Shadow (Scavenger Trilogy Book 1)

by K. J. Parker

  ‘What the hell was all that about?’ Poldarn asked, as they left the building.

  ‘It worked, didn’t it?’

  Poldarn shifted the bag of coins to his left hand. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘But surely you aren’t allowed to do that – put something up as collateral when you haven’t paid for it yet.’

  Copis yawned. ‘You could well be right,’ she said. ‘Which is why I had to rattle him. I think I succeeded.

  ‘You certainly rattled me,’ Poldarn replied. ‘So now what?’

  ‘We take this money to the Potto house – if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s knowing I owe money to someone – then we buy a cart, come back, load up what they’ve got in stock, and work out where we visit first. No point in hanging about, is there?’

  Potto Ilec was surprised but pleased to see them again, and made out a warrant to his storeman for the buttons. ‘I wish I could tell you exactly what we’ve got in stock and what we haven’t,’ he said, ‘but right now I can’t, the stock books are at the factory.’ An unmistakably wistful expression crossed his face. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to see the factory,’ he added.

  ‘Delighted,’ Copis said quickly, before Poldarn could refuse. ‘If we’re going to be selling your buttons, we really ought to see the factory.’

  Potto Ilec beamed. ‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Right then, we’ll go there straight away.’ Before you can change your mind, he didn’t need to add. The smile did that for him.

  It took over half an hour of brisk walking, down narrow alleys and passages where the eaves of the houses on either side almost met in the middle, and Potto Ilec didn’t stop talking until they reached the factory gate. Neither Copis nor Poldarn could make much sense of what he was saying; most of it was abstruse mechanical details of the new pattern of lathes and sawpits and mill gears he’d just had built, interspersed at very long intervals with a few oblique comments about how much he cared for his workers’ welfare and how they were more like family than servants to him. Poldarn kept trying to catch Copis’ eye so that he could scowl at her for getting them involved in such a monumental waste of time, but she had a knack of looking the other way at exactly the right moment.

  ‘Here we are,’ Potto Ilec announced, halting abruptly in front of a grey, split wooden door in the wall of a particularly dark and narrow alley. ‘Our factory, and probably the best facility of its kind north of the bay.’

  He banged on the door three times with his fist. Nothing happened. ‘They probably can’t hear me over the noise of the machines,’ he explained. ‘Can’t complain, it means they’re all keeping busy and concentrating on their work.’ He hit the door a fourth time. A small splinter of wood fell off and landed at his feet.

  Poldarn was getting bored and bad-tempered. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘let me try,’ and he gave the door a kick that would’ve broken a man’s ribs. Something gave way and the door flew open. Potto Ilec gave him a startled look and plunged through the doorway, like a duck pitching on water.

  Inside it was very dark, even darker than the office in the Potto house. ‘Mind your head,’ Potto Ilec said, bending almost double to avoid a very low beam. ‘Oh, and watch your feet, too. An untidy shop is a busy shop, that’s what I always say.’

  They passed through another doorway into a large hall. It was slightly less dark; some light was managing to get through the long, thin vertical slits about two-thirds of the way up the walls that served as windows. The hall was crowded with men, women and children, most of them sitting cross-legged in rows on the ground in front of a wooden stake or stump driven into the damp clay floor. Between the rows there were duckboards, raised on bricks. The smell was repulsive: rotten meat and burned bone, sweat, urine and some kind of sweet oily smell that coated the tongue in seconds. Every surface was covered in fine white dust, like snow.

  ‘This is it,’ Potto Ilec said proudly. ‘I only wish my father could’ve lived to see it.’

  Poldarn peered at the closest squatting figure, which he was eventually able to identify as a man. In his left hand he held a button. In his right was a stick made up of plaited reeds. He was polishing the button with it.

  ‘Horsetail rushes,’ Potto Ilec explained, following Poldarn’s line of sight. ‘They’re sharp and abrasive, just right for polishing out sawmarks, and they’re free; we just send someone down to the reed beds to cut a wagonload.’

