The Blacksmith

by Howe, Barbara;

  That brought me up short. “Magic, you say.”

  “Sure seems like it.”

  “But that sounds like just another way for a man to force himself on a lass. The Frost Maiden shouldn’t stand for it.”

  Annie shrugged. “I don’t know why she does, but there are too many stories like that going around lately. You listen—you’ll hear them.”

  I listened, and heard stories I wished I hadn’t. My gorge rose, and my opinion of the Black Duke and his family sank. My homesickness got worse. Those kinds of things just didn’t happen in Abertee.

  Master Paul told the other journeymen and apprentices that if they finished a piece when he wasn’t in the smithy, they were to ask me what to do next. Glenn looked ready to spit. Later in the day, Master Paul left the smithy to measure a customer’s property, and Glenn knocked an apprentice into the wall. I caught it out of the corner of my eye, and swung on around.

  “You’ll not give me any more lip,” Glenn snarled at Johnny.

  “I didn’t hear any lip,” I said.

  Glenn turned his glare on me. The apprentices froze, watching us. Jack, the other journeyman, kept banging away, pretending he didn’t notice.

  “I’ve been here for months,” Glenn said. “You can’t claim you know Johnny here better than I do.”

  Johnny was a snivelling arse-kisser without the guts to give anybody backtalk, but it’s not fair to call people names when they can’t stand up for themselves. “Maybe not, but I do know about lip. When I give somebody lip, the whole smithy, and the yard, too, knows it.”

  Glenn shoved his chin in my direction. “Don’t you give me any lip, either.”

  “It’s not lip when the other fellow isn’t your better.” I turned my back on him and kept working.

  Turning my back may not have been the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but damned if I would let him spook me. Uncle Will would never have put up with a rotter like Glenn in his smithy. He called men like Glenn puny midgets, no matter what size they were. He’d never taken any lip from me, either, but then I’d never given him any. Never felt the need to. Everybody in his smithy had been proud to work for him.

  God, I missed him.

  The next morning I was thinking about Uncle Will again while shovell­ing coal. I didn’t notice Master Paul wasn’t in the smithy until Glenn got pissed at Sam. Glenn took a swing, the shovel flew of its own accord, and Glenn’s fist slammed into the flat of the blade.

  He was too shocked for a moment to even swear.

  I plastered a smile on my face and lowered the shovel. “We’d all better watch those wild swings. Somebody could get hurt.”

  He let loose then, cursing me, my mum, my dad, and my cousins out to the fourth degree. He was still nursing his hand when he ran out of breath. I’d gone back to shovelling with a grin on my face.

  I was asking for a fight, but didn’t care. I didn’t worry until he ducked out with an iron bar in his hand at quitting time. I told Sam to find a different way home, but wasn’t surprised when he followed me. I would have done the same.

  The next morning, Saturday, I got to the smithy with a split lip, half-a-dozen bruises, and a sore left shoulder. Sam sported a fresh black eye, a cut on his cheek, and a grin. He dropped Glenn’s unbloodied iron bar on the heap, and set to pumping the bellows with more enthusiasm than I’d seen in him yet.

  We’d been lucky. Damn lucky. Even expecting it, that iron bar had whistled past my ear closer than I’d been happy with.

  Glenn never showed up that day. He looked quite a bit worse for wear on Monday. Whenever Master Paul wasn’t looking, we eyed each other like a pair of circling dogs. I never turned my back on him that day, but it was too much of a strain, and I soon slipped back into old habits. The first notice I had of Master Paul stepping out was the crash behind me. I turned around to see Glenn sprawled across an overturned section of fencing. The apprentices wore grins, and Journeyman Jack sported a smirk. He reached down to haul Glenn to his feet. “Duncan must be bad luck for you, Glenn. You’ve gotten pretty clumsy since he’s been here.”

