Pattern

Chapter Twenty

'Pretry soon,' Boarci grumbled, 'we'll be able to find our way blindfold.' He gave the lie to this assertion by catching his foot on a tussock of couch grass and stumbling, but he carried on: 'Probably just as well, if it starts shitting that black stuff again and blots out the sun like it did last time. Don't know about you, but I don't much like the thought of getting down off this mountain in the dark.'

It was three days since the side of the mountain had been ripped open and a glaring red strip had poked out of the fissure, as if the volcano was sticking its tongue out at them. It had taken Poldarn three hours of forceful argument, shouting and pleading to induce the two households to go along with his plan (whatever it was-he had a few vague ideas, but that was all; still, it wouldn't do to let them know that) but he'd won the day at last, or else they'd agreed to let him take a scouting party up the mountain simply in order to be rid of him and free of the sound of his voice. Nobody had had any other suggestions to make, but that didn't surprise him at all.

So, here they were again, struggling over the shale, ash and broken ground just below the place where the hot springs had been. Of the springs themselves there was no longer any trace. The fissure out of which the red tongue was sticking had opened right in the middle of where they had been before and within a few hours the whole area had filled up with red-hot molten rock, travelling (as far as they could judge from down below in the valley) a little faster than a galloping horse. At that point, the only option had appeared to be to leave everything behind and run as fast and as far as they could get, hoping that the fire-stream would chase someone else and pass them by. Then, quite abruptly, it slowed down to walking pace, then to a toddler's crawl. There seemed to be no reason to it, and no reason why it shouldn't pick up speed again at any minute, but Poldarn had a feeling that there was a logical explanation, and that finding out what it was would be a good idea. Hence the expedition, which had now arrived on the other side of the narrow hog's back that separated them from the fissure itself. We must be mad, Poldarn thought; and then, in fairness to his companions, he changed the we to I.

'Right,' he said, as the party ground to a halt. It was stiflingly hot, and everything they could see was washed in soft red light. 'Let's go and take a look, shall we?'

Nobody seemed very keen, for some reason, but he couldn't be bothered with leadership skills at that particular moment. He turned his back on them and started to climb the slope. 'Hold on,' someone said behind him-he recognised Boarci's voice, and felt a surge of thanks that he wouldn't be alone after all. 'Slow down, for crying out loud, I've got a blister on my heel the size of a cow's arse.'

The view from the top of the hog's back was spectacular, but somehow disappointing. It looked for all the world like a road; not one of your up-country cart trails, all ruts and grass growing up the middle, but a high-specification military road, the sort of thing that costs millions and takes a lifetime to build. It was so flat that it could have been trued up with a square and a level, one uniform slate-grey plane with arrowshaft-straight sides, a masterpiece of the road builder's art if ever there was one. It was only the stunning blast of heat rising off it that spoilt the illusion.

'It cools quick enough, then,' Boarci said. 'That's worth bearing in mind.'

Poldarn laughed. 'Depends what you mean by cool,' he replied. 'I'll bet you, if you pitched a bale of hay down there it'd catch fire as soon as it touched.'

'Wouldn't surprise me,' Boarci grunted. 'But that's not what I meant. Seems to me it only moves when it's red-hot. Like metal in the forge,' he explained. 'When it's blue-grey it'll still burn your hand, but you can't squidge it around like you can when it's red.'

Poldarn hadn't thought of it like that. 'It may have cooled down on the top,' he said, 'but my guess is that if you went down a foot or so you'd come to molten rock. I think that under this crust it's still flowing like a river, just not as fast as it did to begin with. Which would explain why it slowed down like it did. To start with, it was running at its top speed, but as the crust formed it acted like a sort of brake-it's squeezing in, closing up the channel the molten stuff runs through.' He frowned. 'That's good, isn't it?'

'Maybe.' Boarci was lying next to him, his chin cupped in his hands, as if he was on a picnic. 'All depends how much it'll slow it down. Maybe it won't have the legs to reach the valley, maybe it will. No way of knowing. But I don't think I'd take the chance if I were you.'

Boarci didn't need to enlarge on that. It didn't take a trained surveyor to figure out that if the molten rock carried on down its present course, it'd fill the valley and flatten both Ciartanstead and Haldersness; there'd be nothing left but this wonderful road, leading nowhere, because the road would obliterate the settlement it led to.

'I'm going to get a little bit closer,' Poldarn announced. 'You can stay up here if you like.'

Boarci groaned. 'I wish you'd stop doing this sort of stuff,' he complained. 'Have you noticed that every time you fling yourself into the jaws of death, I'm the poor bugger who's got to come and fish you out again?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'You stay there,' he said, 'please. I'd rather you did, there's no point us both taking stupid risks. I just have a feeling it isn't going to hurt me, that's all.'

'Bloody fool,' Boarci called out after him; but he stayed up on the ridge, as Poldarn had asked him to.

