Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy)

by Bell, Hilari

  The idiots tried to jump it. Perhaps they had seen the Farsalan chargers going over and assumed it was something any horse could do. Fortunately, their horses knew better.

  Approaching a barrier that had been almost too big for the larger, stronger chargers to jump, with water of unknown depth on the other side and awkward, unbalanced riders on their backs, the Hrum horses planted their feet and stopped.

  Several of the Hrum promptly discovered the depth of the water, hurtling over their horses’ heads and into the ditch. It was deeper than it looked, Jiaan noted—almost five feet deep, and muddy, too. The riders floundering in the ditch were the lucky ones. Other Hrum riders hit the ground when their horses stopped, and the horses behind ran into the horses in front, stepping on the fallen men and unseating their own riders. Only a handful of Hrum, riding at the rear of the pack, managed to remain in their saddles.

  Shouts of pain arose amid the storm of cursing, and Jiaan winced. He had fallen off his horse at the Sendar Wall, when the Hrum had suddenly raised a hedge of long lances, and broken his collarbone. It was barely healed even now, and he vividly remembered how much it had hurt.

  Then he remembered the slaughter that had followed, and any impulse to sympathize with the Hrum died.

  He turned Rakesh and cantered after the others. They would reach their remounts and be gone long before the Hrum sorted out that mess. In fact, with the extra time this had given them, they could probably lead their tired horses instead of having the local peasants return them later. The risks involved in having the horses returned were small, but Rakesh had been his fathers horse—Jiaan hated to take any risk with him.

  Fasal was waiting for him at the entrance to the valley that led to a track in the foothills—the track that would ultimately take them to the small mountain meadow where their army had been hidden for so long.

  “They’ve not going to give up, you know.” Fasal turned his mare to walk beside Rakesh. “This is probably that Hrum officer your peasant spy said was assigned to hunt us down. They’ll send the foot soldiers to look for our riders who left the main force. They’ll probably find at least a few of them.”

  “They probably will,” said Jiaan.

  “But the Hrum will torture them! They’ll reveal the location of the croft!”

  “I’ve been told that the Hrum don’t torture prisoners,” said Jiaan. “But they won’t torture our men in any case. I told them that if they were captured and even threatened with physical harm, they were to tell the Hrum where our army has been hiding. In fact, I ordered them to talk if they were threatened.”

  “You ordered them to reveal our location to the Hrum? Why didn’t I hear about this?”

  Because you’d have argued.

  “I want the Hrum to find the croft,” Jiaan reminded him. How many times was Fasal going to forget the plan?

  OF COURSE, JIAAN reflected four days later, the reason Fasal kept forgetting the plan was probably because he disapproved of it so deeply.

  “No deghan would ever come up with a plan as … as …”

  “Cowardly?” Jiaan suggested coldly.

  A bright half-moon sailed high, but he and Fasal lay in the shadow of one of the pines that covered the slopes around the long valley where the new Farsalan army had been created. He would miss this place, Jiaan realized. But so many knew of its location that it was only a matter of time before the Hrum found it. Better to reveal it himself and let its destruction serve his cause.

  “Cowardly, sneaky, and dishonorable,” Jiaan went on. “A peasant plan that no true deghan would tolerate. But considering how the deghans’ plans worked out … well, I can hardly do worse, can I?”

  Fasal winced, and Jiaan felt a surge of guilt. He might be an inexperienced commander watching the unfolding of his first solo battle plan, but he had no right to take his self-doubts out on his subordinates.

  “Your father,” said Fasal, just as coldly, “would have said this plan is too complex.”

  Jiaan’s father had died with the rest of the deghans.

  Jiaan turned away, gazing down at the army camp that had sprung up around the deserted farmhouse. It was too late for lights to show in the barracks, but wisps of smoke rose from their chimneys. Sentries patrolled; the soft thud of a stamping hoof came from the stables. All looked exactly as it should. But plans hardly ever ran exactly as they should, even simple ones, and this plan …

  “You’re right,” Jiaan admitted. “It is too complex. But I couldn’t think of anything that would cost us fewer lives.”

