Pattern Read Free

weight of a thick woven rug descending round his shoulders. That was much better, of course, but even so he felt obliged to grumble.
    â€˜Wish you wouldn’t do that,’ he said quarter-heartedly. ‘You’re treating me like an old woman.’
    Eyvind grinned and sat down. ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘My mother’s seventy-one, and right now I expect she’s out hoeing turnips. You wouldn’t catch her lounging about on porches on a fine day like this.’
    â€˜Thank you so much,’ Poldarn grunted, feeling even more useless than the peacock. ‘Now, if only someone would tell me what I’m supposed to be doing, maybe I could muck in and start pulling my weight around here.’
    â€˜I wish you’d listen when I tell you things,’ Eyvind replied, ‘instead of falling asleep all the time. Makes it very boring for me, having to say the same thing over and over again.’
    â€˜Give it one more try,’ Poldarn grumbled. ‘You never know, this time it just might stick.’
    â€˜All right, but please try and stay conscious.’ Eyvind leaned back in his chair, his hands folded in his lap, a wonderful study in applied comfort. ‘The reason nobody’s tried to tell you what to do,’ he said, ‘is that we just don’t do things like that here. There’s no need to. For example,’ he went on, sitting up and looking round, ‘there over by the barn, look, that’s Carey. You know him?’
    Poldarn nodded. ‘Ever since I was a kid,’ he replied. ‘So they tell me.’
    â€˜Right. Now, Carey wakes up every morning knowing what he’s going to do that day. If I’d been you, of course, I’d have said he knows what he’s got to do; but that’s not the way to look at it. He knows that today he’s going to muck out the pigs, chop a stack of firewood, mend a broken railing in the middle sty and a bunch of other chores. He knows this because, first, he’s got eyes in his head, he can see what needs doing, and he knows who does what around here; second, he knows because when he was a kid he watched his old man doing exactly the same sort of stuff, the same way his father watched his grandfather and so on. He doesn’t need to be told, it’d be a waste of time telling him; more to the point, nobody could tell him because nobody knows Carey’s work better than Carey does. Do you get what I’m driving at?’
    Poldarn sighed. ‘I think so,’ he replied. ‘Where I lose the thread is when it comes to why they all do it. If there’s nobody in charge telling everybody else what to do, why do they bother doing all this work, when they could be – well, sitting around on the porch admiring the view?’
    Eyvind laughed. ‘If you need to ask that,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand us at all. But you will, in time. It’s really very simple. What you’ve got to do is simplify your mind, throw out all that junk that got lodged in there while you were abroad. God only knows how they manage to survive without starving to death over there, the way they do things.’
    Poldarn didn’t say anything. Every time Eyvind tried to explain things to him, they ended up at this point and never seemed to get any further. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so you tell me: how am I supposed to find out what I’m meant to be doing, if I don’t know what my job is and neither does anybody else? You can see the problem, can’t you?’
    (Far away on the side of the mountain, at the point where the snow began, a fat white cloud shot out of the rock and hung in the air.)
    â€˜Give it time.’ Eyvind yawned. ‘It’ll come back to you, or you’ll pick it up as you go along. Anyway, let’s be realistic. In a month or so you’ll have built a house of your own, you’ll be starting from scratch with your own people –