Pattern s-2

by K. J. Parker

  'Certainly,' the chaplain answered. 'You go right ahead. I think I'll stay here and enjoy the smoke.'

  There was enough of it, no doubt about that. Something inside the vestry-whether it was the books or the tapestries or the wall hangings or the irreplaceable masterpieces of eighth-century religious painting-was spewing out rolling black clouds of the stuff, foul-smelling and probably very bad for your health if you breathed in too much of it. Not that there was anything he could do now, needless to say, but he very much wanted to get away from the chaplain; so he walked slowly towards the empty door frame where the bronze double gates had been.

  Someone was yelling to him. He looked round and saw a young first lieutenant, whose name eluded him for the moment.

  'Problem, sir,' the kid panted, wheezing like an old man. 'My platoon was on the bucket end in the south chapel when the roof came down. We were all accounted for except one. Now we've found him.'

  'So?'

  'It's where we found him,' the kid replied. 'He must've been in the Lady chapel when the roof fell in, and now he's got a rafter across his leg and can't shift.'

  He thought for a moment: Lady chapel. Oh yes. No mouldy old books in there, but there'd been a pair of very nice gold candlesticks, a complete service of silver communion ware, and of course the offertory chest as well. All irreplaceable works of art, that went without saying, and it was very brave and heroic of the soldier to go back in there and try and save them for posterity, but now, thanks to his sheer bloody altruism, some poor suicidal fool was going to have to go in there and fish the bugger out.

  Even from back here, the heat from the blaze was enough to blister someone's face. No way he could bring himself to send anyone in there; which left him with precisely one candidate for the mission. Fortunately, he'd just had it on the very best authority that the world was going to end any day now, so even if it was a suicide mission it was all as broad as it was long.

  A few simple precautions, nonetheless; he confiscated a soldier's heavy overcoat and soaked it with water; did the same with two empty feed sacks and wrapped them round his face; no gloves to be found anywhere, of course, until someone suggested the bee-keeper's hut behind the guardhouse. The wet fabric felt clammy and revolting against his skin, but he couldn't think of anything better at such short notice.

  He posted the young lieutenant in the doorway, with strict instructions to keep everybody else out; then a very deep breath, and inside Poldarn woke up to find that for some reason he'd tangled himself up comprehensively in the bedclothes, as if he'd deliberately twisted them round himself.

  'Fire,' he shouted. 'Come on, the building's-'

  He opened his eyes wide. Nothing to see. He was lying on the floor of the great hall. Everybody else had long since trooped off to work.

  There'd been something utterly terrifying going on just a moment ago, but he couldn't remember what it was.

  He stood up, rubbed his eyes until they could be trusted to stay open, and tottered out into the daylight. Nothing even remotely scary out there, either; all peaceful and industrious and as it should have been-apart from the carpet of black cinders lying over everything, of course.

  One of the women came out of the house, carrying a basket. He stopped her.

  'Rook back yet?' he asked.

  She shook her head. 'Cettle's gone over there to see what's going on,' she told him. 'Mountain's playing up again.'

  The way she said it made it sound like a job for the house handyman: mend the burnt skillet, the rat-house door's sticking, the yard broom needs a new handle, and when you've done that, the mountain's playing up again. 'Badly?' he asked.

  'Terrible,' the woman replied. 'Been doing it half the night, puking up fire and god knows what else. That filthy ash everywhere.'

  Now she was making it seem like the mountain was a naughty little boy given to vomiting on the rugs, just to get attention. 'Oh,' he said. 'Where's Halder?'

  'In the cider house,' she answered, 'turning the apples.'

  Poldarn nodded. 'Thank you,' he said, and crunched across the cinder-covered yard to find him. Why the hell bother turning the apples? In case they got bored, presumably.

  On his way, he stopped to take a proper look at the mountain. There was that glow again, a red bruise on its cheek, and the black pillar standing out of the summit; it was ugly and unnatural, and he didn't like looking at it. And surely Rook had to be back by now?

  Grandfather didn't look round when he clambered up the ladder into the cider-house loft. 'What was that word you used? About the mountain.'

  'Volcano,' Poldarn replied.

