Pattern

Chapter Ten

Poldarn pushed past Colsceg and burst through the door.

The rain was hard, each drop hitting his face like a slingstone, and so thick that he could only just make out the shapes of the encircling mountains. But he didn't need to see them. In his mind's eye, he had a clear vision of what was happening. The ash was dissolving into mud, slithering off the rocky slopes, following the channels and contours like sheep herded by a well-trained dog. Soon it would form its lines and columns, its ranks and files, ready to march; then it would move with terrifying speed (like the raiders, his people, swooping down on Josequin or Deymeson), gathering strength and pace as it went, before cascading in a black river into the valley, and filling it like molten metal poured into a mould. It would be here very soon, too soon to put together a coherent plan of action, organise the household, allocate duties and responsibilities, establish an effective chain of command-all the things that needed to be seen to if anything was ever to get done.

'Well,' Colsceg shouted at him, 'so what do we do?'

He thought about it for a whole second. 'Run,' he said.

'Fine. Where to?'

Ah, Poldarn thought, now there you have me. He looked round, more with his mind and memory than with his eyes. The valley plain was out of the question. He thought of Rook's account of the mudslides at Lyatsbridge; if they ran out onto the flat, there was every chance they'd be swamped and buried before they went more than a few hundred yards. Going up the slopes was no better, they ran the risk of being in the way of a mudslide coming down; it'd be quicker, though not by much, and that was the best to be said for it. Bloody hell, he thought, why's it got to be up to me, this isn't even my house. Why can't someone else tell me what to do, for a change?

'Up the hillside,' he said, and as he said it he knew perfectly well that he was only saying the first thing that came into his head, because there wasn't time to reach a considered decision. 'Keep to the high ground, away from the dips and trenches. You'll be just fine.'

Colsceg nodded and ran off; Poldarn could see people hurrying towards him. Of course, he and he alone was at liberty to please himself, he didn't have to go with the rest of them or allow his mind to be swamped by theirs. He could stay where he was, observe, collate more data, drown in mud, because he wasn't a part of this community. He only had himself to think about.

Not true. The hell with this, he thought; where's Boarci? Damn him to hell, Boarci was his responsibility now, and of course he was nowhere to be seen. Suppose it took him three minutes to find him, that'd use up his little allowance of grace and then it'd be too late to save either of them, even if he knew how to go about it. Waiting for him, looking for him would be an act of monumental stupidity, like running back into a burning house to try and save someone who was probably dead already. Only an imbecile would even consider doing something like that.

'Boarci,' he yelled, but he could only just hear himself over the hammering of the rain.

This would be a good time to be a mind-reader, Poldarn thought as he splashed and skidded across the yard. Already the rain had created pools in every bump and dip; it was flooding down off the eaves and gathering in miniature rivers, scuttling down the slight incline towards the edge of the plateau. The stables, he told himself; if I were Boarci, I'd try and get a horse, see if I could outrun the mud on the flat. Now that wasn't a bad idea, though needless to say it wasn't applicable to the Colscegsford household; there weren't enough horses to go round, and if they couldn't all go, none of them would even consider trying. But Boarci wasn't a part of this house, not even remotely, by betrothal; he could clear out and leave them all to die, and nobody would know he'd even been here. Now if only he could be trusted to think that way for himself, Poldarn would be relieved of the obligation of thinking for him, and that'd be one less thing to waste time on. But it wouldn't be safe to assume that Boarci would do that, and so Poldarn had no choice but to keep looking for him (and that'd be comical, if Poldarn died trying to save the one man in the place who managed to get away).

While he was standing in the yard trying to figure out this dilemma, the first mudslide made its spectacular entrance. It must have come down off the very steep escarpment at the far end of the plateau, because it landed on the roof of the grain store, smashed it into kindling and scooped up the mess before butting through the fence like an unusually ornery bull and slopping over the edge into the valley. Poldarn spun round to gawp, and by the time he'd seen enough the walls of the middle stable were being folded down flat as a torrent of black muck shouldered its way through, heading straight for the main house. That wasn't a problem, it was going away from where he was standing, and he'd noticed a nice sharp outcrop well above the channel it was following down the slope. If he looked sharp about it, he could see no reason why he couldn't get up there and be as safe as any man can be in this notoriously uncertain world. But before he could set off (time, of course, being very much of the essence) he realised that Elja was still inside the house. He didn't have a clue how he knew this, but he knew it.

