Memory

Chapter Three

Behind him, the sea was just a huge grey shape; he wasn't concerned with it any more. He trudged across the beach, worried about turning his ankle over in the deep shingle. Well, he thought, here I am. Directly ahead, a seagull got up and dragged itself into the air, shrieking resentfully at him. At some point in its ascent, it turned into a very large, very black crow.

(Like burning wood, only in reverse; white ash to black charcoal. Which means this fire is burning backwards. Which is fine; now I know where I am.)

The contact was waiting for him on the edge of the shingle; a woman, young, not pretty. 'You're him, then,' she said.

He wasn't in the mood for cryptic stuff. 'Depends,' he yawned.

'The spy.'

'Ah yes.' He grinned. 'That'll be me.'

'You're to follow me up to the farm,' she said. She turned and started to walk. He shrugged, and did as he'd been told.

It was a long way, all uphill, and he hadn't had much exercise on the long sea journey. 'Hold on,' he said breathlessly. 'You're going too fast.'

'No,' she replied. 'You're dawdling.'

'Ah. Thanks for explaining.'

It didn't look like a farm, when at last they got there. He knew what farms looked like; this was just a shack, like a storage shed or a small barn. Also, it was made of piled-up stones, not wood. He thought of how much work there'd be, building something out of stones. Didn't they have trees in this rotten country?

'We're here,' she said, unnecessarily. 'You wait here, I'll fetch my dad.'

'Here' was a small cobbled yard. In one corner stood a mounting-block: red sandstone, overgrown with moss and a busy green-leafed weed he hadn't seen before. Opposite was a midden, of great size and antiquity, newly garnished with leek stalks, turnip-tops and half a dozen fresh turds. Behind that was the plank wall of a small lean-to; the timbers were grey, and about a hundred years ago someone had nailed up two stags' heads to cure. For some reason or other they'd never come back for them, and now the bone was smudged with green. Directly in front of him was the house. There was a doorway, but apparently no door. Through it, he could see a stone-flagged floor, and a chicken wandering aimlessly about, pecking.

Charming place, he thought. And this is probably the garden spot of the whole Empire.

A man appeared in the doorway and stared at him. He stared back. It was pretty obvious that neither of them had ever seen a foreigner before.

'You,' said the man. 'You speak-?'

He'd said a word that made no sense; the name of the language, presumably. 'Yes,' Ciartan replied.

'Oh, right. Didn't know if you did or not.'

'Learned it on the boat,' Ciartan lied. 'So you're our contact, then.'

The man shook his head. 'I just do as I'm told,' he said. 'Bloke you want, he's due in the morning. Meanwhile, you're to wait here. There's dinner, if you want any.'

'Thank you,' Ciartan said politely. 'Do I come in, or what?'

The man nodded gloomily, and stood back to let him pass. Inside, the house was even stranger than on the outside. Ciartan found himself in a tiny little room, no more than ten feet square. It was empty, apart from a few pairs of muddy boots and a rusty scythe, and there didn't seem to be any point to it. The man went through a doorway in the far wall; Ciartan followed, and found himself in another small room. This one had a table and six chairs in it. Bizarre, Ciartan thought. Do people really live like this?

'What is this place?' he asked.

'What?'

'This-building,' Ciartan replied. 'Is it some sort of lodge or guest house or something?'

The man looked at him as though he'd just said something offensive. 'It's my house,' he said.

'Oh.' Well, no reason why the man should be lying. 'Isn't it a bit cramped, then?'

'No.' Ciartan got the impression that the man didn't like him much. 'It's plenty big.'

'I see. How many of you live here, then?'

The man gave him a none-of-your-business-but look. 'There's six of us, seven if you count the nipper. Me, the wife, our eldest-Jarla, you met her just now-and the three boys, and Mito, that's the babe.'

'Oh.' Just seven of them; no wonder the house was so tiny. 'It's different, where I come from,' he said, and hoped that'd do for an explanation. The man either accepted it or didn't care. 'You can sit down if you like,' he said.

'Thanks.' The chair was small, too, and thin, made out of little twiggy bits of wood. No arms. Pathetic bloody excuse for a chair, really.

'The wife'll get you your dinner,' the man said. 'I got work to do.'

Ciartan looked up. For a moment he felt confused; he had been made aware that there was work to be done, but he didn't know what it was, and therefore couldn't figure out what part of it he should be doing. He expected the man to tell him, in default of normal methods of communication, but he just walked away.

Unimpressive, Ciartan decided. You'd have thought that, if these people really couldn't hear each others' minds and had to rely on spoken words to talk to each other, they'd have been rather better at it than either this man or his daughter appeared to be. Apparently not. Already, he was starting to feel vaguely panicky. He hadn't really given much thought to the implications of what he'd been told; that these people couldn't hear minds, didn't even know it was possible, and that their minds couldn't be heard by normal people. In fact, it was downright frightening. For one thing, how on earth were you supposed to know if they were telling the truth or not?

My mother was one of this lot, he remembered uneasily. The idea was disconcerting, as if he ought to be on his guard, in case half of his body turned out to be on their side.

He realised that he was uncomfortably cold, and that the fire in the hearth (one small fireplace, and stuck in the wall, not the middle of the room; now that was just plain perverse) had gone out. The urge to get up and light it was almost overpowering-you see that a fire's gone out, you light it, that's what people do; but since everything else was arse-backwards here, maybe he'd be better off leaving it alone. He had an idea he'd already made enough trouble for himself as it was.