  The gloom in the smithy let up after that. Nobody said anything, but we all took turns keeping an eye on Glenn, and with half-a-dozen burly lads who hated him finally working together, he didn’t get a chance to cause trouble—not in the smithy, anyway. I worried he would be waiting for us on the way home again some night, and not by himself, either. We went a different way each night, including cutting across the square. Glenn wouldn’t dare set foot near the Water Guildhall, so we often went straight past it. In the dark, it was just another building.

  Daylight was another matter. I found the nerve to edge out into the square and inspect the clock tower, but we always went around the Earth Guildhall at the bottom of the square on our way to the smithy. If Richard Collins saw us he’d usually wait, and walk with us until we turned towards the smithy. It was Richard who prodded me to take the tour of the duke’s palace offered to commoners on Sunday afternoons.

  “Go,” he said. “See what they’re spending our tax money on.”

  With paintings, statues, wall hangings, and gold leaf everywhere, it was an eye-opener. The lady giving the tour prattled on and on about each painting’s history. I stopped listening, and eyed the ironwork. She didn’t mention that, but there was plenty, with Master Randall and Master Paul’s touchmarks easy to spot. Somebody working for the duke knew and cared about good smithcraft.

  The tour ended in a hall filled with statues—Greek marbles, the guide said. My eyes slid past the rest and locked onto the one at the far end—a gorgeous lass, turning her head to beckon to me. She might once have been alive, caught in mid-action and turned to stone by magic.

  We walked the length of the hall and her eyes followed me. I couldn’t tear mine away.

  “And this,” the guide said, waving at her, “is an ancient sorceress. She is said to bear a strong resemblance to our Frost Maiden.”

  I backed away with my heart hammering. The tour guide waved us out the door, and I tripped over the sill. Even outside, I felt her staring at me, through the wall. I muscled through the crowd to the street, and ran.

  The weather turned cold early in December. Our breaths smoked in the morning, and we jogged along to keep warm, but with no wind it was tolerable. Richard Collins wore a wool cloak over his fancy suits; if we hadn’t met him at his gate I wouldn’t have recognised him.

  “I guess you won’t sell as much,” I said, “but getting paid for everything you sell ought to help.”

  He said, “What?”

  “That is, if your guild goes through with it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Hammer and Anvil’s bartender said the cloth merchants and tailors are going to stop extending credit to the aristos.”

  “We are?” He stopped dead. Sam and I jogged on a few steps, and had to backtrack to where he was standing, staring at us.

  “The bartender seemed pretty sure about it. He said you’ll vote at your guild meeting this week, and all the other merchants and craftsmen are betting you’ll do it.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of it.” He tucked his chin down into his collar. “I’m always the last to hear anything about my own guild.”

  “It sounds like a good idea. Force them to pay for what they buy.”

  “Oh, it is. I’ve been saying for years we ought to.”

  “Why haven’t you then, on your own?”

  “Without the guild backing, I’d have been driven out of business. The only way for such an idea to work is for all the cloth merchants to agree, and for the guild to enforce it.”

  “I hope they do. Good luck.”

  “Thanks.” He walked away with his head down.

  If I had heard news that momentous about my own guild from an out­sider, I would have been pissed off. He just looked sad.

 
The cloth merchants and tailors did vote to stop giving the aristos credit. Gossip said most aristos were furious, but the duke laughed, saying it wouldn’t last. We—merchants and craftsmen in the other guilds—held our breaths, waiting to see what would happen.

  Annie and I had gone back a few times to listen to Reverend Angus, the rabble-rousing preacher. The more I considered what he’d said, the more I thought we must both be wrong about the Water Guild, rather than agreeing with him about the other magic guilds. Maybe the Black Duke was paying him to make trouble for the magic guilds, to take the heat off the aristos.

  I stopped going, but hearing other folk talk about how great he was rubbed me the wrong way. By the middle of December, I had gotten fed up. I went, without Annie, to hear him preach.

