Pattern

Chapter One

He woke up out of a dream about faraway places, and saw smoke. It was hanging in the air, like mist in a valley, and his first thought was that the chimney was blocked again. But there was rather too much of it for that, and he could hear burning, a soft cackle of inaudible conversation in the thatch above his head, the scampering of rats and squirrels in the hayloft.

Beside him, his wife grunted and turned over. He nudged her hard in the small of the back, and hopped out of bed.

'Get up,' he said. 'The house is on fire.'

'What?' She opened her eyes and stared at him.

'The house is on fire,' he told her, annoyed at having to repeat himself in the middle of a crisis. 'Come on, for God's sake.'

She scrambled out and started poking about with her feet, trying to find her shoes. 'No time for that now,' he snapped, and unlatched the partition door. It opened six inches or so and stuck; someone lying against it on the other side. That wasn't good.

It occurred to him to wonder where the light was coming from, a soft, rather beautiful orange glow, like an hour before sunset in autumn. The answer to that was through the gap where the partition didn't quite meet the roof-it was coming through from the main room. Not good at all.

He took a step back from the door and kicked it, stamping sideways with the flat of his bare foot. The door moved a few more inches, suggesting that he was shifting a dead weight. He repeated the manoeuvre five times, opening a gap he could just about squeeze through.

'Come on,' he urged his wife-comic, as if they were going to a dance and she was fussing about her hair. Hilarious.

The main room was full of orange light, but there wasn't any air, just smoke. As he stepped through, the heat washed over him; it was like standing right up close to the forge, as you have to when you're waiting for a piece of iron to come up to welding heat, and you feel the outer edge of the fire soaking into your skin. He looked down to see what the obstruction had been, and saw Henferth the swineherd, rolled over on his side, dead. No need to ask what had killed him; the smoke was a solid wall of fuzzy-edged orange. Just in time, he remembered not to breathe in; he lowered his head and drew in the clean air inside his shirt. Where had he learned to do that?

Only six paces, diagonally across the floor, to the upper door; he could make that, and once the door was open he'd be out in cold, fresh air. The bar was in place, of course, and the bolts were pushed home top and bottom-he grabbed the knob of the top bolt and immediately let go as the heat melted his skin. Little feathers of smoke were weaving in through the minute cracks between the boards; the outside of the door must be on fire.

So what? Catching the end of his sleeve into the palm of his hand, he pushed hard against the bolt. It was stiff-heat expands metal-but he was in no mood to mess about, and his lungs were already tight; also, the smoke was making his eyes prickle. He forced the top bolt back with an apparently disproportionate amount of effort, ramming splinters into the heel of his hand from a rough patch of sloppily planed wood, then stooped and shot back the bottom bolt, which moved quite easily. That just left the bar; and he was already gasping out his hoarded breath as he unhooked it. Then he put his shoulder to the door and shoved.

It didn't move. He barged against it again, but this wasn't just an annoying case of a sticky door, damp swelling the exposed end grain. He was out of breath now, and there was no air, only smoke. Most men would've panicked; fortunately, he remembered something else he must have picked up somewhere (where?) and dropped to the floor. Right down low, cheek pressed to the boards, there was clean air, just enough for a lungful.

As he breathed in he was thinking, The door's stuck, why? He hadn't stopped to think, Why is the house on fire? If his mind had addressed the problem at all, it had assumed some accident-a glowing cinder lodged in the thatch, carelessness with a lamp. But the door wouldn't open, the wood was burning on the inside. He knew exactly what that meant.

Behind him, someone was coughing horribly. He recognised the cough (she had a weak chest, always woke up coughing in winter). 'Get down,' he hissed, wasting precious breath. 'On the floor.' He didn't look round to see if she was doing as she was told, or even if she'd understood him. Right now, time was calibrated in units of air, and he had very little of it left. Certainly not enough to fritter away on fear or other self-indulgent luxuries; there'd be plenty of opportunities for that kind of stuff later, when he wasn't so busy.

