by K. J. Parker
For his part, Poldarn was overjoyed to be back at Dui Chirra, standing in the cutting, grey sticky mud plastered up his legs. It was almost disturbing how relieved he’d been to come home. Things had started going well in his absence. The clay had dried without even a trace of a crack, and while Spenno smeared the tallow over the core, cursing fluently and reassuringly as his hands moulded the shape that would soon be the gap into which the metal would eventually flow, Poldarn and the rest of the courtyard hands were digging out material for the outer layer and the furnace itself. Good honest, useful work. If he wasn’t careful, a man could kid himself into believing that this was what life is all about.
It would have been stretching the truth a little to say that everything was back to normal. For a start, ten of the courtyard crew had gone away and not come back. Presumably the government had buried their bodies, or nine of them at least, once they’d finished poring and scrabbling over the scene of the fight. But replacing them hadn’t been difficult. There were always a certain number of displaced men wandering about during the rainy season, only too glad to dig clay or do anything they were told in return for shelter, a cooked meal and a bit of money.
‘So what were you and your mates doing in the woods anyhow?’ the investigating officer had asked them. He’d shown up at Dui Chirra two days after they’d got back; it was worrying that he’d found them so quickly.
‘We were on our way to the colliers’ camp,’ Chiruwa had replied, innocent as a snowdrop. ‘We reckoned we might find work there, to tide us over till this place got going again.’
The investigating officer had thought about that. ‘Taking your time, weren’t you?’ he’d asked. ‘I mean, it’s not a long way to the camp from your place, and there’s more direct routes.’
Chiruwa had nodded sadly; the weight of guilt on his shoulders would’ve crushed a roof. ‘I know,’ he’d replied. ‘My fault, basically. I’d been on at them about keeping going, maybe as far as Tarwar or someplace like that; but then we heard there were bandits on the road, and I got scared, made us all turn back and head for the camp – and that’s how come we walked straight into that party of raiders at just the wrong moment. If I hadn’t got panicky about the bandits, the lads’d all still be alive—’
‘Ah yes,’ the officer had interrupted, ‘those bandits. Didn’t run into them by any chance, did you?’
‘Us? No.’
‘Interesting,’ the officer had continued, ‘because we’ve got witnesses who reckon there were twelve of them – the bandits, that is – and that just happens to be how many there were in your party. Still,’ he’d gone on, ignoring Chiruwa’s attempts to speak, ‘that’s really none of my business, I wasn’t sent here to look into any alleged bandits. Now, how many raiders did you say you saw?’
As to who the boy in the coach had been, nobody seemed to know anything. The investigating officer had more or less confirmed that he’d been the son of someone very important indeed, but that was as far as he was prepared to be drawn. On the other hand, there hadn’t been any wholesale reprisals, no villages burned or mass executions– which, in the view of the foundry crew, meant the kid couldn’t have been anybody special. Raiders or no raiders, the consensus was, if he’d mattered a damn to anybody the government would’ve had to do something, even if it was nothing more than sending out a squadron of cavalry to lop off a few heads along the Falcata road. People had a right to know that their taxes are being used productively, after all.
‘To understand the act of drawing the sword,’ said the skinny old crow, ‘it is first necessary to understand the nature of time.’
Ciartan, who’d been dozing (and in his doze he’d been dreaming about a place where a stream crossed a road in a forest, where a boy and a man were fighting, and both of them had been him) sat up and opened his eyes. He still hadn’t got the hang of lectures; back home, where hardly anything needed to be said aloud, Oh look, the crocuses are out or It’s your turn to feed the chickens counted as interminable speeches. Sitting still while someone talked at you for a whole turn of the water-clock didn’t come easily.
‘Time,’ continued the skinny old crow (and Father Tutor did look exactly like a crow sometimes, in his long black robes, with his little spindly legs sticking out underneath) ‘is all too often compared to a river; so often, in fact, that our minds skip off the comparison like a file drawn along a hard edge, and we no longer bother with it. But if we pause for a while and put aside our contemptuous familiarity, we may find the similarities illuminating.’
