Читать книгу The Book of Swords - Gardner Dozois, Гарднер Дозуа, Gardner Dozois - Страница 9

He was in my light. I didn’t look up. “What do you want?” I said.

“Excuse me, but are you the sword-smith?”

There are certain times when you have to concentrate. This was one of them. “Yes. Go away and come back later.”

“I haven’t told you what I—”

“Go away and come back later.”

He went away. I finished what I was doing. He came back later. In the interim, I did the third fold.

Forge-welding is a horrible procedure and I hate doing it. In fact, I hate doing all the many stages that go to creating the finished object; some of them are agonisingly difficult, some are exhausting, some of them are very, very boring; a lot of them are all three, it’s your perfect microcosm of human endeavour. What I love is the feeling you get when you’ve done them, and they’ve come out right. Nothing in the whole wide world beats that.

The third fold is—well, it’s the stage in making a sword-blade when you fold the material for the third time. The first fold is just a lot of thin rods, some iron, some steel, twisted together then heated white and forged into a single strip of thick ribbon. Then you twist, fold, and do it again. Then you twist, fold, and do it again. The third time is usually the easiest; the material’s had most of the rubbish beaten out of it, the flux usually stays put, and the work seems to flow that bit more readily under the hammer. It’s still a horrible job. It seems to take forever, and you can wreck everything you’ve done so far with one split second of carelessness; if you burn it or let it get too cold, or if a bit of scale or slag gets hammered in. You need to listen as well as look—for that unique hissing noise that tells you that the material is just starting to spoil but isn’t actually ruined yet; that’s the only moment at which one strip of steel will flow into another and form a single piece—so you can’t chat while you’re doing it. Since I spend most of my working day forge-welding, I have this reputation for unsociability. Not that I mind. I’d be unsociable if I were a ploughman.

He came back when I was shovelling charcoal. I can talk and shovel at the same time, so that was all right.

He was young, I’d say about twenty-three or -four; a tall bastard (all tall people are bastards; I’m five feet two) with curly blond hair like a wet fleece, a flat face, washed-out blue eyes, and a rather girly mouth. I took against him at first sight because I don’t like tall, pretty men. I put a lot of stock in first impressions. My first impressions are nearly always wrong. “What do you want?” I said.

“I’d like to buy a sword, please.”

I didn’t like his voice much, either. In that crucial first five seconds or so, voices are even more important to me than looks. Perfectly reasonable, if you ask me. Some princes look like rat-catchers, some rat-catchers look like princes, though the teeth usually give people away. But you can tell precisely where a man comes from and how well-off his parents were after a couple of words; hard data, genuine facts. The boy was quality—minor nobility—which covers everything from overambitious farmers to the younger brothers of dukes. You can tell immediately by the vowel sounds. They set my teeth on edge like bits of grit in bread. I don’t like the nobility much. Most of my customers are nobility, and most of the people I meet are customers.

“Of course you do,” I said, straightening my back and laying the shovel down on the edge of the forge. “What do you want it for?”

He looked at me as though I’d just leered at his sister. “Well, for fighting with.”

I nodded. “Off to the wars, are you?”

“At some stage, probably, yes.”

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” I said, and I made a point of looking him up and down, thoroughly and deliberately. “It’s a horrible life, and it’s dangerous. I’d stay home if I were you. Make yourself useful.”

I like to see how they take it. Call it my craftsman’s instinct. To give you an example; one of the things you do to test a really good sword is make it come compass—you fix the tang in a vise, then you bend it right round in a circle, until the point touches the shoulders; let it go, and it should spring back absolutely straight. Most perfectly good swords won’t take that sort of abuse; it’s an ordeal you reserve for the very best. It’s a horrible, cruel thing to do to a lovely artefact, and it’s the only sure way to prove its temper.

Talking of temper; he stared at me, then shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re busy. I’ll try somewhere else.”

I laughed. “Let me see to this fire and I’ll be right with you.”

The fire rules my life, like a mother and her baby. It has to be fed, or it goes out. It has to be watered—splashed round the edge of the bed with a ladle—or it’ll burn the bed of the forge. It has to be pumped after every heat, so I do all its breathing for it, and you can’t turn your back on it for two minutes. From the moment when I light it in the morning, an hour before sunrise, until the point where I leave it to starve itself to death overnight, it’s constantly in my mind, like something at the edge of your vision, or a crime on your conscience; you’re not always looking at it, but you’re always watching it. Given half a chance, it’ll betray you. Sometimes I think I’m married to the damn thing.

Indeed. I never had time for a wife. I’ve had offers; not from women, but from their fathers and brothers—he must be worth a bob or two, they say to themselves, and our Doria’s not getting any younger. But a man with a forge fire can’t fit a wife into his daily routine. I bake my bread in its embers, toast my cheese over it, warm a kettle of water twice a day to wash in, dry my shirts next to it. Some nights, when I’m too worn-out to struggle the ten yards to my bed, I sit on the floor with my back to it and go to sleep, and wake up in the morning with a cricked neck and a headache. The reason we don’t quarrel all the time is that it can’t speak. It doesn’t need to.

The fire and I have lived sociably together for twenty years, ever since I came back from the wars. Twenty years. In some jurisdictions, you get less for murder.

“The term sword,” I said, wiping dust and embers off the table with my sleeve, “can mean a lot of different things. I need you to be more specific. Sit down.”

He perched gingerly on the bench. I poured cider into two wooden bowls and put one down in front of him. There was dust floating on the top; there always is. Everything in my life comes with a frosting of dark grey gritty dust, courtesy of the fire. Bless him, he did his best to pretend it wasn’t there and took a little sip, like a girl.

“There’s your short riding sword,” I said, “and your thirty-inch arming sword, your sword-and-shield sword, which is either a constant flattened diamond section, what the army calls a Type Fifteen, or else with a half length fuller, your Type Fourteen; there’s your tuck, your falchion, your messer, side-sword or hanger; there’s your long sword, great sword, hand-and-a-half, Type Eighteen, true bastard, your great sword of war and your proper two-hander, though that’s a highly specialised tool, so you won’t be wanting one of them. And those are just the main headings. Which is why I asked you; what do you want it for?”

He looked at me, then deliberately drank a swallow of my horrible dusty cider. “For fighting with,” he said. “Sorry, I don’t know very much about it.”

