by K. J. Parker
‘Fine,’ Banspati said. ‘What deal?’
Pulling the details out of his memory was like levering an awkward stone out of a post-hole. ‘They can let us have all we need,’ he said, ‘two quarters a bushel on the road, tenth off for cash on delivery, half a quarter a bushel penalty for failure to deliver. The quality’s good,’ he added, ‘I think. Looked all right to me, anyhow.’
Banspati nodded slowly. ‘That’s more or less what we decided on,’ he said. ‘Dunno why you had to go all that way when we’d already settled it here. Still, that’s that sorted.’
Poldarn wanted to point out that the trip hadn’t been his idea, but he couldn’t face the effort of putting it into words. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘First load should be with us by the end of next month. The bloke said they’re rushed off their feet, but he was lying. I think they were glad of the business.’
‘You bet. Who wants charcoal round here, except us? Probably we could’ve got it cheaper if you’d sweated ’em a bit, but it’s all settled now, so never mind. Good trip?’
‘No.’
‘Get yourself together, and get down to the shop. The Vestoer job’s all done, bar scouring and polishing, so you’d better get a move on.’
Poldarn nodded, and reached for his boots. His head hurt, but there wasn’t any point in mentioning that.
Besides lifting things and hauling on ropes and shovelling wet clay into buckets when the need arose, Poldarn’s main job at the bell foundry was the forge work, making brackets and mountings and clappers; none of which could be made and fitted until everything else had been done, by which time the job was usually a month or so late. Somehow matters had so resolved themselves that every late delivery was officially his fault, and he didn’t mind that particularly, nor the fact that he was always having to do difficult and delicate work in a hurry. Just this once, however, he’d have preferred it otherwise. He wasn’t really in the right frame of mind for concentrating on precision work. But he hauled himself to his feet nevertheless. There was some bread in the crock, but it had gone a funny shade of green, and the water in the jug had flies and stuff floating in it. Skip breakfast, he thought, and I can wash my face in the slack tub when I get there. He tied on his leather apron and shoved through the door into the yard.
As usual, the yard gave no indication that thirty or so men worked there, or that there was anybody around the place at all. To Poldarn’s left and in front of him were the abnormally tall timber-framed sheds, with high lintels and curved doors, where the carpenters made patterns and jigs, and where the half-finished bells were ground, polished and accoutered; away to the right was the muddy wilderness of casting pits and furnace cupolas. He was halfway across before anybody else appeared: an old man and three boys, hauling sand up from the river in wheelbarrows. He didn’t recognise them, and if they knew him they didn’t show it. He reached the forge, unlatched the heavy door and went inside.
It was, of course, dark in the forge; shutters closed and bolted, no light other than the splinter of sun from the doorway. On his way he grabbed a sack of charcoal, which he heaped around the little pile of kindling he’d left there a few days ago. For once, the tinderbox was where he’d left it, and the kindling caught quite easily. He hadn’t had much trouble getting a fire started, not since the night at Ciartanstead when he’d murdered Eyvind.
As Poldarn drew in the coals with the rake, he tried to clear his mind of all extraneous concerns. Making the clapper for a bell involved careful thought. Both the length and the weight had to be exactly right, or the note would be false. He could either draw the thing down in one piece from a thick bar and swage the round bulb that actually made contact with the bell, or else he could use thinner stock and forge-weld bands around it to form the bulb. Quicker the second way, less heavy work, but considerably trickier, because of the weld. Because he was always in a hurry, he always ended up doing it the second way, and this time looked like no exception. A pity, but there it was.
If only Halder could see me now, he thought; his grandfather had kept on at him to learn the trade (relearn it, rather, since he’d been taught it as a boy and since forgotten it, until after the burning at Ciartanstead, by which point Halder was dead and Poldarn no longer needed the skill). Or Asburn, the real smith at Haldersness, who’d tried to teach him and failed; Asburn could’ve done four awkward welds one after the other without turning a hair. But Asburn wasn’t here, and if he was they’d cut his head off for being a raider. Poldarn took the lid off the flux jar. Just about enough, if he was sparing with it (and that was the wrong approach).