Marvellous, he thought. But you'd have to be plumb crazy to try and outrun something moving that fast.

Poldarn ran; and, to his surprise, he found that he was making ground on the mudslide with every forced stride. By his calculations, the mud was shifting along at slightly more than a brisk walking pace, too slow for him to be able to abandon his responsibilities with a clear conscience. The door was wide open, as he'd left it, but he slipped in a pool of mud under the eaves and collided painfully hard with the door frame. He landed on his left knee, with a painful impression of having done it no good at all, but he couldn't spare the time for it to hurt or anything self-indulgent like that. Instead he pulled himself up on the edge of the door and charged into the house, howling Elja's name.

She came out of the inner room, looking sleepy.

'Mudslide,' he tried to say, but he was too out of breath to be able to shape words. Instead, he grabbed her arm and yanked her after him, reaching the doorway just as the mud caved it in.

Too late after all, Poldarn concluded sadly, as the mud swept his feet from under him and he flopped awkwardly onto his side, half falling and half collapsing, like an old shed in a high wind. He pulled Elja down with him, of course, and she screamed at him, bending back the fingers of his left hand where they were closed around her wrist. Now that really was painful, but he didn't have time or breath left to ask her to stop. The current carried him on a yard or so, twisting him round until he was lying on his back, watching the roof timbers getting pulled out of their mortices. He wondered whether he'd live long enough for the pain of having his head crushed by a falling beam to make him scream; he hoped not, since he didn't want to look pathetic in front of Elja.

But it didn't happen like that. Under the pressure of the mud, the walls were forced outwards, and the rafters and joists were pulled free of their sockets on the left-hand side before they cleared those on the right. In consequence, the roof beams folded rather than fell, crashing down diagonally into the mud and spraying it in all directions, but he was too far over to be in their line of collapse. Meanwhile, the wall nearest to him was floating on top of the mud, like a grotesquely oversized raft.

I could get on that, he thought. We could get on that, he corrected himself, and then at least we won't drown in the river of mountainshit. Death was one thing, but the thought of being sloughed over by a huge black slug of sodden ash was too revolting to bear thinking about. So he crawled, waded and flipped his way onto the flattened wall, like a salmon forcing its way upstream, and managed to haul himself over the precisely trimmed log-ends and flop, breathlessly, face down in a pool of his own mud.

A scream reminded Poldarn that he still had duties to attend to. Just in time, he reached out and grabbed Elja's wrist, before the current dragged her too far away. He pulled, and felt something go in her arm; she screamed again, this time from simple, everyday pain, and tried to shake him off. Instinct, he told himself, and pulled as hard as he could, ignoring whatever damage he was doing to her tendons and bones. A ludicrous picture of her hand coming off in his floated into his mind, somehow hopelessly mixed up with a memory of trying to wring a hen's neck, yanking straight when he should have twisted, and getting horribly scratched in the face by the claws of a decapitated chicken. But Elja's hand stayed on and she slopped down beside him on the wall-raft, flapping and wriggling like a landed fish.

'It's all right,' he shouted (but his mouth was full of mud), just as the roof subsided into the black mess, pushing up a wave that nearly submerged them both. He slid his own length down the raft on his belly, his feet ramming her in the neck and ear and almost shunting her off the timbers into the mud. Then-fortuitously-the raft came up against something solid and was jolted sideways, shooting them both back up the way they'd just come. Unfortunately, the impact was enough to wrench the wall-boards apart; the raft disintegrated into its component timbers (he saw Colsceg as a young man, marking each growing beam with his knife so he'd know which tree was to go where when the time came) and he needed both arms to grab on to a floating joist, just to keep his head above the surface. He couldn't look round to see what had become of Elja, but it didn't take much imagination to guess.

What a bloody mess, Poldarn said to himself, and he wondered how they were getting on at Haldersness, whether the rain was cleaning the ash off the fields, whether there were mudslides there, and was everybody dead. It didn't seem to matter; even if he contrived to keep his grip on the log he was hanging on to, sooner or later the current would sweep him off the plateau and he'd end up dead on the plain below, drowned in mud or crushed by house-lumber-if the fall itself didn't kill him. He'd failed, of course; Elja dead in spite of his heroic self-sacrifice, and Boarci clean forgotten about, though in the event he wouldn't have been able to do anything for him. It was almost annoying to be still alive, saved by the happy accident of the angle at which the roof fell, the conveniently handy wall that had served him as a raft-he'd had nothing to do with all that, he hadn't arranged it or done anything the least bit clever, and all that had come of it was that he'd lived a few rather unpleasant minutes longer, minutes he wouldn't have minded missing out on, at that. Pointless and faintly ridiculous, the whole thing.

