by K. J. Parker
Eventually he drifted into sleep; and there was a crow—
There was a crow looking down at him from the top of a pillar; but it was only a carving, a mason’s memory of a crow trapped in stone, like a fly in amber.
He was in the chapter house, but he was alone, just him and the crow. He was waiting for someone. The someone was late, maybe not coming at all. He wasn’t pleased about that. It hadn’t been easy getting there without being seen, and any minute the doors might open, someone else might come in, see him there, ask what he thought he was doing. He had no right to be there, it was against the rules—
As if that mattered; as if losing ten house points or getting detention mattered when blood had been shed (and all his fault, if he cared to look at it from that perspective). He didn’t even have to stay here any longer; any day now, and he’d be out—
She came in through the small low door from the vestry, not the main doors as he’d been expecting. Typical Xipho, planning every entrance, figuring out the optimum strategic advantage, balanced against the acceptable and unacceptable risks. She treated life as extra tuition for core syllabus subjects.
She looked at him sourly. ‘Melodrama,’ she said. ‘With you, everything’s got to be a bloody performance. So, what do you want?’
‘I needed to talk,’ he said.
‘Fine. Go ahead.’
‘Xipho.’ He felt like he wanted to be sick. ‘I didn’t kill him. Elaos. It wasn’t me.’
‘Well, of course it wasn’t,’ she replied. ‘Father Abbot said so. Matter closed.’
‘Yes,’ he insisted, ‘but is that what you believe?’
She looked into his eyes before answering. ‘I don’t have an opinion on the subject,’ she said.
That made him angry. ‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘You’ve got an opinion on everything.’
‘If you say so.’
Precepts of religion; the best fight is not to fight. ‘Please, Xipho,’ he heard himself say. ‘Even if you think I did it, that’d be better than this.’
‘Are you saying you did it?’
‘No.’
‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘Matter closed. Was that it, or did you want me for anything else?’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t believe me,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be acting like this if you believed me.’
‘I told you,’ she said, ‘I haven’t got an opinion, and I don’t believe anything. That’s why we have doctrine, so we don’t have to believe in every single bloody thing. Father Abbot says the matter’s closed, which means that even if you confessed, even if you showed me a sword with blood on it, I wouldn’t have an opinion. Do you understand that, or have you completely wasted the time you’ve spent here?’
He looked at her for a moment. ‘You think I killed him,’ he said. ‘You think I killed him and Father Abbot either approved or he’s got some reason for not doing anything about it. Bloody hell, Xipho, he was our friend.’
‘No friends in religion,’ Xipho replied. ‘Against the rules.’
There was something about the way she’d said it. ‘If I didn’t kill him,’ he said quietly, ‘maybe I’ve got an idea who did.’
‘That’s an interesting choice of words,’ Xipho said. ‘Look, I’m sorry but I’ve got work to do. I thought you wanted to see me about something urgent. Not something that no longer exists.’
She walked out, not looking back. He sat staring at the door she’d gone through for a while, as if it was somehow to blame for the use it had been put to; then he stood up and followed. Instead of taking the north cloister, however, he turned east, past the stairs that led to the tower where Elaos Tanwar had died, until he came to a small door. He wasn’t supposed to know what was behind it, and he wasn’t supposed to be able to get through it. But a small piece of wire passed through a crack where one of the panels had shrunk with age was enough to lift the latch on the other side. He pushed it open and shut it quickly behind him.
He’d known about this place for some time, ever since he’d overheard a conversation in the porter’s lodge between the senior porter and a large, round, well-dressed man who’d arrived on the box of a large cart. The round man’s name, he’d learned as he eavesdropped, pretending to check his pigeonhole for messages, was Potto Ulrec, a button merchant from Sansory, and he’d come to collect something: a large, bulky consignment that was going to prove awkward to shift and load, especially with Potto’s trick shoulder playing him up again. The senior porter had taken pity on him or was more than usually anxious to rid his lodge of unseemliness, so he’d sent one of the junior porters to help Potto with whatever it was he was collecting. For some reason, Ciartan had been intrigued enough to follow unobtrusively. On the way, the junior porter had made a detour to the small yard behind the tool store at the back of the east quadrangle, and had picked up a fair-sized wheelbarrow. He had trouble keeping up with Potto Ulrec, who was clearly in a hurry.
