Memory

by K. J. Parker

  And, since it appeared that he was in a contemplative mood and thinking about old times: what if Gain Aciava had been telling the truth . . .?

  That old question again. It was beginning to lose its meaning, like a word endlessly repeated until it became a mere sound. Besides, Poldarn knew the answer, and entirely unhelpful it was, too: Some of what Gain Aciava told me was almost certainly true.

  But that was only a starting point. A better question was: What did Gain Aciava want from me? It had to be something to do with Copis; because she was a celebrity now, a household name – the mad woman, the crazy bitch. (And how had she got that way?) But he couldn’t bring himself to believe in any of that. Not her style, madness; she’d stood and watched him kill people – soldiers, two successive gods-in-the-cart – and the only aspect of it that had seemed to bother her was the inconvenience, the interference with her plans. He’d seen her angry, but that was something else entirely. Even at Deymeson, she’d been entirely rational when she’d tried to kill him.

  If their child was still alive, he’d be about three years old now. He or she.

  So what use would Poldarn be to Gain Aciava in some matter relating to Copis? To use against her, presumably, since she was a public enemy and therefore liable to be worth money, or money’s worth. But in what way? She felt quite strongly about him, for sure, but Aciava seemed to know all about the terms on which they’d parted, so it wasn’t likely that his role was bait for a trap (unless she hated him enough to take foolish risks to get at him, which he doubted). It’d help, of course, if he knew what she was really playing at.

  Then again, it was possible that the fall of Deymeson and the ruin of the order had unhinged Copis’s mind. She must have believed in it, loved it, to do what she’d done with him, to him, on its behalf. He could almost believe that, until he remembered her eyes. (Cold, bright, always full of life, always devoid of feeling; he couldn’t see her going mad for the fall of the order, just as he couldn’t see her dying for it. Living for it, yes, even if her life had become an intolerable burden. But Copis wasn’t the dying sort.)

  A dog was peering at Poldarn through the spokes of the cartwheel, as if he was some strange new animal never hitherto seen in those parts. He reached about for a stone to throw at it, but couldn’t find one.

  The sensible thing, of course, would be to find Gain Aciava and ask him. Quite likely he’d only get lies or evasions, but any kind of data was better than none at all. But that was out of the question – all leave cancelled, nobody to leave the premises without written permission, deserters hunted down without mercy. Maybe Poldarn could have written Aciava a letter, if he had any idea where to send it and some way of getting it out past the brigadier’s soldiers. Instead, all he could do was wait and see what snippets of information he could scrounge out of his own dreams. Hardly scientific. Poldarn stretched out his legs as far as they’d go, closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep; and– to his intense disgust upon waking – dreamed an entirely unhelpful dream about haymaking at Haldersness when he’d been seven.

  The technical debate between the armoury man, Galand Dev, and Spenno the pattern-maker was rapidly evolving into a full-scale religious war. The point of dogma at issue was whether the tubes should be cast pointing up or down. Not surprisingly, Spenno espoused the orthodox view. He declared that the tubes should be cast just like a bell, with the open end pointing downwards. Galand Dev maintained that the solid core of the mould, which would create the hollow inside the tube, should hang from the top of the mould rather than stand up inside it, which meant casting the tubes with the open end pointing upwards; he reckoned that if they used the traditional method of melting out tallow to leave a gap for the bronze to flow into, the core might shift position during the burn-out, which would result in a tube whose hole wasn’t straight down the middle. His version did away with tallow altogether, and relied on four pins to hold the core suspended (‘dangling,’ Spenno declared scathingly, ‘like an old man’s balls’) in the exact centre of a hollow clay tube.

  As clashes of conflicting faiths went, it was rather more logical and comprehensible than, say, the cause of the devastating schism that had torn the Empire apart during the reign of Nikaa the Third. That conflict had stemmed from the refusal of the Congregationalists to admit that two hundred years earlier a monk had miscalculated the date of a minor irregular festival, in spite of the claims of the Revisionists that a divine messenger with the wings of an eagle and the head of a lion had appeared to their leader in a vision and told him the shelf and docket number in the archives of the file in which the incriminating documents were stored.