  Halder grunted. 'Well, it's at it again. Black shit all over the grass. God only knows where it'll end.' He made it sound like it was all Poldarn's fault, as if knowing a special word for the phenomenon made him guilty of causing it. 'You know any way of stopping the bloody thing?' he asked hopefully. 'I mean, if they've got them in the Empire, they must've figured out a way of dealing with them, or the whole place'd be knee-deep in ashes.'

  'Sorry.' What was he apologising for, Poldarn wondered. 'Like I told you, I really don't know anything about them, except the word.' Halder didn't say anything and the silence was embarrassing, so Poldarn went on, 'But they can't be all that common over there, because I never saw one, or any black ash or anything like that.'

  'Just our luck, then,' Halder said gloomily. 'Well, if there's nothing we can do, there's nothing we can do, so we might as well get on and get some work done.' That reminded him. 'You should be up at the forge,' he added. 'Isn't Asburn there, or something?'

  'I don't know, I haven't been over there today. Is Rook back yet?'

  Halder grunted. 'No,' he replied. 'I asked Asburn the other day how you're getting on, he says you're doing fine but maybe you'd care to try your hand at some of the less straightforward pieces.' He picked out an apple, rotated it in his fingers and threw it in a bucket. 'He's very polite, young Asburn; diplomatic, that's the word. What he means is, you aren't interested and you can't be bothered to learn. That's a pity. That's your work he's doing, you know that.'

  He managed to make it sound like a reproach and a warning, that Asburn was encroaching on his prerogatives, of which he should be fiercely jealous. Poldarn picked a loose flake of dry timber off the wall with his fingernail.

  'You know,' he said, 'I don't think I'm cut out for forge work. I think you need a feel for it, and I haven't got it. I'm sure I'd be much more use as a stockman or in the middle-house gang.'

  Long silence, during which Halder rejected another apple. 'And then there's this wedding coming up,' he went on, 'and then you'll have your house to build. Bloody fool you'll feel, moving into your own house and all the hinges and nails and fire-irons and hardware's been made by someone else. You'll regret it the rest of your life if you let that happen, believe me. Really, you ought to knuckle down, learn your trade. I'm not going to live for ever, you know.'

  'Yes, right,' Poldarn said. 'Will you let me know when Rook gets back?'

  Halder stood up and looked round at him. 'Oh,' he said, 'I see what you mean. Yes, if you like. Now, why don't you get along to the forge and do some work?'

  Indeed, Poldarn asked himself, why don't I do just that? 'You need any help with that?' he asked, more hopefully than realistically.

  'No.'

  'Fine. If Rook comes back, I'll be in the forge.'

  'Good boy.'

  The forge door stuck, of course; and when he dragged it back, it scooped up a little moraine of black ash. 'Asburn?' he called out.

  'Morning,' the smith answered cheerfully. He was always cheerful, when he wasn't being worried. 'Is it still coming down out there?'

  No need to ask what it was. 'Afraid so,' Poldarn said. 'Chucking it out all the time.'

  'Filthy stuff,' Asburn replied. 'Come on in, you're just in time to see something.'

  Oh, happy day. 'Just a moment,' Poldarn said, 'I'll get my apron on.'

  As usual, it took him a little while to get used to th
e dim light. Eventually, however, he was able to make out a little stack of thin, narrow plates resting on top of the anvil. Each plate was about as wide as his thumb joint, as long as his hand from fingernails to wrist, and roughly the thickness of a bulrush. There were five plates in the stack, all the same size, and they were carefully wired together.

  'You may not have seen this before,' Asburn went on-he was grinding something up in the mortar-'and it's quite basic stuff, so it's just as well you're here.'

  'Right,' Poldarn replied. 'So, what is it?'

  Asburn took a pinch of whatever it was he'd been grinding between thumb and forefinger, testing its consistency. 'The regular term is pattern-welding,' he said, grinding doggedly with the pestle, 'though you'll hear people call it other things, like watered steel and the like. It's where you take, say, two bits of hard steel and three bits of ordinary soft iron, and you stack 'em up like this-iron, steel, iron, steel, iron, see?-and then you weld 'em together into a single billet, draw it out, fold it over, weld again, draw out, fold-you get the idea. What you finish up with is a piece of material that's as tough as iron and as hard as steel. Bloody useful for all sorts of things, and it's a wonderful use for all your odds and ends of scrap.'