“Have you got any money?”

He nodded, put his hand up inside his shirt and pulled out a little linen bag. It was dirty with sweat. He opened it, and five gold coins spilled onto my table.

There are almost as many types of coin as there are types of sword. These were besants; ninety-two parts fine, guaranteed by the Emperor. I picked one up. The artwork on a besant is horrible, crude and ugly. That’s because the design’s stayed the same for six hundred years, copied over and over again by ignorant and illiterate die-cutters; it stays the same because it’s trusted. They copy the lettering, but they don’t know their letters, so you just get shapes. It’s a good general rule, in fact; the prettier the coin, the less gold it contains; the uglier, conversely, the better. I knew a forger once. They caught him and hanged him because his work was too fine.

I put my cup on top of one coin, then pushed the other four back at him. “All right?”

He shrugged. “I want the very best.”

“It’d be wasted on you.”

“Even so.”

“Fine. The very best is what you’ll get. After all, once you’re dead, it’ll move on, sooner or later it’ll end up with someone who’ll be able to use it.” I grinned at him. “Most likely your enemy.”

He smiled. “You mean I’ll reward him for killing me.”

“The labourer is worthy of his hire,” I replied. “Right, since you haven’t got a clue what you want, I’ll have to decide for you. For your gold besant you’ll get a long sword. Do you know what that—?”

“No. Sorry.”

I scratched my ear. “Blade three feet long,” I said, “two and a half inches wide at the hilt, tapering straight to a needle point. The handle as long as your forearm, from the inside of your elbow to the tip of your middle finger. Weight absolutely no more than three pounds, and it’ll feel a good deal lighter than that because I’ll balance it perfectly. It’ll be a stabber more than a cutter because it’s the point that wins fights, not the edge. I strongly recommend a fuller—you don’t know what a fuller is, do you?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re getting one anyway. Will that do you?”

He sort of gazed at me as if I were the Moon. “I want the best sword ever made,” he said. “I can pay more if necessary.”

The best sword ever made. The silly thing was, I could do it. If I could be bothered. Or I could make him the usual and tell him it was the best sword ever made, and how could he possibly ever know? There are maybe ten men in the world qualified to judge. Me and nine others.

On the other hand; I love my craft. Here was a young fool saying; indulge yourself, at my expense. And the work, of course, the sword itself, would still be alive in a thousand years’ time, venerated and revered, with my name on the hilt. The best ever made; and if I didn’t do it, someone else would, and it wouldn’t be my name on it.

I thought for a moment, then leant forward, put my fingertips on two more of his coins, and dragged them towards me, like a ploughshare through clay. “All right?”

He shrugged. “You know about these things.”

I nodded. “In fact,” I said, and took a fourth coin. He didn’t move. It was as though he wasn’t interested. “That’s just for the plain sword,” I said. “I don’t do polishing, engraving, carving, chiselling, or inlay. I don’t set jewels in hilts because they chafe your hands raw and fall out. I don’t even make scabbards. You can have it tarted up later if you want, but that’s up to you.”

“The plain sword will do me just fine,” he said.

Which puzzled me.

I have a lot of experience of the nobility. This one—his voice was exactly right, so I could vouch for him, as though I’d known him all my life. The clothes were plain, good quality, old but well looked after; a nice pair of boots, though I’d have said they were a size too big, so maybe inherited. Five besants is a vast, stunning amount of money, but I got the impression it was all he had.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Your father died, and your elder brother got the house and the land. Your portion was five gold bits. You accept that that’s how it’s got to be, but you’re bitter. You think; I’ll blow the lot on the best sword ever made and go off and carve myself out a fortune, like Robert the Fox or Boamund. Something like that?”

A very slight nod. “Something like that.”

“Fine,” I said. “A certain category of people and their money are easily parted. If you live long enough to get some sense beaten into you, you’ll get rather more than four gold bits for the sword, and then you can buy a nice farm.”

He smiled. “That’s all right, then.”

I like people who take no notice when I’m rude to them.

“Can I watch?” he asked.

That’s a question that could get you in real trouble, depending on context. Like the man and woman you’ve just thought of, my answer is usually No. “If you like,” I said. “Yes, why not? You can be a witness.”

He frowned. “That’s an odd choice of word.”

“Like a prophet in scripture,” I said. “When He turns water into wine or raises the dead or recites the Law out of a burning tree. There has to be someone on hand to see, or what’s the good in it?”

(I remembered saying that, later.)

Now he nodded. “A miracle.”

“Along those lines. But a miracle is something you didn’t expect to happen.”

Off to the wars. We talk about “the wars” as though it’s a place; leave Perimadeia on the north road till you reach a crossroads, bear left, take the next right, just past the old ruined mill, you can’t miss it. At the very least, a country, with its own language, customs, distinctive national dress and regional delicacies. But in theory, every war is different, as individual and unique as a human being; each war has parents that influence it, but grows up to follow its own nature and beget its own offspring. But we talk about people en masse—the Aelians, the Mezentines, the Rosinholet—as though a million disparate entities can be combined into one, the way I twist and hammer a faggot of iron rods into a single ribbon. And when you look at them, the wars are like that; like a crowd of people. When you’re standing among them, they’re all different. Step back three hundred yards, and all you see is one shape: an army, say, advancing toward you. We call that shape “the enemy,” it’s the dragon we have to kill in order to prevail and be heroes. By the time it reaches us, it’s delaminated into individuals, into one man at a time, rushing at us waving a spear, out to do us harm, absolutely terrified, just as we are.

We say “the wars,” but here’s a secret. There is only one war. It’s never over. It flows, like the metal at white heat under the hammer, and joins up with the last war and the next war, to form one continuous ribbon. My father went to the wars, I went to the wars, my son will go to the wars, and his son after him, and it’ll be the same place. Like going to Boc Bohec. My father went there, before they pulled down the White Temple and when Foregate was still open fields. I went there, and Foregate was a marketplace. When my son goes there, they’ll have built houses on Foregate; but the place will still be Boc Bohec, and the war will still be the war. Same place, same language and local customs, slightly altered by the prevailing fashions in valour and misery, which come around and go around. In my time at the wars, hilts were curved and pommels were round or teardrop. These days, I do mostly straight cross hilts and scent-bottle pommels, which were all the rage a hundred years ago. There are fashions in everything. The tides go in and out, but the sea is always the sea.