I'll die, and I'll never know who I was. Maybe I should remember now; after all, what harm can it possibly do? But his memory remained obdurately locked, and he couldn't be bothered to argue with it. Something Boarci had said, about his life flashing before his eyes at the moment of death, flitted into his mind and made him smile. The rain was cold and brutal; he'd have preferred to die in the warm sun, but apparently that wasn't going to happen.

Ciartan, Ciartan. Maybe someone was calling his name, or maybe it was just a voice in his head, such as you sometimes hear in the middle of the night, mindlessly enunciating some word or other. On balance, Poldarn hoped it was the latter. It'd be dreadful if the last thing he saw was some poor fool trying to rescue him and getting himself killed in the process. To have that on his conscience at the final moment would be intolerable, particularly since his mind had gone to such elaborate pains to hide his past sins from him, in case they upset him. Above all, he wanted to die in peace; death and haircuts should both be free from idle and distracting chatter, he told himself, and regretted that he'd never have a chance to use the line in conversation, because he rather liked it.

'Ciartan, you bloody fool. Over here.'

Definitely not a voice in his head; but he couldn't look round to see who it was without loosening his grip on the timber. 'Go away,' he shouted. 'Leave me alone, for God's sake.'

'Fuck you,' replied the voice, and he recognised it: Boarci, his new best friend. Particularly galling, he thought; here he was in his last few moments of life, and his dependent, the man he felt most responsible for, was calling out to him to save him. Everything I do turns to horseshit on me, Poldarn thought sadly, as he realised that his grip was about to weaken. Why couldn't I have died back in the Bohec valley, where I wasn't any bother to anybody?

He tried to tighten his grip, but he had nothing left. The beam slipped out from under his fingers, and he felt the mud rushing into his nose and mouth, too quickly for him even to take a breath.

He was in some kind of dream, though for some reason there weren't any crows. The mud had turned to linen, and the soft pressure on his face was a sheet. He batted it away with the back of his hand and turned his head. Next to him on the pillow was a glorious tangle of golden hair. He caught his breath; and she yawned and rolled over to face him.

'Who are you?' he asked.

She giggled. 'Oh, just some girl you picked up at a dance,' she replied.

(The crazy part of it was, he could distinctly remember her saying that.)

He opened his eyes and immediately started choking.

'He's alive,' someone said. Good, he thought. Improbable, but I'll gladly take their word for it.

Someone was leaning over him. It was still raining, and drops of water dripped off the man's sodden fringe onto his face. 'It's all right,' the man said, 'you're going to be all right.'

'Boarci,' he said.

The man nodded. 'He got to you just in time. Damnedest thing I ever saw, the man must be crazy or something. But he pulled you both out, is the main thing, and no harm done.'

You both, us both-am I forgetting something here? 'Elja?' he said.

'She's going to be all right too,' Colsceg said. 'Absolutely amazing, how he managed to do it. Must be as strong as a team of plough-horses. Just as well for you, really.'

Poldarn started coughing again, which was infuriating because he badly needed to know what had happened. 'Tell me,' was as far as he managed to get between spasms.

Colsceg had grabbed Poldarn's arm. 'It'll be better if you can sit up,' he said, jerking him upright so hard he nearly dislocated his shoulder (and his muscles were all torn and bruised as it was; no wonder, after the games he'd put them through). 'There, you can breathe better now'

Can I? Splendid, I'd never have known if you hadn't told me. 'What happened?' he croaked, through a mouthful of phlegm.

'Your friend,' Colsceg said, shaking his head as if he couldn't bring himself to approve of such goings-on. 'He was up among the rocks with us, and he saw what was happening, when the mud trashed the house. Of course, we all told him not to be a bloody fool, but he wouldn't listen, just hared off down the slope before we could grab hold of him. Slippery bugger, always dodging about.'

He stopped, turned his head slightly to the left, nodded. Behind his shoulder, Poldarn could see Colsceg's sons, Barn and Egil. He guessed they were passing on some new development or other.