  'Ah,' Poldarn said. 'So what's that in the mortar?'

  'Flux,' Asburn replied. 'When you're welding iron to steel, see, you've got to make sure you don't get any rubbish in the join. The flux draws out all the shit.'

  'Ah,' Poldarn repeated. There didn't seem to be much else he could say about that.

  'Nice thing about this stuff is,' Asburn went on, 'when you've welded and folded a couple of times, you've actually got like-well, if you've ever seen where a river's cut a deep channel, and you can see all the different layers in the sides of the cut, one on top of the other, topsoil and clay and gravel and shale and rock and stuff. It's like that, only you've got maybe a hundred layers, iron and steel alternately; and when you make something out of it, if you etch it right with salt and vinegar, it brings out the most amazing patterns, like ferns or feathers or ripples in water, or the backbone of a fish. Which is why they call it pattern-welding.'

  'I see,' Poldarn said, relieved to have that particular mystery cleared up before it had a chance to eat into his subconscious mind. 'Why not just use a piece of solid steel, though? We've got plenty in the scrap, haven't we?'

  Asburn nodded. 'Loads,' he said. 'But some people reckon this stuff's better for holding an edge and not breaking, though I'm not so sure about that myself. Mostly because it looks good, and it's the way we've always done it, I guess.'

  'Fine,' Poldarn replied. 'All right, so what happens now?'

  Asburn reached up for the bellows handle and gave it an apparently effortless tug. 'First,' he said, 'we need a good heat.' His eyes took on that worried look. 'I don't suppose you'd just fetch over that sack, there by your foot?'

  Poldarn nodded. As he lifted it, he realised what it was. 'This is charcoal,' he said. 'I thought we didn't use it.'

  'Oh, got to use it for this job,' Asburn replied. 'Coal's too dirty and full of clinkers and shit. At least, there's a sort of coal they've got up north that welds really quite nicely, but-'

  But Poldarn wasn't to be deflected so easily. 'So we can afford to use charcoal for this job, which by all accounts isn't really necessary; but when I want a couple of handfuls just to get the fire started-'

  'I'll have a proper look at that tue-iron later on this week,' Asburn said quickly. 'I'm sure it's not drawing right, and that's why you're finding it hard to get a fire in. If you could see your way to just dumping a bit here, where it's handy to rake in when I need it.'

  Poldarn grunted and poured a quarter of the sack out into the forge bed. Odd, he thought, the coal dust and debris in here looks just like the black ash from the volcano. 'Will that do you?'

  'Oh, that's absolutely fine,' Asburn assured him, 'to be going on with.' He drew down on the bellows handle, smooth and slow, forcing a terrific blast of air through the heaped-up fire. A great spout of yellow flame burst out of the apex of the heap-again, just like the mountain outside. No wonder they'd called it Polden's Forge. 'Now we bung in the material,' Asburn continued, 'and heap up the fuel round it like so. There.' He pulled out the tongs and laid them on the anvil, ready for when he needed them next.

  'Would you like me to do the bellows?' Poldarn asked.

  'If you wouldn't mind.' Asburn made it sound like Poldarn had offered to take his place on the gallows. That sort of thing got annoying after a while. 'That's it,' he went on, as Poldarn's overstretched shoulder muscles registered the effort of pumping the bellows with little fissures of pain. After a long and uncomfortable interval, Asburn fished out the billet, which was now an even sunset orange all the way through, and sprinkled it with his magic dust, which sparkled as it burned on the hot surface. 'Now,' he said as he poked it back into the fire, 'we've got to listen out for when it gets hot enough.'

  Poldarn frowned. 'Listen?'

  Asburn nodded. 'It's a sort of hissy, scratchy sound, when the metal's just beginning to melt on the outside. You'll know it when you hear it.'

  All Poldarn could hear was the creak of the bellows leather, the squeal of a dry bearing and the huffing of the blast as it aroused the fire. No hissy scratching, unless he'd gone deaf. But Asburn must've heard it, because he suddenly darted forward with the tongs and nipped the billet out of the fire, like a buzzard swooping on a rabbit. The metal was white-hot, very slightly glazed and translucent on the surface, and a few white sparkles were dancing in the air around it.

