Memory

by K. J. Parker

  The crank-winders shrugged and walked away. Now the core had to be left to dry, while Spenno scampered away to the middle shed, to heat up a large cauldron full of tallow. Once it was hot and soft, he’d start kneading it in his hands into long, flabby strips, to be pressed onto the clay core until he’d built up a layer of tallow as thick as the bell walls. The tallow would be left to set, until it was hard enough to be cut with knives and chisels; then the carvers and lettermen would get to work, gouging out the relief decoration – flowers, birds, scenes from myth and religion, the letters of the dedicatory inscription and so on – before a further thick skin of clay was plastered on top and left to dry. Once the tapered spindle had been carefully withdrawn, the mould would be ready for hauling down to the casting pit, where the tallow would be melted out of the middle, leaving a perfect bell-shaped cavity between the core and the upper clay coating, into which molten bronze could be poured. All very simple, when you stopped and considered it objectively. As with most things, the further away you got, the clearer it became. It was only up close, with splodges of wet clay flying in all directions and Spenno shrieking abuse, that you could be forgiven for wondering what it was all in aid of.

  Tallow-warming and tallow-fondling could be relied on to take two or three hours at least; five, if something cocked up and Spenno was driven to the pages of Concerning Various Matters for guidance. This made it a good time for avoiding the open yard. With Spenno safely out of the way for a while, the other gang masters (who were all scared stiff of Spenno, though they’d none of them admit it) were liable to come out prowling for anybody with nothing to do and march them off to dig clay or smash up scrap or load charcoal. Having been caught this way on a number of occasions, Poldarn knew the drill: find a safe place to hide, and stay there until Spenno started cursing again.

  In Poldarn’s case, the forge was as close as he was likely to get to absolute sanctuary; since, if anybody came round with a press-gang, he could always pretend to be busy forging clappers or brackets or hinges or staples; and since nobody else understood forge-work, there was no one to contradict him. He dragged the outer door to, closed up the shutters, raked out the hearth and laid in a fresh bed of charcoal. A good fire always came in handy sooner or later.

  Paradox: having fled in here to escape from doing work, Poldarn was now bored and looking round for something to do. The part-finished bell-fittings still lay on the anvil, lightly covered with a thin dew of blotchy red rust, but he couldn’t do anything more with them until the bell itself was finished and the final dimensions established. What else? Nothing in particular needed about the place, apart from the insatiable demand for nails. He wasn’t in the mood for drawing down nails; it was tedious and fiddly work, and it reminded him of Haldersness.

  In search of inspiration, he turned over the outskirts of the scrap pile, in case some interesting-shaped hunk of metal he’d previously overlooked snagged his attention. Since he’d done this dozens of times before it was a fairly vain hope, except that just occasionally he’d catch sight of a width or a profile or a taper he hadn’t properly appreciated before, and he’d get an idea. A twisted length of wheel tyre would suddenly look like the leg of a trivet, or a gate-hinge would blossom unexpectedly out of a discarded attempt at a bell-bracket. Well, it was better than spooning clay out of a hole in the ground. Most things were.

  This time, something did catch his eye. He had no idea what it had been in its previous life, before it failed at its unknown purpose and got dumped in the scrap; but it was square-section, as long as his arm, tapered up and down from a bulge about two-thirds down its length, and if he was any judge, it was good hardening steel, not soft iron. Just for devilment’s sake he picked it out, took it over to the grindstone and touched it lightly against the spinning edge. A shower of small, fat yellow sparks scattered around his hands like falling blossom, telling him everything he needed to know.

  Still entirely for devilment, Poldarn pumped the bellows until the fire roared, then poked the sharp point of the bar into the heart of the coals. A dozen or so pulls on the bellows handle: when he drew the bar out, the tip was yellow, sparkling where the steel was burning. Hardening steel all right; he let it cool to bright orange, then dipped it in the slack tub. A small, round cloud of steam drifted up into his face. He clamped the bar in the leg-vice and tested the hardened end with a file, which skated off it like a careless footstep on sheet ice. No cracks that he could see – prime hardening steel, the very best. Far too good to waste. Now all he had to do was think of something to make it into.

