Chapter 6 #3
Gisli and his son (I think he was called Eybiorn, but I wouldn’t swear to it) took a couple of picks and a shovel and dug into the mound where Siggeir was buried, just deep enough to make a small hole, which they shat into.
Then they went home, and sure enough, the next night Siggeir came to call.
Gisli had moved all his livestock out of the barn apart from one very fine stallion, the only good and valuable asset he owned; he’d bred it to sell for horse-fighting, which is a really big thing in the Mesoge.
Naturally, Siggeir made straight for the barn.
He was busily gutting the stallion with his fingers when there was a loud splintering noise and the hayloft roof came down on his head; hardly surprising, since Gisli and the boy had spent the previous week filling it with rocks.
All that was holding it up was a couple of hefty tree-trunks, and as soon as Siggeir smashed his way into the barn, Gisli hauled on a rope tied round a padstone on which one of the tree-trunks was resting.
Now under normal circumstances a few tons of rocks falling on his head would only have served to get Siggeir good and mad, once he’d had a chance to dig himself out again.
But he didn’t get that chance. Outside the barn, Gisli had stacked up his entire winter supply of faggots, plus all the lumber he could lay his hands on, plus twenty twelve-bushel baskets of charcoal he’d made in the autumn to sell at Visby fair.
He and the boy worked like madmen, dragged in all the fuel, packed it round the pile of rocks and set it on fire.
The barn burned for a week, with Gisli adding more fuel as fast as he could gather and cart it, and the rocks got so hot they split into gravel; and when the fire was eventually cold, Gisli and the boy dug down and found Siggeir, intact but cooked to a crisp.
They smashed him up with hammers until he was basically clinker and cinders, then packed the remains in a couple of barrels and carted them to the big waterfall at Laxarness, where they dumped them into the foaming water.
And that was the last anyone heard of Siggeir for over thirty years.
It didn’t end well for Gisli, I’m sorry to say.
He was left with no barn, no fuel, no lumber, no charcoal and no valuable fighting-horse, so (not unreasonably) he expected his neighbours to chip in and indemnify him for his losses.
This, needless to say, they declined to do.
Who asked him (they said) to stick his nose into a strictly Gauksdale affair which was nothing to do with him, and if he felt the need to pick a fight with a walker and torch seventy marks’ worth of his own property, that was his business and not theirs.
Gisli retaliated by taking his cart over to Red River and helping himself to hay from someone’s barn there, which led to a bunch of the Gauksdale farmers turning up at Gisli’s place shortly before dawn one day, nailing the doors of his house shut and setting fire to it with him and his son inside.
That’s the Mesoge for you, and you can probably understand why I wasn’t entirely heartbroken to leave.
*
Every part of the plan, I decided that night as I sat on a barrel in a room in the Clerestory Tower, was perfect, apart from one thing.
Not that it mattered, of course, because I was in no danger whatsoever, apart from a modest risk of getting pneumonia. I wasn’t the target, and the perfect (apart from one thing) trap I’d designed wasn’t going to be used, because he wouldn’t come for me.
Except, it suddenly occurred to me, my father had come for me under the bell-tower.
He hadn’t come to kill a dignitary of the Church or recover a copy of the true gospels or murder a short man.
It had been me he was after. But my father was now ashes dissolved in seawater, so none of that mattered.
Nothing was going to happen, and I was perfectly safe.
The barrel I was sitting on, like the hundred or so barrels in the ground-floor room directly below me, was full of lamp oil; best-quality Blemmyan, shipped to Choris by Sherden traders to fuel the thousand-odd lamps that light the basilica.
Blemmyan oil burns clean and with a singularly pure light, and they scent it with some kind of resin that makes it smell of violets.
Whale-oil would’ve done just as well at a quarter of the price, but there wasn’t any to hand, and Vitimer didn’t seem inclined to argue about the cost.
The plan was pretty simple, which is how a good plan should be.
As soon as she heard me yelling, Svangerd, on the floor above, would throw a lever which would dislodge a steel pin which held shut the trapdoor on which were piled three tons of bricks.
The bricks fall on the walker; at which point the men in the room below would broach one barrel of lamp-oil and set light to it.
