by K. J. Parker
On that cheerful note, he left and went back to work; they were going to dress out the mould one more time, just to be on the safe side. Poldarn lay still for a while, then reached out and felt for his book, Concerning Various Matters. There wasn't really enough light in the shed, so he could only read for a short while before his head began to hurt; even so, he was three-quarters of the way through. It was very hard going, most of it about things that didn't interest him in the least.
He found his place. He'd just finished reaping machine, to build; a bizarre contraption involving long, sharp blades attached to the spokes of an enormous wheel, driven through a gear-train by four oxen on a treadmill. He hoped very much that nobody had ever tried to build one; it sounded rather more dangerous than a squadron of attacking cavalry.
Recurrence, eternal. He frowned. Even harder going than the designs for labour-saving devices were the philosophical and religious bits, and he considered skipping ahead to red spot, on cabbages, to eradicate. But he had nothing better to do, and there was a reasonable chance that recurrence, eternal might send him off to sleep.
Recurrence, eternal, he read. It is a precept of religion that nothing happens for the first time; that all learning is recollection; that the perfect draw is perfect because it has already taken place. Oh for pity's sake, Poldarn thought, but he carried on reading anyway. The argument runs that in religion everything progresses to a state of perfection (q.v.) in which further improvement is impossible, whereas outside of religion everything tends to a state of dissolution, in which no further deterioration or decay is possible, e.g. decomposition of organic material, erosion of rock into dust, reduction by fire of solid material to smoke and ash; the two final states, perfection and dissolution, being parallel and essentially the same in nature, though not inform or quality. Religion predicates that, since the world is over five thousand years old (see gods, origin of; world, age of; creation, history of), inevitably both processes-progress and decline-must by now have run their full course and be complete, in which case it necessarily follows that the material world as we encounter it is made up of the end products of said processes, namely religion (the perfected state) and that which is outside religion (the declined state, chaos) and that all human experience is therefore merely recollection of incidents that have occurred during the course of one of the two said processes, remembered out of context, as if in a vision, hallucination, prophesy, nightmare or dream. This conclusion is expressed in religion in the form of the divine Poldarn, who will return at the end of all things-which has, of course, already taken place at some unspecified point in the past-to destroy the world and replace it with perfection (namely the state of affairs currently pertaining, i.e. in religion). In applied religion, perfection is expressed in the draw, where constant repetition during training and practice eliminates the act of drawing in the moment at which the intention is formed, so that the sword has already left the scabbard as soon as the hand moves towards it. In observed religion (see ethics, applied) the process of dissolution is expressed in the reduction of materials, e.g. by rotting, weathering, burning, and the process of perfection is expressed as surviving that of dissolution in the perfection of reduced materials, e.g. by fire, e.g. sand to glass, wood to charcoal, ore to metal; essential religion is expressed in the salvation of reduced materials, e.g. scrap reshaped into new objects; the latter giving rise to the so-called essential paradox, whereby salvation can only occur where memory is destroyed in salvaged materials (i.e. when they lose their old shape and are given a new one), the paradox being that the superior or religious process of perfection is thus observed to follow and be dependent upon the inferior or secular process of destruction. This paradox is most usually expressed in the image of the burned scavenger.
Poldarn wasn't quite sure he followed that, but he couldn't be bothered to go back and read it again; if Spenno spent all his time reading this idiotic book, he thought, no wonder he's barking mad. He turned down the corner of the page and put the book where he could reach it again once his head had stopped hurting.
It hadn't done its job, in any case; he'd only bothered with it in the hope that it'd distract his mind from going over once again what Gain Aciava had told him, and the snatches of what he assumed were memories that stayed with him when he woke up from dreams. As for Gain Aciava himself, whisked away in a cart by soldiers-arrested? Recalled? Rescued?
I'd run away, Poldarn thought, if only they'd let me up out of this bed.
The very least of his concerns was missing the inaugural melt and pour of Galand Dev's utterly foolproof new furnace; but Chiruwa came by a certain time later (how long, Poldarn had no idea; days passed, and he'd long since lost track of them) with the latest news. A fifteen-inch crack had appeared in the firebox wall; the prime suspect was non-homogeneous clay, but birchwood charcoal was also under suspicion. Galand Dev and Spenno had almost but not quite come to blows over the question of whether it could be salvaged or whether they'd have to tear the whole thing down and start again.