Poldarn scrambled about thirty yards down the slope, but it was soon fairly obvious that there was nothing to be gained by going any further, nothing to be seen that wasn't obvious from the top of the ridge. The heat, on the other hand, was unbearable, and when he tried to turn round and go back, he felt it like a crushing weight on his back. Damn, he thought, and held still, not from choice but because he no longer had the strength to move. If he stayed there, he told himself, he'd die, and how stupid that would be. So he gathered his remaining strength, like wringing water out of a dishcloth, and dragged himself upright. As he stood facing the steel-grey road, he saw a single crow, a scout, sailing overhead. As it passed over the road it hesitated-he could see it struggling, like an ant walking on water. He wanted it to break free, but it couldn't; its strength failed and broke, it spiralled slowly down with its wings beating furiously, and pitched in the exact centre of the road. It stood upright for a single heartbeat, then crumpled like a piece of brass subsiding into the melt, and burst into flames. The little fire flared up and went out, leaving a black smudge.

'You too, then,' Poldarn said to the mountain; but it'd have to do better than that to beat his score. He could feel exactly the same pressure (and he remembered applying it, back in the forge at Haldersness, with the back of the poker) but he refused to acknowledge it. His knees were still weak from crouching in the ditch, but he wasn't in the mood to give in to mere weakness. That's the difference between us, he told himself, and he walked upright back up the slope.

'Well?' Boarci said.

It took Poldarn some time to catch his breath. 'Nothing to see here,' he panted. 'We'd better follow it on down to where it's still hot. I've got an idea, but I'm not sure about it.'

'Fine,' Boarci muttered, 'but for God's sake don't tell them that. You tell them you had a divine revelation and the god of the volcano told you exactly what to do. Otherwise they'll be off down the mountain like a rat down a drain, and you can forget all about them getting closer to the hot end.'

That seemed sensible enough, though Poldarn decided against the divine-revelation story. Instead, he said, 'It's pretty much as I expected, but I need to take a look at it further down, where it hasn't formed the crust. It ought to be perfectly safe so long as we keep our distance.'

Surprisingly he got no arguments from the rest of the party, who managed to keep up the lively pace he was determined to set in spite of the pain in his legs and back. So long as they had the hog's-back ridge between them and the fire-stream it wasn't so bad; it was almost possible to pretend it wasn't there. But when the ridge petered out and glimpses of orange light became visible through the rocks and dips, that particular source of comfort was no longer available; so they changed tack and cut down the side of a steep combe to a plateau roughly level with where Poldarn guessed the stream had reached. Then there was nothing for it but to head back towards the source of the red glow; and at that point the rest of the party stopped and told him they were going home now. 'You don't need us,' one of them said. 'We'll see you back at the house.' Poldarn didn't object; he nodded and said that he'd be as quick as he could, but he'd probably need half a day to get to where he needed to go and back again. They divided up the food and water and went their separate ways, Boarci choosing to return to the house with the others. 'So I won't be tempted to get myself killed for nothing,' he explained graciously. Poldarn nodded his agreement, and said Boarci was probably very wise.

Poldarn came on it quite suddenly, tracing round the edge of a rocky outcrop. It stretched out in front of him like a sea of liquid glass; almost translucent, like a welding heat, but orange instead of white. Here and there on the meniscus were huge boulders, glowing a paler shade of orange, almost yellow round the edges. He found that so long as he kept back a stone's throw or so the heat wasn't too bad, no worse than the forge on a hot day. It was almost like a curtain, a discernible limit dividing bearable from unbearable. Once or twice he ventured through it, but the view wasn't any better on the unbearable side, so he stopped doing that and contented himself with a mid-range view. As he'd speculated earlier, the crust wasn't just the extreme edges of the stream cooling; a fair proportion of it was made up of the debris the stream collected as it went along, dirt and soil and shale that had burnt away and turned into ash. Where the stream had no channel to guide it, he realised, it was the crust that kept it together, preventing it from slopping out over the sides and dissipating its momentum. If he could find a way of breaking through the crust-it'd be like tapping a barrel, or caving in the wall of a dam-and if he could only manage to drain away enough of the stream, so that the material in front of his breach lost momentum and slowed down long enough to cool-It couldn't be stopped, no power on earth could do that, but it could be diverted, persuaded and tricked into pouring away down the other side of the mountain and missing his valley completely. From what he could remember, the contours fell away sharply on the eastern side. It'd have to flood the whole world with molten rock before it could threaten Ciartanstead.

Poldarn breathed in deeply and sighed. Well, he thought, I've got an idea now. Of course, there's no way anybody could actually make it work, but even so it's better than giving up and running away. Presumably.

(And then he thought: it may be a stupid idea, idiotic and far-fetched, but it's an idea nobody in this country could ever have come up with, because their minds don't work that way. They don't have ideas, because they always know what to do, instinctively, like animals. They can't think, they can only do things that have been done thousands of times before. And that's why I'm here. Thank you. It all makes sense now.)

Boarci had waited for him after all. 'I thought you were going back to the house,' Poldarn said, as soon as he saw him.

