The Highwayman

by R. A. Salvatore

  She finished by lifting her arms up, thumb tips touching, index fingers touching, in a salute to the morning sun. And then she bowed low as she brought her arms back to her sides, her whole body perfectly still except for the bending at her waist.

  Brother Dynard gave a great sigh as the woman walked back into her private quarters to resume work on her sword. Then he, too, faced the rising sun and went through his practice. Not nearly as proficient as SenWi, of course, he nevertheless managed to get through sing bay du, a routine designed to battle two opponents, front and back, with some measure of grace. Then he came to the part he most enjoyed: the stance of the mountain. He found his line of chi, head to groin, and consciously extended that life energy down his legs and through his feet, rooting himself to the stone of the wide terrace. A strong gust of wind blew by, but Dynard didn’t budge. He felt the strength of the earth grasping him, becoming part of him, and felt as if he wouldn’t flinch if a large man charged into him at full speed. Once he had achieved the posture, he allowed himself to absorb the sensations of the morning: the smell of the flowers, the warmth of the sun, the soft feel of his light clothing brushing his skin.

  He saluted the sun, he bowed, and he went inside to his work.

  He couldn’t help but notice his old clothing hanging on a rack just inside the door. Like all the common folk of Honce, each of the brothers of Abelle wore a simple woolen tunic that reached to the knees and was typically belted at the waist with a leather cord. The brothers also added a coarse woolen traveling cloak, dark brown in color. Dynard considered that tunic and cloak, then looked at the silk clothing the Jhesta Tu had given him.

  “Beasts of Behr,” he said with a chuckle and a shake of his large head.

  The monk rubbed his face and moved to the desk, where two books sat open and quills and inks of various colors waited.

  As she had advanced through the ranks of the Jhesta Tu, SenWi had found her private quarters moved forward and forward, and now, as a budding master, the young woman’s rooms were at the very front of the house and cave complex built so high on the mountainside. Several windows lined the front wall of her two-room abode, facing south and east. They were open holes in the stone wall, but SenWi usually kept the heavy drapes pulled aside, except on the coldest of winter nights and when she was at her private work.

  Fresh from her morning exercise, she moved to close those drapes, but paused, catching a glimmer of slanting morning sunlight streaming in to illuminate the ivory and silver hilt and crosspiece of her sword. SenWi walked over and gently stroked the carved piece, fashioned to resemble the flared, curving neck of one of the great hooded vipers known in the steppes of To-gai. Shiny silver and smooth white ivory intertwined through the length of the hilt, an artwork in and of itself. SenWi let her fingers trace the crafted lines, taking satisfaction in the solid grip she had created beneath the illusion of beauty. The neck tapered just a bit down to the crosspiece, which was comprised of two thinner rods of shining steel. Even these had been worked intricately by SenWi so that they bent at their respective ends to form snake heads. Above the crosspiece was a steel rod, just under three feet in length.

  SenWi looked across the room, to the roll of thin metal, much of it already folded to form the sword’s blade. Those first few folds had been critical, for SenWi had to leave an exact opening into which this center pole could be inserted, joining blade to hilt.

  SenWi released the hilt and stared at it, hardly believing that years had passed since she had begun this process, since she had crafted the hilt. She remembered the day when the masters had returned it to her, smiling all, with the news that she could begin to craft her sword.

  How many thousands of hours had she toiled in this one pursuit, this singular goal? Only now, with the end clearly in sight, did SenWi appreciate how well spent those hours had been. For she had learned so much about herself in these last few years. She had found the limits of her discipline, had learned the patience of a true craftsman. She couldn’t help but smile as she recalled days, weeks even, when she had managed to craft only a single line of scales on the serpent-headed hilt. And now she worked on the blade no less meticulously, bending one by one the hundreds of folds that would comprise it. Each one of those folds consumed the working hours of a single day.