He kept himself amused for a while by looking at the battery of strange metal gadgets in the fireplace, trying to figure out what they were for. The poker and tongs were easy enough, though they were ever such a funny shape; but the thing with the long iron spikes-clearly it revolved around its axis, but why? For a long time he couldn't think what it could be used for, except as a particularly unpleasant instrument of torture. Then inspiration struck; maybe they used it for cooking. You could stick a lump of meat on the spikes-it'd have to be a really big lump, you could practically get a whole sheep on there-and then somehow the thing with the chains and weights would turn the whole thing round, so that the meat would get warmed up evenly all over-yes, and that huge iron dish underneath was to catch the juices and the dripping as they drained off. Ingenious, in a cockamamy sort of a way.

A woman came in, carrying a small wooden plate. She was short, and looked as though all the features of her face had been worn away by rain and wind, or by over-vigorous polishing. On the plate were a few slices of hard grey bread, some indeterminate vegetable matter, and what Ciartan devoutly hoped was a sausage. The woman looked away as soon as she could, as if he was somehow obscene, and scuttled back the way she'd come.

The food was, of course, disgusting.

Nobody else came anywhere near him, though from time to time he could hear voices in the yard outside. There were young kids screaming; the man shouting at someone; a female, probably the daughter rather than the wife, singing as she went about some chore or other. He saw the red light of sunset through the doorway, and then it was suddenly dark. It was also getting even colder, all the time. He hoped, and prayed earnestly to the non-existent gods, that this house was just a crummy little peasant shack and not anything bigger or better. If this place was the sort of house the local gentry lived in, then screw spying and screw being in disgrace, he was going home.

Only he couldn't, of course.

No way home, unless he fancied swimming. No ships; and even if there were any, none of them would be going where he wanted to go, for the simple reason that nobody on this side of the water suspected that his homeland even existed. Stranded, he told himself. Marooned. Stuck.

Or, looked at from a different perspective, a brand new start, a new life in a new country; rebirth. Here, he didn't have to be Ciartan from Haldersness any more, with all the trouble and unpleasantness that that implied; he could be any damned thing he liked. The question was whether there was anything in this miserable place worth being,

But there. Here I go, he thought, judging an egg by its shell. Bloody stupid proverb. He'd almost made up his mind to light the fire and the hell with the lot of them, when the man came back, carrying a very small pottery lamp.

'I'll show you where you're sleeping,' he said.

'Thank you,' Ciartan heard himself reply, and he wondered if he'd have his very own pile of damp straw or whether he'd be mucking in with the pigs. Instead, he found himself following the man up a flight of narrow stairs into what was presumably the roof space: big beams and joists, and a triangular ceiling. But the room was huge; ten feet square, at least, and in the middle was a large wooden thing, with something that looked like a flat square bag on top, and another smaller bag up against the wall. 'What's that?' he couldn't help asking.

'What?'

'That thing there.'

'It's a bed,' the man told him, and Ciartan, whose best guess so far had been some kind of cider press, was too astonished to say anything. A bed. Well, bugger me. I wonder how it works.

The man put the lamp down on a stool and went away again, and Ciartan walked over and examined the large wooden contraption. Hell of a lot of trouble to go to just for sleeping, he thought; hell, even Grandad dosses down on a pile of old fleeces, and his room's half the size of this. Do they all use these extraordinary sleeping machines, or is this just for princes of the whole blood and other honoured guests?

He tried hard to pluck up the courage to get up on it, but couldn't quite manage it. For one thing, it had to be the best part of three feet off the floor; what was there to stop you rolling off it in your sleep and crashing to the ground? You could break your arm. Instead, he nervously tugged off a blanket, wrapped himself in it (no fire in the fireplace) and shivered himself to sleep. Perhaps it was the strangeness of his surroundings, or maybe it was just the horrible, indigestible food, but he found himself dreaming, and even by his standards, it was a very strange dream. There were crows in it, of course, and Poldarn woke up.

The familiar feeling, of the dream slithering away; but then he reached out and caught it, and it stayed trapped in his mind, like a lobster in a basket.

Memory, he thought. And the man in the dream was called Ciartan. That was me.

(A fire burning backwards; unconsuming what had once been destroyed and gone for ever. Crows that brought carrion, instead of taking it away.)

Time to get up. Get out of bed. Wash. Eat something. Go to work. He yawned.

Outside, in the hazy sunlight, something had begun without him. As he stood in the doorway of his cabin and watched the foundrymen hurrying backwards and forwards across the yard, he couldn't help being reminded of Haldersness, where everybody knew what they had to do without being told. There was a difference, but he couldn't quite figure out what it was.

'There you are,' said a voice on the edge of his vision. 'Been looking for you.'

Bergis, the head mud wrangler. Too late now to dart back inside; so he smiled feebly and asked how he could help.

'We're starting on the ward-tower bell for Falcata guild lodge,' Bergis replied. 'When you've pulled yourself together, I'll see you down at the cutting.'

Poldarn managed not to groan until Bergis was out of earshot. Marvellous. The cutting was what the foundrymen called the thick seam of grey muddy clay, which was the main reason why the foundry had been built here in the first place. Mixed with straw and lots and lots of cowshit, the cutting clay was perfect for building moulds and lining furnaces, being capable of soaking up vast amounts of heat and retaining it without cracking. It was also very sticky and slimy, and it didn't smell very nice, either. Bergis's job was to pounce on anybody who didn't see him coming and march him off to the cutting to dig and pack the revolting stuff. A job this size would probably call for at least five tons.

Oh well, Poldarn thought, never mind. He picked up a long-handled shovel from the tool store, and drifted slowly across the yard and down the slope through the scraggy wasteland the foundrymen referred to, rather bizarrely, as the orchard.

