by K. J. Parker
‘What do you think of the name?’ Asburn asked, as they waited for the metal to get hot.
‘What name?’
‘Bollesknap,’ Asburn replied. ‘That’s what they said this place is called.’
‘I think it sucks,’ Poldarn replied. ‘I think we need a new name, don’t you?’
Asburn nodded. ‘How about Ciartansdale?’ he suggested.
But Poldarn shook his head. ‘Too confusing,’ he said. ‘Ciartanstead and Ciartansdale. Besides, I never liked that name much.
‘Fair enough.’ Asburn drew the bar out of the nest of red coals; it was orange going on yellow, almost hot enough but not quite. He reached up for the bellows handle. ‘You got anything in mind?’
‘I have, as a matter of fact,’ Poldarn said, lifting the hammer. ‘I was thinking of Poldarn’s Forge.’
Asburn looked at him. ‘Funny choice,’ he said. ‘That’s the old name for the mountain.’ He drew the bar away from the fire, tapped it on the horn to shake off the scale, and laid it on the anvil. Poldarn fixed his gaze on the place where he wanted to strike.
‘I know,’ he said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
In spite of Boarci’s enthusiastic recommendation, they didn’t eat earwigs for dinner that night. By a pleasing coincidence, the first of the migrating geese appeared in the sky a few hours before sunset, and two plump but stupid specimens dropped in on the flood in the yard. They never knew what hit them.
By another pleasing coincidence, Asburn had already made spits to roast them on and a knife to carve them with. It was, everyone agreed, the best meal they’d had since before the volcano erupted, though Hand, one of the men who’d come from Ciartanstead with Poldarn, said they’d have been better for a bit of cabbage and a few leeks. Meanwhile, Elja had found five elderly but serviceable blankets in a mildewed trunk in the trap-house; she cut four of them down the middle and kept the fifth intact for Poldarn and herself. That left them short by two blankets, but Raffen and Boarci said they weren’t particularly cold anyway, and if they were they weren’t sleeping under anything that had come from the back of an outhouse. They smashed up the trunk and put the bits on the fire.
Poldarn woke up well before dawn and realised he had no chance of getting back to sleep. He felt as full of energy as a child on a holiday, so he crept out of the bedroom through the hall – it was dark, but he seemed to know the way, because he got through without treading on anybody – and across the yard to the forge. When he opened the door he found that Asburn was already there, nursing the beginnings of the day’s fire with gentle nudges from the bellows.
‘That’s good,’ Poldarn said. ‘You know, I never dared admit this before, but I haven’t got a clue how to start a fire. Not without plenty of hay and charcoal, anyhow.’
Asburn grinned. ‘I’d gathered that,’ he said. ‘But it didn’t seem right for me to say so, you being the smith by right of birth and all that. Here, I’ll show you if you like.’
When the fire was full and hot, they started work. By alternating, they were able to share the anvil and the hammer, one man striking while the other took a heat. Asburn started by making a spearhead, ‘so Boarci can go and kill things up the mountain.’ Poldarn made three chisels, welding steel tips to iron bodies, since their stock of hardening steel was distinctly limited. The welds took first time without any trouble. Next Asburn made another hammer, a twelve-pound sledge, and once they’d fitted it on a stem carved down from a wheel-spoke with one of Poldarn’s chisels, they used it to draw down and flatten out two broken sword-blades: one into a scythe, the other into a saw. The latter had to wait until Poldarn had made a file so that the teeth could be cut; he used a snapped-off halberd point, which already had the right degree of taper. Once he’d forged it triangular, he took a good heat, clamped it in the vice and used his new chisel to score in the cutting ridges. It was slow work; the heat in the metal kept drawing the temper of the chisel, which had to be rehardened over and over again before the job was done. Finally it was ready; he caked the file in mud before hardening it, so the fire wouldn’t burn the ridges off as it came up to cherry red. The saw was filed and finished by nightfall, by which time Asburn had also made a sett, an axe head and a drill bit.
‘It’s getting late,’ Asburn said, cutting a trail through the layer of black soot on his forehead with the back of his wrist. ‘We ought to stop now, I suppose.’
‘I guess,’ Poldarn replied. The day had gone unbelievably quickly, and for once it had left behind tangible and valuable accomplishments. ‘I was going to make a start on a shovel. That stream in the yard needs banking up straight away, before we get any more rain.’