'Like I was saying,' Colsceg went on, 'this friend of yours, he goes scrambling down the rocks, jumps a good feet onto a chunk of the old front door that's floating on top of the mud, then what does he do but he hops from one bit of timber to another, like a kid on stepping stones-you wouldn't credit it, I'd never have thought a big man like that could jump so far from a standstill-until he's close enough to reach over and grab you; Elja first, then you, one under each arm like a shepherd carrying lambs. Then of course the stupid fool realises he's stuck, standing there on a piece of sinking wood in the middle of the mudflow holding two people-dead weight both of you, we were sure you'd both drowned or choked to death. But then Egil here, and you could have knocked me over with a broom, I could have sworn he had more sense, Egil here sets off after him, catches up the rope we'd been using to get the kids up onto the rocks, and he goes out after him-not nearly so far, of course, but he gets close enough to throw the rope across, and your mad friend catches it; then Egil chucks the other end to me and Barn here, because of course we had to follow him, didn't we, and to cut a long story short we pulled you out, all four of you bloody maniacs. Amazing, the whole performance, but here you are.'

Poldarn screwed his eyes shut, then opened them again. 'Boarci rescued me,' he said.

'You and Elja,' Colsceg grunted. 'And then Egil rescued him, and we rescued Egil. Bloody miracle nobody was killed, of course. Never seen so many grown men acting so dumb.'

Oh, Poldarn thought. 'Thank you,' he tried to say, but his voice was too weak.

'Sort of rounded things off,' Colsceg was saying, 'us saving you after you saved us. Course, if there's a hero here today, it's got to be you. We'd never have thought of that, going up the hill like you said. Sounded like suicide when you said it, but we're bloody glad you did, else we'd all be dead and under the mud right now. Really was a stroke of luck, you showing up like that, and knowing all about volcanoes and mudslides and all.'

Poldarn breathed in slowly, trying to clear his mind. 'Is everybody all right?' he said. 'Did you all manage-?'

'All safe,' Colsceg told him. 'Right down to the old women and the kids, thanks to the rope. Couldn't say whose idea that was, who had the wit to bring it along. Wasn't me, that's for sure.' He chuckled. 'Closest call you ever did see but everybody's alive, nobody's busted up or anything like that, and that's got to be the main thing. Farm's gone, of course, completely fucking buried under all that shit, but so what, big deal. When I was twenty-six years old I started out with nothing but what I could carry on my back, and I can do it again, for sure, doesn't bother me one bit.'

His face told a different story, but Poldarn could hardly comment on that. 'Egil,' he said. 'I want to ask him.'

'What? Oh, right. Egil, he wants to ask you something. Don't tire him out, mind, he needs his rest.'

Egil shuffled forward, looking nervous and very, very wet. 'It wasn't you, it was her,' he said immediately. 'She's my sister, what else was I supposed to do?'

Poldarn nodded. 'I assumed it was something like that,' he said. 'Still, thank you.'

'Oh, that's fine. I owed you a good turn anyhow. So now we're quits, which is good.' He didn't look happy, however; in fact, he looked like a man who'd upset a keepnet full of carp trying to land a small eel. Poldarn got the feeling that if he'd stayed under the mud like he was supposed to have done, it'd have gone a long way towards reconciling Egil to the day's events.

'Suits me,' he said. 'Is Boarci anywhere near? I need to talk to him too.'

'Your friend.' Egil's tone of voice was pretty much the same as his father's. 'He was here a moment ago, then he went off to help with digging the shelter.' He scowled. 'You can tell things are bad, we're letting him help. A man like that.'

A man who saved your sister's life, Poldarn thought; then he added, And mine too, of course. That might well explain it. He wasn't convinced, though; the Colscegsford people just didn't like Boarci, and it seemed that nothing he could do was going to change that. 'Well, when you see him, tell him I'd like to thank him. That's twice he's saved my life. He must like me or something.'

Egil scowled. 'You want to watch him,' he said. 'He'll make trouble for you if you let him stay around. And what you want is a quiet life.'

'That's true,' Poldarn replied. 'Who doesn't?'

Egil looked at him as if he was trying to be funny. 'Sure,' he replied, 'who doesn't? Of course, all this has been a stroke of luck for you. Oh, I don't mean you planned it or you wanted it to happen, but all the same. Bet you'll be resting easier in your bed from now on, with the farm under all that mud.'

Do I want to know what he means by that? Poldarn decided that, in spite of his better judgement, he probably did. 'Is that so?' he asked quietly. 'Why would that be?'