The axe, he thought; the big axe. Of course the door was too solid to break down-he'd made it himself, he was just too damn painstaking for his own good-but with the big axe he could smash out the middle panel, at least enough to make a hole to breathe through. Where was the big axe, he wondered; there was something wrong with his memory, maybe the smoke had got in it and spoiled it, like oil curdling milk. Then he remembered. The big axe was in the woodshed, where the hell else would the big axe be? Inside there was only the little hand-axe, and he might as well peck at the door with his nose like a woodpecker.

Something flopped down next to him and he felt a sharp, unbearable pain in his left foot and ankle. Burning thatch, the roof was falling in. Oh, he really didn't need that. 'Bench,' he yelled, emptying his lungs (like spilling water in the desert; and when had he ever been in the desert?), 'smash the door down with a bench.' But she didn't answer, in fact he couldn't hear her at all, not even that goddamned horrible rasping cough. Oh well, he thought, can't help that now (plenty of time for that later, as well) and it screws up the bench idea. Come on, brain, suggestions. There's got to be another way out of here, because I've got to get out. The other door, or what about the window? And if they're blocked too, there's the hatch up into the hayloft, and out the hayloft door-ten-foot drop to the ground, but it'd be better than staying here.

But the other door was forty feet away; the window was closer, but still impossibly far, and the hatch might as well have been on the other side of the ocean. There simply wasn't time to try, and if he stood up he'd suffocate in the smoke. The only possible place to be was here, cheek flat on the floorboards, trapped for the brief remainder of his life in half an inch of air.

Another swathe of burning thatch landed on him, dropping heavily across his shoulders. He felt his hair frizzle up before he felt the pain, but when it came it was too much to bear-he couldn't just lie still and feel himself burn. He snuffed up as much air as he could get-there was a lot of smoke in it, and the coughing cost him a fortune in time-and tried to get to his feet, only to find that they weren't working. Panic started to circle, like crows round a dead sheep, but he shooed it away as he lurched, overbalanced and fell heavily on his right elbow. The fire had reached his scalp and worked its way through his shirt to the skin on his back.

A man might be forgiven for calling it a day at this point, he thought; but he couldn't quite bring himself to do that, not yet. He'd be horribly burned, of course-he'd seen men who'd been in fires, their faces melted like wax-but you had to be philosophical about these things: what's done is done and what's gone is gone, salvage what you can while you can. Like his life, for instance. Yes, how about that?

It hadn't been so bad back in the inner room-why the hell had he ever left it, he wondered? Seemed like a good idea at the time. So he shrugged off the pain, like kicking away a yapping dog, and started to crawl back the way he'd just come. He made a good yard that way (the palm of his hand on his wife's upturned face; he knew the feel of the contours of her cheeks and mouth, from tracing them in the dark with his fingertips, tenderly, gently, like he meant it; but no air to waste on that stuff now) before the beam fell across his back and pinned him down, making him spill his last prudent savings of air. The pain-no, forget that for a moment, he couldn't feel his hands, even though he knew they were on fire, his back must be broken He tried to breathe in, but there was just smoke, no time left at all. Forget it, he thought, I can't be bothered with this any more.

(He expected death would come at that moment of abjuration; like a rough boys' game, you shout 'I give in' and it stops. But nothing seemed to change, as the time drew out-how was he paying for this time, now he was penniless for air? Had he discovered, in the very nick of time, the secret of breathing smoke? Nice trick, but pointless if his back was broken, and he was on fire too. Talk about irony.)

'What are you doing here?'

He looked up. He couldn't look up, because he was paralysed. He saw his grandfather looking down at him.

'What are you doing here?' the old bastard repeated. He sounded put out, as if his authority had been challenged. 'Get up,' he said, frowning, 'it's time to get up. You've overslept.'

