A History Of Metal

I play with the dry, crumbling clumps of dirt on the ground mingled with the cold ashes of my fire, staring at the hole leading into the Earth. My armour is cold, my body is too warm, whispers of salted steam dance in the space between my skin and the plated steel. The hole is angular, made by man, three great stone struts holding up a well of lightlessness. It is overgrown, its corners and feet softened by moss, and dead roots, and weeds, but angular nonetheless. Its violent stone corners seem to cut through all the brown and green, jagged and unholy.

I have been prolonging my descent. Looking into the ashes, I see Genevieve. I see Rosamund. I see paintings of their smiles and their wet eyes in all that warm dusty white. They are in there. The animals. The refusers of both God and civil shelter. They are underground, waiting. Waiting for me. I toss a clump of dirt into the ashes, and in the shapes thrown into the air from it, I almost see them again. The village. My home. The antlered hoods and painted chests of those that tore through it, a hollering plague serving foul, decrepit Gods from times where men did not speak.

I take up my sword, and light my torch. I will descend. I will envelop myself in their black, lightless air. I will follow. As I enter the hole, I run my hand over the stone, the steel gauntlet cladding my hand makes a song as it rings against the sediment. A song of silence, and trees so tall they touch heaven, songs of no man nor country nor wine.

In Latin, or a language near enough Latin, an ugly engraving adorns the stone entranceway. 

‘He will not forgive what we wrought with it all.’ 

No. I will not.

The hole takes me first into a chamber of brass. No- of bronze. The dullest gold, the hardest orange a man could ever see. There is green here yet. Moss and ivy permeating the walls, leaves and the wilting flowers of weeds pouring like tar through invisible hairline fractures in the rough, swollen metal all around me. At the foot of the stairs, looking across it, the room is almost peaceful, there is still hope in the last stray beams of sunlight not eaten by the shadows of this place. As I walk across the room, the smell of moss and chlorophyll becomes a stench of copper and sugar. Of old, sweet blood dried black and nigh sticking my boots to the floor with every footfall. A skull lies strewn at the far side of this chamber of bronze. Old. Dull. Every morsel eaten away from it. The platter of a banquet eaten by the brothers and sisters of locusts long ago. The sticky, dark blood on the ground is fresher here, though. It spills down the next staircase, deeper into the Earth, deeper into their home that knows no Sun nor Moon.

The next chamber is smaller. I think it may have once been bigger, but every surface now stands hunched under the weight of thick rust, inches upon inches of flaking red bark. The long, matted beard that hangs from the jaw of forgotten, unloved iron metal. There are footsteps in the rust underfoot, cracked and worn through all the red tarnish down to the dull, stoney grey metal it once was. They lead across the room to the next stairwell in a winding, senseless, serpent’s path. A room no longer than the lengths of four men, walked over years untold in a path of a hundred footsteps. I can see no point to this ritual, no meaning to this route walked by the vicious and the silent, these dogs. In the rust, sparkling in the glow of my torch fire, I see it all again. Their faces, their severed limbs, the smoking skeleton of our markets and our homes and our church. I ignore the path, I walk straight. I will not follow a tradition of theirs, not in any slight way, no more than I would follow the grandest of them. I am close to the next staircase, almost to a deeper chamber. I hear breathing, close to me. Theirs or my own, I do not know. As I step on a patch of thick virgin rust, it gives away, my leg plummeting into a hole.  I cry out, I clench my jaw, and I drop my sword as pain tears through me, from my sole to my knee, in a wave, in a torrent. I heave with all my might and free my leg, my greave has shattered like glass, a shard of shining, unadulterated iron ore piercing straight through my foot. The blood pouring from it makes my head spin, runs a chill through my neck and fingertips. I do not linger, I tear the metal out of my foot. Breaths all around me. Theirs, I am sure. They must be- panting and coughing and slow inhalations taken hesitantly through half-closed teeth around the tip of a tongue. The breathing of someone hiding. The breathing of someone watching. My wound is already bleeding far too much. I do not care. I am already heaving myself towards the staircase leading deeper, pulled by something. Not by the breathing, not their rancid damp breaths, but by the voices of two young women, by smoke, by the smell of roasting meat. I take up my sword, which in just the mere seconds it spent on the ground, has found and donned a coat of iron rust so thick I must strain to make a good fist around its hilt.