  Next to the man’s left knee was a large earthenware jar, full of unpolished buttons. There was another jar just like it by his right knee, half full of polished ones. Poldarn noticed that the man’s fingers were cracked and bleeding.

  ‘Over here,’ Potto Ilec went on, clumping along the duckboard towards the far wall, ‘we’ve got the saw benches, where we cut the bone into narrow sheets. Absolutely wonderful, these new saws. All it takes to run them is three men: one turns the handle, one feeds the bones into the hopper, and the third one runs them through against the fence. There, see.’

  Some show of interest was obviously called for, so Poldarn took a step or so closer to the nearest saw bench. In spite of himself, he found it rather fascinating. A tall, bony child was turning a crank (he had to stand on tiptoe to bring it up to top dead centre), which powered a complicated-looking nest of gearwheels, which in turn spun the round sawblade at an astonishingly high speed. The blade was two-thirds buried in a massive wooden bench, and parallel to it was a deep keyway running the length of the benchtop, in which rode a shuttle, fitted with wooden screws and clamps artfully designed to grip various shapes and sizes of bone. A bald man in a frayed red shirt pushed the shuttle forward into the sawblade, which shot out a jet of fine white dust, like a fountain – Poldarn noticed that he was missing half the thumb of his left hand and most of the middle finger of his right – while behind him a short, fat child clamped another bone into another shuttle. The smell of friction-burned bone was sickening.

  ‘Over here,’ Potto Ilec said, ‘we’ve got the drilling benches. Another wonderful innovation; you won’t see anything like this anywhere in the world, I’m convinced of it.’

  The first thing Poldarn noticed about the drilling bench was the row of what looked like miniature gallows – an upright post, about as long as his forearm, with two bars sticking out at right angles, one a hand’s span above the other. There was a hole bored in the end of each of these bars, in which rode a wooden spindle with a brass collet holding a tiny flat-bladed drill mounted on the end. Five or six turns of cord were wrapped round the middle of the spindle; the ends of the cord were fastened to the nocks of a wooden bow, which a worker pushed and pulled backwards and forwards, spinning the drill in its bearings. The second man on each drill pressed down on the top of the spindle with a pad of rag or, as often as not, the bare palm of his hand, thereby pushing the drill down into the workpiece – a square of bone pared off one of the long, thin slices produced by the saw bench, held in position by two wooden clamps tightened by thumbscrews. After each hole had been drilled, the presser-down slacked off the thumbscrews and turned the bone square in its jig, ready to drill the next hole, the result being four holes in a precise square, in the very centre of the piece of bone.

  ‘I can see your colleague shares my passion for fine machinery, ’ Potto Ilec told Copis happily. ‘I’m just like him, I could stand for hours on end just watching.’

  Poldarn, looking at the drill bench, had his back to Copis and therefore couldn’t see the expression on her face, but the little grunting noise she made was enough to give him a fairly unambiguous idea of what she thought about that.

  ‘The next process is really clever,’ Potto Ilec declared, leading the way rather too quickly for comfort across the unstable duckboards. ‘Our chief engineer’s idea, though I must confess that some of the refinements are mine. See if you can guess which.’

  Poldarn had no intention of doing anything of the sort; but the machine – for making the square blanks round – was clever enough, in its way. Mostly it was a lathe; a boy cranked a flywheel, tr
ansmitting power by means of belts and flywheels to a spindle in a sturdy oak headstock, in the centre of which was a boss with four pins sticking out of it in a square. These went through the holes in the button and located into matching holes in a revolving faceplate mounted in the tailstock. As the boy turned the handle the spindle spun round at a quite incredible rate, and the turner applied the edge of a chisel rested on a toolpost to the corners of the bone square until they’d been chipped away, leaving a perfectly circular button. This only took a few moments, after which the tailstock was drawn back, the rounded button dropped into a jar, and a new blank fitted. When the jar was full, Poldarn supposed, it was taken away and put in front of one of the polishers squatting on the damp floor. He asked Potto Ilec why he hadn’t built a machine to do that job as well.

