Pattern (42 page)

Straightening the nails took him no time at all, so Poldarn cast about for something else to do otherwise it'd be a waste of all the good coal he'd shovelled onto the fire, and as a good householder he couldn't countenance that. Already he was beginning to accumulate his own personal scrap-pile (he hadn't had the heart to confiscate Asburn's collection when he left Haldersness, where Asburn had remained to teach Barn the trade); mostly nails and brackets and hinges too badly damaged in the move to be used again, but also a fair quantity of junk retrieved from the various houses – worn-out scythe blades, files, ploughshares, axles, kettles, stirrup-irons, hoes, harrows, steelyards, leg-vices, the history of the settlement at Haldersness told through the medium of broken and discarded artefacts. At the bottom of the pile lurked the two halves of a snapped backsabre, partially rusted through, that had hung in the porch of the main house for as long as anybody could remember. Who'd put them there, or why, or who the sword had originally belonged to, had long since corroded away, but the two bits of steel had still been there, because there hadn't been any reason to get rid of them when the time came to leave the house. Someone had taken them down as an afterthought and thrown them in a basket of oddments; someone else had unpacked the basket and, on the basis that all bits of rusty old metal belonged in the forge, had slung them on the scrap-pile to await purification and rebirth.

A little scrabbling turned them up, and Poldarn laid them on the table of the middle anvil, fitted the pieces together along the fracture, and stared at them thoughtfully. There hadn't been any call for Asburn to make anything of the kind while Poldarn had been hanging about in the forge at Haldersness. There was no demand for weapons, generally speaking; they were something you inherited, or borrowed from the big chest with the four padlocks at the back of the hall as and when you needed one for a cruise to the Empire, and there were always more than enough of the things floating around without the smith having to waste time and effort making new ones. This one, the broken one from the Haldersness porch, looked like it was very old indeed, to judge by the depth of the rust-pits and the shrunken contours of the cutting edge, gradually thinned down and eroded by many years of sharpening with coarse stones. Out of curiosity Poldarn took a medium-grit stone and rubbed it up and down the flat of the blade to shift the rust. Once he'd got it back to white metal, he thought he could just about make out the faint pattern of ripples and ridges that marked out an old-fashioned pattern-welded piece, made back in the days when hard steel was rare and precious and a large object like a sword had to be built up out of scraps interleaved with layers of hard iron.

The thought of all the work that must have gone into it made Poldarn wince. Back at Haldersness he'd helped Asburn with some pattern-welding, swinging the big hammer while Asburn did all the clever stuff; it had taken hours of hard, slow work to produce one small billet, and Asburn had told him later that all they'd done was a very simple, utilitarian pattern, not to be mentioned in the same breath with the wonderful constructs the old-timers used – the four- or six-core aligned twists and countertwists, the maiden's-hair pattern, the butterfly, the hugs-and-kisses, the pool and eye and the Polden's ladder. Compared to what the old-timers used to get up to, according to Asburn, the little blank they'd rushed out was just a shoddy piece of rubbish, a parody, a travesty.

Whatever this one had been, he reflected, it hadn't done it much good. The blade had snapped right on the shoulder, the place where the concave bend of the cutting edge was most extreme. Judging by the corresponding chip and roll in the edge, it seemed likely that it had broken in the act of bashing on something hard and solid, quite possibly somebody's armoured head. So much, Poldarn decided, for pattern-welding.

Still; the shape itself was an interesting one, and he stood for quite some time figuring out how a man would go about making such a thing. First he'd have to draw down a steep taper, both thickness and width; then lay in the bevel, probably, keeping the blade straight as he went so as to give himself a chance of keeping everything even; then gradually introduce the curve, just an inch or so per heat, with gentle tapping and nudging over the anvil's beak; then more straightening and truing up, hot and cold – hours of that, in all probability, since flattening out one kink or distortion tended to set up two or three new ones further up or down the piece, as he knew only too well. Finally draw down a tang and either shape a point with the hammer or cheat by using the hot chisel and the rasp; it could be done, in fact now that he'd thought about it he could see every stage of the operation simultaneously, laid out side by side in his mind like a collection of memories. But it'd mean days of work, even using a solid piece of stock rather than pattern-welding, and since nobody wanted such a thing, where the hell was the point?

