by K. J. Parker
'Piss off,' said Spenno.
One of the clerks tried to punch Spenno in the mouth. A huge foundryman by the name of Salyan grabbed the clerk's fist in mid-air and yanked his arm behind his back. With a mild sigh, the short man took a step forward, kicked Salyan in the groin so hard that the crack echoed off the barn roof, and finished the job with a short, horrible punch to the side of the head. Salyan rolled sideways and lay still. Nobody moved.
'He'll be all right,' the short man sighed. 'Now, please, if we could all get back to the job in hand. This greensand of yours-'
Poldarn left them to get on with it. He remembered that he had a little job of his own to finish, and chances were that once Spenno and the government man had sorted out their professional differences, there wouldn't be much spare time to waste on personal projects. He wandered across to the forge and got a fire in.
He'd left it about half done; the shape was more or less there, but so vague that only he could see it, because he knew what he was looking for. He forged in the bevels, trapping the inside edge of the flat tapered bar between the anvil's horn and the hammer; it was slow, patient work, only a few hard, careful hammer-blows each time before the steel had to go back in the fire and take on more heat. The profile and geometry of the bevels had to be perfect, since each hammer-fall squeezed a dab of orange steel up into the body of the work, subtly twisting and distorting the shape, which meant that for every strike he made on the edge, he needed four on the flat and the spine to maintain the lines he'd drawn in his mind. Every so often he had to spend a whole heat renewing the angle of the back curve, either hammering over the horn or fixing the work in the vice and twisting it with a long rod with a U-bend on the end. It took him the rest of the day to get the bevels done, and he decided to leave it at that. No point starting on the fullers and having to abandon the job part-way through. And he was still on the easy bit.
After what passed for dinner (the rains were still up on the road, though the level was perceptibly dropping, half an inch a day; fairly soon it'd reach the point where the drainage rhines began drawing again, the level would drop by a foot overnight and the food wagons from Tin Chirra could get through again) Poldarn drifted over to one of the watchfires to toast a slice of cheese onto a slab of stale grey bread. Nobody looked up as he joined the ring round the fire; theirs was a circle that could be broken into without risking bloodshed.
'That woman they got with them,' someone was saying, 'the crazy bitch who's into all that religious stuff. They reckon she's the worst of the lot.'
'Worse than the Mad Monk?' Someone on the other side of the circle wasn't convinced. 'Don't believe it. Women aren't like that.'
That amused someone else. 'You never met my old lady,' he said. General laughter. 'No, I mean it,' whoever it was went on. 'I remember one time-she'd been on the cider, mind, and I'd done something or other, never did find out what; anyhow, she got really mad at me, came and stood over me while I was eating my dinner, yelling and carrying on, scaring the kids to death. Well, I wasn't in the mood for a fight just then, I'd had a long day and you've got to feel right for a really good row, so I just got up and walked out, didn't say a word or anything. So what does she do? She follows me, still yelling her daft head off; so I go through the house into the barn, and she comes after me, still yelling and screaming, not getting the point at all-but they're like that, aren't they? So I push on through the barn to the outhouse, nip in, shut the door and put the latch across. She's hammering on the door, I'm shouting at her, fuck off, you stupid cow, I'm having a piss-which was true, as it happens. And next thing I know, she's fetched the axe out of the barn and she's smashing up the outhouse door-and I'm in there, for crying out loud, and I can see the axe blade coming in through the wood. Scared? I'm telling you, I was in the right place, or else I'd have pissed myself. If she hadn't swung wild with the axe and bust the head off the shaft, Poldarn only knows what'd have happened. Anyhow, she went inside, I waited till I thought it was safe and buggered off over the hill into town. Three days before I reckoned it was all right to come home, and then only because she sent the boy over to say that maybe she'd gone a bit too far. A bit too far-those were the exact words. Women? I promise you, when they lose it, they really lose it bad. And I guess this Dorun-whatsemame's like that, only she hasn't calmed down yet.'