In spite of the lack of flux, the welds took, rather to his surprise. Oddly enough, it seemed as though he was starting to get good at this, now that he was just an employee of the foundry rather than the master of Haldersness and Ciartanstead. Another slight miscalculation with past and present; story of his life, apparently.
Once he’d made the basic shape, he stopped. No point going any further until he’d measured up the bell and spoken to Malla Ancola, the chief founder, who’d have worked out how long and heavy the clapper had to be. Annoying; should have done that before he started, because now he’d have to let his fire burn out. Waste of time and good charcoal, and that was what came of not giving your full attention to the job in hand. Never mind the past, or the future; you had to concentrate on the present, and on the work you were supposed to be doing.
Malla didn’t look like a foundryman; he should have been either a prince or a poet, ideally both. He was tall and slim, with long, delicate hands, a smooth round face and, most of the time, a profoundly gormless expression, as if he’d just been interrupted in the middle of composing an ode by a courtier needing something signed.
‘You’re back, then,’ he said, as Poldarn edged his way past the grinding-house door, which had stuck at slightly ajar since the accession of the dynasty before last. ‘Any luck with the charcoal people?’
(Malla even sounded like a poet; low-voiced, quiet, droopy. The accent wasn’t necessarily a problem. Even Tulicers wrote poetry sometimes.)
‘All settled,’ Poldarn replied briskly. He knew from experience that getting into any kind of conversation with Malla was a fatal mistake if you ever wanted to get some work done. Malla could talk about anything, indefinitely. ‘I’m just doing the clapper now, so I need some measurements.’
‘Ah,’ Malla replied. ‘Right. She’s over here. We’ll be making a start on grinding her directly.’ Poldarn sighed. Making a start meant that Malla was just beginning to think about it; like a god at the creation of the world, he was opening his mind to the vague, inchoate possibility of the existence of shapes and forms. In other words, he hadn’t got round to figuring out the measurements yet. Before he did that, he’d need to prune away the rough, gritty skin of casting waste, which might be anything up to an eighth of an inch deep. Until he knew precisely how thick the walls of the bell would eventually be, he couldn’t calculate anything. If this world was going to take a week to create, Malla was still in the mid-afternoon of the second day, turning over in his mind what colour the sky should be.
‘Right,’ Poldarn said. ‘Well, not to worry. I’ll go back and rough out the brackets.’
Malla shrugged. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’ll be all right.’
‘See you later, then.’
‘See you later.’
Poldarn had managed to get one arm of the bracket drawn down and was making good progress with bending up the scrollwork when Aciava finally showed up. Poldarn had been expecting him all day, and now it was almost noon. There could be some deep significance to that, but it was rather more likely that he’d had a lie-in.
‘Hello there.’ He heard Aciava’s voice coming from the junction of light and darkness just by the door. ‘So this is where you work. Nice set-up you people have got here.’
Poldarn didn’t turn round or look up; he was watching the steel in the fire, waiting for the right colour. He wished the steel was ready and he could start hammering it,
so he’d have an excuse for drowning out whatever Aciava said. ‘It’s all right,’ he replied.
‘I should say so.’ The voice was getting nearer. ‘Biggest foundry this side of the mountains, and the only bell factory in Tulice. Founded, no pun intended, over a century ago, the secret of its success is the unique composition of the mud and sand deposits found in the nearby Green River, which are ideally suited to the extremely specialised business of large-scale deep-core cupola founding.’ He stopped, and in spite of the heat of the fire Poldarn could almost feel the glow of his grin. ‘I read up on this outfit before I left,’ he said. ‘Rule number one in the gold-tooth racket: always do your homework before you set out.’
Poldarn nodded. ‘I’d sort of got the impression you like knowing more than everybody else,’ he said. ‘Gives you the edge, I suppose.’
‘Of course.’ Aciava chuckled. ‘Going in somewhere without knowing all about it’d be like walking into a pitch-dark room where there’s an enemy waiting for you.’
Poldarn was, of course, standing next to the fire, plainly visible. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is it. But I don’t suppose you’re here to order a bell.’
‘Nice idea. Out of my price range, though. Talking of which, did you know the bell in the cloister tower at Deymeson originally came from here?’
