Pattern (40 page)

Once he'd found out what was going on, Poldarn's first reaction was to load the carts with everything they could cram on board, and set off for the east. If he'd suggested it, the household would almost certainly have agreed; they were all quite obviously terrified, and it was probably only their strange unspoken communion that kept them from panicking. Somehow, though, he knew that it would be the wrong thing to do; it'd be like running because your shirt was on fire, pointless because wherever you ran to, the fire would go with you. Unfortunately, he couldn't think of a better alternative.

‘Well,' somebody said at last, ‘here we go again.'

‘Maybe it won't be so bad this time,' someone else suggested hopefully. ‘It's only a little bit of smoke, less than last time round.'

That would have been helpful and comforting if it had been true, but it wasn't, and everybody knew that. ‘It'll be different down the valley,' someone else put in, ‘we'll be further away, it won't be nearly so bad.'

‘Just as well we haven't started on the thatching,' Raffen said, and Poldarn had to assume he was referring to the long barn and the middle house. They'd roofed all the other buildings with wooden shakes treated with pitch – nobody had actually suggested it out loud, but they'd gone ahead and done it as though they were following an architect's drawings, and Poldarn had assumed they'd had just such a contingency in mind. If so, it was an impressive example of foresight, and one less thing to worry about.

He pushed his way through the crowd to the front, then turned round to face them. ‘It'll be all right,' he said. ‘Even if the worst comes to the worst and we get another coating of that black shit, at least this time we know what to do, we can handle it. Look, we've got enough food laid in to last us a good long time – if needs be we can just settle down and sit it out. Or we can see if we can't figure out a way of beating the bloody thing.'

Nobody said a word, but Poldarn had no doubt that he had their complete attention, even if that was only because they thought he'd gone crazy. ‘It's possible,' he said. ‘I mean, how do we know there's nothing we can do about it – we haven't tried.'

The crowd stirred uneasily, as if they were afraid that the mountain would hear him and blame them for being associated with someone who could come out with such pernicious heresy.

‘What did you have in mind?' Egil asked.

‘I don't know, do I?' Poldarn replied impatiently. ‘I don't know any more about these things than you do. But it seems to me that the sensible thing would be to try and find out a bit more, instead of just sharing out our ignorance among ourselves like a biscuit ration. I say that while it's just a little bit of smoke, what we ought to do is get up as close as we can to where it's coming from and get some solid information, instead of just guessing and going all to pieces.'

‘Go up there?' someone said. ‘You must be out of your mind. We all know what happened the last time. It could start puking up fire at any moment.'

Poldarn folded his arms. ‘That's not entirely true,' he said. ‘Last time, if you remember, it was several days before it started playing up. If we pull ourselves together, we can go up there, have a look round and maybe even come up with a few ideas before the trouble starts. It's got to be better than drooping round here like it was the end of the world or something.'

‘All right,' Egil said. ‘Who's going?'

That was more like it, Poldarn thought. ‘Me for one,' he said. ‘Anybody fancy coming with me?'

To his surprise, he got more volunteers than he knew what to do with, and he ended up turning people away. ‘The rest of you,' he went on, once he'd made his selection, ‘might want to make a start on a few basic precautions. Split up the food stores, for one thing, so we don't stand to lose the lot if the barn gets burned or buried. Get the roofs covered – it won't hurt even if nothing does happen, and it's got to be better than doing it all in a desperate rush with the cinders already falling. Luckily we don't have livestock to worry about this time round, which is something, but it might be an idea to make up a few extra buckets, things like that.' He knew he was being vague, but for the life of him he couldn't think of anything more specific. But surely they'd know what to do, they always seemed to.

‘Right,' Colsceg said. ‘When are you thinking of leaving?'

‘Straight away,' Poldarn said, as much to his own surprise as anybody else's. ‘No point in wasting precious time, and the sooner we leave, the sooner we'll get back.' As he said that, it occurred to him that Elja was down at Ciartanstead, and he'd just convincingly argued against sparing the time to go there and say goodbye. That seemed to strike him as a very bad and unlucky thing to do, but it was too late to go back on his decision.

