by K. J. Parker
As far as Poldarn was concerned he was delighted to see the back of Silsny, even though he was the first person Poldarn could remember who actually had cause to be grateful for having met him; perhaps for that reason. For the next few days he had to put up with an insufferable amount of curiosity from everybody he met – what had all that been in aid of, had he really saved the general’s life or was it mistaken identity, and what exactly had he said to the great man, all alone out there in the yard with nobody listening – which he dealt with by pretending to be deaf. Fortunately, there were plenty of other issues to occupy people’s minds, and so the matter drifted and faded, with no worse effects for Poldarn himself than a useful reputation for being a miserable bastard.
The tremendous distraction was the sudden and unexpected announcement by Spenno and Galand Dev of their startling new plan of campaign. Since nothing could induce them to agree on which way up the core was to be, they’d decided to do without a core altogether. Instead, they declared, they were going to cast the tubes as solid bronze cylinders, and make the holes down the middle by drilling.
This was, of course, insane; and the foundrymen lost no time in pointing it out. In order to drill a hole down a solid lump of bronze that size, they said, you’d need to build a special lathe. Not just an ordinary lathe: it’d need to be the biggest, strongest, most precise lathe ever built. And then there were the cranes, gantries, steadies – in fact, you’d need to build a special shop for the bloody thing if you were going to do it properly; and even if it could be done at all, which was pretty unlikely, you’d be asking a hell of lot to have it up and running within a year, more like eighteen months. The headstock alone—
Spenno and Galand Dev replied that they’d thought of that. Furthermore, there were plans and detailed directions for building just such a lathe in Spenno’s estimable book, Concerning Various Matters, which, if followed to the letter, would answer their needs perfectly. Brigadier Muno (they went on) had already sent to Torcea for specialist engineers who’d do the skilled work; while they were waiting for them to arrive, the foundry crew could get on with building the shed which, as they’d correctly assumed, would be needed to house the new machinery. By the time the engineers reached Dui Chirra, the Imperial lumber-yards at Sirupat should already have provided the necessary raw materials, including the enormous blocks of the very finest seasoned oak from which the headstock, tailstock and ways were to be fashioned. Nor, they added, would the blacksmith’s shop be idle during this time: plans and sketches for the racks, pinions, cranks, spindles, bearings, lead screws and other necessary hardware would be ready in the morning, by which time bloom iron and steel billets would be at hand from Falcata. The time allocated for getting the lathe built and functional (Galand Dev added, with a broad grin) was thirty days.
Did anybody have a problem with that?
In the event, Galand Dev’s time estimate proved to be hopelessly inaccurate. Instead of thirty days, the job was done in two weeks. It wasn’t a pleasant time at Dui Chirra. Four overlapping shifts worked day and night, so arranged that there was no down time at all – when it was your turn to go to bed, you passed your hammer or your plane to the man standing waiting behind you, who carried on without missing a stroke. The specialist engineers turned out to be foreigners from Morevich; they were being paid for the job rather than by the day or the week, and they were clearly in a hurry to get finished and away from the filthy cold and wet as quickly as they possibly could. Most of the major components had been partly shaped in Sirupat, where they had huge water-powered sawmills that could cut a ten-foot length of thirty-by-forty heart of oak to within the thickness of a scribed line. Inside every shed and house in the compound, the air was thick and brown with sawdust – apart from in the forge, where the dust was black instead of brown and where Poldarn slept on the floor when he wasn’t working, so tired that even the crashing of the three hundredweight trip-hammer that Galand Dev had had sent down from the Torcea arsenal wasn’t enough to keep him awake. (It took twelve men to work the windlass, and when it dropped they could feel the ground shake right across the yard; it’d had to come in through the smithy wall since the doors were far too narrow, and there hadn’t been time to make good or even rig a canvas sheet over the hole. But the extra ventilation turned out to be a life-saver, when the wind changed and blew the smoke from the enormous fire back into the shop.)
There came a moment when the trip-hammer fell and nobody winched it up again; when the fire was allowed to die down and go out. There was still work to be done – bolts to shank, a long thread to recut so it would turn freely, a cracked brace to weld – but it could wait, because the job was very nearly finished. (No job is ever finished; see the precept of religion that states that there is no end and no beginning, only the time that separates them.) The lathe was as nearly ready as it’d ever be, but nobody quite had the courage to throw the brake and set it running.
Poldarn celebrated the sudden outbreak of silence in the forge by sitting down hard against the wall, closing his eyes and going straight to sleep. When he woke up an unspecified time later, the building at first seemed empty; but then he heard what sounded like a soft, expressionless chanting, like some religious ceremony: an early-morning litany performed by sleepy monks. But it couldn’t be that, so he climbed to his feet (pins and needles in his feet and hands) and staggered in the direction the noise was coming from.