Disconcerting. The man sounded like a tour guide. ‘Really,’ Poldarn said. ‘Sorry, don’t remember it.’
‘Don’t you? We all cursed it often enough for dragging us out of bed in the wee small hours. Anyway, here’s where it was made. Clapper forged on that very anvil, I dare say. It’s a small world, isn’t it?’
‘So you say,’ Poldarn answered. ‘Only got your word for that, though.’
‘Ah.’ Aciava sounded pleased. ‘So you’ve had enough of bland assertions, and want some hard evidence. I think we can manage that.’
Frowning, Poldarn laid down his hammer. The work would go cold and the fire would probably go out, but he wasn’t too bothered about that. ‘Go on, then,’ he said.
‘Fine.’ Aciava took a step forward, and broke into the circle of firelight. As if to greet him, the fire flared up (or else it was just poor-quality charcoal). Poldarn felt a sharp tug in the tendons of his right arm. ‘Let’s see,’ he said. ‘What would you like me to prove first?’
Put like that – good question; and he hadn’t given it any thought. ‘My name,’ he said. ‘Prove to me that I used to be called Poldarn.’
‘All right.’ First, Aciava held up his hands, like a conjuror demonstrating that he had nothing palmed or up his sleeve. Then he drew his coat open and reached for his sash. As he did so, he took a step forward. Maybe it was the way Aciava did it, or else at the back of his mind Poldarn was thinking about the sword he’d seen there the previous evening; he skipped back two steps, and seized the hammer. At once, Aciava raised his hands again.
‘Reflex,’ he said. ‘Something you’ll never be rid of, no matter how hard you try. You were trained to do that from third grade onwards. I made it look like I was drawing my sword, so you took two steps back, left leg first, and grabbed for the nearest weapon. Conclusion: you used to be a sword-monk.’
‘Maybe,’ Poldarn conceded. ‘But I’d sort of figured that out before you showed up. And if you do that again, don’t blame me if I bash your head in.’
Aciava grinned. ‘You can try,’ he said. ‘Actually, that’s just the first stage of the proof, to establish that you were once a member of the order. Now, take a look at this.’ Very slowly, he dipped his fingers into an inside pocket and fished out a scrap of paper. ‘Nothing very exciting,’ he said, ‘just a twenty-year-old class timetable. See for yourself.’
He looked round, picked up a fairly clean piece of rag from the floor, and spread it rather ostentatiously on the anvil; then he put the paper on it and stood back.
It was just a list of names; twenty of them, divided into four unequal groups. One of them read;
Elaos Tanwar
Xipho Dorunoxy
Monachus Ciartan
Monachus Cordomine
Gain Aciava
Monachus Poldarn
Poldarn took a closer look, trying to force himself to be calm, analytical. The paper could easily have been twenty years old; it was yellow and frayed across two folds, and the ink was greyish-brown. The letters – well, he could read them without thinking, but it wasn’t the same alphabet that they used in Tulice. There weren’t any names in the other groups that he recognised, though several of them started with Monachus; he remembered what Aciava had said the previous evening, and guessed that those were names-inreligion. There were four little pinholes, one in each corner, as you’d expect on a notice put up on a door or a notice-board.
‘That’s not proof,’ he said. ‘The most it could mean is that there was once a class with people with those names in it. Or this could just be something you wrote yourself, and dipped in vegetable stock to make it turn yellow.’
‘Very good,’ Aciava said. ‘And if I showed you my business seal, with Gain Aciava engraved on it, you’d tell me I murdered someone with that name and took his seal before I wrote the paper. Fair enough. I said I’d show you some evidence. I didn’t say it was irrefutable. But now you’ve got to tell me why I’d go to so much trouble.’
It was Poldarn’s turn to grin. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Not without knowing who you really are, and what you’re really up to.’
‘Quite.’ Aciava dipped his head to acknowledge the point. ‘As I recall, you weren’t at all bad at analytical reasoning when we did it in fifth grade. Better than me, anyhow. Mind you, I did miss a lot of classes, because of them clashing with archery practice. I was on the archery team, you see.’
