by K. J. Parker
They weren’t particularly impressed with that statement – understandably, given the effort it had cost them to get there. ‘We can’t just go back and tell them they’re all going to be killed but not to worry about it,’ Rook grumbled. ‘They’d think we’ve all gone crazy or something. Come on, you said all we have to do is figure out how it works and we can stop it.’
Poldarn pulled himself together, sighing. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Seems to me there’s got to be an enormously hot fire right down there in the roots of the mountain, big and hot enough to melt rock, like a lime kiln. Once it’s done that, I guess all the smoke and fumes get bottled up deep inside until eventually they burst out and punch a hole right through the top of the mountain. The cinders and ash that got all over everything must be molten rock that ended up being spat out high into the air, where it cooled off and came down everywhere like snow. Anyway,’ he added, ‘that’s the way I see it. Anybody got a better explanation?’
‘Sounds reasonable enough to me,’ said Barn, wiping grit out of his eyes with his knuckles. ‘So how does that help us?’
‘It doesn’t.’ Poldarn shook his head. His cheeks and forehead were stinging horribly. ‘I was wrong. There isn’t a thing we can do about it. Let’s go home, I’m sick to death of this place.’
Barn frowned. ‘What about when it rains?’ he asked. ‘Surely if it rains hard enough, that ought to put it out.’
Poldarn couldn’t be bothered to reply, so it was up to Boarci to explain. ‘It’s too hot,’ he said. ‘The rain wouldn’t get anywhere near the bottom of the chimney before it turned to steam. You remember all those fluffy white clouds the last time, once the rain started?’
Barn nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Not that it matters, we can’t make it rain anyhow. But so what? As long as it stays down there it won’t be doing us any harm.’
Poldarn looked up. ‘Depends,’ he said. ‘What we don’t know is how big the fire is or what’s causing it. My guess is that it’s the same fire as heats the water for the hot springs – in which case it’s been going for thirty-odd years to my certain knowledge, and quite possibly a few thousand years before that.’
‘Fine,’ Barn replied. ‘Like you said, it’s been going on for centuries and never done anybody any harm till now.’ He paused, then went on, ‘I’m sure you’re right about fumes getting trapped under the mountain and finally blowing out – I guess that must be what happened, and that’s where all the ash and stuff came from. But now there’s this huge great vent, like runners and risers when you’re casting, so won’t the fumes just rise up out of there and get blown away into the air, all nice and harmless?’ He shrugged. ‘All right, so it’s very big and impressive, but I don’t see what harm it’s going to do us. I’m guessing that this new breakout is where another pocket of the fumes and steam and stuff must’ve built up, and it blasted a hole into the side of the mountain so it could get out. I don’t know, maybe there’s a whole load of them just getting ready to go pop, but doesn’t it stand to reason that it must’ve used up most of its bottled-up fumes and shit by now? In which case, we may get a few more sprinklings of the cinders, but nothing too bad, just like this time around.’ He shrugged. ‘Come on, you’re a blacksmith, you know what furnaces are like, and casting hot metal. If your sand’s wet or you’ve got a blocked vent, it blows up and you get the whole lot in your face. If you’ve done your vents right and cooked your mould, there’s nothing to it. Same here, I reckon.’
Poldarn thought about that for a while. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’
‘Makes sense to me,’ Raffen put in. ‘In which case, there’s nothing to worry about and we can go home. I don’t know about you, but this place gives me the creeps. I say we get back down the mountain and go do some work instead of roasting ourselves alive.’
‘Fine,’ Poldarn said. ‘Let’s do that, then.’