The source of the chanting turned out to be Spenno. He was sitting on the big anvil with his precious book open on his knees, swearing in his sleep. Poldarn remembered what that meant, and grinned; if Spenno was cursing a blue streak, all was right with the world. The complex mechanism that moved the stars and the planets about their axis was balanced, oiled and running true; soon the pinions would engage with their ratchets and rotate the dial on which day was painted light blue with a golden sun, night dark blue with silver stars (cut out of sheet iron with heavy shears and riveted in place). The entire movement and escapement of the world was in order, and therefore Spenno could afford to sleep, still mumbling his mechanical obscenities (like charms to scare away evil spirits). Poldarn grinned – and then he caught sight of the book, open and unguarded.
If, as alleged, Galand Dev had been allowed to study the lathe plans set out in Concerning Various Matters, he was the only mortal in living memory apart from Spenno himself who’d seen inside the book and lived to tell the tale. As far as Spenno was concerned, the matter was perfectly simple. If anybody even tried to sneak a look at the book without his permission (which would never be granted), he’d kill them. He’d told the foundrymen so on many occasions, and they believed him.
And here it was, the repository of all known wisdom – one or two sceptics had cast doubts on its infallibility in the past, but not any more, not after the matter of the lathe plans – left negligently open for anybody to see, while its custodian nodded, snored and swore into space. It was tempting; very tempting indeed. Just a quick glance, not even a whole page, just to get a taste of it. Couldn’t do any harm, and Spenno’d never know. The words would still be there on the page, undamaged by the intrusion.
Poldarn crept forward, then hesitated; and as he paused, Spenno opened both eyes, stared at him for a moment, mumbled ‘Fucking arseholes’, closed his eyes and snorted like a pig. Dead to the world.
Even so. The plain fact was, Spenno was a brilliant but completely unstable individual, who happened to be obsessive about this book of his; if he did wake up for real while Poldarn was violating its pages, there’d be trouble for sure, quite possibly violence. Just for a sneaked glimpse of some mouldy old book, more than likely written in a language he didn’t even understand. Not worth it.
But by this time Poldarn was so close that he could feel the soft draught from Spenno’s foul-mouthed mumblings– too late to be sensible, he told himself cheerfully, what a pity, never mind. He craned his neck, and saw—
—If any kind of glass vessel gets broken, this is how to mend it. Take ashes, ca
refully sifted, and soak them in water. Fill the broken vessel with them, and place in the sun to dry. Fit the broken bits together, keeping the join clean of dirt and grit. Then take some blue glass, the kind that melts easily—
Ultimate wisdom, Poldarn thought. Fine. Handy to know, of course, but hardly worth risking a jawful of broken teeth for. Did ultimate wisdom really cater for cheapskates, the sort of miserable tight buggers who’d bother patching up a broken bottle rather than buying a new one? Even if the gods were omniscient, could they be bothered to remember something like that?
He frowned. Maybe it was just a book, after all, and maybe Spenno was so uptight about it because he was afraid that if other people read all the smart stuff in it, he wouldn’t be the cleverest any more. Rather more likely (just as it was rather more likely that rain was moisture sucked up into the sky by the heat of the sun and then precipitated by mountains, rather than being the gods pissing through colanders; but if you have faith, you know better than to be fooled by the speciously probable). Even so.
Even so, Poldarn realised; the pins and needles in his feet were now so bad that he wasn’t going anywhere for several minutes at least. In which case, if Spenno woke up he was going to be in deep trouble anyway, caught standing over the sleeping pattern-maker with his nose inches from the holy pages, whether he was actually reading the confounded thing or not. In which case, there was no point in not reading it, surely?
All very true; but Poldarn didn’t really want to know how to mend broken bottles, so he cautiously reached out a forefinger and slid his fingernail under the edge of the page, lifting it until it turned and fell. At that Spenno squirmed in his seat and muttered something extremely vulgar, even by his standards; a scary moment, but he didn’t wake up. Still safe, then, so far.
To make a Poldarn’s Flute, such as the Rai and Chinly people of Morevich used to employ in war, first cast a solid round bar of good-quality bronze, of the sort used in bell-founding (see below, under bells). Mount the bar in a Morevish lathe (see below, under lathes) and bore out the hole while simultaneously turning down the exterior until it’s smooth and even. To make the pins around which the flute pivots, to enable it to be aimed accurately, take a thick wheel tyre and swage the pins by folding a hand’s breadth of the tyre into a cylinder on each side; then heat the tyre, slide it over the tube, and shrink it in place firmly by cooling.
And that, as Asburn used to say, is all there is to it. Now that sounded rather more like a god talking, because to a god, it’d be as simple as that – cast a thick bar, drill a hole in it, job done. He wasn’t in the least surprised to learn that all this had been done before (in Morevich, where his people originally came from; where else?) because if he’d learned anything over the last year or so, it was that nothing was ever invented or discovered, only remembered – by men or gods who’d had the misfortune to lose their memories for a time. And if that wasn’t a precept of religion, it damn well ought to have been.
Then he wondered: had that page been there in the book a month ago, or this time last year? Or had it grown somehow, like the new season’s leaves, once the book had realised that the information would be required at some point? He considered the book: big, fat thing, nobody could possibly have read it from cover to cover, not in a single lifetime. So nobody could know for sure whether those pages had always been there (like his own memories, grudgingly spoon-fed him in dreams; had they always been there in his mind, or was someone writing them in from scratch while he was asleep? And had Gain Aciava been telling the truth, really?)