'Oh, right.' Egil gave him a look of pure hatred. 'I forgot, you lost your memory. Which is really convenient, now that you're back home and you're going to have Haldersness and be the big farmer. You know, I'm sure you're telling the truth and you really don't remember anything, which is just fine by me. And with the valley being buried in this ash and shit, there's really only what you and I remember, nothing else that could ever be a problem. So if you've forgotten, that just leaves me and I'm telling you, I can't remember anything either. In fact, my mind's a complete fucking blank, you know? And keeping it that way would be a very good idea indeed.'

'Egil.' Poldarn reached out quickly and grabbed a handful of Egil's coat. 'You're absolutely right, I have forgotten whatever it is you're talking about, and I keep telling myself that I don't want to know anything-well, anything bad about myself from the past, because I have a nasty feeling there's a lot of that kind of thing, one way or another. But that's not who I am; who I am now, I mean. I've been living with myself for a while, and I'm pretty sure that if I was some kind of evil monster, I'd have noticed. But really.' He let go of Egil's coat. 'Really, I haven't seen any signs of that, I think I'm just a straightforward man who doesn't mean any harm to anybody. At any rate,' he added, looking away, 'that's who I desperately want to be, and I'm pretty sure I can manage it, so long as I'm allowed to get on with it. Does that make any sense to you?'

Egil nodded, and smoothed his rumpled coat. 'It all sounds fair enough to me,' he said sullenly. 'Like, who wants trouble? Nobody. Not me, anyhow. Besides, we've got enough trouble as it is, with the mountain blowing up and losing the farm, that's a whole lifetime's worth all by itself. You think I'm going to stir up a load of old trouble, which'd screw things up for me just as bad as for you, you must be cracked in the head or something. And with you marrying my sister-' He broke off, as though he'd just swallowed something rotten.

'That's right,' Poldarn said gently. 'I'm going to be marrying your sister. We'll be brothers-in-law. I need to know there won't be anything bad to spoil that.'

'Not from me,' Egil said, staring past Poldarn's head. 'I mean, Polden knows I wouldn't have chosen you-I love my sister. But I'm not going to go saying anything and put my own neck on the block, you can bet your life. I may be a lot of things-leastways, I may have been a lot of bad things-but I'm not that dumb.' He was struggling, almost as if he was wrestling with some enemy. 'You take good care of her, you hear? You make sure you treat her right, God help us all, because it's not fair, what she's got stacked up against her, she never did no harm to anybody. So if you-you of all people-if you go treating her wrong, that'd be really bad. And like I said, I won't be telling anything to anybody, but even so I might just find myself killing you one of these days. I mean, I could do that and still nobody would ever know the truth, even if I got caught.'

There was something about his manner that made Poldarn feel very nervous indeed. 'That's interesting,' he said. 'But surely, if you did that, you'd just be swapping one problem for another. And the new one would be far worse, wouldn't it?'

'Sure.' Suddenly Egil grinned. 'Why do you think you're still alive, at that? If I killed you, next morning the whole household'd know what I'd done and I'd really be screwed. But only me, if you get my meaning; and my life's all shit anyhow, it doesn't bother me as much as some other stuff does. It makes no mind really what happens to me, I'd rather stay alive and keep going on, one day to the next, but I figure it's really only force of habit, or instinct or something.' He shook his head. 'Maybe the best thing for everyone'd be if you got your new friend to stick that axe of his in the back of my head some day. Quietly, when nobody's looking. Can't say it'd bother me a whole lot, and you'd really be clear then. Other than that-' He shrugged wearily. 'I've said what I wanted to say,' he continued. 'And you did real good, saving us all from the mudslide, so maybe you're not so bad, at that.' He stopped suddenly and looked up at the sky. 'You know what?' he said. 'It's stopped raining. About time.'

