Pattern

Elja yawned. 'It'll be all right,' she said. 'Trust me.'

'Why?'

'Because,' she told him, and snuggled down under the blankets. 'Now shut up and go to sleep. You've got a big day tomorrow.'

He pinched out the flame of the lamp and lay still in the dark. Somewhere in the room the moth was fluttering round, trying to find out where the flame had gone. Stupid creature, Poldarn thought, I've probably saved its life and it doesn't even realise, let alone feel grateful to me for the exercise of my divine clemency. I'm glad I'm not a god; it must be soul-destroying, putting up with that sort of thing.

Next morning, early, he went to the forge. Asburn was already there, and a good fire was blazing in the duck's nest.

'These drills,' Asburn said. 'What did you have in mind?'

Poldarn couldn't remember having mentioned the drills to anybody except Boarci but he guessed that Boarci had told Asburn about them. 'Something like this,' he said, chalking a sketch on the face of the anvil. 'What do you think?'

Asburn nodded. 'Oughtn't to be a problem,' he said. 'Only, they've got to be drawn hard. Have we got anything long enough?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'I was thinking, make the shafts out of iron and weld a steel tip on.'

'That ought to do it,' Asburn said. 'In that case, we can draw down those old mill shafts.'

Poldarn stifled a groan, because that would mean several hours of swinging the big hammer, and he felt stiff and raw after his adventures on the mountain. 'Fine,' he said. 'Good idea.'

'I'll strike, then,' Asburn said, much to Poldarn's surprise. He'd assumed that he'd be striking, while Asburn did the skilled work. 'All right,' he said. 'If you don't mind.'

In spite of Poldarn's reservations, the drills more or less shaped themselves. First they drew down the shafts, reducing them in diameter by a third. Then they forged flats into the round bars, forming them into hexagons; Poldarn wasn't quite sure why this was necessary, but he knew it was the right thing to do-neither of them suggested it, they just did it as soon as they'd finished drawing down. In order to get the iron to work, they took a ferocious heat, almost white, and Poldarn's skin ached where the flare of the fire-stream had burned it. Next he cut lap scarfs into the tip of each drill with the hot sett, dressing them out clean with the hot and cold files, and smothered the scarfs with flux to keep the scale out while they were welding. As soon as the flux powder touched the hot metal it melted into a glowing yellow liquid, more or less the same in colour and texture as the bed of the fire-stream. They put the drill bodies in the edge of the fire so they'd hold their heat until they were needed, and jumped up some flogged-out old rasps to form the cutting tips. When these were ready they went into the fire until they were yellow, whereupon Poldarn fitted them into the scarfs in the shafts and peened them round to keep them in place as he brought the piece up to a full welding heat, turning them widdershins in the fire to keep the heat even. He raked the fire deep for this part of the process, which meant the metal was buried under burning coals and he had to rely on hearing the fizz as the surface started to burn in order to judge when it was ready to weld. He couldn't have been far out, because when he pulled the first drill out it was snowing fat white sparks. Asburn turned the shaft slowly, while Poldarn patted it smartly and evenly with a two-pound ball-peen. He could feel the iron and steel fuse together under the hammer, a curious scrunching sensation, like treading on a deep drift of virgin snow.

As soon as they'd finished one drill they started on the next, and by the time they'd hardened and tempered the blades and ground them to a cutting edge it was mid-afternoon. Poldarn left Asburn to finish up, and made a round of the other preparations. There weren't going to be nearly as many buckets as he'd have liked, but fortuitously there were plenty of skins, since nobody had got around to tanning the hides from last winter's slaughter. He found more than enough hammers, chisels, crowbars and axes in store, along with a reasonable quantity of rope, though not as much as he'd have liked. By the time everything had been stowed on the wagons, there was only just enough space left for the drills. Anything else-and he was bound to have forgotten something-they'd have to do without.

'That's the lot, then,' he announced, with rather more confidence than he actually felt. 'We'd better all get a good night's sleep,' he added, 'I want to get started first thing in the morning.'

Easier said than done. Poldarn lay awake most of the night, trying to visualise the job that lay before them, but the picture evaded him like an unreliable memory. When at last he slipped into a restless doze, the mountain was still there in his dreams-his mountain or another one very like it, only taller and steeper, coughing up fire like a dying man bringing up blood. The most vivid image in his dreams was the hot spring he'd seen so many years ago, with Halder beside him, except that now it was gushing fire instead of water. Somehow that seemed quite natural, as if his previous recollection of the scene had been at fault, and he'd only just corrected the mistake.

The fire-stream had put on a disconcerting turn of speed while Poldarn had been away. Its pronounced snout of rocks, shale and other debris now stood on a small plateau above a steep drop, with very little in the way of obstacles between it and the long, even slope that led directly to the mouth of the Haldersness valley. Once it made it over the edge, Poldarn couldn't see any force on earth stopping it. To make matters worse, the fissure in the side of the mountain was perceptibly wider, allowing a stronger flow. If this scheme didn't work there wouldn't be time to go home and think of something else. Whether he liked it or not, he was committed to his chosen course of action. This struck him as an unfortunate state of affairs, since the more he thought about it, the more fatuous it seemed.

'I'm sure I've forgotten something,' he complained, as they came over the hog's back.

'So you keep telling us,' Elja muttered. She was carrying two heavy buckets of water, covered with hides that had been tied down to prevent wastage by spilling. 'And not just something.'

'Forgotten to bring something we're going to need,' Poldarn said. 'No chance of going back for it now'

'Then let's hope it wasn't anything important.'

On the other hand, this was as good a place as any to try out his idea-better, in fact, than most, because on the other side of the plateau, where the rocks formed a low wall, there was a plainly visible thin point, where it would be fairly simple to break through. Channelled through that breach, the tapped-off flow would run down an even steeper incline that would guide it straight across the other side of the mountain, following a deeply cut gorge to the level plain below, and from there into a deep wooded valley, a natural sump that would take a lot of filling before the fire-stream could continue on its way. There was a farm down there-Poldarn could just make out the tiny squares of the buildings and the subtly differentiated colours of the home fields-but it stood on high ground on the edge of the plain, a long way above the valley. If everything went according to plan, the fire-stream wouldn't come any nearer to the farm than a mile and a half, missing the fields and the pasture completely. An ideal arrangement, in other words. He couldn't have produced a more suitable landscape if he'd moulded it himself out of potter's clay.

'Well,' Poldarn said, 'we'd better get started.'

He'd brought everyone with him, women and children too, and nobody was empty-handed. He hadn't had to order them to come, or plead, or even ask; they'd been ready and waiting for him when he emerged from the house, early on that first morning. Nobody said anything, but they'd managed to keep up a stiff pace all the way from Ciartanstead to the hog's back; so stiff that at times he'd been hard put to it to keep up.