Next to him on the floor, Gain Aciava shuffled and stifled a yawn. Gain had problems keeping still in lectures, too; he couldn’t be doing with theory at any price, reckoning that no amount of half-baked mysticism was going to help him get his sword out of the scabbard and into the bad guys any quicker. Actually, Ciartan didn’t agree. He had an idea that at least a tenth of what the old fool told them in lectures might actually be helpful, if only he could figure out what it meant. He looked off to one side and as he did so caught sight of Xipho Dorunoxy; she’d been watching him, and quickly turned away. Now that was interesting—
‘A river is substantial,’ said Father Tutor, ‘and yet its components have no substance. You can’t hold on to water in your hands, just as you can’t seize hold of time. A river is always there, and yet the water in it is never the same. A river is not an object so much as a process confined inside a shape; and the same, of course, is true of time. When, therefore, we come to consider the draw,’ he continued; paused, sneezed, wiped his nose on his sleeve and went on: ‘When we consider the draw, the relevance should be obvious. The draw is an exercise in time; in the broadest possible terms, the draw is an attempt to eliminate time, because we all want to do it as quickly as possible. But before we can eliminate a thing, first we must properly understand what it is.’
Carefully, just in case Xipho was watching, Ciartan looked sideways. She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, looking straight ahead – not at the old fool, but at a space on the wall slightly above and to the right of his head. She’d been taking notes, because the lid was off her inkwell and she was holding her rather fine ivory-handled pen; but now the nib was dry. He realised he’d been watching her rather longer than was safe, and turned away before anybody noticed what he was doing.
‘Time in the draw,’ said the old fool, absent-mindedly picking at a tiny scab on the back of his left hand, ‘is what separates the decision to act from the act itself. Let us call the decision to act, the past – because the decision arises out of things that have happened to us, a perceived danger, orders from an officer in battle, an insult or an incentive; therefore the decision is the past, and in our river analogy is represented by the source of the river. The act itself is the present, because it is substantive, positive; it constitutes the latest turn of events, until it is in turn superseded by another act. Accordingly, it represents the river lapping at our feet. The consequences of the act lie in the future – consequences that will, in due course, motivate further decisions and further acts, just as the present cools into the past, and the rain falls on the mountains. The draw, then: the draw is only the gap between the past and the present, and as such – logically speaking – it cannot and does not exist. Between the decision to cut and the cut there can be no interval of delay – logically speaking.’
Ciartan yawned. Drivel time, he thought. Pity; up till then, the old fool had sounded like he was about to make some kind of sense.
‘We are faced, then,’ said Father Tutor, ‘with a gap; a hole in nature. We confront something that isn’t there, because it can’t be there, but which we know is there, because we experience it every time we lay hand to hilt. To understand this paradox, let us consider the act of casting a statue in bronze. An image is carved out of wax or tallow and packed in clay or sand. Then the mould is heated, the wax melts and pours out through a drain hole, and leaves behind a gap, an absence. It has no substance, this gap or void; it can’t be touched or held, it
is merely a shape confined between two definitions. And yet, when the molten bronze is poured in, it takes on the shape left behind by the melted wax, imposing its will on the substantial material, even though itself it has no form. In other words, it’s a process; a process confined between parameters, just like time, or the river; or, of course, the draw. In the act of casting, the gap, the process, is memory. In the river, the gap is water. In the draw – as should now be obvious, if you’ve been following at all – the gap is religion. If we could pour molten bronze into the gap between the decision to draw and the cutting of the flesh, we could cast for ourselves a perfect image of a deity – or, as the proponents of the Morevish heresy would assert, of Poldarn the Destroyer.’
Ciartan gave up. He’d tried resisting. He’d tried rubbing his eyes, kicking his own ankle, digging his nails into the palm of his hand. He’d done his best, but it was no bloody good. He apologised to the old fool under his breath, and closed his eyes.
