by Maples, Kit
The boy held up the lamb to prove it. The lamb complained to me.
“The first of my father’s lambing season and damn early but, well, if you want it, you can have it.”
The boy gave me the lamb.
“Now get out of bed and make me a sword. My father commands it. I’m to be knighted in the spring by Cadwallader the king. Need a steel sword for all the rigmarole. What do you want for it, how much?” He brought out a purse of coins.
“I’m not the prince,” I said.
“You’re ugly and filthy enough to be any sort of prince,” the boy said. He rubbed the winter’s ash and soot from my face. “By Morgana, you’re a woman!”
I crawled off the coals, threw down my furs, and shook the dust and soot from my clothes.
“A woman apprentice and a pretty one, too?” the boy said. “Oh, go fetch your master, slave.” He snatched back the lamb to have it ready to gift Prince Llew.
“Lady Brynn,” I said.
“Lady-knight or whatever. Find me the man who cuts the swords.”
I shook out the furs and blankets on the coals. No ash rose. No evidence of Prince Llew.
“Tell your father and your knight-master the season is too early,” I said to the boy. “The gong hasn’t rung.”
The boy pointed to the vaulted ceiling. The smiling gnome was up there. She rang the gong once. The sound echoed across the valley.
I could see the caravans of ladies, knights, and retainers winding up the mountain slope to set up camp to await their swords.
The boy said, “If there is no Prince Llew here at the first gong of the season, then you are Prince Llew.”
“Me?”
“Make mine your first sword,” said the boy. “Armenian iron. Rotted in the Earth. Hammered long. Cut keenly. A sword to wear when I take the king’s slap for my knighting. Oh, and also for killing Saxons.”
The boy opened his purse and took out a single Jerusalem coin. “Gifted me through my father from Arthur the High King. Is that payment enough?”
He gave me my coin that had been melted into the bars and rods of steely iron that now lay frozen in the wine bath trough, waiting for the making of my sword.
“Who are you?” I said to the boy, stunned.
“We,” he said.
He gave me a boy’s hot and fumbling kiss and stood back flushed and happy.
“Make my swords,” the boy said in Prince Llew’s young voice. “When you have done a hundred swords, make your own.”
The boy vanished in a mist of coal ash.
The smiling gnome drifted down the wall from the vaulted ceiling, singing her song.
“How do I make a hundred swords?” I cried to her.
She sang and I understood.
The slaves and apprentices climbed into the citadel with their tools. The gnome sang to them. They understood.
The first breeze of spring sighed through the vast windows of the forge.
“Fire!” I cried. “Bellows! Charcoal! Iron!”
Chapter 4 – Winterdream
We began to make swords to the constant song of the smiling gnome.
She told me how to break the pebbles of ore with the greatest speed and which song to sing as I did it. How to heap up and fire the coals. How to power the vast bellows. She sang of the collecting of the cold iron seeds when the forge had cooled and of re-cooking them again and again to drive out demons and impurities. She sang of the burying of seeds in the spring fields and the digging them up in summer, rotted and pure.
She sang of the molding of the rods and bars, of hammering the hot rods of steely iron into steel. Of rolling and twisting together and rolling again the rods. Of laying the iron and steel side-by-side on the great anvil, heating them to the sun’s hot fire, and hammer-welding them with rhythmic clanging blows that rang across the valley.
She sang of the songs I must sing over the hammering and the heating, of the song-spirits I had to invest in the blades I was rough-shaping.
And then she sang the greatest song of all. The long, lilting, frightening song that told me how to stretch out the iron and steel with massive hammering into an armor-crushing, bone-breaking, head-cutting battle sword. How to cut and chisel the blade. How to grind and hone its edges.
At last I had my first blade. The gnome sang of the making of the pommel. Of the grip that had to be made immune to sweat and dripping blood to stay in a warrior’s hand in battle. Of the crossbar to prevent another sword from tearing off the sword-wielder’s hand.
Then she sang of the scabbard. Of leather and bone, ivory, rubies, fleeced inside for quick drawing of the sword and for oiling the blade at rest.
I held up into the early summer light my first blade. Powerful and true. The sighing wind of spring had shifted to the forge-like blast of summer. I was sweating and filthy with ash and grime. Half burnt from the forge. Happily weary with my work.
I commanded the gnome to ring the gong to announce completion of the first sword of the season.
I heard a young boy climb puffing into the citadel. Richly dressed and richly jeweled. The young squire who woke me on the first morning of the season.
“Is that my sword?” he said in Prince Llew’s breathy young voice. “Is it worth a Jerusalem coin, Lady Brynn?”
He took the sword from me and swung it through the air, delighting in its weight and balance. “Why, scarcely two libras’ weight!” he said. “Wonderful. And free of all alien charms and curses? Excellent. I’ll put my own charm on it when I name it.”
The boy swung the sword against the anvil and the blade shattered.
“No,” he said, cheerily. “Not my blade. Though I do like your figure of naked Mars on the pommel.”
The boy vanished in another mist of ash.
The slaves and apprentices ran shrieking from the citadel but the gnome sang them back.
