Memory

Banspati scowled. 'I'm only the bloody foreman,' he protested. 'I can't do every single fucking thing myself, can I? Besides, you're still alive, so what're you cribbing about? If what they say about the doctors up Falcata's right, he'd have killed you for sure.'

In the end they compromised, as men of goodwill always do when their interests coincide; Poldarn was to stay in bed until the next morning, after which he was at liberty to get up, take off his bandages (entirely at his own risk, needless to say) and report for work. If he was still alive at the end of his shift, he could consider himself officially better.

Perhaps it was the effort of arguing the toss with the foreman; Poldarn slept well, without dreaming, and woke up feeling strong and cheerful. His legs felt unsteady, calflike, after so many weeks of disuse, but he refused to indulge them, and walked awkwardly up and down the shed until they began to regain their memory. Once he was fairly confident that he could make it across the yard without falling over, he sat down on an empty barrel and unwrapped the bandages on his hands.

His skin felt cold without them, but it was still there; white and unnaturally smooth in places, extremely sensitive. He flexed his fingers until he could extend them without discomfort. Everything seemed to be in order; business as usual.

It took him a while to find the knot that secured the bandage wrapped round his face; it was at the back of his head, cunningly placed so as to be almost inaccessible (and he was clumsy with knots, he discovered). He picked at it for a while until he noticed a small knife, rusty and neglected, lying on the floor a few yards away. It was blunt too, but sharp enough to saw through the knot, eventually. The bandage was stiff, as though it had been starched. Once again, these was a distinct chill on his skin once it had gone. No matter.

The daylight hurt his eyes, even though the sky was black and grey-still the rainy season, then, and no comfort for Galand Dev, with his potentially self-destructive furnace. But the air smelled wonderfully fresh, and most of all, different. Poldarn grinned as he walked slowly across the yard, heading for the small stream that fed off the river, just below the mud-diggings.

He found a place where the stream ran between broad, flat rocks. Ferns had somehow found a footing there, and their shade had attracted moss, deep and soft. Where the stream fell from one rock to another there was a shallow pool about a handspan deep. He knelt down-knees grudging and rusty-and looked at his reflection.

Strange, he thought. It would've been a shock if he'd known the story that went with his old face, which wasn't there any more. Instead there was white shiny skin, smooth as fine clay carefully levelled and worked flawless by the tip of the sculptor's finger; a fine setting for a pair of huge round eyes, and between them a melted, featureless nose. White and flat, almost transparent; wasn't that the way ghosts were supposed to look? It was a human face made by someone who'd never actually seen one, working from a rough sketch and a vague verbal description.

The so-called essential paradox, he thought, expressed in the image of the burned scavenger. Now if only this had happened a while ago, that day when he'd pulled himself out of the mud beside another river, how convenient that would've been; nobody would have recognised him, and the man he'd used to be (Gain Aciava's old fellow-student, Xipho Dorunoxy's despised admirer, Ciartan Torstenson of Haldersness) would have been lost, like unwanted memory bleached out of good salvageable material. Salvage and salvation, the essential paradox, or whatever.

He sat down, made himself comfortable. Somewhere at the back of his mind there was the faint recollection of an old story he'd heard as a child, about the gods' mirror, in which a man can see himself as he truly is, not as he wants to be seen or as others insist on seeing him. A wonderfully useful piece of kit for a god, or a king, or a prosperous man of business: hang it on the wall behind the chair where your guests sit down, and you'll never again be troubled by shape-shifters, goblins and elves disguised as humans, princesses cruelly enchanted to look like dairymaids, improvident bankrupts wearing expensive clothes when they come to borrow money. If only he'd had such a mirror (a mirror such as this) on the day when he'd woken up in the bloody mud, with only dead men for company, he could have looked himself in the eye, seen who he really was, seen something rather like this (And wouldn't it be fine if men and women could be melted down, when the quality of their raw material had become tainted with a bad memory; if you could melt flesh in Galand Dev's completely and utterly reliable furnace, flux it and rake it and flux it again to draw off the past, pour it into a carefully cured and fettled mould and turn out a high-class flawless casting every single time: featureless, pearly white, translucent.)

Would anybody recognise him now, he wondered. He hadn't been around for a while, and in a place where people came and went, it was easy to forget a face. He watched himself grinning, as it occurred to him that if he wanted, he could simply walk out of his life and into a new one, no longer tethered to his past by his face No, he couldn't, of course; nobody was allowed to leave the compound without express permission from Brigadier Muno. He was surprised at how disappointed he felt. And of course it wouldn't be long before everybody in the place figured it out, equated the brave Poldarn who'd been horribly burned rescuing a fellow worker with the pearl-faced creature who'd be so very hard to miss. Talk about your paradoxes of religion; he'd never been more immediately recognisable in his life.

'Bloody hell.' He turned round to see who'd spoken. He knew the face, couldn't put a name to it. 'What the fuck happened to you?'

Poldarn didn't answer, and he had a feeling it'd be unkind to smile.

'Oh,' said the man whose name had slipped his mind. 'It's you, isn't it? Only I didn't recognise you there for a moment. So,' the man went on, taking a deep breath, 'you're up and about, then.'

'Apparently,' Poldarn said.

'You feeling all right, then? In yourself, I mean.'

Poldarn shrugged. 'Never felt better in myself in my life. That I can remember,' he added.

'Well, that's good.' The poor fool was trying not to stare. 'There was supposed to be a doctor coming up from Falcata, but I don't suppose he could've done anything.'

'He could've killed me,' Poldarn replied. 'That's what everybody keeps telling me, anyhow. I imagine it's all for the best, really.'

'Right,' the man said. 'Good attitude. And you know what it's like, sooner or later people'll get used to any bloody thing.'

'I'm sure,' Poldarn said. 'By the way, do you happen to know what became of Gain Aciava?'

'Who?'

'Gain Aciava. The man I rescued.'

The man frowned. 'That wasn't his name,' he said. 'But the bloke you pulled out from under the furnace, when you got-well, anyway, him. They came and picked him up. Soldiers, is what I heard.'

'Proper soldiers?' Poldarn tried to think of the right word. 'Regular troops, from Torcea or wherever?'

The man shrugged. 'Search me,' he said. 'I didn't see them myself, and all I heard was soldiers, in a cart. There's been so many bloody soldiers in and out of here since this Poldarn's Flute thing started, you lose track. Anyhow, that's all I know; bunch of soldiers came in and arrested the bugger, and they took him away.'

'Arrested him,' Poldarn repeated.

The man nodded. 'Or they were taking him for questioning, or he'd been sent for. Nobody tells you anything around here any more. You know what, if I could get out of here I bloody would. It's getting to be a right misery.'

'Thanks, anyway,' Poldarn replied. 'How's the job coming along, by the way? Banspati told me to report for work today, but I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.'

The man looked vaguely alarmed. 'You don't want to go starting work yet,' he said, 'not when you're only just back up and about. Besides, there's bugger-all to do. They're still faffing about trying to decide if they can fix the crack in the firebox. You heard about that?'