Memory (10 page)

‘The wife'll get you your dinner,' the man said. ‘I got work to do.'

Ciartan looked up. For a moment he felt confused; he had been made aware that there was work to be done, but he didn't know what it was, and therefore couldn't figure out what part of it he should be doing. He expected the man to tell him, in default of normal methods of communication, but he just walked away.

Unimpressive, Ciartan decided. You'd have thought that, if these people really couldn't hear each others' minds and had to rely on spoken words to talk to each other, they'd have been rather better at it than either this man or his daughter appeared to be. Apparently not. Already, he was starting to feel vaguely panicky. He hadn't really given much thought to the implications of what he'd been told; that these people couldn't hear minds, didn't even know it was possible, and that their minds couldn't be heard by normal people. In fact, it was downright frightening. For one thing, how on earth were you supposed to know if they were telling the truth or not?

My mother was one of this lot, he remembered uneasily. The idea was disconcerting, as if he ought to be on his guard, in case half of his body turned out to be on their side.

He realised that he was uncomfortably cold, and that the fire in the hearth (one small fireplace, and stuck in the
wall
, not the middle of the room; now that was just plain perverse) had gone out. The urge to get up and light it was almost overpowering – you see that a fire's gone out, you light it, that's what people
do
; but since everything else was arse-backwards here, maybe he'd be better off leaving it alone. He had an idea he'd already made enough trouble for himself as it was.

He kept himself amused for a while by looking at the battery of strange metal gadgets in the fireplace, trying to figure out what they were for. The poker and tongs were easy enough, though they were ever such a funny shape; but the thing with the long iron spikes – clearly it revolved around its axis, but why? For a long time he couldn't think what it could be used for, except as a particularly unpleasant instrument of torture. Then inspiration struck; maybe they used it for cooking. You could stick a lump of meat on the spikes – it'd have to be a really big lump, you could practically get a whole sheep on there – and then somehow the thing with the chains and weights would turn the whole thing round, so that the meat would get warmed up evenly all over – yes, and that huge iron dish underneath was to catch the juices and the dripping as they drained off. Ingenious, in a cockamamy sort of a way.

A woman came in, carrying a small wooden plate. She was short, and looked as though all the features of her face had been worn away by rain and wind, or by over-vigorous polishing. On the plate were a few slices of hard grey bread, some indeterminate vegetable matter, and what Ciartan devoutly hoped was a sausage. The woman looked away as soon as she could, as if he was somehow obscene, and scuttled back the way she'd come.

The food was, of course, disgusting.

Nobody else came anywhere near him, though from time to time he could hear voices in the yard outside. There were young kids screaming; the man shouting at someone; a female, probably the daughter rather than the wife, singing as she went about some chore or other. He saw the red light of sunset through the doorway, and then it was suddenly dark. It was also getting even colder, all the time. He hoped, and prayed earnestly to the non-existent gods, that this house was just a crummy little peasant shack and not anything bigger or better. If this place was the sort of house the local gentry lived in, then screw spying and screw being in disgrace, he was going home.

Only he couldn't, of course.

No way home, unless he fancied swimming. No ships; and even if there were any, none of them would be going where he wanted to go, for the simple reason that nobody on this side of the water suspected that his homeland even existed. Stranded, he told himself. Marooned. Stuck.

Or, looked at from a different perspective, a brand new start, a new life in a new country; rebirth. Here, he didn't have to be Ciartan from Haldersness any more, with all the trouble and unpleasantness that that implied; he could be any damned thing he liked. The question was whether there was anything in this miserable place worth being.

But there. Here I go, he thought, judging an egg by its shell. Bloody stupid proverb. He'd almost made up his mind to light the fire and the hell with the lot of them, when the man came back, carrying a very small pottery lamp.

‘I'll show you where you're sleeping,' he said.