'Yeah, well.' Boarci shrugged. 'I started off with those other idiots, but going all that way with only them to talk to, I couldn't face it. I'd rather stay up here and get burned to death. It's quicker than dying of boredom and not nearly as painful.'

Poldarn laughed. 'You may have a point,' he said. 'And I may have an idea.'

He explained what he had in mind as they hurried down the slope, bearing away from the fire-stream as fast as they could go. He was expecting Boarci to tell him he was off his head, but to his surprise Boarci thought about it for a while and then said: 'It could work, I guess. But there's a couple of things that need figuring out first. For a start, what're you going to smash through the crust with? You got any idea how thick it is, or how hard the skin is?'

'No,' Poldarn admitted. 'My guess is, it's not as thick as a brick wall, but not far short of that.'

Boarci nodded. 'Well, you're going to need special tools, then. Big hammers and cold chisels aren't going to hack it; you'll need to make up something specially for the job.'

'All right,' Poldarn replied. 'Shouldn't be impossible. Something like a quarryman's drill, basically just a long steel bar you bash in with a hammer and then twist.'

'Fair enough,' Boarci said. 'Next, you'll need to do something about the heat. You're talking about getting right up to the fire. At that distance it'll take all the skin off your face in a heartbeat.'

Poldarn frowned. 'I think I know what we can do about that. What else?'

'Oh, loads of things. For instance, suppose you do manage to break through the crust, what happens then? All the bloody hot stuff's going to come spurting out of the breach, and God help the poor bastard who's standing in the way.'

Poldarn thought about the crow, and the way it had burnt up in the time it took to sneeze. 'All right,' he said, 'but so long as we bear that in mind-We'll have to go in at an angle, I guess, and hope for the best. I didn't say it was going to be easy, I said it might be possible, that's all.'

'Sure,' Boarci said. 'But you'll need to have answers to all these points before you pitch the idea to that lot down there. They aren't going to like it one bit, I can tell you that right now.'

Boarci was right about that, too. The two households listened to Poldarn in stunned silence. On their faces he could see the sort of horrified embarrassment that he'd have expected to see if he'd got drunk and made an exhibition of himself-singing vulgar songs, dancing on the table, throwing up on the floor. Their reaction annoyed him so much that he forgot to be daunted by it.

'All right,' he said eventually, after the silence had gone on almost as long as his speech. 'Here's what I'll do. If anybody can come up with a better idea before dawn tomorrow, we'll forget all about my suggestion and go with his idea. What's more, he can have the farm; I'll give it to him or stand down or abdicate or whatever you want to call it, and he can be head of household, and I'll spend the rest of my life mucking out the pigs. Believe me, if someone takes me up on this, I'll be the happiest man in the valley. You all got that? By dawn tomorrow; otherwise we'll give my idea a go and see if we can make it work. Good night.'

The silence followed him into the bedroom, where Elja was placidly sewing, turning sheets sides to middle. 'Did you hear that?' Poldarn asked as he closed the door.

'Your speech, you mean? Yes.'

Poldarn lay down on the bed, too tired and fed up to take off his boots. 'I didn't mean that, I meant the reception it got from that lot.'

'But they didn't say a word.'

'Exactly.'

'Oh.' Elja smiled. 'I see what you mean. Yes, I heard that. Couldn't help hearing it. If they'd been any quieter, they'd have been inaudible right down the other end of the valley.'

Poldarn laughed. 'They're bastards, the lot of 'em,' he said. 'I wouldn't have minded if they'd shouted at me or called me a bloody fool. But just sitting there like that, it's too cruel for words.' He made an effort, sat up and groped for his bootlaces. 'Last time I try and do anything for this household.'

'Don't be like that,' Elja said gently. 'They're just not used to people like you, that's all. They don't know you the way I do.'

'Oh really' He tried to drag off a boot, but his foot was too hot and swollen. 'Well, no, I suppose they don't. But that's not the point.'

'Idiot.' She sat on the bed and tugged at the boot, without making any perceptible difference. 'I don't think you realise how scared of you they all are.'

That took Poldarn completely by surprise. 'Scared? Of me? But that's ridiculous.'

Elja let go of the boot and stretched out beside him, hands behind her head. 'What makes you say that?' she said. 'To all intents and purposes you're a stranger, an unknown quantity, and there aren't any of those here. Well,' she amended, 'there's tramps and layabouts like your friend Boarci, but we understand them, we know what to expect. You're completely different, and we can't even see what you're thinking. And if that's not bad enough, you do such weird things, nobody knows what you're going to get up to next. Not just that, but you go around telling people what they ought to be doing, when it's not what they know they should be doing; and sometimes, more often than not, you're right. Most of all, you know about the volcano, it's like you can see its thoughts. That's really scary.' She lifted her head and looked at him. 'Do you really mean to say you hadn't realised that?'

Poldarn nodded. 'Of course not. I mean, most of the time they treat me like I'm a kid or something. That's when they even acknowledge I exist.'

'They keep their distance, you mean. Actually, they talk to you far more than they talk to each other, or hadn't you noticed? That's another scary thing, you're always at them, asking questions, like you're interrogating a prisoner. If you were in their shoes, wouldn't you be scared?'