‘The Morevish heresy,’ the skinny old crow repeated. (Was he still the old fool, or was he really a crow now? In which case this was just a dream.) ‘We call it that, and certainly it has no place in the orthodoxy, rightly so given that its very premisses are idolatry. But we should consider it with an open mind, just as we looked more closely at the trite metaphor of the river. In the Morevish heresy, Poldarn the Destroyer visits our mortal world shortly before the destruction of all things; he comes from outside time, being an immortal god, and he comes on behalf of the past, since the destruction he brings is punishment for the wickedness of mankind – our sins being the source of the river, rising in the bad acts we have committed. But he has no memory of who he is or why he’s here among us, or what he’s come to do; past, present, future are all missing, and all that remains in their place is a gap, an empty space confined between parameters. Poldarn, in other words, represents the process. Poldarn is the draw – according, that is, to the people of Morevich. And here is a significant point; because, according to tradition, in the distant past when Poldarn first left this world, boarding the ship that would carry him away to the timeless islands in the far West – at that time, long ago, the people of Morevich didn’t communicate one with another as we do, speaking out loud and listening to what we hear. Instead, they communicated directly, mind to mind, hearing each other’s thoughts inside their heads, so that words were largely unnecessary. Which is how, it goes without saying, they were able to form the concept of Poldarn – because speech is also an intangible, a process confined between parameters, an empty gap that shapes matter. But the men of Morevich did what we claim is impossible: they eliminated the non-existent gap we call speech, and so could proceed directly, thought to thought. In Morevich, therefore, the draw is also possible . . .’
At precisely the moment when Ciartan fell asleep, Poldarn woke up—
—Because someone was shaking him by the shoulder and yelling in his ear, ‘Get up, you idle bastard, or Banspati’ll do his block.’
Poldarn crawled out through the wreckage of his dream like a man escaping from an overturned cart; all around him, in his mind, were splintered fragments of truth, like the flotsam from a shipwreck. Gain Aciava, younger but still basically the same – he’d looked older than his age as a boy, younger than he really was twenty years on. And Copis, Xipho Dorunoxy. He’d been in love with her then, that thunderstruck passion, that religion that strikes only when we’re too young to know any better. And who else, who else had been in the classroom with them? Twenty or so students, but he’d not been paying attention. He had been paying attention, in a way, to the skinny old crow part of the time, and to the slender, bony, long-limbed girl, but apart from that he hadn’t allowed his concentration to wander, and so he hadn’t studied the other faces in the room, and so he’d missed the whole point of the lesson. Typical.
‘What?’ he mumbled.
‘Meeting,’ snarled the voice – some man he only knew by sight and didn’t much like anyway. ‘In the coalhouse, compulsory or else. They’re all waiting for you. Move!’
Just as well I was so tired I fell asleep in my clothes, with my boots on, Poldarn thought.
On the way to the long, dark coalhouse Poldarn and his escort passed the casting yard where the mould stood, shrouded under a thick swathe of tanned hides to keep out the damp. He remembered: today was the day, everything was ready for the pour. After the final frantic preparations, he’d scuttled away to get a few hours’ sleep while the scrap bronze was packed into the cupola and melted; four hours, maybe five. What time was it? And why the hell have a compulsory meeting? Either the metal was ready to pour, or it wasn’t. Nothing to have a meeting about.
As Poldarn shuffled into the coalhouse, a hundred heads turned and scowled at him. Just what he needed.
‘Right.’ Banspati’s voice, clearly at the very furthest reach of his rope. ‘That’s the lot, we’re all here. Now listen up, all of you, this is really important.’
Nobody heckled, joked, or said a word. Why? Because they’re frightened, Poldarn realised with a jolt of panic. Terrified. For the gods’ sakes; I close my eyes for five minutes and suddenly the world’s all different.
Banspati – standing on an upturned crate – was about to say something else, but he stopped and jumped down quickly, a man anxious to get out of the way. His place was taken by a short, stocky man with white hair and a big nose. Friendly sort of face, bright blue eyes. For some reason, Poldarn knew before the short man said a word that he was an army officer.
