‘Did he?’ grunted the Guildmaster. ‘Well, he ought to know, I suppose. I still don’t know what prentices are coming to. Rack and ruin, no discipline – it’s a proper household that young fellow wants. Thirty-six and still unwed – you should encourage him!’
Gille recalled that the Guildmaster’s eldest girl was among the many who had tried to snare Kunrad, and the few who had succeeded, briefly. ‘It’s not as if we don’t try, sir,’ he said lamely. ‘I mean, we’d be glad of a woman’s touch around the house, us.’
‘Decent cooking,’ groaned Olvar.
‘And filthy clothes washed and backsides run after,’ said Metrye sardonically. ‘A fine prospect for some poor innocent, I’m sure. No wonder they never stay with him long.’
‘Something to take his mind off work, anyhow,’ said Gille sourly. ‘That’s why. He gets lost in it. For a week he’s head over heels in love, and then he gets some new idea – about the armour, usually – and, well, just forgets about them. Along with eating, washing, sleeping, you name it, for days at a time. He doesn’t mean to, he doesn’t mean any harm! But then they see what he’s going to be like.’
‘And they give him the breeze!’ grunted Olvar. ‘And he doesn’t notice that, either.’
Metrye, with two husbands behind her, wrung out the damp cloth on the smith’s brow. ‘Then he can’t really have cared. Nor they. A shame there aren’t more woman smiths!’
‘Woman – ridiculous idea!’ growled the Guildmaster.
‘Well, I can’t think who else is going to land him,’ said Gille. ‘Not while he has this idea set in his mind, anyhow.’
‘Lucky to have anything still set – ah, he’s coming round.’
Kunrad rolled on his side and was promptly and noisily sick. But after he relaxed, and drank some of the wise woman’s herbal infusion, he seemed to recover his wits quite quickly. Until, that was, Olvar, still in anguish, asked him what had gone wrong with the armour.
Kunrad stared blankly. ‘Wrong? Well – oh yes, something did … I suppose. But …’
‘What, Master?’
‘Why …’ His face mirrored Olvar’s anguish. ‘There was something. I know that. But I can’t remember what it was. Not a thing. Not a damn thing!’
‘Common enough,’ said Metrye, brushing the prentices back from the couch like so much fluff. ‘A wound or a dunt on the head’ll often blot out the memory of it. You take your rest and don’t fret your stupid self, and the chances are it’ll come back to you in a week or two, when all else is healed. Lie back quiet, now, and bless your luck your brain didn’t run out your ears!’
Kunrad did his best to take her advice. The grating pain in his ribs every time he breathed made that a lot easier. Leaving a problem alone, though, was not in a true master-smith’s nature. Even when, strapped up and bandaged, he was allowed back to his own bed, it kept him awake all night, as much as the aches and pains did, or the aftereffects of Gille’s cooking. When he did sleep, too, he dreamed again, feverish dreams in which he chased an empty suit of armour that danced eerily through a spectral landscape, lush and pleasant one moment, but the next falling away to reveal the stark bones of the Ice. The awful thing dangled the answer in his face, mockingly; but when he awoke, the bandage sweat-soaked and tight over his swollen ribs, he could remember nothing.
Nor could he still, by the first day of the great spring fair, some five weeks later. The bandages were off, the bruising yellowed and healing, the ribs no worse than tender, but the inner itch was still there. Kunrad was back at work, polishing up the blades and hafts and hauberks that made up his stock-in-trade, for this was the occasion of the year, not only in the town of Athalby but in the whole of the lands around. It would draw buyers from all across the Northlands, from the seacoast to the mountains, from wandering bagmen peddlers to the great merchants who traded between cities, and still sometimes with the hostile South. There, he had heard, the sothrans despised and mocked the idea of true smithcraft. They called it a superstition of half-savages that crafted metal could be infused with virtues, strengths that went beyond the merely physical, influences that could strengthen or direct the purpose of the metal artefact, sometimes in very powerful ways. They scorned it as they did all things northern, yet they were still ready enough to pay high prices for the work itself. Merchants had made a good profit from his work there, he knew; well, let them! They earned it by the trouble of such a long journey among such nasty folk. If they bought from him again, as they always did, that was enough. Of course, the price might go up a little …
It was at a past fair that Kunrad had found his path in life, very early. He was born in Athalby, a quite large town in the rising years of the Northlands, some two centuries after their first painful settlement. In those days there was no Great Causeway across the Marshlands to the South, the land of Bryhaine, and both lands still stood in fear and distrust of their neighbours. This was made more so as the Northland settlers intermingled with the rustic, peaceable folk who came across the sea to settle there, and took on the copper hue of their skins, which many in the South despised. But to the people of Athalby both the sothrans and the Great Ice seemed like very remote menaces, problems for others to get concerned about. They were, by and large, a quiet, stolid folk, hard to impress, harder to daunt, well-nigh impossible to panic and proud of it, shaped in the tough image of their land.