My wars were in Ultramar; which isn’t a place-name, it’s just Aelian for “across the sea.” Ultramar, which was what we were fighting for, wasn’t a piece of land, a geographical entity. It was an idea; the kingdom of God on Earth. You won’t find it on a map—not now, that’s for sure; we lost, and all the places we used to know are called something else now, in another language, which we could never be bothered to learn. We weren’t there for the idea, of course, although it was probably a good one at the time. We were there to rob ourselves a fortune and go home princes.

Some places aren’t marked on maps, and everybody knows how to find them. Just follow the others and you’re there.

“There’s not a lot to see at this stage,” I told him. “You might want to go away for a while.”

“That’s all right.” He sat down on the spare anvil and bit into one of my apples, which I hadn’t given him. “What are you doing with all that junk? I thought you were going to start on the sword.”

I told myself; he’s paying a lot of money, probably everything he’s got in the world; he’s entitled to be stupid, if he wants to. “This,” I told him, “isn’t junk. It’s your sword.”

He peered over my shoulder. “No it’s not. It’s a load of old horseshoes and some clapped-out files.”

“It is now, yes. You just watch.”

I don’t know what it is about old horseshoes; nobody does. Most people reckon it’s the constant bashing down on the stony ground though that’s just not true. But horseshoes make the best swords. I heated them to just over cherry red, flipped them onto the anvil, and belted them with the big hammer, flattening and drawing down; bits of rust and scale shot across the shop, it’s a messy job and it’s got to be done quickly, before the iron cools to grey. By the time I’d finished with them, they were long, squarish rods, about a quarter-inch thick. I put them on one side, then did the same for the files. They’re steel, the stuff that you can harden; the horseshoes are iron, which stays soft. It’s the mix, the weave of hard and soft that makes a good blade.

“What are they supposed to be, then? Skewers?”

I’d forgotten he was there. Patient, I’ll say that for him. “I’ll be at this for hours yet,” I told him. “Why don’t you go away and come back in the morning? Nothing interesting to see till then.”

He yawned. “I’ve got nowhere in particular to go,” he said. “I’m not bothering you, am I?”

“No,” I lied.

“I still don’t see what those bits of stick have got to do with my sword.”

What the hell. I could use a rest. It’s a bad idea to work when you’re tired, you make mistakes. I tipped a scuttle of charcoal onto the fire, damped it down, and sat on the swedge block. “Where do you think steel comes from?”

He scratched his head. “Permia?”

Not such an ignorant answer. In Permia there are deposits of natural steel. You crush the iron ore and smelt it, and genuine hardening steel oozes out, all ready to use. But it’s literally worth its weight in gold, and since we’re at war with Permia, it’s hard to get hold of. Besides, I find it’s too brittle, unless you temper it exactly right. “Steel,” I told him, “is iron that’s been forged out over and over again in a charcoal fire. Nobody has the faintest idea how it works, but it does. It takes two strong men a whole day to make enough steel for one small file.”

He shrugged. “It’s expensive. So what?”

“And it’s too hard,” I told him. “Drop it on the floor, it’ll shatter like glass. So you temper it, so it’ll bend then spring back straight. But it’s sulky stuff; good for chisels and files, not so good for swords and scythe-blades, which want a bit of bounce in them. So we weave it together with iron, which is soft and forgiving. Iron and steel cancel out each other’s faults, and you get what you want.”

He looked at me. “Weave together.”

I nodded. “Watch.”

You take your five rods and lay them side by side, touching; steel, iron, steel, iron, steel. You wire them tightly together, like building a raft. You lay them in the fire, edge downwards, not flat; when they’re white-hot and starting to hiss like a snake, you pull them out and hammer them. If you’ve got it right, you get showers of white sparks, and you can actually see the metal weld together—it’s a sort of black shadow under the glowing white surface, flowing like a liquid. What it is, I don’t know, and not being inclined to mysticism I prefer not to speculate.

Then you heat the flat plate you’ve just made to yellow, grip one end in the vise and twist your plate into a rope, which you then forge flat; heat and twist and flatten, five times isn’t too many. If you’ve done it right, you have a straight, flat bar, inch wide, quarter-inch thick, with no trace of a seam or laminations; one solid thing from five. Then you heat it up and draw it out, fold it and weld it again. Now can you see why I talk about weaving? There is no more iron or steel, no power on earth will ever separate them again. But the steel is still hard and the iron is still yielding, and that’s what makes the finished blade come compass in the vise, if you’re prepared to take the risk.

I lose track of time when I’m forge-welding. I stop when it’s done, and not before; and I realise how tired and wet with sweat and thirsty I am, and how many hot zits and cinders have burnt their way through my clothes and blistered my skin. The joy isn’t in the doing but the having-done.

You weld in the near dark, so you can see what’s going on in the heart of the fire and the hot metal. I looked to where I know the doorway is, but it was all pitch-dark outside the orange ring of firelight. It’s just as well I have no neighbours, or they’d get no sleep.

He was asleep, though, in spite of all the noise. I nudged his foot and he sat up straight. “Did I miss something?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“But that’s all right,” I said. “We’ve barely started yet.”

Logic dictates that I had a life before I went to Ultramar. I must have had; I was nineteen when I went there, twenty-six when I came back. Before I went there, I seem to recall a big comfortable house in a valley, and dogs and hawks and horses and a father and two elder brothers. They may all still be there, for all I know. I’ve never been back.

Seven years in Ultramar. Most of us didn’t make it past the first six months. A very few, the file-hard, unkillable sort, survived as long as three years; by which point, you could almost see the marks where the wind and rain had worn them down to bedrock, or the riverbeds and salt stalactites on their cheeks; they were old, old men, the three-year boys, and not one of them over twenty-five.

I did three years and immediately signed on for another three; then another three after that, of which I served one. Then I was sent home, in disgrace. Nobody ever gets sent home from Ultramar, which is where the judge sends you if you’ve murdered someone and hanging is too good for you. They need every man they can get, and they use them up at a stupid rate, like a farmer with his winter fodder in a very bad year. They say that the enemy collects our bones from the battlefields and grinds them down for bonemeal, which is how come they have such excellent wheat harvests. The usual punishment for really unforgivable crimes in Ultramar is a tour of duty at the front; you have to prove genuine extenuating circumstances and show deep remorse to get the noose instead. Me, though, they sent home, in disgrace, because nobody could bear the sight of me a moment longer. And, to be fair, I can’t say I blame them.

