Pattern

Chapter Seventeen

Eyvind was up and about early the next morning, still obviously below par but determined to make himself useful. He said good morning amiably enough but didn't stop to talk, and Poldarn was left to guess whether this signified forgiveness, diplomacy or just ingrained good manners.

Of course, Poldarn didn't have a clue how to go about building a barn; but although he'd lost his memory he still had enough common sense to realise that he wouldn't go far wrong if he used the old one as a pattern. So, when nobody was looking, he carefully paced out the distances between the corner posts, cut surreptitious witness marks on the main timbers with his knife and even managed to scratch a ground plan on the back of a bit of broken pot. It wasn't quite the same as having a glorious revelation of how to go about the job, as had been the case with the house itself; but he could see that the shades of his ancestors, while obliged to enable him to put a roof over his head, couldn't be expected to go to the same degree of trouble over a grain store and junk depository.

Dismantling the last few timbers and loading them onto carts took up the morning and most of the afternoon, and they finished unloading in the dark. Next day, it rained hard and if he'd had any say in the matter they'd have stayed indoors, but apparently he didn't; so they had to lay out and mark up with rain in their eyes and water trickling down the backs of their necks. Progress was slow, mistakes were made; Root, one of the Haldersness field hands, slipped in the mud while supporting a cross-beam, which fell and hit Eyrich, the Colscegsford wheelwright, on the point of the shoulder, breaking his collarbone. That held things up for a long time, and although nothing was said, even Poldarn could feel the tension it caused between the two households. Then, just when they'd got back into some sort of a rhythm, Barn contrived to miss a wedge with the big hammer and cracked himself on the ankle. Further delays, reduced manpower, loss of key personnel (not so much Barn himself; but Colsceg and Egil insisted on helping him back to the house, and Colsceg was the best mortice-cutter in either household); the further they fell behind schedule, the more jobs were rushed and therefore botched, resulting in more wasted time as skilled workers were called off what they were supposed to be doing to put right the mistakes, leaving the unskilled crews standing around with nothing to do. That was patently unacceptable, so Poldarn grabbed a chisel and a mallet and cut the mortices himself, only to find that it didn't come quite as naturally as he'd expected. That was embarrassing as well as counter-productive, and ended up with the whole job grinding to a halt until Colsceg came back and patched up the mess Poldarn had made of a particularly complicated step-lapped rafter seat.

'Cheer up,' Boarci said, appearing suddenly behind him. It was an order rather than a suggestion. 'Compared to most barn-raisings I've been on, this one's flowing like warm honey. It's when you've finished and you take a step back, and the whole lot slumps over to the left and flops down in a heap; that's when you want to pack it all in and find a nice dry cave somewhere.'

'Fine,' Poldarn replied. 'I'll bear that in mind when the time comes. Are you any good at single shoulder tenons?'

Boarci laughed. 'Better than you, anyway,' he said. 'Mind you, so's my mother's cat. Here, give me that chisel before you fuck up any more dead trees.'

He turned out to be a very competent joiner, almost as good as Colsceg and considerably quicker. 'Outstanding,' Poldarn said, as the tenon snuggled into the mortice and the dowel slid home. 'Only, if you're so good at this, why've you been wasting your time lugging planks on and off carts? We could've used you here.'

'Not my place,' Boarci replied. 'If you weren't as blind as a bat, you'd have seen that for yourself. I'm not from around here, remember, I can't go pushing a man out of the way and doing his job just because I can do it a bit better than he can. All that'll get you is an open door and a boot up the bum, and serve you right. That's the sort of thing you need to know if you're going to run a house, basic stuff like that. Otherwise you'll only make trouble for yourself.'

Poldarn sighed. 'How about if I ask you to do my job for me?' he said. 'Does that make it all right?'

Boarci shook his head. 'Not really,' he said. 'But if it's that or risk the roof coming down on some poor bugger's head, I suppose you haven't got much choice.'

