"That sword is mine!" grated Elof.
"And you are mine, Valant'," replied Nithaid levelly. "And so also all that belongs to you."
"I am nothing of yours! You may have tricked me into becoming your murderer, Nithaid; but you cannot compel me to work for you!"
Nithaid motioned to the guards, and they dragged Elof swiftly to the dais foot; the jolting pain sickened him to silence. He could feel blood oozing from an opened scar. "Let us understand one another, you and I," said the king. "You are mine, either as an outlander thrall, or as a subject of the rightful king of Kerys and all its domains. It makes no difference; but it could. Do well by me, and you both will prosper. But if not -well, I would not coerce a mastersmith such as you with common threats. I would only apply to you the law which governs any man, left to himself, that if you do not work, you do not eat." He shifted his glance to Roc. "But this sturdy fellow here -"
Roc growled deep in his throat. "Do your worst!"
"This sturdy fellow, as I was about to say, I would not waste so. You also would have to work - but in some heavy labour, fettered among felons, or if need be blinded, as I guess you are also some kind of a smith. I think we would have years of work from you, after hunger and thirst first began to bite; but I would rather leave you to look after your friend. He may need you -and he cannot flee. You alone would not get far if you tried, for from his account of your voyage I learned you are scarcely a sailor. The one cannot escape; the other cannot use any freedom he might gain. What do your own efforts tell you?" He leaned forward earnestly, fixing them with a gaze grown suddenly keen. "But do not mistake me! The Ice is your enemy; so also it is mine. And does it not threaten us more closely here than in your homeland? Well then! Do we not need you more urgently here? I would far rather count you as free servants, helping me with the same skill and valour you have displayed. You came asking me for aid; and I never gainsaid you. I mean to drive back these reivers, storm the Gate and make it ours again, hang the Icewitch from it by her own ensnaring hair! But to do that I need to unite this land, build up my power! Help me in that, and you'll flourish! When I trust you I might even have those fetters struck off -"
Elof shook his head violently, too violently; the palace chamber shook around him. "No, king! Never! That, never! These are deep waters of smithcraft you cannot understand. Let the fetters be! I am resigned to them. But that broken arm-ring… I can forge another as fair for the little princess. Let me at least have that back, king for it is a dear and bitter memory to me."
Nithaid tapped his teeth with a ridged thumbnail. "As Beathaill is to me - all that is left me of her mother… I will not take from her what I have bestowed, and I know she will not give it up for any reward. Not now, anyway; in a few years, when she is suitably wedded, perhaps, she may put it aside. I can only counsel you to wait. But what's that, man, however dear, to what you could gain? A man like you could earn a title, even, and estates; you'd hold them a hundred times better than many born to them -"
Weakness and bleak despair welled up around Elof; his breath came fast, and fearing he would faint he threw up his hand to stop Nithaid in his flow. "No, King! The Ice is our enemy, but we have little common cause. I have seen your land, and how you rule it; and beside the king I serve you are a brigand chieftain, Nithaid - no more!" A horrified buzz of voices arose in the court, and many shrank back; but though Nithaid's eyes narrowed, he did not interrupt. "To suit yourself you have maimed me, made me your tame murderer, and taken from me things greater than you can guess. I will serve you because I must, under duress, as a thrall only. Never freely, never loyally; you lack the coin that could buy that of me! I will set great craft in your hand; but only as long as it is turned against the Ice. Cease that struggle, turn aside from the fight, and I will serve you as you deserve. I will crush you, Nithaid!"
The silence when he finished could not have been more shattering than while he spoke. Nithaid's hands had closed hard on the leading edges of the throne-arms, white-knuckled, quivering, as if to tear the ivory asunder; his face was bloodless, his eyes staring, his lips working with words half formed. A great lock of hair had fallen across his eyes unheeded, and they were screwed up to inhuman slits. Then suddenly he threw his head back and bayed like a wolf, a great whooping crow of laughter. "You'll crush me, will you? How, lad, how? Under your crutches? By hopping on me? Ho, it'd be worth it just to see you try!" He doubled up with the force of his mirth, hugging himself till tears shone on his cheeks and his nose ran into his beard, and his courtiers, as soon as they were sure of his mood, joined in, whooping with laughter and even mimicking a cripple's gait. "Enough!" barked Nithaid suddenly, slapping his hand down on the arm of the throne. "Learn this one's courage, some of you! Then you may mock him! But you, Valant', hear me! Serve me as anything you like, so long as you serve me well! And as for slaying me, why, when you feel ready I give you leave to try!"