Egil was quite right. 'That's good,' Poldarn said. 'But don't try and change the subject. Can't you try and get it into your stupid thick head, nobody's going to get killed, there's no need for it. It seems to me, if something can be forgotten about so completely that only two people in the whole world know about it, and life goes on, it can't have been all that terrible to start with. God, that sounds all wrong, I know, but let's face facts. We're still alive, we came through the mudslide. I'd be dead if you hadn't risked your life for me, and Colsceg tells me you'd all be dead if I hadn't said go up the slope instead of down into the valley.' He stopped, trying to untangle the mess of unruly thoughts in his head. 'I see it like this,' he said. 'If I'd died that day beside the river, when I woke up and realised I'd lost my whole life up to that point, if whoever bashed my head in had hit me just a little bit harder, then you'd all be dead-half of Haldersness would be dead, too. If Boarci hadn't killed the bear before it got me, you'd be under the mud right now. If I hadn't gone away when I did-same thing, exactly. What I'm trying to say is, if I hadn't done this thing I'm supposed to have done, I'd never have left here, I'd still be one of you. But because I left, I became an outsider, and I came back just when an outsider was needed. Do you see what I'm getting at? If I hadn't done this thing, we'd all be dead because of the volcano or the mountain or the divine Polden, whatever you want to call it, we'd all be dead and there'd be nothing left, just mud and ash and a few burnt-out ruins. Whatever the hell it was that I did, was it so bad that it'd have been worth all our lives for it never to have happened? I don't know,' he said wretchedly, tense with frustration, 'maybe I did something you could never forgive, maybe I killed someone, I really don't want to know. But suppose that's what it was. If I'd never killed whoever it was, he'd be under the mud with the rest of us right now, and what the hell good would that be to anybody?'

Egil shook his head slowly. 'You don't understand,' he said. 'Like I said, you're lucky about the mudslide, and so am I. Let's say we leave it at that. Agreed?'

'Agreed.' Poldarn suddenly felt more tired than he could remember being before. 'Look, if it's all the same to you, would it be all right if I got some rest now? I've had a rather exhausting day and it's going to be a long way to Haldersness without any horses.'

'You do what the bloody hell you like,' Egil said, and walked away.

It would have been a long walk under any circumstances, up steep hills and down again, with the ground either bruising rock or infuriating bog after the torrential rain. Most of the ash and cinders were gone-no prizes for guessing where-but there were dips and hollows waist-deep in thick black mud; after a near-disaster when they experimented briefly with wading through one of them, they resolved to go round them, even if it meant retracing their steps up a steep-sided combe. Poldarn did his best to walk on his own, but after the fifth or sixth unexpected detour his legs gave out completely and he sat down suddenly and hard in the grey shale of a particularly steep escarpment, after which Boarci grabbed him round the waist and wrenched an arm across his enormous shoulders. After an hour or so of trying to keep pace with Boarci's enormous strides Poldarn wasn't entirely sure that his new friend's help was making things any easier for him, but at least he kept moving, having no other option.

Covering the whole distance in one day proved to be out of the question, and they ended up spending the night huddled in the nominal shelter of a solitary thorn tree with an absurdly bowed and twisted trunk. It didn't take long for them to figure out how it had got that way; the wind was cold and brisk, and of course they had nothing in the way of blankets or even coats, while all their attempts to make a fire proved to be fatuous ('You have a go,' Colsceg muttered at one point, dumping an inadequate bundle of scavenged twigs in Poldarn's lap. 'You're supposed to be a blacksmith, you should be good at starting a fire.')

In spite of the cold, and hunger that was steadily getting harder to ignore, and the general wretchedness of everything, Poldarn fell asleep-at least, he assumed he must have done, because he woke up with a horribly cramped back, pins and needles in both feet and a dreadful ache in his arms and shoulders to remind him of how he'd spent the previous day. The only way he could get up from the ground was by rolling onto his side and pulling himself slowly up the tree with his hands, which had clamped tight shut during the night and had to be prised open, like scallops. He took so long about it that they very nearly left without him.

The second day was much like the first, only worse; the hills seemed to get steeper, the ash-mud bogs more frequent, the wind harder and colder. When they passed the place where Boarci had killed the bear, it seemed to Poldarn like he was revisiting a scene from his childhood, a time long ago and wonderfully happy and carefree, when his whole life was still in front of him and he still had a horse.

'Fat lot of good it did you,' he said to Boarci, who was still hustling him along like a sheaf of cut corn.

'What are you talking about?'

'That horse I gave you, for saving me from the bear.'

Boarci shrugged. 'Serves you right for being too generous,' he replied. 'I could've told you at the time no good'd come of it.'

Faced with a choice between staggering painfully along on his own two feet and listening to much more of that sort of thing, Poldarn decided he preferred the pain. 'It's all right,' he said, wriggling out of Boarci's grip, 'I'm feeling much better now, I can walk on my own. Thanks all the same,' he added.

'Suit yourself,' Boarci grunted. 'I could do without you treading on my feet every third step, that's for sure.'