I don’t sleep much. The people in the village say it’s because I have nightmares, but really I simply don’t find the time. Once you’ve started welding, you don’t stop. Once you’ve welded the core, you want to get on and do the edges, then you want to weld the edges to the core, then the job’s done, and there’s some new pest nagging you to start the next one. I tend to sleep when I’m tired, which is roughly every four days.

In case your heart is bleeding for me; when the job’s done and I get paid, I throw the money in an old barrel I brought back from the wars. I think originally it contained arrowheads. Anyway, I have no idea how much is in there, but it’s about half-full. I do all right.

Like I told you, I lose track of time when I’m working. Also, I forget about things, such as people. I clean forgot about the boy for a whole day, but when I remembered him he was still there, perched on the spare anvil, his face black with dust and soot. He’d tied a bit of rag over his nose and mouth, which was fine by me since it stopped him talking.

“Haven’t you got anything better to do?” I asked.

“No, not really.” He yawned and stretched. “I think I’m starting to get the hang of this. Basically, it’s the idea that a lot of strands woven together are stronger than just one. Like the body politic.”

“Have you had anything to eat recently? Since you stole my apple?”

He shook his head. “Not hungry.”

“Have you got any money for food?”

He smiled. “I’ve got a whole gold besant. I could buy a farm.”

“Not around here.”

“Yes, well, it’s prime arable land. Where I come from, you could buy a whole valley.”

I sighed. “There’s bread and cheese indoors,” I said, “and a side of bacon.”

At least that got rid of him for a bit, and I closed up the fold and decided I needed a rest. I’d been staring at white-hot metal for rather too long, and I could barely see past all the pretty shining colours.

He came back with half a loaf and all my cheese. “Have some,” he said, like he owned the place.

I don’t talk with my mouth full, it’s rude, so I waited till I’d finished. “So where are you from, then?”

“Fin Mohec. Heard of it?”

“It’s a fair-sized town.”

“Ten miles north of Fin, to be exact.”

“I knew a man from Fin once.”

“In Ultramar?”

I frowned. “Who told you that?”

“Someone in the village.”

I nodded. “Nice part of the world, the Mohec valley.”

“If you’re a sheep, maybe. And we weren’t in the valley, we were up on the moor. It’s all heather and granite outcrops.”

I’ve been there. “So,” I said, “you left home to seek your fortune.”

“Hardly.” He spat something out, probably a hard bit of bacon rind. You can break your teeth on that stuff. “I’d go back like a shot if there were anything left for me there. Where were you in Ultramar, precisely?”

“Oh, all over the place,” I said. “So, if you like the Mohec so much, why did you leave?”

“To come here. To see you. To buy a sword.” A decidedly forced grin. “Why else?”

“What do you need a sword for in the Mohec hills?”

“I’m not going to use it there.”

The words had come out in a rush, like beer spilt when some fool jostles your arm in the taproom. He took a deep breath, then went on, “At least, I don’t imagine I will.”

“Really.”

He nodded. “I’m going to use it to kill the man who murdered my father, and I don’t think he lives round here.”

I got into this business by accident. That is, I got off the boat from Ultramar, and fifty yards from the dock was a forge. I had one thaler and five copper stuivers in my pocket, the clothes I’d worn under my armour for the last two years, and a sword worth twenty gold angels that I’d never sell, under any circumstances. I walked over to the forge and offered to give the smith the thaler if he taught me his trade.

“Get lost,” he said.

People don’t talk to me like that. So I spent the thaler on a third-hand anvil, a selection of unsuitable hammers, a rasp, a leg-vise and a bucket, and I lugged that damned anvil around with me—three hundredweight—until I found a half-derelict shed out back of a tannery. I offered the tanner three stuivers for rent, bought a stuiver’s worth of rusty files and two barley loaves, and taught myself the trade, with the intention of putting the other smith out of business within a year.

In the event it took me six months. I grant you, I knew a little bit more about the trade than the foregoing implies; I’d sat in the smithy at home on cold mornings and watched our man there, and I pick things up quickly; also, you learned to do all sorts of things in Ultramar, particularly skills pertaining to repairing or improvising equipment, most of which we got from the enemy, with holes in it. When I decided to specialise, it was a toss-up whether I was going to be a sword-smith or an armourer. Literally; I flipped a coin for it. I lost the toss, and here I am.

Did I mention that I have my own water-wheel? I built it myself and I’m ridiculously proud of it. I based it on one I saw (saw, inspected, then set fire to) in Ultramar. It’s overshot, with a twelve-foot throw, and it runs off a stream that comes tumbling and bouncing down the hill and over a sheer cliff where the hillside’s fallen away. It powers my grindstone and my trip-hammer, the only trip-hammer north of the Vossin, also built by me. I’m a clever bugger.

You can’t forge-weld with a trip-hammer; you need to be able to see what you’re doing, and feel the metal flowing into itself. At least, I can’t; I’m not perfect. But it’s ideal for working the finished material down into shape, takes all the effort out of it, though by God you have to concentrate. A light touch is what you need. The hammer-head weighs half a ton. I’ve had so much practice I can use it to break the shell on a boiled egg.

I also made spring-swedges, for putting in fullers and profiling the edges of the blade. You can call it cheating if you like; I prefer to call it precision and perfection. Thanks to the trip-hammer and the swedges I get straight, even, flat, incrementally distal-tapered sword-blades that don’t curl up like corkscrews when you harden and quench them; because every blow of the hammer is exactly the same strength as the previous one, and the swedges allow no scope for human error, such as you inevitably get trying to judge it all by eye.

If I were inclined to believe in gods, I think I’d probably worship the trip-hammer even though I made it myself. Reasons; first, it’s so much stronger than I am, or any man living, and tireless, and those are essential qualities for a god. It sounds like a god; it drowns out everything, and you can’t hear yourself think. Second, it’s a creator. It shapes things, turns strips and bars of raw material into recognisable objects with a use and a life of their own. Third, and most significant, it rains down blows, tirelessly, overwhelmingly, it strikes twice in the time it takes my heart to beat once. It’s a smiter, and that’s what gods do, isn’t it? They hammer and hammer and keep on hammering, till either you’re swaged into shape or you’re a bloody pulp.