‘Bastards,’ Spenno grunted. Poldarn had to concede that he might have a point there.
Well: if the book (standing, of course, for his own lost memories – even Poldarn could understand symbolism when it was stuffed remorselessly down his throat) kept making up new stuff as it went along – and the new stuff was true, as true as anything else – then it simply wasn’t fair. There was no point running away from memory, if it wasn’t just behind you but quite possibly all around you and in front of you as well. You could run as hard as you could manage and not be running away at all; you could be heading straight for it, and never know until it was too late.
That wasn’t a pleasant thought, and Poldarn was tempted to dismiss it as unproven or wildly unlikely (but no more unlikely than Spenno’s bloody book just happening to contain a full set of detailed instructions for building these Poldarn Tubes that Muno Silsny and his clever engineers in Torcea had only just invented). The only thing he could think of doing was to have another look at the book and see what else it chose to show him. Either he’d catch it out in the act of being written, or he could forget all about this nonsense and get some more sleep before they finally plucked their courage up and tried out the lathe.
Just as tentatively as the last time, he toppled over a page. He saw—
To divert the course of a lava flow from an active volcano, first procure a number of steel-tipped drills, at least ten feet long and two inches in diameter—
Poldarn scowled. The bloody thing was playing games with him. He tried another page.
The flight of the stones thrown from a Poldarn’s Flute can be controlled by raising or lowering the mouth of the flute, causing the stone to fly high or low; the higher it’s thrown, within certain limits, the further it will travel—
Skip a paragraph or so and continue—
An alternative is to substitute for the stone a stoutly made leather bag filled with small rocks, metal scrap, potsherds &c. When discharged at short range, the bag will burst almost immediately on leaving the tube, scattering its contents over a wide area at tremendous speed. Each flying stone, potsherd or metal fragment will become a lethal weapon, making this technique especially suitable for use against closely packed enemy infantry.
Nasty little book, Poldarn decided. He skipped a dozen or so pages, and read—
This effect draws its name from an incident in the myth of Poldarn, patron god of Morevich. According to legend, after playing his pipes which bring death to all who hear them, Poldarn will—
‘Shit,’ grumbled Spenno amiably, stretching his arms and legs and rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. ‘Shit, fuck and piss in a bucket. Fuck—’
This time he was waking up, for sure. Pins and needles or no pins and needles, Poldarn hopped backwards five paces in a straight line, bumped into the small two-horned anvil, sat down on it and pretended to be trying to tease a splinter out of the ball of his thumb. Just in time—
‘Oh,’ Spenno said, opening his eyes. ‘Good heavens. Don’t tell me I fell asleep.’
He shifted, and the book slid off his lap and onto the floor, closing itself and losing its place. (Which was very considerate of it, Poldarn thought, to wipe out all memory of his intrusion, though arguably rather disloyal to its master.) ‘Where is everybody?’ Spenno asked.
‘Resting,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Lathe’s almost finished, apparently. In fact, you’d better be getting over there right now, or you’ll miss the first try-out.’
Spenno made a loud squawking noise, scrabbled on the floor for his book, jumped up and ran. Poldarn counted to ten, to give him time to get clear, then followed, limping.
The sun had come out while he’d been stuck in the forge. (How long had it been since he’d left the building? He couldn’t remember. The pools of water that had stood in the yard since the rains began had dwindled into small reservations of black mud. Soon it’d be high Tulice summer (to which, the old lags assured him, the rainy season was vastly preferable): ground-splitting, skin-peeling heat, just the weather for tending the hellburning furnaces they were planning on building to melt the enormous quantities of bronze they’d be needing for the tubes. Under normal circumstances, they’d shut the works down for a month at midsummer. Just my luck, Poldarn thought.
Nobody about; he guessed that everybody was snatching a little sleep before the next phase began. From what he could remember of Galand Dev’s briefing, this would consist of building a set of giant tre
stles fitted with spindles on which the wood and clay patterns would be turned. (More lathes, in other words; at least Galand Dev had had the tact not to call them that.) The idea was basically a variation on the standard method of making bell patterns: a pole, rotating on trestles, around which they’d build up a full-size clay model of the tube; then slap a thick layer of tallow on top of the clay, then more clay on top of that; melt out the tallow to free the core, and you had your mould. All there was to it.
Poldarn yawned, wondering what to do next. He could limp back to his little mud hut, or he could try and find something to eat (fat chance); or he could be really sybaritic and decadent, and have a wash. Not just a splash of black, gritty water out of the slack tub on his face and hands, but a genuine, no-holds-barred, wet-all-over bath, the kind that normal people had once a day. He knew just the place; where the river tripped and stumbled down a heap of rock slabs into a deep round pool, curtained with ferns and flag iris. It couldn’t have been better suited for the purpose if some duke or king had commissioned an architect to build him an alfresco bathhouse. Of course, nobody ever went there, except in late autumn, when there were rumoured to be fair-sized salmon in the deepest corner.