Pattern (24 page)

Egil was quite right. ‘That's good,' Poldarn said. ‘But don't try and change the subject. Can't you try and get it into your stupid thick head, nobody's going to get killed, there's no need for it. It seems to me, if something can be forgotten about so completely that only two people in the whole world know about it, and life goes on, it can't have been all that terrible to start with. God, that sounds all wrong, I know, but let's face facts. We're still alive, we came through the mudslide. I'd be dead if you hadn't risked your life for me, and Colsceg tells me you'd all be dead if I hadn't said go up the slope instead of down into the valley.' He stopped, trying to untangle the mess of unruly thoughts in his head. ‘I see it like this,' he said. ‘If I'd died that day beside the river, when I woke up and realised I'd lost my whole life up to that point, if whoever bashed my head in had hit me just a little bit harder, then you'd all be dead – half of Haldersness would be dead, too. If Boarci hadn't killed the bear before it got me, you'd be under the mud right now. If I hadn't gone away when I did – same thing, exactly. What I'm trying to say is, if I hadn't done this thing I'm supposed to have done, I'd never have left here, I'd still be one of you. But because I left, I became an outsider, and I came back just when an outsider was needed. Do you see what I'm getting at? If I hadn't done this thing, we'd all be dead because of the volcano or the mountain or the divine Polden, whatever you want to call it, we'd all be dead and there'd be nothing left, just mud and ash and a few burnt-out ruins. Whatever the hell it was that I did, was it so bad that it'd have been worth all our lives for it never to have happened? I don't know,' he said wretchedly, tense with frustration, ‘maybe I did something you could never forgive, maybe I killed someone, I really don't want to know. But suppose that's what it was. If I'd never killed whoever it was, he'd be under the mud with the rest of us right now, and what the hell good would that be to anybody?'

Egil shook his head slowly. ‘You don't understand,' he said. ‘Like I said, you're lucky about the mudslide, and so am I. Let's say we leave it at that. Agreed?'

‘Agreed.' Poldarn suddenly felt more tired than he could remember being before. ‘Look, if it's all the same to you, would it be all right if I got some rest now? I've had a rather exhausting day and it's going to be a long way to Haldersness without any horses.'

‘You do what the bloody hell you like,' Egil said, and walked away.

It would have been a long walk under any circumstances, up steep hills and down again, with the ground either bruising rock or infuriating bog after the torrential rain. Most of the ash and cinders were gone – no prizes for guessing where – but there were dips and hollows waist-deep in thick black mud; after a near-disaster when they experimented briefly with wading through one of them, they resolved to go round them, even if it meant retracing their steps up a steep-sided combe. Poldarn did his best to walk on his own, but after the fifth or sixth unexpected detour his legs gave out completely and he sat down suddenly and hard in the grey shale of a particularly steep escarpment, after which Boarci grabbed him round the waist and wrenched an arm across his enormous shoulders. After an hour or so of trying to keep pace with Boarci's enormous strides Poldarn wasn't entirely sure that his new friend's help was making things any easier for him, but at least he kept moving, having no other option.

Covering the whole distance in one day proved to be out of the question, and they ended up spending the night huddled in the nominal shelter of a solitary thorn tree with an absurdly bowed and twisted trunk. It didn't take long for them to figure out how it had got that way; the wind was cold and brisk, and of course they had nothing in the way of blankets or even coats, while all their attempts to make a fire proved to be fatuous—

(‘You have a go,' Colsceg muttered at one point, dumping an inadequate bundle of scavenged twigs in Poldarn's lap. ‘You're supposed to be a blacksmith, you should be good at starting a fire.')

In spite of the cold, and hunger that was steadily getting harder to ignore, and the general wretchedness of everything, Poldarn fell asleep – at least, he assumed he must have done, because he woke up with a horribly cramped back, pins and needles in both feet and a dreadful ache in his arms and shoulders to remind him of how he'd spent the previous day. The only way he could get up from the ground was by rolling onto his side and pulling himself slowly up the tree with his hands, which had clamped tight shut during the night and had to be prised open, like scallops. He took so long about it that they very nearly left without him.