Poldarn thought about that. 'Not really,' he said. 'I might want to smash my face in from time to time, but I wouldn't be scared. Still, I guess I know me better than they do.'

Elja laughed. 'Are you sure? It strikes me that you know you less well than anybody. After all, you've only known you for a few months. Some of these people have known you forty-odd years, off and on.'

'True,' Poldarn replied. 'But I get the impression I've changed a bit since then.'

'Maybe. How would you know?'

'I don't,' Poldarn admitted. 'But anyway, that's not the point. I don't really give a damn whether they're scared of me, or they like me or hate me or whatever; not right now, anyway. What's important right now is doing something about the mountain. Just sitting there as though nothing was wrong-how can they do that?'

Elja smiled at him, quite tenderly. 'You poor thing,' she said, 'you really don't understand. They're scared of you, but they're absolutely terrified of the mountain. It's far more frightening than the thought of getting killed, or anything like that. They know about death, it happens every day, it's one of those things you live with your whole life. But the mountain is new. They've never even heard of anything like it before, not even in stories. And here you are, telling them they've got to go and fight this terrible thing. No wonder they just sat there. There aren't any words to say what they're all thinking right now.'

'Oh,' Poldarn said. 'And what about you, then? You seem pretty cool about it all.'

'Me?' Elja frowned. 'I don't really know, I hadn't thought about it. For some reason, I'm not frightened at all. I'm not frightened of you, or the mountain.'

'Good,' Poldarn said.

'Not really, no. I ought to be. I don't understand either of you. I just know that you aren't going to do me any harm. I know it's all going to be very bad for a while, and this plan of yours sounds absolutely horrible, but it's not going to hurt me. Something very bad is going to happen sooner or later, but not this.'

Poldarn leaned forward, not looking at her. 'You sound very sure about that.'

'Yes,' Elja said, 'I do. It's not a guess or even a conclusion I've reached-I just know it; like you know something you remember, because it's already happened. Does that make any sense to you?'

'Oddly enough, it does,' Poldarn said quietly. 'It's how I felt when we were building this house. I knew we'd be able to do it, because I felt I'd done it before-no, that's not it. I felt like I'd done it already, if you can see the distinction. I'd done it already, so it was already done and so it had to turn out right. The house couldn't not be built because I'd already built it.'

Elja nodded. 'You're weird,' she said. 'I hadn't realised quite how weird you really are.'

'Oh. So that's not how you see this, then.'

She shook her head. 'It's exactly how I see it,' she said. 'I never said I wasn't weird, did I?' She pushed her hair back behind her ears. 'Look at it from my point of view. I get this really strange, crazy feeling, it's so crazy it worries me. And then you say it's exactly how you felt when you were building the house. Now you are beginning to scare me. I mean, we mustn't both be crazy. Think of the children.'

Poldarn laughed. 'I think it's simpler than that. You love me so much you're absolutely sure I'll succeed and the fire-stream will go away. You have faith in me.'

'Oh, sure.' She rested her head on his shoulder. 'I worship you like a god, that goes without saying, I'm practically your high priestess. All you've got to do is snap your fingers and the fire'll crawl back into its kennel like a dog that knows it's been naughty.' A moth whirred past them and started to circle the pottery lamp beside the bed. 'Do you really think it could work, this idea of yours?'

'It could work,' Poldarn replied, 'but if you're asking whether I can make it work, that's another matter entirely. It could work, but only if we get a whole lot of difficult things right. Maybe we'd have a reasonable chance if we'd done it all before and we knew how to go about it. Getting it to work the first time, when we're making it up as we go along; that's a lot to ask, isn't it? We only get one try, after all.'

Elja yawned. 'It'll be all right,' she said. 'Trust me.'

'Why?'

'Because,' she told him, and snuggled down under the blankets. 'Now shut up and go to sleep. You've got a big day tomorrow.'

He pinched out the flame of the lamp and lay still in the dark. Somewhere in the room the moth was fluttering round, trying to find out where the flame had gone. Stupid creature, Poldarn thought, I've probably saved its life and it doesn't even realise, let alone feel grateful to me for the exercise of my divine clemency. I'm glad I'm not a god; it must be soul-destroying, putting up with that sort of thing.

Next morning, early, he went to the forge. Asburn was already there, and a good fire was blazing in the duck's nest.

'These drills,' Asburn said. 'What did you have in mind?'

Poldarn couldn't remember having mentioned the drills to anybody except Boarci but he guessed that Boarci had told Asburn about them. 'Something like this,' he said, chalking a sketch on the face of the anvil. 'What do you think?'

Asburn nodded. 'Oughtn't to be a problem,' he said. 'Only, they've got to be drawn hard. Have we got anything long enough?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'I was thinking, make the shafts out of iron and weld a steel tip on.'

'That ought to do it,' Asburn said. 'In that case, we can draw down those old mill shafts.'

