by K. J. Parker
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 well-being 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 thing 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
'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, lik
e 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?'