The second day was much like the first, only worse; the hills seemed to get steeper, the ash-mud bogs more frequent, the wind harder and colder. When they passed the place where Boarci had killed the bear, it seemed to Poldarn like he was revisiting a scene from his childhood, a time long ago and wonderfully happy and carefree, when his whole life was still in front of him and he still had a horse.

‘Fat lot of good it did you,' he said to Boarci, who was still hustling him along like a sheaf of cut corn.

‘What are you talking about?'

‘That horse I gave you, for saving me from the bear.'

Boarci shrugged. ‘Serves you right for being too generous,' he replied. ‘I could've told you at the time no good'd come of it.'

Faced with a choice between staggering painfully along on his own two feet and listening to much more of that sort of thing, Poldarn decided he preferred the pain. ‘It's all right,' he said, wriggling out of Boarci's grip, ‘I'm feeling much better now, I can walk on my own. Thanks all the same,' he added.

‘Suit yourself,' Boarci grunted. ‘I could do without you treading on my feet every third step, that's for sure.'

Poldarn slowed down, letting him get safely ahead, and this brought him up level with Elja, who was also walking on her own. He hadn't spoken to her since the mudslide, and she hadn't come near him; he wondered if there was anything wrong between them, or whether it was just a point of etiquette.

‘So,' he said, ‘how are you feeling?'

‘Tired,' she replied.

He nodded. ‘Me too,' he said. ‘I feel like I've been walking my whole life. Still, it's not much further now.'

She frowned. ‘Yes, it is,' she said. ‘That's Riderfell over there, and down in the dip is Fleot's Water, so at this rate we won't get there till just before dark, if we're lucky.'

‘True,' Poldarn admitted. ‘I was just trying to cheer you up.'

‘Oh.' She looked at him. ‘By telling me a lie?'

‘Well, the truth's pretty depressing,' he said. ‘Any bloody fool can tell you the truth and make you feel miserable.'

Elja stared at him for a moment, then laughed. ‘I suppose so,' she said. ‘You know, you're strange.'

‘Thank you. That's probably the nicest thing anybody's ever said about me.'

‘Really?'

‘No,' he explained, ‘that was a joke.'

‘Another lie? To make me feel cheerful?'

‘That's right. Oh, come on,' he added, ‘you people have jokes, I've heard you making them.'

‘I know. I was teasing you, but you seem to be a bit slow on the uptake today.'

It crossed Poldarn's mind that he might have been better off sticking with Boarci. ‘You're probably right,' he said. ‘It was getting soaked to the skin the day before yesterday – I think I'm brewing up a really high-class cold. The silly thing is, I can't remember having had one before. Weird at my time of life, having my first cold.'

‘You'll get the hang of it pretty quickly, I'm sure. I expect it's like swimming, it'll all come back to you once you start.'

He shrugged. ‘Maybe,' he said. ‘Still, you could help me get into the right frame of mind. What comes first?'

Elja thought for a moment. ‘Usually,' she said, ‘you start off with a blocked nose, maybe a cough, some slight deafness even. A general feeling that your head's been stuffed full of unbleached wool.'

‘That sounds familiar,' he said, stumbling over a rock but recovering his balance quite well. ‘What about a slight headache? Is that orthodox?'

‘It's not unknown, certainly,' she said. ‘Though I'd tend to look for that in the next phase, along with the heavy sneezing, the runny nose, bleary eyes, that sort of thing.'

Poldarn pulled a face. ‘So that's what I've got to look forward to,' he said. ‘And do you get those things as well as the earlier stuff, the coughing and so on, or does one stop and the next one start?'

‘Oh no, they all happen at the same time. Though sometimes you'll find that the runny nose clears up but the cough gets much worse. Followed,' she added, ‘by a really horrible sore throat. That's a nasty combination, believe me.'

‘I'm sure,' Poldarn said despondently. ‘All right, so we've got as far as the sore throat. Then what?'

She sighed. ‘Downhill all the way from there,' she said sadly. ‘Next your arms and legs swell right up, you get these horrible blisters breaking out all over your skin, followed by massive internal bleeding, blackouts, madness and finally death. And that's assuming it doesn't go bad on you and turn into pneumonia.'