Poldarn stifled a groan, because that would mean several hours of swinging the big hammer, and he felt stiff and raw after his adventures on the mountain. 'Fine,' he said. 'Good idea.'

'I'll strike, then,' Asburn said, much to Poldarn's surprise. He'd assumed that he'd be striking, while Asburn did the skilled work. 'All right,' he said. 'If you don't mind.'

In spite of Poldarn's reservations, the drills more or less shaped themselves. First they drew down the shafts, reducing them in diameter by a third. Then they forged flats into the round bars, forming them into hexagons; Poldarn wasn't quite sure why this was necessary, but he knew it was the right thing to do-neither of them suggested it, they just did it as soon as they'd finished drawing down. In order to get the iron to work, they took a ferocious heat, almost white, and Poldarn's skin ached where the flare of the fire-stream had burned it. Next he cut lap scarfs into the tip of each drill with the hot sett, dressing them out clean with the hot and cold files, and smothered the scarfs with flux to keep the scale out while they were welding. As soon as the flux powder touched the hot metal it melted into a glowing yellow liquid, more or less the same in colour and texture as the bed of the fire-stream. They put the drill bodies in the edge of the fire so they'd hold their heat until they were needed, and jumped up some flogged-out old rasps to form the cutting tips. When these were ready they went into the fire until they were yellow, whereupon Poldarn fitted them into the scarfs in the shafts and peened them round to keep them in place as he brought the piece up to a full welding heat, turning them widdershins in the fire to keep the heat even. He raked the fire deep for this part of the process, which meant the metal was buried under burning coals and he had to rely on hearing the fizz as the surface started to burn in order to judge when it was ready to weld. He couldn't have been far out, because when he pulled the first drill out it was snowing fat white sparks. Asburn turned the shaft slowly, while Poldarn patted it smartly and evenly with a two-pound ball-peen. He could feel the iron and steel fuse together under the hammer, a curious scrunching sensation, like treading on a deep drift of virgin snow.

As soon as they'd finished one drill they started on the next, and by the time they'd hardened and tempered the blades and ground them to a cutting edge it was mid-afternoon. Poldarn left Asburn to finish up, and made a round of the other preparations. There weren't going to be nearly as many buckets as he'd have liked, but fortuitously there were plenty of skins, since nobody had got around to tanning the hides from last winter's slaughter. He found more than enough hammers, chisels, crowbars and axes in store, along with a reasonable quantity of rope, though not as much as he'd have liked. By the time everything had been stowed on the wagons, there was only just enough space left for the drills. Anything else-and he was bound to have forgotten something-they'd have to do without.

'That's the lot, then,' he announced, with rather more confidence than he actually felt. 'We'd better all get a good night's sleep,' he added, 'I want to get started first thing in the morning.'

Easier said than done. Poldarn lay awake most of the night, trying to visualise the job that lay before them, but the picture evaded him like an unreliable memory. When at last he slipped into a restless doze, the mountain was still there in his dreams-his mountain or another one very like it, only taller and steeper, coughing up fire like a dying man bringing up blood. The most vivid image in his dreams was the hot spring he'd seen so many years ago, with Halder beside him, except that now it was gushing fire instead of water. Somehow that seemed quite natural, as if his previous recollection of the scene had been at fault, and he'd only just corrected the mistake.

The fire-stream had put on a disconcerting turn of speed while Poldarn had been away. Its pronounced snout of rocks, shale and other debris now stood on a small plateau above a steep drop, with very little in the way of obstacles between it and the long, even slope that led directly to the mouth of the Haldersness valley. Once it made it over the edge, Poldarn couldn't see any force on earth stopping it. To make matters worse, the fissure in the side of the mountain was perceptibly wider, allowing a stronger flow. If this scheme didn't work there wouldn't be time to go home and think of something else. Whether he liked it or not, he was committed to his chosen course of action. This struck him as an unfortunate state of affairs, since the more he thought about it, the more fatuous it seemed.

'I'm sure I've forgotten something,' he complained, as they came over the hog's back.

'So you keep telling us,' Elja muttered. She was carrying two heavy buckets of water, covered with hides that had been tied down to prevent wastage by spilling. 'And not just something.'

'Forgotten to bring something we're going to need,' Poldarn said. 'No chance of going back for it now'

'Then let's hope it wasn't anything important.'

On the other hand, this was as good a place as any to try out his idea-better, in fact, than most, because on the other side of the plateau, where the rocks formed a low wall, there was a plainly visible thin point, where it would be fairly simple to break through. Channelled through that breach, the tapped-off flow would run down an even steeper incline that would guide it straight across the other side of the mountain, following a deeply cut gorge to the level plain below, and from there into a deep wooded valley, a natural sump that would take a lot of filling before the fire-stream could continue on its way. There was a farm down there-Poldarn could just make out the tiny squares of the buildings and the subtly differentiated colours of the home fields-but it stood on high ground on the edge of the plain, a long way above the valley. If everything went according to plan, the fire-stream wouldn't come any nearer to the farm than a mile and a half, missing the fields and the pasture completely. An ideal arrangement, in other words. He couldn't have produced a more suitable landscape if he'd moulded it himself out of potter's clay.