‘That’s a long job,’ Asburn replied. ‘You’d be better off running up a couple more knives for the house.’
‘We haven’t eaten anything all day,’ Poldarn remembered. ‘We’d better do that, before we get weak and fall over.’
The treasures they brought with them ensured them a hero’s welcome back in the house. Each piece of work was handed round and admired as if it had been dug up from a king’s grave. In turn, they had to admire the achievements of the rest of the household. Raffen had been out gathering firewood, picking out bits and pieces from the charred mess of Eyvind’s plantation. Boarci had spent the day waiting for the geese, and one of them had come home with him; they’d have to eat quickly and well to get through all the meat they had on hand before it spoiled. Hand and the other hitherto nameless loyalist, Reno, had filled half a blanket with apples, pears, quinces, chestnuts and various evil-looking varieties of fungus. Rook had scooped clay out of the seam in the yard and squidged it into cups, plates and bowls, which were drying in front of the fire. Elja had found a bed of osiers and was weaving them into something, though it wasn’t big enough yet to tell what it was going to be.
‘It’s a shame Rannwey isn’t here,’ Poldarn said. ‘She’s very quick at basket-weaving.’
They turned their heads and looked at him. At last, Elja said, ‘You don’t know?’
‘Don’t know what?’
She took a deep breath. ‘Rannwey’s dead, I’m afraid. On the way down the mountain – we think it was her heart. I’m sorry.’
Poldarn froze, the basketwork still in his hands. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, that’s a shame. I’d assumed she’d gone to Ciartanstead with the others. I don’t think she liked me very much.’
They were staring at him, that uncomprehending stare he’d seen so often. This time, it didn’t bother him so much. The fact was that he felt nothing, except in an abstract, almost theoretical way. Rannwey had been his grandmother, his last living blood relative, and apparently she’d died. To him she’d been a pair of piercing eyes and a blank stare that he’d done his best to avoid; he’d always seemed to bewilder her more than he bewildered the others, and it had made him feel painfully embarrassed. The fact that he’d had no trouble in believing that she’d sided with his enemy was surely eloquent enough. He hadn’t wanted her to die, but he was very glad she wasn’t here, even if she could weave a good basket.
‘Anyway,’ Elja said with an effort, ‘we’re starting to get organised; that’s good. Any chance of someone making a start on some furniture tomorrow? Two stools and the floor are all very well, but I could do with a little luxury, like a table.’
Then everyone began talking at once, urging the claims of their own favoured projects and laying claim to use of the tools. As for what Asburn and Poldarn should do the next day, there was no shortage of suggestions. Pot hooks and fire irons, rakes, pitchforks, hoes, mattocks, spades, more hammers, more files, more knives, more axes, more saws and chisels, an adze (Poldarn didn’t happen to notice who asked for that, but he was impressed), pots and kettles, rasps, calipers, nails, a lamp-stand (‘But we haven’t got any lamps,’ Asburn pointed out), new hinges for the barn door, bolts and hasps and brackets, and – if there was time – a lathe spindle, ploughshares and the metal parts for a spinning-wheel treadle. Poldarn kept nodding till h
e was dizzy; there didn’t seem to be any reason why they couldn’t make them all, if not tomorrow then the next day. It wasn’t as if anything they were asking for was particularly difficult, it was just a matter of knowing what to do. And he did, he realised: somehow he’d known it all along but it was only just beginning to drift up from the depths of his memory. Suddenly he was having visions of himself beside an anvil, bending and twisting and drawing down and jumping up endless rods and bars and odd-shaped pieces from the scrap, while someone whose face he couldn’t see was saying, No, not like that, and Now you’ve got it, that’s the ticket. He found himself grinning because he’d known it all already, even when he’d been struggling to make a straight nail in the forge at Haldersness; he’d known the whole craft, even better than Asburn did – everything, of course, except how to get a fire going.
He woke up even earlier next day, and beat Asburn to the forge by several minutes. He still couldn’t get the fire to catch, but this time at least he knew why. By the time he was so tired that the hammer was slipping through his fingers, he’d made a heap of priceless, indispensable tools and implements, each one a vital contribution to the life of the farm. Wire, Asburn was saying, if we could only make up some plates for drawing wire; but Poldarn knew exactly how to go about that, though he kept it to himself so he wouldn’t look like he was boasting. He’d drawn wire before, any amount of it. It was like everything else, easy if you knew the trick. What a difference just a little scrap of memory made.