They'd already filled one cart by the time he got there. As usual, they'd piled so much into the cart that it was far too heavy to move, even with a team of mules pulling and the digging crew pushing; the more they heaved and struggled, the more bogged down the cart became, its wheels digging wide, soft ruts in the grey sludge. Eventually, someone would break down and fetch a few barrowloads of straw to pack under the wheels; until then, they'd wear themselves out and get spattered in mud up to their eyebrows trying to shift it by brute force. Hell of a way to run a commercial enterprise, but it wasn't Poldarn's place to make suggestions; particularly blindingly obvious ones.

It was too early in the morning for mud-wrestling and pulled muscles, so Poldarn gave the cart a wide berth and headed for the digging pit. The drill was to fill the wicker baskets with mud; when they were full and each one weighed slightly more than a farrier's small anvil, they had to be manhandled up off the ground and onto the bed of the cart. Grabbing the nearest empty basket, Poldarn walked up to the glistening grey face of the pit and started carving his way into it, like a cook slicing a hefty joint of meat. There was, of course, a knack to it, a matter of angles, leverage, mechanical advantage, which Poldarn mostly understood but couldn't quite get right.

Well now, he thought, as he stamped the shovel into the clay with his heel. The man-Gain Aciava, though that remains to be proved conclusively-was right about the dreams; so, either he's a shrewd guesser who knows how dreams work, or he was telling the truth. As for the dream itself: entirely plausible, but it didn't really show me anything I hadn't already conjectured for myself, so it could just've been me reconstructing my first hours on this continent, like a scholar speculating about things that happened a thousand years ago. Nothing decided either way; but do I believe? It's like asking me, do I believe in gods?

Do I believe?

Yes, Poldarn discovered, apparently I do. I think that's how it was when I first came here: the plain girl and her annoying father, and everything seeming strange, and the revolting food. Question is: am I remembering what happened, or has somebody told me the truth about something I've forgotten, like the scholar suddenly discovering an ancient manuscript? Does it matter?

He considered the point; yes, it probably mattered a hell of a lot, because if he believed the dream, he probably couldn't avoid believing Aciava as well. Now that could be awkward.

(But here I am anyway, in a filthy mess, digging clay out of a stinking hole in the ground in return for a few ladles of grey soup and the privilege of sleeping in a turf hut. The question can therefore only be: is it worth risking all this for the sake of finding out who I used to be? And the answer can only be: no, it isn't.)

The blade of Poldarn's shovel hit a stone, and the shock jarred his wrists and elbows. He winced; for some time he'd had an idea that he'd done something to damage the joints or tendons of his arms. Maybe it was the forge work, or perhaps it was an old injury, the result of drawing a sword and slashing empty air a thousand times a day for years on end. Pretty metaphor-no idea where the damage came from or how far back it went, dimly aware that it could have a harmful effect on his future, too stupid to care. His elbow was aching, as if he'd just banged his funny bone. Not a good sign, but here he was anyway; and the mud wasn't going to prise itself out of the bank and climb into the basket.

Only an idiot ignores the past and takes risks with his future; but Nature relies on idiots, or nothing would ever work properly. If it wasn't for the stupidity of all rabbits, hawks and foxes would starve to death; if cows and chickens stopped for a moment to consider that maybe something was wrong, there'd be no milk and eggs on the table. If the god in the cart happened to look over his shoulder and notice the trail of ruined cities and burning farms stretched out behind him, the prophecies would never be fulfilled and the world could never end. And then where would we all be?

But here he was anyway, digging clay when maybe he should be a Father Tutor, with purple slippers and a personal chaplain to open his letters for him. He thought about that; a sword-monk with a trick elbow was about as much use as a blind helmsman, and just as liable to die young. By the same token, there's not much call for a smith who can't swing a hammer, or a foundryman who can't dig. Once the injury's there, and that joint or tendon has acquired its small, crippling piece of history, the damage is done; and the glorious irony is that it's the craftsman's history of practising his craft that makes him unable to practise it further in the future-you can lose the memory, but still the pattern bleeds through the bandage. I am what I was, I will be what I am, the mechanism of history is a circular movement with a repeating escapement, like a trip-hammer. Poldarn clenched his left hand. His elbow still ached, and the tips of his fingers had gone numb. (And if my arm is my life, the damaged tendon connects the pain and the loss of memory.) 'Bugger,' he said, and leaned the shovel against the side of the pit. What he needed, even more than the exquisite symmetry of it all, was some nice hot water to soak his arm in. Well, at least he was in a foundry, where hot water was never a problem.

'Here,' Bergis shouted as he hauled himself out of the cutting. 'Where do you think you're sloping off to?'

'Furnace,' Poldarn replied. 'Done my wrist in.'

Bergis pulled a face; either sympathy or annoyance at lost production. Knowing Bergis, probably lots of both. 'Don't take all day,' he said.

Number five furnace was a baked-clay beehive, suitable for bees the size of vultures. As Poldarn approached, lugging a large copper pan full of water in his good hand, the two firekeepers looked up from their game of knuckle-bones and grinned at him. 'Hurt your arm?' said one of them.

Poldarn nodded. 'Hit a stone.'

The firekeeper nodded. 'Watch you don't splash the clay,' he said. 'It's getting pretty warm in there.'

Fair point; a stray drop of water on the hot clay could make it crack or even shatter, and that'd be a week's work spoilt. He set the pan down very carefully, then sat on a spare stool. 'Room for one more?' he asked, though he wasn't all that wild about knuckle-bones; as a game, it was too random to be interesting, and besides, he was a pretty hopeless gambler.