  He said, “I propose a new set of laws that will apply when the onerous Water Office has been dismantled…”

  We were packed into City Hall on a Wednesday night, not in church on Sunday. I shoved through the crowd. “Excuse me.”

  Heads turned. It wasn’t the first time I’d been stared at for speaking out of turn, and it wouldn’t be the last, but it was the largest crowd I’d ever had waiting for me to make a fool of myself. I said, “I’m all for getting rid of that frosted Water Office, but you remind me of the old fable about belling the cat. Tell us who’s going to dismantle the Water Office, and how.”

  The preacher said, “Sit down, and be quiet. We don’t need to address that problem tonight.”

  The crowd muttered. Nick Cooper, a journeyman cutler I’d drunk with at the Hammer and Anvil, elbowed through to the front. “It’s a fair question. Answer it.”

  The preacher hemmed and hawed, dancing around the question.

  I said, “You’re talking about getting rid of all the Offices.”

  “Yes, they are all burdensome. Our country needs to be free of these ancient relics, and—”

  “And you mean to drive out all the witches and wizards, and give everything over to the non-magic commoners.”

  “Yes, their privileges are injurious to a healthy society, where everyone is equal, and—”

  “Do you have any sons?”

  “What?” He stopped blathering and gave me a blank look. There were other puzzled faces in the room, too.

  I said, “Do you have any children? Sons? Daughters?”

  “I have two boys, the eldest not yet fifteen.”

  “If you drive out all the earth witches, tell me who’s going to patch them up so they don’t die of their burns.”

  “What rubbish are you—”

  “If we don’t have the Fire Warlock defending Frankland, they’ll have to join the army. And since anybody who’s anybody in the Empire is a witch or a wizard, they’ll not drive out their magic folk. Our army will be sitting ducks for the Empire’s fire wizards. In a few month’s we’ll be under the Empire’s thumb, and they treat commoners with no magic even worse than here.”

  He drew himself up to his full height and puffed out his chest—it didn’t help, next to me—and said, “Get out, and stay out.”

  “Fine, I don’t like your ideas anyway.” I jammed my hat on and left, with Nick on my heels. A rumble behind us surprised me, and we stopped on the other side of the street to watch, as half the crowd in the hall followed us out.

  Master Randall said, “You’re following in your uncle’s footsteps, for sure.”

  I answered his grin with one of my own. “How do you know? You haven’t seen my work yet.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant his habit of speaking his mind. You did Blacks­burg a service by telling that preacher off. Word’s gone around, too, that you called one smith a cheat and told another he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.”

  “Frostbite.” I set my mug down on the bar with a thud. “The preacher’s fair game, but making enemies in the guild isn’t a good move. I’ve got to stop saying the first thing that comes into my head.”

  “I don’t know why you should care,” the smith on the other side of me said. “They deserved it. It was all true.”

  “It’s never a great idea to piss people off when you don’t have to,” Master Randall said. “A little tact can go a long way. But that’s easier said than done. I’m twice your age and I’m still learning. You didn’t say anything to those smiths I haven’t said, and they weren’t willing to hear it from me, either.”

  “Is that so.” I gave him the gimlet eye. “Why the blazes did you send me to them, instead of to a respectable smith like Master Paul?”

  “You told me you wanted to get certified. Those certificates aren’t just about how good you are as a smith. They’re also about upholding the guild’s reputation. The guild protects us; we have to protect the guild. I won’t certify a smith who will embarrass us by cheating or shirking his duties.”

  I leaned in closer, still glaring. “If you want men to behave themselves, don’t set them a bad example.”

  “It’s easy for a man to behave himself with me or Clive looking over his shoulder, but maybe that’s not his true colours. If you could stomach Master Hal or his friends at the Three Horseshoes for long, you aren’t the sort of man we want to certify.”

  The smith at my elbow clapped me on the shoulder. “But here you are at the Hammer and Anvil. Drink up, lad. You’re doing fine.”