Elof had raised himself on his arms at that, though they trembled under him and the blood roared in his ears. He thrust out a hand, and he could not see it tremble. "I hear you, king! So be it! So be it!"
The walls spun about him, faster and faster, the torches flared up and danced like marsh-lights. And like the marshes, weighing down his limbs, pressing suffocatingly upon his chest, the darkness behind them reached up to enfold him, envelop him and suck him down.
Chapter Seven - Sorcerers' Isle
So began, in shed blood and desperate pain, the time of Elof's thralldom; and in blood and pain also it was to end. But that end was to be long in coming, and destined to be the ending of many other things besides. Neither Elof nor Roc could foresee it, and for them those first days were black days, as black as any since their youth. They knew they could count on no aid from Kermorvan and Ils; to their friends they would simply have vanished into the ocean's trackless wastes, and grieve as they might, with the weight of kingdoms upon their shoulders they would be unlikely to risk themselves or others on the same voyage. "And here's hoping they don't!" said Roc glumly. "For they'd simply sail all unwitting into the arms of the Ekwesh, and without your ways of winning help!" He swore, and sank his head in his hands. "How about his weirdness Master Raven? Now I'd even be glad of his brand of aid, though the thought of it puts years on me; can you not get word to him?"
Elof, curled up on a pallet with his maimed legs tucked under him, stared into the darkness and sighed. "Since I began this voyage all has gone amiss as never before; so he warned me, and I defied him. He will not aid me now; perhaps he cannot." He listened a moment to the sound of the river waters lapping against the shore far below, and leaned his weary head back against the timbered wall. "No, my old friend, this is something I must accept -"
"Well, you may, but I bloody well don't have to!" Elof shook his head at Roc's sharp outburst. "I spoke only of myself, Roc; this is no affairs of yours, any more than it was in the marshes. You are not crippled; you have nothing to hinder you escaping."
Roc snorted like an ox. "Oh yes I do! That get of a mongrel bitch Nithaid landed his darts right in the gold, neat as pie. For one, I haven't got you this far to leave you now; or why the hell'd I spill all that sweat in the first place? For another, where can I escape to? The duergar? The Ekwesh? Or the depths of the bonny blue sea? I can't sail a ship worth a damn, still less can I plot a course! No, my lad, I'm taken in the same snare; here I am, and here I stay, till we've some way of prying you loose."
"But do you not see?" Elof groaned. "You're his chiefest hold over me! If you weren't in his hands too, I could refuse to labour for him, even if he had me tortured half to death -"
"Which he would! And then the whole way, if you still resisted! He'll baulk at nothing, that one - as we've cause to know. Think I could suffer escaping, knowing it meant that? Could you, in my place?"
Elof grimaced. "I like to think not. Very well, Roc, you have the advantage of me there."
"Not I. Circumstances. And it's surely not worth having your gullet slit just to keep your smithcraft from
his paws; it's a king of our kinsfolk, he is, after all, and foe of our foe."
Elof laughed bitterly. "So I told myself, and so sought his aid; should I have not been warned by the manner of land he ruled? A chieftain of brigands I named him, and brigand he is, ruling by main strength and by fear, by no law save the absolute whim of his will. He hates the Ice, I guess, as he would hate anything which threatened aught that was his. For the evil behind it, for its threat to all men, he cares nothing; let it do its worst, so long as it leaves him alone! And it might, Roc, one day it might! If he gives Louhi a hard enough fight - as he is strong enough to do, can he but hold his realm together - she may decide our land is the easier target, after all."
Roc's alarm was evident in his voice. "You'll never get him to go after her then! And a sudden assault, after years of peace… Powers, Elof, what do we do?"
