'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.
Well now, he thought, how about that for a neatly planned conclusion?
He stayed watching the mountain until it was quite dark. The evening was unusually warm, and somehow he didn't want to go into the house (any house, at this particular time) so he sat in a chair on the porch and closed his eyes. The chair was newly made and really rather fine-Raffen's work, the man had a definite flair for making furniture-and he thought how pleasant life could have been here, if only he'd arrived in this place by a more auspicious route.
The chair was so comfortable that he slipped away into a dream, where he was sitting in a chair on a porch, watching a glowing red sunset over a mountain. But in the dream he was wide awake, because he was waiting, nervously, for a very important appointment. Beside him was a door, a rather magnificent thing made of bronze, with eight panels and slightly over-ornate hinges. Just as the sun set-such timing-the door opened and a grave-looking man in an ecclesiastical robe beckoned to him to come in.
The room he found himself in was big and rather dim; there were scores of candles, but all down at the other end. There wasn't any furniture apart from the table the candles stood on, but there was a mat-a wholly inadequate word to describe such a glorious piece of work. It was dark red, patterned with black and gold lines intertwined in a way that made him dizzy, so that he looked up, and saw the ceiling. That was even more spectacular. It was covered in a fresco, executed in a style he recognised as very old indeed, and it seemed to be telling a story, though he hadn't a clue what it was about. In one corner, a man and a woman were riding in a cart across a field covered with dead crows, while in the background a volcano was erupting, spewing red lava out of one side of the summit. In another corner, the same man who appeared in the cart was getting married, apparently to four women at the same time. Opposite to that, the same man was engaged in the sack of a city, amid scenes of graphic and very artistic carnage. In the fourth corner, he was standing in the bed of a river, surrounded by dead bodies. There was no indication as to the order of events, and the four panels converged on each other in such a way that they formed a continuous circle. In the centre, two sword-monks faced each other in a crowded room, transfixed in the moment of the draw; somehow the painter had contrived to give the impression that the events surrounding that central scene were all taking place in that same frozen moment. Although he reckoned he knew pretty much everything there was to know about the draw by now, he couldn't make out from the position of the figures which one was going to win; in fact, it looked almost certain to be a dead heat.