This lay well to the north and inland, a wide lowland on the southern margins of the Starkenfells, beneath the crook of the arm that the mountains of the Meneth Scahas thrust out northwestward, barring the advance of the Great Ice. They sheltered Athalby and its surrounding villages and farms from the worst of the chill winds, and broke rainclouds upon their slopes to send down a maze of small rivers and lakelets. Other, less welcome streams flowed in summer, swollen with meltwater from the vanguard of the glaciers. The mountains were young and sharp, their rock new. On the higher ground its jagged bones showed through the thin earth, and few trees grew, or much except scrub and heathers and mountain herbs. The rich silt the streams brought down kept the lower ground fertile, but it was never lush, with only small patches of woodland, stunted and wind-bent. It was not especially attractive country. Indeed, the townspeople themselves said that its chief virtue was that it was impossible to get lost, because the country was exactly the same no matter which direction you went. They also joked that Athalby stood at the centre of the world, because no matter how you rode around it, you always seemed to stay in the same spot.
With such reflections, repeated endlessly to one another and even more often to strangers, Athalby folk contented themselves through long and generally peaceful lives. They were not a people to be much concerned with the need for adventure, or change; the seasons were variety enough for them, and the increase or otherwise of their flocks, harvests and families. The frequent markets and fairs, of which spring was the greatest, furnished all the trade and society they required, and a wide range of diversions. It was to one of these that Erlik, Town Smith of Athalby and one of its most solid citizens, took his young son Kunrad, who till then had seemed another of the unexceptional breed.
The first the Chronicles show us of him is a small boy watching a friendly contest of arms, mailed riders sweeping by with lances couched to meet in jangling disorder, or rising in their stirrups to loose long arrows at tiny targets on wands beside the track. Others on foot contest with swords and bucklers, setting the air alive with the toneless music of metal. It is a sound his home is already full of, but there it takes on a newly exciting life. The fighters are the armed guardsmen of various towns, the nearest the Northlands ever came to armies; and the boy watches them, mouth agape. Yet he is held, not by the battling, as many boys would be; but by the beauty of the weapons themselves. And most of all by the bright armour, the rippling shirts of mail, the shining plates at leg and breast, the gaudy shields and the polished helms. They fasten themselves in his mind, these shining skins of metal and their companions and tormentors the bolt and blade
. These are friendly contests, and he sees nothing of their killing quality, only their bright power and the skill with which they can be wielded. Wonderful things they seem to him, attributes one should be born with, instead of flesh and bone. And yet, they are so very crude. So many small details he notices that could be better shaped, so obvious that he wonders why others have not corrected them. All the way home he prattles about them, and Erlik listens patiently; for even an Athalby mastersmith has to have some imagination, and he sees the beginnings of a powerful talent in his little son. A very profitable one, too.
In due course, it is recorded, Kunrad became one of his father’s prentices, and gave good proof of his promise. Erlik was a sound teacher, and by his teens the boy was already an able metalworker, adept at all the ordinary tools and utensils, charms and trinkets the townspeople demanded of a smith. It was not only his way with the metal, though, but the strength of the virtues with which he imbued his work. His steel hoes dug better, and the plants around them flourished; his silver flagons kept the wine fresher. He made everything well; he became a very good smith for all purposes. Erlik, feeling the onset of age, would have been happier if the boy had actually shown more enthusiasm for all these everyday wares, on which his own fortunes had been founded. But what really held Kunrad’s attention was the shaping of fine swords, and knives, and axes, and pikes, and arrowheads, and above all armour; and it was always on these that he chose to use the skills he learned.
