It started to rain as soon as they reached the foot of the mountain, and it didn't stop until they arrived back at Haldersness. By that stage they were all so wet that they couldn't think about anything else, not even how tired and hungry they were. But that was something that could be set right very easily, with a change of clothes, a bowl of porridge (and the inevitable leeks) and a brisk, tall fire, which quickly annealed the memory of the wretchedness of the last few days.
'So,' Colsceg demanded, as Poldarn soaked up the warmth, 'what did you find out up there?'
'Not a lot,' Poldarn answered. 'There's a big hole in the mountain where all the stuff got blown out, you can see right into it. There's a huge pool of molten rock, but it's a hell of a long way down.'
'Molten rock,' Colsceg repeated, as if Poldarn had just said something that didn't make sense, like burning snow or wet fire. 'Bloody hell, that sounds a bit grim. So what do you reckon we ought to do about it?'
Poldarn shrugged. 'Not a lot we can do-it's all too big. But I don't think there's anything to worry about, it's not like it's going anywhere. Now the mountain's got a way of letting off steam, it shouldn't bother us any more.'
Colsceg frowned. 'That's good,' he said. 'So, apart from that, did you see anything interesting?'
'No,' Poldarn replied. 'That's about it, really.'
'Long way to go just to see that.'
'Yes.'
Colsceg nodded. 'Well, I guess it's better knowing than guessing, at that.'
'True,' Poldarn said. 'Anything been happening here while we've been gone?'
'Not really. No more showers of ash falling out of the sky; a little bit of dust, is all, and not nearly as much of that as when you went away. At this rate, we'll be back to normal in a day or so.'
'Good,' Poldarn yawned, pulling his blanket tighter around his shoulders. 'The sooner that happens, the better for all of us. After all, we've got work to do.'
'We have that,' Colsceg agreed, as he rose to his feet. 'Looks like you'd better get some rest. If the rain holds off, we can finish digging up the turnip clump in the morning.'
'Great,' Poldarn said. 'I'll look forward to that.'
Chapter Eighteen
A day or so after Poldarn got back from the mountain, he was in his new smithy, now complete with a large and handsome brick forge and no less than three anvils. Curiously enough, he found himself drifting over to it more and more, whenever there was nothing obvious for him to do, or whenever he could manufacture a pretext. On this occasion all he had to do was straighten a handful of nails, salvaged from the Haldersness woodshed door-he could have done it easily enough on the mounting-block in the yard, with the back of an axe, but instead he'd gone to the trouble of lighting a fire and taking a heat on each one. Partly, he explained it to himself, it was the warmth he enjoyed; since he'd felt the heat of the volcano on his face as he hung over the ledge, he'd felt uncomfortably cold in the house or the fields, no matter how many layers of clothing he crammed himself into. A well-built fire in the forge, livened up by blasts of air from his magnificent new double-action bellows, was about the only thing that could stop him shivering.
Straightening the nails took him no time at all, so Poldarn cast about for something else to do otherwise it'd be a waste of all the good coal he'd shovelled onto the fire, and as a good householder he couldn't countenance that. Already he was beginning to accumulate his own personal scrap-pile (he hadn't had the heart to confiscate Asburn's collection when he left Haldersness, where Asburn had remained to teach Barn the trade); mostly nails and brackets and hinges too badly damaged in the move to be used again, but also a fair quantity of junk retrieved from the various houses-worn-out scythe blades, files, ploughshares, axles, kettles, stirrup-irons, hoes, harrows, steelyards, leg-vices, the history of the settlement at Haldersness told through the medium of broken and discarded artefacts. At the bottom of the pile lurked the two halves of a snapped backsabre, partially rusted through, that had hung in the porch of the main house for as long as anybody could remember. Who'd put them there, or why, or who the sword had originally belonged to, had long since corroded away, but the two bits of steel had still been there, because there hadn't been any reason to get rid of them when the time came to leave the house. Someone had taken them down as an afterthought and thrown them in a basket of oddments; someone else had unpacked the basket and, on the basis that all bits of rusty old metal belonged in the forge, had slung them on the scrap-pile to await purification and rebirth.
A little scrabbling turned them up, and Poldarn laid them on the table of the middle anvil, fitted the pieces together along the fracture, and stared at them thoughtfully. There hadn't been any call for Asburn to make anything of the kind while Poldarn had been hanging about in the forge at Haldersness. There was no demand for weapons, generally speaking; they were something you inherited, or borrowed from the big chest with the four padlocks at the back of the hall as and when you needed one for a cruise to the Empire, and there were always more than enough of the things floating around without the smith having to waste time and effort making new ones. This one, the broken one from the Haldersness porch, looked like it was very old indeed, to judge by the depth of the rust-pits and the shrunken contours of the cutting edge, gradually thinned down and eroded by many years of sharpening with coarse stones. Out of curiosity Poldarn took a medium-grit stone and rubbed it up and down the flat of the blade to shift the rust. Once he'd got it back to white metal, he thought he could just about make out the faint pattern of ripples and ridges that marked out an old-fashioned pattern-welded piece, made back in the days when hard steel was rare and precious and a large object like a sword had to be built up out of scraps interleaved with layers of hard iron.
The thought of all the work that must have gone into it made Poldarn wince. Back at Haldersness he'd helped Asburn with some pattern-welding, swinging the big hammer while Asburn did all the clever stuff; it had taken hours of hard, slow work to produce one small billet, and Asburn had told him later that all they'd done was a very simple, utilitarian pattern, not to be mentioned in the same breath with the wonderful constructs the old-timers used-the four-or six-core aligned twists and countertwists, the maiden's-hair pattern, the butterfly, the hugs-and-kisses, the pool and eye and the Polden's ladder. Compared to what the old-timers used to get up to, according to Asburn, the little blank they'd rushed out was just a shoddy piece of rubbish, a parody, a travesty.
Whatever this one had been, he reflected, it hadn't done it much good. The blade had snapped right on the shoulder, the place where the concave bend of the cutting edge was most extreme. Judging by the corresponding chip and roll in the edge, it seemed likely that it had broken in the act of bashing on something hard and solid, quite possibly somebody's armoured head. So much, Poldarn decided, for pattern-welding.
Still; the shape itself was an interesting one, and he stood for quite some time figuring out how a man would go about making such a thing. First he'd have to draw down a steep taper, both thickness and width; then lay in the bevel, probably, keeping the blade straight as he went so as to give himself a chance of keeping everything even; then gradually introduce the curve, just an inch or so per heat, with gentle tapping and nudging over the anvil's beak; then more straightening and truing up, hot and cold-hours of that, in all probability, since flattening out one kink or distortion tended to set up two or three new ones further up or down the piece, as he knew only too well. Finally draw down a tang and either shape a point with the hammer or cheat by using the hot chisel and the rasp; it could be done, in fact now that he'd thought about it he could see every stage of the operation simultaneously, laid out side by side in his mind like a collection of memories. But it'd mean days of work, even using a solid piece of stock rather than pattern-welding, and since nobody wanted such a thing, where the hell was the point?