  What the core debate lacked in picturesque embellishment, however, it amply made up for in passion and intractability. Spenno immediately retaliated with a whole decalogue of concerns about porosity, stress fractures and crystalline structure, all supported by citations from Concerning Various Matters. When Galand Dev refused to accept the infallibility of Spenno’s adored book, the pattern-maker flew into such a terrible rage that only Galand Dev’s extraordinary reflexes saved him from being stabbed with the sharp ends of a pair of heavy brass calipers. Thereafter, the two opposing factions communicated strictly in writing, with two teams of messengers being kept busy carrying furiously scribbled notes backwards and forwards between Galand Dev in the pattern office and Spenno’s headquarters in the boiler-shed loft. Whether either Galand or Spenno managed to spare time from writing their own notes to read each other’s was a moot point; unless they could read and write at the same time, it was hard to see how it could have been done.

  (‘Plain fact is,’ Banspati muttered gloomily, as the foundrymen crowded round the yard fire on the third evening of the debate, ‘neither of them’s got a fucking clue. You go trying to cast a tube that thick with a hole down the middle, you’ll get the metal at the edges cooling faster’n the metal in the middle, and the whole bloody lot’ll crack like ice at midday. If you ask me, it just can’t be done and that’s that; which means the best thing to do is cast one arse-up and one arse-down; and when they both fall to bits soon as look at ’em, maybe all the government bastards’ll piss off back to Torcea and let us get on with some work.’)

  When the argument had been raging for five days and still showed no sign of calming down, almost the entire foundry crew had divided, in roughly equal proportions, into factions supporting one or other of the two rival doctrines. In most cases, adherence to a faction had precious little to do with the merits of arse-up or arse-down, and was rather more closely concerned with whether the man in question hated the government more than he hated Spenno. Poldarn, who had mixed feelings about both sides, did his best to steer clear of the subject every time it came up in conversation; but since there was nothing for the men to do all day except talk and nothing else that anyone wanted to talk about, he didn’t really have any choice. Rather than make the effort to follow technical arguments he couldn’t really understand, he fell into the habit of agreeing with whoever he was talking to and hoped nobody would notice how quickly his loyalties tended to change.

  In the event, Galand Dev won the argument – up to a point – by adopting a wider fame of reference, or cheating. When Brigadier Muno complained to him that time was getting on with nothing he could put in his dispatches that the people back in Torcea would want to read, Dev replied that there really wasn’t anything to argue about – he was right and Spenno was wrong – but that the workers weren’t prepared to believe him without a compelling reason to do so. Muno nodded, and said that compelling reasons were easy. Then he sent for Banspati and told him that, for security reasons, he was putting the Virtue Triumphant out of bounds; at least, he added meaningfully, until such time as Spenno and Galand Dev could agree on how they were going to do the job, and something was actually achieved.

  Banspati didn’t like that one bit. True, the Virtue had officially been off limits from the start, but nobody had taken the prohibition seriously, figuring that nobody, not even a government adminis
trator, could be that cruel and unfeeling. Quite apart from the beer, the Virtue housed a dozen or so tired-looking, sad-eyed women whose job was to part the foundrymen from their money on a regular basis. As the foundrymen themselves used to say, they weren’t much but they were a damn sight better than nothing, and therefore essential to the smooth running of the foundry. Muno’s prohibition, Banspati knew without having to be told, was likely to prove considerably more explosive than anything the alchemists of Morevich ever brewed up in one of their little clay pots. After a stunned silence, therefore, he promised Muno that he’d talk to Spenno right away and see if there wasn’t some middle ground that might be acceptable to both parties.