And so they’d come to this door. The junior porter had been entrusted with the key, a huge lump of iron on a long loop of string, which he’d hung round his neck. He unlocked the door, but then stood back, as though unwilling to enter. Potto gave him a mildly scornful look and went past him through the doorway. A few moments later he came out again, his arms laden with a substantial heap of bones.
Leg bones mostly; some arms. He stacked them neatly in the wheelbarrow, the way Ciartan used to pile lopped branchwood back home, so as not to waste space in the bed of the barrow. When he went back in, the porter looked away with a nauseated expression on his face. It took Potto four trips to fill the barrow; once or twice he’d stop, go back, pick out a leg or an arm that somehow wasn’t suitable and take it back in with him. Ciartan remembered wondering what on earth he wanted with a load of old bones, and where they’d all come from. When the barrow was full – overfilled by the look of it, with femurs and tibiae balanced on top of the load, wobbling ominously as the porter lifted the handles – Potto pushed the door to and followed the porter back in the direction of the lodge.
Deductions: well, for one thing Potto was buying these bones by the barrowload, hence his anxiety to cram in as much as possible; and of course they made bottons out of bone, and Potto was a button-maker. Beyond that, however, it was a mystery; and it stayed that way for a long time, until one day Elaos and Cordo had been talking about something, while they were all hanging about in Hall waiting for a class to begin, and somehow the conversation had come round to how the Order disposed of the remains of students who’d failed their year-end practicals. Cordo was saying how he’d sneaked out to look at the graveyard out back, and how he’d done a few sums, and there simply wasn’t room in the burial plot for more than five or six years’ worth of dead novices; and Elaos had replied, well, of course not; they only leave them in there for a few years, long enough to compost down nicely, and then they dig them up again, bleach the bones and store them in the ossiary—
Memories of memories, recalled in dreams; and here he was (in the place where novices weren’t supposed to go but where most of them ended up anyhow). A large place, like a vault, with a high roof, plain, the air musty, the smell not very nice. Very much like a woodshed, with the bones all carefully stacked to make the best use of the space available: against one wall a tall heap of legs; on the other side, arms, ribcages, pelvises; in the middle a pyramid of skulls, all facing the same way, like a good display of turnips in the grocery market down in the lower town; fat oak-staved barrels full of finger and toe joints. The most efficient way to break down and store what remained of the human body after everything that could be stripped out was gone; no way to tell one person’s bones apart from another’s or figure out which arm had gone in which socket, which skull had once fitted on which spine. All memory purged; nothing left but basics, components, scrap, the raw materials for the celebrated Potto range of buttons for all occasions.
(He wondered: if I was a god, do you think I could piece all these bits back together again, bodge up a new
race of men and women to populate some derelict world somewhere? Like a faker, a dishonest tradesman; sling them back together again any old how, smear on a bit of flesh and a coat of skin, hair, eyes, pass them off as genuine human beings? What would come of that, he wondered: a head from one life grafted onto a neck from another, a farmer’s hands on a blacksmith’s arms slotted into a monk’s shoulders, capped off with the head of a soldier and the legs of a charcoal-burner. Poor bloody fool wouldn’t know what day of the week it was—)
And here he was again. He stood for a while looking at the racks and rows and stacks, then knelt down and picked something up off the floor: a sword, a raider backsabre, its blade crusted with rust and dried blood. He gave it a cursory examination, then slipped off his cloak, wrapped the sword up in a bundle, tucked it under his arm—
He woke up abruptly. ‘Gain?’ he called out. No reply. Well, Aciava was probably asleep. ‘Gain? Wake up, will you, I need to ask you something.’
Still no reply; but he heard a door creak open, then shut. ‘What’re you making that racket for?’
He recognised the voice but couldn’t put a name to it (a stack of voices on one side of the room, names on the other). Some foundryman.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Is he asleep?’
‘Is who asleep?’
‘Gain. The other bloke, in the other bed there.’
The stranger laughed. ‘He’s gone, mate. No, not dead,’ he added. ‘He’s been moved out – orders. Cart rolled up an hour or so ago. Soldiers. They took him off somewhere.’
Chapter Nine
According to Galand Dev, it was foolproof. Nothing could possibly go wrong – which was just as well, considering how far behind schedule they were, and how ghastly and terrible the news was from outside. He wouldn’t explain the last part of that, but the name Feron Amathy featured prominently in all the rumours; the Amathy house was on the move, had openly declared war on the government, had crossed the bay with an enormous army, had stormed Torcea with horrendous loss of life, was besieging the Emperor in the palace, depending on who you listened to and how long you managed to keep your attention from wandering.