‘My name,’ the man said, ‘is Brigadier Muno Tesny.’ Pause. ‘If my name sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve almost certainly heard of my nephew, General Muno Silsny, commander-in-chief of land forces. I’ve come here today to brief you on a very important commission which you’re about to undertake on behalf of the general staff and, ultimately, the Emperor himself.’
In the privacy of the coalhouse’s darkness, Poldarn frowned. So the Emperor wants a new doorbell. For that they send a brigadier, and I get jerked out of my pit at crack of dawn on a pour day. Well, quite possibly yes; it’s just what you’d expect from an emperor, these exaggerated notions of his own importance.
‘I’ve spoken with your foreman—’ Nod to Banspati hunched in the front row; Banspati winced back, as if trying to disclaim all complicity. ‘And I’ve informed him that this commission will, of course, take priority over all other commitments, effective immediately. Accordingly, the project you’ve been working on has been cancelled, and the treasury department will indemnify you against any financial losses you may incur as a result. From now on, until further notice, you’ll be working for me, full time and exclusively, until this commission has been completed. Is that clear?’
If the brigadier had been expecting questions, he didn’t get any. No wonder; they were all scared rigid.
‘The next point I have to impress on you,’ the army man went on, ‘is the need for absolute security and discretion. It is essential’ (he made the word weigh a ton) ‘that nobody outside this building gets to know anything about the nature of the work you’ll be doing. To this end, it’s my duty to inform you that any act or omission on your part tending towards a breach of security will be considered an act of treason and punished accordingly.’
Oh well, Poldarn thought; presumably the old bastard didn’t come here to make friends, so he wasn’t going to be heartbroken about failing in that regard. So—
‘Now,’ the brigadier said, ‘we come to the nature of the commission.’ He paused, for effect as much as for breath. One thing was certain, he had their undivided attention. ‘Some of you may be familiar with a type of conjuring trick commonly known as Morevich Thunder; another name for it, so I’m told, is Poldarn’s Fire. The trick consists of a standard baked-clay pot, into which a mixture of charcoal, sulphur and ordinary tanner’s curing salts is packed; a lamp wick is inserted, and the pot is then sealed with soft, cold wax. When the wick is lit, the mixture catches fire and erupts into flame, rather like a volcano, mak
ing a sound like thunder. In Morevich these devices are used as part of religious ceremonies, parades and general festivities; they’ve always been regarded as a curiosity, mildly amusing but highly dangerous if carelessly handled or abused.’
Copis, Poldarn thought: she’d had a boxful of the things, used them as part of the god-in-the-cart routine. That they were also known as Poldarn’s Fire didn’t surprise him in the least.
The army man cleared his throat and went on. ‘Armourers working directly for the general staff,’ he said, ‘have made a careful study of these devices, and have concluded that in these toys may lie the answer to the threat posed to the whole empire by the foreign pirates generally known as the raiders. It is the view of our best armoury officers that if the Morevich Thunder mixture is packed into a stout bronze tube sealed at one end, the force of the eruption will be sufficient to hurl a stone or an iron ball with enough force to do tremendous damage. Given a large enough stone, it might be possible to break down a wall, or –’ theatrical pause ‘– or to sink a ship. As you all know, it has in the past proved beyond our ability to contain the raiders’ forces once they land. Neither do we possess sufficient naval strength – or, quite frankly, skill – to engage them by sea. If, however, we could contrive to sink their ships while they were still at sea, by means of weapons operating from shore batteries, we believe that the devastating and intolerable attacks that the Empire has suffered over the last eighty years could be discouraged and ultimately brought to an end. In other words, the Morevich Thunder project could mean an end to the raiders, and thereby, without exaggeration, the salvation of the Empire.’
Total silence. It was obvious that nobody had the faintest idea what the old bastard was talking about, but that wasn’t stopping them hanging on his every word. Of course he hadn’t mentioned money yet; but the salvation of the Empire . . . It had to be worth more than making a few lousy bells, surely—