  Square-section, tapered, as long as his arm. There was really only one use it could be put to, unless he was prepared to sin against serendipity and waste this fine material on a billhook or a crowbar. Then, just as he’d made up his mind what he was going to make out of it, he suddenly realised what it had previously been – a monster bell-clapper, partly drawn down and then abandoned before swaging, probably because the steel had proved too dense and chewy to work comfortably. He smiled, for some reason. Maybe it was because the memory in the steel was an unhappy one, failure and rejection, and he was about to set all that right.

  He paused before starting the job. Time. If Spenno didn’t run into any snags with his tallow-wrangling, that meant Poldarn would have three hours or thereabouts to work on his pet project today. Without a striker to swing the hammer for him, he’d be hard put to it just to flatten and peen out a thick bar like this one in three hours. That was fine; since it was just a whim, there was no hurry, no schedule to meet. If he didn’t manage to get it flattened before he had to go back to work, so what? At least he could make a start. He dug the bar into the coals, drew more charcoal over the top with the rake, and reached up for the bellows handle.

  Five or so hours later, Poldarn paused, drew the piece of steel out of the fire and let it rest on the iron surround of the hearth to cool. Definitely getting there; although right now, to anybody but himself, it looked like nothing on earth. He’d drawn it down into the shape of a grotesquely elongated diamond, or a snake that had just swallowed a field mouse; then he’d bent it right round, like a horseshoe. In his mind, the final profile was clearly visible, as if he was able to see into the future; but first he had to forge in the bevel. That would force the tight curve outwards into a gentle concave arc, with the bevel on the inside, and that’d be the easy part done. The pause broke the trance he’d fallen into, hypnotised by the repeating pattern – heat, hammer, heat – and he felt as if he’d just woken up out of a prophetic dream, only part of which he could remember. At any rate, he was getting there; at any rate, he hadn’t screwed it up yet. Then he remembered about the bell. Oughtn’t Spenno to have finished kneading the tallow by now? He glanced down at his piece of work; the next stage would need concentration – if he had to quit halfway through he might easily lose sight of the thread, the tentative insight into his own future where he pulled the finished article out of the quench and held it admiringly up to the light, to check for consistency and straightness. Without that thread, it was still just a piece of scrap from the pile. Best to leave off starting the bevel until another day.

  That being so, it’d only be polite to take a stroll out to the yard, just in case they’d begun the laying-on of the tallow without him. It was always a good idea to take a break from what you were doing, once in a while, and spend ten minutes or so on the job you were actually being paid for.

  It was still daylight outside. A large group of men were standing or sitting about, mostly in silence, with gloomy, resigned expressions on their faces. As Poldarn got closer to the mould, he could see a glistening skin covering most of the clay; and Spenno, lounging at ease in a rickety wooden chair, reading a book.

  Shit, he thought, as bad as that. He’d have turned right round and sneaked back to the forge, except that a dozen or so of the sad loafers had seen him now, and it was never wise to be too obvious when you were skiving. So instead, he amused himself by trying to figure out how far the job had advanced
, and what the problem was.

  The tallow layer was about half-done, as far as he could judge. A cursory inspection made the nature of the disaster only too obvious: the clay of the core hadn’t dried through properly when Spenno had started applying the tallow, and a large chunk the size and shape of a horse’s head had broken away and fallen off. In order to put it back they’d have to strip off the tallow that had already been put on; but any attempt at doing that would probably damage the core further. Besides, if the core was breaking up, it was probably riddled with little cracks and flaws, so that when the melted bronze was poured in, there was every chance it’d disintegrate, and the yard would be flooded with very hot runny metal, as quick and antisocial as molten lava from a volcano.

  Wonderful. Unless there was something in the book that Spenno was reading, Poldarn couldn’t see any way of salvaging the core; all they could do would be to cut their losses by junking the whole thing and beginning again with a new oak pole and a mountain of fresh clay. Patching up a dodgy mould was never worth the risk. Poldarn squatted down on a small pile of logs and cupped his chin in his hands. No wonder everybody looked so miserable. Three days’ hard work, all wasted.