'Sure,' the other firekeeper said 'Basic rules: five and seven wild, three means roll again, and twelve pays the banker. Two quarters buys you in, half-quarter to raise and quit. All right?'

Poldarn nodded. 'I'll have to owe you,' he said. 'Left my money in my other coat.'

'You haven't got another coat.'

'True,' Poldarn admitted, and dug out a handful of coins, which went in the pot. True to form, he lost on the first four games.

'Don't worry,' said the firekeeper, raking the coins over to his side of the playing area. 'Your luck's about to change, I can feel it.'

'That's what I'm afraid of,' Poldarn replied gloomily.

He won the next game, lost the next two, won the fourth. By then, his pan of water had warmed through. The fire-keepers helped him lift it off, and he sat out the next five games, his arm sunk in the hot water. He had three quarters left to his name, having lost a total of nine.

'You used to have another coat, though,' the firekeeper suddenly remembered. 'What happened to it?'

'Lost it playing knuckle-bones,' Poldarn replied. 'Go on, I can throw right-handed if I've got to.'

The firekeeper pursed his lips. 'Dead unlucky, that.'

Poldarn grinned. 'Ah yes,' he said, 'but my luck's about to change. Your half-quarter and raise you a quarter.'

'Can if you like.' The firekeeper shook the bones in his cupped hands, blew on them for luck and threw. 'Three,' he announced. 'Roll again. Bugger.'

'Twelve,' said his friend. 'Twelves pay the bank. Who's the bank?'

They counted back through the previous games, and it turned out to be Poldarn's go. Including the three quarters he'd just paid in, the pot came to exactly twelve, which was what he'd started with. 'That'll do me,' he announced cheerfully and stood up, ignoring the protests of the fire-keepers. 'My arm's much better now, so I think I'll go and do some work. Thanks for the game.'

'Welcome,' grunted one of the firekeepers, his eyes fixed on the bones and his small pile of coins. Poldarn waved to his turned back, and walked slowly across the yard toward the cutting. Someone else had appropriated his shovel and bucket, not that he minded. 'About bloody time,' Bergis grumbled, as he came back with replacements. 'What took you so long?'

'Won twelve quarters in the dice game.'

(Which was true, he reflected, as he stamped in the shovel blade; at least, it was true in the present, though the past made it a lie. He wondered if the same applied to what Aciava had told him. That'd be a laugh, if no matter how long he played for, he always ended up with exactly what he'd started out with. Forever going round in circles, like the miller's donkey.)

'Is it just me,' Spenno the pattern-maker complained to nobody in particular, 'or doesn't anybody care whether we make this fucking bell or not?'

Nobody said anything. In all the time he'd been at the foundry, Poldarn couldn't recall a single instance of anybody answering one of Spenno's questions. He seemed to exist in a bubble floating on the crest of ordinary communication, up where everybody could see him but no one could make out what he was saying.

Under other circumstances, Poldarn might have found Spenno's patterns of behaviour disconcerting or even alarming, but he'd come to the conclusion that they were just another aspect of the different rules that applied to everything concerned with casting bronze. In this instance, it was a positive comfort to hear Spenno yelling into space, since he only ever seemed to get this frantic when everything was going perfectly according to plan. As soon as an unforeseen difficulty arose, Spenno would stop ranting and prancing; instead, he'd scuttle purposefully about the yard as quickly and deftly as a mouse, muttering, 'It'll be fine now' or 'That's got that sorted' under his breath. In the face of disaster and catastrophe, he'd pull out an ancient folding chair, park it in the middle of the yard, prop his feet up on a pile of scrap metal or cordwood, and spend a relaxing hour or so turning the pages of a battered and incredibly ancient-looking book with the intriguing title Concerning Various Matters, which he carried with him at all times, stuffed down inside his shirt. Whether the book really did contain the answers to all conceivable problems, as Spenno claimed, or whether he used it as an aid to relaxation and concentration, and thought the solutions up out of his own head, nobody knew or greatly cared.

Today, however, Spenno was yelling and waving his arms about, so it was safe to assume that all was well. The pattern itself was already well under way. Spenno had started at crack of dawn with a stout oak pole, which he'd planed down to a taper. He'd worked with drawknives and spoke-shaves and planes and scrapers, hurling each tool over his shoulder when he'd finished with it and yelling for someone to pick it up and hand it to him when he needed it again.

Once he'd finished it and. walked round it several times, squinting along it from various angles, shaking his head and swearing fluently, he fitted a cranked handle at the top end and slotted a thick oak plank over each end, so that the pole spun freely when the crank was turned. Now he was building the mould itself around this spindle, smacking and punching handfuls of clay onto the gradually forming core, while two bored-looking men slowly turned the handle. Every so often he'd stop, run his clay-caked hands through his hair and shriek abuse at his handiwork, before plunging his fingers into a basin of water. Apart from Poldarn, nobody seemed to be paying any attention to this performance; and Poldarn, who'd seen it all before, was only watching because he had nothing in particular to do.

'You there.' Poldarn, who'd slipped into a sort of gentle trance, looked up. 'Yes, you, miserable gloomy bastard with the big nose. Get up here and do exactly what I tell you.'

Poldarn sighed and stood up. He knew what Spenno would want him to do, because he'd watched him the previous evening, cutting a bell-shaped template out of pine board with a large fretsaw. It wasn't the template itself that was needed at this point in the operation; rather, Spenno would use one side of the leftover plank, which had a perfect silhouette of half a bell cut out of it. Poldarn's job would be to shove this against the clay core as the crank-operators turned it, to shear off the excess clay and leave the exact profile behind, smooth and regular. Marvellously clever, Poldarn reckoned; pity it was such a filthy job.