You could put it that way, he thought; then he remembered. What am I doing here? How about what's he doing here, he's been dead for six months 'What are you doing here?' the old man said 'Sorry,' said the man facing him, 'am I boring you?'

Suddenly awake; he was sitting on a chair outside his grandfather's house at Haldersness, under the porch eaves, on a cold, bright day. The man opposite was Eyvind, his friend. His name was 'No, of course not, go on,' he said. He hadn't fallen asleep, really, he'd just closed his eyes because the sun was so bright. His name was 'All this talking,' Eyvind said apologetically, 'I'm not used to it. Truth is, among ourselves we don't talk much. Don't need to. Are you cold?'

'What? No, I'm fine, really.'

Eyvind smiled. 'You're huddled up in your jacket like a caterpillar,' he said. 'Perfectly understandable; where you've been all these years, it's much warmer. We sweat like pigs when we go there. Would you rather go inside?'

In front of him, over Eyvind's shoulder, was the great white-headed mountain. From its sides rose tall columns of milk-white steam, billowing out of the cracks and fissures where the natural hot springs bubbled up from the mountain's fiery heart. It was an amazing sight against a blue sky. 'No, thanks,' he replied. 'I like sitting here. Nice view.'

Eyvind laughed. 'I suppose it is,' he said, 'but I don't notice it any more. Would you like me to get you a blanket or something?'

'No, really.' It was bitter cold; he could feel it in his feet, in spite of his thick leggings and felt-lined boots. Everybody said he'd get used to it.

'Wait there,' Eyvind said. 'I'll get a rug from the laundry.'

Well, it would give him an opportunity to wake up-not that he'd been asleep, of course. Once Eyvind had gone, he was able to wriggle a little deeper into the lining of his coat without appearing feeble in front of his friend. He didn't like the way everybody treated him like an invalid; after all, he was perfectly fit and healthy, he just felt the cold more than they did. And his name His name, he remembered, was Poldarn. At least, that wasn't his real name, it was the name of a Morevich god he'd impersonated while touring round the Bohec valley with a female confidence trickster who'd picked him up after he'd lost his memory a year ago. So far, only a part of that memory had come back; but these people, who lived an ocean away from where he'd woken up in the bed of a river surrounded by dead bodies, these people had told him his name was Ciartan, and he knew they were right. He'd grown up here, he could remember names (not his own, of course) and places, pictures in his mind that turned out to be real. Above all, now that he was here at least somebody knew who he was, and that was a great comfort after his experiences back in the empire.

Don't knock it, he thought, it's not everybody who gets a fresh start at the age of forty-one, especially a start like this. After all, his grandfather owned this enormous farm-'owned' was the wrong word, of course, but it was easier to think of it that way-and everybody was going out of their way to be nice to him: they knew about his loss of memory, they understood how difficult it must be for him, they were only too pleased to help in any way they could, they even jumped up and fetched blankets for him without having to be asked. He couldn't have had a more luxurious, pampered life if he really had been a god.

On the far side of the yard, a peacock was clambering about on the thatched roof of the barn. When he'd first arrived he'd never seen a peacock before (as far as he could remember, though Grandfather insisted he'd killed one with his first bow and arrow, when he was seven) and even now he found it difficult to believe in the existence of such a gorgeous, unnecessary, stupid creature, because animals and birds were supposed to be above that kind of thing, they didn't have aristocracies and leisured classes. But the peacock was clearly some kind of duke or viscount, useless, troublesome and splendidly ornamental. Eyvind would have him believe they were just another breed of poultry, only there to get fat and then get eaten, but he didn't believe a word of it.