“Is that it?” he said. I could tell he wasn’t impressed.

“It’s not finished. It has to be ground first.”

My grindstone is as tall as I am, a flat round sandstone cheese. The river turns it, which is just as well because I couldn’t. You have to be very careful, with the most delicate touch. It eats metal, and heats it too, so if your concentration wanders for a split second, you’ve drawn the temper and the sword will bend like a strip of lead. But I’m a real artist with a grindstone. I wrap a scarf three times round my nose and mouth, to keep the dust from choking me, and wear thick gloves, because if you touch the stone when it’s running full tilt, it’ll take your skin off down to the bone before you can flinch away. When you’re grinding, you’re the eye of a storm of white and gold sparks. They burn your skin and set your shirt on fire, but you can’t let little things like that distract you.

Everything I do takes total concentration. Probably that’s why I do this job.

I don’t do fancy finishes. I say, if you want a mirror, buy a mirror. But my blades take and keep an edge you can shave with, and they come compass.

“Is this strictly necessary?” he asked, as I clamped the tang in the vise.

“No,” I said, and reached for the wrench.

“Only, if you break it, you’ll have to start again from scratch, and I want to get on.”

“The best ever made,” I reminded him, and he gave me a grudging nod.

For that job I use a scroll monkey. It’s a sort of massive fork you use for bending scrollwork, if that’s your idea of a useful and productive life. It takes every last drop of my strength (and I’m no weakling), all to perform a test that might well wreck the thing that’s been my life and soul for the last ten days and nights, which the customer barely appreciates and which makes me feel sick to my stomach. But it has to be done. You bend the blade until the tip touches the jaw of the vise, then you gently let it go back. Out it comes from the vise, and you lay it on the perfectly straight, flat bed of the anvil. You get down on your knees, looking for a tiny hair of light between the edge of the blade and the anvil. If you see it, the blade goes in the scrap.

“Here,” I said, “come and look for yourself.”

He got down beside me. “What am I looking for, exactly?”

“Nothing. It isn’t there. That’s the point.”

“Can I get up now, please?”

Perfectly straight; so straight that not even light can squeeze through the gap. I hate all the steps on the way to perfection, the effort and the noise and the heat and the dust, but when you get there, you’re glad to be alive.

I slid the hilt, grip, and pommel down over the tang, fixed the blade in the vise, and peened the end of the tang into a neat little button. Then I took the sword out of the vise and offered it to him, hilt first. “All done,” I said.

“Finished?”

“Finished. All yours.”

I remember one kid I made a sword for, an earl’s son, seven feet tall and strong as a bull. I handed him his finished sword; he took a good grip on the hilt, then swung it round his head and brought it down full power on the horn of the anvil. It bit a chunk out, then bounced back a foot in the air, the edge undamaged. So I punched him halfway across the room. You clown, I said, look what you’ve done to my anvil. When he got up, he was in tears. But I forgave him, years later. There’s a thrill when you hold a good sword for the first time. It sort of tugs at your hands, like a dog wanting to be taken for a walk. You want to swish it about and hit things with it. At the very least, you do a few cuts and wards, on the pretext of checking the balance and the handling.

He just took it from me, as though I’d given him a shopping list. “Thanks,” he said.

“My pleasure,” I replied. “Well, good-bye. You can go now,” I added, when he didn’t move. “I’m busy.”

“There was something else,” he said.

I’d already turned my back on him. “What?”

“I don’t know how to fence.”

He was born, he told me, in a haybarn on the moor overlooking his father’s house, at noon on midsummer’s day. His mother, who should have known better, had insisted on riding out in the dog-cart with her maid to take lunch to the hawking party. Her pains came on, and there wasn’t time to get back to the house, but the barn was there and full of clean hay, with a stream nearby. His father, riding home with his hawk on his wrist, saw her from the track, lying in the hay with the baby on her lap. He’d had a good day, he told her. They’d got four pigeons and a heron.

His father hadn’t wanted to go to Ultramar; but he held of the duke and the duke was going, so he didn’t really have any choice. In the event, the duke died of camp-fever a week after they landed. The boy’s father lasted nine months; then he got himself killed, by his best friend, in a pointless brawl in a tavern. He was twenty-two when he died. “The same age,” said the boy, “as I am now.”

“That’s a sad story,” I told him. “And a very stupid one. Mind you, all stories from Ultramar are stupid if you ask me.”

He scowled at me. “Maybe there’s too much stupidity in the world,” he said. “Maybe I want to do something about it.”

I nodded. “You could diminish the quantity considerably by dying, I grant you. But maybe it’s too high a price to pay.”

His eyes were cold and bright. “The man who killed my father is still alive,” he said. “He’s settled and prosperous, happy, he’s got everything he could possibly want. He came through the nightmare of Ultramar, and now the world makes sense to him again, and he’s a useful and productive member of society, admired and respected by his peers and his betters.”

“So you’re going to cut his throat.”

He shook his head. “Not likely,” he said. “That would be murder. No, I’m going to fight him sword to sword. I’m going to beat him and prove myself the better man. Then I’ll kill him.”

I was tactfully silent for a moment. Then I said; “And you know absolutely nothing about sword-fighting.”

“No. My father should’ve taught me, it’s what fathers do. But he died when I was two years old. I don’t know the first thing about it.”

“And you’re going to challenge an old soldier, and you’re going to prove yourself the better man. I see.”

He was looking me straight in the eye. I always feel uncomfortable when people do that even though I spend my life gazing at white-hot metal. “I asked about you,” he said. “They reckon you were a great fencer.”

I sighed. “Who told you that?”

“Were you?”

“Were implies a state of affairs that no longer prevails,” I said. “Who told you about me?”

He shrugged. “Friends of my father. You were a legend in Ultramar, apparently. Everybody’d heard of you.”

“The defining characteristic of a legend is that it isn’t true,” I said. “I can fight, a bit. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You’re going to teach me.”