  'All right,' Asburn said breathlessly, 'this is the-' He smacked the billet with his hammer; not particularly hard, but a cascade of incandescent sparks exploded from the point of impact, showering his arms and shoulders. Poldarn could hear them patter to the ground as they cooled and fell.

  '-Good bit,' Asburn concluded, as he tapped and pecked at the billet, working so fast that Poldarn couldn't really follow his movements. Instead of ringing on the metal, the hammer made a sort of flat, squidging noise. When the billet had cooled to a bright yellow, Asburn stopped hammering and picked it up in the tongs. 'There,' he said, sounding thoroughly surprised, 'it's taken, see?' Poldarn leaned over close, until the heat radiating off the metal started to burn his face, and tried to see what all the fuss was about. Asburn was right: the weld had taken-he could see that by the way the heat was soaked evenly into the sides and edges.

  'You could've warned me about the sparks,' he said. 'I nearly jumped out of my skin.'

  'Sorry,' Asburn said, immediately looking the very image of horrified remorse. 'Are you all right? It didn't burn you, did it?'

  'No, not at all,' Poldarn said, wishing he'd kept his mouth shut. 'I'm fine, really. Does it always do that?'

  Asburn nodded. 'If it doesn't, you haven't got it hot enough,' he explained.

  'I see. And then, if it hasn't taken, you've got to go back and do it again.'

  'Well, you can try, certainly,' Asburn said. 'But usually, if you don't get it right first time, chances are it'll have got all full of clinker and rubbish and you'll never get it to go. Right,' he went on, 'back it goes in the fire, we take a normal working heat and draw it down till it's about twice the length it is now. Then we fold it and weld again.'

  In spite of himself, not to mention the hard work of pumping the bellows and swinging the sledgehammer, Poldarn found he was almost enjoying this; particularly the rain of sparks, like a blizzard of burning snow, each time Asburn welded the folded billet. Quite why, he wasn't sure, since it was uncomfortably close to the view from the courtyard, and he'd come in here in the first place to get away from that.

  'How many more times have we got to do this?' he asked, as Asburn put the billet back in the fire after the fourth weld.

  'Depends,' Asburn replied. 'Mostly, on what you're figuring to make out of it. This time it's just a skinning knife for Raffen, so that'd probably do as it is. On the other hand, a couple more times won't hurt, and we'll get a
better pattern. Not that I'm planning on anything fancy,' he added defensively, 'but if a job's worth doing, and all that.'

  'Sure,' Poldarn said. 'I was just wondering, that's all. When you've done that, what next?'

  Asburn shrugged. 'Just forge it like an ordinary lump of steel,' he said. 'You can do it if you like, Raffen doesn't want anything fussy or complicated.'

  Then he's out of luck isn't he? Poldarn thought. 'All right,' he heard himself say, though why he wanted to volunteer for a job he didn't have to do he couldn't quite understand. After all, it'd be a crying shame for Asburn to do all this hard work and then have the result screwed up in the final, easy stage by an incompetent buffoon.

  In the event, though, Poldarn made a reasonable job of it-the blade straight, the back very, very nearly level, no dirty lumps of clinker or scale carelessly hammered in, no ugly pits or stretch marks, and it didn't warp when he tempered it, either. True, compared with the knives he'd seen Asburn make it was ugly, graceless and pedestrian, but if the worst came to the worst and Raffen didn't have anything else handy to do the job with, it'd probably cut something up without snapping in two or wiping its edge off on a hazel twig. After Poldarn had filed it and burnt on a piece of stag-horn for a handle, he let it lie on the bench and looked at it. I made that, he thought; well you can tell, can't you? Nevertheless.

  While he'd been making the knife, Asburn had been up the other end of the building, fussing round a partly made lampstand with chalk and a piece of string. Asburn was capable of spending a whole day just measuring one piece, prodding and fiddling and fidgeting to get an exact fit on something that nobody but him would ever notice or care about. Poldarn had actually asked him once why he bothered; Asburn had replied that maybe right now nobody would be any the wiser if he sent out work that wasn't just right; but in a hundred years' time, or two hundred, a smith would come along and know in an instant what he'd done and where he'd gone wrong, and until then he wouldn't be able to lie still in his grave for fretting about it.

  Poldarn reckoned that attitude was too silly for words, but decided not to say so.