From the other side of the barn he could hear the shrill, musical clang of a blacksmith's hammer-Asburn the smith, getting down to some work at last. Properly speaking, that should have made him feel guilty, since by rights the job belonged to the head of the house, but Grandfather was too old now, his only son was dead, and his grandson, Ciartan, who'd only just come back from abroad, had left home before learning the trade and hadn't got a clue how to light the forge, let alone make anything in it. As a result Asburn, who was born to mend tools, sharpen hooks and scythes and generally make himself useful, had spent the last twenty years doing the wrong work; and the fact that he did it exceptionally well was neither here nor there. You could tell Asburn wasn't a smith just by looking at him: he was a little scrawny man with weedy arms and sloping shoulders. Poldarn, of course, looked every inch a blacksmith, and the sooner he knuckled down and learned the trade, the sooner everything could get back to normal.

But not today, Poldarn thought, even though it'd be nice and warm in the forge and out here it was freezing cold. Today he was far happier sitting and looking at the mountain, because he'd recognised it as soon as he saw it, and it reassured him more than anything else. As long as he could see it, he knew where he was. More than that, he knew who he was, just as long as he could see the mountain.

He'd nearly fallen over when they'd told him what it was called.

'Here you are,' Eyvind said, appearing suddenly behind him; and he felt the comforting weight of a thick woven rug descending round his shoulders. That was much better, of course, but even so he felt obliged to grumble.

'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.'

'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.'

'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.'

'Give it one more try,' Poldarn grumbled. 'You never know, this time it just might stick.'

'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.'

'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.)

'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-well, not from scratch, exactly, but once you're in your own house, running your own farm, you'll know what's got to be done without needing anybody to tell you. Believe me,' he added, 'I've done it.'

That really didn't help, of course. Poldarn knew, because he'd been told, that when Halder and his wife Rannwey were both dead, this house would be dismantled, pulled apart log by log and plank by plank and the materials piled up so that the farm people could help themselves to free building materials for their own houses and barns, and most of the household goods (apart from a few valuable heirlooms) would be divided up the same way. By then, Poldarn would be living in a brand new house a mile away down the valley, called Ciartansford or Ciartanswood or something like that-he'd still own all the land and the stock (not 'own', of course; wrong word entirely) and the grain and straw and hay and wood and apples and cheeses and hides and leeks and pears and cider and beer and everything else the land produced would be stored in his barn and eaten off his plates on his table; but for some reason he simply couldn't grasp-nobody had told him what it was, because either you knew or you didn't-he didn't have the option of living here in this house; it was like walking on water or flying in the air, it simply couldn't be done.

'So you say,' Poldarn replied. 'And we won't go into all that again, it made my head hurt the last time we talked about it. So let's put it this way: if you were me, what do you think you'd be likely to be doing, right now?'

Eyvind frowned, as if he'd been asked a difficult question about a subject he'd never considered before. 'Well,' he said, as a particularly loud clang echoed across the yard from the direction of the forge, 'that, probably. Having a nasty accident, by the sound of it.'

'I see,' Poldarn muttered. 'That sounded like the anvil's just fallen on his foot. Would I absolutely have to?'

Eyvind shook his head. 'That wouldn't happen,' he explained. 'You see, you'd be the smith, you'd be more careful and the accident wouldn't happen. Asburn-well, he's a very nice man and he does some of the best work I've ever seen, but he's not a smith. Little wonder if he screws up from time to time.'

He could never tell whether Eyvind was joking or being serious when he started talking like this, probably both simultaneously. 'In other words,' he said, 'you're telling me I should be over there learning to bash hot iron, not sprawling around in a chair wasting your time.'

'I'm not telling you that,' Eyvind replied. 'But if you're asking me if I think it'd be a good thing for you to do, I can't see any reason why not.'

Poldarn nodded, and let his head rest against the back of the chair. It was a fine piece of work; old and beautifully carved out of dark, close-grained oak, with armrests in the shape of coiled dragons. Presumably it counted as an heirloom and he'd be allowed to keep it. Another thing you can help me with,' he said. 'That mountain. Is it meant to be doing that?'

Eyvind craned his neck round to look. 'Doing what?' he said.

'Breathing out all that steam,' Poldarn replied. 'Strikes me there's a lot more than usual.'