I collected the broken bits of the sword. What had I done wrong? How could a sword expect to break an anvil?
The gnome sang and I returned to work. We made swords. Fifty of them. We proofed them against all the usual threats – mail, armor, helmets, axes, clubs, stones, other swords, Saxon skulls. We found them all good, or good enough to meet our contracts. And better than what was for sale in the swordmaking towns and villages scattered around the Island.
At summer’s end, before the first rush of autumn wind across the forge, I threw the broken sword into the coals and melted it down. I did all the work myself. The slaves and apprentices watched.
I cast the bars and rods. The bars now were more steel than iron. I twisted and retwisted the rods and hammered them round. I hammer-welded the rods to the outside edges of the bars. I cut the sword. Chiseled the fuller. Ground and honed the biting edges to a vivid sharpness.
The season was done now. The slaves and apprentices had gone to get across the mountains before the first snow. I sat on the cooling forge, the sword across my leather-aproned lap, waiting for the boy squire to reclaim his blade.
I heard him come whistling up the stone stairs this time.
“Here, Prince,” I said, “is your sword.”
“Remade out of the old materials? That’s a dangerous thing, Lady Brynn. It will be a brittle sword out of old iron or too full of steel for flex and power.”
“It’s a good sword,” I said.
“Shall we try it?”
The boy swung the sword through the air. “Marvelous balance. An edge that sings through the air! I can feel the power of the iron core and the marvelous cutting of the steel edges.”
“Make the anvil test,” I said to him.
“Oh, all right.”
The boy swung the blade down on the anvil.
The sword shattered.
“Not good enough,” the boy said, boyish-cheery. “Next year, my Lady, for another try?”
I picked up the shattered pieces of the sword. What had I failed to do? The wrong oil for the tempering bath? The wrong incantation over the welding? The wrong Moon phase at the cutting of t
he fuller?
“Yes, next year,” I said. “Damn you.”
The boy disappeared in his usual cloud of ash.
I stood with the sword pieces in my hands and looked down into the still-frozen wine bath holding the bars and rods for the sword that was to be mine. How could I fashion that great sword if I could not make a sword proof against breaking by any boy squire?
I curled up in my rags and furs on the warm coals of the forge, hugging the bits of sword, and slept away the winter, dreaming of my perfect sword.
* * *
On new year’s day, the first day of spring on the oldest calendars and my eighteenth year, I woke in my bundle of furs on the nearly dead coals of the forge, Galabes’ great silent hound staring me awake.
“You?” I said to the dog. “You, too, passed the winter away dreaming of swords?”
He and I were all that was left of the High King, thin and weak remembrances of the greatness that was in Arthur.
“What shall I do to make the greatest of swords for myself?” I asked the dog.
I showed the beast the broken bits of sword with which I had slept the winter.
The hound turned away. I shoved the sword fragments into the pockets of my leather apron. I followed the dog down the mountain steps, across the valley, up the next mountain, and into the cave of antique war rubble kept by Galabes.
Galabes was there, waiting.
“Spring!” he said. “The turning of the world’s new year and of your eighteenth year, Daughter. I’d expected you to be a champion by now. I hoped to be dead by now. But you’re a stubborn and obtuse child and I’ll have to be satisfied with today.”
“Today for what?” I said, with a youthful insolence I intended.
Galabes did now swat me to the ground as he had so often before. I was ready to club and stab him if he tried.
Galabes led deep into the rear of his cave where the massive merlin oak grew, its leaves shimmering with faint radiance, its sighs of misery filling the still air. The hound stayed behind in the cave’s war rubble, almost as though it cowered there, startling me.
“What’s the matter with this tree?” I asked him. “How can a tree weep?”
“Have you made your sword?” said Galabes.
“I can make swords, superior swords. But I can’t make a world-beating sword. Each time I create the sword I want, it shatters.”
I tumbled out of my apron pockets the fragments of the sword I had repeatedly forged and cut for the boy squire.
Galabes recoiled from the pieces of steel and iron clattering to the stone floor.
“Are these bits of metal all you’ve done these years?” he cried, startling me with the sound of his anguish.
“I’ve made fifty swords!” I said, angry. “Great queens and knights go through the world wielding my blades…”
“But you cannot make your own.”
“Mine lies in its rods and bars frozen in a trough in the citadel. Until I can make these broken pieces into a sword that can break my anvil, I cannot forge my own blade well enough to break anything.”
“What’s missing in your formula?”
“I don’t know!”
“I’ll tell you,” Galabes said. “A piece of the last cycle of life. That is lacking in your sword and in you.”
“History?” I cried, astonished and outraged. “What can I know of any ‘last cycle’ of living? What do I know of my own life but I’m a slave, a bastard, and kidnapped?”
Galabes said, with a surprising and frightening calm, “You are a woman of today meant for tomorrow but you have no past you recognize. You need a piece of the last cycle of living to shape your own Fate and to make the sword you’re meant to create.”
“That’s gibberish. Wonderful gibberish. What does any of it mean?”
“You have flint?”
“Of course I have flint.” I took it out of an apron pocket.