  Whatever he said to Spenno, for three quarters of an hour up in the boiler-house loft while the foundry crew milled about angrily in the yard below, it probably didn’t have much to do with porosity, stress fractures or crystalline structure, but it did the trick. Spenno, looking suitably chastened and watched in furious silence by his assembled colleagues, scuttled down from his loft and across the yard towards Galand Dev’s command post in the drawing office. Ten minutes later, the two men appeared at the door and announced that they’d got it all figured out, and work on the first prototype would start at dawn the next day. Meanwhile, anybody who cared to celebrate the reconciliation with a brief visit to the Virtue was free to do so, provided that they were in a fit state for work come morning.

  Very soon afterwards, the yard was deserted. Poldarn, for his part, couldn’t be bothered to go; instead, he crossed over to the forge and spent the rest of the day by the fire, drawing down, splitting, shaping and jumping up. By evening, his strip of odd-looking steel had taken on a definite and unique shape; like a leaping dolphin with a broad, splayed tail (where the upper and lower horns of the hand-guard arched round until they almost touched). He hardened and tempered the steel with an unexpected degree of trepidation; but for once, everything went right, and the piece that emerged from the barrel of burning olive oil was unmistakably a Raider backsabre. It wasn’t, Poldarn suspected, entirely perfect, but that was only to be expected of his first attempt at making such a thing, done entirely from memory. As he took a break from drawfiling out the hammer marks and speckles of forged-in firescale, it occurred to him to wonder, for the first time, what he’d actually made the thing for. If he needed to chop kindling he already had a perfectly good hand-axe. And he wasn’t about to kill anybody – was he?

  Chapter Six

  They faced each other down a thin steel road; two circles, separated by the smallest possible distance. The draw had been inconclusive; there hadn’t been the smallest fraction of a second between them, because both of them had eliminated time in the moment (which doesn’t exist in religion) between the impulse and the result; and all that had come of it was an awkward collision of flats, nothing achieved either way. From there they’d both immediately fallen back into their own circles, swords in the first guard, their minds in their eyes, as the precept of religion puts it, both waiting for the other to move first. And since they were identical in every respect (having attained religion, at least as far as the third grade, and thereby eliminated themselves except as copies, cast from the same pattern in the same mould) there was no way that either of them was going to make that first move, in the same way that a shadow can’t pre-empt the body that casts it.

  Father Tutor was drumming his fingers on the desk, trying to annoy them (one or both, didn’t matter), break their concentration, needle them into making a mistake. Behind him, the rest of the class sat completely still – it was perfectly legitimate for Father Tutor to distract the candidates, but God help a student who sneezed or scratched an itch while the bout was in progress. Quite right, too; in the school at Deymeson, it was traditional that exactly half of the students in each grade after Grade Three moved up a class at the end of the year. The other half, those students who failed the practical, were buried in the yard behind the junior refectory, unless their families were prepared to pay the cost of shipping them home—

  He caught his breath; was that a movement, or the different kind of stillness that comes before movement (as waves ripple out in all directions when a stone falls in water, so a movement ripples backwards and forwards in time, the perceived outcome and the perceived anticipation) or was he just imagining things? The other face, his mirror image, was watching him in exactly the same way as he was watching the other face. Had his equal-and-opposite imagined that he’d seen the anticipation of movement too? That’d be right. Combat is a mirror (precept for the day, a couple of terms back); also, combat in religion is a battle between two shadows (presumably meaning roughly the same thing, but with added mysticism).

  —Which was why friendships were rare among the students at Deymeson; difficult to get attached to someone when it was quite possible – probable, even, given Father Tutor’s macabre sense of humour – that you’d wind up meeting your best friend on the thin steel road, knowing that one of you wouldn’t be back after the summer recess. Unfortunate; but here they both were, the very best of friends, so close it was hard to tell them apart, so close that even the draw had failed to separate them. There hadn’t been time to apologise, to say No hard feelings, if somebody’s got to get through over my dead body I’d rather it was you. That shouldn’t have needed saying, of course, not between friends; but apparently it did, and it hadn’t been.

  Father Tutor yawned loudly; and that wasn’t a legitimate examination tactic, that was just plain rude. Something as out of the ordinary as this, a year-end practical that lasted longer than a sneeze, you’d have thought he’d be pleased, not bored.