I remember one time in Ultramar, we were smashing up this village. We did a lot of that. They called it chevauchee, but that’s just chivalry talk for burning barns and stamping on chickens. It’s supposed to break the enemy’s will to fight. Curiously enough, it has exactly the opposite effect. Anyway, I was in this farmyard. I had a torch in my hand, and I was going to set fire to a hayrick, like you do. And there was this dog. It was a stupid little thing, the sort you keep to catch rats, little more than a rat itself; and it jumped out at me, barking its head off, and it sank its teeth into my leg, and it simply would not let go, and I couldn’t get at it to stab it with my knife, not without stabbing myself in the process. I dropped the torch and danced round the farmyard, trying to squash it against walls, but it didn’t seem to make any odds. It was the most ridiculous little thing, and in the end it beat me. I staggered out into the lane, and it let go, dropped off, and sprinted back into the yard. My sergeant had to light the rick with a fire-arrow, and I never lived it down.

I looked at him. I recognised the look in his silly pink face. “Is that right,” I said.

“Yes. I need the best sword and the best teacher. I’ll pay you. You can have the fifth coin.”

A gold besant. Actually, the proper name is hyperpyron, meaning “extra fine.” The enemy took so many of them off us in Ultramar that they adopted them in place of their own currency. That’s war for you; the enemy turn into you, and you turn into them, like the iron and steel rods under the hammer. The only besants you see over here are ones that got brought back, but they’re current everywhere. “I’m not interested in money,” I said.

“I know. Neither am I. But if you pay a man to do a job and he takes your money, he’s obliged.”

“I’m a lousy teacher,” I told him.

“That’s all right, I’m a hopeless student. We’ll get on like a barn on fire.”

If ever I get a dog, it’ll be one of those rat-like terriers. Maybe I just warm to aggressive creatures, I don’t know. “You can take your coin and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine,” I told him. “You overpaid me for the sword. We’ll call it change.”

The sword isn’t a very good weapon. Most forms of armour are proof against it, including a properly padded jerkin; it’s too long to be handy in a scrum and too light and flimsy for serious bashing. In a pitched battle, give me a spear or an axe any time; in fact, nine times out of ten you’d be better off with everyday farm tools—staff-hooks, beanhooks, muck-forks, provided they’re made of good material and properly tempered. Better still, give me a bow and someone in armour to hide behind. The fighting man’s best view of a battlefield is down an arrow, from under a pikeman’s armpit. For self-defence on the road, I favour the quarterstaff; in the street or indoors, where space to move is at a premium, the knife you cut your bread and peel your apples with is as good as anything. You’re used to it, for one thing, and you know where it is on your belt without having to look.

About the only thing a sword is really good for is sword-fighting—which in practice means duelling, which is idiotic and against the law, or fencing, which is playing at fighting, good fun and nobody gets hurt, but not really my idea of entertainment—and showing off. Which is why, needless to say, we all went to Ultramar with swords on our hips. Some of us had beautiful new swords, the more fortunate ones had really old swords, family heirlooms, worth a thousand acres of good farmland, with buildings, stock, and tenants. The thing is—don’t say I told you so—the old ones aren’t necessarily the best. There was even less good steel about two hundred years ago than there is now, and men were stronger then, so old swords are heavier, harder to use, broader, and with rounded points for cutting, not thrusting. Not that it mattered. Most of those young swashbucklers died of the poisoned shits, before the desert sun had had a chance to fade the clothes they arrived in, and their swords were sold to pay their mess bills. You could pick up some real bargains back then, in Ultramar.

“I don’t know how to teach,” I said, “I’ve never ever done it. So I’m going to teach you the way my father taught me, because it’s the only way I know. Is that all right?”

He didn’t notice me picking up the rake. “Fine,” he said. So I pulled the head off the rake—it was always loose—and hit him with the handle.

I remember my first lesson so well. The main difference was, my father used a broom. First, he poked me in the stomach, hard, with one end. As I doubled up, gasping for breath, he hit my knee-cap, so I fell over. Then he put the end of the broom-handle on my throat and applied controlled pressure.

I could only just breathe. “You didn’t get out of the way,” he explained.

I was five when I had my first lesson, and easier to teach to the ground than a full-grown man. I had to tread on the inside of his knee to get him to drop. When eventually he got his breath back, I saw he was crying; actually in tears. “You didn’t get out of the way,” I explained.

He looked up at me and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “I see,” he said.

“You won’t make that mistake again,” I told him. “From now on, whenever a fellow human being is close enough to hit you, you’re going to assume that he’s going to hit you. You’ll keep your distance, or you’ll be ready to avoid at a split-second’s notice. Got that?”

“I think so.”

“No exceptions,” I said. “Not any, ever. Your brother, your best friend, your wife, your six-year-old daughter, it makes no odds. Otherwise you’ll never be a fighter.”

He stared at me for a moment, and I guessed he’d understood. It was like that moment in the old play, where the Devil offers the scholar the contract, and the scholar signs it.

“Get up.”

I hit him again when he was halfway to his feet. It was just a light tap on the collarbone; just enough to hurt like hell without breaking anything.

“This is all for my own good, I take it.”

“Oh yes. This is the most important lesson you’ll ever learn.”

We spent the next four hours on footwork; the traces, which is backwards and forwards, and the traverses, which is side to side. Each time I hit him, I laid it on a bit harder. He got there eventually.

My father wasn’t a bad man. He loved his family dearly, with all his heart; nothing meant more to him. But he had a slight, let’s say, kink in his nature—like the cold spot or the inclusion you sometimes get in a weld, where the metal wasn’t quite hot enough, or a bit of grit or crap gets beaten into the joint. He liked hurting people; it gave him a thrill. Only people, not animals. He was a fine stockman and a humane and conscientious hunter, but he dearly loved to hit people and make them squeal.

I can understand that, partly because I’m the same though to a lesser degree, and I control it better. Maybe it’s always been there in the blood, or maybe it was a souvenir from Ultramar; both, probably. I rationalise it in forge-welding terms. You can heat the metal white-hot, but you can’t just lay one bit on top of the other and expect them to weld. You’ve got to hit them to make the join. Carefully, judiciously, not too hard and not too soft. Just enough to make the metal cry, and weep sparks. I hate it when they burst into tears, though. It makes me despise them, and I have to take pains to control my temper. Anyway, you can see why I like to stay out of people’s way. I know what’s wrong with me; and knowing your own flaws is the beginning of wisdom. I’m sort of a reverse fencer. I stay well out of distance, partly so that people can’t hit me, mostly so I can’t hit them.

