Pattern (65 page)

Not a fire, then. He could go over to the stables and turn out all the horses; but that'd leave him exposed, in the middle of all the confusion, and someone would be bound to see him. He could chop through the rafters of the barn roof and collapse it, but that'd take too long, and the roof would probably fall on him. He could yell ‘Fire!' and hope someone believed him. He could kill someone else, to divert attention from the first killing . . .

None of the above. He slumped against the wall, furious at his own lack of ingenuity. It was a bad time to have his mind go blank. If only—

He looked up sharply. A thump, so loud that it made the ground shiver under his feet, filled the air, and instinctively he looked up towards the mountain. He knew what he was going to see: a red glow under a black cloud near the summit.
He
might not be much good at causing diversions, but the
divine
Poldarn had a flair for it.

At once the yard was full of people, running out to stare. As on every previous occasion they stood still, eyes fixed on the skyline, no words. Well, he thought, no point in hanging about; certainly no point in standing there gawping like the rest of them. As he walked quickly away from the yard, he couldn't help reflecting on that. Here was the sight everyone in the district dreaded most, and here was one man, not like the rest of them, who was looking the other way.

Once he was a safe distance from the yard, screened from it by the lie of the land, he stopped and did some gawping of his own. Compared to the previous outbursts it was fairly small-scale, a little cut instead of a gaping wound; but red-hot molten rock was gushing out of the mountainside like blood from a severed vein, spurting and dribbling down the neck of the mountain, and he'd have had to be deaf and blind as well as stupid not to get the gist of what the divine Poldarn was trying to tell him. When the god under the mountain chose to deliver a message,
he
didn't whisper.

Bloody hell, he thought; I've got to go home past that.

It was, of course, far too soon to hazard a guess as to where the fire-stream was headed. It looked as if it had burst out just above the place where the hot springs had once been but he didn't know the upper reaches of the mountain well enough to be able to visualise the area in detail and extrapolate the stream's likely route. He wondered if Eyvind would feel obliged to try and do something about it, so as to eclipse the memory of his predecessor in title. It would be hilarious, screamingly funny, if Eyvind led a party up there with drills and goatskins and buckets to divert the course of the stream, and inadvertently sent it tumbling down onto Poldarn's Forge, smashing and burning the house, burying the fields. Seeing Eyvind's face under those circumstances would be better than a day at the bear-baiting.

He retrieved his horse, turned his back on Ciartanstead and rode towards the mountain. By now the road was as familiar as an old coat, and he made good time. As far as he could tell at this stage (and it really was too early to judge) the fire-stream was headed down the Ciartanstead side of the mountain, but slightly further west than it had been before, when its threat had prompted him to divert it. He tried to plan out the route in his head. At the moment, the red smudge was working its way down towards a trough and ridge; once it hit that, it would have to follow the line of least resistance, which would lead it further west to a steep drop. That would make it gain pace and momentum, so that when it reached the bottom of the escarpment it could very well have enough impetus behind it to jump over the little lip just below and carry on in a straight line until it hit the long, flat decline directly underneath; and that would carry it, smooth and quick as a paved street in Boc Bohec, directly onto the roof of Haldersness.

He frowned, startled by the coincidence; then he shrugged. They'd have several days' notice, so there was no real danger to the household there. They'd evacuate to Ciartanstead in good time, taking with them a judicious selection of their goods and chattels, only those things that would be less trouble to find space for than to make again. It'd be a tight squeeze in Eyvind's new house – his people, the Ciartanstead household and the Haldersness refugees as well – but it was wonderful how many people you could fit into a confined space if you really had to. All of them, together under one roof. From one point of view that would be a definite advantage, the divine Poldarn helping him to cover an angle he'd overlooked in his original concept. From another point of view it was rather a pity, but it certainly wasn't his fault, not this time.

(Well, maybe it was. Maybe it was because he'd diverted the previous outburst that this one had broken out in exactly that spot. Or maybe it was the fault of the god under the mountain. Or both.)

In any event, if the fire-stream followed the route he'd figured out for it, it oughtn't to cause him any problems in getting home; a slight detour, over marginally rougher ground, perhaps adding an extra hour or two but no more. As far as that side of it was concerned, the divine Poldarn had been delightfully considerate. As was only right and proper, of course.

