by K. J. Parker
It proved to be a soft, kittenish purr. He had the hammer in his hand all ready, a light dusting of flux on the anvil, loose firescale all carefully swept and blown away. As the work emerged from under the coals it was dripping fat white sparks like tame indoor stars, and as he started hammering the weld together the metal seemed to explode like a volcano, throwing out white-hot hailstones in every direction. Two of them settled on his bare skin and hurt like hell, but he knew he didn’t have time to waste on pain; the iron and steel would only be half-molten together for a few precious heartbeats, and if he screwed up the weld this time, he’d probably have to start all over again with a new strip of tyre and another scrap of steel. He could see the brief opportunity in the hot metal, feel it squirming under the hammer, like a boot squelching in boggy ground (he imagined that it would feel like this to wade across the surface of the sun; something a god could probably get away with, though a man would be incinerated before his foot touched down).
The last few sparks went out, allowing Poldarn to feel the ferocious heat of the metal roasting his skin and flesh, though his hands were a hammer shaft and a pair of tongs removed from it. He stopped hammering and held the work up as close as he dared bring it to his face, trying to see if the weld had taken, but all he could make out was a glaring white hole burnt into his vision, which stayed there when he shut his eyes. He put the work back in the fire; after the trauma of taking the weld, pumping the bellows felt almost pleasant in comparison.
He concentrated this heat on drawing out the shape of the blade, tapering it on the flats and sides, first on the horn, to move it, then on the flat, to straighten it out. To Poldarn’s joy and stark amazement, the weld seemed to have taken, right the way up to a point a fingernail’s width under the eye. He was very impressed. He had no idea how he’d managed to do that.
The rest of the job – shaping, bevelling, smoothing, plenishing – he did in a sort of a daze, without really thinking about it, since his hands appeared to know what to do and his head didn’t; they were remembering, just as they’d remembered how to draw a sword and slash through a neck vein. They’d remembered, because they were a blacksmith’s hands, even if the blacksmith himself had seen fit to forget what he’d once been, who he was.
Damn, Poldarn thought, I was wrong and Grandfather was right, he said I was the Haldersness smith, it’s who I’ve been all along and I wouldn’t let myself admit it. I must have learned this trade – well, of course I learned it when I was a kid, that’s what the heir apparent would do in a place like this. He looked round at the walls, at all the obscure and arcane tools roosting there on their hooks and brackets, and suddenly he knew them all by name, the way a leader knows his men, or the head of a household knows his family: the hardies and the swages and the flatters and the fullers, the stakes and setts and drifts and headers, straight-lip tongs and box tongs, wedge, hammer and side tongs, bicks, forks and scrolls. There you all are again, he said to himself, I’ve been away but I’m back again now, and here you all still are, just where I left you.
Asburn was coming over to him, smiling. ‘How’re you getting on?’ he asked; then, ‘Oh, that’s really nice, you’ve got that just right.’ For some reason, Poldarn felt patronised, insulted; and what was this stranger doing in his shop anyhow, using his tools, like he owned the place?
‘Thanks,’ he said sullenly. ‘It isn’t going to look much, but it’s close enough for country music.’ He leaned over the finished axe head, examining it with exaggerated interest, so he wouldn’t have to look Asburn in the face. ‘Bloody great scale pits there and there, look, they’ll have to grind out, which is a pain.’
‘That’s a bloody good weld, though.’ Asburn was genuinely pleased for him, but that was an unpardonable liberty, as though he needed anybody’s praise or approval. ‘I can never get the heat back up that far,’ Asburn went on, ‘I always end up peening over the tops just to cover up where it hasn’t taken.’
Poldarn shrugged; the interloper’s praise was almost physically irritating, like an itch or a cramp. ‘I suppose it’s not so bad, for a first effort,’ he conceded unhappily. ‘Not much of an axe, though, with no poll. Should’ve done it your way, but no, I had to know best. I reckon this ought to go back in the scrap, it isn’t fit to give to anyone.’