Once you’ve learned footwork, the rest is relatively easy. I taught him the eight cuts and the seven wards (I stick to seven; the other four are just elaborations). He picked them up quickly, now that he understood the essence—don’t let him hurt you, followed by make him safe.

“The best way to make a man safe,” I told him, “is to hurt him. Pain will stop him in his tracks. Killing doesn’t always do it. You can stab a man and he’ll be past all hope, but he can still hurt you very badly before he drops to the ground. But if you paralyse him with pain, he’s no longer a threat. You can then despatch him, or let him go, at your pleasure.”

I demonstrated; I flicked past his guard and prodded him in the stomach with my rake-handle; a lethal thrust, but he was still on his feet. Then I cracked him on the knee, and he dropped. “Killing’s irrelevant,” I told him. “Pain wins fights. That’s unless you’ve absolutely set your heart on cleaving him to the navel, and that’s just melodrama, which will get you killed. In a battle, hurt him and move on to the next threat. In a duel, win and be merciful. Fewer legal problems that way.”

I was rather enjoying being a teacher, as you’ve probably gathered. I was passing on valuable knowledge and skill, which is in itself rewarding, I was showing off and I was hitting an annoying sprig of the nobility for his own good. What’s not to like?

You learn best when you’re exhausted, desperate, and in pain. Ultramar taught me that. I kept him at it from dawn till dusk, and then we lit the lamp and did theory. I taught him the line and the circle. Instinctively you want to fight up and down a line, forwards to attack, backwards to defend; parry, then lunge, then parry. All wrong. Idiotic. Instead, you should fight in a circle, stepping sideways, so you avoid him and can hit him at the same time. Never just defend; always counterattack. Every handstroke you make should be a killing stroke, or a stopping stroke. And for every movement of the hand, a movement of the foot—there, I’ve just taught you the whole secret and mystery of swordsmanship, and I never had to hit you once.

“Most fights,” I told him, giving him a chance to wipe the blood out of his eyes before we moved on, “in which at least one party is competent, last one to four seconds. Anything more than that is a fitting subject for epic poetry.” Judging that he wasn’t ready yet, I shot a quick mandiritto at the side of his head. He stepped back and left out of the way without thinking, and my heart rejoiced inside me, as I side-stepped his riposte in straight time and closed the door with the Third ward. So far he hadn’t hit me once, which was a little disappointing; but he’d come close four times, in six hours. Very promising indeed. He just lacked the killer instinct.

“The Fifth ward,” I went on, and he lunged. I almost didn’t read it, because he’d disguised the Boar’s Tooth as the Iron Gate; all I could do was trace back very fast and smack the stick out of his hands. Then I whacked him, for interrupting me when I was talking. He very nearly got out of the way, but I wanted to hit him, so he couldn’t.

He had to pick himself up off the ground after that. I took a long step back, to signal a truce. “I think it’s time for a progress report,” I said. “At the moment, you’re very good indeed. Not the best in the world, but more than capable of beating ninety-nine men in a hundred. Would you like to stop there and save yourself further pain and humiliation?”

He got up slowly and dabbed at his cut eye. “I want to be the best,” he said. “If that’s all right.”

I shrugged. “I don’t think you ever can be,” I told him. “In order to be the best, you have to lose so much. It’s just not worth it. Being the best will make you into a monster. Stick with just plain good, you’ll be so much happier.”

He was a pitiful sight, all cuts and bruises. But still, under all the blood and discoloured tissue, a hopeful, pretty boy. “I think I’d like to carry on just a bit longer if you don’t mind.”

“Please yourself,” I said, and let him pick up his stick.

Actually, he reminded me a lot of myself at his age.

I was a brash, irritating boy when I went to Ultramar. I’d known all along that I wasn’t going to get the land, having elder brothers in good health. Probably I’d always resented that. I think I’d have made a good farmer. I was always the one who wasn’t afraid of hard work, who saw the need to get things done—not tomorrow, or when we’ve got five minutes, or when it stops raining, but now, right now; before the roof-tree breaks and the barn falls down, before the fence-posts snap off and the sheep get out into the marsh, before the oats spoil on the stalk, before the meat goes off in the heat; now while there’s still time, before it’s too late. Instead, I saw the place gradually falling to pieces—and decline and decay are so peacefully gradual; grass takes so long to grow up through the cobbles, it’s imperceptible, therefore not threatening. But my father and my brothers didn’t share my view. I was keen to get away from them. I wanted to take a sword and slice myself a fat chunk of the world off the bone. There’s good land in Ultramar, they told me, all it needs is a bit of hard work and it could be the best in the world.

The very best; that’s a concept that’s danced ahead of me, just out of reach, all my life. Now, of course, I am the very best, at one small corner of one specific craft. I’m stuck, wedged in by my own pre-eminence, like a rafter lying across your leg in a burning house.

But never mind; I went to Ultramar aiming to be a farmer. When I got there, I found what was left after seventy years of continual reciprocal chevauchees. I recognised it at once. It was what was going to happen to my father’s land back home, but in macrocosm. All the barns fallen, all the fences broken down, all the crops spoilt, briars and nettles neck-high in all the good pastures; the effects of peace and idleness accelerated and forced (like you force early crops, under straw) by the merely instrumental action of the wars. Cut myself off a slice of that, I said to myself; why the hell would I want to bother? So I started hurting people instead.

And the thing is, if you do it in war, they praise you for it. Strange, but true.

In war, there’s so much scope, you can afford to be selective. You can afford to limit yourself to hurting the enemy, of whom there are plenty to go round, and twice as many again once you’ve finished what’s on your plate. I survived in Ultramar because I was having the time of my life, for a while.

Odd thing about farmers; they love their land and their stock and their buildings, fences, trees, but give them the chance to wreck someone else’s land, kill their stock, burn their buildings, smash their fences, maim their trees, and after a brief show of reluctance they go to it with a will. I think it’s just basic revenge; take that, agriculture, that’ll learn you. Volunteers for a chevauchee? My hand was up before I had time to think.