He'd kept his reconnaissance party down to a round half-dozen, himself included: Egil and Raffen and Boarci (Poldarn was counting on him as a sort of lucky mascot), Rook and Barn. He had an uneasy feeling that he'd chosen most of them simply because he had no trouble telling them apart and remembering their names. But, he rationalised, Egil was smart, Boarci seemed to have a knack of not getting killed and of rescuing people when they'd got themselves into trouble; Rook had contrived to keep himself alive through the disaster at Lyatsbridge, so clearly he was nobody's fool, and the other two were stolid and fairly unflappable. He missed Eyvind very badly, of course, if only because Eyvind generally seemed able to understand what he was saying. They took with them as much food and water as they could carry, and the thickest leather boots, coats and hats they could find, in case it started raining big chunks of burning mountain on their heads before they could get out of the way. Apart from that, nothing obvious in the form of sensible precautions seemed to spring to mind. Boarci took his axe too, of course, but presumably from sheer force of habit, unless he was hoping they'd run into one or more slow-moving bears.

The first day they walked in silence, keeping up a pace that was just too fast for comfort, rarely taking their eyes off the mountain and the black smudge over it. They'd opted to head for the mountain in as close an approximation to a straight line as they could manage; this meant trudging up rather more hills than Poldarn would have chosen if the decision had been up to him rather than a wordless consensus. (It did occur to him that he'd wrongly presumed their intention, and they were just following him; but that was probably only because he was feeling depressed.) They carried on walking until it was too dark to see where they were going, then lay down where they stopped and went to sleep. The rising sun woke them all up, and they carried on along the line where they'd left off without stopping for anything to eat, an act of forbearance made somewhat easier by the knowledge that all they had in the way of supplies was the inevitable porridge and leeks.

As the mountain gradually grew larger in front of them, Poldarn found himself thinking back to his memory of visiting the hot springs with his grandfather and realised that something was very different about the silhouette he was walking towards. It didn't take him long to figure out what it was. Instead of a gently tapering, mostly symmetrical peak there was a swollen chimney, perched on the mountain top like a comical hat. They were treading on cinders by now, which made their progress slow and depressingly tiring, and the air stank of sulphur. Even at midday it was as dark as an hour after sunset; the black cloud was between them and the sun, and every fifth step or so they'd stumble over a larger than usual slab of brittle black rock.

Disconcertingly, the smoke wasn't coming out of the chimney; if anything, it appeared to be venting from somewhere on the other side of the mountain, hidden from view. Poldarn wasn't sure that he wanted to get close enough to see it, anyway, but he didn't really have any choice in the matter. It'd be too humiliating to turn back at this stage because of something so trivial as the fear of death. From time to time they heard ominous cracking and splitting noises, and the occasional deep rumble. More than once, the ground shook under their feet, an effect that Poldarn found horribly frightening.

‘The way I see it,' Boarci said after a very long silence, ‘it's a bit like a really big fat boil on your bum. It gets bigger and bigger and redder and redder, till finally it's so full of pus and crap that it bursts all over the place.'

The sun behind the cloud of black smoke went down just as they arrived at the hot springs. In spite of the darkness, Poldarn recognised the place at once. Not much had changed, except that the snow had gone and there was a narrow crack in the ground, no more than a foot wide but bewilderingly deep – Egil dropped in a pebble but nobody heard it land – running away up the hill as far as they could see.

‘I don't like that at all,' Egil said. ‘Seems to me that if it starts playing up while we're here, this is an obvious place for it to come up through.'

True enough, there were patches of grey mist and smoke hanging in the air above the crack, like little tangles of sheep's wool caught in a thorn bush. But they weren't confined to the crack, or even the area of the hot springs. The air was full of them; it was as if they were strolling through an orchard and the smoke was blossom on invisible trees.