The closing stages, which should have been the easy part, turned out to be the most difficult of all. Half the boarding planks turned out to be shaken or rotten, but there wasn't enough new material to replace them. Accordingly, they had no alternative but to splice patches into the spoiled timbers, a hatefully fiddly job even for a fresh, dry crew, and nearly impossible for men who were tired, wet and thoroughly out of sorts. When the sun set behind the rain clouds that had been concealing it all day anyway and the light went, it looked like there was only a little bit left to do, so, rather than leave an annoying little tag end of a job unfinished over night, Poldarn sent up to the house for lamps and torches and they carried on, only to find that they'd underestimated the scope of the tiresome odds and ends, which they compounded in turn with a rash of small, stupid mistakes. Then the damp got into the lamp wicks, the rain got worse, and they were forced to drop their tools and run for shelter until it slackened off. By that time, nobody was prepared to carry on, and they trudged back to the house for their dinner of porridge and leeks. A day in the driving rain had made them all too wet to dry out, even if they hadn't been too tired to face the effort of undressing; so they banked up the fire with fuel they couldn't afford to waste and went to sleep in their wet clothes.

The next morning was hot and muggy. The bits and pieces they'd hoped to clear up by torchlight proved sufficiently awkward to keep them occupied until shortly after midday, and even then there were a few out-of-square window frames and uneven floorboards, things that could just about be ignored but which would have to be seen to sooner or later. Viewed from a distance of twenty-five yards or so, the end result could easily be mistaken for a barn, but if he closed his eyes, Poldarn could see every single glitch, snag and imperfection, from the clumsily nailed splices to the door that had to be lifted into its frame. That sort of thing could be overlooked in a building that'd been standing for fifty years, but in a newly built barn it was all rather shoddy and sad, and he knew perfectly well that until the faults were fixed, he'd notice them every time he walked through the doorway.

Even so, several minutes had passed and it was still standing, without even a couple of props wedged in against the walls-more than could be said for some barns on this side of the mountain. It wouldn't win any prizes, but Poldarn couldn't recall any being offered. When they began to move things in, he tagged along with one of the gangs and tried to look useful, in spite of his aching joints and pulled muscles.

'I can't see what you're making such a fuss about,' Elja told him as she rubbed his back with some singularly horrible-smelling embrocation. 'I mean to say, it's all going to get pulled down in forty years or so, and I dare say it'll manage to stay put till then. It's only a barn, not Polden's temple. You've still got two more barns to do, remember, and that's before you start on the small houses. If we're going to have all this agonising after each one, I think I'll leave you and go home to Daddy.'

'You do that,' Poldarn replied, 'and take that disgusting mess with you. What do they put in that stuff, anyway?'

'You're better off not knowing,' she told him cheerfully. 'And if you think it's nasty, what about me? I've got to put my hands in it, and sleep next to it.'

He pulled a face, though of course she couldn't see. 'I think that'll do,' he said. 'I feel a whole lot better now.'

'You do?'

'Yes. Or at least, I will as soon as you stop putting that stuff on me.'

More by luck than judgement, the other two barns weren't nearly so much trouble; they'd been rethatched more recently and so the damp hadn't swollen the joints, which meant that the wedges and pins came out cleanly and there were fewer breakages. That was just as well; they were almost out of new split and sawn lumber, and the last thing Poldarn wanted to do was send anyone to put an axe to the last few growing trees that had survived the volcano and the black ash. He'd already been putting out feelers about a logging expedition into the unsettled woods of the north and east, a project that would mean joining forces with three or four other households besides the two he was currently responsible for. The initial reactions weren't encouraging.

Lyatsbridge desperately needed timber, of course; they had a house to rebuild from the ground up, and no materials whatever. But unless Poldarn undertook to feed them through the winter, which he was in no position to do, they were going to be far too busy scraping together enough food to live on, and had already resigned themselves to camping out for the foreseeable future, or else packing up and moving away. Eyvind had sent home to Bollesknap to see if his father and brothers were interested in coming in on the project, but he didn't think they would be-they had more than enough timber for their own needs, but not quite enough that they could afford to spare any. Braynolphscombe was too far away to send a message to-it'd mean having a man away from the house for two weeks when they needed all hands for the rest of the buildings. It was a good idea, was the general consensus, but completely impractical.

So it was just as well that they seemed to have got the hang of taking apart the old houses without causing too much damage. The work was getting done, slowly but surely, and gradually Ciartanstead was starting to look like a farm, rather than a house that had got picked up by a freak gust of strong wind and planted down in the middle of nowhere. Needless to say, they'd taken far too long about it. Planting season would be on them before they knew it, with its entrancing prospect of a future that didn't involve porridge and leeks for every meal, but it seemed hopelessly inefficient to abandon the building works when they were nearly finished, and then go back to them several weeks later, when the pattern had faded from their minds. Unfortunately, 'nearly finished' proved to be an alarmingly imprecise and elastic measurement of time and quantity. Eventually, they had to face, the humiliating reality of the situation and split the workforce into two; half to build and half to plant, which meant there were now two jobs that weren't getting done instead of just the one.