How long it took, he couldn't say; it seemed like a very long time, and since all he had to do was stand still and lean on the plank, he allowed his mind to wander. Spenno's constant stream of rage and despair soon began to have a pleasantly soporific effect, like rain on thatch, or the chatter of a shallow rill tumbling down through rocks. In the distance, forming a kind of counterpoint, he could hear the heavy clang of sledgehammers on thick bronze plate, where a working party was smashing up an old, flawed bell for scrap. More pleasant symmetry, Poldarn thought; and everywhere he turned there was symmetry, from the relentless cycle of scrap and melt to the clay core being turned to shape next to him. A man could be fooled, if he let his guard down. He could allow himself to be persuaded that symmetry was his friend, instead of the main component of the trap he should be avoiding. Maybe, he speculated, that was why Spenno ranted against it, when everything seemed to be going so well; no doubt about it, Spenno was a clever sod, a genius in his own way, so it wasn't inconceivable that he'd noticed something that had managed to escape everyone else's attention. Symmetry, pattern, shapes being formed; perhaps that was the secret wisdom known only to pattern-makers-eccentrics like Spenno, and himself.

'Bloody fucking thing,' Spenno said; and that was apparently the accepted word of command to stop turning the crank. The core stopped dead, making Poldarn lurch forward and drop his plank scraper. 'Right, you lot bugger off, and for crying out loud none of you touch it, it's wet, it hasn't dried yet. Understood?'

The crank-winders shrugged and walked away. Now the core had to be left to dry, while Spenno scampered away to the middle shed, to heat up a large cauldron full of tallow. Once it was hot and soft, he'd start kneading it in his hands into long, flabby strips, to be pressed onto the clay core until he'd built up a layer of tallow as thick as the bell walls. The tallow would be left to set, until it was hard enough to be cut with knives and chisels; then the carvers and lettermen would get to work, gouging out the relief decoration-flowers, birds, scenes from myth and religion, the letters of the dedicatory inscription and so on-before a further thick skin of clay was plastered on top and left to dry. Once the tapered spindle had been carefully withdrawn, the mould would be ready for hauling down to the casting pit, where the tallow would be melted out of the middle, leaving a perfect bell-shaped cavity between the core and the upper clay coating, into which molten bronze could be poured. All very simple, when you stopped and considered it objectively. As with most things, the further away you got, the clearer it became. It was only up close, with splodges of wet clay flying in all directions and Spenno shrieking abuse, that you could be forgiven for wondering what it was all in aid of.

Tallow-warming and tallow-fondling could be relied on to take two or three hours at least; five, if something cocked up and Spenno was driven to the pages of Concerning Various Matters for guidance. This made it a good time for avoiding the open yard. With Spenno safely out of the way for a while, the other gang masters (who were all scared stiff of Spenno, though they'd none of them admit it) were liable to come out prowling for anybody with nothing to do and march them off to dig clay or smash up scrap or load charcoal. Having been caught this way on a number of occasions, Poldarn knew the drill: find a safe place to hide, and stay there until Spenno started cursing again.

In Poldarn's case, the forge was as close as he was likely to get to absolute sanctuary; since, if anybody came round with a press-gang, he could always pretend to be busy forging clappers or brackets or hinges or staples; and since nobody else understood forge-work, there was no one to contradict him. He dragged the outer door to, closed up the shutters, raked out the hearth and laid in a fresh bed of charcoal. A good fire always came in handy sooner or later.

Paradox: having fled in here to escape from doing work, Poldarn was now bored and looking round for something to do. The part-finished bell-fittings still lay on the anvil, lightly covered with a thin dew of blotchy red rust, but he couldn't do anything more with them until the bell itself was finished and the final dimensions established. What else? Nothing in particular needed about the place, apart from the insatiable demand for nails. He wasn't in the mood for drawing down nails; it was tedious and fiddly work, and it reminded him of Haldersness.

In search of inspiration, he turned over the outskirts of the scrap pile, in case some interesting-shaped hunk of metal he'd previously overlooked snagged his attention. Since he'd done this dozens of times before it was a fairly vain hope, except that just occasionally he'd catch sight of a width or a profile or a taper he hadn't properly appreciated before, and he'd get an idea. A twisted length of wheel tyre would suddenly look like the leg of a trivet, or a gate-hinge would blossom unexpectedly out of a discarded attempt at a bell-bracket. Well, it was better than spooning clay out of a hole in the ground. Most things were.

This time, something did catch his eye. He had no idea what it had been in its previous life, before it failed at its unknown purpose and got dumped in the scrap; but it was square-section, as long as his arm, tapered up and down from a bulge about two-thirds down its length, and if he was any judge, it was good hardening steel, not soft iron. Just for devilment's sake he picked it out, took it over to the grindstone and touched it lightly against the spinning edge. A shower of small, fat yellow sparks scattered around his hands like falling blossom, telling him everything he needed to know.

Still entirely for devilment, Poldarn pumped the bellows until the fire roared, then poked the sharp point of the bar into the heart of the coals. A dozen or so pulls on the bellows handle; when he drew the bar out, the tip was yellow, sparkling where the steel was burning. Hardening steel all right; he let it cool to bright orange, then dipped it in the slack tub. A small, round cloud of steam drifted up into his face. He clamped the bar in the leg-vice and tested the hardened end with a file, which skated off it like a careless footstep on sheet ice. No cracks that he could see-prime hardening steel, the very best. Far too good to waste. Now all he had to do was think of something to make it into.

