Pattern (29 page)

‘Can't argue with that,' Colsceg said at last, a trifle resentfully. ‘Guess we'll be taking you up on your offer. We're obliged to you.' He said the word
obliged
as if he'd just given his first-born as extra security on a mortgage of his entire property. ‘We'll get started on tearing the old place down straight away.'

Poldarn shook his head. ‘No hurry,' he said. ‘You've all put in so much hard work here, you need a day or so to catch your breath before you start on that. Why don't you just hang around and take it easy for a while? You'll do much better work if you aren't exhausted.'

‘All right,' Colsceg said reluctantly. ‘And I guess there's the wedding to see to, that'll take a couple of days if we're going to do it properly. And if we don't get it done and out of the way now, while we're slack, it'll be awkward fitting it in later.'

He made it sound like a more than usually dreary chore, like forking out the poultry sheds. Charming, Poldarn thought, but then, I've never seen a wedding in these parts. Maybe it is a dreary chore, the way they do it. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised. ‘What a splendid idea,' he said. ‘And, like you say, no time like the present. How would the day after tomorrow suit you?'

Colsceg rubbed the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. ‘Sure, why not?' he said stoically. ‘After all, everything's pretty well screwed up with the volcano and all, so the best thing would be to get it done as soon as possible – no point letting it drag on.'

Poldarn nodded. ‘Assuming that's all right with Elja,' he put in.

‘Huh? Oh, she won't mind. I mean, it's not like we're springing it on her out of the blue. Anyway,' he added, with a slight frown, ‘she seems to like you all right, and a couple of days, you can get most of the furniture and stuff in. That'll be just fine.'

The two households were gathering up their tools, searching for lost froes and wedges, sorting the leftover timber into useful oddments and firewood. There was a general air of grim weariness, like the feel of a week-old battlefield when the scavengers are out gleaning the last pickings of useful property from the dead; all the good stuff having been taken already, and only torn clothes, worn-out boots and broken metalwork remaining. ‘We could announce it straight away,' Poldarn pointed out. ‘After all, everybody's here.'

Colsceg sighed. ‘Good idea,' he said. ‘Save having to call a meeting later on.'

Luckily, Poldarn hadn't been expecting wholesale rejoicing and mirth, so he wasn't disappointed; but even so, he wasn't too pleased by the dogged resignation that greeted the announcement. The best that could be said of it was that both households took it like men, with fortitude and without any undue display of protest or disgust. One damn thing after another, their attitude suggested, but it can't be helped, so what's the good of whining about it? Poldarn made a mental note that they were miserable bastards, every last one of them, and carried the slabbing rail back to Haldersness. It felt much heavier than it had done a week ago.

Chapter Thirteen

F
or once, the mind-reading thing turned out to be a blessing. If Poldarn'd had to break the news of the wedding to the combined Haldersness and Colscegsford households – calling a meeting, standing up in front of them, with their blank, bewildered faces glaring at him in the firelight – he wasn't sure he'd have been able to find the courage to do it. But they all knew without having to be told, and by the time the housebuilders arrived back at the middle house, Rannwey and the other women had already made a start on various nameless and inscrutable preparations, most of which seemed to involve tired, dank-looking vegetation in huge wicker baskets. Whether these would turn out to be things to eat or things to wear or things to hang on walls, Poldarn couldn't ascertain and didn't really want to know. Mostly, he got the feeling that it wasn't really anything to do with him, and his role in the forthcoming event would be both minimal and a considerable nuisance to everybody else.

He wanted to talk to Elja, if only to make sure that she didn't mind, but when he asked where she was, he was told by word, gesture and facial expression that even being in the same building as her before the wedding would constitute an unmitigated abomination; she'd been moved to the trap-house, and wouldn't be coming out until the actual day of the wedding, if then. Meanwhile, it was suggested to him, if he was at a loose end with nothing to do, wouldn't it be a good idea if he looked in at the forge and did some work, for a change.