Erlik, an unwarlike man, found it slightly unnerving as his smithy began to fill with beautiful, lethal objects, not least because they kept their edge all too well and found their mark with bitter accuracy. In part this was due to the cool perfection in Kunrad’s forging, but there was more to it. A quality in himself flowed out into them; and Erlik and his wife, who no longer dared sit down in the smithy without looking carefully, began to worry about where the boy had got it from, and how he was going to turn out.
They did not have to. As the years passed, and he grew from capable journeyman into burgeoning master, he began to study the arts of battle, and even fought in occasional friendly tourneys and trials. It showed in his craft; but on Kunrad himself it had little effect. His prentice piece had been a plain but beautiful knife, of undeniable skill, but too like a dagger for Erlik’s taste; and when at twenty-four he became the youngest candidate for mastery anyone could remember, it was with a hunting sword of conventional falchion shape, broad and heavy, but inlaid and entwined with traceries in many metals, a forest of swirling vines and creepers entangling the figures of foresters, hounds and game, great beasts whose images he had found only in books, all frozen in an instant of pursuit and flight. And beneath them, for the eyes of the masters who marvelled, there was another tracery deep within the metal, fleeting webs of light that spoke meaning to their minds and hearts directly, and to the craft they themselves held. These were the subtle virtues a smith could pass into the works of his hand, to make it more than the mere metal form, a living instrument of its purpose. The masters read them in the light of their own craft, and were borne up themselves into the unending quest the fine gold and silver inlays depicted, eager as the fine edge to cut at the quarry. They were silent awhile as they passed the blade from hand to hand; and then without a ballot, in standing acclaim, they welcomed the gangling young man into their company.
But though his home bristled with spike and blade he never showed any urge to use in earnest the creations that were beginning to make him a name, first in the region and then further afield. He remained the generally quiet, amiable character he had always been, hard-working and serious-minded, and if there were hidden fires they were unleashed chiefly on his work. When his parents died in one harsh winter he declined to follow Erlik as Town Smith, forfeiting riches and a fine house, but freeing himself to his own pleasures. He made the things he liked best, worked hard, lived simply, drifted in and out of several hopeful matches, and eventually, when he had a little money saved, brought in two prentices. The most hopeful candidates went to richer smiths, so he chose those less accomplished but most serviceable to him, Olvar for relentless strength and patience, and Gille for the finer decorations and the wordcraft that could weave and intensify the virtues of a work, the spells that were sung over it.
So it is the Chronicles return to him, a man in his prime who seems to mark time in all the common concerns of life, that he may still pursue the vision of his childhood. Small wonder he rarely dreamed, for his dreams were what he lived and thought about, and what he wove under his hands. Such folk are most often the happiest; but as he made ready for the fair, that dancing vision of imperfection tormented him still, a torment he had never learned how to bear.
As usual he took no booth at the fair, for its centre was just beyond the gates, and his door could be seen from there. He had chosen the house with that in mind. The prentices were busy hanging a banner from his eaves, and staking out a double line of swords and other weapons like a bizarre fence to lead in his buyers.
‘Get yer wares!’ chanted Gille, bedecking them with signs. ‘Get yer luverly pig-stickers! Gizzard-slicers and gut-grallochers! Gall-churners and codpiece-collopers! All hot, all hot! Get ’em while they’re fresh, afore they get you! Don’t drop ’em on yer toes whatever yer do! All hot, all hot!’
‘Shut up!’ grunted Olvar. ‘You sound too much like the pie-seller. Or that girl with the hot rolls.’ He scanned the gathering crowd hopefully. So did Gille.
‘Look, if she turns up, I’ll take her and you take the rolls, right?’
Olvar gave him a withering look. ‘In a pig’s ear, brother prentice. Food’s not all I think about, you know.’
‘Maybe not, but what about that time you almost choked? I told you, you can’t do it and eat—’
‘A man can try. Listen, you, the master said we could go look around the fair for likely customers, when we were ready. So I’ll go now.’