Square-section, tapered, as long as his arm. There was really only one use it could be put to, unless he was prepared to sin against serendipity and waste this fine material on a billhook or a crowbar. Then, just as he'd made up his mind what he was going to make out of it, he suddenly realised what it had previously been-a monster bell-clapper, partly drawn down and then abandoned before swaging, probably because the steel had proved too dense and chewy to work comfortably. He smiled, for some reason. Maybe it was because the memory in the steel was an unhappy one, failure and rejection, and he was about to set all that right.

He paused before starting the job. Time. If Spenno didn't run into any snags with his tallow-wrangling, that meant Poldarn would have three hours or thereabouts to work on his pet project today. Without a striker to swing the hammer for him, he'd be hard put to it just to flatten and peen out a thick bar like this one in three hours. That was fine; since it was just a whim, there was no hurry, no schedule to meet. If he didn't manage to get it flattened before he had to go back to work, so what? At least he could make a start. He dug the bar into the coals, drew more charcoal over the top with the rake, and reached up for the bellows handle.

Five or so hours later, Poldarn paused, drew the piece of steel out of the fire and let it rest on the iron surround of the hearth to cool. Definitely getting there; although right now, to anybody but himself, it looked like nothing on earth. He'd drawn it down into the shape of a grotesquely elongated diamond, or a snake that had just swallowed a field mouse; then he'd bent it right round, like a horseshoe. In his mind, the final profile was clearly visible, as if he was able to see into the future; but first he had to forge in the bevel. That would force the tight curve outwards into a gentle concave arc, with the bevel on the inside, and that'd be the easy part done. The pause broke the trance he'd fallen into, hypnotised by the repeating pattern-heat, hammer, heat-and he felt as if he'd just woken up out of a prophetic dream, only part of which he could remember. At any rate, he was getting there; at any rate, he hadn't screwed it up yet. Then he remembered about the bell. Oughtn't Spenno to have finished kneading the tallow by now? He glanced down at his piece of work; the next stage would need concentration-if he had to quit halfway through he might easily lose sight of the thread, the tentative insight into his own future where he pulled the finished article out of the quench and held it admiringly up to the light, to check for consistency and straightness. Without that thread, it was still just a piece of scrap from the pile. Best to leave off starting the bevel until another day.

That being so, it'd only be polite to take a stroll out to the yard, just in case they'd begun the laying-on of the tallow without him. It was always a good idea to take a break from what you were doing, once in a while, and spend ten minutes or so on the job you were actually being paid for.

It was still daylight outside. A large group of men were standing or sitting about, mostly in silence, with gloomy, resigned expressions on their faces. As Poldarn got closer to the mould, he could see a glistening skin covering most of the clay; and Spenno, lounging at ease in a rickety wooden chair, reading a book.

Shit, he thought, as bad as that. He'd have turned right round and sneaked back to the forge, except that a dozen or so of the sad loafers had seen him now, and it was never wise to be too obvious when you were skiving. So instead, he amused himself by trying to figure out how far the job had advanced, and what the problem was.

The tallow layer was about half-done, as far as he could judge. A cursory inspection made the nature of the disaster only too obvious: the clay of the core hadn't dried through properly when Spenno had started applying the tallow, and a large chunk the size and shape of a horse's head had broken away and fallen off. In order to put it back they'd have to strip off the tallow that had already been put on; but any attempt at doing that would probably damage the core further. Besides, if the core was breaking up, it was probably riddled with little cracks and flaws, so that when the melted bronze was poured in, there was every chance it'd disintegrate, and the yard would be flooded with very hot runny metal, as quick and antisocial as molten lava from a volcano.

Wonderful. Unless there was something in the book that Spenno was reading, Poldarn couldn't see any way of salvaging the core; all they could do would be to cut their losses by junking the whole thing and beginning again with a new oak pole and a mountain of fresh clay. Patching up a dodgy mould was never worth the risk. Poldarn squatted down on a small pile of logs and cupped his chin in his hands. No wonder everybody looked so miserable. Three days' hard work, all wasted.

The crack that disrupted his train of thought proved to be Spenno closing the book with a snap. 'All right,' he called out, in a voice from which all anger had been leached out, 'tear the bloody thing down, we'll start again in the morning.' Sighs, some muttering, and half a dozen men got to their feet, fetched sledgehammers, and started working out their feelings on the failed core. For flawed, shaken, half-dry clay it took a lot of breaking up. That wasn't helping anything.

Move along, Poldarn thought, nothing to see here. Since there wasn't really anywhere else to go, he wandered back to his horrible little turf-walled shack and lay down on the pile of blankets. Quite out of the blue, he realised how tired he was and closed his eyes.

'So that's why they call your lot blacksmiths,' a voice said.

He sat up and opened his eyes. He must have been asleep for a while, because it was now pitch dark outside. 'Really?' he said groping in the dark for his hand-axe. 'Why's that, then?'

'You obviously haven't seen your reflection,' said the voice. 'Your hands and face. Black as a crow. Are you really going to go to sleep like that, without washing?'

He found the axe and closed his fingers round the shaft. 'Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my house?' he demanded.

'House.' Clearly he'd said something amusing. 'I like that. I've seen snugger field latrines. Come on, don't you recognise me?'

Now that he mentioned it, yes. 'Aciava,' he said.