  The crack that disrupted his train of thought proved to be Spenno closing the book with a snap. ‘All right,’ he called out, in a voice from which all anger had been leached out, ‘tear the bloody thing down, we’ll start again in the morning.’ Sighs, some muttering, and half a dozen men got to their feet, fetched sledgehammers, and started working out their feelings on the failed core. For flawed, shaken, half-dry clay it took a lot of breaking up. That wasn’t helping anything.

  Move along, Poldarn thought, nothing to see here. Since there wasn’t really anywhere else to go, he wandered back to his horrible little turf-walled shack and lay down on the pile of blankets. Quite out of the blue, he realised how tired he was and closed his eyes.

  ‘So that’s why they call your lot blacksmiths,’ a voice said.

  He sat up and opened his eyes. He must have been asleep for a while, because it was now pitch dark outside. ‘Really?’ he said groping in the dark for his hand-axe. ‘Why’s that, then?’

  ‘You obviously haven’t seen your reflection,’ said the voice. ‘Your hands and face. Black as a crow. Are you really going to go to sleep like that, without washing?’

  He found the axe and closed his fingers round the shaft. ‘Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my house?’ he demanded.

  ‘House.’ Clearly he’d said something amusing. ‘I like that. I’ve seen snugger field latrines. Come on, don’t you recognise me?’

  Now that he mentioned it, yes. ‘Aciava,’ he said.

  ‘Thought you’d get there in the end. Well,’ Aciava went on, ‘a right cow you people’ve made of our bell. Just as well for us there’s a penalty clause in the contract to cover late delivery. We can sue you, it’ll be something to do while we’re waiting.’

  Poldarn blinked in surprise. ‘Your bell?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right. Quarter paid in advance, too.’

  ‘I thought you worked for a false-tooth outfit.’

  Aciava clicked his tongue. ‘Dental engineers, please,’ he said. ‘And no, that’s not who I meant. I was talking in my capacity as chief lay deacon for the united congregations of Falcata. We’re going to be bitterly disappointed, of course.’

  Poldarn thought for a moment. ‘This congregation of yours,’ he said. ‘Whose idea was it to order a bell in the first place?’

  ‘Mine.’ Poldarn could practically hear the grin on Aciava’s face. ‘There’s nothing quite so classy as the mellow sound of a good bell, summoning the faithful to prayer on a warm summer evening. Of course, I spend most of my time on the road so I wouldn’t be there to hear it very often, but it’d be wonderful just knowing it was there.’

  ‘You ordered it,’ Poldarn said. ‘You only did it because you knew I work here.’

  Aciava sighed. ‘I guess I’ve been found out,’ he said. ‘And there I was, preferring to do good by stealth. It was the least I could do for an old pal, I reckoned, to make sure there’d be work in hand so they’d be able to keep paying you, even if you do spend most of your time on projects of your own. Besides, it’s the congregation’s money, not mine.’

  Poldarn could feel the anger; it was almost objective, as though he was watching it build up from a distance. ‘Like hell you were,’ he said. ‘It’s some stupid game of yours, so you can make me do what you want. In fact, you probably did something to bugger up the mould, so we’d be late and you can sue us and put us out of business.’

  ‘Hardly.’ Aciava sounded highly amused. ‘Even if I was that warped, how do you suggest I managed to persuade your pattern-maker friend – you know, the nutcase who yells all the time – to start putting the wax on before the clay was dry? No, that was just an unfortunate bonus.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yes, really.’ The voice was extremely close; if only Poldarn could pin it down exactly. But he suspected that Aciava was moving quietly about. ‘You know the rule: never assume malice when the facts are consistent with mere stupidity. The nutcase was in too much of a rush, and he got it wrong. I didn’t have to do a thing.’

  Over there, close by the door. Poldarn was almost ready to risk lashing out into the darkness; a few more words, and he’d be practically certain. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘just exactly why are you doing this? What’re you up to?’