Poldarn had hoped that the coolness between Eyvind and himself following the wedding games debacle would gradually thaw as they worked together and made progress, but it didn't. There was no overt hostility; Eyvind was always polite, superficially friendly and unfailingly helpful and hard-working, but it didn't take a mind-reader to see the resentment behind his eyes, or hear the reserve in his voice. At first Poldarn pretended nothing was wrong, in the hope that it'd all sort itself out. Next he tried the direct approach and asked Eyvind if something was the matter or if he'd done something (something else) to upset him. In return he got a chilly assurance that everything was fine, whereupon Eyvind abruptly changed the subject and started talking about wall studs, wind braces and half-lap joints. In spite of himself, Poldarn couldn't help finding this annoying, and he told himself that if Eyvind wanted to sulk, that was his right as a free man and the heir to a fine house. His counter-sulk lasted two days, at the end of which Eyvind announced that he was going home.

'Just for a few weeks,' he added, looking away. Poldarn knew he was lying. 'I really ought to see how things are going at home, before they forget what I look like and all the dogs start barking at me.'

'Of course,' Poldarn said. 'I really appreciate all the time you've spent here and all your help, but naturally you've got to think about your own household.' He sounded like a diplomat, he realised, an experienced ambassador skilfully making an invasion sound like a routine patrol and fooling nobody, because both sides knew the truth. 'As and when you can see your way to dropping by again, we'll be delighted to see you, of course.'

Eyvind smiled weakly. 'I expect that by the time I get back, you'll have finished the outbuildings and made a start on the fencing; I won't know the place, probably.'

'We'll do our best,' Poldarn said. 'And remember, you're always welcome here. I want you to treat this place like your own home.'

Poldarn wasn't there when Eyvind finally took his leave; he was up at the top pasture, where they were building a small linhay for storing winter fodder. He felt Eyvind's absence long before anybody mentioned his departure; apparently he'd said something about starting off early so as to make Nailsford by nightfall, which was why he hadn't wanted to wait till Poldarn got back. He'd taken the horse he'd had sent up from home and the clothes he'd brought with him, but he'd left behind everything Poldarn or the Haldersness household had ever given him, from the fine brass oil lamp Halder had brought back from the Empire to the new pair of working shoes that had been made for him when his old pair fell to pieces. To Poldarn's mind, that only made it worse; all Eyvind's things were there, in their usual place, and he couldn't get it out of his mind that his friend would walk in through the door at any moment. At the same time, he knew that it was highly unlikely that Eyvind would ever come back. This made him feel more isolated than ever before, his last link to his previous life severed. In a way, this should have been a good thing, but he found it hard to see it in that light.

Two days after Eyvind's departure, just as they were about to tackle the dismantling and relocation of the forge, a thin feather of black smoke appeared on the side of the mountain. The first Poldarn knew about it was when he came out of the old forge building at Haldersness and found virtually the entire combined household standing in the yard, their faces turned towards the mountain as if they were taking part in a religious ceremony. Nobody said a word-he was reminded of that night in Cric when he'd been the god in the cart, facing just such a wall of silent, staring faces from the other side of the curtain.

Once he'd found out what was going on, Poldarn's first reaction was to load the carts with everything they could cram on board, and set off for the east. If he'd suggested it, the household would almost certainly have agreed; they were all quite obviously terrified, and it was probably only their strange unspoken communion that kept them from panicking. Somehow, though, he knew that it would be the wrong thing to do; it'd be like running because your shirt was on fire, pointless because wherever you ran to, the fire would go with you. Unfortunately, he couldn't think of a better alternative.

'Well,' somebody said at last, 'here we go again.'

'Maybe it won't be so bad this time,' someone else suggested hopefully. 'It's only a little bit of smoke, less than last time round.'

That would have been helpful and comforting if it had been true, but it wasn't, and everybody knew that. 'It'll be different down the valley,' someone else put in, 'we'll be further away, it won't be nearly so bad.'

'Just as well we haven't started on the thatching,' Raffen said, and Poldarn had to assume he was referring to the long barn and the middle house. They'd roofed all the other buildings with wooden shakes treated with pitch-nobody had actually suggested it out loud, but they'd gone ahead and done it as though they were following an architect's drawings, and Poldarn had assumed they'd had just such a contingency in mind. If so, it was an impressive example of foresight, and one less thing to worry about.

