Pattern (41 page)

So slow was their progress that when sunset came they were still dragging themselves uphill. But that was irrelevant; the benefit they got from the sun was minor enough anyway under the shadow of the cloud, whereas the red light from the other side of the mountain was getting stronger all the time, plenty good enough to see their way by. Besides, none of them liked the idea of trying to camp out on the steep ramparts of the chimney, for a number of quite obvious reasons. They kept going, somehow or other – it wasn't so much that they felt tired as that they'd been exhausted for so long that they seemed to have forgotten what it was like to feel any other way.

They hardly noticed the moment of arrival; one minute they were clambering up a particularly steep section of black rock, the next they were on a ledge, with no more mountain above them, only black cloud saturated with raw red light. The ledge was over a hundred yards across and perfectly level. They lay down, so thankful not to be climbing any more that they didn't have room for any other emotion, and stayed there without moving for a long time.

‘Well,' Poldarn said eventually, ‘we're here. We might as well go and have a look.'

Nobody seemed inclined to move, so Poldarn went on alone. When he reached the edge, he lay down on his stomach and crawled the last yard or so; then he stuck his head out over the ledge and looked down.

The first thing that struck him, quite literally, was the heat. He knew the feeling very well; it was like standing over the forge while waiting for a piece of iron to come up to welding heat. The blast of rising hot air scrubbed his face and burned his cheeks, and instinctively he closed his eyes and pulled his head back out of the way. That wouldn't do at all, he decided, so he braced himself and tried again, making a conscious effort to keep his eyes open.

The inside walls of the chimney fell away sharply into a dazzling lake of pure white light. Once again, he thought
welding heat
, because it was the same colour and quality of light as iron glows with in that crucial moment of malleability before it melts and breaks up, the point at which it can be fused into another piece of iron with nothing more than a few light taps of the hammer. That explained the ferocious heat, even though it lay several hundred yards below him. At first he couldn't make out what it was; not iron or steel, he rationalised, in spite of the resemblance. Then, from somewhere in the back of his mind, came a recollection of watching glass-makers at work, and Poldarn realised that the huge pool of white liquid was molten rock.

The heat had become unbearable, and he pulled back, unable to see for the staring white blurs across his eyes, and the tears. All he could think about, for some reason, was the similarity between the chimney and the pool and a crucible of molten metal, the same shape and colour and glowing light. It must be an extraordinary thing, he thought, to melt rock in a furnace; who would do such a thing, and why? Given the sheer size of the undertaking, it would have to be a god of some sort, a huge and enormously thick-skinned god who could handle such a crucible and withstand such a heat. But even a god would need to have a reason for going to so much trouble, and that raised the question of what he was planning to make out of it. If there was a crucible and a pool of melt, somewhere there had to be a mould, pressed into the sand with a pattern. The only logical explanation was that this god was melting down the old world to make a new one, turning waste and scrap into useful material, loosening it from the bonds of memory, restoring to it its true and original nature by means of the intercession of fire, which forgives and redeems all past sins.

Poldarn opened his eyes again. Yes, he thought, that's all very well, but we didn't tramp all the way up here just to bask in the poetic symmetry of it all. Very reluctantly, he crawled back and examined the view a third time.

When he'd suggested the expedition, back at Haldersness, he'd had some idea of coming up with some scheme for dealing with the problem, stopping the volcano or making it harmless. Now that he'd had a chance to look at the thing, it was obvious that anything like that was out of the question, it was simply too big and too fierce; it'd be doomed to failure, like arm-wrestling with a god. They couldn't put the fire out with buckets of water, or fill in the chimney with earth and bury it, or even tap it like a beer barrel and draw the molten rock off through a spigot in some harmless direction. The problem was insoluble, he couldn't think of a way of dealing with it because there wasn't one.

‘Well?' someone said behind him. Poldarn stayed where he was. ‘Take a look for yourself,' he replied. They got down on their hands and knees next to him and crept forward. ‘Watch it,' he added, ‘it's a bit warm once you get your head out over the edge.'

They did as they were told, and after they'd gazed at it for as long as they could bear they dragged themselves back, just as he'd done, and sat still and quiet for a while.