  For the first time in my life, I couldn’t get excited about Yule. I’d made enough friends in the city I didn’t have to spend it by myself, but even swapping stories over rum punch with half-a-dozen other journeymen at Master Clive’s table wasn’t as good as being at home. I crawled into bed that night, feeling sorry for myself, and missing Nettleton so bad it hurt.

  The festive spirit finally came over me in early January, when Master Randall certified his top journeyman, and Glenn left to take his place. The other boarders gave me funny looks when the visions I had of Glenn kissing Randall’s arse, and what he was likely to get for his trouble, made me laugh over my supper.

  The next morning, Sam acted like a puppy chasing butterflies. I still had that frostbitten masterpiece to finish, so I was a bit steadier, but not much. Neither of us was prepared for the sick look on Master Paul’s face when we stepped into the smithy.

  “Duncan,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should’ve…I don’t know, done some­thing…”

  Jack and the apprentices ringed me with long faces like it was a funeral and I was the dead body.

  “What the hell,” I said. “Sorry for what?”

  Master Paul nodded towards the corner where I had left the lamp stand. I flinched like Charcoal had aimed a kick at my head. Broken, twisted, hammered out of shape, the pieces were a blacksmith’s nightmare. Putting them together would earn me nothing but hoots.

  “I thought you were working late,” Master Paul said. “My wife was nagging me to tell you to stop hammering so we could get to sleep when the noise stopped. I should’ve gone to see…”

  Jack said, “At least he didn’t break your tools, or steal them.”

  “That’s because I paid the Earth Guild for protection spells. Didn’t think I’d need them for this.” I picked the pieces apart and flung them, one by one, on the scrap heap. “When I get my hands on Glenn, he’ll—”

  “Don’t,” Master Paul said. “You’ll call down the magistrate on yourself, and you’re too good to waste your time in the stocks. I’ll report him to the guild. It’s my smithy. He owes me, too.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and set to dealing with the morning’s work. An hour later, Master Paul sent me away before I broke everything I touched, so I saddled Charcoal and went for a hard gallop along the towpath upriver.

  Returning at a walk, the cloud I’d been under while working on that silly lamp stand lifted. I reached the stable as giddy as Sam had been in the morning, and sang bawdy songs while currying Charcoal, until the head groom told me to shut the hell up.
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  Master Paul was right; I didn’t need to lay hands on Glenn. The next time I saw him, I’d get my revenge by thanking him for doing me such a big favour.

  Trouble Brewing

  I whistled on my way to the smithy the next morning, breaking off now and then to yawn. I’d been up past midnight, making sketches by lamplight.

  Sam watched me out of the corner of his eye the whole way, but I didn’t offer to explain. We were the first ones in the smithy, so only Sam saw me toss the sketches for the lamp stand in the fire.

  “Frost it, Duncan, you can’t give up.”

  “Who said anything about giving up? Since I have to start over, I decided to make something better than that silly thing.” I handed him the new sketches. “Take a look at this gate.”

  His eyes bugged out. “You can’t do that.”

  “Sure I can. It’s my masterpiece—I can do whatever I want.”

  “But I’ve never seen…I mean, you just don’t…”

  “Let me see those.” Master Paul stepped through the door and reached for the sketches. His eyes widened. “This is different, that’s for sure.” He studied them for several minutes before handing them back. “I like the look of it better than that lamp stand, but it’s just as well it’ll be hanging on the wall in the guildhall rather than in somebody’s garden.”

  “Why?”

  “I try to balance a garden gate so well one of those fine ladies can swing it with her little finger.”

  “Aye. That’s why I have the hindquarters coming out here, to balance the head.”

  “That’ll make it balance in one direction, but with the head off-centre like that, sticking out to there, it’s going to pull on the hinge a lot harder than the hindquarters.”

  “Frost it!” I snatched the sketches back and glared at them. “I didn’t think about that.”

  “As heavy as that thing’s going to be, it’ll take a man with a good strong arm to shove it open. Sure you’re ready to be certified?”