Getting back down the mountain was much quicker than getting up it, though not noticeably easier. Egil and Boarci led the way, both of them obviously keen to get away from there as soon as possible. Poldarn lagged behind. He found the place just as oppressive as the others did, but he felt sure there was something he’d overlooked, though he hadn’t got the faintest idea what it might be. It wasn’t just a vague feeling that he’d been there before – well, he knew that, he’d been there with Halder, and something about that visit had impressed him so much that the memory of it had forced its way to the surface of his mind (like the fire bottled up in the mountain). As he scrambled and skittered down the slopes of the chimney he found himself going over that memory in his mind, trying to winnow some degree of significance out of it; but the more he searched the more elusive the scene became, to the point where he was hard put to it to distinguish between actual recollections and appropriate-seeming details he’d made up to flesh it out and colour it. He could feel himself rewriting the scene, putting in words and inflections that would make some sort of sense of it all, justifying his belief that there was some secret or clue back up there on the rim of the crater – and wouldn’t that be nice, he thought, if I could go back and mould the past into the shape I want it to be, if I could press a new pattern into the sand and then tap the molten rock and cast a whole new world; like a god, almost, bringing the old world to an end and creating a new one, he thought again. There was a fine notion, for sure; that the world which the god in the cart had come to destroy and replace wasn’t the present but the past, a simple job of heating out the memory.
It started to rain as soon as they reached the foot of the mountain, and it didn’t stop until they arrived back at Haldersness. By that stage they were all so wet that they couldn’t think about anything else, not even how tired and hungry they were. But that was something that could be set right very easily, with a change of clothes, a bowl of porridge (and the inevitable leeks) and a brisk, tall fire, which quickly annealed the memory of the wretchedness of the last few days.
‘So,’ Colsceg demanded, as Poldarn soaked up the warmth, ‘what did you find out up there?’
‘Not a lot,’ Poldarn answered. ‘There’s a big hole in the mountain where all the stuff got blown out, you can see right into it. There’s a huge pool of molten rock, but it’s a hell of a long way down.’
‘Molten rock,’ Colsceg repeated, as if Poldarn had just said something that didn’t make sense, like burning snow or wet fire. ‘Bloody hell, that sounds a bit grim. So what do you reckon we ought to do about it?’
Poldarn shrugged. ‘Not a lot we can do – it’s all too big. But I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, it’s not like it’s going anywhere. Now the mountain’s got a way of letting off steam, it shouldn’t bother us any more.’
Colsceg frowned. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘So, apart from that, did you see anything interesting?’
‘No,’ Poldarn replied. ‘That’s about it, really.’
‘Long way to go just to see that.’
‘Yes.’
Colsceg nodded. ‘Well, I guess it’s better knowing than guessing, at that.’
‘True,’ Poldarn said. ‘Anything been happening here while we’ve been gone?’
‘Not really. No more showers of ash falling out of the sky; a little bit of dust, is all, and not nearly as much of that as when you went away. At this rate, we’ll be back to normal in a day or so.’
‘Good,’ Poldarn yawned, pulling his blanket tighter around his shoulders. ‘The sooner that happens, the better for all of us. After all, we’ve got work to do.’
‘We have that,’ Colsceg agreed, as he rose to his feet. ‘Looks like you’d better get some rest. If the rain holds off, we can finish digging up the turnip clump in the morning.’
‘Great,’ Poldarn said. ‘I’ll look forward to that.’
Chapter Eighteen
Aday or so after Poldarn got back from the mountain, he was in his new smithy, now complete with a large and handsome brick forge and no less than three anvils. Cu
riously enough, he found himself drifting over to it more and more, whenever there was nothing obvious for him to do, or whenever he could manufacture a pretext. On this occasion all he had to do was straighten a handful of nails, salvaged from the Haldersness woodshed door – he could have done it easily enough on the mounting-block in the yard, with the back of an axe, but instead he’d gone to the trouble of lighting a fire and taking a heat on each one. Partly, he explained it to himself, it was the warmth he enjoyed; since he’d felt the heat of the volcano on his face as he hung over the ledge, he’d felt uncomfortably cold in the house or the fields, no matter how many layers of clothing he crammed himself into. A well-built fire in the forge, livened up by blasts of air from his magnificent new double-action bellows, was about the only thing that could stop him shivering.
