Pattern

'That's just fine,' he said, and that seemed to be the cue for the reception party to break up and get back to work, while Rannwey led the way to the long barn.

Poldarn felt ashamed as he ate, because the food tasted wonderful after two days of hungry trudging. As he stuffed bread and stewed beef into his face, he couldn't keep his mind off the obscure conundrum that these people represented; until he thought of the crows circling over the house, and it struck him that when one of their number died, they reacted in much the same way-no grief or heartbreak, just a slight readjustment of their order and patterns of flight, a closing-up of the gap that the dead individual had filled, so that within a few moments it was as if he'd never existed. That was the strength of the crows' organisation-it could lose a member or take back a straggler who'd been away for many years, without any noticeable disruption. Perhaps that was why killing them had been so fascinating; you could kill a hundred of them, and there'd still be just as many left, because really there was only one of them, as immortal as a god (And what else should a god be but undying, present everywhere that one part of Him happened to be, a single consciousness vested in the heart of a cloud of unimportant bodies? Killing crows was like trying to kill a river by drowning it. By that token, Halder wasn't dead; because Halder was the farmer at Haldersness, and there was still a farmer here, the only difference being in the small matter of his name, Ciartan. Ciartan, Poldarn thought: that's me. And a name is just an aid to memory, and memory washes out in fire the way dye washes out in water.)

'I'll say this for your outfit, the grub's not bad.' He hadn't noticed that Boarci was still next to him. 'The beer's a bit thin, mind, but you can't have everything in this life. Pass those boiled eggs.'

Boarci could swallow boiled eggs whole, provided he had enough beer to wash them down with. 'Why do you do that?' Poldarn asked, after he'd repeated the procedure for the fifth time.

'Don't like the taste,' Boarci replied. 'If you just gulp 'em down, you don't have to taste 'em. I was at a place once, they used to preserve eggs in vinegar. Didn't taste any better, but they tasted different, if you see what I mean.'

'I expect you've seen a lot of interesting things on your travels,' Poldarn said, spearing an egg before they all vanished.

'Not really,' Boarci replied. 'Once you've seen one farm, you've seen 'em all. Mind you, I did go raiding one year, when I was able to get a berth on a ship. We were away three months. But all you see when you're on that lark is a lot of open country and a few burnt-down towns. All places are pretty much the same, really.'

Or if they aren't to start with, they are when you're through with them. 'You may well be right,' Poldarn answered mildly. 'So, you'll be sticking around, then.'

'Not up to me,' Boarci replied with his mouth full. 'I hang around till they tell me to piss off. Some places it takes longer than others, that's all. But then, places don't really matter much. My old dad used to say, it's not where you are but who you are. Wouldn't go that far myself, but I suppose he had a point.'

'It sounds pretty convincing to me,' Poldarn said. 'What don't you agree with?'

'Ah.' Boarci swallowed, and gulped some more beer. 'I see it another way. I say, it's not where you are or who you are, it's what you are. Everything else can be fixed, so it doesn't actually matter a toss. Like, you can take a piece of iron, like an axle or a fireback, and you can make it into any bloody thing, but you can't turn it into brass. You get what I'm saying?'

Poldarn nodded. 'I don't really understand them,' he said, 'these people, I mean. You'd have thought it'd have meant something to them, my grandfather dying like that. But they don't seem to care.'

Boarci laughed. 'Of course not,' he said. 'They've got you now.'

'In which case, I'm truly sorry for them. I don't know spit about running a farm.'

'They do,' Boarci said. 'And unless you're as thick as mud, you'll let 'em get on with it and keep your nose out of what doesn't concern you. You've got other things to do, remember; you've got a house to build, and this business with the mountain-somebody said you know all about that, from being abroad.'

Poldarn sighed. 'Look,' he said, 'all I know is that in the empire, mountains that blow up are called volcanoes. That's it, really.'

Boarci shook his head. 'Don't think so,' he replied. 'Else how come you knew exactly what to do when the mud started coming down back at Colscegsford? You know a hell of a lot more about this shit than you're letting on, but if you don't want to share, that's no skin off my nose.'

For some reason, Poldarn found this infuriating. 'I said the first thing that came into my head,' he said. 'By some miracle, it turned out to be the right thing to do. It could just as easily have got us all killed.'

But Boarci only smiled. 'Maybe you don't know what you know,' he said, picking up a bone and gnawing it messily. 'People tell me I'm as weird as a bucketful of snails, but you're something else, believe me. It's like there's two of you, and they hate each other. I've seen married couples like that, been together forty years and spend their lives trying to jerk each other around, but they've grown so close you can hardly see where one ends and the other begins. God only knows what this lot make of you. But that's their problem, isn't it?'

'And mine,' Poldarn muttered. 'But I'm telling you the truth, I don't know any more than you do about volcanoes-'

'What?'

Poldarn closed his eyes. 'Volcano. It's the foreign word for exploding mountains.'

'Ah, right.' Boarci nodded. 'Of course, back where I grew up we had a different word.'

That made Poldarn sit bolt upright. 'You know about the bloody things?'

'Well.' Boarci frowned. 'Wouldn't say that, exactly. But my mother's cousin-we used to stay with them a few weeks each year in summer, to help out with the threshing and stuff-she used to tell a story about how a mountain blew up back in the old country.'

'Morevich.'

'What?'

'Morevich. It used to be part of the empire. Where we came from originally.'

Boarci shrugged. 'Is that so? Never heard it called that before, it was always the old country or back home. Anyhow, who gives a stuff, it's all ancient history anyhow. Point is, she had this story-mind, she was ninety and blind as a bat and a little bit daft in the head most of the time, and she dribbled her soup all down her front, but she loved to tell this yarn about how there was a big mountain right above the biggest city in the old country, and how one day a god came by in an old carrier's cart and told them the world was about to end. 'Course, they didn't believe him, because who ever heard of a real god rattling round the lanes in a dirty old cart, but the day after he'd passed through, the mountain burst open all down one side and burning shit came pouring down off it like molten metal out of a busted crucible, and the sky was so full of ash you couldn't see three feet in front of your nose, and the whole city was covered in the burning shit and that was the end of them.' He paused and wiped gravy out of his beard. 'There was a whole load more stuff to it than that,' he added. 'It had a regular story to it, with heroes and villains, and it was all somebody's fault for doing some bloody stupid thing, but I can't remember all that now, I reckon she made it up out of her head to make the yarn more interesting. Anyway, in her story the blowing-up mountain was always called Polden's Furnace, and that was the name of the god in the cart. There was some kind of woman involved in it, too-a witch or something-but you know what they're like, storytellers, they'll chuck in any old rubbish.'