Poldarn thought about that as he dug a broken halberd-blade in under the coals. He considered the memory of steel, imparted by intense heat and sudden cold: take a piece of hardening steel, heat it until it glows red and quench it and heat it again until the colours crawl upwards, yellow and brown and purple and blue, and you can teach it to remember its own shape. Bend it back on itself and let it go, and it’ll spring back into the shape you’ve taught it to keep. Heat it again and let it cool slowly in the air, and it forgets; bend it, and it stays bent, bend it back and forth often enough and it fatigues and breaks. Memory gives it not only identity, but strength.
Next he considered the memory of flesh, imparted by intense experience and sudden understanding: take a piece of flesh, fill it with knowledge, learning, wisdom, experience; quench it in pain, heat it again in friendship, love and understanding, and you can teach it to remember its own name. Bend it back on itself and let go, and it’ll spring back into the identity it’s learned to inhabit. Heat it again in horror, shame and understanding, let it cool slowly in confused sleep, and it forgets. Bend it, and it follows whatever force is applied to it, adapting itself without resistance to whatever shape will get it out of the way of the pressure, until in time it fatigues and breaks. Memory gives it not only identity, but strength.
Then he considered the broken steel and the broken flesh. One can be put back in the fire over and over again; each time it goes from intense heat to sudden cold to gradual, accumulating heat it accepts a new memory, gains new strength, becomes capable of taking and holding an edge. Put the other in the fire and it burns away, converted into smoke and ash, like the effluent of a volcano. The defining property of flesh is that it can only be worked once; unlike steel, which, if it warps in the quench and comes out distorted, crooked, bad, can be saved by fire and water and more fire, making it infinitely more versatile and enduring than muscle, skin and bone. Even supposing it were possible to take flesh with a bad set and heat out the offending memory, the result would inevitably be weak and ductile, unable to hold an edge, bending and stretching and buckling under pressure until finally the ignorant material fatigues, cracks, tears, snaps, fails. Memory is understanding. Memory is strength.
But supposing you were to take flesh that could withstand heat, even the heat of the fire-stream that had turned Barn and the old man who’d wanted to help into ash and smoke, but that had taken a bad set in the quench and become warped, distorted, untrue. Supposing you could find such a piece of flesh in a ditch or the corner of a barn or in the mud and blood of a river bank, annealed of its memory until it was as soft as a bloom of virgin iron, and supposing you heated and forged and heated and quenched and heated it, in the fire of burning houses and Polden’s Forge and the river mud of the Bohec (as he’d coddled the file-blade in mud so the fine steel of the teeth wouldn’t burn; yes, maybe that was how to save flesh from burning) – suppose you could do that, and keep on doing it over and over again until at last, eventually, it came out straight from the quench, filled with good memory and set in the desired shape. That would be the very best hardening flesh. That would be a god.
But he doubted that – because flesh burns, even when coated in mud or wrapped in oxhides saturated with water; a defining property of flesh is that it burns. That limits its usefulness and cramps its versatility, because nothing survives burning except smoke and the ash that covers fields and buries growth. The thought depressed him, because he’d had such high hopes for flesh as a material for the manufacture of useful and enduring things. But then he thought of how steel burns too, if too much heat gets into it, blanching the orange to white; he thought of the welding heat, the incandescent white that crackles and glitters with sparks, at which point it can be joined to another piece in marriage under the hammer, in the brief moment of love between taking a heat and burning. He considered the way Asburn had made the pattern-welded blade, binding together flat leaves of steel and bringing them to the very brink of burning, and how his hammer had joined the many into one (like the mind of the crows, or the people of Haldersness and Ciartanstead). It seemed to him that in order to make a join in steel or flesh, it was necessary to bring the material to the point of destruction, when the skin is molten and fluid and one piece can flow into another, as the Mahec and the Bohec merge into each other and then the sea, at Boc Bohec. Once joined, of course, they can take heat and sudden cold and incremental heat as well as a piece of the solid, and the only indication that they were ever separate is – of course – the pattern: the maiden’s hair, the butterfly, the pools and eyes.
