by K. J. Parker
Next he considered the memory of flesh, imparted by intense experience and sudden understanding: take a piece of flesh, fill it with knowledge, learning, wisdom, experience; quench it in pain, heat it again in friendship, love and understanding, and you can teach it to remember its own name. Bend it back on itself and let go, and it'll spring back into the identity it's learned to inhabit. Heat it again in horror, shame and understanding, let it cool slowly in confused sleep, and it forgets. Bend it, and it follows whatever force is applied to it, adapting itself without resistance to whatever shape will get it out of the way of the pressure, until in time it fatigues and breaks. Memory gives it not only identity, but strength.
Then he considered the broken steel and the broken flesh. One can be put back in the fire over and over again; each time it goes from intense heat to sudden cold to gradual, accumulating heat it accepts a new memory, gains new strength, becomes capable of taking and holding an edge. Put the other in the fire and it burns away, converted into smoke and ash, like the effluent of a volcano. The defining property of flesh is that it can only be worked once; unlike steel, which, if it warps in the quench and comes out distorted, crooked, bad, can be saved by fire and water and more fire, making it infinitely more versatile and enduring than muscle, skin and bone. Even supposing it were possible to take flesh with a bad set and heat out the offending memory, the result would inevitably be weak and ductile, unable to hold an edge, bending and stretching and buckling under pressure until finally the ignorant material fatigues, cracks, tears, snaps, fails. Memory is understanding. Memory is strength.
But supposing you were to take flesh that could withstand heat, even the heat of the fire-stream that had turned Barn and the old man who'd wanted to help into ash and smoke, but that had taken a bad set in the quench and become warped, distorted, untrue. Supposing you could find such a piece of flesh in a ditch or the corner of a barn or in the mud and blood of a river bank, annealed of its memory until it was as soft as a bloom of virgin iron, and supposing you heated and forged and heated and quenched and heated it, in the fire of burning houses and Polden's Forge and the river mud of the Bohec (as he'd coddled the file-blade in mud so the fine steel of the teeth wouldn't burn; yes, maybe that was how to save flesh from burning)-suppose you could do that, and keep on doing it over and over again until at last, eventually, it came out straight from the quench, filled with good memory and set in the desired shape. That would be the very best hardening flesh. That would be a god.
But he doubted that-because flesh burns, even when coated in mud or wrapped in oxhides saturated with water; a defining property of flesh is that it burns. That limits its usefulness and cramps its versatility, because nothing survives burning except smoke and the ash that covers fields and buries growth. The thought depressed him, because he'd had such high hopes for flesh as a material for the manufacture of useful and enduring things. But then he thought of how steel burns too, if too much heat gets into it, blanching the orange to white; he thought of the welding heat, the incandescent white that crackles and glitters with sparks, at which point it can be joined to another piece in marriage under the hammer, in the brief moment of love between taking a heat and burning. He considered the way Asburn had made the pattern-welded blade, binding together flat leaves of steel and bringing them to the very brink of burning, and how his hammer had joined the many into one (like the mind of the crows, or the people of Haldersness and Ciartanstead). It seemed to him that in order to make a join in steel or flesh, it was necessary to bring the material to the point of destruction, when the skin is molten and fluid and one piece can flow into another, as the Mahec and the Bohec merge into each other and then the sea, at Boc Bohec. Once joined, of course, they can take heat and sudden cold and incremental heat as well as a piece of the solid, and the only indication that they were ever separate is-of course-the pattern: the maiden's hair, the butterfly, the pools and eyes. And that made him wonder whether the best hope for flesh wasn't the coddling in clay but the welding heat, the love of separate pieces achieving union at the point of burning. In the pattern weld, he remembered, Asburn had interleaved hardening steel and soft iron, so that the brittle strength of one should be saved by the soft ductility of the other while still being capable of taking and holding an edge, taking and keeping memory. He remembered what Asburn had told him; that when they first came to this country these people (his people) were dangerously short of good material and so learned the knack of burning and hammering separate pieces of scrap into useful and enduring things; at least until they'd grown strong enough to go across the sea and strip what they needed from the dead bodies of their enemies. Maybe, he thought, the answer to the problem of flesh is the pattern-weld, where muscle and skin and bone are fluxed out and burnt away, but the memory remains in the pattern, the ripples of the pools and eyes, the ascending rungs of Polden's Ladder.