As it turned out, the detour shortened the journey home by at least three hours, though he had more than one awkward moment as he picked his way across sloping beds of deep shale. That was good. Almost certainly, Eyvind had found the body by now. If he'd found it fairly soon after Poldarn had left, and had immediately come to the conclusion that Poldarn had been responsible, there was a chance that retribution was already on its way. Once again, the divine Poldarn was on his side, since by the time the putative expeditionary force reached the mountain road, the fire-stream would be an hour or so further on its way, cutting off the route he'd taken himself and forcing them onto a longer, slower track. Even so, the extra three hours he'd shaved off the trip would come in handy, just in case.

They came out to meet him, clearly aware that something was wrong. At first he assumed it was the mountain that was bothering them – he was feeling quite blasé about it himself, and as he drew close he started to figure out what he'd say to put their minds at rest. But it wasn't the mountain, as it turned out; because Elja's first words to him were, ‘Where have you been?'

‘Ciartanstead,' he replied casually. ‘I told you, I had some business over there.'

Elja looked at him steadily, as if she already knew what she was looking for. ‘There's dried blood all over your shirt collar,' she said. ‘But I can't see any cut or anything, so I'm guessing it's not yours.'

‘No,' he confessed. ‘It's not.'

‘Has it got something to do with the business you had at the old house?'

He nodded. ‘Quite a bit to do with it, yes.'

‘I see.' Elja didn't look surprised, or angry, or disappointed, or even pleased. ‘Did it go the way you wanted?'

He nodded. ‘The mountain breaking out again was an unexpected help,' he said. ‘It got me out of there without any bother at all.'

‘Glad it's turned out useful for something,' Elja said, looking straight at him. There had been a time when a look like that would have bothered the hell out of him, but he couldn't spare attention for it right now. Maybe later, but probably not.

‘I think we'd better make ourselves scarce for a while,' he said, sliding off his horse and stumbling as his cramped legs buckled under him. He straightened up and waited for the strength to come back. ‘Just a precaution,' he added. ‘I think they'll have other things on their minds right now. But I may be overestimating their intelligence, so we'd better play it safe.'

Asburn said: ‘You'll be wanting a lookout, then.'

‘Yes,' he replied. ‘That'd be a sensible idea. You volunteering?'

‘I'll go up the side of the mountain, to where there's that fallen-down old hut,' Asburn said. ‘If anybody can spare the time to bring me up some dinner later on, I'd appreciate it.'

‘Actually,' Geir put in, ‘we could all do worse than head up there, if there's a chance trouble could be on the way. We'd see them long before they could see us, we'd be able to get out of there and scatter up the mountain before they could get up to us, and at least there's the best part of a roof on there if it comes on to rain while we're waiting.'

Poldarn agreed. ‘All right,' he said, ‘you get together whatever we're likely to need and head on up there; take the horses, just in case. I'll join you in a short while, there's a few things I need to see to first.'

‘Such as?' Elja asked him, but he didn't answer. Instead, he hurried away to the barn, where he reckoned he'd be able to find pretty much everything he'd need. The errand took longer than he'd expected – there was never a ball of strong thatcher's twine around when you really needed one – but eventually he had everything neatly piled, bagged and stashed where he'd be able to find it in a hurry. Then he trudged up to the ruined hut; slowly, because by now he was very tired. He hadn't really been able to sleep the previous night, perched on a ledge on the side of the burning mountain, and what little sleep he'd managed to get had been spoilt by a bad dream.

When Poldarn rejoined the others, he was immediately aware that they knew what he had in mind. That was disconcerting, to say the least, and he wondered what it signified; but it cut out the need for long, difficult explanations and justifications, neither of which he was really in the mood for.

‘You found everything you wanted?' Asburn asked. His voice was low and strained – part of it was fear, part of it something uncommonly like embarrassment, as if he felt awkward talking to someone who was in disgrace with the rest of the group.

‘Ready and packed,' Poldarn replied. ‘Now it's just a matter of waiting for the mountain to do its part.'

‘And how long do you figure that'll be?' someone asked; he couldn't be sure who it was, in the growing dark. One of the offcomers.