‘Oh no, really.’ Asburn shook his head emphatically. ‘A touch on the wheel here and there and a bit of buffing soap, it’ll be right as rain. Have you hardened it yet?’
Poldarn shook his head. ‘It’s all right,’ he added, ‘I can manage all right, thank you. Orange heat, then quench in water and draw it back to purple just going on blue. Right?’
Asburn nodded. ‘That ought to do it,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Well, I’ll let you get on with it, then, while I just finish up this latch tongue.’
No, you can just pick up your junk and get out of here. ‘Thanks,’ Poldarn said. ‘Thanks, I appreciate it.’
‘Oh, no bother,’ Asburn replied, with the surprised awkwardness Poldarn had come to expect from these people when he said thank you for anything. ‘Anyway, well done. Nice piece of work, really. Halder’d have been proud.’
When he’d done the hardening and tempering, Poldarn retired to the far corner of the smithy to do the grinding. Well, he thought, as the stone spat up yellow sparks, so that’s what I used to do when I wasn’t killing crows. No big deal, of course, it’s just a skill, something you learn, something anybody can learn. It’s not like finding out your name, or who your parents were. It can’t matter very much, can it? Certainly can’t do any harm; and it’s kept me out from under their feet indoors. That’s just as well, or I’m sure they’d have taken the meat-cleaver to me.
It’s not like I’ve done anything clever or unusual. Bloody hell, if Asburn can do it, it can’t be difficult.
After he’d ground up the blade and set a good edge, Poldarn went out to the woodpile and found a piece of seasoned straight ash branch as long as his arm, which he turned up on the rickety old pole lathe to make a reasonably functional handle (tapered, with a knob at the end so the head couldn’t come off, and every blow would fix it on tighter). As a finishing touch, he served the grip with twine, right up as far as the head. Then he went to look for Boarci.
‘Yeah, it’s all right,’ Boarci said, waggling it up and down in his hand. ‘Ugly as hell, but who cares so long as it cuts and doesn’t bust on me first time I use it. I liked the old one better, though. And this bloody string’ll give me blisters.’
‘Tough,’ Poldarn said. ‘It’s like that so it won’t get slippery with sweat and fly out of your hand.’
Boarci shook his head. ‘My hands don’t sweat,’ he said. ‘But it was a nice thought, I guess. Still, I’ll strip that off when I’ve got a moment. A useful bit of string’s worth having.’
Poldarn wasn’t unduly impressed by that; so he retreated to the hayloft over the stables, where he could be sure of being out of the way for a while. It was dark there, but pleasantly warm, and he liked the smell of hay. He lay down with his hands behind his head, and tried to make sense of what had just happened in the forge.
Certainly, for a moment at least, he’d been somebody different, but he couldn’t say for sure whether it had been someone else entirely or an extra part of himself that he hadn’t known about (like a child growing up in a big house who finds his way into the attic for the first time). By way of experiment, he tried to think of a complicated piece of ironwork – the man-sized free-standing candleholder in the main hall was the first thing that came to mind – and settled down to figure out how he’d go about making it. He imagined a stack of iron bars, and tried to picture himself working them down, drawing out and swaging and jumping up and welding them until they became a finished piece of work. At first it was difficult, almost impossible to hold the shapes in his mind, but gradually Poldarn found that if he concentrated hard enough on the image, the pictures materialised behind his eyes, like the afterglow of the white-hot iron, and he knew that if he relied on
instinct and let his hands and eyes do the work, he’d be able to make the wretched thing eventually. That set him speculating: was that how they read each others’ minds, by staring with an extra eye until they could see what they were looking for?