  Even in the dimness he could see Fasal’s eyes roll. “The point isn’t to save our lives—it’s to kill more of them! If we wanted to stay alive we should lie down like dogs and lick the Hrum’s hands.”

  He had a point, despite the ridiculously arrogant phrasing. “There are more of them,” Jiaan pointed out. “If we don’t—”

  The flicker of movement that caught his eye was so small he almost dismissed it. And it could have been a deer, or a jackal, but …

  “If we don’t, what?”

  “Shh,” said Jiaan, straining to see into the shadows below the trees.

  The Hrum burst from the cover of the forest beside the track, shouting, their drums sounding the charge. They’d gotten their whole unit within striking distance of the camp, and Jiaan had barely glimpsed them—and he’d been watching!

  “Kanarang take them, they’re good!” said Jiaan. His own sentries shouted a realistic alarm and fled as if the djinn of destruction really were on the Hrum’s side. “Most of the Hrum I’ve seen couldn’t sneak into a kitchen for a snack, much less creep up on a battlefield like that.”

  “The Hrum are warriors,” said Fasal. “Warriors don’t sneak.”

  “These did.” Half a dozen Hrum were already in the farmhouse; Jiaan could hear their muffled shouts, though he couldn’t understand them. A trader who spoke Hrum had joined the Farsalan army a few months ago, and Jiaan was learning the language as fast as he could, but he could only pick a few words out of the rapid commands. “I wonder who’s leading them.”

  The main body of troops spread out, storming toward the barracks. Soon they would reach them.

  “Well, whoever’s in charge,” said Jiaan, “we’re about to outsneak the bastard.”

  He rose to his knees, nocked an arrow, and drew his bow, feeling the powerful pull in his shoulders and back. He had trained as an archer—not even his father, who had commanded the Farsalan army, had dared to raise his peasant-born son to a position of command. But the Wheel his mother’s folk believed in had spun, and things were different now than they’d been in the deghans’ day.

  “Fire,” Jiaan called, releasing his own arrow as the word left his lips.

  A flock of dark shafts lofted into the sky, almost invisible even when the moonlight struck them. Then they hissed down toward the Hrum.

  In the darkness, it would take several flights for the Hrum to figure out what direction the arrows were coming from, and Jiaan had further confused the issue by placing his archers on two different slopes. Scattered as they were, with murder raining down on them, the Hrum lifted their shields and ran for the shelter of the barracks, swords drawn to fight their way in.

  There was no need for weapons, Jiaan knew, as he drew and loosed another arrow. All the Farsalans who weren’t here on the hillsides were long since on their way to the new camp in the desert—a camp so well hidden in the badlands’ rocky mazes that Jiaan wasn’t sure he could find it without a Suud guide.

  He fired again. Shrieks of pain told him that at least some of their arrows were finding targets!

  Most of the Hrum had entered the barracks now, several dragging wounded comrades with them.

  Jiaan smiled grimly and prepared to launch the evening’s second surprise.

  “At the roofs!” he shouted. Even if the Hrum heard him it wouldn’t make sense, and even if they’d understood it wouldn’t matter. Jiaan snatched up another arrow, pulled his bow, and sent it up in the high arc
that would bring it down on the roof of one of the farther barracks. Ordinarily that would have been an exercise in futility, for the planks of an ordinary roof would stop a light arrow.

  But as the Hrum were about to discover, the last act of the departing Farsalans had been to strip the ceiling planks away, replacing them with thin strips of wood that were barely strong enough to support the thin wooden shingles. Of course the beams that supported the roof would still catch an arrow, but the flimsy construction that now lay between those beams would not.

  The bellow that arose from the barracks as the first flight crashed through the roof held as many cries of anger and panic as of pain. Jiaan added several more Hrum words to his vocabulary—terms the respectable trader had refrained from teaching them.