‘Might as well have stayed home,' Raffen said eventually. ‘I can't see there's anything we can do about that.'

‘No,' Poldarn replied, ‘there isn't, unless we get on a ship and go back to the Empire. But that's assuming it's any better there. For all I know, every mountain north of Torcea's gone like this one has, and in a few weeks' time the whole Empire'll be gone, the world will have melted away and we'll all be dead. No way of knowing, really.'

They weren't particularly impressed with that statement – understandably, given the effort it had cost them to get there. ‘We can't just go back and tell them they're all going to be killed but not to worry about it,' Rook grumbled. ‘They'd think we've all gone crazy or something. Come on, you said all we have to do is figure out how it works and we can stop it.'

Poldarn pulled himself together, sighing. ‘All right,' he said. ‘Seems to me there's got to be an enormously hot fire right down there in the roots of the mountain, big and hot enough to melt rock, like a lime kiln. Once it's done that, I guess all the smoke and fumes get bottled up deep inside until eventually they burst out and punch a hole right through the top of the mountain. The cinders and ash that got all over everything must be molten rock that ended up being spat out high into the air, where it cooled off and came down everywhere like snow. Anyway,' he added, ‘that's the way I see it. Anybody got a better explanation?'

‘Sounds reasonable enough to me,' said Barn, wiping grit out of his eyes with his knuckles. ‘So how does that help us?'

‘It doesn't.' Poldarn shook his head. His cheeks and forehead were stinging horribly. ‘I was wrong. There isn't a thing we can do about it. Let's go home, I'm sick to death of this place.'

Barn frowned. ‘What about when it rains?' he asked. ‘Surely if it rains hard enough, that ought to put it out.'

Poldarn couldn't be bothered to reply, so it was up to Boarci to explain. ‘It's too hot,' he said. ‘The rain wouldn't get anywhere near the bottom of the chimney before it turned to steam. You remember all those fluffy white clouds the last time, once the rain started?'

Barn nodded. ‘That's right,' he said. ‘Not that it matters, we can't make it rain anyhow. But so what? As long as it stays down there it won't be doing us any harm.'

Poldarn looked up. ‘Depends,' he said. ‘What we don't know is how big the fire is or what's causing it. My guess is that it's the same fire as heats the water for the hot springs – in which case it's been going for thirty-odd years to my certain knowledge, and quite possibly a few thousand years before that.'

‘Fine,' Barn replied. ‘Like you said, it's been going on for centuries and never done anybody any harm till now.' He paused, then went on, ‘I'm sure you're right about fumes getting trapped under the mountain and finally blowing out – I guess that must be what happened, and that's where all the ash and stuff came from. But now there's this huge great vent, like runners and risers when you're casting, so won't the fumes just rise up out of there and get blown away into the air, all nice and harmless?' He shrugged. ‘All right, so it's very big and impressive, but I don't see what harm it's going to do us. I'm guessing that this new breakout is where another pocket of the fumes and steam and stuff must've built up, and it blasted a hole into the side of the mountain so it could get out. I don't know, maybe there's a whole load of them just getting ready to go pop, but doesn't it stand to reason that it must've used up most of its bottled-up fumes and shit by now? In which case, we may get a few more sprinklings of the cinders, but nothing too bad, just like this time around.' He shrugged. ‘Come on, you're a blacksmith, you know what furnaces are like, and casting hot metal. If your sand's wet or you've got a blocked vent, it blows up and you get the whole lot in your face. If you've done your vents right and cooked your mould, there's nothing to it. Same here, I reckon.'

Poldarn thought about that for a while. ‘I suppose so,' he said. ‘I hadn't thought of it like that.'

‘Makes sense to me,' Raffen put in. ‘In which case, there's nothing to worry about and we can go home. I don't know about you, but this place gives me the creeps. I say we get back down the mountain and go do some work instead of roasting ourselves alive.'

‘Fine,' Poldarn said. ‘Let's do that, then.'