'Well,' Poldarn said, 'we'd better get started.'

He'd brought everyone with him, women and children too, and nobody was empty-handed. He hadn't had to order them to come, or plead, or even ask; they'd been ready and waiting for him when he emerged from the house, early on that first morning. Nobody said anything, but they'd managed to keep up a stiff pace all the way from Ciartanstead to the hog's back; so stiff that at times he'd been hard put to it to keep up.

The first step was obviously to breach the wall, and that was a simple enough job, though more than a little strenuous. For that they used pickaxes, hammers and stout cold chisels, cracking and chipping the rocks away from the other side (extremely awkward, since there were precious few places where a man could stand upright and still do any useful work; ten men could squeeze in at a time, and the rest of the workforce could only stand by and wait their turn to relieve them). They used the spoil to bank up the sides of the breach, in case weakening the crust wall in one place caused it to break out elsewhere. From start to finish the work took six hours, rather less than he'd anticipated, and there was still an hour of daylight left when they finished.

Waste not, want not, Poldarn thought; although daylight wasn't actually necessary, given the brightness of the fire-stream's orange glow. One last despairing attempt to remember whatever it was he'd forgotten; then he picked up one of the new special drills and led the way into the breach.

'I'll go first,' he announced, and nobody offered to take his place. 'Who's going to strike for me? Anybody?'

He'd been hoping Boarci would volunteer, but instead there was a long, awkward silence. Then Asburn shoved through to the front, picking up a heavy sledge on his way. 'I'll hold the drill and you strike, if you'd rather,' he said. It was a tempting offer, sure enough; it was the man holding the drill who had to stand closest to the fire-stream, and he'd be the first to die if the crust gave way and the molten rock came spurting out before there was time to get clear. But Poldarn shook his head. 'It's all right,' he said, 'you'll be more use behind the hammer. I don't think I could lift that thing, let alone swing it.'

Next came a rather ludicrous performance. Elja and a couple of the other women had soaked two large raw oxhides in water, and they proceeded to wrap them round him, tying them down at his wrists and ankles and swathing his face in loops of hide until only his eyes and the tip of his nose poked through. Then, for good measure, they splashed a few cups of water in his face and wrapped his hands with strips of sodden buckskin. Poldarn could feel water trickling down his cheeks inside the swathes, also down his chest and back into his trousers, gathering in reservoirs where the string was pulled tight around his ankles. Asburn had to put up with the same ritual humiliation, which gave some degree of comfort, but not much.

'Here goes, then,' Poldarn mumbled through the layers of wet leather. It wasn't the most inspiring speech of valediction, and it came out sounding sillier still. 'Get the next pair ready to take over as soon as we've had enough.'

He hadn't considered the problem of steam inside his clothes; it was hot enough to scald him wherever they touched his skin, and probably the hardest thing he had to do was keep his eyes open as drops of water dribbled off his forehead and turned into uncomfortably hot vapour before they could soak away. But the precautions proved to be more than amply justified; he managed to cling on to the drill long enough for Asburn to deliver five bone-jarring thumps on his end of the drill before the heat forced him back, his nose and fingertips red and tingling. On his way back he crossed with the next two, similarly cocooned in saturated hides. They only managed three hits before giving way to the next pair. It seemed like no time at all before it was his turn again, and with each thump and chink of the hammer he was torn between two horrible possibilities: that the crust was far too thick, and they'd never get through it at this rate, not if they played this game for a year; or that the crust would suddenly give way at the next hit, and he'd trip over his absurd skirts as he tried to run, and the fire-stream would surge over him like daylight flooding a room, and obliterate him completely. Each time he came off duty-he made it a point of honour to stand for at least five hits, a whole ten heartbeats in the face of the fire-his swaddle of hides was as dry as old shoes and moulded round him like armour, springy and tough, so that it took three pairs of hands to peel it off him.

The first casualty was one of the Colscegsford field hands, a man called Scerry; he was holding the drill and tried to get a step closer in, so as to direct the blow more accurately. But that one step was one too many; his wrappings dried out instantly and caught fire, and the shrinking and hardening effect on the oxhide made it impossible for him to run. He tried nevertheless, toppled over and landed on the edge of the crust, burning up in three heartbeats. He must have been dead before the fire burned through the hides, because he didn't make a sound. His replacement was in position before Scerry had finished burning, and the drill poked through his ashes to find the dent in the crust.