‘I’m impressed,’ Poldarn yawned. ‘So this is your proof, is it? Just this little bit of old paper.’
‘Allegedly old paper – you missed an opportunity. Come on, it was twenty years ago, what do you expect? I was damned lucky to have found that; I mean, who keeps old school notices?’
‘Good question, who does? Why would you hang on to something like that?’
‘Look on the back,’ Aciava replied. Poldarn did so. He saw a sketch: a diagram of an eight-pointed figure, drawn in charcoal, and below it a childish doodle of a vaguely heraldic-looking crow.
‘The diagram,’ Aciava said, ‘is the eight principal wards. Lecture notes. The crow was just me being bored during lessons, though I probably chose to draw it because the crow was our team mascot. I was never very imaginative, even then. Innovation’s always struck me as being somehow disrespectful. Result of a religious upbringing, I suppose, the tendency to couple together the words original and sin. Anyhow, to answer your question: I kept the paper for the sketch, and it was sheer accident, coming across it the other day. I’d used it to mark the place in an old textbook. Satisfied?’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s still nothing linking that name on that bit of paper to me. If you can do that—’
‘Can’t, sorry.’ Aciava scratched his ear. ‘And I haven’t brought anything else with me, because – well, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting this kind of attitude, all this suspicion and hostility. I thought that maybe you’d be in two minds about whether you’d want me to tell you about the past and all, but I didn’t anticipate that you wouldn’t believe me. It’s like I’d given you a cute little carved ivory box for your birthday and you’re demanding to see a receipt.’
‘Really?’ Poldarn raised an eyebrow. ‘You told me you knew about what happened when I went to Deymeson. Didn’t it occur to you that after that I wasn’t likely to be in a hurry to believe anything a sword-monk tells me?’
‘Now you put it like that,’ Aciava conceded, ‘I can see your point, sort of. But all right, then. You tell me what’d make you believe, and I’ll see what I can do.’
Poldarn turned away and started raking out the hearth. ‘Why should I?’ he said. ‘If you’re lying, I’d be telling you how to deceive me.’
‘Fine.’ Was there just a hint of impatience in Aciava’s voice? Or was that just play-acting too?
‘I’ll tell you what I think, shall I? I think you still don’t want to know the truth about yourself, and not believing me’s the only way you can do it. If you can persuade yourself I’m lying, you can chicken out of learning who you used to be. Am I getting warm?’
Poldan frowned; any warmer, and he wouldn’t have to bother lighting the fire. ‘You can think what you like,’ he said. ‘But maybe you should go and do it somewhere else. This is tricky work, and I need to concentrate.’
Aciava yawned. ‘Not all that tricky,’ he said. ‘You’ve done the drawing down, so now all you need to do is bend the angles on a bick stake and punch the holes. Like I said,’ he added cheerfully, ‘I do my homework.’
That, or he can read minds. ‘If you’re so smart, you do it.’
‘Not likely. I’d get my hands dirty. Besides, my idea of research is looking stuff up in books. Except for sword drill, I’m what you might call physically inept. And I’m not here to do your work for you. I don’t think your outfit could afford me, for one thing.’
Maybe it was the residue of a religious upbringing, Poldarn thought; this compulsion to fence, shadow-box, score points, even at the risk of seriously pissing off the person you were talking to. If so, it was the most convincing thing about Aciava. Unless it too was fake (homework, and attention to detail). ‘I see,’ he said. ‘So, what are you here for? We’ve established that it’s not just for a class reunion.’
Aciava sighed. ‘Not just that, no. I need your help. Or— ’ He hesitated, as if he was trying to figure out how to put it tactfully. ‘I thought I could use your help. Now, no offence, but I’m not so sure. You’ve changed, you know. Hardly surprising, after all these years, and the stuff you’ve been through. I suppose I have, too. But you’re—’
‘I’m what?’
‘Smaller.’ There was a faint, sad smile on Aciava’s face. ‘You’ve lost something, you know? That hardened edge, that touch of devilment—’ He walked past Poldarn and sat on the small anvil. ‘It’s only a slight change, but it makes all the difference. Pity.’