'Not really' Eyvind shook his head. 'Some days there's more than others, that's all. Why, has somebody been trying to scare you?'

'No,' Poldarn said, 'unless you count what you just said. What's there to be scared of?'

'Nothing.' Eyvind smiled. 'It's just that some of the old jokers around here would have you believe that once every so often-about a hundred years, on average, which means it'd have happened exactly twice since we've been here-the mountain starts sneezing fire and blowing out great big rocks and dribbling rivers of red-hot cinders-like a bad cold in the head, except with burning snot. In case you're inclined to listen to them, these are the same people who tell stories about man-eating birds and islands in the middle of the sea that turn out to be sleeping whales. I thought maybe they'd been picking on you because suddenly there's someone on this island who might actually believe them.'

'Oh, I see. So that's all right, then.'

Eyvind nodded. 'There's a whole lot of things to be afraid of in this life,' he said, 'but an exploding mountain isn't one of them.'

That was reassuring enough, but there was still an itch at the back of his mind, a sore patch where a buried memory might be trying to work its way through before bursting out in a cloud of white steam. Perhaps it was just the name of the mountain that bothered him so much; and because, out of all the kind and helpful people and solid, reliable things he'd encountered since he'd been here, the mountain was still the only one he really trusted. 'One of these days,' he said, 'will you take me up there to see the hot springs? I've heard a whole lot about them but I can't really imagine it. Sounds too good to be true, all that boiling hot water just coming up out of a hole in the ground.'

'Sure,' Eyvind replied, 'though it's a hell of a climb, and most of the way you've got to walk. It's always struck me as a hell of a long way to go just to see some hot water you can't actually use for anything.' He shrugged. 'When I want hot water, I fill the copper and put it over the fire. Takes a while to come to the boil, but it beats hay out of all that walking.'

Poldarn nodded. 'Thanks,' he said, 'I'll hold you to that.'

'Please do; wouldn't have offered if I didn't mean it. Well,' Eyvind went on, glancing up at the sky, 'you may not have any work to do, but I've got a bucketful' He jumped to his feet. 'Catch you later, probably.'

Poldarn got up as well. 'Can I come and help?' he asked.

'You don't know what the job is.'

'True. But I'm bored stiff with sitting around.'

Eyvind shrugged. 'Suit yourself,' he said. 'Your grandfather's given our house two dozen barrels of river gravel, for metalling the boggy patch at the bottom of our yard. All I've got to do is collect it and take it away.'

A slight twinge in Poldarn's left shoulder seemed to urge him to back out now, while he had the chance. 'I reckon I'm on for that,' he said. 'So, where is it now?'

Eyvind laughed. 'In the river, of course; that's where river gravel comes from.'

'Oh.'

'Thought you'd say that. First, we get a few long-handled shovels and dig it out, then we load it into barrels, which Halder's kindly lending us for the purpose, then we load the barrels onto a couple of carts, job done. It's bloody hard work and it'll take the rest of the day.' His face relaxed a little. 'Really' he said, 'you don't have to if you don't want to. Turburn and Asley'll give me a hand.'

Poldarn knew who they were. Turburn was a huge man with a bald head and with shoulders as wide as a plough yoke; Asley looked like Turburn's big brother. Either of them could pick up a three-hundredweight barrel of gravel and walk right round the farm carrying it without realising it was there. 'Honestly,' he said, 'I don't mind, I need the exercise.'

Eyvind was looking at him as if he was a troll or a merman, some strange supernatural being who happened to look a bit like a human. 'That's something I'll never get used to,' he said. 'You say one thing, and you mean the exact opposite. I don't know how the hell you can do that. I couldn't, to save my life.'

Poldarn sighed. 'Well,' he said, 'obviously I'm not very good at it, if you can read me so easily.'

Judging by Eyvind's expression, he'd touched on some kind of important topic here, one that his friend didn't want to start discussing right then. 'Don't worry about it,' Eyvind said. 'All right, if you're dead set on volunteering, you come on. At the very least, it'll teach you never to do it again.'

