THE ARMOUR STILL IN THERAPY

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by a suit of plate mail with a great deal to process.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I am a full suit of gentleman's plate armour, and I will thank you not to stand behind me without announcing yourself first.

I was made for a knight — a big, shouting sort of man who bought me for a war nobody now remembers. The chronicles record only the weather (dreadful) and the outcome (damp). What I remember is the mud. On the second afternoon of the fighting, my knight discovered, with a speed he had never once shown in training, how to undo all forty of my straps in a single motion, and departed the field at a pace the heralds later agreed to call tactical. I did not depart. I was heavy. That was, after all, the entire point of me.

The bog took me in about four minutes. It has since been remarked, around the parish, that I have trust issues. I would gently observe that the last living soul to touch me undid my buckles and ran, and the next thing to touch me was an eel.

I was down there for forty years. I would like to say I bore it with dignity, but there are witnesses, most of them newts. Things moved in. Things I could hear but never see took the lease on my left greave. An entire civilisation of pond-snails rose and fell inside my helmet, and to this day I could not tell you what they wanted, only that they were very busy about it. And the peat pressed in, black and patient, until I could no longer tell where the mud ended and I began — which a suit of armour should always be able to tell you; it is the one thing we are for.

Here is the strange part, which I have never told the smith. Forty years of bog-water should have eaten me to a brown stain and a memory. It did not. Down under the deepest of it there is a hum — slow, patient, older than hammering — and nothing that mud holds is allowed to finish. Not the drowned fence-posts. Not the sunken cart. Not me. I rusted exactly enough to ache and not one flake further, held, all forty years, at the very edge of ending. I have opinions about that. I keep them in the gauntlets.

They dredged me up when they widened the eel-weir — hauled me out backwards into a daylight I no longer believed in — and every drop of those forty years came up with me. This is my affliction, and I will state it plainly, since everyone in the parish has heard it anyway: when I am startled — a dropped hammer, a slammed door, rain coming on suddenly against my pauldrons — my visor clangs shut of its own accord, my joints seize into a full defensive crouch, and four decades of trapped bog — pond-water, peat-slurry, disgruntled tadpoles, and once, memorably, an entire overwintering frog — squelch out of my codpiece and across the smithy floor.

There is no dignified way to write that sentence. I have been trying for three years.

The smith's name is Wenlock. He was ordered to melt me down — I am, on paper, eleven stone of scrap and a drainage hazard — and he weighed the order in his hand the way he weighs everything, and set it on the shelf where he keeps the things he is never going to do.

He does not try to fix me. That is the thing I cannot get over. Everyone else who ever handled me wanted me to be something — proof against arrows, proof of rank, proof there was nothing left worth salvaging. Wenlock only polishes. Every evening, after the paying work, he takes an oiled cloth to one joint — one, no more; we go at my pace — and he talks. Not at me. Near me. About the weather, the price of nails, his sister in Murkminster. And when the rain comes on hard and my visor slams and the floor takes another delivery of forty-year-old pond, he does not sigh. He fetches the mop, and says, "Bad night, old fellow?", and carries on about the nails.

Last Thursday, for the first time since the war, I let him lift the visor. Slowly. Both of us pretending it was about the hinge.

There is a frog living in my helmet again, by the way. A new one; it came in out of the rain. I have decided to allow it. It is not the same as before — nothing is the same as before — but it is company, and it pays its rent in silence, and when it breathes I can feel it through the steel, small and alive and entirely unbothered, which is more than forty years of mud ever gave me.

Even the hardest shell keeps the deep bruises of where it has been — and the kindest hands are the ones that polish without trying to fix.