Straightening the nails took him no time at all, so Poldarn cast about for something else to do otherwise it’d be a waste of all the good coal he’d shovelled onto the fire, and as a good householder he couldn’t countenance that. Already he was beginning to accumulate his own personal scrap-pile (he hadn’t had the heart to confiscate Asburn’s collection when he left Haldersness, where Asburn had remained to teach Barn the trade); mostly nails and brackets and hinges too badly damaged in the move to be used again, but also a fair quantity of junk retrieved from the various houses – worn-out scythe blades, files, ploughshares, axles, kettles, stirrup-irons, hoes, harrows, steelyards, leg-vices, the history of the settlement at Haldersness told through the medium of broken and discarded artefacts. At the bottom of the pile lurked the two halves of a snapped backsabre, partially rusted through, that had hung in the porch of the main house for as long as anybody could remember. Who’d put them there, or why, or who the sword had originally belonged to, had long since corroded away, but the two bits of steel had still been there, because there hadn’t been any reason to get rid of them when the time came to leave the house. Someone had taken them down as an afterthought and thrown them in a basket of oddments; someone else had unpacked the basket and, on the basis that all bits of rusty old metal belonged in the forge, had slung them on the scrap-pile to await purification and rebirth.
A little scrabbling turned them up, and Poldarn laid them on the table of the middle anvil, fitted the pieces together along the fracture, and stared at them thoughtfully. There hadn’t been any call for Asburn to make anything of the kind while Poldarn had been hanging about in the forge at Haldersness. There was no demand for weapons, generally speaking; they were something you inherited, or borrowed from the big chest with the four padlocks at the back of the hall as and when you needed one for a cruise to the Empire, and there were always more than enough of the things floating around without the smith having to waste time and effort making new ones. This one, the broken one from the Haldersness porch, looked like it was very old indeed, to judge by the depth of the rust-pits and the shrunken contours of the cutting edge, gradually thinned down and eroded by many years of sharpening with coarse stones. Out of curiosity Poldarn took a medium-grit stone and rubbed it up and down the flat of the blade to shift the rust. Once he’d got it back to white metal, he thought he could just about make out the faint pattern of ripples and ridges that marked out an old-fashioned pattern-welded piece, made back in the days when hard steel was rare and precious and a large object like a sword had to be built up out of scraps interleaved with layers of hard iron.
The thought of all the work that must have gone into it made Poldarn wince. Back at Haldersness he’d helped Asburn with some pattern-welding, swinging the big hammer while Asburn did all the clever stuff; it had taken hours of hard, slow work to produce one small billet, and Asburn had told him later that all they’d done was a very simple, utilitarian pattern, not to be mentioned in the same breath with the wonderful constructs the old-timers used – the four- or six-core aligned twists and countertwists, the maiden’s-hair pattern, the butterfly, the hugs-and-kisses, the pool and eye and the Polden’s ladder. Compared to what the old-timers used to get up to, according to Asburn, the little blank they’d rushed out was just a shoddy piece of rubbish, a parody, a travesty.
Whatever this one had been, he reflected, it hadn’t done it much good. The blade had snapped right on the shoulder, the place where the concave bend of the cutting edge was most extreme. Judging by the corresponding chip and roll in the edge, it seemed likely that it had broken in the act of bashing on something hard and solid, quite possibly somebody’s armoured head. So much, Poldarn decided, for pattern-welding.
Still; the shape itself was an interesting one, and he stood for quite some time figuring out how a man would go about making such a thing. First he’d have to draw down a steep taper, both thickness and width; then lay in the bevel, probably, keeping the blade straight as he went so as to give himself a chance of keeping everything even; then gradually introduce the curve, just an inch or so per heat, with gentle tapping and nudging over the anvil’s beak; then more straightening and truing up, hot and cold – hours of that, in all probability, since flattening out one kink or distortion tended to set up two or three new ones further up or down the piece, as he knew only too well. Finally draw down a tang and either shape a point with the hammer or cheat by using the hot chisel and the rasp; it could be done, in fact now that he’d thought about it he could see every stage of the operation simultaneously, laid out side by side in his mind like a collection of memories. But it’d mean days of work, even using a solid piece of stock rather than pattern-welding, and since nobody wanted such a thing, where the hell was the point?