Poldarn shivered, and realised that while he'd been lost in thought he'd let the fire go out. Well; no excuse for lighting it again, so he might as well take his beautifully straightened nails back out to the yard and give them to someone to knock into a few bits of wood.

Before he could leave the forge, however, the door opened and Raffen came in, reflexively ducking his head to avoid the low beams that had been a feature of the Haldersness smithy, though the Ciartanstead forge didn't have that problem. ‘Thought you might be in here,' he said. ‘We've got a visitor.'

He made it sound like an infestation of rats. ‘Oh,' Poldarn said. ‘Who's that, then?'

‘Leith,' Raffen replied with ill-concealed distaste, ‘from Leithscroft, over the far side of Corby Wood. Haven't seen him round here for years.'

Poldarn shrugged. ‘What does he want?'

‘Don't ask me,' Raffen answered, ‘he didn't tell me. You should be able to guess better than I can. After all, he's your friend.'

Poldarn had, of course, no memory of anybody called Leith. ‘Is he?' he asked.

‘'Course. You two were always hanging round the yard when you were kids. Pair of bloody tearaways.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that,' Poldarn answered gravely. ‘Probably just as well I can't remember. Well, maybe he was passing and just wants to chat about old times. In which case,' he added, ‘he probably won't be stopping long. Where did you leave him?'

‘In the house, eating.' Raffen came a step or two closer. ‘What's that you've got there, then?'

‘Oh, that.' For some reason, Poldarn felt embarrassed. ‘Just an old busted sword-blade. I was thinking of working it up into a pair of shears or something.'

Raffen squinted. ‘Right, I remember it now. Used to hang in the porch – Halder's dad's old sword. I was wondering where that had got to, since the move.'

‘Oh,' Poldarn said. ‘Nobody told me what it was. In that case, I'll find something else to use.'

‘Really? Why?'

Poldarn frowned. ‘Well, it's an heirloom. Bit of family history.'

‘Oh.' Raffen frowned, as if he'd just found a fish bone. ‘Up to you, I suppose. But it's only two bits of old scrap. Better off as something useful than just lying around rusting.'

Leith turned out to be a big, tall man with startlingly broad shoulders and almost no remaining teeth. Poldarn couldn't remember his face at all, but Leith seemed to recognise Poldarn as soon as he walked in through the door, because he stood up and said, ‘Hello, Ciartan,' in a rather worried-sounding voice.

‘Hello,' Poldarn replied. ‘Look, this is probably going to sound strange, but I don't know who you are. You see—'

Leith nodded abruptly. ‘You lost your memory back in the old country, I know. I heard it from one of the Lyatsbridge people, they were out our way scrounging lumber and stuff. Soon as I heard, I came straight over. It's true, then.'

Poldarn nodded. He couldn't guess why his loss of memory had affected this stranger so much, but he guessed it wasn't just sympathy for an old friend. ‘Apparently we knew each other years ago,' he said. ‘Maybe you could tell me about it.'

‘Yes.' Leith sucked in a long breath, as if he was bracing himself for something painful, like having a bone set. ‘That's why I'm here – there's a few things you really ought to know.' But then he hesitated, as though he was having second thoughts, and a look passed over his face that Poldarn could only describe as sly. ‘They also said you can't see anybody's thoughts now,' he said, rather too casually to be convincing. ‘Is that right? Never heard anything like that before.'

‘Perfectly true,' Poldarn said, trying not to be annoyed. ‘And other people can't see mine, either. At least, that's what people have told me. I wouldn't know, of course.'

‘Oh, that's true enough. It's like trying to see in through a shuttered window, you know there's something in there but the shutter's in the way. Damnedest thing I ever came across, actually.'

‘Really.'

Leith scratched his chin and sat down again. There was a large empty bowl on the table next to him, with a few grains of drying porridge sticking to the side; also a jug and a horn cup, most likely empty now. ‘Makes it a bit hard to talk to you, to be honest, but it doesn't bother me, really. So you don't remember anything at all?'

