Pattern

'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.

Needless to say, the Haldersness household was ready and waiting for them when they trudged down the last slope into the yard. He saw Eyvind and Rannwey and Rook and Scaptey, and Asburn at the back, looking anxious; no sign of Halder, which was odd.

'And another thing.' Boarci was at his side, almost protective, like a bodyguard. 'I lost all my kit back there, when the house got swamped. I'm not fussed about the rest of it, but it's a bloody shame about my axe. It was a good one, too, I'd had it for years.'

'No problem,' Poldarn replied, managing to keep the irritation out of his voice. 'I'll get our smith to make you a new one. He does good work, you'll be pleased.'