‘Ah.' He bit his lip tragically. ‘So how long do you think I've got? Give it to me straight, I can take it.'

She looked at him. ‘A case like yours, I'd say three days, four at the very most. It's sad, really. I'd have enjoyed living at Haldersness.'

‘Would you?' He heard something in his own voice, and quickly changed tack. ‘You seem to know an awful lot about colds,' he said. ‘Have you ever had one yourself?'

‘Me? Loads of them.'

‘And did you die?'

‘Every time.'

He nodded. ‘Well, in that case I guess you know what you're talking about.'

After that there was a slight awkwardness between them, as though one or the other of them had gone maybe a step too far, but neither was quite sure which of them it had been. Shortly after that, they came up against the worst quagmire yet: between two escarpments was a small, steep-sided defile that had completely filled up with mud. After standing and scowling at it for quite some time, they faced up to the fact that there was no way round it except going back down the road for half an hour and taking a long, gruelling detour up the back face of the western slope.

‘Marvellous,' Elja sighed as they trudged uphill. ‘Now we've got no chance of getting there before it gets dark.'

Poldarn would've said something extremely coarse if he could've spared the breath. ‘I don't like the idea of crashing around in the dark,' he said. ‘We could walk into one of those bogs before we knew what'd hit us.'

‘That's right,' Elja said. ‘So I expect we'll end up sleeping out again. I used to love doing that when I was a kid, but now I'm not so keen.'

‘I wouldn't mind if I had a blanket, or if there was anything we could make a fire with,' Poldarn groaned. ‘It's bad enough now with this wind. Once the sun goes down, it's going to be
really
bloody cold.'

‘I thought you were supposed to be telling me nice, cheerful things.'

‘Yes, but they wouldn't be true.'

Elja furrowed her brows in studied thought. ‘Truth is a wonderful thing,' she said, ‘and so is pea soup. You can get tired of both of them if you never have anything else.'

They tried very hard to make up time, but it was pointless; all they succeeded in doing was getting almost within sight of Haldersness by the time it got too dark for any more trekking to be safe. This time there wasn't even one lonely thorn tree to sit under, so they had to make do with a small heap of rocks, the remnants of a long derelict cairn. The shelter it gave them from the wind was minimal verging on imaginary, but it felt better than sleeping out on the bare hillside, even if they did get just as cold and (when it rained briefly, around the middle of the night) wet.

As soon as they stopped, Elja went off without a word and joined the women on the other side of the cairn, leaving Poldarn on his own. He didn't mind that too much; he'd been in company of one sort or another all day, and one of the few things he was enjoying about this forced march was the occasional moment of solitude. It was undeniably pleasant to be able to crouch down on the ground a few paces away from the others and clear his mind at last, since he had a great deal to think about. He didn't manage it, though, since within a few heartbeats of getting moderately comfortable and closing his eyes, he was fast asleep.

When he woke up, his head was full of small pieces of a very unpleasant dream. He made a conscious effort to sweep them away, though he had a feeling that a few of them were still lurking in the inaccessible cracks and corners of his mind, like the last few tiny splinters of broken potsherd after you've dropped a plate or a cup, the ones you find with the soles of your bare feet three months later. It was broad daylight already, and there was a fine spray of moisture in the air, either a wet fog or low cloud. His knees and calves ached as he put his weight on them. Not far to go now, he told himself; but that was definitely another case of telling lies in order to cheer himself up – necessarily pointless when he was both the teller and the audience.

Long before Poldarn saw the farm, he located it by the mob of crows circling in the grey sky. He knew them pretty well by now; someone had walked them off their feed, and they were waiting for him to go away. He wasn't sure what they could have been feeding on; either a newly sown field or a dead animal, he guessed, but there was no way of telling which at this distance. He hoped it was the former, of course, since all the livestock should be a long way away by now, and sowing would imply that the rain had washed off the ash and life was getting back to normal. Typical crows, he told himself, to be so annoyingly ambiguous. He was relieved when he came close enough to distinguish the brown of newly turned earth directly underneath the cloud of slowly drifting black dots. It was going to be hard enough, with all these extra mouths to feed.