A certain time after that, Banspati the foreman came to see him.
'What're you doing still in bed?' he demanded. 'You look just fine to me.'
'Oh,' Poldarn replied. 'That's good. Does that mean I can get up?'
Banspati thought for a moment. 'They were supposed to be getting a doctor in from Falcata,' he said, 'but I don't know what became of that idea. Do you feel all right?'
'More or less,' Poldarn replied. 'But I don't really know what's going on under all these bandages. Do you think I could take them off and have a look?'
Banspati seemed unwilling to commit himself. He wasn't a doctor, he pointed out.
'Well,' Poldarn suggested, 'how'd it be if I said it was all right?'
'You aren't a doctor either.'
'I could be,' Poldarn said, 'for all either of us know.'
Banspati didn't seem very impressed with that line of reasoning. 'Maybe you should just stay put till the doctor gets here,' he said. 'I mean, it's been weeks since they were going to send for him, so he could arrive any day now.'
'So he was sent for, then.'
'They were going to send for one,' Banspati replied.
'But you don't actually know whether they ever got round to it?'
Banspati scowled. 'I'm only the bloody foreman,' he protested. 'I can't do every single fucking thing myself, can I? Besides, you're still alive, so what're you cribbing about? If what they say about the doctors up Falcata's right, he'd have killed you for sure.'
In the end they compromised, as men of goodwill always do when their interests coincide; Poldarn was to stay in bed until the next morning, after which he was at liberty to get up, take off his bandages (entirely at his own risk, needless to say) and report for work. If he was still alive at the end of his shift, he could consider himself officially better.
Perhaps it was the effort of arguing the toss with the foreman; Poldarn slept well, without dreaming, and woke up feeling strong and cheerful. His legs felt unsteady, calflike, after so many weeks of disuse, but he refused to indulge them, and walked awkwardly up and down the shed until they began to regain their memory. Once he was fairly confident that he could make it across the yard without falling over, he sat down on an empty barrel and unwrapped the bandages on his hands.
His skin felt cold without them, but it was still there; white and unnaturally smooth in places, extremely sensitive. He flexed his fingers until he could extend them without discomfort. Everything seemed to be in order; business as usual.
It took him a while to find the knot that secured the bandage wrapped round his face; it was at the back of his head, cunningly placed so as to be almost inaccessible (and he was clumsy with knots, he discovered). He picked at it for a while until he noticed a small knife, rusty and neglected, lying on the floor a few yards away. It was blunt too, but sharp enough to saw through the knot, eventually. The bandage was stiff, as though it had been starched. Once again, these was a distinct chill on his skin once it had g
one. No matter.
The daylight hurt his eyes, even though the sky was black and grey-still the rainy season, then, and no comfort for Galand Dev, with his potentially self-destructive furnace. But the air smelled wonderfully fresh, and most of all, different. Poldarn grinned as he walked slowly across the yard, heading for the small stream that fed off the river, just below the mud-diggings.
He found a place where the stream ran between broad, flat rocks. Ferns had somehow found a footing there, and their shade had attracted moss, deep and soft. Where the stream fell from one rock to another there was a shallow pool about a handspan deep. He knelt down-knees grudging and rusty-and looked at his reflection.
Strange, he thought. It would've been a shock if he'd known the story that went with his old face, which wasn't there any more. Instead there was white shiny skin, smooth as fine clay carefully levelled and worked flawless by the tip of the sculptor's finger; a fine setting for a pair of huge round eyes, and between them a melted, featureless nose. White and flat, almost transparent; wasn't that the way ghosts were supposed to look? It was a human face made by someone who'd never actually seen one, working from a rough sketch and a vague verbal description.
The so-called essential paradox, he thought, expressed in the image of the burned scavenger. Now if only this had happened a while ago, that day when he'd pulled himself out of the mud beside another river, how convenient that would've been; nobody would have recognised him, and the man he'd used to be (Gain Aciava's old fellow-student, Xipho Dorunoxy's despised admirer, Ciartan Torstenson of Haldersness) would have been lost, like unwanted memory bleached out of good salvageable material. Salvage and salvation, the essential paradox, or whatever.
