Pattern

Poldarn passed his hand through his hair. It was thick with black ash.

'I remember this lot,' he said aloud. 'We came here when I was just a kid, and you pointed out all the trees, told me what they'd be used for. We even cut tallies on them, in case we forgot.' He lifted his head, then pointed. 'Look,' he said, 'there's one, you can still just about see it.'

Halder nodded. 'Thought it might ring a few bells,' he said. 'You used to come here all the time, about twenty-five years back.'

'Did I?' Poldarn frowned. 'That I don't remember.'

Halder laughed. 'You came up here flighting crows,' he said. 'You'd sit just inside the wood, just as it was starting to get dark; and when they dropped in and pitched to roost, you'd try and knock them down with a slingshot or a stone. Got quite good at it, too. Always struck me as a bit of a waste of time, but you always said it was too hard to get 'em out in the fields, you'd do better catching them where they lived. Some sense in that, I guess.' Halder shook his head. 'Always seemed to me you took it personal, them trespassing in your wood. Hated the buggers, you did.'

'Really.' Poldarn wasn't sure he wanted to hear about it. 'Well.' He took a few steps forward and rested the palm of his hand against the trunk of the tree that would one day be the middle cross-beam. He could feel it flexing ever so slightly, as the wind mussed up its branches. Then it occurred to him to wonder what they were doing there, at that particular moment. As he understood it, a man only built his house when his father (or grandfather) died, because then the old house would be pulled down and split up. It was as if, by bringing him here, Grandfather was serving a formal notice of his own impending death. Just the suggestion filled Poldarn with unanticipated panic; he looked round, just to make sure the old man was still there.

Halder was looking into the cupped palm of his right hand, which was grimy with ash. 'Bloody stuff,' he said.

'I think it's from the volcano,' Poldarn replied. Colsceg and his tribe seemed to recognise the word, although the only people he'd mentioned it to were Halder and the long-barn hand, Rook. 'I think it's what the big black cloud's made out of. The hot air from the fire shoots it way up in the air, and now it's starting to come down.'

'Figures,' Colsceg said, after a long pause. 'It's coming down everywhere, look. Like snow'

Like black snow, at any rate. 'Let's hope it doesn't get any worse than that,' Poldarn said. 'A few cinders I can handle.' He dusted his hands off, but black smudges still clung to them. Like soot from Asburn's forge, he thought.

'Filthy mess,' Halder muttered, and Poldarn realised he was actually afraid of it-well, fair enough, fear of the unknown; he'd got over that quite some time ago, since he'd woken up beside a muddy river and found that nearly everything had suddenly become the unknown. In that respect at least, he was rather better off than all the rest of them.

'Maybe we should be getting back to the house,' he said.

Colsceg turned his head and looked at him suspiciously. 'What's the hurry?' he said. 'We only just got here.'

'I don't know,' Poldarn admitted. 'It's just a feeling I've got; like, we shouldn't be too far from home, just in case something bad happens. How long will it take Rook to ride to the Lyat place?'

Halder scratched the back of his head. 'Couple of hours, maybe. It isn't far, good track all the way. Why?'

'I just wondered, that's all,' Poldarn said. 'Maybe it'll stop soon. After all, there can't be too much of the stuff in there, surely.'

'We might as well go back now,' Colsceg said.

As soon as they cleared the bend in the river, they all looked back at the mountain. It was still pumping out smoke, but far less than before, and the red glow had faded into a smudge. So that's all right, then, Poldarn thought. But he quickened his pace all the same. The cinders crunched as he walked on them, and he thought how uncomfortable it'd been, making his way over the black rocks on the way to the hot springs.

For some reason, Elja was walking fast too; in fact, she fell into step beside him, leaving her father and the rest of them behind. She didn't say anything, though.

'Well,' Poldarn said brightly, as he felt obliged to do, 'so what do you think of it?'

She looked at him as if he'd farted during a religious ceremony. 'Sorry?' she said. 'What do I think of what?'

'The site. Where the house is going to be.'

'Oh.' She shrugged. 'Very nice.'

Very nice. And said with such zest, too. 'It should be fairly well sheltered from the weather,' he said. 'And well above the river-line, in case of flooding. That's important, too.'

'I suppose so,' Elja replied. 'Did you really spend all your time killing crows when you were a boy?'

Poldarn cringed a little. 'So they tell me,' he replied. 'I can't remember anything about it myself.'

'Oh. I don't like crows. I think that horrid slow way they fly is creepy.'

'Well, yes,' Poldarn said awkwardly. 'To tell you the truth, I don't really notice them. I mean, everywhere you look, there one of them is.'

'Maybe. I think that just makes it worse.'

Well, at least they were talking about something. 'When I woke up,' Poldarn said, 'after I lost my memory, I mean, the only thing I could remember was a bit of a song. That was about crows.'

'Really.'

Poldarn nodded, passionately wishing he hadn't brought the subject up in the first place. 'It went, "Old crow sitting in a tall, thin tree-"'

'Oh, that one.' Elja nodded. 'That's an old one, everyone knows that. You know, you're a very strange person to talk to.'

I'm a very strange person to talk to. 'Really? In what way?'

'Well-' She made a vague gesture. 'I can't see what you're thinking. It makes things so difficult, I've got to say everything I mean. Don't you find it's a real nuisance?'

'No,' Poldarn admitted, 'not really. Look, maybe you can tell me about this, nobody else seems to want to. When you're talking to them-I mean, your family, other people-can you really see what they're thinking?'

'Sure,' she replied, faintly surprised. 'And they can see me back. And you can't, then.'

'No. In fact, I can't even imagine what it'd be like. Pretty strange, I should imagine.'

'Oh. I'd have said it was the other way round. Like being blind or something-you can't see what things are like, you can only hear. How can anybody manage to live like that?'

'People seem to cope, where I come from. I mean, where I've been. For a start, you listen to what people say, and then you know what they're thinking. If they want to tell you, that is. And if not, you've got to try and figure it out, from what they're doing, stuff like that.'

'Oh. But I always thought that over there-' she made a small gesture with her left hand '-they don't always tell things like they really are. I mean, they say things that aren't true.'

'That's right,' Poldarn said. 'Quite a lot of the time, in fact. You get used to it.'

'Really?'

'It's quite easy. Most people, when they're lying, they start acting funny. They won't look you in the eye, or their voices change slightly. It's because they're afraid of being found out.'