“Then strike it on that broken steel for a spark of fire.”
I struck a spark on a piece of the sword.
The tree screamed.
My spark leaped from the flint and steel into the merlin oak and the whole vastness of spreading branches and leaves snapped into flame.
I jumped back.
The tree screamed like a man burning alive.
“Great gods!” I cried. “What is this monster?”
“The merlin of the last cycle of life,” said Galabes over the crack and roar of the flames. “Arthur’s merlin.”
“He’s in that tree?”
“He is the tree.”
Flame reached the highest branch. The tree flashed all over a searing white, shattering and exploding. Its ruins shimmered down to the cave floor in a rain of ash.
I stood stunned in the ashfall thick as winter snow.
Galabes said, in his frightening calm, “Pick up the ash.”
I scooped it up in two hands.
“Eat it.”
“Eat the tree?” I said.
“Eat the merlin.”
“And become a merlin?” I threw down the ash. “Never!”
“Then you’ll never make the sword you were created to make and your wretched soul will drift aimless in the empty spaces between the stars forever…”
“That curse again?” I cried. “Jesu and Mary!”
“Eat the ash and you’ll go through the world a champion. Refuse and you’ll never die but you’ll never live.”
“You sound like a Druid, not a forgiving Christian knight.”
“I don’t know what I am anymore,” said Galabes. “But I knew this old Druid” – he kicked the heap of ash. “He was the Merlin of the last cycle and wizard to King Arthur. He has in him what you need in you, Daughter. Eat the ash. Become what you were meant to become. Make the sword!”
Eat this ash and I’d learn the secret to make the great blade I had to have for myself? I could risk becoming a merlin for that.
I ate the ash.
“All of it,” Galabes said.
“Will it make me a Druid?”
“Eat!”
I ate it all, all of the tree, all of the last merlin.
Nothing happened inside me.
I felt a pricking at the tips of my ears.
“I don’t have any revelation of the sword,” I said, startled.
“Tell me what you feel inside,” said Galabes.
I tested my soul-heart and my liver of thought.
“I feel nothing new inside me! Is this your trick? What have you made me do?”
Galabes said, “The ash hasn’t infected your blood but it will.”
“When?” I said, rubbing the tops of my ears to stop the itch there. “When do I learn everything?”
“Get out of this cave.”
“Get out?”
“Never come back.”
“Why not, Father?”
“You’ll never see me again.”
Galabes was gone.
I shouted in surprise.
The hound was there beside me at the forge in Prince Llew’s citadel.
Then the hound was gone.
* * *
The season that had begun early with the boy squire waking me too soon gave me the time to make my last fifty swords. The gnome sang the commands and the prayers. I shouted them in repetition to the apprentices and slaves. We shattered ore, melted iron, buried it, smelted it, hammered it, cut it, shaped it into steel battle swords fit for any fighting man or woman in the world.
I felt growing in me the manic swordmaker’s power I had seen in Prince Llew. I felt in me the strength of muscle and skill needed to create the greatest of swords. I knew I was ready. But I felt nothing in me like Galabes’ promise of the merlin ash I had eaten.
At the end of the swordmaking season, I sat on my forge coals in my leather apron, another steel sword across my lap. This, too, was made of the pieces of the pieces of the first sword I had made for the boy squire.
The wind in the citadel stopped its whine. The first chill of autu
mn came into the forge. I waited.
I heard footsteps on the stone stairs leading to my forge.
They were not the easy strides of a youth. Nor were they the labored climb of an old man. They were the measured steps of a man in his prime, young, strong, unafraid. Of a champion.
The squire who climbed over the threshold into my forge was no longer a squire. He had been knighted by the king and had in his hand the spurs as proof. He tossed them aside. He was glorious. Young, magnificent, beautiful. Dressed in linens and silks bright with gold thread. A silver dagger under his wide belt. But his boots were the heavy boots of a fighting man, or of a man who toils in the heat and hazard of a forge making swords.
The knight said to me, “Is that my sword?”
He was so beautiful he made the tips of my ears itch.
He took the blade from my lap. “Your third try, Lady,” he said. “Is it any good?”
“By the Rule of three,” I said, “it’s a perfection.”
“It’s light enough,” he said, weighing the blade with a hissing slash through the air. “Plenty of spring and balance. But has it any power?”
He swung the blade and slashed apart a dozen leather aprons hanging from pegs on the wall. He cut through a dozen layers of iron mail hung from a wall, sending the shattered rings tumbling and clattering over the stone floor. He drove the sword point-first into a proofing breastplate and shattered it. He hacked apart a brave test shield with a single backhand stroke. With delicacy and style, he cut the throat of a demon painted on a test helmet and then hacked the helmet in two with a light return blow.
He said, marveling, “Great lords, Lady Brynn, this is the most magnificent blade I’ve ever held!”
He stopped his play at cutting air and slicing dead armor and said, “But can it cut an anvil?”
“Test it,” I said.
“By the Rule, this is the last test. I break this sword and there’s nothing more in life or eternity for you or me or that fool Galabes who chose you.”
“Jesu, is that true?” I cried.