  Even on those days when SenWi was able to complete the single fold easily, she could not then go on. There was no “getting ahead” in the crafting of a Jhesta Tu sword. There was only the process, methodical and disciplined.

  The woman drew the heavy curtains closed and moved across the small room to the special metal table and the rolled steel. She felt the heat more profoundly with each step forward, for under the table was set a small oven, which she had fired up before going out to her morning exercise. She picked up another block of coke, slipped a heavy glove onto her left hand, and used an iron poker to pull open the small round hatch. She tossed in the fuel, then paused and watched as the orange glow increased, as lines of smoldering fires ran like living caterpillars across the face of the new block. Above it, waves of heat climbed, funneling into the seams of the furnace and table so that it would be properly distributed.

  SenWi closed the furnace hatch and moved to the side of the table. To her right lay the beginnings of the shaped blade, with the unfolded metal sheet running to her left like an unwound bolt of silk. Just past the blade, farther to the right, was a raised edge, the apex of the heat zone, slightly glowing in the dimly lit room.

  A small diamond-edged rule and cutter, fashioned with a concave edge designed to fit tightly against the edge of the blade facilitated the next part of the process. When SenWi slowly and precisely ran it across the thin sheet, it drew the line of the next fold and also drew a lighter line indicating the breadth of the overlap area. With her bare hand, she lifted the blade and brought it up and over, using all of her focus and discipline to set it precisely in place, so that the scratched line rested perfectly along the raised and heated edge.

  Then she removed her glove and let the metal sit, while she went across the room and prayed, finding her center of focus, aligning her ki-chi-kree. When the appropriate time of heating had passed, she took up a pair of tiny hammers and moved back to the table.

  SenWi began to sing softly, finding a rhythm and cadence. She began to dance around the table, her hands working slow circles, tap-tapping the metal atop the raised edge, but gently, so as not to tear the already thin sheet. It went on for nearly an hour: the soft singing—chanting really—the graceful steps, each bringing her arms in reach of a different point of the crease; and the continual tapping. Never once in all the days of her work had the woman touched the formed blade with those hammers, despite their proximity. That was the discipline of the dance and the movements, to strike precisely along that single, definitive line.

  When she was done, she dropped the hammers and quickly put on the heavy gloves. Moving fast now, she folded the blade back over the raised bar with even pressure, so that the fold line was perfectly in place with the edge of her previous work. She pulled it as tightly as her honed muscles would allow and held it there, squeezing, for a long moment. Satisfied, breathing heavily, SenWi then poured water over the length of the blade, smiling at its hissing protest.

  She was equally quick to dry the blade, thus hardening the fold.

  Then she prayed some more, and added more coke to the oven.

  Then she prayed some more, and when she judged that the table surface was again hot enough, she hoisted a long, thin block of heavy stone and set it in place atop the blade. And another, and another, until the whole blade was covered, the weight of the stones forcing the folded metal tight against the blazing metal surface.

  SenWi went to take her morning meal. She hoped that she would see her lover there, though she knew that he was nearing the end of his scribing and was working furiously so that his finish would coincide with her own. Bran Dynard wanted them to be on the road in late spring or early summer at the very latest.


  Her work this day wasn’t nearly done, of course. When she returned, she had to remove the stones and cool the blade, and then she would use a diamond-encrusted file to finish the tip of the last fold, scraping it down, hour by hour, so that it fell into exact place of the triangular sword tip.

  Tomorrow, she’d do it again, exactly the same way.

  Enough tomorrows would produce the sword. And they would give her the sense of accomplishment and ownership: that she had taken a simple sheet of metal and so crafted it into a beautiful weapon, a true work of art, an extension of her martial training.

  He wasn’t shivering with cold—winter was surely loosening its grip on the land—but his fingers trembled so badly that he had to stop.

  Brother Dynard sat back, gave a frustrated snort, then stood up, abandoning the moment that he thought would bring him triumph. He paced away from the desk, determined not to look back.