He pushed his way through the crowd to the front, then turned round to face them. 'It'll be all right,' he said. 'Even if the worst comes to the worst and we get another coating of that black shit, at least this time we know what to do, we can handle it. Look, we've got enough food laid in to last us a good long time-if needs be we can just settle down and sit it out. Or we can see if we can't figure out a way of beating the bloody thing.'

Nobody said a word, but Poldarn had no doubt that he had their complete attention, even if that was only because they thought he'd gone crazy. 'It's possible,' he said. 'I mean, how do we know there's nothing we can do about it-we haven't tried.'

The crowd stirred uneasily, as if they were afraid that the mountain would hear him and blame them for being associated with someone who could come out with such pernicious heresy.

'What did you have in mind?' Egil asked.

'I don't know, do I?' Poldarn replied impatiently. 'I don't know any more about these things than you do. But it seems to me that the sensible thing would be to try and find out a bit more, instead of just sharing out our ignorance among ourselves like a biscuit ration. I say that while it's just a little bit of smoke, what we ought to do is get up as close as we can to where it's coming from and get some solid information, instead of just guessing and going all to pieces.'

'Go up there?' someone said. 'You must be out of your mind. We all know what happened the last time. It could start puking up fire at any moment.'

Poldarn folded his arms. 'That's not entirely true,' he said. 'Last time, if you remember, it was several days before it started playing up. If we pull ourselves together, we can go up there, have a look round and maybe even come up with a few ideas before the trouble starts. It's got to be better than drooping round here like it was the end of the world or something.'

'All right,' Egil said. 'Who's going?'

That was more like it, Poldarn thought. 'Me for one,' he said. 'Anybody fancy coming with me?'

To his surprise, he got more volunteers than he knew what to do with, and he ended up turning people away. 'The rest of you,' he went on, once he'd made his selection, 'might want to make a start on a few basic precautions. Split up the food stores, for one thing, so we don't stand to lose the lot if the barn gets burned or buried. Get the roofs covered-it won't hurt even if nothing does happen, and it's got to be better than doing it all in a desperate rush with the cinders already falling. Luckily we don't have livestock to worry about this time round, which is something, but it might be an idea to make up a few extra buckets, things like that.' He knew he was being vague, but for the life of him he couldn't think of anything more specific. But surely they'd know what to do, they always seemed to.

'Right,' Colsceg said. 'When are you thinking of leaving?'

'Straight away,' Poldarn said, as much to his own surprise as anybody else's. 'No point in wasting precious time, and the sooner we leave, the sooner we'll get back.' As he said that, it occurred to him that Elja was down at Ciartanstead, and he'd just convincingly argued against sparing the time to go there and say goodbye. That seemed to strike him as a very bad and unlucky thing to do, but it was too late to go back on his decision.

He'd kept his reconnaissance party down to a round half-dozen, himself included: Egil and Raffen and Boarci (Poldarn was counting on him as a sort of lucky mascot), Rook and Barn. He had an uneasy feeling that he'd chosen most of them simply because he had no trouble telling them apart and remembering their names. But, he rationalised, Egil was smart, Boarci seemed to have a knack of not getting killed and of rescuing people when they'd got themselves into trouble; Rook had contrived to keep himself alive through the disaster at Lyatsbridge, so clearly he was nobody's fool, and the other two were stolid and fairly unflappable. He missed Eyvind very badly, of course, if only because Eyvind generally seemed able to understand what he was saying. They took with them as much food and water as they could carry, and the thickest leather boots, coats and hats they could find, in case it started raining big chunks of burning mountain on their heads before they could get out of the way. Apart from that, nothing obvious in the form of sensible precautions seemed to spring to mind. Boarci took his axe too, of course, but presumably from sheer force of habit, unless he was hoping they'd run into one or more slow-moving bears.

The first day they walked in silence, keeping up a pace that was just too fast for comfort, rarely taking their eyes off the mountain and the black smudge over it. They'd opted to head for the mountain in as close an approximation to a straight line as they could manage; this meant trudging up rather more hills than Poldarn would have chosen if the decision had been up to him rather than a wordless consensus. (It did occur to him that he'd wrongly presumed their intention, and they were just following him; but that was probably only because he was feeling depressed.) They carried on walking until it was too dark to see where they were going, then lay down where they stopped and went to sleep. The rising sun woke them all up, and they carried on along the line where they'd left off without stopping for anything to eat, an act of forbearance made somewhat easier by the knowledge that all they had in the way of supplies was the inevitable porridge and leeks.

