K Parker - Pattern

'Would you like me to do the bellows?' Poldarn asked.

'If you wouldn't mind.' Asburn made it sound like Poldarn had offered to take his place on the gallows. That sort of thing got annoying after a while. 'That's it,' he went on, as Poldarn's overstretched shoulder muscles registered the effort of pumping the bellows with little fissures of pain. After a long and uncomfortable interval, Asburn fished out the billet, which was now an even sunset orange all the way through, and sprinkled it with his magic dust, which sparkled as it burned on the hot surface. 'Now,' he said as he poked it back into the fire, 'we've got to listen out for when it gets hot enough.'

Poldarn frowned. 'Listen?'

Asburn nodded. 'It's a sort of hissy, scratchy sound, when the metal's just beginning to melt on the outside. You'll know it when you hear it.'

All Poldarn could hear was the creak of the bellows leather, the squeal of a dry bearing and the huffing of the blast as it aroused the fire. No hissy scratching, unless he'd gone deaf. But Asburn must've heard it, because he suddenly darted forward with the tongs and nipped the billet out of the fire, like a buzzard swooping on a rabbit. The metal was white-hot, very slightly glazed and translucent on the surface, and a few white sparkles were dancing in the air around it.

'All right,' Asburn said breathlessly, 'this is the-' He smacked the billet with his hammer; not particularly hard, but a cascade of incandescent sparks exploded from the point of impact, showering his arms and shoulders. Poldarn could hear them patter to the ground as they cooled and fell.

'-Good bit,' Asburn concluded, as he tapped and pecked at the billet, working so fast that Poldarn couldn't really follow his movements. Instead of ringing on the metal, the hammer made a sort of flat, squidging noise. When the billet had cooled to a bright yellow, Asburn stopped hammering and picked it up in the tongs. 'There,' he said, sounding thoroughly surprised, 'it's taken, see?' Poldarn leaned over close, until the heat radiating off the metal started to burn his face, and tried to see what all the fuss was about. Asburn was right: the weld had taken-he could see that by the way the heat was soaked evenly into the sides and edges.

'You could've warned me about the sparks,' he said. 'I nearly jumped out of my skin.'

'Sorry,' Asburn said, immediately looking the very image of horrified remorse. 'Are you all right? It didn't burn you, did it?'

'No, not at all,' Poldarn said, wishing he'd kept his mouth shut. 'I'm fine, really. Does it always do that?'

Asburn nodded. 'If it doesn't, you haven't got it hot enough,' he explained.

'I see. And then, if it hasn't taken, you've got to go back and do it again.'

'Well, you can try, certainly,' Asburn said. 'But usually, if you don't get it right first time, chances are it'll have got all full of clinker and rubbish and you'll never get it to go. Right,' he went on, 'back it goes in the fire, we take a normal working heat and draw it down till it's about twice the length it is now. Then we fold it and weld again.'

In spite of himself, not to mention the hard work of pumping the bellows and swinging the sledgehammer, Poldarn found he was almost enjoying this; particularly the rain of sparks, like a blizzard of burning snow, each time Asburn welded the folded billet. Quite why, he wasn't sure, since it was uncomfortably close to the view from the courtyard, and he'd come in here in the first place to get away from that.

'How many more times have we got to do this?' he asked, as Asburn put the billet back in the fire after the fourth weld.

'Depends,' Asburn replied. 'Mostly, on what you're figuring to make out of it. This time it's just a skinning knife for Raffen, so that'd probably do as it is. On the other hand, a couple more times won't hurt, and we'll get a better pattern. Not that I'm planning on anything fancy,' he added defensively, 'but if a job's worth doing, and all that.'

'Sure,' Poldarn said. 'I was just wondering, that's all. When you've done that, what next?'

Asburn shrugged. 'Just forge it like an ordinary lump of steel,' he said. 'You can do it if you like, Raffen doesn't want anything fussy or complicated.'

Then he's out of luck isn't he? Poldarn thought. 'All right,' he heard himself say, though why he wanted to volunteer for a job he didn't have to do he couldn't quite understand. After all, it'd be a crying shame for Asburn to do all this hard work and then have the result screwed up in the final, easy stage by an incompetent buffoon.

In the event, though, Poldarn made a reasonable job of it-the blade straight, the back very, very nearly level, no dirty lumps of clinker or scale carelessly hammered in, no ugly pits or stretch marks, and it didn't warp when he tempered it, either. True, compared with the knives he'd seen Asburn make it was ugly, graceless and pedestrian, but if the worst came to the worst and Raffen didn't have anything else handy to do the job with, it'd probably cut something up without snapping in two or wiping its edge off on a hazel twig. After Poldarn had filed it and burnt on a piece of stag-horn for a handle, he let it lie on the bench and looked at it. I made that, he thought; well you can tell, can't you? Nevertheless.

While he'd been making the knife, Asburn had been up the other end of the building, fussing round a partly made lampstand with chalk and a piece of string. Asburn was capable of spending a whole day just measuring one piece, prodding and fiddling and fidgeting to get an exact fit on something that nobody but him would ever notice or care about. Poldarn had actually asked him once why he bothered; Asburn had replied that maybe right now nobody would be any the wiser if he sent out work that wasn't just right; but in a hundred years' time, or two hundred, a smith would come along and know in an instant what he'd done and where he'd gone wrong, and until then he wouldn't be able to lie still in his grave for fretting about it.

Poldarn reckoned that attitude was too silly for words, but decided not to say so.

All in all, he decided, as he gave the knife blade a few last touches with the stone, he'd had worse days. Which wasn't to say he was reconciled to this absurd system, whereby he was being politely frogmarched into a life and a line of work that he didn't like and wasn't good at; but when he compared this existence with what he'd been through on the other side of the ocean, there wasn't really any need to stop and think before choosing. Quite apart from the comforts and the security, he hadn't had to kill anybody since he'd arrived. That was the sort of thing he shouldn't get into the habit of taking for granted.

'I think I'm calling it a day,' Asburn said. 'How about you?'

'I think that'll-' Poldarn began, and got no further. Three bangs, absurdly loud, shook the floor and filled the air.

'What the hell-?' Asburn muttered; but Poldarn knew exactly what it was. Rook had mentioned them last time, he remembered distinctly because he'd been in the forge when they happened, and they'd been drowned out by the sound of his hammer. Well, he'd heard them all right this time, no question about that.

'The mountain,' Asburn said.

They ran outside and looked over the house roof. The first thing Poldarn noticed was how dark it had become. It took him rather longer to figure out why; the cloud of ash billowing out of the mountain was now so huge and thick that it was blocking out the sun.

'Not very good,' Asburn said.

Apparently he wasn't the only one who thought so; a mob of crows who'd been sitting on the middle-house roof flew up with a chorus of furious screaming and shrieking, and swirled in a barely controlled spiral over the house roofs. They're lost, Poldarn was shocked to realise, they don't know where they are or how to get to where they want to be. Somehow, that was almost more worrying than the sight of the volcano itself. He had no idea why they were having such problems, or even whether it was to do with the ash cloud or the mountain at all; but he'd been watching rooks and crows all his life (he could remember watching them) and he'd never seen anything like this before.