Poldarn slowed down, letting him get safely ahead, and this brought him up level with Elja, who was also walking on her own. He hadn't spoken to her since the mudslide, and she hadn't come near him; he wondered if there was anything wrong between them, or whether it was just a point of etiquette.

'So,' he said, 'how are you feeling?'

'Tired,' she replied.

He nodded. 'Me too,' he said. 'I feel like I've been walking my whole life. Still, it's not much further now.'

She frowned. 'Yes, it is,' she said. 'That's Riderfell over there, and down in the dip is Fleot's Water, so at this rate we won't get there till just before dark, if we're lucky.'

'True,' Poldarn admitted. 'I was just trying to cheer you up.'

'Oh.' She looked at him. 'By telling me a lie?'

'Well, the truth's pretty depressing,' he said. 'Any bloody fool can tell you the truth and make you feel miserable.'

Elja stared at him for a moment, then laughed. 'I suppose so,' she said. 'You know, you're strange.'

'Thank you. That's probably the nicest thing anybody's ever said about me.'

'Really?'

'No,' he explained, 'that was a joke.'

'Another lie? To make me feel cheerful?'

'That's right. Oh, come on,' he added, 'you people have jokes, I've heard you making them.'

'I know. I was teasing you, but you seem to be a bit slow on the uptake today.'

It crossed Poldarn's mind that he might have been better off sticking with Boarci. 'You're probably right,' he said. 'It was getting soaked to the skin the day before yesterday-I think I'm brewing up a really high-class cold. The silly thing is, I can't remember having had one before. Weird at my time of life, having my first cold.'

'You'll get the hang of it pretty quickly, I'm sure. I expect it's like swimming, it'll all come back to you once you start.'

He shrugged. 'Maybe,' he said. 'Still, you could help me get into the right frame of mind. What comes first?'

Elja thought for a moment. 'Usually,' she said, 'you start off with a blocked nose, maybe a cough, some slight deafness even. A general feeling that your head's been stuffed full of unbleached wool.'

'That sounds familiar,' he said, stumbling over a rock but recovering his balance quite well. 'What about a slight headache? Is that orthodox?'

'It's not unknown, certainly,' she said. 'Though I'd tend to look for that in the next phase, along with the heavy sneezing, the runny nose, bleary eyes, that sort of thing.'

Poldarn pulled a face. 'So that's what I've got to look forward to,' he said. 'And do you get those things as well as the earlier stuff, the coughing and so on, or does one stop and the next one start?'

'Oh no, they all happen at the same time. Though sometimes you'll find that the runny nose clears up but the cough gets much worse. Followed,' she added, 'by a really horrible sore throat. That's a nasty combination, believe me.'

'I'm sure,' Poldarn said despondently. 'All right, so we've got as far as the sore throat. Then what?'

She sighed. 'Downhill all the way from there,' she said sadly. 'Next your arms and legs swell right up, you get these horrible blisters breaking out all over your skin, followed by massive internal bleeding, blackouts, madness and finally death. And that's assuming it doesn't go bad on you and turn into pneumonia.'

'Ah.' He bit his lip tragically. 'So how long do you think I've got? Give it to me straight, I can take it.'

She looked at him. 'A case like yours, I'd say three days, four at the very most. It's sad, really. I'd have enjoyed living at Haldersness.'

'Would you?' He heard something in his own voice, and quickly changed tack. 'You seem to know an awful lot about colds,' he said. 'Have you ever had one yourself?'

'Me? Loads of them.'

'And did you die?'

'Every time.'

He nodded. 'Well, in that case I guess you know what you're talking about.'

After that there was a slight awkwardness between them, as though one or the other of them had gone maybe a step too far, but neither was quite sure which of them it had been. Shortly after that, they came up against the worst quagmire yet: between two escarpments was a small, steep-sided defile that had completely filled up with mud. After standing and scowling at it for quite some time, they faced up to the fact that there was no way round it except going back down the road for half an hour and taking a long, gruelling detour up the back face of the western slope.

'Marvellous,' Elja sighed as they trudged uphill. 'Now we've got no chance of getting there before it gets dark.'

Poldarn would've said something extremely coarse if he could've spared the breath. 'I don't like the idea of crashing around in the dark,' he said. 'We could walk into one of those bogs before we knew what'd hit us.'

'That's right,' Elja said. 'So I expect we'll end up sleeping out again. I used to love doing that when I was a kid, but now I'm not so keen.'