‘Hey, why not me first?’
‘Because food’s all he’s after,’ grinned Kunrad, coming out of the smithy, wiping a newly filed spearhead on his leather apron. ‘It’s too early in the day for your pleasures, yet.’
‘It’s never too early!’ protested Gille, but he subsided.
‘Besides, yours are more expensive,’ said Kunrad cheerfully. ‘Look alive now, or you’ll put off the customers! Sell a round dozen of swords today, or a couple of the heavy mailshirts and you can have a silver penny for tonight, and ache for days after. Set those arrows out handsomely, there. Even with the weeks I lay ill, we’ve got a fine stock. Shift it all and we can spend six months or so really getting to grips with that armour!’
‘Yes, master,’ sighed Gille. ‘I can hardly wait.’
Olvar, though, was back unexpectedly within the hour. He was greasy about the mouth, and licking it off his fingers, but it was news he was alive with. ‘They’re all talking about it!’ he announced. ‘There may be war with the South!’
‘There’s always going to be war with Ker Bryhaine!’ sighed Gille. ‘It must be so boring down there in the boggy borderlands they spend their time cooking up squabbles!’
‘Never seems to come to anything!’ agreed a merchant, to whom Kunrad was showing some heavy horse-swords. ‘I’ve heard the rumours, too, but they don’t amount to more than a skirmish here and there—’
‘It’s coming to something this time!’ interrupted Olvar, looking almost excited. ‘There’s a lot of trouble with corsairs at sea, ships taken from north and south, and each one’s blaming the other, either for the corsairs or not doing enough about them. There’s toing and froing on land as well, raids and suchlike!’
‘What, across the Marshlands?’ grinned Kunrad, clinching his sale. ‘They’ll soon get tired of that!’
‘If they live long enough!’ shivered the merchant, slowly counting silver from his purse. ‘Twice I’ve been across that godawful place, in a caravan the size of a small town, mark you, and we still lost men every night! Weeks it took, and I don’t think I got an
hour’s sleep at a stretch without some horrible sight or other alarums. It’ll be a while before I ride those paths again, for any profit!’
‘Well, you’ll have good protection at your saddlebow when you do!’ said Kunrad. ‘Now upon this blade there are virtues of breaking barriers and cleaving a sure path, as I said, as well as mere breaking of heads. And the silver tracing on the guard’s a fine specific against bogles and bump-in-the-nights!’
The merchant winced as he put down the last coin. ‘Let’s hope so! All very well for you to joke, but you haven’t seen them. I’d sooner wield the sword against them than sothrans, that’s for sure. The redpates aren’t such bad fellows in their way. But I’m sure it’s all talk. Why should sensible men fight? There’s little enough profit in war for either side. Why, there’s a sothran lordie here to the fair, friendly and freespending as you like, and he’s pouring scorn upon it!’
‘Is there now?’ exclaimed Kunrad, rubbing his hands. ‘Olvar, you lout, now that’s the kind of news you should be looking to bring back, and not a pack of rumour! Up, off, away the pair of you, waylay his wealthy worship and invite him hither in ways he can’t resist! From all I’ve heard, these sothran lordlings are always after new wargear. Merchant, that’s worth a stoup of ale – will you seal the deal on one?’
Soon after the merchant left, with his weighty purchase bouncing at his back, there was a stir in the crowd, and the prentices reappeared at the head of a small entourage. Kunrad smiled as he saw the tall figure they led, striding eagerly across the trodden grass as if it was his own homefield, with a gaggle of what were evidently servants and soldiers at his back. A rare sight, a sothran so far north, let alone one of their ruling lords, and one that reassured his heart. Not only because this might be his best customer ever, either.
Kunrad was not the kind of man to take joy in any profit a war might bring him. He saw weapons as matters of defence, of shielding the just and enforcing the right. For those, sometimes, men had to fight. Against savagery and barbarism and the greater enemy, the Ice and the evils with which it sought to flood the world – there, too, men had to fight, and he was happy to give them the means. A war, though, between two civilised peoples, lately neighbours under one king – it was not to be thought of.
The Castle of the Winds Page 2