Poldarn shivered, and realised that while he’d been lost in thought he’d let the fire go out. Well; no excuse for lighting it again, so he might as well take his beautifully straightened nails back out to the yard and give them to someone to knock into a few bits of wood.
Before he could leave the forge, however, the door opened and Raffen came in, reflexively ducking his head to avoid the low beams that had been a feature of the Haldersness smithy, though the Ciartanstead forge didn’t have that problem. ‘Thought you might be in here,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a visitor.’
He made it sound like an infestation of rats. ‘Oh,’ Poldarn said. ‘Who’s that, then?’
‘Leith,’ Raffen replied with ill-concealed distaste, ‘from Leithscroft, over the far side of Corby Wood. Haven’t seen him round here for years.’
Poldarn shrugged. ‘What does he want?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Raffen answered, ‘he didn’t tell me. You should be able to guess better than I can. After all, he’s your friend.’
Poldarn had, of course, no memory of anybody called Leith. ‘Is he?’ he asked.
‘’Course. You two were always hanging round the yard when you were kids. Pair of bloody tearaways.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Poldarn answered gravely. ‘Probably just as well I can’t remember. Well, maybe he was passing and just wants to chat about old times. In which case,’ he added, ‘he probably won’t be stopping long. Where did you leave him?’
‘In the house, eating.’ Raffen came a step or two closer. ‘What’s that you’ve got there, then?’
‘Oh, that.’ For some reason, Poldarn felt embarrassed. ‘Just an old busted sword-blade. I was thinking of working it up into a pair of shears or something.’
Raffen squinted. ‘Right, I remember it now. Used to hang in the porch – Halder’s dad’s old sword. I was wondering where that had got to, since the move.’
‘Oh,’ Poldarn said. ‘Nobody told me what it was. In that case, I’ll find something else to use.’
‘Really? Why?’
Poldarn frowned. ‘Well, it’s an heirloom. Bit of family history.’
‘Oh.’ Raffen frowned, as if he’d just found a fish bone. ‘Up to you, I suppose. But it’s only two bits of old scrap. Better off as something useful than just lying around rusting.’
Leith turned out to be a big, tall man with startlingly broad shoulders and almost no remaining teeth. Poldarn could
n’t remember his face at all, but Leith seemed to recognise Poldarn as soon as he walked in through the door, because he stood up and said, ‘Hello, Ciartan,’ in a rather worried-sounding voice.
‘Hello,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Look, this is probably going to sound strange, but I don’t know who you are. You see—’
Leith nodded abruptly. ‘You lost your memory back in the old country, I know. I heard it from one of the Lyatsbridge people, they were out our way scrounging lumber and stuff. Soon as I heard, I came straight over. It’s true, then.’
Poldarn nodded. He couldn’t guess why his loss of memory had affected this stranger so much, but he guessed it wasn’t just sympathy for an old friend. ‘Apparently we knew each other years ago,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could tell me about it.’
‘Yes.’ Leith sucked in a long breath, as if he was bracing himself for something painful, like having a bone set. ‘That’s why I’m here – there’s a few things you really ought to know.’ But then he hesitated, as though he was having second thoughts, and a look passed over his face that Poldarn could only describe as sly. ‘They also said you can’t see anybody’s thoughts now,’ he said, rather too casually to be convincing. ‘Is that right? Never heard anything like that before.’
‘Perfectly true,’ Poldarn said, trying not to be annoyed. ‘And other people can’t see mine, either. At least, that’s what people have told me. I wouldn’t know, of course.’
‘Oh, that’s true enough. It’s like trying to see in through a shuttered window, you know there’s something in there but the shutter’s in the way. Damnedest thing I ever came across, actually.’
‘Really.’
Leith scratched his chin and sat down again. There was a large empty bowl on the table next to him, with a few grains of drying porridge sticking to the side; also a jug and a horn cup, most likely empty now. ‘Makes it a bit hard to talk to you, to be honest, but it doesn’t bother me, really. So you don’t remember anything at all?’