‘What are we supposed to be looking for, anyway?' Barn said nervously as he stepped over the crack.

‘I don't know,' Poldarn answered promptly. ‘Won't know till I see it, either.'

‘Oh.' Barn nodded, as if that made perfect sense now that someone had taken the time to explain it to him clearly. ‘So how much further have we got to go? My feet hurt.'

Poldarn looked round. ‘We might as well stop here for the night,' he said. ‘At least I've got some sort of idea where we are, in relation to everything.'

‘Oh, sure,' put in Raffen. ‘Let's camp out here, right on a crack. I mean, what's so special about waking up again?'

Poldarn ignored that and sank to his knees, struggling to get his arms free of the straps of his pack. ‘The way I see it,' he went on, ‘either we can keep going up till we get to the edge of the chimney, and then we can look down inside and see what's going on down there, or we can go round the side until we find out where all that smoke's coming from. Anybody got any preferences?'

Nobody seemed very taken with either option, but they seemed to prefer the former. ‘I suppose it'll be all right,' Barn said, ‘since the smoke's not actually coming out from there.' He wiped sweat off his face with his sleeve; it was decidedly hot, though they'd all felt chilly an hour or so ago.

‘You all get your heads down,' Poldarn said cheerfully. ‘I'm not particularly tired; I'll be quite happy just lying here, so if anything starts to happen I can give you all a shout in plenty of time.'

Immediately, Boarci twisted over onto his back, pulled his hat down over his face and appeared to go to sleep. The others took a bit longer – Egil even ventured to wash his face and hands by stepping into a shallow pool of hot water, but he yelped with pain and hopped out again straight away, announcing that the water was no longer pleasantly warm but boiling hot.

Although he was very tired, Poldarn had no difficulty at all staying awake; the thought of falling asleep in that place and dreaming was disturbing enough to keep his eyes wide open. In the dark he could make out a faint red glow behind the mountain that hadn't been visible in daylight, which worried him and made him feel grateful that they'd decided to go up instead of round the mountain top. A few hours before dawn, he became aware that a very fine shower of dust had started to fall; his eyes were gritty and he could feel it on his skin. He suddenly realised that he was hungry, dug a long-hoarded slab of hard cheese out of his pack and ate it slowly and deliberately.

The sunrise, when it came, was spectacular, a blaze of orange and red smeared across the sky in wild patterns and swirls. For a long time, all he could do was lie on his back and look up at it. Eventually, Boarci woke up.

‘Bloody hell,' he yawned, ‘is it morning already? How long have you been awake?'

‘I didn't sleep,' Poldarn replied.

‘More fool you, then. You'll be knackered this time tomorrow.'

They ate breakfast in a dull red glow, and set off immediately afterwards. As the day wore on the daylight started to fade, but the glare behind the mountain grew fiercer, so at least they could see where they were putting their feet. Rook was sure there was a lot more smoke coming out than there had been the day before – maybe twice as much, even. ‘That's just because we're closer to it,' Poldarn replied, though he didn't believe what he was saying. Still, it seemed to cheer the others up, for some reason. The dust in the air grew steadily thicker, and they saw several more fissures like the one they'd noticed at the hot springs. Steam and yellow smoke rose up steeply from each one, making it hard to see where the cracks were, but they managed to cross them without anybody falling in.

As always seemed to be the way when struggling up a mountain, the peak proved to be much further away than they'd anticipated, and it was well past noon when they found themselves at the foot of the new chimney. Its walls were steep and black, in places hard and smooth as glass, extremely difficult and treacherous to climb, but now that they were this close, nobody seemed to want to hold back; it was as if the mere act of getting to the top was going to solve something, possibly even make the mountain stop misbehaving and go back to sleep. None of them said anything, or appeared to have anything to say. From time to time, Poldarn had the feeling that he was seeing something familiar, but he couldn't begin to think what it might be. More likely to be his imagination, he decided. One good thing: he wasn't feeling particularly tired, in spite of his lack of sleep. That too was something he couldn't readily explain.