As the mountain gradually grew larger in front of them, Poldarn found himself thinking back to his memory of visiting the hot springs with his grandfather and realised that something was very different about the silhouette he was walking towards. It didn't take him long to figure out what it was. Instead of a gently tapering, mostly symmetrical peak there was a swollen chimney, perched on the mountain top like a comical hat. They were treading on cinders by now, which made their progress slow and depressingly tiring, and the air stank of sulphur. Even at midday it was as dark as an hour after sunset; the black cloud was between them and the sun, and every fifth step or so they'd stumble over a larger than usual slab of brittle black rock.

Disconcertingly, the smoke wasn't coming out of the chimney; if anything, it appeared to be venting from somewhere on the other side of the mountain, hidden from view. Poldarn wasn't sure that he wanted to get close enough to see it, anyway, but he didn't really have any choice in the matter. It'd be too humiliating to turn back at this stage because of something so trivial as the fear of death. From time to time they heard ominous cracking and splitting noises, and the occasional deep rumble. More than once, the ground shook under their feet, an effect that Poldarn found horribly frightening.

'The way I see it,' Boarci said after a very long silence, 'it's a bit like a really big fat boil on your bum. It gets bigger and bigger and redder and redder, till finally it's so full of pus and crap that it bursts all over the place.'

The sun behind the cloud of black smoke went down just as they arrived at the hot springs. In spite of the darkness, Poldarn recognised the place at once. Not much had changed, except that the snow had gone and there was a narrow crack in the ground, no more than a foot wide but bewilderingly deep-Egil dropped in a pebble but nobody heard it land-running away up the hill as far as they could see.

'I don't like that at all,' Egil said. 'Seems to me that if it starts playing up while we're here, this is an obvious place for it to come up through.'

True enough, there were patches of grey mist and smoke hanging in the air above the crack, like little tangles of sheep's wool caught in a thorn bush. But they weren't confined to the crack, or even the area of the hot springs. The air was full of them; it was as if they were strolling through an orchard and the smoke was blossom on invisible trees.

'What are we supposed to be looking for, anyway?' Barn said nervously as he stepped over the crack.

'I don't know,' Poldarn answered promptly. 'Won't know till I see it, either.'

'Oh.' Barn nodded, as if that made perfect sense now that someone had taken the time to explain it to him clearly. 'So how much further have we got to go? My feet hurt.'

Poldarn looked round. 'We might as well stop here for the night,' he said. 'At least I've got some sort of idea where we are, in relation to everything.'

'Oh, sure,' put in Raffen. 'Let's camp out here, right on a crack. I mean, what's so special about waking up again?'

Poldarn ignored that and sank to his knees, struggling to get his arms free of the straps of his pack. 'The way I see it,' he went on, 'either we can keep going up till we get to the edge of the chimney, and then we can look down inside and see what's going on down there, or we can go round the side until we find out where all that smoke's coming from. Anybody got any preferences?'

Nobody seemed very taken with either option, but they seemed to prefer the former. 'I suppose it'll be all right,' Barn said, 'since the smoke's not actually coming out from there.' He wiped sweat off his face with his sleeve; it was decidedly hot, though they'd all felt chilly an hour or so ago.

'You all get your heads down,' Poldarn said cheerfully. 'I'm not particularly tired; I'll be quite happy just lying here, so if anything starts to happen I can give you all a shout in plenty of time.'

Immediately, Boarci twisted over onto his back, pulled his hat down over his face and appeared to go to sleep. The others took a bit longer-Egil even ventured to wash his face and hands by stepping into a shallow pool of hot water, but he yelped with pain and hopped out again straight away, announcing that the water was no longer pleasantly warm but boiling hot.

Although he was very tired, Poldarn had no difficulty at all staying awake; the thought of falling asleep in that place and dreaming was disturbing enough to keep his eyes wide open. In the dark he could make out a faint red glow behind the mountain that hadn't been visible in daylight, which worried him and made him feel grateful that they'd decided to go up instead of round the mountain top. A few hours before dawn, he became aware that a very fine shower of dust had started to fall; his eyes were gritty and he could feel it on his skin. He suddenly realised that he was hungry, dug a long-hoarded slab of hard cheese out of his pack and ate it slowly and deliberately.