Poldarn shook his head. ‘Bits and pieces, but nothing connected. I can remember a few things I did as a boy – scaring birds in the fields, a trip I took with my grandfather, stuff like that. A few names and faces. No rhyme or reason to any of it, as far as I can make out.'

Leith nodded slowly. ‘Didn't I hear somewhere that Halder had passed on?'

The euphemism sounded forced and awkward; Poldarn had got used to people saying things straight out. ‘He died a few weeks back, yes,' he said. ‘That's why we've moved house, of course.'

‘Yes, of course, it stands to reason. I'm very sorry to hear that; he was a good man, for an old-timer.' That didn't sound right, either. ‘So, did he tell you much about the old days?'

Poldarn shook his head. ‘Not a great deal, he didn't seem very comfortable with the subject. Anyway, we didn't talk much.'

‘Right.' Leith seemed rather uncomfortable, like a man sitting in a wet ditch. ‘Well, that's a pity. And old Scaptey, the field hand; didn't somebody tell me he bought the farm last raiding season? Killed in a battle or something.'

‘So I gather.'

‘Really,' Leith said, ‘Scaptey too. I've known him since I was a little kid. You remember my brother Brin?'

‘No.'

‘Ah. Well, he's dead too. We all used to go around together all the time, when we were young. Looks like there's just you and me left, out of the old gang. And you can't remember anything about it.'

‘No.'

‘There's a thought,' Leith muttered. ‘So really it's just me, carrying round all those memories. I guess when I'm gone, it'll all be like it never happened. Not that it matters a damn,' he added. ‘It's not as if we did anything much. Just a bunch of kids, really.'

Poldarn looked at him carefully. You came all this way just to tell me that, he thought, you must have way too much time on your hands. ‘How are things out your way?' he asked. ‘With the mountain blowing up, and everything?'

‘Oh, could have been worse,' Leith replied, his attention clearly elsewhere. ‘Could have been a lot worse. Trap-house caught fire, but no great loss. We had that filthy black ash over everything for a while, but the rain washed it all off, down into the valley. Buggered up all the fish-weirs, of course, but like I said, it could've been a whole lot worse. You seem to have got away with it all right out this way.'

‘By and large,' Poldarn replied. ‘Not like those poor devils at Lyatsbridge. They had it pretty rough, by all accounts.'

‘Bloody tragedy,' Leith said blandly. ‘Last I heard, they were packing up and moving on. We thought about it ourselves, to be honest with you, but we reckoned that on balance we might as well stay put, for now. No, it could have been a damn sight worse. A month later, and it'd have killed our crop stone dead in the ground.'

This was all very well, but hardly worth several days' gruelling ride. ‘So,' Poldarn said, ‘you mentioned there were some things I ought to know about.'

‘That's right,' Leith said slowly. ‘So, you're settling in here again, after being away so long. Making yourself at home, so to speak.'

‘Well, yes,' Poldarn said. ‘I suppose you could put it that way. At least, I've built this house, as you can see. I don't actually know why I needed to build a whole new house when the old one was perfectly good enough, but they told me I had to, so I did.'

‘Nice place.'

‘Thank you. I don't think it's so bad, for a first attempt. And what else? Oh yes, I got married.'

Leith looked up. ‘You don't say.'

‘That was another thing they told me I had to do. But it could have been worse, as you'd say. I reckon I've been very lucky there, as it happens.'

Leith forced a smile. ‘Well, there's something,' he said. ‘You married. That's like the old story about the wolf who became a sheepdog. Still, at our age you've got to settle down, haven't you?'

‘Apparently,' Poldarn replied.

‘And you've found yourself a nice little girl,' Leith went on. ‘Well, you would, wouldn't you?'

Poldarn nodded. ‘Colsceg's daughter. You know her?'

‘No.' Leith looked away. His hands were spread out flat on the table, palms down, fingers splayed out wide. ‘Since my time. Anyhow, that's only one of the places we went. I never liked it much out that way, anyhow. Bleak old place in winter, Colscegsford.' He stood up. ‘I think it's about time I was hitting the road,' he said. ‘If I start straight away I can make Elletswater by dark.'