Poldarn couldn't help remembering the burning of Deymeson, and Copis with a sword in her hands, straightening up into the front guard. So maybe it had just been something he'd said 'She's a nutcase, all right,' someone else said, 'but it's the Mad Monk who's the really dangerous one; because he's mad, sure enough, but not rolling-on-the-floor mad, that's not really a problem so long as you stay clear. He's more the ninety-per-cent sane type. They're the ones you got to look out for, because one minute you're standing there talking to them all nice and pleasant about the weather or the war or something, and next minute they'll pull out a knife and try and chop your bollocks off. Never know where you are with them, see.'
Nobody seemed inclined to comment on that for a while. Then someone else (Sineysri, from the mould-scraping crew) coughed nervously and said that the Mad Monk and the crazy bitch were one thing, but at least they weren't anything like as bad as Feron Amathy. 'And if you ask me,' he went on, 'absolutely the worst bloody thing they could do now is what they're planning to do, by all accounts: give Feron Amathy the job of sorting those two out.'
General mutter of agreement. 'Total disaster,' someone said. 'Those religious nutters prowling about up one end of the country, the Amathy house on the loose down the other, and us poor buggers caught in the middle. All it'd take would be for the raiders to show up, and it'd be damn well near the end of the world.'
'That's right.' Someone Poldarn knew, but couldn't put a name to: thin voice, slight speech impediment. 'If you ask me, old Tazencius has got the right idea for once with these tube things.'
'Sure,' someone interrupted. 'If only we can make bastards work.'
Muted laughter. 'That's right,' Thin-voice went on, 'and that'll only be when that little short bugger pushes off and lets Spenno alone to figure it out for them. But if it all works out, I reckon it's not the raiders they'll be wanting to point the tubes at, it's the Amathy house, followed by the Mad Monk. Then we might be getting somewhere at last.'
'You say that,' growled a deep voice from the dark edge, where Poldarn couldn't see. 'But you know exactly what'll happen, soon as they hand those tubes over to some general or other-assuming they do what they reckon they'll do, and don't just go off phut like a old ewe farting. They'll hand them over to some general and tell him, go fight the raiders or Feron Amathy or whatever; and he'll turn right round and stick 'em up Tazencius's arse, and next day we'll have a new emperor. And so on, over and over. Truth is, there's nobody in this empire you'd trust as far as you could sneeze 'em, not since Cronan died. No, the simple fact is, it's time for us here in Tulice to say enough's enough, boot the garrisons out of Falcata and Torneviz, and get on with it ourselves. Same for the folks in Morevich, and the Two Rivers country. Let those arseholes in Torcea play their games in their own back yard, and see how they like it.'
The discussion got lively after that, and Poldarn decided that it might be sensible to take his toasted cheese and eat it somewhere else, just in case Brigadier Muno or one of his staff were hanging about somewhere in the shadows, learning a few illuminating facts about the loyalties of some of the workers engaged on his last-best-hope project.
Brigadier Muno: if he'd got it straight (he sat down under a cart, one of the monsters they used for hauling the finished bells-huge wheels, plenty of room under them to sit upright, and the dropped sides kept out the night breeze), then this Brigadier Muno was the uncle of the sad young cavalry officer he'd saved from looters and scavengers in the aftermath of some damn-fool battle or other, when he'd come across him lying all bloody beside a river, surrounded by dead men. Whether that memory was an asset or a liability he wasn't entirely sure. The officer he'd carried on hi
s back as far as the man's unit's camp had been properly grateful at the time; but now he was a very grand general, and his attitude to previous benefactors might have warped a little, like sawn planks left lying in the wet. A lot would depend, for a start, on whether Muno Silsny recognised him if and when he saw him again; if not, and if the story of the river rescue was tolerably well known, Poldarn could turn up at the great man's tent only to find he was the fifteenth person that week to have come forward claiming to be the general's personal angel of mercy. That could be enough to embarrass a man to death.
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 fo
r 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 administrator, 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.