The sunrise, when it came, was spectacular, a blaze of orange and red smeared across the sky in wild patterns and swirls. For a long time, all he could do was lie on his back and look up at it. Eventually, Boarci woke up.

'Bloody hell,' he yawned, 'is it morning already? How long have you been awake?'

'I didn't sleep,' Poldarn replied.

'More fool you, then. You'll be knackered this time tomorrow.'

They ate breakfast in a dull red glow, and set off immediately afterwards. As the day wore on the daylight started to fade, but the glare behind the mountain grew fiercer, so at least they could see where they were putting their feet. Rook was sure there was a lot more smoke coming out than there had been the day before-maybe twice as much, even. 'That's just because we're closer to it,' Poldarn replied, though he didn't believe what he was saying. Still, it seemed to cheer the others up, for some reason. The dust in the air grew steadily thicker, and they saw several more fissures like the one they'd noticed at the hot springs. Steam and yellow smoke rose up steeply from each one, making it hard to see where the cracks were, but they managed to cross them without anybody falling in.

As always seemed to be the way when struggling up a mountain, the peak proved to be much further away than they'd anticipated, and it was well past noon when they found themselves at the foot of the new chimney. Its walls were steep and black, in places hard and smooth as glass, extremely difficult and treacherous to climb, but now that they were this close, nobody seemed to want to hold back; it was as if the mere act of getting to the top was going to solve something, possibly even make the mountain stop misbehaving and go back to sleep. None of them said anything, or appeared to have anything to say. From time to time, Poldarn had the feeling that he was seeing something familiar, but he couldn't begin to think what it might be. More likely to be his imagination, he decided. One good thing: he wasn't feeling particularly tired, in spite of his lack of sleep. That too was something he couldn't readily explain.

So slow was their progress that when sunset came they were still dragging themselves uphill. But that was irrelevant; the benefit they got from the sun was minor enough anyway under the shadow of the cloud, whereas the red light from the other side of the mountain was getting stronger all the time, plenty good enough to see their way by. Besides, none of them liked the idea of trying to camp out on the steep ramparts of the chimney, for a number of quite obvious reasons. They kept going, somehow or other-it wasn't so much that they felt tired as that they'd been exhausted for so long that they seemed to have forgotten what it was like to feel any other way.

They hardly noticed the moment of arrival; one minute they were clambering up a particularly steep section of black rock, the next they were on a ledge, with no more mountain above them, only black cloud saturated with raw red light. The ledge was over a hundred yards across and perfectly level. They lay down, so thankful not to be climbing any more that they didn't have room for any other emotion, and stayed there without moving for a long time.

'Well,' Poldarn said eventually, 'we're here. We might as well go and have a look.'

Nobody seemed inclined to move, so Poldarn went on alone. When he reached the edge, he lay down on his stomach and crawled the last yard or so; then he stuck his head out over the ledge and looked down.

The first thing that struck him, quite literally, was the heat. He knew the feeling very well; it was like standing over the forge while waiting for a piece of iron to come up to welding heat. The blast of rising hot air scrubbed his face and burned his cheeks, and instinctively he closed his eyes and pulled his head back out of the way. That wouldn't do at all, he decided, so he braced himself and tried again, making a conscious effort to keep his eyes open.

The inside walls of the chimney fell away sharply into a dazzling lake of pure white light. Once again, he thought welding heat, because it was the same colour and quality of light as iron glows with in that crucial moment of malleability before it melts and breaks up, the point at which it can be fused into another piece of iron with nothing more than a few light taps of the hammer. That explained the ferocious heat, even though it lay several hundred yards below him. At first he couldn't make out what it was; not iron or steel, he rationalised, in spite of the resemblance. Then, from somewhere in the back of his mind, came a recollection of watching glass-makers at work, and Poldarn realised that the huge pool of white liquid was molten rock.