I crawl on my hands and knees like a newborn down the next staircase. I lose my purchase on the staircase of iron on my shaking, cold hands and tumble the rest of the way until I come to a level rest below. The torch in my left hand is dying, fading away. But the way the ceiling above me catches its flame and throws its reflection is enough for me to recognise it, of course. It is enough for me to recognise steel. To my side lays the shard of raw iron that pierced me in the chamber above. I have no recollection of bringing it with me to this room of steel, but shock and darkness and the voices of your loves of course make a man act without reason. I hurl it back up the staircase, into the pitch-blackness. I listen to the dull toll that rings out as it hits the floor above, yet somehow it sounds as if it echoes from somewhere deeper in this desolation.

I lift myself to my knees. A room of clean, shining, beautiful steel. A bonfire, small but beautiful, quietly burns in its centre. I crawl to it on shaking limbs. My sword is not in my hand, not in the flesh, but in my memory, the bonfire stirs memories of all the campaigns… all the skirmishes… my brothers, our king, our Christ. All the battlefields, mud and blood stamped into a maroon jam by a thousand steel boots and all the quiet and laughter before and after them. I warm myself by the fire. I pull off my gauntlets and lay my palms on the dark, cold steel floor. I met Genevieve when we were children, no older than sixteen, I the son of a courtier and she the daughter of a Deacon, one of the last. We sat and ate stolen apples all day, until they made us ill. We had Rosamund when we were older, her twenty-fourth year, my twenty-fifth, later than our lord expected. She was beautiful. The steel against my palms is now warm. They are flat, outstretched, idle- but I feel the grip and tang and weight of every weapon I ever wielded for God and England. Every sword, every shield, every early morning as a boy practicing my middling archery in those years where I thought I could forsake my nobility for the cavalry or the bakery. Foolish in my youth. The pain in my foot stings me, pinching me out of every slight dream, but in this chamber, before this fire, it dulls. It shows some mercy. I hear the shuffling of footsteps and Genevieve and Rosumund and Jesus Christ and my King disappear. They are close to me and I remind myself of how I swore when they next laid their dark, sullen eyes upon me they shall be stood atop their graves. The bonfire has died in the time it took me to stand. It was only small, for all its warmth and beauty. My torch will not be long behind it. I think of my armour and it’s weight and I say the prayer Genevieve’s Father told me the morning we were to be married. I walk across the room, to the next staircase, ever downward, towards the mouth of their dank river of shadows. The pain in my foot returns. Blood resumes flowing. My head is light. The steel around me seems bluer and I remember the eyes of every man I have ever killed. Rosamund will never have her sixth year.

I forget the comfort of the steel chamber quickly. I lose my footing immediately, the blood running from me slices my purchase and I fall. I think I am crying out but no sound escapes my mouth. On my topple down these stairs I must crack every limb, warp every extremity. Every sting of pain inflicted by the edge of every step makes me see them- my Wife, my daughter, my Mother, my Father, the flea-infested dog I begged for us to keep when I was a boy and found her gnawing on chicken bones behind the market and the man my Father ordered to separate its head from its body for fear of mange. I clatter to even flooring and slide across the ground. This chamber is warm, in a way that does not lull me, a strange warmth that makes my teeth ache and my bones tickle. Every breath I take fills my lungs with a… a sensation like the buzzing of wasps. Air that is clear and clean but that I feel take the slightest bites out of my insides. Air I should not be swallowing. I see that the room, in the dying of my torchlight, is a dark black metal, streaked with yellow and olive. I do not recognise it. I do not know it. I have never heard tell of anything like it. I cough on the buzzing air and behind my watering eyes I see a sword greater and sharper than any ever forged, wielded by hands larger than any church or country, dangling, hovering over countless throats on a block that wraps around the world. I need to leave. My hair feels hot. My skin shakes nigh imperceptibly atop my flesh. I cannot see through my tears and discomforted skin of my eyelids. I tear my helm from my head and throw it into a dark corner. Then, I see it, I see one, a hooded man in pelts and paint stood at the mouth of the next staircase. He holds a small torch, barely lit, it does not illuminate his eyes or the legs below his knees. I cry out to him, a curse, the name of my Lord, both of them. He turns and descends. I stumble after him, flying with abandon at the staircase. I could have saved them. I could have been there. I could have cut these animals down and preserved my corner of life. This did not need to happen. It never should have happened.

As I descend the stairway, every inch I get away from that chamber of insidious black-yellow metal, the buzzing in my lungs lessens, the singing heat in my scalp and fingernails lessens. I can breathe once again without tasting copper and petrichor beneath my tongue. The room below glows. A warm orange, a flickering gold. Fire. On feeble legs, I reach the end of these stairs and stand before them. A dozen or so. Standing, holding torches, silent as they always are. Thin, and pale, and bearded. Smeared in crushed wildflowers and sap and white paint. I want to repeat my curses and the names of my loves and lord, but I do not. I look at what they are pointing at, all of them, with a dozen unshaking fingers.