And then I did something bad, and I had to come home. I cried when they pronounced sentence. I despise men who cry. They told me I was to be spared the noose in recognition of my years of valiant and honourable service. I don’t think so. I think they were just being very, very spiteful.

There came a moment, very sudden and unexpected, when it was over, and I’d succeeded. I went to smack him—a feint high followed by a cut low—and he simply wasn’t there to be hit; and then my ear stung horribly, and while I was confused and distracted by the pain, he dug me in the pit of the stomach with his broom-handle.

He wasn’t like me. He took a long step back and let me recover. “I’m sorry,” he said.

It took me quite awhile to get back enough breath to say, “No, don’t apologise, whatever you do.” Then I squared up into First. “Again.”

“Really?”

“Don’t be so bloody stupid. Again.”

I let him come at me, because attacking is so much harder. I read him like a book, swung easily into a traverse and the devastating volte, my speciality; and he cracked me on the elbow as I floundered past him, then prodded me in the small of the back, just before I overbalanced and fell over.

He helped me up. “I think I’m starting to get the hang of this,” he said.

I went for him. I wanted to beat him, more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I couldn’t get anywhere near him, and he kept hitting me, gently, just to make a point. After a dozen or so passes, I dropped to my knees. All my strength had drained out of me, as though one of his gentle prods had punctured right to my heart. “I give up,” I said. “You win.”

He was looking down at me with a sort of confused frown. “I don’t follow.”

“You’ve beaten me,” I said. “You’re now the better man.”

“Really?”

“What do you want, a bloody certificate? Yes.”

He nodded slowly. “Which makes you the best ever teacher,” he said. “Thank you.”

I threw away the rake-handle. “You’re welcome,” I said. “Now go away. We’re finished with each other.”

He was still looking at me. “So am I really the best swordsman in the world?”

I laughed. “I don’t know about that,” I said, “but you’re better than me. That makes you very good indeed. I hope you’re satisfied because as far as I’m concerned, this has been a pretty pointless exercise.”

“No,” he said, and his tone of voice made me look at him. “This was all for a purpose, remember.”

Actually, I’d forgotten, briefly. “Oh yes,” I said, “it’s so you can kill the man who murdered your father.” I shook my head. “You still want to do that.”

“Oh yes.”

I sighed. “I’d hoped I might have smacked some sense into you,” I said. “Come on, you must’ve learned something. Think about it. What’s that possibly going to achieve?”

“It’ll make me feel better,” he said.

“Right. I don’t think so. I’ve killed God knows how many people, all of them the enemy, and believe me, it never makes you feel better. It just hardens you, like forging the edges.”

He grinned. “And hard is brittle, yes, I know. The extended metaphor hasn’t been lost on me, I assure you.”

It didn’t hurt quite so much by then, and I was breathing almost normally. “Well,” I said, “I guess it’s something you’ve got to get out of your system, then you can get on with your life. You carry on, and good luck to you.”

He smiled at me, awkwardly. “So I have your blessing, then?”

“That’s a bloody stupid way of putting it, but if you want to, then yes. My blessing goes with you, my son. There, is that what you wanted?”

He laughed. “As a father you have been to me, for a little while.” It was a quotation from somewhere, though I can’t place it. “You think I can beat him?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “It’s always easier the second time.”

Now I’m not particularly slow on the uptake, not usually. But I admit, it took me a moment. And in that moment, he said, “You never asked my name.”

“Well?”

“My name is Aimeric de Peguilhan,” he said. “My father was Bernhart de Peguilhan. You murdered him in a brawl, in Ultramar. You smashed his skull with a stone bottle, when his back was turned.” He dropped the broom-handle. “Wait there,” he said, “I’ll fetch the swords and be right back.”

I’m telling this story, so you know what happened.

He had the best sword ever made, and I’d taught him everything I ever knew, and he ended up better than me; he was always better than me, just like his father. Nearly everybody’s better than me, in most respects. One way in which he excelled me was, he lacked the killer instinct.

But he made a pretty fight of it, I’ll give him that. I wish I could have watched that fight instead of being in it; there never was better entertainment, and all wasted, because there was nobody to see. Naturally you lose all track of time, but my best educated guess is, we fought for at least five minutes, which is an eternity, and never a hair’s breadth of difference between us. It was like fighting your own shadow, or your reflection in the mirror. I read his mind, he read mine. To continue the tedious extended metaphor, it was forge-welding at its finest. Well; I look back on it in these terms, the same way I look back on all my best completed work, with pleasure once it’s over but hating every minute of it while I’m actually doing it.

When I wake up in the middle of the night in a muck-sweat, I tell myself I won because he trod on a stone and turned his ankle, and the tiny atom of advantage was enough. But it’s not true. I’m ashamed to say I beat him fair and square, through stamina and the simple desire to win: killer instinct. I made a little window of opportunity by feigning an error. He believed me, and was deceived. It was only a tiny opportunity, no scope for choice; I had a fraction of a second when his throat was exposed and I could reach it with a scratch-cut with the point, what we call a stramazone. I cut his throat, then jumped back to keep from getting splashed all over. Then I buried him in the midden, along with the pig-bones and the household shit.

He should have won. Of course he should. He was basically a good kid, and had he lived he’d probably have been all right, more or less; no worse than my father, at any rate, and definitely a damn sight better than me. I like to tell myself, he died so quickly he never knew he’d lost.

But; on the day, I proved myself the better man, which is what sword-fighting is all about. It’s a simple, infallible test, and he failed and I passed. The best man always wins; because the definition of best is still alive at the end. Feel at liberty to disagree, but you’ll be wrong. I hate it, but it’s the only definition that makes any sense at all.

Every morning I cough up black soot and grey mud, the gift of the fire and the grindstone. Smiths don’t live long. The harder you work, the better you get, the more poisonous muck you breathe in. My pre-eminence will be the death of me, someday.

I sold his sword to the Duke of Scona for, I forget how much; it was a stupid amount of money, at any rate, but the Duke said he wanted the very best, and he got what he paid for. My barrel of gold is now nearly full, incidentally. I don’t know what I’ll do when the level reaches the top. Something idiotic, probably.

I may have all the other faults in the world, but at least I’m honest. You have to grant me that.