K Parker - Memory

Still no reply; but he heard a door creak open, then shut. 'What're you making that racket for?'

He recognised the voice but couldn't put a name to it (a stack of voices on one side of the room, names on the other). Some foundryman.

'Sorry,' he said. 'Is he asleep?'

'Is who asleep?'

'Gain. The other bloke, in the other bed there.'

The stranger laughed. 'He's gone, mate. No, not dead,' he added. 'He's been moved out-orders. Cart rolled up an hour or so ago. Soldiers. They took him off somewhere.'

According to Galand Dev, it was foolproof. Nothing could possibly go wrong-which was just as well, considering how far behind schedule they were, and how ghastly and terrible the news was from outside. He wouldn't explain the last part of that, but the name Feron Amathy featured prominently in all the rumours; the Amathy house was on the move, had openly declared war on the government, had crossed the bay with an enormous army, had stormed Torcea with horrendous loss of life, was besieging the Emperor in the palace, depending on who you listened to and how long you managed to keep your attention from wandering.

Galand Dev, with Spenno's highly qualified approval, had designed a new furnace. There was a deep pit, in which the mould, properly baked and cured, stood on its end. The pit was lined with two courses of brick, so that the heat from the filled moulds wouldn't dry out the earth and cause a cave-in; the props were thick iron posts, not timber. Over the pit they'd built a tall crane, to lower the moulds and hold them while they were being aligned. Once the moulds were in place, the pit was filled up with handspan-thick layers of slightly damp earth, tamped down with bronze weights (gently heated so the earth wouldn't stick to them) until it was compressed to the point where it was hard work to stick a knife blade into it further than an inch. Each layer was topped off with an inch-depth of potsherds. All this had to be done quickly, so that the damp from the earth wouldn't seep into the bone-dry moulds and spoil them, so everybody took a hand-even Brigadier Muno and his immaculately dressed staff, who made a point of kneeling on sacks to save the knees of their trousers from irreversible ruin.

The furnace itself was a tall brick tower with a ground-level square opening on one side. The firebox, packed with alternating layers of charcoal and cordwood (elm, birch, and beechwood only), was under the furnace floor. Ten double-action bellows, each made from four full hides, blasted up through, forcing the flame through the firehole into the furnace chamber (circular, nine feet across, flat-bottomed), where it played on the carefully proportioned mixture of scrap and virgin bronze-nine parts copper, one part tin-from all sides, to ensure an even, pure melt. To prepare the furnace for the first melt it had been charged and fired and left to burn gently for three days, to dry out the fireclay without risk of cracking. Galand Dev reckoned it would handle ten tons of bronze easily, twelve at a pinch. When the melt was perfect-after three fluxings and skimmings to draw off the slag; when a pine log thrown onto the surface floated, with no bubbles coming up through the glowing yellow pool, until it burned away to cinders, which spat up from the meniscus with no bronze clinging to them (essential, according to Spenno and his book), and when a greenish-white cloud rose off the melt and hung a few inches above the surface-a weir in the furnace wall could be drawn open and the molten bronze allowed to flow down the shallow incline of a brick-and-clay race (carefully heated by a long bed of glowing coals raked out from the furnace) that fed the in-gate of the mould. In theory, according to Galand Dev. Assuming it didn't rain once the furnace was running, in which case the whole thing would probably blow up.

The entire workforce had been toiling day and night to get it built. Now it was finished, dressed, dried, cured, fettled, and for some reason nobody was in any hurry to try it out. Spenno was sitting on a barrel next to the mould pit, staring up at the lead-grey clouds, as if willing it to start raining. Galand Dev was rumoured to be confined to the latrines by a severe case of terror, with Brigadier Muno standing over him demanding to know if he was done yet. Messengers from Falcata and Torcea were arriving practically on the hour with furious demands for progress reports. Fifty tons of new charcoal had come in from the colliers' camp (but there was nowhere to put it, so they'd shovelled it off their carts into a huge pile in the middle of the yard and left it there). Scouts sent out at dawn rode in at noon to say it was raining at Ang Chirra but sunny and warm at Tin, and the wind was either northerly, southerly, easterly or westerly, depending on who you chose to believe.

'Pity you aren't fit to be up and about yet,' Chiruwa was saying. 'You'll miss the fun.'

Poldarn looked at him. 'What, you mean when it starts pissing it down once the furnace is at full heat, and the whole lot goes up? I think I'd rather be in here, thanks.'

Chiruwa shrugged. 'They're talking about roofing it over,' he said, 'only they're worried that with all that heat going up, the roof'd catch fire and come down on the pit. Makes you wonder, actually, whose bright idea it was to do all this in the wettest place in the empire, in the rainy season.'

'There'll have been a good reason,' Poldarn replied. 'You've got to have faith, that's all.' And the matter is closed, he thought, and I have no opinion on it.

'Maybe,' Chiruwa said. 'Here, did you ever find out what became of that bloke, the one you pulled out of the cave-in? He was in here with you, and then he left.'

'I was hoping you could tell me,' Poldarn replied.

Chiruwa shook his head. 'Friend of yours, was he?'

'I knew him years ago,' Poldarn said, wondering if he was telling the truth. 'I wouldn't call him a friend, though. Just someone I knew.'

'You risked your neck getting him out of there, though,' Chiruwa said. 'Bloody impressive, that was. I wouldn't have done it. Got more sense.'

'I never said I was intelligent,' Poldarn replied. 'Any idea when I'm likely to be getting out of here? They were supposed to be fetching a doctor from Falcata, but nobody's said anything.'

'Roads are still bad,' Chiruwa told him, 'though all these messengers from the army and the bosses over to Torcea don't seem to be having much trouble getting through. You're looking better, I must say. You were a right bloody mess when they fished you out of there. Mind, if I were you I wouldn't count on winning any beauty contests from now on, and pulling birds is going to be a problem, unless they're blind.'

'I was wondering about that,' Poldarn said mildly. 'They said my face got a bit scorched-'

'Trying not to worry you, I expect,' Chiruwa said. 'Next time I come visiting, I'll fetch along a mirror or something. I mean, a bloke's got a right to know.'

On that cheerful note, he left and went back to work; they were going to dress out the mould one more time, just to be on the safe side. Poldarn lay still for a while, then reached out and felt for his book, Concerning Various Matters. There wasn't really enough light in the shed, so he could only read for a short while before his head began to hurt; even so, he was three-quarters of the way through. It was very hard going, most of it about things that didn't interest him in the least.

He found his place. He'd just finished reaping machine, to build; a bizarre contraption involving long, sharp blades attached to the spokes of an enormous wheel, driven through a gear-train by four oxen on a treadmill. He hoped very much that nobody had ever tried to build one; it sounded rather more dangerous than a squadron of attacking cavalry.

Recurrence, eternal. He frowned. Even harder going than the designs for labour-saving devices were the philosophical and religious bits, and he considered skipping ahead to red spot, on cabbages, to eradicate. But he had nothing better to do, and there was a reasonable chance that recurrence, eternal might send him off to sleep.