It turned out to be an unspeakable job, back-breaking and shoulder-wrenching; and Poldarn made matters far worse by trying to keep up, at least to begin with, until he'd frittered away his strength and stamina, leaving fifteen barrels still empty. After that, all he could do was disconnect his mind and keep his arms and legs moving. He was painfully aware that he wasn't really contributing-his shovel pecked at the river bed, and he spilled most of what he dug up before it reached the barrel. Furthermore, his boots were letting in water, his knees had given out, and the strip of rag he'd bound round his hand wasn't really doing much to protect his blisters from the shovel handle. Anyone with any sense would've admitted defeat and crawled back to the house, but it appeared that he'd misplaced his brains along with his memory. It was lucky he didn't cause an accident when it came to hefting the barrels up onto the cart; he couldn't take the weight, and more than once the barrel nearly twisted out of his grip and fell on Turburn's leg. In the end, though, the job got done in spite of him, and he collapsed against the side of the cart, sitting down squarely in a pool of churned-up mud. Didn't matter, he was already filthy from head to toe. The other three weren't, of course.

'Thank you,' Eyvind said, and although all Poldarn's instincts insisted his friend was being facetious, chances were he really meant it. 'Don't know about you, but I'm ready for a beer. Coming?'

Poldarn nodded, and didn't move. It was nearly dark (they'd have finished long since without him, and the carts would've been on the road by now; as it was, they'd have to wait till morning, and the routine at Bollesknap would be out of joint for days), and the white clouds hanging over the mountain showed up as a dull, flat grey; on the opposite horizon, the sun was going down in fire. 'You go on,' he said. 'I'll catch you up. Think I'll just sit here for a bit.'

Some time later, when he'd got the use of his head back, it occurred to Poldarn that here he was again, sitting in the churned-up mud beside a river, still not really knowing who he was or what the hell he was supposed to be doing. He'd come a fair way since that first river-across a huge ocean, to an enormous island in the far west that the people back in the empire didn't even know about; couldn't come much further than that-and at least on this occasion he wasn't sharing the mud with any dead bodies. That said, he could close his eyes and it'd be the same river-that wasn't too hard to arrive at, if he supposed that the Bohec ran into the sea, the sun drew up water from the ocean and dumped it on this island as rain, it could easily be precisely the same water that he'd woken up beside-and the only change would be in his perceptions, because he hadn't known anything back then; for all he knew, he'd been digging gravel out of the Bohec when the unknown enemies attacked My perceptions, he thought. Well, for one thing, I perceive that I'm covered in mud, so I'd better have a wash before I go indoors. Taken one step at a time, any riddle you like can be broken down into little easy pieces; the trick is in putting them all back together again afterwards.

Getting his bum out of the mud was one of the hardest things Poldarn had ever had to do. All the engineers in Torcea couldn't have made it easy.

The place to wash was a little pool behind the house, where the stream collected in a natural stone basin before falling down the side of the combe on its way to join the river. It served the house as a combination bath house, laundry and mirror, performing all these functions rather better than any of the artificial facilities he'd seen in the crowded cities of the Bohec valley. The water was perishing cold, of course, but that was all right, it helped you wake up in the morning and gingered you up when you were tired at night. Like everything in this extraordinary place, even the disadvantages had their advantages.

Poldarn stood for a moment and looked at his reflection, backlit in sunset fire and blood, before smashing it to pieces with his hands; but, as usual, there was nothing to see except his face, no additional information. Maybe it was a true reflection, the only accurate mirror in the world, showing you what you really were: head, neck, shoulders and no past. He bent at the waist and dipped his hands through his face into the water. It was ice cold, and so clean it was hardly there at all.

When Poldarn reckoned he'd done about as much as could be achieved by way of damage limitation, he straightened his back, shuddered at the pain and hobbled back towards the house. Someone had said something, he seemed to remember, about beer.