Hending, a Ciartanstead man, went out before the women had finished wrapping him properly. The bandages slipped off his face and it melted; his hammerman got him clear by grabbing the drill and hauling him in like a fish on a line. He died a few minutes later. Another Ciartanstead hand by the name of Brenny was hit on the side of the head by a splinter of rock-where it came from, nobody noticed; he was swinging the hammer for Carey, and someone else took his place in time for the next hit. A Colscegsford woman whose name Poldarn didn't know got in the way of a drill as it was being pulled clear at the end of a shift; the red-hot tip dragged down her arm from the shoulder to the elbow, burning her severely, but she carried on working for some time, carrying buckets in her other hand. Rook went out to hold a drill wearing heavy leather gloves instead of wrappings on his hands, but the leather turned out to be too greasy to take in water-they were a pair used in the wool store for hauling ropes, and the wool-grease had worked into the palms. The heat in the drill set them alight, taking all the skin off Rook's hands. Egil missed the end of the drill with the hammer head and hit it with the shaft instead. The head snapped off and went flying, hitting a Ciartanstead man between the shoulder blades; he was out of action for the rest of the day. Swessy, an old man who plaited ropes and weaved baskets for the Colscegsford house, took Rook's turn at the drill after Rook got burned. In spite of the wrappings, the heat was too much for him and stopped his heart. He was dead by the time they were able to pull him clear. They had no idea whether they were making any impression on the sidewall of the flow; there wasn't time to examine it, and the red glow dazzled their eyes. They still hadn't thought about what they could do as and when the wall finally did give way, but that possibility seemed too remote to worry about, compared to the other, more obvious dangers.

Finally, after two hours, they gave up and withdrew to the hog's back to rest. The general impression was that things weren't going too well. They'd already used up over half the water, and there wouldn't be time to go back and get any more. The heat had shrunk, curled, stiffened and cracked the hides to the point where they were starting to shrug off water, and it was taking more and more ingenuity to cover the bare patches. Nearly all of the men had minor burns to their hands and faces, not serious enough to count as an injury but sufficient to slow them down or reduce the time they could spend in front of the fire-stream. They were too exhausted to do any more, but everyone knew without having to be told that if they rested for too long, the stream would move on, taking the weakened patch they'd made (such as it was) with it. If that happened, the flow would miss the gap they'd made, and all their effort would go to waste. They kept still for an hour, but that was as long as they dared leave it. It was dark, of course, but there was enough firelight to work by. Nobody said anything. They trudged back to the breach and carried on.

(The crows do this, Poldarn realised. When there's danger they send out their scouts, and sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't, but the work, the joint effort of staying alive carries on. They don't stop to fuss over their dead and maimed, and they know what to do without having to be organised or told. Perhaps we're the crows this time, and I'm the mountain, an unknown quantity suddenly erupting into violence, changing everything. Maybe it's wrong of me to be on both sides at the same time; but there, I haven't known which side I'm meant to be on ever since I woke up in the mud beside the Bohec. The sensible thing would be to find a way not to take sides, but that's a luxury I don't appear to have. I'm lying on the anvil looking up at myself swinging the hammer.)

He was looking the other way when the crust finally gave way. It was only because some woman screamed that he looked around at all, just in time to see Barn, his stolid brother-in-law, drop his drill and spin round. But the breach in the sidewall opened up like a gate, releasing a flood of orange-hot liquid rock that moved faster than a galloping horse. Before Poldarn could catch his breath to shout the molten stone was round Barn's ankles, like the tide on a beach. Then Barn simply wasn't there any more, and his hammerman, a stranger, made a flamboyant standing leap for the built-up wall where the people from the two households were standing. Someone reached out a hand to pull him up, but they missed; he scrabbled at the rock with his fingers, apparently hanging off the sheer side of the wall like a fly, then he slid back down on his stomach, arms still flailing, and slipped into the fire-stream like a ship being launched. He made a very brief flare, but no sound.

But there were other things to look at besides the death of one stranger. For a very long heartbeat it looked as though the fire-stream had enough momentum to slop up the wall and push off the boulders they'd piled up to dam the flood. But it slid back, just as Barn's hammerman had done, found the breach they'd so carefully made, and ducked down into it, surging forward before vanishing over the edge. Poldarn closed his eyes into a dazzled white blur. It was doing what they wanted it to, at least for now. It was little short of a miracle, but it looked like they'd managed to pull it off. Remarkable, Poldarn said to himself; who'd have thought it?

He edged his way along the crowded ledge until he could look down into the valley. Already the fire-stream was slowing down, driving a furrow through the loose rock, dirt and shale, no longer shining bright (like a piece of hot steel shrouded in firescale as it cooled). But it was still moving-walking pace now, but much faster than its previous imperceptible creep. Poldarn stood watching it for a long time, as if afraid that if he looked away even for a moment it would stop dead in its tracks. Then in the back of his mind he realised that something had gone wrong.

He looked out over the fire-stream to the other side of the breach, where at least half of his company were now effectively stranded. They didn't seem to have realised it for themselves as yet; but there was clearly no way that they could cross the stream, either here, further up or down below. Unless they were planning on staying perched on the ledge for the rest of their lives, the only option open to them was to follow it round to the point where the slope behind them slackened off; from there, if they were very careful, they ought to be able to pick their way down onto the lower slopes and thence to the plain below, where Poldarn had noticed the farm. From there they'd have to go the long way round the base of the mountain to get back to Haldersness and Ciartanstead. If they managed to keep up a good pace, they ought to be home again in eight days or so.