‘Thank you,' Ciartan heard himself reply, and he wondered if he'd have his very own pile of damp straw or whether he'd be mucking in with the pigs. Instead, he found himself following the man up a flight of narrow stairs into what was presumably the roof space: big beams and joists, and a triangular ceiling. But the room was huge; ten feet square, at least, and in the middle was a large wooden thing, with something that looked like a flat square bag on top, and another smaller bag up against the wall. ‘What's that?' he couldn't help asking.

‘What?'

‘That thing there.'

‘It's a bed,' the man told him, and Ciartan, whose best guess so far had been some kind of cider press, was too astonished to say anything. A bed. Well, bugger me. I wonder how it works.

The man put the lamp down on a stool and went away again, and Ciartan walked over and examined the large wooden contraption. Hell of a lot of trouble to go to just for sleeping, he thought; hell, even Grandad dosses down on a pile of old fleeces, and his room's half the size of this. Do they all use these extraordinary sleeping machines, or is this just for princes of the whole blood and other honoured guests?

He tried hard to pluck up the courage to get up on it, but couldn't quite manage it. For one thing, it had to be the best part of three feet off the floor; what was there to stop you rolling off it in your sleep and crashing to the ground? You could break your arm. Instead, he nervously tugged off a blanket, wrapped himself in it (no fire in the fireplace) and shivered himself to sleep. Perhaps it was the strangeness of his surroundings, or maybe it was just the horrible, indigestible food, but he found himself dreaming, and even by his standards, it was a very strange dream. There were crows in it, of course, and—

Poldarn woke up.

The familiar feeling, of the dream slithering away; but then he reached out and caught it, and it stayed trapped in his mind, like a lobster in a basket.

Memory, he thought. And the man in the dream was called Ciartan. That was me.

(A fire burning backwards; unconsuming what had once been destroyed and gone for ever. Crows that brought carrion, instead of taking it away.)

Time to get up. Get out of bed. Wash. Eat something. Go to work. He yawned.

Outside, in the hazy sunlight, something had begun without him. As he stood in the doorway of his cabin and watched the foundrymen hurrying backwards and forwards across the yard, he couldn't help being reminded of Haldersness, where everybody knew what they had to do without being told. There was a difference, but he couldn't quite figure out what it was.

‘There you are,' said a voice on the edge of his vision. ‘Been looking for you.'

Bergis, the head mud wrangler. Too late now to dart back inside; so he smiled feebly and asked how he could help.

‘We're starting on the ward-tower bell for Falcata guild lodge,' Bergis replied. ‘When you've pulled yourself together, I'll see you down at the cutting.'

Poldarn managed not to groan until Bergis was out of earshot. Marvellous. The cutting was what the foundrymen called the thick seam of grey muddy clay, which was the main reason why the foundry had been built here in the first place. Mixed with straw and lots and lots of cowshit, the cutting clay was perfect for building moulds and lining furnaces, being capable of soaking up vast amounts of heat and retaining it without cracking. It was also very sticky and slimy, and it didn't smell very nice, either. Bergis's job was to pounce on anybody who didn't see him coming and march him off to the cutting to dig and pack the revolting stuff. A job this size would probably call for at least five tons.

Oh well, Poldarn thought, never mind. He picked up a long-handled shovel from the tool store, and drifted slowly across the yard and down the slope through the scraggy wasteland the foundrymen referred to, rather bizarrely, as the orchard.

They'd already filled one cart by the time he got there. As usual, they'd piled so much into the cart that it was far too heavy to move, even with a team of mules pulling and the digging crew pushing; the more they heaved and struggled, the more bogged down the cart became, its wheels digging wide, soft ruts in the grey sludge. Eventually, someone would break down and fetch a few barrowloads of straw to pack under the wheels; until then, they'd wear themselves out and get spattered in mud up to their eyebrows trying to shift it by brute force. Hell of a way to run a commercial enterprise, but it wasn't Poldarn's place to make suggestions; particularly blindingly obvious ones.