And that made him wonder whether the best hope for flesh wasn’t the coddling in clay but the welding heat, the love of separate pieces achieving union at the point of burning. In the pattern weld, he remembered, Asburn had interleaved hardening steel and soft iron, so that the brittle strength of one should be saved by the soft ductility of the other while still being capable of taking and holding an edge, taking and keeping memory. He remembered what Asburn had told him; that when they first came to this country these people (his people) were dangerously short of good material and so learned the knack of burning and hammering separate pieces of scrap into useful and enduring things; at least until they’d grown strong enough to go across the sea and strip what they needed from the dead bodies of their enemies. Maybe, he thought, the answer to the problem of flesh is the pattern-weld, where muscle and skin and bone are fluxed out and burnt away, but the memory remains in the pattern, the ripples of the pools and eyes, the ascending rungs of Polden’s Ladder.
‘You look thoughtful,’ Asburn said. ‘Problem?’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘Just trying to remember something,’ he said. ‘Did you ever come across a man called Hart? He lives over the other side of the moor somewhere.’
Asburn frowned. ‘I think so,’ he replied. ‘Do you mean Egil Colscegson’s friend, the one who breeds lurchers? I seem to remember seeing him once, over at Colscegsford, years ago. Tall man, big hands, not much good with horses.’
‘That sounds like him,’ Poldarn said, ‘though I didn’t know he was friends with Egil.’
‘It was Egil or Barn,’ Asburn replied. ‘Most likely Egil, because Barn was always a bit timid around dogs. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, no reason. It was him I traded that salt beef with. I was wondering if he had any more going spare. We could do with it.’
‘That’s true. But what have we got that we could trade?’
‘I don’t know. It was just a thought.’ Poldarn
pulled his piece of steel out of the fire. It was still only dull red, so he put it back and hauled on the bellows handle.
Asburn shrugged. ‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘if you want to know about Hart, you ought to ask Elja. I think she went to stay with him once or twice, when she was a kid. Her and Egil both. Or Barn. One of the two.’
Poldarn matched his breathing to the gusts of the bellows. ‘It might be worth following up,’ he said. ‘If he’s an old friend of the family, maybe he’d let us have the salt beef now and wait till later, when we’ve got something to trade for it.’
‘Good idea. You should go over there and see him, when you’ve got the time.’
Poldarn stared into the fire. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I could do that.’
That evening, when they gathered for dinner, Raffen happened to mention that a big mob of crows had settled on some flat patches in the barley and were making a mess of it. So Poldarn got up early the next morning and took a bucketful of stones out to the long meadow. But his luck wasn’t in; the birds were there all right, but the hedge was too low and thin to give him enough cover; they saw him in plenty of time and flew wide rings round him, screaming and flinching out of range whenever he drew his arm back, until he gave up and went back to the house. According to Raffen, they came back an hour after he’d gone and stayed there the rest of the day.
During the two weeks that followed, Poldarn found himself beginning to believe that life could, after all, be a pleasant and rewarding affair, rather than the lamination of tedium and horror he’d come to expect. He got up with the sun and went straight to his day’s work, knowing from the moment he opened his eyes exactly what he was going to do that day, and joyfully aware that by the time he closed them again, he’d have achieved something that would make the next day easier and more pleasant for himself and those around him. He enjoyed the heat of the forge and the weight of the hammer. He relished the challenge of imposing his will on iron and steel, the satisfaction of teaching it shapes that it would hold for a hundred years. He was delighted to find that, as he went about each new project, he remembered in precise detail how to do it. Some operations he knew he’d done before at some time, others he was able to figure out from basic principles that turned out to be ingrained in his mind. Suddenly he could forge-weld better than Asburn, knowing as soon as he drew the spitting white steel out of the fire whether or not it would take. The four-pound hammer became frustratingly light and slow, so he made himself a six-pound straight-peen with a stem as long as his forearm from fingertips to elbow. He found that he didn’t have to wrap a wet rag around a piece of heated bar before he could bear to hold it. His arms and the backs of his hands became pitted with scores of little burns from sparks and flying cinders, but instead of yelping and wincing when they landed on his bare skin, he ignored them and carried on working. Elja tanned the skin of a deer that Boarci had killed on the lower slopes of the mountain, and sewed it with its own sinew into an apron and a pair of long-cuffed gloves; he was delighted by the thought behind it, but rarely bothered to wear them.