The last thing Poldarn wanted to do was stand in front of a raging fire in a dark shed mangling a strip of hot iron; but, since there wasn't really anywhere else for him to be, he went. Asburn seemed genuinely pleased to see him.

‘I hope you don't mind,' Asburn said, wiping a pink furrow across his soot-blackened forehead with the back of his hand, ‘but I'm just finishing up these latches for the new house. They should've been done by now, but if I can get really stuck into them they'll be ready for when you move in.'

Poldarn frowned. ‘Why should I mind?' he asked, but Asburn didn't answer.

There still didn't seem to be anything for him to do; making latch components was clearly a job for one skilled man. He could always make a few nails, of course, but even now that the house was finished there was still a full barrel of nails in the corner, probably enough to last a decade, so there didn't seem to be any point. Then he remembered the promise he'd made to Boarci, to make him an axe to replace the one he'd lost.

‘Asburn,' he said, ‘how do you make axe heads?'

‘Piece of cake,' Asburn replied promptly. ‘All you do is, you get a bit of square bar about a thumb-length broad and about a foot long, you leave a square in the middle alone, because that's going to be the poll, for hammering wedges and stuff, but you draw down both ends to about the thickness of a tooth; then you fold these down at right angles round a mandrel – that makes the eye for the handle to go through – wedge a piece of hard steel between them, forge-weld all three layers together, and then you just work it to shape, take a good orange heat and quench in water. And that's all there is to it.'

‘Ah,' Poldarn said. He'd followed that as far as the square in the middle, but the rest had soared over his head like a flock of startled teal. ‘Thanks,' he said. ‘I'll give it a try.'

Asburn went back to his work; he was measuring something with a pair of calipers, over and over again from a bewildering variety of angles. To Poldarn it looked like a little piece of bar, flat and straight and entirely uncomplicated, but obviously there was more to latchsmithing than met the eye. Piece of cake, he muttered sourly under his breath, as he rootled around in the scrap for inspiration.

What he'd been hoping to find, of course, was an axe head – a genuine one, made by a real smith, which he could grind and buff and pass off as his own work. There were halberds and glaives and bardisches and bills, both broken and intact, enough to fit out a regiment, but nothing as mundane and useful as a small hand-axe. But he did find half a heavy-duty cart tyre and the stub end of a broken rasp; and as he looked at them, it occurred to him (why, he had no idea) that he knew what to do.

First, he took a yellow heat and cut off a foot of the tyre with the hot sett, taking care not to let the glowing steel land on his foot or go flying across the forge when he severed it. While the cut-off section was still orange, he popped it back into the fire with the help of the offset-jaw tongs – undoubtedly not the right tongs for the job, but the only ones he'd figured out how to manage without trapping a blood-blister on the ball of his middle finger – got it as hot as he dared without burning it, and folded it into a U with a few smart taps over the anvil table. Back it went into the fire, while Poldarn rummaged in the heap of rusty tools under the bench until he found a tapered steel pin as thick as the axe handle needed to be. On this he hung the yellow-hot steel U, quickly clamped it in the vice, and tapped all round the pin with a light, well-crowned hammer to knock down the metal where the bend had flared it. That formed a nice, even, round eye, with two equal-length legs coming down on either side. Before the iron cooled, he hammered these together until they touched, then gripped the eye in the vice with the legs pointing upwards, and used the hot sett to open them up just enough to allow him to slide in the finger-length of broken rasp that would form the hard cutting edge. But he didn't do that yet; first he brought it up almost to a white heat, so the iron legs wouldn't burn before the heat soaked through into the middle. He was really proud of himself for thinking of that.

A few taps closed the legs around the insert; then a generous sprinkle of flux and back in the fire and some hard labour on the bellows handle, until the fire was so hot it frizzed his eyebrows. It took a frustratingly long time to get the work to a uniform welding heat, but Poldarn knew better than to be continually hauling it out and fiddling with it; he was listening for the sound of the iron starting to melt, even though he hadn't got a clue what that sound was supposed to be like. But, he figured, that was where his ignorance would come in useful; as soon as he heard a sound he couldn't identify, that'd be it.

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?'