  No answer. Poldarn breathed out and listened. Experience and intuition told him there was nobody there. Aciava must’ve sneaked out through the doorway. Sensible behaviour on his part, Poldarn decided, since otherwise (he realised with a certain degree of horror) he’d have taken a swing at him with the axe. Not good; Aciava’s prudent retreat suggested that he knew more about the way Poldarn’s mind worked than he did himself. The implications of that weren’t pleasant at all.

  ‘Maybe I just dreamed all that,’ he said aloud. (But he didn’t believe it. No crow. Or had there been a crow, but it’d been too dark to see it? Query: does a crow in a dream count if it’s not visible?)

  In Spenno’s personal opinion, it was the clay. According to Bergis, it was all Spenno’s fault for not letting the core dry properly. Banspati the foreman reckoned it had to be the damp weather, while Malla Ancola blamed the sap in the green pole Spenno had used as a pivot for the pattern. Several dozen other explanations were available, if you didn’t get out of the way quickly enough. For his own part, Poldarn couldn’t make up his mind between sabotage and plain ordinary bad luck.

  Not that he cared all that much. Aciava’s threats (if he hadn’t dreamed them) of penalty clauses and lawsuits were all very well, but the fact was that they still had two weeks before the delivery date stipulated in the contract, so that was all right. As for wasted materials, there was only the clay, which hadn’t actually cost them anything. A day’s lost production was neither here nor there in an outfit as thoroughly disorganised as this. If pressed, he’d have opted for bad luck: always plenty of it about, and much easier to believe in. Belief is everything in such matters.

  It meant, of course, another long day digging clay, followed by an even longer day ignoring Spenno’s hysterical outbursts – except that they were comforting, since they implied that, this time, everything was going perfectly. That evening, Spenno melted out the tallow and declared the mould fit for use. They’d melt the metal overnight and be ready to pour shortly before dawn.

  Attitudes differed where the night before a pour was concerned. Some of the foundry crew reckoned it was unlucky to go to bed, and preferred to sit up and watch the melt; others tried to get some sleep, though the raucous noises from the general direction of the furnace meant that this was a fairly vain hope. Usually Poldarn belonged to the trying-to-get-some-sleep faction, but this time, for some reason, he decided to head over to the fire for an hour or so.

  The furnace crew had been there for quite some time when he got there, and the cider jug had passed round the
circle once or twice, with the result that there were more people sleeping by the fire than in the camp. The dozen or so who were still awake were mostly chatting amiably while some old bloke who Poldarn recognised but couldn’t quite place droned methodically through a limited repertoire of popular ballads. Most of them were concerned with the activities of sword-monks and innkeepers’ daughters and he’d heard all of them before; mixed in with these in a fairly indiscriminate fashion were a few old hymns, and at least three versions of Poldarn’s personal favourite, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree. Since several of the tunes were practically interchangeable, the old man occasionally lost track of what he was singing, so that something that started out as a hymn ended up with the unexpected return of the innkeeper, and vice versa. The result could be disconcerting if you were only giving the performance part of your attention, but Poldarn felt that several items from both genres were, like fortified wine, significantly improved by the blending.

  ‘If you ask me,’ said the man on his left (Poldarn hadn’t), ‘this whole country’s going to hell in a handcart. I mean, Tazencius, who the fuck is he, anyhow? Never even heard of him a few years ago, and now he’s running the whole bloody Empire. And if they think we’ve seen the last of them raiders, they’re kidding themselves. You hear them talk, you’d think we’d killed off the whole bloody lot of ’em, instead of just a couple hundred or so. I mean, what’s that? Drop in the ocean. Plenty more where they came from. Thousands. Millions, even. And we still don’t know bugger-all about them. Course, what they should be doing—’

  ‘Actually,’ Poldarn lied, ‘there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’ It was really just a way of shutting him up, easier and less open to misconstruction than cutting his throat and pitching his body into the fire. ‘Someone was telling me the other day that Feron Amathy—’