'You look thoughtful,' Asburn said. 'Problem?'
Poldarn shook his head. 'Just trying to remember something,' he said. 'Did you ever come across a man called Hart? He lives over the other side of the moor somewhere.'
Asburn frowned. 'I think so,' he replied. 'Do you mean Egil Colscegson's friend, the one who breeds lurchers? I seem to remember seeing him once, over at Colscegsford, years ago. Tall man, big hands, not much good with horses.'
'That sounds like him,' Poldarn said, 'though I didn't know he was friends with Egil.'
'It was Egil or Barn,' Asburn replied. 'Most likely Egil, because Barn was always a bit timid around dogs. Why do you ask?'
'Oh, no reason. It was him I traded that salt beef with. I was wondering if he had any more going spare. We could do with it.'
'That's true. But what have we got that we could trade?'
'I don't know. It was just a thought.' Poldarn pulled his piece of steel out of the fire. It was still only dull red, so he put it back and hauled on the bellows handle.
Asburn shrugged. 'Come to think of it,' he said, 'if you want to know about Hart, you ought to ask Elja. I think she went to stay with him once or twice, when she was a kid. Her and Egil both. Or Barn. One of the two.'
Poldarn matched his breathing to the gusts of the bellows. 'It might be worth following up,' he said. 'If he's an old friend of the family, maybe he'd let us have the salt beef now and wait till later, when we've got something to trade for it.'
'Good idea. You should go over there and see him, when you've got the time.'
Poldarn stared into the fire. 'Yes,' he said, 'I could do that.'
That evening, when they gathered for dinner, Raffen happened to mention that a big mob of crows had settled on some flat patches in the barley and were making a mess of it.
So Poldarn got up early the next morning and took a bucketful of stones out to the long meadow. But his luck wasn't in; the birds were there all right, but the hedge was too low and thin to give him enough cover; they saw him in plenty of time and flew wide rings round him, screaming and flinching out of range whenever he drew his arm back, until he gave up and went back to the house. According to Raffen, they came back an hour after he'd gone and stayed there the rest of the day.
During the two weeks that followed, Poldarn found himself beginning to believe that life could, after all, be a pleasant and rewarding affair, rather than the lamination of tedium and horror he'd come to expect. He got up with the sun and went straight to his day's work, knowing from the moment he opened his eyes exactly what he was going to do that day, and joyfully aware that by the time he closed them again, he'd have achieved something that would make the next day easier and more pleasant for himself and those around him. He enjoyed the heat of the forge and the weight of the hammer. He relished the challenge of imposing his will on iron and steel, the satisfaction of teaching it shapes that it would hold for a hundred years. He was delighted to find that, as he went about each new project, he remembered in precise detail how to do it. Some operations he knew he'd done before at some time, others he was able to figure out from basic principles
that turned out to be ingrained in his mind. Suddenly he could forge-weld better than Asburn, knowing as soon as he drew the spitting white steel out of the fire whether or not it would take. The four-pound hammer became frustratingly light and slow, so he made himself a six-pound straight-peen with a stem as long as his forearm from fingertips to elbow. He found that he didn't have to wrap a wet rag around a piece of heated bar before he could bear to hold it. His arms and the backs of his hands became pitted with scores of little burns from sparks and flying cinders, but instead of yelping and wincing when they landed on his bare skin, he ignored them and carried on working. Elja tanned the skin of a deer that Boarci had killed on the lower slopes of the mountain, and sewed it with its own sinew into an apron and a pair of long-cuffed gloves; he was delighted by the thought behind it, but rarely bothered to wear them.