Galand Dev, with Spenno’s highly qualified approval, had designed a new furnace. There was a deep pit, in which the mould, properly baked and cured, stood on its end. The pit was lined with two courses of brick, so that the heat from the filled moulds wouldn’t dry out the earth and cause a cave-in; the props were thick iron posts, not timber. Over the pit they’d built a tall crane, to lower the moulds and hold them while they were being aligned. Once the moulds were in place, the pit was filled up with handspan-thick layers of slightly damp earth, tamped down with bronze weights (gently heated so the earth wouldn’t stick to them) until it was compressed to the point where it was hard work to stick a knife blade into it further than an inch. Each layer was topped off with an inch-depth of potsherds. All this had to be done quickly, so that the damp from the earth wouldn’t seep into the bone-dry moulds and spoil them, so everybody took a hand – even Brigadier Muno and his immaculately dressed staff, who made a point of kneeling on sacks to save the knees of their trousers from irreversible ruin.
The furnace itself was a tall brick tower with a ground-level square opening on one side. The firebox, packed with alternating layers of charcoal and cordwood (elm, birch, and beechwood only), was under the furnace floor. Ten double-action bellows, each made from four full hides, blasted up through, forcing the flame through the firehole into the furnace chamber (circular, nine feet across, flat-bottomed), where it played on the carefully proportioned mixture of scrap and virgin bronze – nine parts copper, one part tin – from all sides, to ensure an even, pure melt. To prepare the furnace for the first melt it had been charged and fired and left to burn gently for three days, to dry out the fireclay without risk of cracking. Galand Dev reckoned it would handle ten tons of bronze easily, twelve at a pinch. When the melt was perfect – after three fluxings and skimmings to draw off the slag; when a pine log thrown onto the surface floated, with no bubbles coming up through the glowing yellow pool, until it burned away to cinders, which spat up from the meniscus with no bronze clinging to them (essential, according to Spenno and his book), and when a greenish-white cloud rose off the melt and hung a few inches above the surface – a weir in the furnace wall could be drawn open and the molten bronze allowed to flow down the shallow incline of a brick-and-clay race (carefully heated by a long bed of glowing coals raked out from the furnace) that fed the in-gate of the mould. In theory, according to Galand Dev. Assuming it didn’t rain once the furnace was running, in which case the whole thing would probably blow up.
The entire workforce had been toiling day and night to get it built. Now it was finished, dressed, dried, cured, fettled, and for some reason nobody was in any hurry to try it out. Spenno was sitting on a barrel next to the mould pit, staring up at the lead-grey clouds, as if willing it to start raining. Galand Dev was rumoured to be confined to the latrines by a severe case of terror, with Brigadier Muno standing over him demanding to know if he was done yet. Messengers from Falcata and Torcea were arriving practically on the hour with furious demands for progress reports. Fifty tons of new charcoal had come in from the colliers’ camp (but there was nowhere to put it, so they’d shovelled it off their carts into a huge pile in the middle of the yard and left it there). Scouts sent out at dawn rode in at noon to say it was raining at Ang Chirra but sunny and warm at Tin, and the wind was either northerly, southerly, easterly or westerly, depending on who you chose to believe.
‘Pity you aren’t fit to be up and about yet,’ Chiruwa was saying. ‘You’ll miss the fun.’
Poldarn looked at him. ‘What, you mean when it starts pissing it down once the furnace is at full heat, and the whole lot goes up? I think I’d rather be in here, thanks.’
Chiruwa shrugged. ‘They’re talking about roofing it over,’ he said, ‘only they’re worried that with all that heat going up, the roof’d catch fire and come down on the pit. Makes you wonder, actually, whose bright idea it was to do all this in the wettest place in the empire, in the rainy season.’
‘There’ll have been a good reason,’ Poldarn replied. ‘You’ve got to have faith, that’s all.’ And the matter is closed, he thought, and I have no opinion on it.
‘Maybe,’ Chiruwa said. ‘Here, did you ever find out what became of that bloke, the one you pulled out of the cave-in? He was in here with you, and then he left.’
‘I was hoping you could tell me,’ Poldarn replied.
