Shadow

'That's right.'

'But he's the god in the cart.'

'I just told you that. You think I'm mental, don't you?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'I can't see any reason not to believe you,' he said. 'Do you think you'd know him again if you saw him, after all these years?'

She scowled. 'My own kid? Of course I would. He's got my mother's chin and his father's nose. I'd know him anywhere.'

Poldarn stood up. 'And you've been here ever since,' he said. It wasn't meant as a question. 'How do you manage? What do you live on?'

She smiled. Once upon a time, it would probably have been a very nice smile. 'I trade,' she said.

'I see,' Poldarn said. 'What do you trade?'

'None of your business.'

'I agree,' Poldarn replied. 'There's no reason why you should tell me if you don't want to, I'm just interested.'

With a turn of her wrist that was too fast for Poldarn's eye to follow, she flicked the hatchet into the log, right between her knees. 'I trade with Master Potto Ilec of Sansory,' she said proudly. 'He sends a wagon up here four times a year, with jars of flour and some cheese and bacon. He needs me,' she added, 'he can't get the good stuff anywhere else, for fear of people knowing. He sends his own son and his two brothers and his uncle, because he won't trust anybody else not to tell.'

Poldarn was holding his breath without knowing it. 'Would you like to tell me what you give him in return for the food?'

She reached down, pulled up the sole of her foot, like a farrier shoeing a horse, and examined it. 'Master Potto Ilec makes buttons,' she said. 'For the really special buttons he likes to use a special kind of bone, with a fine, straight grain and a good feather. It's got to be properly dried and seasoned, and it's got to be the right colour, dark brown. It's the colour that makes it so hard to find.'

'I think I see,' Poldarn said.

'You can't stain it,' she went on, 'it only goes that colour when it's charred in a fire-that dries it up, see, gets all the grease out-and then left to weather, out in the wind and the rain. Takes a long time to cure, according to Master Potto Ilec, you can't rush it. Very hard to find these days.'

'Thank you,' Poldarn said, 'you've been very helpful. Can I ask you one last question?'

She looked up at the sky. 'Don't see why not,' she said.

He took a step closer. 'Your son,' he said, 'did you give him a name, by any chance?'

She shook her head. 'Didn't get round to it. I had other things on my mind, really.'

'Right. Does the name Poldarn mean anything to you?'

'Poldarn.' She thought for a moment. 'No,' she said, 'doesn't ring any bells.'

Poldarn felt in the pocket of his coat. 'Those special buttons,' he said. 'Are they anything like these?'

She glanced at the buttons he'd taken from his pocket and shook her head. 'Too pale,' she said. 'And they're not quite as big as that. They showed me one once, so I could be sure to match the colour.'

Poldarn stepped back towards the cart, still facing her every step of the way. 'Thank you,' he said. 'Is there anything you'd like us to bring you? We'll be passing here again on our way back in a few days.'

She shook her head. 'I got everything I need right here,' she said, 'thanks to Master Potto Ilec, and Feron Amathy.'

Poldarn looked at her. 'You didn't need the kid, then.'

'No.'

'Ah. Well, thank you for talking to us.'

'You're welcome. And now you can piss off and leave me in peace.'

Copis didn't say anything for a long time, not until the ruins of Vistock were out of sight behind the horizon. It was as if she was afraid the mad woman would hear her. 'You didn't ask her name,' she said.

'You're right,' Poldarn replied, 'I didn't.'

'Oh. Why not?'

He shrugged. 'I forgot. I suppose I figured it wasn't important. Talking of which, is Copis your real name?'

She laughed. 'No,' she replied.

He didn't make any comment about that, which annoyed her. 'Aren't you going to ask me what my real name is?' she said.

'No,' Poldarn replied. 'You can tell me if you want to.'

She scowled. 'If you must know, it's Xipho Dorunoxy. And I'm not really from Torcea, though I did live there for years, when I was a kid. I'm from Exo.'

'I see,' Poldarn said. 'Where's that?'

'Oh, a long way away, inland to the east. It isn't even a province of the empire any more. I think it broke away about sixty years ago, though our people still come and go quite freely across the border. You aren't interested, are you?'

He shook his head. 'One thing I've learned lately,' he said, 'is how little it matters what people call themselves or where they come from. They seem to have an idea that without things like that they'll lose their shape and collapse, like a bowl of water if you suddenly take the bowl away. Well, I'm here to prove it isn't true.'

She looked at him in silence for a while. 'You're really trying hard to believe that, aren't you?' she said.

'Yes.'

'Any luck?'

'Not really, no.'

She laughed again. 'Did I ever tell you what the iron-master told me?'

'What iron-master.'

'Ah.' She took off her shoe and shook something out of it, then put it back on. 'Well, I've told you that some of the customers where I used to work liked to talk sometimes, tell me things. I haven't a clue why; I suppose I had a knack of looking like I was interested, and men who're important in business like to talk about what they're doing, stuff they're pleased or proud about, but of course it's usually technical, so nobody outside the shop can understand what they're talking about. Anyway, they used to explain things to me-how things work, how they're made, that sort of stuff.'

'And you listened.'

'It was better than work, that's for sure.' She pushed her hair back behind her ears. 'One of them was an iron-master, like I said. He had a big foundry for brass and copper, and an enormous furnace and great big trip-hammers for the iron and steel-apparently you can't melt iron, the fire's not hot enough, you can only make it soft and squeeze it out of the ore into big lumps, what they call blooms. Then if you want to make plates or bars or whatever, you've got to get it hot till it's soft and beat it into shape.'

'I see,' Poldarn said. 'How fascinating.'

'Shut up, I'm getting there. With scrap, you see, it's different. You sort it all out into piles-soft iron in one pile, hard steel in another, and the soft iron that gets turned into steel, like old horseshoes and wheel tyres and stuff, in a third; and then what you do is you get them all hot and you hammer them and hammer them until they're all welded together into the shapes your customers want-bars and plates and rods. Ever such a lot of work, he told me.'

Poldarn yawned. 'I can imagine,' he said.

'The point is,' Copis went on, 'when you make steel hard, you make it able to hold a shape. That's what hard is, really, being able to stay the same shape even if you get bashed on, unless you're too hard and brittle, in which case you shatter. Anyway, this being able to hold a shape; according to him, the word they used for it was memory. Like a cart spring or a crossbow prod, or a sword; if you bend it, it can remember the shape it used to be and go back into it, exactly the same shape it used to be before you twisted it back on itself. Or, if the memory's really strong, you can hammer and file at it all day and all you'll do is wreck your tools, because it won't budge.' She was looking straight ahead, not at him. 'But if you heat it up, past sunrise red and blood red and cherry red to orange, it'll lose its memory just like you lost yours, and then it stops being hard or springy and turns soft, so you can bash it and shape it and do whatever you like with it. Then, if you just let it cool down slowly in the air, it'll stay soft; but if you take it all red and bloody out of the fire and dip it straight into a pool of water, it'll immediately freeze hard, like the Bohec in winter, and then it'll have a memory all over again. Do you see what I'm getting at?'