The tower would serve as a chimney. By the time the rafters burned through and the bricks and the walker came crashing down, the lamp-oil fire would be good and hot, having spread to the heaped-up mound of charcoal that filled every last bit of space not occupied by barrels.
I’d based the design on the set-up they use to smelt iron in Schanz, which produces the hottest fires anywhere since the empire fell and the secret of blast furnaces was lost.
Svangerd would have just enough time to get clear by running down the spiral staircase and out into the cloister garden, to be joined by the oil-lighting detail on the ground floor.
Every last detail, in fact, had been carefully thought out and allowed for, apart from the one I mentioned earlier.
That detail hadn’t exactly escaped my attention; or Vitimer’s, for that matter.
I think he’d set his mind at rest with the well-known adage about omelettes and eggs.
I’d told myself that it didn’t matter, because the walker wasn’t going to show up, for the reasons stated.
Nothing, therefore, for me to worry my pretty little head about.
A barrel is a stupid thing to sit on for any length of time, because the top band cuts into you in a most inconvenient place. I wriggled about a bit, but it didn’t help.
Someone or something was in the room with me. Don’t ask me how I knew. There was one lamp, which I’d brought with me and placed on the floor. I started to turn my head to look behind me, but a hand pressed down on the top of it to stop me.
“Quiet,” said a voice.
“Kotkel?”
Faces change, but voices stay the same. I hadn’t seen my brother Kotkel since the day I left home.
Of all my brothers he was the one I disliked least. He was spiteful, arrogant and cruel.
He stole the food off my plate when Dad wasn’t looking, and he broke things and left gates open and said I’d done it, just to get me in trouble.
He was the next up from me in the hand-me-down clothes chain, so whenever I was due to inherit a shirt or a pair of trousers, he burned holes in it before giving it to me, then told my father I’d done it, which got me a good hiding.
“Shut your face,” he said quietly, “or I’ll twist your head off.”
Yes, that sounded very much like the Kotkel I used to know. “Kel? What the hell are you doing in Choris?”
Fingers squeezed my skull, reminding me of how very fragile bone is. “I told you to shut your face. Are you deaf as well as stupid?”
“Are you dead, Kel?”
He laughed. “Like you fucking care.”
“I care plenty. Are you dead?”
“Like fuck you do. Where’s the money you were supposed to send home? All these years and not a fucking penny. I ought to squeeze your head in.”
“Why don’t you do that, Kel?”
On reflection, I think the reason my brothers didn’t like me was that I had a habit of answering back.
They hit and kicked me and I retaliated with words, not blows.
It was like we were fighting two different wars, and I fought mine with weapons they couldn’t use and against which they had no defence.
Try as they might, they never could get me to shut up, no matter what they did.
“You’re an arsehole, you know that? Not one penny. We could’ve starved for all you cared.”
“Fine,” I said. “Go ahead and kill me, if that’s what you want.”
I felt the pressure relax. He couldn’t trust himself not to crush me unless he took his hand well away. Good old Kotkel. Never the nicest human being in the whole wide world, but compared to Einar or Kari he was a sweetheart. “What are you doing here, Kel? Who brought you?”
“Nobody brought me.”
“Are you dead?”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Why did you come here if nobody brought you?”
Suddenly, I don’t know why, it occurred to me that I’d bullied my brothers just as much as they’d bullied me, only in a different way.
It must have been intolerable to have my piping little gadfly voice buzzing at them all the time, and nothing would ever make me shut up.
Well, that’s families for you. See above, under Love.
“Nobody brought me, arsehole. You deaf or what?”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Shut up, will you? Just shut up.”
“Not till you answer my question.”
I didn’t see him move, but suddenly he was in front of me. I made myself take a good look.
Kotkel was always tall; now he was easily eight feet, swollen, bloated, like the old monk who had dropsy when I was a novice, his skin rounded and smooth and straining to bursting point, the colour of bilberries just before they ripen.
Completely inhuman, unmistakably my brother Kotkel, who I hadn’t seen for years.
Mostly it was the look on his face, irritation goaded to violence, violence barely restrained by the thought of its consequences.
But for a walker, there are no consequences.
“What’s the matter, Kel? Why don’t you kill me? ”
“You’re a fucking arsehole, you know that?”
“Yes,” I said. “Answer the question.”