They'd given him everything else; now they were giving him the priceless blessing of an excuse. They must love him very much, to go to such trouble. It'd be ungrateful and very, very selfish to jeopardise everything just to satisfy his own idle curiosity.
Poldarn stood up. He might be many things, but he wasn't so wickedly self-centred as to believe that setting his mind at rest was more important than another man's life, or the well-being of his household. It was a small enough sacrifice to make, and he was pleased to be able to give something back in return for everything they'd done for him. From now on, in fact, he was going to put a stop to all this shameful self-pity. It stood to reason that they valued him and needed him or else they wouldn't have given him so much, far more than his intrinsic merits could possibly deserve. It wasn't as though he had any rare or valuable skill, or an endless capacity for hard work. Left to himself, he'd be hard put to it to earn a living in a tough and pitiless world, let alone enjoy all the good things he had here; or, if there was something special about him that justified their indulgence, they knew about it and he didn't, so it'd be plain foolishness to imagine he knew better than they did. Either they loved him beyond his merits, in which case he should simply be grateful, or they could see in him qualities that he couldn't see in himself. In any event, it was high time he stopped moping about feeling lost and bewildered. When the time came, if there was work for him to do, he'd know it and be ready to get on with it. Until then, he owed it to them to be patient, to quit complaining, to be satisfied and to stop making a fuss. That wasn't so much to ask, was it? As for who he'd been… only a fool picks at a scab when it's nearly healed.
Fine, he thought. Now I really ought to get the fire going again. There must be something I could be making, and while I'm figuring out what it could be, I can fetch some fresh coal from the coal shed.
So he went out into the yard, and the first thing he saw was an astonishingly bright red glow in the sky, coming from the direction of the mountain. By the look of it, he wasn't the only one who'd decided to rake up a good, hot fire. And this time Polden had beaten him to it.
Chapter Twenty
'Pretry soon,' Boarci grumbled, 'we'll be able to find our way blindfold.' He gave the lie to this assertion by catching his foot on a tussock of couch grass and stumbling, but he carried on: 'Probably just as well, if it starts shitting that black stuff again and blots out the sun like it did last time. Don't know about you, but I don't much like the thought of getting down off this mountain in the dark.'
It was three days since the side of the mountain had been ripped open and a glaring red strip had poked out of the fissure, as if the volcano was sticking its tongue out at them. It had taken Poldarn three hours of forceful argument, shouting and pleading to induce the two households to go along with his plan (whatever it was-he had a few vague ideas, but that was all; still, it wouldn't do to let them know that) but he'd won the day at last, or else they'd agreed to let him take a scouting party up the mountain simply in order to be rid of him and free of the sound of his voice. Nobody had had any other suggestions to make, but that didn't surprise him at all.
So, here they were again, struggling over the shale, ash and broken ground just below the place where the hot springs had been. Of the springs themselves there was no longer any trace. The fissure out of which the red tongue was sticking had opened right in the middle of where they had been before and within a few hours the whole area had filled up with red-hot molten rock, travelling (as far as they could judge from down below in the valley) a little faster than a galloping horse. At that point, the only option had appeared to be to leave everything behind and run as fast and as far as they could get, hoping that the fire-stream would chase someone else and pass them by. Then, quite abruptly, it slowed down to walking pace, then to a toddler's crawl. There seemed to be no reason to it, and no reason why it shouldn't pick up speed again at any minute, but Poldarn had a feeling that there was a logical explanation, and that finding out what it was would be a good idea. Hence the expedition, which had now arrived on the other side of the narrow hog's back that separated them from the fissure itself. We must be mad, Poldarn thought; and then, in fairness to his companions, he changed the we to I.
'Right,' he said, as the party ground to a halt. It was stiflingly hot, and everything they could see was washed in soft red light. 'Let's go and take a look, shall we?'
Nobody seemed very keen, for some reason, but he couldn't be bothered with leadership skills at that particular moment. He turned his back on them and started to climb the slope. 'Hold on,' someone said behind him-he recognised Boarci's voice, and felt a surge of thanks that he wouldn't be alone after all. 'Slow down, for crying out loud, I've got a blister on my heel the size of a cow's arse.'
The view from the top of the hog's back was spectacular, but somehow disappointing. It looked for all the world like a road; not one of your up-country cart trails, all ruts and grass growing up the middle, but a high-specification military road, the sort of thing that costs millions and takes a lifetime to build. It was so flat that it could have been trued up with a square and a level, one uniform slate-grey plane with arrowshaft-straight sides, a masterpiece of the road builder's art if ever there was one. It was only the stunning blast of heat rising off it that spoilt the illusion.
'It cools quick enough, then,' Boarci said. 'That's worth bearing in mind.'
Poldarn laughed. 'Depends what you mean by cool,' he replied. 'I'll bet you, if you pitched a bale of hay down there it'd catch fire as soon as it touched.'
'Wouldn't surprise me,' Boarci grunted. 'But that's not what I meant. Seems to me it only moves when it's red-hot. Like metal in the forge,' he explained. 'When it's blue-grey it'll still burn your hand, but you can't squidge it around like you can when it's red.'
Poldarn hadn't thought of it like that. 'It may have cooled down on the top,' he said, 'but my guess is that if you went down a foot or so you'd come to molten rock. I think that under this crust it's still flowing like a river, just not as fast as it did to begin with. Which would explain why it slowed down like it did. To start with, it was running at its top speed, but as the crust formed it acted like a sort of brake-it's squeezing in, closing up the channel the molten stuff runs through.' He frowned. 'That's good, isn't it?'
'Maybe.' Boarci was lying next to him, his chin cupped in his hands, as if he was on a picnic. 'All depends how much it'll slow it down. Maybe it won't have the legs to reach the valley, maybe it will. No way of knowing. But I don't think I'd take the chance if I were you.'
Boarci didn't need to enlarge on that. It didn't take a trained surveyor to figure out that if the molten rock carried on down its present course, it'd fill the valley and flatten both Ciartanstead and Haldersness; there'd be nothing left but this wonderful road, leading nowhere, because the road would obliterate the settlement it led to.
'I'm going to get a little bit closer,' Poldarn announced. 'You can stay up here if you like.'
Boarci groaned. 'I wish you'd stop doing this sort of stuff,' he complained. 'Have you noticed that every time you fling yourself into the jaws of death, I'm the poor bugger who's got to come and fish you out again?'
Poldarn shook his head. 'You stay there,' he said, 'please. I'd rather you did, there's no point us both taking stupid risks. I just have a feeling it isn't going to hurt me, that's all.'