K Parker - Memory

Fuck, he said to himself, just when I thought I was being so cool and smart; but there it is, it's happened and I can't ignore it, any more than I could ignore nine inches of steel poked in my ear. I really am in love with her; not just a fancy or the intellectual interest of long-term flirtation, not just the fascinating challenge of the vain quest to get into her pants. That flash of the eyes, too quick for me; past my guard like it wasn't there, sidestepping my wards, a moment of true religion. And he thought, so it does exist after all, that moment (he'd never stumbled across it in the draw, though he was faster than any of those who reckoned they'd found it there), that less-than-a-heartbeat that changes everything, because suddenly between you and the other there's a third presence, that of the divine. He'd never been there before, but he'd seen the place from a distance; years ago, in a muddy ditch beside a stream, where he'd crouched waiting for the crows to pitch and then found himself ducking down again, with the memory of a stone in his hand and a death in mid-air. On that occasion he'd fancied he'd talked with a stranger for a minute or so, an older man who reminded him of himself, but with someone else forge-welded into him, layer and fold and layer, fire and hammer; and he'd wondered, in his immature faith, whether he'd possibly had a vision of the great god of his people, the divine Poldarn, who lived under the hot springs on the high slopes of the mountain.

And this was the divine, the moment of religion, which he'd found in Xipho's tense little smile. He compared the two, and found the similarities were too many and too great to be mere coincidence; in which case, he decided, he must have seen the god of the forge there that day, when he slaughtered the crows over the spring peas. Somehow, that was a comforting thought (because he'd always worried about it, at the back of his mind; if it hadn't been the god, was there something wrong with him, because normal adolescents don't chat with imaginary friends?); in a way, oddly enough, it felt like coming home.

He reproached himself for thinking that way. Being in love with Xipho wasn't something to be pleased or happy about. Rather, it was as good a definition of being in deep, deep trouble as any conscientious lexicographer could ever hope to find. Being in love with the only girl in a class of nineteen monks-He wondered if there was still time to drop by the Infirmary and have his head pumped out, but probably not. Too late. He was stuck with it.

Pity about that: it complicated things horribly. For one thing (he realised, as he put Zephanes back on his proper shelf, and headed for the door) there was the small matter of end-of-grade tests. Deymeson didn't encourage friendships among the students; love was out of the question, when you had no way of knowing who you'd be facing down the narrow steel road, which led half of the class to the next grade and the other half to the closely planted plot of ground outside the back gates. Of course, love wouldn't get in Xipho's way, even if she was capable of it, which everybody was inclined to doubt: she'd cut her lover down for religion's sake as cheerfully as slicing through the neck of a rose. But if he, on the other hand, ended up facing her at year's end, he'd be dead. Consideration; was Deymeson the only place on earth where the lover's traditional promise to love until death was a practical proposition? Discuss, with examples.

Yes, but it wouldn't come to that; and she could kill whoever she liked out of the others and bloody good luck to her. But what if she didn't make it to fifth grade; suppose someone else got put up instead of her, and-? That wasn't going to happen either, he reassured himself. In sparring, the only ones who'd ever outdrawn her were himself and the absurd Earwig, who'd had a crush on her long before his voice broke. Pointless worrying about that.

Pointless, all of it; pointless as a man with no hands buying nail scissors. Nothing good could come of being in love with Xipho Dorunoxy; even a sublimely gifted chancer like himself didn't have a hope. It was just bad luck: infuriating, meanly capricious on the part of Destiny, who could so easily have paired him off with somebody else-Turvo's kid sister, for example, hotter than a stove-pipe and rich as egg soup into the bargain. (What an amazing career move that'd be, though, a real coup for an ambitious young man of the cloth. They reckoned that Tazencius was a man to watch, that his son-in-law was practically guaranteed a top-drawer chaplaincy, and after that, the gods only knew. And if anything-heaven forbid-ever happened to good solid old Turvo, such as coming second out of two at year's end-)

He strolled across the yard, nothing to hurry for, his mind bent on long, improbable thoughts; accordingly, he was almost back at the entrance to Morevich House when a voice called out to him.

He looked round.

Now, for some reason, he had no idea what it could be, Turvo (Depater Turvonianus, only son and heir of Depater Tazencius, prince and hereditary marshal of all sorts of obscure places) had taken a liking to Ciartan the outlander, farm boy and general outcast. The liking wasn't reciprocated. On the rare occasions when Turvo wasn't painfully boring, it was because he was being objectionable enough to court serious injury. But the fact remained: Turvo was always pleased to see Ciartan whenever Ciartan hadn't seen him first.

'There you are,' the idiot was saying. 'Come over here a minute. I'd like you to meet my sisters.'

Not now, Turvo, you arsehole; not now. If you make me do this, then so help me but I'll find some way to rig the ballot for who fights who at year's end. 'Actually-' he started to say; but what excuse could he possibly make for ducking out of what the whole Upper School had been desperately trying to achieve all day? I've got an essay to finish, I have to go and polish my boots. Whatever he said, it'd be perceived as a mortal insult, not just to the moron Turvo but to his great and influential family.

Praying to the god (if any) who lived under the hot springs of Poldarn's Forge that Xipho wouldn't choose this particular moment to stick her head out of a window and see him, he crossed the yard He was woken up by a scream.

Not often you hear a man screaming, Poldarn thought, as he opened his eyes. Extreme pain will do it sometimes, but usually only when there's extreme terror as well. He stuffed his feet into his boots and stumbled out through the door.

It was as dark as fifty feet down a well outside, but he could see fast-moving lights, which he assumed were lamps and torches in the hands of running men. There hadn't been a second scream; bad for somebody. The lights were all headed in the same direction. He consulted his mental plan of the foundry: the casting yard. Hellfire, he thought (and he was surprised at his own reaction). The thoughtless bastards have started the pour without me, and some careless bugger's got himself burned.

Not that he cared an offcomer's damn about the Poldarn's Flute project; it was all a load of nonsense and nothing was going to come of it, that was an article of faith among the entire foundry crew. But not to be there when they did the first pour-he remembered the scream, which meant somebody badly hurt, probably dead, and felt ashamed of himself.

'Who the hell's making that bloody awful noise?' someone shouted. Nobody answered. People were gathering from all over the site, some running, some walking at the weary, reluctant pace of men going to a funeral. They were lighting the big lanterns in the casting yard, the ones that gave enough light to work by. One or two of the hands were running up with ropes, ladders, poles, then suddenly stopping, not doing anything-implying that there was nothing they could do.

The scene reminded Poldarn of something. It didn't take much imagination to figure out what had happened. On Galand Dev's orders, and flying in the face of the very clear instructions set out in Concerning Various Matters, the cupola furnace had been built on top of a mound of earth and clay, to provide the necessary height above the mould to allow the molten bronze to flow easily. What they should have done was dig a deep pit for the moulds, and run the melt down a channel from a furnace built at ground level; but Galand Dev had reckoned to save two or three days by having the mould on the surface and elevating the furnace, with the fire chamber directly underneath it. But the heat of the fire had dried out the mound, shrinking the platform on which the furnace rested. Result: the crucible, holding three hundredweight of very hot molten metal, had leant sideways, to the point where it had tipped over, pouring the melt down on the poor fools who'd been scraping the dried clay of the model off the inner wall of the mould. It must've happened quite suddenly, but it appeared as though there'd been a second or so for the men to get clear, because nearly all of them had made it. All, in fact, save one.