‘Something like that,’ said a voice in the darkness. This time, Poldarn knew there wasn’t anybody there, so he wasn’t too worried. It was a girl’s voice; he wasn’t very good at identifying people’s ages by their voices, but he was prepared to hazard a guess at somewhere between sixteen and twenty-four. ‘Actually, it’s easier than that, once you get used to it. Like walking; it takes you six months of desperate effort when you’re a little child, and then you just stop thinking about it for years and years, until you’re old and it gets to be a dreadful pain again.’ The voice hesitated. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ it continued, ‘because I didn’t mean that we have trouble hearing each other as we get older, I don’t know why I said that last bit. I think it was the symmetry of it that took my fancy. But you can forget all that.’
‘Thank you,’ Poldarn said gravely. ‘Forget what?’
‘Well, all the—’ The voice sighed. ‘Don’t tease,’ it said. ‘You never used to tease, it gets me flustered. That’s a real boy thing, teasing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Poldarn replied. ‘I won’t do it again. Would you mind telling me who you are, by the way? I’m sure I should know you, but I’ve forgotten.’
The voice tutted. ‘More teasing. If you don’t stop, I’m leaving.’
‘No, really.’ Poldarn sighed. ‘It’s too complicated to explain, but I promise you, I really don’t remember—’
He stopped. The voice was giggling. ‘My turn to tease you,’ it explained. ‘Yes, of course I know about you losing your memory, I was there at the time, I saw you. You didn’t see me, of course. My name’s Herda.’
Poldarn listened to the sound of the name, but it didn’t mean anything at all to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Quite all right, I’m not offended or anything. Actually, I’m Elja’s mother.’
‘Oh. But I thought she was dead.’
‘Well, of course I’m dead, silly.’ The voice laughed. ‘I’ve been dead for nineteen years – I died when Elja was born. You know that.’
‘That’s what I’d been told.’
‘Ah, a cautious man, very sensible. But just this once, you’re being told the truth. Make the most of it, it’s not likely to happen to you very often.’
Something she’d said registered belatedly in Poldarn’s mind. ‘You said you were there,’ he said, ‘when I lost my memory. That’s impossible, if you died when Elja was born.’
‘Oh, you. You’re always so damned literal. What I meant was, I was watching over you at the time. Like I always do. Your guardian angel, in fact. Do you want to know what happened, that day by the river?’
Poldarn found it hard to get out the word ‘Yes,’ but he managed it, somehow.
‘Well.’ The voice paused. ‘You know, I don’t really think I ought to tell you, it might upset you. You always were one for getting upset, the least little thing had you in tears when you were a little boy. Like the time you had that pet bird – oh come on, you must remember that, the old bald crow with the broken wing. You kept it for years, in a little hutch that Scaptey made for you.’
‘Remind me,’ Poldarn said, very quietly.
‘All right. It was when you were – let me see, you can’t have been more than five, possibly younger than that, and one day the poor thing was flapping around in the yard, I think one of my father’s dogs had caught it and brought it down, but it managed to get away; and there it was, capering round the yard and flapping helplessly, and the dog was chasing after it in a frightful rage because every time he tried to grab it, the wretched creature did a flutter and a jump and just managed to get clear. The rest of us kids, well, you know how brutal children are, we were standing there watching and laughing our horrid little heads off, when you came thundering out of the trap-house waving a stick, and you whacked that dog across the back so hard I’m amazed you didn’t kill it. And then you got a broken milk-pail, and you crept up on that funny old crow, really patiently, talking to it really gently and sweetly. It kept jinking about and it took you ages and ages, but you didn’t lose your temper or give up, you carried on being nice and gentle until finally you got the pail over it; and then you picked it up so carefully, even though it panicked and scratched your face and pecked you till you were all covered in blood. You kept it in a feed bin, and Halder was furious, couldn’t think why anybody could possibly want to make a pet of vermin as he called it; he couldn’t read in your mind why you were doing it, you’d somehow managed to close your thoughts up so he couldn’t see them. That was the first time you did it, and everybody was very shocked, of course, they said it was unnatural. But that’s beside the point. Halder was livid, but old Scaptey – he was always so fond of you – he made you the hutch for your crow and you fed it and put in fresh straw every week and you’d sit there for hours chattering away to it – we used to creep