  Men were emerging from the deceptive shelters now, dashing out into the open, where they could construct their shield wall and then carry the battle to their enemy. Jiaan thought that fewer men emerged than had run in, but in the chaotic darkness it was hard to tell. And letting these men reach his archers was no part of his plan.

  “Whistle,” he told Fasal. “You can do it louder than I can.”

  “But they’re not even … oh, all right….

  Fasal raised two fingers to his mouth—the resultant shriek made Jiaan wish he could clap his hands over his ears, but he was too busy firing a last shot and gathering up his bow and quiver. It might take the Hrum a few moments to realize that Fasal’s whistle was the signal for the archers to retreat, and Jiaan wanted his whole force mounted and away by the time they did. They were only a few marks’ ride from the trail that led down the cliff face to the rocky desert below, and the Hrum, on foot, would never be able to catch them before they reached it. Once they were in the desert … Jiaan was grinning as he started up the dark slope.

  “We barely scratched them,” Fasal protested, falling into step behind him. “We could have done some serious damage tonight! Especially if you’d kept the footmen here to charge while they were so disorganized. This will only make them more eager to follow us!”

  “Exactly. I want them to follow us, remember?”

  Fasal snorted. “You said you didn’t want to make them mad.”

  “I changed my mind,” Jiaan told him. “Mad is exactly what I want right now. Mad will carry them deep into the badlands. Too deep to back out.”

  “I think you’ve relying too much on the desert,’ Fasal grumbled.

  “Remember when I told you that you should spend more time talking to the Suud?” Jiaan asked.

  “Yes, though why you wasted so much time on those barbarians, I’ll never understand. What of it?”

  “You should have spent more time talking to the Suud.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  SORAYA

  SHELTERED IN THE DOORWAY of Maok’s hutch, Soraya listened to the soft thud of a hammer on hot metal as she watched the peddler and his Suud apprentice. It had surprised her, that quiet thumping, for she’d thought metal being shaped would clang. She’d since learned that that was only true when a piece was “cold-worked.” Hot metal could be as soft as wood—as soft as dough, depending on how hot it was. She had learned a great deal about metal over the last six weeks. About other things too.

  “We have long needed this,” said Maok, peering over her shoulder. “It costs us, to trade with others for our knives and spear points. Now we can make our own. It is a good joining gift.”

  Soraya, who had brought only grain and dried beans for her gift, gritted her teeth and added jealousy to hatred as she stared at the peddler’s back. He had taken off his shirt, even though the night was cool, just as his apprentices had shed the striped robes that covered their white skin. His britches left him with more covering than the Suud, who wore nothing but a strip of cloth wrapped around their hips. Once the Suud had looked almost naked to Soraya, but that had long since passed. Now she thought the peddler looked overdressed.

  He wasn’t working the metal himself—he could grip neither hammer nor tongs with his weakened right hand. She could see that he longed to take over, but he simply watched, and he didn’t nag his apprentices either, commenting only when they needed his advice.

  Soraya knew that in his place she’d have been muttering things like “keep the strokes firm and steady,” even though the middle-aged Suud man was doing exactly that as he pounded three red-hot iron bars into one. No, she had to admit it—the peddler was a good teacher. She sighed.

  “You’re a fool, girl,” said Maok calmly.

  “For hating him? He killed my father. I have a right to hate!”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” said Maok, annoyingly cryptic, as she so often was. “He learned to Speak to the shilshadu of metal fast. Faster than anyone I ever seen. But he cannot work it with his own hands. And I think he is a One Speaker, as many with strong …” She waved her hands, as if to pluck the elusive word from the air. “What is ‘feeling for a thing,’ in your Faran?”

  “Affinity,” said Soraya, noticing for the first time that Maok was speaking in Faran. It kept their conversation relatively private, for although many Suud spoke a rough Faran, none of them were as fluent as Maok.

  “Affinity, yes,” The old woman nodded, her silky hair floating around her white face. “He has strong affinity for metals, but no gift for other things. He will not be an All Speaker, as you will. Besides, Duckie is a nice mule.”