  But he did glance over his shoulder, to see the large volume, the Book of Jhest, opened wide, with all but one of its many pages turned over to the left now.

  Only one to go. Half, actually, for in the second book similarly opened on the slightly inclining desktop, that last page was half written. Half a page to copy of all the great tome—except for the still-blank two opening pages, which were customarily left so that the scribe could preface the work after completion with a letter to its intended recipient. Up to this point, Dynard had been moving on a roll, momentum gained for the final push and with the hope and expectation that this morning would mark the last day of his copying.

  Then had come Dynard’s moment of doubt. For the first time since he had embarked upon this task of expanding his boundaries of understanding and spirituality itself, the monk from Honce had come to realize that this particular part of the journey would be a finite thing: that his work here would end.

  For months, Dynard had been lost in the swirls of the Jhesta writing, the gracefully curving lines and symbols drawing him into contemplation as surely as any chanting ever could. The concentration of exact copying brought him into that same trancelike and prayerful state of meditation. For months, his work had been his purpose and his life; he knew that he could not underestimate the importance of this. This tome that he would bring back to the north could change the very scope of the Church of Blessed Abelle.

  Those thoughts weren’t the source of his trembling now, though. With the end of this part of his spiritual journey so clearly in sight, Brother Dynard had finally begun to look toward the next road—the physical road—across the deserts to the coast and north to the mountains and, finally, the sea.

  He knew well the perils of that road: the robbers and knaves, the warfare between the rival tribes of the Behr, the snakes and great cats and other monstrous animals, the dreadful and often vengeful power of the sea itself. Even if he arrived back in Honce, around the mountains and into Ethelbert Holding, the road inland to Pryd was a graveyard for foolhardy travelers.

  Dynard looked back at the book. Had he done all of this, had he buried himself within the curving lines of understanding and enlightenment, had he created this copy, this artwork, only to have its illuminated and illuminating pages rot in a gully in the rain? Or to have those soft pages used by some ignorant knave to wipe the shite from his arse?

  His chest heaved in short gasps. He closed his eyes and told himself to calm down. In a sudden fit of nervous energy, the monk raced out of the room, down the hallway, then out onto the terrace.

  The wind blew fiercely this day, dark clouds rushing overhead. Few of the Jhesta Tu were outside, no clothes were drying on the lines, and most of the flowers had been brought inside. His fears churning his stomach, his arms and legs trembling, Brother Dynard walked to the far edge of the terrace, to the rail and the thousand-foot drop to the valley below. His knuckles whitened as he grasped that railing, partly to secure himself and partly out of anger—anger at himself for being so weak in the face not of failure but of triumph.

  “I am surely a fool,” he said, his words whipped to nothingness by the gusting wind. A self-deprecating chuckle was similarly diminished, as the monk considered the simple humanness of his failure. He recalled a day from his youth in Chud, a small village across the forest from Pryd. With his father, mother, and two sisters, young Bran Dynard had been walking the forest path, a pilgrimage of sorts, to see the new stone chapel being built by this new Church that was sweeping the land, and sweeping the Samhaist religion before it.

  Bran’s father had never followed the Samhaists and held some anger against them that young Bran did not understand. Not until years later, after his father’s death—indeed at the occasion of his father’s funeral in Chud—would he learn that his father’s twin brother had been sacrificed by the Samhaists; they always killed one of any twins, considering the second born to be an appropriate offering to their gods.

  On that road that long-ago day, the family had come to know that they weren’t alone. Sounds to the side of the path, in the shadows of the forest, had warned them of robbers, or worse. They moved more swiftly—the smoke of Pryd’s fireplaces was in sight up ahead. Bran had seen the sign of danger first, a flash of red in the dark shadows, and on his call of “Powries!” his father had gathered up his younger sister, his mother had grabbed the hand of the other girl, and all had sprinted for the village. For powries, the bloody-cap dwarves, were not ordinary thieves seeking gold or silver—of which the family had none. They sought only human blood in which they could dip their enchanted blood-red berets.