‘Difficult to say,' he answered. Though in his own mind he was quite sure: the fire-stream would reach Haldersness on the morning of the fourth day from tomorrow, but the evacuation would be fully complete by nightfall on the third day. Since the schedule was in his mind and so, presumably, visible to them all, he didn't bother to say anything else out loud, and nobody asked.

‘You think that's the best way to go.' Elja wasn't asking him to reconsider or anything; it was a statement, not a question. He confirmed it with a slight nod of his head. ‘All right,' she said. ‘I think we should be able to go back to the house in the morning, so long as we leave someone up here to keep an eye out, just in case Eyvind does come. But I don't believe he will.'

‘I agree,' Poldarn said. ‘Still, the very worst famous last words a man can utter are
I was sure he wasn't going to do that
.'

In the morning they went down to the house, feeling stiff, bad-tempered and rather foolish for having spent the night on a damp earth floor when they hadn't had to. Nobody seemed to have any work to do; they sat around on the porch or pottered about, not talking, not even looking at each other. Sullen was the best word to describe it; they were like children ordered to go on a treat they didn't fancy. Poldarn spent most of the day watching the mountain. He couldn't see the progress of the fire-stream, of course; he tried to deduce what he could from the direction of the smoke and ash, but mostly he knew he was fooling himself. It was frustrating to have to rely on an ally he couldn't watch, or talk to, one he'd never even met, whose existence he didn't really believe in, but whose contribution was vital and on whose timing everything depended.

He tried to prise his way into Eyvind's mind, but that turned out to be impossible; so instead Poldarn had to rely on his imagination. He tried to think the way his old friend would be thinking, the way he'd always been able to do when killing crows. Uppermost in Eyvind's concerns would be the pressure of responsibility, the priorities forced on him by events, the need to think clearly and pay attention to detail. That would be hard, with his entire world cracking up and burning all around him – Carey murdered, and he'd be sure he knew who'd done it, but what standard of proof would he need to show before he could take the decision to act on it? And the mountain, choosing this moment to flare up and reach out towards Haldersness; what the hell was he supposed to make of that, for pity's sake? Then he'd be constantly itching in his mind about what he'd already done, the extent to which he'd been right and wrong, how much of it was someone else's fault and how much was his own. There would be a voice in the back of his mind urging him to change tack, to find some way to deflect the course of events from the terrible conclusion that was being forced on him. Wouldn't it be possible, that voice would be urging him, to chip a hole in the side of that unbearable chain of consequences, tap it and draw off the heat and the violence, sending it rushing away in some other direction where it couldn't do any harm? Failing that, couldn't he just get out of the way, leave, go somewhere else where the stream of consequences couldn't follow him? But he'd know that was out of the question; because every stream diverted flows into someone else's valley, and such a horrible force of heat and destruction can never soak harmlessly away, all he'd be doing would be changing the place where the end would come, possibly disrupting the schedule a little, almost certainly making things worse for himself, reducing his chances of being the one left alive when it was all over.

Poldarn thought about that. There had been a time when he'd pulled himself out of the mud and had realised his memories had all been washed out, like bloodstains from a shirt; a time when he'd had infinite choices, with no inevitable course he was bound to follow, no channels and slopes and lips and troughs forcing him to flow in any certain direction. He'd felt alone then, terrified, one defenceless little man in a vast open space, where everybody had to be presumed hostile until proven otherwise. Then his course had been aimless, he'd been sure of that. He'd chosen his turnings on a whim, allowing the most trivial factors to sway his decisions. But, as he'd flowed on and gathered speed down the side of his mountain (moving down and out from the peak of Polden's Forge, the sharp apex at the beginning from which he could see everything and recognise nothing), so as he went he'd gathered up dust and stones and ash that stuck to him and formed a skin, an armoured crust that constricted him more and more as his descent gathered pace, forcing him to follow the contours and the features of the terrain, directing him . . . here, to the point where he was rushing down on the roof of his own house, the house he'd built for himself from the timber that had been ordained for that purpose since the day of his father's birth. That conceit pleased him – the trees growing up to meet the fire-stream coming down, the perfectly timed confluence of fire and fuel, destroyer and victim, Poldarn and Ciartan; the threads drawn together to complete the obscure and complex but ultimately satisfying pattern.