The first step was obviously to breach the wall, and that was a simple enough job, though more than a little strenuous. For that they used pickaxes, hammers and stout cold chisels, cracking and chipping the rocks away from the other side (extremely awkward, since there were precious few places where a man could stand upright and still do any useful work; ten men could squeeze in at a time, and the rest of the workforce could only stand by and wait their turn to relieve them). They used the spoil to bank up the sides of the breach, in case weakening the crust wall in one place caused it to break out elsewhere. From start to finish the work took six hours, rather less than he'd anticipated, and there was still an hour of daylight left when they finished.
Waste not, want not, Poldarn thought; although daylight wasn't actually necessary, given the brightness of the fire-stream's orange glow. One last despairing attempt to remember whatever it was he'd forgotten; then he picked up one of the new special drills and led the way into the breach.
'I'll go first,' he announced, and nobody offered to take his place. 'Who's going to strike for me? Anybody?'
He'd been hoping Boarci would volunteer, but instead there was a long, awkward silence. Then Asburn shoved through to the front, picking up a heavy sledge on his way. 'I'll hold the drill and you strike, if you'd rather,' he said. It was a tempting offer, sure enough; it was the man holding the drill who had to stand closest to the fire-stream, and he'd be the first to die if the crust gave way and the molten rock came spurting out before there was time to get clear. But Poldarn shook his head. 'It's all right,' he said, 'you'll be more use behind the hammer. I don't think I could lift that thing, let alone swing it.'
Next came a rather ludicrous performance. Elja and a couple of the other women had soaked two large raw oxhides in water, and they proceeded to wrap them round him, tying them down at his wrists and ankles and swathing his face in loops of hide until only his eyes and the tip of his nose poked through. Then, for good measure, they splashed a few cups of water in his face and wrapped his hands with strips of sodden buckskin. Poldarn could feel water trickling down his cheeks inside the swathes, also down his chest and back into his trousers, gathering in reservoirs where the string was pulled tight around his ankles. Asburn had to put up with the same ritual humiliation, which gave some degree of comfort, but not much.
'Here goes, then,' Poldarn mumbled through the layers of wet leather. It wasn't the most inspiring speech of valediction, and it came out sounding sillier still. 'Get the next pair ready to take over as soon as we've had enough.'
He hadn't considered the problem of steam inside his clothes; it was hot enough to scald him wherever they touched his skin, and probably the hardest thing he had to do was keep his eyes open as drops of water dribbled off his forehead and turned into uncomfortably hot vapour before they could soak away. But the precautions proved to be more than amply justified; he managed to cling on to the drill long enough for Asburn to deliver five bone-jarring thumps on his end of the drill before the heat forced him back, his nose and fingertips red and tingling. On his way back he crossed with the next two, similarly cocooned in saturated hides. They only managed three hits before giving way to the next pair. It seemed like no time at all before it was his turn again, and with each thump and chink of the hammer he was torn between two horrible possibilities: that the crust was far too thick, and they'd never get through it at this rate, not if they played this game for a year; or that the crust would suddenly give way at the next hit, and he'd trip over his absurd skirts as he tried to run, and the fire-stream would surge over him like daylight flooding a room, and obliterate him completely. Each time he came off duty-he made it a point of honour to stand for at least five hits, a whole ten heartbeats in the face of the fire-his swaddle of hides was as dry as old shoes and moulded round him like armour, springy and tough, so that it took three pairs of hands to peel it off him.
The first casualty was one of the Colscegsford field hands, a man called Scerry; he was holding the drill and tried to get a step closer in, so as to direct the blow more accurately. But that one step was one too many; his wrappings dried out instantly and caught fire, and the shrinking and hardening effect on the oxhide made it impossible for him to run. He tried nevertheless, toppled over and landed on the edge of the crust, burning up in three heartbeats. He must have been dead before the fire burned through the hides, because he didn't make a sound. His replacement was in position before Scerry had finished burning, and the drill poked through his ashes to find the dent in the crust.
Hending, a Ciartanstead man, went out before the women had finished wrapping him properly. The bandages slipped off his face and it melted; his hammerman got him clear by grabbing the drill and hauling him in like a fish on a line. He died a few minutes later. Another Ciartanstead hand by the name of Brenny was hit on the side of the head by a splinter of rock-where it came from, nobody noticed; he was swinging the hammer for Carey, and someone else took his place in time for the next hit. A Colscegsford woman whose name Poldarn didn't know got in the way of a drill as it was being pulled clear at the end of a shift; the red-hot tip dragged down her arm from the shoulder to the elbow, burning her severely, but she carried on working for some time, carrying buckets in her other hand. Rook went out to hold a drill wearing heavy leather gloves instead of wrappings on his hands, but the leather turned out to be too greasy to take in water-they were a pair used in the wool store for hauling ropes, and the wool-grease had worked into the palms. The heat in the drill set them alight, taking all the skin off Rook's hands. Egil missed the end of the drill with the hammer head and hit it with the shaft instead. The head snapped off and went flying, hitting a Ciartanstead man between the shoulder blades; he was out of action for the rest of the day. Swessy, an old man who plaited ropes and weaved baskets for the Colscegsford house, took Rook's turn at the drill after Rook got burned. In spite of the wrappings, the heat was too much for him and stopped his heart. He was dead by the time they were able to pull him clear. They had no idea whether they were making any impression on the sidewall of the flow; there wasn't time to examine it, and the red glow dazzled their eyes. They still hadn't thought about what they could do as and when the wall finally did give way, but that possibility seemed too remote to worry about, compared to the other, more obvious dangers.
Finally, after two hours, they gave up and withdrew to the hog's back to rest. The general impression was that things weren't going too well. They'd already used up over half the water, and there wouldn't be time to go back and get any more. The heat had shrunk, curled, stiffened and cracked the hides to the point where they were starting to shrug off water, and it was taking more and more ingenuity to cover the bare patches. Nearly all of the men had minor burns to their hands and faces, not serious enough to count as an injury but sufficient to slow them down or reduce the time they could spend in front of the fire-stream. They were too exhausted to do any more, but everyone knew without having to be told that if they rested for too long, the stream would move on, taking the weakened patch they'd made (such as it was) with it. If that happened, the flow would miss the gap they'd made, and all their effort would go to waste. They kept still for an hour, but that was as long as they dared leave it. It was dark, of course, but there was enough firelight to work by. Nobody said anything. They trudged back to the breach and carried on.
(The crows do this, Poldarn realised. When there's danger they send out their scouts, and sometimes they come back, sometimes they don't, but the work, the joint effort of staying alive carries on. They don't stop to fuss over their dead and maimed, and they know what to do without having to be organised or told. Perhaps we're the crows this time, and I'm the mountain, an unknown quantity suddenly erupting into violence, changing everything. Maybe it's wrong of me to be on both sides at the same time; but there, I haven't known which side I'm meant to be on ever since I woke up in the mud beside the Bohec. The sensible thing would be to find a way not to take sides, but that's a luxury I don't appear to have. I'm lying on the anvil looking up at myself swinging the hammer.)