On the rare occasions during the day when Poldarn wasn't working in the smithy, he either helped one of the others with some heavy job that needed two pairs of hands or walked over to the newly built pen to see to Eyvind's horses. They didn't need much looking after, but he felt an obligation to ensure that when they were called for they'd be in prime condition, groomed and combed, well fed but properly exercised; he felt he owed Eyvind that at least, for giving him this fine house and excellent farm. It was smaller than Ciartanstead but there was less waste-no hills too steep or too rocky for the plough, no bogs or outcrops. Several times, after the evening meal was over and the table (made by Raffen and Rook from chestnut planks sawn with the long two-handed saw he'd forged for them) had been put up against the wall, he wandered out of the house on the pretext of finishing up some job he'd been working on, and strolled round the home fields, taking note of new growth in the crops and the latest tactical manoeuvres of the enemy-the crows and pigeons and rabbits and rats. He couldn't think of anywhere he'd rather be, or anybody he'd rather be there with. Happiness, Poldarn decided, was a simple matter of being in the right place at the right time, with the right people, and the strange trail of circumstances that had brought him there, leading him step by step through the maze from the banks of the Bohec by way of burnt cities and battlefields and ambushes beside the road, murders and plots and betrayals, volcano and fire-stream and destruction of past and future, astounded him by its scope and complexity. Any wrong turning along the way, any apparent misfortune eluded, would have brought him to quite another place in entirely different company, and would have been a disaster. If he'd never left this country to begin with, he'd be a completely different person now-Ciartan of Haldersness, a dispossessed wanderer whose house lay buried under a huge fat worm of slowly cooling rock, conscious of nothing but his own unbearable loss. If he hadn't met with whatever the misadventure was that had stranded him in the mud beside the river, surrounded by dead men whose names he couldn't remember, he'd have lived out a totally different life on the wrong side of the sea, he'd never have ended up here in another man's house on another man's inheritance, which just happened to be the only place on earth where he could be who he was supposed to be. Time and again he tried to reconstruct the course of events in his mind, looking for the points in the story where things could have gone an entirely different way. Running into Copis and killing her partner, the god in the cart-but hadn't she turned out to be an agent of the sword-monks, trailing him before the incident beside the river, being on hand at that crucial moment to guide him along the right path? Stumbling on Tazencius when he'd fallen off his horse and hurt his leg-but hadn't he turned out to be part of some joint conspiracy, carrying him down the right path like the boulders dragged down the mountain by the fire-stream? Very well, then: being waylaid by Eyvind and his companion on the road to whatever that city was, the one ruled by clerks-that was pure chance, Eyvind having been cut off from the rest of his party and stranded in the middle of hostile territory. How easily he could have killed the wrong man that day, or even taken a different road or the same road at a different time or at a slightly slower or faster pace and missed him altogether. When he thought of how he'd got there, like a pilot navigating a ship blindfold through the shoals, he found it almost impossible to believe that it had all been mere chance, nothing but sheer good luck, like calling the spin of a coin correctly a hundred times in a row.
One day, just before noon, Poldarn was putting an edge on a bean-hook when Raffen burst into the forge, looking tired and extremely annoyed.
'Those bloody horses,' he said. 'Bust out of the pen and trampled right across the damned beans. Gould be any bloody place by now.'
Poldarn frowned and put the hook down. 'Damn,' he said. 'You've got no idea where they could have gone?'
'That's what I just said.'
'That's bad,' Asburn put in as he hauled on the bellows handle. 'What's going to happen when Eyvind's people turn up here to collect them? They're going to think we've got them hidden away somewhere and don't want to give them back.'
Poldarn thought for a moment. 'We can't have that,' he said. 'It's their fault, the idle bastards, for leaving them here so long. All right,' he said wearily, 'we'll need to get the search properly organised, we've got a hell of a lot of ground to cover with just the twelve of us.'
They spent the rest of the day tramping up and down the slopes of the mountain. It was hard to figure out how anything as conspicuous as ten horses could escape being seen in such open country, but they couldn't even find any tracks, let alone the horses themselves.
'Which ought to tell us something,' Poldarn pointed out, when they met up again that night at the house. 'If they aren't leaving tracks, it's got to be because they're on stony ground, somewhere up the mountain.'