  Potto Ilec looked very sad. ‘God knows, I’ve tried,’ he said. ‘But the problem’s holding the button. We tried modifying the pin-chucks on the lathes, but even when we found a system that worked, we could only polish the edges, and the insides still had to be done by hand, so it wasn’t worth it.’ He sighed. ‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘if you can think of a way of mounting the button on the spindle I’d love to hear about it. But I don’t think there is one.’

  Poldarn could see one obvious solution – a shallow collet in the headstock that would grip the edges of the button, allowing the abrasive reed to be applied to the face – but somehow he wasn’t inclined to mention it. ‘Well,’ he said, trying to sound enthusiastic, ‘thanks for showing us round. Knowing how they’re made makes me look at them in a whole new light.’

  ‘Delighted,’ Potto Ilec replied, then added, ‘My pleasure. Now you know that when I say we can turn out literally hundreds of buttons a day and all of them identical, I’m telling the absolute truth. There’s not many men in any trade, let alone the bone trade, who can say that.’

  As he spoke there was a loud bang from the back of the shop, accompanied by a piercing scream and followed by some confused shouting. Poldarn spun round and saw that the long leather drivebelt of one of the lathes had snapped; the crank, suddenly freed of its load, had pulled out of the boy’s hands, spun round at furious speed and cracked him under the chin, knocking him off his feet. Potto Ilec gasped with acute distress and thundered back down the duckboard, wading through the workers who’d gathered round the boy, past them to the lathe.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he reported, somewhat out of breath, as he rejoined them a few moments later. ‘The belt’s past salvaging and the crank handle’s bent, but that’s all. I was afraid the changewheels might have seized and stripped their teeth.’

  They’d got the boy sat up and were trying to drag his hand away from his face. There was a lot of blood, but Poldarn couldn’t see the damage because of all the heads and backs in the way. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he muttered. ‘What about the kid? Is he badly hurt?’

  ‘What? Oh, I see what you mean.’ Potto Ilec sighed. ‘I suppose it depends on where the crank handle hit him. Can’t have been the forehead or he’d be out cold, or even dead.’ A thought occurred to him that seemed to cheer him up. ‘I must have a word with our chief engineer and see if he can’t come up with something to dampen the crank axle, just in case something like this happens again. It’d be a pleasing challenge, I think; something with a parallel belt and two drums in suspension on either side of the axis.’ He smiled beautifully. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘with a bit of thought we might be able to come up with something we could modify to fit on to the saws as well.’

  Getting out of the shop, away from the gloom and the overwhelming smell, was sheer joy. Poldarn made a fairly creditable job of hiding it. Copis didn’t even try, but fortunately she was three steps behind Potto Ilec and he didn’t see her. ‘And now you know everything there is to know about making buttons,’ Potto Ilec said. ‘Now be honest, it’s not a bit like how you imagined it, is it?’

  ‘No,’ Poldarn said, and left it at that.

  It was dark by the time he and Copis got back to the house. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted,’ Copis announced as soon as the door was shut behind them. ‘I think I’ll go on up to bed, and tomorrow I’m going to the bath-house. God knows if I’ll ever be able to get that stench out of my hair, but I intend to try. Otherwise I’m going to have to cut it all off.’