  Maybe he’ll stop the fight. No way of proving it, but he was sure the idea had crossed both their minds simultaneously; followed immediately by Maybe we can stop the fight; if we both sheaths our swords together, now—

  He felt the impulse tug at his wrists, but he defied it. Yes, he knew his friend, he knew his friend wanted to end the fight more than anything in the world. But he knew also that his friend was thinking exactly the same thing as he was: Bloody stupid I’d look, if I put up and he doesn’t; and then I’d be dead, and that bastard, that traitor who said he was my friend, he’d still be alive and through to next grade, and that’d make him better than me—

  In religion, there is no time, there is no space, because the sword doesn’t move from scabbard to flesh and it takes no time getting there. Between the impulse and the result no time, no space, therefore in religion nobody and nothing can exist.

  ‘Very good,’ Father Tutor called out, in a voice that suggested he didn’t think it was very good at all. ‘On the count of three, you will both step back three paces and put up your swords; and then we’d better start again from the beginning, see if we can’t do better next time. One, two . . .’

  (And both of them thought: on three the practical will be over, and we’ll have to do it again; another draw, as bad as having to die twice. That gives us this little bit of time, between two and three, to get this mess cleared up.)

  Just before Father Tutor could say the word, both of them moved. Both stepped forward, two circles intersecting (like the ripples from two stones thrown simultaneously into water) and once again the swords met in mid-air, at the point where the shadow joins the body, and so nothing was achieved, nothing happened—

  ‘Three,’ Father Tutor said. ‘Well,’ he added, as they stepped back and sheathed their swords with a click, ‘that was a bit of a shambles, wasn’t it?’

  He couldn’t help it, he was shaking all over. Partly it was simply fear, the reaction to the extremes of danger and concentration. Partly though it was shame, and abhorrence; because at this moment in time there was only enough room in the world for one of them, and yet both of them were still there, illegally sharing it, like a shadow or a mirror-image being soaked up into the body that cast it. Two circles superimposed, becoming one.

  That’s not supposed to happen. And if it does – Not quite sure about the details, but isn’t tha
t supposed to mean something really bad is on the way, like the end of the world, Poldarn’s second coming, something like that?

  Maybe the same thought had just occurred to Father Tutor, because he was looking very grave all of a sudden, with possibly just a hint of why-did-it-have-to-happen-in-my-class.

  ‘Match drawn,’ said Father Tutor quietly. ‘Both pass. Both through to the next grade.’

  A moment when nothing happened (religion); then everybody in the building started talking at once—

  ‘You,’ said a voice in his ear. ‘Wake up, now.’

  Bloody hell, Poldarn thought, not again. Why can’t I ever get a full night’s sleep?

  ‘Fuck you,’ he muttered, and opened his eyes. Banspati– no, not this time. Banspati was there, but he was standing back looking very worried and unhappy (rather like Father Tutor in the dream). The man who’d woken him up was that soldier, Brigadier Muno. A pity, Poldarn reflected bitterly, that I just told him to fuck himself.

  ‘On your feet,’ Brigadier Muno growled at him, and his big cheerful face wasn’t quite as friendly as usual. ‘Get your boots on and follow me.’

  Not good; not good at all. Poldarn didn’t know all that much about the Imperial regular army, but he had an idea he’d read or heard somewhere that the top brass don’t usually come round waking you up and bringing you breakfast in bed. In the background, Banspati was glowering at him with a mixture of hatred and sympathy; you’re for it this time, and thanks to you, so am I . . .

  Typical: when you’re flustered and in a hurry, your feet won’t fit in your boots. Poldarn managed to get them on somehow, though they really didn’t want to go; also he had pins and needles in his left foot, which really didn’t help matters. Was it worth telling the brigadier he was sorry for saying ‘Fuck you’; or would that only make it worse? Probably best not to say anything, he decided, knowing that whatever he did, he’d be bound to get it wrong.