The heat had become unbearable, and he pulled back, unable to see for the staring white blurs across his eyes, and the tears. All he could think about, for some reason, was the similarity between the chimney and the pool and a crucible of molten metal, the same shape and colour and glowing light. It must be an extraordinary thing, he thought, to melt rock in a furnace; who would do such a thing, and why? Given the sheer size of the undertaking, it would have to be a god of some sort, a huge and enormously thick-skinned god who could handle such a crucible and withstand such a heat. But even a god would need to have a reason for going to so much trouble, and that raised the question of what he was planning to make out of it. If there was a crucible and a pool of melt, somewhere there had to be a mould, pressed into the sand with a pattern. The only logical explanation was that this god was melting down the old world to make a new one, turning waste and scrap into useful material, loosening it from the bonds of memory, restoring to it its true and original nature by means of the intercession of fire, which forgives and redeems all past sins.

Poldarn opened his eyes again. Yes, he thought, that's all very well, but we didn't tramp all the way up here just to bask in the poetic symmetry of it all. Very reluctantly, he crawled back and examined the view a third time.

When he'd suggested the expedition, back at Haldersness, he'd had some idea of coming up with some scheme for dealing with the problem, stopping the volcano or making it harmless. Now that he'd had a chance to look at the thing, it was obvious that anything like that was out of the question, it was simply too big and too fierce; it'd be doomed to failure, like arm-wrestling with a god. They couldn't put the fire out with buckets of water, or fill in the chimney with earth and bury it, or even tap it like a beer barrel and draw the molten rock off through a spigot in some harmless direction. The problem was insoluble, he couldn't think of a way of dealing with it because there wasn't one.

'Well?' someone said behind him. Poldarn stayed where he was. 'Take a look for yourself,' he replied. They got down on their hands and knees next to him and crept forward. 'Watch it,' he added, 'it's a bit warm once you get your head out over the edge.'

They did as they were told, and after they'd gazed at it for as long as they could bear they dragged themselves back, just as he'd done, and sat still and quiet for a while.

'Might as well have stayed home,' Raffen said eventually. 'I can't see there's anything we can do about that.'

'No,' Poldarn replied, 'there isn't, unless we get on a ship and go back to the Empire. But that's assuming it's any better there. For all I know, every mountain north of Torcea's gone like this one has, and in a few weeks' time the whole Empire'll be gone, the world will have melted away and we'll all be dead. No way of knowing, really.'

They weren't particularly impressed with that statement-understandably, given the effort it had cost them to get there. 'We can't just go back and tell them they're all going to be killed but not to worry about it,' Rook grumbled. 'They'd think we've all gone crazy or something. Come on, you said all we have to do is figure out how it works and we can stop it.'

Poldarn pulled himself together, sighing. 'All right,' he said. 'Seems to me there's got to be an enormously hot fire right down there in the roots of the mountain, big and hot enough to melt rock, like a lime kiln. Once it's done that, I guess all the smoke and fumes get bottled up deep inside until eventually they burst out and punch a hole right through the top of the mountain. The cinders and ash that got all over everything must be molten rock that ended up being spat out high into the air, where it cooled off and came down everywhere like snow. Anyway,' he added, 'that's the way I see it. Anybody got a better explanation?'

'Sounds reasonable enough to me,' said Barn, wiping grit out of his eyes with his knuckles. 'So how does that help us?'

'It doesn't.' Poldarn shook his head. His cheeks and forehead were stinging horribly. 'I was wrong. There isn't a thing we can do about it. Let's go home, I'm sick to death of this place.'

Barn frowned. 'What about when it rains?' he asked. 'Surely if it rains hard enough, that ought to put it out.'

Poldarn couldn't be bothered to reply, so it was up to Boarci to explain. 'It's too hot,' he said. 'The rain wouldn't get anywhere near the bottom of the chimney before it turned to steam. You remember all those fluffy white clouds the last time, once the rain started?'

Barn nodded. 'That's right,' he said. 'Not that it matters, we can't make it rain anyhow. But so what? As long as it stays down there it won't be doing us any harm.'

Poldarn looked up. 'Depends,' he said. 'What we don't know is how big the fire is or what's causing it. My guess is that it's the same fire as heats the water for the hot springs-in which case it's been going for thirty-odd years to my certain knowledge, and quite possibly a few thousand years before that.'