"What we can!" Elof felt a change within himself, deeper than any mere mood: his voice grew suddenly harsh in Roc's ears, as grim and dark as time-eaten iron. "He is a fool, who incurs without need the wrath of a mastersmith! For had Nithaid used us with any honour, we would have worked strong smithcraft enough for him; it fitted our purpose. Even so fell a hand as his I might have strengthened, seeing no other way to unite the land. But now we will bide our time, you and I; and use that time to seek the means of freedom for us both. And shall we not find it, who in our youth defied the will of Powers? On that day all pacts shall fail, all reckoning fall due; then let him beware! His reckoning is heavy enough now; if he lets fall the struggle against the Ice, the weight may crush him!"
"Great words!" said Roc, the more acidly because he himself was daunted by the voice in the darkness, so unlike the friend he knew. "But breath alone won't bring 'em to pass!"
The voice grew softer, slower and yet more sure. "Yet for all that, we shall make them be, you and I.
We shall quarry our misfortune, we shall smelt it, you and I;
Out of suffering render vengeance, molten in the forge of pain;
We shall strike it on our anvils, ere the fires within shall die.
And from vengeance temper freedom that shall shatter every chain!
The more firmly I am fettered, all the freer I shall stride!
The more cruelly I am pinioned, all the further I shall fly!
The more harshly I am crippled, all the more I shall be free…"
It was sinking now, like the last embers of a dying fire, almost to a whisper on the edge of sleep, mingling with the circling wind in the trees.
"And he shall see it!
The more clearly he shall see it! And in seeing… shall
he…"
King Nithaid had been generous, after his lights, to his valuable thrall. Also, perhaps, he had not been unmindful of his own safety. When Elof collapsed he had had him taken and cared for in rooms of the palace, rather than any of his dungeons; but every door and window had been well guarded. In a day or so, when Elof was recovering his strength, their old acquaintance Aurghes the sergeant had come with a detachment of the royal guards, to which he had been promoted, and conveyed them unobtrusively down to a light longboat and out to one of the islands that lay in the Yskienas around a half-league offshore from the city. Its southern face was unwelcoming, yellow cliffs rising to a roughly fertile country of scrubland and small woodlands, with many oaks, chestnuts and pines on the upper slopes. Its northern side, though, rose more gently, and over a wide part of it a single sweeping slope, smooth and grassy, led to a hill-top crowned with a great stand of oaks, ancient and gnarled, contorted like grotesque dancers as they swayed in the river breezes.
There he had settled them in the shell of an old building, built half of wood, half stone, in a pleasant nook high on the island's upper slopes, by the side of a swift stair of waterfalls and well sheltered by the oaks. Once, he told them, it had been a comfortable hunting lodge, used by those who came to hunt the island's game, which was rich and diverse; it included small herds of rare creatures, perfect cousins of the enormous mammuts found in both Elof's land and this, yet no larger than a dog. In later times the lodge had sometimes housed noblemen sentenced to mild terms of exile. That, he said, might account for the slightly unhappy reputation the island had among the more ignorant peasants; and certainly nobody cared to come there now. So, since neither Nithaid nor his father and grandfather before him indulged in such lenient punishments, it had fallen into neglect and near decay, leaving barely one room sound, abutting the rockface behind. But that very decay had stripped away enough of the wood to reveal, unmistakable to Elof and Roc, the unshaken foundations of a magnificent smithy in the stone. Here beneath the lodge's fireplace was a hearth, wide but well shaped, with the remnants of what must have been a tall chimney, cunningly flued; other lesser hearths were ranged around. Here were solid bases for huge anvils, such as they had not seen outside the tower of the Mastersmith Mylio; and, as in that eerie place, there were recognisable mounts for tall waterwheels, and channels from the many falls above. "He was a master indeed who built this!" said Elof admiringly. "How came it into disuse?"
"Can't say anythin' of that," said the sergeant, rather uneasily. His manner, though not unkindly, had become noticeably more curt and domineering, as if to underline that he had to do with thralls now and not emissaries. "Must've been three hundred years past, or more even. The Lord Nithaid commands you build it anew for yourself."
