the far wall of the plaza, the training ground filled up.

Haaland ran it as he had always run it. And now there was a horned bastard standing in the back row with a wooden sword in each hand, doing the same four cuts as the children and doing them badly, and losing to a grey-templed sellsword every single dawn without fail, and coming back the next dawn.

That had been going on since the duel. It showed no sign whatsoever of stopping.

The second matter was that Emerald had begun disappearing at dusk.

There was reading involved. That was the official position, and it was even true. The girl spoke the northern tongue and could not read a word of it, and somebody was teaching her at a broken library window, and that somebody was the brat.

Oddr had gone past that window once, on his way to somewhere else. He had not stopped and he had not slowed down.

He had heard the boy call her Emi, in the offhand way a man says a word he has worn smooth, and he had heard her not correct him.

Oddr had said nothing about it to anybody.

He was saving it.

He walked the streets most evenings.

It was not an inspection. He simply walked, at the hour when the light went long and gold across the upper terrace, with his hands in his sleeves and no particular destination, and let the settlement happen around him.

That evening a pack of children came up the street at a dead run.

Eight or nine of them. Shrieking, filthy, arms out, in pursuit of a black shape that was not remotely trying to escape them.

Toothless went past Oddr at a lazy trot with his ears flat back and his tongue out and every appearance of a creature being hunted for its life, cut left round a doorway, doubled back through the middle of the pack, and knocked three of them over with his tail on the way through.

The screaming went up an octave.

The old man stepped out of the way and stood with his back against a warm wall and watched them go. All of it, the whole ridiculous parade of it, until the noise turned the corner and went off down the hill.

Then he stood there a while longer.

Half a year ago those children had been sleeping on stone in the dark of a cave, coughing, with somebody else's mother counting them at night to be sure the number had not changed.

The doors were the thing.

Half the doors on that street were open, because it was warm and because they could be, and a man walking down it in the evening got a look into a good many lives whether he wanted one or not.

A young woman sat on a stool just inside her doorway with a shirt across her knees and her needle going. She looked up as his shadow crossed her floor, waved at him with the hand that had the thread in it, grinned, and went straight back to it.

Four houses on, Ylva was out on her terrace in the last of the sun with her back against the warm stone and both hands resting on the shelf of her belly, and did not look up at all, because she had reached the stage of it where very little that is not the child exists.

Further along, a man was fighting his son on the flagstones with a pair of wooden swords.

The boy was not his son.

The boy had come off that galleon alone like all of them, and had been sleeping by the wall in the cave in the third week of winter, and was now this man's, entirely, without one word ever having been said about it by anybody.

He was perhaps eleven and he was holding the sword wrong, and the man kept stopping and tapping the inside of the boy's wrist with two fingers until the point came down. Exactly the way Haaland did it. Badly copied, and copied with enormous seriousness.

"Again."

The boy did it again.

"Again."

Nobody in that street was standing about doing nothing.

That was what Oddr kept arriving at, and it had taken him weeks to work out why it struck him so hard, and the answer was that all of it was pointless.

The shirt did not need mending that evening. The boy did not need to learn a cut. Nobody was going to die if that man went and sat down instead.

They were doing it because it was theirs to do, in a room that was theirs, with the door open because they felt like having it open.

Also, the men had gone strange about furniture.

There was not a stick of it anywhere on that island. Nobody had thought about it at all until the roofs went on and the doors went up and half a hundred families walked into as many beautiful, dry, empty stone boxes and discovered they had nothing whatsoever to put in them.

The centuries had eaten every board, every stool, every bed frame, every shutter. The old builders had left them walls that would stand an age longer, and not one thing a man could sit on.

So they made their own.

The timber crew came back from the north woods one week and half the wood went missing the next day, and after that you could not walk the upper street of an evening without hearing somebody sawing.

Tables, mostly. Bad ones, with four legs of three different lengths.

Then shelves, which was worse, because a shelf is a great deal more complicated than it looks.

The half man said it best, sitting on a wall with a cup, watching a man fit one into an alcove with enormous care.