'Fine,' Barn replied. 'Like you said, it's been going on for centuries and never done anybody any harm till now' He paused, then went on, 'I'm sure you're right about fumes getting trapped under the mountain and finally blowing out-I guess that must be what happened, and that's where all the ash and stuff came from. But now there's this huge great vent, like runners and risers when you're casting, so won't the fumes just rise up out of there and get blown away into the air, all nice and harmless?' He shrugged. 'All right, so it's very big and impressive, but I don't see what harm it's going to do us. I'm guessing that this new breakout is where another pocket of the fumes and steam and stuff must've built up, and it blasted a hole into the side of the mountain so it could get out. I don't know, maybe there's a whole load of them just getting ready to go pop, but doesn't it stand to reason that it must've used up most of its bottled-up fumes and shit by now? In which case, we may get a few more sprinklings of the cinders, but nothing too bad, just like this time around.' He shrugged. 'Come on, you're a blacksmith, you know what furnaces are like, and casting hot metal. If your sand's wet or you've got a blocked vent, it blows up and you get the whole lot in your face. If you've done your vents right and cooked your mould, there's nothing to it. Same here, I reckon.'

Poldarn thought about that for a while. 'I suppose so,' he said. 'I hadn't thought of it like that.'

'Makes sense to me,' Raffen put in. 'In which case, there's nothing to worry about and we can go home. I don't know about you, but this place gives me the creeps. I say we get back down the mountain and go do some work instead of roasting ourselves alive.'

'Fine,' Poldarn said. 'Let's do that, then.'

Getting back down the mountain was much quicker than getting up it, though not noticeably easier. Egil and Boarci led the way, both of them obviously keen to get away from there as soon as possible. Poldarn lagged behind. He found the place just as oppressive as the others did, but he felt sure there was something he'd overlooked, though he hadn't got the faintest idea what it might be. It wasn't just a vague feeling that he'd been there before-well, he knew that, he'd been there with Halder, and something about that visit had impressed him so much that the memory of it had forced its way to the surface of his mind (like the fire bottled up in the mountain). As he scrambled and skittered down the slopes of the chimney he found himself going over that memory in his mind, trying to winnow some degree of significance out of it; but the more he searched the more elusive the scene became, to the point where he was hard put to it to distinguish between actual recollections and appropriate-seeming details he'd made up to flesh it out and colour it. He could feel himself rewriting the scene, putting in words and inflections that would make some sort of sense of it all, justifying his belief that there was some secret or clue back up there on the rim of the crater-and wouldn't that be nice, he thought, if I could go back and mould the past into the shape I want it to be, if I could press a new pattern into the sand and then tap the molten rock and cast a whole new world; like a god, almost, bringing the old world to an end and creating a new one, he thought again. There was a fine notion, for sure; that the world which the god in the cart had come to destroy and replace wasn't the present but the past, a simple job of heating out the memory.

It started to rain as soon as they reached the foot of the mountain, and it didn't stop until they arrived back at Haldersness. By that stage they were all so wet that they couldn't think about anything else, not even how tired and hungry they were. But that was something that could be set right very easily, with a change of clothes, a bowl of porridge (and the inevitable leeks) and a brisk, tall fire, which quickly annealed the memory of the wretchedness of the last few days.

'So,' Colsceg demanded, as Poldarn soaked up the warmth, 'what did you find out up there?'

'Not a lot,' Poldarn answered. 'There's a big hole in the mountain where all the stuff got blown out, you can see right into it. There's a huge pool of molten rock, but it's a hell of a long way down.'

'Molten rock,' Colsceg repeated, as if Poldarn had just said something that didn't make sense, like burning snow or wet fire. 'Bloody hell, that sounds a bit grim. So what do you reckon we ought to do about it?'

Poldarn shrugged. 'Not a lot we can do-it's all too big. But I don't think there's anything to worry about, it's not like it's going anywhere. Now the mountain's got a way of letting off steam, it shouldn't bother us any more.'

Colsceg frowned. 'That's good,' he said. 'So, apart from that, did you see anything interesting?'

'No,' Poldarn replied. 'That's about it, really.'

'Long way to go just to see that.'

'Yes.'

Colsceg nodded. 'Well, I guess it's better knowing than guessing, at that.'

'True,' Poldarn said. 'Anything been happening here while we've been gone?'

'Not really. No more showers of ash falling out of the sky; a little bit of dust, is all, and not nearly as much of that as when you went away. At this rate, we'll be back to normal in a day or so.'

'Good,' Poldarn yawned, pulling his blanket tighter around his shoulders. 'The sooner that happens, the better for all of us. After all, we've got work to do.'

'We have that,' Colsceg agreed, as he rose to his feet. 'Looks like you'd better get some rest. If the rain holds off, we can finish digging up the turnip clump in the morning.'

'Great,' Poldarn said. 'I'll look forward to that.'