'Except you can see for miles up there,' Boarci pointed out. 'You can take my word on that, I've spent the last couple of weeks stalking deer in the open without so much as a dandelion to take cover behind. If they were up there, I'd have seen them, you bet. I reckon they've got to be hiding out in one of the little dips on the other side of the fire-pit.'
Poldarn shook his head. 'But that's in completely the opposite direction to where they started from, coming from the pen across the bean field. To get down there they'd have had to double back, go right across the yard in plain sight of the lot of us.'
'Then that's what must have happened,' Boarci grumbled. 'Because it's the only place they could possibly be.'
'Fine.' Poldarn sighed. 'And did you bother to look down there?'
'Yes,' Boarci admitted. 'And no, of course I didn't find them. But I was on my own, they could've slipped past while I was in the dead ground, and I wouldn't have known a bloody thing about it. I've known deer do that before now.'
Poldarn slumped forward over the table, his face in his hands. 'Well,' he said, 'I suppose it's worth taking a proper look tomorrow, all of us strung out in a line so they can't slip by, if that's what they're doing. We've tried everywhere else, after all.'
'Bit late for that,' Boarci replied. 'If they kept on moving after sundown they could be any bloody place by now.'
'Sure,' Hand put in, 'but down there in the little combes they'd be bound to have left tracks, especially if there's been a heavy dew. We don't have to find them straight off, so long as we can pick up the trail.'
'That makes sense,' Poldarn said. 'All right, that's what we'll do, first thing in the morning. In the meantime, everybody just pray that Eyvind doesn't pick tomorrow to come collecting his property.'
Nobody slept well that night, and the household assembled some time before dawn, impatient to get on with the search so that the horses could be found and life could get back to normal. It was still dark when they set off-'A mistake,' Boarci told them. 'We could be walking right past their tracks and never see the buggers. What I wouldn't give right now for a pair of good dogs.'
That made Poldarn think of Hart and Egil, but it didn't seem the right time to raise that subject. 'We'll just have to take the risk,' he said. 'I'm not turning back now. If we pick up the trail and it leads right back the way we've just come, you can say I told you
so.'
The search wasn't exactly fruitless. They found a ring of big round yellow puffballs that Boarci swore blind were edible; and a solitary cock-pheasant jumped out of the grass at Raffen's feet, only to regret its bad timing when he brought it down with an instinctively aimed stone. They also stumbled across several unmistakable deer tracks, which Boarci took careful note of, and the ruin of a shepherd's hut, roofless and with a small oak tree growing inside it. No sign of any horses.
'Fine,' Poldarn said, as they dropped down to rest shortly after noon. 'So we can be fairly positive they aren't here. Where else could they be?'
No one replied. It was too hot for climbing up and down hills, and nobody had brought anything to drink. Poldarn could tell that they'd lost interest in the search some time ago and wanted to get home and carry on with the work they were supposed to be doing. He could sympathise with that; it did seem ridiculous to waste their valuable time combing the countryside for their enemy's property.
'I'll bet you they've headed straight back to Haldersness,' Rook yawned. 'Right now they're probably in the stable munching oats, and Eyvind is feeling pleased because he hasn't got to waste three days traipsing up here to fetch them.'
'Who cares?' Boarci muttered. 'If they're lost, let him go looking for them. We should ask him to send over some men and a cartload of lumber to fix up the pen; it was his damn horses that bust it up, after all.'
'All right,' Poldarn said. 'If nobody's got any suggestions, I say we should try a bit further down the ridge, where the rill comes out. In this weather, it's a fair bet they're thirsty. It's the closest water this side of the house.'
So they pressed on as far as the stream that came down off the side of the mountain and meandered over the flat before soaking away into a treacherous-looking marsh. No trace of any horses anywhere.
'Of course,' Hand said, 'it's possible they did come this way, wandered out into the boggy stuff and got sucked in. I saw a cow do that once, in the bog up behind the old house. One minute it was ambling along, next minute you'd never guess there'd been a cow there. Spookiest thing you ever did see.'