He sat down, made himself comfortable. Somewhere at the back of his mind there was the faint recollection of an old story he'd heard as a child, about the gods' mirror, in which a man can see himself as he truly is, not as he wants to be seen or as others insist on seeing him. A wonderfully useful piece of kit for a god, or a king, or a prosperous man of business: hang it on the wall behind the chair where your guests sit down, and you'll never again be troubled by shape-shifters, goblins and elves disguised as humans, princesses cruelly enchanted to look like dairymaids, improvident bankrupts wearing expensive clothes when they come to borrow money. If only he'd had such a mirror (a mirror such as this) on the day when he'd woken up in the bloody mud, with only dead men for company, he could have looked himself in the eye, seen who he really was, seen something rather like this (And wouldn't it be fine if men and women could be melted down, when the quality of their raw material had become tainted with a bad memory; if you could melt flesh in Galand Dev's completely and utterly reliable furnace, flux it and rake it and flux it again to draw off the past, pour it into a carefully cured and fettled mould and turn out a high-class flawless casting every single time: featureless, pearly white, translucent.)
Would anybody recognise him now, he wondered. He hadn't been around for a while, and in a place where people came and went, it was easy to forget a face. He watched himself grinning, as it occurred to him that if he wanted, he could simply walk out of his life and into a new one, no longer tethered to his past by his face No, he couldn't, of course; nobody was allowed to leave the compound without express permission from Brigadier Muno. He was surprised at how disappointed he felt. And of course it wouldn't be long before everybody in the place figured it out, equated the brave Poldarn who'd been horribly burned rescuing a fellow worker with the pearl-faced creature who'd be so very hard to miss. Talk about your paradoxes of religion; he'd never been more immediately recognisable in his life.
'Bloody hell.' He turned round to see who'd spoken. He knew the face, couldn't put a name to it. 'What the fuck happened to you?'
Poldarn didn't answer, and he had a feeling it'd be unkind to smile.
'Oh,' said the man whose name had slipped his mind. 'It's you, isn't it? Only I didn't recognise you there for a moment. So,' the man went on, taking a deep breath, 'you're up and about, then.'
'Apparently,' Poldarn said.
'You feeling all right, then? In yourself, I mean.'
Poldarn shrugged. 'Never felt better in myself in my life. That I can remember,' he added.
'Well, that's good.' The poor fool was trying not to stare. 'There was supposed to be a doctor coming up from Falcata, but I don't suppose he could've done anything.'
'He could've killed me,' Poldarn replied. 'That's what everybody keeps telling me, anyhow. I imagine it's all for the best, really.'
'Right,' the man said. 'Good attitude. And you know what it's like, sooner or later people'll get used to any bloody thing.'
'I'm sure,' Poldarn said. 'By the way, do you happen to know what became of Gain Aciava?'
'Who?'
'Gain Aciava. The man I rescued.'
The man frowned. 'That wasn't his name,' he said. 'But the bloke you pulled out from under the furnace, when you got-well, anyway, him. They came and picked him up. Soldiers, is what I heard.'
'Proper soldiers?' Poldarn tried to think of the right word. 'Regular troops, from Torcea or wherever?'
The man shrugged. 'Search me,' he said. 'I didn't see them myself, and all I heard was soldiers, in a cart. There's been so many bloody soldiers in and out of here since this Poldarn's Flute thing started, you lose track. Anyhow, that's all I know; bunch of soldiers came in and arrested the bugger, and they took him away.'
'Arrested him,' Poldarn repeated.
The man nodded. 'Or they were taking him for questioning, or he'd been sent for. Nobody tells you anything around here any more. You know what, if I could get out of here I bloody would. It's getting to be a right misery.'
'Thanks, anyway,' Poldarn replied. 'How's the job coming along, by the way? Banspati told me to report for work today, but I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.'
The man looked vaguely alarmed. 'You don't want to go starting work yet,' he said, 'not when you're only just back up and about. Besides, there's bugger-all to do. They're still faffing about trying to decide if they can fix the crack in the firebox. You heard about that?'
Poldarn nodded. 'So what's everybody else doing?'
'Standing about, mostly. I got pissed off and came on. Waste of time, if you ask me, the whole bloody thing.'
'No desperate panic, all hands on deck, that sort of thing?'
It seemed to take the man a while to figure out what Poldarn was trying to say. 'Don't reckon so,' he replied eventually. 'So if you're not feeling a hundred and ten per cent, I'd not bother going in if I were you. Most like you'd only get in the way.'