In the centre of the room lays a cradle of twigs and dung and ivy, the small cot of some forest beast. Inside it rests a slate of obsidian and white metal. Some relic, some tome, some icon of the hell they perpetuate I am sure. It takes me many moments to blink. I dare not guess how much blood still flows within me. I collapse to my knees and feel in my heart the certainty that I will never again feel the ground beneath my feet, that the last time I could stand as a man on ground familiar to me was at the beginning of this revolting descent, in the moss and the dirt of the forest above. I look up at the tallest of them, standing in the centre of their crescent arrangement. He says something in a language that might have been Latin once, that may yet be Latin again someday. I feel I recognise it but my ears are ringing, pain and rage numbing my senses and dulling all sensation. He points unyielding at the cot of greenery. I look into it again. The smallest pane of perfect, shining crystal I have ever seen, it is glass blacker than broken flint fastened atop a metal so smooth I thought it for a moment to be ice. I want to destroy it. Inflict damage and imperfection upon it, whatever it must mean to them. I will dash it across the chamber, as hard as I can, kill some small part of what they are if I cannot kill a single one of them. Genevieve, Rosamund, Lord Christ my savior if I cannot erase them, I swear I will change them. I reach out and snatch the artifact.

In an instant, I am rapt with fire and thunder and poison and filth all through me, inside me, caking my skin, deep inside my bones, across every image in my mind. Faster than thought, than the extinguishing of a flame, worlds and lives and languages tear through my body and spirit like pikes.

Ten thousand miles away under a sky I do not recognise, a young boy leading a flying box of ribbons and wood in the sky above him by a leash is struck by lightning and dies immediately. On the shores of a mountainous peninsula somewhere beyond knowing every single grain of sand on a beach the length of ten countries coalesce into an endless white blanket the thickness of a hair that wraps the whole world like butcher’s paper. Sand and lightning and alien silk. Fifty thousand years from now in a house full of furniture I do not recognise built on the land directly above us a man swallows a small metal box criss-crossed with golden thread and his stomach fills with acid and smoke and he regurgitates green blood and bile until the whites of his eyes turn scarlet and he dies on the latrine not an hour later. A man in formal dress in an endless void holds up a box of black glass like the one in my hand in front of the world and says something that makes hearts soar and toes curl as the box illuminates and shows images of sunflowers and clouds and raspberries. The roots of my teeth burn from the inside out, from their cores and into my jaw and then into the sockets of my bursting eyes. In a future so close I can still recognise the shape of every river, where I have no descendants nor records of my being, I see a child no older than three years of age staring into a window of fire and lightning, weeping tears for no reason than the stimuli of the light before his eyes and its novelty while his Mother weeps into her sleeve in a dark corner of the room. Sand and lightning and alien silk.

I try to drop the black glass totem but my grip only tightens. Images I do not understand char my bones and set my body aflame. I am dying but I am seeing everything. Mazes of metal string transporting everything that has ever existed. Screaming lovers revoke their wedding vows and confess to adultery from across oceans on airborne currents of grey, shimmering air. I feel my fingernails explode inside the tips of my fingers and the connecting fibers of my backbone melt and blister the back of my lungs and stomach. I see the entire world in a painting created by a single finger and a snake feeding lightning into its canvas. I see the moon block out the light of the sun on living stained glass hung high above a metropolis denser than should be possible. I see a perfect image of God being engraved onto the blade of a dagger by a machine that spits red embers and sunlight. I see death. I see metal dust and fragments of solid oil floating in the spittle flowing down the chin of a smiling baby girl. I see death. I see an old man staring at a tree far away from the window he touches with one pale, thin hand with thin pipes of metal sticking into his arm. I see death. I see constellations of stars twisting and dancing like honey in cold water as they explode from the barrel of a weapon held in the hand of a soldier who marches through the home of his brothers and sisters and kills men and women and children. I see Genevieve with great metal cups over her ears smiling at me and dancing. I see the corpses of millions of people burned stiff in place by hell-fire dug from the innards of mountains. I see my own sword, lost in the dark, buzzing, black-and-yellow chamber of unknown metal above me, glowing bright emerald and wailing the names of every person who has ever lived or ever will live. I see Myself, on my knees, on fire, in a deep hole in the earth, bleeding a river from my rust-stained foot holding a small pane of black glass, seeing Genevieve and Rosamund, who are seeing heaven as they imagined it, as my bones shatter and chip and immolate. 

I see the stone archway that greeted me at the mouth of this hole. 

‘He will not forgive what we wrought with it all.’ 

No. He will not.