"He has nothing to put on it. He knows he has nothing to put on it. He is building it for the idea of one day having something."

He took a drink.

"Gods, I love this place."

Dwarf was right.

Because most of these people had never owned a room.

Not a house. A room. They had owned a corner of a hold, a place on a bench, a patch of floor near enough to a wall that nobody could step on them in the night, and that had been the whole history of every one of them for years.

And here they were, proud as jarls, over a table with a wobble in it.

The stone in the plaza had done its work.

It had stood upright beside the fire since the end of winter, cut and set there on the day they agreed the thing out loud, and every soul on that hill had walked past it a thousand times over the spring and read the line on it whether they meant to or not.

A home of their own for every family, before the next snow.

The snow had not come back yet.

The last family had moved in a moon ago.

So Dwarf took the stone down and laid it flat into the paving in the middle of the lower plaza, where everybody would have to walk over it. He cut the hollow for it himself, keyed to the blocks around it the way the old builders would have, and dropped it in level with the street so that it would never come out again.

"What's that for?" a boy asked him.

"So that in a hundred years," said the half man, "some idiot standing right here can read how their tale began, and feel appropriately small about it."

The boy thought about that.

Then he stomped all over it, on purpose, several times, because he was nine.

Now.

A hundred people. Most of them young. All of them free for the first time in years, in warm dry rooms, at the end of a day of very hard labour, with absolutely nothing whatsoever to do at night.

Oddr had said what would happen.

He had said it in the caves in the middle of the blizzard, and again at the thaw, and again on the steps of the old halls with enormous relish. He had been right, and there was no power on this earth going to stop him enjoying it.

Sixteen women had come out of that winter carrying.

By midsummer there were a dozen more.

"Twenty-eight," he announced at the fire, to a group who had not asked.

"I make it twenty-eight."

"You said a dozen," grunted Haaland.

"I said a dozen by the thaw. It is not my fault the rest of you kept going."

Somebody choked on their food.

"And before anybody asks how I know. I am seventy years old and I have eyes, and there is a certain way a young woman carries a bucket once she has stopped being willing to run with it."

He held up a finger.

"Also the boy hears the heartbeats a month before I do, and he is a terrible liar."

Hiccup, ten paces off and pretending to be busy with the strap on a hoe, kept his back to the fire and did not turn round.

He could not have turned round quickly if he had wanted to.

The mark across the left side of his neck was still there under his jaw, gone from purple to a deep bad green along its edges, and it had stiffened the way a thing stiffens once the swelling starts letting go of it.

He had spent the whole day turning his entire body to look at people, like a man wearing armour he could not get out of. And it had cost him something every morning that week to hold a guard up with that side of him complaining about it.

There was a general roar.

It was, Oddr thought, the first properly stupid conversation he had heard on that island.

Not the black gallows humour of people who expect to be dead in a fortnight. Actual, ordinary, useless human noise.

The business of the orphans had finished itself over the winter. Quietly, in the dark, with nobody deciding anything and nobody using a word for it.

By the thaw there was not a child on that island without a fire to sleep beside and a pair of adults who would come looking if it did not.

Twenty-eight coming. A roof for every family. And not one child left over.

It was not much.

It was already better than a great many places with walls and a lord and a name on a map.

Even Rum had a house.

The last one on the upper row, with a roof and a door and a hearth like all the others, because when the list was made his name was on it and nobody had been small enough to take it off.

He kept it clean. He came to the fire.

He said good morning to people, and meant it.

And that was the thing, and it had been creeping up on Haaland all spring.

They were forgetting.

Not deliberately. Nobody had forgiven anything, because forgiving requires sitting down and thinking about it. It was simply that a man who says good morning to you every morning for long enough eventually becomes a man who says good morning to you.

And Torvald had been a long time dead, and there were roofs to put on and fields to turn and a great deal else to be thinking about.

Haaland's hand went to his hip while he watched him.

Found the hilt. Rested there.

He did it without noticing, the way he had done it every day since he was a young man.

And took his hand away again.