(Every time, Ciartan remembered, except once; and on that occasion, the dream had been slightly different, because part of the way through-at this exact point, in fact-everything had changed suddenly. Both he and the kid were somehow much older, and the kid wasn't asking him to come to Deymeson. He was asking him to join up with some other venture, which apparently involved people they both knew, old classmates, something like that. For some reason, he'd told the kid no, and things had started going wrong after that; cracks in the clay, lies, mistaken identities, (Clay? What clay?) deception and murder and coincidences and just plain rotten luck. And for some reason, it had been very important-he'd made a point of telling himself he had to remember this when he woke up-that the pattern that recreates the lost shape (where the tallow is burnt out in the middle) is in fact an empty hole, a gap waiting to be filled, like a blank memory.)
Deep breath. 'I'm sorry,' Ciartan said, and Aciava relaxed-it occurred to Ciartan that if he hadn't apologised the kid would've felt obliged to fight him or something like that, and the thought of fighting him was scaring the kid half to death. 'I didn't mean to insult you,' Ciartan went on. 'It was just me thinking aloud. I guess I'm not used to people being nice for no reason.'
'Well,' the kid replied, 'I guess that's fair enough. Only, it's not for no reason. Religion's a reason, and after all, I'm training to be a monk, hopefully an ordained priest further along the line. Got to start somewhere, you know. And it'll do me no harm at all with Father Tutor if I bring along a good new recruit for the start of the new term.'
Was that just a little bit glib, a tad too reasonable? No, Ciartan decided, it could have been, but this time it wasn't. 'That's all right, then,' he said. 'I guess that makes it mutual benefit.'
'Exactly.' Aciava smiled. 'The only way to receive is to give,' he added portentously, 'and that's a genuine five-quarter precept of religion.'
A what? Ciartan wanted to ask; but instead he woke up, because some bastard was prodding him in the shoulder with a stick.
'Piss off,' Poldarn muttered.
'I said, wake up,' Banspati replied. 'Bloody hell, you're harder to wake up than a dead tree.'
Poldarn opened his eyes. 'What do you want?' he grumbled.
'You missed the meeting.'
'What meeting?'
'The one you missed. It was important. We had a vote and everything.'
Poldarn remembered. That meeting. To decide whether, in view of the fact that they'd spent the last four weeks trying to cast the Falcata guild bell and every time the mould had failed, they should close the works down or keep trying. And he'd missed it. Buggery.
'Oh, right,' he said, sitting up. 'So, what was the result?'
Banspati sighed. 'Bloody disaster,' he said mournfully. 'You know, there's times when I wonder why the hell I bother. I mean, it's an uphill struggle every bloody step of the way, and at my time of life I just don't need this kind of-'
'The vote,' Poldarn interrupted. 'Yes or no?'
Banspati pulled a face. 'Yes and no,' he said. 'What they all reckoned was-and since when does voting for something make it true even if it isn't? Supposed to be craftsmen, but I didn't see any bloody sign of it. Anyhow, what they reckon is, the only way we're going to get this fucking bell made is if we let the core dry out thoroughly-I mean, really dry out, like three weeks before we even put on the tallow. What difference that's supposed to make I really don't know, but hey, I'm just the bloody foreman.'
'Three weeks,' Poldarn repeated.
'That's right. We make a core, leave it three weeks, then we carry on. In the meantime, I'm afraid I'm having to lay the lot of you off. Don't want to, can't afford not to. We've got this fucking penalty clause hanging over us, and there just isn't the money for wages until we know how much we're going to be made to pay.'
Poldarn scowled at him. 'Wonderful,' he said. 'And what're we supposed to live on in the meantime?'
Banspati shrugged. 'That's your business,' he said. 'If I was you, I'd start looking round for a job somewhere, just to tide you over. After all, you've got to eat, and we can't pay you.'
Poldarn stood up. 'What do you mean, get a job? A job doing what? This isn't the city, you know, I can't just go to the hiring fair or stand about outside the corn exchange till somebody hires me. We're in the middle of nowhere-'
'Well, the others are in the same boat too,' Banspati replied. 'It's not just you, you know. And don't pull faces at me like it's all my fault. I didn't vote for this bloody stupid idea, so you can't go blaming me.'
Poldarn never did find out for certain whose idea it had been or whose fault it was. Nobody at all seemed happy about it, even though the vote in support of the motion had apparently been unanimous (though everybody he asked said they'd voted against, which was odd). More important, nobody seemed to have given any thought as to how they were going to earn a living while the works were shut down.
Poldarn had been exaggerating slightly when he'd said they were in the middle of nowhere. Falcata was only a few days away, and there were half a dozen small villages that could be reached in a day or so of hard walking. But the chances of finding any work at that time of year were slim to non-existent. Any day now, the rains would start; the flat plain that began at lino and stretched over as far as the lower slopes of the Sourwater Hills would soon be flooded, with only the villages and the embanked roads above water. Good for the reed-beds and the osier gardens; good for the market gardeners in the fat strip between Falcata and the Green River, since the alluvial silt that the flood water washed down off Sourhead was just the job for beans and cabbages. For everyone else on the levels, it was simply a fact of life; six weeks every year when you stayed home and found something to do indoors. It had never been a fact of life that bothered the foundry crew, since the flood water had never come far enough up the vale to affect them, and if they had finished work to deliver, there were always barges and rafts-easier, in fact, to float a bell than lug it about on a cart. So long as everybody stayed where they were meant to be, in fact, the wet season was nothing to worry about, and who'd be stupid enough to go wandering about in those conditions?
Someone or other, possibly Malla Ancola but probably not, made vague noises about sticking together and taking the road up the vale into the hills, through the big woods and out the other side, heading for Balehut or even the coast. That idea was so impractical that nobody could be bothered to point out the problems; but someone else suggested spending the forced holiday in the woods, burning their own supply of charcoal, which (if they got it right) could save them enough money to cover what they stood to lose on the penalty clause, in the long term; and as for the short term, everybody knew how easy it was to live off the land in a forest, hunting and gathering all those deer and birds and wild pigs and nuts and roots and berries, not to mention wild mushrooms and truffles. In fact, the argument ran, the only real danger was that they'd get so used to the carefree life of the forester and the collier that they'd never want to go back to rotten old foundry work.
This proposal went the rounds all the next day and halfway through the night, and then died, as quickly and suddenly as it had arisen; at which point people started to drift away, most of them aiming without much hope to reach Falcata before the rain started. The group Poldarn joined up with, however, declared that they were headed the other way. Burning their own coals, they acknowledged, was obviously not a realistic proposition (why this was so, nobody bothered to say; presumably because it was obvious and they didn't want to look ignorant); but hadn't Poldarn said they were always on the lookout for casual labour at the burning camps, to replace the ones who suddenly took it into their heads to drift away and do something else? It was worth a try; and even if there wasn't any food, from what Poldarn had told them there was no shortage of free beer for anybody who was too slow to get out of the way in time.