It was a ludicrous position, and Poldarn found himself grinning, at least until he remembered that the last time he'd seen both Elja and Boarci they'd been on that side of the breach. That wiped the smile off his face, but it was hardly a disaster nonetheless. He looked round on his side, trying to spot familiar faces, but there weren't too many of them. When he looked back, he saw Colsceg trying to attract his attention, with Egil beside him looking worried. He knew immediately that neither of them was aware that Barn was dead.

'Ciartan,' Colsceg shouted, 'we're cut off here, we can't get across. We're stuck.'

Poldarn took a deep breath. 'I know,' he called back. 'You'll have to go the long way round, down into the valley and round.'

'Bugger,' Colsceg yelled. 'Should've thought of that before we broke through. Still, can't be helped.'

That was true enough. 'Will you be all right?' Poldarn shouted.

'Should be,' Colsceg replied. 'Got nothing to eat, but there's a farm down yonder-we can last out till we get there. See you in a few days, I reckon.'

'Longer than that, I'd say' Poldarn hesitated. He felt that he ought to tell Colsceg about Barn, but it didn't seem right, howling the bad news at him across a river of fire; it would be a stupid, grotesque way of breaking the news, and he couldn't bring himself to do it. 'Still,' he went on, 'looks like we managed it, after all.'

'Looks that way,' Colsceg replied. 'Bloody good job, too. I never thought for a minute it was going to work, glad I was wrong. See you back home, then.'

'See you,' Poldarn replied. It was too far for him to see the expression on Colsceg's face, in the dark, with the air disturbed by the hot air rearing up from the fire-stream. He felt ashamed of himself, and his success didn't seem to count for anything, achieved this way. It was as if he'd bought it at the cost of Barn's life and didn't care. 'Sorry about this,' he shouted, but Colsceg was looking the other way, talking to the people on the far side. There didn't seem to be anything else he could do here, so he turned back to his own contingent and explained the situation as best he could. As far as he could tell, they'd already figured it out for themselves, which made the job a little easier.

'When it gets light, you go on ahead,' he told them, when he'd finished explaining. 'I'm going to hang on here for a while, just to make sure everything's going to be all right. I can't see any reason why it shouldn't be, but you never know.'

'Please yourself,' said Raffen. 'Me, I've had enough of this place to last me. I'm shattered, and I'm going to get some sleep.'

That sounded eminently reasonable, and the rest of the party quickly followed suit. Poldarn stretched himself out on the ledge with them, but for some reason he didn't want to close his eyes-maybe he knew he was too tired to sleep, or he was afraid of what he might see with his eyes shut. He lay for a long time staring up into the red sky, and when eventually he did drift into sleep, either he didn't dream or he forgot it as soon as he woke up, in the first light of dawn, with the orange glow of sunrise mirrored in the fire-stream.

Almost immediately, the two severed halves of the expedition team set about packing up and moving off. Poldarn tried to get a glimpse of Elja before she disappeared with the others; he caught sight of her briefly, but she didn't see him, and his view was obscured by other people getting in the way. Not long after that he was alone, perched on the edge of the breach. Everything seemed to be all right; the diverted stream had covered a surprising amount of ground during the night, and was still moving fast enough for its progress to be visible-not quite walking pace now, but at that rate it wouldn't be long before it reached the valley below, and the little wooded combe he'd aimed it at. Somehow it didn't seem nearly as menacing, now that he'd imposed his will on it; as it waddled down the slope it put him in mind of a flock of sheep, bustled and bounced into going where it was supposed to go by a small but agile sheepdog. In a way he was almost disappointed; the work had been painfully hard and men had died, but outsmarting the enemy had been much easier than he'd anticipated, and he no longer had the feeling of being locked in battle with a worthy opponent. Not that he felt proud of himself, particularly; in fact, he told himself, since the solution had proved to be fairly simple and straightforward, chances were that they'd have thought of it for themselves even if he hadn't been there. Quite possibly they'd have done it better without him interfering, maybe even without loss of life.

Poldarn shrugged. Looked at objectively, it was ridiculous to feel a sense of anticlimax. If he hadn't taken charge, the one practicable opportunity would've been missed, and the fire-stream would be headed straight for Haldersness and his new house. Sure, he thought, but would that really have been so bad, compared with so many men dying? Barn and his hammerman, Swessy and the others (he couldn't remember them all offhand, his mind was too ragged, but he promised to remember them later, when he was himself again). So; supposing the fire-stream had ploughed down into Haldersness, forcing the river out of its bed and obliterating his house-both his houses? So what? They were just timber arranged in a pattern, nothing that couldn't be built again, and even the farm, the river, the land weren't all that important; it was a huge island that they lived on-all they'd have had to do was pack up and move on, no big deal compared with what the first settlers here had faced, no big deal compared with the terrible malevolence of the fire-stream against human skin, the heat annealing all the memories out of their bodies, evaporating them, losing them for ever. It occurred to Poldarn that he'd made a very big, serious mistake, and that everything would have been better if only he'd left well alone.