  She disappeared up the stairs, leaving Poldarn sitting in a chair beside the cold hearth. The silence suited him, after the noise of the factory and Copis’ statement of what she thought about Potto Ilec and his wonderful machines, which had continued without interruption from the factory gate right up to her own door. Copis thought the button factory was an abomination. He could see her point, though he’d prefer to arrive at it by way of different reasons (she didn’t hold with it because of the smell and the damp air, which made her feel dirty and scruffy); on the other hand, there was something about the machines – capable, powerful, inhuman – that appealed to a part of him he wasn’t sure he was familiar with. To be able to make thousands of something so that each one of them was exactly the way you wanted it, your idea made real, and with no effort on your part, as the machines and the people who served them did all the work according to your design – thinking about it and trying to imagine what it must feel like gave him just a hint of an idea of what it must be like to be a god. A god, after all, wouldn’t squat on the floor, cutting and filing and grinding each life in isolation. A god would have rows and rows of machines, shaping lives by the hundreds of thousands simultaneously (and each machine would be part of him, and no single machine would be the whole), and the essence of his divinity would be the power to build and set up the machines, work out the sequence of processes, fit together the drives and gear trains, so that the strength of a boy’s hand on the crank would be amplified into enough power to shear through bone at a touch, and the holes in the work would fit the pins of the chuck exactly, every time, with no thought required, so that once set in motion (by one turn of the crank, one moment of force applied at top dead centre) the sequence of actions and processes would lead to a certain and absolutely predictable end, all while the master’s back was turned and he was busy with something else. Gods, he felt, would have that same fierce, absurdly misdirected pride that Potto Ilec had displayed, a passionate love for the process and the product taken for granted, of no interest except for its value in bulk, its place in the chain of processes that moved the buttons from Sansory to the rest of the world and landed them, at the end of one sequence of functions and at the start of another, where they were meant to be, on someone’s coat.

  He closed his eyes. What if there are some gods who only turn the crank, operating a machine they don’t understand or have forgotten about? What if someone were to build a machine and lose his memory, so that he couldn’t remember how the machine worked or what it was for? But at least he’d know to turn the crank handle and set the gears and pulleys racing, and probably he’d try and figure out the workings and purpose of the machine by observing it in action, until logic and basic principles made it obvious what the process and objectives were. He worried away at this question for some time, both awake and in brief, obscure dreams, some of them involving crows and battles and men he didn’t know, some of them merely mechanical, the pure machine without human hands or faces. It had been a long day and he’d had enough of it, but it didn’t seem to want to let go. Bits of it were embedded in his mind, like a splinter of steel from a grindstone lodged in an eye, or the head of a tick that stays in the flesh after you’ve pulled off its body.

  Chapter Eighteen

  They dragged him, bleeding and dizzy, from the cart to the tent flap (and as his feet trailed behind him, each bump and jolt jarring the broken bone, flooding his body and mind with pain, two crows got up out of a dead spruce tree and flew away; one of them had something gripped in its beak, but he wasn’t sufficiently interested to lift his head and see what it was). The sentry outside the tent blocked their way with his spear.

  ‘What’
s the hurry?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Top priority is what it is,’ snapped the trooper on his left. ‘Urgent. You know what urgent means?’

  ‘It’s all right.’ The voice came from inside the tent. ‘Let them through, I’m expecting them.’ A hand pulled back the tent flap, and they hauled him through and lowered him to the ground like a sack of grain, gently enough to stop him splitting open, but beyond that not too bothered.

  ‘Lift his head.’ A hand gathered enough hair for a grip and pulled upwards, lifting his head enough for him to see the man in the tent. ‘That’s him. Fine, good work. Now, you two go and get something to eat, catch a few hours’ sleep. We’re moving out just before dawn.’

  He couldn’t see the two troopers now, so he assumed they were saluting or whatever cavalrymen did; all he could see was six square inches of threadbare carpet. But he could hear the rustling of canvas, which led him to believe they’d left the tent.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ the voice said. A pause – he didn’t reply, mostly because that would involve moving his jaw, which would be very painful. ‘Hello, can you hear me? I asked you a question.’

  Something hit him just above the waist, confirming his impression that at least one rib on that side was broken. He rode out the pain like a man in a small boat in a gale; so long as his connection with this body was minimal, he could stay above the breakers, not get swamped by them.

  ‘I said, do you know who I am?’ If he’d been feeling a little better, he’d have laughed. Possibly he’d have made a witty reply – something along the lines of, I don’t even know who I am, or, Sorry, but my mother told me never to talk to strange men. He didn’t know who he was, of course; or if he did, the knowledge had been crammed into an inaccessible corner of his mind by the pain, and he couldn’t reach it. Didn’t really want to, either.