'Thought you'd get there in the end. Well,' Aciava went on, 'a right cow you people've made of our bell. Just as well. for us there's a penalty clause in the contract to cover late delivery. We can sue you, it'll be something to do while we're waiting.'

Poldarn blinked in surprise. 'Your bell?' he asked.

'That's right. Quarter paid in advance, too.'

'I thought you worked for a false-tooth outfit.'

Aciava clicked his tongue. 'Dental engineers, please,' he said. 'And no, that's not who I meant. I was talking in my capacity as chief lay deacon for the united congregations of Falcata. We're going to be bitterly disappointed, of course.'

Poldarn thought for a moment. 'This congregation of yours,' he said. 'Whose idea was it to order a bell in the first place?'

'Mine.' Poldarn could practically hear the grin on Aciava's face. 'There's nothing quite so classy as the mellow sound of a good bell, summoning the faithful to prayer on a warm summer evening. Of course, I spend most of my time on the road so I wouldn't be there to hear it very often, but it'd be wonderful just knowing it was there.'

'You ordered it,' Poldarn said. 'You only did it because you knew I work here.'

Aciava sighed. 'I guess I've been found out,' he said. 'And there I was, preferring to do good by stealth. It was the least I could do for an old pal, I reckoned, to make sure there'd be work in hand so they'd be able to keep paying you, even if you do spend most of your time on projects of your own. Besides, it's the congregation's money, not mine.'

Poldarn could feel the anger; it was almost objective, as though he was watching it build up from a distance. 'Like hell you were,' he said. 'It's some stupid game of yours, so you can make me do what you want. In fact, you probably did something to bugger up the mould, so we'd be late and you can sue us and put us out of business.'

'Hardly.' Aciava sounded highly amused. 'Even if I was that warped, how do you suggest I managed to persuade your pattern-maker friend-you know, the nutcase who yells all the time-to start putting the wax on before the clay was dry? No, that was just an unfortunate bonus.'

'Really.'

'Yes, really.' The voice was extremely close; if only Poldarn could pin it down exactly. But he suspected that Aciava was moving quietly about. 'You know the rule: never assume malice when the facts are consistent with mere stupidity. The nutcase was in too much of a rush, and he got it wrong. I didn't have to do a thing.'

Over there, close by the door. Poldarn was almost ready to risk lashing out into the darkness; a few more words, and he'd be practically certain. 'Look,' he said, 'just exactly why are you doing this? What're you up to?'

No answer. Poldarn breathed out and listened. Experience and intuition told him there was nobody there. Aciava must've sneaked out through the doorway. Sensible behaviour on his part, Poldarn decided, since otherwise (he realised with a certain degree of horror) he'd have taken a swing at him with the axe. Not good; Aciava's prudent retreat suggested that he knew more about the way Poldarn's mind worked than he did himself. The implications of that weren't pleasant at all.

'Maybe I just dreamed all that,' he said aloud. (But he didn't believe it. No crow. Or had there been a crow, but it'd been too dark to see it? Query: does a crow in a dream count if it's not visible?)

In Spenno's personal opinion, it was the clay. According to Bergis, it was all Spenno's fault for not letting the core dry properly. Banspati the foreman reckoned it had to be the damp weather, while Malla Ancola blamed the sap in the green pole Spenno had used as a pivot for the pattern. Several dozen other explanations were available, if you didn't get out of the way quickly enough. For his own part, Poldarn couldn't make up his mind between sabotage and plain ordinary bad luck.

Not that he cared all that much. Aciava's threats (if he hadn't dreamed them) of penalty clauses and lawsuits were all very well, but the fact was that they still had two weeks before the delivery date stipulated in the contract, so that was all right. As for wasted materials, there was only the clay, which hadn't actually cost them anything. A day's lost production was neither here nor there in an outfit as thoroughly disorganised as this. If pressed, he'd have opted for bad luck: always plenty of it about, and much easier to believe in. Belief is everything in such matters.

It meant, of course, another long day digging clay, followed by an even longer day ignoring Spenno's hysterical outbursts-except that they were comforting, since they implied that, this time, everything was going perfectly. That evening, Spenno melted out the tallow and declared the mould fit for use. They'd melt the metal overnight and be ready to pour shortly before dawn.

Attitudes differed where the night before a pour was concerned. Some of the foundry crew reckoned it was unlucky to go to bed, and preferred to sit up and watch the melt; others tried to get some sleep, though the raucous noises from the general direction of the furnace meant that this was a fairly vain hope. Usually Poldarn belonged to the trying-to-get-some-sleep faction, but this time, for some reason, he decided to head over to the fire for an hour or so.

The furnace crew had been there for quite some time when he got there, and the cider jug had passed round the circle once or twice, with the result that there were more people sleeping by the fire than in the camp. The dozen or so who were still awake were mostly chatting amiably while some old bloke who Poldarn recognised but couldn't quite place droned methodically through a limited repertoire of popular ballads. Most of them were concerned with the activities of sword-monks and innkeepers' daughters and he'd heard all of them before; mixed in with these in a fairly indiscriminate fashion were a few old hymns, and at least three versions of Poldarn's personal favourite, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree. Since several of the tunes were practically interchangeable, the old man occasionally lost track of what he was singing, so that something that started out as a hymn ended up with the unexpected return of the innkeeper, and vice versa. The result could be disconcerting if you were only giving the performance part of your attention, but Poldarn felt that several items from both genres were, like fortified wine, significantly improved by the blending.