Chiruwa shook his head. ‘Friend of yours, was he?’
‘I knew him years ago,’ Poldarn said, wondering if he was telling the truth. ‘I wouldn’t call him a friend, though. Just someone I knew.’
‘You risked your neck getting him out of there, though,’ Chiruwa said. ‘Bloody impressive, that was. I wouldn’t have done it. Got more sense.’
‘I never said I was intelligent,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Any idea when I’m likely to be getting out of here? They were supposed to be fetching a doctor from Falcata, but nobody’s said anything.’
‘Roads are still bad,’ Chiruwa told him, ‘though all these messengers from the army and the bosses over to Torcea don’t seem to be having much trouble getting through. You’re looking better, I must say. You were a right bloody mess when they fished you out of there. Mind, if I were you I wouldn’t count on winning any beauty contests from now on, and pulling birds is going to be a problem, unless they’re blind.’
‘I was wondering about that,’ Poldarn said mildly. ‘They said my face got a bit scorched—’
‘Trying not to worry you, I expect,’ Chiruwa said. ‘Next time I come visiting, I’ll fetch along a mirror or something. I mean, a bloke’s got a right to know.’
On that cheerful note, he left and went back to work; they were going to dress out the mould one more time, just to be on the safe side. Poldarn lay still for a while, then reached out and felt for his book, Concerning Various Matters. There wasn’t r
eally enough light in the shed, so he could only read for a short while before his head began to hurt; even so, he was three-quarters of the way through. It was very hard going, most of it about things that didn’t interest him in the least.
He found his place. He’d just finished reaping machine, to build; a bizarre contraption involving long, sharp blades attached to the spokes of an enormous wheel, driven through a gear-train by four oxen on a treadmill. He hoped very much that nobody had ever tried to build one; it sounded rather more dangerous than a squadron of attacking cavalry.
Recurrence, eternal. He frowned. Even harder going than the designs for labour-saving devices were the philosophical and religious bits, and he considered skipping ahead to red spot, on cabbages, to eradicate. But he had nothing better to do, and there was a reasonable chance that recurrence, eternal might send him off to sleep.
Recurrence, eternal, he read. It is a precept of religion that nothing happens for the first time; that all learning is recollection; that the perfect draw is perfect because it has already taken place. Oh for pity’s sake, Poldarn thought, but he carried on reading anyway. The argument runs that in religion everything progresses to a state of perfection (q.v.) in which further improvement is impossible, whereas outside of religion everything tends to a state of dissolution, in which no further deterioration or decay is possible, e.g. decomposition of organic material, erosion of rock into dust, reduction by fire of solid material to smoke and ash; the two final states, perfection and dissolution, being parallel and essentially the same in nature, though not in form or quality. Religion predicates that, since the world is over five thousand years old (see gods, origin of; world, age of; creation, history of), inevitably both processes – progress and decline – must by now have run their full course and be complete, in which case it necessarily follows that the material world as we encounter it is made up of the end products of said processes, namely religion (the perfected state) and that which is outside religion (the declined state, chaos) and that all human experience is therefore merely recollection of incidents that have occurred during the course of one of the two said processes, remembered out of context, as if in a vision, hallucination, prophesy, nightmare or dream. This conclusion is expressed in religion in the form of the divine Poldarn, who will return at the end of all things – which has, of course, already taken place at some unspecified point in the past – to destroy the world and replace it with perfection (namely the state of affairs currently pertaining, i.e. in religion). In applied religion, perfection is expressed in the draw, where constant repetition during training and practice eliminates the act of drawing in the moment at which the intention is formed, so that the sword has already left the scabbard as soon as the hand moves towards it. In observed religion (see ethics, applied) the process of dissolution is expressed in the reduction of materials, e.g. by rotting, weathering, burning, and the process of perfection is expressed as surviving that of dissolution in the perfection of reduced materials, e.g. by fire,.g. sand to glass, wood to charcoal, ore to metal; essential religion is expressed in the salvation of reduced materials, e.g. scrap reshaped into new objects; the latter giving rise to the so-called essential paradox, whereby salvation can only occur where memory is destroyed in salvaged materials (i.e. when they lose their old shape and are given a new one), the paradox being that the superior or religious process of perfection is thus observed to follow and be dependent upon the inferior or secular process of destruction. This paradox is most usually expressed in the image of the burned scavenger.