'I wouldn't mind if I had a blanket, or if there was anything we could make a fire with,' Poldarn groaned. 'It's bad enough now with this wind. Once the sun goes down, it's going to be really bloody cold.'

'I thought you were supposed to be telling me nice, cheerful things.'

'Yes, but they wouldn't be true.'

Elja furrowed her brows in studied thought. 'Truth is a wonderful thing,' she said, 'and so is pea soup. You can get tired of both of them if you never have anything else.'

They tried very hard to make up time, but it was pointless; all they succeeded in doing was getting almost within sight of Haldersness by the time it got too dark for any more trekking to be safe. This time there wasn't even one lonely thorn tree to sit under, so they had to make do with a small heap of rocks, the remnants of a long derelict cairn. The shelter it gave them from the wind was minimal verging on imaginary, but it felt better than sleeping out on the bare hillside, even if they did get just as cold and (when it rained briefly, around the middle of the night) wet.

As soon as they stopped, Elja went off without a word and joined the women on the other side of the cairn, leaving Poldarn on his own. He didn't mind that too much; he'd been in company of one sort or another all day, and one of the few things he was enjoying about this forced march was the occasional moment of solitude. It was undeniably pleasant to be able to crouch down on the ground a few paces away from the others and clear his mind at last, since he had a great deal to think about. He didn't manage it, though, since within a few heartbeats of getting moderately comfortable and closing his eyes, he was fast asleep.

When he woke up, his head was full of small pieces of a very unpleasant dream. He made a conscious effort to sweep them away, though he had a feeling that a few of them were still lurking in the inaccessible cracks and corners of his mind, like the last few tiny splinters of broken potsherd after you've dropped a plate or a cup, the ones you find with the soles of your bare feet three months later. It was broad daylight already, and there was a fine spray of moisture in the air, either a wet fog or low cloud. His knees and calves ached as he put his weight on them. Not far to go now, he told himself; but that was definitely another case of telling lies in order to cheer himself up-necessarily pointless when he was both the teller and the audience.

Long before Poldarn saw the farm, he located it by the mob of crows circling in the grey sky. He knew them pretty well by now; someone had walked them off their feed, and they were waiting for him to go away. He wasn't sure what they could have been feeding on; either a newly sown field or a dead animal, he guessed, but there was no way of telling which at this distance. He hoped it was the former, of course, since all the livestock should be a long way away by now, and sowing would imply that the rain had washed off the ash and life was getting back to normal. Typical crows, he told himself, to be so annoyingly ambiguous. He was relieved when he came close enough to distinguish the brown of newly turned earth directly underneath the cloud of slowly drifting black dots. It was going to be hard enough, with all these extra mouths to feed.

Needless to say, the Haldersness household was ready and waiting for them when they trudged down the last slope into the yard. He saw Eyvind and Rannwey and Rook and Scaptey, and Asburn at the back, looking anxious; no sign of Halder, which was odd.

'And another thing.' Boarci was at his side, almost protective, like a bodyguard. 'I lost all my kit back there, when the house got swamped. I'm not fussed about the rest of it, but it's a bloody shame about my axe. It was a good one, too, I'd had it for years.'

'No problem,' Poldarn replied, managing to keep the irritation out of his voice. 'I'll get our smith to make you a new one. He does good work, you'll be pleased.'

Boarci shrugged. 'Whatever,' he said. 'But it's a pity, all the same. Belonged to my father, about the only nice thing he ever had.'

Oh shut up, for crying out loud. 'I'll get Asburn on making you a new one straight away,' he said. 'And anything else you want, you just say the word, all right?'

'Like I said, I'm not bothered,' Boarci replied dolefully. 'I mean, when it comes right down to it, it's only stuff, right?'

Talking of stuff: behind the reception committee he could see a great stack of barrels and boxes and bundles, along with most of the major items of furniture-tables, benches, lamp stands, his grandfather's dining chair. There was no sign of any damage to the house, or indeed of any mud in the yard or the surrounding area, so it seemed odd that all the contents of the house should be packed up and outside.

Nobody on either side said anything until the two house-holds were facing each other (like a mirror, Poldarn couldn't help thinking; they were practically identical in numbers and composition). At least he'd be spared the chore of explaining what had happened, thanks to the mind-reading business. He might have to fill in a few details, but he was certain they knew the broad outlines already.

Eyvind took a step forward and cleared his throat, rather self-consciously. 'Halder's dead,' he said.