  Even Soraya liked the peddler’s mule, but as for the rest of it …

  “I think I’m only going to be a Three Speaker,” she said, though as far as she knew, ‘Three Speaker’ wasn’t a real term. “I’ll never reach the shilshadu of that cursed rock.”

  “Stone’s spirit is slow and still,” said Maok. “While your own shilshadu is filled with anger you will not find it.”

  Ah, here was the scolding. Soraya found that she was in no mood to be lectured about forgiveness.

  “I’m going to the mine,” she said. “Maybe I can reach the stone’s shilshadu better if I handle it more.”

  She crawled out of the low, round-topped tent and stood stiffly. She’d been sitting cross-legged trying to reach the spirit of that stupid rock for so long that her legs were half asleep. The frustrating part was that it did have a spirit: old, deep, and oddly gentle. Soraya was sufficiently adept with the Suud’s peculiar magic by now that she could sense it. She just couldn’t yield herself to it as she could with fire or water, or, as she had recently learned to do, with air.

  Air was easy, once you realized how vast and loose was the spirit that filled it—so easy that just thinking about it made a sudden breeze swirl around Soraya, reflecting the turbulence in her soul.

  She damped the connection swiftly, noting Maok’s scowl, for control was something else Maok was trying to teach her. But Soraya couldn’t suppress her smile. Air’s spirit was so merry and open that even an instant’s joining lightened her heart.

  “Don’t go near the smelting oven,” Maok told her. “The way you are now, the fire might flare up.”

  Soraya nodded, turning away. She had no desire to visit the smoldering pit where the ore was cooked—“smelted,” the peddler called it.

  “It is not that you hate,” Maok called after her. “It is that hate blinds you.”

  At least she’d spoken in Faran, so the rest of the camp wasn’t made privy to Soraya’s private life.

  Soraya was sufficiently grateful to Maok for guarding her emotional privacy that she took care to close off her own ability to read people’s emotions as she passed through the camp, walking away from the peddler and the apprentices who clustered around the central fire. A fire that had required only bellows and an anvil to turn into a forge.

  Another of the things that had surprised Soraya was how little equipment was needed to turn rock into sword blades. The peddler admitted that the sophisticated blast furnaces in the mines, and the elaborate forges in Mazad, with their array of bellows, tongs, awls, and other tools, were more efficient. But he said that these primitive expedients
would still do the job. Perhaps even better when it came to smelting the Suud’s iron, for rumor had long claimed there was something special about the ore found in the badlands. Kavi said he didn’t want it heated too thoroughly lest whatever made the ore so special “burn off.”

  The path to the open trench where the Suud mined iron ore led past the crude pit where lumpy packets of ore were baked into an astonishingly soft, spongy matter the peddler called “bloom.” The bloom held soft iron, but it was still caught in its matrix of rock. The men who ran the smelter had to beat the bloom until the other elements scattered out and only a lump of iron remained—a very hard iron, which the peddler said would be too brittle to be useful on its own.

  Soraya didn’t hear any thumping sounds from the furnace, so she guessed they must be heating the ore. But she still obeyed Maok’s instructions and walked wide around the smelter pit. It was a new and unsettling development in her magic, that she had become so aware of the shilshadu of things that sometimes they reacted to her presence even when she didn’t intend it. Remembering how hard she had struggled to reach the shilshadu of inanimate things—even of live things at first—Soraya could only smile.

  Maok said this was a stage most Speakers went through, and that it would pass as she gained more control. The Suud who manned the bellows were protected by the smelter pit’s chimney, but Soraya knew that too hot a fire could ruin the ore they worked on, causing the iron to melt out of the rock and form nuggets at the bottom of the fire pit that were so hard and brittle as to be completely unworkable. And while most of the heat from a sudden burst of fire would go up the chimney, some of it might wash back out of the clay pipes where the men who worked the bellows piped in air. The last thing Soraya wanted was to burn someone, so she left the path, picking her way through the bushes that grew near the stream that provided the camp with water.