up when you weren’t looking and listen to you, and really, it was just like you were having a proper conversation with it, because you’d stop talking and crouch there like you were listening to what it was saying, and then you’d reply, and so on. We laughed at you like mad and teased you, but you didn’t seem to mind, you said it was our loss not having a magic bird for a pet, because it told you all sorts of wonderful things, about the past and the future too; and then we got frightened, just in case it really was a magic bird, and we asked you, what sort of things was it saying to you, about the future? Well, then you started telling us things that were going to happen, really confidently, not as though you were making them up out of your head, and sure enough, they began to happen just as you’d told us – little things to start with, like when the old lame ewe was going to lamb, how many barrels of apples we’d get off the split tree, stuff like that; and after that, really big stuff – women getting pregnant and people dying. That went on for several years, I think, and all that time Halder was getting angrier and angrier, he said it wasn’t right and no good would come of it, you were teaching the rest of us bad ways and all sorts of other dreadful things, and he was really worried because whenever he tried to tell you off, you’d close your mind up tight, like a box, and nobody could see what you were thinking at all. So he decided he’d have to get rid of the bird, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it openly, because he knew you’d be so angry. Are you sure you don’t remember this?’
‘Positive,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Go on.’
‘Well,’ said the voice, ‘one day when you were out with the sheep, he got a hammer and a sharp nail; and he had Scaptey hold the crow’s head while he banged the nail into it and killed it. Then he broke up the slats on the roof of the hutch and put the dead crow back inside, and when you came home, he told you that while you’d been out, a big mob of crows had pitched on the hutch, smashed their way in and pecked your pet crow to death, because they were angry with him for leaving them and going to live with humans.’
‘Halder said that?’
‘Oh yes. What really bugged him, you see, was that you’d made friends with a scavenger, a pest who stole corn and pecked at the thatch and trampled down the laid patches in the barley, in preference to your own kind. For some reason he really hated that, he thought it was so perverse that it was positively evil. So he wanted you to think it was crows who’d killed your friend, so you’d stopped liking them.’ She chuckled. ‘It did that all right,’ she said. ‘That was when you took to sitting out in the headlands with a pocketful of stones and a slingshot. From one extreme to another, my father said – you carried on being just as crazy, except that instead of talking to crows, all you ever wanted to do was kill them, for revenge. Actually, that got Halder even more worried than when you had the pet, but he didn’t say anything, just kept very quiet and gave you nice rewards for keeping the pests off the newly sown fields. Eventually you grew out of it, I sup
pose; but you kept that trick of being able to keep us out of your head, in fact you had your guard up more often than not, more and more as time went on. That was when Halder decided you’d got to go.’
‘He decided that?’
‘Oh yes, you were getting very unpopular, and people were saying things about you behind your back, how you weren’t right in the head – you could see their point, you had a perfectly awful temper, you kept picking fights and beating people up, which had never happened before as far back as anyone could remember – well, how could it, when we can all see what everybody else is thinking? But we couldn’t read you, of course, so you could walk up to someone and suddenly start being nasty, without any warning, and next thing there’d be a fight, and that someone’d be on the ground with you kicking and punching them. That started around the time you stopped killing crows, so naturally people drew their own conclusions.’
‘Why the hell would I want to do that?’ Poldarn asked.
‘Exactly,’ the voice replied, ‘why would anybody want to do a thing like that? Nobody had a clue, except me, of course.’
‘Except you.’
‘Oh yes.’ The voice sighed. ‘You see, you only stopped killing crows when I told you it wasn’t their fault your pet died, it was Halder and Scaptey who’d done it. I remember, I thought it was silly, someone declaring war on a species of bird, and it was time you got a grip on yourself and settled down. But as soon as you knew, you were really upset and you decided that you had to take revenge on people for all the crows they’d tricked you into killing. Really, I should have kept my mouth shut, but I was only trying to help. Well, it all came back on me in the end, didn’t it?’