Getting back down the mountain was much quicker than getting up it, though not noticeably easier. Egil and Boarci led the way, both of them obviously keen to get away from there as soon as possible. Poldarn lagged behind. He found the place just as oppressive as the others did, but he felt sure there was something he'd overlooked, though he hadn't got the faintest idea what it might be. It wasn't just a vague feeling that he'd been there before – well, he knew that, he'd been there with Halder, and something about that visit had impressed him so much that the memory of it had forced its way to the surface of his mind (like the fire bottled up in the mountain). As he scrambled and skittered down the slopes of the chimney he found himself going over that memory in his mind, trying to winnow some degree of significance out of it; but the more he searched the more elusive the scene became, to the point where he was hard put to it to distinguish between actual recollections and appropriate-seeming details he'd made up to flesh it out and colour it. He could feel himself rewriting the scene, putting in words and inflections that would make some sort of sense of it all, justifying his belief that there was some secret or clue back up there on the rim of the crater – and wouldn't that be nice, he thought, if I could go back and mould the past into the shape I want it to be, if I could press a new pattern into the sand and then tap the molten rock and cast a whole new world; like a god, almost, bringing the old world to an end and creating a new one, he thought again. There was a fine notion, for sure; that the world which the god in the cart had come to destroy and replace wasn't the present but the past, a simple job of heating out the memory.

It started to rain as soon as they reached the foot of the mountain, and it didn't stop until they arrived back at Haldersness. By that stage they were all so wet that they couldn't think about anything else, not even how tired and hungry they were. But that was something that could be set right very easily, with a change of clothes, a bowl of porridge (and the inevitable leeks) and a brisk, tall fire, which quickly annealed the memory of the wretchedness of the last few days.

‘So,' Colsceg demanded, as Poldarn soaked up the warmth, ‘what did you find out up there?'

‘Not a lot,' Poldarn answered. ‘There's a big hole in the mountain where all the stuff got blown out, you can see right into it. There's a huge pool of molten rock, but it's a hell of a long way down.'

‘Molten rock,' Colsceg repeated, as if Poldarn had just said something that didn't make sense, like
burning snow
or
wet fire
. ‘Bloody hell, that sounds a bit grim. So what do you reckon we ought to do about it?'

Poldarn shrugged. ‘Not a lot we can do – it's all too big. But I don't think there's anything to worry about, it's not like it's going anywhere. Now the mountain's got a way of letting off steam, it shouldn't bother us any more.'

Colsceg frowned. ‘That's good,' he said. ‘So, apart from that, did you see anything interesting?'

‘No,' Poldarn replied. ‘That's about it, really.'

‘Long way to go just to see that.'

‘Yes.'

Colsceg nodded. ‘Well, I guess it's better knowing than guessing, at that.'

‘True,' Poldarn said. ‘Anything been happening here while we've been gone?'

‘Not really. No more showers of ash falling out of the sky; a little bit of dust, is all, and not nearly as much of that as when you went away. At this rate, we'll be back to normal in a day or so.'

‘Good,' Poldarn yawned, pulling his blanket tighter around his shoulders. ‘The sooner that happens, the better for all of us. After all, we've got work to do.'

‘We have that,' Colsceg agreed, as he rose to his feet. ‘Looks like you'd better get some rest. If the rain holds off, we can finish digging up the turnip clump in the morning.'

‘Great,' Poldarn said. ‘I'll look forward to that.'

Chapter Eighteen

A
day or so after Poldarn got back from the mountain, he was in his new smithy, now complete with a large and handsome brick forge and no less than three anvils. Curiously enough, he found himself drifting over to it more and more, whenever there was nothing obvious for him to do, or whenever he could manufacture a pretext. On this occasion all he had to do was straighten a handful of nails, salvaged from the Haldersness woodshed door – he could have done it easily enough on the mounting-block in the yard, with the back of an axe, but instead he'd gone to the trouble of lighting a fire and taking a heat on each one. Partly, he explained it to himself, it was the warmth he enjoyed; since he'd felt the heat of the volcano on his face as he hung over the ledge, he'd felt uncomfortably cold in the house or the fields, no matter how many layers of clothing he crammed himself into. A well-built fire in the forge, livened up by blasts of air from his magnificent new double-action bellows, was about the only thing that could stop him shivering.