'Thanks,' Poldarn said graciously.
That still left him with the problem of finding something to do. He'd had quite enough of reading, given that as far as he was aware the only books in the whole camp were two copies of Concerning Various Matters. He wasn't wanted at work, which wasn't happening anyway. He wasn't hungry or tired, and judging by the way the man whose name he couldn't remember had reacted at the sight of him, he could forget about socialising, too. A leisurely walk round the inside of the perimeter fence would take him a quarter of an hour. That didn't really leave much.
He was seriously considering going back to the shed and getting back into bed when someone called out to him. He turned round, bracing himself for a similar reaction to the one he'd just received.
The newcomer was Spenno, the pattern-maker; and if he'd noticed anything different about Poldarn since the last time he'd seen him, he didn't show it. Poldarn had only spoken to him a dozen times since he'd been at Dui Chirra; but Spenno was acting as if he'd been looking for him.
'So you're up and about, then,' Spenno said. 'Feeling better?'
'More or less,' Poldarn replied. 'How's it going?'
'Isn't,' Spenno said. 'I keep telling them, whole lot's got to come down, says so in the book, but will they listen?
Hell as like. And they call themselves engineers. Whole lot of 'em between them couldn't peel a carrot.'
Poldarn shrugged. 'Must be pretty trying for you,' he said.
'You get used to it.' Spenno frowned, as if trying to remember what he'd been meaning to say. 'Anyhow,' he went on, 'I want your opinion about something, if you've got a moment.'
A moment; which doesn't exist in religion. 'Sure,' Poldarn said. 'But I don't imagine I can be much use to you. I'm just unskilled labour around here. Unless,' he said, remembering, 'it's a blacksmithing job.'
But Spenno shook his head. 'Nothing like that,' he said. 'No, it's rather more important than that. I need to know, you see, who's going to win the war.'
Poldarn looked at him. 'What war?' he asked.
Spenno didn't appear to have heard him. 'It's pretty fundamental, really,' he went on. 'I mean, here we are, making these bloody terrible things; once I've managed to get through to that clown Galand Dev, anyhow. But we'll get there in the end, no doubt about it. And then the question arises: once they're made and proved and finished and all, who're they going to get pointed at? Got to look at the whole picture, see. Otherwise I'm simply not doing my job.'
Spenno didn't look like he was drunk, or as if he'd been breathing in the fumes off the etching tank. 'I'm sorry,' Poldarn said cautiously, 'I don't know anything apart from what we were all told. You could ask Brigadier Muno, but I don't imagine-'
But Spenno smiled. 'Of course you know,' he said. 'I mean, it's why you're here, isn't it? You know, when you first showed up asking for a job, I couldn't figure for the life of me what you'd be wanting with an outfit that just made bells. Not your line at all. I thought, surely he'd be headed straight for Torcea, or else he'd have stayed out west, in the Bohec valley, where it all seemed to be happening. I couldn't imagine what it had to do with us-I mean eventually, yes, sooner or later it'd be here as well as everywhere else, but not yet, if you see what I mean. But anyway, you looked like you'd rather be left alone, and for crying out loud, it's not my place to tell you your job-I reckoned you had your reasons and you'd just get on with doing what you had to do. And then this all started; and so of course I knew, straight away; where else would you be? Which is why,' he went on with a gentle sigh, 'I haven't really bothered about this much before, since in the long run it's all a bit academic anyway. But like I said, you've got to look at the whole picture; and the way I figure it is, surely once it's all over and you've done your thing and everything's-well, you know; surely what a person did, you know, which side he was on in this war, whether he was one of the good guys, it's going to decide who makes it and who doesn't-afterwards, I mean. Assuming there is an afterwards, of course, and I know, everything'll be completely different, not like anything we can understand. But there'll be something, there's got to be, and I'm buggered if I'm going to lose out on my chance of that just because these Poldarn's Flute things got pointed at the wrong bunch of people. Now I've been assuming that because we're, well, the government, call it what you like, that we've got to be the good guys and whoever we smash to bits with these flute things must be the enemy, the bad people. But now we're so close, and suddenly it's all about to happen-well, you can't blame me for checking up, can you? It's just common sense, really, and it doesn't hurt to ask, just so as to be sure.'