It was too early in the morning for mud-wrestling and pulled muscles, so Poldarn gave the cart a wide berth and headed for the digging pit. The drill was to fill the wicker baskets with mud; when they were full and each one weighed slightly more than a farrier's small anvil, they had to be manhandled up off the ground and onto the bed of the cart. Grabbing the nearest empty basket, Poldarn walked up to the glistening grey face of the pit and started carving his way into it, like a cook slicing a hefty joint of meat. There was, of course, a knack to it, a matter of angles, leverage, mechanical advantage, which Poldarn mostly understood but couldn't quite get right.

Well now, he thought, as he stamped the shovel into the clay with his heel. The man – Gain Aciava, though that remains to be proved conclusively – was right about the dreams; so, either he's a shrewd guesser who knows how dreams work, or he was telling the truth. As for the dream itself: entirely plausible, but it didn't really show me anything I hadn't already conjectured for myself, so it could just've been me reconstructing my first hours on this continent, like a scholar speculating about things that happened a thousand years ago. Nothing decided either way; but do I
believe
? It's like asking me, do I believe in gods?

Do I believe?

Yes, Poldarn discovered, apparently I do. I think that's how it was when I first came here: the plain girl and her annoying father, and everything seeming strange, and the revolting food. Question is: am I remembering what happened, or has somebody told me the truth about something I've forgotten, like the scholar suddenly discovering an ancient manuscript? Does it matter?

He considered the point; yes, it probably mattered a hell of a lot, because if he believed the dream, he probably couldn't avoid believing Aciava as well. Now that could be awkward.

(But here I am anyway, in a filthy mess, digging clay out of a stinking hole in the ground in return for a few ladles of grey soup and the privilege of sleeping in a turf hut. The question can therefore only be: is it worth risking all this for the sake of finding out who I used to be? And the answer can only be: no, it isn't.)

The blade of Poldarn's shovel hit a stone, and the shock jarred his wrists and elbows. He winced; for some time he'd had an idea that he'd done something to damage the joints or tendons of his arms. Maybe it was the forge work, or perhaps it was an old injury, the result of drawing a sword and slashing empty air a thousand times a day for years on end. Pretty metaphor – no idea where the damage came from or how far back it went, dimly aware that it could have a harmful effect on his future, too stupid to care. His elbow was aching, as if he'd just banged his funny bone. Not a good sign, but here he was anyway; and the mud wasn't going to prise itself out of the bank and climb into the basket.

Only an idiot ignores the past and takes risks with his future; but Nature relies on idiots, or nothing would ever work properly. If it wasn't for the stupidity of all rabbits, hawks and foxes would starve to death; if cows and chickens stopped for a moment to consider that maybe something was wrong, there'd be no milk and eggs on the table. If the god in the cart happened to look over his shoulder and notice the trail of ruined cities and burning farms stretched out behind him, the prophecies would never be fulfilled and the world could never end. And then where would we all be?

But here he was anyway, digging clay when maybe he should be a Father Tutor, with purple slippers and a personal chaplain to open his letters for him. He thought about that; a sword-monk with a trick elbow was about as much use as a blind helmsman, and just as liable to die young. By the same token, there's not much call for a smith who can't swing a hammer, or a foundryman who can't dig. Once the injury's there, and that joint or tendon has acquired its small, crippling piece of history, the damage is done; and the glorious irony is that it's the craftsman's history of practising his craft that makes him unable to practise it further in the future – you can lose the memory, but still the pattern bleeds through the bandage.
I am what I was, I will be what I am, the mechanism of history is a circular movement with a repeating escapement, like a trip-hammer.
Poldarn clenched his left hand. His elbow still ached, and the tips of his fingers had gone numb. (And if my arm is my life, the damaged tendon connects the pain and the loss of memory.) ‘Bugger,' he said, and leaned the shovel against the side of the pit. What he needed, even more than the exquisite symmetry of it all, was some nice hot water to soak his arm in. Well, at least he was in a foundry, where hot water was never a problem.

‘Here,' Bergis shouted as he hauled himself out of the cutting. ‘Where do you think you're sloping off to?'

‘Furnace,' Poldarn replied. ‘Done my wrist in.'