by K. J. Parker
‘You please yourself,’ Elja sniffed, as he swung his feet off the bed and rested them tentatively on the floor. ‘Just don’t expect any sympathy from me if you end up rolling on the ground in agony.’
A quarter of an hour of hobbling round the yard, and he’d more or less forgotten what strained muscles felt like; his legs were in full working order and fit to be taken entirely for granted once more. ‘So,’ he said briskly to Raffen, who happened to be passing, ‘that’s me sorted out, I can get back to work. I expect there’s a whole heap of things piled up while I’ve been out of it.’
Raffen thought for a moment. ‘Can’t think of anything,’ he said.
‘Oh come on,’ Poldarn pleaded. ‘There must be something I should’ve been doing. Try and think of something, please, or I just might burst into tears.’
‘Oh.’ Raffen frowned. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the crows are back on the peas. Made such a mess up there, it’ll hardly be worth getting ’em in.’
‘Bugger the bloody crows. I can’t face another five days staring at the roof, I’ll go mad.’ Raffen’s expression suggested that this had already happened, but Poldarn couldn’t be bothered to stop and explain; he’d remembered something. ‘The roof,’ he said, ‘there’s a lapjoint in the third timber, whoever did that made a really piss-poor job of it. Needs fixing, before the whole lot comes down on our heads.’
Raffen scratched his ear thoughtfully. ‘I think you did all those joints,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’m sure it was you. Should’ve been Colsceg’s job, but he was behind.’
‘Oh.’ Now he came to mention it, Poldarn had a feeling Raffen was right. Odd that he hadn’t remembered that before. ‘Well, anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s got to be fixed. I’ll get a ladder.’
Raffen shook his head. ‘Don’t talk soft,’ he said. ‘You’re in no fit state to go fooling about up ladders. Carey can do it this afternoon, after he’s finished the south paddock wall.’
Poldarn scowled. ‘Carey’s got his own work to do,’ he said.
‘No, he hasn’t. He was going to help me out in the middle house, but I’ll get Boarci to give me a hand. Carey’s a damn good carpenter, you should see the work he’s done on the linhay roof Besides, Boarci’s got nothing to do, it’ll keep him out of mischief’
What about keeping me out of mischief? I thought that was the whole point. ‘Oh, all right, if you say so. I’ll go over to the forge, make some nails or something.’
Raffen nodded approvingly. ‘Always useful, nails. Can’t have too many of ’em.’
So Poldarn wandered across the yard, coaxed up a fire after several false starts, and made a dozen nails out of a rusty old spit. Then he remembered the axe head he’d found in the ditch, the one Egil had preached him a sermon about. He fetched it from the house and spent the next few hours working it over mercilessly – files, coarse and smooth stones, polishing powder and the buffing wheel – until he could see his face in the flat and shave hairs off his arm with the edge. A rasp and a certain amount of effort turned a broken wheel-spoke into an acceptable handle, and he shaped an offcut from the nail stock into a wedge, complete with a series of deeply chiselled keys to bite in the wood and hold it in place. Finally he wrapped the last hand’s span of the handle with thatching twine and dunked the head in the slack-tub to swell up overnight. There, he told himself, job done; the only thing left to do was find a home for it. A pity, really, that he’d already made an axe for Boarci; this one was much better in every respect, but he’d look stupid if he insisted on taking the other one back and exchanging it for this. Nobody else had mentioned wanting such a thing, so he had no real option but to keep it for himself – not that he wanted an axe particularly, but the thought of putting it into stock and letting it get rusty and mildewed offended him after all the work he’d put into it.
By this stage the fire had gone out, and it seemed pointless wasting good coal and kindling getting it going again, when there really wasn’t anything that needed doing in the forge. By the same token, of course, there wasn’t anything that needed doing outside it, at any rate by him, so Poldarn raked the clinker out of the ashes and perched on the anvil, turning over what Egil had said in his mind.
It wasn’t as if he needed convincing; he’d acknowledged quite some time ago that he didn’t really want to remember who he’d been or what he’d done. At the time he’d reached that conclusion, he’d had nobody to think of but himself; it was mere selfishness, made marginally acceptable by the very fact of his isolation. To a man on his own, wandering about in a strange landscape and trying to keep out of harm’s way, it was an allowable indulgence, and he’d had the consolation of knowing that he was paying a high price for the privilege of not remembering, in the form of the substantial risks he’d taken precisely because he didn’t know who he was, who was his friend and who was his enemy. Then all that had changed. Suddenly the universal enemy had reared up in front of him and claimed him for its own – but they’d turned out not to be demons and monsters, just a parcel of farmers and artisans seen out of context, and he’d been glad to go with them to claim his apparent inheritance, stepping off the road and into security, a place of his own in the world, a ready-made home and family and happy-ever-after. It hadn’t quite worked out like that, but it couldn’t be denied that they’d given him everything a rational man could expect out of life – food, clothes, a fine house, land and livestock, a lovely and compatible young wife; they’d even bestowed on him the highest rank a man could aspire to in that society, leadership of a household (and if he still hadn’t any real idea of what that meant exactly, that was surely his fault rather than theirs). The argument from isolation, that it didn’t matter because it was nobody’s business but his own, was no longer valid, but it had been replaced by something far more compelling and, for what it was worth, morally defensible: the good of the community. Now, it appeared, there were extremely cogent reasons why he shouldn’t find out the truth, why he should take all necessary steps to make sure the truth never came out. If that didn’t let him off the hook, what the hell ever would?
They’d given him everything else; now they were giving him the priceless blessing of an excuse. They must love him very much, to go to such trouble. It’d be ungrateful and very, very selfish to jeopardise everything just to satisfy his own idle curiosity.
Poldarn stood up. He might be many things, but he wasn’t so wickedly self-centred as to believe that setting his mind at rest was more important than another man’s life, or the wellbeing of his household. It was a small enough sacrifice to make, and he was pleased to be able to give something back in return for everything they’d done for him. From now on, in fact, he was going to put a stop to all this shameful self-pity. It stood to reason that they valued him and needed him or else they wouldn’t have given him so much, far more than his intrinsic merits could possibly deserve. It wasn’t as though he had any rare or valuable skill, or an endless capacity for hard work. Left to himself, he’d be hard put to it to earn a living in a tough and pitiless world, let alone enjoy all the good things he had here; or, if there was something special about him that justified their indulgence, they knew about it and he didn’t, so it’d be plain foolishness to imagine he knew better than they did. Either they loved him beyond his merits, in which case he should simply be grateful, or they could see in him qualities that he couldn’t see in himself. In any event, it was high time he stopped moping about feeling lost and bewildered. When the time came, if there was work for him to do, he’d know it and be ready to get on with it. Until then, he owed it to them to be patient, to quit complaining, to be satisfied and to stop making a fuss. That wasn’t so much to ask, was it? As for who he’d been . . . only a fool picks at a scab when it’s nearly healed.
Fine, he thought. Now I really ought to get the fire going again. There must be something I could be making, and while I’m figuring out what it could be, I can fetch some fresh coal from the coal shed.
So he went out into the yard, and the first t
hing he saw was an astonishingly bright red glow in the sky, coming from the direction of the mountain. By the look of it, he wasn’t the only one who’d decided to rake up a good, hot fire. And this time Polden had beaten him to it.
Chapter Twenty
‘Pretty 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.