'If you ask me,' said the man on his left (Poldarn hadn't), 'this whole country's going to hell in a handcart. I mean, Tazencius, who the fuck is he, anyhow? Never even heard of him a few years ago, and now he's running the whole bloody Empire. And if they think we've seen the last of them raiders, they're kidding themselves. You hear them talk, you'd think we'd killed off the whole bloody lot of 'em, instead of just a couple hundred or so. I mean, what's that? Drop in the ocean. Plenty more where they came from. Thousands. Millions, even. And we still don't know bugger-all about them. Course, what they should be doing-'

'Actually,' Poldarn lied, 'there's something I've been meaning to ask you.' It was really just a way of shutting him up, easier and less open to misconstruction than cutting his throat and pitching his body into the fire. 'Someone was telling me the other day that Feron Amathy-'

'That bastard. Someone ought to fix him good, one of these days.'

'Damn straight,' Poldarn said, nodding emphatically. 'But this bloke was telling me, years ago when he was a kid, he trained with the sword-monks. Is that right, do you know?'

'Oh, everybody knows that,' his neighbour grunted. 'Taught him everything he knows, they reckon, which is another good reason they had it coming, the bastards. Best thing Cronan ever did was kicking shit out of that bunch of arseholes.'

Poldarn frowned, because of course it was the raiders who'd destroyed Deymeson, not General Cronan, even though the monks had sent men to murder him. Still, it made a better story that way, since Cronan was one of the good guys, and the raiders were unmitigated evil. It was good to know that memory could be melted down and recast if it came out flawed the first time around, just like a bell. 'The same bloke was telling me,' Poldarn went on, 'that when Feron Amathy was with the monks, he was in the same year as this mad woman who's going round saying she's the priestess for the god in the cart-you know, the one who makes the world end, or whatever. Is there any truth in that, or-?'

The other man shook his head. 'Can't be right,' he said. 'Their ages are all wrong for that. Far as I can remember, Feron Amathy's been in business for years and years-that's right, because wasn't it him who screwed over General Allectus, way back? That mad woman-Xipho something, she's called-she'd be about your age, from what I've heard tell. So she'd still have been a little girl when Allectus got done; and Feron bloody Amathy started up years before Allectus's bit of bother. He must be getting on a bit by now, Feron Amathy; sixties, maybe even early seventies. Wish the bastard'd retire,' he added. 'Then we could all get some peace.'

'Ah,' Poldarn said, 'thanks. Tell me, have you ever heard of someone called Gain Aciava?'

'Gain what?'

'Aciava.'

The man shook his head. 'Don't think so,' he said. 'Why, what's he done?'

'Just someone this bloke was talking about,' Poldarn replied. 'He reckoned this Aciava was at Deymeson along with Feron Amathy and the mad woman. But if Feron Amathy's as old as you say, maybe the bloke was wrong about Aciava too.'

The other man shrugged. 'Never heard of anybody called that,' he said. 'Doesn't mean there wasn't a sword-monk with that name. All sorts of bloody odd names, those bastards had, and I wouldn't trust any of 'em further than I could spit.'

Just then, the cider jug intervened, and Poldarn took the opportunity to start talking to the man on his other side, who'd just woken up. He turned out not to have anything much to say, so Poldarn sat back and tried to listen to whatever it was the old fool was singing.

At first, he couldn't quite make out if it was another hymn or one of the smutty ballads. There was a man and a woman in it, which suggested the latter, but they didn't seem to be doing anything much apart from talking, and the absence of lewd puns tended to favour the hymn theory. The woman seemed to be telling the man his fortune, and he didn't seem particularly happy about it-understandably enough, since most of what the man was destined to do was profoundly unpleasant, a list of close family members he was scheduled to betray, rape or murder when he wasn't busy burning down cities and plundering houses of religion. Poldarn didn't need to be in holy orders to figure out that this was something to do with the god in the cart, his namesake. On balance, he decided, he'd rather talk to the man on his right, or even the man on his left. Or he could drink some of the disgusting cider. Worth a try, he decided; but by then the jug had passed on round. He closed his eyes and tried not to listen to the old fool singing; not that it mattered, since shortly afterwards, the god-in-the-cart song mutated seamlessly into further adventures of the sword-monk and the innkeeper's daughter, whose brief union had apparently been blessed with issue. Poldarn sighed, and closed his eyes Discomfort. He identified the source; a toecap nudging his ribs. 'You going to lie there all day?' growled a voice he recognised. He opened his eyes and looked up. Banspati the foreman was looming over him like an eviction order.

No crows anywhere to be seen, so it wasn't merely a bad dream. Pity.

'Now what?' he heard himself say, and he wondered why he'd said it.

'Get up,' Banspati replied, 'and get your idle bum down to the cutting. We need more clay.'

Hold on, Poldarn thought, we're ready to pour, what do we want more clay for? 'Problem?' he asked.

Ugly smile on the foreman's face. 'You could fucking well put it like that, yes. Bloody mould cracked in the night, way past fixing. So, we're starting again.' He sighed, shook his large, round head. 'You know what?' he said. 'This job's starting to get to me. Any more of it and I'll end up crazy as Spenno. I mean, two fuck-ups in a row. That's not good, really.'

He means it, too, Poldarn realised. It wasn't so much that he was worried-Banspati was the foreman, being worried defined him absolutely-as the unusual look of bewilderment in his eyes, as though he'd just been badly let down by the one person in the world he was sure he could trust. No anger, just a total inability to understand why this was happening. Not good; not good at all. 'Right,' Poldarn said quietly, 'I'd better get down to the cutting, then.'

Banspati looked at him, then nodded and said, 'Thanks'. And that was way, way past disturbing, out the other side into very scary indeed. Poldarn quickly broke eye contact, and fled.