  To this day, Dynard didn’t know whether or not there really were powries on that forest road. Perhaps it had been a red-headed bird or the bright behind of a wild tusker pig. But he remembered that flight and the sensations that had accompanied it. Barely into his teens, he had dutifully taken up the rear, his father’s spear in hand, and had even lagged behind the others so that his engagement with the powries would not force any of them, particularly his father, into the battle. What Dynard remembered most keenly was that he had not been afraid. At that first sighting of the red, he had been terrified, of course; but during the run, his helpless family before him, he had felt only a sort of elation, the pumping of his blood, the determination that these monsters would not wash in the blood of his loved ones, whatever he had to do.

  It wasn’t until the very end, his family already reaching the wooden gates of Pryd and with only fifty yards left before him, that young Bran Dynard had felt the return of fear, of a terror more profound than anything he had ever known. He was not carrying the spear, but he didn’t even know at the terrifying moment that he had dropped it.

  By the time he reached the gates, his cheeks were wet with tears, and he stood there before his family and the townsfolk who had come out to see what the commotion was all about, trembling and sobbing and feeling a failure.

  A couple of the townsfolk had laughed—probably not at him, though it seemed that way to the teenager. His father, though, had clapped him hard on the shoulder and tousled his hair, thanking him for his courage over and over again.

  Bran hadn’t believed him and felt himself a coward, but then one man dressed in cumbersome brown robes had come forward and had wrapped him in a hug. He pushed Bran back to arms’ length and saluted him. That was when Bran Dynard had first met Father Jerak of Chapel Pryd.

  “Is it not strange that only at the end of our run, when the goal seems attainable, that we allow our fears to surface?” Jerak had said to him, and those words echoed now in his mind as he stood on that balcony of the Walk of Clouds.

  The monk stepped back from the railing and turned into the fierce wind. He spread his feet shoulders’ width apart and brought his arms up before him, entwining his fingers and lifting them high over his head. He found his center of energy, his chi, as the Jhesta Tu had taught him, and he extended that line of power down through his legs and feet and into the stone of the terrace.

  He stood against the breeze, rooted as firmly as any tree, as solidly as any stone. With his interna
l strength, he denied the wind, and while his light clothing flapped wildly, Brother Bran Dynard did not move the slightest bit.

  In that place and in that time, he found again his heart. Some time later, he went back inside, back to his work; and before the last rays of the sun disappeared from the light of his western window, he closed both books, his task complete.

  Only reluctantly did SenWi relinquish her hold on the diamond-faced file, laying the wondrous tool, one of only three such items in all the world, down at her side.

  There was no need to continue; the sides of the triangular tip were smooth and even, and no amount of working them would make them more perfect.

  The tip was done. The wrapping was done. The final heating and beating of the metal was done, including the attachment of the blade to the hilt and crosspiece. Earlier that same morning, SenWi had finished her own scribing, marking the lines, both delicate and bold, of the flowering vines enwrapping the length of the blade. These symbols, so precise, tied the sword back to the Hou-lei traditions, the warrior cult from which had long ago sprung the Jhesta Tu. There could be no mistaking one of these blades, for there was nothing like them in all the world. The wrapped metal ensured that the blade would only sharpen with use, as layers wore away to even finer edges.

  Looking at her sword now, this weapon of few equals, crafted with her own hands, SenWi felt a sense of her past, of her kinship to those who had come before, perfecting their methods, defining the very nature of her existence in their accrued centuries of wisdom. She appreciated them now, more fully perhaps than ever before.

  With hands moist and trembling, SenWi lifted the sword and felt its balance. Assuming a two-handed grip on the hilt, she stepped into a fighting stance and brought the weapon slowly through a series of thrusts and parries, as she had done so many thousands of times with wooden practice blades on the terraces of the Walk of Clouds.