"All by myself?" inquired Elof sardonically, tapping the stones with the crutches of green birch the guards had cut for him. With his legs splinted straight he could already move surprisingly well for short distances, aided by the great strength in his arms.
The sergeant sniffed humourlessly, and handed him a sheaf of waxen tablets. "Tomorrow we return with a first load of stone and all else necessary. If there's anythin' special you'll need in the buildin', do you write it here. Lord Nithaid grants you such tools as you bore, and all else in Amylhes' smithy; it will be packed and sent when the smithy is ready."
"Before!" snapped Elof, scribbling furiously. "I'll need to forge ironwork for the building. And it must be packed by a smith. If he had a library, I'll want that also, and safe housing for it here. And any other books Nithaid can spare, of smithcraft or otherwise."
The sergeant sniffed again. "I doubt there'll be many; What'd a king be wanting with books, now?" He glanced down the long list Elof had scrawled, and his wispy eyebrows shot up. "By the Gate, I'd as soon not be the one gives him this! Him in a rage, he'd do nigh anythin' to anybody!"
"So I have observed," said Elof flatly. "But this is the smithy I must have, to work of my best. If he wishes less, he has only to choose. Tell Nithaid!"
Shaking his head, the sergeant shambled away down the slope to the boat, and left Roc and Elof to spread their bedding in the last remaining room. It was there, alone and free at last to speak openly as the long summer twilight faded into night, that they held that desperate conclave. It proved the first of many they were to have during the weeks, the months that followed after, which at last grew into long years.
At the next day's dawning the guards returned. To the sergeant's astonishment, when shown the list the king had simply grunted and told him to see to it all, adding that there was no measure more wasteful than a half-measure. All that Elof had asked for had been sent; including, to his delight, his precious pack of tools. He tore it open, and sighed with relief at finding it untouched; the gauntlet was there also, his explanation evidently believed. But to the dismay of the smiths 'ail else necessary' turned out to include not only building stuffs but also a pack of thralls to do the actual labour, peasants passive and stolid, stooped by continual labour and poor feeding, burned to a brick red by the strong sun of these southern lands. Though the guards were not especially brutal, they drove and harried these hapless ragged creatures to their labours like mere livestock, till Roc felt his blood boil, and Elof no less. But at the same time he would seize upon some detail and goad all within reach to amend it, guards and thralls alike, till it wa
s to his satisfaction; impatient at his own weakness, he drove them so furiously that even the cowed thralls called down curses upon his head. At last, maddened with frustration, he plunged in among them and, crutches and all, began trying to heave about blocks of stone with his own strong arms. Roc had practically to haul him away lest he injured himself any further, and he sat aside with his hood drawn over his face.
They might have thought him angry; but in truth he wept, and despised himself for weeping. What had been done to his body any man might have found hard to accept; but for Elof, who from his youth had always been impatient of the weaknesses of flesh, it was a terrible torment, and it almost broke him. It was a torment that he could not forget, even for a second, even in sleep. Each night he dreamed of running, free and strong and tireless; then his maimed legs would jerk and thrash, and the pain of his scars would awaken him. Already despising himself for the follies that had led to all this, he could hardly have felt less of a man now had they truly unmanned him. He had learned to walk on crutches quickly, not because he had adjusted to his present fortunes, but because he could not. It was this same impatience that made him drive himself, and led him to bully the thralls. But when it came time to eat he fed them well from the store of decent provisions Nithaid had sent him, though the guards protested it was better than their own. "Why not?" he inquired coldly. "If I am to share their fetters, they are my brethren, and shall share what I have. You who deem yourselves free servants, be content with what your master provides - or try a thrall's life for yourself! I am sure he will oblige you."
The soldiers grumbled still, but made few attempts to hinder him thereafter. They feared him for his influence with Nithaid, but still more as a mastersmith of proven power, which to them was a unique and fearsome thing; had he not been a thrall, they would still have had to salute him as they had Amylhes, falling to their knees before him. From talking to them he had come to expect this, and from his reading in Amylhes' library, when it arrived, he understood why.
The Hammer of the Sun Page 26
