K Parker - Pattern

She came out of the inner room, looking sleepy.

'Mudslide,' he tried to say, but he was too out of breath to be able to shape words. Instead, he grabbed her arm and yanked her after him, reaching the doorway just as the mud caved it in.

Too late after all, Poldarn concluded sadly, as the mud swept his feet from under him and he flopped awkwardly onto his side, half falling and half collapsing, like an old shed in a high wind. He pulled Elja down with him, of course, and she screamed at him, bending back the fingers of his left hand where they were closed around her wrist. Now that really was painful, but he didn't have time or breath left to ask her to stop. The current carried him on a yard or so, twisting him round until he was lying on his back, watching the roof timbers getting pulled out of their mortices. He wondered whether he'd live long enough for the pain of having his head crushed by a falling beam to make him scream; he hoped not, since he didn't want to look pathetic in front of Elja.

But it didn't happen like that. Under the pressure of the mud, the walls were forced outwards, and the rafters and joists were pulled free of their sockets on the left-hand side before they cleared those on the right. In consequence, the roof beams folded rather than fell, crashing down diagonally into the mud and spraying it in all directions, but he was too far over to be in their line of collapse. Meanwhile, the wall nearest to him was floating on top of the mud, like a grotesquely oversized raft.

I could get on that, he thought. We could get on that, he corrected himself, and then at least we won't drown in the river of mountainshit. Death was one thing, but the thought of being sloughed over by a huge black slug of sodden ash was too revolting to bear thinking about. So he crawled, waded and flipped his way onto the flattened wall, like a salmon forcing its way upstream, and managed to haul himself over the precisely trimmed log-ends and flop, breathlessly, face down in a pool of his own mud.

A scream reminded Poldarn that he still had duties to attend to. Just in time, he reached out and grabbed Elja's wrist, before the current dragged her too far away. He pulled, and felt something go in her arm; she screamed again, this time from simple, everyday pain, and tried to shake him off. Instinct, he told himself, and pulled as hard as he could, ignoring whatever damage he was doing to her tendons and bones. A ludicrous picture of her hand coming off in his floated into his mind, somehow hopelessly mixed up with a memory of trying to wring a hen's neck, yanking straight when he should have twisted, and getting horribly scratched in the face by the claws of a decapitated chicken. But Elja's hand stayed on and she slopped down beside him on the wall-raft, flapping and wriggling like a landed fish.

'It's all right,' he shouted (but his mouth was full of mud), just as the roof subsided into the black mess, pushing up a wave that nearly submerged them both. He slid his own length down the raft on his belly, his feet ramming her in the neck and ear and almost shunting her off the timbers into the mud. Then-fortuitously-the raft came up against something solid and was jolted sideways, shooting them both back up the way they'd just come. Unfortunately, the impact was enough to wrench the wall-boards apart; the raft disintegrated into its component timbers (he saw Colsceg as a young man, marking each growing beam with his knife so he'd know which tree was to go where when the time came) and he needed both arms to grab on to a floating joist, just to keep his head above the surface. He couldn't look round to see what had become of Elja, but it didn't take much imagination to guess.

What a bloody mess, Poldarn said to himself, and he wondered how they were getting on at Haldersness, whether the rain was cleaning the ash off the fields, whether there were mudslides there, and was everybody dead. It didn't seem to matter; even if he contrived to keep his grip on the log he was hanging on to, sooner or later the current would sweep him off the plateau and he'd end up dead on the plain below, drowned in mud or crushed by house-lumber-if the fall itself didn't kill him. He'd failed, of course; Elja dead in spite of his heroic self-sacrifice, and Boarci clean forgotten about, though in the event he wouldn't have been able to do anything for him. It was almost annoying to be still alive, saved by the happy accident of the angle at which the roof fell, the conveniently handy wall that had served him as a raft-he'd had nothing to do with all that, he hadn't arranged it or done anything the least bit clever, and all that had come of it was that he'd lived a few rather unpleasant minutes longer, minutes he wouldn't have minded missing out on, at that. Pointless and faintly ridiculous, the whole thing.

I'll die, and I'll never know who I was. Maybe I should remember now; after all, what harm can it possibly do? But his memory remained obdurately locked, and he couldn't be bothered to argue with it. Something Boarci had said, about his life flashing before his eyes at the moment of death, flitted into his mind and made him smile. The rain was cold and brutal; he'd have preferred to die in the warm sun, but apparently that wasn't going to happen.

Ciartan, Ciartan. Maybe someone was calling his name, or maybe it was just a voice in his head, such as you sometimes hear in the middle of the night, mindlessly enunciating some word or other. On balance, Poldarn hoped it was the latter. It'd be dreadful if the last thing he saw was some poor fool trying to rescue him and getting himself killed in the process. To have that on his conscience at the final moment would be intolerable, particularly since his mind had gone to such elaborate pains to hide his past sins from him, in case they upset him. Above all, he wanted to die in peace; death and haircuts should both be free from idle and distracting chatter, he told himself, and regretted that he'd never have a chance to use the line in conversation, because he rather liked it.

'Ciartan, you bloody fool. Over here.'

Definitely not a voice in his head; but he couldn't look round to see who it was without loosening his grip on the timber. 'Go away,' he shouted. 'Leave me alone, for God's sake.'

'Fuck you,' replied the voice, and he recognised it: Boarci, his new best friend. Particularly galling, he thought; here he was in his last few moments of life, and his dependent, the man he felt most responsible for, was calling out to him to save him. Everything I do turns to horseshit on me, Poldarn thought sadly, as he realised that his grip was about to weaken. Why couldn't I have died back in the Bohec valley, where I wasn't any bother to anybody?

He tried to tighten his grip, but he had nothing left. The beam slipped out from under his fingers, and he felt the mud rushing into his nose and mouth, too quickly for him even to take a breath.

He was in some kind of dream, though for some reason there weren't any crows. The mud had turned to linen, and the soft pressure on his face was a sheet. He batted it away with the back of his hand and turned his head. Next to him on the pillow was a glorious tangle of golden hair. He caught his breath; and she yawned and rolled over to face him.

'Who are you?' he asked.

She giggled. 'Oh, just some girl you picked up at a dance,' she replied.

(The crazy part of it was, he could distinctly remember her saying that.)

He opened his eyes and immediately started choking.

'He's alive,' someone said. Good, he thought. Improbable, but I'll gladly take their word for it.

Someone was leaning over him. It was still raining, and drops of water dripped off the man's sodden fringe onto his face. 'It's all right,' the man said, 'you're going to be all right.'

'Boarci,' he said.

The man nodded. 'He got to you just in time. Damnedest thing I ever saw, the man must be crazy or something. But he pulled you both out, is the main thing, and no harm done.'